Julian Dorey Podcast - #78 - Debating Web3, NFTs, & DeFi With An NFT Whale | Mitch Lacsamana

Episode Date: December 15, 2021

Mitch Lacsamana is an NFT investor, trader, and advisor. Currently, he is the Head of Marketing & Strategic Partnerships for the exclusive Discord NFT Investment Community, Metaverse HQ. Mitch also serves as an official advisor to various NFT Collections/Companies including Superlative Secret Society. ***TIMESTAMPS*** 0:00 - A long day from Miami to NYC to Jersey; Mitch’s July 4th NFT Bet; The Early Days of NFTs that Mitch witnessed in 2018; Dapper Labs, NBA Top Shot & What Went Wrong 36:17 - Mitch explains Metaverse HQ & how he got involved; How Discord Works; Play & Earn Gaming; Virtual Land & Its Future Use/Value; How Metaverse HQ turned towards NFT investment/trading theme; NFT Collections and how they work; the inevitable worthless NFTs that exist in the space; CryptoPunks and why some terrible art is “worth” a lot 52:33 - “I am an NFT Degen”; Explaining floor price; The Community Aspect of NFTs, Smilesssvrs / Waheed Zai / Gio Gussen Shoutout; You never know how legit a project is; Mitch tells the story behind Mutant Cats (yes you read that right); How passive earning (staking) works with NFTs 1:08:17 - Julian asks about how some projects aren’t pyramid schemes; Comparing NFTs right now to another historical market; Mitch’s disciplined investment approach 1:27:30 - Discussing the recent FUD Token drop; Mitch explains the recent Wolf Game rip and what happened 1:47:20 - The hurdle of getting NFTs completely mainstream; Shaan Puri’s Twitter thread on the Metaverse; Breaking down the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT Collection and why it matters; Julian asks a pressing question on Bored Apes 2:05:47 - NFT Regulation is coming; The dangers of trading NFTs if you aren’t actively paying attention; The lack of simplicity problem that continues to be one thing holding back crypto; Julian tells a story about a crypto conference in NYC back in 2018 2:24:31 - “The next great invention will look like a toy”; The silly names of NFTs and why they might actually make sense; Thinking of money in crypto and not dollars; Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), and the long term look of the crypto space; Mitch talks about what the DeFi guys were telling him at Art Basel in Miami; Crypto, DeFi, and the entire space is still so new 2:42:55 - Web3: What is it and what will it look like; Mitch explains why he’s still unsure; The Superlative Secret Society NFT Collection that Mitch advises for; Axie Infinity in the Philippines; Julian discusses Mitch’s brother Mike and Don Tapscott Ted Talk he showed him that started everything ~ YouTube EPISODES & CLIPS: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0A-v_DL-h76F75xik8h03Q  ~ PRIVADO VPN FOR $4.99/Month: https://privadovpn.com/trendifier/#a_aid=Julian   Get $100 Off The Eight Sleep Pod Pro Mattress / Mattress Cover: Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is like anything else that requires expertise. If you are not willing to be in it a lot and paying attention to everything going on, be prepared to lose everything you put in there. Yep, 100%. You are up against people, traders like me. You're up against traders like my community that are constantly armed with information, real-time alpha on every project in the metaverse. We have context into everything that ever existed and we have the tools to outpower you we have the the capacity to outgun you and we have the volume to out spend you what's cooking everybody?

If you are on YouTube right now, please hit that subscribe button, hit that like button. And if you have a second, would also love it if you left a comment. To everyone who has been leaving comments, by the way, that has been an enormous help. It is big on YouTube and I really, really appreciate it on the recent videos. It's been awesome. I do my best to get to whatever comments I can. I apologize if I don't get to all of them, but to all of you who are fans of the show, it does help a lot in the algorithm, and it does not go unnoticed.

So I really, really appreciate it when you do that, and thank you to those who have. To everyone who is listening on Apple or Spotify right now, thank you for checking out the show there. If you haven't already, hit that follow button on either of those platforms and I look forward to seeing you guys again for future episodes now I am joined in the bunker today by my very good friend Mr Mitch laximana I will let you read Mitch's bio and also let him explain it in this episode to figure out exactly what's what but the short end of it is Mitch was a very early adopter to nfts he has been a straight up killer as an nft trader and so over the next few months i'm bringing in several guests who are doing different things on web 3 at least

i plan to that's how it looks right now we're doing different things on web 3 so i would say this is the first of those episodes and it was a fitting one to do because mitch is my very good friend who i've been business partners with before go way back with who i've also gotten to watch do this since he started it and and watch him grow and and he just had an amazing year so we kind of got to celebrate it today but for those of you out there who have only heard the word nft is like a passing joke or something like that and roll your eyes and think about JPEGs and stuff, totally understand that. I will say that there is a ton of bullshit in NFTs. You will hear us say that today on the podcast.

My objective is to figure out what themes are going to win and carry forward and help build Web3. I believe NFTs – I'm betting that they are going to be a big piece of that. What I don't doubt is that a lot of it is going to be shit that's worth nothing. The stuff that's not though, will be like the stuff, in my opinion, that rose from the internet bubble in the late 90s and 2000s the big companies were all in that amazon apple whatever and they all did pretty well you know so you have to kind of and anytime there's something new you have to sift the bullshit from the not bullshit and that is part of what the debate today was over so we talked a lot about nfts we talked a lot about defy decentralized finance as well

i had cole cannelli in here for episode 29 a lot of people still hit me up about that one and the deep conversation we had really strictly on DeFi there but it was nice to kind of bring that through again because Mitch is learning more about that based on the seat he sits in and we also got to full-blown the theme of web 3 at the end in this conversation as well so really enjoyed this one I hope you guys find it very informative. I did pick up Mitch from the train station after like a flight cancellation and then a delay on the new flight

and then flying in from a week in Miami, taking a train down to South Jersey, coming over here and then working on a conference call at 9 p.m. and trading NFTs at 9.30 and then hopping on camera with me at 11. So shouts to Mitch for being a trooper and doing this. This was a late one, but he did a great job and I hope you guys enjoy. Anyway, I talk to you every week about my friends at 8sleep. It's because when I come to do this intro, I'm getting up out of bed, out of my 8sleep after

probably only sleeping five or six hours, but feeling like I slept eight. Because with an Eight Sleep Pod Pro Cover, you will get a deep sleep and be energized when you wake up in the morning in a way that you have never felt before. That is because Eight Sleep's technology optimizes your sleep stages around you throughout the night to make sure that this is possible. So if you use the link in my description, along with the code trendifier at checkout, that's T-R-E-N-D-I-F-I-E-R, you will get $100 off your own Eight Sleep Pod Pro cover today. And if you want to get the full mattress, by the way, if you just want a whole new mattress, get the mattress. You get $100 off that as well. And it's the same product. Both are the same. So don't feel compelled to have to get the mattress. I use the cover. Cover's awesome. You'll love it. Also, I'm going to leave a little announcement somewhere in the podcast.

I'm going to stick it in there. But we have a little another something going on with the show. So I was very, very excited about that. I'll leave that for when that comes up. That said, you know what it is. I'm Julian Dory, and this is Trendfire. 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. I like a man's timeline I really do And I gotta tell you It's 10.59 right now

When did you say we were gonna start? I believe I said 11 You did You did And this was after like a long day too So you're flying in from Miami You then gotta pick up a train somewhere I gotta go pick your ass up

That was like 7 hours ago You minted how many NFTs like 2 hours ago? I might have minted 30 of the brand new migos nfts probably be gone by the time this podcast i hope it doesn't go to zero it's already a rug but you get in the car you're like all right jules i have a call at nine i have to mint at 905 we're gonna start at 11 how's that sound like sounds good to me bro but here we are i appreciate your flexibility julian we were supposed to do this last week as you know you're an important man well i'm very important not as important as you and so i appreciate your time appreciate you picking my ass up from hamilton train station yes we just docked ourselves even further that's a thing in the internet space that's right in the world of things i'm gonna get you used to that again you used to

used to dox yourself all the time nine Now you dox yourself a lot less. Well, I mean, I came in doxed. I'm already doxed, you know? I had someone send me pistachios the other day. That was lovely. How? For what? He was like, I want to send you pistachios. One of our members at the community.

Oh, at the community. Yes, at the community. Yes, at the commune. The digital Web3 commune that I run. Oh, at the community. Yes, at the community. Yes, at the commune. The digital Web3 commune that I help from time to time. Wait, this was somebody who just threw there. They'd never met you before. Never met me. Felt super close to me, I guess.

Shout out to Cut. I appreciate it. Wanted to send me pistachios. And so I gave him my real new york address perhaps i should not have done that all right so it was your fault no p.o box or anything i need to get a p.o box that's what i've learned yeah you got to get off grid a little bit a little bit but the world's so transparent like that's what that's what we're rewarding now it's like this weird trend where people are trying to get

more private than ever and in some ways i'm very much one of them for certain things depends on what it is but then people are also more public than ever it feels like the aol like the screen name days you know you live and died by your screen name yeah or you live and died by your runescape account or whatever that was, your means of communication. It wasn't Julian Dory or Mishlock Samana per se. It was Tennis Master. I don't know. I wasn't creative back then.

I played tennis and I was decent at it and that was my username. And so this is sort of how we are all now communicating again is anonymouslyously and with uh funny names oh yeah and we're gonna get there today by the way on all the complex world of building the infrastructure of the metaverse that people like you have been involved with really since it right when it started to go like you were day one or in there maybe not day one technically of like this stuff was i guess created in 2017 but as far as like beginning of 2021 oh this is where the action is this is where i'm going to be you were right in there down and dirty so i think that having people at home who are hearing all these buzzwords hearing about the metaverse hearing about web 3 and being like what the is all that

i think this will be a really good episode to run through it because you've been in the middle of it but you and i sat down i think it was like july 4th right when you came down sure that's the last time we really kicked it was july 4th well no you weren't here in the beginning of august but you were already deep in this but july 4th we talked a long time about your bet so to speak on this space and you had been you've been looking at this i guess coming into nfts through the og days of top shot right yep that is uh that was the way that was the way that i came into nfts so then throughout the spring you started branching out because a lot of that they kind of blew a lot of their opportunity there we don't need to get into that but you started branching out because a lot of that, they kind of blew a lot of their opportunity there. We don't need to get into that. But you started branching out into the rest of the whole NFT metaverse that was coming together.

You were looking at like Zed Run and stuff like that. And then I remember this because with each passing day, it gets more. It ages better and better. But there was – I know like you and I have known each other for a long time. I know when you're like there's a thing. This is the thing. This is going to be the thing the thing and I'm gonna go at this thing right now and that was the attitude and it was like okay I'm gonna go in there's six months left in this year I'm doing nothing but fucking NFTs in the metaverse and I was like you know what yeah that sounds like

actually a really good idea you should do that and you did and here we are the year's almost over and it's like unbelievable we'll get to everything you're involved with there it's not just like you in here trading shit like you run a whole community like a serious serious community and you know everyone in the space so i think maybe the best way to go at this is to i don't know where you want to start with it, but explain how when you had the moment where you're like, number one, NFTs are real. Number two, they're here to stay. Number three, here are all the value props I see in this right now. And number four, here's why I think there's going to be way more value props on this stuff moving forward. Beautiful. here's why i think there's going to be way more value props on this stuff moving forward beautiful let me start with point number one because um that was uh three points too many

for for old mitch but i think that the initial shock value of nfts was um for me in 2018 actually julian so back in 2018 i was helping like co-found a media and marketing company in the blockchain space and uh i did this with my brother mike my cousin matt my friend tyler and bella and we were like basically throwing ourselves into the blockchain ico space back then right so i'm so happy you brought this up yeah right so artifacts digital every single that was the name of our company shout out artifacts digital artifacts digital that really got everything started that really you're understating that but it did it really did because what it allowed us to do was sort of see this world of crypto like for the first time have real exposure to it see just what a rug looks like right like getting the rug pulled under you i we saw the the beautiful side the glamorous side of crypto and then the fucking ugly disgusting side of crypto all at

once and we were providing these services for these companies and me mike and matt my brother and my cousin we found ourselves at the capacity of another working for another company and they had sponsored us to go to the ethereal conference in brooklyn i think it was being hosted by consensus joe lubin at the time and they the creator of metamask which by the way metamask is a hot wallet it's a software that uh everyone in the nft space uses and utilizes it's like basically like gmail signing into any sort of uh when you sign into a website same thing if you're going to do anything crypto nft related usually sign in with their software quick quick sidebar by the way thank you for doing that do that anytime something comes up

today that you think like the average joe's not gonna know yep because like you don't even assume i know all this 100 seriously 100 so and i'll stay if i have to interrupt you a few times to make sure on stuff i apologize but i just want to make sure everyone follows so anyway i'm glad they were running this this conference metamask was one of the sponsors there so metamask i don't know if metamask was a sponsor at the time but we were at the ethereal conference and we watched a crypto kitty get auctioned off for like 114 thousand dollars fiat and me mike and matt just stood there shocked we were like what the fuck did this picture of a kitty just sell and you know for those of you that don't

know crypto kitties was one of the first og nft projects built on the ethereum blockchain by dapper labs the company who rugged me i'm kidding and mostly shout out top shot shout out shout out top shot right shout out dapper labs who invented nba top shot and the crypto kitties they were so innovative that the ethereum blockchain could not handle that game that the crypto kitties game and so eventually over time it became too expensive to keep playing the crypto kitties game but it was really one of the first use cases of nfts that was extremely popular so what what and it was my first exposure to nfts was three years ago you're saying someone bought it in front of you at an auction they're obviously taking place online but they were doing it special through the conference and then announcing it there and

they bought a picture of a crypto kitty yeah but that was and this is where a lot of people get confused with some of these projects depending on what they are crypto kitties existed within a video game online yes so it allowed you access to something that otherwise if you didn't purchase this exact one you wouldn't have access to that to flaunt around in the game exactly so the crypto kitties game from my understanding was one of the first nft projects that incorporated the ability for you to own these digital collectibles these crypto kitties and then within the game it gave you some options you can breed and um and i you could sell and trade these

things and i believe more crypto kitties yeah so again 2018 we watched a crypto kitty sale an auction for over 100 grand and we're like thinking to ourselves what the fuck is this picture of a cat doing who's selling for that long we don't know right i don't remember who bought it i don't even remember the context of like um like what was happening i just remember that in my head i couldn't really picture what was happening yet i didn't understand what this meant i didn't understand what an nft was at the time and so i didn't i didn't value it at over 100 grand right i didn't i didn't the perceived value to me was oh that's worth zero dollars i can right click and save that image and whoop-dee-doo i fucking have it right so i we just

like were bewildered and again we were focused on on crypto companies doing blockchain marketing at the time. My eyes were not where I think it should have been. But I'll never forget. That was my first exposure to an NFT period was that CryptoKitty being auctioned off. And it was also like a weird time because that was what, like July 2018, something like that? It was hot. It was a hot summer. Yeah, like May, June, July. 2018 something like that it was hot it was a hot summer yeah like may june july and you had the entire crypto market which was this nascent idea like for a lot of people other than

like some passing background noise in the news no one thought about crypto until let's say like maybe starting midway through 2017 and so now you're only a year later off that, but the whole, for people that aren't aware, the whole market led by Bitcoin went way the fuck up throughout 2017, like just thousands of percentage points. And then these other altcoins, these other new cryptocurrencies, big air quotes there,

were mooning as well. And so beginning of 2018 comes in and the crash starts happening and it was also when a lot of people like end of 2017 for examples like when i was getting involved like this is a very interesting space and of course i'm participating in buying some some currencies but you don't really know about it yet like hindsight it's like that's kind of dumb so when everyone started doing that, that was correlated with when the markets went down. So 2018 is a really – when you're going through this and, by the way, landing – and we should talk about that – but landing these contracts with Artifacts Digital and in the middle of this world, of this ICO world, the floor was falling out from under everyone. So it went from this high, like, oh my god, here we are. Crypto's here and it's here to stay.

To now, like, dirty word. And yet, at the same time, from the ashes of this molten fire, the fucking phoenix is rising. Without you realizing it. Because this new space that isn't really going to be around for two and a half more years. It's suddenly like, wait a second. That a jpeg but is it what's interesting is that dapper labs the company that created the crypto kitty that i watched get auctioned off at 2018 was the one that reintroduced me back into nfts through their nba top shot product back in 2020 right and i think that's a really interesting thing because as much as i shit on dapper labs and and like poop on them

for what they did to nba top shot and um and how you know i sort of watched my holdings go from a lot to a little i got the rug pulled under me dapper labs did an incredible incredible job at making nfts super relevant and and really helped that barrier to entry be extremely minimal for consumers meaning you can now buy nfts with credit cards right you can now buy nfts with with your bank account as opposed to crypto without having to go through crypto. And I think Dapper Labs, they took their incredible project that ultimately failed CryptoKitties. And I don't think it was a failure by any means. I think in the long grand scheme of things, they actually took the challenges that they saw there and said hey ethereum blockchain

we can't we people love nfts right we we could have kept growing the the user base but the blockchain couldn't sustain it and so why was that gas fees were too high right so okay yeah people that don't understand gas sure within ethereum yes It's something that exists on any transaction you ever do, but it varies. Exactly. So if you can imagine, you know, the whole bit of decentralization is that you're not like having one entity do the processing, right? The processing of a transaction, say, I want to buy something from you, is done by a multitude of individuals, of miners, so to speak.

And so what a gas fee is, is essentially you tipping, you giving crypto to these miners to incentivize them to take your transaction as opposed to someone else's. It's almost like when you call for an Uber and you get surge pricing, you're basically – if someone else is calling an Uber alongside with you at the same time, the person that pays the most will get that Uber. That's how it works. And this is the proof of work concept, which is part of the issue technically because you're relying on people to,

in this case, the miners, the coders around the world who don't have to do anything. They're not hired by Ethereum Inc. It's just like whoever shows up to do it to be who don't have to do anything they're not hired by ethereum inc it's just like whoever shows up to do it to be incentivized to want to do it yeah it's a it's a solution it's not a perfect solution um but yeah it's definitely it's definitely working and i think dapper labs what they did so well again was they said they understood the problem and they said okay we need to build our own blockchain Maybe this blockchain is a little bit more centralized.

Maybe we control it a little bit more and we can offer gasless transactions, which means we don't have to pay for overhead. If I'm going to send you $4 worth of crypto, it's only going to be worth $4 of crypto. I don't have to pay any gas fees, right? And then they did that over years year year year so three years after they released nba top shots um yeah nba top shot on their brand new blockchain called flow and that was what sparked nfts so i had nick garolla in here way back in episode 37 who was very early to top shot and was also very early to get out he did not get rugged at all he for him i remember and he was not he didn't get out because

he thought it was crashed he actually thought he thought the whole space was going to the moon and he thought dapper labs had a really good shot to go there he's like i made a lot of money and i don't know what i don't know so i want to kind of hold off but you know if people want to hear about how some of that worked in great detail you can listen to that one i thought he did a really good job explaining it but just like in a short way since we are going through this story can you explain to people how dapper labs officially got a partnership with the literal mba like they couldn't do this without them and then what these products were because i remember the first time this came out garrul was telling me there was like an article that said i just bought some guy was like i just bought a youtube video for for 35 000 here's why and so a lot of people just like

you were looking at the crypto kitty and saying what the fuck it's a jpeg a lot of people with nba top shot who now may even think that they were right because that project had a lot of problems outside of this a lot of people looked at it and they're like why would I buy a YouTube video yeah and they assume that's why it failed so I just want you to run through it and then like also if you want to give some context into why it didn't work on the flow blockchain and what Dapper Labs did wrong sure would love to hear that yeah I think that um just to start off right so nba top shot was a um and is a nft platform where you can buy sell own digital moments these nft the digital moments as nfts right so a moment would be like a video of a steph curry hitting a three-point shot game winner on a very specific date and they

would only mint 30,000 of them meaning they would there would only ever be 30,000 of this specific moment in history and the idea there is that you have a limited supply. Everyone knows how many exist. Everyone knows who has what. And, and yeah, these NFTs are like, they look then appear as videos, nine by 16 videos. And, and yeah, you can, you can like truly own them. And what that means is you have an account. You can buy off of their marketplace that NBA Top Shot has on their website. And yeah, these moments inherently have value. And you had a profile too and everything. Yeah. And what places value is buyers, people that want to buy, people that want to sell, trade, what have you.

And so, yes, people do want to own these NFTs. And when I got in, NBA Top Shot was still like an experimental thing, right? So Dapper Labs, there was a lot of, we're going to drop a pack in like five minutes. And what a pack was, was you would buy it directly from Dapper Labs, they would have like 5000 packs, and each pack would have three NFTs, digital moments that you can own. And that was an exciting thing at the time because the demand was super high. The supply was extremely low. And if you were lucky to get one of these packs, like let's just say you paid like, I don't know, $5 for it, you might be able to sell those three NFTss for like i don't know a total of a hundred bucks

and it's kind of like a gold rush to me oh absolutely at the beginning it felt that way absolutely because there was so much demand and not enough supply that's why it felt like wow everything is like skyrocketing was there a part of you looking at that though asking yourself hey is this just a money grab because people are bored sitting at home and want to fucking show off their pictures online on a certain platform and therefore since there's this exciting new demand for it people are just kind of coming in and they're adding one on top of another and driving the price and it's going to go away which again for top shot it technically did but it did not for this space so that's not what happened was there that hesitation though thinking like well is this just the jpeg or

the video like i was looking at in 2018 versus now it's like well wait i see what you really get with this and where a another human being even now but especially 10 years from now 15 years from now as as these generations get older and we become more digitized, are going to look at this and see way more than just like, oh yeah, you right-clicked a JPEG or video. I don't think I gave it too much thought as to who was buying, who were the people in the ecosystem, why it was mooning so hard, because NBA Top Shot, it just continued for the first two, three months, continued to moon. And every moment you owned and bought just kept doubling up in price, tripling up in price, quadrupling. And it was

like, holy fuck, wow, this is great. And you're looking at your account valuation, like, oh my God, it's like 50 times what I had put in initially. And so I sort of was not really familiar with how a market worked, right? I had personally never invested in stocks by myself. I always gave it to, you know, a mutual fund manager. I had never really dabbled in crypto and traded at this capacity. So this was my first actual experience with learning to trade, learning to buy low, sell high sort of thing. You were always born for that. You just didn't know it. Well, you would think so, but then we got a little announcement. We are officially welcoming our second sponsor to Trendifyr. And these are my friends over at Privato VPN.

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Everything's just fucking tanking because Dapper Labs has created too much supply and there's not enough demand to meet it. And so what do you have? What you have is a market that comes crashing down. And for all of us, for me personally, I had invested so much in Dapper Labs emotionally, and I saw my account evaluation like 10x. And to see it go from 10x and after a month or two months of really just fighting for it just you know sort of like being with the community and and um staying positive uh they continued to increase that supply and thus prices drove way way down to the point where it just sort of turned everybody off

sounds like the federal government it might it might a little bit go ahead um but uh i had to say that i don't even want to call it the federal government because i don't want them looking into my shit but um maybe i'll like nba tax nba top shot will be like my tax write-off so to speak because by the time i had really like given up on nba top shot i saw my account valuation go from positive ev all the way down to negative EV, right? Negative estimated value. I had lost money because I just kept holding, thinking that it was going to recover. Thinking that, hey, this company will do what it needs to do in order for that floor price to recover. And it never did. And so that was actually my first really big lesson in terms of like trading NFTs.

And I took that sort of – like I want to thank TopShot. I took that lesson of getting rugged over time eventually and I brought that – that helped me build character into the world of OpenSea, the platform where we do all of our NFT trading on the Ethereum blockchain. And that really spearheaded me, that experience spearheaded me into the world of NFTs really. And when was that? Like April? Yeah, I want to say in March. Yeah, back in March, that's where it really all started for me. And where do they even stand today? Like are they – is Top Shot – it's still in existence, but where do they stand like with their partnership with the NBA and what's even their outlook? Because they basically just supplied everyone out of the market.

They still – so Dapper Labs actually has an exciting partnership with the NFL. So NFL All Day I believe is the name of their next platform of NFTs. And so they're going to, I believe, do the same thing that they dished out with NBA Top Shot, these video digital moments as NFTs but on – with the NFLfl so they're giving up the nba they aren't giving up the nba they're actually still doing nba top shot and they're still releasing cracks i don't know not me not not anyone that um that i know i know there are a couple of people actually that are actual true nba fans that want to buy this stuff but for me if i'm going to buy NFTs, I'll probably just go into the secondary market and buy Steph Curry's or something. He's my favorite player. But yeah, I mean, it's going to be, I think for anyone like listening to this

and thinking, wow, I want to get into NFTs and NFL. I love football. I love moments. Like if you want to be a part of that and collect, that's awesome. That's great. Get in there. Be the first one. Be early. You can get all those awesome first moments because I personally believe that these NFTs will be here for

years and years and years to come. That's the whole point. It hasn't even been a year since I've been rugged by Dapper Labs. But even with NFL Top Shot, or whatever they're going to call it through Dapper Labs because Dapper Labs has absolutely no trust within the community. How are they going to drive a ton of demand there again? People are going to think they're going to get fooled. I think that there will be a lot of new people that come into NFTs through this product. That's what Dapper Labs is so good at is bringing people into nfts

and um and through this nfl product they they will definitely pull in brand new people into the space and i would my advice for those people would be do not be so them don't marry them yeah exactly don't be so attached and married to the to the price of your nfts unless you're here to trade right unless you're here to trade nfts buy low and sell high then yeah you should be concerned because dapper labs doesn't have um they they want to invite people and more and more people to collect they're not really interested in retaining collector value because if they were they wouldn't have diluted the market as badly as they did. They wanted to sell as many packs as possible to get that money

upfront from all of us because the secondary market, they make a cut, but it's not as lucrative as selling packs direct to consumer. And so I believe the same thing will happen with the NFL. And I just want to give everyone that warning. if you bought a pack or two and you know you see them evaluated you could sell them for like 5x 10x the cost do it have an exit point you know have an exit because if something is worth 5x 10x what you bought it most often than not it will not stay that way all right i don't want to stay on that too long because because i want to get to where you headed from there but that is a whole separate topic just because thinking it through how you're putting it because this space is still actually so untapped despite the fact that nft was like voted word of the year and shit like that like it is still so early in the sense that so few

people on a percentage basis are in there yeah i could totally see dapper labs just you know letting a little time pass coming out with the nfl product to be like oh my god get in on this and then they're gonna get the people who have never been there don't understand what's going on and then you know maybe it's the same story probably will be all over again because it seems like they just make a lot of money putting this stuff out because the thing that you're not saying that if you really think about it at home, that kind of makes this part of it shady. It's like every time they did this, even though when they put out a ton of products, they were diluting you and driving down all the prices. But every product they released from the start to finish from high to low they made money straight away it's an ipo every time it's like selling a new stock and so they just fucked everyone into

submission and then moved on and so that's why you got out so you you move on from that after your ev goes negative in like march as you said and then how did you make the transition into the metaverse it all happened very quickly and um you know before like maybe it would make sense to give you a sense of where i'm standing today yeah yeah however you want to do it do it so today i am uh i lead as the head of marketing and strategic partnerships for a beautiful wonderful community called metaverse hq we are uh an nft gated community we only made 1500 nfts you need our nft to have access to our community through uh an app called discord which is essentially like slack but fun and like community driven

and less corporatey and less like annoying. It's for people that haven't been on there. It's like a giant chat room, so to speak around communities. And it has other features too. Sure. And you have different, and then much like Slack, you have different workspaces, you have different channels and servers. And so, you know, your favorite games like League of Legends might have their own Discord channel. And NBA Top Shot has their own Discord channel. And so Metaverse HQ lives currently right now on Discord. And to gain access to our community, again, you need our NFT.

And yeah, so I... And there's only 1,500? There's only 1,500. We have 1, 1300 unique users, uh, holders and, um, and all of us basically are incredibly engaged in the world of NFTs in the world of, uh, DeFi and crypto in a sense. And we all have, uh, this, uh, immaculate, uh, I guess you could say like shared mission of trading NFTs, of knowing what exciting new projects are coming up day to day. And that's a really exciting sort of like

real time analysis and evaluation we all get to have as a community. And we've all become very close because of that. that's actually um what brought me into nfts closer and closer and closer it like to the sun was the fact that i had all these people to lean on to um to basically make mistakes with to find really great fortunes with these are the people that i've been in the trenches with how did you come across them we all live in the metaverse so when we were doing nba top shot there was this really awesome um community member of the nba top shot community that was creating on discord well he was creating content on twitter his name was jake and bake okay and um and i actually didn't know this. I learned this recently, but Jake and bake, um, he took it upon himself, my boy, Jake, to start to build and collect people within the space that were really passionate about NFTs and the next phase outside of top shot.

And, uh, you know, I just saw a Twitter post he had that said, Hey, if you're interested in joining this community, fill out this Google Doc. Right? And so I filled it out. And he was like, you're accepted. You're in. And so I gained access to the Discord server called Metaverse HQ. Shout out to MVHQ.

And shout out to you, Jake. And at the time, MVHQ was built by like a 20-year-old, 21-year-old named Cole. And Cole. Not our Cole. Not our coal not our coal right 23. yeah yeah so this cole incredibly young made his fortune on nba top shot and also foresaw what the future of nfts looked like and wanted to put together this community jake helped him build it um you know there were a bunch of other founders. And this community wasn't gated by an NFT at the time. It was just a small handful of people that were selected to be in it. And slowly but surely, as the months went by, March, April, May, June, this community got a little bit more vocal. It got a little bit stronger. I learned a lot from certain individuals.

What kinds of things were they talking about in the early days? Was it all investment-based or were they just talking about action in the space in general? We were talking more investment stuff. We were looking at play and earn gaming, right? So the things that really, at least in my opinion, interested us at the time were more of these stable NFT holds because we all come from a video gaming background and the beautiful thing about NFTs that I think not a lot of people are talking about. I think the future of NFTs going mainstream is going to be through video gaming, through play and earn gaming, through the idea that you can earn cryptocurrency while playing your favorite game. And you don't even have to be the best.

You don't have to necessarily be trying extremely hard. You will simply passively earn crypto. You'll passively earn skins, rewards that you can sell to other players. That, I believe, is going to be the future of nfts into the mainstream and i'm so bullish on that because look at fortnite look at warzone look at league of legends for instance right one of my favorite games in the world that i've sunk hours and hours and hours into i can't even like describe how many hours i put into this game i had a fucking addiction julian league of legends i've earned so much skins and in-game points and currencies and fucking coins whatever and i never saw that amount to a dollar sign i never saw that amount to food

on the table i can never sell these skins to other players or exchange them for real crypto for real value right they were all in game and the future of gaming i believe will be games that allow you to really truly own those assets where there will be a marketplace where you can sell the fucking teemo skins i'm i'm quoting league of legends you can sell skins you could sell equipment you could sell shit in game that you don't necessarily want or or like find value in you can find someone else that would put place a value on that and earn real cryptocurrency and cryptocurrency and the blockchain powers that whole economics and so that's what i'm really bullish on and at the time at metaverse hq we were all bullish on it we liked virtual land projects like the sandbox somnium space which are virtual land yes so virtual land right virtual land is this idea that

if you can imagine like a game like runescape or um like any game online that you just get together with your friends and you just start playing within that world um the idea with the virtual land is oh um you can actually own that land in the game. And, you know, that could be your land, you can decorate it how you want to, you know, you could show it off, you can like host other people's like artwork, digital artwork on there. But the idea is that you truly own it, that's your land, and the NFT is that land, right? so you own the nft and so those sorts of nfts were intriguing to me i like the concept of that and um and play to earn game as

well right like i like the idea of gaming and earning money while you do it so the entire conversation was based around that early on but eventually it seems like it shifted more towards looking at absolutely everything and therefore also looking at it from the perspective of where are good investments in the space and turning it towards – how do i want to say this oh my god nfts are far more than just looking at the in-game value it's like holy shit we're going to be building an entire new universe through this so let's get involved absolutely everywhere where there could be a project that looks like it has potential to help do that yeah i i think that for the beginning, at least, there weren't too many, like the supply of NFTs was still relatively low. And people were still sort of wandering their way into the space, right? It takes a lot to buy Ethereum.

We all deal and live and die by how much Ethereumereum we have and it takes a while to be able to to buy ethereum and to to be knowledgeable about how to make nft purchases and um we were all sort of figuring it out while being more project focused we would be like oh i like this project i've done so much research on it i'm going to invest in it i'm going to buy some of their nfts and a lot of that was gaming so there was really this revolution in terms of supply and demand when like you know the board apes minted and the board ap yacht club is an nft collection of 10 000 nfts that has an insanely ethereal floor price i don't think you can get anyone any board ape cheaper than like 100k right it just doesn't exist they're so expensive now at the time they were 0.08 to mint and that was back in june and that was back no that was like

it might have been might have been may it might have been april i'm not sure i think it was may but can you explain to people like how that works like collections and stuff so you'll hear about these various quote-unquote nft collections that have derivatives of some sort of piece of art that vary in what is rare about them according to the traits within it now i'm starting to get deep and people are like what the fuck are you saying yep but they sell them all at once and what's called a mint which is like an ipo of a stock it's at a set price and then the owners then have a secondary market to trade it based upon certain factors and that's what i really want you to get into and board apes is actually a phenomenal example to use because everyone's been seeing the apes

everywhere online even people have no idea what it is and what they've been able to do to drive that price you just spoke of is build everything around the artwork that's actually very cool but way more around that to've probably heard of AbortApe by now. Both of these are collections of NFTs that have 10,000 in supply total. And we call them generative art collections because these projects are the NFTs, the images of the NFTs are generated uh based on predetermined artwork right so um what crypto punks did that was so revolutionary was they made all 10 000 of their nfts that were generated uh free to claim right if you had a hot wallet like a metamask account a sort of like a wallet that you held

your crypto you can also go on the website and hit claim pay a gas fee and then you would own it for free there it was zero cost when was that when did they come out they were early i don't even know yeah they were early years ago i think right and now they each sell and it's very that's the thing it's like if you look at it because i'm always going to play devil's advocate with this stuff because i have the bias of having had a front row seat to a lot of people in different parts of it you definitely being one of them who have built over the last year with this i remember the first the first time that i really got exposed to this was when Cole was in here.

He was in here at like Christmas, and he talked about it on the podcast. I was like, NFTs. And then he stayed for a while after, and we were talking about it and going back and forth. And he's like, no, you got to look at this. So I see where a lot of this shit is. What I constantly tell people is that it is like anything else when there is a new revolutionary space there is absolutely a lot of bullshit out there but you are not going to be able to tell in most cases what's bullshit and what's not because in the same way that like the tech bubble

happened in 2000 2001 and all these companies that were worth fucking nothing they were selling out of some back room in new york like basically a domain nothing like no business behind it for every one of those you know there might be 10 100 of those but then you had amazon in there you had apple you had microsoft you had companies that were legit some of those obviously were around before but i'm saying like amazon was around in 94 like they were part of that whole boom so even when shit goes bad like that's just the overall market resetting and at some point here we'll we'll see things like that but for the people out there who hear something like crypto punks that's why i bring it up this is a great example if you look at that artwork if you guys aren't familiar with it i will

put a copy of it in the corner right here so that you can look but at first glance if you didn't know what an nft was or how it worked you'd look at this and go what the this is it's basically pixels it's like i don't know 100 200 pixels whatever it is on an image of like a bot looking human void right and it's put out as you explain and we'll get to that like the whole derivatives where they have what is it like in that collection are they ten thousand thousand or ten thousand so there's ten thousand of them they have different pixel traits that were created by an artist but it's like not that complex of art in this particular project and then it's randomized to be digitally once they finish creating it and put everything where they want they randomize it and then sell each one

depending on you know what's rare and what's not. That's what sets the prices. But people will see something like that if they're first looking and go, that's the worst thing I've ever seen. Why would anyone buy this? CryptoPunks, as I'm talking about it, might not be the greatest example ever actually because they were one of the first. So it's kind of like owning wine that was – the grapes were from 1940, right?

Sure. There's a part of it that's like a sentimental thing there. But look at other projects that are like CryptoPunks with quote-unquote first glance like, oh, is that shitty art that a lot of people might say. Why is it that a lot of them are actually going to end up being worth something or are worth something right now or both like i understand it but explain to the lay person this whole concept of community and what it actually does and what kind of benefits they get and even you brought it up so i'll steal it and then keep using it because it's phenomenal but the board apes thing who has done a phenomenal job with this yeah i i think that um i think with where we are with the nft space and you know it it's really interesting because

seldom do i have to explain nfts to people that are not in it um i maybe i don't do like a great job at bringing new people in and trying to describe what exactly is happening here. It's just become very apparent to me that the amount of people, it's like anything. It's like Supreme, right? Great example. Supreme, they keep their supplies super limited. Demand continues to increase, especially when people start wearing Supreme. You start seeing the coolest influencers and fashion designers and all of that uh the culture really drives

the demand and hype for that product forward and thus the secondary market for supreme is extremely high and so what you're seeing now is um n like the Bored Ape Yacht Club, great example. There's an NFT collection called the Cool Cats. These communities have been doing a really fantastic job of building hype, of building attention and awareness around their collections, around the events that they're hosting for their members, maybe around the utility that they are providing those NFTs, the people that they're hosting for their members maybe around the utility that they are providing those nfts uh the people that hold them but for whatever reason you know those floor prices continue to to stabilize and actually increase tell people floor price just so they know what

you mean so i'm an nft fucking degenerate right so i'm a 24 7 n trader, and what that means is I am stacking Ethereum. I am in NFTs to build my stack of Ethereum. So one Ethereum equals one ETH. The idea, the concept behind that is that I don't necessarily think in fiat anymore. I just think in, okay, if I'm going to purchase an NFT, will it increase in value in X amount of time? And here is my exit. That's when I'll exit and sell that NFT. And the indicators that I look at are, is the community awesome, right?

Has the community been super positive and growing? On Discord and Twitter and things like that. Exactly. What you can see publicly. Exactly. And is there really good volume in the market are there a lot of trades and so floor price is essentially the the cheapest nft that you can buy of that collection and so we all think in terms of floor prices but the cool thing thing about NFTs is that it's unlike stocks. Every NFT is perceivably different based on the rarity of the traits. Whereas like you might open a booster pack

as a kid and you get like an ultra rare holographic card. It's the same thing with NFTs. With any collection, you know, you could mint a holographic. You could mint an extremely rare NFT that might be considerably higher than the current floor price of all of the commons of that collection. And it works the same way back then as trading cards and collecting them as it does in NFTs. And that's what's really interesting is that as a trader, I am playing a different game as than a collector right because a collector is buying to to hold to save they're buying because oh they want that super rare trait they want that holographic right me on the other hand i want to sell it to them that's sort of the position that i'm in and so within this whole ecosystem months and months have like gone by everyone has sort of shaken into place as to where they are and um it's just been such an

interesting ride to learn all of it to learn every single facet of it when you're going in though and looking at like is the community bumping and active and stuff? It's more than, like, I'm always going to think in terms of the people who are skeptics and haven't gotten into this yet and think it's bullshit. So I'm going to play a lot of devil's advocate today to fill in some blanks and let you attack. But it's not just like you can go look and say, like, wow, this is a cool conversation. That must be long-term value. If there's a lot of people who are just like in something and for whatever reason it's got some heat that week because the right people came in there and they're bullshitting back and forth online and then a bunch of people followed them in there and now it's like, oh, yeah, by the way, there's art that's made here and we're going to sell it. That's one thing. But there are also a lot of communities around projects that are built on commonly held themes

that tie the people together right so like you and i have a lot of familiarity with one in particular that's done well early on that the smiles verse yep shout out to a hidden geo and shout out to the boys and what's cool by the way i appreciate you going through and describing yourself there with this whole thing because i'm gonna have several people from throughout web 3 on here over the next month or two like we have a few scheduled geo's gonna come through geo just i mean along with waheed who's the man with the plan and and and the artist behind that the two of them just went and built this project over the past seven eight months and done a great job and pulled off a really really good drop when they did it. So I like getting it from different angles because they sit in an entirely different seat than you do. You are in here, you're a true investor,

but what's interesting is where traditional like stock investors and stuff, it's always, it's like this kind of like total dog eateat-dog world. Like it's someone quiet behind their own computer doing their shit. Maybe they talk to a couple of their partners and that's just what it is, right? Even at hedge funds, like that's what it is. With NFTs, even the investors are built around community-based things. You're talking with hundreds of people at all times and sharing ideas and i know people will say like oh well that happens online with stocks too but it is different with nfts because you're built in the same ecosystem that the projects are too you're built on discord you're even built on twitter you're in spaces things

like that and and there's constant back and forth it's like this whole kind of insider thing but when you're going in and looking at the community just go back to the original point you know how do you determine that there's going to be value here and i guess part of that for you sometimes isn't relevant when you are looking at i'm looking for projects simply that have demand right now because i'm not looking to invest in this this is something i want to get rid of but you also then have a lot of projects where you look at and say, oh, is this something I want to hold long term? Is this a community I want to be a part of? And we're going to make a lot of money, but it's because of the positivity there. How do you judge that that type of community is happening? Honestly, you can never really know for sure that what you are buying or minting is for real is legitimate because you know this isn't like apple

coming out with their ico this is you know three random people that are anonymous that announced that they will release a 10 000 nft collection and they have a really nice website that they might have put up from squarespace and use the template and you know they they spun a smart contract together and they look everything looks like it should look but it's a total fucking rug it's a total you just gave money to people that have no intention of building a community of delivering on what they intended to set the expectation to provide and yeah and so there's so much of that right so every single day right now let's just talk about right now every single day there are at least five to ten

nft projects that are releasing that are dropping that are minting which means you can buy them direct from the the you know developers that are creating this project not to mention every other project that has already come out which i can name thousands of them right like there's there's too many and so i think what we do best at metaverse hq and really what you should try to do as an investor um as someone that wants to go and mint is yeah yeah, you want to look and see, hey, is the Discord and Twitter like awesome, right? Is the engagement good? Have they been building it for months and months and months? Do they have really incredible art?

Right now, you know, there are certain sort of mechanics built into NFTs that make that NFT collection more interesting, more engaging. And yeah, I think that when you look at a lot of, when we look at NFT projects on a day-to-day basis, I'm looking for momentum. I'm looking for volume. I'm looking for, has this NFT, have they had a nice little window of pre-sales and those pre-sales are doing incredibly well which is essentially like a company saying like rewarding you for being an early believer and saying you can buy maybe at a cheaper rate but you can buy first before it really goes public before it goes ip or whatever and um i'm looking for those kinds of numbers is it is it transacting well and so based on xyz i will

decide okay this is a project it's going to drop at 9 p.m tonight it's going to cost 0.3 to mint there's going to be 8 000 of them left out of 10 000 shout out amigos shout out uh take off and um unless it's a right fuck you but um you know is this something that is worth um sinking some ethereum into and it's nice to have a community that i can lean on for those sort of things um and then most often than not if you have conviction and you have context into what is doing well what kind of projects are doing well, you can sort of foresee what projects will do well, right? But you never really know for sure, bro.

So I'm going to give you some examples. There's this one project called Mutant Cats. And I know- The other thing is the names. The names are great, right? So Mutant Cats- That's one way to put it. I had just gotten to chino hills

i was with my cousin who has incredible incredible luck and me and him i just got him into nfts at the time maddie ming yeah that's right maddie monkey now shout to you brother uh we just got him into nfts at the time and he's incredibly lucky so i was excited to meet up with him because i was like i feel like something is going to happen something magical every time i'm with matt something magical happens i'm a big believer in like um like the the feng shui the vibe wherever the vibe is that's where i need to be and so i had already ripped with matt like a week ago we had we admitted this one project that did like you know 2x 3x we made profit so i was like i can't wait to get back

and so i'm with him for fucking 30 minutes it's like a monday i think and lo and behold um we're watching i think i was with my internet friends we were all on discord um like just having a nice little chat and someone just this is very much how it goes by the way someone goes oh these are minting they're called mutant cats and someone posts the link to the website someone posts bye bye bye bye bye bye exactly someone posts like the the link to the ether scan which is basically the blockchain right so you could see all the transactions that are happening you could see who's buying what for how much all that shit it's all in the blockchain so we all have visibility to it and we're looking at this thing it's just a fucking website right so the due diligence is if you find something it's

called stealth minting right we had no idea it was going to drop there was none of this it was never announced anywhere that a project called mutant cats would be releasing it's just selling out right now is it an anonymous owner anonymous developers yeah we try to find as much information as possible right so we go on twitter you see why that would scare people not that oh yeah no it should you should admit this right you should not give this website your money and so we went on the twitter that was connected on the website, like 200 followers, right? No Discord. They didn't have a Discord.

And like one of the things is you should have a Discord if you're going to release an NFT project. That's where the community lives. It's on Discord and Twitter. And so we were like, okay, all the signs make us super bearish. Like we shouldn't be buying this, minting this. But for some fucking reason, I was like, Matt matt this is everything we need because what they're promising are the following they're promising um passive earning with your nfts which is a new thing we can get into they're promising like a massive ecosystem so passive earning uh with nfts

is essentially earning cryptocurrency for owning the nft for staking the nft uh which means you you know you basically give it um you don't touch it and you lend it exactly like like you would stake or like have money in a bank you just you put your nft away and you receive cryptocurrency and um the crypto of mutant cats was called fish and the premise was you would earn 10 fish token a day for staking your nfts and me and matt saw what does someone get out of that when you stake it let's we're gonna pick everything apart sure sure so you and again like some of the i i think it's funny but like also if you're someone who's like not like i'm just picturing my old boss lar Larry, listening to this and being like, you've got to be fucking kidding me.

And, you know, Larry, you know what kind of face you'd be making. Like, yeah, yeah. Go buy your fucking fish. You know what I mean? There's there's a real like some of it is just so shitty, like almost like a troll how they do it. But like this project they're talking about, they'll give you fish to stake your NFT. So it was mutant cats right yeah so that this is and this is how it would work right so i minted 40 of them and the premise was when you stake a mutant cat you essentially you're on their website and you it will show you when you connect your metamask your your wallet of crypto and nfts

it will show you how many mutant cats you own it will show you how many are unstaked as opposed to staked and you would basically just click click click click click click click all of them hit the button stake and it would send those nfts into another destination so it's leaving your wallet but the system the game knows that you gave um those are your nft still right is there a way to fuck with that like hack it there hasn't been an exploit of that nature um that like nothing that can't can't be remedied right um and i say that because it hasn't happened yet at a big level but but maybe it could happen. So every day, you know, at the time when staking like released, because when Mutant Cats, first of all, it sold out.

I minted 40 of them. At what price? 0.05 each. 0.05 ETH. And this is back in what, June, May? 0.05 Ethereum back in September, almost October, actually actually so oh this wasn't that long ago no okay so eth at the time was what like beginning of october like 3500 yeah yeah it was under 4k and so 0.05 eth yeah 0.05 call it like 250 gas on top another 50 yeah i would say 300 a piece sure like 300 pop okay so minted them and then i sold off 21 of them and um before long like staking occurred and right so when they had minted out you could not

stake you couldn't earn the passive fish token yet so they have to within nfts i'm sorry i gotta i gotta ask all these people at home gotta we no, no. Keep dissecting. People at home, we got to follow this. I'm right there with you. I'm trying to follow this. Sure. The NFT project within the smart contract, which is another term you mentioned somewhere back there, which is essentially the thing that when it is written into the code, and I'm describing this extremely broadly to keep it simple. But when it's written into code as a smart contract, it is the law that the underlying project must follow yeah and they can it's immutable they can't fuck with it right yep so within the smart contract of any nft this one

mutant cats and particularly for the example they had to put in there that you can stake this if they didn't put that in there you can't stake this. And I only say that because there's cryptocurrency out there on different networks, depending on what you're looking at. It could be a shit coin. It could be something that has potential as far as like in the future. I don't know. But you can literally put it up and they'll say stake it to earn interest on the cryptocurrency. And it's a lot more than a bank will pay you to stake a dollar. So like is this the same concept and the NFT always has to define it as an option if it's even going to be available it is not always

an option so an nft collection um more often than not you can't stake it's not a feature built in right like everyone that builds a game builds it differently and this this nft collection just happened to say hey we're going to incorporate this mechanism called staking and you will earn 10 fish cryptocurrency a day. Fish is a crypto that we created and we will give it to you and it will have utility in the future. That's all that was promised to us. Who's on the other end of that transaction though when you stake a mutant cat who benefits? When you stake a mutant cat, what it does is it gets sent to the developer's wallet, right? It's called the staking wallet. And essentially, everyone that is staking,

everyone that chooses to participate in this will send their NFT to this wallet through hitting the button called stake at the website. And so that effectively removes all of those nfts that are staked from the supply the current supply in the market right so if i send my nft to the staking contract to the staking wallet to another destination i don't own it like i don't have it in my wallet i still own it but i don't have it in my wallet so i can't list it on openc which is where we sell all of our nfts okay all right let me pick the support so they were selling that as a benefit to you who for the sake of keeping it in more lay terms they were trying to convince people like you and maddie meng on chino hills to invest in their ipo and as a

promise of being an early investor i can can hear like the Jordan Belfort. I got a great company, Aerotime International. It is a low risk, high upside. I'll do that whole impression another time. I'm not in the mood right now. But you see something like that. And a part of what they are convincing you to get in on is that once you buy this and you're the first person, the first domino to fall because you're the important one that has to say we're getting this bitch started, right? Once you buy this, you can now stake it on there. And when you stake it, it's not like someone else borrows it for it on the market, which therefore takes away supply and simply drives up demand automatically so that therefore the price of mutant cats will to artificially inflate a price in a marketplace and the question

for something like that is assuming and this is not the case for this example because you have to get to the other benefits it has but assuming that was the only benefit a project had let's say project x the only benefit is that you can stake it and that leads someone like you to buy it how is that not a pyramid scheme i think in essence the success of a game like that of an nft collection like that will continue um and stay sort of above water and and continue to have demand come pouring in when it builds mechanics like staking, like earning, like using those tokens for something else, for some continued value within the ecosystem of NFTs, that is what keeps people incentivized and drives demand in. To a certain point, yes. I mean pyramid scheme might be the wrong word for it.

I think that we are all always at the whim of the developers right that's why my cups as devs do something uh these guys are building and gals i hope are building in real time and if they don't build quick enough if they don't build like the next phase to the game the next aspect we're all going to lose interest and then it will feel like a pyramid scheme because whoever got in last now everyone's starting to sell off because we're no longer interested in the game it's in and of itself if that makes any sense at all and so it does sorry it could look like i thought i lost the mic for a second my bad are we good yeah we're good yeah so in the case of mutant cats um it was incredibly profitable right so when staking

occurred the floor price went from like 0.65 all the way up to like 2.4 eath because all that supply was taken away and since mutant cats had all the attention all the eyeballs were on it the demand stayed the same thus that floor price just fucking skyrocketed so for this project what were the other values like the things that you were buying into besides staking the value props i should say sorry so the idea was there would be more right there would be another like nft collection uh they were going to build like a massive world where there was another nft collection and there would be utility you were earning fish token for a reason right like you'd be able to use this fish token to maybe mint another nft of that collection or maybe you can

use this the crypto to like burn someone else's mutant cat or like delete it from existence you know there was just a like a promise of more utility and that's what kept us engaged now here's where i'm gonna come in and defend in the space because there are people sitting there right now going yeah pyramid scheme they're just selling you another fucking cat behind behind closed doors after this or another fish token or whatever the bullshit is the difference here and again it's not guaranteed like that could end up being what it is the difference here in my opinion and this is where it gets to like the web3 conversation but i think we have more to go before we actually go full blown like you have in this situation a bunch of different projects not even just nft

projects a bunch of different companies a bunch of different projects, not even just NFT projects, a bunch of different companies, a bunch of different people around the world who are in San Francisco in 1835. And the gold rush ain't happening until 1849. And they are just like, holy shit, everything in front of them is their eyes are bigger than they can ever possibly eat. And they are trying to develop whatever they can to create some new world that people are going to go to. So when we see meta – I'm getting used to calling them that, and I'm almost sick. It's always going to be Facebook to me. But when we saw meta come out and change the name of their company and talk about building the metaverse and shift brands. I mean if you listen to this podcast, you've heard people in here who know better than most of us what was going on and they've been talking about this for over a year

on this podcast about how that was happening facebook's been planning this for a long time but what they are trying to do is become the space the the main verse that people go to so that all these other places that get built don't matter. Like if I build the greatest social media platform UI tomorrow and fucking two people use it, it has no value. No one cares. No one's there. So all these different NFT projects could be mutant cats. It doesn't matter how dumb the name even sounds. They are competing to, at the front end of something they can't even see yet,

create a new world that people interact with that may not be a hey you put on a vr mask and you live in this world where you're a fucking cat but like it's going to create some sort of like gamified area that you halfway live in and show off what you have within it within the digital world over the next 5 10 15 20 years and i want to get to like what sean pururi said, I always say his name wrong, but had some great thoughts on the metaverse. But do you understand like what I mean when I say I look at that part differently than pyramid scheme?

Like I see that they're actually in that case, promising to try to build something that is going to build where other people want to be and therefore create social demand, which therefore creates monetary demand for the time spent in there yeah 100 i think that all of this is built on uh a certain social currency right a demand for a fomo if you will um and and really these nft projects they really only can captivate an attention span for so long and people want more

and more and more and more otherwise they're going to move on to the next thing to mint and your project will be like last week's news right we like to say like a year or like a week in real life is a year in the nft space and that's because it just feels like when the next week rolls around we're talking about different shit the other way around you mean no a week in real life is a year in the nft space it really is that fucking oh i misunderstood you i'm sorry you're right yeah yeah um trust me i'm adderall and i'm on coffee i'm like just fucking zoned in right now i'm zoned in but that's that's what i mean though is that like a week can go by in real life and we're not talking about the projects we were talking about like last week. And so this is what's really interesting is that you really have to fight.

If you're going to create an NFT collection and a project, you have to fight to captivate people's attention. How do you do that? Right? How do you do that? You have to understand the current market. You have to sort of have a sense of where it's going. You have to build in that direction it does definitely help that you are first in some regards and that's why the crypto punks they don't have to do fucking jack shit larvalabs can just sit on a fucking

yes pile of money and the floor of the crypto punk is now like 69th whatever it will probably remain that way um but all these other new like projects like the mutant cats have to really fight for attention they have to continuously innovate break the fucking rules break their coding their program and like and really make some fucked up mistakes in the process but like have enough successes super like early on and in short bursts that you can captivate people's attention because otherwise they're going to keep and move on and it's community building yes i agree community building around like an artist or a project is really um can be beneficial for for some time to sustain that that collection i think though that a lot i think if you're going to come into

the nft space what you need to understand is that yeah community building sure like that's going to be that might inflate a floor price a little bit for an nft collection but if the developers if the people that are behind working behind the scenes if it doesn't seem like they're innovating enough fast enough yeah and you don't want to be the one holding the bag holding the nft that's devaluing and you know it and getting depreciating basically in value um sell that right sell it and move on because you will find a team you'll find an nft collection that will captivate for some time but the thing the fact of the matter is when i'm trading when i'm buying and i'm selling i usually have a point in which I intend to sell.

And I'm out. Even the best communities, even the best projects. Yeah, you're very disciplined. If something is 2x, 3x, 4x, I will try and take that right away unless I believe that there's something more going on. But even me, sometimes I'll even hold backs because I was wrong in my play. I was wrong to trust the developers and think that they would do any better. And a lot of times I'm right. A lot of times people are still like, oh, we believe in this project that's going to go to the moon and I'm selling. And it turns out I was right. I sold at

the high. So what I'm trying to say is this. There are so many different places in which people in the NFT space exist, right? You might be a first time buyer, you might be a seasoned veteran, you might be a collector. And I just want everyone to understand that the NFT space, the attention span of people are so like people don't have context right we were thinking about what's next eyes forward right that's a big saying eyes forward just keep on moving forward but we don't see we we don't have context into the history of of how these projects came about of why board ape yacht club is the floor price that it's at it worth like the cheapest board ape is worth that much and um we don't remember that gutter cat gang like another incredible nft project uh and is has really big profound branding in the space we don't remember that you know they actually dropped the ball during their mint date right they they minted 30 minutes before they were supposed to mint and i was sitting on the website like a asshole

trying to mint 30 minutes later and they were already sold out and now they're a blue chip considered a blue chip nft one of the more stable holds have you seen a project blow up like crazy lose all its luster have the prices no no i'm saying have you seen one of those then completely come back and some i have so there's a really recent project called noun dolls and what's it called noun dolls n-o-u-n-d-l-e-s go ahead and like you know uh like any other mint that happens on an evening, right? One of our friends, someone in the community spots it, says, hey, these are minting. They had a really incredible website right off the gate.

I liked it. Staking was already a factor that was built in right away. You can stake right away. You can earn a rainbow token right away right every nft project has their own little uh crypto that's designated with it and i liked all these things at the time and they were 0.04 0.05 to mint and right when they sold out they fucking tanked they were like sitting at like a 0.02 floor price i'm already taking a pretty big hit i'm into 30 and i'm thinking to myself i'll put one of them in the corner too yeah people can say yeah so i'm already taking a pretty big hit i'm into 30 and i'm thinking to myself i'll put

one of them in the corner too yeah people can say yeah so i'm thinking to myself fuck what i get myself into fuck it i'll earn whatever i'll like earn rainbow token i'll hold on to these all my friends were dumping below mint whatever lo and behold the noundles team they stay vigilant they're fucking making announcements every day on Discord. They're posting updates. They're showing like what the future of this, the Noundles game is going to be, how holders will be incentivized. And then within a week, week and a half,

this floor price hits like 0.9. Like I fucking shit you not, Noundles went fucking zoom and they went ethereal, right? So from selling out mint price to immediately tanking below mint cost and then flying to more almost 20x more than 20x like this was an insane insane come up and what i mean by that is my sort of lesson here um i got lucky but i got lucky that i held but i held because the team was super communicative and there was always something new and exciting and i saw in real time a community forum around all that responsiveness and then the fomo built in excitement built in the floor price started to

rise and soon it hit 0.9 and i sold on the way up and so i made a fucking killing a fortune but now the floor price is like 0.2 like 0.15 it's lower actually it's down to 0.098 ouch so it really came down wow so now doles holy fuck and that's what i'm saying you know and that sounds like a and i don't know much about it but based on how you described it because because again, and people need to understand this, Mitch is a very pure investor with this. Like that is what you do. That is the game and space you play in. Now, where you also need some credit is that you do look at – like there are some projects you're directly involved with and there's things that you really look at on the long term. And it's kind of like a separate space to what you do. But on a day-to-day basis, you're a guy in there getting that alpha, figuring out where the action is, which also lends you – you're constantly looking everywhere.

So you learn new things that are going on before other people know. But something like this, the way you just described that sounds to me exactly like doing something for the sake of doing something and then people just got excited about it and i wonder how long that's gonna last because like talking with some people i know giovanni and i were talking when he was finishing up and coming home from our basil down in miami where you were he said that there were a lot of conversations going on that he was very surprised at from other projects where they were talking all about how they're so sick of you know the communities like because they've been around longer than geo and what he'd have been around like communities they've been around like seven eight months since they went live they're sick of the communities all pushing them to just do something make a fucking announcement okay i made an announcement what did that do how's that value and they're

starting to be like wait we have plans to actually build within the metaverse that shit takes time and so what surprised geo was he's like it sounded like a lot of these projects are are and he could see it like in in action too when he went to their discords over the past few weeks are now starting to just ignore that even at the expense of their price a little bit and staying active with their community just like on a basis of like you know talking and hanging out and being a community but not saying like yo we're just going to do something to do it this is what we're actually trying to do long term and if you don't want to wait for it that is your right go ahead and sell and if it affects the price we're not building for the price today we're building for the price two years from now exactly like if you're building if you're truly building for the future you're not going

to be so concerned about what the floor price of your current project is. You want to continuously like keep the community obviously up to date with your progress. And as a collector, if you're a true collector and believer in the project, long term, you're not going to look at that floor price, right? Because you're not playing within the weeds, you are holding long term. and so i have projects that i do the same thing with as well um anything pock does pak he's an incredible nft artist and visionary and overall just insane uh like innovative uh nft like uh producer and um i guess it was back to my earlier point where i said like the attention can only be on a project for so long and then we move on we're gonna every the attention on the market moves on eventually right it will move on eventually and that's what i've learned is that it's so fucking hard to keep the attention on you once you have the spotlight and as a collector you have to understand or as an investor like i am i understand that i understand okay the attention for a project will only be there for so long i

need to have an exit strategy otherwise just like mba top shot i'm gonna see this thing go back to fucking nothing and now doles is a fucking great which is a sad commentary for a lot of it too exactly and now doles is a great example of I can't imagine like how many people bought at the top at the peak of the hype and then just watched it fall and just collapse. Right. And I got out before – well, I got out well before it hit the peak. Like I think my highest sale on Noundles was like a 0.65, 0.67, and it hit 0.9. But still, I got out before it now tanked the floor price and like it's just the attention of the market it just sort of moves it's sort of like a wave and it'll always

go to what's new what's next all right so everything is minus like a crypto punks and stuff like that let's let's be very honest everything is very nascent because we basically looked at 2021 as the year where most of this shit started but based on whatever length of history we now have let's look at what is a consistent amazing success so far and it's an example we already brought up but let's go in depth about it and that's the board api club it's like kind of the elephant in the room here so you you minted a board ape, right? I bought one at 0.4 on secondary.

Okay. And that was what, like June? Yep. That was in the start of June. Right. And then that was one that you definitely got out a little early, probably based on what ended up happening. I got out super early of the board apes. I actually sold my board ape at 1.6 eth because i thought to myself wow 4x right i was this principled investor i had goods i was like okay i'll gladly take this 4x and i'll go multiply it elsewhere and you know i'll get and you have by the way so let's let's give you a lot of credit there you put that money right to work sure so that's fine because here's the thing every investor

is a great investor in hindsight right you're sitting there bored apes at 1.6 in like july or whatever you think anyone was i don't want to say anyone but you think a lot of people were sitting there going oh these are going to be trading for 100 eth you know in in in four months probably not you know that you can't good luck being lucky on that all the time you know what i mean we have a saying jules in the nft space it's called eyes forward and essentially what it means is it's like in sales where you can you can get said no to a million times and it literally won't phase you you will continue to. And that will not affect and impede your conviction in yourself. And eyes forward means exactly that, right?

So if you sold something too early, eyes forward. If you missed something you didn't mint and the market's going bananas and you would have made like a 30, 40 ETH, eyes forward. And that's the way that this works. You can't really be hung up because if you're hung up, you're going to to miss opportunities and i'll give you a great example that we were talking about earlier there's a week recently that uh this fucking influencer tmos he released um a project i hope that guy goes to prison i'm actively advocating for his imprisonment yeah he's no he's we'll get to that he's a he's a criminal yeah he it was really a shame what he did. It was a really terrible time for the NFT community because he used his influence and a network of influencers to talk about his project. Who was this scumbag though before that?

How did he become an influencer within the NFT community with his scumminess? He was just saying funny shit about projects like just being totally like negative about projects but in a funny way and um has anyone ever seen his face yeah he's actually like an nft nyc which was like this massive like conference that everyone in nfts like flew into he was there and he was like you know so he's real hanging out he's a real dude his name's tyler and um and he releases a collection and he has like these influencers that are well trusted in the space endorse it publicly on twitter and he paid them to do it i don't know well he paid one specific person archic to do it right

and archic is like this notorious we don't even know if like she's like a woman we don't know anything about she's probably like a russian like hacker yeah russian dev that did a fame lady squad but who knows right so our chick um convinces him to release his project that has no value at all and it's a total rug it's a total rug of a project like i should not have minted it and i went hard as i went super hard why did you go? I went hard because I had believed that there was more to this project than met the eye. I hadn't done enough research. That was my bad. And a lot, I took the word of a bunch of these different influencers that had said that, hey, this is like, it's going to be great, right? It's like the art looks great.

There was no art. Now, right now, John. It was a total rug, exactly um and shame on me right so like i'm gonna have days like that where maybe i'm not on top of my game so to speak and i'm not gonna have enough time to do research and i'm going to make a mistake emotionally make a mistake um this is the true testament of eyes forward like i lost three eath at least on that project alone and i'm like wow what a you know that three is a lot right three i just don't like losing anything in general i don't want you want to gain and stack theory i'm not fucking losing and i just lost all

of it i'm like all right fuck this guy and that was because i want to make sure people understand too right when it minted like right when you did this right after i believe it was i'm not entirely sure so correct me if i'm wrong i believe it was somebody saw on etherscan which is an open source network where you can see where transactions are happening that tmos the guy running this this token paid the art chick girl to her address whoever she or he or it is yeah like again it could literally be like a fake russian hacker so we're not sure on her so yeah office credibility we all meant and everyone caught it and then tweeted about it yeah everyone caught it and um and then he posts a medium article about what the project is 45 minutes

after the mint opens and it's terror it's terrible it's like trash it's almost laughable how fucked it is and i'm just like oh my god i just like lost their eath right and so this is what i mean by eyes forward is i feel like there's always a new use case for Ice Forward. But I could have just like been sad and depressed and be like, fuck, I'm like, I'm not going to mint anymore. I'm not going to spend any more money because all the money I'm going to spend, I'm going to lose it. Like that was a really like fucking negative time. And the next day, this project called Wolf Game shows up on my tool set set on my momentum trading tools and um i hear the community talking about it and wolf game minted while i was on a fucking flight to chino hills to la and to see a troublemaker there and um essentially i'm on the plane united wi-fi i

don't have enough information right because the wi-fi is so fucking slow and it was just an out of nowhere mint out of nowhere stealth mint and i don't have time to go through my usual channels of like checking the twitter checking the discord talking with my community members getting real-time information on what the fuck this thing even is and i happened to and i was scared i was like fuck i don't get rugged again and i ended up minting 15 of these things and um the premise is you can it's a whole gamified thing there's 10 000 nfts 0.069 to mint you can either mint a sheep or a wolf the wolf you have a 10 chance of minting and i go the fuck in for i go in for 35 minutes and i got fudded hard as fuck because english basically i drop into one community i

chose the wrong one to go into unfortunately i love you jolly but um everyone in this discord i only had a chance to pop in and see one Discord of information with my friends. And they were all like, we're not minting this. It's horrible. Right. Okay. Yeah. So you were trying to do like reconnaissance work on it.

While also minting because these things were flying, right? At the time, like they're already almost sold out. And so I'm like, I want to fucking get in here. And you just got fucked by Tmos the day before. And I just got rugged. So I'm like, eyes forward, got to keep moving. And so. Because to be clear, I just want to make get in here and you just got fucked by tmos the day before and i just got rugged so i'm like eyes forward gotta keep moving and so because to be clear i just want to make sure people understand when that tmos thing happened it wasn't that expensive but you minted a lot of them and it went to zero right away like it is worth zero yeah it's worth zero

eve and so um and yeah i just didn't want to get rugged again and i was being cautious overly cautious obviously everyone should be overly cautious all the time so I was just set back in my norm and um and based off of the FUD in this discord like the reactions of my friends and I actually cancel what is who don't know FUD is fear of insert fear uncertainty and doubt I believe like FUD is basically like just negative vibes towards a project right so they were all like don't mint Mitch we're not minting no one's minting i go okay great like fuck i have 35 like coming my way and i happen to be able to cancel two of my transactions so i canceled 20 mints but i had 15 already paid for it i was like fuck i just got rugged at least i didn't get rugged harder than i

could have lo and behold wolf game is literally the it's like kobe walking onto the nba court for the first time it's a game changer it is the total like why everything about what you would want in an nft project this collection had it had uh risk involved it had earning it had staking what do you mean risk it had risk inherently involved so the the way that the game worked was once all 10 000 nfts were minted you either had sheep or you had wolves or you had both you could stake sheep right and what we were talking about before you could stake wolves which means you're essentially sending those and holy fuck it's at a three floor i'm

sorry i just saw this it was at a 6.5 floor okay these were 0.069 to mint okay so what you need to and that's that's a previous we'll get into that but the whole premise of this collection was really quite elegant because if you're a sheep and you're staking you were making it very simple you're earning 10 000 wool that's their token wool a day right very simple you say sheep you gotta have fun in life people this is funny yeah this is hilarious right it's hilarious it's all internet jpegs and ethereum and whatnot if you stake the wolf then you would actually excise attacks tax of x amount for all the wool that the sheep were accumulating and here was the premise so the first 10 000 were minted

and then they said this for the next 40 000 wolf and sheep you can only mint using wool right so you can't pay ethereum anymore the first 10 000 went 0.069 so now you have a utility for wool you can mint more sheep and more wolves that you can then continue to stake and and you know effectively like decrease the supply in the ecosystem and again this is the line this is the fine line where projects like this in the future we're going to figure out what ones go what way and what ones go the other way but this is the line of where it can turn into just a bullshit pyramid scheme where they keep people involved versus actually creating like some sort of community within the metaverse itself like a like an actual game so it could go either way technically but yeah and like i think that when we say pyramid

scheme and like whatnot like this this was like an engageable thing like people were having fun with it you know like people people were just like talking having conversations about what is the best way to play the game do i like should i buy a wolf and stake it and what and here's where the risk came involved was when you tried to mint a brand new wolf or sheep of the 40,000 and you had to use wool a wolf can steal your fucking mint and that's what's so crazy about it is that now you're sort of having to make decisions of should i just sell this wool and you can go on any other crypto exchange like not the coinbase or binance or the big ones but you can go on like uni swap sushi swap which are just like places where you can exchange crypto for other crypto dude these staking a sheep and

getting 10 000 wool a day people are making like upwards of like five grand per day on just staking and earning wool is there any game though too already or is it literally just the game is the staking that is the game the game is the mechanics involved with nfts because before this you had nft projects where you'd buy it like like a smile so say for instance smiles you buy the nft you own the art you can't engage with it in the way that you can engage in wolf game right you buy the nft and wolf game you have a sheep or a wolf those two things have certain predetermined uh you know like mechanics within the game and you can choose to stake it and earn um whatever it is you're going to earn and so that's what made it interesting it was another

layer deeper and it it created this organic soup in which nft collectors were incentivized to engage and it thus brought all the attention into the market and before long what i had minted on the plane 15 of the sheep hit a floor price of 6.5 and the wolves were hitting a floor price of upwards of 17 to 20 and they were 0.069 to fucking mint and if I was just like a scared, like didn't trust in my conviction, I wouldn't have minted it. And I would have lost money. And that's where Eyes Forward makes so much sense. Eyes Forward means you don't get down on yourself. You continue to have conviction in your plays and you make them.

You don't let anyone else fud you out of it. You don't let anyone else fud you out of it you don't let anyone's talk you out of it and i can't fucking i'm upset that i got talked out of selling or canceling 20 minutes because that would have made me so much more richer but again eyes forward like what is the past is the past what is forward is opportunity and i'm going to put a picture of one of these things in the corner so people can see it and maybe i'll have it even before I just said that if you're watching this right now. But another prime example, if you're looking at it, if you just look at the art, it's randomizable pixels. Art is terrible. Yeah, it's fucking awful.

I mean, it's not the Mona Lisa. Yeah, it's the idea. And that's the standard that you think. It's no smiles. Yeah, it's the idea and that's the standard that you think. Yeah, that's the standard you think of if you're first coming into this, including one that I've held for a long time and still to an extent hold. Like when I see a project like this, they have a high burden of proof for me that I need to say. And again, like it's still like a 1% chance that it's actually going to be one of the ones that wins right but if you're so early to a space you have to be willing to invest around and look at all different things and pick out the ones that you feel like actually have a one percent chance versus some bullshit you know russian hacker just making money real fast but looking at a project

like this come together it's also a really good example in the sense that these things do happen out of nowhere a lot you use the mutant cats one yeah this one was another one you're literally on a plane and you have to make a decision uh-huh you know and and you do because what people should understand if you haven't taken this away already like full disclosure you are investing in all kinds you are one of those guys you are investing in all kinds of things you do have even if they're not rugs like team us you do have losses right because you're taking chances on stuff i'm the brownstone capital of nft investing brownstone capital so if you ever saw the big short brownstone capital yeah was there the run of the mill mom and pop like investment firm that would take really incredibly cheap risks they They were high risks, right?

But they were incredibly cheap and would have high upside. And so I think in my personal opinion, I only mint. I don't usually buy off of secondary market. I don't buy after the mint, right? I will only buy the mint. And you're steadfast about that. Yeah. And so if I like just exactly right you have to

be principled and so i i only mint and um and that's my strategy and a lot of the times like you know that won't go my way but if i'm minting sold out projects more often than not there's demand there and um and more often than not i'm seeing profit and you have to figure out some shit later if you're actually going to stay invested versus like all right maybe this was just something quick i made some money on as like a pure investor if you find out like it's kind of shit and just had random demand for a second for some reason bro we don't have the time to do the research that like our parents would or any traditional investor would in a company before pouring millions of dollars into it.

Depending on the project. Depending on the project, right? These stealth mints, these projects that come out of nowhere and all of a sudden they're minting and you have to decide whether to mint or not. You only have a fucking finite amount of time and you have to find the right people and the right communities to give you the most precise information about is this going to be profitable or not is this something i should do or something i shouldn't and with mutant cats all the signals said we shouldn't but my gut said that i should and so i minted 40 and i made a fucking killing 0.05 to mint and my cost average out of that project was over an eath like that's that's 20 that's over 20x you know what

i'm saying and every single day that i was staking those mutant cats 10 fish fish used to cost 12 bucks right so so they sell separately too what do you mean the fish yeah fish i was accumulating fish for staking so when i had 19 mutant cats but i thought it was only within that ecosystem you can go buy them outside of just owning a mutant cat yeah you could buy fish off of any secondary market and that's that's where the value is derived right so i was staking 19 mutant cats this is something this is why it's passive income i was taking 19 mutant cats i was earning 190 fish token a day do the math 190 times 12 a day, that's how much I was making every single day for the first like, like three, four or five days. But sooner or later, if there's no way to

burn fish or use fish, and remove it from supply, what happens the price just continues to tank because there's more and more fish every single day because more and more people have it. And so that's what passive income means within nfts it means earning a crypto for holding the nft you're rewarded and then you could sell that crypto back for real tangible money that i'm then using to go fly out and fucking do this and that the third so that was a really profitable project like i probably made fuck i'm so upset that the this is going to be public and the irs is going to hear this but i i was i mean dude do the math 190 fish a day 12 like for the first couple of days like i'm just making

that from doing nothing i'm just holding the nft right and then you bought it at 0.05 exactly or 0.069 and sold them at what same thing with like over an eath and cost average yeah well that's a nice day. I had 19. Yeah. And then the Noundles is another great example, right? So Noundles, which now has a 0.098 floor, but I minted for 0.04. Since I held all of them, I was earning the cryptocurrency that I thought was worthless.

At some point, I was earning four rainbow a day per NFT Noundle, right? Four rainbows a day. It accumulated. I forgot about it. And then the fucking project just kept mooning. And I exchanged all of my rainbows for 25 at the top $25 USD. And so I made like almost $10,000 from just that, from just the cryptocurrency that they gave me. And then I sold the NFT on top.

Do you see that? Yes. That's what the passive earning is. You want to identify projects, or at least me, that incorporate that mechanic, that have passive earning in it. That for me is really interesting. And that is what the market is in demand for right now. Well, we started this about to look into the whole Bored Apes thing. So I want to make sure we actually come back to that because we keep on going around in very good tangents. But this is the one that at least a lot of people recognize because of the profile pictures everywhere and seeing it all over.

It's like its own brand online and it – look, let's call it what it is. There are a lot of people sitting at home right now, listening to this, hearing about fucking fish that they can stake online and, you know, looking up at the ceiling and deciding whether or not it's high enough to hang themselves. They're like, what the fuck am I going to do with this?

You know what I mean? Like you have to think, and I know you know this, but for people who are like deep in the space and not thinking about the outside world, in order to push this thing to the next level, yes, technology is going to push where it goes and you're going to see brilliance rise up. If you want to be a part of it though, you have to be able to get it to people where even the skeptic can vaguely understand it and be like, okay, it's not the worst thing I ever heard. Once you're there, you win. So I like to use this platform to try to inform, you know, not just the audience, but myself and better understand things. I will never apologize for looking at where the action is going.

And even if that means that it's not the thing, right? Like we talked about Top Shot back in March with Garol. Like that wasn't the thing. And I said that at the time. But it was the thing before a thing. And I said that at the time, but it was the thing before anything. And it explained a lot and it showed where people were deriving value in things. And so it started to, I was already working around some NFT things a little bit behind the scenes there, but even the shit we were working on then, it was so different. You know what I mean? Like

everything changed and you could kind of see how that was going to happen, hindsight being 20-20, on the top shot thing. So the reason the Bored Ape's example is so critical is because I may have said this part in passing earlier, but they have become their own supreme within the space. you just looked at the wolf game art i'll put the board ape in the corner again i think i put it up earlier but it is way better art it's actually like real art it's pretty cool and these apes are like doing all different shit they have all different kinds of traits it's very fun to look at there's a lot of detail so the art's great the art also serves as the brand design so when you're in this club you own one of these 10 000 apes and I think right now they have like 5.1 or 5.2 thousand total holders. So that means some people own multiple. But when you own one of these suckers, you are in that club. You own a piece of that brand.

You can rock it for real. That's why these people have it as their profile picture and it's actually theirs. And it allows them to get access. And this is the point that needs to be brought up. So do you know this guy, Sean Puri? I may have said that, but we didn't go into it. The Twitch guy? I do not.

Okay. So he's like a big venture guy out in san francisco i definitely didn't read this thread earlier but i i actually if you don't mind want to read this because this guy will put out theories once in a while on twitter in a thread form and this one was shorter it was like 10 tweets where he opines on things heavily going on at the moment and gives an opinion on where it's going and he put this out on october 29th about the metaverse so shortly after facebook made this whole like the day after they made this whole announcement to change to meta and look i mean we have to see how it ages but i love what he said and i want to bring it up because it ties right into board apes here which he actually did

name drop them but it's not what it's about so i'm going to read it real fast hot take everyone is wrong about the metaverse here's my three-part theory part one everyone is wrong most people think the metaverse is a virtual place like in a movie like ready player one a virtual world like minecraft roblox or like zuck showed in a facebook demo yesterday but what if it's not a place part two it's not a place it's a time a time what the fuck yes a moment in time you know in artificial intelligence there's an idea of the singularity it's a moment in time when ai becomes smarter than humans the moment when artificial intelligence is greater than human intelligence which you and i had a nice conversation about that when you were here way

back in the day but anyway part three what it is And this is this is the big thing. This is the theory that really warped my brain because it seems pretty legit. He said the metaverse is the moment in time where our digital life is worth more to us than our physical life. This is not an overnight change or an invention by some Steve Jobs type. It's a gradual change that's been happening for 20 years every important part of life is going digital work from factories to laptops boardrooms to zooms friends from neighbors to followers where do you find like-minded people twitter reddit etc games more kids play fortnight than basketball and football combined identity filters are the new makeup stories are your personal billboard to broadcast who you are.

What matters more? What you look like in real life versus what you look like on Instagram. And then he has a picture. I'll put it in the corner of an Instagram influencer for a picture versus after she tried to take the Instagram thirst trap. Everything goes digital. Your friends, your job, your identity. And now with crypto, your assets are online too. Bored apes are the new Rolex fortnight skins are the new skinny jeans if everyone hangs out online all the time then your flexes need to be digital so if you put if you play this forward another 10 to 20 years we will cross into the metaverse the moment in time where digital matters more to us than physical our attention used to be 99 on our our physical environment. TV dropped that to 85, computers down to 70, phones 50. Our attention has been sucked from physical to digital, and where attention goes, energy flows. If 50% of our digital attention is in our digital screen, the 50% of our energy will go to our digital life.

Today, it takes some effort to take our phone out of the pocket and look at it. Soon, some company will make smart glasses that sit in front of our eyes all day. We will go from 50% attention on screens to 90% plus. That's the moment in time when the metaverse starts. Because at that moment, our virtual life will become more important than our real life. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Like anything, it's neither good nor bad. It's just a thing, a very, very different thing. And that goes to our boy Don Draper's quote where he says, change is neither good nor bad.

It simply is. And it's so, so true. But the reason I think Bored Apes is very relevant to this is because we saw the price action move like crazy from particularly beginning of July. August was nuts. September got nuttier. And then in the end of October,

it just really got big when like Lil Baby bought one. Post Malone bought one. I think Steph Curry bought one. Jimmy Fallon bought one. Jimmy Fallon bought one. So some big people also came in and guess what? They had to buy expensive. It was already way up there.

They didn't get any special treatment or anything, which goes to show you communities can build. And what happened towards the end of that, like that segment period was ApeFest. And it was like maybe 3 000 words from reporters who were just there when it was going on and they talked about the access this gave people and the world they were creating through this ape i mean these apes are the people have created social media accounts and created a story around their ape they've taken some of the cheaper apes meaning the more common feature type ones that shouldn't sell for that much and in some cases made them so popular through a fake character online that now people value it more than apes that have crazier traits they have to go to ape fest in new york city they created all these events similar similar to like an art basil type thing but you couldn't go or couldn't be a part of it if you didn't own an ape or if you weren't somehow around the project

and it's almost like this exclusive club that now they've taken it and because the art is good again this is why i really will always my burden of proof does start with art like a project has a lot to prove if the art sucks. There's got to be some crazy shit behind it for me to be like, yeah, this has a shot. But like their art's actually good and it's pretty cool and it integrates different themes. Like even like a little hip hop and general pop culture that it's its own fashion brand and they have limited merch around it. And merch you can't own unless you own a fucking ape. And you see all these

people come in and to the to the outside reporter they almost think this shit's crazy but what i say is that the bored apes have figured out how to build a metaverse community before the metaverse goes fully digital i.e the the temporary as in maybe over the next 30 year type metaverse that sean is describing in that in that thread right there. To me, Bored Apes, and he even, again, name dropped them, but they are the literal representation of that. that we have been evolving into the metaverse, into a world where our digital selves, the selves in which we create an image of, and it's not actually us, we definitely are putting more and more value into that.

And I think that NFTs have certainly been a gateway or at least the next phase of evolution in that direction where everyone is changing their profile pictures to be of their nft that they own because that is their identity online much like when we played like you know runescape and all those old games like multiplayer games back in the day we were not i was not mitch locks mana i was my character in the game and that's how you would see me a hundred percent of the time in the day we were not i was not mitch locks mona i was my character in the game and that's how you would see me 100 of the time in the game now we are the game the real life is the game we are all becoming it is all now perceivably one like the digital is real and um and yeah people early on

like told me that and i thought they were crazy and. And lo and behold, now we value our JPEGs more than we do our own faces and that's why we care to show those instead. We value what the JPEGs can get us in a lot of cases though. That's the thing. And that's what you're saying on the front part of that answer. And he put it beautifully. Like Bored Ape is the new Rolex, right? Like I'll take it a step farther and use the same example that I that I pointed out a couple times and that is like board apes is like a supreme you know because they integrate like some of that some of that like

streetwear culture vibe you know what I mean I think that what the board apes did really well was they paired in real life experiences with owning their nft thus bringing everyone together that owns an ape or is part of that ecosystem um and allowing them to share their passions for the nft space and that's what it's all about it's about in real life experiences like all this like metaverse like communicating with people online digitally and only digitally it can feel there's a missing component to that and that is like actually meeting in real life because that's what it's really all about right no matter how digital we are we're always going to like when we meet up in person it is going to feel like we have been friends forever because we have been conversing like friends online for so long and um and actually that's what happened right so in nft

nyc that was really the first like nft meetup that uh really a big gathering of nft enthusiasts that got to meet each other for the first time ever. Same with Art Basel to a very minute capacity. And it was amazing. It was exhilarating. And my friends in real life got to see a little bit of it. They said we were like jazzed up to meet each other. They said it was like old friends meeting for the first time in years. And that's how it felt to us because we talked to each other

online more than we talked to our own families sometimes and that's the power with board apes i think that that community not only were they like the first really generative art project that first 10k collection to release after crypto punks they were the next up um they really doubled down on their community they really made in real life experiences something worth going to they made them incredible and amazing and unforgettable and no one wants to sell their ape or their mutant um you know their any anything in the nft collections um that they that have. No one wants to sell because it's just everyone just know that they know what the energy is, they know where the attention is. They have that in real life experience that bonded them even closer.

And that ape, those apes, the ones that they own are their identity into this community. They're the key into this community or club if you were. And that's what really, really makes the Bored Ape so special. We're going to see how long that lasts though too. It's going to have a tested power because everyone's got,

you see some people sell, I mean that's how the sales happen now. Like some people finally have a price, right? Does it, what's weird though is you've seen a lot of people who literally have their net worth now tied up in something that depending on the ape could be worth millions of dollars and they're still not selling

that can change tomorrow you know and again some people do give in yeah but like does it get to a point where you're almost hostage to what it gets you that's interesting look at what's happening with the crypto punks right now their floor price during nft nyc a couple weeks back was like 93 eath now it's like 65 68 something like that and they have been like the known blue chip nft for a long time and a blue chip nft is the same thing as a blue chip stock, right? It traditionally does not move up and down too much. It's not as volatile as some of the more riskier investments in NFTs. And so we consider CryptoPunks to be a blue chip NFT,

but that can change overnight. And there was some disagreements in that community that set that that everyone just kept listing lower and lower and lower and offloading all of their crypto punks and um and yeah that could happen just like that and so you know i think it's i think what you're saying is yes it's important to build community and if you're a part of that community yes hold sure hold that nft and continue to like enjoy those experiences with each other and whatnot at the end of the day that that jpeg that you own is worth fucking a fortune it's worth it could be a down payment to multiple homes

and um i don't think you should lose sight of the fact that selling that could really change your life. And that's the thing. When does it or does it get to a point where too many people – because you know how groups work. When someone – when the average person is thinking something, that means there's a lot of other average people like just in general like statistically speaking who are thinking the same thing. And that's how you see a floor price movement of something like CryptoPunks. They go to the event in NYC or whatever, and then the price was so high, and they left it like, wow, that was cool. All right, time to cash in, right? And then they cash in, and they make a fuck ton of money, maybe depending on who And also, furthermore, when you have a product that's so expensive, you have a limited demand capacity already because you need the wealthiest people who are in the space too, not just some random wealthy guy who's never heard of it and doesn't invest in NFTs. It's not like the stock market where a stock can get really expensive and fucking everyone in culture has been there forever so the rich guys are all there it's it's much it's a much smaller number still which in this case can work to the disadvantage so it's not again we are taught no matter how we crack this we are talking about this so fucking early we don't have history to say this this then that that's a general pattern across this it's like we're learning yeah i i agree i think we're incredibly early

with regard to how this technology is being cultivated um it's very clear to see especially when you have these projects that are so simple in terms of what you can do with them and how you can engage that it's almost preliminary it's almost like back in the aol days right it's almost like broadband it's like what the like how is this so fun and engaging but yeah it's the simplest ever um that's kind of where we are we are now and again i think the future is play to earn gaming um i think the future is nfts um in a bunch of different use cases not just buying and selling jpegs however oh yeah right now the market is still i'm always bullish like i'm always bullish because

i believe in the long game of nfts I hold a fuck ton of NFTs as well. In projects I really believe in. For like the long term. Mostly I flip. And I try to make profit. And I will always take profit and have an exit. But sometimes you know you just have conviction. And we're early.

Again. I think of this as the long game. However that being said. If all of this were to go to zero tomorrow, I will have, you know, I will be prepared for that too. Because you can't play in this market, this incredibly volatile, risky market

with money that you don't have, with Ethereum that you just cannot spend, right? You can't overextend yourself. Much like any market, this one's incredibly, incredibly risky's it's almost it's practically unregulated and you have to know that coming in you can get burned like easily now do you think it's unregulated because it's not regulated like the sec regulates stocks they don't have anything like that this is on the blockchain it's this new thing but you and i both know for better or worse and frankly the precedent is usually horrible and bad but you know

the action might not be the government's going to make cases where shit looks like a crime they're going to figure out how to make something in the law to make it a crime and that's we we should go back to 2018 at some point here so maybe we'll do that in a minute with some of the stuff we saw there but i look at this and like that's what i'm saying like that teamhouse guy looks like a crime smells like a crime walks like a crime it's a fucking crime is a crime what he did was it was a crime it's a crime and right now because this isn't regulated by the sec maybe they couldn't say that yet but if the feds want to figure out a case there in a few months and let's assume that the feds don't know i was talking to jim diorio about this let's assume the feds don't fucking understand the first thing about going online here they will bring in the people who do he said that's what we

do and then we'll figure it out real fast and we'll if there's a case we're gonna make the case yeah and see i get that the my thing though is the more i talk about this team situation the more it pulls me away from what's actually happening now opportunity now i don't give a about the cmos guy anymore he's out of sight out of mind i don't give a if he's a criminal i'm talking about forget i just use him as an example i'm talking about in general but i'm saying yes i don't give a about tmos and here's why because if i give him any thought whatsoever like oh he's a criminal i should press charges i'm wasting time not making not being eyes forward and looking at opportunity in the forward right but i agree with

you there's gonna be a lot of like shit that catches up that happened here over the past year where people will get caught and tangled and ensnared by the government i couldn't agree more with that and that's what i'm saying there's still a lot of them out there yeah and the thing that gets scary is when it's all when and it's not all the projects but when there's a lot of projects where it's like you don't know who's behind it i feel and it depends on how much of that is really the tracks are hidden and you're not able to figure it out? But if the government wants to figure out who's behind something, a lot of them probably didn't do a good enough job to cover their tracks. And they're going to get them. They're going to get them.

Yeah. And you know what? I want to be careful how I say this because, again, I don't like the precedent of if something doesn't exist, they retroactively create laws to make it exist. I fucking hate that precedent. But if I remove that from the equation, just look at this on a level of do victim – do heavy victim crimes deserve to have punishment to make sure that there's an incentive for that – or a disincentive for it to happen in the future? Yes. Yeah, that's the kind of thing you would cheer on then because that's where the bullshit is going to be. Like there was bullshit in the internet bubble in 2000, 2001, and you could even argue that some things maybe should have been prosecuted that weren't. But then also a lot of people weren't prosecuted because they technically didn't do anything wrong. The difference here to me is that you have projects openly just fucking going through no regulatory bodies, going straight to the people and saying, buy this mint right now. And it's fucking nothing.

It's nothing. Yeah, that's the – welcome to the NFT space. You should always be cautious about what you're buying. Even if it looks like it's you know promising it most certainly cannot be right the market will will decide if it's something worth owning at that current point of time it's incredibly volatile and um yeah there's just not enough volume to sustain every project to moon so you have to sort of be in and out like a motherfucking nft ninja and if you're not you're going to be caught holding the bag and more often than not um i'm not holding the bag but

there are again there are bags that i'm holding and yeah there's no regulation um there are projects that most of them are anonymous you don't know who the fuck you're dealing with on the other end they're not sharing linkedins and saying here's my experience i wouldn't believe that either but yeah you know what i'm saying like it's just completely oh these three internet named dudes or gals who are the fuck they are decided hey we're going to release this project and they're communicating but without showing their faces without any information and you have to make real-time decisions on what to do with your nfts if you're going to play this nft trading game or if you're not you just want to park money choose a blue chip nft community collection like board apes uh gutter cat gang cool cats whatever if you can afford it you know

yeah if you can afford it to park money there and hopefully if the market does well those products will do well too but everyone should always be cautious i mean this amount of volatility in a market like this and especially the learning curve of trading and the amount of like overhead there is to playing in this market it's incredibly incredibly risky and i just don't want anyone to get burned i want nft first timers to have a very good experience uh when they are entering the market and i want them to have fun and what i recommend is if you're a new to nft space don't fucking buy an nft until you're like two three weeks in and you know what the fuck is going down and you've talked to people like you like you've talked to people who have been in there.

You've done some research. And like it could be different timelines for different people as well. I mean it's not – this is like anything else that requires expertise. If you are not willing to be in it a lot and paying attention to everything going on, be prepared to lose everything you put in there. Yep, 100%. You are up against people – traders like me, right? to everything going on be prepared to lose everything you put in there yep 100 you are up against people traders like me right you're up against traders like my community that are constantly armed with information real-time alpha on every project in the metaverse we have context

into everything that ever existed and we have the tools to outpower you. We have the capacity to outgun you. And we have the volume to outspend you. And that is a reality that I think everyone should sort of be aware of. And though we're not like all trading the same way, like we're not all like, oh, we're going to choose one project and like that's our project, right? A lot of times we're conflicted on our on our investments right and it can get heated but at the end of the day you know i want to paint the picture that if you're looking to trade nfts and and be a ninja like buy low sell high sort of thing you're you're basically playing against us and if you don't have those resources you know you should go and try to find them

there's there's so much i think about all the time with the conversations that i play in my head old heads in a future world where everything went to shit being like we fucking told you dumbass but what people have to remember with those conversations is that for every one of those you have go look over the course of history there's another conversation that happens where it is completely the other way around and in order you know scared money don't make no money in order to see where the world is going to go you have to and and benefit from it and be a part of building that next world you have to be willing to take chances and not for nothing you alluded to it earlier and started to go through the whole artifacts digital thing but you and then me via you by seeing what you were doing

and get involved with people you were involved with you had a front row seat to being involved where shit goes bad and where there's a lot of shit period in this whole ico thing and what was going on in 2018 and one of the big problems that i've always had with crypto and i'm full disclosure i've talked about this a bunch i'm a huge believer i'm a bitcoin guy i'm an eth guy that's kind of where i'm at everything else i'm very skeptical of i'm even skeptical of eth and i'll to an extent be skeptical of bitcoin though i very much love the statement that bitcoin is i just think it's a beautiful beautiful thing but that's all another topic one problem i've always had with this stuff is the lack of simplicity.

So when you look at technology and you look at Apple and why they were able to steal the market, something that a lot of people studied, and I study it closely as well. difficult technology that the engineers the smartest people made behind closed doors and inherently understood in ways that you me and other people can't understand because we're not in there they they they meaning steve jobs found a way to take that and put it in your pocket and act like it had always been there and make it feel like it had always been there and made it easy for an idiot to understand you know you take out this thing you touch the screen it turns on and then boom you have these little squares you click you're always one or two clicks away there's no buttons well we started with just one and you can do x y and z and it's this whole new universe itself and it's pretty self-explanatory a little old lady can even

figure it out crypto the issue has always been that it's built by some of the smartest people, devs, who are fucking brilliant. But they don't remember that they're brilliant. And the average person who needs to adopt this, who's not a dev, is not. And I'll even use Discord as an example. Discord has quite possibly the most offensive, effrontery, whatever you want to say to my intelligence user interface I have ever seen in my life. It is a clusterfuck upon clusterfucks upon clusterfucks. And it is extremely important right now because devs are the people pioneering and inventing the NFT space in particularly. So within that, yes yes discord is critical because

they're there but they're all the engineers so of course they get it because it's their own little bullshit oh yeah this button's there that button's there you'll figure it out the average person that i bring into discord they're like what the fuck am i looking at and like someone like me who shits on what mark zuckerberg has done to instagram all the time, let alone Facebook. Like, Instagram and Facebook literally look like the second coming of the iPhone compared to something like Discord. And I use that because Discord is just an example of what the problems with the greater crypto space continue to be. We need to get shit to a point within this where you can explain to my grandma i can explain to my grandma a non-dev in 30 seconds

how this shit works and have her be able to pick up her iphone and figure out how to buy it and understand that she bought it and where it is and that it's safe and maybe that's a high standard because you can't even do that with like current banking systems yeah i was gonna say it's a high standard but then again what do people complain about all the time fucking banking system we're trying to make shit better not worse or not the same so they have to figure out how to do that but what i will say is when i look at the iterations of where we were in 2018 and where i first noticed these problems at least now they have brought a bigger sense of pop culture into it and the nfts in my opinion have been that gateway and if you want to get attention to stuff you get attention by giving people something like something they can visualize and

look at art to get them involved with wanting to know more and so i see this as a step in a positive direction overall mind you i'm still gonna say a lot of work to be done yeah i don't disagree with you there i really don't i think the aim is to make it easier for people and i think that's what uh coinbase coinbase's new nft marketplace when it does come out that's exactly what it will do because right now if you wanted to buy an an NFT and you didn't know how at all, and you wanted to just go and make a purchase, it's incredibly fucking tedious and difficult to understand this technology. It's not like buying a fucking something physical at a grocery store.

You hand them the money, you get the item, you've always done that your whole life, you know how that works, it's ing in in what you've done your entire life and like teaching someone how to do the same thing procure an nft receive that nft very challenging very difficult hopefully sooner in the future it will be much much easier that's the idea and maybe we don't want grandmas buying nfts but yeah grandmas want to buy nfts how do we allow that that individual to make such a purchase or to get their beak wet agreed i remember going to an event in new york city back in september 2018 with your someone you introduced me to your client at artifacts sloan Sloan Brakeville, just a little background for people,

he was somebody who was fucking in his dorm room in 2011 buying Bitcoin. And he's a dev, brilliant guy, amazing dude. And what it ended up translating into was at the age of 22, he co-led the first global blockchain project for ibm you know brilliant brilliant dude and he's not a corporate type so he left that after they did that and then went out on his own and then ended up being a client of yours artifacts through his company at the time freight network but freight network like a lot of things was ahead of its time and it got hurt because it was during like the whole ico market so even brilliant guys like that who were OGs in the space were actually optimizing in his case

trying to disrupt the entire shipping industry around the world in a pretty beautiful way I might add they got crushed in the sense the market sentiment shifted as all the bullshit shuck out you know shook out of the tree and and whatever happened there did and so that's that's a project that will have to be tabled because the world's not ready for it but i remember being at that event with him and it's all some of the most brilliant people i've ever heard i mean fucking brilliant i think like jeff pulver was there talking about i think i got that name right but talking about like how he viewed i don't know if he used the term but he was describing what would later become the metaverse, which I had no idea about at the time. And then some other guys, I'm forgetting.

I could look it up. But we're leaving there, and I felt two types of ways. The first way was I continued to say, now, how do I take everything I just heard that some of it had my jaw on the floor and some of it also had me being like, wait, what the fuck does that mean? And make it so that there's no what the fuck do i mean and then also how do you bet against something like this when these types of people are fucking deep working on it and so now that things are so much farther along and we weathered what was that full 2018 storm that went on and everything it shook out a lot of shit in the market but now we have this bigger way bigger second wave and it's not really the second wave there were waves before that that

were smaller and we're seeing this consistent growth i at least see the pathway there to something like not i'm not just talking nfts with crypto actually upending the system because it is invented to make the people take power from the few who have continued to take power from everyone without their permission i guess that when it comes to what i do on a day-to-day basis there's so much with just the world of nfts that pulls my attention away from that but you're right right like crypto in general and defy and the sort of the idea that you can sort of move money without you know these intermediary uh overseers like being able to really see it, pin it to you, tax it.

The way we're moving away from institutional stock markets, I don't know how much of a debt we're making there, but there's definitely volume pouring from there into here. Fuck yeah.

So you're right. I think that's a really interesting time to be in this space. There's definitely volume pouring from there into here. Fuck yeah. Yeah. So you're right. I think that's a really interesting time to be in this space. I admittedly don't know much about crypto and DeFi in general, which is funny because I literally deal in crypto. I'm a crypto dealer. And you're an engineer. And I'm an engineer, though.

DeFi and there's a whole subcategory of crypto and earning more and more crypto that I still need to tap into. But when it comes to NFTs, what I know is what I know. And I found a lot is I just want to make sure that other than like bringing my community members value and however I can, like that's how I will always try and fight for that. People coming into the NFT space, I just want them to be armed with the right expectations about what's happening here. And as much help as an alpha as I can give them, I want to be able to give them, right? So what are the right tools to use? What are the right practices? What are the best sorts of like technicals that you need to know? Those sorts of things to get them underway. Cause you're right. It's incredibly difficult to, um, a enter the space, be even be successful here. And I know that, and I'm predisposed to this world

because i've been in here for almost a year now so that's really like my long time which is a long time in nfts right so that's that's my takeaway is like i i've just seen a lot i've been through a lot i'm still always going going through a lot uh but I love it this is like the most fun I've ever had in all of my life and um I I just want to be a part of it all the time that's all that I know and um I feel like I'm early and I feel like this technology is only going to persist and integrate and weave into our lives in ways that we might not even suspect today. And why I think that, I really can't say for sure. I feel like I've said enough here. But at the end of the day, we're buying and selling jpegs that's what it looks like but we're finally i i forgot who said it best but the next big wave of innovation will look like a toy right someone

said that like the best next invention will feel like a toy it will exhilarate you and excite you and and you'll share that passion and that sense of like adventure uh with other people and i feel like that's what this is that's what nfts are look at the names and we i openly laugh about them and shit but like we're now in this world where the generation just coming to age at the top end gen z grew up in a pure digital video game laden and iPhone laden world. And so they're used to all these funny nicknames completely consuming their life. And so when they go to buy product, that looks normal to them. That's what they know.

Even as some of them are coming into money. So they hear something like Bored Ape Yacht Club and they're like, bet. They hear something like Mutant Apes and they're like, double bet. They're predisposed to it. Right. Sure. And and so you and me even who are only a little bit older i'll speak for myself at least if my first thought is to laugh it's actually another it's another argument for the simplicity of it what's more simple than something that a kid can understand you know so i should be looking at that going huh okay all right they're not calling it the same way that like steve jobs didn't want to call it fucking inspiron or microsoft he was like no let's call it fucking apple you know that was the your grandfather's way of simplicity in a beautiful way which i still

think has credence to it making something five letters it's a term everyone understands but like maybe the next level to layer to simplicity is speaking the language of the people who are now coming into the marketplace and and setting pop culture because look i've talked about this a lot on this podcast in different contexts but pop culture is always set by the youngest generation you i could even make the argument especially now you look at tiktok i was trying to tell people this a couple years ago true when they were all 12 to 16 year olds on there i said they are setting the base just like facebook was set in the base when they opened it up to high schools and it was the 15 to 18 year olds i'm like well now it's 12 to 16 year olds and look the fuck where we are yeah you're not wrong i think especially that age group they're very extremely predisposed to this sense of the

reality that is completely digital that is um not what we would consider real life but to them it is real life and to me now it is real life and that's that's what's sort of really like to your point an interesting thought or something in a an interesting take is that they have an easier time grasping nfts these younger kids than like my dad does right then we did my brother and his friends my little brother and his friends they get it you know this is like oh this is like gaming to them right he's so marty's so into it i love it yeah so that's kind of where we are we are at the moment it's like a nice little time stamp we're still in like phase one of nfts i think where it's still – like the overhead is incredibly high to get in.

The barrier to entry is still incredibly high to enter NFTs. It's incredibly difficult to be successful in being profitable in that sense. And it's the wild, wild west. It's still unregulated. It's still – that's why i think for all those reasons we're still so early compared to what i believe will be like the catalyst of nfts really hitting the mainstream which is through play and earn gaming through the concept of playing video games and being able to sell your skins earn in-game cryptocurrency that you could swap for us dollar whatever country you're

in you know maybe it's the philippine peso and um and that's where i think this is all going to evolve do you think that's the end game though because the only reason i ask is because the concept of cryptocurrency and it's the thing that on a philosophical level i want to believe in because of my beliefs and a lot of different things up in our world but the concept of cryptocurrency is similar to something you said earlier which is you learn to think of it in eth not in dollars it's eth and the example you just gave that leads to like the adoption there is one where people are exchanging it for their latent or their native currency which is being overly inflated around the world by governments who don't give a fuck about the value of your dollar or peso or whatever it is yeah so like how do you how do you conflate those

two things or i don't know if i'm asking that right but you know what i mean like how do you how do you visualize that i i don't know i think that right now for me, maybe I'm like simplifying it for myself because I treat the space, specifically the NFT space, like it won't be here tomorrow. And so one Ethereum equals one Ethereum to me because I can't think in terms of fiat. I need to continuously stack and multiply that. And then when I do think of things in terms of fiat scares the fuck out of me right like my god i just spent that much fucking money in like a matter of an hour for something that doesn't isn't i can't touch i can't feel like it's not tangible if i called my dad he would say what the fuck are you doing mitch you need to like get the fuck online and get some help like i can't think of even terms of that. So it's a psychological thing?

It helps me if I frame it psychologically speaking to be play money, to be digital currency. It's like in whose lives and anyway, right? The points don't matter. And so of course it does matter though. Of course it does matter. Yeah. Like that Ethereum, ethereum right now can buy a fuck ton of things um in real life right in physical like goods and like services and so

um yeah it's it's hard for me to to really say jewels i see this one step at a time i don't know what the end all be all is and nor do i honestly care at this point right now i'm just like i know what i'm doing i know what i'm doing in the short term and i know it's going to look like mid or long term at least i can make some guesses um end game is like a weird thing to think about because i really don't have a say in that yet i haven't i haven't been through enough yet to be able to say and that's the thing and i i should have i shouldn't have a say in that yet. I haven't been through enough yet to be able to say. And that's the thing. And I shouldn't have made it sound like that.

That's my bad. I don't know that you can even think. Really, I could make this argument with anything, especially with this. I don't know if we can even truly think of it in terms of endgame. How can you think of something in the terms of endgame that still is being invented, period? Let alone the best iteration of it? Like even with Bitcoin, like that's – Bitcoin to me is a statement more than anything, and I strongly believe it has the best chance to be the gold on fucking steroids that is the sun that operates a future monetary system. And I've held that belief for a long time. That's why i hold

it right but i could be wrong about that you know i you'd be wrong about any of this stuff and like with ethan particularly what you're dealing in all the time and you strongly believe in i mean you've talked to me about potentially seeing a world where it where the great flippening happens and it actually becomes regardless of how it's used currency versus store value that whole argument it becomes worth more in market cap than like a bitcoin like you're still thinking of that type of potential what makes you see it that way with something like eth especially when we're seeing still the proof of work that's causing all these gas fees and we haven't seen them move to that proof of stake that's been promised for a long time. It's the network effect because I just see so many people dealing in Ethereum, caring about their Ethereum stack.

We're actually – like all these NFTs, majority of them are built on the Ethereum blockchain. That's why we all care about ETH so much. Right. ERC-20 tokens, right? Like we all deal and transact on the blockchain of ethereum and so that's why i'm bullish because i actually see real utility um in this blockchain that's not to say that i think they're going to be the end all be all or that's not even to say that i think it's going to flip bitcoin i think my thing is again i deal in ethath i want more of eath because i deal in it and for me one eath equals

one eath in the same way that one bitcoin equals one bitcoin right i simply want to continue to stack because i truly believe that cryptocurrency in general is going to be the i know you hate the word like putting the term currency on on cryptocurrency but like there will come a point where we are making transactions like everyday transactions like our morning coffees for instance or our netflix subscriptions with our ethereum oh you know what let me clarify because that's based on something you and i were talking about when i picked you up from the train I don't hate that at all I only I was only using that I agree with you a thousand percent and that would be a perfect scenario to me

Where that's what happens because we create something that's based off of an immutable white paper We know exactly what it is. No governments can fuck it up No assholes can decide to take away your wealth behind the scenes without telling you like it is what it is I was only saying that in terms of bitcoin which again as a huge fan the one thing i've just never understood and never agreed with the argument is that it will be the currency i think it's better than the currency to be clear like and because like some of some of the maxis will get on me with that and i'm like no no I think it's literally above that. It is that sun I just spoke about.

It is that thing that whatever is beneath it somehow is tied to the value of that, right? And my bet right now, quote, unquote, and it's a much less – I mean nothing is a 100% conviction bet at all. But like it's far less than that is that the leader in the clubhouse that has the best potential I think because of the word you just used network effects that phrase I agree with you would be Ethereum but again I gotta see them move to where not to get too technical but that

that whole proof of stake where we can see the inefficiencies of like when someone goes to use it for the first time now and figures out when they go to do a transaction it could cost fucking double the price if they're doing it at the wrong time because the gas is high. And they're not seeing that and then going, what the fuck? It's simple. It's boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

It's expensive. It's pricey. Yeah. Yeah, it prices people out. You're right. I think you're right. And that's another reason why I think we are early because there is demand for a blockchain. There is a demand for NFTs for transactions that aren't fucking ridiculously expensive. So just going to be a matter of time before someone builds it and then people come and then that is the standard. And I'm hoping that Ethereum is the standard but if it's not then it's not and i'm okay with that now you were down at art basel though in miami and

what surprised me when that happened like going into it i thought it was mostly okay on top of this whole art thing like obviously the whole nft community is going there which to an extent happened but you were telling me that also a lot of the crypto and particularly like the d5 community like just completely away from being there for nfts like they're spreading some of the word on on the benefits of that they were down there and you were talking with them and you may have alluded to that earlier in something we've talked about a lot today but you were going out of your way to meet with them and so i'm curious what in those conversations these guys told you in general but specifically where are they and they're going to be biased but where are they in from like an adoption

standpoint how do they see this playing out over the next two or three years? And were they relating any of it back to NFTs and how that integrates? So crypto and DeFi, that crowd, that particular crowd of like crypto holders and NFT holders, there's probably like if you can make a Venn diagram you know that the margin in which they are the same are really quite narrow um a lot of us that trade nfts only trade nfts and so forth but these new like metas right the the new and by meta i mean like what's current what's trending uh the new meta nft collections they are they incorporate defy principles they incorporate a token with the nfts and that shit that makes sense defying crypto people right they can play in the nft space in those collections that's their entry point right they don't know they

don't understand like they think nfts before all this was like owning a digital art. And they're like, why the fuck would I even care for that? I'll just stake my, I'll stay in DeFi and earn my crypto that way. Now they're like looking at these brand new projects like the Wolf Games and such. And they're thinking to themselves, oh, this is something I get, right? Sure, there's NFTs in this ecosystem, in this model in this collection but the staking but like the staking the tokenomics all of that makes sense to them and so that's what's enticing them into nfts it's that's the entry point for them is into nfts because before that they didn't

know why why even bother why even care this gets their beak wet because they're familiar with it, and now I'm starting to see that this could be of interest to them. Do you think there's a good argument, though, among that community that separately existing newer cryptocurrencies built on other blockchains that are not named Ethereum can upend it because of the opportunity that ethereum continues to let exist in the sense that they haven't moved yet to the proof of stake and the gas is like fucking insane yeah yeah i think so there's a lot of maxis of other side chains of blockchains that tend to fix or build upon ethereum make it better um yeah i definitely see that for sure

not everyone was gung-ho in ethereum you know yeah that's another thing that makes the whole thing such a wild west because it's it's still early across the board on everything like this entire space has been around since bitcoin started trading on january 3rd 2009 that's not a long time this is not it hasn't even been through one cycle of a generation yep you know if we're calling that like 21 22 years like it's been through half of that and we've seen where i'd say the first legitimately call it eight and a half years no one fucking knew what it was like very few people did and so now if you want to call it four and a half years into people knowing or a greater portion like a substantial enough portion of the population of the world being aware of this existence and learning about it now it's

it's really nascent and so i'm scarred as you are by 2017 2018 we learned a lot we learned all about grifters we learned all about the bullshit that goes on in all this and so i am a natural unbelievably strong skeptic of things that are not named Bitcoin, including for a while Ethereum. And then I started to see some things with the network effects really in like early 2020 where I was like, okay, okay, flyer. And then started to get a little more into it, like talking with Cole and stuff. But these other ones, what I don't want to do is nurse my scars so much that I ignore potential. That's a dangerous dance. Yeah, eyes forward.

But it's also scary because I do still see a lot. I see a lot of the same patterns. Now we're far enough past that bear market of 2018 that some of the same actors have had long enough or you know different actors wearing the same suit have had long enough to now come back and do the same thing and like of course the worst examples are like your safe moons and your literal ponzi schemes but i'm talking like even stuff that may you know be a wolf in sheep's clothing. I'm not in it enough or smart enough in that case to be able to say like, well, that one's bullshit and that one's not.

And I wonder how many other people feel the same way. Maybe it's all bullshit, right? Maybe it's all bullshit. Yeah, maybe. Or maybe it isn't. You can't know. You can't really know. You can't really know. You can't really know, right?

Like, I'm not here telling you this is the fucking, this is like here to stay. I'm telling you my long-term idea of where this is going to go. Short of that, my messaging has been pretty simple. This can all go to zero tomorrow. I always have an exit when I enter. And when I don't, I usually get hurt. And you know, I trade with

literally the best of them. The sharpest tools in the shed. You know, we use the sharpest tools in the shed and we are fucking focused and lasered. And there's opportunity to be made there has been and that opportunity might not exist tomorrow here in nfts but the technology the underlying technology on bullish on long term based off of just what it brings to the table with all these different industries gaming being

the biggest one of all the most obvious one i don't i don't want to not get to the buzzword that has now popped around heavily i mean you can even look at google trends and see it live it's pretty crazy of of web3 which we've mentioned at times today but the the very oversimplified way of putting it is that all the things we're talking about here all these themes together like defy like nfts like taking out middlemen to build financial products outside of the legacy system stuff like that this is all a part of quote-unquote web3 and now it's got some renewed or not renewed like brand new public attention on it with the whole Jack Dorsey leaving Twitter, going full time over to Square and immediately changing the name to Block, which if you follow Jack Dorsey for the power out of the hands of people like him when he was at twitter controlling what goes on the site and what doesn't and he's doing it in at block through the financial side like payments and things like that so i don't want to go too deep in that but like now that this is like out

there and you have a bunch of people saying it but they don't really know what they're they're saying i think the easy way to start is web 2.0 quite simply was where we built the social pattern on top of the internet it went away from individual www.whateverthefuck.com to now you have spaces where you go to find other people in different communities that have similar beliefs or different beliefs and fight about it whatever it is web 3.0 is weird to me and this is what i want your thoughts on because when you talk about decentralization you are trying to build a lot of things that take away all the network effects that everyone bought into for web 2.0 meaning like okay we hate that we gave five social media platforms all the fucking power so we're gonna build an internet where no one has the power and you all have individual homes that you can go into meaning you have to take the effort now again like the old

days to kind of go www.whatever.com but now it's better because it's on the blockchain and it's immutable and i think people have trouble visualizing that, including me. So if I'm looking at you saying Web3, how does it work and what's the benefit besides just, hey, we take away power from people who are wielding it too much and taking away even the right to speak on certain things. What else is there and why is it viable and why is it going to work? I'm going to be extremely truthful with you. When people say Web3, I don't know what the fuck they're talking about.

Really? I don't know what they're talking about. I wasn't expecting that. No, I don't. What is Web3? How would you define Web3? I think the end of what i just said it's where we take sent we take centralized networks move them to individuals in a way that is obviously at a high speed it's essentially built on things that allow

immutable transactions not just financially i'm talking like in general like pathways on the internet via the blockchain like we're seeing in nTs, for example. So that was my hunch. So your Web3 is like the integration of blockchains across multitude of use cases. Oversimplify way of putting it, but yes, let's call it that for sake of argument. Sure. I think there will be a ton of use cases that we've either we can either foresee today uh like music is a great one where there's so much white space in terms of how in your words web3 can be integrated into the music industry and and i think there's opportunities and and white space like that for a bunch of different industries. Like right now, with what I'm focusing on with just NFTs and that ecosystem alone, very limited use cases, extremely limited.

In fact, we don't really have one quite like a real practical in real life use case that actually makes sense for these NFTs quite yet. So I don't know. I can't really put a pin on when the integration will be on the forefront. I can sort of – I know what companies are actually looking at integrating Web3 solutions, and they'll still be centralized to some degree. Like Dapper Labs I think is a great example right they still own the flow blockchain i mean they're not relinquishing control of that blockchain like ethereum does um yeah i have to be very honest like i'm really i really am a fucking nft degenerate like i really am in the sense that i really appreciate this answer

i look eyes forward i flip i mint i fucking sell and um as far as what the future holds for this technology i'm excited for it i don't really know what it's going to look like to be honest the reason i especially appreciate an answer like that coming from you is because you're the guy who introduced me to a lot of things because I mean, and I mean this in a good way, you're a tech nerd through and through, like you can do this shit, right? You can go build this shit. You join these people and do that if you want it to, right? But a lot of people, and I try not to be one of them. So if I fail sometimes, you people can check me out there. But a lot of people want to say for sure, no, no, this is how it's going to go.

This is what's happening, period, end of story. I think more than, first of all, historically, that's never the way to go. Let's get that straight. But secondly, I think more than ever, it is so wide open where shit can go. That's why even like as a fan of Bitcoin, I'll say that. Like I don't – I think it's the best thing as the store of value. But like I could be wrong about that. I'm cool with the statement that it is. That's why I fuck with it and feel that and hope i'm right but

you know the people that are out there defining exactly web 3 like the closest thing that i'll accept as like okay no that's really cool was what we read of sean pori earlier with his whole thread where it's more just a broad like hey what if it's this type of thing? I'm cool with that. We can guess around on that. But to hear you talk like that, a lot of people should check that answer and think twice about just throwing out there exactly how stuff's going to be, which we see people do on Twitter spaces all the time. We see them do it on Twitter regular. We see them do it in Discord. We see people – we see even talking heads on TV try to talk about this and tell people how it's going to go. We see Zuckerberg tell people how it's going to go.

That's the beauty of Web3. We are so new to it that who really knows? I could define it broadly like I did as like the decentralization 2.0 where now we take away the network effects but somehow add them with more speed and it's okay. But like who knows what guys like Jack Dorsey are really thinking of this thing. Yeah, exactly. I think that's speculating what the long-term world of Web3 would look like and what this technology will pan out to be. All that speculation, and this is a personal me take

right i have so much fucking shit on my plate in front of me like day to day and yes i'll try to think week to week month to month year to year that's kind of the conversation with web3 what is what will this look like in like not just years but decades i don't have decades, I don't have time. Like, I don't have time. Like, it takes away from my flipping mentality, right? Because my goal here is to stack Ethereum. My goal is by the time this, all this shit, like, goes fucking bananas vertical, because I believe that it will, I want to have so much Ethereum that, like, I can just fucking chill and never have to flip an nft again

and where this technology will go i don't fucking know i can only have like a a little bit of a hindsight or a guess or maybe like an inclination for where i would like to see it go right through playdarn gaming but you know i just i'm so eyes forward that I just don't really Care to speculate and so I haven't really really looked into it. So what makes you Believe in something like a project that you're personally involved with which is the superlative secret society like what makes you say like okay, I can not not as a as a pure alpha investor as a guy who understands the space and is trying to identify at least some projects that I want to make a personal self-investment in, forget money, and be long-term with. that when in all honesty it does seem like the and again i hate using this term because it's not the right term but i can't think of a better word right now the short-term end game is still so wide open and you don't really know it's it's more a matter of hey this is where action is and i'm

going to capitalize on the action and be there to learn what i can i think that with a project like superlative secret society the art is fucking incredible we can all we can both agree on that it's unbelievable it's unbelievable the statement much like you enjoy bitcoin for the statement of what it actually represents superlative secret society is a statement in and of itself not just from a community standpoint but more so from the artist's perspective like the the team is fully indonesian like they're from a part of the world that does not have access to the same resources that we have here in america the artist was you know this collection was something was doodles that he was making for 10 years and he was just discovered by

another indonesian that said hey let's like create an nft collection incredible a janitor of art 11 111 and let's just fucking like send it to the world and the idea that like you can be an unknown artist from an unknown part of the world and receive that sort of like achievement of financial success and acknowledgement for your work through this medium that is a statement that statement is incredible and incredibly superlative and powerful for me that project represents that statement there's also a lot of other reasons why i fucking love this project but at the end of the day i love the access that mts give um that this space gives people of um people that are disadvantaged in the world

and i'll give you a great example like action infinity a play to earn game hundreds of thousands of filipinos play this game every single day and they're able to receive cryptocurrency directly that helps them help their families yeah right and their communities and without this technology cryptocurrency giving them incentive through play to earn games you know they might not have access to this sort of wealth and that's the type of that's so exciting to me about the space right now and it might not be like that forever. Or it might just continue. Maybe the demand for these types of NF world that are pretty advantaged to parts of the world that aren't and perhaps we'll see a bit of decentralization in terms of wealth and for me superlative secret society that's what that project represents to me it's that it's that

distribution of wealth to disadvantaged parts of the world it's powerful through a beautiful beautiful collection of of art your brother mike way back in the day my first i had started to have exposure to it through my friend barkstone and started investing and learning about crypto maybe like a couple months in back when you guys were in the beginning of jersey city shout out to the old school days but i walked into the basement and there was like this fucking heat coming off this computer chip, you know, like a big size computer chip. It's like literally smoking. I'm like, Mike, yo, it's going to be like a fucking fire. He goes, no, no, no.

Like it's, it's, what did he say it was? It was mining. I'm like, what? He goes, it's mining Bitcoin. I'm like, you mean Bitcoin? He's like, no, no, no. You can never do that. It's Bitcoin.

It's like some bull. It's worth fucking nothing. but i have a chip and i know how to code it so i'm mining it or whatever i'm like huh and so then he gave me he gave me a guy to look into and this is where like the belief came in i think his name was dan don tapscott and he had a ted talk and the very short version of it is he laid out exactly what you just said the people at home who have to receive shit from their family member making ends meet in america but they have to send it through western union who takes 30 days to get there sometimes or whatever it is and takes a 20 cut or something like that now they get it in a second you know and it's and it's there's nothing taken off it gives them access it creates this this environment where even the underprivileged can have a an easier way to get

to things that allow them to be not underprivileged in the future yeah and so something like this where it's not just some dev who no one knows who they are hiding behind a squarespace page as you pointed out talking about like slimy frogs being the next goddamn metaverse when you hear a story like that behind the one that i might add again this is one that mitch is personally involved with i'd like to hear this that's a beautiful thing that's the upside of this space and that's what i want to see when that's in a utopitarian world where where crypto turns out in all the right ways those are the types of things i want to look back on in the history websites not books and and be like oh yeah it all makes sense now yeah 100 there's so many facets to this and we can go on for hours and hours.

I haven't even gotten into that whole play to earn gaming. I sponsor gamers to play for me full-time every day to earn crypto. There's a lot of facets to what's happening here that is more than meets the eye than just flipping, just like buying JPEGs low and selling them high. And I think that the easier it gets for people to enter the space, the more you'll see it. But you really have to see it to believe it. I believe that about anything.

And if you have any questions about what's happening here, feel free to reach out to me. How can people reach you? I'm on Twitter, ClassicMitch up and classic mitch up so classic like your name mitch and up on the end yes exactly um i encourage anyone to hit me up and just ask me any preliminary basic questions that's fine it's okay um again i don't want new people to get burnt in the space i want people to find success. I can only lay out for you how I found my success. It doesn't necessarily mean that's how you'll find yours.

Just being able to have someone to lean on and be like, what the fuck is going on here? You have me. You know what I'm saying? 100%. My brothers had me. You got me through COVID. I was sitting there. I couldn't do anything.

I couldn't edit anything. That was my week of really studying the ins and outs of the alpha. Exactly. Exactly, man. And that was a fun time to have you at the Discord. No, it's cool. I'm still looking in there, but I want to highlight to take your advice and spout it once again. If you are not in there all the time like you are, or I shouldn't say that shouldn't be the base expectation because you're crazy.

But I'm saying like if you do not have a lot of time to really invest in understanding this and understanding what you're getting into and where your money's going, don't fucking do it. Don't do it. Yeah, yeah. Don't do it. Don't do it. A hundred percent. You know? So like you haven't seen me in anything in the last two weeks.

Been busy. Yeah. And I got shit going on here. I'm not done. And if you want to get into it, fucking just learn. Right. Just be a fly on the wall learn just sort of watch what the fuck is happening ask a million fucking questions bug as many people as you can and get familiar don't fucking buy anything don't spend a single bit of eath don't

waste it because i think that will all be wasted but at the end of the day if you want to come play then come play you know like if you're ready, you're prepared, you've got conviction, come fucking play. And let's get it. I like what we did today because we did get complicated and deeper on some things and then tried to simplify some of it. So I hope people could follow. I know we both did our best to make it all make sense. But there is a lot we didn't go into that we could go for a while.

But really, really appreciate you doing this because you flew in from Art Basel today. It's like 2.15 in the morning right now. We did a nice late recording right here. So this was awesome. And there's a lot that we can leave off and check on also next year and see where you're at

and see what's going on, see what's changed in the space, see what else you're finding out. Because I think your network that you've built, not just within NFTs, but now talking with guys who are in these other spaces innovating where, as you admitted, you don't know what you don't know and you're trying to figure it out. I think as I see those relationships develop, there's going to be some interesting things that we could share on here and maybe see some stuff a little bit before it happens possibly yeah 100 thank you for having me brother of course dude it's always good to catch up the old uh like i always say the old jersey city days i i miss them so me too it's the same sort of energy though right it's like we both found something that we love and we're attached to it once we find it you got you got to press the attack. That's it, man. And that's to your credit, July 4th. That's exactly what you said you were doing.

Yeah. You did. God, that was such a long time ago. God damn. Are you killing it, dude? Good to see you. Good to have you through. See you again soon.

Everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Show this man some love. Peace. Let's fucking get it