Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Josh Rasheeds. I'm your host and today on the show I want to share with you some insights that I have, few ideas that I've come up with personally and it's my hope that these ideas might help you to, as the great Wayne Gretzky said, "Skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it is." I call this the WhatsApp phenomenon and this is an idea that I've considered for a good number of years now but I see applications of it to the world around us, to some of the questions that you might be thinking about, some of the ideas that you might be considering and yet this is something that has happened within your and my lifetime and I think the drivers of what I'm about to describe to you are something that you can see personally which makes it interesting as a philosophical tool.

One of the definitions of philosophy that I like is those things that people everywhere can think about just based upon their personal experience. You don't need to go out and do research on anything. You can just think about this and so I'm going to elaborate a theory that I came up with personally.

I've never seen this theory read or I've never gone looking for articles on this theory. They might be out there but I came up with this theory but I think you'll probably be able to see the point that I'm making in this theory and then see the application of it.

I want to talk about how the world develops and is developing. My undergraduate degree is in international business and when I was an international business student one of many books that I read when I was in college was Thomas Friedman's book called The World is Flat and in that book I think, I haven't read it in 20 years, excuse me, in 15 years, I haven't read the book in 15 years and so I hope I'm citing the right book.

But in that book Friedman talks about how mobile communications technology was transforming the African continent and the argument that Friedman advanced in that book was basically this. If you were to go back to say 1950, one of the most connected places in the world would have been a place like the United States.

Other countries as well but once the telephone was developed you had an incredible investment into making sure that that technology was accessible. The ability to speak to somebody with synchronous voice communications was a tremendous path forward, a tremendous advance, a tremendous step forward and so in the United States you had tremendous investment into wiring the country.

Over time the country of the United States became completely wired with electricity and it became completely wired with telephone lines, telephone communications. It was not always that way. My father grew up on a remote ranch in the mountains of Colorado and the only form of communication that they had with the outside world was through the use of radio.

My grandmother was a ham radio operator because that allowed her to talk to her friends across the state and across the region. Then a telephone was installed eventually but of course it was a different kind of telephone system and you started to see the fact that the United States had invested heavily into getting even the remote regions of the country connected with telephone lines.

In my childhood cell phone technology, mobile telephone technology started to become useful. At first it was of course the domain of the rich to be able to have a car phone. Then they started to become more popular and when I graduated high school that was basically the turning point at which a cell phone went from being a luxury good to being a common ordinary necessity.

Now when I was in college one of the pieces of data that I read in the Friedman book was how this technology was transforming Africa and how much faster it was being accepted in Africa than it was in the United States. Friedman made the point that the ability that a rural farmer now had on his small farm somewhere in the African continent to reach real-time market data of the price of crops or current events or things that would affect his life, that was tremendous and yet that technology curve, that development curve in Africa was far faster than it was in the United States.

Now the technology was designed, many parts of it originally in the United States and other nations as well. Different systems were rolled out and there was good application but in many ways it was a lot faster in Africa because there was no need to install the infrastructure that the United States and Germany and Canada and Great Britain had gone through being some of the more developed countries.

They had invested a lot of money and time into stringing the entire country with wires whereas in the African continent all they had to do to realize a communications revolution was to go in and install cell phone towers and it's much much easier to install cell phone towers than it is to install millions of miles of wires connected to central plants and connected to each house and so the pace of development was far faster which is phenomenal, just wonderful for the economic growth and development in the African continent.

But here's where I observe that things changed. If you were to go to many parts of the world today, Africa, Latin America, really many parts of the world outside of the United States, perhaps outside of Western Europe, if you were to try to call somebody or try to connect with them on their telephone you will almost never do it.

You'll almost never connect with someone using the telephone. Rather what you will do is you will use an app and it's most likely to be WhatsApp. There may be regional variations in China, it'll be WeChat but in many parts of the world it'll be WhatsApp, the largest most popular app used on a regular basis by something like two billion people and I've thought a lot about why that is and here I see an interesting trend that is happening on a global basis right now, that I can observe right now.

When I meet somebody, for example right now my family and I are here in Costa Rica, when I meet a Costa Rican and I want to communicate with that person we're going to communicate on WhatsApp whereas in the United States when I meet a US American we're going to communicate on the phone.

And so in the US American culture, while of course there are millions and millions of US Americans who have WhatsApp on their devices, in that culture the phone is a perfectly viable alternative. We're used to talking on the phone, we've been talking on the phone for a very long time, the phone works fine and so we do business based on phone numbers.

But in Latin America and Africa it's not that same way. You'll often see instead of a phone number you'll often see the business post their WhatsApp phone number right on the front door, a little WhatsApp logo, contact us on WhatsApp. You go to their website and when you click contact us it'll pop open the WhatsApp chat and you can chat with them right on WhatsApp instead of using either an external chat client or instead of having their phone number or their email.

And so the point here is that technologies are adopted differently based upon different needs. Now let's talk about WhatsApp versus telephones. WhatsApp is superior to the telephone in every single way that I can come up with. I cannot come up with one single point wherein a telephone, even a mobile phone, is better than WhatsApp.

Let me give you some examples. WhatsApp doesn't restrict your communication to one form of communication. WhatsApp allows you to call and use a voice call. WhatsApp allows you to do a video call and add a video image when that's convenient. WhatsApp allows you to send written text messages. WhatsApp allows you to send audio messages.

So you can choose. WhatsApp allows you to send gifts and stickers and whatever else you want to do to express yourself. WhatsApp allows you to do all of those things. WhatsApp allows you to communicate with one single individual. WhatsApp also allows you to communicate with groups and to create them on the fly.

You can just create a group in a moment and then you can disband it. You can clear it out. You can do anything with it. WhatsApp works on any device. It'll work on a tablet. It'll work on a computer. It'll work on a cell phone and it'll stay connected and organized among all of those.

WhatsApp allows you to function without paying any kind of monthly fees. Now one of the unique things about WhatsApp as compared to some other platforms which also provide the same technology. I'm just using WhatsApp because it's the most prominent. You could apply the same logic to some of the other platforms.

But you don't have to have an active phone number. You do have to have an active cell phone with a connection, an active device, but that doesn't have to actually be tied to an active phone number. You can run it with a voice number. You can run it with a free number.

You can run it in a couple of different ways. And so it's a really useful system. And the reason that, I forgot, encryption, right? WhatsApp is encrypted and encrypted which is a tremendous benefit that the telephone and standard SMS messaging doesn't offer to you. WhatsApp is really good at giving you additional data.

Hey like message received, message read. It allows you to, it's good at sitting there and queuing up messages and waiting until you have a signal to send them out. So it's just a better solution technologically on every level. So why is it that the world has not noticed it and everyone adopted WhatsApp to the same level?

Why is it that a store, a massage parlor or a chiropractor office in the United States of America won't have a WhatsApp profile? Perhaps some individuals working in there will have their own personal thing but they won't use it on a business level whereas a chiropractor or a massage parlor or something in Latin America likely will.

Well, I think it comes down to the need and who benefits from the system. So let's go back to the development of mobile telephony. In the United States when phones first came out they were very expensive but we were accustomed to working in a phone system. My early plans had a certain number of text messages, had a certain number of minutes, you had in network minutes, you had out of network minutes, you tracked all that stuff.

Then cost came down, competition came up. Today virtually any plan that I'm aware of will certainly allow for unlimited talk and text and your plans are mainly differentiated based upon the amount of data that you consume. But WhatsApp came out of the need around the world for people to use their communication devices more frugally.

WhatsApp solved a problem. It allowed somebody, it allowed that proverbial, you know, Friedman's farmer in Africa to just pay for a little bit of data and WhatsApp was much better with his data usage because instead of sending one SMS message he could just send a little tiny data burst and communicate on WhatsApp.

He could send data when he needed and the data would get through, the message would get through pretty reliably. And so it was just cheaper, it was more frugal on data. To this day I find that WhatsApp, I'll often be on a conversation on Signal or FaceTime or even Messenger, something like that, and I'll find that of any of those WhatsApp has the best protocols to work well on a slow connection.

You can have a genuinely decent voice conversation, a simultaneous synchronous voice communication conversation, on WhatsApp even without a ton of data speed, which is pretty remarkable. Their engineers are phenomenal. So I think I've given, talked enough about the technical side of things. Just to demonstrate that in my view WhatsApp is a superior offering.

It's a better solution than telephones and it's something that has revolutionized the world and is revolutionizing the world. That communications revolution is truly phenomenal. Now what do you see happening though with regard to WhatsApp? The first observation that I have is regardless of how good a technical solution is, people are generally comfortable with what they're comfortable with.

I don't know what percentage of US American people who have a telephone have WhatsApp installed, but if it were a few years ago the percentage would have been extremely low because it's just not used. It's not used among "normal people". Certainly young people use it, but it's just not used among normal people.

But at some point in time somebody gets hooked, right? Somebody something happens. They say I want to communicate with you. You're talking across continents, right? I neglected to say this earlier when I was talking about the benefits of WhatsApp. You have the same exact completely free cost of communicating from New York City to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia as you do communicating from New York City to upstate, right, to Rochester or something.

So that's phenomenal, right? If you get in a cab with somebody in the United States with a driver from Ethiopia, there's a good chance that they're just chatting with their family continually on WhatsApp for no cost. That's wonderful and a truly amazing revolution for them. And so at some point people get hooked.

And then what happens is once they get hooked then they start to communicate in different platforms and they start to not notice that these different platforms are all doing the same thing. For example, I remember when my dad got WhatsApp, right? My dad's in his mid-70s and he wanted to communicate with people in Africa and in Asia and they communicate on WhatsApp.

So he downloaded WhatsApp. And so now though that's his most used communications platform and it works really, really well. So you'll have even relatively old people like my parents who will communicate without any problem on WhatsApp and then they've got Facebook Messenger and they've got Telegram and they've got Signal and they're just kind of now we live in this milieu of applications, this just world of applications and we basically view them as in some ways totally fungible.

There are people that I communicate with on whatever platform happens to be convenient. Sometimes Messenger, sometimes iMessaging, sometimes WhatsApp, sometimes Signal, doesn't really matter. And it just becomes a utility and we all use this utility. Now over time the culture and the population can change but it takes more time for a population that's used to doing something an old way to change than it does for a population that's embracing the technology for the first new time.

Now there are still people who cannot imagine not having a phone, not imagine not having a phone number. But a lot of us, right, I don't even pay any attention to the phone number of a phone, or at least I didn't used to. I have found that I've had to reinsert phones into my life in order to deal with SMS, two-factor authentication properly and deal with banks and credit card companies, etc.

But if you can solve that in another way, which of course there are other ways to solve it, the need for a phone is diminished. You just have a communications device. And yet people don't really notice this. Now let's turn to money because I want to apply this to money because I think it's a useful metaphor that more or less touches on what I think is going to happen in the future with the way that we do money.

At its core, WhatsApp and other platforms, they simply solve one human need, which is communication. And they facilitate different and interesting ways to communicate. Even though video calling, they facilitate different ways and whether you use them or not is up to you. Video calling, back in the day, you had this incredible futuristic idea that you would do a video call with somebody and that was going to be cool.

Then it happened and now almost anybody can do a video call on virtually any of these platforms. I personally though almost never use them. I would just prefer just to talk instead of deal with the video. But the technology is there and then people choose what they access and what they don't access.

So money solves a similar function. Money provides a system of accounting so that people can exchange value for value one with another. Just like a telephone or the postal service or any of these facilitate communication, money facilitates transactions. It facilitates trade. It facilitates transfers of value. Now in many systems, such as the United States of America, you have a large, solid, relatively well-run money system.

You have the benefit, by way of metaphor, of having the entire country crisscrossed with cables. But just because that's the way things are right now doesn't mean that's the way that things will be in the near future. Just because that's the way things are right now doesn't mean that's the way things are in other places in the world.

And just because that's the way things are right now doesn't mean that that's the way things will be ten years from now. In the same way that you've had a revolution in communications that's happened right during your lifetime, over the last ten to twenty years, I think it's very probable that you will see a similar revolution in the way that we think about money.

And I think that if you don't see that, think a little bit more about my WhatsApp example. It's hard for me to imagine anybody in my listening audience that doesn't regularly communicate on some application that's not the telephone. And the telephone is still there in the background, but most of the communication now happens in another context.

Well I think in that similar way, that change, that diversity, that changing technology is going to come to the way that we think about money, to the way that we use money, etc. Now for early adopters, there are already options. You can today live in the United States and run your entire life on the British pound.

That would of course be unusual, but you can do that. And here's where you see this incredible intersection between the communications technology and the way that we use money. Right now, you can use other currencies in your life, and I recommend it. I think it's a good idea. When I travel around the world, my primary form of payment is a credit card, and most of the time it's a credit card just simply run through Apple Pay.

The single most convenient way for me to buy something all around the world is by double tapping the button on the side of my Apple Watch and holding it over the credit card reader and moving on with my day. It's a phenomenal system. And if that particular credit card merchant doesn't have a touchless credit card reader, then of course I'll use a physical credit card.

But it's a phenomenal system. That touchless system right on my watch or right on a phone works really, really well. I can't use that system very much in the United States because the United States is significantly behind the curve in contactless credit card readers. But I can use it regularly around the world, even in restaurants and things like that, where usually they bring out the point of service terminal to your table and they punch the numbers in, you hold your watch over it and boom, you're done.

Now why do I do that? Well, because it's annoying to do foreign currency transactions. I don't know how much money I'm going to need in, right now I'm in Costa Rica, the Costa Rican Cologne. I don't know how many colones I'm going to need. And if I go and take out and I convert US dollars into colones, I have to take my passport into a bank, they have to register me in a system, they give me a conversion rate.

I don't know what the conversion rate is fair on their buy-sell spread, it's a real hassle. And what if I'm in Costa Rica one day and Panama the next and Mexico the third, it's just a hassle to keep all that stuff straight and make sure I'm being treated honestly, it's expensive.

Even in terms of spending it, right, I can't really relate very well to what the value of the Costa Rican Cologne is. But I know that as soon as I, you know, swipe my Amex, then about 10 minutes later there's going to be a notification pop up on my phone, "Oh Joshua, you spent $13 on such and such a thing." Oh great, now I can convert it into something that I have a reference for.

I have no reference for the Costa Rican Cologne, I have a reference for the US dollar though. And so everything is facilitated and it's cheaper for me and easier for me just to swipe my credit cards wherever I go around the world. That's a very different system than there was 20 years ago when you traveled with traveler's checks and you didn't have credit cards that had, it was hard to find a credit card that had a no transaction fee, etc.

But today that system is better. Now I can do exactly the same thing with other currencies. If I have a, again, a British bank account or a Canadian bank account or a Mongolian bank account, as long as they offer me that card, I can use the same card and it works the same.

I know the British is hard because they have a lot of foreign transaction fees, but there are options in almost any country. And so in a lot of ways it doesn't really matter what my money is held in. Now of course dollars work well for me. I earn in dollars, I spend in dollars, but all I'm doing is just trying to get something.

I'm just trying to buy something. Now I've been testing a couple of the new offerings that allow you to spend cryptocurrency directly with a card. Pretty remarkable, right? You can have a Bitcoin wallet and a debit card that will simply take from that Bitcoin wallet and you swipe your debit card, boom, it pays.

It's loaded into my Apple Watch app or on Apple Pay on my phone. Double click, boom, here we go. I just used Bitcoin to pay for something at a point of service terminal, anywhere that a credit card is accepted. It's remarkable. And we're living in just the beginning stages of this changing world.

So my point here is that the technology, this technology is superior. I'm not blind to the benefits of cash. I'm the guy who in 2018 I tried to conduct an experiment and I tried to move as many of my personal transactions 100% to cash as possible. I didn't swipe a card or a debit card or a credit card to pay for anything the entire year.

And so I've tested that. But I'm here to tell you as someone who's done that, living on cash is dead, right? That's the past. It's so difficult to do in today's world. It's so difficult. So the future though is not really even cards. The future is digital signals and apps.

I don't know many, I don't know what percentage, but many of the messaging apps now as a built-in feature allow you to use, to transfer money immediately from one person to another. Sometimes this is with an external app, a Venmo, a PayPal. Sometimes it's using directly Apple Pay, Apple Cash, and iMessaging or whatever other options that you have.

But these options are here, they're now, and they're better. Most of my audience lives in the United States. My reason for telling you this is just because you don't use this stuff on a daily basis doesn't mean that this is being used. This is not being used on a daily basis.

The United States of America is very unlikely to be the determined, the culture of the United States of America is very unlikely to be the determining factor of what happens in things like payment technologies, currency use, etc. in the coming years. Why? I think largely it comes down to population and the fact that most US Americans don't see a reason to change.

Now the United States is very good at creating technologists, people who can build something new. Many of the technologies that I have described have been built by and created by US Americans. The United States of America has a very proud history of inventors, creators, etc. But at this point in time, even the whole system of creation is being democratized globally.

Right now, because for the first time in history you can sit at your house in Bangladesh and you can learn to code every bit as well using the instructional content that's available on the internet, using the relevant forums for your coding language, for your application, etc. You can be every bit as good of a coder as somebody who's gone to a prestigious US American university, which means that you can create products, you can create services, and now all of a sudden you need a system that you're not locked out of.

You need a way to have access to a high quality bank account where you can store your money. You need a way to process payments for people who want to purchase your services from around the world. And you need to do it without one country or a few countries controlling all of your transactions saying "oh no, we're going to flag you because you're from Bangladesh and we don't know how to process you".

You need entirely new systems of credit checks and risk profiles. And the way that things are done in the United States doesn't serve the people of Bangladesh very well. I'm not talking this through to try to argue that the United States of America is going to disappear or in decline, or the US dollar is going to be declared worthless.

What I'm articulating is simply that trends are going to change around the world, and they're changing faster than ever before, and these trends are going to affect your money. These trends are going to be things that are affecting how you do business. Know it or not, the people who latched onto WhatsApp in Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, those people have transformed your life.

Because there was a kickback effect. You may have always used iMessaging, and iMessaging is awesome. But then iMessaging started to incorporate more features that you saw on WhatsApp first. Then of course Facebook owns WhatsApp, you had Facebook Messenger change, and all these things are changing. But it's not the population of the United States that drove these trends, it was the population of many countries around the world.

I want to talk about population figures for a moment, because this is something that most people don't pay attention to, because many people don't travel. But let's talk about the population of some of the largest countries in the world. The current population, obviously, is China, which currently has a population of 1.4 billion people.

That is 17.9% of the global population. The second largest country in the world, according to current estimates, is India, which has a current population of 1.37 billion people, that is 17.5% of the world's population. The Chinese population and the Indian populations are going to make a massive impact on your life, assuming that you're not Chinese or Indian, simply because of their size.

And as so many of our communication technology is connected, you cannot have that many people who have access to all of the knowledge of the world, who don't then wind up creating new products, new services, new trends that affect the rest of the world massively. Between China and India, you have two nations that represent something like 35% of the world's population.

Again China, 1.41 billion people, 17.9% of the world's population. India 1.37 billion people, 17.5% of the world's population. The third largest country in the world, measured by population, is the United States. The United States has a population of 331 million people, which represents 4.21% of the world's population. Obviously, the United States has a massive influence on global legal systems, global culture, etc.

The United States has punched well above its weight economically for a very, very long time. That influence is likely to continue for a significant period of time. But that influence, and again, much of my audience is US American, that influence is not guaranteed to continue. There is this, I don't know if it's a popular saying or just a perception, that it's not wise to bet against America.

And I think there's a real grain of truth in that. It's not wise to bet against America. The United States, throughout its history, has accomplished some incredible things. However, just because somebody has accomplished incredible things doesn't mean that they're going to continue to dominate. And I think that you see very clearly, at least I see very clearly, that the global dominance of the United States of America is waning.

Whether it's waning quickly or slowly, I don't know, but it is waning. And I think there are a number of reasons for that. Whether or not that remains true, time will tell. But go and think about other empires. To me, my favorite empire to think about is that of the British Empire.

There was a day when the sun did not set on the British Empire. You had this huge global empire, absolutely massive. And yet, very, very quickly, all throughout the 1900s, that empire systematically collapsed. Now, that collapse was not precipitous and calamitous in the sense that all of a sudden the United Kingdom just became the worst place in the world to be and people were shooting each other in the streets necessarily.

It wasn't that kind of thing, but there was a tremendous collapse. Today, when measured, you have the United Kingdom falling in 21st in terms of the world population number, 67.1 million people, representing 0.85% of the population. Now, the economic rankings of countries is different. We'll come to that in a moment, but I want to finish this population rankings because when you're looking at trends, you're thinking about trends like I'm alluding to, talking about finance trends, banking trends, investment trends, currency trends, adoption of cryptocurrencies or the decentralized finance space, the DeFi space, etc.

My point is population is going to tell a big factor. Most people in the United States have not been looking for solutions to their financial problems. Most people in the United States have been pretty well served with most aspects of their finances. It's been relatively easy for US Americans to get a bank account.

Although the United States has very high levels of bank failures compared to some other countries, generally, the concept of bank failure is not something that US Americans think much about. They just assume it's all going to work out and the regulators are going to take care of it. The US dollar, while massively inflationary, has been less massively inflationary than other currencies and with the military power and the economic power of the United States of America, the US dollar has been king for a very long period of time.

Most US Americans have never earned or banked in anything other than the US dollar. US Americans have generally had access to pretty convenient ways to spend their money. They had access to check systems and they could write checks to people and have check verification and access to credit cards.

Today, still the best market in the world for credit card consumers is the United States of America. It's a tremendous option, the benefits, the perks, etc. that you get with your credit cards. From an investment perspective, the United States of America has featured robust investment markets. Some tremendously powerful and brilliant people have been developing new ways to invest and great academic researchers and very smart investment managers enabling those things, people building companies and just really good stuff.

Some of the lowest investment fees that you'll pay anywhere in the world are in the United States of America. And so most US Americans look at the world and they say, "Look, everything's working pretty well. Everything is good. I've got all my needs met and so things will probably continue." And also they'll say, "Well, you know what?

If the rest of the world changes, they're going to change to be just like us." I don't believe that. I don't believe that. If the rest of the world changes, they're not going to try to build the US American systems because what's the reality of the US American systems?

Realistically, point of service terminals are expensive. Charge a merchant a few percent. That's where your credit card rewards come from. Realistically, bank accounts are very hard to get, especially in the wake since 2001 with the Patriot Act and a few years after. It's very hard to get a bank account.

Payment transfers are very expensive. And if you are a Mexican guy working in the United States trying to send money home to your family in Mexico doing remittances, the fees from Western Union and whatnot are exorbitant, massive. Interest rates in the United States can be very, very high. Credit card interest rates, 19.9%, 29.9%.

And so while on the whole the system is relatively stable, those problems are still there. If you're on a watch list of some kind, you can't get a bank account or you can't get a merchant account, it's real problems. Now pretend that you're trying to run a business in Nigeria.

Nigeria number seven, 211 million people representing 2.69% of the world's population. Growing population, not a declining population like the United States. Nigeria is a powerhouse and yet it's tremendously difficult for Nigerians to interact with the world because of the broad brush of fraud and scams, et cetera, that are drawn over all Nigerians.

The 331 million people, the 4.21% of the world, those consumers are not going to set the future of consumption. There might be some very smart companies, some very smart people that come out of that 4.2%. I expect the United States to continue to be extraordinarily influential in the coming decades.

But the consumer trends, the use of how do we buy and sell with each other? How do we send money to one another? Do we do it in a centralized way or do we do it in a decentralized way? It's going to be the rest of the world's consumers that make those decisions.

Think about this, Indonesia has 271 million people, 3.45%. That's the fourth largest country in the world. Do you have any concept of what the major trends are in Indonesia as a US American or as a Canadian? From an economic GDP perspective, Indonesia is far less powerful and influential than the United States of America.

But that's changing and from a population perspective, Indonesia is an extraordinarily large and powerful country. Pakistan is number five, 225 million people or 2.86% of the world's population. Brazil, number six, 213 million people. Nigeria, 211 million people. Bangladesh, 170 million people. Russia, 146 million people. Mexico, 126 million people.

And the list goes on and on. Ethiopia, Ethiopia is number 12 with 117 million people. Here's what's fascinating about Ethiopia. The median age of the citizens and residents of Ethiopia, the median age, remember median means 50% are lower and 50% are higher. The median age of men and women, boys and girls living in Ethiopia is 20.

50% of everyone in Ethiopia is under the age of 20. Imagine a culture where 50% of your population is under the age of 20 and yet you have 118 million people. Do you think that all of those people are going to sit back and say, "You know what? We're going to just accept the world the way it is." Think about all of the people that you know who are under 20 and how they view the world and some of the things that you think are totally normal that they think would be totally crazy.

"You mean I can't pay with my watch? Are you kidding me? Why wouldn't I? What's the point?" I am increasingly convinced that for my children, by the time they reach their teenage years, the concept that they should only earn their money in one currency, the US dollar, will probably sound as strange to them as the idea does to me that I have to send you a fax.

"I have to send you a fax? Are you kidding me? Why would I send you a fax?" I think that's where the world is going. I think that these technological changes are changing. And the beauty of this, you can take this and say, "Oh, it's scary. I may not understand." The beauty of this is that the consumers get to decide.

You and I don't get to decide. The people with all the guns don't necessarily get to decide, at least not in the long term. The consumers get to decide. The people who say, "You know what? I'll take this. I'll absorb this. I'll make this happen." We're living in a time of tremendous change.

But it's change for the good. Things are getting better. The trends are towards decentralization, transparency, costs are going down, services going up. And the competition that we live in, the world of competition, is creating ways for all of us to win. As much as I appreciate many of the benefits of cash, I'm one of those who does.

As much as I appreciate the many benefits of being able to spend cash, my life is better with being able to do everything digitally. The fact that I can wander around the world and have a very low cost banking system that allows me to, again, with my phone or with my watch, spend off of up to, I think my limit is 12, right?

12 or 10, maybe it's 10. I can spend off of 10 different credit cards just with one little thing. And I can spend with any currency that my credit cards are connected to. I can spend with US dollars off this credit card. I can spend Canadian dollars off that one.

I can spend British pounds off the third. I can spend euros off the fourth. I can spend Bitcoin off the fifth. This is awesome. It's really cool. So in closing, I wanted to try to bring a little bit of perspective to my largely Western audience. I want you to think about my little metaphor of WhatsApp and just consider it.

Because if you are living in the United States of America, you're used to working under a certain system, then it can be hard to see these changes. But I think if you consider my little parable of WhatsApp, then perhaps it will help you to see that things are changing.

Today, this WhatsApp parable was probably more powerful two years ago when it wasn't as popular. Today, I would guess that most, I don't know, it just seems like so many US Americans even would use WhatsApp. If you don't use WhatsApp, you use Facebook Messenger or Signal or some messaging app.

And more and more, more of your communication is there. If it's not Signal or WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, it's Basecamp or Asana or blanking on the other names, Slack. This is how you're communicating. It's not with the old legacy systems. And I'm convinced that's going to affect money and the way that we deal with money.

It's going to affect fiat currencies, the power of fiat currencies versus other things. It's going to affect all kinds of things. And it's going to be an exciting ride. I'm not making any prognostication about the price of Bitcoin, you know, 10 years from now. The world is changing. Bitcoin will be a major factor of that, but the world is changing.

And so, pay attention. Now whenever there's change, last bit of my closing charge, whenever there is change, you have opportunity. The way to get rich is to figure out where money is moving and then put yourself in the way of it and scoop some up. That's how you get rich.

Figure out where is money moving and then put yourself in the way of it and scoop some up. So when you see trends, when you see changes, that means opportunity. I don't know what your opportunities are. Maybe you're going to become a programmer and start building an interesting application that solves a specific problem for a guy living in Nigeria.

I don't know. Maybe you're going to invest into Ethereum. I don't know. The point is that when you see change, change creates opportunity. So pay attention to it and try to find a way that you can be involved in the change. To me, I think the trends at this point are pretty obvious, that the world is changing because the solutions are better.

I don't want to go back to a system of landline telephones. I don't want to go back to fax machines. I don't want to go back to a telegraph machine. I don't want to go back to counting minutes in text messages on a phone. I'm excited to go forward into the next thing because your and my lives have been dramatically improved by these technologies.

So the same thing is going to happen to money in the coming days and it's a trend for the good. Don't be surprised by it. Pay attention to it. Move wisely. Don't make any rash changes, but pay attention to these trends. (pensive music)