Julian Dorey Podcast - #37 - Nick Gurol - NBA Top Shot, The NFT Market, & Dapper Labs

Episode Date: March 3, 2021

Nick Gurol is an investor and teacher. Recently, Gurol was an early investor in NBA Top Shot NFTs. Dapper Labs, in partnership with the NBA & NBAPA, launched Top Shot in July 2019––and the market has seen a major influx of participants and capital in early 2021. Gurol is also known for his 2017 national public feud with Brooklyn Nets All-Star Guard, Kyrie Irving, over Irving's claims that the earth is flat. ***TIMESTAMPS*** 6:06 - NBA Top Shot intro; NFTs; Dapper Labs & The Flow Protocol on the Ethereum blockchain; Hardcourt & Fantasy sports 15:22 - How Nick got involved in NBA Top Shot; Jonathan Bales & his original newsletter on NBA Top Shot; How the secondary market works; The NBA Ad campaign for Top Shot; The Daily Fantasy Sports community influx into Top Shot 23:05 - Series 1, Series 2 & Common, Rare, and Legendary Top Shot classes; How the NBA Top Shot Moments work; Dapper Labs Dr. Seuss project; NFTs and video games; The value of NFTs and Top Shot Moments; Scarcity 32:25 - How the Top Shot website and market works; Could the exchange be hacked?; Dapper’s fight against bots on the site; Coinbase  and Mt. Gox exchange examples 39:40 - Dapper Labs valuation; The theories behind the NBA halting their ads; The timeline of the NBA Top Shot explosion into the mainstream; The pack drop that bombed; Examples of Moments in packs 44:45 - Gurol’s “proprietary algorithm” for uncovering outliers in the NBA Top Shot Moments Market; Revisiting Rare, Common, & Legendary levels; Steph Curry 3-Pointer Moment’s crazy price 49:26 - Gurol’s investment; Revisiting Michael Lewis’ Flashboys book; Why Nick is bullish on Top Shot and the NFT Market; The grind and work behind Top Shot investing; When Gurol knew it was time to sell many of his moments 59:39 - Status of current Top Shot market cycle; Money Laundering protocols Dapper Labs has in place; Fine Art and historical use for money laundering, tax evasion, etc.; NFT Market hard to hide things? 1:04:34 - The timing of Top Shot’s rise; Revisiting the Gamestop, Reddit, Robinhood saga; Is the Top Shot market at a “top?”; Peak sales on Top Shot; The sports card market, PSA, Starstock, and the higher barriers to entry there 1:16:37 - Jared Dillian, The Seafood Tower Theory, & The Taxi Driver Theory 1:25:46 - The NBA’s marketability moving forward; Top Shot restriction in  China?; Anthony Fenu, Riley Horvath, Justin Baker, & Soar’s potential in the NFT market with volumetric content, holograms, and 3D capabilities; “Friction” and why Top Shot is a better investment than sports cards 1:49:29 - Dapper Labs 5% “rake” on transactions; Flow Protocol and its scalability with dollar integration; Cryptokitties; NFTs explained definitively; Sam Merrill’s Top Shot Moments 1:57:21 - Gurol’s national public feud with Kyrie Irving over his flat earth belief; The elaboration likelihood model; The psychology behind changing your mind; Anchoring; the 3 Doors Test; The effects low barriers to entry on public platforms has on our discourse; Reporting and jour... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I took the market cap of the MGLE divided by the market cap of the common. And I basically compared that to LeBron, which I thought was the most efficiently priced because of the most action on LeBron, because you get on the site, you're looking at LeBron's price. And basically what that did is it spit out some outliers and I just bought them all. I experienced that dip because of this legendary pack drop, had everyone with the paper hands. I love saying paper hands, by the way. I love paper hands. I saw a diamond hands get diamond bands story.

That's what I love about it. What's cooking, everybody? You remember the movie series, The Hangover? Of remember the movie series The Hangover? Of course you do. The Hangover was hilarious. To this day, you can walk into a bar, drop some one-liners from those movies, and everyone in the bar is going to know what you're talking about, and everyone's going to laugh their asses off. But right now, I want you to think back very specifically to the first Hangover movie and the scene in which Phil, Alan, and Stu returned to the wedding chapel that they had apparently attended the night before.

If you remember, when they walked in, the proprietor of the institution, Eddie, greeted them. And Eddie was, to say the least, very excited to see them. And specifically, he looked right at Stu and said something like, Listen to me. I'm going to tell you something. I've met some sick, sick people in my life. But this guy, this guy is the craziest, wildest bastard I ever met.

Come here. Come give Eddie some love. He pulls Stu in close, and Stu has absolutely no idea who he was because Stu was the dad of the crew. I mean, this was the guy that wore glasses and New Balance sneakers who probably at that point thought a crazy night was falling asleep on the couch with his mouth wide open at 8.15 with an untouched glass of wine sitting right in front of him. This was not the guy who went to Las Vegas to get fucked up and marry a hooker. Yet here we are. I'm joined in the bunker today by the stew to my Eddie.

Nick Garol, who's probably going to kill me for saying that, but Nick Garol is a friend of mine from college who I have not seen since college. He was a year or two older than me, graduated before me, and we talked from time to time, but I haven't hung out with him,

and I really only remember the Nick Garol that I knew, which was the guy who usually at about 2 a.m would hijack the dj booth and play the song 22 for the 50th time because apparently he didn't remember the first 49 that's my lasting memory of nick roll so when this man this upstanding citizen molder of young minds walked in here today with a mustache a button-down shirt, a DNA tie, and exuding the confidence of a master's degree from Penn

Educator. I was probably a little bit surprised. But I guess that's called growing up, and it's a beautiful thing to see. So I really appreciate him doing it. Now, why did I bring Nick Goral in? You're wondering. What did we talk about nick gural

texted me about eight weeks ago and said julian have you tech have you checked out nba top shot which is the nft market done by dapper labs in coordination with the nba and the and the nba pa we're going to get to what it is today and i said yes i've heard the name i know nfts well i look into that stuff but i haven't gotten a top shot yet. And he says, well, maybe you should check it out. I'm like, I'll get to it. So then a couple of weeks ago, about five, six friends of mine hit me up and they told me the same thing. Right.

And I tell them the same thing. Like, I'll get to it. I'm working on some on some NFT NFT stuff right now, but I'll get the top shot. And they're like, you should really check it out. Then Thursday comes and Nick hits me up and says, listen, man, I just exited the market. I made a fuck ton of money. I know all about it.

I've been in it, in the grind. I believe in it. I didn't exit because I don't believe in it. I'll explain why that was, but I think I should come in and we should talk about this on a podcast. And I said, absolutely. So I got him in here this weekend.

We talked about it and we're turning it around right away because NBA Top Shot is a term that has taken over the internet and a lot of people are asking what the hell is it? Today we answer that question. Furthermore though one other point on this conversation. The reason I love this podcast format and doing this is because we never know where these conversations are going to go. So on this one I'm thinking alright Nick's going to in here. We're going to talk all about Top Shot and NFTs. And we did for about an hour and 55 minutes. And then out of nowhere, Nick took you into his neurological field, which operates on a completely different level, and started talking about some

psychological things. And that one thing led to another. And it turns out the last hour and change of this conversation was a total left turn off the beaten path of NBA Top Shot and NFTs and I really really loved it it's like two podcasts in one in a way so thank you to Nick for doing it very proud of this guy for being such a great leader in society now and excited to see everything he's doing next. Anyway, if you're not subscribed, please subscribe. We are on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. And if you're on YouTube right now, hit that subscribe button, hit that bell button, and leave a like and comment on the video if you would, please. Furthermore, to all the people who have left five-star reviews with a comment on Apple Podcasts, thank you.

I say it every week. They're amazing. They're a huge help. If you haven't had a chance to do that and can take a minute to leave one, I would really, really appreciate it. That said, you know what it is. I'm Julian Dorey, and this is Trendify. Let's go. This is one of the great questions in our culture.

Where is the news? You're giving opinions and calling them facts. You feel me? Everyone understands this, but few seem to do it. If you don't like the status quo, start asking questions. Let's get right to it. Okay. hit you hit me up i don't know like six weeks ago or something like that yeah and you're like julian you got to check out this nba top shot and then i didn't really hear anything about it i mean i was following it out of the corner of my eye and not really paying close attention and then a couple of my buddies

my buddy mitch hit me up talking to me all about it like a week and a half ago. But the reason why I told you about it is because Elon Musk, our boy, apparently because he's on the screen all over the place. He had that Clubhouse thing, right? And I mean, I had no idea what Clubhouse was, but I wanted to hear what he had to say. Because I thought there was a small chance he would be talking about Top Shot. Because it's not – it's right in the Doge lane. It's right in the Dogecoin lane. So I was like, if he talks about Top Shot, I'm going to double my investment because we're going to Mars with the NBA Top Shot card.

So I got in and I was – I think I was in a waiting room. I was in Clubhouse Purgatory and I think it was so – I let you in and like i was just said i think i was in a waiting room i was in clubhouse purgatory and i think it was so like even i let you in and you let me in so i was like thank you sir you're welcome um and so i listened for a little bit became apparent that he was just talking about mars which is cool i'm into that too dude you talked about robin hood on there too yeah did you hear that i didn't stay for that but um but when I got off I said I gotta go to bed because I had to teach the next day and um I just sent you one of my top shot moments and at that point I was I was in I was in pretty deep but not as deep as I got in and I said I got some stuff for you I said something like cryptic because I think I'm very I stole the text and um it was a Giannis dunk which i still have that one it's like what was my first big purchase

because i bought it for like 750 bucks um and uh yeah so i sent it to you and i said uh i got some stuff for you you'll be interested in and then we didn't talk for a while because i wasn't talking really to anybody yeah you were you were you're busy making money i was grinding i was grinding and uh so yeah let's start off by defining nba top shot for people because now everyone's heard in the wind this being tossed around no one knows what the fuck it is so just outline what it is and we'll start there all right so from the top nft non-fungible token okay get used to that fungibility a fungible item is something that can be swapped for something of equal value so a dollar you swap for a dollar that's fungible non-fungible is interesting because you can create scarcity in the sense that a LeBron card moment

where $299 are minted, we'll talk about how that works, is worth way more than a Damian Lillard moment. Same scarcity, $299, LeBron's career, his legacy, his demand is much higher higher so that's what makes it non-fungible how do they create that scarcity they create that scarcity through the blockchain so just like tops has printing presses and ink and things that no one else has access to to make um to make uh trading cards this dapper labs has something called the flow blockchain that's their printing press which is not actually a printing press it's a dapper labs is who controls nba top shot dapper labs put a pin in that dapper labs controls nba top shot um because they own the flow blockchain

which is essentially a token and it's a non-fungible token because it is printing these moments um and uh that's creating the scarcity so the flow blockchain is essentially like if you have a bitcoin is equal to the same bitcoin but in the flow blockchain the lebron moment is worth more than the damien lillard moment and it's also if there's 299 lebron moments you own a number so maybe you own number one maybe you own number 25 of it but you own this it's not a serial mark but in in the parallel universe of blockchain you own a serial marked data point numbers they're called yeah okay so they still do call it that okay and when you you keep on talking about the moment and these videos, but it really is boiled down to this company, Dapper Labs, creating these NBA Top Shot moments, which the moments are the videos,

and they are just angles of plays that you have seen on TV. So maybe it's just a ho-hum play that happened, therefore it's not worth that much and no one was involved, or it's LeBron chasing down Andre Iguon chasing down andre guadal in game six or game seven the nba finals in 2016 which obviously could be worth a lot when you get it you get the digital version of it so you receive a video and there's a lot of people out there going what the fuck it like i could just get that on youtube yeah but you receive it with the it's it's multiple different camera angles i think some of them never spliced together that way before in broadcast i'm not positive on that but we'll check that and you also you get the official

trademarked nba top shot logo on it so it's the same thing as like if it's licensed by the nba correct that's the big thing correct so if you hung a picture of lebron james on your wall today right or 10 years ago if you hung right next to it even forget the size difference if you hung right next to it a rookie card made by tops of lebron james yes that rookie card's worth a lot of money your picture's not yeah because really i mean if you get the a printer that you can access on amazon you can print a printer like that if you get the right paper and the right ink tops has specific printers that only they own specific ink that only they own flow is a specific code blockchain technology

that only dapper labs owns and the the nba has decided to back the Flow blockchain. And the NBA PA. And the NBA PA. Yeah. And the NFL PA. And whoever owns Dr. Seuss. And Samsung. Dapper Labs is going to take over the internet. I'm telling you. The NFL is doing top shot?

Oh, yeah. I would say within the next two years. The NFL is not a partner, but the NFL PA is. If you go on dapper labs website this is where i i'm getting into the weeds yeah you scroll down our community members so that right now in the works you can sign up for ufc top shot um you can sign up for dr seuss top shot which i am because i'm a sick, sick, twisted individual. No, wait. How does Dr. Seuss top shot? Well, I'm not sure what it is.

So another layer to this is like top shot is not in its final – it's not even in its final form. It's nascent. Eventually, these moments are going to be more interactive because that's another layer. Like if I have LeBron rookie's card, it's probably in a vault and I'm never going to see it if it's 10 out of 10. I never get to interact with it. I just own it and it's just money in a bank. Whereas the LeBron moment, so I own this LeBron moment. It's a no look three, right? I watch it all the time. It's like, because I think it's really cool and it's like a cool little thing. I can watch it over and over and over again. Eventually I should should be able to take that moment, based on what I've been told through Discord channels and stuff,

and use it in a fantasy lineup, an NBA fantasy lineup. So I can slot in my LeBron no-look three, and then if LeBron... What do you mean an NBA fantasy lineup? So there's going to be some type of interactive game with Top Shot called Hardcourt. No one knows what it is yet okay so this hard court and there's some third party ones ones called swish i already think it tanked but um with swish i'll just use their rules because i think they're going to be close to what the rules will be for the actual dapper labs version of this which is like if you had a three

point player you could slot in lebron three pointpoint if he scores a three-point in the game you get points to your lineup so he scores a three-pointer in in the actual nba game going on in real life yeah so you use your moment as access to it yes but people own all different moments of lebron james so doesn't don't a lot of people own lebron james but it's the same thing like dfs right so like daily fantasy sports like anybody can build a lineup using a salary instead of having a fixed salary you you have to go and buy the moment beforehand it like creates its own its own league it's like virtual league i don't know if that's necessarily going to take off quite as well as as you might think because dfs already has that type of like itch cornered whereas i've heard another iteration of it could be like i can

take my moments to an nba game and there's like some type of like pokemon go element where i'm capturing my own moments and sending them to the site i don't know where it's going but but there's a lot of interactiveness there that doesn't exist in the cardboard market okay or like it's kind of like like yugio, you can play, like Pokemon, like there's going to be some aspect of that, that that's going to fuel the base of this. Or like people are like,

they don't really care about the scarcity. They don't really care. Like they're just buying one, two, three, like $20 moments. That's like the bottom of the food chain. Okay. Wow. There's a lot of there's a lot of

directions we can go right now i want to stay with the beginning just tell me when you found out about this and and how you got into it and you know are you an nba fan what how did you make buying decisions let's start there okay so january ish mid-january um i follow this guy on twitter his name is jonathan bal. Jonathan Bales, I started following him like right out of college. I got really into like after college, I got really into fantasy sports, DFS, like FanDuel, that type of stuff, like really started taking off. And I got into it. I've never been super profitable, but it's just fun for me. Like I like the math behind it. I like, I like watching football. So I was really into that. Um, so I followed him a lot. He's, he,

um, he created this thing called fantasy labs, which I actually never subscribed to, but I think it's a cool idea. He, um, it's basically a site that allows you to manipulate data and like, we'll spit out good plays and daily, daily daily fantasy it's a big site now he sold it to the churning group um and he's really just kind of like a an investor now like a venture capitalist whatever you want to call it so he writes this newsletter and um it's called lucky maverick and in this newsletter he just gives out like some cool books he's been reading like um ways of thinking about certain things and one day he wrote this article i just bought a 35 000 video that you can watch on youtube

so i read it he talked about like he kind of laid out his um his uh kind of creed for investing and how this fit and checked all the boxes he talked about nfts i was like that's cool sent it to my buddy alex sent the article i was like, that's cool. Sent it to my buddy Alex. Sent the article. I was like, this looks pretty cool. What was his logic there? Because you hear the title and he's trying to get the clicks there

to be able to show like, yeah, that's literally what I did. And then people go, well, this must be worth nothing. But clearly to him, it's not. So what was he saying it was worth? It checked a lot of boxes for him in the sense of like the scarcity is there. he could see like the world's going digital um he saw like the cardboard

market blew up this is just a digital version of that and with that digital version comes more efficiency it's way more efficient in the sense of like buying and selling is more liquid but the cardboard market you have to get graded you have to wait for ebay you have to wait for mailing like this is just a more efficient and because things move faster prices can go up faster um so aside from that like he had other things and layered in but i was i didn't i can't say that i bought in right away um but my buddy did he bought 10 packs and you find a pack for people. And a pack is like, it's like a pack of baseball cards. When you buy a pack, you take it, you open it up, and it spits out some moments. And you click on them, and they reveal themselves.

And then you see what you got. So he got 10 series 2 packs. And at the time, I mean, they're $9. They're still $9 bucks but it's very hard to get them now getting 10 is impossible and probably will be impossible for the rest of the lifetime of the site because how many how many do they make like can i just go on are there other kinds of packs i can go on right now and i can no okay so they're doing them like sneaker drops where you get in a waiting room and then you get a random spot in line.

And if you're within the number that they're releasing, you get one. If not, you don't get one. And then you have to go to the secondary market to buy anything you want. And then if you don't get a pack, you go to the secondary market. And that's where Dapper's making their money and that's where people like me are making their money is the secondary market. Now, the secondary market is like StockX. It's like the stock market. It's just these moments trade by you know moment it's

it runs for 24 hours a day oh yeah yeah i mean they've they've they're in beta still so the market will go down and sometimes the market goes down because i think there's legitimate uh site status issues but in my experience the market has gone down at some pretty inconvenient times. Funny how that happens. Yeah, yeah. But it's framed in a way that they're in beta. They've been very transparent and honest about everything. Like when Robinhood goes down and they don't allow trading, that's a pretty big problem.

And they don't talk about it, yeah. When this goes down, like they talk about why. And I think every time that it's goes down like they talk about why and um i think every time that it's gone down they've actually had a pretty good reason but i think i'm just kind of assigning some meaning to some things because i really wanted to either not sell a moment that sold what when it went down or um i wanted to um sell some moments because i was like i want to get rid of this one but yeah but But yeah, so that's how I got in. So my buddy bought 10 packs.

I didn't get in right away. Two weeks later, I don't know what triggered it. How do you get 10? They were just sitting on the site. Back then in January 14th, which is a month and a half ago. Demand wasn't there yet. Just sitting on the site. And so about two weeks later it started to pick

up a little bit um so after that so after the bails article thirty five thousand dollars it like the dfs community got in um so like the fantasy football very active um twitter community and um so like all the content creators started getting into it and um that i kind of get got in with them how many of these people do you think or do you know seem to be nba fans versus they were just looking at a good trend where there's supply and clear and clear demand the nba fans are just now getting into it when i got in it was n heads, crypto heads. It was people like me. I won't even say that I was looking to make a quick buck. I just saw that it was, I saw an opportunity for an edge.

And if I doubled my money, great. If I lost it, I think I was like, I went into it with like, I'm going to learn a lot about how markets work. And so I was okay. And like my friend who invested with me and then later my uncle could just tell how excited I was about it so he helped us out a lot we call his investment jet fuel and so like I was just into it but I was like I'm not an NBA fan I'm still not an NBA fan like I'll probably I want to get into it but at time, like, the NBA fans are just now getting into it.

And the funny thing is, is NBA itself has not advertised it at all. They have not themselves run an ad since January 20th. But they were running ads before that. They were doing Instagram and YouTube ads. And they only did them for about a week. Because after the Bales article, there was a mini, there was a mini influx. It cooled down for about two weeks. Um, and then Mark Cuban wrote an article. Gary V wrote an article. Logan Paul talked about it on his podcast. Um, who was it?

Uh, Barstool PMT started talking about it. Like that's where we are now. I don't know if you can show a graphic or if I can show you a graphic. What site is it on? It's just a text. I'll just have to text it to you. Yeah, I'll put it in the screen. Just tell me what it says. It's a graph, and it literally looks like Mount Everest. It spikes.

I got in at the bottom of the foothills and I sold up here. Yeah. And so – Now, is the spike still happening? No, it's down. But that's just because they're not able to produce enough supply for the demand that there is right now. So all the money is tied up in Top Shot and there's really – it's just going, it's just funneling into the more scarce stuff. So right now-

When you say more scarce stuff, specifically. So there's two series. There's series one and series two. Series one obviously is more valuable than series two for a couple of reasons. They didn't make as many series ones because they print the amount, the amount that they print on their common moments is based on the number of users interacting with the site so a common series one the mint number on it is out of 5 000 because when they printed series one there were only about 3 000 or sorry there might have only been like 10 000 people hence why your buddy got 10 packs when he went on yeah now series two the mint the denominator mint number was 15,000.

Okay? That's not enough anymore. The next round that they're going to do, series three, is going to be at least 25,000. So every common moment that's printed, because there's common, there's rare, there's legendary, and then there's going to be ultimate. Yeah. So as an example, just to be clear, when you're saying common to legendary and there's rare in the middle, legendary would be that example I gave of like the chase down block LeBron on Nega Dala. The actual play itself is not assigned a rarity.

Okay. So there can be three versions of the same play and different tiers of rarity. So that's one of the edges that I found. Now, what are they? Okay. So let's stay with the LeBron chase down block example and I get down. So there's a common, there's a rare, and there's a legendary. What's the difference between them?

The scarcity. Right, but what's the difference in the product? There's a visual difference as well. So the rare version of the moment will have this like neon box around the front of it. It's a little shinier uh the logo on the side has color where the common moment is just like it's like a matte black but you can tell it's like lakers um and then the the it's just like if you go on the site and look like you can tell which ones are fancier and stuff like that yeah i didn't play around at

the higher levels of rarity um i basically made my money in series one common now how do how do you concept this from the value of having it standpoint what do i mean by that in english when you buy a lebron rookie card gemman 10 whatever something really high end for hundreds of thousands of dollars at this point you have the physical card right now is that something that i've ever been really really into like having like oh i got a sports card or something personally no but i completely get that because people can frame it they can hang it on their wall if they have people over they show them same way that you know you see some of these very wealthy people around the world they collect art right they put it on their fucking walls or

maybe they put some of it in a vault because they're tax harvesting or hiding from taxes whatever but a lot of it's like oh i have this this is a part of my lifestyle my decor when you are buying a top shot moment though you don't have it physically you have it on your computer and if i'm understanding correctly this is built the the the flow protocol is built on the ethereum blockchain so it your assets are stored in a digital wallet much like you a lot of people stare um store their their bitcoin or ethereum or other cryptocurrency on um coinbase or a centralized exchange that gives them a wallet there that's not officially like a separate wallet but it's it's a it's a digital wallet so with top shot it's the same right uh yeah so that's actually one of the

interesting things about it because because like that's one of the things about non-fungible tokens that i don't think people fully grasp yet, at least from my understanding, is I'm going to be able to take my TopShot moments off of the TopShot site. Yes. So if you look at... Like you can take a Bitcoin off of Coinbase. Yes. Same thing. If you look at Coinbase's, I guess it's Coinbase wallet.

I don't know if anyone's noticed this, but there is a tab for collectibles. Yeah. I didn't, i'm very new to crypto yep this is my introduction to crypto um i'm gonna be able to have my top shot moments in in this coinbase wallet but this also makes it really cool but like if a third party app wants to wants to create a game around top shot moments i I'm going to be able to take my Top Shot moments to that site. I'm going to have them be able to interact with that site without the worry of them being ripped and copied.

What do you mean a third-party app wants to create a game around my moment? So like if a third-party app, so there's this one called Swish. If a third-party app wanted to create a fantasy game that is based off of Top Shot moments, they set up their own set of rules, they set up everything. I'm going to be able to take them to that site and have them live on that site and interact with that site. That's what I'm having trouble concepting though they're making up a fantasy let's stay with the basketball example a fantasy basketball game around moments that already happened so it's essentially that's tough to grasp i'm not gonna lie that's my point when you're playing fantasy basketball you are and if you're an elite for money like we all are you are betting on what

you don't know happens yet yeah you're not betting on who has the biggest dick around here and could buy the most yeah you know what i mean there's there's it's like it inserts a lot of capitalism into it where it used to be a pure gambling slash skill that's why i don't think this particularly is going to be a good use of an NFT outside of the collectible realm. I think like the real ceiling for NFTs is the collectible realm. It's going to get that, but also the interactive kind of aspect of it. So I think that's like – What's the interactive aspect?

So it's hard to imagine that with Top Shot because of what you described. That's what I'm asking on Top Shot. Let's go back to the Dr. Seuss. Okay. That one is probably going to be less collectible heavy and more interactive heavy so i don't even know so like let's say i buy the lorax right whatever this nft site is is like and it's going to be for kids like they're going to be able to use that lorax like a fortnight skin so like they're monetizing in a in a way more intense way like the idea of that kids want to buy digital collectibles they want to have their what was the old game where you modeled stuff sims i think yeah they want to have their

sims online where they're playing their video games and stuff. I had Cole Cannelli in here back in the end of December, and it was the first episode in January. And obviously, he is a hacker on the Ethereum blockchain, has his own protocol, really killing it, volmex.finance. He essentially built a volatility index for Ethereum on the Ethereum blockchain. So he took what they do with the s&p in the stock market with the vol index and built it there it's a pretty incredible product but he was the guy who really got me looking into nfts and like i said i top shot is one it's kind of a separate thing i haven't looked at that as much but i look at nfts a lot and that was the first example he gave he said when you're talking about owning assets in a in a digital world where

you are interacting in the world you're going to own that so in the video games if you're playing madden and you own this type of jersey like let's just do something ridiculous like that you own it no one else does and it can't the video game maker who allows the graphic to happen has no ownership over it can't take it from you that's it it can't be fucked with yeah so with top shot you're still you're it's the youtube video concept it's not like you're owning skins in fortnite you own a youtube video that has a nba top shot logo on it yeah so the interactivity i guess the fantasy is one side of it but is there anything else you can do beyond that either right now no other than watching it it's purely a collectible so back

to the original part where i started this this part of the conversation right here physical items you can put on your wall have in front of you be able to show you got them it's like you know yeah sociable in that way i mean are you whipping out like people don't come to your house and see on your wall your moment necessarily although i'm sure that's going to be a more normal thing where we used to have digital frames exactly where we have digital frames so seeing as we don't have that world yet is a lot of are a lot of the investors who maybe actually know what they're doing not just the people running into the pig pile are they buying on the basis of that's the world that's going to be existing so they want it now is that what you think um i just think they understand that people will want to collect these they're not as worried

about displaying them i thought about like how to display them i thought about the digital frames i think it's enough to know that like hey look me up my top shot username is stranger go look at my moments but is that really your name yeah stranger that's incredible yeah um and uh the in top shot itself like you can make a showcase so like it itself is a little bit of a social media social media platform yeah i think they're gonna they're flush they'll flush that out flush out a little bit so they do this on on the flow protocol on the ethereum blockchain like we said but you you transact everything on the website yeah right so you go in there it's just like if someone went into stock x and they looked at the charts and then they saw a price for a product they wanted. They hit buy, right? How does it work?

Do you get your information right there? Can you see what your code is on the blockchain and what your numbers are? Yeah. Okay. And it is technically a centralized exchange though, because this is, they're the New York Stock Exchange of TopShot. Yeah. Right.

So hypothetically, the exchange itself could be hacked uh i mean i'm i'm i guess i don't really have the the technical know-how um i think the i i i'm trusting when i was investing i was trusting that like the idea of blockchain was more secure than i just think that like that itself is a very secure technology i agree with you comparatively speaking certainly certainly depending on the context of what you're looking at but certainly but like when you look back at crypto that's a major question and concern around coinbase that a lot of people have had probably a big blind spot of mine honestly i mean look back in the day you know people who were early in bitcoin know about mount gox and what happened there mount gox was an exchange i got no idea what

you're talking about so mount gox was a centralized exchange think of it just like coinbase right coinbase before coinbase and it crashed and burned and there were i think it was we can check this after but i think there were something like 850 000 bitcoins stolen from there just taken off because they weren't on their own wallet just like how on coinbase right now if you have some assets there which i actually do have some assets on coinbase i know that that's technically not in my own wallet so now i'm working on getting everything to my own wallet so like on the thing that has the 20 word password that the guy lost and now he's shit out of luck. It's essentially like putting it on a hard drive.

It's very bizarre to concept it. It's like a weird thing, but you own it in the ether on your own physical product. It puts the personal responsibility on you. So people are going to be doing that, already are, with NBA Top Shot. I have heard about that but this the the execution is very interesting to me because it's happening almost like you would expect things to happen and I mean this in a simple way like you did in 2008 or 2009 in the sense that if you wanted to go just like Amazon today if you want to go buy something on Amazon well you know we have apps and everything too

which don't have an app as well where you can do it but you just go to the website and you buy it there and that's all you're doing here and they just happen to take care of the back end where you own it according to the blockchain protocol yep that's my understanding and yeah i mean it it can be i mean there's a chance it could be hacked there's a chance that my bank account could be hacked like probably better chance that's i was just gonna say like i have a pretty i'm not gonna tell you what my bank account could be hacked like probably better chance that's i was just gonna say like i have a pretty i'm not gonna tell you what my bank is never mind um but uh but yeah so this another another reason to be bullish on top shot um is they've been attacked pretty hard by bots so the same bots that are buying up all the sneakers the same bots that are buying up everything they've they've done better in my experience and in my research than many many

many other sites at combating that um how do you combat that i don't know i think they have people smarter than the people making the bots so the people making the bots are you talking about people who are essentially building high frequency trading algorithms to do this versus bad actors who are just coming in there to fuck shit up so there's you name two so there's bots they're trying to buy all the packs who are quickly um creating multiple ips so they look like they're on multiple computers multiple accounts because one account one pack is basically how you do it. So today there was a pack drop, 10,000 rare packs, expected value on one, $99 to buy.

Expected value is probably $2,000 to $4,000. It's a very good lottery ticket, essentially. How many people were waiting for those $10,000? Sorry, 203,000. So 10,000 people got them? Mm-hmm. And like I said, one of the moments was a rare moment

that would fetch at least $1,000. And I kind of lost my train of thought here. What am I thinking? Oh, bots, they were going to do it yesterday, but bots got to the site and they didn't release the pack because there was too much bot activity. So the idea is that like 10,000 people, early days in Top Shot, they released like 50,000 packs.

And if you got one, you could get back in line and get another one. And they'd release these cool pie charts that show like these are a number of unique accounts that got packs. See this big block? That's bots. We're going to handle it. So bots got to the site. So they can take it from them. Not take it from them, but they basically don't let them do anything with them.

Yeah. So that's my understanding. I think that's the way that they're punishing the bots, but since then, bots can't even do that, at least in my experience. And if they are doing it, it's being hidden very well. There's other bot activity where I think that I took advantage of it is they were buying up the floor um so they bought up the floor and meaning where where the where the prices got to

a support point they bought up the floor and then i think recently dumped for whatever margin they wanted um and they're just they just did that kind of before this hits mainstream, I think, because eventually I think there's going to be so many people in this that buying up the floor is going to be very difficult for one bot or multiple bots to do. But yeah, so they've done a great job with that, which gives me confidence in their technical know-how. They're very smart people.

And they also have, I mean, if you look at their investors it's it's everybody man like all the big players you see their valuation it's a dapper dapper labs is at a two billion dollar valuation they just raised 250 million dollars last week that like that and here's the thing with these projects and don't get me wrong i don't want to understate those numbers. Those are fucking huge numbers for a non-public company to raise and especially considering I think their last raise was like $12 million and I want to say it was like three months ago. It was not long ago. And their secondary market, they get 5% of it. Okay. We'll definitely circle back to that later. We'll miss some things that we're coming back to because there's a lot of moving pieces here but i want to hit as much as we can so they raise that much money one of the major keys there is not like were they going to get it they were going to get it if you've watched the last month and seen the the spread of the network effects here like you you talked

about how the nba only advertised on some instagram ads and stuff for like a week, and then they stopped. I think – and there's one of two things that happened here, and give me your thoughts. On one hand, on the one hand, like anything else in the world, the NBA's lawyers may have come in and said, hey, we don't know enough about whatever yet. This – insert small little thing here. So don't say anything. And the market's doing well. Just don't say anything. That could be one thing.

The other thing is that could have been a coordinated plan thing in that they're playing off of this scarcity of what the product is that they sell, which is this scarce product. And doing the same thing by saying, oh no, we don't talk about that. Same thing that you've seen with Clubhouse do in a totally different light,

where Clubhouse... Exclusivity, yeah.house exactly they make people have to join the app like be invited to join the app so are you asking me like the reason they stopped advertising like why yeah one of those two do you think they had a team of 10 people plus the founder working on this and they had a user base of 10 000 this blew up way faster than they thought it would um so they stopped advertising to slow the influx of flux of users so they could scale up when i got in so i got in after the 35 000 job morant article i had there was about a 12 hour window that i got in what was the job moran article? It was the Bales. Oh, got it. Yeah, Bales wrote the article. He basically got the Daily Fantasy community into it. That's the video.

I came in with them. And then in between that, like there was, it was a Sunday, about 12 hours, two moments sold for $100,000. And that, that created a hockey stick and i was lucky enough to get in right before the hockey stick um to a certain degree it hockey sticked up and then it kind of came back down and where are we you know do you have a percentage on that where we stand right now percentage of what like how far down it's come off the top oh that was just initial we've gone nuclear since then oh yeah so it went so basically they had a day where they did seven million in sales which was a big day a couple things happened basically they weren't able to scale up their servers were literally on fire they shut down marketing they kind of slowed everything down on purpose and new users

were still coming in, buying stuff up. It was a real fun time on the site. But it really hit a, it almost bottomed out, like not quite completely, but it bottomed out to where like my account value went down a couple thousand dollars. And because they tried to do a pack drop and they just botched it and it was a legendary pack drop so you were it was a thousand dollars for a pack and i think they had like they were i think there were a thousand there were a thousand packs what were some example moments in there just to put a visual on it for an mba series too um i'm trying to think of a good one maybe uh was that where lebron's dunk was that went for like 200k on the second series one

this is this one was um like an anthony davis dunk like like good plays but the the big thing was like the scarcity right you know when they drop this though, like they do a drop like that with the legendary. Isn't it a lot of different plays? Yeah, it's a ton of different plays. Okay, okay. It's not just one. No, so there were like 10 hollow icon series two moments. Like there was another Jommerant in there.

There was just like the big players get big plays. And it was like some of their best plays really scarce only 50 were made plus it comes with nine other moments and some of those are rare so it's a very good pack the expected value on it was absolutely insane um so everybody wanted one so they do the pack drop and they did a couple stress tests before they did a couple practice runs where they dropped like 5 000 common packs just to test this new queue system everything was looking good but they um small little coding hiccup right they did not anticipate people going back to the landing page to join the drop after they joined the drop and if you went back to the landing page after you joined the drop you just were able to buy you were able to skip the line so thankfully like enough if there weren't there weren't enough bots didn't get to it

thankfully but a couple people got like eight right which is just printing money like for free and they didn't take them away from anybody it was it was their fault they acknowledged it but like a faith in the site kind of dropped a little bit. The marketplace really cooled down. People started dumping moments. I almost had those. When was this? This was early February. Okay. Probably like second week in February.

Got it. I almost had those paper hands, Julian. I almost had those paper hands. You got diamond hands, Nicholas. But what I actually did was I bought in more at the dip because I was like... Diamond hands, baby. And what I did was, this is where I actually, I think, this was like my peak of being into it, is I took the rare...

So like I said, they have one moment can have a legendary, a rare, and a common counterpart. And that's the core sets, okay? Okay. So like I said, they have one moment can have a legendary, a rare, and a common counterpart. And that's the core sets. Okay? Okay. So there's the common. The base set is the first core set. Then you have the metallic gold LE.

There's the rare version of the base set. And then you have the hollow icon. Okay? So the more legendary ones, the rarer ones look a lot prettier. And they're, yeah. And they're scarcer. And, yeah. People just want them. The big sell is the rarer ones look a lot prettier. And they're, yeah, and they're scarcer. And yeah, people just want them. The big sell is the scarcity.

So you can have, I'm trying to think of a specific play that I looked at. So there's a Steph Curry three, right? This is a good example that I can think of. It's before the bubble. So there's a big crowd. He pulls up from like, I don't know, what is a three-pointer? How many feet? 25 feet.

25 feet. He pulls up from probably like 35. It's a deep three. Just like catch, boom. Just patented Steph Curry, just dagger. Yeah. Turns around, gives like this, like the three. He's wearing these crazy shoes, like sticks his tongue out.

It's an awesome moment, okay? So that, when I bought it, was like, it was like, I don't know, like $100. And when did you buy that? I bought that at the beginning of February. Right now, look it up. Look up Steph Curry Base Set Series 1. Three-pointer.

Steph Curry, what's it, Base Set? Mm-hmm. NBA Top Shot. Three-pointer. Mm-hmm. NBA Top Shot. Yeah, the price action on some of this stuff is nuts. What's it base set mm-hmm NBA top three-pointer mm-hmm NBA top shot Yeah, the price action on some of this stuff is nuts Let's see pull it up behind you there That's the moment the one so this is number 718 I guess that's just the one I clicked

76 available by collectors. Click that. Yeah, you click on that. Yep. $3,450, ladies and gentlemen. Highest price, $200,000. So that means that someone has put out their limit sale at $200,000. So they're just a little bit pipe dream right there, but maybe not. And then the lowest available price is $3,450.

Yeah. pipe dream right there but maybe not yeah and then the lowest available price is 34 50 yeah so um so other than like i mean obviously like i said i was early so i was able to buy up all these things but at the time i was like what do you buy so what i did was i took i took the rare version of that play because there's a rare version of that one and um i looked at the price of that and i said okay so these rare moments the people that are playing around in this tier probably know what they're doing. If they're putting this type of money in, they probably have some type of algorithm or something. So I'll take that one and I'll just do some math. And I made a spreadsheet and I basically took the market cap of the rare one. I took the price times the scarcity. I took the market cap of the rare one. I took the price times the scarcity. I took the market cap

of the common, and then I divided them. And then I used LeBron as kind of like my base point, basically, because I thought LeBron was the most efficiently priced. You divided them by the total supply. I divided them by each other. I took the market cap of the MGLE divided by the market cap of the Common, and I basically compared that to LeBron, which I thought was the most efficiently priced because it's the most action on LeBron because you get on the site, you're looking at LeBron's price. And basically what that did is it spit out some outliers, and I just bought them all. So what were some outliers you bought?

I ended up with all like Steph Curry. Joe Embiid was a big outlier. Joe Kitsch was a big outlier. Kevin Durant was a big outlier. James Harden was a big outlier. And this is, you're talking like all mid-January right now? End of January, beginning of February? This is early February.

Okay. Yeah, so, I mean, it turns out like I think I'm like this super sharp guy. But again, anything Series one skyrocketed. So. How much money did you put into this? So I put in myself about $3,500. My buddy who had the packs originally, we valued those appropriately. And then he put in like another $1,600.

And then my uncle had some Bitcoin lying around because he got burnt. He got burnt when it went from, I think, 13,000 debt back down to whatever. Not anymore, though. Not anymore. But he just had like a few hundred bucks sitting around in his Coinbase wallet. He's older, not as bought into crypto. He's like, oh, I got now $3,500 worth of Bitcoin just lying in my Coinbase wallet that I forgot about. He like here use it so all said we're a little over 8k maybe 9k um got it okay so you you guys are like a consortium going in there and i also like this because you're not you know you look at things like this and people always bring up the word bubble i definitely want to talk about that later because i i think there's a lot of

nuance to these situations and it's also nascent. So we can't really tell on everything yet, but it's not like you went in and said, you know what? I'm going to put a hundred grand in this. I'm going to put 150 grand. No, I didn't have that. Yeah. Yeah. You went in and you said, okay, well, what are some assets I'm willing to lose here? Cause this is fucking interesting and let's see what happens. So I put AK in with with uh my friend and my uncle right and my thought was like i'm i there's i think there's a pretty big edge to be had here

um i think that we're gonna make some money um at the very least but i also think i want to learn how this works and it kind of like incorporated a lot of different things i've been reading about incorporated a lot of different things that I was interested in. So I was like, what the hell? I'm just sitting around, and I just looked at it as a learning opportunity, and, I mean, there was the underlying thing. I was like, I think I can make a lot of money off of this. So I experienced that dip because of this legendary pack drop, had everyone with the paper hands.

I love saying paper hands, by the way. I love paper hands. I saw saying paper hands, by the way. I love paper hands. I saw a diamond hands get diamond bands story. That's what I love about it. So I held through that and I actually invested. I did the little MGLE versus common base thing with the spreadsheet. And I actually, a funny story about that.

So when I was doing all that math and stuff i had to manually look up all the prices if you try to do that now the market moves so fast that that would probably not be yeah your tables your tables just aged in five minutes yeah yeah so um i actually am still trying to learn python like web scraping i want to make that spreadsheet i made just to see if i could do it i don't even know if it's valuable anymore, but I'm close to getting it so that the lowest ass price would update live, but they're tricky. Scraping, scraping NBA top shot is not an easy task. I, someone listening to this probably knows how to do it. Um, hit me up. Well, that's what they're building there. I mean, it's in the same family of, of bot activity. They're trying to

build against that. They want to build an efficient marketplace where people create a value on something because, I mean, because you're not like a huge regular markets guy, right? You're not like a stock market guy. No, I'm a middle school science teacher. If you look at the markets that we know, the major disruption that happened that created the markets we know now off of the ones that were, say, around 15 years ago or even a little before then was the high-frequency trading. And if people ever read The Big Short or saw the movie, the same guy who wrote that, Michael Lewis, writes a lot of finance books and they're incredible and one that he wrote back in maybe like 2012 2013 something like that was called flash boys where he outlined this movement and how this happened and motherfuckers were building fiber optic cabling underneath like the mountains in pennsylvania to get from minnesota to new york in one nanosecond versus a nanosecond and a half to be able to trade very quickly yeah so when you see these other marketplaces rising up like sneakers collectibles items things like that the places that create these exchanges

the companies that do it their incentive you hope is for the love of the game and the love of the the space that they're in and actively promoting that market so they're going to want to create an environment where people are not just taking advantage of the math around it and they're more or less actually valuing like what does this actually what is the value of the thing i'm buying mean to me and therefore setting the market price that way and i think the people coming into the market now are coming in to buy moments with that mindset they're not coming in trying to figure out like what's the edge here like how can i get a quick flip which um a couple different reasons why i think again i'm still bullish on top shot is one they pay attention to the market dynamics and they care about the health of the market um they are doing things actively to maintain the health of the market um but while also letting people like make money off of it um and then at the same time

they're also they they want the collector they want the nba fan and they do not want the bots they do not want the quick flip you know what i mean and what about guys like you though because you're not necessarily an nba fan i mean i i'm honestly like i took advantage of of it um but when i was in it i was participating in the community. I was on the discords. I was super interested. I was DMing community managers. I was like, I played the game the way they wanted me to play it.

I'm just leaving probably before they want me to leave. Why are you leaving? Because I don't look at the moments and like i don't get that like i'm not an nba fan if i was in if this was nfl i'd be this would be it for me like so when the nfl comes around yeah i'm the fuck out yeah that's the thing like like i'm i'm i'm in i'm into that i just don't i'm not gonna watch the nba because of top shot um so That's interesting. So the appeal of it, even though there's a lot of money floating around and the concept, the allure is that there's money to be made.

We know that works both ways, especially with markets that heat up too fast or whatever. You, at the end of the day, a month and a half in, have the realization that like, hey, this was interesting to learn these concepts and get into this world and get used to it. But I'm not just going to become an NBA fan. So therefore, I don't necessarily want to participate in this anymore.

Yeah. And plus, it was a grind. It was a big grind. How much time were you spending on it? I mean, I teach about six to seven hours a day. So I wasn't doing it during then. Although that one spreadsheet I did, I was proctoring a test. So I was grinding it while I was working. That's the only time I did that. And my kids, their test grades for that, they broke records. So it did not affect my students.

Whoever's watching this, it did not affect my students it i want whoever's watched this it did not affect my students uh ability to succeed trust me if anything i just left them alone and they did better um but yeah so outside of that i mean my girlfriend can attest to this it consumed me like i i mean i lost some weight because i could like forget to eat so like probably three hours a night at least conservatively and you're i mean you talk about building the spreadsheets and stuff but beyond that you are just watching market action to be able to build those watching market action but like heavily involved in like private discords with like other users that were in early on like watching that what they're talking

about adding in my own stuff like sharing my spreadsheets and like having people like check it like checking other people's spreadsheets like like just being a member of the community like took up a lot of my time um and for me like the profits to be made because that's why i got into this in the first place money now that i've i've I've learned how it works to a certain extent at least to a point where I'm satisfied now that it's like the money to be made versus the grind it's just like if I keep grinding I'm not going to see the same type of return you know what I mean so like to me if I were an NBA fan like it would kind of close

that gap for me a little bit but I'm just not not. So, I mean, then again, though, I am kind of getting a little bit as the market's dipping a little bit. Like I'm starting to see that edge come back again. I might dip my toe back in. But, I mean, for the most part, I have my like five moments that I think I didn't sell them because I didn't think it was a good time to sell them. How many moments did you buy and sell in the course of six, eight-week period? I had 90 at one point, which, I mean, it's above average, but people will build a portfolio of 90 moments pretty quickly. Some out of packs, most on the secondary market,

but I churned those out, 8k is worth and a month and a half and then i i just started having that realization it's like i don't want to keep grinding this because i'm not a greedy person per se i don't think about money a whole lot just because i don't really come from money and like this was my first real experience of like some real serious like cash some quiche and i didn't like like what i was becoming like i was losing sleep i was like watching like dollar signs like i don't think affected my teaching or anything um but like i definitely like wasn't putting added like effort into being creative with like my lesson plans which like i'm constantly doing which like is what I get joy out of and so I was just like yeah

it's time to go like I hit I hit a account valuation about a week and a half ago of $56,000 and I was like it's time it's time to do it luckily I sold at the top of Mount Everest like I could buy back everything that I sold the twice over um maybe that that might be an exaggeration but i could definitely get everything back for less than what i sold but you said the hockey stick came back down after you sold but now it's like back up again no so it went seven million in sales record yep kind of a two to three week little bottom out and then up to i think it was i want to get the number right 65 million and i sold at the 65 million point and right now money isn't leaving top shot okay it's just being focused into at the actually valuable stuff so it's being focused out of series two into series one and

the more rare cards because people are like flipping and leveling up from common to rare they're flipping and leveling up from series two to series one and one big thing is like it's going to like if you put money in top shot so anyone listening to this if you want to put money in top shot do not expect to get your money out for at least six to eight weeks why is that because they have to verify your identity which mine is and they have to um they have to look at your transaction history manually to confirm you're not like money laundering okay and that's that's what they're telling but they also i mean this thing would have crashed weeks ago if people could just pull out whenever they wanted to that so they're

checking for money laundering into their products how do they even check for that i guess i mean i don't know how they check for it if i they're checking for it that's that's very very interesting because i i may have mentioned this earlier quickly but one of the major question marks around the fine art collectibles whatever market around the world always has been is the money laundering that happens through it and the the basically cheating on your taxes and there's all kinds of complicated ways that can happen we don't need to get into it but those things happen so one of the questions around nfts and it's obviously we're right in the wheelhouse here with nba top shot is that being able to shield your assets on this from those types of you know whether it be the irs or whatever

it's harder because you're doing it through centralized exchanges that have an immutable ledger that knows who owns what exactly it's like it's not even harder it's it's borderline impossible yeah so if and this is the big question if the value of the fine art market is largely as it turns out defined by just trying to cheat on your taxes or trying to cheat on on your earnings or whatever this market could be in trouble i don't think that's the case though because like i look at the mona lisa you know there's some art i look at where someone paid a million dollars for sometimes and i'm like what the fuck were you doing but i look like the mona lisa i look at name any famous art piece that's

worth something you know it's like a human it's a human thing that was created so i see that still carrying over but you could see through some of the bullshit that will be defined over time in the nfts market whether it be nba top shot whatever whatever the bullshit that will be defined over time in the NFTs market, whether it be NBA Topshop, whatever. Whatever the bullshit is that the market defines become worth nothing because people realize, well, there was no utility here anyway because I can't even hide from shit. And that's the only reason I wanted to get into it. Yeah, I don't see that because it's actually like – I'm getting too far from the mic here. Atta boy. It can't...

Okay, so think about like one of the first reasons people were bearish on Bitcoin. Another thing I like to say, paper hands, diamond hands, bullish, bearish. I'm getting into that again. I get it. Bearish versus bullish. I love it. So one of the reasons people were bearish on Bitcoin early on is like it's only the drug dealer's currency. Turns out because every single transaction is traceable, it's the worst thing to buy and sell drugs with because you can trace it back to people.

I actually don't want to comment on that because it's – yes, but that's getting above my pay grade on some things. But yes, the theory you're presenting as far as how it could affect this type of marketplace now that it's iterated to is not necessarily wrong. So essentially like let's walk it back a little bit. With it being so transparent, the fact that they can somehow – they must have some way of tracking the transaction history in a way like that they can flag certain accounts for potentially money laundering. That is something that you couldn't do in a cash market. At least in my, and again, I'm talking about my pay grade here by far, but I think that that adds legitimacy to it because like in a trans, if the assets you're trading are transparent,

they have a, there's a higher likelihood that the market is more legitimate. Would you agree with that? Yes. Okay. So basically what I'm saying is the money going into TopShot is money going into, okay, I value this because of the scarcity. I value this because it's crypto. I value this because it's an NFT. I value this because it's NBA. You have so many layers of legitimate value. And yes, there are bots. Yes, there are people trying to flip. Yes, there are probably people who are laundering money. But they have made a lot of moves as a company to tramp that down as much as they can.

So the user base, like the 205,000 people that were in line today for a pack, I think about 200,000 of them are legitimately believers in this that will probably keep their at least something in top shot beyond this season can't say you're right or wrong i mean you may very well be right it's anytime there is something so new you there's all kinds of psychology that gets injected in and you're going to start finding every if depending on which side of the coin you're on you're going to find every reason why it works every reason why it doesn't a lot of times the answer ends up falling somewhere in the middle so you trim out the fat of things that are bullshit like i was referring to a few minutes ago and you get to the things that are not but i think the timing of nba top shot is is very

interesting we keep on talking about the diamond hands and paper hands and everything but we did see and i know you at least track this even though you're not in the markets we did see on january 28th the nuclear bomb go off where gamestop had been running where it was the people of reddit against the illuminati the the forbidden community of the hedge funds and wall street trying to short the stock the funny thing is like i was like really in the weeds of top shot and like that not once appealed to me at all so you were already in and you but this this is what's interesting the price action on top shot started going nuts, like nuts, like hockey stick nuts, as you said, in the beginning of February. Right?

Well, the price action on Top Shot really didn't take off until mid-February. Okay, even better. January 28th was when the fiasco happened where Robinhood suddenly didn't allow people to buy GameStop and a few of the other meme stocks. And then all the backlash happened there and so that was a thursday and we saw beginning on monday the price of gme start to fall off a cliff yeah now ironically as we talk right now it has actually started an uptrend again but who the fuck knows it's and it's not up where it was it's like in the 100 110 handle something like that but that movement was people versus institution and it was also a very topish movement yeah and what i mean by that is when you see retail investors coming into the marketplace everyday people right like people who aren't involved in markets could even be like

brilliant people are worth a lot of money but never do shit and now suddenly they're throwing money like they're an expert at something that's usually the time to sell right so there were guys there's two guys i can think of who are two of the smartest human beings i have ever met in my life brilliant who were so caught up in this and didn't give a fuck about GameStop. They were so caught up in the politics of it's us versus them, whatever, yada, yada. And I tried to talk them off a ledge of get the fuck out of it. I know how this ends. The game's already been rigged. It's not going to end well for you.

Get the fuck out. And they didn't. And, you know, we saw what happened. It's interesting to me that Top Shot's action, and again, plenty of people who weren't NBA fans coming in, therefore maybe don't value the things happening in those moments as much. Top Shot's price action that exploded happened in February, largely, after this occurred. Because people were leaving the stock market pissed off. They were deleting their Robinhood accounts, although Robinhood still kept a lot of accounts.

Let's be clear on that. There's a lot of people say they're going to delete it, then they don't. But they weren't, they were pissed at it. They didn't like the system. They took their ball and they went home. But they're still at home. They're still in lockdown. They're still in Corona.

They still need something to do. They still need some action. So they run around and they go, holy shit. NBA top shot. That's the next something to do. They still need some action. So they run around and they go, holy shit, NBA Top Shot. That's the next thing to go. I don't think that it's an A goes to B type of thing because I think like it's hard to get into Top Shot. Like the barrier for entry now is hard to get into Top Shot. The time where like that type of person would have been able to get in pretty

easily was while the game stopped so they they overlapped where like basically i had a choice i guess i decided subconsciously that i wanted to i wanted to fuck some shit up i wanted i wanted to try my hand at this at this greed thing at this markets thing right greed so for lack of a better word yeah it's good yeah whatever um and so i for whatever reason gamestop i just didn't see any fundamental value there okay i'm using another market term yeah you're you were for a guy that's not in the market yeah look at me um i didn't see it there right i'm actually a pretty i'm like very much into gaming and gamestop fucking sucks you know what i mean like i can see they ordered they had a new ceo the actual original like reason why they wanted to kind of like fuck up the short

was new ceo and the new consoles coming out right i get that but otherwise like unless gamestop does something digital like they're done yeah not according to deep fucking value if you listen to him he thinks they're going digital okay well that'd be great for them and i i think that's why you're seeing another surge is because there is a little bit of underlying there's a it's it's not a bad bet like if you look at it that way eventually look at it that way yeah um but what i saw when that was happening because i'm such a market expert was that i was like game stop like like i just it's like a carnival game

so not that like i had this like very like defined choice between the two it's just like i kind of ignored that and i was like oh this looks cool and like like i said i was like i didn't see this as a get rich quick scheme i was, people are going to fucking love this. You know what I mean? And people do. And I don't think it's very related to Top Shot at all. It has that element where if you want to go in there and fuck some shit up, flip, find an edge, and make some money,

you can do it, which is part of the value of it in itself, is that you can play that stock market game if you want to. But it has so many other layers of value beneath that or around that. Because they own something. Because they own something, because it's the NBA, because the NBA markets their players, because an actual moment in NBA history is pretty fucking cool. You know what I mean? Whereas GameStop, GameStop's a shitty company.

Yeah. You don't hold it in your hands. Not that you hold this in your hands so i kept not that you hold this in your hands but you you see something i kept asking myself how will this fail how will this fail how will this fail and i kept saying like they actually put out something like we got a lot of arrows in our quiver and i was like i was like okay they haven't marketed they actually cut marketing so like i want to invest in a company that is has such demand, they have to cut it off. So that's why I was so bullish. And then I got really lucky.

And I think that when I sold, honestly, will probably be the peak. I think everybody thinks that. But I do think that I hit this rare little... So you do think it peaked. And when you're saying peaked, I haven't pulled up anything yet. But when you say it peaked, for now or long term anything yet, but when you say it peaked for now or long term? So at $65 million in sales in one day, I think that that is a peak that will be very hard to replicate because a lot of different things happened at the same time. You had all the big players.

You had Gary Vee, Mark Cuban, Logan Paul, Barstool. They were all talking about it at the same time. Plus people have their stimmies you know what i mean you're looking at in at the end at the daily sale though i'm talking about the value of the assets yeah the daily sale that because they happen right they keep on putting these drops out yeah they're gonna keep doing that i agree maybe the volume of initial adoption like that was the moment i dumped 80 moments in less than an hour i don't think that type of liquidity is ever going to happen again and if i think it could because like i said the nba just needs to run a commercial during the playoffs how quick that's a good question though how quickly did those sales go through like like individually you said less

than an hour to do 80 so like did you have some that were sitting there for 10 minutes and others went off in a second? It was like, you ever see like piranhas in a tank? So it's like the stock market. Yeah. It was like that. Now, if I have the moments I have, like the reason I didn't sell them is because they sat, they sat overnight.

So I was like, people aren't onto these. And I think they're, they're just as valuable as the stuff I sold instantly. So I'm going to wait until there's another spike and print some more money. But that to me was – that's a very unique – because time is money, of course. In the cardboard market, and this is where my friend Alex, who put some money in with me, he hit that wave well and like made some good money in that but he had to put way more money in and just the pure time it takes to get these transactions the ebay fees and everything is just like he's like this is just a such a better version of what i did and it took me way longer to do it than it's taking us so like when i was like dude it's time to sell he's like

let's do it like i'm interested to see how fast it is and i i told him i was i was gonna dump almost everything at like 11 p.m now did you set prices on this or did you just hit enter and say take market i looked at my account value which is based on the lowest ask i looked at the lowest ask for a moment and i went a dollar under and it just went i think there were bots on the site they were just buying up everything sure but i also think a lot of people like real people bought my shit um and i i texted him an hour later i said 80 of them are gone he said what he was like he's like that's crazy so like that is like that's one of the reasons why this is a much better version of something that's worked really well already which is the cardboard market and the cardboard market was heating up for a while i mean that was heating up for in my estimation roughly what it felt like to me about two years or so and gary v was hard on

that and there were some people who and then you saw some of the athletes that actually get into it and it's been huge during corona i had luke servino in here who is uh kendrick perkins personal manager and business partner in a card partnership. So they've been buying cards for a long, long time, long before Corona, the whole nine. And it's interesting that people have put such a tangible value on those physical objects again now and they've created – It's literally cardboard. It's literally cardboard, right? But it's the Gem in 10 or you know this it's the scarcity

thing you talked about earlier this is just an iteration of it that's more transparent more easier can move faster because it's all digital boom second it's completely authenticated already whereas like with the cardboard market you know even kendrick and luke they got to send out all their stuff to psa subjective which is totally subjective you can say whatever the fuck you want about it it's subjective it's and and i shouldn't say totally subjective there are there is some objectivity to it in the sense that some object like um operational definitions sure like yeah but it's like you see what psa does it's unbelievable like how fast they turn this stuff around and how they move it. But they're doing it in a human world, in a physical world where they got to look at it and stuff.

So it makes sense that you're going to have an iteration now where that's just done. Yeah. They were trying actually, Top Shot kind of killed this. I think it's Starstock. Starstock, correct. It's trying to like centralize the cardboard market to make it more efficient, make it faster, kind of like put your cell, your PSA, grading, everything all in one spot. Yep. Top Shot is doing that way better than that could ever dream.

But, okay, so here's another question. Top Shot's creating moments. They're creating videos. Creating, you know, it's. The word is not interactive. So I think another interesting thing is Top Shot's not creating the moments. The NBA players are creating the moments. Right, right, right.

But they're taking it and packaging it. They're creating the products that are the moments. But yes, good point. Whereas Starstock is relying on the physical picture. It is two different ideas. I'm not saying one is better than the other i mean i think both will exist okay in in concert with one another i just think that for me i feel like ah man i missed out on the cardboard market not that i was ever on it never would be on it i was

hoping that i'd have like a hollow charizard sitting in my uh sitting in my closet back home not the case but um let alone one that would be like not have like the ear chewed off of it or whatever the corner but uh but yeah like i just think i think both i don't think the car the cardboard market's going anywhere i don't think the cardboard market's going anywhere and i don't think top shot's going anywhere um because they are two different things to a certain degree but it's this whole thing is this is the kind of stuff i love to study with human behavior a lot you know because i cut my teeth working in the markets and you see the you see the worst of people and sometimes you see the best of people but you see the worst of people

in markets in both directions depending on where their bets lie and there's a guy who i've i used to get his newsletter called the daily dirt nap this, this guy, Jared Dillian, who's brilliant. And he was one of the greatest traders at Lehman Brothers when Lehman Brothers was a firm, and the traders had nothing to do with what happened as to why Lehman Brothers failed. But after Lehman Brothers crashed, he left Wall Street as far as like working at the institutions wrote this newsletter he had already been writing while on wall street and is an investor and a very very brilliant guy and is known as a he is a he is a genius behavioral finance reader or whatever so he studies what people are doing in the macro to determine what the micro is and which in his case is what is the

price of the stock market and the value. So one of my favorite theories that he had, and he had many, but one of my favorite ones, New York City guys. So he had this theory called the seafood tower theory, which is when you start walking into restaurants in New York City and you see seafood towers all over tables, sell your fucking wife and kids. Sell everything. Because seafood towers are, if people aren't familiar with them, it's like, it's exactly what it sounds like. It's this four-layer tower of seafood with different fish and crab and all that bullshit, like on each level. And you pay hundreds of dollars,

in some places thousands of dollars for it. And yes, it's a lot of seafood. But if you just went and bought that same seafood somewhere and took it home and cooked it, you know, it might cost a hundred bucks. Yeah. People buy it for the view and the allure. It's a sign of inflation. Correct. Yeah. Yeah.

Like, like, well, it's a sign of wealth, right? It's a sign of like, oh, we're having fun. It's a tower. You know, all the bitches put it on Instagram and stuff now, all that stuff. well it's a sign of wealth right it's a sign of like oh we're having fun it's a tower you know all the bitches put it on instagram and stuff now all that stuff so bitches as a as a light term they're not a not a direct term you got to make sure that people understand the context there but you get the point like the basic bitch kind of thing so he said whenever he would see the seafood towers that's when he knew people were complacent they were gluttonous they get out yeah one of the basic theories that he didn't invent it's just been around is the taxi

driver theory which says the same thing which is when you get into a taxi and now people could say an uber and you know the uber driver is suddenly giving you stock picks sell everything yeah because that means the retail money's gotten to the marketplace. Some people may look at me as a taxi driver. Sure, sure. But this is my point. I never, ever want to say the words new normal. Those are the words you say before you lose everything and before you're very, very wrong.

So I'm not going to say that. Well, you just said it. No, no. You said it. I said it. I have to point out the term. Touche. What we do need to look at though here is why have we not seen major league economic sell-offs and a lot of people are

going to say right away the fed's been pumping in money and creating a fake economy and the dollar's not worth anything fine assume that that's not completely true though we've seen the stock market go like this we've seen all these other hot markets while people are sitting at home bored just fucking hockey stick and go to the roof go through the roof and we haven't seen the sell-offs because i gotta be honest with you back last april april and may especially when after corona started and all the retail bros is pre-game stop we're going to robin Hood and suddenly becoming day traders with Davy Day Trader, which, you know, that was the funniest shit I've ever seen. They port noise hilarious when they were all doing that.

I looked at that and I said taxi driver. I said, oh my God, like is this going to crash and it didn't at all because people needed action. It was a little it was a different world we had never had people all at home doing something so jared dillian has been flashing the alarm bells on all markets since the beginning of january like and he's putting his actions behind it too he liquidated his entire retirement account and he's been tweeting about it whatever and it's it's scary to me because his track record is excellent and i try to look forward and not backwards to judge who's going to be right and wrong but there's the difference here that i see that we need to talk about is that

you're seeing it in more individual places than anything and so specifically when you saw the explosion in gamestop where was the explosion it was in gamestop it was an amc and a few other stocks was that necessarily an apple no apple had been going up for a long time those weren't the people buying apple but yet there's people like jared who want to say well that's the bubble everyone's running the stock market sell everything and allow that mentality to affect what's happening with apple or something then when you look at something like nba top shot those same people the jareds of the world he hasn't commented on that i don't think but as an example they see things like that and they see a rational exuberance they see people like you who aren't nba fans running to the markets and openly saying look not an nba fan

and i was looking to make money, diamond hands, whatever. And they go, oh my God, taxi drivers going in the market. So do you see some of this stuff? Like you keep on talking about it's here to stay. Do you see some things right now that even as a not markets guy, you're saying to yourself, there are definitely some actions driving prices

in some of these new markets, whether it be NBA Top Sh shots nfts as a whole even parts of the stock market where it's like there has to be some kind of ending here where things get reset and it's not good yeah i so there's a lot to unpack there obviously yeah um if you don't think that these kind of like i I don't know what to call them, these GameStop stocks, Top Shot, anything that doesn't have like big time fundamental value, like Apple, they're going to take a hit once people can take that money that they have and put it into real life experiences. People are funneling money into digital things, whether it's a stock, whether it's a digital

moment, because there's no real life thing to buy right now. I mean, you can eat outside, but you can't really go on vacation. I mean, all that stuff is starting to happen. And also, not only that, it's winter, right? So I have a theory. This is probably something that you can answer easily. The stock market probably does better in the winter. You know what?

I actually don't have an answer to that. That'd be an interesting thing to look at i i never looked at that yeah you probably like i know months i know like september and october can be historically bad months you know but i'm not really sure on that we'll check that after but so people are going to start going outside people are going to start buying real life things um it's going to take a hit but it it's not going to crash our economy, I don't think. But I think at the same time, these people are going to get out, cash out. Who's left?

You know what I mean? Whoever's left is going to lose in these things. But I think what rebounds will actually have long-term value. I think Top Shot is one of those things um yeah i don't know that that's interesting to me but my my window because i set like i'm a very responsible investor i set some goals i uh i had a timeline in line some people would say that's not diamond hands nick um yeah but i don't know i don't know what you want me to say i actually don't believe in that i think

it's pretty fucking stupid honestly i think a lot of people lost a lot of money how dare you because they got caught up in a meme i like saying it because it's funny um but my my goal was like i'm gonna i'm gonna ride this out for the rest of the season because i think that's a pretty good timeline i want to see what what happens to this when nba starts advertising it i i thought that the the big hockey stick that i saw was going to come i didn't think it was going to happen in february i thought it was going to happen like during the playoffs because i could just see all these awesome but like all those people that i thought were going to talk about it during the playoffs started talking about it like a week ago so because like that happened i was i like kind of

did the math not the math but i did the my my gut my gut told me it was a gut feeling that it was time to sell and i'm still really glad i did um i'm sure there will be at least one surge i'm like yeah maybe i should have held a couple of those but i still have five um yeah man i think it's gonna rebound i think everything's gonna like the summer you're you're not gonna see people like to the extent that they are now buying and selling stocks especially if they trading knock on wood reopen the fuck out of this country you know yeah it's gonna be a party people are gonna be out doing things which makes all it's not just top shot like we're picking on top shot with that example it's it's everything you know people are gonna be out buying tangible things

again they're not gonna be sitting there like oh let's check my accounts like 50 million times a You know, people are going to be out buying tangible things again. They're not going to be sitting there like, oh, let's check my accounts like 50 million times a day. Life starts to happen. But the thing is, is like for every, let's say out of the, how many accounts there are? There's over 200,000 accounts now. When I got in, there were 12,000. So there's over 200,000 accounts now. Let's say at least 80% of those are legitimate, not duplicate duplicate accounts i think they can track that and police that pretty well um the nba market is way bigger

than 200,000 absolutely way big it's global and um so let's say half of that 200,000 are people like me who aren't really in it for the actual like collectible like i like these moments for these moments let's say more than half that like they're gonna be able to replace the people that leave in the summer with just as many if not like way more than that and yeah do you know anything about restrictions and i'm thinking of one country in china and the reason i asked that is because china restricts all of our main social platforms there they restrict bitcoin they don't let that shit happen and the chinese marketplace is the largest global marketplace for the nba and particularly have you heard anything around what they're allowing and what they're not

i don't know anything about that i think i mean if china allows the nba why wouldn't they allow things licensed by the nba they allow the nba because the nba is content and they make money off of it where they start to allow free markets for their citizens to profit is where they start to get real sketch i know that i got a tyrese halliburton 888 and i was like i know eight is a lucky number in the Asian culture. I was pretty pumped about it. I ended up selling it and doing other stuff with that money. But I mean, I don't know. I know nothing about that.

Yeah, I haven't heard a peep on that, how it relates globally. The NBA market within the United States is much larger than 200,000 oh sure yeah so that's enough for me and like i said i'm i'm i'm gonna play around with this uh again i might i might try to find a quick little edge here and and maybe but i mean i got i have a bmw sitting in my dapper wallet like that's good enough for me oh yeah well and this is the other question that has to get asked though because i agree with you and i've been an nba fan my entire life and it's it's a huge game and the marketability of the players especially relative to the nfl it's apples and oranges in the nfl they're covered by a face mask and there's also 22 of them on the field at a time yeah and

53 on a roster again there's there's a scarcity game there correct whereas in the nba you can see their faces cameras are up close there's only 10 on the court at a time and there's 12 on each roster so the exactly the scarcity that you have with that creates more market of marketability you know if you're a tom brady like a quarterback like the face and symbol of the team yes you can make a fuck ton of money but also globally basketball is a bigger game than football is globally it's largely an american sport so like football is so i get it with how you can actually get this off the court and stuff but the question that does have to be brought up here is that even when people had all this time on their hands during Corona and all this, when the NBA season came back, and I know their numbers are better this season so far, they're still not where they were though.

People did not love the bubble. That's what I'm saying. I mean, the craziest thing to me is that game six of the NBA finals with the best player of this generation playing in the game yeah had like 300,000 viewers I didn't know that while fucking CNN and Fox had 10 million that night yeah and so it's interesting that while that's happening the forget Top Shot this is before that largely the the card market the cardboard market of these players even though no one's fucking watching or cares is blowing up yeah so who's in that is it just so many people are bored and then

what is the long-term viability of sports here and i think we all love sports i think it's going to be fine i just like to bring up the question because when people had nothing but time you know they were still yeah i guess they didn't watch it the argument you're making is that for me to assume that nba fans will also be into this might be misplaced in that the nba i can't assume that the nba fan will also be into nba collectibles i don't even think that's that misplaced though i i would think are all of them going to be into it absolutely not there's no such thing as all in any marketplace right but do i think a nice percentage whatever that is let's call it enough yeah i'm going to be into it

but the argument you're making almost may seem more bullish on this because even though the nba was doing bad the collectible market around the NBA was doing well. I think that's always, you're always going to have people trying to take advantage of the market. So the only thing that happens is you get more liquidity as the NBA popularity increases back to its level that it was before. And you'll still have those people trying to, because essentially, like, you're basically passing off value down to the lower levels or taking value from the lower levels. If there's more people playing around at the lower levels, the casual NBA fan buying and selling the $50 moments, whatever they are, that's good for the overall market of it.

Here's where I'm probably talking out of my ass, but I don't know if that makes any sense. No, I think it does. I think the way to look at this marketplace and again not just top shot but look at the current round of nfts that are being created whether it be genies dropping the memet ozul the soccer player i think that's how you say his name that sold i don't know what the total number was but maybe there were a hundred of them i have an uncle memet by the way oh well there you go is he is ozul is he turkish yeah turkish exactly gural is turkish fun fact really i thought you I have an Uncle Mehmet, by the way. Oh, there you go. Is he Turkish? Yeah, Turkish.

Exactly. Goral is Turkish. Fun fact for that. Really? I thought you were Mexican. My grandma's Mexican. My grandpa's Turkish. Got it.

Dundar Goral. What a combo. Yeah. That's an unbelievable combo. But anyway, you see stuff like that get sold. You see stuff like Logan Paul selling a digital version of himself on a digital card. Genies, by the way, is going to be massive. be massive geniuses the yeah i'm not really sure what that's going to be fortnite skins i'm trying to think because i also wanted to circle back to fortnite skins fortnite skins

accidentally made nfts it's just not back by the way i agree with that i agree with that um i want to be careful what i say i'm thinking of a couple guys i know um and some some stuff they have around that so i i don't want to get into that but i i don't know anything about genies i just see it i see what it is let's say i agree yeah it's gonna be big yeah yeah i mean it all it already is and that's dapper laughs yeah exactly and they but that offshoot of what they do, they were doing other – before we saw like Mehmet Ozil and all that, they were doing let's call it first generation type stuff. They were dripping out little things. They weren't even NFTs just to kind of give people a taste of what their capabilities were. And now they're actually dripping out NFTs and they're creating these avatars the nfts my point is the

nfts that we are seeing right now are at base level so i think a lot about the my friend anthony was on this podcast and his company soar they build holograms they build 3d representations both vr and ar they have the number one compression algorithm there is right there's no one in the world they are that's the running joke but they are effectively pied piper but it works right and pied piper for people who don't know it's the company in the show silicon valley on hbo which that was their company that allows them to build these experiences what do you think they can do with that with nfts i don't even have to ask him but the types of experiences that they can create to allow

drops of things with his technology versus what's being put out there right now even by genies and other companies like that is it's absurd i mean i i thought i won the other night and i'm like imagine if you had who's named like three music artists you love taylor swift that's one we know that one you're a big taylor guy no you ruined the song feeling 22 for all of us i know i know i've grown i've grown since then. I like Machine Gun Kelly's new album. Okay, let's go with Machine Gun Kelly. So Machine Gun Kelly, let's say that there's two songs he's never released before and then won't. And there's two songs that he's never performed before.

And then six other songs that he's performed, released, whatever the people know. That's a 10-song set. Let's say Machine Gun Kelly performs a concert in his fucking bathroom. And someone like Anthony could go out there and make that a 3D experience and put that into an NFT. This is something, like, I got to ask him about it, but I don't think that's beyond the pale. That's something he's capable of doing. The concert ticket is the NFT. No mean, that's something he's capable of doing. The concert ticket is the NFT.

No. There's no one seeing it. He would capture that concert, have it in 3D, and then have that as maybe a 10 concert drop. And put it on the marketplace where there is 10 of Machine Gun Kelly who you can stand up life-size right here in the middle of your party, in a hologram form, playing the concert, and you own one of 10. And by the way, there's... I can sell tickets. No, not even tickets. You own the asset. So if you have 100

people over for a party, Machine Gun Kelly's playing a concert and no one else is heard right there. Yeah, but if I wanted to charge those 100 people, I could. Oh, fuck yeah. I guess you can. Yeah, absolutely. So, you don't think on the open market market there are enough Machine Gun Kelly fans out there who are going to be like – or just people who understand assets and are going, oh my god, I can own a visual, literal 3D representation of Machine Gun Kelly doing this thing he did that no one ever saw and with these songs no one's ever heard? People are going to want that. Yeah. That's how – and that's just one layer of where nfts can go to yeah i think that's yeah that's big i could i could i could

see that being a big deal i did it's hard for me to wrap my brain around that you're getting into like the little bit of metaverse but this company this company is putting it in the real world. I can see where digital assets becoming, like being able to be a little bit more tangible in the real world. That's a big deal. I guess I would need to understand the technology a little bit more, but just tossing up a hologram,

like what digital technology would I need in my home to... Oh, that's a whole separate question because that's part of the adoption process. That's why we don't have holograms in homes right now. I think that's where you run into issues. Well, it's like any other piece of technology. First of all, behind the scenes,

they all have technology that exists right now that we don't have yet and we won't have for five to 10 years in some cases. Most cases, maybe it's like a two, three year turnaround. So think of it this way. And this is a bad example because this was not the case but let's say apple had the iphone in 2001 they really didn't they were actually building the tablet they were building the ipad first and then they realized let's make the phone first while they were building that so it's not really the case but let's say they did and they had the iphone in 2001 to sell the necessary items including the iphone itself in 2001 would have cost you're buying a car

you know for the same thing that 10 years later is 20 off you know 20 sale on on a street vendor because it's the third three versions ago right to get to that marketplace they had to do it over time to where they could get the production cost down that's all holograms are in right now so the people who buy it by the way who are buying something like that example like a machine gun kelly thing first of all they're rich as fuck so any equipment they need they can get yeah and secondly the barrier to entry of that equipment will go down over time so more people can get it but the rare ones like that the people that get that barrier to entry down and can now enter, they're still never going to be able to buy that anyway. It's a rarefied market.

It's like the people who own art pieces. We talked about having the digital frames earlier, right? That's 2D. Now imagine instead of it, like we talk about the decor when people come in here and it's a part of the ambiance and you want to say, ooh, look what I own. Well, now imagine you have something 3D and the motherfucker's standing there with you. And in that case, rapping. Yeah, I don't – it's just tough because I think you could test that out by just having a moment, like a Machine Gun Kelly moment that you can put on your TV as a concert for a party of 100. That could work.

If that doesn't work, it's going to be tough for the hologram to catch on because there's just so many more steps to make that work in your home. I think it's likelier that a concert venue buys it and makes a concert out of an NFT Machine Gun Kelly hologram. Well, no doubt on that and i also agree with you entirely this is not what i just said is not necessarily minus the very rarefied ones like the machine gun kelly could be a part of that example that's gonna take a while to get to where the everyman integrates it in their life you know same way that the iphone couldn't happen

overnight right actually more so because there's more moving pieces involved but in in concept right now in theory because people are buying out right like they're buying we talked about they're buying these moments maybe there's not a lot of digital frames right now but they're betting that they're going to be so they're buying five years out when that's going to be a thing see i don't i don't think i don't think people are buying them i think having it on your phone is enough it's enough for gen z having it on your say that i don't think that the the um the utility of nba top shot is the moment can one day be on my wall in a cool digital frame i think that it's the fact that it exists online. That's enough. That's enough to be able to show it in a social media platform. When I texted you that Giannis moment, one of the coolest things about these moments is that when I text it to you, it plays in iMessage.

It looks cool in iMessage. It does. That's enough. That's enough. And it's like Instagram. It's the same thing. People go to their Instagram page. How good does yours look?

Now, everyone had that's an open access tool. Everyone has access to it. But we can agree that people who are influencers who have a lot of money and professionally pay for things to be curated correctly and all that. They have extra features that the average person can't get access to. I agree with you. I think there is the same level here. The question then becomes, how much do people value the what the look is there? Because it's a to go back to the original article that he a youtube video with a frame and a stamp around it that says we're partners with the nba and i'll give them a little more credit they have the it's designed with very nice angles and whatever that aren't necessarily scarcity yes there's some

scarcity there to that but it's still a video of a play you can go see in hd 1080p and if you if you got the right equipment you can go see see it in 4K. So is that enough? Is that – or is it going to follow that theory you're talking about where Gen Z is like, oh, look at me. I have this one on my phone where the other Gen Z kid is going to say, well, look at me. I have it on my phone too. It's on YouTube and maybe I don't own it, but fuck it. I can still watch it i think there's enough i think there's enough legitimacy to it already that it's only so the the value of the the moments is only as valuable as the people willing to buy them and and i think like if i

say well i paid this much for it i can not i paid this much for it but i can sell it for this much for it. I can, not I paid this much for it, but I can sell it for this much. As long as that remains a thing, I'm gonna put my moment that I can sell for thousands of dollars up against your YouTube video you got for free. Like it has value just like anything else that has money, like art, like a trading card. It's valuable because I know that someone will pay this amount for it.

And that was kind of like my thesis, like early on when I was like buying, like I didn't really buy a lot of the rare stuff because like I kind of subconsciously was thinking about things the same way you were is like when Barstool gets a hold of this is kind of like where I was going. Like when the Barstool bros get a hold of this, they're going to have around $500 to $2,000 to burn in this marketplace. What is the best stuff that they can buy for $500 to $2,000? And I just bought all of it.

So I don't know anything about the NBA. Here's another thing I did. So I used Vegas odds. I used the Vegas odds for MVP. And I saw that LeBron was the favorite. And in second place was Joel Embiid and in third place was Jokic. Obviously LeBron was priced with that in mind. It was priced appropriately. Um, Joel Embiid and Jokic were not priced appropriately based on the NBA MVP odds. So I bought a lot of them. Because I was so early,

I was able to buy the top 10. I was able to buy the top 10 for under two grand. So what was the best NBA play? It was just his first play, because that's another thing. His first play is going to get a badge that says it was his first play on NBA Top Shot, which is it was an assist between his legs. You should look it up.

Oh, so not his first play of his career, just the first play they created. So there's a couple of different badges that will exist in late March, early April. That's a nice little tip for the listeners. If you can figure out what a player's first play on Top Shot is, it'll get a badge. If it's a play from their first rookie shot is it'll get a badge if it's a play from their first rookie game um it'll get a badge if it's um if it's their first play as an nba player their rook their first rookie moment so like lamello ball has this shitty assist it is like a lollipop assist to some random dude he takes a full it's barely an assist i don't even know what an assist is

in basketball like i don't fully understand it i know it's a pass then someone scores this is barely that it is going for over three thousand dollars because it's his first assist in the nba um and so that's going to get a badge so like if you can figure out those types of things like that's where the edge is right now that That takes some work because it's not apparent. Um, and also the price of that type of thing is already kind of baked in because people know it's coming. But if you want to take advantage from the two,

if you want to take advantage of the users that are coming in, in the future, those are the types of angles you need to take right now. Now in the cardboard, like the physical card market, one of the things that moves prices like crazy is the actual games night to night so if curry goes off for 60 points tonight all of the values of his cards i don't have a percentage for you it's different for every person

based on the situation but goes up you know maybe it goes up 10 overnight and then people can delta that sale whereas if he has five points on one of 13 shooting it goes down yeah here's the top shot the same this is why top shots better there's not friction here's another market term is it a market term i don't friction i believe it is so there's way more friction in the cardboard market because curry curry's not a good example because he's going to hold his value way more than, let's say, Jalen Brown. Again, I don't know a whole lot about the NBA, but I know enough to know that Jalen Brown is a young, promising NBA player. Very good player. He has a 60-point game.

His stuff will skyrocket because he's never had a 60-point game. His stuff will skyrocket, okay? Because he's never had a 60-point game before. Has he? No. Okay. Not a lot of people have. Not a lot, no. So that, you can take advantage of that in the cardboard market,

even with the friction, because it's kind of a signal that his career is kind of going to another level. Right? You can't take advantage of a 60 point game from Steph Curry because if I'm not explaining this well so Jay let me let me rewind it a little bit all right let's do it so Jalen Brown has that 60 point game okay he's a little bit more of a volatile player because we're not quite sure what tier of NBA star he is so he has that 60-point play. I have his cardboard card.

I want to move it because his value skyrocketed. In the process of whatever, getting it graded, mailing it out, putting it on eBay, the auction process, he can have a 40-point game. Or not, sorry. He can have like a zero-point game, like completely flop in a marquee matchup. All the sales are pulled off unless you already had all that done but that's the thing doing all that takes time yeah

but i'm saying like if you had it done before that 60 point game and you own it you can go sell it on the open market yeah so my my partner he he's had situations like that where like the sale is it's stuck in like a little bit of like purgatory and it gets pulled like the the buyer backs out yes yes in that there's that there's a window of time for the buyer to back out in the cardboard market because of the friction of the cardboard market there is not that friction in the top shot moment because i told you i sold 80 moments in under an hour instantaneous yeah yeah so if there was that friction, it would be really hard for me to sell

at the peak of that sales kind of spike that I saw, which I think is like a reason why what you're saying is it's just a better version of that. Like I can play daily fantasy sports with my moments by buying and selling them a little bit because I can say, okay, let's say the Pelicans are going into this stretch. I think Zion is going to absolutely crush every single game because he

matches up well with these three teams. I'm going to buy up a bunch of Zion, let these three games play out and then sell because he just had, he just averaged over 40 points. Got it. So like, that's, that's where the edge is now. Okay. And if I was an NBA fan, I'd be all over that. That's where I would be. I would just be churning that out and just. Okay. And if I was an NBA fan, I'd be all over that. That's where I would be. I would just be churning that out and just printing money. Because if you can find an edge, like if you're good at daily fantasy sports for NBA, and you can see those stretches where a player is going to just crush it,

you can buy before the stretch and sell after the stretch. Whereas like, you can't really do that as well in the cardboard market. You can, but it's, it's harder because of the friction. And if this comes to the NFL, I will be all in on that. So the instantaneous transactability is allowing for certain people to go in and quote-unquote print money right now just because the market's growing.

And I get that. Therefore, there's less – to go back to the friction term there it's it's just time it's it's it's a it's a standard of time and then the bullshit that comes because that causes that time to happen the best the best sellers in the cardboard market have all their cards graded they have a nice little pipeline to a and they sell it right online right away yeah bang but even then there's still a window there like my buddy he's really good with all that and he still has a window of time where the buyer can back out if something happens to that. That's interesting. I know less about that. So yeah, so there could be a problem no matter what precautions you take against it. But it's not just the fans printing money here. is dapper labs and we keep on talking about that so

with dapper labs you had mentioned there's they get like a five percent tax or a five percent rake or something like that i forget what it was in the secondary market so can you just explain what how exactly that works yeah so dapper labs um when you buy something on top shot um as the buyer i don't i don't that none of none of like i don't get have an extra five percent taken from like my dapper balance which is what you buy stuff with and dapper balance is in usd um you can load it with crypto you can load it with your credit card which is another thing is like they're kind of onboarding people into the nft space without needing crypto which i think is kind of a newer thing and that is one of the appeals of the flow protocol is that it's scalable to a degree that

allows they can they can kind of they're okay with people using credit card to get in um because they can scale to that level um so anyway so when i buy a moment i don't see any of that marketplace fee but when i sell the moments it's five percent which um it's a big rake that's a big rake i i mean i think it's smaller than an ebay would if you were selling a card on ebay i think it's it's either comparable or or less than that um i think when you compare it to really anything it's it's it's not that big um i'm trying to think of like what the rake would be. The rake in Daily Fantasy Sports is probably right around 5%.

The rake in betting. Depends what you're comparing it to. Yeah. I just think, like, there's a marketplace fee. It made sense to me. 5% seems like a decent number. It kind of sucked when I'm selling, like, the real expensive stuff. So I sold a Luka Doncic assists that was part of a challenge,

which the challenge is a whole game within the game. I sold that for like close to seven grand and five percent of that i was like dang like that's a lot um but i mean it's not that not that big of a deal still i i think i i'd beat i beat the rake by a substantial amount. So Dapper is incentivized by volume and or price. So let's say the higher the prices are, the bigger the rake they get. So you'd think they'd want them up. But if they get prices so high that everyone just holds it and there's no sales happening, they don't really make money. So they need volume to happen.

Whereas let's say prices go through the floor and people are just buying and selling like crazy and it's a whole different kind of marketplace different actors different everything because the vibe is different well they're making a rake every time so maybe where it takes a hundred trades to make what would have been one trade a week ago well if they have 200 trades happening for every where every one trade did they're doing better in the lower vol market it could kind of go either way depending on how many players there are in the marketplace participating they said they set themselves up pretty nicely with this it's it's pretty good it's it's pretty amazing how fast very dapper labs is really really sharp um and what was the original part of their company they were like like CryptoKitties or something?

CryptoKitties, yeah. And how did that work? CryptoKitties was basically – the CryptoKitty was – I think it was a non-fungible token. Yeah. I believe so, yeah. So it's basically you buy a cat. It's a virtual pet. You can – I think the biggest thing with that, that was cool. I never got in, but I have a buddy that was, um, you can get two cats and breed them and

make another cat that is like you breed crypto kitties. Right. Um, which is essentially like, that sounds really, like really fucking weird, but it's the same thing as like combining. So like if I have three common cards, I can sell them, right, for three grand or whatever and then use that three grand to buy a rarer card. So if you have two cheap CryptoKitties

and you put them together and you make a new one, I think the two cheaper ones go away and you just have a more expensive version of the two that has the characteristics of the two. But everything with non-fungible tokens is still individual there's one of it that's it like even with the moments in nba top shot where they drop 250 at one moment it's still number one number two number three so you own the individual thing and like i joke my i was trying to explain to my mom how nfts work and like what they are and And I'm like, just think of it this way.

They're not fuckable tokens because you can't fuck with it. Like once you own that one, that's it. Like that's the thing. And, you know, whether it be they start with the crypto kitties and create the iterations of it where you can kind of combine and move around. There's still the underlying asset that you own, you know, no one else does. The question is how does the rest of the marketplace who doesn't own that value it? I mean at the end of the day, it really isn't different than any other market. It's just like anything else.

It's the behavior and the actors and the products within the market are what determine how it works and then comes back to supply and demand yeah i think like where this is going is it's all about like will someone buy this for x amount of dollars i think that the nba markets its players in a way um top shot is kind of setting up the game in a way where a steph curry three-pointer is always going to be worth a few hundred bucks yeah on this site it's never going to go away right now it's worth a few thousand and I think it'll probably stay there series one but what will go away is right now like Sam Merrill you know who Sam Merrill is not a fucking there's a hard-o basketball player who's like fist pumping right now like Sam like he's he's like a he's like a white point guard i guess who just has like pretty pretty nice three-point shot but i mean he's a

player for he's a rookie i don't know i have no idea sam how do you spell his last name m-e-r-i-l-l yeah sam merrill so what's the story with him so right right now he's a Series 2 rookie, and 4,000 of his moments exist on the site. If you can find his moment, based on scarcity alone, the fact that he's a rookie, he's going to get this badge, let me just guess, he's probably going for a few hundred bucks. Probably $450. But what the fuck is he worth? That's the question.

That's the thing. This is the shit that it's like. That's where like, that's I have it up behind you. How much? Let's see. I called $450. Oh, there's $12,000. I gotta, where do I click again? Top sale? Do more.

Sales history. Top sale. That's the top sale. $33? If you look for the lowest ask, it being out of $12,000 kind of throws off the equation. But anyway, even $33 is too much for Sam Merrill. Yeah, I don't know who the fuck this guy is. Yeah, so that type of player, he's not going to hold value long term when people have money to do other things. When people have money and can do other things with it sam merrill is not

gonna not gonna hold that value but i think i think the stars will so i think like that that's kind of like where this is going you own 90 though at your peak yeah 90 and i probably at least 40 of those were just randos that okay that's what i was gonna ask that i got like i got in packs that i was like oh whatever throw away but they ended up being worth because they were just series one they were worth like 45 bucks so i had enough of them that like it turned into a like at least a couple grand at least half of them were stars though yeah i had a lot i had a very nice diversified i had all the all-stars i had all the the MVPs. I had all the rookies. That's where I was sharp. Did you have Kyrie Irving in there?

I had plenty of Kyrie Irving. Do you still own Kyrie Irving? In what sense? I own him on the internet because he said their world was flat. That's where I want to get to, but do you own his moments? No, I sold all those ones. I made about five grand off made about five grand so you profited off kyrie irving i don't know how i feel about this nick did you feel morally compromised by that i didn't think about it man i was just churning money you're just churning money but i mean people have no idea what we mean what we mean right now

so if you look up kyi irving flat earth students um plenty of articles kind of pop up about uh while i was in grad school he said the earth was flat on a podcast and i just happened to be teaching uh plate tectonics which if you know anything about plate tectonics it is based on the fact that the earth is round um largely uh so i show a picture of this round globe and this is the day after he went on another player's podcast and was talking about how the world was flat

and had a lot of conviction. And people were laughing at him. It was in jest, but he was serious enough about it that I couldn't teach plate tectonics the next day in class. Because the kids all believed it. Because Kyrie Irving had a huge following at the time. He still does, obviously. tectonics the next day in class um because the kids all believed it because like kairi irving had a huge following at the time he still does obviously but uh he was like one of the big big

big names then like he's kind of he's in in the in the pantheon of of nba players he's not at the top actually is he the captain of the all-star team i don't think so no i don't see like this is where my nba no no anyway there's not even a captain in the All-Star team. Okay. Whatever. But, you know, he's on it. Did he make it this year? Yeah.

He might have. He was one of the starters. I know that. Yeah. Okay. Because I sold his moment. I don't know. When that was named.

Classic. So he said the earth was flat, and all my students said it wasn't. And I just wrote my master's thesis on why it was so hard to teach after an NBA player said the world was flat. And what year was this? Like 2017, 2018? This was 2016. All right. I have it up behind me. And a recent story on NPR, middle school teacher Nick Garol said...

I was a student teacher, by the way. And I was the voice of all teachers for a brief 15 minutes in time. And I literally had never stepped foot inside for a brief 15 minutes in time. And I literally had never stepped foot inside of a classroom as a certified teacher. But anyway, they got a hold of me. Nick Garol said his students started buying into the flat earth theory after hearing Irving's comments. Garol says, and this is from the article, the original article. Garol says his students got the idea of a flat planet from basketball star Kyrie Irving who said as much on a podcast quote and immediately I start to panic how have I failed these kids so badly they think the earth is flat just because a basketball player says it Garol says as he tried reasoning with his students and showed them a video nothing worked however they think that I'm a part of this larger

conspiracy of being around earther that's definitely hard for me because it feels like science isn't real to them. Yeah. And this problem has not gone away. As I've gotten better at teaching, it's not as big of a problem for me specifically, but I mean... Do you reference this article all the time with your students now? Actually, I don't talk about it much. I mean, it was like a cool thing, but I mean, like I said,

I wrote my master's thesis on it. And it's just essentially like the NBA brands its players way better than our country brands education. So when I'm put up against, as a student teacher, mind you, I don't have a lot of social capital with students as a student teacher. It's very hard to be a student teacher because you're automatically the beta.

Because the real teacher is the real teacher. And when I step in front of the classroom, it's like substitute teacher land, time to play around. So some of that was going on, but I kept after it. And there was some real underlying issue there um so basically what i came up with was uh this is some nerd shit so uh the um my girlfriend is a cognitive behavioral therapist and that's interesting she put me on this thing called uh the elaboration likelihood model. And it's going to be I'm going to try to explain it as best I can.

But it's essentially like the science behind changing someone's mind. And essentially, so like you anchor your beliefs in something and moving someone up this likelihood model is basically the way to do that is through education. And on the lower end of the spectrum of the likelihood model is the likelihood that you will elaborate on an idea. If you have only heard a podcast where an NBA player said something, that's low on the likelihood model. So theoretically, if I elaborate more on that idea, if I teach them more about the earth, if I teach them more about science, but also if I build a relationship with that student where they trust what I'm saying is true, they will move away from that idea towards objective truth, and I will be able to change their mind. The only way I'm able to do that is if objective truth is on my side, okay? So in a flat earth example, that's

easy, thankfully. It's harder than it should be, though. Yeah, it's harder than it should be though yeah it's harder than it should be but again there's a relationship piece there's an education piece and so i did my whole master's thesis on this elaboration likelihood model i did like a little survey of all my kids and put them on different places and then i tried to move them up so what i did was i came up with this game called spot the fake news because fake news was a big deal back then. The Trump was like spewing it and it was just a big deal. So what I did was I list the 10 websites and they had to get points and the way they earned points was by telling me if the site was real or not. So one of them was like a NASA site about climate change where had all the facts and I had this checklist of like,

what is a reliable source? And it like, it's like, is the author a scientist? Or is the author an expert in the field that they're talking about? Is it a.org.gov.com.edu? Like you get you should assign value to its reliability based on that. And then so I had all these checklist things. And if you were good at the game, you were able to spot the real sites and weed out the other ones. A funny one is like the tree octopus. So there's like treeoctopus.com is actually built to help teach reliable sources. It's this site that has all these red flags that it's not a reliable source. And it's about like this octopus that like this species of octopus that lives in a tree.

So you can go on the Amazon rainforest and find octopus, octopi hanging from the trees. And like, it's a symbol. It's a, it's a, yeah, it's a teaching tool.

Yeah. So like that was one on there. And so I, I had them do 10 and like middle schoolers are really fucking competitive. I mean, people are competitive, but middle schoolers, middle schoolers are savage when it comes to competition.

So you throw a homework pass as like their reward and like it's all gloves are off. So they're like going at it. They're having a blast. And then like the last site, the same kids that were super competitive with this game, the last site was flat or flat earth dot org. So they had they had to reconcile the cognitive dissonance where they've been trolling me for a month that the earth is flat but to win the game they had to say that this site wasn't reliable that's fucking genius yeah so i changed a few of their minds that way did some of them not change their mind the ones that lost yeah so the ones that were already out of the game like they're like fuck you yeah we're not going

there wow that's what was that theory called again the elaboration likelihood model um that was a piece i didn't explain it very well um you explained it very well okay you explained no seriously i'm gonna i want to give you credit for that that was that was really good and that hit well with that point because it drives it home as far as like you having to recognize between incentive and what you've been saying. So you're reconciling what's true and what's not because you're forced to for your own gain. Now, anchoring is a very interesting point that we could elaborate on with that. And I always look at anchoring as a psychological response to repetition. And and i forget there's an official

psychological term for this but when the concept that when you say something enough it becomes the truth to you right or when you hear something enough it becomes the truth to you and you don't question it confirmation bias yes that's what it becomes but there's another thing below that you're 100 right confirmation bias is a huge part of it because you already believe something and now you want to hear it more but there could be like as an example someone could make a left turn and get in a car crash maybe and it was just a fender bender or whatever and be told like no you made a right turn and then for whatever reason just be like oh i did and then as they keep telling the story over and over again oh i made a right turn. And then for whatever reason, just be like, oh, I did. And then as they keep telling the story over and over again, oh, I made a right turn. Eventually, when they think

of it in their memory, they believe it was a right turn, even though it wasn't. It's not like they're actively lying. They've just now been anchored to something. I always use a genius anchor example of what Trump did on the campaign trail with his very first speech back in like 2015 and then just repeated it and it's this overly simpleton thing that took a complex subject matter and made it way simpler than it could ever be but he convinced people because he just repeated it over and over again and it had a visual and it was memorable and all he did was he got up there and said we're good we're gonna build a wall and mexico is gonna pay for it and the more and more he said it the more and more people believed it could happen.

Despite the fact that not only had we not built a wall before and had a quote unquote immigration problem, however you want to define that, we hadn't even really built fences. And Mexico is going to pay for it? Like, how is that going to happen? How are you going to tangibly going to be able to show on a balance sheet that they did even if you got to cheat it with traded tariffs or whatever so everyone started saying it and was like oh shit yeah that's what's going to happen build a wall exactly and then people who even didn't give a shit about illegal immigration suddenly did right and you and you had this entire movement form strictly because he anchored people over and over and over again so much so that when the mex remember like when the four previous mexican presidents all came out within like a week and they're like

fuck that this is not happening notice they didn't say you're not going to build a wall it's back in like 2016 before he won they didn't say you're not going to build a wall donald they went from you're not even going to build a fucking fence you're not even going to talk about that with us too we're just not going to pay for it. He successfully anchored so much. Regardless of what the policy point was. Or the fact that he didn't follow through with it. He anchored so many people.

That even the presidents of Mexico. Who wanted to fight against this. Didn't realize that their cognitive anchoring dissonance. Or however you say it psychologically. A lot of psychologists and people are saying. I fucked that up. But you know what I mean. They are now coming in. And not even realizing that they are now saying they gave up ground they gave up ground same way that if someone's negotiating with someone and they started

on 50 and then somehow they're still fighting like a dog at 10 and if they got to 15 they'd call it a win they don't look at it like i lost 35 well it's more than 35 i lost 35 off the 50 points right there they look at it as oh i gained five if they actually win that yeah that's like some art of the deal stuff yeah it is well yeah a little pun intended there but with your kids they're so impressionable yeah and they start to get down these rabbit holes and when when you see these videos joe rogan talks about this all the time. You listen to these videos, whether it be Flat Earth or some other crazy conspiracy, whether it's people who actually have decided to believe it or just total trolls who are like, this is hilarious and I'm going to get clicks. They sound really smart because they plan it. They speak with all this quote unquote evidence or whatever.

And people don't pay attention to the fact that they're citing the tree octopus.com they just go holy ball fuck me it's flat yeah there's not a whole lot of accountability even though there's all this information out in the world like it's very hard like people aren't being held accountable because people like to it's an echo chamber people like to to confirm what they thought was true initially because it feels good to be right and this is what gets us to the um the three doors the three doors example oh we were talking about this earlier go through that this is from the movie i'm gonna test you on it okay um most people that i i okay so you let's pretend you're on a game show right now i'm the host all right three doors one of the doors has a lamborghini behind it you

can't see it it's like a price is right game the other two doors have nothing behind it okay you get to pick door one two or three okay so choose a door one okay you chose door number one okay i'm not going to tell you if you got the right one okay with the lamborghini behind it okay rather i'm going to take away a door that definitely doesn't have it. So door number three, I opened door number three. Okay. Nothing behind door number three. Now you're down to door number one, door number two. You have an option to switch your choice. Do you want to stay with door number one or do you want to switch to door number two? I switch. You switch. Yeah. So you, regardless of where the Lamborghini is, you made the right choice, okay? And here's why.

You changed your mind, which most people in that situation do not change their mind. They stick to their guns because the door they chose first, even though it's random and it's shit luck, they think that they might have like a sixth sense. Like, they might say, like, maybe maybe you do you have a reason for choosing door number one other than just no you just asked me a door that was the first number yeah so some people a lot of people like might say like there's a reason i chose door number one right but for whatever reason whatever the reason is like people like to stick with their first instinct right but when you chose out of those three right there was 33% chance that you were going to choose the right one. Okay. So with the information you had, you had three doors and a 33% chance at winning the car.

When I take a door away, I'm, I'm giving you information, right? You have, you, by, by switching, you value that information, right? Because it went from a 33% chance that you were right to a 66% chance you were wrong. Okay? I'm not explaining that right, so let me rewind that. Yeah, rewind that part. Initially, it's a 33% chance that you are correct. There's a 66% chance that you are incorrect. When I chose door number one and you hadn't told me that door number three wasn't it? Yes.

Okay. I take a door away. I take away door three. What are the chances you're correct? With door one? After I take the door away, what are the chances that you are correct with door number one? 33%. It's still 33%, right?

What are the chances that door number two is correct? 66. 66%. It's not 50 50 so if they originally gave you just two door options it'd be 50 50 why i always have trouble with that though because i i know that's i know that's the truth because of i don't even want to say because of like the way i concept in my head I don't think is correct I know that to be the case but why is it that now it's door two has 66 when you don't know whether door one is right or wrong because initially we established that there's a 66% chance that you are wrong initially okay yes? Yes. So given the new information, right? Oh, inverse flip.

Given the new information, you have a chance to put yourself in the 66% chance bucket. 95% of people don't do that. Okay? Now, this is a results over process issue, right? I opened door number one, the Lamborghini's there, you switched, you're going to be like, fuck your theory, theory nick you know what i mean like but if you play that out a thousand times 60 660 times you'll get a car there's no hind you cannot have hindsight bias

it's the same thing in in poker like if you're playing texas hold'em and you know based on deductive reasoning you know you have the best hand mathematically after the turn, which is the fourth card, and there's one card to come, and you know that there's one card in the deck that could beat you if the other person has the necessary cards to get that, if you're putting them on that hand.

If they hit that, that is possible that it can happen. But if you played that out, you know, a hundred times, considering that minus the two cards in your hand and the four on the table there's 46 other cards in the deck there's a one out of 46 percent chance that they're not percent but one out of 46 chance that they're going to hit that card so you might get fucked on one right but it it has to do with are you are you consistent the next time you have a choice like that do you still consistently pick the 45 out of 46 chance yeah therefore over time you are more

likely to gain yeah just like on a slot machine you know you have x percent chance to actually win whether it's 20 or 15 or whatever yeah you could play forever but there are people who play forever and win the million dollar hand but how much fucking money do they lose lifetime playing it and not winning anything yeah the the point of that story was is as you gain information it's okay to change your mind and in fact it's actually plus ev like it is it is better to as you gain more information change your mind we live in a society right now where i think it's like people don't change their mind i'm a democrat everything that democrats do i'm agreeing with because i state i'm a progressive what they they do, I believe in.

I get new information that that the president did something that like, given the given an objective, like you remove Democrat Republican, I think should be bad. Like, I'm not changing my mind about the Democratic president, because I'm a Democrat, right? I'm anchored in that. And that's confirmation bias, right? I think think that like one of the big problems is as you get new information you should be more open to changing your mind and then on top of that as a society we should be okay with people changing their mind and we're not because you're wishy-washy you flip-flop right i love this topic so that's what i'm saying like that's that's just like a human that's this thing that human instinctually that we're just really bad at.

A lot of it's tribal now too because there is such an access to information exchange and the low barrier to entry, no barrier to entry almost, to putting your opinions out there and allowing other people in public, whether it be people in your network or even just – I mean look at what we're doing right now. Exactly. I'm a middle school science teacher talking about markets, right? No barrier to entry to it. All you had to do was talk about Top Shot with me and I'm like, well, I want to bring the Top Shot guy in here.

Done, right? And by the way, getting on my podcast, for starters here, to think of nothing, taking time out of your day, doing all that, the barrier to entry to this is significantly higher than you sitting at home on your toilet and sending a tweet yeah it's not even close so that's that micro that we see all the time and it's kind of funny because i'm hypocritical about it too and i'll here's how i'll explain i'll use a political example one of the things like politically i'm not a socialist right so i'm not a fan of bernie

sanders policies never have been it's not a guy i would vote for but one of the things that i've always said as a enormous compliment to him is that i give him credit that if you look at the history of his career in politics like even since he was on his honeymoon you know and and or whatever when he was in his 20s and held political beliefs and there was some public information around that, he's been consistent. Yeah. And it's like, oh my god. He sticks to his guns. I think I've said that on this podcast that I appreciate that.

And a part of me is like, yes. At the same time, we vilify people for changing their mind when new information comes in we hold people to stances they had in 1987 yeah what the fuck kind of world was it in i wasn't even alive in 90 i was i was not even a thought in 1987 but we're holding people to that type of thing in some and it's this is the problem it's subjective it's a slippery slope in some cases where you see people repeatedly flip-flopping and repeatedly being an opportunist and it's not just politics it's a slippery slope in some cases where you see people repeatedly flip-flopping and repeatedly being an opportunist and it's not just politics it's in anything yeah you kind of know like inherently in your head like that guy's a bullshit artist whereas when you see people

on certain situations as society changes or whatever changes they changed their opinion on something or how business is done or how this is done or that is done we then crush those people for changing those ideas that they previously had a different public idea of when in reality we should consider the fact that maybe not all of them maybe they just got new information and they said you know what i used to think that but now i think this yeah you need to be able to explain yourself well yes um and And I think like the, I don't know if this is totally related, but I have on the list, I sent you, pundits are pussies. Because. What do you mean by that?

Like they, so what I mean by pundits is like news anchors, doesn't matter, Fox, CNN, whoever it is, like their jobs essentially are to hold people accountable for the actions that they have. Like hold our president accountable for sending troops into wherever right and they I analyze the results of that decision over time and they continually offer their opinion on it right so they're essentially holding people responsible for their actions but where's the accountability for them when they offer an

opinion like when the when the president did this and this happened it's because of this and i i told you this was going to happen you know what i mean whereas like for every one of those like we're really bad at predicting the future as human beings there's probably nine instances where they the president made the right decision and they said it was going to go terrible and like that accountability is not there right like i just think like i don't know like how that this is totally related but you know what do you see what i'm getting at there 100 yeah i look at you know the trump presidency is such a case study and will be for forever for my lifetime as far as looking at many concepts but a concept like this and to me you know there there were every president has some sort of net positive

trump had some net positives you know whether you want to talk about bringing certain jobs back and stuff which i don't want to get into the weeds but some of the ways he did that i appreciate the intentions i don't think the long-term model was personally smart but that's my opinion i could be wrong right either way there were some good things that happened through all the bullshit and all the you know crazy drama i thought at least in my opinion and i know the world is not a utopia so this would just never happen because humans are biased and dumb when they get biased if they had just fucking reported on him put no opinion into it just reported he falls flat on his face he walks into it himself how much how many times did he i mean look at how he ended

he gets himself in trouble by fucking talking too much yeah that's all he had to do but instead they injected all these opinions in it in it they effectively have gotten on both sides oh oh yeah oh yeah no a hundred percent but when you look at the national media that has the most attention and has the most backing of the quote-unquote social platforms yes it is the left side yeah yeah so if you see the skew of the opinions it goes that way which if it didn't go if it didn't threaten things like free speech you know i don't know how much i'd care it does though like with actions we've seen which is another issue i don't want to get into that right now i want to make the overall point which is instead they injected

the opinions into everything and created this it's's us against him. And they pushed a lot of people right the fuck into his arms. And I'll speak for myself too. I've talked about this on the podcast. But I look at myself politically, you know, I didn't vote for either candidate in this past election here. And that was not, it was a decision I was willing to change my mind on. But that was one that i was comfortable with by 2019 when i saw like how this was going right before that though i was a trump guy and an obama guy how the fuck is that possible well i'll tell you how it's possible with obama it's pretty simple like you know i'm in college i'm fairly liberal whatever and obama's like a cool guy seemed country actually was coming out of the crisis at least seemingly okay. I was like, all right, yeah, it's cool, whatever. By the time I got to Trump, when he started talking about the bias that we saw and how there were these narratives put out there and they were telling you what to do. He wasn't wrong about that. And so for me, when I go and do my own like, well, what really drove me to it? That's one of the main things that did yeah and i can think at the same time that then okay yeah that's not a guy that

politically i get behind now or have in a while but also yeah he was right about that one thing and now we're seeing it play out on this grand stage where we have this skew and so if these reporters and now you've rung bells i don't know you can unring if they would just step the fuck back and do their job which is to report without opinions the way you want them to do it and i want them to do it we would get to the truth easier and we would see who's good and who and who's bad regardless of political party or political affiliation i i'm not i'm not saying that like news outlets can't have opinions i think that's valuable um especially from people that are studying this stuff and researching this stuff.

I think that's good because the everyday person doesn't have time to research every single political move. They need it to be condensed and delivered to them in a way. That's part of the responsibility of media. I don't think it's been the actual utility of media probably for quite some time especially in the last few years and um all that needs to be paired with that opinion is some type of accountability where and that's tough too because you run you run sims on these things like there's only one result based on a a lot of variables that are random. What do you mean by that?

You lost me a little bit. So a president makes a decision. It's essentially like the flap of a butterfly's wings. What results of that is like it's really hard to predict. The result of that, though, you can see the way it plays out, but you play that same scenario out a thousand times, you might've had the one out of a thousand result. Whereas like 999 times something else happens. We don't live in a situation where we could run that sim. I mean, you could, but people like you can't run that situation over and over again in real time and check the score on that decision. I see what you're saying. But there are ways to objectively hold people accountable to their opinions based on the results of decisions and et cetera.

There's a thing called a Breyer score, which, again, it's what people – these people called super forecasters have you ever heard of like super forecasting contests so they say like um event x is going to have uh what effect will event x have on the price of gas right so you say i don't know i this is tough for me because this is getting into like stuff that i don't know a whole lot about so like this a saudi arabian prince um let's say uh rises to to power what effect is that going to have on gas prices right these super forecasters in these contests you should read the book called super forecasters it's amazing i have heard of that who wrote that i forget but it's a great book it's not in my queue but it's like in my recommended. So basically this person ran this study with these super forecasters, and they answered questions like this.

And basically because his decisions are – the results of his decisions are largely based on a large amount of variables that are essentially random there's cognitive behavior the responses to things like all that like because it's really hard to say like okay i said that there's a 75 chance that the price of gas will go up based on the saudi arabian prince's um actions right so in a contest where you're actually trying to hold people accountable to those types of predictions, there's something called a Breyer score where I have to assign a 67% chance likelihood that the price of gas will increase, right? And the Breyer score takes that and compares it to what happened. And if you are correct, as in 67% chance yes, and the price of gas goes up, you get more points because you were 67% confident as opposed to being 51% confident.

So they give you points per – they give you points on a – Confidence level. Confidence scale. On scale. So 67 correct is worth more than 51 correct but 67 wrong and being wrong is worth more to the downside than 51 being wrong and so then they do it off of every prediction so they can create an overall score not just like oh you got it wrong then and then a boo-boo this one time yeah because like right and wrong is binary you're essentially creating a scale of correctness um which i guess kind of takes out the fact that you can't run these situations over and over again infinitely, which would be ideal. That would be where you truly get the objective result of what happened. It's very much in the weeds right there. It's great though but a real world example of that is gambling right so if i if i

think that the patriots are going to win the super bowl and i am 100 confident i'll put my net worth on it right if i'm correct i double my net worth right if i'm kind of confident i put 50 bucks on it you know like i'm essentially assigning a confidence level with the amount of my bet um and that's what this percentage is and that's how you get your briar score same concept yeah wow i love that there's no there's no equivalent to that there's no equivalent accountability to that when these pundits who are pussies because they do not like when people call them out on their shit don't um and all all you have to do to be like an anchor is you just have to be super

right about something one time to be to be a commentator yeah for people to believe you like to get a following like you got to be right about a few things a few times and they and they they live off that and everything after that like you see it in sports you see it and like you just have to be right about a few things a few times early in your career and you get a following and that following will never never check you which is a problem yeah i mean and look it you end up drawing it on the political lines but i don't want to do that i just want to say objectively the fact that the media hated trump so much drew them to literally anything but trump makes them feel great so that concept is like everything that they did with trump like trump did this so this is going

to happen no one on the left was checking the left could i mean could you imagine if trump had done 18 or whatever it was executive orders in the first four days and and um and by the way i'm just using math of the number of executive orders biden did if you go issue by issue maybe they're not a big deal or whatever but could you imagine the hoopla that that would have had whereas when biden did it i mean fucking sean hannity's talking about it but no one gives a shit other than the people that are already in the tank 18 were undoing trump's things i think i think a fair them. Most of them were. So that's not a fair comparison. And Trump did do some, in my opinion. Well, how's it not fair if Trump didn't do it to undoing

Obama's things? And then let's also, let's go very objective here. Let's forget the names Trump, Obama, and Biden. He just didn't do it the first day. He did a lot of undoing, just it took him a lot longer. because I like my political belief better and my political belief maybe lines up with Joe Biden's, therefore it was the right thing to do versus, well, that's my belief, but another person who's not a bad person thinks differently. You see what I'm saying? I mean, I'm in a weird political spot because in most of my conversations, if I'm having it with somebody who is very clearly left or very clearly right, they're pissed off at me at the end. It's just the way it goes. And then I've had two conversations

on this podcast that were really pleasant where I had someone very left and then another one where someone was very right and they went the opposite because maybe some of the topics we talked about really skewed to things that I was like, I kind of fuck with that, right? So, that's kind of the outlier. The negative part is when people are coming at you, but what I try to do radically is be like, okay, I'm a strong believer the answer is in the middle on a lot of things just based on averages. God forbid I try to bring that up though, people say, well, no, that means that you're condoning the left principle or the right principle that we say is wrong. It's not like you can't just sit there and say everyone on the left is a snowflake jerk off with no job and everyone on the right is a Nazi. These are ridiculous, ridiculous sentiments. Are there

people on the far fringes of both sides that you can say that about? Abso-fucking-lutely yeah but we end up taking those call it five to ten percents if it's that much on each side and making that the all attention rule yes that's right and that's wrong that's my problem i just made the argument that having a spectrum of percentages is like objectively the best way to to kind of assign value to decision making and what just society just doesn't do that yeah and i i think about a lot with this guy walter cronkite on my wall because you know it's not like i was alive when he was a reporter but he's widely regarded as the guy who invented reporting on tv or was the face of it and this brilliant reporter and i remember learning about it in

social studies and it's a tough moral question for me because the thing we the specific thing i'm referring to that we learned about was walter cronkite was on the ground in vietnam reporting and that was really the first time on tv that you know reporters were reporting live from a war and it's a you know i don't want to say universally but a generally agreed upon point that the vietnam war was a massive failure didn't have the right in the the right intentions behind it and you know whatever and there were a lot of problems because a lot of people got fucked up in that war or died yeah and in the context of history walter cronkite reported on that and he very clearly took that opinion publicly i think

he's been proven right by that opinion 100 agree it's a slippery slope argument though because i look at that and i go well in that instance he was 100 right in my opinion i don't really think you can argue that but he then did or did he set precedent for reporters after him to then say, well, you know what? I feel strongly about this, so I'll take this stance. And I have the same question like a guy who I'm devastated didn't get pardoned is Edward Snowden. The one question that's not really his fault, I mean, it's just unfortunately psychology of humans, is because he did that, even if he was right in breaking the chain of command, what is the next guy then say, well, this is enough for me to break it.

And then the next guy and the next guy. It's a tough thing. Like it's a shit or a fart. You're fucked either way. Yeah. I mean I'm just – I'm thinking like for me, again, it's probably pretty clear that I'm pretty left. I think we're going to look back on the reporting that was done on Donald Trump and more of the reporting that kind of vilified him will be correct than not. I think like for the issues that I care about at least. That's a good – that's a very good stipulation.

So like I said, I'm not a markets guy. So he probably did some cool shit for the economy probably did some great stuff for that like but to me like the way the the the effect that he had on the students that i teach history is not going to look kindly upon him not i agree i had to answer i had to answer the question more than once throughout his presidency if I was going to get sent – not me, but a student would say to me, am I going to get sent back to Africa? So yeah, the effect he had on my students, his presidency was, to a certain degree, depending on how you define trauma, was traumatizing. I could see that argument. And I think it was traumatizing in the way that middle school students should not be thinking that much about the president.

Honestly. Agreed. And they were. A lot. Someone, I think it was Anthony Bacari, was in here. And, you know, he's someone who's very, he was my bookie. We brought in here is one of the funniest fucking humans of all time and he looks at things so objectively and like in his own lane he's not

political at all but he was like you know if you're waking up and he said i know there's some people who think with you know this policy or whatever they're gonna be dead or shit like that and he's like look i'm not gonna speak for them like i know what i know i know what my life is you know white male in new jersey it is what it is but he's like in general more times than not especially today with the access to communication and information being tossed around and information to push back against things that are wrong if you as an average citizen are waking up every day and one of the first things or the first thing you think is x person is president and that is fucking my day or making my day incredible he's like your priorities are in the wrong place and it's at you're putting it on a

pedestal that is actually way too fucking high i don't really disagree with that you know i think there's enough of if someone's doing shit that you determine evil and maybe there were some things trump was doing that people on the left determine evil okay fine there's enough especially if if it's the right in power and the left being able to push back especially with the media arm and all that there's enough pushback that it's held in check that's why there's not a fucking wall you know and and immigration you know as far as like campaign promises that weren't followed through immigration wasn't stemmed at all you know it's like any of the things that trump was complaining about right or wrong that they're still there that push that push and pull is good the push

and pull is good it's the wisdom of the crowd essentially um that's good but i think that the president like a good gauge of the president's uh legacy is how how is he looked at by the the kids who really don't have a whole lot of skin in the game and i mean to me like they were thinking a lot about the president yeah and i i mean like i said that's what i care about and um i mean, it's just like if we're going to talk about this and I have this platform, I would not. Yeah. I can't leave here without saying things like that. And I want to, before I move on, like talk about how I am an imperfect ally. You know what I mean?

I grew up in a small town. Like racism is baked into me in my subconscious. What do you mean racism is baked into you? So implicit bias, okay? Why do you call it? And I want to just make sure we're staying on topic here. I want to make sure I understand. Why do you call that racism?

So racism is the, essentially it's an abuse of power. The definition of racism, in my opinion, is a lot like the definition of bullying. There's a power dynamic where people in power are taking advantage of people not in power, and it's repetitive. And that is the definition of racism. And racism, as far as that, part of that abuse of power is implicit bias. So who has access to institutions? Who has access to institutions who has access to certain networks okay um and as an imperfect ally is i grew up with a lot of those messages

kind of baked into my subconscious right the way i interacted with people growing up and the way i interacted with people in in in college was abhorrent in my opinion i i am i mean i don't regret it but i was very ignorant and i'm every day one of the things that drives me is growing out of that mindset which is largely subconscious how how so like when you say earlier in life college before because these things are baked into you what what things do you view as abhorrent like just day to day so like i mean saying this on a podcast is dangerous but i mean i i i think part of anti-racism is owning up to your previous actions while also acknowledging that you have the ability to grow and and uh grow from them like the way i interact with people and their experience mostly is like i didn't value

their experience like when when someone of a person of color and and was telling me like i work twice as hard to get half of what you get i might not have believed them right and in in reality the truth of the matter is is that is more true than not okay you you you're assigning like that number values twice as much for half but sure a good example i saw on the news the other day is misty copeland do you know misty copeland is she's a ballerina no i don't know she's on the i don't know the exact company or whatever but she's like the biggest company on on new york is like okay she's the first black ballerina on the on this whatever um on on the new york ballerina whatever and like for her to access that institution she had to change she had to sacrifice her blackness

she had to wear her hair a certain way she had to put certain makeup on to make herself appear lighter you know what i mean like that is an experience that I don't know that people understand. And I can't, I cannot communicate that well enough, like, as a white person. But I just see it, and I don't think that a very diverse population growing up until i got to college and bucknell was not a very diverse school but in in my interactions with people in school like i just did not value people's experiences i don't i don't disagree with the point you just made i want to have you extrapolate on an example though to actually put it for like i can think of some things but i want to make sure people know we have this in the right context. So you talk about she had to sacrifice some of her blackness to get to where she got. Well, I want you to define some of that exactly. But then I also want you to relate it to something way, in my opinion, that's way more simple and way less intrusive or invasive on your personal freedom or your ability to get what you want. And that would be something like the industry I came from and i'm a white dude right so you know you see me

now on a podcast corona i just haven't cut my hair during corona it's down to my fucking you know past my shoulders and you know i wear a hat could never do this working on wall street could never do this i get fucking thrown out you know i can't i can't wear a hat i can't i i gotta walk in there and in a button down and shit my hair can't be i mean i guess some guys pull it off after they're very very successful and it's rare you know as you're coming up in the industry like i better cut my fucking hair so where people would push back people who are maybe i don't want to even say ignorant but some of them are just straight up ignorant they'd say well we got to do that too you just got to fit in or whatever.

What are some of the things that make it different for someone like Misty Copeland, is that her name was? Coming into, you know, she spent her whole life trying to be a ballerina and get to the top of her game, which she did. Like what kinds of things are like, oh, that's not just like playing the game. It was a standard. There were standards that she had to hold herself to that her fellow ballerinas didn't because of the color of their skin. You see what I'm saying?

Yeah. Like what would some of those things be? Pretend I'm ignorant. So one of those things would be is like I can't look at a ballerina company and see a successful black woman ballerina. Therefore, I can't automatically compare her to anything therefore allowing her into that institution is somewhat of a risk because there's never been anyone like her before in that institution so why bias deep-rooted bias that when this company was formed there was probably a rule that said people of color were not

allowed to access that institution right and of course like you you you drop that but it takes a lot of time for that to actually play out because there's some sort of inherent understood passed down prejudice that maybe a lot of people who have it don't recognize they have it's not from an evil place but it's just kind of built in like oh that looks different yeah i don't i i do not disagree with that that's like that's what affirmative action tries to accomplish is eliminating that bias whereas we just give if anyone can reach that level to where they're in the room getting an interview they get an inherent advantage according to affirmative action now you can disagree with that because again there's a there's a certain point where like from a utility standpoint like

you want it the best hire right but that's i mean we're bad at interviewing people number one and number two like i just think like that bias is so baked in that you you got to kind like just try to eliminate that. And the only way to eliminate that is that if you reach a certain point, you get it. You know what I mean? If you reach a certain point and someone, a white counterpart reaches the same certain point, we can say that you are just as qualified and because there's less representation for people that look like you, you deserve this chance over the person who was white. Okay. And people have a really, really hard time with that because it's the difference between equity and equality, right? Equality is everyone gets the same thing. Everyone gets the same shot. You know what I mean? Equity is everyone gets what they need. The person of color needs a little bit more of a, of the benefit of the doubt in that situation, or a little bit of like that baked in privilege of, oh, I don't have an uncle in this company that can vouch for me, right? So I need affirmative action is my uncle that will vouch for me. You know what I mean? So

that's what you get. And yes, that person, like the difference is between those two people is that might be the person of color's only chance to access that network, to access that institution. Whereas the white person, if they made it that far, they're probably going to make it that far somewhere else. You know what I mean? Just because that white person has privilege because they don't not have to bear the brunt of bias, of prejudice. Which, whether you believe that exists or not, I guess that's where we fundamentally disagree. I can't – and I'm trying to process everything you just said, and I hate to say this, but I do love this topic because it's such – it's a philosophical topic. And I hate that we have to love a topic like this and talk about it, but we do, right? Because these are realities we face.

Most of what you just said I agree with, and i think that you also can't argue with data around it right so you see and you talk about that definition between equity and equality and when put in the correct lens i think it is a conversation that has to happen what ends up happening is sometimes people on the left will hijack it and turn it into a socialism argument which then people on the right or hate right and then they just rail against it that way and ignore the overall issue that was brought up sometimes people on the right will take when the left is putting it correctly and hijack it and make it socialism when that's not what they're saying and the way you just put it i thought was brilliant because it was not it was not based on socio or it was

not based on the economic impact it was based on the opportunity now i mean this would be a whole podcast in and of itself so i want to stay with i would prefer prefer if like from a certain point on that this was just us talking i don't i don't know if i'm super comfortable with having because this is kind of very close to like my sure my, my job. And like, I did reveal like a little bit more than I would have liked to, but you didn't, to be clear. And I'm, I'm,

I get to listen, you know, you're in the moment talking, everything you said was put in an educated manner in a, in a deliberate way. You didn't say anything that even controversial relative, relative to, to you.

But as far as like, I was speaking about the black experience about a white person, I don't know if I'm comfortable with that being out there. You know what I mean? Fair. So the one thing I do want to go to on this though before we get off it, based on what you just said, is where I start to see the circle of life on this having a bad effect is on some of the reverse racism that can come out of it now what i want is a utopian world where we define people on the content of character and not the color of skin or background of religion creed whatever it is everyone is just free to go after what they want to go after and have the same level of competition in that way and not yeah that would be great for capitalism because essentially everyone everyone has a fair shot

and therefore the cream will rise to the top that's not the case agree with you actually yes that's a it would be a great case i have a huge problem with the term reverse racism because again the way i define racism is power plus race prejudice. Yes. And as a white person, we hold the power objectively. So objectively, sometimes where it can – and it's the minority of situations in my opinion. But where we have seen – and I'll give an example here – where we have seen it go the wrong way and not get the intended result by the way it ends up hurting the overall objective is where you end up over delting on it and then causing you know whether it be like people talk about like racial apologies like i'm sorry for being white or shit

like that those are extreme examples i don't mean that i'm saying like where people suddenly start coming out and you know they they automatically go for diversity over like okay well how qualified is everyone here and how much is the gap based on where you started one example i always give of a rule that i hate because i think it ends up being backwards for for coaches of color is the rooney rule in the nfl now to give context, the guys who created this rule are, I believe it was Art Rooney, the second, one of the Rooney's with the Steelers, I think had brilliant objectives. I don't think there was a bad bone in his body and making it fully support his objectives and making it. And what the rule is, is that every NFL team, and there are 32 now

has to interview at least one coach of color as a candidate in the hiring process. The problem with this is that two things. The number of white coaches to black coaches is obviously more because in society there are more white than black or coaches of color, right? There's still more at this point in time. Secondly, we end up seeing i i don't even know what word to use but i'll just say like we end up seeing coaches get used and i'm not talking about white coaches i'm talking about black coaches getting used and what i mean by that is there are teams who maybe they have a coach right and they have a dream coach in mind give an example the raiders a couple years back the raiders had wanted to get john gruden back for years they had wanted to hire rehire him for like eight years or

however long it was it was a dream so they knew that if they could convince him to leave the monday night football booth they were going to fuck not only hire him but pay him a ridiculous contract yeah so they go to fire i maybe it was jack del rio somebody who was right before them i think it was jack del rio yeah so they go to fire him and then they find out that gruden's he's in like he wants to do it what did the raiders have to do they had to hire or they had to interview a person of color yeah so what they had to call it i believe they did one of their coaches i could be wrong on that in other examples it has been like a current coach on a team

and here's how the conversation this is not how the conversation officially goes but this is the connotation of that conversation owner picks up the phone yeah hi so and so black coach x all right so you and i both know we're gonna hire john gruden we want to do that but we have to comply with this rooney rule and they weren't hiring john gruden because he was white they were hiring john gruden because he was a super bowl winning coach who they've been after for years it has nothing to do with skin color they're like but because we got to follow that rule we need can you do us a huge favor you're a black guy can you just come in and it's a sham interview but can you interview with us we'll ask you some questions and be able

to say check we did it yeah it turns that guy be based on the color of his skin who might be a great coach might be a terrible one no idea doesn't matter it turns him into a tokenized object yeah and to me this is and again this is just one example right i believe that the majority of situations support what you're saying which is that the institutions in america favor the party in power and in this case the party being like white right agree with that what we need to look at because i always look at slippery slopes we talked about on other things is where are we letting that happen to where it goes so hard the other direction that not only do like do you have quote-unquote whites losing everybody loses to me the rooney rule everyone loses and by the way i think we have the least number of black head coaches in the nfl in like 15 years right now

i mean it's it's like disgraceful at the end of the day. And if you look at the, I talked about the distribution of white coaches to black coaches, I believe, and we'll check this after, the distribution of black head coaches to white head coaches, that percentage is lower than the percentage of black overall football coaches in the league to overall white coaches. So you have fucked like the standard. The standard should be at if you wanted to have the equality of outcomes, the standard should be at least at that level of what is the number of blacks to whites. So we've like defeated the purpose with a rule that I don't think was created to defeat the purpose. Yeah, I think the rule was put in place because when there was no none, I think it accomplished what it it accomplished a lot in the sense of that. It gave access to the institution of being a head coach and assistant coordinator.

Maybe it has outgrown that. Because I think that like if a coach is a person of color and has the chops, has the record, they'll get the interview. Whereas when the Rooney rule was made, didn't matter how good of a coach you were you probably weren't going to get the interview I don't disagree with that and so it might have outgrown it you know what I mean where it's now doing really a lot of things that it wasn't intended to do like tokenizing those um those people I hate that word but that's how I gotta put it because you know it's like the yeah so maybe so maybe we need to do away with it and see what happens. Because it might actually be doing more harm than good.

But at the end of the day, does the population of black head coaches reflect the population of people of... Sorry, does the population of people of color in coaching reflect the population of people of color in the league? No. Yeah, I don't think it does. I don't think it should ever... I don't think it will i don't think it should ever i don't think it will ever or or can ever maybe should it be a a complete one-to-one reflection maybe but it's certainly not close and it should be closer yeah and maybe the rooney rule is not the answer but i i think that it it's it certainly helped move us forward since that time.

And that's a good point. It doesn't mean that when it was created, it didn't do net positive. There's probably plenty of coaches that can trace their shot back to that. And by the way, the Steelers who have been owned by the Roonies forever, they walk the talk with that. First of all, they're very good at keeping coaches for a long time. They believe in building a culture. They've done that. I think they've had three coaches in like the last 50 some years and guess

who their coach is now for the last 13 14 years mike tomlin who is a blackhead coach who wasn't you know he's obviously been aged as a fantastic coach now but they also took a chance on hiring him because he wasn't he was never like an offensive coordinator or defensive coordinator they just saw a leader and they have given him the chance to be great for years so they walk the talk with that and you raise a good point like okay is something created that is a net positive clear net gain eventually does it have diminishing returns and become a net loss how do you then determine what are the metrics to determine that i think you have to i think where we're going with this is let's say let's do away with the rooney rule and see what happens yeah and i think you have to attack it from the other way you have to you have to implement some type of rule that that combats nepotism which i think

is a huge problem in the nfl so i think that is the bigger issue right now is not head coaches of color getting access to interviews i think i think for largely again this is where i'm uncomfortable talking about the black experience as a white person because if you ask a person of color what their experience is they may disagree with this but largely i think that head coaches of color do get access to interviews more so or maybe to the to a degree that is a little bit more fair or equitable um whereas nepotism is rampant like look at the vikings i just heard something about the vikings gary kubiak's nephew son whatever he's the offensive coordinator for the vikings

he does not deserve that job objectively he does not have the track record like he's the offensive coordinator for the vikings he does not deserve that job objectively he does not have the track record like he's just a kubiak you know what i mean so i don't know how you combat that that's what's sticky that's yeah which some people could argue against and and i know nothing about it but some i i agree with you because you see a lot of it belichick son as a coordinator andy reed son who actually just got fired because of stuff off the field court or linebackers coach like serious position coach so yeah i agree and then again it's a case-by-case basis do some guys have the track record that one i don't know other guys i could say yeah i i don't think he would have ever had that if he didn't have x last name you know so it's it's, it's, it's an interesting conversation. We could

do a whole podcast on it, but I think you spoke on that very, very well. I know, obviously, like it hits close to home because of what you do every day and, and, and who you do it with and, and your student population and understanding that. So, you know, to be able to speak clearly on it and, and, you know, speak to somebody like me, who's not in that environment and have me take it like you coming from a good place, think is a very good result for you so the the thing is like uh one of the reasons why i love teaching and my school specifically is i think we do a really good job of giving our students access to networks they otherwise wouldn't have access to to institutions they otherwise wouldn't have access to so we have students that are going

to schools like like-profile, like private schools like Penn Charter, etc. But we also have students going to vocational schools, which they probably would have been able to get there without us. But behind them, they have the network of us, which is essentially the Episcopal Church, the network that we have access to, they have access to. We take plenty of field trips. We partner with mentors and everything. So that is a big deal, I think, in education, and our public schools aren't giving access to that type of thing to students of color.

Even in, like, the great public school systems, they're not doing that. Maybe they're doing it, but they're not doing it well. And yeah, so I don't know where I'm going with that. The whole thing – It's kind of – well, you're stating things that I think are backed up by serious evidence. Yeah. That's what it is. It's the reason why I do what I do and I think why I'm such a I'm pretty bullish on on my school yeah well your

passion rings through and I know sorry I was just choking on some water there but I know you coming in here was was around Top Shot and everything like we said and we had a great long conversation on that but I like that we went into a totally off-the-road turn with some topics around stuff that's personal to you. And I'm not going to lie. I didn't say anything. But another thing I did want to at least ask you some things about. And obviously, like now we've been doing this a while and we're almost out of time here. So we're not going to get into it as much as I want to.

But you are teaching, as you've mentioned, during this whole thing. And you're teaching, regardless of who you're teaching, you're teaching during a time that's hard for all teachers and all students, because we're in Corona, and I know for a long time you were completely remote, and you can talk about that, but now you're seemingly mostly in person. From the outside, you know, I feel very lucky and fortunate that I am not a kid who's in school. And that even goes up to college and stuff because of the trajectory of learning that was, that was yanked from people for a long time there, whether it be two semesters or even still. So now with people, regardless of age, depending on where they're at, still being totally remote

or even partially remote. do you what have you seen from your seat having been remote for a long time and seeing like the different world we're in as far as like the progress of your students over the last years over the last year and how corona has affected the projected trajectory that you would have wanted for them without corona having happened honestly this might be surprising but it leveled the playing field a little bit honestly what do you mean by that um so there's an education gap where my students come into fourth grade in my school two three four grade levels behind in reading and math right this kind of put everyone on a little bit more level of a playing field right so first of all you gotta you gotta rewind why they're coming to us from schools that

aren't very good because they're in uh neighborhoods where um property taxes are lower therefore the schools get lower resources and it's just because because school funding is tied um to a certain extent to property taxes areas that are desirable to live in have better schools and it kind of is like a positive feedback loop yep if you have a good school people are going to want to live there they'll pay more taxes or whatever they'll buy more expensive homes which therefore can be taxed more um that's my understanding of it. So because of that, they're coming to us from not so great schools, right? And when Corona hit, everyone went to a virtual school, which kind of eliminated some of the

advantages, right? So our school is actually doing really well like our test scores are phenomenal because um we did covid learning very very well and i think that we're very unique in that so i might not be the best person just we have resources we we were able to buy every kid a laptop like right away we were able to do online learning and have a schedule that was basically the same schedule that they would have in person, just all virtual. And you didn't see a big loss in retention. So, so the end of the school year last year was rough. They basically like, we weren't able to do much other than, um, we had them come to the school like every day if they could maybe once a week to like get food and check in and just say hi. Um, I was assigning a lot of like what we call asynchronous

work where like I just assign it and they do it and I'm on Zoom if they need help. And not a lot of kids were doing that work. But what we were assigning, they were reading, they were doing some stuff because their test scores like are really good. And a lot of that progress we're seeing is relative. Okay. Because a lot of standardized testing is not you reach score 55 you're proficient it's no what percentile are you on the scale and the messed up thing with it is is that these under-resourced schools are being held to the same standard as the very well resourced schools and the very well resourced schools are setting the curve. That's where the enormous inequity is in education, is that if we change the way we did, and instead of saying, like, if I'm a school teacher in West Philly at an under-resourced school, I don't need to beat the suburban kids. I just need to hit this mark.

You know what I mean? Standardized testing is incredibly good at reinforcing the hierarchy. You know what I mean? Because if I'm a school teacher in West Philly, like I said, I can teach them all the words. I can teach them everything. But if it was easier for the kids in the suburbs to learn them, they're going to score higher than my kids. And I'm working so hard not only to get them to that level but to catch them up. You're saying it's easier for the kids in the suburbs to do it because of their prior education advantage.

Well, I mean it starts at like a very – Yes, yes. I mean the number one leg up that well-resourced areas have is like access to pre-K. And that's a big one. No one talks about that. Yeah, that's pretty big in the education circles. That's what I'm saying. In your circles it is, but the general public.

And unfortunately, I don't know that there's a lot of backing politically for like universal pre-K, like government funded. I think in like really like Philly. Philly is getting there, hopefully. So it starts there and then it's like reinforced over and over and over again um it's like a pipeline you know what i mean so yeah so that's that's a big thing and it's like their their schools are well resourced from the beginning whereas like largely in these under-resourced neighborhoods it's it's is the teacher good right and unfortunately a lot of there's not there's not unfortunately, there's a lot of bad teachers

because it's easy to become a teacher. And why is it easy to become a teacher? Because we don't pay teachers that well compared to, if I'm a really smart person and I have the intelligence to teach really well, teaching the, here's a cool example, a little, another flex for me, the amount of decisions I make in a day is equal to or greater than the amount of decision, the amount of decisions a brain surgeon makes, objectively. In a classroom full of 30 students in a, in a eight hour day, the amount of decisions that I have to make, and if we want to say the

amount of decisions you have to make is relative to how difficult your job is, is equal to or greater than that of a brain surgeon. That's a loaded one. And the decisions – the amount of decisions I'm making are maybe lower stakes, but it depends on what you define as – these are lives. Yeah. You know what I mean? I should bring you in here and do a whole separate podcast on on these topics because we would just go off forever yeah so anyway i mean we could go on and on and on but um that's kind of like where the inequity kind of reinforces and sure and you you get these like these really big gaps because i mean and is that is that a feature or is that a bug you know what i mean i like how

you put that now you you mentioned though that in your particular situation it appears as if covid has been more positive than the average school or the average student yeah yeah okay because like i said all of that inequity like those fancy computers that they get like my school was positioned to give that access right and on top of that another flex we have very high level teachers at my school yeah so our teachers were probably a little bit more adaptable to a virtual learning environment than maybe even like the suburban teachers were right and i'm saying like suburban versus versus urban that's not fair we'll split into resource versus under resourced yeah because it's a little bit too much of a generalization yeah yeah yeah i like the second one better um and on top of that like i'm teaching a i'm teaching in a neighborhood that is under resource but my

school itself is very well resourcedced. So that's another thing. It's an outlier. We kind of, yeah, very much an outlier. So we kind of cut out that variable, right? And then you bring in another variable. Okay, all of a sudden we're all virtual, okay? Who's best equipped, okay? So if I have the same resources as middle school B and middle school B is, is teaching in a more well-resourced neighborhood. Okay. We're going to see who's the better teachers. Right. So our test scores say that we are, you know what I mean? And it'd be interesting to see the data between like a public school and an

under-resourced neighborhood versus a public school in a well-resourced neighborhood. I don't know if the, I don't know if you would see like something like the test scores kind of stayed where they were before covid pre or it got worse everyone dropped yeah did the did the well-resourced public school drop more or less and or do you think we've seen enough results now to be able to say for sure with covid or is there still you kind of need to see it three four or five years down the line it's everything's so messed up right now it's gonna be everyone took a hit even us well one one last question on it because this this is like kind of

the heart of the issue there's been a lot of controversy around how especially in the public sector schools how governments have decided what local governments whatever what schools are open what the schedule is remote versus in person versus all remote all in person and assuming your situation is more of an outlier there has been a large net loss in the public school sector, it appears, and we need to see data down the line here, in net learning and net productivity and therefore net education over the last year or so. What have your thoughts been around how, with corona, this unprecedented virus that until now didn't have vaccines, highly contagious, whatever. What were your thoughts around, in retrospect, how the government handled it with shutting down schools and then also, even to this day, in many cases, not reopening them and not doing it at capacity? I think it's a really hard problem to solve. We were able to solve it faster than most because

we're small and well-resourced. Enough time has passed where our government local national should have figured something out it is one of the biggest things i think future generations will look back on us and say they opened up outdoor dining before schools they put money time and effort into opening up x y and z before schools doesn't matter what it is yeah before schools because it's essentially when you're layering restrictions you got to layer them in a way that covers up all the holes okay it's like swiss cheese right as as we get vaccinated as you start to pull off layers So one of those first layers that should have been pulled off should have been schools, and it wasn't. And that's a problem.

It shows that we do not value education as a society. I'm biased on this because I have some cousins who I'm close with who have been teachers for years, and they're very, very, much like you, they're very, very informed on this stuff, and they've been're very very much like you they're very very informed on this stuff and they've been talking about it for years and so i could see from the outside that there's a lot of broken things in our education system if you just take a glance like just a basic high level in the air glance you can see it but hearing details over and over again maybe some of its confirmation bias on my end but i agree and i think that net overall your situation aside really bad situations aside

okay situations aside just putting them all together net we are going to see some downstream effects that are not positive in the next few years and you know i'm also you know in in the camp that there is a personal responsibility to things and you know governments have have fucked up at every level along this entire thing state local federal whole nine i can point to a million fucking things and i think that you saying that us looking back and not and judging harshly on not opening up schools is going to be correct i agree with you and i just happen to put in the same lens the overall economy and the overall ability for human beings to go out and make decisions for themselves and that's a whole separate conversation but i i

appreciate you making the point and and leaving it in the sand like that is as a clear line because look i think that commentary is going to age well and i think you've had enough time now also taking into account your own bias of your own situation to then look at the full playing field and say like yeah you know there's some problems here i think that's admirable for a teacher to be able to say that the the problem of of reopening like let's say something like outdoor dining i think that's an easier problem to solve and might take less overall like resources than opening up public school systems that's a tough tough problem to solve enough time has passed where we should have we should have figured it out by now no no one wants to

be the first nick no one wants to be the first to get sued and also on top of that like i mean it's it's it takes a special kind of person to teach during a pandemic in person um without being vaccinated but to me like if you're in it for the right reasons, like this is very much an opinion. If you're in it for the right reasons, like I not once like thought about that. You know what I mean? Good for you.

Like even like the risk involved is like, it's like, I mean, even if the risk was high, like if the opportunity is there to like be in front of the kids and teach them, like that's part of why I took up the profession. You know what I mean? Because schools are not just places where kids sit down and learn. They're, they're essentially when they are like working properly,

they're community hubs. And it just, it was me for a no, it would have been a no brainer to just open up community hubs and have those be like areas where kids are getting their meals and stuff like that and yeah it's tough though because there's a lot of variables in that um but i think we we kind of completely were like we'll just keep them closed we'll worry about this stuff because people seem to value that a little bit more and there there's

a there's got there had to be some type of give and take there and there was no give to the school there was a lot of a lot of take well we can be objective and look at this the same way we've looked at other issues in this podcast where you look at data look at hard numbers and the fact that first of all i appreciate that that was your mindset and you are clearly a guy who's in this for the right reasons and loves what he does and has backed it up with every action you've taken over the last eight years of your life but you know the fact of the matter is yes have we seen people who are 20 years old die of coronavirus we have we have yeah yeah so again i do i do i don't think so like the philly teachers

like had a big strike because they were going to open up the schools without giving them – so it was like 1A is frontline healthcare workers, et cetera. 1B was teachers. Well, there's a difference too between the 65-year-old teachers maybe a touch overweight and you. That's my point. You and your kids, if I want people getting corona, I want you getting it because the data shows me you are in in all likelihood minus comorbidities and stuff you're gonna be fine yeah what i was getting at is like the people the the teachers striking i'm not saying they're bad teachers they're in it for the wrong reasons reasons etc like i i think that they actually got some stuff done like chop is chop is vaccinating

like basically all philadelphia public school teachers that's awesome so there's like a pipeline right there so they got something done which i think is good but at the same time like it's just like i don't know it's it's tough because again i guess i can't blame the government because what were they going to do open it up before vaccinations like three months ago like apparently teachers weren't going to go and go into the classroom. So I get, I get it from that standpoint. Um, so yeah, I guess like when I say that we'll look, we'll look back and, and blame the government for not opening up schools, like you can't, it's not fully on them. Um, it's just like a really shitty situation.

And that's what people struggle with, with this whole Corona. It just sucks. Yeah. And there has to be sacrifices and no one's life is as good as it was before corona no and like we try to blame people for that and it's random it was a random event and we're trying to blame the government for how they're handling it i do think that more often than not even the people in power are probably doing their best. And there's that push and pull. And I mean, there's plenty of people in there that are

that are in it for personal gain, or they're trying to help a certain group of people that that they believe deserve something more than others. But at the end of the day, like in this situation, like it doesn't matter, like everybody's losing. and that's why everybody's upset and that's why like people are losing faith in the government people are losing faith in the economy but the economy's doing fine now but yeah if i touch that one we'll be here for like another four hours yeah so that's that's a good spot to leave it but uh listen dude this this was great love that this came together quick with yeah a very timely timely episode going through top shot yeah definitely thank you for sharing everything and i want to track your progress there see if you jump back in there or especially when

the nfl comes up oh you know how hard you go in we're gonna feast if this comes to the nfl all right good yeah anyway and i also appreciated the you know, the last third of that conversation going into some outside the box stuff. I thought it was really, really good. Definitely. So thanks for coming in, brother. Good to see you. It's been too long.

See ya. You've changed a little bit, but. Oh yeah. Everyone else, give it a thought. Get back to me. All right. Peace. Thank you.