043 - How Tech Resistance Will Limit Your Future Wealth

We're in the middle of some major technology innovations that will change life as we know it. With each, there's opportunities that early adopters profit from.  

Those who resist out of fear or a lack of understanding will have a much harder time catching up when they realize these technologies aren't just blips on the radar. Don't be one of the people who that misses what might be the biggest wealth building techs of our lifetime. 

Two cryptos Tim mentioned that have innovative prospects. 

• GFT
• FIL

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**DISCLAIMER**
Ticker metrics change as markets and companies change, so always do your own research. The content in this podcast is based on personal experience and is for educational purposes, not financial advice. See full disclaimer here.

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Transcript

Welcome to Roaming Returns, a podcast about generating a passive income through investing so that you don't have to wait to retirement to live your passions. When people resist new technology, they end up struggling as the world evolves around them. Today, we discuss several different tech innovations that are happening right now, but you got to embrace, one of which may put you out of a job in the near future if you don't.
Let's get into it. Okay. We back, y'all? Welcome back.
So first things first, I was just reading over the jobs report that came out, and interest rates probably aren't going to go down until July now. So that's just a- When were they projecting before? They just said three times for the year? Oh, May. But the job report came in really, really strong, so like there's really no incentive for them to cut rates.
Makes sense. So I'd say July at the earliest. Is that a problem, though? Not really a problem unless you keep- Unless good stuff keeps coming out? Yeah.
If good reports and good economic data keeps coming out throughout the year, then that I kind of feel like that's going to happen. But then you're just stocking up on REITs at a discounted price. So it is what it is.
So I projected that they would cut interest rates in 2024. That may or may not happen. But I also said that it was a bullish year in 2024, and that is definitely happening.
So I just tied them together like a dum-dum. Well, I mean, we did get the indicators from Powell that they said they were going to do it. So there's some truth to that.
I mean, they keep talking about it. So they may or may not cut. But I wanted to put that out right away.
Like if you have been on the fence about buying REITs, you might want to let them go down a little bit more or utilities. If you've already bought them, then you just want to keep doing $100 or whatever, whatever, $25, whatever you can afford per month until they start cutting rates. And then when they start cutting rates, you want to stop contributing to those additions.
Well, timing is never usually the thing to try to do. It's better to do a little bit. I understand it's not, but like this is a one time when you know exactly what's going to happen as soon as they start cutting the rates.
REITs are going to go up and utilities are going to go up. Generally, I would agree with that. Oh, so you're saying you can buy them up till July.
Whenever, like whenever the news comes out that they're cutting the rates, utilities and the REITs will start going up. And then at that point you can stop buying and then just let your dividends compound into your current shares. I gotcha, gotcha.
Got me. Okay. That was a quick sidebar.
Today we're going to talk about something that I had a very funny thought that I was when I was creating the email a couple of weeks back. I was sitting there thinking and like a lot of young people don't remember like a block buster video or Kodiak cameras. Kodiak.
Kodiak. Kodiak. I was thinking of you.
Kodiak. Kodiak cameras. My brain went to like freaking grizzly bears.
I was like, what are you talking about? Because when I was little or younger, Kodak and Blockbuster were like staples of like Kodak was a staple of your summer trip. You get the cameras and you take the pictures. Do you remember the click and the grind? Individual pictures.
You take it into like CVS and have your pictures developed and then you look through your pictures like, oh, that was a kick ass summer. And the Blockbuster was when you weren't traveling like Friday night, Thursday or Friday night, usually Thursday, because that's when the new releases came out. Thursday night, you go hit a Blockbuster for the new releases and have them all weekend and then take them back.
And I was thinking, what did they do poorly? Because they were like Kodiak. Kodiak. Kodiak.
Kodiak was around for like a century before it collapsed. What did they do poorly that led to their demise? And that tied into my email topic of resisting technology changes or resisting tech or resisting change, whatever, however you want to go with it, which then ties into the current environment of tech resistance, blockchain and cryptocurrencies. So that's what we're going to.
That was my long drawn out way to get to what we're going to be discussing tech resistance today and why it's not a good thing. It actually is a like a dinosaur thing that will leave you in the dust. Well, there's different levels of it.
And like, I'm definitely one of those people that held on to my flip phone for the longest time, and it was just because I had gotten so good at texting without even looking at my phone with just my thumb with that T9 text thing. And like, I could literally just do it while class. It had the dot on the five.
The dot on the five. And you literally could just be like boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. It was amazing.
Absolutely amazing. Youngins don't know. I just I've always had issues with touch screen.
Like even now when I'm messaging it, like the guest text thing is terrible. Autocorrect is horrible. So like my M.O. for it's not that I'm tech resistant in the way that a lot of the boomers and like the old heads are.
I don't like the first iteration of anything because there's bugs and kinks to work out. And typically the first iteration of everything costs more. So let's address the two areas I just brought up.
Blockbuster and Kodiak slash Kodak. Kodak once owned 90 percent of all the camera like film and camera type stuff. They own 90 percent of the market and they were too big to fail.
What happened was digital cameras came out and Kodak looked at those and said, oh, those will never last. Our products better. These digital cameras, they don't have the best shutter speed.
They don't use traditional film. And what happened was the first iteration that was true. The second iteration, the engineers went back and solved all those problems with plus other ones that were not seen.
And within five years, Kodiak was bankrupt from 100 year dominance. It's that motto. If it's not broke, don't fix it.
That's how fast tech innovations can wipe out companies that resist change or don't foresee change. So one of those dividend kings we were just talking about, if they did some kind of resistance crap, they could very well go the way of dinosaurs. So like if you tie this into like we talked about the illustrious Kodiak.
You tie it into the moats like Kodiak slash Kodak had a great moat. They were like the only game in town. But their moat evaporated because they didn't roll with the changes or foresee what was going on in the world.
Another one was Blockbuster and they did the same thing. Blockbuster was I think 75 to 80 percent of all videocassette and DVD rentals went through a Blockbuster and they had the opportunity to actually partner with Netflix. And they said they were stupid.
And they said no. Then Netflix went from the library where you got the little envelope in the mail, which was pretty kickass. Yeah, it was pretty cool.
And they went from that to the streaming and the rest is history. Like Blockbuster was gone within five to six years. Again, like it happens five to six years.
It's a short time. I think it's going to get faster and faster. I'm sorry.
It's a long time in your life. Like five years ago, this is going on. But like in the history of economics, five years is no time.
Blink of an eye. It's quick. And then like everything I read, people are like, well, they should have seen it coming.
They should have seen it coming. They should have seen it coming. It's like, well, no, like if you put yourself in their shoes.
And their egos. Like it was a big innovation, but it wasn't something that they said, oh, it's going to change the world. Like digital cameras and streaming services.
They clearly don't use their product. Because if you had a camera that you were able to take your own photos, not have to go wait for crap to develop. And then them not having this stuff ready when you wanted.
Like that was such a nuisance. To drive, to wait. But like you can't fault them because like the human evolutionary trait is to fixate on the now.
You're not worried about a year from now. You're not worried about two months from now. You're worried about now.
And the problem with a lot of stuff, if you don't jump quick enough, you miss the boat. And this actually can like. Especially for a business.
I think this can spread over like multiple facets of your life. Like it doesn't necessarily just pertain to investing. This can be your finances.
This can be your fun. This can be your extracurriculars. Like if you've just focused on the now, you're going to be left behind because by the time you catch up to the trends, they've already been in place for a while and you're behind the eight ball.
That would be me all the time. Well, that's not always true for me. Like when I started reading into crypto, I saw what crypto could do for practicality purposes and making life better in so many different facets.
I was all in as soon as I started reading about it. I'd heard about it here and there, but like I never really like dug into it. But when I took the time, I was like, whoa.
And that's where like, but I'm trying to like massage people a little bit. Like if you live through the time with like the phone in the basement that had like the 30 foot cord that you talk to people on. Or do you remember the radio dials? What were those called? Rotary dials.
If you had like, if you had the cassette that you would like record off the radio, like all that stuff, you never saw it disappearing. You're like, oh, this I'm like living in the glory of technology. And you didn't see that CDs would replace cassettes or that streaming would then replace the CDs.
That was the digital audio. And then it was streaming services. And then a big one that no one saw coming was the Internet.
If more people saw the Internet coming, we'd have a lot more billionaires. I think crypto is a lot like the Internet innovation. Well, that's that's what I kind of was relating to in the email.
Like crypto, like the biggest thing that people are misinterpreting about crypto is I think it's actually a currency or a fiat or some sort of investment. And it's it is, but it's not. That's not all it is.
You're investing in the network. You're investing in the tech. You're not investing in a coin, a coin like you don't actually get coins.
That's the big thing that people are like, oh, I got one Bitcoin. So like, but they don't actually get a Bitcoin. You just get a one in your computer screen.
I mean, you could put anything in terms of commodity exchange. Like EVs are a good example. They're a stock.
They're an innovation. You can also sell your car to somebody else and get money for it. I mean, crypto is kind of similar where it's it's a currency in some people's eyes.
Yet it's a technology. Yet it's actually the blockchain that's going to innovate a whole bunch of other stuff and intertwinement. And it's well, that's it.
We'll get to that. We'll get to that. But I'm just like I'm walking people through like the nostalgia, the nostalgia period of what's.
Oh, boomboxes. What's going on. But like Walkman, that is, I think it's a I hate I hate to say it.
It's like a 2.7 trillion dollar market cap. But that's like nothing in comparison to like CDs and bonds and funds and stocks. But people are behind the times in the crypto.
Did you compare it to how long it took the Internet to take off? No, but the Internet came around in the early 90s. And by 99, we had the tech boom. So we're going to have a crypto.
There was a tech boom and then there was a tech crash, the dotcom crash. And then once you had the boom up and then you had the crash. And then once the crash happened, then that's when it really innovated, took off.
That same thing happened. Well, that's what we were talking about, that first iteration. That same thing happened with smartphones.
Smartphones where you had the boom and then it dropped pretty significantly and then it took off. Cryptos right now, it's in the it's in the boom part. It's going to crash at some point again and then it's going to take off.
It's done it three times now. That's where crypto. Isn't that what's happening with EVs right now? Yes, the EVs, they boomed and then they crashed and then they're going to fix all the kinks and then it'll take off.
Same with solar, did the same thing. Every innovation, if you go and look at the historical charts of it, you can see the lead up, all the euphoria of it leading up, leading up, leading up, leading up. And then they're like, oh, this shit doesn't work.
Then everyone sells off. And it's because there's this growing pains. Innovation always has growing pains.
It's that first iteration. You got to work through the kinks, you got to work through the bugs. As long as people actually see the practicality of it, improving and innovating life, it's going to come back with a vengeance.
It is. The problem that we're encountering with the blockchain technology is it's being shit on by so many people from so many different angles, like it's only what criminals use. It'll never work.
It has no value. It's a Ponzi scheme. The government and the government is actually behind a lot of this.
I was going to say this is a little bit of a different animal because of the currency component. The big banks are behind it. The big tech companies are behind it saying it's not going to work.
It's going to crash. Criminals use it. They're trying to dissuade you from using it because they have through the years.
What's the word I'm thinking of? Monopoly. Monopoly, I guess, whatever, of the power. It's been like 30 years.
They've been just buying and getting all the power they can. They're not going to give that up without a fight. And the fight is to bad mouth the current technology.
The thing that threatens that. The thing that threatens that till they can get there. Because at first they thought Bitcoin was a hoax, a joke, this or that.
And then they started seeing what other people were seeing in the early adopters. And then they're like, oh, crap, this is eventually going to take over. But if you read between the lines, what's happening is big tech, big banks and the government are all talking shit on blockchain.
But in the meantime, they're buying up. They're buying it up in the shadows. They're keeping it suppressed on purpose so that they can gain the control and the foothold.
So when it when it does, then they can just say at one point, say, well, we were wrong. The blockchain and cryptocurrencies are they're awesome. Everybody should be in them.
They'll own all of it so they can keep their power. That's what's going on. They can keep their power and then they can control the prices of it.
And the thing is, most people, because they tend to trust authority figures in a government for some reason. And that was a couple of questions I posed. I said they're waiting for them to give the green light.
Doing research on this, over 99 percent of crypto transactions are legal, according to Investopedia and Chain Analysis. And if what they're saying about the value is true, then why are the biggest investors that you know of other than Warren Buffett and the biggest investment companies buying it hand over fist? If it's if it has no store of value, if it's not around to stay like it's there. I don't want to say lying, because that could be bad.
Even Rich Dad Poor Dad Dude Kiyosaki, he's even buying. They're misleading you on purpose to acquire as much power as they can in the blockchain area because it is an innovation that's not going anywhere. It is here to stay.
And they're like now they have the A.I. coming out so they can kind of distract you with the shiny A.I. bubble. Oh, A.I. is awesome. A.I. is awesome.
A.I. is awesome. In the meantime, they're like approving ETFs for cryptocurrency so that they can acquire all the Bitcoin, all the Ethereum. I didn't hear too much in the news about any of that, to be honest.
And the NFT thing has kind of died. That was real big last year. But I'm just saying like it's been very suppressed.
So, yeah, they're now shiny objects. But I was going to say with the tech innovation stuff, previous generations or whatever with the tech innovations, they were a lot less and far between. Now it's like we're having the crypto blockchain situation.
AI is coming out like literally right about at the same time. You've got the EV thing going on. It seems like we are like stacking them closer and closer and closer.
Well, they're doing that all on purpose. I swear to God, it's all on purpose. They're being stacked one on top of another on purpose so that they can talk shit on everything to keep you in stocks and bonds and CDs while they acquire all the wealth, all the wealth and all the power.
So that's why I mean, I've mentioned it a few times in passing on the podcast that you have to have the ability to look beyond like next week, next month when it comes to. A.I. is legit the future. Investing in general, but life beyond investing like you don't want to be left the only one holding like an internal combustion engine car when they're all gone.
We actually had this discussion because we're pretty anti the EV thing. And again, it's because we knew there were kinks like we just knew there were kinks. So this whole like everybody jumping on board.
And then with that cold weather storm that happened where all the people got like held up and dry. They were stranded like stuff wasn't charging. They couldn't pump their stuff.
It got real cold. We were like, yep, saw that coming. And like we were just looking at it from a I guess this is maybe where my engineering background comes into play or practicality component.
But I was like, there's so many things that they could do to improve this design versus what it is is existing. And I'm like, I'm not going to be the one holding the bag when the shoe drops. Yes.
And that's not doing it. That's why I like I thought it was imperative to batteries are super expensive to replace. Tech resistance thing.
Don't resist like the changes that are here to stay. Like EVs here to stay, regardless how you feel about it, whether it's a woke thing or not, like it doesn't matter. It's interesting about that, though.
If you look into Toyota and we absolutely love Toyota, but Toyota's looked into all the all the auto industries have or makers have looked into the EV thing. Toyota is choosing not to go full force EV because they've said that it's not practical and efficient at this point. So they're trying to utilize other types of stuff or do hybrids because it's just not there yet.
And that's kind of been my sentiment with the whole thing. It's not that I'm resistant, per se. It's almost like that.
It's ahead of its time. That would be a stock to actually get into, because what I think they're doing is they're actually doing electric with solar and hydrogen. They're doing like a combination like if you're interested in that.
Look into what Toyota's tweaking around with. And I think they probably have the forefront because Toyota's like really, really got their stuff dialed in. And if you like like the autonomous vehicles don't settle on the first iteration of the self-driving cars.
Look beyond that to like what would benefit most from the self-driving cars, which would be taxis and semi trucks and things of that nature. That's how you can actually circumvent what they're doing with the nonsense saying all self-driving cars are bad. Meanwhile, they're actually buying up all the stock to this.
So look beyond that because people don't I don't even think that like the super rich people look at like self-driving taxis and buses and stuff. I've even read some stuff like that would be really cool to get. So people don't have to actually drive and have those if you've ever talked to truck drivers like they can't drive for more so many hours in a 24 hour period.
They have to stop. There's like if you've ever driven across country, you know that you use a lot more gas at certain speeds going up hills this and that. There's a safety concern with stuff.
And if they're like people as drivers shipping our goods back and forth, that'll actually save a lot of costs. It'll probably save a lot of other stuff. Now it's going to suck.
It's going to put those people out of jobs. But at the same time, if you know this stuff is coming, just like the AI stuff, if you know this stuff is coming, you can well choose to go back to school or continuous education in things to facilitate these new techs that are coming out so that you're on the forefront of demand and skill set and not getting pushed out and laid off like everybody else. And that's a key thing, especially with the AI stuff.
Sidebar of that would be AI. You can either do like the programming of the AI or then like what is it called? The proofs or whatever they say whenever you have to write something down that they follow. Honestly, I don't know what they're called.
You can either choose to do the computer component of that or you can think outside the box as to what can't AI do. Exactly. Go back to school for blue collar stuff.
Plumbing, electrical. Because that's the kind of stuff like a lot of people thought it was going to take away the blue collar jobs. But what's actually happening is it's taking away a lot of the white collar jobs.
So the blue collar jobs are getting higher and higher in demand, which means like plumbing is so expensive to have done anymore. So it's like you could go back to school for like only two years versus like. Plumbing, electrical, HVAC.
HVAC is amazing. HVAC is going to be a huge one. So if you want to make yourself a commodity, like look at this as an opportunity to get ahead of the curve.
So embrace the innovation. Or end up like Kodiak. And like think outside.
You have to think outside the box. Like I keep saying, I keep saying, I keep harping on it, but it's true. Yeah, you have to figure out where like the things are.
The holes in the innovation. The holes in the innovation, the rider stuff in the innovation or the things that the innovation is not going to touch. But it's going to create a bigger demand because jobs are going to go elsewhere.
Or there's going to be a flood in the market, which means those people potentially need some kind of other service. So like if we looked at like prime examples, we brought up Kodak. Kodak had the actual physical film and then digital cameras came along.
The holes in the innovation there would have been like the sports cameras, I guess. The data storage. Yeah, this data storage.
And then home printing potentially. And then if you look at Blockbuster had the actual physical DVDs and cassettes and then Netflix came along and had the actual physical DVDs, but then they had streaming. What's the hole in streaming? I don't know right now.
Personal libraries and storage. I would think it would be like, yeah, it would be online things. I really think data storage is going to be huge.
Like huge websites. With the amount of gaming streaming. That's another big one.
The gaming industry has gone from the console, console, console. To this like Steam. You can download it.
It's instantaneously like part of your computer. You get games through that automatic updates. But like online things where they have everything.
They could have everything. I think it would be a hole. I would think the online streaming services where there has to be some way to get rights.
Because that's what they're struggling with. So figuring out a way around that. And that's where the whole peer to peer stuff's coming in.
That's where the blockchain actually is going to solve a lot of the problems. Because the blockchain, you literally can say here I have X amount of. I have proof that I bought this at one point.
X coin. Here give me all the office episodes. And they'll be like, here's all the office episodes.
Give me your X coin. Once you own rights to it, you never have to worry about like if you get off of Amazon. You lose access to the things you purchased.
And it doesn't have a monthly recurring fee. So that actually should help you with budgeting. You literally just have to have your crypto set aside in your cold wallet.
That's one of the things I don't like. So that is going to be an innovation at some point that's going to come about. But don't resist tech.
Essentially is the whole point of this. Well, I want to give you a prime example why you shouldn't resist tech. Over the last 15 years, when you look at total returns per investment, people always think, well, we had.
Oh, this is great. We had two big booms in tech and we had the S&P went up and small caps did pretty well. But like the best of the big three markets was Nasdaq, which went up 20 percent.
Over the last 15 years, Bitcoin itself is up over 200 percent. Compared to that. So you got 10 times higher return from just investing in Bitcoin than you did the Nasdaq.
And all this time we've heard about how it's a great time to be investing in equities because it's a bull market. But at the same time, this thing that they're dissuading you from even entertaining the thought of owning has went up 10 times more. I mean, EVs did something similar.
The dotcom bubble stuff did something similar. But then again, they grow the most. It all comes back to the control mechanism.
They're going to do whatever they can to stay in control. And what they know works is fear. And fear is you're going to lose all your money in the blockchain.
You're going to all criminals. We're going to scam you. Only criminals use this.
It'll never be around. Are they still using that crap? Yeah. So check this out.
So the government is actually saying this, but the government pulled the trigger. We are now using digital currency as of July of 2023. Look into it.
It is a legit thing. They kept it below the radar because they didn't want the boomers and everybody to tweak out. But we are 100% digital currency at this point.
They just don't want you to know. I've been waiting to figure out when they're going to actually pull the cash grab back. I think they're probably going to wait until the boomer generation is on its way out because they can't handle the whole digital stuff.
Well, the boomers, they yield too much control in the voting mechanism. I think they decided against actually doing that cash grab, but that's why. My generation, the Xers and below, they're going to do that.
They're going to say, oh, BTW, we don't have dollars anymore. But they did it. Like back when COVID was happening, you noticed a lot of places weren't taking cash.
Most people thought it was because of COVID, but it actually wasn't because of COVID. It was actually getting people used to not having physical currency. They were updating their systems for this blockchain, this government coin that is now live.
They just haven't publicized it. So the government's telling you that this is bad. And then the human condition is you can't see beyond your own lifetime.
So your entire life, all you've ever used is dollars. So it's very difficult to transfer the, I don't know. This is the only time in our entire lives that we're ever going to have a currency change.
Yeah. It scares the crap out of people. This is huge.
This is something that does not happen every day. And that's why I think the resistance in this whole crypto front. Yeah, money has always been the same.
It's always been issued in dollars. What is it? Like protected by the government, FDIC? Yeah. Protected by the government, backed by the government.
So it's always been issued and backed by the government. And that's all people know. So like actually having a decentralized program of money that's issued by nobody, that has like a finite supply where they can't like just print out more Bitcoin and get into a shitstorm.
But people don't know, they're not familiar. They don't understand the systems and the people who don't understand tech to begin with, the older generation. But it's happened multiple times before.
That's the part that I get confused with. Nobody's old enough to remember. We're like, I guess we're not fans of history.
But if you look back throughout history, you have silk, spices, salt, cows, milk, gold, silver, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There's been so many iterations of what the fiat currency was that was accepted by people throughout history that it shouldn't be that scary to go from dollars to. I think it's because we've had this one for so long that we've never really experienced it before.
I guess. I'm excited. I hate change.
I think it's along the lines of it's not backed by anyone. I think that's what the biggest resistance for the blockchain is. I think that is it too.
But if you do really understand that, I guess I shouldn't say the current, but quote unquote, the current dollar system is backed by the government's say so because we're off the gold standard. Like it's kind of in the wind more than anything else. So it's like my one friend was like, well, crypto is not backed with anything.
I was like, and the dollar is. And he was like, actually, that's a good point. I was like, right.
That's part of the economic conundrum. Like nothing's actually backed by anything. It's all what people are willing to buy and spend and accept as the currency.
Gold's not backed by anything. Because if you think about gold is backed by dollars and everyone's like, well, gold's a great hedge against the dollar's collapse. Gold will be worth so much.
But gold is backed by people using the dollars they have to buy it. So it's really what, I mean, it's the same concept. Like that's the same thing as a Bitcoin.
If people are willing to give you $60,000 for a Bitcoin, it's the same concept of people are willing to give you $2,400 for one ounce of gold. It's literally the same exact thing. It's the same concept.
And I kind of wonder if people get moved over to the crypto thing, if gold is actually going to lose some of its value because of the cumbersome aspect of it. I wonder. I don't know if it will, but I'd be curious to see if it actually does.
Because I'm pro the whole digital thing, just because of simplicity and efficiency factor. Well, gold is very cumbersome and inefficient. And those are our point of views.
Not everybody thinks that way. It's irrefutable. Like my brother's all about gold.
And I'm just like, Gary, if the freaking end of the world happens, like nobody's going to roll up and like shave off a piece of gold to buy a loaf of bread. That's literally not going to happen. It's irrefutable.
It's not up for discussion. It's inefficient and it's cumbersome. That's not just my opinion.
That's fact. To have a gold bar means you actually have to have a safe to keep it in because people will steal it because it's so rare and I guess valuable. Most of the time, if you have one gold bar, you have many gold bars and then you have to have the safety and then you have to have the weapons to defend the stuff and then you have to have all this other crap to like have the gold.
Then usually you want to talk about it. As what we're aspiring to be is nomads, you're tethered to one location because you can't very well drive around 6,000 pounds of gold. And then there's places that store it.
There's a lot of like fear that they're not going to actually give you your gold if push comes to shove. So it's just like, I mean, I know we've talked about this before. Not our bag.
If you want to invest in gold, by all means. But it's not in our opinion. It's not really an asset.
It's more of a liability and possibly a hedge against recession. But are we really in a recession? No, there's two schools of thoughts in that one is we're going to be in a soft landing, which will avoid the recession entirely. And the other one is that every time throughout history, whenever they've cut interest rates, the economies went into a recession.
So there's either the soft landing people or there's the recession people. Majority of the people are beating the table that we're going to go into recession. Anyway, look at it.
We're dividend investors, so we're just going to keep buying more shares. It is what it is. If we go into a recession, we actually buy more shares.
So the good companies will prevail. That's why you do the research and get like the better. Better companies.
Not the Kodiaks. Kodiak slash Kodak. But like a prime example would be recently you had Peleton.
Everyone's like, oh, Peleton is the best thing. You can exercise at home. It came about in the pandemic and you basically subscribe to their, uh, their network and you had the monthly subscription coach on the computer to ride the ride the bike. And they didn't do anything beyond like, all people are going to love to do this. Even after the pandemic's over, Peleton will still be strong.
Peleton's cratered because after the pandemic was over, people just started riding bikes or they went back to the gym because they're social butterflies. And they missed social interaction at the gym. They completely whiffed on that.
They put all their eggs into this, this network and these bikes that are not that great. And they just relied on that. Now they're dead.
They've gone by and the GoPro is another one. I love GoPro, GoPro. They did the action camera and they didn't like go beyond that.
They literally just had, we have this action camera where you can film underwater and they didn't do the research that Apple was doing or that Google was doing. They came out with smartphones that had the exact same capabilities, exact same storage, exact same something or another, whatever. And they didn't make the GoPros easy enough to use, easy enough to integrate.
Like you had to have some weird program before. So then people were like, well, I have to spend $500 on my iPhone, but my iPhone does everything the GoPro does. So why would I spend $400 on the GoPro? And I think the big kicker was the stabilization thing.
GoPro had like extra attachments and then they started putting it in it, but not until after I think a lot of the smartphones had that automatic stabilization or after the fax stabilization button, you could literally just click. So it's like they did kind of shoot themselves. So we can go over like historical illustrations of time after time after time where people.
Well, I kind of feel bad for Peleton because it's like if something booms during, during a pandemic or during a one-off crisis, like you don't really know if that's going to be a lasting thing or not. We were just talking the other day because we're introverts, believe it or not. And I absolutely love curbside pickup.
It is like the best thing ever. I'm so happy. That's never going to go away ever, ever.
That's one of the things that has withstood the pandemic. Believe it or not, the pandemic has brought a lot of really cool things out. Remote work is a huge one.
Remote work is amazing. Like I used to work for the government. I talked to a couple of people that still work there and they're trying to bring them back in the office.
And it's like, if you actually have a job where you were in the office before, then during the pandemic, you could work from home. And then after the pandemic was over, you still work from home, but they're trying to make you to come back. Again, control mechanism because they see how, oh, we're losing control.
Yet the metrics are saying they're more productive. People are happier. They're having better quality of life.
They're having less sick days. Like where is the actual statistical proof showing that they need to be in the office? And the other thing too, from the office standpoint, they have to pay less utilities. They don't actually have to pay for the things.
So their overhead costs should be going down. So the only justification in any way, shape or form is going to be the control factor or some people who need the socialization standpoint. They need to control everything you do.
And that is exactly what they've done time and time and time and time again through throughout history. As employees, if we rebel enough or we leave jobs because that is going away, the employers that still have that or offer that as packages, guess who's going to thrive in future? The companies that have the working home positions. Which I find funny because people were actually gung ho to embrace the technology innovation of working from home via whether it was zoom or whatever.
But then like blockchain, they're like, oh, no. But it's like the same concept. It's just a better iteration of something in the past.
Yeah. It's because money is such a weird thing. People have fear just in general around.
I'm not sure if you don't know what the blockchain does. Like in simplistic terms, there's a bunch of documentaries, I think, literally everything is available for anyone to see. And it's all checked by a bunch of anonymous people to make sure that's valid and that's verified that way.
That's what the blockchain is. It's everything's out there for you to see. And it's verified through, I don't know how many thousands of different anonymous users.
It's all it is. It's nothing like it's more secure. It's more safe.
Nothing that's turning the world over where it's like, oh, it's going to end everything. No, it kind of takes human error out of the picture in a lot of ways. It does.
They literally say, hey, we want to we want to have facts and figures about flower deliveries for 2023. So you have a bunch of people that research it and they get paid. Amount of data that they can verify, they'll get paid in whatever cryptocurrency that they whatever the platform they're on, they'll get paid to verify that, OK, there was one hundred ninety five thousand flower deliveries.
And then another user from a different one says, yeah, one hundred ninety five is right. So you get a bunch of consensus among these anonymous people verifying the data is correct. So you don't have to worry about the quote fake news that everyone's always worried about.
Yes, that's another thing. And it's like you can't it's like they burn down the library of Alexandria and they're just like sticking out random news articles. Well, once it's in the block chain, you can't ever get rid of it.
I mean, that's a very, very, very simplistic definition of the block chain. It's obviously more to it than that. But that's smart contracts.
I mean, right there, it's going to get rid of the middlemen in a lot of different industries. But you can see why banks are opposed to it, because they're getting lending agencies. They're getting they're getting left out, because if you can if you can lend to someone looking for, say, one hundred thousand dollars for a house, you go on over the block chain.
Here's one hundred thousand dollars. And they have to put up collateral for it right there through the smart contract. So you actually have that safety net.
So the bank makes no money off that. So you can see why the banks are pissed. All the money goes from the peer to peer.
They're cutting the middleman out like it's going to do a lot for the people. And you can see why the technology would like all the big tech companies would be opposed to it, because if you can do that on the if you can lend it via the peer to peer, you don't need to go through Google. You don't need to go through Apple.
So they're going to be losing out the customers that way. You can see why the government's opposed to it, because, again, you're cutting them out of everything and they want their money. So like you can see why all the big power players are so opposed to the innovation that's going on right now, because it's going to take money from them.
They're literally shitting their pants when you take money from them. You take power from them. If you take power from them, they become nasty.
It's like any human. Whenever you take power from them, they get nasty and caged animal lashes out the hardest. And I read a quote by this guy named Hal Finney.
I had no idea who he is. Just a really kick ass quote. He says the computer can be used as a tool to liberate and protect people rather than to control them.
And that is what we're entering into a period where you can actually use the computer to your benefit rather than being controlled by whether it's work or whether it's the social media that you pay attention to. Whether you actually like your tech, you're supposed to actually set boundaries and stuff for it, for you to control it, not for it to control you. If you haven't figured that out yet, you're not doing it right.
And then this guy, Brock Pierce, says every smart person that I admire in the world and those I semi fear is focused on this concept of crypto for a reason. They understand that this is the driving force of the fourth industrial revolution. Steam engine, electricity, then the microchip, now blockchain and crypto is the fourth.
Yes, so true. So it's human nature to evolve. It really is.
And human nature is to evolve. And if you don't evolve. Technology's nature is to evolve with the humans as well.
So we're beyond electricity, we're beyond the microchip, we're now in the blockchain. The blockchain and the crypto, I think, are going to be tied together for a few years until the blockchain does its own thing and crypto does its own thing. Right now, unfortunately, they're tied together.
So whenever you hear crypto, it's tied with the blockchain. When people are discussing blockchain, the first thing people think of is, oh, that's a cryptocurrency. But essentially, blockchain is the internet 3.0. Like if you've heard that 3.0 thing, that's what they're talking about.
Yeah, blockchain is the network. The internet 3.0. The cryptocurrency is if I go on to wherever I'm like, say I'm verifying something and I get paid in Cardano, you're using the blockchain to make money. It's different.
Well, the tokens, they're just a means of transfer. That's how you transfer your info and that's how they pay you for your work. And people are putting monetary value on them, which is why it's kind of becoming this currency factor.
But you can see why crypto is worth what it's worth because it's exactly the same as the dollar. It's exactly the same as gold. Because if there's, say, five million people working with, I don't know what's a small crypto, Toncoin.
And Toncoin is going to go up in price because there's five million people getting it and more people want to get into it. But they're like, oh, look at all these people making Toncoin. Toncoin is going to go up in price.
So then people are wanting to pay more for the Toncoin. So it's the same concept as dollars and gold. I don't know why they keep saying the shit they say.
I don't know. I mean, we've explained all that. So Mark Cuban says not understanding blockchain is going to smack you down and make you bleed.
And that's Mark Cuban. That is fact. If you know, if you follow him, he's been on it.
He's all about crypto. He's been on crypto. Smack you down and make you bleed.
That is that is fact. And Charles Lee says cryptocurrency is such a powerful concept that it can almost overturn governments. And that is that is that's why that's why they're there.
When you were talking about it's like making the big businesses tweak out or it's going to like make them run for their money or test their resilience. What's the biggest business of them all? Government. Yes.
So they're either going to have to innovate, get on board. Well, they're cut the fat. And I used to work there.
I'm telling you, like, they got a lot of fat to trim. So I can literally do the jobs of like almost every job that I was involved in. So the first thing you need to understand about crypto is that you're not buying a currency or a stock or a coin, but rather you're buying a share in the network.
I mean, I went over this. The more demand there is for the network, the more valuable the network's cryptocurrency becomes. And I think that's the biggest misconception that people make when they're they're they're embracing or they're denying this current innovation in technology.
They think it's actual coins and it's not. I can't stress it enough. It's not.
But I do think currency that's backed with data and tech probably would be the most resilient currency of all. Currency backed by anything is probably more resilient than what we have. That's a low bar.
That's a real low bar. I'm just saying, like, it's used to be Biden. Like, really, let's let's go there.
Up until Nixon, everything was everything. Everything was backed by gold up until Nixon. And for whatever reason, he said, we're done with that.
And that's what led us down this path that we're currently muddling through, where nothing's backed by anything. They can print as much money as they want. Prior to that, if you printed out a million dollars, you'd have to have a million dollars worth of gold.
I've read a couple places that the physical currency like is more outside the United States. There's more of it outside the United States than there is inside. And there's more hundred dollar bills than there is any other denomination.
And but you can see, like, if I remember when I was little, we went on. What grade was it? I want to say second or third grade. We went to a tour of a bank.
And this was 1980. It was it was after they did the gold standard. But before they started doing the stupid shit with the relaxation of the thing.
And they showed us. They said, OK, so every time someone deposits money, we take it and we put it in here. So any time we like so we can only lend out what we have here.
So even up through the 80s, it was still like if you went to the bank, got a ten thousand dollar loan, they'd actually have to have ten thousand dollars in the bank. Yeah, not anymore. They only have to have like ten thousand dollars.
No. So you get a ten thousand dollar loan. They only have a thousand in the bank.
So they only have to have 10 percent of what they're learning. Oh, yeah. OK, so I did the number right.
I was the wrong number. That's why that's why that's why the banks go belly up when people storm the bank. Whenever people go to get their money out, they don't have but like 10 percent of what they have.
Whoever ruled that one is an idiot. Yeah, pretty much. I don't even know what they're doing, but like that's that's why I actually am all about blockchain.
I've been about blockchain from the second that I like the personal banking thing because of the fee factor. I mean, seriously, fees upon fees upon fees upon fees, late fees, overdraft fees. It's like a smart contract.
You wouldn't be able to send it if you didn't have it. So I'm trying to think five percent would be a good balance of your portfolio in cryptos, no more than ten. But five is a good a good number to just to start with.
I have probably. A lot. Twelve or whatever percent.
But that's because I'm actually using it as an investment tool. Once you actually understand it more, you can actually use it an investment tool like you can understand the patterns like we're in a bull market of crypto right now. You can stock up on stuff and then like after the Bitcoin halves and I think two weeks after the Bitcoin halving, the prices are going to go up more and more close, isn't it? And then I'll probably dump everything but my Bitcoin and probably Ethereum, depending on what they do with the ETFs.
I'll dump everything, all my altcoins by then before the end of the year, and then I'll just keep that in cash. And then once crypto shits itself, which it'll do like it always does, I'll buy it up again for the next halving, which will be in 20 tell years of 2028. There'll be another halving.
So I'll start buying my crypto in 2026 and 2027 because there's a pattern that keeps repeating itself. That's like the beauty of cryptocurrency is there's a pattern. There's not a pattern in stocks.
It's very difficult to time stocks other than like what I brought up at the beginning, like, you know, they're going to lower the interest rates, you know, certain stocks are going to go up when their interest rates are lowered. So you can actually stop investing money then because you're going to you're not going to get the lower price. Tim thinks that pattern is going to go indefinitely.
But I think because of the legislation and all these other things happening that that pattern may fluctuate a little bit differently. Time will tell. I don't really know.
That's why I'm holding Bitcoin and probably Ethereum. If they pass the ETF for Ethereum, I'll probably hold all my Bitcoin and Ethereum, but everything else I just don't. We're waiting for the third gen coins because like we said, the first couple innovations of technology kind of need a lot of bugs worked out.
I never thought I would actually have to address this because I'm an old fart and I've my entire life. I've been like Internet. Awesome.
CDs. Awesome. Streaming.
Awesome. I've never had these. I've never had a problem with technology.
And I thought that everybody was like that if they just look at it and say, well, CDs are, says the man who has the first iteration of the Droid Turbo. But I still have a phone. I look, I look at and say CDs are more efficient than tapes.
So why would I not have CDs? Well, and then I got you the little MP3 player. You're like, I could have thousands of songs on this little tiny thing. Yeah.
He's like, this is cool. But like, I've never like, and I'm kind of resistant in some regard, but I've never like, you know, the big transformative things that are going on. Yeah.
So embrace them. I'm so I, but I never thought I'd actually have to say, Hey people, it's okay to actually like Bitcoin or like Ethereum or like the blockchain. It's all right.
It's the next. And guess what? If you guys don't actually get on board, like you're going to be kicking yourselves in the ass later. Not even from a financial component, because there is a lot of money to be made in the blockchain and cryptocurrency investing, but from the, whenever the government drops the bomb, your dollars are going to be in digital dollars anyways.
You're going to feel violated. You're not going to be able to get in like you would have had you listened or had you done it when you first had a inkling that, Hey, this might be something that's going to last more than two years. They're projecting because by the time they drop the ball, nothing's going to be as cheap as it is now.
And then we're in a bull market, but like, if they dropped it, like when they say, Hey, we're going to go to the, uh, the digital American dollar. So every time you have a check deposit, it goes into not dollars, but U S whatever the hell it is. CBDC.
I think they're calling it something central bank, digital currency. And that's what you have. And then you're like the beauty of crypto is you can do like 0.0002 for something.
And that is the best you can, you don't have to do full shares of anything. I love, that is one of the things I do like about Robin hood. But like, so if you go to the store and you buy like, um, I don't know, $60 with the groceries, you just do your, it's like, it's completely better than cash.
They don't give you like a bunch of change in return. I hate fucking change. I hate it so much.
That's why I don't use cash. But then I was looking around like, like recently, if you look around, like you can see one of the tech innovations before your very eyes that you never even knew was happening until you actually look at it. And I'm like, Oh, when I was little and up until probably through college, everybody had cash.
Everybody carried cash. Everybody took cash, but now people don't even take cash. It's card.
They have card and they have like everything on your pay wallet, on your phone. And people literally just scan their phone so that like, you can see that happened without like, so if you missed that, that's exact. That's how easy it is to be the next code Kodak because you just missed it.
Like, Oh, okay. We went from cash to this computerized stuff. Yeah.
I still don't even have anything hooked up on my phone. We just use cards because so it's very like, that's why I don't talk shit on Kodak. And that's why I don't talk shit on, on GoPro and blockbuster and all of them.
Cause it's very easy. I mean, to get in the weeds, to get passionate about your thing and like blockbusters kind of stupid. I might talk shit.
They had an opportunity to be in, but everyone else that just like you missed it, like you just missed it. And before you knew it, you're like, Oh shit. Uh, we've been passed by.
Yeah. That's why you never done. That's why I don't really talk shit about individual investors because you might just be missing keys to things that you've.
And we're not opposed to EV. We're just opposed to EVs right now until they get their freaking crap together that it makes sense. Well, I was, I've read a lot of reports on electronic vehicles and the propaganda that they're telling you is that electronic vehicles are better for the environment.
So do your, do your part for climate change and better and to keep the environment safe. But actually EVs are burning more fossil fuels than ICEs. Especially if you're on the Northeast, because when you plug them in, you're burning coal, you're burning natural gas.
You're actually using more fossil fuels. You think we're full of shit. Think about how do they run EVs? They do it with lithium batteries.
How do they mine lithium? It's a dirty, nasty, pollutive process. How do you charge it? It's a dirty, nasty, pollutive process to charge your stuff. So like, and you know, with lithium ion batteries, they only last so many cycles and then you have to get a new one.
How do you, how do you recycle it? It's a dirty, nasty, pollutive process. So like I'm not, I've read that and I don't have the reports in my, and if you guys travel, like we travel, like anybody who has an RV knows about the alternator, like the way to charge DC, you have that alternator charge for the battery, which they do not have on the EVs. I don't understand that.
They should have it hooked up to the axle some way, shape or form to actually get that friction, that charger component going on. They should also have, they have the shore power obviously going on because that's how they charge them now. But they should like the way Teslas are actually designed, you could entirely have solar panels on the top roof integrated into the actual like glass piece.
I don't know what they're doing. You'd literally have three different ways of charging so they could charge while running, they could charge while just sitting and, and then having shore power as the third backup. And both of those other two are renewable or like they don't require the fossil fuel component.
So I, I don't know what they're doing. Freaking RV people from back in the eighties had it dialed in like WTF. That was the first thing when we were traveling in 2022, that was like, when I saw a Tesla, I was like, why is there not, um, why are there not solar panels on the roof? I mean, the fact that you can get a solar panel to go hiking with, to charge your phone.
Like I was mesmerized by the fact that it's supposed to be this, this, the, this breakthrough in technology. I'm like, well, why does it not have a solar panel on it? I don't understand. That's exactly what I said.
Like I just, on principle, I'm not buying something that's, they're not efficient at all. They're pollutive. And that's why I'm totally against.
It's almost like they want you to have to pay to charge them up at the things. So you can't have free energy. Well, if you look at, if you look at now, if you were a conspiracy theorist, which I'm not recommending to be, but like, if you look at, they have data about people in Congress and people in power, like they have to file what they invest in.
And if they invest like a lot, most of them invested in Tesla. So Tesla is going to just do what they can to make them the most money. It doesn't necessarily going to be what's best for the customer, for the customer or the planet planet.
Exactly. So if you're a conspiracy theorist, you could just say, follow the congressional money. And you can see why Tesla doesn't have a solar panel.
So I hate to say Tesla, but I am not buying any of your stuff. Solar panels don't make as much money as lithium batteries. I mean, seriously, if you're driving at a speed, you could implement wind power at some way, shape or form if you really, really wanted to.
Like I'm pretty sure Elon Musk could totally do that. So you could have a fourth one. There's our rant on EVs.
So this is why we are actually quote unquote EV resistant. I'm a fan of the technology, but I'm not a fan of the implementation of the technology. Exactly.
So it's not that we're resistant, it's that we are laughing at what they've come out. And then like smartphones, I'm not opposed to the smartphone technology. I just don't like them.
He just doesn't really use a phone to begin with. So he's just buys cheap, but it doesn't even matter. I just buy the cheapest one because I just need to make calls and like surf the Internet every now and then.
The stupid F2A factor authentication nonsense. That's going to go away with blockchain. Yeah, that's nice.
So then we might not even need phones, which will save us a crap ton of money. And then like streaming, like I'm not opposed to streaming. I think it's awesome that people can get what they want.
I would just rather not pay for it. So I do the questionable shit. All right.
On that note, we're going to wrap it up. It's getting a little long. So next week we'll be discussing brokerage accounts.
And like, I think I've figured out a way to do it unbiasedly. Everybody knows how I stand. I like Schwab and that's... Just get into it in that episode.
That's that. But like, I think I figured out how to do it unbiasedly. I'm just going to use a survey of actual investors and this is how they break it down.
And I don't even agree with his method. So I'm going to do a little bit of my thing. I'm going to take myself out of it entirely.
And then at the end of it, I'll be like, well, this is why they're all wrong. Here's why Schwab's the best. Bias card.
But we'll explain why. And you guys might not. If you haven't signed up for the email, you need to sign up for the email.
The email is pretty tight. And it has all this coverage generally. And it has what I think are the best 10 stocks going ex-dividend the following week.
And then if you have money, they're always undervalued and they have a good profit margins and they have a pretty decent yield and their dividends are growing. So it's a way to give you ideas to invest in yourself. I haven't mentioned it a lot because I just assumed that people would sign up for it and that's not happened.
So I guess I have to advertise. Nobody wants to read your long ass crap. It's really good stuff.
You wouldn't think that a hick from Colorado that's introverted would come up with this nice stuff, but that's how it works. But if you're having trouble like figuring out which crypto or not cryptos, which stocks to buy and stuff like that's a really good starting place. Just getting that email, even if you don't read any of this stuff.
I do have six cryptos in the current email going out next week. So if you were curious about what cryptos I have my money in. So do you want to give them just one crypto to possibly stick their stuff in? One crypto.
If they want to buy a crypto right now. I would go with the graph. What's the ticker for that? GRT.
GRT. Is that available on Coinbase? Yes. Okay.
So Coinbase is really the easiest thing if you're in America to get on, sign up. We'll leave a link in the show notes. So you can just click on it.
The graph is what they compare. And then you literally just link your bank. Like Google of the cryptocurrencies.
Basically they just accumulate as much data as possible and they just store it. I like what they sound like they're doing in their white paper and everything. And it's only like 34 cents a coin, quote unquote.
So if you want to get on board, throw a hundred bucks in that. You own a little bit of crypto that you started. So you can just say you have a little bit of something.
We're Filecoin. Filecoin is the Amazon. And that's FIL, right? Yeah, FIL.
FIL or GRT are the two that I don't think people pay enough attention to that are both like they have transformative properties in their network that I think will be well beyond the current having cycle. All right. So there you go, guys.
Those are under undervalued despite this bull crypto run right now. And they're both available on Coinbase. Yes.
You can sign up for that if you don't have it. Real easy to link your bank in there. You have to go through the stupid verifying it's you with your passport or whatever nonsense.
They all have that. You have to send them a picture of you. And they all have that.
If you lose your password, you have to send them an email of you holding your picture saying, this is me holding my picture. I authorize you to release my information or some shit. It's very funny.
But basically, they're all like that. But Coinbase is, I think, the easiest one to get into first out the gate. And then just throw a hundred bucks.
If you like to gamble, this is probably a better gamble for you. Better lottery like that. It's not a gamble.
You'll make money. But I'm saying if you like to gamble, this is probably an actually better one. Yeah.
But what I just mentioned is not a gamble. You'll make money. You're missing my point.
But anyway, all right, guys, thanks for tuning in. You'll make money and graph. I'm just saying.
Just saying. We'll see you guys next time.