Bankless - PleasrDAO's NFT Auction House with Jamis Johnson

Episode Date: January 12, 2023

From its humble beginnings, PleasrDAO is launching PleasrHouse, a unique take on NFT Auction Houses. Chief Pleasr Jamis Johnson joins to set the stage and walk us through this announcement. ------ �� Osmosis | Your Gateway into the Cosmos Ecosystem www.osmosis.zone/bankless  ------ 🚀 JOIN BANKLESS PREMIUM:  https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/subscribe  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS:  🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/kraken  🦄UNISWAP | ON-CHAIN MARKETPLACE https://bankless.cc/uniswap  ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  🚁 EARNIFI | CLAIM YOUR UNCLAIMED AIRDROPS https://bankless.cc/earnifi   ------ Resources: Jamis Johnson https://twitter.com/_jamiis  PleasrHouse https://pleasr.house/  ----- 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://www.bankless.com/disclosures 

Welcome Bankless Nation to a special live stream because we have a very special event that I want to talk about. Pleaser Dow is launching something extremely cool. And so we are bringing on the chief pleasing officer out of Pleaser Dow to discuss what exactly they are building in the Web 3 world. If you are unfamiliar with Pleaser Dow, we'll go through the beginnings with Jamis, the guests I'm going to bring on here in a second. We'll talk about how Pleaser Dow was created. but it really got started with the release of Uniswop v3 and an artist called People Pleaser who release an NFT,

which a, or just a random collection of friends decided to get together to form a Dow to purchase it, but that's really just where this story began. And now Pleaser Dow has taken on a life of its own to do some very ambitious things in the world of internet culture and NFTs on Ethereum and also fighting for freedom in so many different ways and respects. an adventure that has brought in Edward Snowden into the org, as well as a number of other people as well.

So we're going to tell a little bit of that story, and also what Pleaser Dow is releasing into the world of Web 3 today. So I'm very excited to tell this story. And just as a disclaimer, I am a member of Pleaser Dow. And so I own the Peep's token, which is the Peep's token is the token of Pleaser Dow. And so this is a Dow I'm a part of as well. And so we're going to tell this story and more as soon as we get back from hearing about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this episode possible. Uniswap is the largest on-chain marketplace for self-custody digital assets. Uniswap is, of course, a decentralized exchange, but you know this because you've been listening to bankless.

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Secure, fast, cheap, and friction-free. Bankless Nation, I am here with James Johnson out of Pleaser Dow, James. Welcome to the show. Thank you for having me back, David. Yeah, it's good to have you back, my man. And it's been a while since we've talked about Pleaser Dow on the show. I've mentioned it a few times in weekly roll-ups here and then, but there's been a bunch of new listeners into the Banquets world since I've had you last on to talk about the last innovation out of Pleaser Dow. So maybe you could introduce yourself a little bit, who is James, and how did he become the chief pleasing officer at Pleaser Dow? And what that? hell does that even mean? Yeah, I mean, Pleaser Now is a very interesting organization with a very

fun history, but it all goes back to a Friday in March of 2021 when Uniswap V3 was basically doing an NFT auction to commemorate their new protocol launch, as you mentioned earlier. People Pleaser was the artist behind that piece. And I think that, you know, if you were in Defi Summer, if you participated, you knew her as kind of the tone setter of all designs back then. So it was kind of this obvious moment of everyone wanting to bid on this piece. Leighton Kusack tweeted, we should form a Dow. So I grabbed him. I grabbed Blue Kirby and I grabbed Andy 8052. And it just began to snowball from there. We threw a ton of people into a telegram chat, I chose to name it Pleaserdow as a tribute. And it's kind of just been this snowballing,

crazy, almost like Katamari Domesi ball effect since then. I think the things that were more well known for are our acquisitions. So, you know, we've been a part of some very fun auctions. And to name a few, we have a Nadia from Pussy Riot. we have a vial of her blood in cold storage, literal cold storage. What? We bought Jimmy Wales iMac that he programmed Wikipedia on. That also came with an NFT that was the original code for Wikipedia. And then I think the two that were probably most known for are the doge,

the image of the original doge from Atsuko Sedo from Japan, who owns Kabuso, who is now, I believe, 17 years old. And on her last leg, we bought that. The Doge. That is the Doge picture. And that was minted into an NFT during the NFT season, which Pleaser Dowell purchase. So the Doge is what you're talking about. The Ethereum Foundation has a close relationship with Atsuko.

Atsko, I believe, is pronounced. And so the woman who took the photo on, you know, the rich, she actually took the original JPEG from her camera and uploaded it as an NFT. So we got that provenance locked in. We did end up fractionalizing that on Sushi Swap and got it out to the masses so you can own a piece of the Doge today. And then I think maybe the most notorious thing that we are known for is we purchased the never before heard album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, the Wu-Tang album.

from the Department of Justice. Legally speaking, it was not actually directly from the Department of Justice, but this album used to be owned by Martin Schrelli. He forfeited it when he went to prison

and we were able to acquire it. We are working on something for everyone, but I'm not totally at liberty to talk about that. We got the Woo York Knicks going on here. Beautiful, beautiful. You can see that in the video stream if you're watching the video stream.

But I mean, You know, that first run was just so unbelievably exciting. We helped raise a lot of money for really good causes, raised a ton of money for Free Ross Ulbricht, Free Ross Dow. It's just been really fun to be a part of so many good, wonderful missions. And I think that we have always since inception, wanted to kind of shift gears from buying things, for lack of a better word,

to kind of giving back to the community and creating Willy Wonka ideas that other institutions may not explore. We have a lot of interesting people in Dow from mathematicians to programmers, to designers, to venture capitalists, to anon's.

We got a lot of anons. And so, kind of with that entire brain power, we wanted to kind of throw some ideas at the wall, see what sticks, and just try a few fun projects. So this is kind of the first foray into us putting something out into the world. This being what we are going to talk about today on the show and why we're doing the show at all. But I really just kind of want to run through that history just because it really

puts into context the auction house that we're going to talk about. And one of the reasons, I was actually, my claim to fame inside of the Pleaser ecosystem was actually being the first member in Pleaser Dow after the Dao was formed. So I was the first new member into Pleaser Dow, and I did it because I realized what just happened. And you said it was a Friday and March, still during like kind of the depths of COVID. And this X times Y equals K uniswap gif, which people will remember got released. And it just caused an absolute mayhem in the space just because this Uniswap V3 was released. This was around. the release of the token, maybe a little bit after the token. There was just like a ton of hype.

And this awesome, awesome MP4 got released by People Pleaser and was auctioned off by Uniswap. And this really kicked off Pleaser Dow, right? And so I wrote this story inside of the bankless newsletter talking about the significance of this, where this experiment really started and the ability for it Dow is to come together to buy objects that everyone in the Dow really enjoys. that I interviewed late in Kusack about the beginnings of this and also People Pleaser herself and really wrote the story of what happened. And it was actually pretty cool because one of the, I think one of the cool stories about Pleaser Dow was that many people in the Pleaser Dow were bidding against this guy, Andrew Kang, who many of us in Pleaser Dow knew Andrew. And so I don't remember who in the Dow DM'd him, but they were like, Andrew, stop having a bidding war with us, just join the Dow. And that was really the last thing. last moment that really needed to happen for the pleaser Dow to win the auction for the uniswap gift but ever since then pleaser Dow has really been experimenting every single step of the way like what do we do next what do we do next no rules no nothing set in stone other than buying cool

shit that is related to internet culture as NFTs and creating some sort of loose plan as to what to do with that. James, I mean, you've been super heads down in the weed with Pleaser Dow ever since. What would you add to the story of how Pleaser Dow came to be what it is today from the moment of buying X times Y equals K to where it is today? Like, how did this trajectory unfold? I mean, I think that was one of the trickiest parts and still is to this day of Pleaser Dow is it was not necessarily formed with any singular mission. I think that over time, that ethos has kind of bubbled to the top, more so than any that happens during auctions.

When people are asked whether they want to participate in an auction, and it really shows what the entire doubt stands for, I think that the first moment that occurred was our second auction that we participated in, which parlay is perfectly into what we're going to talk about a little bit later. But we did participate in the Edward Snowden's first, NFT stay free. That was right after the X times Y equals K piece.

But like I said earlier, it's kind of just Katamari domic ball of chaos. As I think anyone who is in a Dow is well aware, it's kind of unorganized chaos at times. And so I'm showing the stay free NFT on OpenC, which is owned by Pleaserdow. can you talk a little bit about Edward Snowden's NFT he created an FDFT it was how much did we buy it for it was something like $2.4 million dollars I think it was 4.5 million dollars and then can you talk a little bit about this process

and how Pleaser Dallas fostered a relationship with Edward Snowden's sense yeah so the process back then was really cumbersome we you know put all of our money from an EOA into a NOSIS multi-sig. We had Mariana Conti mint a token. We started to do snapshot votes. I believe our first snapshot vote was whether we should have our color be purple or blue. You know, this was clearly the first vote where everyone was extraordinarily excited to participate in this auction.

And a lot of these processes are automated. Pleaser Dow was the inspiration for party bid or party Dow if you're familiar. so you can do this now all just natively in a smart contract. But we ended up winning that auction by the skin of our teeth. And overnight, we essentially doubled the budget, the annual budget for Freedom of the Press. You know, talking to Trevor at Freedom of Press, he speaks a lot about how hard he has to work

with individual donors and spend hundreds of hours a year just to get a measly budget for freedom of. the press. And so to them, this was basically the biggest game-changing moment since, you know, they formed. Because the, all of the proceeds from Edward Snowden's NFT sale, which, which pleaser doubt bought, all of the proceeds went to the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Correct. Yes. And so, you know, at the time I was, we were considering fractionalizing Edward Snowden piece. And I was lucky enough. to be sending Ed one-way DMs.

And that was an extraordinarily exhilarating moment in my life. Now today, I guess we're on a first name basis. I think I can say that, which is pretty cool. But they, you know, they obviously have, we have a wonderful relationship with them. And so we decided that we were going to put this product out, this live show, this auction house out. and we reached out to them and serendipitously enough, if that's a word, they told us that they had been working on something and wanted to collaborate. Cracken has been a leader in the crypto industry for the last 12 years.

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Cracken support is available wherever, whenever you need them by phone, chat, or email. And for all of you NFTers out there, the brand new Cracken NFT beta platform gives you the best NFT trading experience possible. Rarity rankings, no gas fees, and the ability to buy an NFT straight with cash. Does your crypto exchange prioritize its customers the way that Cracken does? And if not, sign up with Cracken at Cracken.com slash bankless. So let's get into modern times now that we've established that, you know, how Pleaser Dow came to be. And also it's actually worth just drilling down on the X times Y equals K Uniswap gift that was made by People Pleaser, which is where Pleaser Dow got its name from.

was also donated 100% of all the proceeds to, do you remember the charity that that was? It was against Asian hate. Right, yes. Asian and Pacific Islander hate. Right, yeah. And so it's been in Pleaser Dallas culture to buy very high profile internet cultural NFTs. The Pleaser X times Y equals K, Edward Snowden, Doge, a few others.

I saw a Unisox token in OpenC as well. very big cultural icons of the internet as NFTs and also have the NFTs that PleaserDA is purchasing go to a good cost. So this has been built into the Pleaser Dow like code of ethos, if you will, or cultural conduct ever since from the very beginning. Yeah, last time I checked, I believe we have donated over 10 million to good causes. So that's a very good feeling. It's a large number. That's a very large number. All right. James, let's bring us forward into today.

What's next in the Pleaser universe? What are we doing here? Yes. So, well, credit where credits do. Andy had this idea, and we basically took a five-minute conversation with him and decided to build an entire product around it. It is a live interactive show that is accompanied by an NFT, production simultaneously. So everything is built on the rails of Web 3. And basically, we felt like

there was a massive lack of attention to special pieces. You know, you have high volume NFT marketplaces that are churning out NFTs left and right, but there's really no intimacy there. You also have the kind of old guard brick and mortar. auction houses that are entering the space, but still are not really doing it properly. And then I think the third component here is we could have maybe built this on YouTube, Twitch, Netflix, well, not Netflix, but there's really no participation from any of the Web 2 streaming platforms in Web 3. So we just kind of built this entire thing from the ground up.

It's a live streaming show. you can think of it as like the Tonight Show meets Twitch meets Sotheby's all combined into one live episodic moment you're going to have the best elements of kind of a opening monologue and an intro

you're going to have jokes and recap of news you're going to have very well-produced high-quality content that focuses on the piece and the guests that are on the show And then everything is going to eventually move into an interview. And our first guests are none other than Daniel Ellsberg and Edward Snowden, which is really exciting for us. Just a real quick for a moment. Who's Daniel Ellsberg, for those that don't know?

So Daniel Ellsberg is basically the most gangster whistleblower that exists. I know everyone thinks it's Edward Snowden, but I'm pretty sure Ed would agree. with this. He is the first individual to be prosecuted by the Espionage Act of 1917. Oh, yeah, it's right there. And he basically took two years to hand copy 7,000 classified documents from the Pentagon. Keep in mind to make one copy. You've got to use a Xerox machine to copy 7,000 pages. He had to make multiple copies. On some of these pages, you see a small child's hand, because he enlisted his children to help him scan these documents. And he tried to do it through the proper channels,

tried to submit it to the Senate. They wouldn't release it or talk about it. But these documents basically show that the U.S. government was hiding and lying to the U.S. public about the Vietnam War. So he brought it to some journalists againstes and put it on blast, basically saying, I sacrificed myself for the good of the people, people. And this was really the beginning of the turning of the tide of the Vietnam War.

So this NFT in particular is kind of the spiritual successor to stay free. Artistically, it's very similar. It's his face superimposed on a lot of the documents from, well, in this case, the Pentagon Papers. In the Edward Stoning case, it was the hearing, or sorry, the judgment that deemed the NSA wiretap unconstitutional. But in this case, it is the Pentagon Papers, all 7,000 of them. And they are flickering behind his face superimposed on them. And it is a video of him exiting the Boston courthouse steps. And a reporter asks, you know, did you realize the implications of this?

Did you realize, you know, you could go to prison for this? And he essentially just says, wouldn't you go to prison to help end this war? Which is the most gangster thing in the entire world. Just to really hit that home. we had a conversation with him a few days ago. He is 91 now, and he has been, according to him, he has been arrested 89 times. He recently posted the Pentagon Papers in digital format online, just in an attempt to poke the governmental bear one more time. He also publicly speaks about knowing about the Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange leaks prior to those going out to the public,

which again is throwing caution to the wind, just saying, you know, I put myself up against the US government. And so this guy is like, this guy is the real, real deal. Okay, so. Multiple times over. And please, okay, so pleaser dow has created this auction house.

I was debuting the website or showing the website on screen, but it's a little bit of a coming soon teaser page. But the idea here, what we're announcing today, is that Pleaser Dow has got this Web3 auction house where you can bid on NFTs. And the first NFT that's going out is an NFT of Daniels and just like instantiating the Pentagon Papers

into an NFT. Is that what we're doing here? Correct. The first NFT is from Daniel Ellsberg and Freedom of the Press. And we will be interviewing Edward Snowden and Daniel Ellsberg while the auction is kicked off. So the auction is a short-form auction. so that it's more similar to a traditional auction house than it is to, say, a 24-hour NFT marketplace.

It will have some shortened period of time allocated to the entirety of the auction so that we can get some commitment to the interview. And then there will be extensions within the final minutes if any bids happen in those final minutes to kind of keep the guests, you know, keep them there as long as the auction's running. Keep the guess on our toes, of course. All of this is built on the blockchain. So no email, no password. You sign in with your wallet. There's a live chat on the side. It connects to your ENS, has your ENS avatar.

People can see other people's wallet holdings by simply clicking on that user. You can bid right from the app, whether mobile or desktop. There are going to be polls. and obviously, you know, we can't give everything away. But participation is usually rewarded at some juncture in the cryptosphere. There are no plans that are concrete. I'm just, you know, throwing that out there. Oh, and most importantly, obviously, this is in two days.

This is on Thursday at 3 p.m. Eastern Standard. and that is going to happen on pleaser. There is no E in Pleaser. I'm sure that some people will mess that up. 3 p.m. Eastern Standard Thursday, pleaser. Okay. And is the proceeds for this NFT going somewhere? It would be very fitting.

Absolutely, absolutely. So the proceeds will be split 50-50. 50% is going to the Freedom of the Press Foundation. and 50% is going to a Daniel Ellsberg initiative for peace and democracy that is at UMass Amherst. I think I have sometimes messed that up in the past, but I think I got it right. So Daniel has a initiative out of UMass Amherst that he is establishing. And then Freedom of the Press is obviously going to receive a portion of the proceeds. they build software that helps whistleblowers come forward in a safe manner.

When Snowden, you know, he leaked these NSA documents in 2013 with New York Times and Glenn Greenwald, there was a mess up with the redaction of the documents and people were able to discover some private information, which put some people out in the field at risk. And so freedom of press is kind of dedicated to building a lot of these software tools that essentially aid in truth finding and assisting whistleblowers so that they don't get murked by their government. Well, I just love how aligned this is with the crypto space in general. Like the beginnings, our founding fathers, if you will, are like the cypherpunks, right? the people that fought for pretty good privacy, the ones that took the government to court

about making sure that cryptography is just treated like speech. And it's very like in alignment with a lot of the ethos that this whole entire cryptocurrency space is built on top of. And now we have the Vietnam whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. How is how do you pronounce his last name? That's right, Ellsberg. Ellsberg. And then also Edward Snowden, of course,

whistleblowing about privacy violations, which is the same exact concern that David Chom was worried about back in like 1980s. And so I just really see like, and I really want to impress upon listeners just like the degeneracy of the NFT mania. Yes, super, super degen, like so many like crazy NFT things happened. But we have this young upstarting Dow that came just because a group of friends wanted to bid on an NFT together and have that like snowball and snowball and snowball into a Web3 native auction house, which is using sign in with Ethereum rather than email and in like, you know,

identifiable information from the Web2verse to bid on this like NFT of this guy that helped turn the tide of the Vietnam War, which was also a very like establishment versus anti-establishment war. And now like DGens in the crypto space get to buy this NFT to help to donate to all of these Freedom of the Press foundations and Daniel. I think this like story arc is absolutely amazing. Yeah, it's kind of the quintessential, a butterfly flaps its wings moment. We're going to see what happens. We've got a lot of other episodes lined up. Okay, so this is episode zero, episode one, if you will. And this is also the kicking off of the Pleaser Dow auction house.

So this is just, this is the initiation. And it's also being in alignment with like how Pleaser Dow got built in the first place. And then also this is the debut of many, many more NFT auctions just like this, right? That is the plan. We have a handful of really fun episodes lined up. I don't want to give anything away right now. but I think people are going to really love them a lot. I think it's going to be a combination of education,

a combination of the absurdity and memeification and stupidity of the space mixed with the extreme seriousness of this being a world-changing technology. I think that's kind of my favorite part of the culture of crypto is that marriage between not taking yourself too seriously while also believing that this is a revolution. That's kind of the vibe we want to bring to the table. And I think we have something solid here. So I would hope that everyone tunes in for the pilot episode.

Yeah, it's the D-Gen in the front and the region in the back, right? It's like, hey, we can, we'll make like funny jokes and won't take ourselves too seriously. But also we will absolutely move the needle when it comes to like human rights and, you know, improving the human condition and all this kind of stuff. Is that the new C.D. Defi. Yeah. DGEN in the front, re-gen in the back.

Yeah. Yeah. One more time, James. When is this auction going left? So this is going to be Thursday. 3 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. And you can tune in at pleaser. Dot house.

If you need to be notified, we, you can sign up for notifications right now at pleaser. dot house we are taking phone numbers they will only be used for sending out notifications about episodes they're not tying you at all to your um your wallet and we are looking at other solutions there but it felt like the the um best in terms of trade off so go to pleaser dot house you can get notifications sign up for notifications if you don't want to submit your number put a calendar event down for thursday three p m eastern standard time please or

that house. And then what's the schedule for further episodes? How does that work? What's the cadence? Well, we're not going to get into that quite yet. We're going to keep that in our pocket for now. Would it be alpha to go explore the NFTs that pleaserdow.eath or pleaser e.dote owns on the blockchain? Would that be alpha? Well, hmm, I would say yes and no. let's I don't want to

no financial advice coming out right awesome financial advice well James I know you

and all of the Dow has been hard at work helping build this auction house to get this thing out the gate and I think I just want to share

my screen one last time to show something I think is pretty cool while we see when we see Cosmo on the screen there this is a tweet out of Edward Snowden not too long ago I think just a few hours ago going to be a big week that Snowden as he's retweeting the Pleaser Dow episode one to

to the pleaser house yeah not every day not every day you get a Edward Snowden tweet yeah definitely not oh and there's a little video there's a little video here as well a little bit it's a little bit it's a little bit different when Edward Stone tweets that instead of someone like Barry Silbert. All right, well, James, thank you so much for coming on and helping debut the Pleaserdale auction house again. That's coming at Thursday at 3 p.m. Eastern time. I've also got an actual little gif loaded up, and so we will go out on that. But before we do, got to do, as this video plays, risks and disclaimers, bankless nation, of course.

Crypto is risky. ETH is risky. Bitcoin is risky. NFTs are also risky. And you could probably lose what you put in. lose in a bet in an auction house if you choose to partake, but you could also win that too. Nevertheless, we are headed west that we're on the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we are glad you are with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

Thank you.