Crypto The WonderDog! Brewing African Fintech Storm

This is the final part of the show’s transcript, where Dean Kirkland is talking about fintech, Africa and value of staying moderate in the modern world. If you still want to listen to the podcast - click HERE

Charlie: ...And to the final one. Again from Bitnews Today. And that’s all of a sudden -  “Fintech companies are going to Africa” - and…

Dean: Which you don’t think of when you think of people with lots of money, you don’t think of Africa right away.

Charlie: Well, fintech is basically financial technology, it’s sort of what blockchain is, its another way of doing finance through a new technology and Africa apparently is becoming a haven for this kind of thing  because there’s nothing really else left there to do. It’s kind of a white, I don’t want to sound as if I’m some sort of patronizing or condescending, but according to the article Africa is wide open in terms of this kind of blockchain technology, primarily because a lot of the banks and financial institutions in many of those countries are very inefficient and the people there cannot trust who they’re dealing with, they can not trust their governments. 

What they’re saying is this would be a very good method of being able to get financed and borrowing to people who really need it in a more effective and efficient way. And so, again these are three articles that I found very interesting, they make you think and force you to do a little bit more research, I’m glad you got me to look at these at this new site and I would say just people doing it as well.

Dean: Absolutely. This is really great information and articles that you don’t really think about whenever you’re thinking about blockchain the first thing that comes to mind is not Africa, typically, but whenever you think about somebody that needs a complete overhaul in every aspect of their whole life, the African continent could absolutely use some help there.

Charlie: Well, you know, we do too. We need some overhauls here. We got like 1.5 trillion dollars in student loan debt, I mean I’ve got to tell you something that’s probably one of the most inefficient and ineffective ways of borrowing.

Dean: Oh, did you see the article that I just saw, about, I think it was on LinkedIn, that University of New York medical students, they’re putting them through tuition free to be doctors, which was like 55 thousand dollars a year and to be a doctor they’re actually going to be able to pay this tuition free.

Charlie: It’s because the debt that doctors are carrying prevents medical professionals, it's so high that they can’t really effectively be good doctors. One of the things that you need are general practitioners. You make your money by being a specialist, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s what we need, we don’t need specialists as much as we need general practitioners, people who you can go to and say - Doc I’m not feeling good.

Dean: Yeah, there was such a lack of doctors in the US that they are like “We need more doctors”.

Charlie: But not specialists. We don’t need any more brain surgeons; we need people who are going to be capable of doing preventive work. You can’t do that if you’re carrying hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, that simply can’t be done. One way or the other you’re going to have to figure out how you are going to be able to get people to be doctors and take on this tremendous responsibility. I don’t know man, it’s just a crazy kind of world.

Dean: And I don’t know if other students or other educational facilities should follow in this matter, I don’t know how they’re gonna make their money, obviously the schools have to make money or you know, it doesn’t make sense to be a school. 55 thousand dollars per student, per year seems a bit excessive.

Charlie: Well the thing is I went through college, and when I started going through college in the 80’s, the schools that I attended, if I was to look at the cost now - it's almost ten times more than what I went. I looked at the two colleges that I attended and I looked at their tuition now and it’s close to 10 times more. Are you gonna try and tell me, and I’ve said this to other people too, that the kids are learning ten times more than what they learned when I was there? Where in the hell is the money going?

Dean: Into the upper ups pockets, because they need a bigger house, they need more cars, they need to put their kinds through Princeton and Yale and Harvard and stuff, so if you’re going to Fullerton University California or whatever it is, I make sure you pay that 55 thousand dollars a year, so your Dean or whoever can put their kids through Yale and Harvard.

Charlie: That 55 thousand dollars a year for a private school, for a place like Fullerton, it’s going to be a lot less but nevertheless it is multiple times more than what it was, you know, a few years ago. If you take a look at any of these American Universities, you have ridiculous amounts of building projects that are going on all that debt, that’s taking place on the campuses to finance and to facilitate all this. It doesn’t work, it doesn’t help in any way to make academics better. In ten years after you graduate nobody’s gonna care about the quality of the football team, whether or not you had a bigger bench press after a cup. Nobody’s gonna care about that, I care about the quality of your education, and you’re sitting there with an enormous amount of debt with an education that can’t or a degree that isn’t going to be efficacious, because the quality of the education isn’t that good. At some point we as Americans have to start growing up, we really have to start saying to ourselves “More or more expensive isn’t necessarily better”.

This is the end of the part three, if you missed out the first part, HERE it is,  if you missed out the second part, HERE it is