Kind: captions
Language: en
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 is the opposite right it cost
me more dollars to buy the bread
bitcoin is the first point human history
where engineering impinged on economics
understanding
why you like a given blockchain will
help you understand why you like a given
coin
[Music]
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
and in most countries around the world
is
a fungible
item so if you have a ten dollar 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
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 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 u.s
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 end up being the
superior monetary form
but when it looks at the technology i
think that there's going 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 uh you know i don't
know python maximal it's 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 let's
call it sound money all sound money is
basically something outside of the
system and something that people can't
create more of so gold is a analog
version of soundbytes 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 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 it's 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 gonna 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 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
0.0001 bitcoin to buy a bread okay
that's pretty interesting the dollar is
the opposite right it cost me more
dollars to buy the bread so everything's
getting more expensive around me
[Music]
i at that point started having two
tangents which is realizing i needed to
do something about it
that this this disparate 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 um earthquake had left
behind
so i'm like okay what can i do so the
idea i had with a bunch of people was
trying to 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 because 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've 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 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 very
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've
invested 100 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 gonna 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 starts 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 modis 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 blockchain 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 three 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
five dollar item on the ethereum
blockchain it might cost you fifty
dollars in gas and so and it could be
way more you could be trying to buy
something that's three hundred dollars
and spend a thousand dollars if there's
what's called a gas war and this just
happened during our founders 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
foamed in trying to get it before the
sale ran out those two things happen 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
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 sound money
but that's the same as thermal dynamic
we sound money which is conservation of
energy which means mathematically proper
what's up everybody tom billy 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've 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 unstuck
class.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 alright guys enjoy
this and be legendary take care
[Music]
there are plenty of people on wall
street et cetera 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 are 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 uh 80
of millionaires in the united states
inherited zero dollars
so the narrative is interesting everyone
inherits wealth and is just passed down
well 80 of americans inherited nothing
20 inherited something 80 nothing the
second one is that 33 percent of uh
millionaires in america never made more
than a hundred thousand dollars in a
single year
so you start to ask yourself well how
does 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
kind of a deep level
and detailed knowledge of
the actions they're taking and the
reason for it there's a whole other
group of people who are wealthy who
couldn't explain any of it to and they
just know that their parents told them
hey by real estate real estate always
goes up but they don't understand
printing of money they don't understand
quantitative easing interest rate 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 for other people is i have an
economics degree which is crazy because
i didn't learn anything
right there's an element of just
understanding hey invest because at this
point given the inflation and the
monetary debasement it is impossible
literally impossible in america to get a
financial security position
by saving
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 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 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
defy 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 five percent
of the content that i consume on the
topic of cryptocurrency is more than a
week old
[Music]
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
excited about this thing that doesn't
exist
and then
you go home after working extremely hard
and you're like oh it still doesn't
exist
[Laughter]
and i'm just here alone
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 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 two 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
because they think well i'll just do for
two 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 gonna 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're expecting to
work with them for a very long time
you'll hire better people and all your
decisions will be much longer term
we've had so many things where
there's so many opportunities to follow
some
some new fashion or something
and
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 open
c 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 it doesn't have to be a jpeg it
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 open c
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 cryptopunx actually lives
on the blockchain um 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 or somewhere else
[Music]
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 you you've all
know a harare 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
stop 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 it so you don't have to
own one you can own some tiny tiny tiny
uh 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 overtime 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 metcalf'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 gonna 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 we'll
have heard the term defy or nfts
or tokens
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
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 because 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
a bunch of businesses now building on it
and this advertising
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 uses it owns a part of it
therefore if the network's gonna get
used a lot
you're all gonna get rich and the value
of the network is gonna 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
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
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