Among all the valuable metals, gold stands out as the preferred choice for investment. Unlike fiat currency, gold has consistently retained its value over the centuries. Many view gold as a means to transfer and safeguard their wealth from one generation to another. However, in the present, is investing in gold still a profitable option?
In this engaging episode, I sit down with Deven Soni, a seasoned private investor with a strong focus on alternative and digital assets. Join us for an insightful discussion as we dive into the world of gold, exploring its unique characteristics, inflation rates, and what sets gold apart from the world of cryptocurrencies.
Tune in and gain valuable insights from our expert guest!
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Gold Investments: Strategies and Insights with Deven Soni
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. I’m back here, episode number 101, after taking a little bit of a summer off. Hopefully, you checked out the 100th episode where I got my friend and podcast host, Luana Bossetti, to interview me and talk about my new endeavors. But here we are at the end of the summer, right back to the same format of interviewing people who pursue their true passions in life, pursue something that they really want to see in the world. We’re going to start off this kind of new season, kind of new time here with my guest today, Deven Soni, who is the co-founder and CEO of the Matador Network.
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Deven, welcome to the program.
Great. Thank you for having me.
Yeah, thank you very much for joining us from lovely Las Vegas, Nevada. Always a wonderful place. And let’s start off telling us a little bit about the Matador Network. It’s kind of an alternate way that people can invest their money.
Absolutely. So, what matter really is that, at the end of the day, is a company, lots of people buy, sell, and trade precious metals, starting with gold in a really easy streamlined fashion, the same way that they could buy stocks with Matador or crypto tokens with Coinbase. It’s just really an easy, streamlined way for people to participate in the precious metals economy.
I know we just went through a period, potentially still in this period or have another period again where people are really concerned about inflation and people are wanting hedges against that and hedges against kind of the entire expansion of the monetary supply, which has really been going on in earnest for a little over 15 years now. So what does the precious metals offer that, say, something like bitcoin, what’s the difference between when someone’s going to want to invest in one versus the other?
Absolutely, that’s a great question. It’s a really interesting one. I’m going to take a little digression because I think when you think about gold, historically, or precious metals over the last 500 years or hundreds of years, it’s been sort of that mainstream go-to asset when times get rough, when there’s wars, inflation, pandemics, inverted yield curve, all these things, you generally see precious metals outperform the majority of other assets. However, we really haven’t had a time like we have in the last couple of years where you’re seeing some of these issues in the world but you also have a whole variety of new assets, right? Bitcoin wasn’t around in the 80s. And, similarly, there’s just fewer options. You can go on your phone and invest in a bunch of things, fine art, whiskey, whatever, but I think our thought at Matador is really that gold and bitcoin have their own kind of places for people to buy. Digital assets are great because they kind of are investing in the future in some sense, in this idyllic world where a lot more transactions are digital, the unbanked use cryptocurrencies and if you watch crypto for the last 10 or 15 years, I think the world is certainly getting closer to that but I think there’s still a lot of challenges that haven’t been solved with blockchain. I think those are kind of regulatory where there’s certainly worlds where it becomes much harder to buy and sell it anywhere in the world, which could impact its price, and, secondly, you just have some scaling and technical issues that have led to increasing prices of transferring, so I think there’s certain risks of the dream of a kind of bitcoin or crypto-driven global currency. I think with gold, what you have is sort of this past history of performance and stores of value in many, many economic environments and climates and I think there’s a lot of things that are going sideways in the world, there’s a lot more money being printed, there’s wars out there that people have kind of gotten used to but they’re still there and a lot of risks out there. In those markets, gold had done really well but I think bitcoin and crypto is really interesting as well, just, well, the world is going to change, technology is going to progress so there’s a kind of future component to it.
So when someone buys gold through the Matador Network, can you explain to us how it physically works? Because I think the old school method that people oftentimes stereotypically think of is I’m going to bury gold bars into my backyard.
Absolutely, and I think like, for us, the reason we created the business and the product was really, we saw, well, look, everything else is modernized, right? It’s a lot easier to buy. You can open your bank account and do everything from your mobile phone.
Yeah.
Like all these kind of just edge cases that people lose sleep, right? And then it turns into something that causes more stress, not less. What we really decided to do at Matador was to kind of streamline as much of that as possible by saying, well, look, you’re buying gold, that gold, we’re actually storing for you at the Royal Mint in Canada, which to us is like one of the most secure places in the world to actually store metals, it’s highly insured, it’s highly protected, and it’s highly cost effective. You buy gold using our digital app, the gold is stored at the Royal Canadian Mint, but if you do say, “Hey, I actually want this physical gold to bury in my backyard, put under my mattress, in my safe,” whatever, you can actually just push a button on our app and actually get it delivered so you kind of have the best of both worlds, which is a low-cost storage solution that’s safe but, at the same time, the option of getting your gold delivered to you.
Oh, so people who genuinely want to bury it in the backyard, or I think more commonly nowadays is the people who have like a safe somewhere hidden in their wall with detailed combination. I’m guessing what I’m hearing you say, it’s like you’re responding to the market, kind of like how anyone building any business would and just say like, okay, just imagine what your customers are going to want, the range of things, and some of them are going to say, “Yeah, I want a really secure a place but not in my home,” especially if someone has an apartment, let’s say you live in New York City or somewhere like that and you’re going to move every 12 months, it’s not something you really want to have physically on you, but then if you go out to, say, stereotypically, a more rural place where people have more land and want to have everything kind of on their person and maybe have some level of mistrust even of some of the most secure institutions, they can have that experience as well.
When things go wrong, people want access to their gold, you always think of like the worst-case scenario here and it’s like, okay, well, how secure really are home base and is it more likely that you get robbed or mugged, is it more likely that the world order ends completely, I think it’s probably more likely you get robbed or mugged than you can’t redeem gold from the Canadian mint so I think it’s like a risk-reward decision there that I certainly go on one way up.
Yeah, for sure, and people can think their own way as well. So then, what happens when someone decides to sell the gold, for one reason or another?
Yeah, so you can sell it as easy, you can buy it directly in our platform, but the one thing we really wanted to do was really ensure gold is treated like a store value, which means you don’t — you go buy diamonds and you’re like, “Oh, I got this diamond for $10,000, I’m gonna go sell it now,” and you go to the store and they’re like, “It’s three grand, dude,” it’s one of those situations, and gold can often be the same way so what we really want to do is kind of reduce a lot of that friction and risk. So, if you see a price of $2,000 an ounce of gold on Google, we want to be able to let you buy gold as close to that price as possible and we want to be able to let you sell gold as close to that price as possible so that you’re really mitigating any loss of fees. Otherwise, you’re sitting here waiting for gold to appreciate 10 percent just to break even, which is really not what anyone’s kind of preference is when they’re making an investment.
And that’s basically how it works with stocks because, and this is fairly recently but we’ve gotten stock transactions down to a quite low transaction fee, where if you buy a stock at $25 a share and you sell it at $25.15 a share, you’re probably making a profit off of that stock, albeit a very, very small one.
Right, right. It’s got a fixed price where you pay $12 a trade or something, which is great. I think it’s great for the market. It’s one of the reasons, I think, that during the pandemic, a bunch of people got these stimulus checks and what ended up happening was you saw this boom in investing on stocks through Robinhood and people buying GameStop and these things and a lot of that was because a lot less friction, right? You didn’t have to go call your broker, you didn’t have to go fax a copy of your ID to open an account, you just download on your mobile phone, put in your bank details and 10 minutes later, you’re off to the races, right?
Yeah. And then what differentiates the Matador Network from any other, I don’t know, commonly seen gold buying, silver buying platform that you you’ll see about on like advertisements anywhere and billboards and stuff?
Absolutely. So I think like the back end of a lot of those platforms are still what they were in 1990, where it’s like, okay, yes, you want to open an account, you still have to go call someone on the phone, you still have to print out a physical application, send it in the mail, all these things that are just really antiquated. I think part of the reason is gold hasn’t innovated in the last 20 or 30 years as a product and the price hasn’t moved so people haven’t been spending that time on innovating and streamlining where they have with crypto, for example, because it’s the new hot thing. So, I think the difference for us is we really said, “Look, we want someone to be able to buy gold as fast as they can order an Uber,” from downloading the app to owning your first gram of gold, it’s that seamless and quick.
Okay, so it’s like you’re bringing gold into where Robinhood is, where any of these other platforms are where you can just kind of pull it out and you just kind of set up a login password and a couple, whatever the secure verification tests you have on most of your bank applications just to make sure that your info is secure and people don’t rob you of your assets, but, other than that, though, it’s kind of bringing that there.
Exactly.
Awesome. And so, Deven, what motivated you to start the Matador Network? Is there a story that you and your co-founders, the moment you said, “Okay, this is what I wanna do”?
During the first kind of throws of the pandemic, we saw the market and so many things were happening and the first thing that happened was, okay, well, this mass hysteria and fear, people kind of locking down. The next thing that happened was, obviously, I think what helped the economy was just the crazy government stimulus packages, it was like, okay, well, in the last 30, 40 years, here’s how much money has been printed by the US and by these other economies that were supporting restaurants and all these businesses that were shut down and then here’s how much money has been printed in the last 90 days, and you’re like, “Okay, this is actually crazy,” and it was like some multiple in excess. What we actually started to do is think about what the world’s going to look like when so much money floating around, there’s going to be inflation, our price is going to go up and what does that mean? And I think I’ve just kind of been studying finance for pretty much my whole life, both as a hobby and as a profession, and I think now is the absolute perfect time for gold and precious metals to shine. It hasn’t happened for the last 30 years, but now’s the time. And even personally, I was like, “Okay, well, I should probably sell some of my stocks personally and buy some gold,” and I was starting to look at the ways to do it and all the options kind of sucked, basically. It was like, okay, you can buy an ETF, which is not really gold and has a bunch of fees, you can go to your bank that has a bunch of increased stock prices and the whole — we were living on a sabbatical to having like Argentina or something like collect my holdings for gold in Argentina so I was looking for ways to do it and there was no great way and my background, my partners’ backgrounds are in kind of asset tokenization and taking real world things and digitizing them so we thought about metals and gold and in the back of our head knew how to do it, we just hadn’t kind of found the impetus and it felt like the catalyst to do it was really sort of that pandemic and all that money printing that came along with it.
So it’s interesting because I think a lot of people listening out there, anyone that’s looking for their idea, looking for what they want to bring into the world, were kind of looking for that same kind of intersection of a few different things, which is what the world needs, what you feel passionate about, and what you feel qualified personally to do. It’s possible a lot of people identify the problem, I personally felt like that was a problem as well, although I kind of also thought that that was going to be a problem back in 2008 the first time a bunch of stimulus was printed but, of course, I don’t really have a background in finance, I just kind of have an interest in how the history of humanity and how the economy is going to progress over time so you end up in the situation where you’re thinking, okay, it would be nice if someone else did this but I don’t have the skill set, I don’t have the background to do it. One thing I’m wondering on behalf of my listeners is what’s the key to being in the right mindset to identify those situations, when you see, okay, this is happening, this is the need, this is the need that I feel genuinely passionate about, and also I am the person to do it or I have the qualifications, the background, the know how to actually do this thing?
Broadly, a pretty optimistic person. I think, generally, you need to be pretty optimistic to be an entrepreneur but I think, oftentimes, you need to sort of put that glass half empty hat on and look around and say what’s wrong here? What are my frustration points in industries and areas that I spend a lot of time in? What are things that are wrong that I think could go better? I think that’s kind of one line of thinking, but the other one is to be really introspective at times and I think — one of the things I really try to do is, on a monthly or quarterly basis, is really kind of journal the way my life is going and say, hey, are these, from a professional level, from a creative level, from a family, are those things kind of going the right direction? And if they’re not, what are the kind of opportunities and weaknesses I’ve got to get myself in a different situation?
So I think it’s kind of that systematic check-in with yourself of here’s what I’m good at, here’s what I need to work on, being a little more out there in terms of just looking at opportunities and options and problems and merging those two things are… Click To TweetBut if you’re in a mindset where you’re like, “I need to make a change,” I think the absolute best thing to do is really to take stock of your superpowers as a human and everyone has them, it could be relationships, it could be skills, it could be knowledge, it could be background or education, interests, even just looking at those things regularly, like I’ve got stuff on my wall, and, from there, it’s like, okay, well, I’m going to start looking at all the problems I see in the world with that lens of what am I uniquely qualified to do.
And so we live in a culture now where a lot of people like to, “I do this and then that,” which I know goes against what most entrepreneurship really is, but if someone wanted to take this idea of taking stock of their superpowers in that kind of direction of what they know, like I’m going to set up this type of thing, what would you recommend someone do, someone listening right now that says, “I wanna find the best method right now to go about setting aside half a day to just take stock of my superpowers,” or is that completely the wrong way to look at it?
I think there’s a lot to be said for that. The things I think about, like when I think about that, are — there’s a few questions I’d probably ask myself and one is what are areas or experiences I’ve had in my past that I’ve had a lot of success with, where things have gone right, and why did those things go right. I think another one is what is energizing to me, what do I enjoy doing, like break up your day or your week into, “Here’s what I did all week and these are the things I really enjoyed doing, these are the things I really hated doing.” I think that’s a really important one because you might be a fantastic accountant but you hate accounting, so I think it’s like what are those things that you kind of actually find energizing, what are the areas you’ve had success in, what are areas that people look to you for as an expert, whether that’s socially, personal, from family and friends, where do people go to you and say, “Hey, I’ve got a problem and what do I do here?” So I think those three are probably a really good start. And the other one is probably like where do you spend your time learning and consuming content? If you’re spending time listening to experts in a certain area, that probably gives you sort of the 80/20 to be pretty effective, whereas if it’s something you’ve never thought about or never heard of, sure, you can probably get good at it but the learning curve is much higher.
Yeah, that makes sense, especially when you consider the intentional content and one of the things I talk about in my new business Reclaim Your Time is that we all have the intentional and the unintentional and so the unintentional is like I’m just scrolling through a social media feed and really the algorithm is deciding what you want to see as opposed to what do I naturally bring myself toward, what am I going to search, what am I going to type into Wikipedia and actually search on this thing or go to a bookstore even and look for a book on this thing, and if that happens enough times, you start to identify common themes as long as you have a certain level of presence within yourself, a certain level of ability to, I don’t know, set aside some of the constant distractions that we have in life and say, “Okay, this is who I am, this is how I’m feeling. Why am I feeling this?” and it sounds like you’re saying that we go a little bit toward the positive about it in the sense like why am I energized by this as opposed to just like why am I angry, why am I feeling sad, depressed, which is stuff we still need to look into and think about ourselves, to also think why is this energizing me? Why was I more excited to get to work on this particular day than yesterday? Why was I more excited for this social engagement, this meetup than the other one?
Absolutely. I completely, completely agree.
Another thing I mentioned before is that I had kind of thought that this inflation was going to hit the fan back in 2008, the first time that we started printing a lot of money. Now, I personally argue that it did but just a little bit more under the radar with like these assets like houses and education and stuff, whereas like clothing and computers didn’t, but what do you think is the reason why it appeared, at least for a lot of reasons, that the 2008 money printing didn’t lead to the inflation that some people were worried about more widespread whereas the printing that we did during the pandemic did lead to inflation across kind of the entire economy?
Absolutely. So I think with the housing crash in 2008, it felt to me like it was primarily this kind of financial-driven crash that would really impact a very specific sector, which was housing, which is a really, really big part of GDP. So I think when you’re saying, hey, did the cost of housing go up or down post-crash, it probably went down a fair bit for a tremendous number of people who had to downsize. It doesn’t matter why the pricing goes down but that was kind of a big issue. You also had a significant amount of unemployment due to those issues and lack of hiring so there was like this kind of this whole excess of labor, there was just a broad figure in the economy that just shut down spending significantly on non-essential goods, which said, okay, well, now this money is being printed but it’s being there to prop up these large financial institutions, it’s not actually flowing down to the end consumers who often are the ones that are spending what’s called the GDP basket. They’re not spending more on vacations, they’re not spending more on housing. That money is kind of just there to de-lever the debt in the ecosystem. Whereas I think when you look at this pandemic, I think there’s a couple of very different areas where, one, it came in at a time when there was significantly low unemployment. People that were employed frankly were spending a lot less money because they couldn’t spend — you couldn’t spend money in a pandemic —
Oh, yeah, a lot of people saved money just because of that.
And then you also had these significant supply shocks to the ecosystem, shipping was a bottleneck, manufacturing was a bottleneck, which led to a significant increase of goods pricing and, as everyone with common sense knows, when prices go up, for things like that, they don’t come back down when the supply shocks go away. Cereal is not going to get cheaper anytime soon.
And what dangers does this present going forward? You mentioned spending some time in Argentina, I think I remember reading an article quite recently that their inflation rate exceeded 100 percent and, at that point, you get to a point where the economy is just not really working and I’m not saying that we ever came close to getting to that point, but what is the danger if, say, inflation were to be a little bit higher than the official measurement, say, and be at 10, 12 percent for an extended period of time?
I think the thing that really struck a chord with me, both now and back during that time in Argentina where there’s still inflation, maybe it wasn’t as high as it is today, but there’s this big dichotomy of haves and have-nots. I’m not talking about kind of financial wealth, it’s really more about the specific situation you find yourself in and how much at the whim you are to the government. So I think in Argentina, if your sole sources of income were you were a physician or you were a teacher or something where your whole livelihood was paid in Argentine pesos, your savings are in Argentine pesos, you’ve got no way to do anything, you’re in a really tough position because you’re really stuck in that local economy and you’re really excluded from the global economy of, hey, I can invest in dollars and I can own stocks in other countries, I can travel offshore to do my shopping, so if you’re in a position where you had assets, there’s a lot of people in Argentina flocked to the blockchain in 2013, ’14, as you’d expect, those people were living really, really pretty because they make their money in crypto and ethereum and dollars who are working for international companies, they were living pretty well. They’re treating their families out to dinner, that kind of thing, whereas the folks that were maybe equally educated but just weren’t outside the economy had a lot of trouble. I think now, in the US, I think there’s a similarity of if you’re really tied to employment, meaning you’re reliant on a big company who pays you, who says, “Look, for the last 10 years, we’ve given 3 percent raises,” inflation this year is whatever it is, or someone that has more control over their own kind of capital and income because they can adjust their pricing, they can hire or they can make decisions, they can use AI to reduce costs, so if you’re sort of an owner of assets in this market, you actually feel all right in many cases because you’re able to kind of control your own destiny a little more than the employed are so I think it’s always that kind of difference of the haves and have-nots in every economy are the ones that suffer, the have-nots suffer a lot more depending on what situation they’re in.
Yeah, and that kind of explains even the differences in concern over inflation, where people who tend to be more in that have-nots category tend to also be a bit more upset about it, a bit more angry about it. Now, would investments in stocks, like let’s just say you have a stock portfolio, whether it’s a mutual fund or individual stocks, does that count as an asset in this particular context?
Yes, if the timeframe is a long-term timeframe, because the stock market’s been pressured many ways, there seems to be a lot of great values, I think you ask anybody what’s the stock market will look like in 10 years and it’s going to be doing all right, but I think if you’re sort of reliant on your equity and a bunch of companies to make rent next month, you’re probably in a weak position because you’re selling at the bottom. So I do think that investing in stocks makes a lot of sense. I’m a big proponent of 401(k)s and IRAs and set-it-and-forget-it accounts where you don’t think about it for 40, 50 years, those things only kind of start making sense once you’ve covered kind of the base income that you need to kind of live your day-to-day life without a lot of stress.
Yeah, and I think I saw a statistic somewhere that, I don’t remember the exact number, maybe 54 percent of Americans are living, quote-unquote, “paycheck to paycheck” and so they would be in a scenario where if stuff at the grocery store is suddenly 15 percent more expensive and they only got 2 percent or 5 percent even as a raise, now they’re living a less quality life.
Right. Well, what seems to happen is the first thing to go is savings and the next thing to happen is the increase of consumer debt, which we’re seeing.
Which we’re seeing a lot of, for sure. And, also, a lot has been made of some people in the younger generations questioning the whole model of being reliant on a big company or the government, for that matter, and choosing a different path. Do you think this event, this inflationary event as well as some of the other things going on, is going to kind of play into that trend or do you feel like the fear might be getting some people to go more the route of, say, “All right, well, I just need to get a promotion so I can reclaim my quality of life from before”?
Yeah, it’s a great question. It’s something I think about a lot and then it goes back to even the same thing I said about precious metals is like everything that’s happening now has kind of happened before. People are leaving the workforce en masse because of general just dissatisfaction and where are they going to? Well, the first step of, side hustles are getting — the economy is like, “Okay, well, I’m gonna go be an Uber driver or deliver for Instacart or have the side hustle,” which is basically now you’re an employee without the stability, without the benefits. These kinds of offers and opportunities were the reason that the employment laws and social security and things got created, was because there was a lot of employers during the Industrial Revolution taking advantage of workers, that’s why unionization existed. So I think the challenge now is you see there’s this giant trend on social media of the instant gratification, which is, basically, quit your job and go sell stuff on Amazon or go, “Here’s how I make $2,000 a month hustling on Instacart,” or whatever without really thinking about, fine, that’s $2,000 more than I’m getting in my paycheck but they’re not factoring in, hey, I’m not earning social security, I’m not getting benefits, I’m not putting away towards my IRA and I certainly do think the system is broken in many ways because it’s frickin’ obvious, right? In 1980, you could have one person working as a plumber support a family of four, buy a home, send their kids to school and pay for college, and now you’ve got two people that are professionals, have graduated college, same thing. So there’s clearly a problem but I don’t necessarily think that these instant gratification solutions of go drive Uber, cut your cappuccinos are the problem, I think it’s a little bit more about investing in yourself, finding that zone of expertise where you’re excellent at and continuing to drive value, but that’s not a three-week quit-your-job process, it’s multiple years of introspection, I think really are the right path.
And in that process, though, do you feel like being able to drive for Uber, do what people refer to as, quote-unquote, “gig economy,” and provide some sort of, I don’t know, like a stop gap, say, between the moment when you get so frustrated with your full-time job that you just can’t do it anymore without it eating away at your brain, eating away at your soul, and the point where you finish the introspection and you decide, okay, this is the thing that I can really offer the world as long as you’re doing the introspection right and you’re not just spending it all on booze and spending 13 hours a day in front of screens and stuff.
I absolutely think there’s a stop gap. Got a young kid so I always think about — we read a lot of old Grimm’s fairy tales and stuff and there’s the tale of the grasshopper and the ant and when it’s summer, the grasshopper is enjoying their time and eating and just chillin’ and the ant is sitting there preparing for winter and winter comes and the ant’s kind of cozy and safe and the grasshopper is dying of starvation and cold and I think it’s sort of that mentality, which is like, okay, well, I certainly think there’s a time and a place to hustle and grind, exchange your time for money and some of these gig economy platforms are great to do it as long as you don’t lose sight of what your long-term goal is and don’t realize that this is probably not a great ideal long-term solution to build financial stability, at least in my opinion.
Yeah, so don’t start driving for Uber and find a way to spend every dollar that you make beyond your, whatever —
And without planning for the future and say, “This is gonna last forever.” I think it’s just endemic, I’m just terrified of what’s going to happen in 30 years when a lot of these people that kind of got stuck in a bunch of these recessions, they got stuck in the 2001, the 2008, and then this one have never been able to get their head above water to a point where they’re saving enough to kind of retire, I wonder what’s going to happen there. It’s going to be a really interesting social experiment that’s going to be painful for a lot of people.
It’s scary for a lot of people too because I know also if someone kind of graduated school during the 2008, ’09, ’10, ’11 period, they probably accepted or a lot of them accepted jobs at a lower pay rate than they otherwise would have in a more certain economic time and then, possibly, some people are always looking, always out there trying to find a way to upgrade and move jobs but some people don’t necessarily and so there are people who are still behind from that.
Completely agreed and I think the really great thing about the economy the world we live in today is that there’s a lot of opportunities to build businesses, to share your expertise with the world. Despite all the systemic challenges we have, there’s so much innovation happening in the world right now and it’s like leading to things like — you mentioned AI but you have this industry that’s like literally 6 or 12 months old where experts are going to be needed for the next two decades and it’s not that hard. There’s so much content out there online to become an expert in something where you can build and add tremendous value, like I wouldn’t necessarily just like quit your job and go figure it out, the approach that I would probably take in that situation would be like work the day job, pay the rent, and spend my nights and weekends developing an amazing new skill set that I can validate.
I think there’s a lot of need for a lot of talented people out there. Click To TweetThe trades are another opportunity, right? Like a thousand electricians that all make six figures and shortage of millions of pilots in America, these are all things that take a little bit of time and investment but I think you got to also think about where the winds are moving and what’s going to be needed in the next 5 or 10 years.
Yeah, and I wholeheartedly agree with the trades and have had a couple of previous podcast episodes about that, about how we spent three decades looking down on that skill set, not really valuing it, and now, all of a sudden, we have a shortage where, depending on where you live, in some places, if you want to find an HVAC, there’s like a four-month waitlist to find someone that’s going to come in and redo your furnace and your air conditioning. That’s really tough. Now, does this set of opportunities also apply to the skill set known as Web 3.0, so blockchain is something that you mentioned quite a bit, but kind of that general Web 3.0 programming capabilities and stuff?
Absolutely. I think there was this period over the last five years where a tremendous number of companies raised tens of billions of dollars which they’re using to incubate their businesses and their ecosystems. Those types of roles require a wide variety of skills, and ask any top blockchain company and they’ll tell you that they don’t have enough people in certain roles, and I think those roles are not ones that require a PhD and 15 years of experience, it’s being a smart contract developer, which, frankly, you’re a smart, motivated person, you could go probably learn at a boot camp in six months or you’ll probably learn on YouTube in six months. That’s a job that is probably a mid-six-figure job for a lot of people. Or you could go consult and make 80 grand a year working 20 hours a week. Once you kind of develop that skill set, build your own projects, get out there. And the tools to learn, the tools to build, and the tools to promote your work have never been better so I think that there’s a lot of these things. And it’s not even being a technical person and everyone’s is like, “I’m not a coder,” but I think the needs are in marketing and community building and those are all areas that are also giant needs in all these fast-growth industries.
Oh, yeah, community building especially, something I’ve put a lot of thought into myself because one of the things about today’s era with everything is that we’re as lonely as ever despite the fact that all these platforms were developed to connect people. I have this graphic, I present it a lot in my workshops where I talk about how, in 1990, they asked a bunch of people how many close friends do you have and a clear majority, over 60 percent, either put that number in the five to nine or the 10-plus category, and this is how many close friends, people you can talk to, you can confide in. That same survey in 2021 had 48 percent, nearly half, in the one to four category, and 12 percent saying none. And it’s just a matter of, like you were saying before or like you alluded to in your story, that combination of seeing what the world needs, what you’re passionate about, and also what you’re equipped to do. In that boot camp, I love those boot camps, those boot camps do help you find a more efficient and cost effective way to build those skills. Some of them offer 12 weeks really intensive, where you leave your job, some of them offer that six months to a year where you’re still at your job and you’re doing it for three hours at night two or three nights a week or something like that.
It’s not just developers and coders that there’s a need for, I think there’s a giant ecosystem of experts that can bring value, so I would even say, like merge your current skill set, if you’re the top 25 percent of something already, like accounting or marketing or whatever, I think augmenting that with being the top 25 percent in a high growth vertical, which could be Web3, could be AI, and, frankly, these are new industries so it’s not that hard to become the top, it’s like listen to podcasts and read books and you’re better than the majority of the country on something that’s very new, I think you merge the two skill sets and I think you’ve got a great niche for yourself to improve your earning potential if that’s what you’re trying to do.
And now as more people start to consider these options, whatever the options are, improving your skill sets or something like that, do you see something fundamentally changing about the way our societies are structured in general? Do you see anything where the standard, the 20th century model of working for a big company becomes less prevalent, less assumed? Or do you see anything else about our economy changing where we can possibly even get out of some of these horrible trends where it went from one person working 40 hours a week to two people each working 50 hours a week but still getting less as far as housing?
Well, what’s very interesting, it’s one of those almost like forest fire situations where there’s so much like infrastructure that the economy needs to burn down which causes some short-term pain in order to improve the long-term situation of an ecosystem and I think the big ones to me are kind of college, obviously, it’s one of the biggest expenses people have, they get in debt of hundreds of thousands of dollars. If you’re going to be a physician, it makes a lot of sense. If you’re going to go do something that’s not licensed position, doesn’t make a lot of sense. I think what I kind of see there is like, look, you take the top 50 colleges in America, using American example, and they have significant amounts of demand versus their supply. There’s a lot more people who want to go to Harvard or Duke or Georgetown than there are spots, but then you go below that and it’s like, okay, well, there’s a lot more people that don’t want to go to schools than there are spots and they start having heavy marketers to attract people. So I almost see one world that’s going to happen is like, well, look, the world’s going to bifurcate into people that value education and like the top 20 institutions will continue to do well but everything below that is going to kind of fall out and kind of wind down because people don’t see the value anymore, barring 200 grand to go to some small abroad school that doesn’t have great job placement.
I think, similarly, technical trade and certifications are going to have much more cachet. There’s going to be much more sort of modernization of that industry, which I think is great. Click To TweetUnemployment is very low. There’s a lot of jobs that are needed that are high paying that aren’t available, it’s just it’s a skills and training gap, and I think the problem is large universities have been subsidized by the government for so long that they’ve been kind of getting people into the cycle that’s not ideal, that’s kind of one trend. The other one is around home ownership, which it used to be sort of the common thing everyone has to buy a home, it’s what you do, and I think people started realizing that doesn’t work anymore and they’re going to identify and choose different living situations, it might be living with roommates for a long time, it might be living in tiny homes, it might be digital nomadism and living in other places. And then the third one is remote work has kind of augmented this a lot because now you can work for anyone with skills and live anywhere you want in a lot of cases. So I think you have these three trends with education, kind of housing and kind of just broadly the economic opportunities, they’re all going to really impact how the next 20, 30 years are shaped.
And so some people are going to have a little bit of pain and I’m guessing the people with pain are going to be the people who are most attached to the old way, most —
Exactly.
— in whatever way, like their situation is most or whether it being financial, even psychological, most attached to the traditional institutions, traditional education, stuff like that, that are the least willing and open to make some of these adjustments, even if some of these adjustments like maybe, we’re so lonely so maybe having more roommates is better, maybe multigenerational households.
Yeah, cohabitation, co-living, those are things that are really big trends I’ve seen that started during the pandemic that you’re going to see continue, I think. People kind of liked those intentional living communities. I have a lot of friends who are real estate developers and what they’re saying is the demand is around smaller homes around a big community, maybe there’s like a pickle ball court or some sort of communal area. These kinds of things are really in demand by younger people. And I think when you think about that disruption, like you see it happen all the time. Think about the record industry, right?
It’s a really interesting analogy but I think you’re going to see a lot of that where the more you try to hold on, the more you’re going to get torn apart at the end.
Yeah, definitely, and then if someone listening is interested in investing in the Matador Network, starting a precious metal investment and I know you also do some bitcoin blockchain stuff too, what will be the best way to find you?
Yeah. Our domain buymatador.com, we’re launching in the next couple of weeks. We’re kind of in a private beta right now with our initial users so buymatador.com, you can sign for the waitlist and when we launch, you’ll be the first to hear about it.
All right. Well, that’s amazing. I’m glad you’re bringing this opportunity to people who might otherwise have had a little bit too much pain in that process to really do it, people who might have like, gone to one of those gold buying sites and been like, “Oh, I have to do this. I have to do that. I have to do that. It’s a bit too much, getting a bit too annoying,” and making it more accessible, kind of in a similar way to you say to how Robinhood and some of the other sites made the stock purchasing more accessible. Any last words of wisdom for anyone out there listening that’s either found their passion and looking to find a way to make it happen or is just kind of looking for something different than what they currently have?
No, absolutely, I think the two things are, again, like I cannot highlight, at least in my career as well, how much finding the right economic tailwinds of things that are kind of growing fast and moving. They continue to — a lot of humans, there’s a lot of opportunity. When things are moving fast and things are dynamic, that’s the place you want to be, especially if you’re at a crossroads and uncertain, because you’re going to interact with a lot of motivated people, you’re going to see a lot of change in short amounts of time, and it’s really easy to differentiate yourself and become an expert in a place where things are changing a lot.
That’s amazing advice and, Deven, thank you so much for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes and for sharing your story with the audience and helping us kind of figure out that, like I said, that intersection of what you’re good at, what you’re passionate about, and what the world actually needs. And I’d also like to thank everyone out there for listening today, for tuning in to Action’s Antidotes beyond the 100th episode and whether this is your first or your 101st, I really appreciate your being here and I really appreciate you taking the time to listen to this and I hope that these stories lead you to a better place.
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About Deven Soni
Deven is an experienced operations executive and investor. He spent several years as a technology-focused investor at Goldman Sachs and Highland Capital Partners where he helped fund several top technology businesses. He is also a founding director of Polymath, an innovator in the digital securities space as well as the founding COO of Tokens.com, a publicly traded blockchain company. He is currently the CEO of Matador Gold Technologies, a company building innovative tools to bring gold and physical metals buying to a new younger audience.