Youtuber Macro Expert Predicts Inflationary Crash | Mark Moss

2017, Facebook and Google banned all advertising for crypto.

Yep.

What am I gonna do? The brand new YouTube channel, no paid ads, and did $1 million in 28 days.

Wow. All right, you're gonna enjoy this conversation with Mark Moss.

I started the YouTube channel in 2016. I'll take these very complex subjects, make them super easy to understand. On a YouTube video, I'll average 65% retention.

Oh wow, that's high. We talk about an inflationary crash that might be coming. It's just a really wide-ranging conversation. We're gonna talk about how you can build a dream life for yourself, and he's gonna talk about how he did it as well. iHeart said this, you can be bigger than Ben Shapiro.

Pretty cool validation.

So you mentioned, I mean, you came from lead gen, a lot of paid, a lot of SEO, and then now you've kind of evolved into creating content, right? Like where do you see marketing going in the next, let's say, 10 years?

So, you know, I talk about it's not who you are, it's who you know, and the benefit of having this audience and all these things. We know, I'm sure the audience knows, like probably the greatest asset you can own today is attention. That's what everyone's trying to get is attention, in addition to other things, but that attention piece. And so we have that. And I talk, I know how important that is. I talk about it, you know, but it's very interesting. All of a sudden I'm having to live a life without it. And so I don't know if, did you ever see Undercover Billionaire?

Yeah, I saw the one with Grant Cardone.

I watched the whole thing. The first one was really good. It was just one guy, but the one with Grant Cardone—

The Underdog Barbecue. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That sounds good.

But, you know, they were basically dropped off in a town with no money, but they had no contacts. They couldn't use their name. And so, here I am. So, part of what I'm doing is I've been seeing all these people take big exits near me, and I've had some big exits. And the last 5 years I've been doing this, and I've been making a lot of money. It's been great. But I'm not building any equity. I can't sell my personal brand. And I have all this deal flow, and I got brought in. I'm part of the venture fund, and I launched another venture fund, Bitcoin Opportunity Fund. So, now I'll pick that up. But I launched 2 different coaching programs. I had like a really high-ticket coaching program and then like a mid-tier coaching program, like $20,000 mid-tier, like $50,000 high-end. And I had like 80 students across that. And that became sort of a nightmare. And we can get into that if you want. But what I did is I decided, you know what, instead of trying to work with, you know the saying, those who can do and those who can't teach?

Yep.

I'm like, why am I teaching all these people that never can seem to get it right? I can just go do it. So, here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna take 2 or 3 of the best companies I see here. I'm gonna take equity deals in them and I'm just gonna help them do the work. So now, I've jumped into a couple businesses and taken big equity positions because I'm a growth hacker and I can do content. Well, one of the businesses that we have going right now, I've been there 3 months. We almost tripled the revenue in the 3 months I've been there. But back to the story, they have no content. They have no audience.

Yeah.

They have no email list. They have no social media. And so, Everything I want to do, I have to run paid ads every time I turn around. And not just paid ads, but like, hey, we need to drop $30 grand to test this.

Right.

And I'm just not used to that. In August, I ran a 3-day live campaign just off the cuff. Hey, I'm going to go live for 3 days from my studio, launch this new product. It was right after your event. I had 6,500 people just register, give me their full details just to come. Like, just like that. Like, I can drop a $7 million or 7-figure offer like that. But now I'm in this business where we can't do anything without paid ads. So that's been pretty interesting. It's been pretty frustrating as well, and obviously very expensive. So as far as the future goes, I think you either, you know, you either earn your audience or you buy it. And I think if you really want to scale a business, it's a combination of both. And so one thing I'm helping this new company with is we got to get this audience going. We've got to get the email list going. We got to get the social media going. But we also have to build the paid ads as well. So I think it's a combination of both. I think that's sort of the future. One prediction I have of the future of marketing though is I think we're unfortunately probably facing almost like this cataclysmic event where AI is gonna create more spam than we've ever seen in our lives.

Oh, for sure.

And the internet could almost become unusable. I mean, it's just gonna flood. All these people go, oh, AI, write me a book. AI, write me a blog article. And it's just gonna be crap and it's just gonna be just everywhere. And I don't even know how we're gonna weed through that. And I think the future is going to be personal brands.

Yep.

And it's gonna be a personal interaction. And so, I think the way that we'll stand out is by bringing personal stories in where I talk about my personal life, my background, my past, my kids or whatever it may be. And I think that's gonna really separate You know, the mass content, the mass marketing.

Yeah, I think there'll be a period where that happens and then there's gonna be a period where the AIs get so good they can do that too.

So who knows? Yeah, I don't know. I don't, I don't, yeah, maybe. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I mean, we'll have to differentiate ourselves by even being more personal.

So how do you look at it? Is YouTube the mothership and then everything else?

Yeah, I mean, it's been my only focus. And so I've, I mean, I have, you know, 150,000 subscribers on Twitter and 150,000 on, on, on Instagram, et cetera. But I've literally put no effort into it. That's just what's kind of grown because of YouTube, you will, and being on other podcasts and the radio, et cetera. So, that's all grown, but it hasn't been nurtured or cultivated. But I think YouTube is the mothership for a couple of reasons. First of all, it's the second largest search engine. And so, social media content goes away. I mean, sure, you can scroll my Instagram feed and I guess see stuff down there, but for the most part, it kind of goes away. 2, it's highly searchable, right? It's the second largest search engine. You don't have that on any of the other platforms. 3, you have the long-form content, which really builds the brand. So, I think from those main areas, I think it's the best in my opinion. And it's what I use, and so you know it's what I've done. So I would say that's like the mothership, and I think it's going to continue to be. I think it's going to continue to be as well. But I think if you think about you know a marketing campaign, and today more than ever because of attention deficit disorder, we need more touch points. And so I think I think there's you know a use case for all of them in different parts. We've even been just like I said, it's been about six months digging into Instagram, and even the different types of content on Instagram at different places, like using reels to bring in a new audience. Using posts and carousels to nurture and then using stories to bring people into offers and like even utilizing different types of content on the platform.

I love, I mean, I think there's a macro thing here too where it's like there aren't many people where it's like, yeah, you've done lead gen, you've done SEO paid and you know copywriting too and you're a creator too, right? So you're combining a lot of these disciplines together and it's forming like this new like marketing baby.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. And so now that we're gonna start focusing on the Shorts and even creating Shorts, And then that will then go into paid ads. So now we can be testing it on our organic audience. We can find the ones that pop and then move those into paid ads pretty quickly, which on a traditional old-school paid ad, and you're paying for the test.

Yeah.

And so that's a big deal that I just wanna just hammer home for everybody listening. Like, yeah, I have to work hard to get the audience, but now the audience is there and I can just drop content. I can just make money without spending money and Instead of paying to test ads, I can just test 'em with an organic audience. And even more importantly, I can ask my audience, run a poll, hey, what do you think about these 2 headlines? What do you think about this copy? What product would you like to see? What's your biggest obstacle? And so, I mean, the power is just enormous.

That's actually a really important call-out. And I would argue you don't even need an audience for like these Reels, Shorts, and like if it's really damn good, it just takes off, right? And then if you have really good ones, you can test for free now instead of having to pay the platforms.

Just as a story, so in 2017, when I was writing the crypto newsletter, I went up to Boise, Idaho and trained with Russell Brunson on this perfect webinar, right?

Yep.

So, I'm building out this perfect webinar to sell that on and he talks about, hey, ask your audience, what's your biggest obstacle or your top 3 questions or whatever, right? But I didn't have an audience at the time. I had been a paid ads guy this whole time. I never built up an email list. I literally ran a— 'cause I'm a paid ads guy, that's what I know. I literally ran a paid ads campaign that was just an ask campaign and I spent a couple hundred bucks to get 100 responses so I could get that. And today, I can just, Just drop it out there.

I mean, look, there's another call out here. I think it's, you know, there's, there's different types of marketers, right? You have like— so I come from working from tech before, but before that I came from direct response marketing. But it's like people in tech don't like the direct response marketers and vice versa, right? But like, if you're able to embrace both disciplines, that's how you can get the best outcomes.

Yeah.

And you're doing that.

Yeah. And I've always been a direct response. So real long, long story very short, I built up a couple of businesses. I started investing in real estate right here in L.A., right out of high school. Started a couple of businesses. I had a medical equipment business. I had an e-commerce business. I had a couple of big Exits. I was like done, retired, $20 million in real estate, sold businesses, retired, had my first kid. And then the 2008 crash came and just took it all away. It just wiped me out.

Wow.

So then I, I basically lost everything and I had sold my business. So I had no income, I had no businesses, I had no assets. And I had to move my wife, my new wife and my brand new baby out of our custom oceanfront house that I had just built with an elevator, 6-car garage. And we had to go find a place to go rent. How did I get going again? Well, I used my relationship capital. I had a friend that was a mortgage guy. And he's like, hey, if you could generate leads for me, I'll pay you a percentage of the deals I close on mortgage. I was like, okay, I got nothing else to do. So I built some landing pages, put up a Google pay-per-click campaign and set that up, hopped on my dirt bike, went on a dirt bike ride to Mexico for 7 days. I got to Cabo, opened up my laptop and it was just like cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching, just leads, just like. And so I spent 10 years just doing that, just running lead campaigns, mostly all direct response, mostly financial products.

And then pay for performance mostly.

Yeah, pay for lead gen, right? So $150 a lead. In the solar space, it would be like $150 to deliver somebody on the phone. So then we generate the leads, we put them to the call center, the call center would qualify, and we do live transfers. Mortgage live transfers, solar live transfers, things like that.

You have said that it's not who you know, it's who knows you. What do you mean by that?

So my whole content career has been about trying to change the way people think about money. But I'd like to change the way people think about a lot of things. And so we've been told most of our life, it's not who you are, it's who you know. Which there's a lot of truth to that. There's 3 types of capital. Most of us focus on the financial piece, but the relationship capital is like the most important. So it is who you know. But what I found over the last couple of years of creating content is it's not who you know, it's who knows you.

And what's the— what's the story here?

I can tell you dozens. I mean, when we connected, I saw one of our mutual friends, Cody Sanchez, was connected with you. I think I reached out to you and then you're like, oh yeah, I know who you are. Yeah, right. So like, that's an example, a simple example. Let me give you a better example. A couple of years ago, I was speaking at the Bitcoin conference It's in Miami, 35,000 people there. There's all kinds of parties going on for like a week in Miami.

2 years ago?

It was 2021. And I was at one of the companies I work with. They had like this little party going on. And some of my friends that were there were like, hey, we're going to go over to this other party for TVP. I'm like, okay, I don't know who that is or who it is, whatever, but I'll go. So we went over there and TVP is Trammell Venture Partners, is a venture cap fund in the Bitcoin space, the biggest venture capital fund. So I walk into the party and it was their launch. It was their launch party. So I walk in and they came over like, oh, Mark, we're so glad that you're here. We're honored to have you. But I didn't know who they were. I was like, cool, well, great to meet you guys. What do you guys got going on? Oh, this VC fund, blah, blah, blah. Well, now I'm an advisor. I have equity in the business. And so I got a deal of this VC fund by showing up to a party where they knew me and I didn't know them.

Got it. And you had another story around iHeart too. I think that's, that's a fascinating deal as well.

So a couple years ago, I got random message from some guy. Hey, my name's Joe, and, uh, you know, I'd love to talk to you about getting you on the radio and, and doing some shows. You know, I'm a big fan and I work with iHeart. And I'm like, okay, like, you know, we get so many DMs all the time of stuff that I don't know, but I'm like, okay, we'll check it out, right? So I hit him up and he's the second highest guy at the iHeartMedia network, and he was just a fan. He's like, dude, I've been watching your stuff. He's like, nobody does what you do. The, the way that you intersect politics, finance, and technology together, like nobody's really doing that. He's like, I want to bring it to a bigger audience. I'd love to have you on iHeart. I was like, okay. So that opened up a big door. And let me tell you kind of where this got started in my brain. What really kicked me off of this ledge was I've been part of like the ClickFunnels community for a long time.

Yeah.

I was at a Funnel Hacking Live and I go there a bunch, right? Got all those awards on my wall, whatever. But Russell Brunson was on stage. I think he had Prince EA was there and he's like, pulls out his phone. He's like on stage. He's like, oh, I just sent him a DM. And then, and then like Prince is like, like, oh, Russell, like, I'm a big fan. And he's like, no way, I'm a big fan. I just thought, how could anyone ever be a big fan of me if I don't put content out there?

Hmm.

And I was like, they can't. And so that sort of feeds into this whole, uh, it's not who you are, it's who you know kind of thing. One more story about this. At the end of 2021, some of my friends from Austin, the Austin community, part of the Cody community, they wanted to do this little event at the end of 2021, and they were calling it like a Founding Fathers 2.0. They wanted to get people in from like different niches to say like, what do you see in the world? Like, what kind of attack vectors are we looking at?

How do we prepare for kind of thing.

So, we get together in this meeting, right? And Hal Elrod and whatever, right? So, I show up to Tucker Max's office, Scribe Media or whatever it is, right? Well, he sold it now.

Yeah.

But I walk in and Hal Elrod is multi— best-selling author or whatever. I knew who he was. I've heard him on podcasts, whatever. I never met him. So, he's sitting there on a chair like this in the lobby. I walk in and he's looking at his phone like this and he looks up and he's like, The same video. He's like, Mark? He's like, dude, I'm, I'm listening to a conversation with you and Robert Breedlove right now. I was like, cool. I thought he was Tucker Max. I didn't know because I hadn't met either of them at the point, right? So we go in the big boardroom and there's like all the books on the wall and we're just talking and I'm just assuming he's Tucker, right? And then all of a sudden he's like, he's like, oh, I'm not Tucker, I'm Hal Elrod. I was like, oh, no way, dude, I'm a big fan. He's like, I'm a big fan. And it was like That was exactly what Russell Brunson had said on stage.

Love it.

I'm a big fan. No, I'm a big fan. And like, here we were.

So there's this company, it's an ad agency called Centerfield. They're based, I don't know, let's just call it the West Side. And they probably do a couple hundred million dollars a year, if not close to a billion. And the way it's— it was pay-per-lead initially just for telecoms. And then it became, they bought a call center or bought a couple. And then they just started gift wrapping the customers. My whole thing has always been, look, if you're like a world-class marketer, you're just gonna do pay for performance and you're proving it. And I have a couple friends that have pay for performance agencies where they focus on financial too. And they do, you know, healthy, you know, $30, $40, $50 million a year.

Yeah. So the overarching rule, my team and everyone, my coaching clients get tired of me saying it, but you get paid for the value you provide. And so if you want to make more money, you have to get more up on the value level. So if I can just deliver a cold lead, it's only worth so much. If I can deliver them qualified live transferred, it's worth more. If I could If you can get them all the way through the application process, it's worth even more, right? And so, like, you wanna continue to expand up that value transition. I was telling my social media guy just yesterday that, like, look, I get hit up 100 times a day by people wanting to chop up my content or post my content or edit my videos. That's a commodity. If you could help me come up with a campaign, if you could help me nurture the client through a ManyChat sequence, if you could put them into a funnel, that's worth way more. Right?

You still use ManyChat?

So we've been using ManyChat, but now I'm starting to move— sorry, ClickFunnels— moving everything over to GoHighLevel.

Okay.

And it has it built in. Yeah, it's just way better.

Okay, interesting. What is GoHighLevel? Just so people know.

So GoHighLevel is a new software that's sort of like a more all-in-one software. So you got all the funnel capabilities that you might see in ClickFunnels or Kajabi, things like that. And even better, they have an option where they have integration with ChatGPT, and ChatGPT can do all the automations for you.

So it's everything. Yeah, it's everything. Yeah.

I don't have equity, but for everybody listening, what they have—it's a genius business model. Russell Brunson is, I think, arguably one of the best marketers alive today. I don't even know if that's arguably. I agree with that. Yeah, right. And he's done great. ClickFunnels—I don't know—it's worth $100 million or whatever, right? GoHighLevel is worth $500 million, and they just launched a couple years ago, and their model is completely different. And what they do is I bought a master license. So ClickFunnels is $300 a month. For for GoHighLevel, I pay $500 a month. And I have unlimited white labels I can resell underneath me. Huh, interesting.

Yeah. Are you pushing the crap out of that?

This is one of the new business ventures that I just launched.

I love it. Well, yeah, uh, gohighlevel.com/markmoss. I'm just kidding.

No, I don't, I don't have like a reseller, but what you can do is, so for example, back to the lead gen piece. So in this, uh, this one company, like I said, I took about 3 companies that I'm kind of taking as— I don't want to throw around the holdall company and the portfolio companies, whatever, but there's— I I'm invested into a bunch of businesses and things like that, right? But there's a couple that I decided to kind of take. This one, I'm taking like a chief visionary role, chief growth role kind of a thing. And what we're doing is we're using my experience with lead gen and we're disrupting 3 medical niches. And if you're a chiropractor, a dentist, a doctor, like you learned how to do that thing, but you know nothing about marketing. So you're like, well, I guess I should hire a Facebook ads guy. Well, they don't know anything about your business either. And even if they did a good job, even if, even if you found someone, they deliver a lead, what do you do with it? Yeah. How do I nurture the lead? How do I email them? How do I get them in? When I get them in, what's the script I use? So in GoHighLevel, what we're doing is we have 3 medical niches that we're disrupting and we're building templated websites. So it's like, hey, you're, you're this medical office, pick which website you like, the whole CRM, the whole backend setup for you. If you want, we'll just deliver you leads and back to the Legion piece, not just deliver the leads. So now in my ad account, I just add your zip code. Turn it on. Now leads go into your CRM and we have all the nurture sequences set up. So all the ManyChat, the AI, the DM, all that set up. So literally from you pick the template, we turn the ads on, the ads get completely nurtured all the way through, and literally you do nothing. A client just shows up at your office.

And the ChatGPT component you mentioned as part of that, is it coming up with— is it just crafting follow-up sequences or something?

Well, no, it actually does live Okay, so you can—

based on all the data you have?

Based off all the data, and then you can kind of set parameters. I haven't got that far down that rabbit hole yet. So basically then what we'll do is then all these offices that come on, they pay us for the CRM, which is super sticky. So once we give them the website and then we start delivering leads in their CRM, how can they ever leave? So then we can say, hey, it's $500 a month for the website and the CRM plus the lead gen, whatever. And so that's sort of the One of the pieces of this kind of one company I'm working with.

I love it. So how is your business empire right now structured?

Kind of the content sits top of funnel. So the main content is YouTube and the radio and the podcast. And then below that sits products. I have one full-time guy in my office with me who's sort of capturing content and helping kind of distribute that. Everyone else sort of sits remotely. Everyone else is kind of around the country and they do different roles. As far as the business units go in the sort of like investing niche, I have some educational courses, then upsell into like an annual newsletter subscription, $2,000. And then we have higher-level coaching programs from there that go up to $50,000, $60,000 for the high-end program. So sort of everything from very— from free content through lead magnets, like a value ladder, right? So free information, lead magnets, you know, course reports, things like that, low-ticket education courses, And then the newsletter, which is then more like coaching because we're actually giving you, hey, here's a recommendation, buy this uranium asset kind of thing, and then go into coaching programs. So that's sort of like that, that business product. I look at that as sort of my coaching advisory business. Then I have the media business. So the media business would be YouTube and radio and podcasts because that brings in a lot of revenue. YouTube channel brings in a lot of revenue from AdSense, and then the radio podcast I have sponsors for. So that's another pretty good-sized business as well. So I sort of have the media business, the advisory kind of education business, and those are sort of probably the 2 main businesses that I have. And then because of people knowing me, I get this deal flow that's come to me. I have taken advisory positions and equity positions in 2 investment funds, Bitcoin Opportunity Fund, which is a Bitcoin ecosystem investment fund. And then I have the Trammell Ventures, which is a VC fund. And then I have individual companies that I've also taken equity positions as an advisory roles. So I sort of have like this advisory investing business as well. So it's like probably the 3 main assets. And then of course I have my own investments. So big real estate portfolio, my own, you know, Bitcoin and stocks and all that kind of stuff that I manage. It's not really business related. And now just in the last 90 days, I have 3 additional businesses that now I'm taking equity positions in to grow.

Got it. And so people watching right now, they're probably thinking, okay, I can either decide if I want to focus or have like this business empire like you have it. Like, how big could it get? Like, could you give them a range for like what the potential is if they're to make an empire versus—

Well, the potential is unlimited, right? Obviously, I think in, in the media business, I mean, just super quickly, you know, you get paid for AdSense. So depends on what niche you're in. I'm typically getting about $20 per CPM on YouTube because I'm sort of in the financial space. What I've found is it's not so much on your tags. It's really what you're talking about in your video. So if I make videos about banking, credit cards, things like that, I'll get like a $35 CPM. Right. Maybe even higher if I'm doing more just kind of like Fed CPI data, it might be $15, $18, but it's probably a blend of about $20. Right. So you get to 1 million views a month, it's about $20 grand. Right. So just to kind of give people an idea, short-form content doesn't pay that. Yeah. YouTube Shorts ain't paying that. Yeah. So that's long-form content. You typically want your videos to be at least 8 minutes because then they can put 2 ads in there. Podcast sponsors, sort of the same thing, about a $25 CPM roughly. If I did a podcast every day, then I can get more ad kind of copy in there. Newsletter, sort of the same thing. So that's sort of like the content piece, whether it's newsletters, YouTube, radio, podcasts, it's all about the same. You're gathering eyeballs, you get paid for the views, but then it's what do you do with that attention? So that's where the next part of the empire goes. So then what can I offer to my audience that's of value? So between the courses and coaching programs, we fell just short of 8 figures last year.

Courses and coaching, right?

Courses and coaching, just on that. Oh, and then I forgot the third— the other part of my business was my events business. So I've been running my own conference. So I've been running Market Disruptors Live. We have about 500, 600 people that come. We did Miami, we did Dallas. We use those as a way to continue to build the brand, but then that sells the high-ticket program. So like we did the first one, we did like $2 million in a day.

Wow. That's like they come to the back of the room and buy type of thing?

Yeah. Yeah, so we have the big events and then I do smaller events. So then in my studio, my film studio, I can get about 30 people there. So then we'll do like smaller events that we'll sell there. So smaller kind of like mastermind events that I'll sell and then the big events that we'll sell. So then we have like the events business as well.

And you're driving traffic through your organic content, probably some paid and email list, I'm assuming?

I have not— email list, I have about 100 and I don't know, 20, 125,000 on my email list. So, it's basically all just from organic content, mostly YouTube and the email list. The last 6 months, we've been Instagram involved in that as well. Really nothing coming from TikTok or Facebook at this point. In the last 5 years, I've probably spent $15,000 in paid ads.

Wow.

I mean, basically none.

Yeah, basically nothing.

I'll test a little bit here, test a little bit here. We'll run some AdSense or pay-per-click on our keywords, our name. Market disruptors, Mark Moss kind of thing like that. I've tried to get a couple Facebook things go here, a couple there. I never really committed to it. It's super difficult to run finance stuff on Facebook. You basically, I mean, you know, on Facebook they're just shutting everyone's ad account down. You do anything wrong, you look at them wrong, they shut your ad account down. So I've had my ad account shut down so many times. And in the world of finance, like you just, you can't say, it's almost like a weight loss niche. Like you can't say anything. You can't make any claims. You can't talk about any past performance. Like it's just like, Like, you have to be so vanilla. And so I just haven't put the time into it. Probably the most amount of Facebook ads I've ran was for my live event. That was probably where probably 75% of my ad spend over the last 5 years has been for the event, getting people to that.

Yep. Got it. This message is brought to you by Single Grain. Single Grain is a marketing agency ran by yours truly. Single Grain does paid media, SEO, creative, conversion rate optimization, and has worked with a handful of companies such as Uber, Amazon, Airbnb, Salesforce, to startups, venture-backed startups, a lot of different companies. And ultimately our mission is to do innovative marketing that drives customers. If you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com. Again, it's Single Grain, grain like wheat, and we'll see you on the other side. And just so people get a sense for it, like how much social, like how much reach are you getting from the channels per month right now?

For the social channels?

Yeah.

Well, so as I said earlier, like we've, it's just been really the last 6 months we've started to kind of turn attention to Instagram as our main focus on Instagram. I think we're getting 3 or 4 million views a month. Is that about right? 3 or 4 million, something like that? 3 or 4 million views a month on Instagram.

Oh, on Instagram alone?

On Instagram alone, yeah. And then, those same clips are going over to TikTok and Facebook, but I don't even know what that data is. We're tracking it. My team could tell you better. I think we're probably getting more in the 5 million range across those platforms.

And then, that includes YouTube or—

Oh, no, that's without YouTube. Yeah, YouTube's another 1.5 million, 2 million views And then podcasts? The podcast is about half a million.

Okay.

You know, and I don't know what the reach on the radio is. So, I'm in 26 markets, I think. So, that's like a weird deal. I don't know how that works.

I would argue like your reach, like the YouTube, sure, it's like less views or whatever, but it's like such higher quality views. And maybe even for podcasts too, it's even higher quality.

Yeah. So, that's a key piece. I've been binge-watching your content. I told you another one of our mutual friends, Blake, that you had on, I've— I met him through Cody a couple years ago, and, uh, we, we keep up, and, uh, he's Mr. Short Form. Yeah. And as I was listening to that interview, and I was just thinking, I only focused on long form. And I think what I've found is specifically, I, I try to focus on like high-ticket items. And so with high ticket, from the data that I've found, you typically need about an hour and a half with a person before they can buy. While I don't get as many views as Blake gets across social media, the views are so much better quality, right? So on a YouTube video, on a 25-minute video, I'll average 65% retention.

Oh wow.

Yeah.

That's high.

Well, I was just gonna say, so when somebody watches you for 25 minutes and they've been watching 25-minute videos for months or years, I mean, they think they know you. So there's a lot of trust that's built. When you watch hours and hours of content, there's a lot of character that they pick up, a lot of personality. And so you really start to get it versus just a real short form. I mean, I, I'm not a fan of doing short-form content. And the reason why is I think it's one of the bigger problems that we have in the world today, where everybody reads headlines and they don't get the context. And today we see so much, you know, black or white. People think very linearly, but everything has nuance. And if you don't pick up the nuance, you're just never gonna get it. And I'll do a 20-minute video on like a big subject, like George Gammon. He's one of my good friends. You know, he'll dive deep into like, yeah, reverse repo.

Yeah.

Well, I'm left watching that going, what does that mean? Why do I care? So then I'll do a video on like, hey, If you want the technical, go watch George. But let me tell you why you care about this and what it means to you, right? So anyway, I'll take these very complex subjects, make them super easy to understand, and I'll do it in like 20 minutes. And people would be like, dude, it's too long, make it shorter. I'm like, then just read the headline. So anyway, I'm not a form of short-form content because what can I really tell you in 45 seconds?

Plus, I'll be honest, I don't know about you, but like, I don't remember anybody from short-form. Anybody, actually. There's only one person, actually, Jenny Hoyos. That person. She's— but that's 'cause I watched a 35-minute video of her getting interviewed. That's the only reason I know her.

Yeah, I think it's a— the way that I'm seeing it and the way that I wanna approach it is like top of funnel. All my content is top of funnel, but really the Shorts would be super top of funnel. That's how we've been using them on Instagram anyway. And I think I've seen several people like Blake, but even in the crypto space that I know, they really used TikTok to build their YouTube channels. So I think the TikTok, you know, the Shorts will be top of funnel for the other type of, for the long-form content. And then long-form content will still be top of funnel for the products and services.

Yeah, I mean, I think this works out really well. Well, I've done podcasts I've been doing podcasts for years, but I've never chopped them up. Like, we're starting, like, literally last maybe 90 days or so. And it's— I see the flywheel starting to work really well. And it's just like, oh, okay, like, you just, you roll with whatever organic channel is working well.

Yeah. The problem is because, like, most of my content, as I was saying, is typically like a 20-minute, 25-minute, like, thesis. So it's not— I don't think it's super clip-worthy. Because, like, you take a 45-second clip out of a 20-minute, like, teaching video, you don't really get the whole context of what it is. And that's why, you know, I know Like, I listened to your video with Hormozi and he's like, oh, we're just pulling clips now. He doesn't do direct to camera anymore. But I think for what I'm doing, my type of content doesn't really lead to that. And I think that's part of the reason why it hasn't really been growing for us. And so that's where we're thinking about making just specific short-form content for that. That's just short soundbites, snippets. And if you want the deeper content, then you come into the long-form.

Oh, got it. I like that. It's, it's a preview to your long-forms. Yeah. Yeah. 65% retention is insane. Like, what have you done to do that?

Good storytelling, right? It's copywriting. So I think it's all about the intro, right? So it's all about the hook. So I do a 3 3-part hook. And this is just copywriting, like who's it for, what's it for, and status change, right? That's what basically what it is. So like the who's it— so the hook is like, you know, the end of the international monetary order is coming, watch out. So that's like the hook. And then I give the offer, right? So it's like the, the, the hook, the offer. And that would be like, as you know, the system's crashing, 3 banks collapsed this year, the banks could bail in your money. So in this video, I'm going to break down the 3 banks that are most dangerous. So then I'll kind of give the context, and then I'll tell you What's in the video? In this video, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do this, and I'm gonna show you this, this, this. And then the last part is the status change or like the testimonial. Having this information will protect you from whatever, right? So I kind of like, I'll try to get that out in like 60 seconds. So like a really strong hook, the context of what it is, what they're going to receive, and the status change that they'll receive, the benefit.

If they stay till the end.

Staying to the end, right? And then, you know, through good storytelling, they need the journey. Right? So it's like, uh, we're gonna go over this, we're gonna go over this, we're gonna go over this, but we're also gonna say what you need to watch out for, the danger, this thing that you need to know as well. And, and that— and then I think just from years of doing it, you know, I think naturally I'll be like, and we'll come back to that in a minute. Okay, hey, uh, we'll talk about that in a minute. And like hooks to the end kind of things like that.

Yeah. I think it's probably second nature for you now, but that 60 seconds, that hook, and then everything you talked about, how long does that typically take you?

To write it out?

Yeah.

So I know a lot of YouTubers, they talk about like creating the package first, right? The package for me, uh, consists of a title and like a paragraph. That's like, that would be probably the package for me. I would do the title, the thumbnail, 'cause I usually put like a couple words on the thumbnail. So it'd be a title, thumbnail, and like a paragraph. That's like the package. So I'll start from there. Then I'll build it out to typically 8 bullet points. And then of those 8 bullet points, I try to put 3 to 4 bullet points under each one. So that's like, that's where I start. And then I'll usually build the video out and then go back and write the intro.

You're not just like shooting from the hip. And by the way, there's like so many different ways to do this.

Like, I want the hook, I want the intro to be good. And so I'm pretty good at shooting off the cuff because I've been doing it for 5 years now. But I find it to be better when I, when I do it. And I don't go back and try to like SEO optimize it or do any of that. I don't know how important that is for YouTube anymore. The thing is, for what I'm doing, for the type of content I'm doing, a lot of the learning comes from the research process. So when I sit down to build that video, I'm going to spend 4 or 5 hours on that video. I'm going to start researching and pulling stuff, and then I'm learning more stuff as I'm going, so that's why I'll go back and do the intro after I've built the video, because like I'm not exactly sure what the flow's gonna be. So then I might end up with 10, 12 bullet points, and then I'll compress it back down, and then, you know, and then I just launch it. I don't know how long it's gonna take me. I typically figure I can get through about 8 slides in about 20, 25 minutes, you know?

I think your framework's amazing. Are you doing any crazy stuff?

I use TubeBuddy, and TubeBuddy will allow you to A/B test the thumbnail. The problem with the A/B testing on TubeBuddy is that it's a 24-hour period, Period. And so like typically you come out of the gate pretty hot and then, and so, you know, we'll look at like the click-through rate. That's kind of one of the big pieces for me. But like, and if it doesn't seem to be taking off good, we'll go back and change a title or a thumbnail. But because the data has like that lag to it, like I haven't found a real good way to do that. I do know one of the big YouTube strategies and I've seen Russell Brand hiring for this role, but is a YouTube optimizer. And even going back to the back catalog, A year or two old and changing thumbnails and titles in that. So, uh, shout out right now because I'll throw it out a couple times, but I'm hiring all kinds of people. onemarkmoss.com/jobs. onemarkmoss.com/jobs. If you want to be a YouTube optimizer, hit me up. So, um, remote's good. Uh, remote's good. But I, I could certainly use somebody sitting on that YouTube optimizing videos. But I'll go back to this, um, the type of content that I'm doing. So So, my content really changed around the pandemic, and I've sort of had different phases of content. When I launched the channel originally, the entire reason I started the YouTube channel was because I was writing a cryptocurrency research newsletter in 2016 and 2017, crushed it. But in December of 2017, Facebook and Google banned all advertising for crypto.

Yep. I remember that.

So now, what am I going to do? And now, I had spent 10 years in lead gen. So, I was a lead gen. Me and my partner were the largest solar lead generators in the nation at one point. So I'm deep into call centers and data and avatar dialers and, you know, SEO and paid ads, whatever. So I was running this on paid ads. They, they shut that down and we had no way to sell the product. So my business partner at the time is like, hey, I'll just start a YouTube channel. I'll just do TA, technical analysis live, and we'll sell the product. It was a newsletter product and a trading product.

Got it.

And well, we, we launched the trading products and it was just like lightning in a bottle. It was, uh, right when the advertising shut 2017, Bitcoin had gone from $1,000 to $19,000. And then all that shut down. We launched this trading product in December 2017 with a brand new YouTube channel, no paid ads, and did $1 million in 28 days.

Wow.

Boom. Just captured lightning in a bottle, right? I think we broke the ClickFunnels record at the time, and that was on $0 of ad spend.

Yeah.

So then I started talking about more business and success stuff. Then when the pandemic happened, it went like heavy macro, sort of like macroeconomic and like free Those are sort of like the 2 things that I kind of talk about there. And the reason why I'm saying this is because a lot of it is like news-oriented, is driven by the news cycle. And so, it's not really evergreen. Part of what I want to do for next year is get off the news cycle. It's a hamster wheel. I'm done with the news cycle. I want to go back to more evergreen content.

The news cycle is a hamster wheel. I mean, when you're doing like Ben Shapiro or like even Patrick Bet-David, who I love, right? And I think it's just tough because every day it's like, it kind of feels like a job.

Yeah. It's a massive job. It's 2 things that people probably don't realize. One, I have to be in the news cycle 24/7 because I come on to a couple podcasts a week and I don't know what questions they're going to ask me. So I need to kind of know about everything. Like, I need to know what's going on in the oil market. I need to know what's going on with the war in Israel. I need to know what's going on with the Fed meeting last week. I need to know what the CPI data that just came— like, I need to know all that all the time. So there's hours per day of just staying in the news cycle. That's like the Yeah. Now, if I'm talking business, marketing, dude, I've been doing this for decades. I could just talk about that all the time. It doesn't really change, right? But in that news cycle, you have to be in it. And Patrick Bet-David's more like on the politics side, but still, you gotta know that.

He's reacting, yeah.

And then the second part is I've kind of sold my soul for the algorithm, so to speak. And so then what happens is, what should I talk about this week? What's the biggest story? Ooh, I don't like that story. Let me find a bigger story, right? And so it's two-part. I mean, dude, on a whole day and then not decided on an idea. Like a whole day, 6 hours goes by, 7 hours, and I'm just like, I still don't know what I wanna do for a video.

Yeah.

As opposed to, I keep, one of the big hacks for me that I learned a long time ago, and it was actually through time management, is just capture every idea. And so, I use Evernote on my phone, on my computer, and every idea I just write down. So, I have pages of videos I want to do that are evergreen videos, and I just haven't been doing them because I'm always stuck in the news cycle.

Yep.

So anyway, it's a, it's a massive time suck. A couple hours a day of just staying in it and then trying to dig out that story as opposed to just doing something that you want.

And then it doesn't let you focus on the business too.

And it also, it also burns you out. I don't want to say I'm doing videos just for views, but I do think about what video will get the most views all the time. It's stuff that I've been paying attention to for over a decade, and even if I wasn't getting paid, I'm still gonna put all my time into it anyway, so I might as well talk about it.

So iHeart said this, you can be bigger than Ben Shapiro.

It was actually Well, Joe told me this, but he— it was Bob Pittman, the CEO, is the one that told him that. So Joe was telling Bob, hey, you got to watch this guy, Mark, whatever. And so apparently— I haven't talked to Bob personally, but apparently per Joe, he said, he's like, yeah, Bob started watching your stuff. And he's like, dude, this guy could be bigger than Ben Shapiro. He's like, I know, I told you. Yeah. So that was like pretty cool validation. I didn't hear it firsthand, I heard it secondhand, but— Got it.

So I guess that's interesting to me because you know who sticks out to me right now? I was talking to George Gammon a couple weeks ago. And so, so he has his YouTube guy, we're in a Zoom, and his YouTube guy's like, like, your YouTube sucks. And I was like—

Josh?

Josh, yeah. Josh is like, your YouTube sucks. I'm like, oh, thanks. But it's true. And he's like, dude, it could be so much bigger, blah, blah, blah. And they're like, dude, you guys got to look at Russell Brand. Russell Brand to me is entertaining. It's every day he's reacting to stuff, right? And to me, I'm like, I think you can do even better than that. So not even you'll be bigger than Ben Shapiro, but I think you'll just be like this massive brand. And so how are you changing, I guess, your content workflow moving forward?

Because you talked about how you're spending 6 hours a week on it right now, but you want to You know, there's a whole lot to unpack in that specifically, but I kind of got thrown into the world of content creation. Actually, I didn't want to. It was my old business partner that sort of forced me into it. And I've gone through many phases. So it's been— I just celebrated like my 5th year of, I guess, being a content creator. I started my YouTube channel 5 years ago in October. And, you know, you'll hear a lot from content creators or coaches that coach content creators, and they tell you typically to like focus on one platform. So all I focused on was on YouTube. I didn't build TikTok or Twitter or Instagram. None of that. of that. And really, in the last 6 months, I've only started to turn to social media. It's been basically 4 and a half years of only YouTube.

Hmm.

But through that time, my production schedule has changed as well as the content that I've done has changed. And I've gone from 2 videos a week to 3 videos a week to 1 video a week, back up to 2 videos a week, back up to 3. So, I've sort of changed that schedule. For the last— since the pandemic, really since 2020, I went up to 3 videos a week, 2 and then to 3, and I've maintained that schedule. So 2 main teaching videos per week, which are like a thesis. It's like a 25-minute video, not reciting news headlines like a Russell Brand or a Ben Shapiro, but like, here's like a thesis twice a week, plus 1 interview a week. So 3 of those a week. Each of those videos take 4 or 5 hours to write, right?

And you're doing like a— you have a whiteboard and everything.

I got the whiteboard and all that. Then when I got the iHeart deal, which was, I guess, in 2021, Then, I picked up an additional 3 hours of content a week. So, they pitched me on a radio show and a podcast. So, I record the radio and then the radio goes into the podcast. But, I record for 3 hours a week. I do that every Thursday and I have someone helps me with the research and write and whatever. And then, I spend a couple hours in advance getting it, then 3 hours going live. So, it's a full day or even more.

So, this is more than 6 hours of work actually for Oh, yeah, yeah, right.

So, so for the last 2 years, I've been pretty much doing 3 videos on my main YouTube channel, plus 3 hours of radio, podcast, and secondary YouTube channel. So it's about 6 hours of final video at the end of the week, plus, you know, I'm on 1 or 2 shows a week as well. So it's a, it's a pretty crazy schedule to keep up on, which has been fun. At one point, I was kind of telling you, I don't know if before we were recording, but iHeart offered me to build out a network. And so, I thought, you know what? I'm just going to build a media company.

Yeah.

And so, I was kind of like all in on that. But man, I'm a builder. I'm an entrepreneur. I spun up a whole bunch of businesses and try— over the last couple of years, going back to it's not who you are, it's who you know, I have just opportunities just flying at me left and right. And we launched a couple of ventures and each one were like 7-figure, 7-figure, just like picking up money, right? Maintaining this media schedule that I've been running and trying to run businesses just doesn't It just doesn't work. Yeah, it just doesn't work. And so, you know, as I said, like over, over the course of a career, but even over the course of 5 years, like what I'm doing, what I'm focused on changes. And I've gotten to the point where it's like, man, I'm a builder. I wanna build, I need equity. So, um, I'm gonna probably slow the content side down a little bit and, and focus on that.

Got it. Right now, like what percent of the week do you think you're dedicating towards content and what do you think it will be moving forward?

Well, as of right now, I'm still doing the 3 hours of radio, pod, et cetera. Uh, that's a piece that I'm potentially gonna renegotiate this month here at the end the year. We're just entering the end of the year here, right? I typically spend the last month of the year on massive reflection. I do all year, but like, what did I like? What didn't I like? What can I do better? And what do I want for next year? So I'm thinking about changing that podcast thing, potentially cutting an hour or 2 out of that schedule and just bringing it down to like a podcast. And then on my main YouTube channel, I'm thinking about going down to just one video a week.

Less is more.

Yeah, quality over quantity. And I think less is more. I mean, And, you know, there's a lot of people that do one video a week like Cody Sanchez and her media side of the business crushes it with just one video and then focus more on the social media side, on the short-form side. We've done no effort or focus on the short-form side at all.

Yeah, I was going to ask you, but because I was looking at your channel, I was like, yeah, like there's, you know, both you and George Gammon, very, very, very focused. There's like, I'm not going to touch anything else, which is, I think, great. But also I'm looking at everything, I was like, so the question is no YouTube Shorts, you stayed focused on, I guess, like what are you going to open up to? Like Shorts, TikToks, Reels, anything else?

I mean, in full disclosure, I mean, we have those being posted, but it's literally like a team in India that just chops clips and sticks them up, right? So there's— we don't look at data, we don't look at analytics, like we haven't done anything there.

Yeah.

So I think it's, uh, it would be a combination of going and actually creating short-form content. We've started to experiment with it just in the last month or two, sitting down, recording short-form content. So I think it'll be a short-form strategy, which will be including, right, creating content specifically for short-form and hiring platform managers that will dig into the data, optimize it, and start tweaking on it.

Got it. You've mentioned that the phrase I remember is there's like a nightmare that you had with coaching, or there's some, some type of coaching nightmare, I should say.

I think I said on the coaching thing, it was like those who can do, those who can't teach kind of a thing. And maybe just some of the frustration around the coaching side of things. I don't know if I said—

So do you think you're going to stop coaching and move more into kind of, you know, taking equity Yeah, for now I'm, for now I'm putting the coaching on pause.

I've had 8 businesses that have scaled to 7 to 8 figures in 12 months, and like, I have no problem just jumping into something different because it's all the same thing. It's all just, it's just marketing, right? So it's all the same thing. And I'll shut the coaching down, and if a year from now I want to do coaching again, I'll do it again. But it really just was, as like I said, it's those who can do. And I'm like, I can just go build these businesses. I can just take a giant equity stake in this business and I can blow it up in 12 months and make way more. It's shorter. It's on the shorter side. So, so here's what But I mean, I've shut down a lot of the coaching programs, which were making a lot of money for me. And so, this year, my revenue went down from where it was last year. But now, I have equity sitting in these businesses. And so, if I look at the EV value, the enterprise value that I've built up, it actually has surpassed it, but it's not cash in my bank. But I don't need the cash in my bank right now. So, I'm happy to take the long road on these. I think this one, this medical business, I need— not because I'm greedy and I don't need the money. I climb mountains.

Mm-hmm.

I'm a snowboarder. I jump out of helicopters. I ride dirt bikes. I climb mountains. And I want to climb business mountains too. I need a 9-figure deal. Yeah. And this is my 9-figure deal. Got it. Not because I need the money. I just— I don't know. That's my next step.

It's fun. It's fun.

I've done 8. I need 9. And I think I can do 9 on this in, in 36 months.

Got it. 9 is your share?

9 would be total. Got it. And a good chunk is yours. I have just under half.

Got it. For most of these deals where you're taking equity, I'm assuming advisory, you're taking like 1 to 5%.

Yeah. On advisories, it's real small. So there's 3 or 4 deals that I'm like advisory on. So some of them I'll put money Yeah. So, they'll invite me in. And that's back to who you know. So, I've gotten invited into some really good deals I don't belong into. You've seen that app Public Square? It's like all the conservative freedom businesses. They got the team that did Rumble's reverse SPAC and took them public, and they went public.

It's like a Twitter for—

No, it's more of like a shopping app where they match freedom-minded conservative businesses with freedom-minded shoppers.

Oh, interesting. Yeah.

And they blew up, did a reverse SPAC, and like, hey, you want to come in on this deal? Like, we're going to go, we're going to, we got a pre-IPO and like, we're going to double the share, you know? So, I get invited to a lot of deals like that. So, some of them I'll put money in and then I'll take like an advisory role, but not like a full-time role, like an advisory role, right? These businesses that I'm jumping into, like I said, I've got 3 right now where it'll probably be 30% to 40% equity deals. Got it.

And you're not operational. I mean, you're just helping here and there.

So, I'm a little more operational than I want to be right now. now. The rule I put with each one of them is like, hey, I'll do the deal, but the first thing we have to do is have an operator. And so I've got some operators in place, but I'm a little bit more operational than I want to be right now because it's the beginning, right? I'm like rolling up my sleeves and let's dig in. What do the finances look like? Okay, let's get the CFO to come in. That's— I hit up the group the other day asking for a CFO. Oh yeah, yeah. Leveling Up group. Yeah, great resource, Leveling Up. So shout out for that. I met him at your mastermind in August. So good resource for everybody. But yeah, so you know, let's dig through the finances. Let me get a CFO in place. Okay, let's get the operator in. Okay, let me fix up the marketing. Okay, what are we doing? Let me rewrite the VSL. We're going to launch this book a call campaign, so I'll write that. Like those are things that I'm really good at. I have a lot of experience, so it's a it's kind of front loading the amount of operational work that I'll do. But as far as operational work, as far as management, no, no, no, no. If I look at my career, I would look at like in the investing space, in the oil space, you have what's known as like a wildcat. So wildcatter is the one that goes to the plains of North Dakota or Texas, and they'll find a piece of land, find out who owns it, put a contract on it. They'll drill and they'll hit oil. But once they hit oil, they're gone. Someone else will come in and get the oil out of the ground and put it in barrels. So the wildcatter finds the oil. So that's kind of what I've done good in my career. I can go find million-dollar pockets everywhere, but I don't want to get the oil out of the ground. So that's sort of what I'm doing in this role. So I'm like setting up the pieces that we need. I wrote some new VSLs. I wrote some new flows. I built a new stack. I came up with a new couple products that we can bring in. We're getting the paid ads going. We got the book-a-call funnels going. We got the sales team up and running. And once that's going, someone else can run that.

Got it. I love it. Talk, talk about hiring these operators. So how— it seems like you're not satisfied right now with the current operators. So how are you going to change that?

Well, okay. So, you know, I'm not qualified like Cody or, you know, Alex to talk about these subjects, to be honest with you. I'm a wildcatter. And so So, I've mainly been a solopreneur for like the last 10 years. I had some big business. I had 65 people on one of my companies and that was probably the biggest I've had, which isn't massive, but I've been there. But the last 10 years, I've been the solo operator. That hiring and that operator piece and the delegation piece is not my strongest piece right now. Got it. I'm really good at finding cash quick. So, that's something I'm really, really working on. I'm not super happy because I haven't really developed that skill super strong and I haven't opened up that funnel. And that's why I'm shouting it on your show. I decided, you know what? And it was really just in this last 60 days and I just read the book Who Not How. Oh, got it, got it, got it. I read the book Who and now I just read the book Who Not How. And it just made me realize that over these last couple years, I talked about shutting down some of these coaching programs. I could have kept a lot of those things going if I would have found some whos. And so, one thing I took from that is At this point, I just always have to be hiring. And so, I put up a page on my website, onemarkmoss.com/jobs, and I'm just always— I'm always hiring operators because I have deals flying at me left and right. And so, if I have good operators, I can just stick them in. If I have good content people, good marketing people, etc.

Do you remember that book I gave you at the event?

I did.

The brown one?

And I read part of it and it made me go, oh crap, I'm a horrible operator.

Dude, you gotta go the whole thing.

I know. It made me feel bad about myself though. That's good.

Yeah, but, but like, like you were saying, like, as we get older, it's just like, fuck, like everything's just a people game, man.

It's like, it's not even how good we are. It's not just a people game. It's, it's, uh, you, you need the people. Um, I read a book a long time ago by Daniel Pink and it was A Whole New Mind. You read that book?

I know Daniel Pink.

A Whole New Mind. And it basically talks about how our mind, we have a left and right side and there's like a creative side, analytical side, and how everything, our entire education system and everything was built for analytical thinkers and how a few hundred years ago even they thought the creative side of our brain wasn't necessary, they'd do lobotomies, whatever. But really, like, all of our education system, SATs, it's all built on technical analytical thinking. And that was fine growing up. My mom wanted me to go be an engineer because that was a great job. Her brother, her uncle was an engineer. I should be an engineer, a coder, whatever it may be. But in the book, basically he makes the case that those are technical jobs. But what happened is, as Einstein said, the answers have changed. See, most people don't realize that. They think the answers are the answers. No, no, answers change. And what changed the answer was that the internet came. And with the internet, we were able to now scale technical workers across the globe using Upwork, which I use, or Elance or whatever. I can hire any technical person I want. I can hire engineers or coders or developers with a drop of a hat for $5 or $10, right? So why would I want to be that? So what he makes the case is because now the internet has commoditized technical workers, in order to really get ahead, you have to have a creative mind. So now I see a problem that I can come up with a creative solution for. Oh, if I had this app to solve this problem, I don't need to I don't even know how to build the app. I just have to know that I need to get a coder and a UI/UX and whatever. And so, really, you think of yourself more as like a conductor of an orchestra where I can't play the instruments better than any of you, but together, I can bring you together to play a good song. So, most of these operators and roles inside the business, to your point, we need good people. We do, but those people don't have the vision.

Mm-hmm.

They don't have the creativity to see the problem that we're trying to solve, nor do they see the vision of the path to get there. It's not just having good people, it's having the vision to bring that together.

Well, I would argue you still need the person to have the vision.

Right. Well, that would be me, right? That's the creator, right? Correct.

Correct. Yeah. No software, no amazing product or service is built without people.

Right, right, right. Yeah, 100%. Yeah.

So, the story with that book is— so, a guy that was at the event, he read part of the book and he like goes to the conference and then he sees like this executive on his team. He's like, hey, just read this. This is good. And she hates him for the rest of the week because it's a really heavy book, right? Yeah, it is. She's like, I read the whole thing. This is amazing. Here are all the things that we're going to do. And it's just like, boom, the company has changed, right? I can't thank that book enough because I think it's like the modern-day version of—

It's really good.

High Output Management.

It's really good. Yeah, I read a few chapters and like I said, it made me feel bad at myself. I'm like, oh my gosh, I feel so bad. I don't do any of this.

This message is brought to you by Leveling Up Founders, and Leveling Up Founders is an invite-only event for founders. It happens once a year, usually during August, and past attendees include people such as Ali Abdaal, Cody Sanchez, Neil Patel, Vanessa Lau, and the list goes on and on. And ultimately, it comes down to the quality of the group of the people. We try to keep the group high caliber. That's why it's invite only. So if you are a founder at the top of your game, you can go to levelingup.com/founders to learn more about it, and you can apply, and we'll see you on the other side. So we've talked about the marketing side, the business side. And we might come back to these in a second, but I want to talk about, like, let's talk about Bitcoin. Let's talk about macro. Like, here, let's start with this. What do you see in the world and what are the attack vectors? Because you had that phrase.

You know, what happens is there's a saying that generals always fight the last war. What happens is, hey, we got attacked on the south flank last time, so let's go protect the south flank. But then the enemy comes from the north flank. In World War II, one of the engineers in the military looked at all the planes that had come back from battle and saw bullet holes all over them. And they're like, oh my gosh, what we need to do is we need to go build reinforcements where all these bullets are, right? Bullet holes are. someone's like, wait a minute, that's not the wrong thing. These planes came back. We'd want to go look at the planes that went down and reinforce those bullet holes, right? And so it's like, we want to be training. We, we don't want to be fighting the last war. So right now what I'm seeing is everybody's deathly afraid that we're going to have a housing crash and a banking collapse. Why? Because they have PTSD from 2008.

Yeah.

Right? But that's the last war, and I don't think that's the The answers have changed. So everyone's afraid of another 2008. Everyone's afraid of another 2000, whatever 1979, 1929, however far you want to go back. I don't think that's what we're facing. I think we're facing something different. The answers have changed, and so everyone you know they a financial advisor would say past performance is not a guarantee of future. And so I think you're looking at a wrong data set by looking at that. And so I think there's something different coming. If you want me to tell you what that is, yes. It's super important for us as entrepreneurs. First of all, let me just. I say the Federal Reserve is the enemy of the people. They create booms and busts, and most entrepreneurs have no idea what's coming. And what do I mean by that? The Federal Reserve loosens monetary policy and creates a boom. And now you're a dry cleaner, you're a restaurant, you're a landscaper, and you can't keep up with business. So your landscaping business is opening new locations and you're buying new trucks and you're hiring new people. You're a home builder, whatever you are, right? And you're trying to keep up with demand. And And then just for whatever reason, the Fed just turns the faucet off and then everything crashes. But you just hired all these people and just took on all this debt to expand, and now you're out of business. And then the Fed says, oh, well, let's turn it back on, and then it booms again.

Yeah.

And all these businesses, they just don't understand this cycle. And so, it's a big deal. But anyway, here's what I think is happening. You have to understand, most people are afraid of a crash, a market crash, a recession, whatever. But what does that mean? Or more importantly, from like marketing speak, what would the outcome of that be? What does a crash look like? Well, a crash would be, let's say if my asset prices crash and ask, my retirement gets cut in half, I lose my job, I get a lower-paying job. Basically, the crash is my standard of living has gone down.

Correct.

Right? That's the outcome. I can no longer afford all the things I was affording before. That's the outcome. That's a crash. Okay. Well, there's 2 ways to get there. And this is what most people don't understand. There's what most people are worried about is a deflationary crash. They think asset prices are going to crash. Back to the example, recession, my job, etc. I believe what we're facing is an inflationary crash, a reverse crash. And what that means is that instead of everything going down, everything goes up. Home prices go up another 50%. Gas goes up another 50%. Steak, milk, eggs go up another 50%. My pay doesn't. The outcome is the same. I still can't afford the same standard of living I was before. The difference is, is 'cause prices went up. So we just look at the last 3 years. From 2020 to 2023, home prices on average went up about 50% in 3 years. Gas went up 50%. The stock market, S&P 500, is up 65%. But all these assets went up, but the pay didn't go up at that same rate. So people today are struggling because of a crash, but an inflationary crash. And so what I think, while everyone's afraid of this deflationary crash coming, I see more inflationary crash ahead. And that's because of the situation that the Federal Reserve and the government is in. So we have the government, which the US Treasury runs the bank account, the balance sheet for the government. And then you have the Federal Reserve, which runs the monetary policy. So we have monetary policy, which is like the banking policy. And then the Treasury sets fiscal policy. This is like the budget for the United States, right? What's happening is we had a lot of inflation because they printed way too much money, but prices, the equilibrium of supply and Demand. So when you print more money and you don't increase the goods and services, the price goes up. Then on top of it, because you shut the whole world down, you lower supply. Supply chains broke down, etc. So now we've increased demand and lowered supply at the same time. What do you think is going to happen, right? So that's what I mean by printing too much money. But then that caused all this inflation. So the Fed's like, oh shoot, well our mandate—we have two things that we're supposed to do: keep stable prices. Prices aren't stable; they're going to the moon. So what we'll do is we'll try to. to bring inflation down. How do they do that? Well, they can't bring supply, so all they can do is crush demand. So their goal is to increase unemployment. That's their goal.

Yep.

Their goal is to make everybody poor so they stop spending so much money. And so they've raised rates really high so we don't have as much money being created through debt. People feel broke, people are uncertain, so they spend less money. And that's worked, but the problem is it's the government that's the one spending all the money. So from pre-pandemic 2019 to today, the federal government has increased their spending by 50%. And they won't stop. And it's gotten so bad that the government, uh, the Treasury needs money, debt. We have about a $2 trillion deficit. They're adding about $1 trillion of debt every 90 days. It took from the founding of the United States till 1983, I believe, to get to $1 trillion, and now we're adding that every 90 days. So in order for the government, the Treasury, to get that money, they have to issue debt. They do. They issue bonds. So then we have these bond auctions where people buy the debt. The last bond auction we had a couple weeks ago, the 30-year— so we have them for months, 5, 10, up to 30 years— the 30-year, we have massive dysfunction. There weren't enough buyers to buy the debt. And the— so then supply-demand, they had to offer more yield to get people to buy. So it's called a tail when that yield changes. And it was one of the most dramatic yields we've seen in over 5 decades. It is not a good deal. Moody's downgraded the US credit again.

Yeah.

I mean, it's a really big deal. And so what does that mean to us? Let me tell you what it means. So what it means is that the Fed has been trying to tighten the market by selling their treasuries and keep rates high, but they can't sell treasuries into a market where there's already too much supply. They can't sell. So they're gonna have to pivot. And then no one's buying the amount of debt the Treasury needs to sell. So the Fed's gonna have to come in and buy it. It's the only way. The Fed, it can try to stay strong to try to protect the dollar, but there ain't no dollar if the US collapses, right? And so this year we'll see the Fed pivot off of that thing, go back into an easing environment. They're going to have to continue to buy the Treasury debt. The Treasury will continue to spend the money and we're going to have massive inflation. And we're not just going to see it, we have to have it. You have the debt-to-GDP ratio. So the amount of debt that we have to the amount of gross domestic product. And that's a ratio. So right now we're over 125%.

Wow.

No nation has ever come back from that level before. Now that's— so we need to figure that out. So there's 2 ways we can do that. We can bring the debt down or we can bring the GDP up. Now one way, like Vivek Ramaswamy, he's running for president. He says, I'm gonna pull back the bureaucracy, I'm gonna pull back the red tape, I'm gonna unleash the consumer, you know, the entrepreneur, and we're gonna grow out of this. Maybe it's optimistic. If you shut the government down, maybe we could grow out of it, but realistically we won't. But if we have double-digit inflation for 3 or more years, then the GDP goes up because of inflation. If I sell 10 iPhones for $1,000, I made, you know, whatever, $1,000, $10,000. If I sell 10 iPhones for $2,000, I've made $20,000. So the GDP goes up, but I haven't sold any more units. So by inflation, they bring the GDP up, and naturally the debt-to-GDP ratio reequalizes. So it's not just that we will have it, we have to have it. They need it. And as a matter of fact, the IMF, International Monetary Fund, which is the central bank above central banks, wrote a white paper in 2015, called it The Liquidation of Government Debt. In the white paper, they explain it. It's called financial repression. The US already did this in the '40s. You have very high inflation and very low bond yields. You force pensioners, you force mutual funds, you force 401s, you force banks to buy the bonds at very low yields, and you run inflation hot, and you steal the difference. So in my opinion, this is what's coming. Uh, I've been— even when inflation was 9% last year, I said this will be the lowest inflation we'll see for the rest of the decade. Like, inflation is gonna run hot. Now that's just on the US side. Now you add in the wars, supply chain, the world is starting to break apart. So we've been in sort of this anomaly for the last 50 years. Since World War II to today, the world has seen this era of peace. That's an anomaly through history. And we, we had this rise of globalization, but now that's falling apart. Russia's doing their thing, China's doing their thing. Supply chains will continue to be onshored, and that will bring prices back up. So we have massive inflation ahead of us. And so what does that mean? That means an inflationary crash, not a deflationary crash. And so we're going to see— I don't know what's going to happen to real estate in the next 6 or 9 months. People screaming from the rooftop it's going to crash. I think they're wrong, but I don't know in the next 6 to 9 months. I'm pretty sure in 3 years from now, home prices will be up 50 percent. Gas will be up 50%. The S&P 500 will be up 50% because of the money that's going to be printing. So what do we do about that? And this is where it comes in for entrepreneurs. There's 2 things that you can do. In an— in a deflationary crash, you would want to sell all your assets, move to cash, and buy back in in a couple years. But in an inflationary crash, you need to be in the market. And so there's 2 ways that you keep up. You know, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. The rich get richer because of 2 things. One, they own assets. So inflation is very Very good for assets. I want inflation because I want my assets to go up. That's number one. 2, you have to be able to control your income. And this is the big piece for all your listeners. If you're a W-2 earner, you can't control your income and your income will not keep up with inflation. And so if you want to survive, you need to be able to increase your income with inflation. And so as business owners, we can raise our prices, right?

So there's a lot to unpack there. How can people go about, let's say you're a W-2 employee, What are some ways to get started to protect yourself from inflation?

Well, so first, I mean, you can try to lower your expenses as much as you can and try to get as many assets as you can because the assets will go up. Let me just tell you real quick, there's 3 types of asset classes I would look at very broadly. A lot of assets like the S&P 500 and real estate for that matter are proxies for the money supply. So if you look at inflation-adjusted returns, or if you divide the S&P 500 or real estate by the increase in money supply, They haven't really gone up in value. They've really, they've perfectly kept you up with inflation, but you haven't gotten ahead of inflation.

You don't feel richer.

You don't feel richer, right? And so what we want, or I want, is I don't want to just keep up with inflation, I want to beat it. So here's how you do it. There's 3 types of assets. You have scarce assets, okay? These are collectibles, fine art, cars, things like that. Bitcoin, finite. Beachfront, lakefront property, scarce assets. assets. Then you have energy-intensive assets. These would be commodities— gold, wheat, oil— because they take a lot of energy to get out of the ground. You can't just mass-produce them.

Uranium.

Uranium, right? And then finally, you have non-scarce or non-energy-intensive assets. So you want to stay away from those. A lot of those are just equities and speculative things like that. So let's just look at these 2 categories real quick. So over the last 3 years, real estate on average has gone up about 50%. Austin is the fastest-growing city in the US for the last 2 decades, and Austin real estate was about at the top of that range at about 50% over In Austin, there's a lake called Lake Travis, and there's only so many homes that have lakefront access. When Silicon Valley started moving there— Facebook, Meta, etc.— if you're an exec from Facebook making $25 million a year, what do you care if the house is $1 million or $2 million or $3 million for that matter? You don't, right? So those homes on the lake went up by 200%.

Hmm.

See, Austin went up by 50%, the lake went up by 150%. So that's the power of scarce assets. So that's how I do it. Now back to the wage earner. So one, increase your— decrease your expenses so you can buy more assets, scarce assets. 2, try to figure out how you can increase your income more. Now there's a couple ways you can do that. Obviously we already talked about one, you want to make more money, increase the value you provide. So what new skill could you learn that you could give to your employer or another employer to increase your pay? Option 2, side hustle. I'm not a big fan of side hustles. I am a fan of side hustles if you're trying to make that your full But I guess if you've— I've never really been a wage guy, so I don't have that mindset. But I guess if you're in this job and you have a pension, you don't want to leave, maybe a side hustle works for you. But yeah, increase the pay that you have by learning new skills to provide more value or start a side hustle or quit and start your own business.

Do you think anything drastic will happen in the next 6 to 9 months? Because I was watching actually a George Gammon video. This is months ago. He's like, you know, by June of 2024, this is when the recession happens, right? So like, what is your take on it? It's like, or is it just we're just going to continue to crash up, which I feel like we've been doing for the last couple of years?

So, we don't have a crystal ball. And I'm going to answer that question, but I'm going to first— I'm first going to say, who cares? And what do I mean by that? Nothing good in your life comes from short-term thinking. All growth comes from long-term thinking. Charlie Munger, who just passed away this week, RIP Charlie Munger, he said that the big money is not made in the buying and the selling. The big money is made in the Waiting. Okay. So, all good things come from taking time. So, who cares what happens in the next 6 months? I want to know what's gonna happen in 3 years from now.

Decades.

Or decades from now, right? So, it depends on your timeframe. So, for me, I'm pretty confident homes will be up 50% in 3 years from now. What happens in the next 6 months to homes? I don't really know. Right now, some people want to be this trader and, well, but if I just wait 6 more months, I get a better deal. In 3 years, does that matter? Right? Charlie Munger says it doesn't. I would rather take that time effort energy and put it into something that can make me more money. But to answer that question, obviously, one, we don't know. 2 things that I want to unpack in that. So again, George and I are good friends. I'm just going to preface this. We don't see eye to eye on everything. He's talking about a recession and he's talking about this yield curve being inverted. And when the yield curve reinverts, then it signals a recession's coming. So what? What does that mean? What we learned in 2020 is the economy and Assets are not the same. We literally shut the entire economy of the whole world down, but assets went up. So, so what if we have a recession? Who cares? What does that mean now? Well, I could lose my job. Are you in a sector that's susceptible to that, or are you in a recession-proof sector? So you want to unpack that, like, what does it mean? And then back to the attack vectors, I want to understand what are my threats, what are my attack vectors, so I can, so I can So, for example, well, if we have a recession, people won't have as much money. So, probably tourism might take a hit. Do I work in tourism? No. Then I probably don't worry about it. Do I work in tourism? Yes. Well, then maybe I should find a new job, right? I work in insurance. Well, insurance is going to be the same no matter what, right? One of my buddies owns an emergency services company. He does like fire, flood remediation. I don't care about a recession.

Same with HVAC.

Right. HVAC or whatever, right? So, what does that even mean if we have a recession? People need to think through that. And so, George is making those videos. I, you know, like I said, we're friends. But yeah, so what?

So I think, I think like, let's say if you're holding all cash right now and it's like, you know, oh, recession, like a deflationary crash is coming, or, oh, we should hold on to our cash. But it's like, oh, it's inflationary. Maybe we should like put the cash into the market right now. Right?

So yeah, exactly. And so that's the big thing. When at your event you had George speak. And so like I said, we're good friends. We went out to dinner one night and I was like, hey, George, I just made this video. You know, Michael Burry, he keeps tweeting sell and then he deletes his account. And I made this If you go back and see this video from over a year, I've been saying the market's going up, the market's going up, the market's going up, and it's still going up. And George is like, Mark, that's a very irresponsible video for you to put out. How can you put that video out? He's like telling people to buy in this type of a market. But here we are 4 months later and we're at new highs on everything.

Yep.

Now, I wanna just preface this to everybody. We have to be nimble in this type of an environment, but I don't wanna overtrade it either. And so George said that was very irresponsible. for me. But here we are 4 months later and asset prices are way higher than they were 4 months ago.

Right.

You would've made 100% on your money if you would've bought Bitcoin when I made the video, right?

Yep.

I think that we should take the market as, as it is, not as we think it is, not as we want it to be, but as it is. And so the answers can change, but I would guess, uh, my odds over 50%, my base case as I would call it, would be that in 4 to 6 months from now, we're probably— asset prices are probably still higher. Uh, would we see a recession? I don't think it would be— I don't think we'll see a recession as qualified by It's not like a 2008 thing. Well, you need— technically, for a recession, you need 2 quarters of negative economic growth. So, that's going to take 2 quarters to even be classified as a recession.

Which is what we've had.

We had it earlier this year. So, this is a point that I make for a lot of people. And this is an important piece for everybody, okay? One thing I say all the time is people need to learn how to learn. I was told by everybody in my niche, and I'm sure you heard it because you're paying attention, when the Fed raises rates, that's the risk-free rate goes up, stocks have to reprice down. The PE ratios have to come down. They have to. When the interest rate on mortgages go from 2.5% to 8%, home prices have to— they have to— they have— do they have to? Because they haven't. Here we are 2 years later and none of that's happened.

Right.

They don't have to. So Mark Twain said, it's not what you don't know that gets you in trouble, it's what you know for certain.

Right.

And so they have to, they have to, they have to. People have been saying for 2 years it's going to come down. It hasn't. Now, home prices in Austin are pretty weak. They're down about 12%. It's probably one of the worst Seattle Seattle, Austin are probably the worst 2 areas in the country, I think. But where I live in Orange County, home prices are still up year over year, right? So there's regional things. But I want to challenge that. It doesn't have to. And I think there's a couple things in there. One, people realize the game is up. People are starting to realize that the Fed has to continue printing money, that inflation is going to continue to be there.

For sure QE is coming back.

For sure QE is coming back. People are starting to realize that. And that's why stocks are not coming down, even with threats of recession. And I'm from the Austrian School of Economics camp, and the godfather of that, Ludwig von Mises, wrote something about— he called it the crack-up boom. And then he says, and then suddenly the people realize that inflation is both permanent and intentional, and they lose confidence in the money and they buy whatever they can. I'm paraphrasing it, but that's what people realize now. People understand that now. If you've noticed, just in the last 2 weeks, the White House Biden, his Twitter account, White House Press Secretary KJP, they've been running this and even headlines that inflation is not from money printing. They're like trying to like throw shade on that, but people realize that.

So how do people learn how to learn?

Yeah, people learn how to learn. There's a number of ways that you can do that. I think a couple of ways. So first of all, I think there's 3 levels to that. And so the first level is to receive information. Most people just don't get enough information. Most people aren't reading content, they're not watching videos, but then what do I do with that information? So for me, people ask me all the time, Mark, what book should I read? What do you want to learn? So right now I'm reading books on hiring operators and managing because that's where I'm at right now. I might write, write a book on or read a book on time management or marketing. So whatever I need. And the reason why it's important is because I need it. So I read the information and then I implement the information.

Yeah.

And then the third piece, which is super important and everyone can do this, is then I must discuss it or teach that information. Because what happens is, I mean, you create content, so you know this. You maybe haven't thought through it. I'm sure you have. But when I sit down to write that idea, all of a sudden I realize I don't know it as clearly as I thought I did. Or if I, if I, if I read this idea and then I tell you, you're going to have questions for me and it's going to make me go, huh, I hadn't thought about that. And then I have to come with different angles and I have to pitch it differently. So it makes me clarify it and sharpen it. And then what I'm doing specifically, I'm trying to learn something, I take notes. I want to take notes of everything. There's something magical about a hand-eye coordination or brain-hand coordination. And so I'll typically take notes, uh, depends on what, what medium I'm— if I'm going to a conference, which like at ClickFunnels for example, I'll create a notebook and I'll put a line down the middle. And when I hear something I like, I'll write that down and then I'll write an application down next to it. So I'll have a line, here's what I heard, here's the application, here's what I heard, here's the application. And I typically go into a book or a conference with one thing in mind. Like, I'm trying to find a new campaign to launch this year. So when I'm at ClickFunnels, I'm thinking about my business and marketing. And so now when I'm receiving this information, I have a frame to put that in. So here's what I learned, and here's the application. If I'm reading books lately, what I've been doing is I've been getting the Audible and the book at the same time. So I'm listening and reading at the same time.

Yeah. How much better is that for you? Like, I've heard it from so many people.

It's way better. Not only is it— it's— not only is it so much better because of the retention, it's also better because of you're hearing it and seeing at the same time. So, you have 2 forms of learning at the same time, and then you can go through it much faster, right?

So, how do you do it for one of those like 28-hour books? Like, I'm going through one of those right now. What is it? The Laws of Human Nature. And I'm just like, that thing's probably a tomb, but I for sure am not retaining To your point.

Yeah, I want to— I just want to show you. So I just told you I just finished reading the Who Not How book. Yeah. So what I do is I create an Evernote sheet for a book, and then in here you can see like my notes that I've put in here. Yeah. So then I'll put notes and I'll put like the page number. On page 65, 90 Days: A Moving Future Process, page 65. And then I put all my thoughts here.

So like, what's an example of one of your thoughts there?

Looking back over the past quarter, what are the things What are the things that you have achieved that make you the proudest? So, I told you at the end of the year, I do a lot of reflection. So, this is what's in my mind right now. So, this is what stuck out to me. Okay, how can I do my end-of-year reflection better? So, I kind of wrote this down.

I think that's powerful because the way I do it right now is like I'm reading the Elon book and I'm dog-earing a lot of things. I'm reading some other books at the same time. But the problem is I never come back to those dog ears, right? Like you almost, you have to be taking notes. And I like the whole, hey, like what's the actual application to this too? 'Cause then you could actually, like the point of reading is like to actually do something with it.

Yeah, and you know that like you can hear the same thing a year later and it just hits you different. You're in a different part of your life, a different messenger, a different context. And so, that's why it's important for me to have that context I go into. What I used to do before Evernote is I would sit down with a book and I would keep a little mini notepad and I'd write it down, I'd rip it out and stick it in the book. And I'd keep reading, instead of dog-earing it, That's good, yeah. So, then I would have my thought and context on that notepad and stick it in the book. And then, I could just grab the book and I could see all the things that I'd put in there and I could just turn to any page I wanted. Oh, that's good. But now, I do it all in Evernote because now it's searchable and things like that. And then, you want to go back and recall that information. So now, we need repetition. And this is why some of the best books you need to reread over again. One, they hit you differently, but it's also that repetition, which is why I take the notes. So, I take a lot of notes. Through my notes, I have the page number, and then I can go back and reread that again. So that's sort of, I guess, my tips of how to learn. One being learning how to critically think through the information. And then 2, when I'm receiving the information, really taking good notes and taking applications down, making notes so I can go back to them. 3, applying the information that I've learned. And then 4, teaching that information. So in this example, right, I told you at the end of the year I'm doing reflection. So here we are in December at this time of this recording, and this is my month of reflection— what went good, what went bad, etc. So that stuck to me, I'll write that down. This year, as I'm sitting down to do this, I'll grab those notes and I'll actually do that. And then in my community, I'm giving away some of my time management processes just because I use them, and I'll put these notes in that and teach it. So I read it, I'm going to do it, and I'm going to teach it to my community.

Interesting. I love it. That's great. Great framework. By the way, Neil and I have an agency owners group called the Agency Owners Association. All you have to do, just go to marketingschool.io/aoa. Once again, it's marketingschool.io/agency to learn more. And now back to the show. Um, last 2 questions from my side. How are you invested right now?

So, you know, for me, um, I, I, you've, you've mentioned Warren Buffett a bunch, uh, the deal box. And I think that is, uh, super powerful and it's true. So for me, I think, uh, and, and, and then kind of going back to these 3 categories of I believe that most equities are these non-scarce and non-energy-intensive assets, and I don't really mess with that.

So even like a Google or Meta?

Yeah, I mean, the, the S&P 500 is a perfect proxy for inflation. So the way that I'm invested, and, and it's, it's changes, so the way I'm invested today is not the way I've been invested over the last 10 years, let's say. But I'm mostly invested in my business. I'm 80, 90% in my business, right? As far as my assets, they're broken down, Bitcoin is a massive holding. I wrote a crypto newsletter for 4 years and now I don't mess with that. I just buy Bitcoin. So Bitcoin makes a really part of my whole big holding. I think everyone should have a minimum of, I mean, a minimum of 1%, probably 5% of your portfolio in it.

You're much higher than I must be.

I have way higher than that, right? So that's a big chunk, probably like a third of my portfolio. Real estate probably makes up a really big chunk of my portfolio.

Super scarce, both of those.

Yeah, super scarce. So I have a ranch in Austin with cows and goats and stuff like that. I got a house on the beach here in Orange County, and I'm currently building a house in, uh, Cabo on the beach, a beachfront scarce, scarce property.

Costa Palmas?

Uh, it's just, just north of, uh, San Jose, of the airport. San Jose. It's called the East Cape up there on the dirt road up there. So yeah, beachfront property, scarce property, ranch land property, um, some Airbnbs, some vacation rentals, you know, income properties, things like that. So real estate's a big piece, Bitcoin's a big piece, and then I like to So I do quite a bit of venture cap and like private equity stuff, but those are like in businesses that I can understand. Warren Buffett said that I don't buy stocks, I buy businesses. They just happen to be public. So I like to buy businesses. So I, I do VC and PE stuff. I have the 2 funds, and then I like to speculate with some resource stocks. So I'll do some like, uh, resource miner And there's like junior miners and explorers in like gold, silver, uranium, things like that as well. And I've had some that pop really, really big. And, you know, it's interesting.

So our mutual friend, everyone should check out George Gammon, by the way. But he texted me yesterday. I was just like, what are you invested in? He's like, same thing, resource miners, uranium, all that. So you guys are in the same boat there. In the same boat there.

Yeah. I've been pounding the table on uranium for a bunch of— for probably about 2 years now. In my newsletter, we have positions open. We're up 70, 80% on the uranium. I think it's still got a lot of room to run. Again, if you think—

Or nuclear, right?

Nuclear. I mean, nuclear's the future. There's just no way around it. And it sort of goes in and out of fashion, but it's certainly the future. And so if you have that 10-year vision or 5-year vision, I made a video on my main channel. I called it The Big Short 2. And I was talking about how The Big Short was, they recognized, these couple outsiders on Wall Street recognized that these banks were on the wrong side of the trade. And The Big Short 2 is all these uranium, or not uranium producers, uranium producers, but also the nuclear plants, they're on the wrong side. They don't seem to be sophisticated enough to realize how short the uranium is, and it takes years to get new uranium to market. And so I broke down the math and the numbers of how short they are, 60 million pounds or something like that. There's a massive shortcoming. And the difference is, in economics, we say high prices are the cure for high prices. So if prices are too high, people will buy less and more supply comes. But in an environment like this, if there's a shortage of uranium, they buy at any price. They have to. They can't just not buy.

People need energy.

And so that creates a massive boom. So I think uranium is one of my favorite plays right now. And you can trade that through stocks. So I do buy stocks, but in these sectors, right? Also, I think if you like Bitcoin, a really good proxy for Bitcoin are Bitcoin miners. So they typically move like on a 3-to-1 ratio with gold, similar to like how gold miners move with a ratio to gold. So Bitcoin miners, MicroStrategy's crushing it. Bitcoin, the commodities, energy-intensive commodities. So I buy some commodities, the oil, the uranium, the gold, et cetera. Yeah. And then real estate and businesses.

I love it. I think that's the best. I mean, these are all scarce things and these are all things that you more or less understand. And here's the thing, let me ask you, this will be the final question. It'll be a fun one. So Cathie Wood has from, she has like these, the base case and the bear case and the bull case, right? For Bitcoin in So I think the bull case is $1.5 million per coin, then the base case is $650,000, and then it's like $230,000 or whatever. Do you agree with that?

Yeah, I would agree with that. And here's how I would get to that number. So what most people look at is sort of like this growth chart of Bitcoin, and every 4 years the supply gets cut in half. So back to supply-demand, the demand stays the same or goes up, supply cuts in half, right? The price goes up. And so you can sort of see how this goes up. And so based off of this trend, you kind of come to that number. But let me give you a different So as a VC investor, the way that you would do it is you would look at what is the total addressable market, and then how much do I think I can get of that market, right? So if I'm Uber, how big is the taxi industry? How big is the limo industry? How big is the van rideshare industry? Okay, if I can get 5% of that, right? So if we look at Bitcoin, Bitcoin, in my opinion, is much bigger than most people realize. So people think it's like a store of value, like a digital gold or whatever. It's much bigger, but let's just go with that. Okay. That for now. Okay, so then we look at what are the total— what's the total addressable market for the TAM for store of value assets? Okay, so what do people buy to store value? The way that I look at investing is I don't— all of those things that I told you I buy— Bitcoin, commodities, real estate— I don't look at that as investing. That's saving. So I use my businesses, I invest in my businesses.

Yep.

And then I allow those businesses to grow and make money, and then I save that money in assets. The speculative stuff I do, that's sort of investing, but all that stuff is savings. But going back to this, so what are store of value assets? Bonds, okay, offshore bank accounts, real estate, gold, etc., right? So gold's $12-13 trillion, Bitcoin's at half a trillion, $13 trillion, uh, offshore bank accounts, $30 $40 trillion. Bonds, if we add these up, real estate, if we add these up, we're at about $700 trillion of total addressable market for just store of value assets only. We can talk about the payment industry, we can talk about all this other stuff, but just store of value assets, we're about $700 trillion. So what if we get 5% of that? It's certainly a better offshore bank account. All these Russian oligarchs had their Swiss bank accounts seized, so I can put my wealth in Bitcoin, no one can seize it. It's certainly a better Offshore bank account, so it certainly eat that lunch. It's certainly a better gold. It can certainly eat that lunch. It's certainly better than bonds that are losing value or negative yielding. Certainly better than that. For a lot of people, it's certainly better than real estate, right? So five percent, I think, is very conservative. At five percent, at five percent, you end up at about a two million dollar per Bitcoin price. Oh, this has been good, man.

What is the best way for people to find you online?

Yeah, if you just search Mark Moss, you're going to find me. One Mark Moss. You can find everything linked there.

Hiring operators.

I'm hiring, I'm hiring a lot of people. Platform content people, YouTube optimizers, and operators, yeah.

All right, thanks so much, Mark.

Yeah, cool.