Wealthy AF Podcast
Welcome to Wealthy AF, the ultimate podcast for ambitious individuals ready to transform their lives. Hosted by Martin Perdomo, The Elite Strategist, this show dives deep into the powerful pillars of personal growth, entrepreneurship, and building wealth.
Each week, we bring you actionable insights, inspiring interviews with industry leaders, and proven strategies to help you break free from the 9-to-5 grind, unleash your entrepreneurial potential, and create lasting financial freedom. Whether you’re scaling your business, investing for wealth, or leveling up your mindset, this podcast equips you with the tools to design the life you deserve.
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Wealthy AF Podcast
Journey into the Crypto-Estate Revolution with Mark Fidelman
Ever wondered about the magic where real estate and crypto converge? We're embarking on this thrilling exploration with Mark Fidelman, founder of SmartBooks Agency and a key player in the e-commerce and crypto space. Fieldman’s journey from sales to crypto, intriguing insights on hot crypto trends, and a deep dive into the concept of security tokens will leave you enlightened and inspired.
If the buzz around tokenization of real estate has caught your interest, you're in the right place. Fieldman breaks down the advantages, the programming and trading mechanisms of security tokens, and the power of crowdfunding in real estate acquisition. Also, tune in to learn about how tokenization can enhance liquidity in traditional markets and the potential of issuing more tokens than a property's current value.
Lastly, we traverse the realm of Bitcoin, blockchain, and the future of cryptocurrency. We discuss the possible implications of a world where governments issue their own cryptocurrency, along with exploring the groundbreaking developments in El Salvador as they embrace blockchain. Our discussion rounds off with potential concerns around California City's direction and some valuable advice for those ready to dive into the future of cryptocurrency. Don't miss out on this enlightening episode!
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Welcome back to another episode of Latinos and Real Estate Investing Podcasts, where individuals just like you come to learn how to create wealth through real estate investing, entrepreneurship and business ownership. Today's guest is Mark Fieldman, and Mark is a tech savvy founder of SmartBooks Agency, who has been making waves in the world of crypto and e-commerce for over two decades. With a background in technology, sales, marketing, customer service, mark has been instrumental in driving growth for organizations such as NFT leader waxio. Mark has also been recognized as a top influencer by Ford's magazines, named a social media keynote speaker by Inc magazine and ranked amongst the Huffington Post's top 50 most social CEOs. He's even got his own YouTube channel, cryptonize, where he shares insights on the hottest crypto trends. Mark, sir, welcome to Latinos and Real Estate Investing Podcasts. I'm glad that you're here and that we can spend some time together and talk.
Speaker 2:Be honest, glad to speak to your audience and I look forward to our discussion, martin.
Speaker 1:Perfect, my friend, thank you. Thank you for coming on, mark. I will tell you, I am a real estate guy. I do not have any crypto, although I have some knowledge of crypto. Take me slow. Yeah, all right, take me slow. I know what's happening in the crypto market. Obviously is my business to know what's happening in the business world. I am up to date on what's happening. Crypto I'm a big believer of this, mark is if we wind up going, if our currency winds up going to crypto and I own real assets, eventually, then just people are going to have to pay me my rents in crypto. That's fine. We're trading people. You have to pay me, so all of that, right. But thank you for being here, my friend, really grateful for that. Tell us about your journey. Tell us about Mark. How did Mark get started in business and wind up in crypto?
Speaker 2:Wow, you're talking about a long road here, okay. Well, for some reason I always had an act for sales. So I started my career in sales, but I kept finding myself in the marketing department, because marketing is supposed to generate leads for sales. If you're B2B and if you're B2C, you're out in the floor. Retail-wise, you want people coming into the store. So I found myself in marketing. I kind of adapted myself for marketing with a sales slant, and so I became somewhat unique. Not so much anymore, because it's easy for salespeople to come marketing people in the day and age of social media.
Speaker 2:I wrote a book about my journey in 2012, which was called Socialized, which in its niche was a pretty good bestseller, at least on Amazon. And then from there I slowly I was investing in real estate. This whole way. I'm a broker. I'm not a broker because I was in a real estate agent. I'm a broker because I was doing my own deals and I found I saved a ton of money doing that. So I understand your world. The real estate world is still the place to be maybe not now, at least not in Southern California, but real estate will always be the tried and true real assets that generate income or you can buy, improve and flip All these strategies. I wouldn't change a thing.
Speaker 2:However, now with crypto coming on the scene, and especially crypto tied to something like real estate, those are called tokenization of assets or security tokens. This is different than crypto, so I want to draw a line here. Crypto is really supposed to be a utility, either a commodity or like airline miles, where you can spend airline miles to get something. That's what crypto is supposed to be. It's devolved into a security, which is why the SEC and Gary Gensler are going after them. We could talk about that in a minute, but in terms of what I do is we securitize real estate, for example, we could securitize anything on the blockchain. So there's where the similarities are to crypto and that we sell security tokens that are tied to that real estate.
Speaker 2:So let me give you an example of why you guys in your audience should be interested in this. There's a lot of deals that we don't have access to because we can't give a developer or real estate fund a million bucks. But if they tokenize that real estate, they can give us chunks at $100 a pop, and if you start accumulating those I did the analysis over 36 months just security tokens that paid dividends, you'd have a pretty good income at the end of those three months. You would not have had to have saved a million dollars to participate in these deals. You could participate in little chunks, like buying stock. So that's what's given me, that's my journey and why I'm doing what I'm doing today.
Speaker 1:Perfect, perfect. So there's a lot going on in the blockchain world and crypto world right now. So why don't you? I want to go a little bit back to last year, right? What happened with Sam Bankman Freedman, it's his last name yeah, a lot of that happened. A lot of these guys that sponsored what is it? Ftx, was that their name? Yeah, ftx, ftx, and they sponsored them. They're getting sued. Shaq just got served. I just saw that in the papers. He just got served. Can you break down for us that may or may not know. How did that exactly happen? Just, really quick, I don't want to. That's old, kind of old, but I'm going to bring it into today's world and then how. That's what's happening with the SEC and the crypto world as well.
Speaker 2:The problem with the crypto world, of course, is we don't self police very well, we don't call each other out, and then you get charlatans, and I don't think Sam started off being a charlatan, but he became one because there's no governance, there was nothing in place, there was no professionals on his team that said you better not be doing this, so they just invented it and made it up as they go. They thought they were off shore, they could get away with it, but they must have forgotten that they were selling to US investors and US participants. So what he did was he moved money around into his own accounts, and you're not supposed to do that. You're supposed to keep your customer funds and your corporate funds separate. Everyone knows that. This is not a mystery. He knew it. What are you?
Speaker 1:doing. What's that? That's kind of common sense, Mark. Like you're running a business, you've got investors money. It's like logic.
Speaker 2:They were treating it like a carnival and that ended up caving in on him when Luna failed and some other things happened and leaks were made, because this was the worst case of fraud I've ever seen, and now it's empowered the SEC to step in. I know you want to talk about that in a minute, but all these events precipitated what we're seeing now with the SEC.
Speaker 1:So the SEC currently is going after Coinbase and Binance. They're suing them. I just saw that this week in the papers and in the financial and unloaded letter I subscribed to and they're going after them. Can you explain as to why is the SEC? Because the whole point of crypto. I have my own thoughts on it and I want to share my thoughts with you on it later, after I first understand why is it that they're going after them? But why is it that? I have an idea that the part of the reason is because of what happened with FTX and now feel the responsibility that they have to come in and start looking at these things. But what is it that's going on, that now the SEC is suing these companies and kind of like wanting to start regulating?
Speaker 2:them? Yep. Okay, let me unpack this as easy as I can. So there was something called the Howie test in 1927. It was about a Florida orange grove that was selling access to their oranges and their profits and they weren't registered. And what happened was I think it was the SEC or some equivalent sued this orange grove and said you're selling securities you haven't registered. I said no, I'm not, I'm just selling access to my land, my real estate transaction. And they said no, this is why, because there's a future expectation of profit, and whenever there's a future expectation of profit, it's a security and you can't sell security without being licensed. So that's what's called the Howie test and that's the basically the only law that applies to what's going on in crypto.
Speaker 2:And the SEC has taken a hundred year old law and saying well, these exchanges are selling securities, but it's different for Coinbase. They're saying Coinbase is selling 13 securities. Here's why there's securities and Coinbase isn't registered and we're going to go after them. Well, on the point of Coinbase and I'll get to finance separately the point of Coinbase Coinbase tried to go the SEC several times. They said we just want to be, you know, we want to be legit, we don't want any problems. We're listed on Nasdaq. Tell us what we need to do. Sec never told them, never got back to them.
Speaker 2:To me, that's a violation of due process. I'm in law school studying this stuff, so I have a pretty good understanding I'm not an attorney pretty good understanding how it should have worked and the SEC should have responded. They didn't. So I think the SEC is going to lose that one. In the case of Binance, they're claiming that CZ Changpeng Zhao, who's the CEO of Binance, was commingling funds like FTX. Now, if that's the case and Changpeng is going to be in trouble, now he lives out of the country I think he's in Singapore, so nothing's going to happen to him here, but anything Binance related in the US will probably be shut down and you know he'll never be able to go to the US again. So two different cases. But the SEC has been empowered by the failures, frankly, of crypto policing itself. So I blame crypto and an overzealous SEC. If you saw the hearings with Congress and I can get into that if you want. Gensler, who's the head of the SEC, was a joke and I can talk about that if you'd like.
Speaker 1:Yeah, sure, sure, let's talk about it. I saw some of the highlights, some of the shorts on it. I didn't see the whole thing.
Speaker 2:So, if you don't know, he was brought in before Congress and this is Gary Gensler and he was ripped apart. He was asked several questions that he couldn't answer, wouldn't answer, and every one of us has left wondering if you can't answer whether Ethereum is a security or not, how the heck is Ethereum supposed to know if there's security or not? And it was all types of questions like that and all he was doing was backpedaling and this and that it's like no, wait a second. If the world sees this and a jury sees this, they're going to say how is this? How is a company like Coinbase or Ripple, which I'm a big fan of how are they supposed to know if they're filing the law? If you won't tell them what the law is? You're the regulators. So what I think this is, it's a bigger play to save Wall Street and the US dollar from any kind of competition Bottom line. That's what I think it is and that's the gist of it.
Speaker 1:I agree with you, brother. So I said a moment earlier that I was going to give you my thought on what I thought was happening here, and that is my thought exactly. It is a threat against the government losing control of the monetary policies and monetary power, and they don't like the people to have power Again. I'm not as educated as you are in that space of crypto, but I can process things. I read, I can process and use my logic and see what's going on and the government has a history of that game and I think that's the game that I see. It doesn't help what happened with FTX. That gives them the excuse to go after these guys.
Speaker 1:So I want to talk about tokenization we could mention at the beginning of this podcast, and how does tokenization work and what assets I know you said real estate can be tokenized. Can you break that down to me? Of course I know last year, mark, there was some transactions, some big transactions that were recorded I know I get in my newsletters that were purchased through cryptocurrencies, and it was not last year, maybe it was last year or the year before it was. There was talks in our space, the real estate space, that this was the direction we were going to go in and that we were going to start seeing mortgages and things like that with crypto, and I was kind of excited about that kind of learning a little bit of, and then it kind of lost the like.
Speaker 1:It's not. It's not something that we're talking about right now, I guess after everything that happened with FTX, but can you explain that to me, can you explain that to my audiences? What is tokenizations? How do you, how do they work and what assets can be tokenized? And can you explain that process to us, of course?
Speaker 2:Okay. So just think and I'm going to use high level analogies here just because this is what I'd want to hear if I were your audience Just think of tokenization, of taking something public with stock. But instead of stock, your interest represents a token, and that token can be programmed, so it's better than stock to do anything you want. So it could be programmed to be a percent of equity of a large commercial project, or it could be programmed to automatically give out dividends from that project. Or, in the case of a hotel, it could be programmed to give you five free nights because you're an investor in that hotel, if you own 20 tokens or more. Again, I'm making this up Literally, if you can dream it, you can put it into a token as a program and it's all automated. So everything that's the beauty of the blockchain it's all automated, transparent. There's no question about whether you own it or not, or whether you've used five free nights. It's all recorded in a public ledger. So that is what tokenization is, and the advantage of doing it with real estate, of course, is the only way to do it now is to take it public as a REIT. I don't know if you know that process, but it's 50 times more expensive and the regulatory hoops that you got to jump through are unbelievable.
Speaker 2:Now in the US we have something called a Reg D, a Reg A and a Reg S, and there's a CF, which is crowdfunding for projects less than $5 million. These are exemptions to the SEC filing requirements. You still have to file, but it's nowhere near taking a company or a project public that you can use these exemptions to create security tokens that represent your interests and that's all it is. It's taking it public, but doing it through exemptions. And then the secondary market. You can trade those tokens. So let's say you and I invest $10,000 in your favorite commercial project and, by the way, we'd never be able to do that. Nobody, no general partner, is going to accept $10,000 from LP. So but you can with a secondary market or with an initial market where they're issuing security tokens. But let's say the project goes south. It's in San Francisco, tenants are shutting down left and right because there's no policing there. You know whatever we can then trade out of that. Like that we don't have to wait for liquidity event. So that's the advantage of stock or security tokens.
Speaker 1:So let me understand that. So that example you just gave, so you, whatever, you have someone invested in a deal. When you say we can trade out of that, I'm just trying to wrap my brain around this. And can you break that down? Because you set a lot of things, so it's all programs, so these tokens are programmed that you can project out and things like that. So how would someone trade that out of that instantly? So, hey, I heard the news and I saw that San Francisco, all the craziness is happening, all the break-ins and the mayor there is not letting, it's encouraging people not to pay rent and these things are going bad. And now I'm like shit. I got 50 grand of my money in there and with this token I want to get out. Now Tell me what that looks like.
Speaker 2:Sure, okay, I assume everybody here is traded stocks. So you trade stocks on an exchange, your stock exchange, nasdaq, new York Stock Exchange. Those are the two primary ones In crypto. Actually, I want to be careful. This isn't crypto. It is a version. It's using the same blockchain, the same tools, but it isn't crypto because it's backed by something real In what I call the tokenization space. You can there are several exchanges that you can trade these tokens for fiat, which is dollars Sorry, I'm going to use layman's terms or another token like Bitcoin or Ethereum or a hundred other things euros. And some of them are decentralized I don't know how far you want me to go here which means no one controls them. It's controlled by a computer program in the cloud, so no government can shut it down. Nobody's in control of it. It just runs the way it's supposed to run, without any interference by humans or fraud. But there's also listed exchanges that the SSE has approved, like INX, t0, where you can trade security tokens, and that's where you do it.
Speaker 1:Okay, I got it. So that was a part that was kind of missing in my brain. Okay, so now, mark, I have this 50 unit or 100 unit apartment building, right, and I want to buy this thing. Can you walk me through how I would use tokenization to buy that asset, right? So can you walk me through, like so, the normal process. If I'm syndicating, I'm raising capital, I'm the GP, I have LP, we know that or if or or. I'm going to my bank, I have my money, my partner's and I have money. We go put the 25%, not whatever right, or bridge loan or whatever. Can you break down for me how the money moves, what that transaction would look like if I'm buying real estate using tokenization?
Speaker 2:Great question, and this is what we do, actually. So there's two ways to do it. One is to get all your investors on board first and then to say look, I'm tokenizing this project as soon as we buy it, like it'll be simultaneous, so the day we buy it, we're going to issue you a you know a percent of tokens based on your represent, based on what you own of that property, and that's the way most are doing it now. What we're seeing, though, I think is a better way, which is more of a crowdfunding approach, where you say we're issuing security tokens, raising the funds for this building, and then we're going to buy it all cash, because you've already raised the funds. You're going to distribute the security tokens as soon as the building's purchased, using a RedsD.
Speaker 2:Typically, it's a RedsD. If it's under 5 million, it's a Red CF. That's the way you'd want to do it, because you don't need accredited investors with a Red CF, and that's how you move forward with that approach. So there's really two approaches. There's a hybrid approach, too you could do a loan and you could do security tokens. You know it's a mixed situation.
Speaker 1:What's the advantage of doing a transaction that way, using crypto blockchain, versus doing it the old school, traditional way? You mentioned that you still need the regs and all of the paperwork when you're raising, even if you're using tokenization. I want to make sure I gather down right You're not exempt from that. As a GP or the managing member of the general partner raising capital, you still have to get the proper paperwork. Yeah, yeah, man, end of doing it that way versus the old school way of wire me your money and all of that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, of course. Yeah, there's several advantages, but the top three are you created a secondary market for your interest in that property, so you're going to attract. It's less risky for people to come in and buy into your property because they know they can trade out of it if you screw up or if the market tanks. That might not be good for you, but you already have the asset, you already have money to purchase the asset and hopefully it's an income producing asset if it's commercial and you're still taking in the money. So the secondary market you're less concerned about. You do want to keep the price up, especially if you were to sell it.
Speaker 2:But you know all of these things. That's the main thing. Second thing is transparency, since everything's on the blockchain. You see what all the LPs are doing. You see what everything's going on within that project. All the disclosures, all of the communications can be put on the blockchain, distributed automatically to wallet holders. You see, store these tokens in digital wallets, distribution of profits or dividends automatic. So lots of paperwork that you're saving on, lots of communication issues, lots of questions. If it ever gets to court, it's all there and a recorded public ledger. There's no way around it.
Speaker 2:So that's number two and I would say number three is kind of a twist on number one which is In terms of raising money. Both investors, lps and, let's say, people that are not accredited that can invest in the project understand that this is less risky for them to invest in. So you'll actually see your pool of investors increase because of the reduced risk. So I would say those are the top three. There's many others that I could get into, but progressively they get less and less attractive. Now I do want to say that what I think the best option is is to have a portfolio properties and you sell security tokens in your LLC that's holding them, because if it's held in a LLC as opposed to tied to an individual property, then you could issue more tokens than the property values right Now. You're a business, so you can actually keep a reserve of tokens for yourself and sell them whenever you needed to for cash flow purposes, if that makes sense.
Speaker 1:That makes a ton of sense. Yeah, that's just like when we raise capital for a deal, we raise extra capital to have cash reserves to float the project, if we have a project going on when we first buy it. So it's same concept is just a little bit switching of the way we kind of see it versus the way we're seeing it now. My next question is how do security tokens increase the liquidity in traditional liquid markets such as real estate or private equity?
Speaker 2:Well, I don't think either one of those are very liquid unless there's a liquidity event right, I'll say yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:No, you're 100%, 100%, 100% correct. Where do you see the future of crypto going as it relates to real assets? Where do you see the future of our monetary policy? Let's just get into the real freaking talk about this stuff. This is the stuff I want to talk about. This is the stuff I really want to talk about is like, hey man, is crypto going to freaking? Take over the dollar eventually? I mean, they've printed so much money. It's the last two years. It's insane, it's stupid. The big part of the problem with the FCC and the fear and all of that they're scared. Where do you see the future?
Speaker 2:of that going Well. They're scared because they've mismanaged this so badly that inflation is out of control, everything in terms of their fiscal policy, monetary policy, out of control. So who wouldn't want a stable system that people can rely on? That's public. You see every transit. Who wouldn't want that? It's their solution. This is the government's solution.
Speaker 2:We're going to issue CBDCs, which is a digital version of Bitcoin. Now the problem with that is, let's say, martin, you and I piss off the government for some reason. Well, guess what? They can block all those transactions. So you and I have no access to funds. This is not a good thing. We don't want the government who's out of control, both in the judiciary I mean all branches. Really, you don't want them controlling your access to money. Now people tell me well, they already do it through the banks. Yeah, but they got to go through a legal process to do that and you can move your money out as soon as you recognize that's what they're trying to do. If it's all CBDC, they just block anything that's associated with you. We don't want this. So that's their answer.
Speaker 2:I got to give a good side to CBDCs. It would hold them more accountable because you and I could go look on the public ledger as to what's going on. Where's all this money going? So that would be a positive. But I just know governments. They can't hold them accountable and they won't hold themselves accountable, kind of like the crypto industry. They'll just do what they want. And what are we going to do? How are we going to stop them? We don't have an army.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they do what they're doing what they want right now. Yeah exactly. And they could. So why would we change? Why would they change? I got to change. They'll target you and me if we piss them off. I mean, you can see it now. They're political, but we see what's happening right now with our ex-president right. In my opinion, he's been literally targeted. It's obvious, I think, to me that he's being targeted. And if it's done to him, the thing is, can it not be done to you or I If we piss them off?
Speaker 2:And we won't have the press telling you about it, correct?
Speaker 1:Correct. So is this the reason? I suppose this is the reason why the Bitcoin people are so big on this Bitcoin thing, giving the people their control. What do you see being in the space as the future of Bitcoin? What do you? I mean, they're getting squeezed right now. Sec is coming down, government is coming down on the industry right now. In your perspective, what do you see the future of blockchain right now? That's number one. Yeah, I'm curious to get your thoughts as to.
Speaker 1:I think, personally, that the dollar. There's going to be something that's going to replace the dollar. To me, the writing is kind of on the wall. We see, we've printed too much money, we're losing respect around the world as a country and the dollar is losing its value around the world because of again, I'm not trying to politicize it, but it is facts or facts, the leadership that we have right now and what's happening in our country. What do you think will replace the dollar? Where do you see the dollar heading and what will we be trading in in 15 years? This is why I love real assets. This is why I love real estate. It's because, like hey, if tomorrow it's Coinbase, if tomorrow it's and the dollar is no more than hey. I'm going to knock on my tenants door and say, hey, whatever we're trading today, that's your new value. That's what you're going to pay me to stay in this place here, right? That's why I love real estate.
Speaker 2:Well, unfortunately, I think it probably will be CBDCs and I'm praying that the industry gets together and look at together and ensures that no government can control your access to that. It might be Bitcoin, but I think that would be more of the global reserve currency if more and more governments like El Salvador buy into it. But you know, with anything, the US has a control over the money supply, the global money supply through the dollar. Do you think they want to give that up? No, there's many advantages if you're the reserve currency around the world Many, many advantages. They don't want to give that up.
Speaker 2:So it's going to be a huge, massive fight and you're starting to see this unveil itself through the SEC because they're given an excuse by us. So I see two versions of a future CBDC actually three, more of a Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin could become the reserve currency, but that will take a lot of psychological change amongst everybody and that's going to be tough, given all the scams that have happened, even though they're not related to Bitcoin at all. Bitcoin's truly decentralized meaning no one controls it. Computer program controls it essentially.
Speaker 2:Or some sort of hybrid approach, like it's a CBDC and it's Bitcoin, just in case some of these governments get out of control. You at least have that that can be traded around the world. And then absolutely and you ask any banker, goldman Sachs, citi you know you're going security tokens. Tokenization by 2030 is going to be I think it's a 30 trillion dollar industry. Real estate has a value of 360 trillion dollars globally right now. All of that's going to be tokenized and I'll put any amount of money you want on this. That's the future. Well, it might take a while to get there, but that is the future, because who wouldn't want to break these things of value into little pieces and be able to trade it, attach smart contracts to it so you can do really cool things? That's going to happen. It's just going to take some time. So that is the future. I see I don't know who wins the CBDC Bitcoin fight, but I do know most things of value, especially over a million dollars, will be tokenized.
Speaker 1:All right, you mentioned El Salvador, right? So that was the first country that embraced blockchain. I think they went. They changed their pesos to Bitcoin, right I think? If I'm not mistaken, then you have cities like Miami. The mayor of Miami I think it was two years ago or a year and a half ago you remember he started accepting Bitcoin as a means of trade to purchase things locally. And I guess my question for you is, being in the space, how is that going for them? How is a country like El Salvador I saw a documentary today on some other stuff on El Salvador, with their crime and stuff that's something totally different.
Speaker 1:But how is that going for them? You being in the space? How is that? Because they're the world's experiment, literally. How is that working out for them? I know that they kind of took a beating last year when Bitcoin went down by 40% or whatever. Whatever it took. I remember that them being a big thing, but you know, I'm not in that space, I'm not in that world. You talked to me about real estate. I could talk all day about that, but this stuff, how's that going? How's that working out for them? How's that experiment?
Speaker 2:I think it's mixed. The problem with Bitcoin? It was never meant to be a day-to-day trading type of currency like the dollar. So now they're deploying to dip the Bitcoin Lightning Network, but this infrastructure first of all. You have incumbent competitors are going to try and stomp it out every chance they get. Some are embracing it, so the day-to-day payment is very difficult and, yes, el Salvador is controlled by the price of Bitcoin.
Speaker 2:Overall, I think they're positive, though, and they're doubling down on their investment. But yeah, when it dips, it hurts them. But if you have an inflationary currency, like a Venezuela, bitcoin is way better solution for you than your own inflationary currency. So I think that's probably a calculated decision they made. They said look our inflation. Even if Bitcoin goes down, our inflation is so high it still makes more sense to invest in a currency that's backed by millions of people. And yeah, it's an experiment. Let's see what happens. If more and more countries and they're talking about it adopt Bitcoin as a reserve currency, this will be a very good positive for Bitcoin. The problem Bitcoin has is they got to figure out how to make their transactions faster. Bitcoin lightning is working in some instances, but it doesn't have the infrastructure it needs to be a day-to-day payment system.
Speaker 1:Got it. My next question for you, mark, is so maybe we have a listener right now saying, ok, I learned some things here from Mark. I'm getting to understand some of these things. Where do I? Where do? How can I prepare myself for the future? So I like to think myself as a strategist. I'm constantly thinking about the steps I'm taking today to make tomorrow better. Right, what can I do today? Someone's listening and thinking, ok, how do I get involved? Mark just said that by 2030, all real estate transactions are probably going to be done Not all.
Speaker 1:No, about 10th, 30 trillion so 30 trillion, sorry, sorry, yes, you did say 30 trillion. What can I? How can I start? Where is my opportunity today, in 2023, to put myself in the way of that opportunity? Or, or I suppose what I'm really trying to ask is what are some of the things that we can be doing today so that we can be set up properly to take advantage and be ready to start moving with the times, as times are? You know, technology is moving. Things are happening. Things are just going to happen. This is I know. I just I know this. This, this thing is going to happen. It's just we need to embrace it and we need to start to understand it and we need to start talking about it for the average person, the average working class person. And how do we? How do we? What do we need to start doing to start getting involved?
Speaker 2:Yeah, ok, so as an investor, there are some real estate projects that are doing really well trading as security tokens. One is the most famous one is the Aspen ski resort it's called the Aspen coin in Aspen, colorado, and they give off dividends. I think just this year alone they're up 46%. It's a pretty good return. So that is. I would start looking at real estate security tokens as in terms of what dividends they're paying out, what the appreciation, what you know. Just analyze it like a stock.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of ones that are out there, so you should you know kind of the problem with security token industry is not a lot of analysts yet, but there will be. But I would look for things that make sense to you that you couldn't buy into unless you had millions of dollars, and start accumulating those over the next three years and I assure you, if you do this regularly, you'll have a nice passive income. If you keep investing in each of these, either monthly or bimonthly. And that's the advantage of this system is you get access to things you'd never get access to and there's not really much of a middleman there taking money away from you. It's all automated. So that's another advantage is you know you buy through a REIT, you got all these hands in everyone's pockets taking money out. There's a management fee? What 1%? Most of all, you don't have any of that with security tokens. No one's taking a management fee, so it's all done through the blockchain. So that's what I would do if your listeners are investors.
Speaker 1:I don't know if you have developers, or we have a mix of listeners, you know, newbies, all kinds of people, but mostly investors.
Speaker 2:Okay, and if you're an owner, real quickly, you can take your current properties and tokenize them. If you need to take cash out and invest in something else, you can easily do that. So that's what I would do as an existing owner or if I want to raise money for a project, and I would stick to things over $5 million right now just because of the cost. The cost of bringing something public on a blockchain is around $300,000 all in. So, you want to be careful what you tokenize, but if you do it the right way, you make that $300,000 back like that and that's essentially what we do.
Speaker 1:Any resources or any websites, which is so. That's what you guys do. So if someone wanted to any resource or any websites where people can go to to like look at this stuff, that's exactly what you guys do, right, mark?
Speaker 2:Well, we are a tokenization agency so we do have a newsletter I would recommend people subscribe to, because that's all I talk about. I don't talk about me, I don't talk about my company. I talk about I'm just promoting things in the industry that I like and that we've analyzed. There's that and a place called STLMarketcom Well, they're friends of mine yeah, like security token offering marketscom, STLMarkets. So my newsletter is kryptonizedsubstackcom and that it's just a weekly newsletter. It's kind of entertaining because I put on my analysis and I don't pull any punches. If I don't like the project, I don't like it. So those are the two resources I go to now. There's many more. So if my friends are watching this, it's not that I'm not talking about you. Those are the two that just came to mind Gotcha Gotcha.
Speaker 1:Well, my friend, I really am grateful. Thank you for coming out and sharing all of your wisdom and your expertise and the script. Those space is much needed. I could tell you, my audience and myself was much, really, really needed for us, because we're real estate people, right, real assets, by operating on assets and buying real assets and we need to get educated on this space, and it's been something that I've been wanting personally.
Speaker 1:I'm speaking personally for myself, personally been wanting to invest in, but I'm like I got all my chips and my real estate assets, I got. That's where I'm at, man, I'm a real estate guy. However, it's a great place to be. Yeah, I like to, I like to diversify and I like to and I understand I'm not, I'm, you know, I, I'm informed and I understand that this is the future, this is where things are going, this is where this is where it's at, and we have to educate ourselves. So, my friend, we're going into the untitled round and I'm going to ask you a series of questions. You don't have to think, you don't have to justify when asking some questions. One word answers are fine. And are you ready to play, sir, let's do it, perfect.
Speaker 2:Crypto is, oh, crypto is. Crypto is the future, but it's going to be backed by real world assets or it's going to be a commodity, like Bitcoin?
Speaker 1:I've always wanted to travel to.
Speaker 2:Wow, I've been almost everywhere I want to go. I always want to travel to Russia. Actually, I've never been to Russia.
Speaker 1:Awesome, a million dollars is Not a lot of money these days, people coming to LA should try Three places Manhattan Beach, santa Monica, pacific Palisades. Maybe a little bit of Beverly Hills man. I've been to two out of those three that you mentioned. The last one, I didn't go to, pacific Palisades. Where is that and what is what's that?
Speaker 2:It's just, it's the best place to hidden secret in LA. Think of it as a very expensive. Leave it to Beaver town. That's kind of tucked away in the mountains near the right on the coast. It's just south of Malibu, northam, santa Monica.
Speaker 1:Very cool. I got to check that out next time I'm in LA. My advice to young people is start saving now.
Speaker 2:I'm sure you've heard this a hundred times Don't spend. Put 20% of your income every year, every month, every paycheck, into something, whether it's a savings account to buy real estate, whether it's security tokens to give you a passive income. If I'm 20 and I did this for 10 years, I wouldn't have to work. So 20% of your income. I know it's tough, especially in California, to just to live here, but if you, if you just do that for 10 years, your 30s and beyond are going to be amazing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's right, family or business. Woof, what do I prefer? Family or business, whatever that means.
Speaker 2:See, I'm in business for my family, so it's definitely family Passion or stability. For me it's passion Weather is, but my life is this.
Speaker 1:Wine or beer, wine, success or happiness.
Speaker 2:Success to me is happiness, but I'll go with happiness. Angry client or angry coworker oh, I'll take an angry coworker. I can resolve that.
Speaker 1:And lastly, book smart or street smart.
Speaker 2:Man, these black and white questions are killing me. I'm going to go with the right street smart, perfect.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much, mike. Will you appreciate too. I got to ask you one more question because I'm really enjoying this. I got to ask you one more question. You're in LA, right? How are things in LA? We see in the news all of the craziness that's happening in San Francisco. All those cities, all of the I think the big, the big chains of CVS's and the, the ride aids are leaving because of all of the. This is what we see in the news, right? Is it really the way that they portrayed in the news? I know that the news is in the business of fear, monitoring how, how, how are we going to go Already in your state?
Speaker 2:Oh, it's a shit show, not everywhere, but in the districts controlled by these DA's that subscribe to this weird ideology that you shouldn't punish criminals but because the criminals know it. Yeah, they. But if you go to like coastal cities, you'll have some homeless problems. In Venice, bad ones in Santa Monica because the city officials are are too afraid to tackle the problem because they might be labeled something. But other places like Manhattan Beach, pacific Palisades, even even Malibu and, as an island, beverly Hills, those are very safe, very secure neighborhoods where you're not seeing a lot of crime that you see on TV. But it is bad downtown. It's not. It's a place that used to go. I don't go anymore.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was in LA. When was it? I was in LA. I was there for an event right before COVID, January of 2020. I was in LA and it was a real estate combat, a real estate multifamily event. Man, I have some friends there, I have a bunch of friends in LA, and we drove around. I went to dinner with a friend of mine and we drove around. I mean, the homeless problem was bad then.
Speaker 2:They just basically run the city. They do whatever they want. If you and I cross the street, we get a J walking ticket, but if you're homeless, eh, you want to do whatever you want. You put up camp outside someone's home, they let you do it. It's disgraceful. It's disgraceful.
Speaker 1:It was really bad. I remember I was staying in the hotel I was staying in and I liked to walk. I'm a walker. I like to my wife, richie and Anton. I like to go out for walks and get fresh air and after the event one night I go out for a walk and it was like holy shit, all the homeless they were just out. Now, I grew up in New York City, so this is, you know, this is. This is not a big deal for me. I can manage it. I know how to navigate it and those kinds of streets, but it was bad man. And now I've seen, but, based on what I see on the TV and the news, is like man, it's gotten worse since COVID. It's gotten worse, it's worse. I'm like holy shit. It wasn't worse when I was there a few years ago.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm not conspiracy theorist, but some, some part of me is thinking you guys are doing this on purpose.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's. It's it's weird, cause it seemed. It sure seems that way. Anyways, my friend, thank you so much for coming out. I just wanted to get your thoughts on what was happening there. I have, like I said, I have a lot of friends there and I was just wondering if it's still the same way, or is it like?
Speaker 2:It's gotten worse, but there are some people that actually enforced the laws, and I already mentioned those cities, yeah, yeah, and I've seen also there, I've seen some.
Speaker 1:There's some other cities that I've seen San, san Francisco, san Diego, another beautiful city. My wife and I went there in 2003 when Janet Jackson, the whole Janet Jackson thing remember that Super Bowl thing that's right, with what's his name when she, where are we? Yeah, timberlake, with Timberlake. We were there that year. We crossed over to Mexico cause it's right there. As you know, we took a bus and we went over to Santa Clara and man, what a beautiful city. I fell in love with that city. Then what I'm seeing now, what's happening in that city, I'm like whoa, that is yeah.
Speaker 2:San. San Diego is nowhere near as bad as LA or San Francisco, but it's. It's heading that direction because because again, we don't have politicians with a backbone or they're in on some sort of joke that the rest of us are not in on. I can't quite figure it out yet, because this is an easy problem to solve you just let the police take care of it. But you know.
Speaker 1:It just doesn't make sense, man, whatever, whatever, it just doesn't make, it's just so. A thinking, logical, thinking person is like why does this make sense? You're destroying the cities. People are leaving, businesses are not going to want to come here. Why would? Why would money want to come back here? Such a beautiful state, such a great. We have, by way, our top listeners. They are from California. We have a lot of California listeners, so they know, yeah, they so so. So I'm talking their language right now, all of you guys, language that live there. But anyways, my friend, we're out of time. Thank you so much, really appreciate you coming. Thank you so much, martin, for having me.
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