#122 Terence Michael - Fiat Movies, Bitcoin vs. Real Estate, and Energy FUD - Ben Wehrman Podcast

Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
I'm telling you, I get these mandates. So our agents send us monthly. I mean, I could dial up

(00:05):
any network. I get all these emails that says, you know, whatever, whether it's NBC or A&E or
Showtime, this is what we're trying to push. This is what we're trying to say. And they want people
like me, producers to come in and pitch them shows that help push that narrative. And if you do it
and your show gets greenlit, you know, you get a pilot, maybe they got picked up to series or if

(00:26):
It's a movie. You sell the movie. And then you do that. And that was all sort of on the tail end
of the woke movement as well. So there was a lot of that. If you talk to people one-on-one in
Hollywood, most of them were all against that woke stuff. Most of them were against the council
culture. Most of them were sort of like these are these like hippie artist people that are an

(00:51):
into free thought. But it's like they know that if they don't march to and carry the torch for
what Hollywood's saying, they won't get hired. Hello, everybody. Thank you so much for coming
by for another episode of the podcast. I really appreciate you coming by. Today, we have another
wonderful, fascinating Bitcoin brain who is just doing all sorts of cool stuff.

(01:14):
His name is Terrence Michael. He is a Bitcoiner, Hollywood producer, entrepreneur, real estate
investor and author doing all sorts of cool stuff. So I can't wait to hear that story,
how all of this managed to come together. So Terrence, really appreciate being here, man.
Thank you for coming.
Thanks for having me, Ben. I'm excited. I've heard your podcast before and your name around town.

(01:36):
And then you were on the Bitcoin Today spaces. So I didn't realize you were the same Ben.
Yes. Yes. So that's how we connected because I'd heard you on DJ Valerie B Love Show who
Everyone loves her. And also, what was it? I think the Bitcoin Matrix was it? I can't remember. You've been on a bunch of them.
Yeah.
And your voice was familiar. So I recognize your voice from that space. I was like, oh, yeah, this guy has a cool story to tell. So I need to hear this story. Hollywood to real estate to Bitcoin. How did that end up flowing through your life? It's a very interesting pathway. So let's hear it.

(02:11):
Sure. So first the quick version just for the Bitcoiners listening, and then we can back up if you find it interesting, Ben.
But the quick story is that in hindsight, after I found Bitcoin, I've realized my journey has made sense in hindsight.
And that's that I've always wanted to tell stories. I've always wanted to create. I love narratives.

(02:36):
I fell in love with the hero's journey early on. And Hollywood allowed me to do that. But Hollywood is very, very competitive and very broken in that when you work, you can make incredible amounts of currency, of fiat.

(02:57):
You can pull in a lot of money, but it's very few and far between.
It's like a traveling circus, and when the circus ends, you're trying to find the next circus.
And in my case, as a producer, I'm the one that has to build the circus.
No one hires the producer.
The producer says, I'm going to form a corporation.
I'm going to go all around the world and try to raise millions of dollars, find the right script, the right director, cast it, blah, blah, blah.

(03:20):
And the average movie that you watch in Hollywood takes seven years to get to the screen from the time of inception.
So it's a process that I did not end up liking.
Even though I went to business school, I hated the money-raising process.
So after being in Hollywood for a long time, but being worried and especially seeing my friends and my staff and crew not be able to save their money, I realized real estate was the best store of value.

(03:52):
Again, this is all in hindsight.
Now that we're Bitcoiners, Ben, you and I know this.
It's like, ah, I didn't realize that that's what I was doing, but I got into real estate and I wasn't a contractor.
I wasn't a builder.
I wasn't anything.
It was just sort of a means to an ends, right?
Similar to money.
And so again, in hindsight, I was like this was my store of value, but there was so much friction and so much work and so much stress.

(04:17):
And again, it wasn't my native expertise or talents.
I had no schooling.
I didn't even own a hammer the first time I started to take apart a house.
My mom literally had to buy me a little kit that I now laugh at.
And so continuing the quick version, then when Bitcoin came along, I realized, oh, there's a very peaceful version to do what I've been trying to do all along because I've realized that I've never really been able to save.

(04:46):
And I've been psyoped into thinking investing was a positive thing where for people that are professionals, potentially like yourself, it can be very positive.
But for most of the world, it's kind of a negative thing.
It's kind of like I have to do this just to survive.
So that's the quick version of why my journey makes sense when I look back at it.
None of it did at the time, and I think that's because a lot of us don't zoom out, especially in the fiat world.

(05:13):
And we get stuck in this game, this external scorecard of putting points on the board.
You need to be responsible. This is what you need to do.
You go to school and you make money and you go on Wall Street, you've got a real estate developer or whatever.
So, yeah.
Yeah, I love that.

(05:33):
And I definitely agree that there are really only a few weirdos like us that just are fascinated by economics and money and investing.
And I think that a lot of people outside of that bubble in artists are a great example, which you're part of that field of creating art, creating stories, creating these things that shouldn't have to require you to be a part-time investor.

(06:01):
And that's why one of my favorite things on the show is to bring artists in here, which I've been doing as much as I can, of asking them how Bitcoin has helped their lives.
because these people aren't typically super technical,
really wanting to do all this investing stuff.
They just want to create art
because that's the way their brain is designed.
That's what we want them to be able to do.
That's what any good society with a good culture

(06:22):
should really want to create an environment
where artists can do their thing
and not have to be suppressed by these things.
So could you maybe give a breakdown of why Bitcoin is so good,
specifically for people that just want to create cool art?
Because I think that's where you come from.
Yeah. The simplest reason Bitcoin in general, zooming out, just allows anyone to really honor their talents and their sacrifices and the past decisions that they've had to make, whether that was academic or as some kind of trade, is that it just honors that time better than anything else we've ever had.

(07:05):
Right. It it captures it because it can't be inflated and it can't be censored and no one can stop it.
And artists, you know, they aren't on W2s. They don't work at IBM for 30 years in a cubicle.
And so, you know, they they can't get mortgages. They they're sort of cut off from a lot of traditional finance because people look at them as outcasts and it seems risky.

(07:32):
And Bitcoin sort of balances that out for artists where you're working in a seemingly risky business, but now you get to save in something that's the least risky of all.
So if – in other words, if the – if you're like a math professor or you want to teach violin or whatever it is like that you're meant to do, and you don't have to get pulled into the liquidity cycles of, oh, there's a real estate boom.

(08:06):
So let's everyone just become a realtor, right, which – and nothing against realtors, but you can throw a rock and hit someone, and it's not that hard.
I mean I literally tell some of my friends who are sort of like nihilistic about life and stuff.
I'm like, you know what?
In six weeks, you could become a realtor and it's like just whatever.
But it's like we're pulling people away from what they should be doing, what their purpose is, what feeds them because they have to chase the money.

(08:30):
And Bitcoin will allow people – it's not entirely.
People are compensated for the amount of value that they put into the economy because money is just an authentication token for that work in the past.
But if you're doing valuable work, and most creatives are – most creatives, if they've been doing it for a while, you can go back and they can tell you the times where, oh, I sold this painting for this.

(08:55):
I made this thing for this where they have made money, but they haven't been able to carry it forward.
And so Bitcoin allows that.
all things that you know, Ben, but maybe some newer people in your audience.
Oh, yeah. We never get tired of just bringing it back to basics for people. I think that's
where the most important work is being done is the people that are helping folks get off zero

(09:16):
and just understanding why you should at least be interested in Bitcoin and think about it and
begin learning about it. Because we keep seeing this where people from all different walks of life
and interests and expertises are all finding that Bitcoin really applies to them in a very profound way
that they didn't really believe before.

(09:37):
And that usually just comes down to it protects what you just call their authentication token of the work they've done.
And that is so important for humans because when you put in a whole bunch of blood, sweat, and tears to earn this fiat,
and then it just gets stolen from you through inflation by the government printing and diluting

(09:59):
the supply and that's something we talked about here a lot that is just very evil and when you
really think about it and then on top of that they tax you to death like every single way you look at
it people are just having their their work their energy that they've spent doing things in their
life is just being taken away from them and that has a crazy impact on society that you don't really

(10:21):
think about. And people are really trained to not think about that through the government's
schooling system that doesn't teach them anything about actual economics or real life skills,
because they don't want you to understand that this is really just a big machine that just sucks
people's life force out to continue producing war and just causing violence everywhere and just

(10:42):
doing all these really dark things. Yeah. I mean, I was just, I was in the gym just yesterday and I
I was just thinking about this and I was like, you know, I went to business school.
I've studied business.
I studied economics.
I studied finance.
Not once in any class, anywhere, any essay, any project did anyone ever say, you know, what is money?

(11:04):
And it's like when you think about it, like when do you ever go into any industry or career and not know what the thing is that you're proselytizing or that you're working in?
It's like, you know, you go into the car industry.
What is a car?
Okay, let's break it down.
No one has said what is money.
We just jumped past the most basics and said okay now let sell it let trade it This is why you need a central bank Yeah It like it and we Bitcoiners know that But it just so it was just like wow how could we never like the first line of every book should be like okay what is money

(11:37):
Then let's get into how you can make more of it or whatever.
Yeah, it just moves right past the actual foundation because once you learn the foundation and that question, what is money, it gives you the tools required to start really thinking through what's happening and why it's so evil.
And that does not benefit those who are in control because you quickly figure out that it doesn't work for the 99.99% of people out there that are just trying to live their life and create cool things.

(12:09):
And I think that's probably why COVID was such a pivotal – a monumental milestone for so many Bitcoiners.
Like so many people came in at that point or they started to really understand.
Like I came in in 2017, but I started to really get it in 2020 because then you really – especially in the Western world and in America.

(12:31):
If you're not in the global south or Western Africa or whatever, you don't feel the inflation because it's just slow enough that you grow up thinking, oh, well, that's normal.
Prices just rise, right?
Isn't that what they're supposed to do?
But like when COVID hit, you're like, oh, wow.
And like the entire money supply like practically doubled within months.
You're like, oh, wow.

(12:53):
They just opened the faucet on us and now we're drowning.
Yeah, and it's interesting you just mentioned those two years, 2017 and 2020.
because those were also two major stepping stone moments for me.
I got into crypto in 2017.
And then 2020, it was a little bit different for me.
I wasn't really paying super close attention to all the COVID money printing stuff

(13:16):
and the stock market stuff.
I mostly just looked at the stock market like,
oh, that's weird.
Stocks are doing crazy and Bitcoin went way down.
But the reason why that year was big for me is because during the lockdowns,
I was living in New Zealand and just in this little tiny house to myself.
and had a lot of free time to just research stuff.
So I got a bunch of books and I stumbled across some YouTube videos

(13:38):
that answered the question, what is money?
And for me, it was the gold bug, Mike Maloney.
I'm not sure if you've heard of him,
but he has a really good YouTube series called The Hidden Secrets of Money.
And when I watched that, it finally connected the dots for me.
He's not even a Bitcoiner.
Like he doesn't talk about Bitcoin.
He just talks about money and why fiat sucks so much.
He talks about like the central bank and money printing, right?

(13:59):
Yeah.
With those little graphics.
Yeah, yeah, I've seen him.
And for me, that connected the final dot of like, okay, this is money is the real thing that we need to fix.
It's the money itself.
Like you said, there's like this fundamental thing.
And that's another thing that crypto does to you, this crypto virus of taking you in all these different directions of all these different utilities and things when really the foundation is the money, which is the most important thing.

(14:25):
Was that a similar journey for you?
Like in that year range, how did you figure it out?
Totally.
Yeah.
Yeah, you actually just made me think for the first time because we always talk about like, oh, when did you get into Bitcoin?
When did you get into Bitcoin?
And you think about the first year you maybe bought $50 worth or – I've gone back and looked at my first trade.
November 2017, I bought $100 of Bitcoin, and I thought, wow, what did I just spend $100 on?

(14:48):
But really, to be intellectually honest, it was crypto at 2017 because I also bought all this other junk, and I didn't get the best advice.
And I was told, yeah, you need Ethereum.
Bitcoin is the Microsoft of crypto, but Ethereum is the Apple.
You want something faster and dynamic and all these things are going to come out.

(15:10):
So I'm like, oh, okay, I better buy Ethereum.
And then of course-
I thought of it like the app store.
This was kind of what I was told was-
Yes.
I did hear like Bitcoin is the digital gold, but I didn't know why gold was even useful
at that point.
I didn't understand gold.
And so I heard Ethereum is like this whole ecosystem of different things that you can build, and it totally got me.
Well, yeah, and coming from the fiat world, that makes sense because that's all we've known.

(15:34):
We've only known these sort of centralized companies that provide things for us.
And then there were these influencers like James Altucher at the time.
Remember he had his ads everywhere, and he's like, oh, no, you just put $1,000 into each of $20, and you're going to be wealthy.
Because at that point, we're still all looking for a trade.
It was just something speculative to make more fiat. We didn't realize the whole point was to escape it.

(15:57):
And so, yeah, like you, I think it was probably closer to 2020 of the ups and downs and going into the bear.
We hit that bear right away at the beginning of 2018. I think we dropped below 4,000 at that point.
And I said, you know, I should learn a little bit about what all this is.
But yeah, COVID, you know, taking Russia off of the SWIFT system, you know, confiscating the $63 billion of their gold, the Canadian truckers, like all these events really just made it sink in that, oh, man, we are just sort of like these ants in this project.

(16:37):
and they can just move the food around for us to direct us where they want to.
Absolutely.
I'd love to rack your brain a little bit here about the Hollywood and just the entertainment industry.
So one of the things that Bitcoiners love to do is we love to analyze how fiat has ruined things,
which has ruined everything.

(16:59):
And so many people, you will hear them say, they don't make movies like they used to.
You watch an old movie from several decades ago compared to a movie coming out on Netflix tonight.
It's just – it doesn't feel the same.
It doesn't have the same heart and it doesn't have the same power to it.
Same with TV shows, all sorts of different entertainment outlets.

(17:19):
What's your thought on fiat entertainment, fiat movies, and how has it changed this industry?
So, I mean really it's inflation.
And so what has happened is that because there's so much money in the supply and so much of that money trickles over to Hollywood to help enforce where central banks want that money to go, right?

(17:44):
Big pharma, big medicine, big food, right?
Because really, we always break down money and we say, what's the problem?
Well, if you break down Hollywood, every single thing out there is just a plate to show you an ad.
And those ads are to sell medicines and whatnot for all the ills that we already have from all the money printing.

(18:06):
So because of that and because there's so much money, movies themselves, TV shows themselves have been inflated.
They're worth less, and so there's tons of them.
Like it used to be you would get like 20 movies a year, and you look at an ad in a newspaper, and you could look at that ad for 30 weeks straight.

(18:26):
and say, yeah, I'm going to go watch ET.
I want to go watch Poltergeist or whatever, depending on whenever you grew up.
And with the streamers and with everything being so accessible and so easy, everyone
is just getting blitzed because what happens is so like a company like Netflix is directly

(18:48):
at the money funnel.
They're like sitting right at the top and they get all, they get this huge injection
of money.
They're a public company.
Their share price goes up and they have all this money. And so there's no accountability. And they just start throwing $30, $50, $60, $100 billion at tons.
Like they have – they could stop producing right now and they've got enough for like the next four or five years of just like constantly new stuff.

(19:12):
And more and more is coming. So that's one problem.
And because of that, it has drawn a lot of the talent that initially said – like when Netflix did their first TV series because obviously they used to be DVD by mail.
It was – they went to Kevin Spacey and it was House of Cards, right?
And that changed everything.

(19:34):
And they even wanted Kevin Spacey, by the way, to run Netflix.
People don't even know this.
He was – because they were like, oh, wow, he's so creative.
He had his own production company called Trigger Street Productions.
Anyways, all these people from whatever, Spielberg, De Niro to whoever were like, what?
People are going to go to the theaters for my movies.

(19:54):
They're never going to go on a streamer.
But they have thrown so much money at everybody that everyone has just gone over there.
And now it's the new norm.
And it's really due to inflation.
I mean if we didn't have inflation and the dollar was more valuable, people would take the time to make the right movie.
But everything has become disposable.
That's the problem.
And you see it on the TV side. Like that's really how the whole reality or what we call unscripted movement started.

(20:21):
All of these things were so cheap and there was so much money and there was so much of it that they just became these disposable things, whether it was an afternoon dating show on MTV or yet another HGTV watching paint dry show.
So when there's this much money rolling around in the system and the media is at the top funnel because the media has to help push the narrative that everyone wants.

(20:43):
I mean I was very much in Hollywood when COVID hit, and I'm telling you, I get these mandates.
So our agents send us monthly.
I mean I could dial up any network.
I get all these emails that says whatever, whether it's NBC or A&E or Showtime.
This is what we're trying to push.
This is what we're trying to say.

(21:03):
and they want people like me producers to come in and pitch them shows that help push that narrative
and if you do it and your show gets greenlit you know you get a pilot maybe they got picked up to
series or if it's a movie you know you sell the movie and then you do that and that was all sort
of on the tail end of the woke um movement as well so there was a lot of that you know and my

(21:27):
and like my agents would even call me when i was already doing a show and they'd be like hey uh
you're you're like Asian, aren't you? And I'm like, why does that matter? And they're like,
well, you know, we're talking to NBC Business Legal and, you know, they have this affirmative
action thing and they need to show that, you know, your crew has a certain percentage of
ethnicity. And I'm like, well, I don't I mean, I'm I guess I'm half. But, you know, I'm not from

(21:54):
Asia. My parents aren't from Asia. Like, yeah. So if that helps you. So it's just stuff like that.
And I think the people in Hollywood even know, and most of them are – a lot of them are very hypocritical because if you talk to people one-on-one in Hollywood, most of them were all against that woke stuff.

(22:14):
Most of them were against the council culture.
Most of them were sort of like these – are these like hippie artist people that are into whatever and into free thought.
But it's like they know that if they don't march to and carry the torch for what Hollywood is saying, they won't get hired because there's really only like five to seven places that hire you in Hollywood.

(22:35):
That's the other big psyop.
There's these seven places.
That's it.
And each place owns 30 things underneath them, but they're all just brands.
It's like, oh, here's Viacom.
Yeah, there's MTV, there's Spike, there's Comedy Central, there's Nickelodeon.
There and it just like yeah but they all funnel back up into the same And now you got Warner Brothers and Discovery who have combined and combined I mean so if you want to be in Hollywood it kind of the opposite of why a lot of people became artists and wanted to be independent and free because they now just saying what are the mandates

(23:09):
What are the boxes that I need to paint within?
And if I do that, you'll pay me.
Yeah, I don't know if I answered your question.
I think I went on a tangent.
Oh, yeah, totally.
and i mean there's so many different angles you could look at i mean one of the ones you mentioned
there is how you know these they care more about your ethnicity than what you're actually creating

(23:31):
i think that like the award shows like the oscars it like requires that you have a certain amount of
people of different races in the art which just doesn't even make it art anymore it's just
it's so clearly become just an arm of the propaganda that they're trying to push and so
there's no freedom of just artists coming in and creating something the way that they want to.

(23:52):
Like you have to fit into this box.
And like you said, you get a phone call from the agent that says,
this is the message we need to spread.
It's top down very clearly.
Yes.
And real art should be bottom up where people from the bottom just create things that flourish and move upward.
And so it's very fiat in that sense.
All these fiat things, we see the change of bottom up, the top down structure.

(24:15):
Yeah, it distorts those signals, right? There's no free market of what do the people want, because the people are just being fed. And so you have to fit in that. And then it's also a lot of, oh, what was just really successful? Let's copy that. And so everything you do in Hollywood is, well, it's this meets this. Oh, yeah, well, this is The Matrix meets The Big Short. It's like, well, just make your own movie. It doesn't have to be this meets that.

(24:44):
so and don't take a movie like snow white and just put a black person in it and say like this
is a great new movie it doesn't work yeah that's the word i forget what year it was i i think it
was right after covid there was one year where like practically every single movie that was up
in every category in all of the oscars was just african-american it was just black unless you had

(25:07):
a full black cast or black crew like you wouldn't and even within hollywood everyone was like yeah
Well, we're not going to win this year.
We're not going to be nominated this year.
This is the black year.
And it's like great if those are great films, but why are we segregating it?
Like I thought that was the whole point to not segregate.
I don't know.
And then they call you racist for –
Yeah.
They're literally making rules like you have to be a certain race to win an award.

(25:30):
Yeah.
I mean like during COVID, I did this one show and we had – our lead was black.
And we know she even admits.
She's like, we got this show sold and we are now on the air and they are now pumping us as a show for discovery because I'm black.
Now, she ended up – she's fantastic and she absolutely deserved it.
But we also realized we were doing this whole thing because she was black, which isn't right.

(25:56):
She should do it because she was amazing.
Yeah, it doesn't feel good for that person either.
Like I'm sure you didn't feel great when you're like, yeah, I'm half Asian.
Yeah, okay, great.
Why is this giving me a boost here?
I should be getting rewarded for what I'm making and my merits, the meritocracy side of it.
Yeah, exactly. Bring meritocracy back.

(26:19):
So I'm sure this is something you think about a lot.
How does the injection of Bitcoin and the Bitcoin standard and more of these people within the entertainment industry starting to adopt Bitcoin
and more of the producers and actors and all of them actually getting on the sound money standard.
How does this problem start getting fixed?

(26:41):
What are the steps that you see ahead for the incentives to start to change back in a way that is going to make a better product for people to consume?
Well, like a lot of people that come into Bitcoin, regardless of where they come into it,
they start to come into it for number go up and looking at it as an asset.
And fortunately – so there's two sides. So fortunately on the business side of Hollywood, people are starting to look at it just like the government looks at bit bonds or MicroStrategy looks at it on their balance sheet where it's like, oh, wait a minute.

(27:12):
This could help blunt out the riskiness and the volatility of movies.
Like movies just notoriously do not make money.
But it's like, oh, what if you have a $10 million budget? What if instead of a $10 million budget for this movie, it's $11 million, and we put $1 million into the Bitcoin, and it just sits on Bitcoin, and you make the rest of it for the $10.

(27:33):
And so because most movies take anywhere from like 7 to 15 years for full returns because you're selling to 180 countries, you have the royalties, the dividends.
And you can do these things called ultimates where a company will buy you out for a haircut and bring everything forward.
But with the Bitcoin on there, and we know how Bitcoin performs, if you're putting this out to a 10-year period, your $10 million movie could be a loser.

(27:58):
But the Bitcoin will help bring it back up for your investors.
So that's one thing that they're starting to look at because they're starting to see because everyone in Hollywood is very Wall Street-y and very trad-fy in the finance side.
On the artisan side, the good thing is that they are such hardcore climate fighters and environmentalists and global warming fear.

(28:27):
I don't know what the word is, and I don't even know what to call it anymore because you can already tell what side I sit on.
But as they learn about Bitcoin mining and as I explain Bitcoin mining to them because they will yell at me like you're into Bitcoin.
You're destroying the planet.
You're melting everything.
I'm just like, can I just give you some facts?
Do you want to be honest and learn?

(28:49):
And I've seen it.
I've seen it click in their eyes.
I've seen them just forwarding them articles.
And even my own book, I have two whole chapters on environmentalism and how Bitcoin mining solves this.
And they're like, oh, crap.
This is pretty amazing.
I'm like, yeah, this literally is the best tool we have.
And a lot of them didn't even know about methane.
They don't realize that there's something that's 84 times more pollutive and more warming than CO2.

(29:11):
They're just focused on CO2.
And I'm like, let's focus on methane, right?
Just every landfill all over the world just emitting straight into the air.
Like we can capture that and we can convert all that waste of energy into money, into Bitcoin.
So the narratives are now getting out there.
They're starting to permeate.
Hollywood likes to gamble so that just like all of us coming in, they're all – a lot of them are distracted by crypto too.

(29:34):
It's like you tell them about Bitcoin.
They're like, hey, I just bought some Bitcoin.
I'm like, great.
They're like, yeah, I bought the XRP one.
I'm like, no, that's not the – that's something completely different.
And so I think it's just going to take time.
Like a lot of us, they have to touch the stove I think and get burned.
But I'm really hoping that the mining thing will help them because whether they're sincere or not, if they really do care about the environment, Bitcoin mining, as Daniel Batten and Troy Cross always say, really is the best tool that we have.

(30:09):
And we can show them facts. We can show them data. And even the EPA, even the White House, these Cambridge studies, like it's just it's so obvious now.
And I think we've mostly tackled a lot of the misinformation, you know, the things that Greenpeace started and, you know, Chris Larson of Ripple.
But that's something I get excited about talking to Hollywood people about.

(30:30):
Yeah, I love it. I have environmental stuff on my notes here, so we'll definitely get into that soon.
um first before that though a question i have which i'm sure people may be wondering do you know
any big name actors or hollywood names who are really into bitcoin that you'd be willing to share
um so yeah i'm just trying to think if any of them have been out yet about that um

(30:58):
yeah i don't know i don't know if what i should say because i i'm uh but just know this yes there
are there are some there are some fairly big people that are in into uh bitcoin um
Some of them are still into crypto, but yeah.

(31:25):
You know what?
I think it's the Tom Brady and the whole FTX thing, why they're hesitant and why I'm now reluctant to out them.
I was just trying to think real quick.
Have any of them said anything on Twitter but I haven't seen?
There are some that are well-known but not as huge that have been talking about it.

(31:46):
Like you see Alison Lohman who's on Twitter and she joins our spaces almost every day from Big Fish and Matchstick Man and dragging them to hell.
So there's people like that.
But the bigger people like Scarlett Johansson or Gerard Butler, I won't say if they have Bitcoin or not.

(32:07):
One that I know that is open about is he's been to the conference.
I actually got to meet him last year with TJ Miller.
Oh, yeah.
I know a lot of people love that like Silicon Valley show and he's been in a bunch of other shows.
So he's a lot of the comics.
Yeah, a lot of the comics have found it.
And I was trying to theorize the other day why.
And I think it's partly because they're somewhat modern day philosophers like to get their jokes and right.

(32:30):
Like they really think about things and they think about, you know, the human condition.
And if you really think it through, like you're going to come across Bitcoin at a certain point, right?
and uh so i think that's why a lot of them them get it who who out there would you most like to
orange pill in a hollywood scene if you could pick anyone that you think would have a really good

(32:53):
chance to bring more attention to bitcoin who do you think is primed for and that you would like
to orange pill uh you know i would love to orange pill um you know any of the studio heads because
the minute that they can start to, in every single budget of every single movie and TV show,
put Bitcoin in just 5%, 10%, we waste easily about 20% on frivolous junk. And four to 5% goes to a

(33:21):
bond, another couple of percent to insurance and all these things that Bitcoin can really just take
the place of. And so if you just put five to 10% in that and over the timeframe of how long it takes
to get your money back, they would see Bitcoin as a promise.
And then I think people would start to pay attention.
I think that would really help.

(33:42):
And it also becomes transparent.
And then you can get into sort of nifty and creative ways
where you incentivize the crew.
Like my whole idea is that, you know,
when you're dealing with 60 crew members
and you're negotiating their fees and their salaries and everything,
it's like, hey, I'll pay you this.
How would you like to get paid in Bitcoin?

(34:03):
Or how would you like, if your department,
If you're the prop department or you're the art department, what if your department comes in under budget and we can reward you with a certain amount of Bitcoin?
Or what if the apps become available where they can get paid in sats not just at the end of every two weeks or not even at the end of every day but literally every minute Because we don think about this but it like people should get paid as they working Like you should have a clock on your phone It like the sats are just rolling in because legally you have to get paid for working anyway

(34:33):
So why not?
Why are people having to wait?
And, you know, because some of these people that are working paycheck to paycheck have
these cash flow issues.
And so then they're using their credit cards or getting these payday loans.
Yeah, I can speak as I would consider myself in some sense an artist just creating podcasts.
Like that's a form of art.
And I wake up every morning and I see notifications filling up my phone of all the Nostra zaps people have sent me and the sats people send me through Fountain for appreciating my podcast.

(35:04):
It's really – it changes the way that you think about this stuff and it gives you more motivation to create more because you're seeing that instant feedback through real money that people are sending you.
And this is a really powerful tool.
And like you said, I think that that's a really big part of it is just getting people plugged into just being paid in Bitcoin.

(35:24):
It makes it so you can set up all sorts of cool formats where people can just get paid like by the minute or by the hour, by much more feedback-friendly intervals where people can really feel rewarded for what they're doing and earn real money.
100%.
Yeah, I think it changes the incentives because in Hollywood – I was telling someone else this the other day.

(35:47):
It's like all of the departments are very sort of cordoned off, and they're almost in competition.
And it's like the vanities, the hair and makeup are over here, and production designs over here, camera department.
And they kind of don't care about the other departments.
They want their department to look good, and they will ask for as much money as they can from the budget, and they will spend every penny.

(36:09):
There's no incentive.
This is why movies are so – there's zero incentive to save money.
There's none.
But if we could put it on a Bitcoin standard or incorporate Bitcoin and we incentivize them because they see what Bitcoin does and they want Bitcoin.
Or like, hey, guys, if you come under – if your department works together on this or you work – I feel like, hey, this movie, there's this Bitcoin bounty, everybody, and we can all participate in this.

(36:33):
But let's all work together.
I feel like that would help.
But again, like broken money, what's the incentive?
Let's just spend it now, right?
Why create when you can consume, right?
Why save when you can spend?
So that would – so yeah, so there isn't really one person I would want to orange peel, but it would be the studios because then everyone would pay attention because everyone in Hollywood, like it or not, they do whatever the studios say.

(36:58):
The studios are their boss, and whatever they do is amazing.
So let's follow their lead.
Oh, they're putting Bitcoin on the budget now?
Wow.
Yeah.
Yeah. It'll be interesting to see how that works because I'll keep this vague, but a lot of the people that run a lot of big parts of Hollywood are also the types of people that like to own the banks.

(37:20):
And there's some connections up there at the top.
Yeah.
Going to leave it there.
Yeah. I got you. I hear you.
We'll see how quickly they decide to buy the sound money that gets rid of the banks.
That's right.
This is why I think that it may be a more bottom-up approach, but we shall see.
it's I mean you never know it's very interesting we see lots of different pieces all over the place

(37:43):
just finding bitcoin and deciding that you know they're going to jump onto the the escape hatch
now because they see where fiat is going and you know all these different groups that we sort of
have these stereotypes for thinking certain ways they will start to fracture as the system continues
to fall apart and people just want to save themselves because that's that's right nature

(38:04):
So it'll be very interesting to watch, that is for sure.
And so going on this theme of how everything is monetized right now, there's just money flying all over the place.
And it's all just easy money being printed money.
Another place that this is very relevant, which you also have experience in, as you mentioned, is real estate.

(38:25):
So I'd love to jump over to that because I think this is another great connection.
After this, we'll talk about the environment, but this is a way to really talk to these people.
As someone who grew up on the West Coast, I grew up in the Seattle area.
So this is the type of thing that a lot of people that I know and you know down in California as well is very close to young people's hearts.

(38:48):
The people who are trying to connect with is that it's freaking impossible to own a home.
Yes.
Basically, everyone has become permanent renters.
Which is a problem in Hollywood, by the way, which we can also talk about.
What's that?
Which is also a problem in Hollywood, which we could talk about.
Yeah, I mean why don't we start with that?
You can sort of explain how it works, and then we can shift into why fiat is the problem for such high real estate prices and then how Bitcoin fixes this.

(39:14):
Well, so going back to the fact that no one in Hollywood, except for studio people, all the artisans, they don't have W-2s.
It's not a regular job.
There's no job security.
So because of that, they cannot get home mortgages.
and there's all kinds of people in Hollywood that are making half a million, million dollars a year.
They can't get a home because a mortgage is a loan on your future income, not your assets.

(39:37):
They could care less what your assets are.
It's like what – and I learned this because I wanted a home when I wanted to get my first home.
And I was like making all these movies at a five-picture deal at Lionsgate.
I was pumping out these teen comedies, and they're like, yeah, but what if your movie fails?
What if Lionsgate says we don't want to make any more?
So I formed my own mortgage company and I became a broker. I got three licenses in real estate and I was never a realtor. I never wanted to sell or buy homes for other people. I just wanted to get my own mortgage. So I wanted to hack the system. I wanted to figure out what is it. And I realized I just had to change the narrative for the banks on how I make money. And I sort of formed my own W-2, so to speak.

(40:20):
So I formed that company and I became – I still am the Hollywood go-to for mortgages.
Like that is one of my fiat businesses.
I've owned it, run it now for, I don't know, 15 years.
And all kinds of people in Hollywood, very well-known people, people you know, they come because they're like, hey, I just talked to Wells Fargo.
I talked to Chase.
They all said no.

(40:41):
It's like, great.
I'm going to take care of you.
So anyways, that's kind of – that's what got me into real estate.
I became a mortgage broker when I was trying to get my first home, which I could not afford per the bank.
Yet I could have just bought it outright, but they didn't – but I wanted to have a cheap mortgage.
So yeah, so switching to real estate, I think even more than Hollywood.

(41:06):
I think this is the huge play as far as adoption is concerned because like I never owned gold.
I don't – my family doesn't own gold.
I don't have any friends that own gold.
I think less than 2% or 3% of Gen Z and millennials own gold, and mostly it's something that's passed down as heirloom from the grandmas.
But I understood real estate.

(41:27):
I get it.
It's tangible.
We all have to live in it.
So it was the digital real estate.
It was real estate in cyberspace that made sense to me, not the digital gold part when I was trying to understand Bitcoin.
So that part, I was like, oh, digital space, scarce property, like owning land. And there's only so much of it, right? There's 21 million plots. It's like, okay, that made sense to me. And the denominator never changes. So I will always own that amount of land. Whereas with regular real estate, right, everything deteriorates and they can make more and they can just keep building straight up. That's what hit me. And I think that is starting to click for real estate people.

(42:04):
So because I was deep into real estate, I had an Airbnb business.
I've flipped 20 homes, part of a ton of commercial real estate, shopping centers, whatever.
And I'm still stuck in some of those because some of those are partnerships.
But the ones that I was in all by myself, I've sold out and all went to Bitcoin, all of it.
And so I go to these real estate meetups, these real estate – like we think that the Bitcoin conventions and things are crazy and all this.

(42:33):
It's like it's just a tiny crumb compared to the real estate world that does these things.
And so I go to those and I talk to these people, to these real estate developers or mostly investors, and I say, why are you into real estate?
What is it about real estate?
And here's the thing, Ben.
It's like if most real estate investors – and first of all, I'm going to separate the people that want to own their own home for their own home.

(43:00):
I can argue why that's still a bad deal and it's better to rent, but just set that aside and say, okay, someone wants to own their own home. It's not all about money. Fine. I'm talking about all the real estate investors, the people that want income property, that passive income, that mailbox money, make money while you sleep.
There's a huge side hustle culture there. I mean it's all over the internet, all these courses late at night. There's a gazillion people trying to do that.

(43:23):
But if you talk to all of them, the only reason that they're in the real estate is like they like what it says about them.
They feel like they're being responsible.
They feel like they're being smart.
They want to be able to say, oh, yeah, I have this townhome over in Nashville or, yeah, I have a loft over in Austin.
I have a home in Palm Springs, wherever.
But if they're doing what you're supposed to do in real estate and they're being a good investor, it's either rented out.

(43:50):
It's Airbnb.
They don't even get to use it.
It's really just on a balance sheet. And so I ask real estate people to be honest with themselves that you just like the flex. You like the brag that you own real estate because all you care about is what the real estate can get you.

(44:11):
And if you're a good investor, you need to flip it in three years.
You need to flip it in five years.
You need to exit.
You need to sell.
It's just a bunch of boards and nails.
It's there's, you know, it's like people are like, well, you know, Bitcoin's not tangible.
Real estate's tangible.
But yeah, but if you're an investor, there's no tangibility to the real estate until something bad happens, until the sewer is full or until everything gets backed up and until the roof needs replacing.

(44:35):
That's when it's tangible.
But again, you're hiring people to do that and you're just looking at a balance sheet online. It's just the money. And so it's just a lot of work. So I guess this is my rambling way of saying that the majority of people that go into real estate investing don't have any reason to really be there.

(44:56):
They don't really have the expertise or the knowledge.
They're following some course or some book they read, and it's a huge amount of risk, a ton of liability.
Just to get what they're sold as cash flow, they have to put up a ton of money, right?
The cash flow will take a decade just to even equal the amount of money that they're putting up.

(45:17):
And then the cash flow is just a rebrand of appreciation.
Well, are you telling me that if you have another asset that's appreciating 5 to 10x your cash flow, you couldn't just peel off some of that?
And by the way, when you peel off Bitcoin, it's capital gains taxes, which is so much smaller than income taxes.
Cash flow on real estate is income taxes.
And also cash flow, guess what the first thing is that stops when you have problems in real estate?

(45:41):
It's cash flow.
Cash flow stops all the time.
I have so many commercial real estate properties right now that have completely stopped because of interest rates going up and other…
having to refi and like, I'm not even getting cashflow. The only reason I was in some of these
passive things is for the cashflow. Well, there is no cashflow now. It's zeroed out. And some of

(46:04):
them, there's now new capital calls. I have another project in Florida where I'm only going to get
half what I even put in and I'm not even getting cashflow. So I'm losing. And it makes me ill just
to think about how to just put that into Bitcoin. And I even knew about Bitcoin at the time,
but I wasn't like a hundred percent Bitcoin then, you know, I was still part of that whole
diversification, worsification thing. And so if you break it down, if you break down the real

(46:30):
estate bros, if you break it down, you say, why do you want real estate? What are you hoping to get
out of this? What you like? They don't really need the real estate. They just want the money.
They want to hurdle inflation. And obviously this is just a trade. It's an investment. It's
risk for them to do that. So I think a lot of them, if again, if they're honest, will open their

(46:50):
eyes and say, oh, there's a better way for me to do this where it can be peaceful with less risk
and less liability. And it's called Bitcoin. And I just have to get over the fact that,
you know, if mom and dad say, oh, hey, are you being smart? And did you invest in that fourplex?
It's like, no, I bought Bitcoin. So I get it. Mom and dad don't know. So that sounds crazy. Oh my

(47:14):
God, what are you doing? Right. We just tried to help you out. We gave you a little bit of money
you put into Bitcoin. But it's like, yeah, it's property. And it's ultimately scarce,
finite property that's incorruptible and immortal and all the things that we know about Bitcoin.
So if they could start to see that, if they could real, if so if real estate people can realize that

(47:36):
cashflow is just appreciation in a different form and there's appreciation with Bitcoin. So
you can make your own cashflow. You set your own schedule and you can have cashflow.
I think they would help understand it because that's the biggest thing they say.
And then they say, well, you can live in real estate.
Yes, but I'm talking about all the income and investment properties, which no one lives in.

(47:58):
I've owned all these great properties that I look back and I'm like, man, these are so amazing.
I didn't spend one night in them.
I couldn't because I had tenants.
I had a place right next to Bitcoin Commons in Austin.
I had a place right next to Bitcoin Park, like four houses over from Bitcoin Park in Nashville.
I wish I kept those now just because of the Bitcoin aspect.

(48:19):
But no, I've done way better by selling those.
And by the way, it was all during COVID.
COVID opened up my eyes and also because a lot of these were Airbnbs.
And Airbnb, the company – well, not the company.
I say the jurisdictions and where these were turned them off.
Like you're not allowed to have people in there because of COVID, right?
The germs are going to linger in the house.

(48:40):
I was like, oh my gosh, these can't just sit there and burn.
So screw this.
And so I sold them all. So I think real estate people can start to can see Bitcoin as property without friction, you know, borderless, without the jurisdictional risk.
You know, no airport is going to go in across the street. No school is going to be built.

(49:02):
You know, you don't have the noisy neighbor. You don't have the dog. You don't have the tenants, the toilets, the trash, the taxes.
And the taxes you have are only when you sell. You know, that's the whole thing.
And we know this, all Bitcoiners get this, but why are you paying property taxes?
Even if you pay all cash, there's no leverage at all.
Pay all cash for your house.

(49:22):
Why are you paying property taxes?
Well, guess what?
That's just rent.
But your landlord is the county.
My landlord right here is Los Angeles County.
It's like if I, you know, in the amount I'm paying in property taxes is the same as most
people's rent.
And that's not counting all of the maintenance.
And it's deteriorating.
How weird is it that we're investing in something that deteriorates?

(49:46):
So I'm going to store my money in this thing that I have to monthly and yearly be maintaining just to keep what it's at.
I feel like real estate investing was originally supposed to be real estate living, and we turned it into real estate investing because we haven't had choices.
And now people will say the same about Bitcoin.

(50:06):
They're like, well, people are going to drive up the price of Bitcoin.
And they're just going to use that to save like, yeah, but that's the point.
It doesn't take anything away from anybody else.
What does it take away?
It takes nothing.
And that's why there's no utility.
It's like, oh, yeah, there's no utility in Bitcoin.
Yes, that's the best utility.
There is no utility, right?
You get it.
It's, oh, my gosh, it's money.
It's a good thing.
It gives you clearer signal because this is another thing that the gold people use.

(50:30):
Oh, gold is better because it's also used for electronics and jewelry and all these other things.
But that actually creates noise in the system. It makes it less good of a measuring stick as money.
That's right because it's measuring something else. There's a contaminant in it as money.
Yeah. So, I mean, even before I was fully into Bitcoin, I wrote this article called Don't Buy Your House.

(50:55):
And the whole thesis was that even for your own house, and I ran through all the numbers, it is smarter to rent than buy.
And I laid out exactly why, you know, you put up your security deposit.
The security deposit is the only recourse that the landlord has.
And I know this being a landlord.
So the people are like, yeah, well, I want to paint the walls.
I want to put in hardwood floors.

(51:16):
I want to change the sink.
Guess what?
You could do that.
When I rented my first place after college, I did that.
And that's what started up my eyes.
I'm like, I don't like this toilet.
I want to concrete this countertop.
Like I concreted this wall behind me.
Like I want to, you know, I want to.
And guess what?
Most of the time, my landlords either reduced my rent or they came in and looked at the place and said, thank you.

(51:36):
You just improved my property.
Also, there's freedom.
You can move whenever you want to.
I mean, anyways, we don't have to get into that, but it's like I could go deep down a rabbit hole of explaining to people how it's just better to rent in general when it comes to real estate.
And it could still be your house.

(51:57):
If you're worried, you can pay three, four years of rent up front, which will still be way less than a down payment on a house.
So you get chained.
You're stuck geographically.
You're stuck.
You don't know what neighbors are going to move in next door.
You just can't move.
So I happen to own this house because I bought it before Bitcoin, and I wish I didn't.

(52:22):
There's people near me that are renting the exact same house for way less than I'm spending.
So I bought this house, which was the equivalent of 1,818 Bitcoin when I bought it.
Today, it's worth 17 Bitcoin.
17.
And you know this, Ben?
In about five, six years, it's only going to be worth about two.

(52:44):
Yep.
Now, I didn't spend 1,818 Bitcoin because I didn't have it then.
money that doesn't deteriorate, you start realizing like, oh, this is actually, you know,
things are when you just have to change your denominator and you start seeing everything
in a different light. And everyone in Bitcoin seen that meme of the shopping cart over time.
If you're saving in fiat money, which is getting smaller and smaller, you're able to buy less stuff

(53:07):
with it. Oh yeah. The shopping cart, if you're saving a Bitcoin, the same amount of money,
it turns into a Ferrari after a few years.
You're able to buy more stuff
when you're not holding a money that's melting.
It's like that Home Alone meme
where the kid who got the groceries in Home Alone
and it's like, I forget,
but he paid like 50 bucks

(53:28):
and had all these things back then.
And today it's like, oh, that's $350.
Yeah, it's crazy.
And people are starting to wake up
to all this inflation stuff
and how it's stealing from them.
Well, no one understands inflation. That's the other thing. In the fiat world, they think they do, but we get it. And I didn't. Again, going through all the business school, I thought inflation was just prices increasing. And again, I'm just – business school, you look at the symptoms. You don't look at the problem. And that was a big wake-up call for me. It's like, holy crap. We were just looking at the problems and then – yeah.

(54:05):
And you're told like this is just the way it is.
This is the way it is.
2% inflation, that's just the way it is.
That's their target because it is.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, no one has a reason.
No one explains why they are stealing a certain amount from you.
That's just how it is.
And no more questions.
And Bitcoiners ask questions about everything.

(54:25):
And they say, how about 0% theft from me every year for money printing?
That sounds better, doesn't it?
It does sound better.
Yeah.
What's not to like?
And they make up all these things about how deflation would be so scary and bad, but really it's just things getting cheaper over time, which would be much better for everybody.

(54:48):
Yeah, which is naturally how it is supposed to be.
We just don't realize that we've been programmed.
Yeah. And for the people who heard you go on an excellent, you know, rant about the real estate from the investor side and the more like managerial side, how, you know.
It just doesn't isn't very efficient as a money storing vehicle, even though it's kind of the best there is right now or the best there was for a while.

(55:13):
I should say. People who just want to go and buy a house should care about this and listen because
this is what all the big money folks are thinking about as well because they have also
bought up tons of housing. Everyone ever heard about BlackRock just buying entire neighborhoods
of houses because they don't want to hold their wealth in fiat because they know it's going down

(55:36):
in value. So this is causing these big money folks to just flood the real estate market,
which jacks all the prices up yeah so once they realize there's a better monetary solution out
there that will store their value without them needing to deal with all these expenses and
cleaning toilets and tenants and and you know property managers all these different pieces

(55:58):
as you've seen yourself they're gonna they're gonna leave and go to that one and so we're
talking about bitcoin is just a better it's a better store of value than real estate in every
single way. And so once they all leave the real estate market, those prices will, in theory,
drop potentially massively Is that sort of what you foresee Because I know there some controversy out there around what is going to happen once all the real estate investors realize Bitcoin is a better store of value and leave the real estate market into Bitcoin

(56:35):
What's actually going to happen?
Is this going to be like a wonderful event where all the houses drop?
Well, wonderful for the people that aren't owning houses, I should say.
Yeah.
It's going to be terrible for the people who stay owning real estate but potentially wonderful for all the Gen Z millennials out there who can finally afford a house.
What do you see happening there?

(56:55):
I think unfortunately real estate is going to continue to go up because it really just follows inflation, right?
It's like it's really going to do that.
But where it starts to peel off from inflation and even have a premium on top of inflation, I think that's going to come closer down to inflation because those people will be storing in Bitcoin.

(57:16):
I mean it's going to have to be a significant move to do that, but every little bit counts.
Every house that – like every house that I will go out and look at and there's three other people coming to buy it, like two of those three are from a company.
They're from a flipping company.
And those companies start to go away when they realize they can do better simply investing in Bitcoin.

(57:40):
And so then you have one person left you're competing with, and of course the price – it keeps the prices down.
So real estate will still always, outside of Bitcoin, I think, be the best store of value nominally.
The problem is the amount of work you have to do to get there.
I mean I tell some people who aren't real estate pros or they're like, oh, should I be getting real estate?

(58:02):
I'm like, just go get another fiat job or just work longer at your job because if that's what you like and that's what you do, it's going to be the same.
So I hope that that does wake people up.
I mean so getting back to like the Hollywood of it all, when you tell people that part about real estate because a lot of the Hollywood people that have done well and will have these like $20 million places in the Hollywood Hills.

(58:27):
or I was talking to a friend of mine the other day.
She has a $15 million place over in the Malibu Hills.
And you tell them this thing about pricing out people
that just need a place to live
because you're storing all this.
It's just like the environmental thing.
They're like, oh shit.
Like suddenly I'm like, I'm not trying to make you feel bad.
You didn't know.
I didn't know.
But this is what you're doing to the very people

(58:50):
that you march around on the red carpet,
tell people you're trying to help.
I want to help families.
I want affordable housing.
Okay.
So what's the tool that you can do?
You want to help the environment?
You want the environment?
You want the world to be a better place?
You want to make affordable housing?
There's one simple tool for you to do that with and you can do it.

(59:11):
It's because we haven't had that, right?
Like you watch these like all these, what do you call them?
What were these women's pageants?
Miss Americas and whatever, right?
And it's like, oh, hi, I just want to make the world a better place.
Great.
What are you going to do?
It's nice to say that.
But now we actually have something.
Um, yeah, I don't know. I get passionate as you could tell.

(59:32):
I love it. That's what we love here. And yeah, I would agree that it's, it's going to be, I think
the one thing we can all agree on is that it's going to be extremely volatile, especially the
real estate market, because there's going to be multiple, all sorts of different forces acting on
it at the same time. If, and when this scenario plays out where these real estate investors will

(59:55):
all you know jump out and into bitcoin that is a downward price force but at the same time you
know everything that the baby boomers touch is just protected by the full force of the money
printer right now because that's you know their yeah their generation so the government is going
to then just like flood money into it somehow to try to keep it propped up so the boomers don't

(01:00:18):
lose money and so that's the thing yeah price force and you know there's just going to be a lot
madness going on. And I think that the thing that comes to mind is that chart of the price of gold
during the Weimar Republic hyperinflation, where it's just like up and down like crazy.
That's a good point.
Until it eventually ends up much higher. I think that it could be a similar situation for real

(01:00:42):
estate, but it's going to end up at the long term. Maybe I'll disagree with you on this. I think
long-term it will end up lower just because of deflation from Bitcoin becoming the new form of
money. Would you think that there is some merit there? Yeah. I mean, look, once Bitcoin gets into
the ridiculous numbers that seem ridiculous now, but we know aren't, and we know that's inevitable,

(01:01:07):
yeah, the real estate people just, they'll be delusional or they'll be in some mental
institution to not accept that this is a better capital allocation for them and a better investment.
I think part of the reason – part of the problem, another problem I didn't mention earlier that real
estate people have is that they all want to be the hero of their own story. And in real estate,

(01:01:33):
you really can be the hero of your own story because you found the house. You figured out
exactly what to do because these things aren't fungible. Everything is so unique.
And it is – I get it and I will admit it's very rewarding.
It's nice to feel very productive.
Depending what your main vocation is, to be able to go spend a Sunday and tile a bathroom or paint a wall, at the end of the day, it feels good as a human being.

(01:02:01):
Like you feel like you did do something.
But you shouldn't have to for your savings, which is the whole point.
You know, like, honestly, I will still flip homes because I have the skills.
I love it.
I have all the tools.
But flipping a home is different.
That's a business.
You know, you're in and you're out in six weeks.

(01:02:21):
Boom, boom.
I'm talking about the people that don't want to be a landlord and, you know, have some property they have to check in on for the next 15 years.
It sounds cool.
But you're also creating value because you're taking something that's lower quality and you're making it better quality for the next people.
So I would say like that is something that's creating productivity.
It's not just some fiat thing.

(01:02:43):
But because of Bitcoin, Bitcoin being the new hurdle rate, like, boy, it's like I don't jump on things like I normally would have.
Like I'm looking at something around the corner from here and I'm just like, okay, I would put in this much for it.
I would flip it by this.
It's like, well, wait, what's Bitcoin going to do?
And I don't have to do anything.
And it's just like, man.
And it's like we all know Natalie Burnell, who's very popular in the Bitcoin space.

(01:03:07):
Her whole narrative, you've heard her many times, that she wants a home.
She wants a home really, really bad.
Her parents lost their home in the great financial crisis, 2008, 2009.
She wants her home.
She's now newly married.
I know she can now afford a home, but she's looking at Bitcoin and she's like, I think I want to rent a little longer because I know where we're going.
So it's like you delay that gratification as long as you can.

(01:03:30):
And I look at like the Cardone brothers. I look at these billionaires, right? You look at Grant Cardone who's already starting to move some of his real estate into Bitcoin. You look at Gary Cardone who's moved all of it except for his home, and he says, I wish I did it earlier.
And it's like these are guys that own $20, $30 million homes, and they're putting it all into Bitcoin. It's like, okay, like someone's going to start paying attention.

(01:03:56):
Yeah, for sure. And it's really exciting to see things are starting to move that direction because it's just going to end up in a better place where we don't have everything but money is the money.
Yeah.
And this quote from Jeff Booth comes to mind where he says, when you have abundance in money, you have scarcity in everything else. And when you have scarcity in money, you have abundance in everything else. And that's where we're going.

(01:04:23):
And when we have all of the money converging onto the best form of money ever, everything else becomes much more abundant for people and more affordable for people.
And we finally reach that deflation point where things get cheaper over time as they naturally should.
Because that's the way that things should just be when you think about it logically.

(01:04:45):
Humans get better at creating stuff.
We get better at communicating, better supply chains, more innovation.
All these things should make everything more accessible for us, not less, as we're seeing right now.
And I'm glad that people are starting to put those pieces of inflation together.
Yeah.
Yeah, we're all improving and innovating, but the measuring stick is growing faster than we can innovate.

(01:05:06):
And it's like, no, let's have a fixed measuring stick.
The ruler shouldn't change.
Exactly.
Exactly.
I'd love to pivot over to the environment side, like we mentioned earlier.
I know that that's something that you talk about in your book, Proof of Money.
and this is a great piece to touch on.
I haven't really done a whole lot on the show,
but it's really important.
So could you explain to me,

(01:05:27):
like I am a, you know,
like one of the millions of people
we both see on the West Coast.
I'm a climate activist.
I really care about the environment,
which I do care about the environment, by the way.
But if you go into like a climate protest
and you see all those people there who are,
you know, they think that Bitcoin is bad
because it uses energy.
And what is your pitch to them?

(01:05:48):
on explaining how Bitcoin is actually a very good thing for the environment when you look at the whole picture.
Yeah, so I tackle it from different ways. Let me see.
So one way to jump in is simply that, first of all, when we mine Bitcoin, there is zero pollutive gases.

(01:06:14):
We don't emit anything just like a computer or any database.
That's all we're running.
We're just running a computer.
So first of all, get that away.
There's no such thing as waste.
The only waste there is is that, yes, to make the components just like your computer, like your toaster, like your coffee maker, like your Tesla, it requires certain components that use fossil fuels if you think fossil fuels are bad.

(01:06:40):
But that's it.
It doesn't emit anything.
And in fact it more like your hairdryer or your teapot And the warmth the only thing that it emits is warm air is a use in itself for something else We can use that to heat hot tubs heat your floors and hotels and houses and greenery whatever

(01:07:05):
Which a lot of people are already doing, by the way.
There's whole businesses around now that are like turning Bitcoin miners into heaters, which is super cool.
Yeah, like space heaters.
Like do you have a space heater?
Most people have a space heater.
Well, that's literally no different.
And if suddenly your space heater or your toaster or your hairdryer were mining Bitcoin, in addition, would that suddenly be bad?

(01:07:25):
So that's the first thing I let people know.
First of all, let's just be honest.
There's no pollution from Bitcoin mining.
Now, because of the incentives of Bitcoin mining, the only way we can mine is with cheap electricity.
No one over here in Hollywood can plug into their wall socket and mine.
They will be losing money.
it's it's a losing proposition you there's absolutely no way anyone will make money so

(01:07:51):
i just explained to them how are we going to find cheap electricity in fact what is the cheapest
electricity oh well the cheapest is if it's discarded or if it's wasted or if it's stranded
it's orphaned somewhere that no other user of any kind can even access and in fact it's just
going straight up into the air it's coming out of a waterfall to the base of a volcano it's oh

(01:08:14):
the sun is shining, the wind is blowing. Wouldn't that, if no one is using that energy,
would you be against us taking that? And by the way, what if that energy came from a landfill
that's emitting gases? You're against CO2? Well, how about 84 times more pollutive is just going
straight into the air from the landfills? That one always gets them. The landfills blows their mind.

(01:08:36):
Yeah. The methane, you mean? Yeah. Yeah. The methane, excuse me. Yeah. CH4. Because no one
knows no one has thought about methane. And I'm like, yeah, you know, you turn on your stove to
heat up and scramble your eggs that second before it ignites and lights. That's the methane. That's
the gas. And that is just going straight into the air. You know, like here in California,
I think we have like 10,000 landfills. It's like, what? Well, we can take, you know,

(01:08:59):
40 of these miners, the size of a large shoebox, plop them on there. That gas comes up. We ignite
it, combust it. It turns a turbine, turns the rod, the coil goes around the rod into our machines,
gives us electricity. So it's free electricity. We haven't taken anything away from anyone else.
We're now capping that methane. Would that be good? Yeah, that'd be good to cap the methane.

(01:09:21):
And now we're creating Bitcoin, which in essence is a way to transport, to teleport like Star Trek
electricity to anyone else, anywhere else in the world. Like we can capture it here where no one
can use it or access it and teleport to where someone else is. Wait, how do you do that?
Well, because it converts to Bitcoin. We send them the Bitcoin, they sell the Bitcoin,

(01:09:43):
they have their electricity. It's like, what? That's kind of mind blowing to people
that you can do that because there's no other energy consumer that can go to the source.
We are literally the only one, you know, all of this stuff, Ben, but this kind of blows them
because no one has thought about this. I never thought about this until I learned all this.
And so on top of that, then you can teach them about – because they're all for renewables.

(01:10:07):
Oh, renewable energy, renewable energy.
It's like, OK, great.
Aside from the facts that most renewable just clearly requires a lot of fossil fuels to create in the first place, well, we can help encourage that.
We can be the build-out, right?
We're the consumer of first resort.
where we go to this place where no one can go. And because it's going to cost, you know, whatever,
10 million bucks per mile just to bring this renewable source from these windmills in the

(01:10:32):
middle of some planes out to consumers, the miners were going to go there and we're going to move
with them until it gets to consumers. And then we're going to leave, right? Like we, we do become
these, these sort of raccoons or dung beetles of energy because we will go anywhere. And we don't
care if it's a pretty and nice sprinkled donut to eat, which most consumers want. We'll take the
donuts that fell on the floor that are crumbled, that have been fried too long. We don't care.

(01:10:56):
We'll eat those up. And then when people are lined up to that donut shop to have the pretty donuts,
we'll step off and we'll go away. And then when that donut shop person wants to franchise and
open one over here and over there, we'll go there to be the first customer.
Yeah. I love it. And that's a, yeah, just the, that's like the depth of this thing,
which people don't normally think about.

(01:11:17):
And the thing I would add to that is,
you did touch on this a little bit,
but I'll just really emphasize it,
is how all that Bitcoin miners care about
is how cheap the energy is and how efficient it is
because they want to make money.
It's like a pure monetization signal.
Like they want cheap energy
so they can make more Bitcoin, keep more Bitcoin.

(01:11:38):
And what this will do is it helps bootstrap
these cheaper, more efficient energy sources
that are being stranded already.
They're wasted.
So it's a sponge that sucks up this stranded energy
that isn't being used by anyone.
That's right.
And at the same time,
it's helping bootstrap these more efficient energies.
And I even go like crazy big brain with it,

(01:11:59):
which is, well, if I'm talking to one of these climate folks
who is really big on solar or wind or something like that,
I would say, great.
If those projects, if they're well run
and they need more money in financial bootstrapping,
then the Bitcoin miners can come plug into that.

(01:12:20):
And we see that happening all over the place.
Right, because of the intermittency, right?
Yeah, exactly.
It helps smooth out the profits for them.
But I think even bigger, looking at the topic of free energy,
I don't know if you've even looked into that,
but this is like a very cosmic topic that I love diving into here,
where I believe personally that there's going to be much more advanced energy sources down the road

(01:12:46):
than any of the things we're talking about here, the fossil fuels or the renewables.
And the only way that we're going to get there, or at least the best way we're going to get there
and figure that out, is by having these Bitcoin miners who are fully incentivized
and finding the cheapest possible energy because the ultimate cheap energy is free energy.
That's right.
Do you ever think about this or is that a rival you bend down?

(01:13:07):
Because this has been a crazy one I've been learning more about recently.
I do.
I do because it's like it's so foreign to us to – when you start a business or you go into an industry, you always think how can I increase revenues?
How do I just make more money?
And like a lot of things in Bitcoin, it's backwards.
It turns the world upside down and says, no, no, no, no.

(01:13:28):
With Bitcoin, we know exactly what the revenue is.
Like you've never had a business where you know this is the only Bitcoin that's going to come in.
I mean if you win a block, of course, there's still the lottery, which is what required – which is why we need cheap energy.
But it's like – but we know what it will be.
We're capped.
The only thing we can – the only lever we have is expenses.
So if you want to be the best miner, if you want to win the mining game, you have to go to zero.

(01:13:54):
Like that – there's nowhere else to go.
I guess the better place to go with that is someone pays you to take their energy, right?
And maybe we will get to that point where one of these big oil companies or energy companies says, hey, if you're going to come over here, cap our flared wells, which we need to meet EPA standards and whatnot.
If you're going to come – maybe it will get so competitive that they will start paying us to eat their energy.

(01:14:15):
I don't know.
But to me, that would take it one step further.
But yeah, I mean we need to go nuclear.
Yeah, that's a whole podcast in itself.
Yeah, and there will be like steps to this thing of improving what our energy load is.

(01:14:36):
Yes.
Because there's definitely tiers to it.
And it's so hard to figure out what is even the best because there's so much noise around it, so much propaganda, so many financial incentives within that industry.
Right.
Where money is being spent to sway public opinion in certain ways about certain forms of energy.
All the lobbyists.

(01:14:56):
Yeah, the lobbying, it's all really a mess right now.
And I think that clearing that away and just having pure signal over the Bitcoin miners will just figure out what is the actual cheapest.
It's a forcing function for the true best, most efficient energy that we have with the least downsides.
And I think that's really going to be an exciting benefit just for the energy industry and could take us really exciting places on a long enough time frame, which I'm looking forward to.

(01:15:26):
Another angle that we haven't even touched, or I don't think you mentioned this, but is just people aren't thinking about the comparison we're talking about when they think that, oh, Bitcoin uses lots of energy, so it's bad.
They're not comparing it to the fiat system and how much energy the fiat system uses.
So how do you even begin, Terrence, to explain how much energy the fiat system uses?

(01:15:50):
It's obviously way more than Bitcoin, and it's just like a monstrosity of energy wastage.
How do you start to explain how much energy that uses?
Well, yeah, I mean that's a whole other rabbit hole too, right?
Like do you get even to the level of the military and protecting fiat?
But yeah, if you want to just talk about the pure energy of the banks, of the suits, of the retail brick and mortars, including the thermometer on the outside of a bank or all of Wall Street, which is literally just there to financialize things.

(01:16:23):
All the people, all the employees driving their cars into work, burning more fossil fuels.
Like the amount of pieces to it is just phenomenal.
Like you said, the military uses a ton of energy.
like it's one of the biggest energy like wasters ever just huge fossil fuel producer it's it's a
mess and it is to protect the dollar that's why we have that big of a military yeah no i mean we

(01:16:45):
have like you know hundreds of these like stealth fighters that cost a billion dollars a year each
just in the amount of fuel that they're burning and they have to be sitting there ready to go at
any minute's notice i mean anyways that's getting a little off topic but yeah it's like you know you
could tell someone anywhere you live, just get out in your car and drive a few blocks
for like, are you going to see a bank?

(01:17:07):
Like, what's the amount of energy and to transport and all those building materials
and to keep it running and all of that, you know, compared to something that's
completely decentralized and incentivized to have the cheapest electricity possible that does secure your wealth that does keep you from being inflated upon and from being debased and diluted You know sometimes you have to back up and just also ask them the bigger question

(01:17:33):
And it's like, well, well, what is good energy? What is bad energy? What does energy mean to you?
Like, is energy not simply, you know, what you've done in the past and now what you can do now? Like,
who is to say how you get, are you going to sit home for one weekend and watch 15,
seasons of the Kardashians, I think that's a waste of energy. I think the waste of energy is

(01:17:54):
making the show Kardashians in the first place. All the money, the millions of dollars they're
just spending on literally every single episode. And it's like, at what point are we judging others
how they spend their energy? I choose to spend my energy on something that secures my past wealth.
That's it. I have a receipt. I took my car into the valet. He gave me a receipt for my car. When I go back to get my car, I want the whole car there. I don't want the wheel missing and the steering wheel missing. I don't want it to start erasing like back to the future photo. I want the whole thing. So I'm going to use my energy for that. And guess what? I can only do that if I'm finding energy that no one else wants. Anyone else who needs energy, I'm not taking energy away from anybody else.

(01:18:40):
And I'm not causing any energy producer to have to make more energy just for me because I'm going to go find it where it's completely wasted and no one is using it.
It's like how much energy is wasted just in the phantom drain from people that have to have their laptops plugged in all the time.
Well, guess what?
Some people find that valuable.
Do you use the internet?
37% of all of the internet's energy is just for porn.

(01:19:04):
Well, so you must be for porn then if you're turning on it.
Like, you know, you get into where the energy comes from and how it's being used.
And it's like, yes, some people find that valuable and you shouldn't be able to tell
people how they use their energy, which is simply their past time.
It's their money.
It's what they've worked for.
So to me, that's always the bigger question.

(01:19:24):
And then it's like, you know, OK, well, how will you drive a Tesla?
Do you want to look at every single part in that car and all the fossil fuels, the amount
of energy that was used for all those plastics, those synthetics, the paint, that battery?
Took like 2,000 tons of dirt to be removed for that single Tesla battery and what that does to the environment and the plant and all the chemicals going into the waterbeds.

(01:19:47):
So, yeah, it's so obvious to us, Ben, because we've studied this and it's hard to allow people to get there.
It's just like you just want to shove it all down their throat and say, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Here's all the facts.
But it's like they have to arrive at it like we did.
And I think some of these baby steps are helpful. I mean, I sometimes wonder, was Satoshi so – I mean, did he really figure all this out or did we get lucky with this part?

(01:20:19):
Was he really like, wow, Bitcoin miners are going to eat up all this wasted energy?
Like I don't know. Did he think that? I don't know that he thought that far.
Like maybe we just got lucky with some of these things, but it's too difficult to imagine that all of these things he just thought through perfectly and just worked so beautifully where the incentives are for humans just to do good.

(01:20:44):
I don't know. I think about that sometimes. Like, yeah, was it like lightning in a bottle with what he did?
yeah it's a great question because none of us know how much of this was thought out ahead of time
yeah it just sort of seems like the more you read satoshi's work in a white paper like
so much of this was planned and understood because it the creator was just so such a polymath and

(01:21:10):
all these different things he touched on all these things and sort of explored it i say he
we don't even know if it was a he or if it was a group or whatever but it just it's incredible how
it's unfolding and how it's pulling all this humanity together, all the best of humanity
that as we've seen from being a part of this community.
And it's just so exciting to be a part of.

(01:21:30):
And it's such an honor to be a part of it.
And I think that this is kind of a good transition that we could start wrapping things up here.
Yes.
And the final question that you started with at the very beginning is you love the idea
of the hero's journey.
And this is like the quintessential story.
So my final question for you would be, what is the Bitcoin or a hero's journey and why should the person listening to this podcast right now embark on this with us?

(01:21:55):
The hero's journey is that we – that there's a better world.
Other Bitcoiners are asking you to cross the threshold with them into this newer world to unplug and see the beautiful world that is there without having to disrupt the current world.
If people are comfortable in their world, they can stay there.

(01:22:16):
They don't have to go to Oz.
And but as everyone does in the hero's journey, they need a mentor.
They you know, and that mentor could be books.
It could be podcasts.
It doesn't have to be a person, but they need they need someone to bring them along.
They're going to be tested.
There's going to be trials and tribulations for most of us.

(01:22:36):
That's crypto.
That's that's like, OK, wow.
Well, what about all these other things?
This unit bias, this is cheaper.
Wow, activity bias.
I got to be doing something.
And you reach a point where you have to struggle with yourself.
And oftentimes the inner beast is yourself because we have been conditioned and you have to deprogram yourself into what is possible with Bitcoin and exactly how Bitcoin works.

(01:23:03):
And so, yeah, you get to this point where you learn so much about Bitcoin that you reach the holy grail.
But the real reward, just like the hero's journey, isn't just reaching the holy grail.
It's returning to your old world.

(01:23:24):
It's returning with the spoils.
It's returning renewed with the new perspective because we ultimately do live in meat space.
We still do have to interact with our relatives at Thanksgiving, right?
So you return with this new perspective and you can appreciate things in a different way.
You can make your life peaceful even if other people don't choose to be – choose to that.

(01:23:47):
So you don't – you aren't leaving your family.
You aren't leaving your friends, but you get to have this inner peace, almost this like self-actualization because everything becomes clear.
It's like you live in this house and the windows are – every day get a little dirtier.
We know that this happens, right?
But we don't pay attention.
We're just like, oh, I can see.

(01:24:08):
I can see.
Oh, my walls are getting dingy.
Let me paint them bright white.
But all this time, all we need to do is go out and wash the windows.
Yet here we are changing the colors and getting better eyeglasses and getting – it's like because we don't know that, yeah, every day a little bit of dirt gets out on those windows.
And Bitcoin reveals to us the solution that if I were to knock on your door and say, hey, I wash windows, be like, well, my windows are fine.

(01:24:31):
I can see through them.
And we just have to reveal to people that, no, just wipe your finger on there.
We'll show you.
So that's kind of the hero's journey.
You're going to be tested.
It's going to be challenging.
It's going to be hard.
It's easy to say, yeah, just get Bitcoin and don't do anything else.
But, man, I don't know if anyone can do that.

(01:24:51):
I don't know anyone who has done that.
Um, but you know, we'll, we'll, we'll tell you to do that anyway.
I love it.
It's you and I can both attest and all the other dozens at this point of Bitcoiners I
brought on the podcast all have different stories that have different pieces to them,
but they all have the similar, uh, they have the similarities of just becoming a much better

(01:25:15):
person and seeing the world in a much more positive forward looking light.
and it's so exciting how many different aspects it touches once you fix the money.
So really just excited for the future.
And I hope that more people listening get more excited just listening to this
because it really is going to become so much better.
And we can say thank you to Satoshi for that,

(01:25:36):
for giving us this hope for the future,
which would be tough to be hopeful right now if that wasn't there
because there are so many problems that all come down to the money.
So, Terrence, Michael, where can people follow you, sir, and go get your awesome book, Proof of Money?
Give us the full shilling here.
Oh, sure. The easiest place is X. I'm there most all days just at Proof of Money.

(01:26:01):
And that's the name of my book, Proof of Money, which they can pick up anywhere, all formats, audio, hard, paper, Kindle, whatever.
And I will say this for what it's worth because there are a lot of Bitcoin books.
And I feel like whatever book someone picks up for whatever reason, if it's their first book, it's going to be great.

(01:26:22):
So you don't have to get my book.
I think my book is good.
A lot of people have found a lot of value in it.
But pick up whatever book you feel comfortable with.
But I will say this.
Unlike most Bitcoin books, I'm not a Bitcoiner who decided to write a book about Bitcoin.
I am a writer.
I've written many books.

(01:26:43):
And I found Bitcoin.
So people that read my book are like, oh, your approach is a little different.
They like maybe the way I said it.
I do tell story with my book, which some people like.
They're like, oh my God, I love that you could.
It's filled with analogies and metaphors.
So if you like that, there's a lot of that.
I love that.
I do think a lot of people will like that because the quintessential Bitcoin book people recommend is usually the Bitcoin standard.

(01:27:09):
But it's pretty thick and does read kind of like a textbook.
So for people who want more of an easy on-ramp, I think that yours would be ideal for that.
So we'll definitely include the links to that in the show notes for everyone to go check it out.
And yeah, man, it's been such a pleasure chatting with you today.
This has been an awesome conversation, so I really appreciate you being here.

(01:27:30):
You too, Ben. Thank you.
Yeah, and please come back onto the Bitcoin Today spaces too.
We loved having you, so it's awesome.
I will be. I'd love to.
You're a great host. Great questions.
There was a point last year where I was consistently on spaces like every day almost.
So I'd love to get back in on that.
It's a lot of fun, especially when Bitcoin is doing this crazy thing.

(01:27:50):
So we'll try to get back in there.
Awesome.
Thanks, Ben.

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#122 Terence Michael - Fiat Movies, Bitcoin vs. Real Estate, and Energy FUD

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}#122 Terence Michael - Fiat Movies, Bitcoin vs. Real Estate, and Energy FUD