ENS Domain Frenzy, Reddit & 9GAG NFTs, and Minions | Overpriced JPEGs Recap #29

Transcript

[Music] hello everyone gmgm welcome back to another episode of overpriced jpegs this is your weekly recap we are going to talk about everything that has happened in the world of nfts over the past week or at least everything that i think is important the state of the market what's going on with ens domain names and frankly why i think it's over hyped and an upcoming project that i think you should know about as well as a whole bunch of other things so we are going to get right into it right after we hear this word from our sponsors immutable x is the layer 2 platform for crypto gaming immutable offers massive scalability with up to 9 000 transactions per second an instant transaction confirmation no more gas

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staking the assets that we're bullish on and now you can stake seven different coins inside the ledger live app cosmos polka dot tron algorithms tezos solana and of course ethereum with ledger live you can take money from your bank account buy your most bullish crypto asset and stake that asset to its network all inside the ledger live app through a partnership with figment ledger also lets you choose which validator you want to stake your assets with and ledger is running its own validating nodes offering a convenient way to participate in network validation and it even comes with slashing insurance ledger live is truly becoming the battle station for the bankless world so go download ledger live if you have a ledger already you probably already have it and get started securely staking your crypto assets okay volumes may be low but spirits are high and what

i mean by that is volume is trash right now we are seeing like 11 million dollars a day i think that's on the low end somewhere between like 11 million and 20 million dollars in transactions per day in the nft space which is really low compared to where we were months ago at the height of last year but frankly i think a lot of projects are holding up better than we maybe would have expected given those volumes so we're looking over here at some of the top performing nfts you're seeing board ape yacht club no surprise it's a lot of blue chips it's it's board apes it's other side it's uh mutant apes it's punks it's clonex we're going to talk about why they're doing well a little later on today azukis are they blue chip we could

debate it um but you're seeing a lot of these these classic projects really hold their value and i want to of course flag art blocks here as well my friend zenika is super polish and art blocks i've really become persuaded to that style of thinking i think generative art is something that will really hold its value in the long run and so if you're willing to wait it out uh it's going to be a good investment and it's holding up even now so clearly this is a popular thesis because we're seeing art blocks do quite well relative to other projects here in the bear market i interviewed kai turner that interview will be coming out next week he's working on a new generative art project platform gallery you can learn more about it um so that's exciting to me we're also seeing the rise of freeman nfts i think god hates

nfts this is a project for example it's it's down it's number 24 right now in terms of volume but this was like goblin town like wizards if you follow some of these projects you have a free mint and then they pump up and then i think what we've tended to see is that the price has then come back down some of these have pumped up to over an east i think god hates nfts at its peak was it like one and a half eth and it's it's back down more in the you know 0.3 east range goblin town arguably is the exception to that you know at its peak it pumped up to i think eight eighths something like that it's now down to three east but it's been hovering around three eighth i think class i checked it with that 2.98 it's been hovering around three eth for um

quite some time now so i think that's one that may defy the odds in terms of these free mints that pump and then fall it seems like it will have staying power obviously we've talked a ton about goblin town on this show because it was the hottest thing for a long time there let's drill down now on ethereum name service specifically and why ens domains have been absolutely blowing up lately if you haven't been paying attention porno.eth sold for 184 eth it was a little over two hundred thousand dollars at the time it was like one of the biggest nft sales for that week since then we've had zero zero zero zero zero zero yeah dot eth sell for 300 eth we had paradigm.eats sell for 420 eth but if you look through here and if

you're uh just listening to this in the pod i'm showing the top selling eath domain names here on my screen um three and four letter domains are going like gangbusters and specifically you're seeing a lot of domains with numbers like 933.ed 637.ethe222.eth and some of this seems to have been seems to have originated from this premise or from this fact that i believe in dubai apparently it's a it's a big flex to have three-digit license plate numbers so in some of the the middle east i think is where this is coming from that's something that's really desirable and you have folks who are anticipating then that because that's

true for license plates that it'll also be true for domain names and that these three digit like numerical eth addresses are going to be really popular i have to be honest i'm kind of skeptical of this line of thinking i think first of all it's so important to realize that buying ens domain names is is very speculative at this point obviously everything in this space everything in nfts is is speculative but i would argue that something like a crypto punk there's a real logic there in the sense that this is a historical piece of artwork that i think will remain really relevant for decades and centuries to come like a picasso does or or something like that but

this ens domain name thing this logic that because somebody cares about a license plate number that's three digits they're going to care about an est domain name that's three digits i i don't know that feels like kind of tenuous logic to me with that being said i think there is real logic to investing in these ens domain names if you're willing to wait for many years to see if the the bet pays out but i don't think we're looking in the right places necessarily when we're talking about buying 222.eth so here's why i think of ens domain names they have a real functional purpose to them right it's to make it easier to send somebody money or tokens or to look at their wallet instead of having to send it to some long string of numbers

and letters i can go send it to cryptocarly.eth which is one of my ens domain names right and that's a lot easier and in that way it reminds me a lot more of an email address or a social media handle and when i think about what's popular for email addresses or social media handles flexes in that world tend to be like having your name right so i forget who it is who has adam on twitter who's like there's somebody who's at adam on twitter for example we're like that's a big flex like it's your name so it's super easy it's super functional i was looking at who has zero zero zero on twitter it doesn't exist right zero zero zero on twitter doesn't exist it i don't think it exists on instagram i looked on instagram i sent an email to 000 gmail.com and i gotta bounce back and

nobody notices because nobody really cares about zero zero zero in my opinion and then on top of that when i think about where i if the if ens remains relevant if ethereum takes over the way we all hope it takes over and or expect it to take over and if ethereum name service remains prominent when that happens when i think about who's going to want to pay big money for this stuff it's brands right like nobody's really gonna care if zero zero zero if they don't have zero zero zero but advil will certainly freaking care if somebody else has advil.eth because it's going to mess with their wallet it's

going to mess with it's going to be confusing if they're transacting through that wallet like the big brands are where i think you have a really good chance of seeing value accrual because brands have money and they're going to want to pay for that they advil cares that they have advil.com that's the other comparison you hear all the time right i gave the comparison to social media handles but you could maybe argue the better comparison though i'm not sure i agree with this but the better comparison is for web 2 domain names right web addresses advil i'm sure paid a hell of a lot of money to get advil.com adidas to get adidas.com etc etc so it strikes me that if you're going to spend hundreds of eth on a domain name and it's a speculative bet that it's

gonna go up in value you're much better off buying the domain names of brands who are in theory ultimately going to want these and have the resources to do it then to like flex by having zero zero zero dot eth uh i i just think that this is a play that the ogs care about we care to flex that we were here early enough to have gotten zero.eth or whatever but that in the future that isn't something that people are really going to want so folks are buying 933.eth for a bunch of ethereum because they actually love the number 933 and that's the persona they want to flex online great but otherwise i think this is a really stupid speculative play and that there's way better ways to spend

your eth if you're trying to make money in the long term the last thing i want to say on this is there are some interesting social signaling use cases for domain names that um i think have gotten maybe not as much attention as as maybe they deserve as we're having this whole ens bubble um and i talked about it with carlini who is the founder of penelope's country club and uh carlini has done something with penelope's country club which is he bought dot pcc.e he bought the subdomain dot pcc.ed so dot pcc standing for penelope's country club eth obviously and now if you own a if you own a penelope's you can actually register for a.pcc.eth domain so i could be carly.pcc.e

and then you can flex that on twitter for example or what wherever i suppose that you are going to put a handle like that and it becomes another way to identify with a particular community outside of simply using it for your profile picture so carlini's a huge advocate of this he gave the example on this podcast a couple months ago that like hey imagine if board api club did this they own the bayc.eath subdomain they could start a trend where everybody puts dotbasey.eth as their their name on twitter and it gives people options and ways to flex their part of the community without just having to change their profile picture for example so i understand there's social signaling pieces of this i'm just dubious that 637.eth socially signals the same way that frankly just having

carly.ethwood or uh or having porn.ethe does that i understand feels more of a flex to me so we'll see if this bet plays that plays out for folks if the the people who like having three digit license plate numbers are then also super vying for three-digit ethereum addresses and if there's something i'm missing about this if there's another argument for buying these short you know three and four digit 888 whatever addresses let me know i just don't think in the long run people are going to be all that impressed by it they're not going to be like oh wow you must have been so early you got 833.eth but i think saying like hey i got carly.eth or i have nike.eth that to me feels like it's a it's a clear flex and in the case of like nike or amazon.if this one makes

sense to me amazon.exe seems like a no-brainer that that is something amazon will want one day and pay a lot of money for um those are where i think you can you can ultimately make some money not in these short number ones this next story that i want to talk about comes from an article that was published at polygon.com it's called how minions beat disney at the copyright game and if you're interested in the cco debate if you're following the conversation around licensing and the different strategies around licensing in the nft world then i think this is a really interesting article to pay attention to it of course came from my friend john rogers who sent it over to me and basically this this article is arguing that universal is employing a better strategy than disney when it comes to how strict

they are about enforcing their copyright licenses so disney is notoriously very very strict they once and this article mentions this they once sued a um daycare center in florida or a series of daycare centers in florida's that were using like disney characters that had mickey mouse's on the wall in some capacity that were in some capacity using disney characters and this really did not endear disney to the local florida residents who felt like this was unnecessarily harsh to go after these daycare centers simply for using these characters um and by contrast universal who owns minions seems very permissive in allowing really anything to use the minion character

on their storefronts on their merchandise i'll read from this article here it says if aliens ever discover our deserted planet at some point in the future they may mistake minions for a hieroglyphic language our species once used to communicate the babbling sidekicks from despicable me and its spin-offs can be seen on facebook mental health pages on instagram posts announcing a baby was born on the sides of landscaping trucks they're on party supply store balloons bakery chalkboards q and on protest signs cannabis dispensary window murals where they all look higher than usual et cetera et cetera shot glasses so the point is that that universal won't go after folks when they use the minion symbol on all of these different things and it's interesting to note that even q and on protest signs are in there because that's obviously quite political i think something we hear

are one of the concerns for folks who are opposed to maybe cco or some of these more permissive right structures is oh they might get co-opted by you know right-wing brands or political ideologies in some sort of nefarious way and that that will kill the brand overall and on the one hand i think that this minions disney comparison is is maybe showing that that's not necessarily true that as long as you have some level of a central brand so if you look at um i don't know i'm trying to think of a good example of this i think people would argue this about bullet maps so maybe it's not the best example i could think of right like you do have dom hoffman and some central structures who are putting forth like a central vision

for what bullet maps might be so even if some q anon protester ends up trying to use some of those symbols it doesn't mean that the world is going to look at blit maps and associate it with q anon that's all that arguably is happening is that more people are becoming familiar with these symbols or these characters and it's just becoming a greater part of the popular consciousness that's the argument that in some ways or that i'm extrapolating from this polygon article so i think that's really interesting as somebody who who thinks a lot about cco and is sometimes kind of dubious of it now on the flip side of this i guess it's important to obviously say that universal has not quite literally put minions in the public domain so i was looking this up

and i was saying hey have there been any lawsuits where universal has actually gone after somebody for or gone after a company for example for using minions and they have and i found this article it was the only one i could find um but it looks like universal did go after a food manufacturer in asia that uh i guess i can't see this article anymore but there was a food manufacturer in asia who was quite literally commercializing minions and using minions as their logo putting it on their packaging on their brand and really commercializing the use of minions in that way and and ultimately universal did go after them now i know there may have been other issues there too maybe they were concerned about the quality of the foods something else so they are drawing the lines somewhere universal is um and and it just makes me think that there's

there's maybe this interesting middle ground that universal is towing where this is these characters are not in the public domain they they technically do have copyrights around them but universal is just being very lacks in how they're enforcing it and that feels like probably the middle ground arguably you find with something like a doodles which of course i praise all the time people know i'm not a doodles holder i just think they've done a lot really right where doodle says okay you can commercialize your doodle up to 100 000 but if you want to go beyond that come talk to us we may let you do it but we do want to have a little bit more control over it and so i think arguably their their minions is doing something along those lines whereas disney is being super super strict about it and um

and ultimately that disney model probably is not what's going to survive best in this next era and in this this blockchain era now it's interesting while we're talking about licensing and rights you have a artifact announced i guess this past week that clone x holders will now have full rights over their nfts rather than it being limited up to that certain commercial amount which is this uh approach that i think like a doodles takes and does very well clonex is being much more permissive now they're saying great go forth take your clonex characters do whatever you want with them clonex has been pumping a bit this week i don't know if that has something to do with it but i would assume that that is the reason for this clonex pump and it'll be interesting to see what comes out of it and they're putting out

all sorts of materials to to like further spur and encourage the creativity of folks who own their clonex characters and again it's all a big experiment that we will continue to track next up here i want to run through quickly a few stories that i think are worth flagging reddit announced they are launching a new nft avatar marketplace um i think this is not and this is not um reddit's first foray into nfts and of course alexis ohanian who is their founder has invested in a number of different nft projects and invested in the crypto space more broadly um but this is still good news i mean i think reddit is a natural fit for entering this space um they have partnered with a polygon on

this one which i think is interesting and uh they're also allowing you to use credit or debit cards to purchase these avatars to purchase these nfts so it's it's not you're not reliant on having a crypto wallet generally speaking i tend to to be favorable towards this kind of approach because i obviously i think we need to onboard as many new people as possible into this space and making it accessible through things like credit and debit cards is obviously a great way to do that on the flip side there are concerns with you know security if you're not doing something directly on an ethereum or a layer two of ethereum if you're doing something like polygon which is a side chain my understanding is they're using the side chain portion of polygon not polygon's layer two which is still in development you maybe have some security

concerns um but in general obviously excited about this bullish anytime you have a big brand like a reddit do something in the space uh world of women has had some announcements they airdropped something called a capacitor we don't really have a lot of details as to what this is but the air dropped capacitors it was supposed to be to both world of women holders and world of women galaxy holders but then galaxy holders never got theirs and they tweeted some message world of women did that said oh no it looks like the delivery of the capacitors for world of women galaxy got thwarted this tweet was accompanied by this video this kind of creepy video of some super villain laughing about the fact that she had thwarted the capacitors to world of women galaxy uh holders so i think

there's sort of this ongoing question around was there some sort of mistake where world of women galaxy holders were supposed to get these capacitors but didn't and now they're covering up the mistake by having this cool storyline or was this always what was intended and there's some there's more that's going to be revealed here as part of this sort of villainous storyline i'm not sure i think i land on the camp that says this was intentional um but but really i don't know for a fact i have not asked anybody with with any uh senior knowledge of this uh world of women also announced that they were going to be partnering with hasbro to make a monopoly game which is pretty cool i was a huge monopoly fan growing up i also had some of the monopoly offshoots like i had uh dog opoly and wild animal opaly

um so i like kind of fun monopoly spin-offs this would actually be something i would consider buying would be a world of women monopoly game and uh some of the initial art looks cool though i don't think it's official uh yam karkai or or world of women one of them had tweeted out some examples of what a world woman monopoly board might look like though they said those were just prototypes and did not actually represent the final board moving on to other news this week uh moon birds so there was like i'm talking about this only because i like to defend ryan carson because i think there's like just a lot of confusion about ryan carson out there in the world and so there was this tweet that did quite well nearly a thousand likes 60 retweets it had a lot of engagement that said i try

to not be controversial on here but does anyone else not find it odd that ryan carson swept 750 east of moon birds two days before a major patent comes out that implies something is coming which has caused a massive fomo and an insane floor price spike so moon birds has been pumping lately uh i think there's a couple reasons for that one of the reasons is that ryan carson did sweep the moon birds floor and so this person's suggesting that there was insider trading going on and that ryan carson was privy to insider information that that's why he purchased these and oh isn't this suspicious now i think insider trading in the nft world is an important topic because we see it it's rampant it's frustrating john rodgers and i have talked about it on the show even recently because we've seen it with yugo

labs quite a bit this is not a case of insider trading i want to say this so strongly and others thankfully are also pointing this out ryan has been very very clear for a long time that his fund 121g is that what it is 1220g sorry i should know 121g yeah 121g would be buying significant amounts of moon birds as well as some other blue chip nft projects and ryan himself sold off all his entire personal collection of um moon bird nfts just so that he wouldn't have conflicts of interest he said that sometime in early july he was going to be purchasing a whole bunch of moon birds and he's literally just delivered on that promise he then tweeted out saying i had no advanced knowledge of of anything that was going to be coming out so this whole

thing is just bs and again like i there seems to be negative reactions to ryan's tweets regularly that i i think are really coming from misinformed places i had a a a conversation about this with somebody at nftnyc who i was able to kind of persuade like i think people don't have full information i've met ryan i think he's lovely and um yeah this seems to be just like another example of people misinterpreting his actions so i wanted to clear that up as well as obviously acknowledge the fact that moon birds is pumping and uh doing been doing quite well the last week or so okay next story as we move quickly along here before i get into one final project i really want to dive into and put on your radar open c

couple pieces of news coming out of open c we have alex attella who is one of the founders of openc announcing that he will be stepping away uh from the company in the next month or so he's going to remain on the board i think there was some speculation as to whether this was a bad thing whether it was a sign of open seas decline there has some been some some bad news that has come out of openc recently they had this issue where board 8 yacht club nfts were being de-listed i think it was something like six thousand or so of them three thousand of them something like that um board api club nfts were like randomly delisted from openc which caused some panic that was quickly rectified and sounded like it was just some technical glitch they also had a phishing scam or they had a data

breach recently that i'll say something on so people were like is alex leaving because it's bad or there's there's you know some negative things going on i don't think so um what he said here is that he's ready to build again from zero to one and i think that that really is the i i take him at his word for this that basically he's leaving because when you start a company from scratch and you build it to 10 employees that's a very different kind of a company than when it starts to look to maybe ipo someday and it's going and it's hiring many many more employees it's just a different it's a different beast and uh it seems like he clearly wants he enjoys that early stage startup world and uh wants to do that again so congratulations to alex i'm sure he'll do awesome things here in the future

we'll look forward to keeping an eye out for him uh this openc phishing scan that i want to mention or really it's a data breach so i guess openc uses a platform called customer.io let's see if i have something here yeah they use customer.io to manage their their emails and their like newsletter i suppose and apparently there was an employee at customer.io that illegally downloaded a bunch of email addresses from openc's account and sold them or i don't know if we know if they sold them but shared them in some capacity with third-party providers so um this is like a big deal if that's true and that person should obviously be criminally prosecuted it sounds like the law

enforcement's been informed and there may be more to come out of this but obviously just a reminder to please please be careful uh with any emails you get i i have to say i have in the last months gotten all sorts of weird emails like i got one yesterday telling me that oh your your uh 2 000 deposit is incoming you can check the dashboard here like just things that you know if you're not paying attention might sound enticing or like i've gotten fake invoices like hey your your invoice or your your bill has been paid to review check here and it looks like i've just paid 400 for something and it's obviously fake so i've definitely seen an uptick in just like weird emails that i've been getting consenting this space which obviously is a little bit

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cards apple pay google pay for whenever you need some quick crypto whether you're stranded without gas or you just need that nft or you want to tinker with some new application metamask saves you time and gas cost by buying your favorite crypto asset straight from the mobile wallet so check it out at metamask dot io buy hyphen crypto all right one of our final stories tonight is about nine gag venturing into nfts so for folks who like me actually really were not very familiar with nine gag it it seems like it's sort of a reddit type site it's um it's a hong kong-based company that just allows for the proliferation of user generated

content you can you know shuffle on the website and memes pop up it's very meme based you can then upvote things down vote things leave comments again very uh reddit-esque in in many ways or i mean i think you could argue maybe even sort of for channy in some way very very internet culture based and about two weeks ago or three weeks ago now probably they made their initial foray into nfts with a project called you the mvp it was a play on the the popular meme when kevin durant gave his nft or when kev durant gave his mvp speech he said you the real mvp and that of course became like popular and pop in modern culture whatever and so they launched

this you the real mvp nft that seems like it is being viewed like sort of an alpha group style nft it's like the early community for for nine gag nft folks and it's now sitting at like a 23 east floor so again it feels like people are viewing this like an admit one or a proof collective or a metaverse hq that this is this really tight community there's only 420 of them huh 420 um that have access to this very exclusive group and then they've launched this 9gag has launched this sort of broader it seems like umbrella or that they're calling meme land which is their web 3 initiative and so you the real mvp here was the first drop within

this sort of meme land umbrella but they've also said that they're going to launch and a meme land nft that'll be like your more traditional ten thousand i think it's gonna be 999. pfps that will get you access to a marketplace and future meme land drops now i have to say it took me a while to kind of get to the bottom of what was going on here because it's a little bit confusing because seemingly in the in the very not too far future in the in the very uh near future they're launching a free mint nft called potatoes and so like right now you can go on to pre-mint for example and sign up for the raffle to get on the white list for potatoes potatoes is gonna just cost gas

and they haven't really said all that much as to what potatoes is about um but it's getting a bit of attention like i've seen a number of people tweeting about it seemingly excited about it what's confusing here is that potatoes now is coming before the memeland pfp project so it's potatoes by mean land and then but then meme land itself is going to be a 10k pfp project that is separate and that hasn't launched and so for a little while here i was just kind of getting myself in like circular motion trying to figure out what potatoes was versus what meme land was um and i i think where i've landed here is that meme land has been in the works for a little while as a concept and that

the nine gag team was planning on releasing it and then the bear market hit and now they don't really want to release it in the bear market they're worried about sort of selling out or making the kind of money that they wanted to make on it so they're jumping on the freeman bandwagon to get people into their ecosystem right in order to to get uh on the wait list or the white list for the potatoes drop you do have to follow meme land on twitter you have to join the mainland discord so it's drumming up attention to meme land so they'll have a bigger base from which to draw when they actually drop their meme land nft uh which i'm assuming they're using as more of like a big time fundraiser so i i actually don't hate this strategy i think it's actually probably kind of clever and so

if there's maybe something to be learned here which is if you are a project that was going to launch during the bear market uh that was going to launch then the bear market hit maybe it's worth taking a page from this book following what's currently in vogue which is to launch these these free mint nft projects that are kind of meany you know potatoes i don't know it sort of feels kind of silly it's p-o-t-a-t-o-z um so it feels like it's it's trying to capitalize on just like the kind of meme who gives a kind of energy that we're we're vibing on these days with like wrecked guys and everything um and and that way get more attention to meme land before they actually launch the meme land nft i don't know that's all that's all my speculation maybe there's some grander plan going on there but i'm

guessing that's what's going on the other thing that's notable about this project is they have a ton of high profile advisors and investors so nine gag ceo who's the founder of nine gag i mean he's the one behind this entire project but you have folks like you have gary vee you have coco bear from cyber kongs you have kevin rose you have brendan mulligan of pre-mint tim ferriss actually if you know the podcast or tim ferriss um and a number of others when i initially saw this i was like dubious i was like this seems like it's probably kind of and that all of these people that are being listeners as advisors and investors in in meme land this like 10k pfp project are more realistically probably advisors or

investors in nine gag and uh and the founder is sort of like pretending that they're you know sort of conflating who's an advisor investor in nine gag with who's an advisor investor in meme land i actually reached out to a couple of these folks that i know and they were like no no like i did give some advice i think it's fair to call me an advisor for memeland as well um so it seems like this is legit he actually has either you know have these people advise or invest in some capacity in meme land um but i do think it's it's people he's drawing from who have been like supporters of nine gag the website itself so in any case i think this is a worthwhile project for a couple reasons one like i said i think this is sort of an interesting strategy to if

you feel like you're not going to raise the money you want to raise during this bear market to do like a free mint project as a way to get more attention to your central project so i think there's some learnings there i also think you know there's a world where this could be an interesting project in the future you know not nine gag not dissimilar to reddit so obviously has a lot of similarities with just internet culture in general that tend to be into nfts and into crypto they have 200 million followers across social channels you know over over the course of the web in general so they have a huge audience that they can tap into now success in web 2 does not all translate into necessarily there being success in web 3 but my sense is that this guy the founder here ray 9gag ceo is is a

hustler and there could be something interesting here i don't know i mean i'm not i'm not buying it i'm not bending over backwards to get into the potatoes drop um but because i'm not seeing exactly what will make this special but i do think that uh that it is a little bit different than just your your totally standard uh kind of a project and with a team that has some sort of track record and is doxxed which i love to see our very last story is about stories and by that i mean um about how the press is covering crypto i'm sure y'all have been noticing this but i feel like everywhere i go i'm seeing like is crypto dead is blockchain dead and it reminds me what a bubble i'm in right because i'm like this is so

absurd like clearly it's not dead go to one of these conferences and you can see how much activity is happening in this ecosystem how much building is happening and what really drives me crazy is that all of these articles that that say this right that are like oh is crypto dead rarely seem to acknowledge that a this happened to the internet and so that there's precedent for super transformational technologies dropping by 95 plus percent right um and b they don't seem to acknowledge that those same internet those growth that grow stocks have done terribly over the last however many months they're not asking is netflix dead they're asking is netflix going to get acquired what's going on what's the future of netflix but nothing is netflix dead simply because it's dropped in value by some

70x percent or whatever from its peak in some ways crypto is fared better over you know the the uh pre-covered to post coveted period than than many equities have so i'm sure a number of you are seeing that i'm feeling frustrated by it i am as well a couple of bright spots in this to me have been actually a on a serious note freakonomics just released the freakonomics podcast which i'm a fan of released a three-part series on blockchain i thought they were really fair um i think they did a really good job both covering why skeptics are skeptical which i've been honest on this podcast i totally get it like i love warren buffett i understand why this is not warren buffett's game uh so he does a good job covering that while also i think doing a really valid job of

showing why people are bullish about it as well it's maybe a little bit more skeptical of krypton blockchain than i am but i think it was fair so shout out to freakonomics as being a bright spot in this generally kind of terrible coverage of crypto and blockchain during this period of time and then also i wanted to call your attention to this really funny story so uh there were a couple of news outlets gizmodo being one jezebel being another that reported this story of a board ape yacht club based dating app called uh lonely lonely ape i think that had allegedly been shut down during its beta phase because they didn't have enough women signing up and there were too many men there weren't enough women and so the lonely ape dating app site was uh was canceled yeah only dating

club so both gizmodo and jezebel reported on this and lo and behold it was a fake story this whole thing was a troll by the nft community i forget so apparently this was something that you labs themselves joked about they joked about like a lonely app dating club thing or something app many months ago but it didn't get a ton of attention and so somebody just like basically revived the joke and you had news organizations that actually reported on this um and covered it as if it was real and you know of course trolled the nft space for how male and what a sausage fest we are in yada yada ya and joke was on them this actually wasn't even a real story this was the nft community making fun of ourselves and i think this is the thing that i feel like also gets missed

when there's press coverage of this space which is there's a lack of acknowledgement that most of us or at least the circles i run in like we also get what are short like we're self-aware we get our shortcomings we're more critical than anybody about what a sausage fest this space is and when people are critical of nfts or like for example that that the line always goes up youtube video that made the rounds it was really popular a couple months ago it's like they seem to think we're not in on the joke and we're not in on the criticisms they talk about it like what a crazy scammy space this is as if we don't also realize it and aren't working hard to fix it and when you have the smartest minds you could argue in the world and a ton of money that's been thrown at this

industry like so many of these problems we are going to be able to fix so in the world of just me frustrated by media coverage these days it's really been not seeming to be aware that we ourselves are probably most aware of what the shortcomings of this space are and um and then it's also failing to acknowledge that there's precedent for these kinds of dips in the past and that frankly equities have fared just as poorly in many ways and we're not asking our tech equities dead so anyhow that's our show thank you so much for listening as always i'm always particularly grateful when you all listen to these solo episodes because it's just such a strange feeling to just talk into this mic oh sitting alone here in my uh in my office so anybody who

sticks with me through this i'm very grateful too and i will catch you next time [Music]