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

Want to be featured in a future episode? Drop your question/comment/criticism/love here: https://www.mfmpod.com/p/hotline/ Support the pod by spreading the word, become a referrer here: refer.fm/million --------- --------- Sam Parr (@TheSamParr), Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and Jack Butcher (@JackButcher) discuss: (1:37) How Jack Butcher went from struggling founder to listing an NFT for $76m (13:38) How Sam researches wealthy people and discovers profitable businesses in the process (32:44) Why it pays to be early on new platforms (47:30) Jack explains why he's listing his art for sale for $76m (57:40) BitClout's incredible growth strategy (1:09:12) The reputational problem NFTs/Bitcoin/Bitcloud pose and are they just fads --------- --------- Have you joined our private Facebook group yet? Go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion and join thousands of other entrepreneurs and founders scheming up ideas.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Sam Parr?

  Did 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 JP and an NFT thing? I didn't see that you have one for 76 million dollars.

• 0:13Speaker 01

  Just put it up this morning.

• 0:14Sam Parr?

  Do you think that's gonna work?

• 0:15Shaan Puri?

  Look at the smile on his face. I love it.

• 0:30Shaan Puri?

  So I have just kind of an update on my BitClout thing that I wanted to talk about, but we can do it later if we want. Doesn't have to be at the beginning.

• 0:40Sam Parr?

  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.

• 0:48Shaan Puri?

  Crazy Shaker.

• 0:49Sam Parr?

  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 happen. And it's kind of crazy.

• 1:10Shaan Puri?

  So I'll say, if you're tired of us talking about Bitcoin and NFTs and all the crypto stuff, this 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 gonna go, we're gonna show you some range today. We're gonna talk about a website that's like 25 years old. And then we're gonna talk about, you know, a website that's like 25 minutes old, which is BitClout. 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.

• 1:51Shaan Puri?

  And by the way, every, 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

• 2:00Sam Parr?

  It could be that too. Who knows?

• 2:01Shaan Puri?

  Well, actually, the thing about Jack is he's very smooth, very, very low key nicest guy in the world. And

• 2:07Sam Parr?

  So 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.

• 2:16Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 2:16Sam Parr?

  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 they just had a baby and we're been

• 2:27Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 2:27Sam Parr?

  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 he came here 10 years ago. They shared a one bedroom or sorry, a studio apartment that was 400 square feet. And he was there were nothing. I mean, they were they 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.

• 2:49Shaan Puri?

  Right. Okay, so so he he kind of pivots to basically saying, okay, within the agency's 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.

• 3:33Shaan Puri?

  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 visualize value. So he does like the normal creator thing. He gets a little bit of an audience. His Twitter grows to 100,000 people. He creates a course. He creates kind of like a paid community for people who want to learn this thing. And he's doing well for himself, right? And that's where we met him.

• 3:59Sam Parr?

  Very well. And he he he's it does he does north of a million dollars a year in revenue and the only expenses are like some small software stuff and then him and his wife.

• 4:10Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. And so he's doing he's doing very well for himself, right? But it's all relative. She's doing much better now. So what happened? 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, you know, just does an experiment. I don't know what the first one sold for. I think it was like one ether, right? One, one.

• 4:53Sam Parr?

  Two, two or $3,000.

• 4:54Shaan Puri?

  It was like, yeah, just close to two grand. And it was like 1.5 ether or something like that. So it was like 2 or 3,000 bucks. 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 to that something to them. And they had a bunch of crypto gains that they could reinvest their check and 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.

• 5:32Sam Parr?

  Like 70 grand, I think.

• 5:33Shaan Puri?

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

• 5:37Sam Parr?

  And I called him right when I saw that. I go, Jack, is this real? Does someone? He goes, yeah, it's crazy, mate. That's all I said.

• 5:44Shaan Puri?

  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 you buy this thing? It's some random, you know, random username. And he just goes, oh, you know, I love Jack and I think this is 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.

• 6:14Sam Parr?

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

• 6:20Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So to explain that one.

• 6:22Sam Parr?

  So the, the part of the story is the cra- 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, now they love Jack. And what he did was he created a website where you were buying a pack. He had 12 packs. All it said was pack one, pack two, pack three. 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 one.

• 6:57Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 6:57Sam Parr?

  And you would buy these packs having no idea what the NFT art was in it.

• 7:01Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 7:01Sam Parr?

  He had 12 of them and people were bidding on them and each one sold for around 10 to 15,000 dollars, which is, I thought, nuts.

• 7:10Shaan Puri?

  Amazing, right.

• 7:10Sam Parr?

  Until we get to the final part of the story, or at least the most recent part of the story.

• 7:15Shaan Puri?

  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 dollars. 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, the artist Beeple, uh, who was like Jack, but even more popular. So Beeple had done a, a few drops. Those drops were like kind of in the one to five million range-ish. And then the most popular NFT of all time was sold for 69 million dollars recently.

• 7:58Shaan Puri?

  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, uh, basically says, cool. This is a NFT called Fame. And what Fame is, is it will be the number one priced, uh, piece of artwork, uh, digital artwork in the world. Right? So he prices it above the Beeple drop.

• 8:22Sam Parr?

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

• 8:28Shaan Puri?

  This is today.

• 8:28Sam Parr?

  Last. 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.

• 8:45Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 8:45Sam Parr?

  Which I thought was crazy. This is way crazier.

• 8:48Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 8:48Sam Parr?

  Because it's crazier because it might work.

• 8:52Shaan Puri?

  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, right? So pricing, you know, pricing a piece of your artwork for $77 million. It doesn't even mean, it doesn't even matter if somebody buys it. Just pricing it for $77 million is, is already going to put you on the map. The second thing is, this might be a, you know, let's say, take the three outcomes. Somebody actually buys it for $77 million, right? There's been CryptoPunks now, the number one CryptoPunk sold for, oh, Brad, you look this up. How much did that crypto, the top CryptoPunk sell for? I think it was like $7 million,

• 9:36Shaan Puri?

  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 seven and a half 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 Provogia, 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 the, part of what made

• 10:18Shaan Puri?

  the Mona Lisa even more remarkable and more valuable. And now most valuable piece of artwork in the world. And so, so, okay.

• 10:25Sam Parr?

  By the way, great usage of the word homage.

• 10:28Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, thank you.

• 10:30Sam Parr?

  Good job.

• 10:30Shaan Puri?

  We're trying to class it up 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 dollars that he just, you know, manufactured through his own creativity and, you know, and probably, I would bet you like four days of effort.

• 10:45Sam Parr?

  I got, I have chills looking at this tweet that he put out. The reason why this is so crazy is, It might work.

• 10:53Shaan Puri?

  It might work.

• 10:53Sam Parr?

  Someone might be crazy enough to do this.

• 10:55Shaan Puri?

  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 people did that, people did, people 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 skillset. 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.

• 11:40Shaan Puri?

  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. But 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, 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.

• 12:08Sam Parr?

  This boggles my mind. Should we ask him to come on? You want Jack to come on?

• 12:11Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, we should for sure.

• 12:12Sam Parr?

  Are you friends with him?

• 12:13Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 12:15Sam Parr?

  All right.

• 12:15Shaan Puri?

  Not as close as you guys, but yeah, we're, we're close. You should message him. We should see if he hops on, see if he hops on today.

• 12:22Shaan Puri?

  Just be like, you're free to come talk about your fame thing for, for five minutes. Let's just see if he hops on at the end of this.

• 12:29Sam Parr?

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

• 12:44Shaan Puri?

  Um, we can do whatever you want.

• 12:46Sam Parr?

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

• 12:50Shaan Puri?

  Well, I think it's going to go two ways. It's going to be, if I'm listening to this and I'm, most people who are listening to this are kind of like, not as knee deep into this world as we are. And, and we're still like, just kind of dabbling. And so the average person is probably not. You know, familiar with all these things, definitely not taking action and definitely not getting rich on all these things. So there's, 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 like, you know, a giant carnival game that, you know, some kind of Ponzi scheme that I don't want to hear more about. So I don't know, it's probably pretty polarizing.

• 13:25Sam Parr?

  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 big cloud. I want to talk, come back to angel investing.

• 13:36Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 13:36Sam Parr?

  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 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 therealdale.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.

• 14:16Shaan Puri?

  It's a gossip blog. Yeah.

• 14:18Sam Parr?

  For real estate, mostly in New York and LA though. So they're kind of famous, famous e person, 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 hot. Um, you know, it's hard to like bullshit that.

• 14:46Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 14:46Sam Parr?

  And so real estate holdings is one of the best way to get an indicator of someone's wealth or it's a great way, not the best way, but it's a great way. And I found one that interested me a ton. This guy's name was Brian Carringer and he, he bought a house in Malibu in 2019 for $20 million. I hadn't heard Brian. I know a lot of internet entrepreneurs. I hadn't heard of them, so I researched them. 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 dictionary.com? So in the 1990s, this guy started, uh, in 1995, he started a business called Lexico Publishing. And Lexico Publishing owed the thesaurus.com and dictionary.com.

• 15:30Sam Parr?

  And he bootstrapped it and he grew it and he sold it in 2005 to IAC for a hundred million dollars. And then, uh, two years ago, IAC sold dictionary.com to Dan Gilbert. You know, Dan Gilbert of Quicken Loans?

• 15:42Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 15:44Sam Parr?

  He sold dictionary.com for, uh, or they sold dictionary.com for a hundred million dollars. So they, 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, I believe dozens of employees. It's incredibly fascinating because this is what I call.

• 16:03Shaan Puri?

  How do they make money? It's just ad ad cents or is there something else?

• 16:06Sam Parr?

  Just ads. All it is is ads. And it's an incredibly interesting company because it's one of the things that I call a for it. You could, 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 like necessarily sexy. It's like the sweaty startup of internet. You know, if, if sweaty startup means a law landscaping business, this is kind of like that for the internet.

• 16:29Shaan Puri?

  Sure.

• 16:30Sam Parr?

  And, but they've done a really good job of staying relevant. So they do a word of the day, which people like particularly love. Like it's a huge email list of, we just get the word of the day. They also do a word of a year, word of the year, word of the year. So when Donald Trump was president until the 16, I think the word of the year was xenophobic. Because a lot of people were searching what xenophobic means.

• 16:49Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 16:50Sam Parr?

  This past year until the 20, it was pandemic and it was, it's almost like a recap of year. And it's actually kind of culturally relevant. And also what they do is when someone like Kendall Jenner or Kylie Jenner, whatever the woman is who is quote self-made. They, they'll do funny stuff like they'll tweet the definite, they'll retweet a tweet of her calling herself self, self-made. And they'll, they'll say, actually, the definition of self, self-made is success unaided. Or something like that, like they, like they're pretty snarky. I find this to be incredibly interesting, um, because it's something I didn't think about and.

• 17:24Sam Parr?

  That's what it is.

• 17:26Shaan Puri?

  Man, you went from 100 to zero real quick there at the end.

• 17:29Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 17:32Shaan Puri?

  We actually had a friend who was looking at buying dictionary.com. You know about this?

• 17:37Sam Parr?

  No.

• 17:38Shaan Puri?

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

• 17:45Sam Parr?

  Urban dictionaries.com is another big one. That one gets about 40 or 50 million unique a month.

• 17:50Shaan Puri?

  And who owns that?

• 17:51Sam Parr?

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

• 17:56Shaan Puri?

  So there's a similar, you wrote another one on here that that's similar to me, which is chess.com. And so

• 18:02Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 18:02Shaan Puri?

  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. 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

• 18:34Sam Parr?

  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'd be worth a quarter of a billion dollars.

• 18:45Shaan Puri?

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

• 18:50Sam Parr?

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

• 18:54Shaan Puri?

  Right. And they're not just like, it's not flyby traffic like dictionary.com, the source.com, they're gonna have a lot more traffic, but it's gonna be flyby.

• 19:02Sam Parr?

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

• 19:08Shaan Puri?

  Incredible, right? And so 200 million.

• 19:11Sam Parr?

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

• 19:13Shaan Puri?

  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?

• 19:23Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And so you can meet with coaches and you could pay coaches money.

• 19:26Shaan Puri?

  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?

• 19:33Sam Parr?

  Yep.

• 19:34Shaan Puri?

  Yep. Okay. So still dead simple business model around a classic game that nobody owns the IP to, right? It's not like saying, um, Monopoly. Well, you can't do Monopoly. Somebody owns Monopoly, huh? You know, I don't know who Hasbro or whoever owns Monopoly. You, you could do it with chess. And this is one of the reasons why we talked about religion as a really interesting fun, uh, you know, fundamental or like base layer for any business, because nobody owns religion, but it's a highly recognized brand with super high affinity. So I love businesses that are, you know, like pray, the app that's, you know, basically calm for, for Christianity. Or there's versions of this for the Muslim religion. And so I love religion as one of the primary substrates because you have a billion people who know about it. But, uh, nobody owns the IP, so you can use the IP and.

• 20:17Sam Parr?

  So what, what, what was our friend gonna do? Who, who, I wonder who our friend is?

• 20:22Shaan Puri?

  So I don't remember exactly, and I don't know how much we could really talk about it, but they were gonna basically buy two properties at the same time, dictionary.com and one other one. And because they were like, look, dictionary.com gets a ton of traffic, but it's not so sticky of a service. It doesn't really have, um, a great monetization potential. It's just display, just play ads. And then this other thing is a great business model and has, um, uh, you know, has, has great stickiness. And maybe we merge the two, like, let's just, okay, here's a hypothetical. I don't know if this is exactly what they said, but if you're Grammarly, would you pay for, would you go buy dictionary.com and the source, right? Because you're gonna 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, uh, install Grammarly,

• 21:05Shaan Puri?

  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.

• 21:18Sam Parr?

  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 gonna do research on is easygif.com. Do you know that?

• 21:28Shaan Puri?

  I know that one. Yes. I actually, so I have a Slack channel called buyouts in my Slack. And, um, I just have my Slack with Ben and we have a Slack called buyouts, which is basically. Company websites that I think would be awesome to buy. Easy Gif was the first one I ever put in that that channel because I was like, oh, my God, I love this. I love this simple tool that gets a ton of traffic. It's zero to no maintenance and and it makes money. Remove dot 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.

• 22:05Sam Parr?

  So easy gif.com. It's the letters E, the letter Z, and then gif, G I F dot com. Eight 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. It looks like the guy, it looks like it's only a small team, a couple of people made in Latvia.

• 22:24Sam Parr?

  So overseas.

• 22:27Shaan Puri?

  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, 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 it, what its business looks like today. And a pretty large part of their business, I haven't done the research because it's off the top of my head, but very large, tens of millions of dollars a year, I believe, comes from their games division.

• 22:53Sam Parr?

  Particularly one game.

• 22:55Shaan Puri?

  Crossword. And so I play this game every single day, the New York Times mini crossword. It is literally a two minute game that like kind of stimulates the brain and it's fun to do. It requires like no kind of hand eye coordination type of thing. And it's not, 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 is all digital. How do we make a digital version of the crossword? And then they made it mini so that it's actually like simpler for the average person to do. You can like pretty much always win and super fun game. And so the, I don't know what the, do you have the revenue numbers of crossword and the games division?

• 23:31Sam Parr?

  Looking it up.

• 23:31Shaan Puri?

  So if I'm dictionary.com, that's, you know, whoever's the CEO of dictionary.com, hey, free idea that I think would generate probably eight to $10 million a year. You should come out with your, take all these popular games like word scramble or mini crossword or, you know, all these different little word, word puzzle games that are very popular in the app store. And they have trouble with distribution. Good games, trouble with distribution. All you need to do is reskin that as the dictionary.com game and put it as a pop up for people coming to the site to, hey, Download this fun game and you know, 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

• 24:13Shaan Puri?

  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.

• 24:26Sam Parr?

  Okay, so 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%. So 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.

• 24:52Shaan Puri?

  Everything like doubled, yeah.

• 24:54Sam Parr?

  Everything doubled, but let's just round that up to 800,000 from 600,000. So 800,000, I believe it costs $6.95 a month for a crossword puzzle, but so let's round that up to $7. So $7 times 800,000, we're looking at $5.6 million a month.

• 25:09Shaan Puri?

  A month, 60 million a year.

• 25:10Sam Parr?

  Or $67 million a year in subscription revenue only from crossword puzzles. That's it. That's just the crossword puzzle division.

• 25:18Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 25:19Sam Parr?

  Fucking crazy.

• 25:20Shaan Puri?

  Right, right. Exactly. And they're like, I read an article recently where the guy was like, you know, someone from the New York Times was like, yeah, we're quadrupling down on games. Games exploded during COVID. Crossword is already an amazing franchise for us. The next, they have another game, I forgot what it is, but they have like, you know, a few staple games that are like these classics. And they're like, you know, we're, we're actually a games company. They, the guy literally said that. He goes, you know, we, we don't just, you know, just put the game, the same exact game on a phone. We like kind of reinvent it so that it's like even more fun on your phone. We try to like put a twist on the game. We're not just 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

• 26:04Shaan Puri?

  so New York Times can 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.

• 26:14Sam Parr?

  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 crossword puzzles. And the reason why this is important, what we're 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 have thought could actually

• 26:55Sam Parr?

  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 five people break the four minute mile in the same year when previously no one had done it? It's because when you see what's possible, it pushes the boundary and it shows you what you can do. That's neat to me.

• 27:21Shaan Puri?

  So we should also say, so two 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? Yeah. How'd you get that money? Right. And actually, there's a famous TikTok channel that just does only this. I don't know if you use TikTok.

• 27:40Sam Parr?

  I love it.

• 27:41Shaan Puri?

  But he goes up to people getting out of like Lamborghinis or like, you know, like just killer cars and just be like, Hey, man, 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 just, I'm curious. The guy's like, I'm in real estate. Real estate. Cool, man. And he just leaps, right? That's it. Yeah. Kind of bothers him for a second. And the, you know, the person will be like, you know, I'm a cannabis entrepreneur. I'm a, you know, I'm a hedge fund guy. I, I'm a YouTuber. I'm a whatever. Right?

• 28:04Sam Parr?

  Well, the joke on 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.

• 28:14Shaan Puri?

  Right, right. Exactly. And then they're like zoom away. And so, so I love that channel. At first, I think that's just like a really simple, fun idea for a TikTok channel. And then, but, but there is some like, kind of merit to that. And it's really helped me in life, which is basically anytime you see somebody who's got an interesting lifestyle, I like to figure out two things. One is, Is your whole day like this? What's your day like? What do you do? How do you do that? And I like to see how people architect their life, right? Like, and that sort of like, it's like, like you said about the four minute mile, it opens your mind to what's possible. So recently, I got this like, a private chef person who's like making meals for me. They don't, 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.

• 28:58Shaan Puri?

  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, want to eat healthier and pay if you can afford it. That's a convenient way to do it, right? Where, you know, you got the P word, privilege, to be able to do it. And so, the reason I think that's even possible, or I realized 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, you know, lunch and dinner for them every single night. And I was like, whoa, I didn't even realize people have that. And it's not that, oh, you know, I want that, but it's, I didn't even realize that's a possibility of a lifestyle that you could have. It is a upgraded part of your life. And so there's all these little examples I've had in my life of like,

• 29:42Shaan Puri?

  like I have a cousin who has like a virtual assistant in the Philippines. And I asked him, how do you do, what do you do with that? How do you set it up? How'd you find the right person, right? Just get real curious about different people's lifestyles and how they architect, how they design their life. And you kind of, you can pick and choose from there what works for you, what you want out of your life. The second thing is, why did the guy behind dictionary.com like make it work, right? Because it's like, kind of a simple idea. Well, he was early to a platform, right? So to get the domain dictionary.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.

• 30:18Sam Parr?

  Which, by the way, speaking of BitClout, I texted Jack while we were talking. He's going to be joining any second now.

• 30:23Shaan Puri?

  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 gonna use it? Are you gonna claim your account? So if you missed that episode, let me just give you the like 10 seconds of what this is. Imagine, you know, if like Robin Hood 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.

• 31:07Shaan Puri?

  And every time you sell, the price goes down. And so it's kind of like a stock market for people's reputations. And so when we did the pod, my coin was 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.

• 31:26Sam Parr?

  Of course, dude. 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.

• 31:35Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 31:36Sam Parr?

  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 a thing called the BitClout. Okay, hang on. Yep, I just uploaded hundreds of thousands, hundreds of thousands, dude, I'm in. That is you. You try every...

• 31:55Shaan Puri?

  I learned from those guys.

• 31:56Sam Parr?

  And you think it's all the best.

• 31:58Shaan Puri?

  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 pessimistic or skeptical.

• 32:07Sam Parr?

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

• 32:12Shaan Puri?

  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 Z suck.

• 32:22Sam Parr?

  Dude, 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 BitClout thing? It's a Ponzi scheme. And I was like, I don't know, he likes it. That's just, that's his opinion, he likes it. They were mad at, they were mad at me because we were promoting this. And I was like, I don't know.

• 32:39Shaan Puri?

  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 BitClout, 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.

• 33:20Sam Parr?

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

• 33:24Shaan Puri?

  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 saw, then I was talking to my friend Furcon. He's the CTO and was co-founder of my previous company, probably the best kind of technology guy I know. And Furcon's always dabbling. So he was the one telling me about Bitcoin and Ethereum before anybody else before. And I didn't listen to him, I didn't buy. And he was just buying like, he put like 5 grand into Ethereum in the ICO or something like that, you know, like, and so, you know, the ICO of Ethereum was 17 cents.

• 34:08Shaan Puri?

  And now it sells, now every Ether is $1,700, right? So you can see the type of appreciation you get when one of these hits. And he's had, you know, for every 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 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.

• 34:51Shaan Puri?

  And therefore, I'm like in the first 10,000 people that really understand every new technology. And he's like, because of that, one of those technologies is going to be big. So right now, for example, he's super into vertical farming and like hydroponic farming. And he's just like all about indoor farming, all about vertical farming and like, so he'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.

• 35:21Sam Parr?

  Why is this just not an episode that we do?

• 35:23Shaan Puri?

  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 it in technology, it pays to be optimistic. It pays to be an early adopter. If you're willing to look stupid sometimes by, by putting some time or money into things that fail, you, 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 like, you build a big network there or you make a bunch of money because you invested in it. So anyways, that's, that's my overall philosophy.

• 36:07Shaan Puri?

  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 a hundred thousand dollars into the platform, you know, don't tell my wife.

• 36:33Sam Parr?

  So right now, my, um, you, it's, it's a, that's a lot of money.

• 36:39Shaan Puri?

  It's a lot of money.

• 36:39Sam Parr?

  A hundred thousand dollars is, it's a lot of money.

• 36:42Shaan Puri?

  So let me tell you why.

• 36:46Shaan Puri?

  It is a lot of money.

• 36:46Sam Parr?

  Thing right now, my thing is, uh, my market cap on here is, is, uh, goes 170, 200,000. I sold some of my stuff and a guy wired or, um, it sent me money on Coinbase, uh, $10,000.

• 37:00Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 37:02Sam Parr?

  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.

• 37:09Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you sold some of yours. I have not sold any of mine. And instead, I actually invested money into the platform or bought a bunch of people's coins, including yours. And so, so I own a bunch of coins for all these different people that I think might appreciate. And so, I would say there is still a, I would say in the long run, this working in the long run, I think there's like a less than 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, that's the long run. 2% case. Okay. Well, I wouldn't put up 100 grand 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, five, six years. And

• 37:52Shaan Puri?

  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 are, there's the people who make it, there's the people who buy in at the beginning and get, get access. And then there's like, a bunch of crypto enthusiasts who are believers in the general, like, innovation space of crypto, that then say, oh, cool, this sounds fun, I want to go try it. And that's happening right now with NFTs. Like, we talked about our friend Jack, who's selling a bunch of NFTs for, you know, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars. It's because there are crypto enthusiasts who say, NFTs are really cool, I want to invest in that.

• 38:32Sam Parr?

  But the crypto enthusiasts are not, many of them hate Bitcoin.

• 38:36Shaan Puri?

  Uh, yeah, sure. So many, many, there's, crypto enthusiast is not one group of people, it's broken up into like, Bitcoin maximalist, they don't want to talk about anything except for Bitcoin, and they don't want to, they want to invest 100% into Bitcoin. Then there's Ethereum people who are like, all about Ethereum. Then there's people who are just, just trying to degenerately gamble across all the different, like, different crypto projects that exist. I'm talking more about them, the gamblers, because I understand a gambler.

• 39:02Sam Parr?

  Have you made more money, have you made more money off Bitcoin than you have selling your company?

• 39:06Shaan Puri?

  No.

• 39:08Sam Parr?

  That'd be cool if you did.

• 39:09Shaan Puri?

  It would have been sweet. I think in the long run I will, but as of now, no. But if you project forward five years, I would almost certainly my crypto holdings will be worth more than what I sold the company for, when I got out of the sale.

• 39:22Sam Parr?

  Do you think that, what percentage of your net worth do you have in crypto?

• 39:26Shaan Puri?

  So I tweeted out that I was moving 25% into, of my net worth into Bitcoin.

• 39:32Sam Parr?

  Was that real?

• 39:33Shaan Puri?

  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. So my overall, my average buy price is about $11,000 per Bitcoin. But anyways, 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.

• 40:05Sam Parr?

  That's crazy.

• 40:06Shaan Puri?

  So anyways, the thing I want to tell you about is, so that's my general, let's play out three scenarios. Scenario one, let's say with BitClout. 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, like basically like everybody who's legit in technology slash crypto space, like these are tier one mames that are invested in this thing.

• 40:34Sam Parr?

  I don't think it's a scam. It's definitely not a scam in the sense of that it's malicious people.

• 40:38Shaan Puri?

  Right. So that's like one thing that does happen in the crypto world. People take your money and they fucking run away. That has literally happened. So I don't think it's that. 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 going, 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 going to only get more popular over time, I can actually invest in Sam.

• 41:24Shaan Puri?

  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 thousand true fans concept. It's like, if I'm a believer in you, I can invest in you. And as more people realize that you're the shit, your price will continue to go up and I will actually, I'll go up with you. My, my stock in you will appreciate. So I can actually make money being a curator, being somebody who 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 like Twitter or Facebook or whatever, it was cool,

• 42:08Shaan Puri?

  but like I didn't actually gain anything from it financially. If I discovered Jack, you know, you, you said you met Jack when Jack had a kind of smaller following. You didn't gain financially from Jack's following growing. And so I think that's a new thing 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, my shareholder meeting. So you can basically say, cool, for my top 25 coin holders, I will meet with you personally and you know, in a zoom or in person somewhere. 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

• 42:53Shaan Puri?

  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. 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

• 43:11Sam Parr?

  So your, and your market cap right now is like $600,000. Did it, did it get that high because you bought your own stuff?

• 43:17Shaan Puri?

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

• 43:21Sam Parr?

  Why are people buying you? Or how are they even hearing about it?

• 43:24Shaan Puri?

  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 BitClaw because a whole bunch of people join, right? Like, so even just in our little network, right? Andrew Wilkinson joined two days ago and he's a super legit person and he tweeted out today, "I woke up at 5:00 in the morning thinking about BitClout." And he's like, and not just all good things, right? He said like, "The design kinda sucks. I kinda hate the name. I wish it didn't feel so shady because of the way they're doing this, this and this." But here's some things that like the mind virus has infected him where it's like, "Wait, this does open up Pandora's box of a whole bunch of new capabilities and things that you just kinda 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.

• 44:06Shaan Puri?

  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 dollars 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.

• 44:30Sam Parr?

  He bought my stuff.

• 44:32Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. And so I've had a lot of fun basically speculating on people buying a bunch of people's coins. And I think, I think those people are awesome or undervalued. So for example, I'll give you an example. I saw this guy on BitClout and he was posting a bunch of analysis. So he's like exploring the blockchain and 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 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 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.

• 45:14Shaan Puri?

  I bought $10,000 of this analyst coin because this guy was super low priced because 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 BitClout, they're gonna love all the information, the 24/7 news cycle about BitClout. They're gonna love this guy's analysis because it's not easy to do. It's not easy to go on the blockchain and figure this stuff out. So I thought, "Oh, if this guy's, if this guy's gonna put reports up every day, he's gonna get popular." And so already I've doubled my money on this guy just because I was able to like have a strategy, have a skilled gamble is 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...

• 45:56Shaan Puri?

  Deep itch, scratches of like trying to put in money and triple it and 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 three or four days in. But man, I've used the hell out of this thing in three or four days and I don't know what's gonna happen.

• 46:17Sam Parr?

  I've only known it for three or four days, but my life, this is my vocation. I found it. That's what I hear from you.

• 46:23Shaan Puri?

  Well, you hear what you want to hear. I didn't say that. What I said was I've had it amazing three or four days and this might fade. But I view it as a kind of asymmetric bet. 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.

• 46:44Sam Parr?

  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, five, 450 square foot studio or something like that in Brooklyn.

• 46:58Shaan Puri?

  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.

• 47:06Sam Parr?

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

• 47:13Speaker 01

  I mean, it was, it was all right.

• 47:17Sam Parr?

  And, 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, did you see what Jack did? It's crazy. I thought he meant you selling one NFT for like a hundred grand. I didn't, 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.

• 47:44Speaker 01

  Just put it up this morning.

• 47:45Sam Parr?

  Do you think that's gonna work?

• 47:47Shaan Puri?

  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.

• 47:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, interestingly enough, this.

• 48:03Speaker 01

  Text message that got me on this podcast is a kind of evidence for the strategy behind the 77 million, 77 million dollar NFT, which the thesis is it's rounded up from the highest bid on that B pool collage. So that was 69.3 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, artistic

• 48:40Speaker 01

  statement. I have very, very, very, you know, the, the idea of that selling is obviously absolutely ludicrous, but the fact that you can do something like that without permission and make a statement like that, I think is like, that's the, the intent behind the piece itself. And the NFT space, like the last three pieces that I've been working on, the last three pieces I've launched have been sort of a commentary on the world of 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. Let's say no more. Made it an NFT and auctioned it. And

• 49:25Speaker 01

  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 memetic 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's 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 with what you're talking about with BitClout. It's, it visualizes value sort of.

• 50:06Speaker 01

  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 worked, right? You make stuff to get people to look at other stuff. But now there's like this convergence of you can get paid directly for the things you make, which is completely different, right? I think Patreon and-

• 50:36Sam Parr?

  What do you think the odds are that someone's gonna buy this?

• 50:38Speaker 01

  I mean, impossible, say 0.00.

• 50:42Sam Parr?

  I know.

• 50:44Shaan Puri?

  Well, what's happened since you put it up this morning? Are people bidding on it? Can you bid below that ass price or no?

• 50:49Speaker 01

  So you have to enter that.

• 50:51Shaan Puri?

  It's all or nothing.

• 50:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 50:53Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 50:54Sam Parr?

  Can you see any of the activity of like traffic to it or?

• 50:58Speaker 01

  Well, that's the only place I would have data.

• 51:01Sam Parr?

  And what's your, what's your guess?

• 51:02Speaker 01

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

• 51:06Sam Parr?

  Is this like caught?

• 51:06Speaker 01

  So far. And I think it's like, it's all an inside joke as well, right? Like you have to have the context of the people thing. Mario, who Sean and 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 I-

• 51:29Shaan Puri?

  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. I'm not, this is not a, this is not some, you know, quick sale here.

• 52:02Speaker 01

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

• 52:09Shaan Puri?

  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, and I mean that because I intentionally invested an amount of money that would hurt for me to lose it. Like, I would really have to lick my wounds if I'd 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

• 52:54Shaan Puri?

  of my friends made a bunch of money doing it. And so I've kind of waiting for the next one. And like, now that this one's here, I'm kind of over overcompensating for it. So I was really honest with myself about what was, what are the psychological drivers? And I'll put, 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?

• 53:31Sam Parr?

  No.

• 53:31Shaan Puri?

  Because the four levels of luck, I forgot, 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, 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, You know, 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 the third one, which is luck favors the prepared mind, which is you're moving,

• 54:16Shaan Puri?

  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?

• 54:59Shaan Puri?

  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 three and maybe a little four, but three in that luck favors the prepared mind. So what I realized when I, I looked back at Bitcoin and I said, I was being told by smart friends back in 2013, 2014, that Bitcoin is amazing. And at first I took no action. That cost me, you know, the, the price was I think $70 at the time. So I let it go from 70 to 700 and then I bought in at 700. And even then I bought in such a small amount that it wasn't going to like change my life either way. I wasn't going to care if I lost.

• 55:44Shaan Puri?

  I wasn't going to be rich if I won. And I, I went, I looked back and I said, well, why didn't I take more action at that time, right? Let's, let's do 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 skillsets in order to appreciate the, how great this thing is. You had to be really technologically sound 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.

• 56:28Shaan Puri?

  And very few people had that combination. And the people who did have become billionaires and they're very wealthy people now. But most people who had one or the other or neither, they didn't, they didn't benefit. Right? So you need to, you needed to understand that wow, this solved the Byzantine generals problem. This is a computer science breakthrough. And now we can have trustless systems without any central entity. But you also needed to understand that, hey, the government prints all this money and has this inflationary effect. And the reason that, you know, and actually this thing that we all take for granted, the US dollar or currency has really only been around in its current form for, I don't know, 70-ish years. And, uh, 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.

• 57:10Shaan Puri?

  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 BitClaw, 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, going up a lot if it becomes a thing. The other side is just, uh, understanding how social networks start. And, um, when I saw that, oh, this is like, probably the most brilliant growth hack I've ever seen. These people who, whoever made this is very aggressive and very smart.

• 57:53Shaan Puri?

  They're aggressive because they went and scraped Twitter and they put all of our profiles on their website and said, come buy their coin without anyone's permission. That took a level of aggression and sort of like willing to operate in the gray that most people wouldn't really have. And then the smart thing was they said, well, how do we make this network really valuable? Well, if we get really valuable people on it. How do we get really valuable people on it? Well, let's do this. Let's go to really legit investors. So big name investors, that adds credibility. Let's go get a hundred million dollars from them. And then let's invest that hundred million dollars into the accounts of all the influential Twitter people. And so when I went to the website without ever having used the damn thing, my account had $55,000 sitting in it.

• 58:39Shaan Puri?

  All I had to do was tweet it out and say, hey, I'm using BitClaw. 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, um, okay. So that I was like, that's gonna work. A lot of influencers are gonna go see $100,000 sitting in their account and they say, all I gotta do is tweet this thing out? Like, done. Like Sam, you think the thing's fucking stupid, but you did it anyways. Cause 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?

• 59:10Speaker 01

  Uh, about 150, I think, last time I looked at it.

• 59:13Shaan Puri?

  So $150,000 maybe is sitting in your account. And have you verified your account yet?

• 59:18Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 59:20Shaan Puri?

  Do you plan to?

• 59:21Speaker 01

  I'm still, I don't know, man. I'm getting text messages and phone calls and being invited on podcasts to talk about Bitcoin. So maybe I gotta do it.

• 59:28Shaan Puri?

  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, just for tweeting the thing out. And, um, and so then you, so then you go like layers deep. You say, okay, so they're gonna tweet it out. They're gonna claim their money. And then they have a big following. So then their people are gonna say, oh, if Jack says it, I trust Jack and Jack is, Jack is using it, then I should probably use this thing. They go on. And because there's no withdrawals, right now, all the prices just go up. And so everybody's gonna get all these paper gains. And then they're all gonna talk about how this is the greatest thing since sliced bread, because they're just making all this money on here. Right? Like our friend Ryan who came on was like, dude, I'm making a killing on this thing. And then other people are gonna say, oh shit, my friend's making a killing on this thing. I should go do that too. I don't wanna miss the next Bitcoin. I already, I already missed Bitcoin. Now I'm gonna miss the next one.

• 1:00:13Shaan Puri?

  And they're gonna get on and that's gonna drive the price even higher. And so what I saw was that this thing was brilliantly designed from a kind of like a game theory perspective. Now that's ta- let's table like the moral questions and like, is this a Ponzi scheme? And like, there's a whole bunch of other questions, but I, at the very minimum, I thought, wow, this game is architected so that these numbers are gonna go up. This is gonna have a hype cycle, very likely chance of having a hype cycle. And if it has the hype cycle, these things, just like Bitcoin, Bitcoin's only valuable because everybody believes in it now. And the more people believe in it, the more valuable it gets, the more certain its own success becomes. The same thing is true for any network, any social network too. The more legit people believe in it and want it to succeed, um, the more likely it is to succeed.

• 1:00:54Shaan Puri?

  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 theory.

• 1:01:01Sam Parr?

  I've known you for, uh, since, uh, maybe eight years now. It was early on when I met you that you had some type of it factor and that you were at least mildly smart. What, what 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 it's, I think, I think, I think you finally have come out of your shell. Now, are the whole, are you right thing?

• 1:01:42Shaan Puri?

  Well, that's why I like, 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 going to 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 make money and they're not necessarily trying to be long-term holders. That's situation two.

• 1:02:27Shaan Puri?

  And situation three is it just flops and goes to zero. There, there are all three scenarios on the table. What I'm trying to say is the probabilities, I'm not saying this is likely or definitely gonna succeed. What I'm saying is I find it super interesting from a product point of view, how they made it, and I think there's a good chance it goes through the hype cycle. Beyond that, I don't know.

• 1:02:46Sam Parr?

  So Jack, um, what, what, what does this mean to you? What, what side are you on?

• 1:02:52Speaker 01

  I'm just still 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, my understanding of the like 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.

• 1:03:18Speaker 01

  Pretty, you know, unqualified to make a bet on it. And I think to your point, Sean, there's like reputational risk in endorsing it too, before it gets to a point of, I don't know, some of the things that are left unsaid or haven't been clarified are clarified. So I'm on sidelines for the time being.

• 1:03:37Shaan Puri?

  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's, could be some money to be made. Here's my exact holdings. I feel like, oh, I'm disclosing everything and smart adults are gonna do with that what they want. Do your own research. Don't rely on me and come to your own conclusions. I'm telling you what I've come to thus far, three days in. And so I'm always like, oh, people will get all that. In reality, all anyone's gonna remember is, dude, you were super excited about that thing. And either I look like a fucking genius, or I look like an idiot scam artist. That's the sad part about it, is that nobody's gonna remember any of the nuance around how I was thinking about it. Anybody's just gonna remember, dude, you sounded so excited. You said you put a hundred grand in and either, you know, that's

• 1:04:22Shaan Puri?

  why you're the hottest thing to slice bread, if that becomes a $10 million steak, or it's gonna be, I lost my life savings. How could you? You told me this was gonna work. And unfortunately, the way I wish the world, the way I wish people listened to it is not gonna be how people actually listen to it, is my guess.

• 1:04:37Speaker 01

  Are you the biggest, the biggest bit clout bull in the world, Sean?

• 1:04:44Shaan Puri?

  Not even close. Like Craig Clemens, who's, you know, a friend of ours, been on the pod. 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. Like, you know, he could 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 it, how bullish he was early, because it's already, he's got a lot of paper gains, let's put it that way. As far as, and then there's of course, a bunch of other people like, you know, there's, there's the big, the whale guy, I forgot his name, is Big Clout Whale or something like that. He put a million dollars into his own coin. And he's, he also has, you know, the biggest kind of like NFT collection out there, I think.

• 1:05:30Sam Parr?

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

• 1:05:37Shaan Puri?

  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. Uh, 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, um, and so he's made, he's made it big. He's made a bunch of money in crypto. He reinvested into NFTs. Now he's reinvested at least a million bucks into BitCloud as well. So there's a bunch of people who are very, very bullish on this thing, you know, but, um, and, and you know, there's, but, but I'll also say like, you know, what are the downsides, right? Like, A, if you go use the thing, you'll notice three things right away. It requires a password to join. That's already has blocked like 80% of people.

• 1:06:19Shaan Puri?

  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, 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 so, it's like under such heavy load all the time that like, 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.

• 1:06:45Sam Parr?

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

• 1:06:54Sam Parr?

  Or your normal business rather?

• 1:06:56Speaker 01

  Probably.

• 1:06:59Sam Parr?

  And that, is that fucking crazy?

• 1:07:01Shaan Puri?

  Three letters you didn't even know last year.

• 1:07:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a different market, man. Different dynamics. Very crazy.

• 1:07:07Sam Parr?

  Would you say, three years ago, where were you, what, where were you at?

• 1:07:12Speaker 01

  What is it now, 5th March? I was just starting my agency, so I was shooting, uh, car commercials on the, uh, like for, uh, you know, just running around the desert with a handheld camera, trying to make a car commercial.

• 1:07:28Sam Parr?

  Isn't it crazy how much things have changed in such a short amount of time?

• 1:07:32Speaker 01

  Honestly, I feel like the last couple of months has been like compressed a ton of just leaps and bounds of technology and culture. And last year, obviously shifting to do and 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 Topshop thing just went absolutely bananas. And this BitCloud thing is going to pull

• 1:08:11Speaker 01

  on the same like cultural levers that Topshop 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.

• 1:08:21Shaan Puri?

  Right. So Jack, let me ask you, because I feel like, I feel a little torn, right? Because I come on the pod, because I come on the pod today and I say, oh, I gotta talk about BitCloud. Why? Because A, I've been using it a bunch for the last couple of days. It's one of the more interesting projects I've ever seen. But B, I'm like, kind of embarrassed to even talk about it, because there's such a good chance that this thing fails, that it's gonna look pretty stupid. And BitCloud is even more, it's gonna look even more stupid when it fails than like, let's say, like, I guess like what I'm getting at is, I think that it's, you know, it takes a long time to build a reputation of being smart and trustworthy, and it's easy

• 1:09:03Shaan Puri?

  to lose it in a day. You know, I think Warren Buffett said that once. And, you know, it takes, 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 gonna 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.

• 1:09:47Shaan Puri?

  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 like, you know, like, let's sell this baby now. Let's take something off the table. And so Top Shot's like cratering right now. And then as it starts to crater, all the people who thought it was gonna fail are like, see, you know, 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?

• 1:10:21Speaker 01

  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, you, you, 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,

• 1:11:00Speaker 01

  you know, profiting X offer. 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 Salo 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, a technology in general? So if you're an Ethereum, like, whale, let's say, let's say you bought X number, a thousand Ethereum at 7 cents, 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,

• 1:11:44Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:11:57Speaker 01

  Or the largest sale of the last year I've done, I think I got four million impressions on Twitter. So if you think about what it would cost you to buy four million impressions on Twitter, or if what it would cost you to develop something that has that level of resonance. I think it's easy to get distracted from that as, as like the three of us have distribution, but that 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, um, this thing resonates with people.

• 1:12:40Speaker 01

  And that's the beauty of having Twitter. So visualize value, you can see this image that you own. Thirty-three hundred or forty-five hundred 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?

• 1:13:01Sam Parr?

  I, yeah, that does make sense. And Jack, as like, I, I, 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 gonna be like a far more important person than you already are. I was willing, I, so I get the sentiment. Now, without sounding like a douche, like I, I have money, right? And I was will only willing to spend five grand. The way, the way that someone was gonna spend a hundred and fifty grand, that either they're like way richer than I am, or they're just crazy. That's what I, like, I don't understand a hundred and fifty K,

• 1:13:44Sam Parr?

  but like maybe some people don't understand that I was willing to do five K. So these are the people who bought it very, very well.

• 1:13:51Speaker 01

  I'm sure you could like do your Ethereum wallet sleuthing and figure out how much people have, but.

• 1:13:57Sam Parr?

  Well, you said you know them, right?

• 1:13:58Speaker 01

  How much money they have, like I know them and I talk to them.

• 1:14:02Shaan Puri?

  But like. Jack's a normal person. He doesn't do what we do.

• 1:14:05Sam Parr?

  Bro, 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.

• 1:14:13Speaker 01

  They go back and forth in Twitter DM. Some people don't have their real name, but it's like, hey, um, you know, you develop a relationship.

• 1:14:19Shaan Puri?

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

• 1:14:33Sam Parr?

  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's looking for something to do with it.

• 1:14:38Shaan Puri?

  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 Ski 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 you're spending a fraction of his, like, giant stockpile of crypto bucks and it feels different.

• 1:15:08Sam Parr?

  I'm just shocked there's that many, I'm shocked there's that many people that like Jack Butcher, which, who's like a relatively, he's not Beeple, but he's like a kind of a big deal. That there's that many people that will just buy his thing for a hundred, hundred grand. I'm just shocked that that, there's that many people who have that amount.

• 1:15:24Speaker 01

  You're not on your own, being shocked, right?

• 1:15:29Sam Parr?

  And if, Jack, if you do sell this thing for 76 million dollars, I mean, like, obvious, like, who cares about history and how neat that is? I mean, that would like, that would be, I mean, that would be, the Butcher family would be famous for five generations. I mean, that would be.

• 1:15:46Speaker 01

  The most absurd story of all time, perhaps.

• 1:15:52Sam Parr?

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

• 1:16:15Shaan Puri?

  They're broken, depressed, yeah.

• 1:16:18Sam Parr?

  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 earned.

• 1:16:26Sam Parr?

  Like, I don't want that to happen. I don't think it would happen to you.

• 1:16:28Speaker 01

  I get what you're saying. I think it's like, you know, the fact that there's even an outside chance of it happening is just the most ludicrous thing. It's supposed to be like a piece of art in itself, right? That nobody interacts with commentary on the space, but the fact that it exists on a platform where a transaction could actually happen isn't quite like just unfathomable and that would like definitely walk 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.

• 1:17:02Sam Parr?

  That's crazy.

• 1:17:06Shaan Puri?

  Okay, we should wrap this.

• 1:17:08Sam Parr?

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

• 1:17:10Shaan Puri?

  Zach, thanks for coming on. You know, we texted you like 30 minutes ago or 40 minutes ago. You hopped on, so I appreciate that.

• 1:17:15Speaker 01

  It was fun.

• 1:17:16Shaan Puri?

  I hope somebody buys the thing. I think that would be fucking amazing. I think it couldn't happen to a better guy. So, so I think, 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.

• 1:17:34Sam Parr?

  It's hard, dude. Growing a podcast is the hardest thing I've ever done.

• 1:17:36Shaan Puri?

  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.

• 1:17:45Speaker 01

  Find out.