“Prepare NOW!” Eric Trump’s Shocking Prediction For Stock Prices, Bitcoin, & The US Dollar

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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 0:26Speaker 01

  Why isn't finance 24/7? Why isn't it immediate? Why is it that every bank in the world has to have their fingers in absolutely everything?

• 0:35Speaker 02

  Americans can have confidence that the banking system is safe.

• 0:39Speaker 01

  Why can't you just send me a link and three seconds later, it's in your bank account? We are on the one-yard line to something incredible. Crypto and what we're doing, it's growing faster than the internet grew in the 90s. Can you make the argument that the government should be buying Bitcoin? Because it's the single greatest performing asset over the last decade, increasing in value 70% year over year. When you look back in five years, the entire financial landscape is going to be much different, and that's all because of cryptocurrency. I became the most subpoenaed person in American history, 112 subpoenas for doing nothing wrong. I've never gotten so much as a traffic ticket. 91 indictments toward my father, de-banked by every major financial institution in the country. They came after us like we were dogs. I really believe it can never happen again based on the moves being made in crypto.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  All the public criticism, all the attacks, how do you deal with it? And how you do it? You fight back. You don't give up, you fight back.

• 1:34Jack Selby?

  Eric Trump, thank you so much for coming on the Ice Coffee Hour. Really appreciate it.

• 1:37Speaker 01

  It's good to be on, guys.

• 1:38Jack Selby?

  So you tweeted today, and it went viral, that the Trump family has made more than $1 billion in crypto. How did you guys make it?

• 1:46Speaker 01

  Well, we started the three most successful crypto projects probably in history. We started with a meme coin, Trump Coin. For a period of time, it was, I think, above the market cap of Ethereum. It was pretty amazing. It went parabolic. I'll never forget, we launched this on a Friday afternoon. I look at the price the next day, it was at like 70 bucks or something like that for literally a meme. And it was a lot of fun. Obviously, we were really successful in the NFTs in the early days. And then we We start World Liberty Financial. Everybody knows we're the fastest growing stablecoin on Earth right now. And then personally, I'm doing a project called American Bitcoin. Every bit of my heart and soul is in it. We just listed on the NASDAQ. So we mine Bitcoin out of West Texas using some of the cheapest energy anywhere in the world. We mine a lot of Bitcoin.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  We're doing it about 50% of the spot prices right now for BTC and having a great job doing it. So we're going to accumulate. We're obviously mining. And so crypto has become a big part of the portfolio. I was always a hard asset guy. That's what I did. I think you probably know me from building hotels and skyscrapers and golf courses and residential buildings and commercial buildings. And crypto has been incredible and it came out of us being de-banked, right? I mean, because we wore a hat that said, "Make America Great Again." A lot of the financial institutions around the country, they were effectively told to weaponize their banks against us. And I found some of the smartest, greatest people that you'll ever meet in the crypto world, and it is the future. I have no doubt about it. It is the future of finance and as a family, we're all in and personally, I'm all in.

• 3:07Graham Stephan?

  What do you think separates great investors from good investors?

• 3:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think being able to see the future, obviously, and also being passionate. And oftentimes, I know this is going to be contrary and every Harvard professor is probably going to scream, but it's probably not always diversification. I wouldn't exactly say we've made our family fortune based on great diversification when we were all into real estate. Everything we did was hard assets. We weren't diversified. We believed in a certain category. We were damn good at that category and that category grew extremely quickly and we made a fortune off of it. I think a lot of times you have people who go out and they'll put 2% into bonds and 2% into stocks and 2% into crypto and 2%. And at the end of the day, you're not going to move any different than an ordinary market can move. It's a little bit hard to break out of the pack when you're doing the exact same thing as the pack is doing.

• 3:55Speaker 01

  So listen, I think being able to look ahead.

• 4:00Speaker 01

  And see the future. And that's certainly what I'm doing in crypto and that the future is crypto on every single front, on payment rails, on, on, obviously Bitcoin being digital gold. There's no question. I'm just a modernization of finance, having 24 hour finance, having much more efficient finance, having less fees, having less costs, being more transparent. But, but listen, if you look out and look at what AI has done, look at what Quantum's, you know, done, um, you know, look what's happening in so many of kind of the, the energy advances and look how parabolic those stocks and those companies are going. You know, I think you have to, you know, look out and be very good and harness your efforts and exploit your talents. And, um, you know, that's how you do well in life.

• 4:39Jack Selby?

  See, I'm a pretty firm believer, as is Graham, in saving more than you spend. And then also investing that in index funds, a diversified portfolio. Do you think that that is still a good approach to go all in on like, you know, more, you know, cutting edge crypto?

• 4:56Speaker 01

  So, so break the two things apart. I mean, one is a saving strategy. The other is a, you know, career path if you're an entrepreneur, right? And, and so, uh, yes, should you save a hell of a lot more than you spend? Of, of course, otherwise you can't get to the point. Like, how do you invest in crypto if you have no money to invest, right? Let's, let's start at the very basics. So, you know, you, you better save money and you better be able to invest that money into something, right? Um, yes, I, I do believe in that. And I do believe that there's a big portion that, you know, in a way should be peeling off 12, 13% in, in, in great ETFs that are efficient, where you're not going out with crazy money managers that are underperforming the market, where they're charging you 220 and all sorts of crazy rates. So, so listen, there's, there's certain discipline finance, but I think in terms of, of becoming a great investor and really making your money, you're

• 5:41Speaker 01

  not going to do it simply by investing in T-bills. You know, it's just never going to happen. No one's ever become wealthy, you know, investing in, in a product that goes up 5% a year, 4% a year. You know, you can hold on to wealth, you can save money. If you've got a great career and you're siphoning off a hundred thousand dollars a year, or $500,000 a year, or a million dollars a year, and you're investing in a product that's stable, fantastic. Um, but you, you also need a career that can, that can throw off enough money that you can actually get to that, that promised land. What's the best investment advice?

• 6:10Graham Stephan?

  That you've heard.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I guess there's difference between investment and career, right? I mean, I focus so much of my investments on my actual career and on betting on projects that I think I can effectuate and do a great job with. And so I think you have to separate the two, right? And then I think, once you make a lot of money here, you can take that and you can properly invest it over here and you can do so very, very kind of safely and securely. But I think the vast majority of our bets have always been on ourselves and our talents. You know, we go find a messed up hotel, you know, great location, great property, you know, iconic as hell, run like hell. You know, no money was put into it, management teams stunk. They weren't good with what they did, they didn't have the heart, they didn't have the soul, they didn't have the passion, the owners didn't have the vision.

• 6:53Speaker 01

  And so oftentimes we go in, we buy those properties for pennies on the dollar. We put money into them, we re-envision them and we would turn them into gold mines and we did that over and over. You know, in a certain way, it's almost like venture capital, right? But, but, but in a little bit of a different space and like the hard asset space, right? And, and that's always really rewarding when you can take something that was a mess. Hey, I did with this property that you're, you're standing in right now. This was a rich Carlton, they had run the thing into the ground. They didn't know the difference between, you know, tea and a fairway and a green. They weren't golf people, they were sucking money, they were losing a lot of money every single year. I bought the property and nine months later I had the thing, you know, cash flowing positively. And today is one of the most successful properties in all of Florida, right? And so, you know, going in with a little bit of common sense and fixing a place, repairing it, you know, I like that kind of bet.

• 7:38Graham Stephan?

  I do have to say the team here was incredible.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 7:40Graham Stephan?

  We moved some of the furniture around and immediately when I texted Nancy, three people showed up within a minute and they came with tape measures and they were making sure everything was level. And the same height, it was incredible.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  So that's my analness that comes through, you know, the teams and, and, you know, I've become famous for, you know, not walking through the front doors of our properties, going through the loading docks. You know, I know every single mechanical room in every single one of our properties, in every one of our attics, I know every HVAC unit, you know, it's, we are very, very granular. And if you're back a house is perfect. If that mechanical room in the basement of a building is spotless, well lit, well painted, immaculately kept, you don't need to worry about anything else in the operation. And that standard will flow through all the employees and everything they do. And I can't tell you guys, especially with Secret Service in our lives now.

• 8:26Graham Stephan?

  No.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  You know, how oftentimes I go through the back of one of these famous hotels all around the world. They are normally dirty, grungy, lights are burned out, the ice machines are disgusting, they look gross. You will never find that one of our assets.

• 8:40Jack Selby?

  So why can't we apply that same standard to politics? I'm curious, going from business into politics, what was the one thing that surprised you the most out of all of it?

• 8:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:48Jack Selby?

  I'm sure you went in with an expectation as well.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think the lack of competence of a lot of politicians, if you want to know the truth, right? I mean, these are mainly people who didn't have jobs. Look at Joe Biden, right? Joe Biden had been in politics for 55 years, 56 years, actually, when he got out, right? I'm 41-year-old guy, I've got gray in my beard. Think about it, right? Never signed the front of a check, never built anything. You know, most of his life had yes/no decisions, yes/no votes. Can you imagine my life was a yes/no vote? Right? I mean, I might need to effectuate 500 things to get to the end result. And it's all a roadmap in order to get there. And so I think it creates very binary thinking, you know, and oftentimes, some of the politicians who are, you know, debating and voting on the most complicated, you know, items that

• 9:31Speaker 01

  we have in society, know nothing about and have zero real-world practical, you know, skill in, I mean, look at like some of these minimum wage proposals that are going up in New York, you know, doubling, tripling minimum wage. Well, you know, that's great, other than the fact that they're just gonna, you know, automate every single service. And you're not gonna have any jobs in the state because they won't be able to pay for it, right? And you see that, like, look at California, right? You know, they want to triple minimum wage, double minimum wage. And guess what Dunkin' Donuts does? You know, they just automate all of their processes and fire all of their employees. And, you know, I think sometimes you need to be able to have a comprehension of the other side, you know, of a topic. And so oftentimes, these politicians, because they've never run a business and they've never signed a check and they've never had to make payroll and they've never lived through

• 10:16Speaker 01

  a recession or a depression, they have no idea what the hell they're doing.

• 10:20Graham Stephan?

  But now, in fairness, though, isn't that advancing something that we're going in that direction anyway? So let's say they do raise the minimum wage and now it's $40 an hour. I feel like we're heading in that direction anyway. The jobs are gonna be taken over by AI, so they're just speeding that process.

• 10:34Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies, 18+.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  So they're probably speeding the process up, but probably at the behest of of people. And they're forcing it. All right. You know, right now it's not forced. It can, you know, capitalism can, it can, you know, chart that path and the speed of that path. I think so oftentimes, you know, they make bad decisions that that forces something that wouldn't otherwise have to be. And I think that's again, at the behest of a lot of people. All right. And so that always enamored me about about politicians, right? When you have people who really never had real world experience and all of a sudden they're on a, you know, but yeah, you'll hear, you'll hear from all these people, right? You know, Hillary Clinton, you know, what does Donald Trump know about foreign policy? Oh, ha, ha, ha. Well, I mean, in fact, in fact, that we've spent our entire life in just about every country around the world because we're in international real estate, you know, maybe nothing, but her foreign policy

• 11:42Speaker 01

  caused 20 years of of death and destruction and wars. Whereas, you know, my father was serving french fries 12 months ago, and all of a sudden we have, you know, peace in the Middle East.

• 11:52Jack Selby?

  So everyone knows that politics is extremely corrupt. But what was the exact moment in your life that you realized it's way worse than you could have thought?

• 11:59Speaker 01

  Well, you know, it's funny, I talk about it in this book and

• 12:02Jack Selby?

  Congratulations, by the way.

• 12:03Speaker 01

  And I never thought I would be a number one bestselling author. I'm a guy who builds, you know, buildings. I'm number one in the United States. It's kind of a, you know, crazy thing. I'll never forget, I got a call from the FBI and they said, we need to see you at FBI headquarters in downtown New York. There's a threat against your company. And so naturally I rushed down there and no one knew I was going. And they specifically asked that, like, please, no one knows you're coming. And I drive into parking garage. The only people who knew I was there was Secret Service, the guy driving me down, and go up to the eighth floor into one of these, you know, skiffs. It's kind of this, you know, the lead lined room where, you know, you can't, you know, you can't bring cell phones, you can't bring anything into it. And they go, hey, there's a cyber cyber threat against your company. I go, okay, great. I can see every cyber threat that's coming into our company, right? If you have a half decent IT department, you can see cyber attacks

• 12:46Speaker 01

  every single day, right? This is like, you know, 101 business stuff. And I go, where's it coming from? Yeah. Well, sir, we can't tell you that. Guys, is it China? No. Is it Russia? No. Is Iran? And their eyes just, you know, light up. Okay. So guys, so there's a cyber threat coming out of Iran, least shocking thing I've heard all day. But you can't tell anybody that this is happening. You know, this is, this is absolutely secret. You can't tell anybody. And I go, okay, I won't tell anybody. Thanks a lot. Like, this whole thing's feel, felt like it's a waste of time. You could have just told me, hey, there's, you know, cyber threats. Just be really careful with your servers and everything else. But they swear me to secrecy. I go down to the parking garage. I get in a car and no one guys knew I was there. My assistant didn't know I was there. No one, the company knew I was there.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  I was driving up the ramp in the FBI building in New York and I got a call from the head of ABC News, a friend of mine. Eric, I hear you're down at FBI headquarters. And I go, John, what are you talking about? He goes, I hear you're at FBI. I'm like, I'm not at FBI headquarters. He goes, yes, you are. I know you're in the building right now. I go, John, I'm not at FBI headquarters. He's like, Eric, listen, we've known each other for a long time. Don't lie to me. I go, how would you know something like that? And he goes, because their press office out of Washington DC just called to tell me that you just left their skiff and they were, they were briefing you on a cyber threat from Iran. And I go, you gotta be freaking kidding me. Beyond, the Secret Service agent in the front of the car, you know, who was with me for three years,

• 14:09Speaker 01

  I had, I had him on speakerphone at that point, was clenching his fist like he wanted to fight. I just couldn't believe that was the status of the government, that they would, they would do something like that. And then we get into under siege, right? That was kind of my, my first, where they impeached my father twice, right? They make up dirty dossiers. They, you know, I mean, the dirty odd dossiers were talking about golden showers. They were talking about things. All they wanted to do was have my father, you know, divorced, lose his family, embarrassed, all paid for by Hillary Clinton, right? They made up the, the Russia hoax. So we had secret servers in the basement of Trump Tower communicating with the Kremlin. Give me a break. We don't have servers in the base. You know, you know why you don't put servers in basements? Because basements flood, right? Let's just start at the, the basics. I became

• 14:51Speaker 01

  the most subpoenaed person in American history, 112 subpoenas for doing nothing wrong. I've never gotten so much as a, a traffic ticket, right? 91 indictments toward my father, debanked by every major financial institution in the country. They came after us like we were dogs. They raided Mar-a-Lago. They raided Melania's room. They raided Barron's room.

• 15:09Speaker 01

  It was, it was the government. It was, I mean, it was the government. It was, it was Joe Biden. It was Merrick Garland.

• 15:13Jack Selby?

  You think Joe Biden is literally pulling the strings, saying like, you do this, you do that. Cause I, I actually don't think that he was, you know, competent enough to-

• 15:21Speaker 01

  Well, okay, fine. So Joe Biden, or the Autopen, or his underlings, or Merrick Garland, who is definitely, you know, capable enough of this. They lied. When they raided Mar-a-Lago, they said it was on behalf of NARA, National Archives. Does anybody really believe that the National Archives has enough power to tell 30 armed FBI agents to raid Mar-a-Lago and it not come from, from the White House? And by the way, they've all but admitted that it came from the White House at this point, right? But, you know, no, no one believes that. Alright, I mean, why was Letitia James at the White House every week? Alright, why was Alvin Bragg at the White House every week? Why was Fannie Willis and Nathan Wade at the White House every single week? Was that their, was that their jobs? You know, like, isn't that a little bit, isn't that a little bit strange?

• 16:03Speaker 01

  You know, like, we know that Hillary paid for the dirty dossier, right? We, we know that Barack Obama was the one that, that did, you know, the, the Russia hoax. You know, first because they wanted to try and make sure my father didn't get as many votes. And then second of all, because they were so embarrassed that a ragtag group of people who didn't know a damn thing about politics beat them, that they want to be able to perpetuate this narrative for a long period of time, right? They weaponized every bank. They weaponized every, you know, financial institution. They weaponized the DOJ. They spied on our campaign and kind of forgot to mention that before, you know. How do you handle all of this? All the public criticism, all the attacks? How do you deal with it? And how you do it? You fight back. You don't give up, you fight back. Right? And that's, that's this story, guys. Right?

• 16:46Speaker 01

  They wanted to destroy us. They wanted to bankrupt us. They wanted to have our family get separated. They wanted certainly my father to get divorced. They wanted to see us voiceless. Hence the reason we all got stripped off Twitter, Instagram, Facebook. You know, they turned down all of our tiles. It's, it's one of the reasons you guys are as successful as you are, right? Because people are sick and tired of, you know, they, they want to hear independent media versus, you know, the nonsense that ABC and NBC and CNN, everybody else was shoveling for, for years. I mean, they wanted to see us dead. They wanted to see us in a jail cell. And when none of this worked, you know what they did? They tried to shoot my father, right? Not, not only the first time in Butler. But then they tried to get him eight weeks later, you know, about four miles away from here at Trump International. They wanted him off of the stage because they couldn't control us.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  Right? You know, we weren't one of them. We weren't the establishment. They couldn't believe that we beat them at their own game. I mean, guys, we self-funded our first campaign. Hillary Clinton raised 1.5 billion dollars and actually knew what a delegate was, and we still beat her, right? It's kind of a remarkable thing. And we love this country. We love our nation. We love the Constitution. We love God. We love faith. We love freedom. And our country was going to hell. And so guess what? We fought, and we fought relentlessly. And I talk about in the book. It was, guys, we either won the White House or we were going to be in jail for doing absolutely nothing wrong. You know, like, that was, that was the pendulum that was the Trump life. And I said that to my father in the car one day. We were coming out of a courtroom in downtown New York.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  And I go, it's either 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue or you and I, for doing nothing wrong, are going to be in jail cells because that's how bad the system was when we asked.

• 18:22Jack Selby?

  We all spend money on little things every week. Coffee, gas, groceries, nice suits. But imagine if all of that spending automatically earns you Bitcoin.

• 18:31Graham Stephan?

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• 18:58Jack Selby?

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• 19:22Graham Stephan?

  You could also check if you're eligible with no impact to your credit score. So use the link down below in the description or again, head to gemini.com/iced to sign up today. Check out the rates and fees down below in the description. Thank you again to Gemini for sponsoring this episode.

• 19:36Jack Selby?

  What do you think's the main thing people get wrong about the Trump family?

• 19:39Speaker 01

  The closeness of our family is remarkable. Having gone through the fights that we've gone through, they would have otherwise destroyed every single one of us, I think conventionally, and I really mean that. I'm not sure how many other families could have taken what they put through us. Thankfully, we had to checkbook that we were able to fight the legal battles. Guys, we spent over 400 million bucks in legal fees, just fighting off the Russia hoax and the dirty dossiers and everything else that they threw at us. Thank God, we also had a voice, and that probably came a lot from The Apprentice and being on TV before politics, being pretty comfortable in front of the microphone before. But we have a family that fights together, that's always stuck together, that was unbreakable. We're a very, very close-knit group of people,

• 20:21Speaker 01

  and honestly, it's probably the only thing that kept us alive.

• 20:26Jack Selby?

  That reminds me of what I thought was one of the most pivotal moments of the first candidacy, which was in the debate with your father and Hillary Clinton, and they were asked to compliment each other. And Trump said, "Oh, she's a fighter. She'll never give up."

• 20:41Speaker 01

  And you remember what she said?

• 20:42Jack Selby?

  And she said, "Oh, you have great kids," which is kind of like everyone thought, a backhanded compliment. It's like, well, you're not really complimenting his character. You're just saying, "Oh, you have good kids."

• 20:51Speaker 01

  Hey, I'll take it as one of the kids is one of the benefactors of the compliment.

• 20:54Jack Selby?

  You're probably right, yeah. But I'm curious, what is something that you learned from your father that's outside of politics, outside of business, just purely on a human level?

• 21:05Speaker 01

  I think whatever you do in the world, be myopically focused on it. And that probably goes back to what we were talking about with business. Everything I had ever seen him accomplish, when it was the residential buildings, he was myopically focused on the residential buildings, building Trump Tower. And he just, it would be the only thing that was in his mind. When he got to the golf courses, he loved doing the golf courses, and me and him were myopically focused on it. It's all we thought about, it's all we did. It was literally occupied 95% of the... Same thing with The Apprentice. When I was at The Apprentice, just everything was ratings, it was the cast, it was the filming, but you were just, nothing else came in the way. He was always incredibly focused. When politics came around, his only focus was politics, seven days a week, 24 hours a day.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  And every single thing that he did, he turned to gold, right? And I think when somebody becomes myopically focused on their passion, whatever that might be, and for whatever reason they're trying to do it, I think it's awfully hard to beat them. I think kind of the weekend warriors are very easy to beat. And the people who are lazy, the, you know, the, you know, people who show up to work at 10:30 in the morning and go home at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, they don't stand a chance against that person who's driven and will go through every single wall in order to get to their objective.

• 22:20Jack Selby?

  But there's no denying that people like that exist. Do you think that they're just a product of their environment where being lazy is totally fine? There's no real push to be exceptional at anything? Or do you think that, you know, they're making the active choice and they're just like, it's nobody's fault but their own? For example, we have a question we ask on this podcast, we used to ask it quite often, which is if you're poor between the ages of 25 and 45, do you think that it's your own fault?

• 22:43Speaker 01

  You better find a different career path and you better harness, you know, whatever your talents are and you better run at those talents, you know, as hard as humanly possible. And listen, there's a lot of people have advantages, right? In the world, there's a lot of people that have opportunities and there's a lot of people who were given nothing, who became the wealthiest people in the history of this nation out of, out of nothing. I mean, you know, I know so many of them, right? And didn't graduate high school and built billion dollar companies and have done tremendously well. And so I think if you're ever in that spot where you're bored as hell and you're not moving forward, you should probably pull the ejection seat and get out and find something that you're, you A, love or you're passionate about, something that has high growth, something that you're able to monetize.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  And I would, I would sprint toward whatever that might be in your life. And what that is for you is probably very different than it is for me and is probably very different than it is for you, right? It's, you know, I think people have to harness their skills. Skills come in a thousand different forms, you know, and ultimately monetize them. If you're not passionate about something and you really are working, you know, three hours a day and, you know, don't, don't give a damn about whatever you're doing. You're not going to break out from the pack. It's just, it's very hard. Statistics will show you that it's going to be next to impossible for you to, you know, overachieve.

• 24:01Jack Selby?

  What separates the people, though, that are not self motivated, but those who are?

• 24:05Speaker 01

  Listen, maybe his attitude, um, you know, I, I, I would hope, and maybe the utopian view would be that, you know, everybody could self motivate if they found the right thing that motivated them. And I would hope that'd be the case. I'm not saying that's the case. You know, you probably have people in society who are lazy. I hate to say it. In fact, I probably know a couple of those people. And then I certainly know those people who are absolute overachievers and, you know, everything they want to do, they want to do to 110%, no matter what it is, where it is. And, um, and I think those people are probably, you know, will, will overachieve. As kids, we didn't have the opportunity. It was, we didn't have the opportunity to be lazy, I should say. You know, we were put on construction sites when we were 11 years old. You know, if we wanted a bike, congratulations, go work for it.

• 24:50Speaker 01

  You know, go earn money. And, you know, we were spoiled as hell in the conventional fashion. We had, you know, a warm roof overhead. We were always fed and we have had great education. But, you know, if anybody thought that we were rolling around with hundred dollar bills in our pocket, you know, we, we weren't, we were working on, I was doing demo all summer. And again, you wanted a fishing rod, congratulations. You use the money that you earned, you worked for, and you went and bought it.

• 25:13Jack Selby?

  But what was your attitude towards the work when you were young? Were you excited? Because you right now seem highly industrious, highly productive. You love what you do. But back in the day, to take a while to, to foster that sentiment?

• 25:24Speaker 01

  Well, I loved it. I probably would have done it.

• 25:25Jack Selby?

  So you always loved it?

• 25:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, honestly, I probably would have done it for free. Right? And, and so back to your last question, you know, was that built into your, your DNA? Was that nature? Was that nurture? You know, I don't know. It was built into my DNA. I loved it. But it also taught me the value of dollar. It taught me the, you know, the value of hard work. It certainly taught me a skill set, right? Which is kind of building blocks to what I do every single day. And by the way, tired out a young kid. You know, if you're a 13 year old kid or 15 year old kid and you're type A. Do me a favor, don't give them money and don't give them a lot of free time because bad things are gonna happen, right? Like, yeah, it's like a terrible recipe. And so, my parents were exceptional. Were exceptional when it came to that.

• 26:04Graham Stephan?

  You know, we asked Dave Ramsey the same question, and he said, the reason a lot of people aren't motivated or they feel hopeless is that they believe that the work they put in is not gonna have the result that they want.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:15Graham Stephan?

  And I think for you, you could very well see that if I do this, this is what's possible. And you see the reward of that.

• 26:21Jack Selby?

  There's light at the end of the tunnel.

• 26:22Graham Stephan?

  Sure. I think a lot of people in America feel like they're hopeless.

• 26:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:27Graham Stephan?

  That they can't get ahead, that they feel like housing is too expensive, or the stock market's overvalued, or that crypto, they could've gotten in at a thousand dollars and now it's a hundred and ten thousand. I feel like they can't do anything to get by. What would you say to those people?

• 26:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I think you have to find the, you know, industry that you're good at, and I think you have to find the job that you're passionate about, and I think you have to find, you know, the opportunity, whether self-employment or not. Um, you know, I mean, I can't tell you how many, how many friends I have who started, you know, small electrical companies, you know, they were, they were electrical foremen. And, you know, they, they worked their way up and then they went out and they started doing their own jobs and all of a sudden they're, they're running thirty, forty, fifty crews with unbelievable companies and they built it from, from nothing. And it's hard to get there. It's really hard to get there, but, you know, I think you have to take the initial step. I, I think I agree with, with Dave, but, but what you have to do is you have to take the initial step toward whatever that is that you're ultimately passionate about. Um, you know, so oftentimes it's, well, the market's not right, so I can't do it right

• 27:23Speaker 01

  now, or life's not right, or, you know, it's a hard time, or this or that, you know, you have to take the step, you have to be able to take that initial leap and, and, um, I encourage people to do that, you know, follow their hearts, follow their passions, you know, preferably in an industry, um, that has growth or that has, you know, real kind of potential.

• 27:42Jack Selby?

  Do you think the national debt affects the average person out there?

• 27:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course it does.

• 27:47Jack Selby?

  And, and what does that look like to the average person?

• 27:49Speaker 01

  Oh, listen, you have a national debt of what, thirty-seven trillion right now?

• 27:52Jack Selby?

  Yeah.

• 27:53Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, you better believe it does because it hangs over everybody's head and, and whether you like it or not, at some point, everybody's gonna have to pay that national debt and it's compounding. Rapidly. So in some way, shape or form, you're going to pay that in taxes. And if we didn't have national debt, your taxes would be substantially less than what they are. That means you could probably afford a nicer home and more belongings and to take a better trip with the kids. And yet, every single year, this thing goes up by an absolute fortune because the government's out of control and has been and absolutely rebels against people who try and cut the hell out of it. And you see what's happening right now with the government shutdown. You know, they want an extra, what, $2.7 trillion for healthcare for illegal immigrants, you know? And when you say

• 28:35Speaker 01

  no, not a single Democrat comes out and votes in favor of reopening the government, right? Among other things, by the way. Yeah, I think it affects everybody that lives in this country. There's no question about it. And in fact, it might be the greatest risk that we have as a nation, you know, outside of serious armed conflict.

• 28:55Graham Stephan?

  How do we solve it? Is there any way out of 37 trillion? Because I've heard either you have to let it inflate away, or you hope it doesn't go up so much that maybe AI could help boost our economy and make enough money to start shipping it away. Like, can we ever pay this thing back?

• 29:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, you have to grow out of it. All right. I mean, anybody thinks you can cut out of 37 trillion, you can't. I mean, will cuts be important? Yes, you need to get rid of fluff and garbage and fraud, waste and abuse, no question about it. At the same time, you have to have unbelievable growth. And I think that's what we're seeing. And how do you get growth in society? You need the lowest energy costs in the world, right? You need to be champion of industry. I think my father did that better with crypto than than anybody before. The entire world is following us. America is the crypto capital of the world by far, and we were losing our standing there. We're also losing our standing on energy. I mean, look at nuclear power. We haven't had a nuclear power plant in this country built in 30 year period of time. And we are the ones that championed nuclear power. I mean, for a long time, France had more expertise in nuclear

• 29:55Speaker 01

  power than the United States of America did. You know how embarrassing that is? You know, what's France in terms of economic power of the world? What, like 13th in terms of GDP? You know, it's a joke. America has to be number one at absolutely everything we do. We have to be number one at energy. And it's not just nuclear, that's oil and gas and everything else. You know, any country that has low energy costs, you know, has much better productivity. It's just... It's a pretty simple correlation that I think anybody can can can understand. We have to champion the industry. We have to win the AI revolution. We have to continue to win the space revolution. You know, we have to be the most business friendly country on on earth. We need to maintain the reserve currency under and by the way, we are the reserve currency. No one can argue that is not even close. No one, no one wants any of

• 30:40Speaker 01

  the Asian currencies. No one wants any of the South American currencies. Certainly, no one wants a euro for for obvious reason. No one wants the pound. So I think it's great advantage. And we better, we better maintain the greatest, you know, rule of law, an honest rule of law. Because it's why we have so much direct inward investment in in the United States of America. You know, they look at their own countries and they see no promise. They see no future. They see no, they see massive government corruption. They know all of it can disappear like that. And guess where they park their assets? They park in the United States of America. That we better maintain that safe haven for for people parking their money. And so long as we do, we'll maintain the greatest economy ever.

• 31:16Speaker 00

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• 31:41Graham Stephan?

  It's like energy is going to become a major issue over the next 10 years. Why aren't we going heavier into nuclear energy today?

• 31:47Speaker 01

  Well, I think we are. I meant, I think, I think my father, what was his exact quote? If you propose a nuclear plant, I'll give you approvals in seven days. You know, I mean, my father's the biggest proponent of nuclear energy.

• 31:59Graham Stephan?

  How many people applied?

• 32:00Speaker 01

  In terms, I have no idea. But, you know, I mean, these are big because these things cost $30 billion to build. But you know, you've, how many times have you heard drill baby drill, right? And people are drilling. I mean, we're exporting energy for the first time. Again, we're exporting in the first administration, then we stopped exporting. In fact, we became an importer of energy. Now we're exporting again. And, and that's not just oil, right? That's, that's natural gas. You know, you've got states, look at New York with Marcellus and Utica, and you've got the greatest natural gas, you know, shale anywhere on earth. You know, makes Saudi, it makes, it makes the UAE like, look like small potatoes in upstate New York, in Ohio, in Pennsylvania. They're not even tapping into most of it, right? And so we need to drill, we need to be energy independent.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  And by the way, there's a, there's a ton of other forms of energy as well. I mean, solar is doing great, right? We're in Florida right now. Every, every day there's another solar field and you know, it's, it's working great. It's, it's augmenting the grid and you know, it has its purpose, but nuclear is going to win the day, especially these small nuclear reactors that are coming out, these SMRs. And it's, it's fascinating what's happening.

• 33:02Jack Selby?

  So we're huge advocates for financial literacy. I mean, that's what Graham built his entire brand on. I joined because I became financially literate because of his content on YouTube, helped us create this podcast. And I think that that is pretty much the main thing causing people to go poor or some people to go, to go wealthy. Why is financial literacy not taught in schools? Some people speculate that there are elites that want to keep people poor so they can keep them under their thumb. Why is it not taught in school? It's the simplest thing. We learn the most.

• 33:32Graham Stephan?

  It's useless. It's useless. I zoned out in high school. I hated it.

• 33:36Jack Selby?

  Then why do we teach anything in high school?

• 33:37Speaker 01

  It's such an obvious, it's such an, I mean, I agree with you guys a hundred percent. It's because our educational system is absolutely broken. I mean, I went to a school where I was taking Latin classes, you know? No disrespect to, you know, formation language, but you know, give me a break, right? I mean, art, you know, a hundred percent. I mean, I, listen, I went to Georgetown. Georgetown's what? Top 10 school in, in the country and in the world. It's, you know, it's up there every single year. You know, I can't tell you how many nonsense classes that we took in, in, you know? I don't want to disrespect, um, you know?

• 34:08Speaker 01

  I mean, I could go down the list of, of, of worthless classes that, that I took there, but you, you had liberal arts majors who, who couldn't calculate mortgage, who had no idea what the difference between principal and interest was, right? I mean.

• 34:19Jack Selby?

  Compound interest. The fact that probably less than 50% of people know about compound interest is a crime.

• 34:23Graham Stephan?

  What is a credit score? How to get an 800 credit score?

• 34:26Speaker 01

  How to open up a, how to get a home mortgage? How to get a, you know, car lease? How to, exactly. What is the difference between interest, principal, or how to calculate any of it? Right? I mean, you know, how the stock markets work? You know, how the bond markets work? And I'm not talking about, you know, complicated quant, right? I'm, I'm talking about just. You know, the fundamentals of all of it. Yeah, exactly. You know, how the FICO system works and you know, why you might want to actually maintain a high score and, and no, and by the way, even even just basics, how to open up a bank account, savings account. All right, you know, what a 401k is and how to utilize it effectively and what you should be doing with it. No, no, we are grossly. And by the way, and that's before you get into just a basic concept of economics and other things that can help in your, you know, daily life and business.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  But why is that not taught? Because we have not incompetent educational system. I mean, guys, we have an educational system in our country that's ranked 10th, you know, 30th in the world. And we spend like seven to 10 times the amount per pupil, you know, educating people, right? The curriculum, I mean, this is something my father's fought so hard against. Right? I mean, look at the DEI curriculum that you've had over the last, in the woke curriculum. I mean, they're teaching revisionist history. We couldn't get past the fact that they were going up to first graders, you know, drawing a line across a chalkboard, you know, male, female, you know, little Johnny, go, go put your, your mark on the line as to, you know, where you think you are on the spectrum of, you know, confusing it. I mean, we got over that about eight months ago when my father got into office and absolutely killed that entire curriculum.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  But this is, this is where our country was going in terms of the educational teachings, let alone trying to teach him, you know, the financial literacy, which there is nothing more important to the world. Right? Let me just, let me say that there is nothing more important. I would get rid of half of the curriculum. And I would translate that over to, and by the way, you know what else should be taught? Basic trades. Right? I mean, I have some of the smartest friends who do exceptionally well, who couldn't hang that picture on the wall. Zero chance, zero chance. And if they did, the thing is gonna be crooked as hell. You know, they're certainly not lining up two pictures and having them be within Nathan and inch of one another. Right? Yeah, they would have zero chance of being able to do it. Like, how about actually teaching some people some real world skills? So when they move into their first apartment?

• 36:38Speaker 01

  You know, they can mount the TV and actually find a stud in the wall, right? And I think our educational system is broken and it's a great shame.

• 36:47Jack Selby?

  Well, we were thinking that's something we're extremely passionate about. And if there ever isn't an initiative to increase financial literacy in school.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  Oh, we'd love to be behind it.

• 36:54Jack Selby?

  There's any way we could be included.

• 36:55Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh.

• 36:55Jack Selby?

  That would make our dreams come true.

• 36:56Speaker 01

  By the way.

• 36:57Jack Selby?

  We'll work for free. We just want to make sure people understand the basics of investing the safe way.

• 37:01Speaker 01

  I'll partner up with you guys.

• 37:03Graham Stephan?

  That would be incredible.

• 37:04Jack Selby?

  He's already taught millions of people. Like, people come up to him all the time.

• 37:07Speaker 01

  You've done a great job.

• 37:07Jack Selby?

  I opened up a Roth IRA, right? Because of Graham, you know, simple, simple thing.

• 37:10Graham Stephan?

  I would love to see. I did a whole analysis on this and it seemed like, once the government began subsidizing a lot of public schools and colleges, the amount of money per student stayed the exact same, but the amount of money for administrative and staff skyrocketed.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. Have you ever actually seen the charts where they take the amount of student loans, meaning the actual monetary supply of student loans outstanding, and they actually track that to college tuitions?

• 37:35Graham Stephan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 37:35Speaker 01

  And the more money that they put into the system.

• 37:38Jack Selby?

  Yep.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  The more they charge. It almost tracks perfectly, right? It's like Bitcoin and M2, right? They almost like to track perfectly.

• 37:43Graham Stephan?

  Who would have thought?

• 37:44Speaker 01

  No, it's crazy. And, you know, they'll be charging $90,000 for a degree. And, you know, somebody will come out with a basket weaving major. And you're sitting there saying, I don't know, like, maybe, maybe some of these schools, especially when you're getting financial assistance, maybe they should actually peg it to the amount your career will pay when you come out of that very institution, you know, based on that respective major. Because it's, I mean, how many times do you hear somebody coming out of school with a given degree, you know, and they're making $25,000 a year? And they spent $80,000 a year for a three-year period of time, four-year period of time to get that respective major? And they're just never gonna be able to pay it back. You're giving the person, you know, the chance of either you default,

• 38:26Speaker 01

  you know, on your student loans, or just never fill it and live behind an interest lock and, you know, and interest payments for the rest of your life. I mean, it's.

• 38:38Graham Stephan?

  Now, what's also interesting is that also correlated with mortgages as well. That the overall size of someone's mortgage was correlated almost exact to the amount of government loans that were issued.

• 38:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:51Graham Stephan?

  So that's also something that I find kind of interesting, that housing prices also went up along the same as what they were able to get as a mortgage.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  I'm the biggest proponent of higher education, right? The biggest, if done right. I can make a solid argument, and it hurts me to say this, but I can make a solid argument for what the price of a lot of these colleges are charging and for the product that they're putting out. You'd be much better off taking the $300,000 that that education would have.

• 39:20Graham Stephan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 39:21Speaker 01

  Right?

• 39:21Graham Stephan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 39:21Speaker 01

  A hundred percent.

• 39:22Graham Stephan?

  Yeah.

• 39:22Speaker 01

  It's divested.

• 39:23Graham Stephan?

  Like, do anything else.

• 39:24Speaker 01

  Do anything else. Yeah, yeah. Put it in ETF, you know, attracting the S and P 500.

• 39:29Graham Stephan?

  Down payment on a house.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, make 12% a year, every year for, you know, in perpetuity. You know, add to that every single day by going, you know, saving, you know, starting a career saving and.

• 39:39Graham Stephan?

  And it's four years of time, too, that you're sinking into it as well.

• 39:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, a hundred percent.

• 39:42Graham Stephan?

  Yeah.

• 39:42Speaker 01

  And get a great jump start. There's almost no question about it. I think our colleges in this country have a lot of soul searching to do, a lot of soul searching to do.

• 39:51Graham Stephan?

  Although, really quick, before we go into that, I just want to say that eating healthy sounds simple until, of course, life gets in the way. Like, a lot of us don't have the time to go and cook six cups of vegetables to hit our nutrition goals.

• 40:02Jack Selby?

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• 40:09Graham Stephan?

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• 40:20Jack Selby?

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• 40:43Graham Stephan?

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• 40:51Jack Selby?

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• 40:59Graham Stephan?

  Again, that's drinkfirstleaf.com/iced to save 30% off your first month's subscription, or the link is down below in the description.

• 41:06Jack Selby?

  Thank you so much to First Leaf for sponsoring this episode. How has the quality of your life changed over the past few years?

• 41:12Speaker 01

  I started fighting for a cause that wasn't monetary, which is very different, right? I always wanted to build great buildings. I always wanted to have unbelievable teams. I always want to recreate skylines and landscapes, and that's what we do in hard asset space. And I was dead serious about that. And then all of a sudden, we were fighting for something that was a little bit less tangible. We were fighting for the American spirit. We were fighting for the American flag. We were fighting for our constitution. We were fighting for our nation. And it changed in that every single day, I started taking arrows for doing something that I thought was noble and righteous and right.

• 41:48Speaker 01

  I never thought that because you love America and you wanted to fight for its betterness, you would start becoming the most subpoenaed person ever. I never thought that you'd have to spend $400 million defending yourself from shams because Hillary Clinton made up a Russia hoax. And I just, I never thought that we'd be there, but it's also been really kind of rewarding. I have this 99-year-old grandmother who always has a saying. She goes, "How many steaks can you eat?" And it means a lot to me. Where at a certain point, it's not monetary. It's not about succeeding in business. It's about doing the right thing. How many steaks can you eat? And I think it's changed me in that I think I have multiple purposes in my life now.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  One, certainly a company that I love and one of the great real estate companies anywhere in the world, but also one, you know, fighting for an American spirit and American people that I adore and a movement that has become, I think, the most powerful political movement on earth.

• 42:45Jack Selby?

  You mentioned that you're very lucky that you were insulated from a lot of these attacks because of your pocketbook, basically. You had the money to stay protected from all of this stuff. Would you say money buys happiness?

• 42:57Speaker 01

  Um, no, money definitely doesn't buy happiness, but hold on one second. I gotta go back to that. The insulated. We were far from insulated. Um, they wanted us imprisoned and they did everything they could to effectuate that. And the only tool that we had was the fact that we had enough monetary means and allowed enough voice to be able to go and, and fight back against an incredibly rigged system. If we didn't have the voice, we would have lost. If we didn't have the, the monetary means to pay a lot of lawyers, we, we would have lost. Um, and it was touch and go. You better believe it was touch and go. Uh, I will tell you, some of the most miserable people in the world are some of the wealthiest and, and, uh, you know, I, I've met people who have achieved every milestone in life.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  Um, they have their private planes. They have their this, they have their that. They've got their beautiful houses. They've got their trophy wives. They've got their trophy husbands, right? And yet they're still miserable. So no, I don't, I don't think money buys happiness. Um, I think being a great person, I think being mission driven, I think being loving what you do. So oftentimes I think it's when you, when you lose the passion, um, that you find the misery, you know, the, the people who have done extraordinarily well, but are passionate about what they do are normally incredibly kind of happy people, um, versus the people who are now sitting on, you know, tremendous fortune, um, with idle time are typically the people, um, you know, who, who, who go down the other path. And I've, I've seen that a lot and it's a shame.

• 44:23Jack Selby?

  So what would you say for yourself are your primary sources of happiness?

• 44:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. I've got two unbelievable kids, uh, Luke and Carolina. Uh, they are absolutely my joy in life. I've got an unbelievable wife, Laura. You probably know her from, um, she's become a superstar in the world of politics and on Fox News and, and she's amazing. Um, I love building, I mean, in my free time, I, I love projects. Uh, I love the shooting sports, um, love the outdoors, love being outside, love dirt bikes, grew up on dirt bikes and, and, uh, still doing a lot of the ATVing stuff. So I just, I love the outdoors. I love waking up early. I'm up at five o'clock on a weekend, normally my truck and, you know, watching the sun come up and, uh, uh, love fishing and, and, uh, skiing. I mean,

• 45:05Jack Selby?

  How do you even find time to do that stuff?

• 45:07Speaker 01

  I, I don't, I don't, but I try and, I try and carve out a day a week.

• 45:10Jack Selby?

  Is this a recent thing? Oh, a day a week. So you have like a schedule?

• 45:12Speaker 01

  No, it's a, listen, uh, you know, if I'm not traveling on a Saturday or Sunday, you know, I, I, I try and find some time for myself and, you know, it's, listen, it's difficult, right? I do, we run a very big company and. Work very hard and don't sleep a whole lot and you know always get interrupted no matter you know what I'm doing and that's fine right this is the life I love and it's life I enjoyed and I think if I ever had free time I'd probably be miserable and incredibly bored right you know I think there's certain people who are my grandfather had this great expression it's to retire is to expire and I think we're all built that way I think humans are probably actually built like that but no I like to run hard in everything I do and I can't tell you how many times I'll come off a plane at one o'clock in the morning and I'll be up at five o'clock and you

• 45:56Speaker 01

  know in the morning to to try and get a couple of free hours of free time so I think what actually gets compacted in my life is actually probably sleep but that's okay we operate on very little sleep anyway Would you ever run for president? I retired from politics I called my father the morning of the election after we won in November 6th and I said pops I love you I'm going back to the company I'm going back to the people I love I'm going back to you know doing this you know I'll run this side of of life and you know you do a great job for the country and you won't need to worry about anything over here and you know I know the country is in great hands and I never thought I would have been in this race I never thought I would have been a major player on that stage and I was and arguably without without me my father couldn't have done it right because there would have been no one

• 46:41Speaker 01

  watching over the actual company and you know that was everything he had ever built everything he ever created this a major he had an answer back in the 80s which is you know if I ever got so bad that we had no other choice I would do it and that would probably be my answer as well I've seen the best of politics I've also seen the worst of politics I've seen how they can try and destroy a family for doing absolutely nothing wrong I see how they can lash out and try and prison you and bankrupt you and then kill you as they did to my father twice

• 47:10Speaker 01

  at the same time I see this kind of amazing transformational change that he's making every single day right I mean peace in the Middle East who the hell would have thought right look at where our economy is look at where our world is look at our standing around the world and so you know the good news for the first time I can see you know I really see people who are making a difference he's making a difference and I think that's a beautiful thing for our nation and we better have good business leaders Running this country and not these bureaucrats who have been, I mean, can you imagine if AOC ran a thirty-two and a half trillion dollar economy?

• 47:38Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, well, it's Deloitte. They're polluting the oceans. Did you see that?

• 47:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I mean, I, but, but like, I, I mean, look at, look, look at, you know, Kamala, right? I mean, she goes out and talks, her big economic plan was to stop the price. What did she say?

• 47:55Jack Selby?

  Gauging?

• 47:56Speaker 01

  No, no, she said gauging, price gauging.

• 47:58Jack Selby?

  Oh, sorry, price gauging at the grocery stores.

• 48:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, price, so she wants, her economic plan for this country is to stop the price gauging. Now, I, I

• 48:05Jack Selby?

  Have you seen the, the margin, though, that they have at?

• 48:08Graham Stephan?

  Kamala. Grocery stores are making a ton of money. They're making 1% margin.

• 48:12Jack Selby?

  Yeah, I mean, those guys, if anyone has money, it's

• 48:14Speaker 01

  By what?

• 48:15Jack Selby?

  Around the grocery stores.

• 48:15Graham Stephan?

  The grocery store owners.

• 48:16Speaker 01

  You know, Kasmatidis is a friend of mine, right? He owns Christides and Dextino's and all those. And a lot of places are not even making that. You know why? Because of the theft in some of these cities, right? When, when you used to have a theft rate of, you know, half of 1%, and now all of a sudden, you know, you have 7% of product walking out of your stores in high-tax environments, you know, with spoilage and everything else that you have in the supermarket business, you're not making anything. And the hardest business, but yet Mandami wants to go and nationalize grocery stores. So, you know, in, in, in all the infinite wisdom of City Hall in New York, I mean, I've saved them more times than you can count. We saved them on a skating rink in, in Central Park. We saved them on a golf course, which they spent thirty, thirty, not three, thirty years trying to build. At a cost of almost $300 million to build a golf course, and I got the thing done in 18 months, right?

• 49:00Speaker 01

  And yet, in City Hall's infinite wisdom, they're gonna go nationalize grocery stores and make these things profitable. Give me a break.

• 49:05Graham Stephan?

  How are you gonna save New York in a sense? Like, it, it seems like he's getting a lot of attention, and I would even love to have him on the podcast.

• 49:13Jack Selby?

  We would love, guys, we try to have people on the left on this podcast all of the time. I'm not just saying that seriously.

• 49:19Graham Stephan?

  They don't do it. They don't do it. We want, we want more people on from the left.

• 49:22Jack Selby?

  We have Eric Trump here right now, guys. If we could just get Mandani, if we could get Kamala, if we could get anybody, any, AOC, Bernie Sanders, please.

• 49:31Speaker 01

  That's all the same questions you asked me, didn't it?

• 49:33Graham Stephan?

  What's funny?

• 49:33Jack Selby?

  We would love to.

• 49:34Graham Stephan?

  We, we've thrown out the offer for years and zero response back. So, if, if you could help, because I'm in real estate.

• 49:41Jack Selby?

  You guys on talking terms.

• 49:43Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, can, can be honest.

• 49:44Graham Stephan?

  I'm in real estate, yeah.

• 49:45Speaker 01

  I mean, the reason they won't do it is, you know, they don't control you. They control ABC, they control NBC, right? I mean, Network TV was, became the, you know, kind of the PR arm of the Democratic Party. Everybody knows that, right? You know, the reason you guys are doing great is you have an independent voice and you can ask questions and you can ask them uncomfortable questions and because of that, they won't go on your programs, right? Like, if they go on CNN, they're gonna just, you know, they're gonna hold up little, you know, fluff T-balls, you know, and let them kind of hit it out of the park all day long with nonsense. And in the case of ABC, you saw what they did with, you know, Kamala's interview. They literally edited all the questions to make her try and sound intelligent. And they took questions, they edited her answers, and they tried to make her sound intelligent. Like, this is, and that's the reason these people won't come on your podcast, because

• 50:28Speaker 01

  they, they have to do what I've done for the last 90 minutes, where you actually have to be intelligent and run your mouth and, you know, know the answers to kind of far-reaching topics of which these people don't, because they've never lived in the real world. And as I said before, most of their votes have always been, you know, yes to no.

• 50:45Jack Selby?

  But seriously, that is an honest offer. So if anyone, you know, if you know Kamala, let her know.

• 50:50Graham Stephan?

  Are you worried about him getting elected and destroying a city and putting these policies in place and driving people out? He was talking today about a 52% tax rate in New York City.

• 51:01Speaker 01

  Well, listen, guys, I left New York, I left New York because of the weaponization in New York, but I left New York also because of the taxes. I mean, between, you know, between-

• 51:06Jack Selby?

  We left California because of the taxes. We left back in 2020.

• 51:10Speaker 01

  How can you blame it? I mean, let's just take a tale of two cities, right? New York, which was our entire life, I still have a lot of assets in New York, and let's take Florida for a second, right? You know, New York is thinking about increasing property tax, you know, just taxes generally more, you mentioned the 52%, you know, kind of marginal, right? Yet DeSantis is coming out every day saying he's gonna eliminate all property taxes in the state of Florida, right? You know why DeSantis has that much cash? Because everybody left New York and they all came down here. There's an article in New York Times saying that the top 18,500 taxpayers in New York City paid 85% of the taxes. And they all left.

• 51:44Speaker 01

  They all left. And now all of a sudden, they want to raise taxes again. You know what they should do? They should go the exact opposite way. Cut wasteful spending, bring down the tax rate, and no, no city in the world could compete with New York. I love New York. New York's made. I love New York. I love everything about the city. If, if they had, and I'm not talking about bringing it down to zero, but if they brought like, you know, state and city tax down to like what North Carolina has, you know, 4%, 4.5%. Oh, it would crush. Same with California. So many people would move back to California. People would pay the marginal difference 100%. You, you couldn't compete against New York. You could pay a little more, but you know, what's going to happen? He's going to come in, your streets are going to get dirty, your streets are going to get unsafe. You know, he wants to defund the police, as you know. You know, he hates the Jewish population. I mean, he says he's including last night on Martha McCallum,

• 52:27Speaker 01

  he said that he wants to imprison, you know, Netanyahu if he ever came into, to New York. So Netanyahu comes to, to speak at the UN, and you're going to have the mayor of New York imprison him? This can't be serious. This, this, this can't be serious. Right? So congratulations, you're just going to have a major world leader that doesn't come to the UN, which is going to diminish what the UN function is, which is going to only diminish New York. It's a, it's, it's hard to believe we're here. It's incredibly. So what are you planning to do? If anything? Listen, I no longer vote in New York. I'm a proud Florida resident. I, I love it down here in Florida. It's sad, again, I have a lot of assets in New York and I, I only wish the best for the city, but it's. But you do have a big platform and a big voice. Oh, and believe me, I use that platform and voice. And, um, you know, it, it is hard to run against somebody who promises everything for free. Right?

• 53:12Speaker 01

  It's, it's kind of, you know, one of those life lessons that I think we've learned over hundreds of years. You know, somebody goes around, you know, promising, you know, the world for free. I mean, it's, it's easy to promise something until you actually have to pay for it. And, uh, and I think they're going to run into that in the hard way. And I think if he does in fact increase taxes again, I think you're just going to see another exodus from, from New York to Florida. And I think that's just going to continue to make Florida real estate more expensive. So guys, honestly, I want to bring in Asher Ghanute. He's one of our partners. He, he's a part of American Bitcoin. This is a company that we, we started, we just listed. I've never been more proud of a company in my life. Again, as I said before, we're, we're literally mining Bitcoin at $50. I believe in the future of, of cryptocurrency probably more than anything I've ever believed in my life. I think it's the, the greatest complementary asset to hard assets, which is what I do every, every day.

• 53:57Speaker 01

  And, and, uh, we should have him, uh, we should have him join. There's no, no one's a partner in this space.

• 54:02Speaker 00

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• 54:27Jack Selby?

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• 55:44Graham Stephan?

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• 55:53Jack Selby?

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• 56:00Graham Stephan?

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• 56:14Jack Selby?

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• 56:25Graham Stephan?

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• 56:47Graham Stephan?

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• 56:56Jack Selby?

  Thank you again to Helium Mobile for sponsoring this episode. So now we're going to be adding in Asher Janut from Hut8. He's the CEO of Hut8, which builds and operates data centers. How did you guys meet?

• 57:07Speaker 01

  God, it seemed like we had every mutual friend in the world who goes, Eric, you need to meet Asher. And I think they were saying to Asher, Asher, you've got to meet Eric. And the rest is history. We've come to your friends. And no one better smarter, no one better in the energy space, no one better in the crypto space anywhere in the world. And we started American Bitcoin together.

• 57:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, Mike and I were chatting about this actually last night. We were saying that one of the first nights that we met, we had like a pizza party and we were chatting about just what drove us and kind of what was the kind of intrinsic driver. And I think we connected really well because mining lives in the center of real estate development and also this crypto world. And so we started talking about, and he's like, look, I grew up living on development sites. I grew up building these buildings, these real estate properties. And so we connected a lot on kind of our, both of our passions to build infrastructure.

• 57:56Jack Selby?

  Okay, so in the simplest ways possible, because we're going to do a deep dive on crypto. That was one of the main reasons we wanted to film this episode was to talk about crypto and its involvement in the United States. Explain what it is exactly that you do and how it ties in with what Eric does.

• 58:09Speaker 05

  Sure. So Hut8 is an energy infrastructure company. And the idea is we're harnessing power to push technologies of the future forward. And what that exactly means is we're investing into power infrastructure. So that's power generation. Station interconnection to the grid and then we're building data center capacity. Those are data centers that support Bitcoin mining compute. Those are data centers that support AI compute. And so when we formed American Bitcoin, Hudd8 was one of the first Bitcoin miners out there. One of the first companies that was publicly traded to own Bitcoin on the balance sheet. And we said, as we continue to become more and more of an energy company, we need to separate kind of the Bitcoin in the energy businesses. And then so Hudd8 basically builds and operates all the data centers. And then American Bitcoin owns the actual servers that mines all of the Bitcoin and is able to produce the Bitcoin.

• 58:54Speaker 05

  And so if you think about American Bitcoin, essentially the business model is we're increasing the amount of Bitcoin we have. So our shareholders increase their Bitcoin per share. So essentially it's like a Bitcoin yield if you were to own Bitcoin directly versus owning a percentage of the company. How profitable is it to mine Bitcoin? Depends on when. Right now it's been really great. I mean, we have over 50% margins right now in terms of how we're mining. And the unique thing about our business is I think our competitive advantage is that relationship with Hudd8. Hudd8 is a large shareholder in American Bitcoin. So I obviously serve as a CEO of Hudd8 and also the exec chair of American Bitcoin. And so there's this natural synergistic relationship where American Bitcoin doesn't have to go spend the money on all these lower yielding assets.

• 59:38Speaker 05

  So like when you invest into a substation or into a building, you're not expecting to be paid back in two or three years. When you're investing into Bitcoin servers, you're expecting to be paid back really quickly. And so we have this unique relationship between the two companies that allows American Bitcoin to have these vertically integrated cheap economics without having to put out the capital spend upfront and then without having this kind of large team and overhead that we have to carry. So when did the both of you first learn about Bitcoin? You go first. You go first because you were first. All right. So, I mean, I learned of Bitcoin itself early on. I mean, we have two people in the room today who are partners in American Bitcoin as well. So early on Bitcoin and then crypto in general and Ethereum.

• 1:00:22Speaker 05

  I remember when Ethereum was sub $100, Matt Prusek, who's our president, sent me a long email and like, Bitcoin is digital gold, Ethereum is digital oil and kind of the whole presentation. And then in terms of mining specifically is our CEO, Michael Ho. And he started mining really, really early on, 13, 14 as kind of a hobbyist. And then really 15, 16 and 17 on an industrial level. And so when we started kind of the business, the idea was Bitcoin mining is now an industrial scale business. And we can go and build a blue chip company within the sector and within the ecosystem. And that kind of so really early on from buying interest hobbyists of buying GPUs and plugging them into racks and mining Bitcoins now large scale infrastructure projects.

• 1:01:06Jack Selby?

  But how early on, like what age were you, what was the price?

• 1:01:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, what was the price? The first time you bought Bitcoin.

• 1:01:11Speaker 05

  So my, my story is a little, my, my story is a little bit different because my story was when we started, so we started a company called US Bitcoin Corp. It merged into a company called HAD8, and so we run HAD8 today. And then we spun out American Bitcoin. So there's a lot of US, America in, in the story. But when we started the company in 2020, that was basically, my approach was very conservative, which was, I don't know Bitcoin that well. It's this awesome store of value, but there's also in crypto, as folks I'm sure are listening, for every one or two great projects, there's 100, 200 not great projects. Right? And so actually understanding which projects to actually invest into, what are the long-term stable assets? So Mike has owned Bitcoin since, I don't know, 2012, 13, if not earlier.

• 1:01:55Speaker 05

  And then my experience coming into it was very different, which was, okay, if I invest in Bitcoin, I'm taking volatility risk. It can go up, it can go down. And my thesis in Bitcoin grew as we started building the company. And the reason we started mining company was if Bitcoin doesn't go to zero and we're one of the best operators, we'll always make money. When times are good, we'll make a lot more money. When times are bad, we'll make less. We'll always make money in betting on kind of this asset class. And so I have a very different and unique way of entering this space. It came from a energy background of if we understand energy and energy is the thing that produces Bitcoin when you're mining and we're a low cost operator, then I have a different, so I'm not the bought Bitcoin super early on, have believed in Bitcoin for the last two decades.

• 1:02:40Speaker 05

  Mike, our, our partner is, is much deeper. I came from very much the power story, which was how do we invest into Bitcoin in a kind of de-risk fashion? And how do we manage to kind of volatile? And obviously, since building this and growing, we've become only more and more passionate about this asset class.

• 1:02:56Jack Selby?

  When did you first learn about Bitcoin?

• 1:02:57Speaker 01

  I really got into crypto when we started getting debanked. The same people that were coming after us were going after all the crypto people. The same people that were shutting down our bank accounts were shutting down the crypto people's bank accounts, all because those people believed in a different, you know, type of finance, a different way to move money. Think of Bitcoin, I mean, I think it's really important for people to kind of zoom out. We have a company that literally can mine any products for roughly 50 cents on the dollar, right? So the spot price of Bitcoin right now is 115,000 roughly, and we're mining it every single day for roughly 50% of that. Go talk to anybody who does copper, go talk to anybody who does gold, go talk to anybody who mines lead, go talk to anybody who mines silver. Most of the time, they're actually mining at about par, and then they're using complicated options and financial mechanisms to otherwise get

• 1:03:40Speaker 01

  their selling futures and all sorts of other things in order to make their profit. You also have a product that's limited, right? And I think it's the only commodity in the world, the only product, the asset class in the world that can't grow. You've got 21 million Bitcoin, slightly less because some of it's been lost over time, but you've 21 million Bitcoin. If the cost of gold ever went up to $20,000 an ounce, I would break down this wall, there's concrete behind it, and we would extract gold from those columns because there's gold in virtually everything, right? As price goes up, Elon will put a spaceship on Mars and he'll extract gold and the supply of gold will go up. That can never happen with Bitcoin, right? So it's this unbelievable asset, but it's global,

• 1:04:25Speaker 01

  it has immediate liquidity. Try walking through an airport with a gold bar, right? They're going to arrest you and they'll probably call the IRS, even if it's your own money. Around the world, it's become such a powerful tool, even maybe more so outside of the United States in that you've got absolute government corruption all over the place, you've got massive inflation. I often use Zimbabwe because I've been there and I've seen it, but I mean, you had Zimbabwe, you had inflation that was going up 1,000% a year. You had inflation that was actually going up more than that during certain periods of time under Mugabe. I mean, imagine getting a paycheck. You work in Zimbabwe, the second you get the paycheck, it's gone. Set it on fire, it's gone. Now, all of a sudden, with a basic phone, being able to connect to the internet, which virtually everybody has in

• 1:05:07Speaker 01

  the world now, you can buy an asset class that has 24-hour liquidity, that's global, that's incredibly in demand, that has a limited supply, that can never be taken from you, that can never be confiscated from you, you can't get debanked, it can't be burned, it can't be taken out by a tornado or hurricane, it's not subject to your little local branch that can be robbed. Bitcoin has become an unbelievable, an unbelievable asset. Try and transfer money. We transfer a lot of money because we're a very big company. Try and transfer money at 5:01 PM on a Friday afternoon.

• 1:05:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, through the SWIFT system, that money won't get to its intended recipient until, you know, Monday afternoon, maybe Tuesday morning. Why isn't finance 24/7? Why isn't it immediate? Why is it that every bank in the world has to have their fingers in absolutely everything? You know, if I want to go buy a watch out of Geneva, you know, why do I have to transfer money from, you know, Chase here, or whoever the hell I bank with to Geneva? Or, you know, you have FX, you know, currency exchange fees. The bank's going to have his finger in the transaction. Why? Why can't, why can't you just send me a link? You know, a link to your wallet? And instantaneously, you receive the funds at virtually no cost to move that money. And instantaneously, that watch is in a FedEx coming over to the other side of the pond.

• 1:06:24Graham Stephan?

  So how does this compare then to the dollar? Couldn't the dollar be digitalized in such a way that it could do the exact same thing?

• 1:06:31Speaker 01

  It is being digitalized.

• 1:06:32Graham Stephan?

  Right.

• 1:06:32Speaker 01

  Right? It's called stablecoins. And, but, but you're then betting on, on completely, you're, you're betting on, on the dollar. Right? I mean, Bitcoin is a store of value. It's digital gold, right? That's here. Stablecoins is obviously, you know, digitizing, obviously a currency. It doesn't have to be the US dollar, but the vast majority of stablecoins is the US dollar. We have USD1, which is the fastest growing stablecoin on, on earth right now. And it's pegged one to one with treasuries off of the US dollar. And so there's no question that the SWIFT system is going to disappear. There's no question that finance is going to become 24/7. There's no question that you're going to have this DeFi atmosphere, you know, using blockchain and smart contracts that can play a major role

• 1:07:15Speaker 01

  in the role that traditional finance is playing right now. If you have a million dollars worth of assets, right? And they're in, they're in JP Morgan Chase. Why are you going to JP Morgan Chase to ask them to give you financing? And why does that financing take you 120 days to get after going through paper contracts and, and know your customers while they have every skyscraper in every city around the world? Why, why can't you just go on there and say, I want to borrow against my money? I'm going to do this in a smart contract. And three seconds later, it's in your bank account. Right? And that's what's going to happen to finance. We, we are on the one yard line to, to something incredible. I mean, listen, crypto and what we're doing, it's growing faster than the internet grew in the 90s. Right? That's just a fact. When you look back in five years and 10 years.

• 1:07:56Speaker 01

  The entire financial landscape is going to be much different and that's all because of cryptocurrency. And that's why I'm so damn excited about it. And I would have never gotten excited about it had it not been for this, had it not been for a siege, had it not been for a de-banking, had it not been for deplatforming and realizing that there are a couple of people, you know, sitting in their ivory towers that can control what you do, what I do, what all of us do. We've all been, he's been on the receiving end of being deplatformed all because he believed in industry that was the future of finance. And we've all been there and I really believe it can never happen again based on the moves being made in crypto.

• 1:08:30Jack Selby?

  What does it mean to be de-banked? Is that just something that happens overnight? You check your accounts, there's no money in it.

• 1:08:36Speaker 05

  I'll give you an example. His is much more extreme, but we started the company. We're young entrepreneurs, just raised our series A, right? All of our money was in Bank of America, all in one bank, one bank account. We were just starting the company. We didn't have a bunch of different bank accounts. And we get an email and said, your account is shut down. You'll receive a check in the mail in the next four to six weeks. And we just said, what?

• 1:09:02Speaker 01

  Four to six weeks.

• 1:09:03Speaker 05

  We have to pay bills, we have to pay employees, we have to pay our vendors. We raised the money to go buy equipment, go build a facility. And so we had this period of time where people said, do you actually even have money? Are you a real company or not? Like we do, we just don't know it's in the ether.

• 1:09:19Jack Selby?

  Who decides that at Bank of America?

• 1:09:21Speaker 05

  It's crazy because you go into the branch and you say, where is my account? And they look it up and they say, it doesn't exist. We can't help you here.

• 1:09:29Jack Selby?

  But then what does that escalate into? You say, okay, well.

• 1:09:33Speaker 05

  You literally just wait and check the mailbox every single day.

• 1:09:36Jack Selby?

  There's no person you can contact.

• 1:09:37Speaker 05

  It's insane. You go into the branch, you're not in the system anymore.

• 1:09:39Jack Selby?

  So who's making that decision then?

• 1:09:41Speaker 01

  Bureaucrats, people who can hate you because you believe in something that they don't, which is exactly what's happening to us.

• 1:09:47Jack Selby?

  So you're posing as competition for Bank of America, I'm guessing.

• 1:09:51Speaker 05

  I think it was just because we weren't even buying Bitcoin. We were in the business of buying equipment that were building data centers to support the Bitcoin ecosystem.

• 1:09:59Speaker 01

  So it's funny.

• 1:10:02Speaker 01

  I did. In fact, I got a letter in the middle of the night. I got it from Capital One. I got it from all the banks, but the biggest one was Capital One by far. Eric, your accounts are all shut down, right? You know, where they give you a couple of days to migrate your accounts, but they're all shut down. Now, think about a company like ours where you have some of the biggest commercial buildings in the world, some of the biggest hotels in the world, where you have thousands of vendors, thousands of tenants. You've got lockbox provisions and loan documents, right? Where, you know, money has to flow in and out of certain accounts, right? So, you know, mortgages can be paid first, after taxes, everything else, and then the waterfall. You've got ACH payments coming in from every direction. You've got real estate taxes. You've got, you know, you've got hundreds of employees. You've got every cost imaginable, right? Thousands of inputs. This isn't a, this isn't a personal account where you pay a credit card out of

• 1:10:46Speaker 01

  and you pay, you know, a couple of bills, a couple of home loan bills. You have thousands and thousands of inputs. And then you take that and you spread that out to 300 accounts that all have that scenario, that all have that Christmas tree. And they call you up saying, "Congratulations, you know, you're done. You're closed." Or they give you a couple of days, the accounts close, go somewhere else. Right? They wanted to take the rails out from under us, right? They wanted to see us bankrupt. They wanted to see us gone. They didn't want us to be able to, you know, to conduct normal business. These are for condominium associations. These are for golf courses. And who is "they"? Who do you think it is? Well, I mean, two things. In a lot of cases, it was the actual bank and the higher-ups in the bank who simply didn't agree with "Let's make America great again," right? And they weren't wearing the red hat, you know, and they didn't like my father's political views.

• 1:11:31Speaker 01

  And the fact that I was standing on that stage shows, so they assert them, them. And then I think in a lot of cases, it was, it was, it's not that I think, I know. It was government regulators going in and, you know, they happened to flip to page 17 or whatever the hell page it was. "Oh, interesting. You're the Trump Organization." I'd be very careful doing business with them because we're the regulators and, you know, we will, you know, start looking. I can't tell you how many of my friends ran, ran big banks and they were shaken down by the government saying, "I hear you bank Trump and you better not do that anymore." Guys, this is real world stuff. This isn't, this isn't make believe. This isn't, and I would have never believed it could have happened in the United States of America if it didn't happen to me, right? If I didn't see, see assets that had no affiliation with politics shut down in the

• 1:12:14Speaker 01

  middle of the night for no reason whatsoever, other than political affiliation. What banks shut you down? Oh, let's start. Capital One, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, First Republic. First Republic was, was, was big, right? And then about, you know, 12 others behind then. But, but beyond those, you know, I'd, I'd say just about every major financial institution in the country. But then you had the Aon insurances of the world, then you had the Shopify's of the world. I'm never forgetting, you know, all our e-commerce platform for, for Trump was on Shopify at the time. And, you know, congratulations, you're hereby closed. Why? Like, why are we closed? Because we're selling golf polos to say Trump National Golf Course on it? Right? And that's when you realize that there's nothing that can be done in that world that

• 1:12:59Speaker 01

  can't be done better on blockchain. Guess what? You're using smart contracts, they can't do that to you. How is your relationship now with those banks? Well, they all kiss our ass. I mean, what do you, what do you think they would do now? You know, how many of them have come back to me and licked their wounds? You know? And how does that look like? Do they just apologize? Do they ever give you a reason? Yes, normally, you know, we very much, you know, Eric, it's so great to see you again. You run into them at like, you know, cocktail party or, or a lot of times they'll reach out to you and, you know, we, we really like to bring the teams back together. You really have an amazing company. We're really proud of everything that you've been able to accomplish. And I'm sitting there gritting my teeth, saying, you dirty. I can't say it on the podcast because, but you can only imagine my anger when I had hundreds of employees who didn't sleep for months on end, you know, as, as, as we're

• 1:13:42Speaker 01

  working on, on Hail Mary after Hail Mary to find, try and find every little, small regional bank, who by the way, loved our accounts, right? Because of the, the value of them. After being thrown off for dogs for doing absolutely nothing wrong.

• 1:13:54Graham Stephan?

  Could you ever talk to him and be like, hey, man, let's just like go off to the side. What happened? Like, who told you this?

• 1:13:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, but my, my conversations aren't, I think the conversation you would have is probably exponentially nicer than the conversation that I would have, right? And I think maybe that's a little bit of bitterness over what happened.

• 1:14:08Graham Stephan?

  Sure.

• 1:14:09Speaker 01

  And you'd probably be in the same seat if they did the same thing to you.

• 1:14:11Graham Stephan?

  What's funny, my Bank of America account was shut down. This is back in 2020. And my theory, and I've had this account, by the way, for 15 years. And I had a mortgage with Bank of America and my theory was that I had too much money going in the account that it flagged it. And they gave me thankfully 60 days. They said, you know, after 60 days, we have to shut down your account.

• 1:14:29Speaker 01

  Those are kind of them. They didn't give you 60 days.

• 1:14:32Graham Stephan?

  But I had everything going into one account, but I think too much money was going in and then I would transfer that to investments. And I think they saw like big transfers in and out within 24 hours.

• 1:14:41Speaker 01

  Is that capitalism?

• 1:14:42Graham Stephan?

  I guess it was that. I'm not sure. I never found out. And they never told you? Exactly. Uh, yeah, it was just, it was a letter I got in the mail. I reached out and they say, oh, your, your account has been flagged for something. And I, I looked it up online. I couldn't find exactly what it was.

• 1:14:55Speaker 01

  The employees at those banks, right? Obviously on a smaller retail account, you probably don't have an exact account rep that just kind of owns you. I remember calling some of our account reps who'd be crying, which is like their entire livelihood was managing the Trump accounts at these various financial institutions. And they were, they were gone. They were just, they were out of, they were out of work. I mean, and everything that, you know, all our accounts were just closed down for no reason other than some call from above.

• 1:15:21Speaker 01

  It can't happen. It can't happen. And I'm proud to say I've, I've held a lot of the banks accountable, you know? I was one of the first to start talking about this. Asher's the first one to say is like, he's like, I never talked about this because I always found it embarrassing. And then by the way, back in the day, I almost found it embarrassing too. Like, how can you lose a bank account? Like, we're, we're a great business. We're one of the greatest real estate companies anywhere on earth. How the hell do you lose a bank account? Like, it was, it was almost like a mark of shame. And now honestly, it's like, almost like a badge of honor that we fought through it. And I've held every single one of those banks accountable. And there's probably one that'll sue next week. So, okay. But honestly, just to make the point, they, guys, it wasn't just us. They were doing this to conservatives all across the country, right? Like, again, not, not, not back to this, but the sole concept of, of what I wrote about in Understatement, it's,

• 1:16:03Speaker 01

  they were coming after all of us. They had, they weaponized the IRS against, you know, churches, right? Against conservative causes. They weaponized every aspect of this system. The fact that both you and you have been de-banked and I've been de-banked. Like, that's more than coincidence, right? I mean, this was happening to a lot of people that they didn't like. And so to crypto, why am I such an advocate of Bitcoin? Why am I such an advocate of blockchain and DeFi? You know, I would love to see so many of these banks fail to exist.

• 1:16:33Graham Stephan?

  Can you make the argument that the government should be buying Bitcoin and putting that on their balance sheet?

• 1:16:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, 100%.

• 1:16:40Graham Stephan?

  And why aren't, why is the government not getting it? Why are they simply taking crypto and holding it rather than actively?

• 1:16:47Speaker 01

  For both sides, right?

• 1:16:48Graham Stephan?

  Please.

• 1:16:49Speaker 01

  Why should any government be buying Bitcoin? Because it's the single greatest performing asset over the last decade, increasing in value 70% a year, year over year, every year. Like Germany, a couple of years ago, there was a great article, you probably, you might know the exact numbers, but Germany had like 30,000 Bitcoin or something along those lines. And they sold it right away. They monetized it into, you know, their currency. And it was like the worst investment ever made by a government. And by the way, that's a pretty damn low bar, as you know, right? The government should definitely have, have certain crypto assets on their, on their balance sheet, mainly, mainly Bitcoin. And actually, the United States government does, right? You have a lot of forfeitures.

• 1:17:25Graham Stephan?

  Correct.

• 1:17:25Speaker 01

  And they've taken a great stance, saying that we're not selling any of it. You have a lot of countries around the world that are actively buying. If you go to, you know, the UAE, if you, if you go to a lot of countries, they are actively putting that in their treasuries. And you look at the Fortune 500 companies, they are actively hoarding Bitcoin. The biggest families, the biggest companies, you know, countries, sovereign wealth funds and individuals are all hoarding Bitcoin, right? It's why it's been as explosive as it is. And it's funny, people are like, oh, Bitcoin's down by 3% now. It's like, this time last year Bitcoin was at like 55,000 or 60,000 roughly. It's had unbelievable explosive growth. Why is the country not just going out and taking billions to go buy it? Because America kind of doesn't work that way. You have sovereign wealth funds in other countries and they go out and they make investments on behalf of that country.

• 1:18:10Speaker 01

  And honestly, I wish America had a sovereign wealth fund. I think it'd be the greatest thing we ever did. But America doesn't kind of work that way, right? America's, you know, pretty myopic. You take in tax revenue, you pay the expenses and you let capitalism and the private industry reign. Mostly these other companies, you don't really let capitalism or in countries, you kind of let, you know, government take every penny they can, invest it on behalf of the country and then pay out dividends. And so it's a little, America has a little bit of a different way of thinking and obviously thus far it's served us well.

• 1:18:39Speaker 00

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• 1:19:04Jack Selby?

  So what percentage of both of your portfolios are in Bitcoin and/or crypto? And for the average person out there, the average listener, what percentage do you recommend that they would have reflected of Bitcoin in their portfolio?

• 1:19:16Speaker 05

  So I have a pretty large percentage of Bitcoin. I am a large owner of Hade. Hade has a large owner of American Bitcoin. We hold over 10,000 Bitcoin at Hade. We have a lot of Bitcoin we're accumulating at American Bitcoin. We haven't shared the updated numbers yet. But I would say it's really what is your investment horizon? If you buy Bitcoin, you're buying and holding it, and you don't need or want that liquidity. And I think that's key. And so everyone has to think about, all right, what percentage of my portfolio can I just buy and hold? Like Bitcoin is a volatile asset. Over the course of the last decade, it's compounded at over 7% on kind of an average annual basis. And so, but there are years where there's pull downs, and you have to be able to withstand those pull downs and not sell.

• 1:19:58Speaker 05

  And so I would say, I mean, if you're just kind of passive and you say, hey, I want to dabble, have a couple of percentage points, 5%, potentially even 10%, and just hold and leave it and pretend that that capital doesn't exist. And in 10 years from today, you'll be very, very happy. Right? On the other hand, if you're younger, you're a bit more risk-taking, and you want to build more generational wealth, then you can increase that percentage because you're a large earner and can have new income coming in that you spend instead of your assets.

• 1:20:28Jack Selby?

  And also, where do you hold your Bitcoin? Like, do you have it in cold storage? Because I, I mean, I don't maybe want to say exactly. I have mine in Coinbase. I don't know, like, you know, how secure that is? This is like a very novice question, but for the people out there that want to buy Bitcoin, what's the easiest and best way of doing it?

• 1:20:46Speaker 01

  You know, the amazing thing now, you can buy Bitcoin at a thousand different places, right? Go back five years, you had to buy it on a ledger, and you had to kind of put it in cold storage. You were buying it mainly on DeFi, and it was a complicated process. It lost a lot of people, you know, and it was, it was, it was hard. Now it's easy. You can go to Fidelity, and you can stand up a digital asset wallet in three seconds. You can go to Schwab, you can buy, you can buy ETFs, you can buy... American Bitcoin. I mean, we're listed, you know, so your stock account, you can literally go buy American Bitcoin on the NASDAQ as of, you know, six weeks ago when we listed the company, right? I mean, you can buy it through most of the financial institutions. And if you can't, you can buy spot ETFs. And if you don't want to do that, you can buy pure plays like us and, you know, or you can go to Coinbase, or you can go to Kraken, or you can go to Binance, or you can go to, you know, a thousand other, you

• 1:21:31Speaker 01

  know, places, or you can go back and do it, you know, the traditional way and own it on Ledger if that's what you choose to do. But, you know, Bitcoin has so many different kind of ways you can can own it relative to where we sat five years ago. And I think it's one of the reasons that all of crypto has exploded the way it is, because a lot of people just didn't want to go through the hassle. A lot of people didn't want to go through the pain. And now, now guess what? The market opens up at 9:30 in the morning and, you know, you can put $10,000 into something that you believe in. But, you know, I think Asher said it best, you know, there's a lot of people who who love crypto and they'll hop in and they'll ride it up, they'll ride it up, and they're seeing these compounding returns that are insane, 70% year over year, as as Asher said. And then all of a sudden, it draws down 10% or draws down 20%, right? And they lose their

• 1:22:13Speaker 01

  minds. They can only see a one-way arrow. And I think you have to have, you know, they call them diamond hands, right? But like, you've got to be able to hold and you've got to be able to understand that you might have 5, 6x the return, but you also might have 5, 6x the volatility. And volatility is actually what's amazing in crypto. Go buy the dips, right? The people who have been successful in crypto are the ones who bought in here, wrote it up, it might come down, and guess what? They dollar-cost average back in, wrote it up even higher, it comes down, they buy back in. Buy the dips in crypto. And the people who have done that historically have have made an absolute fortune.

• 1:22:49Graham Stephan?

  How manipulated is the price of Bitcoin? Because I see all of these charts and analysis on Twitter, and they say, oh, this Bitcoin whale just came in and like, shorted the market and then bought the dip perfectly. And like, all of this stuff. And now there's this narrative out there that like, someone's behind the scenes, like, you know, being able to influence the market, upper, down like 10, 20%.

• 1:23:10Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's certainly easier to do with meme coins, right? Than than it is Bitcoin. I mean, you know, what's the average liquidity? Michael, our partner, would know this right behind us. Michael, what's the average liquidity of Bitcoin on 60 billion a day? So, you know, somebody going in with 100 million bucks is a moving, moving BTC. At all, right? It's and by the way, yeah, there are people who take these wild bets. And by the way, I've seen as many go right as go wrong, where somebody goes in with 20x leverage on a BTC bet, right? And then, you know, BTC goes down $1,000 and they get totally liquidated. Like, that's not how you play this game, in my opinion. I would never play the game like that. I really do believe in buying and holding long term. And I think if you if you buy Bitcoin

• 1:23:52Speaker 01

  and you you buy and hold and you buy into some of the dips at obvious times, and you open up your eyes in a four or five year period of time, I think you're going to have done exceptionally well.

• 1:24:02Jack Selby?

  You know, it's funny is have you seen the stuff online where people are speculating that Barron is like a secret crypto whale? People on Twitter are like posting that.

• 1:24:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was really, it was really bizarre is the same tweets that come up about Barron come up about me in the exact same verbiage with same images, just with a different face. I mean, apparently last week I bought a billion dollar yacht. I'm not sure if you saw this.

• 1:24:23Jack Selby?

  Oh, how is it?

• 1:24:24Speaker 01

  Hey, you know, I've been really, really busy with under siege, so.

• 1:24:27Jack Selby?

  So now this is how you relax?

• 1:24:29Speaker 01

  No, no, I guess I guess I just forgot that I bought a billion dollar yacht. I just, I guess I didn't know about that. I don't know the name. I don't know where it's being built. I know nothing about this yacht, but apparently I bought a billion dollar yacht last week.

• 1:24:38Jack Selby?

  Congrats.

• 1:24:39Speaker 01

  You know, so so you guys will be the first guests when we get this.

• 1:24:41Jack Selby?

  Thank you.

• 1:24:42Speaker 01

  No, it's a joke. And then I'll see the exact same picture of the same fictitious yacht. And, you know, Barron Trump just bought a yacht and it's it's. Don't believe what you, you know, believe credible people. Don't believe what you read on the internet.

• 1:24:53Jack Selby?

  That's what we've come to experience as well.

• 1:24:54Graham Stephan?

  I think people like to think, though, that Barron's behind the scenes, like I see him next to Trump is like, "Father, buy now," or "Father, time to dump." It is funny. And I think people like it's a bit mysterious.

• 1:25:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:05Graham Stephan?

  Like, if people don't see him.

• 1:25:07Speaker 01

  By the way, Barron's a sweetheart and he's a, he's a great friend of mine. And he's, he's really, I brought him into a lot of the crypto projects that we've done and he's, he's done great for himself and we've had a lot of fun doing it together. But I can tell you that I look at those memes and I literally. I laugh, right? And by the way,

• 1:25:25Jack Selby?

  They're hilarious, yeah.

• 1:25:26Speaker 01

  You know, a meme is meant to be funny, right? I think sometimes I hope, I hope serious people or people who are trying to enter a space don't take this crap literally. Because I think that's dangerous. And I think, you know, once in a while, the industry has to mature a little bit. It's matured a lot. I mean, over the last five years, it's matured a lot. You have serious people. I like, I am dead serious about replacing traditional finance with cryptocurrency. I'm dead serious about this. This isn't fun. This isn't trading meme coins. This isn't screwing around. This isn't gambling on brands you like. I am dead serious about the rails of what cryptocurrency will do and having America lead the way. And curing so many of the wrongs that have been perpetrated against so many people,

• 1:26:10Speaker 01

  including both of you and me, based on what you just said. And so there's a lot of people. Asher, I mean, he's building, spending billions and billions of infrastructure, electrical infrastructure, the heaviest gauge wires you've ever seen behind the biggest energy, you know,

• 1:26:31Speaker 01

  formulation, I mean, you know, in the greatest complexes you've ever seen. You look at, you look at one of our sites and mine's Bitcoin, right? Every one of these computers is literally running underwater. It's all, they're all liquid cooled. All the chips are liquid cooled. I mean, this is space age stuff. It is, it's real, it's tangible. It serves an amazing, you know, purpose and it is the future of finance. There's just no question about it. And, you know, you have to be able to differentiate that from the, from the garbage and the meme warriors and, you know, the people who haven't left their, their, you know, their grandmother's basement in a long time and just want to spew nonsense and make up facts and, you know, claim that Baron and I both bought the same boat for a billion dollars last year.

• 1:27:11Graham Stephan?

  We're going to be giving away a hat to one Iced Coffee Hour member. So this is it. One of you will win. Pass me those other two bucks. Yeah, dude, okay, so this is for us. Eric, thank you.

• 1:27:23Speaker 01

  Guys, thank you.

• 1:27:23Graham Stephan?

  Thank you so much for coming on the Iced Coffee. Great, great being on.

• 1:27:25Speaker 01

  Thanks. Thanks, guys.

• 1:27:35Speaker 06

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