Full Transcript
Dr James: 0:41
Fans of the Dentists who Invest podcast. If you feel like there was one particular episode in the back catalog in the anthology of Dentists who Invest podcast episodes that really, really really was massively valuable to you, feel free to share that with a fellow dental colleague who’s in a similar position, so their understanding of finance can be elevated and they can hit the next level of financial success in their life. Also, as well as that, if you could take two seconds to rate and review this podcast, it would mean the world. To me, what that would mean is that it drives this podcast further in terms of reach so that more dentists across the world can be able to benefit from the knowledge contained therein. Welcome to the Dentists who Invest podcast. Welcome back everyone to another episode of the Dentists who Invest podcast. And we are riding high because we have just come off the back of my interview with Benjamin Ahmed. What a clever little kid, and he knows so much about NFTs. It’s absolutely insane. And on the topic of NFTs, I have sat in front of me a gentleman called CK who is here to tell us about his experience in the crypto world and NFTs and why we believe in them so strongly because I’m a big bull on NFTs as well, and we’re here to have a little bit of a conversation to compliment mine and Ben’s discussion from the last podcast. Ck, my friend, how are you today?
CK: 2:04
I’m always alright. I always say I’m always alright, it’s everybody else.
Dr James: 2:11
That’s a good line. That’s a good line, my friend. You know what I met and can I just put this in context for everybody who’s listening. I met CK at CoinFest crypto conference way back in September and we’ve only just got round to doing this podcast and I was so blown away by CK, what he’s achieving, what he’s creating, and also CK you’ve probably worked out already it’s got the gift of the gab and he’s going to be a phenomenal podcast guest and I’m looking forward to this one. And, ck, you told me, if my memory does not deceive me, you told me that this is going to be your first ever podcast. Am I correct in saying that it is?
CK: 2:43
indeed, but yes, I’m a little bit shy. I’ll say to myself, as you can tell, no, I just really don’t have any time. There’s nobody’s approached us with these podcasts, but it’s been. Yeah, something new for me. It’s something new, yeah they’re fun.
Dr James: 3:01
Well, you know what, we all have to start somewhere and I remember, you know what my very first few episodes of my podcast you should have heard of many Oms and as there were and how I couldn’t get my words out, and for you it comes very naturally. So I think this is going to be a fun episode, my friend. So, on the topic of NFTs and your South CK, maybe it might be nice for you to give everybody a little bit of background as to who you are and what you do. A little bit of an intro.
CK: 3:25
Well, to be honest, I started off as a construction company owner, so I’ve owned my own construction company for 20 years and I saw that the way that we’re being treated on the payment terms of things. I decided to look into cryptocurrencies and how smart contracts work and then thought, well, this could probably help me and my business to stop being ripped off by bigger companies. And that is the truth. That is exactly why I came into crypto. This is around 10 years ago. I started looking into it and then, six years ago, actually made the move, started allocating some assets, or some of our money, into assets, and watched it grow. From there, watch the crypto verse grow, the metaverse, the NFT verse, absolutely everything to do with crypto and fully submersed ourselves within it.
Dr James: 4:16
That’s awesome. You’re a real go-getter. You just took the initiative, seized the moment and went for it, and I think that’s cool and that’s part of what that’s a lot about what being an entrepreneur is. It’s just sensing the mood, sensing what you, you know that’s success for what’s going to happen next, and jumping in as well and making the most of it and fashion it, fashioning it towards something unique that you can do, and creating your own brand or your own essence, and that is a phenomenal thing. You I remember CK you told me there was a story that you told me when we first met and it was about you will do it better justice to me and it was about. It was related to the fact of how builders get paid and it was something to do with the fact that you’ve got these shell companies and they’ve got these fake balances.
CK: 4:58
What was? Can you, yeah that? stuff with me, so I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you the example of what I’ve been through, and this is the fact. So I’ve got around 20, 30 lads working for us bricklayers within the construction company. So we pay the lads every two weeks and on invoice to the proprietary company, like the principal contractor, they’ve got 60 days to pay us. So all in all, we’re probably sat on a good chunk of money that we’ve been paying out for 90 days before payment. Now, when the company decide not to pay, who do the lads come after? Do the lads come after the boss of their company that’s supposed to owe them the money? What do they go after? The principal contractor that owes their boss the money? But it’s clearly me. So what was happening is that the companies would get to their final endorsement or the final payment of, say, 150 houses per year that we’re building, and just not pay with no reason other than they can send small subsidiary companies bankrupt because they’re part of a group or part of an umbrella. So these companies will turn around and not pay us with that to take them to court. They turn up to court and say, okay, well, what we can afford as we’re in liquidation, is a pound a month and offers one pound per month for the rest of my life. If I die, my kids get it, which is absolutely perfect. You’re never going to see a 190,000 pound bill being paid off ever. So I say, once I saw the functionalities of smart contracts and how I can utilize the ingenuity of the code, then that’s why we sort of migrated and started Excalibur wallet.
Dr James: 6:46
That’s awesome. That story stuck with me and I remember you telling it to me and it really resonated me from the point of view that you’ve taken this technology and you fashioned it towards your own world and we’re now seeing how this industry is blossoming, because these are all the possible permutations of smart contracts and the word of the moment, NFTs, the acronym of the moment, NFTs. So on that topic, NFTs can you please tell us in your own words for the layman’s, the potential layman that are listening, what an NFT is?
CK: 7:19
So NFTs, what are they? To me personally, an NFT gives your client base or your custom base value and utility. So the actual NFT itself is just a JPEG, it’s just an MP4 uploaded onto a blockchain, and that is the basics of what it is. Now the utility and the value is derived when we import the value to it. As a dentist or a dentist practice that wants to create an NFT and give value to its customers, it would have a membership. You’d buy the NFT for a set amount and you’d get a year’s membership or six month membership, whereas you’d receive value, so you’d receive a teeth clean per week or per month or whatever the case is. As the business owner, you can derive your own value to give to your custom base, and that’s basically what people are doing at the minute. So artists they don’t need a middleman. They can interact directly with their community. By listing an NFT, you can buy that piece of artwork directly. You don’t need to go through an art shop. Now I’m an artist and I’ll do my own paintings and I’ll go to an art shop and I’ll pay for the window space and I’ll stick my painting in the window and then it won’t sell. So you’ve just paid for the window and in a major city, it costs quite a lot of money and you’ve got the probability of it not selling, but it’s still costing you money. Now, by having an NFT, you’re placing it onto a marketplace and waiting for your own community to interact with you directly. You’ve got no third party. There’s no middleman. This is amazing for music artists as well. They don’t need the recording companies to take 99% of their value and give them 1% in payments. Now the recording artist can actually claim all of that value for himself or herself or themselves. So it’s just one way that we can give utility and value to our client base directly, without using an intermediary company or middleman.
Dr James: 9:35
Well, it’s just an extension of the blockchain, in effect, if you think about it, because the whole point of crypto is that it removes to be any need for a third party and in transaction it’s peer-to-peer, isn’t it? Now we’ll take a concept. It’s flourishing, it’s blooming, and now we’re planning it to art, we’re planning it to media, and also the other beautiful thing about an NFT is it can be representative of any agreement, any agreement whatsoever in the world, providing whoever creates it, whoever distributes it, backs that agreement up. So it’s all done on reputation and that’s why it works in your industry as well. In that specific example and you also told me about how you were gonna fashion NFTs towards what it is, what you do and remedy that problem you spoke about so how do they work in that particular instance for yourself?
CK: 10:22
So a smart contract would be enabled in the fact that the person that is wanting a construction company, that would want a development constructing, would then come to us for tender. We would tender for that project. They would put their money into the smart contract. This smart contract is then derived between us both. Whereas I’ve put in the limitations of how much money we would like per square meter, you agree to this. And then, when we have completed the works, we come to you and say James, we’ve done half your house. This is the amount of bricks, this is the amount of insulation, this is the amount of materials that we’ve used. Can you sign us off for quality purposes? You come and have a look. It’s up to your exacting standards. You agree, I’ve accepted, and directly from the smart contract I am paid with all taxes and all other things taken out of the pot before it gets to me. This safeguards us both in the fact that I know that you’ve got the capital for the said project that you’ve asked for, and you’re safe in the fact that you know that if I’ve done bad quality workmanship, the money is not paid to me but it’s sat in an independent pot, let’s say, by itself.
Dr James: 11:48
Real quick guys. I’ve put together a special report for Dentist entitled the Seven Costs and Potentially Disasters Mistakes that Dentists make whenever it comes to their finances. Most of the time, dentists are going through these issues and they don’t even necessarily realise that they’re happening until they have their eyes opened, and that is the purpose of this report. You can go ahead and receive your free report by heading on over to wwwDentisttoInvestcom or, alternatively, you can download it using the link in the description. This report details these seven most common issues. However, most importantly, it also shows you how to fix them Really. Looking forwards to hearing your thoughts. I love it. And you know what? We’re just awakening as a society, to the versatility of these contracts because, as time goes on, we’re realising all the possible permutations. And that very specific example is how you’ve utilised this for your own purposes and you’ve created this functionality which remedies an exact problem. And you can’t be the only builder. And what the exciting thing is, you can’t be the only builder who has ever went through that, and you’ll agree, I can see a shake in your head and I don’t know anything about the building industry, but it can’t be the first time that’s happened.
CK: 13:07
You know what I mean, I believe, through and through, freelancing. It works like this there’s a lot of people out there that work on a freelance basis, where they’re procuring works and then, for some unknown reason to mankind, the client, when it comes to the final payment, just doesn’t want to pay either. They’ve run out of money. It wasn’t allowed in their budget. They thought that they could get it cheaper somewhere else. Whatever the excuse is, there’s thousands of people out there that go through this, so to alleviate that. That’s what this sort of smart contract is in place to do is to help both parties not get ripped off.
Dr James: 13:46
And the exciting part is we’re just at the start. This industry is still nascent and there can only be more adaptations and functionality that we can realise as time goes on and that is the coolest bit, because crypto is still in its infancy. Nfts we’ve talked about this a little bit already outside of your industry. How do you see them helping society at large and why are you a believer in them? Not just for your trade, but elsewhere too?
CK: 14:17
Yeah, as we’ve sort of touched on, I think that it gets rid of the middlemen. The middleman makes the most money. He’s the one that puts the two people together and does the least work and does the least work. They just skimming off the top continually. But that’s that is. We’re getting rid of the middleman. By using the NFTs, you’re directly impacting your community, whereas your community can directly involve themselves with you. I’ll take an example of Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis. They came out with their own NFTs called Stoner Cats. Now these cats are part of a cartoon or an animated cartoon to which each of the NFTs is a character. So now they’re setting up their own film studios. They’re going direct to their client base, which is people who are interested in them as celebrities. So I mean personally, I invested because I know they’re quite big names and possibly down the road in the future it might be released on the TV and it might appreciate in value. But these are the sort of things that NFTs are creating. Is that interaction between even celebrities and directly to the average Joe? Look at Board 8 Yacht Club. There’s so many celebrities that are involved with that that when you go into the metaverse, you’re directly talking to Snoop Dogg, you’re directly talking to Eminem, you’re directly talking to these different celebrities which you would never have had the opportunity before, never. I think there’s a lot of youth out there not personally, but there’s a lot of youth in there that’s appreciate this mechanism, if you like.
Dr James: 16:04
I’m going to take what you said and I’m going to repurpose it towards the dental industry, because we have to bear in mind that most people who listen to this podcast or, of course, dentists and here’s the time possibility and you can actually be interested and see what you think about this. This is what I was dreaming up about functionality for NFTs in the dental industry. Now here’s something you probably don’t know about the dental industry when you go to a private practice and you join their subscription plan, that’s actually managed by a third party. So they’ll collect the bad debts, they’ll collect the fees for you, they’ll take a little bit off the top and then they’ll distribute it to you the dental practice, right. So most people don’t know that, but the only reason I know that is because I’ve worked in practices like that. Yeah, so here’s what you do as a dental practice with your NFTs you cut out the middleman. You create your own practices, nfts. You sell them to patients, prospective patients, who wish to join your dental plan. The holders of the NFTs get discount, like they do in most practices, when they join the plan, and they also get their checkups paid for every year their six months checkup and then maybe a visit to the hygienist included in the plan as well. Okay, fairly standard. Except what that means is that whoever owns that NFT, the dental practice, gets all of the money for the practice plan, rather than some. But here’s where it gets crazy. Here’s where it gets really crazy. Okay, the patient is still a member of the practice, or well, maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. Okay, they decide that they maybe don’t want to be for a period of time. They give the NFT back to you so that you can rent it out on their behalf to someone else who wants to be a member of the practice. Yeah, that patient pays the practice, but they also pay the patient who’s the actual owner. That patient gets paid to own, be a member of your practice. You get paid as well. And then when the patient decides they want to move on, they sell their membership and you get part of the cut as a dental practice, which is a whole new avenue or revenue. That was not possible ever before. And this is the exciting possibility of NFT, and you know there’ll be a lot of dentists listening to that. You’re thinking my head is spinning a little bit because it doesn’t make. It won’t make sense. It’s not something that we’ve ever encountered before. But even if you didn’t understand that exact example, removing a third party from anything can only be a good thing from the point of view that it makes more profitable. What do you think of?
CK: 18:44
that CK. Absolutely amazing, mate. Absolutely amazing. That’s a. It’s starting your own economy, whereas people can interact with your NFTs, be rewarded for holding those NFTs. It’s another way of residual income. There might be people out there that just do it for an asset allocation. I could buy five of your NFT memberships and rent all five of them out, because it’s making me a residual income over time. If it’s in your own dental coin or whatever you’d like to call it, which there is a chat that has already created that token, so you’d have to think of a different name so you can have your own coin that can be distributed to the NFT holders and give them rewards in those tokens. If there’s enough liquidity within the market, you can easily exchange those tokens for Ethereum, for Bitcoin or whatever else you’d like to exchange it for.
Dr James: 19:36
And you just said something that I’d like to raise as well, because here’s the kicker you can get paid in Ethereum, which, if you believe in crypto, you’ll also believe that it’s an appreciate an asset, which would be therefore better than getting paid in pounds of dollars, you might argue, which is a depreciate an asset. Maybe not everybody’s going to be on board with that one, but there’ll be some people out there with that mindset, and that’s an extra selling point right there.
CK: 20:06
The more value and utility that you can bring to your client base or your custom base, the better off your practice is going to be, or whoever’s business will be 110%.
Dr James: 20:18
And on the topic of Ethereum, most NFTs are built in the Ethereum network. Do you see Ethereum continuing maintaining a position on its throne as the king of smart contracts, or do you see it being usurped by someone else? How do you see that panning out? It’s hard to say, but who is your which smart? I suppose another way of asking this is which network is your NFTs on? Because naturally, by extension, by default, that will be one that you believe in.
CK: 20:49
Yep, everything’s on Ethereum. When you have a look at the crypto space in general and you’ve got, let’s say, the 18,000 tokens, how many of those tokens are built on Ethereum and how many are built on Polygon, binance, solana and all these other projects that are starting to have smart contract capabilities? Where were they all born? I’ll tell you now. They was all born on Ethereum. Even Cardano, in a way, was born through Ethereum because of Charles Hoskins. He came from the Ethereum Founders Club, so when he came out of there and decided to create his own ecosystem and smart contract capabilities and NFTs and all the rest of it, where did those ideas come from? I see Ethereum as the river of dreams and the rest of the crypto tokens as the little streams that have come off of it. Which they do. All of their functionalities are perfect within cents. Say, polygon having no network fees or near to nothing on network fees, on transaction fees, are absolutely amazing. But what else do they offer other than a cheap method of transaction? Everything’s exactly the same as what Ethereum has. So to me, although everyone else is taking pieces of Ethereum and creating their own projects, essentially they all are part of Ethereum anyway, or have been at some point. So for me personally, I’ll stick with Ethereum when eth2.0, which is the future of Ethereum, comes. Then we’ve got cheaper transactions as well, so how cheap they’re going to be, I’ll give you a few notes, but I can tell you we’ll have another lease of life within Ethereum and the adoption of it once those transaction costs come down. We don’t see a hardship on OpenSea with the NFT sales that everyone’s not transacting anymore. If you have a look at the top clubs within the NFT space on OpenSea, they’re only ever increasing, which means that people are still using Ethereum and the Ethereum chain.
Dr James: 23:03
Despite its fees, despite its fees for the moment, which are very high. I minted an NFT once and to anyone in the crypto space, this is probably not that surprising, but to anybody outside the crypto space, the little, probably a little surprise or stunning that you might pay for this amount of money to mint an NFT. I think I paid $1,200. Okay, well, that’s that’s. It was a peak time in the market. It was actually. It was a, not an IPO, but the, the NFT equivalent of an IPO, where you’re, you’re frantically buying and everybody’s joining in, and I flipped it. I did. I actually just about lost some money on it. But that’s how crazy the market is, that people will actually buy it for that price as well. And yes, no, I didn’t make any money, but I came. It was pretty close. So what that shows you is that that’s laissez-faire, that’s common trade in the crypto world for them to be bought at that price. So $1,200 is going to price a lot of people out for the time being, but the idea is that, as you say, we get each point to you on the each 2.0 on the go, transaction fees come down and as well as that, because you can now get rewarded for staking your NFT, your Ethereum. What that means is that there’ll be less Ethereum freely available in the market and therefore scarcity goes up and therefore price follows. That is the theory.
CK: 24:27
Yes, and that’s that’s a very good theory to go by.
Dr James: 24:34
It is and I’ll be excited, and that development is due to happen. They’re a little loose on the timeframe, but some point this year, I believe. They keep moving the timeframe around. But what’s this space? What’s this space we talked about 8th? Do you believe in any other cryptos? Crypto is. Do you believe in Bitcoin as well? Do you believe in the spaces?
CK: 24:49
Oh, of course. Of course, when you have a look at Bitcoin itself, it’s a good way to transact with mass wealth. So if I wanted to send you a couple of billion pounds, I could send you them in around half an hour for around a pound. You can’t do that in the normal financial market. If I wanted to send you just a million pounds, it’s going to cost me around I don’t know 18,000 to 19,000 to send it. You’re going to have to wait four to five days for clearance. Whoever else has got to take their transaction portion, and by the end of it you’ve waited a long time and the money’s a lot less than what you anticipated. In sending With Bitcoin, you’ve got something there that, although it’s a little bit slow and clunky, we’ve got to also think that from Bitcoin’s inception, which was the seed look at the amount of plants and trees that have grown from it Everything that we’ve been working on at the minute through Ethereum and all the other blockchains will eventually, in my opinion, migrate onto the Bitcoin chain If Bitcoin doesn’t have smart contracts, the bigger projects that were at the beginning of the inception of crypto time. Let’s say where you’ve got your Bitcoin. You’ve got Litecoin, you’ve got the XRPs, and although people create stigma and oh well, no, you should stay out of this, you should stay out of that being a maximalist will never, help you ever like ever. If you want to have wealth for the rest of your life, you need to allocate assets in different baskets. You can’t just sit all your eggs in one basket. It only takes one trip for you to lose everything, so never do that. And within the crypto space itself, I say there’s so many projects out there trying to get something new and innovative cross-chains, oracles. We’ve got the metaverses being built, so oracles are going to be massive to try and interact with each other. I’m sure there’s not just going to be one metaverse, there’s going to be 20 million metaverses, or let’s say, 20 metaverses all linked in together somehow, whether it be, let’s say, a hypothetical hotel You’re walking through a door and you’re in metaverses, facebook. You work through another door and you’re on the Solana metaverse you walk through another door, and so on. So there will be an integration of sorts, because that’s what we’ve had from Bitcoin’s inception. Bitcoin created something. Ethereum sort of made the connections between itself and Bitcoin. Then something else came out and they all have a cross-chain of sorts where they’ve wrapped Ethereum, where they’re wrapping Bitcoin to integrate it within their networks.
Dr James: 27:45
Bullish on the space in general, then oh, definitely, definitely, when we’re so early.
CK: 27:50
when we have a look at how early we are, it’s 13 years, 13, 14 years maximum that we sat at at the minute. So we’re still on that Metcalfe’s law of network effect, where the word is spreading and the more and more people that join, the bigger the group gets. Assets have got to appreciating value.
Dr James: 28:16
Love it. There will be some people listening to this podcast who still don’t believe in crypto, don’t believe in Bitcoin, don’t believe in Ethereum. To those people, what would you say, coming from a place of love, coming from a place that you genuinely, earnestly just want these people to maybe consider how it could help them, and even if they choose not to invest in it or choose to become involved in it, that’s totally fine. But if they want it, to go and educate themselves and learn and maybe begin or at least increase their understanding so they can make a decision, from a point of view that it’s educated, on whether or not they like to be involved in the space, what would you say to those people, and where do you reckon they should go, just to gain a little bit of knowledge and then go from there?
CK: 29:03
Honestly, I think it’s completely fine. However, you think If you complete pessimistic about this space, then that’s completely fine. That is honestly, completely fine. But just look at what you’re surrounded by within society. What other mechanisms are there that will save you if the financial market crashes, if the banks decide to have bail-ins? Now, a bail-in is completely different to a bail-out. A bail-out, we, as taxpayers, pay the banks to bail them out of the crap, let’s say. Now, a bail-in is where they close the accounts. They tell you sorry, you can’t withdraw any more than a tenor a day. It goes for everybody, and that is exactly what happened in Greece. There was a bail-in. What will you do if something like that happens in your country, if the banks close the doors to which you’ve left them the keys to your wealth, because they are now custodians of your money? What are you going to do? Have you got an asset allocation somewhere else that will save you from this, whether it be gold, silver? We’re not saying you’ve got to get into crypto. We’re saying diversify what you do have in case something like this happens. But please take a look at crypto because since its inception, we’re sort of nearly doubling our money every single year, and that has been for the past 13 years without a break. So it’s up to you, of course, it’s up to you, and if you don’t believe in something, you should never jump in. And even if, after you have educated yourself within cryptocurrency which isn’t difficult there’s a million people out there on YouTube that you can derive information from. So, even after that that, you’ve decided that it’s not for you, that’s perfectly fine, but just be careful that you haven’t got all of your eggs in one basket, because that’s a one trip and you’ve lost everything.
Dr James: 31:07
Fair enough. It’s just about diversifying and spreading your wealth. You know, and as much as I love crypto, as much as I think it’s awesome and it can help so many people, I still would not put all of my money in one place, just the same as I wouldn’t put all my money in stocks, or all my money in bonds, or all my money in houses or all my money in commodity. That doesn’t make sense. But to have a portion allocated to it, that’s a different game entirely. Can I recommend one book? I’m going to recommend Cryptocurrency the Future of Money, and it’s by Paul Wigner and I can see it over there on my shelf. That is the most comprehensive discussion on the ins and outs of Bitcoin, what it’s designed to do, what Satoshi Nakamoto set out to create and what it’s supposed to remedy in society and the financial world in that book. So definitely would recommend picking it up. Ck, you’ve been an absolutely fantastic guest today and I have no doubt in my mind whatsoever that those people will have learned a lot about the NFT space and also the crypto space in general. Ck, if anybody wants to reach out to you to learn a little bit more about you and what you do, even just to connect, as in an altruistic fashion, just to learn a little bit more about the space. Where might they find you, my friend?
CK: 32:15
Yeah, you can go on the internet, wwwexcaliburwalletscom, and there’s the Contact Us page. You can get my email address and as an email we’ll respond within 24 hours. We create people’s generative artwork for them. We create their tokens for them, and you can be part of our own ecosystem if you don’t want to have your own.
Dr James: 32:40
Absolutely 110%. And can I just say, ck stole the show with his stall at CoinFest. It was bigger, better, bolder, more fantastic than anybody else’s. It had loads of screens and gizmos and shirts and merch and things like that, and that’s actually how we got this conversation started. And yeah, excalibur Wallet, that’s one that I’m going to watch and I’m considering I’m going to buy one of your NFTs at some point, my friend, because I like the project, but also someone says something powerful to me once. Someone said see the project, but see the person behind it as well. It’s not just that, and you can sometimes see the project as a means to being involved with the individual. That’s just the vehicle for doing it. That was some very powerful words and do you know what? On that note, I’m going to leave everybody with that. Thank you so much for an amazing episode. My friend CK, we’ll catch up really soon. Thank you, Mike. Well being and investing knowledge. Looking forward to seeing you on there.