Playing the Long Game ft. Mark Lack | Coffeez for Closers with Joe Shalaby

0:00He built a multi-million dollar brand, made a big exit, and then went all in on bitcoin, tripling his money in just over a year. But for Mark Lack, success isn't just about stacking wealth. It's about playing the long game. From one of the world's best paintball players to one of the top personal branding experts, Mark has spent his life mastering one thing, how to get ahead before the rest of the world catches up. But here's the twist. After selling his company, Mark faced a life-changing moment that put everything into perspective. today we're talking about entrepreneurship wealth legacy and what really matters in the end welcome to coffees yeah you know bringing the energy already yeah you know it's a big intro for a young guy you know people are like this dude joe's about the interview it's nice to be called young because i have a three-year-old daughter or she'll be three next month and that makes me feel old you know kids always make you feel old yes i got we got four we were talking about the kids and you know they but they bring back your youth and they keep that vitality and keep you grinding for sure you know that's that fire that's inside inside of you i could feel it it's the vision we said you know pain pushes until the vision pulls and kids help you get that vision dialed mark let's get right into it big exit and uh bitcoin you know tripled so it did and i put it all in there so it worked out well and that right there is a huge lesson though right is it's like for me that was such a paradigm shift that i spent so many years over a decade working hard to make money and to have the financial freedom and the time freedom that comes with that and the choices you can have for your family and then I got liquidity that was of a of a good amount that I was able to then have the conviction and education on bitcoin and its future and put all of the money on bitcoin at$25 ,000 and today we just tapped right around 74 ,000 again so it's almost 3x in just over a year since I bought in heavy I had been buying in since 2020 but like I I bought in heavy, all the liquidity from that.

2:05And that mindset was like, whoa, I just made more money in my whole life doing nothing. My money went to work for me. I didn't have to work for my money. That shift of my money is working for me at such an accelerated rate. And I had educated myself on where to put that money. Not some BS bond or money market fund. It's given me five and a half percent, which a lot of my friends were like, my money's all tied up in this. And I was like, dude, you're getting 5%. You know what I mean? Like I'm up 180%, 200%, 300%. Like, what are you doing? And it was their lack of education reflects their lack of conviction.

2:41And for me, I had heard about the proposition that this could be the number one technology in our lifetime and study it every single day relentlessly. Because where else? Have you heard anything else that could be the number one thing of our lifetime? Have you heard anything? No. Because I want to learn about it. And we were talking about like, this is the highest performing asset. We were just at lunch. We were just at lunch talking about this. Yeah. Ever. Like when you hear this is the number one asset and opportunity and technology in our lifetime, bro, like a century, this is it. And me, I think ever, it's ever like right there with like the internet, but you couldn't like invest in the internet.

3:23You can invest in things built on the internet, like companies, but like, this is right there. this is like if you could have invested in the internet and um and for some reason when people hear that they don't just immediately go maybe i should spend some time learning about this right rather than sound bites off um social media or whatever it's like dive in and like i'd never heard anybody tell me like this is the thing dude and so for me i was like whoa no and billionaires are saying this is the thing and so i was like whoa i've never heard anybody talk like that before about a thing and an opportunity and so i was like i'm going all in on that and uh it's paid off.

3:55So for, for people to understand, it's like, if you find out what that thing is, go all in on it, take the risk. If you're young enough, there's context here, right? Like, I don't know your situation and whatnot, not financial advice, even though telling people to buy Bitcoin, it's commodity. You can tell people to buy it. It's not sec. You don't have to worry about that. Um, I'm not telling you to go buy a stock. I'm telling you to buy a commodity like gold. I can tell people to buy that if I want. So yeah, but do your research. But I think when you do your research, you come to the inevitable conclusion that anybody does, who's put a hundred hours or more studying this um it's going to change everything um and that's why it's about to hit all-time highs a new all-time high again again before the election um and it's going to rip forever with volatility in between but like zoom out real estate theoretically goes up forever if you buy pristine real estate it goes up forever um as a reflection of the i think all real estate goes up forever anyways even right even if it's pristine real estate because bitcoin is pristine So I'm trying to make the comparison that like if you buy the best commodity or the best asset or the best real estate, theoretically, it should go up forever.

4:56And usually at a disproportionate rate. Well, beach real estate is just going to go up every year. It's not going to have that volatility. Right. You're comparing it to like prime beach real estate. Right, right. But I don't want to turn this into a whole Bitcoin podcast because otherwise I will right now. Yeah, yeah. No, we could easily talk about Bitcoin. I can talk about why it's better than everything. Yeah. Even per scene beach real estate. I know. We even got about. For so many reasons. Yeah. Yeah, but let's, because there's so many podcasts and educational platforms just on Bitcoin, but we did have a huge day today, so congrats.

5:24It's still early, because I can already hear the people, you know, is it early? Is it still a good time to get in? Because you asked that at lunch today. Dude, you know what? I invested in Bitcoin, and I lost my tail in 2018, and then I invested. But see, had you held it, you'd be up so much, and that's the misconception that people have, is you're never down if you hold it long enough, just like real estate. You're never down if you hold it long enough. and again, most right now, especially because it's at an all-time high, no one's down. So technically I could say nobody's down right now if they bought and held because we're at an all-time high.

5:53So anybody who bought and held at any point in time is theoretically up. I love the chatter about Bitcoin. I love where it's going and I love that it's continually going up. And for those who are reluctant and we had this long discussion, it's still early. It's still really all the sailor says it's year one of the 10 year gold rush. And so 2024 was the very beginning of what's going to be 10 years of Bitcoin adoption globally, institutions, governments. It'll be in your pension. You'll have it even if you don't know it because it'll be slipped into your pension and your 401k and ETFs. And, you know, like old people will have it and they don't even know they have it because it's just Bitcoin.

6:36Yeah, because they're invested in funds that, you know, have to have a small allocation to it. or they're invested in the S &P 500 and Michael Saylor's micro strategy, MSTR is about to get added into that. Real quick, cause I don't want to talk about MSTR, but we mentioned it at lunch today and it's such, so people can understand like how MSTR stock, micro strategy has gone up 1200 % in one year. It's gone up a lot. We could look at the exact numbers. 12, 1300%. You don't need to, you know, I, all I know is ridiculous amounts. Yeah. A ridiculous amount. Unbelievable. And the reason why is because he took a unique, the CEO took a very unique strategy.

7:14He had Apple or Microsoft done the same strategy. Microsoft's talking right now on their board meeting in December. If they're going to add Bitcoin to their balance sheet instead of just having cash on their reserves, having some Bitcoin on them. I think that that's probably going to pass. If that passes, that's going to change the landscape for everybody. Because in January of 2025, so a couple months from now, the FASB accounting laws change, which shows fair value accounting versus intangible accounting. So companies like Microsoft who hold Bitcoin on their balance sheet can show when Bitcoin goes up, they can show it on their quarterly earnings that they had a positive impact on their balance sheet versus right now, you can only show an impairment loss.

7:54If Bitcoin goes down, you have to show that you can only show it went down. If Bitcoin went down and then it went up, you have to show the down. You can't show that up. So it's just like, and again, I'm not an accounting expert, but like that's the gist of it is there was, there's no reason for a big company to hold it on their balance sheet because you could only show losses, not gains, but in January that changes. And micro strategy has shown that his stock went from 2 billion to 54 billion in just a few years, 2 billion to 54 billion market cap in just a few years from buying Bitcoin. His stock goes up in proportion at a three X leverage.

8:27So if Bitcoin goes up 10%, his stock goes up 30 % and Bitcoin's up like 180 % right now. so his stocks it's just disproportionately up every company when they when they compare themselves to mstr probably like kicking themselves in the even nvidia is down compared to microstrategy mstr is up more you were talking mstr makes nvidia look like a little runt yes their stock they're everyone's like oh i wish i bought nvidia well actually you wish you bought mstr because it's up even more and it still has a lot more to run because it's only at a 50 billion market cap where NVIDIA is at 3.6 trillion.

9:00So it's not like NVIDIA is going to go up another 100x, but MSTR is for sure going to go up a lot. That's not financial advice because that's SEC. That's stock. Well, okay. We're not saying to buy anything. We threw a lot at people really, really quick. But these are the plays you got to make though because the big thing that people need to understand as we talk about stuff, because this is macro, this dominates all else. Because we talk about a lot of things, but if the oxygen got sucked out of the room, nothing else would really matter except getting oxygen. And so we could talk about a lot of things and it's great, but the big thing that everybody has to understand is the oxygen is being sucked out of the room and what that means as a metaphor is the government is printing more money than they've ever printed in the last 200 years and they're printing it at such an accelerated rate because the debt keeps piling up so fast and the interest on the debt keeps piling up so fast that inevitably if you look at other countries that are much smaller than us, but it happens nonetheless, they get into hyperinflation where they have to print so much money just to survive that while you're literally eating lunch, like we just went and had lunch, they're erasing the price of the lunch on a whiteboard and writing a more expensive price before you've even finished the lunch.

10:08It costs more. By the time you're finishing the meal, the price has already gone up. That's how fast the inflation is happening. Now for us, we're like, oh yeah, the last four years, things cost a lot more since the pandemic. You know what I mean? It's like things cost more because they printed so many trillions of dollars. We actually like really notice the inflation. Like my grandma was always like, it used to cost me$2 to go to the gas station. And now it's a hundred that's inflation over 80, 90 years. But if you look, the government printed more money in the last four years than they did in the last 200.

10:37That's a pretty disproportionate, uh, accelerated inflation rate. And so the point is, if they keep doing this, it's like the old adage, the penny that doubles every day. Would you rather get a million dollars in cash right now, or a penny that doubles every day for 31 days. Most people who haven't heard this before say, I'll take a million in cash right now because a penny that doubles every day can't possibly be more than a million dollars in 31 days because it's one penny, two pennies, four pennies, eight pennies. That can't possibly add up to more than a million dollars in 31 days. But crazy enough on day 31, you have roughly$10 million in pennies, $10 million.

11:10And the reason is because those last couple of days, it's like$2 million, $4 million,$8 million. It's so rapid at the very end. And that's why there's a bunch of great books out there about hyperinflation like parker lewis talks about gradually and then suddenly 200 years and then suddenly boom the last four just rips your face off the last four years of printing is the same as the last 200 that's hard to wrap your head around so now you extrapolate the last four years over 10 20 more years at this accelerated i don't think we're gonna have this kind of accelerated right now especially with you know even if it just stays the same i'm hoping a massive...

11:47Which it sort of has to. It sort of has to just to pay off. Yeah. If you understand unfunded liabilities and the$1.3 trillion we owe just an interest on the debt. It's crazy. I won't get into it because it'll be a whole different conversation that we can go on. But the point is the government's printing more money than they've ever printed before. And that's going to make it more difficult for your typical middle-class consumer to go and buy things. Rent's going to cost more. Gas doesn't cost more. Food's going to cost more. Everything's going to cost more. And the rate at which inflation is going up, the cost of goods, the cost of housing, the cost of things that you want to spend your money on nobody wants money they want what it can get you and so that's why you don't want like money from another government that's like a trillion pesos or whatever right like you you may not want that or a bajillion lira like you may not want that you want u.s dollars that's why it's the global reserve currency for now um but you don't earn a percentage annual income goes up three percent a year so average person makes three percent more per year but the inflation rate is much more than that like we were talking about right like things that you want to buy, like food and a house is going up so fast.

12:48That's why they're saying like millennials won't own houses. Like it'll be like the most disproportionate home ownership ever. Like before it was like every baby mover owns a house. Now it's like not many of my friends own houses and they'll never be able to afford in a house because the house keeps going up 10, 20 % a year. In California, especially. Especially here. But their income goes up 3 % a year, but the house goes up 10 % a year. How are you ever going to afford it? You can't afford it now. how are you going to ever afford it? My house doubled in four years, doubled in four years. That's not supposed to happen, dude.

13:17So any of my friends who love the neighborhood I lived in, they can't afford it now because it doubled and their income didn't double in four years. No one's income doubled. Yeah. Well, yours did. You got that big exit, put it on Bitcoin, it tripled. But again, because I invested in something that's going to inflate faster than the rate of the money expansion. You see that this is where it's all going. I can get so rich doing nothing because I bought an asset that goes up faster than the monetary expansion rate. Just like my house doubled, bro. I bought Bitcoin at the same time I bought my house.

13:46My Bitcoin's up like 18 X. My house is only up a hundred percent. My Bitcoin's up 1800%. So I probably shouldn't have bought my house. I should have bought more Bitcoin. You see my point? So invest in things that go up and as a reflection of the monetary expansion rate, the more money they print, the more my house will go up. You know, while you were talking, it just reminds like everybody knows the classic way to get rich in America is real estate. It was real estate, real estate, real estate. That mantra or that attitude. That was before Bitcoin. That was before. Everyone's now like, we will be telling our kids, well, invest in Bitcoin.

14:21Like invest in Bitcoin because it's going to keep going up. And this, it will probably be the new standard of wealth. The difference is you can fractionally own it. So somebody can buy a hundred dollars worth of Bitcoin, but you can't buy a hundred dollars worth of a house. Yeah. one day we'll be talking like i own like my dad's gonna pass me down one bitcoin oh yeah you're gonna be a millionaire a whole coiner yeah and one coin can be fractionalized into 100 million units or satoshis um so you can own 100 million you know fractionalized units of one full coin so it's like pretty cool like there's a dollar and then there's 100 pennies right there's a bitcoin is 100 million satoshis or little units so i'll be owning one full coin will be a really big deal in the future.

15:03Yeah, it will be. Biggest companies in the world, trillion dollar companies, BlackRock, they're all predicting Bitcoin's going to go to millions and millions of dollars for one single Bitcoin. It's unbelievable. So at$73 ,000, that's a pretty good opportunity right there to go up. And they have a lot of interest in it going to that price and they will personally funnel, funnel. Get it to that price. Yeah, they already are. Because they're going to just buy it up. What BlackRock's doing with real estate here in the US, they're like, let's just buy every property exactly that we possibly can exactly but now they're seeing more like bitcoin what you have to understand is if you have a nine-to-five job and you're watching this you will never make enough money to afford the things you want in life unless you're just a really rare decimal of one percent high earner who's in sales or some performance-based job where your income is not a reflection of your time nine to five but it's a reflection of your output so in sales you get paid commission based on closing a result, a sale, right?

16:00So not many people though work in a performance-based job where their income is attached to their performance. Most people get paid just to show up and they get paid for their punch in the clock, right? And so those people who get paid to punch the clock will eventually probably have some form of universal basic income or not end up living the life that they're really capable of. And it's not their fault. It's the government is printing more money than they ever have in any generation before us. And so that's why like my grandparents owned multiple houses and a motor home and a boat. And it was like, that's what everybody did back then.

16:33Right. You had a house and a motor home and a boat back way back then. Right. Um, and then my parents like easily owned a house and baby boomers, right. Baby boomers have like$75 trillion in assets. Crazy. Um, but millennials and Gen Z and the ones younger than that, it's going to be tough. They have to compete against AI, taking their jobs and they have to compete against the fact that everything's going to cost so much and companies can't afford to pay them at the rate of which the government's devaluing everything. So like if all of a sudden like my house doubles again in four years, again it doubles in four more years, dude, no one's going to be able to afford that because their income didn't double and then double.

17:09It's like, so those people's income... It's just like what's happening in Tokyo. It's happening in London. If you look in history, it pretty much always happens. It's the reason why empires collapse is because at some point there's been enough war and enough, you know, plandemics and enough reasons that the government can justify printing trillions of dollars to save the country. And at this point, they either have to let it collapse, which is why the people, oh, it's going to collapse. It's the worst recession ever. The banks have more outstanding debt than by 700 % than they did in 08. Like the stats are crazy for why we should have a recession.

17:41But it's called a reverse market crash. The government can't let it crash because if they do, it'll be so bad of a crash it'll be like great depression bad like worse than 07 08 like you're talking back to the 1920s bad like a great depression bad like because we have so much more debt like there wasn't that much debt back then like if you think about how much debt we have like it's just so much worse and so they can't let it collapse and so what happens they just keep printing money it's almost just like um they if they let it collapse america's done so they can't afford for that to happen. So regardless of who's in office, they don't want to be the president that went down with America.

18:19So they have to print more money. And again, tying this back to businesses and why I sold my company was because I knew that I couldn't make enough money every year to keep growing to offset the rate of which the government was going to screw me. The government was going to make my house double in the next four or five more years, just like it did the last four years. And I knew that I wasn't going to earn enough money in my business to offset that delta of, wow, they're really screwing me. They're making everything cost more. And when I want to buy that $10 million house, it's going to be that much harder for me.

18:50You know what I mean? Um, so I sold my business and I put all the money, I basically reached into the future and grabbed three years of net cash and I got all of it in one day. And then I put all of it on Bitcoin because I knew what's the asset that's going to go up at a disproportional asymmetrical rate. That's going to go up so much higher than the money they're printing. Just like my house doubled in four years, but my Bitcoin went up 18 times in those four years. Man. So I knew that what I just did was I just basically went out and I grabbed like 10 years of cash. I got three years from my business, put it on Bitcoin and Bitcoin has now basically tripled since I bought it.

19:28So that's three times three. So I basically got reached into the future. I got nine years of net cash all in one year and Bitcoin is going to double again. And it's going to double again. It's going to double again it's going to double again and i'll have made the best trade slash investment slash bet of my life selling my company at the perfect time in 2023 going all in on bitcoin in 2024 and see you later bitcoin's just gonna it's gonna go all the way up it's gonna have volatility in between but like if i hold it for 10 years you'll see me and bitcoin will be at a million two million dollars and you'll be like you still holding and i'll be like yes so i want to i want to talk about you know your entry into entrepreneurship and how it all kind of started with becoming one of the world's best paintballers.

20:08So how was that journey going from one of the world's best paintballers to becoming like one of the top entrepreneurs? I'll give you the fast because now I feel old because it's so long ago, but I'll fly through the bullet points for it and you can choose to dive into whatever chapter you want. So I didn't like school, didn't resonate with me, didn't like the stuff I was being taught, started to resent education because if someone's just trying to feed you a bunch of BS and you're like, dude, this is not, I don't really give a shit about, are we able to come up on here? I don't, I don't really give a shit about any of this information you're teaching me.

20:41And I started to get smart enough where I would ask, well, what am I ever going to use this for? Right? Like, when am I ever going to use, why am I having to give up so many years of my life to learn this information? And the teachers didn't give me good enough reason. Didn't like if somebody, it's almost like a business. Like if somebody's like, well, why do I need to do data enrichment? I'm like, dude, let me tell you. And then they're like, whoa, that was a really good reason. But if I tell you I'm giving my time and my money to come to this school, to get an education and you can't tell me why a good enough reason why I'm even going to need this education, I'm leaving.

21:09This is a business. I'm paying you for a service. And if you can't tell me why I need it, I'm leaving. I'm going somewhere else. And so I started to self-educate myself with people like Tony Robbins and John Asaroff and old school, Brian Tracy and Jim Rohn and all the personal development and then marketing and sales and came to realize self-education was going to be my route, not for a formal traditional education that most people go through, get a degree, go beg somebody to hire you get a job that has a fixed income that's now lower than the rate of inflation and you're just slowly going poor um so i realized self-education was my route i got super invested into sales and marketing because i was like i want to get rich everybody thinks i'm the stupid kid who doesn't do well in school so i want to prove them wrong which is the pain pushes right pain pushed me like michael jordan was the last guy picked on the team and he was like no I'm going to be the best.

21:59And so everyone's like, you're stupid, bro. You don't do well in school. And I was like, dude, I'm not stupid. I just think this information we're learning is pointless and I don't need to waste my time on it. What's the point of getting an A? And guess what? I mean, literally my entire class doesn't make as much as I do. You know what I mean? It's like take all the kids that were in my class. None of them all combined together. Even if there's one superstar guaranteed, they don't make what I do. All of them combined. And I don't say that in a bragging way. It's just the facts because I'm still friends with a lot of my friends from college who went to the fancy schools and some of them actually are employees of my company.

22:31Like, it's just funny how it shifts, right? It's like formal education gets you a job. Self-education can give you the life that you want, whatever that looks like for you. Cause you choose school. You don't choose. They hand you a textbook. I was like, nah, I want to, I want to choose what I'm going to learn based on what outcomes I want. And so for me, I would ditch school and I would go listen to audio books and read books from Jay Abraham and Tony Robbins. And I mean, I, and if you've, I don't know that we have, we haven't done a zoom yet, but at my house, um, my home office, I have a big bookshelf behind me of like a thousand books and I've read most of them.

23:03Um, that was when I was like full tilt, like college to, you know, before kids just reading, like my goal was to try to be like Tai Lopez, a book a week, you know, and it was like, I would just go through so many books, just like obsessed because I saw the reflection, better education would give me knowledge to take action that would make me more money. And as soon as I attached more money, which meant choices, freedom, better life, everything, um, to what I learned, I was like, Oh my God, inside these pages is money inside. These pages is gold. I have to find it. And I'd look at the books as like a game.

23:38Cause I like games and I would open the book and I'd be like, I got to find the next gold thing. That's going to give me that. And then more books you read, the better you get at connecting dots. You know, like we're talking and it's like, dude, you see the connections between this and this and this, and you need a lot of information to be able to connect the dots. Just like if you went and talked to some random person on the street who works at Chipotle, they probably wouldn't be able to connect a lot of dots regarding like, you know, the government's gonna print enough money, it's causing inflation, it's gonna make things go up, well, I gotta find the right assets.

24:06They're not thinking about connecting, they just go, dude, things cost more. And it's like, dude, you didn't connect the dots? Like, you see what I'm saying? Lack of education. And so what I realized was like, the more education I can get, the more I could connect dots. And so then I started to become obsessed with what is the education that I need to connect the right dots so that I can get filthy rich in the best way possible so I can go out and focus on things in a non-transactional way. I don't think people, I don't think God put us on this planet to be slaves to working for money. That's just my belief.

24:38You're absolutely right. Right? No, he did not. I mean, he put us on this earth to prosper. He put us on this earth to serve. Right. And so I want to, and I am now, but I want to really get to that place where it's like, dude, I don't even ever even think about a transaction. Like, how are we going to do business or make money? Instead, I'm just always coming from a place of like, how can I help you? How can I help people? Right? Like, just shift full philanthropy mode. And I have like my own dollar amount in my head. Like, when I get to this dollar amount, then I can just shift to 100 % that.

25:10But I'm slowly doing it and slowly doing it and slowly doing it because I see that as the vision. I want to be like full philanthropy, contribution, education. Like Michael Saylor gives all his education money for free like that. Like I want to like go out and solve like global problems and like get behind things like that and not be like, well, but I got to make rent. But I got to and I'm already past that. But you get my point. Like it's hard to like, what's the number? Mine's a couple hundred million because I just believe like at a couple hundred million dollars, you can you're done. You know, your philanthropy goals like and you also like you also sort of and maybe it's a limiting belief.

25:40But you also sort of need a certain net worth to get in the door with people. yeah like elon musk's probably not gonna like you know be like hey let's go conquer things together and solve these big issues together you don't have any money so you could be an employee or it's like hey i'm gonna put 100 million in this project with you let's get it done he's like oh you okay okay you can come to the table now and so i also believe sometimes you need to have like the connections and the money to be able to make the big impacts without just being like dude you're just an employee at the charity no i fund the charity and that's what makes it go and so for me, I just feel like everybody should strive to figure out what that vision looks like for them.