#155 - NFTs Explained: How Digital Art Is Being Sold For Millions and What the Opportunities Are

Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) and Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) discuss: Negotiation as a Service (NaaS) - The guys talk about (and maybe invent) a new category of business: negotiations as a service. The idea here is that there are certain big ticket items where a professional can negotiate a better price for the end consumer. - Incentives matter, however. For a Realtor, getting a client a better deal isn’t always in their best interest. A better model: the negotiator gets a designated percentage if they are able to negotiate below a set price. - Idea: Applying a better incentive model to real estate or home financing. Paying a skilled negotiator a fee for reducing your interest rate can result in thousands being saved annually. - Idea: Salary negotiations for both employee and employer. NFTs - NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are unique crypto tokens. Unlike say, Bitcoin, they aren’t mutually interchangeable -- each token is unique. In other words, NFTs are collectible. - NFTs have exploded in recent months. One site, https://cryptoslam.io/ (also https://defipulse.com/), tracks the daily transactions of different NFT. The top NFT, NBA Top Shots, does $46m worth of digital art transactions daily. - Shaan 10xd his money on the following piece in a matter of days. https://niftygateway.com/itemdetail/secondary/0x8ae06a29a816580cbd069e460dd57c6c964bb3da/7500010105. - This piece alone https://cryptoslam.io/cryptopunks/mint/6487 sold for over $1m. - Artists like Eminem and shows like Rick and Morty are created pieces of content that’ll be sold as NFTs. - Logan Paul made $3.5m in one day selling nfts https://beincrypto.com/logan-paul-raises-3-5-million-in-one-day-from-nft-sales/. - Opportunity: When a goldrush is happening, sell shovels. Shaan and Sam think the shovels here are displays. People are buying NFTs, they are going to want to display them. The options at the moment are frames like https://infiniteobjects.com/ and https://www.netgear.com/home/digital-art-canvas/. On the pod Shaan estimates you can sell 300-400 frames and easily generate $5m in a month. - https://opensea.io/: Another marketplace for NFTs. This is the eBay of NFTs CoinMarketCap - CoinMarketCap is a displayed of crypto prices. It's a simple idea that has been working. - When they delisted South Korean cryptos without warning on Jan. 7th, the move wiped out $100 billion of total crypto asset market value. - They were acquired for a rumored $400 million. The company only had 36 employees. Check out today's sponsor: Ourcrowd. They make it easy to invest in early startups. Go to ourcrowd.com/thehustle to get started. 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. Editing thanks to Jonathan Gallegos (@jjonthan) See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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

• 0:21Shaan Puri?

  All right, we're live. Sam, how's Cancun?

• 0:24Sam Parr?

  I don't know.

• 0:26Sam Parr?

  I'm sure it's great.

• 0:27Shaan Puri?

  What's up with your boy Ted Cruz?

• 0:29Sam Parr?

  Yeah, what an asshole, man. He bailed on us.

• 0:32Shaan Puri?

  Us Texans.

• 0:34Sam Parr?

  What a jerk. Whatever. I am going to Hawaii next week, though. I'm gonna be recording from Hawaii, so I'm bailing as well, but I'm not an elected official, so it's okay.

• 0:44Shaan Puri?

  Dude, the funniest picture was, um, somebody posted this meme and it goes, it's Ted Cruz, and it just says like, "I didn't go to Cancun," but he's got his hair like braided like every girl when they go to Cancun.

• 0:55Sam Parr?

  I saw one that was a missing poster. Like, "Have you seen me? Last you crossing the border."

• 1:01Shaan Puri?

  So, we're back and we've been talking big game about how acquisition's done. That was both a busy time and a stressful time, and you were running a company that was doing 10 things, and now you're able to focus more on the podcast. And we've been talking big game about this podcast is gonna level up. What do you want to tell the people? What's the plan and how are we gonna deliver?

• 1:20Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so I'm working with Karen, the guy that was on the podcast. Sean and I, you're gonna have to work with him together. But basically, we're gonna do a few things, but our goal, I think Sean, needs to become top 10 in the business category, which is like an official category. I think 100,000 listens per episode will get us there. So we need to do that. And so there's a few things that HubSpot is gonna do for us. The first is that we are gonna have a dedicated researcher.

• 1:47Shaan Puri?

  So I'm gonna just summarize. Going forward, we're gonna level up the podcast in a couple of different ways. We're trying to go top 10. Sam says to get top 10, we gotta have 100,000 listeners per episode, which is kind of a crazy number. Yeah, I think that's fair. You know, 100,000 people listening to every episode, that's stadiums, football stadium, more than a football stadium, which is pretty cool.

• 2:05Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but like a good episode of ours gets about a third of that. Maybe, what's like 34, are we at 40? I don't know what the...

• 2:12Shaan Puri?

  I think we're at about 30 now, so we gotta like, we gotta triple basically to get there, which we should be able to. So then, all right, how are we gonna do it? HubSpot's hooking us up with some resources, so we're having a researcher. We're gonna do recaps, summaries, clips that we're gonna post on Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, so clips of different little segments we talk about. We're gonna have a dedicated email like recap that you can sign up for. And then one other thing is we're gonna try doing some live, live shows where we go live on Twitter spaces or Clubhouse at the same time. So I think that'll be pretty cool.

• 2:43Sam Parr?

  I'm writing that down because I forgot to write that down. All right, let's get into some ideas. Let's get back into it. But first, did you see I became a meme this week?

• 2:51Shaan Puri?

  Oh, yeah, dude, what happened? You started getting like, uh, what I saw was Vinod Coleslaw, who's like a big dog of Silicon Valley, basically retweeting some guy who was retweeting your Twitter thread about what you learned from your friend Andrew about investing.

• 3:04Sam Parr?

  But did you see that?

• 3:05Shaan Puri?

  Some people were taking shots.

• 3:06Sam Parr?

  So the tweet reached about 2 million people. And if you search, I was trapped, like in the quotations, you'll see maybe 20, like, people saying, I was trapped this weekend. I was trapped in LA with Kim Kardashian and Kanye West.

• 3:18Shaan Puri?

  Oh, is that what they're making fun of you for? Because you said I was trapped with, you know, these Silicon Valley people?

• 3:23Sam Parr?

  So there's tons of them. Then there's another one that says, this weekend I was trapped in the ocean with a dolphin. So if you go to my Twitter feed and I retweeted a few of them, some of them got like liked thousands of times or maybe hundreds of times, but I think a couple were a thousand. And it was interesting. First of all, I want to say this, the whole I was trapped thing, it was kind of supposed to be like a joke. It was like supposed to be like, you see, it was like I was teasing. And I said, the most powerful person and something like that. That's actually not wrong, I think. But like, I was obviously being like hyperbolic, like as a joke. I guess it wasn't obvious. And second of all, people were angry at me. And I'm like, guys, I didn't say any of this. I'm just sharing one unique person's interesting perspective. People are like, dude, this guy Sam is like such a bro about the boys' club.

• 4:06Sam Parr?

  I didn't say this. I didn't say I agree or disagree. I'm just saying this is like one person's opinion. And it's really cool to share interesting ideas. So I got roasted pretty hard.

• 4:14Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you deserved it. It's all good. I got roasted as well this week. We just get roasted. That's good.

• 4:19Sam Parr?

  What did you get roasted for?

• 4:20Shaan Puri?

  I got roasted because of my opinion on the fucking Bachelor. You know, last week when I was talking about this stuff?

• 4:26Sam Parr?

  I don't even want to talk about it. Yes.

• 4:28Shaan Puri?

  Someone was like, I can't believe Sean said he agrees with everything this guy said. It's like, like, maybe I did say that. I don't know. But I back and listen. Obviously, literally, I don't agree with every word that somebody says. That's not my point. I agreed with the point the guy was trying to make. I tried to explain it, but in general, I think it's good. Like I was, if somebody was asking me, they're like, hey, like, I've seen you've been growing your audience a lot lately. Cause like my Twitter kind of like exploded to over a hundred K. And they were like, what do you think I'm doing wrong? And I said, I looked at your feed and you say only reasonable, agreeable things. And I don't think reasonable and agreeable people is very notable to follow or share. And so I said, you gotta take some risks. Like it doesn't mean you have to be controversial, but you have to have some part of what you're saying that people love.

• 5:12Shaan Puri?

  And if you, and the way to test, does it, do people love what I'm talking about is some people need to be hating your style or the content or your opinion that you're talking about. If there's nobody who's strongly disagreeing or really dislikes your style, then you haven't really put forth anything that is new, unique or bold. And so that's kind of like a back test. So the goal isn't go out there and get hated. No. The goal is put things forward in a like bold style and have like original opinions and like say original things. Say things that are, that aren't just stuff that everybody already knows and agrees with. And the way you'll know you're doing that is periodically, you're going to get a bunch of people thinking you're an idiot

• 5:53Shaan Puri?

  or thinking you're a jerk or thinking you're too arrogant or whatever it is. Those are natural consequences.

• 6:00Sam Parr?

  We're both in the gettin' roasted club. So, uh, congrats fellow members. So today we're gonna, we have three ideas we want to discuss. The first one is NFT, which Sean actually talked about this maybe a month ago, and I thought it was so stupid. And we've got some, a follow-up that proves that you're actually right and I wasn't. The second one is this thing called inside car buying, which I would love to start with, and then followed by that. Following up, we're gonna do this thing called coin market cap. But can we talk about the one that I suggested first? Because it might be quick, but I'm trying to buy a car right now. Nothing like crazy fancy, maybe like a pickup truck or something. I don't know yet. But I found this site called insidecarbuying.com. My friend Neville told me about it. And if you go to it, it looks very old school. The blog has not been updated since 2015.

• 6:45Sam Parr?

  But I did some research on it. It has some good reviews and it has one of the most interesting value props I've actually heard of in a long time. And so I don't know if it's just this one person, but go ahead, Sean. What do you see?

• 6:56Shaan Puri?

  No, I just wanted you to explain it. Like tell, give me the two sentences of what they do for you.

• 7:00Sam Parr?

  So you pay $500 and it's a money back guarantee. And what this guy does is I believe you tell him the type of car you want. I don't know how specific like in color, but like I imagine you tell him the year and model and like any options or anything. He scours the web, finds cars that match that criteria and then negotiates for you and says, all right, this is the cheapest one. And if he can't get you a good deal or you can't save at least the $400 or $500 that you pay him, you get your money back. And it's so fascinating that this exists because it's actually doesn't sound that challenging. He's probably just gonna like, has like a whole bunch of canned emails.

• 7:36Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 7:36Sam Parr?

  But it's incredibly interesting because this business model makes a ton of sense. And I think of what all this can apply to, cars is an interesting one. And whenever I see something like this, this guy's site, I think, wow, this is amazing. It looks like a sole proprietor, so just one person, he's based out of White Plains, New York. And I'm like, if you go to this guy's website, it looks like it's from like 2008, like it's really old. But what happens if you put a little lipstick on this, package it a little bit differently? I think it's incredibly fascinating.

• 8:02Shaan Puri?

  This is a Sam Parr special, finding these little niche things that are great bootstrappable businesses that just make a lot of sense. Okay, so I like this idea a lot. And I've also, when I went through the process of buying a car, I mean, you spend hours just looking, researching. And then you have to like reach out, you have to go check them out, you have to negotiate. So when do you, do they negotiate before you've actually seen or like test drive of the vehicle or after?

• 8:26Sam Parr?

  I'm not sure yet. I'm actually gonna give him my money and sign up for this. The reason I hadn't so far was it looked so old that I wasn't even sure it was still in service. But I'm gonna sign up for it and give it a test because he claims money back guarantee. I don't know if that's true, but we'll find out. But it's $400 is a good shot.

• 8:42Shaan Puri?

  Like I'm looking at it. He says, on average, our average customer saves $4,219. Maybe bullshit, but I would believe it because there is like with cars, there's actually quite a bit of wiggle room around price. And it's about somebody who knows how to negotiate and is not gonna get fatigued by the process and just be like, oh, whatever. I want it. I just want this process to be done with. And so if this person, if they actually cared about how much they saved you, I would actually be even more excited that. My problem with all brokers is That the broker's incentive is to tell you they're gonna, you know, they're gonna treat you great. And then they want you off their books as fast as possible. So they want to match you with the thing you want to buy as fast as possible. So they can move up, they can get their commission and move on to the next client.

• 9:23Shaan Puri?

  And so that's the only thing I don't like about this is this person's incentive is to get you the first car that you're willing to buy. Rather than maybe the best car or negotiating a bit further and things like that, that are totally aligned with you.

• 9:36Sam Parr?

  Well, I'm not endorsing this particular brand, the service. But I think it's actually really interesting because I've seen a few of these things pop up recently. We're gonna call them like, what's SaaS stand for? Software as a service?

• 9:48Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, this is.

• 9:49Sam Parr?

  It's like NAS.

• 9:50Shaan Puri?

  Negotiator as a service.

• 9:51Sam Parr?

  And I've seen a few of them. I think our good friend Andrew started one. I forget what they negotiate. Do they negotiate?

• 9:57Shaan Puri?

  SaaS, SaaS tools.

• 9:58Sam Parr?

  So SaaS tools.

• 9:59Shaan Puri?

  You're paying, you know, I don't know what the hustle's paying, but I would guess the hustle's paying quarter million dollars, maybe more in just software licenses for different tools that you're using. Slack and Zoom and whatever else. And what they do is they say, okay, great. Hand us your bill. Like we just give us your monthly P and L. And then we're gonna go call a bunch of people and we're gonna save you money because we're gonna go negotiate with these people. And it's called buyer.co. I think that's a great idea. I don't know how it's doing. We should ask Andrew next time he's on like.

• 10:27Sam Parr?

  And then there's a third one called Main Street, which isn't exactly the same, but pretty, but a very similar premise, which is they, you upload your QuickBooks or whatever you use. And they find ways that you could save money because the government gives, like, let's say, and we actually did this manually because my, this woman who works for me is good at this. But it was like, all right, you can actually save 25% of your taxes because you have this many people on research and development. Or if you have someone in Canada, you can get a rebate here and Main Street automates. And I believe from what I've heard, I have no insider information other than rumors is that they're crushing it. They're doing really well.

• 11:01Shaan Puri?

  They're doing extremely well and I regret passing on investing in them now very much. All right. So where else could you do NAS? What are some of the nasty businesses that we could do?

• 11:09Sam Parr?

  I have a couple. I think cars is, I don't think cars is being touched.

• 11:12Shaan Puri?

  Right. So you're saying you could do this better and you could do this and market it better. Great.

• 11:16Sam Parr?

  I don't know how it would work, but I bet you if I spent a month researching it, I could totally figure it out and figure out the opportunity and build something here. So software is a good thing because we were a very small company, but we spent seven figures probably on software. A lot of people are doing it for, I think you could do it for, uh, what else? You could do it. I mean, I bet a lot, a lot of companies already do do this for what you owe in taxes. So you kind of hear these scammy commercials on the radio of like, we help, we, we negotiate for you with the IRS. That's a huge business, but for some reason those are, I actually don't know if those are scammy or not, but they certainly appear that way. What else is there?

• 11:51Shaan Puri?

  There's a few. So I would say, uh, also a business that we've talked about before, do not pay falls into this category where they basically say, hey, you got a parking ticket? We will just hand it over. We will go and contest this. We will, uh, we'll try to get you off the hook of this or we're going to negotiate it down. So I think they do a good job of this. There's some others that I think are interesting. So one is venture investing. When you go and you want to raise a round, most founders, what makes a great founder? Somebody who could build a great product, somebody who's great at selling customers, somebody who really knows a certain niche market. Guess what they're not good at? They're not good at this like fundraising dance and then they're going up against expert negotiators, which are venture capitalists who are seeing hundreds of founders every, you know, every month and negotiating term sheets with them.

• 12:35Shaan Puri?

  And so maybe there's an opportunity in the tech world to be able to just hand it over and say, okay, cool. I will do the pitch with you, right? I will go and I'll explain my business to you. I'll tell you why it's so great. I'll answer all your questions about the business, but in terms of the round, talk to my agent, right? Talk to, you know, inside fundraising and inside fundraising is going to do the actual negotiation on terms, valuations and handle all 10 firms I'm talking to. They'll all talk to that guy. And then he'll come to me and basically say, hey, here's what I think the best thing is. So I think you could do it there. I think apartment searching or house searching is something you could do here where it's not the same as like a, a listing agent or like a listing broker. I think there's something else. If you talked about, if you framed it as a negotiation service specifically.

• 13:19Shaan Puri?

  And so you could say, cool, you're going to use a broker anyways to go house hunting or go apartment hunting for where you want to rent. But when you get there. You call me and I'm going to save you money and I'm going to basically, I'll make $500 a pop, but I'm going to save you $300 a month on your payments. Another version of this could also be refinancing a house. I refinanced my house and it was like the most painful tedious process and I regretted ever agreeing to do it. Even though I knew I was going to save, I think $600 a month. I think there's like a refi, you know, refi pal who could refinance your house, take, go through the whole refinance process and shield you from like 89% of the bullshit and now you're only dealing with 11% of the leftover bullshit that only you can do.

• 13:57Sam Parr?

  And I have three more examples. The first is for high paying jobs. So I've hired, I don't know the exact number, between 50 and 100 people. And I would actually say I'm, I'm a horrible negotiator. I'm really bad at it, but I've noticed that the average person, there's a huge difference between people who are good at it and people who are not good at it. So I've had people take a lot of money from me and get a salary way higher than what I was willing to pay because they were such good negotiators. I think there's a, by the way, is my gain too high, Abreu?

• 14:27Speaker 02

  I mean, if you want to turn it down just a little, but it's not, it's nothing horrible.

• 14:30Sam Parr?

  I've noticed a lot of people are really bad at negotiating jobs and I have a friend who's an executive recruiter and he helps people negotiate higher end jobs, which that probably pay half a million or more. But I do think there's a world where you can get this for a $100,000 job. You can turn $100,000 job into 105,000 or 110,000. I think that actually could exist. The second one is, um, I used to have this app that got shut down by the, by the city of San Francisco. But if you got a parking ticket, it would automatically fight it for you. What was that called? Do you remember that?

• 14:59Shaan Puri?

  Do not pay, that's what I was talking about.

• 15:01Sam Parr?

  No, it was before that. It was even before that.

• 15:03Shaan Puri?

  I know the one you were talking about. Yeah, it got shut down, right? Like

• 15:05Sam Parr?

  It was the most effective thing I've ever seen. Like it told me before I even knew, if I was inside somewhere like my, like my house, it said, boom, you just got a parking ticket. We're fighting it for you and it was awesome. And the city of San Francisco shut it down, but it was so good. And then the third thing that I could bring to you about this, which I don't know what I can say that incriminates me or not. So I'm going to say, I have a friend who got a speeding ticket recently. And you know how a lot of the court, like this was in Kansas. This person wasn't in Kansas anymore. They were in Texas where they And they had to fight the ticket because they thought that they it was unjust like it wasn't really happening. You know how a lot of these, so you gotta go to court and a lot of times they're in Zoom, you know that?

• 15:46Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, now, now they're all in Zoom, yeah.

• 15:48Sam Parr?

  Yeah, well, this person's sister is a lawyer and they were on a speakerphone chatting with quote me and telling quote me what to say while like they were listening like

• 16:00Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 16:00Sam Parr?

  And it was awesome and it was fantastic.

• 16:03Shaan Puri?

  So you had like a lawyer lawyer in your ear like Secret Service style, you know, say this, don't say that.

• 16:07Sam Parr?

  And granted, I didn't get away with it, but and I had to pay a $200 ticket. It was nice having this lawyer in my ear.

• 16:14Shaan Puri?

  On your side, right?

• 16:15Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And so I think that that's interesting and I'm like, that should exist for negotiating a salary. That's kind of intriguing thing. So I think there's a lot of this, this whole category is actually really, really cool. And the reason why it's cool is if you do a good job, it's a no brainer to pay you money.

• 16:31Shaan Puri?

  Just like Main Street or just like a salary negotiator. It's like, I'm only taking what I get you above what they offered you, right? I'm only, I'm only taking from the savings of your parking ticket. And so it's a very like non scary, sort of a toothless pricing structure where the person doesn't have to feel like they're going to overpay and not get something. You only pay if you get it, incentives are aligned. All right. I like that. This is a cool one. And I think there's also something cool about it. You know, if you do this on the internet, let's, if you are the best car negotiator, you know, this guy's in New York, he's going to service clients. You're in Texas, he's going to service clients all across the country. And you could become kind of like the domain authority of doing this. And I think that's kind of cool as like a solopreneur style business.

• 17:12Sam Parr?

  And we'll move on, but as a reminder, it's insidecarbuying.com. I have not connected to this person. My friend shared it to me. I just thought it was nifty. For all I know, this is a really common thing. I don't know too much, but it's pretty neat. All right. You want to move on to the NFT?

• 17:25Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you said nifty. So here we are, NFTs. All right. So where do you want me to start with this? Cause this is like a big topic. I can start wherever you want.

• 17:32Sam Parr?

  Well, let's give the background. Sean brought up digital trading cards a month ago. And both me and Jack, I think it was, and a few other people were like, Sean, this is really stupid. Like this, what are you talking about? Why would you ever do this?

• 17:44Shaan Puri?

  There's a company called Top Shot is what I was telling you guys about, I think on the, on the podcast. And now I want you to go to this following link. I'm going to put it in here. cryptoslam.io. I just want you to go, go to cryptoslam.io. And tell me what you see.

• 18:00Sam Parr?

  Wow. Oh, wow. Okay. Crypto Slam.io is a collectible ratings by sales volumes. And NBA Top Shot in the last 24 hours has sold $45 million worth of stuff and is up in only 24 hours, 165%. In the last 30 days, which is around the time that we discuss this, they've sold $164 million with the volume and they're up 1,200%. And it's been about 5,600 buyers.

• 18:27Shaan Puri?

  56,000 buyers, last 30 days. Just yesterday or last 24 hours, 32,000 buyers is what it says, which is an insane number. And I gotta say, the numbers for Top Shot are so insane that I am personally a little bit skeptical. There might be something called wash trading going on where people are just buying and selling back and forth between either them and their friends or them and a bot or a bunch of bots to drive up the value of the portfolio to make it look like, oh, wow, there's a lot of activity here. And it's really just, you know, I'll pay you $10, you pay me back $10. I'll pay you $10, you pay me back $10. Like, that's a thing in crypto that has happened for a long time. And I suspect it's what's going on here, but that's a conspiracy theory. What everybody else sees is that NBA Top Shot, this idea that we were talking

• 19:10Shaan Puri?

  about, that I was like, hey, this is kind of interesting, but kind of weird. And you guys were like, what the fuck is that? And it makes no sense. $45 million last 24 hours of gross market, GMV in the marketplace. And they just raised money at a $2 billion valuation. So there's definitely some legit people that that believe in this thing. So I'm going to explain NFTs as best as I can. And I'm no expert, but I do my best here. Okay. So cryptocurrencies came out and people were like, wow, this is amazing. There's like, kind of like a digital, digital money. There's a little, little digital coin. And for the most part, every coin is the same. If I have Bitcoin and you have Bitcoin and we swap, they're all identical. It's like dollar bills, right? But what an NFT is, is NFT is more like Beanie Babies. So an NFT stands for non-fungible token,

• 19:52Shaan Puri?

  meaning one of them is not the same as the other one, right? Just like I was saying, Bitcoin is fungible.

• 19:56Sam Parr?

  What's fungible? Does fungible mean like bleeds? What does that mean?

• 19:59Shaan Puri?

  Fungible means like one can be swapped for the other and there's no difference.

• 20:02Sam Parr?

  Got it.

• 20:02Shaan Puri?

  Uh, one Bitcoin is the same as all other Bitcoins in theory, right? And non-fungible means when I own this LeBron trading card or I own this LeBron video, there may be only 200 of those and it'll be different than a different one of Steph Curry doing the thing, right? They're not the same. They can't be swapped like all for each other. So anyways, that's what NFT stands for. So this started, you know, a while back with CryptoKitties. Do you remember that? Did you ever hear about CryptoKitties?

• 20:27Sam Parr?

  I heard about it at the dojo when I worked there because I loved it, but I didn't know what it meant.

• 20:31Shaan Puri?

  All right. So actually I'll take it back. I'll make it more approachable. So there's been, you know, different types of collectibles, whether it's Pokemon cards, baseball cards, Beanie Babies. There's a whole bunch of different collectibles out there, coins, different shit like that. And they have value because people enjoy collecting them and there's some rarity to them, right? Like a Charizard is like the rare Pokemon card. So it's more valuable than like a Squirtle, which is just like, you know, the kind of the common card. And so all of a sudden, a bunch of people give a shit about a thing. And within that set of things, there's like a scarcity. There's only a limited number of them. So that makes some of them valuable. And so you'll see Pokemon card sets going for like $40,000 nowadays,

• 21:12Shaan Puri?

  or a LeBron James rookie card of which there are only, I don't know, a thousand or 10,000 of them or whatever, will be sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars. And the one that's in mint condition, the most expensive one sold for $1.8 million, right? So people spend a lot of money on these collectibles. And, you know, back in the day with Beanie Babies, there was like, I don't even know what they're, you know, Princess the Bear and Claude the Crab and like, whatever. Beanie Babies made these things and people started going nuts for them and started collecting them. And they were all of a sudden selling on eBay for thousands of dollars. And it was sort of a craze. It didn't last forever, but some things last longer than others. Sports cards have lasted for a long time. They still remain valuable. Beanie Babies, not so much. That's what's going on now in the crypto world.

• 21:54Shaan Puri?

  On Ethereum, which is the second biggest cryptocurrency, you can now create. Your own set of things like Beanie Babies. So I can go and I can make up a set of things that I'll call Beanie Babies. And I can make it on using Ethereum and I can say, hey, guys, come buy it. And that's what a bunch of people are doing. And they're doing it with stuff like CryptoKitties, which was the first big one. They basically created a bunch of little animated cats. And you could buy this cat for like initially like a dollar and then the price went up to $10 and some were selling for thousands of dollars. And people were getting really excited. And then the hype faded away and CryptoKitties like went to zero.

• 22:27Sam Parr?

  According to your, the thing you just brought up, CryptoKitties in the last 30 days has sold $730 million in stuff.

• 22:33Shaan Puri?

  Last 24 hours, CryptoKitties $61,000 of volume. So not, not dead, but the same team that built CryptoKitties, they're the ones who built Top Shot. So they basically pivoted the company to doing Top Shot. What they did with Top Shot was they went and partnered with the NBA and they were like, hey, NBA, we want to create, you know, you already make money on digital like trading cards, which are, sorry, just trading cards, which are like piece of cardboard with, you know, just a picture on it. But like, hey, with the internet, we can actually take LeBron James dunking, we can take that highlight clip and we can turn it into like a collectible item. That's just that clip, that highlight moment. And so that's what Top Shot is. It's a bunch of these little moments. And you open up a pack and you'll get like five different highlights and you're hoping to get like a really famous player's highlight.

• 23:15Shaan Puri?

  And like most of the time you get like some average player doing some average thing. But nonetheless, that's what people are collecting. And so there's a whole bunch of these. I'll show you one that I did.

• 23:23Sam Parr?

  Where do you show this off at? So like if you had a card collection, you would mostly hide it away, but everyone's probably frame it or something. What do you do it?

• 23:31Shaan Puri?

  So with these, there's basically like digital displays. So like on their website itself, you'll have a collection, you can kind of share it. It's like an Instagram account. You basically share it and people can go browse your, your stuff. What I did is yesterday I bought a $600 display that I'm putting on my wall behind me that will rotate through all my digital art. And that's by the way, that's one of the

• 23:50Sam Parr?

  What's that called?

• 23:51Shaan Puri?

  Uh, so I bought this one called Mural. It's made by Netgear of all companies. It's like, so this is one of the business opportunities. There is so much volume going on in this NFT space that people will want to display it on their desk, on their walls at home. And there's no simple way to do it. Like right now you could use kind of like a TV, but that's pretty clunky and it's like, it's a TV. It's kind of like overkill. And then there's this other thing I want you to check out called infinite objects.

• 24:18Sam Parr?

  I need to get art for my house. Should I just only, this is pretty neat. It is pretty cool. So I don't want to spend a hundred grand though on a, on a LeBron dunk, but I would.

• 24:25Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so, so, so let me explain slowly and I'm, I, I, I, cause I feel like I'm a little all over the place. So let me explain it a little bit slowly. So I want you to go to this link that I'm going to send you right now. This is the first NFT I ever bought. It looks pretty sweet. Uh, tell me when you have it open. It was a Kobe Bryant NFT made by this artist called Boss Logic. And I've been following this guy, Boss Logic. You've probably seen him because he makes a bunch of UFC art and Joe Rogan like reshares his stuff all the time. So he's this kind of just famous Instagram artist and like he would sell some posters sometimes and he would get like, some rich people would slide into his DMs to like commission some artwork.

• 24:56Sam Parr?

  It's just like a neat, I guess a video is what it is, but it's, yeah, it looks sick.

• 24:59Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. It's like, it's like a looping video. So he created a piece of digital art, which is an animated picture of Kobe Bryant shooting a fadeaway and he's kind of like fading away and becoming an angel because he passed away. Right? So it's called forever Mamba. He goes to a website called Nifty Gateway. Nifty Gateway is basically like eBay for all these collect, for like the crypto collectibles, right? eBay made its name.

• 25:19Sam Parr?

  What does this have to do with crypto?

• 25:20Shaan Puri?

  It has to.

• 25:21Sam Parr?

  Why can't this guy just make?

• 25:22Shaan Puri?

  Scroll, scroll down. I'll show you why. So if you scroll down on that page, you're going to see at the bottom, all this data, market stats, right? It'll say that the average resale price of this item is $4,000.

• 25:32Sam Parr?

  But how is there an average resale if this is one of a kind?

• 25:35Shaan Puri?

  I bought this and I sold it. So I bought this for $824. That was when it was released, all of them cost $824 and there was five minutes where you could buy as many of these as you wanted. So it dropped for five minutes. A bunch of us bought them. So there were, I think 429 people bought this thing for $800. So if you just look at the, the same piece of art. Yeah. So I got like number 200, somebody else got like number one, you know, that sort of thing. So this guy did $400,000 worth of art sales in five minutes, this artist. And Nifty Gateway takes like a 15% cut. So then now look at like click global history down there. And then click only sales and go to page. So global history, only sales and go to page four and the second to the bottom one. It says that curious goods bought the forever

• 26:20Shaan Puri?

  mob, but number 236 from Sean Puri for $8,100. So I basically

• 26:25Sam Parr?

  So you went from 800 to 8,000?

• 26:27Shaan Puri?

  In 20 days, I 10x my, my money. I bought it for 800 bucks. I sold it for 8,000 bucks. And I actually sold too early. Now these are selling for $15,000 currently, $20,000 because a lot of people are really into this. And there's only 429 of them that will ever exist because that's how many were initially minted when he dropped it. Now, anybody who sells it, we're selling not copies, we're selling the original. I no longer own this. This other guy owns this.

• 26:48Sam Parr?

  I couldn't just rip this off and put this in my frame.

• 26:51Shaan Puri?

  You can, but so you can

• 26:52Sam Parr?

  And it would look as good. It would just be like, I would be a poser.

• 26:55Shaan Puri?

  If you'd be a poser, you would know, just like if you go buy a Mona Lisa poster right now from, you know, Amazon, that's not the Mona Lisa. You'll know that's a picture of the Mona Lisa.

• 27:04Sam Parr?

  Dude, they're selling for 20,000.

• 27:05Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. So the one I sold, I think is on sale for $45,000 now. You pick your price as the owner of the art, you can pick your price, whatever you want. So yesterday, for example, there was another drop that me and Ben, we woke up early in the morning and we went in and we, because we've seen these things when they drop, they're just like appreciating like crazy right now, right? I 10x my money in 20 days. So I was like, all right, let's see. Let me just take those winnings and let me parlay this. Let me see if I can turn my initial $800 of capital into $100,000. So I'll show you this other one that I bought yesterday.

• 27:33Sam Parr?

  I'm looking at all these. Some of them are great. Like

• 27:35Shaan Puri?

  There was this artist who was a former baseball player. He became an artist named Micah Johnson. He created this character called Akku and he makes this, this video. I just sent you the link.

• 27:45Sam Parr?

  By the way, this is all owned by Gemini. Is that the Winklevosses?

• 27:48Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, actually what's funny is the Winklevoss twins, they started Gemini, which is like Coinbase. It's a place to go buy cryptocurrency. You can go buy Bitcoin there and they bought Nifty Gateway from these other twins. So the Winklevoss twins bought these other twins, the Cockfoster twins, they made this little eBay for selling digital collectibles and they own it. And now this thing is taking off. Like I talked to Griffin, the founder, and he was sharing some of the, the stories about how it started slow and then now it's just doubling like every month.

• 28:16Sam Parr?

  I'm looking at the traffic and it looked like in August, they had 11,000 people. In October, they had, these are all estimates, 38,000. Then forty eight thousand, then a hundred and fifty thousand, and now close to four hundred thousand.

• 28:29Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think they're doing twenty million in sales every month right now. I believe they will get to by the end of this year. I believe they will get to a hundred million dollars in art sales per month. I don't know what like Christie's and Sotheby's and those guys do. I don't think this is that far behind. And so what they're doing is they're going to pop, they they find a popular artist. Well, I don't know how big they are. What I'm saying is like, this is not like just some super fringe thing anymore.

• 28:52Sam Parr?

  The forever Mamba one that you got is the best one.

• 28:54Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's sick. But there's some other good ones. Like I told you, Beeple, when he did his drop, he has really cool art. He did four million dollars of art sales, you know, on the, in his like five minute drop. And then the cool thing is for the artist, every time I resell it, the artist gets a cut of the resale too. So this artist, the Boss Logic guy, yeah, he put his initial ones up for eight hundred bucks and now they're selling for way more. But I think there's been two hundred million dollars of total sales and resales of that piece of art. Actually, that that sounds high. Maybe it's twenty million. I think I might have got the number wrong. But he's getting a cut of all the resales too. As an artist, you don't just get sort of like exploited by making something great and then rich people start trading it with each other and making a bunch of money. The artist always, because it's linked again, because it's all done on the blockchain.

• 29:36Shaan Puri?

  It's all perfectly kept records. There's no way to sell it kind of just for cash on your own in some art gallery with five rich old white people. Um, this thing is all done in public on the internet. Everything is recorded. And because of that, there's a, um, you know, a perfect way to pay royalties to the artist.

• 29:51Sam Parr?

  So can you have this? Oh, my God, these, some of these are really neat. Can you have this at your house in a frame and then just, you know what, I'm just gonna sell this right now. Boom, sold. And then I'm gonna buy another one and it now it's uploaded into my frame.

• 30:03Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. That's exactly what I'm gonna do. I bought me and Ben frames and we're gonna put them up next week. And we've been collecting these. So in yesterday's drop, I bought five. Each one was a thousand dollars in the drop. I bought five of them. And already each one of those is selling on average for twenty five hundred dollars. So in one day, I could, you know, go sell it. A thousand thing I bought for a thousand dollars, I could sell for twenty five hundred dollars right now if I wanted to. I think it might appreciate some more, so I'm gonna hold on to it. I will say.

• 30:26Sam Parr?

  You ever sell any of them?

• 30:27Shaan Puri?

  When I saw, hey, the thing I bought for eight hundred dollars, I can get eight grand for that video right now. I sold it and I kind of had seller's remorse as soon as I sold it, but. It's hard to say no to 10x your money in 20 days. It's it's pretty good.

• 30:37Sam Parr?

  I I know it's good, but.

• 30:39Shaan Puri?

  What I'll say is NFTs let you do a lot of things, one of which is this.

• 30:43Sam Parr?

  But are you using the word NFT correctly? Wouldn't M F it would like a Beanie Baby be an NFT?

• 30:49Shaan Puri?

  Well, if a Beanie Baby was was created or registered on the blockchain, then yes.

• 30:53Sam Parr?

  Got it. Okay, so NFT only doesn't refer to a one-off rare car. It only refers to something that uses.

• 31:00Shaan Puri?

  It is a digital collectible. It is a unique digital collectible. Now you can have, let's say, 500 of these, but each one is like a serial number, right? Like, I owned number 206 out of 429. So I owned that one and 206 is unique. It's not the same as 205. And it's not the same as 207, right? They're all serial numbered, basically.

• 31:18Sam Parr?

  Logan Paul, which I can't believe I'm quoting, but, you know, he left his podcast and moved to Puerto Rico to focus. And he was like, I want to dedicate my next little bit of career to NFTs.

• 31:29Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, so him and Gary V have like gone all in on this whole like Logan Paul, I like this whole NFT thing. Because they've made a killing in like sports cards and Pokemon cards recently. So they're like, oh, dude. This just makes money. There's no like downsides to this. But Logan Paul did a NFT drop, I think, yesterday. He did 3.5 million dollars of sales of, I'll show you the the thing he sold, which is it's basically like it's just like a picture of him. It's like a little card. You could go look this up. So basically, it was one Ethereum per thing. So you bought it for one one ether. And this was his thing.

• 32:00Sam Parr?

  What's five link newsletter? Is that yours?

• 32:03Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, this is my new thing. I'm gonna every Friday, I'm gonna send out a bunch of links I think are cool. And one of the links this week is about Logan Paul's thing and the details behind it. So anyway, so he he did a million dollars of sales in the first 30 minutes. He ended up doing 3.5 million in the day. And that's it. That's how many there are. And now, whatever, you can trade these. Now, so let me be clear. A lot of this stuff, it's gonna do what Crypto's Kitty did. It's gonna go way up. And then it's gonna go crashing down because there may not be people who want to collect these things, right? And especially with NFTs, it's like, it's not even like Beanie Babies. With Beanie Babies, you had to go create a toy. With NFTs, it's like I can literally go and Microsoft Paint right now. I can create 40 files and then I can print them. I can basically tokenize them. I could say, great, here's my rare art.

• 32:42Shaan Puri?

  Right? So there's like, there's gonna be a lot of supply. So I would say there's a very good chance that this is a hype bubble right now. It is a very cool mechanism for artists to get paid.

• 32:52Sam Parr?

  Big of a hype bubble. I mean, not that, I mean, if Logan Paul did it, then yeah, it's probably close to mainstream, but it doesn't seem that mainstream.

• 32:59Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I don't say it's mainstream. What I'm saying is like, I'm not saying that all this stuff is gonna hold its value. I think that right now, this is like, just kind of a frenzy. And everybody's piling in and everybody's trying to make a buck. I don't think most people want to like, own the art and display the art. I think a lot of people are just buying stuff to flip it.

• 33:16Sam Parr?

  At my home, we don't have any art and that's what we're doing now. I would 100% invest $10,000 to $20,000 in the total of frames and cool shit like this.

• 33:27Shaan Puri?

  So that's why I started with the art example, because the art example is the least, it's the most familiar. And it's the least hateable. Because you're like, wow, this, like, this is a real unique piece of art that somebody did. It looks beautiful. I could put this up on my wall. I've seen people buy art before. That makes sense. Now let me show you something else that's done with, uh, NFTs and you're gonna tell me.

• 33:45Sam Parr?

  By the way, can you name all, where's all the places people can go to buy this stuff? So niftygateway.com, what else?

• 33:50Shaan Puri?

  Niftygateway.com is where the best art drops are happening and it's the easiest to use. You can go buy it with a credit card. You don't have to have like, um, you know, you don't have to have like a big crypto wallet to be able to do it. You can just go and be like, cool, put this on my Visa. I'm gonna buy this thing. So that's why Diffy Gateway is smart and they're partnering only with like high-profile artists. So there's not a bunch of trash there. But if you want the opposite, if you want like, what's everything? Here's what's trying to be eBay for the crypto world is OpenSea. So go to opensea.io, like open like ocean, so open sea. And this is where anybody can list any NFT. There's no like kind of curation filter and you could just sell and resell anything here. And so you'll go there and you're gonna be like, this is like a little picture of a plant.

• 34:32Shaan Puri?

  This is like a picture of, like, this is literally just like a pixelated image of a hamburger. And it's selling for $3. And so this is just like, it's just like eBay. There's just, this is everything. If you wanna buy it, you can buy it. Look at the link I put into.

• 34:45Sam Parr?

  Put it in Slack.

• 34:46Shaan Puri?

  Okay, I'm putting it in Slack.

• 34:47Sam Parr?

  But I don't understand. They have like domain names too. What? This is so interesting.

• 34:51Shaan Puri?

  I'm gonna tell you a little bit more of a hateable one now and, uh, you tell me what you think of this one. So this is CryptoPunks. CryptoPunks, same idea as Beanie Babies. They made a bunch of little characters. And the character looks like a little 8-bit thing from an old-school video game. It's just like a head of a little video game character.

• 35:09Sam Parr?

  Oh, my God, and they're selling for one hundred and fifty K.

• 35:11Shaan Puri?

  You know, there's like ten thousand of these. So right now, CryptoPunk number two, zero, one, three, just sold for ninety-two thousand dollars. Now, when you see that, you're gonna not feel the same way about, oh, yeah, I like this. I'll put this up on my wall at my house and I'll like, I can, I'd pay for digital art. I don't think you would go buy these CryptoPunk little collectible figurines anymore than you would go buy a Funko doll for seven hundred dollars on eBay right now. You know what I mean?

• 35:35Sam Parr?

  You don't own any crypto by buying this, correct?

• 35:38Shaan Puri?

  No, you actually spend crypto to buy one of these.

• 35:40Sam Parr?

  Because they have, this sounds nuts.

• 35:42Shaan Puri?

  You pay, you pay in Ethereum, you pay in Ether, right, to go buy one of these things? And so yesterday, somebody dropped half a million dollars on CryptoPunks in about a thirty-minute time span. And so a lot of people think it was Chamath. Because he's talked about, he said, I'm building a very big NFT portfolio right now. I'll reveal the details of it later. You know, there's only so many whales who are gonna go buy half a million dollars of NFTs in like a thirty-minute span. And so some people think it's Chamath, maybe it's some other random crypto millionaire or a hundred millionaire or something like that. But there are many, many different types of these. So I'll give you another example. Music. There are artists that can just release a ten-second sound sample.

• 36:21Shaan Puri?

  I think is gonna release a track on Nifty Gateway, I believe. I hope I'm not breaking any news there, but there are artists who are gonna release songs or clips of songs as tokens that you can own. So you can own that song, or you can own that clip of that song. They're gonna release it as like a piece of art, basically, that you can go buy and bid on.

• 36:38Sam Parr?

  So the opportunity, obviously, here is displaying all these things.

• 36:41Shaan Puri?

  I think so. So I'll tell you the three.

• 36:43Sam Parr?

  I mean, other, there's, the biggest opportunity is these marketplaces, but.

• 36:47Shaan Puri?

  I believe if somebody was to make a very cool, simple frame, that's like kind of marketed and branded towards NFT collectors. Right now, there's so much money being splashed around here. I think that you could sell three hundred dollar frames, four hundred dollar frames. And I think you could sell probably five million of them in a month, five million dollars of sales in a month right now, easily, because of, people need a way to display these.

• 37:09Sam Parr?

  How do I get this thing literally in the frame?

• 37:11Shaan Puri?

  So there's two ways. One is you download your, you right-click this thing, you save video as, and then you just, like, most of the frames can accept, like, a video file, so you just upload it that way.

• 37:21Sam Parr?

  The frames are attached to Wi-Fi?

• 37:22Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, the frames are Wi-Fi, are Internet and a smart frame, right? It's like a digital picture frame. And so the other way to do it, the better way, I think, is if you're gonna make this and market it towards those people, you would just say, cool, link your Nifty Gateway account, just like, log in. And once you log in, cool, your whole collection is there. What's your Ethereum wallet? Just connect it and then boom, we'll display whatever you want here. And there's just a little companion app that will let you do this. Now, check this out. Our friend Ryan Hoover invested in this company called Infinite Objects. Have you seen this before?

• 37:48Sam Parr?

  I dismissed all this. I think it's cool.

• 37:51Shaan Puri?

  I don't know if people are gonna like this because A, a bunch of this is visual. And if you're listening to this, I'm not sure if you're gonna get it. And B, I think I'm talking a little bit fast and all over the place because I'm excited and I think you get it pretty quickly. But for a newcomer, I don't know if what I, if any of what I said is gonna make sense. So let me know. You could tweet at me and be like, that made no sense. Can you do it simpler? But look at this site I just sent you. So Infinite Objects, at first glance, you're just like, oh, this is like, um, it's just one of those digital picture frames, right? It is and it isn't. First, it's like kind of well-designed. It looks pretty slick. It looks like something like, I don't know, like Apple would make or something. But the cool thing is it's an infinite object, meaning whatever you put inside, that's it forever. It is a forever looping video of whatever you put in there.

• 38:31Shaan Puri?

  So I think these are great gifts, by the way. Really cool gift for like Valentine's Day or whatever, like to get somebody, Mother's Day, that sort of thing. But it's a printed video, so it can't change in the same way that like, um, you know, a poster can't change. So they basically just imprint this video in and then it's sealed and then nobody can ever change what's inside this. So the first-

• 38:50Sam Parr?

  Dude, it's just like that Harry Potter shit. This is what it all reminds me of.

• 38:53Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. It looks like a portrait that's like moving like in Harry Potter. Exactly. That's, I think, that's like very much what they went for, like the magic of that. The very first big drop that I was talking about, the biggest NFT drop, that one that that artist Beeple did. And by the way, this guy Beeple, some people were like, oh, my God, this guy made like $4 million in one day doing an NFT drop. This guy is a monster. For eight years, he made a different digital art every day. And he posted on Instagram and they're all like amazing. And he would do one a, one a day, every single day for like eight or nine years. And then he like cashed in all that like fan love. Through an NFT drop and that's, you know, and now he's the, he's the kind of highest selling artist on this thing. His things are now going for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

• 39:33Shaan Puri?

  And Christie's invited him to do a official, do like a traditional art show and, and sale. And they're going to accept cryptocurrency for the buyers of the art when he does it there. But when he did his, he offered one of these with every buyer, which I thought was really smart. So he said, if you buy this thing for whatever $2,000, you will get the digital thing and it'll be recorded on the blockchain. But I'm also going to send you an infinite object with the piece of art in it. So you'll have it in your house. And I think that's where this all goes. I think artists are just going to include a, a physical token with the digital thing you bought.

• 40:05Sam Parr?

  I love this. This is so cool. I do have a little bit of a nitpick with infinite objects, which it looks like all their stuff is really small.

• 40:12Shaan Puri?

  It is small. Yeah. It, this is like, it looks like a book sized thing, like the thing you have behind you, the thing I have behind me. That's what I want. And that's, I bought like a big, and this also has a big problem, right? So like, I think their product is slick, but this is a big problem because you can only ever display one thing in this. Once you do it, it's forever. You can't use it to display your collection. You'd need to, if you bought 30 pieces of digital art, you need to buy 30 of these to display them. And so I think that's the big flaw of this, that somebody can still do as an opportunity in the NFT space is to actually make a, a frame that will rotate your latest buys. And if you sell something, it'll leave, you know, that sort of thing. This guy Darren Revelle tweeted, he's this kind of sports journalist type dude. He tweeted this thing out. He goes, look at these two images and tell me which one you would want.

• 40:53Shaan Puri?

  On the left is a autograph signed, there's a, a trading card with Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant on it. And it was signed by both guys, signed by Michael Jordan, signed by Kobe Bryant. And on the right was that Kobe Bryant NFT that I showed you. And he goes, both of these right now are selling for $20,000. Which one would you rather buy? And the Twitter replies are very interesting because some people are like, are you crazy? That's a dude, I could just save that little image as my wallpaper right now. Boom, I got it for free. And then other people are like, so what? That other thing's just a piece of cardboard with some ink on it. You know, like if you break it down, like believing in autographs, believing in, um, trading cards, like pieces of cardboard with, with somebody scribble on it. Like, why is that valuable either? And it's all valuable because it's rare and it's all valuable because other people believe it's valuable.

• 41:37Shaan Puri?

  And so the big question is, that's what money is and that's what all this is. So the question people have right now is, all right, with this NFT thing, you know, is this the next Bitcoin? I kind of feel, well, this is what a lot of people feel. It's like, shit, I kind of missed out on that Bitcoin thing. Is this NFT that? Should I just be piling into this? Or is it more like ICOs three years ago where boom, everyone's doing ICOs, everybody's getting rich, crowdfunding through ICOs. And now ICOs are seen and people at that time were saying, dude, this is like kind of a money grab. These projects are not legit. This thing is not worth that. It's just a frenzy right now. My personal opinion is that NFTs are nowhere near as valuable as Bitcoin could be, because if you just look at the collectibles market, like trading card market, there might be like, the trading card market might be somewhere between 5 billion and 20 billion a year.

• 42:21Shaan Puri?

  Bitcoin, which is like a financial asset, financial system, like things in the financial system are worth trillions, like, you know, like if Bitcoin's digital gold, gold's market cap is $10 trillion. So they're just operating on different scales. So I would definitely not think of NFTs as like the next Bitcoin. I would think of it as a really cool way now for us to make things on the internet scarce. Because you could just copy paste anything and I could just, I can send you a file and then I have it and you have it. Everything was super, super abundant. So there was no way to have real scarcity on the internet. All digital stuff was like, could just be cloned and replicated infinitely.

• 42:56Sam Parr?

  Do you remember watching videos and it's like rare video of Eminem backstage talking to Dr. Dre? It's like, well, no, there's no such thing as rare on the internet.

• 43:06Shaan Puri?

  Well, in that case, like, it might be rare because that's the, you usually don't see Eminem backstage, but like, there's definitely any gif, any picture, any video, any song, you could just like infinitely share it and send it. We can all have one for free. Like, there was no scarcity. The internet was amazing because it made everything so abundant. So everybody could have it. But what you lose is then, what's the point of creating the art if it's just going to get cloned everywhere and I don't get any piece of the action? And so what I think is cool here is that crypto is kind of unlocked a way for artists to make things scarce that are digital. And some of it's going to be bullshit in the sense of, yeah, it's scarce, but no one cares about it. So therefore it has no value. But some things that people care about, now you have a way to make them valuable through scarcity. And I think that's really cool.

• 43:51Sam Parr?

  All right, let's talk about this last thing. I think that this episode is going to be good, but we'll talk about this last thing. It is crypto related, but not in the same way. So Sean brought up this thing that I actually looked into is pretty interesting. Coin market cap. Is that or coin market?

• 44:05Shaan Puri?

  I'll tell you how this got put on my radar. Somebody said.

• 44:07Sam Parr?

  Coin market cap. Sorry.

• 44:09Shaan Puri?

  Somebody said this question. I was going to quiz you with this, but I put it up here. So you had a chance to research it, but I was going to say, hey, guess which website is bigger? Coinmarketcap.com or WallStreetJournal.com? And like, you know, any rational person who's just like, kind of on the outside, you would think Wall Street Journal, of course, things, that's an institution. It's been around for years. Everybody knows about the Wall Street Journal. What the hell is CoinMarketCap? Well, it turns out CoinMarketCap has gets more traffic every month than the Wall Street Journal. And all CoinMarketCap was is a guy that well, it's been around for for seven years. It's been growing. It passed it up years ago. It was this guy in his apartment and all he did was he just displayed some price information about cryptocurrencies. That's how it got popular. And now it's turned into like a full fledged thing where they like do journalism.

• 44:48Shaan Puri?

  They do. They write some articles about the latest news and whatnot, but like fundamentally, it was just a display of kind of price information about crypto. And it is amazing to me that this thing was getting 100 million monthly visitors when the Wall Street Journal was only getting, you know, like 80. It had passed the Wall Street Journal. That blew my mind and I had to know some more. So that's how this got on my radar. What did you think was cool about this?

• 45:07Sam Parr?

  So I looked it up. It was started by this one guy named Brendan Ches. I think it is C H E Z. Started about seven years ago. What's interesting is that he's, the story is always a good story, very secretive. So I'm almost positive you can't find a picture of him.

• 45:22Shaan Puri?

  I couldn't find anything. I tried to find this motherfucker's picture, couldn't find it.

• 45:25Sam Parr?

  Yes, he's only done one or two interviews and it's always a stock like outline of a black like head like with a shadow on you. And he, it's so powerful that he delisted the South Korean exchanges for some reason. I don't understand why. I guess the story is, is that he delisted some South Korean, I'm a total new, but basically like the equivalent.

• 45:45Shaan Puri?

  He took something off his site. Yeah.

• 45:46Sam Parr?

  Yeah. He basically, it was like the Coinbase of South Korea. He said, no, we're no longer going to deal with you anymore.

• 45:51Shaan Puri?

  And by the way, delisting, it's not like they lost any power. He just like stopped. It's like if the Wall Street Journal stopped talking about my company, that doesn't actually hurt my company, but it did in this case.

• 46:01Sam Parr?

  And in this case, it wiped out a hundred billion dollars in market value of crypto asset market value. So very powerful. And I looked it on LinkedIn. The company only has thirty six employees. And because of its secrecy, a lot of the employees actually looked like legitimate, just like normal, like tech worker employees. Although there is a lot of secrecy about it. So who knows what the truth is. But the company sold to Binance. Binance, Sean, is it Binance like pretty much a Coinbase competitor?

• 46:27Shaan Puri?

  It's Coinbase in Asia. It's it's bigger, a little bit bigger than Coinbase, but it's the biggest exchange, which is like, it's the biggest place to buy and sell cryptocurrencies in the world.

• 46:34Sam Parr?

  And Binance bought it for a rumored four hundred million dollars. And there's potential that it was like five or ten employees when they bought it. And Binance bought it kind of for the similar reason they HubSpot bought us, not exactly the same, but similar, which is like, wow, you're sending a lot of traffic to all these places that are our competition. What if we just owned you and they promised not to like completely ruin it, but I do think they like promote themselves. I don't know that. I don't know the reality.

• 46:59Shaan Puri?

  There's a reason they bought it. Let's put it that way.

• 47:01Sam Parr?

  Yeah, they can promote they so they can say, oh, you're going to check out the price of Bitcoin all day. By the way, if you sign up right now for Binance, you can get a fifty dollar.

• 47:08Shaan Puri?

  Come buy Bitcoin here. Yeah, that's all they want. They come buy it here. Don't buy it over there.

• 47:12Sam Parr?

  Crazy fascinating because this idea of just like, I'm sure it's this product is it's pretty slick and on the surface it looks dead simple like, oh, all he's doing is like pulling in data like any dumb idiot.

• 47:22Shaan Puri?

  I remember this thing like this looked so simple back in the like now it looks like a proper website. It's got articles, it's got journalists, like it's well designed. This thing started as just like a plain white and black display of a bunch of numbers and like that's all it was and it was popular because it was the easiest, fastest way to go at a glance. See what was going on in the crypto world with the price and the market caps and the change over like change in the last twenty four hours and stuff like that. So it's amazing. This is a great example of why Combinator calls picks and shovels businesses, which is something our friend Andrew Wilkinson likes a lot, which is whenever there's a big gold rush. Don't try to be one of the people in the gold rush. Go sell shovels to the people go and try to who want to go get gold.

• 48:01Shaan Puri?

  And so examples of this would be, you know, Andrew's company, We Commerce, which is basically, okay, Shopify is getting big. E-commerce is getting big. Don't try to be a big e-commerce site. Sell tools to people who want to start their own, who want to go in the gold rush of e-commerce and go try to build their stores. And now We Commerce is a public company worth like, I don't know, eight hundred million dollars or something. This is that same idea, which is instead of trying to become a crypto fund or buy a bunch of Bitcoin or speculate on the price or do anything, they're like, we'll just report like the price in the news. We'll just be like a display of information and that picks into business like they, you know, sold $400 million. I think it's kind of amazing.

• 48:37Sam Parr?

  This is wild. I think that this episode is, I don't know if people are going to absolutely love this or think that it was too, too much. Uh, but this is a fascinating thing. I'm kind of amped up to be honest. I'm leaving this amped up.

• 48:50Shaan Puri?

  And by the way, the, that website told you about crypto slam or, you know, whatever. There's all a bunch of these now. DeFi Pulse, they're building the coin market cap. They're trying to build the same thing, coin market cap for NFTs. They're like, oh, we'll display a bunch of information like that thing I sent you that showed you how much money Top Shot had made in the last 24 hours. That's what coin market cap is, but they're just doing it specifically for NFTs and they're trying to become the coin market for NFTs. And I think you could take that same principle to really any space that's hot. Right? Like you could do it with Crunchbase or whatever did it with startup funding news. Every time there's funding, cool, we're going to write it down here and it's a searchable database of that. And you can just do this in any, any industry where there's a lot of interest. You could just become the like info display sites for that thing. Chartable does this with podcasts, for example.

• 49:32Sam Parr?

  Not well.

• 49:33Shaan Puri?

  What's this one you're sending me?

• 49:34Sam Parr?

  You guys got to fix this. What, what is it?

• 49:36Speaker 02

  I sent you a worldmeters.info and I think they blew up just because they showed the daily count of coronavirus.

• 49:42Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I remember this. So it was a kid. He might've been not even 20. He was a young kid and he did the same exact chart, but for COVID cases. And it blew up. And I think the New York Times did an article about how he refused to sell it and he refused to put advertising on it. And they've estimated that he could be making four or five million dollars a year off just display ads.

• 50:04Shaan Puri?

  Bray is just sent the traffic. It's 220 million visits this last month.

• 50:09Sam Parr?

  Oh, then he would have made way more. This was, uh, like right when COVID started a year ago.

• 50:14Shaan Puri?

  You could just sell masks on this one. One link to a mask. Yeah.

• 50:19Sam Parr?

  When I saw that, I was like, dude, make money off of it. You're working hard. Get paid. Like, how are you gonna keep doing this if you can't make any money? 200 million people come to your website a month? How on earth do you afford, unless they're gonna give you that, that's gonna cost you, surely that would cost tens or six figures a month, maybe?

• 50:33Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I don't know how much it costs. Maybe it would be a gift.

• 50:36Speaker 02

  Has ads on it. This guy is making some good money. And all it's doing, it's what you guys said. He's just pulling data for Corona cases in different countries. And 200 million hits him up.

• 50:44Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, now I see, I turned off my ad block. I see like Squarespace ads all over it now. So whatever that guy was saying where he wasn't gonna do it, at the bottom, you can, you know, lending tree, refinance calculator.

• 50:56Sam Parr?

  Well, this is good. I think we should wrap up here. This is pretty sick. We're gonna bring this heat hopefully every time. And this is sick. Well, thank you for listening. Tell us the feedback on this. I want to know what people want and if they dug it.

• 51:09Shaan Puri?

  All right, we're out of here.