My First Million - #136 with Jack Smith - Trading Cards and Collectables: A Deep Dive Into The Opportunities In The Space

Episode Date: December 11, 2020

Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) are joined by Jack Smith (@_jacksmith). They discuss: - (0:59) Introduction to Jack Smith - (7:04) Jack introduces the world of collectible card investing - (14:40) What is Rally Rd - (23:29) How to make money lending against trading cards - (32:52) Collecting NBA moments? - (37:00) The opportunities in trading cards - (47:00) The massive size of eBay's collectible business - (49:00) Shaan hears from a sketchy entrepreneur and they discuss cards as ETF Thank you to our sponsor this episode, Flatfile! Spend less time on Excel and more time building your business by easily importing data using Flatfile. Check them out at flatfile.io/hustle. Have you joined our private FB group yet? It's a page where people share each others million dollar ideas or what they're already working on: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Uh-huh. So in I feel like I can rule the world I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On a road, let's travel, never looking back. So an introduction here, this is Jack Smith. He's one of my one or two closest friends.

He's number one, dude. Who's number one? He's above him. Sam tells everyone know the number one. No, it's like there's like a couple guys who are the crew. We have like a tight-knit group. Jack doesn't like to. brag. I'm going to brag for him. But basically, he started this company called Vungle, which was sold

to Blackstone, the large P.E company for, I think, $750 million in cash. They had raised a little bit of money, but not a significant amount. It was a wonderful exit. He also helped start this company called Ship, which crashed and burn, but it was awesome. It was cool while it lasted, and it was a good idea. And then he was, he had his, did you know, Sean, Jack had his hands? He was involved slightly with that, remember that credit card that went viral in 2013 or 14 where it was like called coin and you click a button and it would change your debit cards. You could have five cards on one card. Yeah, it was a sweet concept. It was one card and then you just switch over. You just push a button. It's like, now it's your business. Now it's your travel rewards card or whatever else.

I think it was a Kickstarter project, right? Jack? Or like it started as Kickstarter. Yeah. Yeah, it was like one of the first to use sandwich video, which is the guy that has done videos for like Square and all these lot after. His was one of the first ones. do it and then it kind of went viral mainly to the video. So talking about the sandwich guy, because that guy is interesting, right? So he has, if you haven't seen it, basically he was like an ad agency or not ad agency. I don't know what to call it, but marketing agency. And he would make videos. And so people wanted their version of the, the Dollar Shave Club launch video, which was like this really like funny, entertaining, but like told the company's story really well and got a bunch of

customers, got a bunch of hype. And so if you go to their portfolio page, it's like kind of like a bunch of big winners, like Slack and others. And at some point, you know, he, he was, they were just charging so, and the guy himself, I think, is named to Adam, is that right? Yeah. He's in all the videos, which is cool. He's a good actor. He's like a good straight man. You know, he's like, is the perfect like normal dude just explaining this cool thing.

And it got to the point where it was too expensive. He would only take equity or he would like require equity now for these projects that he was helping launch into kind of the stratosphere. Is he still doing that or have they pivoted or what's the latest? Because that was a few years ago. Well, actually, coin was one of the first ones. So I think coin, it was something like, the video was something like $75,000 or something, I don't know. So they paid in cash, but actually because, was because of the video that they just did so much better than they fall, then the guy just told him like, hey, dude, like, you pretty much blew it out of the park for us.

So he just, like, gave him at tea, even though he never asked for it. And so after that, then the guy was like, hmm, probably should ask for just equity and any future deal that I do. If this guy's giving it to me voluntarily, I probably should have asked for it. We're going to talk about today is collectibles. And the reason why Jack is here is because Jack sold Vungal. Is it two years now or a year ago? Yes, I'm like a year, one year. But prior to that, he wasn't working there.

He left and has had a lot of free time, like three years of free time, four years of free time. And what Jack does at his hobby is so weird. He just like buys and reviews tons of stuff. And he definitely returns a lot of it. But he just consumes information. And he loves trying new products. He's up so like, I remember for his birthday recently, his wife and me and a couple buds, she got, we went to Tahoe and she got him a cake that was an Amazon box.

Like, that's what he's famous for is like just buying stuff. And for my wedding, the gift that he got Sarah and I was he wrote two or three pages and he said, this is the best soap for black women's hair. This is the best low sugar gummy bears. This is the best foot cream. This is the best towel because it has copper in it and copper prevents bowl. And he like explained. And so he bought us like probably $1,000 worth of just gadgets that were his best.

So he just reviews everything. And his latest kick is collectible. Hold on. Before we would go to the collectibles, because that's an amazing intro. Jack, why do you do this? This is so funny that you do this. Just like, I mean, Sam is exaggerating a thing about, like, best shampoo for black people's hair. That's what you got her, dude.

You got her, Deva curl. Yeah, but that's just the best shampoo in general. Like, it doesn't matter that it's made of African Americans. Well, she's black and I thought that you were being thoughtful and you got her like, I don't know. I just got her good. But it's just like if I'm buying something like a backpack, then I want to have the best backpack. So I'll just buy 10 of them, trying them out and then return nine. And were you always this way?

Like you're like, I got it. Because I remember even when Product Hunt launched, I think you were the number one person on Product Hunt. And you were like a successful, busy dude at this point. But you were like just like kind of these randos on Product Hunt. but you were like all over it. You had the number one most hunted products or something crazy too. So have you been this way for a long time? So I think product hunt is similar with the collectibles thing in terms of just like

I joined when it only had a couple of hundred users. And so it's like identifying something nascent and then seeing if there's obviously when things are small, there's more opportunities around because there's lots of competition. Product Hunt just joined early. And then as you said, I was kind of posting every day. I basically built a bot to post. to it. Nowadays, you can schedule a post, but then you couldn't. So I just built a bot to schedule a post each day. But I was still kind of manually involved having reviewing products. But it was kind of just

fun to be seeing what's new. I just like trying out more stuff because then I feel that is when there's like opportunities. Okay. And I called you a few weeks ago, maybe a month ago now, because I had this very interesting collectibles situation. And I didn't even know you were into collectibles, honestly. I just called you because I said, Jack's really, really, really clever. And I think for this business opportunity, you either out-clever it or you don't do it at all. And so I just thought, I only talked to the most clever guy I know. And it turned out that you were like super heavy into the collectible space and you started telling me all these interesting things. And now you can, we'll talk about it. And then anything you don't want to talk

about, we can just cut afterwards. That's no, no problem. Just pull that back. But basically, let's start with what I learned on that call. Okay. So I call Jack and I say, hey, Jack, I don't know if you know anything about the collectible space. And you were kind of, of course, understated. You were like, yeah, I know a bit, which really was like, I know everything. You know, you don't know shit. And you were like, yeah, I know bit. And I said, you know, there's this opportunity to buy this multimillion dollar collection for like kind of 10 cents on the dollar, but I don't know what I would do with it. I don't know how I would flip it. How would you flip this? And what you told me was like, okay, there are these platforms out there, these new emerging platforms for collectibles like Rally Road, like Otis.

And you said, I've been using these. And in fact, here's some of the things I learned from this conversation. Jack is not only an investor in a couple of these platforms, is the number one probably power user of all these platforms. It's like product tonne all over again. You are all over these platforms while they are small. You're probably the most active user on the platform buying and selling stuff. You have a full operation in the Philippines, kind of like helping you, you know, like a machine, work the system.

So tell us what you could tell us about this stuff. Sure. Yeah. I mean, as you said, like the CEO of Masterworks just like they randomly just like sent me an email. like, hey, can we chat? And then we got on the call and it's like, dude, what are you doing? We're looking at the logs as many orders late at the time. They're like, and then I just told them like, hey, I have these guys in Philippines, like $3 an hour just place some bids because they were like, yeah,

because we were pretty confused. Like this guy who sold his company, is he just bored in Hawaii that he's just logged onto our platform 24-7 like bidding on stuff? So they were a bit confused. They think you're like a virus. Yeah. Or they were just trying to figure out like, dude, what are you actually trying to do? Like, how can we help you because this is not a good use of your time too?

But it's just, as you highlighted, like, emerging platforms, there's kind of different arbitrage opportunities somewhat. And what I've seen is, so from speaking, I've spoken to, like, the founding teams of these different platforms, I believe I'm like, they didn't want to confirm. They said, you're the number one or number two user, probably in terms of like assets under management there because they're so small. it's not that hard to be their biggest user. What I learned as well, speaking to some of these others, is that you've kind of got a few different users that are using these platforms. The majority of whom would fit into their calling in stocks

is just like the Robin Hood users that just don't care about valuation and they're just buying stuff just because it sounds cool. So kind of what they're saying about stocks with Robin Hood is what the most users and collectibles are doing as well. And then you actually, it seems like you have sophisticated, collectible people, more sophisticated than me, I don't know anything about what these things are actually worth.

You're actually seeing a pretty strong, the market seems to be working there. Like assets that undervalued, they jump to being valued what they maybe should be. So, for example, there's this Pokemon card collection that launched maybe like six months ago. And then now the platform got an offer. that hey someone actually wants to buy the collection, 4x the price they listed it at. And actually what they do is they let the people that own that piece, they vote. Should we sell or should we not?

And they actually voted not to sell. And now it's trading it like 6x the price. And so I was speaking to a founder of one of the other platforms and he's like, yeah, that piece was undervalued. Somehow people that are really into Pokemon cards, obviously have found the platform and found that it's undervalued. And now they've kind of bid it up to what it kind of should be. that. How about we structured this conversation this way? So first of all, we got to get background here,

which is last week, Sean brought up PSA. What's PSA stand for? Does that important? I don't even know. Sports. Yeah, it's a, it's a, it was a company that grades sports cards, right? They grade, not just sports cards, they'll grade other cards as well. They were doing, I looked it up, they're doing about 80 million in revenue, 20 million in profit, publicly traded company. And then this guy named Nat Turner alongside Steve Cohen. Steve Cohen is the guy who was inspired, the TV show Billions, or partially, he owns the Mets now, big-time billionaire. And then a couple other folks, Nat Turner is a tech guy who's very wealthy now,

and they bought this company, and I actually don't know what they're going to do with it, maybe just like make it cooler. Anyway, Sean brought us up, but it was very interesting, and we're like, all right, let's do a whole episode just on collectibles. So for this conversation,

how about we structure it like this? Let's just go through some of the interesting platforms and some of the big winners and some of the trends in this collectible space. Does that sound good? Well, and to highlight how I got into it is that I actually start, looking at the collectible stuff based on the, because I was listening a bit to the podcast

that Sam, you did with Gary Vee. And you just kept asking him, like, what's the best opportunity? And he just kept them saying, sports cards. And then you were like, yeah, but what else is interesting? And he just was like, I can't think of anything. Just sports card is the only decent thing. And so I'm like, okay, well, if he's going into it that heavily, then maybe it might be interesting. And so actually how I started is I, again, with people in the Philippines, I just bought my own collection of 500 or so trading cards, like individual ones. And I'm storing them, but then I was like, this is like so much work, trying to research what the actual fair valuation for a card is and doing all the accounting for it and then listing it to sell. So even though I did

actually buy and flip some cards for a profit myself, I'm like, this is kind of loads of work. And then I found that there's these fractional ownership platforms. And so they're basically doing all the work and then they basically bring you like, hey, any collectibles, but some are training cards. It's like, here's a really valuable card. It's worth $100,000, but users can buy like $25 pieces of it. Let's talk about Rally Road because I think that's actually the one, the coolest one. Sean, do you know Rally Road? Yeah, so I'll give you kind of the two seconds. I'll give you the layman version of Rally Road. So Rally Road is a platform that's letting you invest in what they call alternative assets. And these are things like it could be a vintage car. It could be a Michael

Jordan rookie card. It could be a Pokemon collector set that's unopened. And, you know, they'll put it up and it'll be thousands of dollars. And then like Jack saying, you can do the sort of fractional ownership component where I can buy, I don't have to buy the full collection, but I can invest in that asset in the same way, you know, I can buy shares of Apple. I can buy shares of Tesla. That's the way that Raleigh works. Is that the, did I capture the main bits there, Jack? Do I leave anything important out? One of the main bits is that the way they've designed it is maybe like Tinder and Robin Hood-Hood-esque in that they've basically made a game.

It's extremely gamified and addictive and awesome. That basically they'll just be like, all right, we're dropping this asset. Like they do a drop kind of like an IPO. You buy in. And then basically that asset is locked up for three months. And then they'll basically trade each asset once a quarter, but only for one day. And so they're like, all right, this asset is trading that day. So basically they're kind of compressing all the demand also into one day.

And then it's really gamified because when they drop the IPO, is they're like, oh, it's selling out, and it sells out in, like, under a minute. So, like, unless you're on the app at that time, you miss out, so it's really gamified. And they don't actually have that many products. I think they have, like, dozens of products on there, right? Like, they have, like, a few. It's blown up a lot recently. It's got a lot more recently.

Well, as of recently, they had, like, dozens. And it was, like, a million-dollar Ferrari to a, like, a Babe Ruth baseball card, Harry Potter, first edition. So it was kind of a random collection, but it was all so cool looking. They make it look so cool. It's the Chicago Bulls six championship rings from Michael Jordan's run. It's a complete set of six rings. And I just click notify me when this goes live because it's valued at $300,000.

And you can own a piece of the Michael Jordan kind of dynasty championship rings that they have. And this company has raised about $30 million. They're based in New York. Very interesting company. So one of a bit as well is that I think a lot of their users, they're not doing anything about valuation. of, they just want to own a piece. Maybe they support that sports team. And they're like, oh, wow, I can own a piece of that rings thing. So what they do is when you invest,

they also, sometimes they give, sometimes they actually sell memorabilia associated to it. So you can get like a share certificate being like, I own a piece of something you can put on your wall at home because otherwise you have nothing to show for it. Right. That's how, when I used to go buy like an autograph basketball, that's going to sit in my office and people are going to see it and you lose that value. You gain a lot of convenience, but you lose that value when you use one of these platforms. So it's really smart. I think they're doing a bunch of really smart things. I'll give you some examples of what's smart. So the things Jacks talked about where they kind of gamified it, I think it's really smart because in any marketplace,

like a marketplace, all about liquidity. And early on, you have pretty poor liquidity in the marketplace. So by compressing it where it's only going to IPO for one day and it's only going to trade one day a quarter, you're compressing all of the, whatever little supply and demand you have it gets like aggregated into a short time window. So it actually feels like you have high liquidity during that period. So I think that's really important. That also creates, you know, FOMO and it builds hype and it drives more demand, which is another way to fill the marketplace is by sort of manufacturing or amplifying

the demand that already exists for it. So I think that's like a really smart business and product decision that I honestly don't think these businesses would work if you didn't do that at the early stage. Where are they storing all this stuff, Jack? Because you were toying around with this idea of doing this like, Like, what's it called the Freeport? Or is that what it's called the art world? There's different rules for art and other assets have other rules.

So the FreePold stuff is specifically to art. So it depends on the platform. But what, let's say, Otis, for example, is doing, that they're just storing their stuff. They actually outsource it. They're just storing it in a normal collectibles vault. They're actually using PWCC, which is what I store my cards in. So BWCC is a company that does their own grading, but they're not really reputable like PSA.

So they're kind of just not that reputable for grading. But they grade stuff. And they're the largest auction house for trading cards. So it's kind of like the whatever the big art auction houses are. They are that for sports cards. But then as well, they're in somewhere, maybe it's Texas or somewhere that basically doesn't have any sales tax. and then there was news articles about it. They spent $3 million building a vault in the basement of their office,

kind of like a bank vault. And so they can store trading cards for you as well. So they're kind of an all-services shop, grading storage, listing it on their own auction house or eBay, and they also do lines of credit against your collection, which I can talk about more. But Otis and stuff store their trading cards there. However, some of the places like Masterworks actually, have their own art gallery and are doing their own storage in New York because one of the aspects

they wanted and Rally Road does this with some of their cars is pre-coronavirus, a bit tougher now. They wanted that their users come and see the assets they own. Like, hey, come and see the car and you can tell your buddy, like, I own $25 of this car, but you can see it in real life, a real life museum art gallery. So if I was going to invest in these companies, I think if I was going to rank them, PSA would have been number one because I think that they have the dominance of They're the certifiers. So they become the kingmakers. And obviously, the demand has far outstripped their ability to fulfill it.

So, Jack, give people a sense of, like, you send something in to be graded by PSA. Roughly, what does that cost? Roughly, what's the turnaround time right now? Which I think shows the opportunity that they have. Well, you say opportunity they have, but they're like the dinosaur incumbent, you know, so it doesn't, just because they've got the opportunity, it doesn't mean someone else can come up and grab it. PSA, basically all of the collectors respect their gradings, but this is because they have decades-long

reputation in history of being the market leader. There's actually a competitive company called Beckett, which is they were head and head, but then basically Beckett, maybe even like a decade ago, I'm not super expert on this, but this is what I remember. They basically had a scandal where some, like, professor had been like doctoring cards. He would just like take a knife and like cut the edges, like he was like really precise. And then it kind of got exposed that he had been doctoring them and Beckett had graded them like, oh, these are 10 out of 10 amazing. And so basically all the collectors started boycotting them and like we don't trust their

ratings. So PSA is like the only one that people trust because of these decades long reputation. So if someone new comes up, they're not going to respect them because they don't have a history and track record. I don't know if I would invest in them now because I'm not sure how much growth potential there is. You know, it's a decades-old one. But to answer your question, right now, apparently they have a massive backlog, like four to six weeks or something.

And basically the price that you pay to have your card graded, there is based on what you estimate it's actually worth. So they have different price brackets. Like if your card is, you think it's worth over $5,000, then you have to pay more. I think the cheapest is something like $25, $50. Yeah, I think it might go down as old as 10, but yeah, They have kind of like a three month backlog right now. And I think that the opportunity for them would be you have the brand and the trust.

Can you use technology to drive, you know, more velocity, more volume and make more money, right? So I think they have the defensibility, but they don't have the innovation yet. The other thing that I think is interesting is PWCC, ever since you told me about that, I really liked what they're doing. Can you talk about the lending thing that you're doing with them? I thought that was really smart. Yeah. So I actually, I've only got a small amount of money here.

But this for me is like a really good. safer side of investment opportunity. So right now, like my wealth advisor and stuff, like typically wealth advisors will want you to just buy bonds as something that's safe. But then even though they've tried explaining to me like multiple times that was, I still don't get what the hell they are. And I'm just like, these are so boring. Because they want you to just put your money in that.

And then it's like, oh, this will go up 4% a year. And it's tax free. So this is so boring. And I don't even get what I'm investing in. It's like California water supply. bond or I don't understand it. So PWCC have this lending program, which basically how it works is, as I said, let's say, Sean, you have a collection of a thousand trading cards and you're storing them at PWCC. Now, PWCC, when you sent them the cards, they like were able to grade them. And because

they're the largest auction house, they have all the data about how much your card is really worth. Like they're monitoring real time, you know. So they basically know, have a very big. very accurate idea about how much your trading card is, collection is worth. So they'll be like, your collection is worth like $50,000, according to us. They also are storing your collection. So they actually have your asset in their possession. And so they'll say like, hey, listen, your collection is worth $50,000. I'll give you a line of credit because you need to buy a house or something. So I'll give you a line of credit of like 50% of the value of your collection. So I'll give you like a loan of $25,000. And they're going to charge you pretty high interest on that because

you can do the loan just for like one month or something. So it's about 10% a year interest. But this is like way safer than normal loans because like normally a bank giving you a loan, you're banking on like your paychecks, whereas you might just lose your job or like a mortgage. I've never seen your house and it could get blown up by a storm or something versus or you could just run away. But PWCC, they own your trading card collection. They have custody, right? Yeah, they've got custody. And so basically me, as a lender, I can lend money against that training card collection. And it basically pulls all of the users. So basically what for me as a lender, I put in, let's say, $250,000 that I'm lending. And

PWCC will spread that across all the loans that they have. And I get paid like 9% a year interest. That is tax that order in the income. So it's the highest tax. So, you know, up to 50% interest. So it's not the most lucrative thing. You're looking at a stable 9% before tax, maybe 5% after tax. However, it seems very safe to me and is stable income because they've been doing this program for 10 years, they've never had anyone default. If someone did default, as in like they gave them a loan,

the guys refused to pay it back. PWCC would just sell their trading card collection. They know how much it's worth. They only gave a loan against 50% of the value anyway. So the training collection should be more than enough in value. If that wasn't enough to pay back your debt, then they use all of the other collection of trading cards they have because it's appalled. You're not only doing a loan to one user that you're investing in all of the ones. What's your current net worth is in, what percent is in these alternative assets?

Maybe 10 percent? That's a substantial amount. Right. That's a lot. I view these loans as like a separate asset class to owning. For me, I view this is like fixed income. Basically, I'm just getting a check in the mail every month. Yeah, that's true.

But to a normal person, like to my parents or your parents, they're like, Jack, this is kind of strange. This falls on that category of alternative. But you're saying 10% is just the collectibles part, not the lending part. Yeah, well, I mean, the lending have only really started with it. So I only have a small. So right now you do Rally Road, which is everything, baseball cards, cars, boxing gloves, whatever. You do Masterworks, which is basically you can buy a portion of a Picasso.

So you can buy, it's high-end art. What's Otis? It's very similar to Rally Road. It's kind of a mix between Rally Road and Masterworks. They have high-end art, but also high-end collectibles. What's mythic markets? It's more like niche. They're figuring out, they're the smallest player, I think.

They're figuring out the positioning. He gave them the feedback. Some of their stuff is like so niche. It's just targeting people that play Magic the Gathering. So they have like this painting of a card from Magic the Gathering. I'm like, what the fuck is? I don't know what the hell it is. Like, Rally Road is awesome because your parents would know most of the assets on there and be like, all right, that's pretty unique.

They have like the joystick controller that they used for the NASA mission that landed on the moon. Or they have the first edition signed Harry Potter. Like, everyone knows this stuff. But then Mithic Markets has like some stuff that's kind of decent, some stuff that's just like, oh, this is the highest value card in Magic the Gathering. It's like this plant. I'm like, what the fuck is that? What other categories interest do?

Because I have a few that I'm thinking about. Do you have any that you're like, there needs to be a marketplace for this or this is the category that I think is going to pop in the next five years? Well, kind of Rally Road is trying to be the platform with all of those. They have different tabs for all of the assets. They have wine, all of these. They don't have art,

but there isn't really much of an asset class in terms of collectibles I could think of. I guess one I haven't seen is maybe like currencies, like unique currencies or historical artifacts from like dinosaur bones or something. That's interesting. Do you guys know, I actually don't know how to pronounce it, even though I go to it all the time. Is it called Hadoki?

It's the watch one. Yeah. How do you, I don't even know how to pronounce it. It's one of those words that you like read it all the time. Haudenki or Hedoki. Oh, yeah, yeah. They just sold a majority of steak. So basically, it's a weird company.

I don't know if it's considered a media company or an e-company, but they started out by just blogging about watches. Now they sell special edition watches. And I believe, and Abrae, you'll have to double check. I believe they just sold on Friday or Thursday last week. And I think they sold for around $100 million, and they're doing $20 million in revenue. But basically the idea, and I'm a very low collector of watches.

I'm very new to it. But it's for like high-end Rolexes and things like that. And I noticed that when I went to go and buy, I bought a two, I own two Rolexes from the 80s and 70s. And if you want to buy an older Submariter, they are so hard to find right now. Watches, I mean, they've always been popular, but Louis Vuitton bought this company, which is an interesting signal. Well, also they also had an interesting background because they were a company that had been going for many years.

And then Kevin Rose, who's the fan of dig and stuff, he had raised maybe like five or ten million, like a startup studio, but he was kind of messing around with ideas and he didn't really know what to work. on. And so he just like merged with the H of company and then just kind of made them like sexy with CEO for like a year or two, then quit. And then so maybe just made them like more tech respectful to. So that's, I think that's an interesting category is watches. I think they're growing, you know, a lot of young celebrities, John Mayer, like cool people are like super into them. I think that's categories and actually get a lot bigger. I think that categories is hard because like Jack was saying, I think that the larger, the most popular platforms will do well.

as they can just add your category fashion and you can become large. There might be some exceptions. Like I was looking at a company to invest in that's comic book space. And they have like a good reputation in the comic space. They are, you know, well known in that community. They already have relationships with all the kind of brick and mortar stores. And so, you know, they might be able to get to escape velocity in, let's say, the comic book world, which would maybe have a different population. I think that for the most part, there's the opportunities in this are look a little bit different. So there's things like, Sam, do you know NBA Top Shot? The game, you paid the bar?

No, that's Popa Shot. So Top Shot is a new collectibles type of thing. You know the guys who started CryptoKitties? Do you remember CryptoKitties? Yeah, it was like a joke that turned into like a huge thing on accident. Yeah, kind of. So they pivoted to something called NBA Top Shot or that's what they focus on now. I don't know if they fully pivoted or what.

But what it is is it's a crypto-based thing. These are called NFTs, non-fundgible tokens, meaning like for Bitcoin, all Bitcoin are the same. My Bitcoin or your Bitcoin, you can't tell the difference. But like for a collectible, like mine and yours are two. distinct things and there may be only 10 of mine in existence, right? So that's what NFTs are. The blockchain now allows for people to build NFT-based things. And so what these guys did was they initially made crypto kitties, which was a collectible of these different types of kitties that they made and it kind of went viral because it was kind of funny and goofy or whatever. And it kind of

faded out. But what they're doing with a Top Shot is they partnered with the NBA and they licensed out moments, highlights, basically. So you open up a pack. And instead of getting a player's card, you get LeBron dunking in 2009 on the against the Atlanta Magic, this one awesome donkey hat. And you get that. And they basically say that there are 400 of these highlights in these moments, these top shots in existence. You got one of them and that's in your collection now. They tried to turn, instead of a static trading card, they're saying, of this video moment that's five seconds long from, you know, the NBA that's actually like, and they sort of artificially create the scarcity around it by saying there will only be this many of this moment ever created.

That bullshit to me, right? Well, everyone's got a different opinion of it. I don't know. I've opened up one pack just to see what it was like. And actually, Ben, Ben's on the call, too. Ben, you should tell about the top shot you just opened and your reaction to it. Yeah, I opened a pack and I got a Cam Reddish dunk for like $30. I don't know if you guys know who that is.

He's like a subpar NBA player. And I was like, how the fuck is this going to be worth anything at any point? This is kind of odd to me. I'm on it right now. They're selling stuff for $200. The reason that I wouldn't be bullish on this is because they are the ones claiming that the assets are valuable and facilitating the trading. Like in the basketball or the collectible world, it kind of works because the grading authority saying how scarce something is is independent of the producers that are making the basketball stuff. So PSA is the one saying this is valuable.

We have the data. Like if you're just creating, otherwise you could just give a value to every clip on YouTube. Right. And also just collecting clips, I think, is I can see why you would talk yourself into the idea and why it would sound cool in a pitch deck, but in practice, support. I don't think it's like, well. So one thing that I do think would be interesting. Actually, sorry, to interject, Sean, is that. So I don't think that this like virtual asset on the blockchain is interesting to me right now. It's too early. And these assets, a video clip has no underlying value. But I would be interested to see Otis or Rally Road or a competitor put, physical collectibles on a blockchain. So then I could own, like, let's say, they could just tokenize assets. So then a Michael Jordan training card, I would have it as a coin. And then I could send it to my friend to coin or like sell it on. Then you could have like multiple trading platforms, you know, then are independent. So that would be kind of interesting, physical collectibles

on. Does rally or anyone, do they let you send a fraction to a friend? Can you gift? No. Okay, that's kind of interesting. So I would say, okay, one opportunity is these guys who were trying to basically say, okay, shit, all the traditional collectibles, they're already on traditional platforms. So let's create a new collectible, right? That's what they're trying to do with this like moments thing. Now, it may work man out. Sorry, just to add in Sean, actually Otis is doing one bit like that. Otis is doing collaborations. So they're doing like Otis X some guy. They haven't done that well so far with it, to be honest, because again, they're kind of creating a collectible just for Otis, there's no data on what its actual value is.

Then there's another kind of like angle here, which is like making it easier, right? So one of the problems when I was looking at buying this collection was like, I was like, shit, I don't know what any of this is worth. You know, I'd have to send it into going to graded. That's kind of expensive. And then, you know, we looked at, for example, there's a couple of apps that are doing what are called live breaks. Sam, do you know what these are?

Yeah. Yes. And you talked about it last week. And people on YouTube are doing it. I looked up this, I watched this Logan Paul video, 10 million views of him opening a deck of cards. And then there's this other guy name, is his name Pac-Man, I think his name is. And it's a channel with 2 million subscribers, and all he does is opens packs of cards. Yeah, it's crazy.

And this also happens on Twitch. There's this guy Castro who does this on FIFA. FIFA's not even collectibles, right? It's just like, within the game, there's these micro-transactions. And every kid kind of like begging their mom, like, can I get some coins so I can buy more FIFA packs? And the mom's like, what? I already bought you the game. What are you talking about?

But like the games have started building in these micro-transactions. So this guy will just buy like four grand worth of packs and just open them for three hours. and while he's opening them, people are subscribing and donating to him so he can keep it going. And like for a kid, it's like the dream. It's like, dude, what if my mom gave me $3,000 and I could just buy all the diamond packs? And like, they could just, they just watch him do it instead because that's like the closest they'll ever get. So I think that's interesting that it's interesting to watch people open.

But I was on one of these. So there's Loop, which is L-O-U-B-E. That's for sports card live break. So it's like a live stream like a Periscope or a Twitch stream. But what it is is it's a table and the guy, if you push the buy button, the guy will open up the pack you just bought and you'll see the whole group together will see what you got inside and then there's whatnot which is doing this for Pokemon cards and basically non-sports and they're doing quite well and so I was looking at these and I was like okay that's cool problem was again

if this guy's opening this pack I don't really know enough like a collector will know oh my god that's a rare card that was worth 360 dollars that you just got it would take me like a three-day process to figure out what I really got and what it's worth I was curious to see have people done the thing. I don't know if you know this Jack. Have people done the thing where they kind of like use like an iPhone app, kind of like that plant scanner app that basically just lets you just hold up your phone to a card you own and tells you like this is this card. It's worth between this and this depending on how it got graded. You could send it in to go get graded and like find out if it's the $30 version or the $300 version. Do you know if something like that is this?

Because I think that technology has been used for plant identification, bird identification, you know, math problem solving. I don't see why they couldn't do that with cards. Well, actually it had been approached by a couple of users in the Trends Facebook group that are working on business ideas in the trading card space. And one of them is looking to build an iPhone app that will try and use AI and stuff to give you their opinion about the grade as well. So kind of doing that and grading it. They would maybe grade it for a dollar instead of $25. Obviously, this is just their opinion, but you could maybe just have a rough idea. So one of the reasons I think that's interesting is because there's a lot of

people out there that just have a collection from when they were a kid when this was not a money-making and they're just like yeah for the hell of it let's just see what happens yeah they have a binder and like they're not going to go spend $10 a card descended in a PSA that's way too extreme you know are they really going to spend the time to list each one on eBay and then like fulfill it and whatever like I think that's kind of like interesting so so I think there's a latent demand if you could just aggregate my friend Xavier did this with books where he just got people to send in old books that they didn't want and it's like it's a social impact project, but like he would sell the books and then he would, this is called better world books.

And he would sell, he created a marketplace like Amazon to sell the books. All the books he was getting for free. All he had to do was just receive mail from people and libraries and stuff. And then he would also donate books on their behalf to, you know, libraries and need. So I think somebody could do that if you could get everybody to go into their garage or their attic and go get their card collection and just mail you all their shit. And if you had an efficient way to like scan those, I think that could be a somewhat interesting opportunity, kind of like the junk. Isn't this, I always get caught up in this shit because I'm like, all right,

Jack's talking, he's got a large, potentially maybe millions of dollars involved in this. But he said himself that he knows nothing about sports cards. It's so odd, though, that you've got these people that are created. Like, at the end of the day, there's got to be someone who wants to buy this just to hold onto it and look at it or hang it on their wall. Isn't it so weird how this market is being created around people who actually aren't fans of it? Well, I think that's the beauty of it, right?

This is just like Bitcoin or many other things. which is that the value is in the belief of it. So some people want it for the tangible use, the same way some people want gold for jewelry, right? They want to put it on the wall. They want to look at it. They want to think fuzzy thoughts about Michael Jordan every time they see it.

And other people like Jack are just saying, oh, here's a scarce asset. Here's a rare asset that I can put some percentage of my net worth into. And I see the trends of where this stuff is trading. And I know that not more is being produced. And it's a safe store of value for me. I don't think my wealth is going to go down. That's my question.

Is it that safe? So, for example, let's say that you have a card of a guy and tomorrow he says something racist or he rapes someone or he dies or like let's this happens in NBA guys get injured right and their card value goes down. Yeah like what happens if Jordan does something tomorrow

he has an OJ Simpson moment where it's like oh my God you are not a good guy you're a bad guy something crazy happens does that mean when they die when they die the price goes up 4X overnight. Jack's waiting for these guys to die. I don't know who Wayne Gretzky is, but I can't wait until that guy crooks. They say any news is good news, right?

If he said something racist, it gets banned or whatever. It makes his card more valuable. Like, OJ Simpson's cards are probably really valuable. That's true. The opposite also happens, right? Because right now all these rookie cards for like Luca Donchich or in the NFL, this guy Joe Burrow, he was a rookie, he was the number one pick. His card was worth X.

He got hurt. He like blew out his knee in a recent game. His card value went down by about 50%. And a whole bunch of people were buying because they're like, look, I believe in Joe Burrow over the 15 years. This is my opportunity to, but it's kind of like a growth asset then. I'm trying to make a bet because I think I can get a 4x multiple on this if I'm right. And that game of being right and wrong, I think is what makes it fun.

Just like, you know, in many ways, people do that with the stock market. It's like I love listening to mob stories. And I follow all on YouTube, all these guys who were in the mob. And they're like, yeah, two things would happen. First of all, we would take so much money for a sports game. And in the 70s and 80s, you know, the athletes weren't making as much. And so they were able to bribe them or the athletes were notorious gamblers and we would get into debt with us and we would say, all right, make sure that this happens next game so we could bet money on it. I wonder if you're going to see anything like that going on it because this is like one of the very few assets.

I guess you could do this with stocks, although there's way more regulation around it. But this is one of the few assets that it seems like you can meaningfully manipulate. Yeah, so you're highlighting good thing. So actually Otis, their tagline is they want to be the NASDAQ of everything. However, unlike the NASDAQ, NASDAQ caused all these regulations that you can't do insider trading and stuff. Here is the Wild West, like anything goes. There's no insider trading rules or whatever. That's why there's also room for opportunity because it's so new, there's no rules yet.

Jack, if Jack wanted to, could partner up with three other people and could pump. You could pump and dump all day probably on these assets because there's not enough volume. That's what I'm saying. You could take $10 million probably and you could move markets and just press. profit every single time you do because of that. The same way people did this with ICOs, kind of like in these shit coins in 2017-2018. There's this famous episode from Entourage,

that TV show Entourage. And I'm not a baseball guy, so I'm not going to remember this, but there was a baseball player in the 60s and 70s with the Yankees, Sunny, something. I don't know, maybe you guys know. And one of the guys on Entourage was like, hey, my grandpa's neighbors with ex-player, they say he's really, really sick.

He's about to die. And so they go and buy his card for $250,000. and then they're like, oh, my grandpa said that he recovered. And they're like, shit, and they lose all this money. What's like, you know what I'm talking about the famous? Yeah, I don't have to remember. But anyway, it was like, I'm afraid of that happening. In terms of the tampering or sort of like the mob, I mean, sports betting is the way, better

way to go about it if you wanted to do it, right? Beating on a game and getting somebody to shave points or throw is much easier than like decapitating or killing somebody for their card value, right? So I think sports betting is a much bigger market would be much easier. easier to tamper with. Now, there is, of course, risk, right? If there was no risk, there would be no reward. So the risk that you're talking about are the risks that go associated with this. I think that's like, okay. I wanted to bring up two other things that are interesting. I probably should have led with this one, which is eBay. Sandy Kofax, by the way.

Oh, Sandy. Okay. Not Sunny Kofx. I'm so not a baseball guy. I know he's like a big deal. So eBay announced today that they had a new program, which is interesting. And with it, they released some new news. So the program, I'll say it was really simple. It's like, If you're selling a trading card that's worth $20 or less in value, now they guarantee that you can mail it for a dollar envelope guaranteed by USPS, which is like 70% less than it would normally cost. So it's really helpful for sending, you know, the buying and selling of trading cards. The reason they did this and they announced this number is because in 2020,

eBay, which is still the biggest platform that all these other guys are trying to unbundle, did 45 million cards sold in 2020. If you just take an average of $20, that's $900 million of GMV just on trading cards, let alone any other type of collectible that's sold on eBay, right? So that's the size of the prize, I would say, is probably that or double that. If you just add everybody else up, they probably add up to maybe half of what eBay is, something like that. So let's say it's $1.5 billion in GMV is kind of like where this market is today.

Not the biggest market, but also much bigger than, you know, the average person would expect about like Pokemon cards and Garbage Pill Kids and baseball cards and stuff like that. So I think that was pretty interesting to see the scale that eBay has on this stuff. And they're being really aggressive now because they know that they already like messed up with sneakers. Sneakers got taken away by StockX and Goat and stuff like that. And so if you go on Reddit right now, every Reddit ad I see is eBay talking about how you can trade sports cards easily on eBay.

You can trust them. And it's going to be hard for them to fight off all these competitors. They've also been featuring on their homepage trading cards for quite a long time. So, you know, they're pushing that to every user that visits the home page of eBay. Here's another opportunity or here's another idea that I've seen that I actually really like. So what are the opportunities people trying to stretch? So there's Rally Road and others who are trying to be the marketplace. They're trying to beat eBay.

Then you have people who are trying to create new collectible moments or items. That's like NBA Top Shop. And then you have people that are what I'll call making the on ramp easier. So that's kind of what I was saying where I was like, even if I bought a pack, it wouldn't know what the hell is worth. So there's a company that I talked to yesterday about potentially investing in. It's called dibs. And actually, d-I-bbs.io.

I'll tell you a funny story about the pitch. It had like every red flag you can imagine during the pitch. I hope the guy's not listening. I feel bad if I do. But like, I got to say, it was a hilarious pitch. He's like, a nice guy, but he's like, yeah, I'll tell you the five red flags. Red flag number one. He's like, oh, my background is I was doing social media marketing.

And I was like, that's like to me like, I know that type of person. Did you have abs? Yeah. He was like, good-looking, funny, and had apps. And I was like, okay, already I don't want to invest. You're too good-looking for a three. Second thing was, oh, yeah, I live in Columbia. I live in Medell, I was like, oh, why do you live in Columbia?

I don't want to know this story. You're like, okay, that's already like... Is it an American living in Columbia? American living in Columbia. Did he have an ICO under his belt? Yes, so that was the next thing. Oh, my God. Spent the last three years doing marketing for random ICOs.

Oh, my God. I just predicted this. Does he have a Ferrari? Okay, very close, very close. So there was two other ones. One was, I can't say his name. I don't want to totally, totally bash the guy guy because this just for jokes. But his name is the name of a city and his partner's name is like this total white guy name who lives in Santa Monica. And I was like, oh, God, these names, I can't even deal with these names. And then the last piece was, he had posted, I was stalking him on Instagram during Nicole. And he had posted like this video of like Grant Cardone. He was like, Grant Cardone. He was like, Grant Cardone. I was like, Grant Cardone. I think actually it's kind of interesting. But like anybody who admires him that, like, I'm like, okay, that's the sort of like level of depth you have around kind of your, you know, you are what you admire in many ways. And so like for people who are like, Gary V is the most brilliant businessman I've ever met. And it's like, you know, he's just so inspirational.

I'm like, okay, that's cool. Like I'm glad he's inspiring you, but, you know, that's one specific type of like celebrity entrepreneur, maybe for that to be your hero. This guy just checked all the boxes, man. But their idea is actually really good. So one thing I really liked that they're doing. idea is that you just buy into a player. So how do you make this so approachable for the average person? So you just say, hey, you think LeBron is awesome or let's say, let's take an up and coming

player like Janus or Luca, you know, these like NBA players were still young in their career. You say, oh, you believe in Luca. You could just buy into the Luca collection. So they're turning players into like their own little ETF of a collection of cards that are associated with that player. So you don't have to know that this is a 19, you know, or sorry, like a 2010 rookie card of this mint grade from this basic collection that's never going to get reproduced or whatever, right? You don't have to know all that. You just have to buy into the player at a certain price point, and you know that it's collateralized by the underlying card assets. So I think that's actually like a kind of a smart idea to let people buy into these kind of like known entities and not have

to know the science underneath what they're doing. So I like that idea of making it more approachable. Well, I mean, the idea that I was having on this call, I was just thinking you could abstract it a step further. Like if you get someone who actually knows financial markets, they could just launch an actual ETF on the New York Stock Exchange. So I would just start with, well, one, you could just have alternative assets as an ETF, just have it so broad, but then going in deeper, then you could just have sports cards or art because, like, actually one guy I know, he's just launched an for Bitcoin in Egypt and Africa region and Europe. You can't trade it in US for some reasons, but he's just making a bunch of money just made

an ETF for Bitcoin. How easy is it to make an ETF? Because I know people have been trying this for Bitcoin in the US and just getting blocked. But I don't know. Just don't do it in the US. I don't know if that's a Bitcoin regulation. Do it in Colombia. How old you boy?

Yeah. That was the other one. He's like, oh yeah, we use the blockchain. And I was like, oh, why do you use the blockchain? He's like, um, sort of our secret. I don't really want to talk about it. And I was like, wow, okay. Hadi San Diego, that's his name.

Hottie San Diego doesn't know his shit. Okay, so you could launch, so, Jack, do you know how long this guy was working on launching an ETF in Egypt or whatever you just said? Well, you can, it's quite big, actually, and you can trade it in, he's in Egypt, but then it's basically you just can't do it in the U.S. because of some rules. But basically what you, I don't know how long it takes, I would guess maybe like six to 12 bumps or something. But basically what you can also do is the simpler thing, how these things often start, is there's ETFs and then there's indexes. So indexes you can't actually trade against.

They are just a way of tracking. But then basically people can create ETFs that like mirror an index. So there's probably already an index for the art world. Just create an ETF allows it to be tradable. You could do this in Europe. So I was looking at, so this company that's behind the stuff is called Panini. and Panini is a European company. What ended up happening, I was like, why does this European company make all the basketball cards? And what happened was, Benini was like a billion-dollar company back in 2009, something like that. They were doing a billion-dollar revenue. It's probably worth a bit more than that.

And they were big in the space in soccer, I believe, and in Europe. And I don't know the full history, but what happened was they came to the U.S. And they outbid tops and upper deck for the basketball rights. So they got the NBA rights. They outbid them. And so all the basketball cards that are like super, super hot right now. That's probably like the most bought into card collection right now is basketball cards. And they're all by this company called, you know, the cards are by Prism. Prism is owned by

Panini. And Panini is the maker of it. And so I don't know how long these rights work, but they got basketball, they got hockey. They got for baseball. They got like a certain type of right where they can't show the player in uniform. They can show like something else. But they were basically pretty aggressive and they outleaped those guys. And so I think you could do potentially an ETF in Europe where you have to have the belief in alternative assets and maybe the regulation is looser there. So I like that. This could be like the way Chamatha and these guys are making like $100 million per spec. This could be like that.

Is that how much do you make by the way? Oh, more than that, dude. I think he's making like $100 million or more per spec and he's doing 26 packs. They get like 20% of the capital raised as the manager. And some of these are like 100 minutes. I just had another idea. So basically the opposite of that kitty cards thing, whatever. I think lots of stuff is going virtual, but I think there just is intrinsic value in physical.

The more stuff goes virtual and virtual, that's why I'm bullish about physical stuff like Harry Potter stuff stored in a vault. Because you're preserving a time capsule. Like physical is important. I just had another idea, a bit more niche, but couldn't they just create trading cards, physical trading cards, but for like e-sports players? Yeah. So there's a couple companies that are doing this. Is that going to do for e-sports. The more popular version of it actually, because e-sports players themselves are actually not.

that popular, but the idea of like an YouTuber slash Twitch streamer, which is basically the subset of either really good player who actually gets famous, because otherwise, e-sports players kind of like this nameless, faceless, one of the hardcore people know about them. There's a company called LMAO. So what I saw this come out and I thought this was interesting, or LAMO, Lamo cards, or not cards. They're doing as dolls. U-2s is another one that's making these little collectible dolls that are on either memes or influencers. And what Lamo did was they partner. with the four biggest Twitch streamers. And the way they did this was they gave a piece of the company to the agency that

manages it or the agency that incubated this company. I'm not fully sure what the deal was. But there was this agency called Loaded. And what Loaded did was they said, hey, we represent Ninja, who's the number one streamer in the world, also Dr. Disrespect, also Summit and Lyric. And what these guys did was they made this collectible little figurine action figure, basically, of each of those streamers. They actually sell them in physical stores.

they did an activation at like Comic-Con where they built like a six-foot-tall version of it, put it outside and said, scan your phone on this, like hold your phone up to this, and they put a QR code on the body so that when you held it up on your camera, it launched their website and said, this is coming soon. And it also was like an AR thing. Like when you were holding your phone up to it,

action figure like came to life like a transformer and had like smoke coming out and whatever. It was like, buy this thing coming soon. Pretty intense. It didn't take off as big as I thought it would have. But I don't think that that's a, bad idea. I would still go after that if I could, right? Because it's the same idea, right? What's the difference between LeBron and Ninja at this point? Both of them have 20 million followers

and, you know, armies of 13-year-olds who think that they're gods. Could you turn that into a physical trading card asset and license their brand and likeness? Probably in a way that you could never do with sports because it's all too, it's done already. Is anyone doing like income share agreements for Twitch people? Now you're talking to John's language. Like someone is just a brand new streamer and you know you join together to give them $100,000 because you think they're going to be massive and then in exchange they give you 25% of their next five years income so there's a two things that are like this that are interesting one is some people have tried to copy the uh k-pop model so this is how k-pop works right in korea which is they basically say okay come to our factory right we have

a studio with cameras and lights you get to come into our accelerator like a y-combinator and we're going to teach you how to build your brand and all this stuff but we get a piece of you and we get to represent you as your agency. I think that's what like what, what, what BTS, what's it called BTS? I don't know if BTS came out of that. Maybe they did, but this is a very common, very popular thing in Korea. So some people have tried that in the U.S. to mix results. But the bigger version of this was actually the other day, Mr. Beast, who's one of the

probably the fastest growing YouTuber. Are you guys familiar with Mr. Beast? Yeah. He does these videos that are like kind of just like random ass stunts and challenges. He'll go to a restaurant, he'll tip $20,000 and just record the waiter's reaction. Or he'll say, he'll buy a Lamborghini and, you know, tell us four friends, come here, put your hand on the Lamborghini. And the last person to have their hand on this Lamborghini gets the Lamborghini. He just films them 48 hours. And then someone

has to go pee. And then they, you know, like, eventually they all fall asleep or whatever. And one person's left. So what he said was like, you know, there's all these up and coming channels that I think could make really good content. I would love to do like an ISA. Like, I'll promote you. And you keep doing your thing. I'll help you. But I'll take, you know, 10, 15% of your channel's revenue. This is like a pretty compelling idea because I think more than the, you have to do it like an income share agreement where you're not just giving them capital. You have to help them get the exposure in the same way that Lambda School helps you get the job and have to train to you to learn how to code. It's a little bit more than just the money for future

money. How's that difference getting an agent? Because Mr. Beas can blow you up, right? So he can shout you out on his channel. He can basically king make anybody who he thinks has the raw ingredients, but what's the incentive for him to shout out these cool people? Well, if he owned a piece of them like a portfolio, if he had a portfolio of these up-and-comers. So he's not on the content treadmill every day. He uses his following to put the next person on the treadmill and he just sits back and relaxes from there. Yeah, I'm into all this shit. I think that this is, we're at the hour. I think that this is, I want to go work at Rally Road. That's what I want to do. How fun would it be to work at those places? What type of returns are you seeing investing in these IPOs when you think

like, I guess what's good, what's normal? Is it super volatile? What are you seeing? I'm not sure about blended returns. And I'm doing this with a longer time horizon. It's kind of hard to quickly flip stuff. But Rally Road has had some awesome exits in the past year. So basically you can buy in at the IPO stage and then maybe someone off the platform is acquiring it for double the price, quadruple the price, or you can just buy a bunch of shares during the IPO and then like flip them to someone else later, you know. The challenge is that you kind of have to have some money to start with. I think the people, if you're coming there, not with much money. Like if you're coming there wanting to buy $25 worth, I don't think you're going to make much money

because you're just like washed out by the whales. They all, all these platforms are having stuff like for me as a whale. Like they're doing like pre-sales for me. Right. I can just buy in before any of that you sees it. JPMorgan does this or whoever will do this before an IPO, right? They go to their big clients and they say, hey, you get the early bid on the IPO before Dordash goes public or whatever.

So I'm not sure about blended returns pretty low at the moment. Because, as I said, looking, you want to have a few years horizon. I mean, hopefully I don't think. Do you have like a goal? 10 to 20% a year? What did you say 10 to 20% a year return? I mean, if something's like an alternative asset, it should be paying outsized returns for the risk. Are you doing it for that reason?

Or you're just doing it because you just want to do it? Just both. Yeah, it's kind of fun. By the way, Ben just linked us this thing in the chat. So after Mr. Bees tweeted that out, he then made a very very very. video saying get this random person a million subscribers on YouTube and he just tagged this guy at Zellis. And if you go to Zellis's YouTube channel now, he has almost two million subscribers now. Thanks to Mr. Beast. Right. So he just literally, it's like if Soquoia could invest in you and get

you your first 10 million DAU basically. That's basically what he was able to do. Wow. What is that that one that he got? Two million views. What's that called? Zellis. Z-A-E-A-L-U-U-S. Yeah, I posted it. I'm not sure how many he has. had beforehand, but I think it was a small account. He made a video about it. He made it into a contest. I mean, that just grew up our, you know, I just got one other idea, though, is Sam related to the Houdinke thing you were saying,

that are they a media company or are they an investment company? But kind of interesting to see, like, a media type company join, tapped onto Rally Road or something, you know? Well, that's kind of what they are. You know, like a good example of this is Huckberry. Huckberry is a weird store. Huckberry is a store that sells just like guy stuff, so camping gear or guy clothes or outdoor stuff. It's like R.E.I, but for like kind of yuppie guys. And they tell the story behind the clothing.

And with Rally Road, whenever I go to the stuff, I'm a car fan. So I like hearing the history of that car or I like hearing the history of that baseball car. I want to know the history around it. And I actually do think that they do need to do a better job of telling the story. Because I used to work for this TV show called American Pickers. And we had six or seven million. viewers a week. At the time when I worked there, we were number two on cable. So it was the second most popular show in the country. And the guy, Mike Wolf, the main guy, would go and tell the story behind a gas pump. He would find a 1960s gas pump and he would say, this was created by mobile oil. Mobile oil made it this way because in World War II, they didn't have enough supplies, so they had to do whatever. And people would come in from around the world and they would buy this gas pump because

of that story and they would pay a massive premium for it. And I do think that a lot of these platforms they need to do a much better job of telling a story. And if they could copy media company's strategy of storytelling, I think they'll have a significantly larger business. And I think Ben said something about, what was this someone's a newsletter for fractional assets? What are you? Atlin Insights.

They're basically a new company. They're raised money right now. They're trying the media approach, in addition to having a, as they say, a stock market for physical things where it's a buy and sell platform for collectibles. If somebody's listening to this and you're like, okay, yeah, I don't know shit about Pokemon cards or whatever. One thing I would recommend is I've learned over time that what smart guys like Jack kind of do as their hobby or where they start kicking the tires and it seems a little bit weird and it's kind of like laughable and you're like four years later that's going to be the thing that's really interesting that like you're going to wish you got in.

Like this is how crypto was for me. I kind of ignored it initially. Enough of my kind of really smart friends were dabbling with the stuff on the weekends. And when they were dabbling with on the weekends, that was a strong signal. And actually I just went to my old old laptop and I found. the Bitcoin that I have stored on that laptop. And the Bitcoin I have from back then, right, I think I had taken like a $2,000 and $3,000 budget and just been like, okay, I'm just going to buy some Bitcoin. I bought a little bit of Ethereum as well when that came out. And that's

not worth like almost 100 grand. And I don't know if that's going to happen, right? Like Bitcoin was one of these things that panned out as sort of the investment of the decade. But I would say, just for a learning exercise, I would go download Rally and Otis and Loop or one of these live breaking platforms as well. And I would take like $300. Like go take like, I don't know, 90 days of coffee money. Like skip your daily coffee and like, be like, okay, that's $300. And go like get a little bit of skin in the game just to learn how these platforms work. And then you'll, once you've skin in the game, you'll start checking on it.

And you'll start learning a little bit about it. And like, then you decide later like if this is a good idea or bad idea or whatever. Nine times out of ten, it's not something you're going to pursue. But that's like the simple way to get in. And you don't have to take such a huge amount of money to do it. Well, this one went a little long. We normally keep them at an hour. But I think it's good.

this was fun. Anything else we want to go over, Sean? No, I mean, thanks to Jack for coming on. Jack, is there anything else that we didn't talk about that we should have? You learn by watching how the markets react over time that I've just seen like, oh, okay, this Pokemon thing, it was available at this price, and it now has gone up to this price, and I would kind of just see how the markets move. I mean, one insight is for Masterworks, they have a minimum of $10,000 per art piece, because these are like $5,000 piece of art. But what they do is they segment their users, like when they're doing Google and stuff. They're like, hey, if you have over $10,000 to spend, go here. If you don't, then they

direct them to the trading platform where you can buy a piece for like $20 a piece. And so actually what I'm observing on Masterworks is that on average, like every single piece on their platform, none of them are trading below the IPO price. Especially if you thought, you would not have lost money. The challenge is that they don't have much liquidity yet. So you wouldn't be able to like sell all your shares all at once because $10,000 would flood the market. But it is kind of interesting observing. On the countryside, Rally Road, a bunch of their cars are like, some of them are down 50% from the IPO price. So it's not to say that you can't lose money on this. That's why Raleigh Road does seem to have more accurate market for what the true valuation of the set is, because some of their

assets are trading below IPO. Gotcha. Okay. And Jack, do you have a lot of Bitcoin? Yeah. And what's your take on Bitcoin? What's your like? So I was into all of the different alt coins and stuff like when it was at the bubble a few years ago. You could very easily see when the market was going to crash because I went to a friend's wedding in England, met this random guy and he's like, oh yeah, I just took an extra mortgage on my house and put it all into crypto. And I'm like, what are you doing? And then so that's what I said. Like when your taxi driver is giving you stock tips, that's the time to get out of that market.

So for me now, I'm buying for the long term, but I only have Bitcoin and Ethereum. Okay, that's great. By the way, I did the same. I went to a wedding in D.C. And my aunt who has a thick Indian accent tried to tell me about how great Ethereum was. And she's like, Ethereum's very good. And I was like, you know Ethereum? What's so good about it?

She's like, very good investment. And I was like, oh, God. So I came back and I tried to sell every crypto I had. And this is when Bitcoin was at 3,000. So I had gotten like a 10X. And I sold as much as Coinbase would let me. And then I hit the limits and I'm so upset. And it turned out to be a horrible move, right?

If I just held it, it would have done better. Which reminds me of, I think your rule of thumb is absolutely right, right? It did, it ran up to 20,000 and then it crashed back down. But there's another phrase that goes around around. Money is the bubble that never pops. It's unlike other assets because there is no checks and balances around it, like a stock can, like Tesla stock is like running up out of control. And at some point, they will have to deliver profits against that valuation. And if they ever have a setback in their production or

their profits or whatever, it's going to hurt their stock, there is no revenue. There is no profits of Bitcoin. The price is the stock. The price is the profits. And so the more the price goes up, the more people believe that this thing will keep going up. And that is the beauty of Bitcoin. My understanding is it's either in the top five or top 10 of all the price, the currencies in the world right now in terms of assets in that currency. So could easily become the number one held currency in the world. It's very appealing because it's not owned by any government or whatever. I had a long talk with my wife last night because I told her how much Bitcoin I'd been buying over the last two weeks. And she's like, what are you doing? She was more like, why did you talk

about this? And I was like, it's an investment. I'm not buying things. It's an investment. And she's like, That's like if I went and bought a house that didn't tell you. And I was like, no, but this is an investment. It's not like I'm buying things. Speaking of which, Sean, did you ever sell your house? Yes, I did. Was it a bloodbath? Yeah, I lost like 180K total.

Oh, oh. Well, I mean, yeah, that sucks, but like I would have thought it would have been even worse. Well, it's just like, right, like you lose that out of your down payment, right? So I lost like whatever, 20% of the money I had in the property I lost, right? So it's a 20% loss. That sucks. Not great. That's not great.

but like the way that I see the headlines now in San Francisco, it's like death and over and carnage. I'm lucky that I got out at all. I think it would have gotten much worse. That's what I'm saying. I only had one offer. I had one offer and I took it. Who was it?

Like a family or just a rich person or what? Yeah, they are like kind of an exec at wealth front. They're both execs at wealth front. One's like the head of whatever engineering or design, the other ones that have been of design or something like that. I don't know. They both like kind of like top. people at wealth front, I guess.

So they were unaffected, you know, by the, you know, they weren't like the economy was not hurting their business necessarily. Right. But it seems everyone else is getting the hell out of there. Yeah. I mean, everyone I know at least. But yeah. Create an ETF to be able to short San Francisco.

Ah, now you're talking. I really think, Jack, I'm surprised you're not in the SPAC game. I'm surprised you're not the guy with the ETF in Egypt or like, you know. Well, but the thing about Jack is he's got the IQ and the ability to pretty much pull off all this stuff. but he's missing one major component. What's that component, Jack, that you're missing? You know what it is.

Social, emotional. You're incredibly lazy. Okay, that's well. I'll say, Jack, I'll say, Jack, why don't you do this? And the answer is always too much work. They overboard on things that most people wouldn't lift a finger on. Didn't you, like, spend like a month building a chair, like a super ergonomic chair for yourself?

Oh, I didn't actually send you the photo. I actually, I bought the alt work now, which is like the actual. Gotcha. Yeah. But SPACs, I can't say anything, but actually, like, speak to me in like three months about SPACs. Oh, okay, okay, great. I love it. Crazy.

Okay, we should stop recording and we should start talking to him. All right, we should wrap it up. Thanks, Jack, for coming on, man. I appreciate it. Thank you.