#743 NFTs And Shark Diving w/ Greg Norman Jr

Greg Norman Jr is the Founder & CEO of Shark Wake Park. He's also the Co-Founder and CEO of Jupiter Group In this conversation we talk about everything from NFTs, to intellectual property licensing, to literally diving with sharks. I hope you enjoy! ======================= LMAX Digital - the market-leading solution for institutional crypto trading & custodial services - offers clients a regulated, transparent and secure trading environment, together with the deepest pool of crypto liquidity. LMAX Digital is also a primary price discovery venue, streaming real-time market data to the industry’s leading analytics platforms. LMAX Digital - secure, liquid, trusted. Learn more at LMAXdigital.com/pomp ======================= Compass Mining is the world's first online marketplace for bitcoin mining hardware and hosting. Compass was founded with the goal of making it easy for everyone to mine bitcoin. Visit compassmining.io to start mining bitcoin today! ======================= Do you want a new job in the bitcoin and crypto industry? You should go apply for hundreds of open roles at http://www.pompcryptojobs.com or sign up for our training program at http://www.pompscryptocourse.com =======================

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

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Greg Norman Jr. is the CEO and founder of Shark Wake Park. He is also the co-founder and CEO of Jupiter Group. In this conversation, we talk about everything from NFTs to intellectual property licensing to literally diving with sharks. I really enjoyed this conversation with Greg, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, I want to tell you all about our sponsors. First up is LMAX Digital. LMAX Digital is the number one institutional crypto exchange. They offer clients the deepest pool of crypto liquidity on the planet, all underscored by

• 0:46Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:30Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:10Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:53Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:33Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 3:57Anthony Pompliano?

  We have Greg Norman Jr. here with us. Some of you may not know who he is. Some of you may know who he is off of crypto Twitter. What's going on, man?

• 4:04Speaker 02

  How you doing, man?

• 4:05Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm feeling fantastic. I'm super excited to have you here.

• 4:08Speaker 02

  I'm excited to be here too.

• 4:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's have, uh, let's have you kind of just give a quick rundown of your background and then what you do on a day-to-day basis today. Uh, and then we're going to dive in and I basically want to just break down a number of the businesses that you're involved in and kind of how they work, what the economics are, so people can kind of understand. Uh, you've got a skill set around business building, right? That you can apply to IP licensing, the Wake Park, and then obviously Jupiter Group as well. But maybe just give us your background first.

• 4:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, Greg Norman Jr. So I grew up here in South Florida, went to school at University of Miami. This is my hometown here. I traveled the world with my dad, Greg Norman, the Hall of Fame golfer, and very lucky to experience the life that I have experienced with him. He showed me a lot, showed me part of the world and showed me how he operated, not just in his athletic career, but in his business career. So very fortunate to be side by side with him for as long as I have been. So, uh, worked with him for about 15 years. While I was working with him for 15 years, I was a professional kite boarder and weight boarder. So I was able to experience that side of the world too, being a professional athlete, while working with him in the branding, licensing divisions and operating divisions of Greg Norman Company. Uh, that's shark.com if you all want to check that out. And we have a couple of different operating businesses, but we also have the licensing and branding division,

• 5:19Speaker 02

  which everyone knows him for is the Great White Shark. So that's a great story. Uh, he got the title, the Great White Shark by, in 1981, US Masters, he was leading the golf tournament, uh, the first day. No one knew who he was because he comes from Australia. Uh, long blonde hair, had a flair to him, you know, like being very aggressive on the golf course. So at the press conference, they call him in and they say, who are you? What do you do? Uh, where you come from? He said, from the beaches of Australia. I surf, I play golf and I dive with sharks. So the next morning he wakes up and, uh, the newspaper of the Augusta Tribune, I believe it was, said, the Great White Shark leads the US Masters. At the time, he was sponsored by Reebok and Paul Fireman, the CEO and founder of Reebok, came to him and said, Greg, this is amazing. We have to run with this. So

• 6:04Speaker 02

  they founded the logo and the name, Great White Shark, immediately and they just launched it. And then Greg Norman Collection became the thing. Then from that spawned out to Greg Norman Golf Course Design, the wine brands, the beef, the Operating companies which are the Australian Grill, which is in North Myrtle Beach, then in the Wake Parks. And then we have another partnership with Verizon Club Car G P S I called Shark Experience, which is broadcasting entertainment, sport and news on the golf course via Club Car, via the Verizon network. So you could watch golf while you're playing golf. So we do a lot of different things. We also operated a opportunity fund for investing into technology that we, you know, our network allowed us to get into. And then I broke away, not broke away, excuse me.

• 6:49Speaker 02

  I partnered with him and founded my own company, which is Shark Wake Park. And that took the ethos of what he did with Greg Norman Golf Course Design and applied it to my sports that I love, which is wakeboarding. And when I saw wakeboarding, traveling the world is what it could do for communities. And I went to one location in the Philippines where they built a wake park there. It became the number one tourist destination in that area of the Philippines and created this economy around the wake park for local school kids, for the local population. And I wanted to do that back here. Being from West Palm Beach, there was no wake park here. The only wake park we had is in Deerfield Beach called Ski Rickson. That was built in 1983. So it's actually older than me. I used to drive down an hour and a half every day to go ride.

• 7:33Speaker 02

  And so I knew I had to make a mission myself to build these wake parks. Luckily enough, the first one was opportunity in North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Built Shark Wake Park eight, four, three. And what we did was we partnered with local municipalities. So they had a park, recreational facility, dead body of water. They were not creating any revenue off of it, nothing. So we said to them, hey, look, we'll partner with you. We'll share revenue with you. We'll put in all the money, all the capital in order to build it. We'll operate it, everything. So you get a new asset in there. You get cash flow and you have another calling card for your community to create something really cool and unique. So they did it. And thank you for the city of North Myrtle Beach for believing us.

• 8:13Speaker 02

  And it's been a great success to this day, even during the last year after COVID and how difficult it was to come out, got out of that. It was a resounding success this year. And then West Palm Beach allowed me to do it in 2019. So that was really. Crazy how we just opened up and then COVID hit and we had to slow down and get back up to speed again. But that's really cool. Shark Wake Park, West Palm Beach is in Lake Okeechobee. That's off of Forest Hill Boulevard and the Turnpike. And we actually have two kids there, Colby Zabarth and Austin Rudd, who now are junior world champions. They've never been on a wakeboard before in their life, and now they're junior world champions. So I got very proud of them.

• 8:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Are you their coach?

• 8:51Speaker 02

  Ah, no, I'm not their coach.

• 8:53Anthony Pompliano?

  I was going to say, I need lessons.

• 8:55Speaker 02

  No, no, no.

• 8:56Anthony Pompliano?

  The magic touch.

• 8:57Speaker 02

  I helped them for sure. I love riding with the kids. They're phenomenally better than me now. Plus, I'm the old guy. I ride, my knees hurt the next day.

• 9:05Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. So I got a whole bunch of questions. I know what brothers do as well. First, let's start with the IP business. When you see the IP get created, right? I think there was an opportunistic, hey, this is a really good kind of moniker and like, let's run with this. How does that business work, right? Do you basically just look around, you're like, oh, there's a computer, let's put the name on that. Oh, John's got a sweatshirt, let's put a name on that. There's water bottles, put a name on that. And like, you just try to put the name as many places as possible? Or are you have like a criteria or a framework to make decisions around where are we actually going to partner on specific products and like, what we want the brand to kind of stand for, if you will?

• 9:39Speaker 02

  Great question. So one thing I learned very quickly from my dad is that he took a lifetime of work and a long-term vision in order to build his brand. It became a very successful, globally known brand, The Greg Norman Company. What he always did is hire the best people in order to be able to build out the business for him. But also, when he evaluated opportunities, like you're saying, do you just slap it on everything? Is no, absolutely no. What he, what we found is that, and what I think everyone knows, is that it's so easy to degrade the brand very quickly if you do the wrong thing or tackle with the wrong partner, or you try to jump into the wrong opportunity, it could easily degrade the brand versus add value to the brand. It's very difficult to add value to the brand. So over and over, you have to have that long-term

• 10:23Speaker 02

  goal of where this is going to be in five, 10, 15 years. Not that, hey, next month, hopefully this makes some money for me and we can move on from it. So yeah, that's the long-term vision he's had from day one.

• 10:32Anthony Pompliano?

  And how do those relationships work, right? If you go and you find a company that's making a product, right? Whatever the the kind of widget or product is and you guys want to do a licensing deal with them. How is it they're like a revenue split? Do they pay cash upfront like just like how does IP licensing deal work kind of from a generic framework?

• 10:50Speaker 02

  Every opportunity is different without a doubt. So for example, a shark experience, we literally partnered with Verizon, Club Car and G P S I to build out the shark experience, leveraging the name shark, obviously, in order to get the global creditability in the golf market that we needed to be. That was a partnership through and through JV. Other opportunities are royalties or upfront cash flow or upfront fee or to use a brand. So it really is all opportunistic. So we'll actually luckily partnered with one of the biggest in the space, which is Authentic Brands Group. Authentic Brands Group just purchased 51% of the Greg Norman name and license. So now they're our partner to be able to go outsource deals for us while we still are working in tangent with our current operating companies and current licensing companies.

• 11:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. So basically, when you go ahead and you do something like that, you guys got it to a certain point, a certain size and success, and now you pour gas on that fire. You know it works and hey, let's go get and use these partners to really help us kind of take it to escape velocity from there.

• 11:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly right.

• 11:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, makes sense. All right. Golf courses is a part of the business as well. What do you guys do there?

• 11:53Speaker 02

  Design, manage, build, operate, all the above. So we really say from the very get go, when we come in from a development standpoint, and we talk with a developer, most developers want to have the new Augusta National, the greatest championship golf course ever, 18 holes of perfection. That's extremely expensive. And you're also pushing out the majority of golfers who are 20 plus handicap who can't play those things. So the hardest thing in the world is to make a golf course that everyone can play and enjoy. The other thing to do is the least disturbance approach. Golf, it moves around a lot of dirt. We got to create a lot of water. So we got to utilize the environment as much as possible. So my dad's always created an eco-friendly first approach when building

• 12:36Speaker 02

  golf courses, which is utilize the landscape to be to be as best as he possibly can do with the golf course. And then what comes next around it is what the moneymaker really is, which is selling houses. On green grass. That's when the late 90s, early 2000s, where the boom of golf happened here, where people are just trying to sell houses on green grass. So you got to keep that whole mindset from the very get go. Starts with a golf, then the clubhouse, and then the real estate around it. So it flows very efficiently.

• 13:05Speaker 03

  I'm sure it depends, but could you walk us through what like an average golf course deal would look like? Like, I'm sure they pay a fee to get it designed. I'm sure they pay a fee for the land. I'm sure they pay a fee to get the clubhouse built, like everything like that?

• 13:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. So we do the broad range of the spectrum from just the land planning, just the golf course planning. Here's the specs. There you go. Have fun.

• 13:25Speaker 03

  Go have someone else build it.

• 13:26Speaker 02

  Go have someone else build it, or we build it all, or we do the whole shebang, which is, here's the golf course, here's the clubhouse with interior design, here's Greg Norman Real Estate, which is real estate planning development side of it as well, with also interior design, landscape design around it, everything. So

• 13:41Speaker 03

  Here's what you should sell at the restaurant.

• 13:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Bring in the wine, bring in the beef, bring in the clothing. You got it.

• 13:47Speaker 03

  And where do most of these courses make most of their money? Is it actually on golf? Or is it the houses? Is it in the clubhouse? Is it somewhere else?

• 13:54Speaker 02

  Very rarely do golf courses make money from selling greens fees. The very successful ones do from memberships, the private golf clubs you'll hear about, to the very famous public golf courses like Pebble Beach, right? $350 to go play golf. It's crazy, but they're booked out all year long. So those are those anomalies. And the rest of the time, it is just for development, for selling, you know, houses on green grass, or bringing people into the resort.

• 14:18Speaker 03

  Gotcha. The first time that we sat down in person, you casually hit me with, I go shark diving. Wait, what is that? Explain the shark diving real quick before we get into all the NFT stuff.

• 14:30Speaker 02

  Right. So off of Jupiter, Florida, where it's my home, is one of the greatest shark diving locations in Florida, if not the world. You have a broad range of species, and it's not as scary as you all think. You really are just sitting on top of the surface and they're all swimming below you. Crystal clear water, because you're in the Gulf, Gulf Stream, that is really warm water. You'll have sandbar sharks, dusky sharks, hammerhead sharks, bull sharks do come around, tiger sharks do come Around a very rare occasion, a great white shark will come around. I've never seen one of those, but they're there. They're everywhere, actually.

• 15:03Anthony Pompliano?

  So you you get you're in the boat?

• 15:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:05Anthony Pompliano?

  And how big are these sharks?

• 15:09Anthony Pompliano?

  You're in the boat. What do you got on? Are you just like in a speedo? Or you got like a like a wet suit on? What do you got on?

• 15:15Speaker 02

  Pop, don't vision me in the speedo.

• 15:19Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you wear?

• 15:21Speaker 02

  Wear your goggles, mask, snorkel, fins, jump in the water.

• 15:25Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. So you jump in. You don't like slide in quietly.

• 15:28Speaker 02

  Oh, no, man. I dive down there and grab on the dorsal fin and go for a ride with them. You should never do that. I did not say that. I take that back. I grabbed the dorsal fin. Okay. But yeah, you go down there. They swim right next to you. If you go to certain operations, Cooper, Florida is amazing for it. There's shark addicts. They're an incredible operation. They'll take you out there, go diving with them.

• 15:47Anthony Pompliano?

  And when so when you when you go like, why do why? And this is me being somewhat serious. If I watch television, shark attacks, the only time I ever hear about sharks, right? Like, oh, somebody got attacked, whatever. Why are they like more chill when you're doing it? Is because you're not threatening to them? Or what's going on there?

• 16:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, great question. I mean, without a doubt, media does spin it all up because the hype stream will be able to get people to watch that show. Great White Discovery Channel, Shark Week, it's all about the latest, greatest, new bite, whatever. But they're not like that. They're out there for sure. They are the apex predator for sure. But they're not going around just eating everything. And here's my theory, and I don't know if this is true or not. But there's no shark hospital out there. Sharks just can't go up to anything and just attack and go because they most likely will get hurt too. So they're really cautious. If they're going to bite something, if they're going to come in, it's because they know they're going to have a high success of getting a meal.

• 16:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, bro. They see me. They definitely like, yo, we're gonna eat the shit out of that guy. You ever seen the the meme of the woman in her car and she's filming? And she's like, you know, if chicken comes in my house, I eat it. She's like, that's why I don't go in the shark's house. Because if you go in the shark's house, the shark's gonna eat you. You ever seen that one?

• 16:51Speaker 03

  Why would you go in the shark's house? I don't go in there. They don't come in my house.

• 16:55Anthony Pompliano?

  But like, there's no shark hospital, but it is the shark's house. So I'm chill.

• 16:58Speaker 03

  I just looked it up, too. There's 57 or no, there's on average, there are 16 shark attacks per year in the United States.

• 17:04Anthony Pompliano?

  16?

• 17:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's very low.

• 17:06Anthony Pompliano?

  And one fatality every two years.

• 17:07Speaker 02

  You want to know wild stat? More people die from falling coconuts from a tree than die from shark attacks.

• 17:14Speaker 03

  It's not, it's not.

• 17:15Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, screw ruggle fish. We're going shark diving. No problem.

• 17:18Speaker 03

  Well, I mean. You don't want to go in their house.

• 17:21Speaker 02

  No, one thing for sure I do want to say before we get off the shark diving. It's fun. It's really fun. Okay. It's not just fun, but it also shows you the new world, which is underwater. It shows you sharks in a real environment and it can show you down, oh, well, we actually need these things in the water. We don't need to eliminate them and maybe it'll get you down the road of conservation because we desperately need conservation for sharks. Because they are the apex predator, because they are apex predator, they are the ones that control the ecosystem in the ocean. So we need them for a healthy ocean.

• 17:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. So I do agree with that. I feel like people who love the water and love the animals in the water. One, they're doing great stuff for the environment, but two is the only person I've ever seen do this is, you know, Joe Rogan posts sometimes. Like if you really go down a rabbit hole of the ocean, there's some wild stuff. I've seen videos online where there's like, what looks like a, like just jellyfish or like some sort of thing. And it changes colors and then it like poofs out comes. I'm like, dude, I'm out. And then I saw there was an article where they gave a cephalopod, which I don't even know what that is. They gave a cephalopod. Is it? Okay. All right. They gave it an intelligence test and it passed. I'm out. Dude, Google it right now. They gave a cephalopod.

• 18:33Speaker 03

  C E P H. I was gonna start with an S.

• 18:39Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that's how you spell it. Cephalopod. And I think they gave it a, an intelligence test and it passed. And that's when I was like, all right, we don't, we don't understand it. And I think part of it is like, you know, I talk all the time. I got, I literally have a NASA jacket on where it's like, everyone thinks about space. It's like, go up, go up, go up. But we don't understand the ocean and the ocean is what? I think it's 70% of the earth.

• 19:00Speaker 03

  We've only discovered or observed, I believe, 5% of the ocean.

• 19:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 19:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:05Speaker 02

  We know more about the surface of Mars than we do about the, the bottom of our ocean.

• 19:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 19:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:10Anthony Pompliano?

  That reminds me, there was.

• 19:11Speaker 03

  Damn, they said this cephalo fish is as smart as, is as smart as children.

• 19:16Anthony Pompliano?

  I told you.

• 19:17Speaker 03

  They said that they got the same intelligence level as children.

• 19:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And they gave it an intelligence test, right?

• 19:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. The same one they give children and it got.

• 19:23Anthony Pompliano?

  And it passed.

• 19:25Speaker 03

  But not, not like one year olds, like, like, you know, five to 10 year olds.

• 19:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes. Like your intelligence level.

• 19:31Anthony Pompliano?

  That was a layup. The only thing I'll say about the ocean that I want to talk about NFTs is there's a Brazilian billionaire, I think, who's the, he built a one man like submarine. And he has gone to the bottom of the ocean. I think he's touched the bottom of four of the seven oceans. I think or something. I don't know. If we Google it real quick, I think it's a Brazilian billionaire who went to the bottom of at least four of the oceans or something. But he goes by himself in a like a custom made submarine thing. And I'm like, dude, you gotta have some freaking courage to go do that.

• 20:08Speaker 02

  How cool. I want to do that.

• 20:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, like, I actually think that you would go do that. I would not do that.

• 20:14Speaker 02

  In a heartbeat. I would do it in a heartbeat. Oh, I can't believe I'm forgetting his name. You're all gonna make fun of me for this, but he did Terminator. He did Aliens. He's the director of that, the movies.

• 20:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 20:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, he went down to the Mariana Trench in his own submarine.

• 20:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 20:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. Why am I spacing on his name? Famous director.

• 20:30Anthony Pompliano?

  James Cameron?

• 20:31Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 20:32Anthony Pompliano?

  James Cameron, yeah. My whole thing with the ocean is just like, if there's a crack in that thing, like you're done. Like you ain't getting back up.

• 20:38Speaker 02

  You'll never know.

• 20:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. I also watched the freediving documentary. Polina was watching it and there's a woman. She's like the world champion freediver, taught herself how to do it with her breathing and everything. And one day she was with some friends, she dove down, they were just like practicing. So she wasn't going like really deep, like kind of world record level depths. She went down and never came back up. And they searched for, couldn't find her. And like, I think that's part of it is like, there's like some finality down there. Like, how, when you go shark diving, do you bring like oxygen with you or no?

• 21:13Speaker 02

  Oh, no, no. I do do scuba diving, but typically it's all freediving. So it's holding your breath, diving down there.

• 21:18Anthony Pompliano?

  How long can you hold your breath for?

• 21:20Speaker 02

  Ah, if I was training up, I could hold it for about four minutes, 30 seconds.

• 21:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Holy shit. I did it once. I felt like I was going to pass out after 20 seconds. Cause the further you get down, right, the harder it gets.

• 21:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's called the mammalian dive reflex. So your body is accustomed to be able to hold oxygen and be able to live without oxygen for a long time. You're born in. Nine months in underwater and you're in your mother's belly, right?

• 21:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:44Speaker 02

  So your blood shunts from your extremities to your internal organs. It, um, your liver actually squeezes to produce more red blood cells to go into your bloodstream. So your body is meant to go into this reflex. It's a natural reflex. Your face hits cold water, it automatically kicks in mammalian dive reflex.

• 22:03Speaker 03

  Should we do a breath holding contest? I went free diving once and I, that sounds cooler than it was. I was. The water was swimming.

• 22:14Speaker 03

  But I had the goggles, I had the goggles. I was like snorkeling, but they would tell, I was with some guy and he was like, we were in Turks and Caicos. And the guy was like, you know, take off the snorkel. Fancy guy. Take off the snorkel and basically like dive down. We'd go in like these little like cave looking things, not really caves.

• 22:28Speaker 02

  How deep do you go when you free dive? I could hit a hundred feet.

• 22:32Speaker 03

  A hundred feet? We didn't go anywhere close to that. Bro, you sound like you held your breath the length of the pool. I wasn't like in standing room water. I was like diving. We were, I was like.

• 22:42Speaker 02

  Like this guy.

• 22:45Speaker 02

  Buddy, you come with me, I'll get you down to 50 feet.

• 22:48Speaker 03

  All right.

• 22:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. If you have a proper instruction, you'll be able to hold your breath.

• 22:51Speaker 03

  And you leave them there, right?

• 22:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, you got it.

• 22:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:54Speaker 03

  See at the surface. All right, tell us about Jupiter Group. What are you guys doing?

• 22:57Speaker 02

  So because of my past with branding licensing and all this, I got to understand from a very ingrained level from the internal side of how every organization, IP, brand, institution is trying to get into the NFT space. So MBA Top Shot, they did a great job of kind of opening a mass adoption for people to get involved with digital ownership, digital scarcity, digital ownership, own that one video of LeBron James dunking, you sell it on the marketplace, make some money. I think that's the first inroads of people finding the NFT space. But I got to see quickly about how all the major players out there all want to get involved with this industry, but just don't have an inroad to get there. They don't have a vehicle. So we created Jupiter Group and my partner Nicole McGraw, she owns the Art Gallery in Palm Beach.

• 23:40Speaker 02

  She's partnered with a contemporary artist, well, famous contemporary artist Brendan Murphy, who has 22 foot sculpture of Boongie Spaceman in Antigua. He's doing another one in London. And anyways, we partnered with him to form the Boongie Project, which is a 10K PFP avatar project aimed at connecting digital to physical. So that way, the majority of the world who got involved with Brendan Murphy's Boongie Project could own a piece of his work, which is usually priced out of the market for a lot of people.

• 24:12Anthony Pompliano?

  How much is it?

• 24:13Speaker 02

  For the PFP?

• 24:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, for the physical piece, but also the PFP.

• 24:17Speaker 02

  For some of the physical pieces sell for $350,000.

• 24:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Wow.

• 24:20Speaker 02

  Some of his paintings sell for $50,000. The mini sculpture sells for $20,000. So, I mean, his buyers are Serena Williams, Warren Buffett.

• 24:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Buffett buys it?

• 24:30Speaker 02

  Buffett, yeah. He didn't buy one of our NFTs, but we're working on it.

• 24:36Anthony Pompliano?

  If he buys an NFT before he buys Bitcoin, it'd be all time.

• 24:41Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. So the whole idea is you take the physical art and a lot of the PFPs are basically the same type of art, same artist, but what is the connection between the physical piece and then this, the digital pieces?

• 24:55Speaker 02

  So we did what was called a proof of burn concept with redeemable polygon token. So if you minted during the minting process, the first 200, you were entered into a guarantee to get a mini physical sculpture from Brendan Murphy, a 101 mini sculpture, 13 inches tall, roughly around 20K on a fair market value. So that's one of the pieces we were able to give out. 30 paintings we gave out and then a seven foot, $750,000 Boongie sculpture as well, which is really cool.

• 25:25Anthony Pompliano?

  It's massive.

• 25:26Speaker 02

  Massive. A kid from Fort Lauderdale won it, a 19-year-old kid.

• 25:30Anthony Pompliano?

  What's he gonna do with it?

• 25:30Speaker 02

  He actually lived right across the street from it. It sounds ridiculous, but it was completely randomized and completely, it's all on chain. We built everything on chain.

• 25:42Anthony Pompliano?

  That's one of those things when you know who wins, like, damn, I gotta have to explain this one.

• 25:46Speaker 02

  It was too perfect. He literally lived across the street from the gallery, which it's sitting in. And it's again, it's all on chain, so we did build it out.

• 25:54Anthony Pompliano?

  So what is he gonna, a 19-year-old kid gets $750,000 sculpture, what's he gonna do with it?

• 25:58Speaker 02

  So we dropped him a token, the redeemable polygon token. He could hold it, he could trade it if he wants to, or he could hold it and then he'll burn it to redeem it for the physical. And he could do whatever he wants with it. It's his.

• 26:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Has he indicated what he's gonna do?

• 26:11Speaker 02

  He's got a lot of cool ideas, actually, a lot to try to give back to the piece. But now he's really effectively part of art history. And I don't say that lightly because now he is an owner through a proof of burn system that we built out through blockchain network for a $750,000 physical sculpture. So it's one of a kind. Beforehand, the only thing that happened like this was Uniswap did a redemption token like this for what they called Unisox. And the Unisox, they priced up to around, I think it's $150,000 for a pair of socks now. But the idea is that you were able to burn the token to redeem the physical. And that's what we're trying to do, connecting the digital, the physical with Brendan Murphy. Then our next one with Mr. E is Instagram accounts, M R E G F X.

• 26:56Speaker 02

  He's a fantastic digital graphic artist who were launching his polygons to do the same thing for him, connecting digital to the physical.

• 27:02Speaker 04

  How many people actually burned the token to receive the physical?

• 27:05Speaker 02

  No one's done it yet. So the redemption hasn't happened yet. It's going to happen in the next couple of weeks. But right now they're trading on the open market on OpenSea.

• 27:14Anthony Pompliano?

  The, we're going to pull up a picture here in a second of, of the physical sculpture. And when you see it, it's just, this took a long time, right? It's like one of those pieces that you're just like, damn, that like the proof of work that goes into, to building something like this, which I think like, forget all the digital stuff for a second. I do think that one piece of, that's really interesting is people forget how much work goes into creating the actual art itself, right? And when you see sculpture specifically, like to me, it's just, it's one of those things where like, I couldn't create that if I tried, right? So you have respect just for somebody who has a skillset that you don't have. But then when you look at something like this, it's very obvious, even if you know nothing about art, there's like, oh, I'd created something on the weekend.

• 27:57Anthony Pompliano?

  And there's like, oh, this is a professional that created something that was super, super high quality. And I think that that's part of what the allure for a lot of this is, is there's this like aspirational component to some of these artists that you're just like, dude, I like the care that you put in the attention to detail is crazy. I don't even like, I didn't know until you had told us that the source was a big deal. But like, oh yeah, we got the, the photo here and he's standing next to us, a seven foot tall statue or. Sculpture that he made.

• 28:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, sculpture.

• 28:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Sculpture. What is there a difference between a statue and sculpture?

• 28:25Speaker 02

  There is. Think about a piece of marble in the yard is.

• 28:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. Okay, got it. Yeah. So like, and even the base, and I mean, like, it's just, it's incredible. And then what is written on on these?

• 28:36Speaker 02

  Like all his formulas. It's all little bits and pieces of his work of his life all come together in formulas to try to try to solve it, if you will.

• 28:45Speaker 02

  So that took three years. Three years of concept. Yeah.

• 28:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Three years to make that sculpture.

• 28:51Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 28:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Holy shit.

• 28:52Speaker 02

  Yep. And then the the PFPs, the 10K project, 11K project we did is 20 years of his work all wrapped up into one. So when we were working with him, the first generations of the software to be able to spit out all that different, all the different traits in the PFP and the avatar, he saw his work after 20 years out of the new way he's never seen before. Which is really cool to see because he had all the backgrounds, the bodies, the visors, the ears. He, we coupled it all together and the software spit out 3.5 million different iterations of the avatars and we only took the 11K out of that. So we got to see his work in a new way. Plus now our Discord before we launched, it reached 142,000 people with zero marketing put into it.

• 29:33Speaker 02

  It was just completely organic and really amazing to see how now you have over 100,000 people connecting with a new artist, Brendan Murphy, who they probably never heard before. And now they are they're fans of his for life. It changed his outlook about how it is. And I think Beeple kind of did it right. And he was the one that put the cat out of the bag. Now everyone knows like we're going to jump into this full force. But to to really jump into it from an artist's perspective, when I was working with Brendan Murphy and working with Mr. E, it's scary to them because it's so new and so foreign. But now they get to connect. And I think that's a beautiful thing about the decentralization of Web 3 that NFTs are, you know, a subset of that provides because it allows everyone to participate on a whole new level.

• 30:17Speaker 02

  Because now they are, you know, as a free market trades these things in open public, they're, they could profit off these things.

• 30:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 30:23Speaker 02

  It's a global liquidity market. It's not like the art market right now where you have to go take it to some show and hopefully it sells. Now you. Can connect with everyone.

• 30:32Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you think about your business? Are you guys going to go look and partner with these artists? And then like help them basically take their ideas and their art and then bring it into like this new world? Or are you thinking of it some other way?

• 30:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. So we will partner with the world famous contemporary artists out there, digital graphic artists, who want to get fully on board with it as well. And that's a very important thing. And I think that this world we're in right now, the NFT space, it's very apparent that a lot of big celebrities are leveraging their brand in order to be able to just throw out an NFT. Hopefully they make some money and they walk away. It's, it smells of bullshit and everyone knows they can't, that's like, you're not going to be involved with that anymore. So now you're going to have to, if we partner with anyone, a Juba group, it's their life now because it's our life. And it's now the community's life. So they're going to have to be full force building that community with us. The artists just can't produce something and walk away. It's never going to work.

• 31:24Speaker 02

  That's why I think you're going to see like Nike, for example, Nike just jumped into, I think it's Roblox, right? Nike did his big thing. And I, one thing, I read this tweet the other day, it's not mine. I wish I remember who said this and said, what's the greater headline? Was Nike made a hundred million dollars off of jumping into the metaverse? Or some kid sold a pair of digital Nike shoes for a million dollars and changed his life? I think that's that last one. The kid sold it for a million dollars is the definition of web three and where we're going. It's the metaverse. And I think that's, it's all falling down that road.

• 31:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, part of, and by no means am I an expert on any of this stuff, but as I think through it, like I've always said, we already live in the metaverse, right? Like the internet is the metaverse. Twitter is the like, Gabby Dyson from YOGA Games told me, he was like, it's the lo-fi version. So we all meet in the digital square. We walk around. I kind of see what everyone's talking about. I can jump into a conversation if I want. I can ignore somebody if I want. I can take what you say and go and share it with everybody else by retweeting. Like, like there's this element, but it's super low fidelity, right? It's not what people think of when they hear metaverse or virtual world or whatever. And maybe there's some transition to something like that, but it's very obvious to see why the visual components of this are becoming so powerful. And people, when you're looking at a screen, you're going through the portal, right?

• 32:39Anthony Pompliano?

  If you buy into kind of like the ready player. One stuff, it just feels like art is such like a no brainer to kind of pull people into it. Do you think at all about like headsets and I've got a, I bought a, what is it Oculus Quest two? I haven't used it yet. I'm waiting for the right time to pull it out, but what do you think about like those headsets? And kind of like where this world is going?

• 33:02Speaker 02

  I think it's pretty cool. The Oculus is really cool system. I think they solved a lot of problems from the original Oculus and Vive to today. I mean, you're going to have Zuckerberg pumping billions of dollars into it to try to recreate the metaverse or what he did with Meta. And I don't think the metaverse is going to be owned by any central location. I think it's just a, another extension of the internet. So it's going to be fluid. You're going to be able to jump from one verse to another verse to like a Roblox or sandbox or Decentraland, AR, VR. It's gonna get deeper and deeper in the feeling like reality and the headset will be the first iteration of that for sure.

• 33:38Speaker 04

  Yeah. One of the things that we did that I thought was pretty cool was we went and toured a building that wasn't built yet using VR. So using the headsets and using the hands and you can connect with people. And so you can tour the same building at the same time with someone that's located in New York while we're in Miami. So I thought that was really interesting because you basically are seeing a development before it's built in front of your eyes. Rather than just looking at it on paper when you're building a golf course, something like that.

• 34:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, without a doubt. And I think the, the, the, the whole, the middle of it all, of it all is the blockchain, right? And Bitcoin really started it. Now I'm a big Bitcoin guy. I'm wearing the Bitcoin shoes right now.

• 34:11Anthony Pompliano?

  He does have on the Bitcoin Adam shoes.

• 34:14Speaker 02

  So I think that the, the idea of Bitcoin allowed everyone to understand digital scarcity and digital ownership, right? And then you'll have subsets of it like Ethereum, be able to build off of and do DApps on top of that and Solana then. But like when you get to the understanding of what the metaverse is going to be, I think if you are a video gamer, you can fully understand it, right? If you ever played World of Warcraft, which I did, you understood that there's a whole digital economy on there. Where people are taking real world money, buying gold to buy swords and helmets and everything. It's been years in their life in that space, but when they come out of it, they have nothing to show for it. They don't own anything. They didn't do. Anything like that. I mean, parents now know they know how much money kids are spending on skins for Fortnite. It's absurd, but they don't own that skin. They don't own that character.

• 34:59Speaker 02

  With blockchain and what this technology is going to allow us to do is that you will be able to own that character. You'll be able to own that sword. You'll be able to own that piece of artwork. You'll be able to own a piece of culture within this metaverse that you could then pour all your heart and soul into. Then it's going to have a value. So the value is going to be able to sell on the open market. And it's already happening. I mean, OpenSea, it did 3.4 billion dollars in trading volume of last August. That's beat eBay. And there was only a couple hundred thousand people actually trading on there.

• 35:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's like, it's like two, 300,000 people and they had massive volume. Here's one of my big questions. Does it matter where it gets built? And does it matter if it's decentralized versus centralized? Like, how do you think about? I'll use an easy example. So if I go to twitter.com, google.com, you know, whatever website I go to, amazon.com. I probably couldn't tell you what the technical stack is, right? I know simple thing that TCP IP, right? Like, there's some core things that we know the internet generally runs on. But once you get past maybe three or four core components, I couldn't tell you if they're using AWS or they're using Google Cloud or they literally have their own servers. I couldn't tell you what the code is written like off the top of my head. Like, I don't know what the technical architecture is. I could go find out some of it. But as a user, I just want to be able to go to google.com, type in a word and it tells me what the answers, right?

• 36:10Anthony Pompliano?

  And like, as long as that works, like, I'm good to go. Is that where we're going to end up with all this stuff? And like, all like the tribalism, everything almost like doesn't matter because just whatever works, people will use. And the end user won't know what's actually underlying it. Or do you think that there's still going to be some level of importance as to like where it gets built for some, you know, reason?

• 36:28Speaker 02

  I think it's going to be a global decentralized system without a doubt. I think the time and place of where like a Twitter or Facebook, where you can be kicked off the network because you said something wrong is going to go away. And we're going to have bad actors be able to utilize that, utilize that open system as any new vehicle they have bad actors on. But eventually that's all going to get weeded away too. Eventually, it's just going to be a decentralized system where you like the internet, you could build on and do whatever you want on it. Unless you're not harming anybody, I think it's going to be completely open. I don't think you're going to be finding one central location for it. To be built like for for example, sorry, Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud. That's still a centralized server and it's still sitting, the data is sitting in a farm somewhere in some location.

• 37:12Speaker 02

  And then if you have the most important data in the world, if that fails, you're you lose your data. I think the decentralized cloud is the next evolution of that, like we utilize storage to host all our 4K resolution for our NFTs across the decentralized global network. So you could be able to go on and see on storage right now where all your assets are being held. And I think people are going to want that securities.

• 37:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I completely agree. Where can we send people to to find out more about this stuff? And I know you're going to stick around till the end of the show, but where can we send people?

• 37:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, go to our Discord, which is Boongie Project and also Polygoons. Our Twitter, which is Boongie Project and also Polygoons. Be able to follow us there, get and anyone wants to get into an NFTs to understand what it is. It's still extremely early. It's the wild, wild west still. You have to be very systematic and be secure with how you operate in that space. Be able to understand what you're clicking on, who you're clicking to, where you're where you're connecting your wallet to. Before you just start arbitrarily jumping around. So be careful out there, but you do it correctly. You jump into a Discord, you jump into Twitter and become part of a community. You'll be able to understand what digital ownership of a piece of artwork really is.