The Brandon Davis Show
Gary Cardone - Energy Visionary and Bitcoin Disrupter
Gary Cardone, an entrepreneurial titan with roots in Southern Louisiana, draws fascinating parallels between the natural gas industry's deregulation in the 1980s and the digital asset revolution of today. This episode promises to enlighten you on how questioning entrenched practices in energy and embracing competition led to a more efficient market, and why Gary sees a similar future for Bitcoin. Discover how his transformative experiences in the energy sector give him unique insights into the potential of digital currencies to disrupt traditional financial systems.
We discuss the disruptive impact of Bitcoin on legacy financial institutions like Visa and MasterCard, exposing the inefficiencies of the current financial landscape. Gary shares personal anecdotes of challenging the status quo, highlighting the importance of intellectual capital in fostering innovation. Learn about the struggles and eventual decline of outdated systems as newer, technologically advanced solutions emerge. This conversation offers a compelling vision of a future where digital assets dominate, providing faster settlements and greater efficiency.
Explore the misconceptions around peak oil and the strategic advantages of Bitcoin mining, especially in utilizing surplus energy. Gary debunks myths about energy scarcity and delves into the potential of Bitcoin to revolutionize energy markets. We also address the challenges posed by green energy initiatives, the overwhelming regulatory landscape for digital assets, and the critical role of robust digital reporting solutions. This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in the intersection of energy efficiency and the burgeoning world of digital currencies, offering valuable insights into the future of both industries.
Gary Cardone, an entrepreneurial titan with roots in Southern Louisiana, draws fascinating parallels between the natural gas industry's deregulation in the 1980s and the digital asset revolution of today. This episode promises to enlighten you on how questioning entrenched practices in energy and embracing competition led to a more efficient market, and why Gary sees a similar future for Bitcoin. Discover how his transformative experiences in the energy sector give him unique insights into the potential of digital currencies to disrupt traditional financial systems.
We discuss the disruptive impact of Bitcoin on legacy financial institutions like Visa and MasterCard, exposing the inefficiencies of the current financial landscape. Gary shares personal anecdotes of challenging the status quo, highlighting the importance of intellectual capital in fostering innovation. Learn about the struggles and eventual decline of outdated systems as newer, technologically advanced solutions emerge. This conversation offers a compelling vision of a future where digital assets dominate, providing faster settlements and greater efficiency.
Explore the misconceptions around peak oil and the strategic advantages of Bitcoin mining, especially in utilizing surplus energy. Gary debunks myths about energy scarcity and delves into the potential of Bitcoin to revolutionize energy markets. We also address the challenges posed by green energy initiatives, the overwhelming regulatory landscape for digital assets, and the critical role of robust digital reporting solutions. This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in the intersection of energy efficiency and the burgeoning world of digital currencies, offering valuable insights into the future of both industries.
you're now tuning in to the brandon davis show on the r2r network, where news, crypto and politics collide. Get ready for raw, unfiltered discussions, fearless insights and a relentless pursuit of the truth, from the shadowy corners of the blockchain to global power plays. Join us on this journey of discovery and defiance, and remember the only thing we aim to change is your mind. This is the Brandon Davis Show.
Speaker 2:Gary Cardone, outstanding man, nice to have you on the Brandon Davis Show Real quick for my audience. Maybe you can just tell them who are you. Who the heck are you man?
Speaker 3:audience Maybe you can just tell them who are you. Who the heck are you? Man, Whoa, That'll take the whole show up. Short story man, Just a lucky guy. I've been around, been in four industries and oil and gas payments. I've been building businesses since I was 27. I didn't know I was building a business at 27, but that's the way it ended up and you know, I think I had a really cool platform, had a lot of really good bosses and mentors, and have been fortunate enough just to look at life as a bit of a business, as a bit of a game and, for the most part, just been a corporate warrior man.
Speaker 2:Love it. Where are you from? Louisiana, southern Louisiana.
Speaker 3:Where? South Louisiana Lake, Charles Lake.
Speaker 2:Charles.
Speaker 3:Yeah, a little refinery town near Texas border.
Speaker 2:Man. So what did that look like? How did you guys get down there?
Speaker 3:Well, I think my family Italian family dad was from, I think, madisonville, which was near New Orleans, and then my mother's family was Sicilian, got born on the boat coming from Sicily. Wow, landed in Louisiana. Big Italian population in Louisiana, catholics you know the whole deal, yeah yeah, yeah, good stuff.
Speaker 2:I've been to Sicily, I've been the whole deal. Yeah, yeah, yeah, good stuff. I've been to. I've been to Sicily, been to Palermo Uh, that's, that's about all I've been to over there. I've been to Spain as well. Mediterranean is beautiful here, um, so I'm going to jump right into it. Man, uh, I've done some background research on you. I've talked to you before. Obviously, I know you, people know about your brother. What are you trying to accomplish right now in terms of transitioning from the energy industry to being? It seems like you're really working to be a thought leader and are a thought leader in the Bitcoin industry, the crypto industry. What's this all about, man?
Speaker 3:Well, when I got out of college, I had a marketing economics background and I was fortunate enough, I just happened into the natural gas business. And a year later, this is in the 80s. A year later, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission a four-letter agency for I think it was Reagan's office was going through the entire energy complex saying hey look, you guys have a monster monopoly position. It's basically an oligopoly. You've made a return on all these assets of about 20% a year for centuries. It is time to open the market up. And so what has gotten me very, very interested in crypto? The transition for me is really, really easy.
Speaker 3:I haven't been in the energy space for probably 20 years, but I went from energy after spending 25 years in it and then went into payments and I saw the problems with payments, all the problems with payments the energy companies had and the energy companies today have none. The way electricity and natural gas are priced has none of the issues that the entire payment rails have, has none of the issues that the entire payment rails have. So, spent 25 years in energy helped. About 50 to 100 men with attitudes kind of like mine went into the energy markets. We were all outsiders and we said you know what you guys cannot do this. You cannot create a highly competitive model because you've never done that. It's going to require free market specialists like us. We went in, reformed the rules with the regulators in the United States, canada and Europe and you have markets that have no friction whatsoever. They work perfectly and they work on a 30-day market. There's no long-term, 30-year contracts with blue chip credit and DuPont didn't have to take out a bond and literally, exxon says I want to go drill for oil or natural gas and I'm going to take the chance on the market being there in the future.
Speaker 3:There's not this. I'll guarantee you a 20% return. So now we have. What do we have? In 25 years, we've created the most dense energy country in the world through technology and logistics and interconnectability. That only occurs if you're a free market player. If you're a monopoly player, you can't serve the whole market. You're serving one contract. So this is exactly why Bitcoin. I am so certain Bitcoin will have its day, because if we could do this to natural gas and electricity, which defines whether you're a first, second or third world nation, nobody needs a credit card and nobody needs bitcoin. So really you follow my point. I mean yeah, yeah, no completely.
Speaker 2:I here's. Here's what really intrigues me about your experience. You're referring to around about 1987, ronald reagan. He kind of deregulates everything he introduces. That I'm kind of curious. You know what sort of effects on the industry as a whole Do you see? Did you see it happen then? And then what are you going to? What do you expect to see with the crypto industry now as we enter a period of regulation, like you know what's that look like?
Speaker 3:Well, first off, it's been since, as you said, 1987. I spoke to my mentor, who is now the chairman of the board of Williams Pipeline Williams Energy Company, biggest integrated Biggest in the world.
Speaker 3:Biggest energy company in the United States, for certain, and they move all this product around, they refine it, they clean it, they ship it. They've got a trading operation, he told me. He said, gary, we just bought a business for $25 million. That had been the question he was answering. Was this question? Hey, steve, when we were doing this, he was 28, I was 27. A bunch of 30-year-olds. This is who changes industries. It's the 30-year-olds, 22-year-olds who, by the way, we had no what's the word Formal?
Speaker 3:education, fascination or romantic interlude with the old energy space. We were like, dude, we just got here. Right, we just showed up. You guys have been in these country clubs for 20 years. Hell, we don't even like golf. And that's the way most of these industries are built, right? They're built to pretend to be competitors. Who's really a big club and Joe Consumer's paying for it? Right, club, and Joe consumer is paying for it?
Speaker 3:The question I asked him was we grossly underestimated the opportunity. We built a $30 billion company in seven years In the 80s that was real money back then and restructure the way four continents play with their energy. What is happening now? Have the oil companies finally got it? And he told me he said, dude, we bought a company for 25 million that had never made money and the next year we made a quarter of a billion in cash. So what that tells me is that if the company has the right culture, like Williams, they will survive that transition. Williams has been around forever.
Speaker 3:What did they do? They appointed a CEO that was in his 30s. I know the guy. He's a very, very good guy. They then went and hired a guy like Steve, who then would hire guys like me and understand that this is going to become a puzzle, right, whether it's payments or bitcoin or or uh banking or or uh etfs. This is now becoming integrated in the system.
Speaker 3:Once you shine a flashlight into a oligopolistic market where supply and demand are not speaking to each other because there is intervention, they're intervening, right, whether Visa's intervening, or they're treating their buddies better than they're treating competitors, or Amazon gets so big that almost Walmart can't compete with them. If Walmart can't compete with them, what about the other 10 million small merchants? They can't compete with them. So I think what we're seeing is we will see a replication of what happened in energy and it will be very profound and all of the opaque areas in markets that should be open and public. I mean, most of these companies are very large public entities, yet we can't find a lot of clear information. That doesn't happen in an open market.
Speaker 3:So when we shine that little tiny pin light called Bitcoin into some of these spaces, it's going to start showing, it's going to highlight where all the margins are that aren't deserved to be made. I'm cool with margins, but you can't charge me 30 cents on the dollar just for sitting there. Google and they might ban this show, but you send me $100, dude, they're going to take 33 bucks. That would be a federal offense. If Visa did that, visa would charge me 3% and I think they're criminals. So Google's just taking 30. It's like, dude, that's not open access. Okay, right.
Speaker 2:So this is important. I want to kind of get into this for a second. So you said that you go to school, you come out, you're working for an energy company. Am I correct in saying that? Correct, pipeline company, okay, an energy company. Am I correct in saying that?
Speaker 3:Correct Pipeline company.
Speaker 2:Okay, pipeline company and you. And then did you say, this other guy was working for you? You two created a company together.
Speaker 3:No, no, I joined a company Okay, that would be my first introduction to the oil business and my job in that pipeline company was to fill, to fill an empty 36 inch wide pipe that ran from texas, laredo, texas to houston. So just for people having a frame, because most people don't understand, they turn their tv on, they turn the kettle on, they turn the bathtub on well, there's, there's pipelines running all over the place. Monsters, someone has to fill those right, whether it's liquid or natural gas or crude oil. My job was to fill two billion cubic feet a day up. Okay, like and do it with these big, complex contracts, 30 year contracts, where the price escalates. All of that went away within a year or two through this market change. And then you would create a spot market.
Speaker 3:Okay, and the oil companies? You asked hey, what was the impact of this? We had 43,000 oil and gas producers. Went to about 18,000 immediately. Okay, so you immediately consolidate because the inefficient players don't make it. Then now it's about 600 oil and gas producers. Okay, so it gets smaller. It throws a lot of like, it freaks a lot of players out. But guess what happened? We might have lost some oil companies, but we have lower oil energy prices. Interesting.
Speaker 2:That is interesting. So there's two things I want to take from that. The first thing is you kind of mentioned that this is the way that the oil and gas company had been doing business for so long.
Speaker 3:Right the industry yeah.
Speaker 2:The industry. And then you come along and maybe one of the competitive advantages that you had was you were so young and you had a completely different perspective on things, and you talked about culture a second ago. So you know, how did you kind of bucking the status quo at that company translate to you moving towards this company that you created? It was a $30 billion company. How does that, you know? How does that all tie together and play into everything?
Speaker 3:Well, I think sometimes people don't ask the right questions. Okay, and I'm not saying you don't like me Generally speaking.
Speaker 3:Yeah, in my case, I had to understand what I was good at and what I was not good at and not interested in. I also had to know, I had to be aware, that something didn't look correct to me. If you were buying 2 billion cubic feet a day, surely you want to buy it in the cheapest manner possible, right, sure? Yet I went to my boss and said how much do we pay for this? I got this pipeline right here and there's a Conoco just drilled a well right next door to it. What are we going to pay him? And he's like well, we're going to pay him $7.36,. Gary, really, why? Why wouldn't we pay him seven dollars and 16? He said ah, dude, we don't mess around with pennies and nickels as soon as that margin I was 22 years old dude, I said two billion cubic feet a day times a nickel.
Speaker 3:Yeah, this was six months into the job. I'm like whoa. That's weird. I never forgot that because the only thing I learned, other than how to chase girls in college, was supply and demand are the only thing that really matter. Supply and demand, if they are allowed to speak to each other and they are not muffled. Now, the economics 101 guy didn't tell me that part. But when supply exceeds demand, prices fall. And when demand exceeds supply, prices rise period, maxim God's rule. And when you can't, when you don't have that dude, when the price is 736 and it keeps going up, no matter how much supply there is, you know this is fucked up. This can't continue this is an artificial market.
Speaker 2:Middlemen, screw things up, screw markets up.
Speaker 3:Well, this middleman spent a billion dollars putting a straw in the ground and he wanted to make sure that he had a return, because he's having to report to his shareholders that his return is better than the other guy's return that the shareholder had an opportunity to invest in. So it becomes a very big club and all you're doing is comparing one against another.
Speaker 1:And if they're all?
Speaker 3:using McKinsey, dude, and they're all using the same metrics. Hey, we have to pay 736. We have to pay 736. Don't you understand? This is more expensive. Well, today and 10 years, I haven't heard the word dry hole. In 10 years, in 10 years, I haven't heard the word dry hole. In 10 years, there are no dry holes, dude. So why would you think you could continue making assured, guaranteed margins? I don't want anyone to be guaranteed a margin. If you guarantee a margin, you guarantee inefficiency.
Speaker 2:If you make each other compete with each other on the margin, the market's very healthy. So let me ask you this what happens to an industry when it is busted up? A lot of people say that's a bad thing, but, as evidence would show, over the past decades here, it's actually made a lot of things better, it seems. Do you think that'll be the same way with cryptocurrency, as power might centralize and it gets busted up? It's just going to make it better in the long run. What are your thoughts?
Speaker 3:Well, I'm not sure that the digital asset industry gets busted up. I don't think there's anything to bust. I think it's all getting ready to be grown.
Speaker 2:How do you feel about traditional finance getting involved with this? I guess that's where I'm going with that.
Speaker 3:That is a great question. I think One of the reasons I really like the crypto side of this versus Bitcoin and I really differentiate these two worlds. There's Bitcoin and there's everything else, and I love all these 20,000 tokens for one reason it is going to completely confuse the legacy guys. Hey, who should we do a deal with? Solana Ethereum? They're going to waste 18 months, two years. Dude Announce partner deals Visa's going to do this. That guy's going to waste 18 months. Two years. Dude Announce partner deals Visa's going to do this. That guy's going to do this. They have no clue what they're doing. Yeah, none of them do?
Speaker 2:Do you think they've felt that way for many years now with regards to digital assets? Just not understanding.
Speaker 3:Well, look, you have an issue here. If you're king of Visa and MasterCard and they are effectively one company, last thing you want to do is let go of your 45% and 51% gross operating margins. Can't do that, dude. As soon as that happens, your price on your shares are going to get. You know, like Visa, mastercard, that whole industry has paid a lot of money for nothing. Okay, there's $7 trillion in fees just in fees and fines, and little little charges. All so they're handling their game very, very well. They have figured out how to manage the regulator and pay fines and stay in the game. Sure, now you've introduce Bitcoin, which, sadly, bitcoin does not have a marketing and PR department or centralizement. So they kept talking about how many transactions Visa and MasterCard do versus the five that Bitcoin did, instead of saying, hey, visa and MasterCard are not settlement systems, you're comparing settlement to transaction. Sure, and Bitcoin is the most liquid settlement system, 24-7 in the world, and Visa and MasterCard own 72% of the credit card market, and none of those transactions clear or settle for 180 days Period. Not one of them. 180 days, dude.
Speaker 3:Now, this has just been pitched poorly. Okay, the way to break into these markets has not been done well. It is now being done well. Okay, we're hiring lobbyists. Now we're getting organized. We're communicating to the politicians with this message this is three to four million jobs. This is not about breaking the fed up. Hey, hey, hey, let me do business with you, man. Let me poke you in the eyeballs 13 times. I'm going to steal your monopoly from you and let's do a partnership. I bought 13 times. I'm going to steal your monopoly from you and let's do a partnership. This has been the Bitcoin message. Instead of there's a lot of inefficiencies. It is clear to me we are digitizing planet Earth. And in order to digitize planet Earth, what does that mean? We become a rental economy and we're not going to use legacy money or any legacy construct thought process to manage the future of how you and I live together. These tools are inefficient to manage trillions and quadrillions of transactions.
Speaker 2:Which is why it's really cool to have a market, because the market is millions and millions of collective decisions that take the place of these decentralized planning and whatever it is, whatever industry. So that's that's important, that's powerful. So let's ask this does traditional finance see this digital age, digital asset age, as an existential threat to them doing business and are they taking any sort of steps to try to mitigate that? Do they want to control it? Like? What's that look like any insight from anybody if you talk to, or yourself?
Speaker 3:yeah, so this goes back to your last question. Um, really about hey, how are they going to respond?
Speaker 3:yeah look, culturally it doesn't really matter what they do. Culturally they can't make this move, they just can't make it. Guy like me will have a job till the day I die, dude. Yeah, I, I mean literally I, I it'll be the day before. Like I have too much experience and like I'm not trying to say hey, visa, you're going to lose your game sooner or later. Everyone loses their controlling position, especially when it becomes too controlling. Visa, mastercard and legacy players like fossil fuel companies, machine equipment companies, the adms of the world. They must be looking at, uh, micro strategy and nvidia, sure, going, hey, what the fuck just happened? Dude, nvidia makes equipment and they are now making $28 billion a quarter. Okay, this is a game changer. They're multiple 75. Okay, something is happening. And the board has to be waking up, going whoa, dude, we have COVID, we have relocation issues, we've had to figure out how to work remotely. The world is not now going to globalize. See, the COVID thing fucked up the whole globalization deal. Now that isn't happening.
Speaker 3:You blow up a dam, a couple of pipelines, you start a war, you start another war and people start to get irritated. You then sanction two or three countries, boats, planes, villas and money, credit card access, banking access. And now we're all sitting around going oh, planes, villas and money credit card access, banking access. And now we're all sitting around going oh, wow, can you believe? They're going to farm mica and they're going to farm bricks and they're going to farm another. Yeah, no shit, sherlock. Okay, you stop their banking capability.
Speaker 3:This isn't the first or second time. This is three times in 30 years you've done this shit to countries. Sure, the first or second time, this is three times in 30 years you've done this shit to countries Sure. So embargoes and this kind of behavior does not work in the future world. The United States is 5% of the world's total population, we consume 25% of all the energy on this planet and we're making the rules up for everyone that that doesn't work in a fractured, deglobalizing marketplace well, deglobalizing and technology, technological solutions come to the marketplace which you can't control.
Speaker 2:Those and people you know the market's going to gravitate towards those, especially if you're a country who's getting beat up, who's getting bullied. You don't have to take that anymore, right.
Speaker 3:That's right.
Speaker 2:So one thing that I also wanted to kind of ask you about here what's the public perception in the crypto world? The perception of big companies oil and gas companies, large corporations, visa, mastercard is that these people are stupid. They don't know better than me, they don't know better than the crypto bro. They don't understand. My perception is these companies have unlimited resources, have the ability to research and understand things at levels that no regular one person could.
Speaker 2:These companies pass down knowledge for decades and decades and decades, or hundreds of years, and they get better and better and better, and it's almost like you're fighting a Leviathan that you could actually never really beat at the ground level. So I know, you know, watching some of your interviews and researching, I know that you probably look at this industry and you shake your head with the amount of experience and wisdom that you have and say you guys just don't know what type of game that you're playing right now. So how do you see yourself maybe educating folks about what the game really is, to give them that dose of reality? Is that your role? Is that something that you bring to the table by being involved in this movement?
Speaker 3:Um, I don't. I mean I'll take whatever role I guess that I can be the most effective at, but I think that my job is not to educate the legacy players how to do this. I mean they should have hired me like 20 years ago. I mean I have cost some large companies a lot of money just by being there, but the truth is, had they collaborated the first time I did this in England by myself, I offered the host company to. I said look, let me write a white paper for you. They owned a monopoly in the United Kingdom it was British Gas and I said said how would you guys like to control the entire european energy landscape?
Speaker 1:and they're like dude, that's a good idea.
Speaker 3:Let me write you a white paper. It was best piece of work I've ever done. That never saw one day of oxygenation. They threw it in the trash can and the basic premise was hey guys, you need to shit all over the UK market. You need to take the price from 26 to 8. Bury the market. Choke your suppliers up with so much long-term energy because I knew they were super long. They thought I was mad, they thought I was psychopath, dude. I said, like they threw the paper away. I said you understand this is now going to happen, but it's not going to happen because you did it. Someone else is going to do it.
Speaker 3:You got somebody else right and it's probably going to be me, because you ain't going to stop me from doing this. This is a beautiful white paper, dude. Well, the only thing that they lost 3 billion sterling, dude, the next year Income Excuse me, income Excuse me. They made three billion pounds a year before. They lost two billion sterling, which is three billion dollars at the time, and we made 120 million. See the leverage. I made 120 in three years, cost them three billion.
Speaker 3:That's what the legacy player doesn't understand. There will be 30 of me. All I need to do is make a couple million dollars the first year. In fact, the guy asked me the legacy player. This is how these people think okay, I have this problem still today.
Speaker 3:I build these little companies from scratch and then $200, $300, half a billion, a billion dollars, I sell them. I go to these big companies and they well, you don't have enough revenue. I said, well, I got a million and a half. Last year I had half. Now I've tripled, and then one day it's going to be three and then it'll be six and then it'll be 10. Yeah, but it's just not really. It's so slow, it's not significant.
Speaker 3:I said, yeah, but what if there's 30 of us? Right, if I make a million with three people, some other guy's going to go shit. I'm smarter than Gary. I think in the chargeback company business I built, there must be 15 companies that copycatted what we did after. And there was at least 30 energy players that copied what natural gas clearinghouse tried to do. And the ones that made it all their cultures were non-legacy players run by non-legacy players who had a bit of a boner against the legacy players, their cultures. It would be like sending somebody from high school to the pros, you know, and saying compete in there. And I'm saying Visa, mastercard or the high school.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So, with that said, let me ask you this Can I just interrupt you one other time?
Speaker 3:Yes, you can. So listen, in order to breach the Holy Grail, you have to be a certain character right. There has to be more gold in that Holy Grail for you to keep scratching at the guy that created the gold. He's just defending his position. Defending is not a winning position long, long term. Sooner or later, you got to attack man, and if there's 10, 15, 30, the intellectual capital. My pitch to the legacy guys hey, you laugh at Bitcoin too many smart cats like me walking into Bitcoin dude and spending 12, 15 hours a day and deploying their capital. You do not Like? Look at what Elon did to NASA. Just pour some intellectual capital on a problem and we will come up with a better, better solution. Every time, man, I say I believe in humanity more than I believe in cartels and clubs and constructs that are made out of nothing, that are unfair, quite frankly, to the smaller guy and that's really me. I I would rather be known as Robin Hood for the small guy, because it's unfair.
Speaker 2:It doesn't feel like that's the culture, though, man.
Speaker 3:It's not the culture.
Speaker 2:It's not the culture at all. They're afraid to release or unleash that human potential on the world, and it's because there's control vectors everywhere, it feels like. Do you agree with that? Yeah?
Speaker 3:The scheme is to get people addicted. You know, if you look at the credit card industry, I asked a guy from Visa once. Very senior guy said hey, what is the job of the consumer? What is his role as an actor in this matrix that you guys create over 50 or 60 years? Remember this is 50 or 60 years. You guys created over 50 or 60 years. Remember this is 50 or 60 years. Sure, and for the bitcoiners, everybody needs to remember it took 50 years for pz mastercard to get seven credit cards in everybody's back pocket. Adoption is very hard. Okay, adoption is extremely difficult on scale. So what bitcoin's done in 15 years is staggeringly significant. Staggeringly. The progress they have made in the manner in which they made it actually gets me so bullish because you couldn't have done this in a poor way, Possibly. Yeah.
Speaker 3:You know, it's just not been. It's not been orchestrated in a controlled strategic. Hey, this is what we're going to do. The messaging's been wrong.
Speaker 2:We're going to take over all the payments Price go up. People like that too. That brings a lot of folks. Yeah, absolutely. Well, you know. I want to tie this in. I'm curious about your thoughts about this. The infrastructure is already in place in terms of energy. Bitcoin is running on its own. Have been around in bitcoin for you know what, 15 years now some most, most less, maybe like 10 years these mining entities, etc. At what point are we going to see major moves from the energy in this industry to come and gobble up the digital asset industry? Because that just seems pretty natural natural progression.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think it'll be a long time before you see the American fossil fuel companies. This is why I'm really excited If we can get Trump in office. I've already told him hey look, I'll do four years, I'll work. Just tell me what you want me to do. Point me into a division. I'm happy to go, spend four years trying to help, but this is the problem that the visas, the regulators, our politicians don't get, including the oil companies. And my message to Trump would be hey look, this is not an American product. You have to get your head out of your ass. We're such a narcissistic country it doesn't Wait. What's not an American product? Bitcoin? Yeah, the digitization of planet Earth is happening, with or without America's involvement, and the first fossil fuel companies that will make Bitcoin will be sovereigns. They will be Russia, iraq, iran, all the people we keep fucking with. They're going to make Bitcoin. Why do you?
Speaker 2:think that Because they're trapped.
Speaker 3:Every time they get access to a market, we blow pipeline up. So Europe just had access to the cheapest fossil fuel in the world, bro, from russia. Okay, nobody tells that story. They were buying extremely cheap fuel. They're not now buying extremely cheap fuel. They're buying extremely expensive fuel. From who lng produced, lng components?
Speaker 2:from america she's saying they started buying that after the nord stream debacle. Of course yeah. Debacle, because they couldn't freeze in the nordstrom debacle. Of course yeah. Debacle because they couldn't freeze in the winter time.
Speaker 3:Right yeah, well, they were terrified, right. I mean, this thing blew up right before christmas. I don't know who blew it up, I'm pretty sure it wasn't two norwegian fishermen smoking the united states man.
Speaker 2:Everybody knows it's the united, totally the united states proxy.
Speaker 3:Totally like I don't. I'm not even sure it was through proxy.
Speaker 2:That's terrible I mean like I don't, I'm not even sure it was through proxy. That's terrible. I mean biden has let some stuff slip up that I was like really he said that.
Speaker 3:Dude, there's a dam in the ukraine that was blown up and it's destroyed. Decades of food that nobody's talking about, that hasn't hit the system yet.
Speaker 2:I did I hear, I did hear about that, I heard about it uh, we have three bridges that get hit.
Speaker 3:You know it's messing. Like we are. Talk about inflation okay, like I know we're jumping all over the place here, but this, all the inflation we've had for the last three years, is politically driven. Supply demand shocks. Man dude, you're just shocking the shit out of supply chains since covid well, is, is the is?
Speaker 2:are they doing that for political means, to to justify or to to gain power, like why? Why are these things happening?
Speaker 3:what? Why I mean political. I think they're trying to start a war. Okay, because if you did that to me, okay, imagine like oh, we're gonna blow some pipes up between canada and cal, put California in the dark, which would happen, by the way. What is that? An act of war? Is that just peace, love and kind of mistake? It's an act of war. It's an act of war. So this is just a war game. Now my point, though, is that the market's working. Everything the old school players do will be juxtaposed to the new world, which is the new world is going to be get along, to go along, because you're going to have a. You should have a hyper-efficient and highly competitive digital environment where we can move around. Like, I actually think, in the next four to six years, dude, I'm going to have the ability to have a sovereign passport. Yeah, that's virtual. Why shouldn't I? I should be able to have a virtual passport. Look, two sessions from now, two turns from now, I could build a case. Ai should be nearing the capacity to be our government.
Speaker 2:You could make the case. What do human beings do in government.
Speaker 3:They just are supposed to manage our constitutional agreements and our bill of rights, and they're not.
Speaker 2:This is scary man, this is scary to me, and AI ties into this whole conversation too in a huge way, totally Especially energy.
Speaker 3:See, it's all correlated. You cannot, it's all. If you're going to AI, what Is AI? My secretary, that's going to be a robot that's going to send you $3.32 in US dollars. Yeah, no, they're not Okay, they're going to send a digital yeah, no, they're not okay.
Speaker 2:They're going to send a digital. I read a uh, I read a report recently. This is situational-awarenessai, the website, and this is probably the most frightening document that I've ever read in my life. They talk about, uh, like a nuclear arms race, but it's going to be with AI, agi. If China is starting to ramp up spending as a percentage of GDP up to you know, 10 or 15 or 20 percent to fuel these AI farms in these cities, then the United States is going to be forced to do the same as well.
Speaker 2:You have OpenAI, which is you know. We know OpenAI, chatgpt you had the former director of the NSA just join their board about two weeks ago. There's some major things happening in the background with AI. That's also going to tie into digital currency, but the industries that are going to be affected the most man are the energy industries. I mean, the amount of energy that it's going to take to push us into this kind of weird future in terms of AI is just tremendous. Have you talked to your friends about this in the energy industry, and maybe what are their thoughts about this in the energy industry, and maybe what are their thoughts about all that sort of thing?
Speaker 3:Well, their thoughts are that we're going to have so much demand and finally, you know, the energy market's going to move and be get paid a better multiple than the very companies that obtain multiples from buying the energy and then converting it to some digital product, whether it's Amazon or Facebook. My view is not so rosy for the energy players. I think we have an immense amount of energy. Dan Yergin, who became very famous in the 90s and 2000s, wrote two or three novels I mean monster pieces of work on peak oil. He must have made at least $100 million. He was wrong, dude. I mean so wrong, it's ridiculous. Peak oil 2000. Peak oil 2010. Peak oil.
Speaker 2:So when you say peak oil, for the listeners you're talking about the maximum amount of oil that will. It's just going to go down from that point on.
Speaker 3:Basically, there's an end of cheap oil which, by the way, is different than peak peak oil. So you're getting close to a point where all the $45 crude oil is done. You're not going to find any more. I don't believe that.
Speaker 2:Why don't you believe that Well?
Speaker 3:23% of all the fossil fuel that we have found has nowhere to go right now. It sits behind the pipe, it's not in the market, it's leaking out of the gas, it's being flared, wasted away. It's highly inefficient. The way we run our systems.
Speaker 2:No scarcity right there is gross.
Speaker 3:Like you live in the United States, I can prove to you within 30 seconds, if you have enough, that energy is way too cheap in this country. By asking one question, run a poll. Who closed and turned their laptop computer off last night?
Speaker 2:Nobody.
Speaker 3:No one man. Well, it must be too cheap If you're willing to leave a fucking piece of. You would not leave your car running overnight, would you? No, you wouldn't because you can and it's not that significant a charge. You do and therefore there's waste. To show you how significant that is in England there's about 72 million homes If every TV was pulled from source so you can't just do the remote instant play. A 450-megawatt coal-fired power station comes off the grid. Wow, One 450 megawatt coal-fired power station Disgusting right Comes off the grid. Just so you and I can be wankers because we can't wait one second for the shitty CNN news to come on.
Speaker 2:So did you roll your eyes when you heard the FUD in terms of bitcoin and digital currencies about using too much energy?
Speaker 3:oh, I didn't really roll my eyes, I mean, I just I was like, oh, okay, they're gonna run that one, that's cool. Um see, I like them running, though. So because then you have a debate to do, which is marketing. You know, that's not the real energy, like what's what they're doing in Texas right now is not going to be forever.
Speaker 2:What are they doing in Texas?
Speaker 3:They're they're low. They're low balancing in Texas, oh right, but I don't think I mean it's cool, there'll be some of that, but the real use for Bitcoin should be and this is just economics why would you transport natural gas from Pennsylvania or Chicago all the way to Texas, pay a dollar fifty to get it there, to then do load balancing? Why? Why wouldn't you just produce it in Wyoming and turn it into bitcoin and not have any transport fees, if that makes sense?
Speaker 3:If you're Putin and you just had your your blown up right, why wouldn't you just mine Bitcoin in the Siberian tundra, turn it into Bitcoin, then move it wherever the fuck you want, for whatever currency, and no one can ever say no, right? No one can ever say no. By the way, this is the same sovereign that already has crude oil on its balance sheet and it drills crude oil and does balance sheet, and it does not. It drills crude oil and does not need to show a profit. See, it's very interesting. Sovereigns don't need to make money on their energy in order to make bitcoin and in order to make that story work, whereas an oil producer needs to make some money right right Now.
Speaker 3:Who's going to drive this home? This is hilarious, okay. The game theory here that's working out for Bitcoin is just staggeringly interesting. Nuclear power stations 25% of all the nukes in the United States are talking to AI and Bitcoin people right now?
Speaker 2:Yes, they have to.
Speaker 3:Why would that be important? And the reason is because nuclear power stations are actually a problem on the grid because they are baseload. There is no turning off a power station. It's a thousand megawatts on or off and you can't keep it off forever. You have to do plans.
Speaker 2:You can't store it or you can't control that flow.
Speaker 3:A thousand megawatts is popping out it's not 900, it's 1,000, and you can't modulate it down. This is a nuclear power station, so the problem for them is they sell the cheapest energy to the grid 3 cents a kilowatt. What if I went to a nuclear power station and said hey, dude, I can get you 5.5 cents. Wow, that sounds pretty cool.
Speaker 2:Oh, via Bitcoin, Of course, dude.
Speaker 3:I'm going to sell you an 80% load factor profile, mr Utility, and then I am going to divert either when you want or when I want, but I'm not selling you base load at three cents. If you can buy it cheaper than five and a half, you just tell me when to turn off and I'm going to mine Bitcoin. Everybody wins, dude, no than five and a half.
Speaker 2:You just tell me when to turn off and I'm a mine Bitcoin okay everybody wins dude.
Speaker 1:No, that's, that's great, everybody doing that. Yet why aren't people doing?
Speaker 2:that yeah, well are they like will be okay no, there there is.
Speaker 3:Once you have this discussion, I remind everybody, you know, in order to, the purpose of a first meeting is to get to the second meeting. Some of this takes time. You got. You got to find the right people inside these organizations. The more time we have in Bitcoin with, the more PR and the more good news and hey, this is happening and the area is cleaned up the more you're going to start seeing people come up with very clever bond economic methodologies. Like I could probably make a very good living just walking around the energy company going hey, man, look that project right there, you ought to wrap some bitcoin around. There's certain projects that where it's stranded, okay, like literally the energy's just sitting there. So they're going to get there, man, because there's so much energy sitting behind pipe not doing anything and it will be the sovereigns or our nuclear power station that will do this, so it can be.
Speaker 2:It can be nuclear or it can be fossil fuel as well well, it can be.
Speaker 3:It could be sun too. It could be anything yeah, but the nuke the, the sun and the, the wind and all that bullshit energy. Dude, dude.
Speaker 2:Why? Because it's inconsistent and it's not dense. So when you hear and this is awesome for me because I don't know anything about energy so we hear Elon say yeah, we just got to take a corner out of Utah and put a solar farm down there.
Speaker 3:Yeah, what are your thoughts when you hear something like that? You know, I mean, look, I'm not, I don't know. Maybe, maybe I don't know either. Shit, I don't know, dude, I have no idea what that does to the environment when you start putting mirrors back in. I have no idea, but what I do believe is that energy prices will continue to come down, just like every other product comes down over time.
Speaker 2:Okay, and.
Speaker 3:I think technology is going to allow us to get there, so solar is not going to ever make it. If crude oil is at a hundred bucks, 60 bucks and natural gas is at $1.87. There's no room for them. What the green people should do. This is why I get so irritated with the Bitcoin community, because I'm like dude, you could fuck this up if you really try. The greenies have made no progress whatsoever, except noise, and the reason they made their noise is talking about how clever wind and solar are, and then they fail, and in order for wind and solar to work, they have to have subsidies.
Speaker 2:And it's inefficient. What?
Speaker 3:you should have been doing is you should have been praying for war and supporting $300 crude oil and $5 natural gas so that you could compete without subsidy. If I'm the government, I'm like I ain't getting shit for subsidy. Dude, either make it work or don't make it work, and you can't then blame the oil producers going wow, you guys are actually being very efficient. At $65. They make. You know that's $45 to $65 is break-even for crude oil, and at $75, people are making a good margin, keeping in mind you hadn't heard about dry hole in a long, long, long time. Sure, you know your margins go down when your risk goes down right and your volumes go up. So there's no oil producers bitching about selling crude oil at $70. They're making $25, $30, man.
Speaker 2:So what's this huge war on the energy industry in the United States and the Western world, it seems? Why do they want to shut this down? Is it really because they believe that this sort of energy is dirty and it's going to kill us all? Do they really believe that?
Speaker 3:What they, the green peeps?
Speaker 2:Well, the green peeps and the political representatives of those people, yeah.
Speaker 3:The politicians know nothing, man, and all they're doing is they're a little bit like many of the companies that are large in this world who work on quarterly earnings. These people are working on one and two-year voter surveys. If you're working on quarterly earnings, I don't know how you survive the future, dude, because private companies will not have to have quarterly earnings. They will be looking at this digital new landscape going oh my god, everything has to be rebuilt, everything okay, like every tool that we've ever had to do all the legacy business accounting audits, tax reporting, analytics, risk management, trading reporting, third-party reviews, audits, quality of earnings that all has to be done digital. Have you seen?
Speaker 3:The tax treasury department came out with a 365 page tax ruling on digital assets 365 pages. They had 2 000 comments. They, they. They are saying you have five or six major accounting firms going hey, this digital asset thing, dude, you, you can't make us responsible for this. And they're like what are you talking about? He said well, right now we have 4 billion 1099s from legacy business, analog, us dollar, digital asset industry, when the Treasury Department requires reporting from broker dealersers goes to 12 billion additional. Okay, now, even if you don't like the numbers, 4 billion to 12 billion. Hey, that is a 300 increase in files. Right, like, no, like, that's a big lifted. Billions of farms, triple the farms just to be able to do digital and report for it. No one's set up for this. They're set up on Excel spreadsheets and Google Sheets.
Speaker 2:We're talking about trillions and trillions of transactions is that I'll tie this in real quick, Node40. How does that play into all of this?
Speaker 3:Node40, I invested. Not only did I go heavy into Bitcoin and a couple of other products, but I also bought 42% 43% of Node40, which, when I got involved, I kind of switched their focus. They had some consumer business and our focus has been basically to deal with this reporting what I call the picks and the shovel picks and shovels of every industry that's anywhere that has to get built in digital. So Node40 is one of those firms. It's got 26 computer science kids, two salespeople and that's it. We're just building a solution to solve a problem that I know is there, even if the legacy players haven't really completely confronted. Oh shit, they're getting ready to, and this is just a part of being compliant, having reporting. That's the beauty behind digital man it can be perfect.
Speaker 2:So give the quick elevator pitch about what it is for the listeners. What is Note40 exactly?
Speaker 3:So well, exactly, it's a full-on. It's a CFO in a box, dude for digital assets. Okay, so I'm a single family, I have an LLC, but I'm not a business. But for me, Node40 is my digital CFO and none of my lawyers or my accountants do anything with my account until Node40 looks at it, anything with my account until Node40 looks at it. Node40 supplies my lawyers and any litigation I would ever have. Node40 is my source of reality because my accounts zero out on digital. Okay, like I have probably six years.
Speaker 3:See, I believe Bitcoin is going to be worth a million dollars at some point. Right, if you agree with me, you need to treat it like it's worth a million dollars, and the way you're treating it right now is like it's worth nothing, because people are spending $100 on software saying they're going to keep crypto till they die and they're never going to sell it. Well, you will sell it because you will die. 86% of us are going to get a divorce. Then there'll be a forced sale. So my challenge is if I think it's going to be worth a million dollars, that then has alerted every IRS person. Make sure that we get our piece. And two, I better be treating it like it's not a Volkswagen. I better be treating it like hey man, every year I need to do a report.
Speaker 3:Every year, I need to give my data to my accounting firm and then the accounting firm needs to be able to understand what your crypto is without ever knowing anything about blockchain. Understand what your crypto is without ever knowing anything about blockchain. So Node40 is basically a translation device for any 78-year lawyer to look at your crypto position and go shit, I understand that better than the other stuff. Sure, right, because it's perfect. It's clear, it tells a story. If I die tomorrow morning, my children get a letter. Here's the node 40 data. This is everything you need to know about my crypto books since the beginning of time. Do not let my lawyers, your lawyers, an accountant or any third three letter agency come and bully your ass and take it away from you so does this?
Speaker 2:does this cater to bitcoin and crypto at large?
Speaker 3:uh, it's, uh, we'll, we will be and or auditing smart contracts. Now, this is everything, dude. This is nfts smart contracts, staking yielding token. Larry Fink says he's going to tokenize real estate. You're not going to use the accounting firms you're using right now, dude, and you're not going to use an Excel spreadsheet.
Speaker 2:You heard the mix up in the real estate industry, the ruling against the MLS.
Speaker 3:Oh, on the agent fees.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:See, it's coming.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's coming.
Speaker 3:That's why I did what I did last night with Dennis Porter's support him on some of the lobby work. See, when I see the real estate, what did you do? I told him I'd match $50,000 if you got some people to donate some money. Got it, were on a big space and he came on I said, dude, what you doing? Like he's really getting some policy push through and he's learned how to talk to them now. Like he's had eight years of mistakes and now he knows okay.
Speaker 2:This is a part of the game.
Speaker 3:It's a skill dude to get these people like. I'm spending a lot of time with Politicians now, sure, and people keep asking me why. It's like I can actually tell them what bitcoin is without freaking them out right, you can speak their language.
Speaker 2:I can man.
Speaker 3:I mean I can sit down with a late. You know, I was with anna, anna, paluna, luna and then beck, and I'm like this how would you like to say there's three million jobs? There's three million jobs? Oh, by the way, these three million jobs do not need college, that's a great story, dude, they don't go away and the and lifetime value.
Speaker 3:I mean their careers to their careers and high paying jobs um 16 year old, 66 year olds, I mean, if you, you want a job, this industry is wide open for it and no one's starting with a head start, like all you got to do is put your head down and learn. Did I answer your question or did we get off track?
Speaker 2:We got off track a little bit.
Speaker 3:The point I was trying to make on the real estate guy, so it doesn't really impact my digital position, but when I see this lobbying effort where, hey, these fees are too high, this is going to happen everywhere. It's very important that's happening and we need to keep pushing. You know what those fees are too high 6% to sell a bloody house, that is a very. That will be the most difficult cartel to break up because there's so many pieces. See, it's a, it's a system where it's such a skanky business Okay, no value add whatsoever and then you just keep getting parasites in the value chain. Yeah, Title thousand dollars for title man, I mean I learned. And then you just keep getting parasites in the value chain. Yeah, Title A thousand dollars for a title.
Speaker 2:Man. I mean, I learned a lot about real estate, I guess, from your brother, and I was in that quite a bit in 2016. And when I realized that I could just create my own contract and take it to the title company and then get a check, that blew my mind. It's common knowledge for a lot of people, but at that time it wasn't for me, and then that made me realize just how much people are getting raped and pillaged with with the that that industry in my opinion. So here's the deal. Man, we are 57 minutes in. I think we've touched on quite a bit.
Speaker 2:This has been pretty data dense. That makes me happy. Here I'm going to do something that I do with all my guests here a little bit different. I've got, let's see, here, I've got about 20 words and I'm going to say the word and you've got three seconds to react. Okay, and you can react as short as you want or as long as you want, okay, and be good for shorts and things like that. So, all right, are you ready? Sure, all right. First thing, bitcoin, money, elon Musk.
Speaker 3:Pain OPEC Destruction Ethereum. A child Destruction Ethereum.
Speaker 2:A child. Donald Trump. Power, nfts Overstated Donald Trump again. Anything different.
Speaker 3:Good family.
Speaker 2:Vladimir Putin.
Speaker 3:Monster, alpha man Vladimir.
Speaker 2:Putin, monster, alpha man Solana.
Speaker 3:Solana. Don't know what to say about Solana. Probably going to make me a shitload of money.
Speaker 2:Renewable energy Joke Shale, shale.
Speaker 3:Made during the $10 to $30 crude oil market. Carbon tax A fucking, total scam. Fucking total shit show of a scam. Okay, the biggest fucking joke, oh, the second biggest joke until we get to Zuckerberg Toxic, toxic, freaking toxic, and not a good thing for society.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Joe Biden.
Speaker 3:Embarrassing for the United States Saudi.
Speaker 2:Arabia.
Speaker 3:Powerhouse ExxonMobil ExxonMobil interesting.
Speaker 2:Not a top 10 energy player Got it.
Speaker 3:Crypto mining, inefficient and stupid. Brandon Davis Brandon Davis Good looking guy, dude Awesome. You answered very smartly right there.
Speaker 2:Good looking. I like the red hair. Good God, almighty.
Speaker 3:I've got a nice voice.
Speaker 2:Guys, that's our interview. Gary man, thank you. You did great, man. You shared a lot of knowledge. I think people are really going to like this and I appreciate you coming on, so we'll go ahead and stop this now, and do you have anything you want to send people to a website or anything you want to talk about?
Speaker 3:No, look, I do spaces on Mondays and Thursdays. I do some live YouTube. I'm really here for entertaining education. Yeah, it pisses me off that my education was so bad and everybody else's was, and I'm like okay, quit bitching about it and actually do something. So here I am.
Speaker 2:Well, dude, I do appreciate that about you, because I've seen you from afar for a couple years now and you've really, really grown, man. You're putting a lot of work in to understand this, and that shows, so, you know. Keep it up, man, it's awesome, thank you.
Speaker 3:Thank you very much.
Speaker 2:Appreciate you All, right guys we'll stop this and thank you guys.