Tech Brew Ride Home - (TWTR SPC) This Week's NFT Explosion With @jacksondame And @SHL0MS

Episode Date: September 4, 2021

Chris and I get deep in this week's NFT craziness with two folks who are actually working right now in the space, @jacksondame And @SHL0MS. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Today is Wednesday, September 1st, the first goddamn day of September. I can't believe it. This year is flown by.

This is the TechMeme Ride Home Experience, the show where we talk about the latest and greatest, whatever the hell is going on in the world of tech, what's blowing up, what's popping off. Good morning. Thank you. Welcome to the show. I am Chris Messina. And I am co-hosting with Brian McCullough, the host of the TechMeme Ride Home podcast.

And today we've got a crazy show. I just, I can't even, I don't know, like intrepent. any other way. But before we get into the big topic, which is NFTs and everything that's happening in that world, I feel like we're entering a bizarro, mirror world, all at the same time. We're going to talk a little bit about some of the news, but we're going to start off with an initiative that Brian has cooked up, which I think is actually very interesting, very fun. While he is talking about it, I'm going to go find the tweet so the folks who are here in the space can vote on today's World Cup of Entrepreneurs. Brian?

Yeah, listen, guys, this is just a B.S. thing. That's a fun thing that... You're fired from marketing. But podcasts have been doing this. So many of my favorite podcasts do do this in terms of what are the things that they cover. Like the movie podcast. Like which directors should we

cover? My favorite history podcast is on the World Cup of British Prime Ministers and things like that. The idea behind this is you do a sort of Sweet 16th sort of bracket style, you have your audience vote on it. And then, okay, but what does that mean? You're voting on who's the best prime minister, best entrepreneur, whatever. When you do the show, when you do the wrap up of it, of who wins and whatever, you do bracket, bracket, bracket,

till there's one left standing. It allows you through this weird sort of lens to sort of analyze things like a movie or a person or a company or whatever. So I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I said when we announced this earlier this week, it's just for fun. And we've got the great folks from the Acquired FM podcast that are going to come on and do this with us. And it'll allow us to just, like, in a fun little way, analyze what is interesting about various people and their companies and their whatever, whatever. What I want to say is, we're about to go in a holiday here in the U.S. So I'm announcing every day all of the matchups.

Right now we've got Bezos versus Ma. Tomorrow the lineup is Mark Zuckerberg versus Jack Dorsey. Because the holiday's coming up and I won't be able to announce it. Because this is coming out on Saturday, every day you can vote for various matchups. Saturday's matchup is Oprah versus Patrick Collison.

Sunday's matchup, the 5th of September, Gates versus Whitney Wolf Hurd. And then Labor Day, September 6th, it's going to be Larry and Sergey of Google versus Larry Ellison, the Battle of the Lerries. And then the day we come back, it'll be Steve Jobs versus Mark Benioff, and that'll round

up our first 16. So, yes, that's it. I just wanted to do that. Just table setting, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, every day, you can go on Twitter to the at TechMeme podcast. It'll be pinned to the thing. You can vote.

Right now, the voting for Bezos. Actually, Jack Ma is getting better than yesterday. The loser guy. Jack Ma's 24.1% against Jeff Bezos, 75.9%. And I believe that Evan Spiegel lost that around 15% yesterday. Anyway, whatever. The point is, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I expect that, but if you think about this, if you look at the brackets, like, we're eventually going to have, I'm assuming a Zuckerberg versus Musk at some point, you know, a Bezos versus Musk at some point. Draw out the trolls. Sure. Well, I tried to, but right.

I tried to, I tried to seat it. I try to do it literally that way where it's like we should have some real, some real heavyweight bouts at some point. Anyway, that's enough of that. about this process, by the way, as I understand it, as you've described it, is that we get to talk about the loser. And so as they exit the bracket, as they've picked off, you know, the island, so to speak, that is the opportunity for us to actually kind of go into them and to, you know, consider them as an entrepreneur. And I think that's, that's actually going to be the most interesting

thing because I think it's, it's, whether it's, you know, the flawed individuals or the people who, like, had a shot and then, you know, missed it or just, you know, I don't know, like, giving those folks their due, I think. And that's, that's the thing about. about this that I'm actually most excited about. Right. So, you know, Evan Spiegel is the first voted off the island. So he would be the first one we'd be able to talk about and we'll be able to talk about, well, why is he, he didn't win, but what is his story and what are his proclivities and, you know, yeah, so we'll be able to talk about it in years, you know, maybe Evan actually won and, you know,

he won the Metaverse contest and, you know, there you go. Right, there you go. So we'll be able to talk about each person individually, 16 people in two episodes. It's going to be fun. Anyway, enough. Okay. We got it. Perfect. So yeah, don't forget, go vote. You can follow the hashtag, et cetera. All right. So let's get into a few news pieces. And then we've got so much to really unpack in what's going on in this world. The first thing I wanted to talk about, I think, which is, it's kind of relevant. It's connected to a lot of things. Obviously, it's connected to identity, which is obviously my saddle horse. I don't know. Stocking horse. Whatever. I don't know horses because I've only rid them like a couple

clients. But regardless. Hobby horse. Hobby horse. Thank you. Exactly. I knew it was some kind of horse. Small horse that I come back to frequently, a pony.

Anyways, the pony is Apple ID, essentially expanding to support driver's licenses. Now, we sort of, you know, you had to have known this was coming. You had to know that not only with these chips being put into, you know, the iPhone and, et cetera, and the watch, but that with the Apple wallet, that whole concept of replacing the wallet. I mean, it is named appropriately, you know, given all the skemorphism that, you know, was the early, I guess, design paradigm for the iPhone, moving more of those pieces of the wallet, literally onto your device and onto your phone, onto a secure enclave where, and again, like this is where the privacy narrative is so important. Like, if you kind of look backwards six months and you look at Apple's telegraphing and their marketing messages, you can kind of see where they're going and why they're. they have to set these things up to prepare the market to essentially become a frog that's about to be boiled. In this case, they started out with things that were very simple, just like going to tickets,

you know, like to events or things like that. And then eventually they added in airline tickets and stuff like that. And that was like revelatory, you know, and all the systems that had to be put in place to enable that. And now more recently, they've added transit passes and stuff like that. Moving into the government identity space, moving into, I know vaccine, passports aren't quite enabled yet really moves this conversation forward in terms of both, you know, privacy and access and security and why that narrative is so important for Apple to take over more and more of those things, especially in more places all over the world.

So I just, I don't know, I think it's very important to look at the conversation and the narrative around driver's licenses being added to, you know, Apple ID and Apple wallet because of things that we've talked about in previous episodes around the New Year customer regular. around moving away from anonymity, pseudonymity, and the need for more and more players, I guess, in the space to know who their customers are and who they're doing business with. This, you know, doesn't not have connections to the whole only fans thing and what was going on there. So I just wanted to like, I guess, pluck that out and sort of, you know, bring some attention to that because I think it's very relevant and very important.

I think also, you know, it comes down to your device is eventually. going to be you? I mean, we already have that. If you live in the two-factor authentication world, you're already there. I think about that all the time if I were to be hit by a bus. You know, like, because, you know, I've given my wife my passwords and, like, things like that. But at the same time, like, if you couldn't get onto my phone, you wouldn't necessarily be able to get into my anything right now. If your face gets disfigured or something, like, I don't know. I don't know. I mean, you know, if you're like, exactly. I've, I've had several digital deaths, you know, where I've lost access, you know, or where hackers took over my SIM and were able to get into

my accounts or where, you know, my laptop was stolen when I was traveling in Europe one time, and I've got two factor on everything. And, you know, I don't know how many people, you know, actually print out their two factor backup codes for some period of time. I didn't have a printer, so that was not really possible for me. But nonetheless, like, it very viscally, like, you know, gave me a sense like, oh my God, like, I could lose these things. And, There's not a backup. There's not sort of, at least as far as I know, and I hope that there's not a backdoor into these things once you add that second layer of protection. And on the one hand, that's great and that's good.

And that's, you know, what we require. But it also does, just like with all the stuff that's happening in the crypto world, put a lot more responsibility on the individual to maintain the security of their devices, you know, et cetera. So anyways, I think it's just really important, something to pay attention to. The other thing I wanted to bring up, and I guess I had a couple of thoughts about this, that went beyond the coverage that I saw in Axios. I should be doing a better job of actually tweeting these links or pinning them here. But regardless, the one that I was interested in was Amazon, I guess, getting into the live audio space. You know, we've seen this across the board in a number of ways.

And Amazon has actually done a bunch of stuff getting into live streaming and media over the last year. Specifically, they've added more and more QVC style content where, I don't know, you open the Amazon app now or you go to the website. and there'll be somebody who's just sitting there showing you some fidget spinner or something, like, you know, as a live stream and you're like, wow, this is really crazy. Like who watches this stuff? But on their hand, you know, people are bored, I guess. You know, they haven't discovered NFTs, I guess. And anyways, Amazon moving more towards radio, I think is interesting for a number of reasons.

And I think it specifically has to do with the voice assistant that shall not be named and providing content for that. I will say that what I've noticed is that with Google's assessment, assistant, which I will not invoke, two things have been happening with my little puck device that I have in the shower is that when I listen to my morning briefing and it plays a number of news clips ads are being inserted into that context. So not only is this becoming an increasing like commercial area, as we knew I suppose voice computing would become, but this becomes very, I think, interesting and necessary for the, again, the voice assistant that shall not be named to provide additional content in just an always on, always available. This is your replacement for radio.

wherever you go, you know, kind of offering. So anyways, it's part of the streaming wars. It's part of, you know, live content. I just, I find it like very, very interesting. And I've, I've sort of underreported on it or covered it because I feel sometimes I'm always like, well, this is the podcast space, so I shouldn't talk about it. But, you know, Amazon buying Wondery for $300 million is actually the biggest acquisition in the entire history of the podcast space.

Yeah. So there's that. there's the idea that they already have audible. So, you know, if we're looking... And supposedly this may be within the Amazon music brand. So anyway, if you look at it through those lenses and then the she who shall not be named... Whatever.

Like, they're actually more position than just about anybody to, I don't know, own a space that is incredibly hot. I just want to shout out real quick and then let's move on. Clubhouse having over 700,000 live audio rooms each day up from 300,000 in May. Yeah. So again, on the is clubhouse real, a bust? Is it, you know, whatever? Is it over?

Interesting data point there. Yeah, it's really good. You know, Remy's here in the audience and I'm sure he's got opinions. We're going to, Remy, just so you know, we're going to hold maybe until the end to bring other folks up, just given how much we have today. but I do think that this question about what happens to terrestrial radio. I know a lot of people sort of think about it from the perspective of, oh, well, you know, terrestrial radio goes out and has all this connection. Remy's question is, do you think Amazon could build what Spotify did not build with greenhouse?

I think the answer is a little bit different. I think the way I would understand what Amazon is doing is it's creating programming that it needs to have on a number of different media formats in order to have inventory, you know, whether you're talking to a smart speaker that is, you know, Amazon owned and powered, or whether they're doing, you know, live audio streams for commercial content or whether it's powering the Amazon ad

ecosystem, which has just been growing like crazy. So it just seems to me that they're not going to rely on any other company. You know, maybe, you know, what crazy idea would be Amazon acquires like a clubhouse or something, but that just seems completely like off in terms of the,

both brand alignment, but also what Amazon tends to go for in wanting more generic banal, like non-creator-centric kind of you know what chris that's funny that you said that and i've never thought of that yeah that makes a shit ton of sense and if you think about something that's a crazy thing for amazon to buy i would say twitch uh wait did they not already don't they already own twitch that's what i'm saying right exactly yeah so i you know if you if you go back in time i wrote two sort of canonical pieces on the voice space you know one was about the air pods um and i you know i called them the sex sticks like fuck your ears because they're just like they're very sexy products and apple's all about creating that

i don't know that shine that jewelry like sort of uh element whereas amazon if you go back i think the piece is called like why silicon valley is all wrong about the um amazon echo and or the show maybe the whole point was that they create these very like germane basic non-sexy you know uh dare i say frumpy like digital products to make them one one very cheap and two extremely accessible they don't look like technology they look like turds and so you you know like if you're not looking to spend eight hundred dollars or four hundred dollars on like a home pot or something you don't mind you know going for the amazon product so anyways it just i think it's it's important to keep in mind what's going on there and what they're what that direction may

actually mean and it's not like oh they're doing clubhouse or they're doing social audio no no no this is about creating inventory and what they do with that inventory and what they do with that inventory is yet to be seen. Okay, the next thing that I want to talk about, which kind of relates to the first one and also the second one to some degree, this point about iPhones adding the ability to have satellite coverage. The one thing that, and again, I'm just speculating, and I'm probably totally off base and someone's going to tell me in it many, and that's fine. I usually am, but I'm just sort of making things up as I go, but it seems to me that maybe this satellite coverage might have something to do with, you know, the Apple car. Like maybe if, you know, the future of

mobility is kind of cars or phones, rather with wheels. And you need that connectivity wherever you go. Apple wants a device that, you know, is connected everywhere. And so having Apple needs their on star. Exactly. Exactly. So that again was something that I didn't really see brought up. It seemed very odd. You know, you're like, oh, I'm a person who has an iPhone and I, you know, go hell of diving or what are the hell of skiing, whatever it is where, you know, you're on the woods and, you know, you do something stupid because you're unprepared for, you know, hiking some mountain or something. Like, does it really make sense to put that level of connectivity in the iPhone just for, like, those users, like, for that emergency use case? Like, how often does that happen?

Mike Rundle actually points out, you know, maybe Apple AR glasses could use this as well. So there's really good coverage. I would say coverage in terms of pretending this is like a head fake. That's what it seems like this could be. The satellite coverage could be a head fake that actually allows Apple to continue to explore different forms of connectivity that are not 5G. that are more energy efficient, and that actually empower or enable other types of computing platforms that are not specifically handheld.

So that was my little thought. I had not thought of that. You should do my job. Honestly, God. That's such a dot connection. That's obvious when you say it. Well, thank you. That is why we have these conversations, right?

Because I'm walking around, I'm like, I don't think that's really what this is. And, you know, the tech press covers it from like the most straightforward way possible. And, you know, we get to speculate here. here. The last, the last kind of mini story that we wanted to cover that I wanted to just cover was today's launch of SuperFollow on Twitter. I do not have it yet. I may be denied from monetization options forever and ever on Twitter, and I won't explain why, but maybe that's going to be the case. But regardless, they did launch, and I've seen some people that have it. It's, you know,

I guess it's cool. Actually, this does lead into like the next bigger story, actually, I think, in interesting ways. The thought I had about Superfollow is that, I guess, things. One is that this completely changes norms, expectations, and behaviors on social platforms forevermore. You know, it's one thing to sort of go to a premium, you know, news or newspaper or magazine site where at one point, you know, us old people would actually buy physical copies like prints of these things for like four or five bucks at the airport and we'd consume them and then maybe dispose of them afterwards. But up until I would say 2020 and 2021, it was rare to feel like you would, you know, need to spend money to follow people on the internet or just to

interact with them or engage with them. You know, certainly there's been tipping and things like that, but super follows changes the vernacular of interacting between people in a way that it's going to just, I don't know how it's going to change things. I don't know if the norm and expectation will be that everyone has a super follows and, you know, sometimes you do that. And that's just how you create your tribe or your club or your connections or something. Or if it's going to create new, a new class system, you know, with haves and have-nots and like poor people and rich people, even worse than what we have today. And so I don't know. So I'm, I guess I'm following that quickly. But today just seems like, you know, September 1st was a big day when it comes to the

creator economy and what's happening there. So speaking of the creator economy, okay, we're ready to switch over to the big, the big topic, the big story. Yes. Well, and, and There's no headlines about this all week. If you were online and you're connected at all, the last week has been NFT week, hands down, no questions asked. Like, what the fuck? Yeah. And it's, and I want to, I guess I want to draw a distinction. And Brian, I think you can actually kind of lead this conversation.

We've got two amazing guests. We've got Jackson coming up. And we've got Shlomo, I guess, like, or I'm sorry. you're going to have to tell me exactly how you want me to say your... Shlooms. Shlooms. So easy. Shlooms.

It's literally... It rhymes with... Okay. Like I said, I'm a newbie here. We've got Jackson and Shloms here. And these are two guys that I've been following for quite a while. I will let them introduce themselves and sort of like how they kind of want to be known. But they both are participating, I would say, in...

Let me let me start again. There are three different ways that I'm sort of... observing the NFT space evolving. One that was the 2020 NFT space was essentially kind of digital artwork, you know, as they say JPEGs and a certificate of authenticity that established some sense of rarity or uniqueness, artificial scarcity for an image. And then you could buy and sell and trade and you kind of, you know, kind of prove that you had this thing first.

And it, you know, created a real asset. But what I see happening specifically with what Jackson and the folks that loop party project, project, are doing, is adding a whole other element that's a very different sort of generative structure that, dare I say, I mean, is sort of, you know, akin to the way that I was thinking about hashtags in the beginning. It's a generative structure or technology that allows people to build unforeseen things far into the future without no central coordination with the people who kind of came up with or established the idea to begin with. And I'll let them kind of talk about what that is. And then on the other hand, what Schloams is doing,

with his art projects, I think goes beyond what the basic idea of sort of like owning a flat image and having a certificate of authenticity. These are constructs or kind of collections. They're, I don't, they're, they're tied to moments. And he's going to actually tell you about a sale that's going on right now to sort of help. Yeah, I don't even want to chill it. I don't really want to even chill it. I just want to share with everyone like within the past 10 minutes, my auctions aren't ending, but I'm about to make more money than my shitty corporate job would have given me in three years. Okay, you're going to need to show. This is the biggest moment of my life that we're all sharing right now.

This is amazing. Okay, then you need to share that. Share the project. Explain it. Explain what's happening. Sure. So if you look at my Pint tweet, maybe I'll give a little bit of context. But I can see it.

Okay. Thanks. Yeah. So that is. the announcement of the final of four drops of my project. So I can also pin like the main announcement thread. But it's a sort of crypto-native, physically fractionalized, sort of like real-life generative take on Duchamp's Fountain.

So I took this urinal, put my own pseudonym on it instead of our mutt, and had a bunch of people in a parking garage in the middle of the night, fractionalized it with a hammer. So 175 shards. We've sold most of them already. The first two drops were like flat sales. We completely melted down the NFT platform that it was hosted on, which is a great problem to have.

And then, yeah, so right now what's happening is 20 of like really large pieces are on auction. They were supposed to have ended at, I guess, half an hour ago. But the bidding on OpenC gets extended for 10 minutes every time a new bid comes in. So they sort of like were stagnating. And then all of a sudden within the last five minutes of the bid, they started going crazy. And the last 10 pieces, so nine pieces of the urinal, like the craziest pieces,

and then the hammer that we used to fractionalize it, we're supposed to be the next drop that we're supposed to have dropped half an hour ago. But now I think I called an audible and we're just going to wait until all of these end because I can't think. And I'm probably going to buy. When you say fractionalize, I just want to point out that you literally, as I understand it, now, maybe you can DM me the link to the video of you, quote unquote, fractionalizing it. But this is where this becomes, I think, super, fascinating conceptually because you literally took a sledgehammer and smashed the thing like

IRL in the Adams space. And then you digitized the results of the smashing into those fragments that you described and then you sold each of those as an NFT that was the digitized 3D version of the thing that came out of real life. Right? Yeah. So it's sort of, yeah. So it's sort of like it started off almost as a play on words.

Like what if fractionalization wasn't like not like just. you know, just owning equity in a piece of art, like what if was actually part of the art and made the art look different, like non-fungible fractionalization, basically. And I was like, well, how do I do that? Not really like a smart code or like, let's just take a conceptual angle to this.

And then it's also a play on like the generative trend in crypto, which is, you know, usually that, you know, the artist makes a bunch of code and then the art itself gets generated when, you know, a person buys it and it's based on the time or their wallet idea or whatever. And I thought, well, let's make a generative based on my friends and, you know, the specific physical circumstance of, you know, everything in human, like, the history of the universe leading up to this specific moment will, you know, because of the laws of entropy, like, decide exactly how this piece of art will look. So, you know, I've called it IRL generative or intropically generative.

But yeah, it's sort of as a joke, but now, I mean, I think it's like a serious concept. You should probably stop talking about it because I'm actively bidding on it right now. I don't want people flooding in. Sorry. Okay, I'll talk about the next thing. So the next plan, which I tweeted about, is I want to make a Dow where we all pool funds to buy a Lamborghini and then we physically fractionalize that. Preferably by blowing it up. I was going to say, yeah, by blowing it up.

I mean, you could actually create a lot more share, I suppose, right? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Hmm. Mm-hmm. And so it's a Lamborghini because I hate Lamborghinis. Everybody wants Lambo in this space is what I understand, though.

That's the thing. I did want to, so I know, like, one of Brian's, I think, roles in this conversation is to actually take a step back. Because, you know, he has lots of things that he's got going on. And I tried to sort of dive deep within the last 24 to 48 hours to sort of understand the things that are happening. And I want to make sure that we call out certain things. Granted, we have a slightly more sophisticated audience. But I think, you know, when you mention things like DAOs, I think the goal that I want to have in this conversation is to bridge several divides. Part of it is yes to sort of, you know, understand some of the, I guess the acronym soup that's coming about out of this.

But also like the reality of, you know, a DAO or whether it's like the party bids or things along those lines. Like the idea of fracturally owning something, I don't know, I suppose like in and of itself, you know, has been around for a long time. we're changing the nature of how that works and who can participate in that. However, I think Shalams, when I asked you, like, how do I get involved and how do I buy a piece of your urinal for some reason? Like, first of all, the starting price was not insignificant. And secondly, the mechanism by which one would do that, like, it feels limiting. It feels exclusive. Well, so what was the starting price that you saw?

I think it was, was it like three or four or five ether or something? It was like, I don't know, $13,000 or $14,000. So that's, so that's, that's on secondary. What I initially sold the first shards for was $44. You could buy it with the credit card. It was priced in dollars. So actually, this was the first NFT that a lot of people owned. The site ended up not having the capacity because this was the largest,

the most traffic they've ever generated by like a factor of 10. But for the people who did buy shards, someone ADXed within two hours because they went immediately to a four ether floor price, which was like whatever, $16,000 or something that they paid $400 for. On the same marketplace, on the exact same marketplace, or they took it somewhere else? No, they took it to OpenC. Right, right, right. So if you think about that, that's a lot of value that I left on the tables very specifically

because I wanted to make a piece of artwork that my friends could afford. Like that wasn't the reason why I made this piece, but it's one of the reasons why I was attracted to the idea that I had already thought of. And I initially thought that I would have trouble drumming up demand because it's such a fucking weird concept, pardon my French. Maybe you have to leave that out. Um, sorry, but um, it turns out, it turns out that it was the exact opposite problem where now my friends are pissed at me because it didn't get a shard and they would have, you know,

made a lot of money on it. So you know, can't win either way. I also, and I don't know how comfortable you feel about this because I feel like you're, uh, you know, a rather strong pseudonymous like, you know, person, perhaps almost well, pseudonymous, like I can't even see the word anymore, but like, you know, whether it's your, your typography or the the way that you present on Twitter it's not it's not it's not it's not it's not it's not it's not it's sort of uh you know how do I put this I feel like I'm sort of going back to my days in art school where it's sort of like I see what you're doing and wow it's kind of like fucked up and weird but great and I love it uh thanks able to share a little bit more

just like about your background where you're coming from you're asking if I like went to art school or whatever no no I don't like care if you went to what but I want to understand how you got to be this way and why do you behave this way and How did you get into this? Because I think it's important. I will give you, yeah. I mean, so this isn't like super de anonymizing because it's kind of obvious, but my name is Shlomo. I grew up like super, super religious community.

And, you know, I won't like wax too poetic about it. But I just grew up in a really, really, like, structured, like, environment with a lot of rules and restrictions. And I think that people who leave an environment like that, like sort of self-select for being, Well, usually having mental health issues, and I'm very involved with that community, but also, you know, just like you have to be like a, you know, at the really, really extreme end of the human spectrum of like being independent thinking and creative in order to like do something like that. Because I don't think people understand like when you grow up in a almost cult like environment, like how strong that the grasp is on you, I guess. I'm not really phrasing it too well because I'm also sort of freaked out about the auction at the same time. But that plus, yeah, just that sort of environment. I literally just tweeted today.

That's where you started from, right? Yeah. I'm really just tweeted to any sufficiently long conversation about my art turns into a therapy session, so let's not do that. Okay. So we don't have to like, although I'm usually game for like therapy sessions, especially in the context of like, you know, the tech world and like all the stuff that's going on and all the dysfunction. But I do think that it's interesting to sort of, one, try to understand, like, did you find this community as a result of leaving, you know, this hyper-conservative context from which you came? And then in finding that belonging, kind of develop these relationships and connections that allowed you to, you know, put this type of art out there and have people respond in this way. And, you know, eventually I want to understand more of, like, the economics and the finance of this. Like, like, I don't even care for that yet. like, you know, money is, whatever. I would say, yeah, the internet was like a huge factor and like, you know,

realizing there's like more of a world out there than like my insular community. So I just grew up like super like, you know, like all over. Like I didn't do any like sort of social media where it was like me and my friends. Like I wanted to connect with like strangers on the internet with like the same interest as me. So I was like, without naming an age, can I just, Can you give us a ballpark? Yeah. I'm like a zillennial.

Okay. So you're younger than 30? Yes or no? Possibly. Yeah, probably. All right, all right. Around there. Around 30.

Okay. So actually, actually, this is one thing that I wanted to bring up, which is the connection to the financial crisis. I feel like this is, maybe it's been part of some of the coverage, maybe not. But what I'm trying to pick apart and understand is the norms and kind of expectations and behaviors that dictated and informed a lot of the behaviors that my generation engaged in and led us to do things to create social platforms the way that we did. And then to look at what this current generation and this current wave is doing by imbuing

finance and financialization and the concepts of finance and behavior and psychology into like these independent, autonomous, like even the keywords and like concepts are entirely different than what I feel like was popular, you know, a decade or 15 years ago. And that break is so, so important to understanding this because you have a bunch of people who are reporting on this stuff who are like my age and Brian's age coming out this with the perspective that they had back then. You know, we, not to try to, you know, go on forever, but like, you know, the Gulf War was like a big deal in like our lives. Like that loomed large and that I think informed. Are you talking about the 1990 Gulf War? Because that's the one I'm thinking of. Yes.

Exactly. Right. And that was the first time, at least for me, where we had a live feed of missiles going off in the desert halfway around the world and we're watching this thing and we're watching the shock and awe of the, you know, US Empire attacking, you know, this foreign nation that, you know, ostensibly at least, you know, had, you know, the lies that had been built up to to lead us to that war in Iraq. Now, within the last week, we ended this 20-year war in Afghanistan, while in the meantime, this younger generation grew up and grew through Occupy Wall Street and the financial crisis.

And so while we were off, you know, gallivanting and world building in terms of, you know, civilizations and country building, this younger generation came up on the social media that we had created and that was exploited by previous administrations to create something vastly different and new that is somewhat resistant to the type of, I don't want to call it like mind control, but story control that many of us suffer from or are trying to escape from. So that's what I'm, I guess, trying to pick apart. And, you know, anyways, I'll leave it there. Brian, you had some questions. Yes. So, okay, I got two. And I'm going to kick these back to you.

Hold on, I'm bringing up the essay here. Kai Sheffield, who's the head of crypto at Visa, had an essay. Remember when A16Z launched Future a couple of months ago and then never published anything again? Yes. Okay, there's an essay that he wrote, and this is in June, so think of in terms of crypto.

Okay, let me just quote real quick. today most successful characters exist as intellectual property owned by a single corporation. This means that fans don't have any governance, let alone direct ownership of these characters, limiting them to being only passive consumers of the products and narratives that the corporation decides to create. Even if fans buy public equity in the companies to show support or alignment, it's difficult to make a targeted bet on the success of a single individual character or franchise. Blah, blah, blah, blah. It goes on and on.

It's an excellent essay if you can look it up, Chris, and pin that. So, Mr. Urinal Salesman, what do you think, because I do have a second question specifically about the urinal and that choice, what do you think about this idea of, we've been asking you about your generation and things like that, but like this idea of that modern fandom, modern consumers of culture have, feel an ownership of the culture, of the culture. culture and yet actually have no ownership of the culture. Do you think that that is related to what you are doing and what is happening right now? Yes. If you look, I rambled about an hour ago on Twitter about how, you know, like if you look at the famous conceptual artists of the traditional art world, sorry, can you guys hear me? Yeah. Yep, you're good. So think of like Damien Hearst, right? Like how does he interface with his fans? They read fucking in, sorry, I did it again. Sorry, Chris. Keep cussing.

They read interviews. They see them in the newspaper, right? Yeah. I'm on Twitter. I'm DMing my fans. Like, my fans are my friends. People who are my fans, like enough in my tweets, respond enough. Eventually, like, give it a month.

We're friends. Like, you know what I mean? Like, and they've never met me in real life. Like, this is a fundamentally different relationship. It's not the same at all. Like, it's not like we're just reinventing it on chain. And it really has not that much to do with the tech of crypto. It's more like a social and cultural,

well it does but it's more about like how how it allows artists like me to monetize art that's for people like me and doesn't need to be for like gallery owners in order for it to be commercially viable what you just said art for a week for twitter weirdos and actually make money from it and not just like get a couple clicks and you know no attention what you just said is maybe the most interesting thing to me right now even if i'm going to because i'm going to play devil's advocate in a second. Even if I'm skeptical about even the blockchain side of this, is that it doesn't matter. That's almost secondary because

crypto and the blockchain is just basically unlocked sort of an energy here, an artistic energy, that who gets a fuck about the blockchain? Right? Because whether you can argue that it's enabling it or not enabling it, there is an energy here that I don't think is just because crypto exists. I mean, it wouldn't be here if crypto hadn't. It's the enabler. It's created an energy that is now here. And right, it wouldn't be here without crypto. But what I'm saying is that

that energy that you're talking about, that connection to the answer. Okay, go ahead. Well, I think you're right. I think in certain circumstances, I think actually, I think you're right to a certain extent, but I do think that the fact that you're, that some of us are making art as NFTs actually allows us creative possibilities, if that makes sense. Like, pretty much none of my art would make sense as a non-NFT. Like, it wouldn't exist. So it's a different genre. Right.

Right. Does that make sense? So actually, so let me pause you there because I want to bring Jackson into this, because I think this actually dovetails perfectly well, which is, and I'm going to let Jackson, I think, explain this, but I'm going to try to explain it from how I understand it. And this is specifically related to this thing called the, is it the loot? Part of your project, loop project, right? Yeah.

Yeah. So as I understand it, there are a set of essentially text-based. I tried to explain this to my partner Joe earlier today. I get it. But essentially, there are these attributes. And Jackson, send me a tweet or something and I'll pin it. Oh, yeah. That what is it?

Like there's nine or 10 of them or something. It's like a text file. And it lists these attributes or things that are in a kind of bag, like a random grab bag that you get. And, you know, the price of these things actually, you know, has gone up considerably. But that's sort of besides the point. The point is that the things that are in the bag are a set of primitives that you can use and remix to create all sorts of expressions or games or other things.

Like, it's not deterministic in the sense that, you know, I'm going to pause right there because I already understand that I'm going down the wrong path. So, Jackson, go for it. Yeah, I mean, you're totally right. It's a very kind of ridiculous project in some ways when you think about it from a traditional mindset. It is literally in some ways just a bunch of text files in some ways that are via the blockchain have been made digitally scarce so that only people who acquired them, they own them. And there's enough people that have an agreement that what the blockchain says is true, that there's this consensus that it is valuable and it is ownable.

And so that is what is the case. And the interesting thing about this project is, you know, most people who, when they go to make, like, let's say most people when they go to make a video game, they spend months developing it and after maybe years they end up launching it to a community and hopefully people buy it are interested in it. Whereas this, you know, Dom, the creator of this project, it was really just an experiment for him. He put it out there on a whim sort of and a bunch of people, you know, collected all these

pieces. He didn't even sell them. He just put them, he put all 8,000 of these pieces out there essentially for free and whoever claimed them first got them and they you know people are a community is sort of rallied around them and because it's on the blockchain you can you can develop things on top of it so it's kind of like an interoperable standard and so now people are you know it's all these it's all these fantasy sounding items you know like swords and dragon shields and all this stuff and very reminiscent of you know dungeons and dragons or rimscape or things like that and uh there's no game

There's no team. There's no customer support. There's no nothing. It's just, you know, 8,000 or so different people that rallied around this really interesting concept. And now we're in multiple Discord servers, scheming and plotting about how to build a game on top of this, how to make additional art projects that are derived from it. And there's like kind of a micro economy forming around. it. I mean, I find this just like so, I guess, fascinating. It feels like a lot of other people

who are in the crypto space see it and they understand it and they recognize it as a moment. Like, I feel like somebody said something about this being sort of like the punk rock moment. And this is something that I think Brian and I talked about recently. You know, we're looking for those moments where there's a deviation, where there's a blip, where there's something that, you know, causes you to be like, wait, did you see that cap? You know, like, it's like, you know. And this, and I don't want to like oversell it because it's still fairly inaccessible. But what I think is happening in a way is that the internet is becoming somewhat aware of what can be used if you start with even simpler ideas embedded in the blockchain and embedded as NFTs, that the remixability is the thing, that the participant, the participatory aspect of these units of meaning. allow for a great range of different people to actually join and participate and to interpret

and to add on as opposed to where we were not too long ago, where the pieces of artwork that were coming out seemed to be somewhat, you know, fait accompli. Like, this is my finished art and I just wanted to be, you know, locked into amber forever. And I don't want anyone to fuck with it. This is saying the exact opposite of that. And actually, you know, like Shalom's, I'm curious how you see that and where your piece, kind of the fountain piece, comes into this because it also feels like it's kind of done, like it's done art versus the loot project will continue to unravel and unfold perhaps indefinitely. I mean, just like there's still people who are playing, you know, second life. You know, like they could be playing this loot party or loop project thing for who knows how long.

Yeah, I mean, I'll chime in and say that, you know, I, I, uh, I think that Shlom's work is most likely going to create lots of mini-sprout-off projects. Like, I managed to buy two of them the other night on the first night, and I'm already planning on fractionalizing one of these fractional shards further. A fraction of a fraction. Using fractional art. Yeah. Jonathan, I'll throw up between someone else's is doing this interesting economics project

where every person has to sell his own NFT to someone who owns like N plus one shards to sort of try to like conceptually put the piece back together. And then I have another friend who's working on manually recreating each shard in CAD

because we didn't take 3D scans to put the urinal back together in 3D. So my work tends to inspire like I wouldn't call them copy. Like derivative works like in the non-pojard of sense. Like I'll help these people out.

You just touch on something and then I want Brian to jump in. Sure. You know, is that back in, and I don't know if you guys remember this, but this was certainly influential for me in, I want to say, 2004, 2006, was what Larry Lessig was promoting as copy left, was the Creative Commons, was CC0, which was putting things into the public domain, was essentially advertising on your creative works.

And Flickr was one of the early supporters of this. Like, this is, to me, like, the Internet as a medium reflecting its true nature of wanting to treat information as free, but humans, just knowing what we've known before, tend to put things in cages or to lock it up as an industrial production machines as opposed to what you're doing. The fact that you use derivative work as opposed to a generative work is interesting. I mean, it may or may not be too significant,

but going back to that era, it felt like there was a lot more willingness to be open and to share. I mean, that was the impulse that led to the hashtag being what it was and why I resisted any kind of calls for it being patented or trademarked or anything like that or what we did with co-working in Barcamp. I mean, those ideas were meant to be generative, were meant to be culture producing, and to create essentially a way of seeding the early internet community around the world. And so it feels like that's happening again with some of these primitives. Anyways, Brian, you had some questions.

Yeah, I'm going to reset a little bit because we've got a little bit in the weeds about these specific projects, which is great. And we're going to come back to that. I want to reset so dumbly, so, you know, noob, old man, waves, cane stuff. So let me do this rapid fire. I've got three or four here. Okay. Number one, GM is good morning. Correct?

Yes. Good morning. Yeah. And it's essentially just people, at least right now the NFT community is all shiny, happy people that love each other, right? I wouldn't, I didn't say that. I'm deep in the weeds enough to know there's a lot of drama that it goes on on a week-to-week basis. But I think in the wider Web 3 ecosystem,

there's a cultural norm forming that we all like to say good morning to each other every morning. Okay, number two. And I would just add, yeah, sorry. I was going to add Jackson and I think are in sort of like a specific, very specific subset of the NFT world that I think is like very collaborative and happy go lucky and there are other parts that are a little different. I agree.

Okay. So number, number two, if I don't know about these things, it's because I'm not in the right Discord channels. Is that where a lot of this community is happening right now? I would say no. I've up until more recently, I have Twitter chats. Yeah, 90% of my information comes from Twitter or Twitter DMs. Okay.

Telegram a little. Okay, so essentially all over. I mean, shit, it could be fucking subredits or something. But if I want to... No Reddit. No Reddit? Okay. Okay.

Yeah, okay. Okay. Yeah, no. I mean, if I want, this is, this is, this is what I'm saying. I'm asking the dumb questions. I'm playing the dumb person because I'm also dumb. Okay. If I want to buy your stuff, I need to have ETH.

Yes, no. Otherwise. Usually, yes. I tried to do with dollars and it turned out to be a fucking disaster. So usually yes. That's a kind of sublimatic, is it? Occasionally, no. Yeah, exactly.

The idea that as someone like me that covers the broader internet space where, you know, six months ago I was covering the first wave of the NFT craze, and then it went away. And I think I tweeted last week or something, I was like, I'm pretty sure there will be a bubble burst in the NFT landscape where people would be like, oh, that was such a fad. Nobody does that anymore. The only problem is I'm not sure if that's still ahead of us or if that happened in April and May. That probably already happened. So do you do the two of you have any sense for why we have this resurgence now? Was there some catalyst that you can point to? I mean, I don't know if I'd say catalyst.

I think having been around like doing this stuff on a daily basis throughout the ups and the downs, I would say that there's just been people on the surface who have been building stuff day in and day out and are making small incremental progress regardless of what the financial markets are doing. And I think it's just over time that you sort of build a headwind with that and enough people start, you know, taking notice and starting to use the products. I mean, I work at a wallet application company called Rainbow. And we've been working every single day during all that. that, you know, the ups and the downs when no one was paying attention.

And, you know, I think we're, you, you slowly see the benefit of just, you know, building stuff. Chris, you get all your questions answered. I mean, I, if I still want to play the devil's advocate, I could play. Like, you know, so I guess, yeah, go ahead. The devil's advocate thing, it's easy. You know what I mean? Like, it's easy to sort of like call bullshit on this.

And it's easy to like, you know, be upset about. like the value or the cost or what's happening with financial speculation and all those things. But, you know, again, I guess for me, you know, I posted a, I pinned, you know, Paki has a great piece on how corporations are getting into NFTs. And I think he's really doing a good job of sort of thinking through why this is happening, where it's going to go, and what companies that are really getting, I guess, I don't want to say ahead of it, but are kind of playing along to learn along with everyone else is to think through some of the knee-jerk negativity that's easy to manifest and instead kind of ask the question of like well what types of behaviors and activities are positive

here what are the i have a way to frame it yeah i have a way to frame it sure okay so duchamp and the and the the fountain are the perfect way to do this because you know what the dot we're doing, we're essentially being like, oh, art is so valuable. We're going to dare you, motherfucker, to value a fucking urinal. Right. And so the question would be, the two, and this is to the two of you, for being artists in the space, for being, you know, people that are pushing projects in the space, what would you feel about it becoming, it's already big money and things like that, but that has to do with the energy of, it and the creativity of it. What would you feel about it being corporatized? What would you feel about it?

Not just being something that we crazy kids are doing over here in a corner, it being something that, you know, all of a sudden Disney releases a fucking Lion King, you know, series of NFTs. Would that be a betrayal? Would you embrace it? What would you feel about this becoming bigger than just energy. I would think, I mean, Disney specifically, yeah, I don't know, Disney specifically, I don't know. I think maybe it would be okay, but my ideal vision of a sort of corporatized future

of the space is a lot more of like the Dow version of corporations where like that, you know, normal people like us can still benefit from it. But I don't really have like any, any, sound bites for you about that. I think that it's relatively inevitable and I think that in the same

way that corporations are now using the internet, and they weren't, you know, whatever, how many, 30 years ago, whatever, I think that the same is true for this. I think that, you know, I think in 10 years you're going to see a lot more, a lot more companies using NFTs and I think that I think it's a natural, I don't think that I don't think that me

personally, I'm not going to like or enjoy the NFTs that these corporations, that these corporations put out, but I think that it is going to happen and it's going to be a key component of all this stuff continuing to grow. Yeah, so one question that Mike sent me was around how, you know, top shot and what the NBA is doing, you know, is already an example of this, you know, in, in climate land. I would say, you know, I pinned a tweet to some of the, what Marvel's doing with their NFTs. Like, for those that have universes and for those that want to build metaverses, like the NFTs also become sort of a loyalty unlock that if you own them for a long

enough period of time, or if you own a fraction of a major NFT or an important NFT, or if you are part of some universe, you know, in like the Marvel narrative or something, you know, and you had the NFT at this date, then maybe it gets you access to some, you know, real-life experience or something. Like there are a lot of ways in which this unlocks all sorts of new design primitives to great new types of experiences. I think one of the questions that I guess is it's going to be impossible, I think, to answer. But as someone who, and again, I'm not trying to like, I don't know, like center on me, but I'm looking at my experience and being like, if we extrapolate out,

you know, 14 years into the future, where does this go and does it go where we want to go? Like in the early days, there, you know, corporations using hashtags was like a laughable idea. It was never going to happen. And then gradually, of course, over time, as we moved into a more visual medium and as more and more people like individual users adopted that nomenclature, brands had to communicate more like their customers. And so the brands became a reflection of the way in which people, you know, communicate and talk. In a similar way, I mean, what you guys are engaged in is training brands and companies to behave in new and novel ways that lead to different types of engagement. And the thing about Dow's that I think is important

or interesting or smart contracts is that you are in a way, like quite literally, like, writing the code for how these companies, you know, will behave. And one of the things that I'm almost like deathly afraid of is, and I alluded to this when I talked about the super follows, is the way in which increasingly it may become a lot more expensive to just exist on the internet, because if you start later on and you don't have access to NFTs, if you don't get any of these bored apes or, you know, bananas or whatever the next thing is, you actually will have missed the opportunity to kind of get those things that enfranchise you in this new internet economy. And when that becomes corporatized, you know,

corporations are a series of rules that sort of self-reinforce. And if they are exclusive, then you've just created the preconditions for what the whole movie like Fight Club is about when they blow up the whole computer heart system. So I guess like if this system were used against you, how would that feel? And do you feel like that would actually be something that you could dismantle? or is it actually something that's going to become really, really difficult to escape, you know, once it becomes normalized to the degree that I think Brian is asking? Yeah, I mean, I'm very hopeful, like, to your point, I would, obviously I would feel bad about that. Like, I don't want that to happen.

And I believe that there are, I believe that there are, like, to your question about Disney, you know, in the future. And I think that to that kind of thing, I think that corporations will be doing this, but I think there are lots of things that are growing and being built right now that, you know, 10, 12 years from now, they are going to have surpassed Disney or things. It's going to be like a scenario of blockbuster just getting like a runover by Netflix. Like I, you know, that sounds a little crazy, but like, I think to your point about exclusionary and locking things down, like there's a lot of NFTs projects right now and like art projects and gaming projects that are choosing the opposite route of just making everything open.

Like I shared a shared tweet at the top of the space of an NFT project that was built by the same creator that made the Lute project. And they're taking the totally different approach of, let's not lock down this IP at all. Let's not make this exclusionary. Instead, let's release all of it into the public domain immediately and let's see what happens. So I think that is what, Like, to me, I'm really excited about that, and I'm hopeful that that kind of radical sort of just giving away of intellectual property and embracing the, like, the free spirit of the internet, I think that that is going to create, that's going to be the ticket to making sure that the corporations and whatnot do not turn this into a, like a, you know, a hellish landscape.

Well, and I love that. I think that that's the thing that's important, you know, and I think For me, the one thing is funny, I was on a podcast the other day, and I was asked if I get bored telling the story of the hashtag. And I don't because the story allows me to present an alternative form of or approach to seeking success in the tech world, where it's not just about an exit or about liquidity or about making money, but about creating cultural, like, production or being inclusive. You know, when, like, the design of the hashtag is such that, and, you know, it's funny, there is no smart contract attached to it, but essentially relative to, let's say, the domain system, which in some ways it was in opposition to, there was no central registry that you could go to. Now, granted, I just discovered today that there's something called the hashtag protocol, which is about apparently centralizing hashtags and having, you know, artificial scarcity applied to hashtags, which is somewhat offensive. But regardless, in the beginning, anybody could use a hashtag, you know, and brands tried at different moments to try. trademark hashtags and to prevent the use by normal people. But that went against the grain of the way the thing was intended and designed.

And so as long as I think there are folks who are willing to experiment in that and not everything is going to the moon, but maybe some things are going to Saturn or Jupiter or Pluto or whatever, or maybe even, you know, towards the sun, then that I think is like positive and productive. And then that maybe resists that, I don't know, trend towards homogenization that seems to occur over time. Anyways, I've been blathering a lot. Are you guys open to maybe taking one or two questions, bringing some folks up?

Of course. Yeah. Okay. If anybody has questions, raise your hand. Happy to bring you guys up. Obviously, we've been going for around an hour now, so really appreciate your attention so far. Obviously, this is a great opportunity for Brian and I to sort of indulge ourselves in this

conversation, but happy to bring some other voices up as well. Okay, we got Peter up here. Peter, why don't you, if you could introduce yourself very briefly, and if you got a question or comment, preferably you can state which and then offer it. I know Peter's been waiting for a while. Okay. Well, Peter, if you're there, you are on mute, but... Yeah, I'm not now. I'm not now.

Great. Hello. Right. Hi. Yeah, Chris, I interviewed you in Copenhagen. I'm a journalist. also, oddly. Yeah, good. Also, I was actually in the first Gulf War as a war correspondent. There's another point that hit me about what you're talking about. One, you're talking about the

internet and about how it was this great three thing. But one of the things that we're talking about with the internet, sorry, with NFTs, is that we're using crypto to actually turn it into a sales device. That's one point. The next point is this idea about entropy, which a lot of people have mentioned, I think is a very good one because basically what you're doing with an artwork is you're saying that something happened in a moment in time and you're giving somebody the opportunity to buy into that moment in this entropyic system. The other thing that I think is that Moving towards now is something called, what I think is existentialism. It's not, it basically means in social media, we're looking at what we do and what we do in periods of time.

And what we're trying to do is lock some of that down. And so that's what we're doing with this art. And I mean, I'm particularly interested in this because I'm also a poet. And one of the things that I've been thinking about doing is trying to actually. actually work out how you can use, or you can NFT poetry. And one of the ways that you can do that is NFT poetry performances. I mean, it strikes me that the way that you have to do this is that you actually have to make something happen in the moment in time that you're recording and you're giving somebody an option to buy into that.

I've finished now. Thank you. So I think to jump on that, and, and Damme, if you want to jump, or I'm, James, Jackson, if you want to jump on that too. I go by both. It's fine. Okay. What sort of like, you know, occurs to me in, I guess what Peter's saying. I thought about this before, and I think this relates to Shlom's approach as well, is that in some ways, and what Brian was saying about the urinal and the sale of that was that it was about also generating a conversation. It was about creating something that could be participatory and would lead to people having to investigate and understand why they felt things were valuable or why people exalted certain things.

And so it was the opportunity to actually provoke and be provocative and the results that came from that that caused the thing to have value in and of itself. And I guess like I'm curious, like in other words, like you're creating a game by pointing at the thing and saying, why is this valuable? And then people saying, well, it is valuable. and then that is actually the thing that becomes participatory. But maybe I'm missing something. Jackson, do you want to jump in on that? Yeah, I think you're spot on with that. And I agree with quite a few of the things that Peter was saying.

I think the thing that's always made me the most excited about the Internet and Web 3 and the NFT space is how it's not a, it's less about, at least in my opinion, it's less about, consumption and more about interacting and engaging. And I think to go back to that loot project that we were talking about earlier, the reason why that's so fascinating is there's not really much of anything to consume there. It's more like people just toss some, toss some items out there and ingredients and then let the chips fall to see what people do with them. So I think that that's, you know, I like that I can put it. wanted of it. And I think that that's what makes a lot of this so special. Totally. All right. I brought Daniel up. Daniel, do you have a question, a little bit of

introduction? Hi, Daniel. Hi, I'm Daniel. So I'm working in cybersecurity. I just had a pretty simple question for the four of you, I guess. What is your favorite urinal shard? it's that circular one that just sold I missed out on I'm so sorry I've been participating in the auction while oh yeah I've been bidding nonstop and I'm losing that's is the Jackson

turned into my will as of yesterday so now he's a high roll was a robe for or you at least you raise the price of some robe to like 300 Eath right yeah and I I sold I sold one of those loot things yesterday for like $100,000. Okay, wait. We do need to reset. Number one, is the urinal cake part of the urinal?

Well, everyone's laughing that, yes, urinal cakes exist. So far, they've only been given to the people who participate in the ritual. They're all black. They have a holographic sticker on them. They're probably easily the coolest-looking urinal cakes to ever exist. and they've never been used. And I might, their hand paint,

they have not been used. They're hand painted by myself. And I might just start like selling them in like small batches as non-NFTs just so people can actually have like a physical thing. Just to fuck with the whole thing. I'm like I didn't. I didn't want to do it because I didn't want it to be like super monetizing. But now that so many people tried to get charts,

it didn't. I feel like it's just, it's just a way for people to participate more. So yeah. Okay. As of this moment for both of you, and you don't have to share this if you don't want to, but each of your projects, what's the dollar figure or ETH figure or whatever that currently the total project? Are you talking about like all NFTs combined?

No, of like the urinal project or the loot drop or like what are we? I don't know. Yeah. Well, okay. So for my urinal project, The first two things were flat prices, so 70, 70 small shards at $400. Okay, and you know what? I'm not asking, I'm not specifically asking what you personally have made. Like, what is the project itself, the value of the project right now? Honestly, I still have to do that math because the price is being discovered as we speak, like, all my bid.

My auction was supposed to end an hour ago. As of right now, I'm about to make like three times the salary. that I made in the job that recently quit one night. So I don't know, take that as you. No, that's a good answer. What are you going to do with it? I mean, like, it seems like there's, on the one hand, this is like a circular economy. You know, like you kind of mint these things.

You make a bunch of crypto, I suppose. I don't know when it becomes fiat or not. You know, if your landlord sort of accepts shards, you know, for, you know, rent or something. But do you, do you have a vision for where this goes next? Like, do you build a whole, you know, Osama Noguchi kind of, I don't know, he was a designer type person. Like a workshop where you just, you know, make urinals all the time or what? Well, there's sort of like a Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right? Like, versus financial stability and then maybe is the Noguchi thing.

So we'll see where this ends up. Like I still have my major auction tomorrow. So like that's, I don't know. I'll be an answer in like 26 hours, whether I'm going to be. building as little people you know on the way to the home room. Chris I still don't in hashtag you know like we're not big leagues yet. Well to the point of the evaluation things though I'll just clarify I'm not I didn't

create Lou project and I'm not actually there's no official people that work on it either but okay you know in the span of six it's been six days since it was created and launched and in that six day period, time period, there has already been $54 million worth of trades happened on the secondary market. Yep. Yeah. In days and weeks and things like that.

I'm going to give one more thing and then you can bring someone up and we can wrap, but I have an idea for the next one. Isn't it Duchamp that then put the mustache on the Mona Lisa? so maybe the next one would be a mustache on a board ape or something like that like take that's like part of it isn't it like I mean like the whole actual piece of the whole NFT

it's not my but like Brian I fully support you doing it and I will show you how to make it. Yes there we go. Yeah. Let's go. I love it. Okay. I brought up

new Neo Nu or the sun emoji however you would like like to be introduced, please let me know. Hi, son emoji. First things first, can we make sure we answer Daniel's question? He kind of asked his question and the room got reset. So I'd kind of like to make sure he gets his question off first. Oh, please do.

Do you want to just reiterate how you heard his question? If Daniel wants to. No, I'll let you go ahead and say it himself. Oh, I was just asking between the four of you, what were your favorite pieces of the toilet? That's right. I'm sorry. I you know personally I liked I like the the sledgehammer itself it was like shiny and chromy and it's just like I don't know it's like badass it was great thank you I I own

shard number 134 so that's my favorite the one you know of course and now that I know have you even looked at these yet no but now that I know the you know the you know that's um obviously okay yeah all right we've answered that son does that oh I didn't answer it um number two my name on it so I was gonna say that was that was that was that was that was that was that was my other one that I was going to choose. Yeah. Yeah, I like that one. Okay.

Son, I think we've answered that one. Okay. And then just my question for the general audience, or basically for Shlom's is, or for Shlomo. Can you tell us what's going on with the bidding war right now? Jackson as well, I'd actually like to hear about the bidding. I lost. That's what happened. Oh, you lost eight?

Honestly, my girlfriend is not bidding war duty, so I don't even know. But I'm focusing on talking. There's still some going. I'm looking at them right now, but I'm out priced. How many of your left? I think that's the one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. There's quite a few. There's a lot still going.

Yeah. Is there a short link for something where people, you know, listening to this could go see the collection? Yeah, I'll put it up. We sort of had a last minute change to OpenC. It was supposed to be elsewhere, but I'll put it up. I could put up the page where all the bids are coming in live. Basically, these were supposed to end at nine ESTs, so like almost an hour and a half ago,

but every time a bid comes in, it gets extended by 10 minutes. Right, right. And almost half of them are still bidding. Wow. Wow. You know, I will say, like, I had this experience actually back in March when I participated in my first NFT drop, which is from Blow, and he dropped his album. And I actually have a time lapse video on YouTube of the entire bidding thing.

And I, like an idiot, didn't know about this 15-minute sort of window that kept expanding. And so I thought I was going to be there until, you know, 8 p.m. or something. And I was, like, there for, like, seven hours, like, fucking recording the screen. Yeah. It was interesting. So I just made the same mistake and committed to make the next and final drop immediately after this one at 9. And, you know, I'm just waiting for this. So.

No more sleep. Exactly. Wow. Well, it sounds like we should let you all get back. to that thing is how that's way more important than talking to us two assholes. I'm talking to create the hashtag right now. That's true. That's true. Chris is, Chris is an important person. When you work at it, when you work in the NFTs, you learn to like, I didn't hear what you created. Chris created the hashtag. Hashtag hashtag hashtag creator.

It was a long time ago. It was 14 years ago. So, you know, it's had time to mature and to grow into its own little fledgling thing. Anyways, so, you know, if it wasn't clear, that's where a lot of my perspective is coming from. It's just like, and I don't, I don't over, I don't want to overstate or overclaim anything. As a result of that connection, it's just kind of like being able to observe something, you know, that you've minted to use the modern language. And to see it grow and then become a thing that everyone uses and has no idea where it came from. I don't know, like it's, it's, interesting to see sort of similar market dynamics, network dynamics, existing right now.

And so I think that's why I'm so drawn to this because I'm like, I remember that time. I remember when we were trying to figure out Twitter, when we didn't know what Twitter was. Like way, like, you know, Superfollows is this whole new thing that's built upon a mature network that kind of knows how people interact and know how they produce and create content. Back then, it was hard to explain what Twitter was. But we could see what it was going to become. we knew how important it was going to be. And it needed these different structures and these handholds to bring more people on,

to make it more useful, to make it more relevant. And so that's kind of like the genesis for where that idea came from. And I want to point out and remind folks that the hashtag came out of an effort to decentralize the social web. That was like the goal. That's what we were working on. So the fact that it's happening now and you actually have something like identity and something that is persistent.

changes the entire nature of what's possible. And so a lot of the dreams at least, you know, that I feel like a lot of folks had, you know, 15 years ago when we were starting out on the social web are now starting to be realized. And that's just how long the stuff takes. So with the NFT stuff, it may take another 15 years to get to the place

where this stuff is as commonplace as, you know, tweeting as today. But anyways, it's, it's super excited to be here, to be part of this conversation to like, you know, bring you guys up who are like in the trenches. You're in it. You're breathing it. I love it.

I don't know. It's super exciting for me to, I agree. To be involved and to have you guys invite, you know, us into this world as it is living. Thanks for putting up with our stupidity and, uh, not at all. No. Obtousness of it. Chris, have you NFT the hashtag yet?

Yes. That's money on the table right now. He did. I did. And, um, it only brought in 10,000 bucks, which I'm not complaining about. I put a third of it towards. That's because you didn't ask myself in Jackson to. Well, now I know.

Now I know, man. I, you know, I, you know, I, you know, I probably have some other. tweets from back then, you know? My consulting fee is moon cats. Well, listen, hey, if you guys are agents or something, I did mint the first podcast episode, NFT. That's true. What was that?

Five months ago. Yeah. Yeah, right, right, right. So we actually, it would be great for you guys like to consult on us and tells what we did wrong because clearly we did not go to that. Yes, right. I think we spent more in gas than the whole thing that we made. Anyways, do you guys have anything that you want to leave us with?

Any parting thoughts? You know, what should we be looking forward to from both of you guys? What are you guys seeing on the horizon for your... Yeah, I mean, I'll just say that, you know, there are... I know you're talking about dumb questions, but like, there really are no dumb questions in the space. Like, there's so many confusing things about it. And, you know, one of my jobs at Rainbow and one of the things that we're trying to do there is make the space feel a lot more welcoming and accessible to people and give them the tools and the knowledge to be able to start doing this stuff with a lot of confidence. And so yeah, just check out Rainbow, check out what we're doing.

I think if you're interested in this, it's a great way to get started. What's a good address for Rainbow for the convention browser? Yeah, rainbow.me. Great. Cool. Shalams. Whenever I think of my next art thing, or rather, whenever it just appears to me in a trance, I'll let you know. I had the idea of doing the Dow that blows up a Lamborghini,

but we'll see if that ideas sticks. Other than that, you know, I'll keep posted. I'm a millionaire in two days or not. I'm not going to ask you about taxes. If someone else wants to create the Lambo Dow, how should they get in touch with you or reach you? Well, I'd say, first of all, that's my idea. Please don't do it.

Ferraris are fine, totally. Twitter DMs or X at shlulums.com, both work. But, I mean, I'm not old, so I just use Twitter DMs instead of email. Wow. Oh, that makes me not old. Okay, great. See, see, we're still young. Welcome.

Welcome to the class. All right, guys, this is awesome. Thank you so much for doing this with us and joining this conversation. I am, Christina. And this is another episode of the TechMeme Ride Home Experience. Thanks for being here, guys. This episode will come out on Saturday. So if you want to catch any of it, share it.

Please do so then. If anybody is in the New York City area right now, I'm looking at Twitter. Fucking be safe. man. It wasn't supposed to be a hurricane situation, but it is looking bad out there. Thank God, I'm on a slope. Be well, everybody. Bye.