The Jordan Harbinger Show - 79: Carter Thomas | Top Cryptocurrency Tips for New Kids on the Blockchain

Episode Date: August 9, 2018

Carter Thomas (@carterthomas) started as a marketer and strategist in the mobile app space, publishing over 1,500 apps on multiple platforms that have generated 18M+ downloads. Now he educates the curious about cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies via videos and a podcast under the Coin Mastery banner. What We Discuss with Carter Thomas: A primer on cryptocurrency and blockchain so you can understand what people are talking about even if you're not interested in investing. Beyond finances, how blockchain can be used to better secure everything from identity to medical data. Why it's important to understand this technology now instead of waiting for it to saturate the markets of the mainstream. The pros and cons of cryptocurrency trading from the perspective of the vendor as well as the consumer. How cryptocurrency is being used today to counteract the hyperinflated conditions of Venezuela's traditional economy. And much more... Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course!  Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally! Full show notes and resources can be found here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy med yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

An interesting episode to check out is called Speaking Truth to Goop, where Jen Gunter breaks down the pseudoscience behind the wellness industry in a way that is super entertaining and eye-opening. It's sharp, funny, and makes you a lot harder to fool, which, if you listen to this show, you know I'm all about that. From exploring cults to analyzing our cultural and political landscape, the Conspiratuality Podcast will help you stay informed against misinformation and resist fear tactics.

Find Conspirality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with my producer, Jason DeFilippo. In today's conversation, we're talking with my buddy Carter Thomas. He started as a marketer and strategist in the mobile app space, and he's done something like 1,500 apps, but we're not talking about apps.

He got obsessed with cryptocurrency, like many of us, and, of course, blockchain technology along with it, and started teaching his friends about it, including me, on his YouTube channel and podcast, and the rest is history. He's amassed a huge following there and his podcast, Coin Mastery, where he's taught us a lot about trading concepts, as well as how to manage emotional swings in trading. But this isn't a finance episode. We recorded this episode at the height of blockchain and Bitcoin hysteria. So it's kind of fun and interesting to release it now while things are in a little bit of a lull, because I think the wisdom and knowledge holds up really well.

Today, we'll get a primer on cryptocurrency and blockchain. This isn't just Bitcoin and idiots like me funneling away tens of thousands of dollars. for zeros and ones, or these days, mostly zeros. And we'll also discuss why blockchain isn't just a fad or a trend. It's also not just about money. We'll soon be using blockchain tech for everything from identity to medical data. And further, we'll outline why this stuff is important to understand now, instead of waiting for it to come at us and how markets, which are made up of people,

are so easily manipulated and how we can protect ourselves as well. Don't forget, we have worksheets for today's episode so you can make sure you understand, and solidify your understanding of everything that Carter is teaching us here today. That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. All right, here's Carter Thomas. As you walked in, we were just talking about

how we were trying to coordinate some logistics and I'm like, oh, I don't have your phone number, send him a text and Jen was like, actually he uses telegram and I thought, of course he uses telegram. Crypto guy using telegram. Probably doesn't even know how to make a regular phone call anymore except when he calls his mom. You know, that's so classic, but we were talking about security.

Part of the reason, the main reason is because no one has your phone number now. You got a new phone number and it's on lock and nobody's got it. And I thought that's a really good idea. And whenever I tell people about security stuff, they tend to think, oh, I'm not that big of a target. And now you could buy 100 bucks worth of Bitcoin or maybe if 100 bucks worth of Bitcoin in 2013, you could be a huge target. And even if you think you don't have that much in crypto or you think you're not that big of a target, I only have 20 grand and Ada or whatever. That could turn into $200 or $2 million in a few years. Or someone could just say, screw it, you're an easy target because I have your phone number and I can send you a phishing email and get it.

So tell me a little bit about why, and what sparked that for you? Because you're very public with trading large amounts of crypto, which could be millions of dollars or it could be $300 at a time. Nobody knows. That's worse for you. Yeah. I've always been pretty careful, like all the way back to the beginning of being an entrepreneur, which, you know, eight years now, just crossing the T's, dotting the eyes, and always preparing for the worst kind of situation. And so as I got into crypto, I walked in there, like, okay, security first, then I'll figure out the rest of all this. And, yeah, it's, it sparked with people just being.

hacked here and there. I mean, every two weeks, you're seeing somebody in the crypto community. They could hack like a big name or somebody super unfortunate. There's a lot of simple steps that can be taken to make sure that sort of thing, like the chances of it happening are very, very small. And for me, one thing was, okay, let's get a dedicated phone for this. Let's get a dedicated phone for that. Let's get a dedicated phone for, you know, multiple points of breakage. And part of that was changing the phone number and only using services that don't require your phone number, things like that, is cumbersome, which I think stops a lot of people from doing it.

And I'm sure there's people out there that have tons of crypto, way more crypto than I could ever dream of having that are more cavalier about it. And I'm pretty kind of do my own thing guy, but I just tend to focus on that side of it. I thought that was an interesting sort of way to begin because the way that I, of course, I heard of Bitcoin in 2011, gave zero Fs about it, right? 2012, 2013, 2014, 2014, 2015, 2016. And then a buddy of mine can't stop looking at his Coinbase app during sushi. And I'm like, what are you doing?

And he goes, I'm telling you, I threw two grand into this thing called Ethereum in January. And I go, oh, yeah, my friend's son invented that. And he goes, would you, biny? And I went, nah, I'm going to do it later or something. I don't know. She told me a couple months ago. And he's like, let me tell you what happened over the last five months. And I just went, oh, damn it.

You know, it would have been like, it would have been like 50X or something or 20X, whatever I had put in. And the funny part is I was talking with my friend and I go, all right, well, aren't you worried about this? I mean, were you keeping it? Because I didn't understand how the whole blockchain thing worked either. And he told me where his money was. And I won't get into too many details. But suffice to say that it was worth more than his house, the amount of crypto that he had, Ethereum especially. and he was not using two-factor authentication.

And I said, well, hopefully you don't use the same password that you use for like your Gmail. And he was like, yeah, I should really change it. And I just thought, you have like $2 million worth of this stuff or something, some nebulous number that I didn't even ask him because it was, you know, it's a polite company. And you're using the same security protocol that you would use if you made a Fiver account to hire somebody to make a meme for you. Yeah. Yeah, it's, it's, that has been one of the most shocking things is, you know, every week, maybe for two weeks now, I'm like, get your coins off the exchanges, put them onto a hardware wallet, lock it up somewhere, you know, have a dedicated computer, you know, go as extremely long,

but at the very least put two-factor authentication on. I don't care if you have 50 bucks or, you know, two million or whatever it may be. It's just so critical. And all people are just like, oh, I'll do it tomorrow. I agree with the, I'll do it tomorrow mindset. I mean, it's a bad mindset to have, but I totally get why people do it. And I want to back up the truck, though, because right now I can imagine my producer going, tell us what you're effing talking about right now.

And I think that we should do a little bit of a primer on what crypto is because people have heard of Bitcoin, but people don't really know that Bitcoin is not. Crypto is like this giant circle. Bitcoin is like a pinhead dot in it. People don't understand what blockchain is. They don't know what cryptocurrency is. They might know kind of what Bitcoin is. and they think it's like PayPal.

Sure. Right. It started as a payment system, right? The vision of cryptocurrency, especially of Bitcoin, was let's revolutionize payments, banking, money. And that has evolved, really with Ethereum, which is a new form of blockchain,

new technology that came out a couple years ago. That's changed into the ability to change economies, micro economies, you know, networks, how networks are used and integrated. And that is starting to evolve into changing the way the companies really behave, right? How stocks are being issued and making up companies, how people are breaking the value of companies down.

So I think a more accurate term now is crypto assets. And so Bitcoin, being the original and the biggest, is still has this idea of moving money around, holding money, censorship resistance, everything around it. But the whole crypto world is really just a way to take ideas that ordinarily had one model becoming company, and now you have this whole new way to create value through that company. It's been confusing, I think, for a lot of people, even technically minded people, because they think, okay, this is a currency that's not controlled by a bank.

And unfortunately, one of the reasons that I didn't get Bitcoin earlier was because a lot of my friends in three-letter agencies went, this stuff is used for terrorism, it's used by criminals. It's not going to be something that a lot of people are using because the government's going to get involved and it's going to be, you know, we're going to see a crash. And I didn't realize that that exact sentiment is why it's going to be more valuable because it's actually a threat to established orders that can't really control it. It's kind of like when, was it Metallica was like, we're going to put a stop to this MP3 sharing business. And it's like, nope, you are just going to draw a ton of attention to it and everyone's going to do it. Now we have Spotify. Totally. So Bitcoin or

cryptocurrency in general is kind of in the e-donkey, what is it, views or a Napster phase right now, not even probably in the Napster phase. And the Spotify phase is five to ten, however many years away, but it's coming. And what I mean by that is you think Apple pay on your phone is cool, wait until you can pay cents at a time or millions of dollars at a time with virtually no fees instantaneously over international borders with the same ledger. Totally. And if you don't get that, I understand why.

Because it took me years too, and I worked on Wall Street, and I know tech stuff reasonably well. And yet, here we are late to the party like a lot of other people. I think there's two big phases of this crypto revolution. I think that we are kind of phasing down from the first chapter, which is the hype, the Get Rich Quick scheme idea. and we are beginning the next phase, right, the Napster or the Spotify phase, the next huge one. So I think for a lot of people, they may like, oh, man, I missed the $20,000 Bitcoin run, but they're so early to the next run. So there's going to be another huge wave. It's going to be way bigger.

It's going to be more options. So it's going to be harder to pick the winners, but it's going to be bigger. And I think the other big piece is that, and this is when the mass adoption will happen, is, right now everyone thinks about, well, is it going to replace money? How could it replace money? It's not a bank. But with the crypto assets, the way the blockchain's work is you can start to replace things like advertising, right?

So you go on YouTube right now and you see an advertisement, you got to wait five seconds and you click. There's a middleman that's funding the creator and connecting it to the viewer. Now, if you use something like a crypto asset with all the technology and all the details behind it, now the user can actually have tokens where they can pay the creator directly and they can cut out the advertising industry and that unlocks $100 billion in revenue. That just was inefficient before. So there's all these new ideas that are just very, very slowly starting to get some traction,

people starting to be like, wait, this is actually a real thing. This is a real technology that could make real money because that's the big piece is that even when people get the technology, like, yeah, but show me where the revenue is. Right. How is this worth this much money? And once that starts happening, then it's going to be the real thing. Right, because we don't necessarily need it to equal something in dollars. We just have to have a function for the token. And can you tell us where, where's my blockchain? Because, of course, one of the first things that people ask me, when I tell them to put their coins or their tokens on a hardware wallet like we were talking about with security, they say, yeah,

but what if I lose this thing? I'm never going to lose my computer. I leave it at home, but what if I lose this little thing? And I had to be explained, I had to have this explain to me as well. Your currency is not on that little thumb drive. Your currency is not on your phone. It's not on your computer. It's on the blockchain, which is one of the reasons why it's so useful and, of course, why it's so freaking risky if you don't handle it correctly.

It's kind of like having your money in every single branch of every single bank or every single business in the entire planet at the same time, and nobody can lie about it. But people don't really get that. People, even very intelligent people that I try to explain the blockchain, they just go, well, if everyone has it, it's not secure. When really, it's the other way around. Totally. Can you tell us kind of what the blockchain even is without using math, please? Totally.

Yeah. So I think an interesting analogy is how ATMs work. So you could walk in at any ATM right now, and theoretically there is money inside that ATM. But until you put your private ATM card in with a password, you can't get access to that money. Right. So you're essentially saying this is how much, here's my account, you know, I can access it now. But that money is being registered against one central spot. So maybe you have a Chase account or a Bank of America or whatever.

And you rely on that bank to verify that information for you. With the blockchain, that information is actually public, but it's all encrypted. So any given moment, you can go out and see the 10 billion lines of stuff that's saying, hey, this is everything that's on Bitcoin, and here are all the different transaction values, here are the wallace that are available, but to get access to it, you have to put in your own ATM card to redeem it from the blockchain. And that blockchain is being redundant on thousands of computers. So if one goes down, it doesn't matter. Versus if Bank of America goes down. Yeah, that ATM's not helping. You're done, you know?

I mean, FDIC maybe, but, you know. Maybe. Yeah. And so that's the difference is that it's just being copied so many places, but the idea of going up and redeeming your amounts is the same. A lot of people that I know don't really see the need for this. And I totally understand that. And I think it's going to become apparent later. It reminds me of when I told my dad, and I've told this story on my show many times. But when I was, I think, 13 or 14, I said, dad, we've got to invest in this Yahoo thing because you can search for things on the internet. And it was the first sort of type in a word that you want to find and it will find documents with that word in it. And he said, and I totally understand his.

logic 20-20 hindsight no one's going to use this there are libraries everywhere and everyone knows how to find the books that you need and i thought this is not the way that i'm thinking because i'm learning the dewy decimal system in middle school here and i hate every second of it and this i can do from home it's a little slow because i have to use america online dial-up but that's kind of the phase that we're in now and people don't really see the need for this but if you go and we have show fans in venezuela this is not a country that's well connected on the internet it's not a country full of rich people. They're undergoing essentially a revolution right now, even if it's a slow burn. And there are people there that are using mining rigs to mine Bitcoin and using that to try to get

foreign currency because it's really the only thing that's between them and starvation is this little ant mine or the size of an iPad or something. And this is their lifeline because they don't have the stability around them of anything else. But what it sounds like blockchain can do is bring stability like that to places that don't have it, but could also invent entirely new industries. And this is something I don't totally understand. Maybe you do. There are other applications for the technology other than currency, right? There's medical records, identity data. I remember I bought a ton of, I think it was like Verge or something a year or less ago. That was a really good purchase, by the way. You know, I remember going, oh, nothing's doing anything. And I just forgot about it,

got really busy. And then someone said, hey, you should sell some of your verge because it's like 21x, what you paid for it. And I went, how much of this did I buy? Oh, right. Here's my mortgage payment for the next year. And there's a lot of really interesting stuff going on with medical data, things that people theoretically don't want on the internet, but are actually much more secure on the blockchain. Why is this the case? That is the thing, right? It's, I think the currency solution is going to be a big deal. And it already is, for those reasons, censorship resistance and for just store value and potentially for payment processing. But I look at any that could benefit from greater efficiency and or transparency, which is basically everything, right?

Every business, every industry, if it was massively efficient, if everything happened in real time. And like the, you know, identity, medical records, things like that. And the amount of money that would be unlocked from those kind of secondary industries that are built on protecting your data or, you know, securing the data or whatever would be gone because all of the data would be encrypted, but it would be public. Right. And so you could go get access to the data. You could verify that the data is there.

You just wouldn't know who's is whose until you put in your private key to get your own data. And so you'd really remove, you know, for lack of better term, like you'd cut the fat from the business world, which is just an unbelievable amount of money that would be replaced or displaced, I should say, with a superfluble. pure technology that's faster, easier to use, and, you know, just revolutionize everything. So instead of having Equifax protect my data and then lose it and then not report it for three months while the executives sell off their stock shares and hopefully those bastards go to jail for it, we'll see about that. We could actually have it all in the blockchain. It could be verified by

any party, anywhere in the world in real time, cost basically nothing and be monitored by us or by anybody in real time with the transaction costs of a few electrical signals essentially. That's it. And it would eliminate the need for credit bureaus and things like that. And that's just credit checks. We also have medical data. We have identity verification for passport control, immigration. All of this stuff could be linked to us as people, which is a little 1984, but I feel

like every bit of revolutionary technology is kind of 1984 in a way. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Carter Thomas. We'll get right back to the show after this brief word from our sponsors. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. To learn more about our sponsors and get links to all the great discounts you just heard, visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash advertisers. We also have an Alexa skill so you can get inspirational and educational clips from the show in your daily briefing. Go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash Alexa or search for Jordan Harbinger in the Alexa app.

And now for more from Carter Thomas. But I feel like every bit of revolutionary technology is kind of 1984 in a way. Yeah. I mean, I think it kind of has to be, there's obviously a paradigm shift of this, right? You know, the mindset shift of what's happening and being able to be okay with data being public and realizing that it doesn't change your privacy implications. And that is partly as generational. It's partly just technological.

But I think that's the key. is being able to be okay with data being out there, knowing that it's still secure. In fact, it's more secure because it's verifiable. And no, it doesn't have implications on you personally. Yeah, it is funny how we feel like our personal proximity to our data makes it safer. Like, oh, no, that's safe. It's under my mattress.

What? You know, are you home right now? No. I mean, this is much safer being everywhere at once. And you're right. It's hard to wrap our mind around the fact that if millions of computers have copies of the blockchain, it's actually safer than you having one copy or there's one in a safety deposit box in a bank

that you just parade never burns down or gets misplaced somehow. And us being able to keep this also ensures that our transactions with other people are kind of always an escrow in some way, right? So if I'm doing business with you, you can't really not fulfill your end of the bargain because it's almost like it's running on a computer

that doesn't care that you're mad at me today or that you changed your mind after I already delivered the goods and services. It's automated. That's it. And that's a huge piece, you know, the idea of smart contracts or logic that's built into the blockchain, which is really what Ethereum was built on, the idea of solving that. And I think that that brings up a really good point where Bitcoin especially has a reputation

of, oh, this is only used by criminals. It's used from the dark web. When in reality, there is nothing more traceable than cryptocurrency. I mean, absolutely everything has a paper trail. versus if you got a big block of cash, you're not finding out where that goes. You know, that's disappearing pretty quickly, with the exceptions of a few privacy coins that, you know, don't necessarily have the paper trails. But I think that that's also a big piece of it is it really flips the script on people

when they say, oh, it's dark web anonymous coin. And then you realize, well, actually, it's not. Right. You might actually enjoy having cash because of that reason. Right. You can literally see every purchase or every transaction, I should say, that someone one's made. And I think that's fascinating because not only is it going to allow for crazy studies of economics in the future, because you can see what everyone's doing, you also have the security

element of being able to have everything sort of in the spotlight. And I'm sure that the NSA slash maybe not even just them have computers that are going, let's just create some sort of visual map of every single blockchain transaction on every chain for every majorly adopted coin, especially because you can always do it retroactively. If I've got to a copy of the blockchain for a new coin that starts tomorrow, but nobody adopts it for a year, I've still got that blockchain on my computer, and it can get vacuumed up by a security service and examined, and we can see the trail of all the cash. And we did a money laundering episode on this show recently, and Joshua Fruth talked about how international criminal organizations

are using all this. If you're resisting cryptocurrency because you're worried that you're supporting criminal activity, find like ether scan.com.com. or whatever and look at the transaction. That's literally the least successful way for criminals to move money around and try to get away with it because you can see every single transaction. Totally. Yeah. I mean, the SECC just did a big deal with CipherTrac, I think, is the name of the company where

it's exactly what they're doing. They're saying, give us a full audit on everything that's ever been run on every public blockchain out there. We're going to be able to match it up to all the transactions we need so that we can determine securities laws. The IRS will probably get their hands on. I can't wait for that. You know, it's like, then all of a sudden there's a whole new set of challenges and solutions within the blockchain world.

You know, there's a lot that comes with this sort of idea, this paradigm shift, which is also why I think it's going to take a while before it really starts to go big. How do you counter, I mean, not that you spend a lot of time doing this, but for our purposes here, how do we counter the people that say, look, this is a fad, it's not going to catch on. because there's a, to be fair, there's a lot of smart people saying that. Sure, Bill Gates, I think, said it about the internet, or somebody said it about the internet back in the day, some sort of notable, and we got to snopes this, right? Because it might not have been him. They said the internet's a fad. But this, how do we know that smart people who know about those massive glaring errors

are not wrong or are wrong about this also being something that's just going to crash and burn at some point? Well, I think there's a few things, a few pieces of it. The first thing I would 100% freely admit is that any of the coins that are out right now could all go away. But I don't think the technology will ever go away. So in five years, Bitcoin, Ethereum, you know, you go down the top 10 list, that could all be completely different than what it is. Simal to what the Internet is, was like in 95 or whatever it may be. So I think that's one piece of the puzzle.

Because when you ask the same people, hey, do you think blockchain technology is worthless? that number gets very, very, very small. The thing that people that right now are like, oh, the valuation's ridiculous. You know, the fact that people that have no skills, right place, right time are making tons of money. This is the biggest bubble because when you look historically, bubbles are really just built on moments and time when valuations can't be compared to anything else, right? You create your own valuation, which is why the bubble can happen. Right. And that is what causes a lot of the skepticism.

So as soon as that gets worked out, like how to value crypto assets and who knows how that's going to play out and what assets will get valued, it will gain the traction because there's the technology behind blockchain. I've yet to meet someone who thinks that that is worthless. There's nothing there. Can you explain in some degree how the blockchain works in sort of layman's terms? Because, okay, everyone has a copy of it. So what, I have to leave my computer on 24-7 in order to? be up to date with everything? I mean, that's the part that I think a lot of people have trouble wrapping their head around. Yeah, so let's say those are called nodes, right? So let's say there's

a thousand nodes out there. They all have a copy of the Bitcoin blockchain, just as an example. And let's say you have a wallet. Your wallet does not need to have the entire blockchain on it. It just needs to be able to ping one of the computers that has the blockchain and be able to verify, hey, all the blocks are there, looks good, takes one second to do. And then if you have your own private key on there, your key can match against any of those blockchains and say, oh, yeah, here's my balance in my wallet, so to speak. So there's kind of like these master people, right, who have big computers running the nodes, and then you have the regular people like ourselves who just have wallets on our phones,

on our computers, on websites, whatever, that can just ping it to verify that it's still there and that we can control when we want to, you know, send a transaction to the blockchain, But all that processing can get done somewhere else. And so we're writing on the end of the blockchain, right? So we're only putting links on one end of it at a time. So you can't go in the middle and sort of splice anything in. And that's what makes it, is immutable really the right time for this? Totally.

So that's what makes this more secure, right? Is that we don't have to figure out, is this a legitimate copy of the blockchain? Because since so many people have it, they can constantly compare that chain to each other. Right. And if it doesn't look right, then I would assume, at some point, that sort of black sheep chain gets the boot from the network. That's also about the integrity of the network. Because like some people like to say, if you want to shut down Bitcoin, you have shut down the

internet. Right. Which is not going to have. The whole thing is designed to be nuclear proof, right? Literally. Yeah. And so, yeah, you'd have to shut down all 1,000 forever. But that is one of the big pieces of it.

Yeah, you can look back to the Genesis block in 2008, I think it was. look at the first mine Bitcoin and that's it. That's incredible. Yeah. And I think that that should signal to people just kind of why this will be important in the future. It's just having that immutable ledger that really truly is something that you could hack one with a great amount of effort. And you'd have to hack every single other node at the exact same time without knowing even where they are or who they are. And then you'd still run into problems because someone would have an old copy on a computer that's offline and it would go, wait a minute.

this thing hasn't been touched in three years. How come it's different back here? Right. So you'd always, always have the record. It's like having seven billion copies of the same video, you play them all at once, and someone goes, wait a minute, how come this little piece is spliced in here? That obviously didn't really happen.

Or either that or every other copy of this video is incorrect, which one is more likely. Right, exactly. So I think that's brilliant, and that's something that you can really only get with sort of high-powered math and high-bandwidth internet and things like that. Yeah, and I think that that's one of the overarching themes of, especially with Bitcoin, but really with all the cryptocurrencies and crypto assets, is that it's international.

It's a global thing. So you could have those thousand nodes running the blockchain. You could have 50 in America, 50 in Brazil, 50 in Germany. I mean, it can be everywhere. And that's when it gets really interesting from a censorship resistance standpoint of, hey, we want to shut this down. So the idea of like the Venezuela, maybe they should. try to shut it down in Venezuela, but they can't shut it down in Chile or shut it down in Australia.

So you've got all these redundancies all built in. It's very different from equities where it's very clear that this security is a, let's say, a U.S. company. There's securities laws where you can trade the securities, you can shut them down. So it opens up a whole new world for basically all the agencies out there. So crypto, it tanked in the last couple of months, the currency valuations anyways. Obviously, blockchain companies are still going full steam. People seem to forget that, by the way.

Have you noticed that? It's like, oh, Bitcoin, oh, it's low now. So everyone just sort of stops. It's like, no, people that you know that are just trying to make money every day don't talk about it as much anymore because they went back to work or they're on their mom's couch trying to figure out what the next thing is. But this type of thing, when you see this, I know the answer to this question already, but are you worried, right?

Are you worried, oh, no, this is coming to a halt. because like we discussed before, a lot of smart people think this isn't going to work or it's foolish. When you see these downturns, what are you looking at? Because I know that you look at the markets as a whole and not just, oh, this is what happened this week. Guess I'm shutting down my YouTube channel. Sure. As you can imagine, I'm definitely not worried about this long term. But I do think that it's, I've always looked at crypto as a social phenomenon more than a financial one.

And even though 95% of what I talk about and what I think about has to do with tech and pricing. The basis of all this is that there's some deep-seated revolution, you know, generational level of revolution. And guys like Ray Dalio talk about this all the time, kind of once in a generation type of cycle. And this may be the catalyst for that. But I think what's the most fascinating is seeing what happens during the downturn, especially when it happens this quickly, to people that have never really invested before. And that's one thing that's been super interesting on my end is I see so many thousands of thousands of people

they've never bought stock before they've never like bought an index fund and so they go into crypto and then they go read the intelligent investor and they're like oh well I'm just going to buy and hold that's what you do in the stock market

and that to me is really fascinating because I'm like this isn't the stock market this is totally different and watching what happens as it goes up and down especially as it goes down from an emotional standpoint Like the psychology of all of these people that have never really experienced not only a crash, but just an investment and feeling what that's like, that changes a lot of the demand curve, right? It changes a lot of the price.

And so I don't think it necessarily is down whatever 70%. I just think that it was massively overvalued. And so now we're getting down to the reality. Yeah, kind of the, okay, here's where we're at, and maybe it goes back up, maybe it comes back down, who knows. But what I do know is that over the long term, investments aside, there is enough people, there are enough people, I should say, who believe in what it represents. There are enough people that go on Twitter and be like, this is going to take down the banks. This is going to free me from the government. There's enough people that own enough crypto that will not let it die.

And that is, it could go down to 50 bucks and there'll still be enough people that will keep the tech moving. And that is why I don't think it's, you know, I don't know if blindly holding the entire time is the way to do it. But I think that it's my strategy. I mean, I think that it's, if you're in it for long haul, not a bad, I mean, it's a good move. My strategy generally is, wow, this is really depressing to look at. I'm just not going to look at it for like four months. Which is probably, you know, for most people. I would say that's the right thing to do.

I've noticed, and I'm sure you've seen this because you're teaching people how to, on Coinmastery.tv, you're teaching people how to make picks and think about investing, think about the mindsets. It's got to be fascinating for you, just as it was for me, which is one of the things that sparked this interview, watching people who really know better. I mean, I have friends that make millions of millions of dollars and they'll buy something and they'll go, damn it, it's going down. I got to sell it. And I'm thinking, what are you talking?

Have you never handled money before? What is wrong with you? Or, oh, it's going up. I'm going to chase that green candle. I'm going to chase that upward trend. And I'm just thinking, you are one of the smartest people that I know. And look at you just high on crypto right now. Totally.

High on your valuations, your chicken block folio. I can't have a conversation with you at the dinner table. People get so hooked on this. And then it goes down and you see these both sophisticated and unsophisticated investors making massive emotional mistakes, both with buying and selling. Totally. And I think that that is probably not a good sign, but maybe we just all need to learn the hard way.

I don't know. What do you think about that? I think that, you know, markets are markets. And one, I will say one of the greatest parts of this journey for me has been how much it's forced me to study history and how many books and just diving in, not only have bubbles, but just how people have reacted through these things and talking to people that have been through these different scenarios. But I think when you drill into the micro decision making of everyone, you know, the day-to-day

decisions, I think crypto represents something very emotional to people. I think because of the speed and the volatility of it all, I think that there's a lot of people that feel like this is their only shot and that they're never going to get a shot like this again in life. And if they don't get it right this time, one are they ever going to get it? They got to go back to a life of working 80 hours a week or working 50 hours a week.

It's something you don't like to do. My personal perspective is there's a bit of escapism in there where crypto represents this. Right. The unicorn event. Yeah. Lambo's. But it just like freedom.

That's it. You know, just like, oh, my gosh, I'm finally out. I'm done. And as soon as, as many people know, as soon as you feel like you're getting that, it's when it crashes. Right. That's like how it works. Because guys like me and my friends go, oh, crap, everyone's really happy right now.

I'm going to sell some of this because I'm nervous. And then people go, wait, did that just go down? Oh, crap. This is the beginning of the end. Yeah. Dump it. That's it. Yeah.

We'll be right back with more from Carter Thomas. after these brief messages from our sponsors. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers is what keeps us on the air. To learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard, visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash advertisers. And if you'd be so kind, please drop us a nice rating and review in iTunes or your podcast player of choice.

It really helps us out and helps build the show family. If you want some tips on how to do that, head on over to Jordan Harbinger.com slash subscribe. And now for the conclusion of our interview with Carter Thomas. And then people go, wait, did that just go down? Oh, crap, this is the beginning of the end. Yeah. Dump it.

That's it. Yeah. It's a very, very powerful emotion. I mean, FOMO is just so underrated. Yeah. For people, oh, you know, like, even if you don't have that much money in it, you're like, oh, whatever, I'll be fine. But, man, you watch that price start going up. I know.

It's insane. Like, how could I, how could I not? How could I miss this? Yeah. You know, how could I miss that? Because if this is the run, if this is the one that goes big and I miss this, how could I ever be okay with that? And, you know, that's one of the hardest things to turn off. That's why every Telegram group, which Telegram is an app where a lot of people discuss cryptocurrency.

I'm not sure why it's the number one app for this, but I think it's just the way that it handles groups and individual communication. Supposedly secure, way less secure than other apps. Yeah, TVD on that. That's another story. but you see people at the height of these things, there's five or ten a day. Hey, has anyone heard of Carter coin? Where's Jordan coin? What about wrecked coin?

And there's just one after the other, after the other, after the other. This one's going to be huge. My friend said this one's going to be huge. And you have what essentially look like penny stocks, which scare a lot of people away. But it sort of wraps into the question, is it too late for people to get into this? Because, look, I've been doing this for a couple of years or a year and a half now. you've been doing it for a while. But the learning curve, in my opinion, going from when I knew nothing about it,

other than, yes, I've heard of Bitcoin, and I think I have some somewhere, if I can find the file that has the wallet, to knowing how all this works, having deep roots connected into the industry, seeing some of the new products coming out, understanding the tech behind it to some degree, I feel like that all took just a matter of months because of the level of obsession that people have with this, including myself. But also, I think a lot of folks think, oh, I missed the boat on that. And I kind of think you, you didn't miss this like you missed free music on the internet, right? I mean, you can still, there's always, always, always time, especially right now.

The 2017 run, the January of 2018 run was obviously a unique unicorn event. And I think it was a perfect storm of critical mass of people of technology, which allowed for the speed, and lack of regulation. Because that's really what the fact that these could be manipulative. the way they were is what drove a massive amount of this, this growth. And so I think that moving forward, we may have some interim, you know, three-week, everything goes up by 50 percent type of euphoria. But I don't know if we're going to get a sustained across the board, everybody gets rich type of situation. Or, you know, a verge going up 8,000 percent of it may be.

What I do think is going to happen, though, is that the entire market. market cap. So let's say market cap right now is $320 billion. I think that the market cap may go to, let's say, $10 trillion in a couple of years. But the problem is there's going to be a schism where there's the financial side of crypto and there's the venture capital side of crypto. Because one thing that you find out, especially in the United States with these kind of situations, is that the regulators are not interested in creating new agencies. They're interested in taking the new stuff and boxing it into what exists. Hammering that square peg through the round hole.

And what exists is securities laws for finance and venture capital. I mean, securities two for venture capital. So what I would tell people is that there's obviously still huge, huge opportunities, but it's going to be more of a science to find the winners. And it's going to look more like finance and venture capital. That being said, 97 to 99, that was all on New York Stock Exchange. those are still going up 900 percent. So it's still possible to happen with the regulations in place.

But I think that there needs to be another like kind of rebuilding of the support of the general like faith in blockchain and crypto for that to kick off. Yeah. And I think I think you're right on that. And I also see huge gaps between newbies in advance that get closed with record speed. I mean, there'll be somebody, a friend of mine went to a meetup of yours a long time ago. I think it might have been the first one. It's like standing room only, hugely popular.

And there'd be people in the room asking you about, well, China regulating this and causing all this fear, uncertainty and doubt, what do you think is this guy? And then the next question is like, how do I buy Bitcoin? What's it in that, Bitcoin? And so there was this huge gap. But then you can find those same people who want, what's a hardware wallet? And then three months later, they're telling you about how the tech of this one ICO is doomed to failure because it doesn't something. And you're just thinking, the gap is closing. so quickly. This is no longer teaching your parents how to dial into the internet. This is like

you can learn how this stuff works just like you can learn how Spotify works if you've never used a music player on the computer before, just like you can learn how an iPhone works by picking it up, messing with it for about 20 seconds, and you go, yeah, I think I got a hang of this. It becomes not quite as intuitive as an Apple product, but if this is the rough Wild West stage of it and you can figure it out by reading articles online and messing with it, then it's not going to get more complex, most likely. It's going to get easier, especially as companies decide to bring this to the mass market so they can make more money.

Yeah, and that's a huge piece. From adoption, which I think is the next big thing in crypto, is people using the products and the currencies, whatever may be, that's going to drive so much of the growth. And then the other piece is, yeah, the investment side, right? We've got thousands, if not millions of people that are. You know, technical analysts now, you know, air quotes around that. Yes. And, you know, people that have, you know, killed it on ICOs and think they're venture capitalists.

And what you're going to see now is the people that are in those established industries, you're already seeing companies opening up trading desks or seeing venture capitalists get into cryptocurrencies, getting into the seed round stage. That's all going to fuse together. And it's just going to become a more competitive space, but there's going to be way more money. I'm really excited about it. I thrive on that sort of thing. I love when it gets bigger and bigger.

And I think that, but I also think that as it gets more competitive, one thing that people are going to miss is that they're going to chase the tactics that worked in 2017. And even 2018, like, oh, it gets listed on exchange. You get a 20% bump. That's my move. Oh, there's a fork coming. Oh, the price is going to spike because people want to get the airdrop. Like, those tactics will die. and then the lower quality coins will eventually die.

All the stuff that kind of works will stop working, and then the fundamentals of who's on the team, what problem are they solving? It's just a classic fundamentals of investing and of product development, which is stuff that just takes time to learn. You know, you can't just kind of open up Coinbase and you're an expert on, you know, Fibonacci retracements or whatever.

Yeah, Fibonacci. Yeah, some of the, all that, stuff where it's sort of, oh, this is what the markets do. It just to me seems like reading tea leaves, except it sounds fancier than reading tea leaves. So people who are smarter believe in it, but it's still the same set of logical bias that you see anywhere else. I've come around kind of full circle and technical analysis in the sense that at first I was like, this is what is this? You know, there's a lot of lines. Like, come on. Then I got to, then I went all the way to the other side where I said, wow, there's actually a lot of, this is telling me everything I need to know.

Right. And now I'm kind of the point where it guides, it gives you a bit of a guide. Like, it gives you some level of probabilities, but it's by no means is it going to, because everybody's looking at the same thing. Yeah. Like, if everybody's looking at it, then there's a whole game theory side of what happens when everyone looks at it. And so I think that that's another piece of the puzzle that's going to, you know,

slowly work itself out because you go talk to traders on equities or futures or 4x or whatever and you show them oh yeah yeah I'm just going to draw ascending wedge or you know Elliott wave like dude cup and handle yeah like what are you talking yeah this is a five trillion dollar market that does not work yeah there's too many players there's too many people yeah and there's too many smart people trying to figure out how to turn your cup and handle into whatever exactly you know something else it's oh this flag up just kidding it's a bull bro oh just kidding it says and it doesn't now we're going to be competing against computers that are betting about what we're going to do based on numbers that they can calculate in real time versus

what we think is going to happen which is not quite the same level of accuracy on your channel on your youtube channel coin mastery tv you teach a lot of mindsets so instead of invest in this buy this this is what i'm buying which like you said that was the first maybe two dozen episodes of your show now you're teaching mindsets instead of doing this and that and i read on your Twitter ages ago that the reason you do that is because if you just tell people what to buy, one, they get pissed off when you're wrong. But two, they don't really apply anything. Can you sort of explain the psychology behind this?

Because it seems like you're more interested in people learning how to do this, sort of teach a man to fish versus being Jim Kramer predicting, hey, that this is, Oracle's going to go up tomorrow. Hit the bell. Yeah, hit the bell. The product announcement's on tomorrow. I betting on this one. I started this channel because I couldn't find information on the Internet.

And I was really fascinated with crypto. I bought a little bit of crypto. And I just wanted to learn. And so in Gary Vaynerchuk style, I was just like, why don't I document my journey here? And I also had a pretty good amount of experience as an entrepreneur that I can hopefully apply in as an investor, venture capital a little bit, whatever. So the premise of the whole show is how do you make better decisions and capitalize on this revolution, financial revolution, technological. Revolution. And that's always been the foundation of how it started. But obviously, you know, people want to hear about, hey, what do you think of this coin? Right. So I try to blend those.

But I think the big piece is that when I look at the bell curve and I know that 20% of people are going to win huge in crypto, maybe even 10% over the next couple of years, I tend to believe, even from my experience and just from researching and talking to people, the thing that gets people to that 20% in finance is the ability to connect dots, is the ability to see a set of things that are happening and say, I know that this is going to impact this, there's going to impact this, or it's going to impact this. It's kind of like how macro trading works.

And the more I can help people do that, or at least give them insights into what I'm trying to figure out how to do, because by no means in my agee, I'm not, I'm just trying to do it like everyone else, you know. I think it helps a lot of people that are more naturally left-brained who are thinking, what's the coin, what's the price, when do I, like, what do I do? Give me the instruction book. Yeah, yeah. And I'm more about, well, there's a little bit of art to this science that will help you stay at, at least at the level where you can keep winning over the long term and that you don't wake up in April of 2018 and be one of people to be able to.

to delete your Twitter account because you're done with crypto. Right. Because it's never, you know, you're done, you know, it'll never come back and you're over it. So I think that that's just something that I firmly believe in, like a value of mine that I've always had. Yeah, teach Amanda Fish, but more just how do you stay at the top level? And when everybody's making money because it's just like, oh, go buy this coin at this time, it's hard to believe that. But I know we're the long term, you, I mean, look at everybody.

someone like Tim Ferriss's interview, you look at anybody who, you know, any people who are on these podcasts, they don't talk about the tactics. They talk about like the principles, the fundamentals, the mindset. Like, well, why don't you start with that? And why are we, like, it seems like it should be the winning. How do you research a technology that most people don't understand? And what's your mindset when you research things that are so new that a lot of us don't really have any context for it?

I think the first thing you start with is obviously it's got to have a sick logo. I'm just kidding. Yeah. It's got to look rad and have a flash movie when you go to the watch. So it's sort of a rocket in there. The first thing is got to solve a real problem. So if you can't look at that and look at the problem in real life and you don't see that that's a problem, that's a red flag. Second thing is they got to have a real team.

Not only with people that have amazing credentials, but people that have. have built like real businesses before. I think that's one of the highest proxies of success in venture capital is have you built and sold the company before. Yeah. You know, and most people haven't. They're credible technologists, but they're not really very good business people and that's a big piece of it.

And then you can get into what's unique about cryptocurrency, which is how strong is the community, you know, how engaged are they, how quickly is their development cycle? What is their GitHub repo? Which, for anybody listening, that's like a place where you can show. people, you're coding history, right? So you can see how much development has been done. And I think that there's more due diligence along that, but I think it really comes down to the basics of, is this a real problem? Do I believe that this person's going to solve this problem? Is there an opportunity in the market for this thing to happen? And that's when, if it checks all

those boxes, then you can dive into the, you know, the details of it all. You mentioned something on an earlier show, and I'm going to butcher this. but I'll try to paraphrase it. It was, you work harder doing the research because that's really the only advantage that you can get when we all get the news at the same time. Do you know what I'm talking about? Yeah, I think that one idea, a principle,

I would say that I've become very, very, I guess, obsessed with over the last two years, is this idea of leverage and how constantly trying to leverage your own time, your own skill sets, your own, everything you have. How do you get the most out of it, your time and everything? and in crypto in the past year or so, I look at what can I compete with other people on? Some people have quant algorithms and they can compete on the day trading and they can run

7,000 trades a minute and scalp half a cent here and there over and over. I can't compete with that. So short-term trading, not going to happen. There's technical analysis. I can't really compete on that. My skills right there. You go down the list, researching. companies is something that I've been pretty good at outside of cryptocurrency and within

cryptocurrency. So I figured why don't I just get even better at researching these companies, finding out which ones win, why they win, what do I believe in? Because when I look at all the things I can compete at, that's the thing that I have a real shot at. I could walk into a room and I'd probably know more about a company than 80% of people there. That's a competitive advantage. I should double down that as opposed to trying to get pretty good at a lot of other things.

And so I would encourage anybody in crypto or, I mean, really anything in business, you identify where you have a natural advantage and you go all in on that thing. Yeah. I love research myself. I'm sort of obsessive with it. The other thing that I do that I teach on this show, especially, is the value of networking and creating relationships. because you can find people, or remember a friend of mine said,

oh, man, this ICO is coming up, it's closed. This is when ICOs were the thing, right? It's closed, it's impossible. We're never going to go. And I went, oh, I wonder if I can find a CEO. So I just found out who she was. I asked a couple of friends of mine. I got an intro within like two hours.

She was on the phone with me, I think, the next day via Skype from like, you know, Belgium or something. And I went, yeah, a bunch of my friends want to buy this, but I know that you're really overcommitted. and she said something like, oh, well, you know, I'm really looking for these few technologists type people. And I went, oh, I think I can connect you to them. So I did. And she went, do you want an allocation of this?

I can't give you more than like $500,000 worth. And I went back to my friends and I said, yeah, I mean, we could buy like 500 grand worth. And they went, wait, what are you talking about? You joined this group like yesterday. You don't even know what this company is. You make a few phone calls and now suddenly we're able to invest half a million dollars into this amazing thing. What do you, how? And that becomes a massive competitive advantage as well because you can get deals first.

You can get better pricing on things. You can find out what might work and what's a scam because you can find out, yes, this is my friend running it and no, I don't give him my own money. You shouldn't either. You know, there's a lot of things like this that you can find. And do you also value networking and outreach or are you more siloed with your research? 100% value networking. I think that the most valuable skill in crypto is.

is the ability to identify and provide value to other people that have skill sets that you do not have or have access that you do not have. I think that there are so many people. And I saw this in the app business. I saw this. Before the app business, I was doing websites. I mean, every industry I've been in, a vast majority of the people who want the upside the most are waking up and they're looking at the computers. I mean, like, I got to do this on my own. I got to learn the skills myself.

It's me. It's David and Glythe. It's me versus the world. And the more you can collaborate and provide value to other people, and they'll help you out in return. And they have something, a skill set or whatever. You build that network, whether it be an allocation, whether it be somebody who is really good at doing. Like, if you're a technical chartist and you don't really want to do the fundamentals or research, become really good friends. Like feed someone free charts all day.

They're going to feed you research all day and vice versa. Or, you know, if you want to find someone who hasn't got an algorithm, you know, you go and do whatever for them and they hook you up with the algorithm. So I think that process is in itself a competitive advantage because it is easier to sit there with your computer drinking coffee and being like, well, I'm just going to refresh it and hope the market goes up. That's the easy thing to do. And sign up for a couple newsletters and hope someone tells you what coins.

just buy at the right time. Yeah, this is one of those industries where I think you might even underestimate your own competitive advantage because you do so much research. You say, well, you know, I read this and then I talked to the person who wrote that article and they got this source. Then I read that source. And it turns out that this is actually not true at all. And you second guess yourself at some point.

I remember going into a meetup of some kind and a couple of people were talking about something and I went, I don't know if that's how it works. And they're like, oh, you know, calm down. and we know what we're talking about. And I was like, well, and I won't say this person's name here, but I was like, well, I don't know. I was talking with so-and-so the other day. And I just got a total different understanding.

And they went, wait, wait, that person said what? And it was like, get out, you know, conversation over. Everyone's on the phone. Hang on. I think that this person might have been wrong about this because this massive crypto influencer said kind of the opposite. And I'm like, maybe I should check before you guys, you know, pull your money out of something. But it turned out that I was actually right on this particular instance.

And I ended up, these guys. love me now because I feel like I saved them like a few million dollars I think in some sort of huge mistaken investment because I just happen to be in a bunch of these different groups and kind of skimming them and lurking because I had the right friend who invited me to this who had another friend who invited me to this is another thing and these kind of networks mirror real life quote unquote networks where you can get jobs opportunities massive advantages on people just because you happen to have your ears, you're a fly on the wall in 27 different conversations with people that nobody else has access to. If you can build that type of

platform, and I would imagine your YouTube channel has transformed the way that you do this kind of business because I don't know if this is your experience, but you can probably email a lot of people and they go, oh yeah, of course I've heard of you. And you probably get a lot of email, hey, I'll give you a hundred grand if you say that you're buying this crappy scam coin that I'm making to buy. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. the ladder of that. And yeah, I mean, that's a huge piece of the channel has been, whether it be an ICI I want to get on or just a meeting I want to get. Hey, what's up? Here's my YouTube channel. And they're like, oh, whoa. Yeah, we're totally down to talk to you now. I think also for anybody

who it's like, oh, well, you know, you're in San Francisco or you're in New York or you're in L.A. You've got access to these people. I live in Omaha. How am I going to get crypto networks, built. You can do a lot of this online. Yeah. I mean, you can, you can meet people online. You can set video calls. You can, it might not be as easy as walking into a meetup and serendipitously meeting the right person, but it's all possible too online. So for anybody who is in an area where there's not a lot of crypto going on, it's still possible to do. Or you can travel to a conference or something like that. Let's wrap with how markets are about, I've heard you say this a lot. Markets are about people, they're not necessarily about rational, logical information. And I'm paraphrasing you. Sure. If I'm

misquoting you, you know, call me out on it. But you seem to use a lot of knowledge about people to kind of predict or try to predict what's going to happen with certain coins or markets. Has that made you money? And how are you using your people knowledge to make money or save money? Because I, in example, case in point, you tweeted recently, I think something called Centra. The founders get arrested by the SEC and people are buying the dip and you're just like what the hell's going on here and you see I recently also saw you say something like I'm genuinely excited to see how many people buy and sell based on April Fool's pranks that they just didn't check yeah it's there's especially in 2017 there was probably within three months I made four or five trade or whatever you

want to call it based on stuff like what's the sentiment on my YouTube comments? Are people mad? Are they happy that I'm doing longer videos? And I could tell based on, was it a bull market or a bearish market? And those kind of things were like very one-time tactics, but I was like, this is the most emotional, ridiculous market. There's no regulation. And most importantly, there's no verification.

There's no earnings report. So there's no way to show that Verge isn't worth what everyone says it is. If everybody believes it, that is what it's worth, right? That's why it's a bubble. And so there is a lot of moments like that. And I think that as it was screaming up, there's a lot of things that you could see, a lot of sentiment reactions. And then as we're getting to the bottom, you're starting to see a lot of sentiment reactions.

And I think that, yeah, it's definitely one element. I don't think that I bank on it as much as I used to because I think that, there's more complexities to, there's more money coming in than the was before. But yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, a speculative market like cryptocurrency is, is purely based on how people feel. And what stories do they believe?

And that's, I mean, the fact that $50 billion can come in in 48 hours like it did last week, because there's like a surge of euphoria, that to me means that all this money is just sitting on the sidelines. I mean, it's waiting to come back. in, people just need to feel like they're back in the bull run for it to really come in. So it hasn't been completely exterminated yet. But for now, everyone's, you know, there's this cautious feeling. So we can see the influence at work as well. I mean, a few months ago, to illustrate your

point, China said, actually, we're going to ban this and everything tanked. And then it was, I think, two days later, well, we don't mean we're going to ban everything. We just mean we're going to maybe start regulating things more. So it went way up as people went, oh, okay, I'm relieved about this now. Then it was, well, actually, we're going to shut down all the exchanges, though, everything tanks. And I'm just thinking there's some set of bureaucrats in this Chinese government area that regulates this stuff going, all right, so everyone buy right now, and then they release

some sort of BS media thing through state-run media. It goes through the roof. All right, everybody sell your stuff. All right, we all sold? You all good? All right, cool. Tank it again. Buy it.

Let it fly up again. Rinse and repeat until they finally just lost all but every shred of credibility. And we see this fear, uncertainty, and doubt being manufactured by media outlets, especially state-run media, where they can really coordinate these things. And so you can see how this market is actually less rational than any other market, which most markets are not rational at all. And now we see how this market is based purely. This is like a Snapchat market. This is a Twitter market where McCaffey can go, I really like Verge.

It's really great while he's cashing a $250,000 check from the people who created Verge. And then he's doing this once or twice a day and laughing his face off at every single one of us. And yet we're still following him on Twitter. Yeah. I mean, it's that that plays a lot into the, I think it plays a lot into the, I think it plays a lot

of the skepticism. I mean, the people who are skeptical of cryptocurrency, it is because of this. And they should be. I mean, the fact that billions of dollars can move based on really anything. Sure. Or nothing at all? Yeah, like just boredom or whatever.

That's a problem. Or at least it's not a sustainable model. And I think at the same time, it's an opportunity if you're willing to, you know, ride the lightning, as they say. And, you know, you can be smart about it. But yeah, I mean, I tend to be a little bit more of a conspiracy theorist, especially as I read more books as I meet more people that have been trading for a long time. And you start to realize that a lot of the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that comes is coordinated. I mean, there is, it's not an accident.

It wasn't like, oh, well, we're just going to do this. And whatever happens happens, there's intent behind plenty of these things getting released. you know, the George Soros and the Rockefellers, oh, we're going to start buying crypto. There was a reason why that press release was all coordinated at a certain time. They already bought a bunch. Yeah. This is all, it's all a big game to everybody. And so I think that, you know, like one tweet I put out, I was like the quote from Jurassic Five,

he's talked about how it's not how you play the game, it's how the game plays you. and I think that is cryptocurrency for now. It definitely was last year, and it still is now, where there's no formula. There's no script. It's trying to remove the Bitcoin out of your wallet. It's trying to screw you. Like, the market is trying to remove it. The game is how do you keep it and hopefully build your stack along the way?

But that's the game. It's kind of like surfing in the ocean, right? Either the ocean spits you back out. or you drown. That's it. Right? Nobody stays on the wave forever. That's it.

And it is what it is, right? Markets are markets. They're going to do what they do. I think as regulation comes in, they'll be, you know, especially the CFTC regulating the exchanges, there'll be more, less volatility, potentially less of these, you know, influencers who can move the price of a, you know, $500 million coin. But I don't know. I don't see this dream being given up anytime soon. I still see a lot of people that are like, I am not, no matter what, I will not give this up.

And that's very different than pecs.com. It's very different than what the internet bubble was. And that's why there's a big question mark of how does this all play out? It's kind of like a lottery that you can give a reasonable chance of winning if you play enough, unlike the actual lottery. Exactly. Although buying lottery tickets also a bad strategy, whether we're talking about crypto or the lottery itself. Very, very, very true. Is there anything that you want to leave us with that I haven't asked you yet?

I think the biggest thing is that especially for people that whoever have been in the market or have been thinking about the market, being able to recognize that it's not going to happen the way it happened in 2017 again. It may be better, it may be worse, but it's going to be different. and for anybody out there, if you're in crypto or are you going to get into crypto, you have to accept that and be okay with that and not play the game the exact same way that you played it last year because you will get hurt if you try to do that. So I think that's super important. Just stay smart, surround yourself with good people, you know, good information, and just all about the fundamentals. It really just comes out of that.

Yeah, that smart money is going to do the opposite of what smart money did last time because the dumb money is going to expect the rest of us to do the exact same thing again. And they're going to be wrong. Exactly. Right. So the smart money says, all right, they're thinking three moves ahead while everyone else is thinking too. Yeah, I think that's brilliant. Thank you so much, Carter, for coming in sharing your wisdom with us here, coin mastery. It's a YouTube channel where you are sitting in a small, acoustically terrible office, but giving really good information.

It's inversely coordinated with the quality of the information. That's right. Thank you very much. Dude, thanks for having me. It'll be interesting to see where blockchain technology takes us. And I think Carter's got a really good outlook on this. Like, yes, he focuses a lot on trading, but he really is a technology enthusiast at the end of the day and has a very rational mind. So it's interesting to see where this stuff is going and what he's teaching us.

Great big thank you to Carter Thomas. He's on YouTube Coinmastery. He also has the Coin Mastery podcast as well. And if you enjoyed this, don't forget to thank Carter on Twitter. Tweet me your number one takeaway from Carter Thomas as well. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. And don't forget, if you want to learn how to apply everything you heard here from Carter Thomas, make sure you go grab the worksheets, also in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast.

This episode was produced and edited by Jason DePhilippo. Show notes are by Robert Fogarty. Booking, Back Office, and Last Minute Miracles, all by Jen Harbinger. and I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful, which should be in every episode. So please share the show with those you love

and even those you don't. We've got lots more in the pipeline. We're excited to bring it to you. And in the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen. And we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast.

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