How Creative People Can Use NFTs and Cryptocurrency to Earn Money

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This episode of the Big Leap is all about NFTs, cryptocurrency, and how creative people can use it to earn money, like real fiat money, or use it to monetize ideas and intellectual property. So, Gay, what are some of the big ideas that we're going to be covering in this episode?

One of the big ideas is how to shift your thinking into this whole new world that we're exploring with crypto and with NFTs, non fungible tokens. But what excites me really about it is it's a new evolution of the way human beings are being creative. And so that's why I really want to explore it. Whether you end up buying any cryptocurrency or not, I think you need to get into this whole new way of thinking about things.

Well, we're really going to go deep, but more importantly, we're not going to get into technical stuff that'll confuse you. Instead, we're going to talk about the creative ways to approach this and how you can participate in ways that you don't get hurt in the meantime. So all that and more in this episode of the Big Leap.

Hi, this is Gay Hendricks. Welcome to the Big Leap podcast. Today we're going to explore something together, something that you and I can have a conversation about that's really in the mysterious world of the unknown for me. So we'll learn about it together. And fortunately, we have a genius expert, my podcasting colleague Mike, with us to help us out with the technicalities of it all.

All right, so today we are talking about NFTs and cryptocurrency, and I'm going to approach this through a different angle, which is how artists and creatives and writers and musicians, as well as anyone who holds intellectual property, can benefit from it. So we'll go through the.

World as I understand, and I think what I'll do is I'll let you ask some questions and we can begin with crypto itself and I'll give you practical, tactical, real world examples, and then we'll actually invent a currency together. We'll invent an NFT together and we'll talk about how it can be used. So how's that sound?

That sounds fine, but can you start with a couple of real basics? Because up until about two weeks ago, I had never heard the term NFT before. I actually had to do a Google search for what it was because somebody contacted me and several people have contacted me over the past few weeks and said, would you be interested in doing an NFT and threw around some fairly large sums of money. And so it caught my attention. And when I went to look it up, kind of my first thought actually was, I got to talk to Mike about this, because you're the one person I know who I can reliably call and say, wtf, you know, what is going on here with cryptocurrency or whatever. So how about giving us, me, the folks, a quick definition of what exactly an NFT is and what does the word even mean?

Got it. Well, the, the best way to, to frame it is cryptocurrency is a mechanism of storing wealth or some kind of currency and be able to exchange it quickly. So bitcoin being the most popular one. And you can buy Bitcoin now, you can store it in a wallet, it's protected, and then you can convert it back into fiat cash. And theoretically, unlike gold, where you've got to move it and it's going to be super heavy, cryptocurrency is virtual, and it's not necessarily tied to traditional fiat currencies. Now, there's all kinds of challenges and problems people talk about, but the bottom line is right now, all of money, all of currency, relies on trust to give it value. And we're used to the US Dollar being the most trusted currency in the world. And then you can say, well, gold might be more trusted than that because it's settled on, it's standardized on, and it's existed for millennia where cryptocurrency is brand new, but as of right now, when we're talking, it's hovering around the $60,000 per Bitcoin point. And folks who bought it and held onto it, or hodled it, hodld it from years ago, they may have bought it for like, or even made it for like $8. And if they held it, they'd be multi millionaires right now. And let's just suspend our disbelief as to whether or not it's worth anything or not. Here's what's important. Enough people believe it's real, that they invest in it, and then they move it around and convert it back and forth or speculate, right? And the way everything gets tracked as to whether or not someone owns it or not is using something called the blockchain, which is a distributed ledger. All it is is encrypted data that says when you buy belongs to you. And that ledger gets replicated to tons and tons of computers, making it very difficult. If not. As of now, imagine for a moment if. And I'm going to give you A real life example without mentioning the artist's name. But I have a friend who recently acquired the last known unreleased video of a very, very famous.

Artist, a musical artist. And this person died some time ago. And what they've done is they've packaged it as an nft. And one of the things which a non fungible token basically means it's a way of verifying or validating that something isn't a, that it's original.

It's original, it can't be fungible, means you can exchange it.

Yes, that is correct. And what this individual is doing is setting up what are known as smart contracts. So that's one of the things you can do with the technology, the underlying technology. So let's say that the smart contract says that every time this video gets watched, the owners get paid a couple of pennies and they are allocating like a certain percentage of that to the trust or the.

Of the dead artist's family. Okay. They're going to receive a certain percentage. The owners who built this NFT are going to get a percentage and, and then distribution partners will as well. And because of the way data gets moved around is every time something gets an activity occurs, you can get paid. So right now there's a lot of shenanigans, a lot of scammers out there just trying to find a way to make free money by creating NFTs, not necessarily using the technology properly. But I'm going to give you a real life example of how I'm excited about it. Say again, there's a very famous musical artist that is going to be doing a big concert. Now in the case of this big concert, they are creating NFT digital art that's going to be plastered all over the set and the stage of this artist. And instead of going to a traditional.

Organization that would fund the.

The venue and the concert and all that, they've went, they've gone out to all the fans and said, you can buy a piece of art for a certain amount of money and you're going to own a percentage of the concert. Which means when people buy tickets to the concert, you'll get a certain percentage of that. In addition, your art will be visible during the entire concert and you will own that concert and be able to, or that art and be able to do whatever you want with it.

They would own a piece of art that's being displayed on the stage, that would, then that becomes an asset of theirs. Someday if they wanted to sell that. Yep, you could sell it knowing nobody else is going to forge it.

Yes, or license it out. Now, in this particular case, let's do another so again. But they can also set it up so maybe they'd get a percentage of ticket sales. And every time the ticket sale comes in, because all this is occurring on the blockchain, just imagine it's a logical piece of data moving around that determines when a ticket gets sold. If you own a piece of the art, you will get a certain percentage of the ticket sale. Let me give you another example. Let's pretend that you owned a high end winery and your wine got forged sometimes. Okay, so what if there was a way of creating a.

Bottle, a cork that was smart, that got inserted into the bottle of wine and it would determine when it got popped open. And it would also maybe have a little GPS in it. And recently Apple came out with their new smart tags, their air tags. It'd have technology like that and it would state, first of all, you could follow the wine as it's being made. So you could buy wine even before it's bottled. You know, you could follow it from barrel to bottle and then when you received it, you'd have the benefit of buying this smart NFT wine. And perhaps you'd get a bonus which would say, hey, when you buy a case of this wine, you receive discounts in the future as well as a ticket to the winery and, and maybe some sort of a special event. Now you might say, well, that's not necessarily unique, but what's unique about it is the fact that all of this can be set up in such a way that it's tracked through the blockchain and there's a mechanism for knowing and keeping track of all this stuff. I think the big opportunity now is it opens up the possibility where artists can do the equivalent of crowdfunding for their music, their art, their writing, their content, and be able to sell the original copyright without having a traditional publishing agreement. In other words, it just got rid of a whole bunch of overhead, a lot of attorneys, and a lot of mishmash that is very expensive, very litigious, and doesn't allow for the fast motion or creation of content. And we can invent other ideas as well as we move along. Does that start the conversation?

Yes. That's very interesting. Well, right off the bat, I'm a lot more interested in NFTs at this stage of the game than I am in crypto. And.

The reason is that I've had two or three people contact me about it, including one group that I thought had a very interesting approach and that was that built into the thing was a certain royalty for me, the artist, the author, in this case, they were looking for an audio thing that I could do that would then become the NFT and.

That I would certainly get my royalty off of it. But then there would also be a chunk that goes to a charity that we designate. So that I think it was, you know, like you could designate say 25% to the charity so that people, when they buy it, could have the satisfaction or maybe even the tax write off of having part of it being a contribution. I don't know about the tax part yet, don't quote me on that. But, you know, I know that I've bought art at a fundraiser for a cause and, you know, like, I bought a piece of Anthony, two pieces of Anthony Hopkins paintings that hang on my wall here, and I bought them at a fundraiser where part of the money was going to Anthony Hopkins, who was there and, you know, signing things and everything. But part of it was going to a film festival that I was part of at the time, a charity. And so I like that model in a way, because, you know, it's always good to have, when people are spending money, to have your heart involved and to have something that you can feel good about as well as being a commercial venture. You know that I like the idea that I own art that has appreciated, and I like the idea that I might be able to invest in an NFT that then has value for people in the coming years, for both of us.

Well, I'm going to stack this and give you a few ideas, and my goal is to pique your interest in cryptocurrency because there's a multitude of ways of going through this. Now, first of all, I'm going to use a.

I'm going to throw out an idea that by itself.

I'll just tell you what it is. There's a website called bitclout.com and I don't like them because I think the nature of what they're doing is sort of scammy. But the concept of what they're doing is brilliant. So first of all, let me tell you the good, brilliant part before I get to the scammy, icky part. Okay, so you can go to this website, bitcloud.com, you can create a profile, and the more famous you are, it creates a coin. It creates a cryptocurrency coin in your name, right? And I just created one. And on my I. You'll be able to see it here. This is My. My crypto account on BitCloud. I'm going to describe it if you can't fully read it, but I created it, and as soon as I put it up, enough people saw that I had made this because they, of course, published some information about it, and a bunch of people started buying it in my crypto, which started out having no value right now, is worth.

$47.53 per coin. All right, now, I didn't do anything for this. I'm going to make sure. Okay, there. It's. It's. I just. My camera wasn't focused, and a bunch of. Let's see, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. About 10 people bought my. My coin. Now, I didn't do anything to promote it, but here's what's important, Gay. Imagine for a moment that you could create the Gay Hendrix coin and you.

Big Leap. How about Big Leap Bucks?

Yes. I love that. Okay, let's invent this right now. We could create the Big Leap crypto, and you and I would both put some money into it to stake it. In other words, we buy our own coin. And when you do that, you can stake it. And when we put some money behind it, it immediately has a certain amount of value. Now, if we went out to our community and said, hey, there's an opportunity here. You can buy our crypto and buy it right now for pennies, and if it increases in value, it's going to be worth something. And there are exchanges right now. So when you create something that's derived from a master crypto, like Ethereum, which is a popular one.

There'S a division, and you can basically convert the Big Leap token into Ethereum and turn it into cash, or you can hold it. And all of this exists on a blockchain ledger. So it's a public ledger, so everything's transparent. And then if we said, hey, Gay, here's what we're going to do. We're going to wrap up some of our assets, and we'll do the Big Leap experience. Okay? Boom. That's one of them. We're going to. Anyone who joins the Big Leap Experience will automatically get some of our coins. Okay? You're going to get a thousand or five thousand or whatever it is, and then together, we're going to create a community, and our community, we're going to collectively create something. Okay, maybe you and I create something. Maybe you do it. It could be a documentary. It could be whatever. And we'll say, as long as you're a holder of the crypto, you're going to own a percentage of whatever this is. So it's just like raising money. It's sort of a vc.

And what winds up happening again, we could set up smart contracts that effectively say anyone who owns the crypto and holds a certain amount of status receives.

We could do, you know, pay out dividends.

Okay, so.

That'S effectively how it works, but it's all automated. That's the big benefit.

Okay, yeah. Well, that's very interesting.

Yeah.

All right, well, I can see lots of conversations to come about this, but I kind of like the idea. I mean, it's interesting that at some point somebody invented the whole concept of money. You know, it was probably started out with coconut shells or something like that or something that had value.

Calorie shells. I believe that was one of the first ones. Little, little attractive shells they have out in the South Pacific. Yes, totally. Yeah. So that was the first bitcoin and. Yeah, yeah, okay, I'm liking this. I'll tell you, the NFT thing for some reason is a little easier for me to grasp, but I'm working on it.

Okay, well, it's. Here's the key thing that I will bop and push inside your head right now to think about. One is, anytime someone offers to pay you with Bitcoin or Ethereum, I say do it. And it's super stupid, easy to do. It's literally, I can hold up right now. I'm using one of my wallets. I have a variety of them, but if I said, for example, or you said, hey, Mike, can I pay you in Bitcoin? I'd say, easy, that sounds great. So I would go up here and show. And I'm going to show it for anyone who's watching this right now, my.

Wallet address. And it literally looks like this. This is my bitcoin wallet address. Now, from your wallet, you could take a picture of this, or I can send my wallet address, which is a public key, text it to you, and you could say, hey, Mike, in exchange for whatever. Right now, bitcoin is at, let's say it's $55,000, which is about what it is as of today. And our normal transaction would be 25 grand. You could send 25 grand worth of bitcoin, boom, it comes over, it receives. I pay us a transfer fee. That's the way the network works.

And.

Then I'd sit on it. And for example, earlier this year or last year, it was a client paid me in bitcoin because he lived in Malaysia. Transferring money with the traditional wire Transfer way was a pain in the butt for him for a variety of reasons. Because of swift laws and all this kind of. And it was a big enough transaction. He says, will you accept Bitcoin? I said, yes. Bitcoin was trading at 10 grand. I held it. That's now my high end RV fund. Okay, so because it turned into a substantial chunk of crypto and we now on our website have a pay by Bitcoin option. And it's stupid easy. It's literally from your wallet, you take a picture of your QR code or put in the address. It's literally copy, paste, send, and boom, it shows up.

And what I'm excited about is now a creator. Like again, if we decided, hey, let's create the big leap coin and we did something like we're talking about, we created a plan and publicly talked about it. Our currency could be worth something substantial simply because our audience thinks it's awesome. And of course they see an upside. They have a piece of us, they have a piece of you. And it doesn't cost you anything, not really.

And then you could convert. You might say, hey, look, as soon as this hits a certain point, I'm going to actually convert some of my big leap coin into.

Ethereum and Bitcoin and boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. But because usually when stuff is trading at pennies, people are like, hell, I'll throw 10 grand at this thing. Right? Well, suddenly this is where it's like penny stocks, except because there's a lot of hype involved right now. It gets attractive. So I think the net net is exciting. There are shenanigans afoot. There are people who shouldn't be involved in this who are involved in it. The law can't figure out what the hell each direct. You know, it's like there's some of this just flat out violates traditional SEC rules. There will be heads turning. There are a couple coins that have been buried in SEC's gone after them. But.

In some cases they just haven't been able to do anything because they haven't been doing anything wrong. And when some smart attorneys say, hey, look at what's going on in Wall street, it's nothing compared to what's going on here because there's so much invisibility and I mean nasty stuff, because we as the American public, that Wall street protects itself. There is nothing that's transparent over there. They pretend it is. But in this world there is actually more transparency. And I think there's a lot of idealists that are interested in it right now. That's what I'm excited about.

Yeah, well, one of my friends.

Invented a.

A virtual currency and is doing great with it. So I.

It'S in the neighborhood, so I'm warming up to the whole idea. When I first saw it, I thought, oh my gosh, this has Ponzi scheme possibilities all over it, you know, and so they're going to have to really be careful about the whole integrity piece, whoever gets into this. So. But that would be the advantage of somebody like us getting into it because we're both high integrity people that don't have a track record of any kind of hassles as far as any kind of our.

Yeah, yeah, that's pretty easy to look up. Yeah, exactly.

It's.

And, and you're right. There are, I think the way some of this is being controlled at this moment. Again, some of this I just learned yesterday. There are, there's a proper phrase for it, but I'm going to call it a liquidation pool. It effectively is a system that allows you to convert one crypto into another crypto and do it transparently. The limits right now on cash in, meaning fiat in, Fiat out, is $20,000. And there are some really smart people trying to figure out some workarounds for that. But this is the kind of thing, because they're trying to avoid laundering. And this is why.

The powers would say that's why we have the Swift system, for example, to prevent bad actors from moving around huge volumes of cash, it has to go through central banks. You go, okay, yep, that's true. And there's a lot of shenanigans and invisibility and opacity and it prevents the free movement and the intellectual property. And, and, and so I've heard multiple arguments. I can't argue one side or another other than I understand and see them. But the notion of.

All of this is being tested right now and there is an enormous amount of power and wealth being created in the land of cryptocurrency. There's billions and billions being dumped in. And the biggest banks like JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley are buying huge volumes of Bitcoin and selling it to their clients who are just like, hey, should I buy this? They're like, yeah, why don't you, you know, take 5% of you. And they're like, okay, I'll buy some. And they mark it up 5%. Right. It's free money to them.

Yeah, well, they're always interested in selling a new financial instrument. And so. Yeah, well, all right, well, thanks for the education. I'm going to keep meditating on this and I'll keep you posted if I decide to go down this path with one of the NFT companies or whether it's something that we ought to invent.

Yeah, I like the idea. Yesterday was the first day I really seriously considered talking to you about it and bringing it up because in the past when I talked to some people, A, I didn't fully trust them, B, when I said well what's it going to take? They threw out some numbers that I knew were obscene and I'm like, eh, I don't want to do that. Too risky. And I just want to understand, you know, if we're going to dance in the space, I want to make sure that we are legally on the right side of the law and are not scrutinized and do anything unintentionally illegal.

For sure.

Yeah.

Yep. Well, we stayed pretty squeaky clean. Katie and I have for a long time and that's the way I want to keep it.

I agree. I'm on the same page, so. Well, here's. Let's leave this episode on this level. You and I are going to continue this conversation. Let's call this opened up. I am going to reach out to one of the connections I recently made and fly this by him and see what he thinks and see what it would take. He offered to do something basically at very little or no cost to us and I'm going to test that out and find out if it's real. And in the meantime, if this is something you're interested in learning more about, this is an opportunity that Gay and I are going to continue pursuing all the intellectual pursuits we do and incorporate this in what we do with the Big Leap experience. So if you want to learn more, you just head on over to bigleappodcast.com apply or you can always just text for some more information by texting. BL that's big leap BL 2858-434-5316 anything else you want to add, Gay?

Well, are we going to take virtual currencies? Can people pay for the Big Leap experience in virtual currencies?

Yes, absolutely. We'll accept all the standard big ones which are Ethereum, Bitcoin, Litecoin and it's.

Brain dead easy if you have. Let's put it this way, if you don't have a wallet.

I will put a little blurb inside how to set one up in the follow up for this video and it'll be like how to Set up your own wallet and start buying some crypto. And it'll include a link to a couple wallets that are actually good, that I trust. And you get free cryptocurrency just for setting it up. That's one of the ways that these companies grow is, you know, you download the link, you enter a little code, and boom, like I did this one. I'll give you one more little, little nugget here, Gay. So I've taken all of my crypto, I moved it to a crypto bank. This particular one's called Celsius. Celsius lets you just move your bitcoin over and they pay you six and a half percent interest on it compounded daily. So not only are you earning interest, but because the crypto itself has just been going up like crazy, you benefit from the value of the crypto going up and the interest you're earning. And a lot of these new cryptos, when you stake, meaning, you make the primary investment, they just. The standard deal is they pay a 15%.

Compounded daily, all coming through the blockchain. And because they don't have overhead, it's easier for them to do it than if you're investing in a traditional institution. It's all automated.

Yeah. Well, good. Well, here we go into a whole new wide world. And a deep world as well as.

A wide world it is. Mind's blown. So well, hope you enjoyed this. If you did, make sure you like comment. And you want to close this one out. Gay.

Yes. Just to remember where all this Bitcoin and NFTs come from, which is the inexhaustible infinite supply of human creative intelligence. And so whatever you're up to today, make sure you take a stand for the evolution and growth of your creative intelligence today.

Right on. All right, we'll see you in the next episode. Thanks for watching and listening.