Summary
Transcript
How do you build wealth as an immigrant and turn it into multi eight figures? How do you start from zero coming from another country in just a short period of time? And that is the topic of the conversation I am having today in this interview with no other than Luke Belmar. He’s somebody that will change the way you think about money completely. How you build wealth. He’s young.
He’s very young, but he’s very accomplished. He’s turned the Internet and the media world completely upside down, receiving over half a billion views per month, talking about how to build, multiply and preserve your wealth in this new digital age. He came to the US from Argentina at 16 years old with only $200 in his pocket. He hustled. He grinded his way to a multi eight figure net worth through digital marketing, ecommerce and investing, and now helps others do the exact same thing through his new group called the Capital Club.
I had the pleasure of speaking there a few months ago in this interview. We get into a lot of topics you need to build, grow, and protect your wealth. We talk about things like, how did he build wealth after coming from nothing with it, but at the age of 16, $200 in a suitcase. My I asked him about how someone else, wanting to follow the same path that he went on, would go about making money like he did.
How can you make money in the beginning? Arbitrage, sales, anything that you can get your hands on. We talked about making money. We talked about how do we multiply it. We talked about the investments. I asked him how did he 40 x his investments in crypto and what did he do next? Sell out of crypto. Rotate the tech stocks. It only made sense. Undervalued meta undervalued Shopify, which are the only two stocks that I truly knew because I run Facebook ads and I run Shopify.
So I understand the Q four reports of Facebook and I understand the Q four reports of Shopify undervalued. I wanted to know what his views were on what people should be focusing on to be more successful. I spent 20 years getting good at business. Now I need to spend the next 20 years. And that was yet productive. And then we talked about how coming from a country like Argentina shaped his view on money.
Crazy part is, people need to understand that the money system isn’t just an accounting system, it’s a tool of power. We got into what he thinks about the new president, Argentina, what he sees as the future of technology, business and investing. We started out talking about building community, providing value, and so much more. This is a banger interview. You definitely want to get a pen, a paper out.
You want to get ready for a masterclass on starting from zero and building an empire. So let’s go. All right. Luke Belmar, how’s it going, brother man? The myth maybe about to be the legend. You’re the. I’m here in your studio. You’re definitely the man in the myth, though. The guy behind the curtain. I love the scarcity that you do. Where when you first started hitting me up, I’m like, I don’t even know who this guy is.
I go, look at your instagram, there’s like nothing there. I look at your YouTube, there’s no videos there. Who is this guy? You do everything very with scarcity in the mindset. So we’re talking about right now, we’ll just jump right into it. We’re talking about your community that you run and talking about how you limit that and create this scarcity for the community. And you’re talking about how basically 2500 people per day get an invite to join.
Only 369 people of the 2500 actually get in. Correct. If they don’t win the race, they’re out and they’re out for good. So you don’t want to give them another chance to get back in, even though that’s certainly hurting your bottom line. They miss their chance. They miss their chance and that’s it. Because the value extends beyond the money. You have to build a community beyond a financial metric.
Right. So if you want to build a loyal following and if you want to have a community that fucks with you, you have to put them through things that challenge them. You can’t just hand over everything for free. You can’t just make everything easy and comfortable, because if you don’t pay, you don’t pay attention. And if you get everything for free, you’re not going to value it. And if you see me all the time, then you’re going to think I’m normal.
So familiarity breeds contempt. The less you see me, the better. So I limit my content, but I maximize my distribution. So I figure out what is like a winning Facebook ad. You can match that same thing with the concept of content creation. So you have a winning piece of content. Perfect. That video gets a million views. That’s a winning piece of content. You’ve proven the thesis. Are you only going to limit that video to 1 million views? Are you going to repurpose that video 10,000 times? So in 2023, we posted almost 100,000 videos.
Wow. And that is the difference between me and everybody else is with the 100,000 videos. I don’t have to focus on sending emails. I don’t have to focus on giving people a second chance because there’s always new inflow of individuals that are willing to actually go through the 369 process and sign up before everybody else and join the community and become part of Capital club. All right, hopefully you’re enjoying this interview with Luke.
I got to take a very quick break, real quick to tell you that I am hosting a live event where I’m going to show you how to seize the upside of the Fed’s uturn, grow your investments in 2024 and sidestep market volatility. I’m going to break down about 20 or 30 charts so you can see the actual data, see exactly what you should be doing, what you should be watching, and so much more.
I’m going to be not only showing you the information, I’m going to be taking all your questions live. So join me, come hang out live. Let’s get through this data, ask me all the questions you have. Let’s plan to get through this together so we can all be on the winning side of this. All right, let’s just jump right back into the interview with Luke. If you think about email, email is a way one, it’s a way to own your list, right? So you talk about rent the list versus own the list.
So it is a way to own the list. If you were to get canceled on all the platforms, you have no email list, which is the problem. But it’s also a way to nurture the list. And so basically you’re saying, forget nurturing on email, I’m just going to continue to nurture them online. Yes, 100%. And you nurture them through short form. So long form is when they know what you’re about.
Short form is when they know that you exist. So in short form, they know that you exist. And then the continuous repetition of email is, what for you to be in front of people. But that doesn’t mean you have to be in front of people via email all the time. So the question is, what do you use the email communication for? I began perceiving email completely different than any other digital marketers ever talked about email.
So I consider myself, let’s say I have my own kingdom. Right back in the day, 2000 years ago, Alexander the Great conquered all of the known world. Luke the great, not quite, but he clearly didn’t have the ability, the access or the time to go to every single governor, every single point of his empire and proclaim his message. He had to send what? Messengers. In this case, emails.
But what were they talking about? The word of the king. Whatever he wanted to transmit, it wasn’t the messenger cooking up a message via email marketing with a nice slogan on behalf of the king. So every email that comes from me, I sit down, I write it, whether it’s on my phone, whether it’s on my notes, and I send it to my team. So the authenticity level that’s attached to the email, I don’t see it as email marketing.
I see it as a one on one communication with another individual. That’s why my email open rates with a quarter million follower list is 68%. Now let’s talk about. I want to jump back to the beginning, but I want to hammer this point home. So that’s cool for you. Great job. You can not let anybody in. 15% of the amount of people in. What about people that don’t have that many people? I mean, how would you apply that to something where you’re trying to get 50 people to join? First, you need to ask yourself, is what I’m building or who I am worth following or worth investing in? And that’s a candid conversation, because you are in a marketplace where there’s competitors, there’s people that are phenomenal.
There’s people that are excellent. I mean, you’re in the finance space. You understand your competitors. There’s dudes out there that are extremely intelligent, really competent. So you have to get to par, be legit in order to compete at that level. So I think initially, before even conversing about building a following, it’s, are you worth following? Right. So the reason you have so many followers on YouTube is because your content is fucking phenomenal.
The reason I reached out to you was because I saw your bis world structure. I’m like, oh, financial structure. I’m like, okay, this guy’s quite intelligent. Now I know what he’s about. Let me go reach out to him. And that’s because you had substance. Most people are out here doing bullshit stuff online. They have no substance, so they’re not worth following. So first is, ask yourself, do I have a product worth selling that people want, and am I with somebody worth following? If the answer is no, then ask yourself, who do I have to become in order to become worth following? You went through the fucking trenches.
You went through implosion. You went through all the bullshit. You sold companies, you listed companies, you’ve done the whole nine. So now you’re in a situation whereby you actually have credibility and street cred and validity. To do what? To actually be in a situation whereby you can coach, you can teach, you can build communities, you’re worth listening to, right? Other people aren’t. So I think before getting to that stage of, hey, why don’t people listen to me? Ask yourself, am I worth listening to? And if the answer is yes, now you need to start creating content.
Content around what? Content around what? You know, become passionate about it and understand that there’s people that are there with you. And then when it comes to how much content you need to produce, I take a completely different approach than Gary B. Gary B. Says, create content. No, no. Create limited amount of content that is high quality, known to convert and distribute that to everybody that knows who or knows this niche or this community.
And if they don’t know who you are, they will. And it’s a very different approach, a very different format, because instead of doing this shotgun approach of million pieces of content, I’ll take one winning piece of content and distribute it to ensure that hundreds of millions of people see it. If I know it converts. I love that. I know you worked with Andrew Tate, and it’s sort of the message Andrew Tate has about getting girls become the kind of guy that a girl wants.
Don’t just be mad about it. And so you’re kind of saying the same thing about your content. Become the kind of person that somebody would be interested in. I remember when I think right around when I was 20 or so, I just had this idea, I need to travel the world. And the reason why I wanted to travel the world is I wanted to have a bunch of stories because I wanted to be interesting.
And now I travel a couple of months a year, and I’ve been doing that for decades now. But at that time, it was like, I need to go have experiences, so I have things to talk about. And so business deals that you do all of those things, so it plays in. What about when you talk about the content? The Gary Vee. So Gary Vee’s like, don’t create document, just document what you’re doing.
And not like, hey, here’s what I’m eating. But more like, the lessons that you’re learning along the way is kind of what I picked up from it, but you’re talking about creating content, but you create content across a pretty wide niche, or not a niche, but really a wide group of subjects, everything from stoicism to crypto to creating content to whatever. What do you think about starting niche down? Niche? Your face off, if you will.
The riches are in the niches versus being so broad like you are. So it depends on the niche that you pick, and it depends on your objective. So, for example, my umbrella approach is very simply, everything’s aligned. So if you look at the people that are usually involved in stoicism, they’re also involved in the understanding of entrepreneurship, or they want sovereignty. So now the understanding of crypto and bitcoin could tie into the idea of this autonomy, and then bitcoin ties into the concept of principles of being your own merchant, managing your own money.
And that ties into, okay, now I have freedom of money, maybe I want freedom of employment. So now you begin to talk about that. And now, okay, well, social media, how can I make money online? So what I try to create isn’t individual niches that are viewed individually. I try to create a garden, so I create a garden for the community. And how I view my community is very different to how most people view it.
Most people view the community as a place where they’re going to make money. So how I view, if my Internet exposure was like a small little empire in the real world, I would consider capital club or my community, like the Nile river. You don’t take from the Nile river. The Nile river exists. Your goal is to preserve it. You build your empire around the Nile river. So what are the businesses that you’re building around the community while nurturing and sustaining the community? Most people fuck up the community.
Most people poison the river. Most people destroy it instead of building around it. So I have my beautiful community, great people, top of the top. Now, how can I empower them? So empowering them through different experiences, different events, different content that I understand, because I’m very similar to my audience, what I want. So I only talk about the shit that I enjoy because I know we have, for example, similar interests.
We could sit down, talk about stoicism, bitcoin, crypto, and entrepreneurship, and that’s it. And it’s within our niche and our range. So I try to become really good at what I like and then share those things to people that are similar to me. And it just happens to be that my audience and my choice of enjoyment is large enough, and it’s becoming the future. Like e commerce and crypto, it’s only going to get bigger, and we just happen to be at the cusp of it.
So it works. I love what you said about not taking from the Nile river, just building around it. And so I can tell the first experience I had was at your mastermind in Spain last year. And you’ve really built this community of giving more than you’re taking. So you use the word empower, and that’s ultimately trying to do, and you’re trying to really think about, how can I cultivate another relationship? And it’s an old sales message, which is, if I help other people get what they want, think it was zig Ziggler.
If I help people get what they want, I get what I want. And so you’re kind of creating this system that empowers people to get what they want, and then ultimately, then you can get what you want around it. And it’s a long game. And I think most people. Let me get your comment on this. I think most people can’t play the long game. The majority of people, I think, are held back because they can’t imagine working for free.
They can’t imagine working for free. They’re used to a paycheck. Well, if someone’s not going to pay me every hour, I’m not going to go do it. And so how am I going to go work for months or even years without getting paid, hopefully to get it in the end. I don’t know what your thought is on that. So you know what I was talking about with Andrew on the Tesla coming over here? We’re in the car, and I was like, imagine you’re in year 200 of the 400 year of israeli slavery inside the egyptian kind of empire, where you have the story of Moses, or you can even take, when Israel gets captured and taken into exile to Babylon.
You have the story of Daniel. What happens if you’re born in year 227 of that slavery? You have no context of freedom. You have no understanding of what it means to be autonomous. You have no reference point of working for yourself. You have no reference point of making your own money. You have no reference point of sovereign currency because you’re under the thumb of your oppressor. People don’t seem to understand that that’s where we are today.
You’re 200 and something years into an ecosystem that’s been curated and designed for slavery. So when you understand that you’re 100 and something years into the psyop, you begin to ask yourself, why does it take ten years, twelve years, in order for me to buy a house, cash? That sounds kind of slavish. When a couple of years ago I just would have to work two, three years, and before that, it would take a couple of months.
What the fuck is a 30 year mortgage? Now they’re trying to come up with 50 year mortgages. So I begin to evaluate all these scenarios, and I ask myself, where the fuck are we going in the future? So to get. It’s not so much an opinionated thing. It’s more. So I like to observe things pragmatically and see them play out. What I was saying is, do you think that holds? You’re taking a very long term approach.
Okay. I’m going to preserve the Nile, and I’m not going to take from it. But I know if I build around the Nile and help people get what I want, eventually I’ll get what I want. And I was saying, I think most people are held back by the fact that they can’t imagine working for free. Yes. Correct. So back to the point. So if you’re in year 176 of slavery, and all you know is that you’re going to work and in return you’re going to get a paycheck, then that’s the default mindset that you’re going to hold.
Old. No labor is going to be put forth unless you’re able to see a reward. And most people can’t see a reward in front of their. Like, if it’s right here, if they don’t see the dollar sign right here, they’re not going to do it. They’re risk adverse. They don’t understand that they have truly nothing to lose, but they’re not willing to take any risk. So I think the big discrepancy as to why individuals aren’t willing to take the risk or why individuals are in a situation where they have this kind of potentially slave mindset, to me, has to do with nurture, how they grow up, the school system, how they’re educated.
And overall, I think, is a cultural experience of hundreds and hundreds of years of systemized cheating that’s been done on people to extort them for their time, their energy, and their effort. If you look at how the fiat system was created, it wasn’t created to empower people. It was created to steal from people. So if you begin to realize that this is kind of like a slavery model that’s imposed on everybody, if you can kind of shake away from it or at least observe it from a third party perspective, it may be beneficial.
Yeah. Let’s jump back to the beginning of Luke Belmar. So, from what I know from your story, you’re some poor little kid from Argentina that came to the United States with $100 in your pocket, 200. $200 in your pocket. A lot of what we become is from where we came from, and so a lot of that is cultural, educational, and, I mean, today, right now in the United States, we’re seeing millions of people coming up from Venezuela and Argentina and South America coming up, and I don’t think they have the same mindset as you.
So I’m curious, what was that like? Why did you come up here? And how did you come up here? $200. And how did that work out? Yeah, so, age of 16, I graduate from high school. Thankfully, my parents put me in an english speaking school. It cost $300 a year, so I was able to learn not the colloquialisms and the specificities of English. I think I adopted this.
I’ve also been in America for over a decade at this point, I’m 28. Arrived when I was 16, so I was able to learn the language and get quite eloquent with it. But at the age of 16, $200 in a suitcase. My parents got me. Well, they didn’t get me a flight. One of my family members was actually working for the airline, Argentina airline. And I was able to get a flight attendant spot.
So wherever the flight attendant seat sit, I think in Spanish, it’s called a yam seat or something like that. I don’t know what it’s called, but that’s where I sat. And then I had family members in the US, stayed with them, worked all sort of OD jobs, pressure washing basketball courts, cleaning toilets, flipping wings, flipping pizzas. And then in the year 2000, end of 15, 2016, my first exposure to anything digital was I had a fellow server.
I was working a restaurant in 2015, and he was like, hey, have you heard of bitcoin? That was the first bullet, remember? That was the first kind of the 1516. That’s when I got in. It was peaking, but I was like, this is expensive. I don’t know what this is. Bitcoin is a couple of. Couldn’t really afford it. But you know what, let me take a couple of dollars and put them on bitstamp.
But I wasn’t really part of crypto, but that was my first exposure to anything Internet. 2016 came around, got exposed to everything that was ecommerce. I said, hey, I’m going to go live with my brother. $200 a month. That’s what I paid him for. Rent, sleep on his couch, and I built my first online business, which was selling and reselling online digital assets. It was Instagram pages, building those accounts, selling them.
It was Facebook ads for different. How did you figure out that you want to buy and sell Instagram accounts? Because people were willing to do it. So, for example, people would hit me up, and they would. But did you have, like, a friend that was doing it? Everybody was doing. This was the craze of the meme pages back in the day. It was when the meme pages were going crazy.
So people would build up a niche of a meme page, and then they would grab an e commerce store, run some Instagram story ads to it, boom, milk it, go to another page. What I would do is just build up the pages a little bit and then sell the pages to e comm guys or build people’s pages, sell them to them, flip Instagram usernames, anything that I could do, hustle, make money online.
So in that regard, I think a lot of people are caught up today, and I got to find my passion. I don’t know if this is what I want to do. Is this what I was made for? And it’s like, dude, sometimes you got to make. How much money is there in digital arbitrage? It’s insane. No, I get it. But the point I’m making is, I think so many people are paralyzed with inactivity because they don’t know what they want to do.
And I’m guessing, and you tell me if I’m wrong, but I’m guessing this wasn’t, like, your dream calling in life. It was like, hey, there’s an opportunity. Confucius once said, if you do not economize, you will agonize. So it’s very true. People are like, oh, I need to be a business owner. No, you don’t need to be a business owner to make money. You just need to make money.
Right? Becoming a business owner is high risk. You’re the last one to get paid, brother. Everybody gets paid here, whether the business works or not. The video editor is still getting paid. Everybody’s getting paid, but we’re not. So how can you make money in the beginning? Arbitrage, sales, anything that you can get your hands on. So you just saw an opportunity like, hey, I see people doing this.
I’m just going to jump in and figure it out. 100% just jumped in. And that’s the piece that I want to hit. So many people are paralyzed with fear because they don’t know what they want to do. And it’s like, just start making money. You don’t know what you want to do until you start doing things that you don’t like. Last year, I made millions of dollars doing coaching programs, and I decided I didn’t like them, but I wouldn’t know that until I had done them.
Right. And so we’ve changed that. But I think that’s a good point. Okay, so keep going. So now you’re flipping those things. But I think one of the important parts of this entire narrative that I want to hone in is that my expenses were so low, and my risk wasn’t built up with having things, family, bad decisions of the past, whereby I limited the amount of risk or the amount of opportunity that I would pursue.
I was only paying $200 to sleep on my brother Nate’s couch. Right? That’s what I was paying. I had nothing to lose. I wasn’t married. I didn’t have kids. I don’t have any of these things. Right. So anything that I do is full on business, full on risk, everything, all in, because I could afford it. And what I think for young people is never put yourself in a situation where you make irreversible decisions.
It’s one of the most important principles I learned. So, from a young age, I never made decisions or took action towards things that I could not reverse that would fundamentally change my life path. And I think that was my most important lesson. Like having kids out of wedlock at the age of 17. Right. That fucks up your life. Yeah. Okay. For some people, it’s an anomaly, and they end up being super successful.
But for the average individual, that’s an irreversible decision. So what do you do with that irreversible decision? You have to deal with it. So my objective was, don’t make irreversible decisions. Make decisions that, if anything happens, you can pivot from. So low risk, high reward, low expenses. And then I got a marketing gig. So I started doing marketing ads for Wall street businesses. So companies in Wall Street, I would do their ads because they weren’t running Facebook ads.
So I got my first check for about $86,000 for nine months of work. Wow. Running Facebook ads doubled the company’s revenue. I did it for free for two months. I was doing outbound because I would get dms from them on Instagram or LinkedIn messages, like, hey, if you’re interested in our products or service, this is shit. Let me add some ads to them. Ran it for two months for free.
I called them like, hey, guys, I want a contract. Like, oh, no, we’ll think about it next month. I was being nice. Turned off their ads the next day. Next morning, they called me, hey, can you fly up to New York? Yes. They gave me my check, and I called my dad, and I was like, I made it and he’s like, bro, $80,000 to $90,000. That’s crazy. I’m like, yeah, but it’s not enough.
But remember, I was paying $200 a month for rent us dollars and you’re coming from Argentina and it’s crazy. So now I’m making this money and I’m like, what can I do with my advertising skills? Because this is a nine month gig. I don’t know if these guys are going to renew. I don’t know if they’re going to keep on going. Most agency work is quite laborious. These people were calling me.
I’m like, let me move this money. Let me try some other things. Let me take my Facebook ad skills. What am I going to do? Ecommerce figured out the entire ecosystem of ecommerce. Drop shipping, now arbitraging physical products, not just digital products. We ended up doing, in the span of three years, 16 million in revenue, which isn’t massive numbers, but it is for teenagers. And we ended up flipping and putting all our money into crypto, which I know sounds insane, but it only makes sense because crypto is the future.
And yeah, we rode the 2020 bull run and we 42 x our portfolio, so quite fire. Yeah, I love what you said. I want to break a couple of pieces down for the listeners here. So if you look at the world of sports, let’s just say you want to be a pro, whatever baseball player. To think that, hey, I’d love it if the Dodgers would sign me a contract and I’m going to go learn how to play baseball and I’m going to be really good baseball player for, no, no, you got to do it your whole life and you have to be good enough that they give you the contract.
So what you said was sort of like that. You went and learned how to do digital marketing. You went and learned how to build Instagram, social media, flip those, and only once you had learned those skills on your own, for free, working for free, spending your own time, effort, labor, then you got good enough to make a little bit of money. Then you went and gave those services to a company for free to prove your net worth.
And only once you had proved enough worth, they were willing to pay you for that. Sort of like getting a contract from the Dodgers. But people today think that they can just go, hey, will you give me a job to do marketing for you? But you got no marketing skills. And that goes back to the question I had posed earlier about people not wanting to work for free, but we play sports for free.
And so it’s just this mindset shift that really holds people back. So I kind of wanted to highlight that. I think to add and to finalize that point is, if you always want to make money, you have to be irreplaceable, if you have to be irreplaceable, and you have to be in high demand. So I made sure that I was irreplaceable. What did I do for this online company? Doubled their online revenue in two months.
So now I was irreplaceable and I was in high demand. So now I had the leverage. And I think in business, it’s all about leverage. You leverage yourself by becoming better. And people are like, oh, well, they leverage themselves through blackmail or through finessing. No, the ultimate form of leverage is to become so indisputably good that people call you. Right? You give your services for free until they want to pay you, until they demand to pay you.
Yeah, I love that. Okay, so now you put all your money into crypto because you’re young and you’re low risk, and you figure you might as well bet it all. You already said that’s kind of how you grew up. And so at this point, you’re still young, your expenses are still low. Now you know how to make money, so now your risk tolerance is higher, because now you know you can go make more money if you need to, and you don’t have the downside risk.
So now you throw it into crypto. You time the market cycle pretty good. You 40 x 42 x your portfolio, you crush it. Then what? Sell out of crypto? Rotate the tech stocks. It only made sense. Undervalued meta. Undervalued Shopify, which are the only two stocks that I truly knew, because I run Facebook ads and I run Shopify. So I understand the Q four reports of Facebook, and I understand the Q four reports of shopify.
Undervalued. Right? Q four, they fucking rip their sales through the roof. So in Q one reporting every single year, look at the meta stock. Every single Q one, it rips through the moon. So I rotated out of crypto, which I felt like it wasn’t at the value that it was supposed to represent. I think it was overvalued. I rotated to undervalued assets. This case, meta Shopify, Robin Hood, Coinbase, microstrategy.
And my only one that I’m still waiting to play out, which will play out, is payPal. Yeah, I mean, Facebook sold off 75%, which is ridiculous. You think it’s going to go away 75%. So, like, yeah, what an undervalued stock. All right, I’m going to take another very quick break right here. I’m not running commercials in these. So these are my commercials. But I want to let you know I’m having this live event so we can seize the upside in the Fed’s uturn that’s coming and grow our investments this year without dealing with the volatility.
It is going to be a volatile year. Things are going crazy. So come join me. We’re going to look at the data, we’re going to look at the charts, the graphs, and I’m going to show you what I think is going to happen, more importantly, what we should be doing about it, how we can position ourselves, what assets we should buy, what we should be watching, and so much more.
Come hang out. Check it out. It’s all for free. I’m going to answer all your questions live. There’s a link down below. Let’s go. I’m curious. So now you’ve cut your teeth. Making money, create wealth. So you and I, we actually say the same three things, different words, but create wealth. Multiply wealth. Yes, preserve wealth. And most people don’t understand those three. And so your journey was creating wealth.
What can I do? Pressure wash basketball courts? Flip pizzas? I’m creating wealth. I’m earning wealth. Flipping Instagram accounts. Creating wealth. Then you have to go to multiply it. So then you throw into crypto, you multiply it 40 times. Right. And now you have to preserve it. I’m just curious how you think about those three buckets as far as your attention and time focused into that. So how much time do you really think about your growing, creating the wealth through businesses versus managing it, multiplying that wealth.
So it depends. So on the business side, there’s two aspects. One is instant cash flow. So I can do a consulting call for $10,000. But let’s say just like Luke Belmar. So 90% of my time is focused on my business and growing my wealth, and I spend about 5% or 10% of my time with what my money is doing when I’m not earning it. Or what does that look like? Yeah.
So I would say the breakdown isn’t like a specific breakdown of time. It’s more so a breakdown of my life patterns. So the life patterns in the business side, it breaks down to active income and it breaks what I have to work for directly versus money that comes in. So I’ll create content. Capital club will continue printing subscriptions. I need to create the content regardless. So that income just comes in.
I have my entire team. I have my CEO Steve Tan. I have my entire organization. There’s almost 100 employees inside Capital club that build, manage that structure. I don’t need to be there every single day. I spent the last four years building that. So now it’s in a place where it consists in itself simply because I’ve created the other vehicle of content creation. So content creation fuels this.
That’s more so like my passive stream of consecutive money. So I’m not really focused on this besides the product. Right. Because if it’s my vision, I need to ensure that the product sustains itself. And I’m focused on community, retaining people, then on the active income side, it would be like, I don’t do coaching, but if there was a coaching experience, right. So if you do coaching, that’s your active income.
That would be money you receive right away. I don’t do a whole lot of that. I don’t focus really on instant money because I’ve made money. Once you scratch that itch of, okay, I don’t no longer need to eat. I think people need to change their mindsets from hustler to boss. And I think people start making millions, they don’t change their mindset. Right. It’s the same mindset that they had when they had nothing.
You can’t have the hungry mindset when you’re already full. It makes no sense. That becomes gluttony because now when you have a lot, you have to begin to share. And if you want to scale, you need to bring people in. So now my main focus is recruitment, right? So now I focus on looking for talent and looking for opportunities. So now that my main basket, my Nile river, is being nurtured and taken care of, I’m bringing new content, new eyeballs to build out the ecosystem.
If I choose to, I can have some sort of active income that requires me to dedicate specific hours, but I don’t necessarily like to do that. And most of my time now is focused on looking for new projects, business development, and recruiting top tier talent. Because if you can recruit top tier talent, all you have to do is let them work and get out of their fucking way.
Yeah, like that. Recruiting talent. We’re going to talk about that, but let’s just go back to it for a minute. So I often say that the lines between business owner and investor are very blurred in my career. Right when I was out of high school, I started buying bank owned properties, fixing them and flipping them and I did over 100 of those properties. Was I a real estate investor, or was my business buying and selling houses? I have 100 grand in my bank account.
I could just go buy bitcoin, or I could hire a new employee to go do business development for me. Am I investing into my business or am I business? Right? So the lines are very blurred, and I just want people to get an idea of this because it’s something that I see. So I talk about investing, right? I run investment newsletters and things like that. And the majority of people, I would say, come into my universe, and they have a.
They want to quit their job and be a full time investor. And I’m just like, whoa, whoa, whoa. That’s not how it, like, Warren Buffett still goes to work every day at a business called Berkshire Hathaway. Ray Dalio still goes to a business, Bridgewater Capital. Right? So it’s like, you need to have the business, and then you invest into it. So that’s why I was kind of curious what your thoughts were on that.
And so I think about. And Alex Ramosis talked about the s and p me, right? So it’s like I asked my buddy the day we were down in Mexico together over New Year’s, and I said, if you were going to put $100,000 into the S and P 500, the historical average over the last 60 years is about seven and a half percent on that. So if you put 100,000 in SP, you make seven and a half percent.
If you put 100,000 into your business to hire a new business development manager, do you think they could bring you back more than $7,000? And he said, yeah, I think so. I’m like, then why don’t you do it? I guess I never thought of it. But the point, because they don’t see the employees as an investment. They only see it as a salary. And when you’re paying for an employee, you’re investing into them.
Time, energy, paycheck, attention. So your goal isn’t just for them to do the job. My employees, dude, I sit down with them and I tell them, this is how you can scale in the organization. This is your growth path. This is your growth trajectory. I sit down and I have real conversations with them. It’s like, hey, if you work well, this is the future that you can potentially have within the organization.
So it’s not just, okay, giving them the vision of, here’s a paycheck, but now adding to it, now they’re part owners, now they feel like they’re part of the vision. Now they feel like they’re part of the mission, and now the focus becomes a little bit different. Yeah. And to the point that you made earlier, people, they don’t reinvest back into themselves. Right. So it’s like they were hustling, hustling, hustling.
They made the million bucks or whatever. It was a couple of hundred grand, whatever that number is for you. But then you don’t make the shift to then being an investor in your own business. So I make the 100 grand or the million bucks, and then I want to go put into whatever I’m going to put it into, but then I don’t invest back into the business. So then the business doesn’t continue to grow.
Right? Something like that. I think about the mindset shift, the difference. And actually, I was with one of my portfolio companies I was coaching last night, and we were talking about this specifically and how they’re going to close on the phone, sell their product. And I said, the difference of a poor mindset and a rich mindset is a poor mindset thinks about the cost and the rich mindset thinks about the value.
So would you buy this used iPhone for $5,000? Well, if you’d only think about how expensive it is, you wouldn’t. But if I said, but my bitcoin wallet’s on here with 100 grand, do you want to give me five grand now? Right. And so that’s sort of like the mindset shift that people have to go through, like thinking about the value that I’m going to get, not spending my time, investing my time, not spending my money, but investing my money and back into the business for that growth.
So I think it’s an important point to hit, really create wealth, and it’s understanding that you don’t have to make money every single day, every moment of the day to be productive. Only a fool would plant a seed and watch it and be angry and observe it the same day. No, the world has a natural process. There’s an eb and flow to nature. You are part of nature.
You cannot go beyond universal law. There’s a time and a season for everything. So there’s a time and a season for harvesting, and there’s a time and a season for sowing. So when are you sowing? If you’re sowing, it’ll eventually come to you. What people don’t seem to understand is the success that you enjoy today isn’t from today’s actions. It’s from the accumulation of all the past seeds and then people end up losing in the future.
Yeah. That’s because you slacked off today, because you’re focused on the rewards from the past, thinking that you’re eating them, indulging on them today, when in fact, you’re just indulging from past performance. And if you leave idleness in the present moment, your future is going to get fucked. So it’s like, how can you continue? And that’s the super trap, right? You start accumulating wealth, you start making money, and you start slowing down, slowing down, slowing down, slowing down, slowing down.
Because your attachment and your value and your perspective of what it means to be high performance or productive is attached to dollars. But there’s so many things in life that transcend dollars that you can focus on your health, your nutrition, your family. I was speaking to a guy that had done over a billion dollars in real estate sales, made a fuck ton of money in commercial real estate, and he said, I spent 20 years getting good at business.
Now I need to spend the next 20 years learning how to become a good father. So it’s like his focus changed completely because he realized that to become a complete man, to become a full, successful individual, there were other areas that he had to work on and spend time, energy and attention that weren’t going to yield necessarily net dollars, but that were still part of his development and his process.
And that was yet productive. Yeah. Most personal development would tell you there’s at least three and usually four categories of your life that you need to work on. And that would be like health, wealth, your business. Right. That’d be your relationships. And then the fourth one that people throw and be like your own spirituality, like where you’re at with that. And really, if all four, three or four aren’t worked on together, then they hold you back.
So, for example, I’m really good with making money, and I spend a lot of time with my family, but I’m 300 pounds and I’m sick and I’m tired. So then I don’t have the mental clarity or the energy to do as well in business or with my family as I could. So if I got my health up, then my business and health would grow. If I’m really healthy, I’m in the gym all the time.
I’m going to make a bunch of money, but my relationships are crap. That holds me back because I don’t have that support network behind me. Yes. And so really you want to keep all of those going together and they multiply each other. Leonardo da Vinci famously said, to develop a complete mind. Study the science of art and study the art of science. Learn how to see, realize that everything connects to everything else.
Then he continues to say, he says, God will sell you all things at the price of work. God will sell you all things at the price of labor. So first you need to understand that everything connects to everything else. So how you treat your wife, how you treat your kids, it’s going to reflect how you treat your employees, how you treat the waitress, how you cheat in business, or how you’re loyal in business.
It’s going to be a reflection as to everything else that you do. So to develop a complete mind is to understand that everything is in unison. Everything is in harmony. And to not be in harmony in one area is to be dysfunctional in everything. It’s like having a toothache, being ripped, six pack tan, fucking great physique. But you have a toothache, everything is miserable. So unless you develop a complete mind and full focus and understand that God will give you anything, but you have to work for it.
You have to exchange and transmute this energy and this life power and this life will into creating, materializing something into the universe, into the physical world, it’s going to take labor, but you have to do it with unison and completion. If not, you’re not going to win. Yeah, I love that. I’ve never heard that quote. I wrote it down because I’m going to go look it up. But I talk about everything has a cost to the point that you’re making, and God will sell you everything at the price of your work.
So the cost to get what you want is going to be your time, typically your time, your labor, your effort, energy, things like that. And you could say, well, the cost to getting in shape is I have to join the gym and I have to go to the gym. I have to dedicate time and attention to that. But also there’s a saying that says either you sacrifice things today to get what you want, or those things become the sacrifice.
Yes. So one way or another, it’s either going to cost you my time today or it’s going to cost my future dream. And that principle of God will sell you all things at the price of labor. Led me to the belief, excuse me. Led me to, not the belief, because belief entails religion or a system that you can’t see. It made me realize the power of bitcoin. Why? This is a complete flip.
But when God sells you all things at the price of labor, labor represents energy input. So the system, the machine that we talk about. If you’re born year 200 in the slavery machine, you don’t know what being free or using your own autonomous energy to create things for yourself looks like. So now you’re in a situation whereby you’re using your energy to create things that don’t belong to you.
So, for example, you have this money that’s printed out of thin air. There is no energy input that’s sustaining the US dollar. How many people we printed? $6 trillion. What type of energy was input to print that money? None. None. But what about the money that was printed through energy that becomes devalued? The money doesn’t become devalued. What becomes devalued? Your energy. Your energy that you’ve put in dollars as a value of energy now is being slowly trickled and depleted.
So what happens? God can’t sell you all the things at the cost of labor if you’re in the fiat system, because the energy, right, whatever God wants to pay you is slowly being taxed or slowly being filtered out. So that led me to if I’m going to get anything in life, at the cost of my life force energy, so I need to take my life, my energy, and materialize it into something.
Whatever I materialize it into has to be able to sustain its energy and has to be able to sustain its. If you pay me $10,000 today for a phone call or a consultation call, and I put it in the bank today, I would be able to redeem that $10,000 for something completely different than what I would be able to redeem that $10,000 in ten years if it was in fiat.
If it was in fiat. So it’s not that my money is worth less, it’s that my energy is worth less because my energy can now no longer purchase what it used to. So that led me to believe to find something that requires energy for existence. Bitcoin requires literal, physical energy input for existence. So what you’re buying from bitcoin, you’re not buying bitcoin. What you’re buying is an immutable storage of perfect energy.
Right? I love that. And we talk about that on a philosophical level a lot, which a lot of people think is nana, new, new stuff, and we don’t need to pay attention to it. But if you don’t really understand this, then you don’t understand the whole key behind life. And so the law of energy is that energy cannot be created. It can only. Only be transferred. Yes. So we have food, which gives me calories.
Calories are measurements of energy. And then I expend those calories by thinking, by working, by doing. So I’m spending my energy, my life, if you will. And then let’s say that I’m working for 4 hours to earn enough to live for that day. But then one day, I decide to work an extra 4 hours. Well, then I want to save that extra energy in something that I could then choose to spend tomorrow so I don’t have to work.
And then the goal. So that’s sort of like your life battery, if you will, right? And the goal is that that battery holds its charge. You don’t want that to lose power. But to your point, the fiat system is like a battery that’s like, if you’ve ever gone up in the mountains where it’s cold, like your batteries, they die real quickly, right? So you have this battery that’s losing, and bitcoin is a different type of battery that can hold that energy.
And it’s your life. It’s like, literally your life. As a matter of fact, I just put out a tweet a couple of days ago now that I got my Twitter account back, talking about inflation, increased the cost by $32,000. So for the average worker at $32 an hour, which is the medium pay, it was taking them about 300 extra hours per year to have the same quality of life that they had the year before.
So 300 hours per year of your life, that’s your life. That you could be in the gym, getting in shape with your kids, teaching them lessons with your wife, building your relationship, 300 hours of your life, your energy expended for the same thing. That was last year. And what I came to realize is, we were talking about going back to the creating part, multiplying and preserving of wealth, the multiplication factor people need to realize.
I need to stop expending my time and my energy for dollars. That’s the process of building gardens or ecosystems where money works and makes itself, is it no longer requires time and energy to make it. If we go into the Louis Vuitton store and I go with somebody that makes $1,000 a month, they’re going to look at a Louis Vuitton wallet that’s worth $500 differently than me, because to me, $500, it didn’t require any time, energy, or intention for me to make it this person.
It required three weeks of time or two weeks of time, energy, and attention. So they’ll value the wallet in direct proportion to the amount of effort and labor that it took them to produce. What the necessary energy to purchase that wallet, right? So now I’m no longer in the premise of is this cheap or is this expensive? How much energy and lifespan and time did it take me to acquire that thing? Because you don’t buy things in life.
Hear me clearly. You don’t buy things in life with money. You buy things in life with the time that it takes you to make that money. So the objective of multiplying your wealth is to be in a situation where you no longer work for money, but you work towards creating systems that create money, giving you the freedom so that you can use your energy to do what you want in life.
Let me ask you about this. If you think about money, I’d say that we don’t want money. Nobody wants money. What we want is the goods and services that money buys us. But if you think about money, for example, it’s like an exchange of value. It represents value exchange. So I could say, hey, Luke, let me come over to your house and help you move this weekend. Or, hey, let me come build a fence for you, or let me paint house, or let me build a website for you.
If I, as a friend, were to say, hey, I’m going to help you move this weekend, then I would have built goodwill with you, and you would sort of owe me a favor back. Right? We’re not going to write it on paper, but maybe you would help me do something. A social credit. A social credit, right. So then really by me providing you value, it’s sort of like a favor.
And now you give me an iou that you owe me a favor, some value in the future. But that’s like a barter system. So if we want to scale past the barter system, then we need something, a sort of iou that I could go to give somebody else. So the dollar sort of represents an iOu. So I’ve built you a fence, I helped you move, you give me an iou that’s recognizable.
It’s a medium exchange to get other favors from other people. And if you think about that philosophically, then I’m going to say something people don’t like to hear. And that means that if you’re broke, you’re kind of selfish. How much goodwill have you put into the world? How many IOU slips are you sitting on in that barter environment? If I helped you move and you move and you move, and I built you a fence and you a website, and I collected all these favor IOU statements, the person that had the most amount of favor iOus, you would say, man, that guy’s really generous because you get paid in proportion to the value that you provide.
Hide. Bingo. And the thing is, the marketplace will pay you in proportion to that. So if you have no value to provide, it’s either you don’t know how to provide value, or nobody can see the value you can provide, because either you don’t showcase it, or it’s just not there. I agree fully. Yeah. It’s an interesting way to look at it when you look at it from a philosophical angle.
Let’s talk about it now from like a. More of a. We’ll stay on the philosophical, but let’s look at it from, like a freedom angle. Now, I’ve often said many times, and I strongly believe, that there is no freedom without the freedom to transact. And really, it starts with the freedom of private property. So back to me being able to store my value, store my energy, that’s my first form of private property.
Do I store it in dollars or bitcoin or gold? Or do I store it in a ranch with cows? However I decide I want to store that. That’s my life battery. So that’s my property. And if you take that cow from me or take my money from me, that’s my life. You’re literally stealing it. But then the freedom starts with being able to control the private property, but then, more importantly, be able to transact.
And so we see today that the governments of the world want to continue to impede that ability for us to transact freely. And I’m curious, your point of view coming from Argentina. So, Argentina is sort of the textbook example today of sort of a society breaking down and hyperinflation, where people couldn’t even hold their money anymore. And as I was with you and your team in Spain last year, I was told that I wasn’t really aware of this.
You’re not even allowed to spend much of your money, so I think you’re not even allowed to spend all you have x amount of dollars that you can withdraw per month. But I think maybe it was Yemi from your team, said you couldn’t even spend more than $300 a month on your credit card. You couldn’t because. Or they would exchange at a very high rate, 700 to one, or something like that, right? So they wouldn’t even allow you to spend your own one.
Well, they wouldn’t allow you to spend your own money. Capital controls lock you in, and then they would just continue to steal from you. And the crazy part is, people need to understand that the money system isn’t just an accounting system, it’s a tool of power. So when the coinage was created, for example, 700 year 700, around BC 700, I think it was in Turkey, that was the first introduction of the coin.
Right? So coin, just like bitcoin, it’s not money, it’s technology. It’s technology of what? The remittance of value. That’s all it is. So the coin was the standardized remittance of value from a to b. I could actually move it. How would you make a cow divisible? Right? If I want to sell you a ranch and it’s going to cost me 19. 5 cows, it makes no sense, because now I have half a cow that’s worthless.
So it’s no scalability in that idea. So now I have money. And as soon as money came into the side of coinage, you begin to sell seabarons, kings, people that could actually hold currency and had some sort of. In this case, back in the day, it would be army that could sustain their sovereignty. You would do quite well with coinage. The issue with coins is that they began to get debased.
So they introduced metals that would debase the currency. So, for example, Rome, let’s say they conquered the entire known world and they had no more kingdoms to conquer, therefore no more gold production, therefore no more economic growth. So they had to debase the currency. The issue with that is that now you no longer know what’s legit, you no longer know what’s false. Remember how there’s this verse in the Bible that says that God abhors the misbalancing of weights, because back in the day, gold wasn’t measured by units, it was measured by weight.
So everything had to have a fair balance. Now we have the introduction of the fiat system, which was initially a physical representation of the gold. It was an IOU. Exactly. Now the IOU got overprinted. Bullshit. Now the government got into bed with this entire scam, I. E. The introduction of bitcoin, which goes back to the bartering system, but with the technological advancement of no middleman necessary. What happens in society, especially with governments, is the new technological advancement produces a temporary period of time of sovereignty.
So when coinage came, new barons rose, new sheiks rose, new tsars came into power, new money. Same thing happened with the radio. As soon as the radio was introduced into the house, one of the big criteria was for the government to control every single outlet on the news, which was the source of technological transformation, the radio. As soon as the Internet came, we had a few years of what Internet freedom, where people could look up information, see all the details.
Boom. Then censorship. You had that technological period of boom where people got free. And now you’re in a situation where you had social media come into play. Social media came into play. They censored social media really deeply. But now you have the cracking of social media. So people, there’s technological advancements that produce what? Freedom. So if you look at the etymological use of the word to think, or thinking, it was extremely popular pre introduction of the radio in the household.
So people used to think freely prior to the government coming into the house. As soon as the radio came into the house, you can look up the etymological use of the word and the popularity of it to think, thought, freedom of thought. The moment the radio was introduced into the house, that use of word went down. People stopped to think. When did that word begin to emerge again? The moment the Internet became placed in the house.
So a seek of freedom and truth and thinking once again. Now you have the introduction of new technology, which is what? Bitcoin on the monetary side, which is the disruption of the financial system that we’ve been under for the last 100 years. So now people are waking up and there’s. Oh, there’s something else. Whether bitcoin is the future or not is not relevant. What happens is that bitcoin showed that there is another way of transacting outside of the now controlled technology of remittance.
Now we have a decentralized form of remittance that gives us the ability within a few years, before they have digital ids and id me and all this garbage, to access the Internet a few years to become extremely wealthy in this period of time, because we have this technological differentiator. So if people understand, technology frees you, and then technology gets controlled, and technology frees you again, and technology gets controlled, your job is to figure out what’s the next pocket of technology I can take advantage of for my next power play.
So if you look at the future, what are you going to need? You’re going to need autonomous AI that runs off of your scripts, not off of somebody else’s scripts. You’re going to need unmanned machines that work specifically for you. That’s technological advancement. That’s part of the future. So money, in my opinion, will eventually become obsolete. When I have bots, when I have robots, when I have AI working for me, half of the jobs are not going to be commercially viable.
Maybe it’s not ten years, 20 years, but in 50 years, we will get there. So money will no longer be valuable. So what will money be? And that’s where the question becomes store of value and things of this nature. But technology is always evolving, always moving, but it always comes down to the transactions of goods and services. Well, I guess it depends on what you considered money. I mean, if I think of money as a medium of exchange, we’re always going to need a medium of exchange.
Yes. So money is not going to go obsolete. What we know as money and what we even consider value will change. Crazy. So value will change, just like information changed. Back to your point before radio, and even in the 80s, information was what I got on the nightly loser in my morning newspaper. Today, I see a kid in Thailand Post a picture on the beach, and I see what the water looks like, I see the temperature.
So, like, all this information that wasn’t there. So I think value changes. But humans are always going to exchange. Yes, we’re always going to exchange. That’s what capitalism is. In my book, the Unconished Manifesto, we really kind of honed in on that specifically, which is capitalism is not a political modality, it’s human nature. So capitalism is private property, using it more efficiently, and free trade, among others. I have a fire.
You kill the rabbit. Hey, cook your rabbit on my fire. Let’s just share that, right? And the beauty of bitcoin is that it lets you do that at scale, at scale, multi border, without being present with a money type that people internationally accept as a form of value, which is incredible, and it’s never happened before, which is the fascinating part about bitcoin that I absolutely love. I’m curious your standpoint on this, because you came from Argentina, where the money’s wrecked, like literally impoverishing people, and you travel the world, so you talk with a global audience, if you will.
Do you think that helped you understand why we need a non government money like bitcoin better than most people in the US who are like, what do we need different money for? I grew up in a small town. It’s not a village, a small town of 12,000 people. I would go to my local steakhouse, a small little steakhouse, five different tables, one server, cook on an argentine style grill, the argentine peso to the dollar.
I remember the time I was eleven years old, buying my dad took me, took me to that steakhouse, and I think it was a filet mignon or something like that. It cost $3. It was nine pesos today. The dollar to the pesos and three to one. Yeah, three to one. Three to one. Would cost me a dollar to take a taxi. So everything that was nice about Argentina was the fact that the dollar was cheap and still the peso was pretty healthy.
But today you see the introduction of socialism. You see the debasement of currency. And truly the big thing that I see, which is the big shell shock factor based off of my study of history, is that this cycle that Argentina went through of the debasement of currency, the nationalization of privatized assets and the introduction of a socialist super vampire like government isn’t the first time that it happened in history.
I was talking with Andrew. It happened in Korea, it happened in Cuba, it happened in Bolivia, it happened in Venezuela. You have a lot of countries where you have these socialist type governments that come in, they leech everything from private citizens and they debase the currency by stealing everything. Now what happens? Because they steal everything. They still have to get loans. There’s still debt to who? Most likely the IMF.
So what happens? You have now the IMF being introduced into the scenario and they’re, quote unquote, the bad guy, but simultaneously are the good guys. So you don’t know how to look at them because they’re the ones that are putting you in debt and they’re the ones that are pulling you out of debt. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, like a loop cycle. So here you have a socialist government that’s most likely put in place.
You have a period of normalization of making sure that the government owns all the national assets. The airlines, the petrol companies, the railways. They own everything. But obviously we know that governments can’t run shit because they’re incompetent. So these products, these goods, these services, they become shitty. Now you have massive inflation. Not only do you have massive inflation, you have massive debt. That debt needs to get paid off.
So you have the introduction of a right wing party. Right? It happened with Peron. It happened in probably the post World War II when the United States began to introduce the fight against communism. So you had this introduction of right wing kind of police states come in. And my thesis is that these right wing police states, we either have bukele, you have Malay, you have different individuals. Their purpose is one very simple, in my opinion, it’s the repayment to the IMF of all the debt.
So here you have a right wing politician or somebody that’s more on the liberal side that says, okay, we privatize. We need to sell off all national assets. Okay, perfect. What are you doing with that money? You have to pay back the IMF, motherfucker. Like, that’s why you’re here. So create the entire inflation system, prop a ton of debt, then bring somebody through, a police state can pay off that debt and then run the cycle back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
My thesis was very simple, and you’re going to see it play out, because I’ve been predicting the future for quite a bit of time now. You’re going to see it happen with people introducing third parties. So no longer right wing party, left wing party, you’ll have a third party emerge that’ll be self funded. So you look at the president of Ecuador, he’s not right wing, left wing, he’s a new guy that just emerged, new party, Malay, not left wing, right wing, new party.
And what happens? Young guys, right wing fucking hate the old system, but they still have to play the rules of the game because they’re in debt. Who’s going to pay off that debt? The IMF? So what I see is I look at these cycles in these loops, and I try to figure out where in the loop, because it’s happening, these jackals, it’s happening. Where in the loop is this country or this stage? And how can I succeed in it? Now, before the introduction of right wing police states or heavier duty kind of controlled systems, which I think right wing governments tend to do more than left wing governments if given too much control.
And they’ll do it especially under the name of safety and security, because, remember, Trump is the one that introduced the vaccine. Trump is the one that introduced all the lockdowns and all these things. Whether it was his willpower, his introduction, it doesn’t really make a difference. There is a precedent that right wing, and I’m not any political party, I’m just an observant from the sideline, they tend to introduce more of police rule.
On the other side, you have the other guys that introduce a lot of state rule, and they’ll introduce a lot of, hey, the government is going to be your daddy and manage your things. But in between here, you have the narrative creation, and the narrative creation is the pendulum swings either to the left or to the right. And we’ve seen it, and you’ve probably witnessed it. A pendulum swing at an energetic level, moving to the right through history.
So the question is, where do you position yourself to not get fucked by these guys that are debasing the currency, but simultaneously not being in a system where there may be right wing police states? So when I left Argentina at the age of 16, it was under the premise of there’s a socialist culture that’s coming. And it wasn’t that I knew that shit was going to hit the fan, like how it went to become one of the most worthless countries in the world, even though from one of the richest, even though in 1890 was one of the wealthiest countries in the planet.
I just left simply because in the US there was more opportunity. And truly, up until this day, and I’ve been to 59 countries, the United States is still the greatest country in the world, hands down. I personally don’t like the left and the right and the Republican, Democrat and the libertarian, the socialist, the like. It’s just like all these labels that nothing really neatly fits in there. And I thought Malay actually called this out pretty well.
In one of the speeches where I saw, he talked, know, the left is socialist and the right is fascist. He said, but they’re all collectivist. They’re all collectivists. So in my book, the Unconscious Manifesto, shameless plug again, I talk about, and we actually draw a diagram of how all politics is on one side. And on that there’s a spectrum from left to right, socialist to fascist. But socialism and fascists, although are on extreme opposite ends, apparently are all central planners and collectivist ideas.
So all politics. But isn’t bitcoin a collectivist idea? No. At the same time, no. Bitcoin is the exact opposite. But it has to work. You have to have a collective unit of people for it to work. Well, what I’m talking about, collectivist is central planning. Okay? So somebody is planning the system versus what we said. And I have a diagram. I’ll get you a book when we’re done here.
On the other side is capitalism is natural, emergent. It’s individualism. And bitcoin fits over there. And so you have sort of. And Malay called this out. He said, look, all this, you’re left wing, you’re socialist, you’re right wing, you’re fascist. He said, it’s all collectivist. He said, we’re bringing back the individual. There is no state. And so Frederick Bastiat and the law talks about this. There is no state.
There’s no such thing as a state. There’s us as you and I as individuals. And collectively we could agree to have this town or whatever, this country. And so I thought it was a pretty good statement. At a theoretical level. Yes, it’s cool. But you still have billions of debt, in debt that you have to pay Malay. Cool. That sounds nice. Okay. You still have to go and sit down with.
And you would rather him default on that? I don’t know, because I don’t really know what the best solution would be. I think the best course of action right now, at least for Argentina, is the privatization of national assets. There’s no reason why the government should run anything. There’s shit at every. And that seems like what he’s trying to do. Yes, and that’s great. The question is, who do you sell it to? The highest bidder.
And who’s the highest bidder? It’s most likely all under the table. Yeah, it’s all under the table. Nationalization companies that come in and they go. There’s a book called Confessions of economic Hitman, of an economic hitman. He talks about the jackals. They come in and they give you an offer, and if you don’t take the offer, so be it. At the end of the day, you have a guy that comes from a third party.
Not left wing, right wing, a third party. Somebody has to fund that party. 45% of Argentines don’t just vote for you because you have a message. There’s narratives, there’s pushed, because you see it in anywhere around the world. In order for a message to be propagated, it doesn’t just naturally catch on. You have to push a message. And I think from alternatives, definitely the best alternative. But do you think there’s sort of like a zeitgeist at the time? So, for example, the pendulum.
I think the pendulum doesn’t swing from left to right. I think the pendulum swings from centralization to decentralization, and I think it’s technology that does that. And that’s a whole different conversation. But if we look at the pendulum from that viewpoint, just for this exercise, and you see this pendulum has been swinging towards centralization. So we have the creation of the UN and the IMF and the BIs and this global us led homogeneity, et cetera.
But then we have, like, it’s gone so far, and now there’s no truth, and men are women and boys are girls and all these things. And it’s gone so far that people are rejecting that. And you’re seeing the Jordan Petersons and the Andrew Tates rising up in the face of that. People are starting to latch onto that. And it seems like Malay Maloney over in Italy, and Malay is just like one more person.
It seems like the whole world has been gaslit so hard, and they’ve been told for so long that they don’t matter, that they’re latching onto that type of a person. Yeah, it’s the opposite of what you’re already given. So it’s not an extreme, it’s just an extreme of that position. I’m not saying it’s good or bad. It’s just a natural pendulum swing. But remember, it’s the pendulum swing of technology.
We’re talking about technological freedom. As soon as that technology gets suppressed or controlled, you have censorship. You want decentralization. You need new technology that overtakes the centralization. So you have centralization in the Federal reserve and the banking system. You need bitcoin. You have the centralization of the radio or the television. You need the Internet. So you have these pendulum swings. Now, the objective is figuring out, because of Moore’s law, these pendulum swings get slower and get faster and faster and faster, and they go back and forth, back and forth.
Freedom, censorship. Freedom, censorship. To the point where, per the words of Ilya, co founder of open eye, he said, AI has the ability to create in perpetuity, stable dictatorships. And that’s the freaky point where I’m like, that’s a scary point. That’s the scary point. And he’s true. I agree. He’s right, bro. He’s right. But I don’t like that. I don’t like it at all. But I’m like, okay, these are the freedom pockets.
Decentralized, decentralized, centralized, decentralized. We need to be capitalizing on these decentralized pockets before it goes back to, it doesn’t matter how much bitcoin you had, it doesn’t matter. When Covid locked down, that shit locked down, most people were fucked. That’s just the situation that people were in. I don’t care if you believed in it or you didn’t believe in it. Your business, if it was a physical business, was closed down.
Whether you got jabbed, wore a mask, didn’t liked it, didn’t like it. That was the outcome that was naturally happening. But then you had the ability to make money online. That was a pendulum swing. That was your freedom pocket. Dude, the amount of money people made during COVID online was crazy. But the people, physical, brick and mortar, no. And now the pendulum swing of, oh, things opened back up a ton of businesses, started making a ton of money in person.
So you have these pendulum swings of censorship. Decentralization, censorship, decentralization. And it’s capitalizing on these pockets prior to being in a situation where you end up like China, where now everything’s credit controlled systems, everything’s WeChat, everything’s face id, your Tesla needs to be under a certain credit score connected to your id in order for you to charge the fucking vehicle. And it’s absolutely insane. So I don’t know if Elon Musk, using the X app now that has all 50 states, the ability to remit money.
I don’t know if he’s going to create a super bank with X. That’s my opinion. That’s what I think he’s going to do. But what happens when X becomes the Wechat of North America? Now you have the censorship that you’re kind of going to be fucked up on because you have the head of technology that’s always at the cusp of everything. So you have this guy that runs your vehicle.
So he has probably the best understanding of transport. He has satellites that are shot into space. He owns the AI that gets plugged into your brain. He owns this rocket ships, he owns the AI, and he owns the social media platform that feeds the AI. All he has to do is control a couple of things and shit gets really, really intense, really fast, very scary. So the goal is, before these things get introduced, which are obvious, look at Skynet and China.
It’s coming. How can you create and utilize these pockets of decentralized wealth creation to not have to face the reality of living in these states? So how can you? I think building digital businesses outside of a specific ecosystem that is like Instagram or Facebook, if you’re limited to one social platform or one specific avenue, it can be extremely difficult. Number two is you need something that is low risk, high reward, and usually that comes from service based businesses.
So when you have to expend your life force energy to receive money. So your only expense, if you don’t have a lot of money, is your time and your energy, which isn’t worth much because you can’t produce much. So I think digital businesses, something that is scalable, I think physical business, service based businesses, something that is low risk, high reward, that doesn’t take a lot of startup cost, and you need to build an AI proof business.
I met with one of the founders of OpenAI a couple years ago. AI proof business or use AI? Use AI? Yes. So what? The AI boom took place. You had a couple businesses, you had the AI businesses that emerged and you had, let’s use AI to beef up our business. When I met with this guy a couple of years ago, he said build. He’s like, yeah, AI is just a lot of things.
What you need to figure out is what can AI never replace? Or what is the hardest thing or the hardest moat for AI to replace. So that’s what you’re going to build your business on. It’s the hardest mode that AI can not bypass. Which is what? Community, personal development. The things that AI can’t do, physical things. The things that AI can’t do for you. So I shifted capital club, I shifted all my businesses to turn them, not as AI companies, but as AI proof companies.
My companies aren’t crypto companies. My companies are crypto friendly companies. So it’s like, as the narratives emerge and as the narratives change, because I don’t make any irreversible decisions, I’m able to pivot. Digital businesses, low risk, high reward, which are basically service based businesses, because you’re just contributing your time and labor, low risk because you don’t have to put up capital so you can bootstrap them. I agree with all that AI proof.
I mean, sure, you have the physical, or you could use AI. You could look at, like, I think, trying to become a lawyer or a doctor today. If you’re starting your career now, right, and you’re going to go to college, I’m going to go to college and be a doctor or a lawyer. Like, man, that’s probably going to be. And the difficulty here is the fact that you’re competing against an institutionalized establishment that not only has proven its inaccuracy and invalidity to be an institution like these big universities, Harvard, Yale, all these things.
All we have to do, dude, is let’s take every single one of the presidents, ceos of all these top universities, run all of their papers, every single paper, essay, video conference, every single presentation, keynote that they’ve ever done, and let’s find plagiarism. Let’s find plagiarism in their work. And we discredit half of the fucking universities automatically off rip. Not only that, but we also have to understand that the universities today are political weapons.
They’re not educational institutions. They are political, dogmatic, government controlled ecosystems. So when your entire narrative is you’re the age of eight, and your fucking first grade teacher asks you, what is your dream job? Not what do you want in life? Hey, how was your day with your parents? Go respect your mom and your dad. No, what is your dream job? The moment you’re born, you’re fucking curated into the system.
Unless you unplug and wake up and realize that they’re treading on you, you’re not going to tell them, don’t tread on me, motherfucker. So you need to have this enlightenment, this wake up reality check. Dude. Yeah. I want to start my own online digital community. Wasn’t on my bingo card. My little brother sells Pokemon cards online and makes good money. That wasn’t on the choice. Right. So to your point, yeah, I love all that.
So let’s go ahead and close it out here. So what’s the advice? You said you can see the future, you see future trends. I don’t want to say you can predict the future, but you see these future trends. So you’ve already kind of laid that out. So frame it up for us one more time. Kind of close it out and give us maybe some. Let’s frame it out.
Specifically, I actually wrote a medium article where I think I posted it January 1, where I posted my predictions for 2024. So I created an article in three specific niches. Your commerce niche, your markets, your money and markets niche. And then you’re going to have your crypto, which I think are going to be the three overlining narratives of 2024. So let me go ahead and pull this up through my eight months of research for 2024.
I kind of put this into perspective so you can just type up 2024 Luke Belmar predictions. It’s two minute read. We’ll link it in the show notes, too. So in the beginning we have ecommerce. So these are trends for 2024. The first one is ecommerce direct to consumer brands begin to receive a new wave of funding in private equity investments. So if you look at 2021, 2022, private equity when it comes to ecommerce, tanked completely.
I see another resurgence of investments into IP and into brand in the ecommerce niches. So for all these drop shippers, all these white labelers begin to understand that there’s going to be businesses that are going to be buying business, which I think they’re going to be good to talk to you to get well positioned. Next is info products will begin to legitimize themselves and directly compete with universities and learning institutions.
So now, why would I listen to this professor that’s never been overseas about international business when I can go and sit down with somebody that has international business experience and just listen to them on YouTube? So now you have e learning, which has been like almost any phase of new technological advancement, usually gets capitalized and captured by low interest and more predatory individuals. So you look at 20, 17, 20, 15, 20, 14, crypto.
It was more scammy, right? Because it’s brand new. There isn’t real shit built on it. It’s the same thing with info products in elearning the first people on the initial wave was the people that could milk the money off. But today you have real learning institutions online that are competing with the best of the best. I see this as a trend in 2024. Next is political themed ecommerce and drop shipping.
So in all, 2024, because of an election year. Yes. Massive. I made a ton of money selling a Donald Trump coin last election. So it was just a coin that had Donald Trump’s profile face and it was your memorabilia token, and people bought a ton of it. I think these do extremely well. Shout out to my radio show sponsor, universal Coin and Buoyan. They make a special Donald Trump gold coin.
So if you want to get actual gold coin, check out universal coin. Yeah, so it’s not that drop shipping coin. Yeah, it’s actual real one. Next, you have dominant influencers continue to build scale and sell IRL businesses. So now you’re going to begin to see influencers, the likes of Mrbeast and the likes of Luke Belmar, be in a situation whereby you’re building collateral businesses like the Nile river that we were talking about as proxy small empires around your traffic source.
So I see a lot of content creators now no longer doing merch, these simple kind of basic one hundred and one s of commerce, but utilizing their audiences and building real products. So now you can translate loyalty from here to loyalty here. And once you have loyalty on the product, you can sell that company. Yeah, I love that. Next is health. Longevity and wellness becomes a top white hat.
Monthly recurring revenue e commerce. So we, I think it was universal talent agency or universal talent management that manages all the top guys. Gary Breckett told me this. He said they did a massive report as to what are the emerging trends and niches and biohacking. Longevity, health and wellness and anti aging were at the top over any other category in all of commerce. So I see that becoming super powerful.
Next, I’m big on Shopify, so anytime Shopify keeps ramping up, I love it. Money in markets. The US continues spending. Nothing new there. We already know it. Debt spiral, boom. Everything that we already know, bitcoin ETF gets approved. Obviously this was written a couple days ago, but now I see a big narrative towards Ethereum ETF. We are going to get an ethereum ETF eventually. It is inevitable when you begin to look at all these big companies, all that bitcoin is, is a financial instrument where they can take a fee, make some money and have market dominance.
Why wouldn’t they do the same with ethereum? And why wouldn’t they do that the same with a basket of crypto assets? They might. So it’s worth considering at least paying attention. Next, you have your competing layer ones. So you have Solana, you have avax. You have these other kind of chains that people like to have high frequency trading ecosystems take place. So, for example, you have this whole shitcoin ecosystem, which people like it, hate it, it’s irrelevant.
It’s a system that exists. Bitcoin can’t sustain that ecosystem because bitcoin isn’t designed for high trading. So now you see a lot of layer ones that are designed for people that want to buy $6 worth of something, and it’s only going to cost them a fraction of a penny. There’s a market for that. I think that that’s going to be one of the narratives that’s going to be taking place when it comes to money in markets.
So anything that’s layer ones that dominate with high frequency trading, I think it’s going to be dope. PayPal and Robinhood stock, super underperformed stocks. I think now that the market begins to take form, I think that there’s a high likelihood that these stocks perform extremely well. Venture capital, private equity, begins to invest into crypto infrastructure. So a lot of companies that are risk adverse towards projects that have token allocations and tokens, there’s companies that will not touch this for legal purposes, but they will still buy infrastructure in crypto.
They will still buy SaaS and crypto. So for builders, you don’t necessarily need to launch a token. You don’t necessarily need to build something that’s what’s already been built. You can build a crypto friendly company that is of interest for people that are in the crypto space, but that isn’t tied to crypto specifically. And shout out to my fund, bitcoin opportunity fund, we’re investing in through the infrastructure of the bitcoin ecosystem.
Perfect. So now you have the example, right? So now you can invest not in tokens, but in projects that sustain the crypto ecosystem. I see a massive narrative there for crypto and Defi. Defi platforms shift focus to reducing retail onboarding friction and begin to compete head on with centralized exchanges. So you have the likes of Jupiter Exchange or Phantom Wallet. If I was to show you phantom wallet right now, I download the phantom wallet in 30 seconds, I open up Jupiter exchange.
Somebody sends me USDC, and I’m trading in ten minutes for me to open up a Robin Hood account, get KYC, fund it, connect Ach, connect my card. Get it funded. Buy some bitcoin takes a long time. I see DFI very soon competing head on hand with centralized exchanges, with your webulls, with your e trades, with your ameritrades. DeFi is getting really, really crazy and it’s getting really, really well funded.
So I’d be looking at these nfts with high viral ip become multi billion dollar brands. So nfts are merely your ability to hold on to a percentage or a piece of a company or be part of a community. Companies that have high value ip that can merge into the real world are going to do extremely well. You have the likes of pudgy penguins. You have a couple other companies that are doing extremely well.
These are worth considering and looking into only if they have real world applications. You look at the likes of. You talked about Pokemon, right? Pokemon, that’s ip. So you’re not investing in Pokemon cards, you’re investing into the ip that gives the Pokemon cards value. And I think that that’s one of these narratives that’s going to be taking place next is tokenize assets under management. So I see a big play.
Larry Finks begins and has been talking about the tokenization of all real world assets. Everything, real estate, mortgages, your bank statements, your car loan, your house, anything is going to be tokenized. So companies that begin to build portfolios or begin to take money in to manage assets in a tokenized format I think are going to become extremely popular. Next, we have more publicly traded companies begin to add bitcoin to their balance sheets.
I think now that you had this reporting system kind of update, my companies have bitcoin in their balance sheet. It’s never going to leave. I think more public listed companies are going to begin adopting it. I think that’s going to be huge. And then one of the big ones is layer one. Smart contracts focused on parallel execution of the EVM, which is the ethereum virtual machine, become popular.
So this is basically l ones or different projects that allow Ethereum to not operate like a piece of shit because right now it operates like a piece of shit. And then finally, the big one for the end of the year is the middle class officially gets priced out of buying one full bitcoin. Certainly a few of those are going to play out. Sounds pretty good. Sounds pretty ambitious.
All right, well, man, we’ve covered a lot of ground. I think that’s probably a good place to break it off. Thanks for having me, Brad. That’s what we’ll focus on for next year. Position yourself in one of those areas. If I’m going to summarize this for people listening, focus on yourself. Work for free so you can build a skill. Deliver the skill to the marketplace for free until someone wants to pay you for it.
Once you’ve created that wealth, learn to control where you work and when you work, and then parlay that money into some places that you can multiply that wealth. Here’s a whole bunch of themes that you can do this and continue to build your wealth and grow your wealth and then protect it so you can protect your freedom and sovereignty. Can I mention the protection real quick? The protection, I divided into two things, and this is kind of a left kind of curveball.
It has nothing to do with yourself. It has to do with the people that you bring. So to preserve your wealth, you need a financial advisor, a financial planner. You can’t assume that just because you said, just because you’re good in one business doesn’t mean you’re good in every business, and just because you’re good at making money doesn’t mean you’re good at keeping it. So in my life, the first thing I did, as soon as I began to make a little bit of money, I found a financial advisor or a financial planner that had my risk appetite or understood my risk appetite and could help me position a portfolio.
Whether it was a mentor, whether it was somebody that’s a CPA and actually specialized in this, I have found these people. Next is a financial role model. So if I want to preserve my wealth, I need to look at somebody that’s been able to do this model prior and take from them. Right. So take from their ingredients, take from their recipes, and put something together for me. Take the likes of Warren Buffett.
Warren Buffett has his principles of, if you’re too diversified, you’re ignorant, right? Yeah. Or if you invest everything into one, you’re putting both feet into the lake. Too much risk. So somewhere within there is his financial model of wealth preservation. You need to find who kind of aligns with you, learn from them, become mentored by them. Find a financial advisor that can help you manage this area, which is very different than making money and being an entrepreneur.
And I think having advisors, having counsel, and having people that do this management in store for me and kind of think about the future of what I’ve already built have been able to position me for the preservation of wealth. Awesome. Well, with that, we’ll sign it off. Thank you. Luke Belmar. Thank you for having me. Mark Moss. Such a pleasure. Likewise. See ya. All right, that’s a wrap.
Hopefully you’ve enjoyed this interview I did with Luke Belmar. Boy, I know he’s young, but don’t overlook his accomplishments because of his age. There’s a wealth of wisdom that we can all learn because we can learn from anything and anybody, but specifically, we can learn from somebody who came from nothing and made that much money. Make sure to give him a follow. Check out all his links down below.
Also, like I said, join me live as we talk about how we’re going to navigate what’s happening with our central bank and our government and really about the world. I’m going to show you all the charts, the graphs, how we should be building our portfolios to deal with this so we can survive and thrive 2024 without dealing with all the volatility. There’s a link down below. Come join me.
That’s what I got. Hope you enjoyed it. To your success. Out. .