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Web3 Exposed 🧽🎙️2024 “META”
Recorded: Jan. 8, 2024 Duration: 3:15:51Space Recording
Full Transcription
Like, comment, repost. Let's go. Let's go. Sheesh.
I'm on that dope again. I'm on that floor again. Switch off the floor again.
Yeah. Hey. I'm buying sacks again. I'm buying sacks again. I'm buying sacks again. Yeah.
Yeah. Right in the parachute, gripping that door. I'm on that floor again. Yeah, yeah.
Can you call me? William is yet again late for work. Tag Will below. Jesus Christ.
I'm getting paid, king of streets. Young nigga, mage, friend of the crowd, take to the grave.
Hang out my problems, I'm sipping the bar. Shout out to Dallas, my bitches a star.
Nigga, you're rich, been taking you to walk out. Piss on your cans, get shit at you, brah.
There's some nice, get ready in the car. Bitch, get great, be fuck me in the car.
Let me tell you guys something.
I got a lot to say today, okay?
Not only had I had enough coffee and my lion's mane, and I went to the gym on you bitch asses,
but I got to talk about it because it's not even all-time highs yet, and a lot of y'all
operate in literally, like, I think y'all high.
I really think you're high, and not just off of a weed, off of some wild shit, because
the shit that I've been seeing is almost like we forgot, we forgot about all the shit
we went through as a community.
Like, come the fuck on, bro.
What are we really, really doing out here?
5.06 p.m. Eastern, we're about to get this show on the road.
Your favorite Spaces host is officially live.
I get it.
I get it.
You fucking spend the whole day in bullshit spaces, and guess what?
I apologize.
I wish I could go live earlier, but guess what?
I got real shit to do, and I'm putting something really, really dope together, and the only
way it's going to happen is if I spend more time off of Twitter during the day, okay?
That's just how it works.
I'm still grinding.
I'm still scrolling.
I'm still looking at y'all shitty-ass takes.
I'm still hopping into Twitter rooms anonymously, and with my account, I come anonymously because
I swear to God, you guys act different.
Not everybody.
I'm not relevant.
I'm really not, but some of y'all act different when you're hosting, when certain people are
in the room.
I've done this before.
When I started hosting Spaces, and I saw somebody I liked or looked up to, or just somebody dope,
I'm like, oh my God, they're in my room, and you guys be fucking it up.
A lot of people go anonymously now.
I see, and I get it.
I understand why.
Anyway, we got a lot to talk about.
We got a couple of experts coming to the stage to talk about Bitcoin, talk about ETFs, talk
about their take on the macro.
Girl, I got a couple of goats coming to the stage.
A lot of cool people making cool shit.
Shout out to NFT Bark.
Mr. Steve will be pulling up today as well.
I got a surprise at the ending.
Also, if you guys caught last week's show on Friday, I had the blessing of hosting Ray
Trapani, the star of Bitcoin, or excuse me, Netflix documentary named Bitcond.
He's 100%, I think, the MVP at the time for 2017 ICOs.
I mean, the guy launched an ICO with a group of friends.
It rubbed.
It scanned.
It fucking frauded people.
So, his friends went to jail.
He snitched.
He did not go to jail.
He was here.
He answered questions.
He handed it like a G, in my opinion.
All respect to the guy.
And I'm glad we had it.
I got a lot of good feedback on it.
It's getting clipped up at the moment.
So, you guys will see some clips on the feed soon.
If you missed it, first two minutes of the space, I said, if there's 20 comments below,
that will unlock the first piece of ETH.
All you got to do is repost the room to qualify.
So, boom.
We hit 20 comments.
Instantly, some ETH gets sent to somebody's wallet below, as long as they repost it, that
qualifies them.
There is no other Twitter space doing that.
I don't give a fuck, okay?
And I'm, respectively, that's a shit of myself, I am not bankrolled up like these other hosts,
okay?
A lot of these hosts are out here selling their soul to host this fucking Twitter space.
Shanice, however, I'm not going to lie.
But this is a selfish thing.
I get to go on a stage, talk, and then you listen.
And if you don't want to fucking listen, you leave.
But guess what?
I still keep talking.
It's just like the best shit ever.
Because people like Bad Brothers will stay.
People like William will stay.
People like people will stay.
Whatever, man.
Ho ass.
We go at it back and forth.
He will stay and listen.
So, anyway, thank you guys for being here.
What We Exposed was birthed just almost two years ago from a silly-ass idea.
And the idea really was, yo, how the fuck am I going to get these people here?
Let me do a clickbait fucking title.
Let me expose somebody.
Granted, now it's a lifestyle, right?
No, I don't live to expose people.
I do not.
No, no, no.
I don't live for that.
However, when you guys make dumb-ass decisions and then try to cover that shit up, you know
what I'm saying?
We got to kind of go over it.
This show was not designed to wreck people, wreck people's lives.
If anything, it was designed to not only educate but show awareness on all the things in Web3
and crypto.
The good, the bad, and the motherfucking ugly.
I'm really bearish on, quote-unquote, content creators in this space.
You guys are cringing me the fuck out.
I'm very bearish on founders that see new numbers in the market and think that we forgot what
they did in 2021.
Some of you have a, some of you, like, not all of you, but some of you, like, no fucking
way.
Like, I don't know what weed you're smoking.
I don't know what the fuck's going on.
I don't know why you think you're allowed to do what you're doing.
But that's, that's, it is what it is.
That's, that's the sentiment of the market.
That's what we're dealing with.
If you guys haven't realized already, too, Twitter Spaces is, is, is literally a, it's
a feature on an app.
And this feature on this app, unfortunately, qualifies nobody.
And what do I mean by that?
Anybody can go live and say a whole bunch of nothing, like I'm doing right now.
A whole bunch of nothing.
But the best part is you get to sift through and go and listen to the things and the people
that fucking matter.
That's the best part.
You want to go into rooms and you want to interact with people like Matt.
You want to interact with people like Bad Brothers.
Well, sometimes you want to interact with people like Will that know the market and will tell
you whether to buy or sell.
And if he's wrong, okay, if he's fucking wrong, you fucking just go after his ass.
That's the best part of this whole thing.
So that's, that's, you listen.
I just want to remind you guys again, again, again, again, I enjoy being here in Web3.
I enjoy hanging out with all you beautiful people.
But what I do not enjoy is the fuckery that this race sometimes breeds.
And a lot of you like, oh, where profits hasn't been.
Oh, no, it's coming.
Don't worry.
I'm ready to rail on your favorite fucking influencer and your favorite founder and your
favorite shitheads in this space that you guys continue to glorify.
But it's all right.
We're going to continue to build.
Like, comment, repost the room.
A banger is literally loading.
Trying to find the song Matt likes.
I don't think he likes this song, but he's going to bop to it.
Thank you, Matt.
I have to say, that was quite cool, actually.
I was running for a season looking like a damn football team.
All in the same thing.
All repping one thing.
Looking for revenge.
Do what you couldn't do.
Tell Obama that my verses are just like the whips at the end.
They bulletproof.
Minus 20, we in Pickfield at K's Kitchen in the Canada boost.
That's Tal right there.
He's a real sicko when you get to know him.
Bro, shout out Hash Ketchum.
He made this song specific to the show.
You know we got to start this song when it's a banger.
It's because we played this song.
Literally why.
Literally why.
How's this guy talking on mute?
You got exposed.
You gotta go.
You ripped around.
You's a clown.
You's a boss.
So we should know.
You should know.
We know.
We know.
We know.
Uh-oh.
We hit 29 comments.
One of you are about to get some crypto in your wallet.
Like, comment, repost.
Let's get it.
The best part about the ETH giveaway is I also rubbed a multi-sig of $1.4 million.
Therefore, I have tons of Ethereum to give to you.
Just kidding.
Whoever cuts that up, suck it.
You fucking shithead.
Anyway, no.
But seriously, definitely some ETH giveaway.
Definitely some Solana giveaway.
All you got to do is repost the room.
Thank you for your support.
We're about to get started.
I'm doing whatever that I want.
I live in discomfort.
I'm right home.
You could never throw me out of my zone.
You got to explode.
You got to go.
You ripped around.
You's a clown.
You's a boss.
So we should know.
That we not.
We can see you being a steady scheme.
I'm alone.
Maybe.
Drifted.
Shifting.
I'm alone.
Switching.
Wristing.
People map the dark.
They spin.
Ripting.
That is just enough.
Switching.
Wristing.
People map the dark.
I see what they feed you.
Only difference between me and you is that I don't need you.
I don't believe you.
But I can see you.
The motor show behind your actions because you see through.
Please.
Can you chill out and learn how to be cool?
Because we do what the shell is starting to bleed through.
We do.
They get to the scene to see you.
Think you pouring the seeds when you just poured in a seed.
Sheesh.
All the homies pulling up today.
I have a safe assumption.
You's a lame.
It's why you're trying to game everybody in the space.
But I think your brain is bugging.
Yeah.
You told that brain's bugging, huh?
Come on.
You gotta go.
You gotta go.
You put your brain.
You's a lame.
You's a bugging.
Drake called me.
He told me to stop using the other song because I guess he goes live on kick now.
So he's like, yo, don't use that part of the song.
I know your show is Web3 Exposed.
I was like, all right, Drake, whatever.
Say less.
No problem, brother.
Don't want any beef from you.
Welcome to the show, guys.
5.15 p.m. Eastern.
Another great day to have a fucking great day.
I feel amazing.
Why do I feel amazing?
It may be because I consume Lion's Mane on a daily basis.
I go to the gym and I make sure to take 50 deep breaths in the morning before I go on to the Twitter timeline.
If you don't do this, I highly recommend you do it.
And our longest printing.
Go ahead.
And our longest printing, William.
Listen, William.
Don't get ahead of yourself, William.
William is hot today.
You see how he already un-miked?
He's already un-miking.
Woo!
Woo!
God, Luna, you already finished your fucking boot.
You're also about to fucking yell at me.
Anyway, so I'm hype.
I'm hype.
The long is indeed printing.
You may have caught on if you are in the trading channel, in the Web3 Exposed Discord that is currently free to get in, okay?
I promise you there's nobody grifting you.
Nobody's selling you anything in there.
There's a lot of free information in there.
We got cool things like Will's analysis from time to time.
Me, what I'm doing.
I keep telling you guys, I am taking a $200 account to $10,000.
The goal is to not take 15 months to do it.
The goal is to do that in about 90 to 120 days.
Let's see if I can do it.
But regardless of the fact, it's really just a challenge for me to prove to myself that I can stay consistent and disciplined.
I can't tell you guys how many times I've taken accounts to the thousands from 300 and just blew it being a fucking degenerate, right?
And so this is really, be real, it's a selfish thing so I can put myself accountable, but then also remind myself of the skill set that I do have.
And then also too, you guys should keep up, you know, keep up, especially if you trade, if you, you know, if you spot, if you just buy spot and don't care to trade, then obviously I'm not interested in convincing you to trade.
I'm talking to the traders.
Like if you're an active trader, definitely take a part of it.
But yeah, really excited to get the show started.
I'm rambling more than I want to.
I did, however, find a Celsius in the fucking fridge, guys.
You know what this means?
You know what this means?
I didn't drink a fucking Celsius all day.
I'm proud of myself.
But I did, I did, I did drink some coffee.
But whatever, it is what it is.
Welcome to the show.
We have unlocked the first piece of ETH.
Look at that, 41 comments.
All right, we're about to unlock the next piece of ETH, baby.
You guys want this fucking ETH.
I feel you.
I feel you.
Let's get it.
William, give me the good news of the market.
And I don't want no fucking, don't sell me a dream.
Be real.
Why the fuck is the market pumping?
Is it solely because of the ETF news?
What's your analysis on the market today, Will?
Go ahead.
Thank you for being here.
Yeah, we've talked about it in the past.
I think the ETF helps drive the narrative.
ETF drives validity, right, to the asset class.
I think, like, a lot of people are, again, their anticipation is that ETF is the ride or die of Bitcoin.
ETF, for me, is inevitable, right?
So it's not an if rather than when.
And so if you look at it from that perspective, I don't think that, you know, there's much really to worry about there.
It's just buy and hold, basically.
And I talked to you guys about this week after week.
We've had discussions.
I post my bad trades as well as my good trades.
I've had a few bad trades, definitely.
Lucid, horrible trades so far.
Done absolutely, you know, nothing, right?
It's like poking it with a stick.
Please come back to life.
But I've had a lot better trades than just the few that I've had bad.
And that's what it's about when it comes to trading specifically and or buying assets and so on and so forth.
It's about having more wins than losses.
Or at least in dollar amount, right?
It doesn't have to be more wins than losses in number, but more wins than losses in dollar amount.
But you definitely want to bring up that number if it's super low.
So I posted this right here because, you know, I know I've been obviously called out a few times and saying that I was bearish, blah, blah, blah.
And Matt knows, like, me and Matt were sitting in spaces with people literally arguing with them, telling them that price was going up when everybody was calling for it to come down more.
And it's like, no, dude, like, price is definitely going up.
The momentum is to the upside.
Really great follow, by the way, guys, if you guys don't follow him.
Guy's really great.
Has a lot of great insight and info.
He's one of the, I'd say, top five picks in my book.
No offense, obviously, Matt.
That's pretty high up there for me.
But, yeah, I would say overall, I keep my circle small, too, so that's saying a lot.
I would say, like, if you look at Bitcoin's price currently, it's sitting around, like, you know, roughly $47K.
We discussed this.
We said probably, you know, $48K to $50K.
I mean, I think I talked about it this morning, probably.
I literally threw it up.
So I threw it up the other, like, a week or two ago in your Discord.
And I told people, hey, we're going up here before we even look at any type of retrace or pullback or whatever people want to call it.
Really, I just call it, like, you know, a rift in the overall move.
The overall move trend is up.
Like, it's five months consecutive green.
A lot of people that are still sitting on the boat or sidelines sitting there crying and talking about how retrace has to happen.
It's like, look at Bitcoin any time it starts to make a pattern of just green, green, green, green, green.
Eventually, it just blows out.
So it's just the pattern is a little smaller right now on compression, right?
And I think it's more about compression.
I think the explosion or the guy candle comes in, you know, somewhere around the ETF discussion and or launch.
I mean, there's just so many different ways, and Matt will probably speak on it, too, that I think that we're getting signals that the ETF is already in play.
It's just a matter of, you know, when launch at the end of the day.
And I've seen this a lot, too, because of all the different types of filings that are being put out there, too.
And a lot of them are, like, final stage type filings.
So overall, I'd say, you know, Bitcoin is going to continue up.
And really, I think, like, it can exceed what a lot of people are expecting, probably get up above 50K.
Probably hover there for a little while.
I posted a chart on this, I think, today, basically on the play for Bitcoin here.
It's actually in a pretty interesting position because if you look at it from previous cycles,
this is where it really kind of hits hard.
Where we are now, it's kind of like where we were just before the bull run actually started to occur.
And when I mean bull run, I mean the actual explosion above all-time high and just the continuation pattern over and over and over again back in 2020 to 2021.
So these are kind of like the two chart comparisons that I threw up there.
So this is showing the 2017 bear to bull into the 21.
And you saw that breakout, that pullback, and that breakout again, right?
And that final breakout moved.
And really, we're kind of seeing a similar move here.
So we got a double tap on the support there, right, for Bitcoin.
And we got a double tap again, right, on the bottom there for Bitcoin.
And people are not accepting the move, just like they weren't directly after the COVID pullback.
They were like, oh, no, it's over.
The COVID pullback with a higher low, right?
With a higher low, they were super bearish on Bitcoin.
If you were bearish on anything, you should have taken all the assets that formed lower lows and been bearish.
And there were a lot of stock companies that did that, that still came back and did phenomenal.
And people were bidding them up.
But when it came to Bitcoin, even though it formed a higher low, people didn't want to accept that, you know, the strength was strong in the asset class.
And I think that this, you know, overall, it's great to discuss the ETF.
I feel like it moves the needle for validity.
It moves the needle for confidence.
But I think, like, if you're not buying, like, I would argue this.
And some people will call this kind of dreamer or overly bullish.
But look at the SPY in, like, the 1970s.
We actually talked about it this morning on this morning's show.
But look at the SPY in the 1970s.
And look at the run it did after the 70s just straight up.
Now, granted, that took a multitude of years to play out.
But arguably, you know, if you would have taken the SPY and bought it at those lows and watched it run, you would be up thousands of axes, right?
And arguably, I would say Bitcoin is one of those types of assets for me that, you know, once this thing gets rolling, I think, like, and the ETFs start rolling, we start getting probably really good inflows.
And the thing is that a lot of people are underestimating, in my opinion, is passive flows, right?
Passive flows will be really strong for Bitcoin.
And once you start getting an asset like that in people's hands, like BlackRock and, you know, Fidelity and all these other bigger players, and some of you may see them like, I don't want them in Bitcoin.
Well, that's too bad.
They're already here.
But at that point, you can start seeing passive flows, you know, from just investors in general, which means you're going to get stronger passive flows, which means better support, which means less volatility, which means, you know, more potential for Bitcoin to just continue to keep climbing and not really have major pullbacks like it has in the past.
So, I mean, we talked about this in 2021.
Bitcoin was a baby asset.
And, you know, now it's starting to mature a little bit.
You know, maybe it's a teenager now.
So, people are starting to see it as a teenager, and it will eventually mature into an adult.
Wait a second.
Wait a second.
Wait a second.
Teenager?
Like 13 years old teenager?
Or like 17, 17?
Yeah, like low end.
Low end.
Like 13.
Low adolescent.
Yeah.
Adolescent teenager just coming into the teenage age, right?
And, you know, eventually it will grow up.
When it grows up, it'll be the spy.
And once you're in the spy, you got to look for something else.
At least from a performance standpoint, right?
You can always stay in it from a perspective of just, you know, I guess preserving capital.
But growth eventually goes out the window at a certain point.
Yeah, I think a lot of people are fumbling.
They're fumbling the whole move.
They're fumbling the market because they're continually looking for tops rather than looking for the potential for more upside.
And, you know, the breakout move that happens every single time with Bitcoin because you have to follow the patterns until the patterns don't play at the end of the day.
And I think people are just ignoring the patterns and they're continuing to try to find something new for Bitcoin to go back down because entries weren't taken and opportunity was lost for a lot of people.
And I understand the pain there, right?
You got to play catch up now, which means what?
You're probably playing higher beta stuff and you're probably losing some money here and there on those two.
But it's, again, it's because you're getting in, getting out before the actual move occurs for the overall market.
I think everything will move eventually.
It's just, you know, the bigger players will move first.
Okay, and they came across the board with Apple, NVIDIA, Amazon, Facebook.
Even Amazon's kind of lagging, to be honest with you.
And all those started to move.
Then Bitcoin, right?
Bitcoin followed all those.
And, you know, that will ripple out eventually to make caps, low caps, and so forth.
And your exponential growth will be there.
You just got to be able to capitalize on it.
But, yeah, overall, Bitcoin go up.
I think probably see 48 to 50K, roughly.
And it's probably this week, to be honest with you.
You know, if not, we'll see it next.
This is kind of that HTF resistance in that 48K zone.
So you could see some pullback there.
And then from there, I think the market will continue upwards.
I think people got to look at the opening of this month.
And if Bitcoin's green on the close here, like your quarter one, if your Q1 does good on stocks or any asset in general,
it's more than likely that you should look at it from the aspect that I need to stay bullish,
regardless of the volatility, because if you have a good beginning of the year, it tends to play out through the rest of the year,
especially with Qs and stuff like that.
So that's something else to keep in mind.
That's a good one to follow also, QQQs, for those of you who don't know.
So that's the one that plays the most on a green Q1 is a green full year.
All right, William, really straight to the point.
And thank you for that analysis, by the way.
We appreciate it.
Drop those charts below.
Guys, pin up to the top.
If you look at the top, his charts are there.
But look, just in one straight answer, nobody knows what the fuck an ETF is.
Can you tell them what it is?
It's essentially, you know, well, it depends.
It depends on what type, right?
So, like, you have spot and then you have your other type of ETF.
All right, I'm getting confused again.
Okay, what is a spot ETF then?
So I'll explain spot.
So spot means they have to buy the underlying asset.
And then non-spot means they just give you the, we'll say, the value of the underlying asset, right?
So spot is more positive, and that's what they're going for, is spot.
So spot will create liquidity for Bitcoin.
Non-spot will not create liquidity for Bitcoin.
So those are the two scenarios.
But spot has always been the play.
It's always been the target.
And that's what they're targeting is spot Bitcoin ETF.
So that means they'll be buying the asset.
So it's a one-for-one.
So if somebody comes in and says they want to buy five Bitcoin, then, you know, they have to hold five Bitcoin in their books.
And if somebody says they want to hold 50 Bitcoin, then so they have to hold 50 Bitcoin in their books.
Now, granted, they can front-run that if they can anticipate the drive or the amount of people that want to purchase, right?
So what does that mean?
And that means they can buy ahead of, you know, the market.
And they could be buying right now, for instance, or buying later or whatever.
You know, I don't know what the stipulation of them being allowed to buy.
It might be after the ETF launch.
But whenever they buy, they can buy up the anticipated amount that they need and then sell that at much higher valuations once price starts to pump and Bitcoin starts to move up.
And so in that case, they can capitalize on the upside and maybe even de-risk at much higher valuations.
And it allows them to really capitalize and manipulate the market.
But overall, it would be positive for price of Bitcoin go up.
I hope that wasn't too complicated.
No, it was very complicated.
That's what we like.
We love complicated.
So we could listen to it on slow-mo and then maybe we understand it even better.
So would you say in, I don't know, the 10 years Bitcoin has been around, this is pretty bullish for the Bitcoin asset or not really?
I think it's very bullish for price on Bitcoin, yes.
I think it adds validity.
It adds, you know, the want and the urge to hold and have it.
A lot of people have been wanting to enter this market and just haven't done it just on the hem that they could lose their Bitcoin or they don't feel they're responsible enough to hold it.
And they will go through places like BlackRock and other places to have Bitcoin or exposure to the asset.
So I think it's very positive for Bitcoin, in my opinion.
Ladies and gentlemen, do you know what this means?
Let me tell you what this means.
Yes, sir.
We got money to give away because Will told me that fucking long Bitcoin.
All you have to do is repost the room.
I appreciate you.
ETH on the way to some wallets right now.
Thank you guys for the support.
We got Akilahs on the stage.
You get blessed with the first take of the day, sir.
What's going on?
Thank you for being here.
Talk to us.
Profit, thank you so much.
So first of all, I wanted to thank Will for this amazing summary.
And second, I just wanted to basically, I read the title and it said what the fuck is an ETF.
And so because I'm a financial lawyer, I wanted to kind of jump in, explain a bit in simple terms what's an ETF and what's the impact on the market.
So an ETF basically is used to get access to some markets.
So for example, if I want to invest in Indian companies to get exposure on the Indian economy, instead of going and buying one stock, two stocks or three stocks of companies out there, I would go into an ETF, for example.
And get access to a kind of a diversified pool of stocks.
When it comes to the Bitcoin ETF, it's a totally different dynamic.
And so for retail investors, it doesn't really make sense because I could go and buy a Bitcoin directly or a part of a Bitcoin.
So the ETFs were very good for gold, for example, in the early 2000s.
And that was something that was really constructive for gold.
And even with gold, it took a lot of time for basically a lot of institutions and companies to start buying those gold ETFs.
So I wouldn't expect that this BTC ETF would get a lot of traction early on.
But moving forward, as Will said, it will give it, basically, it will become more legitimate and kind of more secure.
And I just wanted to highlight something very important that Gary Gensler tweeted today, the head of the SEC.
He said he was he tweeted a kind of thread.
He tried to do a thread, but it was really like a BS thread.
Like he it was some kind of maybe intern doing the thread or something trying to copy someone from the space.
But, yeah, he did.
He did a thread and he said, do not invest in crypto because it's dangerous.
Only invest with basically companies that are regulated.
And so, in a sense, he was hinting on the fact that you could invest in ETFs because I'm going to regulate them, in a sense.
So I think that I think that that gives a strong signal that all the pension funds, institutional investors are going to move towards ETFs because they want to comply with some regulations and they want to meet some kind of requirements for their investors.
And so that's going to push institutional money towards BTC, which also goes into what Will said.
We're not going to have those major swings downwards moving forward.
It's going to become a bit more stable.
So to summarize what my point and my take, basically, BTC ETF is not really relevant right now for retailers, retail investors like us.
I mean, we could directly go into a wallet, MoonPay or whatever, and buy a Bitcoin or a part of a Bitcoin.
It's going to give it basically more credibility when it comes to institutions.
And this will reflect into more liquidity moving forward.
So that's kind of I wanted to try to explain ETFs.
I'm not sure if it was too complicated.
So that was my take.
Thank you, man.
I appreciate that.
Quickly going to go to Steve, and then I would love to hear from Matt.
Go ahead, Steve.
Yeah, I actually had a question for Will because, I mean, I have a cursory understanding of these markets, and I thought that analysis and that breakdown was great, like very understandable in how you put it down.
But I guess my question would be, you mentioned like, hey, there are people who miss this who are trying to do higher beta plays right now.
If somebody missed sort of they're like, oh, my God, I only have, you know, 0.05 Bitcoin right now, which is still a ton.
But, you know, for the average human being, like, what do you think is the next down the line play?
Do you think it becomes a basket of cryptos?
Do you think it goes down market cap wise?
Because there's such smaller market caps beyond what Bitcoin has.
And I'm curious what Will's take on that is after Bitcoin, obviously, it's going to be a while, but what's the next domino to fall in that sense?
My thought is always like a ripple effect.
It's the same thing with stocks, right?
So, like, when bad things happen, all the liquidity gets sucked up in the biggest assets.
So, Bitcoin, the biggest asset.
And then Amazon, we'll say Apple, so on and so forth, Facebook, all the biggest assets.
So, all the liquidity gets sucked up in the doze.
And as participants become more comfortable with the market, you then start to see those profits or those flows move into mid caps.
And then as people start to get really frothy and people have made quite a bit of money on their mid caps, you then start to see that flow out to low caps.
So, like, it's all about knowing where you're at in the market.
Like, we're already seeing L1 activity, right?
So, we're seeing some flows into mid caps.
We haven't quite seen a lot of flows into small caps yet.
So, like, I guess air and opportunity growth is small caps, but that's the highest risk factor, too, on the curve.
So, that's kind of the other thing you have to consider when you're doing that.
So, when I say you have to play catch up, like, you essentially, if you miss the entire move, you have to take more risk, right?
And this is why it's better to be risky when nobody else is being risky because you don't have to take as much risk.
You can take less risk than everybody else.
Whereas, if you wait and you wait and you wait and you wait, and again, this is an FA.
It's just a fundamental, I guess, thesis that you should always keep in the back of your mind when you're investing.
Then, eventually, at a certain point, once price has exceeded beyond a certain position, you then, at that point, have to take on a lot more risk, which is really going to screw you if it ends up being wrong.
And that's always the position you don't want to put yourself into.
So, you want to put yourself into a position to understanding where the market is and where people hate it the most and then start looking to position in those areas specifically.
So, like, I guess, for me, like, if I were to sideline the whole time, I would probably have to primarily be at big caps and small caps to catch up to the moves that have already occurred in a lot of this market.
So, I'm not telling you guys what to do financially.
I'm just telling you, like, what I would do to, like, catch up to, like, the moves I've already missed at that point.
But I've been positioning.
So, because I've been positioning, I don't have to risk as much as the rest of the market may have to.
And I think a lot of the market sat sidelined and really didn't position on these moves.
And there's just so much seethe on the timeline, man.
Like, people just continually keep talking about some kind of retrace that's fundamentally just going to be a smaller pullback at a smaller time frame that's, you know, while the market continues to trend to the upside, in my opinion.
Appreciate that, Will.
Matt, first of all, thank you so much for your time today, sir.
Really appreciate you being here.
Please go ahead.
The floor is yours.
Oh, no.
He said, I don't want to be on this stage, Shanice.
I got stage fright.
I don't know what happened, Matt.
I'm going to try to bring you back.
Maybe he got rubbed.
Liz!
While we get him back up, talk to us.
What's going on?
Oh, Will, I wish I would have had this conversation with you earlier because I don't like trading crypto, but I do indices.
So, I'm clearly playing out this head and shoulder.
Last week, indices are going down.
This week, I'm like, no, it's still going to come back to, like, my shoulder.
Fuck no.
Took me out.
So, I wish we would have had this conversation because, yeah, everything is fucking pumping right now.
So, you took your position a little too early, sis.
It's all good.
We do that a lot.
It's all right.
We live and we learn.
But, yeah, that's right, ladies and gentlemen.
You heard a woman here trading.
I know you guys are used to bro rooms and bro, bro, bro.
No, no, no.
We got all types of traders here.
Women, men.
We love to see it.
Matt, you're back, hon.
Please go ahead.
Hey, Profits.
Thanks for having me.
Hey, Will.
Thanks for the kind words earlier.
Yeah.
So, wow, there's a lot of different topics to hit on.
Let me touch on the previous question that was to Will.
That was an excellent question of, okay, if you missed 2023, what's one way you could catch up or what are you looking for in the future?
I think, honestly, the biggest thing the markets are missing is, I mean, we all know Bitcoin is one of the most misunderstood assets out there, but Bitcoin businesses are, like, misunderstood squared.
And there are going to be companies, like, after this ETF is in the rearview mirror, there are going to be publicly traded companies with positive cash flow that look at what Michael Saylor and MicroStrategy did
and say, why the fuck can't we?
Why can't we do that?
And I don't mean taking the entire balance sheet and dumping it into Bitcoin, but let's just pretend, like, what if we're a bicycle repair shop?
Or what if we're auto parts?
Like, anything that has nothing to do with Bitcoin, but you're making positive cash flow, and we just say, look, every $1 out of $2 we make in the future, we're going to put 50% of our profit into Bitcoin.
That company is going to explode in market cap, in value.
And they don't have to go the over-leveraged balls to the wall like Michael Saylor did, but you better believe they're going to be some sort of really massive move, leverage play on Bitcoin.
And it's not going to just be a one-off.
Like, I'm ready for all the other companies that, again, have nothing to do with crypto.
It's really important to have differentiated profits, differentiated cash flow.
So if Bitcoin goes in a bear market, they're buying more Bitcoin, not less.
That's key.
But I'm ready for those companies, because that's coming.
Because this ETF thing, everyone's going to be wondering, like, well, what's the next thing?
That's the most obvious next thing.
And two, I think one thing that people are not appreciating with all these ETFs coming to the market is this is one of the easiest ways.
These are like Web3 wallets, honestly.
And I know that's a bit of a hot take with Bitcoin maxis and OGs.
But let's face it.
If all of us up here on stage, let's just pretend we're a company and we want to put Bitcoin on our balance sheet.
Well, who the hell are we trusting with the keys?
Will, are you trusting me?
Am I trusting profits?
Are we trusting Steve?
Like, no, we're not trusting any single one of us with the Bitcoin keys.
We know how everyone here has been here too long.
You know how easy it is to, you know, cash out and run.
So a Bitcoin ETF, honestly, it makes a lot of sense for companies or groups or just a group or just family individuals that, you know what?
I don't really trust you.
You don't really trust me.
But we're all customers of Fidelity or we all have a Bitwise account or we all, you know, whatever.
We all bank at BlackRock anyway.
So, you know, we'll just let them do it.
Because none of us are going out tonight and spending Bitcoin on coffee with that.
No, we're trying to hold that Bitcoin securely, cheaply into the future and benefit from the value.
So that's just – when you start thinking of it in that way, it's like, no, it's not that, like, all these boomers who are already 65 and older and in retirement, oh, they're going to flood into Bitcoin.
Ah, forget that.
Forget that.
It's the Gen Z.
It's the millennials that are trying to figure out a way, like, how can we get Bitcoin exposure?
But we don't – none of us actually trust each other.
But we have a ton of cash that we're trying to put into play in Bitcoin.
That's the key.
Yo, well said.
I will say, Mr. Matt, here in Miami, the guys, the Gen Z guys are trading in their Bitcoin at Club 11 for Casamica bottles.
That's a fact.
I've seen it with my own eyes.
However, you're on the other side buying it.
I already know, Matt.
I already know.
Will, I'll go to you real quick and then we'll go to people.
Go ahead.
No, I just wanted to touch base on what he was saying.
And, yeah, just to what Matt was saying is, like, that just – it adds comfort to the purchase, right?
If you don't have to trust others, you can all invest together.
You can all pool in at BlackRock or Fidelity or any of these other firms because why?
Because if they fumble the ball on the Bitcoin, guess who's responsible to pay you still?
They are.
And that's the point at the end of the day.
You have a middleman.
Yes, you're paying them probably more than the asset of the value cost, but that's – you're also getting that comfort of basically insurance stating that you're going to get paid back if they fumble the ball and lose their keys or somebody robs them or whatever, right?
They got to be the one to figure out that end of the deal.
So, again, it allows money to move into the space and be comfortable moving into the space.
It doesn't mean BlackRock can't get hacked or can't get exploited.
Like, that could 100% happen.
Would it be bad?
Yes, and I would think that they probably have safeguard after safeguard after safeguard in place set up for that Bitcoin to keep it away from people.
But anything could happen at the end of the day when it comes to that.
But I would say this is positive on inflows because, again, if they get hacked and they lose all their Bitcoin, guess what?
They got to buy more to be able to equal out what people have on the book still.
So either way, they're going to be investing in the market.
I also think you're going to get to the previous question.
I forget who asked it, but it was an excellent question.
Bitcoin always has a major buy opportunity every year.
Set your watch to it.
It works like clockwork.
2024 is also going to have pullbacks, too.
Like, don't think that this is just straight up and then straight up some more.
You'll get pullbacks.
If you haven't taken the time, everyone keeps comparing all these Bitcoin ETFs to when gold had their ETFs.
But go back to 2004, specifically November 2004, when the first gold ETF got approved and launched, GLD, the Big Daddy.
Instead, the week it launched, that was the high watermark local top for gold for another year.
For a year, that was the top.
So I'm not saying that's going to happen for Bitcoin.
I'm sure we're going to pump when we get official approval.
I'm sure we're going to get a pump when we get the official launch date.
Those are two different dates, by the way.
There's approval and then there's launch dates for all these different ETFs.
I'm sure price will go up.
But, like, don't just think that, oh, and if you missed it, there's just no opportunity for the rest of the year.
I call bull on that.
And we have history to prove it.
It's funny.
I just want to put out one more thing, Matt.
It's funny how every single cycle, people get literally psyoped every single cycle into not buying the lows and into not selling the highs.
They always get psyoped into it.
But I've seen it now for two consecutive cycles, people continually getting sapped on both sides.
So, again, you've got to look at where you are.
Just figure out the halving.
Figure out where you are in the halving.
And then start positioning when it makes sense.
Not just against the halving specifically, but also against price, right?
Is your price at support?
Okay, great.
Is it not at support?
Okay, great.
Let's wait for it to get there, so on and so forth.
I mean, I literally let the market come to me.
I didn't come to the market.
What does that mean?
That means when the market started getting within 5 to 10K of my range bottom, I started DCAing in.
And I continued to DCAing all the way into the bottom, and then I basically came up, took a little bit of profit out.
But that profit I took out, basically, I rotated it into a higher beta so I can capitalize on upside from the market.
It's a little bit of a different strategy.
Not everybody can play that, but it's something that I did specifically to be able to capitalize on my sats.
I mean, even if you're bullish on Bitcoin, you still want to make exponentials, right?
Even if you're bullish on, we'll say, Tesla, and you're all in on Tesla, you still want to outpace it a little bit, so you'll buy some higher beta things.
Like, we'll say, Rivian, Lucid.
Like, I'm just throwing out names of other EV companies, Polaris, so on and so forth.
And you'll buy those to kind of offset your position at Tesla, because if Tesla grows exponentially, we should see the field as a whole grow exponentially.
And the same thing goes with crypto.
If Bitcoin grows exponentially, we should see crypto as a whole grow exponentially by market cap and so on and so forth.
You know, real quick, we got some heavy hitters on the stage, ladies and gentlemen.
Watch out.
It's like over a million dollars in Bitcoin alone on the stage.
Fucking traps us.
Anyway, people, go ahead.
You got the floor.
And then I'm going to pass it to Bad Brothers.
Hey, good afternoon, everybody.
Really hope everybody's having a blessed start to the week, y'all.
Again, profits will always appreciate these banger spaces.
Look, I just have a quick take and then a quick question.
So one thing that I've truly realized after being in these spaces these last few months is we all need to realize why we're in this industry, right?
So something that profits said even today was even if you're not a trader, know why you're here, right?
So one thing I've realized is my whole goal is to make sure my children have a future.
That five, ten years from now, they're secure.
They're able to go to college.
They're able to have their homes, so on and so forth.
I just don't feel comfortable trading, looking at the market and gambling like that.
But something I've also realized, and I know I've said this before, but I've been through, so this will be my second cycle.
I'm seeing a lot of similarities to the cannabis industry and crypto.
And what I mean by that is I feel that after these ETFs get signed, a lot of regulation is coming and the Wild Wild West days are over.
Now, I had my mother call me yesterday actually kind of panicking and saying, you know, she gets under half a percent of compound interest in her savings and she's wanting to move basically a good chunk of her money into Bitcoin to get some of that interest.
But when we talked last week about not your wallet, not your keys, Will, this is my question to you.
What do you think is the best way to find these like main exchanges to actually hold, let's say, for another decade or so because you actually believe in the technology and you want to get, you know, a good five percent interest?
Do I look at places like Coinbase that actually have an IPO launched?
There's a place called Nexo that is a Swiss bank.
Like, do we go overseas for things like that?
What do you suggest if you were in my shoes and you're here for the long term and not so much as a trader?
Oh, I can't tell you directly what you need to be doing or anything like that.
Definitely not an F.A. on here.
I would tell you, I would simply just trust somebody who's an actual company personally, if it were me.
Right.
Like somebody who has like a stock company.
I know Coinbase has one, but I don't know like what their functionality is on payback, paybacks or so on and so forth.
So if you're looking to earn interest, it's such a hard call in this space, to be honest with you.
Like there's going to be a lot of people who say, oh, we'll trust this.
Trust that.
Like there's don't trust anybody.
Don't trust anything.
Don't trust me.
Just know that, you know, where you should be putting your money is ultimately, man, it's such a hard question to answer.
It's your decision where you want to put it specifically, right?
But at the end of the day, I would say in crypto, it's hard to say that there's a safe place to put your money to earn interest.
I'll put it that way.
But if you're looking to capitalize on upside, that's a different question, right?
Capitalize on upside.
You could buy through BlackRock and so on and so forth and make them responsible for it.
But getting APR from anybody, you're taking more risk by giving them your crypto to do so.
Gotcha.
Okay.
I really do appreciate that.
And I hope you know, man, every time I take this knowledge in, I definitely don't take it like, you know, ask financial advice.
But I do look up to you, brother.
I think you're an extremely intelligent person.
And I really do think you have a genuine heart.
So I just kind of wanted to see what your take on that was.
Appreciate you, brother.
Guys, guys, guys, guys.
Speaking of.
Yeah, Luna, Luna, let's relax.
I'm going to tell him now.
This is a safe space.
This is not only a safe space.
This is Web 3 Exposed, 5.53 p.m. Eastern.
On the dot, we have hands.
I don't want to go to any of you.
I have to go to you.
I'm just messing around.
Go ahead, bad brothers.
The floor is yours.
Yo, yo.
Yeah, people's ex to why we're here.
I'm here to abolish the state, but we can get into that later.
So, Prof, do you let me know?
That's good.
But, no, yeah, to what Matt was saying, I mean, you know, I think it was spot on.
Obviously, you know, I think a big company, they'd probably have, like, a multi-sig, maybe with three people.
It could be marketing.
I don't know.
I got you, Will.
I'll fix you, Will, because you're always having fucking technical difficulties.
I'm sorry, bad brothers.
Once again, for the interruption, go ahead.
Now, my next question was actually for Will, so I'll always for him to come back up.
Of course it was.
Of course it was.
Of course it was.
We're going to do a GoFundMe to fix this dude's headset and his phone, because every single Twitter space is, there's an issue.
Not that one's in the blue.
There's not an issue, because now, guess what?
Now I got to move people around.
It's knocking people off the fucking stage.
Now it's like a whole fucking thing.
All right, relax, Prof, it's not a big deal.
It's not the end of the world.
It's fine.
He's back.
All right, William, are you there?
It still shows him in the, oh, here it comes.
All right.
Yeah, it's like, Liz, just stick your thumb where you should stick your, anyway, Will, go ahead.
He has a question for you.
No, I was wondering if you know any of the details of, because I was hearing in a space this morning on, what I was figuring is we get this ETF, we get a green candle,
we'll probably retrace and maybe trade sideways a bit for the halving, but what I heard this morning was that some of these ETFs have like these limits up to like $5 billion,
where they have, I don't know if it's the right word for it, but basically promotional rates, where the fees are less than they would.
So, I mean, I don't know if people are going to be trying to ape in things just to get that, you know, less fee, because obviously it's up to $5 billion.
If you're putting $100 million into this, 5% is a lot of money.
So, I don't know if you've looked into that or you have any opinion on that.
I mean, personally, I think that, you know, it's a great incentive, but I think people will still have trust issues probably for a couple of years, even up until then.
But once they see BlackRock and these other firms, you know, handle it well, I think at that point we'll see more.
I think this is going to be a lot more muted than what a lot of people are expecting, right?
The ETF overall, I think it'll be good for passives, but I think it'll be a lot more muted.
And then people will probably sell into it, right?
And you'll probably see some kind of like sideways chop, and then the market will take off again.
Like, I think people are too focused on ETF and not enough on where we are in the cycle and, you know, where Bitcoin can go after every happening.
Woo!
5.56 p.m. on the dot.
Steve, I cannot wait to get into your book in a few minutes.
I hope you have some time.
I'm going to pass it to the boy, Mike, a.k.a.
Trapperversity.
What kind of name is that, prophets?
Listen, this is the name of an individual that fucking prints.
And not just in the crypto market, in the e-com, in the mother, everything.
He probably sold something to your mom this morning on Amazon.
No cap.
One more thing, prophets.
Just one more thing.
Again, I think people need to understand, like, ETF is good for the space.
But, like, don't focus on it for short-term gains.
It's not there for short-term gains.
I think that's what people are so looking forward to is this short-term hump that they can just sell off into.
It's not what it's – it's there to give strength to the narrative, give strength to Bitcoin itself, that it's a good asset.
It's an asset worth investing into.
So, that's it.
Now, big facts.
Thank you for that.
What's up, Trapp?
Good to see you.
Yo, it's good, man.
It's always a pleasure being here.
Thank you for the invitation, as usual.
Big Will.
Good to hear you always, man.
Listen, I love coming to these things, man.
Just listening for a few minutes.
You guys got hella sauce here, man.
So, I like to put my two satoshis, right, because we don't talk about pennies anymore.
We talk about, instead of two cents, I'm going to put my two satoshis in here.
So, the way I think is kind of like what Profit was saying, right?
Diversity is key, and that's why, you know, I dip my toe in a little bit here and there.
And kind of like what Will was saying, I feel like a lot of the people that are focused on the short-term already missed out.
Because if you're thinking short-term, then that means you're missing out on the long-term situation that Bitcoin and any other asset can involve, right?
Whether it's a stock or whatever it is.
And so, I feel like it comes more of like a limiting belief or maybe a cultural upbringing where we're usually thinking about the weekend instead of the long-term.
Because the way I feel is that whenever Bitcoin is $100,000, $150,000, $2,000, it doesn't matter if you bought it at $30,000, $40,000, $50,000, $80,000.
What matters is that you continually bought, right?
And today, I actually posted something along the way because dollar-cost averaging is probably the best strategy that you can ever get into.
Because last year, by doing dollar-cost average, I was able to acquire entire Bitcoin by doing, you know, a couple hundred dollars, $500,000 here and there.
And that strategy is well overlooked within everywhere because people want to come in here and they want to get rich overnight.
But I tell you what, in my opinion, right, most of the people here and in general that are working today, you guys have 401ks.
You just say yes because of the match, but you don't even know what it's going through.
You just let it accumulate, right?
So I feel like Bitcoin is the same way.
You shouldn't be thinking now.
Bitcoin is a buy-only, save-up, right?
And then if you want to gamble, you want to make a little money, then go ahead and look at other avenues, right?
But Bitcoin, for me, is a buy-only dollar-cost average on red days.
And yeah, great.
We're going to have bumps here and there.
But in the end of the day, it's how much Bitcoin are you holding, right, in the long term, 10 years from now, 15 years from now.
And I guarantee you that most people are not bullish enough in the long term because obviously we hear a lot of ETF talk now and then we got the happy and there's a lot of things.
And kind of like Matt said, nothing ever goes all the way up, right?
So we should focus less on the short-term scenario and definitely on the long-term scenario, it's definitely a better possibility.
That's my two Satoshis.
Gotta love those two Satoshis.
What's up, Medejit?
You got the floor in this all.
Yo, yo, this fucking pump that we're having right now has me just like, I just want to like go on like this centralized perfect exchange and just long the fuck out of everything.
But like Will said, like, it's probably a little too choppy to be doing that right now.
So I'm just adding to my spot bags.
But yeah, I'm just super excited and I agree.
Not everyone is as bullish as they should be.
And I actually have a little note here on like a potential market outlook by one of my friends.
And it says, high conviction.
Lows are in for everything.
This is for January.
Lows are in for everything.
Made conviction.
Bitcoin goes to 55k.
Most altcoins underperform like Sol, AVAX, and Phantom.
Like the Boomer altcoins.
T and Cosmo ecosystem catches a bid.
Performs relatively well because of all the airdrops happening there.
Neutron, which I think is a paralyzed EVM, hits one bill in TVL, I think.
That's what they're saying there.
Injective outperforms Sol in C.
That would be cool.
I just bought a big bag of Injective over the weekend.
And then Sol consolidates this month while the Sol ecosystem coins start to pump, which they've already done.
But that would be like Dark, Shadow, NOS, Linfinity, SNS, Neon.
So those will all outperform Sol.
And then low conviction is Solana meme coins using returns.
Whiff and Bonk lows are in.
And ETH meme coins are dead.
And Elephant in the room.
Can we talk about ETH?
Like, does it hold this 0.05 ETH BTC or what?
What the hell?
Five years from now, is this the new IOTA?
Like, what's going on?
I want to hear your guys' thoughts.
This is the perfect time for me to enter, Profits.
I'm not an ETH Maxie.
No, please go ahead, Sol.
You got it.
Yeah, I'm an ETH builder, Matt.
And I'm going to tell you that like so much money and infrastructure rests on Ethereum that it's pretty much branded like BTC.
If people think ETH's going to fail, they think the whole space is going to fail.
I mean, you're talking about perfect execution and scaling throughout the whole life cycle of their product.
And now we're finding market stability.
So I think like people want the volatility, Matt, so they can build and get a bunch of money real quick.
But the truth is what we really want, what our parents want, is a little bit more stability so they can feel more comfortable coming in and not losing all their retirement.
And so this is like grounds my other point I wanted to make about Will.
I want to throw some concrete under Will's feet about the muted market that he thinks is going to come.
And I think you kind of hinted at this, Matt, is that like we're not going to get this big blowout event.
We're going to get like stability because that's what BlackRock promises our parents and our grandparents is that stability.
Like that's what their brand is.
They put money into that for years, for almost 40 years now.
And they're not going to change suit to – this is like one of hundreds of thousands of assets that they manage, right?
So like what – there's nothing in my mind that makes me think that they're going to like make this asset overperform or underperform.
I don't think it's priced in at all.
I think honestly they're going to set walls on both sides of the order book and they're going to let it fucking stabilize.
And then they're going to look good when they do that.
And if I'm wrong, I'm wrong.
But I think like that's the best bet I could make for myself is just like being a proponent of ETH being stable, being a proponent of Bitcoin being stable, and then getting their hikes when they really deserve them and they actually did something that was worthwhile.
So I think like a lot of us are growing and maturing.
We're learning how to properly speculate and analyze.
I've watched this with a lot of my friends like grow up in the last year or two and make way better decisions with their money, start paper trading when they should, and actually like start reading, right?
Like, so I do believe Ethereum has so much value on not only the back end, but the front end of its ecosystem that like it's not going to disappear.
I mean, you know, it's one of those things like if I wish death upon Ethereum, I wish death upon the whole ecosystem.
Same with Bitcoin.
I don't like – I'm not a big Bitcoin proponent, but I never wish death upon it because it's like, you know, it's the same team.
So I do believe like the people that want ETH to die are people that want to get like real big unhealthy green candles that will basically lose all of our parents' money.
And if we want this big onboarding event that we all talk about, you know, weekly, we really need to focus on that stability factor and actually getting caloric output from our ecosystem into the real world.
And that means like I want to buy a Corolla this year, like a nice, you know, four or five years old just to like – because I've been talking about it.
I want to buy it with Ether Bitcoin on a real platform.
And if I can see that happening this year, I think like I'll be ultra bullish if we can start buying cars and like different luxury assets for real.
Like that's I think what's going to like really put us into the threshold of like people giving a fuck.
If I can get a deal on something and an asset that I can't get in cash, then it makes more sense for me to maybe spend that asset on it or stable out, you know, if they're taking that option.
So I think like we need more infrastructure meant to take this – not necessarily Bitcoin because that's more of like you said, like a hold.
That's more of like a store of value.
But Ethereum is I think finding its way into prepping these layer twos into going into the major markets and acting as actual currencies in small ecosystems.
And when that happens, like everything that happens on Optimism comes back to ETH.
Everything that happens on Base comes back to ETH eventually.
So it's like there's a – it's like it's a big farm that's growing a lot of different crops.
And that diversity is its benefit, right, because it's not monocropped.
It is very diverse.
And that's why I'm bullish on ETH.
But it's a real question you're asking, Matt, because like it's been having weird price action.
I've noticed it myself every day.
And I'm actually kind of comfortable when I wake up now.
I'm like, damn, it's going to be in between $2,200 and $2,300.
Cool.
So when I saw it dip down under $2,200 today, I was like, oh, it's going back up.
And it did.
So I think we're getting more predictable events in these upper markets, in the upper threshold of our economy.
And that's what makes me Buffalo-ish.
This is my term I've been trying to push.
It's like bulls run alone.
Buffaloes run together.
They eat grass and they chill for long periods of time together as a community.
And then they run.
And when you hit that, when you hit the casino and you hear, Buffalo!
You see some old lady just like super happy.
Oh my God, that melts my heart.
So, you know, I'm all for the Buffalo run.
I think we should take it slow.
Eat some more grass.
And then let's get it together.
Right?
I think that's what we need to be on.
Before I pass it to Will, real quick, I will say that I think in all my years of investing in crypto, the biggest consistent disconnect is that we don't understand what it means when price is priced in to news and things of that nature.
And it can be very, for a newbie, like I got like six DMs today on Instagram because I showed how $60 billion entered the market in the last 48 hours.
And I, you know, don't like, I don't, I'm not some expert trader, none of that.
But I understood this concept years ago.
And this is when I learned how to trade more efficiently, follow the big money.
Right?
So I shared that and then I shared the ETF news.
And then six people were like, should I be buying Bitcoin right now?
And to be honest, you should have been buying Bitcoin for the last five years of me shilling it down your fucking throat.
But aside from that, yes, like DCA is the answer, right?
That's the answer.
And so when we talk about this news, it's not to make you have FOMO and go buy.
It's to understand, okay, look, you are in front of a big event, right?
A big news event.
Technical analysis aside, you're in front of a big news event.
How do you prepare before and after?
Because there's going to be more big events to come.
The last big event, which I don't hear anybody comparing besides Mr. Eric Crown, shout out to him, good YouTuber, or rather an analysis guy, an analyzer.
He compared the news of the Coinbase IPO going live to this new ETF event.
And it had some interesting, he had some interesting takes there.
And I make this a point because back then, it reminds me of then.
Everybody was like, do I buy the Coinbase stock?
Everybody was like, do I buy Bitcoin?
So have this news, understand this news, sure, but understand what it actually really, really means, right?
Will, go ahead.
No, I mean, I see it a couple of different ways.
ETF comes after the halving, we're above all-time high, it could signal a top, right?
ETF comes before the halving or below the previous high, it could signal a possible pullback before the actual launch.
But it depends on where you are with price, first off.
That's kind of a major for me, is where are you at with price when ETF launches?
And then in addition to where are you at with price when ETF launches, I think just a lot of people, they're anticipating, I think, major pullbacks based on economic conditions.
I don't see the economic conditions in comparison to the market just running, you know, with, I mean, granted, yeah, we could say it's running with few brain cells, that's for sure.
But I would say at the same time, that liquidity flows is king, right?
So regardless of whether it has few brain cells or not, you just have to follow the flows, and the flows were trending up.
I think a lot of people are thinking that this whole thing turns back around and completely retraces itself.
I don't.
I wanted to give credit, too, to Bullish Trader.
I know he was on the show a long time ago.
Bruh, get the fuck...
No, hold on, hold on.
Let me just, let me finish the...
It's nothing crazy.
It's nothing crazy.
It's literally, it was just on one thought that he said one time, right?
And it was around, you know, they're going to come in and stabilize, and it's going to make it boring.
Yeah, they're going to come in and stabilize the market, I think, in some ways.
And I think, like, if you're anticipating the market to just dump into them launching an ETF, I don't think that's going to be the case.
I think that you'll see stability going all the way into the ETF, right?
At least.
And then I wanted to also point out another major event, and that specifically is the presidential election this year.
Either way, I mean, look, this isn't a take sides.
We'll just say both presidents.
We don't have to name names.
Both people that are running for president, or, oh, here, we'll say, I'll go one better.
Everybody who would be running for president this year has potential for a second term, right, including the current president.
So since all of them have potential for a second term, I would anticipate the current president would try to make markets look fairly good going into an election so they are able to possibly get.
I'm not saying they will.
I'm just saying so they think they can possibly get another return, right?
And when you look at it from that perspective, it gives every incentive for the current president to keep markets healthy or at least not shake them, right?
In which case, I don't see any downturn through 2024 due to that specifically.
If that means that cutting rates, which is what I think they're going to do this year, then they'll do that.
And if that means pumping liquidity into the market, a.k.a. backdoor liquidity, I think they'll do that.
So those two scenarios are kind of ones that you have to keep in the back of your mind if you're looking for downside for the markets.
Yo, RDC, we'd love to hear from you, fam.
And then Trap.
I guess my thoughts on it, too.
I'm kind of mostly in agreement with everybody.
I'll say this on, like, the buying and selling of your Bitcoin.
Like, when you want the price to go up so you can sell, the thing you do is you give away your power as a community in the market by not holding any assets.
You do the same shit with property and all these different things.
And, like, that PVP construct is how you make money, but it's also how you split up societies, right?
And so maybe there's a thing together where we say we, the people that weren't here, you know, all these other people were trying to make it easier to onboard people.
But we slogged through the hard thing.
And so we should keep our assets to show for it because by the time they figure it out, like, we should profit at the end and not sell out into the profit, right?
Like, to me, like, when you, I don't know, buying and selling is okay, but you should always be accumulating because if you're not accumulating, you're just not showing any faith in your decision, right?
And then, like, toward my other end, no, I guess that's all I really got to say about that.
That and Bad Brothers, I think I've been in almost every space you've been in today, low-key.
I don't even know how that happened, but it just happened.
All right, so since we're back on the discussion on the ETF, I always like to say when in doubt, zoom out, right?
So that's one of the things. So if you zoom out, technical analysis usually is looking really good, especially on the six months per candle chart on Bitcoin.
But to zoom in on what's going on right now is that most of the time I posted a chart that whenever there's a sell the news event, like the Coinbase or the Bitcoin ETF futures, which doesn't affect the spot price, right?
There was a sell the news event.
Now, I feel a little different about this, which could still happen, right?
But the reason why I feel different about this is because the people that usually buy to sell the news cannot buy Bitcoin right now, right?
So technically, obviously, everybody can buy, but not the institutions, not the people that are looking to get in through something that is already publicly traded or some type of regulations, right?
So I feel like that's not happening this time.
They are waiting for that to happen so that they can get in.
So long story short, I feel like we like kind of like Will said, too, and we I'm very a little I'm still bullish for the year also because the fact that a lot of people don't think about this.
But last March, OK, when the banks started failing, the regional banks and there was a bank run of the banks, the Fed had to step in and lend 60, 80 billion dollars to these banks.
And all those loans are going to come crawling back now in March and people are going to have to pay those loans.
Now, even if the currency is bad, even if the Fed's pivoting after July or so and we see a recession, because historically, whenever the Fed's pivot, it's not a good thing.
We have the market actually corrects 20, 30, 40 percent when that happens initially.
And then and then we see we see a bounce.
Right. But the idea here is that last time this happened, even the BlackRock CEO went on national television and called crypto a flight to safety.
Right. So therefore, if we do see the banks melting again, which would be a black swan event, kind of.
I think that will be bullish. And also historically, whenever a president and incumbent president, which means the one that is already in charge coming into the election,
usually the economy kind of like we'll say as well, the economy stays pumping because they want to make sure that they get reelected or at least have a chance to because presidents don't really do well on getting reelected if the economy is not doing good.
So all these things together make me feel like we're still very bullish, obviously not all the way up.
Right. Everything goes up and down sideways. But I feel like I'm feeling very good about 2024.
Four and plus to finish it up for all my numbers, people. 2024, if you add it up, is the number eight.
That's infinity. That's money. That's love. You know what I'm saying?
We all getting it this year, man. I'm happy. And I think that it's the year of the woods looking good.
You got it. You got it. You got it, bro. It's the magic here, bro.
You already know.
I'm breathing fire on them. Let's go.
Johnny boy, what's good?
You know, what's going on, guys? Will Profits, thanks for having me.
We actually go way back from another time when we worked together as co-workers.
But I was just going to comment on on Will's analysis there with presidents who have been successful with reelections during recessions.
Since 1900, there's only been one president who's won a reelection with a recession occurring at the same time or in the last two years of their first term.
And since then, you know, four presidents who ran for a second term during an economic downturn were all unsuccessful.
So the two people are.
What's that?
Roosevelt, right?
Yeah. Yeah. You said there was one.
You know, you got to give us got to give us who the one was.
William McKinley.
Old guy.
Nobody knows that.
He got shot.
But I thought he got killed.
That's not that's not fair.
No, yeah.
You are.
Because after his first term, we were still in the Depression.
Sorry.
Go ahead, Johnny.
Yeah, no, I was just bringing that up just because, you know, I'm sure the two, you know, incumbent presidents who are going to battle it out this year, they're looking at those stats and they're going to want to beef up the economy because the economy really is the number one issue when it comes to voters patterns.
So, I mean, I just wanted to comment that on Will.
And then, yeah, the only real the only real concern I have, you know, about, you know, some of these assets that did well in 2023 is that if you look at the world economy, I mean, you see China.
China's economy is not doing too great.
Their stock market has completely just gone to shit this past year, as well as you're seeing a lot of issues in the euro zone and in other places around the world.
So, I mean, as far as, like, the world economy goes, it's not the greatest.
But, you know, I think that things like Bitcoin can be, you know, used not as, you know, a risk asset anymore.
And we might see a transition into having it as a fight to safety.
Now, I'd agree.
And then what do you call?
I think, you know, especially with the economy, I know I've heard some people say, well, they're talking about cutting rates and maybe the economy will be better.
If they cut rates, I don't see housing prices going down that much, number one.
Number two, you run the inflation risk.
And even, you know, people see the prices at the grocery store.
They're used to the prices that were, you know, maybe five years ago, right?
They still go every day and go, oh, God, how much is this?
So even though the rate of inflation is going down, you know, those prices aren't coming down right now.
So either way, it's not going to be looking better for them anytime soon.
Yeah, and when it comes to Bitcoin, I mean, just like Will was saying, it's all about the flows.
And if you look at the last quarter of 2023, I mean, the flows were just crazy big.
Even this first week of 2024, you know, you saw, what was it, 151 million in the first week of inflows.
$113 million of that just went straight to Bitcoin.
Crypto equities, crypto stocks have been doing well as well.
And what I really look at and focus on is central bank net liquidity and the rate of change of how that increases.
Because if you look at where it bottomed, if you would have just paid attention to central bank liquidity, and there's a chart for that,
that's essentially where Bitcoin bottoms, and that's, you know, you would have done really well if you're just looking at that metric.
I'm not a fan of single factor metrics, but central bank liquidity is a pretty good one when it comes to, you know,
taking a look at the relationship between that and Bitcoin.
You know, you know what I'm really excited about right now?
Farming some of these Bitcoin protocols.
Now they've got, like, a lot of DeFi and NFT5 protocols popping up.
Does anybody know any good ones?
Besides Bitcoin?
Yeah, but, and I haven't done anything on that yet.
I have to because I know they're probably going to do something, and I'm going to regret it if I don't.
But, no, yeah.
I mean, everybody's been talking about farming lately, whether it be on Solana, Bitcoin.
You know, it's a great way if you have, especially if you have sides, if you put in Joy to, you know,
potentially get some air drops and stuff.
The only thing I would say is just, you know, be careful.
I mean, I think a lot of people talk about farming like, oh, yeah, I just put money here and I'll do.
I mean, there is always the risk that one of these protocols that you're farming gets hacked and you lose your money in it, right?
So, you know, pro-farming, go do that.
But, you know, I'm just saying be careful with that type of stuff because that is a possibility.
Yeah, they're going to farm your liquidity, Bad Rose.
So, they're going to farm.
Sandman, go ahead.
Hey, yo.
How's it going, guys?
Sorry, Elon was rugging me.
I'd, like, jump up here.
What's going on, Sandman?
Fucking Elon, man.
I'm trying to get in the ring with that MF-er.
Anyways, I don't know, man.
I might be the only person up here.
I actually think Saul nailed it.
I don't think Bitcoin, I think, like, when the big institutions get involved,
their interest is in making sure that there's stability.
And so, I, while I'm always, like, infinitely bullish on Bitcoin,
it's, like, just, you know, something everyone should be involved in.
And I don't believe that, like, if you're in this to, like, have significant VIG or upside.
I'm not sure, personally speaking, that Bitcoin is the answer.
And I might be the only person that says that.
But usually when everyone else is bullish, I'm usually trying to go the opposite direction
and sell against it is my own personal POV.
And personally speaking, I think where I'm really focused is, like, what are the peripherals, right?
Anytime you see, like, a big news event, a lot of people like to focus on the topic at hand, which is Bitcoin.
A lot of people overlook a lot of the things that might happen as a result of the ETF.
Like, as an example, RWAs and collateralization, right, is a good component where a lot of these institutions,
if they're going to have significant liquidity up against, you know, the markets here,
they're going to have to have good collateralization,
which means that they're going to have to have assets on chain that they can collateralize against,
especially if they're going to be able to get the scale that they want.
And so also we talked about this, I think, the other night, but identity management,
another thing that is going to have a huge vector on institutional involvement.
And so for me, I'm looking for, like, where the upside is.
And I like to look at the peripherals.
And, you know, everyone else is focused on Bitcoin.
I'm kind of looking at, like, what are these institutions going to need aside from Bitcoin
to make this like a scalable operation for them?
So, yeah, that's just kind of my take on it.
Do you guys know anything about, like, Grayscale and Chainlink doing something together right now
in the last couple of days?
I was hearing some stuff.
Somebody might have more information.
I just was curious.
I have not.
I am very familiar with what, like, a lot of the institutions are doing for collateralization on AVAX,
but nothing with Chainlink.
Johnny, my bad, bro.
I was dealing with my dog over here.
First of all, thank you for being here.
And I appreciate you giving your take.
Will, look, the whole gang's here.
Where's Marty?
We just need Marty.
And it's a party.
It's a party.
How you been, Johnny?
Thank you for chiming in.
How's it hanging over there?
It's pretty good.
It's pretty good.
Can't complain, you know.
It's good keeping up with you guys as well as Will.
I'm in a couple group chats with Will.
So, I mean, keeping up with him a lot.
So, you know, for those who don't know, I learned all my TA from Will back in the day.
So, I mean, I have nothing but to give back to this guy here.
Heck, yeah.
I'd love to see it.
Johnny's such a good sport.
Anybody would be just fucking blessed to have this guy on their team.
Met this guy, IRL, by the way, ladies and gentlemen.
I can't say that about a lot of you people here on Web3.
I just hang out with you on Twitter spaces, and I don't know who the hell you really are.
But, yeah.
Thank you, Johnny.
Appreciate you.
Go ahead, Will.
I know you're on mic.
Go ahead.
No, you're on mic because he wronged.
Ladies and gentlemen, he wronged again.
We should just do a contest at this point.
Matt, back to you.
Well, I just wanted to thank you, Profits, for having me up.
Thanks again, Will.
I do have a dinner I've got to get going to, running to.
But I wanted to reiterate, like, look, ETFs, the Bitcoin ETFs, they're going to happen.
We just don't know exactly which date, but they're going to happen.
So, where's the alpha?
Where's the way to make money?
What's the biggest, easiest, easy button after ETFs?
And I'll repeat what I was saying earlier in the space.
I think it's public companies that announce they're putting Bitcoin on their balance sheet.
Very similar to Michael Saylor, but it doesn't have to be crazy over levers to his degree.
For instance, you know, everyone knows Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway.
They have 40% of their market cap tied up in Apple stock.
Like, that's what you can do if you're just, again, a random auto parts company, a random telecom.
It doesn't matter.
As long as it's not Bitcoin or crypto related, I want to see those news headlines that, you know what,
now that Fidelity or BlackRock or Valkyrie or etc. is going to house and store and keep the Bitcoin, great.
Now, we're going to put some of it on our balance sheet because we want our cash making money for us over one year, five year, ten year terms.
And those are going to be such easy buttons.
People are going to boo-hoo those and, like, make excuses of why, like, well, who cares if auto parts has Bitcoin?
What does that mean?
It's huge.
It's absolutely freaking huge and an easy way to make a lot of percent gain.
I'm going to take advantage of it.
It's such a stupid, easy button, left curve, but don't overthink it.
It's going to be a cheat code moving forward.
I mean, I think it's almost kind of like those life insurance trusts, like the personal ones.
I think this is what most banks were scared of because if a company stacks a bunch of Bitcoin on their balance sheet and then they say,
no, no, I'm not going to take BlackRock's money so that they can push an agenda on me and what I have to sell or the way I have to sell it.
Like they say they do at their conventions, they say, I will just borrow against my equity in the Bitcoin to do my expansion, right?
When you start to see stuff like that, I think that's going to be businesses are going to go, oh, they fucked around and found out.
That's interesting because I think that's – to me, I think that's the most beneficial is the moment a company says, no, we're going to expand, but we're going to borrow the money from ourselves.
But what was it – so again, the reason why this is going to be such a paradigm shift is the biggest reason these companies weren't doing it in the past is, well, all the red tape about how are we going to custody it?
Who are we going to trust?
How do we audit this shit?
I mean our accounting department doesn't know how to handle this.
Well, post ETF, it's so easy for all of them.
We're just holding ETF shares.
BlackRock, Fidelity, Valkyrie, Bitwise, they have to manage all the accounting.
You don't have to do it.
You don't have to pay for it.
You're going to get your financial report every month, quarter, and year, and then that's already approved for the SEC.
See, you don't – all you're doing is just copying and pasting.
Like this is such an easy button, and I'm excited for those because it's going to be – there's going to be some juicy trades.
Juicy, juicy.
Enjoy that dinner, sir.
And I appreciate you as always contributing to the space.
You guys go ahead and follow Matt if you liked what you heard.
Definitely appreciate you.
Hope to see you again on the show.
So, ladies and gentlemen, 6.28 p.m. Eastern, a few of you have gotten some ETH below.
There's 69 comments.
Yeah, baby, for the culture.
Maybe we don't comment anymore.
Just kidding.
Continue to comment.
Repost the room.
Going to give away a little bit more ETH here.
And before we get to the next segment, I do want to say again, guys, Happy New Year, and I appreciate you.
You are God's highest form of creation, and you deserve everything that you desire.
I genuinely mean that.
I'm not trying to get all motivation on you, but I just want you to know and be reminded.
It's not easy out here, man.
It's not easy out here.
The world's crazy.
Continue to, you know, tell the people you love that you love them, right?
Take care of yourself.
Always, always take care of yourself.
But, yeah, we're going to jump into the next segment.
Also, if you haven't already, Web3Exposed.com.
Hit up the website.
Add your email.
Get in the Discord.
The party is live and popping.
All you got to do is get in there and tag the shit out of Will, and that actually gives you access to some rewards.
Go ahead and do that.
Harass him in that Discord.
Also, we're printing in the trading channel.
Like I said, I have a, what's it called?
An account that I'm taking from $200 to $10,000.
That's the goal.
It's a challenge.
Am I telling you to go trade crazy and gamble?
I'm just letting you know I'm doing it publicly, and I'm sharing my trades in there.
Can you start a book?
Can you start a sports book on Will's, a book on Will's phone going out or, like, rugging?
We're going to do that and a fucking GoFundMe for this dude's mic.
This is crazy.
Can't be, how kind of fucking analyst, what kind of successful analyst has a shitty mic?
I don't know.
Hopefully, he's got the mic in that photo.
Anyway, guys, we have a legend on the stage.
His name is Steve.
Steve and his amazing co-host, Kaplan, have been running a really amazing show in the
mornings.
And I think since I've been on crypto Twitter, it's been live.
I was definitely somebody that would sit in there daily and still do.
When I have no morning meetings, I jump in there.
But I say that to say that they've been the most consistent spaces.
Not only that, very, very value-filled.
And it definitely gave me ideas back in the day of, like, okay, what kind of people do I
want to be around to create something cool like this?
Or at least similar.
So definitely, you know, a group of people that I look up to and I see doing amazing
things in this space.
Haven't grifted anybody.
Haven't sold anybody's soul.
Haven't done anything malicious.
Just been fucking beating the drum, being consistent.
And in my opinion, he gives way too much credit to some shitheads in this space.
But he's a good guy.
And he won't tell it.
I'll say it for him.
But no, more importantly, Steve has written a book.
And I'm super excited to hear about it and have you guys hear about it.
I believe he's giving some away.
But Steve, the floor is yours, man.
Thank you so much for being here.
Please introduce yourself.
You are 100% somebody in this space, again, that I definitely look up to.
And I see doing amazing things.
And you come such a long way.
And I have, you know, I'm nobody to be proud of you.
But, man, I'm super proud of you.
And your family, I'm sure, is proud of you as well, Steve.
So thank you for being here.
You got the floor.
No, it means a ton, first of all, coming from you.
I respect the hell out of you.
You're one of the people.
Like, the people who I really value a lot in this space.
Now, don't get me wrong.
People can be new entrants or whatever.
But, like, the people who showed up every day, bull and bear.
Because there's a long period of time here where things weren't so great.
And you mentioned it.
Like, consistency is something that's really important to me and my co-host.
You know, we do a show at 8 a.m. every Monday through Friday.
We've done something like 527 straight episodes or something where we haven't missed a day.
It doesn't matter if it's Christmas, New Year's, holiday, sick, not sick, vacation, whatever it is.
One of us has shown up every single day for over two years, and I don't know when we're going to stop on that.
And, Profit, you're very much the same, right?
Like, I think we're wired very similarly in the sense that we're not 9-to-5-ers.
We're kind of pushed through it.
Quick background on me.
I had about 15 years of corporate comms and corporate marketing experience, mostly working at large Fortune 500 and multinational companies.
I had leadership roles in those.
And I really enjoyed that.
But I've always been sort of like a tech nerd, and recently, you know, I had always been into tech.
I was early to, like, Web1.
I was, like, coding.
I'm 40 years old.
I was coding websites in, like, the mid-90s.
And I had, like, teachers telling me how I was wasting my time, which is basically how a lot of people right now feel in crypto and NFTs,
where you have your friends and your family telling you you're crazy.
I had it with crypto as well.
I had it with social media.
Like, you name it, any tech buzz.
I've been early to, and I had people tell me I was crazy.
And recently, when I was around, when I was 37 years old, I really started to get into Web3 and NFTs.
And I decided, you know what?
I built a pretty good corporate career.
I'm going to swing the bat and try to learn everything I can about these things.
So back in 2021, I co-authored the first Harvard Business Review article about NFTs.
And it was really well-received by—it was actually a crazy story because I'm, you know, I'm, like, part degen, part professional.
So, like, I actually got asked to do it the night before NFT NYC, the one that everyone was going to back in 2021 in November.
My co-author, who's a Harvard professor, was like, hey, man, I got clearance to write this.
I'd love to write it with you.
And I was like, well, you know, I'm going to NFT NYC tomorrow, but of course I want to do this.
So I'd be, like, out until 3 in the morning at, like, marquee for, like, the whatever concert.
And then I would be at my hotel room, like, proofing a Harvard Business Review article and then kind of adding on to it.
And by the end of the week, we had it written.
It went and got published.
And when we saw what happened, it got really well-received by the overall crypto community, but also by the traditional business community.
So along the way, like, I was like, that was cool.
And I continued to grow in this space, continued doing Coffee with Captain.
I took a job leading community for Starbucks Odyssey.
That's Starbucks Web 3 program.
So that's my other day job right now.
So host the show, got the book writing, working with Starbucks.
And as we started to, you know, do this, my co-author and I looked at each other and we're like, I feel like there's a book here.
He's like, I do too.
Because we started thinking to ourselves, like, look, if traditional business people read this article and said NFTs aren't a big scam,
we probably should write a more, like, full text because we'd be going and talking to businesses and they still sort of got it, but not really.
Like, I talked to Fortune 500s and large, you know, advertising agencies.
And they kind of got it, but not.
And so we thought, you know, there's probably a book here that's instructional.
So we ended up writing this book.
We wrote it with Penguin Publishing, who's one of the world's premier business publishers, Penguin Portfolio.
And, you know, I'll get into the book in a minute.
I'll give away three.
I'll let you decide profits how we want to give them away.
Preferably United States.
I'll send them overseas if I have to.
I spent, like, 50 bucks sending one to Romania recently to a contest winner.
So I'll do it.
But preferably United States and also profits.
Whenever you send me the three, give me your address, too.
If you don't mind, I'll send you one as well.
This is before they hit shelves.
So if it's cool, yeah, it's already pinned.
You got the pin.
Pin at the top.
So it's preorder right now.
It's a $30 book.
So what is this book?
Effectively, what we decided to do was we want to make NFTs, Web3, blockchain, and crypto in general not stigmatized in the larger business world.
And, you know, my co-author, he's a brilliant Harvard business professor.
He literally teaches case studies about Bored Ape Yacht Club and you name it in his classes right now at Harvard.
You know, I talk to large companies.
I work with Starbucks.
And the goal is, like, you know, if your friends and family or your co-workers say that they think crypto is a big scam, which we literally have a title that says, isn't crypto a scam?
Because as we talk to these businesses, we know what the questions people ask or, hey, is something really infallibly being able to be proved to be owned?
And we can say, yes, you can prove infallible ownership.
And here's how it works.
Our editor didn't understand crypto, anything like that.
And we effectively go through and whether it's case studies on things like Bored Ape Yacht Club or Starbucks or Nike or like you name it.
We mentioned a lot of large pixel vault, a lot of large NFT brands in there and the sort of things they did.
And we effectively explain what NFTs are, what blockchain is, how it works, and then give sort of a framework to success for businesses coming in, whether you're Starbucks or the local coffee shop.
So it's sort of an instructional book.
And last thing I'll say, then I'll take a beat and kind of let you get in here because I know I'm kind of ranting, is, you know, if you don't believe us, on the back of our book, I'll give you kind of some of our endorsements.
These are the people who wrote quotes for it.
Gary Vaynerchuk wrote a quote for it.
Chris Dixon, who's the co-founder of A16Z.
Two Nobel Prize winners, the former chief marketing officer of Progressive and Adam Brotman, who is the former chief digital officer of Starbucks, who is also the CEO of J.Crew.
So that's sort of the people who have endorsed it on the back.
There's sort of quotes from all those people.
And yeah, like our goal is like, honestly, it's funny.
We were meeting with the Harvard people the other day about promoting it.
And our goal isn't really to like necessarily like, look, we want to sell all the books because we want it to be successful.
But like the way a book deal works, like we don't make more money when our book sells.
The book deal is done.
You get an advance and that's that.
We just want people to know that the ideas are out there and how and it's sort of like a mission to bring this a little bit.
The Harvard people were laughing at us because like they're like, you guys are really passionate about this and you don't seem to be leaning on us to sell books.
You seem to be leaning on us to present ideas.
And that's the goal is to get these ideas and share information and ideas so that people know this is software.
This isn't some big scammy thing on the Internet.
It is a better software solution for a variety of applications from the most poetic, which is, hey, if someone's in a country of unrest and they have Bitcoin and they leave that Bitcoin goes with them, right?
That's a poetic version versus, you know, Starbucks doing it as the next generation loyalty program.
So there's a bunch of applications that we explain in the book, but I'll take a breath because I know that's a lot.
There's a little background on the book.
And like I said, above, there's a pre-order link.
It was trending number one in three categories on Amazon when we were selling it, when we did the pre-sales.
So computers and tech, it was number one and a couple of other ones like cryptocurrencies and things.
But computers and tech is a crowded category.
So in any case, you know, appreciate every single purchase, but I'll take a beat there and kind of let you get in with anything else.
No, that was well delivered.
How long was it in store, like in the, you know, in the brain of like, I want to write this book.
Was it like a couple of months?
Was it in the years in the making?
How long was the process?
So I've always wanted to write a book, period.
So like it's kind of always been in my brain that it would be cool to do because I've always been a writer just my whole life.
But this particular book, I mean, Harvard Business Review article, the first one on NFTs was 2021 November.
And probably I would say, you know, I kind of was excited about that.
That was like a career accomplishment because when I was at like large companies, we would use Harvard Business Review article and like our off sites when they were like, hey, this is the thing you want to read.
And this is what we're talking about.
And we're doing like trainings and stuff.
So I was like really stoked about that for about a month.
And then it was probably about, I'd say three months there that I didn't really, I thought it and didn't vocalize it.
And then when I DM Scott about it, my co-author, and he said, I'm thinking the same thing.
We'd both been kind of bumping around in our head immediately after the article that there's a book here.
And so probably about three months.
And that's when we, you know, reached out to Penguin.
And what's crazy about it is like, this is what's, I respect the Penguin publishing on it.
Because those two like, or those people there that we talked to, the two people in particular, our publisher, kind of the lead guy, he published a bunch of seminal marketing books, like Start with the Y and all these other great ones.
And he like was very open-minded to the idea of like a new tech book and how important it was.
And so like we went to them and thought like we were going to have to like really sell it into them.
And normally when you sell a book, you like write the whole book or write a bunch of chapters or whatever.
We sent an outline and they read it and they're like, okay, cool.
Well, here's what you need to do better than this outline.
But we want to write this book because we think it needs to be written.
And so credit to our editor and credit to like the publisher where they didn't go immediately to how many books are we going to sell or who do you know or what is it?
They basically said this outline sounds like something important for businesses to know.
So we think it's going to have impact.
And there's no product or book like this on the market.
Like there's things that talk a little bit about blockchain that are a little bit more heady that are maybe for IT people.
And there's things that talk about NFTs that maybe go down the route of like trading things like that and maybe explain them on a cursory level.
There's nothing that's like here's a framework based on academic research from everything in the market.
Because the thing about Scott and me is like we're DGENs but also academics in the same sense.
Like we love studying the markets and we care about it.
Like he's one of the world-class people at market design.
But at the same time, like we're trading NFTs.
Like I currently have like LFG staked on Orca as I'm earning percentage against it, right?
It's like that's sort of the level down that we're at right now.
I have a bag of used car.
But also at the same time, like I, you know, I'm very – I think it's very interesting to think about how Starbucks is using it to lean into customer loyalty.
And I've learned a ton from their customer loyalty team and how they apply Web3 to that.
Or my buddy who's tokenomics, director of tokenomics at Nike and listening to how .swoosh is doing it.
And that stuff is really – like this is a better software solution.
It reminds me like, you know, like people like will hear about it.
And I try to explain to the better software solution thing where they're like – there's an old interview with like David Letterman where Bill Gates is talking about the internet.
And David Letterman says like, well, you know, there's radios if we want to listen to a baseball game.
And there's tape recorders if we want to listen back.
And it's like you think of how bananas that sounds as a comparison to the internet now.
And there's people doing the same thing with blockchain where they're like, well, I could do that now with a database or I could do that now with this.
And so in any case, that's sort of, you know, the premise is it's a better software solution.
And we kind of play both ends of it on the DGEN end but also on sort of the actual technical application end.
Dude, can you repeat that analogy one more time, please, just so I can remember because that shit was – that was a base take, bro.
Like seriously.
Go back and –
The David –
I just want to highlight that because what he said was real about the like the fact that people will fade technology as it's emerging.
And the way you said it, man, that's a – that's a clip of –
People faded video games.
So, I mean, like people like Milton – the people like – the people like – it was Milton Bradley in the 70s who said video games were a passing fad.
And the last thing I'll say – and sorry, Will, I know you were like jumping in but like this is my problem with my passion on this topic is –
And this is also why I'm terrible at selling books because I've pitched buying the book maybe once and everything else has been about the passion around it.
But, you know, it's like – it's like people faded video games.
People faded the internet.
And what I think people don't think about is consumer behavior dictates it and it happens whether you want it to or not.
And so the reason why – when I was a kid – again, I'm a 40-year-old – when I was a kid, seeing an adult playing a video game was like seeing a unicorn in the wild.
It meant that – you know, unless it was Tetris or Dr. Mario, that was like the exception of the rule maybe, right?
But outside of that, it didn't happen.
But guess what?
My generation grew up playing video games and my brother and I in about an hour are going to be teabagging people on Halo Online together because it's acceptable for an adult to play a video game now.
My children play metaverse-based games like Minecraft and Roblox.
What do you think they're going to age into?
They're not going to say, you know what, I no longer demand this consumer experience.
They're actually going to demand from brands consumer and gamified experiences and the ones that are able to deliver that and blockchain is the back mechanism to do it are going to ultimately succeed.
And again, we're already seeing 58,000 people were active members on Starbucks Odyssey last year and they haven't even turned the lights on.
Think about that.
Anyway, again, I'll take a breath.
Sorry.
I just wanted to reach into the Starbucks thing.
Yes, I've looked into it.
It is absolutely crazy.
I think there's a lot going on over there.
And I think like Starbucks sees it, right?
Starbucks is one of the few companies that sees it, whereas a lot of companies are so far behind, it's not even funny.
A lot of people don't understand.
Like the companies that are fading it are literally people that are probably getting close to retirement age and that's who's heading those companies.
The people that are not fading it are younger investors, younger entrepreneurs, younger CEOs, CFOs, so on and so forth.
They see the potential in these moves.
And I agree, Steve.
I think like a lot of people don't understand to walk to my room and pick up my store or my store to pick up my toy or to as a kid.
Right.
Or to open my phone and play with my toy online.
There's two totally different factors there.
And I think for a lot of things that people fade is convenience.
That's how Netflix put Hollywood video out of business.
That's how the mobile phone put the home phone companies out of business.
That's how online, you know, shows, so on and so forth, Paramount and so on and so forth.
They all adapted because they didn't have a choice to the Netflix model and because Netflix started as CDs and then went to basically digital.
What did it cost them?
Nothing because they don't have to no longer have to make CDs anymore.
So you just go on your TV at home that now has an internet on it essentially and you can watch Netflix.
So why would you pay for cable $120 a month when you pay $15 for Netflix, which gives you very similar actions?
I think just people don't understand ease of access.
And then in addition to that, evolution of technology.
I'm in a very similar age group to you, Steve, also.
I'm not going to disclose completely my age up here, but some of you heard.
But I would say this.
I've watched evolution from, you know, the early 90s all the way to today.
And it's been an amazing journey.
And I think like all of you that are young, younger, younger here will.
And I don't say that like I'm some old man who's retiring, but I say it more like I know I remember being your ages and watching evolution take place right in front of my eyes.
And as long as you look at it and you can see the innovation, right, I think we started with testing, right?
We were testing the water with the initial NFTs.
And those initial NFTs will have value because they were the first test net for a lot of the space that we're going to see evolve from NFTs in general.
Everybody thinks that JPEG NFTs are going away.
They're in reality just going to evolve, right?
They're going to evolve into something useful, evolve into something that people can utilize.
And that's the point that people miss.
Like even these projects that look like they're dead or dead in the water or, you know, founders don't look that great.
Even these guys can come up with something amazing.
They just have to figure out what that evolution is.
You got every NFT project out there digging 24-7 looking for the evolution of the next tech, the next leg up for NFTs in general.
And this is why I don't fade to space.
I do not.
Even though I don't run an NFT as my main picture, like my collection is broad.
It is very broad.
Like I have so many different collections, so many different NFTs, but it's because I know what the potential is of this.
And I know what the potential repercussions would be of fading evolution, right?
I remember AOL dial-up.
It's not feasible.
Nobody's going to use it.
And then what?
Now no longer AOL dial-up, right?
And now we got fast internet.
We got gigabyte, right?
Gigabyte speed internet.
And, you know, I'm not trying to, like, necessarily reminisce, but I'm just trying to give you guys a reality check.
Like, people are laughing at, like, electric cars.
Now we have electric cars.
What happens when we get to flying cars, right?
What happens when we get to self-propelled cars where you don't have to drive them anymore?
Like, people think that that's not going to happen.
And people also didn't think you could hold a phone in your pocket 20, 25 years ago.
But now we're doing it.
Remember the old Star Trek that the community that was like, whoa, that's so crazy.
You had this little thing, and you could just talk to someone like that.
And, you know, nowadays it's all in our...
George Jetson.
Well, it's, it's, it's, I can actually put actual color commentary to what Will just said because I'll, let me give you an exact example.
This is how much people didn't think cell phones could fit in your pocket.
I don't know how many people are familiar with, like, the McKinsey cell phone study.
But there was a McKinsey cell phone study that they did for AT&T where AT&T is like, we want to know in the year 2000, this is 1980, how many people are going to be using cell phones?
Their estimate, based on size and the current tech, the way it was, was 900,000 people.
It was for rich people.
There was a high barrier to entry.
It was heavy to carry.
The actual figure, and this is five years before the iPhone or six, seven years before the iPhone, 109 million.
Because, so AT&T ended up then spending $12 million, a huge amount of time to try to acquire McCaw's cellular to then re-come back from their mistake of not going into cell phones, but it was too late.
They had missed it.
And it's because that exact example Will gave, I mean, there's people who said the internet was a passing fad because of cost and tech barriers.
What does that sound like we're doing right now?
And so, whether it's cell phones or video games or, you know, you name it, the internet itself, I mean, and look, that's not to say everything's going to be successful.
I mean, in Web 2, we had, you know, we had Friendster and you had Daily Photo and you had MySpace and you had Instagram and you had Facebook and you had LinkedIn.
Like, in Web 2, there were winners and there were losers and a lot of brands otherwise introduced their strategy.
So, there are native Web 2 brands, right, like those LinkedIn, those Facebooks, et cetera.
And then there are large brands like the Starbucks and whatever, Progressive Insurances or whoever in the world, Nestle's, who use it for different purposes, right?
Progressive uses online social media to triage complaints because that's where people go to yell at their insurance company, right?
I work there.
That's what they do.
So, they set up an entire purpose of that.
So, they use Web 2 for their purposes.
And I think Web 3 is such a powerful general purpose technology with such ubiquitous use.
It's like you now have a ticket that can become a ticket, an access pass, a retargeting software, something that a local bar could use to give you a discount.
Lin-Manuel Miranda could say everybody who supported the Heights before Hamilton came out, I want to send you something special and not have to have trouble finding their favorite fans, right?
And so, I just think there's so much ubiquity to the technology and that's what the book itself is generally about.
See, I'm actually plugging it.
I'm doing a good job.
My editor would be happy.
It's actually like, you know, for people to understand what this is because, you know, the goal is like, again, I handed this to test readers who had no idea what NFTs are.
We handed it into some of the toughest, most critical economists in the world and we fixed it based on what their feedback was being like, this makes no sense.
This makes sense.
This is a whole.
And to be honest, sometimes our ideas change, right?
Sometimes we've looked at something and we're like, you know what, that step, like that step of our sort of evolution that we saw, we're actually going to move that around because the challenge is valid, right?
And we didn't want to be in our own bag too much.
So, to your point, Will, I think like technology gets faded across the board, but like there are certain inevitabilities and I just think people can fade the blockchain.
But once businesses like Starbucks and Nike start saying, like again, 58,000 active members last year in Starbucks Odyssey and the way that people were acting in a year where they were basically doing beta testing, like they have 33 million people in their actual traditional rewards program.
Which, by the way, you talk about like people adopting it, like Howard Schultz gets it.
He's a little older.
He gets it because the guy who helped architect the program, Adam Brotman, was the chief digital officer who started that sort of initial loyalty program.
So, there's a lot in there.
Well, I wanted to add to that too.
I think like if you look at things like gaming and so on and so forth, these game devs, man, like they're not the, we'll say the backers, right?
The backers of the game.
They're doing everything they can to keep games off blockchain, everything they can to keep NFTs out of people.
And the reasoning, a lot of people are thinking that it's the gamers specifically is because they don't want you to own your own assets.
They didn't lose control of those assets because they go to you, you actually own them, and you can do whatever you want with them, right?
So, they're fighting tooth and nail to make people think that this is not something that they want versus understanding, yes, I have to pay $5 for that gun or $10 for that car or whatever or $5 for this or $5 for that.
By the time you end up, you know, adding it up, you come to the value of the game.
But the reality is, is that once that gets implemented, they can set up royalties where these assets can sell forever.
They never stop selling.
They never stop rotating.
They always have value based on that.
And it's actually more beneficial for them in the long run to adopt blockchain versus fight it.
And you're seeing a lot of game developers fight it, whereas I think we'll start to see more and more game developers start to come into blockchain and understand that there's more value here than what they were actually intentionally looking at.
And they can still control the assets in a way, not necessarily through your ownership, but they still have a hold on it through royalties and so on and so forth.
So, they're still making money regardless or not whether you own the assets.
Now, you could get blocked or banned or whatever if you're cheating or whatnot, you know.
And then in that case, your assets are useless to you, but you could resell those useless assets even if you're banned specifically to somebody else who may be playing that game and still be able to monetize.
And they make money off of you for selling them, even though you're banned.
Well, I think the gaming ones and economies of scale, though, because on a game, they get their money up front, right?
And I just don't think they figured out how to quantify, balance that, and then explain it to somebody who's going to loan them the money to build the game, right?
Like, I mean, it's just basically your CBA for the game development, right?
And then, like, CapExing that all in and then trying to create a profit schedule that supports that type of revenue stream because there's not really very many of them, right?
I think that's – I mean, I think they like to – I don't want to say get their nut first, but I don't know another way to say it besides that.
So we're just going to let that one float.
Well, the thing is, if you look at video gaming in general, these games launch and then they die, right?
A lot of them do that.
A hundred percent, a hundred percent.
And so resell value would actually keep games alive and keep retention going on games, even games that seem to be, you know, potentially dead.
Whereas, like, the games that launch and die, they don't necessarily die to, we'll say, just basically no attention.
I've seen a lot of games build up on hype and then die because there was a bug and then they fix the bug and nobody comes back because there's no reason to come back.
Whereas, like, if you own assets and something and you think they've improved on it, you might come back because you think you can get some kind of monetary value to get out of it, right?
And, again, I think that that's the value of the retention there is, like, yes, it's not going to be upfront capital, but it's going to be consistent flows.
And you can get upfront capital, technically, if people are buying assets on chain for their avatars or whatever that they're playing in the game and then they can get the initial.
It's just they like the more guaranteed upfront capital for the overall game.
Maybe some people spend $10 million, maybe some people spend $150 million.
But when you do the balance out, it equals out to the same, right?
They're just not looking at it from that model.
It doesn't make any sense to me to not have, like, when you open up that marketplace that people own their assets, now it's, oh, someone created a whole other section or map for that game.
And they created it through our developer portal.
So now we make money off of it.
It's like you explain that.
Like, I explained this to somebody at Blizzard in a call and he's like, I just don't know if that would work.
And I'm like, your model is you create a new portal and you charge people for it.
If you had 1,000 people, now instead of the seven people that you pay to create portals, you have the 700,000 people that play your game that are like, well, in a creator economy, I'm going to create this portal.
And then what do you do?
They have to come through you to create their levels, items, whatever it is.
You know what I mean?
Like, he shut me down.
He's like, that's not a good economic principle.
And I'm like, man, we got to look at some different math.
And I'm like, do you play the games here or do you make sandwiches for people who play games here?
I can't figure it out.
To what you're saying, too, and I know I've mentioned this game before, but Ark Survival Evolved, which is being developed by Snail Games, they're doing just that specifically.
So they're actually paying developers to add modded maps and add mods and so on and so forth.
So I think that adding that onto the blockchain will definitely help.
I can throw you one more advantage on top of that, just to build on that, because the gaming conversation is actually multidimensional.
So an example that has absolutely nothing to do with the gaming company itself is like, so one of my jobs when I was at Nestle, I worked with Hot Pockets.
And one of our sponsorships we did, I actually have a jersey from NRG, the gaming team that says NFT Bark on the back that they issued me back when I worked there.
And NRG is a sponsorship that makes sense for Hot Pockets because you could probably guess the same people who are interested in NRG, a competitive gaming company, professional gaming company, people who are interested in Hot Pockets, right?
It's that sort of like 13 to like 20 some year olds who's playing games, who cares, right?
Now, imagine a world where Hot Pockets could also be a little bit more precise and say, anybody who has a certain Fortnite skin, anybody who bought the Ninja Turtles Fortnite skins, now get 15% off on Hot Pockets for the next month.
Well, now simply connecting your wallet through the same blockchain, through one software, makes that asset much more flexible in how they can use it.
Or even more so, like somebody else could develop and say, if you bought the Ninja Turtle skin in Fortnite, we're going to give you the Ninja Turtle skin in Roblox because we've done sort of this like cross compatibility when it comes to the actual traits.
And when you start looking at stuff like that, it builds value on top of assets.
And the point that y'all are making is ownership is so important in knowing your value of assets.
Like right now in Web 2, one of the analogies we heard, I think it was Jed Asper who made this analogy, right now with your Facebook, what you have is the equivalent of, with all your photos and stuff, you have the equivalent of you moved into an apartment, you bought a bunch of furniture and put stuff on the wall.
But when you move out, that stuff all stays there and the landlord keeps it.
That's what Web 2 does right now.
But the portability of the assets changes the game and the things you can do and the flexibility around it and the ownership of it because the more you build on top of it, like why did Board of Yacht Club move?
A variety of reasons.
But like the actual community was incentivized to build value on top of it because the more value they built, the more value that was accrued to the asset.
So anything you own, you accrue asset.
It's like the difference between renting and owning a house, right?
When you rent a house, you're not going to go upgrade the kitchen.
What's the point, right?
But if you live in a house, you upgrade the kitchen, it helps to resale value and you live in it.
That's what an ownable digital asset does.
And my kids get that.
But a lot of adults don't get it because they don't live that life currently.
Hey, man.
Thank you for coming on the stage tonight.
And thank you, Profits, for inviting such an interesting guest.
When I first met Profits, I had written multiple papers on this.
And like, it's some years ago, but I wrote a whole bunch of papers and it's for ConocoPhillips and for meat processing, like getting federal regulations out of it.
Like, I'm so happy you came on the stage about this, man.
I love hearing about this shit.
I'm definitely buying your book tonight.
100.
Love to hear that.
Let's go.
Oh, yeah, Steve, the pinned comment, rather, the pinned tweet on your profile is where they can go for everything about the book, correct?
That is good.
Yeah.
If you go to my profile, there is a pinned tweet and there's a link to buy right there on Amazon.
And if you have any trouble, just tag me, whatever.
And like I said, if there's three people in here, however you want to give them away, get some addresses.
I'll send three out.
Profits, like I said, include yours.
I'll send yours.
Include wills.
I'll send a fifth.
I got books.
I got books.
I'll send them.
And this is before they hit shelves.
On-sale date or on-shelf date is the 23rd, but the actual book is available for pre-order now.
And this is the thing I'll say, and this is my shameless shill, if you go to my profile, like even if you don't want, like $30 for a book is like the equivalent of like 0.012 ETH right now, right?
Like it's barely anything.
Buying this book actually helps it get on bestseller lists.
It helps it get in the hands.
It helps it show up.
My friend, my normie friend texted me the other day, didn't even know that my book was out and was like,
hey, I just got an Amazon suggestion.
Is this you in this book you're writing?
And so the more you do it, the more it shows up in Amazon suggestions, the better it does.
And every time you buy it, like $30 to help mass adoption.
And this is my ploy.
My ploy is that if you buy that book, it helps to get on bestseller lists.
It helps it show up on the radars of Fortune 500 CEOs.
And if you buy two and give it to a friend and help them, you know, help them read them and onboard them, it's just those little ripple effects.
So if you go to the pin in my profile tweet, you buy the book, it's $30 on Amazon, shows up on the 23rd.
And again, I'll be in, and if you buy it, make sure you tag me and let me know.
I'll be eternally grateful.
I just want to thank you personally.
Man, thank you for that.
Amazing, amazing, amazing.
Go ahead, Sandman, you got it.
Wait, wait, wait, hold on, hold on.
There's about 205 people in here.
Thank you guys for welcoming yourself to Web3 Exposed, 7.01 p.m. Eastern.
Go ahead and hit the website.
Go ahead and get in the damn Discord.
Get in the damn Discord.
It's a party in that motherfucker, and there's no NFT for sale.
That's also how you show support.
I don't show coins on your fucking throat every day.
I don't come up here and manipulate you for 17 hours at a time.
I come here to drop as much value as possible.
I DM and comment and hit up and use all my resources possible to bring people here to bring Alpha.
It looks easier than it is.
I know, I get it.
I look like I'm just doing a layup over here.
But ask 10,000 other people who are doing Web3.
They can't, and that's why they're not.
Slight flex.
No, but seriously, thank you guys for being here and supporting, and I hope that you're learning something.
And if you do like what you're hearing from the people, follow them.
Retweet them.
Like them.
Engage with them.
Anyway, Sandman.
My bad, bro.
Go ahead.
All good.
Shout out to the Boomer squad here.
So, yeah, I remember I used to run an analytics team for a large Fortune 500 team, and we did about $300 million worth of marketing every year.
And I remember distinctly sitting in a room with our CMO and laughing about who would do social media advertising.
Like literally laughing about it.
And then we started laughing about, well, do you think we could accept Bitcoin?
And it was all just a big fucking joke.
And so I think that conversation earlier was spot on about just like these things, you know, these metas shift very quickly, and you have to kind of be on it.
And I actually have a question for Steve, because I actually do a lot of very similar stuff.
I work with a lot of very large brands.
I help guide them through different innovation workshops, help them understand, you know, how to use blockchain, AI, and those sorts of things in their systems.
And I've noticed a lot of just like very primitive or fundamental obstacles that they have in conceptualizing, you know, how to use, you know, to your point, like very ubiquitous tech.
Like what would you say is like the main opportunity from your POV?
Where do you feel like brands are missing it?
And for those that you feel like are doing it really well, you know, where do you feel like those differentiators are?
So I think there's a couple of differentiators.
So, you know, a lot of people look at the, I think the ones that are early have a little bit of an ace in the hole.
I mentioned Starbucks, Adam Brotman, my friend who, he happened to be the architect of the Starbucks.
He was, so he was chief digital officer for Starbucks back when it was, he was, he said he was literally embarrassed to say that was his title, right?
Because they weren't a thing at the time and helped architect their sort of rewards program and sort of their new sort of that world, which became like 1% and 2%.
And now it's, you know, now I think Starbucks, like one of like the 20 largest banks in the world with how much money they have like in their program, right?
So they had an ace in the hole in that Adam was a trusted person who could come in and tell them and they're a tech forward company, right?
Forward thinking.
Nike had an ace in the hole in the sense that Seth, my buddy, he, he worked for Nike for years and logistics.
And he also happened to be a web three degen who was like making gifts on the internet.
And so when they acquired Artifact and then they started to look into, you know, what that world is, like that became an advantage they had.
So I think that's something that the current ones on the forefront have.
I think the biggest opportunity I run into when I talk to large companies, the two things I sort of get, generally speaking, are one, and this actually, like I said, I swear, this like dictated how we were going to do like a book.
Like we, in, on page eight, there is a title.
This is one of the first things I run into.
There is like a subhead, like a big, bold subhead that says, but wait, aren't NFTs connected to cryptocurrency and isn't crypto a scam?
It's a giant subhead.
And the line just goes, we get that question a lot, honestly, especially when FTX collapsed.
So like we're aware of that.
So number one, blockchain, the issue I run into with blockchain is people think that FTX and everything associated with crypto that is wrong is what blockchain is.
So that's thing number one.
Thing number two is trying to get people over the tech, the barrier that it is infallible proof of tech, of actual digital ownership.
Because like the analogy I always use is like, and I use this analogy and they like the analogy, but then they prod is there's a guy named Adam Hollander who I'm friends with, who's like a traditional finance guy.
And he says it perfectly with, imagine you went to a museum and you see a beautiful painting on the wall.
You can take a picture of that painting on your phone.
And that picture is not worth anything outside of like the clout you get on Instagram, right?
You could go buy a copy of it in the gift shop, but that print isn't worth much more than the paper it's printed on.
The reason the one on the wall is worth so much is because it's the original, the museum owns it, and they can prove both of those things.
And up until recently, it was impossible to prove that for digital items, right?
And now with the blockchain and with NFTs, you can infallibly prove people who own things.
So, you know, that's the analogy I tend to walk into because people say, what's the value prop?
And then I start to apply it to where they are.
So like we explain why it works once they prod and talk about validators and all that stuff if they really need to.
But the truth is, I try to meet people where they are.
Everybody likes music unless you hate joy.
So I use like Taylor Swift as an example or another artist as an example, right?
Where I say, imagine if they sold, you know, NFT.
I mean, the Backstreet Boys were making like a hundred grand when they were the biggest artists in the world because of a scheming music industry.
But you can talk about if they had sold NFTs and actually, you know, put value back against those and funded their own career, right?
That's one example you can use.
You can use something really mundane like medical records where people swab their mouth and send it into 23andMe, right?
And 23andMe charges them for the information, then sells their data on the back end for millions.
Imagine a privatized blockchain where instead you could actually own your health data and press buttons to opt into studies and monetize your own health data.
There are companies working on that.
So you can start to find where people are or shit, even buying a car.
I'm the biggest sucker.
I go to buy a car and they're like, you need the unicorn wheels.
I'm like, well, I need the unicorn wheels.
I'm going to pay $7,000 more for this car.
But instead, I go in and I go on the blockchain.
I know the last sale, the highest sale, what each one's going for, the work that's done on the car, like that sort of blockchain-based stuff.
So my biggest things I run into is people think crypto is a scam.
They're not sure how you can have infallible proof of digital ownership and why that matters.
And then I have to find an industry where I can meet them, even down to the insurance industry.
The idea that you can use a data profile because you're based on big consumer data and trying to do predictive analytics, well, guess what?
But somebody's digital footprint is going to tell you all the predictive analytics about them, where they've been and what they do, right?
Travel industry, you check in with Delta when you go and Delta immediately drops a POAP of sorts in your wallet.
And they have a private backend where you can put all of your trip memories and information in there.
So instead of being like, five years ago, did I go to New York?
And what was that?
You have it in there on the blockchain.
Like, finding these individualized examples is the last step I tend to find where I start to get people to say, okay, here's how it can apply to my industry.
And again, that's largely what the book aims to do is say, it's so general purpose because when we were coming up with a title for the book, we kept trying to find what the thing is.
And we kept coming back to like, but this does, the blockchain does everything.
And we're like, well, I guess we'll call it the everything token.
So that's where we net it out.
Yeah, well, and I'm curious if you've kind of run into this too, and then I'll kick it over to Sal,
because I know he's had his arms probably just getting huge right now.
But one of the things that I run into quite a bit is the conceptual approach of selling products to consumers versus building a community from the bottom up.
And I think conceptually speaking, at least in my own experience in working with larger brands,
they immediately go to the monetization and ROI and the ability to sell products.
And what seemed to be very perplexing to them is when I say, no, if these people in the culture know you're trying to sell them something,
they're immediately suspect of you, right?
And so like, it's very counterintuitive.
And I think a lot of brands are very focused on this kind of top down traditional funnel type of strategy where,
you know, you build awareness and then you get engagement through evergreen stuff mid funnel,
and then you drive conversion tactics down to the bottom and they convert and they buy your product and blah, blah, blah.
And here, like the most successful projects I've ever seen, especially the big, you know,
the larger Web 2 projects that go out and launch are those that actually aren't trying to sell any products at all.
And they're really just like very much doing it for the development of their, you know, their core audience and really just trying to,
you know, almost get a very fine tuned focus group of who their power users are in any context,
and then find ways to get them to either go out and evangelize the brand through, you know, user generated content,
or for them to kind of optimize their products that they have, you know, for their larger bids.
Because it's very expensive to get that consumer research and that feedback from consumers.
And here in these communities, you can get them obviously, you know, good and bad, you know, very quickly and indirectly.
So I don't know if you've run into that just in your own research and just like the conceptual approach of having to sell something versus build something.
No, you're going to get me into trouble.
You're going to get me into trouble because like I'm very close.
Like we have something called the NFT staircase, which is literally the sort of five major principles that we explain.
And it gets at, like, I can't say it or like, again, my, my publicist and editor that we have for this thing tied with Penguin will literally kill me probably if I do.
But you are so on the right track of like the difference of how you approach the model.
And I'll give you like two example elements of like identity and community and the importance of that.
Like, you know, it's like when I was leading, so I was leading internal comms for progressive insurance when we sent 40,000 people home for COVID.
It was the most challenging yet rewarding thing.
And besides that, you're navigating things like the murder of George Floyd.
You're navigating trying to communicate to employees everywhere at a terrible time, right, with COVID and a pandemic, all that stuff.
Prior to sending people home, one of the things I used to say is I don't, that's when you become 40,000 people's like, you know, gateway to like your company, your executives in the world.
Right.
But prior to that, my big thing was one of my mentors, one of the people who wrote a quote on the back of the book, Jeff Charney used to say, you don't have 40,000 employees.
You have 40,000 marketers and you need to figure out how to activate them for progressive insurance.
And that's what an NFT can do for somebody in a different way.
So I think the way you're thinking about it is like the same way.
Like I try to explain to people when I'm walking through the airport and I see like if an Alabama fan, football fan is walking through the airport and sees another Alabama football fan, they'll look at that shirt and yell, roll tide.
And they've never met that person.
And they'll never see that person again.
And why?
Because they have a shared identity and community and a shared goal.
And the value accrual of that goal is what Alabama football does.
Right.
And explaining to a company that you can create a football fan.
I've seen it.
I've seen it with Starbucks Odyssey.
There's a group of people who spung up a site called odysseytips.com, which has speculative info and all these other things.
Right.
Nike has entire forums about them.
It's like you can create sports fans for your brand by doing it right.
And so exactly what you're saying is like very much.
I will say that the and I'll probably get in trouble for this.
But the the the identity and community elements are critical and that comes before that comes after a utility that comes after you're bringing bringing value to someone.
It doesn't come before you're extracting value from them.
And I think you're really, really on to something there.
You know who else is on to something, ladies and gentlemen, profits over wages, daddy.
Tell that motherfucker.
She's a psycho.
Yeah, I'm speaking in third person.
13 p.m.
Eastern on the clock.
Click.
Go ahead, man.
The floor is yours.
I was just wondering, how do how do I get 15 percent off Hot Pockets?
Click.
Appreciate you pulling up, man.
Hope you're having a good night.
Saul, the floor is yours.
What's up, Click?
Hot Pockets are disgusting, Click.
Come back with a better one next time.
So, you know, Steve, this, you know, what you said when I tapped into is like the inevitability factor.
What we're doing here in this space and building in this space.
And I took, you know, took a bunch of certs of, you know, a bunch of different classifications from IBM, right?
And one thing I noticed in all of the classes is that they point out this trifecta to us.
And you've got to understand, IBM, if they're saying it, it's the truth in tech.
It's kind of like, you know, they're the grandfathers of this shit.
They're not going to die.
And they're always kind of ahead of the curve in the back end.
And they're talking about IoT needs, you know, needs AI, which needs blockchain, you know, which feeds IoT.
You start to see this come to life with RWAs and D-Pens and all the other things going on.
And I think it's really important to understand that we're going in this quantum direction.
We're going in this AI direction where it's going to need blockchain to be able to, like, basically keep pace with reality on some level.
To keep it from, let's say, spinning out of control.
So somebody can't just, like, hack into your car and make it go right into a school or something.
You know what I'm saying?
And so at the bottom line, like, beyond even, like, the fun utility we can get out of it, the gaming and all the tokenization of things, I think underlying that is, like, the actual security aspect of a distributed network and what the actual benefits of a distributed network are.
And I think that fractalizes, like, into our real lives as we live them, like, what we do as people and as you guys are talking about how we organize to build these businesses versus how we chose to, like, how we were taught to build them before.
You know, so as we, like, I think we're, like, we're in the information era now.
So, you know, in the age of the Aquarius, like, my hope is that people will, like, understand that trifecta is a real, that trifecta, like, the IoT, the AI, and the blockchain are all happening.
They're not going anywhere anytime soon, and they're, like, really all hinge on one another.
So, like, I know people that are bullish on AI but aren't bullish on blockchain.
I'm, like, I'm bullish on all three.
You know, I got a smartwatch.
I got Apple headphones.
I got, you know, IoT in my car and my fucking – all this stuff works together.
I mean, and it's kind of crazy that if you don't got something to balance it on, it could all break, right?
It's Moore's law, my man.
It's like you just described it.
Sorry, I didn't mean to – I was just going to say, like, you're just –
I love the punch, dude.
Punch in, bro.
You're hitting it.
Like, you're hitting it.
Like, it's like people, like – there was a bunch of MFers who pivoted over to AI when Web3 didn't seem as cool and we were hitting a bear market.
And it's, like, it's not an either or.
Like, you can be passionate about either one, and I don't discount anybody who's passionate about AI.
But it's and.
It's both.
And the other thing I'll build on that that's going to happen with AI that's going to expedite the use of blockchain, and blockchain is going to expedite the use of AI because companies are going to be able to use both.
And the IoT is going to expedite our connectivity because that is how we like to live our lives.
Like, I like the – like, people just underestimate technology.
I try to explain to people that when I was a kid, my parents are like, you don't give anybody your banking information.
You don't tell anybody anything online.
You bring your check to the store to pay a credit card or you get a fee or maybe you mail it in.
Maybe you call it in, but that's scammy.
Like, the idea that we do all of our banking online is one of the most underrated things that nobody ever thinks about when, like, literally in the 90s.
Like, you can find videos – everyone's seen that video going around when Burger King started expecting credit cards and everyone's like, I don't know about these plastic credit cards.
It's like, people don't understand how quick this shit moves.
And the other thing I'll say that builds on what you just said there, Saul, that the reason why I was getting all excited and had to kind of cook in here is, like, your point also is not only are all those things going to matter, but the people using them aren't going to give a shit how they work.
They're going to give a shit that they work, right?
The reason my 67-year-old mom can use Starbucks Odyssey is because she has no idea it's an NFT and no idea it's using a blockchain.
She just knows that she goes – she does a gamified Pokemon Go-like journey with Starbucks.
She gets a little reward and then she gets a special treat that ends up getting her something later on.
People on Facebook who don't know what an NFT are and Leafrakers, which is, like, 100,000 people or something that celebrate, fall, and love Starbucks, and cup collectors, because there are, like, 80,000 people who collect Starbucks physical cold cups.
So if you ever think that we're not – like, we're more normal than you realize when you realize that there are other people who do this with the physicals.
Like, it's not a big jump to say someone who collects a physical cold cup wants to collect an NFT, but the people in those Facebook groups found out that a limited edition pumpkin spice Tumblr was being given out with one of the Starbucks journey for the first, like, 2003 people to complete it.
And there were screenshots I took of people on Facebook, don't know what an NFT is, don't know what blockchain is, saying, run to Odyssey, go get this Tumblr, complete this thing.
And so the fact that, like, that's what matters in the future is, like, not – like, does anybody care if something's on Amazon Web Services or Azure or whatever?
I don't think so.
You care that it works, right?
All I care is I can go on Instagram and see the memes.
Thirst traps, maybe.
No, just kidding.
But, like, all I care is I can go on Facebook or Instagram and see what I want to see.
I don't care what the back end is running on.
And so I think the other thing about it is AI, blockchain, and IoT are going to just increasingly become part of us in our lives.
And while a lot of people like to shake their fists at a cloud and yell in technology, like, the truth is, it's coming.
So either you can embrace it or you can sit there and yell at it, just like Blockbuster did as streaming video came in.
And as soon as we had high-speed internet, streaming video was off to the races.
So I just think that that's kind of the spot we're at.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Web3 Exposed.
We have an important announcement.
We'll be right back after these messages.
The NFT technology is remarkable.
It's insane because the first year of people discovering it, their scammiest friend made $83,000 selling a penguin with a penis in its eye.
Shout out, Luca.
Normal people don't get it.
They're right.
It's the same reason people didn't get the internet in 99.
You had normal people saying, how the hell is Pets.com worth $85 billion?
How the fuck is Web3 Exposed carry spaces on her back?
I don't know.
I don't know.
Go ahead, Will.
You got the floor.
And then I want to pass it to RDC.
Nah, I just wanted to add how you feel about NFTs is how I felt about the bear market.
Everybody's screaming at me how it's coming down.
I was like, okay, we'll see.
It's funny how people fade to stupidest shit, man.
You got to clear up trend.
It's pretty easy, okay?
You got a bunch of JPEGs that just sold for a quarter million dollars in 2021.
It was a grift.
Those JPEGs are still here.
They're still here.
They haven't gone anywhere.
So, I mean, I don't know what people are smoking.
Is the ETH still there in the weed offer?
No, but the NMT's there.
No, the point being is the brand, the culture, all that stuff like that still exists.
And I think the evolution of NFTs is still in the making that a lot of people are fading, right?
Like, it's like the easiest place, guys.
Like, we went from Atari to Super Nintendo to, you know, N64 to, you know, PlayStation.
Like, you got to understand things evolve in time.
Now we're going from physical assets to potentially physical and digital.
And then I think eventually it'll be just digital.
So, I think once we see the combination of everything together, people will understand the move.
It's not as difficult as people have to make it.
Sometimes you just have to, like, shut down the whole, well, what if?
Because you can ask what ifs all day long, right?
And this was a conversation I've had with a few people in this space specifically, where it's always like, well, what if war?
What if macro?
What if this?
What if that?
Let me ask what if, Will.
What if I could make a breed of cats that had chips in them that we could trade as RWAs and breed of, and we'll call them crypto kids?
But here's the thing.
When people discuss what ifs, they always discuss negative what ifs, right?
They never discuss positive what ifs.
They never say, what if this evolves to something better?
What if we added this?
What if I make generational wealth?
Created more utility.
Like, it's always, what if downside?
What if price go down?
What if this all fails?
Well, I can tell you this.
Everybody who's an innovator, they never what ifs.
Can it fail?
They what ifs.
Can we make this bigger?
Can we scale it?
So on and so forth.
RDC!
Yo, so I got a spicy one for you, Steve.
I'm the only gas guy.
And so I was working in an area where there was a lot of major farms, right?
And they have totally different regulations about it.
It costs them much less to operate per capita or whatever.
And we buy, we buy meat, like we raised in slaughter and all that nonsense, right?
And so I was talking to one of the guys.
I was like, well, if you don't like them, if you don't, if you don't like it, the only thing you have to do, the difference between federal and state regulations is you tokenizing the ownership of a slaughterhouse.
Because farmers can't sell their own meat, but slaughterhouses can.
And so if you own a percentage of the slaughterhouse, you can sell your own meat because now it is not a USDA issue.
Now it falls under states' rights, right?
And just some shit like that.
I was like, so you hand out those tokens.
I ended up making a whole thing for them, but I said, if you have tokens for all the people around that can sell meat, then they can sell it to the grocery stores locally.
And then you use your community ownership to weed out major producers and you start to get it growing there.
I said, but what happens when they have a shortage of meat in Canada and you have an overproduction in here?
If you're running, and I used it in that time frame, I used the graph.
I said, if you're running all of your data on the graph and then somebody can say, shit, let me get a token for this thing.
Let me get a token for this butcher shop, whatever you want to call it, right?
Major ones are not called that, but this processing facility.
And you say, I'm going to buy meat from Tom because Tom had a surplus and he hasn't sold it.
And now all of a sudden you can do a transaction and all the shipping is handled by the meat processor.
Why?
Because they do it transactionally.
They take the bones and they take the carcass and all that and they make marrow and some of the other things that you make with the waste of the meat.
I'm not going to get off in the weeds because this shit's boring.
But I put a whole plan together for him and we almost fucked around and bought a processing facility.
I just didn't live in the state where they were operating and I wasn't going to go work at a processing facility because that's not the type shit I do for a living.
But that's one example where you can circumvent monopolization by large-scale business by acting as a community and saying, this person's good at this and this and this and this.
And then find somebody like me who writes boring-ass papers and then we write some shit up and then we go – we make better for everyone by listening to everyone.
And then we construct things.
Blockchain allows you to be at a local level because the second tier of that was let's say this pizza place has an excess amount of hamburger that goes bad this week.
So what do they do? Instead of advertising in the newspapers, they buy X amount of coin and push it to everyone who owns a wallet for that coin in a local area and say, what's your favorite type of whatever pizza that has hamburger?
And so whoever wins, they can come – they get paid in coin to take the survey because that's the marketing budget, right?
Instead of paying a marketing company, you pay the people.
And then say you can use your coin and money to pay for said pizza.
I wrote up all these different things.
I wrote up shit for – like I said, Conoco shit for international for, like you were saying earlier, regulations in schools, right?
And so you just say the people who are over safety are the ones who allow companies to be educators because you can do certifications for everything.
And the beauty of having a blockchain certification is instead of saying I've done this for 20 years when in fact you work in the office and you don't work in the field so you don't know what motherfuckers do outside anymore.
Instead of saying that, every day that you clock in with your QR code assigned to your person, that lets somebody know exactly what you did that day.
So not only do you have I do this for a living, but I do this every day so I am consistent and you can start attaching metrics to that like, oh, man, these are my projects I worked on this year.
Like you can have a total value construct for people.
And now all of a sudden when you want to hire somebody as a company both externally and internally, you have quantitative analytics on the people who push.
If your business is doing really good in one area, same type of business is doing bad in the other area.
Is it the people or is it the economy?
If you're tracking where your people check in every day and like what they do and you might think, oh, well, you're tracking people.
No, your people are reporting to you what problems they're having, what they're doing.
It just it makes you work better because, you know, the value in it is how you look inside your app.
You're like, I'm being top flex every day.
You could check my shit.
I mean, you become your own baseball cards inherently is what it is, right?
Literal proof of work.
Literal proof of work.
Yeah, 100%.
Like I put all these different things together.
It's so crazy because when I made that one to Conoco for regulation for international regulations to the there, he was the subject matter expert, the head of engineering for the global group.
And he's like, I don't I don't see how that would ever be a thing.
Called me two years later and was like, so how you said it was going to be 60,000 to build that system.
And if it's two years ago, it ain't going to be on 60,000 now.
But and a matter of fact, I'm not going to do it for you because if somebody else hasn't done it, they're going to do it faster than you ever could.
So just buy them.
I'll let you know when I find him and then you can just buy them because that's what you guys do.
You big bank take little bank.
You don't have to be an innovator to work at Conoco.
My guy, you just you just buy them.
It's crazy, man.
Just a couple of couple for you to chew on, like some some IRL examples that it's crazy, like farmers would have adopted it.
If I mean, it's crazy.
You talk about 2020, you would have had a co-op facility for buying meat outside of the FDA and it would have been legal and USDA and it would have been legal.
And it would have been fine to because you're the whole reputation stakes on the processing facility, as it always does.
They can be audited, all that.
Everything stays the same.
It's just they can go, no, Tyson, we're not going to process your meat here because you put too many pesticides in.
Like you could start turning out major businesses that don't treat their animals right or don't treat land right.
Right.
Because the smell of some of these farms really destroys property value.
The operating practices of all these people that do different things, you could start turning them out if you own the means of both production and distribution.
I saw that's that's what I think the core of blockchain is, is communal owner, not communal ownership, but communal personal time investment in the motion of your ocean.
And no, I didn't mean that under the sheet.
I meant that just, you know, that's the only sorry.
That's my name.
Blockchain does not solve that.
Confirmed.
Blockchain does not.
Does not solve that.
But the thing is, you hit on, first of all, in a very short period of time, you hit on like five bangers in a row, which is like kind of crazy.
But like, number one, just the idea of regulation, I'll say this, farming sore spot, at least for me, in the sense of I love farmers and are America's farmers.
But all I can think of is a 78 year old case about fucking orange groves called the Howey test, which sticks in my craw, which is not the right way to regulate digital assets, which are extremely flexible.
But that's what always comes to mind when I think of it.
But your point about regulation, number one, strong, but like the supply chain idea extrapolates into so many places.
Like you can do things like print to own.
You can do things like RWA's, which you can claim to own, where if somebody buys a shoe and doesn't claim the shoe, it sits in a warehouse and then sells it to someone else and they claim it and it lowers a footprint right there.
Or even again, the print to own through supply chain that blockchain can have, which you're starting to see Nike implement.
Again, my buddy Seth, do you think it's a coincidence he's director of tokenomics, but also is in charge of supply chain?
Like there's a reason for that when you're looking at a company like Nike that's working with three right now, right?
When you talk about the sort of digital physical like that, where you can, you know, have a have a actual NFT like G money did in his shirts, which then track no matter who has the shirt, you can track and grab that NFT.
There's a world where maybe someone scans that NFT when you enter a place and you can actually show people that you're exposing their brand to a larger crowd.
Even PFPs, which were brought up earlier, actually a second ago, I had a note about it.
It's like people act like PFPs are a jump when Will was talking about people saying, oh, these monkeys, these PFPs.
I'm sorry, but I have like 14 friends on Facebook who have pictures in front of the Disney castle.
You cannot convince me those people wouldn't have a Disney PFP if it offered them the ability to get a discounted rate in the future on going to Disney.
It's a very small jump for a company like Disney for that.
So like, you know, and then instead of having a thing where like you wrap a car and then that car goes through a city and only has exposure to like God knows how many impressions.
You have a digital space that because it's an NFT and the way the technology will work with connection, one single asset, which is distributed across multiple platforms, you have the opportunity to have a loyalty score, which is next level.
We've already seen brands that have rewarded on chain monkey for a period of time, rewarded people for having their PFP on Twitter.
So it's not a big jump.
And the last thing I'll say that you said on there, which I think is paramountly important and really interesting is sort of, I joked around about what you said about proof of work,
but, but proof of education, certifiable degrees, certifiable work.
It's like even down to the idea of like you issue an employee badge and then you no longer give that employee badge after a period of time when that person is working for your company.
But what that does is when I used to like work at Progressive, every local company around the main campus gave discounts to Progressive.
But if you didn't remember your badge when you left campus, or if I was out with my family, or if I wanted to cut the line at the airport where they allowed us to do it, did I have my employee badge?
Probably not.
If that's an NFT that exists in a mobile fashion on my phone, which is what's going to happen because more than half the world gets online via mobile.
If it's a mobile application on my phone, well, then I just use it the same way everywhere.
And that also correlates to my employment time.
And when they cancel it out, my employment ends.
I don't have to update my LinkedIn and try to remember where I worked in 2006.
Instead, it just goes automatically when it's on the blockchain that way.
And when you apply to a company, you know you have verified work history in that sort of thing.
Which, again, I know for people who barely have a job like me and do these weird things, it doesn't exactly work that way.
But for most normal people who work a normal job, that would be super valuable.
But still, you're putting projects in there, right?
And all it does is takes verification.
But even to the thing, I mean, you danced around it a little bit, and I don't know if it's a thing, but I did a Cardano project where I said the thing you need most inside your project is to know where people get their rosin and things like that.
Because I was like, there's a book called The World is Flat, and it's an economic book about flattening economic scale.
And I said, if you can just find the person who has the cheapest, it's for additive manufacturing, all types of 3D printing from shoes, everything.
I was like, if you find the person who has the cheapest material, that should be inside your dashboard.
So when someone searches it, it gives you five choices.
And then you also have quality, right?
So whatever is quality and cheap rises to the top.
And then you buy all that person's out, right?
And so you can flatten the scale of production.
So when you complain about, man, China makes everything cheaper, okay, so buy your fabric in Guangzhou province then.
Oh, you didn't know that's where they make the best one of this?
Like, I literally have all of that.
I don't do manufacturing.
I don't even like that shit.
I just look it up for other people.
But you can literally find all the places where they make the best shit for the cheapest.
Like, off-white shirts are $8.50 to manufacture if you don't put their label on it, right?
iPhones are $8.78 to manufacture if you don't put their label on it.
Right?
Just knowing shit like that, that's how you say, well, I'm a great person and I do great things.
And I'm going to manufacture these things, but I'm not going to make $50 million.
I'm going to make X amount, right?
And you just flatten that scale of economy.
And then if other people have a really cool idea or something like that, you say, oh, man, in our group over here, now your JPEG ownership becomes more like the Better Business Bureau, right?
Like, there's so many different ways that you could morph it toward the purpose of bettering society.
You know?
I mean, hell, I'm in another group.
I'm like, don't tell me.
Don't go get me a discount to Starbucks with a PFP.
That's not what I'm after.
Find somebody who grows coffee in the fucking world.
And then let's get that dude to see how we can set his shipping up, whether he needs a Dun & Bradstreet account.
Like, I can set that shit up for him.
Like, let's get that.
And then let's get Homie's Coffee over there that feeds his kids that has, like, a name and we can find him.
You know what I mean?
Like, that's how we need to do it.
Like, just keep it in the circle.
Because if you flatten the economic curve of the cost of supplies, we can do everything anywhere, right?
You're everything, you're everything coin.
But you can do everything anywhere, right?
Hard to see the fucking legend.
Hold on, ladies and gentlemen.
There's an emergency.
I just flew across my desk.
We got JPEG GPT on the stage.
JPEG, what's going on?
Fortunes are made by positioning yourself between moments of extreme action.
Every minute spent in preparation affords you an extra millisecond to execute when the adrenaline hits and time begins to dilate.
Do you ever think about how many illustrators, editors, musicians, filmmakers, and admen slaved away to make the disposable content used to steer the minds and wallets of civilization?
Could they have ever predicted how their creations would live on in the memes their descendants harvested from them?
So many images, clips, and songs repurposed, like fired artillery shells scavenged by tribals.
There is no delineation between a brand and an individual.
There is only the delusion that the individual should participate with equanimity, innocuous modesty, and fair pretense.
Life is a constant war of ideas, and if you aren't grasping the joystick controlling an unpiloted predator drone,
then you are the plucky gorilla crawling through dirt tunnels and making canoes out of F-16 jettisoned fuel tanks.
The average corporation finds itself in the same trappings of a standing state military trying to fight asymmetric warfare against an insurgent population.
They are forced to abide by rules of engagement their enemies are not encumbered with.
How many six-figure annual salary 20-year-old marketing savants have sat frustrated in boardroom meetings
watching their most lukewarm bare-bones authentic Twitter replies get hampered by a supervisory sign-off process?
OX Labs was forged in the arena.
We started with the implicit understanding of our circumstances.
There will never be a moment of selling out for us, because everything we do is for the money.
We were repping suits, towers, and helicopters from day one.
In this dynamic, we are the ex-Green Beret employing PMC,
delivering instructional pamphlets and ammunition crates to whom it may concern.
We are here to teach you how to dismantle APCs and harvest their steel organs for ramshackle death machines to be kamikaze piloted.
We are Zero X Labs, and we are them ones.
I got to edit.
I got to edit that shit, and make sure it says Web3 exposed at least one time.
Anyway, guys, wow.
What the fuck?
That shit always blows my fucking mind.
Saul, I'm going to pass it to you, and then I want to go to Vivid after.
I haven't heard from this motherfucker in ages.
I want to know what's going on on that end.
Go ahead, Saul.
Yo, JPEG is on one today.
Wow, dude.
I actually raised my hand specifically to give him a space.
I was going to ask him, can I ask JPEG a question?
All corny.
But yeah, I got a decent take, though.
The thing we're missing in this space right now, we focus so much on the quantitative,
and we got to focus on the qualitative.
Because we got now the AI and the machinery and things to make the quantitative.
That shit's automated now.
So now I think it's most important that humans, specifically us, focus on the quality of products,
and the QA of shit.
And I've seen people start to pump out work really fast in the last year, because they
got the tooling now.
But it's really important to actually take time to make quality shit.
And I think we look at the quantitative state in a lot of stuff, but we don't really look
at the qualitative state as much.
And I think the next phase of AI improvements and improvements in a lot of our lives are
going to be on the qualitative factors.
That's what we're really looking for at the bottom line of making money, right?
It's for a better quality of life.
So people usually don't get money and buy less quality shit, right?
But with that said, I do want to push people that are building anything, project managers,
biz devs, developers.
And I say it's a lot of profits, but y'all just need to really step up the security levels.
They're moving at a lightning speed and everybody's at risk.
You know, so let's like, like shorten the contract risk.
There's some great tools out there.
I want to make people aware of, or actually, you know what?
If anybody's interested in the tools, hit me in the DMs, because some of these are kind
of dangerous and I don't want to give them to the wrong people.
I know we got shady motherfuckers in the crowd, but I love y'all and profits.
Thank you for staying so consistent.
Will, let's get you a fucking better mic, dog.
We get on this raise real quick.
Love you though.
Yeah, we've got.
Quality, dog.
We need quality.
We all love you.
Go ahead, back.
Before I go to Vivid, go ahead.
I said we got 14 of those A&M listeners, you know, they're probably in here looking for
that alpha song.
Ever since that new anonymous feature came out, it just made it easier for you guys to
just thank you for the support regardless.
I mean, just text somebody that you love them.
Vivid, what's up?
What is good?
What is good, man?
There's a lot going on.
We got, you know, people violating Will for his poor mic quality, but it's okay.
We're going to get through that.
We're definitely going to push through it.
JPEG, I don't know what the fuck that was all about, but it was phenomenal.
So I'm glad I didn't have to go after you.
But yo, I'm sticking and moving.
Life is good.
I just hope that now that you guys are pretty much done with shitcoin season, we position
ourselves to the next meta, quote unquote, which is probably going to be NFTs in my opinion.
So if you didn't position yourself the right way, you should probably look for something
new that's going to come out soon because I know that's where the money's going to be.
But the one main important thing that I wanted to bring up, because I have no idea what this
conversation was before this, but the biggest market and biggest industry right now is behind
content creation.
Every single company and platform, including cryptocurrency chains, are pushing themselves
through content.
So if you can use AI to formulate your content, or if your brain is just that creative and
powerful, I suggest anyone making anything in the world right now, please, please, please
just formulate your entire marketing strategy behind content, because that is what is going
to propel you to the next level.
Besides that, I fucking love you guys.
I'm about to go play poker, but I just had to come in and show love.
And make my voice known, you know?
My God, yo.
Nice to hear from you.
Keep pulling up.
And I say this verbatim.
Elon Musk just said that Mark Cuban is a racist.
Wow.
Woo!
That's the news.
What does that mean for the price of Bitcoin?
That's all I want to know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
But you know what?
I keep Elon Musk on task, because what he says moves markets.
Elon!
Oh, my God.
He just said this right now.
That was a live tweet I gave you all.
That, like, happened seconds ago, if you didn't see it.
He said Mark Cuban's a racist.
I got to do my research now.
Profits.
This is horrible.
One racist calling, another one racist.
Anyway.
Click.
Did you really have a take?
I'm going to give you one more shot.
Not exactly.
I don't know.
I was just listening to the conversation.
This is good shit.
JPEG Mafia.
I think I've only heard him once or twice before.
But, like, that was good shit.
Loved it.
Yeah.
I don't know.
Good conversation.
Stay bogged up, brother.
Sandman.
Go ahead.
No, I don't know who was just saying it, but talking about the content creation angle,
I think that's spot on.
And more importantly, I think one of the things that's going to shift, especially if there's
anyone who runs brand strategy at large organizations here in the audience, is the day and age of
paid media is done.
Like, user-generated content specifically is what I think most brands are trying to figure
out how to solve for.
And it's the hardest thing to get because you can't buy it.
And a perfect example is Walmart and the whole Pudgy Penguins thing.
Like, if you go back and you look at their previous tweets that they had, you know, prior
to doing the Pudgy Penguins drop, they were lucky to get 100, you know, likes or retweets
or whatever on any of their posts.
They had virtually zero engagement for being a multi-billion dollar organization.
And then when you look at what happened with Pudgies, the level of user-generated content
that they got was arguably probably more than they've had in several years.
And I think that specifically, because, you know, you have to keep in mind that we are
just absolutely inundated with marketing advertisements, either directly or indirectly in media and in
physical, you know, locations and signage and all of those sorts of things.
And so we're desensitized.
And even though we're going to get a good deal on a hotel booking, let's say, on a banner, we won't click it.
But we will respond if our homie says, yo, stay at this restaurant or stay at this hotel or go to this restaurant in Miami.
And so that level of, like, individual connection that you get and the organic, you know, user-generated content that really drives those relationships
is, in my opinion, the most valuable thing is anyone in content creation or anyone in brand strategy for a large organization
to try to figure out how to solve for in this new framework.
No, Sam, Sam, you're spot on.
And, like, to add to your point, too, is, like, look at the difference between, like, I can give a million examples in the crypto space,
like Mad Lads and Used Car, Pudgy Penguins and, like, all these people.
But, like, just go to, like, the simple, like, even, like, the younger generations.
If you look at TikTok, nobody goes to an actual website for, like, a brand anymore unless it's already an established company.
Now you see things where it's, like, host websites where, like, you can buy pretty much any product on any platform off of one of these host websites.
So, like, there's a million different products, kind of like Amazon, where, like, these people, as long as they have some content creation behind it,
it's, like, an individual user.
People would rather go off of a recommendation of an individual user who has some type of influence and buy the product through that host website
rather than go to, like, where that product might have even been, like, originally originated.
So the next step for anybody, like, pushing anything is not, like, building the brand behind, like, that specific product or something like that,
but building a brand behind an individual user and pushing it that way.
Do you hear about this TikTok beyond – what is this?
I just saw this on my feed.
TikTok beyond the mobile screen.
Now we're going to have TikTokers promoting their TikTok on screens besides TikTok.
This is insane.
I don't want –
Are we supposed to respond to that?
Are we rugging or what?
What does that mean exactly?
Like, in your living room?
It didn't make any sense because it doesn't make any sense to me.
But, yeah, I'll pin it at the top.
You can count on Saul – I mean, Bad Brothers for the random news.
We got a special guest, Andrew, on the stage.
What's up, Andrew?
What's up?
I can talk to TikTok for a second.
So what it typically boils down to is brands are looking for alternative channels to monetize through.
So, like, for example, I don't know if this is still live, but I want to say maybe two or three years ago, TikTok launched, like, a TV streaming channel.
And it was pretty simple.
It was like, all right, we get, you know, X amount of eyeballs on a mobile device.
You know, now we can put the same content on television.
And then what happens is they turn around to large-scale ad buyers and they basically say, all right, you can buy, you know, inventory on TikTok.
You can buy inventory on the TV app.
And then the TV app might be priced at, like, a premium CPM that's higher.
So a lot of times when you see these platforms, like, try to go multi-platform or multi-channel, I mean, that's what they're trying to do is they're trying to – they're basically trying to take a bigger chunk out of, like, an annual advertising budget because most marketers will put, you know, X percentage against broadcast, now kind of SVOD hybrid, at-a-home, digital, influencers, all these different things.
So it's really just – it's a money grab, typically.
And then it's hard, honestly, when they do that.
It's actually hard to drive a lot of viewership onto those platforms.
And so it's not uncommon that they'll, you know, juice the numbers by doing various things.
Same model, like, whenever it's at NBCUniversal, like, you have the cable channels, you have the broadcast channels.
You know, every month, X amount of inventory on the broadcast channels literally goes to trying to drive traffic towards the cable channels, you know.
So what you would typically see is on the TikTok mobile app, they would aggressively start trying to push people to the television app.
Yeah.
Another perfect example, like, to Steve's point, of a very ubiquitous use case for blockchain, right, as marketers.
Blockchain fundamentally – and I've said this a thousand times in these spaces – is a back-end technology, and it serves as a data integrity and attribution platform, period.
And so fundamentally, this is about data sovereignty, and I think when you think about Web2-oriented marketing, 85-plus percent of the data they get comes from third parties A, and 85-plus percent of, like, the likelihood that they're going to get any kind of marketing spend is going to be relative to whether they can prove their return on ad spend, aka attribution, right?
And, of course, blockchain don't lie, and you have a, you know, immutable record that is, you know, distributed, and everyone can trust and validate.
And so, you know, that back-end technology, even though nobody cares, is, in my opinion, marketers, especially in programmatic media, if you are not using blockchain solutions on the back-end, like NGMI, as far as I'm concerned, like, you're going to get washed out very quickly here.
You know, that's, first of all, banger, because, like I said, my previous world was, like, leading marketing and communications disciplines at, like, large companies.
So you're speaking my language, which is, you know, we tried for years for multi-touch attribution, and I actually came up with a model, helped design a model, I should say, alongside our web folks, where we actually were able to track attribution against PR, where, like, we knew that someone was worth, like, a certain lifetime underwritten profit based on where a keyword showed up in Google.
So if we did PR, which got Google, which made it show up on USA Today, and it went higher in the Google algorithm, it meant a certain amount more money of LOP, which meant lifetime underwritten profit, which mean that we could attribute, if that PR campaign was done in a clean test, the only attribution.
And so, to your point, that is a lot of shit duct-taped together, which the blockchain duct-tapes a lot of things together very seamlessly.
And so, as an example, let's say that somebody has a lawnmower, right, a whatever, you know, John Deere lawnmower.
Well, right now, if John Deere or a bag of mulch wants to market to them, how are they going to find who owns it?
Did they sign up with an email? Did they register the thing? Well, guess what?
If there is a, you know, NFC chip tagged in that, or however you get it with an NFT that's associated with the lawnmower that travels with it,
well, now those mulch people can target those people directly.
Well, they buy that bag of mulch, and they buy a second bag of mulch.
Guess what? John Deere and them and anybody else at the blockchain can then attribute that purchase activity.
And what you have now is a more powerful consumer because what you own as being more tractable makes you the attractive consumer, right?
I've said it before.
Like, one of the things that I think is interesting about Bored Ape Yacht Club that they never quite took advantage of,
which I don't know if they tried, but you talk about, like, third-party user benefits.
Like, somebody who did not sell a $400,000 picture of an anthropomorphic ape on the internet,
like, that person should be a good consumer for, say, a Delta.
Do a steal where you say, we'll give you 100,000 miles equivalent of a credit card if you sign up for our loyalty program,
which is blockchain-based, and now you're in the system, right?
And you can build on top of what that is, but the point about attribution is so strong because if you tie it back to a wallet,
and by the way, even in this space, here's one of the things I learned.
A lot of people are real tough about KYC-ing until they have the opportunity to get an airdrop or another side drop or something else.
Then everybody's out there talking exactly where they live.
So a lot of people get upset, and look, I'm not poo-pooing on self-custody because I think it's an important element
and part of what brought a lot of us here, but I will say that if people are in an NFT world
and the opportunity to KYC, like, I love that Amazon knows exactly what I want to buy with my other products.
I'm sorry, I do. It's just who I am. Not everybody feels that way.
A lot of people feel spied on, whatever. That's cool. They don't have to like that.
But the fact of the matter is, consumers who are willing to connect a wallet to information
are ultimately going to turn into a marketer's dream, but that also puts the advantage in the consumer hand
because they are the ones who can be getting the most relevant things to what they want.
You know, again, like, again, like cheesy local example,
if everybody in Omaha, Nebraska wanted to create a local sort of NFT that got you discounts at certain restaurants,
well, instead of getting coupon books and chopping them out, you could do that
and other restaurants could target on top of it and there's building sort of benefits there.
So the flexibility of the technology and the attribution that you just talked about helps the marketers.
It's one of the first technologies we've had to this degree because let's face it,
in web one, you were the consumer. You could buy and consume things.
In web two, you were the product because they basically used your information and bought and sold it.
In web three, you are the brand. You actually have the opportunity to be part of the brand.
And for one of the first times in human history and technology,
you can see mutual benefit from sort of shared incentives from consumers and companies.
And you really haven't seen that in the past.
And the blockchain does provide that as crazy as it sounds and as big and sort of, you know,
hyperbolic as that sounds. The applications are so unbelievably widespread.
Yeah. The only thing that I just want to make sure that we all like, we got super like,
you know, uh, righteous about this on the last spaces too, but it better end up being that the
person who owns that personal information changes too. And I think like sovereign custody of PII
is going to be like absolutely the next paradigm shift that's going to occur and who monetizes that
data, who grants access to it, how that's enabled and how that's, you know, just like you have,
you know, sovereign custody of your Bitcoin right now, you should have sovereign custody of your
personal information. And, and to Steve's point, like try going to Amazon and them not knowing who
you are, like you're going to get the worst fucking product experience ever, ever. But the
difference should be you own your data, you've consented and want Amazon to look at that
information. And, and if there's any monetization for ad sponsorships or anything like that, like
you are the one that benefits from it, you know, at least in part. Right. And so I think that's,
that really needs to be a narrative that's pushed forward in this next journey.
Yeah. You press a button and you say, yes, you can use my data, but I get this right. You have
that. It's the health data example where instead of sending it to 23 and me and them spending it
like they, you say, I want to opt into this study and they say, okay, we'll give you a hundred dollars
to opt into this study. And you make that choice, right? It's like those sorts of things, the sovereign
ownership of data and the ability to be empowered by the data you own is a whole different ball game on
top of the different gamifications of things that you could see in a whitney of different
industries. But I totally agree with you. Like the ability to own your own data, your own
information has never been more apparent and obvious based on how they can build a block,
how they can build the blockchains and the software around it and how that can all go. I love,
I love the way you put that.
Hey, sorry. I had a glitch there. Yeah. I was just going to talk addressable for a second. So
yeah, I, I worked at a Amazon headquarters and I literally sat under the $6 billion budget.
And I think like, like, let me just talk to Amazon and data for a second. Then I want to talk about the
shift to web three because that's part of why I joined this industry. So at Amazon, we had arguably
like the most valuable first party data you could ever imagine the challenge. And like, this is
actually a nice thing to hear as a consumer is like the data inside Amazon is very siloed, right?
So meaning when I'm a marketer, what I was trying to do is I was trying to see, can I get data sets
from prime video to literally see what people are watching and then match those against their, you know,
customer profile data and actually be able to drive like tangible product sales. The nice thing for
customers is, is you can't, right? So at Amazon, like all the first party data is very siloed. And
even when you opt into something, you're typically opting into like one product or services TOS,
right? And so there isn't a lot of data sharing and there isn't a lot of internal data matching.
The only time you can really do that is like, you have to basically get approval from the top.
And then when you do get approval, you're basically given like the minimum threshold of data needed to do
whatever that experiment is. But again, if someone as a consumer hasn't opted in on both sides,
like you get rejected, like there were probably 10, 15 instances where I tried to do some like
pretty meaningful data matching that would move the needle for us. And the answer was no, right?
So that's actually like a good thing to know. On the flip side, when you come into web three,
and I'll give you like an example of this, like I'm a big fan of addressable, it's like addressable.io.
But basically what I can do is if I want to spend paid, paid media, and I do think paid media will
always be a part of the marketing mix to some extent, because I love the influencer space,
but it's really hard to scale and it's really resource intensive. But what I can do is I can
get hyper targeted because to your point before, the amount of data available on chain is insane,
right? So I can look at things like not just, you know, geos and not just, you know, assets in
holdings, but I can look at like, how many times did someone access a DEX in, you know, 24, 48,
36 hours, you know, you know, what DEXs did they access? What's their average trade volume,
all this stuff. So as a marketer, it's exciting because you can target in a way in crypto that
honestly, I don't think I've ever been able to target in 20 years outside of crypto, right? So
I think like in general, a lot of these tools and things that we're seeing, you know, will
potentially become the alternatives to cookies, right? Because as cookies start to get outlawed
in various places, as a marketer, you're going to continue to think about how do I target,
you don't want to put 100% of your spend towards Facebook and Instagram, which has, you know,
some of the best targeting. Blockchain data becomes a very, very valuable resource.
Well, the issue also is, and this is where blockchain comes into it, is jumping across
channels, right? So, you know, Facebook doesn't have the same filters as, you know, a LinkedIn
doesn't have the same filters as like a YouTube, right? And so your, your models, your segmentation
models that you build and any kind of like retargeting, they're not necessarily going to
extend across platform, even though all these people are on different platforms, right? And so
having that single key, and a lot of what we do actually is like media distribution. So we build
like blockchain systems for like streaming applications, like video streaming and content.
And there's going to be a real push for dynamic content generation, in stream kind of shoppable
experiences. And everything is literally going to be, you know, dynamically delivered on a user basis.
So not only can you target the right individual, but because of blockchain, you can actually have
like 100% certainty that you're going to execute like to the right person at the right time very
dynamically. So if you've got a million people watching the Super Bowl, you know, profits is
going to see a different piece of content versus, you know, click versus, you know, anyone else in
here, Steve, and that's all going to be delivered at different points throughout the show for different
reasons, and all based on your needs and interests, right? And there really is no other way,
in my opinion, to be able to do that, than, you know, some sort of distributed ledger that has
immutability in the data.
Yeah, 100%. Because I think the problem is like, you know, do this if you've never done it before,
but it's hard to find it. But if you can, if you can open Instagram, and you can basically get into
your data profile, like they intentionally make it very hard to find, you'll see exactly, yeah,
you'll see exactly like the persona that they built for you against how you're targeting,
and you can actually have fun with it. Sometimes I change mine and like, just throw them off.
But like, the difference, I think, when I look at the data that I'm looking at from a blockchain
perspective is like, the data is not as personal, right? Like, I'm not, you know, I can, I can draw
conclusions about user behavior, I can draw conclusions about, you know, the type of the type
of person I'm targeting. But it's not invasive the way that a lot of the web two data sets are. And I
think that, you know, I'll give you like a funny example. Like, if you have your own domain, like I own
my full name.com, you know, every time you create an email address, it's not registered, it'll just
auto forward to your, you know, to your main email address. So one of the things you can
see, and I'm getting into like the data brokering thing, which is probably the grossest thing in
marketing. So you sign up for an AT&T account, you sign up with AT&T at your domain, you sign
up for a, you know, a Whole Foods account, you sign up with, you know, Whole Foods at your domain.
And then when you start to get all those spam emails, you're like, how did these people get my
data, you can literally see how these web two companies sell your data to third parties,
right. And it's, it's pretty, it's pretty insane. So I think, again, you know, you forget,
like, luckily, places like Amazon are doing that. But there's a lot of other companies where your
data is just being sold and monetized without your knowledge. And that's why you're ending up
with 100 spam emails a day, you know, it the best is I used to have to do like, I work with our
executives at one of the companies I was at and had to do like all their speaking ops and applications
and stuff. And so like, because I led PR or whatever. And so like, that was part of my job. And so
when I apply for these things, I would use the executives name, right? That's just how you
apply for them and go. And I would know exactly who sold my shit. Because within like, months or
weeks, I'd be getting things like, Hi, Jeff. And I'm like, well, that one was from this thing.
And they're like, Hey, there, Trisha. And I'd be like, there we go. And it's funny, like how those
how those whole things work. And no, I by the way, I'm just, I'm sitting here, I got to run in a
second. But I'm like sitting here just geeking out because this is like, my favorite stuff like prior to
Web3 was these types of conversations. So I'm literally just sitting here like eating popcorn
and listening to Andrew Cook and, and everybody else on and obviously Sandman as well. This is
fantastic.
Yeah, I think I'd love to see it. Oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead.
No, I was just gonna say, I think I think you can build a model around it for fairly easily,
too. I think a lot of people just don't understand it. Or, and it's funny, because a lot of these
businesses know how to do this, right? They can say, Hey, hook up your wallet, and you get a 10%
discount, but it's just like Black Friday, they mark it up before they mark it down. And then
you think you're getting a markdown. But in reality, it's already marked up prior to being
marked down, maybe a month in advance or whatever. And so you think you're getting a discount by hooking
up your wallet. And while everybody else is overpaying, because they don't want to hook up their wallet
and distribute the information that they're that they're requesting, right? Essentially, that's them
paying you, they're paying you through discount. And they don't have to give you a dime through
that. It's just a better process. And it makes more sense. And it allows them more access to
your information. And it's kind of like selling you your information. But in reality, it's just a
markup to a markdown phase. And even better, these will have three MFers, they'll fucking pay you to
give you their information. Right? That's what an NFC is, frankly, right? Like you're spending
thousands of dollars to be able to get access to that information. So I mean, talk about positive ROI,
it was like, no contribution, but it gets so much more sense to hook up your wallet, get a discount,
rather than pay for information of a person who's probably not even, you know, interested in your
product. A lot of these places that pay for information related to products, they're paying
for it, but not everybody on the list is interested in their product, right? Imagine getting a list of
just people interested in your product based on blockchain information, then you could pretty
much, we'll say specific advertisers as individuals, and not put as much cost through
efforts of trying to get information out to individuals that are not interested in your
product. Because when you're advertising, you want to target your target audience, you don't want to be
targeting people who just have absolutely no interest in it, right? Like, there's a lot of things I could
really cover about what was we'll say, like, pink cars, right, for instance, or red cars. Some people
like pink cars, some people like red cars, some people don't like cars at all, you don't want the
people that don't like cars at all getting your advertising, it's a waste of advertising dollars.
So, again, it's just, it's about incentivizing through manipulation at the end of the day, and
that manipulation could just simply be a markup to a, you know, potential thinking that you're getting
a discount, and then they don't even have, they're paying you in a sense, but they're not really paying
if you get what I mean. Yeah, I mean, Progressive introduced real quick on that, like, Progressive
had something prior to me getting there, but we really were putting a push on it when I got there,
called Snapshot, which is usage-based insurance, where people basically got a discount for plugging
a, you know, sort of a, a, like, little device into their onboard diagnostic port, and everybody
who signed up for this thing got a discount, even if they were the shittiest driver of all time.
Why? Because you were giving data, and at mass, that data became more predictive towards your
actual scores, or some people got a real discount because, oh, you only drive twice a week to work,
and you work from home most of the time. There's no reason that we shouldn't be giving you a better
discount because you're less of a risk, and we want you to continue to buy more of our products.
Or, hey, you know what? Maybe your discount's not so good. It's like, well, I thought I was
supposed to get higher than that, but it actually nudges that person out the door and provides
driving data for that area, for that type of car, for that person, for that demographic,
and you're able to use that big data to be more predictive overall.
So the, the, the forefront of that to your point is, like, everybody basically got a discount
because they were providing the data. Some got more than others, and they were able to model out
where that sort of best case scenario was for, with things like lifetime underwritten profits.
So, like, exactly what you're saying, but that juiced up to a thousand is what we're talking about
with blockchain-based data because the predictive nature of, like, again, if I own a Fortnite NFT
that was bought in the last week, I can be targeted as a gamer, and without a shadow of a doubt,
a gaming company, Hot Pockets, whoever it was, can advertise to me saying,
that person was playing Fortnite last week, or the account connected to this was.
And so they're getting to somebody who is their target demographic. So your point's exactly right
there. Actually, I was going to say, though, but I do need to sneak out the back door, though,
because I got to go grab dinner with, with the fam. I appreciate the hell out of y'all having me on.
Again, my pin profile tweet, if you're looking for a book, if you got, if you got 0.01,
one worth of value out of this conversation, 0.01 ETH worth of value, please buy my book because
it's $30, and that's what it is. It is the pin tweet on my profile.
Steve, how much is that in Solana?
Oh, god damn it. Who is Joshua on stage? I'm having a nice little moment here. He's made
his picture. What happened to his face?
What about Cardano? I got some Cardanos in my wallet, I think.
No, it was funny, Steve. I was actually going to add on to what you were saying about Progressive.
My last Tesla and my latest one that I bought right before the cutoff for the tax incentive for 2023.
Tesla's insurance, because it's in-house, is typically 50% to 80% cheaper than if you were to go with
GEICO, Progressive, State Farm, what have you, because they already have all the data of the drivers.
And so my monthly premium is $150 through Tesla. If I were to have gone through GEICO,
which is ironically who I had my Inventador insured through, would have been about $300.
It's funny, because too, you talk about the data that they want. And see, there's a problem.
These conversations get me all geeked up, and then I can't leave. But I'll say this. The thing
that you just said about the data, though, it's like, when we're Progressive and I would think
about it, they would be like, well, who's your biggest competitor you're worried about? GEICO or
Allstate or State Farm? And it's like, no, no, no, no. You're worried about Amazon or Meta doing car
insurance, because they have the data to be predictive, and they could tie other things to that and throw
some major models. You're worried about Google and Alphabet doing it. So, okay, for real,
it's going to sneak out. Let me know the three winners. Happy to get them. Shanice will get me
your addresses. And thank you for having me on. This has been so fun, so energizing. I appreciate
the hell out of it. Legend, man. Thank you so much for being here. Like I said, it's all about
highlighting the good in Web3. And this is definitely the good. Shout out to you, Steve. Thank you again.
And guys, go show love to his profile and go get that book. A lot of you already did below.
That's what's up. It's all about supporting each other.
Eight o'clock.
Yo, it's fucked up, Profits.
Yep.
I can't order his book.
That's why I have to do it.
No, I can't order his book.
You're going to get a crock and I'm going to lose my train of thought.
No, I can't order his book because I'm moving and it shit comes off a pre-order on like the 25th.
So, like, I don't know where to send it to. It's annoying. Like, I want to pre-order, but I can't.
Maybe there's a downloadable PDF.
Josh is here.
Act right, everybody. Andrew, go ahead.
I don't have a book, but I have some dank memes.
But I want to put on my conspiracy theorist hat for just a second.
So, like, one thing I just wanted to bring up, and I think it's important, is, like,
someone brought this up about NFTs before.
And I talked to a lot of these big projects.
I mean, they are definitely building, you know, back-end data sets against users.
And they're looking at, you know, other things that your wallet's doing and all that.
And that's fine as long as you've kind of opted in and you understand that.
But I don't know that everybody understands that.
But the bigger one that I wanted to kind of just bring up is Web3 Social.
Because when I first saw some of this Web3 Social launch, like, a lot of it's leaning into,
you know, just trying to fix, quote-unquote, the problems with Web2 Social.
But I'm personally convinced that, like, one of them, if not all of them,
will eventually pivot into identity companies, right?
And I think that the rationale behind that is you launch an identity company,
people are going to be very weary of that, right?
Because it's, like, I don't want to give up all that personal data.
Do I trust, you know, this person or this company to handle it?
And so what's the easier way to kind of get into identity through things like social, right?
So anyways, that's just, like, one thing I wanted to bring up,
just as a word of, like, awareness for people.
Go ahead, Vector.
Would that not be, like, kind of, like, mitigated through, like,
kind of, like, decentralized matters, like peer-to-peer kind of, like, hosting?
Yeah, you definitely could.
What's up, buddy?
You definitely could.
I think the question just becomes, like, who is it, right?
Because, I mean, you have to realize, like, a lot of these companies that say they're decentralized,
are they really decentralized?
You know, if there's a foundation, you know, or excuse me, I should say DAO voting,
who controls, you know, the most say in the DAO?
So the answer is yes, but the question is, like, you just, you never know, you know?
Well, the question is how.
I mean, at the end of the day, it's just, like, if you provide, if it's a DAB, for instance,
okay, and then people are providing their data and they're seeing all,
and they're getting, like, an opt-in for, like, you know, peer-to-peer kind of, like, hosting.
So now you know that it's peer-to-peer.
And then, so it's just, like, you, it's, like, a, it's, like, at sign-up even.
You know what I mean?
Like, so there's no other way for it to even, you know, kind of not be peer-to-peer.
And so it's encrypted.
If it's encrypted, you get a piece of, you know, you can even earn for hosting that data
depending on how much data that you decide that you want to give to the, you know, platform
to do this sort of thing.
Yep.
Because that, for me, is, like, the, that's, like, the, what you guys are talking about
is so cool, too.
It's, like, the, the next level of all this, as far as, like, founders are concerned and
people that are building web-free products for web-free products not looking to, like, you
know, merge or marry themselves in the world, too.
Then, like, your value proposition that you have to any kind of consumer base is what we're
talking about right now.
Like, if you're getting, you're getting a large user base and you're, and you're getting
large data sets and then you're, you're looking to sell it and you're providing things like
that, then, like, that's really the only kind of avenue you have to compete because
other, like, you know, like, these, these big, these big, you know, companies, they're
not willing or prepared to do that.
You know, they don't even have the capacity to do that.
And so I think it's cool that we've been talking about it because, like, it's, like,
quite literally the only avenue I feel to success that we have is thinking about really
scrappy, innovative ways of value share and data and marketing and advertising.
That's, like, the, the prime pot just for the reasons we're all speaking about, which
is the fact that blockchain data is, one, it's just, like, highly accessible.
And then, two, it's just, like, it's completely deterministic.
So you can see and really predict, like, who and wants what and why.
And it's, like, when you, when even, like, founders are kind of, like, blowing the, they're
missing the mark.
When you get a community of however thousand many people, that essentially is a huge pool
of people that you can provide, like, kind of, like, data to these advertising companies
and then start giving that share, that revenue share back immediately to your community, which
I'm sure would alleviate so much, like, you know, like, I guess, like, the problem between
you kind of putting out, like, your main product.
You know what I'm saying?
You've already gathered all this awesome data that you can, like, continue to gather when
you're in discords, when you're in this, when you're having to make content creation,
when you're organizing them by their trade groups, and they're making all this stuff.
All that stuff is just more and more data that you can be providing, and then you can
be providing, like, kind of, like, a revenue share during the whole time that you're building
the next big thing, too.
So it's good to even talk about this stuff to give founders ideas as to how they could
actually be, you know, being, like, you know, of value to their community members.
You're definitely overestimating the intellectual capacity of founders.
None of them are trying to sell on-chain data.
They don't even understand on-chain data themselves.
Of course.
I know this.
That's why I'm saying, that's why we're talking about it here, though, right?
Well, you know, what I think is really cool about it is, like, this is, for the first
time in history, I think, going to drive us into, like, an age of abundance.
And the reason I say that is because data and information is the most valuable resource
on the planet.
It's more valuable than gold.
It's more valuable than Bitcoin, frankly.
And it's unlimited.
Like, it's unlimited.
We're going to continue to create more and more data every single day.
I think the stat is we create more in two days of information on the internet than we
did, like, in a full year, just 10 years ago.
And just think about how that's going to continue.
And it's not going to stop, right?
And so, as all these systems continue to evolve, I think what it's really going to do is allow
for, you know, really the democratization of data and, more importantly, like, an abundance
where people are going to start being able to grow, you know, their own value and really
drive that and control that themselves, right?
And I think the companies that understand that and respect it, like, it's really important.
Google made enough money in less than a week to pay off $3 billion in fines through data
acquisition.
I was just going to say, man, yeah, you hit the nail on the head because when I was at
Amazon, like, we didn't look at ourselves as a retail company.
We looked at ourselves as a data monetization company.
It's like, how do we take the data and further monetize it over and over?
And what does the lifetime value of a customer look like?
And if we put one Alexa device in a house, how does that impact, you know, LTV if we put
two Alexa devices and one in the car?
But yeah, that's exactly it.
It's all about data.
Yeah.
I'll never have that shit in my house.
I got ops in these streets, man.
I'm telling you.
Yo, where you been, Josh?
You know, you've been a little absent in Web3.
What's going on?
Honestly, this week, I'll fill you in on what we've been working on throughout December.
It's been very interesting.
But the funny part is it actually hooks directly into this data topic because the interesting
aspect is when you're building things that other people aren't, you have access to a
lot of data that other people don't have and everything kind of aligns with what's currently
being discussed.
There's a lot of announcements that haven't been made yet, but I'll apprise you to them
the next couple of days.
That's why he comes out of hiding, because he has alpha.
He has things to release.
That makes sense now.
It makes sense.
Happy New Year.
Haven't spoke to you since last year, bud.
Much success.
Much love to the family.
That was corny.
I know.
Much love.
Oh, man.
What did I do?
Yo, my daughter just turned three yesterday, so I'm dealing with that, too.
Oh, happy birthday.
That's what's up.
That's lit.
Super awesome.
Watching a human grow.
I could only imagine.
I don't know.
I'm watching a dog grow.
I'm not watching a human grow, but I could imagine how that is.
Yo, my dog just turned 10 three months ago.
There you go.
Watching both happen.
But no, what a super, super banger of a space.
It was four hours.
I don't know how we're still here.
It's supposed to only be two.
Anyway, thank you guys for pulling up, as always.
If you haven't already, web3exposed.com is the website.
Go there.
Go to the Discord.
Pull up.
Tag the fuck out of William.
Ask him for some analysis.
Ask him to do his job.
We need to know what the market is up to.
We need to long.
We need to bet all of our money so we can make more of it.
That's how you trade.
Totally kidding.
But definitely a lot of alpha today.
Make sure you guys run it back if you guys came a little bit late.
Also, too, there's going to be bangers every single day.
I have some of the craziest guests pulling up this week.
And I'm super excited to intro everybody that I got coming.
So thank you again, as always.
What the fuck?
Did you just yet again host another fucking banger?
Yeah, you did.
You did.
All right.
My dog's going crazy.
Make sure you text somebody.
Let them know you love them.
Drink some water.
Okay?
More importantly, write down your fucking goals and attack that shit.
If you're here to conquer and spread the love and the greater message of Web3, I'm on your fucking team.
Hit me up.
How can I help you?
I'll see you guys tomorrow, 5 p.m. Eastern.
Be here or be a square.
Even though that didn't rhyme, it's all right.
I love you.
I'll see you guys tomorrow.
Peace out.
Peace out.
