Is the NFT market bottom in?

Transcript

GM GM welcome to web3 Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet don't get caught in the hype cycle I'm Jaybird and I believe that nfts are going to change the world that's why I'm here carving a path for doers to confidently build and invest in web 3. now on today's show we are asking the question is the bottom of the nft market finally here is the pain over or is there more pain ahead and we have joining us Gavin Purcell from

overpriced jpegs one of the best podcasts and newsletters in the nft space to break down the state of the market we're going to talk about how look it's pretty bleak out there right now daily volumes active wallets sales are at an all-time low floors are hitting all-time lows although it appears that they've bounced back a little bit from all-time lows we got influencers leaving the space but there's some things giving us hope that we're going to talk about today we're going to talk about liquidity and how liquidity flow through the markets from Bitcoin to eth to altcoins into things like Pepe and mean coins and and how does that eventually flow to nfts where

does that fit we're going to talk about money flowing through markets outside of North America in Asia and many parts of the world there is money flowing through those areas and there's also a continued interest in nfts and in the future of this Tech not just in the investment financialization of nfts and then we're going to talk at the end we're going to zoom out and talk about not just n of T investing which there's lots of advice given from Gavin on how you should think about your nfts and investing but also we're going to talk about the future where does this go long term where do we see the opportunities now and then also

down the road and finally we're going to wrap up we're going to talk a little bit about Gavin's new podcast all about ai ai for humans is called great podcast Gavin just brings it well to knowledge because Gavin originally came from TV and media sort of pre-internet media he was one of the producers on Jimmy Fallon's Tonight Show where he was a big part of the rise of that show he was employee number two there and really took that show to the top and so he has seen how much media and culture has an impact on humanity and on Trends and there's such a tie-in with nfts there so he brings such a great perspective to Today's Show really excited for you guys

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so get your tickets today by using the link in the show notes and to the promo code web3 Academy 15 to secure your spot or if you become a pro member you can get an even bigger discount so GoPro today and we'll see you in Lisbon Portugal the 9th of June at the Epic web 3 conference if you haven't what's going on my man great to have you on the show finally I know this is exciting it's been a while Jay we've known each other now for a bit here and uh I'm excited I always love chatting about both nfts and overpriced jpegs they're one of the same in some ways right we'll see where we come out at the end of the show if they're nfts or if they're just all overpriced let's start at the top the most obvious question title of the show

do you think we're at the bottom of the nft market oh so okay there's a lot of things going on right now the nft market so why work at overpriced jpegs with Carly Riley and we write a pro newsletter every week which is our subscription-based product we just wrote a pretty long article about this I think one of the the signals that I've seen and I think this is going to sound like kind of counter-intuitive but when you see major players in the capitulate relation stage meaning that they either walk away or they get liquidated and they walk away honestly that's a good sign and it's something I will say this is a first person perspective my basic story in nfts is like January of 2021 is when I was first introduced to them and I got very kind of feverish about them early on and then I was in the middle of

that OE meta that hit in like Nifty Gateway all this stuff and there was a giant crash right like all that stuff went down and I was like well this is it I'm walking away right I'm walking away like this was a flash in the pan like tulips and all that stuff was there and I missed Apes cats cyber Kongs all the stuff that came in June in July came back in August and got into like lewd and Anonymous but like missed the really big moment right so I think that when you watch people in the space walking away or saying like I'm done within a teaser nfts are over that is a great sign for the people that are still here because I think in the past if you follow all through crypto history these are the moments where people if you stick through it the opportunity exists

so I think from a are the nfts at the bottom I'm not sure because we'll talk about doing the things that have happened last couple days but there's that and then you know the other thing that's so hard right now is there's so few people in this space that what happens is when something big in another world happens say Pepe or one of these meme coins runs all of the liquidity gets sucked out because there's just not enough people here again it goes back to my feeling is like if that sort of stuff is happening we're in such a small number of people that are actually buying and trading these things that we have to be close to the bottom right that's kind of what I feel like who knows right this is the hard part I think you know if you ask somebody the

same question six months ago which would or let's say nine months ago before Luna before FTX they would have said like last May there was the big moment at last May in nft is where the other side kind of took a bunch of eth out of the market right you know Goblin Town launched around that time and it was like this big comment and everybody's like oh it's Goblin Town I think most people just told you that was the bottom right that would end up at the bottom we've seen two other bottoms since then this is kind of sad to say but like it's almost when people have been beaten down so much that they're willing to walk away that's when the bottom actually happens and I do feel like we're there if that makes sense the other signal to me and we'll get into

the different signals that you look at and the inspiration for this show today came from an article that you and Carly wrote over at overpriced jpegs asking the question is the bottom in and I reached out to you I was like we got to get you on the show to talk about this Gavin because everybody's wondering this and there's a lot of fear and when there's a lot of fear yeah typically that is a bottom signal and so we'll get into that but we recorded a show last week where we talked about crypto and how the crypto bottom is in and we're actually the crypto bottoms sort of passed now we're in this early phases of a bull run fingers crossed fingers crossed yeah fingers crossed I mean that's why I say early phases yeah we'll

run because the early phases it's choppy it's up yeah it's down but it's not down only yeah anyways so and that's crypto then the question becomes okay so what about nfts and where do nfts fit and so we'll get into that I'm sort of jumping ahead but before we do you guys record a podcast every week you're writing articles every week how are you yourself feeling right now and what are you hearing from others that you're talking to yeah so I think that we have this conversation every week on the Friday show I've overpriced yeah I can't talk about The Vibes right and I think yeah Vibes check but I check and I think you know the Vibes for the people that are still here are okay I would not say they're good it's between zedica who comes on the show quite often talks

about like there's a lot of snippiness right now in the world yeah tease right there's a lot of people like angry at each other and being back and forth and I think if you cannot be in that place especially if you've been here for a while right I think there's different stages of people that have been here some people came in and they had The Big Ape run up and they had the cats and they've seen this thing and they had their big moment they're like oh well this is rough but maybe I've seen it big other people came in and it's only been down right like they maybe came in that's me yeah but if you would yeah if you came in like April of last year right like every single thing from that point on after the other side felt like you know you had things like Goblin Town

and wag die and stuff like that and you will have some things that hit but you didn't have this feeling of like it's all working right now so I think Vibe wise the people that are left believe in the promise of what these things are and I also think so that there's two parts of this the people who are left some of them believe in the promises that these things are the other group of people who are left are traitors that will never leave because there is always going to be now a market here right like the thing people forget about is like Petty stocks are still traded every single day and I'm not putting nfts and penny stocks together but once you establish a market for something and there's any liquidity it will get traded and well if there's a lot less liquidity it will be

a lot less opportunity and more people can get wrecked but it will still get traded so I think there are people who have learned how to trade nfts as a thing and those people are not going to go away and I think we'll talk about this later but as more people come back in I think that will come back in a much larger way as well so there's two from Pathways one is there's the people who really believe in the promise of what these could deliver from a utility standpoint and then there's the Traders the people that are left I think are starting to feel like okay about things I think there's still a question on timing like you know we talk about is the bottom in that there's things that are happening right now that I'm not 100 sure of like one of the things that's so

different now versus used to be is we're in a very unfamiliar economic environment right like we're in a very different way yes macros all over the place and and no one really knows right like there's this whole conversation of like are we in a recession already have I called in a recession when they call it a recession is that better for the economy on our side because then it means we've turned a corner all of that stuff wasn't the case in the original bull run the original Bull Run there's just a lot of people who had a lot of time in their hands and a lot of extra money because yeah they were feeling flush from a lot of these people are tech company people and the tech companies are also cutting people now too so there's a lot of that going on as well

yeah yeah no it's a great Point okay before we jump into the state of the market and what's going on I just want to take a moment to pause and get a bit of Gavin's story because I think you and I met a few months ago you've got a background in traditional TV media you've worked with some huge celebrities some huge stars and now you're like I gotta listen to every week talking nfts you know every project before you drove your background I need to know are you also active on crypto as well and trading there or is nfts where the most of your portfolio and most of your crypto Investments are well okay so I will say that I don't have that many talents but the one thing I've always been decent at is being able to like be

super curious and then like absorb a bunch of information really fast right and so one of the weird things that when I got into Discord which I'm pretty deep on it allowed me to like access to a lot of other information really fast and I try to suck some of that out I have like five or six discords that I kind of regularly visit and try to get information out of what I loved about nfts is when I I think I understand better about nfts is it's telling a story about what a project is about what they're trying to do whereas with crypto or even with no mobile companies they are telling a story as well but it's not as important in some ways it's much more math driven in some ways I think it's something I think about like investing in math and my background is I you know

a writer I come from the creative side there was something about nfts that appealed to me about this idea of like okay they're all small businesses but they're also built on community art and storytelling most of them and that's what I know right like that's my background so I feel like I've got a better take on that than I do on like what's the cap table or what's going to be the Returns on this x number company I can see those gestating story companies or see those gestating IPS and understand oh this team gets it or this is a really interesting play I understand why this is working somebody described it once as cryptos for babies basically I mean like it's like you know building blocks of crypto rather than it being like the giant architectural sets and that makes sense to me because I get

that aspect of it and then there's all these other things that kind of go along that I can kind of get into it was it's the culture side yes your culture yeah right like you've been a purveyor of culture for your whole career you've seen different Trends rise and fall you've worked at the bleeding edge of cultures so anyways give us the background on Gavin the highlights are born in Seattle Washington and I was like in high school during grunge I always think of that's an interesting time to grow up in Seattle which is fun right but then I taught English in Korea moved back to LA to kind of fall into the entertainment business wasn't really planning on it but like moved to California originally go to grad school for fiction writing and then ended up falling into the entertainment business kind of farted around doing PA jobs

doing other stuff and then landed a company that was kind of a place that I pursued but in 2002 a company got started in La called G4 TV which was a television channel but when they still launched television channels about video games and I grew up a massive video video Gamers still play a lot of games as much as I can like you know what nerdsner I like to say like I'm in my you know mid-40s and like I was a nerd before being a nerd was something people said out loud so like I grew up playing you know PC games Apple games Sega Genesis like all this the old school stuff and really kept with it all the way like never left it so being at G4 was pretty transformative for me because I was able to put my passion something I cared about my whole life into this

media business and so I kind of moved up pretty quickly there and then got kind of Lucky a couple years in that I was part of a team I was one of the co-creators of a show called attack of the show which kind of grew out of a former show called The screensavers and weirdly in this world The Two Hosts of it were Kevin Rose the proofs Kevin Rose and Kevin Pereira who is my friend and now co-host of the podcast I'm doing on AI but we started this show and what it became about was digital culture right so it became a show with games laid in but it was really the beginning stages of what was changing all of culture right the digital culture was changing like you saw viral videos starting to happen you saw social media starting it was really the web2o world right it was

web2o and we were doing the cultural kind of side of that along with comedy and all sorts of other weird Tech stuff super fun job really enjoyed it it got like to become kind of a cult hit like Kevin and Olivia Munn became the main host of it eventually that show got decently popular and then in 2008 I got a call and the call is from Jimmy Fallon's office and it was like hey Jimmy would like to meet with you about he's going to be hosting late night in the future and I was like oh that's cool I mean I kind of knew Jimmy at the time like they always talk about SNL that whenever you grew up your SNL cast is the cast when you were in high school right and so when I was in high school that was like Phil Hartman and John

Levitz and and all those guys Jimmy I kind of missed because I was in college at the time or and I was while Jimmy was kind of ascending but anyway I met with him I realized I would wanted to bring some ideas to that meeting because I was like okay I'll bring some ideas but I don't really want this job it was funny thing I don't even want this job because I really love to attack a show that time so I wrote up a bunch of stuff and it turned out that he and I got along really well Jimmy also was very nerdy was a C plus plus major in college like he was a programming major like yeah he was a computer programming major before he dropped out and we had a similar vision of what this could be and so like weirdly enough a week later I got a call

from Lord Michael's office they flew me out to LA to meet with Lauren and then three weeks later my wife and my two young kids we were living in Brooklyn like it was that fast right so I went from living in La my whole life got kind of upended and then I was there for eight years you know I saw the show kind of from the beginning the very beginning stages I was Employee like number two and I was a producer writer on it and I kind of raised with it and we launched The Tonight Show out of it and then this thing happened there so it was like and along the way in that way one of the things that I kind of added was my media background also my digital stuff came in and we did a lot of stuff you know Jimmy

became very big on Twitter we did a live interactive stuff on the show we brought games onto the show we brought technology onto the show all the stuff that I cared about I was able to bring that into the show itself and kind of help it kind of like level up to the next stage left there because I wanted to try something different went to a company called VOX media which is like you know Verge and all those companies ran video for them for a while as it crossed the whole company which was super interesting and then worked with Sarah Silverman on a show I ran a show for Sarah Silverman in La I left that job to go run that show in La which was super fun that was in the middle of all the political craziness of the Trump World and that was interesting and then

left that joke because Sarah show got canceled unfortunately it was a great show but didn't succeed in the way that we had hoped but got canceled and so I went on to what's called an overall deal with NBC I came back to The Tonight Show to run it for a year to kind of like Bridge them between different people like I wasn't planning on going back like forever and ever but I went back and ran it and during that time I was running it covet happened right so like it was this experience of like what's it like to do at The Tonight Show where Jimmy's at home with his kids and all that stuff and learning all that stuff sorry I cut to a year from that I did that for a year left in November of 2020 and was kind of like trying to figure

out what my next thing was right because I was like okay I'll do this for a year after I figure out my next thing is like I was thinking about maybe I'll go into like VC at some point I was thinking about I had a podcast I was doing that I really like just as an experiment and then you know I got hit with this bug Brian Brinkman my friend Brian Brickman who's a really big artist in the Ft space was our graphics artist at Fallon and he was like I had seen him talking about FC's I was like what are these things and he kind of explained them to me and then Jonathan Mann who's another guy who's the song a day man guy he was my intern at G4 and I asked him about it and he was like oh you could check out

this and he was the one who first set me up on open C and like sold me one of his Saga days like in January that year yeah it's funny that was like one of my first nfts was I bought Jonathan's song a day like in January second week of January like right after the Insurrection I remember it very well yeah then I like I said I kind of like farted around for a while didn't really fully commit kind of folded out up moved out and moved back to LA all sorts of Life stuff happened and then I got weirdly got sucked into the world of like [ __ ] coins during kind of defy summer which was okay okay mistake but I I got into it and then saw Loot and a couple other things and I knew Andy Milonakis you know Andy Milonakis the no

TV guy so Eddie milanakis was like a TV show host on MTV for a while he's a very funny comedian but he and I knew each other a little bit over Twitter and so I saw him start to talk about this stuff on his Twitter handle and I started talking about it too and like we dm'd about butt stuff and then Andy sent me one one day this was like in maybe early September he's like hey you should check out this project to minimize and I was like okay great I'll check out this project and I got into it and I was like this is really cool and I dove in and act like people are really cool with a lot of punk holders or people that were really smart and I started to kind of get the system of what was interesting about Community around FTS and then also

what was interesting about the trading side of nfts because these were very smart Trader people right and the thing about Anonymous which I always laugh about is talk about holding back bags right I bought these for I have two of them that I bought for like one for 0.25 ease and one for like I think 1.15 each and the big thing about Anonymous at the time was their on chain really cool all the art existed on chain you could re-roll them do all this really interesting Innovative stuff they ran up to like 15 eth really fast like three weeks and I always tell people like I thought I was a [ __ ] genius I thought it happened I was like this is my new job I'm gonna do this forever yeah like I could just make you know 25 000 on this in two rights what the hell why

wouldn't I do this so I ran up and then they ran back down as everything does in this phase and it got the bug inside me right and the buck yeah I will say this the bug is the last thing on my story is I'm always trying to figure out how much of the bug I think this is an important thing for everybody to listen to How much of the bug is actually what's interesting about this stuff which there is a lot versus the idea of the dopamine of gambling right because that isn't part of what this space is too and I think people have to remember remember that especially if you're starting to feel yourself get kind of either super feverish more Super down you don't want to allow that part of this space to kind of like penetrate your soul right and

that's something that I think you over time you get better at I was talking to a guy at a Discord and then my Discord the other day about how I miss Pepe I saw it run up I actually had some queued up I was gonna buy it I was like I don't know if I want to [ __ ] throw money away at a shitcoin again and it's now whenever I put it was probably worth like 200 youth right which is kind of crazy but I would have put it at the time which is insane I used to feel so terrible about that right like I used to feel this place where I was like oh my God can you imagine what that would have been like I could have done X Y and Z and now I've gone to a place where like you missed up you missed stuff right

like you have to have it more kind of like even killed thing or else you will get ground down internally and I think that's one of the biggest things I want to get across to people it's like if you're ever feeling like you're grounding yourself down internally it's not worth it it really isn't worth it this is gambling and it's hard you know what I mean it's fascinating a world it's awesome but like don't let your mental health get damaged because you're chasing something that may never come I want to do another show where we just talk about Jimmy Fallon and whatever oh yeah with hey like you know he's the best he's super cool I still friends with him and he's a great guy that's awesome yeah but I think you make a great point is and we're going to talk about this at the end of the episode but

I was going to tease it right now is I do think you know you and I have decided to put our careers into web3 and nfts being a big part of web3 because we believe that this is world changing technology yeah not because we believe that the nft market is going to make us millionaires there's this like interesting dichotomy where you kind of get stuck on oh am I here because I believe in the future of the tech or am I here because I'd try to make a bunch of money and I'm gambling and you can get very sucked into the gas inside because that's where all the emotions are yeah and especially at Lowe's like we are right now there's not as many new projects coming out there's not as much

talk about oh the life-changing Tech you look at the numbers and it's not daily active wallets is it showing an increase it's showing a decrease yeah I'm like all-time lows so yeah I think you make a really good point let's actually lead into that so what are you seeing as sort of the state of the market today and I mean it changes so fast so actually there might be some things like blood it happened just recently yeah versus a week ago when you guys wrote this article on yeah Pro I mean a couple things are interesting right now I think that one of the biggest things to feel okay about is that there's still money in the system and when I say that when I say the system I mean like the kind of crypto world is here and like the money

well you mentioned earlier is like we're seeing a little bit of Bounce at crypto right which is a good thing which means that like it's not only down in the crypto World The Funnel that we talked about briefly at the top has always been this kind of theory and it's not been proven per se but it's like okay Bitcoin goes and then they all switch ethereum is included in the alts they go and a little bit Bitcoin comes down then like there's a [ __ ] coin run and then there's kind of like a t run and nfc's always kind of end at the at the end of it the hardest thing about ift is always is and people say this is like eth go up nfts go down eth go down nfts go down eth goes flat nfts go up maybe right this is

like the world yeah that you're that you're lucky to be in the thing I think it's really important to know is that like again going back to Pepe you're looking at something that went from a zero market cap zero dollars to a now I think 500 million plus market cap in the course of three weeks right so the money exists like the money exists and in a lot of ways we have to be encouraged about the nft world and again this goes back to what you're saying about the separating from the people interested in the tech and the traders of this you have to be happy that a lot of that money ended up in people's hands who are exposed to nfts and understand what nfts are right because there's a world where if I'm somebody who was lucked out and put 0.25 into Pepe when it was like

whatever 250 000 market cap and suddenly I have 500 Ethan my hands am I going to put 400 of the wet that away and be like okay I explore my lesson sure but then I'm going to take a hundred of that and be like okay time to go back to the casino and try to put some down right like because that's part of what you do and try to build your gains so that's one thing that's encouraging is that the money is still in the system no one has left people have left I shouldn't say people haven't left because people have left but the money there is money in the system still I think the other thing that's interesting to look at is a couple projects that have become that have still come on very strong and I think you know we have azuki and meme land are

both really interesting and one of the things we pointed out in that article is that the Asian markets are much stronger than you would expect knowing where we are in the Western markets right I think it's in part because I don't know exactly what this is it mind you mean just to be clear do you mean Asian markets as a whole or do you mean Asian crypto or Asian nft markets I mean Asian crypto and ft market and I think this has to do part in part with like there's a little bit of more fear on our side about regulation and what that means especially after the FTX thing right but I think think in Asia at least in you know Hong Kong and Japan there's been signs that they're going to be a little more crypto positive and I think that you see projects that like this is the

hard thing to know exactly for sure but like you have beam land which is Ray Chan who's based in Hong Kong and you have azuki which is obviously a wet an American project but like has brought appeal in Asia because it's an anime project as well both of those projects are up over the last like 30 days versus like almost everything else is down right when you think about apes or you think of all the other larger projects but neemland is up like 40 across captains and potatoes and azuki is up I think like 25 right like they're both held so that's encouraging it's not like every single project is down now I will say this the tricky thing is we have so few people in the space right now that when all the money rushes into one thing and right now say it's Pepe and like two

weeks ago was nakamigos right nakamigos was the project it went from like again free and I think it peaked at like almost an eighth right like so there's 20 000 of them so that's a lot of people in one's project to get to it eat right what happens is If It Moves something else a lot of the time is those people all go out and then suddenly that project knock Amigos is up like 0.25 now right so it went on this big peak and run Captain zinazuki have held and gone up during that time so that shows you that there's some strength there right so I think that's an encouraging thing in the nft market we're entering this kind of like ShakeOut period where like you're seeing like who are the people that are serious about this what does it mean to be serious what does it mean to

try to create a longer term brand in the space and you know I think proof has obviously had some struggles lately especially you know after their last kind of like the I think they're on the right directory proof's on the right directory you think so okay I'm wearing my moon Bird shirt right now I have an Uber too and I I haven't heard either but I've lost a lot of money I would buy Birds yeah yeah so I mean here's the thing I thought they were on a great track and I think the bummer to me is they really didn't need the thing that just happened to them right like they didn't need the problem with the diamond thing I think that made a lot of people mad because it was like oh I can buy back into proof that this I'm not physically buy but I buy back into the

idea of what they're trying to do and I believe that pathway that Kevin has laid out and those guys have laid out is smart I believe that like focusing on art is a really good thing and I was more than happy to like get a free awesome nft of an artist from that drop I think the problem is when you screw something up that you've already had we've already been seen as somebody who has screwed things up in the past it kind of compounds and it looks worse right so that's bad but another project like this is Doodles who were really down bad right like and I think a lot of the general consensus around Doodles is like oh those guys they don't know what they're doing that said like Carly I know is very positive on Doodles and has kind of like turned me a little bit on them as well too they

are doing really interesting stuff they own an incredible Animation studio now which like that's a big move in this space right like when you have that sort of they their partnership with Pharrell is real and it's there and I think they're getting way better community so like there's projects that even look like they were kind of like dead no I don't mean dead they look like they were just gonna grind down to zero even those projects feel like they're starting to show Little Sprouts of Hope out of them right and I think this is a good sign I will still say My overall theory about nfts is especially when you're trying to trade them there's gonna be like five that will work over the long term into when I say long term I mean over years two years better than 10 or 20. there's going to be lots of

opportunities to find new things along the way right like it's really hard to kind of resurrect a bag from before like I think there's a project called freelanders you know three Landers yeah yeah I remember that's a great project great project super cute the art was great I don't ever see that coming back and I don't mean that in a bad way it's like you're just gonna have a really hard time with projects like that returning from kind of chaos and Purgatory that they were in because it takes so much more lift to get you out of that than it would be to launch something new right which is the trick you have in the space you kind of are getting into what I have found from direct experience of buying the top of nfts um is like you I'm not a math guy yeah I

was never excited about investing the only Investments that I've ever been excited about have been more private investments in like my friends businesses yeah things like that that felt more meaningful to me yeah now at the same time You could argue those are the worst possible Investments because those are rich very high risk so my feeling now is this is the analogy I like to use investing in nfts is like investing in a business at the start of the internet and you're picking one business yeah right or maybe you're investing in a few but you're picking what you think is going to be the next Shopify or you hope it's not

the next PetSmart or whatever yeah that's the thing PetSmart's the best example right like whereas investing in blockchains is the equivalent investing in the internet right right so it's becoming very hard for me to like logically spend money on nfts right when blockchains feel much more stable and long-term and I don't even know what use case is going to go on blockchain I need to know whether it's going to be D5 it doesn't matter I just need to know that there's going to be billions of people on chain and as long as you might have enough chains probably a few of them are going to go I think we all know the ones that are going to likely make it yeah so but at

the same time it's not fun to invest in blockchain it's like there's no there's no story really the story is no story I can't print it and put it on I can't use it my pfp you know there's no culture value there's no emotional attachment which is probably why I'm bad at investing because I'd make it emotional yeah it makes it difficult but at the same time like I won't lie I saw your knock Amigos article and I was like [ __ ] like Gavin's very exciting right I have to say like when I wrote that article I was I was like this feels like something and the funniest thing is and I you know I don't regret it because that's what I was thinking at the time the fact is they've gone down from when I wrote that articles like 0.65 down to 0.25 right

and you're just like well I guess it's just another project that people are just going to bail on when they don't get into it like that's the frustrating part right I think the fun time of nfts were like going back to three Landers like three lenders got to like over an eighth right and this is a small project from an artist and it felt like but there were like four Day projects over an eighth right then you know what I mean like there were so many but you had like mfers were already all these projects that were really crushing at the time and when you're in the middle of all that everybody feels like they can win it feels like oh there's an opportunity for all of us to kind of come up and now it feels like oh there's this one pathway where things are gonna

work and then if you don't get out in time you're kind of screwed and then slowly what happens is you chip away at your investment stack and then you look at yourself you're like well how did I just spend whatever 10 to eat over the course of a month and there's it's gone because like it's all this garbage you have in your thing so like that's where it can be really tricky and I think where when you think about investing in FTS it's okay right now to wait right I think don't walk away the one break I took those last like year and a half I missed uh did you dagaku right which did you daigaku I was in the mix of people who knew that thing it out went from like again zero to 12 and then it kicked off a bunch of other stuff there will

always be opportunities no kind of no matter what the market looks like so don't walk away but like also it's okay not to try to get into everything that's the other thing it's important to know it's like it's okay not it's okay to go for like a few days without trying to get a win because if the wins are fewer farther between you might be better served by kind of waiting for a second like one dumb like kind of investment note I took over the course of the last year which I a couple smart people friends of mine are investors is like don't mint anything right now like don't mint because like the minting value was always about if something's gonna run up super fast having a mint and then maybe getting a rare for minting is valuable what you should always do now is just

wait to see if the thing's gonna take off at all because 95 of projects when they mint out go down and then maybe they come back up if you're lucky but it used to be in the old days like if you didn't get in on something you were Suddenly at a like it went to two or five x before you had a chance to buy it in secondary but now it's like minting almost feels like just wait it's such great advice and because that connects to the sentiment of the market yes and this is what gets people trapped it's the famous Warren Buffett quote right yeah it's so tough to do that yeah that's what you got to do and you have to go against your own human nature for it yeah in some ways yeah completely against right whereas in the middle of a

bull run when everything's popping that's when fomo sets in and that's when you feel like you're missing out when everyone's saying that it's bad is when you actually should be sticking around and began and you mentioned like liquidity is good and from a macro if you listen to our podcast from last week from a macro perspective liquidity is actually very good because the Asian market started printing money like China was printing Japan put in some new program in the last like quarter uh the US is already printing money to save all these Banks and likely printing more so from like liquidity is good on a macro level and then as you said within crypto liquidity is good we're just seeing it move around yeah between between

different coins and obviously Pepe took off and then Harold Well Jack there was so many there and I was like what is going on so liquidity is good nfts are at the bottom of the funnel it clearly hasn't funneled down yet I definitely well that's not a proven theory that makes a ton of sense feels like yeah right yeah I've seen it happen before right like it's tangentially I've seen it happen before especially with new people I think because like you come into the space by grabbing some eth or grabbing some Bitcoin it's fun and it's exciting but then pretty quickly you're like it's not really that much and then all of a sudden you're like oh I could turn this Ethan to an nft like that funnel makes sense I think we're at the point of no more down only but then yesterday and things are happening right

now we're recording this about a week before we launched this so things might even happen and then who knows yeah exactly I think let's take a step back so I think we both believe the plan right now should be you know because we all need a plan you gotta take a breather right now yeah don't fomo into anything but don't leave either don't Rage Quit who is the influencer who just Rage Quit a couple weeks ago Big Brother yes right yeah okay so that's the plan right now but let's take a step back I think the reason a lot of us are here is because we just believe long term in the tech and this is this like so I'm curious I know you you said before we sit record you have a take on this of like and I'm trying to figure out my own take on this of so right now

I'm fairly confident and a lot of the stats a16 Zeds you can tell I'm uh Canadian a16 of course I didn't think it was weird that's why I've married some Canadian well your wife's Canadians exactly so their recent crypto report projects and most strong projection show we should be at a billion people on Chain by 2030. where are we at right now did they say like what is right now we're at about 300 million yeah okay all right oh yeah so here basically three active three two five x or whatever yeah so that is likely going to happen now where does this position Us in terms of you've got this Pro Trader market and blur is just going after it and maybe we talk a little bit about blend the new

product they just announced and then you've got everyone else and so what I'm wondering is when so many new people come into the space there's going to be another 700 million people that come into space how many of them are going to be Pro Traders how many they're going to be it's going to be everyone else all boats gonna rise with the tide and we'll all succeed there's two things about this one is I think that we will get there I think a16 said is right about this stuff going forward gaming is going to bring a lot of people on board I'm a big positive believer that gaming has got offer a lot of people I also believe we're just going to see people come back into nfts I think one of the biggest things we have to figure out I know there's a lot of people trying to figure

this out is how to better do wallets and how better to do security if I was ever in a situation where I could go into Bodega and use my touch to buy a coffee and when I went to go touch my thing if there was a chance that all of the money in my wallet could disappear because it was hacked I would have never ever ever use Touch to pay somewhere along the way there's got to be a fix on that we have to have better security and if that means better regulation I'm actually all for it like I said this before like in some ways regulation can be helpful in that way and we have to really be careful about how we kind of focus on it but like people have to feel that the money they own is not going to get stolen from them because they made a

they clicked on some bad link right like this is something that's really important assuming all this works that we get better wallets we get more people on we get to a billion people my take on this is going back to what I said about the penny Traders if you onboard that many more people into the space and I saw this I think very specifically when the Donald Trump NFD launcher was a good weird example about this no matter what there will be a small percentage of those people who will see a door to a casino they will open it and they'll be like what's this there's a chance for me to play this game as a game because that's what it is right and they'll see that so I believe on a Pro Trader level if you onboard that many more people you're going to bring a lot

more money and you're going to bring a lot more trading action is the best case scenario you know it's like I think the one thing I would say about is casino gambling like so is the stock markets these are people whose lives are built around the versions of gambling right hedge fund Traders are essentially gamblers at a very high level so as you onboard more people I think that Pro Trader group will grow but I hope and I think this is you and I are coming from the same place that there's also this world and I think it's probably going to happen at a much smaller price point I think you're going to have nfts that are from five to twenty five dollars that maybe go and maybe you're lucky it's almost like who those little toys called the they'll pop whatevers you know I

mean they really be a yeah they become Collectibles right when you think about like when you're a kid I used to collect comic books right and if I had a comic book that was worth like 25 bucks that was like a big deal right and I bought it for like 65 cents or something like that that's the kind of levels you'll see this kind of collectibility happen at for the masses but some of those people like so in the version of the Trump thing when Trump minted his nfcs It's the funniest things I did this dumb nft myself I created called old men with white beards which was this very like strange AI project I did because I wanted to try to do a project from start to finish by myself I saw one guy buy an old man with white beard and I went to

his wallet and all that he had and by the way I hope this isn't about like connecting me to the Trump that if he didn't thought but all he had in his wallet was the Trump NFC and like two other things that come out that day and I think what was interesting is this is clearly in my mind and this is kind of guessing at this but like this is a person who had never done nfts and tried it was like wow this is interesting I can go buy something else with this ethereum because or this money you know he might have bought it on his credit card but then he you could sell it for ethereum and then suddenly he's onboarded so I think my take on this is the onboarding is going to happen at that five to twenty five dollar level but what's gonna happen is some of those

people will see the thousand dollar plus level which is where a lot of the real action happens at and they'll get into that game and they'll see it and they'll either good at it and shoot up or they'll not and they'll fall off but the larger exposure to the entire Marketplace is going to bring more people into all sections of it but I think my gut is saying is that the majority of the growth is going to come at this lower level where people are going to play in a much cheaper space if that makes sense I think even just free nfts right like Starbucks who knows when that comes to being launched and yeah still like in like closed right now yeah yeah all the web through social lens all the free nfts that are constantly being

minted there nfts are a rapper for everything digital just to prove ownership and yeah prove you know authenticity and and and there's so much in that I think I really framed my thinking around Moon Birds because I bought my moon bird for 8.5 East so when East was like 30 000 at the time right maybe a little bit less than that but a Roundup so I make myself feel worse and I didn't know that they were gonna be a art collector's pfp at the time right and so that's the thing you got to know when you're investing in a project early on you're investing in a business do you understand the business plan and do you believe in the business plan and business has changed and they pivot and really I was investing in Kevin Rose I just believed in him but now I'm sitting

here looking at it and I agree with what you're saying there's going to be a small fraction of pro Traders and I know that somewhere in blur's deck for sure they are like look at Bloomberg and they're sitting there thinking there's Bloomberg this entire software and machine that manages All Pro Traders on all equities and stocks and yeah Commodities in the current markets that you can currently financializing you can trade well they're saying okay that needs to happen for nfts and I think there's going to be institutions investing in nfts and all of that I think the part that I get caught up on is the ones that I am invested like Moon Birds it's this question of do I believe that they can create a business from my

membership to that business is thirty thousand dollars right it's definitely possible like I look at I'm sure you're a part of communities where you have great value from that community and you're thinking oh yeah I'd pay a lot of money to be in this others would pay a lot of money to be in this and if there's scarcity which there is an nfts then you can create a lot of value well I would say I put it back to what some of you said before which I think is really interesting is and I don't mean this is nothing against members because again I'm a holder and I actually am a big believer in what they're trying to do in the 1998 did you buy the Amazon or did you buy the pets.com I'm not saying that moversuspense.com but like there were four or five companies that

survived that in a major way that still survive like eBay Amazon Yahoo like even Yahoo kind of fell off but like what we might have just seen is like the first stage and like it might be that there's burnout this goes back to I was saying before even about three Landers it's like it's going to be hard for companies to change their own narrative and to come back versus all the other new stuff that's going to be coming down the pipe right like this is where we're in a situation where lots of projects I'm sure right now are just stating like there's lots of big name projects that are just like chilling for a bit because the Market's so bad when we turned it back on you're gonna see all new things take off and you're gonna have these older projects

like birds or Doodles or or these things that are like two to five range that were in the 10 15 20 30 range 35 range you know are they ever gonna get back there I can't tell you that because I don't know like that's a slog like it's always harder to come back from a hole to dig yourself back up than it is to start from scratch which is where like you know zagabond who is in charge of azuki so we know his history right like he tried a couple other projects before and it came out and said it like part of the value of starting a project fresh as an an on but I'm not a believer in that by the way my big thing is when I came into this world I came in as an Anon because I wanted to try and see what it is but

like everybody along every step along the way has known me as funky doc right that's not like I'm ever trying to put on a different thing but like part of the value of starting a new thing even for people who like want to do something new who have a project that didn't work you have a much fresher start at there it is you have a fresher start and end team you have a fresher start at IP all the stuff you might have made mistakes on the issue is in the past for us now as holders of moon Birds if Kevin Rose were to say like I've screwed up with members I'm not saying he's gonna do a space I screwed up with moon Birds I gotta go do something else and start from scratch so many people have invested so much time and so many

like actual dollars in the thing that you would not be able to go do that very easily right like the risks are very high that you get kind of like one shot at a project of that size and if it doesn't work you're really just gonna be digging yourself out of that for a while so I think that's what I would say to you is like as a members holder as well I believe that Kevin is smart I believe that that team is well funded I believe that they have a long-term vision of stuff is it going to be hard to dig out of a place where they are coming a little bit out of a hole yes because there's going to be more and more projects coming down the pipe that will take attention that will take funding that will take all this stuff and that's

the trickiest thing just mentioning that you don't love Anon teams makes me think of knock Amigos because nakamigos is a non-team right yeah I've got to bring it up just because you've gone so deep on the project so tell us a little bit about okay so I will say this I don't mind Anonymous teams but the reason why I didn't mind it was the knock Amigos is because it felt like they were doing it right right like in this what I say let me explain what that means in my mind from somebody who's watched a lot of projects and I launched I had a project myself that I launched called Chief fighter in February of last year so like I know the process of launching a project and if you ever want to read something very long everybody's listening I wrote a 37 page article in

October of last year doxing myself which gave the my entire history in this space plus the sheet fighter history plus all this other stuff so I have a lot of thoughts in that but if you ever want to spend six hours reading something go read it now can you go interesting because okay my take is this first of all they came out of the box without it Promises at all right because I think there's two different ways you can approach nfts one is you can come out and say like okay we are an IP company we are growing for the future we are going to make this thing into something that you can't believe we've got movies we got cartoons we gotta do this thing that's one way you say we're a business nakamigos came out and they were like we're a nft we're art we're not

promising anything and like there's this kind of like cliche in the space now like you know no road map no promises but like then you're really relying on okay who's your original holders who's spying in what do you look like what is the community form around it and it's all organic or at least you know semi-organic because there's not good because there's some thought that maybe they had sartoshi the guy that was like the guy that started mfers or as part of like the kind of whether he was part of the team or not he was the one that kind of like was involved early on but so my feeling is the cool thing about watching that as somebody from afar who's looked at all these nft projects is it felt like what the original inspiration by crypto punks was and I'm not saying that nakamigos is

crypto punks or anything but they're both pixel projects they were very like not actively Shilling themselves right the project itself and it came from a group of people that clearly knew what they were doing but we're not out here promising the moon they were not saying to anybody we're gonna be Disney of 2025. so to me it was kind of a throwback to these old nfti ideals which is like okay you know pfp's identity is an important thing but that only comes from if you build a community around the thing that feels like significant and all that stuff out organic and then you know what the interesting thing is we talk to that is like it also organic and then momentum shifted and people just went to the next shiny thing right now that said the fact that holding a 0.25

floor at this point means there is a pretty significant holder base there yeah it's not gone to zero but maybe that's not enough anymore right and this is the interesting thing to think about is that like if you're going to do that as a kind of a project put it out there into the world great but as a buyer don't expect them to like go up forever first of all so you have to be aware if you love The Art and you want to rep it and you love the community that is the purest most awesome form of entities right I think you talked about the suj it's like I love the idea what an nft project coalesces and you see the whole timelines got people that are using their pfp and they're making memes like that's what this is about it's about fun and it's about that they were not

attempting to make a business and maybe that's the world we're in now where if you're not the chance of you holding on for a while is much more difficult versus before where it felt like there was more money in the space and you could kind of hold on to that so when you're thinking about them as an investment it's a little bit trickier way to look at it right like I even think like out of that article I wrote I was like I own one I own one not gonna go and I was considering buying more because like I believe that I wrote this stuff it's really interesting and then you know narratives shift and it just changed a little bit again it's not like it changed drastically but it changed enough where it made me start to think of like gosh maybe they're just the space for these

projects it's long-term things they just don't have the power in the way that they have maybe you know a year ago or a year and a half ago and maybe also there could only be one punks you know I mean I think that's the other thing there's like one project that can have that narrative and maybe it's just that yeah yeah that's a great Point keeping on top of this stuff is impossible for us I'm in it you're in it it's so hard to keep on top of but you guys do such a great job over at overpriced jpegs and I just want to give you a chance to talk about overpriced jpegs Pro the premium product that you've launched recently and I know that's where this article that we mentioned came from as well as the index that you guys are releasing now of the

top projects which I've really been enjoying reading yeah so overpriced Pro is a Weekly Newsletter that's a paid newsletter we have a free newsletter you could definitely sign up for as well which is 140 000 subscribers which gets you a couple newsletters a week the paid product gets you this other piece which is really deep research on specific things like we did a big long thing in ocracy goes this piece that Carly really focused on about the bottom and going in we have a full-time researcher that works with us on it so like it's something we do a lot of deep research on it then the nft had actually mentioned is monthly we have a group of people together we call the council the nft council who like we pull for what they think the biggest projects are in the space and we always think about them

as a are they trying to be a business first so these are not lagging punks this is more like you got Doodles azuki me land all the big projects that we kind of rank them based on how our Council thinks they are sitting in the space so we're getting all them to ask and so we get a really interesting cross-section of how things move and what they go up and down like an interesting example is like we've done two of these now the first one Digi daigaku was like number six and people like well this is an interesting project they got they had this Super Bowl ad but it was just after the Super Bowl ad the next month it had fallen off the top ten and it's like that happens and you can watch How Stuff trades so for us the opga pro newsletter is always about like

delivering deep information about the space to people that really care about it the other the thing we're folding into right now is some access when I say access I mean access to our knowledge base so this week actually this will probably air after it comes out but we're going to do our first like AMA with our Pro subscribers so basically we're going to have Carly and myself be on an AMA with them and hear from them not only about the pro subscription and questions about it but really about the market and like having a direct access to what it means like to be part of it and following the stuff as clearly so I think that's part of where this kind of pro stuff is leaning as well too and I say not just us I think everybody it's like it's a combination of like

information that's deep in thought through access to like the people whose brains are continually thinking about it and then ultimately I think it's also about like trying to open up people's minds so they feel like they have an understanding about the overall picture rather than just like the day-to-day kind of nitty-gritty does that make sense yeah yeah yeah yeah totally yeah and great value and all of that content I mean it's so hard to keep on top of this stuff and you need to have expert that guide you and lead you and those that you trust which unfortunately it's been tough to find people you trust in this space well that's a reputation right it's reputation you got to earn it and if you lose it you're in trouble totally totally I want to also bring up your new podcast that you just launched

recently yeah tell us about anybody for humans is what it's called yeah so AI for humans is a podcast with my friend and I Kevin Pereira who's from biology four days the United States buddies and we're both just super fascinated with what's going on with generative AI we actually launched a thing so the quick story is last November you know we're really getting into this space and we went to an event in New York at Union Square Ventures called promptopia which was like the early days of like this kind of gen AI world and it was like yeah oh yeah exactly it's like stable diffusion creators were there to tell the people we were like this is amazing so we launched it came out of that threw together a startup called prompto.com which was like this really weird kind of game that we use stable diffusion to

kind of create a game show sort of thing you can I think it's still alive you can go to promptogame.com out of that everything was moving so fast right like there was all these startups people were getting funded blah blah what are we gonna do and we kind of like both were busy on other things and then eventually we said like well what are we what is our background our background is Media right we make media we've been I've been making TV shows and digital media for 20 plus years Kevin has hosted television shows for the last 15 plus years we were like let's just do a podcast about it so we started doing a podcast and what it's been really fun is and you'll appreciate this is like we are not the Bloomberg of podcast like we are trying to have fun with this stuff we come from a comedy

background we come from a place where we are creatives and we're trying to see like okay well how do you a explain what's going on in this world to normal people because so many people hear this idea and they see like the Instagram guys like you can make thousand dollars a week with chat GPT like that's not the good knowledge the good knowledge is saying okay here's what's real here's what's happening and here's what that means in human terms and here's what it means to like understand AI right now but then also like here's the fun things you can go do with it like we always have a thing on our show where it's like what dumb thing did you do with AI this week and like I spent like three plus hours trying to figure out how to make an NFL draft that was from other planets

and Aliens were involved so I went through chapter I had it write like a script for me because that's the amazing thing is like I'm not a programmer but you can have it write computer scripts and I had to write a script that it held the draft and I used you know generated all these names all this stuff and like that's all doable now and you just have to understand how to talk to people and talk to things and make sure they get a sense of it so we're really excited about it we feel like this is our fourth show is coming up this week and like every week we find weird crazy stuff to do and obviously you know the amount of media that's happening around this space is Bonkers right now but we're trying to make something that's fun able to watch for anybody and also like you hopefully

you'll take away a few information pieces from it too I love it we need more simple yeah AI access like yeah because I think like you said we love it and we're excited we can talk about all day but the majority 90 of the population is like what yeah exactly I don't understand right so yeah it's uh and also it's scary right like there's a story about like IBM's laying off 30 of its employees you know what I mean and they're saying it's directly due to Ai and it's like oh man that's [ __ ] I know it's a big thing right it's like crazy stuff but like so that's what you know you try to like make it aware my biggest goal with it is always like any transition in this space and Jay you know this because you've done this as well but like there are opportunities

everywhere along the way in emerging media and emerging Tech as it changes but you just have to change fast enough that you can see it my big advice to everybody is always stay aware of what's Happening try things do things because you don't want to be the person that's a year two years down the road like the fact that you're listing this right now whoever you are you're smart you're aware you know that this is a bang great keep on it don't stop it but also like keep looking at what's coming next because that's how you keep yourself as a human adjustable and ready for whatever's coming after this yeah fantastic advice if you're here like you know something the rest of the world doesn't know we're so so early yeah such an important reminder and there's going

to be dips along the way that's any new tech has massive cycles and we're in the down of the cycle now but it will come back okay I want to wrap with a speed round would I just ask a couple fun questions sure because we like to have fun here at web3 Academy too first question what's an nft you'll never sell Anonymous I have my Anonymous and it's something where I have two of them the two that I bought originally and I bought one more I just feel like it's part of it was my original pfp until I made my old men project and now that's my theme but like anonymized is something I'll just hold on until if it goes to zero it's uh the community has changed a lot over time but it's still my the home base for what I believe everything I learned about ft so it'll

be enough okay cool something you've purchased recently for under 100 that brings you Joy yeah I'm really bad about this because I will not think enough about it I also tend to buy things a lot oh you know what I bought a new iPhone cord because I have two daughters that always steal my iPhone cord so like knowing where an iPhone cord is at any given time that's brought a lot of Joy because I like I always have been searching for it forever oh one other thing the stumbler sort of my wife did this but not me we have two big dogs and they love to get the door my office is like not very far away from the front door and I would go crazy because three or four times a day my younger dog is still a giant 90 pound like mixed but

Bart and my wife bought a foldable gate to just stop them from going up to the window and that's changed my life so that's awesome that's amazing yeah okay last question and no pressure on this one if you had a billboard that one billion people were going to see what would you write on it I think mine would be is like stay curious because I really truly believe that is the heart of it's funny because I think sometimes I'm a little in my head but that is what drives me as a person is staying curious and asking questions about things I'm interested in I believe that that gives me motivation to live and I think that if you stay curious and you learn about things you care about that gives meaning to life and I know

that like this I'm not trying to downplay like of relationships I have an incredible family all that stuff but the thing that drives me on a day-to-day basis is curiosity and what's happening and what's interesting that I can kind of turn myself on with so like stay curious was always going to be my answer to that I love it I love it spoken like a true nerd exactly five new things Gavin this has been a pleasure thanks so much for the time and sharing your knowledge and for giving us all a deep breath in this chaotic space that sometimes we lose ourselves in it's a good reminder that we're all gonna make it I think we're all gonna make it but stop using that phrase it needs to be over yeah we gotta be aware of that like okay

let's get a new phrase let's let's call her let's jump up with a different phrase besides we're all gonna make it at some point but yes I agree thank you so much Jay it's been awesome to be here thanks so much for listening in everybody have a great week thank you for listening to web3 Academy we hope this helps you along your web 3 Journey if it does please share this episode And subscribe so you don't miss the next one nothing in this podcast was Financial advice crypto and web 3 can be risky you can literally lose it all in fact if you invest on account of what we say you probably will lose it all so don't do that in all honesty the point of this podcast is to remove the noise of markets and price and focus on utility and occasion anyway so you should not

take any of this as Financial advice thank you friends and see you in the next one