3 - Mack Flavelle | Overpriced JPEGs

Mack Flavelle is the Co-Founder of CryptoKitties, Dapper Labs, and Big Head Club. CryptoKitties was instrumental in establishing the ERC-721 standard, which is the base for the vast majority of NFTs. Mack helped launch NBA Top Shot and StonerCats, and that just begins to cover his impact in the space. Needless to say, Mack has had a prolific career and pioneered many innovations for NFTs. His creativity and boundless energy powers this conversation about the history of culture on the blockchain, and a discussion of his more recent and upcoming projects leads to bold predictions about the future. Mack is a fascinating character, and we wouldn't expect anything less from one of the founding fathers of the NFT movement. ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://jpegs.banklesshq.com/ 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST APPLE: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/overpriced-jpegs/id1591954323 SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/show/5G2HSDneVg8mZUQ3zUIoLX?si=6d57ee1f89184974 ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 👀 ZERION | YOUR NFT PORTFOLIO https://bankless.cc/Zerion 💸 ONJUNO | YOUR CRYPTO PAYCHECK https://bankless.cc/OnJuno 🌊 INDEX COOP | METAVERSE INDEX https://bankless.cc/MVI 🦄 BLOCK::BLOCK | METAVERSE IP https://bankless.cc/blockblock ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 3:30 Mack Flavelle and Cats 10:12 CryptoKitties and ERC 721 13:56 Inflection Points 19:14 Pink Cat Villain 22:59 Innovations & Explosions 28:01 The Price of Kitties 36:10 New Major IP 42:30 Ronin & Death Poems 50:59 Big Head Club 56:32 Lessons from StonerCats 1:01:54 Ghostbusters Etc 1:04:05 The Big Questions 1:11:27 Closing ------ Resources: Big Head Club https://www.bighead.club/ Japanese Death Poems https://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Death-Poems-Written-Monks/dp/0804831793 ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Speaker 00

  Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of Overpriced JPEGs. I am Carly Riley. On today's show, I have Matt Flavell, who I'm so excited to have brought on to this podcast because Matt is very fun. He actually was the person who came up with the idea for CryptoKitties, which is one of the very first NFT projects and in fact was the project that gave way to the ERC 721 standard that all NFTs today, for the most part, conform to. So we talk a lot about about the history and what it was like back in the early days, why CryptoKitties was able to be so successful. We also talk about his latest projects. He's now the CEO and founder of Big Head

• 0:49Speaker 00

  Club, which is the company you might know for having partnered with Miele Kounis and Ashton Kutcher to release Stoner Cats, but he's done a number of projects since that as well with Big Head Club. So he also, at the very end of this episode, makes some predictions about the future of the space. So stay tuned for that. A couple of warnings before you totally dive in here. One, we curse quite a bit in this episode. Matt is a bit of a cursor. I'm a bit of a cursor. And then when I'm around somebody else who's a cursor, it really gets unlocked. So please just be cognizant of that if you have kids around, or if you feel uncomfortable with swear words, for what it's worth, probably worth putting it out there. And then also, we recorded this episode a number of

• 1:34Speaker 00

  weeks ago, and it was actually before Matt's latest project had dropped, Big Head Club's latest project had dropped. That is their Ghostbusters project. So they launched a collection of NFTs for around Ghostbusters, the animated film that is released, releasing soon. So anyhow, that there's some time, timing differences, because we talked about it as if it were coming up, but it has already happened now. So you can go check out Ghostbusters, the Afterlife on OpenSea. And I think those are all my caveats. So please, please enjoy this episode. We'll hear from our sponsors first, though.

• 2:10David Hoffman?

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• 2:53David Hoffman?

  That's Z E R I O N slash banklist.

• 2:57Speaker 00

  I want to give a special thanks to overpriced JPG partner Block Block. Not only because they are a sponsor of this show, but also because they are my employer. Block Block is an innovative blockchain lab. We work across NFTs and the metaverse, and our goal is really to push the industry forward with every new project we take on. We founded and currently run the MiBits DAO, which just partnered with Larva Labs to create more metaverse-friendly renderings of MiBits, which is awesome. We are also partnered with a Sundance Award-winning filmmaker to build the first DAO that will own a feature-length documentary film. We have a ton of cool projects down the pipeline and are really looking for cool people to partner with on this.

• 3:40Speaker 00

  So go to blockblock.io to subscribe to our newsletter and be kept up to date about what we have going on, and also to check out open roles we have available. Would love to have you apply, come work with me, coming out, blockblock.io. Here we go. I am so excited to have you on the show, Mac. You and I have, actually, I've had the pleasure to chat with you a number of times before this, so I'm not meeting you for the first time here. And I want to introduce you by saying that you have been a part of at least two groundbreaking projects in the NFT space, and I want to name those projects and see if the audience can spot the theme.

• 4:25Speaker 00

  So the first project is CryptoKitties, you may have heard of it, and the second project is Stoner Cats.

• 4:34Speaker 00

  Spot the similarity. So Mac, what is your thing for cats?

• 4:39Speaker 02

  I will, I can legitimately tell you my things for cats right now, and it has to do with CryptoKitties. So also, okay, we're gonna tell a story. I'll tell you another story about cats after, because there's a third cat thing you don't know about.

• 4:52Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 4:54Speaker 02

  Uh, but here's where the cat thing comes from. So wow, we're just gonna get right into it. Okay. So I used to work at a company called Axiom Zen, and Axiom Zen was a foundry before that was a thing, or an incubation, something, a startup studio. You know, we never quite found the words for these. Beta Works was pioneering this model years ago in New York and that kind of thing. At Axiom Zen, we used to build incredibly high-quality software. It was award-winning. We won like Apple Design Awards and Webby Awards and all sorts of things. And we did that for partners, and it was a lot like, I describe it as like, when you first get into like making apps with technology, you always have a friend who's like, "Oh, I got an idea. Like, I've got an idea. Wouldn't it be cool? Like, you should make my app."

• 5:38Speaker 02

  And Axiom Zen, the founders, Roham and Sam, who are brothers, had that experience, but their friends were like generally billionaires. And so when they were like, "I have an idea," then they'd be like, "And I have the money to make it." And then we would do that, and we would, you know, make really, really, really great apps and charge people for it. And part of the privilege of that entire experience was that we would have profit, and with that profit, we would say, "Oh, now we think we can shape the world." Like, it's interesting to learn from our partners, and we had the privilege of being very selective about who we worked with, and that was very nice. But then the byproduct of all of that was a small pile of opportunities that we had in front of us.

• 6:15Speaker 02

  And so I essentially led the consumer foundry there, and that was the like, if we don't have a partner, but we're gonna build something, what are we gonna build? And then that was kind of like, well. Let's get Mac to come up with something and not that we got to do what I wanted, but at least like I would try and convince people what we should try or they're trying to convince me and I played a pivotal role in that consumer foundry, self-directed part of the business. Um, and so that was a lot of ephemeral messaging apps. That was a lot of mobile games. That was a lot of like, oh, we're gonna build the next Snapchat and we're gonna, we're gonna build the next like Flappy Bird or this kind of thing. Like, how do we hit those kinds of massive trends and waves?

• 6:54Speaker 02

  And, and we realized the luck and the discipline and the commonalities and the discrepancies between those two examples I just gave and blah, blah, blah. Okay. So Ram said to me, you know, we're doing all these consumer experiences and we're building all these things. And Ram says to me, he says, how do you feel about the blockchain? And I said, I'm pretty sure that's like a fancy word for Bitcoin that libertarian assholes use for why they want to take down their governments. And he was like, well, no, but uh, maybe. And he's like, how do you feel about making the blockchain fun? And I was like, well, that's a fucking dumb idea. Like who, who would, who would want to do that for any reason? And he was like, well, if you want to keep your job, you do.

• 7:36Speaker 02

  He hates it when I tell the story that way because he didn't actually say that. We were good friends and he never threatened my job, but he was like, no, dude, like, this is a massive opportunity and as a business, we want to look at this and like, that means you need to look at this. And I said, okay. So I went into the woods and I came back three days later and I came back with three truths. And the one truth was that I'd always wanted to build a gardening game. Something where you put a seed in the ground and you do not know what color or what shape the flower that blossoms will be. That kind of discovery seems really fun to me. Like literally for over a decade, I've been trying to put together a gardening game where you listen to the birds, the kind of the songs the birds make is different depending on what gardens are in your garden. That sounds fun and beautiful. So that was one truth, like this gardening game thing.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  And the second truth was that the only thing I'd ever seen on the blockchain, any blockchain that I gave you than the remote is the fuck's about, was a CryptoPunk. So, and this part I used to not tell people because I found it kind of embarrassing, but in 2017, I didn't tell anybody and I spent $35 buying a CryptoPunk.

• 8:39Speaker 00

  Do you still have it?

• 8:40Speaker 02

  I do.

• 8:41Speaker 00

  Oh, man.

• 8:43Speaker 02

  I bought it because it looks like Wonder Woman and I love Wonder Woman and it was the first time.

• 8:47Speaker 00

  That's badass.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  We can do a whole thing about the like avatarization and the PFPs and the hybrid tries to buy things that look like themselves. I can tell you about the sexist racist people buy CryptoPunks and the price of rarity of black female traits versus others in CryptoPunks. I'm the only person I know who given choice to buy any CryptoPunk on earth virtually like this was four years ago. And the only one I bought looked like Wonder Woman. I don't know if you can see me right now. I don't look like Wonder Woman.

• 9:10Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, you're you're being absorbed by an only Ronan's head right now. You look like you're about to be eaten. For those who are not on on YouTube, I'm sorry. You can't see the look right now, but.

• 9:21Speaker 02

  It's a look. There's a whole thing going on.

• 9:24Speaker 00

  It's a look.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  Uh, so, so that was two truths. Gardening game, CryptoPunks is the first thing that matters. And the third was that cats are opt out. You do not explain why you're using cats if you're building consumer applications. You explain why you were not using cats if you were building consumer applications. The gasoline, the internet, people love them. They have been viral since before, literally since before the word viral existed, cats have gone viral. Like, it's just if you're trying to build things for muggles, they're trying to build things for normal people who do not give a fuck about how the magic works. You just want them to care. Then you put a cat on that motherfucker and that is my cat thing. Now, the other side of that is I didn't come up with Stoner Cats, but I did hear about Stoner Cats and I was like cats. And my fucking Spider-Man radar did his thing and I was like, that's probably a pretty good idea.

• 10:10Speaker 02

  Long answer, that's the cat thing.

• 10:12Speaker 00

  Um, that's amazing and and we will get into Stoner Cats later. Uh, so you started to tell your story, obviously. I I gave you a a hard lead in, I know, but so your background, you're working at this agency. Your boss essentially comes to you and is like, yeah, we're doing blockchain stuff. You're like, ew, we're libertarians in their basement. You don't know anything about NFTs. So, right? Like, you don't know that term. You're coming at this being like. Okay, I just need to make this weird technology thing fun and cats are what consumers want. And so I don't think people really realize, like you, you conceptualized and came up with CryptoKitties.

• 10:50Speaker 00

  And CryptoKitties brought us the ERC 721 standard, which is what all NFTs essentially are today. That's correct, correct?

• 11:00Speaker 02

  Every NFT that you care about is a 721 standard NFT, except for functionally two. All of the top shops, because they're on flow, but they are built based on the lessons of 721, because it's the same architect behind both. It is Dieter.

• 11:15Speaker 00

  Flow is Dapper Labs, which you did CryptoKitties with, and so.

• 11:20Speaker 02

  Yes, Dapper Labs was a byproduct of CryptoKitties' success. After CryptoKitties blew up, we created Dapper Labs to manage the success. And so, actually, actually, there are three NFTs that matter in this earth that are not 721s. One is Topshop.

• 11:37Speaker 02

  Two is CryptoPunks, because they predated us, remember? I saw those before we made CryptoKitties. And then the weird thing, which I'd actually forgotten until I was talking to somebody two weeks ago, is that CryptoKitties are not pure 721s. The standard wasn't finalized. There's one call, there's one like method call on 721 standard that does not exist inside CryptoKitties. So they're like 98% 721. It's a weird little, for the historical nerds of this technology who either exist or who will come along, that is like a cute little fact. But yes, the 721 standard that literally every NFT that most people who listen to this will ever care about are truly and honestly a byproduct of us trying to figure out how to make cats fuck.

• 12:21Speaker 02

  Because if you have a Bitcoin and I have a Bitcoin and we trade Bitcoins, you nor I care. Started with a Bitcoin, ended with Bitcoin, we're good. But if you have a pink cat and I have a blue cat and we trade, I care a lot. Cause I don't like pink cats. I like blue cats. And so I have a text message to one of the most famous NFT collectors of all time named Richard. And Richard is the guy who just said no.

• 12:46Speaker 00

  You just said no to nine and a half million dollars, right?

• 12:49Speaker 02

  So Richard is my oldest friend who's into blockchain. Like Richard and me are supposed to go hitchhiking to ghost towns together and shit. We have like a weird thing. We've built apps about weighing elephants and all sorts of shit from the old days, long before any of this. And when I first came up with these CryptoKitties things, I messaged Richard and I, because he's my, he was my Bitcoin guy. And I was like, hey, man, I think they're gonna make my Bitcoin cat idea. And he said, what Bitcoin cat idea? And I said, where are the Bitcoin cats? Fuck, to mine Bitcoin. That is how I first described, and like honestly, a month ago, Richard sent that to me as a signal message and was like, this, this is an NFT.

• 13:29Speaker 00

  Oh, you need to post that somewhere. Send it to me. I'll post it. I know you're off social.

• 13:33Speaker 02

  It's a whole thing. It's a whole thing. And so, and so.

• 13:38Speaker 00

  Make that an NFT. Post it. Make it an NFT. It'll sell a million dollars.

• 13:42Speaker 02

  I got one about Top Shot too, that I don't show people very often, but I got one about Top Shot. People like, oh, like OG days of Top Shot, the OG days CryptoKitties. I got screenshots, you know?

• 13:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, you got receipts.

• 13:53Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 13:54Speaker 00

  You got receipts, baby. Did you know right away that CryptoKitties, or, or how long into the process did you realize like, hey, this is gonna be a thing?

• 14:04Speaker 02

  Um, we got excited early on, but it wasn't obvious. I don't think most people ever know that what they're working on is obviously gonna work out. Or at least that takes a type of arrogance that I don't have. I have other flavors of arrogance, but not that flavor.

• 14:18Speaker 02

  So there was a couple, there was a couple sort of like inflection points or moments of note. First of all, one month before we went live, we went to ETH Waterloo. So that was an Ethereum conference in Waterloo, a little town in Canada. And Vitalik was gonna be there and everyone was gonna be there. Like, it was the one place where you could get all of the ETH people in a room at once. And we sent four people, Fabiano, Benny, Jordan, and Arthur. And they didn't even have tickets to get in. They just went there. There's pictures now of them, like, finishing the code for the alpha, trying to get in. And they spent three hours on the Friday night begging people for tickets to get into that conference. And they somehow worked their way in.

• 15:02Speaker 00

  They're like scalping tickets to ETH Waterloo.

• 15:07Speaker 02

  And Benny is a fucking maniac, in the best sense of the word. And Benny got them all put on tie-dye shirts and brought, like, helium balloon-shaped, like, cat emojis. Brought fucking sparkles and stickers. We didn't have a brand shit I was wearing, is it? We didn't have a brand at this point, so we took a picture of a cat and put it on a space background and wrote CryptoKitties. And that was our brand for... The whole thing was bonkers. We had no idea what we were fucking doing. Went to ETH Waterloo. They ran their alpha. The UX on the website was functionally nonexistent. Like, it was really and truly borked. But there was one little booth at ETH Waterloo where you could go there. And the weird cat guys were doing the cats.

• 15:46Speaker 02

  And you could go there and, like, press the button on the Ringby Network three times and roll the dice and see what cat you got out the other side. And from there, motherboard, the Vice thing, the, like, Vice newsletter.

• 15:59Speaker 00

  The Vice tech.

• 16:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They wrote a thing about us. And that was like, huh. That's... Like, it was weird that they were there in the first place, but it's even weirder that they wrote a little thing about us. And so that was the first inflection point for me. Then we had a Telegram group, because this was four years ago. Discord wasn't quite what it is now. Like, for this community, Telegram was everything. It was always Telegram. And, uh...

• 16:25Speaker 02

  We built this little Telegram group of sort of alpha users. And that grew to like a thousand people in the month leading up to the launch. And that was like a.

• 16:33Speaker 00

  There's a signal. Yeah. In ETH period at that time, not obviously, actually, but.

• 16:39Speaker 02

  Uh, and then the night before launch, I remember one guy writing, I, I got three more moments for you. They're all quick, but the night before launch, one guy in the Telegram group said, this is better than any Christmas. I cannot wait for tomorrow. And when I read that, I was like, huh, really? I wasn't excited, but that's, that's.

• 16:59Speaker 00

  Like you realize I just said, I wanted to cat, cats to fuck on the blockchain like.

• 17:04Speaker 02

  We spent a week, I swear to God, we spent a week at Axiom Zen going to meetings about at what point do you hand the sperm to the other cat? Smart contract transactions, there was like bag of sperm meetings that were legit scheduled and was very professional.

• 17:16Speaker 00

  Is that what the calendar event said? It was like discuss cat sperm.

• 17:20Speaker 02

  It was, it was a whole thing. Uh, about three days after we launched.

• 17:28Speaker 02

  No, no, no, it was before we launched. So we had a private beta. We let a couple of people like start. It was the real cats, but it was like a little private space. And the guy who worked at Axiom Zen, but not on the project at all, like very not related to what we were doing. Came up to me and said, thanks for the trip to Vietnam. And I was like, what do you fucking mean? And he said, well, I just sold $2,000 with CryptoKitties and I'm going to Vietnam and that's because of you. And they're like people who were using CryptoKitties at that time were like, you know, 10 people in the office and 50 people not in the office. And again, I was like, huh. And then the last one, I, I'm, you're calling me right now in my parents' house. I now live here, built a nice little house, me and my family, we all live here, very cute.

• 18:11Speaker 02

  But at the time I did not live here and at the time I was staying in the basement and it was three days after we launched. And I walked upstairs and two things happened at once. One, somebody sent me a message. It was like, you just sold a cat for $30,000. Which I now, I know now like in our, in our multimillion dollar, blah, blah, blah, like.

• 18:28Speaker 00

  Right. That seems like nothing, but at the time.

• 18:30Speaker 02

  At the time, nothing like this had ever happened. I promise you and, and. And we're like, oh, fuck. And we melted Ethereum. Like, our website was broken, the network was down, everything was broken. I'm not smart enough to know what any of that means, just that like, my phone is exploding.

• 18:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, you just knew there were people you worked with who were very freaked out.

• 18:48Speaker 02

  We fucked up everything and it was over $30,000 cat. And it was at that point, literally, that we're all just like.

• 18:54Speaker 00

  And that was day of launch? When was the $30,000 cat? Three days?

• 18:57Speaker 02

  I think it was three days. I think it was three days later. I'm pretty sure, like, at least the way I have now encoded this story in my head, I know where I was. I can see the stairwell over there. And I think it was three days after lunch. And yeah, then it was just like, okay, this is fundamentally different. Like, we don't know what we're getting into.

• 19:14Speaker 00

  And do you think, were people at the time really into it because they were actually like, oh, this is, this is a fun game? Like, I want to play this? Or, or was it like the novelty of it and the people who were already blockchain enthusiast was like, oh, amazing, a new use case for this technology I love?

• 19:32Speaker 02

  Um, most people who were very blockchain native hated cryptocurrencies. Most people who were very blockchain native were legit, like the ICOs were everywhere. We talked about it right before we turned on the thing. I wrote a blog post when we launched called Fuck Your ICO. Because the thing to do in blockchain at the time was to write a white paper. And you would write a white paper and you would say, if you give me wild, wild amounts of money, here's the thing that I'm going to claim to do in the future. And this was a business model that worked. A bunch of, well, I don't know.

• 20:04Speaker 00

  Kind of sounds like roadmaps, but like, wanting more money?

• 20:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know.

• 20:10Speaker 00

  Make the distinction.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  They're $25 million roadmaps. It was, it was, it was a crazy time. And, and we went out and said, we're going to do something different. And this was fundamentally different. We said, we're going to build a product and we're going to ship a product. And then you can pay us for it if you want. That doesn't sound revolutionary. That's called business to last like X thousands of years in human history. But at, at that moment in blockchain, that was very strange and very different. And it was very good. Uh, but a lot of people in blockchain didn't like us, in Ethereum didn't like us because of our success. Like, truly and honestly, we crippled the network. We brought it to its knees.

• 20:48Speaker 02

  Many people messaged me saying, fuck you, take your cats off this network. We're trying to do important work and you are fucking it all up. And for like six hours, I was, I felt terrible. I was like, oh, what have we done? And like, sorry, we were just trying to play around and like, oh no, we heard Ethereum. And after six hours, I started laughing and I like, kind of haven't stopped laughing since. The Batman who laughs over here, like, it's just too much that you can't handle my cats. Like, that was, that was.

• 21:23Speaker 00

  You can't handle my cats.

• 21:25Speaker 02

  Couldn't handle it. All these dudes, it's either they were gonna take down the government because they had like great libertarian values and great ideas on how technology could destroy the middleman. And they couldn't handle my pink fucking cats. And that was a moment where I was like, oh, I'm the bad guy. I'm the villain. And I think that the villain with the pink cats is my new hero.

• 21:48Speaker 00

  So you were bringing new people into, into the space. And just so I'm clear on this, because I was, I was like vaguely aware of ETH back in 2017, but I was not following the ICOs. I told you this before we joined. I like saw, I had a colleague I worked with who was like showing me CryptoKitties. And I was like, the fuck is this? Like, this is so weird. And like pieced out from it, you know? And so a- at the time, all these ICOs were basically, the difference between a, an NFT thing today is they were trying to raise like $25 million or these, these massive sums of money. And it wasn't even a piece of art. Like, there was no clear utility tied to it correctly. It was basically just like Bitcoin did it really well, so come give us your money because we're a variation on Bitcoin. Is that, is that a fair way to characterize what all these ICOs were?

• 22:33Speaker 00

  No?

• 22:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. No, no, no, no. That's like reasonably accurate. In every case, it was like, we are going to release a coin soon. And that coin is going to be valuable because more people after you are going to want that.

• 22:48Speaker 00

  Want to buy it. So it's, it feels a little MLN-y, which I sometimes accuse.

• 22:51Speaker 02

  Very, very, very MLN.

• 22:54Speaker 00

  Okay. Multi-level marketing scheme, multi-level marketing for those who don't, who don't know MLMs. Okay. And so you come along and it, it strikes me that you're sort of a character that was not. As you said, not natively interested in being in the blockchain.

• 23:08Speaker 02

  I was the kitty.

• 23:09Speaker 00

  But.

• 23:09Speaker 02

  Deter was a crypto. I was the kitty.

• 23:12Speaker 00

  You were the kitty part of crypto.

• 23:13Speaker 02

  And I was all the kitty, not the crypto.

• 23:15Speaker 00

  And you had this crypto friend and, and was, and he was like, all right, you have to come do this. And so you being more of a consumer oriented, I know people kind of a person were just the, the perspective that at that point, the community was sort of missing in the people who are building on it. That's what it sort of feels like to me. Does that, that, that's sort of, I know you're, you're going to be humble about it, but that's sort of fair. You were like, all right, I get consumers. So I'm going to do this thing that's going to make all the purists really mad, but it's actually going to get consumers into this space.

• 23:43Speaker 02

  I didn't realize we would make purists mad when we started. Uh, I just thought that we could make something that people wanted and understood. And that was different and new. And to be clear, we did a bunch of, so I have a like sort of hypothesis or a strategy or something about launching these things that is significant and it involves being true to the purists until you hit the tipping point. So the way CryptoKitties like spiral out of control and the best way possible spiraled up into the stratosphere was that we made a bunch of decisions like the price of CryptoKitties was listed in Ethereum. That didn't make sense to almost anybody at the time. Why would you list in Ethereum?

• 24:26Speaker 02

  It's not in US dollars. Everybody here is thinking in US dollars. And we're like, oh, well, we're making this for people who have Ethereum and use Ethereum. We don't talk about it a lot, but the goal of CryptoKitties was to be infamous. We didn't plan on making millions and millions and millions of dollars. We left the door open so that we could. That was Rohan's genius. Me and Deter were going to do a certain thing and Rohan was like, guys, like, make sure that they can give us lots of money if they want to. Thank God he did. That was very like Rohan's very smart.

• 24:52Speaker 00

  What, what were you, what were you going to do?

• 24:55Speaker 02

  Ah, honestly, I was thinking about this the other day. I was trying to remember there was right near the end. There was a key decision that Rohan came in on and it was like, it wasn't like at a zero, but when we remake the walls, Wolf of Wall Street movie later about this and some of this crazy and I think everything and shit, he basically was like, just at a zero, like, why, why did you, why, why did?

• 25:17Speaker 00

  Like charge more or it was just like.

• 25:18Speaker 02

  Yes, charge more.

• 25:19Speaker 00

  Charge more.

• 25:19Speaker 02

  Charge an order of magnitude more. Let them pay an order of magnitude more. And we just talked about the CryptoKitties pricing algorithm. That is one of the fucking smartest things I've ever seen in my life. That was all Dieter. That was not me by any means, but, uh. We did a bunch of stuff that was really honestly true and native to the Ethereum ecosystem, including having rock solid smart contracts. Like, to be clear, that 721 standard with these cute little cats and this pink website, everybody else was doing Matrix bullshit. It was like a green writing, vertical and like black background. This is Ethereum, this is blockchain, that's the future, it's crazy. Whatever he was doing. And we're like, we're gonna do cat puns. Our community is a super fun place to hang out.

• 26:04Speaker 02

  Like, but that mattered. A pink website with cat puns, well-designed play. I won't even go so far as to call it a well-designed game, but well-designed play, and then rock solid technology underneath it all. A bunch of those things appealed to the Ethereum people. If we had made trash, then the people who came in and were like, oh yeah, I have $30,000 in internet money to spend on this, would not have. Once the people came and spent $30,000 and then another day later, something, you know what? $30,000 might have been day one, in three days it was the $100,000. Cause there was also a $100,000 cat moment where we're just like, okay, like, fucking, the wheels have come off. This is, this is.

• 26:44Speaker 00

  What have we done?

• 26:47Speaker 02

  I, I don't wanna speak for them. I had a woo, what have we done moment. And, but at that point, the New York Times comes along. When you sell a picture of a fucking cartoon cat for $100,000 on the internet, then you hit a tipping point and the mass comes. So, when we're building these things, like, yes, I was always thinking about the consumer and that's just how, I can't help not think that way, that's sort of how I'm wired. But, being authentic to the community that was in place where we showed up. These people who had values and like, we did not appeal to the libertarian fundamental nature, but not everybody loves Ethereum. I mean, fundamentally, not everybody loves Ethereum is a neck beard with a fucking libertarian bent.

• 27:27Speaker 02

  Oh, I'm the first person, this is true, I'm the first person ever to use the word neck beard in the New York Times. There's a Twitter robot that will scour the New York Times and find first time uses of words. And after I did one of my New York Times interviews about this. And I was used to use this line with libertarians, the neck goes, that's like a soundbuddy guy. I got a tweet that was like, congratulations, you're the first person to ever say neckgears. And here comes, I was like, okay.

• 27:52Speaker 00

  Wow, that's, that's, that's what goes in the Twitter bio or the resume or the LinkedIn you no longer have. That's.

• 27:58Speaker 02

  Or the tombstone.

• 27:59Speaker 00

  Or the tomb, or the tombstone. Um, I actually do want to talk about this pricing structure if you're serious about wanting to talk about it and why.

• 28:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's dead simple, but it's beautiful. So CryptoKitties, I mean, we did a bunch of shit so well and a bunch of shit really stupid. And, uh, one of the things that Dieter put together was this pricing mechanism. So at the time on the blockchain, nobody could figure out English auctions, the standard auctions that we're now used to where like you have 24 hours and the price is going up and da, da, da. So we had to use Dutch auctions and Dutch auctions are where you have a starting price. And you have an end price that is lower than the starting price. And during a set period of time, the price goes from the starting price to the end price. And the reason that's interesting is because anybody can buy it whenever they want.

• 28:47Speaker 02

  And obviously you should wait longer because the price is going down. But if you wait too long, somebody else will snap it. So it's a very interesting use of auctions for price discovery, which is the unsolvable problem in launching new products. How much should I charge for this? And so CryptoKitties was interesting. Every 15 minutes for one year, we released a new cat. That is how we made money. That was the main way that we made money. And there were some other little things that we did, but this was the vast majority of the income and it was a significant amount of income. Every 15 minutes, the clock cat got released. That's what we call them clock cats. And they come out every 15 minutes for one year. It was 96 a day. And so 365,000 functionally over the course of the year, a little bit less than that.

• 29:31Speaker 02

  And the pricing was beautiful. The pricing was the average price of the last five plus 50%.

• 29:43Speaker 02

  And so the price would go up and it would go up and up and up and it would get astronomically high and people would finally be like, fuck that, I'm not paying that much for a clock cat. And then the price would come down because it was a Dutch auction. And when it got to whatever was deemed reasonable at the time, then it would get bought and that got included in the next batch. And so you had this constantly fluctuating, floating price. Floating, that's my new word. Uh, and it was incredibly dynamic way to understand what people willing to pay. And then because most people weren't around for Crypticities, the thing that made Crypticities so interesting was that you might get a new gene inside those cats. We had this big gene puzzle and the only way to get new genes, which was like the low number

• 30:27Speaker 02

  exclusive shit, if you're a collector, you understand this. But the only way to get that hot new shit that you couldn't get anywhere else was by buying our clock cats and then unboxing it basically and seeing like, oh, does it have one of those special stuff? And sometimes you could see it when you physically looked at it and you'd be like, oh, that one looks cool. But sometimes there'd be a real secret locked deep inside the genes. We built this weird ass gene structure around that game. And so that clock cat, I don't see, I've never seen that repeated and I'm not totally clear on why, because I've also never seen a better way to kind of price something. Again, where people want to give you a lot of fucking money, this is a method by which they can. But if people decide that, uh, what you're selling isn't worth that, they can discover a price that they feel is rational and it kind of like serves everybody really well.

• 31:11Speaker 00

  That's, yeah, that's so interesting. And, uh, you know, I've seen Dutch auctions done plenty of times since then, but never quite in the way you're describing there. Um, was this being done on like a bespoke website? Like OpenSea was around, but obviously very new. This is like you had your obviously bespoke site.

• 31:28Speaker 02

  OpenSea was not around.

• 31:29Speaker 00

  OpenSea wasn't, it was started around that time though. Maybe it wasn't like.

• 31:32Speaker 02

  As far as I know, I could be wrong, but as far as I know, OpenSea was born to make Crypticities usable. Like.

• 31:41Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 31:42Speaker 02

  Cryptic, there were other, and if you, the moment we launched.

• 31:45Speaker 00

  You spawned it all. You spawned literally all of it.

• 31:49Speaker 02

  We created a large series of problems and many people have come along to solve many of those problems. You should hear Dan at OpenSea talk about the OpenSea mafia. You know, he'd be like with PayPal mafia. So there is a Kitty Hats mafia. The, one of the first things that ever existed on top of crypto kitties was Kitty Hats, Hats on Cats. And a small team of people came together in our Discord, became friends, and built Cats on Hats. One of them is employee number one at OpenSea now. One of them is employee number one at Axie Infinity. One of them is the lead designer at Dapper. And two others played significant roles in Consumer Revolution. And this was Kitty Hats. This was Hats on Cats. It's like, you know.

• 32:33Speaker 00

  This is what's so beautiful about this space. And, and because there is the like, underdogs versus the institutions element, obviously, to crypto. And like, you know, like Wall Street Bets bringing down Melvin Capital and like, all these people with a huge position on, on, uh, on GameStop, like, putting a limit at like, 42069. Like, and these people are bringing down like, massive institutional hedge funds. And it's like, the people who are bringing down the future of banks all met because they were like, put cats on hats.

• 33:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. It, it's like, I fucking hate always coming back to this, but Dixon wasn't wrong. The next big thing looks like a toy. My, my latest hypothesis is that what he was wrong is too strong a word. What he was, he was too narrow. I don't think the next big thing starts as a toy is limited to technology. I think the next big thing starts as a toy is culture, period. Pink haired rappers, all my shitty 40 year old friends fucking hate SoundCloud rap. They hate that emo, mumbly, pink haired shit. And they sound like their parents talking about rap. They're like, they're not even rapping, like, oh god, I fucking hate the autotune. Those guys, like, can they even freestyle? It's like, shut up, old man. What the fuck do you care? This is, these kids are making art. And,

• 33:47Speaker 02

  and art, like, that Salon de Fou, the impressionist art movement that became such a big deal in Paris, uh, rock and roll as we know it, like, so many massive trends in art and culture started Looking like a toy.

• 34:00Speaker 00

  You have so many people who who who have thought that DeFi was how crypto was gonna go mainstream. And it's now so clear, and I guess should have been clear from the beginning, that it was gonna be NFTs and art and music and weird cat games. And like, everything we know about the internet has been leading us to this point, uh, but it's it's just so eminent now.

• 34:20Speaker 02

  Because it's all identity. People don't buy content. People honestly don't spend that much time thinking about investing. Like, normal people don't. DeFi is really great for everybody who's smart enough to figure it out. Nobody who's a fucking normal human being understands what the fuck DeFi is going on about. But identity, people care deeply about, and NFTs are really just a placeholder for identity.

• 34:42Speaker 00

  The heart of that. Here's a very weird, specific question. Were there royalties baked into CryptoKitty sales? Like, are you still getting some of that sweet, sweet CryptoKitty money?

• 34:52Speaker 02

  Uh, let me think about what we did. What we said was that, so Dieter, again, whose name has come up, very smart guy, the CTO, the architect, engineer, the guy behind the 721 standard. And and a lot of my ideas about crypto are a byproduct of basically studying his school. I think of it like Kung Fu shit. Like, I got Dieter's style, you know? And, uh, in Dieter's style, if you own an NFT, then you should truly own it. You don't have to pay us royalties. You don't have to do a goddamn thing because you own that motherfucker. On the other hand, if you want to use our website to perform a transaction, we will charge you a fee.

• 35:37Speaker 02

  And so that's what we did with CryptoKitties. If you were gonna breed them, or if you were gonna buy, I honestly forget if we took, I don't think we took a cut if you were just selling them. We said, like, that's not our business. You own it. So you should be able to sell it. There's no royalties. It's not ours. Uh, but on the breeding of the cats, which was the main mechanic, we always said, you can go do that on your own. Build your own marketplace if you want. Build your own website. Call the smart contract directly. But if you go to CryptoKitties.com and use our UI to do this, yes, we take a small fee for that.

• 36:09Speaker 00

  Got it. So you've kind of made reference to this in this conversation and I've heard you talk about it in other conversations where after CryptoKitties or at a certain point in that phase, all this major IP started coming to you and including and the NBA, which I think leads us to NBA Top Shot. That actually surprises me. So A, like really? Like, did you, all these companies and brands were coming to you saying, hey, we want a piece of this? And then B, how many of them really got it? And how many of them were just like chasing a trend that they saw temporarily?

• 36:46Speaker 02

  Um, yes, they all truly just came knock on our doors. It was every major brand. It was every VC. It was every IP owner. I mean, not every, every is an exaggeration, but like in droves, they arose, uh, they came to our door.

• 37:03Speaker 00

  Was that after the New York Times? Like, they like read it in the New York Times were like?

• 37:07Speaker 02

  No, the New York Times doesn't even that. We just were making like, like millions and millions of dollars selling cartoon pictures of cats. And whether you were Jurassic Park or the NBA or Dr. Seuss or anybody, it was like, what? Why, why are people paying so much money for your piece of my cat? They're just making memes out of our shit. We got our shit on Giphy and somebody gave you millions of dollars for your shit? How about you give us one of those? This was like a, uh, this was a thing that everybody was feeling. Uh, because yeah, a, and to be clear, because of the ICO, I'm like, right now, you know,

• 37:46Speaker 02

  um, crazy summer of, or spring and summer of, of, of, uh, NFTs and we're on Saturday Night Live and like, we've all just lived through this insanity that is this recent spin of entities. The last time shit was this crazy was 2017. One of the things that we got right with CryptoKitties was just the timing. And a line that I used to use a lot, but it's true, is that like, if a knitting magazine could find a way to write a print article about blockchain in November of 2017, they would have. Everybody wanted to have some way to write Bitcoin in their link based shit. Or it wasn't blockchain, it was like Bitcoin blockchain, saying that. So in that time, when everybody needed to have an angle, anybody whose job involved technology, their work,

• 38:30Speaker 02

  needed to have some kind of informed opinion on the blockchain. That's when we showed up and we're like, yeah, you sell cat fucking for a lot of money. I'm like, what? So, yeah, everybody came and then... Oh, yeah, no, most of them didn't really get it. Not at all. Most of them, no, most of them are like... Well, and there's an interesting question of what they got. Like, I've just told you about kitty cats, kitty hats. Kitty hats was hats on cats and it was amazing. And it has led to hundreds of millions of dollars of business value being created by the people who organize themselves in our Discord to come up with that shit. Uh, and the fundamental concept of kitty hats is one of the biggest ideas in blockchain to us at the time, which was extensibility.

• 39:15Speaker 02

  Somebody else built kitty races. It was a fucking dumbass car racing game, but you put your cat in a car and you race it. And the thing about kitty hats that I loved, I was telling the story the other day, Dan's is I lying when I tell it. I'm telling that way anyways. First time I seen kitty hats, my reaction was fuck you. You didn't ask us for permission. Why the fuck are you putting hats on my cats? Those are my cats. And then or somebody was like, dude, like this is the blockchain.

• 39:40Speaker 00

  You're missing the point.

• 39:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. You remember the conversation we had about extensibility and about how really cool this is? And then we have this moment of like, oh, that is cool. Like, as long as I'm not being Disney about this, and as long as I'm not being so fucking precious about my little Mickey Mouse here, this is really, really neat. People are coming along and building value into this product, into this IP, into this network and ecosystem that we're trying to build. And these people came and built value for our consumers, which builds value for us. This is fucking incredible, actually. That decentralization and extensibility is a beautiful piece of blockchain.

• 40:17Speaker 02

  And you'll notice that NBA is not doing that. So when a lot of these brands come, this goes back to your question of who actually got it. Very few got it. NBA are very interesting and I salute them for being the pioneers that they are. They have made a fuck ton of money for being pioneers, to be clear. Like Topside has been very good to NBA. But that wasn't obvious. They did a risk building that. And even then, my point is, they've leaned into parts of blockchain that work well for them, which is true ownership of these moments and the economics around it and some of the sort of blockchain primitives that build up the ecosystem, for sure. But there's other huge ideas that they vehemently don't want anything to do with, which is like, oh yeah, we're gonna remix the NBA brand because this is extensibility. No, you're not. You're really not.

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• 42:46Speaker 00

  I want to get into big head club and maybe one way to to do this and I'm putting you on the spot here, but it feels like what you did in the CryptoKitties era was identify these ways to be really innovative in the space. And the big piece I think you brought to that was just understanding consumer behavior and saying, hey, nobody's tapping into consumer behavior in the blockchain right now.

• 43:11Speaker 00

  The industry has obviously gotten more sophisticated since those days, but do you feel like there are gaps right now or real areas for innovation that you see or you're excited about? Again, I'm putting you on the spot.

• 43:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, no, no. I, I, I, so,

• 43:33Speaker 02

  NFTs are interesting. If you give people what they want, then you will be stuck in the present or the past. And so like, sometimes I get mad when people are like, oh, I'll tell you about only Ronan. People are like, why are you like spending thousands of dollars trying to teach us about history? We just want pixelated animal pictures. That's like what we're here for. We want to flip our pixelated animal picture in the next 72 hours to make a lot of money. That's why we love NFTs.

• 43:59Speaker 00

  And you're like, cool, don't buy my project.

• 44:02Speaker 02

  Very much so. Please don't.

• 44:04Speaker 00

  And I don't want your angry DMs. There are others who will get it.

• 44:08Speaker 02

  Or if it was DMs, I wouldn't even mind. It's the fact that they're like rage tweeting in public. I'm like, motherfucker.

• 44:17Speaker 02

  In 2017, the way to make money in blockchain was to do an ICR. And we told everybody to go fuck themselves and we made NFTs. We absolutely understood where the ball was, where the ball was going. And we said, neither of those is right. Actually, we're fucking walking due west from here. And a lot of other people thought they knew that and they tried to walk west and we don't hear their stories. You never hear the stories of all the microwaves that didn't make it. At some point, somebody invented a microwave and we're like, oh, that was kind of obvious. But there's a thousand inventions like microwave that didn't fucking make it.

• 44:47Speaker 02

  Point is that we had to have vision around the 720 standard and around playfulness and around true ownership and non-punchability underlying all of that. So now, Oni Ronin has a new project from Big Hit Club. Big Hit Club makes strange and marvelous NFTs that stand the test of time. I say that all the time, that is our motto, it's on our website. I find those-

• 45:03Speaker 00

  Strange and marvelous NFTs that stand the test of time.

• 45:07Speaker 02

  That's it. That's, that's the magic. And if we can deliver that, then we'll be doing this for a very fucking long time, which it seems like it's probably gonna work out. But, one of the things that we did is if you're watching on the video, Oni Ronin behind me, uh, we went and checked... Okay, so I have a book, actually, you probably see it right here. Uh, okay.

• 45:28Speaker 00

  It's hard with the Japanese. I'm getting word at a time, Japanese death poems.

• 45:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, Japanese death poems. So, I started learning about Japanese death poems. And a samurai would attempt to write a haiku as close as possible to his or her last breath. The last moment that you were alive, you try and write your death poem. And the, like, the most hipster samurai points you can get is if you get it, like, you, you, you, you finish, the pen drops, and you die. If you could do that all in one smooth motion, you're the best fucking samurai death poet. To live well is to die.

• 46:04Speaker 00

  My gosh.

• 46:06Speaker 02

  In that world-

• 46:07Speaker 00

  That's morbid.

• 46:09Speaker 02

  I, dude, I go on Twitter and just read that death poem book to people in Twitter Spaces sometimes.

• 46:15Speaker 02

  Uh... So those, those haikus are amazing. Some of them were written decades before people died, like, not everybody succeeded at nailing it. But you're trying to write it right again. Okay, so I love that story.

• 46:29Speaker 02

  I was talking to a Japanese friend of mine who gave me the nickname Dekate, Detake, because it means big hands, because he used to hang out with me at Dapper. When we were making all this stuff, we'd go get drunk at the bar. He's this old Japanese guy that I met. And we'd go get drunk at the bar, and then we'd go back to the office and we'd do Hogwarts Lego. Because Axiom Zen, Dapper, they always had Lego for me, because I liked Lego a lot. And so, Sam, one of the co-founders, he liked Lego too. He would buy fancy Lego and we'd sit around and do Lego. And me and Taka, with, me and my guy, his name I don't use for certain reasons, we got into it, arguing, getting along, having so much fun building Lego. He gave me my Japanese nickname. And then-

• 47:10Speaker 02

  I was talking to him about these death poems and samurai history and the NFT thing became inevitable that we needed to make uh NFTs to celebrate the haiku of the samurai death poem form. And that's where Ronin came about. So in all of that, we ended up creating these crazy things. I called my old neighbor. I was like, man, you want to make demon samurai art? And he was like, okay, side note, that guy was my neighbor for 15 years. I lived in a one bedroom apartment with my wife and two kids for fucking 12 years. I didn't have kids for the whole 12 years, but for 12 years, I lived in a one bedroom apartment.

• 47:52Speaker 02

  This guy was my neighbor. Right now, he's buying an island. Nope, he's buying a house, buying a house on an island off the coast of Canada. Cause all the money I gave him for these fucking Ronin that he made for us. Like we change artists' lives with this shit. So I went to him and I was like, we need samurai. And me and my Japanese friend did all the design on this. We did all of the research to find these haiku. And so in the background of that guy behind me, you can see a real haiku written in smoke. That is a real haiku that a man or woman, samurai class, wrote in the last 800 years. And when you take your own Ronin, which I think have the best art in NFTs this year, outside of maybe Galaxy Eggs, because I really like the Galaxy Eggs as well. Uh, in that world,

• 48:36Speaker 02

  you can commit your Ronin to the Trial of Ascension and then you can listen to the haiku for the first time. We actually, uh, we got like this incredible narrator to narrate each of the 20 possible haiku that you can get. It's one of the rare characteristics, like everything else about the NFT. And then, and then we deliver amazing art. We deliver like historical context, interesting audio. The technology is rock solid. We did this entire interesting like reserve phase to stop gas wars on the launch of the whole thing. And now I'm getting to the point of this. We reached out to a guy who teaches at Concordia, a big university in America. He teaches about Samurai history.

• 49:15Speaker 02

  He also teaches the Big Head Club about Samurai history. The only way to get a class from that guy with small intimate group is to own one of these Roman NFT. He got ahold of me. His name is Dr. Bender and he said, you know, you could literally put together the best curriculum on Samurai history in the English language. If you hired five of my friends. And I was like, okay, done. Like, of course. That's fucking amazing. We have Haiku lessons. We have calligraphy lessons. We have flower arranging lessons. And the only way to get access to any of this is to own an Oni Roman.

• 49:48Speaker 02

  The idea that we can redefine education and community. Dr. Bender messaged me after our first class. We did our first class this week and I was so fucking worried about how it'd go, but my team is amazing. I had nothing to do with it. They just made it happen and I showed up and honestly, me and my wife sat there and had this fucking incredible hour of history lessons with Daphne's certificate. So cool. And he messaged me and he was like, it's so nice to teach a group of people who want to be there and listen and learn. And they're not doing this for credits. They're doing this because they're like, oh, wow. In the middle of a Wednesday. Yes, I want to learn from this. This is an incredibly interesting idea around what NFTs can be. We have ridiculous fantasy. Like some of these fucking things have got like hardcore death metal hands sticking out of their heads. This is just weird ass art.

• 50:31Speaker 02

  It's also historically accurate, interesting contents. It's also incredible community. We're doing fucking Zen meditation three times a week as a community. If you want to join, we unlock all that shit with these Oni Roman. And the idea that you can have community powered education is really, really interesting. And I don't see anybody else talking about that in NFTs. And a bunch of the people that I've talked to were like, I don't want that. I want a companion drop that I can flip in three days. I'm like, cool. Do you?

• 50:58Speaker 00

  Do you still think about the floor price? Or are you like?

• 51:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:01Speaker 00

  I'm building an education program.

• 51:03Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no, no. You don't get to build an education program if you don't think about the floor price. Nobody's gonna come to your fucking education program. Then it doesn't matter. Yes, I think about the floor price. Uh, I do not normally ever use the word investment to describe what we do. Two reasons. One, the SEC is real. I'm in Canada. I shouldn't want to go to your American jail. This is not an investment. This is not financial advice. This is not an investment. Do not buy a Big Head Club token as an investment. Uh, the other reason is because I really like. If you are buying this because you want to have the CryptoPunk experience that I had, this is not for you. I do believe that many of our NFTs will in the future be able to be sold for lots of money.

• 51:48Speaker 02

  I think if that's why you're here, you're here for the wrong reasons and you are not bringing real value to my community. My community started out, it's been a long six months, it's been a long six months. And we now have what is consistently one of the nicest, kindest, most thoughtful, gentle communities in the world. Our Discord is fucking amazing. Our mods are amazing. And people are warm and gentle and it's a little chaotic at best because there's 25,000 fucking people in there. And so sometimes it's a little mad, but it is a beautiful, amazing place where we are now treating each other respectfully. We're learning about history. We are shaping the future of art. And if that sounds like a fucking good idea, then you should come get yourself Big Head Club token.

• 52:30Speaker 02

  If you're like, man, I need 10x returns, where's my yield? And I need this on a timeline measured in hours and or days. There's lots of cool projects for you. You should go do that. You probably shouldn't go do that over here.

• 52:45Speaker 00

  Let's talk about some of the other Big Head Club projects. We've talked about Oni Ronin, which is the latest drop, very cool. Stoner Cats was the first drop, which made a bunch of noise. How, how did you get involved in Stoner Cats? You know, how did you end up on Zoom calls with Mula and Ashton and the, the crew?

• 53:08Speaker 02

  The true answer to that story is, and we don't tag with the fact that we've raised a bunch of money, but we raised a bunch of money for Big Head Club. Not a bunch of money, especially not in fucking 2021 NFT space. We raised a little bit of money.

• 53:22Speaker 00

  We raised a few CryptoPunks and.

• 53:24Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly. We, we, there's a lot, money is cheap right now. Let me put it that way.

• 53:32Speaker 02

  We raised a little bit of money and I got to this moment where like literally in three days of sort of calling a couple of friends. It was like, okay, we've raised as much money as we want to. Like it was soft committed, but it was very easy. I mean, I'm the CryptoKitty fucking top shot Dapper guy in the middle of an NFT Renaissance. Obviously it was reasonably easy.

• 53:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's who do you want money from, not who.

• 53:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. And that's an incredible privilege. I would not, don't let me betray like how lucky I feel about that. And almost actually to your point, I got sort of closed the rounds air quotes in three days, looked around and was like, wow, every single person at this table has a dick. Like every one of you has a penis and that's a problem. Because I am a forty year old, straight, white man with more privilege than most people could ever even fucking conceive of. And I think it is in exactly this moment that I'm supposed to share that privilege. This is exactly where I'm supposed to be like, oh, hold on, like, maybe there's another way to do it.

• 54:30Speaker 00

  The side of me that bought a Wonder Woman Crypto Punk.

• 54:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:33Speaker 00

  Steps up. So something's gotta give.

• 54:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, something's gotta give. And so I called all of my investors and I was like, hey, um, I would like to meet some of your friends. I would like to meet some amazing investors who are women. I would like to bring some other perspectives to this table. Do you know anybody great that I should talk to? And through that process, I met a woman named Maria. And Maria works at Sound Ventures. And so I was talking to Maria at lunch and she's become a very good friend of mine. I, I hold Maria in very high regard. But during all of that, um, Maria, Maria works with Ashton. And so Maria is part of what we call thirty fifty game who are behind Sonar Cats. And as her and I were talking about NFTs and she's, she's a full DJ. She fucking loves these NFTs.

• 55:22Speaker 02

  She like can't not buy this shit and sell this shit. And she's like so deep in the life. It's amazing. And so while we were, we called each other regularly, sent each other funny gifts and talked about NFTs and all this stuff. And she was like, hey, my friend Mila is like working on this project and we've got this amazing content and we're trying to figure out how NFTs can work to like make this work. And we just talked about a bunch of different ideas. And I kept being like, that's a bad idea. That's stupid.

• 55:48Speaker 00

  Why did you think it was stupid?

• 55:50Speaker 02

  They just had some. Optimistic and totally unrealistic ideas about what NFTs could be or should be. And to be honest, I'd forgotten what a lot of them were. But it was weeks of me talking to Maria regularly, being like, no, that's dumb. Like, you're smart, but that's dumb. And then eventually she was like, fuck you, come talk to Mila. And I was like, oh.

• 56:12Speaker 00

  Talk to Mila Kunis, okay.

• 56:16Speaker 02

  And then we did, and we, yeah, that's how I ended up going to Mila and Ashen for the first time. And then that just became a regular thing and they sort of became friends and, and, uh, and eventually we came up with Stendercats as, as we defined it and that worked pretty goddamn well, to be honest.

• 56:31Speaker 00

  Has there been anything that has surprised you about that project or?

• 56:37Speaker 00

  That you've learned that was substantially different from Dapper?

• 56:42Speaker 02

  That, that is a nine hour list, and so we won't go into all of it. Um, what have I learned? I mean, the cartoons are slower to make than you think. I've certainly learned that. I don't make cartoons, but I partner with people that do. And I've learned a lot about that process. I've, I've learned a lot about the time of that process. Uh, I've learned a lot about DAOs. I didn't learn anything about DAOs while at, uh.

• 57:06Speaker 00

  You and I have, have had a couple of conversations about DAOs.

• 57:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:09Speaker 00

  The trials and tribulation of the DAO life.

• 57:12Speaker 02

  So much to learn. Uh, and to be honest, like, you know, not being around the bush, we learned about celebrity. We, we were excited about that project because we were bringing people and I honestly fought with the, fought is a strong word. I discussed loudly with them for weeks about what NFTs mean and the value of NFTs and all sorts of things. And we were super set to do that project. And then a bunch of these shit lords who think of themselves as the kings of NFTs were like, oh, you brought cash grabbing celebrities to our ecosystem. Fuck you. First of all, it's not your ecosystem. Second of all, I spend more time in Discord, talking to my community, helping them build out the DAO,

• 57:53Speaker 02

  helping them figure out what's next, trying to do cool stuff for that community than probably any project on earth. I realize that's bold. Gary spends a lot of time in his disposal. Let's give him that.

• 58:05Speaker 00

  I mean, Gary's Discord. Give out for that, yeah.

• 58:09Speaker 02

  Uh, like, he's very good at what he does. Very smart guy.

• 58:14Speaker 02

  So, yeah, we learned a lot about community building and...

• 58:18Speaker 00

  What's one, I know, I don't want to keep you for too long, but what's, what's your one big takeaway around community building? That you learned from Stoner Cats? Never Stop.

• 58:26Speaker 02

  Never Stop. Never like, like, remember that everybody could be having a bad day. Remember that everybody, uh, who's here cares for a reason? You know, I've had people, even in Cryptic Kitty's, on Cryptic Kitty's, the price would go down on Cryptic Kitty's sometimes. And I had people message me and be like, "I spent my rent money on Cryptic Kitty's and the price is going down. You're a fucking asshole." And on the one hand, I would be like, "Wow, no, actually, you're the asshole." "I'm just some dude on the internet trying to make things that are fun." But on the other hand, and like, you're dumb as shit, clearly, but you're dumb as shit and your rent is on the line. That sucks. Like, that's a terrible place to be in.

• 59:08Speaker 02

  And so, community building, like, if you're serious about it, you're, you're there for people in their bad days. We have people who, like, snap in our Discord. And then I go DM them and I'm like, "Hey, for months, you've been really cool, like, really fucking cool." And you were just really mean to a bunch of people that you know and like. Why would you do that? "Oh, well, my husband just walked out on me." Forty-eight hours ago. I'm, I'm reeling from that. No shit. Yeah, that really sucks. Now, nobody saw that. People just saw you being shitty on Discord again. Or for the first time. And if you're really serious about building community, like, all these anonymous fucking animal profile communities that can up and disappear in the middle of the night, they don't have to really worry about community.

• 59:53Speaker 02

  My name is on the shit. We're gonna be doing this for years and years and years.

• 59:57Speaker 00

  I was gonna ask this. Do you think it's important that... Senior people on a project be the ones also in a Discord versus just having, call it a team of mods who are maybe intermediaries?

• 1:00:09Speaker 02

  I don't think it has to be the senior people. I think it has to be people who are empowered to serve that community. And so if, like, I, I'm very much a senior person. I'm the CEO of the company. Uh, I'm in Discord because right now that's the right place for me to do, that community is so valuable to us, to create value for my companies, to create value for that community. Those two things cannot be pulled apart. There is a world in the future where I don't actually spend all that much time in Discord. Um, there's a lot of other things I could be doing.

• 1:00:36Speaker 00

  Do I hear, uh, whist?

• 1:00:41Speaker 02

  It's my favorite.

• 1:00:41Speaker 00

  There's a time in the future when I see the sunshine and I go outside and I feel the wind on my face.

• 1:00:48Speaker 02

  There is nothing like the random DMs from strangers in Discord that are like, "I love what you're building here. Please never stop." We get, we get like heartwarming, tear to your eye, tight moments in Discord, in public, in private, all the time, and it's fucking beautiful. And then other times, there's people just, "When next episode? When floor moved?" Over and over and over. You're like, "You don't fucking have it. We're working on it. Like, really? Sixteen hours a day. We're in here bleeding for you fucking people. We're working on it, my friend." So, yes, occasionally I wishfully, wishfully, wishfully try and get out of Discord. Occasionally, all I want to do is pop into Discord. Our Discord is such a nice place to do this. It's incredible. It's so like,

• 1:01:31Speaker 02

  like, I, Discord used to be taxing, and Discord is now honestly where I go for a bump. It's like, if I need to feel good, I just go say something funny in Discord and people are like, "Mac, we love you." I'm like, "Yeah, thank you. I'm gonna go to my next meeting now." Uh, but, but no, you don't need senior people in the Discord. You need people who are empowered to serve the community in the Discord.

• 1:01:55Speaker 00

  I want to get close to wrapping up. I have so many more questions I could ask. The first thing I want to shout out Ghostbusters.

• 1:02:00Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:02:01Speaker 00

  That's your next launch as big head club. You have like the the rights to the Ghostbuster IP to make it an NFT. Is that what's going on?

• 1:02:10Speaker 02

  We do. We have. So this is an incredible project because Sony is fully on board with this. I talked to Sony twice a week, every week. Sony is super excited about this.

• 1:02:21Speaker 00

  That's so.

• 1:02:21Speaker 02

  But Sony is not leading this project. Jason Reitman and Gil Keenan are leading this project and they're the director and the writer, director slash writer and writer of this movie. So the guy who directed the first two Ghostbuster movies is named Ivan Reitman. He's a legend in the filmmaking world. His son is named Jason. His son made Juno. He made Thank You For Not Smoking or Thank You For Smoking. And now he's doing the new Ghostbuster movie. So Jason and Gil fell in love with NFTs. Jason and Gil got ahold of me and were like, hey, we have this really cool concept for NFTs. Can we do this? And I was like, yeah, so long as this is not four stripe Adidas shit. Like, I can't go make off brand Ghostbuster fucking NFTs.

• 1:03:06Speaker 02

  And they're like, no, no, dude, like, fuck you. We are the director of the movie. Like, my dad directed the original movie. This is a family legacy for us. But this is not Sony's project. This is our project with Sony's blessing. And and so then we're like, oh, well, fuck, this is really cool. And so, yes, Ghostbuster NFTs, Ghostbuster Afterlife, movie dropping on November 19th. We have a campaign called 12 Days of Afterlife. I will let people decipher when that starts. And we have some fucking amazing NFTs and a really neat sort of community experience built up around that coming soon.

• 1:03:37Speaker 00

  Any hints you can give on that?

• 1:03:40Speaker 02

  Uh, I would tell you that I would tell you that at one point, Baby Yoda took over the internet as the most interesting thing on the internet and that you should consider what creatures and characters might exist in the Ghostbuster movie that people are calling the next Baby Yoda.

• 1:03:57Speaker 00

  Okay, that gives me a lot to think about.

• 1:04:02Speaker 00

  I will contemplate that one.

• 1:04:05Speaker 00

  Final two questions.

• 1:04:06Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:04:07Speaker 00

  First one, do you think NFTs are mainstream?

• 1:04:12Speaker 00

  Right now?

• 1:04:12Speaker 02

  Uh, yes. I don't, I, I don't, uh, let's, let's think of it. Um, I don't think most people on earth have ever bought Supreme brand clothing. I don't think that my mother knows what Supreme is. I do think that Supreme is mainstream. I think of NFTs the same way. Like, is it Walmart? No. But do most, if you throw a rock and hit somebody, they probably have an opinion on an NFT. They probably don't own one, but they probably have an opinion on it.

• 1:04:41Speaker 00

  How recently do you think that happened?

• 1:04:44Speaker 02

  Uh, last six months. That's, it could have just been me, but that skit on Saturday Night Live at the beginning of the summer really felt like, like a sort of a crescendo. Uh, crescendo is the wrong word because we're not on the way down like, you know, I, I really do think they're, I don't, I, I guess it depends what it's named by mainstream. I like that thing I just said, that everybody has an opinion, very few people own them. Right? Like Coinbase is coming, Twitter is coming, Facebook just changed the name to Meta. Real mainstream is still coming. This is not Walmart. But you're not an interesting obscure person because you have a fucking opinion on NFTs anymore.

• 1:05:23Speaker 00

  Okay. In 2018, you were asked in an interview, uh, what you think, like make a prediction for the crypto art NFT world in five years. This is what you said. Where is it? Uh, I think crypto collectibles are going to be a meaningful part of people's identities in five years. Not one, but in five years, we'll be able, you will be able to point to your crypto collectible profile online and say, these I own and they matter to me and you can understand me by understanding my crypto collectibles. That struck me because it has been so on point. We are already there within a certain part of the population.

• 1:06:03Speaker 00

  I think over the next three years, you still have three years left for this prediction to come true. You'll increasingly see that be true. Like you kind of nailed it in a big way. So of course, my final question to you is, what is your prediction for the next five years of NFTs crypto collectibles?

• 1:06:21Speaker 02

  Uh.

• 1:06:25Speaker 02

  In the early days of Facebook, the like most interesting feature on Facebook was the poke. And it literally, do you remember the poke?

• 1:06:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:35Speaker 02

  You know those these profile?

• 1:06:37Speaker 00

  It was like, how many days have we been poking each other back and forth? Oh, my God, like, he must like me. He poked me, you know, thirty days in a row.

• 1:06:43Speaker 02

  My favorite question was, would you poke your boss on Facebook? And most people would be like, no. And it's like, well, why not? Like, what is the, what is the poke? And so for anybody who wasn't paying attention at the time, the poke was a feature, you could, you could poke somebody. But what that meant was never stated. There was no consequence for that. There was no output. It was just this arbitrarily odd digital behavior that that was odd and still somehow acts as a kernel for the entire social experience this many years later. It is not hard to see how the Facebook poke seed became our notification centric hyperware plugged in connected reality.

• 1:07:28Speaker 02

  So, one, one thing that I either heard or said, or somebody told me, I don't know. Across the time, an idea came up that what Facebook did was make something that was

• 1:07:42Speaker 02

  until then organic, which is relationships and friendships, and made them digital and it made them explicit. You had to outright say, I send a friend request. We have a transaction that indicates we've crossed some threshold. Like before, we just used to get a ride home in the same person's car from a party three times. But now that was done, we're like, hey, you're my like car seat buddy and we're friends. I'm like, that's cool. Now, now, now we're sending friend requests and it became explicit and digital. And I essentially feel like we are at that point with NFTs. I feel like things are, like, yes, you can go look at your constellation and say, value me because you are looking, the world I described and where we're going to get with these Twitter profiles and all these things in this like

• 1:08:27Speaker 02

  showtime and the, the sense that you should go to a specific place and in this digital and explicit way. You should see me trying to peacock myself and represent myself with these NFTs. And I think where we're getting to is just like where Facebook is far more nuanced, not just Facebook, but the social experience is not an explicit poke. The social experience is, I mean, there are uh multitudes of interactions that we can have that add context and are subtle and they're more than that and less than that. And they all feel very natural at this point. That's where we're going with these NFTs. We'll get to a point where I will look at your Instagram profile or your TikTok, not profile, but just like your picture and your profile.

• 1:09:11Speaker 02

  And there'll be three NFTs in your TikTok profile. And nobody's gonna be like, oh yeah, look at my NFTs. It'd just be like, oh, that's cool. They got the thing from Ghostbusters.

• 1:09:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:09:22Speaker 02

  We we know that you paid for it because of course you did. Because it's twenty twenty six and people pay for digital things that matter to them because their identity matters to them. And we will simply have um dissolved away all of the explicitness and all of the all of the like, I have to poke you. I have you to look at my NFTs. No, it's just our identity. It's just who we are. That's where they.

• 1:09:46Speaker 00

  Love it. I I I adding on to that, I think you're gonna end up in a place where like you're on dating apps and instead of it, like you going to, you're like more interested or maybe not more interested, but you're equally interested in checking their PO apps and NFTs and you know, all of that stuff. And it's more informative to you than their Instagram or TikTok profile.

• 1:10:06Speaker 02

  So four years ago.

• 1:10:08Speaker 00

  Into one.

• 1:10:09Speaker 02

  Four years ago, I called the head of product at Tinder, who was a friend, and I said,

• 1:10:16Speaker 02

  you should allow us to use NFTs as a way of representing yourself. And it'd be super fun to put an experiment in Tinder where like. Yeah, you spent money on this NFT. That means you care about it. That means it's a good representation of self. Fuck the song I listened to on Spotify most this week. Like, that's just whatever year we're in. What matters to me is these NFTs that I bought. Like, let's do a test. Let's do that, Tinder. And the guy, I think Jim Morris, JMJ, he's the angel guy on Twitter. He said, for me to run an experiment, I have to believe it can make me a hundred million dollars. That is the scale of Tinder. And so what you're talking about makes a lot of sense. He legit got NFTs.

• 1:11:01Speaker 00

  You're selling cats fucking, I'm selling human beings fucking.

• 1:11:04Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly.

• 1:11:06Speaker 00

  The scale is different.

• 1:11:06Speaker 02

  The scale is so insanely different. And, and, but now we're at that point. Now Twitter's doing those things. So yes, you are right. That is the world that is coming deeply and strongly and truly, I concur.

• 1:11:23Speaker 00

  I am excited and afraid. But on we go. Thank you so much, Mac. I really, really appreciate you hanging out with me Friday night, recording this. Can't wait for Ghostbusters. Any final words?

• 1:11:37Speaker 02

  Be nice to each other.

• 1:11:46David Hoffman?

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• 1:12:29David Hoffman?

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