We’re BACK! Markets, Disney, Gaming & more w/ Zeneca and Gavin l #206

Hello everyone, GM GM!

Welcome back to another episode of, I'm gonna call it, Overpriced JPEGs. This is going on the podcast feed. The podcast feed hasn't been rebranded from Overpriced JPEGs. Plus, this will always be Overpriced JPEGs. Like even if the podcast feed fully rebrands to the Carly P. Riley Show, or something.

- It could be a franchise, make it a franchise, right?

- Correct, it's like Blockbuster! Blockbuster's a franchise with an Overpriced JPEGs, Overpriced JPEGs is a franchise with the Carly P. Riley Show. We are a Russian nesting doll of content over here at the Carly Empire.

Guys, that felt so good to say.

Hello, Zeneka, Gavin, welcome back. I am so excited for this episode.

- It's good to be back. I'm very excited at all. -

Well, not only are we back, but the market is back.

- That's what I was gonna say, Gavin. We're back in the micro and the macro sense. The three of us are back, but the market feels like it's back. And that's of course where we're gonna start is like, are we calling this a bull market yet? And Zenika, I really wanna get your thoughts on like, how to play, how you're thinking about handling this bull market, taking the wisdom you gained from the last bull market. But before we dive in, we do need to hear a word from our amazing sponsors. Web3Sense, OpenSea, Ledger. Let's hear from probably not all three of them in this moment. We'll hear from another one later, but let's hear from some of them right now.

(laughing) - We get a micro sense of what we're gonna hear from you.

- Let me really explain to you in a detail. Hey, listen to the ads guys, support them as they support us. You know, if you like this show, they are the reason it exists. So, you know, don't just like fast forward through.

Let me introduce you to a brand new company that I could not be more excited about. Web3Sense, a Web3 analytics platform that combines on-chain data with social media insights to give you the deepest, most meaningful intelligence into any NFT community. I have tested other analytics platforms out there, but Web3Sense has the most comprehensive capabilities I've seen in the NFT ecosystem. They apply sophisticated data science to wallet histories to determine behavioral patterns and help shape predictive analytics. In other words, they can tell you which Twitter accounts are actually the influencers in your space.

And they can tell you what resonates most within a community by looking at what other communities token holders are involved in. The number of use cases here is virtually unlimited. So whether you're a trader, creator, institution, brand, agency, I promise Web3Sense has data that you want to see. With the deep and actionable insights that you need to build, analyze, grow, start, whatever you want to do within the NFT space and in terms of building a business and a community. Now they are still in very early days, so they're eager to connect with the community.

So if you're interested in learning more about what Web3Sense can do for you and your business, and you should be, go and fill out the very short form linked to in the show notes and someone from their team will reach out with more information and an opportunity for a product demo.

Trust me, you won't regret it.

Let me tell you about OpenSea Studio. Yes, you know OpenSea, perhaps you use OpenSea, but did you know they launched OpenSea Studio? It's a one-stop shop for all creators to launch and manage their projects. Using OpenSea Studio, you can create and manage a drop end-to-end, including setting up allow list phases, uploading media and metadata, which has helpful preview functionality, and building the drop page itself.

You can also mint an NFT or collection where the creator owns the contract. OpenSea Studio lets you build on all blockchains compatible with OpenSea, and there are eight of them. Lets buyers mint an NFT from your collection using a credit or debit card, and there are no coding or technical skills required to do any of the above. OpenSea will be adding more features and functionality to OpenSea Studio over the coming months, including revamped collection pages with new storytelling modules, and more ways to leverage NFT technology, including redeemables, which you all know I'm a huge fan of, and analytics.

I'm an OpenSea user because they have the best selection of NFTs and a truly inclusive view of the NFT ecosystem, supporting, as I said, eight chains in eight global languages, and because I trust the systems they've built to help keep the space safe, like copymint protection, malicious URL detection or removal, robust verification, and more. It is why they are the place to buy, sell, and now create NFTs. Check them out at the link below, and you'll be supporting the show in the process.

All right, we're back. Let's start kind of big picture here on a couple of levels. Maybe let's start through this. Gavin, why do you think we're back in this moment in time? And then I want to turn it to you, Zenika, to talk about are you considering this a bull market yet, and how are you playing it? Starting with you, Gavin, though, why are we back?

- Okay, so I'm not 100% convinced we're back. I know a lot of people believe that we're back, but I will say the reason why I think it feels like we're back is when I go into the discords that I've been going into for the last year, many of which were very active discords and have active members, they were very slow. When I mean very slow, I mean, these are discords where you would often see at any given time, six, 10, 15 people interacting at one time, there would be like an hour between messages, and that was like, I almost for a while thought, oh man, this feels like, is this the end, right?

Like we've had that conversation on this podcast a number of times, it's like, what is the end? And there will be a comeback, but what does it look like?

To me, the thing that feels like it's back is that activity is back, right? And when I say that activity, obviously there's buys back. NFT stats has been doing a really good job of tracking the volume of inflows. And I think that's a really important thing to be aware of is that there is money actually coming into crypto for the first time in a very long time.

But the thing that makes it feel like it's coming back is the actual people who make this world the world, are actually coming back and being active again. And I think the hardest thing sometimes to know with this is, there was all this talk during the bull market of the, you know, the normies, the mainstream, all those people, but I'm not sure those are the people who matter. I think the people who matter are the people who are gonna be like actually doing the buying and selling of NFTs, at least in the beginning to kind of get that activity back.

So that's what I feel right now is it feels like that version of NFTs, those people who are most active are starting to be active again. So that's what gives me hope.

- And your theory on this is partly that we have the tech sector back a little bit in terms of stocks are up and obviously we could talk about macro and, you know, a pretty good CPI print. You have the Fed staying solid on rates, not, you know, hiking rates anymore, probably not gonna see another rate hike in this cycle, you know, is what I think a lot of people are feeling. And so those are the factors that are leading to stock rallies, which are leading to the tech. So you feel like it's almost like the Amazon and Apple employees, like the tech savvy workers who aren't like full full de-gens, but who cycle in and out of this stuff when they have some disposable cash. Is that part of your theory?

- I think so. I mean, the macro is so weird because you'll find some macro people who say like, we are F'd, like this is like, we are F'd for a long time and it's not a good thing.

And you'll find some macro people who are like, guess what? Now, you know, this is the kind of like shining bright light before the sunny day that you start to see beams of sunshine come through. Like that's what they're seeing now.

- That's Raoul Pal.

- Yeah.

- He's always like sunshine.

- There are some people who really believe we might've turned this corner, right? And when I say that, I mean like, okay, tech companies are starting to hire again. In fact, you know, this is gonna seem so mundane, but like Salesforce laid off 10,000 people and now they're hiring 3000, right?

So they might've over corrected on their layoffs in part because they had to get their bottom lines in order. But I think, you know, tech companies are the thing that drives the degens because I think no matter what, the people who have a lot of money in this space often come out of the tech industry.

That's not, that's kind of a blanket statement, but I have found in my experience, a lot of those people are people that either made their money at tech companies or are still at tech companies that are actively involved in them. So yeah, I think so. I don't know.

Here's how I know we're back. YouTube is just like aggressively feeding me Cathie Wood interviews. (laughing) Like, oh, we're back, baby.

- Yeah, yeah, exactly.

- Cathie Wood went on CNBC three times in a month, let's go. - Yeah. - All right, Zeneca. Your thoughts on are we back? And then, you know, again, you've been talking about a bit like how to think about a bull market, regardless of whether this is the bull market or the bull market comes in six months, or whenever we really feel comfortable making that pronouncement, curious your thoughts on how to handle that.

- Yeah, I mean, I think there's sort of those two layers, there's the crypto, and then within that there's NFTs. And I think crypto is, I mean, it's hard to tell if we're fully back in either. I feel more confident saying, I feel like we're back on the crypto sense, whether this is the beginning of an epic bull run that's gonna last a year or two, or we go down a bit, and then the bull run starts in six months or nine months.

I mean, the wheels are in motion. It's just like, it's the cat's out of the bag. The bull market is starting. It just might have a slower start, I think. And there's so many reasons for that. The halving, the ETF's, and all sorts of other things, I think are really showing signs of life in crypto. And I think that's nice to, it's just really nice to see.

NFTs have sort of operated a little separately from crypto. I mean, like, you know, Bitcoin was up for most of, is up a lot this year. NFTs were going in the opposite direction the whole year, until probably about a month ago. I think the last few weeks, we've really seen a bull run in the NFT space for a variety of reasons.

I think perhaps things had just finally bottomed, and there was no many, we just run out of sellers. Like that happened at a certain point. There was the Memeland airdrop that injected a lot of liquidity, I think, into it. There were other airdrops, like other tokens were doing airdrops. There's the Blur airdrop coming up. There's a lot of speculation around that. There's eight fasts. There was Gordon Garner came in and bought. There's a whole bunch of like catalysts that I think made NFTs pop these last few weeks.

I'm less convinced. I feel like NFTs are in more of an echo bubble than the beginning of a new bull run. And by that, I mean, yeah, I still think 99.9% of them are going to zero. I think that is just a fact. I think what we're seeing now though, is that separation between the ones that are gonna make it, are really, really starting to separate. They've gone up 2x, 3x, 4x, or 50% if they're high market cap, over the last few weeks. And I think those ones are like now like, all right, we can tell they're gonna, you know, Pudgy Penguins or Parallel being a more recent one and Forgotten Ruins being another example.

But it's, yeah, it's an exciting time. It's an exciting time.

- So speaking to Gavin's, your point earlier from earlier about like, I don't know that the normies or who matter, I think there's two different categories here that are important to like differentiate between. There's NFTs are back in the sense of trading, the casino, the gambling, which I don't think ever goes away because I think our generation is just too acclimated to the idea, to having opportunities that will go up 50,000%.

- It's the deep value sort of scenario, right? It's that it's all that stuff, game stop.

- I talked about this with Ben Mezrich, right? It's the idea that like our generation, the generation below us, I don't think is ever gonna hit a world where we're just like, yeah, we just want like 20% annualized returns, which is by the way, 20%. And that's like, that's why Buffett has gone, right? That's why Buffett is the greatest investor in the world. But you know what I mean? But like that's, but like our generation has always, always wants the shot at the casino.

- The lottery ticket, they want the lottery ticket.

- They want the lottery ticket without it being the lottery or quite literally Vegas, right? You wanna have almost the feeling that like you're smart, right, and you have something to do with why it's happening, right? So I don't think that's going away, but that's one category and I think that's really what you're talking about, Gavin. And for that, the normies don't matter, right? Because most people in the world are never--

- Although the question is who's the normies then, right? Like then the question is like, maybe the normies are all those people now. And I've thought a lot about that. I think that's a really interesting point, Carly, is the transformation of how generationally we see money and people below us see money, that's a big deal.

- Right, you're right. But I still don't know that I ever see it being like more than 50% of folks, whereas the second category, and these are the two categories that I'm distinguishing, there's the the Roblox CEO category. Like that statement was so interesting. And I'm doubting any, I don't imagine many folks missed it, but in case you did, basically he was asked by Andrew Ross Sorkin on I think CNBC, what do you think about items going off platform, something like NFTs, whatever. And he basically said the dream is you partner with creators. His dream was Elton John, which is hilarious.

- Well, they had an Elton John thing on Roblox. That's why I think he said that.

- Well, clearly the CEO is like an Elton John fan, but he was like, my dream is like Elton John comes on and does like a limited run, eight really unique capes that are able to go off platform and that are in the form of an NFT.

- That's what he said. - He said eight capes?

- Yes, did you miss this, Gavin? Yes, that's what he said.

- I didn't hear the eight capes part. Can you imagine? I got the Elton John velvet cape. I can't believe it. Oh my God, that is insane.

- That's why it was so funny. It was like so boomer in that way. But what's so interesting to me about that, because it really was a click moment for me because one of the things I thought about is like, why would any of these super successful centralized platforms move to NFTs? And the argument was always that like over a long enough period of time, other platforms that have NFTs enabled will start winning and that'll be like the voting with their pocketbooks and then these other games, these other platforms will have to start to shift their ways.

But what this said to me was like, that makes sense. Like integrating them in these small ways where you have certain really exclusive items that are interoperable that go on and off platform that can be shown off on an Instagram-like app where you're showing off all your digital items, some of which you bought on Roblox, some of which you bought on Fortnite, some of what, that actually totally makes sense as an interesting first step, which felt like it was what this Roblox CEO was getting at.

And that is the second category to me, which is this category of where you really do have quote unquote normies who are participating in that kind of thing where at some point, a lot of people in the population own digital items in some way, but they're not actually gambling on ape pictures, right? They're owning a collectible in the way that anybody owns any sort of collectible and they're showing it off in some digital universe.

- So I think that's the transition to gaming, right? Because I think one of the things that Zen has spoken about and I think is really fascinating right now is how explosive the web3 gaming world is, which is funny because it still feels a little bit like smoke and mirrors sometimes when you look at it from afar, but things like Prime, which is a real game experience and now has a token that's working really well, the whole idea, and Carly, you know this, because we've been doing these interviews for Between Two Layers, the Immutable podcast, which is the idea of gaming, if you can make a game that people wanna play, you're gonna get normies, you're gonna get those people and that's what Roblox is doing too.

One of the things with Roblox I think is really interesting is everybody tried to make, in the original Bull Run, there was Decentraland, there was Sandbox, all these like metaverses that tried to make metaverses from the ground up and that is really fricking hard. If you can get into the metaverses that are real, Roblox is a metaverse that matters, Fortnite is a metaverse that matters, then you have hundreds of millions of users conceivably that will do this and that is massive, I feel like.

- Yeah, well, you jumped my gun, I was gonna do some bull market predictions, but let's do gaming first since we're now deep in that and then we'll go back to my bull market predictions and some interesting stats that I got from our friends over at Web3Sensr. So gaming is an idea, you've teed this up really well, I wanna get your thoughts on this, Zeneca, just to give some stats here because, as Gavin mentioned, we have been working with immutable, so I've been diving into the crypto gaming space a bit.

$600 million worth of VC investment went into crypto blockchain gaming in Q3 this year, $600 million, that is before we've even hit, it feels like there's a bull market back, right? That is a lot of money, that is you are closer to a billion dollars there than you are to a hundred million dollars, right?

And so that was something that really jumped out at me is like there's still major investment, I believe Robbie gave, Robbie, who's the president of Immutable, which is a gaming centric layer two, said they met with, Immutable met with every major game studio, basically, certainly in Asia, there was like 60 major gaming studios that they met with, he said there was one out of 60 that said they had no interest and would never do anything with the blockchain. The other 59 all had some level of openness to it and I think it was something like 30 were actively looking at it and we're talking about the biggest game studios in the world, basically.

So the appetite is really there and then obviously even in the micro sense, like in the space right now, it feels like there's a lot of topping off, you mentioned Forgotten Runes, Zeneca, Gavin, obviously you're mentioning Prime, Parallel, talk about what you've been tracking in this Zeneca and what you're just saying about.

- Yeah, I mean, I think if we go back to like 2021, that bull market, there was a lot of hype and excitement around gaming and metaverse at the time, Facebook changed their name to Meta and everyone's talked about, we're gonna be in the metaverse, we're gonna take our apes in the metaverse, we're gonna play games, we're gonna play to earn, Axie, like it was all there.

The problem was there weren't games, that no one had created a fun game for people to play and the counter argument that the skeptics who were absolutely right always said was, it takes five years to build a good game, it takes 10 years to build a good game, it takes time.

Now we're going into 2024 now, a lot of these companies, they've been building for five years, they've been creating games and they've got them out to market and Parallel and Forgotten Runes, they're the two I think that are taking the most mind share, at least in my little bubble, have done that. Like Prime, the Parallel, the trading card game is by all accounts really fun to play. People absolutely love it and they've cracked that nut. And I think that we're gonna see more and more and more fun games come to market and the entire gaming crypto NFT space will just, it's such a good match made in heaven. If you can make it work and the biggest part of making work is making a fun game and like now we're starting to see that happen so I think that's gotten a lot of people excited. I saw this thing, this is game on the Ronin network, Pixi, Pixelland or something like that.

- Yeah, by the way, I just, that's so funny you mentioned that because I actually just saw that last night and it's exploding, right? Like the Ronin network is something that people have been using.

- 100,000 daily active users - Yeah, it's crazy. Which is like what? Yeah.

- Oh my gosh.

- Well, one thing I will say, I've heard from multiple people that there are probably a lot of bots, that those users are a lot of bots, but still, that's a big number and if you look at the explosion of how it's done over time, I mean, the Axie guys did this best, they scaled it the highest, maybe they didn't do the best in terms of their security on their wallets and their tokens, but--

- On the network, it was the bridge.

- Yeah, the other bridge. They scaled the best really in the last market and like Ronin is an interesting chain, like I've only started, because I think the Kongs are moving on to Ronin, like there's a lot of interesting stuff happening there and I know the Axie guy, one of the Axie founders is a pretty heavy Cyber Kongs holder and user and I think that Pixels game, Zeneca, is something really worth watching, like whether or not you're in it, just the fact that you can get that many active users and now, again, how many are bots, but that's a giant bull side, right? That is a giant--

- I mean, God, if it was 25,000 daily active users, I would still be like--

- More than the entire NFT player. - More wallets than people trading NFTs. - Yeah, totally. - The entire year.

- Totally, totally.

- I was gonna add one other thing to the gaming side, which I think is that the normie conversation doesn't work in the trading side because normies are gonna have a hard time understanding wallets, they're gonna have a hard time understanding all this stuff that we always thought onboarding was gonna work, it's not gonna work on the trading side, but, where it will work is in individual environments when somebody gets into a game, like Zeneca was saying that they really like and play and they think it's fun, and then they see their buddy found out how to work the wallet and is now making, I don't know, 50 bucks a day playing the game. And that is interesting, right? And maybe one guy gets lucky and gets $50,000 because he hit on a rare thing.

In some ways, I sometimes feel bad about this, but what it is is it's opening the door to the casino to people that you know will be gamblers. Zeneca, you probably have seen this. You've probably seen the guy who's a pretty good poker player who brings his buddy who gets obsessed with poker, and then suddenly the buddy is as intuitive as he could possibly be. I would bet 75% of those people flush out over the next three months of their bankroll.

It's just, it sometimes can be tricky, but it's how the casino works. It's how you open the door.

- It's, I don't know, I have all these thoughts of the hyper-gambilification of the world that we're seeing, with Rollbit and all these gamble, that's in a whole other sector. Gamblefy is blowing up as well.

Clearly the product market fit. Clearly people want to gamble. That's just the clear as day.

Unfortunately, a lot of people are gonna get wrecked because that's the nature of gambling, most people aren't sensible when it comes to gambling, but that's just a reality. That's just the world that we live in. All you can do is take personal responsibility and hope to sort of make smart decisions and hope that others do as well.

- So this gets me to a little bit of how to play the bull market, and we have more news we'll get to here in a minute as well. How are you going to approach this bull market, Zeneca, in a way that is maybe similar to, or perhaps different than--

- Oh, I made so many mistakes last time. I think we all did, right? Everybody learns their mistakes.

- Oh my God, I made so many mistakes. I must be the worst NFT trader.

- There's no way, that's true. There's not many-- - I cannot admit that these are worse than I am. - No, there's no way.

- I just didn't make, I don't like, some people have like big wins and big losses. Like I just don't, I didn't do anything, I didn't have any like good wins. You know what I mean?

- Carly, there was a trader who just bought, they just was one of those bots that shows out who sold. There was somebody who bought an Ape at 160 and sold it just now for 28 in this world. So it lost $450,000. (laughing)

- I bet there's a lot of stories like that. There's a lot of people that just, yes, yes.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah, fine, fine, fine. I just mean like I didn't, okay, fine. I'm not the worst. Go ahead, though Zeneca. Tell me the mistakes you made and what you're doing to correct for them.

- Yeah, I mean something, and the crazy part is, I knew I was making these mistakes at the time, but when you're in the thick of it, it can be difficult to sort of act upon it.

The biggest one for me was I spread myself too thin. I had shiny object syndrome. I chased, like I bought NFTs from everywhere and like, you know, you spray and pray approach and just, you know, everything goes up and it's fine and it's great. And then I got like this overwhelming portfolio and I couldn't keep up with this project and that project and there's an airdrop and a claim and there's a token here and it was just a mess. And then ended up bag holding everything like a lot of people did.

And this time around, I think it's about higher conviction bets and plays and much, much, much fewer trading. Like just like find projects that are, this is great. I understand it, I get it, I believe in it. It's I have the highest conviction. I'm gonna dedicate all my time and energy into like these five things, five to 10 maybe, tokens and NFT projects and like just that's it.

And then maybe every now and then I'll trade in and out of something or maybe do something else, but not just try and be everywhere at once, which is so tempting because you're in discord and someone says, "Hey, this token is underrated and you get in on this and you, I'll just put a hundred dollars in there or five." It just gets really overwhelming.

So that to me is one big thing, but even like zooming out one more step, having like an overall strategy going into the market is something that I talk a lot about. I actually wrote this full market survival guide, which maybe we can link to first part at least.

- Yeah, yeah, I would love to.

- And it's all about thinking about how much time you wanna put into crypto, what your goal is, what your risk tolerance is and like figure out what percentage of your net worth you want in crypto. And within that, what percentage is in Bitcoin and ETH and NFTs, et cetera. And then setting a time like once a week or once a month to check in on that, cause you can start out saying, "I want 5% in NFTs and 5% in meme coins and 80% in Bitcoin." And six months later, you can have a portfolio that's 95% NFTs and meme coins cause things are absolutely crazy and you don't necessarily change it.

And then that's how you round trip and lose it all back.

- I had such a good point because I would have told you last cycle that I wanted to be majority ETH, a little bit Bitcoin, a little bit NFTs. And I was like 80% NFTs. Like, you know what I mean? Like I just ended up buying NFTs until I was all NFTs. And then I'm watching my, looking at my portfolio now and being like, "Why the fuck do I have so many NFTs? Like I wanted ETH. How did this happen?" So it's such a good point. Go ahead, Gavin.

- I was gonna say, it's that gambling thing a little bit, right? Because you go towards, and I think this is something that I've found that's tricky for me is I don't have like, you know, millions of dollars in this space, right? Like I've got, I've got a chunk of money, but not like a lot of much. And what you go for sometimes is I want to 100X or I want to even 25X the thing, rather than the steady, like as Warren Buffett said, the 20%.

Like it's pretty clear if you've been following crypto that ETH is at what, 2000 now? Very good chance we get to $4,000 ETH in this next run. If, you know, if things work out the way they have.

- If not, $7,000, $8,000. Like honestly, I, you know.

- Let's say, let's say a 6,000, right? Let's just say that is three times as three X from here. So you have to keep that in mind is anytime you're going to play a thing, that three X is much, much better than zero. You know what I mean? Like that's the important thing. And I think sometimes it's really easy to chase those things. And I have found myself even now in this move, throwing away ETH at some like shit coin things because I've seen friends of mine that have like taken a shit coin and run it up.

And by the way, even with Turbo, you remember Turbo back in the day, we all, that was pretty good. And when you have that one taste of that, you're like, oh my God, well, I could find a way to kind of like take this through to another level. That's the tricky thing that I think is how do you, how do you sell? When do you sell and why do you sell? And also selling doesn't have to feel bad. I think that's the other thing that happened in the last run was that people sold. And in my heart, there was always like, I'm part of this community, but if I sell, I'm hurting that in some way. And that's the other side of this thing. That's really tricky.

- Yeah. I want to say I totally, I felt that a lot as well. Selling out of communities, there was an emotional connection that can be difficult. I think that emotional connection part is what you need to try and remove. And the best way to do that is have a sell strategy before you buy the thing. Say I'm going to buy, whether it's an NFT or this amount of money in this token. And if it goes up five X, 10 X, 20 X, two X, I'm going to sell, it could be the whole amount. It could be take your profits out, write it down, have a strategy and like keep it somewhere you can look at and regularly check because that is how you remove them.

Because once you're in the thick of it, when you have a mean coin that goes from a thousand dollar investment to a $50,000 investment, you're thinking, well, it just, if it goes to 500,000, if it just does it again, I have a house.

- Yeah, exactly.

- You think $50,000 would be really nice. I could buy a car, I could change my life, but it's not going to fully change my life. 500,000 or a million, that's possible. And so, and that's how people end up round tripping. So have a sell strategy.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's so true. And by the way, when you do sell at 50,000, it will probably go up. It may, you know, it will go up to 100,000. And then you're going to hate yourself and you're going to lay in bed and feel sick. And it's like, you made 40,000, you made whatever, you get a $49,000 profit. Like, relax. And the thing will probably crash back down to 2000 and then you'll feel like a genius. Like, it's just the vicissitudes of like living and breathing in this market is so much. And, you know, this is why, you know, obviously I'm kind of expanding what I'm focusing on, which as much as it's funny, because it's like literally as potentially a bull market is hitting again, I'm actually so grateful for it because I'm not wired. Like, I don't do well just like living and breathing this market in a bull run where I'm tracking everything, where I'm feeling like, where every time I don't just like buy the bottom and sell the top, I kick myself for it. Like, that's not healthy. You're never going to, you're never going to do that consistently.

- Y'all know the phrase, not your keys, not your crypto. Well, in a world where too many people have had to learn that the hard way, Overpriced JPEGs is proud to partner with Ledger, the world leader in critical digital asset security.

Ledger's Nano S Plus and Nano S hardware wallets, paired with the Ledger Live app, Ledger's own software for setting up your Nano device and managing your crypto assets, is the easiest way to start your crypto journey while maintaining full control of your digital assets. You can use all your favorite dapps with Ledger Live, accessing 15 plus web3 apps, including one inch, ParaSwap, Lido, and Zorion.

So you can not only manage, but also grow your portfolio. And Ledger Live is available on mobile and desktop. Securing digital assets shouldn't be complicated. Ledger is as easy as it gets. Uncompromising security, effortless connectivity, full transparency, Ledger is your one-stop shop to trade and track crypto, grow your assets, and manage NFTs. Secure your future with Ledger. Visit shop.ledger.com today or check out the link in the show notes.

- I'm curious if you guys have any high level predictions on what you think will do well this cycle. Obviously art blocks for Zeneca, don't worry. Well, you can, oh, you actually, you look like maybe not. Well, let me say this, because I wanna bring in these stats. Web3Sense who's been an amazing partner to me and OverPriced JPEGs this year, Jim Borger sent over some data he's been looking at and his prediction and I wanna give it to you guys and then I wanna have you react and make your predictions as well.

So Jim is looking at, one of the things that Web3Sense pulls is total locked value basically within communities. Like what is the total community value? How much money, how much ether, Bitcoin, crypto are sitting in the wallets of people who are in certain communities as well as what are the values of all the NFTs in that community?

And this is perhaps somewhat intuitive but communities that have diversified have a variety of portfolios. So Yuga, he points to obviously Art Blocks, obviously diverse set of artists. And then one that was interesting is it was Futurverse actually with things like having a bit of a stake in Cool Cats if you consider some of that. Like they all have a lot of both dry powder and then also just money locked in NFTs in their communities. And his feeling is that that will bode very well in this next cycle because if folks who are still in that community obviously have a certain amount of fidelity and loyalty to those communities, they've ridden it this far. So there's a lot of really just wealth that's sitting around that could be deployed in various ways if those communities and projects want it to be.

Now we've obviously talked about something like a Yuga, like have they already stretched themselves to, like have they oversupplied, things like that. His feeling is if you really just look at how much liquid powder is in there and how much money is in there in total, that's a really powerful place to be for communities like Futureverse and Yuga and Art Blocks were the three in particular he cited. And so he's actually more bullish on some of those which I thought was interesting. You could look at it a couple of different ways. Like I said, you could look at it like, well, I don't know if they already run their communities ragged because they've put out more collections or he could be right, right? A sentiment starts to come back and be more positive. Folks are willing to put more money into the communities they're already in.

- Yeah, I think it's a really interesting stat. And I think that we've already started to see it a little bit as the market has turned around. There've been like some massive sweeps of people with deep pockets that pick up. I think there was one today, someone bought $400,000 worth of Pudgy Penguins or something like that, where it's, you know, people that have conviction, if they have the dry powder, and some people certainly do, maybe they were just waiting for a better time and then now they wanna double down. And yeah, I think we're gonna see some explosive stuff.

- I am not 100% sure. I completely trust the idea that money in communities equals potential value. Only because I think part of the thing I expect to happen, one of the things I think it's really important to look at is Punks for this cycle. Punks actually bottomed at around like 48, I think something like that. And while Apes went all the way, like so Apes went above Punks and the Apes went way down. And I think age around like 30 ish, something like that right now. I actually think Punks have a chance to get to, if we do have a real bull market, to 150, 200. And it's like one of my great regrets of life is like, I never, probably all the ETH I wasted, I could have bought a Punk, but I believe that Punks really are going to be the NFT for the future of everything. And I think they are going to be the thing.

So if I were somebody who had a lot of money, that, and you know, there was a run on Punks that has been a run on Punks for the last couple of weeks. I feel like that's the kind of place.

The other thing that I'm looking at, and this is just purely almost from a trading perspective, but like you remember the last bull run, it took a couple months for things like Azuki to come around and things that felt like fully fledged, not to say Azuki went through its own series of like issues along the way. But what I'm waiting for is like the new project that feels like it's fully formed and that it comes and it shows up and you're like, this is a new blue chip. I think that kind of project is going to fly. And I think that's something that we're waiting on soon. And again, it may not fly long-term, but it's going to fly in the immediate term in such a crazy way because everybody's waiting for something like that.

- Well, and this was going to be my question. Do you think that the projects that will succeed, if this is a bull run that we're on, what will be the breakdown between, it'll be the projects from the first cycle versus it'll be totally new projects springing up?

- I think it's like the ICO run, like which happened, I mean, I'm not a crypto historian, but the ICO run, there were some really interesting things that stuck around from that, but like Zen said, 90%, 99% of the stuff died. And I think things like Pudgies, things like Apes will still work. And listen, I hold a couple of Pudgies, I'm a big fan of Luca, but like, I still think people chase the new. And I think that the promises of these older projects, the promises of the older projects, a lot of them aren't paying off, right? And Apes is a good example.

Like, look, I think Apes is crazy strong community. They're really good, but like, Apes is a grown up business now. It's like, Apes has got to look at bottom lines. They've got to look at like, they laid off, I think they laid off people, right? They're in the ones group of layoffs and like, they've got to figure out how to make a business out of this thing. They're not the exciting new thing anymore. And the other thing about Apes, which is really hard, and this is where I think, I don't know what you can do with this, but Carly, we've talked about this before, culturally, they had their moment and it's no longer. And it is very hard for something to come back from the peak of Apes are cool to Apes are not. And I don't think you will find many 12 to 15 year old boys who think that Bored Apes are the coolest thing in the world anymore, which I think drove a lot of the cultural awareness of it before from a non-crypto standpoint.

- Which by the way, fits historical patterns of, like, of toys, let's say. Like, what I'm harkening to is what we've heard from David Horvath, which is, if you get the big celebrity partnerships, if you get the big brand deals, that usually spells a quicker death for your brand. You will have your big moment, but you will flame out much faster.

And most brands, most characters, most toys, whatever, have a life cycle that is, you know, if you're thriving, it's 10 years, but most are not Hello Kitty, right? Most franchises do not have just the cultural staying powder. You could probably count on one or two hands, the number of IPs that really have a super powerful long-term cultural staying power, especially if you're talking about something like a Hello Kitty where there's not like a huge story behind it. Obviously you have things like Star Wars or Harry Potter or things that like, you know, the story is so rich and so full and people are so connected to that, but that's distinct, right?

You know, it's hard to imagine any of these IPs managing to also strike lightning in the bottle in terms of creating a story IP that is as iconic as one of the major ones. So yeah, I think it's an interesting point.

- Zenika, I want to get your reaction on the Art Blocks comment. And again, this is a Web3Sense stat. That's really somewhat staggering to me, but Art Blocks holders, total community value, TVC of 1.2 billion. There's $1.2 billion in crypto and in NFTs that they hold within the community of people who own Art Blocks artwork. I mean, that's a big number.

- It's a very big number. I mean, there's two things that, there are a lot of Art Blocks pieces and collections, friendship bracelets says tens of thousands of them. So it could just be there's a lot of wallets here, but Art Block whales are built different. Punk whales are built different. Like there's a few projects where--

- It's the OGs.

- It's the OGs. It's the people that, some of them were on the ETH ICO. Some of them--

- That's what I was gonna say. It's people who bought ETH when it was a hundred bucks, so they bought 10,000 ETH or whatever.

- There's a guy, by the way, there's a guy I know in mice who bought Bitcoin at $4 and ETH at 33 cents. And he just swept a bunch of mice and everybody's like, "That's crazy." And he's like, "Well, guess what?" He's still an engineer. He works a day job, but he's probably worth nine figures just because of that, which is the craziest thing. So you have to remember, there's a lot of those people in crypto for sure.

- Right, correct. And to your point, Zeneka, disproportionately what NFTs do they own? Punks and Art Blocks and the real OGRI with fundamentals. So you didn't seem like you thought Art Blocks was gonna be the tear or was gonna be the run up for this cycle. Did I misinterpret your facial expression?

- No, there's definitely truth to that. Obviously I've been extraordinarily bullish on Art Blocks and generative art forever, and I still am. But sort of fitting with what I was saying before about my strategy and what I've noticed is that there's so many, like Art Blocks is a platform. There's a lot of artists, a lot of collections, a lot of projects on there. I don't think just any random Art Block project is just a good investment or thing to buy from a financial perspective.

If you like the art, great, absolutely. That's what it's there for, it's to appreciate art. But if you are thinking it from a financial lens, I think, I'm again, trying to pull everything into the highest conviction plays. And to me that is, and again, this is just from an investing perspective, there's Art Blocks that I just love and will never sell. But that's your Squiggles, that's your Fidenza, your Meridian, your Gazers, there's these OG projects. And then there's a few more recent ones, Fontana and I could list a bunch more of it.

So I think that, yeah, a lot of Art Blocks projects will perform really, really, really well and be in that 0.01%, but also a lot won't. And I think moving forward as well, Art Blocks, Art Blocks is a massive establishment in the space for generative art, for spreading art and good in the world. But now there's a lot of others as well. There's, you know, there's FX Hash coming to ETH, there's Verse, there's, there are a lot of other platforms and artists are releasing on their own. So I think it's sort of that massive, almost monopoly behemoth effect is dissipating a little bit.

- There's more competition.

- More, which is great for artists. It's great for collectors. It's great for basically everyone except potentially Art Blocks as a business themselves, but.

- Though not also for sure, he's thrilled with it, right? Like he's not the kind of person who wants more.

- Oh yeah, he wants more.

- He wants more.

- He's like, just let the art operate. - 100%.

- Another thing I'll say about that, which I think is an important thing from a trading and money perspective only, is that there is lots of art in the world that is not worth very much money, right? And I think that good art, there's lots of great art in the world with pretty much money. And we might've had, and this is just a guess, but like we might've had because Art Blocks was so concentrated and so good at what they did in finding digital artists and launching them, that we might've had this kind of like peak moment of visual art in this early stage. And there will be stuff like Squiggles, and Fidenses, and those kind of things that will continue to have value. But I think it's gonna get way harder in some ways to have a project reach those levels again.

There will be lots of artists who get paid, which is amazing, that's the most important thing. And I hear that from my artist friends, like they just want to be able to make their art and be able to make like $75,000 a year, which is not impossible to do if you make cool stuff in this space, because people will mint it. But I'm just not sure we're gonna see like the 100 ETH level projects that we saw in this last run. And I think that's the interesting thing from a trading investing perspective, if you think about it.

- I don't know that I agree. The reason I disagree is as we talk about this casino, we talk about gambling, right? Like why wouldn't art be as subject to that as a monkey JPEG? I keep using that shorthand, but like why would the PFPs be more susceptible to that? Unless you're saying as a category, you don't think we'll see 100 ETH sales on any of this stuff.

- No, no, here's my theory. My theory is that the OGs are OGs and they're great. And they were part of the reason the value of that went up early. I don't know if the projects that are gonna be coming out from an art perspective, there will be a few, there will be a few that will do well. I think that it's the early stage projects that feel like they were first that are gonna get there. And now we're in a place that like, it's kind of diminishing returns. You're still gonna have pops, but I was only gonna have a big thing.

I will say on the other side with the, like I say, Ape's 2.0, whatever Ape's are, you know, I can't think of it. I can't think of an animal that hasn't been used. That's how screwed up the last boat run was. There were whales, but that's why we can call them whales, whatever. Yeah, there are a lot of whale projects.

- There were killer, oh, not killer bears.

- The idea of a memetic power of a community and the memetic power of like spreading the word of something, the memetic power of an image on a shirt, on a whatever, that still feels like it has, it's almost like a meme coin versus like the steady, you know, kind of raising coin. You can have a spike because of how word of mouth happens that I'm not sure you can have with art in the same way. And that doesn't mean I love generative of art. I love digital art. I just am not sure you're going to see the size of art projects in terms of ETH going forward. That's all.

- I get your point. I get your point. Again, I don't know that I'm not fully bought into your theory, but I appreciate the theory. Let's turn now.

- That's a great way of saying fuck off, man.

- No, no, no, no, but it is my flightway of moving us on to the next topic.

- Fair enough.

- And conversation here.

Which is the Disney news. I have thoughts on this. I have a lot of thoughts on this, to be honest. Let me just frame it up for folks. And I'm going to frame it up the way I feel like it's been framed on social media, which is like Disney is entering the blockchain, which is weird to me because Disney has like been doing stuff for like a while now. So it's like people are acting like, feels like every time Disney does anything with NFTs, it gets re-announced. Disney's involved with NFTs and it's like, yeah, they've literally been involved with NFTs. Anyways, but I understand why this is a little bit different. But anyways, so the framing on Twitter is like, Disney's getting into NFTs and obviously they've got this partnership with Flow is a big part of the deal and the announcement.

I am actually quite excited about this, but again, I push back a little bit on this, everybody's jaws on the floor that Disney's involved with NFTs. Maybe I'm overstating that, but that's sort of the sense I've gotten from this is it feels like people are really acting like for the very first time Disney has put a stamp on NFTs. Again, like I said, I have a lot of thoughts. Let's start with you guys though. Zen, what do you think make of this?

- Yeah, I think it's great. I think you're right, Disney's been like, they've been on the VeVe platform for two years. Yeah, you've had John-

- They've worked with Flow. They did a whole big drop with Cryptoys. Star Wars did stuff with Cryptoys as well as, I think they had another partnership with Cryptoys that they did that was also on Flow. - Yeah. - Let's continue.

- I think, but it does seem a little different and like it seems like they're going a little more mainstream, a little more free. I'm pretty sure they're all free, right? I've always said, I think that when, the whole PFP craze of buying a PFP for $80, $100, it's not how NFTs are necessarily gonna work in the future when big brands come in. They want people to have-

- I know, they're free.

- I don't know if they are either. I might just be making that up.

- No, but I think you're right. This is different. They're launching a platform, is my understanding of this, called Disney Pinnacle on Flow. That's really interesting. And this gets to what John Rogers has sort of always talked about is like Disney needs to have their own, I mean, he's always said basically their own layer 2 is what he thought they should have and like really have like their own chain basically that is the Disney chain, which I still think is a pretty interesting idea and maybe where they go at some point. But this is a step in that direction rather than just licensing out their IP to companies at Cryptoys, to companies like VeVe, to use their, I assume these are NFTs, they're publishing themselves, but they're not licensing the right out to anyone else. They're building their own platform and they're modeling it off of, and this is again something John Rogers and I talked about quite a bit, credit to John on this, off of the pin business that they do at the theme parks. Which is why I don't think they're necessarily free, though I could be wrong. But I think they're trying to like sell, I think they are gonna be lower cost though, to your point, Zen, like they're not, my sense, and again, these are not, none of us are spouting facts here, but my sense of this is like, they're gonna have this platform, this store on Flow where you can buy these lower cost NFTs that are like the pins you can buy in the theme parks.

But sorry, I cut you off and then said a bunch of shit, but-

- No, I mean like, yeah, I think that is the big difference. It is a more significant foray into NFTs than we've seen them do before. So I think people are right to be excited. I think it's, it is great and big and TBD, how it all plays out, but I think, if they play their cards right, this could be another case of, we've seen massive success with Starbucks and their Odyssey program, and if Disney does something somewhat similar, then all of a sudden there's just more NFT adoption in the world and it could be completely abstracted away. So most people don't even recognize that they're interacting with NFTs, at least in the early days, which would probably be necessary and even better, but yeah, I think it's great news.

- Gavin, do you have additional thoughts here?

- I mean, my only thought is always as tricky and I just had this thought, which is, for all the time that I've been working with Carly in the show and been paying attention to this, everybody chases the idea of Disney's doing this or Pepsi's doing this or Coke's doing that, and I think ultimately it's fucking dumb. And I will say this, I think it's dumb because the technology is going to go everywhere probably, right?

But the idea that you can pin your hopes on, I do believe this is all bag going up talk, and I think that it's a way of capturing bag going up in general, and even from a standpoint of the Decrypts of the world, and this is no shade against Decrypt, like I like Decrypt in all those media companies, but it's all about, oh my God, they're finally here. And the funny thing is the finally here narrative has been two years going on, and I don't feel like we've hit finally here yet, so I don't know, it feels like it's interesting, but this is the kind of thing that happens in three years.

Like at the next bull run, this is where this will be a big thing, I feel like, because it will be integrated into the system.

- I kind of agree. I have two thoughts on this, of two minds. On the one hand I agree, and that was sort of my point, like everyone's like, oh my God, Disney's finally here. And I'm like, first of all, they've been here. Like they've been doing things. We don't entirely know what this is. I will say, I think Sammy Mocha, Sammy Eth, who I like, but had a post where they said here, they're like, Dapper, Disney is coming to Web3.

- I saw that tweet, yeah.

- They've been to Web3, and then said Dapper Labs is partnering.

- He was very excited about it.

- Right, but this is the funny thing, they were like, Dapper Labs is partnering with the $159 billion entertainment conglomerate to bring Web3 IP to the masses. Again, what? Like we've been talking about this for so long, that's not what's happening here. I do think this was cool though. And again, Sammy, I liked this post overall, it was very informative.

But then he was like, do you think the Simpsons NFT episode timing was a coincidence? Disney acquired 21st Century Fox in 2019, which had the rights to the Simpsons. Yes, I absolutely believe there was a coincidence. There is literally a 0.003% chance that the part of the Disney team, which has gone through a ton of reorgs, that is spearheading this initiative, was talking to the writers of the Simpsons, saying make sure you put up a year ago to say, put a plug in, that's like lukewarm on NFTs.

- Yeah, let's go on the episode, every NFT is worth zero. So like the whole thing is a shit on NFTs, right?

- This was the perfect example of like, NFT enthusiast arrangement syndrome, where you're like.

- By the way, Sammy, again, we do love you. I really love you guys.

I will link to the post below, because genuinely people should read it. And actually I got some of the information. It's a great post, Sammy, but I do just want to make fun of you for that top part. And I get it too, like you're putting out a tweet, you want people to like read it. It's like also probably an engagement farming thing, which we all do, because that's the name of the game of the internet. But I was like, come on, like this and that. Yes, it was a coincidence, but the Simpsons episode came out.

And no, this is not like, you know, they're now bringing web3 IP to the masses. I'm sure this is like, so, but, but, but, but, but, I do think this is different. I do think that having a platform is different. I do think going about it in this way is the kind of way I want to see Disney going about something like this. I will see. I mean, I would actually prefer it to be on ETH and no shade to the flow team. I think flow is very cool. I know they're trying to be family centric and the, the consumer, the consumable consumer chain and things, you know, I'm, I'm more of an ETH person. So, but I think it's, it's great for flow and congratulations to them for, for getting this partnership.

And I do see it as meaningful given that we're, you still have a whole swath of mainstream and you still like mainstream articles coming out being like NFTs are dead. Right. Yeah. I think that's the biggest thing is that. And you're like, yeah, arguably the biggest foray into this, they have made in the sense that they're doing their own platform. Like that is, that is meaningful.

- They're sniffing the bull market. They're sniffing the bull market.

- And I do think that this is the kind of thing that this speaks to you to me, that gets me excited is this borderless entertainment concept that Tom Bilyeu, you talks about quite a bit, which is his big bet, which is this idea that you move seamlessly through like the digital world to the physical world. Like, you know, you get this digital pin, you go to the park, you redeem it for a physical pin. Like, you know, who knows the way that you can then interoperate these things? And like, I hear the critics being like, they could have sold digital pins before, but again, the idea that you have something that's peer to peer that exists on the internet freely, though that mirrors the way things exist in the physical world. That is a really, that is a psychological difference that I think a lot of people just don't get yet, but that I really do think matters in the long term. I also wouldn't be in this space. I wouldn't have thought the last two years in this space. And so that really excites me, you know, because I never got the sense with any of these other partnerships Disney has done, like with VeVe, that what would be the incentive for Disney to like really incorporate a VeVe collectible into a broader Disney experience? Right. Whereas if they own these things and this is their platform, I think there could be an incentive for like you buy this thing now. It has interplay in other parts of the Disney ecosystem and the Disney universe.

It's funny you mentioned that because one thing I just thought about was and I think maybe John has said something like John Rogers, I'm like this before is like one of the best use cases maybe of AR experience would be in a park, in a theme park. And imagine in a theme park, if you when you walked into the door, you get the Disney goggles or whatever, or maybe there are goggles that everybody has and your pin makes you into some version of a superhero in that space, right? Like and then everybody's like, oh, my God, look at that person. You get to then be a character like that's a really interesting contained use case.

This is where like to me, we might be like five years away from like the the pure version of NFTs we've talked about forever, which are literal ownership of things that can be displayed in the virtual AR environment, which Apple's glasses are going to be coming out in three or six months from now. We're at the beginning stages of...

-Do you have a countdown, Gavin? Do you just have a countdown on your wall?

- And I do. It's like, yes, yes.

- There's only 72 days left. Oh, Kim.

- I will. They're very expensive. So I probably will not buy them in the beginning, but maybe I will. I'll find some way to leverage my my NFTs to go buy one. But that does feel like when you talk about Disney being in something, if these are the ground stages for that, I'm excited because I feel like that is the next real use case of NFTs, because an Ape is interesting on a T-shirt and that's cool. But that's only so much you're going to be able to get with that.

If I can signal to people that I care about and the Disney people are the perfect example. Like I'm not a Disney adult, but like I know that that is an incredibly active community of people and they love Disney. If those people get that and they embrace it, that is massive. That is the new big normie run. Right. Like that feels like where the normies are really going to come in in a big way.

- And this is where my now NFT Derangement Syndrome is coming in. Because I got us on this path of being like, you're going to they're going to incorporate it into their broader ecosystem and you're going to be able to redeem it for something in the park. And there's literally zero evidence for any of that. But that is the kind of thing that gets me excited and feels at least in the long term, more realistic to me than the idea that like in this short term moment here, Disney's onboarding a bunch of masses in the next, frankly, even year.

I mean, this is your point, Gavin. Like I think we're we're we're still a cycle or two away from normal people really wanting to buy and show off a digital item. Like even this cycle, I don't think we're we might get a little bit more of that, but we're still not getting that. Right. I think we still frankly, I think a bunch of seven year olds need to get older. Yes, I really do think this is something that's

- Honestly that's very true. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

- Yeah. I think something is going to be driven by a bunch of people who are seven now being 18.

- Once again, I think of this sometimes from a gaming perspective. I was I'm I'm 49. I'm very old for this space, but like I was a big gamer early on in the early nerdy stages, like in the 80s, I was a big gamer, both arcades and got into PC gaming, did some programming. It was a niche, a niche entity. In fact, people were made fun of for it, right? Even sports video games, which I love. I love playing like John Madden football early on.

- And then those guys, when they call it John Madden football, that's that's how old you are. Now we just call it Madden.

- But all those kids who grew up not thinking it was nerdy now are mainstream and games are bigger than movies. So that's you're exactly right. Digital items need people to grow up into them.

- Yeah, absolutely. All right. Well, let's close out here with just some fun highlights. I know that we've all been enjoying such as Gordon Goner on Twitter. It's good to have Gordon back.

- So good. It was so good.

- Zeneca, explain for anybody who somehow has missed it? Gordon Goner's Twitter behavior.

-I mean, so Gordon is Gordon Goner, one of the founders of Yuga Labs and had to step away from the space, I think roughly a year ago, because some health concerns are heart issues. And sort of within the last month has sort of come back and been way more active. He's not working at Yuga. I think he's an advisor or something now, but he's just like he's embracing his inner degen. He's like an NFT degen like the rest of us. But he's got deep bags because he's one of the great founders of Yuga Labs.

So he's just out there and for like a week or 10 days, I think, he was just on Twitter every day saying, you know, I didn't like back in twenty, twenty one and twenty two. I didn't want to buy too many NFTs because people would speculate, oh, he bought an NFT. Is Yuga acquiring this company?

Or there would be and we're at a stage of the market now and he's so far removed where I think he felt comfortable just going in and yoloing and just like he's kind of like he's just fully embracing his inner degen. And like it's amazing. He bought a Punk. He bought Pudgies.

- A World of Women. He bought a Dead Fella,

-Toads, a Squiggle, a Fidenza. There's 30 collections probably he bought from and he spread it out where he'd buy a tweet about it. And like that that project, that discord would go crazy and people were having fun. And I don't know, it was just a great week in the space. A lot of fun.

- And I think I forget who I think I saw NFT stats tweeting about this, but I think NFT stats was actually quoting somebody else who had said it. But like just there's been it's really fun to watch the fanfare with which he rolls out his buys. Yeah. You know, there's this real like, oh, I love this. And this is why I love this piece. And this is why I'm celebrating this piece and just real generosity to the way that he's doing it, which which is what makes it so fun.

- Yeah, I found it. What I found was like I don't know Gordon and I've only followed him from afar. But like he always felt like a little bit of like the heart of the Apes. And even like, you know, the kind of fuck you attitude of Apes or kind of like the little bit of like the weirdness of Apes. And when he was gone, it got that corporate vibe to it. And like, I think that that feeling is the heart and no matter what people think of NFT is the Disney NFT non-withstanding, that feeling is the heart of this whole world. Right. Like that feeling of like, you know, fuck it, I'm going to throw a thousand dollars on this, like what could be a rug because Yolo, like that sort of vibe in, that he kind of started, is is what drives the excitement around this space. And the fun. I think that's one thing that's really important is NFT is starting to feel fun again.

- They really are.

- And Gordon is one of them. And like, that's something that I really missed. Right. Like I think part of NFTs to me was always when I got involved was like, oh, there's a bunch of weirdos that are all doing this stuff together. And they're caring about these funny things. That's fun. And then it stopped being fun. It stopped being fun in a big way. And Gordon's kind of return makes it feel fun again.

- Yeah, it's a really good point. I do think Gordon was a big part of the we know he was a big part of the branding and the like Apes really reflected vibes. Yeah. Yeah. Like his brand in some ways. And I think that's a really good point. And I know that like other side and like Jimmy, the trial, Jimmy the Monkey, for example, that I happen to know was like a big that that was really his brain child. Like there was a lot. And then he had to step away.

- The Butthole key. Remember the butthole?

- Yeah. I mean, it's not my sensibility for what it was.

- But that felt like apes. And that felt like something that was weird. Right. And like, that's not that you're not going to see the Activision do a butthole key. You know what I mean? Like that feels interesting.

-And I think that was a very, very much Gordon's project that he had to step away from, you know, for this literally to save his own life. Right. Which is just so sad. But I think it's been so great having him back.

We didn't really talk about Blur in this episode or the oh yeah. Is it only season two airdrop? Is that all we're on?

-Yeah, well, we should talk about this. We should talk about this because it's I think I mean, Zeneca might have an interesting perspective, but like it's going to be a lot of money put into the ecosystem in like what's in like a week. Isn't it like four days? So it's going to go crazy. And granted, no one I mean, I can speak about this because I'm not I know Zen's an investor, but like I think people wrote Blur off.

A lot of people in this space really wrote Blur off in the in the last three to six months because they're like, oh, and these are going to nothing. It's kind of an NFT or killed NFTs, blah, blah, blah. But I think that there's a real opportunity that there's going to be like significant liquidity injected into the market because of this. And I personally I know people are saying, well, Blur took is going to drop to nothing after this because people have been just farming. I actually think Blurs got a real shot at surviving because you look at what happened, what's going with OpenSea and all the other marketplaces. They are so...

-Soponsoring OverPriced JPEG's, by the way. Yes. Go support OpenSea.

- Sorry. Sorry. Yes. For OpenSea. But I'm just saying, no, I'm not saying OpenSea is going away, but I think that I think people are writing off Blur again in a way that doesn't make sense to me right now. Because if there is a bull market, all marketplaces are going to end up doing well if they're good. Right. Like I think that's what will happen.

- Yeah. No, I think that's an interesting take. What do you think, Zeneca?

- Yeah, I think I mean, there's so much mass speculation about will this look there's going to be a lot of liquidity, like unlocking and what's going to happen with it. People are wondering, and is it going to flow back into NFTs? Are NFT floor is going to go up or they're going to go down?

I think everyone is trying to picture that because on the one hand, there's like been incentivized bidding and support for like a lot of collections, which some people saying are propping up floors. Some people are saying a dropping floors. And so if that disappears, we don't know. We don't know. Is there going to be I have absolutely no additional information than anyone else? Is there going to be a season three? What is that going to look like? Is that going to be some other form?

I mean, I think everyone kind of thought that token price would drop leading up to the air drop because it's going to unlock. But it's sort of done the opposite over the last few weeks. Kind of the whole market is going up. And I think is the end. I've heard a few people say that like buying Blur, like buying an index fund of NFTs to an extent, if NFTs are doing well, then the Blur token will be doing well and yada, yada, yada.

Reality is we just don't know. We'll have to wait and see what. Yeah. Yeah. We'll have to wait and see.

- I think that the money coming in, first of all, I think Blur doing this now is not a coincidence. I think they were waiting very clearly to see signals in the market that would make sense for them to do it, because had they done this three months ago, game over. I think that would have been.

- But also it's about a year. I mean, didn't they wasn't the last air drop in December of February?

- It was February. February.

- But did they announce it in December?

- Maybe it might. Oh, yeah, it could be.

- I feel I feel almost confident that they announced it. So I guess it's not. But I felt like it feels like it's been a year, basically.

- It's coming up on to it. Yeah.

- I mean, I would say like I think they probably plan to do this earlier, but because of how bad the market was in June, July, August, September, probably they pushed it, which was smart. The last thing I'll say about this is I think that this will be a really good indicator to see what at least the short term NFT market will look like, because I think if coming out of this, you see a lot of people buying projects that exist.

And I think that the winners will probably be the Pudgies or the or the Punks or places that are like kind of safe haven projects, most likely. If those go up, I think we're in a really good place come January. If they kind of like stay flat or go down or go down significantly, then I'm a little bit more worried about what's going on. That'll be that'll be like a good indicator, I feel like.

-Mm hmm. Yeah, interesting. All right, folks, this was so fun. I missed you guys.

- It was fun.

- Come back to the dark side. That's what I got to say. Yeah,

- I am not leaving. I'm just expanding. And I'm not I'm not going away. I'm going to talk about crypto and NFTs. I know again today, later today on the show.

- We got to get you buying some meme coins, Carly or something.

- I know. Here's my thing. What I honestly like my what I really realized in the last cycle, like I said, like I do talk about high conviction. I don't know that there are any NFTs I have a higher conviction on than ETH. And that's why I really messed up last cycle because I think I just didn't cue to that enough. Yeah. And I'm still so over allocated NFTs and I don't even know which ones I would want to sell. So I'm sort of just like holding, in which case that means I'm still just like overallocated.

And, you know, like G-Money makes the point that that NFTs are leveraged ETH, which I totally get if you buy the right ones. Otherwise, like otherwise, they're taking the wrong direction. Yeah. And so, you know, that's really my I just love I love ETH. I really freaking like Ether and I really want to own Ether and I don't want to lose any of it. And I already feel like I spent too much of it in the last like literally as we're talking, I'm like, I want to go buy more ETH because it's been interesting to me to see how ETH isn't pumping relative to other ones like your Solana's been pumping way more than ETH and things like that. And I just I think the value prop for ETH is just so much clearer as much as I like Solana and like Flow and the chains. And so Ronin, whatever. Right. And so I I think an ETH run is coming at some point over the next 12 months. Like I really do think I think it could hit freaking 10K. And that's not in any way financial advice. It totally could go to 3K and come back down. But I'm just like, I just want to ETH. So that's my fear is like I don't want to buy more.

Anyways, not the point. The point is I'm still going to talk about NFTs. I'm still going to talk about crypto. I'm still something I love.

- I just come over to the AI side. It's very it's very fun talking about AI as well.

- And my YouTube, one of my new followers in the YouTube comments was being like, AI, I'm like, I know I'm like following AI stuff a little bit, mostly through you and through AI for humans. Gavin's other great.

- Can we plug it? Go go go to AI for Human's Show on Twitter and YouTube and everywhere and find us.

- Love it. YouTube and on podcasts. It's great. I listen to it usually in podcast form, but both are awesome. All right, folks, that is the show. We'll do this again. Again, we're not going anywhere. It's not going to be on the weekly cadence that it once was. But we will regularly. I don't want to make any promises. We'll do this again. We'll do this again. At some point.

Bye, everybody. Talk to you soon. Bye all.