Also media, Welcome back to it could happen here, a podcast about things falling apart, And speaking of falling apart, when we're when we're talking about the crumbles, the slow and sometimes rapid erosion of institutions in this country, nothing is quite as relevant as the tech industry.
I'm Robert Evans. Obviously on the line with me is Garrison Davis. And we also have someone new with us today who's going to be talking talking tech, and particularly talking about the n f T crash and some of what that has to tell us about both how the tech industry functions now and about how kind of our economies of hype contribute to a state of what what what what? Ed Zitron, who is our guest here, tends to call the rot economy. Ed, welcome to the show.
Hi, thank you for having me.
Yeah, I'll just hand it over to you at this point.
So you may remember two years ago where kind of ghoulish half wit libertarians emphatically told you that NFT's non functibal tokens would change everything that people wanted to own a unique digital object, and indeed that the said uniqueness of said objects, say a picture of an ape or an animated gift of a sports moment would be worth millions.
The hypeia was insane. Justin Bieber paid one point three million dollars for a board ape, which is one of ten thousand procedurally generated pictures of a monkey, and celebrities like Milakounis and Lindsay Lohan would fund and create their own NFT projects. In fact, multiple celebrities raised millions of
dollars for these kind of noxious little creations. Their logic entirely hinged upon the idea that something being a one of a kind somehow made it valuable, and that a digital token connected to a picture of video is the same as say a rare baseball card or a comic book, or the sense that owning part of a digital entity like a game was somehow valuable. I personally do not think owning a sword from World of Warcraft a unique one means anything. I do not think that's meaningful in
any way. But listen, got a bit of advice for anyone listening. When any one tells you to ignore your eyes in your ears, it's the Duller voice in your head that says, huh, that sounds really goddamn stupid or to, of course, put a bunch of money into an unproven asset. You should always try and work out how they're going to get paid in the end. But nevertheless, it's important to know the fundamentals of this crap, this noxious industry. Now,
of course we're talking about cryptocurrencies. So these are tokens on a decentralized blockchain. In this case, a non fungible token or so it's an NFTY is a unique digital identifier on a blockchain like Ethereum or Polygon, one that kind of be copied, substituted, or divided like a regular token. Ownership in this case, who owns the NFT is based
on whoever owns the wallet. That said that the NFT in question is actually stored, and meaning that if someone tricks you into sending your board ape to somebody else, they technically own it. These NFTs of images, say the board Ape, yacht club, Pudgy Penguins, what have you, are connected to images. So by which I mean you are quite literally buying a jpeg, you are buying a tokenized jpeg.
These images are kept on something called the Interplanetary File System IPFS, and you have an IPFS address that attached to each token. What's important to know about this is this is another decentralized project where there's no real proof that your IPFS address isn't going to disappear in ten years.
So you could end up buying one of these tokens and be left with bugger or like I said, you're effectively by buying a very expensive JPEG that may or may not be an image of something in ten, fifteen, twenty years, or even five years.
So like I used to buy a whole bunch of digital games for my Nintendo Wii system, right, and these were not physical games, And now I cannot re download any of these things even though I bought them, because the digital system is just Nintendo is no longer supporting it isause it's kind of like a similar mechanism here in terms of there's like all this necessary internet infrastructure to like host these digital assets, but we don't actually
control it infrastructure, right, So it's different than holding like, you know, a disc or in the case of an NFT, like an actual physical picture of a monkey.
What's really funny is the example you just gave is one of the few examples of where NFTs could actually be useful.
Huh.
Digital games right now are in this position where, like you said, and you find this a lot with streaming products as well, where you can buy something, you buy a video game, you buy a movie, and you own it on Apple TV. Apple has complete power to pull that down. If indeed there was a non fungible token that contained the video in question, that might be quite useful. That might be really useful. In fact, unlike NFTs in general,
which are not useful at all. You are just buying a jpeg the leads to an image and owning this jpeg. This NFT might get you inside a discord, perhaps a special discord of like minded people who have spent a lot of money on something very silly.
Sounds like a party.
It's so good and it's it was really something. These things have been around since at least twenty fourteen. I think crypto Kitties was one of the original ones. You could breed horrible looking cats. These horrible cats have sex and create new horrible looking cats. Well you didn't get to see the sex. Don't worry, Okay, it's the only reason I invested.
Well, I let me google crypto kitty rule thirty four. I'm sure.
I'm sure that there is a crypto kitty hen type, but.
Now make sure to put Reddit in the in the search RaSE there. You gotta you're gonna get better results that way.
Will I get in trouble for sending these results in the group chat? Will people get mad?
I feel nothing anymore?
Yeah, honestly, there's not as much as I thought there would be. I'm kind of disappointed.
Well there's a vampire. Yeah. So the thing about this is the gold rush, this huge multi billion dollar NFT industry that kind of popped and dropped in the last couple of years, was something created by a kind of
perfect storm of post lockdown financial hystory. You saw it with like AMC and game stop stocks, you saw it with crypto in general, and it was the sense that you were getting in early on something and it kind of resembled in a funky way being babies baseball cards, but also with the kind of stench of the fine
art industry. But I also think that during the pandemic, and I'll get to a little more of this later, people really got this defined sense of how unfair everything is, how you can't just go to college anymore, you can't just work really hard and get a mortgage, you have to effectively find a way to cheat, and this seemed like a cheat they had got in on early. The problem is they didn't and I'll kind of get into
that later. But another part of it, the part that really stank to me, was that they were selling this ugly, obviously rotten dream that you were owning part of a future media property being at the Yeah, like you were going to be part of Disney or Marvel the board apes. When you bought a board ape, you allegedly got the rights to distribute it and build a show or merchandise.
And in fact, Seth Green bought an ape that he tried to build a TV show around Classic twenty twenty two idea building a TV show around NFT.
Oh you guys, did you guys see the show by the way.
We waked in the first few episodes.
No, no, no, that was a different NFT show.
Yeah, that was a different board ape show.
I can clarify here. There was a there was a show called The Red Ape Family that was about an adjacent property that Red Apes, but other NFTs. But then Seth Green was also trying to make a show that was like almost like a who framed Roger Rabbit where it's a mix of like cartoons and like real background sets. But it's just like about Seth Green, who is a monkey as a bartender, like it looked like dog shit.
What's kind funny is someone scammed him out of that ape so he had to pause. He had to pause production on his show This is the future of entertainment, folks, because he didn't have the intellect property rights anymore. And then he ended up having to pay one hundred grand to get it back and the show never I cannot find the show anywhere. But this is the thing putting
that aside. People genuinely thought they were buying like amazing Fantasy fifteen, first appearance of Spider Man stuff like that.
They thought that they were buying something that would give them access but also some degree of ownership over a future IP And frankly, I can understand how they were scammed because you had people like Alexis o'hanian, the founder of Reddit, who threw his VC firm seven seven six sunk fifty four million dollars into an NFT project called Doodles, claiming in January of this year, twenty twenty three that Diogles this year. This year. H In fact, now, to
be clear, the funding was last year twenty twenty two. Okay, okay, but he claimed this year. And to be clear, Doodles is a collection of an NFTs and an associated cart in that kind of looks like Adventure Time but significantly worse. Yeah, that makes sense. Alexis said that Doodles wanted to build the next generation of Disney and a whole world of IP that is giving people a state and a sense of ownership. Sure so, sure, buddy, yeah, exactly, Thank you, Alexis.
I one hunt. How does being rich feel? So to be clear, what Doodles was is still it was a collection of ten thousand NFTs of Doodles procedurally generated, like most of these, and it's worth taking a step back here. Why are so many of these projects ten thousand images? It's because there's absolutely no creativity, not even a little. They just is it's.
Like a is there like a false scarcity aspect which is trying to like inflate value? Is that like another reason for why they would have like these limited A matches, because I know the original board ape ones were like around around ten thousand as well at least initially.
Yes, there's always like a couple thousds ten thousand, but when you take a step back and really think about it, that's actually a huge amount. It isn't the scarce good It isn't It may be to the people who are pumping and dumping them, but ten thousand isn't creativity. There's what, like, it's maybe thirty different spider men, so that's not ten thousand of them, and none of these have a name,
none of these have a character. I will get to the two characters and Doodles, because there are just two.
The more that you talk about this and just kind of based on my paying attention to it, I kind of feel like part of what we're seeing is like
the intersection of two cultural myths, right. One of them is like the myth about how I mean it's not entirely myth, largely accurate about what happened with Apple when it went public, right, and all of these hundreds of like nerds who had just been like working class kids who become worth hundreds of millions of dollars overnight, right, which has become part of kind of like our our cultural memory of like how tech is supposed to work
ever since. And then the other is like Star Wars, right, and the way in which George Lucas revolutionized capitalizing on every silly idea you've ever had, Like a lot of NFT. A lot of the NFT hype is based on the belief that like you could be, you could you could buy into the next like Glurf, stream Bow or whatever fucking weird George Lucas character, and it could get a movie, you know, because yeah, it's all infinitely capitalizable.
Yeah, the kind of Buckshittos of the world. Yeah, yeah, I mean you're actually right as well, because I don't know if you remember when episode one Star Wars Episode one came out, they deliberately made the box to look like the old Return and the Jedi figures, which were now worth thousands.
A lot of money, a lot of money.
But there is that full scarcity aspect, and it is like that, except even worse because there's less value to it. Because when you buy a doodle, as you will, putting thousands of dollars into something called a doodle, one might wonder what exactly is the value of this, because doodles do not actually convey any intellectual property. Board apes kind of do the legalities muddy. You can merchandise your doodle for up to one hundred thousand dollars of physical goods,
so T shirts. You know why you would buy a doodle T shirt? I'm not really sure, but you could sell it. Just the theoreticals here are amazing. But Doodles, really, at it's call, was sold on the idea that it allowed you to steer the company to vote on the future of Doodles, which is kind of similar to Board Ape Yacht Club. You could get ape coin if you had NFTs of the Apes or the Immute Apes, and you could then vote in these votes about the future of the Board eight Yacht Club, but not Yuga Labs,
who owns the Board eight Yacht Club. So really you were just controlling a vague sense of nothing. In the case of Doodles, you could vote on what they may do in the future. It was never really obvious.
Was doodles A doos is a dow okay, okay.
And the funny thing to remember about almost all of these as well, is not in the case of Doodles, but in the case of like the bord Epe Yacht Club and the Ape Chain, I hate this crap, and Joyson Horowitz owns fourteen percent of all ape coin of their initial drop. They own multiple cryptoproducts, large chunks of these total tokens, and so they can control these votes if they need to. But what's also important to know is none of this stuff involves the actual goddamn company.
Nobody owns a thing. These decentralized autonomous organizations doos are always framed as this kind of democratic process, carefully leaving out the fact that a democratic system with transactable votes is by definition of goddamn kleptocracy. But on top of that, you don't own anything. You don't have anything with these companies. You don't get stock, you don't get anything. You just have one of ten thousand images that may in ten
years not actually go anywhere. It's farcical. The only thing dumber than that, however, is the fact that Doodles is no longer an NFT project and will no longer cater the speculators. According to a statement a much by the co founder Jordan Poopy Castro Poopy is oh.
Wow, see this is where I'm putting you know what, Garrison, I'm putting the whole company pension plane behind this guy, Poopy's got to be the one who mix those cars from now on.
You got to it's really got to suck as well. If you were like a speculative investor in Doodles already and you find out that your whole thing is what can be worthless because of a guy called Poopy, I think that that's that's just very special to me. Yea, yeah, continue,
I'll continue. So, just to be clear, less than the year before this, according to their investor, this company was positioned to continue to define the NFT industry and onboard millions to the blockchain and become one of the most inclusive, creative, joyful media brands in Web three and beyond. This is the same company that had now officially RUG called their
entire customer base. And by the way, if you'd have invested at the time that the fifty four million dollar funding round so towards the end of twenty twenty two, you would have lost money. You would not have gained money. There was no liquidity event that had given would give you anything. Also important to recognize with so other than Alexis o'hanian, the other investor in Doodles was FTX Ventures.
So in March of twenty twenty three, you kind of sat down with your morning coffee and you read the announcement from Jordan Poopy Castro and found out that your FTX back town ft project had lost about eighty five percent of its value and now the company was not backing you in any fucking way.
Yeah, but I mean FTX is putting out Super Bowl ads. They seem stable, they seem like, Alliam, that'd be fine.
What could happen? It'd be fine. But what's great about this is it is probably one of the largest rug pools I've ever seen. And nobody is in trouble. Nobody's mad at Alexishanium Doodles sold people on a dream. A stupid dream, but a dream, yes, yes, yes, very very goddamn stupid one that you'd been investing in, participating in the future of intellectual property and have some industry over
its future. You would theoretically, though obviously when you read this now it sounds dumb, and also when you read it at the time, it's you were meant to be buying into the next Disney, next Marvel. Yes, what was sold?
That is Another huge aspect is think there's like, I think a lot of people who are like, you know, grew up with like pop culture and want to take part in like the creation of like culture and media. But you know, Hollywood systems feels so foreign and unattainable. So this thing comes up and this looks like like a democratized way that you can like get in on some like new version of what the entertainment like landscape
will be. And you're like, oh, this is this is like my chance I can be one of ten thousand people to like contribute towards this next big, you know, cultural thing in ten twenty years. I mean, obviously that's like in retrospect, it's very clearly a scam for some people, like probably myself and many people listening. Initially this sounded like a scam, but it certainly was alluring for a good deal number of people. I mean, I'm this is kind of reminding me that there was this very similar
kind of dow big big failure around Dune. They were wanting to put out.
Oh yeah, they want wanted to buy, they wanted to buy the deck and the rights to Yodorowski's Dune, Yes yeah.
And and and put out media and put it like their own like animated series, which is funny because initially they just they weren't even gonna bother with like the intellectual property, which is really funny because you know, a big part of of this this NFT stuff is like you own the IP of each NFT character, right, And as they as this kind of project progressed, they slowly started to realize that what they've done was probably just
commit massive fraud, and they completely collapsed. Like this dune like NFT dow project was being was being boosted by a lot of like very mainstream publications. It was it was extremely hyped up, which can lead people to like assume this is like a legitimate like entertainment project that you could like participate in by buying this small little piece. Last year, very very clearly kind of fell apart. Yes, was kind of pre predestined.
And what's really sad about this is we can laugh at these people. I'll get to this in a bit, and we can laugh at these people. We should. It's very funny, but at the same time, a lot of people got screwed here because they trusted in people like Alexis Ohanian, founder of Unscathed. Despite the horrifying things that Reddit has done. Alex Ohenian insanely rich, married to a
tennis star. God bless him. Hope they're happy. But nevertheless, Alexis has managed to fairly easily escape all blame for the fact that he misled everyone with this and other things. But this in particular because the dream of doodles. God, that sucks to say out loud, by the way, the dream of doodles was that you were buying one of these ten thousand things, and that you'd be part of a community and you'd be able to steer the doodle's movement.
The doodles community is christ I know. The Doodles revolution I think is more more accurate.
And the doodle Easters, now that's not a term.
No, no, no, I like that. I like that doodle least as doodlers.
They're all the doodoos. Yeah, but you would be investing in the future VIP, you'd have part of this and you'd be you know what, put aside the money, put aside all the cash, because they're not doing speculation anymore. It's not about that. Let's just focus on the community, which is dying, which is completely dead. I would argue so fairly recently, Doodles had to remove the fifty quorum, which would require fifty percent of NFT holders to interact
with the project to push a vote through. They had to remove that in say why they had to remove it, and I guess because nobody gives a shit, because nobody cares, nobody gives a rap fuck about any of this, and then voted to appoint a founding Community Council to make decisions about where the doodle bank, oh my god, Jesus Christies would be would be spent in the few So the doodle bank was where some of the revenues went from the secondary sales of these NFTs, because the companies
always take a cart because let's seeking baby anyway. So if you were interested in the community aspect of Doodles, you're kind of shit out luck because they've now entirely deleted their Visions and Guidelines document, which is the part of the website that tells you how any of the community shit works. And they nothing is happening right now with them. There's nothing going on. This is the ninth most popular NFT project, and they have attempted to and
indeed succeeded in removing their association with NFTs. Now one
would think, okay, maybe they have a discord. Of course they did find it eighty five thousand members, oh wow, Except it felt more empty than my discord, which has six hundred people in it eighty seven hundred and sixty members as of when I opened it, and the newest stands section did not have a post in it since August thirtieth, which was announcing that the Doodle's Crops collaboration had sold out, terrible news to the least barkable people alive,
and their other official channels really hadn't been updated since mayor August. The General Hall channel, which is where everyone was talking, was mostly just bots and people's saying the words Dude's rule, that's dods rule. No real communication. It felt like several chat bots kind of what you know, how you see oblivion or Skyrim MPC's walk up to the other yea kind greetings to you. Imagine that with
NFT's eighty five thousand bloody people. I even tried to I'm not going to say antagonize them, but I did ask them, are you happy with your investment? No responses. I was like, how'd you feel about? No response, someone responded with Dude's rule once and it's insane because you won't believe this. The valuation of this company in their fifty four million dollar funding round was seven hundred million goddann dollars, and their chat room as the charm and
vibrance of a dying more. This is meant to be the next generation of Disney, and yet it has no fans. There are people who will shoot you to death for insulting Spider Man. There are people who will scream at you for not liking the latest Star Wars thing. These are superfans. Yeah, there are people who will do that with obscure video games you've never heard of. But for Doodles, this barly billion dollar enterprise, the future of Disney. Not
one of these people cared anything about this. All it was there's like, there are no superfans, no loyalists, no evangelists, nobody excited, no one even expressing an emotion, Just a bunch of freaks who got con saying GM every two minutes or hours. Actually, it was so strange because I've been in chatrooms since I was like eleven. I've seen varying levels of chatrooms in various games even the smallest community was kind of hopping. At some point, this then had no life. It was so strange.
It's just like a digital ghost town.
And the reality is what I said earlier, there's ten thousand of these goddamn things, these featureless, procedurally generated things. There's nothing to them. These NFT companies, these ones that allegedly want to replace Disney, they're incapable or unwilling to do anything approximating world building or law development. Lore Doodles, which is worth seven hundred million goddamn dollars, which got fifty four million dollars, has three characters that I can find.
There's hap Is cap Mellow, and there was another one which I could not find a name for. There is maybe ten minutes of footage in the years that this thing was meant to exist. It's just so bizarre. It's so utterly craven and half fast. It's people attack Disney and Marvel through Disney obviously and Star Wars that oh, they're just oh, they're pushing this crap out. They're just churning this shit out and saying people are buy anything.
In comparison, Disney are steadfast or teurs. They are creative agents like Liken to Salvador Dally, they are the compared to the NFT people, they're gods, because even Disney's least likable properties get more attention and have bigger fans than this. There are Disney adults who would like crying and falling on their knees when the lockdowns ended. Oh now these
people would care. Now, these people of Jordan. Poopy Castro died tomorrow, nobody would shed a tear or even remember, apparently, And it's just I think the way to look at this, and especially Doodles, is that there is just within the NFT world and actually within the tech industry, Writt Lafe just this deep, deep seated loathing for creativity, storytelling and the customer Pendleton Ward, who made the original Adventure Time don't know if you remember, which is very clearly where
Doodles is ripped off from. Just compel them. They look very similar. He made it over a decade ago. It's a five minute long video. He made it on his own, without funding, without anything, and it's beautiful and it's weird and it's great, and you're like, wow, I'm so glad this guy did this. Doodles, which has tens of millions of dollars sitting around, has put out seven goddamn minutes
of teasers and advertisements for brand collaborations. That's it. That's all something about Farrell, something about crops, something about allegedly Doodles having a cartoon. I don't goddamn know, but my theory is that none of this was ever about creating anything. This was an attempt to go back to what you were saying earlier, to recreate that sense that I just bought the Star Wars toy that will be worth three thousand dollars and ten years. That's all this was. It was.
I'm pretty sure they're well on their way because I'm looking at the Doodle site right now. You can buy a rug featuring my favorite Doodles character hap for one hundred dollars.
So are you serious that these not the focus is selling a rug?
Yes, yes, the crops are sold out. Unfortunately, I know, I know you were really wanted to get those. They're sold out. They were one hundred and twenty bucks. They're selling. They're selling little Vinyl toys for one hundred and eighty five dollars. They have a cat mush, they have a cat plush for forty bucks. They have a puzzle for twenty two dollars, and they finally have the before mentioned a rug.
So yeah, it's it's it's just wonderful.
It seems like a good investment. These things are selling out fast. You want to you gotta, you gotta get in. Your characters could be the next one. Yeah, But I.
Think that the ultimate thing is none of this was about creating anything, that really is it. It was creating just enough to sell securities to suckers, and now all of it is falling apart. The SEC just sued a group of celebrities for an NFT cat cartoon called Stoner Cats.
Yeah.
No, I was really excited about Stoneer Cat.
I was really pumped up for seeing Stoner Cats. But sadly the SEC changed the creator for unregistered offering of NFTs, which are securities, and they raised eight million dollars. It's just very sad, very funny by the way that the SEC now is to get in like garygansters to look at Stoner Cats and say, all right, let's let's take a look at this, or that's not good. How a test is going to have fun with this? But I think NFTs were and are probably one of the more
nihilistic parts of the industry. Yeah, because they did the bare minimum to convince people. They made up all of It's kind of like that episode of The Simpsons where they remake Flanders's house and it's just a facier and it effectively.
Falls bearing poster.
Yeah, yes, exactly, and it's just enough to make people believe this could be worth enough, because it's never really obvious what actually makes something worth something. In the collectible's market, there are established artists whom I personally own a bunch of original comic artwork, a lot of it by Arthur Adams, and that market is fairly small because there's only so much one man can do, and the value comes from
what people are willing to pay. But in that case, it's beautiful pencils and inks and it's gorgeously you want on your wall. In this case, it's I'm buying something that sounds like it might be valuable. There's not really a fundamental community that sounds fine, but when you push past even the first layer, it all falls apart. And that's because, in my opinion, the NFT hype was just a long conon customers in the media. It's a scam, a scam where companies built the appearance of value without
ever actually generating anything. There's nothing to old some vinyl figures. Who cares? Nobody's done. The board Ape Yacht Club has the world's shittiest cartoon. They did a flash game called Dookie Dash.
Yes I did, I did see Dookie Dash. What was great was Game of the Year twenty twenty two.
Game of the Year twenty twenty two. Immediately, by the way, scammed, just immediately someone broke it and they had to like, they were like, what how did this happen? But that's the thing, you go. Labs worth a couple billion dollars, Doodle's worth seven hundred million, nothing to them, not a single interesting idea in any of them, but they existed to con people into believing this completely thin view it.
And also the nihilistic part is he was talking about people collecting art and collecting creative things, but without actually ever seeing the value in the object. The objects creativity was only as valuable as it was sellable, but not even sellable to an enterprise. It was just like to another person who could continue the chain of shit.
I think there is a large untapped market for this though that Doodles is actually trying to exploit because I just found probably one of the most epseetic things I've discovered today, which is saying something because I've seen a lot of a lot of best stuff today. Today's a lot of workime footage is But there is a Doodle's immersive experience in Chicago for children. Oh No, children create their own Doodles and you can pay twenty eight dollars per person to spend an hour in this Doodles themed
art installation in Chicago. I'm looking at I'm looking at the availability.
There is yeahs book one for the team.
There is ten slots open each day. All the slots are open tomorrow, So I think we should get a flight like tonight.
Yeah, right now.
Asap.
Yeah, that's gonna sund I'm gonna send you this like because it's the most one of the more disturbing things i've I've I've found.
I don't want to go to the Doodles camp every It's twenty twenty eight dollars per kid for one hour of walking in this one Doodles themed room where first your kid creates a Doodle's character.
So you can enter doodle world. You go through a rainbow portal, you slide down rainbows, play in puffy clouds, and crash a spaceship and then you romp through a whimsical world until your hours up, and then you leave after spending twenty eight dollars per child.
It's like if a committee designed fucking meal wolf right, Yeah, yeah, it's it's a committee of people on thorazine.
But if you watch this video as well of this Doodle's world, here's the thing. You don't see anything of anything. There's nothing rabow. There's a picture of the guy who I've already forgotten the name of Hop.
I can't forgot Hop's name.
I can't believe I've forgot Hop.
But its one and eighty five dollars to get a figure you have to remember.
God damn it. And but that's that's the thing. This is just it's a masterpiece of emptiness. It is a meaningless thing. There is nothing to doodles.
No, it's it's it's vapid.
There's nothing to any of it. And NFT Investors was sold this dream of kind of an access to wealth or for both sides that like, oh the artist will make money because every NFT sale you get some royalties, some residuals, which theoretically is a cool thing that when an artist has a piece sort on someone else. I like that idea I always have, And in turn, by buying into this quote unquote art, you can generate your own wealth and you can be part of this positive
chain where everyone wins. But you're also early, so you get to feel smart. Except the problem is that you're more than likely left with a worthless piece of shit. You're left with nothing. So fundamentally there will be and I don't believe more than a couple thousand people made any money on NFTs. Now, the majority of the people who bought NFTs are going to be left in the red, and every new entrant is just another sucker to hopefully dump an investment onto. Because there are no NFTs that
have a fundamental value. There's not one. It's not notice that Disney, Marvel, none of these major things. Notice that none of them got involved. They didn't want to fucking touch us. DC did a vague idea of buying comic covers, but even then it was half us because why why would you do it? I've been saying this since twenty twenty one that these things had no value, that it was just an attempt to sell people this vague sense
of participation in a new economy. And in fact, there was a study that came out an analysis of seventy three, two D and fifty seven NFT collections. Ninety five percent of NFTs on the market are now totally worthless. The value of these collections is zero ethereum. Almost every single person encouraged to invest them by The New York Times, by CNBC is a victim of a massive legal fraud
peddled by Internet charlatans like Alexishanian. I'm not saying he's one of them, but there are people within the NFT industry who also wash trade these things, which means that they effectively sell them to themselves. And there's a there's actually increasingly impressive research that suggests that most NFT sales were just washtrading, just people pumping and pumping and pumping. That's why Justin Bieber's ape that he bought for one point three million dollars is worth about sixty grand. Now
he'll be fine, but other people won't. And that's what's really anger inducing. That's what fills my veins full of poison and if these were never worth anything, and the majority of the industry is made up of fake goddamn transactions and the people who will suffer on the majority, and the majority are not rich, The majority are not anything other than desperate people who were manipulated.
It's like with fucking the FTX collapse, which is funny in a lot of ways, but also one of the big bag holders wound up being like a teacher's pension fund. Like that was massive, and obviously I think that like an addition to go in after sam people regulators should be looking at who the fuck made the call to put people's pension money and fucking brain genius kids gambling in. But it is like there is like real harmed in
and that was like always the plan. Everyone who was involved in pushing this is was trying to, Like the whole game plan was create this critical mass of hype that broke people's ability to actually analyze what they were doing. That just kind of made them panic and throw money in because they felt like otherwise they were going to miss out on their chance to retire.
Right.
That was the whole thing, and that's why like the entire social media hype around this was all based on you're gonna stay poor forever if you don't get in on this right now, Like it's so disgusting and yeah, just evil, evil people.
And they were never a great investment. They were never in the future of IP. They're just a vehicle to extract capital from retail investors, from regular people who to your point, earlier, who didn't invest in Apple earlier or Google early, they didn't get the chance, they didn't buy the Star Wars toy. So this was their chance to get ahead. And if these are just an exploitative scam, they create just enough, it's a true scam as well. They create just enough to get people in the door,
and just enough to make that investment defensible. They and it honestly shared a lot of the language of the Joe Oldstein's and conspiracy theorists and tell other teller evangelists telling people to your point that oh, you're not gonna make it, Oh have fun staying poor. What a noxious fucking thing to say, What a disgusting thing to say
to someone. And what's funny is they use the other scam that some companies in the tech industry used FDx, for example, where they would raise rounds a venture capital which gave the appearance of a real enterprise where things were actually happening, and then they sold them this dream of, oh, you could own a piece of this, despite the fact that not a single god NFT actually granted stock options, voting rights, or anything else, because if they did that,
it would immediately become a security, so they'd never do that. You don't have consequential votes. You don't have any industry over this industry. You just have a thing that can be It may not be fungible, but the operating environment for it is absolutely fucking fungible. If Doodles was truly non fungible, they wouldn't be able to change the doodle's quorum. They would just have to sit there and do nothing.
But what's also important to realize, and as I've said before, but I'll say it a goddamn gain, is they really didn't try very hard. The board Ape Yacht Club, which is the biggest one the ten thousand horrifying looking apes owned by a company called Yuga Labs. They were valued at four billion dollars in twenty twenty two. Despite the fact that they said they were going to go Hollywood. They'd not actually created anything they did. They said they
were going to do a metaverse product. They sold NFTs of this metaverse thing that they've never shown, called Other Side I believe. Yeah, it crashed ethereum, but have not in the.
Video game where you travel through a toilet looking for poop, Dookie Dash. Yeah, this is the new Disney everyone, This is it.
This is the new Disney. It's the metaverse that will never get built. It's the cartoon about monkeys and toilets that actually advertised Dookie Dash. The rich deep low of the bored a Yacht Club, by the way, is that a monkey did a poo so bad that a key
came out to another dimension. But then the monkey somehow put that key in a bit that the monkey drank, and then the monkey did another poo where it put it into the sewer pipes, thus making it necessary for you to pilot another monkey to go and get the key. Very fucking stupid, very bad, ugly, like the designs suck.
That's the other thing. These aren't even good looking. And this is a company worth four billion dollars four billion dollars, and all they've done is not make a metaverse, but make a lot of money, make a terrible series looking of cartoons that may or may not go anywhere, and an Eblum's World clone that got scammed almost immediately. Someone found a way to exploit it immediately, because it's a flash game. These are not creative enterprises. These are not
entertainment companies. They're shell corporations for ill godden revenues for secondary market sales of ten thousand bullshit pictures that were hyped up by the media who could not analyze it properly. They just saw the large amounts of money that were being made, the crooked ways, by the way, the ones which were clearly pumped everyone covered them. World of Woman.
Do you remember that one World of Woman? The NFT That was my favorite one because there were so many guys in the crypto world who like, yeah, I bought a World of Woman, entity support Woman. I love it. No, it's so good, and it's because all of it's exploitative. NFTs are vehicles to exploit people, particularly Americans, who are desperate and fairly questioning their place in the world that is continually turned upon providing basic social services and the
ability for its citizens to thrive. There are a few honest ways for the average person to accumulate wealth anymore. It's nearly impossible to buy a house. Returns on the market suck. Market's already confusing. And yeah, all of that's quickly outplaced by the fact that you have student loans, health insurance, and inflation is making things more expensive than ever. And I would argue that that is really the root of what's so evil about crypto. Yeah, it's inherently exploitative.
It is inherently linked in all of these ways to religious dogma that you're buying into something that you're finally part of, something meaning for, something that will grow, something that will make you in a way that your predecessors might have been just through living normally. This industry it took root because most people can't thrive. Everyone has to hustle, everyone has to struggle. You can't do the things that people even twenty years ago could. You can't work a
normal job and buy a house anymore. You can't get a mortgage in many cases, you can't just go to college and probably pay those loans off in five years. God, no, that shit's going to follow you decades and nobody's helping you. And then along comes these along comes this very technological, cool sounding, non fungible token, this thing where oh, I could be part of this new art market. I can be the smart one for once. I could be ahead
of everyone. And the people on the other side of that transaction are telling you everything you want to hear. Then the next Disney, then the next Marvel. You're gonna be part of something. You're gonna make it. That's what you'll do if you buy into this. All of those crypto people are totally fine, all of them, the Winklevosses like Sohanian Mock Andresen, Chris Dixon, they're all doing great.
They are multi millionaires several times over. The people on the other side are victims, victims of what I would argue any just society would decide was a financial crime. And I think that every single venture capitalist who put money into these products and who pump them should be held accountable. They won't because that is the modern tech industry, because that is the modern government. There is no justice for the victims of NFTs. And it's really horrifying to watch.
Yeah, I know, sometimes it can be hard to be sympathetic for these folks because we imagine them being like, you know, freedra Reddit, you know, chriactures. But I think if you have the capacity to feel sympathetic to like former cult members, this is kind of the same thing. This is like, this is it's really the same process. And a big part of actually beating cults is the
ability to be sympathetic to former cult members. That it's actually like a crucial part of getting people to like get past this sort of thing.
Yeah, and that's going to include not just the innocent, but some people who did some pretty ugly things. And yeah, I think that's and that's hard critical.
Yeah, And I always try and push people to think of that because it is very easy to your point to look at the fedoras, to look at the wagon. Me guys, we're going to make it people and say these are the majority. I would argue most people, and I'll say this haven't been in too many telegrams of too many rug pulled projects just watching the vast majority of people are desperate. They just want their investment to turn.
They just want something because there really isn't much way out people that really isn't Most people get lucky, and that's how they live what used to be, what used to be just like the general purpose good life, two point four children, house, white picket fans just doesn't happen
for anyone anymore. And you're left with this. In a society where that happens, where there's so there are so few opportunities to thrive for people, you get things like this, you get these massive cons and I think that it will be hard for this to take root again. I don't think cryptos unscrewing people. I think that they will find a way to pump this in the future.
Yeah, which is why you should buy our new cool Zone coin, you know, for just the price of forty five dollars a coin you can ape in, and we're recommending right now just kind of transferring your whole four oh one k or into cool Zone coins, which which you can do by just sending it to our mailing address in the form of a check. Well, we'll get your coins to you.
Don't worry, no problem, I will personally take care of it well ed.
Thank you so much for putting this together. I think it's important to kind of look at this sort of stuff in retrospect, especially as the next con builds.
Up scheme.
You know, interest rates will drop eventually, and then there will be another attempt to fleece large numbers of people, possibly using Larry David, although he may have learned this lesson this time. Ed, do you want to give the people some notes on where they can find you if they want to read your stuff?
You can find letters your ed dot at as my newsletter, where's your red app? And you can find me on on Twitter or x the everything app or rate. My newstop business will be caught soon at ed Zitron. I'm also on blue Sky. You find me a zitron C I, t R O N.
Well check ed out in any of those places and check us out here. You already found us once, so presumably you will not forget how to find us the second time until next time. You know, don't invest money in unregistered securities.
It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It could happen here, updated monthly at coolzonemedia, dot com, slash sources, Thanks for listening.