Episode of My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.
Transcript
Note: This transcript was auto-generated from YouTube captions. It may contain errors and lacks speaker identification. A full Gemini audio transcript will replace this.
Kind: captions Language: en do you see with jacket it’s crazy i thought he meant you selling one nft for like a hundred grand i didn’t or however much you sold that like what’s the difference between a jpeg and an nft thing i didn’t see that you have one for 76 million dollars just put it up this morning do you think that’s gonna work look at this i love it i feel like i can rule the world i know i could be what i want to i put my law in it like no days off on the road uh just kind of an update on my bitcloud thing that i wanted to talk about but we can do it we can do it later if we want it doesn’t have to be at the beginning uh what i would rather you you t you lead it unless you want to talk about jack butcher like we have a ton of like this is all related crazy there’s like the world is so weird right now and amongst our friends i think that there’s probably a tier or two above but we are in such an odd tier where we have very close friends or you and me a little bit but less so have made a fair amount of money on all of this new stuff happen yeah it’s kind of crazy so i’ll say if you’re tired of us talking about bitcoin and nfts and all the crypto stuff um this is probably not it’ll probably skip ahead to the part where we’re gonna talk about you know dictionary.com later so so i would say we’re gonna go we’re gonna show you some range today we’re gonna talk about a website that’s like 25 years old and then we’re going to talk about uh you know a website that’s like 25 minutes old which is uh big cloud so let’s talk about jack first okay so we have a friend jack butcher who is uh he’s behind this account that’s kind of very popular on twitter called visualize value he himself was kind of like a designer background so very like kind of artistic guy and um by the way every time i say artistic i think i’m about to say autistic and so i have to like you know catch myself each time make sure i didn’t call them autistic so it could be that who knows well actually the thing about jack is he’s very smooth very very low-key nicest guy in the world and uh i met i met jack a year ago a year ago i contacted him and asked him to do this design stuff and then he was just up and coming right and sarah and i my wife became friends with jack and his wife and we they spent thanksgiving with us down here in austin where uh they just had a baby and we’ve been friends with them talking all that stuff and he did his story is that he used to live in new york city him and his wife he’s british he he came here 10 years ago they shared a one bedroom or sorry a studio apartment that was 400 square feet and he was they were nothing i mean they were they they were they tried to start an agency business they didn’t go so well and they were on their last dollar and this is only like 18 months ago right okay so so he he kind of pivots to basically saying okay within the agency it’s work that i do the part that i like and i’m good at and other people don’t seem to like what they really want are these like pitch decks i’m making i’m really good at making these slides where it’s just a rectangle and i communicate some information on it and so that’s where the visualized value brand came from was he’s just putting out like a little you know like an image a rectangle that would take a concept and like bring it to life visually and so he started off getting popular by just taking a bunch of naval’s uh popular tweets you know sayings his little kind of one-liners and he would create a graphic out of it and he has this one graphic style if you’re on twitter you’ve seen it it’s just black and white uh it’s always a black background with white text on top and a little kind of like very simplistic minimalistic um like graph or chart or drawing on top of it okay so that’s visualized value so he does like the normal creator thing he gets a little bit of an audience his twitter goes to a hundred thousand people he creates a course he creates kind of like a paid community for people who want to learn this thing and he’s doing well for himself right and that’s where we met very well and he he he’s it does he does north of a million dollars a year in revenue and the only uh expenses are like small software stuff and then him and his wife exactly and um so he’s doing he’s doing very well for himself right but it’s all relative she’s doing much better now so what happened um this craze around nfts came out and if you don’t know what nft is just think of it like digital art that people buy and uh crypto people people really like it because it’s virtual art in the same way that crypto is sort of like a virtual money or a digital money so anyways jack starts doing nfts so jack basically takes his same art that he’s posting on twitter for free and he’s like no now you can own this piece of art so now you can own this post that i’m putting up and so he just dabbles you know just does an experiment i don’t know what the first one sold for i think it was like one ether right uh one when he used two two or three thousand dollars yeah just close to two grand and uh it was like 1.5 ether or something like that so it’s like two or three thousand bucks still pretty sweet right like this is just a you know dot png file that he otherwise uploads to twitter for free and now somebody wanted to own the png file because they’re fans of his and this meant something to them and they had a bunch of crypto gains that they could reinvest their chucky cheese money right and so um okay so now he’s like stepping it up we’ll fast forward he does some more nfts he releases another nft this one gets bid up and gets bought for 33 eth which is i think something like um what does 33e 338 times like 70 grand it’s like 70 grand so he sells one of his images for 70 grand okay and i called him right when i saw that i go jack is this real did someone he goes yeah it’s crazy mate that’s all i said right right exactly because he’s not like he’s not like a schemer in any way but i think he is smart and he is interesting he likes to dabble but like he wasn’t he’s not trying to pull a quick one he’s like putting his art out there and people are buying it and so i actually message the buyer and i go why the heck do you buy this thing it’s some random you know random username he just goes oh you know i love jack and i think this is going to appreciate value and i you know i just really love this like i just love the i love the art and i was like wow okay fantastic so that’s the guy bought it for 70 grand so then he did something even crazier which i’m talking about the packs do you know the packs yeah so to explain that one so the the part of the story is the the crate there’s two crazy parts of the story the most recent thing that happened which we’ll talk but the first crazy thing is he was like you know what if i did like people love jack he’s got a cult following probably more than sean people love shawn they used to love me then they moved to sean now they love johnny love jack and what he did was he created a website where you were buying a pack he had 12 packs all it said was pack one pack two pack three it looked like a imagine like a baseball card but with a jack butcher cover on it it was just black and it said visualize value pack one right and you would buy these packs having no idea what the nft art was in it right he had 12 of them and people were bidding on them and each one sold for around 10 to 15 000 which is i thought amazing until we get to the final part of the story or at least the most recent part of the story exactly so he so he gets to today i log on to twitter as i do first thing in the morning uh what’s going on in the world tonight holy [ ] jack butcher has listed a new piece of art for 76 million dollars something like that what is this what’s the exact number 72 76 million he basically and it’s called fame and what he did was the most the highest um priced nft thus far in the history of mankind was people the the artist people uh who’s like jack but even more popular so people had done a a few drops those drops were like kind of in the one to five million range-ish and then the most popular nft of all time was sold for 69 million dollars recently and like there’s some rumors that like that was sort of a manufactured sale like somebody came in and did it just to like they’re gonna like i don’t know these are rumors but rumors were that they kind of made a publicity stunt so anyways jack uh basically says cool this is a nft called fame and what fame is it will be the number one priced uh piece of artwork in a digital artwork in the world right so he prices it above the people i wasn’t i wasn’t referring to this i was referring to what he did last i didn’t even see this this is crazy today last last week what he did was he he wrote he did an nft and it says here’s the difference between a uh a jpeg and an nft and it just had a verified it he basically made a tweet and then he sold that tweet for like 150 000 right which i thought was crazy this is way crazier yeah because it’s crazier because it might work exactly so okay so let’s walk through this if you’re jack why i’ll tell you why do this and why it might actually work why do this well if nothing else this is just a great way to drive attention uh press and um and just do something that’s bold right so pricing you know pricing a piece of your artwork for 77 million dollars it doesn’t even mean it doesn’t even matter if somebody buys it just pricing it for 77 million dollars is uh is already gonna put you on the map the second thing is this might be a you know let’s say take the three outcomes somebody actually buys it for 77 million dollars right um there’s been crypto punks now the the number one crypto punk sold for abraham you look this up how much did that crypt the top crypto punk sell for i think it was like seven seven million dollars something like that people sold for 69 million so there is a chance there is a maybe five percent two percent chance that this thing actually sells for 77 million dollars which would be incredible second thing this might be a shoot for the stars you land on the moon situation uh yeah the crypto poke sold for seven and a half million um and the guy who bought it by the way this is kind of cool i don’t know how you pronounce this but the person who bought it his handle is perugia or pervugias i don’t know what it is i’m not in the art world but that’s the same that’s an homage basically that’s the same name of the guy who stole the mona lisa which is what helped catapult the mona lisa to fame was when it was stolen um and that was like part of the part of what made the mona lisa even more remarkable and more valuable now most valuable piece of artwork in the world um and so so okay so by the way great usage of the word homage yeah thank you um we’re trying to class it over here so all right so so he might not sell it for 77 million but even if it sells for 1.7 million that’s 1.7 million dollars that he just you know manufactured through his own creativity and you know and probably i would bet you like four days of effort um i got i have chills looking at this tweet that he put out the reason why this is so crazy is it might work someone might be crazy enough to do this right he basically has a no loss situation and because jack’s brand is because he is authentic he is um not kind of like a you know quick flash in the pan trying to make a quick quick dollar like he’s literally almost like you know he’s more of an artist really than he is like anything else and so he’s been doing this for a while he’s been creating daily content he’s been building up a following and so just like people did that people did people did a new piece of art every day for 10 years and so it’s like you know he’s an overnight success 10 years in the making and i think jack’s very similar so i see jack having a no lose situation and this is nfts are a thing that basically fits his skill set and so like there’s a lot of reasons people kind of [ ] on nfts right now one is that it’s overvalued it’s a bubble what do you really own look i can just screenshot and boom i own the thing too you know like there’s a bunch of ways you can make fun of this well one of the good things that came out of this is that um you know in most of these these like kind of hype cycles it’s the suits on wall street that get rich this time at least it’s starving artists that get rich and so you know at the very worst even if the whole thing comes crashing at least a few artists got paid and you know who could be really too mad at that i i can’t so so i think this is kind of like an amazing thing jack’s doing this boggles my mind should we ask him to come on do you want jack to come on yeah we should for sure are you friends with him yeah all right not as close as you guys but yeah we’re we’re close you should mention we should leave you hops on today just be like you free to come talk about your fame thing for for five minutes let’s see if he hops on at the end of this all right i just texted him all right we’ll we’ll come we’ll come back to that uh [ ] crazy i uh yeah i almost have chills talking about it would it be weird going to a different topic or do you want to stay on nfts and stuff like that um we can do whatever you want is everything less is everything less exciting well i think it’s going to go two ways it’s going to be if i’m listening to this and i’m most people who are listening to this are kind of like not as knee-deep into this world as we are and and we’re still like just kind of dabbling and so the average person is probably not you know familiar with all these things definitely not taking action and definitely not getting rich all these things so there’s i think it’s going to be kind of polarizing some people are going to think oh wow this is really cool i should go check this out and learn more about this some people are like this is so stupid i think this is all just like you know a giant carnival game that you know some kind of ponzi scheme that i don’t want to hear more about so i don’t know it’s probably polarizing let me move let’s do a different one um let’s do a different one and we’ll only spend about 10 minutes on it and then we’re probably going to come back to this all right i actually want to come back to this i want to come back to big cloud i want to talk come back to angel investing okay um okay but someone i i tweeted out that i’m gonna start a youtube channel and someone said you should talk about your research process and that’s a really hard thing to talk about but i want to bring up one one topic uh of my research process as well as one interesting thing that i found so what i like to do is i like to find out who um is buying different parts of real estate or different real estate so i go to the realdeal.com and there’s this one segment called yolanda says it’s like this fake author named yolanda he goes i heard a rumor that this person’s buying a house the owner is this this and this yolanda hears that um they’re gonna offer this much money i have no idea jolan is a fake person right it’s just like a blog a blog website gossip blog yeah for real estate mostly in new york and la though so they’re kind of famous famous e-purse people doing it and what i love to do is find out who who’s buying the real estate and then i go and research them and the reason why is one of the best ways to figure out if someone’s actually wealthy or not is by the real estate holdings that they own that’s one of the few things that it’s really hard to fake i mean you could fake it but if someone has bought a 20 million home the likelihood that they’re worth 100 million plus is incredibly high um you know it’s hard to like [ ] that right and so real estate holdings is one of the best way to get an indicator of someone’s wealth or it’s a great way not the best way but it’s a great way and i found one that interested me a ton this guy’s name was brian carringer and he uh bought a house in malibu in 2019 for 20 million dollars i hadn’t heard brian i know a lot of internet entrepreneurs um i hadn’t heard of them so i researched them and this is the guy who started dictionary.com kind of a crazy thing when you think about it because who really thinks of dictionary dictionary.com so in the 1990s this guy started uh in 1995 he started a business called lexico publishing and lexico publishing owned the thesaurus.com and dictionary.com and he bootstrapped it and he grew and he sold it in 2005 to iac for a hundred million dollars and then uh two years ago iac sold dictionary.com to dan gilbert you know dan gilbert of quicken loans yep he sold dictionary.com for uh or they sell dictionary.com for 100 million dollars so they they didn’t do a very good job with it but dictionary.com gets around 40 dictionary.com and thesaurus.com gets around 40 million uniques a month and does about 20 million in revenue and they have barely any employees i i believe dozens of employees it’s incredibly fascinating because this is what i call how do they make money it’s just adsense or is there something else just ads all it is is ads and it’s an incredibly interesting company because it’s one of the things that i call a for it you can let’s call it i call it a forgotten property like just things that you forget that even exist but just quietly make money and are quite repeatable they’re not like necessarily sexy um it’s like the sweaty startup of internet yeah yeah you know if sweaty startup means a lot landscaping business this is kind of like that for the internet sure and but they’ve done a really good job of staying relevant so they do a word of the day which people like particularly love like it’s a huge email list of we just get the word of the day they also do a word of a year word of the word uh of the year so when donald trump was president in 2016 i think the word of the year was xenophobic because a lot of people were searching what xenophobic means right uh this past year in 2020 it was pandemic and it was it’s almost like a recap of the year and it’s actually kind of culturally relevant and also what they do is when someone like kendall gender or kylie jenner whatever the woman is who is quote self-made they they’ll do funny stuff like they’ll tweet the definition they’ll retweet a tweet of her calling herself self-made and they’ll they’ll say actually the definition of self self-made is success unaided or something like that like they like they’re pretty snarky i find this to be incredibly interesting um because it’s something i didn’t think about and that’s kind of cool yeah you went from 100 to zero real quick there at the end yeah uh okay so we actually had a friend who was looking at buying dictionary.com you know about this no we had a friend that was looking at buying dictionary.com and merging it with another business i can’t remember the name of it now urbandictionary.com is another big one that one gets about 40 or 50 million uniques a month and who owns that wait uh just a guy a guy in san francisco aaron peckham so there’s a similar uh and you wrote another one on here that that’s similar to me which is chess.com and so yeah i don’t know as much about it as you do so fill in the gaps but i was looking at it i was like oh man chess.com is a great domain uh chess is this kind of like very quiet you know just like super sticky just relevant it’s a classic game right it’s just been relevant for so long and then with queen’s gambit it got like way more popular recently there’s all these crazy charts spiking the trends of people searching for chess chess boards check how to get good at chess like what is queen’s gambit how do you do a queens gambit all those things and so it had they have 200 employees i bet you it’s worth if you told me i heard a rumor they’re thinking about selling and i would bet it would be worth a quarter of a billion dollars exactly that’s that’s what i was going to say they have a huge amount of traffic what’s their traffic monthly it’s uh i don’t i’ll look it up but they have around 50 million registered users right and they’re not just like it’s not flyby traffic like dictionary.com thesource.com they’re going to have a lot more traffic but it’s going to be fly by 200 200 million monthly uniques according to similar web most of which is direct incredible right and so 200 million they make money way more though do you know how they make money no i well i can guess tell me if i’m right so i would guess that basically they sell some kind of you know course tutorial a way to get better at chess do they do that yeah and so you can meet with coaches and you can pay coaches money right can they do they also have some kind of like premium pro membership where you get matched with better people and your stats get saved and something like that yep yep okay so so dead simple business model around a classic game that nobody owns the ip to right it’s not like saying um monopoly well you can’t do monopoly somebody owns monopoly you know i don’t know who hasbro or whoever owns monopoly you can do it with chess and this is one of the reasons why we talked about religion as a really interesting fun uh you know fundamental or like base layer for any business because nobody owns religion but it’s a highly recognized brand with super high affinity so i love businesses that are you know like prey the app that’s you know basically calm for for christianity or there’s versions of this for the muslim religion and so i love religion as one of the primary substrates because you have a billion people who know about it but uh nobody owns the ip so you can use the ip and so what what what was our friend gonna do who who i wonder who our friend is so i don’t remember exactly i don’t know how much we could really talk about it but they were gonna basically buy two properties at the same time dictionary.com and one other one and because they were like look dictionary.com gets a ton of traffic but it’s not so sticky of a service it doesn’t really have a great monetization potential it’s just display display ads and then this other thing is a great business model and has um uh you know has great stickiness and maybe we merged the two like let’s just okay here’s a hypothetical i don’t know if this is exactly what they said but if you’re grammarly would you pay for would you go buy dictionary.com and thesaurus right because you’re going to go get 50 60 million people coming to look up words and find out what words mean and you can say hey by the way if you you know if you ever feel like you want to sharpen up with this maybe you should uh install grammarly which is a great way to write you know choose better vocab write write perfect grammar and become a better writer right like they have a business model attached to it that that that makes sense and so i wonder if there were other things like maybe i would if i was grammarly i would maybe buy dictionary.com um i just thought it was interesting because you don’t really think about this another one that i’ve been i’m going to do research on is easyjiff.com do you know that i know that one yes i actually so i have a slack channel called buyouts in my slack and uh i just have my slack with ben and we have a slack of buyouts which is basically company uh websites that i think would be awesome to buy easy jif was the first one i ever put in that that channel because i was like oh my god i love this i love this simple tool that gets a ton of traffic it’s zero to no maintenance and uh and it makes money you know remove.bg is another one like that uh where you can just remove the background of a photo and then you pay for credits so it’s like you don’t need to know photoshop to remove the background of a photo and i just think that’s genius so easyjiff.com it’s the letters e the letter z and then jiffgif.com eight million uniques a month you go there and you upload a uh video and it turns it into a gif uh i was doing research on it looks like the guy it looks like it’s only one uh a small team a couple people um made in latvia uh uh lots if i’m dictionary.com uh one thing that they should do is they should take a page out of the new york times playbook so i don’t know if you’ve you probably have because you’re in the you know you’re in media you care about the stuff but most people aren’t aware of how new york times really makes money what it what its business looks like today and a pretty large part of their business i i haven’t done the research because it’s off top of my head but very large i know tens of millions of dollars a year i believe comes from their games division particularly one game crossword and so um i play this game every single day the new york times mini crossword it is uh literally a two-minute game that like kind of stimulates the brain and it’s fun to do and it requires like no kind of hand-eye coordination type of thing and it’s not you can’t get super addicted to it because it’s like one a day um so the mini crossword is like they took the crossword which is a big part of the papers okay now the paper’s all digital how do we make a digital version of the crossword and then they made it mini so that it’s actually like simpler for the average person to do you can like pretty much always win and um super fun game and so the i don’t know what the the other revenue numbers of crossword and in the game so keep on going so if i’m dictionary.com that’s you know whoever’s the ceo of dictionary.com hey free idea that i think would generate probably eight to ten million dollars a year you should come out with your take all these popular uh games like word scramble or mini crossword or um you know all these different little word word puzzle games that are very popular in the app store and they have trouble with distribution good games trouble with distribution all you need to do is reskin that as the dictionary.com game and put it as a pop-up for people coming to the site to hey download this fun game and uh you know even if you’re converting you know half a percent of your traffic to this thing you’re gonna end up driving a lot of revenue because this game is these games work and all they need is distribution and maybe people who come to diction.com or they subscribe to the word of the day email like i think they would like to play these little word games they’re very popular even my mom plays these little word scramble games okay so uh some information on new york times new york times is a publicly traded company so this is where i’m getting some of the numbers but i don’t always break out the revenue by segment so i’m doing a little bit of guesstimation but i would bet i’m right within 10 to 20 percent um so in 2020 new york times said they had 600 000 people paying for the crossword puzzle only just crossword puzzle that was in 2020 2020 was a huge year for uh subscribe subscription remember everything’s actually yeah everything doubles but let’s just round that up to eight hundred thousand for six hundred thousand so eight hundred thousand i believe it cost six dollars and ninety five cents a month for a crosswind puzzle but so let’s run that up to seven dollars so seven dollars times eight hundred thousand we’re looking at 5.6 million dollars a month 60 million or uh 67 million dollars a year in subscription revenue only from crossfit puzzles right that’s it that’s just the crossfit puzzle division right [ ] crazy right right exactly uh and they’re like i read an article recently uh where the guy was like you know someone from the new york times was like yeah we’re quadrupling down on games games exploded during kovid crossword is already an amazing franchise for us the next they have another game i forgot what it is but they have like you know a few staple games that are like these classics and they’re like you know we’re we’re actually a games company the guys literally said that he goes you know we we don’t just you know just put the game the same exact game on a phone we like kind of reinvent it so that it’s like even more fun on your phone we try to like put a twist on the game we’re not just going to come out with you know the classic you know like for example 2048 if you ever played that little numbers game where you slide the tiles and it like you know it adds up to 2048 um the game’s awesome and so new york times can come out with a version of 2048 which is like um you know their own twist on the game so i found that to be pretty interesting and that’s what i would do if i was dictionary.com um so in this segment the takeaway should be learn about real estate and read the real deal and google all the entrepreneurs and the reason why you do that is you’re going to discover stuff like dictionary thesaurus.com and you’re eventually going to learn about crossfit puzzles and the reason why this is important what we’re discussing is just interesting stuff but the reason why this is all important is we are showing that you can make a killing a [ ] killing hundreds of millions of dollars to the point where you’re buying a 20 million dollar home on the beachfront of malibu more than most celebrities will ever be able to afford and you’re doing it by building something that you’re just like it starts as like a silly thing that you never would have thought could actually become this big and when you see this stuff it actually inspires you and or at least it inspires me knowing that like i can turn something silly into something profitable and that’s a badass that is awesome just knowing that that’s possible it is cool it’s kind of like why does everyone why did five people break the four minute mile in the same year when previously no one had done it it’s because when you see what’s possible it it it pushes the boundary and it and it shows you what you can do that’s neat to me so we should also say uh so two things that i took away from that you are really good at figuring out uh like you sniff out these little interesting stories because you just think who’s that guy how does he drive that car how much is that car yeah how’d you get that money right and actually there’s a famous tick tock channel that just does only this i don’t know if you used to but he goes up to people getting out of like lamborghinis or like you know like just killer cars and just be like hey man uh what do you do for a living and the guy’s like what and he just said yo well what do you do for a living i just i’m curious you guys like i’m in real estate real estate cool man and he just leaves right listen that’s it yeah it kind of bothers them for a second and then you know the person will be like you know i’m a cannabis entrepreneur i’m uh you know i’m a hedge fund guy i uh i’m a youtuber i’m a whatever right well uh the joke of that channel is the people say one of two things the women say i’m a wife yeah and they like are joking and then they also or they’ll say i sell drugs right right exactly and then they like zoom away um and so so i love that channel at first i think that’s just like a really simple fun idea for a tick tock channel and then um but but there is some like kind of merit to that and it’s really helped me in life which is basically anytime you see somebody who’s got an interesting lifestyle i like to figure out two things one is is your whole day like this what’s your day like what do you do how do you do that and i like to see how people architect their life right like and that sort of like it’s like like you said about the four minute mile it opens your mind to what’s possible so recently i got this like a private chef person who’s like making meals for me they don’t they don’t come to my house they don’t make food in my house but it’s like a delivery service meal prep service but let’s call it a private chef right because it’s not doordash it’s somebody who’s giving me a menu or giving feedback yeah you’re doing the same because i’m doing it you know trying to be fit you’re trying to do this for the same reason you want to eat healthier and hey if you can afford it that’s a convenient way to do it right where you know you got the the p word privilege to be able to do it and so uh the reason i think that’s even possible or i realized that was because the investor in my last company he had a private chef that was like a former michelin star chef at a restaurant this guy elgin amazing chef who was like would be in his house and he would make you know lunch and dinner for them every single night and i was like whoa i didn’t even realize people have that and it’s not that oh you know i want that but it’s i didn’t even realize that’s a possibility of a lifestyle that you could have it is a upgraded part of your life and so there’s all these little examples i’ve i’ve had in my life of like like i have a cousin who has like a virtual assistant in the philippines and i asked him how do you do what do you do with that how do you set it up how did you find the right person right just get real curious about different people’s lifestyles and how they architect how they design their life and you kind of you can pick and choose from there what works for you what you want out of your life the second thing is why did the guy behind dictionary.com like make it work right because it’s like kind of a simple idea well he was early to a platform right so to get the domain dictionary.com you couldn’t do that today but you could do it when the web was early and not everybody believed which is a perfect segue back to bitcloud new platforms by the way speaking of big clout uh i texted jack while we were talking he’s going to be joining any second now oh perfect um so we brought this up on the last podcast because ryan beagleman came on a friend of ours came on and was like dude i haven’t had this much fun on a product since like the early days of facebook i’m obsessed with this thing and he was asking us like are you going to use it are you going to claim your account so if you missed that episode let me just give you the like 10 seconds of what this is uh imagine you know if if like robin hood and twitter had a baby so it’s basically a stock market for people so you go on the app bigcloud.com and you just see all these people and you can buy instead of just following them or just liking their content you can actually buy into their stock essentially you can buy their crater coins and so you could buy their coins and every time you buy the price goes up and every time you sell the price goes down and so it’s kind of like a stock market for people’s reputations and um and so when we did the pod my my coin was about 1500 at the time while we were recording it and ryan was like my fourth biggest holder he had bought up a bunch and he was like are you gonna use this thing or not i said sure i’ll give it a try and i’ll see what happens of course dude yeah you know like there’s guys who take like like my friend jack takes every vitamin if you’re like hey i have this vitamin boom done take it right like he takes every vitamin or he takes every type of supplement you could ever you are like that with bitcoin or any type of like this isn’t bad but like schemes so it’s like hey there’s this thing called the big cloud okay hang on yep i just uploaded hundreds of thousands of the hundreds of thousands and i’m in that is you you you tried everything i learned i learned from you well i don’t think it’s all the best but i do at the beginning you know at the beginning it makes sense to be optimistic when everybody else is uh you know pessimistic or skeptical uh you’re like you fall to this is the greatest thing i’ve ever seen that’s your default no no my default is i’m game to try it and then if it starts to have some merit i’m like okay you know what’s really cool about this x y and z even if a b and c but that’s not how people perceive it i had people message me after our thing saying like why the hell is sean uh pumping this big club thing it’s a ponzi scheme and i was like i don’t know he likes it that’s just right that’s his opinion he likes it but they were mad at they were mad at me because we were promoting this and i was like i don’t know so let me explain so we have two friends so you have one of your best buddies is jack smith um and jack he came on the podcast we did an episode with him back when this was an interview show and i asked him i said well how did you create this bungle thing that now sold for i know 750 million dollars or something like that and the root of his thing was i try every platform early as soon as something comes out i want to try it and in fact yes if you go on big cloud jack smith owns two cents of my my coin oh he was there before me of course he was right on product he became the number one power user as soon as product hunt came out he used it every single day with nfts and collectibles um he’s like the number one power user on all these different platforms for digital for for for fractional ownership and collective yeah on uh rally road he’s the number one buyer exactly and um and so that’s what jack does and it’s not that all of these will work it’s that you only need one to work for it to pay off big right if you were early in twitter uh you know even just as a user you would have a big following if you were early as an investor in any of these companies if they hit it gets very big so that was the first kind of huh i noticed that from jack then i saw then i was talking to my friend fer khan he’s the cto and was co-founder of my previous company probably the best kind of technology guy i know and furcon’s always dabbling so he was the one telling me about bitcoin and ethereum before anybody else before and i didn’t listen to him i didn’t buy and he was just buying like he put like five grand into ethereum in the ico or something like that you know like and so you know the ico of ethereum was 17 cents and now it sells now every ether is is uh 1700 right so you can see the type of appreciation you get when one of these hits and he’s had you know for every one that one ether that hits big like that he has you know maybe 50 or 100 things that don’t fully pan out like for example he’s huge on vr he bought me an oculus i was like dude let’s play vr poker together let’s try vr and like vr hasn’t hit in a big way yet and he spent you know thousands of dollars on vr he spent you know hundreds of hours building in vr and so far that’s yielded nothing but i asked him what’s what’s your deal with this is it because you like am i dumb i don’t think vr is big you you seem to be all over he goes no what i do is anytime there’s an interesting technology i’m just curious about it and therefore i’m liking the first 10 000 people that really understand every new technology and he’s like because of that one of those technologies is going to be big so right now for example he’s super into vertical farming and like hydroponic farming and he’s just like all about indoor farming all about vertical farming and like so he’s we have this one hour a week called the cool [ ] hour where i just sit back on zoom and he just kind of shows me the cool [ ] he’s been trying out this week and this week was all about vertical farming and it blew my mind i didn’t know anything about it and he was telling me all the reasons it’s awesome why is this just not an episode that we do it should it really should be because it’s so good it’s kind of my edge right now because he tells me about [ ] and then i go take action on it and like he’s even earlier than me so he gets more upside but i’m still very early just by being buddies with this guy so anyway that’s a long way of saying it in technology it pays to be optimistic it pays to be an early adopter if you’re willing to look stupid sometimes by by putting some time or money into things that fail you you will net out way way ahead just by being early into a bunch of interesting things at the very least you learn um but at the most one of these hits and then you gain a bunch of like you build a big network there or you make a bunch of money because you invested in it so anyways that’s that’s my overall philosophy i totally see the people who are like bitcloud is dumb this is a scam this is a sham this is you know this will never work hey i think there’s merits to all those arguments but from my opinion i just thought this sounds interesting sounds very different than anything else that’s out there i tried it and i immediately liked it so the first 24 hours i was hooked by the second 24 hours i had put a hundred thousand dollars into the platform you know don’t tell my wife so right now my um you is a that’s a lot of money that’s a lot of dollars it’s a lot of money yeah so let me tell you why it is a little bigger thing right now my thing is uh my market cap on here is it goes 170 to 200 000 i sold some of my stuff and a guy wired or um sent me money on coinbase uh ten thousand dollars right [Laughter] i’m like i think this is silly but like i told you this is silly and you’re still gonna give me money okay fine i’ll take it i sold some of mine yeah you sold some errors i have not sold any of mine uh and instead i actually invested money into the platform or bought a bunch of people’s coins including yours and so um so i own a bunch of coins for all these different people that i think might appreciate and so i would say there is still a i would say in the long run this working in the long run i think there’s like a less than two percent chance this works in the long run if it does work my hundred thousand dollars is going to be worth tens of millions of dollars but that’s the that’s the long run um two percent case okay well i wouldn’t put up a hundred grand for a two percent win because i actually have a second way to win in this case which is that i have now been an early adopter of basically every crypto thing over the last i don’t know five six years and some of them are dumb some of them work whatever and what i’ve seen is that anytime a kind of new exciting disruptive idea comes out whether it’s icos or nfts or whatever pick your favorite acronym there’s like a hype cycle that takes place there’s the people who are there’s the people who make it that’s the people who buy in at the beginning and get get access and then there’s like a bunch of crypto enthusiasts who are believers in the general like innovation space of crypto that then say oh cool this sounds fun i want to go try it and that’s happening right now with nfts like we talked about our friend jack who’s selling a bunch of nfts for you know hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars it’s because there are crypto enthusiasts who say nfts are really cool i want to invest in that the crypto enthusiasts are not many of them hate big clout uh yeah sure some many many if there’s crypto enthusiast is not one group of people it’s broken up into like what’s called bitcoin maximum list they don’t want to talk about anything except for bitcoin and they don’t want to they they want to invest 100 into bitcoin then there’s ethereum people who are like all about ethereum then there’s people who are just just trying to degenerately gamble across all the different like different crypto projects that exist i’m talking about more about them the gamblers because i understand the game more money have you made more money off bitcoin than you have selling your company that’d be cool if you did it would have been sweet i think in the long run i will but uh as of now no but you know if you project forward five years i would almost certainly my crypto holdings will be worth more than what i sold the company for when i got out of the sale do you think that what percentage of your net worth do you have a crypto so i i tweeted out that i was moving 25 into of my net worth into bitco into bitcoin and not just like not just liquid net worth just net worth i ended up getting about 20 in but the price kept rising as i was doing it um so my my overall my average buy price is about eleven thousand dollars per bitcoin um but anyways my my holdings now are like i don’t know almost fifty percent of my net worth just because crypto has appreciated so i didn’t put in as much as i said i was going to it was a little bit less but it appreciated so now it makes up more and i didn’t sell i didn’t like sell to rebalance let’s put it that way that’s crazy so anyways the thing i want to tell you about is so that’s my general my my let’s let’s play out three scenarios scenario one uh let’s say with big clout this is a a scam i don’t believe it’s a scam given that they have backers and investors like andres and horowitz and sequoia chamoth coin you know coinbase capital the winklevoss like basically like everybody who’s legit in the technology slash crypto space like these are tier one names that are invested in this thing i don’t think it’s a scam it’s definitely not a scam in the sense of that’s like it’s malicious people right so that’s that’s like one one thing that does happen in the crypto world people take your money and they [ ] run away right that is literally that has literally happened so i don’t think it’s that um and i’ll bucket in you know one of the big criticisms is you can’t withdraw your money yeah you have a huge amount of value in there but you can’t withdraw yet i would bucket that into the scam argument like if you think they’ll never allow you to withdraw i think that’s silly that would be a scam then after that podcast i kind of understood what the heck big clout was which is it’s basically a social network where you can bet on the people who are gonna you know and their reputation and so as a as a as a participant you could say okay instead of just following sam if i think sam is awesome and sam’s going to only get more popular over time i can actually invest in sam which is a little bit different than like patreon or sub stack where it’s like i’ll pay you for your [ ] that’s different that’s like okay do i want to buy this content or not instead this is i’m a believer in you and so like back to that thousand true fans concept it’s like if i’m a believer in you i can invest in you and as more people realize that you’re the [ ] um your price will continue to go up and i will actually i’ll go up with you my my stock and you will appreciate so i can actually make money being a curator being somebody who um who recognizes talent before others do who recognizes reputations that are on the rise so i think that’s really cool that’s a new thing you couldn’t do that before if i was an early user of snapchat or like twitter or facebook or whatever it was cool but like i didn’t actually gain anything from it financially if i discovered jack you know you said you met jack when jack had a kind of smaller following you didn’t gain financially from jack’s following growing and so i think that’s a new thing that that that’s a really cool mechanic now on the other side let’s say you’re let’s say you’re the creator let’s say you’re jack you can basically go on and say cool you know what i’m like a little mini warren buffett i want to have my berkshire hathaway summit my my shareholder meeting so you can basically say cool for my top 25 coin holders um i will meet with you personally and you know in a zoom or in person somewhere um and that’s a privilege you get by being one of my top shareholders or i can say hey i’m gonna produce some premium content and instead of having to set up a whole different app like substance or patreon or or something else like you just say great if you own over 10 of my coin you get this thing um and so it gives people a way to not just buy the content but to be a long-term holder of you and i think that’s really cool too as a creator and so you’re in your market cap right now it’s like six hundred thousand dollars how did it did it get that high because you bought your own stuff or i’ve only bought net one coin of mine um so why are people buying you or how are they even hearing it i heard about it on the pod i think so i think that was one thing but then otherwise there’s just people hearing about big cloud because a whole bunch of people join right like so even just in our little network right andrew wilkinson joined two days ago and you know he’s a super legit person and he tweeted out today i woke up at five in the morning thinking about big clouds and he’s like you know and not just all good things right he said like the design kind of sucks i kind of hate the name i wish it didn’t feel so shady because the way they’re doing this this and this but here’s some things that like the mind virus has infected him where it’s like wait this does open up pandora’s box of a whole bunch of new capabilities and things that you just kind of kind of couldn’t do before and definitely couldn’t do in a platform that had any legs and this has legs about 170 million dollars has been deposited onto this most of that is from their institutional backers like andrews and horowitz and sequoia and those other guys um but but the rest has been you know maybe eight to ten million dollars has come in from from users who are buying into the platform uh the cto of hubspot darmesh he’s on there every day me and him are chatting on there all the time because he’s like he’s posting like you know he’s a daily user of this thing because i think it’s a cool new technology cool app and he’s playing with it he bought money he he bought my stuff exactly and so uh i’ve had a lot of fun basically speculating on people buying a bunch of people’s coins and i think i think those people are awesome or undervalued so for example i’ll give you an example i saw this guy on big clout and he was posting a bunch of analysis so he’s like exploring the blockchain and he’s he says look because this is built on the blockchain it’s all public you know if i go to facebook i can’t tell you how many daily active users facebook has they have to disclose that information for me to know it but with things built on the blockchain you just see it and so um so this guy’s posting like look here’s how many new people signed up today here’s how many posts there’s been and so you can see like how much engagement this thing has or if it starts to fade you’ll be able to see it fade so i bought this i bought a [ ] ton of this guy’s coin i bought ten thousand dollars of this analyst coin because this guy was super low priced because nobody knows who the heck this guy is but i knew that if if there are people who are power users of the platform they’re enthusiastic about big clout they’re going to love all the information the 24 7 news cycle about big cloud they’re going to love this guy’s analysis because it’s not easy to do it’s not easy to go on the blockchain and figure this stuff out so i thought oh if this guy’s if this guy’s gonna put reports up every day he’s gonna get popular and so already i’ve doubled my money on this guy just because um i was able to like have a strategy have a a skilled gamble as what i’ll call it right same reason i love poker same reason i like investing in startups and the stock market is because there is definitely this like deep itch scratches of like trying to put in money and triple it and make more money um combined with some skill there is a strategy to it it’s not just a slot machine where you just pull the lever and you hope for the best so for for whatever reason for some combination of reasons this [ ] is so addictive to me and maybe this will fade i’m only three or four days in but man i’ve used the hell out of this thing in three or four days and i don’t know what’s gonna happen i’ve only known it for three or four days but my life this is my vocation i found it that’s what i hear from you well you hear what you want to hear i didn’t say that what i said was i’ve had an amazing three or four days and this might fade um but i view it as a kind of asymmetric bet if this one if it fails i lose one i lose one times my money if this succeeds i’m going to make more than 10 times my money and so that’s why it’s a good bit for me speaking of betting on people jack we were talking about you earlier basically uh sean i didn’t know so basically we gave your background we said that you and celia lived in a shitty apartment a little studio five 450 square foot studio or something like that and brooke tried to make it sound like slumdog millionaire he was like he’s like you know they shared one ramen noodle each and yeah jack was that right was it 400 something square feet 450. in bad neighborhood crown heights that’s right yeah i mean it was it was all right um and and uh basically started an agency it was only going okay not going that great and then like over the last 18 24 months you’ve just knocked it out the park yada yada i didn’t realize until sean said it when he said do you see what jack did it’s crazy i thought he meant you selling one nft for like a hundred grand i didn’t or however much you sold that like what’s the difference between a jpeg and an nft thing i didn’t see that you have one for 76 million dollars just put it up this morning do you think that’s gonna work look at this okay so jack can you tell us about the 77 million dollar one what’s the thinking behind that and then just in general what’s the nft experience been like it’s kind of mind-blowing yeah i think um interestingly enough this text message that got me on this podcast is uh kind of uh evidence for the strategy behind the 77 million 77 million dollar nft which the thesis is um it’s rounded up from the highest bid on that b pool collage so that was 69.3 and obviously tracks to the price of ethereum but anybody who would bid on this would be you know the owner of the most expensive nft in the world um so you know part press play commentary on the world of nft’s artistic statement uh i have very very very the the idea of that selling is obviously absolutely ludicrous but the fact that you can do something like that without permission and make a statement like that i think is like that’s that’s the the intent behind the the piece itself and the nft space like the last three pieces that i’ve been working on the last three pieces i’ve launched have been sort of a commentary on the world of nft so the first one sam talked about it’s like what’s the difference between a jpeg and an nft i put that image on twitter and you got a great response someone commented and said you should make this an nft let’s just say no more made in nft and auctioned it and then the second one uh just finished today there’s like a comment on the idea of non-fungibility right so anybody can save this jpeg but what we’re really talking about here is like this mimetic status game that’s all these different incentives coming together to you know some people are buying these because they love them some people are buying them in the same way that they’re betting on a creator like a big clout uh the same thesis behind a big clout you buy this thing and you assume this person is going to keep creating for years and maybe they emerge at the top of the space and then your investment increases in value um i think there’s a lot of parallels with what you’re talking about with bitcoin it’s it visualize value sort of was almost a layer on top of the business i was operating so i was making these graphics to you know create things that would get people’s attention to then put something else in front of them and be like hey here’s this thing so like my background is marketing and advertising and that’s how that works right you make stuff to get people to look at other stuff but now there’s like this convergence of you can get paid directly for the things you make completely different right i think you know patreon what do you think the odds are that someone’s gonna buy this i mean impossible to say 0.00 why no well what’s happened since since you put it up this morning no are people bidding on it can you can you bid below that ass no no so you have to enter that it’s all or nothing yeah yeah okay can you see any of the activity of like traffic to it twitter well that’s the only place i would have data and what’s your what’s your people would visit a few thousand i think is this like so far and i think it’s like it’s also an inside joke as well right like you have to have the context of the people thing mario yep who sean i saw you saw that tweet he added this layer of context to it which is like the reason uh you know it’s very minimal in its execution but when you have that additional context i think it’s like there’s a light bulb moment that goes off so the thing i respect is that it’s all or nothing if you had done it where it’s like oh well hey may not get 77 million but i’ll take you know 77 000. well then it’s sort of like okay he’s just you know it doesn’t have the same artistic balls that it takes to say no this is the if we’re either breaking the record and this is the most valuable piece of digital art in the world oh we’re not and it’s a commentary on the whole madness of the situation it’s like we’re either going all mad or we’re laughing about how mad this was that we’re not doing anything in between i’m not this is not a this is not some you know quick sale here again another parallel with bitcloud it either goes off or it just uh you know it just stays there forever as a memory right yeah as i that’s why i tweeted i said this is either going to be an amazing investment or amazing lesson learned for me and um and and i mean that because i i intentionally invested an amount of money that would hurt for me to lose it um like i would really have to like lick my wounds if i lost this amount of money because it’s not going to just go down by like 10 it’s going to go down by percent or it’s gonna go up by like ten thousand percent and so you know either way i’m gonna learn something out of this whole process it is so polarized and clear and i had to write down why am i doing this what do i believe about this and what and part of the why i’m doing this wasn’t just here’s all the great reasons to do this it was like well you know i kind of sat on the sideline at this other thing that i was early on and i missed out on this big wave and a bunch of my friends made a bunch of money doing it and so i’m kind of waiting for the next one and like now that this one’s here i’m kind of over over compensating for it so i was really honest with myself about what was what are the psychological drivers and and i’ll put put two things together one is one is that which is like here’s the dark side of why i’m doing this meaning like here’s the not so great reasons but true reasons that i feel motivated to do this right my own psychology put on a piece of paper the second thing is maybe this is um you guys have probably all heard this i know jack you have for sure sam you know the thing about the four levels of luck no because the four levels of luck i forgot mark andreessen shared this from somebody else and then neval shared it and that’s how i heard it but basically it’s like there’s there’s dumb luck or you’re just you’re standing still and luck just hits you upside the head something really lucky you just have you get struck by lightning right um that’s just dumb luck you did nothing and something happened then there’s like the second level which is you’re moving around like crazy and you’re doing a bunch of [ ] and then doing a bunch of [ ] you kick up a bunch of dust you move a bunch of things around and actually you have a higher percentage chance of colliding with luck because you were taking so much action right and so that’s kind of like you know um uh you know the luck favors the bold basically you took a bunch of action therefore you’re more lucky than somebody who didn’t then there’s a third one which is luck favors the prepared mind which is you’re moving but you’re also looking and when you see something you recognized luck before others saw it and so i would say jack is a good example of this which is he had the artistic ability to create really compelling visuals but he also had the like business brain and like kind of tech savviness and was in the tech world enough to see nfts as this opportunity uh that he could marry his two things together and give it a try and so that’s where you recognize luck for what it is and then the fourth one is reputational luck which is you have built up such a big reputation that luck finds you well that’s where some in some great company says sam we would love to have you on board because we’ve been reading your content for years you’re such an amazing copywriter and we just think you could really help us out with that you know um and so boom luck came to your doorstep and that’s that’s sort of the analogy that naval gave or whatever was like someone finds a sunken treasure and they come to you because you’re known as the world’s best scuba diver so to me this is like luck level three um and maybe a little four but three in that luck favors the prepared mind so what i realized when i i looked back at bitcoin and i said i was being told by smart friends back in 2013 2014 that bitcoin is amazing and at first i took no action that cost me you know the price was i think 70 at the time so i let it go from 70 to 700 and then i bought it at 700 and even then i bought in such a small amount that it wasn’t gonna like change my life either way i wasn’t gonna care if i lost i wasn’t gonna be rich if i won um and i i went and i looked back and i said well why didn’t i take more action at that time right let’s let’s do the hindsight game and one thing i realized is that in order to i i didn’t bet on it because i didn’t have enough conviction i didn’t have enough conviction because i didn’t even understand what the heck it was so part of that is i didn’t take time to understand it but the second was bitcoin was one of those weird things that you had to have two totally different skill sets in order to appreciate the how great this thing is you had to be really technologically sound uh in your brain to even under even understand it and be able to go buy the thing or mind the thing it took real tech savviness to do it at that that time the second thing was you had to really understand macroeconomics and very few people had that combination and the people who did have become billionaires and have been very wealthy people now but most people who had one or the other or neither they didn’t they didn’t benefit right so you need to you needed to understand that wow this solved the byzantine generals problem this is a computer science breakthrough and now we can have trustless systems without any central entity but you also needed to understand that hey the government prints all this money and has this inflationary effect and the reason that you know and actually this thing that we all take for granted the u.s dollar or currency has really only been around in its current form for i don’t know 70-ish years and uh and you know before that we had gold and before that we had shells and money actually does evolve over time and maybe this is the new form of money and here’s why it’s a more sound money than these other things i’m familiar with right so very few people had that overlap i see the same thing happening with bitcloud on one hand you had to understand the financial incentives that this like the token economics or crypto economics that exists here what are all the incentives and why would this thing go up and when you if you understand the crypto economics the token incentives you’re like holy [ ] this is so well designed this is a very high likelihood of going up if it going up a lot if it becomes a thing the other side is just understanding how social networks start and um when i saw that oh this is like probably the most brilliant growth hack i’ve ever seen these people who whoever made this is very aggressive and very smart they’re aggressive they went and scraped twitter and they put all of our profiles on their website and said come buy their coin without anyone’s permission that took a level of aggression and sort of like willing to operate in the gray that most people wouldn’t really have and then the smart thing was they said well how do we make this network really valuable well if we get really valuable people on it how do we get really valuable people on it well let’s do this let’s go to really legit investors so big name investors that adds credibility let’s go get 100 million dollars from them and then let’s invest that 100 million dollars into the accounts of all the influential twitter people and so when i went to the website without ever having used the damn thing my account had 55 000 sitting in it all i had to do was tweet it out and say hey i’m using big cloud come use it with me basically right and i had to tweet that to my 120 000 followers in order to claim this 50 thousand dollars that was sitting in there this like kind of imaginary fifty thousand dollars i was sitting there and um okay so that i was like that’s gonna work a lot of influencers are gonna go see a hundred thousand dollars sitting in their account and they say all i gotta do is tweet this thing out done like sam you think the thing’s [ ] stupid but you did it anyways because you were like [ ] i got 35 grand sitting in here i’ll take that and jack how much money do you have sitting in your thing uh about 150 i think last time i looked at it so 150 000 maybe is sitting in your account and have you verified your account yeah or claimed it no do you plan to i’m still i don’t know man i’m getting text messages and phone calls and being invited on podcasts to talk about bitcloud so maybe i gotta do it yeah maybe you do and maybe you have a pretty big [ ] incentive to do it which is that there’s 150 grand sitting there just for just for tweeting the thing out and um and so then you so then you go like layers deep you say okay so they’re gonna tweet it out they’re gonna claim their money and then they have a big following so then their people are gonna say oh if jack says it i trust jack and jack is jack is using it then i should probably use this thing they go on and because there’s no withdrawals right now all the prices just go up and so everybody’s going to get all these paper gains and then they’re all going to talk about how this is the greatest thing since sliced bread cause they’re just making all this money on here right like our friend ryan who came on was like dude i’m making a killing on this thing and then other people are gonna say oh [ ] my friend’s making a killing on this thing i should go do that too i don’t want to miss the next bitcoin i already i already missed bitcoin now i’m gonna miss the next one and they’re going to get on and that’s going to drive the price even higher and so what i saw was that this thing was brilliantly designed from kind of like a game theory perspective now let’s take let’s table like the moral questions and like is this a ponzi scheme like there’s a whole bunch of other questions but i at the very minimum i thought wow this game is architected so that these numbers are going to go up this is going to have a hype cycle very likely chance of having a hype cycle and if it has the hype cycle these things just like bitcoin bitcoin is only valuable because everybody believes in it now and the more people believe in it the more valuable it gets the more certain its own success becomes the same thing is true for any network any social network too the more legit people believe in it and want it to succeed um the more likely it is to succeed and so then there’s actually a chance that this does become you know a new a new wave of social networks so anyways that’s my whole sorry i’ve i’ve known you for uh since uh maybe eight years now it was early on when i met you that you had some type of it factor and that you were at least mildly smart what what big clout and bitcoin has done for you has basically like brought out all of your confidence and all of your speech giving abilities now the whole high iq thing and if you’re right thing tbd but your ability to convince people that it’s awesome very very high i congratulate you on your confidence and your ability to persuade people i think it’s i think i think i think you finally have come out of your shell now all right the whole are you right thing well no we’re gonna i keep saying the thing which is there’s a very low chance that this succeeds in the long run if it does you’re gonna get paid super handsomely very similar to bitcoin back in 2013 2014 and very similar to the hundreds of other crypto projects that had the same promise and didn’t pan out right so that’s the thing with low odds usually they don’t pan out when they do you can get paid handsomely there’s a middle ground here where if this goes through a hype cycle there is a good chance that even if it doesn’t succeed in the long run in the short run there’s a bunch of money to be made that is the degenerate gambler side of me and many people anybody who is in the into game stop anybody who’s you know going and trading a lot of people have fun speculating and trying to uh make money and they’re not necessarily trying to be long-term holders so that’s situation two it’s situation three is it just flops it goes to zero there are all three scenarios on the table what i’m trying to say is the probability is i’m not saying this is likely or definitely going to succeed what i’m saying is i find it super interesting from a product point of view how they made it and i think there’s a good chance it goes through the hype cycle beyond that i don’t know so jack um what what what does this mean to you what what side are you on i’m just sort of waiting for it to shake out i guess i think the first time it came across my feed was like the ultimate bear case like you know this has broken the the commandments of crypto therefore you should not go anywhere near it and my understanding of the like mechanics of pre-mining and all of these like i wasn’t paying attention to the ico cycle when it was happening years ago so i just felt pretty um you know unqualified to make a bet on it and i think to your point sean there’s like reputational risk in endorsing it too before it gets to a point of i don’t know some of the things that are left unsaid or haven’t been clarified are clarified so i’m on the sidelines for the time being yeah i think that’s smart i think that’s the risk i run which is i think that when i say hey this is a this is a gamble you can lose all your money it’s not likely to succeed that there’s that there could be some money to be made here’s my exact holdings i feel like i’m disclosing everything and smart adults are going to do with that what they want do your own research don’t rely on me and come to your own conclusions i’m telling you what i’ve come to thus far three days in and so i’m always like oh people will get all that in reality all anyone’s gonna remember is dude you were super excited about that thing and either i look like a [ ] genius or i look like an idiot scam artist that’s the sad part about it is that nobody’s gonna remember any of the nuance around how i was thinking about it anybody just remember dude you sounded so excited you said you put 100 grand in and either you know that’s why you’re the hottest things to slice bread if that becomes a 10 million steak or it’s gonna be i lost my life savings how could you you told me this was gonna work and uh unfortunately the way i wish the world the way i wish people listen to it is not gonna be how people actually listen to it as my guest are you the biggest uh the biggest bit clout bull in the world sean ah not even close like craig clemons uh who’s you know friend of ours been on the pod um he was on it before us he’s invested i don’t know how much money but he’s like the biggest whale you go to anyone’s account he owns he owns like the majority of their coin like he he and he’s like yeah i’m bullish um like you know he could speak for himself how he’s thinking about the calculated risk but like you know he’s got a huge stake and i’m you know envious of how early he was on and how bullish he was early because it’s already he’s got a lot of paper gains let’s put it that way as far as uh and then there’s of course a bunch of other people like you know there’s there’s the big the the the the whale guy i forgot his name is big big clout whale or something like that he put a million dollars into his own coin and he’s he also has you know the biggest kind of like nft collection out there i think well that guy bit he bought um he wired me or i keep saying wired but he sent me 10 grand in ethereum so one guy is the guy who’s providing secondary market liquidity that’s the guy you worked with then there’s this guy who basically has the whale coin it’s a community token a separate thing uh he owns two million dollars worth of nft art and he created a coin that basically says hey i collect this art if you own my coin you own a part of my art collection and um and so he’s made he’s made it big he’s made a bunch of money in crypto he reinvested into nfts now he’s reinvested at least a million bucks into big cloud as well so there’s a bunch of people who are very very bullish on this thing you know but um and and you know there’s but i’ll also say like you know what are the downsides right like a if you go use the thing you’ll notice three things right away it requires a password to join that’s already has blocked like 80 of people now you could find it if you just twitter bit clout if you google big cloud password you’ll find it easily but today that’s a that’s a challenge it’s password protected because they’re not ready for scale which is the second part you go use the thing and it’s so it’s like under such heavy load all the time that like i click the follow button and the thing [ ] spins for 30 seconds it’s like super annoying that it’s not a faster app it’s like the thing is always going down because they can’t handle the scale right now um jack are you are you gonna make more income from nfts in 2021 than you think you will from your real job or your normal business rather probably and three letters you didn’t even know last year yeah it’s a different market man different dynamics very crazy would you say three years ago where were you what where were you at was it now march i was just starting my agency so i was shooting uh car commercials on the uh like for uh you know just running around the desert with a handheld camera trying to make a car commercial and isn’t it crazy how much things have changed in such a short amount of time the last couple months has been like compressed uh a ton of um just leaps and bounds of technology and culture and um last year obviously shifting to doing work fully online i think was one jump and now like the normalization of crypto is just feels another like rocket um and stuff like you know what we’re talking about here is like it feels like that stuff is just not just creeping into the mainstream but it’s just a burst pipe now right like the top shot thing just went absolutely bananas then this big cloud thing is going to pull on the same like cultural levels that top shop did maybe it’s successful maybe it isn’t but it’s like the cat’s not going back in the bag at this point right so jack let me ask you because i feel i feel a little torn right because i come on the pod because i come on the pod today and i say oh i gotta talk about big clout why because a i’ve been using it a bunch for last couple days one of the more interesting projects but b i’m like kind of embarrassed to even talk about it because there’s such a good chance that this thing fails that it’s gonna look pretty stupid and big cloud is even more it’s gonna look even more stupid when it fails than like let’s say like i guess like what i’m getting at is i think that it’s you know it takes a long time to build a reputation of being smart and trustworthy and it’s easy to lose it in a day um you know i think warren buffett said that once and uh you know it takes it takes it a decade or whatever to build a reputation and a day to lose it so i kind of feel that way with with bitcoin but cloud crypto in general it’s all such uncertain territory it’s uncharted waters uncertain territory nobody really if anybody tells you they know what’s gonna happen they’re definitely not saying you know tell me the truth uh people speculate people have fun talking about it people place their bets and then the chips will fall where they may now do you feel that way with nfts like do you feel almost embarrassed or slightly guilty you know selling a file for 150 000 and you know let’s say next year the nft market comes down to earth like i think right now top shot is top shot’s getting slaughtered um it’s going down like 30 month over month because all the whales are like hey cool we’ve made millions of dollars let’s just do a coordinated sell-off and like you know like let’s sell this baby now let’s take something off the table and so topshop’s like cratering right now and then as it starts to crater all the people who thought it was going to fail are like see you know i told you so this was silly to begin with um as somebody who’s selling digital art for hundreds of thousands of dollars does a part of you worry like what happens a year from now when you’re the same nft you sold for 150 000 is worth a thousand dollars and um what do you i guess how do you think about that yeah i thought a lot about it i think um coming into it originally had zero expectation of like the level of investment that people would be willing to commit to something like this one thing i will say is i’ve like i have a relationship with every single person who’s bought one so because the twitter layer on top really the nft layer you you often they have links to twitter profiles obviously introduce yourself everybody that bids on the work and i think that to me is you know if you have a relationship with the person that collects the art that’s different than throwing it into this anonymous market and you know profiting x off it i also think there’s an argument to be made for like my background is commercial advertising right so i know you guys spoke to michael saylor a couple weeks ago and i just have this like i guess loop in my head or this thing i’m thinking about around what is a marketing expense relative to a like a uh a technology in general so if you’re an ethereum like whale let’s say let’s say you bought x number of thousand ethereum at seven cents or whatever it was back in the day and you want to see the technology you believe in the technology that made you wealthy adopted by more people you want to like spread the gospel as it were feels to me like there’s a lot of people participating in this market for that reason so the nft explained piece which was by far the most expensive um or the largest sale of the last few i’ve done i think they’ve got four million impressions on twitter so if you think about what it would cost you to buy four million impressions on twitter or if what it would cost you to develop something that has that level of resonance i think it’s easy to get distracted from that as as like the three of us have distribution but that is a valuable thing right to own something that has that level of cultural uh velocity to me is you know i don’t want to say it’s underpriced but i think it’s like i think it’s a uh it’s a legitimate bet like if you can see that this thing has this thing resonates with people and that’s the beauty of having twitter so visualize value you can see this image that you own 3 300 or 4 500 people clicked on and said i like this thing so there’s also a mega advantage there having that layer on top where you can evaluate how like how much this thing resonates before you sell does that make sense i yeah that does make sense and jack as i i consider us close friends i wanted to like buy i wanted to i was willing to spend around five thousand dollars to buy one of your things just because i like look up to you as like a creator and i actually think your arts badass and i think you’re gonna be like a far more important person than you already are i was willing i so i get the sentiment now without sounding like a douche like i i have money right and i was real only willing to spend five grand the way the re the way that someone was gonna spend 150 grand that either they’re like way richer than i am or they’re just crazy that’s what i like i don’t understand 150k but like maybe some people don’t understand that i was willing to do 5k so these are the people who bought bought it very very well sure you could like do your ethereum wallet slew thing and figure out how much people have but well you said you know that right like i don’t have to i don’t have to know someone i’m like oh well the guy drives a g wagon he’s from dubai some people don’t have their real name but it’s like hey um you know you develop a relationship here here’s how it works the guy who bought the people uh artwork for for whatever 69 million or something like that um i i i i’d be mixing it up but you know meet covan that’s his has his handle uh well i just read about him he he started a uh i mean he’s probably worth hundreds of millions of dollars through bitcoin so he’s really invested invested five thousand dollars into bitcoin and is worth over a billion dollars based on when he invested it he’s reinvesting like i said you go to chuck e cheese you’re great at skee-ball you hit the 5 000 jackpot the tickets start spitting out of this machine you don’t think about it like spending 150 000 you think about it like spending 70 ether and you have 70 000 ether or whatever right so he’s spending a fraction of his like giant stockpile of crypto bucks and it feels different i’m shocked there’s that many people that like jack butcher which who’s like a relatively he’s not people but he’s like kind of a big deal that there’s that many people that will just buy his thing for 100 grand i’m just shocked that there’s that many people who have that i’m not on your own being shocked and if jack if you do sell this thing for 76 million dollars i mean like obvious like who cares about history and how neat that is i mean that would like that would be gener i mean that would you the butcher family would be famous for five generations i mean that would be the most absurd that’d be crazy perhaps it would be it would be just so wild and so funny i i hope it works i kind of actually in a way maybe i actually hope it doesn’t work because you know what they say about people who you’re not exactly this because you’ve worked hard for it so it’d be like selling a company for you but you know what they say about people who like win the lottery and how like a huge some of them um a huge number of them they end up becoming mathematics and or they get they’re broken depressed yeah yeah like they’re already messed up a little bit and now they’re just even more they’re they’re messed up times the amount of money they earn like i don’t want that to happen no i don’t think it would happen to you i would also be nervous like you know the the fact that there’s even an outside chance of it happening is this the most ludicrous thing it’s supposed to be like a piece of art in itself right that nobody interacts with commentary on the space but the fact that it exists on a platform where a transaction could actually happen isn’t quite just unfathomable and that would like definitely warp your experience of the world and i i can’t even fathom what something like that would be like but yeah aliens will land before that happens that’s crazy okay we should wrap this i don’t i i don’t know where we go from here but jack thanks for coming on what a weird yeah you know we texted you like 30 minutes ago or 40 minutes ago you hopped on so i appreciate that it was fun i hope somebody buys the thing i think that would be [ ] amazing um i think it couldn’t happen to a better guy so so i think i i think there is a um i hope i get a text that’s like holy [ ] and if i get a text today that says holy [ ] from anybody i know what has gone down so i hope it happens it’s hard dude growing up podcast is the hardest thing i’ve ever done it’s easier to just sell a picture for 77 million dollars than it is to get create a top 10 business podcast i [ __ ] you not it is actually easier to do one than the other find out i could be what i want to i put my all in it like my days off on the road let’s travel never looking back