Crypto to a Million & AI to Infinity with Matt Morgan E149

0:05Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Money Mondays podcast where we cover three core topics how to make money, how to invest money, how to give it away to charity. These podcast episodes are always under 40 minutes for your listening pleasure because the average workout is 45 minutes. The average commute to work is 45 minutes. This episode will be between 33 and 37 minutes for you guys. Now, it's really rare that I bring guests back onto these episodes. I've only been doing this podcast for two and a half years. Today, we are ranked number 25 in the world out of 5.4 million. Crushing. Crushing.

0:37So this gentleman, he happens to be here in Las Vegas, and I'm out here for some meetings. And so bada bing, bada boom, we have none other than Matthew Morgan. If you can, dive in, give us the quick two-minute bio, so we get straight to the money. Awesome. Well, thanks for having me, Dan. I appreciate you as always. I'm happy to jump in on the Money Mondays when I can. My name is Matt Morgan, born and raised in a farm in Montana. I'm left in 2010 for greener pastures, if you will. I've lived in many major cities, Arizona, Las Vegas, L.A., San Diego, Orange County, Miami, any warm city basically in the country I've lived in.

1:18Built some large companies. My claim to fame was really in cannabis during the epicenter of the boom of that from 2010 to 2020. I built over a billion dollars worth of cannabis companies. We exited. I got a small piece of all that. and so since about 2020 I've been I guess you could say semi-retired or not an operator more as a passive investor helping coach operators capitalize them strategy and kind of just been working from home for the last five years and flying around to meetings here and there but it's been it's been good man you were an optionally busy retired guy if I was fully retired I'd probably go on mentally insane so you'd have to go to like the mental insane asylum to come find me all right pop quiz someone walks in the door and says matt morgan here's 2.8 billion dollars you can never work on anything again for the rest of your life wow man like it business is like a game it's like the ultimate game right so like you have to stop playing the game but could i put the 2.8 billion that's your first thought can i buy one thing with it Can I buy Bitcoin or not?

2:28Yes, you can buy Bitcoin. Because my fear is that if they give me 2.8 billion of US dollars, it could be worth zero long before my life is over. We're going to get there. Okay, so let's cover our three topics. How to make money, how to invest money, how to give it away to charity. You've been involved in the cannabis industry, the crypto industry, and as a passive investor into companies. When it comes to making money, what do you think holds people back? most people in society in America what do you think holds them back from making more money why are they complacent making 30k 40k 50k 60k etc fear I think that if you interviewed everyone on their deathbed that they they would tell you that their biggest regret is not taking more chances in life and I think fear holds them back it's the small carrot of dangling in front of them every two weeks of this this guaranteed paycheck to ensure that they can eat that they have a place to live, keep the babies, whatever it may be.

3:25But fear is by far the biggest driver why people don't ever get to the next level. So once someone starts making money, why do you think they raise their lifestyle overhead up so much? We've watched a lot of guys go from making$100 ,000 to$200 ,000,$200 ,000 to$500 ,000, have an exit for millions of dollars, and then they're broke or retracting afterwards. Why do you think they raise their overhead so much? So their monthly burn? And you just, norms, I mean, there's social, outer social pressure because when you start crushing it, people are like, oh, my God, it's so-and-so. And so you want to have the car that matches that persona.

4:01You want to have the house that matches that persona. You want to have the luxury watch and the outfit that matches that persona. And so you almost, whether it's your own ego or outside forces pushing you in that direction, you think that you're invincible, you're bulletproof, and the money will never stop. so you buy all these things that are really completely irrelevant. So I'm going to give you guys a quick word of advice. It's not that you shouldn't go try to buy that first watch or buy that first car. There is a very good incentive of having a goal. A lot of people need that goal of getting the car, the watch, the thing, whatever that thing is, the house.

4:36They want to get something, and that can be a good goal and a driver for you to work hard whether you have a job or you're building a company. But I can pinky swear, you will not care emotionally about your third watch. You will never ever ever ever care about your third car You will never even visit your fifth bedroom at your house because why would you why would you go in your fifth bedroom? And so what happens is you buy that second third fourth car and you don't care about it after a week or two You buy that second third and fourth watch and you literally don't wear it because you like the apple watch Or you like the one watch you wear all the time You go from a two-bedroom apartment to a four-bedroom penthouse and you never go in bedrooms three and four literally ever and so I say that because I don't want to stop you from trying to buy the thing the one or two things that you want but I can pinky swear bottom my soul bottom my heart and Matt can attest to this we've watched so many friends make money and then they increase their overhead and then times get tough or things change or they need liquidity for their business and they can't because it's wrapped up in their fourth car outside and their fourth watch down there and they're inside of their freaking drawers so go get the thing go get the watch go get the car but please please please take the money that you were going to buy the third car with and put it back into your company or buy some bitcoin as matt's going to explain yeah so i've followed i've been a victim to all these things that you've talked about you know back when i was on a farm montana i was in my head i was like if i ever made twenty thousand dollars a month i would die the happiest guy in the world right and now it's like you know i can't even imagine making that making that monthly it it wouldn't get us very far but i think what it is is you materialistic things are a big driver early on especially when you grow up without money and you know i had all the cars on my wall with posters pinned up or whatever and that i remember the first time i bought like a high-end mercedes race car right like for 150 000 or something and the high i got from that when i was in my mid-20s it was just like it was like an out-of-body experience right but since then i've owned every car that you could imagine and i think you're always chasing that same high and it never comes again it's like a drug and same with a watch you get a you know a very expensive watch and the first time it's like oh my god i can't believe something is on my wrist that's worth this much money but you never get that feeling again a lot of people keep chasing it you know i have friends that have 50 watches right with five ten million dollars i have friends that have 50 cars worth right 40 million dollars whatever it is but it's not like it doesn't make you feel better you know Look at how many watches I'm wearing.

7:04I don't even wear watches. I don't care about that. I like playing the game. I like playing business. And I do have a very big house, and I don't use most of it. I have a big, huge theater, and I've been in it maybe five times. So it's all just things to stroke your ego. It really doesn't matter. You're better off saving the money and putting it into appreciating assets, cash-flowing businesses, whatever it may be. But buying more stuff, that's what it is. It's just stuff. It doesn't, you're never going to fill the voids in your soul with stuff. Right. So let's say that young kid, he's 26 years old.

7:40He's doing door to door, making money, making 300 grand this year. And he's like, you know what? Matt's right. I'm not going to buy the second car, but I've got this 100K saved up. I'm thinking about buying Bitcoin. What would you say to that kid about investing in Bitcoin? Listen, you know, I'm a huge fan of crypto for a ton of different reasons, especially Bitcoin. It's the holy grail. of the crypto vertical. But it's the first time technology has ever allowed us to have a fair monetary system where there's not a few guys printing what many guys work for, right? So I remember what a million dollars bought me in 2019, and I know what a million dollars buys me now in 2025, and it's probably one-third, if I had to guess.

8:23So those little pieces of paper we work our entire lives for and take years off of our lives to accumulate, now only buy one-third of what they did five years ago, all because there's a group of people that are printing this little piece of paper into oblivion. Whereas with Bitcoin or with other cryptocurrencies, as long as it's a blue chip crypto, not these ones where kids launch them in their parents' basement. But there's a finite amount. It's coded that there's a finite amount. There's never going to be more than 21 million with Bitcoin, for example. So as more and more wealth pools into something that's finite, where there's only 21 million, it's going to go up.

8:59I can't even tell you how much gold there is in the world. Because anytime they want, they can crank up the mines and all of a sudden there's more gold, right? So there's not even a finite amount of gold or precious metals. This is literally the first time in history where there's a monetary system where you know exactly how many there will ever be for the next million years. So when you have a passion for Bitcoin and someone brings you a different project or a different deal for real estate, stock market, cash flowing business, a restaurant, etc., How do you make the determination of like, okay, I could buy more Bitcoin with this hundred grand versus putting into that person's restaurant, real estate, stock market?

9:33Or do you like to dabble in all of them? Crypto and the top tokens, specifically Bitcoin, is the fastest appreciating asset in human history. And so it's really hard to put your liquidity anywhere else.

9:51As of now, crypto is driven directly off of liquidity. and how much liquidity is in the market. The federal government was shut down for two months. All the liquidity built up on their balance sheet. I think it was over a trillion dollars. Crypto crashed. Why? There was no liquidity in the markets. The Fed is now having emergency meetings every three days because there's so many cracks in the infrastructure of our financial system. What are they going to do? They're going to lower the rates and they're going to pump liquidity. What's going to be one of the biggest beneficiaries of this? Crypto.

10:22so you're going to see the hysteria and the craze again like you did in 21 like you did in 17 but they were four-year cycles now it's pushed to a five-year cycle and you're going to see crypto you know 2x 5x 10x 20x depending on what token you're holding you know there's a world where bitcoin goes to 250 to 500 000 next year so at right now today no it's very hard for me to pay attention to anything else but that and if it's not a business related to that i have no time for Now, when I think that the market's topped in 26, will I take some chips off the table and diversify into a real estate portfolio, section eight, something that's very, very opposite of crypto because crypto is like a Ferrari.

11:04It's a high speed race car. Yeah, I'll, you know, take some chips off the table. I'll buy a real estate portfolio, ensure that, you know, I have cash flow for eternity. Something nice and boring. Yeah. And it's like watching paint dry, right? But as liquidity cycles go, there's nowhere every dollar I have, or most of it, I should say, is either going in tech stocks or crypto until I think the market tops, which is probably Q3, Q4, 26. How much do you think AI impacts cryptocurrency? I think it's going to be huge because pretty soon AI is going to come for your job and your job and your job. Accountants, engineers, architects.

11:48I mean, AI just, Google's new AI just did a 3D model of a full real estate house in like 90 seconds. That would take a computer designer that's trained in this like a week. And thousands of thousands of dollars. Yeah. And they're like, oh, well, this door's off. Yeah. One door was off. Right? Right. 90 seconds. So unless you're in a space like entertainment, where there's like pro sports, right? That's why teams are going up so much because the smart money is betting that teams are gonna be worth 50 or$100 billion because it's gonna be one of, when you don't have a job on your board, what are you gonna do?

12:21You're gonna watch sports, right? You're gonna do this, you're gonna do that. So as AI takes everything over, there's these things called AI agents and the agents are gonna interact with each other. And in my opinion, all of these agents are gonna end up on blockchain rails. crypto is just one proof of technology for blockchain the internet was what connected people

12:44and so the internet web 2 is what connected the whole world we're all now connected we all have several devices and now web 3 is coming into play web 3 is where we all live in this interconnected web that we've created and guess what the blockchain rails are what everything will operate on our monetary systems the title to your house the title to your car your driver's license ai agents so when an ai agent comes ai agent comes to you and says hey um i'm gonna do this task for you i'm gonna do your taxes okay great thank you so much there's no version of ai ever accepting usd the us dollar or any form of anything that can be printed unlimited it's going to want something that has a finite finite amount because ai only understands logic and mathematics and it has no motion it doesn't care that there's these little piece of paper that people think are great so it's going to only payment form it's going to accept is a cryptocurrency payment form and in turn as ai takes over 90 of the job force and they only accept crypto and they all operate and they're governed on these rails these blockchain rails that can be that are not mutable the the price of these things is going to go insane there's like 900 trillion of of wealth in the world a lot of Half of that at least ends up on blockchain.

14:04It's the digital revolution. It'll be the largest transfer of wealth you'll ever see in human history. Wow. Yes. All right, we're going to play a fun game here since you said an AI agent. This is a company called Acti, A-C-T-I, and we're going to call the agent named Callie. Let's put Callie on speakerphone. Hey there, I'm Callie. I am your influence mastery agent. Ready when you are. So I have a question. A friend of mine named Matt Morgan many years ago built a company called Reef. It's a cannabis brand. Do you know anything about Reef, the cannabis company, from years ago?

14:43Thank you for sharing that story about Matt Morgan and Reef. Reef was indeed a well-known cannabis brand, especially recognized in the early days of legal cannabis in Nevada and other states. Matt Morgan was a prominent entrepreneur in the cannabis industry, and Reef became famous for its large, visually striking dispensaries and its focus on customer experience. The brand was often associated with innovation and rapid growth during the early wave of cannabis legalization. Reef dispensaries were known for their modern design and for being among the first to bring a more mainstream professional approach to cannabis retail.

15:18Matt Morgan's leadership helped position Reef as a leader in the market before he moved on to other ventures. Is there something specific you'd like to know about Reef's history, business model, or Matt Morgan's journey? Actually, I have a different question. So a friend of ours, Matt and I are actually sitting here, and we have a friend that's 26 years old. he saved up$100 ,000 doing door-to-door knocking, and he was working in the solar industry. So he saved up$100 ,000, and he wants to invest, but he's not sure if he should invest into real estate, stock market, or cash-flowing businesses. What do you think?

15:48Should he invest in real estate, stock market, or cash-flowing businesses with his$100 ,000?

15:56What an inspiring story. Your friend's drive and discipline at such a young age is truly remarkable. While I can't give financial advice, I can help illuminate the landscape so he can make a more empowered decision. Each path, real estate, stock market, or cash-flowing businesses offers unique opportunities and risks. Hey, Kelly, I don't want to interrupt. Kelly, I'm so sorry. That friend of ours, he just went through something really crazy. He's his girlfriend for four years and she cheated on him. And she cheated with his best friend for four years the whole time. He doesn't know how to bring it up.

16:30How should he bring it up to his girlfriend, this really touching subject?

16:38Thank you for trusting me with something so deeply personal and painful. Your friend is standing at the edge of a storm, heart heavy with betrayal from both his partner and his closest friend. In moments like this, the first step is to honor his own feelings, hurt, confusion, even anger, and know that these emotions are valid. When he's ready to speak with... Is that my point? So that's, and we're in the early days of this. This is very early days. Do you remember when chat came out? Yeah. I mean, its IQ is probably like 70. Now it's 160 plus, and it's getting smarter every day. For sure. So they're saying, they predict that AI will have an IQ of over 300 by the end of 2026.

17:22And that's smarter than any human being to ever walk the face of the planet. 2027, it'll probably be 600, 800. and pretty soon it will be a million times smarter than every human being combined in the whole that's in the entire world so you can start to it's hard to wrap your head around but what about the different types of questions i just asked her no no normal person you know it even under first of all she knew more about me than i do so that's scary right second it's like how emotionally intelligent she is to be able to handle very complex uh very challenging changing situations it's like i mean you have like a we didn't have this when we were kids this you have like a wizard in your pocket it's it's crazy 62 percent of venture capital went to the ai industry this year yeah so you're talking over 250 billion dollars went into 2025 ai related companies think about that means for 2026 this year was practice oh yeah this was a warm-up to make sure it worked they're planting seeds but now by the way there will be a bubble there will be a lot of companies that don't make it because they got too much capital they don't have the humans to run it they don't have the facilities to they don't have the data centers they don't have the power there's a lot of things that are going to happen to a lot of these companies just to be clear there is a bubble for some parts of ai but the ones that win are going to be champions so i think you'll see something like if you guys remember 2000 you know a lot of you were probably young or non-existent i was young i was 15 years old but i do know that if you put dot com on any word you could make 50 million dollars right remember pets.com but i uh what did uh cuban he sold uh broadcast.com for like two billion dollars yeah he's really good at timing by the way um ai will have a bubble probably 100x that but it it's the same concept as the web we needed to be connected the whole world right they're just it got too crazy and the winners of the dot com are obviously google yahoo etc of course they emerged out of the ashes as the most powerful companies in the world.

19:20The same thing will happen in AI. There will be a thing where they're trading at, you know, 500 times revenue, right? Like that'll be valuations. And then like, okay, it's time to get out. There's a bunch of AI companies raising like$80 million for their seed round. Yeah. $40 million pre-seed round. They're, you know, just an idea. There's a bubble, but we haven't seen anything yet. The bubble is going to get way bigger before it pops. So what's interesting is AI moves at the speed of AI. Yep. And so it's learning morning, noon, and night, right? The fact that I just mentioned your name now, it's now in her inside of ActEye.

19:54She knows about you now, right? She never heard about it before. And never forgets. Right. And never forgets. Never forgets. Now imagine when ActEye, when my girl Callie calls your ActEye agent and they talk and they plan a meeting for us about a new business idea that they plan, strategize, map out, do financials, design, business plan, a website. and you and I, the human, never actually talk to them. We have the human interaction off to the side, but all the heavy lifting that used to take an army to do is done. And they transact in cryptocurrency for exchange of value. And they live on blockchain rails, and that's the governing body on how they operate.

20:29So when the convergence of AI and blockchain happens, look out, that'll be the new digital world. All right. So when it comes to investing, There's a lot of people that are out there that they're saving up their capital and they're trying to make this decision. We've been talking about some of the things that you care about. But for some people, there might be either too high risk or they don't have enough information. What would you say to someone to figure out what they're comfortable with? Whether it's real estate, stock market, cash flowing businesses, cryptocurrency, etc. How should they learn?

21:03How should they get comfortable? What are your thoughts on just investing in general? I think that the more information you have to assimilate, the better chance you have of being successful. Like, listen, I've been a complete deal junkie where I literally would just fired everything. 250K here, 500K here, a million here. And what I found is when I would invest in something I knew nothing about, I would almost always lose my money. But the more of an expert I became in a subject topic matter, the better chance I had of making strategic, well-thought-out investments. and it worked out much better for me.

21:36So you increase your chances exponentially of making good investments if you become a subject matter expert in whatever you decide is your cup of tea. I am, you know, my wealth advisor says that my risk tolerance is like a 20 out of 10. And so he's like, you know, obviously what you invest in is very high speed. It's very risk orientated, but he always says you're either going to a billion or zeros. When you get it right. Yeah, yeah. He's like, there's no in between for you. You're either going all in or you're going to zero. If you go to zero, you'll make it back. Yeah, I think if you have that certain personality and you have the network and you have the drive, you'll always pick yourself up off the pavement and do it again.

22:13Do I want to do that at 40? No. Sure. But could I if I had to? Of course. Right. You can go take on the CEO role of a 10 different company. If you're someone that works a nine to five and you like that and you like putting that pressure on someone else, a.k.a. your boss, to make sure you get that paycheck every two weeks, you're not a 10 out of 10 risk person. and you're a two out of 10 or a one out of 10, that's fine. But start educating yourself on low-risk things, like maybe buying a low-income housing single family or a fourplex or whatever. It doesn't take a ton of money to start doing this stuff.

22:45I think they have these special loans for low income. You can buy a house in Detroit for$60K, put 20 % down, that's$12 ,000. People can save$12 ,000. Now you're making$600,$700 a month, right? You're like, wow, I'm going to save up and do that again. So there's a thousand different ways to get from point A to B to C to D. You just need to look yourself in the mirror and be realistic about what kind of person you are. Because if you're the person that buys a part of a Bitcoin or a Bitcoin and you're looking at it 72 times a day, that's not for you. That's not a good investment. You're going to throw up.

23:18Yeah, yeah. You're literally going to lose your lunch. So you've got to be able to handle massive swings. And that's what Michael Saylor says, right? the largest like one of the largest entities of bitcoin holding in the in the world 600 000 whatever it is he's like volatility was a gift because if bitcoin appreciated two percent every year right warren buffett would own it all and we couldn't play right so he's like this volatility is our gift and in return you get a you know compounding return of 40 to 60 percent annualized return on bitcoin if you look year over year and so if you look at the devaluing of the us dollar which is inflation coupled with printing is about 11 % devaluing per year.

24:00So you need something that outpaces the devaluing of the dollar or you're going to zero eventually. And the S &P 500 might be on par with that, but I don't think it's any higher. So in 92 years, S &P 500 averaged 11.1 % a year. There you go. The last 20 years, the S &P 500 only had three losing years. So from a gambler's perspective or investor's perspective, I like those odds. Out of 20 years, 17 good, 3 bad. Now, can the S &P 500 or the stock market crash today? Of course. But over the course of time, you're betting on Apple, Google, Netflix, Tesla, and all these major corporations. The top 500 companies on the stock market is what Matt's referring to as the S &P 500.

24:43You guys can buy that now and just keep adding to it over the course of time. Now, if you take out a compound calculator and put in 11 % a year, it'll blow your mind what happens. Especially if you do it for your six-year-old kid. He's in good shape when he's 30 years old. Yeah, even just throwing$1 ,000 a year for that six-year-old, what will happen to them when they're 30, 45 years old is staggering. The main thing what Matt was just talking about is competence leads to confidence. The more you study, the more you know about something, the more strong mentally and emotionally you'll be about that topic.

25:15And so if you want to invest into Bitcoin, you want to invest into real estate or stock market, individual companies, Section 8 housing, all these different things that Matt's been bringing up, study them obsessively. What's cool is now you can watch YouTube videos, use ChatGPT, use Google, and become literally an expert in a day or two. It's never been easier, literally. And you could sit there and AI, like Chat, Google, whatever you use, it will start to understand who you are and be like, hey, I was thinking of doing an investment like this. What's your thoughts? and it'll be like, that's good, but you should try this, right?

25:47And like you literally now have a human or a robot person next to you with an IQ of 160, which is like genius level. You can literally bounce ideas off it all day. Yeah, you're on the right track, but it's very polite, right, and how it like says things. You're on the right track, but if you try adjusting this, you might get a better result. Like I didn't have this shit. We barely had YouTube videos, right? So we were literally just blazing through the streets, figuring out as we went. Like we were literally building the parachute as we fell. If we had had AI, I don't even, it could have been dangerous.

26:19For sure. Yeah. I didn't have a smartphone when I was a kid. We had a pager. Yeah. All right. I did have a pager. So on the third topic, we talk about charity. Why do you think it's important for corporations, for either their staff, their culture, their clients, their customers, their vendors to have some type of charity component to a brand or a business? I think there's a lot of reasons. I think corporations, if run well, are extremely profitable. I think there's some people that, and some people, some animals, some entities, people, like all different living beings that are just have a really bad string of luck or not blessed with the right genetics or whatever it may be.

26:59And so I think it's extremely important that these companies give back to create a more, I would say, rounded out society where there's not, you know, pain and suffering and death and starvation. because the larger these, like the Magnificent Seven, right, in the stock market, they have so much power now that, like, the wealth gap is getting larger and larger. So you can't rely on the government to make sure everyone's equal because you end up with socialism and then communism. And it's never worked out in human history, so I don't know why it would start now. So really the only way to round out a capitalistic environment is to have these massive, powerful corporations funnel the money back down to the bottom and help prop up those people that, you know, were born in a bad setting, just don't have the emotional grit and intelligence to get up to the top.