Why Jack Butcher is Selling an NFT for $80M+

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, you know, catch myself each time, make sure I didn't call him autistic.

So it could be that too. Who knows?

I mean, actually, the thing about Jack is he's very smooth, very, very low-key. Nicest guy in the world.

And, um, 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. We're, uh, they just had a baby, and we're, we've been friends with them, 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 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 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 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, you know, 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, 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.

Very well. And he does north of $1 million a year in revenue. And the only expenses are like small software stuff and then him and his wife.

Exactly. And so he's doing very well for himself, right? But it's all relative. So 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 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, you know, just does an experiment. I don't know what the first one sold for. I think it was like 1 Ether, right? Uh, 1 Ether, 2 or $3,000. It was like, yeah, just close to 2 grand. And, uh, it was like 1.5 Ether or something like that. So it was like 2 or $3,000. Still pretty sweet, right? Like, this is just a, you know,.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 a schemer in any way. But I think he is smart and he is interesting. He likes to dabble. But 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 username. He just goes, oh, I love Jack and I think this is going to appreciate value. And I just really love this. I just love the art. And I was like, wow, okay, fantastic. So that's the guy who bought it for $70 grand.

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

Yeah. So to explain that one.

So the, 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, right? And you would buy these packs having no idea what the NFT art was in it, right? 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's 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 going to 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, 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 wrote— he did an NFT and it says, here's the difference between a JPEG and an NFT. And it just had a verified— 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 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, and just do something that's bold. 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— let's say, take the 3 outcomes. Somebody actually buys it for $77 million. There's been CryptoPunks now. The number 1 CryptoPunk sold for— Abrey, you look this up. How much did 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. And that was like part of that, part of what made the Mona Lisa even more remarkable and more valuable. Now, most valuable piece of artwork in the world. And so, so, okay, so anyway, Great usage of the word homage. Yeah, thank you. Um, 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.

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, 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, 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 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, 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.

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're free to come talk about your 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. Well, we'll come back to that. Oh, let's travel, never looking back.