The world works in incredible ways. When you open yourself up to the idea of something, maybe you don’t believe it 100 percent yet, but you at least open yourself up to it, exciting things start coming your way.
On Wednesday, we chatted with Justin and Gene from Braindrops.cloud. They’re artists who create and sell nonfungible tokens (NFTs). Many people are talking about things like NFTs and crypto, similar to how we talked about the internet in the early 1990s. And of course, the internet is now an inextricable part of our everyday lives.
Today I want to talk a little bit about some things that might seem “out there.” I mean the world of things like the blockchain, Web 3.0, crypto, and yes, NFTs. Not because SPI is about to dive headfirst into any of this stuff—but because I think it’s important and exciting to be open to what might be possible.
These new technologies are absolutely going to shape the way we build and run our businesses, and how we share what we create with our audiences. In fact, it’s already happening now! So let’s talk about it.
SPI 556: When You Open Your Mind, This Happens
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, where it’s all about working hard now so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host, he thinks beach cleanups are the best social events ever, Pat Flynn.
Pat Flynn: Isn’t it incredible? It’s just absolutely incredible. The world works in very incredible ways. Where when you open yourself up to the idea of something, maybe you don’t believe it 100% necessarily yet, but you at least open yourself up to it, things start coming your way. And we’ve heard about these kinds of things with regards to Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich. If you believe it, you will achieve it. “Whether you think you can or you cannot, you are right.” That’s a Henry Ford quote. I experienced something like this this week. Now, the previous episode that was published, 555, for many of you who have listened to it, you’re either left awe-struck and inspired and curious, or like I’m sure many, you’re left confused and wondering what is wrong with the world.
Pat Flynn: Now, we chatted with Justin and Gene from Braindrops.cloud. They create NFTs and they sell them. They’re artists and they are in that world. They’re great people. They’re not what’s wrong with the world, but many people are talking about things like NFTs and crypto similar to how we chatted about the internet in early 1990. What is this thing? It sounds wacky, that’s unreal. A lot of us pushed it away. And of course, it’s now a part of our everyday lives. You wouldn’t be able to listen to this podcast if it wasn’t for the internet. Many of you are building a business and creating a living on the internet like myself. And now we’re at this stage where some people are calling it Web 3.0, the whole metaverse thing with Facebook and NFTs and tokens and Ethereum and Bitcoin. It’s confusing to a lot of people, much like how, why do I have to type in https://? I still don’t even know why I need to do that.
Pat Flynn: But here I am on the internet. I know why we need to do that. But anyway, like I was saying about allowing yourself to be open to things. You start to see things in different ways and you start to hear things that maybe were already being spoken about, but now because you are open to them, you’re thinking about them differently and you start noticing them more. It’s similar to when you get a new car, for example, and it’s a brand new model you’ve never had before, and you start seeing it everywhere on the street now. The same thing happened with relation to the conversation I had with Justin and Gene. So if you heard that episode, awesome. If not, you could go back and listen to it. I do offer a warning as far as the technicalities of the content in that episode, with relation to NFTs and crypto and whatnot, and how confusing it could potentially be. But I’m not looking away.
Pat Flynn: I’m digging deep. I’m going deeper into it and trying to understand more about it rather than just push it aside. And the reason for that is because not just because everybody’s talking about it, but because I do believe, and I’m starting to see and hear about actual utility. I heard about this on a podcast episode of Colin and Samir. They have a podcast as well as a YouTube channel with a video podcast version of their show, which I highly recommend. They interview a lot of amazing people and big time creators. And they came out with a video, again, this happened right after this conversation with Justin and Gene, and it was titled, “Mr. Beast,” who is a giant YouTuber, if not the most popular YouTuber, “Mr. Beast Should Sell His YouTube Channel.” Now, it’s not in the way that you might think a person might sell an asset like a channel or a brand.
Pat Flynn: In many cases, traditionally, we think of that as, well, we determine what the value is and then we get a huge check for it and then we move on with our lives. That’s not what they’re talking about. They’re talking about this world of NFT and ownership in things. And not just ownership in art or ownership in crypto, but the idea of being able to, as a creator, using NFTs as the mechanism for this, to allow for your fans and people to own shares of your brand. Or in the case of Colin and Samir, they were speaking specifically about a particular video that we’ve chatted about here on the podcast before, it was actually the first episode of the year with Roberto Blake. We chatted about Mr. Beast’s Squid Game video.
Pat Flynn: That video, easily one of the most popular videos in recent history on YouTube. Mr. Beast has been very open about how much it has cost and how much work was put into it. It was about three and a half million dollars to film that one YouTube video, but he’s definitely made many times over. So what if Mr. Beast decided to offer to his fans, the ability to own a piece of that video and share with the ad revenue? Maybe let’s say that it cost three and a half million, he was able to supply his own two and a half million dollars through T-shirt sales and brand deals and whatnot, but here’s this extra million, so he’s going to offer a part of the ad share revenue. He’s going to chop that up into 1,000 shares, if you will, and then raise money. And then anybody who purchased those shares or who has ownership in that part of the video could then make money through the ownership of this and support of Mr. Beast.
Pat Flynn: That was a very, very interesting concept. And then they started to go further about, well, what about an entire channel’s ad revenue, or an entire channel, including their brand deals? So hypothetically, let’s say that you, listening right now, wanted to buy into Smart Passive Income, similar to how it’s like a company on the stock exchange. If I had a certain number of shares that I could offer, I could sell those shares and they would be whatever value we would decide. Maybe it would work, maybe it wouldn’t, much like companies when they IPO or have an initial public offering. And then you could earn revenue from the growth of the brand. That would be really interesting, right? Now, what’s the benefit of this? Yes, you could invest in it and generate an income, but additionally, you would have this feeling of literal ownership of the brand.
Pat Flynn: Many personal brands are going to be going down this route, I imagine, which is even more interesting. You can own a piece of a person in a way, not a piece of that person. Like, oh, I got his left pinky. No, I mean that personal brand on a particular platform. And then the NFT situation is what is the engine that provides the ability for any creator to make this happen. That is what’s creating these shares that have now the ability for people to own. And that ownership is able to be tracked, which we talked about in the episode with Justin and Gene. Very, very interesting concept. So what if I sold 10,000 shares of SPI, SPI coin or whatever it might be, and maybe there’s some art tied to it that gives something like similar to GaryVee and his VeeFriends, his Empathy Elephant or Persistent Panda? Is it Patient Panda? I’m not exactly sure.
Pat Flynn: The art isn’t even really the center of it at that point. It’s about what that gives you access to. And then GaryVee’s VeeFriends NFTs is access to him and the community. But in the case of ownership of a brand or ownership of a piece of a video, for example, it is literal ownership in that thing and the ability to generate a revenue from it. And then for the creator, there’s the idea that you’re going to get this support. You might get a cash injection as a result. You have these additional fans who you know are going to be your superfans, but in addition to that, you also get the idea that you can have secondary income coming in from the exchange of those things. So if there’s a Flynn coin, for example, or SPI coin, and it’s exchanged in some market, and these markets exist now where you can put these things up for somebody else to buy to then get access to your thing or get access to that portion of the video that you purchased.
Pat Flynn: The other thing that Colin and Samir were talking about is the fact that on YouTube, thinking of YouTube or even a podcast, the asset is also the back catalog. It’s similar to music. How I think it was Bruce Springsteen had sold his album or his catalog for, I don’t know, a billion or some odd million dollars. It wasn’t just the latest song, but it was his entire catalog because people were also listening to all those things back then. I have videos on YouTube that people are watching that were filmed years ago. That is an asset that is making me money. And that is something that a person hypothetically using this scenario could potentially buy into. It’s just such an interesting thing. Then today I had coffee with Britney Lynn who was my former publicist, and she’s been trekking around the United States in a van with her husband and it’s been really awesome.
Pat Flynn: We just caught up, and this came up during a conversation today. This idea of being open to this now, it’s like more and more people are talking about it. But anyway, I’m jumping around a little bit. But to go back to this, it’s like, okay, if you had an SPI coin and maybe you bought it at, I don’t know, $1,000 or something, but the value of SPI goes up, therefore your coin is worth more. You could potentially sell that for, let’s say $2,000. It’s doubled its value. Much like how a company, if their value doubles, the market capitalization or the overall value of that company would allow and trickle down into the shares to double hypothetically. I mean, being very basic here. But as the creator of that coin, we can build in what’s called a smart contract.
Pat Flynn: Meaning, if this Flynn coin or SPI coin exchanges hands, I can build in a fee so that if you sell it to another person in the community for 2,000, there might be a hundred dollar fee every time that happens. So I can generate a passive income as the creator using these smart contracts. That’s a word that you’re going to hear quite a bit now, that is involved in this Ethereum crypto space that allows for things like this to happen. And I’ve heard more. Michael Stelzner from the Crypto Business Podcast, Crypto Business Podcast. Yeah, he started a brand new podcast, which I highly recommend you check out. It is the Crypto Business Podcast. They’re talking about a lot of applications like this. Joe Pulizzi from Content Marketing World started something with NFTs with relation to access to certain groups and certain channels within his space and Discord.
Pat Flynn: It is a wicked thing to think about. It is a wicked thing to think about. And it’s really cool because we say personal brands. And when we hear about the word brand traditionally, in terms of money and shares and stuff, it’s nothing we really even think about much when it comes to personal brands. We don’t have necessarily a number of shares within our company as a personal brand. We just show up online on a content platform, but now we can add another layer to it. Now, obviously there’s always going to be downsides and things to worry about. My worry is that, for example, you are baking in the exchange rates and things based on another platform. So if YouTube, for whatever reason, decides to change the game or flips a switch on an algorithm and all of your back catalog and all these videos that a person might be buying into, all of a sudden don’t get any more views, well, then that’s not good. But at the same time, that’s what happens. It’s a risk and it’s an investment.
Pat Flynn: It’s one that could go up and it’s one that could go down. Much like how, when I’m an investor in Tesla, there are a number of things that are great, that are happening, that I’m banking on and hoping for with relation to the future and the company. But there’s also going to be times where, especially in the micro environment or in a micro era, it might go down and it might go down quite a bit. I’m definitely a long term investor, so I’m not worried about when it goes down with a certain number of percentages or percentage points, but I’m in it for the long haul. Anyway, just another level of discussion with relation to where the future of business and community is headed.
Pat Flynn: I imagine that there’s going to be a time where every community has some form of a digital token to express that membership. One that gives you access to things. One that could be exchanged with somebody else in some way. Again, the fact that these things can be tracked back to you and ownership, not tracking back to you in a bad way. Like, oh, so-and-so is here and now I know where their house is, but more like, yes, you are the verified owner of this particular SPI coin. Sure, you can get into FlynnCon. Or, yes, you have the VIP token, so here is your access to the Discord server where all the other VIPs are and the masterminds happen. And in the case of what Colin and Samir were talking about, and again, I highly recommend you check out their show as well, in addition to Michael Stelzner’s Crypto Business Podcast.
Pat Flynn: He was founder of Social Media Marketing World and Social Media Marketing Podcast. If you recognize that name, that’s where it came from. But this idea of, well, what if I create an online course? Could I potentially raise money to film this course and to make it great, and to market it by offering shares of it to others? It’s more than just an affiliate situation. It’s a situation where you actually own a piece of that course yourself, and it becomes an asset and you can invest in it and other courses. When it generates an income, you receive a payout for that. Maybe that comes in every month, or I don’t know technically exactly how that would happen, but the future of business is coming, my friends.
Pat Flynn: It’s the reason why I wanted to have these weird conversations. And it’s weird now because it’s new, but we might look back at this maybe even in a year and be like, wow, we were ahead of it. We were thinking about things in a way that other people just weren’t and now it’s become a part of our everyday lives. So, something to think about and something to definitely explore. But as I learn more and as I experiment more, and I will be experimenting with this, I don’t think you necessarily have to worry too soon about me jumping head first without research into a SPI coin of sorts. But I have other platforms where that may make sense. And that’s all I’m going to say. So I’ll keep you posted because it’s really fascinating.
Pat Flynn: I hope you enjoy this conversation this week. Make sure to check out episode 555 with… I feel like I’m saying a phone number, 555 49 72. No, check out episode 555 with Justin and Gene if you want to hear more from an artist’s perspective with relation to NFTs and some basics related to that as well. So thank you so much. I hope you enjoy this follow-up Friday, and let’s keep our eyes and ears open and our minds open to the future. Cheers. Love you, guys. Have a good one.
Pat Flynn: Thanks for listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast at smartpassiveincome.com. I’m your host, Pat Flynn. Our senior producer is Sara Jane Hess, our series producer is David Grabowski and our executive producer is Matt Gartland. Sound editing by Duncan Brown. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is a production of SPI Media. We’ll catch you in the next session.
