Learn About CRYPTO and How You Can Get Into NFTs from the Worlds Leading EXPERTS

Okay, this is now the fastest adoption of any technology in all recorded human history. So, it used to cost me one Bitcoin to buy a loaf of bread. Now, it might cost me 0.0001 Bitcoin to buy a bread. The dollar's the opposite, right? The It cost me more dollars to buy the bread. Bitcoin is the first point in human history where engineering impinges on economics. Understanding why you like a given blockchain will help you understand why you like a given coin. The key orienting mechanism is to understand what the underlying technology is. And then from there, we can get into where you can go to learn more. But, understanding that underlying technology is really critical. NFT stands for non-fungible token. Now, to understand what a non-fungible token is, I think the best thing is to understand what a fungible token is. So, money, the traditional what people call fiat currency here in the US uh and in most countries around the world, is a fungible item. So, if you have a $10 bill and I have two fives, we can exchange those and they retain the same amount of value. So, my two fives are worth exactly what your one 10 is. We exchange that, you now have the same value that you had before even though you have something that is technically different. So, that's fungible. They can be exchanged once we know what their value is. Uh on the non-fungible side, what you're doing is you're making something truly unique. So, the example that I think is really powerful is to think of the Mona Lisa. So, I could give you a brushstroke perfect replica of the Mona Lisa, but because one of them was painted by Leonardo da Vinci and one of them wasn't, the one that was made by Leonardo da Vinci is considered to be far more valuable. So, knowing which is which becomes critically important. Now, traditionally online, everything was fungible because it was just zeros and ones. So, if you had a digital image, I could just go screenshot that digital image. Your digital image is completely fungible with my version of that image. So, a digital replica of the Mona Lisa was exactly the same as another digital replication of the Mona Lisa the same as another digital replication of the Mona Lisa. What the blockchain introduces is a way to prove that any given digital item is different from another digital item, and this is the critical part. This is the part that people are not yet understanding because you hold a specific NFT that the blockchain knows that you're the owner knows what utility belongs with that. Or I should say because it knows you own it, other applications can read that you own that thing and give you utility. That's really how it works. No, so I think there's um a separation between there's monetary component of this and then there's like a technology or like a corporate component of it. The monetary part, you have to be a maximalist, right? You're a fiat maximalist if you're a US citizen you get paid in dollars, you save in dollars, you invest in dollar denominated assets, you pay your taxes in dollars. So, you're a fiat US dollar maximalist. When it comes to monetary assets, everyone in the world is a maximalist because that is what you denominate your wealth in, right? Very, very rarely does somebody say, "Hey, 50% is in this currency, 50% is in this currency." And so, from a monetary standpoint, definitely a Bitcoin maximalist because I think Bitcoin is the only one that has an opportunity to actually um kind of ascend to global reserve status and and end up being the superior uh monetary form. But, when it looks at the technology, I think that there's there's to be massive competition on that. So, if you look at the technology side of it where you're not talking about monetary asset, you're actually talking about a technology asset, it would be like saying you're an iOS maximalist or you're a, you know, I don't know, Python maximalist, right? Depending on the language or the platform or whatever. So, I think that you've got to be able to separate out and say, you know, Bitcoin is competing with uh fiat currencies for store value, medium of exchange, etc. And really fast, fiat just means it's government-backed. Just government-backed and and basically they control it. So, the the key definitions here are a fiat currency versus what's called sound money. All sound money is is basically something outside of the system and something that people can't create more of. So, gold is a analog version of sound money. It's a physical form of sound money. Created by stars exploding. Just, I mean, when I heard that, I was like, "God, yeah, that really is an interesting way to think about why it's scarce." Yeah. And then Bitcoin is a digital form of sound money. And so, you can compare the sound money to the fiat money. Um and, you know, it becomes pretty clear pretty quickly to people like, "Okay, one is uh completely abundant and can be created at will. 38% has been created in the last 18 months versus one that nobody can create more of." Well, I don't need to know much else other than that to know which one's going to end up being more valuable. And so, if we look over the last 12 years or so, Bitcoin's purchasing power, and all purchasing power means is how much does it cost to buy, you know, a a good, um the purchasing power has appreciated. It's increased. So, all of the expenses around you, all the the physical items that you buy have gotten cheaper and cheaper. So, it used to cost me one Bitcoin to buy a loaf of bread. Now, it might cost me .0001 Bitcoin to buy a bread. Okay, that's pretty interesting. The dollar's the opposite, right? The It cost me more dollars to buy the bread. So, everything's getting more expensive around me. I at that point started having two tangents, which is realizing I need to do something about it. That this this this parrot information level, that one group has everything, everybody else has nothing. And the other thing is I needed to make the world safer because we're kind of screwed. Because of this over-financialization, all the debt, that we could lose the system at any point. Nothing had gone away. The printing of money was just a way of wallpapering over the cracks that the that the earthquake had left behind. So, I'm like, okay, what can I do? So, the idea I had with a bunch of people was to try and set up the world's safest bank. Um and I tried to go and do that. It was slightly arrogant or stupid probably to try to do cuz it's not easy. And we got together quite an amazing group of people still. We tried in Singapore, we tried in Switzerland, we tried in the US, we tried It was just hard to do. The system is not there for you to try and change. And so, in that process, a friend of mine, one of my uh clients, tapped me on the shoulder and said, "You should take a look at Bitcoin." This was 2012. And I'd been aware of Bitcoin, and I took a good look at it. And he explained to me both the store of value proposition and the blockchain element, that anything could be trusted on the blockchain. I looked at this and I'm like, "Oh my god, this is the future of that we need. Because the problem we've got is when a firm like Lehman Brothers goes bust, nobody knows who owns what. And somebody's going to get screwed in that equation." Just one of the many issues at the center of the system. Nobody knows who owns anything. So, I started looking at that and I wrote I started writing articles and invested in it first time in 2013. 2014 I started Real Vision because I wanted to democratize the very best financial information. Nobody gets access for an hour to the world's most famous hedge fund managers unless you invested a hundred million dollars. Real Vision changed that equation entirely and said, "Listen, forget all these sound bites on CNBC of three minutes. It's worthless. We're going to give you an hour of the world's most successful investors, the best independent analysts and strategists, and then you have a level playing field. And that was a game-changer. I mean, since Real Vision started in 2014, there's probably been 200 podcasts that's copied that model. So, this is this movement, there's two things. There's the democratization of information, and then there's crypto. So, crypto, as it starts building out as an ecosystem, you start to realize that, "Okay, this is now the fastest adoption of any technology in all recorded human history." So, understanding why you like a given blockchain will help you understand why you like a given coin. And that becomes, I would say, critically important to think from first principles, otherwise all you're doing is aping into something based on FOMO. Now, when you have a thesis, like, I'll give you an example of two competing platforms. So, you have Ethereum, which is its own blockchain, and then you have Solana, which is its own blockchain. Now, both of them are taking a very similar approach to the market. NFTs is one of the big plays. It's certainly not the only play, but it's a big play for both of them. And what they've done is taken very different approaches. So, with Ethereum, their primary modus operandi is to make sure that they're maximally safe through distributing all of their nodes, so that it isn't centralized. The problem is that creates very low throughput. And on layer one right now, there are layer two things coming, and now we're we're getting in danger of, you know, going too deep down the rabbit hole too quickly. So, I'll just stay at layer one. I am well aware that there are layer two solutions. In fact, Impact Theory is building something on a layer two solution. But right now, I'm just talking layer one. So, on layer one, you have very high security, very high confidence that the changes to the the are all legitimate. But, it's very low throughput. On something like Solana, where they're taking a more centralized approach, so they have fewer computers that they have to fewer nodes, maybe they are tied to computers, but fewer nodes that have to be, you know, communicated with to verify a transaction, it increases their throughput, but some would say that it decreases their security. And about, I don't know, 3 weeks ago, a month ago now, there actually was a day where both chains were attacked on the same day. And Ethereum did not go down, and Solana did. But, the interesting thing is that it didn't seem to really impact the price of Solana. So, there's a lot of community belief that the advantages, even though you may get these occasional moments where it's more more vulnerable to an attack, that the community is saying, but the throughput and the and what that does is it ends up reducing the fees. So, everyone's complaint about Ethereum, low throughput equals high gas fees, high gas fees mean that even just like if you wanted to buy a $5 item on the Ethereum blockchain, it might cost you $50 in gas. And so, and it could be way more. You could be trying to buy something that's $300 and spend $1,000 if there's what's called a gas war. And this just happened during our Founder's Key Sale. There was at the very end, there was this moment where another project was launched that had nothing to do with us. And then, as the price went down on our keys, on the Relentless keys, people FOMO'd in trying to get it before the sale ran out. Those two things happened at once, and you have people paying crazy gas fees to try and get their transaction to go through. Look, I think the big thing that happened with regard to Bitcoin this year is that Bitcoin is the first is the first point in human history where engineering impinged on economics. Up until this point, people didn't really embrace the idea of energy theory and engineering theory and math and sciences as being integral to the way that a monetary asset function. You know, it used to be money was, you know, seashells and tokens and then and then we have this general, you know, we have gold and we have coins and then we have general agreements and and uh and the like and Bitcoin was the first time when we created um a digital monetary asset, a pure a pure digital token on a pure digital network that uh that actually uh respects the laws of conservation of energy. You know, I say it's it's sound money but that's the same as thermodynamically sound money, which is conservation of energy, which means mathematically proper. What's up, everybody? Tom Bilyeu here and I have a question for you. At the start of this year, you likely set some goals for yourself and I want to know how those are going. Most people give up on their goals and dreams by February, but I have some good news. If you're not on target to succeed at the things that you want to achieve this year, it's not too late and trust me when I say you are not alone. Everyone gets stuck and loses momentum towards their goals at some point, myself included. If you know what you're doing and you're willing to take massive action though, you can get back on track. The trick is not to think about being stuck as a problem with your motivation or to interpret your lack of results that you're getting as a sign that you're not smart enough. The trick is to recognize that the game that you're playing is a game of neurochemistry. It's about managing the way that you think about yourself and framing things in the right way. If you use your brain more effectively, repeat things that empower you, you can actually find ways to solve problems faster, create positive habits and behaviors that you know are going to help you reach your goal. I want you to take massive action right now. So, I pulled a workshop from Impact Theory University called the six steps to getting unstuck and I want you to watch it right now. It's going to help you get back on track with your goals and make the rest of this year your most successful ever. To watch it, go to unstuckclass.com and register for access. I'll walk you through the same process that I use to get through obstacles and make fast progress towards my goals whenever something slows down. All right, guys. Enjoy this and be legendary. Take care. There are plenty people on Wall Street, etc., who don't understand economics, macro or micro, and also just simple personal finance things, right? This stuff is hard and it goes back to there's nobody teaching it in school. And so, you basically have two ways to learn. You can learn by doing kind of trial by fire and some people figure it out, some people don't. Or you're lucky enough to have a parent, a friend, a mentor, somebody else who sits you down and explains it to you. And I think that's why we're seeing such an explosion of interest. Yeah, sure. The meme stocks, cryptocurrencies, it's easy to mock and make fun of these young people, but these young people are interested in understanding how does the market work? How does finances work? How does investing work? And so, you know, if you go back to that data, right? We talked about 45% of people have no investable assets. The two stats that just blew me away when I started to look at this was 80% of millionaires in the United States inherited $0. So, the narrative is everyone inherits wealth and it's just passed down. Well, 80% of Americans inherited nothing. 20% inherited something, 80% nothing. The second one is that 33% of millionaires in America never made more than $100,000 in a single year. So, you start to ask yourself, well, how is it that somebody that doesn't make six figures a year become a millionaire? Well, they have to be disciplined and understand personal finance. And so, it is possible to do it. It's not everyone. It's hard, right? It's not the uh the easiest thing to do, but it can be done. And so, as you start to understand like, okay, the education is a huge piece of this. You actually see that the people who are wealthy, some of them could explain to you why they're doing things. They have a a kind of a deep level um and detailed knowledge of the actions they're taking and and the reason for it. There's a whole 'nother group of people who are wealthy who couldn't explain any of it to you, and they just know that their parents told them, "Hey, buy real estate. Real estate always goes up." But they don't understand printing of money, they don't understand quantitative easing, interest rate and none of that stuff matters. It was just they just did the action. And so, there's a lot of paths to get to kind of the um the desired, you know, area, if you will. Um but I do think that Bitcoin specifically, what it's done for me and and for other people, is I have an economics degree, which is crazy. Right? There's an element of just understanding, "Hey, invest." Because at this point, given the inflation and the monetary debasement, it is impossible. It's literally impossible in America to get a financial security position by saving. It's it's just they're debasing the currency. 38% of all dollars in circulation were printed in the last 18 months. That's insane. That's insane. Like when you think that we're over 200 years old as a country, that's really bananas. For me, everything always begins with learning those terms, going in finding the influencers, and then really going deep on learning the technology. The fastest way to learn something is to use it. So, I started going in, and the first thing I did was build a project around it. That was that drop that I referenced earlier called Neon Future. It was a drop based on a comic book that Steve Aoki and I did together. We created the NFTs together. We launched it on Nifty Gateway, and that was like sort of an on-rails experience because Nifty Gateway handled all the contract writing for the smart contracts, which is what they're known as on NFTs. You get the smart contracts, which allow you to interact with that piece of art, let's say, to give that piece of art properties from who owns it to what can be done with it. There's all kinds of amazing things that you can do. Now, that was my first exposure. And I began to learn about the underlying technology. As I learned about the underlying technology by watching all these YouTube videos, by going in to Twitter and Clubhouse and listening to people talk about it, and watch people coding in Solidity, like actually trying to learn about the basics of the coding so that I could understand what the technology was capable of. Then, once I did my first drop, again that on-rails program where a lot of it was done for me, but I began to really understand what this was, and I had a couple months of learning under my belt. Then I went out and found my own coder and said, "Okay, here's the thing that I want to build." And I've spent the last 6 months building renders, which is that marketplace that I was talking about for anime and video game art, uh which as I'm recording this it hasn't launched yet, but it will be launching soon. And so, in that, now you start really getting under the hood. Now, I'm working with a tech team, it's not like I'm coding it myself, but as you interview people trying to figure out who knows their stuff, you start meeting people that give you confidence that they really know what they're talking about. And maybe you have This is exactly what I did. I had some people auditing other people. So, you just find these people slowly. I cannot tell you how many people I've interviewed and how long it took to begin cobbling this stuff together, but it's extremely powerful. As you spend that time asking questions, not being afraid to look stupid, you get a little bit more information. Again, first it's learning the words, then it's figuring out, in the case of tech, who actually knows what they're doing from a coding perspective. YouTube unto itself is one of the greatest inventions in modern history. The fact that any of us could go on right now and take an MIT course for free on YouTube. If you type in cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, Ethereum, whatever, DeFi, anything that you want into YouTube, you're going to get a slew of results. In the beginning, you want to look for crowd validation. So, what's got a lot of views? That's going to be a great place to start. Now, it may have a lot of views and still be worthless, but it's a very good place to start. When you're learning anything new, first you need to understand the language. So, every new area, industry, topic, all of that is going to have its own vernacular, its own jargon. And to really begin to understand it, you have to know what people are actually talking about. So, first it's just, "Hey, we're going to watch a bunch of content and we're going to begin to learn the words that people use." Now, part of the reason that I suggest doing this on YouTube versus say books is that the publication cycle is very long and things in this space are changing so rapidly that personally, I probably only watch about 5% of the content that I consume on the topic of cryptocurrency is more than a week old. So, I'm always talking about kind of venture-backed startups. I don't know what it's like to start a restaurant or something. It could be very different. But, um if you're doing a technology company, usually you're talking about something that doesn't yet exist and you're trying to get investors, employees, and all kinds of people um excited about this thing that doesn't exist. And then um you go home after working extremely hard and you're like, "Oh, it still doesn't exist." And I'm just here alone. Um and so, it's it's very hard to um to continuously be be kind of uh have this energy to keep to keep something going. And with Numerai, I mean, we've had like the there was this huge crypto crash in 2018 and areas and and market-neutral funds have had a really tough time. So, there's been so many times where you you would quit. Um but then the last 2 years, it's like uh so glad we didn't quit. Why didn't you quit though at the hardest part? Because I I just knew I wanted to Something I say to entrepreneurs is, don't start a company unless you're prepared to make it your life's work. And that's gets around so many of the problems that people have. Like, they might start a company in an industry that they don't even like. Cuz they think, well, I'll just do it for 2 years and then I'll sell the company. Oh, yes, I did exactly that. And uh and then it's like not long-term and it's like So, if you if you have it in your in your in your game plan that you're going to be doing this for a long time, it changes your whole mind. Um you don't want to hire somebody who you don't really like because you know that you might have to you know, it's not going to work. And if you expect them to work with them for a very long time, you'll hire better people. And all your decisions will be much longer term. Um we've had so many things where uh there's so many opportunities to follow some some new fashion or something. And uh we've always had a lot of resistance to anything that doesn't make perfect sense for the long long term. And that's such a nice thing to rely on, too. You want to create an NFT that's awesome. Now, that could be an awesome piece of art. It could be an amazing bit of utility and the image is very, very, very basic and simple, but there are places that you can go that will allow you to mint your own piece. I'm pretty sure OpenSea will let you mint. Impact Theory is we have a sister company called Renders, which is an NFT marketplace for anime and video game art. And there for people that are focused on that kind of art, you can mint. And what minting is is taking a JPEG, an image, doesn't have to be a JPEG, could be movie file like an MP4, but you're taking a media file of some kind and you're putting it on the blockchain. Now, sometimes, and this will very quickly get way too complicated, but I'll just give you a sort of little hint about how this works. So, if you go to some place like Renders or you go to OpenSea, we make it easy for you to mint. So, it's like we take all the complexity out of it. For you, it's just a button. But, what's happening behind the scenes can get far more complicated, which you can either, if it's a really small file, and I mean really small, you can actually store it on the blockchain, and this will be different by blockchain. I'm speaking primarily about Ethereum right now. So, you can, if it's very small, you can put it directly on the blockchain. So, something like CryptoPunks actually lives on the blockchain. And if it's a larger file, then what you're going to do is you're going to put a hash, don't worry about what that is, you're going to put a hash on the blockchain that points at the file, which resides somewhere else, typically something called IPFS, so InterPlanetary File System. Again, you don't have to worry about what that means for now, but just know that you have this thing on the blockchain that says, "Yeah, that thing over there, stored on that server, that's the real one." And so, that's how you're able to have a large file that's it's impossible financially to put that on the blockchain. So, you have this thing that verifies the actual asset, which is over on a server somewhere else. When I look at Bitcoin, what I see is something that I can own, right? There will only ever be 21 million of these. Now, like anything, as Noah Yuval Noah Harari says, even money is just a story, right? It's a fiction that we all tell, and it only has value when we agree that it has value. So, Bitcoin has that same sort of Achilles heel, that if tomorrow everybody stopped believing that owning that has any value, then it would have no value. But, we have this ultra-scarce thing that the last 10 years have proven people believe has value, and you can own a piece of that. And as we go, if it is true that more and more people will pour into this digitization of economic value, essentially, then that those 21 million units are going to become hyper-scarce and hyper-valuable. Now, the great news is that you can fractionalize this, so you don't have to own one, you can own some tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of it. But, now you you have ownership, so you're able to buy something now that you can own as it appreciates in value, and then you can sell it later. And so, it becomes just this buy and wait game that real estate maybe still is, but that's why real estate has worked over time. You owned it, you could also live in it, which is certainly advantageous, and then the expectation was that it would go up in value. When I think about Ethereum, at first I was like, okay, I like how much, you know, we haven't even talked, we haven't named Metcalfe's law. You've talked about it, but this how you can value something based on its network adoption curve. And so, I could see there was something going there, and then when I got into NFTs, I realized I just had to buy a bunch of Ethereum to use it. And so, I was like, okay, well, wait a second. If I'm over here like scrambling just to buy it to spend it, I'm like, this is me being able to buy into the dollar when it's like new and nobody's sure if we're going to use it. I thought, whoa, I would take that opportunity. So that's how I see the difference in the two. One is just sort of straight ownership of something and then one is like, well, I know people use this and because people use it and there's controls around the supply that the odds are that it will go up in value. Ethereum's kind of like owning a part of the internet. It's as you said, I mean, everybody has to use Ethereum basically that uses this crypto rails unless you're just in the Bitcoin world. But everything that we've talked about and everybody will have even if you're not very familiar with the space will have heard the term DeFi or NFTs or tokens. And basically most of that is still being built on Ethereum. And as you said, the network, so what is this Metcalfe's law that you and I have referred to? Metcalfe's law is it really started to become understood in the '80s and then much more so as mobile phone networks started, these giant connected networks, right? Because digital technology allowed networks to connect. Before it's humans, we couldn't connect with each other in the same way. So networks connect with mobile phones and suddenly they explode in value, you know, all these phone companies, huge companies. And if you added them all up around the world, they'd be worth tens of trillions probably. We just don't even think of it in those terms cuz they're fragmented networks. Then the internet comes along, this free network, and everybody builds on top of it and they create network effects like the most classic example is Facebook. Facebook connects us with friends and family and in exchange they get your data, they sell you adverts, and they so you've got a bunch of people using it, bunch of businesses now building on it, and this advertising monetization structure. Shareholders get rich, the uh you know, you and I get to unfortunately meet somebody from university that we don't want to talk to that we met 20 years ago and we're now connected with again, you know, it's that. But the network that Ethereum and Bitcoin does is different. You're the owner of the network and the user. So as a user like you said, with the NFT, you're actually owning a share of the network itself. So everybody who uses it owns a part of it. Therefore, if the network's going to get used a lot, you're all going to get rich and the value of the network's going to go up massively. The reason that I'm so obsessed with NFTs is that it is going to change the world in the same profound way that the internet changed the world. So I want you to imagine as the technology begins to integrate all the different ways that it will show up in your life. And my favorite example to give people now is AR. So right now, there are AR apps. You can take out your phone, you can point your phone at different things and images will appear. And in the future, what appears when you point your phone at it or when Apple gives us Apple AR glasses, let's say that we're walking through a mall. So not even something we think of as being connected to the internet. But we go to the mall and you know, they've got those um posters on the wall um that, you know, have advertisements or they have directories that you you can find all the different things in the mall. Now imagine that those are blank. And or they have a QR code on them. And when you hold your phone up or look at them in your glasses, it reads that QR code and now based on the NFTs that you have in your wallet that are already connected to your glasses or to your phone, it's going to populate that based on the NFTs that you have. So imagine you have that Impact Theory NFT and I know, hey, if you go to this store in this mall, you can actually get a special discount that we've negotiated with them. It's going to be things like that. Or, hey, you're walking through the metaverse. So, now the digital version of a mall or whatever, a game, and you're walking by a door, and you're there with your friends, and you look at the door. This could be same at the mall, same in the metaverse, right? You look at that ad, and you see an Impact Theory logo. Your friend looks at it, and they don't see an Impact Theory logo. Why? Because they didn't get one of the Impact Theory NFTs. You're in the metaverse, a door appears for you, but not for your friend, and there's an Impact Theory logo on it. You're like, "Whoa, that's weird. Do you see the door?" The other person doesn't see it. You see it, you open, you go in for some kind of exclusive experience, exclusive offer, whatever. There are a million ways that this is going to manifest, but that exclusive access, getting advanced copies of things, getting advanced information, exclusive groups, discounts, all of the above and more.