My Take On Crypto and NFTs
Host: Isaac Mashman · January 31, 2022 · Episode 90 · 26 minutes
Transcribed from the episode audio and edited for names and terms. Wording can differ slightly from what was said; the episode itself is the record.
I'm listening to Chase the Vision with Isaac Mashman. Yo, yo, what is going on everybody? Isaac Mashman here, and welcome back to another episode of Chase the Vision with Isaac Mashman, the podcast that is all about helping you become a more capable individual through me, sharing my experiences and knowledge in business, life, and personal growth. Stoked to be talking to you guys today about this subject as it is something that I really haven't expressed my viewpoints firmly in one place ever before. Now, before I jump into the subject matter, I would like to remind you guys of my fee for listening. This isn't monetary, I'm not asking you to buy anything and I'm not selling you my course.
I would much rather you, however, share this podcast episode with a friend, a business partner, an affiliate, somebody that you know that you believe can get just as much value from this episode as you did.
This is the way that the show grows as I'm not running a bunch of advertisements and wasting your time. And I'll say this once again, right? There have been plenty of shows that I've listened to, that I've been fans of for years, and I understand and respect the decision to monetize your podcast, but when there's an advertisement every 10 minutes, it can become cumbersome to somebody who's listening, and I'm just not here for it. There's a reason I don't listen to the radio, and there's a reason why you don't listen to the radio either, because of all the advertisements. You wanna be able to be in control of what you were hearing and how quickly you were consuming that information. But anyways, today I want to address the current investor market. Now I do need to proceed this with this, you know, stereotypical claim.
This is not financial advice. And I'm not telling you guys to base your future financial decisions on what I'm about to tell you or what I'm going to be discussing because I do want to give you guys an unbiased and mainly logic focused perspective on where I am putting my money, where I am making my investments and what I'm steering away from. Now, there's no denying that as time progresses and as society moves forward, technology is going to get better and better. New use cases for technology are going to come out and problems are going to be solved as these technological solutions really come into the focus, into the mass market.
And over the past decade, we've seen the rise of cryptocurrency. We've seen the rise of Bitcoin going from literally pennies for one Bitcoin to 50,000 and 60,000 at its peak.
As of today of recording this episode, I believe it's probably hovering around 35 to $36,000. Now, I have never been one of these guys that is 100% bullish on cryptocurrency. I'm also not one of those guys that is 100% skeptic either. I believe that skepticism has its place, and I believe that it is important to do your due diligence and research before making any investment, obviously, right? You want to research the quantity, the supply and demand, the risks, and I would also say don't invest more than you are willing to lose when it comes to cryptocurrency and even the stock market. Now, something that I have recently really developed a keen interest in is in real estate, and not so much of the multi-unit homes and buying houses and such and that's something that I'll get more and more involved with as my business scales, as my net worth scales, as my income level scale and I'll buy an apartment complex.
I'll do those different things. Will I buy a home? Probably not anytime soon. The only time that I'll buy a home and actually pay a mortgage is when I'm going to be building my dream home that I build from foundation up and design every single small detail about it. I'm probably 10 years away from actually building that kind of compounds that I really wanna build because I'm talking 20, 30, 40 million dollars here of what I envision myself walking in as my dream home. I don't wanna buy just any home. And so you do have the real estate market and although I haven't been making those kind of plays, I have been making investments with certain individuals, right?
So to name one, I invested with Cardone Capital earlier in the year because I saw the benefit of being invested in these AAA net properties down south in Fort Lauderdale and Miami and the areas that are really growing and thriving.
And I can say that I'm associated with Mr. Grant Cardone. I know that you guys are about to say, oh, here we go. Is this spiel is going to be like Uncle Gene, going to be like Grant? No, I have my own opinions. I've done my own research. I agree with the Grant Cardone on a lot of different things, but my beliefs do not align 100% with his. but he does speak a lot of truth in what he normally discusses. And so I've really seen this really need, this necessity for real estate, because there are in fact set amount of houses in the United States, and there is a set amount of property in the United States.
You can never create more land. And Bitcoin is a fixed asset, right? You have 20 million or however many bitcoins exist, but there are other cryptocurrencies that are infinite.
They're not finite. infinite to where more and more and more can be created. And the actual reason for cryptocurrency would be a decentralized way of making transactions, right? Allowing you guys to or allowing us as a consumer market to be in control of our financial decisions and paying and a set coin. It's I view it almost like a video game where you have a currency in game that you you can exchange for other assets or liabilities, right? You have a million dollars of Xcoin and this video game that has a value in that video game for another amount. And that is the ideal use case for cryptocurrency today, but many people are leveraging cryptocurrency as investment vehicles. Currency does not mean investment, right? A currency is something that you can leverage to make more of by investing into an asset.
But we are taking that out of context and only investing in these coins and waiting for the coin to increase in value. And it might as well be a pump and dump Ponzi scheme. There have been influencers that have been arrested or charged under a lot of scrutiny because of promoting a coin that they probably know is a bunch of crap just so they can get more and more and more people involved with that coin and make more money. A good example of this would be delish coin, right? And I'm not going to lie, I made money on Dogecoin like many people, but that doesn't mean I'm bullish on it.
But the only reason that Dogecoin ever got to the point to where it almost reached a dollar, I think it was at like 70 cents or 75 cents at its peak last year in 2021 was because Elon Musk was promoting it and it became this cultural phenomenon that had no real value, it had no use case.
You're not about to go up into the store and use Dogecoin to buy a furniture, use Dogecoin to check out your groceries at Walmart. That's just not going to be the case. Now, in the future, cryptocurrency is going to become more widely adopted to where you are able to go and use Bitcoin or Ethereum or any other crypto in order to make these said purchases, versus the fiat dollar bill that we have in our wallet or on our credit card. Because the dollar, mountain or bank account is virtual, that we insert, we deposit a piece of paper or a check, and the bank system just goes in and adds a zero, and all of a sudden, there's a speculative number in this account, but it's a firm number. It's a number that the bank put there, but it doesn't really be.
It's not really based off of how many people are holding on to it and how many people aren't. Yes, interest rates can get involved, and I don't want to get extremely technical in this conversation, but when it comes to cryptocurrency, it's really just about not so much supply and demand, but how much interest is there? The sense of community that exists around a specific coin, I've seen coins like Floki and Moon and SafeMoon and Sheba, which was the rip off of Dogecoin. And it's like, all of these different things are claiming that there are use cases for these coins, yet if you do your research and you're like, anybody can say that this has a use case, but are people actually using it for that? Are people actually using it for renewable energy? Are people actually using it for X, Y, and Z?
The chances are 98% of people are not. They're using it to make money and use it as an investment vehicle because they can get rich quick. Now, I'm not saying every coin is a get rich screen. There are plenty of cryptocurrencies. I'm sure that have positive use cases and I'm not here trying to sound like a conspiracy. All I'm here to do is say that I'm not a firm believer in cryptocurrency in this market yet. In the future, I believe that it can evolve into something magnificent and something that, Although wants to be decentralized is going to be forced to become centralized because of regulation, because of the government, and because of these different things, which based off of who I've listened to and what I can gander and what I believe would be the case, I think having regulation is actually a benefit because now there are going to be regulations on the pump and dump aspects of the Ponzi scheme aspect, right?
Jordan Belford and and a lot of these people went to jail in the 90s and the 80s for manipulating a stock that you have the 16 year old influencer who's manipulating a coin and certain people are losing thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars.
And the average consumer is losing hundreds because some influencer told them to do that. And there's no real consequence for that action. I think that's scary, especially for people that might not be as educated in a specific area, right? They're going to listen to somebody they trust which is understandable, right? you're listening to me and you are taking and consuming and appreciating my opinion because you trust me. And that's why I know and I'm aware that the information and what I'm talking about has to be coming from a place of logic and coming from a place of I'm not telling you to do this and I'm not telling you not to do this.
Here is my opinion. Here is my system of beliefs, so to speak. And on top of that, something that I am not bullish on at all is the entire NFT craze, the non-fungible token or whatever it stands for, right?
Pretty sure that is what it stands for. And I know that NFT is something that can never change, right? It's something that is a proof of ownership. It's something that, you know, it's like, hey, this is yours, you own this. And I think that again, with cryptocurrency, there are some amazing positive use cases of almost being similar to a stock in a company. You will own a share of that stock or you own 100% of that company by owning 100% of those shares, right? You can own X, Y, and Z tokens or percentages of a musician's song, right? So you can earn royalties off of that by being an owner.
So I see that as a use case. But the one thing that I don't see is how one ugly, right? And excuse my rather biased opinion here, right?
This is my own perspective and I know art is subjective and art, you know, can be up for interpretation. but I don't see how one pixelated JPEG-8 can go for $1.3 million and be sold or go for $200,000 and 500 Ethereum. And I just, I don't understand that because yes, you can screenshot it. You can, you know, other people can rip that off and you have the rights to this image and there's copyright and then it's like, this is yours. But I believe again, that goes back to the sense of community and almost being a vanity metric of saying, I'm a part of this club.
I'm a part of this group. And then next thing you know, it's like you are gaining value on that investment quote unquote investment because there's additional interest, right? It doesn't mean that more business is being generated.
It's more interest is being generated. Typically with a stock, right? The way that a stock goes up is not just off of interest, it's off of how much a company is growing, how much an establishment is growing. And our NFT is really growing in this form of an ape, right? Is it really growing in this form of some polar bear that's pixelated, right? And there is plenty of art in this world that is beautiful, that's gorgeous, but I would rather have something that I could hang up on my wall that has history to it and didn't take an artificial intelligence five seconds to generate or to evolve or to mutate.
And I don't want you guys to click off of this and think that I'm just a skeptic that's yelling about these things. But I'm genuinely concerned because maybe I don't, it's not that I don't understand it. It's just very simply like I'm viewing it from a realistic set of eyes of yeah, the world is evolving and the world is changing. But what has been around since the beginning of time and what will continue to be around and that's going to be real estate. That's going to be companies. That's going to be these other investments and other investment vehicles that I know will not fail, right?
There could be a rug And all of a sudden cryptocurrency crashes and people lose millions of dollars because the founder or because of some hackers All of a sudden they own a hundred percent of the coin and everybody else loses money, right?
I'm not saying a hundred percent of the coin. That's obviously a fallacy But you know the system shuts down the government steps in and a coin gets you know completely torn apart and They're going to be lawsuits But then again if it's decentralized how can there be a lawsuit because how can we hold somebody? accountable for their action. The entire point of Bitcoin was to become anonymous, you know, Satoshi, right? The guy who created Bitcoin personatively. It was an anonymity, right? It was being able to change the world while also remaining anonymous. And I see that these people are hopping on this bandwagon, and it's not because they're genuinely interested.
It's because they genuinely want more money. They genuinely want something that is an easy way to make money and exit, right? in a way to become a millionaire through NFTs or cryptocurrency or these coins.
And that's concerning to me. And it's not my place to necessarily be concerned because you will have the ability to make your own decisions. But I would rather take $200,000 or $100,000 or even $10,000 and put it on a down payment of a home or a renovation or put it into my business and scale. And I understand too that a lot of the people that are making these massive, massive investments are wealthy individuals who have multiple streams of income that are worth hundreds of millions of dollars, right? I read somewhere that Justin Bieber spent 500 Ethereum on on a ape, right? One of these NFTs, the kids worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
He's not going to be complaining over, you know, 500 Ethereum. But when you have the average consumer or the average person of interest, he was a hobbyist of the profession thinking that they can spend a couple thousand dollars and it it'll change their life.
I think that that is a dangerous game and there should be caution about that. Now, when it comes to the stock market investing in that, I'm not saying that you're even going to be getting magnificent gains in the stock market. You're not going to make money all the time. The stock market is actually, it's been red for the past couple of weeks. My investments are down, right? The investments that I made in certain companies are looking a little red and I'm like, all right, I'm gonna ride this out. but I'm not hottling until the moon, right? I'm not hottling until the end of time. Until I get my money back or anything, I'm there.
I'm invested in the company. I have a belief in this actual business that I bought a share of. I am an owner of that company because I believe in that company.
You should invest in what you believe in. And yes, you can invest and believe in an NFT or believe in a cryptocurrency, but are you really believing in the actual use case or are you believing in the hype? Are you believing in the fad? And that's something that you have to take a step back and actually view with an unbiased set of eyes and say, what do I actually believe in regarding this? Is this something that I'm going to see myself doing or it being around five years from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now. And personally, what I am going to be doing more of in 2022 is angel investing.
I can't say angel investing because I'm not yet accredited, got a ways to go for that as well, you know, 2020 for that, that's what I'm thinking.
But I'm going to be making investments into companies when I can. I'm going to be, you know, investing continually into the stock market, marketing companies that I believe in and companies that I trust. I'm going to be buying more parcels of land in communities that are growing, pieces of land that have the opportunity for growth or the opportunity to be bought out. I'm going to be getting my business and getting my other streams of income to the point where I'll be able to get multi-unit properties and that sort of thing to where I can get these different passive forms of income and income, then in certain situations have tax benefits, right?
Having a tax-free event is something that cryptocurrency isn't able to do. And this is something, yes, I will admit that I learned from Grant Cardone because whenever you are getting involved with something, you want to learn from the people that know the most.
You want to learn from the people who are actually extremely successful or other mentors that I'm not going to name, right? What is the form 1031, right? Taking one specific property, selling that asset, and reinvesting the money and deferring the taxes. It's not about paying the IRS, you know, every single dollar that you have. I think avoiding taxes and illegal method and writing off expenses and taking deductions and using tax credits and using these different loopholes is genius. I think that's what they are meant to be. Like that's what they're for, right? They are meant to be used, not abused, they're meant to be used to where you are able to get the most out of your hard work, the most out of your time, the most out of your money to where you're not giving an entity 51% of what you're making.
These are my beliefs and I'm simply explaining in this podcast episode, these are my beliefs and I see again a use case for cryptocurrency in the future. I see use cases for NFTs. I'm not a skeptic on all of these different things, but I also see a need and an necessity for more rental property, more land, more real estate, more companies that are publicly traded, more investments, and there are other things that have my attention to my eye. And I begin into another topic, and I feel like it wouldn't be fair if I didn't have this very brief discussion on the metaverse. I understand there are people who believe that I am uneducated by saying that, oh, I believe that the metaverse, you have to be stuck in your headphones 24 seven and the Oculus Rift and the Samsung goggles in order to be in the metaverse.
I understand the metaverse, you don't have to be trapped in this virtual reality. It's all around you, right? Seeing certain things in front of you that you can only see by wearing, you know, a piece of technology, I get it, I understand it. I was born in this century, like I understand, I've seen technology change and grow and advance. And I'm a huge video game nerd. I'm a geek. Like I love all these different things and I love technology and science fiction. But at the same time, I'm not going to spend a million dollars on a fake virtual piece of freaking land. Like when I made this announcement back at earlier in January that I bought my first two parcels of land, it was obnoxious and almost offending to me how many people were like, oh, in the metaverse or real life.
Come on, bro. Did you buy it in the metaverse? Like, what did you use? Did you use X-Sandbox? And I'm like, dude, this is real land I can stand on. This is land I can put a shovel in the dirt and I can build something on. This is land that I can rent out to a real person face to face to put a mobile home on or an RV or to camp on. This is real property that I can stand on and actually put my fingers in the dirt that I can feel the dirt underneath my toes. I'm not investing in the metaverse, I'm not investing in some fake piece of land that is online in a virtual world.
Demand's adoption for that. Yeah, it's right around the corner. I get technology is advancing in a rapid exponential rate at this point where it's fascinating.
But look, you gotta live somewhere. You can spend your hard-earned money on fake parcels and fake land and NFTs and cryptocurrency and you can make money off of this. Don't forget you gotta pay capital gains. But guess what? I'm gonna be buying the land that you need to sleep on. I'm gonna be buying the land that the servers are required to run on. I'm gonna be buying the land that I can build something on so you can go out and grab something to eat. So your door dash person can pick it up from a restaurant. I'm gonna be buying the land that you need to go ahead and stay on whenever you're traveling, the hotel.
Gonna be owning the land that you need to go ahead and stay in regarding an apartment complex. That is going to be the game that I'm playing.
You can be in the metaverse, but I'm going to be in real life. You can be thinking about all these different things, but I'm going to be associated with these big players in the stock market and the companies and investing in companies that I believe in and making these equitable investments. That is what I'm interested in. I'm not interested in the cryptocurrency fan of the phenomenon. I'm waiting for it to be widely adopted. And I'm not going to lie to you. I've made money in cryptocurrency, but I'm not bullish on it. I see an opportunity. I'm going to take it. But I'm not over here going to do some pump and dump scheme.
And Syria agrees with me. She decides to speak on my watch. These are my perspectives. These are my beliefs. They might not align with yours.
And what I'm talking about may not be 100% or the world's going, might not be 100% accurate. These are my observations. These are the things that I've researched. These are the things that I've found. These are the things that I've seen. And these are the things that I hold dearly to my heart. I feel like the metaverse is a conundrum to me because there's already such a massive disassociation with technology and social media. I already feel disassociated enough with social media. And this is me being pure and honest right now. I do not need to be more disassociated by having screens and such projected in my reality.
I see the use case, I see the value, but at the same time I see what is going to be around a hundred years from today. I can pass, I wanna be able to, like I think if I could say anything, I wanna be able to pass on a billion dollar or 10 billion dollar real estate portfolio.
I don't want to pass on some Bitcoin in a wallet. I want to pass on something that my kids can walk on. If I have kids in the future, they can feel, they can cherish, they can enjoy, they can surf on, they can swim in the ocean of the beach front property. I want to pass on that to my future generations or to the people I care about. I don't want to pass on coins in a wallet or some virtual land that is great if you're living there. Yeah, great. That's what I believe in. These are some of my perspectives and some of these things might change.
Right now at the time recording this is January 30th, 2022. It's coming out on the Monday which is tomorrow, January 31st. Come 2024, my perspective might change.
I might look back at this and be like, man, Isaac, I regret saying any of that. Will that be the case? I doubt it. I doubt it. I'm pretty confident on how I'm going to feel in the future, but I'm not completely writing that fact off. And so with any investment you make, be smart, be wise, do your research, do your due diligence and don't believe every single person who says this is a great investment. I saw something about a guy, he's like, you know, I'd never expected to see Bitcoin fall this low again. And he's like, if I, if I convinced you to buy in at $50,000 a coin, I'm sorry.
Now a Bitcoin rise above 50k again, possibly, probably, I think it will. But at the same time, if you're giving out advice and people are making investments off of something that you're telling them, then aren't you partially at risk because you made that recommendation?
And that's why you always have to be careful with what you're recommending. You know, I'm only going to recommend you something that I believe in. And I know it's 100% the fact this goes down to business and your specialty and your expertise. Be careful. Be cautious. Exercise your rights to research, right? Your right to research. That's something I'm going to coin. So that being said guys, I appreciate you sticking around for this episode to Chase the Vision and continue excelling in 2022 and always remember to chase after your vision. Much love.