Step By Step Instructions on How The AVERAGE Person Can Get Into CRYPTO and NFTs

[Music] hey everybody welcome to another episode of impact theory today we're going to be talking about what i think is one of the most important things you could be thinking about and researching right now and that is crypto and the blockchain and specifically nfts now why do i think that this is so important one i think that this is going to forever change the way that we interact with the world and with the internet and what blockchain is really introducing is a revolution of sovereignty as some say it is certainly going to put the power back in your own hands now having said that none of what i'm going to say as i answer these questions is financial advice you definitely need to do your own research and my only ask is that you do that research i really feel that this may be the single greatest moment of wealth transfer that any of us are going to live through and if you look at it and you reject it and you say that you know what i understand it from a first principles position and i don't think that it's going to be anything fine i can't see the future i absolutely could be wrong but i feel this tremendous sense of a moral obligation to let people know what's happening that this major transformational moment is happening right now before our eyes and many people have said and i completely agree with the analogy that what's going on in blockchain right now is exactly like what happened to the internet in 97 and i mean that very specifically in terms of nfts and the way that nfts don't think of it as art which we will talk about recognize that it's a technological layer that happens to manifest as art in one case but there are many ways that it can actually manifest we're going to talk a lot about that don't think about it as art understand it as a technology think from first principles and see how it's going to integrate into the world because it's going to make the world way more interactive and personalized and i'm talking about the real world not just online that will have huge implications there as well all right let's dive into the questions what exactly are nfts what's the best way to start investing in them and can you share links or courses to workshops to learn and polish these skills okay so first and foremost just uh 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 u.s 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 110 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 brush stroke 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 now because of that people can imbue things with incredible utility so it isn't just that you own that piece of art though that is a really important part of the energy that's pouring into the space right now but again art is only one example of what this can do so let me give you an example right now we're building out our first impact theory drop we did a neon future drop which was my sort of genesis as a creative but we're now doing a genesis drop which is just a fancy way of saying your first drop for impact theory the company and we're imbuing it with an insane amount of utility meaning that there are going to be things that if you buy one of these and you have it in your wallet and we'll talk more about wallets later for now just know that there's this digital thing called a wallet that when you buy an nft it goes into that wallet and now somebody like me a company can have you connect your wallet so that we can see what's in it we see oh cool you have one of the it tokens whatever that thing is ultimately going to be called we haven't announced it yet so you've got one of those special it keys you're part of the it club and now we're going to because we recognize you have it we're going to give you access to things that other people are not going to have access to it could be early access to one of our future nft drops it could be free access to the different courses in impact theory university that we offer it could work as a ticket to get into one of our live events and on and on and on all because the blockchain tells me the company owner that definitively you are the owner of this thing and because i know you're the owner right again it's non-fungible so somebody couldn't come along with something else let's say somebody else's token and get these same things out of me because programmatically i can check the blockchain and say yes that person really does own it yes that really is an impact theory token so therefore i can give them this additional benefits or whatever the case may be so let's say that i make that token an image and so what you're buying technically is a jpeg right you're going to hear that a lot that people are just buying jpegs why on earth do these things have value they have value for that chain that i just walked you through i know that your version of that jpeg is authenticated by the blockchain that that's one that you actually got from me or from somebody who got it from me because of course there's a secondary market and you can trade these things which is part of the magic of nfts and why people are so excited about it that you keep that value and as the value of these nfts go up and of course they could also go to zero but if the value of them is going up you benefit from that and if you decide to sell that you capture the value and the only reason that you're able to capture that value is because i and everybody else can verify that you actually own it so if somebody went into your wallet and took a screenshot of it and tried to say hey that's not theirs this is mine the blockchain says that's not true so now for the first time even though visually they look the same going back to our mona lisa example the blockchain says no no the one that was actually created by tom at impact theory which is now owned by sally in saskatchewan that is the real one that was created by impact theory this other one is unknown right it's just a jpeg it's a fraud so now just like in the real world there are ways to prove that something is yours now digitally there's ways to prove that something is yours and when i say that changes everything that changes everything we'll definitely get more into that later all right now we can definitely drop some links that you guys can check out in order to learn more about this but we also have a discord that you can join the impact theory discord where we talk all about what we're doing on the nft side where holders of future holders at this point um that have that coin have exclusive access to certain parts of that where we can give you information and on and on and make sure that you get all your questions answered so that's one place there's also a ton of videos that are being put out there on youtube right now they are extraordinary there is so much free information that you can get just by going and looking for just drop nft into the search bar in youtube filter by the last call it 30 days or last seven days and you will see you can you know look by what's got the most views [Music] and see what's going on there's so much incredible information you just have to take the time to go through it and twitter and discord are probably the two most popular places for people to learn but if i'm honest i spend the bulk of my time when i'm researching on youtube all right next question with all these different types of crypto how do i know which one is right for me all right so first of all do your research when i got into this first of all i didn't want to get into this and shout out to david kim who harangued me for like six months i have never historically wanted to learn about investing i find it way too complicated way too boring my whole life has been optimized around getting good at making money i never wanted to have to worry about investing money and so david was like hey you need to really look at crypto i was like i have no interest in this i don't want to learn about all that stuff i want to have my money as close to being buried in the backyard as humanly possible i don't actually do that so there's no need to come to my house but that was the sort of emotional place i was in i didn't want to think about what was happening with my money i wanted to make it and i wanted it to be safe and secure what is up everybody a few weeks ago on this very show anthony pompliano said that the digitized version of anything is always better than the analog counterpart and i couldn't agree more laptops beat typewriters email beat telegrams ipods beat walkmans and netflix beat tv so here's the deal my friends the digitized version of impact theory is coming and if you like what i've done for you with this channel and the interviews and the content that we create i've got some really good news for you what is coming next is even better and a whole lot bigger we've launched a discord community you can think of that as group chat with your friends but on super speed which will help you with our upcoming nft the impact theory founders key if you don't know what that means don't worry in one sentence i can explain it this is the greatest thing that impact theory will ever create and we're launching it on october 13th it is the future of everything and if you want to be part of the future of impact theory click the link below this video and join our discord guys i cannot wait to see you on the inside take care and then i realized that there is no safe and secure because at a minimum you're competing against inflation and so your money's purchasing power goes down over time sometimes slowly sometimes terrifyingly rapidly and so it was very important to understand the following statement poor people spend the middle class save and the wealthy invest and so i'd managed to make myself wealthy but i didn't know what to do with my money so because of nfts i finally have to go learn about the blockchain so i get excited about nfts i see their business use case immediately to implement something though you need to be able to think from first principles to think from first principles i had to learn about the technology so i embarked using youtube just like i was encouraging you guys to do i went down the rabbit hole of learning about different cryptocurrencies and i started with bitcoin bitcoin then led me to ethereum and i learned about those and the blockchain and the reason that i started there were they were just the two most popular they were the places where the most energy was going and the key and i'll give you some of the highlights but the key is to really understand it from first principles so that you're not just mimicking what other people are doing that you can create your own thesis around what these are why they matter what the use case is and one thing i will say is i'm what they call a use case maximalist so for me i'm not just trying to flip and trade because quite frankly i'm too ignorant to it i don't want to spend that kind of time in it i see the blockchain as something that is going to change the world and that as a business owner i really better understand that and then as i came to understand it i realized that it plugged in perfectly with the kind of things that i need to do in order to build the next disney so i had to learn about this technology now whenever you're learning about a technology you start with a lexicon so you're going to fumble around so you're going to go and you're going to type into youtube whatever word you know cryptocurrency bitcoin ethereum nfts whatever is that starting point that you're at then as you get in you're going to begin to encounter the language so you want to start learning the terms the next thing is that you're going to start to figure out who the different players are in the space and then once you figure out who the players are you're going to go deep down the rabbit hole of actually gaining that expertise okay so it starts with words lexicon then it goes to influencers and then finally it goes to the actual true understanding that's going to come over time and you need to start using it now the fastest way to learn about cryptocurrency is to go invest in some again this is not financial advice and if i haven't already said this let me tell you when it comes to cryptocurrency which is an extremely volatile asset the only thing more volatile than cryptocurrency is nfts nfts are like the king of volatility of lack of uh liquidity right you can get your money tied up in an nft and never be able to get it out so you need to be very thoughtful that the utility of that thing is worth the money that you're paying for it okay that's incredibly important all right so the fastest way to learn about cryptocurrency is to go buy some but you're not going to invest any money that you can't afford to lose okay say that again you're not going to invest any money that you can't afford to lose the first thing i would do and did is go to coinbase it's very easy it's one of many there are many that you can do but speaking from experience i went to coinbase was very easy for me to set up an account there's something called kyc which stands for know your customer so they're going to ask it's anti-money laundering they're going to ask you a lot of questions they're probably going to make you send in if i remember right you have to photocopy both sides of your driver's license and send that in they're going to encourage you to connect your bank account there are other ways that you can do it i ended up treating like an ach wire so i wasn't in the beginning days i was not comfortable connecting my bank account and so i gave them my routing number and my account number so that i could ach money back and forth so follow your comfort level only do what you understand and only do what you're comfortable with once you have a coinbase account then you can trade your fiat currency just your us dollars for the cryptocurrency of your choice again only invest in the ones that you understand and believe have utility for me i think the very first thing that i bought was bitcoin the next thing that i bought was ethereum and then the third thing that i bought again this is all based on my understanding of the technology was something called chain link it's probably beyond the scope of today's conversation but there you have it those were the three things that i bought into now why and as we talk about knowing what is right for you so the reason that i invested in bitcoin is because the narrative around bitcoin being digital gold and so that really made a lot of sense to me and that's a store of value and the reason it's a store of value is because it is provably scarce okay provably scarce is the important thing so gold has been that thing that is provably scarce that we have for like 5 000 years agreed is going to be the thing that we store value in meaning i want to buy some gold with the money that i've earned and then that gold sits somewhere until 1971. this was true that gold sits somewhere in a vault and they give me paper receipts based on the amount of gold that i have those paper receipts over time people realize hey i can actually trade these because they are as good as gold because you could literally take that paper receipt go to the vault where the gold is stored change it in for the gold so people realize whoa this is a lot easier to trade in this paper receipt than it is in the gold standard so we switched to paper money which you guys all know but it was backed by gold then in 1971 richard nixon decides hey we're going to go off the gold standard and we become a fiat currency fiat means buy decree and so now by decree we're going to say that this money has value but it's not actually backed by anything other than basically the full might of the us government or any country's government and this is why people have a real beef with fiat currency because they can print more of it now that's definitely outside the scope of this question but you get the idea so i'm thinking whoa this is cool you've got this provably scarce thing that unlike gold which actually increases the amount over time which means the value of each individual piece goes down over time bitcoin solves that problem there's only 21 million units that will ever be created for always and forever that's it period full stop never a single bitcoin never a single satoshi which is merely a division of a bitcoin so you don't have to buy a whole bitcoin as a side note you can buy one satoshi which is some tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny fraction of a bitcoin so trust me if you've got a dollar if it weren't for fees you'd be able to buy a dollars worth of bitcoin so don't worry you don't have to have huge amounts of money to try this okay so i hear this narrative that this is provably scarce limited supply only 21 million units ever going to be made it's not meant to replace the dollar it's meant to be a store of value like that gold in the vault somewhere so instead of physical gold in a vault somewhere i now have my bitcoin in a vault somewhere so that vault can be coinbase that vault can be a ledger hardware wallet remember when you start learning you're learning the words so i'm throwing some words out there that i don't expect you to actually understand right now but you're going to begin to learn those which become new search terms for you in youtube and you can go down that rabbit hole okay so you've got your bitcoin stored in the equivalent of a vault somewhere and that represents however many dollars you used at that time to acquire so now you're storing theoretically because again this is a very volatile asset you're storing value now a reasonable question to ask is if this is such a volatile asset why do i consider it a store of value there are many reasons but i'll give you the punchline that really hit me it is the single fastest adopted technology in human history let that sink in bitcoin is the fastest adopted technology in all of human history it got adopted faster than electricity then the telephone then mobile phones then computers than the internet nothing ever has been adopted faster and when you step back and look at i think it's 12 or 13 years that bitcoin has been around now as you come and zoom out all of that volatility drops away and it is literally up and to the right it's crazy now again i cannot see the future nobody can it is entirely possible that this asset class drops to zero because just like paper money that you're used to the normal money it only has value because we all say it has value and if we all stop saying it has value then it stops having value same is true a bitcoin if tomorrow everybody wakes up and decides math that was dumb then it stops having value so you need to be very thoughtful about that now i happen to have a reasonable amount of belief that over time it's going to continue going up because of what i mentioned before humans have forever been looking for a store of value that allows money to maintain its purchasing power over space and time and bitcoin by narrative as i understand it seems to be the most effective at storing value over space and time because it's digital it has a hard cap there will never be more of it and its adoption is ridiculously fast now the only thing the only technology ever that shows an even faster adoption curve than bitcoin is ethereum now ethereum hasn't been around as long so who knows again maybe it goes to zero and that notion of there's only one gold so there's probably only going to be one digital gold that's why i'm more bullish on bitcoin than i am on ethereum but in full disclosure my portfolio is in terms of value is almost 50 50. even though as of today i've put in about half the money into ethereum that i have into bitcoin so with half of the input i've gotten the same amount of value in ethereum that i did in bitcoin now this could this changes day by day so who knows what that's going to be tomorrow who knows what it's going to be in a year from now i have no idea so but that's the way i think about it so bitcoin you've got as gold and then the way that people refer to ethereum is the if bitcoin is digital gold then ethereum is digital oil and they literally call the fees on ethereum gas fees so that's like if you think about one is used constantly and the other is a store of value that's a good way to think about now if i'm honest in my daily life the way that i think about ethereum is as money because i spend it constantly so i'm buying it not just to have a store of value i'm buying it so that i can buy nfts that i can be engaged in that community and other goods that will pop up over time that you're able to purchase with ethereum right now the big ones are to lock your money up in d5 which is like putting in a bank account and earning interest and i know precious little about d5 so take that with a grain of salt and then in nfts and i have spent a substantial amount of money in nfts whether i am up in the long run is a huge question mark as of right now it looks like i'm up tremendously but again nfts are extraordinarily volatile and extraordinarily illiquid which means there isn't people constantly buying it like you get with bitcoin and ethereum okay that's a wall of information hopefully you can go back listen to that again because there's a lot of very usable points in there but those are the two big things that i have invested in that third again is chain link because it has utility i'm not going to go into that for now but it has utility in the nft world because my entry into this is all about nfts because as a business owner i'm thinking about how to integrate nfts into our business strategy that led me to chain link i could immediately see how i was going to need it in my own business which then made me think okay well if i'm going to need it i'm sure a lot of people are going to need it and so that was why i invested in it again and what's known as a utility maximalist so whatever i'm buying i'm not just buying because i'm hoping that it's going to go up i'm buying it because i understand it and i understand how it's used and i have a bet that when i look out at the future of what's going to happen with the world that that use case is going to continue to be relevant and that is a very good way to think about it so you have a thesis and you buy based on your thesis or cell based on your thesis not based on hype so be very very thoughtful about that okay watermelon you doing right now if the answer isn't joining impact theory's discord community all i can say is that you are missing out you are missing out on incredible fellow impactivists missing out on exclusive content missing out on direct access to me missing out on what i was talking about in that first sentence and you will miss out on the biggest thing i will ever do you will miss out on impact theory founder's key this was originally code named the full meal deal and it will be your ultimate key to unlocking all the things we are working on impact theory will be leading the charge into this metaverse blockchain nft space and i want to make sure that you don't miss out this opportunity will be huge not only for impact theory but for you as you navigate the new digital world that is coming go to impacttheory.com discord and click start here to get in on the fun and i'm telling you this is really the best community on discord the choice is yours are you going to get in or are you going to miss out there's a link and more info in the description copy all right guys take care and be legendary peace next question what is a wallet is it safe how can i put bitcoin in a usb and carry it with me if bitcoin fluctuates so much in price how can i make sure that i'm not paying for a pizza in bitcoin that later that same amount of bitcoin will have made me a millionaire okay so there's a classic story about somebody who bought bitcoin for whatever however many 120 bitcoin that at the time was very very little now 120 bitcoin would be millions of dollars so it is uh in fact if i remember right it might have been thousands of bitcoins because the last time somebody checked the pizza ended up costing like 250 million dollars or something like that so there is no way to know that and this would be like buying something with gold over time that gold is going to go up in value one hopes so you never know if that's going to be the case so the way that i would think about it is personally i don't put money into bitcoin because i plan to sell it i put money into bitcoin because it's a store of value and i want to hold it across time and space so when i invest in bitcoin i don't care about the ups and downs of the market in the short term as michael saylor said when it comes to bitcoin any time horizon less than four years is just noise now the reason that he picked four years if i'm not mistaken is because that's when it halves uh its output a i don't understand that well enough to go into the like nitty gritty of how it works but there are what are called miners and they're currently mining for that next bitcoin remember there will only ever be 21 million units but not all 21 million units have been created yet and so there are miners that are out there slowly creating this over time and there's a set schedule at which uh interval they come out and every four years the amount of time and energy basically that it takes to release those unmined bitcoins gets cut in half so if it were 16 per block now at the next uh four year cycle then it will fall to eight and then four so on and so forth uh so that's why he says four years because that ends up creating uh market dynamics that change the price so we're definitely outside my depth in terms of being able to articulate the having and the supply shock that that creates but willie wu is a guy that you want to look up somebody that's got a really he's very good at articulating these movements and then while we're talking about resources i will point you to hope.com which is michael saylor's website around bitcoin i think you will be blown away by he put that why he put that on hope.com i think it's very interesting now let's talk about wallets themselves okay so a wallet as i mentioned earlier is a an application basically and the one that i recommend it's the most common when you're dealing with ethereum is metamask so metamask is a chrome plugin that is an extension on your browser so you would search for metamask go to the official site which will put the link to the official site i'm pretty sure it's metamask.io um but you're gonna go there you're going to install it into your chrome browser again i think that's the only browser that it works for you get it in chrome and now you set up your account you're going to get something called a seed phrase whatever you're doing i want you to stop and i want you to pay attention because this is the one of the most important things i'm going to say in the beginning remember i said part of the thing that gets people excited about the blockchain and cryptocurrency is that it gives you sovereignty when you take on bitcoin and hold it in your metamask because maybe you bought it in all cryptocurrencies by the way let's say that you bought it on coinbase they're the custodians of that so there's a saying in cryptocurrency not my keys not my coin meaning if you don't have this seed phrase to be able to open and close that the security on that to stop things from flowing in and out then technically coinbase or the government whoever the government could come and put pressure on coinbase to seize your assets whereas if you have them in your metamask wallet or you have them in a cold storage like i mentioned earlier ledger ledger is a usb drive that you can store your seed phrase on now i haven't spent enough time on hardware wallets to know the exact mechanism by which it works but it's basically a a dumb terminal that can't be hacked it has so little information and computing power that there's virtually nothing is bulletproof but there's virtually no way to get into that thing so uh it's considered as unhackable as something is going to get so by putting your access to your crypto onyx remember your crypto isn't actually on that that's your access to your crypto so the thing that gives you universal global worldwide access to your crypto is something called the seed phrase now when you create your meta metamask wallet it will give you a seed phrase when i say don't ever ever ever ever under any circumstances for any reason ever ever ever don't ever give your seed phrase to anybody else okay my wife doesn't know my seed phrase now it's not because i don't trust her it's because that's just another point of vulnerability so now you should be asking yourself though but wait a second if i'm the only one that knows my seed phrase and something happens to me then how would somebody else get my money or like my wife upon my death or more terrifyingly what happens if i lose my seed phrase forget my seed phrase or i get caught up in a phishing attack and i give my seed phrase to somebody the answer is you are [ __ ] that's sovereignty there is no recourse if you lose your seed phrase whatever that was protecting so if that's your metamask wallet like right now in my metamask wallet i shudder to think how much is in there in nfts it's a lot a lot a lot and if i forget my seed phrase or am dumb enough to give my seed phrase to somebody and i do have empathy for people that have been tricked into giving their seed phrase which is why i'm really going out of my way to say don't give your seed praise to anybody if i forgot it or gave it to somebody poof it's all gone and you need to really think about that but the great news is that nobody can confiscate it so if you're the only one that has it there's no way to get into your metamask wallet there's no way to hack that to get it out and that's doubly true if you have it on a hardware wallet so you're trading this inviolability no one can take your money from you and if you heard about what happened in cyprus i forget how many years ago but i don't know seven or eight ten years ago something like that in cyprus um one day they just decided we're taking 10 of everybody's money to get the government solvent again now you can't do that if you've got your stuff stored on a hardware wallet so that's why people do that but the problem is that um if you lose that seed phrase there's no getting it back there's no forgot my password that doesn't exist so you have to be really really incredibly thoughtful about what you do with that to circle back around to the pizza question the whole goal there is that by holding your bitcoin it is going to go up in value so if you're going to spend like i said i spend ethereum and i hold bitcoin but ethereum also goes up and so that's a tricky beast and is ethereum some people predict that ethereum's gonna be bigger than bitcoin and that one day it's gonna be worth even more and if that ends up being true you could be in the same situation so part of how i get myself to sleep on that one is that i just spend ethereum so back and forth so casually on things just like i would the us dollar that it's like at some point your money has to function so if all you want to do is hold then use your us dollars for exchange use your bitcoin ethereum as a means to store value and just don't spend it because no one i mean the whole hope is that this goes up over time all right next question can anyone quickly and easily create an nft uh yes but this all comes down to 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 open c will let you mint uh 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 a 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 openc 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 um 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 cryptopunx 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 uh 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 or somewhere else so that's essentially what you're doing is getting that proof of who owns what so it's a very simple process when you use a third party if you want to do it for yourself it is definitely a process that you can learn but you're going to want to find because to build your own marketplace and the minting functionality is going to be relatively complex but if you wanted to do that you would need to either learn how to code in web3 the programming language on ethereum specifically is something called solidity you certainly could learn how to do that but it won't be the easiest thing you've ever done but it is very very very possible and i will say that anybody out there that's even remotely considering computer science if you're wondering what branch of computer science to go into i would highly highly recommend web3 the amount of money that we have paid web3 developers to put together our platform and the other web3 things that we've created is crazy they are so in demand right now but yeah that is nft minting very very simple all right next can you give us actionable advice how did you wrap your mind around nfts and learn about them okay so 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 these 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 six months building renders which is that marketplace that i was talking about for anime and video game art 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 and 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 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 you hear somebody mention something like for instance i heard about open zeppelin that it was a repository of smart contracts that you could literally copy and paste so it's like whoa that's a huge breakthrough okay so that's going to be the first place that i start then you start hearing about people like manifold xyz and you realize that they're creating like this incredible library of these very custom smart contracts and so i was like okay i want to know more about those guys start following them on twitter start jumping in their discord seeing what they're up to and so you begin to put together this information and even now compared to somebody that can actually code in web3 i'm a total idiot but i know enough that i can engage that i can find the right people and that i can build the things that i want to build and over time as they say your network is your net worth you start putting these individuals together that can help you create the things that you want to create but it's about putting in a relentless amount of time and energy in the beginning i was spending there were times where i was for sure putting close to 40 hours a week in research now i still maintain roughly 20 hours a week just in pure research around nfts the blockchain uh cryptocurrency bitcoin ethereum like i'm in it i'm learning about it then on top of that because of all the different things that we're creating i'm constantly dealing with tech teams figuring things out seeing where the hurdles are the stumbling blocks what are the solutions and i'm engaging in that constantly trying to understand it and the easy way to understand it is to say okay here's what i think is happening repeat it right which means you're going to constantly run the risk of looking stupid because you say something and the code of that's not at all how it works but i run that risk refine it find out what it was that i didn't understand repeat it again did i understand it this time talk to as many people as you can constantly saying this stuff getting that feedback of what you understand what you don't understand and you're going to see as you're using that knowledge right in a huge part of this and using can just be saying it out loud explaining it to other people but then if you can get that second layer of actually creating something either learning to code yourself or going out and building something with a coder you're going to learn this a lot faster and then you just have to keep doing that for a very extended period of time like i said i've already been working aggressively in the space now for about seven months and actively building my own platform for six months so it's like as you do that stuff you really really begin to learn but worst case youtube videos follow the right people on twitter go into twitter spaces go into clubhouses look for people that are talking about this stuff learn as much as you can fill all of the moments that i call transitional moments as you're moving around as you're cooking as you're feeding the dogs as you're going for a walk because you're stepping out to grab stuff out of the mailbox whatever you should constantly be filling those moments with information all right and again if you want to [Music] get any shortcuts discord is a tremendous place to go and one of the rooms that we have or uh one of the areas that we have in our discord is around this stuff so if you want to come learn more about nfts the blockchain all of that you can certainly head over to the impact theory discord and we'll put the link below this video okay now here is the most interesting question how do you imagine the future with nfts okay 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 posters on the wall that you know have advertisements or they have directories that you know you can find all the different things in the mall now imagine that those are blank and where they have a qr code on them and when you hold your phone up or look at them with 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 metaphors 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 uh advanced copies of things getting advanced information exclusive groups discounts all of the above and more loyalty programs it is going to be absolutely insane what people are able to do one thing that i just encountered literally two days ago was i happened to have something called a board ape so there was an nft project called the board ape yacht club and i bought one of the board apes and now because i had that there was this virtual shop that opened up on a website and the guy said hey if you hold any of these projects and one of them was the board apes then you have the ability to mint a custom pair of this is going to be hilarious for people that aren't into nfts but you can buy a custom pair of virtual shoes that have your unique one-of-one board ape on them now that store is only accessible for people that have that thing in their wallet and let me tell you those shoes as crazy as you're going to think i am are some of my most prized possessions because they're only for me they're completely custom if anybody had gone to that store and they didn't have one of the supported nfts in their wallet then the vendor of this order looked just like a vendor in a video game so you go up to this vendor in the video game hey welcome i see that you have some really cool items in your wallet would you like to mint these and it showed me all the different things that i could mint and then i went in and again you guys know what minting is now so i click the mint button boom they communicate to the blockchain this image now belongs to my wallet address technically but me tom biliu so now i've got this thing now it is a one-of-one pair of shoes it could have been anything it could have been a one-of-one shirt that they're actually going to mail to me and maybe later they say hey anybody that bought those shoes you now have the ability to buy that pair of shoes in real life and you just have to have the nft in order to have the ability to buy that so you can imagine all the exclusive stuff that nike does now they can do things like hey if you want this ultra rare shoe like in real life an actual physical shoe it's only available for the 350 people worldwide that have the nike coin and making this up i doubt that they actually have a nike coin yet but have the nike coin and have done taken some other action right so i could do something like hey anybody that's been in impact theory university for more than a year verified by your impact theory coin the token we can now give you access to something special and it it all happens programmatically so i just i as in you come to impact theory's app we check your wallet we say yep you've been in here for more than a year we know it it's on the blockchain boom and now we can make something available to you and only you so it it just this degree of customization this degree of interactivity like i said going to the mall somewhere out in the real world and it's responding to you based on the nfts you have creating options and opportunities that other people aren't going to have and when you start thinking about these these are just the dumb ideas that we're thinking of in the 1997 version of the internet but nobody's thinking about the 2021 version of the internet and what that's going to be like in 15 20 years for nfts it's going to be insane and it's going to integrate into every product i really believe right now just as virtually every business i mean that they're of course always going to be edge cases but virtually every business should have a website strategy virtually every business should have an nft strategy and yes it's very early right now which means you're more likely to get adoption by the people that are coming in you're going to get so much disproportionate attention it's just like when a new social media platform launches in the beginning there's all this crazy organic reach and then over time that organic reach begins to fall off because more and more people are coming into the system there's more noise now that doesn't mean that they don't get optimized and of course there are massive huge wins to be had even as this stuff goes at scale but being an early adopter is going to enter you into a stream that has so much excitement and momentum going on right now that i think invariably the earlier you adopt it the better off things are going to be for you in terms of getting exclusive access to things that people aren't going to do in the future like when i think about what the utility that we're putting into our own um nft the impact theory nft that we're going to be doing it's [ __ ] crazy it's literally crazy we are packing that thing with so much value because i'm super paranoid that i want to make sure that anybody that buys it gets that upside and this may be the most fascinating thing about nfts nfts allow communities to grow with the creator so imagine that you could buy a still frame from steamboat willie disney's genesis moment for mickey mouse you can imagine how much that would go up in value over time just by being the first time that we ever see mickey mouse now imagine that that actually gets you things within the park or gets you early access into the next marvel movie or on and on it enters you into a drawing to go on set for the next filming of you know the marvel cinematic universe the number of things that people can do are limited only by their imagination because now things are provable i can prove that that's yours and by proving that it's yours it means you capture that value you can sell it and then don't even get me started on derivatives this is going to be a whole thing that's probably a topic for another video but it is incredibly exciting to see like those shoes so the shoes that i talked about where it was based on my nft my board ape and the shoes were a custom they had this my board ape on them happened just like that programmatically based on what was in my wallet that's a derivative and so you get these insanely talented artists because of the technology able to do things like that and that is just a hint at where all of this is going it's going to be massive it's going to change everything so buckle up get ready learn about it because if you learn about it you can think from first principles if you don't you have to copy all right that's it follow me on twitter i'm going ham they're talking about nft and crypto and all that good stuff so be there or be square and if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care peace