495, the attention was around the information. The internet was actually called the information super highway. It was about looking up stuff. It was a better encyclopedia.

Look at this information at the time in 1994. I don't think anybody walking on earth understood that the internet would eat up almost every aspect of our lives. Everybody laughed at me in 1995, when i told them that i was going to build a website to sell wine and i'm telling you everybody laughed at me. Everybody said nobody's gon na buy, i remember being in meetings where people would say things like gary.

This is crazy. Nobody's gon na buy wine on the internet. The internet is a fad and i would reply. Not only are people going to buy wine on the internet, people are going to buy everything on the internet.

You got your perspective. I just want to be happy. Don't you want to be happy? As a matter of fact, i used to use the concept of people are going to buy tomatoes on the internet because for some reason people are very passionate about touching tomatoes at the supermarket and that very much upset people. And i remember when, when fresh direct came to new york and people were buying tomatoes on the internet, it was a very big deal for me because i emailed a lot of old friends and said i told you, so i think that the blockchain uh in the Consumer way that we're talking about it with nfts is the biggest thing.

That's happened since 1994 or 95, and i think everybody here should spend as many hours educating themselves on what i'm really saying. It goes far beyond board ape or befriends. It is a monumental shift and right now we're looking at collectibility with a hint of utility, i think very quickly we're going to get into a scaled world of utility with hints of collectibility on the back end, and when that happens, it's going to start really moving. What do you tell somebody who says i don't i don't really know about nfts.

I don't know what that whole world's about. Is it? Are they meaning the people that say i don't know or the people are saying it's a scam. It's full of it's a fad. I think the people who really just haven't taken the time to look into it or you know, given it any thought at all, even if you don't invest or are involved but know what it's about.

I don't really have a lot of passion of really saying anything to them, meaning i'm not in any need of everybody understanding it. It's going to happen anyway. What i would say to people i care about, is it's a missed opportunity for you not to get educated on this, but i i often tell friends and family and people i care about in my community a very simple truth in moments like this. I have no interest in convincing anybody on earth that this is important or opportunistic.

I have conviction in my belief that it is, but i'm not in the commencing business, i'm in the business of putting things on the record and being historically correct, and this is an interesting point and also being prepared to have to deploy a lot of humility. If i'm historically incorrect, you know for me the reason i'm comfortable doing this is, if god forbid, because i don't want it to happen, this whole thing isn't real and the blockchain disappears. I'm mentally prepared for saying here's why i didn't see it. This happened and this happened, and this happened and i think that's a very important part of many people's journeys.

I think a lot of you here. Don't produce content or don't do things out of the fear of being wrong, and i want to remind you that being wrong is not only okay, it's actually a preference, it means you're pushing. What's not. Okay is when you're wrong not being accountable and owning it.

Now. Obviously, today we're at coders hq how can coders or the coding community, or even like uh digital artists, jump onto the blockchain web 3.0. You know it's funny, because a lot of you probably are aware of my content. I often make fun of school or college, but what's unfortunate is that people aren't really hearing what i'm saying.

I believe that education is the most important thing in the world. I think the way education is currently being sold in the world has lost its way in the reality of our world. The answer to your question is: how do you take advantage of it education in december 2020, when i sensed through my strength, which is consumer intuition, that the nft thing was finally getting close? I spent hundreds of hours, educating myself, it started with very simple videos of what is an nft today, because i remembered what i thought it was in 2017, when i first saw crypto kitties, but i knew that i hadn't been paying attention, so i had to re-educate Myself um, the answer is education, like every web 2 developer in the world should be learning how to develop for web 3 because it's lucratively exciting for them. There's incredible demand for web3 developers and really it's not a very big leap for a web 2 developer.

To get to web3, there's just certain things you have to know and understand that you know a decentralized server is a very different environment than owning your servers, which is why so many launches last year struggled because a lot of developers didn't remember that they were really Building on the blockchain they were so accustomed to building on their own server. They got caught. You could see the traits uh. So the answer to your question is just education like put in the time and effort to be educated and another little side.

Note a lot of the energy right now in web 3 is unfortunately built around greed and short-term financial behavior, which is a very different game than web. One and two were built on because there wasn't this much money being thrown around. So if you're in this room just make sure that you're not getting clouded by greed, which what that really means is once you have a hypothesis, make sure that your hypothesis is not grounded in what you'd like to happen. For you make sure you're double checking everything in a more holistic point of view on it.

Can you give any advice to coders who want to capitalize on their code and coding capability? Has there been any like drive towards blockchain with 3.04 coders? In specific i mean we know about the nfts. Well i mean you know any viable project, that's launching on its own website and is minting a project needs development. You know some, you know yeah. I have a lot of advice.

It's called understand how to code on decentralized servers right. It's like get get accustomed to the new behaviors um. There's incredible. I mean this is this: is one of the great eras for developers there's so much security that needs to be figured out, there's so much bridging that needs to be figured out, there's so much capabilities of minting that we haven't even explored.

Yet i mean this is probably the most exciting time for a developer since probably 2005 678, when the web 2 movement was happening um. So you know it's funny for me to even think that developers don't see how big of an opportunity this this is. I think it goes back to education and execution yeah, i think uh. You know you touched on that a little bit as well.

One of the other questions was about how initiatives like coders hq are focused on enabling the coding communities - and you know you said education. Obviously, but um you know: how could they focus on driving communities towards you know, so what kind of education? How do they shift from how it currently is to uh web 3.0? Where does it start? It starts with believing that the opportunity exists you're not going to spend 50 hours learning if you don't think it's there. So you know i remember when ruby on rails as the language started, catch attention back in four five, six, seven trying to remember exactly the timing. You had to believe that that was a language that was gon na catch.

You know heat, otherwise, you weren't gon na stop coding in php and then, of course it didn't catch as long term and it evolves and that's just the game of development right something stick. Some things don't, but you learn, you know you learn from certain things and learning that language might have helped you be stronger at the next thing. I i think it starts with conviction around the movement is actually happening and again, i think the biggest reason. So many of your friends don't see the nft thing or the blockchain thing is because they're bringing their internet perspective to the blockchain people, make jokes like that's so stupid, i'm going to right click and save that's an internet lingo! That's what we did on the internet.

That's not how the black chain works when people like this is stupid like who owned like people say the most basic things like. It is much easier for me to know if you own something on the blockchain than for me to know. If you own something in real life, we can all go outside right now and take a picture next to a car put on social media. Make pretend it's our car people do that you can't do that with an nft.

I can look it up in three seconds and see you don't own it. So what's really fascinating is, is the concept of. Are we grasping the opportunity and are we learning how to not bring our web 2 development brain to web 3? Which is why so many projects struggled last year, incredible developers didn't even realize that subconsciously. They didn't understand the pitfalls they were going to have at mint because they didn't understand that they didn't control the server, even though it's decent, it's just fascinating to watch.

So i think, a recognizing the situation and then b having the humility to really put in the work to do it properly. What are the factors that drive your decision into investing into digital uh companies? I mean you did it. You know at a very early stage, like you said, with the wine company and also invested into tech companies and now you're very ahead in the uh web 3.0 world. My my greatest strength is intuition around what people are gon na do before they realize they're gon na do it.

That has been my real business gift that i'm able to somehow intuitively understand that you are going to do this, even though you say you're not going to, and i think a lot of that has to do with a couple of core beliefs i have, which is A i don't think humans understand how much convenience will always win in the end that you know that i remember the blackberry to iphone debate. So many people never thought they would get an iphone because they liked the buttons on the blackberry. But i remember just thinking every day from day one i'm like, but it has the internet on it and the internet is more powerful than touching buttons. The internet will beat the buttons and i think that's how i think about the consumer blockchain.

I already understand that nfts representing the mundane like a receipt or a ticket or a bracelet, is going to be better for people. They just don't see it yet like, and so i you know for me what i do is. First, i understand the consumer truth. People are going to do this that that's intuition pattern recognition.

My obsession with history there's a lot of things that help me be good at it and then the next thing i do after that is i i i invest based on the human being, that's running it. I think the reason that i'll be successful in nft investing and a lot of people are going to lose. Is i don't believe in what a lot of people accept this truth, for example, so many people talk gary. This nft has, i, i think, a lot of you if you are in this space.

Remember the last several months. I love the road map. That's why i'm investing and i was like, but that's like a pitch deck just because you say you're gon na do something. Doesn't mean that's a good reason to invest.

I learned that lesson in my career, that was a good deck, but they didn't know how to actually run a company number. Two gary you don't get it. This is gon na win because of the community. Well, the community is only as good as the people executing the project.

These communities are not really built. The far majority on communities they're built on the fact you're rooting for it because you bought it and you want it to go up. You're financially incentivized, just like people that bought beanie babies cared about it to just flip. Thus, beanie babies died because they're not disney they're, not transformers they're, not marvel where you actually care about the characters.

You just bought the beanie baby to sell the beanie baby, which is 99 of the behavior in nfts, which is why i put out content saying 99 of these are going to fail because i know human behavior. For me. What i do is believe in a human truth, a thesis and then i start looking for the people that i think are capable of driving that to a successful outcome, which is something i don't think people are spending enough time on in nft land i mean there Are people spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on projects where the founders are anonymous? The reason there's so many rug pulls is because people are making bad decisions because they're in a gold rush and everybody's, so over focused on making money in 24 hours that they're going to lose money. You always seem to be one step ahead of the game.

The game right now is 3.0 and blockchain. Is there anything else that you're thinking about or is on your plate, that uh is coming up? No, i don't allow myself to think that way. Uh. I have no emotion that tomorrow needs to be a new playing field.

What i do is, i spend all my time absorbing what humans are doing, so that i'm ready when something has emerged. I didn't force nfts into the lexicon. I watched people and realized nfts were on the precipice of happening, so for me, i'm just paying attention, but i only get interested when things are on the precipice of scale. My career, when it's looked on when i'm long gone, will probably be much more of a story of timing than anything else.

I bought ethereum in 2015 and you can find clips of me talking about in 2017, 2018, but they're very far and few between i bought it. I understood the concept i watched from afar and then, when i felt that the summer of 2020 was showing me indications because of top shot and flow because of punks that something was brewing, then i committed to the time in the winter to say: is it ready And then, by early january february 2021, i'm like oh, my god, it's ready, then i got very loud. You know it's funny, i'm so frantic high energy loud. I i understand my communication style, which i think confuses people at times to think i might be a little bit throw against the wall and see what sticks a lot of people say.

You know when someone says something nice about me, like man, you've been really right about stuff i'll, always see a lot of comments, i'm like yeah. If you predict 900 things, three are going to be right and i always i and i always, and i always reply to those people i'm like hey, would love to have you show me the video of what i predicted wrong? I think what i do very well seems very counter to my energy, which is the following: there's a great saying that a lot of people really believe in which is measure twice cut once i believe that i measure 50 times and cut once it's just that after I'm done measuring 50 times and i'm ready i cut loudest. I also feel that, because of my intuition and because of my listening strengths, that i do see things a hair early, i once i sense it and i taste it i'm so convicted that it's a feeling that i've known before that i'll put in the work so Fast which allows me to speak to it earlier, i was right about tick-tock right. I was right about social.

I was right about e-commerce and content and many platforms, and - and it's because i put in the work - and i don't fear being wrong but i'll, be very honest with you. The only reason there's so many people in this room right now is because i've been right right like like, and so i tell you a lot of people like well gary you're, of course, your nft project's doing well, you have a huge community, i'm like one that I earned like all like i'm fascinated by by that and so i'm incredibly thoughtful of what comes out of my mouth. I think a lot of you that have followed me for a long time. I don't say that many things i'm pretty narrow.

I have a good knack of saying them: 8 000 different ways um, i may say them in new platforms in different content formats, but you know to me i'm 100 sure that the consumer blockchain is going to matter and i'm trying to learn and build community and And more importantly, it is incredibly intoxicating to have your community benefit from your observations, and so that is been a beautiful part of this journey. For me, you.