MFM #165: How Jack Butcher is Selling his Art for $76m & How to Research Wealthy People

Do you see what Jack did? It's crazy. I thought he meant you selling one NFT for like $100 grand. I didn't— 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 $76 million.

Just put it up this morning.

Do you think that's going to work?

Look at the smile on his face. I love it. Yeah, I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never look. Okay, so I have just kind of an update on my BitCloud thing that I wanted to talk about, but we can do it later if we want. It doesn't have to be at the beginning.

Uh, what I would rather you, you, 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 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 happening. Yeah, it's kind of crazy.

So I'll say, if you're tired of us talking about Bitcoin and NFTs and all the crypto stuff, uh, this is probably not— you'll probably skip ahead to the part where we're going to talk about, you know, dictionary.com later. So, so, so I would say we're going to go— we're going to show you some range today. We're going to talk about a website that's like 25 years old, and then we're going to talk about a website that's like 25 minutes old, which is Bitcloud. So let's talk about Jack first. Okay, so we have a friend, Jack Butcher, who is— 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 by the way, every time I say artistic, I think I'm about to say autistic. And so I have to like catch myself each time, make sure I I didn't call him autistic.

So it could be that too. Who knows?

Well, actually, 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 Sarah 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've been friends with them, 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 came here 10 years ago. They shared a one-bedroom— or sorry, a studio apartment that was 400 square feet. And he was— they were nothing. I mean, they were— they, they tried to start an agency business. It didn't go so well. And they were on their last dollar. And this is only like 18 months ago.

Right. Okay. So, so he, he 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 Visualize 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 popular tweets, sayings, his little kind of one-liners, and he would create a graphic out of it. And he has this one graphic style. If you're on Twitter, you've seen it. It's this black and white. It's always a black background with white text on top and a little kind of like very simplistic, minimalistic 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. 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. Very well.

And he, he, he's— it does— he does north of $1 million a year in revenue. And the only, uh, expenses are like 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. He's doing much better now. So what happened? 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 crypto. People, people really like it because it's virtual art in the same way that crypto is 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, just does an experiment. I don't know what the first one sold for. I think it was like 1 Ether, right? 1 ETH.

2 or $3,000.

It was like, yeah, just close to 2 grand. And it was like 1.5 Ether or something like that. So it was like $2,000 or $3,000. Still pretty sweet, right? This is just a.png file that he otherwise uploads to Twitter for free. And now somebody wanted to own the.png file because they're fans of his and this meant something to them and they had a bunch of crypto gains that they could reinvest their Chuck E. Cheese money, right? And so, 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 bid up and gets bought for 33 ETH, which is, I think, something like— what is 33 ETH? 33 ETH times—

like 70 grand, I think.

70 grand. So he sells one of his images for 70 grand.

Okay. And I called him right when I saw that. I go, Jack, is this real? Did someone— he goes, Yeah, it's crazy, mate. That's all he said.

Right, right, right. Exactly. Because 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 messaged the buyer and I go, why the heck did you buy this thing? It's some random, you know, random username. He just goes, oh, you know, I love Jack and I think this is going to appreciate in value. And I, 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 $70 grand.

So then he did something even crazier, which I'm talking about the packs. Do you know the packs?

Yeah. So explain that one.

So the part of the story is the crazy— 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 moved to Sean. Now they love Jack. And what he did was he created a website where you are buying a pack. He had 12 packs. All it said was Pack 1, Pack 2, Pack 3. It looked like a— imagine like a baseball card, but with a Jack Butcher cover on it. It was just black and it said, "Visualize value, Pack 1." And you would buy these packs having no idea what the NFT art was in it. He had 12 of them and people were bidding on them, and each one sold for around $10,000 to $15,000. Which is, I thought, amazing until we get to the final part of the story, or 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 $76 million, something like that. What is it? What's the exact number? $72, $76 million. He basically— and it's called Fame. And what he did was the most— the highest priced NFT thus far in the history of mankind was Beeple, the artist Beeple, who was like Jack, but even more popular. So Beeple had done a few drops. Those drops were like kind of in the $1 to $5 million range-ish. And then the most popular NFT of all time was sold for $69 million 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 kind of made it a publicity stunt. So anyways, Jack basically says, cool, this is an NFT called Fame. And what Fame is, it will be the number one priced piece of artwork in a digital artwork in the world, right? So he prices it above the Beeple drop.

I wasn't referring to this. I was referring to what he did last. I didn't even see this.

This is crazy. This is today.

Last week what he did was he, he wrote, uh, he did an NFT and it says, here's the difference between a, uh, a JPEG and an NFT. And it just had a verified— it, it— he, he basically made a tweet and then he sold that tweet for like $150,000, right? Which I thought was crazy. This is way crazier. Yeah, because 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, if nothing else, this is just a great way to drive attention, press, and just do something that's bold, right? So pricing a piece of your artwork for $77 million, it doesn't even matter if somebody buys it. Just pricing it for $77 million is already going to put you on the map. The second thing is this might be a You know, let's say take the 3 outcomes. Somebody actually buys it for $77 million, right? There's been CryptoPunks now. The number 1 CryptoPunk sold for— I'll bet you look this up. How much did that crypto, the top CryptoPunk sell for? I think it was like $7 million, something like that. Beeple 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. Yeah, the CryptoPunk sold for $7.5 million. And the guy who bought it, by the way, this is kind of cool. I don't know how you pronounce this, but the person who bought it, his handle is Perugia or Perugia or something. I don't know what it is. I'm not in the art world, but that's the same. That's 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.

By the way, great usage of the word homage.

Yeah, thank you.

Um, good job.

We're trying to class it up right here. So, all right. So, so he might not sell it for $77 million, but even if it sells for $1.7 million, that's $1.7 million that he just, you know, manufactured through his own creativity and, you know, and probably I would bet you like 4 days of effort.

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 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, 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 Beeple did that, Beeple did a new piece of art every day for 10 years. And so it's like, you know, he's an overnight success, 10 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 kind of 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, you know, in most of these, these like kind of hype cycles, it's the suits on Wall Street that get rich. This time at least it's starving artists that get rich. And so, you know, at the very worst, even if the whole thing comes crashing down, at least a few artists got paid. And, you know, who can be really too mad at that? 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 Jack to come on? Yeah, we should for sure have him come on. Are you friends with him?

Yeah.

All right, great. Not as close as you guys, but yeah, we're close. You should message him. We should see if he hops on today. Just be like, you free to come talk about your fame thing for 5 minutes? Let's just see if he hops on at the end of this.

All right, I just texted him. All right, we'll come back to that. Fucking crazy. I, yeah, it's— I almost have chills talking about it. Would it be weird going to a different topic, or do you want to stay on NFTs and stuff like that?

Um, we can do whatever you want.

It's like, is everything less ex— is everything less exciting?

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 just kind of dabbling. And so the average person is probably not familiar with all these things, definitely not taking action and definitely not getting rich off all these things. So I think it's going to be kind of polarizing. Some people are going to think, oh, wow, this is really cool. I should go check this out and learn more about this. Some people are going to be like, this is so stupid. I think this is all just a giant carnival game, 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 10 minutes on it and then we're probably going to come back to this. I actually want to come back to this. I want to come back to BitCloud. I want to come back to angel investing.

Okay.

Um, okay. But someone, I tweeted out that I'm going to 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 want to 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 is buying different parts of real estate or different real estate. So I go to therealedeal.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 they're going to offer this much money. I have no idea. Yolanda is a fake person, but it's just like a blog, a blog, a gossip blog.

Yeah.

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 bought, who'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 $20 million home, the likelihood that they're worth $100 million plus is incredibly high. you know, it's hard to like bullshit that, right? And so real estate holdings is one of the best ways 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 Bryan Keringer, and he bought a house in Malibu in 2019 for $20 million. I hadn't heard of Bryan. I know a lot of internet entrepreneurs. I hadn't heard of him, so I researched him. And this is the guy who started dictionary.com. Kind of a crazy thing when you think about it, because who really thinks of dictionary.com? So in the 1990s, this guy started, uh, in 1995, he started a business called Lexico Publishing, and Lexico Publishing owned thesaurus.com and dictionary.com. And he bootstrapped it and he grew it, and he sold it in 2005 to IAC for $100 million. And then, uh, 2 years ago, IAC sold dictionary.com to Dan Gilbert. You know Dan Gilbert, Quicken Loans?

Yep.

He sold dictionary.com for, or they sold dictionary.com for $100 million. So they didn't do a very good job with it. But dictionary.com gets around 40— dictionary.com and thesaurus.com gets around 40 million uniques a month and does about $20 million in revenue. And they have barely any employees, I believe dozens of employees. It's incredibly fascinating because this is what I call—

how do they make money? It's just AdSense, 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— let's call it— 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 necessarily sexy. It's like the sweaty startup of internet.

Yeah.

Yeah. You know, if sweaty startup means a lawn landscaping business, this is kind of like that for the internet. Sure. 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 the year. Word of the year. So when Donald Trump was president in 2016, I think the word of the year was xenophobic because a lot of people were searching what xenophobic means. This past year in 2020, it was pandemic. And it's almost like a recap of the year. And it's actually kind of culturally relevant. And also what they do is when someone like Kendall Jenner or Kylie Jenner, whatever the woman is who is quote self-made, they'll do funny stuff. Like they'll tweet the definite— they'll retweet a tweet of her calling herself self-made. Self-made, and they'll say, actually, the definition of self-made is success unaided or something like that. They're pretty snarky. I find this to be incredibly interesting because it's something I didn't think about. And that's what it is.

Kind of cool. You went from 100 to 0 real quick there at the end. Yeah. Okay. So we actually had a friend who was looking at buying dictionary.com. You know about this?

No.

We had a friend that was looking at buying dictionary.com and merging it with another business. I can't remember the name of it now.

UrbanDictionary.com is another big one. That one gets about 40 or 50 million uniques a month.

And who owns that?

Wait, just a guy. A guy in San Francisco, Aaron Peckham.

So there's a similar— I know you wrote another one on here 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, chess.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 of people searching for chess, chess boards, 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 if you had a—

Chess.com, they have 200 employees. I bet you it's worth— if you told me— I heard a rumor they're thinking about selling, and I would bet it would be worth a quarter of a billion dollars.

Exactly. That's what I was going to say. They have a huge amount of traffic. What's their traffic monthly? It's—

I don't— I'll look it up, but they have around 50 million registered users.

Right. And they're not just like— it's not fly-by traffic like dictionary.com, thesource.com. They're going to have— A lot more traffic, but it's going to be fly-by-night.

200 million monthly uniques according to SimilarWeb, most of which is direct.

Incredible, right? And so 200 million—

they make money way more though. Do you know how they make money?

No, I can guess. Tell me if I'm right. So 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? Yep. Yep. Okay. So still dead simple business model around a classic game that nobody owns the IP to, right? It's not like saying Monopoly. Well, you can't do Monopoly. Somebody owns Monopoly. You know, I don't know who Hasbro or whoever owns Monopoly. You can do it with chess. And this is one of the reasons why we talked about religion as a really interesting, you know, fundamental or like base layer for any business because nobody owns religion, but it's a highly recognized brand with super high affinity. So I love businesses that are, you know, like Pray, the app that's basically Calm 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 nobody owns the IP, so you can use the IP.

And so what was our friend going to do? I wonder who our friend is.

So I don't remember exactly, and I don't know how much we can really talk about it, but they were going to basically buy two properties at the same time, dictionary.com and one other one. 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 a great monetization potential. It's just display ads. And then this other thing is a great business model and has great stickiness. Maybe we merge the two. Okay, here's a hypothetical. I don't know if this is exactly what they said, but if you're Grammarly, would you go buy dictionary.com and Thesaurus?

Right?

Because you're going to go get 50, 60 million people coming to look up words and find out what words mean. And you could say, hey, by the way, If you, you know, if you ever feel like you want to sharpen up with this, maybe you should 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 Grammarly, I would maybe buy Dictionary.com. I just thought it was interesting because you don't really think about this. Another one that I've been— I'm going to do research on is ezgif.com. Do you know that?

I know that one. Yes, I actually, so I have a Slack channel called Buyouts in my Slack and I just have my Slack with Ben and we have a Slack called Buyouts, which is basically websites that I think would be awesome to buy. Ezgif was the first one I ever put in that channel 'cause I was like, oh my God, I love this. I love this simple tool that gets a ton of traffic. It's zero to no maintenance and it makes money. You know, remove.bg is another one like that. Where you can just remove the background of a photo and then you pay for credits. So it's like you don't need to know Photoshop to remove the background of a photo. And I just think that's genius.

So ezgif.com, it's the letters E, the letters Z, and then GIF, gif.com. 8 million uniques a month. You go there and you upload a video and it turns it into a GIF. I was doing research on it. Looks like the guy, it looks like it's only a small team, a couple of people. Made in Latvia. Latvia. Yeah.

So overseas. Here's two other things. If I'm dictionary.com, 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 this stuff. But most people aren't aware of how New York Times really makes money, what its business looks like today. And a pretty large part of their business— I haven't done the research because it's off top of my head, but A very large—

I know.

Tens of millions of dollars a year, I believe, comes from their games division.

Particularly one game.

Crossword. And so I play this game every single day, the New York Times Mini Crossword. It is literally a 2-minute game that kind of stimulates the brain and it's fun to do and it requires no kind of hand-eye coordination type of thing. And you can't get super addicted to it because it's like one a day. So the Mini Crossword is like they took the crossword, which is a big part of the papers. Okay, now the paper's all digital. How do we make a digital version of the crossword? and then they made it mini so that it's actually simpler for the average person to do. You can pretty much always win. And super fun game. And so I don't know what the— do you have the revenue numbers of Crossword and the games division?

I'm looking it up.

Keep on going. So if I'm dictionary.com, that's whoever's the CEO of dictionary.com. Hey, free idea that I think would generate probably $8 to $10 million a year. You should come out with your— take all these popular games like Word Scramble or Mini Crossword, or all these different little 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 reskin that as the dictionary.com game and put it as a popup for people coming to the site to, hey, download this fun game. And even if you're converting half a percent of your traffic to this thing, you're going to end up driving a lot of revenue because this game is— 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 segment. So I'm doing a little bit of guesstimation, but I would bet I'm right within 10 to 20%. Um, so in 2020, New York Times said they had 600,000 people paying for the crossword puzzle only, just crossword puzzle. That was in 2020. 2020 was a huge year for subscription revenue.

Everything actually went—

yeah, everything doubled. But let's just round that up to 800,000 for 600,000. So 800,000, I believe it costs $6.95 a month for a crossword puzzle. But so let's run that up to $7. So $7 times 800,000, we're looking at $5.7 $6 million a month, $60 million a year, or, uh, $67 million a year in subscription revenue only from crossword puzzles.

Right.

That's it. That's just the crossword puzzle division.

Right.

Fucking crazy.

Right, right. Exactly. Uh, and, and they're 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 actually a games company. The guy literally said that. He goes, you know, 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 going to come out with, you know, the classic, you know, like for example, 2048, if you ever played that little numbers game. Where you slide the tiles and it like, you know, it adds up to 2048. The game's awesome. And so New York Times could come out with a version of 2048, which is like, 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.

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 going to discover stuff like dictionary, thesaurus.com, and you're eventually going to learn about CrossFit puzzles. And the reason why this is important, what we are discussing is just interesting stuff, 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 $20 million 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've 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 kind of like, why does everyone, why did 5 people break the 4-minute mile in the same year when previously no one had done it? It's because when you see what's possible, it pushes the boundary and it shows you what you can do. That's neat to me.

So we should also say, uh, so 2 things that I took away from that. You are really good at figuring out, like you sniff out these little interesting stories because you just think, who's that guy? How does he drive that car? How much is that car? 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 used to watch it, but he goes up to people getting out of Lamborghinis or just killer cars and just be like, hey man, what do you do for a living? And the guy's like, what? And he's just like, what do you do for a living? I'm curious. The guy's like, I'm in real estate. Real estate. Cool, man. And he just leaves, right? That's it. Just kind of bothers him for a second. And the person will be like, you know, I'm a cannabis entrepreneur. I'm a hedge fund guy. I'm a YouTuber. I'm a whatever, right?

Well, the joke of that channel is the people say one of two things. The women say, I'm a wife.

Yeah.

And they like are joking. And then they also— or they'll say, I sell drugs.

Right, right. Exactly. And then they like zoom away. And so I love that channel. At first, I think that's just like a really simple, fun idea for a TikTok channel. And then, 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, like you said about the 4-minute mile, it opens your mind to what's possible. So recently I got this like 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 because I'm doing it, you know, trying to be fit. You're trying to do this for the same reason. You want to eat healthier. And hey, if you can afford it, that's a convenient way to do it, right? Where, you know, you got the P word privilege to be able to do it. And so 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. Who was like, would be at his house and he would make lunch and dinner for them every single night. And I was like, whoa, I didn't even realize people have that. And 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 an upgraded part of your life. And so there's all these little examples 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, how do you do it? What do you do with that? How do you set it up? How did you find the right person? Right. Just get real curious about different people's lifestyles and how they architect like how they designed their life. And you kind of, you could pick and choose from there what works for you, what you want outta 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.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 Bitclout, new platforms.

Which by the way, speaking of Bitclout, uh, I texted Jack while we were talking. He's gonna be joining any second now.

Oh, perfect. So we brought this up on the last podcast because Ryan Beagleman 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 going to use it? Are you going to claim your account? So if you missed that episode, let me just give you the like 10 seconds of what this is. Imagine, you know, if like Robinhood and Twitter had a baby. So it's basically a stock market for people. So you go on the app. Bitclout.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 could 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 $1,500 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 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 BitCloud. Okay, hang on. Yep, I just uploaded hundreds of thousands of hundreds of thousands onto it. I'm in.

That is you.

You try everything. I learned.

I learned from those things.

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, you know, pessimistic or skeptical.

You're a default to, this is the greatest thing I've ever seen. That's your default.

No, no, 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 suck.

But that's not how people perceive it. I had people message me after our thing saying like, why the hell is Sean pumping this Bitclub thing? It's a Ponzi scheme. And I was like, I don't know, he likes it. That's just his opinion.

He likes it.

They were mad at me because we were promoting this. And I was like, I don't know.

So let me explain. So we have two friends. So you have one of your best buddies is Jack Smith. 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 Bungle thing that now sold for, I don't know, $750 million or something like that? And the root of his thing was, I try every platform early. As soon as something comes out, I want to try it. And in fact, yes, if you go on BitCloud, Jack Smith owns 2 cents of my coin. He was there before me. Of course he was, right? On Product Hunt, he became the number one power user. As soon as Product Hunt came out, he used it every single day. With NFTs and collectibles, he's like the number one power user on all these different platforms for fractional ownership and collectibles.

Yeah, on Rally Road, he's the number one buyer.

Exactly. And so that's what Jack does. And 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, even just as a user, you would have a big following. If you were early as an investor in any of these companies, if they hit, it gets very big. So that was the first kind of, huh, I noticed that from Jack. Then I was talking to my friend Furkan. He's the CTO and was co-founder of my previous company. Probably the best technology guy I know. And Furkan's always dabbling. So he was the one telling me about Bitcoin and Ethereum before anybody else. And I didn't listen to him. I didn't buy. And he was just buying, like, he put like $5,000 into Ethereum in the ICO or something like that. And so the ICO of Ethereum was $0.17. And now every Ether is $1,700, right? So you could 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 50 or 100 things that don't fully pan out. Like, for example, he's huge on VR. He bought me an Oculus and 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 deal with this? Is it because you like, Am I dumb? I don't think VR is big. 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 like in the first 10,000 people that really understand every new technology. And he is 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 is just like all about indoor farming, all about vertical farming. And like, so he's, we have this one hour a week called the Cool Shit Hour. Where 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 because it's so good. It's kind of my edge right now because 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 In technology, it pays to be optimistic. It pays to be an early adopter. If you're willing to look stupid sometimes by putting some time or money into things that fail, you will net out way, way ahead just by being early into a bunch of interesting things. At the very least, you learn. But at the most, one of these hits and then you gain a bunch of— you build a big network there or you make a bunch of money because you invested in it. So anyways, 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 from 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 24 hours I was hooked. By the second 24 hours, I had put $100,000 into the platform. You know, don't tell my wife.

So right now, my, um, you is a— that's a lot of money. It's a lot of money. Yeah.

So let me tell you why it is a lot of money.

Thing right now, my thing is, uh, my market cap on here is, is goes $170,000 to $200,000. I sold some of my stuff and a guy wired or, um, sent me money on Coinbase, uh, $10,000, 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 a less than 2% chance this works in the long run. If it does work, my $100,000 is going to be worth tens of millions of dollars. But that's the long run, 2% case. Okay. Well, I wouldn't put up $100,000 for a 2% win because 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, 5, 6 years. And some of them 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 make it, there's the people who buy in at the beginning and get access. And then there's like a bunch of crypto enthusiasts who are believers in the general 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 Jack, who's selling a bunch of NFTs for 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. My belief—

But crypto enthusiasts are not, many of them hate BitClout.

Yeah, sure. Many of, there's crypto enthusiasts is not one group of people. It's broken up into like what's called Bitcoin maximalists. They don't want to talk about anything except for Bitcoin. And they don't want to, they want I invest 100% into Bitcoin. Then there's Ethereum people who are like all about Ethereum. Then there's people who are just trying to degenerately gamble across all the different crypto projects that exist. I'm talking to you more about them, the gamblers, because 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. I think in the long run I will, but as of now, no. But if you project forward 5 years, I would almost certainly my crypto holdings 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 25% of my net worth into Bitcoin, and that's 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 $11,000. Per Bitcoin. Um, but anyways, my, my, my holdings now are like, I don't know, almost 50% of my net worth just because crypto has appreciated. So 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 3 scenarios. Scenario 1, let's say with BitCloud, this is a scam. I don't believe it's a scam given that they have backers and investors like Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia, Chamath, Coinbase Capital, the Winklevoss. Basically everybody who's legit in the technology/crypto space. These are tier 1 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 one thing that does happen in the crypto world. People take your money and they fucking run away. That has literally happened. Happened. 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 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 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, 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 want to buy this content or not? Instead, this is, I'm a believer in you. And so like back to that 1,000 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, your price will continue to go up. And I will actually, I'll go up with you. My stock in you will appreciate. So I can actually make money being a curator, being somebody 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 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 said you met Jack when Jack had a kind of smaller following. 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? I'm like a little mini Warren Buffett. I want to have my Berkshire Hathaway summit, my shareholder meeting. So you can basically say, cool, for my top 25 coin holders, um, I will meet with you personally and, you know, 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 going to produce some premium content. And instead of having to set up a whole different app like Substack or Patreon or something else, like you just say, great, if you own over 10 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 you're in your market cap right now is like $600,000. How did it, did it get that high because you bought your own stuff?

No, I've only bought net one coin of mine.

So why are people buying you or how are they even hearing about it?

They 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 because a whole bunch of people join, right? Like, so even just in our little network, right? Andrew Wilkinson joined 2 days ago and he's a super legit person. And he tweeted out today, I woke up at 5 in the morning thinking about Big Cloud. And he's like, and not just all good things, right? He said the design kind of sucks. I kind of hate the name. I wish it didn't feel so shady because of the way they're doing this, this, and this. But here's some things that 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 just kind of couldn't do before. And definitely couldn't do in a platform that had any legs. And this has legs. About $170 million has been deposited onto this. Most of that is from their institutional backers like Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia and those other guys. But the rest has been, you know, maybe $8 to $10 million has come in from users who are buying into the platform. The CTO of HubSpot, Dharmesh, he's on there every day. Me and him are chatting on there all the time because he'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 bought my— he bought my stock.

Exactly. And so I've had a lot of fun basically speculating on people, buying a bunch of people's coins that 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, 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 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've 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 cuz this guy was super low priced cuz 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 going to love all the information, the 24/7 news cycle about BitCloud. They're going to 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, if this guy's going to put reports up every day, he's going to get popular. And so already I've doubled my money on this guy just because I was able to like have a strategy, have a skilled gamble as well, 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 it scratches of like trying to put in money and triple it or make more money 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 whatever reason, for some combination of reasons, this shit is so addictive to me and maybe this will fade. I'm only 3 or 4 days in, but man, I've used the hell out of this thing in 3 or 4 days. And I don't know what's gonna happen.

I've only known it for 3 or 4 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 3 or 4 days and this might fade. Um, but I view it as a kind of asymmetric bet. If this, if this fails, I lose one, I lose one times my money. If this succeeds, I'm going to make more than 10 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, 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, 450 square foot studio or something like that in Brooklyn.

Sam tried to make it sound like Slumdog Millionaire. He was like, he's like, you know, they shared one ramen noodle each. And yeah, Jack, was I right?

Was it 400 something square feet? 450 in a bad neighborhood, Crown Heights, right?

Yeah, I mean, it was, it was all right.

And basically started an agency. It was only going okay, not going that great. And then like over the last 18, 24 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 NFT for like $100 grand. I didn't— 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 $76 million.

Just put it up this morning.

Do you think that's going to work?

Look at the smile on his face. I love it. Okay, so Jack, can you tell us about the $77 million one? What's the thinking behind that? And then just in general, what's the NFT experience been like for you? It's kind of mind-blowing.

Yeah, I think interestingly enough, this text message that got me on this podcast is kind of evidence for the strategy behind the $77 million NFT, which the thesis is it's rounded up from the highest bid on that Beeple collage. So that was $69.3 million 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. So, you know, part press play, part commentary on the world of NFTs, part artistic statement. I have very, very, very, you know, 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 intent behind the piece itself and the NFT space, like the last 3 pieces that I've been working on, the last 3 pieces I've launched have been sort of a commentary on the world of NFTs. 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. Say no more, made an NFT and auctioned it. And then the second one just finished today, but it's like a 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, you know, some people are buying these because they love them. Some people are buying them in the same way that they're betting on a creator like a Bitclout, the same thesis behind a Bitclout. You buy this thing and you assume this person is going to keep creating for years and maybe they emerge at the top of the space and then your investment increases in value. I think there's a lot of parallels of what you're talking about with Bitcloud. Visualize Value sort of was almost a layer on top of the business I was operating. So I was making these graphics to 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 works, 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 going to buy this?

I mean, impossible to say. 0.005.

Well, what's happened since you put it up this morning? Are people bidding on it? Can you bid below that last 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 traffic to it?

I can see Twitter clicks to it, but that's the only place I would have data.

And what's your guess?

Of how many people would visit? A few thousand, I think.

Is this like caught?

So far. And I think it's like, it's 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. He added this layer of context to it, which is like the reason, 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 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 $77 million, but I'll take, you know, $77,000. 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, or we're 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. We're not doing anything in between. This is not some quick sale here.

Again, another parallel with Bitcloud. It either goes off or it just stays there forever as a memory.

Right. Yeah, that's why I tweeted. I said this is either going to be an amazing investment or amazing lesson learned for me. And, um, and, and I mean that because I, 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 because it's not going to just go down by, like, 10%. It's going to go down by 100% or it's going to go up by, like, 10,000%. And so, you know, either way, I'm going to 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 kind of sat on the sideline at this other thing that I was early 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'm kind of waiting for the next one. And like, now that this one's here, I'm kind of overcompensating for it. So I was really honest with myself about what was What are the psychological drivers? And I'll put two things together. One is, one 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, you guys have probably all heard this. I know, Jack, you have for sure. Sam, you know the thing about the four levels of luck? No, I guess the 4 levels of luck. I forgot who— Mark Andreessen shared this from somebody else and then Naval shared it and that's how I heard it. But basically it's like there's dumb luck where 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? 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 got 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 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. That's where Some, 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? And so boom, luck came to your doorstep. And that's, that's sort of 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 3 and maybe a little 4, but 3 in that luck favors the prepared mind. So What I realized when I looked back at Bitcoin and I said, I was being told by smart friends back in 2013, 2014 that Bitcoin is amazing. And at first I took no action. That cost me, you know, the price was I think $70 at the time. So I let it go from $70 to $700. And then I bought in at $700. 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, I went and I looked 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 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 totally different skill sets in order to appreciate the, how great this thing is. You had to 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 took real tech savviness 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 billionaires and have been very wealthy people now. But most people who had one or the other or neither, they didn't They didn't benefit. 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. 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, 70-ish years. and you know, before that we had gold and before that we had shells and money actually 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 Bitclout, 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 understanding how social networks start. And when I saw that, oh, this is like probably the most brilliant growth hack I've ever seen. These people who, 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 $100 million from them, and then let's invest that $100 million 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 $55,000 sitting in it. All I had to do was tweet it out and say, hey, I'm using Bitclout, come use it with me, basically, right? And I had to tweet that to my 120,000 followers in order to claim this $50,000 that was sitting in there, this like kind of imaginary $50,000 that was sitting there. And okay, so I was like, that's going to work. A lot of influencers are going to go see $100,000 sitting in their account and they say, all I got to do is tweet this thing out, like, done. Like, Sam, you think the thing's fucking stupid, but you did it anyways because you were like, shit, I got 35 grand sitting in here. I'll take that. And Jack, how much money do you have sitting in your thing?

About 150, I think, last time I looked at it.

So $150,000 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 $150 grand sitting there just for tweeting the thing out. Yeah. And so then you go like layers deep. You say, okay, so they're going to tweet it out, they're going to claim their money, and then they have a big following, so then their people are going to 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 going to get all these paper gains and then they're all going to 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 going to 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, I already missed Bitcoin. Now I'm going to miss the next one. And they're going to get on and that's going to 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 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 at the very minimum I thought, wow, this game is architected so that these numbers are going to go up. This is going to 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, the more likely it is to succeed. And so then there's actually a chance that this does become, you know, a new, a new wave of social networks. So anyways, that's my whole story.

Sure. I've, I've known you for, since, maybe 8 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 BitCloud and Bitcoin has done for you has 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 you finally have come out of your shell. Now, are the whole, are you right thing? Well, that's why, like, we're gonna—

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 crypto projects 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. That's situation 2. Situation 3 is it just flops, it goes to zero. There are all 3 scenarios on the table. What I'm trying to say is the probabilities— I'm not saying this is likely or definitely going to 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, what does this mean to you? 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 has broken the the commandments of crypto, therefore you should not go anywhere near it. And my understanding of the mechanics of pre-mining and all of these, like, I wasn't paying attention to the ICO cycle when it was happening years ago. So I just felt pretty unqualified to make a bet on it. And I think to your point, Sean, there's reputational risk in endorsing it too before it gets to a point of I don't know.

Yeah.

Some of the things that are left unsaid or haven't been clarified are clarified. So I'm on the sidelines for the time being.

Yeah, 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 could be some money to be made. Here's my exact holdings. I feel like, oh, I'm disclosing everything and smart adults are going to do with that what they want. Do your own research. Don't rely on me and come to your own conclusions. I'm telling you what I've come to thus far, 3 days in. And so I'm always like, oh, people will get all that. In reality, all anyone's going to 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 going to remember any of the nuance around how I was thinking about it. Anybody's just going to remember, dude, you sounded so excited. You said you put $100 grand in and either you know, that's why you're the hottest things to slice bread. If that becomes a $10 million stake or it's going to be, I lost my life savings. How could you? You told me this was going to work. And unfortunately, the way I wish the world, the way I wish people listen to it is not going to be how people actually listen to it, is my guess.

Are you the biggest, the biggest Bitclout bull in the world, Sean?

Ah, not even close. Like Craig Clemens, 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 can speak for himself how he's thinking about the calculated risk, but like, you know, he's got 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 gains, 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, there's the big, the, the, the whale guy, I forgot his name, is Big Clout Whale or something like that. He put a million dollars into his own coins, and he's, he also has, you know, the biggest kind of like NFT collection out there, I think.

Well, that guy, he bought, um, he wired me, or I keep saying wired, but he sent me 10 grand in Ethereum.

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. It's a community token, a separate thing. He owns $2 million 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, 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. but I'll also say, what are the downsides, right? A, if you go use the thing, you'll notice 3 things right away. It requires a password to join. That already has blocked like 80% of people. Now you could find it if you just Twitter BitCloud, if you Google BitCloud password, you'll find it easily. But today that's a challenge. It's password protected because they're not ready for scale, which is the second part. You go use the thing and it's under such heavy load all the time that I click the follow button and the thing fucking spins for 30 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.

Jack, are you going to make more income from NFTs in 2021 than you think you will from your real job or your normal business, rather?

Probably.

Isn't that nuts? Is that fucking crazy?

3 letters you didn't even know last year.

Yeah. Different market, man. Different dynamics. Very crazy.

Would you say 3 years ago, where were you? What— where were you at?

What is it now? March? I was just starting my agency, so I was shooting car commercials on the— like, for, you know, just running around 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?

It feels like the last couple months has been like compressed a ton of just leaps and bounds of technology and culture. And last year, obviously shifting to doing work fully online, I think was one jump. And now like the normalization of crypto is just feels like another like rocket. and stuff like, you know, 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. And this Bitcloud thing is going to 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.

Right. So Jack, let me ask you, because I feel a little torn, right? Because I come on the pod today and I say, oh, I got to talk about Bitcloud. Why? Because A, I've been using it a bunch for the last couple days. It's one of the more interesting projects I've ever seen. But B, I'm kind of embarrassed to even talk about it because there's such a good chance that this thing fails that it's going to look pretty stupid. And Bitcloud is even more it's going to look even more stupid when it fails than, let's say, I guess what I'm getting at is I think that it takes a long time to build a reputation of being smart and trustworthy, and it's easy to lose it in a day. I think Warren Buffett said that once. And it takes a decade or whatever to build a reputation and a day to lose it. And So I kind of feel that way with Bitcoin, BitCloud, crypto in general. It's all such uncertain territory. It's uncharted waters, uncertain territory. Nobody really— if anybody tells you they know what's going to happen, they're definitely not saying, you know, telling the truth. 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 Shot's getting slaughtered. It's going down like 30% 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 let's sell this baby now. Let's take something off the table. And so Top Shot's cratering right now. And then as it starts to crater, all the people who thought it was going to fail are like, see, I told you so. This was silly to begin with. 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 NFT you sold for $150,000 is worth $1,000? And what do you— I guess, how do you think about that?

Yeah, I thought a lot about it. I think coming into it originally, I 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, player, 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 off 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, I guess, loop in my head or this thing I'm thinking about around what is a marketing expense relative to a, like a technology in general. So if you're an Ethereum like whale, let's say, let's say you bought X number of thousand Ethereum at $0.07 or whatever it was back in the day. And you want to 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 NFT Explained piece, which was by far the most expensive or the largest sale of the last few I've done, I think I got 4 million impressions on Twitter. So if you think about what it would cost you to buy 4 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 is a valuable thing, right? To own something that has that level of cultural 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, it's a legitimate bet. Like if you can see that this thing has, this thing resonates with people and that's the beauty of having Twitter. So Visualize Value, you can see this image that you own, 3,300 or 4,500 people clicked on 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 consider us close friends, I wanted to like buy— I wanted to— I was willing to spend around $5,000 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 going to be like a far more important person than you already are. I was willing. So I get the sentiment. Now without sounding like a douche, like I, I have money, right? And I was only willing to spend $5,000 the way that someone was going to spend $150,000 that either they're like way richer than I am or they're just crazy. That's how I like, I don't understand the $150K, but like maybe some people don't understand that I was willing to do $5K. So these are the people who bought it.

Very, very well. You could like do your Ethereum wallet sleuthing and figure out how much people have.

But well, you said, you know, how much money they have.

Like, I know them when I talk to them.

But like a normal person, he doesn't do what we do.

But if you know that, 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 Dubai. I say, I mean, go back and forth in Twitter DMs.

Some people don't have their real name, but it's like, hey, um, you know, you develop a relationship.

So Sam, here, here's how it works. The guy who bought the Beeple, uh, artwork for, for whatever, $69 million, something like that, um, I, I, I might be mixing it up, but you know, Meet Kovan, that's his, that's his handle.

Uh, well, I just read about him. He, he started a, I mean, he's probably worth hundreds of millions of dollars through Bitcoin.

So he invested $5,000 into Bitcoin and is worth over a billion dollars. Based on when he invested it. So he's reinvesting. Like I said, you go to Chuck E. Cheese, you're great at skee-ball, you hit the $5,000 jackpot, the tickets start spitting out of this machine. You don't think about it like spending $150,000. You think about it like spending 70 Ether and you have 70,000 Ether or whatever, right? So he's spending a fraction of his, like, giant stockpile of crypto bucks and it feels different.

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 people, but he's like kind of a big deal— that there's that many people that will just buy his thing for $100 grand. I'm just shocked that there's that many people who have that amount on your own being shocked by it. And if Jack, if you do sell this thing for $76 million, I mean, like, obvious, like, who cares about history and how neat that is? I mean, that would be— the Butcher family would be famous for 5 generations.

I mean, that would be the most absurd story of all time, perhaps.

It would be. It would be just so wild and so funny. I hope it works. I kind of 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 huge sum of them, a huge number of them, they end up becoming meth addicts and or they get—

they're broke and depressed. Yeah.

Yeah. Like they're already messed up a little bit and now they're just even more— they're messed up times the amount of money they earn. Like, I don't want that to happen. I don't think it would happen to you. I would almost be nervous.

Like, you know, the fact that there's even an outside chance of it happening is is 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 quite like just unfathomable. And that would like definitely warp your experience of the world. And I can't even fathom what something like that would be like. But yeah. Yeah, aliens will land before that happens, mate.

That's crazy.

Okay, we should wrap this.

Yeah, I don't know where we go from here, but—

Zach, thanks for coming on.

What a year.

We texted you like 30 minutes ago or 40 minutes ago when you hopped on, so I appreciate that.

It was fun.

I hope somebody buys the thing. I think that would be fucking amazing. I think it couldn't happen to a better guy. So I think there is a 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 a podcast is the hardest thing I've ever done.

It's easier to just sell a picture for $77 million than it is to create a top 10 business podcast. I shit you not. It is actually easier to do one than the other. We'll find out. I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.