The Pomp Podcast - #743 NFTs And Shark Diving w/ Greg Norman Jr

Episode Date: December 6, 2021

Greg Norman Jr is the Founder & CEO of Shark Wake Park. He's also the Co-Founder and CEO of Jupiter Group In this conversation we talk about everything from NFTs, to intellectual property licensing, to literally diving with sharks. I hope you enjoy! ======================= LMAX Digital - the market-leading solution for institutional crypto trading & custodial services - offers clients a regulated, transparent and secure trading environment, together with the deepest pool of crypto liquidity. LMAX Digital is also a primary price discovery venue, streaming real-time market data to the industry’s leading analytics platforms. LMAX Digital - secure, liquid, trusted. Learn more at LMAXdigital.com/pomp ======================= Compass Mining is the world's first online marketplace for bitcoin mining hardware and hosting. Compass was founded with the goal of making it easy for everyone to mine bitcoin. Visit compassmining.io to start mining bitcoin today! ======================= Do you want a new job in the bitcoin and crypto industry? You should go apply for hundreds of open roles at http://www.pompcryptojobs.com or sign up for our training program at http://www.pompscryptocourse.com  =======================

what's up everyone this is anthony pompliano most of you know me as pomp you're listening to the pomp podcast simply the best podcast out there now let's kick this thing off greg norman jr is the ceo and founder of shark wake park he is also the co-founder and ceo of jupiter group in this conversation we talk about everything from nfts to intellectual property licensing to literally diving with sharks. I really enjoyed this conversation with Greg, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, I want to tell you all about our sponsors. First up is LMAX Digital. LMAX Digital is the number one institutional crypto exchange. They offer clients the deepest pool of crypto liquidity on the planet, all underscored by 100% uptime

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or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. We have Greg Norman Jr. here with us. Some of you may not know who he is. Some of you may know who he is off of crypto Twitter.

What's going on, man? How you doing, man? I'm feeling fantastic. I'm super excited to have you here. I appreciate that. I'm excited to be here too. Let's have, let's have you kind of just give a quick rundown of your background and then what you do on a day-to-day basis today. And then we're going to dive in and I basically want to just

break down a number of the businesses that you're involved in and kind of how they work, what the economics are so people can kind of understand. You've got a skillset around business building, right? That you can apply to IP licensing, the Wake Park, and then obviously a Jupiter group as well. But maybe just give us your background first. Yeah. Greg Norman Jr. So I grew up here in South Florida, went to school at University of Miami. This is my hometown here. I traveled the world with my dad, Greg Norman, the Hall of Fame golfer, and very lucky to experience the life that I have experienced with him. He showed me a lot, showed me part of the world, and showed me how he operated, not just in his athletic career, but in his business career. So very fortunate to be side

by side with him for as long as I have been. So I worked with him for about 15 years. While I was working with him for 15 years, I was a professional kiteboarder and wakeboarder. So I was able to experience that side of the world too being a professional athlete while working with him in the branding licensing divisions and operating divisions of greg norman company uh that's shark.com if you all want to check that out and we have a couple different operating businesses but we also have the light the licensing and branding division which everyone knows him for is the great white shark so that's a great story uh he got the title the great white shark by in 1981 u.s masters he was leading the golf tournament uh the first day no one knew who he was because he comes from

Australia. I have long blonde hair, had a flair to him, you know, like being very aggressive on the golf course. So at the press conference, they call him in and they say, who are you? What do you do? Where do you come from? He said, from the beaches of Australia. I surf, I play golf and I dive with sharks. So the next morning he wakes up and the newspaper of the Augusta Tribune, I believe it was, said the Great White Shark leads the US Masters. At the time he was sponsored by Reebok and Paul Fireman, the CEO and founder of Reebok, came to him and said, Greg, this is amazing. We have to run with this so they founded the logo and the name great white shark immediately and they just launched it and then greg norman collection became the thing then from that

spawned out to greg norman golf course design the wine brands the beef the operating companies which are the australian grill which is in north myrtle beach then in the wake parks and then we have another partnership with verizon club car gpsi called shark experience which is broadcasting entertainment, sport, and news on the golf course via Club Car, via the Verizon network, so you could watch golf while you're playing golf. So we do a lot of different things. We also operated a opportunity fund for investing into technology that we, you know, our network allowed us to get into. And then I broke away, not broke away, excuse me, I partnered with him and founded my own company, which is Shark Wake Park. And that took the ethos of what he did with Greg Norman

golf course design and applied it to my sports that I love, which is wakeboarding. And when I saw wakeboarding traveling the world is what it could do for communities. And I went to one location in the Philippines where they built a wake park there. It became the number one tourist destination in that area of the Philippines and created this economy around the wake park for the local school kids, for the local population. And I wanted to do that back here. Being from West Palm Beach, there was no wake park here. The only wake park we had is in Deerfield Beach called Ski Rickson that was built in 1983. So it's actually older than me. I used to drive down an hour and a half every day to go ride. And so I knew I had to make a mission of myself to build

these wake parks. Luckily enough, the first one was opportunity in North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, built Shark Wake Park 843. And what we did was we partnered with local municipalities. So they had a park, recreational facility, dead body of water. They were not creating any revenue him off of it, nothing. So he said to them, hey, look, we'll partner with you. We'll share revenue with you. We'll put in all the money, all the capital in order to build it. We'll operate it, everything. So you get a new asset in there, you get cash flow, and you have another calling card for your community to create something really cool and unique. So they did it. And thank you for the city of North Myrtle Beach for believing us. And it's been a great success to this day,

even during the last year after COVID and how difficult it was to come out of that. it was a resounding success this year uh and then west palm beach allowed me to do it in 2019 uh so that was really crazy how we just opened up and then covid hit and we had to slow down and get back up at the speed again but that's really cool shark wake park west palm beach is in lake okehele uh that's off of forest hill boulevard and the turnpike and we actually have two kids there colby zabarth and austin rudd who now are junior world champions they never been on a wakeboard before in their life and now they're junior world champions so i got very proud of them are you their coach uh no i'm not there i was gonna say i need lessons no no no the magic touch i helped

them for sure i love riding with the kids they're phenomenally better than me now plus i'm the old guy i ride my knees hurt the next day all right so i got a whole bunch of questions i know my brothers do as well uh first let's start with the ip business when you see the ip get created right i think there was an opportunistic hey this is a really good kind of moniker and like let's run with this how does that business work right do you basically just look around you're like oh there's a computer let's put the name on that oh john's got a sweatshirt let's put a name on that there's water bottles put a name on that and like you just try to put the name as many places as possible or are you have like a criteria or a framework to make decisions around where are we

actually going to partner on specific products and like what we want the brand to kind of stand for, if you will? Great question. So one other thing I learned very quickly from my dad is that he took a lifetime of work and long-term vision in order to build his brand that became a very successful globally known brand, the Greg Norman Company. What he always did is hire the best people in order to be able to build out the business for him. But also when he evaluated opportunities, like you were saying, do you just slap it on everything is no, absolutely no. What What we found is that, and what I think everyone knows, is that it's so easy to degrade the brand very quickly if you do the wrong thing or tackle with the wrong partner or you try to jump into the wrong opportunity. It can easily degrade the brand versus add value to the brand.

It's very difficult to add value to the brand. So over and over, you have to have that long-term goal of where this is going to be in 5, 10, 15 years, not that, hey, next month, hopefully this makes some money for me and we can move on from it. So, yeah, that's the long-term vision he's had from day one. And how do those relationships work, right? If you go and you find a company that's making a product, right, whatever the kind of widget or product is, and you guys want to do a licensing deal with them, is there like a revenue split? Do they pay cash up front? Like, just like, how does an IEP licensing deal work kind of from a generic framework standpoint? every opportunity is different without a doubt so for example a shark experience we literally partnered with verizon club car and gpsi to build out the shark experience leveraging the name shark obviously in order to get the global creditability in the golf market that we needed to be that was a partnership through and through jv other opportunities are royalties are up front cash

flow or up front feed or to use a brand so it really is all opportunity opportunistic so we'll actually luckily partnered with one of the biggest in the space, which is Authentic Brands Group. Authentic Brands Group just purchased 51% of the Greg Norman name and license. So now they're our partner to be able to go outsource deals for us while we still are working in tangent with our current operating companies and current licensing companies. Got it. So basically, when you go ahead and you do something like that, you guys got it to a certain point, a certain size and success, and now you pour gas on that fire. You know it works. And hey, let's go get and use these partners to really help us kind of take it to escape velocity from there. Yeah, exactly right.

Yeah. Makes sense. All right. Golf courses is a part of the business as well. What do you guys do there? Design, manage, build, operate, all the above. So we really say from the very get-go, when we come in from a development standpoint and we talk with the developer, most developers want to have the new Augusta National, the greatest championship golf course ever. 18 holes of perfection. That's extremely expensive. And you're also pushing out the majority of golfers who are 20 plus handicapped who can't play those teams. So the hardest thing in the world is to make a golf course that everyone can play and enjoy. The other thing to do is the least disturbance approach. Golf, it moves around a lot of dirt. We got to create a lot of water. So we got to

utilize the environment as much as possible. So my dad's always created a eco-friendly first approach when building golf courses, which is utilize the landscape to be as best as he possibly can do with the golf course. And then what comes next around it is what the moneymaker really is, which is selling houses on green grass. That's when the late nineties, early two thousands, where the boom of golf happened here, uh, where people were just trying to sell houses on green grass. So you got to keep that whole mindset from the very get-go starts with the golf, then the clubhouse, and then the real estate around it. So it flows very efficiently. I'm sure it depends, but could you walk us through what like an average golf course deal

would look like? Like I'm sure they pay a fee to get it designed. I'm sure they pay a fee for the land. I'm sure they pay a fee to get the clubhouse built, like everything like that. Yeah, absolutely. So we do the broad range of the spectrum from just the land planning, just the golf course planning. Here's the specs. There you go. Have fun. Go have someone else build it. Go have someone else build it or we build it all. Or we do the whole shebang, which is here's the golf course. Here's the clubhouse with interior design. Here's Greg Norman real estate, which is real estate planning development side of it as well with also interior design, landscape design around it, everything. So here's what you should sell at the restaurant. Yeah, exactly. Bring in the wine, bring in the

beef, bring in the clothing. You got it. And where do most of these courses make most of their money? Is it actually on golf or is it the houses? Is it in the clubhouse? Is it somewhere else? Very rarely do golf courses make money from selling greens fees. The very successful ones do from memberships, the private golf clubs you'll hear about to the very famous public golf courses like pebble beach right yeah 350 dollars to go play golf it's crazy but they're booked out all year long so those are those anomalies and the rest of the time it is just for development for selling you know houses on green grass or bringing people into the resort gotcha the first time that we sat down in person you casually hit me with i go shark diving and i was like wait what is that

explain the shark diving real quick before we get into all the nft stuff right so off of jupiter florida where it's my home is one of the greatest shark diving locations in florida if not the world you have a broad range of species and it's not as scary as you all think you really are just sitting on top of the surface and they're all swimming below you crystal clear water because you're in the gulf gulf stream that is really warm water you'll have sandbar sharks dusky sharks hammerhead sharks bull sharks do come around tiger sharks do come around a very rare occasion the great white shark will come around i've never seen one of those but they're there um they're everywhere actually so you you get you're in the boat yeah and how big are these

you're in the boat what do you got on are you just like in a speedo or you got like a like a wetsuit on what do you got on pop don't vision me in the speedo what do you wear where are your goggles mask snorkel fins um jump in the water all right so you jump in you don't like slide in quietly oh no man i dive down there and grab on the dorsal fin and go for a ride with them you should never do that i did not say that i take that back i grabbed the dorsal fin okay but yeah you go down there they swim right next to you if you go to certain operations jupiter florida is amazing for it there's shark addicts they're an incredible operation they'll take you out there go diving with them and when so when you when you go like why do why and this is me being somewhat

serious uh if i watch uh television shark attack it's the only time i ever hear about sharks right like oh somebody got attacked whatever why are they like more chill when you're doing is because you're not threatening to them or what's going on there yeah great question i mean without a doubt media does spin it all up because yeah hype stream to be able to get people to watch that show great white discovery channel shark week it's all about the latest greatest new bite whatever but they're not like that they're out there for sure they are the apex predator for sure but they're not going around just eating everything and here's my theory and i don't know if this is true or not but there's no shark hospital out there sharks just can't go up to anything and just attack and go because

they most likely will get hurt too so they're really cautious if they're gonna bite something if they're gonna come in it's because they know they're gonna have a high success of getting a meal yeah bro they see me they definitely like yo we gonna eat the shit out of that guy you ever seen the uh the meme of the woman in her uh car and she's uh filming and she's like uh you know if chicken comes in my house i eat it she's like that's why i don't go in the shark's house because if you go to the shark's house the shark's gonna eat you you ever seen that one yes you know why would you go to the shark's house i don't go in there they don't come to my house but like there's no shark hospital but it is the shark's house so i'm just looked it up too there's

57 or no there's on average there are 16 shark attacks per year in the united states 16 yeah it's very low and one fatality every two years you want to know wild stat more people die from falling coconuts from a tree than die from shark yeah exactly yeah it's not it's not we're going uh shark diving no problem well i mean you don't want to go in their house no one thing for sure i do want to say before we get off the shark diving it's fun it's really fun okay it's not just fun but it also shows you the new world which is underwater it shows you sharks in a real environment and it can show you down oh well we actually need these things in the water we don't need to eliminate them and maybe get you

down the road of conservation because we desperately need conservation for sharks because they are the apex predator because they are apex predator they are the ones that control the ecosystem in the ocean so we need them for a healthy ocean yeah so i do agree with that i feel like uh people who love the water and love the animals in the water um one they're doing great stuff for the environment but two is uh the only person i've ever seen do this is uh you know joe rogan post sometimes like if you really go down a rabbit hole the ocean there's some wild stuff i've seen videos online where there's like uh what looks like a like just jellyfish or like some sort of thing and it changes colors then it like poofs out comes i'm like dude i'm out and then i

saw there was an article where they gave a cephalopod which i don't even know what that is uh they gave a cephalopod octopus is it okay all right they gave it an intelligence test and it passed i'm out what dude google it right now they gave a cephalopod an intelligence test it's c-e-p-h It's going to start with an S. So that's a good, I think that's how you spell it. Cephalopod. And I think they gave it a,

an intelligence test and it passed. And that's when I was like, all right, we don't, we don't understand it. And I think part of it is like, you know, I talk all the time.

I got, I literally have a NASA jacket on where it's like, everything's about space. It's like, go up, go up, go up. But we don't understand the ocean and the ocean is what?

I think it's 70% of the earth. We've only discovered or observed, I believe 5% of the ocean. Really? Yeah. we know more about the surface of mars than we do about the the bottom of our ocean really yeah that reminds me uh there was damn they said this uh cephalofish is as smart as it is as smart as children i told you they said that they got the same intelligence level as children yeah and they

gave it an intelligence test right yeah the same one they give children and it got and it passed but not not like one year olds like like you know five to ten year olds it's like your intelligence level uh that was a layup uh the the only thing i'll say about the ocean that i want to talk about nfts is uh there's a brazilian billionaire i think who's the he built a one man uh like submarine and he has gone to the bottom of the ocean i think he's touched the bottom of four of the seven oceans i think or something i don't know if we google it real quick i think it's uh a brazilian billionaire who went to the bottom of at least four of the oceans or something but he goes by himself in a like a custom-made submarine thing and i'm like dude you gotta have some

freaking courage to uh to go do that how cool i want to do that yeah like i actually think that you would go do that i would not do that in a heartbeat i would do it in a heartbeat oh i can't believe i'm forgetting his name he's you're all gonna make fun of me for this but he did terminator he did aliens he's the director of that the movies yeah yeah he went down to the mariana a trench in his own own uh submarine really yeah why am i spacing on his name he's famous director james cameron thank you james cameron yeah my my whole thing with the the ocean is just like if there's a crack in that thing like you're dumb like you ain't getting back up you'll never know yeah i i also watched uh for the free diving uh documentary uh polina uh was watching it and

there's a woman she's like the world champion free diver taught herself how to do it with her breathing and everything and uh one day she was with some friends she dove down uh they were just like practicing so what she went going like really deep like kind of world record level depths uh she went down and never came back up and they searched for couldn't find her and like i think that's part of it is like there's like some finality down there like yeah how uh uh when you go shark diving do you bring like oxygen with you or no oh no no i i do do scuba diving but typically it's all free diving so it's holding your breath diving down there and how long can you hold your breath for ah if i was training up i could hold it for about four minutes 30 seconds

holy shit right now once i felt like i was gonna pass out after 20 seconds because the further you get down right the harder it gets yeah it's called the mammalian dive reflex so your body is accustomed to be able to hold oxygen and be able to live without oxygen for a long time you're born in for nine months in underwater and you're in your mama's belly right yeah so your blood shunts from your extremities to your internal organs it um your liver actually squeezes to produce more red blood cells to go into your bloodstream so your body is meant to go into this reflex it's a natural reflex your face hits cold water it automatically kicks in mammalian dive reflex should we head to it should we do a breath holding contest i went free diving

once and i that sounds cooler than it was i was i had the goggles i had the goggles i was like snorkeling but they would tell i was with some guy and he was like we were in turks and cacos and the guy was like you know take off the snorkel fancy guy take off the snorkel and basically like dive down we'd go in like these little like cave looking things not really caves how deep do you go when you free dive i could hit 100 feet 100 we didn't go anywhere close to that bro you sound I'm like, you held your breath the length of the pool. I wasn't like in standing room water. I was like diving.

I was like, Greg knows. Buddy, you come with me. I'll get you down to 50 feet. All right. Yeah, if you have a proper instruction, you'll be able to hold your breath for two minutes. And you leave them there, right? Yeah, you got it.

You leave them there and see at the surf. All right, tell us about Jupiter Group. What are you guys doing? So because of my past with branding, licensing, and all this, I got to understand from a very ingrained level from the internal side of how every organization, IP, brand, institution is trying to get into the NFT space. So NBA Top Shot, they did a great job of kind of opening a mass adoption for people to get involved with digital ownership, digital scarcity, digital ownership, own that one video

of LeBron James Duncan, you sell it on the marketplace, make some money. I think that's the first inroads of people finding the NFT space. But I got to see quickly about how all the major players out there all want to get involved with this industry but just don't have an inroad to get there they don't have a vehicle so we created jupiter group and my partner nicole mcgross she owns the art gallery in palm beach she's partnered with a contemporary artist world famous contemporary artist brendan murphy who has 22 foot sculpture of boonji spaceman in antigua he's doing another one in london anyways we partnered with him to form the boonji project which is a 10k pfp avatar project aimed at connecting digital to physical. So that way, the majority of the world who got

involved with Brendan Murphy's Bungie project could own a piece of his work, which is usually priced out of the market for a lot of people. How much is it? For the PFP? Well, for the physical piece, but also the PFP. For some of the physical pieces sell for $350,000. Wow. Some of his paintings sell for $50,000. So the mini sculpture sells for $20,000. So I mean, his buyers are serena williams warren buffett um buffett buys it yeah he didn't he didn't buy one of our nfts but we're working on him if he if he buys an nft before he buys bitcoin it'd be all time all right so uh the whole idea is you take the physical art and a lot of the pfps are basically the same uh type of art uh same artist but what is the connection between the physical piece and

then this uh the digital pieces so we did what was called a proof of burn concept with redeemable polygon token so if you minted during the during the minting process the first 200 you were entered into a guarantee to get a mini physical sculpture from brendan murphy a 101 mini sculpture 13 inches tall roughly around 20k on a fair market value um so that's one of the pieces we were able to give out uh 30 paintings we gave out and then a seven foot 750 000 boom g sculpture as well which is really cool it's massive massive a kid from fort lauderdale won it a 19 year old kid was he actually lived right across the street from it it sounds ridiculous but it was completely randomized and completely it's all on chain we built everything on chain i just walked it over that's one of those

things when when you know who wins like damn i gotta have to explain this one it was too perfect He literally lived across the street from the gallery where it's just sitting in. And it's, again, it's all on chain. So he built it out. So what is he going to, a 19-year-old kid gets a $750,000 sculpture. What's he going to do with it? So we dropped him a token, the redeemable polygon token. He could hold it.

He could trade it if he wants to. Or he could hold it and then burn it to redeem it for the physical. And he could do whatever he wants with it. It's his seven foot room. Has he indicated what he's going to do? He's got a lot of cool ideas, actually. A lot to try to give back to the piece. But now he's really effectively part of art history, and I don't say that lightly because now he is an owner through a proof-of-burn system that we built out through blockchain network for a $750,000 physical sculpture.

So it's one of a kind. Beforehand, the only thing that happened like this was Uniswap did a redemption token like this for what they called Unisocks. And the Unisocks, they priced up to around – I think it's $150,000 for a pair of socks now. But the idea is that you were able to burn the token to redeem the physical. And that's what we're trying to do, connecting the digital, the physical with Brendan Murphy. Then our next one with Mr. E, his Instagram accounts, M-R-E-G-F-X. He's a fantastic digital graphic artist. We were launching his polygons to do the same thing for him, connecting digital to physical.

How many people actually burn the token to receive the physical? No one's done it yet. So the redemption hasn't happened yet. It's going to happen in the next couple of weeks. But right now they're trading on the open market on OpenSea. the uh we're going to pull up a picture here in a second of uh of the physical sculpture and when you see it it's just this took a long time right it's like one of those pieces that you're just like damn that like the proof of work that goes into uh to to building something like this which

i think like forget all the digital stuff for a second i do think that one piece of um uh that's really interesting is people forget how much work goes into uh creating the actual art itself right and when you see sculpture specifically like to me it's just it's one of those things where like i couldn't create that if i tried right so you have respect just for somebody who has a skill set that you don't have but then when you look at something like this it's very obvious even if you know nothing about art there's like oh i'd created something on the weekend and there's like oh this is a professional that created something that was super super high quality and i think that that's part of what uh the allure for a lot of this is is there's this like aspirational component to

some of these artists that you're just like dude i like the care that you put in the attention to detail it's great i don't even like i i didn't know until uh you told us that this artist was a big deal but like oh yeah we got the uh the photo here and he's standing next to that's a seven foot tall statue or sculpture that yeah sculpture yeah sculpture what is there a difference between a statue and a sculpture there is think about a uh piece of marble in the yard is got it okay got it yeah yeah so like and even the base and i mean like it's just it's incredible uh and then what is written on on these like all his formulas it's all little bits and pieces of his work of his life all come together in formulas to try to try to solve it if you will

so that took three years three years of concept yeah three years to make that sculpture yep holy shit yeah and then the the pfps the 10k project 11k project we did is 20 years of his work all wrapped up into one so when we were working with him the first generations of the software to be able to spit out all the different traits in the PFP and the avatar, he saw his work after 20 years out of the new way he's never seen before, which was really cool to see because he had all the backgrounds, the bodies, the visors, the ears. We coupled it all together and the software spit out 3.5 million different iterations of the avatars. And we only took the 11K out of that. So we got to see his work in a new way. Plus now our Discord before we launched, it reached

142 000 people with zero marketing put into it it was just completely organic and really amazing to see how now you have over 100 000 people connecting with a new artist brennan murphy who they probably never heard before and now they are they're fans of his for life it changed his outlook about how it is and i think people kind of did it right and he was the one that put the cat out of the bag now everyone knows like we're going to jump into this full force but to to really jump into it from an artist perspective when i working with brendan murphy and working with mystery it's it's scary to them because so new and so foreign but now they get to connect and i think that's a beautiful thing about the decentralization of web 3 that nfts are you know a subset of that provides because

it allows everyone to participate on a whole new level because now they are you know as a free market trades these things in open public they're they can profit off these things yeah it's a global liquidity market it's not like the art market right now where you have to go take it to some show and hopefully it sells now you now you can connect with everyone how do you think about your business like are you guys going to go look and partner with these artists and then like help them basically take their ideas and their art and then bring it into like this new world or are you thinking of it some other way yeah absolutely so we will partner with the world famous contemporary artists out there digital graphic artists who want to get fully on board

with it as well and that's a very important thing and i think that this world we're in right now at nft space it's very apparent that a lot of big celebrities are leveraging their brand in order to be able to just throw out an nft hopefully they make some money and they walk away it's it smells of bullshit and everyone knows they can't that's like you're not going to be involved with that anymore so now you're going to have to if we partner with anyone a juber group it's their life now because it's our life and it's now the community's life so they're going to have to be full force building that community with us the artist just can't produce something and walk away It's never going to work.

And that's why I think you're going to see, like Nike, for example. Nike just jumped into, I think it was Roblox, right? Nike did this big thing. And one thing, I read this tweet the other day. It's not mine. I wish I remember who said this. And it said, what's a greater headline? Was Nike made $100 million off of jumping into the metaverse?

Or some kid sold a pair of digital Nike shoes for $1 million and changed his life? And I think that's that last one. The kid sold it for $1 million is the definition of Web3 and where we're going. That's the metaverse. and i think that's it's all falling down that road yeah part of and by no means am i an expert on any of this stuff but as i think through it like i've always said uh we already live in the metaverse right like the internet is the metaverse twitter is the like um uh gabby dies on from uh yoga games told me he was like it's the lo-fi version so we all meet in the digital square

we walk around i kind of see what everyone's talking about i can jump into a conversation if i want i can ignore somebody if i want i can uh take what you say and go and share it with everybody else about retweeting like like there's this element but it's super low uh fidelity right it's um not what people think of when they hear metaverse or virtual world or whatever and maybe there's some transition to something like that but it's very obvious to see uh why the visual components of this are becoming so powerful and people when you're looking at a screen you're going through the portal right if you buy into kind of like the ready player one stuff um it just feels like art is such like a no-brainer to to kind of pull people into it

um do you think at all about like headsets and um i've got a uh i bought a uh what is it oculus quest 2 i haven't used it yet i'm waiting for the right time to pull it out but uh what do you think about like those headsets and kind of like where this world is going i think it's pretty cool the oculus is really cool system i think they solved a lot of problems for the original oculus and the five to today i mean you're gonna have zuckerberg pumping billions of dollars into it to try to recreate the metaverse or what they did with meta and i don't think the metaverse is going to be owned by any central location i think it's just a another extension of the internet so it's going to be fluid you're gonna be able to jump from one verse to another verse or like a roblox or sandbox

or decentraland ar vr it's gonna get deeper and deeper in the feeling like reality and the the headset will be the first iteration of that for sure yeah one of the things that we did that i thought was pretty cool was we went and toured a building that wasn't built yet using vr so using the headsets and using the hands and you can connect with people um and so you can tour the same building at the same time with someone that's located in new york while we're in miami so i thought that was really interesting because you basically are seeing a development before it's built in front of your eyes rather than just looking on on paper when you're building a golf court or something like that yeah without a doubt i think the the the whole the middle of it all of

it all is the blockchain right and bitcoin really started it now i'm a big bitcoin guy i'm wearing the bitcoin shoes right now he does have on the bitcoin adam shoes so i think that the the idea of bitcoin allowed everyone to understand digital scarcity and digital ownership right and then you'll have subsets that like ethereum be able to build off of and do daps on top of that and solana then but like when you get to the understanding of what the metaverse is going to be i think if you are a video gamer you can fully understand it right if you ever played world of warcraft which i did you understood that there's a whole digital economy on there where people are taking real world money buying gold to buy swords and helmets and everything and spend years in their

life in that space but when they come out of it they have nothing to show for it they don't own anything they didn't do anything like that i mean parents now that know they know how much money kids are spending on skins for fortnight it's absurd but they don't own that skin they don't own that character with blockchain and what this technology can allow us to do is that you will be able to own that character you'll be able to own that sword you'll be able to own that piece of artwork you'll be able to own a piece of culture within this metaverse that you could then pour all your heart and soul into then it's going to have a value so the value is going to be able to sell in the open market and it's already happening i mean open c it did 3.4 billion dollars in

trading volume of last august that's beat ebay and there was only a couple hundred thousand people actually trading on there yeah it's like it's like two three hundred thousand people and they had massive volume here's one of my big questions does it matter where it gets built and does it matter if it's decentralized versus centralized like how do you think about um i'll use an easy example so if i go to twitter.com google.com you know whatever website i go amazon.com i probably couldn't tell you what the technical stack is right i know simple thing at tcpip right like there's some core things that we know the internet generally runs on but once you get past maybe three or four core components i couldn't tell you if they're using aws or they're using

google cloud or they literally have their own servers i couldn't tell you what uh the code is written like off the top of my head like i don't know what the technical architecture is i could go find out some of it but as a user i just want to be able to go to google.com type in a word and it tells me what the answer is right and like as long as that works like i'm good to go is that where we're gonna end up with all this stuff and like all like the the tribalism everything almost like doesn't matter because just whatever works people will use and the end user won't know what's actually underlying it or do you think that there's still going to be some level of importance as to like where it gets built for some reason.

I think it's going to be a global decentralized system, without a doubt. I think the time and place of where like a Twitter or Facebook, where you can be kicked off the network because you said something wrong is going to go away. And we're going to have bad actors be able to utilize that open system as any new vehicle they have bad actors on. But eventually that's all going to get weeded away too.

Eventually it's just going to be a decentralized system where you like the internet, you could build on it and do whatever you want on it. Unless you're not harming anybody, I think it's going to be completely open. I don't think you're going to be finding one central location for it to be built. For example, Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud, that's still a centralized server. The data is sitting in a farm somewhere in some location. If you have the most important data in the world, if that fails, you lose your data.

I think the decentralized cloud is the next evolution of that. Like we utilize storage to host all our 4k resolution for our NFTs across the decentralized global network. So you could be able to go on and see on storage right now where all your assets are being held. And I think people are going to want that securities. Yeah, I completely agree. Where can we send people to, to find out more about this stuff? And I know you're going to stick around until the end of the show,

but where can we send people? Yeah. Go to our discord, which is a Boonji project and also polygoons our Twitter, which is boonji project and also poly goons be able to follow us there get and anyone wants to get into an nfts understand what it is it's still extremely early it's a wild wild west still you have to be very systematic and be secure with how you operate in that space be able to understand what you're clicking on who you're clicking to where you're where you're connecting your wallet to before you just start arbitrarily jumping around so be careful out there but uh you do

correctly, you jump into a Discord, you jump into Twitter, you become part of a community, you'll be able to understand what digital ownership of a piece of artwork really is.