Transcript
Speaker: Mr. Hacks in the building with the shades on.
Speaker: How are you doing, man?
Speaker: I'm doing well.
Speaker: Thank you, brother.
Speaker: How about you?
Speaker: I'm doing fantastic.
Speaker: Better now.
Speaker: Yeah, I'm really excited because I've seen you doing your thing all across Twitter.
Speaker: I've been in your Discord for a bit as well.
Speaker: And I love the energy that you bring to the space.
Speaker: So I was really happy that you said yes.
Speaker: Yeah, my pleasure.
Speaker: How do you get started?
Speaker: How'd you get here?
Speaker: Okay, so I'll give you like...
Speaker: Long story short.
Speaker: No, you can keep it long, man.
Speaker: I have all night for you.
Speaker: I've been in crypto since as long as I can remember.
Speaker: I think I was maybe like 15 at the time when my friend was telling me about it because he actually used to buy stuff off Silk Road.
Speaker: So yeah, I got into Bitcoin like super early, like in the sense.
Speaker: And from there, kind of just...
Speaker: You know how things go.
Speaker: You know how it goes.
Speaker: So, yeah, after that, really, I didn't really like get into NFT still two years ago.
Speaker: And also I couldn't afford much Bitcoin at the time because I was very, very young.
Speaker: So it's kind of like watching on the sidelines, learning, I would say, you know, but buying a little bit, but paper handing every time just because, you know, I got in super early.
Speaker: But yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, that's it.
Speaker: From there, past two years, I've kind of been working on just community building.
Speaker: I used to be a streamer before, so I've actually been familiar with managing discords, managing communities, and all that good stuff.
Speaker: Yeah, I think in 2016, I used to have a discord server with about maybe like 8,000 or 9,000 members, I believe.
Speaker: And I used to be sponsored by
Speaker: Nexon, Tencent and Pearl Abyss at the time.
Speaker: So just through my sponsors, I was able to kind of, you could say, get an audience or a bigger audience.
Speaker: And from that, you know, people would come into the Discord, we'd be gaming, we'd be voice chatting.
Speaker: So yeah, just got really familiar with that type of vibe.
Speaker: And I feel like when NFTs came around, it was like, I was already kind of doing that stuff.
Speaker: So it was just, it felt natural, I would say.
Speaker: It felt natural.
Speaker: So yeah.
Speaker: That's really cool.
Speaker: From there, I actually started as a market analyst in CyberSnails and then in the Habibi server with Ramo.
Speaker: Yeah, just due to like maybe feeling, you could say, underpaid.
Speaker: I was very underpaid in CyberSnails.
Speaker: I was getting that 0.15 ETH a month that they were giving me.
Speaker: And I was basically like managing the whole server.
Speaker: The whole community was like basically under my hands almost, right?
Speaker: So yeah, people were asking like, why don't you just make your own server?
Speaker: Why don't you just make your own server?
Speaker: And the answer was, I just wasn't ready to launch a project.
Speaker: So I was still working on a roadmap at the time.
Speaker: And I knew what I wanted to make because I know what I'm into.
Speaker: Like you can just tell by the Bob Marley shirt, you know, I'm all about the music and just like stoner vibes, positive energy, love.
Speaker: So yeah, it took me a while to really figure out the roadmap, how I want it.
Speaker: to put it on the blockchain, what were the utilities that I had in mind, getting all the partners and the collaborations in place too.
Speaker: So yeah, it was quite the journey.
Speaker: But almost one year after being in Cyber Snails and Habibis, I already had a community, you could say, and people who knew me and just knew I had a decent reputation in the space.
Speaker: So from there, that's where we started almost one year ago.
Speaker: Actually, it'll be a year and a few weeks.
Speaker: We started the Alpha Gang server.
Speaker: It was a free mint.
Speaker: It was a free mint, the Genesis collection.
Speaker: And yeah, it was mainly just honestly like my friends, my community, the people that I came across through my Web3 ventures, I would say.
Speaker: And yeah, that's a quick intro story from there.
Speaker: That's really cool.
Speaker: How do you get from the streamer to market analyst to community?
Speaker: Like how did you learn those skills?
Speaker: How did they translate into...
Speaker: each other like i said i was i was managing a discord with about 8 000 people in it and i would mainly be in the voice chat or just texting them you know like while gaming right because i used to play a lot of mmo rpgs essentially is what they were um that's actually how i got the name hacks right um it was through my my clan uh whenever like all the games i played would be pvp so whenever um
Speaker: we'd play like they'd call me a hacker.
Speaker: So, uh, essentially everybody thought I was hacking the game.
Speaker: Cause I could like, uh, basically infinite combo just by timing things really well.
Speaker: Uh, or like, you know, skill chaining, you could say.
Speaker: Uh, so yeah, that's how I got the name.
Speaker: Uh, but yeah, just through that and just through like, you know, uh, winning a few tournaments, right.
Speaker: Getting sponsored.
Speaker: Uh, I was able to kind of build that reputation for myself, uh, as a gamer and as a streamer.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: I had a YouTube channel, actually.
Speaker: It's still there, but it's just I just don't post on it anymore.
Speaker: But yeah, I used to get about like maybe 30,000, 40,000 views per video on some of the good ones.
Speaker: So it wasn't bad and it was good exposure.
Speaker: And actually through that, I was selling digital collectibles, all kinds of dropshipping back then because I was maybe 16, 17 at the time when I had just started all of this.
Speaker: So I paid myself through university, through my bachelor's degree in psychology, and then eventually through my master's while doing dropshipping.
Speaker: Had a part-time job as well, actually.
Speaker: But yeah, always been in the digital space, you could say.
Speaker: Always been kind of in the gaming space, Discord, and SEO and just online sales.
Speaker: Dude, it's insane because you're...
Speaker: You and I were not that... Like, I'm 30 years old.
Speaker: I don't know how old you are.
Speaker: I'm turning like 27 in 18 days.
Speaker: You're 27?
Speaker: You're three years younger than me?
Speaker: But I feel like you hit that spot in where all social media and everything virtual just...
Speaker: absolutely blew up.
Speaker: Like I got Facebook when I was 16.
Speaker: You must have got it when you were 13 or 12.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: And like, it makes the whole difference because you were born into it and you were able to like, obviously capture the opportunities that it had.
Speaker: And it, and it like, it seems to have prepared you for this.
Speaker: Yeah, 100%.
Speaker: Honestly, if I wasn't an avid gamer and just so used to Discord and messaging people all the time, I wouldn't be able to do what I do.
Speaker: I'm working literally sometimes 18, 19 hours a day in the Discord.
Speaker: I see you.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: And the ping is nonstop, right?
Speaker: Always announcements, announcements.
Speaker: So yeah, we're always doing something in the gang.
Speaker: And that's how I like it lively.
Speaker: I like it that there's always something to do because we kind of think of it as our home base, right?
Speaker: We know exactly what's minting.
Speaker: We have the calendars.
Speaker: We have the trackers and, you know, we have all the members from all these different blue chip projects that are just discussing alpha knowledge and sharing the Web3 opportunities out there.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But we're not an alpha group.
Speaker: We're actually like a musical NFT collection.
Speaker: So we make our own music as Alpha Gang.
Speaker: We make our own productions, our own beats.
Speaker: Everything is fully original.
Speaker: All of our art is hand drawn as well.
Speaker: That's how we're actually able to use like similarities between the artists.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: We don't name them the artist's name.
Speaker: but there's always the similarities and the looks, right?
Speaker: And that's because we use a fair use disclaimer and all of our arts hand-drawn, original made.
Speaker: That's awesome.
Speaker: So how does it all come together?
Speaker: What's the plan?
Speaker: Because it is named Alpha Gang, and there is some solid alpha.
Speaker: I've seen you make quite a few.
Speaker: I'm in two different groups right now, and I just ended up here because I like the people behind them.
Speaker: I'm only in your Discord because I like your vibe, and I'm not even actively participating because I'm building my own stuff, so I don't really have the time.
Speaker: But it's the only reason.
Speaker: And you have a, that other guy, he's coming up with stuff and it's like few, but huge moves, but you're like coming at it with consistency.
Speaker: And every day there are, there are, there are wins.
Speaker: Like, how does that happen?
Speaker: How do you, how did you get to this place?
Speaker: Honestly, I would say it's a network, right?
Speaker: Like I have a lot of people who share information with me and then there's also like 20 other shot callers in the server, right?
Speaker: So it's just, it's basically,
Speaker: power numbers, you could say, right?
Speaker: The more eyes that you have scanning the markets and analyzing stuff, the more successful you'll be and the more opportunities that you'll catch.
Speaker: For example, there's DTK Crypto.
Speaker: I'm not sure if you're familiar with him, but he's actually one of our partners.
Speaker: And we kind of have, we kind of have like, you could say information relay between the two servers happening at all times.
Speaker: So even between different alpha communities, we get like their information information
Speaker: And then they have my wallets tracked.
Speaker: So basically we're just a big collective, right?
Speaker: Even if we're kind of divided by these different collections or passes or whatever you want to call them, we still work together across different communities.
Speaker: And within the community, we just have so many talented shot callers who are always trading, right?
Speaker: Because that's what they do for a living.
Speaker: Just like myself, they're full-time traders.
Speaker: Yeah, it's honestly just having those eyes always out there, right?
Speaker: Whether it's a community member, whether it's a shot caller, whether it's a staff member, whether it's a partner from another project.
Speaker: I've had Alpha given to me from basically just about everyone, right?
Speaker: From friends to advisors to other founders.
Speaker: other projects.
Speaker: And yeah, like I don't really try to focus too much on that.
Speaker: I actually mainly focus on the crypto side myself.
Speaker: I don't know if you've seen our crypto channel.
Speaker: Yeah, I've seen a few.
Speaker: Yeah, that's usually what, because that's what I do for a living, right?
Speaker: I'm mainly a leverage, like a futures trader.
Speaker: So yeah, NFTs, I kind of do it for fun, just to build the communities.
Speaker: I hold a lot of shit to zero, bro.
Speaker: Like I don't always sell stuff.
Speaker: You know, sometimes I'll flip, right?
Speaker: If it's profitable and, you know, like there isn't a community, it's just all hype.
Speaker: Yeah, I'll definitely sell it.
Speaker: But other than that, like if there's a community, if there's something strong, I like to get to know those people, right?
Speaker: Because those connections kind of mean more to me than just, you know, 0.03 or 0.04 or whatever it is.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, yeah, mainly we're a trading group, right?
Speaker: We're a trading group.
Speaker: But yeah, what I usually tell people, or if you look at the OpenSea description, for example, we're hip hop and artist themed musical NFT collection with trading utilities, right?
Speaker: So what are trading utilities?
Speaker: It's the alpha, it's the bots,
Speaker: It's the nodes, it's the analytical tools, right?
Speaker: So, but why did we pick this theme?
Speaker: Well, it's because it actually brings a lot of webtooth people in.
Speaker: Like you could actually just randomly hop into one of our spaces and you'll see that there's like random musicians who know nothing about NFTs, nothing about crypto.
Speaker: And this was my whole vision of bridging Web 2 and Web 3.
Speaker: Because when I first started, I wish I had, like when I was coming just from Web 2, I wish I had like a community like that, that could actually help me out, look for my benefit.
Speaker: Just, you know, somewhere where I felt like I could vibe and not maybe fall as victim to as many scams or just bad projects, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That was my whole vision behind it.
Speaker: I was hoping to have art that attracts the musicians, the Web2 people, the people who are into celebrities, who are into the music.
Speaker: And that's actually the case.
Speaker: A lot of people in Alpha Gang, they're brand new to NFTs.
Speaker: They're brand new to trading.
Speaker: And they're just looking for somewhere to start.
Speaker: And that's actually what we are.
Speaker: We're a very great starting community for new traders coming into Web3.
Speaker: Honestly, I've been in crypto for a while myself and it would be hard for me to imagine a better place for people to start.
Speaker: I mean, I have a project and we have an amazing community and it would also be a great place to start.
Speaker: I don't want them to listen to this and think like, what the fuck, what about us?
Speaker: So yeah, that is a very good place to start.
Speaker: But your project is, your community is as well.
Speaker: Like there's,
Speaker: There's true empathy and there's true, like people do seem to care about each other.
Speaker: And how did you, how does that happen?
Speaker: How did you make sure that, because now it's you and it's 20 other shot callers and it's probably moderators.
Speaker: Like there's, there's a bunch of people.
Speaker: How do you, how did you instill that?
Speaker: We started as a community focused project, right?
Speaker: Like there was a free mint.
Speaker: I wasn't doing it for the mint, like for the mint funds or the money, right?
Speaker: It was a free mint.
Speaker: And all the royalties went back.
Speaker: I was actually paying $2,000 on my credit card every month before I made a single dollar off Alpha Gang just to actually fund the project, right?
Speaker: So, you know, they knew that I had good intentions in mind.
Speaker: They knew that the other co-founders, the Lou brothers, sorry, they're actually the triplets from the movie Pacific Rim.
Speaker: They're Canadian.
Speaker: What the fuck?
Speaker: Yeah, so they're very well connected.
Speaker: They're very well connected in the space.
Speaker: It's actually how we were able to get so many partnerships, right?
Speaker: Where you have the most partnerships through Alphabot, like in all of Web3, right?
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: that's definitely through them because they have a lot of connections.
Speaker: I'm, I'm, I'm well connected in this space, but they're very well connected in web too, right?
Speaker: Cause they're millionaires, they're celebrities.
Speaker: They've worked with Jackie Chan, right?
Speaker: Arnold Schwarzenegger, like all these big names.
Speaker: So it's a different game.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: When we first started, they actually had a little celebrity agency.
Speaker: They were able to bring a couple of celebrities into Alpha Gang.
Speaker: So many founders of like so many different hype projects were minting our OG free mint and holding like
Speaker: imaginary ones the founders they minted alpha gang um pxn their founders nanopass and the whole phantom network that they minted alpha gang right that's crazy right from the start as a free mint before we even minted we got 50 imaginary ones whitelist when like every single group in the space is like fighting and trying to get them
Speaker: And this is how we're able to do it.
Speaker: It's just because us as founders, we're very well connected in this space.
Speaker: And people respect us because they know that we're not cash hungry.
Speaker: We're not just trying to get people's ETH and that we're actually just trying to establish ourselves and make a name for ourselves on Web3 because that is what we're doing, right?
Speaker: And they know that they'll get it right back.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And it's not even just about getting it right back.
Speaker: I think for them, it's mainly like they see it as a new space and they want to make a name for themselves in this space, right?
Speaker: They want to establish, cement themselves in the space as credible people who are into Web3.
Speaker: And it helps when you make those networks because after that, everything becomes easy, right?
Speaker: You just get handed stuff almost because it's about who you know and
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: It takes a little bit.
Speaker: It took me so long to figure this out, to be honest.
Speaker: And even with my previous business, I always thought that if you build a cool product, the people will naturally come to you.
Speaker: And it was kind of a naive, overly optimistic way to look at things.
Speaker: And then you realize that it's...
Speaker: I low-key laughed a little bit when people were saying your network is your net worth because it seems so simplistic.
Speaker: Yeah, it does.
Speaker: It really does.
Speaker: It sounds so simplistic and especially because it's said in the context of like, if you watch the people around you, if they're worth 5 million, then you're set up.
Speaker: If not...
Speaker: But the truth is, if you want to start a business, if you want to get good opportunities, if you want to do anything good in the world, you need to surround yourself with people who share your values, who themselves can help you set up.
Speaker: Like you need to help.
Speaker: It does take a fucking village.
Speaker: For sure.
Speaker: This is actually like a very basic principle of social psychology that you're referring to.
Speaker: It's like you are the sum of the five people that you hang around with the most.
Speaker: But yeah, I mean, it is a little bit cliche, but at the same time, like if you surround yourself with positive energy people who work hard, who are go-getters, you're more likely to be like them, right?
Speaker: Because you're just associating yourself with them and spending so much time with them.
Speaker: You're in the same environment and just presented the same opportunities as them.
Speaker: So it is definitely true.
Speaker: When you surround yourself with hard workers, you yourself are more likely to become a hard worker.
Speaker: Cause that's all, that's all it comes down to at the end, right?
Speaker: If you put the time in, you put the commitment in and you put your mind to something and you don't just keep repeating the same stupid mistakes, hoping that the results are going to be different, right?
Speaker: You actually like try to strategize, you plan things out.
Speaker: Then, yeah, it's just, it's usually tends to be the nature of things, right?
Speaker: It's like a hard work is rewarded.
Speaker: Sometimes it's slept on, but eventually it'll be rewarded.
Speaker: And as you said earlier, right?
Speaker: Like in this space,
Speaker: It's an attention economy, right?
Speaker: So it's really an attention economy.
Speaker: So even if you're building an amazing product, even if you have so, so much utility, like people will still sleep on you for a picture of a rock, right?
Speaker: Like that's just how it is.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: That's just how it is.
Speaker: So, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, Zagabon tweeted a few days ago about pay attention to how attention pays.
Speaker: It's like, it sounds like a joke, but when you think about it for a few minutes, it starts to make a lot of sense.
Speaker: And it is the nature of our world.
Speaker: And Web3 is just that almost physical rule on steroids.
Speaker: Go ahead, Simon.
Speaker: It's a culture of just instant...
Speaker: It's the culture of instant gratification.
Speaker: That's all I wanted to say.
Speaker: That irks me sometimes, because it's really like nobody understands the way for gratification in Web3.
Speaker: Very little people do.
Speaker: Very little.
Speaker: Do you think they'll win?
Speaker: Do you think we'll win?
Speaker: Because I'm 100% delayed gratification.
Speaker: I'll work for something for ages.
Speaker: I'll keep investing.
Speaker: And it's fucked me over a few times.
Speaker: Do you think that eventually when it matures,
Speaker: We had our time, honestly, we had our time back in the early days, right, when everybody was just diamond handing everything.
Speaker: But you don't see that happen anymore because a lot of people kind of realize the consequences of that.
Speaker: So even if they were diamond hands, now they tend to flip more.
Speaker: And nobody wants to hold.
Speaker: Everybody wants to stay liquid, especially when the market was as uncertain as it was last year with the price of Ethereum and the price of Bitcoin.
Speaker: People don't want to hold on because they don't want, even if their NFT doesn't dump, they don't want the price of ETH to dump, therefore the floor price to dump.
Speaker: So it's getting really hard.
Speaker: Honestly, it's getting really hard.
Speaker: We'd need to see a lot more adoption happening and we'd need to see a lot less rugs happening.
Speaker: I'm truly convinced until we stop minting open editions for 2.2 million and just letting the founder go buy a GP
Speaker: two days later while the floor price is at a quarter of a cost, right?
Speaker: You get where I'm going with this, right?
Speaker: Until shit like that stop happens, we're just going to keep getting punished, bro, because it's flipper culture.
Speaker: It's flipper culture.
Speaker: The projects aren't actually really building anything.
Speaker: And even when they are, it takes too long to deliver that when they finally do, people are disappointed and they don't.
Speaker: Look at doodles right now, right?
Speaker: Like Genesis, Duplicator, it's gone to shit.
Speaker: And it's because that's what happens.
Speaker: You have high expectations and then it leads up to disappointment.
Speaker: Yeah, and because speculation thrives on, well, speculation, because you're speculating about what they're going to do, and as long as you don't know what they're going to do, you still have, like, I think Artifact is such a great example of that.
Speaker: And they've just, like, taken slaps after slap, like slap after slap.
Speaker: For sure, it's sad, but.
Speaker: It's sad.
Speaker: I think it, I think, honestly, I think they'll come out on top, not just because I'm wearing a clone X right now.
Speaker: I genuinely, I genuinely believe that they're going to, that they're going to come out way, way, way on top because they're, they're looking way beyond the, oh my God, 50, 50, 20% floor price dump.
Speaker: Yeah, no, for sure.
Speaker: It's a long-term play.
Speaker: Like, anything that's, you know, blue-chip status in a sense, right?
Speaker: Like, Nike's involved, right?
Speaker: And they've already, like, artifacts already established themselves in the space, like, countless times with multiple drops.
Speaker: So, um, with those, I usually actually buy into the FUD like I did with the clone, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Because it usually does make good entries.
Speaker: It usually does make good entries, bro, right?
Speaker: Like, to get that clone for a seven and a half, you would have never got that if it wasn't for the FUD, right?
Speaker: If it wasn't for the incidents that took place.
Speaker: So, um,
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Honestly, just I don't sleep on projects that have delivered in the past, projects that I know are capable of delivering.
Speaker: And everybody's going to mess up, bro.
Speaker: Like nobody's perfect.
Speaker: Not a single project can go their entire Web3 experience without making at least one mistake that upsets at least 10% of the holders.
Speaker: You know what I mean?
Speaker: Like it's just, it's bound to happen.
Speaker: And it's better.
Speaker: It's better because you, honestly, if anything, it reinforces the strength of the people who stay holders.
Speaker: It's a shakeout.
Speaker: There's a loyalty.
Speaker: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker: For sure.
Speaker: It weeds out the weak hands.
Speaker: And at the same time, it makes for good volume.
Speaker: And at the same time, like it's it does strengthen the community because the people who actually stay, they want to stay.
Speaker: They're not just there because their bags are pumping or because the floor price keeps going up, you know, like they're there because they find something of value.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: Oh man, I am.
Speaker: As we were saying, sorry, just to go back before we totally get started.
Speaker: As you were saying about speculation, that's what drives all of these pumps, bro.
Speaker: Like it's 100% speculation, right?
Speaker: Always.
Speaker: That's the thing.
Speaker: we're in a very greedy space where speculation literally determines value.
Speaker: Because when you see those people sweeping 12, 13, that's when floors actually start to move.
Speaker: And all those people are doing are speculating that the price is going to go up.
Speaker: So they ape in and they go in with mass, right?
Speaker: Like they go in 10K, 15K, 20K sweeps, all based on a speculative airdrop, on a speculative NFT that's coming, on a whitelist that they might get, right?
Speaker: So that speculation creates greed, which in terms creates volume.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And it all is because we're a bunch of retail investors who don't know anything about what we're doing, basically.
Speaker: Like 95%.
Speaker: Yeah, because a lot of us are degening and we're hoping to make that 10x, that 5x return, right?
Speaker: Because it happens a lot and it happens every day in NFTs, right?
Speaker: You can literally 5x within 20 minutes if you just get in the right play, right?
Speaker: Right play, right time.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: But I think it's...
Speaker: all of us go through the phases.
Speaker: You go slowly from a degen to an investor.
Speaker: Even when I got started, I've said this, I don't know how many times, but I got into it in 2017.
Speaker: And at that point, I'd already been like doing Forex for like a couple of years.
Speaker: I'd played a bunch of online poker.
Speaker: And so I knew about due diligence and I knew about like keeping your emotions in check and staying, like playing the mental game and having a strict mental...
Speaker: bankroll management but then you see the crazy valuations like turning 5k into 45 in what four weeks yeah for sure through the acos and and it just it drives you crazy and then you forget everything and then everything dies down and that's when you're like okay you know what not gonna repeat it the next cycle let me humble myself again exactly i'm gonna learn the lesson 100 and that's how it goes right so it's a game of psychology like
Speaker: That's all trading is, honestly, at the end of the day, especially when you're trading against other people, it's a battle of the minds, right?
Speaker: It's a psychology game.
Speaker: So, yeah, I am a clinical psychologist by trade.
Speaker: I actually was working as a clinical psychologist up until last year.
Speaker: That's when I decided to quit because I was basically losing money to go to work, right?
Speaker: Especially during the bull market, you know what I mean?
Speaker: Like, I was losing money to go to work.
Speaker: Just through One Mint, like GNSS, right?
Speaker: Just because they had
Speaker: some connections, the artifact, right?
Speaker: At the time, I was able to mint 20 of them, right?
Speaker: So 10 on each wallet, two wallets.
Speaker: I was able to mint 20 of them for 0.3 ETH each.
Speaker: And they got up to 1.3 ETH within one day.
Speaker: So literally within a day of 5X my money.
Speaker: And it wasn't like a small amount of money.
Speaker: It was like you go from 6 ETH to...
Speaker: you know, like over 2060, right?
Speaker: So it's, it's a huge, huge profit margin.
Speaker: And you can only do that in the bull run, right?
Speaker: You can only do that if you know how to trade, if you know how to gas work, because that was a very limited drop.
Speaker: Like everybody was trying to go for it.
Speaker: Um, and most people weren't successful.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So, um,
Speaker: we try to teach our community stuff like that to prepare them.
Speaker: So even when the bear market was here, we'd still be trying to teach them stuff for the boat.
Speaker: Like even with the alpha gang mystery drop of the red boxes, there was a little bit of a gas war for that, but I set it up that way because I want them to practice.
Speaker: I want them to get used to gas wars.
Speaker: So when the bull market comes, they're actually able to make those really big plays.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's actually one of the things that I was, that I was thinking about, because I haven't spent enough time that I know the full scope of, of everything that you do and how you do it.
Speaker: And, and then there's calling alpha,
Speaker: telling people, hey, this is a cool opportunity.
Speaker: And then there's teaching people how to invest, how to take profit, how to manage your bankroll.
Speaker: How much emphasis do you guys put on that?
Speaker: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker: Also...
Speaker: uh i i don't manage anybody's assets i'm not a financial advisor i never claim to make anybody rich i don't tell people hey join alpha gang you're gonna make 10 eath 15 eath people have done it people have done it people do it every day almost but not every day but in the bull run they did it every day literally like people were printing eath but that's not what we pitch alpha gang as right we're we're a musical nft collection with trader utilities and we just have a really strong trading community like a
Speaker: a lot of good traders and you can learn from these good traders, right?
Speaker: And a lot of them are willing to teach you stuff.
Speaker: So me, myself, for example, I mainly host live streams in the Discord about crypto trading, leverage trading.
Speaker: And then I also, you know, we'll do a little breakdown of IC tools, NFT nerds, all these different tools and just teach them about how they can actually analyze floors, sell walls,
Speaker: and stuff like that with NFTs.
Speaker: But yeah, obviously, like, I'll tell them, like, get this whitelist, you know, this might be a good opportunity.
Speaker: It's just presenting Web3 opportunities, like get this whitelist, keep an eye on this collection, it might move, you know, stuff like that.
Speaker: Mainly, I'm more focused on the community building side, the crypto trading side, and the education side, which is either live streams, or just info.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, vibes, of course.
Speaker: And yeah, most of what I do, honestly, is kind of like, I'll prepare little psychology tricks, right?
Speaker: It's kind of like a, you could say it's like a fire alarm or like a fire drill, right?
Speaker: So I'll post like a webhook in our announcements and I'll troll them, right?
Speaker: I'll be like, you know, like the person who- Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: That's fucking hilarious.
Speaker: Yeah, so I'll do things like that just to get them like, don't interact with webhooks, right?
Speaker: And then I'll give them another option and be like, you know what?
Speaker: I'll give you guys another chance.
Speaker: Just scan this barcode.
Speaker: And then they, they, they fall for it.
Speaker: They vote, let's scan this barcode.
Speaker: I'm like, no, never scan barcodes.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So it's again, another lesson.
Speaker: And I just try to find different fun ways to kind of incorporate this for the new people that are coming in where they're still having a laugh, but they're learning something.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So, um,
Speaker: essentially uh like what alpha gang is it's just an embodiment of web3 to be honest we have the gamers we have the musicians we have the rappers the freestylers uh we have the traders the dgens like everything bro we're very welcome encompassing community we have 50 year olds we have 16 year olds we don't care bro you're here to trade you're here to have fun with nfts you're here to learn about crypto right just not manage your own risk we always tell them manage your own risk uh and
Speaker: you know, like, yes, we might even give them an exit or we might give them a stop loss.
Speaker: For example, when you're crypto trading, I always tell them only traded 5% of your total portfolio, never risk more than that.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So we do give them some advice for risk management.
Speaker: Uh, but we're not like, um,
Speaker: a portfolio manager in terms of like, I'm going to tag you until you dump, make sure you sell.
Speaker: That's up to you, right?
Speaker: We give suggested exits, we give suggested entries, but you're free to follow whatever you want to follow at the end of the day.
Speaker: And most importantly, you're not just there to make money.
Speaker: You're there because you want to be part of the community.
Speaker: You have some value to offer back to the community, right?
Speaker: Because...
Speaker: We give a lot of value to our community.
Speaker: So if you're in our community, we hope to get some value back from you, even if it's just positivity and good energy and good vibes.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So that's kind of how we build the community.
Speaker: It's such a good balance.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I'm very active in the community too.
Speaker: So that definitely helps.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: That's the euphemism of the century.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: yeah it definitely helps build a strong community when they see like the founder is active and he's friendly because that's that's that's almost like an example like a role model you could say for them to shadow right because if if
Speaker: if they see the founder being an ass, he's being a jerk, he's being very down and negative all the time, then the community is probably not going to vibe too well with that.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: When they actually, and if he's not there, you feel cheated as well in some way, because you feel like you bought into something for one person and, and yeah, and they're not there.
Speaker: It's really cool.
Speaker: Cause that's such a, what you're describing is a, is a very important balance.
Speaker: And what I think most Western nations have got wrong where, um,
Speaker: citizens have kind of become babies of like you're showed the way you've, you're told what you need to do.
Speaker: You're told that you need to study, that you need to get that job, that you need to do all of these things.
Speaker: And then when something bad happens, you're not really equipped, um,
Speaker: and how to deal with it.
Speaker: But it's really cool that you're mindful of this and that you're actually putting them through the drill.
Speaker: Honestly, when I saw the webhook thing, I laughed a little bit.
Speaker: It was a genius learning experience.
Speaker: For sure.
Speaker: Well, we're always thinking of just like fun ways to kind of
Speaker: engage with the community and actually provide value back to them, right?
Speaker: That's the most important part.
Speaker: Like if you're going to hold my project, if you're going to be part of our community, I want to be able to offer you value.
Speaker: Otherwise, why are you holding this JPEG?
Speaker: Why are you holding this MP4 file or whatever it is, right?
Speaker: So,
Speaker: Yeah, definitely.
Speaker: We've always been, since the first day, community-focused, community-driven.
Speaker: And our main goal at the end of the day is to offer value in utilities, mass utilities, mass value to all of our holders, and to actually allow them to express themselves, whether it's artistically, musically, no matter what value they can bring to the gang and help us just be a community.
Speaker: we're accepting of it so we have people making memes we have people making fan art we have people making music we have people rapping we have people freestyling producing beats right it's just all these different talents coming together and it's like hey this is the value i can bring so i want to bring some value to the community let me share this with you guys and all of us do this the whole the whole staff team and sometimes just community members right they're willing to share uh so yeah it just makes for a very
Speaker: intrinsically rewarding experience.
Speaker: You don't do it just because of an outer reward.
Speaker: It feels self-rewarding on its own.
Speaker: Yeah, it's amazing.
Speaker: There's a couple of things that I want to touch base on in here, but one of them is
Speaker: like what makes an organization, what makes a business is the values of the people that make it up.
Speaker: And that's easier said than done usually because you usually do need a very strong business case.
Speaker: But in your case, it's like you have these values that one of your biggest assets is yourself because you're extremely vocal, you're extremely present, you have a good energy, you have good vibes that people resonate with.
Speaker: And so it does make it easier to build something around.
Speaker: But you are... Sorry, the most important part, I think, isn't just all of that, but it's to be relatable.
Speaker: I think the community...
Speaker: wants to feel like they can relate to a founder and not that just he's behind some, you know, like he's building in the background all the time because that's bullshit, bro.
Speaker: You can build, you can be present at the same time, even if it's just little bits of time.
Speaker: You don't need to disappear for six months.
Speaker: You don't need to not tweet for six months, right?
Speaker: Like nobody's building that hard where they can't grab their phone and just send a tweet that takes two seconds, right?
Speaker: So it is about that balance, again, at the same time.
Speaker: But it's also like,
Speaker: If you're building a project, if you're doing something in this space, you have to be passionate about it.
Speaker: And if you're passionate about it, you're not neglecting your community.
Speaker: That's the first thing that actually makes the project, is the community.
Speaker: Without the NFT holders, why is there the NFTs?
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: So I feel like a lot more projects, especially coming in from Web2, they neglect this.
Speaker: They forget to...
Speaker: You know, they bring in the allure, right, of like the VCs, the big spenders, the investors, but they forget to nourish and they neglect their community.
Speaker: So they're left with nothing at the end other than flippers or people who, you know, they just bought in hopes that their investment would go up and they don't care at all what happens in the server or what happens with that brand, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, all the strong communities that I've seen, honestly, with like NFTs, you know, they say it's like the community is the main utility, like Azuki, the community is the main utility, right?
Speaker: It's sad, but it's true.
Speaker: You know, like these founders could be doing a lot more.
Speaker: Don't get me wrong.
Speaker: These founders should be doing so much more, especially the type of funding that they have.
Speaker: But it's true.
Speaker: It's true.
Speaker: They have a strong community and it's just because the community came together.
Speaker: So it doesn't matter what the founder does because the community is just so united.
Speaker: The community is just so strong.
Speaker: It obviously helps because all their bags are going up, right?
Speaker: So it's hard to tell.
Speaker: Sometimes the line gets a little bit construed, right?
Speaker: It's a whole chicken and the egg thing.
Speaker: Where did it start?
Speaker: Did it start with the... Like the community got here because of the founders.
Speaker: No, it is really, really interesting.
Speaker: And that's where we are, I think, in our cycle.
Speaker: We're in a place where you...
Speaker: I don't know if this will still be the case in 10 or 15 years, because at some point you have to build a business.
Speaker: I love, like, I love what I see from Mizuki.
Speaker: And I, I gotta say like the, the, the community itself is so, is so inviting and you kind of want to be a part of it.
Speaker: And I look forward to what they do.
Speaker: So vocal.
Speaker: Yeah, definitely.
Speaker: But in a good way, not in a, in your face.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, definitely.
Speaker: No, they're good vibes.
Speaker: They're good vibes.
Speaker: Mainly what upsets me, to be honest, like when I see these big projects that get so much funding with like so much royalties on second day, it's not envy.
Speaker: Honestly, it's not like I wish I had this for my project, but it's just...
Speaker: I don't see them building as hard or actually offering as much utilities or as value as anybody else because they don't have to, because they simply don't have to, you know what I mean?
Speaker: Like they don't have to offer value or utilities to compete because they can just release an airdrop and based on speculation, pump everybody's bags, right?
Speaker: Because when they're releasing an airdrop, most of the time, these airdrops don't really have much value.
Speaker: They could be just at PFP, but other parties who FOMO in because the Genesis is at a high floor,
Speaker: So now all the bag, all the holders get their bags pumped.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So I don't, I don't have a problem necessarily with this airdrop utility, but it is, it is essentially just dumping on other people.
Speaker: Like that's all it is.
Speaker: You're creating something out of nothing.
Speaker: You're giving it to your holders unless, unless it has actual value and it's, but, but most of the time they'll release it just like speculation, right?
Speaker: It's just like speculation here.
Speaker: There might be an airdrop.
Speaker: You're going to get a dark Azuki.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And it just leaves like,
Speaker: room for things to happen, magically happen, right?
Speaker: Yeah, I definitely think we're still early.
Speaker: Like, just to summarize it, to keep it short, we're still super, super early.
Speaker: And, like, the space is not ready to see a change in, you know, the top 100 NFT market caps.
Speaker: Like, the top 100 coins in the space, crypto coins, they're all actually building something.
Speaker: Or they already have built something.
Speaker: Or they've provided some kind of value to the space or the blockchain or whatever it is.
Speaker: But with NFT projects, it's not like that at all.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It's not like that.
Speaker: They don't have to offer any value.
Speaker: They don't have to create anything new.
Speaker: You know, Azuki's right to fame was that they made the 721A, but that wasn't even accurate.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: That was like a copy contract from another.
Speaker: So essentially, essentially, it's like we're super early.
Speaker: And right now, the people who are like made it is people who made it back in the bull run.
Speaker: And now they're just kind of maintaining their floors.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It's the blue chips.
Speaker: Yeah, very competitive space and very speculative space.
Speaker: And it's really like investment driven.
Speaker: So obviously collections who do happen to have high floor airdrops and all of these coins that they give to their holders that they can make millions of, right?
Speaker: Like those are obviously going to be the projects that thrive.
Speaker: But unfortunately, those projects tend to kind of be more Ponzi-nomic driven, right?
Speaker: Like you understand where I'm going with this?
Speaker: It's like the holders are incentivized through the financial gains that they make.
Speaker: But when you actually strip it down to the psychological principles of how they're operating the project, it's very similar to a Ponzi, right?
Speaker: Like it is sadly, but it's the truth.
Speaker: You need to, in order to, there's a lot of truth in what you're saying and I can get behind pretty much most of it.
Speaker: There's different timeframes.
Speaker: Like it's like in crypto, when you're trading, you're looking at it on the one minute and then on 15 and then on the hour to kind of validate and validate your hypothesis.
Speaker: And for this, it's a little bit similar because you're,
Speaker: azuki i think from what i'm getting from it from my what my gut is telling me i think they're going to wrap it up nicely i think that what they're doing is actually weaving a story using nfts using their um their community in order to do it and and i think they're going to do something great with their ip um it's not one of those that i'm
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: And great art.
Speaker: And they seem to have smart minds within the team and they seem to have smart minds in their community who they listen to.
Speaker: And so that's one of the parts that makes NFT such an interesting asset class.
Speaker: It's not just a financial asset.
Speaker: It's a lot more.
Speaker: And you're actually storytelling has never been a more important role in a marketing strategy for a brand than it is
Speaker: with NFTs.
Speaker: 100%.
Speaker: Because at the end of the day, it's a digital asset, right?
Speaker: And you don't want to just be selling a digital asset without a story.
Speaker: So yeah.
Speaker: For sure.
Speaker: I totally agree with that.
Speaker: I'm not trying to fud Zuki or anything, but I just think... They'd be hard to fud anyway.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: You can't fud them.
Speaker: Right now, at least.
Speaker: Their IP is undeniably great.
Speaker: They have an amazing IP.
Speaker: Same with Bored Ape.
Speaker: Same with Clones.
Speaker: They have an amazing IP, and you can't deny that.
Speaker: Even Doodles, they had an amazing IP.
Speaker: They just lost their community.
Speaker: For sure.
Speaker: And there's definitely always going to be room for that, and there's definitely always going to be space for that.
Speaker: I just like to see these IP projects...
Speaker: deliver more because there's so much that you can do on the blockchain and they have so much capital and funds raised.
Speaker: The sky's the limit really for them.
Speaker: But unfortunately, we don't see that, right?
Speaker: We just see some more art.
Speaker: We just see some more airdrops when we could be seeing a lot more, right?
Speaker: Like maybe I'm being a little bit greedy, but I think the founders there are being more greedy, you know, because they have a lot of funds to play with that they could do a lot for the community with.
Speaker: Yeah, I think it's also a little bit scary right now to deliver because look at what happens.
Speaker: Artifact is trying to do it and they're delivering dope stuff.
Speaker: And the response is just not there because expectations are high.
Speaker: Liquidity is low.
Speaker: And so you're you're just kind of throwing awesome stuff into the into the wind.
Speaker: So I'd agree with you.
Speaker: I'd love to see more from these people.
Speaker: But like being a being like from the entrepreneur founder perspective, I get it.
Speaker: Take your time if you got to take it.
Speaker: Come out with the at the right time for honestly right now.
Speaker: They've been up until now.
Speaker: They've been timing.
Speaker: I'm talking about Azuki now, but they've been timing everything so perfectly.
Speaker: And I think that's what Bored Apes have done and Yuga have done so well as well.
Speaker: Like the timing of every single thing they've put out was just absolutely on point.
Speaker: For sure.
Speaker: And they really pay attention to market conditions, right?
Speaker: They don't drop something when the volume is completely dead.
Speaker: And even when it is, they're the center of attention.
Speaker: So they're, they're sucking all that volume anyways.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So, um, uh, yeah, no, there's that they're definitely smart.
Speaker: Like both teams are definitely very, very intelligent.
Speaker: They know what they're doing.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: But yeah, again, me personally, just because I'm a founder and I know how much I've delivered with such little, I'm thinking like how much I could actually deliver with that amount of funds.
Speaker: And it's just insane, right?
Speaker: It's insane.
Speaker: Like they don't give even 1% back of what they made to their community, which is a shame, which is a shame because that's their bread and butter.
Speaker: The community is the reason they have those high floors.
Speaker: The community is the reason that they're getting exposure every day through PFPs, through all these people marketing them basically for free, right?
Speaker: Dude, you're absolutely preaching to the choir.
Speaker: I resonate with this so much.
Speaker: I am the same where I don't make it if my community doesn't make it.
Speaker: I launched my project
Speaker: we had a couple of launches in November and then in March, which were great conditions short term, but like midterm, everything just got blasted off in June.
Speaker: I didn't cash out anything.
Speaker: I didn't cash out anything because I don't feel like if my community hasn't made it with me, I'm not going to make it.
Speaker: And then I'm going to suck it up until we all make it together.
Speaker: And so I, this resonates with me so much.
Speaker: And I think it's, did you ever hear about Italian?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, I think so.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I personally had high hopes because the founder seemed very, she was very vocal.
Speaker: She called herself a builder and all of that.
Speaker: And she got people into the project and made a lot of money for herself, was flaunting it in ways that were borderline.
Speaker: And then...
Speaker: At some point, they were like, okay, we're going to abandon this and just move to something else in a way that a lot of people felt alienated.
Speaker: And I think, so she got a lot of heat for it.
Speaker: And I think it was a good example of
Speaker: what you guys are doing is not three is not web three.
Speaker: It's, it's web 2.2.
Speaker: You're, you're just using web three tech in order to extract, extract value.
Speaker: And, and, and that's not, I think the future of what we're doing, the, the, the projects that we'll have,
Speaker: obliterated everyone else on the market in 10, 15 years will have got it well and will have given a lot of value back to their existing.
Speaker: Yeah, 100%.
Speaker: They're actually using the blockchain properly.
Speaker: They're using it to
Speaker: you know, make these token gated communities, token gated utilities actually offer kind of, you could say memberships, right?
Speaker: You could see all, even, even in these blue chips, you can see it as prestigious memberships, right?
Speaker: To these clubs, fancy clubs.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So, um, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: We're just super early in this space.
Speaker: Like we barely scratched the surface of what you can actually do with a smart contract of the types of utilities that you can offer to a community with a token.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: like just today we released token gated music videos for our community you need to connect your wallet to a page sign the message and then you can actually download all the contents you can download the beat you can download the video right so there's just so much cool stuff that you can do for your community using the blockchain but unfortunately people just
Speaker: You know, it's like, okay, their images.
Speaker: And then actually, the most recent AMA that I was in, like someone compared it to their rocks, the rocks that you keep in your wallet.
Speaker: And sometimes they go up in value, you know, but as long as we keep that mentality, as long as we're just seen as rocks that sometimes go up in value based on speculation,
Speaker: Like we're not going to have the advancement.
Speaker: We're not going to have the mass adoption.
Speaker: We're not going to have the people coming in from Web 2 to Web 3, right?
Speaker: Because we're just going to keep that stigma that surrounds NFT of these founders who come into this space, suck a bunch of money.
Speaker: They don't deliver shit.
Speaker: And then they live these outlandish lives where they're literally spending the community's money on like all types of substances and Lord knows what, right?
Speaker: So...
Speaker: um yeah we these guys aren't rock stars like why are we supporting their drug addictions why are we supporting their fancy lifestyles when they haven't done anything for us it's just that us as dgens we're just like so we want that instant gratification we want to mint their projects so we can flip it for money so we give them money to use someone else's as exit liquidity while they still get to keep their money and it's just it's a whole mess it's a whole mess like
Speaker: we need the space to change, honestly.
Speaker: And I'm a very big preacher of that.
Speaker: Every time we get into these discussions, I actually get heated because I'm passionate about this.
Speaker: I can tell.
Speaker: And it pisses me off.
Speaker: It pisses me off when I see someone just running with 2.2 million and not doing shit for the space.
Speaker: Because that's just liquidity gone out of the space.
Speaker: And people ask, why are our bags dumping?
Speaker: Well, bro, our bags are dumping because we keep funding and minting shitty projects that rug us, right?
Speaker: It's like,
Speaker: It's just liquidity leaving the space that most often won't come back in because those people are now scarred.
Speaker: Those people got liquidated.
Speaker: Those people lost their life savings, right?
Speaker: They're not going to come back to NFTs.
Speaker: They're going to tell everybody else that NFTs are a scam, that I lost all my money.
Speaker: And it's just going to keep that negative energy within the space that we really don't need because it can be easily filtered through, you know, properly interviewing founders, making sure that if we're going to fund this project, they're in a vested, they're in a vesting period.
Speaker: Or there's so many different ways we can go about it where we can ensure like,
Speaker: okay, if this is the roadmap you promised to deliver on, you're going to deliver on it, right?
Speaker: But we don't see that type of responsibility within the space.
Speaker: It's like, oh, it's just, oh, the holder's fault.
Speaker: You're the one who minted, bro.
Speaker: It's your fault.
Speaker: Well, no, like there needs to be some kind of standardization.
Speaker: And I'm not asking for centralization.
Speaker: I'm asking for standardization within these projects where it's like,
Speaker: okay, this project is not going to build shit.
Speaker: Well, just cancel them, right?
Speaker: Cancel culture is so strong within, you know, like celebrities or people who do or say stupid stuff.
Speaker: Well, what about the people who are doing like literally crimes on the internet?
Speaker: They deserve to be canceled.
Speaker: You know what I mean?
Speaker: Yeah, but what's really hard about this and about cancellation is one, people who are in the position where they should be canceled are very smart and very good at hiding their tracks.
Speaker: And even if you're on the blockchain and you're supposed to be able to track everything, it's a lot of transactions.
Speaker: When you look at Luna, there were in the transactions a bunch of
Speaker: hints that there was some stupid shit going on that it wasn't for the people to invest in.
Speaker: It was just super centralized stuff.
Speaker: But when all of this gets lost in billions of transactions, then it's really hard to see.
Speaker: And the other thing that really makes it hard is that
Speaker: If you're holding a bag, you're incentivized to protect that person, even if they're doing something nefarious.
Speaker: And I think I have a lot of respect for Izuki and Zagabon and how they've turned it around.
Speaker: But I do think that if people were not holding assets that were worth tens of thousands of dollars at the time where the fight happened, he would have been canceled for sure. 100%.
Speaker: 100%, but people were overly invested and overly attached, right?
Speaker: And that's what it comes down to at the end with a lot of these bags that are going down.
Speaker: And it's like the communities are still shilling them like they did even back in the bull run.
Speaker: It's because they're overly invested and they're overly attached.
Speaker: So this is almost like their hopium.
Speaker: If they don't support, if they don't protect the FUD, then they lose control, right?
Speaker: It comes down to control.
Speaker: This is like a psychological principle now, right?
Speaker: Because if they don't feel in control, if they don't feel they're in power, then they feel helpless.
Speaker: And if they feel helpless, then they're not going to make it in their heads, right?
Speaker: So, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Honestly, it's just a very interesting space.
Speaker: And I like to, like, sometimes just look at things from the outside and kind of do, like, a little case study, right?
Speaker: Especially with, like, all these different projects that, you know, like, make it like a maze to get the whitelist for them, right?
Speaker: You have to, like, get this orb, and then you have to get that orb, and then you get that orb.
Speaker: And it's like you're running through a whole maze that the founder made just so that you're able to pay him money.
Speaker: You know, you get where I'm going with this?
Speaker: It's true.
Speaker: It's ridiculous.
Speaker: But like that, it's fucking ridiculous.
Speaker: But it's fun too.
Speaker: It's actually what's happening.
Speaker: Yeah, but it's actually what's happening, bro.
Speaker: It's like you're trying to secure your payment.
Speaker: You're trying to get on the waitlist so you can pay the founder money and he's making you run through all these obstacles that you're doing.
Speaker: You're acting like it's an MMORPG game and you're on a quest to get the shiny object, right?
Speaker: But it's all based on speculation, bro.
Speaker: Like maybe you're running around and you're working 40 hours a week trying to get whitelist for the server.
Speaker: You're working a full-time shift basically for one week.
Speaker: And maybe the mint price goes under the floor price, right?
Speaker: So now it's like you wasted your time that you'll never get back and your investment is down the drain, right?
Speaker: So I just think there's smarter ways.
Speaker: that people should go about doing things.
Speaker: And I think that, you know, like the FOMO hype driven culture needs to steady down a bit.
Speaker: And we need to actually, if this is going to be an investor's game, we need to all think like investors.
Speaker: We can't have 80% of us just trying to flip for a $10 profit.
Speaker: You know what I mean?
Speaker: Like it's not going to work.
Speaker: But that's the thing.
Speaker: We've like retail people, retail investors have never really been taught what it is to invest.
Speaker: And so you're not, I was actually having this conversation on the podcast a few days ago.
Speaker: You're not taught how to do due diligence and how to do your research and how to vet a project.
Speaker: And even after three, four, five years, you get people who get into the wrong projects.
Speaker: And so I think it's just, we're going through a natural phase of human evolution where,
Speaker: And we're actually, thanks to Web3, kind of regaining control over something that we didn't have a lot of control over because it was reserved to the elites.
Speaker: And so it's probably going to take a few more bull runs in order for normal people like us to understand, all right, I can't just make a split decision to invest in a project.
Speaker: I actually need to research it.
Speaker: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker: Definitely.
Speaker: Definitely.
Speaker: I think in this space, information is very, very powerful.
Speaker: And clearly we see that every day, right?
Speaker: With all these collections mooning.
Speaker: And it's like, if you add that information, then you're riding the moon bag.
Speaker: If you didn't, then you missed out and you're FOMOing, right?
Speaker: So information is definitely very valuable in this space.
Speaker: And I think a lot of the big players, especially like the whales of the Laudiquility, they don't like to share this information, right?
Speaker: They don't make it accessible to people.
Speaker: So they can actually manipulate the floors the way that they want to, right?
Speaker: So...
Speaker: Yeah, it's a very predatory space at the moment.
Speaker: And this doesn't just apply to traders.
Speaker: This applies to founders.
Speaker: Founders actually are very predatory.
Speaker: And they will basically almost enslave people just to make themselves look good.
Speaker: They have people going crazy in their Discord chat to make their project look hype.
Speaker: Even if they're not actually building something, even if they have no utility, even if they don't plan on actually doing anything on the roadmap, what they care about is a popping chat
Speaker: So everybody mints when the contract gets deployed.
Speaker: So there's just all these psychological matrices that are set up by these founders to entice people to invest, entice people to spend.
Speaker: So there's a psychology behind every mint, technically.
Speaker: There's a psychology behind every mint and how to get a mint out.
Speaker: All of these different factors are
Speaker: like have an effect, have an effect on the people that are grinding this much, have an effect on the people that are FOMOing, that are maybe coming off secondary because they see like so much interaction happening in the Discord and they think, oh, my investment is definitely going to go up here.
Speaker: This is an active server, right?
Speaker: So it's almost mind tricks.
Speaker: It's almost mind tricks.
Speaker: We're primal animals.
Speaker: For sure.
Speaker: For sure.
Speaker: For sure.
Speaker: Definitely.
Speaker: When you come into Web3, you really see that, right?
Speaker: Because as you said, you know, it's like you see all types of people.
Speaker: And they don't necessarily have to be traders or investors, right?
Speaker: They're just people.
Speaker: We're all people at the end of the day, right?
Speaker: So, yeah, it's just a very, very naive and not so mature space, I would say, right?
Speaker: Like a lot of investors in NFTs, N1T3 in general, are just very naive.
Speaker: Like they're not completely aware of what they're actually doing sometimes when they're funding a project or when they're minting something out.
Speaker: They're not actually aware of what they're doing, right?
Speaker: They think they're just maybe...
Speaker: you know, by buying this picture that has supposedly this roadmap.
Speaker: But who knows where the Mint funds is going, right?
Speaker: Like, because a lot of us, you know, after the funds are deployed,
Speaker: Like, yeah, maybe there's a couple of detectives out there, but most of us, we just forget, bro.
Speaker: We're already in the next project.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: We're already moving on to the next project.
Speaker: We left the server, we unfollowed on Twitter, and we're looking for the next opportunity, right?
Speaker: That's how a lot of people in this space operate now.
Speaker: I hear this all the time.
Speaker: It's like you mint, you sell, you unfollow on Twitter, you leave the Discord, and you don't look back.
Speaker: Even if it moves, you don't look back.
Speaker: This is the mentality that's being widespread now in the space, right?
Speaker: So it's like we're just chasing the new next shiny thing, and that's it.
Speaker: That's all we're doing.
Speaker: We're chasing ether.
Speaker: We're chasing captains.
Speaker: We're chasing the new next shiny thing.
Speaker: Right?
Speaker: So.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And the current, like, world conditions don't help because...
Speaker: We're all like we're coming out of COVID.
Speaker: The market conditions are not great.
Speaker: So you're looking for stuff that's going to turn you on a little bit, make you excited, make you feel like you, that you're going to fit in, make you a little bit of money.
Speaker: We're all dopamine deprived because we spend our whole day, our whole day on our phones, just looking through, looking through Twitter.
Speaker: And so the more stimulus, the better.
Speaker: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker: We're definitely just like a,
Speaker: you know we're too focused on gratification on on our minds being stimulated in general right just like that that because it's it's no matter what server you go in where you see all these pretty pictures and all these people talking it's it's stimulation of the mind right stimulation of the mind uh so what i really wanted to actually mention though polymath i'm already forgetting my track of thought yeah we'll come back to it we'll come back to it in a bit i'll probably remember uh but
Speaker: Yeah, honestly, the main moral of this story is like, I really hope people just become a little bit more self-aware when they do step into certain projects, when they are deciding to support a certain project.
Speaker: They're being more critical thinkers, right?
Speaker: Because that's ultimately what the space needs.
Speaker: It's more critical thinking.
Speaker: Like, do we support this project?
Speaker: Do we not support this project?
Speaker: Are we just supporting this project so we can use people as exit liquidity?
Speaker: Or is it because they're actually building something and we want to fund their roadmap?
Speaker: So we need to
Speaker: really start viewing NFTs as startups because that's what they are.
Speaker: If you're saying you have a roadmap and you're saying you want to collect this much money, you're a startup, right?
Speaker: It's like, we want this much money funds to build this and this and this.
Speaker: Well, if you're a startup, then maybe you should be held up to the same rules as a startup.
Speaker: And I'm not saying every startup is expected to make it because most of them do not make it.
Speaker: And that's fine.
Speaker: That's fine, right?
Speaker: You don't have to make it, but at least deliver on what you promise to deliver, right?
Speaker: It's like, that's the least that you can do.
Speaker: Try your hardest and do it transparently because this is the minimum that should be expected because you're absolutely right.
Speaker: It's not a random number that 90 something plus percent of startups
Speaker: go bust.
Speaker: And that's why you need to diversify.
Speaker: You need to do it smartly.
Speaker: You have to treat your portfolio not for your dopamine hit for the next seven days, but for the next 10 years.
Speaker: And yeah, but I agree with you.
Speaker: There should be an obligation
Speaker: for people who are founders that they do things transparently that they treat the people who have bought their nfts as investors and that they actually do owe them something for sure i say this all the time it's like i don't owe anybody in this world anything i'm debt free but the only people i owe are the people in my community and my holders because they believe in me that's the only reason i owe them it's not i love this mint funds or anything because they believe in me and um
Speaker: I left my nine to five to work like an 18 hour a day job.
Speaker: So clearly I didn't leave.
Speaker: I didn't leave my job to work less like some of these founders do.
Speaker: Some of these founders, they came into Web3 to just make money and make a payday.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But then you see people are actually spending like literally all day, every day trying to build something, trying to interact with the community.
Speaker: And, you know, those people aren't there for the money.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: If they were, they could put those 19 hours into something else and probably make more money.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So those people are there because they're passionate about what they're building because they're creative individuals.
Speaker: Like I don't, I don't view myself as a insanely intellectual or intelligent individual, but I know I'm a creative individual and I know I'm very passionate.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So as a founder, you have to like focus on your strengths and see what you could do.
Speaker: Like, what are you good at?
Speaker: What are you good at?
Speaker: How can you offer value back to these people who believed in you and invested in your project?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So,
Speaker: That's why I'm doing, for example, the metaverse counseling, because I have a license to do this, right?
Speaker: So this is something that I can bring value to my holders by doing.
Speaker: And it's very neglected in the space, because when everything is FOMO driven, when everything is go grind this whitelist for 40 hours, bro, so you can make a big
Speaker: People neglect their health.
Speaker: People neglect their families.
Speaker: I've heard of people almost getting divorced because of the husband or the wife branding for this white list.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So these, these types of, I'm serious, but like this is, yeah, I know that's, that's what's hilarious.
Speaker: For sure.
Speaker: For sure.
Speaker: So that we definitely need more mental health aids.
Speaker: We definitely need more, honestly, like you could say activists, even we need activists in web three.
Speaker: We need those people who make themselves heard, who are very vocal, who are able to rally communities and stand up behind a good cause.
Speaker: Because that's what we're missing, right?
Speaker: That's what we're missing.
Speaker: What happened in the 80s and the 90s when there was unethical things going on?
Speaker: Well, people rallied and they made themselves heard.
Speaker: And this is the same thing that we need to do in Web3.
Speaker: It's like we're reliving the past and we're watching all these unethical things happen.
Speaker: And now who are the heroes that are going to stand up?
Speaker: Where's Martin Luther King?
Speaker: Where's whoever, right?
Speaker: You get where I'm going, right?
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: We need more.
Speaker: vocal people who aren't just there because, oh, they're influencers and they're famous and they have a reputation in this space, but because they're actually, they're doing something.
Speaker: They're bringing value to Web3, even if it's speaking out against injustice.
Speaker: Man, I absolutely love what you're saying.
Speaker: We've talked about value extractors and I talk about this all the time.
Speaker: In this space, we have more extractors at the moment and there are value providers that are rising and more and more and with every single wave of extractors.
Speaker: like the three arrows stuff, the Luna, the FTX, we now realize, hey, like what you're saying before, you're putting money into these guys' pockets and you have to, it is kind of, it kind of is your responsibility.
Speaker: It's hard because like you want to say it's their responsibility because, you know, nobody told them to mint.
Speaker: They didn't have to mint, right?
Speaker: They didn't have to give the person the money.
Speaker: But if you think about all the psychological factors around them,
Speaker: First, they're incentivized to make a profit.
Speaker: Second of all, they see the height.
Speaker: They see the, although we were going to make it in the chat, we're going to make it.
Speaker: Don't sell.
Speaker: If you want to get out of the hood, don't sell, bro.
Speaker: If you want to get out of the hood, you better not sell.
Speaker: It's almost like a culture.
Speaker: It's like paper hands, diamond hands.
Speaker: It's almost like a cult.
Speaker: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker: And it doesn't even have to be a cult.
Speaker: Forget about the cult.
Speaker: It could literally just be
Speaker: Like greed, everybody has, as humans, we are naturally greedy.
Speaker: There is greed in us and it's up to you to kind of, you know, like waver yourself off that greed and just come back to earth, become a little bit grounded.
Speaker: So you don't end up making those stupid decisions, right?
Speaker: Because when people see something that's minting out really fast, right?
Speaker: First thing they'll do is click and mint, right?
Speaker: Oh, bro, this is going to sell out.
Speaker: I need to get in.
Speaker: I need to get in, it's about to sell out, but maybe it's a drain or maybe it's a, maybe it's literally like people controlling it and making it mint out that fast.
Speaker: So you FOMO in, right?
Speaker: Like there's a lot of manipulation tactics that happen in the space that people are just oblivious to, right?
Speaker: And when you are a founder, when you do see these things happen, like even if it's just floor manipulation, right?
Speaker: It's very easy to spot.
Speaker: It's very easy to spot the more experienced you become in the space.
Speaker: But to new people, they fall for it every time, right?
Speaker: Those big fake sales,
Speaker: the setting up the floor before the mint, having the high wealth offers on the collection before the mint, right?
Speaker: It's just simple little tactics that make the naive investor FOMO win, right?
Speaker: So it's like, it's like if you're new to the space, yeah, like sure people are putting the responsibility on you, but how are you going to know better if you don't have anybody to tell you otherwise when this is like a brand new world to you?
Speaker: Because a lot of people come and they come with a little bit of money and this is a brand new world to them.
Speaker: They've never done anything like this before.
Speaker: You come in here cute and naive like your friend told you, oh, just buy this NFT.
Speaker: You're going to make 5x your money.
Speaker: And then you come out and then you have the Twitter bots.
Speaker: You have the airdrops on your wallet.
Speaker: I remembered what I was going to tell you now.
Speaker: So I was going to say earlier is the reason we have this happening is because what do you see, bro?
Speaker: Every single YouTube video is a fucking...
Speaker: a clickbait thumbnail how to make 100x in nfts how to make 50x in nfts bro i've made i've made 500 nfts and i'm still not advertising that and i'm still not trying to bring people in saying like bro look i made a bag of nfts even if i did even if i did i'm not advertising that i'm not pushing that culture i'm not bringing in people who are just looking to make that 5x and 10x and then they go broke and then they end up leaving this space and say oh it's a scam
Speaker: right?
Speaker: Because they came in for the wrong reasons, first of all.
Speaker: They didn't come in for the community.
Speaker: They came in strictly for financial gain and they're being sold a dream that does not exist because they know nothing about this space.
Speaker: How are they going to make 10x?
Speaker: How are they going to make 20x when they don't even know how to list something on OpenSea?
Speaker: When they don't know how to accept a wealth offer, right?
Speaker: Like they have no education, no skills, no training, and they're being shilled all these random NFTs on YouTube saying, make a 10x.
Speaker: This is the next 10x.
Speaker: This is the next 20x, right?
Speaker: And then they go in and they grind and they get the weightless and they mint and they lose their money.
Speaker: that's the people who should be canceled for sure.
Speaker: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker: There's just, there's, there's too many people in this space who like, they're trying to be Andrew Tate, right?
Speaker: They're trying to be Andrew Tate or they're trying to be like, uh, uh, just someone who preaches, like they know something that they don't and they're token gating it.
Speaker: Like they know the cure, they know the answer.
Speaker: It's a, the cure to cancer, right?
Speaker: Like, uh, but it's so easy to come to, to make yourself appear like you're an expert.
Speaker: Because you prepare very well, you do minimal research, you prepare your video, you do 15 takes, and of course you're going to come out and you're going to seem like you know your shit when in reality you've actually never made any money off YouTube.
Speaker: Otherwise you wouldn't be doing YouTube, you'd just be flipping NFTs.
Speaker: I tell my community this all the time.
Speaker: It's like, if someone knows how to make money, they're probably not taking your money, bro.
Speaker: They're just going to make money, right?
Speaker: They don't need your money.
Speaker: But if someone's asking you to pay $5,000 for a course, or if someone's asking you to buy their floor for 10 ETHs so you get to know how to make money, then there's something shady going on, bro, because they don't have the cure to cancer.
Speaker: Like, I'm telling you right now, there's no reason that that floor price should be 10 ETH, and it should be token-gated that hard when there's no actual substance inside, but it's just a FOMO high-floor tactic, right?
Speaker: So, yeah, we need more transparency in this space and we need more critical thinkers and we need people who maybe they are in it for the short term investment, but are also in it for the long term growth of Web3.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: I don't care if you want to flip projects and you're here to make money.
Speaker: A lot of people are.
Speaker: Go for it.
Speaker: But also be one of those people who wants to see the advancement and the growth of Web3.
Speaker: Because otherwise we're just going to be stagnant and we're never actually going to grow.
Speaker: And even more than that, it's not just about the growth of Web3.
Speaker: It's about your personal growth because after a while, you realize that your own advancement means nothing if you're not sharing it with others.
Speaker: And so if you're, it's come in here and come and try to hustle and try to make money, try to make a hundred bucks, 500 bucks, 1K.
Speaker: But-
Speaker: Pay attention to the people around you.
Speaker: Pay attention to the people who are here for you and understand that they matter a lot more than those 10, 1500 bucks that you're making.
Speaker: Cause it's that connection is, it's so important.
Speaker: Not just, not just for like your professional advancement or your career, but even just for your fulfillment.
Speaker: We're, we're social animals.
Speaker: A hundred percent.
Speaker: A hundred percent of social beings for sure.
Speaker: I completely agree with everything you said, but honestly, like sadly, you don't see enough of this in this space, right?
Speaker: You don't see it.
Speaker: It's like those very like hidden communities that actually share these sentiments or these vibes, or they've been around for a long time.
Speaker: They've just been in too many projects and they know, right?
Speaker: They know because most people that come into a project, bro, they just want the wait list.
Speaker: They just want the ETH.
Speaker: They want to hopefully make more ETH than they put into the project.
Speaker: And sadly, that's just become the culture now.
Speaker: That's become the norm.
Speaker: Like we've seen so many mints.
Speaker: It's like they sell out with a gas ore and then within five minutes, they're under mint price.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And it's like, well, it's because everybody was just trying to mint to dump on people who couldn't mint.
Speaker: You know what I mean?
Speaker: It's like that's just a very wrong way to go about a launch, to go about a project.
Speaker: But it's unfortunately what's incentivized.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It's what's incentivized and it's what's built for.
Speaker: But yeah, you realize that when you actually choose transparency and when you actually choose to be there for the people that you're building for and that you invite them, then they're not going to be here just to make a few bucks.
Speaker: But there are still humans who want to belong somewhere.
Speaker: Behind everything, behind the green, behind everything.
Speaker: We want to be...
Speaker: want to participate in something that's bigger than us.
Speaker: And, and that's like, if, if one, if there's one thing that founders should hear before they get in is okay, the money's great, but the people are more important for sure.
Speaker: 100%.
Speaker: And until we actually start treating these beautiful JPEGs as people and not just investors or another number or a minter,
Speaker: right like that's that's not gonna happen and sadly you don't see that bro because most founders that come either they're ready like big shots and what too and you know like they're just trying to make another quick buck or they see it as a great business opportunity or they're just trying to gain more exposure but whatever it is um they're not there to actually connect with people they're not they they encourage they might encourage the community to connect but they won't connect they're going to be behind doors the whole time right so
Speaker: I've noticed so many projects.
Speaker: They want their communities to do everything.
Speaker: They want their communities to rep their PFP.
Speaker: They want their communities to go out and raid, to host spaces, to do all of this.
Speaker: And then the founders are quiet.
Speaker: They don't do anything, bro.
Speaker: They just expect the community to carry them on their back, right?
Speaker: And we've seen this happen a lot, especially when it's like a project that people are over-invested in.
Speaker: The community will do it.
Speaker: They'll rally behind it, even if the founders are absent, right?
Speaker: Like, look at MFers, right?
Speaker: Sertoshi left and MFers were still trending, right?
Speaker: You know what I mean?
Speaker: And
Speaker: They're still getting sales.
Speaker: They still had the high floor.
Speaker: That's 100% community driven at that point.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And yeah, yeah, it's nice to see.
Speaker: It's nice to see the community driven aspect, but it also be nice to see more community driven projects coming out where the founder isn't necessarily, you know, making millions and millions every single mint or whatever the case might be.
Speaker: And he's actually participating in the, like, this is what I liked.
Speaker: about alpha gang is like, I was almost elected as a founder.
Speaker: It was almost like a democracy and they're like, yeah, Hacks, we want you to organize the project and we want to be part of your roadmap, right?
Speaker: Because I started from the community, right?
Speaker: I started as a very active community member, right?
Speaker: I wouldn't be grinding for a whitelist.
Speaker: I never did that, but I would be always like making these relationships, making these friends, talking to people for hours, trading with them for hours.
Speaker: Like this was just something I enjoyed doing, right?
Speaker: I didn't need incentive or
Speaker: for cyber snails to pay me more than 0.158 to do it.
Speaker: I was doing it because I wanted to do it, right?
Speaker: I was making way more like per flip than they could have ever paid me.
Speaker: So it didn't matter.
Speaker: But what mattered was almost like the principle, right?
Speaker: So it's like, if someone is bringing your project so much value and it's like, they're actually managing your community, they deserve to be a co-founder.
Speaker: They deserve to be a community manager.
Speaker: They deserve to have some kind of role that helps further advance them in Web3.com.
Speaker: Because they're helping you, bro.
Speaker: They're literally holding your project on their back.
Speaker: Right?
Speaker: So, yeah, that's why in Alpha Gang, we have such a huge staff team.
Speaker: Because it's like, you don't have to do much.
Speaker: As long as I see that you're actually participating...
Speaker: You know, you're helping people out.
Speaker: You're being friendly.
Speaker: I want to make you staff.
Speaker: Why wouldn't you want to have those people as staff?
Speaker: Because those people are good for the entire community.
Speaker: Those people are actually ensuring that they're doing it because they want to do it.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And that's the best that's the best people to have.
Speaker: You don't want people who are just there for the payroll.
Speaker: You don't want people who are just there for the rewards.
Speaker: You want people who actually are enjoying themselves while they're working even.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Like with me, for example, the reason I can work 18 hour days is because I enjoy what I do.
Speaker: If I didn't, I wouldn't be here still.
Speaker: I wouldn't be working these crazy hours if I didn't actually love what I did.
Speaker: And I've always hung out with my community.
Speaker: I enjoy hanging out with my community.
Speaker: As you said, right?
Speaker: Like we're social beings.
Speaker: And since COVID and since isolation, right?
Speaker: Like that's actually like when my streaming got even crazier during COVID, right?
Speaker: When COVID first started, right?
Speaker: Because...
Speaker: You're just so isolated and you have all this time alone and there was curfew and you couldn't go out.
Speaker: So that isolated us even more.
Speaker: And without these communities that are present in Web3 and Discord and whatever type of community, just a community in general, because it doesn't have to be an NFT community, right?
Speaker: Most people, they forget that.
Speaker: They think like, okay, if you're going to be a community, you need to have an NFT.
Speaker: But that's not true.
Speaker: You can just be literally in a no-token-gated platform
Speaker: open community where there's just actually a strong sense of community and it can be a great place to be.
Speaker: You won't feel alone.
Speaker: You won't feel isolated.
Speaker: You always have people to hang out with.
Speaker: And it's probably the best way to start too.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: And that's, that's actually how we started, right?
Speaker: We started as a public server.
Speaker: All the channels were public.
Speaker: Nothing was token gated.
Speaker: People just came to hang out.
Speaker: They liked the vibes.
Speaker: Then they decided to mint and it was a free mint, right?
Speaker: So yeah, I think people need to really take a step back.
Speaker: And before they launch a project too, it can't be just like,
Speaker: on a, on a whim.
Speaker: Like I see a lot of people, they hear about how much a founder made and that's it.
Speaker: They're like instantly, Oh bro, I'm making an NFT.
Speaker: Okay, bro.
Speaker: What's your NFT going to do?
Speaker: I don't know, bro.
Speaker: I just want to make the ETH.
Speaker: Bro, like, okay, how are you going to get the community?
Speaker: Bro, I'll hire people.
Speaker: I'm going to hire marketers.
Speaker: I'm going to hire this person.
Speaker: I'm going to hire that person.
Speaker: They see it as a business opportunity.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And until that stops happening, it's like, it's going to be very hard to advance.
Speaker: It's going to be very hard for the space to advance because we're incentivizing these greedy founders who come to extract ETH from us.
Speaker: And we're just naive or we don't know better or whatever it is.
Speaker: And we allow it to keep happening.
Speaker: Like, bro, it happens every single day.
Speaker: And OpenSea is like notorious for this.
Speaker: Like they have all these projects on their homepage and it mints out and it pumps.
Speaker: And then the next day it's half the value.
Speaker: And you know what?
Speaker: I'm going to cut out the entirety of this conversation and just keep this part and just repeat it in a loop for two hours because it's so fucking important.
Speaker: It is.
Speaker: And we really need to evolve beyond that.
Speaker: Man, I'm an optimist at heart.
Speaker: I'm an idealist.
Speaker: And I see Web3.
Speaker: I see why I personally came here for unity.
Speaker: And our mission with our project is to bridge the opportunity gap with Web3.
Speaker: And that's what I care about.
Speaker: That's what drives me.
Speaker: And I want this...
Speaker: Like what you were describing before of the founder needs to be down in the trenches.
Speaker: I like 100% agree with you.
Speaker: But what I personally hope for is that I'm going to be down in the trenches for the next five years.
Speaker: And then I'm going to build it up so that in five years,
Speaker: all the people who are around me will have taken ownership and will get 100% of the value that they get.
Speaker: That's, that's what I, what I hope for in my heart, because I think that's what Web3 was all about initially.
Speaker: Yeah, I get what you mean, a hundred percent.
Speaker: And it's kind of like a, it's a long-term vision, right?
Speaker: It's a long-term vision.
Speaker: And just by doing this, you're actually a pioneer in the space too, right?
Speaker: You're building something somewhere early where not many people have built land.
Speaker: Or have not built land successfully, at least.
Speaker: So you're a pioneer.
Speaker: And that's great.
Speaker: I highly recommend more people to do this.
Speaker: I always tell people this.
Speaker: Like, bro, if I became a founder, if this person became a founder, you can become a founder too, as long as you're passionate.
Speaker: That's all you need to be.
Speaker: It's just passionate, right?
Speaker: Like a lot of people, we have a launchpad, Alpha Gang.
Speaker: So people come up to me with like V-Gen projects.
Speaker: They come up to me with like all types of shit.
Speaker: And if they're not passionate, I don't do it.
Speaker: I don't do it.
Speaker: I'll say no to them, right?
Speaker: They just want to launch a degen to make 0.005 ETH per NFT or whatever.
Speaker: I'm going to say no because that's not how NFT should be, right?
Speaker: It's not about you getting a bag, bro.
Speaker: It's about you actually building something in this space.
Speaker: And until people really start treating it like that, we're just going to see all these projects that go to zero, these projects that don't get volume a year later because there's just nothing there.
Speaker: There's no community.
Speaker: There's no server.
Speaker: It's literally just pictures on the blockchain.
Speaker: And even though sometimes a picture is worth more than a thousand words, there's literally zero words, bro.
Speaker: Like there's nothing happening.
Speaker: There's no engagement.
Speaker: There's no activity.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So it's like, what are we doing?
Speaker: And I hate to be a pessimist, but I'm just being a realist because I've seen it.
Speaker: I've seen it for more than two years now being in this space.
Speaker: I've seen it and it keeps happening.
Speaker: And like when I actually got a platform, I got followers.
Speaker: I got, you know, like a community who supports me.
Speaker: the first thing I wanted to do is make myself heard, right?
Speaker: Make myself heard because hopefully it'll bring about even a little spark of change.
Speaker: Even if I, if I managed to change Web3 by 1%, I'm happy, right?
Speaker: Because that's one.
Speaker: That's already a lot.
Speaker: I hope, I hope it for you.
Speaker: For sure, bro.
Speaker: And I really hope so too, because,
Speaker: It is a very, very beautiful technology.
Speaker: It's something I'm truly, truly passionate about and something that I really see the value in.
Speaker: But it's 100% neglected and people are just sleeping on it and they're just focused on the Ponzonomics side where they neglect the true builders.
Speaker: They neglect the people...
Speaker: that are actually bringing something new to the space, bringing something cool of value to the space, because it is that attention economy that we talked about.
Speaker: You could literally make a project with the best utilities out there in the market for the best price possible, and people will still sleep on you if you don't have enough followers or you don't do those giveaways or you don't have those big collabs.
Speaker: It's just conditioning.
Speaker: It's conditioning.
Speaker: But that's the thing about business.
Speaker: I wholeheartedly agree with you that if passion is not there, then you should never even consider it as an investment.
Speaker: But passion is only one of them.
Speaker: I've always been extremely passionate about everything I do.
Speaker: And yet, in the past five years of being an entrepreneur, I slowly, all right, passion.
Speaker: Then I learned about sales.
Speaker: And then I learned about marketing.
Speaker: And then I learned about marketing.
Speaker: managing other people.
Speaker: And then beyond those like hard skills, there were also like inner soft skills of my own relationship to success and to making money and then to be okay with that and to finally be in a place where, and so it's hard to do business because you need all of these things to be aligned in order to succeed.
Speaker: And it's even harder to do business in web three because the volatility is just a fucking killer.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, because you're basically doing a double play, right?
Speaker: It's a derivative, right?
Speaker: When you're trading ETH NFTs, you're trading a derivative of ETH.
Speaker: So it's a leverage play.
Speaker: It's a leverage play and it can either hit really big or it can hit really bad, right?
Speaker: Because you'll get F'd on the floor price and on the price of ETH.
Speaker: So yeah, definitely a very volatile space.
Speaker: definitely not for the weak hearted.
Speaker: Um, I've seen people, this goes to crypto trading too.
Speaker: I've seen people go from $40,000 losses to $18,000 in profits.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And all they had to do is just hold and play the psychology.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So that tells you how volatile the space can be.
Speaker: Like, and the thing is you make a mistake like that, that only took two minutes to make.
Speaker: And you live with that for your entire life.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So yeah.
Speaker: If you don't get back up on the horse.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: But even if you do, even if you do, all it takes is just one bad trade to make a $60,000, $40,000 loss.
Speaker: And you're going to remember that for the rest of your life.
Speaker: That won't leave you.
Speaker: You might get over it.
Speaker: And I really hope you get over it.
Speaker: If you don't get over it, you should see someone, right?
Speaker: But it's going to be there.
Speaker: It's always going to be there.
Speaker: It's always going to be on your black book in the back of your head, right?
Speaker: So it only takes a second.
Speaker: It only takes one wrong decision, one wrong move.
Speaker: It's a very calculated game.
Speaker: When you're investing into NFTs, when you're investing into crypto, if you don't look at it like a game of chess, then you've already lost half the battle.
Speaker: You have to plan ahead.
Speaker: You have to think two moves ahead of your opponents and who are your opponents.
Speaker: Maybe it's the flippers.
Speaker: Maybe it's the founder himself.
Speaker: You don't know.
Speaker: You don't know.
Speaker: You have to strategize.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So.
Speaker: That's exactly what I was thinking when you were talking of, you have to remember that you're still, okay, we're in this, this is a beautiful space.
Speaker: You're holding beautiful JPEG.
Speaker: You've made nice friends on the Discord server.
Speaker: You're still competing with a bunch of people.
Speaker: And if you want to survive, I mean, there's different ways to, you could buy one NFT that you just absolutely resonate with.
Speaker: And this is going to be your online identity for the next 15 years.
Speaker: And then that's,
Speaker: That's something else completely.
Speaker: And you can be happy to write it down to zero because you've had one hell of a time.
Speaker: That's one thing.
Speaker: But if your game is to actually make some money out of it, if you want to play NFTs as a
Speaker: digital uh as a financial asset class then dude like you're playing against millions of people and you have to do the work in order to it's not luck no one success by luck is is an absolute myth myth sorry it was it was true back in the bull run you could get very lucky yeah but now in this type of market no it's not luck
Speaker: It's not luck in this type of market.
Speaker: Back then it could have been, right?
Speaker: Luck is not a strategy.
Speaker: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker: But back when it was initially starting, if you minted Bored Aves, if you minted Mutant Aves, and you just had that diamond hand mentality, you got lucky.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: It's not lucky because it was just random luck, but it's because it's a very small percentage of that much success.
Speaker: coming your way of you minting that certain project and yeah before in the past these opportunities did exist you could get lucky back in the past you could have got lucky you could have minted a CryptoPunk and forgot about it for a year why the fuck did I have to mint CryptoKitties not even mint I bought like four why did I not get a Punk man
Speaker: Yeah, for sure, bro.
Speaker: And that's just, that's just like, yeah, not just no luck, but that's also, that's also like something you needed to experience, right?
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: You need to know what's meant back then and stuff.
Speaker: And it was, it was a very niche crowd, right?
Speaker: Like even in the Solana community, I don't know if you've done much Solana NFTs, but back in the past, it was crazy, bro.
Speaker: Like every Solana community was the strongest of the Bored Ape community.
Speaker: Like they were that diamond handed.
Speaker: especially because the mints were so cheap, your initial investment was only like $5, $10.
Speaker: You know what I mean?
Speaker: So you're not as willing to sell, right?
Speaker: And yeah, the culture just kind of slowly drifted away from us.
Speaker: Before it was really like incentivized to be paper-handed because you didn't want to be the guy who paper-handed punks.
Speaker: You didn't want to be the guy who paper-handed apes.
Speaker: You didn't want to be the guy who paper-handed all these things that were blowing up.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But in this market, nothing blows up.
Speaker: And if it does, it's slowly going to go back on the decline over a period of time.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: We've seen it happen with every collection, no matter how great they are, they climb up and then it's a slow, gradual decline, especially if it's a hype mint.
Speaker: It's going to start off really high.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Invisible friends, captains, they start off 7th, 8th, and then just slowly work their way to 4th.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Because the hype and the expectation is,
Speaker: aren't going to stay matched from day one till day 30 when the eyes aren't on that project.
Speaker: And what maintains a floor price isn't actually just the value, but it's that volume, right?
Speaker: It's that consistent volume that's coming in and coming out.
Speaker: Because without that volume, even the highest collection floor is going to slowly go down over time.
Speaker: We've seen many examples of this.
Speaker: Just because there's a lack of volume, the floor price starts to go down.
Speaker: Yeah, and we know right now that the hype cycle is just so much shorter.
Speaker: A few months ago, you had an influx of money, you had liquidity that was out there on the market, and so you knew that the chances...
Speaker: For sure.
Speaker: But now we're paying for that.
Speaker: Right now we're paying the consequences of that.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: We haven't even started to pay the consequences of that.
Speaker: Like this is just, this is just a small test.
Speaker: For sure.
Speaker: For sure.
Speaker: Definitely.
Speaker: Cause yeah, a lot of people like even alpha gang last year, right.
Speaker: They're like talking about how ether is going to go to 5,000.
Speaker: And it's just like the market's booming and it's, you know, that euphoria, right.
Speaker: When the market's doing really good.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: I told him back then and there, I was like, guys, what the government did is not healthy.
Speaker: You can't just randomly print a trillion dollars and expect for that not to have any effect on the economy.
Speaker: That's unrealistic, right?
Speaker: So that's actually how I was able to predict.
Speaker: I sold all my Bitcoin of 30,000, bro.
Speaker: Right before the crash.
Speaker: And that's how I was able to make that decision, like very full heartedly knowing that I was probably making the right decision.
Speaker: It's because if you just think about it from like a finance point of view, right?
Speaker: Like the micro and macro economy cycles, the boom and the bust, like it's bound to happen.
Speaker: You bring in such an influx of money.
Speaker: Bitcoin reaches all new time highs.
Speaker: What comes after highs?
Speaker: After every high, there's a low.
Speaker: After every low, there's a high kind of thing, right?
Speaker: And even just recently when Bitcoin reached 15,000, a lot of people were really scared.
Speaker: And I was in Alpha Gang telling everybody to buy.
Speaker: I told everyone, I said, I put 20% of my portfolio in Bitcoin at 15.5,000, right?
Speaker: 15.5K.
Speaker: So these are just things that you pick up on after years and years of trading.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And just having that experience without that experience, you wouldn't know.
Speaker: You'd be so quick to think, oh, guys, we're fucked.
Speaker: We're going to 10K.
Speaker: Capital saying we're going to 12K.
Speaker: This trader saying we're going to 13K.
Speaker: Buy Bitcoin at 10K.
Speaker: Buy Bitcoin lower.
Speaker: Buy Bitcoin lower.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: You're going to hear everything from everyone and everybody's pretending that they're an expert and that they know what they're doing.
Speaker: But in reality, it's the people with experience are going to come out on top most of the time because they've been there before.
Speaker: They've been through a bear market before.
Speaker: They've been through a bull cycle before.
Speaker: They've seen the ebb and flows of the market.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: I think we're in a space where experience is rewarded more than other things.
Speaker: And luck will always play a huge factor because realistically, nobody knows where Bitcoin is going to go.
Speaker: Even though I'm a trader, if you were to ask me, like, would you bet like your whatever or would you like, would you swear on your mom's life that it's going to go up?
Speaker: Of course I can't.
Speaker: I can't say that.
Speaker: No one can, right?
Speaker: Because realistically, as much as you analyze, however many fibula lines you draw on the chart or whatever you're doing, you don't know.
Speaker: You don't know.
Speaker: You're taking a risk, but hopefully you do proper risk management so that your wins outweigh your losses, right?
Speaker: And that's what we all hope to do as traders to be profitable.
Speaker: Because if your losses are outweighing your wins, then you're not a profitable trader.
Speaker: And if you're not a profitable trader, then can you really make a living out of trading?
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Just when you open this door, especially like in these podcasts, when you open this door, it's just a never ending door because there's just so much to talk about.
Speaker: But it's a necessary one.
Speaker: It's a necessary one because it's it should be the hope to make 100x should be like the bottom line of
Speaker: what you're told.
Speaker: It's like, hey, you should get in there.
Speaker: You should do all the research on what Web3 is, on what decentralization is, on how these business models might evolve in.
Speaker: You should make sure that you understand how wellets work and how to have proper security on your assets and do your research due to due diligence, read the white papers.
Speaker: And if you do this well, then potentially, and if you use proper bankroll management, then potentially,
Speaker: you could make some money in the next five years.
Speaker: For sure.
Speaker: And it doesn't even have to be five years because you said a lot of good things, right?
Speaker: You said a lot of good things.
Speaker: You do that for a few months and you could realistically make money.
Speaker: You'll win.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly, right?
Speaker: It's just all about your strategy, the mindset that you go into things.
Speaker: And it's about you taking care of yourself because if you don't take care of yourself and you go on a loss, you're going to end up revenge trading.
Speaker: You're going to end up getting more losses.
Speaker: You're going to try to chase back that win.
Speaker: You're going to maybe get a moonshot and now you get lucky, but you need to make up an ETH.
Speaker: So you're not selling for 0.3 ETH profit, right?
Speaker: When profit is profit and you should lock that 0.3 ETH in maybe because over time that 0.3 ETH is going to add up, right?
Speaker: Stacks up, yeah.
Speaker: So I really preach consistency, right?
Speaker: Like I tell the gang, like our goal is consistency.
Speaker: I'm not going to make any of you rich, but I'm going to show you opportunities.
Speaker: And if you're consistent, if you're present, you're going to have opportunities to make money.
Speaker: You can't deny that, right?
Speaker: Like it happens every day.
Speaker: We free minted checks.
Speaker: It's almost at one each.
Speaker: And that was 10 per wallet, right?
Speaker: That was 10 per wallet.
Speaker: It went off in our tracker.
Speaker: I pinged it when there was only a thousand minted.
Speaker: There's only a thousand mint and you can mint it on as many burners as you wanted.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So the opportunity is huge and it's there, but it's like, are you tapping into it?
Speaker: Are you actually paying attention to it?
Speaker: Are you doing your research to know who the artist of checks was and why hacks is minting 30 on his burners?
Speaker: You know what I mean?
Speaker: So it's like these little details, they really matter in this space.
Speaker: And to most people they're oblivious to it or they don't bother or they just simply don't know.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We're just in a very, very young space where,
Speaker: All the wrong things are rewarded, unfortunately.
Speaker: And all the wrong founders are rewarded, unfortunately.
Speaker: Not to say that there's founders who haven't got their rise to shine, but even when they do, usually it's very overdue, right?
Speaker: Like when they finally get the rise to shine, it's very overdue for some of these founders.
Speaker: And yeah, honestly, man, just like every time I have a platform to speak, like I can't help but voice these issues and these concerns because...
Speaker: if we're not voicing these issues and no one is, then I don't think anything's going to change, bro.
Speaker: Everybody's just going to be lured by that hanging carrot, that dangling carrot in front of their face, that expensive PFP, that blue chip or that hyped mint or whatever it is, right?
Speaker: So we really need to kind of just understand that psychology plays such a big role in everything that's being built here in Web3.
Speaker: And until we actually kind of just tap into...
Speaker: our own morality.
Speaker: Cause that's what it comes down to at the end of the day.
Speaker: It's morality, right?
Speaker: Like, am I really supporting this project when I know so-and-so is going to happen or like this founder has done so-and-so in the past, or maybe they're unethical or maybe they have very bad spending habits.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: I've seen other like trading groups, right.
Speaker: Other big projects.
Speaker: Their founder, they make a ton of money from the community.
Speaker: They get 100 ETH and they start leverage trading with their community's money and they blow it all.
Speaker: They get liquidated.
Speaker: And now they have to step down as a founder and the mods are coming to clean up after them.
Speaker: This is a true story that just happened recently.
Speaker: A very big project, right?
Speaker: I think I saw it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So yeah, I think most founders, when they run into a large sum of money from mint funds, they've never managed that much money before in their life and they just do stupid things with it.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So, um, it's so easy.
Speaker: It's so easy to, you have the access, uh, no project, very, very little project who they do claim to be decentralized, but they don't use a multi-sig and, and it just sits there and you're right.
Speaker: You don't know who the founder is.
Speaker: You don't know what their habits are.
Speaker: You don't know if they're addicted to gambling or addicted to other things.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: and we're a bunch of dgens so the the probabilities are pretty high that the person that you're giving your money to is gamble it away yeah yeah definitely definitely um yeah just we got a long long way to go but when i see other builders uh building stuff that actually brings value it just it gives it gives me motivation i'm not so cynical and i'm actually happy right because i'm like
Speaker: you know, like other people are doing what I'm doing.
Speaker: They're actually building and they're not caring about certain metrics, but they're more focused on the value that they provide to their community.
Speaker: And as long as their holders are happy, their community is happy, people are actually finding value in it, then...
Speaker: It doesn't matter.
Speaker: You don't need to be the biggest.
Speaker: You don't need to be the shiniest.
Speaker: You don't need to be the strongest.
Speaker: But as long as you do have that base, right?
Speaker: Like what's the reason for your project, bro?
Speaker: Because if there's no reason for your project, if it's just a cool PFP that does nothing, well, you could have sold that as digital art.
Speaker: You didn't need to actually be on the blockchain or to be a token, right?
Speaker: You could have just sold it as digital art.
Speaker: A lot of these open additions that are coming, it's like, bro, this could have been digital art.
Speaker: This had no reason at all to be an NFT.
Speaker: It's just an artist coming with a big name and DGENs, FOMOing in and buying his art.
Speaker: Wanting to extract.
Speaker: But their art never ends up as the same value as their Web2 art, even when they're famous, right?
Speaker: Because this art is controlled by DGENs.
Speaker: It's not controlled by the art collectors and the connoisseurs, right?
Speaker: So yeah, it's interesting.
Speaker: Yeah, it really is.
Speaker: Man, I think those are really interesting thoughts to actually close off on because it is one of the most important things that we've said today.
Speaker: And before we do close off, who are you looking for right now?
Speaker: Who do you want to reach out to you?
Speaker: Where should they find you?
Speaker: What should they expect from you?
Speaker: Yeah, you can always find me in the AG Discord Alpha Gang.
Speaker: I don't give anybody any promises.
Speaker: You might not make any money, bro, but you're going to h ave a good time.
Speaker: You're going to enjoy your time.
Speaker: There's good vibe people, there's friendly people.
Speaker: And yeah, you'll get to know more about me, about my community, what we're all building together.
Speaker: Because I strongly believe that the holders of any project are the project, right?
Speaker: The project is the holders, like the people who identify behind those NFTs, behind those PFPs.
Speaker: So
Speaker: Yeah, just closing message is, yeah, find founders that make themselves available, get to know them, find out what they're building.
Speaker: And if they're passionate, and if you actually see that they're advancing in Web3, support them.
Speaker: I'm not asking you to support me.
Speaker: I'm saying other founders who are actually passionate and building something that's going to advance us as a space.
Speaker: Because no matter who you are in Web3, if you just leave off with that message, if that message resonates with you, and you end up supporting someone who actually built something good, then you're advancing the space and you're actually investing into the right projects.
Speaker: Man, couldn't have said it any better.
Speaker: And I absolutely support it.
Speaker: And he is very humble and he's not saying that you're going to get anything with him, but I do highly recommend that you check out Alpha Gang because even just for the vibes, honestly, and I don't just, I don't usually just throw that word around because it's just been so overused.
Speaker: But in this case, they're there at the bottom of the bear market.
Speaker: They're there.
Speaker: So man, Hacks, thanks so much.
Speaker: I love this conversation.
Speaker: Yeah, me too, bro.
Speaker: Anytime.
Speaker: We'd love to have it again anytime.
Speaker: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker: It's great meeting you out.
Speaker: You too.
Speaker: Take care, man.
Speaker: Thank you.
