The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Todd Wahnish, Entreprenuer, Product Specialist on AI, Stan Lee, Jeff Koons, Marvel, Adult Swim, Cartoon Network & Warner

Episode Date: August 16, 2023

Todd Wahnish, Entreprenuer, Product Specialist on AI, Stan Lee, Jeff Koons, Marvel, Adult Swim, Cartoon Network & Warner Web3comicon.com Adultfantasy.io Biography Todd is a multi-award-winning entrepreneur and product specialist with over 25 years of experience in the animation and comic industries. He has contributed to the creation of original I.P. for renowned companies like Marvel Entertainment, Cartoon Network, Adult Swim, Warner Bros., and KidRobot. Todd has had the privilege of working directly with creative legends such as Stan Lee and Jeff Koons, the most successful American artist since Andy Warhol. In addition to his impressive career in animation and comics, Todd is also deeply involved in the web3 space. He is a key figure in the development of adultfantasy.io and Web3Comic-Con, pioneering the intersection of digital culture, blockchain technology, and pop culture. As a mentor and advisor, Todd has shared his expertise with entrepreneurs from some of the world's top startup institutions, incubators, and accelerators. These include the Thiel Fellowship, Techstars, The Startup Leadership Program, Columbia University, and NYU. His guidance has helped shape the next generation of innovators and disruptors in both the traditional and digital realms.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com.

Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. The Chris Voss Show, the family Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. The Chris Voss Show. The family that loves you but doesn't judge you. At least not as harshly as your mother. So welcome to the show, my family and friends. To the big top, the podcast in the sky. As always, we have the most amazing guests. I think you're going to be excited to hear from this one today.

Because he's going to be bringing a wealth of knowledge, a wealth of experience, and a wealth of decades of just doing some exciting things in the world. And I know some of you out there are going to be like, oh my God, and you're going to be giddy with all sorts of coolness. I know I am. My nipples are hard right now. Can I do that joke on the show? I don't know.

We'll check with the attorneys. Anyway, guys, in the meantime, meantime as always we use those teasings and lead-ins to guilt and shame you into referring your friends family relatives to goodreads.com for it says christmas youtube.com for it says christmas linkedin.com for it says christmas and uh also go give us five star reviews on the uh itunes there we certainly appreciate you we love the people that do that they have a special place in my heart it's kind of like right over here if you're watching the YouTube video. And just there's a whole box and a room in there for those people.

And when I sit out there rocking chair at the end of my life, I'll be like sitting there thinking of all the wonderful people who give us five-star reviews. So you will be remembered. Anyway, guys. Shit and a ramble. We have an amazing gentleman on the show. we're talking about some really cool stuff and uh i promise you if you're not impressed then well you know there's other shows uh we have a gentleman in the show todd wanisch uh do i have that correct tom did i hit that right yeah you absolutely did there you go i want I wanted to make sure. It's early today in the morning.

Todd Wanus joins us on the show. He's a blockchain enthusiast and Web3 visionary shaping the future of digital interactions. He's a multi-award winning entrepreneur and product specialist with over 25 years of experience in the animation and comic industries he's uh contributed to the creation of uh original ip for renowned companies like you may have heard of these this is what's going to be exciting marvel entertainment cartoon network adult swim warner brothers and kid robot if you haven't heard any of those companies where where are you living in utah or something todd has had the privilege of working directly with creative legends such as Stan Lee. You may have heard of him as well.

If you haven't, then you're definitely living on the rock. And Jeff Koons. And the most successful American artist since Andy Warhol. It would be even cooler if he worked with Andy Warhol. But, I don't know. There you go. In addition to his impressive career in animation and comics, Todd is also deeply involved in the Web3 space. We're going to be talking about Web3 today.

And he is a key figure in the development of adultfantasy.io. It's not what you think. We'll find out about that. And Web3comic-Con, pioneering the intersection of digital culture blockchain technology and pop culture he's a mentor and an advisor and he shared his expertise with entrepreneurs for some of the world's top startup institutions incubators and accelerators uh and welcome to the show tom how are you i'm doing great man how are you there you go we're gonna have a broad-ranging discussion here this is gonna be pretty fun between entrepreneurism and IPs and Stan Lee and

Marvel Entertainment, all these really cool things that you've done. Give us a.com. Where do you want people to find you on the interwebs and stalk you? Well, I've got two for you. The first one is adultfantasy.io. It sounds exactly like what it is, adultfantasy.io. The second one is web,

the number three, comiccon, that's C-O-M-i-c-o-n.com which is which I'm sure we'll talk about there you go there you go so give us a 30,000 overview of both of these companies I know adult fantasy sets a tip off that it might be something whatever and I guess I had a dirty mind as you explained to me in the in assuming something tell us what they are. Well, adult fantasy is smut.

No, I'm just kidding. Good night folks. See you later. No, we just lost it. No, it's so adult fantasy is actually a,

a system for allowing original creators to come in and, and develop and create um intellectual property and characters like a character franchise creation system uh in a in a bottom-up approach uh so so the reason it's very it's very simple adult fantasy you know we we tend to be uh grown-ups who like pop culture and and fantasize about making stuff so there there's nothing, especially in Web3, if anyone's been looking at Web3 or just been curious about it, nothing screams adult fantasy than a bunch of grown adults, grown people purchasing JPEGs in the hopes of bigger and better riches.

It's pretty fantastical. So adult fantasy seemed like a good name, and it also turns heads, which is always a good thing in my book. Usually they go to the website, they're disappointed. They're like, oh, this isn't what I thought it was. But it looks really cool. It looks like a lot of I see what I see, like a lot of kind of adult swim sort of characters and different NFTs, I guess, here and things like that. For sure. So the idea behind Adult Fantasy,

certainly with my background from Marvel Entertainment and Cartoon Network and Adult Swim, we're really here to do the things that we as creators always wanted to be able to do, which is if you look at the things that we buy, if you're watching on YouTube behind me, I've got what I call the world's like most expensive green screen it's essentially just a ton of toys and comics and graphic novels and books right and as a kid when you're buying

these things you're just a consumer right you buy the spider-man book uh but you don't have any say in the direction of spider-man you don't have any ownership in the spider-man property you get to go pay to see money to see spider-man in the movie theater basically rightMan. You don't have any ownership in the Spider-Man property. You get to go pay to see money to see Spider-Man in the movie theater, basically, right? Or T-shirts or backpacks or whatever. But if you actually think about it from the standpoint of a community or a tribe around that character,

well, for example, take Venom. So one of Spider-Man's biggest villains, his biggest bad guys is Venom. And when that book came out in the 90s, I think it was the 90s, early 90s, late 80s, something like that. The character of Venom, of course, the story was great and

the art was phenomenal from Todd McFarlane, genius comic creator. However, it was the fans that made Venom a popular character. The fans bought the book the fans said we need more of this and so the head of honchos at marvel said okay it's a money tree let's make more let's make more venom and so you start with a mini series and that sells out and then they'll say okay let's put it on some merchandise or license it out and that sells out

and fast forward a decade or so or two and all all of a sudden you've got Venom movies, right? But as a fan, you or I don't have any say in that. It's a one-way relationship. Well, with the blockchain and Web3, we actually can change that dynamic and own what it is that we create. The number one word you have to understand with Web3 is ownership. That is what Web3 is about. If Web 1.0 was about

read, where you were reading the web, really simple websites where you could just read blog posts and really early forms. Web 2.0 is where we are now, which is write. You have the ability to read and write with Web 2.0. That's your apps. That's your Facebook. I can type a post into Facebook and hit with Web 2.0. That's your apps. That's your

Facebook. I can type a post into Facebook and hit post and everyone can see it. It's databases and logins and all that kind of stuff. Right? Well, Web 3 is about ownership, where through Web 1 and Web 2, we gave up all of that information. We don't own any of our privacy. If you type a key in your computer, it is being recorded, right? Everything you do is captured and data mined and reused for advertising and all kinds of purposes that you may or may not agree with. Well, with Web3, you actually stay in control of the things that you create. It is provable, it is permanent, and only you can change it. So it is about, you know, assuming that we're moving deeper and deeper into the digital age and more and more people are going to do more and more digital things,

ownership becomes a real big deal. And so from the adult fantasy perspective, we were like, well, what if we created a universe, the next Marvel universe, the next great property where, where first we'll see it with characters. Cause that's my background. So I'm like, cool,

let's do 1990s Marvel comic style characters meets, meets venture brothers from adult swim. Cause I love both those properties just to kind of put the idea out there and then start creating the tools where other people can come in, whether you're an artist, whether you're a writer, whether you're just a fan and you don't actually have any skill or talent to say, you know, to think of, it doesn't matter. We're creating the tools where you can come in and create a property,

create a character and by, you know, kind of, kind of not only say tricking people, but strategically showing people that they can also build businesses for themselves by way of these creative outputs right and so and so we're bringing those tools together so that a community uh can can can build these characters build these creations and then the the best can rise to the top and and people who create them can get rewarded for it as they should there you go so uh how did let's talk about how that plays into web3 the comic-con uh property and what you guys are doing there and then we'll get to your origin story for sure man so so web3 comic-con we we had a really interesting

uh point last year where we had launched we launched adult fantasy in 2021 and did pretty well we were pretty happy with results results. And then in 2022, we were launching our products and kind of continuing to grow adult fantasy, but we were kind of like, well, what's next? And we also knew that the market can always go up, it can go down, we're in a recession,

or maybe you don't think we're in a recession. I think we're in a recession. So there's always, regardless of the economic temperature, it's always volatile. So we were like, well, what can we do to make sure that we're going to be here for the next 50 to 100 years? Like, what can we actually do to increase our footprint and really connect people together? Because that's just like we're creating with adult fantasy, like the connection point for creators and fans and things like that. We said, well, what if we created a network effect for founders and actually people

who are actively building in Web3? And so you can almost think of these as like a staircase. So we were like, okay, people can come into a fantasy. We can help them create their businesses. We can help them watch characters. We can help them have fun creating toys and games and t-shirts and all kinds of stuff. And then if they get traction

or if they want to get a bigger audience, maybe we can create something like Web3 Comiccon where they can have a virtual booth and they can actually do interviews and actually get their word their work exposed to a much broader audience uh and the other the other reason we thought about this is um whereas in irl the real world with pop culture conventions um you know you can can travel, there's a ton of them, and they're relatively affordable. In Web3, these conventions are scattered all over the globe. And in some cases, they cost thousands of dollars. And so from our perspective, we were like, well, that's not really going to onboard people. And a lot of people kind of have heard the word,

you know, blockchain or heard the word Web3, and they're not really sure what it is. And they're not sure how they fit into it. You know, is it a scam? Is it not a scam? Like there's all kinds of crap information out there. And so we thought the best thing that we could do was to put a virtual conference together with some of the best pop culture and entertainment brands that we know, friends of ours, get them all together, do interviews, and really educate people about not just what each project or company is working on, but really show how Web3 is the future of entertainment and how it's the future of popular culture, among other things.

And the best way we could do that from a ticket price is to say, you know what, it's free. So if you go to Web3Comicon.com, you just push the button to say, claim a free ticket. It's a free ticket. The show is live right now, as in today. It goes on for the rest of this week. If you're watching, you can go there right now. It's fantastic.

Thankfully, we've gotten a fantastic response from fans and creators. We think this is the beginning of a beautiful thing. There you go. We talked in the green room. A lot of people can't, we think this is the beginning of a beautiful thing. There you go. I know a lot, you know, we talked in the green room, you know, a lot of people can't go to these shows because they sell it so quickly.

They're expensive to go to. Uh, and you know, a lot of events have gone online now, 5,000 plus attendees, 40 plus speakers, uh, three days.

It's going between August 16th through the 18th. Um, and so, you know, people are still watching our videos from 10 through the 18th. Um, and so, you know, people are still watching our videos from 10 to 15 years ago. Uh, so, uh,

is this going to be held every year? So if someone's watching this 10 years from now, they'll, they'll know where to go. Uh, is that the plan? The yearly sort of event? A hundred percent.

So we'll be doing this every single year. And there's a lot, we're also, uh, once the convention is over. So if you're like, it's the 22nd, I'm like, damn it, I missed it. I just heard the show. And it sounds awesome. It's totally okay because we're,

we're planning different ways that people can watch all of the replays and get access to everything. So this is an ongoing venture. And we're really here to, it's a cross between education, you know, a lot of education in the space, but we do it in a fun way because I think the coolest, the way to become a fan of something and learn what it can do for you is by seeing what it can do for other people and have fun doing so.

We even have the people, the future of golf. We talk about all kinds of stuff, so sports, games, comics, you name it. And you guys have a thriving Discord, it looks like, about 7,000 plus people that are in their discord doing stuff yeah absolutely and we've been very fortunate and and you know it's uh you know it's magic you know i just showed up in a towel out of my shower and did some tiktok videos and everyone showed up that's usually how it works these days uh so there you go uh so todd tell us about your origin story uh You work with Stan Lee. You've worked with a lot of impressive different companies and stuff, Marvel Entertainment, etc. Give us your origin story. Tell us about how you got here and some of the things that you learned over the decades that go into the current products you're working on? Oh, for sure, man. Great question. So, so the, the TLDR

of my background is, um, I, from the time I was, I can remember all I wanted to do was draw comics professionally. And so I have kind of a, a one track mind when I put my mind to something, I tend to tend to do it like, just like conventions, like, Hey, let's throw a convention. That'll be easy. Right. It's totally fine. We'll just learn how to do it. So I really wanted to do comics. And by the time I was old enough and had the experience, and by the time editors were looking at my work and saying, hey, you actually, you finally hit a professional level, the entire comic market crashed.

This is like in the 90s. And so I was just graduating college. And I was like, well, I need a job. And fortunately, I was in Atlanta at the time and Cartoon Network was there and Cartoon Network was just taking off. So I got very lucky. I bothered the hell out of people. I called every day. Well, I called I called once a week for like two months until the producer.

I'll never forget. He forgot to put the mic. He forgot to mute the phone. And it was like, can we have a job for this kid, Todd? Like he keeps calling. Can we just give him something and i was like yes like just badger people that's the persistence persistence and badgering yeah polite badger uh and then once i got once i got in i literally never left um it was also because i was broke and they had a stocked kitchen so i was like well they have a bathroom and a kitchen so i'll just live here uh and so i just i just kind of made it my a kitchen so i'll just live here uh and so

i just i just kind of made it my goal to to be the first one there and be the last one to leave and just even when there wasn't any work i i would ask politely if i could show up uh just because they had empty desks i was like well do you mind if i work on some of my own stuff and they were like we don't care and so i put myself in a position where i was the when the work came in i was the first one there so they were like okay you yeah that's brilliant so i started off as an inker uh because my pencil my comic line was really tight at the time uh and then i moved up to assistant animator and animator and director and all this kind of stuff moved up through the ranks uh and uh ended up launching my own my own uh company uh it was just my it was just me and maybe one or two friends that I would contract.

And so we called it a luxury animation boutique. Sounds nice, right? Yeah, it does. Yeah, it's me and my two friends. Exactly. It sounds expensive. So we ended up working with a lot of great clients that way. I ended up doing a lot of music videos.

Dirty South Hip Hop was huge at the time in Atlanta, Georgia, in the South. So Outkast, Goody Mob, things like that. Tony Braxton, The Roots. So I ended up doing a lot of music videos for them. I thought I was going to be, I really wanted to be a music video director. Like, absolutely. Like, the classic aha video take on me i was like that's my career i'm just gonna do that i can't do comics i'll just animate music videos and that

way i won't be bored and i'll always be able to experiment and grow and all that of course uh youtube comes out and of course the music video thing kind of goes away um migrated up to new york city in 2003 uh and uh uh kept stuff, kept working, kept hustling. And slowly over time, just started releasing my own products. We created toys. So this is actually a bunch of our own toys back here that we launched. And really, that's sort of how the entrepreneurial journey started. And the way that the stanley thing started to kick in and the jeff koons thing kicked in is i had been doing my own company now for probably 10 years maybe a little longer maybe 15 and i no one ever taught me business

right nobody i i was i just would kept i just knew to keep getting work like i was like i'll just be here you just keep giving me stuff to do and that'll be that'll be the career right that's how and i realized after so many like that roller coaster ride the peaks and the valleys and the ups and the downs um you know after after several years of that decade plus of that i was like i can't do that something i'm missing something uh and then so when the opportunity came the really the first opportunity was for jeff coons a friend of mine called called up up and was like, Hey, we're looking for somebody, but it's full time. I shut the studio down. Hardest decision I ever made.

It was a massive pay cut. I mean, we're talking, you know, a lower than $20 an hour job. Wow. From, from making, you know, close to six figures around six figures a year. So I was a huge pay cut, but I was at a point where I didn't like, I didn't, I didn't know where to go. I didn't know how to break the ceiling that I had created for myself.

I was like, well, this, this guy's the number one artist on the planet. Like surely if I'm inside his company, maybe I can like, of course make the best work I can and make myself a valuable assistant and all that good stuff,

but also learn the ropes. Like, what does he, what does this guy know that I don't know? Right. And, and that was also the same thing, the jump from Marvel. So I learned all this stuff. I wanted to learn, uh, working with Jeff, it was a fantastic experience. Uh, and then the opportunity for Marvel came up exact same thing. I had a friend call me up from like a guy I knew in high and college um someone who i kind of peppered his mind like three or four three or four years prior i just said hey by the way if you ever need an you know an iron man animation give me a call i'll do it for you for free because i fucking love marvel you know what i mean and um and uh he calls me out of the

blue and it's like hey man you remember that you remember that animation thing you were talking about he's like yeah he's like you still doing it i was like for you of course he was like well they're looking actually marvel they're looking at uh maybe bringing somebody on you want to do an interview and i was like yeah why not and so one thing led to another and that's how i landed at marvel and uh they brought me in to develop my own intellectual property so i got to go through their 8 000 characters and create a pilot. And then, and then they brought in Stan to pitch the pilot at San Diego. And it was,

it was wonderful. It was fantastic. I got to, I got, you know, I feel like I did my best to use my time with Stan wisely and just ask him a ton, as many business questions as I could without being like,

that's not knows brat in the corner that just won't leave him alone. There you go. I mean, the, the Stan the stan lee is is like i don't know would you call him the godfather comics or oh 100 yeah you can yeah yeah i mean i mean i hate love by everyone around the world recently passed i think a few years ago i think and uh i always wanted to meet him i thought he was a really cool dude he always seemed really nice and then you know some of the cameos in a lot of the different movies and stuff um and and so I think I think the fan base for him you know I grew up collecting comics as a kid you know we had the simple stuff back then Superman and Spider-Man and and all that stuff uh it seems to have done a lot of things um and and to for viewers tell us what's in your background because for viewers that are most of the people are going to listen to this on the

podcast and audio but uh we want to encourage people of course go to the youtube and subscribe uh there's the plug but what's behind you there's there is a picture of stan lee behind you and and other things give us a a readout on what that oh sure. So over on this side, this is all at the top shelf is manga, like Japanese comics. These are all graphic novels and different art books. And then directly behind me, this pillar kind of in the center, these are called Marvel Essential Collections. And they don't make them anymore. But what they did for quite a while was they were reprinting all of the classic stories, all of the stuff from Fantastic Four number one and Thor number one and Captain America number one through the issues of hundreds. And what they were doing is they were reprinting them in black and white on newsprint paper, just like the original comics. tens of thousands of pages from the masters of comic illustration as they as close to seeing

the real art as possible right without like an artist edition or something it's just a treasure trove for me and then up here uh behind me directly behind me we have uh other artists we've got uh alex toth and uh jordy brisette jordy brunet and um katsuhiro tomo who did akira uh like that's his whole that's an entire shelf dedicated to him uh no akira the movie from 1988 okay yeah so neo tokyo all that good stuff so basically these are sort of the people that inspire me this is like my inspiration wall uh and then and then to this side these are all pieces that we created like um this is a lot of like I'll show you real quick on YouTube here. So these are a couple

of characters. And so these were very similar to what we're doing now. This was an early experiment called Blanky in I think 20... I'm going to say 2010? 2008. It was 2008 to 2010. And these were designed by artists all over the world uh we did

a contest and i was like well i'll make the platform which is the the shape of the toy because i had i'd done toy design right um and we got all these artists from all over the world in a contest to design the toys and uh yeah and so it was it was pretty successful i just uh you know manufacturing and having to put all the money up front doesn't seem like a good idea to me uh but now we're in the world of digital so you know we're kind of doing the same thing with uh with adult fantasy it's just kind of bumping it up a notch there you go and then you don't have the upfront cost the inventory so there you go you don't have to do the production stuff i mean that's i i i built my businesses back in the brick and mortar age you know back when you had to do large investments just to, you know, sign a three-year lease on an office building, buy all the furniture, and then get the licensing, sometimes government licensing.

And then after you paid for all that, you're just like sitting there going, I hope somebody buys our stuff. It's hard. That is not easy. It's not. It's incredibly difficult. Yeah. And so, you know, now it's a whole new age, you know. Now you can start a business, you just go on GoDaddy and, you know, 20 bucks and you're cooking. But this is great, what's going on in the future. And of course, you talk to entrepreneurs as well. You help entrepreneurs, teach them, you know, talk to them about how to start a business,

how to monetize and all that good stuff, I guess. Because you kind of went through that journey where you had to figure it all out. Yeah, 100%. I mean, the short story behind that is, you know, in between while kind of in between all of this, my wife and I were learning how to code. So this is back 2013. We taught ourselves how to code. My wife is now a lead dev she's huge she's a freaking genius um i found that i was oddly enough better on the design side on the front end of that that kind of stuff but what we were doing was we had a we had a company called arting that was a decentralized gallery platform for artists.

It's no longer up. It's not there anymore. But again, you can kind of see the thread of this throughout my life is like trying to build things for creative tools for artists to help them with business. And we started doing a lot of contract work for a lot of startups, both venture-backed and bootstrap startups in New York City, because we were there. And one of the things that I did, and I think I'm thankful for is,

I always go into a situation, and maybe it's a character flaw, but I always go into a situation, a new environment, thinking that I know nothing, and that I'm the dumbest person in the room. Right? So I'm always like, I don't know what I'm doing. Clearly, if you have an app and you have venture backing and you've got the funding, you've raised, you know, one, two, three, $10 million, you know, something that I don't know because I've never done that. And by doing the consultancy, what I would do is I would, as we were building the apps for them, I would pepper them on their marketing. Cause I was like, well, clearly that's my, that was my failure at the time. I was like, that's my biggest weakness. I can make all this amazing stuff,

but it's, it's like hell trying to get people to buy it because I don't have a massive audience. Right. And I don't know how to get an audience. And so these people raise a lot of money. They must know more than I do. And so I started asking them about marketing stuff. And they really, what I learned very quickly is that they had no idea. A lot of the answers were, oh, well, we'll pay a marketing firm after the app is made, which is a terrible idea, in my opinion. And when I would ask them about some of their marketing ideas, what ended up happening, and it wasn't a plan, is they would tell me their plan, and I would be like, don't do that. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And I would tell them about what happened to me and my background, because

I've launched so many companies prior to Adult Fantasy, and before we had successes, right? I had like seven or eight companies that just either broke even or failed outright. And so I had seen a lot of i had made a lot of mistakes and so i was telling people like don't do i wasn't necessarily telling them what to do right but i was like don't do this because it's wrong and what happened over time over a period of years of me doing this it started where i would start you know just tell them on the phone and then it migrated to videos because i didn't want to say the whole thing again to their co-founder and what what I learned is that um I started to gain confidence in myself in that regard because I learned that the people who actually took my advice did well and the ones that didn't did not

and not to say that I was some sage but I was like okay well clearly I know what not to do right I was like just don't do what I did and you'll be fine. Sounds like my whole life. Right, exactly. You didn't have to agree with me. Totally. But that's what I'm here for, Chris. I set it up. You did. So over the last

10 years, I've coached and mentored and advised a number of startups, startup founders, and entrepreneurs, and we have a really good track record with their success. And so why not try to bring it to a bigger audience? There you go. You've worked with the Thiel Fellowship, Peter Thiel probably, and Techstars and all that good stuff, and done mentorship experiences with them. So I guess you deal in blockchain technology, and you've been good at merging with pop culture.

What do you see the future of the space of Web3, blockchain technology and all that? Do you see Web3 becoming this huge, expansive future? This seems obvious, but I'd love to hear your words on it. Yeah, 100%. to hear your words on it yeah 100 yeah 100 like where we are now is where we are right at the if you remember i mean you look much younger than me chris but uh if if you if you remember if you remember the uh the dot-com era right and i'm too young for that too young i okay well for those of us who live through the dot-com era uh i made a lot of money day young for that. Too young. Okay. Well, for those of us who live through the dark on there. I made a lot of money day trading for that.

Well, you remember it was, it was, everyone was talking about the internet and it was like, why do I need the internet? I have a fax machine. Oh, you can listen to music online. Why? I have tapes. That doesn't make sense. Who is going to want this? Right.

We have the, we have the broadcast news. Why do I want to watch a video online? Like, so, so there was this huge gap between the opportunity and what the future was going to be and what most people could see. And that's where we are again. Again, the point of Web3 and blockchain, the very key point, if all you do is take away the fact that Web3 is ownership, that's the key to everything. It's ownership of everything from your identity to the things you create to the key to everything. It's ownership of everything from your identity, to the things you create, to your home, to everything. So as Web3 moves forward, you're going to be able to own all of these things that are now digital. You'll retain

ownership of whatever assets you have in your possession. So the applications are kind of endless, but I think some of the obvious ones are tickets for shows, right? Well, if you have it as a digital ticket, you'll scan it in on your phone. That ticket is an asset that you own, which means you can resell it later. So if you go to a concert and it turns out to be like a, the equivalent of like a legendary Beatles concert or something, you actually have something that you can sell on secondary and you can actually make a profit because you have a collectible. Likewise, you have a lot of fraud that happens with home title things

and all kinds of stuff. Well, if you have your home title on the blockchain and it's clear that you own it, right? It's immutable. It can't be be changed which means unless you do something stupid it can't be stolen like it's permanent it is a record of the things you have um other uses that aren't necessarily like fun comic book animation entertainment stuff that i think are important you know we're we're now in the in the age of ai and deep fake technology um and i. And I don't know how familiar you or your audience are with what's going on, but we're about six months away from

people being able to make blockbuster, like $150 million films, right? But from their laptop. Wow. You can now use a prompt just as you would in ChatGPT or any other AI program. You can type in and it will render video and the video is spectacular. It looks like a blockbuster movie. We're very, very soon moving into that age where you're not going to be able to tell

real reality from video. We're already there now. You think that's going to challenge maybe Hollywood per se, Netflix, Amazon? Why do you think they're on strike currently? Yeah. One of the key things is that they're afraid that AI is going to take their job and they're correct.

Yeah. to, you know, where someone could, could, you know, take your likeness and do something negative to, you know, to you. Well, once that video is encoded on the blockchain, or once these images are encoded on the blockchain, there's a permanent record that shows this is original. And this has been edited, edited, modified, or for whatever reason is not the original. And so I have no doubt one of the things that excites me the most just as as a as a potential investor for these things is uh when you start to see police with their body cams very soon all those body cams will be encoded onto the blockchain so that so that the judge in whatever case will know for certain and the jury of course will know for certain this actually happened here's the

record because if it had been modified if it had been modified it wouldn't have the same record yeah i know the biden administration just cut a deal with the uh with the the guys who run these ais like mid journey and stuff to start marking stuff so that it's somehow putting identifier on stuff so they can know uh what's faking on we probably need more of that but geez i just thought that you know what if somebody takes a body cam and does a deep fake on it you know it could create a fake scenario that you know and then that goes viral we're already seeing you know

politicians being thrown under the bus and some deep fakes you know this guy died or something and people are like oh my god you know and people believe it because they were so were so like the old phrase of like don't believe everything you hear or don't believe everything you read. Well, video, we have such a trust in video because we see it.

Yeah. Right? And we now can't trust whatever you see with your own eyes. Wow. Right? actually now have a technology that can actually ensure originality ensure proof of of of truth i guess um or or at least original sourcing plus you know it transcends that and goes into entertainment as well so you get to make something you can own it you know whereas if you're an artist and you put something you draw a picture and you put it on on instagram or facebook or twitter anyone can

just drag it and drop it to their desktop and they own it because there's nothing that says it's the original. There you go. You've talked about how in the next six months we're going to see this explosion of people making their own films. We lived through a few of these iterations. It used to be there was three news stations that you watched on TV when I grew up and probably you grew up.

And now, you know, everybody's got a damn news idea or concept. You know, everyone's on Facebook talking about whatever. Like they're, I want to say Ted Koch, but he was the head of New York. I've got something mixed up. Ted Koppel, that's the one I'm looking for. Everybody thinks they're the news anchor desk of CBS. And then we've seen that with video. We've seen that with YouTube.

Of course, we were early on with YouTube videos, and news has been disrupted incredibly you know and jeez if they disrupt film films what's interesting thing about film is film is one of our biggest exports uh and major money makers it's still like a it might be a cornerstone of our country i don't know um in in the billions of dollars that go into it. Jeez, if you, if you blow up Hollywood and democratize it to where it's about any idiot like me can make a movie and possibly sell $150 million worth of it or, or a semblance of it. I mean,

there's lots of creators on YouTube that don't make a lot of money, but they enjoy doing what they do or they make enough to, to get by. Um, that can be really huge. I mean, and no, I don't think anyone wants to see me as a, as a leading man in any movie. or they make enough to get by. That can be really huge. I mean, and no, I don't think anyone wants to see me as a leading man in any movie anytime soon. Well, I think it depends on perspective, right?

And one could argue that it's already happening. Like, you know, you have really big legacy companies like Disney and other companies. And sometimes without going too too deep into the weeds of it i mean even some of their movies that they make um are now being banned in china or being banned in other countries even even if they're making even if they're even if they're tailoring their content specifically for the rest of the world because of the saturation of the american market right and so they're already getting pushback. And so I think, I think you're,

I think there's going to be a huge opportunity for the creator to grow their own audience, grow their own property, build their own businesses around whatever it is that they create, you know, whether it's in, whether it's a traditional, traditional quote unquote business or virtual, it's not going to matter. And then these larger legacy companies will end up being the partners. Wow. I think, I think just as you saw, and you've already seen this, if you think about what Disney did with Star Wars, what'd they do? They bought it, you know, Disney and Marvel, what did they do? They bought it, right? There's all all this all this like consolidation and acquisition happening because they need they need that fuel they need that those original stories they need

those creators and then what happens just because they're large companies and and you know for whatever reason uh they end up squeezing them like a grape until there's nothing left for a while right and so they need and so they need to find something else. And so I think you're finding, this is why you're finding YouTube stars kind of blow up now where they have their own TV shows or they're getting their own movie deals or all this kind of stuff.

It's just going to elevate. And so I think you're going to see, not just from the creator economy, but from every sector, I think you're going to see large companies start to partner with people who kind of stake it out on their own, in their own way

and make a name for themselves and make an audience for themselves. Um, any, any large company is going to want to, want to magnetize themselves to that. So I went through the, the, uh, Twitter, social media, uh, you know, new revolutionary era posts, uh, the, the great, uh, recession. Um, and it was like the Wild West. And then, of course, there was the gobble up of, you know, Facebook buys everything. And as you mentioned, Disney buys everything. Roger, Robert Iger just took over again as CEO.

I think he's a great guy of Disney. And I think one of his comments that he's made, correct me if I have this wrong, but, you know he he felt like they over uh did the marvel movies like too many they they just they they kind of fed too many into the system instead of trying to pace it out and you know not not to not to overkill the brand what were your thoughts on that yeah i think it i think that's correct and i think one of the things that hurt the brand um so when i was there it was i i came into marvel when they i think they were doing

iron man 2 and one of the things that i found fascinating and and really as a positive was at the time the the film division the mcu side which was was in Burbank, they were basically using the Marvel writers as a writer room. So they didn't know a lot because they're Hollywood people. They didn't know a lot about the source material. And so they would have calls and they would have conferences and retreats with a lot of the well-known writers of marvel to say okay and basically just talk about the characters storylines how this could work how that could work and i think you saw that outcome in those that first decade of film um all the way up through endgame right um now prior to that uh prior to endgame and i think was I think I don't remember if it was happening when I was there or after I left, but

at some point, Disney basically said, we don't need you guys anymore. Thanks. We got this. Right? Hundreds of billions of dollars a year later, and I guess you start to feel like you know what's up. And so they started, they just

didn't talk to any of the writers. They didn't talk to any of the writers they didn't talk to any of the creators they they they're they're still people i don't want to make a false impression there's definitely still people at the mcu in there that know the history of marvel and that are very knowledgeable of the topics of course but to the degree as it was in the initial days it was no longer the case and in my opinion i think and i could be totally wrong and that is a little bit of an outsider looking in even though i was there for a while like in my opinion i think that hurt the the films hurt the brand because they're at the point now where a lot of the storylines a lot of the characters a lot of the things that are going on are kind of in name only right and maybe that's because they

feel like they've kind of gone through the history and picked out the best stuff now they have to create new stuff i don't know but but i think that that there's a creative deficit there's a gap between the fans like myself who there's a million stories i would love to see right um and the people who are making it who who either may not like original story, think they can do a better job, may want to use it as a platform for something else, whatever the reasoning, they're not elevating the classic stories in a way that they were in the beginning.

Yeah, I would agree with you. I probably lost my comic book fan years ago, but I kind of gave up watching Spider-Man. Don't hate me, but it's just like, can we quit telling the original story and do something different? Every time I go, I'm like, wait, I thought there was another guy who was Spider-Man. Who's this guy this week?

The same thing with Batman. It's really annoying, especially when you put the guy from the vampire movies who can't act his way out of a paper bag in charge of Batman. It's really annoying. Especially when you put the guy from the vampire movies who can't act his way out of a paper bag in charge of Batman. Come on. Which is probably why they brought back the great actor, I forget his name, but he's been in so many movies

for one of the Marvel things. And I'm like, yeah, go back to him. But they did, you know, Star Wars did the same thing too. I like Star Wars wars but it's like how many fucking movies do we have to blow up the death star in for real like right can we well that they don't know they don't you see they don't know what to do they're like well fans like this so do the thing again you know we'll just do the same movie but different like right no more death

star just move on like uh you know and they they have kind of the i guess that was the manchurian the the i want to say the manchurian candidate how old am i the manchurian mandalorian yeah the mandalorian yeah uh you know with the little baby yoda but but even then yeah but even then you know so many these movies now i you know you i probably remember watching movies back in the day where they didn't make movies necessarily for children targeted or, you know, multifamily spans. And they also didn't make movies for merchandising. Like, you know, there was no Jar Jar Binks and crap and different things were like, we can sell anime dolls of this idiot character. I mean, they kind of did a little bit, I think, I guess, back in the day.

But it wasn't it wasn't like the movie didn't seem designed for that you know what i mean like you watch movies nowadays and you're like oh this is clearly something that's gonna end up in the disney store i don't know uh no well i think that's a good i think that's a great point right and i think that's also why why you're gonna see you're already seeing sort of a bottoms-up reaction to that where people are just like screw it i'll I'll make my own content. Like the technologies here where we're like, we can do it ourselves. And I think what you're seeing and what you're reacting against is a combination of the natural greed of large industries, right? Which is not necessarily

a bad thing. It's just sort of the way it works um and the budgets the ballooned budgets that they have now for these things if you're going to put in 300 million dollars into a movie it has to be a billion dollar blockbuster just to break even yeah um and i i i'm with you i kind of miss you know one of my favorite movies of all time is the fugitive with harrison ford that was good or or the game with uh that was such a great fucking movie. One of my all-time favorite movies, man. So brilliant. I never saw the ending coming. Oh, me neither. I still watch it.

I love movies like that. Was that a $100 million budget? Of course not. Did they make it with the idea that there were going to be toys and all this kind of stuff? No. And that's okay. Yeah, that would be great. Although I do know a guy who basically turned the game

into an actual business. Did he really? Yeah, that's a topic for another time. Probably a life coach or something like that? No, no, like literally doing what happened in the game. Oh, like he, wow. Okay, there's some, I hope his liability policies are high. So yeah, that was one of those movies that I didn't see.

But, you know, you bring up a good segue why people are sick of Hollywood. I mean, I think even, what was the movie back in the day that I think was a black and white? And it was from the 20s or 30s. And it started making fun of how hollywood just recycles everything and the and the irony was it's the gal that comes down the stairs it's the washed up actress i think movie yeah i forget but uh um this you know they started doing they started the meme joke of hollywood just recycles everything and this is in black and white 1920s 1930s hollywood and and yeah i think you're i

think you're right i think everything's been done so much overdone redone you know i mean do we really want to see iron eagle 20 and uh iron man 10 right i mean come on what do you what do you do as a multi-billion dollar international conglomerate when someone on youtube can have five six seven eight million subscribers and get and get a quarter million views on any video that they make in a week yeah look at how do you compete with that right who's that guy that uh he he just owns youtube he's he's he's a billionaire basically uh mr beast mr beast yeah you look at a guy like that and you're just like you know and there's a billionaire, basically. Mr. Beast? Mr. Beast, yeah. You look at a guy like that, and you're just like, you know,

and there's a lot of kids that would rather watch his movies than some of the stuff that they put in theaters. You know, they tried using a lot of this AI technology in the new Raiders of the Lost Ark. I guess that's a bond now. And, you know, I was going to mention earlier, I want to fall back to this a little bit, but not spend time on it. But, you know, we talked about how merchandising and the manipulation in the movies, that breaks the fourth wall for me. When I see the merchandising or I see the play in the movie that you're just like, that didn't need to be in here.

You put that in there for a merchandising play or you put that in there for some sort of social commentary virtue signaling play you know like i'm never gonna go watch the barbie movie i've heard it's all over the place and it's it's kind of an interesting funny commentary but evidently they tried to slap everybody in the face and i just to me that's not a movie i just i want to see a story i don't want to see a pop culture social media commentary fucking whatever i if i want to see that i'll go on twitter facebook you know well i think that's what you're what you're saying is is the a a planet wide reaction to that yeah right with web three with blockchain with all this stuff like again, you are now part of a community. And the people that support you, support you.

And what I mean by that is you make the thing and you start to attract people. And as you work hard and as they work hard making their thing, you support each other. And so as you start to build your audience, as other people start to build their audiences, and as you start to do to do joint venture partnerships, or collaborations, or giveaways, or raffles with one another, the audience cross pollinates, and you start to share the wealth of, of, of the creators, right of the of that creation moment. And so it doesn't, it eliminates the ability, I mean, certainly you can make a topic on whatever you want to talk about, but there has to be people involved because what Web3 does is it democratizes the creation process. So there is no, there is no black box anymore of,

of saying, Hey, I'm going to make the movie that I want to make. And I'm going to say the thing that I want to say, you can do that, but good luck. Right. Whereas, whereas when you go to Web3 and you're saying hey i really want to make this film and in order to get this film funded we're actually going to sell uh these these digital collectibles that can be redeemed for this we can vote on this you can actually have a say in the direction of the of the of the movie maybe even who we cast um as the audience becomes a part of the filmmaking process or whatever creative endeavor it is they they end up becoming not only your biggest fans they become your um you know kind

of like your biggest um you know what do you call it like um evangelists right because they're a part you are now bringing people it's not again our generation is i want to go to see a movie that i like and they're not giving it to me therefore i'm not going to go again right because we're the consumer they're the product creator but now everybody is a part of the same process so everybody is kind of putting putting their little two cents in and you have a voting you can have voting systems or just by trade just by volume just by community everybody gets a chance to kind of put their input in doesn't mean everything gets made you know you know too many cooks in the kitchen

is still a thing right but but when the final product gets pushed out there when it gets made when it gets sold everybody celebrates because everybody had a hand in the in making of the thing you were there from the beginning you know you didn't just't just see a trailer and go to a movie. You saw the casting. You saw the shots. You got updates daily on the filming. And the director, there was that one time the director said, what do you guys think of the shot? And you said, I think you should reshoot it. And he said, you're right.

We should reshoot it. And they did. And it's so cool. So all of a sudden, you have a communal way of creating whatever it is that you need to create. And I talk a lot about entertainment and to create and and it's and i i talk a lot about entertainment uh in pop culture but it's not just about entertainment and pop culture right it goes to everything that we're that we do as a society well this will be explosive i mean you're saying in six months we'll have these these people making movies i've already seen what

people are doing with ai with uh with with all the different artwork they're making and writing and stuff. I mean, you could probably write a lot of scripts on AI these days, ChatGPT as well. I imagine there's people already doing that. They're writing books on it, I know that. But yeah,

if we have a disruptive movie thing, that's just going to be huge because people are going to tell original stories. I've seen, like Martin Scorsese, you watch some of his original films. I'm kind of a fan of some of them. You watch how he came up and how he developed and different things and how that made a difference and made great producers and film. The original Akira Kawasawa movies oh yeah you watch

the i'm a big fan of him you watch some of those original things i mean he like made basically the genre of film basically 100 and cinematography and stuff um uh and and screenshots which is i guess isn't cinematography but yeah if we have if we have all these people that it becomes democratized where you know you don't have i know people that it becomes democratized where, you know, you don't have, I know a million people in Hollywood that, you know, you know Hollywood too. And there's a million people with a script. I mean, I can't walk around,

you can't walk around Hollywood for five seconds without someone trying to hand you a script. There's so many creative talent that are probably there that is a base that could be tapped into. And this could be really huge. Well'll give you i'll give you another one more example in the creative to show you from the when i saw and i think a lot of people it's it's so interesting i was talking to somebody much smarter than me the other day and you know we're in a very strange time where you know right now if you think about games, the games own the player, right?

So why wouldn't the player want to own the game? Well, of course, if you're a player of a game, who wouldn't want to own that? But we've been conditioned. It's very much almost very similar to like a Stockholm syndrome, right? Where we actually sympathize with our captors where we're like, well i what do you mean i

can own it well i mean it's a complete it's such a radical concept that i think it's a lot it's very hard for people to grasp so as an example um like with adult fantasy we are uh after web3 comic-con uh we're actually in development of a tabletop role-playing game oh really do you ever play tabletop games like dungeons of dragons or anything anything like that? When I was a kid, we played tabletop. I didn't ever get into D&D, but I know a lot of people are. It's huge. It's huge. One of the first rules

of doing any kind of tabletop role-playing game is you're making your character. The inherent problem with making your character in a tabletop game is that after the game is over, you don't really have a use for the character. Even if that campaign lasts a year and a half, when that campaign ends, that character document just goes in a little folder and you get to keep it and good luck, kid, have fun. And you just create another character. Well, because of technology like the

blockchain, what we have the ability to do is to create a very simple rules-light character builder and campaign generator where you can come in, you can create your character. We even use AI to help generate the backstory. So you get a really nice detailed backstory of a character. And then you play the game. And as you play the game, because of technologies like AI and blockchain, these things can get logged. So for instance, you're playing a

game all of a sudden you have an account like a profile like you would on any application any web app where here's the history of your character and all the adventures that they've done right and once you start to bring things in like ai you don't even have to be awake because all of a sudden you have an ai system that's like oh well, well, while you were asleep, somebody in Utah was playing and their characters met your character in a village that you were visiting. And so all of a sudden you have these new little snippets of story that are developing your character over time. Well, as you're developing a character over time in this way, and you're doing it through fun, I think that's the most important thing. It's not work. You're playing a game so so as you're having fun and you're developing a character and this rich lore and

this rich backstory well what happens is other people start to recognize your character first is people at your table or people that you play with and then as as it gets bigger and bigger bigger certain characters will start to get recognized across the spectrum of any number of games that are being played. And as these characters hit a certain level, now we have a character with a rich lore and backstory with tons of stories with an audience that knows the character and cares about the character. And now we can actually reach out to other partners through licensing deals and product deals to actually make your character into toys and t-shirts and

lunchboxes and animated shows all of that stuff and of course you as the creator of that character you get you get rewarded for it and so i think what i think this is this is the future at least with my passion with these character franchises this is the future like why why wouldn't you kind of crowdsource the creation of new properties, the next Marvel Universe, the next big MCU thing? Why not crowdsource it from people that care about it

and play it and then let the cream rise to the top and reward that and then everybody wins. There you go. Well, you've given me some amazing ideas and wow, I didn't even think about this future of film.

So you've opened my eyes to that. That's really an interesting play on disruption of Hollywood and all the things. I mean, technically no one's ever disrupted. And one of the problems with the Hollywood is it is kind of a, I don't know what you say. It's a top 1% sort of game. I mean, even that shows in the distribution of money in the SAG stuff. Most of the people, I think, what's the average person in SAG make?

Like $30,000 a year or something? It might be less. And that's why they're on strike. But, geez, if we democratize that whole thing for making film, I mean, right now I've got my old man in the sea beard, so I've got some Hemingway movie ideas or Orson Welles. I could probably do Orson Welles. If I can

learn Othello or something, I don't fucking know. I'll just do Citizen Kane 2 and just run around and I don't know. That or I could do a really sad movie about the pathetic life of a podcast host. And, you know, all the drinking I do in the back. I don't do drinking.

I don't know. This thing where you have this glorious podcast, this glorious podcast, interviews in life, and then off set, you're just like, my life sucks. This is Fridays around here. I don't know what that means anyway. You know, I don't know. that means anyway. I don't know. For some reason, I have some dark drama of that in the back of my head. I don't know why.

That's great. And I see. I see. Who was the actor who played Batman? He also played that daddy movie where he was in the 80s where he was at home. He's a great actor. We referenced him earlier in the show. Yeah, I'm terrible at that.

I can't bring him up. Yeah, I'm terrible at things. I'm great with faces. But I'm thinking of him in the show. Yeah, I'm terrible with that. Yeah, I'm terrible with things. I'm great with faces, but I'm thinking of him in the movie. You know, he's played some recently dark characters and stuff, so I'm thinking of some of his stuff. But, yeah, there you go. Whatever. I don't know.

Yeah, it's like the black swan of podcasting. The black swan. Yeah, yeah. Something dark like that where it's like it's like i don't know maybe maybe it's like a podcasting ghost that haunts me or some shit i don't but yeah something like that uh god it's the 1989 michael keaton is the name i keep oh yeah that's some of the references we've been doing on the callback of the show. So I see him playing, I don't know, some washed-up dude or something in, I don't know, some dark place, which is Fridays around here.

Anyway, moving on. I don't know. I got one. Hey, if you have a better screenplay, send it in the Chris Voss show. Send it in or email, and we'll give it a look. And maybe, I don't know, maybe there's a movie there or something that will just bomb which is probably apropos for this moment.

Anyway, Todd, anything else you want to promote or plug before we go out that we haven't covered on? No, man. I would just say check out adultfantasy.io. It's spelled exactly the way it sounds. I promise it's not pornographic smut. Although

don't tempt me uh and uh and uh web3 comic-con uh web the number three c-o-m-i-c-o-n.com it's the largest online only web3 pop culture conference and it celebrates creators and fans it's uh live august 16th through 18th but don't worry if you're listening to this after there's going to be replays um just hop in uh it's really simple it's free so just give us your email and name and we'll send you a bunch of information and show you how to do it and honestly chris you know a thank you for this because this has been a blast and and i also like look man whether we're talking about the the um the democratization of film or or anything i think the proof is in the pudding right you you want you were both examples of that like 25 years ago could you

like this wasn't a possibility it was either radio hosting or nothing right and then you're like hopping and it's like yeah i'll just compete with like rush limbaugh it'll be fine and or or or like on my side even even a couple months couple of months ago, you know, we, we started talking about web three comic-con last year and, and who, who the hell can launch a convention? Like we've got 40 speakers, the biggest names in web three. We have a tiny team, like, you know, we're, we're just a few, a handful of people. But we were able to do something virtually that costs tens of millions of dollars to do in real life. Yeah.

Tens of millions. And has the same buzz, the same fun. I mean, everyone's really enjoying themselves. We're getting great feedback. And it's just a sign of the times. If you really want to do something, now's the time to do it. Don't let anyone stop you. And do your research and figure out a way to make it happen.

There you go. I'm going to start thinking of movie scripts and movie plots for Chris Voss, The Chris Voss Show. And I'm glad you presented this because we were just going to launch an OnlyFans next week. Sold! No one wants to see that.

So anyway, thanks Todd for coming on. And what a wonderful discussion as well. We got your.coms, right? I think you just plugged them? Yeah, sure. Adultfantasy.io and web3comicon.com. And web3comicon is spelled W-E-B, the number three, C-O-M-I-C-O-N. There you go.

And thanks for coming on the show. We really appreciate it, man. Thank you, brother. I appreciate it. There you go. Thanks to my audience for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com for just Christmas. For the show, your family, friends, relatives,

give us five-star reviews on iTunesreads.com for just Christmas. Further share your family, friends, and relatives. Give us five-star reviews on iTunes. LinkedIn.com for just Christmas. And I think YouTube.com for just Christmas if I missed it. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time.