 Okay, today with me on NFK Stars, I have Sharan Hegre, who has managed to explain the complex fintech world to his entire social media audience. So, Sharan, welcome to the show to begin with. How, I mean, you started this during the pandemic. How did you get into this entire thing? And how did you think that it would probably work out? Are you, you won't show at that point? Well, to be honest, I was absolutely not aware that it is going to be this big. To be honest, I started because I had a lot of free time once the pandemic hit. So I used to work as a management consultant before being a full-time content creator now. And back, as you know, management consultants, they travel a lot, well, 14, 16 hours and out of that, you know, probably three, four hours to spend on the road and in flights. So that went away once the pandemic happened. So I had a lot of free time that way, started consuming content on YouTube. I got inspired by a lot of creators on YouTube to start my own content and something that I was really good at was personal finance. So I thought, let me start making content on that. Start off with YouTube, then move to Instagram to promote my YouTube videos. But to be honest, I never really expected it to be this big. It just began as a hobby and very fortunate that now it has become a full-time career. Right. And how did you, I mean, going back even before that, how did your interest in finance start? So to say, maybe from childhood or is it something that you became fond of interested in maybe at a later stage? Well, finance for me has always been, you know, special because as a kid, me and my sister, my mom, I mean, she used to inculcate very good financial wisdom to us. By that, I mean that, you know, they used to allow us to understand the opportunity cost of everything that they're buying and make us question whether this is really worth buying a particular item or not. And like all of us, when we were little kids, I used to get money from our grandparents for our birthday. And I used to never spend it. I used to just keep it in my money belt. By the time I reached 18 years old, when I was in third year of engineering, that's when I had estimated close to 50,000 rupees. And that is when I started thinking, okay, I can't just let it, I said, let's cash and you can do something about this. And like any person who was interested about investing, the first thing that we want to learn about is stock market. So that is what I did. But then slowly, I realized that there are so many foundational concepts that you should know most people forget about when it comes to investing, but you all directly want to dive into the stock market. So if you see content today, I talk mostly about the boring personal finance things, insurance, taxation, which is really, really boring. That is how I became really good at finance. And then it was all self-studied. I don't have a formal background in finance. I started by watching videos and then reading by the time I was in the first video, I was very comfortable with the financial jargon that both reading full articles, enjoy reading articles. And now I can read a huge article of finance within half a minute because I'm very comfortable with the jargon views now. And then I finally moved to books, right? And that's how the entire journey began. Okay. I read something else about you as far as the whole NFT world is concerned, your unique outro sold for 65,000 now for normal people like me, what does that mean? What is unique outro? Yeah, so the use case of my NFT is applicable only to my audience, right? So the idea behind an NFT is that it's a non-fungible token and it derives its value from the people who values it, right? For example, let's say a Pokemon collectible might mean nothing to me and you, but it could mean thousands of dollars for someone who is a big Pokemon fan, right? Similarly, my NFT, so that my outro is my signature outro where I say follow my financial jargon. So that has been animated and created into a unique NFT. Now, the application or the use case behind the NFT is that the person who owns it gets the opportunity to do a collab with me, right? So that video will be posted both on my page and on his page. It could mean nothing to many people, but it could mean a lot. It could be a huge deal for someone, a person in my community or another content creator who is looking to expand the reach of his audience. So that is the fundamental difference between an NFT and a currency. Currency has the same value for everyone, 100 rupees note, the same as 100 rupees note in a wallet, but an NFT might mean the world to me, but nothing to you. So that is the story behind my NFT. Okay. Okay. But I think that sets some clarity on the matter. Also, as far as the future of NFTs and the metaverse is concerned, now there's a huge segment of population which says that every few years a new fact comes along and you really don't know what exactly could work, what could spectacularly fail. So what exactly according to you is in the future of NFTs and what are the risks involved which people should be aware of? Sure. So NFTs are of two types. One is the NFT which has a unique story behind it. For example, that the Beeple Art NFT which sold for 69 million dollars, which is essentially every pixel was designed by a particular person. So it became a unique piece of art by itself because it had a story behind it. And due to that story, it derived an incredible amount of value. And there are many NFTs like that which are being sold today, but that is exactly where the bubble lies. I feel that these story-related NFTs where it could be a random piece of cartoon or let's say just I've seen NFTs of cats and dogs being sold. So I think that is where the bubble lies that eventually people realize that this is just a random piece of artwork and not really worth that much money. So that is one set of NFTs. Second set of NFTs is actually have an application associated. For example, my NFT. There was a real world application associated with my NFT that it is not just a video of me that there is a use case behind it as well that the person who owns it gets obviously to do a collab with me. That's number one. Another example of a real world use case based NFT is Gary Vee's NFT. What happens there? The owners of those NFTs get access to his Discord community. And in this Discord community, I get the opportunity to interact with Gary Vee on a much more deeper level. Instead of him talking to 10 million people across the social media platform, now there's just 1000 people that he can focus his attention on. That's the difference. And then there are multiple levels within his community. For example, if you reach the highest level, you can also get an opportunity to do one on one talk with them. So these are some of the unique cases that are built into NFTs. And lastly, I would say another application in the real estate sector, wherein let's say there is this million dollar property in let's say Goa. Now, I want to buy this and give it out for rent, but I don't have a million dollars. So what we can do is we can divide this into 100 pieces and then each of us can take like $10,000 each of the property. And then this NFT will sort of ensure that the records of who owns each and every bit is immutable on the blockchain. And whenever there is rental income coming, it is automatically divided across the 100 owners of this property based on the smart contract. So there are so many applications which can be built in. Coming to the risk, like I said, be very of a story-based NFTs because they don't have a real-world application. But NFTs which have a real-world application, I would put my money on that. Okay, okay. I think you'll make a great teacher or lecturer in the future. But thanks a lot Sarin for talking to us and all the best for the future. Thank you so much. It was a pleasure talking to you.