Raoul's Unified Thesis on NFTs

27:38It's very similar. So that was interesting. But Damien now has a community in a Discord channel, and he can do other things with that community that he couldn't do before. So it opened up a whole new world to him. But for others, it's created the ability to get around a similar idea. Now, one of my favorites has been two of them are actually similar-ish, which are MFers and Rex Guy, of which I own both of those two. Why those two? Well, MFers I bought first. MFers was really interesting because that is basically a representation of all of us in Web3, stuck at our computers, dressed in whatever, working all day and all night and absolutely loving it.

28:22We're all motherfuckers, and that's what the MFers is all about. It's a representation of us. We're looking at ourselves in the mirror with a smile on our faces, laughing how ridiculous and how hard we're all working, and how we're addicted to our computers. That really resonated with many people, and I think everyone saw themselves in it. RecGuy came exactly at the right moment from OSF, good friend of mine. From his artwork from Red Light District and other pieces, developed this PFP of the RecGuy. And the wrecked guy was that Web3 MF-er, essentially, hoping that prices would recover and getting wrecked.

29:05And part of the space is understanding the volatility and understanding that sometimes you're going to get wrecked. Sometimes somebody's going to pull the rug on you because it's so nascent, there's scams around. Other times, the NFT you think was valuable is worth nothing. And other times, they're worth a fortune. or the crypto market itself gets trapped in the macro liquidity cycle, and everything's down 80%. That's being wrecked. And Wreck Guy represents that. And again, it's the humor, the gallows humor of we get what this space is about. It's different. We're different people, and we deal with it.

29:41And I love that. It's culturally relevant. And what's happened is they've held events around the world. They've got no roadmap. He's not trying to create yuga. He's just saying, listen, we're all in this together. Let's have some fun with it. And I love it. And that really resonated with me. So there's a lot of these different types of communities. And they're really, really interesting. We've seen crypto dick butts as well, which is A, one of the funniest of all. And B, it's the irreverency as well, the fun. There's so little fun in the world right now. And Web3 is fun. It's based on fun and irreverency and laughing at ourselves, celebrating when everything goes wrong, celebrating when it goes right.

30:26We're all in this together, we're all going to make it. And the way that people say GM to each other is not ridiculous. us. It's a reflection of the bitter wars of Bitcoiners versus Ethereum people and how seriously people took the space. But this injected something different in. It injected a sense of community. And the community is not, oh, I'm a Bored Ape and you're a punk. It's like, we're all welcome together. We're all going to make it. And that idea that we can bring communities together again really has been what's needed. Because we look at the political battles online, and the battles of belief systems, and it's a tough old world on the internet.

31:10And Web3 just goes, fuck all of that. We're all humans. We're all ridiculously flawed. We're all trying to do groundbreaking stuff, have some fun. Some of us succeed, some of us will fail. And I think that's amazing. We've also seen some incredible uses of NFTs in the music space. I think this is still very nascent. RIC pioneered it. People like Jack Spillone and a bunch of others, Cooper, a whole bunch of people have pioneered this. It's not yet taken off, but I think it's coming. I think it's going to be really, really important because what is music? Right now, it's a digital file, and it's endless in supply.

31:52Why would you not make it an NFT and make it limited in supply. Maybe the artwork for records that we used to love, I used to get an album or a CD, and it was the artwork I loved. Maybe those can become NFT, so they have scarcity, and you want to collect them again, as opposed to just streaming it from your Spotify list. Because artists got screwed like everybody's got screwed in this whole system. This is a way of both artists and music artists to get their IP back, their value back within their community because they are valuable. If Rihanna produced a limited supply album for just 1 ,000 fans, what would they pay for it?

32:33A lot. What benefits could you come with it? Well, because it's a smart contract, you can have first rights to tickets, you can have all sorts of things. That leads me into what Ticketmaster have been doing, and I will get them on Real Vision at some point is they've been dropping NFTs to everybody who turns up to sporting events and music events because their wallet is NFT, is Web3 enabled. Now, I'm not sure there's a full roadmap for that yet. But the idea is get these things in as many hands as possible, which is Punk6529's mission. I've had, what, five or six hours of conversation with Punk6529.

33:10And he's become a good friend of mine. And somebody, I think, is really the trusted guardian of the space in terms of thinking and what he's trying to do. He's thinking, well, listen, everything has been centralized. And here's a chance when we go into the metaverse and this digital rendition of the world that we live in, that we can reinvent this relationship that we have with our own communities, assets, IP, and culture, the memes. See, memes run societies. Memes run all societies. Religion is a meme. Everything is a narrative that humans invent to create societal contracts and societal constructs.

33:57So his idea is, well, let's seize the memes of production. What he means by that is, let's get as many people into the space as possible, where we We physically own digital assets. And that means that we can coalesce and create platforms that are better aligned with our own needs as opposed to the needs of a giant corporation. So if you think about Facebook, Google, and others, they captured the lion's share of all of the revenue of a space where we got used by advertising. And it's only going to get worse as we get into a more digital world, as we start heading into the metaverse, where we start to have a more visual representation of the digital lives we live in, as opposed to streaming text on Twitter or whatever it may be.

34:39There's a huge change coming. This is an important battle to face, is our rights as humans in this world. I think it also leads us into identification. I've talked a lot about this. I think it's incredibly important that we have digital identification and that we can keep it private, but we're provable who we are, and that we have the credentials we say we are. Say we have, and I think that is going to be increasingly important in a world driven by AI, where you can make any image instantaneously in huge quantities for any different type of person. We don't know what's real and what's fake. We could have Joe Biden saying, I'm going to nuke Russia tomorrow in a CNN video.

35:25You can do that very soon just by text to video, and it will create the video. That's a huge problem coming up to the US election. I mean, imagine how other sovereign states could use this. We don't know what is real and what's not. We don't know who we're dealing with online. Are we dealing with AI? Are we dealing with bots? Are we dealing with real people? Digital verification of identity, I think, is going to become increasingly important. Now, governments will get involved in it. There's nothing we can do about that. And you will have your government ID, much like you have your passport. And guess what?

36:02Governments know everything about what's in your bank account, and Google knows everything about you. You actually have no privacy, even though you think you do. But we can get our privacy back, and we can use it to log in around the web and have different manifestations of ourselves. I might want to be somebody different on Reddit than I am on Twitter, than I am on Real Vision, for example. And the ways of doing that to prove that I'm actually a real person, I'm the same person, without saying who I am. Or maybe I don't want to prove I'm the same person, but I give a certain layer of the information away.

36:32Anyway, that's digital ID, which is a massive, massive part of all of this. The other thing that we're seeing is business models around capital and involvement. I think people like Ben Mesrich and Dan Sickles, both filmmakers, have done really interesting things around what you can do with movies and books and other stuff like that, is you can essentially crowdfund it by getting people to buy NFTs that involve in it that may get some stream of payments or participation in the future success of that project. It's like Yuga Labs. But if I'm seeing award-winning filmmakers and authors doing it, okay, that's really interesting.

37:12Ben Mesrich's bigger idea is to create a platform for authors, much like Amazon's done with the ability to self-publish. But imagine if you can get paid better, you have to keep your ownership rights, Amazon doesn't take a larger share, and you can get a community behind it, et cetera. Okay, that becomes really interesting. The 1 ,000 true fans approach is much easier to do once you have Web3 enabled access. So I think that's disrupting the media industry. I think we'll see NFTs become very large in the sports industry in due course. Collectibles have always been a large part of that industry, and it's only going to get larger.

37:49Brand loyalty and brands, I've built a whole business around this called Science Magic Studios, which I co-founded. I'm not involved in running it, but Tarek, who is the president of Science Magic Studios, he broke new ground as well, because he realized that there was something called Fidgetal, where basically you could have digital manifestation of physical goods, which is Adidas trainers. How could you then partner with other Web3 communities? How can you build a community around this? People are already training Nike trainers and Adidas trainers. Why don't give them digital things to trade as well?

38:25That's a really interesting concept. We've seen people like Balenciaga doing similar in the fashion industry, and Dolce & Gabbana and others. The fashion people are coming into this space, too. They're realizing that, well, if I want to wear something online as part of my digital identity, why would I not have a Gucci thing if Gucci is one of the brands that I like? It also could be digitally native ones that have never had physical product. All of these are possible. There's the interaction where you get the NFT and it gives you the physical, and Dolce & Gabbana have done that too. We've seen the crossover with Tiffany as well.

38:58We've seen so many developments happening all at the same time using this NFT technology. It's fascinating to see. This is this applications layer, the consumer layer, the broad layer, and it's still pretty early days. But I think it's much bigger than all of that, too. I think Web3 is an incredibly powerful business model. It's probably the most powerful business model I've ever seen. And that goes back to network effects. So if you remember, I've talked a lot about the network effects, Metcalfe's law of owning cryptocurrencies. Why does it work so much? Because it's Behavioural Economics 101.

39:38one, if you have incentivization to help promote something, you will do so. If the better it goes, the more you get, then even better. If you're a salesman, you get paid to sell something, a car, but you don't get paid the upside of Tesla over time growing as a company. You have to be a shareholder for that. With Facebook, the shareholders got rich because they developed an incredibly important network, one of the biggest networks on earth. That meta network is Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp. We got to use the utility of these platforms. We can connect with friends and do all the things that we want to on their network.

40:24We can advertise our businesses. We can do all sorts, communicate with everybody. Great. Then they monetized us with advertising. So they took the lion's share of the revenue, and the shareholders got rich, and we didn't. Okay, I mean, that's fine. It's a business. They can do what they want. But this new model, imagine if everybody who had gone to Facebook in the early days, or into WhatsApp, got given shares. Then imagine how fast the adoption would have been, and how broad it would have been, and what it would have meant. And it could have been an enormously valuable network, even more so than the trillion dollars or whatever it did at peak prior to the big sell-off it's just had.

41:08What happens if Google had a token? What would that mean? Now, that's what's going on with NFTs. They're allowing you to participate in these other networks. Just because some have 10 ,000 doesn't mean they can't have a million NFTs. And as people like Solana roll out new technologies to allow it, we'll see much more scaled NFTs, Polygon too. And I think that becomes really interesting in those network states ideas that we can do really, really big things with all of this. So once we start thinking about that, we realize that as the technology gets cheaper and more efficient to create NFTs at scale, we start opening up the world of contracts themselves.

41:53The Web3 business model now means that your customers are partners of your business in a certain respect. It's not an ownership like a share, but it's a participation of the network, and they get utility for doing that.

42:10That means you now have a direct connection with your customer, like the music artist or the visual artist has by selling NFTs. They now have a direct connection with their audience. And therefore, they can capture more of a lion's share of the revenues without paying third parties, be it Ticketmaster or being Live Nation, or be it Google or Facebook or advertising agencies or high-frequency traders in the advertising markets and all of these other people that take about 80 % of the economics. People who design the contracts, the lawyers, the accountants, all of that stuff can all go away. So it becomes this very powerful relationship.

42:47you have a direct relationship with your community, which is the new word for marketing, because you don't have customers anymore, because they're actually part of your business. You need to get your head around that. We've been like that for a long time at Real Vision. It's a very natural state for us. Community is what we truly believe in. That means everybody has to participate and help each other in growing it to build out the utility for everybody else. The community element of Web3 is groundbreaking for marketers, because suddenly, you're not just selling to people. You're bringing them to join you in your product mission.

43:20And I think we're going to see enormous changes in how the world works. And what you're doing is you're making two things a reality. One is creating culture as an asset class. You can invest in culture. I've talked about this at length. What is the cultural value of Disney? It's probably a couple of trillion dollars. It's probably the biggest brand in the world, maybe of all time. I don't know. Certainly culturally relevant brand. Coca-Cola may have been culturally relevant in the past, but it's less so now. Well, Disney is still culturally relevant to billions of people around the world. Okay.

43:58To have a part of that ecosystem, that's valuable. So culture becomes an asset. The same with clothing, same with music, same with sports, same with all of this. It's culture, culture, culture. Web3 enables culture, which is why RecGuy and all of these things are cultural. And that's my RecGuy behind me, are all cultural phenomena, as well as digital phenomena, and art phenomena, and all of the other things, technology. And the other element outside of culture is that these things are intangibles, brand and culture. What that means is they don't appear on your balance sheet. They don't have real value for you because you can't measure them.

44:35So you just put some fake number there. It doesn't mean anything, and people kind of ignore it. But when you tokenize it, it has a real value on your balance sheet. So that makes companies much more valuable. So it unlocks hidden value in the system, which is an extraordinary thing. It just accrues. So that is another big unlock for brands and anybody else. You get to monetize your culture, monetize your brand, and share it with your community. And that creates network effects that makes these things grow much, much faster. And we will see some shockingly fast brands. Go back to the example of Yuga.

45:13Yuga was probably the fastest appreciation of value for any company or project in history. I don't know. In the first year and a half, it did something like 250 ,000%. I mean, simply mind boggling. And I think we'll see things like some of these new AI open source networks, maybe tokenize the network there, where you can participate in the network, you pay with the tokens to use the network, use the data. And maybe if you supply data to the network, you can get paid in tokens too. And that means society at large can participate in these giant networks. Now, that's probably more of a community token, cryptocurrency utility token than it is an NFT because the scale of something like that.

46:00But NFTs get really scaled when you start talking about contracts overall. So contracts overall, airline tickets. Right now, it's so inefficient with airline tickets. There's gatekeepers. You can't sell them. You have to ask, beg the airline for a refund. Why can't my airline ticket be an NFT? And if I can't cash that flight, you can buy it straight from me and the rights transfer. Well, that's easily possible with the technology. And it would make it much more frictionless. Airlines wouldn't have empty seats. We could figure out much more efficient pricing mechanisms. And you create trading markets around stuff as well.

46:37So there's a liquidity provision as and when you need it. So I think airline tickets is a really, really great way. Hotel rooms, another no brainer. Punk6529 and myself talked about this. His hotel rooms are wildly inefficient. You have to use the centralized websites. Everybody charges a commission from you. It's a relatively large commission. It's an opaque world, different pricing everywhere. And also, if you don't go because suddenly your trip gets canceled, you never get a refund. The hotel ends up with not somebody in their room, which means that somebody is not ordering wine at the bar and ordering a burger and doing all the stuff you do when you're at a hotel.

47:16So, they lose revenue. So, it's inefficient. So, everybody's incentivized here as well to fill those hotel rooms. And therefore, if I could sell my NFT of my hotel room, why the hell not? I think train tickets, airline tickets, anything, restaurants, restaurant seats, hot restaurant seats, why the hell not? Why would you not have NFTs? It's a really efficient way. Exhibitions, anything can have this. Insurance contracts, insurance contracts, particularly standardized ones, car insurance, everything else, they can transfer with the car. Or if you sell your car, you can sell the same insurance to somebody else who's got the same car or whatever the mechanism is to change that.

47:58Or maybe you can change the contractual terms by changing the car and the smart contract updates. There's so much efficiency in the system, internet permissioning, moving around, digital ID, all of that kind of stuff. Hotel keys, car documentation, we're already seeing that in California, experimenting on Tezos. Real estate, everybody's waiting for that to happen. And we're already seeing the nascent signs of real estate becoming NFTs. And you can then transfer it around with much ease. Any certification, your university certificate, any knowledge, any proof of knowledge, everything, that can all be done as an NFT.

48:36Why the hell not? It's much more verifiable. Using things like soulbound tokens as well, where it sticks with you for life and you can't sell it because it's your certificate of having a bachelor's degree or whatever it may be. So super interesting. A lot of your documentation, your passport, what is that but an NFT? So I do think this is all coming. I think I'm seeing supply chains moving to NFTs. I've already seen it for the spirits industry, the wine industry, the beer industry, where you can buy and sell infantry using NFTs gives you certain rights, and you can sell it on if you don't use it.

49:11So you can buy more than you need. Let's say you've got a big event. Let's say it's the America's Cup, and it's in Sydney. And you don't know how much bear you need to order because you don't have big successes. So you order the NFTs, and therefore, you can then return it back down the value chain quickly without having to physically take it, don't need all of this, send it back to the supplier. The supplier takes a haircut on it, sends it back to somebody else who end up with excess inventory. All of this can clear in a much more efficient way. And I'm seeing all sorts of things. Medical records, employment histories, driving licenses.

49:46I mean, any single thing is an NFT. And then we talk about finance. Finance, my word is my bond. That's how the City of London started. And then it turned into a ledger system. I bought that, you sold that. And then that's become hugely inefficient, but it's on electronic databases now. But it still takes two or three days to settle stuff. But if we move to an NFT-based system, it's instantaneous. Now if we put securities and derivatives, this is one quadrillion, whatever the number is of derivatives, FX contracts, all of these different types, interest rate contracts, some of them are standardized.

50:34That's easy for NFTs at scale. Others are unique, and NFTs can deal with unique assets too. All of this can then be settled instantaneously. Now, there's hundreds of billions of dollars tied up in the T plus two, T plus one, whatever it is, settlement system. All of the billions of dollars where people are earning interest off the back of us, and it's trapped capital. That trapped capital, which probably ends up being trillions of dollars a year, comes flooding into the system. So you're making the entire system more efficient. We can also get rid of the amount of legal costs and accounting costs, because all of this is recordable.

51:13The smart contracts automatically settle stuff. So it changes the nature of how we do business. And that frees up more capital. It's more efficient use of capital. I mean, think of a house, how inefficient a use of time and capital that is with some standard transaction, which is buying and selling a house. Things don't really change. You pay the real estate agent, You pay maybe a notary, depending where you are. You pay a lawyer. The other party pays a lawyer, pays notary fees, accounting, taxation, all of it. It's ridiculous. The technology solves all of this. So out of this great blockchain technology came the application layer of NFTs.

52:00The application layer of NFTs started with digital art. Then it moved into communities. Communities unlocked a ridiculously large new business model and a way for us all to create societies online with meaning and purpose and value. It allows our online assets to have a value, be transferable, be immutable. All of the elements of what blockchain does is groundbreaking. And then once you've got those elements, and you've got community, and you build things out, build whole new business models out of it, and you do things together with your customers who are now your community, they're all part of the same journey together, that unlocks this whole Web3 business.

52:47And it gets rid of middlemen and gives the power back to creators and power back to companies and takes layers of money out of the system and gives it back to everybody. Okay, that's incredibly powerful. But then it's even bigger when we start thinking about how we can use any contract in the world and free up all of the capital that's frozen in, whether it's implicit time to get stuff done, or the actual cost of doing business, all of the people who make money off the side of it from a transaction between you and I, that all goes away. The whole securities industry, how this whole thing functions, that all goes on to blockchain.

53:24And NFTs are the big unlock. It's so big that none of you yet have got your head around it. And even I haven't. We don't know the number of applications and the innovations that are going to come. But I know that so many people working on it. And I think it's really important for all of us to get involved in this, because really what it is, is Punk6529's battle of our future. Firstly, we've got the battle with AI. How do we know who's who and what's what? But secondly, we've got the battle with our place in this new digital society. Does the power accrue to the few, or does it accrue to the many?

54:05We have a chance of rewriting history here, rewriting history in the future. By making the steps to create a Web3 environment, and making it bigger and broader and accessible, and abstracting away the complications of wallets and all of this stuff, making it easy. Those things are coming. And it's going to explode in ways, as I said, we don't understand. But if we all need to play our part in pushing it forward, because it is so important for us to own our lives in this digital world. We don't want to be the slaves to giant corporations. Now, what's great is I know a lot of these big Web 2 giants, really good people work there.

54:47They're really smart. And they get it too. They understand that there is a revolution taking place. And this is a revolution. And that their business model will be under pressure. They understand. But they've got a hard job too. They've got shareholders. And they've got existing business models that are going to have to change. So somehow, they have to find a balance of introducing the Web3, which is going to be very powerful for them too. And creating new revenue opportunities for them and all the participants in that network, whilst sunsetting their existing business. And that's a hard thing to do.

55:19We've seen Facebook make a bigger stab at it with their metaverse project. And you've seen that sunset period. Shell has didn't like that. And that's hard. But Mark Zuckerberg owns most of the voting shares, so he can get around it. And they create so much cash anyway, that they can do it and take the risk. Others can't. But I feel really strongly about it. And I've been talking about this for a long time. Any of you who've been following me have understood the journey of where I think this is going and how big the Web3 revolution is. And that's why I've also started thinking about this in more detail myself.

55:52What can I do more? Real Vision, we've obviously educated people. We've been in this space since 2013, 2014, talking about crypto, educating people about crypto, explaining that macro and crypto are connected. They're just different new systems. That's a newer system. This one is going to get sunset, and this new system will take it over. It is It's absolutely going to happen. But what we're seeing is the friction, which is the central banks, the governments, the regulators, trying to slow down the adoption, make sure it's on their terms, because we pay their taxes, because we physically live in their states, but we also live in these digital states.

56:26On Twitter, somebody put up an image of an MFA with something else. I can't remember what it was a mashup of. It struck me. I hit him up immediately, said, hey, listen, I think you're on to something really big here. Can you do me a favor? can you mash up my board ape with my X copy? I have the IP rights to my board ape, and the X copy CC0, which means that it has no IP rights attached. You can build anything on it, even though you can still own the original one, but anybody can use your image to do something. I'm like, can you do something? He came back, and that is what you see on Twitter. It actually is a GIF that switches between the ape as the pure ape, and then into this hybrid weird world glitchy ape.

57:14And I love that, because I thought, I'm putting two communities together. Here's the community of art and the community of bored apes, and putting them together in one place, which nobody had done. But that struck me as a much bigger idea. Maybe we could bring all the communities together. You see, Web3 is still scattered, and we get together on Discords and a bit on Twitter. But I thought Real Vision should play a role in doing this. It may be creating the super community of all these communities, give people more of a home, give them the kind of content that they need to succeed in the space, help educate people.

57:50Now, that's macro, and we've got plenty of that. But it's also crypto education. It's also understanding who's doing what, who's building what. That's what I'm doing with my Rails Adventures in Crypto show, is basically learning and letting you look over my shoulder. We're experimenting and building something really big at Real Vision too around NFTs. It's going to be called the Real Vision Collective. You'll see a lot of details, and I'm not here to plug that now. It's our place as people at the epicenter of the nexus of macro, web three, and crypto to help drive this space forward. And I take that seriously.

58:28And so does everybody work at Real Vision. So keep your eye on for that. We want your support, but it's for you. It's a community-based thing for all the communities to give them more knowledge, more power, more ability to express themselves, and more abilities to connect and create deeper, bigger communities. We want to see ideas generate and experimentation come. So that's the role we're going to try and play. We're going to try and push our boundaries, the boundaries of what a media platform or a technology platform that Real Vision is, and show the world what you can really do with this technology.

59:02I urge you to think about your own business models. How can I leverage this technology to drive this space forwards? And for goodness sake, get involved. It's all about community. It's there for you. It's not about naturally just making money. I buy art, and I just bought some incredible photographic art done by generative AI and photographic stuff. And it's like this warped, dystopian, utopian idea of Americana. It's incredible. And it's only possible because of AI, and then blockchain technology for NFTs. We're seeing the same with generative art as well. So another thing, which is the AI creating the art, but just get involved, collect stuff.

59:47Think about how you can unlock your own business model and participate in what I think is one of the biggest revolutions we've ever seen, just enabled by that three letter Arachnism NFT. Thank you.