0 (2s):
Lights that spark Fire Nation JLD here and welcome to entrepreneurs on fire brought to you by HubSpot today, we'll be focusing on why blockchain, cryptocurrency and NFTs are important for you to understand, to drop these value bombs. I have brought Joel Comm into EOFire studios. Joel is an internet pioneer, New York times bestselling author international speaker podcast, host serial entrepreneur, blockchain enthusiast, and eternal twelve-year-old. He co-hosts The Bad Crypto Podcast and The Nifty Show. And today Fire Nation we'll be talking about how Joel went down the crypto rabbit hole and where it's taken him.

0 (44s):
We'll talk about Bitcoin, and if it's actually made up or not, we'll talk about why blockchain is such a superior technology and NFT is of course, non fungible tokens. And are they a fat? Are they here to stay and so much more when we get back from thanking our sponsors, customers want more from brands delivering more means owning the customer experience, taking control over data acquisition analysis, creative and delivery, Klaviyo calls, this owned marketing, and they believe it's the best path to growth for more visit Klaviyo.com/fire. That's KLAVIYO.com/fire, managing conversations with prospects and customers throughout all stages of their journey can be tough.

0 (1m 26s):
Information gets lost between departments in your customer's experience suffers as a result. HubSpot wants to change that. Learn more about how you can scale your company without scaling complexity at Hubspot.com. All right, Fire Nation. I have a long time friends since 2000 and really 12 is when we started seeing each other at the same conferences and having great conversations over that time. And now here we are in 2021, he's literally my neighbor and Palmas Del Mar Puerto Rico. So I get to see him in person a lot more now, which is awesome. He gets to spend a lot of time in my pool here in Porto Rico.

0 (2m 8s):
And obviously I've had him on the show three times before. So this is numero Quatro, number four for Joel Comm, being on entrepreneurs on fire ends. We're going to be talking about, and again, I know we had some details about this in the introduction, but I want to really make sure that you get why blockchain, cryptocurrency and NFTs are important for you Fire Nation to understand. So Joel, say what's up to Fire Nation and give us a little catch up about, you know, just what's going on in your world.

1 (2m 43s):
What's happened in EOFire been a few years since I've had the opportunity to speak with the, the Fire Nation people. So, and hi neighbor, like just waving across from all Miss Del Mar and just moved here a couple of weeks ago. And following your lead was actually supposed to move last may from Denver and then COVID hit and everything got canceled. So I finally made it and I can see the ocean right outside my window here. And I love it. It's absolutely beautiful.

0 (3m 14s):
Well, we love having you here and I have a couple Palmas rules that I've told Joel about, which you get to learn Fire Nation when you move here too. So we'll keep those private for now, but there are some rules when you live down here and there they're only rules that improve your life for sure, but something interesting Joel, is that you decided to go down a little crypto rabbit hole if you years back. And you know, I have a podcast called The Bad Crypto in The Nifty Show and NFTs and all this jazz. So talk to us about that rabbit hole and where it's taken you up to this moment in time.

1 (3m 48s):
My career has been one of pivoting and playing with the cool toys. Like I've just, I've always been a nerd and into technology. I bought my first computer when I was 16 years old, back in 1980. So now I've thoroughly dated myself. It was a TRS 80 model, one with four K of Ram and a tape drive for a storage device. And so when the internet came about, I built my first website back in 1995 and you know, fast forward to today, I've done just about everything. That's not illegal, immoral or fattening, you know, online for business. And about four years ago, I really started to explore blockchain in Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. And once I finally understood it in early 2017, it blew my mind because it reminded me of technology.

1 (4m 39s):
That was his world in game-changing as the internet was when I discovered it, I thought, wow, this looks, tastes, smells, feels a lot like that. And I had to learn more. And what I discovered going down this rabbit hole is the deeper I went, the wider, it went, it is an amazing world. It is totally going to change just about every vertical known to mankind, not just payments, but because of smart contracts, it's going to change all these industries, entertainment, travel, insurance health, the power, the list goes on of all the industries that it's going to change.

1 (5m 21s):
And just on a Lark, myself and my friend, Travis Wright, who's a leading marketing technologist and a good friend. We decided because we were having these conversations about crypto and blockchain every day on messenger. Why don't we start a podcast? Or like, that sounds like fun. Right? Sound familiar. Let's start a show kids. And we started the bad crypto podcast. Not because crypto is bad, but because we didn't know a lot, we're bad, right? We're we are just learning and wanting to take people on a journey with us. And we make a lot of debt, bad dad jokes, right? So that's, you know, it's bad crypto. It's got attitude. If anybody doesn't like the show, we could say, well, it's built into the brand.

1 (6m 4s):
I mean, it's, we're, we're bad and we have fun. And during that time, we've become one of the top crypto podcasts in the world. We're in the top 100 of all business pike, business podcasts on iTunes. We've had over 10 million downloads in that time. And we have interviewed most of the biggest names in crypto blockchain that are pioneering everybody's future. All of you in Fire Nation, your future is being pioneered by the people that we've had the opportunity to speak with. And just last year, while we've been tracking NFTs, since they first surfaced in 2017, we started producing our own as pioneers of non fungible tokens, digital collectibles.

1 (6m 48s):
And now not only are we hosting another show called The Nifty Show, which comes out two days a week, including a live YouTube every Friday, but we are creators and have created our own brand new intellectual property called blockchain heroes, which are superheroes digital collectibles based on blockchain and cryptocurrency, personalities, and trends and concepts. We have sold over a million dollars of our own NFTs and done over four and a half a million dollars in secondary market sales. So we have our eyes on this whole blockchain Bitcoin, crypto NFT arena.

1 (7m 29s):
And I've been talking with you about it and you are, you know, you're at this place where you're super excited and you're like, tell me more. I'm like, well, let's do a show. We can talk about it.

0 (7m 41s):
Exactly. And I mean, Fire Nation, again, I've known Joel since 2012. And if there are three words that I do think describe Joel, the best he is at pivitor pivitor is something he's been able to do so many times. And I love that about him. Number two, pioneer. He always is looking for that cutting edge to be on like the what's next what's coming. And he loves having fun. And what I love about it is you really did all three with this most recent rabbit hole into crypto. Like you pivoted into it, you are an absolute pioneer and you looked at me the other day and you're like, John, I'm having more fun than I've ever had before.

0 (8m 21s):
And how cool is that Fire Nation? We can literally look at a friend and say, I am having more fun now than ever. And guess what, he's also having a lot of financial benefits from that fund that he's having as well when he mentioned some of those numbers, like that's some crazy stuff. So let's just get right into the big B word, Bitcoin isn't Bitcoin Joel, just a made up word.

1 (8m 47s):
Aren't all words made up. Somebody had to be the first one. Oh, what we call this, right? Yes. Is it was actually created by a person who we do not know who he actually is. He's got an anonymous identity and goes by the name Satoshi Nakamoto. And back in 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto released a white paper on Bitcoin, which you can go download and read for free at Bitcoin.org to this day. And the idea was to create a new form of digital currency that would be decentralized and secure on a type of database called blockchain.

1 (9m 29s):
That was a public ledger. That was immutable. That was unchangeable, that was unhackable. And that this would be the future of payments. They would be peer to peer person to person without needing an intermediary. Imagine not needing to pay a fee to your bank, to transact money with somebody else or to hold your money. Right? Imagine not having issues with saying that you paid somebody for something, and they're saying you didn't, but being able to check the public ledger, which is available to anybody to see, to locate every transaction, they're all verified.

1 (10m 10s):
Imagine it being secure and unhackable. And that's what Bitcoin this made up word is really all about. It's a digital currency that is fully decentralized, meaning it is free of any one financial institution or a government entity having control over it. In fact, there's no Bitcoin, Inc. There's no CEO of Bitcoin. You cannot write to technical support of Bitcoin. Now, if you have a, an account with a, an exchange, say Coinbase, where you're buying Bitcoin shirt, they have customer support, but there isn't a somebody to complain to at Bitcoin, Inc because it doesn't exist.

1 (10m 53s):
It's de-centralized. And within that lies the power of cryptocurrency and of blockchain. The power belongs to the de-centralized masses, the people, we, the people of the world, rather than the financial institutions and the politicians that seek to govern how we live and how we operate. And when I discovered how Bitcoin is created and how that works, I was fascinated. I said, wow, this, this is going to change the way

0 (11m 27s):
World Fire Nation. That last sentence is the most powerful in true one. This is going to change the world. Now, Joel, you got into a little bit about this and the last part that you just shared there. But I do just hear a lot of people always saying blockchain is this technology that is so superior to everything else. What exactly does that mean? When people say the blockchain technology is superior and why is this true?

1 (11m 59s):
Think of it as a super fancy database, but the most secure database, the most efficient, the most effective, the most transparent, all of the things that you want in, you know, the storage of your money, your payments, your contracts, your transactions, all of those things that costs billions of dollars a year in, in customer support in aggravation because there's problems with double billing and because amounts are disputed blockchain, doesn't have those issues. It's all transparent. It's all efficient and effective and unhackable. And because of that technology, because of how secure and effective this fancy database is, think how many industries that changes, you know, in the, in the future, your money will make money for you through terms such as decentralized finance, which we have now, your collectibles and not just your collectibles, but anything that requires a deed of some sort, a proof of ownership will be a non fungible token.

1 (13m 11s):
I know we'll talk about NFTs and a little bit here, especially because people are hearing so much about them in the news. And wondering if they're a fad or, you know, some crazy investment scheme, but blockchain itself is going to change everything. And you know that this is true because in the beginning, people laughed at it, right? What had gone D say, first, they laugh at you, right? Then they are first. They ignore you. Then they laugh. I dunno, but either way, the first steps are nobody cares. And then they start paying attention. They try to defeat you. And then they acquiesce and they adopt. And all you have to do is look at what's happening with the major financial institutions in the world, the JP Morgan's, right?

1 (13m 54s):
The Goldman Sachs chase visa, MasterCard, they're all beginning to adopt blockchain and plans for Bitcoin, for their customers. We have major corporations, such as Tesla and micro strategy that are investing billions into Bitcoin. We are reaching that point that we are not yet mainstream or still early adopter, but it's coming very soon. And the day is also coming where we will no longer use physical currency, those dollar bills that you have. You know, we've been on a path for a long time with credit cards and checks, remember checks and, and now PayPal and Venmo and Zelle to going cashless.

1 (14m 42s):
Crypto is the last, you know, thing to fall. The last domino that takes us fully to a cashless society and a more secure and more efficient way of managing

0 (14m 57s):
Walk into my grandmother's house. Like she was always like at a table, like hunched over this piece of paper scribbling. And I'd be like, Graham, what are you doing? And she was like, I'm balancing my checkbook. And I'm like, I grew up thinking that all my grandmother ever did was balanced her checkbook. Like that's literally all I thought that she did. And I was like, Oh, I guess that's what adults do. Like we just spend our lives balancing our checkbook, like whatever that means. And like, I've never balanced a checkbook, but that's just like sharing. Like I just happened to come of age when bouncing Chatbooks, just like never like we're actually relevant in this world. And I did take the Liberty Joel, to, to look it up first, they ignore you.

0 (15m 37s):
Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win. So Fire Nation Bitcoin has been ignored. It's been laughed at it's being fought right now. Guess what? It's going to win. And Fire Nation, we got so much important stuff to talk about. When we get back from thanking our sponsors, managing conversations with prospects and customers throughout all stages of their journey can be tough. Information gets lost between departments in your customer's experience, suffers as a result, HubSpot wants to change that. That's why they created a CRM platform that makes it easy to align across teams. So how does HubSpot do it with one unified system of record?

0 (16m 19s):
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0 (17m 4s):
Do you ever wonder how companies you admire the ones that redefined their categories, do it companies like living proof and Chubbies they do it by building relationships with their customers from the very beginning, while also evolving in real time as their customers' needs change, these companies connect quickly with the customers, collect their information and start creating personalized experiences and offers that inspire a rapid purchase. Often within minutes of uploading their customer data, Klaviyo empowers you to own the most important thing to any business, the relationship between you and your customers and the experiences you deliver from the first email to the last promotion, to learn more about how Klaviyo helps you own your growth visit Klaviyo.com/fire.

0 (17m 44s):
That's KLAVIYO.com/fire. Joel, we're back. And I want to talk about actual application. Like let's really break it down for Fire Nation. How is blockchain being used in the real world today?

1 (17m 60s):
You know, the beautiful thing about doing The Bad Crypto Podcast is we've had the opportunity to interview hundreds of people. And also these people representing various projects. So I'd like to break it down for Fire Nation in a way that the masses can easily understand. And that is the music industry. The, the music industry is a very broken industry. And if you're a song writer, you sign a contract and that contract is with the record label. Now, I want you to think about how many hands are in the till. When a song is written in sold, you have the record label and the executives, you have their marketing team, you have the producers, you have the song engineers, you have the song writer, you have the musicians, you have the studio musicians and, and there's there's others, right?

1 (18m 51s):
Then you have distribution channels and all of them get a piece from every song. Now, there has been a couple of projects that have been put out there that have solved this problem, because let's say an artist wants to sell a piece of music, say, sell a song for a dollar. They're not going to see the royalty from that music for about a year. It's kind of like book royalties, right? You and I have experienced that. You sign a deal with a book publisher, and six months later, you get a report for that six months, but then you don't get paid until six months after that. It's very, very long. There's a lot of hands and they're grabbing their piece with blockchain there's technologies out there.

1 (19m 33s):
Now that an artist can sell their song on a platform, say for a dollar it's purchased by the consumer who instantly downloads and owns that song. And the moment it's purchased a smart contract is executed on blockchain. And that $1 is instantly divvied up to everybody who has an interest in a royalty from it in a matter of minutes. So for example, the smart contract could be written in such a way that says the song gets 15%. The musician gets 10%. The producer gets X percent. The mom of the artists gets two and a half percent.

1 (20m 14s):
And it instantly shows up in the wallet. There's no warranty statements or delays to getting paid. That's because of blockchain it's secure and it removes the middleman. Now take those same notions of programmable smart contracts on blockchain and apply them to say the power industry. What if you could harness your solar power and sell it to another person on your grid, on your block for cryptocurrency, peer to peer, without needing the energy company to do it say you wanted to purchase a home from somebody else and just pay them in Bitcoin and eliminate the banks and the agents in all of the middlemen, sorry, real estate agents, but the world is changing.

1 (21m 4s):
Apply this to just about any industry that uses a contract of any kind. And you're going to see that every industry is now ripe for disruption. Every business that feels as secure as blockbuster once did as retail once did as Nokia once did, Nokia was completely disrupted by Apple and the iPhone Walmart. And so many retail giants were completely disrupted by Amazon and blockbuster. Well, hello, Netflix. They re they, they took, you know, they ruined their fund and there's no more blockbusters.

1 (21m 45s):
This is going to happen repeatedly in dozens. If not hundreds of verticals in, in everybody, who's listening. Now you need to be looking at the vertical you're in and asking the question who is playing in my sandbox, in the blockchain arena. And the, the questions to ask yourself are what are some of the problems that my vertical is experiencing and can blockchain help to alleviate or fix those problems? Odds are the answer is yes. And somebody's probably already doing something about it. Meaning it's going to impact you. This is why you've brought me in.

1 (22m 27s):
And this is why it's important that everybody pay attention to what I'm saying, because in all likelihood, your vertical, your industry is already being disrupted in. You don't know it

0 (22m 40s):
By our nation. Don't be the person that finds out too late, that your industry is being disrupted. Keep listening to content like this. Stay ahead of the curve. I mean, this is stuff that isn't the mainstream news, by the way now, I mean, here's a guy that for 5,000 days in a row just made one image online, never made more than like a hundred dollars off of it before ever be PL and then decided to, Hey, I'm going to let, Christie's put up a little auction of my everyday's 5,000 of them and one NFT, $69 million later. He's like, Oh, so this is how you make money as an artist, non fungible tokens.

0 (23m 21s):
So we've heard NFTs in being batted around those three letters in the news. We've maybe gone the next step and heard about non fungible tokens. What the heck are NFTs? What are non fungible tokens, Joe?

1 (23m 35s):
First of all, let's talk about what's fungible because that's a word that a lot of people might not know. John, if I say, Hey, open your wallet and hand me a dollar and let's, you've got $10 bills in there. 10, $1 bills. John, can you hand me a dollar? You're not going to turn to me. And you're going to say, Oh, which one? Because they're all the same. Each one is treated identically. A dollar bill is a dollar. Bill is a dollar bill. That is something that is fungible. Each one is treated the same when something is non fungible, it's unique. So if I say, Hey, John, are you buying a, you told me you're buying a house. And I'm going to say which one, because they're not all the same.

1 (24m 19s):
Each one is unique. In fact, you could think of human beings as non fungible beings because each one is different. A non fungible token is an item on the blockchain that is unique from every other one. Now we can look the same, but it has its own unique identifier. So another way to think about it is a piece of art, maybe a lithograph, and the artist creates 500 of these lithographs and they number them one through 500 and they're numbered and signed at the bottom of each one. Those are non fungible pieces of art. Each one with its own certificate of authenticity, a non fungible token on blockchain is an item which could be a piece of art, could be a digital collectible, like a trading card could be a house deed or a, a deed to a motor vehicle.

1 (25m 11s):
Anything that requires proof of ownership. It's like the ultimate certificate of authenticity. And you know, we're hearing the hype about it because of people. The media always comes in at the beginning of the early adopter part of a technology cycle. We've, we've just exited at the beginning of of 2021, the pioneering part. And we're now in the early adopter where the media comes in and does their thing. And they start asking the questions. Is this a fad? Is this, you know, insanity? Is it going to be tulips or beanie babies? And the fewer is going to die down in some people who have spent too much on some digital collectibles are going to have a rude awakening, but I can tell you that what you're hearing about right now is just the beginning of NFTs.

1 (26m 4s):
They're here to stay. They are going to be ubiquitous. And it's the same people that said back in 1998 that, you know, we didn't need the internet and people would never, you know, go for e-commerce those same people. The ones that are saying NFTs are, you know, just a fad. They're not gang. They're here to stay in. You will own some

0 (26m 26s):
We'll own some Fire Nation, but you want to own some in 10 years, or do you want to own some, maybe in 10 hours? And this is maybe a good time to give a little teaser of a conversation we're having tomorrow on entrepreneurs, on fire with a certain, someone who's doing something pretty cool in the music space. So why don't you kind of give a little breakdown there,

1 (26m 50s):
Excited about this two gentlemen that Travis and I had the opportunity to meet known one of them for three years. And the other one more recently are super savvy in the crypto and blockchain world. And they've, can't come up with a way to disrupt the music industry with NFTs that not only look beautiful, but have a purpose. And so I don't want to say too much more about it, but there's some really interesting things happening with the technology and those of you who appreciate art, appreciate technology or appreciate music if you fall, or you're just curious and want to play, you're going to want to listen to this interview that is going to be coming up with our friend Nobel Jacoby.

0 (27m 35s):
It's going to be awesome. Fire Nation is coming out tomorrow. If you're listening to this the day that this episode came out and if you're not, then it's still the next episode. So just go and listen to that as well. And if you listen to this 10 years from now, you're going to be like, Oh man, I literally could have got in on that 10 years ago. If I listened to entrepreneurs on fire every single day, like I should. I mean, this is some really cool stuff. This is so much fun. I mean, I'm having so much fun. Joel's having so much fun. This is the future, Joel, before we say goodbye here, why aren't you just take us home? Anything you want to share on the major takeaway you want for Fire Nation from this episode, you know, let us know how we can find out more about you follow more about you with The Bad Crypto Podcast and The Nifty Show and everything you have going on.

0 (28m 22s):
And then we'll say, sure,

1 (28m 23s):
First of all, it's important to note, I don't believe you are a financial advisor. Are you John? No. And neither am I. And we've always been super clear with our audience. There's a lot of people out there that will hype up certain projects, whether they're stocks or whether they're cryptocurrencies or NFTs, and there's videos out there on YouTube where people just pump things up and they expect you to go buy just based on their hype. We always tell people that not only we are not financial advisors, but you should not do what we do just because you're hearing us talk about it, but that you need to be responsible for your own money for your own investments, your own future, and do your own due diligence.

1 (29m 6s):
Do research really go down the rabbit hole. So you understand what it is you're getting involved in. And don't just chase the hype train for anything. I don't care what it is because that, you know, that's how people can make mistakes. So don't make mistakes. Do your own due diligence. One way you could do that is just go to YouTube and type. What is Bitcoin? What is blockchain? Avoid the videos that say this crypto is going to the moon, right? And it's going to blow up. Don't don't do that. I don't recommend that, but learn, educate yourself. Start listening to the crypto podcast because we have a lot of fun. And if you're into NFTs subscribe or listen to the nifty show, both are top shows in Apple, iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, all the places that you listen to, things in your ears and would love to hear from you guys because we're just regular guys.

1 (29m 59s):
Travis and I are just two dudes talking crypto and we are passionate about it. We know the game changer. It is. We love creating our own NFTs. Cause I don't know. John, did you collect baseball cards when you were a boy? I loved it. Okay. So did your mom ever throw out a bag of your cards when you were away at school? I cried.

0 (30m 20s):
Tears came down. My

1 (30m 22s):
Me too. It was, you know, it was two bags. I mean, those cards would be so valuable, but whether you've collected baseball cards, garbage pail, kids, you know, whatever your collection has been Funko pop. Those are coming to NFT shortly. These digital collectibles, guess what? Mom can't throw them away. If there's, if there's fire or water, neither one of those can damage them because they're in your wallet. They can't be stolen unless you give the keys to your wallet away. They don't degrade over time. They always stay mint. And you know, I recommend that people collect what they like, not as an investment opportunity, but because they like it.

1 (31m 4s):
And if it turns out that something becomes more valuable over time, because they're more scarce. That's, that's cool. I own some NFTs that are one of ones. They're the only one of that particular item in the world. And it's in my wallet and I'd love to look at them. I play with my NFTs the way somebody else might pull their baseball cards out. So I just encourage everybody. If this sounds exciting to you to just start learning more about it, because we have really just crossed the threshold from the pioneer phase to the early adopter phase. And that means when you look at the technology adoption curve, we're still a few years away from the very beginning of mass adoption.

1 (31m 45s):
And that's always a great time to begin exploring for yourself.

0 (31m 48s):
Well, Fire Nation, you know that I always end the episodes by saying you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. It's true. And that's why I love that. Joel has moved to Palm, miss Del Mar now, because you know, maybe I get to now slide him into my top five here and, you know, continue to up-level my NFT knowledge, my crypto knowledge. And you know, I live in a community where we're, we're in a WhatsApp group with like 35 other guys that are all getting into this as well. And we get to share tips, tools, tactics, and Joel's in there too. And it's just awesome when you are surrounding yourself with the right people. So you've been hanging out with JC and JLD today. Fire Nation, keep up that heat. Enjoy. I just want to say thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today, for that we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side.

0 (32m 37s):
Hey, Fire Nation today's value bomb content was brought to you by Joel and Fire Nation. I've created a treasure trove of free courses for you. I teach you how to podcast run a mastermind, create funnels that convert and so much more. All you need to do is visit EOFire.com/resources to start learning today. I'll catch you there, or I'll catch you on the flip side. Customers want more from brands delivering more means owning the customer experience, taking control over data acquisition analysis, creative and delivery. Klaviyo calls this owned marketing, and they believe it's the best path to growth for more visit cleevio.com/fire. That's KLAVIYO.com/fire, managing conversations with prospects and customers throughout all stages of their journey can be tough.

0 (33m 24s):
Information gets lost between departments in your customer's experience. Suffers as a result. HubSpot wants to change that. Learn more about how you can scale your company without scaling complexity at Hubspot.com.