It Could Happen Here - A Requiem for NFTs

Episode Date: October 20, 2023

Robert and Gare sit down with tech columnist Ed Zitron to do a little autopsy on the NFT "movement" and what it tells us about Big Tech today.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You should probably keep your lights on for

Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart. And speaking of falling apart, when we're talking about the crumbles, the slow and sometimes rapid erosion of institutions in this country, nothing is quite as relevant as the tech industry. this country, nothing is quite as relevant as the tech industry. I'm Robert Evans. Obviously, on the line with me is Garrison Davis. And we also have someone new with us today who's going to be talking tech and particularly talking about the NFT crash and some of what that has to tell

us about both how the tech industry functions now and about how kind of our economies of hype contribute to a state of what Ed Zitron, who is our guest here, tends to call the rot economy. Ed, welcome to the show. Hey, thank you for having me. Yeah. I'll just hand it over to you at this point. So you may remember two years ago where kind of ghoulish half-wit libertarians emphatically told you that NFTs, non-fungible tokens, would change everything. That people wanted to own a unique digital object. And indeed, that the said uniqueness of said object, say a picture of an ape or an animated gif of a sports moment, would be worth millions. The hype was insane.

Justin Bieber paid $1.3 million for a board ape, which is one of 10,000 procedurally generated pictures of a monkey. And celebrities like Mila Kunis and Lindsay Lohan would fund and create their own NFT projects. In fact, multiple celebrities raised millions of dollars for these kind of noxious little creations. Their logic entirely hinged upon the idea that something being a one of a kind somehow

made it valuable, and that a digital token connected to a picture or a video was the same as, say, a rare baseball card or a comic book, or the sense that owning part of a digital entity like a game was somehow valuable i personally do not think owning a sword from world of warcraft a unique one means anything i do not think that's meaningful in any way but listen got a bit of advice for anyone listening when anyone tells you to ignore your eyes and your ears to dull a voice in your head that says huh that sounds really goddamn stupid. Or to, of course, put a bunch of money into an unproven asset, you should always try and work out how they're going to get paid in the end. But nevertheless, it's important to know the

fundamentals of this crap, this noxious industry. Now, of course, we're talking about cryptocurrency. So these are tokens on a decentralized blockchain. In this case, a non-fungible token, what's known as an NFT, is a unique digital identifier on a blockchain like Ethereum or Polygon, one that cannot be copied, substituted or divided like a regular token. So ownership in this case, who owns the NFT, is based on whoever owns the wallet that said that the NFT in question is actually stored. And meaning that if someone tricks you into sending your Bored Ape to somebody else, they technically own it. These NFTs of images, say the Bored Ape Yacht Club, Pudgy Penguins, what have you, are connected to images. So by which I mean you are quite literally buying a JPEG. You are buying a tokenized JPEG. These images are kept on something called the Interplanetary File System, IPFS, and you have an IPFS address that attaches to each token. What's important to know about this is this is another decentralized project where there's no real proof that your IPFS address isn't going to disappear in 10 years. So you could end up buying one of these tokens

and be left with bugger all. Like I said, you're effectively buying a very expensive JPEG that may or may not be an image of something in 10, 15, 20 years, or even five years. So like I used to buy a whole bunch of digital games for my nintendo wii system right and these were not physical games and now i cannot re-download any of these things even though i bought them because the digital system is just nintendo is no longer supporting it is this kind of like a similar mechanism here in terms of there's like all this necessary internet infrastructure to like host these digital assets but we we don't actually control that infrastructure right so it's it's different than holding like you know uh a disc or in the case of an nft like an actual physical picture

of a monkey what's really funny is the example you just gave is one of the few examples of where NFTs could actually be useful. Digital games right now are in this position where, like you said, and you find this a lot with streaming products as well, where you can buy something. You buy a video game or you buy a movie and you own it on Apple TV. Apple has complete power to pull that down. If indeed there was a non-fungible token that contained the video in question, that might be quite useful. That might be really useful. In fact, unlike NFTs in general, which are not useful at all, you are just buying a JPEG that leads to an image and owning this JPEG, this NFT might get you inside a discord perhaps a special discord of

like-minded people who have spent a lot of money on something very silly sounds sounds like a party it's so good and it's it was really something these things have been around since at least 2014 i think uh crypto kitties was one of the original ones. You could breed horrible-looking cats. Oh, no. Make these horrible cats have sex and create new horrible-looking cats. Well, you didn't get to see the sex. Don't worry. Which to me

was the only reason I invested. Let me Google CryptoKittyRule34. I'm sure I'll find something. I'm sure that there is CryptoKittyHentai. Make sure to put Reddit google crypto kitty rule 34 i'm sure i'll find something i'm sure that there is a crypto kitty hentai but now make sure to put reddit in the uh in the search phrase there you gotta you're gonna get better results that way will i get in trouble for sending these results in the group chat will people get mad i i feel nothing anymore yeah um honestly there's not as much as I thought there would be. I'm kind of disappointed.

World is a vampire. So the thing about this is the gold rush, this huge multi-billion dollar NFT industry that kind of popped and dropped in the last couple of years, was something created by a kind of perfect storm of post-lockdown financial hysteria. You saw it with like AMC and GameStop stocks. You saw it with crypto in general. And it was the sense that you were getting in early on something. And it kind of resembled in a funky way, like Beanie Babies baseball cards, but also with the kind of stench of the fine art industry. But I also think that during the pandemic, and I'll get to a little more of this later, people really got this defined sense of how unfair everything is, how you can't just go to college anymore. You can't just work really hard

and get a mortgage. You have to effectively find a way to cheat. And this seemed like a cheat they had got in on early. The problem is they didn't and i'll kind of get into that later but another part of it the part that really stank to me was that they were selling this ugly obviously rotten dream that you were owning part of a future media property yeah yeah like you you were going to be part of disney or marvel the board apes when you bought a board ape you allegedly got the right to distribute it and build a show or merchandise and in fact seth green bought an ape that he tried to build a tv show around classic 2022 idea building a tv show around an nft oh did you guys see the ad for that show, by the way?

We watched the first few episodes. No, no, no. That was a different NFT show. That was a different Bored Ape show. I can clarify here. There was a show called The Red Ape Family that was about an adjacent property that included red apes, but other NFTs. about an adjacent property that included red apes,

but other NFTs. But then Seth Green was also trying to make a show that was almost like Who Framed Roger Rabbit, where it's a mix of cartoons and real background sets. Oh, no. But it's just about Seth Green, who is a monkey, as a bartender. It looked like dog shit. What's really funny is someone scammed him out of that ape so he had

to pause he had to pause production on his show this is the future of entertainment folks because he didn't have the intellectual property rights anymore and then he ended up having to pay a hundred grand to get it back and the show show never, I cannot find the show anywhere. But this is the thing, putting that aside, people genuinely thought they were buying like Amazing Fantasy 15, first appearance of Spider-Man, stuff like that. They thought that they were buying something that would give them access, but also some degree of ownership over a future IP. And frankly, I can understand how they were scammed because you had people like alexis ohanian the founder of reddit who through his vc firm 776

sunk 54 million dollars into an nft project called doodles claiming in january of this year 2023 that doodles this year this year in fact now to Doodles... This year? This year, in fact. Now, to be clear, the funding was last year, 2022. Okay, okay. But he claimed this year, and to be clear, Doodles is a collection of NFTs and an associated cartoon that kind of looks like Adventure Time, but significantly worse. Yeah, that makes sense.

Alexis said that Doodles wanted to build the next generation of Disney and a whole world of IP that is giving people a stake and a sense of ownership. Sure. Sure, buddy. Yeah, exactly. Thank you, Alexis. I want to know how does being rich feel? So to be clear, what Doodles was is still was a collection of 10,000 NFTs of Doodles procedurally generated like most of these and it's worth taking

a step back here why are so many of these projects 10 000 images it's because there's absolutely no creativity not even a little they just it's is there like a is there like a false scarcity aspect which is trying to like inflate value is that like another reason for why they would have like these limited batches? Because I know the original Bored Ape ones were like around around 10,000 as well, at least initially. Yes, there's always like a couple thousand, 10,000. But when you take a step back and really think about it, that's actually a huge amount. It isn't a scarce good. It isn't a scarce good. It isn't.

It may be to the people who are pumping and dumping them, but 10,000 isn't creativity. There's what, like maybe 30 different Spider-Men, but that's not 10,000 of them. And none of these have a name, none of these have a character. I will get

to the two characters in Doodles because there are just two. Hey, guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout?

Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows,

presented by iHeart and Sonoro. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology.

I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts.

Check out betteroffline.com. The more that you talk about this, and just kind of based on my paying attention to it, I kind of feel like part of what we're saying is like the intersection of two cultural myths, right? One of them is like the myth about how, I mean, it's not entirely myth, largely accurate about what happened with Apple when it went public, right? And you have all of these hundreds of like nerds who had just been like working class kids who become worth hundreds of millions of dollars overnight, right? Which has become part of kind of like our cultural memory of like how tech is supposed

to work ever since. And then the other is like Star Wars, right? And the way in which George Lucas revolutionized capitalizing on every silly idea you've ever had. Like a lot of NFT, a lot of the NFT hype is based on the belief that like you could be, you could, you could buy into the next like Glurfstreebo or whatever fucking weirdo. Yeah, yeah, yeah. George Lucas character. And it could get a movie, you know, because.

Yeah. It's all infinitely capitalizable. Yeah. The kind of buck shittos of the world. Yeah. Yeah. And you're actually right as well, because I don't know if you remember when episode one, Star Wars episode one came out, they deliberately made the box to look like the old Return of the Jedi figures, which were now worth thousands. A lot of money. A lot of money. it. Because when you buy a doodle, as you will, putting thousands of dollars into something called

a doodle, one might wonder, what exactly is the value of this? Because doodles do not actually convey any intellectual property. Bored apes kind of do. The legality is muddy. You can merchandise your doodle for up to $100,000 of physical goods. So t-shirts, you know why you would buy a doodle t-shirt? I'm not really sure, but you could sell it. Just the theoreticals here are amazing. But doodles really is cool, was sold on the idea that it allowed you to steer the company, to vote on the future of doodles, which is kind of similar to Bored Ape Yacht Club. You could get ApeCoin if you had NFTs of the apes or the mutant apes, and you could then vote in these votes about the future of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, but not Yuga Labs,

who owns the Bored Ape Yacht Club. So really you were just controlling a vague sense of nothing. In the case of Doodles, you could vote on what they may do in the future. It was never really obvious. Was Doodles a Dow? Doodles is a Dow. Okay. Okay. And the funny thing to remember about almost all of these as well is not in the case of Doodles but in the case of like the board ape yacht club and the ape chain i hate this crap andreessen horowitz owns 14 of all ape coin of their initial drop they own multiple crypto products large chunks of these total tokens and so they can control these votes if they need to but what's also important to know is none of this stuff involves the actual goddamn company. Nobody owns a thing. These decentralized autonomous organizations, DAOs, are always framed as this kind of democratic process, carefully leaving out the fact that

a democratic system with transactable votes is by definition a goddamn kleptocracy. But on top of that, you don't own anything. You don't have anything with these companies. You don't get stock. You don't get anything. You just have one of 10,000 images that may in 10 years not actually go anywhere. It's farcical. than that, however, is the fact that Doodles is no longer an NFT project and will no longer cater to speculators. According to a statement from March by the co-founder Jordan Poopy, Castro Poopy is. Okay. Well, see, this is where I'm putting, you know what, Garrison, I'm putting the whole company pension plan behind this guy. Poopy's got to be the one who makes those calls from now on. You've got to, it's really got to suck as well if you were like a speculative investor in doodles already and you find out that your whole thing is going to be worthless because of a guy called Poopy. I think that that's just very special to me.

Yeah. Yeah. I'll continue. I'll continue. So just to be clear, less than a year before this according to their investor this company was positioned to continue to define the nft industry and onboard millions to the blockchain and become one of the most inclusive creative joyful media brands in web3 and beyond this is the same company that had now officially rug pulled their entire customer base.

And by the way, if you'd have invested at the time that the $54 million funding round, so towards the end of 2022, you would have lost money. You would not have gained money. There was no liquidity event that would give you anything. Also important to recognize with, so other than Alexis Ohanian, the other investor in Doodles was FTX Ventures. So in March of 2023, you kind of sat down with your morning coffee and you read the announcement from Jordan Pupicastro and found out that your FTX-backed NFT project had lost about 85% of its value. And now the company was not backing you in any fucking way. Yeah. But I mean, FTX is putting out Superbowl ads. They seem stable.

They seem like, yeah, that'd be fine. What could happen? It'd be fine. But what, what's great about this is it is probably one of the largest rug pulls I've ever seen. And nobody is in trouble.

Nobody's mad at Alexis Ohanian. Doodle sold people on a dream. A stupid dream, but a dream nonetheless. Yes, yes. Very, very goddamn stupid one, that you'd be investing and participating in the future of intellectual property and have some industry over its future. You would theoretically, though obviously when you read this now it sounds dumb and also when you read it at the time it's you were meant to be buying into the next disney the next marvel yeah this is what was sold that is another huge aspect is think there's like i think a lot of people who are like you know grew up with like pop culture and want to take part in like the creation of like culture and media, but you know,

Hollywood systems feels so foreign and unattainable. So this thing comes up and it, and this looks like a, like a democratized way that you can like get in on some like new version of what the entertainment like landscape will be. And you're like, Oh, this is, this is like my chance. I can be one of 10,000 people to like contribute towards this next big, you know, cultural thing in 10, 20 years. But I mean, obviously that's like,

in retrospect, it's very clearly a scam for some people, like probably myself and many people listening initially, this sounded like a scam, but it's, it certainly was alluring for a good deal number of people. I mean, I'm, this is kind of reminding me that there was this very similar kind of dao big big failure around uh dune they were wanting to put out oh yeah they wanted to buy they wanted to buy the deck and the rights to yodorovsky's dune yes yeah and and and put out media and put out like their own like animated series

which is funny because initially they just they weren't even gonna bother with like the intellectual property which is really funny because you know a big part of of this this nft stuff is like you own the ip of each nft character right and as they as this kind of project progressed they slowly started to realize that what they've done was probably just commit massive fraud. And they completely collapsed. This Dune NFT DAO project was being boosted by a lot of very mainstream publications. It was extremely hyped up, which led people to assume this is a legitimate entertainment project you could like participate in by buying this small little piece. Last year, very, very clearly kind of fell apart, as was kind of predestined.

And what's really sad about this is we can laugh at these people. We'll get to this in a bit. And we should. We can laugh at these people. We should. It's very funny but at the same time a lot of people got screwed here because they trusted in people like alexis ohanian founder of reddit unscathed despite the horrifying things that reddit has done alexis ohanian insanely rich married to a tennis star

god bless him hope they're happy but nevertheless nevertheless, Alexis has managed to fairly easily escape all blame for the fact that he misled everyone with this and other things, but this in particular. Because the dream of Doodles, God, that sucks to say out loud, by the way. Yeah, it sure does. The dream of Doodles was that you would buy one of these 10,000 things and that you'd be part of a community and you'd be able to steer the Doodles movement. The Doodles community. Jesus Christ. I know.

The Doodles revolution, I think, is more accurate. And the Doodle-easters. No, that's not a term. No, no, no. I like that. I like that. Let's go with it. Doodle-easters.

Doodle-easters, Doodlers, they're all the Doodoo's. Yeah. But you would be investing in the future of IP you'd have part of this and you'd be you know what put aside the money put aside all the cash because they're not doing speculation anymore it's not about that let's just focus on the community which is dying

which is completely dead I would argue so fairly recently doodles had to remove the 50% quorum, which would require 50% of NFT holders to interact with the project to push a vote through. They had to remove that. They didn't say why. They had to remove it.

Because nobody gives a shit. Because nobody cares. Nobody gives a rat fuck about any of this. And then voted to appoint a founding community council to make decisions about where the Doodle Bank. Oh my God. Jesus Christ. Would be spent in the future. So the Doodle Bank was where some of the revenues went from the secondary sales of these NFTs because the companies always take a cut because rent's seeking, baby.

Anyway, so if you were interested in the community aspect of Doodles, you're kind of shit out of luck because they've now entirely deleted their visions and guidelines document, which is the part of the website that tells you how any of the community shit works. And nothing is happening right now with them.

There's nothing going on. This is the ninth most popular NFT project. And they have attempted to and indeed succeeded in removing their association with NFTs. Now, one would think, okay, maybe they have a Discord. Of course, they did find it. 85,000 members. Oh, wow. Except it felt more empty than my my discord which has 600 people in it

85 760 members as of when i opened it last and the newsstand section did not have a post in it since august 30th which was announcing that the Doodles-Crops collaboration had sold out. Terrible news for the least fuckable people alive. And their other official channels really hadn't been updated since May or August. The General Hall channel, which is where everyone was talking, was mostly just bots and people saying the words, Dudes Rule, that's D-O-O-D-S, rule. No real communication.

It felt like several chatbots kind of, you know how you see Oblivion or Skyrim NPCs walk up to each other and go, kind greetings to you. Imagine that with NFTs. 85,000 bloody people. I even tried to, I'm not going to say antagonize them, but I did ask them, are you happy with your investment? No responses. I was like, how'd you feel about no response? Someone responded with dude's rule once. And it's insane because you won't believe this. The valuation of this company in their $54 million

funding round was 700 million goddamn dollars and their chat room has the charm and vibrance of a dying mall this is meant to be the next generation of disney and yet it has no fans there are people who will shoot you to death for insulting spider-man there are people who will scream at you for not liking the latest star wars thing these are super fans yeah there are people who will do that with obscure video games you've never heard of. But for Doodles,

this nearly billion dollar enterprise, the future of Disney, not one of these people cared anything about this. All it was, there's like, there are no super fans, no loyalists, no evangelists, nobody excited,

no one even expressing an emotion. Just a bunch of freaks who got cons saying GM every two minutes or hours. Actually, it was so strange because I've been in chat rooms since I was like 11. I've seen varying levels of chat rooms in various games. Even the smallest community was kind of hopping at some point. This thing had no life. It was so strange. It's just like a digital ghost town.

And the reality is what I said earlier. There's 10,000 of these goddamn things. These featureless, procedurally generated things. There's nothing to them. These NFT companies, these ones that allegedly want to replace Disney, they're incapable or unwilling to do anything approximating world building or law development. L-O-R-E. Doodles, which is worth 700 million goddamn dollars, which got 54 million dollars, has three characters that I can find. There's Hap, there's Cat Mello,

and there was another one which I could not find a name for. There is maybe 10 minutes of footage in the years that this thing was meant to exist. It's just so bizarre. It's so utterly craven and half-assed. People attack Disney and Marvel through Disney, obviously, and Star Wars. Oh, they're pushing this crap out. They're just churning this shit out and saying people will buy anything. In comparison, Disney are steadfast auteurs. They are creative agents, like into Salvador Dali. They are the, compared to the NFT people, they're gods. Because even Disney's least likable properties get more attention and have bigger fans than this. There are Disney adults who would like crying and falling on their knees when the lockdowns ended.

Oh, yeah. None of these people would care. None of these people, if Jordan Poopy Castro died tomorrow, nobody would shed a tear or even remember, apparently. And it's just, I think the way to look at this, and especially Doodles, is that there is just within the NFT world and actually within the tech industry writ large, just this deep, deep-seated loathing for creativity, storytelling, and the customer. Pendleton Ward, who made the original Adventure Time, don't know if you remember, which is very clearly where Doodles is ripped off from,

just compare them. They look very similar. He made it over a decade ago. It's a five minute long video. He made it on his own without funding, without anything. And it's beautiful and it's weird and it's great. And you're like, wow, I'm so glad this guy did this. Doodles, which has tens of millions of dollars sitting around, has put out seven goddamn minutes of teasers and advertisements for brand collaborations. That's it. That's all. Something about Pharrell, something about Crocs, something about allegedly Doodles having a cartoon. I don't goddamn know. But my theory is that none of this was ever about creating anything. This was an attempt to go back to what you were saying earlier, to recreate that sense that I just bought the Star Wars toy that will be worth $3,000 in 10 years. That's all this was.

Well, I'm pretty sure they're well on their way because I'm looking at the Doodle site right now. You can buy a rug featuring my favorite Doodles character, Hap, for $100. Are you serious that these motherfuckers are selling a rug? Yes. Yes. The Crocs are sold out, unfortunately. God damn it.

I know you were really wanting to get those. They're sold out. They were $120. Jesus Christ. They're selling little vinyl toys for 185 dollars they have a cat mush they have a cat plush for 40 bucks they have a puzzle for 22 dollars and they finally have the before mentioned rug so yeah that's it's it's just wonderful it seems like a good investment.

These things are selling out fast. You want to you got to you got to get in. Your character could be the next one. Yeah. But I think that the ultimate thing is. None of this was about creating anything. That really is it. It was creating just enough to sell securities to suckers.

And now all of it is falling apart. The SEC just sued a group of celebrities for an NFT cat cartoon called Stoner Cats. Yeah, no, I was really excited about Stoner Cats. I was really pumped up for seeing Stoner Cats. But sadly, the SEC charged the creator for unregistered offering of nfts which are securities and they raised eight million dollars it's just very sad very funny by the way that the sec now

is to get him like gary gensler has to look at stoner cats and say all right let's let's take a look at this oh that's not good the howie howie test is going to have fun with this but i think nfts were and are probably one of the more nihilistic parts of the tech industry yeah because they did the bare minimum to convince people they made up all it's kind of like that episode of the simpsons where they remake Flanders' house and it's just a fascia and it effectively falls down after being touched. With a load-bearing poster, yeah. Yes, exactly. And it's just enough to make people believe this could be worth enough. Because it's never really obvious what actually makes something worth something in the collectibles

market. There are established artists who might, I personally own a bunch of original comic artwork, a lot of it by Arthur Adams. And that market is fairly small because there's only so much one man can do. And the value comes from what people are willing to pay. But in that case, it's beautiful pencils and inks and it's gorgeous. You want that on your wall. In this case, it's, I'm buying something that sounds like it might be valuable. There's not really a fundamental community. That sounds fine. But when you push past even the first layer, it all falls apart. And that's because, in my opinion, the NFT hype was just a long con on customers in the media.

It's a scam, a scam where companies built the appearance of value without ever actually generating anything. There's nothing to some oh, some vinyl figures. Who cares? Nobody's done, the Bored Ape Yacht Club has the world's shittiest cartoon. They did a flash game called Dookie Dash. Yes, I did. I did see Dookie Dash. What was great was-

Game of the Year 2022. Game of the Year 2022 immediately, by the way, scammed. Just immediately someone broke it. In fact, they had to like, they were like, well, how did this happen? But that's the thing. Yuga Labs worth a couple billion dollars. Doodles worth 700 million.

Nothing to them. Not a single interesting idea in any of them. But they existed to con people into believing this completely thin view. And it, and also the nihilistic part is he was talking about people collecting art and collecting creative things, but without actually ever seeing the value in the object, the objects creativity was only as valuable as it was sellable, but not even sellable to an enterprise. It was just like, to another person who could continue the chain of shit.

Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the

people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural

creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast,

and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists To leading journalists in the field And I'll be digging into why the products you love Keep getting worse

And naming and shaming those responsible Don't get me wrong though I love technology I just hate the people in charge And want them to get back to building things That actually do things to help real people I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough So join me every week to understand

What's happening in the tech industry And what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. I think there is a large untapped market for this, though, that Doodles is actually trying to exploit. Because I just found probably one of the most upsetting things I've discovered today, which is saying something, because I've seen a lot of bad stuff today. Today's a war crime footage day for us. A lot of war crime footages. But there is a Doodles immersive experience in Chicago for children. Oh, no. Children create their own Doodles. And you can pay $28 per person to spend an hour in this Doodles themed art installation in Chicago.

I'm looking at the availability. Yeah, let's see if we can book one for the team. There is 10 slots open each day. All of the slots are open tomorrow. So I think we should get a flight like tonight. Yeah. Right now. We got to book this ASAP.

Yeah. That's going to sell out. I'm going to send you this link because it is the most, one of the more disturbing things I've, I've, I've found. I don't want to go to the doodles camp. Every it's $28 per kid for one hour of walking in this one doodles themed room where first your kid

creates a doodles character so you can enter doodle world you go through a rainbow portal you slide down rainbows play in puffy clouds and crash a spaceship and then you romp through a rainbow portal, you slide down rainbows, play in puffy clouds and crash a spaceship. And then you romp through a whimsical world until your hour is up and then you leave after spending $28 per child. It's like if a committee designed fucking Meow Wolf, right? Yeah. Like a committee of people on Thorazine. Like a committee of people on Thorazine. But if you watch this video as well of this Doodle's World,

here's the thing you don't see. Anything of anything. There's nothing. It's rainbow. There's a picture of the guy who I've already forgotten the name of. Hop? I can't believe you forgot Hop's name. I can't believe I forgot Hop. Hop is $185 to get a figure.

You have to remember. God damn it. But that's the thing. This is just, it's a masterpiece of emptiness. It is a meaningless thing. There is nothing to doodles. Oh, no. No, it's vapid.

There's nothing to doodles. Oh, no. No, it's vapid. There's nothing to any of it. And NFT investors were sold this dream of kind of an access to wealth for both sides. Like, oh, the artist will make money because every NFT sale, you get some royalties, some residuals, which theoretically is a cool thing. That when an artist has a piece sold on someone else, they gonna i like that idea i always have and in turn by buying into this quote-unquote art you can generate your own wealth and you can be part of this positive chain where everyone wins but you're also early so you get to feel smart except the problem is that you're more than likely left with a worthless piece of shit you're left with nothing so fundamentally there will be and i don't believe more than a couple thousand people made any money on nfts now the majority of the people

who bought nfts are going to be left in red. And every new entrant is just another sucker to hopefully dump an investment onto, because there are no NFTs that have a fundamental value. There's not one. It's not like, no, it's that Disney, Marvel, none of these major things. No, it's that none of them got involved. They didn't want to fucking touch us. DC did a vague idea of buying comic covers, but even then it was half-assed because why? you do it i've been saying this since 2021 that these things had no value that it was just an attempt to sell people this vague sense of participation in a new economy and in fact there was a study that came out an an analysis of 73,257 NFT collections. 95% of NFTs on the market are now totally worthless.

The value of these collections is zero Ethereum. Almost every single person encouraged to invest in them by the New York Times, by CNBC, is a victim of a massive legal fraud peddled by internet charlatans like Alexis Ohanian. I'm not saying he's one of them, but there are people within the NFT industry who also wash trade these things, which means that they effectively sell them to themselves. And there's actually increasingly impressive research that suggests that most NFT sales were just wash trading, just people pumping and pumping and pumping. That's why Justin Bieber's ape that he bought for $1.3 million is worth about 60 grand now.

He'll be fine, but other people won't. And that's what's really anger-inducing. That's what fills my veins full of poison. NFTs were never worth anything. And the majority of the industry is made up of fake goddamn transactions. And the people who will suffer are the majority. And the majority are not rich. The majority are not anything other than desperate people who were manipulated.

It's like with fucking the FTX collapse, which is funny in a lot of ways. But also one of the big bag holders wound up being like a teacher's pension fund. Right. Like that was massive. But and obviously, I think that like in addition to going after Sam, people regulators should be looking at who the fuck made the call to put people's pension money in fucking brain genius kids gambling den.

But it is like there there is like real harm did and that was like always the plan everyone who was involved in pushing this is was was trying to like the the whole game plan was to create this critical mass of hype that broke people's ability to actually analyze what what they were doing that just kind of made them panic and throw money in because they felt like otherwise they were going to miss out on their chance to retire, right? That was the whole thing. And that's why the entire social media hype around this was all based on, you're going to stay poor forever if you don't get in on this right now. You're going to stay poor forever if you don't get in on this right now.

Like, it's so disgusting and, yeah, just evil. Evil people. And they were never a great investment. They were never the future of IP. They're just a vehicle to extract capital from retail investors, from regular people who, to your point earlier, who didn't invest in Apple earlier or Google early. They didn't get the chance. They didn't buy the Star Wars toy.

So this was their chance to get ahead. And if these are just an exploitative scam, they create just enough. It's a true scam as well. They create just enough to get people in the door and just enough to make that investment defensible. And it honestly shared a lot of the language of the Joel Osteens and conspiracy theorists and other televangelists telling people, to your point, oh, you're not going to make it. Oh, have fun staying poor. What a noxious fucking thing to say. What a disgusting thing to say to someone. And what's funny is they use the other scam that some companies in the tech industry used, FTX, for example, where they would raise rounds of venture capital,

which gave the appearance of a real enterprise where things were actually happening. And then they sold them this dream of, oh, you could own a piece of this, despite the fact that not a single goddamn NFT actually granted stock options, voting rights, or anything else. Because if they did that, it would immediately become a security. So they'd never do that. You don't have consequential votes. You don't have any industry over this industry. You just have a thing that can be, it may not be fungible, but the operating environment for it is absolutely fucking fungible. If Doodles was truly non-fungible, they wouldn't be able to change the Doodles quorum. They would just have to sit there and do nothing. But what's also important to realize, and as I've said before, but I'll say it a goddamn

again, is they really didn't try very hard. The Bored Ape Yacht Club, which is the biggest one, the 10,000 horrifying looking apes, owned by a company called Yuga Labs. They were valued at $4 billion in 2022. Despite the fact that they said they were going to go Hollywood, they've not actually created anything. They said they were going to do a metaverse product. They sold NFTs of this metaverse thing that they've never shown called

Other Side, I believe. It crashed Ethereum. And they had that video game where you travel through a toilet looking for poop dookie dookie dash yeah that's this is the new disney everyone this is it this is the new disney it's the metaverse that will never get built it's the cartoon about monkeys and toilets that actually advertised dookie dash the rich deep lore of the board ape yacht club by the way is that a monkey did a poo so bad that a key came out to another dimension but then the monkey somehow put that key in a beer that the monkey drank and then the monkey did another poo where it put into the sewer pipes, thus making it necessary for you to pilot another monkey to go and get the key.

Very fucking stupid. Very bad. Ugly. Like the design suck. That's the other thing. These aren't even good looking. And this is a company worth $4 billion. $4 billion.

And all they've done is not make a metaverse, but make a lot of money. Make a terrible series of cartoons that may or may not go anywhere, and an E-Balm's World clone that got scammed almost immediately. Someone found a way to exploit it immediately because it's a flash game. These are not creative enterprises. These are not entertainment companies. They're shell corporations for ill-gotten revenues, for secondary market sales of 10,000 bullshit pictures that were hyped up by the media who could not analyze it properly. They just saw the large amounts of money that were being made. The crooked ways, by the way, the ones which were clearly pumped, everyone covered them. World of Woman. Do you remember that one? World of Woman, the NFT? Everyone covered them. World of Woman. Do you remember that one? World of Woman, the NFT? That was my favorite one because there were so many guys in the crypto world who were like,

yeah, I bought a World of Woman NFT. I support woman. That's, I love it. No, it's so good. And it's because all of it's exploitative. NFTs are vehicles to exploit people, particularly Americans, who are desperate and fairly questioning their place in a world that is continually turned upon providing basic social services and the ability for its citizens to thrive. markets already confusing and yeah all of that's quickly outpaced by the fact that you have student loans health insurance and inflation is making things more expensive than ever and i would argue that that is really the root of what's so evil about crypto yeah it's inherently exploitative it is inherently linked in all of these ways to religious dogma, that you're buying into something, that you're finally part of something meaningful, something that will grow, something that will make you whole in a way that your predecessors might have been just through living normally. This industry, it took root because most people can't thrive. Everyone has to hustle.

Everyone has to hustle. Everyone has to struggle. You can't do the things that people even 20 years ago could do. You can't work a normal job and buy a house anymore. You can't get a mortgage in many cases. You can't just go to college and probably pay those loans off in five years. God, no's gonna follow you decades and nobody's helping you and then along comes these along comes this very technological cool sounding non-fungible token this thing where oh i could be part of this new art market i can be the smart one for once i could can be ahead of everyone. And the people on the other side of that transaction are telling you everything you want to hear. They're the next Disney. They're the next Marvel. You're going to be part of something. You're going to make it. That's what you'll do if you buy into this. All of those crypto people are totally fine. All of them,

the Winklevosses, Alexis Ohanian, Marc Andreessen, Chrisris dixon they're all doing great they're multi-millionaires several times over the people on the other side are victims victims of what i would argue any just society would decide was a financial crime and i think that every single venture capitalist who put money into these products and who pumped them should be held accountable. They won't because that is the modern tech industry, because that is the modern government. There is no justice for the victims of NFTs. And it's really horrifying to watch. horrifying to watch. Yeah. I know sometimes it can be hard to be sympathetic for these folks because we imagine them being like, you know, Fedora, Reddit, you know, characters. But I think

if you have the capacity to feel sympathetic to like former cult members, this is kind of the same thing. It's really the same process. And a big part of actually beating cults is the ability to be sympathetic to former cult members. That is actually like a crucial part of, of getting people to like get past this sort of thing. Yeah. And that's, that's going to include not just the innocent, but some people who did some pretty ugly things. And yeah, I think that's hard,

but critical. Yeah. And I always try and push people to think of that because it is very easy to your point, to look at the fedoras, to look at the wag me guys, we're going to make it people and say, these are the majority.

I would argue most people, and I'll say this, haven't been in too many telegrams of too many rug pull projects, just watching the vast majority of people are desperate. They just want their investment to turn. They just want something because there really isn't much way out for most people. There really isn't. Most people get lucky and that's how they live what used to be just like the general purpose good life.

2.4 children, house white picket fence just doesn't happen for anyone anymore and you're left with this in a society where that happens where there's so there are so few opportunities to thrive for people you get things like this you get these massive cons. And I think that it will be hard for this to take root again. I don't think crypto is done screwing people. I think that they will find a way to pump this in the future. Yeah. Which is why you should buy our new CoolZone coin.

For just the price of $45 a coin you can ape in. And, and we we're recommending right now, um, just kind of transferring your whole 401k over into cool zone coins, which, which you can do by just sending it to our mailing address in the form of a check.

We'll, we'll get your coins to you. Don't worry. No problem. I will personally take care of that. Well, Ed, thank you so much for putting this together. I think it's important to kind of look at this sort of stuff in retrospect, especially as the next con builds up scheme. You know, interest rates will drop eventually, and then there will be another attempt to fleece large numbers of people, possibly using Larry David.

Although he may have learned his lesson this time. Ed, do you want to give the people some notes on where they can find you if they want to read your stuff? You can find me at where'syoured.at. That's my newsletter, Where's Your Ed At? And you can find me on Twitter or X The Everything App or ratemynews.biz, as it will be called soon, at Ed Zitron. I'm also on Blue Sky.

You can find me as Zitron, Z-I-T-R-O-N. Well, check Ed out, any of those places, and check us out here. You already found us once, so presumably you will not forget how to find us the second time. Until next time, you know, don't invest money in unregistered securities. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts

from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for

listening. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app,

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