Julian Dorey Podcast - 😎 #94 - This Guy Built One Of The Best NFT Companies On The Planet | Giovanni Gussen

Episode Date: April 7, 2022

(***TIMESTAMPS in description below) ~ Giovanni Gussen is a founder and innovator. In 2021, Gio and prominent artist, Waheed Zai, co-founded Smilesss, one of the most successful NFT companies on the planet called earth. Zai’s incredible portfolio includes collaborations with Supreme, Complex, and the great Pooh Shiesty (among others). ***TIMESTAMPS*** 0:00 - Intro; Gio tries to remember SXSW, Gio was a Clubhouse fiend; Smilesss Co-Founder Waheed Zai’s backstory; Gio & Julian talk Bored Ape Yacht Club 25:10 - NFTs and use-case in the metaverse; The concept of value in NFTs; Smilesss’ partnership with eFuse; How many metaverses can there be? 36:07 - The Pooh Shiesty Album Cover that got Waheed on the map; Why Smilesss launched a collection (Smilesssvrs); Reflecting on where we are since the last time Gio was in for a podcast (Ep 34); Everything that goes into an NFT Collection launch 1:03:40 - What Smilesss did post-launch to get rolling; The Verifried Drop; Gas problems; UI, UX, and simplicity in crypto; Smilesss partnership with Coinbase; Why fashion is ubiquitous 1:24:00 - Dealing with different cultures around the world in the modern internet business world; Biden’s executive order on Crypto; The problems with CBDC’s and centralization; The metaverse vs the Physical world; Haptics; Gio brings up Elon Musk & Neuralink; Shaan Puri’s theory on the metaverse; How Gio sees Smilesss in the Web3 world; Gio recalls the Discord hack; The earliest effects of Artificial Intelligence (AI) 1:49:10 - Gio’s recent trip to Miami to meet with the big VC’s; Remembering the Great ICO Crisis of 2018; The balance of building in front of the community vs. innovating; Gio talks more about South BY Southwest;  the shooting that was not Smilesss fault; Who is Smilesss looking to partner with  right now? 2:08:24 - Smilesss the next Supreme in the metaverse?; Fashion and the IG era; Gio and Julian bring up the Metaverse vs Physical world conundrum again; “You have to have bad to know what good is”; Twitter hacks are a disaster right now 2:28:13 - The problem with over-anonymity in crypto; Gio talks about other projects he likes; Smilesss’ TV Show Development deal with Time; Gio & Waheed’s creative relationship; What makes Smilesss different 2:46:24 - Has Gio pinched himself yet?; Leverage; Tai Lopez’s rug ~ YouTube EPISODES & CLIPS: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0A-v_DL-h76F75xik8h03Q ~ PRIVADO VPN FOR $4.99/Month: https://privadovpn.com/trendifier/#a_aid=Julian   Get $150 Off The Eight Sleep Pod Pro Mattress / Mattress Cover (USING CODE: “TRENDIFIER”): https://eight-sleep.ioym.net/trendifier Julian's Instagram: Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As much as the metaverse exists and all the stuff that we're doing in there, I still live in the physical world. I still want to do shit in the physical world. I still want to go outside, toss the baseball with my dog. I still want to smell and see grass, you know? So it's like, it's interesting though, because you could also compare that to like realistically anything, like the nuclear bomb.

If all it takes is one wrong scientist to, you know, yeah, shut up, to get it in the wrong hands and do something horrible with it. So it's like, at the end of the day, as scary as it is, you're investing in the people to hopefully do right with the new technology that's getting spun out. What's cooking, everybody? If you are on YouTube right now, please hit that subscribe button. Hit that like button on the video. And as always, if you have a second, we'd love to see you drop a comment down in the video comments section as well. To everyone who has been sharing the links to these episodes, I say it every week, but I will keep saying it because it's enormous.

Thank you. That is the best thing we can do. It's word of mouth to spread the news of the show. And I really, really appreciate all of you. So let's keep that rolling. To everyone who is listening on Apple and Spotify right now, thank you for checking out the show there. If you haven't already, be sure to hit the follow button on either one of those platforms and leave a five-star review if you have a second. And I look forward to seeing you guys again for future episodes.

Now, I am joined in the bunker today by my very good friend mr geo gussin geo is a guy who's on this podcast very early on i think it was number 34 and we filmed that at the very end of january 2021 and there was about 10 minutes in there where he talked about something he had been looking at heavily for the past few months called nfts and what do you know that craze was really starting right around then and here we are 15 months later and now geo along with waheed zai is the co-founder of one of the biggest nft projects in the world the smiles verse so if you haven't heard of smiles verse you're going to hear about that today you're going to hear about some of the story of how it happened, all the things Gio can talk about

with it, if you know what I mean. And it was just, look, for me, sitting here with a very good friend and watching him do this over the past 15 months and then getting to track it on this podcast, it doesn't get any better than that. So I love doing this. I also really, really appreciate Gio doing this because he had literally just gotten off a flight he had been flying around for like the past three four weeks he was exhausted had to go out of town again and we had to get this in right before he did so he made it work wasn't even in a talking mood and did a really good job so really really enjoyed the episode really appreciate my homie coming through to make sure we got this done. And I hope you guys enjoy hearing all about Smiles Verse and what happened.

So that said, you know what it is. I'm Julian Dory and this is Trendfire. Let's go. This is one of the great questions in our culture. Where is the nuance? You're giving opinions and calling them facts. You feel me? Everyone understands this. But few seem to do it.

If you don't like the status quo, start asking questions. Do you like anything that stood out? Is the world ending from some sort of android that people are creating and going to unleash on the human race? Like what's the story? Honestly, I didn't really go to the events. I just went to all the NFT stuff.

Thank you, sir. Not bad. Who was down there with the NFTs? Cool Cats did something with like a pizza shop and then a couple other things, I believe. Doodles had like an insane thing going on. It was like a whole, they branded like a whole building honestly i didn't go to it but it was the videos looked up like inside they had a lot of cool activations did something with shopify but it was cool so was that like digital physical world type deal

where you bought cheers my brother for coming in but was that like digital physical world stuff where you buy something digitally but you're there at the event? Oh, this one's good. Right? Oh, yeah. Chris Jessopini brought that. Yeah, that one's good. Phenomenal. That one's good.

Phenomenal. It was a lot of physical, digital stuff. For us, we leaned into the physical. Obviously, we showcased like our NFTs and stuff like that. But for the most part, it was our first time like connecting with the communities because it was our first irl event irl in real life in real life we got to speak to everyone here you know what i mean i know i know a couple of the lingo words but we gotta we gotta keep it real for everyone who has no idea but you know it's interesting having you in here because you and i are really tight and we got tight after meeting through this podcast, which was really cool.

But that was, I think we filmed that like 10 days before we dropped it. So it was like the very end of January. I remember the Robin Hood shit was going down. And where you were, you were still on the venture capital side. But there was a good maybe 10 minutes in there where you started really talking about nfts and this is like when nfts were still not like that was really february 2021 when people start talking about a lot but you were all over this a few months before and you're like yo this is the shit to invest in not just like on an individual basis but like this is how brands are gonna basically like interact with their with their customers in

the future and so cole cannelli had been in here a couple weeks maybe like a month before you he had said something he's obviously deep into it and i was like okay this is this is some crazy shit like let's look at this and then boom here we go so now we are what like 15 months later 14 months later something like that and you are in a very short time that feels like a long time you are the co-founder of let's call it what it is one of the biggest nft projects in the world legit shit it's been a wild ride it's been 14 15 months that is crazy i know it feels like three months in a way it does but in another way it also feels like a lifetime years like it flew by but think about all this shit like i'm not even talking from my

end i'm talking like on you right now like think about all the shit you've done especially since we'll get into that like how that all happened but like since finding why he didn't connect with him in march that was like march 15th or something so like a year that's fucking crazy look at this it's been a roller coaster yeah an extreme roller coaster but an exciting one yeah i mean look this is like i think the big takeaway i had from that conversation where i was listening to it back editing that we had was like we were in different lanes and so to speak but we were both we had been knocking on the door for a long time I wanted to burst that thing down and now you have so we're just

getting started exactly so let's let's start from the beginning here so I want to tell this story and I want you to tell this story excuse me but why he'd say how'd you find him? My brother. You were involved in that process in the beginning. I wasn't going to say that, but yeah, you can bring it right in. You were involved in that process in the beginning. So it all started on this little old app, which I think last episode we talked in nausea about. R.I.P. Clubhouse. So I was just bouncing around all these rooms.

This clubhouse was so interesting. Totally different world. I'm not used to voice. I did like Instagram stories a little bit a while back, but like honestly it wasn't me. Took me down a little rabbit hole. I didn't want to go down, so I stopped doing them. So I wasn't really used to like voice,

and we were just doing Twitter, Instagram, the normal stuff. So we hopped on clubhouse, and it was just so interesting because each room was so different. And you were just meeting so many different people. What kind of rooms were you going into? I mean, at the time, it was always like startup rooms, venture capital rooms, that type of stuff. Always trying to wedge in. Something else in there too?

So you're hosting the family barbecue this week. But everyone knows your brother is the grill guy, and it's highly likely he'll be backseat barbecuing all night. So be it. Impress even the toughest of critics with freshly prepared Canadian barbecue favorites from Sobeys. Clubhouse is dead, right? Clubhouse is dead? Yeah, it's dead.

Clubhouse is dead. You can talk about that shit now. No. Sometimes I'll be going in, like, I'd be, like, hopping in to see if there's, like, any cool rooms going on at, like, 1 a.m. and there's one room, like, five chances to fuck me. No, that's bullshit. That's bullshit. That's bullshit.

All the people that we were joining clubhouse rooms, listen, I gotta defend myself here for the people. All these rooms we were hopping in at clubhouse, every other person that i was with nightly hopped in these rooms and i'm gonna put i'm not gonna put this kid on blast one of our mutual friends used to tag along as well ah shout out to the kid but uh yeah full circle here a lot of startup rooms a lot of venture capital rooms and then i started seeing these NFT rooms. Like, what the hell is going on? And then kind of around the NFT rooms was always art rooms.

So I saw Wahid in some of these rooms that I was going into. Like artists who were creating. Yeah, artists who were creating, yeah. And I saw Wahid in one of these rooms, and then we stumbled upon his Instagram page. And then I started talking to him a little bit and asked if he wanted to join a clubhouse room that I was doing. And I leaned into you because the podcasting is your world.

I'm not a good interviewer at the end of the day. So I brought you in. And then we ended up hosting that room with him. You're better than you think. You just think about it too much when you have to do it. I do. I do. But I like that.

Yeah, yeah, whatever. But we started doing that. And we had an amazing room checked out his work but like the beautiful part of it was he's a he was a really young kid at the time what was it he was 20 21 yeah maybe 19 yeah i think he was 20 yeah probably 20 or 21 he's only a year older now like let's add that in true but he was just like very wise for his age which when i was his age i was you know a shit storm um and he was just a really genuine dude and authentic which those people are hard to come by so i try to keep those people tight to me so we just kept talking and talking after we did the room uh and then he became honestly my brother and then ended up helping him mint his first few NFTs, getting him started.

I'm going to put that in the corner of the screen, by the way, for people watching. They got to see that original one. Holy shit. It's beautiful. Tell people what that was. So, well, there was two. There was the picture of Lil Durk and Young Thug that kind of went viral for a little bit and got a lot of eyes on him. That's that meme.

The famous meme where he's looking in the looking in the screen yep and then it snowballed into his genesis peach that a lot of people probably that are privy to the space know um and yeah we just started doing like two or three which one was the genesis again it's the one where the all smiles character is like jumping and grabbing a skateboard yes kind of kickflip i'll stick that in the corner too for people that that are just listening right now and can't see the art and can kind of kickflip. I'll stick that in the corner too. For people that are just listening right now and can't see the art and can kind of know what it is while they're looking at it, if they're watching on YouTube, you know, the thing about Waheed is he had this weird,

like, stretch to reality where it's almost like Pixar, but new school, sleeker, more cultured and the the shaping of the characters is his own thing like it's it's fucking it's genius his art is is genius you knew it was genius the second you looked at it i knew it was anyone who looked at it knew it was genius like people know good art and it's just to see where it is now which we'll get to how all that came to be like you look at the early pieces it's the same shit like he was there he was already arrived yep well the thing with him is there's a story and that's honestly what i think separates us a good bit is the story that gets told through his art anything that we do at the end of the day we were even talking yesterday

kind of some alpha for the people in the audience the events that we're going to do in the future it's all going to be like storytelling because yeah we'll have like a huge rager with music and artists coming through and stuff like that but we want to curate an experience at the end of the day and that's what i think is going to always going to separate us in some capacities we're leading with the story and the art what do you mean curate an experience if you follow why he dart he tells stories he does acts right like act one act two act three yeah and the whole storyline is related in each piece it's about his experiences it's about the people that he's engaged with across the way like anyone who's helped him and and had an impact in his life so we want to continue to tell kind of different stories that

aren't necessarily his life or my life or any of ours but just expanding on our collection which is culture fashion music hip-hop art such an interesting guy man i mean i can't wait to get him in here to sit down and start from square a with him to go through it that'll be an amazing podcast it is he's got a story you know he he's from for people out there who aren't familiar with him he's from afghanistan he left at what like age 16 15 15 okay so he grew up there obviously we didn't do a very good job over there after about 2002 so it's it's the the country is now under Taliban control. It wasn't at that point, but it had not been a total successful turnover. So it's still a turmoil-ridden place due to some people over there, certain extremists, things like that. But comes to America, and Kidd just has a knack for creating shit.

And what's amazing about him is I love people who have a lot of culture to him you know he i mean he he's like he's like a hip-hop head who's got like it's very hard to explain but he's got like a he's got like an edge to him and he keeps his own culture within everything that he puts out with that it's this unbelievable marriage that if you didn't know who he was, you wouldn't even be able to tell that. You just know what you're looking at. And the way he also expresses himself is different. It's real. That's the difference. It's real. And we talk about it all the time. Even in the NFT space and what we're trying to do with the company, we're not trying to follow any specific path. You know the Bored Apes, you know the Punks, you know this, you know that.

But we're different. We have art at the end of the day like i said we have a story to tell so outside of just the things that we offer and give access to as being a holder we're leading with the art the art is telling us stories which it's real it's culture it's people at the end of the day which i feel like is lost in the space a little bit before we go like maybe this is a good spot like before we go down to the timeline of how smiles verse came together and and where this all is right now can we go back to like the year 2021 itself with the development of nfts and how it changed because my podcast with mitch was one that a lot of people really liked because he broke down a lot of the marketplace and took people into every day like what shit what might be shit what's probably shit and then what actually is good and also was able

to bring it back to like you know this space regardless of all the people running into it this is the key to the whatever the next era is here so i think now we're looking at it from i think i know now we're looking at it from the end of someone who's building a company within there right you're on a different part of the business and you've you officially like launched this thing i guess like end of summer started to announce it and put it out there like smiles verse end of summer 2021 but ahead of building that what i saw from the outside you were in this every single day so this is why i want you to expand upon what i saw is the initial nft rush that was very much driven by clubhouse by the way which is kind of funny now but the initial nft rush of like late january especially febru March was all like, oh, celebrities dropping X. Right.

Not that that doesn't still happen. It does. We see it a lot. But it's not as widespread as it was at the beginning. And it's not like those are the projects that rule. The projects that rule, the best example probably is is board api club yep and so maybe a good place to start would be talking to everyone about how board api club came to be who's behind it like what the project is and why it's important and why it's also like now becoming this huge center of culture so three

things with this yeah one talk about later they just announced the fundraising round of 450 million at a four4 billion valuation. Wait, I didn't even see that. Today, right before this. Holy shit. Yep. Second thing, I will premise this episode by saying I am not a collector. I am a builder in this space.

So most projects that happen and pop up, I don't even know about half the time unless they get on my radar through like the team or through the space through twitter and stuff because you know in my opinion there's there's so many different niches right now so many people are trying to figure it out that does not necessarily a direct competitor do so i'm kind of just i'm focused on what we're doing and building yes but full circle here board apes ultimately were like the first mainstream project that got any traction. And by project, I mean generative project, which is in most cases like 5,000, 6,000, 10,000 NFTs within a drop. And that in this case, and for a lot of them, they're all personalized NFTs. So they're all different.

Randomly generated. In a lot of them. So a computer basically, when you go to click mint, you don't know what NFT you're getting until it reveals. all personalized nft so they're all different randomly generated in a lot of them so computer basically when you go to click mint you don't know what nft you're getting until it reveals and even the you know the project founders also don't know what nft you're getting and just to review for basics again for people who didn't listen to the one with mitch or aren't as familiar with this and you know i think an important thing is simplifying this stuff to bring it out so that everyone can kind of feel for what it is but there's the way they work is to rarity through traits so in this case port api club i'll put a

picture of that in the corner so people can look the main character's an ape it comes on the same you know square of a picture that's a digital representation only that you buy on the blockchain because each one is a one-of of one and you own it and each one has different things on that ape so it can be the simplest thing ever where it's got a trait that some type of hat that's worn on the most different apes throughout the whole collection or it could be you know like what's a really rare trait some of the apes like a gold skin yeah exactly so it could have like gold skin and therefore maybe there some of the apes have like a gold skin yeah exactly so it could have like gold skin and therefore maybe there's only i don't know like 30 apes like that or

something like that so therefore higher lower supply higher demand basics of economics those are the ones that tend to quote unquote sell for more typically yes um and the board apes kind of like i said they were the first project that kind of got mainstream and actually was doing things but the ironic part with the board apes is you know right now in this market when a project drops you see they'll sell out in 30 seconds a couple minutes in the entire collection board apes when they minted if you look across the past three four years we have finally started to put a focus on the sleep aspect of our health it's always been something talked about because everyone has to sleep but there hasn't been like a lot of like crazy tech science going behind it i mean there was like sleep number and tempur-pedic but who the fuck wants to sleep

on that until our friends over at eight sleep came into the business see the silicon valley now miami eight sleep company is the first real tech company to do mattresses rather than mattress companies trying to do tech. What happens is they have this product. What happens is – why the fuck did I say it like that? We'll still go with it. They have a product called the Eight Sleep Pod Pro Cover, which is what I use every single night. It comes in queen or king sizes. It goes right on top of your current mattress, and it optimizes your sleep stages around you.

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that's very, very important. You have to use trendifier where it says like promo code, T-R-E-N-D-I-F-I-E-R. Use that code to check out and you will get $150 off your own Eight Sleep Pod Pro cover today. And if you want to just get the full mattress, which is the same product, but it also comes with an actual mattress, you get the Eight Sleep Pod Pro mattress and you get $150 off that as well using code TRENDAFIRE at checkout. So get some better sleep, get some more energy, check out Eight Sleep. You're going to love it. Talk to you guys next week. It was like a week or so before they sold out. There was clubhouse rooms about them, which ultimately I think that was the big push that got them to sell out,

was the clubhouse rooms are filled with a lot think that was the big push that got them to sell out was the clubhouse rooms are filled with like a lot of people and everyone on stage was buying them and i didn't take anyone's advice and i didn't buy it myself so that's why i'm not a trader here people i didn't sell it like mitch you sold it for like an eth or something like that poor guy but they when they announced it this is what I'm not even sure about. Because when I've looked at all the stuff, like reading some of the great articles that like long pieces have been written on them, just from like a culture perspective, you see everything they're doing now. But when they announced and we're just doing these clubhouse rooms, what was the utility they were offering? So that you own, quote quote unquote you own this nft therefore here's what you get access to so with them they ended up dropping a board ape kennel

club which is a companion to the main collection and it was a dog and the traits some of them mirrored the original collection and then some of them had new ones as well and that was it at the time yeah but now it's been you know they were first project, so they've had some time to grow. A lot of funding, a lot of trading volume to add additional funding, and just a lot of big celebrities are now involved. So it's almost like I compared it the other day. I almost compared it to like a Soho house. That's your membership into now like that exclusive club. And that's what they ended up maximizing.

Or maximal. Maximizingizing words are hard right now but it became this center of hip-hop and culture with apes which is kind of funny like it's some random like drawing but it suddenly becomes this bigger collective for like something important in society i guess and now people have access like holders it ended up as you said getting towards celebrities but people have access to go to their exclusive clubs their exclusive events in person online you know mixing the physical and digital and also it's become a it's like a simplicity brand statement like they have fashion brands that go with it they're simple like black and white space type shirts brand statement like they have fashion brands that go with it that are

simple like black and white space type shirts that i think they have other colors too but a lot of simplicity type designs and it's like it's almost like they are forming their own offshoot of like supreme in the metaverse like that's kind of their vision with it, like the vibes I get from it. I don't know what you think. I think they're just trying to, in a way, be the ones that are at the forefront of IP. Because recently they acquired the CryptoPunks from Larva Labs, which is the original creator of CryptoPunks. That's a huge project collection. But a big thing with the CryptoPunksks was if you owned one you didn't get full rights to the ip so you can only do so much to it what the board apes did they gave you full rights

to the ip of your ape so now there's a lot of people creating businesses and doing a lot of interesting things with the ape so board apes yuga labs technically which is the parent company of board apes purchased crypto punks and then gave away the ip rights to that you just mentioned that i want to look this up there was a guy there was a guy who bought a board ape and it was a really simple one like it wasn't it didn't have rare traits but i was on the twitter account a couple weeks ago i don't know if i could pull it out but he named it something and started his own social accounts with it i guess because he owns the ip of owning the ape and now it's it's a very it's a very sought after ape because he created like this being exactly which is really

kind of it sounds like almost stupid when you think about it because it's like well it's just one of the apes so you could go buy one that has a better you know rarity to it it should be worth more but no this one's like a character i'm blanking on what the name is of it but there's a couple of maybe like jenkins valet jenkins that's it yeah so there's this interesting though because they have a whole writer's room and everything so now it's like the community involved in jenkins valet is involved in creating stories around this and around kind of themes in the space utilizing this hate and what kinds of stories are we talking like things that they want to make a tv show out of uh potentially honestly yeah because they did raise at the end of the day funding from from the sales of the nft so they do have capital which is mainly decided by the people

i believe um but they do some interesting things i'm still having trouble like conceptualizing this part of it which one like how we're basically buying these masks up in digital space to say that like you own the only one you know like you see all those people who are like never looked at an nft in their life and they post the funny memes of like someone trying to block their picture like as someone's like taking a picture of their ft like no you can't take a picture of that and they're like oh yeah it's so hard to protect but you don't really what was the one example someone gave maybe mitch gave it but it's like you can look at a lamborghini

you can sit next to it even but you don't fucking own it and it's it's supposed to be the same thing with this it's just something about the disconnect of people not seeing the metaverse yet because it's not technically like a huge thing at this point it's not where everyone's going all day so they they're not seeing it in practice and it's very hard to conceptualize like why that's going to be important the one thing you could conceptualize right now is like if you own one the access you get to like social events and stuff or online or in person yep well also too like for a comparison standpoint it's almost like a picasso right in the museum and you try to buy a picasso it's millions of dollars we could also

go to say a target or something and buy a print of a picasso you own it but it's not the real one right which is very similar in this space and i think the difference playing the devil's advocate of the people out there who are like what the the difference they look at it is the real picasso you can touch it right it had his hand well the brush his hand probably smudged at some point too like it touched the actual whatever the canvas that he was painting on sure and like those were his strokes whereas anything that was created after that it was just reproduced I guess like when I think it, maybe this is me just trying to qualify it, but I think this makes a lot of sense. When Waheed makes an NFT, he's making it on his computer.

Now, instead of a paintbrush, he's got a mouse, right? And he's clicking around. He's doing this whole thing there. that uploads and exports and uploads the file to the internet for people to buy. Now, if someone wants to like take a screenshot of it, they don't have the one that his mouse in this case touched. It really is the same thing if you boil it down that way. For sure. But it's also like that's – it only makes sense that that's the next step because when I grew up, I didn't have a phone in my hand.

As soon as someone's born today they have every form of technology at their disposal everything's digital so it only makes sense that art is the next medium for that yeah i mean we should have seen it with the video games easily yeah for sure which full circle nfts now yeah i mean what's it fortnight that's pretty much accidentally where nfts were created you could say in forms yeah yeah yeah but it's going to be interesting to see because we have a partnership with a gaming production company efuse and we're kind of working with publishers now to figure out which games we can actually do because at the end of the day we are an nft company and a lot of

these big gaming publishers have really given a public stance on nfts yet or what their thoughts are around it so they're kind of staying away right now and there's been some projects that have popped up that were gaming focused that ended up not doing well and kind of under exceeding expectations um so they kind of got earning gaining gaming stuff well a lot of them are doing well but i'm not going to single out any projects specifically but there's been one of recent that caused a lot of issues um and gaming publishers took notice to that so now they're taking kind of a step back and instead of diving in at first but when the publishers who are doing it are you saying that it's not you're just talking about their own existing new games that these projects are looking to create versus publishers integrating these NFTs into existing games?

It's kind of both. um we're gonna have holders only tournaments in our discord and then if you end up winning that you get an opportunity to play against uh pro gamers or streamers in a live stream tournament on twitch but with those we're not playing any blockchain games we're gonna play our first ones with halo so like we're trying to do nba 2k and games like that are all these things gonna go blockchain though as well like integrate that like isn't halo going to have to if the world moves there they're going to have to integrate accepting i mean i don't know i'm trying to visualize this a little bit but they're going to have to integrate accepting outside nfts into their universe so to speak yeah for sure especially because the board apes are going to come out with their own metaverse and they drop the token i think last

week and that token is going to basically be the currency that's exchanged within their game. So it's only a matter of time for the most of them but So they're building their own metaverse. Yeah.

I didn't see that. Been a lot of moves the past like week and a half. When they say they're building their own metaverse though is that their own community

within a larger metaverse or is that quite literally their own community within a larger metaverse? Or is that quite literally their own place where only they can go or people they invite? I believe it's going to be like people they invite and other projects that they collab with. Because the teaser video they put out included other projects. My only thing when I'm trying to figure out where that ends up that constantly gives me pause is large community and scale, right? So look at Facebook back when they disrupted and basically like started the social media craze. Everybody went there.

Someone else – I don't know if they did. They probably didn't. But someone else hypothetically could have created a site right after facebook that was even better right i guess you could say instagram did in a way right but let's just say like in 2007 right and they could have taken market share right but they didn't because everyone went into facebook it was the best product at the time and even if this other product hypothetically would have looked great if no one's going it doesn't matter so when i look at these different places saying like oh we're launching a metaverse i'm like if every fucking company launches a

metaverse that's true it's gonna be like kiosk outside the kiosk outside the mall right like it's not these aren't going to be the things that people are like hot button going to you're giving people too many choices i mean our social media world is basically boiled down to if i include like streaming and all that sure let's say it's boiled down to like eight different platforms total within america and english-speaking countries things like that right so how do how do we even in this and like in this space it's so new so yeah and the crazy part is we were saying it's so new last year like we are everyone's it's become a buzzword now but we are so early and it's it's early enough, too, from a gaming standpoint, because a lot of the games right now, it's not high quality, which we're in 2022.

If you watch the intro to Halo, I almost thought I was watching a legit movie with real people. The technology is there. We should be building in that. So I know a few companies are building in Unreal Engine, so it's really high-quality graphics. But in this space, when you don't know who's going to win it's all about interoperability so you as a project all these companies that are creating metaverses want to work with you so you should be able to plug into all of these because then you can collab with

not collab but like pit against each other so like a mario kart smiles could be racing the board apes so it's about collaboration i think and that would create events obviously which was always the plan i know that but that's also how you open up to like more people than just your holders though yeah i just keep thinking about like you know what facebook meta you know is trying to do like i don't even know if we do we know that's the point i don't think we really know but we never will but either way i think it's probably a safe bet that if you look at the world mark zuckerberg grew up in and what he created he wants his own place where everyone goes you know he wants his blue f in 2.0 yeah you know so that would mean that he's taking time away from other opportunities therefore taking people away

over time because he's getting more volume and then creating that centralized social hub in the now metaverse yeah you know and then look at the central land where it's digital real estate like that whole thing and what they could do there that's a whole another it's a whole nother thing we can get into that but like that's human beings are herd animals at the end of the day by and large it just it is the way it is go on twitter you can see why yeah it is especially um in this space right now it's kind of i don't dance carefully uh it's kind of built around hype right now and what happens with hype it's a large group of people following kind of the same thing it's just kind of the premise of the space right now which is unfortunate but kind of all points that we're still early yeah i mean i look i think

the bus has not even arrived at the stadium it's not the first inning you know for me i'll think that the game's underway once i see nfts as like the ticket to regular things in society it will be soon right and and in a way that the first iterations that have already happened but i'm saying like on a wider scale like when i see not my dad but like when i see some of my friends who are in their 20s so they're not like teenagers and stuff like that just casually whipping out an nft to go to a sixers game or something like i'll know we're in we're in the second inning i mean that's that's like the most tangible and immediate thing, in my opinion. Tickets are a no-brainer because you can track everything forever.

And then concert tickets, too. It'd be dope if Drake knew one person has been to his concert 10 times. That's now a VIP fan. That could unlock something special. Can we know? Well, you can know that. You may not know who they are, well you can know that you may not know who they are but you can know their digital identity true but i guess the caveat is they

would be kyc because you have an email address that i don't know true master and stuff would have to link to i'd have to see that like how that works assuming it's the same i mean the tech in the space is moving incredibly fast so i'm sure there'll be a workaround for that all right well let's go back to you then because i mean board apes was just the best way to go through that because you saw the shift from that whole like oh it's just a celebrity pump your bag space to oh no you can you can literally be like an anonymous group and come out create a project that builds a community around it, gets the people behind it, and leads the way. And then obviously Mitch and I, if you want to listen to a podcast, talked about all kinds of shit projects and stuff like that. That was number 78, I want to say, something like that.

So I feel like we kind of covered that there. there but you throughout the spring in like april may and then into the summer june july you started partnering with waheed on his just individual projects so not even partnering he's my boy my brother i was just doing what i can to help him right so you're you're basically like helping him with the back end some of the business side of it because he's putting out some of these collections like the act one act twos he put out some sick work of like kanye west too beautiful forgot about that one shout out yeah i'll put that in the corner that was like like the best part about his art is the easter eggs he puts into it and that one right there i was just like the level of detail on all the little things from every era of yay's career it was unbelievable he's sorry

first thing that's how he tells the stories yeah so puts out things like this you're helping him and then when did you guys start having the conversation of like oh we should do a collection where why he can build and we'll talk about what the collection is and everything where why he can build his own character and put his own spin with all different kinds of traits on it that he can also build and create a community around his art um so i mean initially wait what was the question i spaced it's okay when did when did yo it's still trippy like hearing yourself oh you're one of the anti-headphones guy i forgot very much so yeah you're one of very much no one is but you are I think there's been like maybe one other person here is like a little weirded out for a second but I mean the simple end of the question is when did smiles verse start to be like oh yeah my bad so fortunate

unfortunate his one of one works because every time he meant to them they're up for auction so they always want to explain to people what that is a one-of-one is literally a one-of-one piece it's not out of a collection so there's only one edition and the way he did it was they would all be up for auction so they'd always start at 0.1 ETH and then they quickly started rising in price which became unattainable to like you know the everyday people which at the end of the day me and him try to represent the most um so we were like how do we kind of create something that enables a lot more people to get into smiles because him himself was starting to

grow as an artist a lot he did some work with push iced tea he did a supreme t-shirt he had done the poo thing right when we met him he'd already done that yep yeah yep the album cover and now it went diamond platinum yeah i'll put that in the corner too we're gonna pump all the art in the corner today that's why he'd day run that's why he'd uh but yeah so it basically became unattainable you know and we wanted to figure out how to create something one that we cared about because the reason i vibed with his work so much it's it's all stuff that i enjoy it's fashion it's hip-hop it's culture that's kind of my world if you know of recent if you've been around me i'd literally walk around all day just spitting

rap lyrics out jules you do too like we're very the same with this we are so it was just an awesome opportunity to one funnel both our passions into something and then two welcome in a lot more people and just get to hang out with cool people and do dope stuff with dope people that vibe with what we're about and again i like the aspect of opening it up to everyone because we'll get to where you're sitting today but obviously it's it's pricier at this point but the people who got in at what would be the start of this project like the people who built the community over a few months like open to anyone right so you may have some wealthy people in there you may have some people who aren't wealthy you may have some kids in

there who are like 15 with no money but they get a chance to be a part of this and now they also get to as of right now build like a little wealth off this too which is very very cool that's honestly like the most beautiful part in my opinion is not only like all the stuff that we're doing and the connections that we get to make the partnerships that we have but it's it's about the people you know because then we gave people an opportunity to get in at a relatively cheap price it was only 0.1 eth but we gave them an opportunity to get in at a relatively cheap price. It was only 0.1 ETH. But we gave them an opportunity to liquidate, which a lot of people in this space talk about diamond hands. You got to hold on to this forever. But at the end of the day, if you could take our piece that you purchased for 0.1, sell it for 1 ETH, sell it for 2 ETH, sell it for whatever, that's life-changing money at the end of the day.

And our community has a lot of newcomers to this space. So what better introduction to them to 10X their initial investment, you know, and potentially change people's lives. Read a community member come up and say that he ended up selling his piece and used it to fund his career and to start getting into art. That's impact. Yeah. Yeah. an involuntary seed investor into people in a way because the the the people who get in there you know they they are they're building off of maybe what what they get through you and like you know the cynics will say and they'll be right about some projects oh it's a pump your bags kind

of thing get money into it get out but one of the things that really separates what you guys are doing and frankly, you have a huge leg up on board ape even with this is that you are centered around a legit, legit artist with a vision who creates unbelievable shit that is applicable to so many different things. So we'll get into partnerships and stuff like that. But you guys can continue building out beyond just an initial collection. But the people who own the collection essentially, in this case, in this modern world now, they own a piece of fucking stock in this company. So what you do, the work you guys do, why he continues to create how it develops into even wilder shit like things 3d things in the metaverse and obviously it's all kind of in the metaverse right now but you get what i mean like in the more in the more developed space things in in the video game space which is going to integrate a bunch of those things together like they get to be a part well that's the thing. They're, at the end of the day, investing in the team

and hoping that we continue to execute on things that we strive to build. And what's the next? What was, I guess at the beginning, like after you guys concepted this, that was what, like July maybe? Something like that? Yeah, it was about July we started thinking about it, and then actively started working towards it in about August. So he started creating these characters in August.

Yeah. And did you guys know you were going to turn this thing around in 90 days? No, we thought it was going to be like two weeks. Really? Oh yeah. That was aggressive oh yeah we were initially targeting like september 8th because our collection we dropped 8888 for the people we're targeting september 8th we ended up launching like october 30th yeah and rolled into like november 1st and 2nd i could have told you

that was going to happen but nah but a couple trials and tribulations, we woke up and realized what we were undertaking. And Waheed specifically, because I think at the time we were like one of the first 3D projects. So file sizes, we had some issues, we had some tech that we needed to figure out. We ended up overcoming it. Now here we are. And in the process itself, obviously like your Waheed

is in there every day building this shit. And you had to work for 90 straight days just doing this nonstop. And even beyond it after the launch, if you know what I mean. But you also were in there working on ideas with the designs too, which I thought was really cool. Like, as you said, a lot of the themes of this project and of Waheed's art match what you're interested in but you have a i think one of the things a lot of people maybe even in the community don't realize is like you have a really really good eye for this shit so you and why he played really well off each other because you were a legitimate guy he could bounce ideas off of like oh i'm looking to do this or oh

i'm looking to do that and you could have something to throw at him. Like, yo, what if you did this? Yo, I tell people all the time, my most enjoyable part of doing this is getting to be behind the scenes of the art creation. Because early on when I was talking to him, I only saw the end product. I didn't necessarily see from start to finish. Now, when we started doing this, I was getting even more exposed. I saw like bits and pieces throughout the process. He would send me like work in progress photos, but I never got to see like start to finish. And that to me is like the most beautiful thing because at the end of the day, it's, it's, it's a story, right? So he's telling a story about something that means something to him. And it's almost like it's coming to life and just getting

to be involved, him asking me my opinion, it's so special, man. And it's good for me because I'm in the business side. So my head is so far deep in operations and trying to grow that I don't necessarily get to funnel out the creativity every that often. But when he's creating, it's amazing. I love it. And it's really cool that you guys developed this relationship completely remote for a long time. Obviously, now you guys have hung out a bunch in person.

It's the ultimate metaverse relationship. Exactly. Exactly. So now it's not, I guess. But for a long time, to get to the point where you were at launch and doing the damn thing, I mean, you met him, I guess, right after launch in person, right? Yeah. It's kind of fucking crazy. We were working for 90 plus days every day and night up till 4, up till 5 a.m.

So FaceTime, scheming, creating, building. And then we didn't meet until like, I mean, I guess I knew him for eight months before we actually met. And then three months, every single day committed to building together. And what program does he create on? He works in blender so he's showing you he's showing you actively throughout the whole process literally every night going through step by step piece by piece building it yep it's fucking awesome it is and then even now like when he does his one of one works sometimes he'll throw me a curveball

and not show me for a few days, and then I get fucking surprised. Like, this is the last piece. I'm not sure when this episode's coming out, and I don't know if it'll be out by then. We're filming this one a little early, a little earlier than I like. Gotcha.

Probably come out in, like, 12 days or something like that. Well, when people see his next one-on-one, it's going to be crazy, because he's stepped out of his comfort zone, which is very good for him because you know even some people say like they want to have him work more time on the project creating specifically for the project but at the end of the day he's super young into his career he's only been creating for a year year and a half he needs that space to experiment if he's always kind of

doing things for this he never gets that freedom because it's always one goal that he has to attain but when he does his one-on-one marks it's an open court yeah i mean he's a he's got the typical artist gene you know he he needs i saw at least you know dealing with him and talking with him especially in the weeks after the launch where there's all kinds of shit going on you're dealing with just fixing this doing that whatever you know that's the initial point exactly and speaking from experience when you're dealing with like high level stress like that and you got to like sit and be able to create complex really cool shit it doesn't happen yep straight up you know so he i'm glad it got to a point at least somewhat quickly relative to how long it could have dragged down as far as like getting things under you where now you guys have

a have a clear you know you're still taking on things day to day they're always unexpected it's like any other business but he has his his room to run oh you know what i mean oh yeah oh yeah and he's running i'll say that yeah i'll say that what we can't say too much but what will be coming out soon is uh you know it's going to shake things up and kind of just tie into everything that we've done so i'll leak a little alpha here um we just threw a music event at south by Southwest. Shout out to Miles Mills. It's with a rapper that some people may have now attached to us. That's all I got.

Okay. Is there another guy who has a couple issues with a couple things he's working out with the legal system right now? Coming down the chute too all right that wasn't a yes or no for the record but you know i had to put that one out there yes it's uh it's exciting and then kind of on rapper topic little baby's a holder so that's dope now how many does he own maybe uh good question but last time i saw one we've had a lot of interesting holders pop up recently jerry lorenzo which obviously that excites me the most who the fuck is that bro jerry lorenzo i am cultured i don't know i can't know everyone dude he's the founder of fear of god and uh is now i guess creative director for adidas basketball and did he reach out to you when he bought no

have you reached out to him i mean of course i've tried you should try a little harder oh yeah yeah that's the coolest thing about this man like i mean one of the first days casey nystad's going in there and buying one buying like three but like a gold one too which is like a rare one i was excited you know you get an excuse now they're invested right you get an excuse to have access to these people it's just beautiful to see like these type of people which a lot of them i've looked up to for a good bit of time now seeing our vision and what we're trying to build and wanting to invest in us to make that happen it's fucking awesome man i'm proud of you too because it was um i mean i I think some of the early podcasts we did in here, you were number 34. You know, this thing was still on zero at the time.

I treat it every day like it's on zero, but it's not on zero now. But, you know, I look at some of those and first of all, some of the people I had in here were so fucking good, which I'd like to take a little credit for being able to spot that and some people i knew but let's be real here like people who can come in here and talk and tell a story open up about stuff i mean it's content makes itself you know what i mean so i was so grateful for that but like i said early on in the podcast you and i connected through that and we you know we did one up here is one of the longest podcasts we've done in here at this point and then we did another podcast downstairs afterwards and talking and you know we had such a similar we were on the same vibe as far as like really just putting the work in for a long time and trying to figure out like how to how to get

this through and it's almost like sometimes in life you can see not the train crash the good train right the good train the fucking machine i don't know what a good train is but one that's big and coming in fast as fuck. And you can see it. Everything's slow. You can see where it's headed and no one else notices it because you're the only one seeing it like, oh, here to here, right? However that works. And I got that vibe heavy listening to you because you had done all the right things and gotten yourself in some of the most serious situations for so long.

And now when you, i'll never forget that like when you called me up and said yo we're going in this clubhouse room with this with this guy waheed here's his work i need you to check it out give me your two cents and i looked at him like holy fucking shit would you find this guy and so of course it was good but there's a lot of variables for the artist that said once we got in that room with him and i heard the two of you interact there's this thing that went on in my head where i saw that train and i was like it's a wrap like in my head i'm like he's gonna run with this like this kid is a fucking good kid i mean you hope you know someone through listening to them for a while you can't for sure but he sounded i mean we talked

to him for a while in there and i really really liked. And I'm like, Giovanni's one of the best guys I know. Like, this is going to be a match made in heaven. And it didn't even start that way at all. But you just, you know, you helped this guy out for a while. Helped him get his legs under him and the stuff that wasn't the art. You know, and then eventually you guys come together and form this partnership. And to see it, you you know almost like a time capsule like 14 50 months later on here to talk about it you know that's the kind of shit i'm gonna look

back on and track this and you know five years from now hopefully number one podcast in the world see where we're at right okay but like look back and say damn like we caught that it happened like you could see it you could see the little sparks of geo even like geo pre-waheed in here and then you could see it again when he comes in 15 months later or whatever and where they're at and then three years from now when you guys are have overtaken halo with your own fucking smiles first game like you know people look back and be like god damn it's all there it's the coolest shit man i mean bro you know this but like when you're trying to build something especially in a space that's new and just not conventional even to like your said geographic area it's tough to find people

to lean on and even just one ask for help but two like just in a way vent to them where they can understand and you know what he was getting into and kind of how I saw this forming out into a company, he was young. And, you know, he just needed someone to lean on at the end of the day. So if I could do that for anyone, I'm more than happy to do it. And it just so happened that he's really dope. All our passions align. And, you know, like you said, he's a really good dude. So it's just interesting how everything came together.

But I'm just super happy to be in this position to build something that we both care deeply about and the work's only getting better man i mean not just the opportunities coming in which we'll talk about but you know the quality of it the range of it i mean it's confidence for sure as well once once you start getting that you know everything he's putting out he puts his heart and soul into, you know, he's got the support of you helping him along the way to actually create the shit. He's got the business side taken care of. So you ain't got to worry about a lot of that stuff, which is great as a founder of a company and everything. And it's like, you know, the, the, the end product that,

that confidence you get from that type of situation shows itself so like i looked at his earliest stuff like i told you and i'm like it's fucking phenomenal yep but like there's even little things he'll do now when he drops something where it's like oh he figured something out again yep there it is i love that shit me too it's the easter eggs that's what i'm saying wait till the next one he pulled out some tricks Got out of his comfort zone. He's got to do like a lot of research on that too. I know he inherently knows a lot about the subjects, especially if it's like people within hip hop or stuff like that he's a fan of. But he's got to do like the clothing right no the clothing is essentially taken from anything else it's a recreation of something that he enjoys he's very like new yorkie kind of style of clothing so like construction type vibes that's his that's

his that's his world so like the clothing he creates kind of models off of that it's all different which is the dopest part within the one of ones though you're talking about the collection because that i guess that's both that probably makes sense but within the one of ones like even looking even looking at like the kanye one to go back to that i'll put it i'll put in the corner again for people to see like yeah if you're a huge fan of kanye like he is like i am like you know inherently all the things that are in there but like the the little ways he did it like what he would put the things on like oh when did when he won his grammy maybe we'll work this album work a different one into that i don't remember if that was an example but like i remember just

looking at that for like hours just like damn like he really cut this out like this wasn't just fucking around like i got high and made a piece this is like some wild shit it is but he also does i mean it's kind of his nature though too right like he's super into hip-hop which is like the craziest thing to me given his background like i was throwing big l at him and stuff bro and he knew everything about it he knew big l very well i never talked to him about big l bro everyone i love that it was crazy it was crazy so he's pretty good with the 90s deep deep like he knows his roots honestly like he knows the hip-hop roots and stuff so it's kind of ingrained in him and he just funnels it through his work how do you get

into that i haven't asked him that because again like he immigrated here when he's like 15 years old or 16 years old yeah but then that's just kind of i'm not going to speak for him here but you know it's kind of just your taste it's it's what your vibe was so you get naturally attracted to it i'll ask him when he's in here yeah we'll talk about it but again like his story and i'm looking forward to that his story is really i mean to me it's it is the embodiment of every bit of earning the american dream that it would still exist in i mean it's it's really an incredible thing but when you guys went to launch this because we've talked about that a little bit and you've thrown out like some prices and stuff like that like it was launching for 0.1

can you just explain everything that goes into that like you finish the the collection or you know it's going to be finished in like a week or two, something like that, and you set a date where you're going to go mint this stuff, meaning you offer it to the public for people to come and buy however many they want to buy. People have to get whitelisted to be some of the early shares just like an IPO works where you have people behind the scenes, and then there's a public sale where people come in and they buy it as fast as it goes. What was the full process there and how did it end up going within, like, let's say the first two weeks of launch? Full process. Definitely took, like I said, about three months. it was really once we figured out how to generate 3d files which was like the main issue because the file sizes were so large that we weren't able to generate all 8888 but we ended up figuring out shout outs in your crypto a rockstar dev it figured out how to do it a mechanism to do it and we were able to pump it out so it was like i said the wild west but like everything we were able to pump it out. So it was like, I said the Wild West, but like everything we were doing, and my background's in tech, but not in Web3 tech.

So everything we were doing was just like trying shit, throwing it at a wall, and hoping it sticks. And what, like, as far as the exports and things like that, you know, I'm used to like Adobe Premiere and stuff. I never build in this shit. So when you have 8,888 pieces, he goes in there, he builds all of the individual traits, which there were hundreds of those. Yes. And then, I mean, for people that haven't seen it, the detail on each one of these traits is absurd. It's like insane. So this could be anything from like the shirt the main character is wearing to the platform he's standing on to even the simplest part would be like the background that's the one easy one the rest of it hats facial facial features he created different

types of faces things like that different therefore different emotions like different pants different chains like the whole nine he put gas masks on some of these guys. It was crazy, the level of shit. So he builds all this stuff and then you randomize it. So how does that work? And is that what you're talking about as far as like the export speed when Senora Crypto came in there? Yes, the randomization and then actually like producing the completed file so we can then send it off to render.

And what is that in English? We rendered in 6K resolution, so you alluded to being able to zoom in and see the high-quality detail. It's because we rendered in such high quality. But for his files, there's a lot of triangles. We're getting super techy here. There's a lot of triangles and meshes,

so it creates a very large file size. You're limited with what you can do in a file size. Like for augmented reality, for example, if your file size is too large and you try to view something in AR through your phone, your phone melts and basically shuts down. You can't actually view it. So what you can do with things

is essentially based on how small the file size is. So you guys had to figure out a way to make it small enough that it could be exported to go on OpenSea, pretty much. Essentially. And then also be able to render because be exported to go on open sea pretty much essentially and then also be able to render because we needed to render on our developer's computer and his computer power wasn't large enough so we needed to be able to essentially render all of them and also delete them at the same time so they weren't staying on the computer and taking up storage this was kind of like a remote garage operation too which is kind of funny yeah spread

out throughout the world which senior crypto our developer is in milan italy and waheed's in minnesota i'm in jersey damn so you get it all done i guess that render took like two weeks something like that i don't know if you said that it took about uh i think a week because then we also had to re-render some things there were a few issues and then send it back and forth a couple times uh so it took about like a week week and a half so you do the mint you do the pre-sale where no one knows, they can't see the ones they're buying because you don't reveal until afterwards. That's how it works. But then you reveal, and I really don't look at the price action very much.

I'm looking at what the project's doing, talking to you every day. I haven't looked at the floor in months at this point. But when you're looking at these projects on open sea on different platforms you're looking at where it is relative piece by piece on value so projects being bought for a floor of two eath meaning the lowest possible available price for one of the products in the collection nfts in the collection i'm sorry is two then, you know, that's a solid project. If one is 0.05 ETH, it's not as good, right? It might be okay, but it's nothing special. You guys have managed to be at least, like, floating up in the area, I guess,

of, like, 1 and 2 early on here, and it was kind of crazy. Like, shortly after launch, maybe, like, maybe a week after render, post-IPO, not IPOo but you know what i mean like post release and everything like you started to see some of these bigger names start to buy in and say oh i like what's happening here and then you start to see the price move i mean yeah it's pretty crazy but like the reality is to post launch it was a slow build up we didn't a lot of times you're seeing right now projects will launch and they'll moon right away or 10 12 15 20 x we went to about 0.9 so there was a multiple for people to liquidate if they wanted to and get their money but then it

kind of went down a little bit and we got to about i think we crossed one eighth maybe like a month and a half into it two months maybe um and then it's kind of been even a slow steady growth from there. So for me personally, though, I don't get caught up in price watching because, again, it's so early. We don't necessarily know if those are the right metrics and indicators of success of a project. What happens, though, after launch? I think this is what a lot of people no one outside

the space thinks about this but even people in the space who are just like moving around and flipping shit a lot of times you know they're not thinking about what actually creates value it's more or less just getting caught up in the moment of what people are talking about on twitter but you have yeah you have to keep that hype going so you can't just like launch a collection of 8888 and just live off that forever it's got to be like hype going so you can't just like launch a collection of 8888 and just live off that forever it's got to be like well what are you guys doing so what what was the did you guys have a plan on that before you launched like different things you wanted to do or did you start to kind of listen to the community and let it come together naturally well there's a couple

things that people sometimes forget about that we did but even before we launched we had a sponsored wrapped smiles lamborghini race in the Lamborghini World Cup in Milan, Italy. So that was something we did initially. That was a really awesome time. Shout out to Alessandro and Mark for making that happen. But that was like kind of our intro before we even minted. And then once we did launch, actually as we were launching, we had a booth at ComplexCon, which ComplexCon is, you know, for us and what our projects is trying to do, the perfect

spot because it's for upcoming streetwear brands and kind of projects like that. So they started introducing NFTs. So then we went to that. And then we just started building after launch. And we dropped, shout out Vera Fra out verified who's an incredible incredible animator on our team um oh yeah his works great that's the guy who does the uh the ar stuff if you remember our pre our pre-reveal um animation was a smiles character doing a tray flip across um a table in waheed's one of one works i saw that so many fucking times it rings in my head at this point.

But it was pretty fantastic. It was very fantastic. But we ended up dropping that for holders about, I want to say, a week and a half after we launched. And we actually added to that as well because in our collection we have different skin colors. So we have an OG skin, a silver, a red, and a gold. I'll put those pictures in the corner so you can see. Because there's a main, for people that are unfamiliar with the project i think we've kind of said this but just be sure like there's a main character he dresses up the character in each nft in the same generalized

position in the middle of the screen yep so we have different skin colors as well so we also added the different skin colors to the um tray flip animation and we airdropped actually it was a free to claim so if you held a smiles piece you could go and mint it for free all you had to pay was gas how do you guys like the whole gas thing do you see that situation improving anytime soon and for people that don't know can you explain what gas is gas at its simplest form when you go to i don't know cvs and you make a purchase with your debit card or your credit card there's a transaction for you have to pay so gas is the blockchain's form of the credit card transaction fee but in this case in ethereum correct but it's it fluctuates based on the volumes of transactions happening on ethereum

at the time so you know there were a lot of cases where gas was insanely expensive, so people couldn't go and mint pieces that they wanted to mint. Actually, now it's been fairly good because just innovation and smart contracts, you could be more conscious of the gas and kind of put some boundaries and restraints on it. So it is getting there, but we're all kind of waiting for, like, Ethereum 2 to come

out yeah when i mean that's my one thing about eth and i full disclosure i own eth i've owned it for a long time i'm very picky with crypto i own i pretty much i only own bitcoin and eth at this point but i don't have i have far more questions aboutTH because one of them is we keep on hearing about this moving the proof concept and I don't know how long they've been talking about this maybe like four years whatever it's been like it still hasn't happened and now we've had a full year over a year of ETH being the ecosystem of this booming new space by and large of NFTs and yet we're still seeing I mean you'll go in there to buy something for you know 0.1 eth and if you go in at eight o'clock on on a thursday night you might be paying the same shit and gas or more yep it's a problem it is a problem but the reality is we

don't we still don't know when it's coming there's a lot of side chains and layer twos for um example like a polygon or matic for the people at home if you're familiar with that um it's basically built on top of ethereum so with polygon you know gas fleas are negligible but there's only so much you can do there's a little more of an onboarding um hardship for the everyday person to get into polygon so it's like in a world that's already complex the easiest route is Ethereum. But also you have to go where the builders are at. And the builders right now are on Ethereum.

Yes. And that is the huge advantage. Like they're there. I don't know the percentage, but it's a lot. I mean, people are building. All the DeFi apps, like the action is happening on Ethereum from a security standpoint as well. So I'm personally, that's where I'm focused on is mainnet. Yeah. as well so i'm personally that's where that's where i'm focused on is mainnet yeah i mean look i again i think it's it's clearly the the court that everyone's playing on i just i mean we see

all fast innovation moves we see how fast things get disrupted and like i keep looking at this wondering like is someone just going to come in with a product that suddenly doesn't have gas or something very very light that somehow has enough incentive for people to be able to code and and therefore allow the ecosystem to live i mean maybe you know i haven't seen anything again i'm very very skeptical of anything i hear about i assume it's sure you always assume it's shit they have to burden to prove is to prove that it might not be right but i just haven't i mean it's not that i haven't even seen it it's just it hasn't improved at all period right data is data so you know

when you're a project like yours or you're in the nft space you are i don't want to use the word hostage but but you are, you have to live within... The bounds. Exactly, where everyone is. So you can't control that, but also like, what if one day, oh, we're going over here

and doing it here. Hypothetically, I would assume if you're a good project, it doesn't really matter, but who knows? I mean, all it takes is some sort of like ecosystem disruption

to accidentally shake out the tree of like shit that doesn't adjust right away. Well, at the end of the day, I'm going to be honest. I really just think it's a UI, UX thing. You're a user experience. The sooner we can simplify it, the sooner the masses get involved. Well, let's talk about that. Because you and I talk about UI, UX with tech all the time. Big passion.

We had talked about Instagram last time that aged well yep because it's true fucking shit platform true the j was a phenomenal platform logicals coming back to on there if you saw that i didn't see that but it's going to take a lot to save the clutter that they have on there thanks that's it i think i put that out as a clip too on youtube so that's there for people to look it up where we talked about instagram but you know that was a perfect app yep it was simple straightforward your grandma could figure it out in two seconds now there's all kinds of different size text everywhere you your feed i guess i gotta look into this chronological thing but your fucking

chopping button is sitting right where my thumb is oh it's brutal the save buttons in a bad space like there's all kinds of problems with it but you know looking at nfts and crypto at large like in the same basket right now a long-term thing that has always been my criticism of again something i'm involved in and believe in 100 you know the the thing the hurdle to get over is figuring out how my grandma is going to pick this up like she picked up an iphone for the first time and maybe she sucks at using it but like she can make a call she can send a text she can hit the safari button and go to the internet you know how do we get to where if someone goes on a 50 year old's podcast and they're sitting across from a 50 year old host and they say oh dude just buy the nft and they slide the phone across the guy's going to be able

to do it i'm i think we're getting there we're very close because you know you've used coinbase and i think most people have probably used the coinbase app it almost mirrors a robin hood right so the flow is essentially the same as buying stocks we just need to integrate that with nfts now so the nft platforms need to be as easy as buying selling stock at the end of the day um which cooling base is coming out with their own nft marketplace hopefully soon um and it should change the game which for people in the audience we're also a coinbase day one launch partner so our project will be on Coinbase's NFT platform when they launch. Are you guys still the wallpaper on their page?

I don't believe so anymore, but we were up for a good bit of time. That was sick. Yeah, that was really cool. Very cool. But we've been working very part of Coinbase, in my opinion, is they're spending time with the creators that are involved in the day one launch to actually get an understanding of, okay, this is what we've built.

What can we do differently? What things do you guys need in additional? And then even in the next six months, what are you building towards that you might need? Now, you guys have been on OpenSea this whole time, which has been the main platform for launch where people buy and sell NFTs. So technically marketplaces read the blockchain.

So anytime you technically mint something, a marketplace can pick it up and then display it on their platform. Okay, so that won't change. But is there going to be, in your opinion, a real rush here to where you see projects go exclusive to certain platforms so like it becomes an arms race where oh now guess what it's only gonna be red on you can only buy and sell on coinbase or i think so just because of kind of how they're going about things right now and this honestly is not exclusive to coinbase um it could be any platform that ends up coming out but if you spend time like i've been telling you from the beginning right like you need to put the time into the space you can't just pop in and try to do something and expect it to go well it might go well within a week but after that week it's going to burst into flames

so the way they're approaching it i respect a lot because they're spending time with us they're getting involved they're asking the right questions i had a call with them today like they're doing what they can to kind of get an understanding of what each individual project wants to build towards and then where the similarities overlap across the board how'd you get connected with them and when they reached out to us of course they did yeah but it was it was awesome funny story i don't think i've ever told this before so i don't know if we put this out do tell put it out i was scrolling through our smiles instagram page and someone from coinbase was in the requested messages back in november i didn't see the message so when i did get connected to someone on twitter when they reached out it was like two months later so there was like two two and a half months they were reaching out early yeah wow

but we're just happy to be working with them right now like i really enjoy the team that they have and even the people involved like they're they're really good people and they're trying to do right by the space which is at the end of the day all i care about how do you define that right by the space for a platform spending time and learning not trying to come in and swing your stuff around and say this is what you guys need not get an understanding of what we've been building for the past six to eight months what's your biggest ask of like them when they're coming to you saying like oh what are you not getting right now how can we give it to you i'm under nda oh so i can't talk about the platform at all really that sucks respect it though respect it for sure that's that's what it is for sure good answer your lawyer

shout out the lawyers i wasn't even thinking of that but when are they, I don't know if this is covered by the NDA, but when are, vaguely, are they planning to fully launch? Hopefully soon. That's all I know. Okay. Not much there. That's an honest answer. Okay. It's been, they've, it's just like tech, man.

In any tech, right, there's unanticipated hurdles that you go through. Delays here, delays there. Especially the more conversations we have and the things that we're throwing at them. Because, bro, at the end of the day, we're still learning too. But they're doing it like a soft opening, right? Yeah, it'll be a beta. Yeah, it's not going to be like, oh, any project can just upload now. No, yeah.

It's going to be selected like you. That's pretty cool. It's very fun. Yeah. It's going to be selected like you. That's pretty cool. It's very fun. It's exciting to work with someone like Coinbase, but also help them build a new product. I think OpenSea, the design of the platform is actually, by and large, very nice.

It's pleasing. It's white space. It's fairly simple when you go through it. There's a few things I could point out. All in all for how they brought it out there is pretty good but some of the issues that they've had along the way is i feel like they're going to kind of blow this because you're going to see something like a coinbase which is already long established as a brand in crypto come in and say all right well we're going to replicate that in a customized way as you've been pointing out for nfts now and there's actually going to be space for them to come in and steal that market in my opinion for sure i mean at the end of the day it depends on i'm going to sound like a broken record but how much time you're spending with the

community because they're your customers at the end of the day they're going to drive all the volume of sales so if you're not appeasing to them of the day, they're going to drive all the volume of sales. So if you're not appeasing to them and your platform isn't super friendly to them, it doesn't really matter. How big is your community now? I guess Discord, let's start there. Discord was like 15,000. I think Twitter is approaching 40,000. But we have 4,500 holders.

So about 53% unique ownership roughly and you probably i'm totally guesstimating right now you probably have brand awareness at probably close to a thousand x of that i'm gonna guess as far as people who have if I showed the average individual the average Twitter user right now a picture of smiles There's gonna be a lot of people say oh, yeah, I've seen a bunch of that or I've seen that before I think what's interesting about us is We our logo it's on camera right now if you're watching is text You easily branded so you can send that in a message you can have in your Twitter name you could have it in your Instagram name which to me is like the most appealing you know what I didn't realize for

the longest time with that I sat up like at night really really wondering how why he'd did the did the colon on the offshoot but apparently i think it's only like a twitter like it's a twitter like glitch it's a glitch on twitter so that when you do two two colons at a time it makes one like crooked and i'm sitting there like on my keyboard like how the does he do this i'm like googling it i can't find anything i'm like what the man yeah but that was kind of cool i do like how at the end of the day though always about simplicity I like how it's it's straight like that

it is and it's like an alien it also appeals to everyone right like it's a smiley yeah at the end of the day you could be 50

you could be 60 you could be 10 you could be 20 exactly so we kind of appeal to all audiences it's memorable in that way in a way yeah

I wish you had a couple less S's on it but fewer S's blame Twitter yeah I'm just just cutting some I's and dotting some T's here I wish you had a couple less S's on it, but fewer S's. Blame Twitter. Yeah, I'm just cutting some I's and dotting some T's here. A little backwards action. But when you guys actually started to then have to move to the next phase, after the launch and after the initial price stuff we talked about,

that's where these next actions of partnerships came in. And in my opinion, this is one place where talking with you literally like at launch, this was all you were focused on. Like how do we figure out how to get this with existing brands across different industries such that A, we get brand awareness, but B, we get opportunities to create in other spaces that aren't just, you know, building a collection or something like that. The partnerships, I think, in my opinion, are very key, especially, I'm going to say it again, in a space that's so new. Like, especially for us, because we're doing fashion, right? I'm all cards on the table. I've never built a fashion company before. I'm in tech, right? That's my background. So the partnerships that we're creating like for example with the hundreds bobby from the hundreds has been incredible to work with and just to kind of create these relationships that will help us expand as not just an nft project

not just a web3 company but a brand a real world brand so all these partnerships they're essentially relationships that'll help us get to the next step of what we're building towards. And what was the full extent of the hundreds partnership? Because, by the way, you're wearing the hoodie right now. It's sick. Love the design. Yeah, it's dope. Honestly, I like simplicity.

That's what I like about it. So the hundreds, we did two color waves of this hoodie and then also a T-shirt. And we dropped a tote bag with a hundreds one uh color wave exclusive to holders of our nft and then one open to the public so it was it was awesome man and it really helped kind of get a little more traction a little more eyeballs to us as like i said a mainstream brand not just an nft project you just said that you have never built a fashion brand like that's a weakness though i'm just thinking about that because i mean without going through names and stuff there's all kinds of people in fashion obviously who came up through the game you know they're working at age 19 at these companies and stuff like that so i don't want to discount that

at all but fashion is something that even people who don't like fashion practice. That's true. If you walk outside and you're not naked, you have fashion. Whether it's good or bad is a whole different thing. It's subjective. But when I look at different people over time, obviously, if we are going to use an example, one of the easiest ones to point to would be like a kanye west who's a rapper but i think it's clear to say now he's a fashion genius yeah was always there you know if you're a person that values that kind of shit or has always been thinking visually about this stuff and and you ask yourself questions like oh why do i like that there why do i like that positioning of what she's wearing and on

that part or whatever you know what i mean like when you're looking at this anyone can can take that imagination and extrapolate it it's just a matter of if it's good or not but like your style coming up through tech for example as we've said a million times now you leaned into the same simplicity aspect that i like to lean into looking at anything and so what's the difference in creating some great fashion, something like this? Well, I guess that's, that's true because if,

if you ask any of my friends, I'll always know that like I've dressed very different my whole life and I'm kind of, I'm a streetwear head myself. So I guess I've always had that in me, but more so from building a fashion company I've never done. So you never built an NFT company either. Valid point. Touche my brother. Touche. touche yeah that's like i'll tell you straight up that's like a cop-out no you're not practicing

either because you're doing it that's my point so like if you weren't doing it i'd be yelling at you right now because facts when you start something like someone has to start with something so yeah yeah for sure but that's what's most exciting about this yeah just like the nft space we're just trying to figure stuff out and do it together but again it's all about the relationships and the connections you make because like one thing i've learned a lot italy for example praised for manufacturing distribution over there of their clothing super closed community you need to know people to get into that space to even step into a warehouse that could potentially produce something for you yeah so like it's all these extra steps and there's been a fashion company out of paris that i've

spoken to two amazing dudes they've they shared a lot of insight with me um speaking of bobby just getting these relationships and getting an understanding of how this works also during and post-covid which through all of this stuff through a loop that's a whole nother interesting topic though too like cross-cultural interaction because one of the things you got immediately with this like when it was the smallest community is because it's an internet based thing it's a blockchain based thing you have access to pretty much everywhere around the world besides maybe like north korea you know so you can talk to anyone you said your developers and your crypto shout out out in italy they're like perfect example you know so you're getting connected with all these different people who you know are from a totally different place totally different walk of life look at your

partner look at the two of you and how different you are like like your backgrounds but have you seen besides the example you just gave like of going into italy and how hard that is for instance to break into different fashion areas there and stuff like that which is not hard to believe for me just thinking about that but have you seen different things that you've run into where it's like oh you have to change your order of business on something even within your day-to-day operations because you're dealing with people who are from a different country and from a very different culture even how they go about business every day i mean the reality is even too from the united states because we don't necessarily like we're the regulations

aren't in place yet they're still trying to figure it out biden just signed an executive order the other day yeah there's a little bit of substance but we don't realistically know how that's going to impact anything what was the order uh pull it on up because i don't want to botch it for crypto oh crypto i did see that but there you go kind of to your point it's addressing crypto not nfts so we didn't even get to nfts yet all right let's let's go to coindesk let's go straight to the source here behind you all right this is as i said from coindesk it's called straight to the source here behind you all right this is as i said from coindesk it's called biden's executive order more regulatory updates oh no that's a podcast we don't want that i didn't i haven't read this yet i saw like two tweets on it which means i assume i know

nothing about it because you never know what you're gonna get there this one right here yeah let's go cnbc all right biden just put out an executive order on cryptocurrencies here's everything that's in it the measures focus on six key areas consumer protection financial stability illicit activity u.s competitiveness financial inclusion and responsible innovation let's see also it says in there um they're putting serious resources towards thinking about a currency we're going to talk about that but i don't know enough about it okay the measures announced wednesday will focus on six key areas i just read those it's calling on the treasury to assess and develop policy recommendations on crypto it also wants regulators to quote ensure sufficient

oversight and safeguard against any systemic financial risk posed by digital assets while policymakers have been keen to downplay any systemic risk resulting from crypto there have been increasing concerns over the role played by stable coins these are digital tokens that are meant to be pegged to the value of existing currencies like the u.s dollar tether the world's largest okay when it's all tethered thing we don't have to get into that this one this next one i love by the way i'm not even gonna give this the time of day and read it illicit activity what the fuck do they think the dollar's used for yeah that's it bro this this is where it gets scary man because you see disruption coming and like i think anyone with half a brain has said

this since day one so long before i was ever looking at crypto, like when Bitcoin got created in 08, 09. If a government loses control of money, what do they control? It's very – no, nothing. Nothing. So like I keep looking at this as someone who believes in the space very much, and my fear has been the whole time, they're going to find a way to centralize the fuck out of this. Low-key, though, to an extent right now, centralization to, in some capacities, is not a bad thing.

Especially in a space that's kind of new and we need innovation to move really fast. Sometimes it's hard to move fast if you're completely decentralized. What if you put it under complete control of a government though oh i'm talking about like from a company standpoint government yeah we we don't need them involved whatsoever and that's the thing this is this is the government getting involved and what you were alluding to was cbdc's central bank digital currencies which you know I keep looking at this and I keep looking at all the little things going on on the chessboard around the world and, you know, some of the madness we see. Madness creates opportunity.

It creates opportunity for good people and it creates opportunity for people who aren't so good, you know? You know, so I look at a potential economic crisis if it were to happen around the world, which eventually it will. We had a very – I don't want to say we had a quick one at the pandemic. We did not have a quick one. We still very much have one. It just increased the wealth gap. But the overall health of marketplaces, which pack the bags of the rich by and large, obviously recovered quickly. So I'm talking about a sustained prolonged economic downturn that affects everyone for a long period of time we're going to be due

for that you are right so when that happens the advantageousness i don't know if that's a word but we'll go with it like that you will see governments potentially be able to take there is oh everyone's desperate. Just like when people were desperate when the pandemic hit, they gave everyone $1,400 checks and didn't ask any questions about where the money was coming from because people fucking needed it. So now we're in a desperate situation. They go, oh, just sign up for the central bank digital currency. You know that dollar in your pocket?

It's still worth something, but this is going to be the next thing. So just get started. And people go, well, well fuck yeah sign me up like that that desperation will out of necessity will get the 60 year old grandma yeah to have to figure it out and she's got the backstop of the government yep being the one to help her through the process so you know okay and my bill's paid we're cool yeah i'll go yeah what's that you know what my grandson was talking about that that bitcoin thing yeah this is the same shit right like that's how they're going to think about it it's it's going to be interesting man to see how it plays out because also the there's our government is uh for all intents purposes here very old and this is a very new thing so that's a fear as well as

like how they handle it. And the people that get involved to help make those decisions. Can you imagine like Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer sitting in the room talking about digital currency? No. I don't personally want to be in some of these rooms that they're talking about this stuff. I think the flies on the wall in there are going to die of stupidity attacks on their brain cells. I mean, if flies even, they have brain cells, right? Good question flies even they have brain cells right I'm not a biologist I don't know same shit but like it's just you think about the people the last two

presidents have been in their 70s yeah you know like yeah who I got a fuck for a 50 year old in a space where we're talking about hopping into a metaverse and Facebook's working on actually bro i saw a recent article came out that a company out of either china or japan i'm not sure i don't want to misspeak on that but they're creating ways that you can actually physically feel pain while wearing an oculus headset for example in vr ar haptics yes but it's one step further because haptics it's like you don't necessarily feel pain yeah feel in general yeah so they're already working on the next level of it oh yeah oh yeah been

working on it that's fucking scary man it is so it's gonna be very uh next few years are gonna be very interesting how do you how do you think about innovation like let me expand that's a really dumb question on broad but like expanding upon that you'll see people who talk about hiding down in in the bunker no pun intended for this place so that's not this kind of bunker the name of the studio but you'll see people who are talking about avoiding the perils of the future and all that and the same people who are talking on landline phones today and don't own anything, let alone a flip phone or something like that. And it's like, well, that's not the way to go. Technology is so useful. It's a part of what has helped with human longevity, connectivity, de-escalating conflicts as hard as that is to believe sometimes.

It's significantly better than any point in world history right now so it's a beautiful thing and i love technology and i'm always looking at the new shit including the stuff that worries me and i try to look at it from my seat in a way of like imagine if it were 1950 and i were thinking about the ideas of what became what we have now you know would i be terrified of it well there'd be a few things i probably don't love you know there's certainly become some free speech issues potentially online things like that but things that i think over the long term people will figure out when you start talking about what's human though versus what's still human or not human. Trying to be human.

Exactly. That's when I start to go, all right, I want to look at all this and I want to be very aware of it and I want to adopt where I can just to experience to see what it is. But I get scared on a grand scale across communities around the world. How once it starts to rip like the first domino across society, everyone gets into it. And then the things that become habit make us lose the things that make it

great to be alive. I totally agree with that, which to be honest is a big thing with like our brand and what we're trying to do. Yeah, we're starting in Web 3, but ultimately we're going to be in Web 2 and Web 3. Because as much as the metaverse exists and all the stuff that we're doing in there, I still live in the physical world. I still want to do shit in the physical world. I still want to go outside, toss the baseball with my dog. I still want to smell and see grass, you know?

It's interesting, though, because you could also compare that to like realistically anything like the nuclear bomb if you like all it takes is one wrong scientist to you know yeah shut up um to get it in the wrong hands and do something horrible with so it's like at the end of the day as scary as it is you're investing in the people to hopefully do right with the new technology that's getting spun out like elon musk and nordlink right like that could also spin out into a terrible situation but based on his track record and things he's done you you know you kind of see that he's trying to push towards the goal of doing good by humanity so it's like just putting the trust in the people at the end of the day because that's always going to be an issue with tech or medicine or whatever it is yeah and elon musk is a such an interesting

example in the middle of that because you know i'm a huge fan you're a huge fan a lot of people love him and and he does what he does for the good of humanity that's that's his stated goal and you know people who don't know him we have to take him at our own judgment what we can see but i i think the guy is really cool help him write about that you know no no i don't that's what i'm saying i hope i'm right about that because i don't know but yeah it'd be cool to talk to him one day and get a feel for where he's at but you know it doesn't change the fact that and he recognizes this that there is a heaviness to the types of things that he's looking to create and to his credit he's also

the first guy to point out for the spaces themselves like the full industries of like ai and things like that yo we need to think about this that's why i like him the most is because he doesn't just play super optimist. He also plays devil's advocate at the same exact time, which when you're trying to build a company and do the crazy shit that he's trying to do, you should have that in mind. Sure. I think too many – I think within tech, we have too many brilliant people.

It's not all of them at all, all it takes is is a few and powerful positions we have too many brilliant people who are either completely hostage to what they view as the inevitable and therefore don't care and or are hostage to the money slash power that comes with the things that they can create and the the worst person is the latter rather than the former but the pessimistic person that makes up the first of those two the former you know being somebody who looks at this like oh it's inevitable there is a way to be responsible about building technology that makes the human race better in my opinion you know so like i try to separate it all out and look at everything on the surface for what it is but you know maybe now's a good time to talk about web3 because you are building to to like be in that but you know we see's a good time to talk about web 3 because you are building to to like be in

that but you know we see a big buzzword like that come out mainstream let's say like a year ago something like that started to gain speed in 2021 in in the general public but you know i start to think of it in the same lens that i look at like ai wow, there's some really cool shit that's going to come out of this. How do we maintain a level of control over it as like a species? So the hardest thing to me with Web3 is that almost nobody from what I can tell can really conceptualize it. I've read the Twitter thread from Sean Puri, I never know how to say that, on here a few times, so I'm not going to read that right now. I think he probably did the best job of anyone where he was talking specifically about the metaverse and how he thinks that everyone has it wrong and it could be like an access point more than anything, which I tend to agree with. But when you're-

Wait, what do you mean by an access point so i almost got to pull up the thread because he put it so beautifully but he was saying like you know our world of what we used to do we used to play games outside now we play video games with each other we used to care about what we looked in in front of each other now we can throw on instagram filters and it matters what you look like on there and all these different things he said we've already been moving digital so the metaverse isn't necessarily going to be a time or a place it's going to be an an experience and he didn't he didn't use this word but or this phrase like access point but that's essentially what he was saying he's like the metaverse will be your ticket right so like when we were talking about the simplest example like oh your ticket to the concert or something like that you have to have an nft to get it there or something like that

like that's that's how he looked at it it's not going to be oh everyone just buys houses in digital real estate somewhere and throws on goggles and lives in the matrix he doesn't think it's there at least like over the next 25 which which I hope he's right about that. Sure. But like when you're looking at this as someone who's building a potential access point to the metaverse, like what's your, what are your fears of what Web3 can be? And then I want to talk about your, let's be positive. Let's talk about your hopes with it. Well, I guess the fear is like taking advantage because in a space where a lot of people are new, but a lot of people are crypto native, but not necessarily metaverse

native. It's easy to take advantage of people in this space, especially in an anonymous world. You're hiding behind a profile picture. Your Twitter name is I love kittens 47 and your profile picture is a cat. Um, it's very hard. It's very easy to come in, take money, or just honestly coerce people to try to do something because it is so new and everyone right now, it's kind of like the mentality is almost like spray and pray. You're just hoping that one of the projects you get involved with hits. And when that happens, there's a lot that get pulled out from under you. So that's kind of my biggest thing is, is taking advantage of people right now, because there's a lot of bad actors in the space, but there are also some really, really, really good people. So it's kind of just up to the, like I said earlier, kind of up to the people to rally together and make sure that as a collective, we come together and push this space forward. Because as much as like,

we preach decentralization and all that stuff in Web3, we really operate in like silos, which is unfortunate, because in the Web2 startup world, anytime I connect with someone, and I ask them for help or ask them for a question even when they ask me for help or a question we pick up our phone and try to call anyone who we think can help or be of service to that person in this space it feels very gated right now even though our whole push is towards decentralization so for example like discord hacks are um a big thing right now and i wouldn't even call them hacks. It's more of like compromised. Yeah.

What's been going on there? So there's been a lot of different use cases from a social engineering standpoint. It's not necessarily, like I said, a hack people aren't coming in and exposing discord flaws. They're more so social engineering with project communities that have discords.

So what they'll do is for example, recently we had a discord hack and we traced back as much as we possibly could to try to figure out what happened and from what it seems is smiles smiles yes our discord got compromised um we had if you're looking to search the web privately and not have all these websites track you when you leave check out my friends over at privato vpn privato is the vpn company that gives you full privacy while not losing you any speed and it allows you to use the product on multiple devices at the same time so you can be using it on your laptop and your phone and you get the full experience and everything's great privacy speed multiple devices that's all you need So if you use the link in my

description, you will see the Privato landing page. It is my landing page with their site. And on that page, you will see a $4.99 a month plan. It's the same one I use. You're going to love it. So check it out. One of our team members basically lose access to their account and it was compromised by a bad actor, whoever this person was. So they have a dev shop outside of Smiles where they work with a lot of different projects to kind of build smart contracts and do things for them. The first thing you do when you get approached by a community to work for them, even me personally, because I've been approached to be an advisor of a few projects coming up. First thing you do is go and interact with the community and see what they're about whether that be on twitter or discord or here or there so they basically sent him an invite to their discord

server and usually when you join a discord there's like a verification bot to make sure that you're not a bot that's going to come in and have the discord it's like their own captcha kind of exactly yeah like a captcha bot so he got sent the server invite and when he went to join the server there was this capture bot that popped up that he had to fill out to do but really the capture bot was a fake bot that then went in and hacked your account and then you basically gave access to this bot and it controlled and then in our server he had certain privileges where you could post in certain channels how'd you guys fix that we had um a discord security specialist come in and basically rip apart our entire server rolls

permissions channels everything and tighten everything up so you were just essentially able to like reset who was allowed to do what yes yes but luckily for us like a couple projects have been exposed to really big ones where their community members have lost half a million to a million dollars luckily for us well it's still an unfortunate situation but we only had um 13 people impacted so they didn't lose that much money at the end of the day but still maybe like a to look at this more broadly though and you can bring in whatever context with examples you want but like what what is when someone says web3 like what is it to you decentralization i think is the biggest thing um power isn't necessarily controlled by one person or one entity it's distributed across the community members which from a i guess innovation standpoint kind of in my opinion

increases the longevity of an industry because if a company goes down it's really at the end of the day powered by the people so the people always exist as long as the industry is there. That's a really good, succinct answer. I ask people this these days, and some people who are even very smart innovators will look at me and be like, I don't fucking know, man. Well, that's the thing, bro. If you asked me two weeks ago, my answer would have been totally different.

You ask me again in a month, two months, it'll be a different answer. Yeah, because if NFTs are still not arrived at the stadium, what do we even say about Web3? It can happen fast, and it will. It'll be slowly and then all of a sudden. And in a way, we could be in the middle of that and not know it right now. But again, I'm trying to look at this

with the same lens of both pros and cons that I look at like AI, which we've at least been looking at for longer because we can concept what that is and everything. But look, in fairness to AI, the only thing I think we've probably gotten a little out of control that we see in the public there's certainly some things behind the scenes but you know the the only thing that's probably not been great as of this point on a day-to-day basis for the average person is like algorithms you know because algos are a simple kind of ai but you know we know what it's doing to people you know i when i look at people and and opinions they sprout if they're on one of the two extremes yeah i try to sit here and imagine what their what their twitter feed looks like like imagine what their facebook feed or instagram feed looks like and i'm just thinking to myself that machine knows exactly what it's doing

it's pretty crazy because I had an interesting experience with a couple of friends recently where I came across a post that was sponsored. And I've never seen anything like that on my page before on Instagram. I sent it to this group and one other person. And then literally for the next week, that's all these posts that I saw. And I wasn't opening my Instagram in public because it was a vulgar photo that i shared with the boys and uh yeah

that's all i saw for a week that's after sharing two posts like the two people bro listens to you you know when you say something around your phone our phones aren't right now because they're on airplane mode but like my laptop's listening yep it's creepy man there's always someone on the other side there's always someone on the other side and like we always have to remember that the governments around the world powerful governments they have backdoor access to all this shit yeah you know america's a free democracy in that way i know there's a lot of people fighting over stuff these days but by and large you know we're by far the best with that around the world other countries aren't you know like how about living in russia right now you know what's what's their government using on their people to watch things i'm curious to see how the quote-unquote big air

quotes decentralized web 3 will be bastardized in a non-decentralized way and i'm speaking in really broad bold terms right now i know that but like by governments you know whether it be like the cbdc's and stuff we talked about you know whether it be like the cbdc and stuff we talked about you know with with currency which is the most powerful example or other things you know like is is is congress gonna drop an nft any year like is anyone gonna buy it the constitution's getting minted yeah yeah like that's where it starts to get to, well, baby, where do we put the rabbit back in the hat here? Some of that is a little creepy to me, but at the same time, it's doublespeak. I understand that, so it's hypocritical to say, but you can only control what you control. The crowds are going to take it where they take it yeah and then it's i don't know i guess in this space like i said kind of earlier we're we're we're a little bit away from full decentralization but i don't necessarily think that's a bad thing like even board apes

uh we talked about earlier but they raised 450 million dollars who they raise it from venture capitalists so even now yugo labs know, it's not a fully decentralized company. But again, in some capacity, you need that for, especially in this space, the speed of innovation that everyone anticipates. Well, you were down in Miami with some rather powerful venture capitalists a few weeks ago. It was a good time. It was a good time. Good people. So what kinds of things were they asking you?

Where does their, because again, you were with some of the tops of the tops here, the Founders Fund guys, among others. Like where's their head at with NFTs and what innovation are they looking forward to? They're honestly trying to get an understanding of how the communities operate, which I've found very interesting because they're not necessarily saying, okay, I see X amount of returns and X amount of gains and X amount of time. They're really trying to get an understanding. So I guess from their perspective, they can better choose what companies and projects to invest in. So they

can kind of see, all all right what's going on right now isn't necessarily what's going to be going on in the next year or two right like so many new people to the space i think the last metric i saw was like 700 000 active wallets or something like that put in perspective coinbase has millions of users on their platform so all it's taking is that one next thing to really open the door to the masses 700 000 in america i believe so still that's really low it's extremely low that's there's 300 and x amount million people that's really low like that's the shit that scares that's look at how it is still. It can flip on a dime, but look at how ripe it is for a CBDC to come in. Yep.

So that's why it's very scary, especially with the DAOs coming out and passive income through some of these projects. You start toying with the space of, okay, is this a security? Is it not a security? And then do you want to, A, spend the money with the legal team to venture down that route to see if you can figure out how to properly do it or do you just say let's see what the government uh kind of how fast they move and what they implement well the thing that you guys have managed to avoid in the nft space to this point and i don't think there's been close calls with it and again it's been like roughly a little over a year here don't jinx us of a run knock on wood but like the last time i remember a mad rush towards something within a greater space so like for example within a greater space of crypto

was the ico movement in late 2017 into 2018 yep and what we saw is that it killed it right like Icos couldn't exist after that it was like a dirty word now what's weird is that when you look at nfts it's kind of been like reborn with some of the tokenization so to speak within there in a different way but similar idea even dealing with ETH and all that I understand it's different but you still see parallels to that like it almost was resurrected in a small way but either way the the projects like sloan was working on that he was building you know legit guys like that in the space had this giant sucking sound happen where it didn't matter how long you've been in it like him or what a great innovator you were. If you were attached to anything near that, you're fucked, right? So that was because there was an enormous bear market.

And we haven't – there's been over the last year we've seen probably two main stretches where we saw, for example, let's say like the price of ETH go way down at least by a percentage basis over a month, something like that. So I'd say like late last spring into summer and then pretty recently as well. But have you had any throw up moments while that's going on or has there been anything where you've seen worrying signs of people in the community revealing their ass and just kind of like being like oh fuck this i knew it wasn't gonna work and and leaving or do you see a lot of a lot of people who are bought into this space i'm not just talking about innovators although that's important i'm talking about like literally people who are just market participants i mean the reality isn't anything right now no matter what your project is no matter what you're

doing there's always going to be FUD and for the people at home or in crypto native FUD is fear uncertainty and doubt um which is a common theme in the crypto space just because again it's so new so no matter what you're doing you're always going to experience some capacity of that FUD happening um but for the most part man I'm I joke with Waheed, but I think maybe it's the Jersey in us. We got thick skin. Uh, that stuff doesn't really weather me because I know, we know what we're building towards and what's in the future.

What's to come over the next few weeks. What's to come over the next six months. And I'm very confident that we'll execute on that stuff. So what goes on right now? I'm head down building. Yeah. I'll say my, and this is just my two cent perspective from the outside talking with you but you as a company started to really

make these steps like what's on your sweatshirt right there in front of you and making deals with coinbase and some of the other places we can talk about maybe a month and a half after launch something like that and it was directly looking back on it now it was directly correlated but between the time when you stopped fucking mentioning the floor to me and being worried about that and and people being mad at you now i understand you know you're running a company price for you you're worried about your shareholders it's a it's a great trade and you should keep that but like you know i think a lot of these projects just looking at it from 30 000 feet in the air gets so caught in just doing something for the sake of doing it because

they're looking at the fucking floor price every day oh my god the floor price is down like 0.05 we're fucked right you didn't get stuck in that and then you started to let actions do the talking and it's correlated with why you know your overall levels we we know it goes up and down but like your levels are are higher than they were then your legitimacy as a project you're not just your followings but like your brand awareness things like that it's at a much higher level because you're focused on the business of what are we building here versus just price watching every day and it's it's a very very hard thing to do in your seat it's very hard and I think a lot of project founders do get caught up in that because

it's the attention economy right now especially as the volumes of projects that are launching bro it's 10 20 30 every day it's it's hard to keep up so we're all fighting for the collector's attention which as I mentioned you know there's X amount of wallets right now that are active in the US. So that's a very small, limited number of people that every single project is essentially trying to tackle. So, and even, you know, when you do do something with the attention economy, it's once you drop something, it's okay. It's hyped up for a week, maybe a week and a half, then it's what's next. Old, yeah. Then it's what's next. And coming from Web2 and even doing business with some Web2 companies in this space, the reality is these things take time. You can't spin up a Coinbase partnership in three days.

You can't develop merchandise in two days, especially if it's high quality. So these things take time. And like i said we know what we're doing we know what we're building towards i know that we can all weather the storm of some of these things and just wait for this next big thing to come out the difference between web 2 and web 3 though looking at the time period where web 2 was being built and the time period where web 3 is being built now is you by nature of the business model as well within web3 within nft specifically you have to

innovate in front of the crowd you have constant access 24 7 to your community behind you so every one of them can hit you up publicly in front of everyone else and say what the fuck yep on a whim whereas you know when they're building facebook they were doing in a dorm no one was talking to them the most they got is when they had investors come into them those are the people who bothered them and it's behind closed doors right so it's way way different for you to have to deal with that in this era way different i mean you know i'm coming from startups and some of the startups that i've worked for we're in stealth mode so no one knows what's going on but in this space the minute your project sells out you are now running a publicly traded company and That was the biggest shake-up for me in the beginning and honestly about you too

Like the whole thing was a learning process and even right now we're still learning because new things come up every single day, but I think the biggest thing that we have going for us in that standpoint is we're very One we don't hide from anything if something doesn't go well we're the first to talk about it even if we shouldn't be sometimes and you know this but i think that at the end of the day people take notice of that because you guys handled that one really well in november yeah there's a couple times but like i said we're not hiding. The minute we do

it, we're in the public because that's what they want. They want to air things out at the end of the day. Well, that starts with the founders though, too. A hundred percent. That's a big credit to you too. A hundred percent. And that's what we built this whole thing on was trust and transparency. The balance to that is how you learn how to, the right reasons not as a dick not as oh fuck you i am who i am you are who you are not like that learn how to drown out some of the day-to-day without it's a weird dance without drowning it out and you know for people listening right now who are in the smiles community you know if you're someone who talks all the time in discord is throwing ideas out there is looking for results, stuff like that, perfectly fine. other founders of other projects were that a lot like some of the successful ones were

telling you that they were starting to just kind of like on a day-to-day feed the community a few things when they tell them their concerns are heard but focus on the things behind the scenes and then bring it right to the community as it's happening so they could show them results and that is also correlated with when i started seeing you do this too, where you guys started to get results because you weren't so focused on, oh my God, you know, fucking whoever the fuck 69 just tweeted out that, you know, we haven't done this thing. And if we, what, how are we going to answer this right now? They just put something on the discord in general.

You know what I mean? You will go mad. You will. If you're thinking like that all the time. It's just like you're in the podcast world. You can't be reading all the comments even though i'm sure and sometimes you do but i i'd have fun with them because i recognize 95 of them are always going to be but that took time i'm sure that didn't happen from the start that actually happened from the

start for me all right i ain't gonna lie it's a different way it's not like your world though my comments don't matter like they're not directly correlated to the price they're correlated to audience but the audience it's different man it's not it's not as high stress as your world yeah straight up yes and that's something i don't think gets talked about enough either is the stress in this space because outside of being now essentially operating a publicly traded company you're also in a space that doesn't sleep and they expect the team behind you to not to sleep either. So, I mean, we've been doing this since September, I guess, is like I said, when we, I guess, started building August, September, I feel like I haven't slept yet,

you know, and just all the stuff that we keep doing and the events here, events there, it's very tough and it definitely takes a strain on you. But, you know, for me, it's shout out to my team because they're the rocks behind everything that, you know, kind of keep the gel there and pull everything together and just allow us to kind of get that space. And that's been like the most weightlifting thing is now going to some of these events that we have, like South by Southwest,

and knowing that the team is in place with the right people to then continue to run the things that we need to run and not necessarily be relying on Waheed or I or one of the core initial founding members. Yeah we talked about it briefly at the beginning South by Southwest but to go back to that like what did you guys do down there for Smiles? We talked about like lightly a couple of the other things like you saw down there but what about you guys? So we did an event on March 18th in collaboration with the Cryptoon Goons community. They sound like stand-up guys. They're actually – they're really dope people.

You know I love the names. Yeah. You know I love the names. But they have a dope artist behind them. He's like a tattoo artist in the real world right now. But they're very focused on like kind of streetwear and stuff like we are. And I really like their animations. It's honestly like a kind of Mickey Mouse type character.

So it's dope. But we did an event with them. We rented out a bar called Halcyon. We had live screen printing going on. Huge projector kind of running through animations that we've done like we talked about earlier some of the stuff they have had a wall displaying our nfts we had a dj in there open bar for a little bit um it was a really good time we probably had about 100 to 125 people come through uh so it was just dope man it was really cool to get to shake hands with you know people i've talked to for so many months and this being our

first real in-person event yeah because you've done like some company stuff obviously you've done like did you said the complex con but that was even earlier we had no holders then so it was just people that's what i'm saying like people you work with yeah or people who know yeah yeah so i mean the next step is is really pulling off like what Bored Ape has done, like with Ape Fest and everything. We started a little bit. So March 19th, the following day after the Cryptoon Goons event, we rented out a spot called Vulcan Gas Company. Joe Rogan's played there. Like a lot of big comedians go there for Austin.

And it's 600-person venue. We had some really dope artists come through, really cool djs tropics um he's an nft it's kind of making his name in the nft space from dj standpoint ria raj um swank and then we kind of had some main acts uh with elijah the boy out of new york who's starting to get up and running too and then uh smooky margelle that was fucking, he killed it. Everyone that came through killed it. Probably had about 400 to, at least the last check we got was like 415 people to come through throughout the night. So it was just really cool.

Two levels, porch outside. And you shot a few people outside too. Yeah. So unfortunately, there was also a shooting outside. Not smile sanction. It shoot not smile sanction it was not smile sanction luckily we were wrapped up before that um there's been a couple issues throughout the week apparently in austin so it was uh just happy the event went well and we got out of there before anything got out of there before it started flying yes not bad it was interesting what's what's the next in real life plan nft nyc in june i believe the dates we're gonna blow it up for sure is that a weekend it is you know

unfortunately the dates that nft events are set up they're not they're not the best i believe it's like a monday tuesday or something yeah fuck it we're going to n to NFT LA at the end of this week, which actually we are pushing live a grant proposal system, which is we're taking an allocation of our funds, putting it aside to fund community events and community initiatives that they would want to do, whether it be, you know, spinning up a coffee line, something like that. So the people get to decide. The people get to decide. Well, they'll submit a proposal and then we as a team come together and see if it makes sense for us as a get to decide. The people get to decide. Well, they'll submit a proposal, and then we as a team come together and see if it makes sense for us as a brand to do. That's pretty cool.

And we're preempting that with our first community. Well, it's a funded event created by the community. Shout out Stock Disick in the Discord on Twitter. Stock Disick. Stock Disick, he's a homie. I love the names he has been a rock star came to us with this full plan thank you sir you got came to us with this full plan a bar in downtown la rented out dj's coming through uh drinks everything set up ready to go so we're going to preempt our grant proposal system with our first community uh event and then we got something i'm not going to say it yet but we got something coming that

we're going you can't do that because i'm not sure if it's actually going to happen yet we're still like figuring it out if you put it on the record now there's pressure for it to happen but the episode won't be out by then what no the episode's still going we're doing this early but it's still going out in like 12 days n NFT LA is top of the week. Oh, you're talking about there. Sorry. I wasn't thinking on that. Yep.

How many days is that? Like three, four days? Three days. 28th, 29th, 30th, 31st. Four days. How is LA right now? I'm going to be honest, bro. I love LA.

I mean, who doesn't? But it's still like... I believe they lifted the mask mandates for the most part. I don't think you have to show your Vax card anymore, so it's starting to get, quote-unquote, back to normal. That's good. It's such a great place. It's like...

The people are hungry out there. That's what I love. Like the people in your space or just the people in general? Both, honestly, because some of the meetings that we have out there aren't specifically Web3 companies. Can you talk about some of the people you've have out there aren't specifically web3 companies can you talk about some of the people you've been meeting i can't yet i can't yet but uh can't talk about shmamey i don't know who that is but uh no uh it's just they're very i don't know they're willing to learn which is different like in a lot of these

spots the hustle's there but people are like very fixed on what they want to do they kind of have horse blinders on which is good in some capacity but in approaching us a web3 company that's a new space you got to spend time you got to understand what we're doing you got to understand what we're going to plan to do or how the space operates right now. So they're hungry and ready to move, but they're also spending the time with us to curate something that's really dope, not just trying to rush the market. Now, what types of things, like you've talked about things that are like crypto platforms, like Coinbase, obviously you talked about some fashion stuff, but you can talk about more of that too.

And I guess like some video game stuff, but i don't know how deep we got into that like what other types of verticals industries i should say i guess are you guys talking with slash like who's been reaching out heavy and again you don't have to say names but what kinds of projects clothing and clothing brands and honestly sports teams, leagues, stuff like that. What do they want? A lot, it's really centered around like what we're focused on is fashion because at the end of the day that's what separates us from a lot of the other projects. You can zoom in like you talked about, zoom in, see the thread, almost see the fucking thread count in some of these things which and on top of waheed's insane designs and different uh you know clothing that he does like his last one of one that he dropped created a backpack that with the backpack has a hood attached to it you wouldn't

know but it looks fucking sick and that's something i haven't seen yet so it's like that's our big competitive advantage here and i think people are starting to realize that and kind of um as we build out our runway that's that'll kind of come full circle you can kind of like because you've talked about building a fashion brand in the digital world here but maybe now we can actually expand upon that like you can kind of already see the tracks on what you guys are doing as far as like you will because you're led by a great creative mind and a great artist somebody who concepts a statue from the rock right you're going to be able to get you already are get really creative with shit to start your own movements and i overuse this example but i will always go back to it just because they did it over such a long period of time and just totally changed how people looked at not just streetwear not just fashion but like community around brand

and that's supreme you know they did it in the physical world starting as like a skateboarding fashion offshoothoot fashion brand. Obviously always focused on what became the streetwear industry and things like that. But they made that fucking, that red Supreme about that, you're already wearing a physical status symbol of something with your brand right now that you've done. You can morph – you can take that Sean Pory concept at its surface and morph the digital and physical worlds with your own form of supreme, as I said, maybe Bored Ape is trying to do. Maybe they don't pull it off like that they do it kind of their own way you do it your own way too but you i guess the race is to become the one the thought leader the culture leader the what are they doing that is now

going to set the standard like they're waiting on you guys to drop it whatever it is like is that how you think about it? In some capacity, but even the Bored Apes, I guess in some way they're targeting streetwear, but at the end of the day, you only see here up. Really, what are you dressing? As they move forward, you'll get the full body

and stuff like that, but ours is off the rip, a full body character. You have t-shirts, you have headspace, you have socks,shirts you have headspace you have socks shoes pants um and as we kind of build i said it already but the runway um if you're not familiar with it but the runway is essentially a 3d editor you can go onto on our platform and when you log in with your metamask which is your crypto wallet on your platform on our website to people what that means on our website okay so it'll just be a quick integration connect with your crypto wallet

it'll populate the nft that you own and then every time we do a physical merch drop we'll also drop it as a digital nft which then you'll be able to swap the traits on your character with the new merch that you just bought because for us you mentioned you mentioned rarity earlier. We don't have an official rarity scale on any website or anything because we have construction vests in our collection, and people are buying those pieces because they resonate with it. Even if there's more available, so to speak, than of other things. Exactly, because that's what they wear in, say, their 9-to-5 job. So who am I to say, yo, you wear this in your 9-to-5,

so it's worth less than someone else's gold skin or something like that. So people are buying pieces that they resonate with, not necessarily tied to any rarity scale. And that's why the art makes a difference, man. But also, like, physical merch. You're not buying a hoodie or a shirt that you don't want to rock. You're going to rock it because you vibe with it and that you resonate with it. So if you can do that in a physical world world you should absolutely be able to do that in the

digital it's going to be interesting to see how that looks because i mean on the surface it is as simple as dressing your avatar in the space right but how does what we create to be worn in the digital world translate to what i hate to use this word but what will remain of the physical world you know like sometimes i feel like as everything gets more complex and society gets more advanced and more and more problems spike up because different groups of people have different priorities and then you know you see wider trends like the wealth gap separating out so many people in society to where you know there can be times of like lack of hope people people turn to things that give them their own comfort

that give them a reason to have their own identity in a world of a crowd right and that's why fashion in the instagram era it's a very correlated thing for sure has become this i mean it's like peacocked right when we looked at fashion not to take anything away from it but when we looked at trends 15 years ago the range that we would see was nowhere remotely close to what we see now across every type of style and every type of person and so as people start looking at digital characters is totally different like i'll give you an example and this isn't i guess yeah it is a fashion statement but like he has the one trait in there where the character has i forget what it's called but like the uh the vinyl thing sticking out of his back like out of his backpack school record

player right yeah now that looks insane it also looks like it's pretty heavy because it's off a literal like vinyl record player and all that but like something at first thought ridiculous like that people could fuck with in the metaverse and then be like yeah i'm gonna get a backpack with that in the real world and you guys could lead that movement by creating the designs and by the way to bring it full circle what have fashion brands been working off of for the last 15 years or so when they start with something new they're designing it on a computer and they're testing out how it is you get to do that with the people actually getting to see it while you're fucking doing it yep it's been it's it's something special for sure and it's it's also like you get to create

very new things because you're not bound essentially to what you can do in the physical world which then pushes you even further when you go to try to create this close in the physical world that's a good way to put it you're also like a really good guy to speak with about this because and you mentioned this a little bit but like to expand upon it like you are truly someone as your friend i can attest this who lives so heavily in the physical world i mean i bother you about moving to new york all the time and you look at me like i have 10 heads like no i gotta live on a farm room for my dog my dog the fucking runner i'm like no no no no go to manhattan like we gotta do this right no no i'm not doing that you know like you love nature and all this shit and whatever and you're somebody who disconnects a lot

too like you just kind of go out there and do your thing and yet you're at the forefront of like a very extremely forward-looking futuristic industry in this way and in the very earliest stages building things that are entirely new concepts so much so that even people in their mid-20s who are just older than the youngest kids can't even fucking process this and yet you know you're doing that as someone who isn't just the person as you said who was born with the phone in their hand looking at it you understand both values of what the world has to offer between tech and physical world my question for you is how many people are really like that though in building this stuff how many people really value that versus how many people are just excited to be

in the comfort of an environment that now allows them to be disconnected from everyone but feel more connected than ever just because they're on a computer i think that's what it is though is that people are just infatuated with what's going on right now that they just said fuck it let's just go head first into this but the reality is especially as someone trying to build a company in this space you need that balance like you genuinely do because as i kind of said earlier it's it's very stressful space so if you don't have that separation you're gonna go mad you're gonna go absolutely mad and then also in some capacity just because the space is so small right now

things become an echo chamber. So if you're very deep in the metaverse, you're going to lose touch with reality. And honestly, all the things that got you into the space and you wanting to try all these things. How does that not happen, though? For the crowds, you're talking as a founder in that way, and I appreciate that because that's important. But the crowds are who adopts, the average person. I think the unfortunate answer is time because this is not sustainable there's burnouts real so you can only do this for so many for so long so people are just gonna eventually see that but then also it's up to us as other founders in the space to kind of build something that does

resemble and give you that freedom like whether it's you know you hop into a virtual world that's actually you in tahiti and you can meditate for an hour things that kind of bring you back and ground you in some capacity while living within the bounds of this digital world we're all building towards in the extreme scenario of that though in the future if you are doing that and you're just doing that for everything and while you're in that world it's like the matrix you're laying down in a thing like this and maybe you're 600 pounds because you never move all day every day in the real world like how does that how does that translate does it translate to quality

of life because everyone's per like it has to life? Because everyone's perfect. It has to. But how? If everyone's perfect, if you can build your most perfect thing, if, like, think about the heaven scenario. I'll extrapolate. I think about this a lot. I don't really know what the fuck goes on. Like, all that.

But sometimes I think about it. Like, oh, is there, like, something after this whole thing? When you go there, whatever personal belief you subscribe to, there is an overall belief of the concept of like heaven. Like, oh, it's a great place where everything's perfect and all that stuff. If everything's all good and you're conscious in that environment how's it enjoyable because you don't have like what makes life great as shitty as this is to say isn't just the good it's the fact that the good happens because awful shit happens on different levels whether it be you know you have a bad day because you know she broke up with you and you didn't see it coming or like your whole family died in a car accident like there's different

levels of it and obviously way more extreme in the second scenario but these types of things have to happen to people either happen to us and we die or something bad happens or happen to people around us that affects our vibe and how we look at things in the world in order for us to then understand what the high feels like so if we don't have that in like a heaven scenario i always wonder how that would go down or if there's just an extra power consciousness that allows it to not matter i hope that's what it is i assume that's what it is but like in the real world if you created that environment how does that how are people going to be happy in that bro Bro, that is such a deep question. I didn't even smoke before this either. I need one.

That's a tough one. Because there's so many different ways it could go ultimately. Like we, I mean, that's kind of the scary part at the same time. We really don't know what's going to happen. But again, like we were talking about earlier, you kind of got to just trust in the people that are building and that's fucking scary no of course not but i believe in myself and i believe in some of the other people that i know are building something relatively similar to what they would want to do. How so?

At least I imagine Meta is building their own Metaverse, which they've already leaked from an Oculus standpoint, and seeing people and having conferences and stuff like that. But I know that there's other people building towards that where I'm confident that they're not going to take it the wrong way. But again, it's a shot in the dark, right? We don't actually know. And even the people that I do know in this space, I've only known them for what, a year?

So it's still, you know, at the end of the day, a risk that you are taking. But I don't know. I have, it's probably not a good thing, but I have a lot of faith in human beings, which I hope that we'll get there together i do too that's why i keep that there because you know for people listening not watching right now you pointed at this earlier about bringing it up again i chose this very deliberately on this wall over here the picture of the bomb test at i forget how

to pronounce the island's name but there was an island after world war ii because apparently we did this where we just bought it and it's no longer there and then that's that was its last day on earth right there because we blew up a nuclear bomb to test yeah and you see the power of that to say nothing of the bombs that we had to drop at the end well add to is a whole another thing but that we dropped at the end. Well, add to is a whole nother thing, but that we dropped at the end of the war. And like, we've managed here, knock on wood with reason shit. We've managed to coexist across the world and not have that happen.

And mostly not have fears of it. And I wonder how that will translate to technology. And I share your opinion. I do have overall faith in humanity, even when we have the day-to-day negative stuff that happens to makes us question it for sure. But the big end game question there is what if technology, but it's not even a, what if like innovation is going to get to a point where it out thinks us nuclear bombs require us to hit a button for now right you know you build

i don't even want to say a sentient machine but you build a machine like there was the facebook example i think we might have said this last time where they built two ais like basic ais and in the computers like basic shit four or five years ago and they quietly pulled the plug and shut it down because they can like it's something you could just pull the plug on because the fucking computers invented their own language to talk to each other elon if you're listening put a kill switch in neural link we need to know there's an exit what if elon's the fucking mole he's the alien here to send to end humanity by acting like the man here to save it yep yep no i mean at the end of the day man i think by nature humans are programmed to do good it's just an experience or something that they encounter along the way that throws a wrench in their thinking.

So I think inherently we all want to do good and build a better future together. I think you're mostly right about that. I hope to God. I hope you are too. Yeah. But like you can be right about that and also look at human history and know that it didn't turn out that way for people nor does it on a daily basis but the way you put it like i don't know if you said these exact words but you just said it like the environments where the impedi impetuses whatever around them shape them to not do good

and sometimes it can them up so much that they think they're doing good and they're really doing the worst shit ever yep like i really wonder that sometimes thinking about like hitler like did he actually think did he actually think that like half the shit he did was good like i don't even know how that's there's a point and that's the most ridiculous one of the most ridiculous examples but there's a point to which can you be that brainwashed? I mean you mentioned look back on history. There's been a lot of tribal situations. So I think it's safe to say in some capacity, yes.

But, man, we just got to hope that we're all trying to do good at the end of the day. I know what I'm trying to do. I know what I'm trying to do. I know what you're trying to do. So we could be outliers, but we could also be the masses. And let's hope to God there's a kill switch in there. That's what I'm saying. Some sort of controls, some sort of tribe-seeking or tribe-supporting controls. Because, like, you've been talking with Jim DiIorio on here.

Yeah. A lot. And I think I talked with David Satter about this. I don't know if it was on camera or off, but when he was in here recently. You know, all it takes is, if you have a room of 10 people

at a well-placed organization, so like with Jim, talking about the FBI or the CIA, you know, his world. Well, you just need one bad person in there you know so like he was involved talking with tim cook and the san bernardino iphone right thing and of course he wanted the fucking iphone to this day still says that but he and i had a great conversation about it where he understood where i was coming from and i'm not going to say he agreed with me, but he thought about it in a new way because I said, Jim, you wanted that iPhone. For people who don't know, this was the terrorist in San Bernardino in 2015. He killed all these people. He was then – I think he committed suicide or was killed at the end of it the government wanted his iphone because they believe it had information to protect lives at the end and tim cook made a controversial but a decision that i

laud to say you have to go through the courts to get i can't give it to you because if i do it's a slippery slope the next one you'll ask me for someone lesser and lesser and now i'm not protecting my users privacy so jim was angry about that and he was trying to talk with tim saying give me the fucking phone and i said i'm so glad he didn't give it to you because if there were i use the 10 guys thing i'm like if there were 10 guys in there and eight of them were half the man you are great what if the 10th one's not yep snowball effect too yeah if it's not this and it's going to spiral into something bigger at the end of the day and privacy is a big issue i mean we talked about the discord hacks uh earlier it came a report came out that there's been verified accounts on twitter that have gotten

hacked and what's going on there um so there was a report i vaguely read it so i don't know the full logistics but um apparently similar to the discord, there's been Twitter accounts that have a verified symbol that have gotten hacked. So then obviously if there's a verified symbol, in most cases, then not someone in the Twitter world thinks this is a legit person because you need to submit articles. You got to do all this to get verified. They ended up posting Bored Apes dropped a coin about a week and a half ago so riding the hype of that they made a bunch of tweets saying hey we're giving away x amount of ape coin if you purchase this pass and then this pass was worth 0.3 eth so they got through a lot of people and i think they took like 50 eth or something like that which is comparative to the

other hacks kind of on the lower end but still at the end of the day it's 150 000 could have impacted a lot more people could be a little test too could also be a little test because it was only at least to my knowledge because those accounts were trying to like do it to myself too they would tag me in all these tweets and do all this stuff but i just knew like hey this is some shady business going on um but not everyone does so this could be something bigger i believe there's only four accounts but it could have been 10 it could have been 20 could have been 500 where at that scale you're losing millions i mean it kind of related to what you're saying i i don't i don't know why i didn't ask this earlier because you kind of brought it up but also the problem within nfts and web3

that i mean at least i look at it as a problem is this whole anonymity thing you know because like when you see a hack as you were just laying out it comes from a fake source or an anonymous source and we've seen this is as old as time this has been happening on every piece of technology ever created that communicates but in web 3 i'll tell you a thing that pisses me off is when projects are not doxxed i don't fuck with that shit i don't like it at all i did not think what what buzzfeed did to the board ap Apes founders was professional. I didn't think that was right. But, yeah, I'm fucking happy those guys are docs.

In my opinion, there's no fucking way you should be anonymous and accepting shareholder money. That's insane to me. Well, that's the thing. The amount of money that's being thrown around, it's very tough to go out there and just say, hey, I'm going to trust this dude with a random profile picture that i've never met or know anything about um but you know for us i think that's an advantage that we have here i am on a podcast you know i'm i'm not hiding anything right and honestly we've had because at the end of the day like with some of these uh new projects that come out they're always looking for other existing projects to then give pre-sale spots to so you can utilize the brand that's been created to now bring

awareness to your upcoming project but at the end of the day that's essentially you have to treat that as a partnership because you're attaching my brand to a project that hasn't minted yet where who the knows where it's going to go in a month where it's going to go in six months are they just going to pull the plug and rug everyone, right? So for us, we implemented like a due diligence process. If you're not walking through these three, four, five steps that we need to do, we won't offer pre-sale spots. And one of them is hopping on a Zoom call with us. If you don't want to hop on a Zoom call with us, fine. We just won't be partnering with you to offer pre-sale spots to our community because that is a real fear. And the rugs are crazy, man. Every day there's a new one.

And at the end of the day, I need to protect my brand. Again, though, you're one brand. And again, this is one aspect of one slice of the pie, right? NFTs. For everything, though. Like, maybe in a way some of it's hypocritical, because I look at something like Bitcoin and love the fact that the guy who created it is anonymous. However, it's a decentralized system that puts control in the hands of the people and no one can take it over.

So he doesn't get to make decisions on it. He does still own a big he or they, like if it's multiple people. They do own a big position in it, but's not ain't 50 ain't 30 or whatever it is you know so in a way that's like an exception i have because money is the most powerful thing in this life that ties people around the world together and the heaviness of a person who invents that like a person or like a small group of people who invents potentially a new money for the rest of the world. That's something I don't know that humanity could handle to know that information if they were inventing the space as they did in that case because we know Vitalik invented ETH and stuff like that. So there's – it's like anything.

It can age over time but even with eth like that's something that gets held against it because it's like oh these people run it there's something in for them something in it for them like yeah i'll take the hypocritical exception there but on a day-to-day like people communicating back and forth within these communities and on the internet and innovating and and building things you know i don't think that's great that there's not a giant movement requiring identification no i mean bro we need to be very conscious of like especially in my community we have a lot of new people like when we minted a lot of people didn't even know

how to mint and then after we were walking them through how to do the process so i'm very protective of these people because this was also me like i didn't come in knowing anything about this space or how to mint an nft what gas was what a smart contract was what any of this was so for me i'm very protective of those people and in our community for the most case it's if you lose one eth that's like that fucks up their their life like that's a couple months of rent for some of these people so if we're trying to achieve mainstream adoption we need to be protective and make sure that people know where their money is going to even though say maybe in a year the project ends up not going anywhere. Right.

But that's a risk you're taking, but at least know initially that it's as de-riskified as possible. Yeah. I hope the communities like the, the internet community ends up solving that problem by enforcing it in a way, you know, obviously you guys are enforcing that within your your own community which is great so that's that's a good start you guys are thought leaders at this point but we need to see it where people know who main users are i'm not saying like you know everyone who participates like for example within the within the stock market you

don't need to know which random jo Blow is buying in his Schwab account. I understand that. But I'm saying if you are moving serious money or building or things like that,'m going to be looking at heavy to see how that develops some more because you are going to continue to see it used for by bad actors for fraudulent purposes. And you know, when the average person hears that who hasn't adopted, huge red flag. Huge red flag. Huge. Huge. And then even like all these hacks where I keep talking about it, but like,

how are you going to expect the everyday person to come in when all you see is this going on? You know, it's tough. So it's really about us. And there's some founders that we kind of have been coming together to make sure that, you know, we just share these thoughts, share these ideas, share the issues we're having, and then try to come together and make a decision. Because it's not like this is just happening to one of us. It's happening to all of us. So we need to band together and make sure that we're doing what we can to push the space forward in a positive way and do what's best to really make this mainstream. Who are some of the coolest founders of other projects that you've been able to connect with

at Art Basel or even at South By? I know you mentioned the one who you did something with at South By, but who are some leaders in the space that you've been able to connect with it like Art Basel or even at South by I know you mentioned the one who you did something with at South by but like who are some leaders in the space that you've really liked um Bobby Hundreds he's honestly just because we are striving towards similar goals but obviously he got his start in web 2 we're getting our start in web 3 so we're kind of reverse engineering each situation here um but his his you know the stuff that he shared has been amazing um what's the full extent of his company for people out there listening so the hundreds is a streetwear brand that's been around for about two decades um they've really helped get streetwear mainstream and now they're venturing into the nft space with

uh adam bomb squad which is their project i think it's about 20,000 NFTs, 15,000. And that's basically your access point into exclusive merch, discounts on their public merch, stuff like that. And then with specific projects, though? No. So they do their own merch drops? No, no. I'm saying like with specific

projects like who are some who are some guys who you've connected with oh yeah they're doing great betty from deadfellas betty is amazing um she's actually out of australia but she thinks very similar about the space which i appreciate because you know in a new world it's hard to find people that are kind of pushing towards this the right goal that we're all trying to do what's like the value prop of their project um deadfellas i'm gonna be honest i'm not gonna speak on behalf of them i just know kind of the things that they're doing and behind the scenes like how betty thinks about approaching things which i appreciate a lot because we share the same values um and so there's dude honestly there's there's a good bit but for the most part

we have this little founder chat that i really enjoy the people that are involved shout out aiden from the hearts we got mason from alien friends got a lot of good people in there and like you said there's there's still 10 20 that are minting every day like new projects something like that yeah probably more if i'm going to be honest yeah so let's even assume more how how many of these things are making it i mean you always hear everyone talk about Gary Vee saying like 99% of these projects are going to fail. I do agree that, honestly, most of them are going to. But there's ones that are building real stuff, and those ones are going to make it. And especially the ones that are weathering the storm right now. Because the space as a whole is very interesting.

What the market wants, what the community wants's it's very interesting is the best way to put it um but the ones that are head down building you know shout out the gutter cats too because that's one they kind of got me into the space ironically bro but um i think they got the one mitch told a story about on here i think they got a lot of hate in the beginning but they've just been slow and steady growth which is like i respect the hell out of that they just reached a 10th floor the other day and flipped the cool cats which is a huge project like but that's a good example of just ignore what everyone else is doing stick to what you know and what you want to build put your head down and do it because over time people are going to realize real products created

by real people that bring real value i'm trying to remember if it was the same one as does gutter cats offer staking not yet okay what do you think of that staking yeah honestly it's it's very interesting but i need to stay away right now just speak until we figure out what regulations look like i know there's different mechanics and things that are potentially illegal but like i said you never know what's going to happen and the government's always looking to make an example of someone but also staking to me this is what i really want your thought on staking to me looks a lot i'm thinking from the form of a government looking to make a case on something they don't like. Looks a lot like a pyramid scheme. It's definitely interesting.

It's definitely interesting. And I don't even know that much, I guess, from a technical standpoint about it. But like I said, I just need to be protective of the brand that we're building because at the end of the day, that's kind of why there's a big push for us to diversify revenue streams through with getting the merch line up and running, you know, to some of the toys that we're going to end up doing. Toys? Like vinyl figurines. Like a Funko Pop almost.

Stuff like that. A little why heat in here? Yeah. We have a deal with Time Studios to create an animated TV show. Oh, you do have that deal? Yes. Maybe I'm thinking of another one. I thought that was the one you weren't doing.

Was there another one you were doing and then you were like, fuck that? I'm definitely thinking of another one. Yeah, maybe. Okay, so what's the story with time? So it's still in the early discovery phases and obviously anytime that you go to create a TV show, there is an opportunity that it never comes to fruition

because you need to both agree on a script, you need to have the same storyline, and then obviously it needs to get picked up. So if it never gets picked up, the gets created so you're making a tv show yes and what's it about uh we're still working through the storyline and stuff like that so it's not necessarily uh fully fleshed out it's going to be it's going to be a long-term thing for sure like we might not see it until two three years and is why he designing all the characters within the show and the animation it's

going to be based on like the image and likeness of the smiles do you have a working name of the show or no very early and can't talk about much right now and what's what's the story with time aren't they didn't they get spun off so they're their own thing now or maybe i'm thinking of another time studios got bought by mark bain off the founder of salesforce so i guess technically they're spun off yeah all right so deep pockets done over there tech tech mindset too it's pretty interesting it's it's gonna be very cool to see what old school brands, like names, so to speak, really pivot hard and actually effectively over this next little, say, two to five year stretch right here. Effectively is a key word.

Yeah. Because like, and obviously I'm biased, but times working with you guys, I know how you guys think about things. That's smart, obviously, in my opinion. Yeah, I mean, obviously I'm biased here, but I'm just excited. Keith has been awesome to work with so far. So I'm just excited to see what we end up creating because it's going to be different from what we've kind of seen operate in the space so far in terms of animations and stuff like that.

So it's going to be exciting. Are you and Waheed, he i mean in my conversations with you guys it seems this way heavy but i'd just love to put on the record here and see what your thoughts are are are you guys pretty aligned at this point with the different vert i mean i'm using corporate speak but the different verticals you want to go after and like how you want to build this or is is he more pushing ideas and and you're making it work or like what's what's the workflow there the beautiful thing about the both of us is we just brainstorm together like we just bounce ideas whether it's from an art standpoint uh next collection we could drop

an event we host the next product we're going to come out with outside of nfts we're all just putting in ideas together and figuring out what sticks and then expanding on it from there so it's just been it's been exciting man um well he's amazing it's my boy i just we brainstorm very well together but we also work very well together because i know my limitations even from a creative standpoint so I let him do his thing kind of lets me do my thing on the on the business side so it's just a beautiful relationship what's the like next iteration of what he wants to do because like everyone thinks about smiles as as the character because he's had even back to some

of his early acts like when he did stuff that wasn't you know of kanye or of little dirk and young thug and stuff he was using his design of what then became the main character of the collection but like you know if you're talking about building this out into a brand does he have a lot of ideas about different iterations of designs and quote-unquote brand calling cards he can use to build this out to create your own you know supreme sticker type deal with smiles for sure and it expands even like outside of nfts or even fashion like he's so early in his artistic career he wants to get into creating physical art whether it be statues or stuff like that like why not that's also the most exciting part because who knows where he as an artist is going to end up at the same time but um from an nft standpoint you know we have a

male character so it only makes sense the next step is a female one for sure yeah i was wondering i guess you guys are thinking about that right now then very much so but also like the collection took us three months to launch so why he's work does take time and he's got to hone his craft on a female a little more. So I'm not saying it's going to be next week. I'm not saying it's going to be next month. There's going to be some time to be put in, but I think based on this collection and the quality that everyone's seen in the male character, they can expect that to be even better in the female. Yeah, I mean, representation is critical in any public project of anything these days, and for good reason. I think one of the things you guys have going for you, though, is that before getting to that,

this is truly something that people of all backgrounds can get around because it's such a, you know, the thing we've talked about ad nauseum today, it's such a culturally significant project. And I'm biased, but again, I think more so than than a board apes because it's it's a person it's you know it's a digital person it's a digital recreation his own imagination but it's a person who has fashion and interests that align with heavy heavy doses of all kinds of pop culture and it creates like when you were talking about them making a show around you know some of the board ape

characters i'll bet they'll do a great job with that but like i can already picture in my head 12 different ideas of shows you could create around characters that directly fit the voice and image and idea of what people may imagine unknowingly in their head right now of what smiles represents if smiles was boom a person or like a figure or a talking walking character in front of you well it's it's we're real at the end of the day yeah whether it's us as the founders us as the team you know we're always shooting you straight we're always being real you hop into a twitter spaces with us i don't have some fake persona he doesn't have a fake persona like the words that are coming out of my mouth is how you and i talk behind the scenes like i'll we're all very straightforward and we speak from our minds

and we're very transparent um which is in my opinion not happening enough in the space um but that's just why people resonate with us because even if it's a construction vest like i said that you're wearing your nine to five or it's not and it's the skateboard and you've never skateboarded in your life but that's something you can attach to because that's in the real world it's always something you wanted to do you just never took it on so why not expand on that in the digital world and give yourself you know the opportunities that you never really had because that's kind of outside of us being passionate about music, culture, sports, which correlates to our collection.

It's also things that some of us have never done before. Like Wahid, the character is essentially created around the skateboard flip, right? That's his Genesis piece. He's not a skateboarder. He always wanted to be one, but he's not. I didn't even know that, actually. So it's like our stuff is we're real at the end of the day so cool well how are you doing i mean like do you i'm just thinking about it like

you know we're talking we talked about the project a bunch saying a little bit about you but like have you pinched yourself yet no not at all that's why you know i talked about a lot recently honestly we need to step back kind of appreciate what's what's happened and what we know is going to happen in the future just because shit moves so fast and like we kind of talked about earlier people want things it's the attention economy so it's like we drop one thing that's really dope to us really exciting something we never thought we'd be able to do. But then after it's like, all right, what's next? What else can we deliver on? So we need to do a better job taking a step back. But like conversation with you, like with people like this, it's, it's starting to

kind of hit a little different and make me realize kind of what we're doing, but I'm just, it's exciting to be doing things that I really care about at the end of the day and building something really cool really dope with dope people i mean it doesn't get better than the people you're surrounded with and actually genuinely fucking with them and and feeling like you're you're in a good space but whenever i look at people who build success in anything in society that has attention on it, especially, so that's across all kinds of industries. One of the, it's technically one of the, but probably the most powerful barometer of measuring where you are as far as it being in a in a in a good thought leadership position and

and clearly making it quote unquote versus where you were besides just money right which doesn't it has scale to it so it has different stories at different levels it doesn't always tell the full story the number one thing that in my opinion that i see is when it when the shift happens from you making the phone call to receiving the phone call you know so for years you obviously had an insane network and dealt with some serious people and some very exciting things and we're close on a lot of stuff. And this is what we talked about last time. But the impetus was on you for Outbound. It was on you to, you know, stick your fucking foot in the door and, like, hold it there, you know? And now you're in a position where every day you get to decide. I got 30 legits in my inbox.

I have time to answer five. Not to be a dick either, but like legitimately, you know, to put your focus and give the correct attention, respectful attention to people. You got to make decisions. And now it creates these opportunities to build upon the talents that exist within your company that, you know, it's different from when you're trying to get there. Very much so. But at the same time, it's also a lot more pressure because a lot of these deals and partners and companies that we speak with, they don't know anything about the space. So they're really relying on us to kind of curate a lot of this stuff. So it's very exciting to, you know, get these calls and see some of

these emails come in. Then on the same side of that, it's a lot of work and a lot of pressure because not only do I have to be conscious of our brand now, I have to be conscious of, of how it could impact theirs. But again, it's, it's, and I mean this in a good way. It's a good form of, of personal power to control your destiny you have because they're coming to you because they want to do it already. They're asking you how it's not like yeah you know maybe you still get places like that for sure but i'm saying like they're still reaching out to you and they're still like oh yeah i don't get it i'm not i always picture like the old dude with the suspenders that still exists in some offices in certain industries that's like i don't understand this shit but just that kid he fucking got it like let's let's get him in here tell us how to do it right like

you're talking to those guys and they're like you have our attention that's yes there's pressure that comes with anything to be great at it and to be a leader or you know carve out carve out people's time to be devoted towards you and what you do in anything there's going to be pressure but you know pressure makes diamonds and and that's also what what actually gets you to the point like even the point you are right now yeah for sure um it's definitely it's fun man for sure but it's also like people watch how you move in the space. And I think they're, they're watching how we move, how we interact with the communities, how we engage, and just how we approach things. Like, it's never, why you and I say this every time,

we've turned down a lot of huge deals that honestly, probably would have propelled our floor to say 10, 15, 8, just because of the names that were involved but because they approached us being more conscious of their brand and their quote-unquote community uh we didn't want any parts of it because at the end of the day we wouldn't be here without our community so if they're not going to be willing to put take press have them be precedent over others i don't want to touch it because we need to be conscious of the people that got us to this point and continue to make sure that we're providing value directly to them. I don't care who the brand is. I don't care how big your name is. We got here because of how conscious we are of our community. We need to keep doing that. And that's the right way to run it. It's the moral way to run it. And it's a commendable thing. It's also something that you've earned

with leverage to be able to say that right like if you're when you're trying to get your foot in the door like that sometimes you're in a situation where you're like do we really got to say yes to this for sure turn the lights on tomorrow it's been situations where like honestly after you know after we minted the floor obviously went up and then it settled down a little bit and people were pretty pissed and that's when some of these big opportunities got put in front of us. We could have sold out. We could have bailed out and took the easy route and said, yeah, this will shoot the floor up for 10 ETH.

But then it also sets an unrealistic expectation because, okay, you shoot up to a 10 ETH floor overnight. Now you have to constantly deliver things of that value or you're going to crash and people are going to be like, what the fuck's going on? So I enjoyed kind of our process and how we're doing things right now i just think we're doing things the right way our heads down we're not getting influenced by drop this token do this do that like we know what we're doing we know what we're

building towards well you also released the the blueprint the blueprint back in december great name by the way. Really good name. But how far along are you into that? There's two different lengths of vision to look at. Important here, you're looking 90 to 180 days out, but then you're also looking at blueprint ideas of five years out. So how close are you to really looking at a grand scale, five-year broad plan to to share

with people i think my biggest strength is i know what i know but more importantly i know what i don't know and i don't know what the space is going to look like in two three years i know what we're going to try to do but ultimately we need to be ready to adapt on a dime if we need to fair yeah it's changing every day man yep especially right now you know the last you asked me what the space was going to look like in september i would have said you something and now here we are and it looks totally different than what i probably would have said what do you think of the whole like where are we with the whole celebrities thing which kind of started this whole thing it seems to me like now yeah there are guys that put out a project they're

going to make money because they have a name brand but sure you talk about like that attention or the allocation of money being over a select group of people who are actively within the space so they get to decide where they're going to put it towards it seems to me like the vast majority of the money is going towards not celebrity-backed dumps it's going towards projects that have legitimate ideas or or have a vision to do something to actually build well also i think a lot of celebrities have seen what happened early on and kind of how reputations in the space got hurt a good bit by them coming in and just trying to do a cash grab at the end of the day

um so there's a lot from the celebrity standpoint they're starting to be more of collectors and getting into these projects not necessarily dropping them but even the ones that do they're i think they're starting to talk to the right people that are getting them to understand how to enter a space like this it's good to know i mean i think uh for right now but i'm gonna knock on wood after i say yeah yeah we'll knock on wood on all that you're still gonna see i mean what did ty lopez well yeah for sure that one's very interesting he even he even hopped on a podcast with shout out function function is also a smiles holder um but he was very vocal about his opinions and ty lopez invited him on his podcast to uh kind of dig into things i respect

that i respect the hell out of that i gotta go listen i didn't see that but yeah like i see something like that project and i'm just like what are you doing like you don't need to do that yeah it's a lot of youth to watch a movie yeah listen there's a video used to i mean i didn't look at all the things but there's a video he's talking about like i picked out like an old card that was lying around in my bookcase you get that like but it's also interesting because like influencers are reliant on their community to make money that's by definition what an influencer is so in some capacity can you hate because he's taking

advantage of the audience that he built but obviously i i don't agree with a lot of it but no it just comes down to what what value are you really getting the same way that we questioned instagram influencers starting several years back where you know they'd be selling like some fat loss product that they never used and and airbrushing all their pictures to back it up and and behind the scenes it was shit you know stuff like that they they cancel themselves with that because then to be an influencer it requires to get to that point you develop trust that's how you build an audience an audience that don't trust you ain't an audience it's a fucking it's it's a it's a tomato gallery so you, you know, I think NFTs can also reveal that,

because I think you're going to see people do that. I'll have to check out that podcast he did, but I don't know. When I see stuff like that, I'm like, come on, man. And again, I'm looking at it on the surface, but still. Yeah, but it leaves a bad taste in people's mouths, which in turn hurts the projects that are building something real. Yeah, yeah you can only control what you can control exactly so stay in your own lane but listen man really really fucking impressive watching this thing quite literally since day zero grow literally kind of i've had i've had probably of anyone i would say the best front row seat

just like popcorn. What are we thinking? What are we doing? Not having to take any of the calls as far as making decisions or doing anything. But it's been really cool to see you grow. I love Waheed. He's a fucking amazing guy. You guys are an incredible pairing, which that shit's hard to do in business.

Find people that are yin and yang. You guys really have a great yin and yang you guys really have a great yin and yang there we got to get them to like new york a little more we'll work on them you know yeah i gotta work on you but you're kind of a lost cause but uh listen man great great job thanks for coming in here to to talk about it you know since the last one when it was all just about to start it's it's a very cool thing i appreciate every conversation we have man i love you you've been a great friend and likewise to you you deserve the flowers for what you're doing here with uh trying to fire so much love thanks brother well we're it's it's kind of cool there's some shit happening in jersey right now we're cooking the boys are

buzzing we're fucking cooking in jersey but we'll do it again. Thank you. And everyone, where can they find Smiles? www.smileswith3s's.com Check us out on OpenSea. Smilesverse. Check us out on Twitter at Smiles with 3 S's. On the end. 3 S's on the end, right? Yes. I don't know if you said that, but I want to make sure. And then also, you have the link to Discord on Twitter, right? Yes. Link to

Discord on Twitter. Instagram. link to Discord on Twitter Instagram check us out we're out here stay tuned for more to come out excellent well that said

you know what it is I'm Julian Dorey give it a thought get back to me peace you