The Virality of Value: Memecoins in the Attention Economy - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2024

how are we feeling feeling good feeling good Jerome [ __ ] your puts Powell just did oh God just did a 50 bips rig cut how do you guys feel about that how you why you looking at me like that you call three months ago yeah yeah so uh you know at asymmetric we're actually a macro fund rest in crypto clothing and uh we wrote about this um almost 3 months ago and we were told that we were crazy because we thought that uh Jerome Powell had to cut 50 in September because he didn't cut 25 in July at 2:30 this morning I had to take some cringe Victory Laps on the internet because it turned out to be true so yeah 50 bips today from the FED we expect more liquidity to come into the market I think it's going to be a great Q4 for all of us yeah I think it's a pretty pretty big switch woo thank you go ahead what were you saying I was going to say yeah I think it's a pretty big switch in uh language from pal cuz their focus the past two years or so has been on bringing inflation back down and that's been the reason they're way more restrictive with their policy but uh at um their last meeting they were pretty clear and blatant that their focus is now on making sure the economy is not deteriorating further um and that's why I think one of the reasons they cut 50 instead at 25 but that language means that moving forward they're going to continue to go in that direction unless they see significant changes in the data on inflation um so I think it's really good for like Risk in general yeah I think what you'll end up seeing like to anon's point like the FED has what's called the Dual mandate where they focus on a Target inflation rate of about 2% and then they want to maximize Full Employment and so we saw softening in the labor markets over the course of the past couple of months they should have cut in July but they got data the day of the of of the meeting and they didn't cut which is why they had to cut 50 now but most importantly there's six weeks until the US election and so if there was any bad data print that comes within that time the FED now has egg on their face they would actually have to do what we would call an emergency cut and that would be a political [ __ ] storm in the United States there's no way that they were going to actually enable enable that to happen which is why they had to do 50 now the last thing I'll point out though is uh the 50 bits cut is important mostly because they can start high and taper lower right so when the tightening cycle began back in 2022 they shocked the markets with 75 VIPs and then another 75 and then did 25 from there this isn't necessarily a shock from our perspective they should have done 25 in July they're doing 25 in September uh now they're doing 50 and they're playing catchup so we think they probably do maybe another 50 in in November but certainly we on a path for 25 until we're 200 basis points lower from the top of the corridor which was 5 a half% so given that the FED is cutting typically you know there's two camps right one Camp is obviously they see liquidity in the market risk on some people call this uh you know potentially an upcoming recession or a signal For an upcoming recession funny enough I was listening to Peter the's podcast uh during all-in Summit and he seemed to be uh bearish uh he sees a recession coming he sees the AI boom as kind of the signals for that 999.com bubble um how would you respond to that I mean I would look at the data and right now the United States is tracking towards like a 3% GDP Atlanta fed GDP number yesterday came out they increased it to 3% it shows it ripping into the fourth quarter so on a from you know a pure economic output perspective it's hard to see a recession when you have Rising GDP values um I'd never bet against Peter teal so maybe he has crystal ball out into the future but I think the reality is like you have a a a cutting cycle that's begun by the fed that's going to loosen Financial conditions going to make it easier for people to borrow money refinance their mortgages buy homes and this is a global Central Bank coordinated effort see the same thing with the ECB see the same thing with the Bank of Canada etc etc moreover though in the United States next year in 2025 we have over $110 billion of capex investment for things building like you know chip manufacturing plants green energy all these types of things these are massively stimulative to the economy so as we sit here today like again I'm not betting against Peter te it's hard for me to envisage a situation where there's somehow some massive recession in 2025 and furthermore just because you're cutting rates doesn't mean that there's something wrong with the economy I think so many people make this mistake they go back and look at the previous 50 bits rate cuts and it was like covid Global financial crisis Doom bubble why are we cutting rates now because the real rates are too restrictive and so they want to stimulate the economy while maintaining you know low inflation and full employment and that's what you're going to see I think going into 2025 so uh given where we are in the market how would you construct your portfolio meme coins there we go the thing you guys came here for actually you came here for Iggy she's on her way so don't worry she's gonna be making an appearance but um no look I I I think if anybody has followed me on Twitter and even anom certainly I think has a similar view is like this concept of it's either a full full-blown depression or dog coins to a trillion Y and the reality is the federal the Federal Reserve and the central banks are going to be printing money that's not going to allow a depression to happen it's going to allow people to go further out on the RIS curve and so you know this is not Financial advice obviously but I think having exposure to meme coins is the highest risk return you could possibly have in a portfolio today uh don't put all of your money in it of course but you know balanced portfolio of course various uh crypto assets you know maybe you own some real estate that's cool maybe not but you know I think you're probably going to want to be long assets going into next year yeah I I definitely agree with that I think one thing with crypto is you never want to try and force your opinion on the market um and I think that's why a lot of people this year have done poorly in how they're um allocating because they believe something that the market was showing them consistently was not true um just on how certain assets have done comparably to others and it's been pretty proven I think this cycle so far that memec coins have been the best beta to their native l1s for sure um as people move down the risk curve outside of just the native asset they're looking at what other altcoins they can get exposure to and if you look at um altcoin trading volumes across centralized exchanges um across dexes all these different venues mean coins are a large percentage of that volume across the board um I think that's going to continue to happen so looking at the different types I mean there's so many meme coins now obviously over the past 18 months you know there's uh CB tokens which we'll talk about in a bit but you have meme coins that are trying to build its kind of wedge in the market uh and I think the one that you've called out anom was um me right mhm um and so I guess like what differentiates different meme coins what stands out to you um um what are the things that you look for when when you're looking at meme coins yeah there's a lot of different um attributes and factors that Meme coins have um I think the biggest and most important one is the community around them um I think mad talks about this a lot like the cult cult-like behavior that happens with memes um is super bullish and if you look at how Bitcoin originated back in whatever 20 2009 2010 um it didn't have any actual value like it had no value on exchanges no value anywhere really the only thing that um made the network has value was all of the validators Who Running validators on the network and all the people holding Bitcoin who believed in it and what it stand for and what it was and that's really purely uh mtic value um in the early days and then obviously it's it's would be impossible to recreate a Bitcoin just because of how it how it started out but early days there was that cult that Bitcoin cult is the reason it's still here today reason crypto is still here cuz if those people didn't believe in Bitcoin early on um there's no reason for it would be priced like at any any dollar value um so I think now what like I look at four main attributes when I'm when I'm discussing mem coins and which ones you should be buying I think relatability is one that's really important so when I say relatability that means any person that doesn't know what crypto is um like doesn't know what defi is doesn't know what L1 is a rollup whatever all the technical aspects but they're able to identify what the mem coin is and what it what it relates to so like whiff is a really good example any body can understand it's a dog with a hat like that's really easy for anybody to understand I think meme coins are kind of a chosen horse to get people into crypto and then they do more research and learn about all the other different factors um second thing I would say is like distribution is really important so there are memes that launch with their own teams like Bon is an organized team very structured super smart people behind it um and they own a certain percent of the supply but it's vested um over a certain amount of years and they're doing work to do events like Partnerships and all that stuff for Bon um so if the distribution is concentrated and a team or certain amount of people you need to be vested or you need that community of people to be very interested in the meme long term the issue that we saw with the Celeb coins is these boted launches or sniped on um on launch but they had zero intention of staying around long term a lot of them um which is why you have people who have like 50% of the supply obviously the coin is not going to be able to do well on launch so the team and then there's more decentralized version U which is more common among memes is you want really widespread distribution early on um With Your Meme coins and the reason that you want really widespread distribution is you have a ton more voices that are going to speak to it um and make it go viral across different platforms across different socials um in its early days and that's how I think these things spread like wildfire third thing I would say um is like the virality aspect so if you look at Doge in 2017 I got you guys know Elon was obviously pushing Doge super hard which caught me off guard but because of how many people he knew and everybody knows who Elon is that made Doge able to go viral super super easily so with memes it's either connection to um some like current events that people know really well or like people influential across socials or like athletes um that a lot of people know if they're connected to these memes that's another way that they go um super vile and I say the last thing is like extensibility so with whiff also one of the ways that it went super viral is because the Hat aspect of the meme you can put a hat on all of these other different things that are not technically related to whiff but once you make them related to whiff by meming them in that way um that also spreads uh the attention so whenever people saw like a hat or like edited a popular meme with a hat like that's another way um they were extended the meme onto other like things in pop culture yeah anom and I did a podcast in December of last year and uh I forget who it was with but um the interviewers asked him a question about whiff and he said he's like I asked this girl you know that I was with like which one of these she has she's if I remember correctly she was not into crypto or anything and he was like which one of these do you think is like cuter or you know whatever the best that you would like want to gravitate towards and it was this dog with a hat on right it was obvious and uh I think there's an extremely underappreciated importance in that Simplicity and then you take exactly what he just described with the extensibility the Hat can be applied to basically anything like that has extreme meme virality capabilities built into it and yeah let's over intellectualize a dog with a hat but it works like you see the thing on the hat is like on everything right and that just keeps SP spreading through you know the internet Zeitgeist and more and more people get associated with the whiff Community the other thing that I tend to look at and he had mentioned Bon right Bon has like a crazy story as it relates to how it came to be in salana it was air dropped to people on Christmas Day 2022 in the absolute suicide watch state of depression that people were in at that time and it helped fuel a lot of developer teams to continue to be building on salana the Bon team to Anson's point they're very smart they're very like they operate like a company and now what has stemmed from this sort of like you know team of community members that just wanted to help push Salon forward there's actual products and they're doing live events that are generating real protocol Revenue that feeds back into this ecosystem so a lot of people ask me like a meme coin why would it have utility it's like well why would it not you either have to constantly be capturing attention which is very very difficult to do or eventually when you become a blue chip meme coin which in my definition is you reach a billion- dollar market cap and retain it you have to figure out another way to have some level of utility associated with it and so you know if you look at mother for example with what Iggy's been doing she's done something I don't think anybody has been able to do in web 3 because most people will come to like a celebrity getting into you know you guys probably saw the last cycle with the nfts and all the nonsense that was associated with that they think it's immediately like oh they're grifting and I I think that that's a healthy skepticism but if you look at what she's doing and where how mother is being integrated into so many different products and projects um no one's really doing that and these are her companies businesses things that she's involved in but I think the other key thing that's different and I think gets lost on say the Celeb token concept barring all the scams clearly but those are always going to happen no matter what if it's in crypto or not you know 10 15 years what ever it was when Instagram first came out and celebrities started to get on Instagram people loved it because they felt closer to their celebrities there's a level of proximity that gets smaller even though like you know you're just on an app and you're looking at like whatever what Kim Kardashians eating for breakfast but as a fan you kind of feel like you're more connected to her and I think Iggy's gone on record to say that this is one of the things she likes about the mother community and the token that she's created it's another way of having some proximity to her and what she's doing and her cult of personality I think that that is a really like sort of underappreciated Point as to how the mcoin theb coin has become a thing in crypto personally I don't think memecoins are the right naming factor for what's happening in the space m um I do think meme coins bring in a negative connotation to to all the things that are happening um and I mean like what's really happening today is that we're all tokenizing ourselves we're tokenizing Brands we're tokenizing individuals and her her brand value and the token within that brand to all its entire ecosystem for for mem coins they're starting to build out like animations and like real world toys and products like pudgy Penguins is this how you guys think about it is this where you think it's going to go I mean from my perspective you know I've I've written about this and and probably tweeted too many times about it but the way I look at like meme coins culture coins celeb coins whatever you want to call it um things that basically piss off VCS these these types of tokens um they attach themselves to culture and culture can be personified through things like art music food fashion Etc but there's absolutely internet culture and so you as a person on the internet or you know an anonymous pickle on your Twitter like what doesn't matter like you could be anything you want on the internet and there's ways of that people can build community they can monetize that they can token themselves to your point I think that that is actually such a new area of exploration for what's happening on the internet because back in like 20067 whenever YouTube really started to pop off this was the first time we had like a viral video but the person that made the viral video couldn't like monetarily benefit from it it was basically YouTube and then eventually if you had viral content you could get a little small like percentage of it and then maybe you have some like referral or affiliate links to something else well what's happened with uh you know call them culture coins or meme coins is that there's now the ability for an individual a team a product a concept to actually have monetary value associated with it that can be propagated through the you know the the world at the speed of light I think that that's just an incredibly powerful thing is it good or bad I don't really care it's happening and so as an investor especially as a hedge fund manager my job is to generate returns for my investor and so this is one of the the reasons why we we have no problem kind of adopting and and partaking in this cultural experiment as to what's happening with say meme coins and culture coins in crypto yeah I think every cycle for crypto we kind of get a new primitive that's proven out um and I think the focus for this cycle people have said it's like a mem coin cycle but I think what it really is is consumer adoption and like consumer apps in crypto that's really what it's representative of um like the first proof of concept I would say would be Bitcoin obviously um store value um hedge against inflation second one be ethereum Global decentralized computer you can build all these applications on that's proven out now and the third thing I would say is mainly defi like we have core defi Primitives now that not just us crypto native people believe in people in trafi believe they have value um these applications have been up and running for a long time now and people store billions of dollarss on them and I think this cycle is the consumer Focus cycle for crypto so I think nfts were really the the Trojan Horse for retail last cycle um there were a ton of people completely new to crypto who went directly to nfts didn't know Bitcoin was didn't know what all these other things where they went directly to nfts and the same way this cycle people are going directly to memec coins and then learning and researching on the back end I think that we haven't seen the long-term proof of these culture coins having value at the community and owning a partnership part of that value we haven't seen that proof yet I think pudgy Penguins is probably the closest to it they've done a really really good job with their nft brand that's like a brand like a real brand that these people who own the nfts feel like they own a own a part of that brand and they have all their merchandise in Walmart um like the plushies people people buy um those are doing well well so that's like a brand that's done well I think similarly memes are doing the same thing now as like a brand um like Mew was at the anime convention in New York um handing out toys handing out plushies um doing their demos and games and things like that and there's a there's some memes that are going down that path of being like a brand in a culture that people feel like they own a part of in crypto so yeah I think it's it's consumer Focus apps consumer um focus things in crypto this cycle that's that's a big area I know you talk about all the time yeah um but this also has a a pretty big implication to the you mentioned the VC market and then obviously like the infrastructure market and and all the things that that uh has happened over the past few years but it seems like you know a lot of value a speculative retail value is moving away from infra to meme coins and other types of culture coins is this a a permanent Behavior change um how do you think this is going to affect you know protocol that are generating cash flows um where do you think the specul like is like I guess from a high Lev perspective is retail always going to display in the culture coin area moving forward and the smart money will go to uh you know infra defi Etc yeah well no go ahead andon I I think there's two two main reasons for that I think whenever you see the first iteration of something in crypto that's when it has its speculative Mania like it's super super high no target really nothing to compare it to and that's what happened with l1's last cycle you had l1's last cycle who went extremely high cuz nobody had any Benchmark besides ethereum that really was it so at the end State you ended up with these l1s with like multi-billion dollar valuations but no apps on them and not not a ton of users um outside of a few and so now it's like okay where do we price this infra as they're in the stages of that proof of concept and building out the apps and having users and gting users the second thing I think is like the regulatory issue just like it's it's really hard for people to direct cash flows through these tokens to token holders right now and obvious that's going to change in the future but that's like another reason I would say yeah I mean like I love thinking about this because uh there's there's so many people that will um come from say traditional finance and you know they've got their spreadsheets and their discounted cash flow and price to earnings ratios and all this [ __ ] that was made up you know think about it like what was before the price to earnings ratio no one knows and then all of a sudden somebody created it you know what that is that's a meme that's a meme guys sorry price is a meme now people will take this as as the word of God and bring it into finance and think that that's actually the way that it's supposed to work and then they take that from traditional finance and apply to crypto what's the big difference crypto is permissionless networks and protocols these are businesses so why would you take a business model and apply it to a network it doesn't make any sense yeah right oh look who it is I swear I'm not an [ __ ] I just uhhuh it's I'm really not well you entered at a great time cuz I was boring them with discounted pass models so Iggy iselia everybody hi sorry I really apologize I do apologize it's just F1 is kicking my ass yeah I know he's kicking my ass well to finish the thought so that we can actually get to the main event um you know look ask yourself this question if you're out in the audience right now and you and you have you know a few few thousand or few million dollars are you going to buy a token that is generating real revenue or are you going to buy mother like think about it you're going to buy something that's actually going to be moving with the market going forward and frankly fewer people know about Ava and to anon's point that was last cycle so I just don't think that there's a lot of value in applying uh these old models to to the kind of the new token economy especially on a cycle basis so you know we talked a bit about what are meme coins right and I think people have this very negative connotation to them and so I sent a message in our group chat to ask you know what do you guys want to talk about and you mentioned something which I think really hit home um I feel like the internet memes can be a language an idea or a song a token can be a meme token without having to have a a newer and more widely accepted version of a meme so you almost feel like this is the next evolution of a meme it's the next evolution of a meme but it's also the standard original rendition of what mimics is and I think that what's happened is memes have been adopted by internet culture and so now we have this more what I would say is the modern modernized version of how we think of a meme a meme is a picture with something funny or an one illustration of something that's transferred over and over again on a online and that's not actually what a meme originally was a meme is a unit of culture that could be language that could be playing hopscotch that could be a catchy song and yes now because of the internet we have this new derivative of it but I think the interesting thing is to see that now that's been kind of suspended in time as aim is only this one thing aim is so much more it always has been the term was coined many decades ago and so I think what I would like to see as the older original version I would like I think that is the future of meme tokens and it kind of gets confused then when we talk about things like well what is it is it a celebrity token is it a meme token celebrity token Is MeMe token meme token doesn't have to be an illustration of something it can be as simple as a catchphrase and that can become a meme token and I think that that's what we're going to start to see culturally within crypto where what as the definition of of meme is can kind of navigate back to the original concept of that what's very interesting and just want to uh touch on a point when Haka uh first went viral I saw on pump fun like four or five I mean maybe 20 or 30 different Haka tokens Y and you see this with every New Meme like man in finance I don't know if you guys have seen that the Viral Song but I've seen many tokens that went viral because of man and finance relationship so I think that there something really important happening here which which you brought up and it was the only message you sent but that was a message that no no but but that kind of the most important one in my opinion about when we're talking about this because it's very relevantly that's how powerful I think that must I think that if more people approached you know if you're thinking about starting a meme coin project I think that it would be really beneficial to you to look to a a broader definition of of what meme is what mimics are and how you can incorporate that your token I think it also helps with subjects that we've spoken about a lot Joe and anom in terms of escapism or building out a larger um you know I idea of what it is uh more robust that's what I do like about celebrity meme is that it it can be language because the subject can speak um it it can be something that they wear over and over again there are a lot of ways that it can culturally meme itself but that does doesn't mean that that concept is limited to it being a physical person you could start just with your phrase and that is the meme token and I think that if you're going to be a first mover in where meme tokens are going MH it would be smart for you to consider having a different angle like that to set yourself apart from the traditional form that we see of a a tokenized illustration of a meme yeah I mean to your point about like the to a thing and like what's so fascinating about this cuz I was a soft software developer for a long time and you can basically like front run culture with tokens now right if you know actually how to write code and you can execute on salana with smart contracts and you have like maybe you have some filtering mechanism where you know like when the hawk Tua thing happen it just automatically generates a token it automatically creates a pool and then people can kind of like go AP [ __ ] on it I'm not suggesting that's like a good or bad thing it's just going to happen and to to Iggy's point it doesn't have to be a an animal a human being any of these types of things it could be literally a phrase and so I think we're kind of like at the very very beginning of how crazy this shit's going to get because when things can just programmatically tokenized culture what does that mean I don't think anybody has an answer for that which I think is why it's really exciting for all of us on stage it's effective like for example I like to play around with these sorts of other types of memes that we're talking about and a few days ago we decided in my community to meme a phrase and so we started to do copy pastes online um and anom you participated in this of uh igia Alia started the Bull Run it's silly but you know just from a phrase alone that is a meme that then transfers itself and repeats over and over and over again and is replicated and then your my market cap is up by 15 million that day and I haven't actually produced any stereotypical meme there but I have I have MD language and things like that I think are going to become very effective because we are oversaturated and I think fatigued as as a marketer and as an audience of what we traditionally uh think of in this in this category yeah I I completely agree and I think like on the one hand people have asked me Joe there's such a proliferation of meme coins is that good or bad and I'm like well if you have a fixed supply of people yeah but this is what's I think so cool about having someone like Iggy come into the we web 3 Community is that she's helping Bridge a massive you know new user base into the space now they could start with and this is what anom was talking about earlier they could start with being like I want to be a part of the mother Community I'm going to hold some mother token but then all of a sudden guess what they have a a wallet and then they start to understand like oh wait so like I can go and get a discount on my mobile phone service because I can pay with mother on unreal mobile like that's pretty cool but then they're like wait a second how do I like get cash back in my bank account they have to create like a coinbase account or okx or whatever depending on where you live it creates this kind of like path dependent virtual or virtuous you know sort of end goal where you start with someone who has a huge audience huge reach globally identified as a a cultural icon but that can bleed into a broader user base and so you know right now yeah all of us in crypto we're like shuffling our money around and trying to figure out who's going to make a few bucks right that's basically it until you have this kind of Step function Improvement in the number of users it's not going to change too much yeah you could have the institutional side of stuff buying Bitcoin ETFs Etc but until you actually have like culture at a mass level adopting crypto you know it's just going to be more of the same of what we've seen for the past you know call it six seven months yeah I also would like to add to that that I think that that sort of token functionality integration is something that we're going to see a lot more now that we see crypto accepted as a payment system um a lot more openly and I think that's going to rapidly keep developing where there's going to I think it will be a necessity for meme tokens to integrate those sorts of perks not just I see people talk a lot about this as okay having these sorts of perks can on board the normies on board the new users and yes that is one function but also I think it kind of eliminates some of the PVP type of mentality that we see that gets people like we're saying in and out of a token quickly and turns it more into a PPP system where you are more likely to stay within this token because there are these other perks that you're getting and it's not just that they're integrated I think what's really important Beyond just the integration of the token into these sorts of products or things be being relevant in future but that they come with a discount or they come with an incent incentive to make the user say okay this club is valuable to me because I have these experiences that are on offer to me beyond the experience of a digital community and it's going to have to uh develop that way for it to remain competitive here if we're going to have access to crypto freely when we're out in retail it can't just then be well the token is integrated into this okay well I can pay for this in salana Bitcoin the token why would I join this meme coin then that's no longer integration becomes no longer just the perk it has to develop into something that um you know is of more interest and value to the to the people that are holders here it's like a sub social network it is and it's also I think integration is interesting because it's a way to add to the brand identity what is Your Meme token and and what is it about and what other brands can you then align yourself with in a parallel approach that give you a more in-depth Persona of who is is it that's in your token holding it and how does that person see themselves and it's a lot like that in entertainment where people identify I like rap music or I like this artist and this to me means that I dress a certain way and I outwardly can show you what I like and brand Association plays a lot into that culturally with music or entertainment already so I think that with crypto becoming a lot more retail it's undeniable that we're going to see that type of thing happen in meme tokens too where it's more than just what do you hold in your wallet oh yeah I it's beyond that the meme token can become a bigger brand or Persona that somebody can identify with and say yes this is me and all these brands are me that are associated with it and this is a wider more cultural thing that's happening here that I see myself in and want to be a part of and these people in this community also are this so I want to come and be here with that can you identify that when you like you know a a cat how do you know when you're looking you know at the party that everybody there likes this one you know token you you can't it doesn't have these defining factors or I'm just trying to mindlessly integrate into every other thing for the sake of utility like it's that does not develop brand identity and so there's no consumer identity then to see themselves and want to be parallel to that and I think that that's very important for the future of where meme tokens ultimately have to go with retail expanding for crypto I completely agree and I think one thing that I want to kind of underscore to Iggy's Point like celebrities have found ways of monetizing well beyond you know their craft right so like Ryan Reynolds is a great example he's an amazing actor but he had like a tequila brand and he had a you know a mobile virtual Network operator that he sold and made a fortune on uh rihan has her Cosmetics line right like everybody knows about the Kardashian sort of retail Empire I don't even know how many products they have but and I'm not even sure what they're but and to cut you off quickly though I will want to add to that they come with a brand identity there are people that do not want to purchase that product because they do not see themselves Associated as a person with that Persona that's right yeah and and and with say like if you look at like uh Rihanna for example with her Cosmetics line like she has an enormous audience and there are there are people that want to associate with her and she's built a brand identity I think the next level up from that is what Iggy's doing with Mother she's creating a brand identity around mother itself while having you know access to her celebrity and all the things that she's doing with it I think that's the key difference here is that all of the other folks that have tried to enter web 3 and do some celebrity thing aren't thinking about it from how do we build a brand around this that people want to be a part of because they may know me from you know my my years as a super successful uh you know you know artist right that's a huge differentiator I think for what Iggy's doing as well as how things are going to be going moving going forward yeah I I I agree with that I S successful celebrity tokens cannot translate if the brand is just the person exactly that does not work as a concept and that has to change when we're talking about celebrity meme tokens it cannot be that it has to be the same retail formula that you're talking about with Rihanna having Fenty or Kim Kardashian having schemes where we've moved beyond for them in retail their face necessarily being on the brand to entice the consumer and it is the same formula with meme tokens that is the only way that it can work otherwise you're pigeon ho holding yourself into okay the super fan of what I've already built out here as a brand identity it is a different audience and it just cannot work that way that's right andon I think one of the most important realizations for me is how much attention is actually worth in this attention economy if you look at the Haw Tu a girl that was like a 30second clip and it turned her into a billion dollar business in less than a month if you look at how people do deals with these very important Like Rappers athletes companies um like Stak stake did a deal with Drake for 100 million because so many people know what Drake is and I think it's easy for people to understand how much that attention is worth when it's not a coin or a token but when you do that that uh transfer that fin financialization that crypto does people kind of like Get Lost In The Gap there I think it's it's really really really under under um underemphasize how much attention is going to be worth especially with how how much people are on the internet now I agree and all these people that we're talking about in the retail space ultimately they are successful because they create memes we're talking about musical artists a song is a meme a hook is a meme they are in the position that they are and the platform that they are because they understand mics whether they realize that they do or not they do and so this is the same thing and that is why I feel so strongly about the fact that we have to expand our concept and reasoning of what an internet meme is and backtrack that to what it was originally that that is the key to where this is ultimately going whether you agree with it or not I mock my words in five years that is what we're going to be seeing for meme tokens I'm very sure of that you know what's very interesting as uh we see a lot of startups in the crypto space um we're starting to see startups that are looking to tokenize music and songs um and we're starting to see like onboarding experiences like moonshot they're looking to onboard more and more retail so all all of what you you're saying is starting to happen even in the startup World which is very interesting for sure um and it's [Laughter] cool and that's why why I'm wearing a cowboy hat today because I'm having a rodeo and I'm very committed to branding you know um and that's why I'm wearing this cowboy hat today because I just want to showcase the fact that escapism matters here too when we're developing meme tokens and developing a concept that people can buy into I think that we understand that when we have especially in nfts the storylines of nfts or what this gecko has in the different parts of it and what we can develop that within meme tokens too but it doesn't have to be that it is secondary to some picture or Persona or character it this is directly the the consumer that has to identify with it now in future you think igy do you think what you're doing though is actually reproducible for other celebrities that your friends with yes 100% but do they want to right I don't know yes exactly I think that once there's a road map for people to see how to integrate and how that can be successful then yes I think that they will but I I think in my personal opinion I'd say that we're about two or three years away from that truly happening because meme tokens as a whole need to evolve into this new model that we're talking about and having memes that can be people or language will make a lot of that make more sense to The Outsider or the celebrity but I don't really think that celebrities are essential in um coming into the space and showing you how to do that it already exists in the retail space we already have that room road map of what T uh catches a consumer's attention and gets them to buy into the brand and then want to look the brand want to outwardly represent the brand want to buy into the brand experience and other parallel products and really we should be taking that road map no matter if you are an illustrated token or if you're language or music or uh human being right and we we have the road map there it doesn't require necessarily celebrity to come in and and do that celebrity does that in retail and meme tokens should look to that road map and find ways to utilize it in the crypto space because it's proven and it's been proven for decades and decades and decades yes products have expanded and they're more robust now in the way that we integrate them into an already engaged audience but you know this has been occurring for for decades it's not it's not a New Concept the internet makes that hyper sensationalized and we have more access to the consumer and to the to the data of what is working or not and meme tokens need to take that it's available to us and start to integrate it into the token it can't just be hype or selling the news anymore it's not going to be good enough yeah in many ways I feel like there's a couple things that I'm I'm hearing one is um uh s tokens and token in general are going to become much more rampant and so people will have to design different playbooks and in your case you're actually designing the playbook for celeb tokens yeah um and so I do feel as if once you find massive success I could see you know hundreds of other celebrities coming in replicating that Playbook and you me you you tweeted something this morning um I think it was this morning where you talked about the uh uh the debate rebuttal with Eric yes um and you mentioned something and I want to bring this up which is celeb tokens are simply meme tokens with docs Founders and larger reach right which I think is that that's like exactly what it is um and so I think that was very important but then one more thing I want to touch on is that there's a group of people within crypto that just hates uh or doesn't believe in celeb tokens meme tokens and Etc I don't believe in Celebrity tokens as they have been in the past either I think that concept does not work I understand the concept of getting a person that has a platform and to board an audience yes that could work yeah but the road map of how to make that happen will will never be successful and does not work it does not work if we're approaching celebrity token as something that is outwardly different to Simply ducked founder of a meme coin it it's a losing battle that's right you cannot say I'm Katie Perry and buy ktie coin dollar sign Katie no that is not what what kind of a brand ident idti is that what's my experience where is this escapism what it's not it has to be a a wider concept I'll talk about I wasn't meaning to talk about Katy Perry but I will Celebrity perfumes are a good example of this um and it seems like a weird thing to compare but successful celebrity fragrance is something that many celebrities go into fragrance and attempt and the ones that work Katie Perry had a good one uh it was purr she took something that she's known for she likes cats she has cats and she made a perfume purr it's a memeable thing that is parallel to her persona but she didn't call her perfume or brand it Katie that's right meme tokens are the same thing with especially with celebrity tokens it it has to be a relatable concept that's still on brand a parallel harmonious branding for the celebrity at hand but it cannot be just here I am yeah exactly love me no exactly look I mean the the the point that you were making about like the folks that get so upset that celeb coins meme coins culture coins even exist like the the CTO of a16 Z's crypto fund he and I were supposed to have a debate and he refused uh because he he's like one of these guys and look I I don't know him personally but like I see him on the internet and you know he's he's he he and other folks that um tend to over intellectualize a lot of their investments in this space have a problem with people [ __ ] [ __ ] up with things like meme coins like that's just a fact and that's never going to change these are permissionless networks by Design you should embrace this type of like bizarre creativity that's going to happen and frankly having culture actually adopt this new text technology makes it cemented for life so this should be actually embraced by the broader community as opposed to VCS with massive bags and investments in over intellectualized Technologies pointing to meme coins and culture coins as if it's some sort of horrible thing for the industry it's just nonsense well what's what's really funny about that is when you have a trade thesis and it incites a ton of anger in a very large group of people it's either a really good thesis or it's a really bad thesis I've learned that a lot it's like if you can if people are like really really really against it that means that whatever belief they currently have if that ends up being proven wrong they're going to have to redo their entire thought process on why they're wrong and those are also people that are going to end up buying later um so it's really interesting it happened to me with salana also last year people were yelling at me saying I was crazy for talking about Sal I was going to do well this cycle um I ended up being right as like the market has shown but if I were to take what people were telling me back then and just listen to them I would never have bought it at all um so that's that's a really interesting like point with trades I think for sure all right sorry I think we're at time um any final words any final words uh giving igy final word my final word is this if everybody thinks something is maybe a terrifying idea I would [ __ ] lean into that [ __ ] lean in lean in I I am a rapper a lot of people thought that I was very [ __ ] but I'm still very successful because it's a polarizing concept y if there are a lot of people that are that are so far on one side against something it's probably very Innovative it's probably very scary and if you can figure out how to crack that lean into that [ __ ] because you need to take risks and it's going to pay off and I believe that what we're talking about is inevitable and I really don't think that it's harmful I think that the concept that that causes harm or somehow uh takes away to bring in people that like meme tokens or these sorts of tokens to crypto is really like not the way that human nature is humans are not two-dimensional we're all eclectic we have very different interests we like multiple things I can like a meme token I'm sure a lot of you do or like to have fun and do something silly it doesn't mean that you don't want to go and read the Wall Street Journal or that you're not excited about the rate cut I [ __ ] am and I also I'm going to go shake ass tonight at a party you know I we all can be robust and an Eclectic and I think for a space to truly be have stay power and and to to grow in the way that it needs to and evolve it has to be a wider ecosystem and you have to understand that yes maybe you hook someone on something that's technical or maybe you hook someone on something that's silly and escapism but they're going to come into the ecosystem and see other products that are of interest to them and so ultimately I think that it's beneficial to me when someone is a a [ __ ] Bitcoin Maxi purist that comes and checks my stuff out because you'd be surprised how many of them actually want to have a good time and vice versa maybe you came in here for some escapism and to do something silly and you just wanted cats and dogs but now you're talking to people in this community and you see that this other thing is of interest to me too and so ultimately however you get them in the door crypto is an amazing expansive world I've only been in it for four months and I'm having the [ __ ] time of my life I'm interested in things that I never thought that I'd be interested in or that I looked at in the outside and thought that's so boring and it's not it's fun it's exciting I feel like when I see the market move up and down or Soul move up and down I feel like I'm seeing a song on a chart go up and down and that same experience is going to be shared by other people it's not that you are onboarded for one thing and then you are simply some two-dimensional thing that only is there for that so there's really nothing to be fearful of in that regard we just need to on board with whatever the the the spark is and to make sure that we have a robust community that then entices people to explore it and it is really that simple to adoption yes exactly thank you lit all right thank you guys so much yeah