CLASSIC: What the Heck is an NFT?

In tonight's Classic episode: a new player has entered the strange, often confusing world of Bitcoin -- the non-fungible token, or NFT. This digital token, which can be virtually anything, is technically unique. It's a one-of-a-kind thing existing in an entirely intangible state. Numerous artists, musicians and celebrities have sold NFTs for thousands of dollars, but critics allege this may be anything from a fad to an outright avenue for criminal enterprise. So what exactly is the Stuff They Don't Want You To Know about NFTs? Is this a digital revolution, or another case of The Emperor's New Clothes?

They don't want you to read our book.: https://static.macmillan.com/static/fib/stuff-you-should-read/

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Fellow conspiracy realists, you might remember a funny thing that
happened to civilization not too long ago. The idea of
putting value into something intangible– that's a story as old
as time. That's fiat currency– But what about a non
fungible token? Remember when everybody went nuts about that? We

(00:24):
even briefly behind the scenes, we even had some folks
in our crew who wanted to do entire shows about it.

Speaker 2 (00:31):
Well, we also had leadership within our organization wanting to
figure out how to, you know. rope this whole craze
into podcasting in some way, shape, or form. The idea
of like, what if we sold the first episode of
all of our favorite podcasts as NFTs? We know that
was certainly done, as was discussed in our recent YouTube episode.

(00:53):
The first ever YouTube video was sold as a non-fungible token.

Speaker 3 (00:57):
Well, yeah, it's hype, guys. You got to sell the
hype first and then come up with the actual idea afterwards, right?
That's one of the things we've learned. Do you guys
remember We're sitting in Austin, Texas, at a fancy schmancy hotel.
We're in a back area. There are some campfires around,
and there's people on stage having serious discussions about what

(01:21):
NFTs are and how they're going to revolutionize.

Speaker 2 (01:25):
Money. And they monorail.

Speaker 3 (01:27):
That's what it was.

Speaker 2 (01:28):
It was a monorail speech. They busted.

Speaker 1 (01:30):
Busted hard. Well, it's tough. Some people did very well.
in the NFT bubble, but that bubble eventually, you know
what I mean? And when we guys, when we recorded
this back in 2021, we wanted to start at a
very approachable level. That's why the title of this classic

(01:53):
episode is what the heck is an NFT? And I
can't wait to see how it ages because we said,
is this a digital revolution or another case of the
emperor's new clothes?

Speaker 4 (02:07):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know.

Speaker 1 (02:19):
A production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 3 (02:31):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt.

Speaker 2 (02:34):
My name is Noel.

Speaker 1 (02:35):
They call me Ben. We are joined, as always, with
our super producer, Paul Mission Control Deccant. Most importantly, you
are you, you are here, and that makes this Stuff
They Don't Want You To Know. You know, I was
thinking in our previous episode, our two-part episode on Davos
and the World Economic Forum, the whole time I was

(02:56):
listening back, because we listen back to every episode to
make sure that we said what we meant to say.
I was thinking we missed that opportunity to talk about
something that we usually mention, which is that money as
a concept is pretty tricky. We talk about inequality, you
talk about the value of something, you get into some murky,

(03:19):
surprisingly philosophical territory really quickly. Like there's no real way
to differentiate between economic ideology or religious ideology. We have had,
for how many years now? For a while now, we've
had like a standing call for someone to tell us
what makes those two things different. Do you guys remember that?

(03:40):
Has anybody written into us to give us a good
difference yet?

Speaker 3 (03:43):
No, we've always said they're so, yeah, it's just, they're
so similar.

Speaker 1 (03:48):
So when we talk about currency. I think one thing
that's interesting in our earlier episode on cashless societies and
what that might mean, we all noted that we had
been using cashless forms of payment more and more often.
And I was interested in you all's experience. Did you
find that increasingly the case during the pandemic?

Speaker 2 (04:10):
Oh, sure. I mean, it makes me think back to
an episode, Ben, you and I recorded recently on our
other show, Ridiculous History, about Uh, leper colonies and, uh,
leprosy currency, the idea that, uh, that cash could be
transmitting disease. And I think there were a lot of
businesses that weren't even accepting cash at all during the pandemic, uh,
let alone people being stoked about, you know, uh, interchanging

(04:34):
bills with others who, who they don't know if they're
carriers of, uh, Of the virus or not. So absolutely.
And it seems like that is certainly to blame or
to credit for the massive spike in, say, Amazon sales
and stock price and Jeff Bezos, you know, pocket money
and other companies like that, delivery services, food delivery. I mean,

(04:56):
it was all cashless. Yeah, 100 percent.

Speaker 1 (04:59):
And as we talked about in that episode and in
other episodes of Stuff They Want You to Know. Physical money,
especially the bills, the folding money, as they called it
back in the day, is filthy. It's got traces of
cocaine on it. Something like 40% of U.S. bills have
traces of feces on them. It's just not clean stuff.

(05:20):
But it does represent this idea. of value. And in
a way, that's what today's episode is really about. It's
about something you may have heard of recently in the news,
or you may have heard of as early as 2018,
called an NFT. What is an NFT? Well, to tell you,

(05:43):
we have to do a quick recap of what cryptocurrency
is first. So here are the facts.

Speaker 3 (05:50):
And if you're like me, your head is going to
be banging against a wall for much of this episode.

Speaker 1 (05:55):
But is it a physical wall, Matt? Or is it
like a blockchain of your head hitting a blockchain idea
of a wall? Is it a wall coin?

Speaker 3 (06:06):
No matter what it is, my neck and head are
thrusting forward vigorously and multiple times until I either understand
or cease to be awake for a while. Sorry, let's
get into cryptocurrency. Tough to understand a little bit, but
it's also... Ben, you've done a great job breaking it
down in this episode, so let's just talk about it.

(06:28):
A cryptocurrency is a digital currency. It can be used
to buy anything, any kind of service, any kind of good.
It's just a little different. It uses this thing, an
online ledger. It uses cryptography to protect that ledger and
to protect transactions and to keep a chain, essentially, of
all of the interactions... that that particular piece of currency

(06:50):
has gone through.

Speaker 2 (06:51):
Just for the record, in its form, cryptocurrency can't be
used to buy anything. It has to be converted back
to USD. There are some vendors that will accept cryptocurrency.
I think Tesla is talking about accepting cryptocurrency for transactions
and things like that. And there are even starting to
be crypto ATM machines at gas stations and stuff. It's

(07:13):
starting to be mainstreamed. in an interesting way. And it's
starting to be mainstreamed in a conversational way in terms
of like, you know, people from the Fed are talking
about it and they're not crazy about it.

Speaker 1 (07:23):
No, no, that's a good point. They're not. Because, you know,
you'll also see reports of some businesses who have maybe
tried to accept stuff in cryptocurrency, but then due primarily
to concerns about taxation, they had to like roll that back.
These are unregulated currencies. So for a lot of people,

(07:44):
this is an opportunity amid financial chaos. You'll hear about
a lot of people who purchase some Bitcoin or some
Dogecoin or whatever you want. The general name would be
like altcoin. They've purchased something like this and they're not
going to Tesla. They're not planning to go to Pizza

(08:08):
future or whatever pizza company we're going to make up
for this episode. Instead, they're buying it. They're holding it.
They're going diamond hand. They're hoping that because there's a
lack of regulation here and because the value is vulnerable
to speculation. that the stuff they paid like, you know,

(08:29):
$ 10 for will be worth $ 100 at some point, and
then they'll sell it then. It's investing. You know what
I mean? It's an old game, and it's made several
people quite wealthy, particularly people who invested in Bitcoin earlier,
which I'm still kicking myself about.

Speaker 2 (08:46):
Totally. I mean, super producer Casey Pegram of Ridiculous History
always laments about how he had a couple of full bitcoins.
When we say a bitcoin, we're today talking about a
fraction of a bitcoin because the value of a bitcoin,
I believe now is almost $ 60, 000 for one. So when you're,
you know, people like you or I are investing in bitcoin,

(09:08):
we're buying. 002 bitcoins or whatever. But then you have
some of these altcoins where the value of one, it
might just be a handful of dollars or a couple
hundred dollars. And that's the thing. There are literally hundreds
of these different altcoins, like you said, Ben, and they
all have kooky names that are tied to different things,
like things like Polkadot is one or like cashmere. They're

(09:29):
almost like a joke how many of them there are.
But you're right, Ben. It is a speculative, highly, wildly
speculative world. where people are making and losing fortunes even
based on trying to ride the wave or make bets.
But I think the smart move, and hopefully what many

(09:50):
folks are doing, is just try to hold on to
what you have and see what happens, especially with the
main ones like Ethereum and Bitcoin.

Speaker 1 (09:57):
Yeah, casino rules hold for an income. of gambling Don't
walk in there with more than you can afford to lose.
Consider it goodbye money, right? We've done episodes touch on
numerous aspects of this in the past. Please do check
those out. We'll probably name drop a few on the way.

(10:17):
We also want to recommend some work by our complaint department,
Jonathan Strickland, over on his show Tech Stuff. He has
some great primers on the basics of cryptocurrency, the origin
of Bitcoin, and so on. But for a real quick
refresher for this, before we get into the very strange story,
maybe we can talk about pros and cons of cryptocurrency

(10:40):
in general, right? Bitcoin is a kind of cryptocurrency. It's
the one that most people would recognize today. First, it's transparent. Wait,
how can it be transparent? You're saying, I thought people
could be anonymous. They can, but the transactions of every
Bitcoin itself are or every piece of cryptocurrency, they're all
stored on this open ledger called a blockchain. And that

(11:04):
means that information about those transactions is pretty much available
to anyone at any time. And if you have problems
with the purposeful vagueness of aspects of the banking system,
then that's like, that's a really good thing. It's like
you can play, now you're playing that, um, Oh, what's

(11:25):
that street side scam where you got the three cups
and you got the ball or something?

Speaker 2 (11:29):
Shell game? Yeah. Three card money?

Speaker 1 (11:31):
Shell game. Shell game.

Speaker 2 (11:32):
That's the one.

Speaker 1 (11:33):
Now you're playing a shell game with transparent cups, kind of.
That's right. So there's a big advantage. That's a huge pro.

Speaker 2 (11:40):
And it's interesting because you essentially serve as your own bank.
Like you're not working with a bank. I mean, you
have to have used some service. There's this thing called Nexo.
that essentially stores your crypto for you and takes it
off of the exchange so it's less vulnerable. I'm not
quite sure what that means, but that's how it was
explained to me. But there, essentially, you are your own

(12:01):
bank using this service, and it extends you like lines
of credit based on how much crypto you're holding.

Speaker 1 (12:09):
Yeah, exactly. And there will be exit points where you
are required to interact with the world's extant financial system
But another advantage that this stuff has over banks is
that it is instant. It's possible to buy or spend
stuff wherever you are, and you don't have to necessarily
have a computer to use it. You can do these

(12:32):
kinds of transactions entirely on your phone if you wish.
So that does hold real value for people who might
be technologically challenged in one way or another. But of course,
the big one, the big, big one is anonymity. anonymity.
It's sweet. It's the reason everybody's addicted to the internet.

(12:54):
It's also one of the reasons everybody hates the internet.
Anonymity means that you can have this unregulated currency that's
not bound by adjustments or fluctuating political changes. It's also
great for people who value their privacy online. People who

(13:15):
are thinking, well, I don't want to hand over All
my information of one sort or another just so I
can get some cheddar, some digital cheddar, excuse me. And
this security that anonymity provides is a benefit. But of course,
like other forms of technology, like fire, it can be

(13:35):
used by anybody. So someone sees it and they say, hey,
this is a great way. not to freeze in the
wilds of Yellowstone. And then somebody else says, this is
a great way to get rid of that house I hate, fire.
And cryptocurrency has the same potential. Like, it's no surprise
that people on the dark web or various black markets

(13:57):
would want to use cryptocurrency. Because you know who really
values their anonymity? Criminals. I feel weird to say it
that way. But this is something law enforcement and financial
regulators worry about because now you can move vast sums
of money in ways that we'll talk about. So that

(14:18):
kind of gets us to the cons. And there are
cons in addition to anonymity.

Speaker 3 (14:24):
Well, yeah, the first thing is I already said it
in this episode. This stuff can be dang confusing for
people like me. But, you know, it's just due to
the fact that it seems un-understandable, incomprehensible. Just, I don't
get it sometimes. But I think that's one of the
reasons why I personally haven't taken up, you know, going

(14:45):
into crypto at all right now. Just because I don't
fully understand it. And, you know, if you meet the
right person that can kind of bring you into the world, maybe,
you know, you have a sensei, a crypto sensei, maybe
that'll do the trick.

Speaker 2 (14:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (15:00):
But that really does seem to be the last hurdle.
Like if there was some, some amazing advocate that was
going around and well, I don't know a good example
of this was the Neil deGrasse Tyson for cryptocurrency, making
it understandable for every lay person out there, then maybe
there would be wider use of this thing.

Speaker 1 (15:20):
An evangelizer.

Speaker 2 (15:21):
There are definitely folks like that, like on YouTube, but
you're right. They're not like main, they're not like, you know,
of that degree. And then I, you know, I'll be
completely candid. I've, I've begun to dip my toe in it.
And it was only because I had a friend who
borderline insisted that I do it. Like, like made me
feel almost as though if I didn't do it a
little bit, then I'd be like missing out on something

(15:43):
really cool. So I did it, nothing insane, but like,
he's given me information. Cause even just navigating how to
get in and out and the different currencies is all
very specific stuff. Cause you have to like store it
in a specific type of wallet just for that currency. And,
you know, and just the way it works where you
copy and paste these like really long keys to get
your money from one place to another, it is a

(16:05):
little daunting. And if you don't have someone kind of
shepherding you through it, I could see how it would be, uh,
not appealing at all. But, um, you know, I, I've
been enjoying my very limited experience in it. And so
far it's, you know, it's going okay.

Speaker 1 (16:19):
We need a jaw rule. We need someone who can
sit down on, uh, international news platforms to explain the
basis of cryptocurrency. You know, I think it's a great bit.
I don't care if we're overusing it. It's a great bit.
All respect to Dave Chappelle. Another con of cryptocurrency, market fluctuation.

(16:44):
In addition to being confusing, right, Matt, and I would
argue that a lot of people are your, your faithful
podcasters included are also often confused by the existing financial system,
which is designed to be confusing so that you can
rip people off. Like that's, that's the purpose of it. Uh,
in a lot of ways.

Speaker 3 (17:05):
All I know is I have some dollars and I
have some mattresses. And if I put them together, that's
the way it should be.

Speaker 1 (17:11):
I got into crypto mattresses. Uh, but the, the thing is,
in addition to being, uh, confusing, uh, when something is new,
it can also be incredibly unpredictable. And systems don't like
general unpredictability. What systems like is an inequality of information

(17:33):
such that some people can predict things that other people
cannot as a primary force of a lot of these markets.
So A lot of people, as we said, bought into
one coin or cryptocurrency or another as an investment. And yeah,
people are using these the way you use actual money.
Somebody famously bought a pizza in the early days of

(17:54):
Bitcoin and now way overpaid for it. People have used
it for gambling. That's pretty cool, too. There was even
a case where somebody bought a house with cryptocurrency, bought
a house with Bitcoin.

Speaker 3 (18:09):
There's a story later about buying a house.

Speaker 1 (18:12):
Yes.

Speaker 2 (18:12):
Yes, there is.

Speaker 1 (18:13):
Kind of, I would say. We'll get to it. But
this is the thing. Most people, or a great many people,
are buying this stuff to hold on to it, right?
Then the next con would be the scams. As with
every emerging technology, there are people that are going to

(18:34):
use the inexperience, naivete, basic human trust of other people,
to cheat them out of stuff. And then that's compounded
by the fact that you can accidentally cheat yourself out
of stuff here because you can lose millions of US
dollars worth of value, currency, if you lose the stuff

(18:55):
you need to access this. This happened to a guy
named James Howells, probably the most famous example right now.
He literally... accidentally threw away a physical hard drive with
7,500 Bitcoins back in 2013 when he was cleaning his home.
He wrote to the local government, the authorities of the

(19:16):
landfill where he thought it would end up, and they
wouldn't let him dig it out. And he is just S-O-L,
which on a family show means sorely out of luck.
There are some other pros and cons, and we're getting
to them, but those are the basics. And when we
think about unpredictability, we see the biggest example that just happened.

(19:37):
Something people hadn't predicted has already occurred. And it is this,
the rise of the NFT. What does NFT stand for?
Does it stand for know? fun time what does it
stand for new fun time uh does it stand for
what are some other ones let's just make some things.

Speaker 3 (19:57):
Up nascent frog tremble.

Speaker 2 (20:04):
Nascent frog trouble that's great how about neo-fascist troglodytes neo-fascist
troglodytes yes nazi cave cave people yes.

Speaker 3 (20:14):
Uh does it.

Speaker 1 (20:19):
Uh does it stand for nearly fanny time that's filthy
in the uk it doesn't stand for any of those
things but we'll we'll tell you what it does stand
for and why it's got so many people fascinated after
a word from our sponsor We're back. NFT, despite all

(20:42):
the awesome acronyms we just made up, NFT is a
real thing. It stands for non-fungible token. And fungible in
this case has nothing to do with fungi.

Speaker 2 (20:52):
It's a weird one. I thought that was a made
up word. I was not aware of this in economic parlance,
but it apparently means like one-to-one, right? So a Bitcoin
is fungible. You can trade one for another and you'll
have the same thing in the crypto universe. A token
is a representation of a thing, you know, some building

(21:16):
block in this ecosystem.

Speaker 3 (21:17):
Right.

Speaker 2 (21:19):
Non fungible means exactly what it sounds like. It means
it is one thing and one thing alone. It cannot
be traded for another thing because another thing like that
doesn't exist.

Speaker 1 (21:29):
Right.

Speaker 2 (21:30):
It can't be replaced with something else. There's no parity there.
There's no equivalent. So one of the first uses was
a game called CryptoKitties. Ben, you've got to tell us
about CryptoKitties. I was not aware of this.

Speaker 1 (21:43):
Yeah, CryptoKitties. So CryptoKitties is interesting. It is a blockchain game.
And what it allows you to do when you play
it is to purchase, collect, breed, and sell cats. Cats
that are entirely... This got so popular in 2017 that
it jammed up the Ethereum network, slowing it down significantly

(22:07):
as it reached its all-time high number of transactions. Back
in 2018, when the game was also still really popular,
someone bought a non-fungible token, a digital cat, from the
game for, get this, $ 172, 000 US, real money. And what

(22:32):
they got for that was really, I mean, yes, in
technical terms, they got this long blockchain, right? But what
they got was an image of, I'll say it, a
quite cool cartoon cat, right? But is it $ 172, 000 cool?
How much would you pay for an image of.

Speaker 3 (22:54):
Yeah, this is my problem. And I feel like I'm
just not understanding something.

Speaker 2 (22:59):
No, I think you probably likely are.

Speaker 3 (23:04):
You're buying this image. So you own the image, but
you can't make money on owning that image.

Speaker 2 (23:14):
You don't own the rights to the image. You own
this particular assembly of these pixels in this form.

Speaker 3 (23:22):
Yes.

Speaker 2 (23:23):
In the, in that way, even though it can still
be screenshotted and it can still exist as an image
on an Instagram for people to look at and enjoy,
but you own what the higher resolution that's, that's okay.
I'm with you, man. I'm what is it? What are
you getting? Like, are you getting like some mega high
4k version that you couldn't achieve with a screenshot? Cause

(23:45):
I know people are taking these and like, you know,
you can get a digital frame and you can throw
one of these into these digital frames and then they
have it in your house. There's an art show at
a local gallery called ABV Gallery that this local mural artist,
Greg Mike, owns. They're doing an NFT show. And in
the gallery is just a bunch of TVs, like a

(24:05):
bunch of like vertically positioned TVs with these images. Many
of them are animated. Most of them are. I think
all of them maybe are animated. Now, I don't know
about that. But that's definitely the popular version of these.

Speaker 3 (24:18):
And they loop.

Speaker 2 (24:19):
They're like a looping animated image, like a GIF or something,
but higher resolution.

Speaker 1 (24:23):
Yeah, so there are a couple of things that qualifies
what I would call ownership here. I don't know that
it is fair to say they meet the requirements of
what constitutes ownership in the pre-NFT world. There's a great
way to explain this. Shout out to Mitchell Clark over

(24:46):
at The Verge. Let's say you are deep in the
trading card game and you have a very rare or
somehow unique trading card, like Pokemon. You have the Pikachu Illustrator.
That's a rare Pokemon card from what I understand. And
you trade it for a super rare, very old baseball

(25:06):
card from like the turn of the 20th century. And
you've completed your trade But now you have something totally
different from what you started with. Also, important note, Matt,
people can sell NFTs after.

Speaker 2 (25:20):
They purchase them.

Speaker 1 (25:21):
And there's a weird system set up for it. So
maybe that makes a little more sense. I like Mitchell
Clark's example, but there's another one I thought that... I
want to see what you guys think. It made a
little more sense to me. Let's say... Let's think about
borrowing $ 100 versus borrowing a car. So let's say... you

(25:42):
go to Paul Mission Control, and you're like, hey man,
can I borrow $ 100? And Paul, being a mensch, says, yeah,
of course, you can borrow it, just pay me back
next week or whatever. So he'll expect you to pay
him $ 100 next Wednesday or Thursday or whenever, but He'll
just want some form of $ 100 back. He's not reasonably

(26:03):
going to expect you to come back with the exact
same $ 100 bill. And yes, peek behind the curtain, folks.
Paul only uses $ 100 bills. It's very weird to be
with him at restaurants.

Speaker 3 (26:16):
Can confirm.

Speaker 1 (26:17):
Except for Applebee's, where he eats for free. Yeah, so
we can confirm that that's real. But let's say instead... Well,
let's say the same day you borrow $ 100 from Paul,
you go to Codename Doc Holiday and you ask to
borrow her car. And because she's awesome, she lets you

(26:38):
borrow her car. And you say, okay, I'll bring it
back to you next Wednesday or Thursday or whenever. So
you come back to Paul and Alexis and you give
Paul $ 250. And he's like, what are these? Because he's
only ever seen a $ 100 bill. But he believes you
because it adds up to $ 100. But then, you know,
Doc is like, where's my car? And you're like, well,

(26:58):
I brought you a car back there. Like that's a car.
Then she would say, no, no, no, no, no, bro.
My car is my car. I gave you my car
and I would like my car back. That's where a
car would be a non-fungible token. And this bill, this
$ 100 bill would be more like a Bitcoin. And NFTs

(27:21):
are the crypto version of this. Like they can literally
be anything. That's the other thing. They can be anything
that you can digitally depict.

Speaker 3 (27:29):
Totally.

Speaker 2 (27:29):
Like, for example, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey recently sold his
first tweet, the first tweet as an NFT for $ 2. 9 million.

Speaker 3 (27:38):
So that tweet is then encrypted. in this very specific encryption.
And now it's an NFT.

Speaker 2 (27:47):
It's yeah. So it's like, it's you attach an NFT
to the assets and that's what makes it. It's not
like that's not the NFT itself. It's the thing that
you attach to it that then verifies a chain of custody.
It's essentially like a digital authenticity report, but what the
hell does that mean though? How do you own a tweet?
I can screenshot that tweet and put it in a

(28:08):
digital frame. To me, it's a fetishization of ownership is
what a lot of this is.

Speaker 1 (28:13):
That's not an unfair way to say it because, you know,
it reminds me of the story that keeps coming up
when we explore these kinds of things about the emperor's
new clothes, which we'll wax poetic on later, but But
you're right. So drawing, music, animation, video clip, digital art,
you buy the NFT, yet you still own it, quote unquote,

(28:36):
whatever that new idea of ownership is. But other people
can just right click and save it when they see it.
Other people can, you know what, other people can right click,
save it. And then if they have a printer, they
can print it out and they can frame it themselves.
And they own an iteration of that.

Speaker 2 (28:52):
It's like when Martin Shkreli bought that Wu-Tang Clan album.
He had it. He could do whatever he wanted with it.
He could have lorded over everyone like he pretty much did,
or he could distribute it to the world. That's different.
That's like a one-of-a-kind thing that he and only he
has access to and has the rights to do with
what he will. This is not that. So I'm very

(29:14):
confused as well, Matt, about the draw in terms of like, why?
Why spend... you know, two or three million dollars on
the first tweet when like you can just, you know,
look at it. It's this idea to me of like
I own the first tweet and that's cute. And it
also means that the only people that are doing this

(29:35):
that level of cash, are people that can afford to
do cute things with that kind of money.

Speaker 1 (29:40):
The tweet example is funny to me because in the
Verge article that I just cited, the journalist had to
update their article because they originally said selling a tweet
as an NFT as a joke, and then- Dorsey did it,
and they had to go back in the article and say, hey,
we were joking, but this guy did it. We don't
know if he read the article. But people paid much

(30:02):
more than what they paid for that tweet. One NFT
was auctioned at Christie's, so congratulations to Mike Winkleman, a.k.a. Beeple,
a digital artist who sold an NFT there for, Paul,
can we get a drumroll, please? Yes, $ 69 million. very

(30:24):
real dollars. And yeah, it's a lot. These are by
design meant to give the purchaser again, that quote unquote ownership.
And it is ownership as a, as a concept, you know, it's,
you could also even on the artist side, let's say
I sell an NFT of something that I have painted.

(30:49):
Then I, I would still have that physical painting. I
very well could. And then I could just create more
NFTs of the same thing, just the same image with
different blockchains attached. And now it's like I've made prints.
Now you have a number three of 100 of Ben
Bolin Quesadilla study number seven.

Speaker 2 (31:09):
I love your work, Ben. I love that series. But
I have to ask, though, is there an inherent agreement
or an implicit agreement? Implicit wouldn't be enough. Is there
an agreement, contractual or otherwise, for the artist to never
make another thing like that again?

Speaker 1 (31:25):
In some cases. In some cases. Because, again, this has a–
doesn't have any kind of sweeping regulation. And the idea
is that it necessarily doesn't because, right, you download this
thing or you print it out and you own it
even though you never bought the NFT. You don't own
it NFT-wise, but isn't possession nine-tenths of the law? I mean,

(31:48):
this caught on pretty quickly. Now we're talking about a
multimillion-dollar market. So I think the three of us have
raised some really great questions at the jump here. Most directly,
why mess with this? Why have them? Well, it's great
if you're an artist.

Speaker 2 (32:05):
If you're Beeple... Of course, you.

Speaker 1 (32:07):
Can absolutely understand why people are calling this an evolution
in fine art collecting. You can sell new stuff in
a new way. That's dope. You can also make a
lot more money off a digital thing that maybe you
otherwise would have sold as like a sticker or something.
You know, because if you look at these, a lot
of these are really cute little pieces of pixel art

(32:29):
or some of them, right? And that wouldn't have been
like if you saw that on an app store or
as an emoji or something, would you have paid for it?
Or would you have just waited until there was a
whole pack of emoji to download for 99 cents or something,
or wait for a next OS update, where then it's
just folded into it? That's what's happening. Ben, Ben, Ben.

Speaker 3 (32:52):
No, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 2 (32:53):
Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben. What?

Speaker 3 (32:55):
Let's start making original Stuff They Don't Want You To
Know videos again, but exclusively as NFTs. Come on, dude.
Let's make millions of dollars for people who just have
Ethereum sitting around and they don't know what to do
with it all.

Speaker 2 (33:13):
Let's do it.

Speaker 1 (33:15):
That's a really good point. That's one I hadn't thought about.

Speaker 2 (33:18):
Oh, okay.

Speaker 1 (33:18):
Wait, we got to get back to that one. That's
a very good point. That's a crazy point. Well, here's
another benefit for the artist, though. You can enable a feature.
on an NFT, the bulk of which are on Ethereum,
that pays you a kind of residual. So every time
your work is sold or changes hands, you get a

(33:40):
little cut of the deal. And that didn't happen with
a lot of classic oil paintings or whatever. That didn't
happen for Leonardo da Vinci or Picasso or any of
the masters of the craft. But it's a little different
for buyers. I mean, it's a flex, right? Ultimately, it's

(34:02):
kind of a playground of the rich. Look what I
can do. I've got an NFT gallery next to my
dirigible collection.

Speaker 4 (34:09):
And I.

Speaker 1 (34:10):
Don't know, in a positive way, it is a new
way to support artists you like. That's cool, right? You've
got artists that you think is is a really important
voice in the world and you want to financially support them.
Then you could say, Hey, I will buy your NFT.
I feel like it's a creative way of donating in some,

(34:31):
in some way. And yeah, you get usage rights, but
I don't think somebody would, I don't think you would
find somebody using an NFT that they didn't buy as,
or an image from an NFT that they didn't buy
on their Instagram profile. I don't think you would see
them getting sued, right? They would just take it down.
I don't know how you enforce it, you know, or

(34:52):
why you would bother. But it's just, it's only unique
in that it's a token on the blockchain. So it's
in this weird, I know this phrase gets overused so often.
It's in this weird liminal space. I'm so sorry. I
like it.

Speaker 2 (35:06):
It's true though.

Speaker 3 (35:07):
It's right there in between.

Speaker 1 (35:09):
It fits so many things. It is a very useful phrase.
So an NFT, if we think about it, is kind of,
designed to be both a Mona Lisa, only one exists.
There's only one real Mona Lisa and the rest are forgeries.
But it's also kind of, it has the capability to
be a Honda Civic. You can just, especially the artists,

(35:30):
you can just take the same thing and then say, okay,
this is a different non-fungible token. And now there are thousands.
Logan Paul from YouTube has made some video clips of
his existing videos as NFTs.

Speaker 2 (35:45):
Mm hmm. Grimes, you know, the once kind of indie
electro weirdo kind of outsider artist who became more and
more popular with every record and then kind of really
jumped the shark by having a baby with Elon Musk.
She sold six million dollars worth of NFTs, various kind

(36:05):
of digital imagery, kind of collages like that were collaborations
that she did with another artist. There's something called the
War Nymph Collection. Some of it was set to music.
And a lot of this stuff, since it is so new,
there are a few portals to getting this stuff where
artists have accounts, like you would on a social media platform.

(36:25):
The most popular one, I think, is called Nifty Gateway.
And that's where she sold her stuff. Ah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (36:31):
And so the question then is, what does this mean
for the future?

Speaker 3 (36:35):
Sure.

Speaker 1 (36:36):
What can NFT specifically lead to? Here we enter trickier water.
Don't forget, this is the same species that went absolutely
nuts and bananas for pogs, for beanie babies, for countless
other crazes.

Speaker 3 (36:52):
Magic the Gathering.

Speaker 1 (36:54):
I was going to say, man, I thought of you
because Magic the Gathering, I don't think counts as a
fad or a craze anymore. It's been around too long.

Speaker 2 (37:01):
Nah, dude.

Speaker 3 (37:02):
That thing's forever. It's here.

Speaker 2 (37:04):
It's here.

Speaker 1 (37:05):
And if NFTs are just a craze, how long will
they last? And if there's more to it than that,
then what's the stuff they don't want you to know
about NFTs? We'll tell you after a word from our sponsor.

(37:26):
Here's where it gets crazy. First, obviously... I feel like
we shouldn't even have to point this out, but it's
due diligence. First, obviously, there's a very valid criticism that
these massive amounts of money could be used for something better,
something that helps the world. However, that is a criticism

(37:48):
we look at every time we look at fine art,
the toys of the wealthy, the mozzarella fleets, everything that
we like. The problem with that is. Once somebody has
their own money, you cannot really tell them. And I
would argue you should not really tell them what to
do with it. Of course, also, I would argue that
a lot of philanthropy is just a PR shell game

(38:12):
again to, well, to screw the rest of the world.
But it's true. It's true. That's a non-starter. You can't, people, surprise,
don't react well when you say, hey, why did you
spend $ 69 million today? on this digital thing when that
could feed and house X amount of people for Y

(38:34):
amount of years, whatever. People don't like to hear that.
Same reason Jeff Bezos probably doesn't like it when people
are saying, here's the fraction of the money you made
during the pandemic that could make a life-changing difference in
the day-to-day lives of your employees.

Speaker 3 (38:51):
I do want to point something out here. Many of
these transactions we're talking about were done in, I think
it was Ethereum. That was mostly the coin.

Speaker 2 (39:00):
That was used for these.

Speaker 1 (39:01):
Ethereum is where it started.

Speaker 3 (39:03):
So I am, and I'm just putting this out there,
and I don't even know if this fully computes, but
they were rather low numbers of Ethereum that were exchanged.
We're talking hundreds. I think that was the most, or
at least the one sale that was for several hundred
thousand was like, uh, 200 and something Ethereum. I think

(39:27):
we said something like that. Um, imagine that you, you
got into Ethereum very, very early on and, you know,
let's say you put even as much as $ 10, 000 down
when Ethereum is at the lowest possible levels, when it's
just beginning, that could translate to many, many, many, many Ethereums.

(39:47):
which would essentially be a fortune that was created out
of very little money very early on, and you would
have so much of it, the equivalent of what it
actually is in dollars maybe doesn't matter to someone as
much once that, like, it's almost like winning the lottery
really quickly. I can imagine the value of it seeming

(40:10):
very different than if it was a hard-earned million dollars
that someone worked their whole life to achieve or something.

Speaker 1 (40:16):
I'm so glad you brought that up. I'm so glad
because there's something that I think a lot of people
can understand through comparison here, right? If someone just has
this Ethereum and it's kind of grown native to that
financial ecosystem, never touched it. Cause you're like a lot
of other investors. You just wanted it to accrue and

(40:36):
then hit a windfall. And then maybe you would think
about taking it out into another currency. There's something that
happens when you travel to a part of the world
that uses a different currency, and it's really weird. I
don't know if there's a technical or respected name for it,
but when I'm just freestyling here, I call it– it's

(40:57):
the monopoly money effect. You know what I mean? Like
you go to a place where– Like you go to Japan,
that'll be a familiar example to a lot of people,
and you take your U.S. dollar amount that you have
and you exchange it for yen, right? And you get
these different amounts of.

(41:20):
So, like, if you put in $ 250, then all of
a sudden you have over 27,000 yen. And even though
you know that the value systems are different, psychologically, you're
walking around and you're.

Speaker 4 (41:33):
Like, this is what it feels like at the top.

Speaker 1 (41:37):
You know what I mean? Yeah. Yes, in terms of
cost of things, that $ 250 and that 27,187 yen or
something are still like they have parity. But I know

(41:58):
exactly what you're thinking about. It's like it's one of
the reasons that a lot of people, when they're traveling
to unfamiliar places, might spend a lot more than they
think they're spending. Because they're just like, hey, these are all–
plus other countries use coins a lot more often than
the U.S. So they're like, I'm just putting pocket change
in these things. I don't know that this is really
worth $ 5 or whatever. It's tough. And that's even without

(42:21):
exchange rates. So you are absolutely right, and I can
see that. So we're not saying all these people are
billionaires or whatever.

Speaker 2 (42:27):
And I think that's my point too about like– internet spending,
crypto culture gone run amok kind of is how I
look at this in some ways, because so many people
made a lot of money on crypto, maybe not instantly,
but it's like a lot of people that I know

(42:47):
that made a lot of money on crypto used it
to buy like, you know, synthesizers and like toys and stuff.
It's not like, You know, they were never banking on
it as being their like life's blood or their life's work.
It was always kind of funny money, you know, because
they knew the bottom could drop out any day. I
was talking to a guy who, you know, is giving

(43:08):
me some advice on this stuff. And he says he
lost ninety thousand dollars in one fell swoop. And when
there was a big crypto kind of bottom fallout situation
back in like 2013 or something like that. And, you know,
to the point where he got out of it entirely.
for a while and then got back in but I'm
just saying like you know I've known people in the
past I've played in a band with a dude years

(43:29):
ago who had all this crazy stuff and it's because
he lived with a dude who got in early with
the crypto with the Bitcoin stuff and he got him
into it and he just had like funny money to
just blow on whatever like it's it reminds me of
like the kid in Big you know what I mean
like when you like all of a sudden you got
all this money you got more than you know what
to do with you just like buy yourself like a

(43:51):
pleasure palace you know Um, it's just interesting because you're right.
I think that's totally correct. It doesn't feel like earned.
It just feels like frivolously, uh, created, um, therefore can
be frivolously spent. I don't know.

Speaker 3 (44:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (44:04):
And a lot of people already had a sort of
separate existence. You know what I mean? A lot of
people already had a day job where they were doing,
so they had income, you know what I mean? And
this stuff just, uh, kind of kept accruing in the,
in the background. So that makes sense. But there's something
else we have to talk about. The, uh, tease this
a little bit. Crime. Non-fungible tokens get especially interesting when

(44:29):
you talk about money laundering. So it's no secret that
criminal elements use crypto money laundering to hide the dirty
origin of various funds. The Easiest way to do it.
This is not financial advice. No one is telling you
to do this. We cannot legally say this is roughly

(44:51):
how you do it and get away. The most easy
way to do it is kind of a three-stage process,
which we can describe vaguely. You can purchase cryptocurrency with, like,
let's say you have your dirty cash. Call it your
fiat cash, right? If you want to get a little
edgy about it. You buy your cryptocurrency with your fiat cash.

(45:14):
You got it from running guns or stamp fraud or something.

Speaker 2 (45:18):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (45:19):
It's just stamp fraud is still my favorite crime. And
now that you have this and you have it in cryptocurrency,
you have to be careful because crypto-based transactions, again, overwhelmingly,
can be followed via the blockchain.

Speaker 2 (45:34):
However.

Speaker 1 (45:35):
Once you've got these dirty coins in play, then you
can do a couple things. You can use a service
to make it a little more anonymous, breaking links between
those Bitcoin transactions. That's possible. And then you have a
legit excuse for that. You can say, well, I'm using

(45:56):
that service because it provides even better personal privacy and security.
The easiest way to wash it, which is interesting, is this.
So like, let's say I've been running guns for a while, right?
I had a crazy year during the pandemic. I got
into a side gig and now I have a lot

(46:17):
of money that I can't move because Uncle Sam will
get after me. Then the next, the easiest way, so
I put it in Bitcoin or whatever, or I put
it in Dogecoin or whatever. And the easiest way for
me to get around is The traceability there is to
take not the money I had in cash, but the
money I already put in one crypto coin and then

(46:38):
wait for an ICO, an initial coin offering. Because like
we said earlier, there are tons and tons of different cryptocurrencies,
different coins. And when that initial coin offering comes out.
These are one of the businesses that does accept payment
in cryptocurrency, aren't they? So now I just have to say, well,

(46:58):
I'm going to get I'm going to buy in big
with Ben coins or whatever, and I'm going to pay
for it all with bitcoins. And then, boom, I have
shell gamed the coins. And I've done so well enough
that now people are not going to be able to say, hey.
The origin of Bencoin is actually a crazy, crazy international
trade in AR-15s and Kalashnikovs and crap like that.

Speaker 4 (47:22):
Boom, boom, boom.

Speaker 1 (47:24):
And the last thing you have to do is just
integrate that money back into the legitimate financial system. And
then you can just say, hey, like the thing is,
this is where the unpredictability, volatility, fluctuation of cryptocurrency comes in.

Speaker 2 (47:43):
Because you just.

Speaker 1 (47:43):
Wait till it gets to a really high point and
be like, oh, yeah, yeah, I got it a while ago.
And then this happened. And so now I've got, I
guess I just got lucky, you know. And then I
would say, not to lecture people, but I would say
if you made it that far unscathed, maybe you can
retire from it. The illegal gun trade, it's not a

(48:05):
very smart business to be in, or it's not a
very good business to be in. And this can get
you around stuff like income from drugs, from trafficking, from
weapons sales. It can help you dodge taxes possibly. To me,
the most interesting thing, I think maybe we talked about
this a little bit. is how useful is this for
state actors who don't want to get caught paying for

(48:27):
someone for an illegal activity? How useful is it if
you want to get around sanctions, right, to buy stuff
and to accrue funds? And all that stuff is important, right?
Because we are talking about crime. We're talking about human lives.
But there's another much bigger problem, which people are only
really now starting to understand is, in mainstream conversation, and

(48:52):
that's this. The crime, the legit stuff, none of this
can happen if we can't maintain life on Earth in
some way. One of the biggest problems with cryptocurrency and
with NFTs is, in fact, the environment, and in a
very not cool way.

Speaker 2 (49:10):
That's right. It's absolutely a detriment to the environment. The technology,
the amount of electricity, the amount of resources and infrastructure
required to process just one transaction. Bitcoin in general could
potentially leave a carbon footprint the size of the entire

(49:31):
region of London. It all goes back to how these
things are created. New bitcoins are created by this idea
of mining coins, which is the extra CPU intensive process.
It requires like thousands and thousands of these complex calculations.
The more bitcoins there are, the longer it takes to

(49:51):
mine new coins and the more actual electricity it takes.
That blew my mind when I first understood that. But
when you really start digging in, you realize, no, this
is this is very, very much a real thing.

Speaker 1 (50:03):
Yeah, there's some fascinating and not super happy research into this.
There's a Dutch economist named Alex de Vrij who found
that the energy use here is growing at this breakneck
pace because it takes longer to mine one Bitcoin to

(50:27):
complete the math there. Now the energy use... he estimated
by 2017, the energy use was already 30 terawatt hours
a year. And that's where he gets that London number from,
because he said back in 2017, 30 terawatts a year
was the same amount of energy used for the entirety

(50:49):
of Ireland. You'll see another report where you can see
that Cambridge University studies found Bitcoin uses more electricity than
the entirety of Argentina as far as February 2021. So
it's accelerating is the issue. We're feeding more and more electricity.

(51:10):
into the machine. And that is creating more and more
pollution because most of the world's energy comes from fossil fuels, right?
So it's something we don't really think about, but it's
absolutely true. And something, Noel, you and I, I think
had talked a little bit about this off air when
you were kind of getting into.

Speaker 2 (51:28):
Bitcoin, right?

Speaker 3 (51:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (51:29):
Well, it's not something I even fully realized right when
I started. And again, I'm not like deep into it
by any stretch of the imagination, but It's true. I mean,
there's look, there's definitely like Bitcoin apologists, for lack of
a better way of describing them, that will say, OK,
there's a conflation going on. People are saying, you know,
one Bitcoin transaction consumes as much energy as your house

(51:52):
uses in a week. And in this blog, three myths
about Bitcoin's energy consumption from Satoshi Lab's. They point out that,
you know, it's electricity that it consumes, not energy writ large.
So it's like I use as a consumer electricity, gas
and gasoline. Bitcoin transactions only use electricity. But that's it's

(52:14):
honestly like I only bring that up just to show
both sides. But, yeah, it's true. I mean, it is
fair to say that a one single crypto or Bitcoin
transaction in 2020 probably was 741 kilowatt hours, which was
more compared to the cumulative 100,000 Visa transactions with only

(52:37):
one energy consumption of 149 kilowatt hours.

Speaker 1 (52:40):
Yeah, so there is a real issue here. And the
thing about this is it's an issue that's tough to
mitigate in many ways because the way the system is
built demands that increased consumption Ethereum, who, as we mentioned earlier,
is kind of the big daddy of NFT, uses a

(53:04):
process called proof of work to validate their transactions, to say, like, yes,
this is the actual thing happening and it is legitimate.
But in response to the growing criticism about energy consumption
and environmental damage, they've been moving to a less intensive
process called proof of stake. And this proof of stake process...

(53:28):
is going to, according to them, take up less than 1%
of the energy that's currently being consumed. So that's, I mean,
that's good news, I guess, but it's something a lot
of people haven't thought about. I didn't really think about it.
You know, you have to get a, it gives you
a sense of just how gargantuan the infrastructure is now

(53:50):
to create these coins. But there is one other philosophical
argument quandary here, and it's one that does not have
an easy answer, and it's this. We talked about it
at the very beginning. What is value? What is currency, economy, religion?
There's this fantastic fairy's tale that I guess qualifies as

(54:13):
a fairy. It doesn't really have fairies in it, but
there's this story that's very popular in the West, or
was back in the day, called The Emperor's New Clothes.
We all remember Back in the story goes, once upon
a time, there was an emperor who had everything. And
he was a super fancy dude. And he had all

(54:33):
this super fancy exclusive stuff. And he was very jaded
because he had bought everything you could buy. He had
the finest clothes, the finest caviar and cheese wheels and
NFTs hanging up at his boudoir. And he wanted something
that no one else could have. And so a tailor came.

(54:54):
from far away an unknown an unknown man came to
him and said i will create for you the finest
suit of clothes right the look at this this uh
this silk is so fine that only the most refined
eye could see it can you surely emperor you can
be the type of dude to appreciate this type of

(55:15):
stuff and then the emperor was just what did the
emperor do oh.

Speaker 2 (55:18):
My god yes it's gorgeous and feel this finery. It's
so soft. It's like velvet, but like, you know, magical
angel velvet.

Speaker 3 (55:29):
Give me all of the bolts.

Speaker 2 (55:31):
That's what fabric, invisible fabric comes in. And then, you know,
he makes him these outfits that he then wears in
a parade, and he's just got his junk all hanging out.
He's out there. And it's the perfect, it's a parable.
Let's call it a parable, perhaps, because it's meant to
teach a lesson, right? And the lesson is, be grateful
for the things you have, And don't focus all of

(55:51):
your energy on things because that's not going to make
you happy. And at the end of the day, you know,
it's like more money, more problems. If you get to
a point where you just keep wanting the next thing
and the next thing and the next thing, you're never
going to actually be happy because you're just building your
image of successful life and of happiness on stuff. And
it's the oldest cliche in the book, but you can't

(56:12):
take it with you. Um, and I feel like this
is a product of that. I think you're spot on Ben. This,
this phenomenon is a product of that malaise that I
think overly wealthy people have, or they want to have
a thing that no one else can have, or, get
in on early on the cool thing or, but you know,

(56:33):
the twist of that story is, I mean, I said
he was, he has junk hanging out and all that,
but I mean, that's because what?

Speaker 3 (56:38):
Well, my, my son, it's because there are no clothes. Uh, that's,
that's me talking to my son, reading the emperor's new
clothes to him. Um, there you go. Bingo. Um, so the, the,
the big thing here also is that, uh, The value
is based on really nothing besides the fact that it's
difficult to make these things. They are trackable and you

(57:00):
can make more of them and they're clean and they're
somewhat anonymous. So like the value is in what they
are somewhat, even though they're not really there, they're digital things.
But I think something that's really important here is that
because it is based on, based on belief, people who
have been heavily invested in something like Bitcoin or Ethereum,

(57:23):
them getting others to believe in the same way as
our salesman to the emperor, getting them to believe that
the Bitcoin is real and very, very valuable is highly
profitable to them because their investment goes higher and higher
with every new person that says, yes, I see the
clothes too. They, they're amazing. Um, so when I'm thinking about, um,

(57:45):
It's specifically calling out some billionaires and multi, multi, multimillionaires
out there who are going on Twitter and other places
talking up Bitcoin and Ethereum and all the other ones
out there saying how great they are and how you
should get invested. I'm imagining all of us people on
our level, like, you know, investing your hard earned money
in something like this. And then really we're filling the

(58:07):
coffers of billionaires who just went in on a whim
to invest in their Bitcoin.

Speaker 1 (58:15):
Some of that happened with Wall Street bets when we
saw people drop it in the thread to say, you
know what, the next GameStop is going to be. You
should invest in that.

Speaker 2 (58:24):
You're right. Yeah. Well, case in point, you know, our
buddy John McAfee of the antivirus fame? He was just
indicted for altcoin pump and dump scams where essentially he
was big upping these altcoins on his Twitter as a
person who's supposedly an expert and saying if you would ask, oh,

(58:46):
are you invested in this? And he would say, no,
my son, I am not. And of course he was.
And then he would pump it based on the exposure
it would get from his tweets. And then he'd dump
it and make the money and then rinse and repeat.
So he is actually facing up to 80 years in prison.
He's 75 years old. Can't believe that's what it took

(59:08):
for this guy to finally have to answer for some
of his misdeeds that we know about. Didn't he practically
stage a coup in a third world country or something, Ben?
I can't remember exactly what the deal was, but dude's
easily a maverick-y nutjob.

Speaker 1 (59:25):
He's lived a life. He's lived a life. But he
is also clearly... If he is convicted, which doesn't sound
like he has been yet, he's clearly doing exactly– he's
clearly tackling the same conundrum that you were talking about there, Matt,
which is Bitcoin is barely used as a real world currency.
It's bought, again, as an investment. So that means that

(59:48):
its value, whatever its value may be, is solely found
in the fact that other people value it. And so
when you ask how much something is worth in the
world of art, you're really asking– Because art is subjective,
you're really asking about other people's opinions in the future.
And then when you remove the physical object there, it
becomes increasingly intangible. Then this question becomes more and more

(01:00:12):
important and even more difficult to answer. No one does
have an answer yet. And I think we're endeavoring to
be very fair about this. You want to support your
favorite artist, then by all means. Do you want to
spend your money on what you want to spend it on? then,
I mean, by all means, as long as you're not

(01:00:32):
hurting somebody, it's pretty much up to you, right? That's
not a crazy take.

Speaker 2 (01:00:37):
I completely agree. And if I could, I would just
love to return briefly to that $ 69 million NFT auction
at Christie's by the artist Beeple, who I think is cool.
I like his art. I've followed him on Instagram for
many years now. But the piece that he auctioned off
was called The First 5,000 Days. Every day is the

(01:00:58):
first 5000 days. And if you look at it like
big or like, you know, zoomed out, it just looks
like a like a mosaic. Well, these tiny little squares,
all the tiny little squares are 5000 of his artworks
that he has published in digital form on his Instagram
over the years. And I recognize many of them now
to be completely transparent. There are some eagle eyed folks

(01:01:20):
that have searched through some of those images and found
some kind of racist and problematic images in there. So
I'm having to reassess my feelings about Beeple, but your
feelings about his art and his politics aside, he was paid, uh,
his cut $ 53 million, uh, of that $ 69. 3 million sale

(01:01:41):
in Ethereum. Guess what he did? He converted it to
us dollars instantly and, and, and, uh, and said, uh,
he did so he goes, boom, $ 53 million in my account.
Like what the, uh, I'm not remotely a crypto purist.
I was making digital art long before any of this.
And if this NFT stuff went away tomorrow, I would
still be making digital art today. He says, then goes

(01:02:04):
on to say, I absolutely think it's a bubble, to
be quite honest. There was a bubble and the bubble
burst and it wiped out a lot of crap, but
it didn't wipe out the internet. And so the technology
itself is strong enough where I think it's going to
outlive that, says the man with $ 53 million in his
bank account. If the bubble burst, it burst with him.
I would say, but clearly not.

Speaker 1 (01:02:25):
Well, you know, there's a, there's another thing. I'm sure
a lot of our full listeners were waiting for us
to mention Banksy or people claiming to be Banksy sold
a NFT just earlier this month after the original was
physically burned in Brooklyn. This is the first for the

(01:02:47):
art industry, the peaceful, was by the way, you gotta
love this Banksy approach. The piece was called Morons. It
pokes fun at art collectors. It had been burned by
a team of crypto enthusiasts at quote, a discreet location
in Brooklyn. They sold this NFT of this thing that

(01:03:09):
no longer physically exists for $ 38, 000. So what were those
folks buying exactly? were they buying something unique that only
they could appreciate or are they buying the emperor's new clothes?
I think that's, I think it's a fair question.

Speaker 3 (01:03:26):
It is.

Speaker 2 (01:03:26):
And it reminds me of another Banksy stunt where he
had a piece in a frame of like, I think
a little girl with the balloon or something like that.
And he posted a video that was either him or
I think Banksy's a group of people. But he posted
a video or they posted a video from the audience
in the auction and And right as it was auctioned

(01:03:48):
off with the final, you know, call of the auctioneer,
the frame shredded the piece before everyone's eyes. And guess what?
That made it more valuable because it stopped halfway. And
so now it's like so that's like literally because the
destruction of the art made the art more valuable because

(01:04:09):
it was now Banksy's hands were on it. And it's
just like custom shredder frame. So it's also ephemeral. And
I think it's no accident that one of the most
popular cryptocurrencies and the one used for these is called
Ethereum because it's all just kind of in the ether,
you know?

Speaker 1 (01:04:27):
And of course, to the collective known as Banksy, as
I think it's a group of people too, thank you
so much for hoisting. The world of fine art on
the petard it deserves.

Speaker 2 (01:04:41):
Yes.

Speaker 1 (01:04:43):
So massively appreciated. Thanks, as always, to everybody tuning into
the show. There is some stuff they don't want you
to know about cryptocurrency, and there are some questions that
have to be asked about NFTs. We can't wait to
hear from you. Are you an artist who has been
creating NFTs? Are you someone who has purchased one? What's

(01:05:04):
your opinion on cryptocurrency? Let us know. We cannot wait
to hear from you. You may end up hanging out
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You can make your own posts. You can do whatever

(01:05:39):
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It's that easy.

Speaker 1 (01:05:49):
Or make a dumb joke.

Speaker 3 (01:05:51):
Or that. Exactly.

Speaker 2 (01:05:53):
Yeah, there's definitely alternatives. We just need to know that
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