FULL SEND PODCAST - Bored Ape Creators x Nelk Boys | Ep. 54

Episode Date: August 19, 2022

Bored Ape Yacht Club Creators Explain How Steph Curry & Bieber Got Their NFT & How BAYC is Worth $4B Presented by Happy Dad Hard Seltzer. Find Happy Dad near you http://happydad.com/find (21+ only). Video is available on http://youtube.com/fullsendpodcast/videos. Follow Nelk Boys on Instagram http://instagram.com/nelkboys. Part of the Shots Podcast Network (shots.com). You can listen to the audio version of this podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts & anywhere you listen to podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We want out! We won out! We won out! What do you guys? Did you guys just see it on Twitter recently? Yeah. We've seen it like I think... We're rolling too. You could just, yeah. We just go for it. All right. Yeah. Yeah. You guys saw it on Twitter? Yeah, we saw it on the, when you guys were talking to Elon, somebody like sent it to us.

They're like, yo, do you know about this? Yeah. Well, this is, we really appreciate you guys coming through. We got the founders of the board eight Bial Club. Gordon, Greg. Greg, Gargamel, whatever. Yeah, all good. Either one. No, I think this is like a really cool one for us too because obviously we love the NFT space too. And just like to see what you guys have done over the last few years is like it's crazy. Thank you. Yeah. It's insane. A year and a half. Not even a few. Right. Yeah, exactly. Crazy. You guys don't do a lot of like sit downs and stuff too, right? This is actually I would say our first. We did an interview with input magazine. That was kind of like our first big interview in person a couple weeks ago. We recently did a podcast that has. hasn't aired yet. It'll be on NPR. But this is like our first, I think, legitimately, like, sit-down podcast. This one's going to be big, too.

You guys are going to be killing it lately. I know. I was looking up, like, who your last couple of people were, and I was like, oh, shit. Yeah, you guys see your content come up on TikTok. Like, ultimately, it's like my, like, nightly routineist to go on TikTok, and you guys have, like, been crushing it. Yeah. Do a lot of people ask you to do interviews and you guys don't want to do them?

Yeah, we get asked a lot, especially lately, but... Yeah, for the longest time, I mean, we just, I don't know. we're like usually pretty private guys and like I don't know we've been doing this for just a year and a half like 14 hours a day every day just like focused on the business and so it's hard to be like oh you know let's put aside time to just like go out and do press or talk to people and all that also like kind of like a socially anxious person to some degree like it's funny like you put me in a crowd of people and I'm like totally normal like you'd be the life of the party but like something like this I'm like yeah well guy um guy Oserie who yeah he reached out to us about this and Um, he, he always told me that, how focused you guys are, right? Like, because I, because I asked a few months ago. I was like, hey, like, would love to meet them. Not even, not even for the podcast, we'd just love to sit down with you guys. And guys like, dude, these guys are so laser focused.

Like, you'll see, like, I can't tell you, but you'll see what they come out with. Then ape coin came out. Other side came out. The, you know, the, um, crypto punks, you know, so I was like, oh, shit. Okay. Now I get, like, these guys are really building something special. Yeah, for a long time, it was like, the motto was like action speak louder than words. And it was like, you know, there wasn't a lot.

of people in the NFT space who are really sticking it out past like the fact past the point where they made a few million or whatever it was and it was just like we wanted to be known as the founders who worked our asses off and that's what we did it's inspiring awesome yeah it's really inspiring to us because same thing with our product we we meant to 10,000 back in January something like 9,000 of the 10,000 have been held for over 90 days and people don't sell there's only actually less than 90 listed out of the 10,000 and that were minted. What's with the drill, too? The drill, well, the restaurant's opening tonight. Guys, we have the board eight founders, not lazy lions. Yeah. Make sure everyone knows that. You guys want to try one of these?

Yeah, for sure. John, you want to pass two of them? How long have you guys known each other? 10 years? 10, 11 or something like that. And when did you guys get started on working on this whole project? I want to say, too, before we get into that, I think there's going to be a lot of, like, hardcore NFT,

like people listening to this, too, but there's also going to be a lot of casual people. So I just want to let the audience know, too. We're going to kind of ask some questions for everybody, too. I mean, we did that with Elon. I mean, there's a reason why Elon's episode was three hours long. People are like, well, I can't believe you didn't ask about this specific galaxy and all this. I was like, dude, we were just like, we're just chatting with one of the boys.

Yeah, we were asking random stuff. That Elon episode, I'll be honest, could have, if we didn't drink so much, it could have been a five-hour episode. We were at the end, including him. We were like, I think Elon was getting too tanked. Yeah, like, we were all like, okay, if it weren't for drinking, like, that would have been a five-hour episode Because we just like to talk about everything. Nothing specific. There's like an endless amount of topics with that guy.

You know, it's like, you know, from everything from like, is the world of simulation to just like, are aliens real? Yeah. Or it's like, you know, cars. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. What else? What was some, like, random things we talked about, too?

There was a-talked about his house parties, like mushrooms, everything you think. Has he done mushrooms? Gaming, too. Oh, yeah. He has to. Oh, yeah. He's admitted to it, but he has to. Nice, nice.

But he's pro-mushrooms. Yeah, he's pro-phodelics. Yeah, how did, how did, how dead? this all like kind of start like how did you two meet each other i'm so interested in just this whole story yeah for sure i mean we met in miami we both grew up in miami but we didn't actually meet while we were living here we met like on spring break i was doing my undergrad in new york he was in chicago uh turns out we had mutual friends that like we each knew since the time we were like 15 how many years ago is this this was like 10 years ago that we met and um yeah just at like

some shitty bar in south miami that like our mutual friends would go to and we like i don't know we just started talking and we just got in a fight about books basically like i was studying writing he was too you know he's got like fucking kurt vonnegut's face tattooed on his arm so like clearly he's a novelist that we both like there was this like book that i was obsessed with the time called infinite jest by a guy named david foster wallis which is like a thousand pages and it's like kind of cringy if you're like of a certain age and you're a man and you're like that's my favorite book. And I immediately was like, oh, have you read that? And he's like, that guy sucks. And like, that was basically how we started fighting. And then that was like

the genesis of everything. It was like became like a sparring partner for ideas and creative stuff over the years just like texting about like, oh, what do you think about this or this short story? I'm working on this project. And then, you know, it's just somebody that you could be very frank with about like, that's a piece of shit, but maybe do this instead and whatever. And then it was just like a productive creative relationship in that way. And then we became even closer friends through MMRPGs. Have you guys ever played any of those, like World of Warcraft or anything like that back in the day?

I played a reign of chaos. Okay. You play that? No, I don't know that one. Nice. Was it like after World of Warcraft? No, that was before. It was before, really?

Have you played Diablo? Yeah. It's like when Diablo got hot. Gotcha. Okay. We played some of the early MMRGs. I think you were a big EverQuest fan. I played a game called Star Wars Galaxies.

Is Ruincape considered that or no? Rooenscape is deaf like OG Rooscape for sure. I ran RuneScape back in the day. Yeah. I got a lot of the people in our club actually are like old school Oh really? It makes sense like people get into NFTs I remember Maple Story it was amazing Maple Story was lit yeah yeah good stuff

But yeah how long ago ago is this well I mean so if we met 11 years ago we played like on like We played like World Warcraft together as like soon as like a few years ago Yeah definitely like you know like late 20s like not cool like you know just like yeah just nerding out And then from there, you were the first person to introduce me to crypto. Like 2017. And you had already been exposed to it, I think, in 2015? I knew about it since, like, college, since, like, 2009. But that's how it works with crypto.

Like, the first time you hear about it, you're like, no, I don't get it. Or this seems weird. And then, like, fast forward five years later. And it's at, like, 100x what it was. And you're like, I should have paid attention or something. Right. Because, like, the person who first told you about it, like, is now rich. And you're the idiot who didn't listen.

I don't think you guys did this by design just happened with like musicians and artists and celebrities like picking it up. I know MoonPay was a lot behind it as well, which is a good thing. Like I think MoonPay's really been aggressive with like making it mainstream, but like it was your guys' projects that really put NFTs and got guys like me to actually pay attention. I think the IP piece of the puzzle was the thing that took it to the next level. We weren't the first project to give away a license to the board apes to NFT holders. But I think we were the first project to do it with IP that actually felt like. like, you know, that you would want to utilize for products and branding or TV shows or whatever it is.

That was the thing that, like, I think really captured the attention because when we put this out, we had no idea it would become this big, obviously. We had sort of, you know, an idea of like utility in mind and sort of dreams and we kind of made the scaffolding there. So it was like, okay, maybe this could be like a Web3 Supreme or maybe this could be, you know, something larger than life. But at the same time, watching what occurred was, like, unbelievable, right? like within a week people were creating derivatives of their board apes and like having artists

commissioned them and people were already figuring out ways to like you know monetize the intellectual property which was incredible yeah how did that how did that yeah going back to that story so after that yeah yeah the warcraft wait 2017 that's pretty recent too for to get into crypto right yeah relatively yeah it was I think that was a you know it was a big moment a lot of people were getting into it and we just I you know I threw like a thousand dollars into like five different things. But what was interesting then, I feel like that hadn't existed, at least not for me previously knowing about crypto, was like, you just got into these communities on Twitter and you could read about 20 different cryptocurrencies all day and just feel like you were scratching

like the surface. It just felt like there was this whole world of possibility opening up. And like, you just wanted to know more. It was like this attention economy that was going on. And I don't know. And also it was just like a magical moment where like, yeah, we bought it in it. what, Ethan like 300 bucks and then went to like 1,400 in like four months and it was just like this is crazy what is happening here

and then the bear market hit and things got quiet but like it just felt like something that we always wanted to kind of pay attention to and but we were non-technical people so it was like how do we like participate in this as like creatives or storytellers and that kind of thing. Yeah like we were like really obsessed a little bit

with crypto Twitter and, like, the personalities that would be on there. And, like, there was something really endearing about some of these guys or girls. It was, like, they, you know, you could basically cryptographically verify that the person behind, like, that cat pitcher was worth, you know, maybe $100 million in crypto or something. And, you know, instead of, like, fucking off to the south of France, like, most people in their 20s would if they made that much money very quickly, they were just, like, up at 2 a.m. being, like, who wants to play league, you know, like, I'm bored. And that was, like, very odd to us. It was, like, I don't know, just interesting. Book Club on Monday.

Gym on Tuesday. Date night on Wednesday. Out on the town on Thursday. Quiet night in on Friday. It's good to have a routine. And it's good for your eyes too. Because with regular comprehensive eye exams at Specsavers, you'll know just how healthy they are.

Visit Spexsavers.cavers.cai to book your next eye exam. I exams provided by independent optometrists. I love crypto Twitter. Yeah, it's hilarious. Yeah, like the memes are just, yeah. It's all about the memes. Crypto Twitter's good. A little bit better than political Twitter.

Oh, yeah. And you deeper you get into it, the more inside baseball gets, it just becomes like hilarious. Yeah. So are you guys just buying coins together, like investing? He was more of like a long-term investor. I kind of took like a fish to water with like trading and technical analysis, which I was like moderately okay with because I had some experience with that in penny stocks when I was in college. But, and yeah, we kind of just rove that first wave, 2017, which was our first wave.

all the way up and all the way down, basically. And then kind of just kept Twitter and crypto in the back of our heads because we're like, you know, we can't contribute to this as tech guys because that's not really what we are. We can't contribute to this really meaningfully as traders or investors because we're not that good at it. But culture hadn't really come to Ethereum. We'd been exposed to NFTs very early on in 2017 by via Cryptopunks and a project called CryptoKitties.

And I remember that was my first NFT was a Crypto Kitty. but it didn't seem to like really capture the attention beyond that bull cycle you know because it didn't like the it felt a little dilutive it wasn't there it kind of had like the feeling of an NFT blockchain game but not really it wasn't like fully fleshed out yet they were both those projects were like pioneers

particularly crypto punks which were like the first truly generative pro thought picture project did you buy it as an investment or just like yeah I mean I bought it at the time I did not even consider it as investment i bought it thinking like oh maybe i can do something with this maybe it's fun yeah and it was for a little bit and then it kind of like you know the attention kind of died out i was in 2017 i was in 2017 yeah damn how did you even hear of them then i think through crypto twitter it was like

that was just a like a moment in time it was just a flash in the pan on crypto twitter where everyone was just buying crypto kitties one day and you're just like okay just like these digital cats that you could like breathe and get more cats and like you know it's so popular that like it was clogging up the ethereum network that like you couldn't get another transaction through some days because like everyone was just like breeding cats on the internet and it was like what is happening like that's crazy um yeah at the same time that like the scarcity model for it wasn't really there like it's not like you know when you think about board apes so like there's 10 000 where it's like with crypto kitties it's just like okay these cats are just multiplying and like the value of the one before it isn't there

anymore because there's you know 100 000 of them or whatever it is and now fast forward to now you you guys bought crypto punks yeah i mean it's it's pretty yeah it's pretty wild and i was gonna say what what like when did you guys decide to make your project? So early 2021, you know, in late 2020, crypto started to be like more of a thing again in the mainstream, you know, public. And by January, kind of 2021, a project called Hashmask came out that caught our attention to, it caught everybody's attention on crypto Twitter basically because it was like a,

it was like an art project that was getting published on Ethereum is what it was. It was like an NFT project that wasn't like a technical thing like CryptoKitties was. It wasn't like this weird generative thing like Cryptopunks was. It was just like a new medium for people to publish on in the same way it's like when podcasting opened up or like, you know, YouTube creators or anything else. It's like, holy shit, here's this new place to like put content out that you don't have to be like the most technically savvy person in the world to do it. And if you understand the medium and all that, like that's like a moment in time.

And so we just, you know, I saw a hash mask and literally I texted him like, hey, let's make an NFT. And he, you know, was like immediately like, let's fucking go. And I think the next day I sent like a legal Zoom, you know, incorporate. You know, I made an LLC as a way of like, okay, this isn't going to just be like a COVID side project that we don't follow in on. I'm like kind of burning the ships. Like this is going to be a pain in the ass to wind down because I'm like incorporating and all this crap for it. Damn. Did you guys own a bunch of others up to that point?

Like since your crypto kiddie? Were you continuously buying? No. So what was the first move you made when you, like, said, let's start a project? Like, how did the name come about and how did the art come about? There was, like, a period of time where we're bouncing around a lot of ideas, none of which were very good. And then there was this, like, three in the morning, I remember, or it was like around midnight, and I, like, message garg. I'm like, I have, we'd eventually come.

No, let me back up a bit. We'd eventually come to a point where we thought the market was starting to dry up and die out in NFTs. And it actually was. It was entering into, like, a little bear market for a minute. We were like, oh, gosh, it used to be that, like, for a period of time there, you could put up any picture on the internet, essentially, and, you know, attach it to Ethereum and it was going to sell. But suddenly, projects weren't selling out. We started to think, okay, well, we need to attach some utility to this. We need to start thinking more broadly what we can do with this technology.

And we had this idea for, like, a very high flutant art board idea, where it was like, okay, if you own an NFT and we were imagining that these were going to be like Murrow or Mondrian-esque, you know, like paintings, if you owned one of them, you would have access to a drawing, board where you could drop a pixel like every five minutes or something like that. And we're like, oh, and people create collaborative art and it'll be beautiful and whatever. And then that night that we had the idea or a little bit after the idea, I call an old friend of mine, Nicole Munis, who ended up becoming our CEO later, someone I've known since I was 15 years old. And I was telling her the idea. And she's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. But you're kind of an idiot because like the very first thing that someone's going to draw on

this pixel board is going to be a dick. And I was like, oh, yeah. And that ended up being true, by the way, the very first thing drawn on the pixel board was indeed a dick. And we're like, oh, this is not like a high flute and high art, you know, fancy thing, which also was the internet. It was the internet, right? And so we're like, okay, what is this then? And we're like, where would someone draw a dick? And we were like, oh, it's like a dive bar bathroom wall.

That's where you draw a dick. And then so we started thinking about like the places we'd grown up here in Miami. And then it kind of like sprawled from there from thinking about, well, okay, if we're going to make something, let's not make something inauthentic to ourselves. Let's make something like a place that we're going to go. And then kind of the club model formed around that. And it was late at night. It was like midnight and I messaged you. I'm like, I'm going to write you an essay with a crazy idea. And in that had the words Board Ape Yacht Club and had a bunch of imagery of like CBGBs and Andy Warhol's factory and just like, you know, an aesthetic that felt really cool and interesting to us from like 1969 New York. And it just felt like the kind of club that we would want to be a part of. And from there, like we just tried to make it more like ourselves. You know, we like at first the idea for the yacht club, the exterior of the image had, um, was like, you know, a decrepit, like, Bayside Miami kind of old yacht club. And then eventually we thought it was even cooler to put it in the Everglades

and, like, make it ramshackle and secret, like, this, like, you know, special place that you would have to find. And then Bored Apes, of course, came from the idea of these, like, crypto Twitter personalities, who to us seemed like bored apes to ape into crypto or in trading communities, you can even see how popular it is just from, like, I think it's AMC is now doing their own, like, stock that's, like, ape. That's going to be the ticker symbol. it just means to like not do your due diligence in and just go hard into you know some kind of asset you know it's like go ape shit essentially it's like the full send thing yeah exactly true it is right well collab I guess we got I guess yeah this is great by the way yeah I normally don't like banana flavored things but this is actually safe that's the thing we like we didn't want it to be a gimmick too like once we tasted banana

then we're like all right we're doing this yeah it was good it was good by accident yeah you know it was supposed to be, you know, let's just put the ape on a box. I'll be honest, guy gave me the idea, you know. We bought, we bought, I think it was back in November, December. We bought apes. And then, then Happy Dad, the L.C. bought an ape. And we just bought it. Like, we just bought it the guy. I was like, hey, Happy Dad also bought an ape. And he's like, well, you should make a drink out of it. Or he just said put it on one of your can. And he just said put it on one of your cans. And then that's when the idea just

went, all right, well, what if we did a specific flavor? It takes a while. It takes like six months to come up with new flavors and cans and all this stuff and then distributors and then licenses, all that. So the idea started back in December and then just, it's actually ironic. We're with you guys. Today it just came out. It's incredible. Congratulations, guys. We did

literally today. Yeah. We did 10,000 cases only. And now it's like there are already gone. They're going to be collector's items. Yeah, they're going to be collector items. But I think we're going to make it a permanent flavor eventually. Because everyone likes it. Like, I mean, you, I mean, we, I mean, we got two legends here. One thing, Kyle, uh, myself, Steve and my brother think of sometimes like, all right, we have access to gas

stations, convenience stores, grocery stores. What else can we do? Do we do another liquor? No. This is crushing it. Let's focus on this. So then I'm like, what else do people buy a gas stations? It's a beef jerky. So we have, so we bought four more. This guy's an original one. Sergeant Pepper is pepper flavor. Amazing. This guy with a bloodshot red eyes is spicy. Perfect. A little too spicy for him.

Then we got terriaki. Oh, yeah. I love it. So, you know, there's a new product that we have that's going to come out the end of this year. And going back to, you know, we want to take these products. We're going to do something with our NFT holders that can't really get into it yet because of details. But something where our NFT holders will be a big part of this. guys are going to do great just based on how pop that you guys are and how awesome you guys are

making the products, obviously. But what's so cool about, like, the intellectual property of Bored apes in particular is, like, we've seen people who had no following, essentially, utilize the commercial license to great success because there's this cool feedback loop that's happening in Web3. Or, like, there was this, like, fast food franchise that started in L.A. called Bored and Hungary, right? It's crushing me. Right? And it was like, but like on opening day, lines around the block because all of Web3 wanted to support it, right? So, like, all these NFT people, all these Crypto people were just like, yeah, let's try it.

And it ended up being a great burger. And so they're going to be super successful, I think. I heard he's opening up more. Yeah, that's what I'm here too. Andy, shout out this is my buddy, Andy. I'm proud of him. You guys did meetups too, didn't you? In New York.

So we've done two ape fest. What do those look like? Well, the first one was kind of like, we just pieced it together with guys help a lot, by the way. Yeah, and like two months, we just like figured it out. We had like a thousand person or two thousand person yacht in Manhattan, in New York City. Two thousand person? Yeah, or someone was a thousand or a thousand or two thousand? I think it was a, sorry, I don't know, I honestly don't remember.

It's been like, it's been almost a year since that. Then we had a big venue, we had a community meetup space. It was, it was a lot. And, you know, we had like strokes and little baby played and it was pretty wild. Oh, yeah. But for like, you know, especially considering like the project, I don't even think was a year old that time. And of course, it was like five months old. Greg and I had had no experience running events whatsoever.

So obviously relied a lot on guys' expertise then. But still, you know, one of our co-founder, SaaS was also someone who, like, you know, was just figuring out how to run major events for the first time. Yeah, it was just a sophomore. engineer that got thrown in. Crazy, crazy. All right, let's go. In the longest time, we were like, in January still, we were 11 people.

Like, now Yuga is 75. Like, we're scaling up like crazy. This January? Yeah. You were 11? 11 people. Wow. How many on the initial launch of the project?

Four. Just the four co-founders. Tomato, Garga, myself, and SAS. Yeah. And what were like the different roles upon, like, launching, or like to get to launch? Kerem and Zichon, Tomato and SAS. They came from, you know, software engineers. as software engineers and there's actually kind of a funny story for that yeah because basically the

story was when you know all right i contacted gordon to like hey let's do this we've been in crypto together since 2017 like we both understood the opportunity um but obviously we needed technical help to get this thing done and so you know the strategy wasn't much more sophisticated than me being like oh i think like javascript's important here and uh i call karem tomato and i'm like oh do you know any javascript and he's like yeah it's like 90% of my job i'm like perfect look at this let's figure out how to make like something on the blockchain together and he texts me back like 15 minutes later he's like this has nothing to do with javas what are you even talking about um and i was like okay well you learn solidity which is the more

important thing but uh anyway so basically we just contacted any friend we knew that studied computer science in college basically and was like let's let's put together a team for this and and they were super down and like everybody was just working nights and weekends i'm trying to let's put this together from nothing so they came in more as engineers. We came in more from a creative and strategy perspective, but we kind of met all on the same page with everything before launching. And since then, we've, you know, it's been much more collaborative. What were your like initial goals when you guys all get together? What are you guys trying to accomplish with the whole project? For me, it was just like, yeah, what did you guys

kind of expect? Honestly, like, I, you know, 2020, obviously we had the lockdown with COVID. I was working as a book editor at the time, you know, working 10, 12 hours a day as a senior editor at a book publisher and just wanted, like, had this idea of like, I want to start my own thing, like, not be relying on, on, you know, a paycheck kind of thing. And so for me, it was, it was more modest at the time. It was just like, let's just, I just want to make something with my friends. And if it makes some money, like, awesome. And I think I purposely went to Gordon for it, though, because like that's our dynamic is like I think like what's achievable what can we do like how do like I was a book editor or a poet I always want to make things like simple and like bold

and he's like I want to make it fucking crazy and take over the world and we meet somewhere in the middle it's a good combo it's like uh yeah so you're like this is like we got to fuck the shit up my backstory here is that like you're like the good cop bad cop it's good yeah yeah every day all day yeah sorry about that buddy so my backstory was I was um I got really sick in college. I have an autoimmune disease called colitis. And I was like basically bed to bathroom for 10 years, like really, really ill. Lost 10 years in my life. And I had kind of started to basically miraculously recover through the help of Western and Eastern medicine, probably a couple months before Garga texted me, let's make an NFT. That was like literally what he said.

Let's make an NFT. And so I don't know if you quite realize just how much fire had been building up for me for 10 years. And so, yeah, I came into this thinking, I want to build something extraordinary. You know, I don't just want to like, you know, do something for just a brief moment. It wasn't just for fun for me. I was thinking like, okay, I want to make my mark on the world a little bit. And I want to, and I was also obsessed with online communities. You know, like, you know, when you're sick for 10 years, you know, it's like in your 20s, you know, it's like, you don't really have a real life outside of your digital life. That's why we just play World of Warcraft. That's why we'd play World of Warcraft. That's why I got.

into crypto because it was like something I could do from bed basically I also played a ton of video games outside of World Warcraft I was on Twitch I was on YouTube you know just like being a part of online communities on Discord just like that was my home you know that was like my version of the Metaverse you know it was the way I could experience reality and not feel bad basically about myself and so board API Club in particular but you know the rest of the things that we're doing at Ugal Labs really became an opportunity for me to build and help foster online communities that I thought, you know, would push the space forward, communities that I myself would want to be a part of.

What happened on that launch day? That was crazy. So, like, there were a couple days there where, like, you know, we started off and we had, like, our pre-sale. We were giving away one Ethereum at the time to somebody who could, like, solve some really shitty, like, puzzles that were on our site that, like, you know, we hired someone to help come up with.

and basically everybody who was in our discord at the time like you know up until these things were going to be for sale had no interest in the project they were just there to like try and win this money and we were like okay this isn't going too hot like uh that's okay though like you know we just we're trying to market the shit out of it anyway we could one of the ways we did that is we like we started making like um board apes that look like certain influencers like if there's somebody, you know, whose profile picture on the internet was like this anime girl with pink hair. Like, let's do like a B-YC version of this person and, and tweet it out at them and try and

get some attention that way. Is anybody specific you guys chose to do that with? It wasn't really anyone like, it was just like crypto Twitter people. It was just like anyone who we thought might, you know, laugh at it or retweeted or something. You know, I don't know. It was like a smorgasbord. Because we were starting from zero.

Yeah. We had zero audience. We had zero followers. Like we were just trying to like, how do we go, how do we do stuff? though. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we'd seen it done before. It wasn't like our original idea. It's, you know, to be fair. But we just went, you know, like everything, we're like, how do we take this to the next level? How do we go harder with it? Like, we got to, you know, give away Ethereum. We got to tweet this out. We got to make this cheaper than anything's been out there before. We have to make it so everybody's buying it at the same price, which isn't how these things were selling before that. What was mint price? It was 0.08, which was around $200 per eight. Yeah. I got some angry friends who, uh, yeah. Why didn't you? tell me to buy an $8 for $200, you ask. That's good, though, because there's probably some, like, random people that bought it

that couldn't afford it what it is now, right? Yeah, that's exactly right. That's exactly right. Like, you know, the model was we wanted to make this egalitarian. Because before us, a lot of the NFTs around then were being priced on a bonding curve, essentially. So it ended up being kind of like a fucking Ponzi, frankly, because it was like, you could, the first person to buy one, got one for less than the person who was the last person to

buy one. So it became like people who got an early dumping on people who got. later. But that didn't foster a community whatsoever because it was like, it made it like competitive. It made it like, oh, we're against each other in a sense. You're like literally trading against each other. So we priced them all at $200 to make sure that this was truly a club, like truly an egalitarian membership. So it didn't matter if you minted a gold ape or if you minted a floor ape, you know, it didn't matter. Your utility, your membership was the same. Yeah, the token was always supposed to represent like your entrance into this

club and like day one what the club was it was a like a digital space where you could play on this pixel board like we're talking about but we wanted to have open the possibility of like more and more stuff and then if you had just one ape then you got access to everything and it didn't matter if it was a good ape or you know cheap one or an expensive one they're all good eggs yeah they're all so when you did the mint how quickly did it go well so we we had a pre-sale that lasted a week and again as guard was saying And it basically flopped kind of flopped. Yeah, it was like 400 sold. We did everything we could to promote it as much as possible.

400 in a week? Yeah, four or 500, which, but the thing is back then, you either sold out like immediately where you kind of never did is what the feeling was. So, you know, it wasn't like 400 in a week. Oh, we did it. It was like, never happen. And so you got kind of despondent. I was like, shit, you know.

And I call you like really angry. No, we got to go. We got to go. You're ready to quit? I wasn't ready to quit. I was just like, fuck, like, what's happening? we're going to I didn't have anything.

Oh, how are you ready to quit though? A week in? No, well, this was after like three months of nonstop. Oh shit. You know,

working on this and, and, and it tweeted like a hundred people or anything we could do. And, you know, some of the early community members in particular were just so amazingly helpful. There's two in particular,

or three in particular that I recall that, you know, they had, you know, they knew some people in crypto and they, you know, they saw the vision

for what we were trying to build here and they, you know, hesitantly, you know, believed in what we were trying to do. And so they would reach out to people. And that, I think, moved the needle a little bit. But it really wasn't until... Yeah, what was the turning point?

The apes revealed, right? So, pre-sale, you didn't get to see what you had. It was kind of like... You owned one, but it was like... You didn't know which one it was. You couldn't empathize with it yet. It was just like, you own one of 10,000 apes. You didn't know, like, you know, it's this guy, actually.

And somehow that, that little magic part of, like, you know, basically, like, cracking it open and saying, like, oh, that one's mine and people can identify with that? How long was that, though? between the Reveal, the purchase and the reveal. It was just a week there. A week, and then the reveal, they sold out within, like, I think, four or six hours. Once they were revealed, it was flying up.

A madhouse. We flipped Uniswop at the time, which was, like, to us, mind-blowing. Oh, that's awesome. And, yeah, I mean, that was the moment when people saw the apes. It's kind of, like, the way I think about it is, like, I think some people, like, equate it to slot machines, and I don't think that's accurate. I think it's more like Toys R Us. You go, and there's, like, those machines where you get, like, the little characters or whatever,

And it's like you're, you know, you don't know which one you're going to get when you put in the quarter and spin it and see what you're going to get. I think that it's like a little sweat though. Like just in there, you're like, oh, I want to see this fucking guy. Yeah. Yeah. It's exciting. Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

So at the time, mutant apes kennel club, were they part of the roadmap yet or were they? We had a vision, not not the kennel club. The mutants were a vision for the end of the roadmap for sure. And we kind of knew what we were going to do there. And that took a long time to build it. We were like working on that throughout the pretty much. much from the, from the moment we sold out, I started working on mutants almost instantaneously with a couple amazing artists.

Yeah, we hit, like, if you go to the website in the back of like the inside of the bar, there was this mutant ape arcade machine that we put there. And it was just the idea of this like, I don't know, this metafictional, like, oh, there's this weird arcade machine. This is like magical machine that's going to do something to the apes. Like, you know, you got to kind of wait and see. And we really just wanted to blow people's minds with like how crazy different the art would be than the originals too.

So what mutant apes sold the other day for like three point. nine million or something? I think it was one of the mega meas. It was almost four million, yeah. It was like two days ago. A mutant ape did?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it was fucking dope. Yeah, it's a great megan. That one is so good. Yeah. Shout out Lovin's who is the artist behind that one. So you guys sell out on the board apes and you go right into mutant apes?

We start working on them, but it was like a huge project. Huge endeavor for us. But really there was a lot of like small things we did in between then where it was like, I think the first kind of moment was a month. It was a month later, we did our first merch drop. What was the floor at at that time, like a month later? You remember? I have no idea.

It was pretty steadily rising. I mean, there would be like little dips or whatever. But honestly, I'd be completely frank with you. We'd never look at the floor price, like, ever. Ever. I don't care. I just, like, it's not a part of like what we're doing this. Explain that reasoning.

I'm not trying to build something to increase its value. I'm just trying to include. Well, if I'm building something, it's not to raise the floor price of the thing. I'm literally just doing it because I want to. have fun. Well, if you like focus on that part of it, it's kind of a loser's game, I think. It's like you if you're focused on that, yeah, maybe you can make it go up for a little while, then it's going to just come

crashing down. So you've got to just think about like utility, the community, building everything else and that part will sort itself. Yeah, like the fun community, utility, those are the things that matter here. And I remember like really recently we had like a friend who's a founder in the space, reach out to us and he was like, I just don't know how to get the floor price of my project

to go up. I'm like, don't think about that. Go take mushrooms in the forest and think about something cool. You could do with the project instead. Like, why you're just such a new space of like you can do something weird with an NFT that hasn't been done before I think the space will reward that and so there's like a world of opportunity in terms of utility here I mean like

I feel like people like we just like open the door there like it's it's really endless yeah that we talk about that too it's beautiful that we could pretty much write our own rules did you guys have any like crazy reaction when you see one of the big first celebrities buy in and then there's just this domino effect yeah who is the first it was pretty crazy

I think like we had a few post Malone throughout that whole summer Post came way later, way later. I mean, like, honestly, Jimmy Fallon bought one. She was down on that was pretty wild. I think Steph Curry was... Steph Curry, that was the moment.

Yeah, that was the craziest. Oh, yeah. That was a big jump. He popped into our Discord for a moment. He was before post? He popped into the Discord. Yeah, I think Shaq did too. And those are those guys where I was like,

Shack's always yours. Oh, fuck. That's crazy. We've kind of made it. Like, this is like, this is real now on a whole other level, you know? There's a whole dog effect. What's Steph's username on Discord? I don't remember.

I don't remember. I think, you know, honestly, I think he just popped in there like just to say hi how crazy was the fucking discord yeah it was wild yeah that's insane our discord is so fun

that we were dropping mutants and so we weren't even like we were so focused on everything else and somebody just like was I was just started getting texts and I was what we're always like literally I think the last to know when a new celebrity joins too

it's you know it's go so viral though yeah I mean we've bought it we've got John's buddy John's very close friend Justin Bieber bought one well his was 1.2 million I remember how much you bought it for.

I love Beaver's Eight, the Lonely ape. Yeah. Well, that's what he, because people were, you know, give him a hard time, like, you've overpaid. Yeah, who cares? And I asked him about it. That's what he said. He said, he looked lonely.

You wanted that one. You know, it's like, yeah, NFT space can be weird. And the number, right? There's something there with the number for him that, like, it's, uh. Yeah, he just told me he looked lonely. He said, yeah, I feel like he looked sad and lonely and he needed a friend is what he told me. Yeah.

If he wants it, he gets it. Yeah, exactly right. It's like, he just, he wants the ape that he wants. Have any celebs try to finesse like a free ape off you guys? Well, we don't own any apes, right? I only own one ape, right? So it's all, like that was another thing that we like did kind of differently than other projects at the time. Like early on in NFTs like Cryptopunks and there's nothing, it's not to persmurch them at all.

This was just their model. You know, it was like, well, rather, you know, there weren't really like prominent marketplaces like OpenC at the time that we're charging like a, you could charge like a secondary percentage off. So every time a board ape gets sold, we take a small percent of that, right, on marketplaces, right? It's 2.5 percent on board apes to be close. clear. Another model in the early days was, okay, we could just withhold a bunch of them. And so those become assets for us if, you know, the price increases, right? We didn't do that. We thought like, well, no, for what we're doing, it doesn't make a lot of sense because we're trying to create this egalitarian club. We want as many club members as possible. You know, the only thing

that, like, really mattered to us, you know, since we didn't really think about floor price was the unique wallet holder account, right? So that, like, actually this was decentralized as much as possible, distributed as much as possible, I should say. Yeah, if you have 10,000 apes and 10,000 unique holders, like, that's the Grail, in our opinion, you know, which, you know, it's, we're, and so we have like double the unique wallets or maybe more than punks to this day. Yeah. So sometimes someone will come out, reach out to us and be like, hey, I want to get an ape, and I'm like, cool, go on the marketplace. Yeah. I saw some, there's some unique things that people are doing. There's like a band, right? Oh, yeah, yeah,

so that has nothing to do with you guys. Seth Green's now doing a TV show with his, uh, with his board ape, where he's playing the character, and I saw a trailer from VCon when he promoted it, and it was amazing looking. There's non-fungible films. It's another project that's kicking off. They're trying to, because, like, the cool thing about it, this is like, yeah, you can utilize the IP, and that's awesome. But then there's this whole other side of it, which is like, okay, if you start your own project in relationship to the IP, there's another project called, like, Jenkins the Valet, for instance, that, like, ended up raising, like, over $100 million from D.C.'s, And, like, they're basically creating, like, a platform for decentralized storytelling.

I don't think that's how much they're... Okay. I might not... Kingship is the one. Kingship with the Universal Music. We know that we're just, like, constantly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, she's, she's, uh, Celine Joshua is the one at Universal Music.

She's like, I think she's, uh, she joined the team a few years ago to run innovation. And now I think she's running Web 3 for Universal. And she's always the one. And she's the one, you know, I got to give her credit. Like, she's where the one that's been working with, like Snoop and Nick Adler a while I go to get them and like she goes to artists um you know her whole job she reports directly to the president of universal Lucian Grange so uh or the chairman and her whole job is like break innovation and that's why she's been all up she's all about apes so

yeah she's incredible and she's a killer i mean she's doing an amazing job yeah so she's one of and it's pretty nice to see someone like her like you know going in and because people think she's crazy right when she's talking about these things like you know like you know like you know Yeah, we should, you know, invest in million dollars in apes and, you know, like, I think it's, I think it's like, it's comparable to like, you know, people think it's crazy, like gamers in particular don't understand NFTs right now, I think, or like gamers like, you know, in the sense of like call of duty or whatever, they're like, you know, but that's completely going to change.

Like in all these industries, like people are going to understand the utility of this down the road, I think, because, you know, NFTs imply a lot of things, but one of it is ownership, right? It's like, if I'm playing a game, like, if you played an old, like, diiote, It's like, let's say that game no longer exists. Let's say, like, they turn off the switch. I see this on TikTok all the time. It's like the last days of an MMRP. And it's like, because the company just wasn't making enough money 14 years later and

they're just going to turn off the switch and that server's gone. And you see players who devoted like 14 years of their lives to a game, made friends, relationships, maybe met their spouse in the game. And suddenly it's like, nope, this is gone now. It's like, because there was no real ownership, right? I'm surprised. Or your inventory or your home that you built or anything. NFTs completely changed that model.

you look at like was it riot made uh four billion dollars last year two sorry two billion dollars last year selling cosmetics in league of legends um epic made four billion dollars selling cosmetics in fortnight all of that value goes in none of it's coming back out yeah it doesn't make sense right and it's like nfts completely changed that model i was going to say i'm kind of surprised you can't it'd be cool like in fortnight's a game where you could do it where you could play as your nfti i'm surprised you can't do that yet yeah why and so that's what we're building on other side our metaverse but i wouldn't get into that as well but i mean you know the idea here is like in our operability. It's like you should be and you should be able to like build an asset. Yeah.

You know, SDK, software developer and create your thing. And then if you want to play on it, they're great. If you want to take it somewhere else, great. Yeah, that's for a shit. When do you think technology will like connect like that where like someone can buy an NFT and then put their shirt on their character and I think it's actually, I think it's happening very quickly. Yeah. And I think the trick is I think a lot of major game companies are very interested in it. But it's hard like you're saying for a big incumbent company to start innovating on that level. And I think that's like, you know... When it does, it'll be huge, though.

That's where we come in. It's like we already have the hardcore NFT community that wants to see this that can understand the value proposition there. You know, and when Ubisoft or somebody likes that tries to start getting in NFTs, then there's like 20 Reddit threads that like with, you know, the NFTs are terrible and blah, blah,

and they don't quite understand the value proposition there. Whereas we do and we can kind of emanate out from that place of power and you get people interested in. You guys get a lot of big companies coming to you? Like, help us out? Yeah. Because we get it. I can't imagine what you guys get it. Yeah, we get a lot of inbound, yeah.

But especially you guys. You guys are like the leaders of the space. So it's like I could only imagine how many people were trying to get advice from you guys. Yeah. Again, we're working a lot. You know what I mean? We work like 12, 14 hour days often.

And I would say like 90% of our job right now is just to say no to people, frankly. It's a lesson. 90% of our jobs to grow the company. That's what I spend all my day. Okay. 90% of my job is saying no. Yeah. You got it.

You got to stay focused. One of the other things, though, going back to, like it, ownership is one thing you guys did differently with Cryptopunks was allowing the changing the IP ownership, right? And that kind of, that changed the game with Cryptopunks, which was their issue with apes going against apes first. Like, wait, I don't own the IP here. I'm buying ape. Then you guys change that up after your acquisition of Cryptopunks. Yeah, I mean, look, Matt and John, the creators of Cryptopunks, the guys from Larvalaps, they're absolutely genius. as visionaries, like, you know, to come up with that, with the model that they did at that time

is amazing. The reality is the markets have changed a bit. There's like new dynamics and things that like OpenC has introduced. And yeah, when we met with them and talked about the idea of us acquiring crypto punks for them, that was something that we would only have done it if we could do exactly what you said. We're, we're owning this thing, but at the same time making it a bit more decentralized now making it so anybody can own the IP of the you know has a license to use their punk in any commercial way that they want essentially why did why did you guys want to buy crypto punks and like me bits and stuff punks is like it's like the monaisa of like you know like early cave paintings of like nfts in our opinion it's like the first true iteration if like

you preserve the legacy of that thing into the future then it's it's good for the whole ecosystem and frankly it was like thinking about who else might own it. It was like that scared us a little bit. That scared us a little bit and so we were like let's... But why though? We don't, you know, if it gets really kitsy

or like they damage the brand it. The goal is to take over the world. Yeah, that's what I'm going to say. It's kind of interesting because you guys are kind of like you own what? Mutinapes, crypto punks. So you guys own like the biggest players? Yeah, we own the I think 5% of the entire. It comes from that though. I mean if the two guys own the biggest projects and the

space. We don't want to take any more market share from anybody else. The whole goal here is, how do we grow the pie? You know, 25% of the pie? Cool, let's grow the pie. How do we do that? There's a lot of work that needs to be done. Like, infrastructure-wise, it needs to be safer. It needs to be more secure. If my mom wanted to buy a board ape, you know, you could wait until the end of the world right now. She wouldn't be able to figure it out. Like, it's just not that easy yet. And so we can do that kind of work for these communities to kind of broaden things and open it up. exactly like we just want everybody to win and if we can make those kind of tools so everybody

has an easier time of it the better you guys also uh you guys raised money from indreason recently a lot right not just indreason but the big group but 150 million dollars yeah we raised it a four billion dollar that's a shit ton of money so uglabbs is worth four billion dollars currently at our last valuation yeah

and when was the LLC made on zoom so it was like a year and two months a year in a month a year in a month and it's worth four billion that's fucking ridiculous it was the largest seed round in human history I believe well for you know US seed round valuation I think

okay anyway another friend of mine holy shit that's crazy sits on the board yeah I love Chris yeah because we were talking to them earlier today like he's Chris old friend of mine I live we live in San Francisco together but kind of like what's the plan with that right because I mean with that kind of money

you guys are you guys got some shit up your sleeve right like you're building something you're building a lot Yeah. I mean, it's, I can't really speak too much on what we're building, but, you know, I can say that other side is a huge passion project here now. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's an incredibly ambitious project. Is there anything you could tell us about the goals for that?

I mean, it's just kind of like, hey, so what did you want to talk about? Well, I want to tell you about Wagovi. Yeah, Wagovi. What about it? On second thought, I might not be the right person to tell you. Oh, you're not? No, just ask your doctor about Wagovi. Yeah, ask for it by name.

Okay, so why did you bring me to the circus? Oh, I'm really into lion tamers. You know, with the chair and everything. Ask your doctor for Wagofi by name. Visit Wagovi.combe.com for savings. Exclusions may apply. Like we were saying earlier, like the idea of growing up and playing these, like, in these virtual worlds, like World War, these other things.

That was like the original Metaverse. It wasn't like kind of like what meta's going out there with. We're like, you're in a conference room and you have no legs and you're hanging out. or whatever. It was like, no, you're just like playing a game and you're meeting people that you would have deep relationships with for years. And if you can recreate some of those spaces but have more ownership of your assets within them, if there's decentralized ways for people to like contribute to them, like the best stuff that's come out of games in the past 20 years is a lot of it's like mods and stuff that comes from the ground up. And then those same

people are like, oh, smash subscribe to my YouTube or donate to my Patreon or whatever. There's no way for them to monetize that within the platform itself. They're just like asking for handouts for the good that they did. So blockchain offers like a more permissionless way to like align incentives, reward people for work they're doing on a platform rather than, you know, this Patreon model. And I think it'll disrupt a lot of things that are happening out there where like, you know, Apple takes 30% of everything that gets made on the app store, Roblox takes a ton, Minecraft takes a ton, Like, if you can be less greedy on that front and encourage more content, then the creators will flock there.

And your mode is just that this is where the party's at. So is the other side, do you think, like, the main focus right now? No, I think it's evenly distributed, frankly. It's kind of where everything comes together, though. It is. We have teams working on all the brands, and that's what we're really trying to do is, like, you know. So is it like, is it kind of like, it's like a metaverse, like a game and like a marketplace? Is that like the plan for it?

We're going to be building out of game on other side, but no, I would, I would view it more as a platform. As a platform. You can think of it like NFT roadblocks, but just that looks better. Right. Yeah, I always felt that depiction of like the Metaverse, like how they're showing it on like Facebook and all the viral things you see. Is like, is like, is that quite accurate to what like a Metaverse is? Yeah, like Metaverse comes from like, there was a novel, science-by novel called a Sci-Fi novel called Snow Crash. And it like, and then the other way that it became kind of popularized was from Ready Player 1.

I don't know if you guys read the book or saw the movie. And both of those visions were fairly dystopian, I think. And it was this idea that, like, you know, oh, we're going to exist in virtual worlds in the future, right? Like, that's like the next, that's like kind of the end point of the internet to one degree or another. And I do think that that is fairly the end point of the internet maybe, or at least the next evolution of it. But it doesn't have to be dystoping. It doesn't have to be weird. It doesn't have to be like we're sending our kids to, like, you know, online metaverse school and they're plugging in 15 years with neuralink or whatever.

are like, it doesn't have to be that. It could be something like, again, within the ethos of port apiocl, it could be egalitarian. It could be fun. It could be primarily a platform for experimentation in games. So we kind of have this sort of like moral obligation in the back of our heads that's like, okay, we can be at the forefront of this thing to one degree or another, taking what we learned from MMRPs and online communities and build something that helps shape what the metaverse becomes in the future, kind of like set the world.

ground rules here. It's like, no, no, no, we're not allowing, we're not going to say that a 40% rate on secondary sales is acceptable. We're saying, you know, something like more like 2.5 or 5% is acceptable and make the focus on fun rather than, you know, let's go, you know, live our entire lives digitally. That's so interesting. That shit's going to be huge. You guys own a bunch of land in the Metaverse already crazy? Yeah, yeah, that was part of the goal here is like this is a platform and so we want to be able to incentivize, frankly, other game companies, other people that are coming to us who want to build on this platform, like, how do we get them invested into it?

And so, unlike with BEO, I see, we did reserve more NFTs for this than... I think one of the biggest things and the toughest thing to overcome, because, like, you guys said you learned everything pretty much in the get-go from crypto Twitter. It's like, how do you educate normal people on this shit? I mean, I think it's part of this, right? It's like coming on podcasts, getting out there. I think it's like normalizing the space a little bit and sort of like helping people understand. You know, I mean, it's like, you know, I see every now and then like a very anti-NFT

person being like, oh, monkey jpegs or whatever in here and just like, okay. But like people think it's a scam, man. Yeah, I think it's a scam. I think it's a Ponzi or whatever. It's like come in, look at a little bit of what we're building. Look at the ecosystem. Look at the utility here. Look at the intellectual property and understand that like we're building something that's kind of never been done before.

Yeah. I think you got to like, there's got to be a way to kind of dumb it down for everybody. I think it's just going to be over time though. Like half our fan base, like I said, half of them will be like hardcore and they'll be like making fun of us because we're not asking you guys like more intelligent questions. And then half will be like, they just don't even get it at all.

So there's such a big gap, I find, just from talking to fans and meeting people. It's interesting, where I think over time is the way that everyone will just be educated on. I completely agree. I think gaming is going to be a big way that that happens. Like we're saying, like, you know, billions of dollars a year accrued these companies

for digital assets that people want to own that they're kind of renting and they don't actually truly own. Like, you know, like legal legends makes, like, yeah, a couple billion dollars a year off like Timo skins and shit. You think, like, for example, like, Call of Duty one day, like, let's say I buy, like, an NFT of, like, a flamethrower. Do you think one day, like, Calla Duty will let you, like, pull from the blockchain and bring that flamethrower into the game or something? I think it'll get to that level. Yeah, that be crazy.

I think there's, you know, there's a couple different things that NFTs would bring to that. Number one, if you buy a skin in Fortnite or something like that, you don't know how many are out there, and you can't really trade that. And that's an easy use case where it's, like, you would know off the bat, hey, there's only 5,000 of these. out in the world and I can trade it and I don't need anyone's permission to do that. It's not like if you like back in the day, you level up your character on World Warcraft is 60 and you get bored. You want to sell it. You go to eBay and you try and sell it and maybe they're like delete your eBay account or ban your World Warcraft account or you successfully sell it and then they ban that guy's account or whatever. Like there needs to, everywhere in business

in the world like things are tilting more in favor of users and this is a natural place where users can get more out of the things that they're buying on a platform. It's so crazy you see that too because there's definitely people out there that have spent 5, 10 grand on skins in Fortnite and nothing like in the metal universe. Like, you know what I mean? Right. Yeah, and they can't, you know, I don't think, you know, a lot of these platforms, they couldn't even

give it away to a friend if they wanted to be like, they can't trade. But they're willing to spend that on. That would be crazy if that happens. To answer your question directly, I think it's going to depend, like, the call of duty question. I think it depends on the platform that's built on, right? It's like, you can kind of see something like that potentially happening on Roblox, for instance. Although it's like, that's not going to have like the fidelity of call

of duty but on a platform such as other side right like you could build out a call of duty game theoretically on other side and have that level of interoperability that would be crazy yeah you guys know how many uh total unique wallets you have between all your projects oh i think we recently learned that i'm blanking but um 60 000 70 000 80 000 it's in that range yeah you guys got quite a community that's kind of crazy right like the community is amazing yeah Shout out to the whole Discord. They're, like, the best people in the world. You guys did merch that crushed.

I got mine. Are there any, like, unique concepts that people have with the apes that haven't hit yet that you guys have heard of or anything that? I mean, we've been seeing, like, cool stuff. I mean, like, everything. Yeah, alcohol. You know, alcohol. That you haven't seen yet. Like, you know, like.

Seth Green's shit is. TV shows. Yeah, it's really cool. You know, digital bands, like you were saying. You know, I think that's the burger shop in Long Beach. The burger shop. Like, the important part is that. like snoop what snoop it's a permissionless process

no one needs a permission they just need a and they can they can do it yeah it's kind of cool you get your ape and then it's up to you to do you're creative with it yeah yeah we don't want to be gatekeepers in that way and and that's where like the creativity lies um what's the initial goal when you guys drop like ape coin

that's part of ego labs is crypto punk's gonna drop a coin so that's born out of the ecosystem and yuga's like adopted it as something that we are you know the currency for everything that we're building but you know we're not in control of Apoin in any way. This is a Dow. This is a decentralized thing. We want to use Apecoin as the currency for other side for as many like in worlds, like real world and

also digital like things that we can do. It's just like the currency. I saw Gucci accepts it. Yeah. How weird is that? Yeah. Is that random? Are you guys like what the fuck like Gucci retailers except Apecoin? It's, it's sick. It's like step in the right direction though, I guess. Yeah. I know. Drives adoption. I think it's great. Yeah. What was the What was it that Tiffany did recently? So Tiffany, you know, did a drop of 250, like, necklaces, you know, like pendants, where if you owned a Cryptopunk, they'll make you, like, a bespoke custom, like, you know, Tiffany necklace with your punk. And they're like, these are, like, you know, gold and jewels. And, you know, it's Tiffany.

It's, like, high quality shit. Wow. And there's a limited addition of them. So it's like, it's really like an ultimate flag. And it's their first thing in the space. So it's like, how much? I think they sold were like 30th 30th 30th

Wow Not a total amount though 250 so it's like yeah I mean it was a 30 Eth you know what is that like 55K probably at the time that they did it But I mean for like a one of 250

personalized Tiffany pendant You know I mean it's like Tiffany sells things for $55,000 You get one of those automatically Not all in that no no no This was something that was offered exclusively to punk holders Got it but that goes back to what we're talking about earlier

It's pretty cool is the fact that That wasn't a co-lab that was something that they did with people who owned the IP. And they were able to do it because they changed that game with Cryptopunks allowing the holders to own the IP. That's right. To be clear, we didn't have anything to do with that. Like if we owned a Cryptopunk before

six months ago or a year ago, we wouldn't be able to, even if you bought it and you bought it for a million bucks, you weren't able to put it on beef jerky or alcohol. Oh, got it. And then when they changed their rules after their acquisition. Right, because of the way the IP is set up, and it's like any brand can come in and offer things exclusively to holders,

cryptographically. I mean, so you can cryptographically verify membership, right? So you can see it's easy. Got it. It's just trying to like push forward like the amount of innovation, creativity in the space, like just free things up a little bit more. So I like the physical stuff. Like I, you know, I mean, I mean, how much money do like the Simpsons do outside of the Simpsons with video games and merch and all that? My mom actually, my mom knows nothing about NFTs. But when I was telling her about apes once, she's like, oh, it's like the new Simpsons. It's like this generation Simpsons.

Like, oh shit. Yeah. I guess it's like that. Yeah. I mean, pop culturally, you know what I mean? Yeah. And pop cultured, it's, it is like today's generation Simpsons.

Yeah, when we first started, I remember like our chief creative officer Patrick was like, oh, it's like the new smiley face. That's how he saw it. Like, you know, like remember the 70s smiley face t-shirts that was like captured the cultural zeitgeist in that way. Yeah, the thing Forrest Gump came up with. Right. He came up with a smiley face.

Is that really? No, no, in the movie. Like, remember like there was like a splash on his t-shirt and made a smiley face. Oh, right. Yeah, Tom Hanks took credit for the Smiley Face. What do you guys think about like the, I know the whole market's down, but what do you think about the slight, like,

is there like a disinterest in NFTs as a whole right now? Or like, what's your thoughts on that? I think it's been like, you know, there's less, it's less crazy than it had been. But like, I don't know, we feel like we're doing great. You know, things are fine out there and that we can keep building. We, you know, like you said, we have a pretty big war chest from our raise. And we had a pretty big war chest from before then, too. Yeah, and so, like, you know, these things happen in cycles.

He was in a fucking massive war chest before, too, right? Yeah, we're a very profitable company. And so, but one of the reasons we raised, right, was we're thinking, like, because we'd been around in 2017, we'd seen what happens with these market cycles. And we're like, okay, let's ensure that we're, like, extraordinarily well capitalized and send a signal that, like, hey, we're going to be around no matter what happens. Three year, four year bear market, we're building, right? Like, we have the runway to last.

Yeah. That was very important to us. And then also, there was, like, just frankly, like, A16 is, like, an extraordinary strategic advisor you know i mean it's like these these vCs are some of them are like amazing to have on your side it's like a main office right now we have an office in new york but there really isn't central us we were born out of covid you know so we're really all over we have people in allay austin new york uh south america europe everywhere wow yeah so what does the future look like what's the next steps for board api club everything crypto punks is there anything in the works

i mean we just want to keep embracing all the things that that have, you know, been successful as it is. It's like more places where it's not just an NFT and it gives you access to in-world events, digital spaces, gaming interoperability, like giving more things for communities to play with and build on top of, you know, for BEO I see in particular,

I think like the merch stuff is like really key to the brand, the streetwear aspects to it. And we have a lot of like things that, some exciting stuff in the pipeline for that in particular. You guys do a collab with Adidas, right? We did. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How'd that go?

Oh, yeah. Dude, how did that come about? That came about very early on, too. Oh, that's what it was like... Super organically. I think they were just fans. They reached out. We had the Discord. It was like a year ago this time, I think, right?

It was all in 2020. So someone from Adidas hopped in the Discord, what they say? Yeah, we just got like DMs and they were like, oh, you know, that they were with Adidas and that they wanted to like work with us on a, you know, a metaverse project essentially. How crazy was that? Well, I think like the people who were behind that, this one guy, Ben in particular, he was just like an NFT fan. I think he'd owned a board. tape. And he was just like, this is really exciting. I'm going to take this to the higher

ups and show them what we can do here. And he came about it really organically, really like with the community in mind. And it was a super successful project because of that, right? Unlike like brands that sometimes come into the space and it's just like, it's just a cash grab. They're not really invest in ecosystem. Well, a lot of brands will want to just like take. You know, they'll be like, oh, you know, we're a big brand. We do physical products. But for our NFT thing, we're just going to do an NFT and they're not bringing their core competency into it at all. Whereas Adidas from the start was like, hey, you know, they're a, you know, athletic brand. They wanted to actually like make product and come at this authentically and like bring their expertise into it.

And so that's what we were like, okay, this is legit. Like, let's go. And it was more than us too. It was two other projects. Pixel ball and G money. Yeah. So they really just like we're like trying to showcase that's like, hey, we're doing this for the whole NFT community. I mean, to build a brand back quickly and do a collab with Adidas is pretty crazy.

Yeah, it was pretty wonderful. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, considering that like our first merch drop was boxed up. in Greg's mom's backyard last summer, just the four founders, because I was so dumb that I was like, no, we could just, like, ship it. We could do the fulfillment ourselves, guys. Like, this is no big deal. And I'm like, meanwhile, I'm, like, sweating fucking bricks. Like, this was the worst idea I ever had. That's how everybody starts, though. That's what it was. Like, there's, like,

great photos of us just, like, box. Because I couldn't even come inside because it was like during COVID, his mom wouldn't even let me inside. I was just like, we're just out, sweating. Sticky kids in the backyard. Sticky kids in the backyard box. You know, Twitter and Instagram, like, they haven't really gone to Web3 route. I mean, the most anyone, anyone, done is like Twitter created the octagon for profile pick like that's the are you guys fans of the octagon I feel like it's

kind of more sauce if you don't do the octagon yeah I don't do it personally but it's kind of like trying too hard I kind of like do like what I don't like about is they charge for it right like that to me was like why did you monetize that? Why didn't you roll this out just like for free? Yeah this wasn't like it felt like

it felt like a business decision rather than a community decision and that's what felt inauthentic to me Yeah, it is like, all right, who's got money? Yeah. It's like, oh, they're spending money on NFTs. Like, oh, they'll pay for it. And turns out they're like, it doesn't matter if you had a million dollar board ape.

It was just kind of like, yeah, fuck you. I'm not doing spending three bucks a month on that. Yeah, that's funny. Yeah, it didn't really go well with like the community, right? But you guys, it's something you have. I have to be grateful to Twitter, right? I mean, like, most of the ecosystem of crypto exists because of Twitter to large extent, from the perspective of community.

So, you know, they're trailblazers. I mean, it's an incredible platform. do I think that it could be better absolutely yeah well they got to get rid of the bots they have to get rid of the bots I get a lot of bots myself these days it's pretty wild but um but yeah that's something like you know web three I'm surprised like there hasn't been I know some people have tried I know some like former coinbase guys have left and tried I forgot the name of it guys are working on lens protocol which is like another like you know uh move on that on like a web what a web three like social platform like Twitter could look like too but uh yeah it feels like we're a little

bit of a way's way it's hard to like get that that startup like velocity of like you know these things only work because there's people on the platform and how do you get the first people well you guys could do it you guys have a community like you have tens of thousands of like diehards right like you guys i know and like we're gonna leave here and he's like let's go do that i know what was the one that's the java experience i mean you guys have someone that has the experience that's all you really need yeah it's all crown like just make us the new twitter dude yeah but even like and i want to you know because the new big buzz right now is like ens domains I want to kind of see what you guys think about that, too.

Because, again, that's something else, right? It could be .8 domains too, right? Like, I would get a .8 domain, you know? But what are your thoughts on, like, ENS domains right now? Because, I mean, they're just going through the roof right now. Yeah, I think it's very cool. Yeah, I mean, it's like, you know, it's kind of an NFD with innate utility. It's like, this is your domain.

In the same way, it's interesting, though, that, for example, in crypto, we all use, like, dotio and dot XYZ domains because, like, people are basically like, Now, fuck that. I'm not going to pay that exorbitant price for the dot com. And, like, I'm going to make my own community here. But, yeah, for a long time, the dot-eath has been, like, it's a status signal. And it's just also, like, easier if you're trying to send somebody, something, like, you can get to their mailbox that much easier.

It's also, like, in a certain sense, it's like the truest form of, like, digital land, you know. Yeah, so your little carving out your little spot. You guys talk about it, though, dot ape. I mean, is that something else that, you know, I could throw one, you know. No comment. Yeah, okay, cool. he's always just smiling the whole time you said so many things he just smiled well because i can bro these guys are geniuses and they could they could is that one thing you guys do is not like over promised

stuff and like kind of yeah i don't like i don't like setting expectations high yeah that's like i see that mistake happen a lot on in nfts a crypto in general just the internet in general we're like oh you know it's gonna be the biggest baddest thing ever floor price is gonna go through the roof and it's just like i don't do any of that shit i don't talk about i don't talk about price action yeah i don't talk about expectations you know it's like because someone's just got if it doesn't go that way someone's just going to screenshot you and send it back in your face. Yeah, like, we're always trying to be mindful of sort of like the cringe factor, you know,

and just like, we're more like, I don't know, trying to like foot ourselves sometimes than manage correct expectations because it's like, and that's why we can't talk about some things that we're working on because then people will get way too excited. Like the no comments and the smiles and they're going to think like, oh, they're doing this, this and this. It's like, that might be true. It might be not true. We have like a thousand ideas and we can only execute certain amount of them.

We have like 75 people, you know, it's like, and yeah, we're building and scaling the company as fast as possible that takes time like we're in exponential growth right now right i mean like it's hard to get in the right people and build a company i feel that i mean we go through that the same thing right when we're building we kind of don't really announce it until it's out yeah that's maybe tease it like with like i think with uh with this flavor like we were on a snoop episode and you know he was going to talk about dr bombay and we're like all right cool how do we connect we show them this oh when we did the snoop episode back in april we tease but at the same time like the other stuff that we're really building around our community it's like

just let us build it, you know, like no, no distractions, just tunnel vision. So that's the same mentality we have as well. Someone asked this the other day. It was like the funniest fucking question. They were like, when you released mutants, which was like, how much the mutants like ultimately go over? It was like $90 million or something? 70?

70 million dollars. And it was like, it was like the biggest thing we'd ever done at that point. And it was a very successful project and still is. And when we launched it, someone was like, we basically announced it saying the tweet was fuck it mutant saturday and someone was like oh how did you decide it like that was the time like how like how long before did you decide that that was going to be the day like how did you map that out on your roadmap and internally and we're like what do you mean and he's like well didn't you like come up with stats or data and we're like no no it was just like we knew we're done

so we said fuck it saturday yeah not everything's calculated yeah um i think we got some food from gecko dave grutman the owner has sent us thank you that course All right. Oh, wow. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. What type of aoli?

Oh, okay. What do you guys suggest as far as security? Yeah. Like, I hold all mine on ledgers. Hardware wallets, you know, everyone should have a ledger. You know, that's probably the easiest one for people to set up in particular for NFTs. Just the regular ledger, right? Like that regular thing is just called ledger.

You should never, you know, never, ever type your seat phrase into your computer. There's no reason to do that ever. don't do it write it down on a piece of paper or something if you're more sophisticated there's like these you know steel things that you can get it inscribed on all that kind of stuff um yeah and people need to act with like a lot of suspicion it's like anytime you're being asked to to connect your wallet that you should treat that the same as if like you're on you know chase or bank of america dot com and like going to be approving a wire transfer like you know it's giving access to assets in in some of these scenarios someone told me i don't remember if it was in new york or miami

that like there's like robbers that like hang out outside of like nfts crypto parties and they just know like someone's going to come out and they have their like metamass you know um or their coin base wallet they're like i transfer right now like it's happened jesus horrible yeah it's great it's great it's great i mean it's a wave it used to be a watch now it's a fucking Send me your NEPT. Yeah, send me your eight, right? Like, send me your eight. Way worth way more than a watch.

Yeah, that's good. Got some questions on ape coin. Obviously, it's doing very well. You know, I'm, you know, bear market. Didn't help, but it's picked back up recently. I think, like, the time of this interview is somewhere around $6.89, maybe $7. It's a lot of pressure. Like, with that, like, when it dips, like, do you look at that?

I know you don't look at floor price, but do you look at the price of $8.0. We're trying to play long-term, like, you know, here. we're for everything that we're doing we're just focused about building utility and and access making things safer everything will figure itself out what else like what do you think of when you think of a point like you know a lot of people hold it a lot of you know the price is doing well yeah yeah just kind of curious like what what do you what's the day look like when it when apcoin comes comes up i mean with everything that we do like the hustle comes from like how do we just build like that that's where like that's where we're focused like no we're not like

freaking out about price on anything but we are freaking out about how like hey we have all these things we want to build there's 75 people in the company that's not enough we need to be 120 by the end of the year we need people in for this that or the other thing like what is the next big you know how do we get more people on to other side as soon as possible we had 5,000 people 400 in the first trip how do we double that for the next one how do we you know get people building on top of it how do we introduce more ways for people to you know, transacting when we do a merch drop, how do we have, you know, be able to have people buy and sell things with Apecoin in an easy way and secure way?

Like talking to like teams that like say like, I don't know, Shopify or others to like integrate. We talk to everybody in trying to, you know, for our specific needs of like, you know, when we did we did a merch drop, when we were accepting Apecoin a few months ago and the platform that we were using for it, you know, the, the, that to accept Apecoin. kind of shit the bed immediately and you know some of these things

they'll work well for smaller you know of like a hundred people trying to use something in an hour but like when we did a merch drop it was you know thousands in like a minute we were trying

we were smashing this thing and some things aren't battle tested in that way and so like how do we just get the infrastructure and the tooling there so that it's important to what we're trying to do

yeah I think we should start accepting on our site Fulson.com yeah start accepting 8point let's go we'll reach out It's built on Shopify right now.

If they can't help us, we might reach out to you guys. I think helping you guys make that a utility would be pretty cool. I know a lot of our fans I've seen in our Discord. A lot of them are holders of 8-point. They're all believers. Yeah. It's awesome. Oh, yeah.

Something I'm kind of curious about, just kind of going back, is you guys stayed pretty quiet for a long time, right? About revealing yourselves behind the whole project? Well, yeah, I mean, what happened was... BuzzFeed, right? BuzzFeed, yeah. I worked with a pretty malicious. factor to dox us. And I think they were trying to come at it from the perspective of like,

oh, you know, we think these guys are nefarious and they couldn't find anything nefarious on us. So then they were like, well, no one's allowed to be anonymous around the business. Didn't mind that like all of our employees knew who were, all of our partners knew who we were. You know, let's dox them. And so right before they docks us, we're like, well, we'll put up a photo of ourselves, introduce ourselves to the community. Yeah. Was there any rationale behind like why you didn't want to like share like who were? I mean, I think it's just like kind of part of the crypto eco-ecos.

system just to, you know, launch projects using a pseudonym. It was just kind of built par for the course. Yeah, we always had an LLC. It's like not like, like somebody had an issue. There's a, there's a legal entity that someone could take it up with. So it wasn't like this. Yeah. And who's to say you have to be like public. I just ask because the internet makes it a big deal where they're like, I think journalists made it a big deal. But like the actual community like, I don't know. Is it really a big deal? Like, but anyway, people know who we are now and it's like, it's fine. And I'm like, honestly, it's become a blessing in a certain sense. That's what I was insane. Yeah. How's it changed? Well, I mean, like, because like, we think about like the

first ape fest where you threw like I was anonymous at eight fest no one knew who I was you know I'd walk around the crowd and no I knew like you know I'd help create this whole thing you know it was kind of like magically it's like thousands of people and I'm just like and sometimes I'd see people from the community I'd like tap their head and be like hey I'm Gordon you know we'd have a hug and talk or whatever but this last we were just I was out there like giving wristband like people thought I was an intern I was like yeah that was the job every day it was just like hustle for people and then this but then like okay flash forward to this Fest where we were like at Pure 17 maximum capacity four nights in a row, 4,000 people a night.

It couldn't even get everyone in every night because that's how high the demand was. And I walk outside of the area that I was hanging out in just to meet some people. And it was like a line for them to people just wanting to meet me. I'm just like four hours a night, just shaking hands, kissing babies, meeting the community, people who are like, you know, I've been dying to meet for the past year and a half, you know. It was amazing. It was like extraordinary. It felt a little bit like Mickey Mouse that too. Yeah, a little bit.

I don't know. It was fucking stoked. Like, I was fucking stoked because, like, the people who wanted to meet me almost entirely were people who were building in the space. They were utilizing the intellectual property. They were building their own projects. They wanted to talk.

They, you know, I gave them my email. It's like, let's shoot the shit. Let's talk about, you know. So I have a large back catalog of emails I need to still get through.

But, yeah, it was like, you know, a blessing and a curse in a certain sense, you know. Yeah. That's something we talked about the event that you guys through last year, but we didn't talk about the one this past June.

Yeah, it was wild. Yeah, it was like eminent. A dog, little baby, Eminem, Showcase the new video, which is, like, amazing. It was so good. Imagine going back, like, 15 years ago. Eminem bought one, yeah, damn.

Yeah. Imagine, like, telling yourself 15 years ago, like, Eminem's going to be at your company's event. Like, that's so crazy. It was so great. It was so good. And they did the music video. And it was Eminem and Snoop.

It was, you know. Yeah. I don't know if you've noticed, but they liked me to ask the hard-hitting ones. So, obviously, there's been those accusations and shit behind, like, oh, these guys are racist, white supremacists. all that stuff. How did that even come about and how do you respond to that?

Yeah. Yeah, it's been pretty crazy. I mean, like, you know, obviously with all the attention that's been brought to the NFT space, there's like opportunists that come into it as well. And something that we saw, you know, early last fall was when crypto punks were on top. That was like the project that everybody was reaching for. They had the highest floor of anything. It was like, you know, it's the OG community.

And a troll started, like, attacking that community and, you know, got behind this project, you know, formed this project called not Larva Labs, you know, punks were created by Larva Labs. This was not Larva Labs. They were going to take punks, you know, remint them facing the other way and just kind of like needle at these people and troll them and get attention. And what happened was once apes took over punks, you know, that attention of like, okay, who's on top? top, who do we got to take down, turn to us? And when somebody started minting an ape and facing it the other way, we're like, don't give them attention, like, just leave it B. Sure. And then, of course, like, the new opening was like, oh, what if we start up this conspiracy theory and that they're like secret neo-Nazis in this country? Because no one knew who we were.

We just were non-est people on the internet. So if you're really clever and you can do this shit, like, it can get attention. And what were they using as, like, evidence or, like, to push that narrative? It's like Alex Jones level shit. Like, he could turn, like, this can into, like, seven degrees of Hitler, basically. Like, seriously, it's like what we'll get down to. A journalist wrongfully put at one point that our project minted on April 30th as, like, the date, which is apparently, I guess, the date that, like, Hitler died. Which, no, I didn't know that neo-Nazi celebrate the day that Hitler died.

I don't think they actually do. It's, like, sounds like an okay day. But, like, that was, like, one of the things, you know, we have one of, like, one of four. of our logos, they were saying look like this Nazi logo that we've never seen before. Our logo looks like every fucking, like, it's a skull. It's like every other logo. And it's also like a like a really standard mock-up, right? Like it's like, like, basically like every motorcycle club patch in the history of the world basically has that similar lockup.

And it's like, and like I was looking the other day, like if you go to Whole Foods, you just like look at logos around your town or like when you go shopping, it's like, oh yeah, this is like a standard lockup, whatever. At the end of the day, you know, when you're as big. as you guys are. People are going to use your name. So is a target on your back? It's also just like the guy's a grifter, right? The guy's made like millions of dollars. Like that's the thing that like once people like understand it's like, oh wait, he's made

millions of dollars off this grift. Like he's like he's incentivized to spread a conspiracy. It's basically like a market. How did he has money? Because he creates knock off NFTs. That's what he did for crypto punks and create crypto funks. And he would board apioclo. He's a scammer.

He's a scammer. That's all it is. It's like the guy's literally, he brags about it. He's bragged about making millions of dollars off this shit. Right? And it's like, you can go into, you can find him, like, screenshots on his Discord. Yeah. Where he, like, talks about, he's like, oh, he wants us to sue him.

And it's like, it's like going to increase his cloud or whatever. It's all, like, fucking nonsense. Yeah, motherfucker doesn't even deserve attention. And it's like, point in case, by the way, like, you know, I was born a Jew, Cuban American. Are the two founders, Turkish American? And the other one's, Guademal and Pakistani. And it's just like, give me a fucking break. You know, it's like, like, neo-Nazis.

Like, get out of here. Yeah. It's just, like, ridiculous. You're just using your name. I mean, it happens. It goes with us, man. We get it to. Believe it or not, as much as people love us, people try to use our name all the time.

You and I could make a YouTube channel today talking about NELC boys suck. And this is why we'll get a couple hundred thousand views, you know, a million views. It's like, you know, just use the big guy's name and you're going to get views. And that's a sad thing about the other names now. Happy Dad and Board Aid. Yeah, they get a great title for somebody. Yeah. Happy Dad.

Happy Dad, Boardate, Milk Boys suck. And this is why. And they're going to get a couple hundred thousand views. The nice thing is here, it's actually, well, it's not nice. But the thing, the reality of the situations, it's of such a small percentage of people. Like, it's like, you got to be like below GED level of intelligence to read through his shit and be like, oh, like, you know, I actually believe it. Right? It's straight up.

He's like the Alex Jones of NFTs basically. Got it. And that's what it's become. Do you give a fuck? Not anymore, to be honest. Skydizzers no attention, honestly. You got enough on the biggest podcast, you know, on YouTube right now. Like, fuck that guy.

You got to come up, you know. Yeah. Well, sorry this guy brought it up. No, no, no. I don't know why. Like, all week long, I got to bring it up. Yeah. So a lot of more other things. There's a lot of other things

if I can talk about with these guys. Throw me under the bus right now. I gotta bring it up. I gotta bring it up. You guys know the vibe. He's like, I'm Jewish. I can bring it up. No, no.

But I appreciate it. But I mean, me personally from my advice, you know, I've been in this business for a very long time. Worked with a lot of different people. It'll go away. It'll go away. Don't give it attention. My personal advice.

Okay. Keep fucking building. Keep winning. The best way to shut up. Yeah. Just keep winning. Just win. Just win.

And I think you guys stay focused. That guy just wants to be a distraction. He wants to see you guys come down. But all the stuff that we talked about in the last hour and a half and tell Stani how to bring this shit up. You know, like all the other stuff you guys are building. You know, like people who are not, no one's going to remember about a stupid video on YouTube. Yeah.

You know, I watch like the first five minutes of it. I was like, all right. Like I get where this guy's going. Like. Yeah, when they got to the point where it was like, I don't even visit the video, but like, reached out to me. And they're like, what about the Hawaiian shirts in the collection? It's just like, what, have Hawaiian shirts been like canceled for everybody now?

because some dipshits wear them. It's like, I don't know, there's so many different variables in the collection, so it's weird to see somebody like pull something out. They're like, oh, yeah, the Hawaiian shirts. Wait, what are they saying about the Hawaiian shirts? Because, like, you know, like the fucking boogaloo, like those alt-right fucks who like wear them

and they're like, oh, I'm going out with my AR-15 because I'm a fucking idiot or whatever. Oh, yeah, I don't know. Hawaiian's like, okay, what about the like rainbow suspenders or like, I don't know. If he's hanging on Hawaiians, then you know he's just not cool, you know. I mean, that thing was a couple months ago. I think, to me, I even forgot about it.

You know, I really... Yeah, it doesn't pop up on our radar too much. I mean, it's like... You guys are building some shit, man. Like, let's do dot ape domains. Let's do platform. You know, but, you know, like the things that you guys are doing, man, it's like, it's been crazy. It's been like, it was crazy a year ago watching...

Because we never really wanted to be public people, you know? I mean, it's like, so now we're thrust into it. And it's like, okay, well, you know... But you guys are dope. Yeah, you guys are like... I mean, you guys are in showbook. is with you in an NFT space and pop culture and music you know you guys are on this show like you guys are you know and you guys are in showbiz you know and it's like this shit's going to happen and

you just have to ignore tunnel vision and just fucking keep doing what you're doing thank you man I appreciate that advice and yeah I appreciate the situation you know it's like when you become a public person because you've done something you know kind of incredible it's what we've been able to accomplish this past year the good and the bad is going to come you know it's like you know it's like uh what we say it's like you know it's you always got to pay the devil the 10% you know It's like every step up. I get that. Yeah.

I mean, dude, you guys are the new wave of American dream. Like, you were a publisher? What'd you do before this? Nothing. I was sick for like fucking 10 years. I was like, I was going to go to grad school. And I was like, oh, I'm in bed. And then like, this idiot fucking contacts me.

He's like, let's make an NFT. And I'm like, you have no idea what's in store. What's the relationship like with Guy O'Seri? Speaking of Goat. He's so incredible. He's the best partner we could have possibly asked for. We're on the phone with this guy hours every day, working on all kinds of things together. He's like probably the only person I've ever met in my life.

who will stay in the ring with me, ideating, beating up an idea until the, like, you know, wee hours in the morning. And I think you- Fuck you. I do that with you all the time. Oh, yeah. From the moment we sold out last year, BCs were knocking at the door. And like, I don't know, we didn't know shit about running a company, let it alone taking on venture capital. We knew it from like watching Silicon Valley, like the TV show and stuff.

We're like, no, these guys are going to find a way to screw us. Like, we got to just no, no, no, keep our heads down. And so when we got introduced a guy, we were. were, we were, like, suspicious, we're like, what's the deal here? I don't know. Like, this guy's got, you know, he manages red out chili peppers and Madonna and this stuff. Like, he's not going to have time for, for us, really, is he? But as we got to know him more and more, it just was like, oh, like, he's, you know, he, he was really part of this in, like, ideating, beating up ideas, like, you know, and he has an incredible, I think it's probably from working

with artists. He has an incredible, maybe like, bedside manner of, like, participating in the creative process. Yeah. But also, like, you just, at a certain point you'd be like, no, we're just doing this. And he's like, okay. He had to like earn his cred with us a little bit. I remember like the first time I met him, he was like, what are your favorite bands? And I was like, all right, bad brains and KRS won. They were like the first two bands I could think of him. One was like a old school hip hop artist. The other was like a DC hardcore band. He goes one second. He just gets on his phone. He starts scrolling through it. He shows him at like age 16 with Keras 1 in Brooklyn, like a photo

of them arm in arm. And I'm like, what the fuck? And then he's like, and then he's like, and then another one. And then he shows me a photo of him in HR, lead singer, bad brains. And he's a fucking he is like yeah i put them back together for the reunion tour and i was like okay yeah and i got off the phone and i was like yep like he's coming in the building yeah that's the one thing about guy you know there's a lot of music managers out there um he doesn't get fired you know like there's no i used to work with this person like it's everyone's like i've worked with him for a very very long time like people don't fire guy oh sir he's just like he's got he's like 30 year relationships and yeah that's incredible and it's a it's a testament to his character he's a truly good good good human

Yeah, the more people I meet, the more people have kind of the exact story that you have here, which is that, like, it's just a genuinely great person. Yeah. Anything changed for you guys with the lifestyle, all that? We bought pelotons, like, immediately. That was, like, the one thing. I know that sounds ridiculous, considering the pelotons? Yeah, like, you know, bicycles. Okay.

That's the biggest purchase? No, I mean, that was like the first thing. You guys were something juicy. I know that's not juicy, but that really was the first thing. You pulled up in Harari. I saw you. A what? Ferrari?

No, that was a little shit. I took an Uber. Uber, bro. Come on. I took an Uber, too, by the way. Ferrari's 90. Have you guys made any big purchases or anything like that? I know you got the modest. I was living in like a basically like a studio apartment before.

So I bought a new home. Yeah, we moved. But like I don't know. It took me a while to get to that though. Because again, like we work a lot. Yeah. This is like the first time out of the house I've been in a while, you know. I think like, yeah, like four or five months in,

we bought like Pelotons. That was the thing. And we're like, yeah, we're all going to get shape. We're going to be like on fucking calls, like just riding the bike. that's what we're doing and then like two weeks later it was like this is just like a coat rack you know yeah i saw this great line the other day that was like you know when i was poor i had all this time you know that i could have spent money you know uh but now that i'm not so poor i don't have much time to spend money so i really it's not really about you know what we're

buying it's just about like where our attention is and our attention is just like heads down constantly i think like uber eats is where i spend all my money mostly like it's just like smash that priority i brought it in fred sauna that was like oh bro game change I want to buy like a cold immersion tubs. Dude, I'm like kind of nerdy with like the alternative health stuff. Sonas. Yeah, it's every day. My girlfriend and I like, we're just like, he goes hard on the alternative health.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's huge. Nice. Congrats on the sauna. Thank you very much. Yeah, yeah. Awesome. I think we're good, right?

Yeah, we're good. Congratulations guys. This is amazing. Yeah. Congrats on all this. Thank you. Thank you. We need you guys to pick up Metacards yourselves.

Yeah. We're, we're, you know, we'll send you a link to that. you can find it on an Opency. Yeah. Yeah. But no, we appreciate it. I mean, we've been, we've been wanting to get them on for time.

Yeah. You guys have really inspired us. I appreciate everything you guys have done. It's awesome to just sit down. It's the best part of the podcast. Get to sit down with people like you and just learn. And it's awesome. Yeah, thank you guys.

Appreciate it. Thank you. All right. Yeah. All right, guys. Peace.