#165 with Jack Butcher - Selling a $76m NFT, How to Research Wealthy People & How BitClout Went Viral

Did you see what Jack did? It's crazy. I thought he meant you selling one NFT for like a hundred grand. I didn't s or however much you sold that, like what's the difference between a JPEG and an NFT thing. I didn't see that you have one for seventy six million dollars. Just put it up this morning. Do you think that's gonna work? Look at the smile on his face. I love it. I feel like I can rule the world I know why

Can be what I want to Uh, I'll put my all in it like a day's all on a roll, let's travel, never look. I have uh just kind of an update on my BitCloud thing that I wanted to talk about. But we can do it, we can do it later if we want. Doesn't have to be at the beginning. Uh what uh l I would rather you you take you lead it. And let's you want to talk about Jack Butcher? Like We have a ton of like

This is all related. Crazy shit. Yeah. There's like the world is so weird right now, and Amongst our friends I think that there's probably a a tier or two above. But we are in such an odd tier where we have very close friends.

Or you and me a little bit, but less so. have made a Fair amount of money on all of this new stuff happened. Yeah, it's kind of crazy. So I'll say if if you're tired of us talking about Bitcoin and NFTs and All the crypto stuff.

Um just probably not it'll probably skip ahead to the part where we're gonna talk about You know, dictionary.com later. So so so I would say we're gonna go we're gonna show you some range today. We're gonna talk about a website that's like twenty five years old, and then we're gonna talk about Uh, you know. a website that's like twenty five minutes old, which is uh BitCloud. So No, let's talk about Jack first. Okay, so we have a friend, Jack Butcher.

Who is Uh he's behind this account that's kind of very popular on Twitter called Visualize Value. He himself was kind of like a designer background, so very like kind of artistic guy and um By the way, every day every time I say autistic, I think I'm about to say autistic. And so I have to like, you know, catch myself each time, make sure I didn't call them autistic. So It could be that too, who knows? I mean, Well actually he th the thing about Jack is he's very smooth, very very low key

Nicest guy in the world. And uh I I met I met Jack a year ago. A year ago I contacted him and asked him to do this design stuff, and then he was just Up and coming. Right. And Sara and I my wife became friends with Jack and his wife. And we

They spent Thanksgiving with us down here in Austin where uh they just had a baby and we're we've been Friends with them uh uh talking all that stuff. And He did his story is that he used to live in New York City. Him and his wife, he's British. He he came here ten years ago. They shared a one bedroom

Or sorry, a studio apartment that was four hundred square feet. And he was they were nothing. I mean, they were they they're they try to start an agency business. It didn't go so well, and they were on their last dollar. And this is only like eighteen months ago. Right. Okay. kind of pivots to basically saying, okay, within the agency work that I do. The part that I like

and I'm good at and other people don't seem to like, but they really want. are these like pitch decks I'm making. I'm really good at making these slides where it's just a rectangle and I communicate some information on it. And so that's where the visualized value brand came from, was he's just putting out like A little you know, like an image, a rectangle. That would take a concept and like bring it to life visually. And so he started off getting popular by just taking a bunch of Naval's.

uh popular tweets, uh, you know, sayings as little kind of one liners. And he wouldn't create a a graphic out of it. And he has this one graphic style. You if you're on Twitter Twitter, you've seen it. It's this black and white. Uh oh, it's always a black background with white text on top and a little kind of like very simplistic, minimalistic. um like graph or chart or drawing on top of it. Okay. So

That's visualized value. So he does like the normal creator thing. He gets a little bit of an audience, his Twitter grows to 100,000 people. He creates a course, he creates kind of like a paid community for people who want to learn this thing, and he's doing well for himself, right? And that's where we met him like. And he he he's i it does he does north of a million dollars a year in revenue and the only S uh expenses are like the small software stuff and then him and his wife. Exactly. And um so he's doing he's doing very well for himself. Right. But it's all relative. She's doing much better now. So what happened? Um

This craze around NFTs came out. And if you don't know what NFTs is, just think of it like digital art. That people buy. And uh crypto people really like it'cause it's virtual art in the same way that crypto is sort of sort of like a virtual money or a digital money. So anyways. Jack starts doing

NFTs. So Jack basically takes his same art that he's posting on Twitter for free and he's like, No Now you can own this piece of art. Now you can own this post that I'm putting up. And so he just dabbles, you know, just does an experiment. I don't know what the first one sold for. I think it was like one ether, right? Uh one ether. Two two or three thousand dollars. It was like yeah, just close to two grand and uh it was like one point five ether or something like that. So it's like two or three thousand bucks.

Still pretty sweet, right? Like this is just a You know, dot PNG file that he otherwise upload to Twitter for free. And now somebody wanted to own the dot png file because they're fans of his and this meant to that something to them, and they had a bunch of crypto gains that they could reinvest their Jackie Cheese money, right? And so Um

Okay, so now he's like stepping it up. So we'll fast forward. He does some more NFTs. He releases another NFT. This one gets bit up. And gets bought for thirty three E. Which is I think something like um What is thirty three E? Thirty three E times like seventy grand seventy grand. So he sells one of his images for seventy grand.

And I called him right when I saw that. I go, Jack, is this real? Does someone he goes Yeah, it's crazy, mate. That's all I said. Right, right, right, exactly. Cause he's not like He's not like a schemer in any way, but I think he is smart and he is interesting, he likes to dabble, but like he wasn't He's not trying to pull a quick one, he's like Putting his art out there and people are buying it. And so I actually message the buyer.

And I go Why the heck did you buy this thing? It's some random, you know, random username and he just goes, Oh, you know, I love Jack and I think this is gonna appreciate in value. And I j you know, I just really love this. Like I just love the I love the art. And I was like wow, okay, fantastic. So that's the guy who bought it for seventy grand. So But then he did something even crazier.

Which I'm talking about the packs. Do you know the packs? Yeah. So t explain that one. So the the part of the story is the the craze there's two crazy parts of the story. The most recent thing that happened, which we'll talk But the first

Crazy thing is He was like, you know, what if I did like people love Jack. He's got a cult following probably more than Sean. People love Sean. They used to love me, then they move to Sean. Now they now they love Jack. And What he did was he created a website where you were buying a pack. He had twelve packs. All it said was pack one, pack two, pack three. It looked like a imagine like a baseball car, but with a Jack Butcher cover on it and it was just black and it said visualized value pack one. Right. And you would buy these packs having no idea what the NFT art was in it. Right. He had twelve of them and people were bidding on them. And each one sold for around ten to fifteen thousand dollars, which is

I thought Amazing. Until we get to the final part of the story. At least the most recent part of the story. Exactly. So he so he gets to so today I log on to Twitter as I do first thing in the morning. What's going on in the world today? Holy shit. Jack Butcher has listed a new piece of art for seventy six million dollars. Something like that. Seven what is it? What's the exact number? Seventy two, seventy six million. He basically and it's called fame. And what he did was the most the highest um

Priced NFT. Thus far in the history of mankind was People. the the artist people. uh who's like Jack, but even more popular. So Beeple had done a a a few drops. Those drops were like kind of in the one to five million range ish.

And then the most popular N F T of all time was sold for sixty nine million dollars recently. And like there's some rumors that like That was sort of a manufactured sale. Like somebody came in and did it just to like They're gonna like

I don't know, these are rumors, but rumors were that they kinda made it a publicity stunt. So anyways, Jack Uh basically says cool. This is a NFT called Fame and what Fame is, is it will be the number one priced uh piece of artwork in a digital artwork in the world. Right, so he prices it above the people drop. I wasn't

I wasn't referring to this. I was referring to the what he did last I didn't even see this. This is crazy. Last week what he did was he b he wrote uh he did an NFT and it says here's the difference between a uh A J a JPEG and an NFT and it just had a verified if It he he basically made a tweet. And then he sold that tweet for like a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Right.

Which I thought was crazy. This is way crazier. Because it's it's crazier because It might work. Exactly. So okay, so let's let's walk through this if you're Jack. Why I'll tell you why do this and why it might actually work. Why do this? Well Um I if if nothing else, this is just a great way to d drive attention, uh press.

And um and just do something that's bold, right? So pricing the you know, pricing a piece of your artwork for seventy seven million dollars, it doesn't even mean if it doesn't even matter if somebody buys it. Just pricing it for seventy seven million dollars is uh is already gonna put you on the map. The second thing is This might be a Yeah.

Let's say you take the three outcomes. Somebody actually buys it for seventy seven million dollars, right? Um, there's been crypto punk's now. The the the number one crypunk. Sold for you look this up. How much did that crypto the top crypto punk sell for? I think it was like seven seven million dollars, something like that. People sold for 69 million. So there is a chance, there is a maybe 5%, 2% chance that this thing actually sells for$77 million, which would be. Incredible.

Second thing. This might be a shoot for the stars you land on the moon situation. Uh yeah, the Crypto Punk sold for seven and a half million. Um And the guy who bought it, by the way, this is kinda cool. I don't know how you s pronounce this, but

The person who bought it, his handle is Per Perugia or Peruvia or something, I don't know what it is. I'm not in the art world, but That's the same that's a an homage, basically. That's the same name of the guy who stole the Mona Lisa. Which is what helped catapult the Mona Lisa to fame was when it was stolen. Um, and that was like part of the part of what made the Mona Lisa even more remarkable and more valuable now most valuable piece of artwork in the world. Um

And so So okay, so Great usage of the word omave. Yeah, thank you. Um we're trying to class it up right here. So all right, so so he might not sell it for seventy seven million, but even if it sells for one point seven million, that's one point seven million dollars that he just, you know, manufactured through his own creativity and th you know, in probably I would bet you like four days of effort.

Um I got I have chills looking at this tweet that he put out. The reason why this is so crazy is It might work. Someone might be crazy enough to do this. Right. He basically has a no-loss situation, and because Jack's brand is

Because he is authentic. He is Um not kind of like a You know Quick flash in the pan, trying to make a quick, quick dollar. Like he's literally almost like a you know, he's more of an artist, really, than he is like anything else. And so he's been doing this for a while. He's been creating daily content. He's been building up a following and

So just like people did that, people did people did a new piece of art every day for ten years. And so it's like, you know, he's an overnight success ten years in the making. And I think Jack's very similar. So I see Jack having a no lose situation. And this is NFTs are a thing that basically fits his skill set. And so like there's a lot of reasons people kinda Shit on NFTs right now. One is that it's

Overvalued, it's a bubble. What do you really own? Look, I can just screenshot and boom, I own the thing too. You know, like there's a bunch of ways you can make fun of this. Well one of the good things that came out of this is that um you know in most of these These like kind of hype cycles. It's the suits on Wall Street that get rich. Uh this time at least it's starving artists that get rich. And so uh, you know, at the at the very worst, even if the whole thing comes crashing out, at least a few artists got paid. And you know, who could be really too mad at that? I I I can't. So so I think this is kind of like an amazing thing Jack's doing. This boggles my mind. Should we ask him to come on? Do you want Chuck come on? Yeah, we should have to come on.

Are you friends with him? Yeah. N not as close as you guys, but yeah, we're we're close. You should message him. We should see if he he hops on he hops on today. Um Just be like you're free to come talk about your fame thing for for five minutes. Let's just see if he hops on at the end of this. Yeah.

All right, I just texted him. All right. We'll we'll we'll come back we'll come back to that. Uh Fucking crazy. I Yeah.

Yeah, it's I almost have chills talking about it. Would it be We're going to a different topic or do you want to stay on NFTs and stuff like that? Um We can do whatever you want. Well, I think it's gonna go two ways. It's gonna be if I'm listening to this, and I'm most people who are listening to this are kind of like

not as knee deep into this world as we are and And we're still like just kind of dabbling. And so the average person is probably not you know, familiar with all these things, definitely not taking action and definitely not getting rich on all all these things. So there's I think It's gonna be kind of polarizing. Some people are gonna think, oh wow, this is really cool. I should go check this out and learn more about this. Some people be like this is so stupid. I think this is all just like, you know, a giant carnival game that

You know, some kind of Ponzi scheme that I don't want to hear more about. So I don't know, it's probably pretty polarizing. Let me move let's do a different one. Um, let's do a different one and we'll only spend about ten minutes on it and then we're probably gonna come back to this. I actually wanna come back to this. I wanna come back to BitCloud, I wanna call come back to Angel investment. Okay. Um okay. But

Someone I I tweeted out that I'm gonna start a YouTube channel and someone said you should talk about your research process, and that's a really hard thing to talk about, but I wanna bring up one one topic. uh of my research process as well as one interesting thing that I found. So what I like to do is I like to find out

Who um It's buying different parts of real estate. Or different real estate. So I go to the real deal dot com and there's this one segment called Yolanda says. It's like This fake author named Yolanda, he goes, I heard a rumor that this person's buying a house. The owner is this, this, and this. Yolanda hears that. Um

They're gonna offer this much money. I have no idea. Yolan is a fake person. But it's just like a blog a blog. For real estate. Mostly in New York and LA though, so they're kind of famous. Famous E purse people doing it. And what I love to do is find out who bu's buying the real estate. And then I go and research them. And the reason why is one of the best ways to figure out if someone's actually wealthy or not.

is by the real estate holdings that they own. That's one of the few things that it's really hard to fake. I mean you could fake it, but if someone has bought a twenty million dollar home, the likelihood that they're worth a hundred million dollar plus is incredibly high. Um you know, it's hard to like bullshit that. Right. And so real estate holdings is one of the best way to get an indicator of someone's wealth. Or it's a great way. Not the best way, but it's a great way. And I found one that interested me a ton. This guy's name was Brian Carringer and he he uh

bought a house in Malibu in two thousand nineteen for twenty million dollars. I hadn't heard Brian I know a lot of internet uh entrepreneurs Um I hadn't heard of'em, so I researched them. And this is the guy who started dictionary.com. Kind of a crazy

thing when you think about it because Hmm. Really think of dictionary dictionary dot com. So in the nineteen nineties, this guy started uh in nineteen ninety five, he started a This is called Lexico Publishing.

And Lexico Publishing owned the Thesaurus.com and dictionary.com. And he bootstrapped it and he grew it and he sold it in two thousand and five to IAC. For a hundred million dollars. And then Uh two years ago, IAC sold dictionary.com to Dan Gilbert. You know Dan Gilbert, Quick and Loans? Yep. He sold dictionary.com for

Uh, or they sold dictionary.com for a hundred million dollars. So they they didn't do a a very good job of it. But dictionary.com gets around forty dictionary.com and thesaurus.com gets around forty million unique a month and does about twenty million in revenue. And they have barely any employees. I I believe dozens of employees. It's incredibly fascinating because This by the way. How do they make money? It's just ads, ad sense, or is there something else? Just ads. All it is is ads. And it's an incredibly interesting company because it's one of the things that I call a for uh it you call let's call uh I call it a forgotten property, like just things that you forget that even exist, but just quietly make money and are quite repeatable. They're not like necessarily sexy. Um it's like the sweaty startup of internet. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

law landscaping business. This is kinda like that for the internet. Sure. Um And but they've done a really good job of staying relevant. So they do a word of the day, which people like particularly love. Like it's a huge email list of we just get the word of the day. They also do a word of a year. Word of the year word uh of the year. So when Donald Trump was president in twenty sixteen, I think the word of the year was xenophobic. Because a lot of people were searching what xenophobic means. Uh th this past year in two thousand twenty, it was pandemic.

And it was all it's almost like a recap of year. And it's actually kind of culturally relevant. And also what they do is when someone like Kendall Jender or Kylie Jender, whatever the woman is who is quote self made. They they they'll do funny stuff, like they'll tweet the definitive they'll retweet a tweet of her calling herself self self made and they'll They'll say actually the definition of self Self made.

Is Success unaided. Or something like that. Like they like they're pretty snarky. I find this to be incredibly interesting. Um, because it's something I didn't think about.

And That's Man, you went from a hundred to zero real quick there at the end. Yeah. Uh okay, so we we actually had a friend Who was looking at buying dictionary.com. Do you know about this?

No. We had a friend that was looking at buying dictionary.com and merging it with another business. Can't remember the name of it now. Urban dictionary dot com is another big one. That one gets about forty or fifty million unique a month. And who owns that?

Uh just a guy. A guy in San Francisco. Aaron Peckham. So there's a similar um I know you wrote another one on here that that's similar to me, which is chess.com. And so Yeah. I don't know as much about it as you do, so fill in the gaps. But I was looking at it, I was like, Oh man, Chest.com is a great domain.

Uh chess is this kind of like Very quiet. You know, just like super sticky, you know, just relevant. It's a classic game, right? It's just been relevant for so long. And then with Queen's Gambit, it got like way more popular recently. There's all these crazy charts spiking the trends. People searching for chess, chess boards, ch how to get good at chess, like what is Queen's Gambit, how do you do a Queen's Gambit, all those things.

And so it's not. It ha they have two hundred employees. I bet you. It's worth If you told me uh

Th I heard a rumor they're thinking about selling and I would bet it'd be worth a quarter of a billion dollars. Exactly. That's uh that's what I was gonna say. They have a huge amount of traffic. What's their traffic monthly? It's uh I don't I'll look it up, but they have around fifty million registered users. Right. And they're not just like it's not flyby traffic like dictionary.com, thesaurus.com, they're gonna have A lot more traffic, but it's gonna be flyby. Two hundred million monthly uniques, according to Similar Web, most of which is direct.

Incredible, right? And so two hundred million th they make money way more though. Do you know how they make money? No, I well, I can guess. Tell me if I'm right. So I I would guess that basically they sell some kind of, you know, course tutorial a way to get better at chess. Do they do that? Yeah, and so you can meet with coaches and you can pay coaches money. Right. Can they do they also have some kind of like premium pro membership where you get matched with better people and your stats get saved and something like that? Yeah. Yep. Okay. So dead simple business model around a classic game that nobody owns the IP to, right? It's not like saying um Monopoly. Well, you can't do Monopoly. Somebody owns Monopoly. You know, I don't know who Hasbro or whoever owns Monopoly.

You you can do it with chess. And this is one of the reasons why we talked about religion as a really interesting fun uh, you know, fundamental or like base layer for any business because nobody owns religion, but it's a h highly recognized brand with super high affinity. So I love businesses that are, you know, like pray the app that's you know basically calm for for Christianity Or there's versions of this for the Muslim religion. And so I love religion as one of the primary substrates because you have a billion people who know about it. But uh nobody owns the IP, so you can use the IP.

And So what what w what was our friend gonna do? I wonder who our friend is. So I don't remember exactly and I don't know how much we could really talk about it, but they were gonna basically buy two properties at the same time, dictionary.com and one other one. And because they were like, look, dictionary.com gets a ton of traffic, but it's not so sticky of a service. It doesn't really have Um a great monetization potential is just display. display ads and then this other thing is a great business model and has um

uh, you know, ha has great stickiness. Uh maybe we merge the two. Like let's just Okay, here's a hypothetical. I don't know if this is exactly what they said, but If you're grammarly. Would you pay for Would you go buy dictionary.com and to source, right? Because you're gonna go get fifty, sixty million people coming to look up words and find out what words mean, and you can say, Hey, by the way. If you you know, if you ever feel like you want to sharpen up with this.

Maybe you should uh install Grammarly, which is a great way to write, you know, choose better vocab, write write in perfect grammar and become a better writer. Right. Like They have a business model attached to it that that that makes sense. And so I wonder if there were other things like that. Maybe. I would if I was Greg Mole, I would maybe buy dictionary.com. Um I just thought it was interesting because you don't really think about this. Another one that I've been I'm gonna do research on is easygif.com. Do you know that?

I know that one, yes. I actually so I have a Slack channel called Buyouts in my Slack. And um I just have my Slack with Ben and we have a slack called Biots, which is basically Company uh websites that I think would be awesome to buy. Easy Gif was the first one I ever put in that that channel because I was like Oh my God, I love this. I love this simple tool. Like it's a ton of traffic, it's zero zero to no maintenance, and uh and it can it makes money. You know, remove.bg is another one like that.

uh where you can just remove the background of a photo and then you pay for credits. Uh so it's like you don't need to know Photoshop. to remove the background of a photo. And uh I just think that's genius. So easy GIF dot com, it's the letters E, the letter Z, and then GIF GIF dot com. Uh eight million unique a month. You go there and you upload a

uh video and it turns it into a gif. Uh I was doing research on it. It looks like the guy it looks like it's only one uh a a small team, a couple people. Um made in Latia. Uh So

Yeah. Here's two other things. If I'm dictionary.com Uh, one thing that they should do is they should take a page out of the New York Times playbook. So I don't know if you've

You probably have because you're in the you know, you're in media, you care about the stuff, but most people aren't aware of how the New York Times really makes money, what it what its business looks like today. a pretty large p part of their business. I I I haven't done the research because it's off the top of my head, but Very long. Tens of millions of dollars a year, I believe, comes from their games division. Um particularly one game. Crossword. And so um I play this game every single day, the New York Times mini Crossword.

It is Uh literally a two minute game that like kind of stimulates the brain and it's fun to do and it requires like no kind of hand eye coordination type of thing. And it's not you can't get super addicted to it'cause it's like One a day. Um, so the mini crossword is like they took the crossword, which is a big part of the papers. Okay, now the papers all digital. How do we make a digital version of the crossword? And then they made it mini so that it's actually like simpler for the average person to do. You can like pretty much always win.

And um super fun game and so the I don't know what the do you have the revenue numbers of of Crossword and the game's looking it up. So if I'm dictionary.com, that's you know, whoever's the CEO of dictionary.com, hey, free idea that I think would generate probably eight to ten million dollars a year. You should come out with your take all these popular f uh games like

Word scramble or mini crossword or um you know all these different little word word puzzle games that are very popular in the app store. And they have trouble with distribution. Good games. Trouble with distribution. All you need to do is re skin that as the dictionary.com game. And put it as a pop up for people coming to the site to hey.

Download this fun game. And uh, you know, even if you're converting you know half a percent of your traffic to this thing, you're gonna end up driving a lot of revenue because this game is is very these games work. And all they need is distribution. And maybe people who come to dictionary.com or they subscribe to the word of the day email, like I think they would like to play these little word games. They're very popular. Even my mom plays these little word scramble games. Okay, so uh

Some information on New York Times. New York Times is a publicly traded company, so this is where I'm getting some of the numbers, but I don't always break out the revenue by segments. So I'm doing a little bit of guesstimation, but I would bet I'm right within ten to twenty percent. Um so two thousand twenty. New York Times said they had six hundred thousand people paying for the CrossFit puzzle only. Just CrossFit puzzle. That was in two thousand twenty. Thousand twenty was a huge year for uh subscripts subscription revenue. Yeah. Everything doubled, but let's just round that up to eight hundred thousand from six hundred thousand. So eight hundred thousand, I believe it costs six dollars and ninety five cents a month. For a crosswind puzzle, but so let's run that up to seven dollars. So seven dollars times eight hundred thousand. We're looking at five point six million dollars a month. Sixty million a year or

Uh sixty seven million dollars a year in subscription revenue only from Crosswood puzzles. Right. That's it. That's just the Crosswood puzzle division. Right. Fucking crazy. Right, right, exactly. Uh and and there like I read an article recently uh where the guy was like you know, someone from the New York Times was like, Yeah, we're quadrupling down on games. Games exploded during COVID. Crossword is already an amazing franchise for us. The next they have another game, I forgot what it is. But they have like, you know, a few staple games that are like these classics and they're like, you know, we're We're actually a games company. They the guy literally said that he goes, You know, we we don't just you know, just put the game the same exact game on a phone. We like kind of reinvent it so that it's like

even more fun on your phone. We try to like put a twist on the game. We're not just gonna come out with You know, the classic You know, like for example, twenty forty eight. If you ever play that little numbers game where you slide the tiles and it like, you know, it adds up to twenty forty eight. Um the game's awesome. And so New York Times could come out with a version of twenty forty eight. Which is like um, you know, their own twist on the game.

So I found that to be pretty interesting and that's what I would do if I was dictionary.com. Um so In this segment, the takeaway should be learn about real estate and read the real deal and Google all the entrepreneurs And the reason why you do that is you're gonna discover stuff like dictionarythesor.com and you're eventually gonna learn about

Crosswit puzzles. And the reason why this is important. What we're discussing is just interesting Stop. But the reason why this is all important is we are showing that you can make a killing, a fucking killing, hundreds of millions of dollars to the point where you're buying a twenty million dollar home on the beachfront of Malibu. More than most celebrities will ever be able to afford.

And you're doing it by building something that You're just like it starts as like a silly thing that you never would have thought could actually become this big. And when you see this stuff, it actually inspires you. And or at least it inspires me. Knowing that like I can turn something silly into something profitable and that's a badass. That is awesome.

Just knowing that that's possible. It is cool. It's kinda like Why does everyone why did five people break the four minute mile in the same year when previously no one had done it? It's because when you see what's possible, it it it it pushes the boundary and it and it shows you what you can do. That's neat to me. So we should also say uh so two things.

I that that I took away from that. You are really good at figuring out uh like you sniff out these little interesting stories because you just think Who's that guy? How does you drive that car?

How much does that cost? Yeah. How'd you get that money, right? And actually there's a famous TikTok channel that just does only this. I don't know if you use TikTok. But he goes up to people. Getting out of like Lamborghinis or like, you know, like just killer cars. And just be like, Hey man, uh what do you do for a living?

And the guys like what? And he's just like, Yeah, well what do you do for a living? I just I'm curious. Yeah, it's like I'm in real estate. Real estate, cool, man. And he just leaves. That's it. Kinda bothers him for a second and then you know the person will be like, you know. I'm a cannabis entrepreneur. I'm uh you know, I'm a hedge fund guy. I uh

I'm a YouTuber. I'm a whatever, right? Well, uh the joke of that channel is the people say one of two things. The women say I'm a wife. And they like joking. And then they also or they'll say, I sell drugs. Right, right, exactly. And then they like zoom away. Um, and so so I love that channel. At first I think that's just like a really simple, fun idea for a TikTok channel. And then um, but but there is some like kind of merit to that. And it's really helped me in life, which is basically anytime you see somebody who's got an interesting lifestyle.

I like to figure out two things. One is Is your whole day like this? What's your day like? What do you do? How do you do that? And I like to see how people architect their life, right? Like And that sort of like it's like you said about the four minute mile, it opens your mind to what's possible. So recently I got this like uh private chef person who's like making meals for me. They don't work they don't come to my house, they don't make food in my house, but it's like a delivery service, meal prep service.

But Let's call it a private chef. Right, because it's not DoorDash, it's somebody who's giving me a menu or giving feedback. Yeah, you're doing the same'cause I'm doing it for you know, try to be fit. You're trying to do this for the same reason. You want to eat healthier and Pay if you can afford it, that's a convenient way to do it, right? Where

You know, you got the the P word privilege to be able to do it. And so Uh the w the reason I think that's even possible or realize that was because The investor in my last company, he had a private chef. That was like a former Michelin Star chef at a restaurant, this guy Elgin, amazing chef.

No W like would Be at his house and he would make it you know, lunch and dinner for them every single night. And I was like, whoa, I didn't even realize people have that.

And it it's not that oh You know, I want that, but it's I didn't even realize that's a possibility of a lifestyle that you could have. It is a upgraded part of your life. And so there's all these little examples I've I've had in my life of like Like I have a cousin who has like a virtual assistant in the Philippines. And I asked him, Yeah, how how do you do what do you do with that? How do you set it up? How'd you find the right person, right? Just get real curious about different people's lifestyles and how they architect how they design their life.

And you kind of You can pick and choose from there what works for you, what you want out of your life. The second thing is Why did the guy behind dictionary.com like make it work, right? Because it's like kind of a simple idea. Well, he was early to a platform, right? So to get the domain. dictionary dot com. You couldn't do that today, but you could do it when the web was early and not everybody believed.

Which is a perfect segue. Back to Bit cloud. Which by the way. Speaking of BitCloud, uh I texted Jack while we were talking. He's gonna be joining any second now. Oh, perfect.

Um so We brought this up on the last podcast because Ryan Biegelman came on, a friend of ours came on and was like, dude I haven't had this much fun on a product since like the early days of Facebook. I'm obsessed with this thing. And he was asking us like Are you gonna use it? Are you gonna claim your account? So if you missed that episode, let me just give you the like 10 seconds of what this is. Uh imagine, you know, if if like Robin Hood and Twitter had a baby. So it's basically a a stock market for people. So you go on the app.

Bitcloud.com And you just see all these people. And you can buy instead of just following them or just liking their content, you can actually buy into their stock, essentially. You can buy their creator coins. And so you could buy their coins and every time you buy the price goes up and every time you sell the price goes down. And so it's kind of like a stock market for people's reputations.

And um and so when we did the pod, my my my coin was uh about fifteen hundred dollars at the time while we were recording it. And Ryan was like my fourth biggest holder. He had bought up a bunch and he was like, Are you gonna use this thing or not? I said Sure, I'll give it a try and I'll see what what happens. Of course, dude. Yeah. You know, like There's guys who take like

My friend Jack takes every vitamin if you're like Hey, I have this vitamin. Boom, done, take it. Right. Like he takes every vitamin or he takes every type of supplement you could ever you are like that with Bitcoin or any type of like This isn't bad, but like schemes. So it's like hey, there's this thing called the Bit Cloud. Okay, hang on. Yep, I just uploaded hundreds of thousands of that. Hundreds of thousands on dude. I'm in. That is you. You you try everything. I learned I learned. And you think it's all the best.

Well, I don't think it's all the best, but I do at the beginning, you know, at the beginning it makes sense to be optimistic when everybody else is uh, you know, pessimistic or skeptical. Uh default to this is the greatest thing I've ever seen. That's your default. No. My default is I'm game to try it. And then if it starts to have some merit, I'm like Okay, you know what's really cool about this? X, Y, and Z. Even if A B and C said. That's not how people perceive it. I had people message me after our Thing. Saying like why the hell is Sean uh pumping this BitCloud thing. It's a Ponti scheme. And I was like, I don't know. He likes it. That's just his opinion. He likes it. But they were mad at they were mad at me because we were promoting this and I was like, I don't know. So so let me explain. So we have two friends. So you have a your one of your best buddies is Jack Smith.

Um and Jack, he came on the podcast. We did an episode with him back when this was an interview show. And I asked him, I said, Well, how did you create this bungal thing that now sold for I don't know, seven hundred fifty million dollars or something like that? And the root of his thing was I try every platform early. As soon as something comes out, I wanna try it. And in fact, yes, if you go on BitCloud, Jack Smith owns two cents of my my coin.

Oh he was there before me. Of course he was, right? on product and he became the number one power user as soon as product time came out. He used it every single day. with NFTs and collectibles, um He's like the number one power user on all these different platforms for digital c for for for fractional ownership and collectives. buyer. Exactly. And um and so that's what Jack does. And and it it's not that all of these will work. It's that you only need one to work.

for it to pay off big, right? If you were early in Twitter. Uh, you know, e even just as a user, you would have a big following. If you were early as an investor in any of these companies, is if they hit. It gets very big. So that was the first kind of Huh, I noticed that from Jack.

Then I saw uh then I was talking to my friend Furcon. He's the CTO and and was co founder of my previous company. Probably the best kind of technology guy I know. And Furcon's always dabbling. So he was the one telling me about Bitcoin and Ethereum before anybody else. Before and I didn't listen to him. I didn't buy. And he was just buying like he put like five grand into Ethereum in the ICO or something like that. You know, like

And so you know the ICO of Ethereum was seventeen cents. And now it sells now it's e uh every ether is is uh seventeen hundred dollars, right? So yeah, you can see the type of appreciation you get when one of these hits. And he's had, you know, for every one that one ether that hits big like that, he has, you know, maybe fifty or a hundred. Things that don't fully pan out. Like for example, he's huge on VR.

He bought me an Oculus. I was like, dude, let's play VR poker together. Let's try VR. And like VR hasn't hit in a big way yet. And he spent you know Thousands of dollars on VR. He spends you know, hundreds of hours building in VR. And so far that's yielded nothing.

But I asked him, What's your what's your deal with this? Is it because you like, am I dumb? I don't think VR's big. You you seem to be all over it. He goes, No. What I do is anytime there's an interesting technology I'm just curious about it and therefore I'm liking the first 10,000 people. that really understand every new technology. And he's like

Because of that, one of those technologies is gonna be big. So right now, for example, he's super into vertical farming. And like hydroponic farming. And he's just like all about indoor farming, all about vertical farming and like So he he's we have this one hour a week called the cool shit hour. I just sit back on Zoom and he just kind of shows me the cool shit he's been trying out.

This week. And this week was all about vertical farming and it blew my mind. I didn't know anything about it. And he was telling me all the reasons it's awesome. Why is this just not an episode that we do? It should it really should be'cause it's so good. It's kinda my edge right now,'cause he tells me about shit and then I go take action on it and like He's even earlier than me, so he gets more upside. But I'm still very early just by being buddies with this guy. So

Anyway that's a long way of saying It in technology it pays to be optimistic. It pays to be an early adopter. If you're willing to look stupid sometimes by ch by putting some time or money into things that fail. You can you will net out way way ahead.

just by being early into a bunch of interesting things. At the very least you learn Um, but at the at the most, one of these hits and then you gain a bunch of like you built a big network there, or you make a bunch of money because you invested in it. So anyways, that's that's my overall philosophy. I totally see the people who are like BitCloud is dumb. This is a scam, this is a sham, this is you know.

This will never work. Hey, I think there's merits to all those arguments. But For my opinion, I just thought This sounds interesting, sounds very different than anything else that's out there.

I tried it. And I immediately liked it. So the first twenty four hours I was hooked. By the second twenty four hours, I put a hundred thousand dollars into the platform, you know, don't tell my wife. So right now my um Y you It's a

That's a lot of money. It's a lot of money. Uh So let me tell you why. Yeah.

It is a lot of it. My thing is uh my market cap on here is is uh goes one seventy to two hundred thousand. I sold some of my stuff and a guy wired or um It sent me money on Coinbase, uh ten thousand dollars. Right. I'm like, I think this is silly, but like I told you this is silly, and you're still gonna give me money? Okay, fine, I'll take it.

I sold some of mine. Yeah, you sold some of yours. I have not sold any of mine. Uh and instead I actually invested money into the platform or bought a bunch of people's coins, including yours. And so um so I own a bunch of coins for all these different people that I think might appreciate. And so I would say there is still a I would say in the long run, this working in the long run, I think there's like a less than two percent chance this works in the long run.

If it does work. My hundred thousand dollars is gonna be worth tens of millions of dollars. But that's the that's the long run. Um Two percent case. Okay.

Well, I wouldn't put up a hundred grand for a two percent win. 'Cause I actually have a second way to win in this case, which is that I have now been an early adopter of basically every crypto thing. over the last I don't know six five six years. And some of'em are dumb, some of them work, whatever.

And what I've seen is that anytime a kind of new exciting disruptive idea comes out, whether it's ICOs or NFTs or Whatever. Pick your favorite acronym. There's like a hype cycle that takes place. There's the people who are there's the people who make it. There's the people who buy in at the beginning and get get access. And then there's like

A bunch of crypto enthusiasts who are believers in the general like innovation space of crypto. That then say, Oh, cool, this sounds fun. I want to go try it. And that's happening right now with NFTs. Like we talked about our friend Jet uh Jack, who's selling a bunch of N NFTs for you know, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars. It's because there are crypto enthusiasts who say NFTs are really cool. I want to invest in that. When the crypto enthusiasts Are not many of them hate BitCloud.

Uh yeah, sure. S many many if there's Crypto enthusiasts is not one group of people. It's broken up into like big what's called called Bitcoin maximalists. They don't want to talk about anything except for Bitcoin and they don't want to they they want to invest 100% into Bitcoin. Then there's Ethereum people who are like all about Ethereum. Then there's people who are just just try to degenerately gamble across all the different like different crypto projects that exist. I'm talking more about them, the gamblers, because I I understand a gambler. Have you made more money off Bitcoin than you have selling your company? No.

That'd be cool if you did. It would have been sweet. Uh I think in the long run I will, but uh as of now, no. But You know, f if you project forward five years, I would Almost certainly my crypto will be worth more than what I sold the company for. What I got out of the sale. Do you think that what percentage of your net worth do you have in crypto? So I I tweeted out that I was moving twenty five percent

into my net worth into Bitcoin into Bitcoin. And not just like not just liquid net worth, just net worth. I ended up getting about 20% in. But the price kept rising as I was doing it. Um

So my my my overall my average buy price is about eleven thousand dollars. For Bitcoin? Um But anyways, th my my my holdings now are like I don't know almost fifty percent of my net worth just because crypto has appreciated. So I I didn't put in as much as I said I was going to. It was a little bit less.

But It appreciated so now it makes up more and I didn't sell. I didn't like sell to rebalance, let's put it that way. That's crazy. So anyway, so the thing I want to tell you about is

So that's my general my my my let's let's play out three scenarios. Scenario one Uh let's say with BitCloud. This is a uh a scam. I don't believe it's a scam given that they have backers and investors like Andre Sun Horowitz and Sequoia, Chemoff. Coin you know, Coinbase Capital, the Winklevoss like

Basically like everybody who's legit in the technology slash crypto space, like th these are tier one names. That are invested in this thing. I don't think it's a scam. It's definitely not a scam in the sense of that it's malicious people. Right. So that's that's like one thing that does happen in the crypto world. People take your money and they fucking run away. Right. That is literally That has literally happened. So that so I don't think it's that. Um and I'll bucket in, you know, one of the big criticisms is you can't withdraw your money. Yeah, you have a huge amount of value in there, but you can't withdraw yet. I would bucket that into the scam argument. Like if you think they'll never allow you to withdraw, I think that's silly. That that would be a scam then. After that podcast, I kind of understood what the heck BitClout was.

Which is It's basically a social network where You can bet on the people. Who are gonna you know, and their reputation. And so as a

As a p as a participant, you could say, Okay, instead of just following Sam, if I think Sam is awesome and Sam's gonna only get more popular over time. I can actually invest in Sam. Um, which is a little bit different than like Patreon or Substack where it's like I'll pay you for your shit. That's different. That's like okay, do I wanna buy this content or not? Instead, this is I'm a believer in you.

And so like back to that thousand true fans concept, it's like if I'm a believer in you, I can invest in you. And as more people Realize that you're the shit. Um, your price will continue to go up, and I will actually I'll go up with you. My my stock in you will appreciate. So I can actually make money. Being a curator, being somebody who

Um who recognizes talent before others do. Who recognizes Reputations that are on the rise. So I think that's really cool. That's a new thing. You couldn't do that before. If if I was an early user of Snapchat or of like Twitter or Facebook or whatever. It was cool, but like I didn't actually gain anything from it financially. If I discovered Jack, you know, you you said you met Jack when Jack had a kind of smaller following. Yeah.

You didn't gain financially from Jack's following growing. And so I think that's a new thing that that that's a really cool mechanic. Now on the other side, let's say you're let's say you're the creator, let's say you're Jack. You can basically go on and say, Cool. You know what?

Um I'm like a little mini Warren Buffett. I I wanna have my Berkshire Hathaway summit, my my shareholder meeting. So you can basically say, cool, for my top twenty five coin holders. Um I will meet with you personally and you know in a in a Zoom or in person somewhere.

Um, and that's a privilege you get by being one of my top shareholders. Or I can say, Hey, I'm gonna produce some premium content. And instead of having to set up a whole different app like Substack or Patreon or or something else. Like You just say, Great, if you own over ten of my coin, you get this thing.

Um, and so it gives people a way to not just buy the content. But to be a long term holder of you. And I think that's really cool too as a creator. And so So your and your market cap right now is like six hundred thousand dollars. Did it get that high because you bought your own stuff or I I've only met one coin of mine. Um Why are people buying you or how are they even hearing it? Well, I heard about it on the pod, I think. So I think that was one thing. But then otherwise there's just people hearing about BitCloud'cause a whole bunch of people join, right? Like so Even just in our little network, right?

Um Andrew Wilkinson joined two days ago. And you know, he's a super legit person and he tweeted out today I woke up at five in the morning thinking about big clout and he's like, you know, and not just all good things, right? He said like The design kinda sucks. I kinda hate the name. I wish it didn't feel so shady because the way they're doing this, this and this.

But here's some things that like The mind virus has infected him where it's like Wait, this does open up Pandora's box of a whole bunch of new capabilities and things that you sh kind kinda couldn't do before. Um, and definitely couldn't do in a platform that had any legs and this has legs.

About a hundred seventy million dollars has been deposited onto this. Most of that is from their institutional backers like Andrews and Horowitz and Sequoia and those other guys. Um But But but the rest has been, you know, maybe eight to ten million dollars has come in from

from users who are buying into the platform. Uh the CTO of HubSpot, Darmesh, he's on there every day. Me and him are chatting on there all the time because He's li's posting like, you know, he's a daily user of this thing because I think it's a cool new technology, cool app, and he's playing with it. He he bought my stock. Exactly. And so Uh I've had a lot of fun basically speculating on people, buying a bunch of people's coins, and I think

I think those people are awesome or undervalued. So, for example, I'll give you I'll give you an example. I saw this guy on BitCloud. And he was posting a bunch of analysis. So he's like exploring the blockchain. And he's l he says, look, because this is built on the blockchain, it's all public. You know, if I go to Facebook, I can't tell you how many daily active users Facebook has. They have to disclose that information for me to know it. But with things built built on the blockchain, you just see it.

And so um So he this guy's posting like look, here's how many new people signed up today. Here's how many posts there have been. And so you can see like How much engagement this thing has, or if it if it starts to fade, you'll be able to see it fade. So I bought this, I bought a fuck ton of this guy's coin, I bought$10,000 of this analyst coin. 'Cause this guy was super low priced'cause nobody knows who the heck this guy is. But

I knew that if If there are people who are power users of the platform, they're enthusiastic about BitCloud. They're gonna love all the information, the 247 news cycle about BitCloud. They're gonna love this guy's analysis because it's not easy to do. It's not easy to go on the blockchain and figure this stuff out. So I thought, oh, if this guy's g if this guy's gonna put reports up every day, he's gonna get popular. And so already I've doubled my money on this guy just because Um

I was able to like have a strategy, have a a skilled gamble, is what I'll what I'll call it, right? Same reason I love poker, same reason I like investing in startups and the stock market. Is because There is definitely this like Deep itch scratches of like Trying to put in money and triple it and make more money.

Um Combined with some skill. There is a strategy to it. It's not just a slot machine where you just pull the lever and you hope for the best. So For for whatever reason, for some combination of reasons, this shit is so addictive to me. And maybe this will fade. I'm only three or four days in. But man, I've used the hell out of this thing in three or four days and I don't know what's gonna happen. I've only known it for three or four days, but My life. This is my vocation. I found it. That's that's what I hear from you.

Well, you hear what you want to hear. I didn't say that. What I said was I've had an amazing three or four days and this might fade. Um, but I view it as a kind of a asymmetric. That If this w If this fails, I lose one I lose one times my money.

If this succeeds, I'm gonna make more than ten times my money. And so That's why it's a good bet for me. Speaking of betting on people, Jack, we were talking about you earlier, basically uh Sean, I didn't know So basically we gave your background. We said that you and Celia lived in a shitty apartment, a little studio, five four hundred fifty square foot studio or something like that in Brooklyn. Sam tried to make it sound like Slumdog Billionaire. He was like he's like, you know, they shared one ramen noodle each. And yeah.

Jack, was I right? Was it four hundred something square feet? Four fifty in uh bad neighbor crown heights, right? Yeah, I mean it was a it was all right. Um And uh basically started an agency. It was only going okay, not going that great. Uh and then like over the last eighteen, twenty four months, you've just knocked it out the park, yada, yada, yada.

I didn't realize Until Sean said it. When he said, Do you see what Jack did? It's crazy. I thought he meant you selling one N F T for like a hundred grand. I didn't s or however much you sold that, like what's the difference between a JPEG and an NFT thing. I didn't see that you have one for seventy six million dollars. Just put it up this morning. Do you think that's gonna work? Look at the smile on his face. I love it.

Okay, so Jack, can you tell us about the seventy seven million dollar one? What's the thinking behind that? And then just in general, what's the NFT experience been like for you? It's kinda mind blowing. Yeah, I think um Interestingly enough, this Text message that got me on this podcast. Is uh

Kind of uh Evidence for the strategy behind the seventy seven million. Seventy seven million dollar NFT, which the thesis is um it's rounded up. from the uh highest bid on that beepool collage. So that was sixty nine point three, and obviously tracks to the Price of Ethereum, but

Anybody who would bid on this would be You know, the owner of the most expensive NFT in the world. Um So You know, part press play, part commentary on the world of NFTs, part artistic

Stateman uh I have Very, very, very You know. The

The idea of that selling is obviously absolutely ludicrous. But the fact that you can do something like that without permission and make a statement like that, I think is like That's the the uh the intent behind the the piece itself and the NFT space, like the last three pieces that I've been working on the last three pieces I've launched have been sort of a commentary on the world of NFT. So the first one Sam talked about was like what's the difference between

A JPEG and an NFT. I put that Image on Twitter and Got a great response. Someone commented and said you should make this an NFT. Let's just say no more, made it an NFT and optioned it.

And then the second one uh just finished today was like a the comment on the idea of non fungibility, right? So anybody can save this JPEG. But what we're really talking about here is like this mimetic status game, that's all these different incentives coming together to No, some people are buying these'cause they love'em, some people are buying them in the same way that They're betting on a creator like a bit clout, uh

The same thesis behind a bit clout. You buy this thing and you assume This person's gonna keep creating for years and maybe they emerge. at the top of the space and then your investment um Increases in value. Um

I think there's a lot of parallels with what you're talking about with BitCloud. It's It visualized value sort of was almost a layer on top of The business I was operating. So I was making these graphics

to you know create things that would get people's attention to then put something else in front of them and be like, Hey, here's this thing. So like my background is marketing and advertising and that's How that worked, right? You make stuff to get people to look at other stuff. But now there's like this convergence of you can get paid directly for the things you make. Which is Completely different, right? I think

You know, Patreon and What do you think the odds are that someone's gonna buy this? I mean impossible to say zero point zero zero. Yeah, you what's happened since you since you put it up this morning. Are people bidding on it? Can you can you bid below that ask price or no? So you have to enter that. It's all or nothing. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Can you see any of the activity of like tracking to it or to it, but that's the only place I would have data.

And what's your what's your people would visit? A few thousand, I think. Is this like caught so far? And I think it's like it's all sort of an inside joke as well, right? Like you have to have the context of the Beeple thing. Mario, who Sean, I saw you saw that tweet. The reason uh you know, it's very minimal in its execution, but when you have that additional context, I think it's like there's a light bulb moment that goes off. So

I th the thing I respect is that it's all or nothing. If you had done it where it's like oh well hey, it may not get seventy seven million, but I'll take, you know, seventy seven thousand. Well then it's sort of like okay, he's just, you know. It doesn't have the same artistic balls that it takes to say, No, this is the If we're either Breaking the record and this is the most valuable piece of digital art in the world. over not and it's a commentary on

the whole madness of the situation. It's like we're either going all mad. Or we're laughing about how mad this was. This is not some, you know, quick sale here. Again, another parallel with Bitcloud. It either goes off or it just uh You know, it just stays there forever as a memory. Right.

Yeah, as I that's why I tweeted I said this is either gonna be an amazing investment or amazing lesson learned for me. And um and and I mean that'cause I it I intentionally invested an amount of money that would hurt. For me to lose it. Um like I would really

have to like lick my wounds if I lost this amount of money. Cause it's it's not gonna just go down by like 10%. It's gonna go down by a hundred percent or it's gonna go up by like 10,000%. And so, you know, either way, I'm gonna learn something out of this whole process. It is so Polarized And clear. And I had to write down why am I doing this? What do I believe about this? And what are and part of the why I'm doing this wasn't just here's all the great reasons to do this, it was like

Well You know, I kinda sat on the sideline at this other thing that I was ear on and I missed out on this big wave and a bunch of my friends made a bunch of money doing it. And so I've kind of waiting for the next one. And like now that this one's here, I'm kind of over overcompensating for it. So I was really honest with myself about what was the what are the psychological drivers and and I will put it uh put two things together. One is What is that? Which is like

Here's the dark side of why I'm doing this, meaning like Here's the Not so great reasons, but true reasons that I feel motivated to do this, right? My own psychology put on a piece of paper. The second thing is Maybe this is um

Y you guys have probably all all heard this. I I know Jack, you have for sure. Sam, you know the thing about the four levels of luck? No. I guess the the four levels of luck. I forgot who Mark Andreessen shared this from somebody else, and then Naval shared it, and that's how I s I heard it. But basically it's like There's There's dumb luck. You're just

You're standing still and luck just hits you upside the head. Something really lucky just happened. You get struck by lightning, right? Um, that's just dumb luck. You did nothing and something happened. Then there's like the second level, which is You're moving around like crazy and you're doing a bunch of shit. And in doing a bunch of shit, you kick up a bunch of dust, you move a bunch of things around, and actually you have a higher percentage chance of colliding with luck. Because you were taking so much action, right? And so that's kind of like

You know, um Uh you know, the the luck favors the bold, basically. You took a bunch of action, therefore you're more lucky than somebody who didn't. Then there's a third one which is Luck favors the prepared mind, which is You're moving, but you're also looking, and when you see something

You recognized luck before others saw it. And so I would say Jack is a good example of this, which is He had the artistic ability to create really compelling visuals. But he also had the like business brain and like kind of tech savviness and was in the tech world enough to see NFTs as this opportunity.

uh that he could marry his two things together and give it a try. And so That's where you recognize luck for what it is. And then the fourth one is reputational luck, which is You have built up such a big reputation that luck finds you. Well, that's where

Some in some great company says, Sam, we would love to have you on board because we've been reading your content for years. You're such an amazing copywriter, and we just think you could really help us out with that, you know? Um, and so boom, luck came to your doorstep. Because and that's that's sort of the the analogy that Naval gave or whatever was like Someone finds a sunken treasure. And they come to you because you're known as the world's best scuba diver. So

To me This is like Luck level three. Um and maybe a little four, but three in that luck favors the prepared mind. So What I realized when I I looked back at Bitcoin and I said

I was being told by smart friends. Back in twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen, that bitcoin is amazing. And at first I took no action. That cost me, you know, the the the price was, I think,$70 at the time. So I let it go from 70 to 700. And then I bought in at seven hundred. And even then, I bought in such a small amount that it wasn't gonna like change my life either way. I wasn't gonna care if I lost, I wasn't gonna be rich if I won. Um, and I th I went and I look back and I said, Well, why didn't I take more action at that time, right? Let's let's do that the hindsight game.

And one thing I realized is that In order to I I I didn't bet in on it because I didn't have enough conviction. I didn't have enough conviction because I didn't even understand what the heck it was. So part of that is I didn't take time to understand it, but the second was Bitcoin was one of those weird things that you had to have two d totally different skill sets in order to appreciate the How great this thing is.

Yeah, be really technologically sound uh in your brain to even under even understand it and be able to go buy the thing or mine the thing. It was it took real tech savvyness to do it at that that time. The second thing was you had to really understand macroeconomics. And very few people had that combination. And the people who did have become billiards and they're very very wealthy people now. But most people who had one or the other or neither, they didn't

They didn't benefit, right? So You need to you needed to understand that Wow, this solved the Byzantine generals problem. This is a computer science breakthrough. And now we can have trustless systems without any central entity. But you also needed to understand that Hey, the government prints all this money

And has this inflationary effect and the reason that You know And actually this thing that we all take for granted, the US dollar or currency, has really only been around in its current form for I don't know, seventy ish years and Um and you know, before that we had gold, and before that we had shells, and money does evolve over time. And maybe this is the new form of money, and here's why. It's a more sound money.

than these other things I'm familiar with. Right. So very few people had that overlap. I see the same thing happening with Bitcoin, which is On one hand you had to understand The financial incentives

That this Like the token economics or crypto economics that exists here. What are all the incentives and why would this thing go up? And when you if you understand the crypto economics, the token incentives, you're like, Holy shit, this is so well designed. This is a very high likelihood of going up if it going up a lot if it becomes a thing. The other side is just

Uh understanding how social networks start. And um when I saw that oh This is like Probably the most brilliant growth hack I've ever seen. These people who b whoever made this is very aggressive and very smart.

They're aggressive. Because They went and scraped Twitter and they put all of our profiles on their website and said, come buy their coin without anyone's permission. That took a level of aggression and sort of like willing to operate in the gray That most people wouldn't really have.

And then the smart thing was they said, Well How do we make this network? Really valuable. Well, if we get really valuable people on it. How do we get really valuable people on it? Well, let's do this.

Let's go to really legit investors, so big name investors. That adds credibility. Let's go get A hundred million dollars from them. And then let's invest that hundred million dollars into the accounts of all the influential Twitter people. And so when I went to the website without ever having used the damn thing. My account had s fifty five thousand dollars sitting in it.

All I had to do was Tweet it out and say, Hey, I'm using BitCloud. Come use it with me, basically. Right. And I had to tweet that to my hundred twenty thousand followers. in order to claim this fifty thousand dollars that was sitting in there, this like kind of imaginary fifty thousand dollars that was sitting there.

And um okay, so that I was like, that's gonna work. A lot of influencers are gonna go see hundred thousand dollars sitting in their account and they say all I gotta do is tweet this thing out like Done. Like Sam, you think the thing's fucking stupid, but you did it anyway because you were like Shit, I got thirty five grand sitting in here? I'll I'll take that.

And Jack, how how much money do you have sitting in your thing? Uh about one fifty, I think, last time I looked at it. So a hundred fifty thousand dollars maybe is sitting in your account. And have you verified your account yet or claimed it? No. Do you plan to? I'm still I don't know, man. I'm getting text messages and phone calls and being invited on podcasts to talk about BitCloud, so maybe I gotta do it.

Yeah. Maybe you do. And maybe you have a pretty big fucking incentive to do it, which is that there's one hundred fifty grand sitting there just for Just for tweeting the thing out. And um And so then you so then you go like layers deep. You say, Okay, so they're gonna tweet it out, they're gonna claim their money. And then they have a big following, so then their people are gonna say, Oh, if Jack says it, I trust Jack and Jack is

Jack is using it, then I should probably use this thing. They go on. And because there's no withdrawals, right now all the prices just go up. And so everybody's gonna get all these paper gains. And then they're all gonna talk about how this is the greatest thing since sliced bread, because they're just making all this money on here, right? Like our friend Ryan who came on was like, dude, I'm making a killing on this thing. And then other people are gonna say

Oh shit, my friend's making a killing on this thing. I should go do that too. I don't want to miss the next Bitcoin. I already missed Bitcoin. Now I'm gonna miss the next one. And they're gonna get on and that's gonna drive the price even higher. And so What I saw was that this thing was brilliantly designed from kind of like a game theory perspective. Now that's t let's table like the moral questions and like is this a Ponzi scheme? And like there's a whole bunch of other questions, but I

At the very minimum I thought, wow. This game is architected so that these numbers are gonna go up. This is gonna have a hype cycle, very likely chance of having a hype cycle. And if it has the hype cycle These things, just like Bitcoin, Bitcoin's only valuable because everybody believes in it now. And the more people believe in it, the more valuable it gets, the more certain its own success becomes. The same thing is true for any network, any social network too.

The more legit people believe in it and want it to succeed. Um, the more likely it is to succeed. And so then there's actually s a chance that this does become You know, a new a new wave of social network. So anyways, that's my whole uh I've I've known you for Uh since uh maybe eight years now.

It was early on when I met you that you had some type of it factor and that you were at least mildly smart. What? What big clout and bitcoin has done for you. That's basically like brought out all of your confidence and all of your speech giving abilities.

Now The whole high IQ thing and if you're right thing, TBD. But your ability to convince people that it's awesome. very, very high. I congratulate you on your confidence and your ability to persuade people. I think it's I think I think it I think you finally have come out of your shell. Now

Are the whole are you right thing? I keep saying the thing which is There's a very low chance that this succeeds in the long run. If it does, you're gonna get paid super handsomely. Very similar to Bitcoin back in 2013, 2014. And very similar to the hundreds of other cryptocks that had the same promise and didn't pan out. Right. So that's the thing with low odds. Usually they don't pan out. When they do, you can get paid handsomely. There's a middle ground here where

If this goes through a hype cycle. There is a good chance that even if it doesn't succeed in the long run, in the short run, there's a bunch of money to be made. That is the degenerate gambler side. Of me and many people. Anybody who was in the into GameStop, anybody who's you know going and trading, a lot of people have fun speculating and trying to. uh make money and they're not necessarily trying to be long-term holders. So that's situation two. It's situation three is it just flops it goes to zero. There there are all three scenarios on the table. What I'm trying to say is

The probability is I'm not saying this is Likely or definitely gonna succeed. What I'm saying is I find it super interesting from a product point of view how they made it. And I think there's a good chance it goes through the hype cycle. Beyond that

I don't know. So Jack. Um What what what does this mean to you? What what side are you on? I'm just sort of waiting for it to shake out, I guess. I think the first time it came across my feed was like the ultimate bear case, like, you know, this is broken the

the commandments of crypto, therefore you should not go anywhere near it. And my um my understanding of the like mechanics of pre mining and all of these, like I wasn't paying attention to the I CO cycle when it was happening years ago. So I just felt pretty um you know unqualified to make a bet on it. And I think To your point, Sean, there's like reputational risk in endorsing it too before it gets to a point of

Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. Some of the things that are left unsaid or haven't been clarified are clarified, so Um on the sidelines. For the time being. Yeah, I I think that's smart. I think that's the risk I run, which is

I think that when I say hey this is a This is a gamble. You can lose all your money. It's not likely to succeed. That there's That there there's Could be some money to be made. Here's my exact holdings. I feel like, oh, I'm disclosing everything, and smart adults are gonna do with that what they want. Do your own research, don't rely on me. And um come to your own conclusions. I'm telling you what I've come to thus far three days in.

And so I'm always like, Oh, people will get all that. In reality, all anyone's gonna remember is, dude, you were super excited about that thing. And either I look like a fucking genius or I look like an idiot scam artist. That's the sad part about it, is that Nobody's gonna remember any of the nuance around how I was thinking about it. Anybody's just gonna remember, dude, you sounded so excited, you said you put a hundred grand in and either You know, that's why you're the hottest things to slice bread if that becomes a ten million dollar steak. Or it's gonna be

I lost my life savings. How could you? You told me this was gonna work. And uh unfortunately Um The way I wish the world the way I wish people listened to it is not gonna be how people actually listen to it, is my guess. Are you the biggest uh The biggest bit cloud bull in the world.

Shaw. Ah even close. Like Craig Clemens, uh who's you know a friend of ours been on the pod. Um he was on it before us. He's invested I don't know how much money, but he's like the biggest whale. You go to anyone's account, he owns he owns like the majority of their coin. Like he he and he's like, Yeah, I'm bullish. Um like you know, he could he can speak for himself how he's thinking about the calculated risk, but like You know, he's got a a huge stake, and I'm you know envious of how early he was on and how bullish he was early because it's already

He's got a lot of paper games, let's put it that way. Um As far as uh and then there's of course a bunch of other people like You know There's b there's the big the the the the whale guy, I forgot his name is Big Big Clot Whale or something like that.

He put a million dollars into his own coins. And he's the he also has, you know, the biggest kind of like NFT collection out there, I think. Well that guy bit Cl he bought um he wired me or I keep saying wired, but he sent me ten grand in Ethereum to my guy. So one guy is the guy who's providing Secondary market liquidity. That's the guy you worked with. Then there's this guy who basically has the whale coin that's a community token, a separate thing. Uh he owns two million dollars worth of NFT art.

And he created a coin that basically says, Hey, I collect this art. If you own my coin, you own a part of my art collection. And um and so he's made he's made it big he's made a bunch of money in crypto, he reinvested into NFTs, now he's reinvested at least a million bucks into BitCloud as well. So there's a bunch of people who are very, very bullish on this thing. You know, but um

And and you know, there's but but but I'll also say like, you know, what are the downsides, right? Like A, if you go use the thing, you'll notice three things right away. It requires a password to join. That's already has blocked like eighty percent of people. Now you could find it if you just Twitter, Bitclout if you Google Bitclout Password, you'll find it easily, but Today that's a that's a challenge. It's it's password protected because

They're not ready for scale. Which is the second part. You go use the thing and it's so it's like under such heavy load all the time that like I click the follow button and the thing fucking spins for thirty seconds. It's like Super annoying that it's not a faster app. It's like The thing is always going down because they can't handle the scale right now.

Um Jack, are you are you gonna make more income from NFTs in two thousand twenty one than you think you will from your real job? Or your normal business rather. Probably. And that's

Is that fucking crazy? Like th three letters you didn't even know last year. Yeah. Different market, man, different dynamics. Very crazy. Would you say W three years ago, where were you what where were you at? Was it now Fifth March? I was just at my agency, so I was shooting uh car commercials.

On the uh Like for us. Yeah, just running round the desert with a handheld camera trying to Make a car commercial.

Isn't it crazy how much things have changed in such a short amount of time in the last Couple months has been like Compressed uh a ton. Oh

just leaps bounds of technology and culture and um Last year obviously shifting to doing work fully online, I think was one jump. And now like the normalization of crypto. It's just feels like Another like

Right. Um and stuff like Yeah, what we're talking about here is like It feels like that stuff is just Not just creeping into the mainstream, but it's just a burst pipe now, right? Like the top shot thing just went absolutely bananas, then this BitCloud thing is gonna pull on the same like

Cultural levers that Top Shot did. Maybe it's successful, maybe it isn't, but it's like the cat's not going back in the bag at this point. Like So Jack, let me ask you because I feel like

I feel a little torn, right? Because I come on the pod because I come on the pod today and I say, Oh, I gotta talk about BitCloud. Why? Because A, I've been Using it a bunch for the last couple of days is one of the more interesting projects I've ever seen. Um But B, I'm like

kind of embarrassed to even talk about it because there's such a good chance that this thing fails. That it's gonna look pretty stupid and BitCloud is even more It's gonna look even more stupid when it fails than like, let's say, like I guess like what I'm getting at is I think that It's you know, it takes a long time to build a reputation of being smart and trustworthy, and it's easy to lose it in a day.

Um And I think Warren Buffett said that once. And uh you know it takes takes a a decade or whatever to build a reputation and a day to lose it. And

So I kinda feel that way with s with big coin, bit cloud, crypto in general. It's all such uncertain territory. It's uncharted waters, it's uncertain territory. Nobody really if anybody tells you they know what's gonna happen, they're definitely not saying, you know, saying telling the truth. Uh people speculate, people have fun talking about it, people place their bets and then the chips will fall where they may. Now Do you feel that way with NFTs? Like, do you feel almost embarrassed? Or slightly guilty, you know.

Selling a file for$150,000. And you know, let's say next year the NFT market comes down to earth. Like I think right now, top shot is Top shots getting slaughtered. Um, it's going down like thirty percent month over month because all the whales are like, Hey Cool, we've made millions of dollars. Let's just do a coordinated sell off. And like, you know, like let's sell this baby now. We're let's take something off the table.

And so Top Shot's like cratering right now. And then as it's sort of creator, all the people who thought it was gonna fail are like, see, you know, I told you so. This was silly to begin with. Um, as somebody who's selling digital art for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Does a part of you worry like what happens a year from now when You're

The same N F T you sold for one hundred fifty thousand dollars is worth a thousand dollars. And um What do you I guess how do you think about that? Yeah, I thought a lot about it. I think um coming into it originally had zero expectation of like the level of investment that people would be willing to Commit to something like this?

One thing I will say is I've like I have a relationship with every single person who's bought one. So because the Twitter layer on top of the NFT layer. You you there's often they have links to Twitter profiles, obviously introduce yourself, everybody that bids on the work. And I think That to me is

You know. If you have a relationship with the person that collects the art, that's different than throwing it into this anonymous market and you know Profiting X of it. I also think there's an argument to be made for like

My background is commercial advertising, right? So I know you guys spoke to Michael Saylor a couple of weeks ago and I just have this like Um I guess I'm loop in my head on this thing I'm thinking about around

What is a marketing expense relative to a s like a uh a technology in general. So if you're an Ethereum Like Wail, let's say, let's say you bought X number of thousand Ethereum at seven cents or whatever it was back in the day.

And you wanna see the technology you believe in, the technology that made you wealthy adopted by more people, you want to like spread the gospel as it were. feels to me like there's a lot of people participating in this market for that reason. So The N F T explained piece, which was by far the most Expensive

Um Uh or the the largest sale of the last few I've done. I think they got four million impressions on Twitter. So if you think about what it would cost you to buy four million impressions on Twitter or if what it would cost you to develop something that has that level of

Resonance. I think it's easy to get distracted from that as As Like The three of us have distribution, but that that is a valuable thing, right? To own something that has that level of cultural uh velocity

To me. Is you know, I don't want to say it's Underpriced, but I think it's Like. I think it's a uh

It's a legitimate bear. Like if you can see that this thing has Um This thing resonates with people, and that's the beauty of having Twitter. So visualized value, you can see this image that you own. th thirty three hundred or forty five hundred people clicked on it and said, I like this thing. So there's also a mega advantage there, having that layer on top where you can evaluate how

Like how much this thing resonates before you sell. Does that make sense? I yeah, that does make sense. And Jack, as like I I I consider us close friends. I wanted to like buy you I wanted to s I was willing to spend around five thousand dollars to buy one of your things. Just because I like look up to you as like a creator and I actually think your art's badass and I think you're gonna be like a far more important person than you already are. I was willing I so I get the sentiment. Now

Without sounding like a douche. Like I I have money, right? And I was will only willing to spend five grand.

The way the re the way that someone was gonna spend a hundred and fifty grand That either they're like Way richer than I am. And or they're just Crazy.

That's the one I like, I don't understand 150 K, but like maybe some people don't understand that I was willing to do five K. So th these are the people who bought bought it I don't know, I'm sure you could like do your Ethereum wallet slew thing and figure out how much people have, but Well, you said you know how much money they have. Like I know'em and I talk to'em. But Jack's a normal person. He doesn't do what we do. Bro. Like I don't have to I don't have to know someone I'm like oh well the guy drives a G Wagon he's from the go back and forth in Twitter DM. Some people don't have their real name, but it's like

Yeah. Um You know, you develop a relationship. Sam h here here's how it works. The guy who bought the people uh artwork for for whatever sixty nine million dollars something like that. Um I I I I might be I might be mixing it up, but you know, meet Covan?

That's his you that's his handle. Uh Well, I just read about him. He he started a uh he I mean, he's probably worth hundreds of millions of dollars through Bitcoin. So he's gonna be able to do it. He invested five thousand dollars into Bitcoin and is is worth over a billion dollars b uh based on when he invested it. So He's reinvesting, like I said. You go to Chuck E Cheese, you're great at ski ball, you hit the five thousand dollar jackpot, the tickets start spinning out of this machine.

You don't think about it like spending$150,000, you think about it like spending seventy ether and you have Seventy thousand ether or whatever, right? So he's spending a fraction of his like giant stockpile of crypto bucks. And if I'm just shocked there's that many. I'm shocked there's that many people.

that like Jack Butcher, which who's like a relatively he's not beeple, but he's like kind of a big deal. that there's that many people that will just buy his thing for a hundred hundred grand. I'm just shocked that that there's that many people who have that amount. Being shocked by that. And if Jack, if you do sell this thing for seventy six million dollars.

I mean Like Obviously. Who cares about history and how neat that is? I mean that would like

That would be gener I mean, that would be you the Butcher family would be famous for five generations. I mean that would be the most absurd stuff, perhaps. It it would be. It would be just so wild and so funny. I I hope it works. I kinda in a actually in a way, maybe I actually hope it doesn't work. Because you know what they say about people who You're not exactly this because you've worked hard for it, so it'd be like selling a company for you. But you know what they say about people who like win the lottery and how like a a huge Some of them um

Uh a huge number of them, they end up becoming math addicts and or they get They broke and depressed. Yeah. Yeah, like they're already messed up a little bit. And now they're just even more they're they're messed up times the amount of money they earn. Uh Like I don't want that to happen. I don't think it would happen to you. I think it's like, you know, the the the fact that there's even an outside chance of it happening is just the most ludicrous thing. It's supposed to be like a piece of art in itself, right? That nobody interacts with commentary on the space, but the fact that it exists on a platform where a transaction could actually happen.

Is it quite Light. Just Unfathomable and that would like definitely warp. your experience of the world. And I I can't even fathom or something like that.

Would be like but Um Yeah. Yeah. Aliens will ban before that happens, Mate. That's crazy.

Yeah. Okay, we should we should wrap this. I don't yeah, I don't know where we go from here, but Zach, thanks for coming on. What a weird. Yeah, you know, we texted you like thirty minutes ago or forty minutes ago when you hopped on, so I appreciate that. It was fun. Uh I hope somebody buys the thing. I think that would be fucking amazing. Um I think couldn't happen to a better time. So so I think I I think there's a Um I hope I get a text that's like holy shit. And if I get a text today that says holy shit from anybody, I know what has gone down. So I hope it happens. It's hard, dude. Growing up podcasts is the hardest thing I've ever done. It's easier to just sell a picture for seventy seven million dollars than it is to get create a top ten business podcast. I shit you not. It is actually easier to do one than the other. Find out.

Yeah. Mm-hmm. I feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to I put my all in it like my days off On the roadless travel never looking back

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