Digital Social Hour - AI-Powered Merch: Transform Your Business in 2023 | Curtis Blackmore DSH #563

Episode Date: August 4, 2024

🚀 **Tune in now** to the latest episode of the Digital Social Hour with Sean Kelly, where we dive deep into the explosive world of **AI-Powered Merch: Transform Your Business in 2023**! 🌟 Joined by the innovative Curtis Blackmore, we explore how AI is revolutionizing the print-on-demand industry, making it easier than ever to turn your creative designs into profitable merch.   Curtis shares his journey from starting a clothing brand to creating My Designs, a cutting-edge platform that automates everything from order fulfillment to generating AI-driven product listings. 😲 Discover how tools like GPT-4 and MidJourney are changing the game, allowing you to voice your ideas and instantly create high-quality merch. Imagine saying, “Generate a cocker spaniel portrait wearing sunglasses,” and having it ready to sell in seconds! 🐶🕶️   Don't miss out on these **valuable insights** into the future of e-commerce and AI. Curtis also reveals his fascinating background growing up in a polygamous community and how his upbringing shaped his entrepreneurial journey. This episode is packed with intriguing stories and **insider secrets** you won’t want to miss!   📺 **Watch now** and **subscribe** for more eye-opening stories on the Digital Social Hour with Sean Kelly! Hit that subscribe button and stay tuned for more exclusive conversations that will transform your business and your life. 🚀   **Join the conversation** and share your thoughts in the comments below. Let’s get the dialogue started! 💬   #AiAutomation #AiProductListings #AiPowered #AI2023 #AiImageGeneration   CHAPTERS: 00:00 - Intro 00:40 - MyDesigns Platform Overview 03:38 - AI Innovations in Design 07:14 - NBA Career Highlights 11:47 - Early Entrepreneurship Journey 15:48 - Backpacking Through Europe Adventures 16:00 - Starting a Mortgage Company Insights 19:04 - No Drugs or Alcohol Commitment 19:51 - Microdosing Explained 20:10 - Time Slows Down When You Break Routine 21:02 - Broke Rib During Championship Game 22:40 - 400 Meter Dash Experience 24:24 - What Curtis is Excited About This Year 24:57 - Where to Find Curtis Online   APPLY TO BE ON THE PODCAST: https://www.digitalsocialhour.com/application BUSINESS INQUIRIES/SPONSORS: [e-mail]   GUEST: Curtis Blackmore  https://www.instagram.com/cb33 https://mydesigns.io/   SPONSORS: Deposyt Payment Processing: https://www.deposyt.com/seankelly   LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/digital-social-hour/id1676846015 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Jn7LXarRlI8Hc0GtTn759 Sean Kelly Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmikekelly/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

poster you know what i mean i watch it every couple years and i'm like wow this is actually starting to happen yeah it's happening fast it's moving way faster i thought it would right yeah once it started with gpt 3.5 i think where things really took off and then obviously this generative ai models around image generation now video generation is getting really big it's it's exciting and it's moving unbelievably fast it's hard to even keep up yeah for real it's cool to see you embrace ai because a lot of business owners are scared of it and not using it or avoiding it. Wherever you guys are watching this show, I would truly appreciate it if you follow or subscribe.

It helps a lot with the algorithm. It helps us get bigger and better guests, and it helps us grow the team. Truly means a lot. Thank you guys for supporting, and here's the episode. All right, guys. Here with Curtis Blackmore. We met through basketball, and now we've become friends and diving into business together. Good to have you. Yeah thanks for having me on I sure appreciate it. Absolutely yeah we met through basketball you lit me up that first game and I was like who is this dude then we started talking becoming friends and it's been cool to see you start my designs and really grow that brand man. Yeah I appreciate that you know it's been a lot of work getting to that point with this and getting that finally launched you could do that startup route but it's going well.

So I'm really excited to be here and talk about that a little bit if we can. Yeah. So MyDesigns is basically a merch POD company, right? Yep. It's a print-on-demand platform for creators to basically take all their designs, their assets, and turn it into merch products you can put on Etsy, Shopify, and soon Amazon. Nice. We're going to expand, you know, TikTok shops and additional marketplaces too.

But basically we automate everything from order fulfillment to making it easy to bulk publish your products. It's one thing that we do really well and bulk generate mockups and all the assets you need to basically create a really high quality product listing, including a listing data to now. So title, subscriptions, tags, all you need is designs, hundreds of them. We can write your listing data in a few seconds. Nice.

Optimized for every platform you're selling on. Super cool. Yeah. And I was on your YouTube. It seems like you've been doing merch for years, man. So what brought you to the merch game? Yeah. So I actually, if you go back far enough, I started a clothing brand called Cap'n Athletics and we were doing Shopify at the time. What we were doing is sourcing locally. And then it got to a point where we needed more

products. So we started sourcing from China and now you have all this excess inventory, sizes, colors, variants, right? I've been there. So kind of that naturally led me towards print on demand. I started first hearing about it through Printful using Shopify. So kind of switched our model at that point, did pretty well with it, really liked it because now I'm not holding inventory. You can have as many colors, as many products, different sizes, and only pay for something when someone purchases it. Nice. So it was a really nice model and a good change for us. And then eventually that led to figuring out about Merch by Amazon, which is Amazon's entrance into the print-on-demand game. Yeah.

And it was built directly into Amazon, and they would just do the fulfillment themselves. Again, just needed a graphic, put it on products. Now it's on Amazon with Prime Shipping. And that was really cool. So I started Merch Titans, building a product and keyword research tool around that particular market,

and just spun off into eventually building automation software and got really obsessed with automation. Love that. So from design scaling automation to publishing automation and all of that eventually led to my designs, which kind of brings it all into one hub. Yeah, I like the print-on-demand model

because, dude, I have nightmares of inventory still because I used to sell jerseys and I would have sometimes 100K plus in inventory just sitting there knowing it probably won't sell. But with POD, you don't need to have money tied up in inventory. Nope, not at all. You only pay for something when someone purchases it. Yeah. That's the beauty of it. And then it routes to, right, you can automate the entire order fulfillment and tap into a global, you know, fulfillment network. There's so many benefits

to it. The only downside is you're not going to have as high profit margins, but at the end of the day, you can scale a lot quicker and a lot faster. You won't have as high, but you're actually going to make more, to be honest, because you want a money-tied inventory because not everything sells out. Yeah, exactly. It nailed it. Like you could order thousands of things thinking it'll sell out

and then you're just stuck with all that inventory. Yeah, and it's a mess. Yeah, it's a huge mess. Because you're donating at the end of the day, right? Yeah. Have you been using any AI

with the companies? Yeah, I've been obsessed with AI with my design in particular, like I say, in writing your product listings for you in bulk. You can just use an open AI in what they're building there, a chat GPT, AI, with my design in particular. Like I say, I'm writing your product listings for you in bulk. You can just use an open AI in what they're building there, a chat GPT, but really a GPT-4.

It's insane. And then Vision AI, we can just drop designs and basically write your entire product listing. Wow. No matter what product you're selling. That's incredible. We're doing that, but also generative AI, because this is really important in the field we're in,

because everything's around the graphics. So Midjourney's been phenomenal, especially version 6. And then you've got Stable Diffusion. SDX phenomenal, especially version six. And then you got stable diffusion. SDXL is their newest model. They have a few more coming. Those are awesome because they're open source. And we kind of tap into that and can kind of do a lot of our own training and different things with it.

But yeah, we have that built right into my design. So essentially by the end of this year, you'll just be able to voice an idea into our app. So hey, my designs, you know, generate a Cocker Spaniel portrait wearing sunglasses and sell it on t-shirt on my Etsy shop. That's so cool. So you just say that and boom, you know, I have multipleer Spaniel portrait wearing sunglasses and sell it on a t-shirt on my Etsy shop. That's so cool. So you just say that and boom, you know, I have multiple variations. Just select the ones you like and hit publish.

That's so cool. That's how easy I want to make it. Yeah, because right now, designing merch is an annoying process. You got to hire a designer. They got to format it right. Then you got to order it. But with that, you can just make it yourself

without any graphic design experience. Exactly. And we can already do that right now. Text prompts. Yeah. We have everything else done, but now we'll get to the point where you can just voice it

and then simplify and streamline that whole process. I think that's the next evolution of shopping right there. Yeah. And that leads me to the next part because once you have a lot of people doing that, right,

you start saturating marketplaces, et cetera. It's like, what is the thing that you think about the future of e-commerce and print-on-demand? So we started kind of building this internally. We're going to release a tool

pretty soon to test this. But basically, it's a generative AI marketplace, all powered by print-on-demand. So you run a search, product doesn't exist, we'll create it for you. You know, all the mock-ups, everything, print files, everything's perfect for the printers.

You just purchase it, it shows up at your doorstep. Wow. So you're just going to be printing money off designs you haven't even made. Yeah, what the customer wants, right? They're searching for a particular product, and we'll just create it in near real time. Dude, that is dope.

Yeah, I could see that. I just watched ready player one again last night that's such a good movie but we're getting closer and closer you know what i mean i watch it every couple years and i'm like wow this is actually starting to happen yeah it's happening fast it's moving way faster i thought it would right yeah once it started with gpt 3.5 i think where things really took off and then obviously there's generative ai models around image generation now video generation is getting really big. It's exciting and it's moving unbelievably fast.

It's hard to even keep up. Yeah, for real. It's cool to see you embrace AI because a lot of business owners are scared of it and not using it or avoiding it. Yeah, we're really excited about it

because our vision's always been what I said about being able to voice something and eventually have that but AI just sped that up because I thought it was going to take six years to get there.

We'll be there this year. Absolutely. Dude. It's been amazing. You follow NBA at all? Yeah. Who's your team? Utah Jazz. Okay. You got them winning this year? I don't know about winning this year, but you know, they've struggled on early and they came around and had really good spurts there, kind of up and down. We're still in a rebuilding mode, but I wouldn't be surprised if we make the playoffs. And if we do, I think it could be

an interesting run. Okay. Okay. I'm a Lakers fan, but I don't have too much hope this year for them actually they did just pick up dinwiddie which i think is a solid pickup but i don't know if there'll be enough the west is stacked it's completely stacked it has been for years yeah it's it's so much better than the east it's not even close the east has like maybe two three teams but the west seed one through ten is like it's so tough you can get into that play in tournaments can be tough i know right it's nuts um growing up in utah what was that like no i like to actually grew up in northern arizona okay it's colorado city is the name of the town but it's right on the border of utah so it's a border town and then the other side of the city is hildale utah so it's a small polygamous community well probably fairly big it's like i say small but there's

actually around 10 000 people okay part of that community so it's pretty big for a polygamous community yeah for a polygamy so every family there was basically polygamous yeah for the most part wow it was really tight-knit yellow community grew up in that's different completely different like for instance my my family right i have 36 brothers and sisters my dad my dad had three wives jeez and. And all the women had a lot of kids, 10 plus usually. Wow. Not in every family, but that was pretty common. Damn.

So they really had a lot of kids, and it's an interesting experience. Yeah, so growing up in that environment, you probably thought that was normal at the time. Yeah, it's just what I grew up in. That's what I knew. Right. Very disciplined, very community-oriented. There's a lot of really great things about it. They teach you hard work ethic and all that.

But at the end of the day, it was a healthy experience. That is interesting. Did you gravitate towards one mother or did you treat all of them equally? I gravitated towards my mom, obviously. Okay. That's pretty common for most kids in polygamous families. Yeah. But there's also your favorites, right?

Certain moms you love. So you called a mother, like all three of them? Yep. Wow. That is interesting, man and 30 you said 36 siblings yeah 36 siblings and you know all their names yeah that is impressive dude absolutely i'm close with quite a few of them like that's a lot of people you know kind of scattered in different places but you know close with quite a few of them but definitely not all of them how many were in in your actual house growing up so at the peak because you get to the point where the older ones move out. Yeah.

But I would say probably 24, 25. Oh, my gosh. And do you think with that many siblings, you are getting the attention that you wanted as a kid? So it's different, right? You're not going to get as much attention from your dad. Dad was always, he's an entrepreneur. He's always on the road. Right.

He's gone a lot, but he's also there as much as he could be. But so you get the attention elsewhere, right? You have that family. You have really like a lot of socializing going on. There's so much going on at all times. And it's not just your family, right? There's, you know, like I said, hundreds of families. So it's a big, big community.

So you get out and get attention elsewhere. If like friends, family members, the moms for sure. Got it. They really took care of the household. Yeah. And things like that. So not necessarily from my dad, but from my moms for sure. That is so fascinating. And when did you learn that that wasn't like the traditional family? How old were you? Probably five, six. Oh,

so you knew early. Yeah. You started to figure it out, right? That's super early. Okay. Yeah. It's definitely not the traditional family. Yeah. And did you want that or were you cool with where you were at? No, I was really happy with, like I said, I don't have really any negative experiences growing up the way I did until like later on in life. There's just a lot of things that happened that split, the community split. Got it. People took over and really caused a lot of heartache and split a lot of families apart.

It was just bad. But outside of that, I really liked growing up with a big family, my brothers and sisters and a big community like that. It was awesome. Nice. And you mentioned earlier you left around 14. So my dad and my dad and my mom did yeah okay and our family kind of split up too because someone already left earlier and moved to salt lake city took their kids with them one of the moms one of them stayed in the religion and my dad and my mom you know they got kicked out

essentially they got kicked out yeah because that's what was happening so it goes back if you go back far enough to keep it short warren jeffs his dad died warren jeffs okay this is like the prophet right got it so he took over and right away started just splitting families started If you go back far enough, to keep it short, Warren Jeffs, his dad died, Warren Jeffs. And this is like the prophet, right? Got it. So he took over and right away started just splitting families. Started remarrying the women to other families, like dads. And it was just a complete mess. My dad's like right away, this is not right.

So that's when things got really bad. Why was he remarrying families though? No idea. It doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Yeah. Why would you break up the family unit? That doesn't make sense to me. I don't know if it's intentional, but they completely destroyed the entire community.

Wow. It happened fast. So you look into it, there's all kinds of documentaries. Yeah. I got to look into that. So it no longer exists out there? No, it does. And it's all fragmented. There's all these different little subgroups, right? But the main thing is really completely broken out. Got it. So how long after that did you get into business? So I actually started in, really when I was a kid growing up in that started with snow cone shacks on the side of the road, selling that. Other things you would sell, like yard selling, buy-in selling,

and then really got into computers at a young age. So I'm working for my dad because he owned the hardware store, the grocery store, the radio shack. Dad? Your dad was a baller. Yeah, he had the dairy at one point. So he built a lot of the infrastructure there in that community. But I was working for him one summer. They had a computer sitting in an office they they're gonna throw away i'm like hey

can i buy this so i worked a summer bought it for from him for 150 it didn't work obviously so but i knew that so like basically had to figure out how to rebuild that start buying parts and gotten a hardware side of computers that way then obviously got really obsessed with the internet it's like the dial-up internet in those days. The dial-up mode is so slow, man. You got it good because I grew up right into that. It changed pretty quickly. Yeah, so kind of that whole process. I got really obsessed with the internet,

and then eventually kind of skipping ahead. Obviously, there's a lot that happens. But I got through my freshman year of high school. That summer, I was really bored. I'm like, what am I going to do? And I was playing World of Warcraft at the time. I heard about World of Warcraft private servers, so I'm like, what am I going to do? And I was playing World of Warcraft at the time. I heard about World of Warcraft private servers, so I'm going to see if I can figure

out how to kind of reverse engineer and create my own. And now it took me a couple weeks, and I had one up on my computer at home. Again, a terrible computer. But I got it up, got everything working. I had to literally learn a little bit of database work, networking, port forwarding from your router, getting a website up so you can register with the database

and then connect that to the server, which is running on your local computer just the whole process that taught me a lot of what i do these days now yeah um we got that all set up and with went and did a little bit of marketing within literally less than an hour had like 40 players on my server on my computer okay i obviously crashed my computer so had to like eventually get to where you buy a dedicated host and stuff and i took it big and by And by my senior year, we were having days where people were donating $800 days. Holy crap. How many people were playing? At the peak, I had over 2,000 players.

Dude, that's incredible. That was one of the biggest ones out there. That was active. I'm talking people at the peak, 2,000 players online. Yeah, that's super cool. I used to play RuneScape private servers, MapleStory, a couple other games. Private servers were fun because you could experience what it was like being high level. Because to get to that

level in the normal game takes, what, 10,000 hours? Yeah, it takes forever. Yeah, and it's like, dude, you're never going to get there. Yeah, but I see it 100%. And like World of Warcraft, for instance, being a game master and then getting anything you want, like all the items you say, just experiencing a lot of different things. One idea is kind of gamified it. So you could donate

for points on the website and use the points to buy in-game items. They were custom, right? Smart. You obviously had an advantage. It was a PvP-based environment. Yeah, that's dope. What other games did you play? So World of Warcraft,

I really played Final Fantasy XI online. I played all the Final Fantasy series before that. I've never played that game. Any of the Final Fantasy series? No, I've heard about them. Final Fantasy VII is by far my favorite. Really? Okay. Phenomenal game, the storyline.

But all those Final Fantasy games, the storylines are just incredible. I got to check it out, though. I think you're going to like them. Is it a shooter or is it a MMO? No, it's a role-playing game. Okay. Yeah, it's fun. And then MMOs came with Final Fantasy 11.

So later on, they actually built their own MMO, and I can't assess with that, man. That's when about the same time I started playing World of Warcraft 2. Yeah. I've actually spent tens of thousands of hours on video games growing up, and they get a lot of hate online, but I learned some really good skills from them, to be honest. Absolutely. I think, like I said, my skill set to this day,

the fundamental things that I do or understand now, it's all started from World of Warcraft. Same. Building those private servers. That was it. And then the socializing, the community, right? It was a lot of fun. Yeah.

You learn social skills. You learn teamwork. Your words per minute when you type now, it's just, it was a lot of fun. Yeah, you learn social skills, you learn teamwork, your words per minute when you type now it's probably a hundred which comes in handy for business these days because everyone uses a computer.

I mean, dude, I type, I think I did the test type race or whatever. I got like 110 words per minute. That's crazy. It's insane, dude.

Gonna take that back to gaming. Yeah. Yeah. Gotta be fast. I don't even do the, whatever it's called, PEMDdos that they teach in school did you have you i remember kind of doing it but i know i have my own little yeah

yeah i use like maybe four fingers but it's like wrapping i do that's funny i don't like the pemdos dude when you type with your pinky it feels so awkward it is it's just weird i never use that um i want to talk about your trip in europe backpacking for a month yeah so i so what i did is i was working a corporate job and mortgages got to where i was doing that for four years in fact that's what brought me to vegas coming to salt lake city they moved here they moved headquarters here so i moved with them um in about you know four years into that job i was like just done with it right just corporate like grindy like and i feel like there was much higher i could go yeah uh so got

really sick of that started reading and studying i came across tim ferris's four-hour work week classic led me to vagabonding like the book brow pots i think his name really good book i kind of got obsessed with the idea of like going to europe backpacking and quit my job after i saved up no money and i went and did that so i did 30 days to try it and it's a phenomenal experience man staying in hostels obviously so you're staying in rooms with multiple people well part of it you're trying to push you out of your comfort zone you weren't sketched out oh yeah it was very uncomfortable it just like each each place i went to is different it always took one or two days to kind of like settle in but then i'd move to another city so it's just enough to keep me wow comfortable and i moved to another city and just started all over again how many cities did

you hit so i started in amsterdam okay uh then worked my way down to paris and then to madrid and from madrid flew up to cologne germany and spent i think about amsterdam okay uh then worked my way down to paris and then to madrid and then from madrid flew up to cologne germany and spent i think about five six days and i went over to prague the czech republic so eastern europe wow which is phenomenal every time i've been to eastern europe now it's my favorite place in europe i gotta check it out like the whole yeah prague all the way down through budapest and go down to croatia wow so those were your favorite usually people say italy greece like italy's amazing okay I haven't been to Greece yet, but I just like Eastern Europe. I love Europe, man.

The people are different. They actually don't care too much. I haven't been in like 10 years, but they didn't care too much about social media or anything when I went. It seemed just like genuine. Yeah, it's different. Yeah. When I went to Amsterdam, people were very just upfront, you know,

and that's my type of style. I come from the East Coast. Yeah, and that's not my type of style. They sound like the East Coast. Yeah, and that's not my type of style. They sound like the exact opposite. But, you know, I have a team in Serbia, Novi Sad. There's seven software engineers that work over there,

and I love the Serbians, man. I love their culture. But like you said, they're just very up front. That's how they grew up, right? Just everything they think of, it's just right to your face. Absolutely.

I kind of appreciate that. Yeah. Were you solo the whole trip? So I had my buddy, Philip, who actually, it's funny i met him building world of warcraft oh yeah right so my first one when i got to point i needed a web developer to take over that whole process someone introduced me to him he was 12 13 years old at the time i was 16 so just a young serbian kid he was really good right so i met with him because

we built multiple projects along that that journey and sold some of them and met with him in amsterdam he was with me until cologne when i went to prague he had at home but uh yeah so i went with him and then one of my buddies on the trip but most of it was solo too nice which was the funnest part of it yeah i've actually i've done a few solo trips it's different i like to be able to share the experience usually but i think sometimes a solo trip is needed yeah i agree that's what i recommend everybody do yeah it is it's incredible. I mean, if you want to start with somebody, then eventually end up solo for at least a couple cities, you'll learn so much from that experience.

That's cool you went with someone you met online. I'm trying to think if I ever met up with someone that I met purely online, and I don't think I have. Yeah, he's my CTO at MyDesigns. Wow. And you met him on World of Warcraft? Yep. Started back when he was 12 or 13 years old when I was 16. We worked on so many projects since. He went and ended up at Microsoft for a while. Nice. But then eventually quit when I just, I brought him over

to build this project with me. Super cool. Now I know a big part of Mormonism was no drugs, no alcohol, right? Yeah. Are you still not doing that? So I drink alcohol, but I didn't drink till I was almost 21. Okay. Like it was pretty common in my family. As we we got out of the religion a lot of people are drinking it's actually really common that community a lot of people drink and they drink a lot really yeah i mean not the mormonism side of saying what's like the people that get out that get out okay kind of like trying to find their purpose and what they're doing right but uh no i didn't drink till i was 21 damn and never done drugs really wow smoked weed once or twice more than that but tried it and that's pretty much it wow so no cravings to do mushrooms or anything no i'll actually have i've actually i've actually

microdosed getting the truth out so yeah i completely spaced that part but i microdose mushrooms and i wouldn't even count that as as taking drugs that's probably why i didn't say because i haven't been at that level with everybody experiences he talks about but at some point absolutely i'm a fan of microdosing dude i think psychedelics there's a lot of a lot of power yeah i've split tested days where i micro microdose and then days i don't and productivity is higher every time yeah and what's the creativity like that's the part i notice the most with me for sure yeah you think outside the box because you you get so locked in sometimes when you're grinding and that's why i take vacations now actually because i used to not and i realized you need you need time to reset.

It's interesting what happens subconsciously. Like you said, you're locked in a box, and it does feel like that. Grinding, it's the same thing every day, and also time speeds up because your brain starts a shortcut kind of routine. So with getting out and traveling, kind of break those routines and break things up. Time slows down. Yeah, dude.

Time flies when you're in that grind mode like you are right now with the startup. I'm sure you're working 15 hours a day. Yeah, absolutely. Pretty much every day, 6am till about 11 at night. I mean, there's breaks and stuff in between, right? You have basketball and things like that, but that's pretty much it. Dude. It's actually funny how much I look forward to basketball because it just clears your head. Like the whole week you're grinding and you're like, Oh, I got a game today. Thank God. Yep. It makes a big difference. Huge difference. I miss, I can't wait to be back yeah you've been out for what a couple weeks now been four weeks now i've taken another two maybe three weeks off just let my shoulder get healed up and nice i broke that rib so that's feeling a lot oh you broke it yeah this i broke it in the

right before the championship oh yeah i didn't even know that yeah top left rib how'd that happen just uh in one of our games the semi-fininals, a guy just spun around like his elbows out. Oh, yeah. Just hit me right perfectly. Bruh. And it hurt like hell when it happened. I'm like, what is that? I had the adrenaline.

I couldn't finish the game. And then the next day, it really hurt. Oh, gosh. And you played the finals? Yeah, I played Wednesday the next day, too. It was just stupid. And then I played the finals. But the finals, that was a whole week later,

but it hurt even worse. Oh, my gosh. So I don't know what happened there, but now it's finally starting to feel pretty good. Did it heal on its own? Yeah. I think with ribs for the most part, I haven't even went and got it checked.

But it was definitely broke. I could feel it moving around and all that. Jesus. But yeah, most times ribs will just heal on their own. I feel that. Did you play anything else other than basketball? Played a little bit of football. Okay.

Mostly basketball. Tight end? Did track and field. Mostly wide receiver. Oh, yeah. I didn't play it competitively in high school. Okay like with friends and family but um my brother did nice he's an athlete you'll have to meet him someday he's a hell of an athlete i'm game dude football i just never got into it i was too skinny growing up honestly yeah i was getting recruited when i

went to because i went from like the small school my hometown yeah i was trying to play college basketball and ended up going up to salt lake city and played at a high school up there my senior year. And I made it, you know, starting five on that team, did really well. Nice. Just wasn't enough time to get around scouts and whatnot. Yeah, because I feel like they start recruiting you sophomore, junior year, right? Yeah. And they're looking at some of those kids out of eighth grade all the way up.

These days, like, yeah, like seventh grade, like, it's crazy with social media, what it's done. I feel like back then it was way harder to get recruited. Yeah, 100%. And you had to make your own mixtape and it was just like, how do you even do that? You know, it's a whole different skillset on its own. Yeah. I remember signing up for that website. I forget what it was, but you upload your mixtape and then recruiters were on there, but I wasn't good enough. I did track. What was your event in track? So I did the 400 meter dash okay that's

terrible man rough you tried it my best time was 54 and i fell uh maybe 56 either way i felt like i was dying the whole time yeah you had the entire time and it happens fast i think i got 49 holy crap we had a guy on our team that was 47 seconds dude 49 in high school 49 or 50 yeah it's my senior year and that's the only time i ever played track and field but i also did pole vaulting bro so you were a speedster back in the day yeah because i i gotta admit in basketball i don't see that in you no i'm slowed down man after like going like to utah valley university i was kind of like playing with the team there yeah i was gonna walk on as i did but i was competing with those guys when you're right out of high school and like at a very high level yeah i mean with any of them but then i end up fracturing my ankle torn a few of the ligaments since then i came back way too early and that

messed up a lot of things i feel that dude because dude with your skill set and i i'm picturing you with speed with that skill set oh my gosh you'd be the best player in the league and one of my favorite things like back then was like starting to get to that point because i played center in high school right because that's what we needed and i started to extend my game after high school playing more on the wing as a slasher, more like a smoke forward. Yeah, you can shoot now. Yeah. And that's like slashing down the middle and just throwing down dunks

and things like that. I was like, what is doing until I end up messing my ankle up pretty bad. Damn, you were yamming? Yeah, hell yeah. I'm still trying to get my first dunk in the league. I got one on Tuesdays, but I want to get one on Wednesday leagues. Nice. You know?

Yeah, you'll get it. I'm on BT now, so we'll see. Oh, you're on BT? Yeah. We lost, though, week one, man. There's some good teams. Yeah, I'm excited to. I'm on BT now, so we'll see. Oh, you're on BT? Yeah. We lost though week one, man. There's some good teams. Yeah.

I'm excited to get our team back in at some point. I know we're getting so specific. The audience is probably like, what are they talking about? I love basketball though, man. Me too. It's awesome.

What are you excited about this year and where can people find you, man? Mostly excited about continue to build my designs. We're probably going to do another capital raise, probably at a 10, 12 plus million dollar valuation. Nice. See where things go with that and continue to build that startup. And then raise my another capital raise probably at a 10, 12 plus million dollar valuation nice see where things go with that and continue to build

that startup and then raise my family I have a little baby girl now she's been so much fun thank you it's been awesome Lacey's taking care of her and doing such a great job

you want 10 kids? probably not 10 but I do want at least 3 okay and we do have a stepson Kyler nice so him and then my little baby

and now hopefully have 3 more love it yeah 3 is a good number I'm aiming for a three too that's awesome love it man where can people find you go to curtisblackmore.com you can find all my socials and whatnot from there perfect all right guys thanks for watching as always and i will see you tomorrow