Having a Job Is So Last Century…
Today, we pick up where we left off last week, with those fast-food workers soon to be booted from their jobs by machines…
As I surmised in a column last week, we’re racing headlong toward a very strange future, employment-wise. Technology is replacing workers across the job spectrum. And perhaps nowhere is the impact more pointed than the fast-food sector.
Cashiers are losing out to self-order kiosks. Automated burger-making machines threaten to make the burger-flipper extinct. White Castle and CaliBurger are already using “Flippy,” an automated French fry machine that negates the need for humans.
Which ultimately gets us to the question: Where do people go to earn a living when tech has usurped jobs even at the lowest rungs of the workforce?
I have an answer…but stick with me. This is going to sound crazy. However, I promise you it’s not—it’s already taking shape.
We are rapidly moving toward a future where money will come to us not simply from the work we do, but from the digital assets we own.
Let me take the cover off my Portal to Tomorrow and show you the passive-income world we will very soon live in …
You’ve probably heard Mark Zuckerberg prattling on lately about the metaverse. This is his dream for the next iteration of the internet…a vast series of interconnected online worlds that we will navigate with our unique avatars, and likely with virtual reality glasses of some sort.
Facebook will not lead this evolution, as Zuckerberg hopes. But Facebook’s presence means that this future is coming because Facebook will be the gateway drug for tens of millions of people.
And, believe it or not, the metaverse will introduce the broader world to income opportunities that are essentially endless.
Let’s consider one example—gaming.
Often when I mention gaming, people’s eyes glaze over. They think “I’m not a gamer, I don’t care about PlayStation or Call of Duty or Super Mario, so this has nothing to do with me.”
But that’s entirely the wrong way to think about this. That’s like saying, “I prefer Android phones to iPhones, so why would I invest in Apple?”
I’m not looking at this space as a gamer; I’m looking at this space as an investor. And gaming is a monstrously large industry.
Various estimates say gamers number some 3.2 billion people worldwide. Since the emergence of Pong in the 1970s, gaming profits have flowed almost singularly to the game makers—Sony and Nintendo and others
That’s changing.
Now, gamers themselves and/or individual investors are sharing in those profits.
Consider an as-yet-unreleased game called PolkaCity. It’s something similar to Grand Theft Auto, if you’re familiar with that global gaming phenomenon. However, PolkaCity exists on the blockchain, just like bitcoin. And that opens up all sorts of interesting income opportunities using crypto.
Think about this: You can own a roadside billboard in PolkaCity and earn a 25% share of all the very-real dollars spent by very-real companies on in-game advertising. You can own a bank in PolkaCity and get a share of all the financial transaction fees that occur as players convert Ethereum for POLC (the in-game currency). You can own a vending machine and share in the in-game purchases players make for various digital items they need/want when playing the game. (The annual yield on a vending machine in PolkaCity: 182%.)
I’m not saying PolkaCity is going to rocket to success. Who knows if the game will become popular? And I’m not saying you should go buy any of those assets in PolkaCity.
Instead, I’m saying that there are many, many games like PolkaCity popping up all over the place. Through these games, you and I can essentially become Atari and Nintendo and PlayStation.
Better yet, we never even have to play the game. We just own certain assets, and those assets spin off income for us from all the millions of players playing around the world—24/7, 365.
Ah, but you’re thinking: Jeff, you have to have money to buy these assets, and that requires a job!
Not necessarily.
There are many so-called play-to-earn games already in existence (and many, many more on the way) in which players begin playing for free. Over time, they increase the levels of some character or in-game item and then they can turn around and sell the item.
I’ve seen numerous stories of people who started with a free play-to-earn account, or who invested a minimal $10, and then grew their characters into assets they sold for several thousand dollars.
That cash, in turn, would go a long way toward buying assets in PolkaCity or some other metaverse. And soon enough, you’re generating more than adequate passive income to live a good life in the real world.
This is very much part of the future I see. It’s a very big part of the reason I have been participating in the launch of a few new gaming projects in the crypto space. I want to get in early, at what I consider affordable prices, before those assets explode in value.
As recently as early October, you could have bought a billboard in PolkaCity for about $225. Today, because the POLC token has risen in value, and because investors realize the passive income potential of a lowly billboard, it will cost you nearly $6,000.
There is plenty of risk in my approach, of course. The game may flop, or it might never come to fruition—and then I just own a worthless, digital doorstop. But the opportunities could be truly life-changing.
I’ll tell you more about my ventures into gaming tokens tomorrow…
