Build, Grow, and Protect Your Financial and Personal Sovereignty with Mark Moss – EP 67

Interview with Mark Moss

Build, Grow, and Protect Your Financial and Personal Sovereignty with Mark Moss

Today, I’m talking to Mark Moss. Mark is an Investor and Entrepreneur with a passion for helping others avoid the same mistakes he made, so they too can live a life by design, not by default.

Mark has founded 7 companies, each of which have scaled beyond 7-figures within the first year. One of those companies became a Fortune 500 Exit to the biggest medical equipment company in the world.

Mark has also fixed, flipped and developed over $25M in real estate, invested in private business, gold mines, oil fields, and new technologies.

In our discussion, you’ll hear the story of how Mark lost a multimillion dollar fortune early into his entrepreneurial journey, and what he did to rebuild his wealth faster than ever.

We also talk about financial sovereignty, why the financial system is rigged and working against you, the importance of holding hard assets, and the “great reset” that everyone should be preparing for. That and a whole lot more!

Featured on This Episode: Mark Moss

✅ What he does: Mark Moss is the host of one of the fastest growing channels on YouTube, talking about Bitcoin, Federal Reserve Policies and other related Macro topics. He’s also host of the Market Disruptors Podcast and Live event and host of the Mark Moss show on the iHeart radio network

Mark has over 25 years as a full time investor and entrepreneur building and investing through multiple markets including a tech focused Fortune 500 exit, and through multiple boom and bust markets which taught hard lessons and perspectives that can only be learned with experience.

💬 Words of wisdom: “Financial Sovereignty to me is having the right to direct my life as I see fit, in a way that leads me to my own ends.” – Mark Moses

🔎 Where to find Mark Moss: YouTube | iHeart Radio | Twitter | Instagram | LinkedIn | Facebook

Key Takeaways with Mark Moss

• How Mark fell in love with investing and entrepreneurship.
• The story behind Mark’s first business—a Fortune 500 Exit to the biggest medical equipment company in the world.
• Flipping houses and developing over $25M of real estate from the ground up.
• Starting a motocross e-commerce business.
• How Mark earned his wealth back FAST after getting crushed by the real estate industry and losing everything!
• Creating the lifestyle you want, and making money to support it.
• Why the pain of losing money is an excellent teacher.
• Mark’s views on financial sovereignty
• Living in alignment with your core values.
• Understanding how the financial system is rigged and working against you.
• Why the global financial system is ready to be reset.

Mark Moss | Understanding Financial Sovereignty 

Mark Moss Tweetables

“Financial Sovereignty to me is having the right to direct my life as I see fit, in a way that leads me to my own ends.” - Mark Moses Click To Tweet “Keeping money is way harder than making it.” - Mark Moss Click To Tweet

Resources

• Mark Moss Website
• Mark Moss on YouTube | iHeart Radio | Twitter | Instagram | LinkedIn | Facebook
• Market Disruptors Live Event

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Read the Full Transcript with Mark Moss

Justin Donald: What’s up, Mark? So glad to have you on the show. Thanks for joining.

 

Mark Moss: Yeah. Justin, an honor to be here. Man, a few times we’ve been able to get together and talk. I’ve enjoyed it every time so I’m looking forward to the kind of deep-dive today.

 

Justin Donald: Well, I got to just pay you the compliment that like every time we have a conversation, I’m left wanting more. And so, I mean, you’re the exact type of person I love hanging out with. Not to mention, we’ve got a whole bunch of mutual friends between Mike Dillard and Hal Elrod and Cody Sanchez and Dan Held and whoever else. It’s a pretty fun network that we’ve got. So, there’s so much I feel like we can cover. And man, I feel like an hour is hardly going to do it justice but I want to jump in because you are such an expert. You’re the foremost expert in a lot of different areas and I just love how you stay very relevant with the times and you pivot based on what’s most important to you, to your lifestyle, to just what you believe in at your core. And so, I think that’s cool but – and I shouldn’t even say but. I think that’s cool AND what I would like to do is I’d like to figure out kind of where you got this investor IQ from. Like, how did you decide that you wanted to get into investing? Because you’ve been doing this since like high school or right out of high school, right?

 

Mark Moss: That’s it. Yeah.

 

Justin Donald: So, tell us about that story.

 

Mark Moss: It’s interesting and it’s something I’ve actually spent a lot of time with deep introspection trying to figure out, trying to reverse engineer that because I’m trying to figure it out for my kids. Like, how can I put this into my kids? And the short answer is I don’t know how. You know, a lot of work I do now is on this history and cycles, and a lot of people have probably heard this generational theory and it’s this fourth turning, which is hard times create strong men, strong men create great times, great men create weak, and weak men create bad times. And so, I think about those generations. And so, my grandfather was a farmer in Iowa. My father grew up on a farm and was a hard worker but not as hard as my grandfather. My father was then a contractor who was a crazy hard worker and made me start working construction with him when I was a kid so I’m a hard worker but not near as hard as my dad. As a matter of fact, I vowed to myself I would never do a job I had to get dirty in because I hate it that much. And now my kids are just weak. That’s like four generations, right?

 

But I guess to kind of answer that question, to rewind the clock. So, I think a couple of big things were when I’ve reverse-engineered this and try to look at, one, as I said, my dad grew up on a farm. He’s a super hard worker. He was a contractor, flooring contractor. So, a construction worker is an entrepreneur, right? He’s an entrepreneur and he just figured out how to make money. Now, when I was born, he was an officer in the Air Force. He flew jets in Vietnam. So, he was in the Air Force when I was born but he left the Air Force and he just figured out how to make money. And I say that because that’s how I’ve always been. There’s never been a point where, and I’ve been broke many times, but there’s never been a point where I was like, “Shoot, I should go look for a job.” That thought has never crossed my mind. It’s always, “How can I make money?” So, I think it was modeled to me as I was growing up in that household. I think another big piece of it isn’t really so much about the business but more about the environment I grew up in, which is my parents were probably very nontraditional, a sense where they were grassroots, politically active. This is in South Texas when I was growing up as a kid.

 

Politics is something that’s discussed around our table on a still ongoing basis, not just with my family but my extended family as well. So, we kind of grew up looking in on the conservative side of things. As a kid, I was homeschooled for a number of years and that wasn’t popular at the time. As a matter of fact, it was very frowned upon at the time. And I say those things because I think it allows me to have this very open and creative mind and I think one of the biggest problems with school today is it takes away creativity and kids. It teaches them what to think and how to regurgitate things instead of how to think. And so, I think that was a big piece of it. And then like I said, my dad made me start working construction when I was like 10 years old and I hated it. He would literally drag me crying to the job site and he didn’t care. I just had to work. Now, my kids complain about having to pick up the dishes off the table. I’m like, “Ah, fine, I’ll just do it.” But he would just make me do it. And then I remember like times as a kid, it was like – and things were just different when you and I were kids. We didn’t have the excess that we have today. And even in a middle-class family, we just didn’t have that stuff. But it was like, “Dude, you want a bike like go mow yards.” So, I did.

 

And so, I’d pass out fliers and I’d mow my neighbor’s yards and like my mom would go to Costco and buy us boxes of candy and we’d sell it in our front yard when kids were coming home from school and just doing stuff like that. And so, I guess that’s probably what put that into me I think. And I think the other big thing that I’ve kind of reverse-engineered is that maybe we were middle class, maybe on the lower end of that middle class, I don’t know. I mean, we’re contractors. I don’t really, whatever, middle class but my dad was like so adamant of us going to like private Christian schools, and we couldn’t really afford that but he would always like do trade-outs with the school, figure out ways to get us in there. And I think now I’ve seen research that shows that people from the middle-class tendency to go further ahead because they’ve seen how those rich people live but they don’t quite have it and it builds that like pressure. And so, hanging out with a bunch of rich kids in private schools like they had brand new cars and I drove the biggest piece of junk there was, right? We never went on vacations growing up but my friends would take me on their vacations to Hawaii or snowboarding with them. And so, maybe that was a big piece. So, those are probably the big levers that I can kind of think of.

 

Justin Donald: Yeah. That’s great. There are so many things in there I’d love to kind of dissect. I mean, one of them, I love that homeschooling is cool now. You know, there was a season where you didn’t want to home school or you didn’t want your kids to be homeschooled or maybe even the kids knew that they were like, “Oh, it’s homeschool.” Now, it’s become very popular. And I think that that’s good because it creates a different education system. And I do think it’s important to have these options regardless of where your kids go to school, I do think that you should have a lot of rights around your choices there and a lot of countries, places around the world kind of mandate a certain type of education. And so,9 it’s nice that we have the freedom to kind of pick and choose but I like having education outside the system because we do need people thinking in a way that is not funneling a certain education or information stream to us. You and I had very similar upbringings. I remembered so many just in hearing you talk about how your dad was with you and what he did and so much. I mean, I drove this ‘89 Honda Civic hatchback wagon that was like this little go-cart and certainly had…

 

Mark Moss: I had an ’81 Subaru station wagon hatchback.

 

Justin Donald: The wagons, man. And for sure sometimes I would pull up and it was like, “Oh man, everyone’s got a nicer car than me,” but I bought that thing with my own money. It was $3,500 or $3,600 and that was all my money and I worked hard to get that and there is an appreciation for it, and all my friends kind of called it the go-cart, so it ended up becoming a little more palpable. But you said something that I think was the biggest distinguishing comment that you made about kind of where you are and how you got to where you are today and it was this. You said, “My mindset was how can I make money? Not I need to get a job. It’s how can I make money?” which is that’s how I always thought as well and I love hearing that. But inside of that, you kind of figured out a few things that you were good at. So, early on, I think you bought some homes but you also started some businesses. Let’s start with the real estate and then let’s go into some of the businesses because you had a lot of success there, too.

 

Mark Moss: Yeah. So, I never had a job. I worked for my dad. I played sports through high school, so my parents didn’t really make me get a job. And my senior in high school, my buddies are like, “Hey, you want to work at my dad’s engineering company?” I’m like, “I don’t know. What are we going to do?” He’s like, “We’re going to sweep the floors and take out the trash.” I’m like, “Okay. Whatever.” So, I started doing it for a couple of hours a day. There was this little, tiny engineering company and there was like three or four engineers working there and they got hired to design this dental camera. There was no such thing in the world as that at the time. And they designed this little camera that goes in your mouth and looks at your teeth. And now everybody has seen those by this time but at this point, there was none available. And so, they designed that, and then it was like this company said, “Hey, now, could you build a couple for us?” So, they started making a couple and then, “Hey, could you make a couple more and increase production, et cetera?” And so, this really had just started ramping up and they started making this medical equipment. And like right when I graduated high school, my parents really, really wanted me to go to college. I have three sisters. All three of them went to college.

 

They really want me to go to college, and I was like, “Okay. I want to go to Colorado. I want to snowboard there. I want to start a snowboard company when I get out.” And at the last minute, my parents were like, “We can’t afford to send you there like it’s not going to happen. Like, just go to a community college first.” And I was like, “Nope, then I’m going to start working full time,” and my parents are like, “No, don’t do it. Once you start making money, you’ll never go back.” That’s what my mom told me. She was right. And so, right out of high school, this company was just starting to grow and it’s funny because it’s the only job I’ve ever had in my life, I mean, working for somebody. And I never even filled out a job application because I was literally just working at my friend’s dad’s company for two hours a week. But then we started working full time and this company grew, grew, grew, grew, grew. And I think the big key that I try to think about and try to tell other people is like whenever you’re working, you don’t know what you want. Try and ask a kid today what they want to do in life is ridiculous. I never would have guessed that I’d be doing what I’m doing today even five years ago or 10 years ago.

 

And so, I didn’t know but I started working, and I’m always looking like, “What’s the next step? Where’s the angle? Where can I move to?” And I think that’s the mindset that people have to have. So, I started working in this company. We started making this stuff, and I started working in this division making this piece, and I worked in this division making this piece, and it finally grew big enough that we had to start repairing the equipment. So, I helped start a repair department, and then I was doing that. And then one guy left and started a competitor company. And then this guy left and started a competitor company. So, then I started knowing everybody in the industry. I moved up into marketing and then at 21, I started traveling around the country and the world, running the trade show division in this big medical equipment company. And so, I started just 21 every big city about eight stops a year and just always looking for the next angle, meeting the sales reps out there, seeing what they’re doing. And this is all brand new to me, right? I’m just learning all this as I go and I realize that they had all these customers but they didn’t really care about the customers. They just want to sell new equipment.

 

And so, all these reps were messaging me all the time, like, “Hey, Mark, can you help me out? I got this customer, the companies are not helping him with and blah, blah, blah.” And so, I started a repair company on the side, and at night, I would repair equipment. And it took off pretty well. At first, I kind of did it on the side for a while and I had some partners and it was kind of like it wasn’t really going good. But finally, I kind of doubled down, committed to it, quit that job, and just started this repair business full time and grew it pretty fast. And then I knew everybody in the industry because I had to put my time in and really built those bridges, and it grew really big. And about seven years later, I had a Fortune 500 exit with that company to the biggest medical company in the world, Henry Schein. It’s a $4 billion, $5 billion company.

 

Justin Donald: Wow. That’s incredible. Your first company and you had a monster exit. And here’s what’s even more impressive, though, because you have started I believe it’s eight different companies, all of which are seven or eight figures or higher all within 12 months.

 

Mark Moss: Yeah. So, that one wasn’t. That was like my first business. So, that one took a long time to scale. I didn’t know anything about anything. I didn’t go to school. I don’t have no MBA, right? And so, I’m just kind of figuring it out as I go along. I’m an entrepreneur. I can figure things out. And so, I was doing some marketing and I was doing direct mail. So, I was just literally like printing out a letter, folding it in an envelope, and send it to these dental offices. And I would do as many as I could fold by hand and send out. And business was kind of like this and I made good money on a repair, so I didn’t have to do that much. I was young at the time, whatever. And I remember at one point, though, that I had a lull and I didn’t have any money, and I was broke and I had to go work for my dad doing tile. I had to get some money. And I was so mad that I had to do that because I never wanted to do that again. No offense to construction people but when you grow up in South Texas in the humidity and the heat and you’re 10 years old and you’re carrying buckets of mud on your hands and knees on the floor like I just never wanted to do that again. So, no offense to anyone getting dirty but I was like that life isn’t for me. So, I had to go back and do it again. And that was just like the kick in the pants that I needed. And so, I got enough money, and instead of doing bits and pieces of direct mail, I mailed the whole list at one time. It was like, I don’t know, a couple of thousand bucks it cost me to do that.

 

And I got my whole family, I have a big family, and everybody helped me stuff envelopes at the kitchen table and we got all this mail and I just, boom, just dumped it out there. And that just took the business off and I never looked back. And from then, I’ve always been a marketer first. So, that’s the one big problem I see with people in business today. They want to be the best operator. It’s all sales and marketing. And so, I’m a marketer, right? And so, that really lit the fire in me, and then I just started dumping millions of pieces of direct mail out and the business just cranked from there.

 

Justin Donald: And what are some of these additional businesses that you got involved in?

 

Mark Moss: Yeah. So, that business, I mean, I think I quit my job. So, these are all overlap, right? I do lots of things at the same time as you do, right? So, I quit that job and started that business in 1997 and I sold it off in 2004 but in 1995 so while I was still working full time, I started buying real estate. So, in 1995 in California, the banks had gone through from ‘89 to ‘92 there was this big real estate crash and the banks were sitting on just all this repo’d property they couldn’t get rid of. And in 1995, they were basically selling it to anybody who would take it off their hands, zero down. Just come take it, fix it, HUD repos, whatever. And I didn’t know anything about this but your network is your net worth. My best friend, my roommate, his grandfather owned a local bank and had helped some Mexican kid that barely spoke English up in Los Angeles to start doing this and was making millions of dollars. So, he was like, “Hey, take my grandson under your wing and teach him,” and it just happened to be my roommate. So, I saw what he was doing. He didn’t take me under his wing nor teach me or anything but I saw what he was doing, and I was like, “Ah, that’s what I want to do.” And so, I found it was a duplex. It was $80,000, about an hour away from my house. I got it zero down. It was a VA repo at the time, zero down, but I didn’t have the money for closing costs. It was $3,000 and I didn’t have that.

 

And so, I brought on a partner and we split the closing costs. We got some credit cards and we did all the work ourselves for six months and I made like $30,000 on that first deal. And I was like, boom, that’s it. And so, I kept that going. And over the next decade, I fixed and flipped like over 150 houses and developed over $25 million real estate from the ground up, mixed-use, commercial, etcetera. So, that was going. And then in the late 90s was the dot-com boom. And in like ’98, ’99, I remember my roommate quit his job and he’s like day trading, these like things called internet stocks, kind of like what people do today with cryptocurrencies. And then in like ‘99, anything with dot-com was like just getting tons of money. So, we started, me and my buddy started a business to, at the time like ’99, it was like the first rewards thing where like you would shop with rewards and then we donate money to your cause kind of a thing. You see it all over the place today. And we had to set up a server in my office and we had to build it because there was no like cloud hosting, none of that. And I swear we were like this close to getting super-rich and then the whole dot-com thing imploded and that fell apart. So, that one didn’t work out too well.

 

But then in 2001, at the bottom of that market, I was like, “Hey, I want to sell…” I was into motorcycle racing. I was like, “I want to sell motocross stuff online.” And in the motocross magazine, there was no dot-com anywhere in the magazine. If you want to buy stuff back then, you literally had to cut out the thing mail order and mail in a check and they’d mail it back to you. And there was no Shopify, no, none of this, right? So, it’s cosmetic, $25,000 to build this website. And I had my medical equipment business so I was like, “Hey, I’ll just use the warehouse. I’ll warehouse the equipment. I’ll use the same shipping and receiving department so I’ll kind of double that up.” And I went to these brands and I said, “Hey, I want to sell your stuff on my website,” and they laughed at me. So, no one would ever buy anything online. That was ridiculous. And I’m like, “Well, I beg to differ,” and I spent all this money on this website and I’ll just buy your product and it’s on me if I don’t sell it. And they said, “We don’t even want our stuff sold on your website.”

 

Justin Donald: Holy cow.

 

Mark Moss: That was 2001, and then I built that business until 2008. So, I had the real estate thing was going. I had the e-commerce business was going. I had the medical equipment business going all at the same time, and I’m in my mid to late 20s at this point. And then in 2000, like I said, 2005, I sold the medical business. In 2008, I sold the motocross e-commerce business. And that’s where things went wrong. So, I had those two businesses plus I had the real estate business. I had owned over 200 real estate doors at one point, units at one point across the country and I sold all my cash flow properties. I sold both my businesses, big exits.

 

Justin Donald: Oh no.

 

Mark Moss: And I put it all into developing some monster-like commercial projects in Southern California. And then all of a sudden, 2005, 2006, 2007 starts coming. I’m like, “Oh, shoot, like this market’s going to meltdown. This isn’t good.” I started trying to get rid of whatever I could but some of these projects are four or five-year projects like you don’t walk away from them. And I got crushed. I went from selling all these businesses, had all this property, I just got married, built a custom home, six-bedroom, six-car garage, elevator, whitewater views, the whole deal, having my first kid, and then I went to owing millions of dollars in the whole and being broke.

 

Justin Donald: Oh, that is rough. And wow, having your first child during pregnancy, having a child, I mean, it’s hard in that first year. You know, all parents know this. It’s chaotic just on the home front, just blocking and tackling. Oh, just in that.

 

Mark Moss: And not only was it so bad where like I lost like all my assets but all my income, like I had got rid of all my businesses, all my income and properties. It was like everything was tied up into that which, of course, in hindsight seems like a horrible idea at the time, and I was young. I grew up in Southern California doing action sports. I’ve broken all my bones. I have metal in all four limbs of my body and so I’m used to the risk, right? And I’m used to this like, “All right. Let me just try that again.” So, anyway, yeah that sucked. It wasn’t good.

 

Justin Donald: Well, and talk about this because this has to be a huge contrast because you could have gone pro in a myriad of different things, right? You’re a surfer, you’re a snowboarder, motocross, the whole nine yards. You could have just gone one of those paths, which early on I think that’s what you thought you were going to do. And so, now you go, you’re like, “Oh, this is great. I decided to be an entrepreneur,” and now it’s like, “Oh, I just lost everything. Actually, I’m not even. I owe millions of dollars.” Where are you at, at this point emotionally?

 

Mark Moss: Well, I mean, I think you could imagine where I was at emotionally. It was very, very, very difficult to deal with. I have a lot of friends and associates that I worked with at that time who still to this day, a dozen years later, have never recovered from that and they’re just working menial jobs. They’ve just never gotten it going again. I think the fact that I have broken all my bones and I have gotten back on the dirt bike and hit that jump again, like I said, I’m used to it. I’m just like, “Okay. Like that sucked. Let me try that again.” And so, I think that resiliency was there but then, yeah, how do you start over? I did it once. How could I do it again?

 

Justin Donald: Well, this is the brilliance. We’ve seen this before with millionaires and billionaires that go bankrupt but they earn that wealth back really fast in a quarter, a fraction of the time because you’ve got expertise. And so, I’m curious to hear how you were able to get back so quick.

 

Mark Moss: Yeah. And I did. So, a couple of things. So, one, I was like, “I’m really good at making money like I’ve done really well making money, but what is this whole financial casino going on in New York that is seemingly controlling my life and I have no idea about or no control over?” Because like I’m playing a game on the runway here but there’s a game at 30,000 feet that’s affecting my life and I don’t know what that is. So, one, I have to figure that out. So, that’s the first thing. So, like, I started digging deep into research and what is this financial system and what is the Federal Reserve? And I became a gold bug and I started thinking sound money is the answer and it’s the Federal Reserve that had all these problems and blah, blah, blah. So, I dug deep into that. I learned this concept that money is like energy. It doesn’t disappear. It transfers. So, that means when I lost my money, someone else got my money. And I didn’t like that. I may not be the most competitive guy but that didn’t sit well with me. And so, I vowed to myself, I vowed to my family like that would never happen to me again. So, over the last 12 years, I’ve spent my time studying this phenomenon known as wealth transfers, and there’s a bunch of different reasons why they happen in ways they work but I always want to be on the receiving end of the wealth transfer, not in the giving end. So, that was one thing.

 

But how did I get back like how did I pay my bills? Like that was a big problem. What am I even going to do right now? Like, how do I get back from there? And so, again, how can I make money? What can I do to make money right now? What skills do I have? What do I know how to do? Who could benefit from those skills if I was to offer them to them? And what can I do to make money? That’s just what, you know. Some people have their labor, “Hey, can I go dig a hole for you? Could I paint your fence if that’s what you have?” For me, I had different skills. I knew how to do marketing. And what I tell people especially young people that are trying to figure this out is that you get paid for the value you provide. And if you want to make more money, you provide more value but really align yourself as close as you can to the money supply. That’s sales and marketing. If I said, “Hey, Justin, if I bring you a million dollars of sales in the next 12 months, would you give me $100,000 of that?” And of course, you would.

 

Justin Donald: Sure, without a doubt.

 

Mark Moss: Without a doubt.

 

Justin Donald: No brainer.

 

Mark Moss: I could go down to my downtown and walk into any store and give them that deal and they would take it. And so, how can I do that? Sales and marketing. So, anyway, I had been doing this online thing for quite a while with the motocross business and doing all the marketing with my medical equipment business. And what happened is I had a buddy who was doing mortgages and he’s like, “Hey, if you could like drive leads to me and I close some of these deals, I could give you a bunch of money on every deal, you know?” And I was like, “Okay. That sounds pretty attractive.” And I’d never done anything in that niche before, that area, but I know enough about real estate and whatever so I figured it out. So, I built like a landing page. I think it was like lead pages at the time, which I didn’t know. I never had done that before but I built like this lead page, like a lead capture page. I set up a Google pay per click campaign, which I didn’t really know a whole lot about but I kind of figured that out and I set up this whole campaign, Google pay per click, going to lead things, send the leads directly to him via email and really did that all over a weekend. And then I hopped on my dirt bike and I rode from the California border to the tip of Baja Mexico to Cabo, San Lucas. It took me six or seven days.

 

And when I got there, I got to the hotel and I opened my laptop and I looked at my emails and it was just like chuching, chuching, chuching, chuching, chuching. And I was like, “Whoa, like, I made a bunch of money and I was riding my dirt bike.”

 

Justin Donald: That’s great.

 

Mark Moss: So, obviously, I went deep into that. I doubled down into that and I spent about the next decade of my life doing lead generation. And so, I started driving leads to mortgage companies and debt companies, embezzlement, and tax attorneys, and whatever type of financial services that I kind of got into that niche. Me and my partner were the largest home residential solar lead generators in the United States for a while. So, I dove super deep into that and I loved it because the piece that we haven’t really picked up on but you mentioned, like, I could have done this pro surfing or motocross or snowboard. I wanted to do those things. And I think one of the things about the job thing is like I want to do those things. I didn’t go pro but how could I keep that lifestyle and make money? It wasn’t like, “How can I make money and then what do I do with my time I have left over?” It’s like, “No, how do I keep my lifestyle and make money to support that?” I mean, right now it’s January at the time of this recording. I mean, if it starts snowing right now like I might hop on a plane tonight and be out in Utah and go catch it. If there’s a big swell showing up in Hawaii, I might be on a plane tomorrow and go catch that. And like, I want to have that lifestyle. I can do that.

 

And so, this lead generation business was perfect because, as I said, I could set up a campaign, hop on my dirt bike, ride for seven days, and then have money. And so, it fit perfectly with my lifestyle and I, yeah, did that for quite a while.

 

Justin Donald: That’s incredible. And I just love, again, it’s not – the question isn’t, “Do I want lifestyle or do I want to make money?” It’s, “How can I have both?” It’s an abundant mindset of like, how do I accomplish all of the things that I want to accomplish? And quite frankly, you losing millions of dollars is quite possibly one of the best lessons you ever learn, though in the moment it’s incredibly painful. And by the way, I have experienced something similar. It doesn’t sound like I’ve lost as much, thank goodness, because I was still able to learn some lessons. Maybe you learned some much better lessons than me. But the truth is some of the best lessons I ever learned were through the pain of making poor decisions, poor investments, not doing enough due diligence, thinking that I knew more than I did at that point in time because I only had a select part of maybe an economic cycle. So, I didn’t know everything the way that I know it today. You didn’t know everything the way you know it today. Now, you’re better equipped. You’re better equipped not only for yourself and your family but to teach other people these lessons that you’ve learned. And I’d love to get into just kind of your world view on financial sovereignty and financial freedom. You know, I talk a ton about financial freedom, financial independence, and I love you really embody financial sovereignty. I’d love to hear how you define that.

 

Mark Moss: Yeah. So, there’s a quote that I love and it’s, “Smooth seas never made a skilled sailor.”

 

Justin Donald: That’s nice.

 

Mark Moss: You have to. The only way to get patience is to wait. The only way to get stronger is to tear your muscles down like it’s the only way, right? The famous one, Mike Tyson says, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” Right?

 

Justin Donald: That’s right.

 

Mark Moss: Yeah. Definitely, there’s a lot of lessons in there. A lot of lessons personally on resilience, on adversity, on all these things. One thing I would say and you’ve mentioned your losses, I think the one thing that you would probably agree with is that when you make a lot of money and you make it pretty easy and you make it pretty fast, you don’t really pay attention to where it’s going and you start making some really reckless decisions. So, you mentioned some of yours. Maybe you didn’t do proper due diligence and stuff, I think. I’ve had those same mistakes and a lot of people that haven’t achieved that level of success think it’s kind of ridiculous but keeping your money is way harder than making it.

 

Justin Donald: Totally. Totally agree.

 

Mark Moss: And people that haven’t made it, don’t understand that but it’s way harder.

 

Justin Donald: Yeah. And it’s a whole different skill set. That’s the other tricky thing. It’s one skill set to earn it. It’s another skill set to grow it or at least maintain it.

 

Mark Moss: Yeah. Exactly. So, as I said, after 2008 I got my butt kicked. It was devastating. It was painful. And a lot of that you said that you didn’t lose as much as I did. And so, I think the deeper the wound, the deeper the impact and motivation. So, like, I was extremely wounded and I was extremely motivated to go figure this out. And so, like I said, I dove into my education. I knew there was something in my education that was the problem. And so, I started pointing to that and, like I said, started digging in the financial system and studied the Federal Reserve, started studying all this stuff, and became a gold bug. And the more I started to learn about all this stuff, you can’t unsee this stuff once you see it, and then you start becoming very disillusioned in the system. You start realizing how rigged it really is. And we’re at a point today where I’m very sad for most people who don’t understand what’s going on because it’s a shame. They’ve done the best that they can with the information they have, and they just don’t understand the whole game is rigged against them. And that’s what I didn’t understand in 2008. Even knowing that, it’s still difficult what to do because the game is so rigged against us.

 

But I kind of got disillusioned with the whole system. Like I said, I kind of grew up in this political home. My grandfather was a World War 2 vet. My father was a Vietnam vet. I thought I would go to war one day. That’s just how I grew up. And here we are in a war. Financial sovereignty, to me, the way I think of sovereignty is having the right to direct my life as I see fit in a way that leads me to my own ends. So, today we think we have freedom but really we have coercion. Hey, Justin, you can choose A or B, right? You can either take this medicine or you can lose your job. It’s your choice. That’s no choice because either one I choose leads me to their ends. It’s not the same as liberty. Liberty is freedom of coercion. I can direct my life as I see fit. So, that’s the way that I look at the word “sovereignty.” And I like to think about, as you said, I focus on financial sovereignty. So, financial being a key piece of that but then sovereignty. So, not only do I look at money as an asset but like my health as an asset, my freedom as an asset. And those are all things that I should be doing and the money is the base of that. That money allows me to get those other things I need. It can allow me to buy like I’m building the house in Mexico right now.

 

So, I just bought a ranch out there in Texas, out by you. And so, I’m increasing my options to increase my sovereignty. If Puerto Rico got too crazy and I was living out in Puerto Rico last year and I moved out there for tax efficiency but then they were cramping down on my liberty, so I left because I have the finances to do that.

 

Justin Donald: And by the way, I want to jump in here because this, I think, is brilliant. Number one, you live in the highest tax state in California, right? You move to Puerto Rico, which has the best tax incentives of any place. So, it’s not a state, it’s a U.S. territory so there are different rules. There are local tax laws that the U.S. kind of gives them the independence to have. And so, you have this incentive to go there. You’re able to reduce your taxable liability tremendously by doing so. But what I think is cool is once it started interfering with your actual freedom, you valued your freedom over the amount of money that you would save. And so, I like that your core values are such in… They’re so in alignment that instead of being like, “Yeah. I can save millions if I stay here,” you said, “Well, forget that. My quality of lifestyle is way more important to me than any tax savings I could possibly have.” That’s cool.

 

Mark Moss: Yeah. I think that’s a key piece that you hit on and for a lot of people maybe want to dig that out a little bit, the core values that you talked about. When I was trying to come back from the dead after 2008, I spent like a decade in like personal development, digging into all these like personal development and discipline and all these things. And, one, I read a dozen books on goal setting. How do I make a big goal and how do I accomplish it and all these things? And all these books, most of the books would talk about in the beginning, the first chapter to be on what are your values, your core values? And I’m like, “Oh, that’s like not new stuff. Just how do I set a goal?” But then after I realized after a while like you can’t set a goal unless you understand what your core values are. And so, I had to go back and do that, and it’s been my guiding light from here on. And the reason why that’s important is like freedom is my number one goal, I’m sorry, value. Freedom, helping others, always learning, those are like three of my top core values. And so, then once I’ve established those, I can’t establish a goal or do anything that would violate those.

 

So, for example, I’ve had many times people have offered me jobs, good-paying jobs, and in times when I probably needed those jobs. And once or twice, I’ve almost been kind of persuaded to do that but I know that it would go against my core value of freedom and it would cause stress in my life. And so, I couldn’t do that. And so, people make bad decisions because they haven’t identified that litmus test of value. So, that’s a good piece to talk about. But also, the other thing is I think life is always out of balance at different times. So, yeah, I moved to Puerto Rico to optimize for tax efficiency, moving from the most tax-heavy state, as you said, in California, over half of my income goes away. But California and New York were competing to see who could be the strictest in the lockdowns. So, California was super locked down. Puerto Rico is wide open. My kids couldn’t go to school. And so, with that, let’s just go to Puerto Rico. And it was awesome and it was amazing and we paid from over half of my income to less than 4% of my income going to taxes, which is amazing.

 

Justin Donald: Wow. That’s incredible.

 

Mark Moss: I mean, it’s incredible. Zero cap gains tax and 4% income tax. And so, wherever your income comes in, you can do the math on where that falls then. But then throughout the year, they kept getting more and more crazy with their mandates. And in August, they put this statewide Puerto Rico mandate, where you basically have to show your papers, we’ll say that, show your papers to gain access to freedom and I believe that I was born free. I believe I was born with freedom rights, and I don’t believe that I should ever have to work for freedom, to move or whatever. And so, they put that in August. But on my side of the island, they didn’t enforce it and I was like, “Eh, well, they’re not enforcing it, whatever.” But as of December 27^th, there was a full crackdown and I couldn’t go anywhere without showing papers, and I’m not going to live like that for a bunch of reasons. One, I have kids, and if anybody has kids probably listening to the show, they would probably understand that. My kids are a little bit older. This has hit them very, very hard. Their whole world has been completely changed and my youngest, she’s 12 but like she barely remembers a world before this. And my daughter at the kitchen table told me one thing. It was like a year ago when she said, and again, California was very strict, and she said, “At least we can go outside again.”

 

I was like, “What? At least we can go outside?” And that was like a punch in the gut. And that really changed the course of my life. And there’s just one thing I’m focused on right now and that’s sovereignty. That’s it. And I’m doing it for my kids. I’m doing it for my grandkids. And so, I want to change the direction this world’s going. And so, I can’t live in a country giving them my feet and my money, and a lot of my friends were there like, “Oh, just get this fake thing and it’s all good.” I’m like, “No, I won’t live like that. I’m going to live in the truth. I’m going to build the world that I want.” That’s just financial sovereignty. How do we use our money to build the world that we want? And I have to do that by me living in the truth and also by me being a representative of that but also using my money. So, as long as they’re getting my money, I’m telling them it’s okay what they’re doing, and it’s not. And so, I’m back in the tax-heavy state. I would gladly give up more of my income to live in the truth, to vote with my money, than I would try to play that game.

 

Justin Donald: Well, you did buy land in one of the coolest cities in the West, one of the most free states in the U.S. so that’s good to hear. More than anything, I just love that you are aligned with your values and you’re living integrity there, regardless of what people believe on the topic of this. I think it’s important that you are not operating in contradiction to who you are, what your values are, what the values you’ve set for your family are. And so, I really respect that. Earlier, you talked about how the system is rigged, and I think that this is something I really want to explore because anyone who knows the system knows it’s rigged. Anyone who knows Wall Street knows that there are supercomputers. There are algorithms. There’s timing where you cannot win, they’re going to win. The financial system is built in a way where the average retail investor or just citizen, in general, is at a major disadvantage. For people who save money, they don’t invest it, they don’t buy assets, they just save, their money is literally becoming worth less by the day.

 

Mark Moss: Yeah. Worthless.

 

Justin Donald: Yeah, right? 40% of the dollars in circulation today happened in the last two years. They were printed or added to a digital ledger in the last two years. So, almost half the money in existence today was created within two years. There’s no way I will ever believe that inflation was 7% in the month of December. But by the way, that is an all-time high, 40%. Think about it. So, 7% is a 40-year high. Like, that’s the worst inflation in 40 years, and those are based on numbers that they picked that really soften the blow. We’ll just put it at that. And so, if you’re not buying assets that basically inflate at the same value as the monetary supply is expanding, then you’re losing money. So, that’s one example of how the system’s rigged. I’d love for you to kind of dive into this a little bit more with how you see it.

 

Mark Moss: Okay. Well, strap in because it’s even worse than you think. So, I just was in Houston a few weeks ago. I shared a stage with the former congressman, Dr. Ron Paul. I was super honored. He started the movement of End the Fed back in 2009, super instrumental in what I’ve done. He really brought the exposure into the Federal Reserve. I think before 2009, nobody even really knew what the Federal Reserve was or who they were, what they did. And today it’s in the normal conversation. People are understanding what’s going on, and there’s a whole bunch to unpack in that. But without going into that, to kind of explain about this rigged system, it’s even worse than what you think or what you were just saying. You probably know. But in my talk, I went as I love to do, I love to use history as a guide, and so I started in this talk when I was talking with Ron Paul and a quote from Thomas Jefferson, one of our founding fathers, and he said, “If the American people will ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks of corporations that grew up around these banks will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.”

 

So, that’s Thomas Jefferson. So, he says, “If they allow the private banks to control the issue of their currency first by inflation and then by deflation,” okay, so that is the key piece there. Now, you’re absolutely right about targeting the inflation rate, the 7% highest ever, but really, what you’re actually more right on is targeting the amount of money that’s been added to the base. And so, what happens is people talk about inflation like 7%. To think that you could put a single number on what inflation is is ridiculous. So, if I was going to measure the amount of water in a bathtub, you can’t do that with math. That’s like physics and algebra. If I was going to measure the wind drag coefficient over a jet, you do that with complicated math, not arithmetic. Inflation is also very complicated. It’s why most people don’t understand this. So, for example, out there by you on the lake, I know someone who bought a house a year ago for $10 million and just sold it for 25 million. That’s a 150% inflation on a price of a home but homes in Kansas City didn’t go up that much. So, it’s very nuanced, right? Like, I eat steak. You eat hamburger meat. My inflation is more than yours. I’m in California. My gas went up more than yours or whatever. And then in Germany, like their energy rates went up way faster than anybody else’s.

 

And so, it’s all different. There’s billions of people. There’s trillions of inputs that cause prices to move and change, and they all affect this differently. So, what inflation is, is increasing the monetary supply. That’s it. So, when you increase the monetary supply by 40%, used cars go up by 35%. The national home average, yes, is 35% but some go up 100%, some go up 20%, right? So, it’s different. So, the prices going up is the symptom. It’s the money supply going up that’s the problem. But here’s where it is. So, back to Thomas Jefferson. If they do it first by inflation and then deflation, it’s those two things, and this is where the game is rigged beyond. It’s not that they have high-frequency trading. Sure. Yeah. For the average guy who thinks he’s going to get rich in the stock market is kind of ridiculous. They have an unfair advantage there. But where the game is rigged and this is where you and I, even if we know the game, we’re not that insulated is that over the last year-and-a-half or two years, they pumped in $8 trillion, to your point.

 

Justin Donald: And by the way, more than that, that’s what we know about, right? That doesn’t count the unfunded liabilities that are out there and on the balance sheet.

 

Mark Moss: No. I’m talking about how much they pumped into the market.

 

Justin Donald: Yeah. Correct.

 

Mark Moss: I’m talking about how much they’ve pumped in. And to your point, it’s actually right. I’m working on this video. So, we have the FOIA request, a Freedom of Information Act, and there was a FOIA request put into the Federal Reserve to see how much stimulus they put in after 2008. And they fought it for two years. And then it got bumped. It went all the way to the Supreme Court. It’s been 12 years and it just got released. It had to go to the Supreme Court and they said that they stimulated, we knew about $700 billion in the tarp. Then there was about another $700 billion that went to the banks. It’s about $1.5 trillion. The FOIA request show $30 trillion.

 

Justin Donald: Right. Way more and way more went to the banks, way more, and every big bank.

 

Mark Moss: Yeah. So, the problem is they put in $8 trillion or whatever time period. When they pump money in and they lower interest rates, what’s happened is you and I as investors, we’re looking for all these billions of data, trillions of inputs aggregated into a number and that’d be in the price and we base our decisions based off of that signal off of the price. The problem is when they dump all that money, it artificially moves the markets and now we’re making decisions with bad data. And so, we, in order to keep up with inflation, well, I need to expand my business. My demand is big. I need to buy new equipment. I need to buy this. I need to grow. I need to move. If I don’t, I get left behind. But the problem is we’re playing a game of musical chairs because remember, it’s first inflation and then deflation. So, what’s deflation? If inflation is increase the monetary supply, what’s deflation? It’s decreasing the monetary supply. So, what’s the Fed saying they’re doing right now? They’re ending the stimulus and they’re raising rates, and then they’ll do quantitative tightening, sucking money out. So, it’s like a shot, an injection. They’re injecting money in, everything goes crazy, and then they inject it back out and everything collapses around it.

 

They create the booms and busts. We’re not privy to that. I don’t know what’s in Jerome Powell’s head, what he’s going to do tomorrow. He doesn’t tell me that. I can’t read his mind. And so, it was like two weeks I was driving down the street after I gave this talk and I was driving down the street and I was looking at all these small businesses in my town and just a little food delivery company or this new restaurant. And I just thought, “Man, I feel so bad for these people.” They’re doing the best that they can. They’re risking their life savings. They’re sacrificing time with your family, blood, sweat, equity, and tears just to have a couple of guys in Washington just to suck the money right out and crash the whole system. So, that’s what’s going on and that’s about how bad it is. That’s why it’s rigged.

 

Justin Donald: Yeah. And this goes to the point of being able to manipulate and control the markets. You know, there’s the ability to control the public markets or strongly influence them but this is like bigger than that. This is like economic cycles where you’re not allowing a free market. And so, the type like in Austrian economics, it’s a lot more kind of free market making things happen as they are versus trying to control, “We’re about to have a crash. Let’s pump more money in the system. Let’s inflate this thing a little longer. Hey, things are getting really great. Things are booming. Hey, let’s raise interest rates.” And so, that manipulation on the economic cycle at some point is going to play out in a bad way. Maybe short term, it works, it helps but long term, something’s got to give.

 

Mark Moss: Yeah, definitely. And, to your point, they’ve built this up so big. In my talk, I showed this chart and it went back 150 years and it showed the booms and busts. And then I had a red line at 1913, which is the year the Federal Reserve was created. And since then, the booms and busts only get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger because every time the system tries to deleverage, they have to pump it back up and it gets so big they can’t manage it. It’s so big. And yeah, that’s the system that we’re in, and that’s why it’s rigged and that’s why it’s super dangerous for us.

 

Justin Donald: And let’s talk about this. You know, no one really knows when this is going to happen but inevitably there’s going to be a market crash at some point in time. There always is. You can’t just have a market continue to go up. Recently, we saw a lot more turbulence than what we’ve seen in a while. January’s been a rough month for public markets. They’ve been really great for private markets or at least the private markets that I’m in. I’m curious on your take on this. Do you have any ideas, thoughts around a market crash or just any major economic event?

 

Mark Moss: I do. So, it’s ridiculous. It’s a crime that we have to try to read the Fed’s mind to figure out what comes next. We should look at economic indicators and job reports and all these things to figure it out but we should never have to try to read minds. And so, the fact that there’s a couple of guys that can change my destiny, that’s a crime, in my opinion. But what do I think comes next? I mean, I’m trying to read his mind based off of previous experience where I see things going. This is a much bigger conversation that we should get into but here’s my short view on this. So, there’s a plan and this goes back. And so, I’ve been doing this work on these three revolutionary cycles. There’s a 250-year political revolution cycle. There’s a 50-year technological revolution cycle and there’s an 80-year financial revolution cycle. They’re all different cycles, all different time frames, but they’re all three converging right now. That’s why the world seems so messed up right now. And when you understand it from this lens, what’s happening is on a 250-year time frame, the world rejects centralization or globalization and tries to move back to decentralization.

 

So, technology is changing things, and these leaders are losing their grip. The financial system is ready to be reset. About every 80 years that happens. Eighty years ago was the Bretton Woods Agreement. When the entire world’s financial system was reset, the whole world went to a gold standard, and the dollar backed by gold, et cetera. And here we are about 80 years later and the IMF literally said, “We are calling for a Bretton Woods 2 moment.” What does that mean? They’re going to reset the financial system. So, they’re telling it. We know this. So, this we can use of economic data. So, at the end of a long-term debt cycle, the Fed, the central banks have two tools, interest rates and monetary supply. Interest rates are at zero or negative in most parts of the world, and we’ve added $20 trillion of debt in the last 18 months, $300 trillion of debt in the last 50 years like we can’t do much more. When you and I are playing a game and we’re out of moves, what do we do? We reset the game. So, the system is a long-term debt cycle. It’s ready to be reset. The IMF says they’re going to reset it. So, that’s where we’re at.

 

What does a reset look like? Of course, Klaus Schwab wrote the book, Covid-19: The Great Reset. We hear him talking about this build back better. We need to build a new version of capitalism, they say, et cetera. So, what does that reset look like and how are they getting us into that? So, where are they trying to take us and this is a little maybe controversial but if you read their books, I say, take them at their word. So, people should read their books to hear what they say because you may think I’m crazy but I’m just reciting what’s in their books. So, what they’re trying to do, they believe you mentioned the Austrian lens. They believe that the problem with socialism or communism, or, I should say, a centrally planned economy is that there’s not enough data. There’s not enough input. And so, they can’t manage the price efficiently. But if they could collect all that data and put it into a giant database, then they could manage it better. So, how do they do that? Well, if they can get our entire life into a database, so central bank digital currencies, which of course, we’re hearing a lot about. As a matter of fact, the Federal Reserve, I think a week ago submitted their final thing for guidance so now they’re basically asking for open comments on it.

 

China’s already rolled theirs out. So, that’s coming, central bank digital currencies. You’re starting to see a lot of talk about global IDs. It’s not safe to have anonymous users on the internet anymore. They want to push it into global IDs. They can track that. Of course, not get into the health aspect in those topics but they want us to now show a pass in order to check in and get access to society so that they can collect all that data. So, I think that’s coming. So, we know the financial system has to be reset. We know they need these tools in order to do that. So, you’re asking about when is this crash and when is it happening? The way that I’m looking at it is they didn’t just spend 8 trillion or 20 trillion globally to keep the markets from crashing to just let it crash now. So, they’re going to try to keep it going. They’re going to try to taper it down a little bit but they’re not going to let it crash right now. I mean, they’ve spent 20 trillion. Why not another 20 or why not another 40, right? Like, they wouldn’t stop now. I think, and this is only my opinion, I think when you look at it from a long lens and this is a bigger discussion but they’re not ready to reset the game yet because the new game isn’t ready to be played yet.

 

They need those couple of pieces, the central bank, digital currencies, they need to be in place yet. I think we got another 12 to 24 months before that’s ready. I think they’re going to try to keep the game going a little bit longer. I think they’re going to continue to jawbone. They’ll talk about raising rates. We’ll talk about this. They’ve already moved the market without doing anything. All they did was say something. And so, they’ll talk about it. They’ll get the market to move. You start to see a lot of rhetoric in the news about Elizabeth Warren said, “These turkey producers are greedy. We should talk about they’re taking too much value.” Biden says, “I’m going to call the S.E.C. on the gas companies. Why are they gouging on gas?” They’re starting to talk about price-fixing and they’re talking about changing the CPI basket. So, they change the CPI basket. They price-fix a little bit. That keeps the prices from rising too fast. They jawbone a little bit about what they’re going to do and they extend the game. I think it goes another 12 to 24 months until they’re ready. Then they let the market crash and then, “Hey, we have this new system,” and they roll it out.

 

Justin Donald: Yeah. And you’re seeing some of the beginnings of this where the banks are really looking to be able to control every and any transaction, $600 and above. I mean that to me is a big red flag that instead of making a note here, red flag it, a $10,000 transaction or close to a $10,000 transaction that we’re lowering that to $600. That to me is…

 

Mark Moss: And just to hit on that for one second. So, what a lot of people don’t know is that, obviously, in March 2020 is when the market crashed, the economy was locked down, et cetera. But what people don’t know, a lot of people don’t know is in September of 2019, whatever, happened a few months before, the whole banking system froze. It seized up overnight. So, there’s this repurchase market where the banks loaned money back and forth to each other. I won’t go deep into it but basically, it locked up. It seized overnight and the Fed had to jump in and put $50 billion in overnight in order to keep the banking system from seizing up. Well, it was 50 billion one night, 50 the next, 50 the next, 75, 75, 100, 150. Next thing you know, it was a trillion dollars a day, and from September 2019 to July 2020, they pumped in $11 trillion and that $11 trillion didn’t go to commercial banks. So, the Fed is supposed to backstop commercial banks where you and I bank, Wells Fargo, JPM, Bank of America. No, no, no. That $11 trillion went to investment banks that made risky investments. So, they’ve given $11 trillion to these investment banks and no accounting or no, there’s media blackout on that. But yeah, Justin, if you spend $600, we need to shine a flashlight up your skirt and find out what the heck is going on, right?

 

Justin Donald: Yeah. Not to mention, by the way, that we have I think it’s around $8 trillion in debt that the US government holds right now that’s coming due, that’s going to have to be refinanced in the next, I think, year? Less than a year? Sometime this year?

 

Mark Moss: Yeah. Well, what the Fed has been doing with all these treasuries is they’ve started taking on the long-term debt, the 30-year, the ten-year, and they’re rolling into annual and even daily. So, now, like if you had a rental property that was on a 30-year fixed and you go to an annual, that’s volatile. Now, it’s daily. And so, like that’s going to create a lot of turbulence for what the Fed’s doing.

 

Justin Donald: Yeah. And the last thing I want to make sure that we get into, you talked a lot about wealth transfers and how this can be kind of maybe even one of the greatest opportunities if your eyes are open. And I’m curious to hear where you see these wealth transfers happening. As a bitcoin guy, I know that some of it is there, some of it is in the crypto market. So, I’d love to just get your thoughts on this real quick before we wrap.

 

Mark Moss: Sure. It’s not a real quick topic but to talk about it quickly, one thing that I would say is, like, again, history. So, if you look at like Weimar, Republic of Germany is a perfect example. There’s a book written, When Money Dies. If you really want to dig into it, that’s a good book to read. But the key piece here is that we saw hyperinflation in Germany like we’ve never seen before. A loaf of bread went from $0.12 to $1 billion inside of five years at the point people were selling anything. Gold’s never been higher. Real estate’s never been higher. I should sell my gold. I should sell my real estate before the market crashes back down. Right? Kind of like what we’re seeing today and people did. So, they sold their gold and they sold their real estate and they ended up with cash but the cash became so worthless, that literally, they would burn the cash instead of wood. The cash was worth less than the wood was.

 

Justin Donald: Wow.

 

Mark Moss: So, what happens is at the end of a cycle like this, you’ll see two things are very prominent. One, speculation. So, go look at what happened to Venezuela or Lebanon. They turned to speculation. Everyone’s trying to trade because you have to try to stay ahead and that’s, of course, the world we have today. We saw the record amount of job quits last month. Everyone quit their job to go trade options on Robinhood and trade cryptocurrencies. So, that’s where we’re at in the cycle. And just like in Weimer, Republic, people today are like, “You should sell your house or your car, whatever, before bitcoin, before the market crashes.” So, if you look at a chart, I mean, it’s like a straight hockey stick and you’re like, “Dude, I could have just bought gold here and held it here, and I would have been a genius.” But if you zoom in on that, it was crazy volatile. And if you traded that with any leverage, you would’ve been wiped out many times. And if you looked at your portfolio on a weekly or monthly basis, you would’ve been stopped out over and over because it was, I mean, like, insanely volatile. So, how do we play this? What do we learn from that? How do we play this? Well, we have to understand this is the trend that’s going on.

 

We’re in the last stage. They’re openly telling us that they’re about to reset the system. And so, we need to be out of cash. Now is not the time to be selling your assets for cash. Because what happened in Germany is they had a bunch of cash that was worthless. They should have kept the gold and the real estate. And so, I think we want to be owning real – we want to be holding hard assets. Hard assets are things that can’t be artificially made. So, real estate, obviously, and to the point, earlier, Lake Travis real estate is going to do better than Kansas City real estate, so you got to be selective in what you’re doing there. I think gold is going to be the trade of the decade. I think real estate is going to be even bigger than that. Some people would say it’s not a hard asset. When I say hard asset, not because I can hold it in my hand. Hard because nobody can create more of it. It’s a limited supply. And of course, the price of bitcoin is extremely volatile. I mean, it was at 69,000 and now it’s at, I don’t know, 40,000, 38,000 right now. But if you look at it zoomed out, it’s been the trade of the decade. And so, you can’t survive a time like this looking like this. You’ve got to look like this. And so, understand the big macro picture. Understand what’s going on. Understand we’re at the end of a long-term debt cycle.

 

The only way this plays out is the central banks, they have to reset the system. The only way they can do that is to back it by something. If they want to remain relevant, which they’re not going to, and there’s a whole another talk into that. So, we need to be looking over like a 5 or 10-year timeframe and we need to position ourselves in assets, gold, real estate, and bitcoin, I think are the plays. Don’t look at them on a monthly basis. Look at them on a long-term lens.

 

Justin Donald: That’s so good. I just appreciate your willingness to be very vulnerable here and share kind of where you’re at, where your heart’s at. I know some things are a sensitive type of topic these days, and I just like being able to openly talk about whatever it is that people want to talk about. I think that it’s important to have that freedom and that opportunity to kind of communicate your views and to kind of weigh them back and forth with other smart people on both sides of the fence on whatever the topic is. So, I appreciate you sharing that. Where can our listeners and those watching find out more about you, Mark?

 

Mark Moss: Yeah. So, I do a couple of videos a week on YouTube. Just search Mark Moss on YouTube. I have a nationally syndicated radio show. So, you just search Mark Moss Radio, Mark Moss Podcast is on there. And then I’ve been doing live events where I’m trying to bring this financial sovereignty to people. We got one coming up in May 6^th in Dallas, Texas. You can go to MarketDisruptorsLive.com and check that out. But as you said, you thank me for being vulnerable. I’m just trying to help people not make the same mistake I made because, as I said, I have friends that have still never recovered from that. And luckily, I was good at making money and I was able to come back. I don’t want to see people make that same mistake and so I’m trying to do the best I can with that. So, yeah, watch the videos, get the perspective, come to the live event. And yeah, that’s it.

 

Justin Donald: Mark, this has been absolutely incredible. And I just thank you for taking the time to share all this awesome content with us, these things to think through, the whole idea of buying assets and the value of that kind of where you see the markets going, short-term, long-term, wealth transfers. This has just been awesome. What a great time. And to my audience, I just want to end today the way I always end. What’s the one step you can take today to move towards financial freedom and living a life that you truly desire on your terms, not by default but by design? Thanks. And we’ll catch you next week