#956 Josh Jenkins-Robbins On Creating Instant 3-D Animated Characters For Everyone

Josh Jenkins-Robbins is the Co-Founder Immi, a company that is pioneering a new real-time avatar and animation technology that is available to the the masses. In this conversation, we discuss building Immi, the technology behind it, real world use cases, how this technology will usher in a new virtual world, and partnering with large studios. ======================= Brave Wallet is the first secure crypto wallet built natively in a web3 crypto browser. No extension required. Store, manage, and grow your portfolio, get NFT & multi-chain support, and more. Download the Brave privacy browser at brave.com/Pomp, and click the wallet icon to get started. ======================= The Pomp Podcast is powered by BetOnline.ag, the world's largest sports betting, casino, poker and horse racing website that accepts cryptocurrency for wagering. BetOnline.ag gives you the ability to use Bitcoin and more than a dozen altcoins to make deposits and withdraw your winnings. There are no crypto transaction fees, and processing is instantaneous and secure. Visit https://promotions.betonline.ag/pomp and use PROMO CODE: POMP100 to receive a 100% matching bonus on any crypto deposit. BetOnline.ag is available in nearly every country around the world, making it the top global gaming destination for crypto users. =======================

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. Josh Jenkins-Robins is the co-founder and CEO of ME.io. They've got some really cool avatar animation technology. In this conversation, we talk about the technology, what users are doing with it, how this technology is going to help usher in a brand-new virtual world, and why it's so important to partner with studios and also have your own developers on the team. I really enjoyed this conversation with Josh, and I hope you guys enjoy it as well. Before we get into this episode, I first want to talk about our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by FTX US.

• 0:45Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:29Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:10Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:49Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:13Speaker 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.

• 3:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Josh, let's get started. How are you?

• 3:39Speaker 02

  What's up, buddy? How you doing?

• 3:40Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm doing fantastic. I'm very excited about this. I have no clue how this is gonna go, but we're gonna do the best that we can. Before we jump in, let's talk a little bit about this idea of real-time animation and facial tracking technology. What the hell is that? Just start there. What does that mean?

• 3:59Speaker 02

  Well, let's back up to, you know, the greatest entrepreneurs solve the biggest problems, right? And so about 18 months ago, I became an investor in a studio in Los Angeles called AMG I Studios, doing some really cool work, really for traditional production at the time, you know, trying to, they were a bunch of Pixar and DreamWorks and Disney alum that had set out to create the fastest Animation studio in the world like why does it take four years to make Toy Story? When it could take one year and with gaming technology, which is if you think about gaming, what is gaming? Gaming is real time animation, real time rendering. It kind of caught up to the production world and the production world is using that now for all sorts of really cool stuff. But we had a, we had an idea. I was watching, actually it was a, I always remember it. There's motion capture stage.

• 4:44Speaker 02

  You got this guy, you know, with all the sensors and everything. And then he had a iPhone. Attached to a helmet on his head. I said, what's the iPhone for? So it's got, the iPhone is so good. Tracking 52 points on your face at any one time, just like we've got, that's why we have face ID. We could open up our phone, unlock it, which is our face. I said, well, what if we could, what if we could map that expression directly to the, to the care or to the, from the actor to the character? And they said, yeah, that's exactly what we're doing. I said, well, what if we could do that in an app? What if we could do that in a consumer facing way? Because the problem I see is that casual creators now dominate the world. We know that Tik Tok, Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, those are the platforms. But these casual creators have never had the ability to make animated content.

• 5:26Speaker 02

  They, they, unless you had time and money and expertise and software. I said, but what if we could do that in an app, a consumer facing app? And what if we could create a way for people to not only create clips, but to share those clips? Maybe put those characters in augmented reality. How about communicate? Zoom, Twitch, stream, why not make it much more fun? Because if, you know, there's a lot of conversations at this days about metaverse and avatars. I find them pretty uninteresting to be honest with you. But when you look at the ability to embody a character, it creates a form of self-expression and fun and joy. And that's why we love Halloween. That's why we love Comic Con. It's, this is kind of a form of digital cosplay, if you will.

• 6:07Speaker 02

  And so that's why we have such a great cap table. People see the vision of this, including the founder of Zoom. You know, we've got a lot of other folks like Mark Cuban on board, Tony Robbins, Paris Hilton, Steve Aoki. So we're having a lot of fun with, with what this could be, because I believe this could be a platform for the world. To be able to flood their feeds with animated content and allow themselves to truly express themselves and bring a whole nother level of creativity that we've just never seen before.

• 6:32Anthony Pompliano?

  So let's go ahead and pull up the actual technology so people can see this thing. Cause this is pretty damn cool to, to kind of see how it works.

• 6:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, you got it. So this here is a board eight, uh, which we can get into. There's a little bit of latency with Zoom, but as you can see, his face is my face. So I'm talking as him.

• 6:52Anthony Pompliano?

  And so as you, as you talk and you're making him move right now.

• 6:56Speaker 02

  Yep, I'm, I'm making him move. This is our, this is actually a preview of our desktop app, but we actually have a, the mobile app is available right now. The desktop will allow for this kind of thing much more, you know, easily with Zoom, et cetera. But you could see that he's, his, his voice and his face is embodying my face.

• 7:16Anthony Pompliano?

  And so like, if you make really, uh, yeah, there you go. So like, if you make really big face movements, basically as you open your mouth, the avatar's opening their mouth and it just continues. And obviously all of the movements that, uh, the avatar has at the moment, are you controlling that? Or are those like pre-programmed?

• 7:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we, we use a level of artificial intelligence in here. So what we've done is there's a couple of things you can do. One is the character, when you're, when you're happy, the character will start to become happy. So your, your, your smiles on your face translate into happy gestures for the character. When you're angry, the character starts to become angry. And then you can kind of hijack that and you can have him do all sorts of fun stuff. You can make him, you know, you can make him do dances when you want him to. But all the while I'm still controlling, you know, his facial expression. And, uh, and his, and his voice, right? And so I'm, I'm effectively piloting him. But I can still make, so, yeah, so it's got a combination of the ability to do, and then you can do all sorts of fun little special animations.

• 8:18Speaker 02

  And, you know, one of my favorites right here, get a little scratch.

• 8:24Anthony Pompliano?

  So when you, when you think about, uh, how people will use this, will folks be able to create like entire animated, uh, features, et cetera? And they'll just have a bunch of different characters and then they'll almost have like actors that know how to pilot these individual characters very well? Or how do you think about, uh, how these studios are going to use this technology?

• 8:44Speaker 02

  You know, I actually think it's less for studios and more for the casual creator. Right? I mean, this is, this is think Tik Tok, think, think Instagram, think, think Snapchat. I mean, that's where people really will utilize this technology. It just adds a whole nother level of creativity. And we could talk about the NFT space too, which I think is, which is fascinating as it relates to adding utility to, to NFTs, which is certainly needed at this, at this stage.

• 9:08Anthony Pompliano?

  And so are you basically trying to create or will you guys create essentially like NFTs where people have control over what the NFT does? Like, could you make this an NFT? Or does the technology only allow you to add like a pre-recorded video as the NFT?

• 9:26Speaker 02

  No, that's a great question. So what we want people to be able to do is to be able to have fun with the app no matter where they come in. Meaning, let me explain. So I look at it as kind of three buckets. We're going to have like right now, there's 20 free characters in the app and we're building a world of IP. I mean, these guys behind in this studio here are doing incredible character work. And so that's kind of step one. Step two is in-app purchases and licensed content. So you can imagine as an example, if a Minions movie is coming out, you know, next month, why wouldn't a studio let everybody become a minion on the app and start posting content and tagging and flooding the feeds, right, with minion content? And maybe they run a competition that says, you know, the, the top most 10 creative videos out there in the world will get to go to the red carpet, right?

• 10:11Speaker 02

  So there's all sorts of really interesting or sports mascots, talking crap to your buddy, you know, as a sports mascot. So there's all sorts of fun licensed IP, et cetera. NFTs are interesting because, you know, right now they're mostly 2D projects. We actually, funny story, so we, we actually bought a bored ape early on. My, one of my, our head of social media Tyler said, hey, you gotta buy this bored ape. I said, how much is it? He said, 25 grand. I said, you're out of your mind, that's insane. But the rest is history. I think it's worth a few hundred grand now. But we animated the bored ape, which was the first one that I was on there and And what's interesting, it's one of our free characters that people can use, but we started showing that to a lot of these celebs, right, that have this profile picture and that's their flex now.

• 10:55Speaker 02

  And so we said, look, what if we could, what if we could create, what if we could actually animate those board apes for them? Because it's one thing to have it as your profile picture, but why not bring it into the world with you and create content with it? So in the last 48 hours, I don't know if you've seen Snoop Dogg has posted four videos of his ape in augmented reality, doing his, doing his crip walk dance and all sorts of fun stuff. Paris Hilton has posted hers. We've created one for Jimmy Fallon. We're working on Steve Aoki's. We're working on a bunch of these board apes. So that's kind of a fun project. And what's, but what's more interesting is the scalable aspect of this, meaning where actually there's a project that we're working on with the studio here that's called My Pet Hooligan. My Pet Hooligan is an awesome NFT project. It has

• 11:40Speaker 02

  8,888 unique, right, one of one characters. And so what we've done is we've compiled those and rendered those characters in the cloud. And so soon, those owners of those NFTs, instead of just having a profile picture, they're actually going to be able to link their wallet directly to the app and it will identify that they own that NFT. And then that NFT will show up in the app for them to do exactly what we were doing here, which is create content with, stream with, and really let it become part of their digital identity. And so, and then, and then thirdly, we're going to launch our own NFT series sometime later this summer, so that will be the first fully animated NFT genre that's built for user-generated content. So you can imagine

• 12:23Speaker 02

  this kind of, you know, Marvel of the metaverse, if you were, we have this immeverse of characters all, you know, from variety of different characters and a variety of different IP.

• 12:33Anthony Pompliano?

  So when you start to think about kind of the business behind this, you all have now raised a pretty significant amount of capital. Those investors include Paris Hilton, Mark Cuban, Tony Robbins, Pitbull, Steve Aoki, G Money, and a number of other individuals. What is kind of the business here? You license the technology, you have the app in the App Store and you monetize that? Like, how do you think about building a business to be able to make this sustainable?

• 13:01Speaker 02

  There's so many paths to revenue, as you know, with when a when a an app like this, a revolutionary technology comes where last week people couldn't make animated content and today they can do it on their phone in real time. You really want mass adoption first, right? So you don't want to monetize too early. So our goal is to make this worldwide mass adoption. I think that when you look at the potential revenue streams, there's a variety of different methods you could go. One is in-app purchases, the ability to buy characters, licensed IP, NFT mintings, NFT secondary sales, merchandise, people could build their own their own merchandise here, subscription, premium features. I mean, there's so many different potential directions that we could go here.

• 13:43Speaker 02

  That'll be that'll be fun for us. Promotional revenue, like those conversations, like I mentioned, like a movie studio or a gaming company or a toy company wants to add this into their their elements of how they're engaging, you know, engaging fans. I think there's numerous ways in which we can we can monetize. And then then down the road, you look at what we call character portability. We build all of these characters before we kind of shoehorn them into an iPhone, we build them in the Unreal Engine, which is, you know, what what Epic Games is built and is powering a lot of different metaverses, etc. So when you look at character portability, being able to not only have your character there for user-generated content, but maybe you pay a small fee to take that character into a gaming environment, right? A metaverse environment, if you will, where, you know, you're not just floating around as

• 14:26Speaker 02

  an avatar with no legs, you actually have something fun and animated and really cool that that is more of a an embodiment of who you are or who you feel like being in that moment.

• 14:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so when you start to see this, what do you hope comes out of the technology? The technology is so cool. Is this a thing where you guys will actually open source some of it and allow people to kind of build on top of it? Is it something where you'll continue to develop it internally? Like, how do you think about the relationship with the developer community and kind of pushing it this forward so it gets better and better over time?

• 14:57Speaker 02

  That's a great question. So kind of two parts. What I want out of it, I think is obviously we want to create a viable business. But I think the, the fun and the joy and the delight of even you just smiling when you see the characters and me talking for the first, that's what, that's what gets us excited, is watching people have so much joy and fun, frankly, in a time when we need more of it in this world. And then in the long run, I think it's going to be interesting to see how we engage with the developer community. I mean, right now, the, the capabilities that we have in, in this studio to animate characters, we're working on scalable solutions to that. So like I said, instead of animating one character, we can animate this 9,000, you know, my pet hooligans. But in the developer community, you can see building a set of specs where you can say,

• 15:42Speaker 02

  you know, a lot of these NFTs now, for example, are giving you 3D files and they might give them to you in a T pose. And that's an animation, you know, nomenclature, but it's, it's kind of like no one knows what to do with it. But in a, in a perfect world, we would build the ability maybe for a marketplace or for developers in the world, creators, to say, hey, if you submit these according to spec, right, according to a certain spec, we could maybe rig those into an animation body that we already have set up. So all of a sudden now, people around the world could be creating characters, submitting characters, and then selling those characters potentially, you know, in a marketplace as well. So there's lots of opportunity down the road for us to figure out how to, how to engage that. But we got, we got a lot to accomplish before that as well.

• 16:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so when you start to see this, is this where the, the future's going? Is that like, we get more anonymity or pseudonymity, we get more kind of digital interactions, but maybe not with our real faces or those real identities? Like, how do you see this playing into the bigger trend at play?

• 16:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a, I, I do see that for sure. I think people, you know, we've kind of had this, this, what I'll call the narcissistic period of social media where it's all about people, it's all about looking a certain way, trying to become a certain way, using filters, all these things that try to make yourself look better. At some point, that just runs its course. And I think so for, for, when I look at this, it's kind of, this is a nice way out. This is a nice way for people to go, oh my gosh, how much more fun can I have when it's me piloting the character's voice and, or having fun with it or subverting that character, or just having a conversation as that character? That's way more fun. And I think that's kind of where we're headed in terms of, people have this conversation about the metaverse and.

• 17:25Speaker 02

  Right now, there's a lot of marketing, but we'll see where that ends up going. I kind of fall into the realm of the camp of where Apple's headed, which is kind of more of a mixed reality, augmented reality. And that's why our characters are, you could put them in augmented reality. You can make them walk around in space. So I think this is definitely where the world is going for sure. But I still think that there's a point of human connection and humans love humans. We need connection. It's not going to just become this dystopian world of scrapping on your headset. I don't envision that as well. So we'll see where it goes, but I think we're well positioned either way.

• 18:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And then when you think about the team itself, how's the makeup of the team? Like, how many developers versus non-developers? And how do you think about the body of work ahead?

• 18:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we have a big animation studio. That's our strategic partner, AMGI, about 40 animators, character developers. And we have a team of about, at any one time, about 20 to 25 full-time developers on the app side, kind of enterprise-level app technology. So this thing's totally scalable. And like I said, we have the mobile app available now. People can go on, download it, check it out, have fun with it. Look at some of the clips that people are making and just have a blast. And then ultimately, we'll have a desktop app very soon as well. So people can start doing Zoom calls and Twitch streaming and all that. So it should be a lot of fun. And we'll continue to expand the list of celebrities and people that want to be involved and build their own characters, their own personas and identities.

• 18:59Speaker 02

  And it'll be a lot of fun.

• 19:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's pretty cool.

• 19:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a shift in the power dynamics is what it really is, which I know that that's a theme, right? Throughout your shows and your conversations with the world is disruption. And I think this is a democratization, as much as cliche that sounds. It is a democratization of animation. It is disruption in the power dynamics between leaving the creativity into the hands of studios only, right? Want to empower the people, right? And that's what social media did. It took the content away from the power is the be and gave it to the ability, the citizen journalists and everybody else in the world. And we're just want to give them more tools to be able to do that as it relates to the fun and joy of animation, which is a worldwide language that everybody loves.

• 19:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And then when you think about where people can go and use this technology, is the app the best place for us to send them?

• 19:53Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Yeah, just go. I mean, it takes, you know, a minute to onboard yourself to pick a character. There's 20 fun characters to choose from. You can, you can just have a blast. You could upload different backgrounds from your camera roll. So you can up and even videos. So you can insert characters into environments and you could put it in AR. Have, have fun. Send messages to your friends. Start sharing it on social. Tag us. We love that. And yeah, our website is IMI.io. You could go right there. There's a link to the app store and there's, there's, it's a lot of fun. You guys will really enjoy it.

• 20:27Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it. This makes, this makes a ton of sense. Awesome. Where can we send people to find you on the internet?

• 20:32Speaker 02

  Uh, you know, I, right now, I'm just using, I'm, I kind of like just to focus on our Twitter, our, our IMI handles, to be honest with you. I kind of keep my personal life a little bit, you know, behind the scenes.

• 20:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Off the internet.

• 20:44Speaker 02

  Off the internet. Yeah, yeah. But our Twitter is IMI underscore IO. And then our Tik Tok and Instagram is just IMI.io. So we'd love to, we'd love to engage with all your, all your fans out there and all your followers as well. We'll have a blast.

• 20:58Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it. Awesome, man. Well, listen, thank you so much for doing this. I, I don't think that we've ever had anyone come on and, and have a virtual character participate in the interview. But, but it's very, very cool technology. I highly suggest anyone who's interested, go check out the app itself, and then also the technology that, that makes this all possible. But Josh, this is fantastic. So thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

• 21:18Speaker 02

  Thanks, Pom. Thanks for having me on, buddy. Have a good one.

• 21:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Sounds good. Talk soon. There it is. Ready to go. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you guys enjoyed this one. Make sure you subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to try to transition to get a new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to pomscryptocourse.com. We've developed a curriculum with the top teams across the industry. It's a three-week intensive training program with over 50 events packed into that three-week time period. Go to pomscryptocourse.com to learn more and I'll meet you guys for the next episode.