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Is Cryptocurrency the Future of Money? w/ Zac Juergensen (Part 1)

Tim Marting


Hey, everyone. Thanks for listening to Thoughts of a Random Citizen. I have a really good interview today with Zac Juergensen from DIY Wealth. We talk about a heap of entrepreneurial and investing potentials as well as maybe veering off time to time and talking about our own thoughts. However, I am aware that the recent episodes I've released have been a bit longer and maybe asking a lot of you guys from your time commitment, so I did go ahead and split this interview into two parts. It'll be closer to 30-ish minutes as opposed to the hour-long episodes, because this one did run a bit long, but without further ado, I hope you guys enjoy Part 1 of this two-part episode with Zac Juergensen.


All right, Zac. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast today, man. I'm really excited to talk about your background, figuring out more in detail how one accumulates wealth, maybe when they're in debt or have no wealth to start with and then ideas on how to build on that foundation. Something that people don't really talk about as much as or in as much detail as I think they should should. We're going to get it a little bit into tech in the middle as well so I'm pretty excited about that, but to start off, man, can you tell us a bit about yourself and what you've done leading up to the success that you've found today?


Yes. First off, thanks for having me. I'm glad we were able to coordinate. To anyone starting to listen to this podcast or if you stumbled across Hugh's podcast, we've already been talking for many, many minutes offline. This is going to be a great episode. With that said, in as concise of a way while still storytelling, basically I grew up in Michigan.


I grew up in a very fragmented family situation. Very much did not foster positive thoughts and positive environment. Ended up being the victim of child abuse, both physically and mentally, and in and out of court systems, ended up having to testify against a parent, and it was just overall just a very shitty situation to be in as a kid growing up. Because of that misdirected anger, misguided child, hung out with the wrong crowd, I guess, getting in trouble not applying myself to things, and was aware enough that I needed to get out of my hometown by the time I ended high school.


It was either stay in my hometown and become a nobody, I guess you could say, which is subjective I guess but to me personally, that just didn't seem like a highest and best use of a lifespan. The alternative was joining a military because my grades weren't good. I knew I wasn't getting into college, so my logic at the time was, "Okay, if I'm going to go to war, I might as well will just train with the hardest, baddest motherfuckers."


Instead of looking at the Air Force or the Navy, which I would advise anyone to do if they're thinking about joining the military, I ended up joining the Marine Corps, ended with a bunch of alpha males with tons of trauma and it's a pissing match. I needed it, it came with its own set of rewarding things and things that have helped me succeed, but it also came with its own set of baggage and stuff that you just got to work through.


It was definitely a double-edged-sword , but ended up doing a tour overseas. I realized I don't want to fucking do this for the rest of my life and so at that point, we ended up losing an individual and a bomb dog and that's when things clicked on my head and I was like, "Wow, like life is fragile. You can lose it whenever." I thought I was young and still invincible and that happened and things just really registered in my head that I need to start applying myself to things in life.

I had one more year left and I was like, "Well, I definitely don't want to fucking do this so I need to figure this out." I just started picking up books. I started, I picked up journalism books, I picked up photography books, I picked up art books, I picked up science books, and then I ended up landing on this finance book. Wasn't even that big or interested in finance in general, but I picked it up. Easiest read in the world. For anyone listening, I have zero financial knowledge. I did not grow up in a household where finances were talked about, my dad's bad with money, my mom's not the greatest with money when it comes to investing strategies either.


It's called The Little Book On Big Dividends. It's like 97-page book, it is super small. The easiest thing to read. If you have no knowledge base, just start there. That's what I started on and I was like, "Huh. All right, cool enough." It's like these monies, you let it sit around and it makes you more money. That's a pretty cool concept. Some of you aren't even going to know this, you're going to be too young, but I opened A Scottrade account. Scottrade no longer exists anymore, but I opened a Scottrade account and in 2010, the bottom of the market, but I didn't know. I didn't know what I didn't know.




I wish I knew what I knew now, but you could have thrown darts at a board on stock tickers and made money if you would've thrown money in 2010. I ended up buying 10 shares of Bank of America, okay? I put my money in. 10 shares of Bank of America, it was trading like $9 or $10, it was like $100, whatever. But to me at the time, it's like a kid blowing his paycheck every weekend and going to Myrtle Beach and getting drunk. $100 to me was a lot of money.


I'm watching it all day. It's going up, it's going down and when it's up, I'm just like, "Fuck, yes, I'm a genius. I'm so smarter than everyone," and then it went down and I'm losing money during the day and I'm just like, "Oh my God, why did I do this to myself?" Up and down all day, roller coaster. I don't do that to myself anymore, obviously, but again, you got to get your feet in the water. You got to get used to this shit and so the market ended up closing and I looked at my account and I'll never forget the number.


I ended up having $4.14 more than I did when I started the day, and that registered really hard in my head and I was just like, "Holy shit. I could smoke a bowl of weed and not do jack shit today, or I could be the most productive person in the world. It doesn't matter. My money just made me money," and that registered in my head and what has taken me and carried to this powerful story of I've had nothing. I've been given nothing in life. I don't get handouts, I wasn't dealt the best hand in life from a familial situation, and those cards. I went into the military and had trauma. Fast forward, from in-debt poor money management to a net worth of a million dollars and I left my corporate job effective September 8th, 2021.



Wow. Well, congratulations on all of that and also sorry for some of that.

ou know what, man? Everyone's got-- and that's the thing too that I like to reinforce the people. Just because you know you are a child abuse victim or just because you're in the Marine Corps, you don't get to monopolize trauma. There are women out there that deal with trauma in different areas. There are guys that deal with trauma in different areas and so don't ever feel like you're not deserving enough to address and accept the fact that you have trauma because you're comparing it to someone who you think has greater trauma. I think that's a huge stigma in society so that's something definitely I want to drive home to.

Yes. Great stuff, man. It's also a really good point there, what you said that maybe you weren't the best in school, but you can turn it around at any point in time. I was actually just having this conversation with somebody earlier today and no matter how terrible you start out in school, I was a terrible student. Absolutely horrendous and then--


Hell, yes. Team Shitty at school.


Oh yes, 100%. But then you get to a certain point in life and I'd say it's around like 25 and you can start earlier or later, but at a certain point, your brain finally finishes and if you want to be an astronaut and you were the dumbest kid in school, chances are, you can probably freaking be an astronaut. If you want it, you apply yourself and you work hard towards it.


Truly.


That's for anything for anyone, and that's not, you don't have to be 25 to eventually start excelling but I'm just saying that when you're young, your brain is doing a bunch of other things and it doesn't really care much about learning, so just because you weren't the best in school, don't let that get you down.


The other thing I'll parlay off of what you're stating, I don't think higher education is necessarily the keys to success anymore and if anything, you have people going into tons and tons and tons of debt and in retrospect, I look at my time building my real estate business while I was in college versus what I actually learned in college, and I don't really have a lot to say about higher education.


Yes. That being said, education is one thing, but that is when the whole, "I'm forming a real estate company" comes in of education. Not the I'm going to pay


The standardized tests, sit in a classroom, and that's not real life, man. Do you go to your job and take a test and if you get a 90%, you get paid? No, that's not how life works, but that's what we're going to tell you you need to do in order to understand how to operate as an adult makes zero sense in my head.


Yes. Moving on from that, I feel like no one ever talks about how it absolutely really started for you. Bringing up what did forming that real estate company when you were in college, what were those first few steps up to the few months to year of the habits that you changed, the education, what was that lifestyle change that went through you that you can actually tell people about?


Yes, it's a really good question, man.


It was a while ago right now, so sorry about that.


It was and I wouldn't say it happened overnight or within a week or within a month. I think I remember talking about it on another podcast, but it's not like I just immediately dove into the deep end and knew how to swim. I put my toes into the shallow end, then I got ankle deep, then I got shin deep, then I got knee deep. Now I'm starting to float. Now I'm swimming around. There wasn't any one defining thing, but I will say be aware of your debt and pay it off.


That was something I had to fight and get out of for about four years. I had half of a leg paying out debt and the other half of it was maxing out a Roth IRA. I didn't even get to max it out a couple years, but you need to start investing and you also need to start paying off the debt. I know there's some people that subscribe to the philosophy of pay off all the debt right away. There's a large opportunity cost if you do that relative to getting some money into the game when you're 20, 21, 22, and watching that turn into hundreds of thousands of dollars. I'm not even kidding.


Mindsets huge there, too.


Yes, mindset's huge, you got to be aware of it, and you got to make sacrifices. That's one thing, too. I didn't internationally travel until this year. This was the first time. I've internationally traveled at 31. I didn't do a lot in my 20s. I mean outside of Afghanistan. That wasn't a fucking vacation though. I didn't do a lot in my 20s. There was a lot of sacrifice there, and I'm not saying you should do it the way I did it, because literally, I look at my 20s, I didn't go to concerts, I didn't really have strong relationships, I didn't have a lot of friends.


I just didn't do a lot. I just focused on, "Hey, I need to build this security, this money situation up, because once I have this, then I can go do whatever I want." That's a good mentality to have, but there's balance with all of it. As you're building your wealth, don't forego everything in life. You don't want to have dark dark years, and you definitely don't want to have a dark decade like I did. Moving into the real estate aspect, obviously, maxing our your Roth 401(k). That was something I just always did.


Now I'm sitting on a little over $100,000 in my 401(k). You can only max out that thing with $6,000 a year. It just goes to show the power of the growth that happens behind this stuff if you start very early. Regarding real estate, again, I come from a place where I not blessed with tons of money, so how did I build my real estate portfolio out? How did I get to five properties? I lived in one for a year, and then I would turn it into a rental. The reason that works for people with less money is if you're an investor purchasing something as an investment property, you have to put 20% down, and you get a shittier interest rate.


If I'm a primary homeowner purchasing for a personal residence, I only have to put 3.5%, 5% down. If you have a VA loan, 0% down, and I get a better interest rate. I live in it for a year, then I decide, "You know what? I want to live in a different city, or I want to live somewhere with a bigger backyard, or I want a more functional kitchen, or I want..." Okay? Now you can convert that into a rental property. You only had to put 5% down or 3.5% down. You got a better interest rate on it. You have a rental now, and you get to rinse and repeat that same process over and over again as many times as you want to move. Personally, I'm at a point where I'm tired of moving every year, but-


You're telling me to--


it's a huge workaround to build wealth and build cash flowing real estate assets that you can start using from day one versus coming to the table every single time with 20% down. If you live in a metro area where things are costing $300,000, $400,000, $500,000, who's got 20% of that sitting around cash at our age? Probably not a lot of people. Between those two things, that is really how I've built a majority of my net worth.



Again, a majority of it's sitting in real estate. I got probably about 30% of it in the stock market between stock options for my previous employer, cryptocurrencies, and then the traditional stock market. 60% of it, 65% of it, whatever the math breaks out there, is sitting in real estate assets, but they're cash flowing assets. Again, when you have adjustments for-- Let's say inflation happens. Inflation was huge this year, because of all the stimulus checks that went out. You get to adjust for inflation. You never lose purchasing power of a cash flowing piece of real estate as long as it's in a highly desirable area.


So true, and the beautiful, beautiful thing, passive income which is where you're getting onto now wanting to travel and stuff. Two questions, I'll just ask it and I'll let you go. One, where did you travel this year? Then second, what have you been focusing and doing your most time on in the last two to three months?


Ended up going to Tulum. If you guys have never been, amazing.

Don't even know where that is, man.


It's in the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. Do you know where Cancún is?

Yes, I've been to Cancún.


About an hour 40, two-hour drive south down the coastline but, dude, Tulum was absolutely beautiful. There was this place called Azulik and they had these bird nests. You have all this tropical canopy. They had these restaurants where you walked up these spiral stairs, and they had these things called bird nests. They were low-seated. 20 huge tables where 20 people could sit around in, and there're huge twigs that, oh, it almost made it look like a bird nest, but you're sitting above the canopy eating, and it's just absolutely beautiful.


I would love to get back to Tulum again. I didn't want to leave. I literally didn't want to leave. My friends were like, "Zac, just go back to work. Circle back on things." I was just like, "I don't want to leave. I don't care. I'll tell my company I'm going to stay for another week. They can fucking figure it out. This is too amazing." I don't want to leave, but they were like, "Just calm down, circle back."

Clearly, that showed me I want to explore the world. I want travel more. I don't want to be on someone else's watch. That, amongst other things, really just triggered me to just like, "I'm done with this." I'm done with this constant idea that I need a bigger house. I need a faster car. I need more, I need more, I need more, I need to consume, I need to do, I need to achieve, I need to achieve, and that is very much what capitalism is. Learning to have enough will give you all of the freedom in the world. You just got to learn to have enough.


Then to your other question, obviously, this podcast is something I'd really like to grow. Obviously, would I like to generate a revenue personally off of it? Yes, of course, but above and beyond that, identifying what enough is for me within this podcast and then creating a community of wealth builders, and then all of us coming together and going, "Let's throw some money to Africa and build some high schools. Let's throw some money."


The last thing I want to be is a hypocrite and the sworn enemy of what I think the problem with capitalism is in its greed and its never not having enough. Learning to have that enough and then teaching other people to learn how to have enough, and then now we can move together collectively and help build wealth for other people that wouldn't have these opportunities. I think that would be such an amazing rewarding thing. That's why I'm obviously fighting day in and day out to spread my message.


I've been working on that. I've also been helping a buddy. I've invested in his jewelry business. He's a very talented human being, but he's a little scattering Jane, so that's where I come in, and I'm trying to help him organize things and be more accountable and goal-set. I got that. Then other than that, I've been focusing photography, planning a backpacking trip to Vietnam, but I've just taken it day by day more and enjoying day to day more instead of just being stressed out constantly and anxious and worried about stuff. That's a real thing, man, in capitalism and I still struggle with it, but learning to have enough, unplugging from this situation of I don't need to perpetually consume. I can have enough and I can just be happy.


Yes. A nice mix between minimalism and capitalism, I guess.


Yes, you have to. You have to find that balance, because there's people in this world that will have tens of thousands of times more net worth than you and I, and they won't be as happy as us.


Yes, 100%. I actually addressed that in my last episode with Mickeli Bedore, Episode 42, Sales, Marketing, and Startups, I believe it was titled. Really good episode, so if you're interested in hearing that, check that out out. Moving on from inside the mind of the entrepreneur, I was going to see what you were doing in the next year and a half to three years as well. What now are you wanting to expand to now that you have this income, this setup?


For me, I actually just acquired my first Airbnb. I worked with an Airbnb consultant. I also had a business partner for this one just to reduce the risk, but long story short, we have roughly six months booked up, and that's between October and March or April. Anyway, the gross rents that will be collected on that is about $38,000, so you could safely project if that's what's happening for six months, then if I want to project what's going to happen for a year on this property we're looking at just a hair under $80,000 gross.


We ran numbers on that and basically, the net, we're probably looking in between $40,000 and $50,000 net on one single family residential property. That is a much, much, much, much larger cash flow than a long-term single family rental. I would like to get one or two more whether it's in Mexico, Nashville. I would like to get them in different cities. Then obviously when it's not booked, that's an asset I can go use and travel for with free lodging and then it goes back to being a cash flowing asset. That's definitely one thing I'm definitely trying to focus on a lot.

The other thing is obviously, metaverse Web 3.0 cryptocurrencies. That historically didn't make a lot of sense for me, even though I had smaller positions and historically, even when I started the podcast, I was 1% to 2% a year net worth in cryptocurrencies. I will be moving from a 1% to 2% net worth of my position to probably close to a 10% net worth of my position over the next year, year and a half, so between learning that and then also refining and getting better at the Airbnb space because again, with Airbnbs, like 90% of people do Airbnb wrong. They just buy a house and it looks the same as everyone else's house, and they expect to make tons of money.


That's not how you do it. Airbnbs, you want to really identify a theme. Ours is a tropical Cuban Havana theme, and because of that, bachelorette parties are interested in it. Younger generations are interested in it. We have murals on the wall brick walls so that way, people can take-- Anything that's creating more content for Instagram and stuff like that, that's a bigger pull for your Airbnb. If you're not going into Airbnb space with the intention and thought of, "I am a boutique hotel giving a unique experience to someone with the privacy and seclusion of a home," you shouldn't be in the Airbnb space.


I know that for those who might not know, you are based out of Arizona. Is that where you purchased the Airbnb?


Yes. All of my real estate is currently owned within Phoenix, Arizona, and so I'm at a point where I would like to start acquiring assets elsewhere. That way, not only can they increase my net worth, but also I can leverage and use them on my off time or when they aren't booked or whatever it may be. Secondary vacation homes, wherever it may be, definitely more interested in doing that globally, but obviously, real estate laws start getting really different from country to country.


Yes. I've been dealing with that myself. Then something maybe that somebody's interested in listening and thinking about Airbnbs, I know Arizona's warm year round but seasonality is a big part in Airbnb so if people are interested, keep that in mind. Moving on to the metaverse, I'm really excited about this conversation because you had a really good episode on your podcast, and it was about how the economy will evolve in some facet that people will now work in the metaverse. When I heard this, it just like blew my mind because I was like-- You hear of metaverse, things to do in the metaverse, but having jobs in the metaverse, I'd never even considered it. Can you explain more about working and the metaverse economy specifically?


Yes. Again, I can't predict the future. I'm not a prophet, but I try to be a very forward-thinking person and think about what the applications can look like even if all of the pieces haven't arrived there yet. What do I mean by that? Especially in the technology space, you have to think on three legs. There's software, there's hardware, and then there's demand or adoption. Younger generations are obviously adopting and accepting the demand of what technology brings because they're born into it. Older generations, not as much.


Software is required in order to do things, like for instance, augmented reality. In order for augmented reality glasses to be commercially available and work, you can have them commercially available but unless we get to a point where we have 5G everywhere, then augmented reality work doesn't work because it doesn't have the bandwidth to operate. For people that don't know what 5G is, it's basically 100 times faster than 4G, and that is the minimum necessary requirement for someone to throw on a pair of augmented reality glasses and be able to see things live playing out in a virtual augmented reality of base reality.

The final piece is hardware. Obviously, companies like Google and Facebook, they are definitely working on this stuff. Once it becomes commercially available, i.e., the hardware, software is there, i.e., 5G, and then the demand is there, younger generations and there obviously will be some older people adopting it, now all of a sudden, people start looking at everything and go, "Wow, these investment opportunities in this space, now they make a ton of sense." I'm trying to be the person that thinks about that stuff before all three of those things merge together.





Again, who knows if I'm right, who knows if I'm wrong, who knows if it's going to be a year, 3, 5, 10? But I try to think like real-world application. If you're someone not making a ton of money in the United States and the US dollar between inflation and stagflation, income's not rising and stuff like that, and someone offers you to work in a metaverse where you get paid in Ethereum and what's Ethereum going for right now? $4,600 or something like that.


Even if you're getting paid in fractions of Ethereum, so you go in there and let's say you get paid 0.001 ETH for every hour you work in the metaverse. Well, I would rather go do that because that asset's appreciating way more and it's a deflationary asset which we can go into and talk about in a little a bit. That's like a double appreciation factor on Ethereum, and I can go work for eight hours and pull out and transfer that into the US dollars and now I've made $500 in a day relative to going and working a front desk job making $10 an hour and I walk and I still got to pay taxes and all that shit and pay for Medicare and social security. I'm barely getting by and I got to cover a rent.


Maybe I'm someone that has a kid, I got to figure out how to get them through-- You can't tell me if someone were to offer that opportunity to someone and they had the opportunity to make more in cryptocurrency then convert it back into US dollars to pay for their groceries, pay for their rent, pay for... There are tons of people that would go and do that. Myself included. If I knew I could go make more money podcasting in the metaverse and I could get paid in Ethereum or something like that, yes, like let's do it because that's clearly an asset class that is appreciating and doing so much better than the US dollar has been. Especially this year has been a great example with the amount of inflation we've seen.


Yes. Not to mention that they're going to build out to where you'll eventually. I mean, they already have it in some places around the world. EL Salvador being one of them. You can pay with that crypto that you

Oh, I didn't even that. El Salvador's already at a point where that's as good as a currency?


Oh, yes. They're doing something right now. That came out I think June of this year, June or July, but it's a legal tender next to the US dollar, so you can get lunch.


Damn, that's sick.


It's fully integrated. Essentially, they're already doing things to where eventually, if you get paid in that whatever crypto you want to have it, you're going to be able to just go and tap like you would your phone. There's not even that converting back to the dollar.


That's awesome. You see stuff like that but you still got people going, "This is nothing." Like, "What?"


Yes. We were just talking earlier about a large argument against crypto, is that it's this digital asset.


Oh, yes. Tell them this was a great example.


It's pretty much the fact that they call it this digital asset and yet what happened this last 18 months when the US, for example, not mentioning Australia or Europe or wherever else you want to call it, just printed trillions and trillions of dollars. If you actually believe that they just printed trillions and trillions of physical green dollars or physical euros including all the coins and everything, no. First off, the cost alone would be like a trillion dollars, but that didn't happen.


Yes. They'd probably lose money knowing the government.


Oh yes, just on contracts alone that they sign and undercut. To think that they consider this digital asset something that isn't a thing but then that is what all of the governments are actually trying to convert to, so what is the argument against bitcoin? That comes down to the fact that it is the US government that is staking it, I don't know. Maybe I've been away from America too long.


I think that's such a huge important thing that you talked about before we got on this episode because I think people do hear that. They hear the fed printed more money. You really think the fed's printing more money? All they're doing is fucking moving a couple zeros over, but you're going to tell me that's normal, that's acceptable, that's okay, but if I go do that with a cryptocurrency, oh, it's fucking witchcraft, it's hoopla, it's nothing. It's the same thing.


Hugh: It's the same thing, except bitcoin has a fucking cap. It stops. The other digital currency that they're just moving the zeros over doesn't, it continues as much as they want it to.


I forgot who I was-- I can't remember if I was talking to someone or I was listening to a podcast, but someone said if aliens invaded earth, the fed would just cut interest rates and they would print more money. That's their answer to everything, dude. That is literally their answer to everything. Like, "Oh, tough economy? Let's cut interest rates and print more money." That's cool. That might work on an occasion here or there, but it's literally the playbook we've been going back to again and again and again, and they're going to keep going back to it.

I think that's a reason that the advent and rise of cryptocurrency has really happened because they're just-- This isn't going to stop. It's stuck on repeat, okay? It's not working for a lot of people, and billionaires end up sucking up a bunch of the money. Fed prints more money, more circulation. Again, when we say the feds prints more money, they're not actually physically printing it. They're just adding zeros to things. People are just tired of it. They're tired of dealing with-- Me and you, I'd say we've done much better for ourselves relative to some people and the cards they've been dealt.


Some of that's by intention. Don't diddy bop through life thinking like, "Oh, the opportunities is going to fall in my lap." You have to be intentional with this stuff, but the middle class is shrinking. The mom-and-pop shops and small businesses are getting eaten alive by companies like Amazon and Apple. These companies aren't paying their fair share in taxes while the middle class continues to get raped. We're seeing trend lines emerge here, and it's not painting a very happy bright future for a lot of people.


I forgot, I read an article somewhere. Not the younger generation behind us and the one behind that, but the next-- I don't even know what you would call. Gen Y, Gen Z, I can't remember these, but the new one coming. The ones that are being birthed right now. Statistically, things have been plotted out. At the rate college costs, and housing cost, and all these other stuff are going, 66% of that generation will be worse off financially than their parents. That's a crazy statistic, but you're telling me this capitalism shit is working right now? I'm not against capitalism. I think it's done amazing things, and it's created tons of innovation.

What we're doing right now, what we currently live in today, that is not capitalism. That is not capitalism.


Correct. You're 100% right, but for whatever reason, we keep saying it is. You're 100% right.


It's funny talking about the bitcoin price. People saying that it's just going to eventually drop to zero. First off, we have a shit ton of what people like to call Bitcoin maximalists out there. Via the fed printing alone, the Bitcoin maximalist, because it is capped, will continue to put in their money, and some of them are very wealthy. El Salvador's buying like-- I don't even know. They just bought probably 400 bitcoins in the last month alone because of the price dips recently.


Smart.


Via this alone, the price will continue to rise, period. Just the way that the fundamentals work, the way that we continue to devalue the US dollar, bitcoin will go up alone without even any large investors from here on out.


I agree with that statement, but just for someone skeptical, let's play devil's advocate. I love playing devil's advocate because playing devil's advocate makes you a balanced investor, and it makes you better at building wealth. Let's play devil's advocate. Let's say bitcoin finally does stabilize and it's as stable as the dollar. As long as there's people like you, me, millions, billions of other people that go, "This is just as valuable to me as the United State's dollar," it doesn't matter whether it goes up or down at that point.


It has solidified itself as an agreeable medium of exchange for hundreds of millions of people, if not billions of people, and that's all a United States dollar is. That's all a Canadian dollar is. A dollar is worthless. We've just all agreed, "Hey, this is a good medium of exchange for goods and services." That's all we're agreeing to at this point with cryptocurrencies. Again, because it's new, it's scary, some people don't understand it as well, there's this dismissal of it. Especially, I think, amongst older generations for sure. Again, if myself and younger generations, if we all agree like, "This is as good as a dollar for me," it's not going anywhere then.


Yes. The dollar used to not be worthless when it was backed by gold.

Correct, but now it's fiat.


Now, it's fiat.

Now, we get to just add zeros to it.


Not only on that, but when the fed decides to print a bunch of money to stimulate the economy, they just pay the banks to hoard more money and buy their bad debt.


Yes. We got to love that, too.

There's all those fun things.


You're a tortured mind like me. I can tell. You and I just look at the world and it's like, "This is all just so fucked."


I love traveling in it though. It's a great, beautiful. You know what I mean?


Yes. From an economic standpoint and a financial standpoint, we look at it, you and I are definitely people that look at things at like 10,000 feet and we're just like, "Man, what are we doing?"


That's the thing. Most financially literate people view the way that we view the world. They see it for what it is, but then you have outside of a select few of incorrectly motivated individuals. You have the financially illiterate individuals. Not to call the people who aren't as financially literate, but those people aren't as aware because they don't look at it everyday, they don't study it everyday, they don't educate themselves every single day, almost all hours of the day on it like I do, like we do.


Obviously, you wouldn't-- If I'd spend as much time studying finance as I did study in biology, I'd be a damn good doctor. Guess what? I'm not, because I know nothing about-- You could say this guy, you need to remove something from him or he's going to die. I'm sorry, but that gentleman would die. I could try. To say that they can dictate and say that, "This is the way that it should work. This is--


Right, when they have no frame of reference.


Unproven things, and they had no frame of reference, they don't understand, well then-- I'm not trying to be this upset mind and this tormented person. No. It's just I'm viewing it from the logical standpoint and the logical reality of life. Moving away from that darker--


Sure. Yes, we got on a little bit of a darker path there, but it's okay.

Yes, it is.


We're taking people on a rollercoaster ride right now.


Exactly. Unfortunately, that concludes Part 1 of the podcast. If you'd like to hear the rest of the conversation, please tune in next week for Part 2 where we dive into augmented reality, applications, virtual reality, a bit more of the Web 3.0, and also things such as the market in general and more real estate. If you guys like Part 1, I can guarantee you'll like Part 2 as well.

That wraps up another episode of Thoughts of a Random Citizen. If you guys have a question for the podcast, head over to toarcunited.com. It's in the show notes, and you can record a question. Feel free to email us if you don't want to record a question. On there, you'll also find information about financial advice, travel tips and destinations, broad market analysis, and there's a whole heap of stuff on there for you guys.


If you like the show, please review, like, subscribe, share with a friend. It goes a long way. As always, these are Thoughts of a Random Citizen for citizens. There are experts that do come on the show, and I always do my best to research before each show. However, do your own research. This isn't advise, this is generalizations. There is your free disclaimer. Enjoy your week, and I'll talk to you next week on Thoughts of a Random Citizen. Cheers.



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