Bankless - 3 - Mack Flavelle | Overpriced JPEGs

Episode Date: November 27, 2021

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 

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of overpriced JPEGs. I am Carly Riley. On today's show, I have Mac Flavel, who I'm so excited to have brought on to this podcast because Mac is very fun. He actually was the person who came up with the idea for CryptoKitties, which is one of the very first NFTE 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 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 Club, which is the company you might know for having partnered with Milakunis and Ashton Coucher to release Stoner Cats. But he's done a number of projects since that as well with Big Head Club.

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 warnings before you totally dive in here. One, we curse quite a bit in this episode. Mac 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 weeks ago, and it was actually before Big Head Club's latest project, that is their Ghostbusters project. So they launched a collection of NFTs for around Ghostbusters, the animated film that is released. So anyhow, there's some 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 OpenC. So please, please enjoy this episode. We'll hear from our sponsors first, though. On Juno is your new crypto-enabled financial services company. On Juno lets you get your direct deposit paycheck paid to you in crypto.

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Uber, Starbucks, Walmart, Target, and other WebView companies. Use code bankless when you create your On Juno account, and our friends at Juno will air drop you $50 in Eth when you set up your first crypto paycheck. Sign up at onjuno.com slash crypto to get started. That's onjun.jun.com slash crypto. I want to give a special thanks to overpriced JPEG partner Block Block. Not only because they are a sponsor of this show, but also because they are my employer. BlockBlock 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 Nebitz Dow, which just partnered with Larval Labs to create more metaverse-friendly renderings of Mebits, which is awesome. We are also partnered with a Sundance Award-winning filmmaker to build the first Dow 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. So go to blockblock.com.com 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. We'd 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. 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. 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. So the first project is CryptoKitties. You may have heard of it. And the second project is Stoner Cats. spot the similarity. So, Mack, what is your thing for cats?

I can legitimately tell you my things for cats right now, and it has to deal with CryptoKitties. So also, I'll tell you another story about cats after, because there's a third cat thing you don't know about. Here's where the cat thing comes from. 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. BetaWorks was pioneering this model years ago in New York and that kind of thing. At Axiomsend, 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 described it as like, when you first get into, like, making apps or technology, you always has 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. And Axiomsend, 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 would 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 bi-product of all that was a small pile of opportunity that we had in front of us. And so I essentially led the consumer foundry there.

And that was the like, if we don't have a partner, but we're going to build something, what are we going to 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'd try to convince me. And I played a pivotal role in that consumer foundry. self-directed part of the business.

That was a lot of ephemeral messaging apps. That was a lot of mobile games. That was a lot of like, oh, we're going to build the next Snapchat and we're going to build the next like flapping bird or this kind of thing. Like how do we hit those kinds of massive trends and waves? And we realized the luck and the discipline

and the commonalities and the discrepancies between those two examples I just gave. Okay, so Rom said to me, you know, we're doing all these consumer experiences and we're building all these things. And Rom 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 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 would want to do that for any reason? And he was like, well, if you want to keep your job, you do. He hates him when I tell the story that way because he didn't actually say that. We were good friends and he never threatened my job. 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, but you listen to the birds that come in the same. 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. And the second truth was that the only thing I'd ever seen on blockchain, any blockchain that I gave even the remote is the fucks about, was a crypto punk. So, and this point 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 crypto punk. Do you still have it?

We do. Oh, no. I bought it because it looks like Wonder Woman. And I love Wonder Woman. And it was the first time. That's badass. We can do a whole thing about the like avatarization and the PFs and I have we tries to buy things that look like themselves.

I can tell you about the sexist, racist people buy crypto puns and the price of rarity of black female traits versus others in crypto puns. I'm the only person I know who given choice to buy any crypto punk 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. Yeah.

Well, you're being absorbed by an Oni Ronan's head right now. You look like you're about to be eaten. For those who are not on YouTube, I'm sorry, you can't see the look right now. It's a luck. There's a whole thing going on. It's a luck. So that was two truths. Gardening game, crypto punts 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. to the gasoline of 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 should 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. So that's the cat thing. That's amazing. And we will get into stoner cats later. So you started to tell your story, obviously. I gave you 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, weird 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 conceptualized and came up with CryptoKitties. And CryptoKitties brought us the ERC 721 standard, which is what all NFTs essentially are today. That's correct, correct?

Every NFT that you care about is a 721 standard NFT except for functionally two. All of the top shots, 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 Deeter. Flow is Dapper Labs, which you did CryptoKitties with. And so. Yes. Dapper Labs was a byproduct of CryptoKitties success.

After CryptoKitties blew up, we created Dapper Labs to manage the success. Actually, there are three NFTs that matter in this Earth that are not 721s. One is Top Shot. Two is Cryptopunks because they predate them to remember. I saw those before we made Gripped Kitties. And then the weird thing, which I'd actually forget. gotten until I was talking to somebody two weeks ago is that Crypto Kitties 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 Crypto Kitties. So they're like an 58% 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 because if you have a Bitcoin and I have a Bitcoin and we trade bitcoins, you nor I care. Start with the Bitcoin and with the Bitcoin, we're good. But if you have a pink cat and I have a blue cat and we trade, I care a lot because I don't like pink cats. I like blue cats. And so I have a text message to one of the most famous NFD collectors of all

time named Richard. And Richard is the guy who just said no. You just said no to nine and a half million dollars, right? 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 crypto kitties things, I message Richard and I, because he's my He was my Bitcoin guy. And I was like, hey man, I think they're going to 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 is an NFT. Oh, you need to post that somewhere. Send it to me. I'll post it.

I know you're off social. It's a whole thing. It's a whole thing. And so. And so. Make that an NFT. Post it, making an NFT, it'll sell a million dollars. I got one about Topshot, too, that I don't show people very often.

But I got one about Top Shot, people are like, oh, like, the OG day is a top shot, the OG days, CryptoKitties. I got screenshots, you know? Yeah, you got receipts. Yes. You got receipts, baby. Did you know right away that CryptoKitties, or how long into the process did you realize, like, hey, this is going to be a thing?

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 going to 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. So 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 Eith Waterloo. So that was an Ethereum conference in Waterloo, a little town in Canada, and Vitalik was going to be there, and everybody was going to be there.

It was the one place where you could get all of the Eath 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. They spent three hours on the Friday night

begging people for tickets to get into that conference. And they somehow worked their way into it. They're like scalping tickets to Heath Waterloo. Literally to Eat Waterloo. 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 and brought fucking sparkles and stickers.

We didn't have a brand shit I was wearing. 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 bongers. We had no idea what we're fucking doing. I went to East Waterloo. They ran their alpha. The U.X on the website was functionally non-existent.

It was really and truly borked. But there was one little booth at East Waterloo where you could go there and the weird cat guys were doing the cats. And you could go there and like press the button on the Rinkby 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 news. The vice tech. 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 we built this little telegram group with 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, huh?

There's a signal. Yeah, there's a thousand people in ETH period at that time. Not obviously, actually. And then 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, really? I'm also excited, but that's, that's true. You realize I just said I wanted to cats to fuck on the blockchain. We spent a week, I swear to God, we spend a week at Axioms then going to meetings about at what point do you hand the sperm to the other cat?

In the smart contact transactions, there was like bag of sperm meetings that were legit scheduled and was very professional. Is that what the calendar event said? It was like discussed. It was a whole thing. So we had a private data. We let a couple people like start. It was the real cats, but it was like a little private space. And a 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 Crypto Kitties

and I'm going to Vietnam. And that's because you. And the people who were using Crypto Kitties at that time where 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, 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. 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. I know now, like, in our multi-million dollar, blah, blah, blah, blah, like... Right, that seems like nothing, but at the time... At the time, nothing like this had ever happened, I promise you, 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. Yeah, you just knew there were people you worked with who were very freaked out.

We fucked up everything and was a $30,000 cat. And it was at that point, literally, that we're all just like... And that was day of launch? When was the $30,000 cat? I think it was three days later. I'm pretty sure, like, at least the way I've now encoded the story in my head, I know where I was. I can see the stay all 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 it. And do you think, were people at the time really into it because they were actually like, oh, this is a fun game. Like, I want to play this. Or was it like the novelty of it and the people who were already blockchain enthusiasts was like, oh, amazing, a new use case for this technology I love. Most people who were very blockchain native hated cryptocities. 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.

It kind of sounds like roadmaps, but like wanting more money? Is that? Yeah, no. It's $25 million roadmaps. It was a crazy time. And we went out and said, we're going to do something different. 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 that lasts like thousands of years in human history. But at that moment in blockchain, that was very strange and very different. and it was very good. 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. Many people messaged me saying, fuck you, take your caps off this network. We're trying to do important work, and you are fucking it all up. And for like six hours, 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 an idea. You can't handle my cats.

Couldn't handle it. All these dudes who thought that they were going to 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 the 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. So you were bringing new people into the space. And just so I'm clear on this, because I was like vaguely aware of Eath 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 crypto kitties. And I was like, the fuck is this?

so weird and like pieced out from it, you know. And so at the time, all these ICOs were basically the difference between an NFT thing today is they were trying to raise like $25 million or 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 a fair way to characterize what all these ICOs were? No? 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 coin.

So it feels a little MLNE, which I sometimes accuse. Very, very, very MLN. Okay. Multi-level marketing scheme. Multi-level marketing for those who don't know MLMs. Okay. And so you come along and it strikes me that you're sort of a character that was not, as you said, not natively interested in being in the blockchain. I was the kitty.

But it was a crypto. I was the kitty. You were the kitty. You were the kitty. You were the kitty. You were the kitty. And I was all the kitty, not the crypto. And you had this crypto friend 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 perspective that at that point, the community was sort of missing in the people who were building on it. That's what it sort of feels like to me. Does that sort of, I know 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. I didn't realize we would make purists mad when we started.

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 astratosphere 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?

It's not in U.S. dollars. Everybody here is thinking U.S. 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. millions of dollars. We left the door open so that we could. That was Roham's genius. Me and Deeder were going to do a certain thing. And Roham 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, Roham's very smart guy. What were you going to do? Honestly, I was thinking about this other. I was trying to remember there was, right near the end, there was a key decision that Roham came in on and it was like, it wasn't like at a zero, but when we remake the Wolf of Wall Street movie later about this and somebody just played you and I think of everyone shit. He basically was like just at a zero. Like why did you, why? Like charge more or it was just like?

Yeah, charge more. Charge more. Charge an order of magnitude more. Let them pay an order of magnitude more. And we just talking about the CryptaKitties 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, but any means.

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 backgrounds, and this is Ethereum, it's a blockchain. That's a future. It's crazy.

Whatever it was doing. And we're like, we're going to do cat puns. Our community is a super fun place to hang out. Like, but that mattered. A pink website with cat puns, well-designed play. I won't even go so far as it's a well-designed play. I won't even go so far as it's called 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 or something, you know what, $30,000 might have been day one in three days. It was $100,000, because 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 what have we done I don't want to speak for them I had a woo what have we done a 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 mask 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 who loves Ethereum. I make fun of them. I really who loves Ethereum is a neck beard with a fucking libertarian bent. 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 person. 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 and the necktires that's just like a sound buddy guy I got a tweet that was like congratulations you're the first person they were say neckdures and you're like okay wow that's that's that's that that's that's that goes in the the Twitter bio or the resume or the LinkedIn you no longer have that's or the tombstone 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 it was 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 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, these 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 have 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. 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 was 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'd come out every 50 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. And the pricing was beautiful. The pricing was the average price of the last five

plus 50%. 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 client 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. And it was incredibly dynamic, way to understand what people are willing to pay.

And then, because most people weren't around for CryptoKitties, the thing that made Crypta Kitty 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 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 the 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 jeans we build 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 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. Yeah, that's so interesting. And, you know, I've seen Dutch auctions done plenty of time since then,

but never quite in the way you're describing there. Was this being done on like a bespoke website? Like OpenC was around, but obviously very new. This is like you had, you're obviously bespoke site. OpenC. It was started around that time, though. Maybe it wasn't like. As far as I know, I could be wrong, but as far as I know, OpenC was born to make cryptopities usable. like, there were other energy, the moment we spawned, you spawned at all. You spawned literally all of it. We created a large series of problems and many people have come along to solve many of those problems. You should hear Dan at OpenC talk about the OpenC mafia.

You know what you'd be like about the PayPal Mafia? So there is a Kitty Hats Mafia. One of the first things that ever exists on top of CryptoKitties 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 1 at OpenC now. One of them is Employee Number 1 at Axi 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. This is what's so beautiful about this space, and because there is the 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 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. Yeah. It's like a fucking hate always coming back to this. But Dixon wasn't wrong. The next big thing looks like a toy. my latest hypothesis is that what he was wrong is too

strong of 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 soundclad 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 auto tube those guys like can they even freestyle? It's like, shut up, old man. What the fuck do you care?

These kids are making art. And art like la Salon de Fu, the impressionist art movement that became such a big deal in Paris. Rock and roll as we know it. Like so many massive trends in art and culture started out looking like a toy. People were like, that's not serious. You have so many people who have thought that defy was how crypto was going to go mainstream. And it's now so clear and I guess should have been clear from the beginning that it was going to be NFTs and art and music and weird cat games. And everything we know about the internet has been leading us to this point. But it's just so eminent now.

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 defy is going on about. But identity people care deeply about. and NFTs are really just a placeholder for identity.

The heart of that. Here's a very weird, specific question. Were there royalties baked in to crypto kitty sales? Like, are you still getting some of that sweet, sweet crypto kitty money? Let me think about what we did. So Dieter, again, whose name has come up, very smart guy, the CTO, the architect, engineer, the guy behind the 721 standard. 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 style, you know. And in Deeter 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. And so that's what we did with Tripititis. If you were going to breed them or if you were going to buy, I honestly forget, I don't think we take 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. 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

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And if you buy $500 of MVI on the Dharma app, you can receive $50 worth of ETH on on the Polygon Network. There's a link in the show notes for you to click so you can get started on your journey into the Metaverse. 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 the NBA, which I think leads us to NBA Top Shot, that actually surprises me. So, A, like, really? Like, did you have 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?

Yes, they all truly just came knocked on our doors. It was every major brand. It was every VC. It was every IP owner. I mean, not every. Everything's exaggeration. But, like, in droves, they came to our door. Was that after the New York Times?

Like, they, like, read it in the New York Times where we're like... No, the New York Times doesn't even that new... We just were making like millions and millions of dollars selling cartoon pictures of cats. And whether you were Jurassic Park or the NBA or Dr. Zeus or anybody, it was like, what? Why are people paying so much money for your pictures of my cats? They're just making memes out of our shit. We got our shit on Giffy and somebody gave you millions of dollars for your shit. How about you give us one of those?

This was a thing that everybody was feeling. And to be clear, because of the ICOTM, like, right now, you know, crazy summer of, or spring and summer of NFTs and we're on Saturday night live. And like, we've all just lived through this insanity that is this recent spin of NFTs. The last time shit was this crazy was 2017. One of the things that we got right with Cryptokinies was just the timing. And the 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'd would have. Everybody wanted to have some way to write Bitcoin in their link-based shit. Or it wasn't in blockchain. It was like Bitcoin, saying that. So in that time, when everybody

needed to have an angle, anybody whose job involved technology, their work needed to have some kind of informed opinion on the blockchain. That's when we showed up. We were like, yeah, you sell cat fucking for a lot of money. What? So yeah, everybody came. No, most of them didn't really get it. Not at all. No, most of them are like, and there's an interesting question as what they got. Like, I've just told you about 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. And the fundamental concept of Kitty Hats is one of the biggest ideas in blockchain to us at the time, which was extensibility. Somebody else built Kitty races. It was a fucking dumb-ass car racing game, but you put your cat in a car. And the thing about kitty hats that I loved, I was telling the story the day the day and dance as I'm lying when I tell them. I'm telling them.

I'm telling you. First time I've 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 you or somebody was like, dude, like this is the blockchain. You're missing the point. Yeah, exactly.

You remember the conversation we had about extensibility and about how really cool this is. And then me having this moment of life. Oh, that is cool. Like, as long as I'm not being Disney about this, 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. And you'll notice that NBA is not doing that.

So when a lot of these brands comes, this goes back to the 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, Topshot has been very good to NBA. But that wasn't obvious. They took 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 definitely don't want anything to do with, which is like, oh, yeah, we're going to remix the NBA brand because this is extensibility.

No, you're not. Yeah. You're really not. I want to get into Big Head Club and maybe one way 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. 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. 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 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. And you're like, cool, don't buy my project. Very much, so. Like, please don't. I don't want your angry DMs. There are others who will get it. Oh, if it was DMs, I wouldn't even mind. It's the fact that they're like rage tweeting in public.

Come, motherfucker. in 2017, the way to make money in blockchain was do an ICO. 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. The point is that we had to have vision around the 720 standard and around playfulness and around true ownership and non-fungibility underlying all of that. So now, Oni Your Ownin is a new project from Biggat Club.

Big Ed 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. Strange and marvelous NFTs that stand the test of time. That's it. 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 going to work out. but one of the things that we did is if you're watching on the video only running behind me so i have a book actually you probably see it right here oh okay it's hard with the japanese i'm getting word out of time japanese death poems 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 bone.

And the, like, the most hipster samurai points you can get is if you get it like, you finish the pen drops and you die. If you can do that all in one smooth motion, you're the best fucking samurai death of death. To live well as to die. Gosh.

In that world. Morbid. I do. I go on Twitter and just read that death bone book to people in Twitter spaces sometimes for fun. Those haiku 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. I was talking to a Japanese friend of mine who gave me the nickname De Tate, because it means big hands, because she used to hang out with me at Dapper. When we were making all the 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 at Axioms-in, Dapper, they always had Lego for me, because I liked Lego a lot. And so Sam, one of the co-fathers, he liked Lego too. He would buy fancy Lego and we'd sit around and do Lego. And 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 I was talking to him about these death poems and samurai history.

And the NFT thing became inevitable that we needed to make NFTs to celebrate the haiku of the samurai. death poem form and that's where a Roman 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. This guy was my neighbor. Right now, he's buying an island. Nope. He's buying a house on an island off the coast of Canada because all the money I gave him for these fucking Ronan 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, summary class wrote in the last 800 years and when you take your own erronin 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 in that world you can commit errone to the trial of ascension and then you can listen to the haiku for the first time we got like this incredible narrator to narrate each of the 20 possible haiku that you can get that's one of the rare characteristics like everything else about the nifty and then

we deliver amazing art we deliver like historical copy 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. 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 a hold of me. His name is Dr. Bender. And he said, you know, you could literally really 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 only Roman. 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 Japanese 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. It's also historically accurate, interesting context. 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 on your own. 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

NFT's. And a bunch of the people that I've talked to are like, I don't want that. I want a companion and drop that I can flip in three days. I'm like, cool. Do you? Do you still think about the floor price? Or are you like, I'm building an education program. 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 going to come to your fucking education program. Then it doesn't mind. Yes, I think about the floor price. I do not, nor will I ever use the word investment to describe what we do. Two reasons. One, the SEC is real. I'm in Canada. I still don'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-heglym token as an investment. The other reason is because if you are buying this, because you want to have the crypto-punk 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. 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 of duty. It's been a long since 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 that. 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 a bighead club token. 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. Like, you should go do that. There probably shouldn't go do that over here. Let's talk about some of the other big head club projects. We've talked about Oni Ronan, which is the latest drop, very cool. Stoner Cats was the first drop, which made a bunch of noise. How did you get involved in Stoner Cats?

you know, how did you end up on Zoom calls with Mila and Ashton and the crew? The true answer to that story is, and we don't talk about the fact that we've raised a bunch of money, but we raise a bunch of money for Big Head Club. Not a bunch of money, especially not in fucking 2021 and empty space. We raise a little bit of money. Let me put a guy. We raised a few crypto punks and. Exactly.

Exactly. We, there's a lot. Money is cheap right now. Let me put it up. We raise 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, oh, 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 cryptocity fucking top shot dapper guy in the middle of an NFD Renaissance. Obviously, it was reasonably easy. Yeah, it's who do you want money from, not who is. 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 it 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 40-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. The side of me that bought a Wonder Woman Cryptopunk. Yeah.

Steps up. So something's got to give. Yeah, sometimes they've got to give. And so I called all of my investors and I was like, hey, 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 a bunch and she's become a very good friend of mine. I hold Maria in very high regard. But during all of that, Maria works with Ashton. And so Maria is part of what we call 30-50 game who are behind SonerCats. And as her and I were talking about NFTs, and she's a full DJ. She fucking loves these NFTs. She like can't not buy this shit and sell this shit.

And she's like so deep in the life. It's amazing. So while we called each other regularly, sending each other funny gifts and talk about NFD's and all of the stuff, she was like, hey, my friend Mila is like working on this project. and they'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. Why did you think it was stupid? They just had some optimistic and totally unrealistic ideas about what NFTs could be or should be. And to be honest, I've forgotten what a lot of them were,

but it was weeks of me talking to Mario 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, okay. Talk to Mila Coonis? Okay.

And then we did and we, yeah, that's how I ended up calling Mila in action for the first time. And then that just became a regular thing. And they sort of became friends. And eventually we came up with Stennercats as we defined it. And that worked pretty goddamn well, to be honest. Has there been anything that has surprised you about that project or that you've learned that was substantially different from dapper? That is a nine-hour. list and so we won't go into all of it.

What have I learned? I learned that 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 learned a lot about the time of that process. I've learned a lot about Dow's.

I didn't learn anything about Dow's while at... You and I have had a couple conversations about Dows. Yeah. The trials and tribulation of the Dow life. So much to learn. And to be honest, like, you know, not being around the bush, we learned about celebrity.

We were excited about that project because we were bringing people. And I honestly discussed loudly with them for weeks about what NFTs mean and the value of NFTs and all sorts of things. And we were super stoked to do that project. And then a bunch of these shitlords 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 kids.

community, helping them build out the dial, 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 discord. Let's give him that. I mean Gary's Discord. Good back for that, yeah. That guy's very good at what he does. Very smart guy. So yeah, we learned a lot about community building. What's your one big takeaway around community building that you want from Stoner Cats? Never stop. Never stop. Never like, remember that everybody could be having a bad day. Remember that everybody who's here cares for a reason.

You know, I've had people, even in Crypto Kitties, on Crypto Kitties, the price would go down on on Kipi Kitties sometimes. And I had people messaged me and be like, I spent my rent money on Cryptoities 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 and so community building like if you're serious about it you're there for people in their bad days

we have people who like snap in our discord and then I go DM 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? that. Oh, well, my husband just walked out on me.

48 hours ago. 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. My name is on the shit. We're going to be doing this for years and years and years. I was going to 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. 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'm very much a senior person. I'm the CEO of the company. 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's a world in the future where I don't actually spend all that much time in Discord. There's a lot of other things that could be doing. Do I hear a whisper in your voice? It's my favorite in the future when I see the sunshine and I go outside and I feel the wind on my face. 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 like heartwarming, tear-deer-eye tight moments in Discord in public, in private all time and it's fucking beautiful. And then other time was people just, when next episode, when floor moves over and over and over.

You're like, you don't even fucking up, man, we're working on it. Like, really, 16 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, try and get out of Discord. Occasionally, all I want to do is pop into Discord. Our Discord is such a nice point. It's incredible. It's so like 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,

man, we love you. I'm like, yeah. Thank you. I'm going to go to my next meeting now. But no, you don't need senior people in the Discord. You need people who are empowered to serve the community in the Discord. I want to get close to wrapping up. I have so many more questions I could ask. First thing, I want to shout out, Ghostbusters. So that's your next. That's your next launch is big head club. You have the rights to the Ghostbuster IP to make it an NFT? Is that what's going on? We do.

So this is an incredible project because Sony is fully on board with this. I talk to Sony twice a week every week. Sony is super excited with this. But Sony is not leading this project. Jason Reitman and Gil

Keenan are leaving 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 his name Ivan Reitman. He's a legend in the filmmaking world. His son is named Jason. His son made Juno.

He made 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 a hold 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 Adita shit. Like I can't go make off-branded Ghostbuster. fucking entities. 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 so then we're like, oh, well, fuck, this is really cool. And so, yes, Ghostbletters 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 out around that coming soon. Any hints you can give on 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. Okay. That gives me a lot to think about. I will contemplate that one. Final two questions. Yeah. First one.

Do you think NFTs are most? mainstream right now. Yes. 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 NFT is the same way. Like, is it Walmart? No. 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. How recently do you think that happened? Last six months. Could have just been me, but that skit on Saturday. night live at the beginning of the summer really felt like a crescendo.

Crescendo is the wrong word because we're not on the way down. Like, you know, I guess it depends what you're 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 is sharing 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. Okay. In 2018, you were asked in an interview. what you think, like make a prediction for the crypto art NFT world in five years. This is what you said. I think crypto collectibles are going to be a meaningful part of people's identities in five years.

Not one, but in five years, 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're already there within a certain part of the population. 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? In the early days of Facebook, the most interesting feature on Facebook was the poke. Do you remember the poke? Yeah. Yeah. And you would have poke streaks.

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, 30 days in a row. My favorite question was, would you poke your boss on Facebook? And most people would be like, no. And it was like, well, why not? Like, what is the poke?

And so for anybody who wasn't paying attention to the time, the poke was a feature. 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 digital. behavior that was odd and still somehow acts as a kernel for the entire social experience this many years later. It's not hard to see how the Facebook poke seed became our notification

centric hyperware plugged in connected reality. So 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 until then organic, which is relationships and friendships. It 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 special. Like before, we just used to get a ride home in the same person's car from a party three times, but how that was done? We're like, hey, you're my car seat buddy and we're friends. I'm like, that's cool. Now we're sending friend requests and it became explicit in 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 showtime, and 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 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 entities. 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. And there will be three NFTs in your TikTok profile. And nobody's going to be like, oh, yeah, look at my NFTs. It just be like, oh, that's cool.

They got the thing from Ghostbusters. Yeah. We know that you paid for it because, of course you did, because it's 20, 26, and people pay for digital things that matter to them because their identity matters to them. And we will simply have dissolved away all of the explicitness and all of the, all of the, like, I have to poke you. I have to you to look at my NFTs.

No, it's just our identity. It's just who we are. That's what I think. Adding on to that, I think you're going to end up in a place where, like, you're on dating apps and instead of it, like, 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.

So four years ago, four years ago, I called Tinder. And I said, 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 ear were my home.

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 $100 million. That is the scale of Tinder. And so what you're talking about makes a lot of sense. He legit got energy.

He's like, you're selling cats fucking. I'm selling human beings fucking. Exactly. The scale is different. The scale is so insanely different. But now we're at that point. Now Twitter is doing those things. So yes, you are right.

That is the world that is coming. deeply and strongly and truly I concur. 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?

Be nice to each other. Love it. Cool. Bye. Bye.