Coach, the energy out there felt different. What changed for the team today?
It was the new game day scratches from the California Lottery players.
Everything. Those games sent the team's energy through the roof.
Are you saying it was the off field play that made the difference on the field.
Hey, little play makes your day, and today it made the game. That's all for now, coach, one more question.
Play the new Los Angeles Chargers, San Francisco forty nine ers and Los Angeles Rams scratchers from the California Lottery. A little play can make your day. Peace made responsibilit must be eighteen years or older to purchase late or claim well.
I mentioned I was buying the dot Eath domains pretty much like Go Daddy of Web three. I had manfucking coins and I said, well, what's the value of these coins? And you know, when you register your coins, there's like an official registry and then they peg a value. Value was seventeen dollars per I only spent three grand on the domains? Is it true that this shit has war seventeen thousand? I sold all the coins and I took
the cash out. When's the last time Go Daddy gave you anything for owning a dot com.
My graduates from my SKO being forced back drop b drop, Mike drop backdrop.
If y'all love E y L, I need you to make some noise please. I got my guy John Henry. Y'all know John.
Legend, buster Ship. If you're a true E y L you.
Know he was the first person on our platform to speak about n f T S for anybody else. That's a very little known secret, so only the diehard E y L fans know about that.
But we got a jam Pat Day for you, guys. Man.
We got these two legends right now, My brother Troy, he's coming on next with the one and only Master Investor.
He and Dounlap Wall Street Trapper we got.
We got the O g Be's gonna come a town, DJ Michael Watts. Of course my god Tolby Wigway Legend Legure themself.
So you know it's a vive man.
Shout out to Ally, shout out to our partners at United Masters. Every time we get together, we make magic happen. So just want to thank you guys for coming out. Were about to get it to it. Let's do it.
All right, So the moment you've all been waiting for.
This is a conversation that I'm excited to actually ask to host this panel because I felt like this is something that we don't get a chance to talk about a lot. We talk about stocks, a lot, real estate a lot, and I love I love both of those. But you know, I get into a whole different vibe when we talk about NFTs, crypto and Web three point zero and this is what we you know, we're in the future, So we're in the future now, so it's
important to educate ourselves and know what's going on. So John Henry really needs no introduction, but I'll give one. He actually is based in Austin now from New York, co founder of Harlem Capital, Legendary hallm Capital for Black Brothers. Yeah, give it a clap for that. That started the legendary venture capital firm. Then now what he's doing now is the CEO of Loop Loop Car Insurance. So Loop Car
Insurance has revolutionized the car insurance industry. And we got to thank him because he gave us our opportunity for our first angel investment, our first ever angel investment was into his career.
Yes, sir, I appreciate you. I appreciate you. For that. Sean Henry's a whiz kid.
Man knows everything when it comes to the you know, valuations and selling the company and all of this stuff. Man extremely extremely smart guy. And then Buster Shire, like I said, if you don't if you don't know, you should check his episode out, episode one thirty of EYL. Last April. We spoke and Buster he's a whiz kid for real. Twenty one years old. He's the founder of hoop Nation, which is an Instagram page has one million followers,
five million followers on TikTok. He is the voice of the Crew League on Revolt, and he's an avid NFT investor. He actually we talk about it, but he spoke save it. I'll save it for later. But he If you listen to his episode and actually did some of the things that he said, you made a lot of money. If you didn't, then shames on you. But first and foremost, thank you guys. I appreciate it absolutely, absolutely.
Yo.
First things first, every time I'm proud of this one, every time I've jumped on the EYL platform, I've first started by paying respect to the brothers at EYL, because it wasn't that long ago when someone got me hooked up with them episode forty five, and I pulled up to Troy's crib in like yonkers in their living room, and they was talking about doing really big things. And I don't know if y'all been keeping up, but they've
been doing some really big things. So I'm gonna need Jah to make some noise for Ernie Leisure because every generation we have a couple of superstars that emerge, and this is that time right now with these brothers.
So so agreed. Appreciate that, brother, So let's get into this. So Bust, I'm gonna start with you. Let's start with this NFT conversation. So if you listen to his episode when he came on in April, he talked about crypto punks, he talked about board Apes, he talked about open Sea, and that was early crypto punks.
How much was it at that time?
So the floor of crypto punks was about twenty thousand at the time, it's about two hundred thousand now and board Apes was had just minted and they minted at point zero eight eighth and now it's at about three hundred thousand dollars.
See, all you got to do is listen.
So let's let's back it up because I still feel like a lot of people don't fully understand what what NFTs are. So before we go into two and depth, can we just go up with some basic terms. When you when you talk about a floor, right, can you explain to them what a flow in an NFT project is.
Yeah, So a floor of an NFT project is essentially the cheapest that you can buy, said NFT FO. Usually projects have between five thousand and ten thousand total supply. The best ones will be the highest and the worst per se will be at what.
Is the floor? Which is the cheapest you can get one for? So minting, what is minting?
Minting is getting it when it first comes out, so you're the first person to own it, and you have to pay gas to actually receive it from wherever they put it out initially from and usually it's a it's blind, so you don't know which one you're going to get. So you're minting an NFT in a project. You know you're going to get one from the project, but you don't know which one you're going to get.
That is minting. Well, somebody says they pulled the rug, what was them?
So a rug is essentially when somebody launches a project, makes all these promises and then doesn't fulfill those promises. That is what's called getting rugged, which is when a founder just leaves the project entirely. Similar to where in like a traditional business standpoint, if somebody took a bunch of investment and then said, I don't really care about this company anymore.
So all right, now you got some basic terms.
Let me also paint a little context, because I feel like this NFT shit kind of came out of nowhere. I don't know if you guys agree, but I'm seeing Heineken and Budweiser and a lot of corporates now. I like to pay attention to big money because they don't do shit for the fun of it. They do it because there's money to be made. And it wasn't that
long ago that some of the first projects were emerging. Now, I had long since been following crypto and people was talking about yo by you know, bitcoin all other stuff, and people made a lot of money doing that. But I'm not a currency trader. I'm busy. I run a fifty five person company, you know, and we're trying to change it at financial services. But it's my job as a co SEO to pay attention to friends. And what happened was a collectible layer came emerged on top of
the cryptocurrencies. So now it's not just you trading coins, like trading dollars and pounds. It's like now people made stuff on top of it that you can collect, right. And so if a pop and ass artist, for example, makes a limited collection of a certain type of art, people can buy and sell those and it's really cool for artists, including musicians, because they get a perpetuity of the royalties. So like Boskio, for example, he only sold that art one time and only made money that one time.
But now we have a device that allows the artists to collect royalties and perpetuity. And so there's signal and then there's noise. Noises when you can't decipher the value, signals when there's value. So the noise is all the speculation. How these fucking apes were three hundred thousand, I have no clue, but paying attention to the signal, the signal is big corporates moving in the signal is NFTs potentially
having more utility beyond just trading apes. It might be the future of how leases are done, the way you buy all different types of things can be NFTs in the future. So I wanted to start this conversation first by contextualizing. I don't want you, guys, don't make the mistake of discarding this. We can't afford to do that
as a community. I'm gonna keep it a buck with y'all right now, because the bank consystem done left us out at the FAHA program in nineteen sixty five when it was the single greatest driver of personal wealth in this country. Okay, so we have a new revolution right now, as Rashad was saying, So don't make the mistake to discard this, discard the noise, and pay attention to the signal.
That's a fact, ladies and gentlemen, John Henry, waste no time. It's like a heavyweight fighter just came out swinging. So all right, so let me ask you guys this, both of you guys. You can chime in. What's the future of NFTs. Do you think we want to talk about utilities? And you can kind of explain utilities a little bit
more if you want. But a lot of projects are starting to, you know, go down in value, like any new emerging industry, like even with crypto a couple of years ago when a lot of coins went to zero. But I always say, like the dot Com era, most of those companies went to zero, Crypto, most of those coins went to zero.
But the Internet is still here.
Doesn't devalue the Internet, it doesn't devalue cryptocurrency. So what do you feel for the naysayers that says like this is just a one time thing and it's going to be going next year. And how do you feel about utility because that's where I see the value is in more of a utility of projects.
Yeah, utility is one hundred percent of value.
I think the projects that haven't panned out since you know, we first started talking about NFTs last April are the ones that don't have utility. And the ones that do
are those where they actually send you physical things. They give you tokens, they give you a lot of these projects give you digital land where there are these metaverses where they give each holder plots of those land, and people who hold conferences and share and talk and educate people, those are the ones that I've seen do the best. The future is in everything, right, Like you mentioned, royalties think about that for a traditional artist that has to
pay to rent Madison Square Garden. Let's say Drake's coming to New York, he plays at MSG, he pays the venue, then they sell some of the tickets. The arena gets a cut of that too. Now he so before he sold that front row ticket for ten thousand dollars and that was it. The resaler then sold it for twenty thousand. The resaler of the resaler sold it for forty thousand.
But now if that ticket is an NFT and it can't be converted without ten percent going to the original artist, now Drake's making you know, fifteen to twenty twenty five
thousand just from resales of those tickets. So think about that across the board for every sporting event, for every concert, For an event like this, even if there were if entry costs money and it was a limited amount of tickets and you had to pay to get in, and more people wanted to get in, then could fit everybody here would resell theirs, but at least a percentage of
that would go back to the original creator. So the way that money is going to be sent and brought back to the original creator of anything, whether it be a podcast or a concert or a sporting event is changed forever.
Let me double click on that. I think that's a great building block. I was upstairs early. I've seen a lot of rolexes and people pull up and whips and you know, it's an investment. It's an investment, right right, right. There's a reason people buy those things, right Like I got a couple too, We got a couple of nice toys. There's all things that we that will invest our discretionary income on. And it's really no different in this new era,
with this new type of currency. There's collections that are you know, rising and value and they're a lot more valuable than a rolex. And let me underpin a really critical fact of Web three, and that is your wallet is public. Yep, it's a publicly accessible wallet. I can go check out what you own and what you own
and what you own. And so with that dynamic, you know, it's it's playing off of human behavior in the sense that the same reason you buy the bends or the rolex, it's the same reason why you're going to buy into some of the collections and show them off. And if you look on VC Twitter right now, you're going to see a lot of profile pictures of different collections because they just want to show off what tribe they belong to, what they believe in, and so on. So that's one
aspect is the social behavior. The economics is important to underpin as well, especially now because you know it's south by Southwest. You know music portion Before you would have to go to a label to get funded and discovered, but web three democratizes access and it effectively becomes a
vehicle by which you can fund your own projects. Fuck you got to get the approval of a label for now when you can just go directly to your fans put out an NFT that allows you to monetize the direct relationship but you have with your community, and now you have the capital to make a bang and ask album, you know, do activations and go on tour. So don't ignore this as a mechanization of monetizing the relationship you have with your community directly.
Oh one other thing that I would add too.
You know, I remember at the beginning of twenty twenty one when we first started talking about NFTs and a lot of people that I would.
Send it to and be like, you should take a look at this. This is interesting.
I think this could be the future of traditional collectibles think sports cards, memorabilia, sign things, whatever it may be. And they're like, well, there's no intrinsic value. I'm like, well, there's no intrinsic value.
None of the other stuff either.
The difference between in raw material value between the greatest Michael Jordan Rookie card and this board ape is about one penny because of the cardboard that it was printed on, maybe less so when you start, when you push that aside, at least you're able to look at it as okay, a lot of these things are equally. There's no intrinsic value of something that was done by da Vinci per se. The material value is very minimal. It's what we as
a society put on that. And the great thing about you know, NFTs and digital things is, you know, like you mentioned, if somebody, if somebody owns a da Vinci and they keep it in their house high security.
You know, we don't we don't see it.
Whereas every wallet, my wallet, you know, everybody else's wallet is publicly available to see and see what those things are. So it really is a museum that travels with.
You in your pocket.
And Uh, once you sort of get over the intrinsic value home, which is that I saw early on from people that I was friends with IRL, it all starts to make a lot more sense.
So I wanted to say that too.
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Yeah there's no intrinsic value in almost anything. Really.
I mean the American dollar, what's the intrinsic value. There's just the faith that we have in it's back by the military. Goal you know has some uses, but most people don't use goal like that. They just hoard it. It's like, you know, that's why he said bitcoin is like digital goal. Housing has value, but even that it's subjective, Like a house in here could be the same exact house in the house in New York, but the house
in New York is worth ten times more. Like why because people think that New York real estate is worth more than Texas real estate. As soon as they start to think differently than everything changes. So I think that that's very important what you said. We have to get out of that because that is something that people say like, well, it has no value. Well, you know a lot of things have no value. So let me if you look at it like that, a lot of things do have a lot of value. So you both of you guys
not only talk about NFTs, but you own NFTs as well. Right, So what for people that's looking to invest in NFT projects, what are some things that they need to take into consideration when looking at this is a good project to invest in, this is a bad product to invest in.
On the note of tangible value.
You know what does have tangible value and it's not subject to fluctuating sentiment. Is income produce in real estate. Because the way that you value real estate is based off the cash flow. I'm gonna tell you guys, something's gonna blow your mind right now. I own a few multi family properties. They produce cash flow. I sold one of those buildings, I took the earnings, it's a five hundred thousand, and I put I went all in into NFTs. Here's why I pay attention to the startup markets. I
pay attention to the public markets. Right right now, there's a public market correction, so all the public companies are coming down to value. But even six months ago everything was at an all time high, and I'm trying to make sense of it. People are paying all time high values on multiples of revenue in the public markets. In the private market, it's even real estate. I'm getting some
cash flow, but not a whole lot. And so what I need us to understand as a community is that every once in a while, there's a generational shift and potentially the emergence of a new asset class. I want you guys to view this as an asset class, and when you're looking at it from the perspective of price arbitrage and pricing inefficiency, I believe that there's a lot of room for NFT floors and prices to go way up. So I said, all right, I bet if I lose this half a M, that's gonna hurt. But if Web
three plays out, it'll change my life. I get chills saying that shit. You guys, put a little bit of money and like, Ian is gonna smack me outside the head because he's you know, he's got like the long term investment principles.
But if you invest a little bit.
Of money on a prolonged basis in the market, bet you're gonna be up eight to fifteen percent if you find the opportunity that's generational. Like we didn't have a chance to invest in Amazon when Amazon was being founded in nineteen ninety five. You feel me like it's the
two three year window. It's the twelve to eighteen twenty four months where a lot of these projects are gonna be within reach and we have to make decisions as a community, Are we gonna buy public stocks that are that are blue chip and then they're gonna give you a three percent yield? But remember scare money, don't make no money. And plus I don't know about y'all, but
I grew up dead fucking broke. I come from a household that grew up below the poverty line both parents income combined it and may twenty four grand in Washington Heights.
What's good.
I ain't got nothing to lose. So if so, if that's where we're coming from, then what do we have to lose by hedging into something that opportunistically and macro economically has a lot of room to grow and we're getting the indications from the corporates. So that's how I approached my NFT investment journey. And I know we didn't get into like what we look for in a collection, but I wanted to contextualize this shit as.
An investment opportunity. So that's my take on it, one hundred percent. The upside, like you said, is infinite. Then I sort of look at it from a similar way as to where it's like investing in a startup, because if so far NFT projects have only made money from withinside the NFT projects, but there will come a point where they build businesses on the side of the NFTs and then put that revenue back into it. What's the
difference between Amazon and that There is none. They all make money outside of inside the core team and from a specific user base. Like that's the way that I see all of this playing out. Young and old, intelligent found from all around the world create a company.
It's the facade of that is art.
But then underneath that, when they get the funding, the good ones will create businesses on the sides of those. And it's entirely possible that one day we see a project that has ten thousand and has a ten.
Million dollar floor. Entirely possible.
Play let's play that a little further the other day. I'm seeing at any moment now you're seeing news news. I've seen that the board apes. You guys seen them. They got signed to a major label and they made a band out of the apes. When I saw that, if it clicked right away, I understand it's intellectual property development.
You're creating characters.
Imagine if Harry Potter when it came out was an NFT collection. Imagine if you bought into Harry Potter at the fucking start of it, right or Mickey Mouse.
Absolutely.
When I look for projects, I look for IP development opportunities. Do I fuck with the characters? Do I resonate with like just the way they come across? Can I see this being an audiobook? Do they have a robust community? I'll tell you right now, if E y L dropped the NFT project, who will buy hands up?
Soon reached?
Okay, by the way, fun moment fucking six seven eight months ago.
You know how there's a dot com right?
I try to buy like VM dot com many years back, and and that shit was was five hundred thousand.
I was like, bad, I can't. I can't.
And then when I noticed that that NFT projects they had to dot eth, I said, yo, this is the new dot com. Once you've seen something one time, it's it's up to you to seize the day the next time. So you know what I did. I went on to you could buy is ens domains dot com. I started buying up dot eth domains and good, I started buying my home. I started buying my shit first, Jean Henry dot E got it, and then I started buying my
homies next, and then I started buying my enemies. After that, I was like, caught you slipping, bitch, caught you slipping, bitch, caught you slipping, bitch.
I hit up shot. I was like, Yo, you guys got Eyl dot Eth.
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Nah Man, someone sliped it, but we was looking though. I was like, guess who owns that shit?
And guess what. I paid a rack for it.
But I'm gonna hook the homies up with it anyway, because that's love.
We still don't need that throw by the way, I got you, that's crazy.
Troy.
Troy was like we saw on YouTube. He was he was like, Yo, somebody damn somebody took it. It was like weeks. He didn't tell us until I spoke to him about south By Southwest.
He's like, oh, by the way, I own euyo. I'm like, well, or you want to plan on telling me?
I was secretly like just waiting to see how long motherfuckers took before they came to me.
So, wait, was your wallet addressed up public? Did you not have your NS on it?
I had it all my public good dress, and I was just waiting and I'm motherfucker is snoozing.
That would have been even more awkward if you were looking at who owned it that way.
Yeah, definitely, he definitely caught a slipping. But that's that's a good gym right there though, because that that is the new website. That is the new website for sure. First of all, shout out to Tamika Mallory and my son in the building. Thank you for your advocacy. Appreciate it absolutely. Let's talk about let's talk about eight coin.
That's interesting. You just told me about that. So you know, we talked about the board eight Yacht Club and now it's like a whole new vibe with them actually having a cryptocurrency which went live today right yep, this.
Morning on all major platforms. Eventually, Yeah, they're alive now, so just kind.
Of explain that, but even deeper than that, explain how that could be an evolution that could potentially change you know, how we look at these things.
Yeah, so again you're going to start seeing these projects do things that you know, whether they originally started as art or had plans of utility, eventually to expand they have to turn into a real business. And board Apes have done that time and time again. They actually acquired crypto Punks, so board apes parent company, Yuga Labs now owns the crypto punks as well. That was a very large deal that valued that companied over four billion dollars.
And you know, the next iteration for a lot of these companies as they create new projects is to create their own currency. So they launched ape coin, which launched this morning. I last time I checked, it was about seven dollars each and anybody that owned an ape before got an air drop that was between seventy thousand and two hundred thousand dollars just for having owned an ape. So without selling their ape, they were able to make a lot. And that that isn't necessarily the outside business
idea that we were talking about before. But what it will allow is for when they do their land releases, when they have parties, when they launch merch it'll only be payable in apecoin. So that's that's sort of another level of how these certain NFT projects are expanding, and they are, you know, an example of the ones that have done it the best, and you know, regulatory wise, it's very complicated, but if you're worth four billion dollars, it get gets a little bit less.
Let's go further on the coins.
So so you had mentioned a term air drop, and this is unique to.
The web three space.
But what it effectively allows you to do is if you publish said n FT. Let's say you're an artist, you publish you know, n FT collection five thousand, You got five thousand fans.
Cool.
Now you can because they own something that's linked to your collection, you can effectively transmit to them anything of your choosing. Okay, now people have gotten very creative with this. That's called the air drop. If you all all own an entity that I made, I can air drop to you something that you authenticate the fact that you own my NFT by connecting your wallet BET. Once that's registered, I transmit something of value to you Okay, cool.
How have people played that out? Well?
I mentioned I was buying the dot eat domains, so from the company, it's pretty much like go Daddy of web three. They launched a coin, their own coin called n s coin, and what they did was, Hey, anyone who bought an NS domain before X date, you get set amount of coins. And people knew that I was sniping domain. So my Twitter was blowing up, yo jays, you gotta check out how many coins do you get?
I went, I checked it out.
I had man fucking coins and I said, well, what's the value of these coins? And you know, when you register your coins, there's like an official registry and then they peg a value. And I had like four hundred coins and I think that the value was seventeen dollars per and I did the math. I was like, I only spent three grand on the domains. Is it true that this shit has worked seventeen thousand?
Yep?
And someone's like, yo, behold it because the value is going to go up. Like nah, I'm telling this shit right now. I sold all the coins and I took the cash out. But here's the bigger takeaway. When I tweeted that I was like, yoh, I can't believe I just made seventeen grand. Someone tweeted back and said, when's the last time go Daddy gave you anything for owning a dot com?
Again, I got the chills and I heard a few wows.
That is the difference between the way that the web three economy is evolving. It allows you to have an economy with your consumer base so that the support is not just them to you.
You can go back to them. And when you guys own eyl coin, it's coming.
You guys are gonna get air drops from Ian Dunlab. The mortgage got you know whomever, all the stars in the ecosystem, right, and so that is a very interesting opportunity for us as an insurance company, for example, because if we made loop coin, then we have a way to reward our community for being part of our you know, our mini economy, so to speak. And that's something that I wanted to illustrate for y'all as another example of a very unique dynamic that is worth unpacking now.
It's extremely important and it's high level conversation and shout out to I got him five hundred in the building and we was talking backstage and when Buster was telling us about that, we have a mutual friend that owns eight board eight and he called them and he was like, yeah, I made seventy thousand today, So you know you have these information obviously resources as well, but information can really change your life. Like, you know, think about making seventy
thousand dollars for no reason. Literally, he just owns one. What about the people that own ten own one hundred.
So there's somebody out there.
I saw it on Twitter today who owns one hundred apes and one hundred mutant apes and one hundred kennels which is the third iteration. He made sixty million today just on an air drop. So and he lives in Portugal so it's not taxed.
Yeah, it's one of these things, you know. Everybody always laughs like it's stupid, it's ape. It's all funny until it's not.
That's right.
And by the way, the next one is going to be meta mask. So meta mask, which is the wallet that everybody uses to buy and sell NFTs. If anybody in here has ever bought and sold an NFT with meta mask, you have an air drop coming.
But here's the thing, I don't give a fuck about the apes I care about your collections more than I care about the apes. Do you understand why I'm here? You get what I'm saying. I don't give a fuck about the apes. I also don't give a fuck about meta mask. I give a fuck about who's in this room right now and all the collections that I want to see emerge right now, and the w's that I want you guys to get right now.
One hundred percent. You see what I'm saying.
Yeah, extremely important, John, Let's talk about Luke. Since we are investors in Loop, Yes.
You are, Yes, we have. We have a Loop squad. We got like thirty DP to Loop. So Loop is a new age company. But you you're mixing AI with insurance, which insurance is not something that's sexy. But talk about Loop a little bit because it's interesting. You talked about how racist insurance is, absolutely and you talk about how you're changed in the face of insurance. You add an AI to insurance, and then once we saw a NAS invested, we had to invest.
Oh yeah, talk about talk about everything you got going on Loop. Yo.
By the way, life has a lot of full circle moments. Shaddy, I know you're a huge NAS fan. I grew up listening in a thousands and thousands of hours of NAS, and to have NAS invested in my company is a moment that I received humbly, and I got on one knee, as I still do often because it's nothing but gratitude in this journey.
Yeah.
So, look, I mentioned that we was collectively omitated from the FHA. I thought it was because the banks didn't want to lend to our community, but then I learned better banks to do whatever for their interests.
Okay, it was the insurance companies.
That dictated certain areas and said, hey, these areas are uninsurable. Of course we now know that as redlining, and so the reason that we weren't able to participate was not because of the banks, although they typically get the heat, is actually because of the insurance. And so insurance is the invisible culprit in financial services that underpins trillions of dollars of economic activity. You can barely go to the
bathroom without fucking insurance. You needed to buy a crib, you needed to buy an investment, you need to buy you need to buy a web. You needed for everything. And when we took a look at just how much inequality there is in the actual pricing. I'm talking about the guts of the guts of the guts of that system. A lot of the way that they price people is based on demographic factors, right because these models were built a long time ago, So they would say, do you
own your crib? All right, what's your credit score? What kind of job you work? And of course what they're low key doing is are you black? Or are you affluent? And to present a startling statistic today right now, all of this stuff is public because insurance is regulated at progressive.
For example, you could have a duy and two speeding tickets, I e. Fucking reckless, But if you live in an affluent, affluent neighborhood and well educated, you actually get a better rate than someone who lives in a low income area with a completely clean record. And I don't know about y'all, but that's not gonna fly anymore. And so we wanted to create a vertically integrated insurance company, as non sexy as it sounds when I have to say, yeah, I'm
selling car insurance. Yeah I'm selling car insurance, you goddamn right. And what we're doing is we have the technology now to price people based on how they drive.
But the big idea here is much more powerful.
Can we create a fair, honest, transparent insurance company that is made by the way, by a citizen of our same neighborhoods. And the way that that fuses his Web three is, you know y'all got projects.
I'm sure y'all. How many of y'all got a side hustle? Hands up? Okay, how many of y'all full time entrepreneurs? Hands up?
How many y'all thinking about becoming entrepreneur's hands up? How many of y'all just got invested in stocks and shit?
Hands up? So everyone here is trying to get their bag.
So the way that this fuses the Web two with the Web three thing is there's always a way. I wouldn't view it as like, Yo, that's the new and this is the present. I would look at ways that you can introduce elements of what's going on into what you're doing.
Much like how Kanye.
Teases out the new sounds and works into his presence sound sounds that are e merging.
Well, so too is commerce.
You can work in elements of the future into your present endeavor so that you can so that your fifteen minutes could be as long as jay Z's you have it bust.
Let's get into this metaverse conversation metaverse. What is going on in the metaverse? Right now, everybody's talking about it, people will still not really they don't know. On the fence, they like, you're going to turn us into a whole society of the matrix, like getting plugged into machines and all of that.
What's the metaverse all about?
So everybody sort of defines the metaverse as something different and right now it's sort of a buzzword and tech. It doesn't actually mean anything, and it has a different definition for everybody. But my definition of it is, you know, quite similar to Web three. So it's you know, creating new projects, communities, digital land.
The future, right the future.
Is sort of how I look at explaining what the
metaverse is. And the way that I see the future playing out is you know, artists getting their fair share, not needing permission from other people, and you know, being able, you know, and that the fact that anybody in here today can start something and you know, cultivate a strong community and build something that is greater than the best deal that the best whoever is high up in the world that you're trying to excel in can give you is is sort of where I see the future and
how I identify the metaverse, and then you know there you know, other explanations like the way that Mark Zuckerberg looks at it as is, you know, everything in our
life is going to be digital. So you're going to be taking meetings in VR, and you're going to be appearing in other cities as holograms, and you know the way that that the reason that that is good is that you don't have to be living in a specific city, so it sort of takes down barriers of where you live, where you're from, what your house looks like, all different things, and it creates much more equality if everybody's in a virtual meeting, whether it be as themselves or as like
a panda, because that's how it's really happening. Like my Instagram profile right now is an NFT. It's not me, and that is just another example of sure it's utility because it's like, oh, I like that NFT project, or there are other people that are in that, and then they feel a sort of synergy with me because we both own this thing. But what it really is is you know an example of how people in the future aren't just going to be expressing themselves as their physical form,
It's going to be as their avatar form. And that also fits in pretty well with what the metaverse is. But the metaverse to me, in short, is the future of tech and you know, everybody having a chance in a world where the companies all reward you for you know, supporting them, depending on how early you supported them. I think we're already in the metaverse, right. I agree with you.
We flew down a lot of our team, right. We spent all day in Zoom and when we got to meet in real life, it was like I already knew them.
We spend more time with each other now digitally as well on social platforms. And imagine if you're watching TV.
My barber gave in this idea.
She blew my mind somehow barbers are like always ahead of the curve.
He was like, yo, he was cutting me up.
He's like, yo, imagine you just watching TV and you know you're watching like Lebron play and right now, like you could just scan a q R crow whatever. It's like, Yo, watch this game from like floor side right now, but you got to pay ten bucks, would you do it?
Hell yeah, paying ten bucks? Boom, I'm in there.
And by the way, because of the way that the social platforms are set up, you might be scrolling on Instagram and that's gonna be the gateway to access the metaverse. So now you're scrolling through, you like that experience, you tap through? Boom, you're in there. And by the way, who do you want to be? When you're in there? You can pull up as a board a or as a eyl character or whatever NFT that you have, and now you're bringing person. You're personifying some of these NFTs
in this metascape. And that just sounds oh D futuristic. I get I get it, but it's actually practically and pretty tangibly not too far off from how we already experience the world. And I'm gonna be keeping an eye on how this thing, you know, plays out. But what I can say is that the currency, the thing that allows you to partake in the metaverse are gonna be NFT collections. So go out there, find you some great
NFT collections and view them as stock. If a stock takes off, you know, if you got one, share cool story. But if you know, if you have a healthy exposure and you got a portfolio of NFT projects, is going to afford you the ability to take place and to take to partake in all different types of projects of growth and so on.
It's a fact. So let me ask you this before we wrap.
John, We're gonna bring trap and Ian out next and they're gonna be talking about stocks. And I got a lot of money in the stock market. But I was talking to Humble and Humbles a financial advisa, very very sharp guy. He's Charlemagne's financial advisa, Easter Ray's financial advisa, Alonzo Ball gentlemen from Africa, and he was saying, like, you know, in the next five years, like the amount of money that's gonna be made in the private markets
is just gonna be astronomical. And once again, we're kind of getting left. When I say we, we as a community is getting left on the train because most of us don't even have the opportunity to invest in private companies. We don't have the knowledge to invest in private companies. But that's that's where you make your one hundred x thousand x is in not necessarily the public markets and the private markets.
You were an angel investor.
You had a VC firm and now you actually have a startup where you've raised money.
Can you talk about private markets a little bit? Yeah, yeah, we can spend some time there. I mean, look, all all the stocks that you guys buy in the public markets, they've already done made money for all the early investors,
they done got paid out. And in twenty eighteen, when we had the record wave about IPOs, shit, in twenty twenty, there's a new there's a new vehicle called a spack that effectively allows you to go public without any scrutiny from the banks, which, by the way, I think should be damn, you're illegal.
However, it unlocks a lot of liquidity.
And when the spacks you know, came out, a lot of private operators were like, damn, we've raised a lot of money in the private markets. At some point you get the biggest check that you're gonna get from the private markets, so then you go public.
And so in twenty twenty we.
Saw spack after spack, after IPO after IPO, and guess what eighty six percent of those profits went to but a handful of firms, and guess what those firms were.
But in a handful of zip codes.
Okay, so they was coming from Silicon Valley, and I'm in this game to democratize where those proceeds come go to when we I PO. But interestingly, you know who's left holding the bag are regular people because guess who buy these i pos pension funds. Okay, so like the unions and shit to represent teachers and the public school system and all these people that pull together their money from everyday people. They buy these overpriced as IPOs, and then they take a bath when the when the market
corrects them, and yet again it's another opportunity. It's another very stark example of how you know when your privileged you have access to investing these deals is you can't even get in these deals unless you're what's called an a credited investor. However, you know, I'm not even like the Web three guy, like that's not really my jam,
but it's coming to me right now, revelation. I really do feel like we should be looking at NFT projects as the democratization of even private rounds, because you know, I don't you don't need to have a million dollars in network to part to participate in these things, and these projects the best run ones. You should be looking for projects that are going to run like businesses produce revenue. And so in that same way, you guys have a chance right now to buy Twitter at a few dollars a share.
What's so crazy? Not to cut you off, but it's my brother nineteen Keys. We talk all the time, and we actually had that conversation where it's like, I feel like NFTs can become the new public offering, whereas like NAS recently didn't with his he had two songs that he put on royal and whoever owned it got royalties, has royalties in the song. So what's stopping a company from saying, okay, instead of going public in the private market, I'm gonna go public in public market.
Exactly and offer.
And now you can raise one hundred million dollars by offering your NFT. And now if you own an NFT, now you have equity in the company.
So there are two levels of public public offerings really an NFTs. The first is when the NFT comes out and the second is when the coin comes out. So for the apes, for example, there are tons of everyday people who's you know, we're in hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt who bought an ape and it made you know, miracles happen. That is that one hundred two hundred five hundred thousand x that before was you know, unreachable and literally inaccessible for everybody else.
So that exists today, it's out there.
The question is how do you find those and how do you identify people who are good business operators? And the thing that I personally look for is people who have a track record. That's the only way that I can say, Okay, this guy, he's he has a big company and he's done successful things, maybe even in collectibles before,
and that's how I personally identify them. And something that I like too as docks founders because from what I've found is that the majority of quote unquote rug pulls, people who start a project, take money and then leave it, are people who are anonymous, because that's something that's very popular in the NFT space. So I look for people who have something public facing to lose if they fail, because there's more on the line for them and they're less.
Likely to leave the project. Like eyl yep not.
What you said was extremely important and I think people kind of missed that a lot like that's really the only reason why we invested in Loop is because anything that John does, if I have an opportunity to get involved, I mean, it's kind of a no brainer. A he's like a real genius. But also he has a proven track record. So it's like I invested in the company. Not so much because I know the insurance game so much, but I know him, like you know what I mean.
So I believe in the CEO, I believe in the founder. No different than Apple, right, no different than Amazon, no different than Tesla. People are investing in Tesla because they really believe even Elon Musk's vision. So the same rules that apply to you know stocks, same rules apply to crypto,
same rules apply to NFTs. Look at the project, look at the people behind the project, look at their track record, and usually that's a decent indicator, at least a good indicator of you know, what to expect in the future.
And one other thing to listen to what they say their goals are. Do they want to launch you know tokens one day? Do they want to launch businesses on the side, or do they look at it as just art Because a lot of people look at it as just art and that will tell you today that Okay, there aren't going to be additional revenue streams coming from this, so pay close attention to what they're saying.
Their goals are south by Southwest Man, make some noise for John and Buster. Yes, yes, yes, yes, high level conversation.
My graduates from my school being forced back drop bag drop Mike, drop backdropp.
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