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

Sam Parr

Do you see a jacket? It's crazy! I thought he meant you selling one NFT for like $100, or however much you sold that for. What's the difference between a JPEG and an NFT? I didn't see that you have one for $76,000,000.

Jack Butcher

just put it up a smaller

Sam Parr

do you think that's gonna work

Shaan Puri

just a smile

Sam Parr

at his

Shaan Puri

Face? I love it! Never look... So, I have just kind of an update on my BitCloud thing that I wanted to talk about, but we can do it later if we want. It doesn't have to be at the beginning.

Sam Parr

What I would rather is for you to lead it, unless you want to talk about Jack Butcher. We have a ton of... like this is all related.

Shaan Puri

and he yeah

Sam Parr

There's like... the world is so weird right now. Amongst our friends, I think that there's probably a tier or two above, but we are in such an odd tier. We have very close friends, or you and me a little bit less so, who have made a fair amount of money on all of this new stuff happening. Yeah, kind of crazy.

Shaan Puri

So, I'll say, if you're tired of us talking about Bitcoin, NFTs, and all the crypto stuff, this is probably not for you. You'll likely skip ahead to the part where we're going to talk about, you know, Dictionary.com later. So, I would say we're going to show you some range today. We're going to talk about a website that's like 25 years old, and then we're going to talk about a website that's like 25 minutes old, which is Bitcloud. Let's talk about Jack first. We have a friend, Jack Butcher, who is behind this account that's kind of very popular on Twitter called "Visualize Value." He himself has a designer background, so he's a very artistic guy. By the way, every time I say "artistic," I think I'm about to say "autistic," so I have to catch myself each time and make sure I don't accidentally call him autistic.

Sam Parr

so it could be that too who knows I mean

Shaan Puri

well actually he

Sam Parr

the the

Shaan Puri

The thing about Jack is he's very smooth, very low-key, the nicest guy in the world. And, well, he's...

Sam Parr

I met Jack a year ago. I contacted him and asked him to do this design stuff. He was just up and coming.

Shaan Puri

right

Sam Parr

Sarah and I (my wife) became friends with Jack and his wife. They spent Thanksgiving with us down here in Austin, where they just had a baby. We've been...

Jack Butcher

right

Sam Parr

Friends with them, talking all that stuff. His story is that he used to live in New York City with his wife. He's British and he came here 10 years ago. They shared a studio apartment that was 400 square feet. They had nothing. I mean, they tried to start an agency business, but it didn't go so well. They were on their last dollar, and this is only like 18 months ago.

Shaan Puri

Right, okay. So, he kind of pivots to basically saying, "Okay, within the agency's work that I do, the part that I like and I'm good at, and other people don't seem to like but they really want, are these pitch decks I'm making." I'm really good at making these slides where it's just a rectangle, and I communicate some information on it. That's where the **Visualize Value** brand came from. He was just putting out a little image, you know, like a rectangle that would take a concept and bring it to life visually. He started off getting popular by just taking a bunch of Naval's popular tweets, you know, sayings, his little kind of one-liners, and he would create a graphic out of it. He has this one graphic style. If you're on Twitter, you've seen it. It's just black and white. It's always a black background with white text on top and a little kind of very simplistic, minimalistic graph, chart, or drawing on top of it. Okay, so that's **Visualize Value**. He does the normal creator thing; he gets a little bit of an audience. His Twitter grows to 100,000 people. He creates a course and a paid community for people who want to learn this thing, and he's doing well for himself. Right? And that's where we met him, Mike.

Sam Parr

Well, he does north of $1,000,000 a year in revenue. The only expenses are like small software stuff and then him and his wife. Exactly.

Shaan Puri

And so, he's doing very well for himself, right? But it's all relative. She's doing much better now. So what happened? This craze around NFTs came out. If you don't know what NFTs are, just think of them like digital art that people buy. Crypto people really like it because it's virtual art, in the same way that crypto is sort of like virtual money or digital money. So anyways, Jack starts doing NFTs. Jack basically takes the same art that he's posting on Twitter for free and says, "No, now you can own this piece of art. Now you can own this post that I'm putting up." He just dabbles, you know? He just does an experiment. I don't know what the first one sold for; I think it was like one Ether, right? 1 E, one of the two.

Sam Parr

2 or $3,000

Jack Butcher

it was

Shaan Puri

Like, yeah, just close to $2, and it was like 1.5 Ether or something like that. So it's like $2,000 or $3,000. Still pretty sweet, right? This is just a, you know, .png file that he otherwise uploads to Twitter for free. Now, somebody wanted to own the .png file because they're fans of his, and this meant something to them. They had a bunch of crypto gains that they could reinvest their Chuck E. Cheese money, right? So, okay, now he's like stepping it up. We'll fast forward. He does some more NFTs and releases another NFT. This one gets bid up and bought for 33 Ether, which is, I think, something like... what is 33 Ether times...

Sam Parr

like $70 I think

Shaan Puri

$70 so he sells one of his images for $70

Sam Parr

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

Shaan Puri

Right, right, right, exactly. Because he's not like... he's not a schemer in any way. But I think he is smart and he is interesting. He likes to dabble, but like, he wasn't... he's not trying to pull a quick one. He's putting his art out there and people are buying it. So, I actually messaged the buyer and I said, "Why the heck did you buy this thing?" It's some random, you know, random username. He just goes, "Oh, you know, I love Jack and I think this is gonna appreciate in value. I just really love this... I love the art." And I was like, "Wow, okay, fantastic!" So that's the guy who bought it for $70.

Sam Parr

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

Shaan Puri

yeah so so explain that one

Sam Parr

So, the part of the story is the craze. There are two crazy parts of the story. The most recent thing that happened, which we'll talk about, but the first crazy thing is he was like, "You know what? If I did... like, people love Jack. He's got a cult following, probably more than Sean. People love Sean. They used to love me, then they... Sean now they..."

Shaan Puri

love jack

Sam Parr

Now they love Jack. What he did was create a website where you could buy a pack. He had 12 packs, and all it said was "Pack 1," "Pack 2," "Pack 3." Imagine a baseball card, but with a Jack Butcher cover on it. It was just black and it said "Visualize Value Pack 1."

Shaan Puri

right

Sam Parr

and you would buy these packs having no idea what the nft art was in it

Shaan Puri

right

Sam Parr

He had 12 of them, and people were bidding on them. Each one sold for around $10,000 to $15,000, which I thought was impressive.

Shaan Puri

nice amazing

Sam Parr

until we get to the final part of the story or at least the most recent part of the story

Shaan Puri

Exactly. So, he gets to today. I log on to Twitter, as I do first thing in the morning, to see what's going on in the world today. Holy shit! Jack Butcher has listed a new piece of art for $76,000,000—something like that. What is it? What's the exact number? 72... 76,000,000. He basically... and it's called "Fame." What he did was create the highest-priced NFT thus far in the history of mankind. The most expensive NFT was by the artist Beeple, who is like Jack but even more popular. Beeple had done a few drops, and those drops were kind of in the $1,000,000 to $5,000,000 range, ish. Then, the most popular NFT of all time was sold for $69,000,000 recently. There are some rumors that this sale was sort of a manufactured event—like somebody came in and did it just to... I don't know. These are rumors, but the speculation was that they kind of made it a publicity stunt. So, anyway, Jack basically says, "Cool, this is an NFT called 'Fame,' and what 'Fame' is, it will be the number one priced piece of digital artwork in the world," right? So, he prices it above the Beeple drop.

Sam Parr

I wasn't I wasn't referring to this I was referring to what he did last

Shaan Puri

I didn't even see this this is crazy this is today

Sam Parr

Last week, what he did was he wrote... he did an NFT, and it says, "Here's the difference between a..."

Jack Butcher

a a

Sam Parr

A JPEG and an NFT, and it just had a verified... He basically made a tweet and then he sold that tweet for like $150,000, which I thought was crazy.

Shaan Puri

this is way crazier yeah

Sam Parr

because it's it's crazier because it might work

Shaan Puri

Exactly. So, okay, let's walk through this. If you're jacked, why? I'll tell you why to do this and why it might actually work. Why do this? Well, if nothing else, this is just a great way to drive attention, press, and do something that's bold. Right? So, pricing a piece of your artwork for **$77,000,000** doesn't even mean it matters if somebody buys it. Just pricing it at that amount is already going to put you on the map. The second thing is, let's say there are three outcomes. Somebody actually buys it for **$77,000,000**. There have been Cryptopunks; now, the number one Cryptopunk sold for... I'm sorry, can you look this up? How much did that top Cryptopunk sell for? I think it was like **$77,000,000**, something like that. Beeple sold for **$69,000,000**. So, there is a chance—maybe a **5%** or **2%** chance—that this thing actually sells for **$77,000,000**, which would be incredible. The second thing is, this might be a "shoot for the stars, you land on the moon" situation. The Cryptopunks sold for **$7.5 million**, and the guy who bought it, by the way, this is kind of cool—I don't know how you pronounce this, but the person who bought it has the handle **Perugia** or something like that. I'm not in the art world, but that's an homage. Basically, that's the same name as the guy who stole the Mona Lisa, which helped catapult the Mona Lisa to fame. That was part of what made the Mona Lisa even more remarkable and more valuable, and now it's the most valuable piece of artwork in the world. So, okay, so by...

Sam Parr

the way great usage of the word homage

Shaan Puri

yeah thank you

Sam Parr

good job

Shaan Puri

We're trying to class it up right here. So, alright, he might not sell it for $77,000,000, but even if it sells for $1,700,000, that's $1,700,000 that he just, you know, manufactured through his own creativity. And, you know, I would bet you like 4 days of effort.

Sam Parr

I got chills looking at this tweet that he put out. The reason why this is so crazy is that it might work. Someone might be crazy enough to do this, right?

Shaan Puri

He basically has a no-loss situation. Because Jack's brand is authentic, he is not just a quick flash in the pan trying to make a quick dollar. He's literally more of an artist than anything else. He has been doing this for a while, creating daily content and building up a following. Just like Beeple, who created a new piece of art every day for 10 years, Jack is an overnight success 10 years in the making. I see Jack having a no-lose situation, and NFTs are a thing that fits his skill set. There are a lot of reasons people kind of criticize NFTs right now. One is that it's overvalued; it's a bubble. People ask, "What do you really own? I can just screenshot and boom, I own the thing too." There are a bunch of ways you can make fun of this. However, one of the good things that came out of this is that, in most of these hype cycles, it's the suits on Wall Street that get rich. This time, at least it's starving artists that are getting rich. So, at the very worst, even if the whole thing comes crashing down, at least a few artists got paid. Who could really be too mad at that? I can't. So, I think this is kind of an amazing thing Jack is doing.

Sam Parr

this boggles my mind should we ask him to come on do you want jack to come on yeah we should for sure have him

Jack Butcher

come on

Sam Parr

are you friends with him yeah alright great not as close as

Shaan Puri

you guys but yes we're we're close you should message him we should hear you he hops on let's see if he hops on today

Jack Butcher

just be

Shaan Puri

like you're free to come talk about your fame thing for for 5 minutes let's just see if he hops on at the end of this

Sam Parr

Alright, I just texted him. We'll come back to that. It's fucking crazy. I almost have chills talking about it. Would it be weird to go to a different topic, or do you want to stay on NFTs and stuff like that?

Shaan Puri

we can do whatever you want

Sam Parr

with the consumer less ex is everything less exciting

Shaan Puri

Well, I think it's going to go two ways. If I'm listening to this, most people who are listening are kind of not as knee-deep into this world as we are. We're still just kind of dabbling. So, the average person is probably not familiar with all these things. They're definitely not taking action and definitely not getting rich. I think it's going to be kind of polarizing. Some people are going to think, "Oh wow, this is really cool! I should go check this out and learn more about this." Others are going to be like, "This is so stupid! I think this is all just a giant carnival game, some kind of Ponzi scheme that I don't want to hear more about." So, I don't know, it's probably pretty polarizing.

Sam Parr

Let me move... Let's do a different one. Let's do a different one and we'll only spend about 10 minutes on it, and then we're probably gonna come back to this. I wanna come back to BigCloud. I wanna talk, come back to angel investing.

Shaan Puri

okay

Sam Parr

Okay, but someone... I tweeted out that I'm going to start a YouTube channel, and someone said I should talk about my research process. That's a really hard thing to talk about, but I want to bring up one topic of my research process as well as one interesting thing that I found. What I like to do is find out who is buying different parts of real estate or different real estate properties. I go to TheRealDeal.com, and there's this one segment called "Yolanda Says." It's like this fake author named Yolanda. She goes, "I heard a rumor that this person's buying a house. The owner is this, this, and this." Yolanda hears that they're going to offer this much money. I have no idea; Yolanda's a fake person.

Jack Butcher

right

Sam Parr

but it's just like a blog a blog it's a gossip

Shaan Puri

gossip blog yeah

Sam Parr

For real estate, mostly in New York and LA, though. So, they're kind of famous—famous people doing it. What I love to do is find out who is buying the real estate, and then I go and research them. The reason why is that one of the best ways to figure out if someone is actually wealthy or not is by the real estate holdings that they own. That's one of the few things that it's really hard to fake. I mean, you could fake it, but if someone has bought a $20,000,000 home, the likelihood that they're worth $100,000,000 or more is incredibly high. You know, it's hard to like... bullshit that.

Shaan Puri

right

Sam Parr

And so, real estate holdings are one of the best ways to get an indicator of someone's wealth. It's a great way—not the best way, but a great way. I found one that interested me a ton. This guy's name is Brian Carringer, and he bought a house in Malibu in 2019 for $20,000,000. I hadn't heard of Brian; I know a lot of internet entrepreneurs, but I hadn't heard of him. So, I researched him, and this is the guy who started Dictionary.com. It's kind of a crazy thing when you think about it because who really thinks of Dictionary.com? In the 1990s, this guy started a business called Lexico Publishing in 1995. Lexico Publishing owned Thesaurus.com and Dictionary.com. He bootstrapped it, grew it, and sold it in 2005 to IAC for $100,000,000. Then, two years ago, IAC sold Dictionary.com to Dan Gilbert. You know Dan Gilbert—Quicken Loans.

Shaan Puri

yep

Sam Parr

He sold Dictionary.com for... or they sold Dictionary.com for $100,000,000. They didn't do a very good job with it, but Dictionary.com gets around 40 million unique visitors a month, and Thesaurus.com gets around 40 million uniques a month as well. They do about $20 million in revenue and have barely any employees. I believe they have dozens of employees. It's incredibly fascinating because this is what I call a...

Shaan Puri

how do they make money it's just ad adsense or is there something else

Sam Parr

Just ads. Okay, all it is, is ads. It's an incredibly interesting company because it's one of the things that I call a "Fur You." Let's call it, I call it a "forgotten property." These are just things that you forget even exist but quietly make money and are quite reputable. They're not necessarily sexy; it's like the sweaty startup of the internet.

Shaan Puri

yeah yeah yeah

Sam Parr

You know, if "Sweaty Startup" means a lawn landscaping business, this is kind of like that for the internet. Sure, but they've done a really good job of staying relevant. They do a "word of the day," which people particularly love. It's a huge email list where we just get the word of the day. They also do a "word of the year." For example, when Donald Trump was president in 2016, I think the word of the year was "xenophobic" because a lot of people were searching for what "xenophobic" means. This past year, in 2020, it was "pandemic." It's almost like a recap of the year, and it's actually kind of culturally relevant. Also, what they do is when someone like Kendall Jenner or Kylie Jenner—whatever the woman's name is—who is quote "self-made," they'll do funny stuff. They'll tweet the definition or retweet a tweet of her calling herself "self-made," and they'll say, "Actually, the definition of 'self-made' is success unaided."

Jack Butcher

or

Sam Parr

Something like that. They're pretty snarky. I find this to be incredibly interesting because it's something I didn't think about. And that's what it is—kind of cool.

Shaan Puri

Man, you went from a 100 to 0 real quick there at the end. Yeah, okay. So, we actually had a friend who was looking at buying Dictionary.com. You know about this? No? We had a friend that was looking at buying Dictionary.com and merging it with another business. I can't remember the name of it now.

Sam Parr

urbandictionary.com is another big one that one gets about 40 or 50,000,000 uniques a month

Shaan Puri

and who owns that wait

Sam Parr

just a guy a guy in san francisco aaron peckham

Shaan Puri

So, there's a similar one. I know you wrote another one on here that’s similar to me, which is Chess.com. I don’t know as much about it as you do, so fill in the gaps. But I was looking at it and I was like, "Oh man, Chess.com is a great domain." Chess is this kind of like very quiet, you know, just super sticky, relevant... It's a classic game, right? It's just been relevant for so long. Then with *The Queen's Gambit*, it got way more popular recently. There are all these crazy charts spiking the trends of people searching for chess, chess boards, how to get good at chess, what is *The Queen's Gambit*, how do you do a Queen's Gambit... all those things. So, if you're gonna shut...

Sam Parr

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

Shaan Puri

exactly that's that's what I was gonna say they have a huge amount of traffic what's their traffic monthly it's

Sam Parr

I don't I'll look it up but they have around 50,000,000 registered users

Shaan Puri

Right, and they're not just like... it's not flyby traffic. Like Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com, they're going to have a lot more traffic, but it's going to be flyby—200 million.

Sam Parr

monthly uniques according to similarweb most of which is direct

Shaan Puri

incredible right and so 200,000,000

Sam Parr

they make money way more though do you know how they make money

Shaan Puri

No, I... well, I can guess. Tell me if I'm right. So, I would guess that basically they sell some kind of, you know, course or tutorial—a way to get better at chess. Do they do that?

Sam Parr

yeah and so you can meet with coaches and you could pay coaches money

Shaan Puri

Right, can they also have some kind of premium pro membership where you get matched with better people and your stats get saved? Something like that? Yep, yep. Okay, so it's still a dead simple business model around a classic game that nobody owns the IP to. It's not like saying "Monopoly." Well, you can't do Monopoly; somebody owns Monopoly. I don't know who—Hasbro or whoever owns Monopoly. You can do it with chess. This is one of the reasons why we talked about religion as a really interesting, fun, you know, fundamental or like base layer for any business. Because nobody owns religion, but it's a highly recognized brand with super high affinity. So, I love businesses that are, you know, like Pray, the app that's basically Calm for Christianity. There are versions of this for the Muslim religion as well. I love religion as one of the primary substrates because you have a billion people who know about it, but nobody owns the IP. So, you can use the IP and...

Sam Parr

so what what what was our friend gonna do who who I wonder who our friend is

Shaan Puri

So, I don't remember exactly, and I don't know how much we can really talk about it, but they were going to basically buy two properties at the same time: Dictionary.com and one other one. They were like, "Look, Dictionary.com gets a ton of traffic, but it's not a very sticky service. It doesn't really have great monetization potential; it's just display ads." Then this other thing has a great business model and great stickiness. Maybe we could merge the two. Here's a hypothetical: I don't know if this is exactly what they said, but if you're Grammarly, would you pay to buy Dictionary.com and Thesaurus? You're going to get 50 to 60 million people coming to look up words and find out what they mean. You could say, "Hey, by the way, if you ever feel like you want to sharpen up, maybe you should install Grammarly," which is a great way to write, choose better vocabulary, write in perfect grammar, and become a better writer. They have a business model attached to it that makes sense. So, I wonder if there were other things like that.

Sam Parr

Maybe I would, if I was Grammarly, I would maybe buy Dictionary.com. I just thought it was interesting because you don't really think about this. Another one that I've been... I'm going to do research on is EasyGif.com. Do you know that?

Shaan Puri

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

Sam Parr

So, **easygif.com**. It's the letters **E**, the letter **Z**, and then **gif**. **gif.com** has 8,000,000 unique visitors a month. You go there, upload a video, and it turns it into a GIF. I was doing research on it, and it looks like the guy behind it is part of a small team, just a couple of people, and it was made in **Latvia**. Yeah, so overseas.

Shaan Puri

here's two

Sam Parr

other things

Shaan Puri

If I'm Dictionary.com, one thing that they should do is take a page out of the New York Times' playbook. I don't know if you've seen this, but you probably have because you're in media and you care about this stuff. However, most people aren't aware of how the New York Times really makes money and what its business looks like today. A pretty large part of their business... I haven't done the research since this is off the top of my head, but...

Sam Parr

a very

Shaan Puri

large I know tens of 1,000,000 of dollars a year I believe comes from their games division

Sam Parr

particularly one game crossword

Shaan Puri

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

Sam Parr

I'm looking it up

Shaan Puri

Keep on going. I'm not sure if I'm talking to the CEO of Dictionary.com, but hey, here’s a free idea that I think could generate probably $8 to $10 million a year. You should take all these popular games like Word Scramble or Mini Crossword, or you know, all these different little word puzzle games that are very popular in the App Store. They have trouble with distribution. Good games, but trouble with distribution. All you need to do is reskin that as the Dictionary.com game and put it as a pop-up for people coming to the site. You could say, "Hey, download this fun game!" Even if you're converting, you know, half a percent of your traffic to this thing, you're going to end up driving a lot of revenue because these games work. All they need is distribution. Maybe people who come to Dictionary.com or subscribe to the Word of the Day email would like to play these little word games. They're very popular; even my mom plays these little word scramble games.

Sam Parr

Okay, so some information on The New York Times. The New York Times is a publicly traded company, which is why I'm getting some of the numbers. However, they don't always break out the revenue by segment, so I'm doing a little bit of guesstimation. But I would bet I'm right within 10 to 20%. In 2020, The New York Times reported that they had 600,000 people paying for the crossword puzzle only. That was in 2020. It was a huge year for subscription revenue; the flow actually doubled.

Shaan Puri

yeah

Sam Parr

Everything doubled, but let's just run that up to 800,000 for 600,000. So, 800,000. I believe it costs **$6.95** a month for a crossword puzzle, but let's run that up to **$7**. So, **$7** times **800,000**, we're looking at **$5,600,000** a month, **$60,000,000** a year, or **$67,000,000** a year in subscription revenue only from crossword puzzles. Right? That's it. That's just the crossword puzzle division. Right? **Fucking crazy**, right?

Shaan Puri

Exactly. I read an article recently where someone from The New York Times said, "Yeah, we're quadrupling down on games." Games exploded during COVID. Crossword puzzles are already an amazing franchise for us. They have another game, but I forgot what it is. They have a few staple games that are classics, and they're like, "You know, we're actually a games company." The guy literally said that. He goes, "We don't just put the same exact game on a phone. We kind of reinvent it so that it's even more fun on your phone. We try to put a twist on the game. We're not just going to come out with the classic." For example, 2048. If you've ever played that little numbers game where you slide the tiles and it adds up to 2048, the game's awesome. The New York Times could come out with a version of 2048 that has their own twist on the game. I found that to be pretty interesting, and that's what I would do if I were Dictionary.com.

Sam Parr

So, in this segment, the takeaway should be to **learn about real estate**, read *The Real Deal*, and Google all the entrepreneurs. The reason why you do that is you're going to discover stuff like *Dictionary.com*, and you're eventually going to learn about CrossFit puzzles. The reason why this is all important is that we are showing that you can make a killing—a **fucking killing**—of hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars. Imagine buying a $20,000,000 home on the beachfront of Malibu, more than most celebrities will ever be able to afford. You're doing it by building something that starts as a silly idea, something you never would have thought could actually become this big. When you see this stuff, it actually inspires you. Or at least, it inspires me, knowing that I can turn something silly into something profitable. That's a badass realization! Just knowing that’s possible is cool. It's kind of like, why did five people break the four-minute mile in the same year when previously no one had done it? It's because when you see what's possible, it pushes the boundary and shows you what you can do. That's neat to me.

Shaan Puri

So, we should also say two things that I took away from that. You are really good at figuring out, like, you sniff out these little interesting stories. You just think, "Who's that guy? How does he drive that car? How much is that car? How'd you get that money?" Actually, there's a famous TikTok channel that just does only this. I don't know if...

Sam Parr

you I love it

Shaan Puri

But he goes up to people getting out of Lamborghinis or, you know, just killer cars and says, "Hey man, what do you do for a living?" The guy's like, "What?" And he'll just say, "Yo, what do you do for a living? I'm just curious." The guy might respond, "I'm in real estate." "Real estate? Cool man," and then he just leaves. That's it. It just kind of bothers him for a second. Then the person will be like, "You know, I'm a cannabis entrepreneur. I'm a hedge fund guy. I'm a YouTuber. I'm a whatever," right?

Sam Parr

Well, the joke of that channel is that people say one of two things. The women say, "I'm a wife," and they joke about it. Then, they also say, "I sell drugs."

Shaan Puri

right right exactly and then they're like zoom away and so so I love that channel at first I think that's just like a really simple fun idea for a tiktok channel and then but but there is some like kinda merit to that and it's really helped me in life which is basically anytime you see somebody who's got an interesting lifestyle I like to figure out 2 things 1 is is your whole day like this what's your day like what do you do how do you do that and I like to see how people architect their life right like and that sort of like it's like like you said about the 4 minute mile it opens your mind to what's possible so recently I got this like private chef person who's like making meals for me they don't work they don't come to my house they don't make food in my house but it's like a delivery service meal prep service but let's call it a private chef right because it's not doordash it's somebody who's giving me a menu or giving feedback yeah you're doing the same because I'm doing it for you know trying to be fit you're trying to do this for the same reason you wanna eat healthier and pay if you can afford it that's a convenient way to do it right where where you know you got the the p word privilege to be able to do it and so the the reason I think that's even possible I realized that was because the investor in my last company he had a private chef that was like a former michelin star chef at a restaurant this guy elgin amazing chef who was like would be at his house and he would make you know lunch and dinner for them every single night and I was like woah I didn't even realize people have that and it's not that oh you know I want that but it's I didn't even realize that's a possibility of a lifestyle that you could have it is a upgraded part of your life and so there's all these little examples I've I've had in my life of like like I have a cousin who has like a virtual assistant in the philippines and I asked him how do you do what do you do with that how do you set it up how did you find the right person right just get real curious about different people's lifestyles and how they architect how they design their life and you kind of you could pick and choose from there what works for you what you want out of your life the second thing is why did the guy behind dictionary.com like make it work right because it's like kind of a simple idea well he was early to a platform right so to get the domain dictionary.com you couldn't do that today but you could do it when the web was early and not everybody believed which is a perfect segue back to bitcloud new platforms

Sam Parr

by the way speaking of bitcloud I texted jack while we were talking he's gonna be joining any second now

Shaan Puri

Oh, perfect! We brought this up on the last podcast because Ryan Beagleman, a friend of ours, came on and was like, "Dude, I haven't had this much fun on a product since like the early days of Facebook. I'm obsessed with this thing!" He was asking us, "Are you gonna use it? Are you gonna claim your account?" So, if you missed that episode, let me just give you the quick 10 seconds of what this is. Imagine if Robinhood and Twitter had a baby. It's basically a stock market for people. You go on the app, bigclout.com, and you see all these people. Instead of just following them or liking their content, you can actually buy into their stock. Essentially, you could buy their creator coins. Every time you buy, the price goes up, and every time you sell, the price goes down. It's kind of like a stock market for people's reputations. When we did the podcast, my coin was about $1,500 at the time while we were recording it. Ryan was like my fourth biggest holder; he had bought up a bunch. He asked, "Are you gonna use this thing or not?" I said, "Sure, I'll give it a try and see what happens."

Sam Parr

of course dude

Shaan Puri

yeah

Sam Parr

You know, like, there are guys who take every vitamin. My friend Jack takes every vitamin. If you're like, "Hey, I have this vitamin," boom, done, he takes it. Right? He takes every type of supplement you could ever imagine. You are like that with Bitcoin or any type of scheme. So it's like, "Hey, there's this thing called the Big Cloud." Okay, hang on... Yep, I just uploaded 100 of 1,000 of them. Dude, I'm in! That is you. You try everything.

Shaan Puri

I learned I learned from those guys

Sam Parr

all the best

Shaan Puri

Well, I don't think it's all the best, but I do. At the beginning, you know, it makes sense to be optimistic when everybody else is, you know, pessimistic or skeptical.

Sam Parr

you're a default to this is the greatest thing I've ever seen that's your default

Shaan Puri

No, no, no. My default is, "I'm game to try it." Then, if it starts to have some merit, I'm like, "Okay, you know what's really cool about this? X, Y, and Z," even if A, B, and Z suck.

Sam Parr

Yeah, that's not how people perceive it. I had people message me after our thing saying, "Why the hell is Sean pumping this Big Club thing? It's a Ponzi scheme!" And I was like, "I don't know, he likes it. That's just his opinion, he likes it." But they were mad at me because they thought we were promoting this, and I was like, "I don't know."

Shaan Puri

So, let me explain. We have two friends. One of your best buddies is Jack Smith. Jack came on the podcast; we did an episode with him back when this was an interview show. I asked him, "How did you create this Bungle thing that now sold for, I don't know, $750 million or something like that?" The root of his success was that he tries every platform early. As soon as something comes out, he wants to try it. In fact, if you go on Bitcloud, Jack Smith owns 2 cents of my coin. Oh, he was there before me—of course he was! Right on Product Hunt, he became the number one power user. As soon as Product Hunt came out, he used it every single day. With NFTs and collectibles, he's like the number one power user on all these different platforms for digital fractional ownership and collectibles.

Sam Parr

on rally road he's the number one buyer

Shaan Puri

Exactly. So that's what Jack does. It's not that all of these will work; it's that you only need one to work for it to pay off big. For example, if you were early on Twitter, even just as a user, you would have a big following. If you were early as an investor in any of these companies, if they hit, it gets very big. That was the first kind of insight I noticed from Jack. Then I was talking to my friend Furkan, who is the CTO and co-founder of my previous company. He's probably the best kind of technology guy I know. Furkan's always dabbling. He was the one telling me about Bitcoin and Ethereum before anybody else. I didn't listen to him; I didn't buy. He was just buying—like he put $5 into Ethereum in the ICO or something like that. You know, the ICO of Ethereum was 17 cents, and now it sells for $1,700. You can see the type of appreciation you get when one of these hits. For every one Ether that hits big like that, he has maybe 50 or 100 things that don't fully pan out. For example, he's huge on VR. He bought me an Oculus and said, "Dude, let's play VR poker together. Let's try VR." But VR hasn't hit in a big way yet. He spent thousands of dollars on VR and hundreds of hours building in VR, and so far, that's yielded nothing. I asked him, "What's your deal with this? Is it because you like it? Am I dumb for not thinking VR is big? You seem to be all over it." He replied, "No, what I do is anytime there's an interesting technology, I'm just curious about it. Therefore, I'm like in the first 10,000 people that really understand every new technology. Because of that, one of those technologies is going to be big." Right now, for example, he's super into vertical farming and hydroponic farming. He's all about indoor farming and vertical farming. We have this one hour a week called the "Cool Shit Hour." I just sit back on Zoom, and he shows me the cool things he's been trying out that week. This week was all about vertical farming, and it blew my mind. I didn't know anything about it, and he was telling me all the reasons it's awesome.

Sam Parr

why is this just not an episode that we do

Shaan Puri

It should... it really should be because it's so good. It's kind of my edge right now because he tells me about things, and then I go take action on it. He's even earlier than me, so he gets more upside, but I'm still very early just by being buddies with this guy. So anyway, that's a long way of saying it: in technology, it pays to be optimistic. It pays to be an early adopter. If you're willing to look stupid sometimes by putting some time or money into things that fail, you will net out way, way ahead just by being early into a bunch of interesting things. At the very least, you learn, but at the most, one of these hits, and then you gain a bunch of... like you build a big network there or you make a bunch of money because you invested in it. So anyway, that's my overall philosophy. I totally see the people who are like, "Bitcloud is dumb. This is a scam. This is a sham. This will never work." Hey, I think there's merit to all those arguments, but from my opinion, I just thought, "This sounds interesting. It sounds very different than anything else that's out there." I tried it, and I immediately liked it. So the first 24 hours, I was hooked. By the second 24 hours, I had put $100,000 into the platform. You know, don't tell my wife.

Sam Parr

So right now, that's a lot of money.

Shaan Puri

that's a

Sam Parr

lot of dollars it's a lot of money

Shaan Puri

Yeah, so let me tell you why it is a lot of money.

Sam Parr

My current market cap is between $170,000 and $200,000. I sold some of my stuff, and that guy wired or sent me $10,000 on Coinbase.

Shaan Puri

right

Sam Parr

I'm like, "I think this is silly," but like I told you, this is silly and you're still gonna give me money. Okay, fine, I'll take it. I sold some of mine.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, you sold some of yours. I have not sold any of mine. Instead, I actually invested money into the platform and bought a bunch of people's coins, including yours. So, I own a bunch of coins from all these different people that I think might appreciate. I would say there is still a chance, but in the long run, I think there's less than a 2% chance this works. If it does work, my $100,000 is going to be worth tens of millions of dollars. But that's the long run, 2% case. Okay, well, I wouldn't put up $100 for a 2% win because I actually have a second way to win in this case. I have now been an early adopter of basically every crypto thing over the last, I don't know, 5 or 6 years. Some of them are dumb, some of them work, whatever. What I've seen is that any time a kind of new, exciting, disruptive idea comes out—whether it's ICOs, NFTs, or whatever—pick your favorite acronym. There's like a hype cycle that takes place. There are the people who make it, the people who buy in at the beginning and get access, and then there's a bunch of crypto enthusiasts who are believers in the general innovation space of crypto. They then say, "Oh cool, this sounds fun! I want to go try it." That's happening right now with NFTs. Like we talked about our friend Jack, who's selling a bunch of NFTs for, you know, $100,000 if not $1,000,000. It's because there are crypto enthusiasts who say, "NFTs are really cool! I want to invest in that."

Sam Parr

the crypto enthusiasts are not many of them hate big clout

Shaan Puri

Yeah, sure. So, many, many of the crypto enthusiasts are not one group of people. It's broken up into different categories. There's what's called **Bitcoin maximalists**. They don't want to talk about anything except for Bitcoin, and they want to invest 100% into Bitcoin. Then there are **Ethereum** people who are all about Ethereum. Finally, there are people who are just trying to degenerately gamble across all the different crypto projects that exist. I'm talking more about the gamblers because I understand the gamblers.

Sam Parr

More money? Have you made more money off Bitcoin than you have selling your company? No? That'd be cool if you did.

Shaan Puri

It would have been sweet. I think in the long run I will, but as of now, no. However, if you project forward 5 years, I would almost certainly say my crypto holdings will be worth more than what I sold the company for, or what I got out of the sale.

Sam Parr

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

Shaan Puri

So, I tweeted out that I was moving 25% of my net worth into Bitcoin. And not just liquid net worth, but my entire net worth. I ended up getting about 20% in, but the price kept rising as I was doing it. So, my overall average buy price is about $11,000 per Bitcoin. But anyways, my holdings now are like, I don't know, almost 50% of my net worth just because crypto has appreciated. I didn't put in as much as I said I was going to; it was a little bit less. But it appreciated, so now it makes up more. And I didn't sell; I didn't like sell to rebalance, let's put it that way.

Sam Parr

that's crazy

Shaan Puri

So anyways, the thing I want to tell you about is... That's my general... Let's play out three scenarios: **Scenario 1**: Let's say with BitCloud, this is a scam. I don't believe it's a scam given that they have backers and investors like: - Andreessen Horowitz - Sequoia - Chamath - Coinbase Capital - The Winklevoss [twins] Basically, like everybody who's legit in the technology/crypto space. These are tier 1 names that are invested in this thing.

Sam Parr

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

Shaan Puri

Right, so that's one thing that does happen in the crypto world: people take your money and they run away. That has literally happened. I don't think it's that, and I'll bucket it into one of the big criticisms: you can't withdraw your money. Yes, you have a huge amount of value in there, but you can't withdraw it yet. I would bucket that into the scam argument. If you think they'll never allow you to withdraw, I think that's silly. That would be a scam. After that podcast, I kind of understood what the heck BitClout was. It's basically a social network where you can bet on the people who are going to rise in reputation. As a participant, you could say, "Okay, instead of just following Sam, if I think Sam is awesome and he's only going to get more popular over time, I can actually invest in Sam." This is a little bit different than platforms like Patreon or Substack, where it's like, "I'll pay you for your content." That's different. Instead, this is about being a believer in you. So, back to that 1,000 true fans concept: if I'm a believer in you, I can invest in you. As more people realize that you're the best, your price will continue to go up, and I will actually go up with you. My stock in you will appreciate. I can actually make money being a curator, being someone who recognizes talent before others do, who recognizes reputations that are on the rise. I think that's really cool.

Sam Parr

that's cool

Shaan Puri

That's a new thing. You couldn't do that before. If I was an early user of Snapchat, Twitter, or Facebook, it was cool, but I didn't actually gain anything from it financially. If I discovered Jack... you said you met Jack when he had a smaller following. You didn't gain financially from Jack's following growing. I think that's a new thing, and it's a really cool mechanic. Now, on the other side, let's say you're the creator. Let's say you're Jack. You can basically go on and say, "Cool, you know what? I'm like a little mini Warren Buffett. I want to have my Berkshire Hathaway summit, my shareholder meeting." So you can say, "For my top 25 coin holders, I will meet with you personally, you know, in a Zoom or in person somewhere." That's a privilege you get by being one of my top shareholders. Or I can say, "Hey, I'm going to produce some premium content." Instead of having to set up a whole different app like Substack or Patreon or something else, you just say, "Great, if you own over 10 of my coins, you get this thing." It gives people a way to not just buy the content but to be a long-term holder of you, and I think that's really cool too as a creator.

Sam Parr

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

Shaan Puri

or I've only bought net one coin of mine

Sam Parr

so why are people buying you or how are they even hearing about

Shaan Puri

Everybody on the pod, I think so. I think that was one thing. But then otherwise, there's just people hearing about Big Cloud because a whole bunch of people joined, right? Like, even just in our little network, Andrew Wilkinson joined two days ago. He's a super legit person, and he tweeted out today, "I woke up at 5 in the morning thinking about Big Cloud." He's like, "And not just all good things." He said, "The design kinda sucks. I kinda hate the name. I wish it didn't feel so shady because of the way they're doing this, this, and this." But here are some things that like the mind virus has infected him with, where it's like, "Wait, this does open up Pandora's box of a whole bunch of new capabilities and things that you just kinda couldn't do before and definitely couldn't do in a platform that had any legs." And this has legs. About $170,000,000 has been deposited onto this. Most of that is from their institutional backers like Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia and those other guys. But the rest has been, you know, maybe $8 to $10 million has come in from users who are buying into the platform. The CTO of HubSpot, Dharmesh, he's on there every day. Me and him, we're chatting on there all the time because he's posting like, you know, he's a daily user of this thing because I think it's a cool new technology, a cool app, and he's playing with it.

Sam Parr

he bought my he he bought my stock

Shaan Puri

Exactly. I've had a lot of fun basically speculating on people buying a bunch of coins. I think those people are awesome or undervalued. For example, I saw this guy on Bitcloud who was posting a bunch of analysis. He was exploring the blockchain and said, "Look, because this is built on the blockchain, it's all public. If I go to Facebook, I can't tell you how many daily active users they have. They have to disclose that information for me to know it. But with things built on the blockchain, you just see it." So, this guy was posting, "Look, here's how many new people signed up today. Here's how many posts there have been." You can see how much engagement this platform has. If it starts to fade, you'll be able to see it fade. I bought a lot of this guy's coin. I invested $10,000 in this analyst's coin because it was super low-priced. Nobody knows who this guy is, but I knew that if there are people who are power users of the platform, they’re enthusiastic about Bitcloud. They’re going to love all the information and the 24/7 news cycle about Bitcloud. They’re going to appreciate this guy's analysis because it's not easy to do. It's not easy to go on the blockchain and figure this stuff out. I thought, "Oh, if this guy's going to put reports up every day, he's going to get popular." Already, I've doubled my money on this guy just because I was able to have a strategy—a skilled gamble, as I’ll call it. It's the same reason I love poker and investing in startups and the stock market. There's definitely this deep itch that gets scratched by trying to put in money, triple it, and make more money, combined with some skill. There is a strategy to it; it's not just a slot machine where you pull the lever and hope for the best. For whatever reason, this is so addictive to me. Maybe this will fade; I'm only 3 or 4 days in. But man, I've used the hell out of this thing in those 3 or 4 days, and I don't know what's going to happen.

Sam Parr

I've only known it for 3 or 4 days, but my life... this is my vocation. I found it. That's what I hear from you.

Shaan Puri

Well, you hear what you want to hear. I didn't say that. What I said was, I've had an amazing 3 or 4 days, and this might fade. But I view it as a kind of asymmetric bet. If this fails, I lose 1 times my money. If this succeeds, I'm going to make more than 10 times my money. And so that's why it's a good bet for me.

Sam Parr

Speaking of betting on people, Jack, we were talking about you earlier. Basically, Sean, I didn't know. So, we gave your background. We said that you and Celia lived in a **shitty** apartment—a little studio, 450 square feet or something like that—in Brooklyn.

Shaan Puri

Tried to make it sound like *Slumdog Millionaire*. He was like, "You know, they shared one ramen noodle each." And yeah, yeah.

Sam Parr

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

Jack Butcher

heights right yeah I mean it was it was alright

Sam Parr

And basically, I started an agency. It was only going okay, not going that great. Then, over the last 18 to 24 months, you've just knocked it out of the park. Yada, yada, yada. I didn't realize until Sean said it. When he asked, "Do you see a jacket?" it's crazy. I thought he meant you selling one NFT for like $100, or however much you sold that for. I didn't see the difference between a JPEG and an NFT. I didn't realize you have one for $76,000,000.

Jack Butcher

just put it up this morning

Sam Parr

do you think that's gonna work

Shaan Puri

look at this one

Sam Parr

smile on

Shaan Puri

His face... I love it! Okay, so Jack, can you just tell us about the $77,000,000 one? What's the thinking behind that? And then, just in general, what's the NFT experience been like for you? Because it's kind of mind-blowing.

Jack Butcher

yeah I think interestingly enough this text message that got me on this podcast is kind of evidence for the strategy behind the $77,000,000 $77,000,000 nft which the thesis is it's rounded up from the highest bid on that beeple collage so that was 69.3 and obviously tracks to the price of ethereum but anybody who would bid on this would be you know the owner of the most expensive nft in the world so you know part press play part commentary on the world of nfts artistic statement I have very very very you know the the idea of that selling is obviously absolutely ludicrous but the fact that you can do something like that without permission and make a statement like that I think is like that's the the the intent behind the the piece itself and the nft space like the last three pieces that I've been working on the last three piece that I've launched have been sort of a commentary on the world of nfts so the first one sam talked about was like what's the difference between a jpeg and an nft I put that image on twitter and got a great response someone commented and said you should make this an nft let's say no more made it an nft and auctioned it and then the second one just finished today but it's like a the comment on the idea of nonfungibility right so anybody can save this jpeg but what we're really talking about here is like this mimetic status game that's all these different incentives coming together to you know some people are buying these because they love them some people are buying them in the same way that they're betting on a creator like a bitclout the same thesis behind a bitclout you buy this thing and you assume this person's gonna keep creating for years and maybe they emerge at the top of the space and then your investment increases in value I think there's a lot of parallels of what you're talking about with big cloud it's it visualized value sort of was almost a layer on top of the business I was operating so I was making these graphics to you know create things that would get people's attention to then put something else in front of them and be like hey here's this thing so like my background is marketing and advertising and that's how that work right you make stuff to get people to look at other stuff but now there's like this convergence of you can get paid directly for the things you make which is completely different right pay I think you know patreon and

Sam Parr

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

Jack Butcher

I mean impossible to say 0.00

Sam Parr

I I know

Shaan Puri

You... well, what's happened since you put it at this? I don't know. Are people bidding on it? Can you bid below that ask?

Jack Butcher

price or no so you have to enter in that

Shaan Puri

it's all or nothing

Jack Butcher

yeah yeah

Shaan Puri

okay

Sam Parr

can you see any of the activity of like traffic to it or twitter

Jack Butcher

text to it well that's the only place I would have data

Sam Parr

and what's your what's your guess

Jack Butcher

many people would visit a few thousand

Sam Parr

I think is this like caught

Jack Butcher

So far, I think it's all an inside joke as well, right? You have to have the context of the people. *Thing Mario...* Yep, who? Sean? I saw you saw that tweet. He added this layer of context to it, which is like the reason. You know, it's very minimal in its execution, but when you have that additional context, I think there's a light bulb moment that goes off. So I...

Shaan Puri

The thing I respect is that it's all or nothing. If you had done it where it's like, "Oh well, hey, may not get $77,000,000, but I'll take $77,000," right? Well then, it's sort of like, okay, he just doesn't have the same artistic balls that it takes to say, "No, this is it. We're either breaking the record and it's the most valuable piece of digital art in the world, or we're not." It's a commentary on the whole madness of the situation. It's like we're either going all mad or we're laughing about how mad this was, right? But we're not doing anything in between. I'm not... this is not some, you know, quick sale here.

Jack Butcher

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

Shaan Puri

Right, yeah. That's why I tweeted, "This is either gonna be an amazing investment or an amazing lesson learned for me." Indeed, and I mean that because I intentionally invested an amount of money that would hurt for me to lose. I would really have to lick my wounds if I lost this amount of money. It's not going to just go down by like 10%. It's going to go down by 100% or it's going to go up by like 10,000%. So, you know, either way, I'm going to learn something out of this whole process. It is so polarized and clear. I had to write down, "Why am I doing this? What do I believe about this?" Part of the reason I'm doing this wasn't just, "Here are all the great reasons to do this." It was also, "Well, you know, I kind of sat on the sideline at this other thing that I was early on, and I missed out on this big wave. A bunch of my friends made a bunch of money doing it." So, I'm kind of waiting for the next one, and now that this one's here, I'm kind of overcompensating for it.

Jack Butcher

yeah

Shaan Puri

so I was really honest with myself about what would what are the psychological drivers and and I'll put put 2 things together 1 is 1 is that which is like here's the dark side of why I'm doing this meaning like here's the not so great reasons but true reasons that I feel motivated to do this right my own psychology put on a piece of paper the second thing is maybe this is you you guys have probably all heard this I know jack you have for sure sam you know the thing about the four levels of luck no I guess the the four levels of luck I forgot who marc andreessen shared this from somebody else and then naval shared it and that's how I I heard it but basically it's like there's there's dumb luck where you're just you're standing still and luck just hits you upside the head something really lucky just happened you get struck by lightning right that's just dumb luck you did nothing and something happened then there's like the second level which is you're moving around like crazy and you're doing a bunch of shit and in doing a bunch of shit you kick up a bunch of dust you move a bunch of things around and actually you have a higher percentage chance of colliding with luck because you were taking so much action right and so that's kind of like you know you know luck favors the bold basically you took a bunch of action therefore you got more lucky than somebody who didn't then there's the third one which is luck favors the prepared mind which is you're moving but you're also looking and when you see something you recognize luck before others saw it and so I would say jack is a good example of this which is he had the artistic ability to create really compelling visuals but he also had the like business brain and like kind of tech savviness and was in the tech world enough to see nfts as this opportunity that he could marry his two things together and give it a try and so that's where you recognize luck for what it is and then the 4th one is reputational luck which is you have built up such a big reputation that luck finds you but that's where some great company says sam we would love to have you on board because we've been reading your content for years you're such an amazing copywriter and we just think you could really help us out with that you know and so boom luck came to your doorstep and that's that's sort of the analogy that naval gave or whatever it was like someone finds a sunken treasure and they come to you because you're known as the world's best scuba diver so to me this is like luck level 3 and maybe a little 4 but 3 in that luck favors the prepared mind so what I realized when I looked back at bitcoin and I said I was being told by smart friends back in 2013 2014 that bitcoin is amazing and at first I took no action that cost me you know the price was I think $70 at the time so I let it go from 70 to 700 and then I bought in at 700 and even then I bought in such a small amount that it wasn't gonna like change my life either way I wasn't gonna care if I lost I wasn't gonna be rich if I won and I looked back and I said well why didn't I take more action at that time right let's do the hindsight game and one thing I realized is that in order to I didn't bet in on it because I didn't have enough conviction I didn't have enough conviction because I didn't even understand what the heck it was so part of that is I didn't take time to understand it but the second was bitcoin was one of those weird things that you had to have 2 totally different skill sets in order to appreciate how great this thing is you had to be really technologically sound in your brain to even under even understand it and be able to go buy the thing or mine the thing it took real tech savviness to do it at that that time the second thing was you had to really understand macroeconomics and very few people had that combination and the people who did have become billionaires and they're very wealthy people now but most people who had one or the other or neither they didn't they didn't benefit right so you needed to understand that wow this solved the byzantine generals problem this is a computer science breakthrough and now we can have trustless systems without any central entity but you also needed to understand that hey the government prints all this money and has this inflationary effect and the reason that you know and actually this thing that we all take for granted the us dollar or currency has really only been around in its current form for I don't know 70 ish years and and you know before that we had gold and before that we had shells and money actually does evolve over time and maybe this is the new form of money and here's why it's a more sound money than these other things I'm familiar with right so very few people had that overlap I see the same thing happening with bitcloud which is on one hand you had to understand the financial incentives that this like the token economics or crypto economics that exist here what are all the incentives and why would this thing go up and when you if you understand the crypto economics the token incentives you're like holy shit this is so well designed this has a very high likelihood of going up going up a lot if it becomes a thing the other side is just understanding how social networks start and when I saw that oh this is like probably the most brilliant growth hack I've ever seen these people who whoever made this is very aggressive and very smart they're aggressive because they went and scraped twitter and they put all of our profiles on their website and said come buy their coin without anyone's permission that took a level of aggression and sort of like willing to operate in the gray that most people wouldn't really have and then the smart thing was they said well how do we make this network really valuable well if we get really valuable people on it how do we get really valuable people on it well let's do this let's go to really legit investors so big name investors that adds credibility let's go get a $100,000,000 from them and then let's invest that $100,000,000 into the accounts of all the influential twitter people and so when I went to this website without ever having used the damn thing my account had $55,000 sitting in it all I had to do was tweet it out and say hey I'm using bitclap come use it with me basically right and I had to tweet that to my 120,000 followers in order to claim this $50,000 that was sitting in there this like kind of imaginary $50,000 that was sitting there and okay so that I was like that's gonna work a lot of influencers are gonna go see a $100,000 sitting in their account and they say all I gotta do is tweet this thing out like done like sam you think the thing's fucking stupid but you did it anyways because you were like shit I got $35 sitting in here I'll take that and jack how much money do you have sitting in your thing

Jack Butcher

about 150 I think last time I looked at it

Shaan Puri

so a $150,000 maybe is sitting in your account and have you verified your account yet or

Jack Butcher

or claimed it no

Shaan Puri

do you plan to

Jack Butcher

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

Shaan Puri

Yeah, maybe you do, and maybe you have a pretty big incentive to do it, which is that there's $150 sitting there just for tweeting the thing out. So then you go layers deep. You say, "Okay, they're going to tweet it out, they're going to claim their money, and then they have a big following." Their people are going to say, "Oh, if Jack says it, I trust Jack. If Jack is using it, then I should probably use this thing." They go on, and because there are no withdrawals right now, all the prices just go up. Everybody's going to get all these paper gains, and then they're all going to talk about how this is the greatest thing since sliced bread because they're just making all this money on here. Right? Like our friend Ryan, who came on and was like, "Dude, I'm making a killing on this thing." Then other people are going to say, "Oh shit, my friends are making a killing on this thing. I should go do that too. I don't want to miss the next Bitcoin. I already missed Bitcoin; now I'm going to miss the next one." They're going to get on, and that's going to drive the price even higher. What I saw was that this thing was brilliantly designed from a game theory perspective. Now, let's table the moral questions, like, "Is this a Ponzi scheme?" There are a whole bunch of other questions, but at the very minimum, I thought, "Wow, this game is architected so that these numbers are going to go up." This is going to have a hype cycle—a very likely chance of having a hype cycle. If it has the hype cycle, these things, just like Bitcoin, are only valuable because everybody believes in them. The more people believe in it, the more valuable it gets, and the more certain its own success becomes. The same thing is true for any network, any social network too. The more legit people believe in it and want it to succeed, the more likely it is to succeed. So then there's actually a chance that this does become a new wave of social networks. So anyways, that's my whole story.

Sam Parr

I've known you for maybe 8 years now. It was early on when I met you that you had some type of "it" factor. You were at least mildly smart. What Bitcoin and cryptocurrency have done for you has basically brought out all of your confidence and all of your speech-giving abilities. Now, the whole high IQ thing and whether you're right... that's to be determined. But your ability to convince people that it's awesome is very, very high. I congratulate you on your confidence and your ability to persuade people. I think you have finally come out of your shell. Now, regarding whether you're right... well, I'm not sure. We're going to see.

Shaan Puri

I keep saying the thing, which is there's a very low chance that this succeeds in the long run. If it does, you're going to get paid super handsomely, very similar to Bitcoin back in 2013 and 2014, and very similar to the hundreds of other crypto projects that had the same promise and didn't pan out, right? So that's the thing with low odds; usually, they don't pan out. When they do, you can get paid handsomely. There's a middle ground here where if this goes through a hype cycle, there is a good chance that even if it doesn't succeed in the long run, in the short run, there's a bunch of money to be made. That is the degenerate gambler side of me. Many people, anybody who is into GameStop, you know, going and trading, a lot of people have fun speculating and trying to make money, and they're not necessarily trying to be long-term holders. That's situation two. Situation three is it just flops and goes to zero. There are all three scenarios on the table. What I'm trying to say is the probabilities... I'm not saying this is likely or definitely going to succeed. What I'm saying is I find it super interesting from a product perspective.

Shaan Puri

Of view how they made it. I think there's a good chance it goes through the hype cycle. Beyond that, I don't know.

Sam Parr

so jack what what what does this mean to you what what side are you on

Jack Butcher

I'm just sort of waiting for it to shake out, I guess. I think the first time it came across my feed was like the ultimate bear case. You know, this has broken the commandments of crypto; therefore, it should not go anywhere near it. My understanding of the mechanics of pre-mining and all of these... I wasn't paying attention to the ICO cycle when it was happening years ago, so I just felt pretty unqualified to make a bet on it. And I think, to your point, Sean, there's reputational risk in endorsing it too before it gets to a... I don't know, some of the things that are left unsaid or haven't been clarified are clarified. So, I'm on the sidelines for the time being.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I think that's smart. I think that's the risk I run, which is I think that when I say, "Hey, this is a gamble. You can lose all your money. It's not likely to succeed," that there could be some money to be made. Here's my exact holdings. I feel like, "Oh, I'm disclosing everything," and smart adults are going to do with that what they want. Do your own research, don't rely on me, and come to your own conclusions. I'm telling you what I've come to thus far, three days in. So I'm always like, "Oh, people will get all that." In reality, all anyone's going to remember is, "Dude, you were super excited about that thing." Either I look like a genius or I look like an idiot scam artist. That's the sad part about it. Nobody's going to remember any of the nuance around how I was thinking about it. Anyone's just going to remember, "Dude, you sounded so excited. You said you put $100 in." And either, you know, that's why you're the hottest thing since sliced bread if that becomes a $10,000,000 stake, or it's going to be, "I lost my life savings. How could you? You told me this was going to work." Unfortunately, the way I wish the world would listen to it is not going to be how people actually listen to it, is my guess.

Jack Butcher

Are you the biggest Bitcloud bull in the world, Sean? Or is...?

Shaan Puri

That’s not even close. Like Craig Clemens, who’s a friend of ours and has been on the pod, he was on it before us. He’s invested, I don’t know how much money, but he’s like the biggest whale. You go to anyone’s account, he owns like the majority of their coin. He’s like, “Yeah, I’m bullish.”

Jack Butcher

that's bull

Shaan Puri

Like, you know, he could speak for himself about how he's thinking about the calculated risk. But, like, you know, he's got a huge stake, and I'm envious of how early he was on and how bullish he was early because, already, he's got a lot of paper gains, let's put it that way. As far as, and then there's, of course, a bunch of other people. Like, you know, there's the big whale guy. I forgot his name; it's Biclop Whale or something like that. He put $1,000,000 into his own coins, and he also has, you know, the biggest kind of NFT collection out there, I think.

Sam Parr

Well, that guy, he bought... he sent me $10 in Ethereum.

Shaan Puri

To my stuff. So, one guy is the one who's providing secondary market liquidity. That's the guy you worked with. Then there's this guy who basically has the whale coin. It's a community token, a separate thing. He owns $2,000,000 worth of NFT art and he created a coin that basically says, "Hey, I collect this art. If you own my coin, you own a part of my art collection." So, he's made it big. He's made a bunch of money in crypto and reinvested into NFTs. Now, he's reinvested at least $1,000,000 into BitClout as well. There are a bunch of people who are very, very bullish on this thing. But, I'll also say, what are the downsides? If you go use the thing, you'll notice three things right away. First, it requires a password to join. That's already blocked like 80% of people. Now, you could find it if you just Twitter "BitClout" or if you Google "BitClout password," you'll find it easily. But today, that's a challenge. It's password protected because they're not ready for scale, which is the second part. You go use the thing and it's under such heavy load all the time that when I click the follow button, the thing spins for 30 seconds. It's super annoying that it's not a faster app. The thing is always going down because they can't handle the scale right now.

Sam Parr

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

Jack Butcher

probably

Sam Parr

and that's nuts is that fucking crazy like 3

Shaan Puri

three letters you didn't even know last year

Jack Butcher

yeah it's a different market man different dynamics very crazy

Sam Parr

would you say 3 years ago where were you what where were you at

Jack Butcher

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

Sam Parr

and isn't it crazy how much things have changed in

Jack Butcher

Such a short amount of time! The last couple of months have been like a compressed ton of just leaps and bounds in technology and culture. Last year, obviously, shifting to doing work fully online was one jump. Now, the normalization of crypto feels like another rocket. What we're talking about here is that it feels like this stuff is not just creeping into the mainstream; it's like a burst pipe now. The Top Shot thing just went absolutely bananas, and this big cloud thing is going to pull on the same cultural levers that Top Shot did. Maybe it's successful, maybe it isn't, but it's like the cat's not going back in the bag at this point.

Shaan Puri

Right so jack let me ask you because I feel like I feel a little torn right because I come on the pod because I come on the pod today and I say oh I gotta talk about bitcloud why because a I've been using it a bunch for the last couple days it's one of the more interesting projects I've ever seen but b I'm like kind of embarrassed to even talk about it because there's such a good chance that this thing fails that it's gonna look pretty stupid and big cloud is even more it's gonna look even more stupid when it fails than like let's say I guess like what I'm getting at is I think that it's you know it takes a long time to build a reputation of being smart and trustworthy and it's easy to lose it in a day you know I think warren buffett said that once and you know it takes takes a decade or whatever to build a reputation and a day to lose it and so I kinda feel that way with with bitcoin bitcloud crypto in general it's all such uncertain territory it's uncharted waters it's uncertain territory nobody really if anybody tells you they know what's gonna happen they're definitely not saying you know saying telling the truth people speculate people have fun talking about it people place their bets and then the chips will fall where they may now do you feel that way with nfts like do you feel almost embarrassed or slightly guilty you know selling a file for a $150,000 and you know let's say next year the nft market comes down to earth like I think right now top shot is top shot's getting slaughtered it's going down like 30% month over month because all the whales are like hey cool we've made 1,000,000 of dollars let's just do a coordinated sell off and like you know like let's sell this baby now let's take something off the table and so top shot's like cratering right now and then as it starts to crater all the people who thought it was gonna fail are like see you know I told you so this was silly to begin with as somebody who's selling digital art for 100 of 1,000 of dollars does a part of you worry like what happens a year from now when you're the same nft you sold for a $150,000 is worth $1,000 and what do you I guess how do you think about that

Jack Butcher

yeah I thought a lot about it I think coming into it originally I had zero expectation of like the level of investment that people would be willing to commit to something like this one thing I will say is I've like I have a relationship with every single person who's bought one so because yeah the twitter layer on top of the nft layer you you then often they have links to twitter profiles obviously introduce yourself everybody that bids on the work and I think that to me is you know if you have a relationship with the person that collects the art that's different than throwing it into this anonymous market and you know profiting x offer I also think there's an argument to be made for like my background is commercial advertising right so I know you guys spoke to michael salo a couple weeks ago and I just have this like I guess loop in my head or this thing I'm thinking about around what is a marketing expense relative to a like a a technology in general so if you're an ethereum like whale let's say let's say you bought x number a 1,000 ethereum at 7¢ or whatever it was back in the day and you wanna see the technology you believe in the technology that made you wealthy adopted by more people you wanna like spread the gospel as it were feels to me like there's a lot of people participating in this market for that reason so the nft explained piece which was by far the most expensive or the the largest sale of the last few that I've done I think I got 4,000,000 impressions on twitter so if you think about what it would cost you to buy 4,000,000 impressions on twitter or if what it would cost you to develop something that has that level of resonance I think it's easy to get distracted from that as as like the 3 of us have distribution but that that is a valuable thing right to own something that has that level of cultural velocity to me is you know I don't wanna say it's underpriced but I think it's like I think it's a it's a legitimate bet like if you can see that this thing has this thing resonates with people and that's the beauty of having twitter so visualize value you can see this image that you own 33100 or 45100 people clicked on it and said I like this thing so there's also a mega advantage there having that layer on top where you can evaluate how like how much this thing resonates before you sell does that make sense

Sam Parr

I... yeah, that does make sense. Jack, I consider us close friends. I wanted to buy you something. I was willing to spend around **$5,000** to buy one of your pieces just because I look up to you as a creator. I actually think your art's badass, and I believe you're going to be a far more important person than you already are. I get the sentiment now. Without sounding like a douche, I have money, right? I was only willing to spend **$5,000**, the way that someone was going to spend **$150,000**. Either they're way richer than I am, or they're just crazy. That's the part I don't understand. But maybe some people don't understand that I was willing to do **$5,000**. So, these are the people who bought it very, very well.

Jack Butcher

You could do your Ethereum wallet sleuthing and figure out how much people have.

Sam Parr

well you said you know them right

Jack Butcher

money they have like I know them and I talk to them

Sam Parr

but like jack's

Shaan Puri

a normal person

Jack Butcher

he doesn't

Shaan Puri

do what we do

Sam Parr

Bro, if you know them, like, I don't have to... I don't have to know someone. I'm like, "Oh, well, the guy drives a G-Wagon. He's from Dubai." I say, I mean, they go back.

Jack Butcher

And forth in Twitter DMs, some people don't have their real name. But it's like, "Hey, you know, you develop a relationship."

Shaan Puri

Here’s how it works. The guy who bought the people artwork for, whatever, $69,000,000, something like that. I might be mixing it up, but you know, Meet Kovan, that’s his handle.

Sam Parr

Well, I just read about him. He started a... I mean, he's probably worth $100 million through Bitcoin. So, he's like, just doing something for fun.

Shaan Puri

With it, he invested $5,000 into Bitcoin, and it is worth over $1,000,000,000 based on when he invested. So he's reinvesting. Like I said, you go to Chuck E. Cheese, you're great at skee ball, you hit the $5,000 jackpot, and the tickets start spitting out of this machine. You don't think about it like spending $150,000; you think about it like spending 70 Ether, and you have 70,000 Ether or whatever, right? So you're spending a fraction of his giant stockpile of crypto bucks, and it feels different.

Sam Parr

I'm shocked. There's that many people that like Jack Butcher, who is relatively... he's not a beephole, but he's kind of a big deal. I'm just shocked that there are that many people who will just buy his thing for $100. I'm just shocked that there are that many people who have that amount.

Jack Butcher

on your own being shocked by it

Sam Parr

And if Jack, if you do sell this thing for $76,000,000, I mean, like, obviously, who cares about history and how neat that is? I mean, that would be... that would be genius! I mean, the Butcher family would be famous for it.

Jack Butcher

I mean

Sam Parr

5 generations

Jack Butcher

I mean that would be the most absurd stories of all time perhaps

Sam Parr

It would be just so wild and so funny. I hope it works. I kind of, in a way, maybe I actually hope it doesn't work because you know what they say about people who win the lottery. A huge number of them end up becoming addicts or they get... You know, it's not exactly the same because you've worked hard for it, so it'd be like selling a company for you. But still, it's interesting to think about.

Shaan Puri

they're both depressed yeah

Sam Parr

Yeah, like they're already messed up a little bit, and now there's even more. They're messed up times the amount of money they earn. I don't want that to... I don't think.

Jack Butcher

it would happen to

Sam Parr

you but I would also be nervous

Jack Butcher

Like, you know, the fact that there's even an outside chance of it happening is just the most ludicrous thing. It's supposed to be like a piece of art in itself, right? That nobody interacts with, commentary on the space. But the fact that it exists on a platform where a transaction could actually happen is quite, like, just unfathomable. That would definitely warp your experience of the world. I can't even fathom what something like that would be like. But yeah, aliens will land before that happens to me.

Sam Parr

that's crazy

Shaan Puri

okay we we should wrap this

Sam Parr

I don't I yeah I don't know where we go from here but zach thanks for coming on what a week

Shaan Puri

you know we texted you like 30 minutes ago or 40 minutes ago

Jack Butcher

when you

Shaan Puri

hopped on so I appreciate that

Jack Butcher

it was fun

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I hope somebody buys the thing. I think that would be **amazing**. I think it couldn't happen at a better time. So, as I think... I hope I get a text that's like, "Holy shit!" If I get a text today that says "Holy shit!" from anybody I know, I will know what has gone down. So, I hope it happens.

Sam Parr

it's hard dude growing up podcast is the hardest thing I've ever done

Shaan Puri

It's easier to just sell a picture for **$77,000,000** than it is to create a top 10 business podcast. I **shit you not**, it is actually easier to do one than the other.

Jack Butcher

find out