The Startup Ideas Podcast - Memes Rule The World with Dogecoin Creator Billy Markus

Episode Date: January 19, 2022

Have you heard the story about the crypto founder who sold all his crypto for $10,000 only for it to be worth billions many years later? On this episode of Where It Happens, co-hosts Sahil Bloom (@sahilbloom) and Greg Isenberg (@gregisenberg) get to the bottom of one of the craziest stories by speaking directly with the co-creator of Dogecoin Billy Markus (@BillyM2k). He explains his early experiments in crypto, how he created Dogecoin, the truth about his famous sell, the future of cryptocurrencies, and a special message for Elon Musk.Want more community? Learn more here: http://trwih.comSPECIAL THANKS TO OUR SPONSORSCOMMONSTOCKhttps://commonstock.com/Why settle for the old model of investing when new options offer you so much transparency to help you grow your wealth? Commonstock is the home of smart money and an innovative social media approach to investing. We both love the platform and have used it to enhance our financial strategy.Commonstock is a social media platform like Reddit, but it removes anonymity and adds transparency. The app lets you see what smart money investors are buying and selling – in real-time – all while letting you see their reason why. This way, you know whether investors have skin in the game, or whether they only talk a big game. It’s a great way to get insights that support your investing strategy.To learn more and sign-up today go to commonstock.com.CAPCHASEhttps://www.capchase.com/roomToday’s show is sponsored by Capchase.Capchase is a new financing option for fast-growing startups. They are offering Where It Happens listeners .25% off their first draw, preferred onboarding, and more. Their main product Capchase Grow lets you tap into your future revenue today, meaning you can reinvest in your business faster. We love what they are offering to business owners.To learn more go to capchase.com/room

Dude, nice headset, man. God, I love that. That's like 80s retro gamer headset. I mean, I'm not embarrassed to wear it. I'm not afraid to be a nerd, but I know it makes me look a bit nerdy. I think it's amazing. It's like some ready player one shit. I love it, dude. I think it's kind of your look now. I sort of want you to wear it when we're back in person once this whole Amicron thing dies down and we can do these more in person again. I want you to keep that thing rolling.

I like it. You should just wear it around your neck. Be one of the neck headphone, guys. I'll start with my ears. I'll see if I can make through the neck. What's going on? What do you want to talk about today? Oh, man, got a bunch.

I want to drink, though. Last episode we filmed when we did it with Scott Bell. I didn't drink. And I actually felt like that was a mistake. So I've got my drink ready. And I'm going to be drinking Kentucky Owl Bourbon whiskey. A friend of mine, Blake Bird, shout out, big supporter, sent me this bottle for the holidays. And it's amazing.

And so I'm going to be drinking that today. What are you drinking? This is just a sparking water. I think it's pronounced Lecourt, even though I would call it Lecois. I think it's Lecois. I think it's Laquois. I think it's LeCroix, Ryan Hoover would know.

He drinks a lot of it, and he talks a lot about it. I think it's the Croy. It's the key lime flavor. Okay. You know, I'm in Florida, so key lime key. I leave Greg for two months, and he starts going soft on me.

I'm the only one drinking now. I'm the only degenerate around here. Anyway, I mean, if I lived in the Northeast during the winter, I would be drinking whiskey too at 4 p.m. Yeah, it's cold. There's ice on the road outside. I can see.

The whiskey tastes good. Keeps me warm. So, dude, let's dive into it. I feel like we have a lot. We've got a very cool guest that's going to come on that we'll intro when we get to it. But a bunch of stuff happened this week that I just want to talk about and I want to get your perspective on. Capchase is the financing solution for fast-growing startups. It lets companies access their revenue today so that they can reinvest in their business and grow and scale much quicker than they otherwise would be able to. Is it complex, though? No, it's super easy to set up, only a couple of clicks. You can go through the process so quickly.

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It's a platform for verified investment knowledge. So people are going and sharing their ideas, sharing their trades, but it's actually connected to their brokerage account. So you can see the results they're generating and see their actual track records over time. So you're learning from people not only the best investors, the Bill Ackman's, the Daniel Lobes are on there, but also individuals who are actually going and putting their money where their mouth is on these trades. and you're learning alongside them and being taken on the journey. Is it just stocks? There's everything now. There's going to be stocks.

There's crypto. We're in this crazy world where there's so many different investment opportunities, which just means there's so many opportunities to learn. And Commonstock is creating the platform for you to learn alongside the best. And also, as I said, let your gains speak. So to level up your investing game today, check out commonstock.com. You won't regret it. So you saw this vampire attack.

I think that's a hilarious name, by the way, which we can get into as part of all this. But OpenC got vampire attacked by this thing called, what's it called? Looks. Looks rare. Looks rare.org. Kind of crazy whole thing. So you're going to have to correct me if my research in general is off on this. I dug into it earlier because I'm trying to be more.

of a degenerate on this stuff. But it's kind of cool. So basically, you know, OpenC is like the biggest player in the NFT marketplace space. They just raised money. Mario at the generalist did a great piece on it, but they raised money at like, what, a $15 billion valuation or some like massive valuation. I can probably pull it up while we're talking here. But they raised money.

They're like, you know, the air incumbent. Yeah, 13.3 billion in New Round of Venture funding. Massive company. this company called looks rare which is looks rare.org comes along and does something kind of neat. It's called a vampire attack, but basically they entice you to come over and list NFTs on their new marketplace, looks rare.org. And the way they're doing it is by offering you an air drop of these looks tokens. And all of a sudden, people were doing it.

And the reason was because these looks tokens were actually valuable. And it was based on the amount of transaction volume. I think you did on OpenC, the number of tokens you'd get dropped, I think. And so you'd go. Yeah, it was in how much you bought. So, yeah. It was your ETH volume on OpenC? Yeah, I believe it's, you know, if you spent, let's say, 10th on OpenC,

you got some sort of percentage, you know, something like that in Lux tokens. Okay. Okay. So I, my experience with this, like, I think it's fascinating. It's actually like from a consumer standpoint, a pretty neat growth hack because basically what they did was incentivize people with this thing that who knows if it has value. But basically you just had to list, you had to list an NFT for sale on looks rare.org in order to claim these tokens. And what started happening was as people started claiming them, people started staking them, buying them. Suddenly they had real value.

And so like I went over. I was kind of late. I think it all started on Monday or something like that. I think you texted me about it, a few others. I didn't pay attention. And then I went over to it yesterday and pulled up my thing. And my looks rare token drop was worth like four Eath or something like that in the amount of looks tokens they were going to send me, which is bananas. Like they were just giving you free money.

Right. So what did you do? So you claim the looks token and then tell people what you did. Yeah. So all you had to do to claim it was. was list one for sale. So I had some like unbelievably worthless NFT in my OpenC, you know, in my wallet that I listed for sale, which was never going to sell. I listed it for one Eath on the looks rare thing. And that allowed me to claim it. So again, like I kind of found a loophole to the system because it didn't matter. And it was like I think it was Chodes by the way. It was the Toad's derivative Chodes that has no volume, no liquidity. I listed that. It allowed me to claim, I think I claimed 3,000 looks. And maybe I'm like embarrassed. Well, maybe that's not many. I don't know how many other people got. But it was worth like at the time when I did it, I think it was worth 15,000 US dollars. Like so in Eath, you know, it was like five Eath, and maybe a little less than that, five Eath, but kind of crazy. And so then basically it says like they have you there and you can sell it. And I think a lot of people probably did and dumped it. But then a few of my friends were like, hey, you can actually stake it. And so then on the website, they have this whole thing where you can. immediately stake the looks that you got and generate, like they have a live tracker of the

APR you can generate that's like very gamified. And so I was like, well, this is free money that no one, like I didn't think I was going to have. So I might as well stake it. And so I staked it. And it's like a 950% APR to stake it or something like right now. Right. So I think, I mean, there's a lot of interesting pieces of it. First of all, you got $15,000 for doing nothing. Someone, basically just wrote you a check for $15,000. Assuming it's liquid. Yeah, assuming you can sell it, right? Like, sometimes they do these air drops and the thing isn't liquid.

You can't actually sell it. So who knows? But looks, like, I claimed mine. I claim mine. And I sold it right away. A lot of people did that, right? So you converted it into ETH, converted it into ETH, which I converted into U.S.D,

which I transferred to my account, and I went and bought something. so like liquid and that and you know it happened and it happened quickly so I think like for me it was like Christmas came really early we're in mid-January so so yeah the first thing is like the fact that people are getting this like random check is is honestly why I think a lot of people don't like people in crypto or people who are doing these NFT things is like sometimes it is really easy money and we can talk about like the perception of NFTs and the perception of crypto people after but that's the first thing I wanted to make mention of how like how crazy that is the second thing is air drops in general are just fascinating right because basically what you're doing is you're

looking at public blockchain data and you're rewarding loyalty so because Sahel Bloom is a loyal OpenCee customer, someone else, another company or another product or another community, is able to take that data and potentially grab the users from OpenC, because that's what they're trying to do, right? They're trying to bootstrap the network. And yeah, sorry, go ahead. You're hitting on something really interesting that relates to our conversation with Scott too, which is one of the, it's actually an interesting innovation of Web 3.

I think like Chris Dixon had a threat on this recently. that Web3 is interesting in the context that you can actually vote with your feet very credibly because this platform looks rare, tiny, no one knows what it is. They can come in and do something like this and then maybe they start charging, you know, a quarter of what OpenC charges from a commission standpoint. And suddenly, you know, like people have to race to the bottom on that margin that they can charge and clip because I might just vote with my feet. Now I can like go over to looks and maybe I'm an early.

looks adopter and start using the platform more, I buy looks tokens. Now I'm incentivized to use looks because I actually want looks to succeed. I've got a bunch of looks now. I'm staking it. If a bunch of people start using looks, like I might start piping looks up because I'm a part of it and they're charging a lower fee. And so it's kind of interesting because it does remove power from these centralized platforms when people can really vote with their feet this quickly. Yeah. I also think it makes the open. Opencies of the world or the competition, just a lot more, like make them more scared, which makes the product better. You know, they have to adapt.

You know, I'm sure they're looking at this product and they're like, okay, what, you know, we don't want to lose people, right? So what do we got to do on our platform? Do we need to make a more decentralized? Do we need to add, you know, certain, they added a, they had a few features on looks on that platform that, you know, opency was missing. So it's pretty interesting. other thing also is there are kinks with with airdrops right so you mentioned that you know you went on the platform you basically listed something a chodes which is worth zero for you know one eath so you're kind of like that's a problem right because then you don't that platform is going to have a lot of like

bad inventory and bad merchandise um so i think um there are kinks and I'm sure that they're going to fix it. And a lot, you know, but we're, the cool thing is we're learning about this process. People are trying things. People are pushing the boundaries. I don't understand how it's not. Like, it's just so weird to me because they've created value from nothing. Like, there's this thing of just like money from nothing that still confuses me fundamentally

when I try to think in first principles on this kind of stuff. Because they sent me a bunch of tokens that they just created out of thin air. that don't actually have value, but now they do because they've dropped it to a bunch of people and because a bunch of people now have it and are trading it and because a bunch of people like me have staked it, you can actually trade it and there's liquidity because that's what the staking does is it's providing liquidity in the protocol. I just like, it breaks my mind a little bit to understand it. And so for me personally, whenever that happens, I try to like dig in more.

and that's why I'm staking it, honestly, is I just want to, like, participate and learn more about it and kind of be along for the ride and see what happens. But it's pretty fascinating. I think it's interesting. And it's like it's a, it is a case study in Web 3 and how these things can materialize. And like a company that no one had ever heard of,

I don't think, for the most part, a week ago, is like part of the zeitgeist all of a sudden. I'm sure people at open see are thinking about it. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think, I'm sure, actually, I'm sure they're more than thinking about it. I think they're probably looking at it and they're, they must be scared or feel a bit vulnerable. And I don't blame them, to be honest.

Like, you know, I don't know the exact numbers, but probably tens of thousands, if not 100,000 plus people have gone and claimed tokens. That's like, you know, I think one of the takeaways I have from this whole thing is networks have value. You know, it's a reminder that. networks have value. Like, yes, these tokens are coming out of thin air, but when you're creating a network, that network of buyers and sellers has a lot of value. And scarcity drives value too, right? You're staking your tokens. Those tokens are going out of your wallet. Therefore, demand, you know, supply goes down, puts price pressure to go up. So a lot of interesting things. I wish I paid more attention in economics class in school. I have to relearn it all. And I've been

relearning it all in the trenches. But yeah. Yeah. It's going to be interesting to track. The price is remarkably stable for, like, I would have thought everyone just dumped it and it became worthless. And the price is basically hovered around four bucks for the last several days and with a few pops and a few drops. But like generally pretty, pretty stable. I just like, it's interesting to think about centralization and decentralization. Because when you think about the biggest companies within, within the crypto and web three landscape, you know, the ones that have like really made it institutionally, they're still centralized, like Coinbase, OpenC, they're centralized. And so this is kind of scary, like, because you can have these attacks that are somewhat

successful. I mean, I would qualify this as successful at this point that come from like truly decentralized positions and chip away at the veneer of these, of these centralized players. So it's kind of interesting. It's definitely going to be one to track. And, you know, in this era where like memes and, you know, the internet virality. they, you know, kind of own the zeitgeist. It's a very telling reminder of, you know, not being complacent. Like earlier in the week I wrote about the Icarus paradox and like not flying too close to the sun and getting complacent and hubris.

And I think like web theory is a perfect example of where you have to really be careful about that to the point you made earlier. Totally. Yeah. We've moved from means of production to memes of production. That's a good segment. way too to who we have in today. I feel like you teed that up pretty well. Memes of production. I like that. I like that. And we're going to bring our guest into Jam. And that's a perfect

transition because what meme has owned the internet and the zeitgeist over the last really two years more than Dogecoin, the joke cryptocurrency that took over the world. So we've got Billy Marcus who will not be on video because he avoids showing his face publicly due to security concerns, which I don't blame him for because there is a dark side of the internet. But super, super excited to have him in with us and get to talk. I mean, I need to get the story of Doge because there's some just absurdity along the way in that. But then, you know, talk about in the new era of investing, meme investing, you know, the funniest outcome wins and, uh, dive into all of this, memes of production. I loved your comment there.

Totally. I'm excited to talk to him. I've never, like, I follow him on Twitter, uh, which is an awesome follow. I don't, you know, I haven't done like, to be honest, much research on him. Um, I'm just looking forward to chatting with him and hearing, hearing like, what is his, um, like, why did he start it? You know, how does he, how does he see, you know, memes of production? What does he think of this of air drops?

I'm curious of that too. And just, yes, see if he's a cool guy or not. It's going to be fun. Shibatoshi Nakamoto on Twitter. I think his at is something different, but that's what his name is. So he's got to be pretty funny because I do think that's a funny name. Let's bring him in and let's dive in on this now. He's coming in.

Hey, you there, Billy? Hey, can you hear me? Yeah, we can hear you, man. What's going on? I hear a lot of weird noise. Uh-oh. I don't like that's our voices. That's our voices.

No, no, it's like yelling like, hey, darn. I don't know. Let me put this next to the mic. I'm worried. Is it in your brain? Hang on. It might be from my end. Oh, oh my God.

It is from my head. I was looking at some Twitter video and it was on loop. It was a bunch of like people screaming like, hey, God. I'm like, what? And it happened to coincide exactly with like coming in here. I was like, what the heck? Anyway. God.

I was like, holy shit, man. Billy's having a paranoid attack. This isn't a good start. Or it's going to be a great start. And this will be an awesome episode. I don't know. Anyway. Are you good now?

We're not starting the episode, right? This is, uh, oh, no, we're starting, man. Cold open. No, no. We can cut it out. We can cut whatever you want out, man. We do whatever post-production you want. So if you say anything that you didn't like, I did think that was pretty funny, though, in general.

Greg and I record, we record straight through. So Greg and I were like recording before. We like do a kind of opening jam and then bring someone in. But thank you so much for joining us, man. Yeah, no problem. I hope you have a drink. Well, actually, it's pretty early your time. You're on the West Coast, right?

Yeah, it's two, and I still have a lot of work to do today. Oh, man. I'm sorry to do that. I do have water, so that's something. Okay. Well, Greg's drinking a sparkling water. I'm sitting here like the degenerate on the call drinking a whiskey. But it's cold in the northeast.

man, so I need it. I need it right now. Yeah, what's your, what's your drink choice in general? I'm a bourbon guy. I like bourbon. I mean, I love tequila, but tequila, like on an evening in the cold Northeast on a Thursday, and I didn't feel right. So I'm drinking bourbon right now. Kentucky Owl, Bourbon whiskey. Nice. Yeah, I like... I like whiskey and Coke. If, like, if I just go to a bar and I have no creativity, I either say, like, can you give me something that doesn't taste like alcohol or just whiskey and Cook. Simple man. I like it. I like it. Well, dude, thank you. Thank you so much again for joining us.

This is going to be fun. I mean, you and I have, like, I want to give a little bit of the background because it's funny, but basically like Billy and my relationship is a classic of 2021, 2021, which is literally we met on Twitter. Like I meet everyone. Greg, you and I met on Twitter. Like all of my favorite, you know, boyfriends and girlfriends are on Twitter. And I just like I was. on to how kind of just like fun, open, and, you know, just like openly sharing you were. You just had this like vivacious personality on Twitter and I love that. And your name is Shibatoshi Nakamoto, which I find fucking hilarious. And so I started just like interacting with you. We were DMing and then we talked about bringing you on. And, you know, you mentioned that you don't do like public appearances for security reasons, which I totally get.

but just so stoked to have you here and get to jam more on, you know, meme investing, the story of Doge, your background, and just get into it. Yeah, it sounds fun. I know you as the guy on Twitter who posts really long threads that are smart. It's better than the guy on Twitter who posts really long threads that are dumb. So I think some people probably think that of me too, which is fine and I'll just mute them. But I appreciate you, man. You're the man.

And I think we were racing to a million at one point. and you were like at, actually, Billy challenged me to a race to a million followers on Twitter. He was at 940,000 and I was at 400,000 and challenged me to race. And honestly, the audacity to do that just made me respect him more. So anyway, welcome to the show and thank you for joining us. Yeah, I like challenges that I can win easily. Yeah, smart man, just bet on things you know you can win. So can we just start, and this is not an interview, very informal, and feel free.

to curse and have a blast. But like, can you just tell people, like, what your background is, who you are, like how you kind of came to, you know, kind of came to be the founder of what you ended up building? Sure. I'm just a software guy who've played video games on my life. I just grew up a nerd and kind of an internet troll. On AOL, I would, like, you know, impersonate guides and be a douche.

And then moved on to different message boards and was a douche there. and then grew up a little bit, but still have that, you know, introduce in me. So when I came to, like, learned about cryptocurrency, I, like, you know, saw the Bitcoin Talk Forms, I think, is what it was called in, like, 2013. Was this, like, on Reddit or where was it? No, it's actually a form called Bitcoin Talk. That was, like, where in 2013, that was where, like, hub of all Bitcoin Talk was.

And I was like, whoa, this is fascinating. People are, like, using their idle CPU. cycles to make money. I want to make money. So I try to learn how to mine and then eventually learned that it took way more power to mine than you could get because Bitcoin at that time was like $100 bucks. A Bitcoin. I also have very embarrassing trades on Coinbase that are like me purchasing like 10

Bitcoin and then like three days later me selling the 10 Bitcoin for like $20 profit and me like yeah, totally earned that. you know did you uh like on on the forum did you make a lot of friends or were you kind of just solo doing your own thing building by yourself that that is not a foreign bitcoin talk was not a form to make friends and meet people it was just a you know a forum to talk about how great you are or how great whatever dumb altcoin that you're making is going to be and then people trying to mine it um and then other people just you know speculating on whatever they think the price is going to be in the future and stuff like that.

So kind of same is Twitter now, I guess. This makes me think of like early days Silk Road, by the way. I don't know if you guys have ever read that book. I think it's called American Kingpin. It's actually one of my favorite pieces of nonfiction I've read in the last five, 10 years. So if anyone hasn't read it, it's worth a read. But it's basically the story of Silk Road, which was like, for anyone that doesn't

know it, it was like the Amazon of, you know, kind of, illicit activity at the time and most of the transactions were through bitcoin so people were buying drugs and unfortunately you know weapons and different things on there but it was like the ultimate libertarian um you know government can't control what you do this is an open marketplace and you could buy with bitcoin and it was like part of the early ethos of the bitcoin internet um was running through um through Silk Road and honestly like i think a lot of the bad rep that people have applied to crypto still goes back to what, you know, their kind of predisposition was around it with Silk Road. But this guy, the founder of it, who was like, you know, Jeff Bezos founded all, founded Amazon, this guy,

Ross Albrecht founded Silk Road is in jail for life, you know, based on a handful of different things. And, you know, different people will tell you different things about what he did. But super worth reading the book. But this guy's in jail for life for founding this thing that, you know, was ostensibly a marketplace where people happened to do illegal things. but a fascinating story of like early days of Bitcoin and some of the stuff that was happening in the utility of it early on. Yeah, absolutely. The primary utility in 2013 of cryptocurrency was illegal gambling or illegal purchase of drugs and weapons and whatever other terrible things. And yeah, and, you know, just speculation in general.

So that was like the scene in 2013. And then there's all these alt coins that were usually like based on like coin, the script based. which were a little easier to mine with a graphics card. Like they hadn't been solved. Like at that time, ASIC miners, the specialized computers that are used to mine Bitcoin or mine a light coin right now, were only good for Bitcoin. And so there are a whole bunch of coins that if you had a fancy graphics card, like I did, that you could mine it with your graphics card and get a decent amount of them.

So that's how I started learning about these different. So wasn't like, was it really like gamers then, just people that? that had these fancy graphic cars. Not really. Like, so that ties into like, when I found all of these coins and like all of the like different coins that people had made,

it was like, oh, these are all dumb. Like I could probably learn how to make one of these. They seem like they're all the same. And I found a guide, uh, for how to do it.

And it was like, you know, take light coin change seven parameters and recompile it. And then you have your own stupid crypto coin. So I was like, okay, cool. So I, I had just been playing Animal Crossing a lot.

And in 2013, no one knew what Animal Crossing was. And I released Bell's coin. This is my first cryptocurrency, my only other one other than Dogecoin. And no one knew what it was. Like literally no one on Bitcoin talk forms had any idea what Animal Crossing was. They're like, what is this? It looks like a cartoon. I'm like, it's from a game.

You know, Bells? Like, from Animal Crossing? Like, no, it's stupid. Like, it won't make me rich. I'm like, okay. So it just died like almost right away. So what year was that? Sorry, that was 2013 that you did that?

Yeah, that was like mid-2013. Okay. And then, yeah, after that I was like, well, crypto, or like, obviously I can just retire from this. I don't want to get yelled at by random people. But then Bitcoin. Does that exist? Does Bell's coin still exist anywhere? I'm like Googling frantically because I've never heard of it, but I like, I need to find this now.

It does exist in the form of Dogecoin because Bitcoin, or, uh, uh, Dogecoin is forked directly from Bell's coin. Oh, okay. So you've got to walk us through it, man. Okay, go from here. Okay, so no one knew about Bell's coin. You started this thing. It was a joke.

Yeah, yeah. How did this fork into Doge? So, like, I don't know, two or three months later, I, like, Bitcoin just crashed, and I went in some, like, IRC channel that was like, oh, why did Bitcoin crash? Oh, it's because China's stuff, which, you know, is the same story now. And someone linked to Dogecoin. com and was like, ha ha, this is going to do the next big thing. And I clicked on it. And Jackson Palmer

on the other side of the earth in Australia had like just put up this site with a like doge coin picture and like all these like pop up comic sands like wow and blah blah, blah. You can see it on an archive.org from 2013 still. And it just said in the bottom, if you want to make this a reality, like hit me up. And I was like, I want to make this a reality because I know how to make this a reality. because I know how to make cryptocurrency. So, yeah, I just took the next couple hours. And, like, all I wanted to do was change the regular Bitcoin client to be Comic Sans font and then, like, have some custom stuff on it.

Like, instead of mining, it was, like, dig and other stupid things like that and, like, change some of the font or the icons. And then, yeah, that was it. It was just, like, this silly, ridiculous thing. It's like, ha, we're going to make Dogecoin. It's going to twigone. It's going to totally take over the world, lull, and then we released it, and then stuff happened. What was it that you at? Sorry, go ahead.

Yeah, when you, when you say, like, you know, you thought it was going to take over the world, do you mean, like, you thought it was going to take over, like, the current, you know, small crypto world? Or did you actually think, like, did you have a vision of, like, you know, and, you know, today, like, post Malone's buying, like, board apes and visas, you know, crypto and, you know, crypto and it's just like it's it's it's mainstream did i'm just curious like did you and jackson like how you know have some foresight to oh no we had no foresight whatsoever and not only that it was just a complete joke it was just like this this thing's gonna die in like couple days it's obviously stupid no one's gonna buy this like this is just a gag because it was funny but like it was

functional it was just a fork of an existing coin that already worked so we knew it'd work it's just like like no one cares about this and then that was wasn't true. A lot of people cared about it instantly. And obviously, like, you know, you're talking about the current scene with NFTs and all this stuff. It's like, no way we would have thought anything like this would happen. It was all just a bunch of nerds, like, being silly with each other back at the end. It was basically a drop. Basically what you're saying is it was like a drop, you know, it's like we were talking, like I saw your thread on mischief, that company that does those drops every week. It's basically that, you basically were like, let's have some fun.

I'm going to like change a few things, add a story to it and press compile and go to sleep. And then you wake up and it just, you know, it starts spreading. Yeah, pretty much. I mean, it's fascinating to look at the chart, though. Like, I've got the chart up of all time. And so like what year was that that you actually did the drop that you released it? December 8th, 2013. Okay.

So I'm looking at the chart. and basically like I can't even give you what the scent was for a single doge because it's too many decimals like it was December okay so on December 28 I can't really quite zoom in on January 1st 2014 so a few weeks later it was at 0.003 and my eyes are like glazing over because of the number zeros and basically for you know from then until uh there was a little spike in 2018. when it got up to almost one cent, which is like probably a huge jump. I mean, you must have been, at that point, like the 24 hour volume was $300 million. Like, you must have been thinking this is wild. And that felt crazy.

And then in January 2018, it crossed into one cent territory, but then it went back down and it was below a cent. And then all of a sudden, like I'm pulling up the chart. In 2021, the thing goes from, you know, On January 1st, it's under a penny.

And it goes from there over the span of that month, basically. Like, by February 1st, it's at 7 cents. And from there, it goes from 7 cents to by May, almost, what, like 70 cents, 75 cents it goes up to? Like, what? I mean, what are you thinking as this is happening? So I sold all my cryptocurrency in 2015. Like when there's this big bear market Bitcoin included

Yeah Bitcoin I had a bunch of Bitcoin have a bunch of light coin And I was just like whatever Like this this is a bear market was like three years At that point So yeah You know the people freak out now if there's like two days of bear market They're like oh God this is the worst It's like and then they make fun of anybody who sells during it

It's like yeah try three years Try having a bear market for three years And seeing if you like you want to hang on to it And basically I had a I got laid off for my job, and then I was, like, kind of panicking because I was watching my bank account go down. I had moved to California, so my rent was, like, pretty expensive. So I was like, oh, that's right.

I have all this, like, cryptocurrency. So I just got rid of all of it and got the cash and felt a little more comfortable, which was a terrible thing. But, yeah, so basically when all this stuff happened, like 2018 happened, and, like, crypto was going crazy and all the ICOs were happening. and my friends knew about it, so they'd be like, oh, what do you think of this? I'm like, oh, my gosh, like, this is pain. This is, like, I mean, it's fine, like, you know, good for it, good for people who are in the space.

But for me, it's like, ah, that sucks. Oh, my God. Okay, so I need, okay, well, I don't mean to add insult to injury here at all, but, like, I read an article. And so, like, just the general background on this, I find incredible. because you're out here, you're still clearly a public figure, you're doing fine, you have a job, like things are good, and Elon Musk follows you on Twitter, which like basically no one can say. So like, I need to bow down to you as a result of that. So if Elon is out there actually and he sees this episode, that would be great as well because I think he'll find it hilarious. But I did see an article when I was researching for this about the fact that you sold all your dogecoin and, um, you bought a car. And when I was looking at it, I was like, okay, so you, you know, you sold your dogecoin, you bought a car. I think it was a Honda Civic in the article, which who knows, maybe they're, maybe they're making it exciting for the article, CNBC, whatever it was. But then like during the

spike in 2021, that doge coin that you sold would have been worth enough to buy Honda. And it cracked me up when I saw it because it was such an example of the absurdity of some of these things where, I mean, there was like no rhyme or reason to it. The memes control the world. Like Elon Musk went on, I think it was Joe Rogan's podcast, or maybe a clubhouse room or something where he talks about like, you know, he who controls the memes controls the world, like the Dune line. And it really all of the sudden, I mean, it took over in 2021,

where like meme, you know, like Greg called it memes of production. It's so fascinating to me, though, to see it in real time and to see it with, you know, a case study like this with what you went through. Yeah, a couple of things with that. So the Honda Civic thing is hilarious because it's usually a picture of Jackson, my co-founder, and then saying like Billy Marcus sold all his holdings for a Honda Civic. And that was like kind of a misquote because I didn't want to say the exact amount.

It was about like $10,000. So I'd say like about as much as I sold all my crypto for about as much as, you know, it cost to buy or used Honda Civic. And then that just became the meme. was like picture of Jackson control the world yeah the meme strikes again the meme strikes again yeah well that is I mean that well like it's such a classic like media thing like clickbaity headline of like sold and bought honda bought used honda civic could have bought all of Honda it's such an absurd I mean I get it I get why they do it actually it does drive clicks I clicked on it yeah I think it's kind

funny so sometimes I just roll with this like yeah people like how's your Honda I'm like I don't know never had one never had one before they probably wants to sponsor me like I'm down whatever yeah it is funny we talked on one of our first episodes Greg you remember this um like talking about um it was like the idea of like lost porn and like man in the arena stuff with Howard in that first episode that we dropped when you know like we all now everyone loves to share gains and like talk about their amazing wins and things like that. But it's so interesting because now I think like Reddit, you know, with Wall Street bets, people are actually sharing their like massive Ls and the things that they sold to

earlier, the big Ls they're taking. And it's become like a point of pride for a lot of people to kind of share those. And I find, I mean, I think it's like healthy actually, um, societally that people are doing more of that. Billy, do you see it as an L? Because like I look at it and I'm like, how many people get to like create a meme and spread it, you know, that for, well, I mean, first of all, it's enduring. Like, it's been years at this point. And, you know, hundreds of millions of people have seen it. I'm just curious, like,

how do you feel? I don't mean, you know, how do you feel about it all? Um, so in terms of the, the loss porn part of it, or just that as part of culture, uh, I agree that that I think that's a good thing, uh, that people are like more realistic about it. It's not like, oh, we always just make money because everything goes up all the time. I think it's good. that there's a reasonable thought of like this is pretty much gambling. In terms of like what I think, it's just weird. Like it's from my position, I just kind of made something eight years ago. And then eight years later, it went crazy.

And Elon Musk was talking about it. I'm like, okay. Like it's just a very like, all right, I guess I'm in this position now. And then like when I tweet stuff and people are responding to me, I'm like, that's weird. Like people are listening to me. I'm just some nerd like sitting in my underwear most of the time we're on the toilet, tweeting random prep. So it's like it's kind of like this fake.

But that's what I love about the internet. That's like that's the amazing thing about the world we live in too. Like dude, I mean, I'm looking at it. I'm pulling it up right now. You created something which I mean, how many people in the world can say this? You created something that today has a market cap of $22.4 billion and traded $2 billion of volume. I texted my friend, David McDonough, who's the founder of this business,

Common Stock. That's an awesome, you know, free platform for investment knowledge. They're a supporter of the show because he gets a ton of retail investing data through their, through their platform and the integrations. And he said that Doge was the, over the past 12 months,

the fourth most traded asset across all retail brokers and exchanges. Oh my goodness. And it was, it beat out, by the way, it beat out Apple, Amazon and the spy index, the S&P 500. It was literally behind Tesla, Bitcoin, and Ethereum,

which Tesla is like a meme in and of itself, obviously. So, I mean, it goes to show, though, like, what you did create, whether or not you profited from it as, you know, as much as anyone would have liked. I mean, it's pretty insane. Like the numbers on it are bananas. Yeah. I remember seeing a graph of like the most

search thing in the United States for various ports of time during the year on Google. And Dogecoin, like, April, May and part of June, was the most search thing, like, in the entire United States, which is like, oh, okay, this is, like, everyone knows what it is now. I can tell, like, an anecdote, actually, when I first came to California, there was a Dogecoin hackathon, and I wasn't invited or, like, I just kind of came as a whim. and like I went there and they were like oh are you on those list I'm like no but I'm Billy Marcus they're like oh okay I'm like yeah like I made Dogecoin and they were like oh okay and like you know eventually let me in but it's like they didn't no one knew what it was like it wasn't a

thing that's like a common knowledge and now it is like most people know or I've heard of Dogecoin and have some like either an opinion on it or think it's like what the heck was going on I know that that's true because I said it before I came in to record this. I told my wife I was recording an episode and I was like, hey, just so you know I'm filming something. And she's like, oh, who are you chatting with? And I was like, Billy Marcus. And she was like, oh, who's that?

I said the founder of Dogecoin. She was like, is that that dog cryptocurrency? And my wife knows nothing about this stuff. And I was like, yeah. And she's like, oh, so and so. Like my friend was buying a bunch of it. And I was just like, okay. So it clearly has entered the zeitgeist because my wife does not touch any of this stuff or

know anything about it, but she knew what it was. So yes, you've definitely, you've definitely crossed the chasm, as it were. Yeah, that's cool. And also, like, most of the companies that I've worked for, because I've worked for a lot of startups since coming to California, like, every once in a while, I think, like, huh, the thing I made in a couple hours is worth more than this company. I mean, it's worth more than a lot of companies, by the way. I mean, $22 billion is no joke. The trading volume is what's bananas to me, too. I mean, $2 billion today is just crazy. Like, do you, do you ever think and I again I'm not like

trying to rub this in like do you think about the fact that you like it would be worth billions of dollars today your your stake in it or is it just something that you're like yeah I mean it's so long ago and you created it was a joke and it still is a joke I mean it's like openly a joke but it became a meme do you think about it ever so my my personal stake would have like at max out about six million this because of like when those articles came out there like, oh, let's take the entire market cap of Doge

going to attribute it to Billy Marcus. It's like, yeah, that's not how it works. Yeah, but to your point, though, like, I think it was, I wouldn't call it like terrible, but it was just kind of like my mom was struggling last year with like house payments essentially. And it was like, oh, I can help you, but like, it's kind of difficult for me to, you know, pay for your mortgage while also paying for all my expenses to California. So when Dogecoin was getting unpopular, it's like, yeah, I could have, you know, done it easily if I just had this. But fortunately, I was able to make it up by selling NFTs and stuff and was able to pay

off her house. And so that was like everything I would have ever wanted. So at this point, everything's gravy. Like doesn't, you know, I have a decent job and everything's fine. I don't really have any regrets or anything. Right, you got a million people. Yeah, yeah, a ton of people hitting like buttons and sometimes getting you to. I mean, there's just something amazing about it that's like, I don't know.

I mean, like memes control the world. And this is like the most visceral example of that, that you created something. And honestly, there was no reason other than like Elon Musk starts tweeting about it. People start thinking it's funny. I saw someone recently say that like the funniest outcome is the most likely outcome now with all of these things. And I think about it now a lot with investing of like are is this company like are there memes and virality that happen around this company? And like I've talked to Greg about this before. Like I'm a big believer in this new asset class around like event contracts.

And I invested in this platform called Calci that is like the only CFTC regulated platform. And their whole thing, you know, like what I'm trying to. trying to talk to them about is like there's so much interesting memeable content here where people are trading on these like binary events and you're getting into things and there's these like crazy charts of when things are swinging and like harnessing memes now has to be a core strategy at some of these companies that are trying to grow because all of a sudden you can just you know shoot things to the moon out of the blue from just capturing the zeitgeist at one moment in time. Yeah, I would like memes are the language of the internet essentially and I think you know the the previous term for all this stuff was virality right like the cheapest marketing is to have something go viral and the cheapest and most effective and often really scary for companies to have to try to scale after they go viral like oh no like a jillion people are looking at my stuff so I think in that way it makes sense like if like one thing I noticed in general is

if I'm trying to express a point on Twitter with my 280 characters, usually if it's nuanced, it's like pretty hard. And, you know, people, people will read your threads because you do a good job of, like, prefacing it with, like, what you want to say and getting people interested with your, you know, 19 things of whatever. But mine are like, you know, like, here are three tweets in a row. Like, no one understands it. But if I make a meme, people understand it. It's like, oh, okay, like, the picture is worth a thousand. words, it gives all this context, and it's just like way more efficient at expressing what you want to say. So I really do think memes are powerful and like can't be denied. Just like, you know,

being viral is really, really important in marketing. Billy, what is a meme? Can you, you know, for all the people listening, like, how do you define a meme? There's like the, you know, like old school definition of a meme, which is just like any idea that's read essentially. So like everything's a meme. But like memes nowadays are more just like a picture or an image of some sort that expresses something that's usually kind of funny or kind of true in a way that is easy to comprehend very quickly. Yeah, I don't really know if that's a good definition, but it's kind of how I think a definition at the moment. And like Doge meme?

It captures it. It captures in an image something that, you know, a bunch of words couldn't say. Yeah. But it doesn't have to be an image, I don't think, right? Like, I think, like, to me, a meme is a spreadable idea. The format could be a video. It could be an image. It could be, you know, a letter.

Would you say, Philly, would you say you're like, you understand, And, like, when it comes to, you know, nerd culture, programming culture, you're kind of, like, an expert. Like, you understand that culture really well, so you can create memes for them really well. Would you say that? No, I mean, not necessarily. I think if you're obsessed with something, for example, I was, like, really into Starcraft 2 for a while. So I could make StarCraft 2 memes because I understood, like, the nuance of that particular subculture. I think that's where memes are.

Like I can make Dogecoin memes now or like crypto memes right now because it has a very specific subculture and like people can relate to specific things if I make them in a meme image. So that's what I agree. So I think that I think the reason you were able to create Dogecoin in two hours is because you had such a deep connection and understanding of that community that it was just second nature to you. That's what I think. What do you think, Billy? He's humble, man. He's humble. He doesn't want to give himself credit for it.

Be honest. That's my outside perspective. My outside perspective is like, like you knew or, you know, you and Jackson knew that, like, that dog had a good chance of, and the name and just like the whole bit and all the nuances that you said in the contract and like the words here and the words there. together that had a good chance of spreading. Not quite. It was more of a feeling of this has to exist

than a feeling of like this will work and this will be popular because the Bitcoin community at that time had no sense of humor whatsoever. It's just like, you know, the least funny community in history. So like that, having something that's supposed to be funny,

like I wouldn't think that would work in that context. but it had excitement outside of that little, like, subculture. So actually, this is true, in my opinion, is that Dogecoin has done an amazing service to the cryptocurrency community of, like, getting more people into cryptocurrency than ever would have if Bitcoin was just Bitcoin. And, like, those people that were really into it. That's a great point. Yeah.

It provided, I mean, it's a lot of what companies are trying to do now. It's like providing rails. The memes provided rails into. this new world and it provided like a logical on ramp to the point where my wife is talking about cryptocurrency as a good example of it like normal people on the street my parents probably know what doge coin is and that's interesting and that's like hugely hugely valuable to the space and so again to your point on like what you created having lasting value it's interesting I want to pitch you guys on an idea I've been having and this like meme conversation is so ripe for exactly what I'm

talking about we're talking about memes control the world like memes are driving massive flows of money, memes are influencing behavior. So my idea is, why don't you go and roll up these meme accounts? Like, go and find the best meme accounts that exist on Twitter, on Instagram, on TikTok, like Parik Patel on Twitter, love Parik, the, like, Greg guy that did the No Way Jose thing to Jose Canseco, Litquidity on Instagram and on Twitter. Like these people that are capturing the set of emotions, the zeitgeist that are really good at just like over and over again putting out these memes that capture attention.

They have so much collective clout. Individually, they're like sort of small and subscale. I'm not sure there's a ton of like monetization there. But if you could roll them up, even if you like de facto brought them into a partnership together, you could, I think, sway, you know, individual kind of companies, trajectories, perception, you know, markets around things if you actually, like, brought together the collective clout of these meme accounts. So why not go and like roll them up? Go and like, create a fund and go and either buy or like, you know, kind of have them roll a stake into a collective

entity where you can then just go like leverage the power of memes to move markets. And I don't mean move markets in like an illegal context. I literally mean, you know, they all go get behind an individual company and they're creating memes around it. I think you could genuinely drive and accelerate outcomes for those companies. That's interesting. I would I would push back only like in general, I think the idea makes sense. My pushback is that I think what attracts people to accounts like that are they aren't trying to do anything specific other than be funny. And if one of those accounts, like, just decided to like, like, okay, my, you know, my riffs that I do all the time that are funny are now Ford.

And I will just talk about Ford and make Ford memes that would like kind of tank the value of the account. It would be like, okay, that's just like the Ford chill and that's kind of not as interesting. Not that that is exactly what you're saying, but like it's, it's like, it's like, it's like, with Reddit marketing. There's a lot of people that want to market on Reddit, but you can't just go in there and like, hey, everyone, buy my stuff. You have to, like, make it funny or make it viral in some way. Otherwise, no one cares about it because they want things to come off authentically and not like, you know, you're part of the man type thing. So I think it's, yeah. Have you heard of

doing things media? Have you guys heard of that one? Uh-uh. They own like middle class fancy, shithead Steve like a bunch of these brands trash can Paul I'm looking at cats doing things they have a similar model where they buy the accounts

and what they do is they keep usually it's like a 15 year old guy in his basement but they keep that person on board so they apply your strategy around like

let's go buy accounts, but they're very, like, it's basically, they're combining Sahel, your idea with Billy's kind of like, but keep it, keep it, you know, pure. Billy, what you're basically saying is like, the purity rules everything in meme land, and I totally agree with that. At least check out, our company, we actually create accounts around memes all the time. So we created something called I Need Plan I don't know I've ever told you about this. I remember this. Go for it.

This is awesome. So yeah, we created an account that got hundreds of thousands of followers. You can follow it on, you know, on multiple platforms. But on one platform I like the best, Instagram. I think it has almost 100,000 followers. And it's just plant memes, you know? People are stuck at home and they're talking about plants. And it's like once you have this plant account and these people are like so into plants,

you can create a lot of businesses on top of it. right like you can go and create you know an nfts project you can create plant coin and start air dropping i don't know stuff into them you can create a d to c plan company i think like once once you control the attention um there is a lot you can do but it's tough to remain pure yeah i do think the um the purity point i it totally resonates with me and i think that's the challenge of it i just think about it in the context of like my own experience with meme accounts like this Dr. Parik Patel account on Twitter. I know the actual person behind it now.

And a lot of people recently have been saying that they think that I am the person behind the account, which I find hilarious. Because I wish I was that funny and, like, and innovative. And I honestly wish I had that much time to do what he's done. But he and I have this whole back and forth thing of like each other's wives that's funny, kind of like, you know, below bar humor and like, you know, college humor. But like he'll comment on something I posted. and be like, oh yeah, this is why your wife left you or something like that.

And he'll get like, he won't ratio me, but he'll get like 700 likes on something like that. And for me, it's like people hit me up and be like, dude, you should tell him to delete that. Like that's terrible that he got you like that. And for me, I'm like, dude, that actually just drove. He has 500,000 followers. That drove so many new impressions to the thing that I had. And like, I don't care if a bunch of people like that. It's funny.

Like, I think he's funny and it's a hilarious thing. but it drove so many more eyes to me so i almost think that like you don't even need to have them shilling the product like if it's ford you could have someone like that going in under the ford product and being like delete this this is dumb or like making fun of it and you know like trying to ratio the accounts and it would still drive so many net new eyes to it that you'd have this like net positive effect in the aggregate created by something that was still genuine to the account yeah i i did notice like when, I think, you know, May, April, May time period,

when my account was very popular or very high engagement, if I just, like, commented on someone's tweet that I thought was funny, it would, like, raise up a lot. And then kind of, you know, the same thing happens to me. If Elon Musk likes one of my tweets, it's basically like this weird validation loop that happens,

where it's like, like, I made a tweet, I thought it was funny and, like, no one cared. And then, you know, three hours later, Elon Musk lights it and all of a sudden, like, it gets like 30,000 likes. I'm like, okay. It's like much people like, well, if Elon Musk liked it, it must be funny type feeling to it. Well, it pops up in all of his, he has 69 million followers. Right. Nice. Nice. And he, when he likes it, it pops up onto a bunch of those people's, you know, maybe not 69 million. Maybe it's like, I don't know, like 42 million or something like that.

people see it and they get, you know, a thing that says, like, this pops up. And so now people that didn't see it, do see it. My biggest triumph of this entire year, by the way, like the last 12 months was he commented on one of my things. And I successfully defended getting ratioed and did not get ratioed by Elon Musk. And so that was like my number one triumph on Twitter of the last year. Because when he comes in and comments on things, like he blasted Jeff Bezos and ratioed the hell out of him on something. And I was like, it was one of the funniest things I saw on Twitter last year, like the back and forth between the two of them with the little, he did the like silver medal when he passed him in net worth. And I don't know. I mean, yes. Like I think it's fascinating though.

And I think there's there's something from a business standpoint to rolling up these accounts that are like individually not particularly valuable and collectively have a lot of clout that could drive, you know, real value. Well, yeah. The thing you, the thing you could do also is cross promote in like a pure way when you have the network. Billy, what you're saying? Oh, like now you're making me paranoid because I just today got a million followers. And now I'm thinking like- Congratulations, man.

What a day. You won the bet, by the way. Congratulations. Yeah, I came here just to, you know, to gloat. Yeah, figured. But yeah, now it's like, oh, no, like every random stupid thing that I'm liking might show up on a million people's feeds. I'm like, oh, no, I better be more stingy about what I like. You, dude, you also follow 420 people, by the way. Nice. You follow 420 and you're followed by

one million. This is like a screenshotable thing right now. Shibatoshi Nakamoto at Billy M2K. Man, yeah, that is a beautiful thing. If you fall like, it's, I mean, once you follow 420 people and you're followed by 69 million, that would be slightly nicer, but you've got a little ways to go. Yeah, I actually have to unfollow somebody to follow someone new because I don't, I don't want to get rid of my... Yeah, I don't want to agree with that. I think Elon Musk should go on a follow spree actually and get to like, now he's at 70 million. He grew. That's unfortunate. He could have, he had a real memeable moment there if he got to 420 following and 69 million at the same time. Dude, he went from 69 million to like 7 million or 70 million really fast. That was like last. They always said. I'll say the first million's the hardest, Billy.

He grew by a Billy. One million. Have you ever seen, speaking of memes, have you ever seen that meme where like Drake, I think it was Drake tweeted the first millions the hardest. And T. Boone Pickens tweeted back at him saying, the first billion is even harder or something like that. I thought that was the funniest thing. I was like, he was like, try the first billion or something.

It was like the most unnecessary flex, but also hilarious, that T. Boone Pickens was tweeting at Drake. yeah he's like the oil guy from like the 40s or something right totally i think he passed away he's the late oil guy from there but yeah i mean like complete business legend but like total savage for coming at drake that way so that's hilarious further to the point on memes um man i uh i had a blast wait wait wait billy what do you do now what do you do now like what is what is the day to day

in in that's true actually i feel like we don't even know the end of the story not the end of the of the story, the middle of the story. I just work and like, you know, I'm a, working at home as a software engineer. I make a software or educational software for kids. So that's my day job. And then while things are compiling or if I go to the bathroom or if I'm just like procrastinating, I'll just tweet.

That's basically my life. That's all I do. And why, uh, why not start, like, what's stopping you from starting a new project? Like, do you have that? Itch. Like, you've started something. It's hit critical mask. You know, do you have a million person following.

You have a million followers. On the back of that. Yeah. Any interest in starting something new? Yes, but one thing I don't like about the cryptocurrency space in general, and this includes NFTs and every derivative of cryptocurrency is promising, like over-promising. So I don't like to promise anything. I don't like to hype things that I'm doing.

So, like, I might be working on something on my own time or whatever. But if I do release something, I'll just release it when it's done or ready. Because otherwise, you know, it's really great. Like, Dogecoin literally was made to make fun of how many of these, like, dumb, same projects were out there hyping themselves up about how great they were going to be and how much they were doing. And none of them did anything. Like, almost every single one of them died. And Dogecom was the only one who made it because it had a, community and because it didn't make any promises because it was funny and fun like it made a

community that like wanted to make it successful so yeah you had me at community bill yeah you said gregg's love word i mean to be honest billy like i think i stand by it like i stand by the fact that i think that you have a deep understanding of community and the community that you were in at the time and how to build memes for that particular community. Like you did it. And I think that you did it once and I think you can do it again. I appreciate that. Yeah.

I would buy into your next thing. I will say that right now. So you may not hype it publicly. But if you are doing something new, I want to know about it. I will message you every day about it. I know a lot of people who would be interested in backing whatever it is that you do next. You know, I'm very good at like getting interested in stuff before it becomes very popular. and then getting uninterested in it before it explodes,

like e-sports or like magic cards or things like that, and cryptocurrency. So, yeah, maybe I have something of my interest early. That would be interesting for people. Billy, what in the cryptocurrency space that is, like what's unattractive to most in the cryptocurrency space that you find potentially attractive? Like, what are people sleeping on?

actually is starting to become bigger now. I do think there's something. I played a lot of MMO RPGs, like World of Warcraft, and got sick of them and never wanted to play one again. But the idea of like owning stuff from it and being able to like sell it to other people, I think is massive. So for example, have you heard of VR chat? So like VR chat is like a virtual world of,

like, I don't know, 4chan meets virtual reality. This is kind of like this crazy virtual reality world. I basically see the future as VR chat with NFTs. So VR chat, but like you own like whatever that you have on you and you can like show it off.

Because in World of Warcraft, like people literally would get certain pieces of gear and then stand around this place called Iron Forge. Yeah, I loved it. Yeah. And then people would be like, where'd you get that cool mount or where'd you get that cool shoulder? Like, that was enough to make people feel cool about themselves. So imagine that plus like, yeah, this is like worth like 10,000 bucks.

And I could sell it. I own this. It's not owned by Blizzard Entertainment, but it's owned by me. So like if I like 3D virtual goods, being able to actually status signal. Like it plays on a lot of human, human emotions, like natural biological things. Yeah. And it's already proven to work in video games. So, like, it will work.

The only problem right now is the gamers tend to hate NFTs. So I think they're just going to be rebranded to, like, digital goods. And then people decide that they like them, not knowing that behind the scenes is blockchain tech and NFT tech and stuff. Yeah. I think it was super interesting. I just pulled it up here while I was poking around. I was an OG World of Warcraft player. Funny enough, like, the Stanford.

for baseball team when I was there, especially my freshman year, you know, you like think, you know, jocks and like, you know, they're not nerds and don't do all that kind of stuff. And we were like on road trips, we were all like sitting on the floor of the bus and in rooms playing World of Warcraft on our laptops and being like, dude, dude, iron forge. Like, we got to go to do this quest, whatever it was. And it was a blast. And I actually still miss playing that game. Yeah, what, what, what, uh, what, uh, what, uh, geez, this is like, you're, you're,

dating me now. I have no idea. I have no idea. This is 09. Yeah, good company. Vitalik, the creator of Ethereum. He was Warlock in World Warcraft, and Blizzard nerfing Seifen Life was one of the reasons that he decided to make Ethereum. He was like mad to the centralized group,

like had the control to nerf something. So he was like, well, decentralization would be better, so he went on to... Fascinating. We got to get him on an episode for this, Greg. Yeah, that's a good, it's a good call out. If you, I have two closing questions for you, Billy. Number one, if you could say one thing to Elon Musk that he might hear through this, what would you say?

Oh, I don't know. This is like, thank you for enjoying Dogecoin. Thanks for having fun. I think to me, Elon Musk appreciates Dogecoin because it's silly and because it's ironic and because it's funny. and fun, which is what I would like people to appreciate Judge Crane for, not like just be like looking at the money that they potentially could make or could lose because that's kind of fun, but not, I don't know, it's kind of crazy.

But, you know, just like the fact that it's funny and has a community that's just interested in screwing around and making memes, I think he appreciates that about it. So I appreciate that he appreciates it. Yeah, he appreciates it for the pure reasons that you created it around, which is like he likes it for what it is. which is that's cool. Last question that we ask everybody. Five-year predictions.

Like, what are your predictions for the future? Anything that jumps out to you that you think about for the future. It could be this, you know, thing around NFTs, VR chat, etc. What do you think, you know, five years from now we're going to be really excited about as a human race? Oh, man, that's so hard. In terms of, like, crypto prices, I always just answer the shrug. because I have no idea. I sold in 2015. It's not like I know anything about what's going to happen in the future. But in terms of like what I think is cool, it probably would be something related to. I do see, I don't think blockchains will take over games because not every game would be good with that. There's a lot of problems with security and botting and all that stuff that would ruin the purity of games themselves. But I do see block. blockchain gaming becoming bigger in general.

And, you know, people wanting to, like, just play video games and earn money, which is my dream when I was 12 years old. So I could just play video games for a living. Yeah, play to earn. I mean, we had, um, Alexis. Yeah, we've talked to Gio and Alexis who have both been, you know, around play to earn quite a bit. Obviously, it's a fascinating space. I do think they're like getting people over, getting gamers over the, um, apprehension

around, you know, and consternation. that they have around NFTs and around, you know, this space in general, I think is going to be key. It's interesting. There's a lot happening. It's a great prediction. I think it's a good one. I know it's a hard question. I appreciate it. I got one last question for you, Billy. You mentioned, I mean, your stake would be worth $6 million or so today if you kept the doche. It's a would you rather question. So would you rather question? So would you rather have the $6 million in a bank account plus compound interest, but no one would ever heard of you, Billy? No one would know that you're the creator of Dogecoin, or would you

rather the, you know, used Honda amount of money, but you're in the same position you are today. You've got a million followers. You're following, you know, 420 people on Elon Musk sometimes likes your tweets. I would rather have the $6 million bucks be anonymous I think like when I came back to mention because I was not on Twitter

for a really long time and I just got a bunch of you know emails telling me to cap Dogecoin and like it was really annoying so I actually just came back to tell everyone to leave me alone but then found it was kind of fun and there was some cool people on Twitter and I just kind of hung around and started shit posting

but like really like I would rather just have money and be anonymous and not have to deal with this to be fair honest that's the best answer I think I think it was the best question the best no I'd take the million followers and I would take Billy's current situation for sure because I think that you know his like his current status if if he wanted to and I don't think this is what motivates you Billy which is totally fine I just think like you know you probably have six million dollars of annual, you know, income embedded in the value of what you're, you know, where you exist today. So I just, I don't think it's necessarily what motivates you and what you want to do and the way you want to approach things. But, um, I bet you could sell your, you know,

your kind of influence an account for $6 million to somebody probably. So it's, uh, I don't know, it's an interesting thing. I'm going to DM you about this, Billy, because I do want to talk more about it because I think it's interesting. You want to buy my account, don't you? I want to change your mind on this answer that you just gave because it like personally hurts me a little bit. Because I think you're amazing and I think there's, I think you're way too humble for what you've done in your life as well, which I love and I think it's, it's very endearing as well.

But man, I think I, you should, you should be very proud of, um, of some of this stuff that you've, uh, you've been able to accomplish in a short time. Yeah.

Well, uh, I, I think a lot of people have that feeling to where it's like, oh, you have so much to do so much. And I'm like, I just want to play games and, make video games, make music, and have everyone leave me alone.

Well, it's why we like you, ma'am. It's awesome. It was a blast getting to jam with you. Yeah, this is fun. Hear more of the story, man. You're a legend. And I'm congratulating you on winning our bet of reaching a million followers before me. It was a bullshit bet, just to be totally honest.

And I'm pissed. I'll send you a doge going so that you're not at zero as a payment on the loss there. Yeah, well, let's race to $2 million then. We can... Okay, let's raise to $2 million. That's fair. We can make a public wager on $2 million. How about you own zero cryptocurrency?

No, I have a decent amount of Ethereum. Actually, no, I have none. Let's pretend I have none, so I don't have to make a large bit. Let's do one-eath on $2 million. All right, one-eath on $2 million. That sounds good. Okay. All right.

Hopefully in the next two years. It'll force us to stay in touch, dude. This is great. one-eath on who hits two million first i'm a massive underdog Elon musk if you're out there help me out give your boy a follow at sahill bloom on twitter help me get one-eath from billy thank you sounds good signing off thanks so much billy from where it happens thank you the saying used to be let your games speak with commonstock it's about let your gains

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