 And then I started, I picked up the white paper, read the white paper became really fascinated and I've spent probably last three years accumulating a much larger position on Bitcoin. I think me buying Bitcoin today is at $28,000 is a safer risk adjusted bet investment strategy than it was in 2017. When people start using the product, Bitcoin, they will then learn the difference between the old world and the new world. I spent three and a half million dollars on a Saturday afternoon, the day Celsius was breaking up. I had to fund node 40 for my 40% investment, three and a half million dollars. He got it at $232,000, shifted it to stablecoins and was using the funds within seconds. So I really appreciate it. Love it when we get more folks from entrepreneur, traditional finance base that just get it. Why Bitcoin is your assets are essentially going to be the future. And the reason for this is we need as many people as we possibly can to educate and be the voice of reason as I think fiat and economies around the world are starting to collapse. So with that in mind, I got to say welcome, Gary Cardone to the channel for the first time. Thank you. Thank you. Good to be here. Yeah, man. I saw a couple of different interviews with you and I was like, oh, this guy, this guy gets it. This is going to make my job super easy. But before we go on with the questions, Gary, there's a little quick background of yourself. Looks like you were the VP of Natural Gas Clearinghouse and became president CEO, Dynage Europe, which was a Fortune 30 company. You've had a bunch of different companies like real estate with Cardone real estate holdings e-commerce with global risk tech as well. CEO and co-founder of Chargebacks 911 for fraud mitigation risk management type of stuff. And of course now you're a Bitcoin digital asset advocate being a majority shareholder for Node 40, which is accounting and crypto tax platform. So which is I think a pretty good company to be in since you've been investing in Bitcoin since 2016. And I think this is we're in the right place at the right time. So, Gary, let's get into it. I've seen some of your interviews and they go super long. So I'm going to try to condense this as best as I possibly can. Let's go over some of the basics. First of all, I'll ask these three questions. How'd you get a Bitcoin? The second one will be, well, why will Bitcoin be mass adopted and give us just a little outlook for the future? So let's start with the basic of basics. How did you get a Bitcoin man? Because in 2016, I remember I got in 2017 and I thought it was a fraud. I didn't really see it. But what did you see that a lot of people didn't? Well, clearly, thank you for having me first off. I'm really enjoying this industry. I see this as a not as Bitcoin. I see this as an industry, a multi trillion dollar industry that's being built. And I think if people look at it that way, it opens the opportunity for not only investing in some of these opportunities, but there's businesses that are going to be built around this type of disruptive technology invention. I got into it quite frankly, I'd spent from 2012 to 2016 we built CB911. That became the largest independent agnostic disputes platform in the world, a global business. These it would become a big client, MasterCard, FIS, WorldPay, people like that, NuVay, PaySafe. A lot of e-commerce bank providers, right? They're really vendors, but they made e-commerce work. I tend to get really deep into markets. I think with my commodity background, he started laughing, but I go really deep into a market because my training really was about understanding supply and demand. And in order to understand supply and demand, you have to understand the entire value chain, who's making money and where it starts and where it stops. In looking at payments, the payment industry, by payments, I mean the credit card, debit card industry where people buy things from retailers and they use credit card transactions. I was absolutely flabbergasted in the first few years about how much leakage, friction, waste there is in the payment industry relative to the energy complex which I came from. And my thought process was, hey, energy, if electricity stops flowing to your home, you guys are going to have a problem. If electricity stops flowing to hospital, people die. We commoditized 50 men across the planet, maybe a couple of women, but 50 people across the planet basically went into Western markets, United States, all of North America and Europe and transformed, that's what I was doing in England for 10 years, changing the regulations such that supply and demand could speak to each other without an oligopoly, a monopoly or a duopoly, the most dangerous of all three of those, duopoly. These constructs distort supply and demand so they don't speak to each other and I was seeing so much friction in the internet, payments piece of the business. I was like, well, if it's not going to be stopped in its tracks, it will always increase. And I could not understand why the card schemes weren't putting their foot down. All the regulatory processes that occurred over the last 10 years in payments created more friction, more damage to the consumer, not less. It has not worked. I do not see the payment rails working and the reason is the payment rails were built in 1972. A 52 years old, never considered e-commerce. The worldwide web was not built to be a payments platform. It was built for a communication event and they never understood. Look how smart these people are and they missed the whole kahona. This is going to end up being a financial transfer mechanism because I think money is simply a method of communicating. They never considered putting the payment piece into this because the truth is the worldwide web helped all of finance. It is the only industry that did not get damaged. Web 3.0 is going after the rest of the margin that was not so far attacked and that's making a market efficient. You have a lot of opacity and opacity is unclear. It is not transparent. You can't go into these as P&L or their public documents and say how much do they make from fees, fines, charge back. Then you start to realize you can't see it. You can't see it because that is the reason it is continuing to exist because it is a profit center. All this friction is a profit center for many vendors including charge backs down one. I told my partner we are lucky to have this bloody business. It is built on a poor construct. I started investing in gold and guns. I bought 600 guns on one afternoon because I could buy a bunch of ARs and put them in a storage facility. I got a monster price on brand new. I've never even opened a thing. I don't think I'm a war monger or anything. I just thought it was, I'll never build about 600 AR 15s for 300 bucks a piece. Top of the line, right? I'll give them to my kids one day and they'll do something with them. I bought about 300 times more gold than I did Bitcoin. That wasn't very smart. Exactly. Then I left it alone. I literally didn't even look at it for four years and then I started getting more bored. I was trying to exit my business because I predicted that we would be here where you don't have any capital flowing into businesses. Interest rates are up. I'm like, I don't want to be in a great business and not be able to exit it. It was a very complicated exit. I have a thousand years of videos to do over poor governance in a family-owned business. How to lose $200 million and still make a bunch of money, but it was inefficient. Then I picked up the white paper, read the white paper, became really fascinated. I've spent probably the last three years accumulating a much larger position on Bitcoin. I think me buying Bitcoin today at $28,000 is a safer risk-adjusted investment strategy than it was in 2017. My first thing was $7,000 or $8,000 or something like that. Most certainly at $28,000, I'll buy some after this interview. Today's price, I think it's a better risk reward than it was when it was $8,000. Yeah, I can see that. That's why, essentially, why you're getting into it. Gary, I got to tell you, I can tell why your interviews go long because you have a wide breadth of information that you're willing to share. I got to tell you, if you right now are listening to the video and you're liking what you're hearing, check out Gary. He's got a lot of different places you can find it. Right now, mostly it is on Twitter or X and you can find him over there. He's also doing a bunch of Twitter spaces with people in the space. It looks like you got a YouTube channel that you're going to start up at some point. Of course, there's also one for Node 40. I will link that in the description so you can find Gary and you can continue on and you can see how his journey is going and what's happening. And then just to piggyback on what you said, Gary, when you said about, you know what, this is going to crush, you know, this is an asset that does quite well. There was a great piece that put up by Charlie Baleo. He takes a look at the asset class return since 2011. And we take a look at what you just talked about. I mean, as far as Bitcoin, the NASDAQ 100, convertible bonds, high yield bonds, cash, gold, US value, real estate investment trust, long duration treasuries. And if we do this cumulatively and take a look at it, I don't even, it's hard for me to contemplate this number, but 8,908,509% from 2011 to 23. If we annualize that it's 144%, which beats out everything. So I know, like when you talk about these things, I understand because I did the same thing. I invested in some other stuff that wasn't as well and didn't do as well. But moving forward, I think, again, we're in the right place at the right time. And that would lead me to the next question, which is this. And you can touch on this mostly already, but why will Bitcoin be mass adopted? I mean, we've had other things in the past done quite well. But what you just talked about as far as the business and the incompatibilities and the different rails from the finance sector in 1972 moving forward. Why do you think Bitcoin will actually be mass adopted just to add on to what you said? Well, I'm not sure it will be. All right. Funny enough, and I'm not even sure that it needs to be. I think, you know, to me, you would have to also say when and what does mass adoption really mean. And I'm sorry that I go on so long, but I think that like good, but with a few points. No, I'm really talking about to the audience because I hate giving an answer without some background. Like, I don't like many of the this new public platform, unless somebody comes up and says, look, I am extremely biased because I own X, you know, I own a lot of Bitcoin. And I'm really deep in this space or versus guy that's, hey, I own $10 for the Bitcoin. I'm going to be a pontificator and leader. Like it does make a difference, right? And I'm 65. And so I would not want anyone to go out and do what I did because they don't really know what my position is right my position. I have extremely high risk tolerance. It's what excites me when I first met the Bitcoin community and they were pushing adoption from the under bank. That's, hey, there's three billion under banked or non banked people. I think that's a flawed mechanism to get adoption. I think the adoption will come from people like me. It will first start with business to business because it is those businesses that really are sensitive to why am I paying these fees to a bank to roll out half a million dollars to a vendor that I pay every month. And I've got to make the same phone call. It's painful. It's time consuming. There's no real security behind it. I bought node party. If when people start using the product Bitcoin, they will then learn the difference between the old world and the new world. I spent three and a half million dollars on a Saturday afternoon. The day Celsius was breaking up. I had to fund node party for my 40% investment from five institutions at two 30 in the afternoon. I sent Perry Wooden three and a half million dollars. He got it at two 32 shifted it to stable coins and was using the funds within seconds. Okay, from five banks that took me 12 minutes, $12 to transfer three and a half million dollars. Imagine if I was trying to do that on a Monday. Assuming the bank was open. Never going to happen on Saturday. Not a chance, right? It was the most efficient transaction I've ever done with another human bank. Okay, I've done gold transactions physically with people literally paid for services. Perry saw me do that once. But I did this one 800 miles away. He's in New York. I'm in Florida Saturday afternoon and Galaxy and Celsius both completely imploding. I had to see real problems. I when you use it until someone uses it and really understands whoa, no secretaries, no CFO, no Treasury Department was lightning fast. And it settled instantly. Right. And there was no recourse for me whatsoever. So I like those trades. I think that's a big boy trade. It reduces friction. And I think what Michael Saylor has been really helping the industry do with this FASB rule. This is a monster change. Okay, you're going to see now companies going, I like the way to be able to move money. And that to me is the next step that carpets are putting this on their balance sheet. They're then going to go HR is going to walk in and go, you know, we have 30% of our employees that would like to get some part of that payment in Bitcoin. Well, it's on their balance sheet now. Boom, boom. Okay. Now it's becomes, look, it's a slippery slope to get disruption to move into mainstream. I've spent decades doing this where you go into big markets and it takes a lot of pushing and shoving and, you know, carousing and promoting. And like, all you have to do though is a few little leaks start drop and then people go, okay, I'm going to increase my margin by taking that strategy over here. And I think that's what you're seeing. I mean, look at Michael strategy stock price. Right. Okay. Now if you go back on your chart, I actually remove everything before 2018. I pretend like Bitcoin did not exist before 2018. The return is 570%. Mm hmm. 2018 only is junior to Tesla. Right. Tesla I think has been since 2016 has been one of those major major major movers in the space. Yeah. So that's kind of that's kind of how I came into the space. I think the adoption. We don't need 8 billion people. Right. I'm actually concerned about Bitcoin that it doesn't have enough liquidity. Some of the maxi people don't like me right now because I just am very realistic about how long this change takes. Well, you know, just to piggyback on what you say. I gotta agree here on this one part because if you're talking about 8 billion people using Bitcoin, that's impossible. And if we just it's very simple. Back in the day, you remember this back in the day. I mean, if we take a look at the average transaction fee of Bitcoin, when does it go up, which it becomes unusable. Quite honestly, I mean, not for like when. Okay, Gary, when you said that you can move millions of dollars, you're not, you're not really caring about $50, $45. But for the average Joe or the person out there who is trying to become banked, who is unbanked, it's very difficult, especially when you start to see mass people using it. It's not even that much. Right now, I think we're seeing 5% of the people. So in 2017, 2018, you're looking at a $50 transaction. You can't buy things like that if you're using Bitcoin. Of course, we come over here. So what is this short show? This shows the average dollar transaction of Bitcoin. Yes, the Bitcoin average transaction fee. So this is interesting. So the average credit card transaction is $106.38 and I think it's going to crash. Okay, you're going to see microtransactions all over the place. Yeah. Well, Gary, this is just the fee to actually move it. It doesn't matter. Oh, the fee. This isn't the average ticket. Sorry. Yeah, this is the average. Sorry. This is the fee. So that's when we talk about like, you're right. It's impossible to say because moving forward like, who's going to use these fees? So I think like it is a good people. You mean you both read the white paper, which I think everybody should read the white paper. Right. And it says very specifically right there. It's a peer to peer transaction method. Now, we start to go into like, this is a store of value and this is great. Even McCormick from what Bitcoin did, it was a huge Bitcoin maximalist said, look, he goes, in all honesty, you're looking at third world country. They're using it. It's not a really great store of value, especially going out 30, 40% in a month. Can you imagine? He said, in all honesty, even stable coins are much better. So on that, what you said, yeah, it is very true. But moving forward, you know, and I think you've talked about this on other, other shows, fiat, fiat currency inflating away and things like that. If we're going to start, this is the M2 money supply. If we're going to keep doing this, which is what America is great at, we turn the money printers on M2 money supply goes up, then we see inflation. And of course, I don't know about the average person out there, but you know, like for the average home cost has gone up to three, sometimes four X, depending on the market, I can guarantee his people's wages haven't gone up that much, but the inflation rate has. So it's a good thing to think about and Gary, you know, on this one, I think you're right. But that would be us the last one. But back to adoption. I think the real underbank adoption, the stuff in South Africa, this is, I actually think having all these other solutions, assuming they're not criminal, right? I don't have a problem with any of these other solutions. My theory is, and I don't invest in them. I don't even own any Ethereum anymore. It scared me so much. I'm like, Hey, I don't believe it's decentralized. I mean, I'm asked what just go back to the bank. I know these bank people. I can't call Vitalik and go, Hey, I need some margin. I need a few days of margin here. I can call my bank and tell them that because I've got a bunch of assets with them. But, you know, when Bitcoin's at a half a million dollars, I can't do the math here. But, you know, if you divide the number of Satoshis, once Satoshis get to be a penny, half a penny, I think then you have a currency that people aren't even going to talk about Bitcoin. They're going to talk about Satoshis. The price needs to move up for their Joe consumer to come in. That's why I think guys like you and me, I wouldn't mind paying the $50 fee to move three and a half million dollars. Because that's the right way. That's where you'll get scaled, right? Because you're going to be moving big chunks of money. People are going to see that it works. And then it's, oh, hey, a Christmas present. I'm going to send $1,000 to my sister instead of going shopping. Yeah. Right. So I'm going to send her a tenth of a Bitcoin. Right. So that's where I see that that big exchange happens. It's never been the case where 10 million people start trading potatoes with each other. There's always a distributor in between each other. Right. Right. It's the way markets work. Yeah. You're right. And then just to piggyback to say that, you know, like transactions, I know people are screaming at the screen right now and going, what about lightning? The lighting network is going to draw everything down. Now it goes back to what we were talking about adoption. If they can get lightning network and go in there and it actually, you know, really pushes in, then sure, I can see what where it's going. I'm just saying that right now, I mean, Gary on the same page, we're kind of on a little bit of an unusable type of product unless you're have no problems with doing $50, $60 transaction fees for moving X amount of dollars. All right. So that would Gary that a little bit us to the last, which actually you're pretty much touch on, which is the outlook for the future. And this could be anything you want to, we could talk about short-term future, long-term future. I think we all know, and you said this in an interview over 7000 years, all fiat currency is gone to zero. But we know that's going to happen. I don't know what's going to happen, but what do we look at for like outlook for the future? Let's go short term. Cause right now we're looking at October 5th, 2023. How about 2024, 2025, 2026, as far as Bitcoin and digital asset market. And this could be anything you want to want to talk about. Sure. I think if you're holding Bitcoin and I am, I think we have 14 to 18 months. And if Bitcoin does not do what, let's face it, we have all been really earlier. Timing has been wrong. Let's admit it. The timing is wrong. The markets, like everyone in Bitcoin is underestimated how long this takes. I'm not being mean to you. It's just a big old market. Okay. It's awesome. You know, I go fishing in the ocean, the entire Pacific, like where am I going to plant my bait? Right? Like who knows? So I think we get an ETF in 2020. I thought we'd get one this year, but clearly government is just being a dick. Excuse my language, but like this is now just, we're going to delay cause we want to irritate you. Yeah. It is a no brainer. This is happening. And if the United States wants to stay out of this, they are going to lose one of the greatest opportunities in mankind. The truth is they're only 12% of the market. So they don't even have a second period. End of story. It's really fascinating. It's the first time America in a hundred years has not been in control of a monster industry. That's a big deal. Okay. You can't sit there and go, wow, in a hundred years, this is the first industry that the United States has not been able to like completely manage, control the process. They control all the inputs and outputs of energy in Europe today. All of them. Okay. Like think with that. That's heavy. They control all the military that's in Europe today too. And thus all the money. So I think next year is going to be really fascinating. I hope Binance doesn't blow their face off and then we have another, you know, vomit moment on Bitcoin, but that truly will be if it happens. And I hope it happens. If it's going to happen, let's get it over. Yeah, we're at the band-aid off. I've been actually surprised and I've got some really interesting friends. Big commodity traders are like, hey, this price should be at 800 bucks right now with all the carnage that's occurred in this bloody industry. It's a total circus. It's Enron, WorldCom, Maydox or whatever his name was. Plus a total circus, right? On YouTube, Twitter spaces and LinkedIn all the time. It's not becoming a big carpet. They don't want to do this, right? Like nobody's ever heard from me until the last two years because I dealt with big carpets and they don't want a bunch of vocal mouthing of what happens in their marketplaces. I think the slippery slope that we got on, we are digitizing planet Earth. And you're not going to digitize part of it. We're going to digitize all of it. You're not going to have part of it on a horse and buggy. And then part of it with Tesla is automated. Nobody's even driving the bloody car. Like if automated cars get on the roads, guess what? You're going to take humans off the road. You can't have robots and humans driving around, right? There's two different variables. I mean, you're going to have wrecks all the time. It will be the humans. So I just see this moment where I think we're, I've never seen a window like this where Joe domestic can either invest in Bitcoin if he's got $1 and run the man. It's so clear they're all coming. There's $800 trillion sitting in asset classes and a new asset class has been born. The first asset class in 30 years has been born and basically rubber stamp and anointed by Secretary Gary Gensler. The SEC chairman saying this is a sustainable asset class. Larry Fink said it is a sustainable asset class. McKinsey and every other top accounting firm, a sustainable asset class and all the family offices have yet to participate. Family office participation in the ultra-wealthy is less than 1% allocation of Bitcoin. And you got BlackRock writing a report saying the proper allocation should be 83%. I mean, that blows everyone's mind. Have you seen that? Yes, and well, here's the thing. So yeah, perfect segue. So it blows everybody's mind now, but it also blew everybody's mind. Because I remember, I talked to Simon Dixon not so long ago and he talked about how it blew his mind when Bitcoin hit $100 when he was investing in $2 or $3. And then of course, people were like, it'll never get to $1,000. It'll never get to $20,000. It's the same narrative coming over and over again, but like you said, I think if we're going to front-run anything, I think this is the time when we are super duper early. The technology has to catch up. So let's see. We need to remember to remind it, hey, we are still early and that means you could get into a position in Bitcoin and appear to be underwater. Okay, you're early. Like everyone's been early. I own $50,000 Bitcoin. I own $40,000 Bitcoin. I own $20,000. Actually, I don't own any of that because what I actually did was because I bought Node 40 software. That's how I met these guys. I took a monster tax loss, sold all my Bitcoin to buy Node 40 on that afternoon, took a million dollar loss, then reloaded all that Bitcoin. I replaced all that Bitcoin in the last four months at $20,000 discount to where I was. See, this is when it gets really smart because you have another asset you can move around, especially when it's volatile. Like having a volatile asset is not necessarily bad. I would take 570% return for five years if you told me the price was going to do this every day. Like nobody sells their 401k, man, when the market goes down 20%. They don't even look at it. So if it's a store of value, just stick it in the 401k, hold it for four or five years, and keep studying, right? And just keep letting that money work. Look, it's the only asset in the world that can't be printed made up no matter what the price is. A trillion dollars, you can't go produce more Bitcoin. At $100, every drop of oil will come into this market. Oil prices in the world will never, ever exceed $100. Not for long periods of time. Gold can only go up so much. Right. In my opinion. I mean, none of these things can't be produced. So I just look at it as a, you know, gosh, I think I'm going to allocate some piece of this. Yeah. And if I'm wrong, okay, I'm wrong. But what if I'm right? Shoot, what if we're all right? So Gary, you said a lot in a short amount of time. So we talked about everything as far as mass adoption, what things are going to happen. And I like your opinion of moving forward into the next year. And of course we're super early and we'll see what happens. So everybody, if you like what you hear, there's a great place to find Gary. There is a link in the description. Here is his link tree. Mostly you can find him on Twitter. And of course we'll help him get his YouTube channel up and running. And we'll go from there. So you can actually start spitting out some videos. Gary, thanks so much for stopping by, man. And the last words of wisdom for the investor, even though the last one you said was pretty good, you don't look at your 401k, you don't look at other things, why are you looking here? But any last words of wisdom? Dollar cost average. Do not try to pick the bottoms. You're not a professional, even the pros can't do it. Don't pick the bottoms. Don't try to pick the tops. Dollar cost average and you'll be just fine. And manage your position. You don't have to go all in, sell your house, sell your car. And that's not necessary. It's not even smart. So just do well and read. Anybody that reads, you're going to be much better equipped if you're investing in yourself. And that's probably the best investment anyone can make. Got to agree there. Readers are leaders. So everybody, you liked today's video. Thumbs up. Subscribe with the good stuff you can find Gary. Gary again, thanks for stopping by. And of course we'll see you guys in the next one. Thanks man. Great seeing you.