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What's up everyone this is Alex Lieberman co founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew welcome back to founders journal my personal audio diary where I give you the business builder the tools you need to think better in order to build better whether that's building a business a team or new product.

Today I'm talking about Bitcoin I think this is the first time I've ever done it but it'll be worth your time let's hop into it.

So a few days ago I bought Bitcoin the price was $35,000 I actually was $35,800 and I'm going to explain to you why I bought it what this episode isn't going to be is a dive into my personal portfolio.

It's also not going to be an explainer on Bitcoin if you think that would be helpful and you don't believe there's already enough good content out there on it just let me know but I feel like there's a ton of content so I don't want to create yet another primer on Bitcoin what this will be is a glimpse into how I think about taking risk and making decisions.

Because while this is a personal decision I think the process for taking personal risk isn't all that different from taking business or career risk so what I'm going to do is walk you through my decision to buy Bitcoin my decision regarding how much I bought and all of the considerations I made along the way.

You might be thinking to yourself Alex Bitcoin is old news at this point why are you just investing now I'll answer that question as well so on May 21st I put roughly 0.25% of my net worth into Bitcoin this decision came after about 30 hours of research on the topic I spent time reading a great book about Bitcoin and the history of money called the Bitcoin standard I watched an hour long video by Anthony.

Anthony Pompeiano also known as pump breaking down what Bitcoin is and I spent a few hours discussing my thesis with a friend from college who worked in emerging technology for PWC while I didn't put a ton of money into Bitcoin I did a pretty significant amount of research for a few reasons first I put in enough money such that if I lost it all while it wouldn't be the end of the world it would definitely sting.

The earlier question why I had and I already invested in Bitcoin this is the reason I didn't take the time to adequately study and prepare thoughts on whether I wanted to invest in Bitcoin or not and I knew that I never wanted to make the decision just because a bunch of people on Twitter were saying that Bitcoin is going to the moon to me that was what gave me signal to study Bitcoin but I was never going to put my money into something that I didn't study myself the second reason I put a pretty significant amount of time into researching this is.

I've thought about Bitcoin as kind of like the gateway drug to the world of blockchain technology that is one of the amazing innovations of Bitcoin is that it is decentralized because a network of computers or nodes validates transactions so that you don't have to trust a bank or an intermediary to be the middle person between you and the person on the other side of the transaction so things like Ethereum NFTs or non fungible tokens.

decentralized finance these are emerging technologies that I'm fascinated by so my thought was even though I didn't put a lot of money into Bitcoin I wanted a great foundation for kind of this house of knowledge related to blockchain for it to sit on top of so what was my view on Bitcoin after all of this research after reading the book after watching the video after talking to my friend well the view is that there is a very good chance that something is going to replace gold.

Gold as a store of value and if that happens Bitcoin is the front runner to become the new gold or as people refer to it the digital gold so let me talk for a second about the first assumption that I needed to agree with or disagree with to make this decision the first is store of value what does that mean and why is it important the reason having a store of value is important is because you as a person as a consumer as a business

you want to have confidence that if you make $20 today and you put it into the bank that it will be worth $20 next year or something close to it the issue is you can't just assume that this will be the case with the U.S. dollar and in fact time has proven this to be the opposite the U.S. is an inflationary monetary system and simply what that means in practice is that if you took $1 in 1917 and you kept it in a safety deposit box for just over

100 years if you open that box up today and you brought that into a store the same $1 would be worth five cents today one of the reasons this concept is so relevant and troublesome today this concept of store value is because the United States is printing more money today than it ever has for context one in five U.S. dollars was created in 2020 just let that sink in for a second

20% of all the currency in the United States economy today was created in the last year so not only is this a mind blowing stat but also it is why it is such a relevant discussion to be talking about Bitcoin gold and stores of value today

because there is real concern that inflation is going to ramp up in the U.S. and your United States dollars will be worth less tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that and so let's say you are someone who is worried about inflation

and you're worried about your dollar tomorrow being worth less than your dollar today you're going to need to find a place to put your money that at the very least stores its value so your dollar tomorrow is worth as much as your dollar today

and that's where most people would say why not gold which is a good question because gold for the longest time has been considered the store of value if you're worried about inflation

gold similar to Bitcoin is considered to be a head for inflation and what that just means again is it maintains its value even the value of the dollar goes down tomorrow relative to today

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