The Pomp Podcast - #956 Josh Jenkins-Robbins On Creating Instant 3-D Animated Characters For Everyone

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 josh jenkins robbins is the co-founder and ceo of emmy.io they've got some really cool avatar animation technology in this conversation we talk about the technology what users are doing with it how this technology is going to help usher in a brand new virtual world and why it's so important to partner with studios and also have your own developers on the team. I really enjoyed this conversation with Josh and I hope you guys enjoy it as well. Before we get into this episode, I first want to talk about our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by FTX US.

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Starting point is 00:03:21 opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp 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. Josh, let's get started. How are you? What's up, buddy? How you doing? I'm doing fantastic. I'm very excited about this. I have no clue how this is going to go, but we're going to do the best that we can. Before we jump in, let's talk a little bit about this idea of real-time animation and facial tracking technology. What the hell is that? Just start there. What does that mean? Well, let's back up to the greatest entrepreneurs solve the biggest problems, right? And so about

Starting point is 00:04:05 18 months ago, I became an investor in a studio in Los Angeles called AMGI Studios doing some really cool work, really for traditional production at the time. They were a bunch of Pixar and DreamWorks and Disney alum that had set out to create the fastest animation studio in the world. Why does it take four years to make Toy Story when it could take one year? And with gaming technology, which is if you think about gaming, what is gaming? Gaming is real-time animation real-time rendering um it kind of caught up to the production world and the production world is using that now for all sorts of really cool stuff um but we we had a we had an idea i was watching actually it was a i always remember it there's motion capture stage you got this guy

Starting point is 00:04:44 you know with all the sensors and everything and then he had a iphone attached to a helmet on his head i said what's the iphone for they so it's got the iphone is so good tracking 52 points on your face at any one time just like we've got that's why we have face id uh we could open up our phone, unlock it, which is our face. I said, well, what if we could, what if we could map that expression directly to the, to the care or to the, from the actor to the character? And they said, yeah, that's exactly what we're doing. I said, well, what if we could do that in an app? What if we could do that in a consumer facing way? Because the problem I see is that casual creators now dominate the world. We know that TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, those are the

Starting point is 00:05:21 platforms, but these casual creators have never had the ability to make animated content. They've unless you had time and money and expertise and software, I said, but what if we could do that in an app, a consumer-facing app? And what if we could create a way for people to not only create clips, but to share those clips, maybe put those characters in augmented reality? How about communicate? Zoom, Twitch, stream, why not make it much more fun? Because there's a lot of conversations these days about metaverse and avatars. I find them pretty uninteresting, to be honest with you. But when you look at the ability to embody a character, it creates a form of self-expression and fun and joy. And that's why we love Halloween. That's why

Starting point is 00:06:02 we love Comic-Con. This is kind of a form of digital cosplay, if you will. And so that's why we have such a great cap table. People see the vision of this, including the founder of Zoom. We've got a lot of other folks like Mark Cuban on board, Tony Robbins, Paris Hilton, Steve Aoki. So we're having a lot of fun with what this could be, because I believe this could be a platform for the world to be able to flood their feeds with animated content and allow themselves to truly express themselves and bring a whole nother level of creativity that we've just never seen before. So let's go ahead and pull up the actual technology so people can see this thing because this is pretty damn cool to kind of see how it works. Yeah, you got it. So this here is a board

Starting point is 00:06:42 eight, which we can get into. There's a little bit of latency with Zoom, but as you can see, his face is my face so i'm talking as him and so as you as you talk and you're making him move right now yep i'm i'm making him move um this is our this is actually a preview of our desktop app but we actually have the mobile app is available right now the desktop will allow for this kind of thing much more you know uh easily with zoom etc but you can see that uh his voice and his face is embodying my face. And so like, if you make really, yeah, there you go. So like, if you make really big face movements, basically, as you open your mouth, the avatar's opening their mouth and it just continues. And obviously all of the movements that the avatar

Starting point is 00:07:30 has at the moment, are you controlling that or are those like pre-programmed? Yeah. So we use a level of artificial intelligence in here. So what we've done is there's a couple of things you can do one is the character when you're when you're happy the character will start to become happy so your your your smiles on your face translate into happy gestures for the character when you're angry the character starts to become angry and then you can kind of hijack that and you can have him do all sorts of fun stuff you can make him you know you can make him do dances uh when you want him to but all the while i'm still controlling you know his facial expression uh and uh and his and his voice right and so i'm i'm effectively piloting him but i can still make so yeah so it's got a

Starting point is 00:08:14 combination of the ability to do and then you can do all sorts of fun little special animations and you know one of my favorites right here get a little scratch so when you when you think about uh how people will use this will folks be able to create like entire animated uh features etc and they'll just have a bunch of different characters and then almost have like actors that know how to pilot these individual characters very well? Or how do you think about how these studios are going to use this technology? You know, I actually think it's less for studios and more for the casual creator, right? I mean, this is, this is think TikTok, think, think Instagram, think, think Snapchat. I mean, that's where people really

Starting point is 00:08:54 will utilize this technology. It just adds a whole nother level of creativity. And we could talk about the NFT space too, which I think is, which is fascinating as it relates to adding utility um to to nfts which is uh certainly needed at this at this stage and so are you basically trying to create or will you guys create uh essentially like nfts where people have control over what the nft does like could you make this an nft or does the technology only allow you to add like a pre-recorded video uh as the nft no that's a great question so what we want people to be able to do is to be able to have fun with the app no matter where they come in meaning let me explain so i look at this kind of three buckets we're going to have like right now there's 20 free

Starting point is 00:09:38 characters in the app and we're building a world of ip i mean these guys behind in this studio here are doing incredible character work and so that's kind of step one step two is in-app purchases and licensed content so you can imagine as an example if a minions movie is coming out you know next month, why wouldn't a studio let everybody become a minion on the app and start posting content and tagging and flooding the feeds, right? With minion content. And maybe they run a competition that says, you know, the top most 10 creative videos out there in the world will get to go to the red carpet, right? So there's all sorts of really interesting or sports mascots talking crap to your buddy, you know, as a sports mascot. So there's all sorts of fun, licensed IP, et cetera.

Starting point is 00:10:20 NFTs are interesting because, you know, right now they're mostly 2D projects. We actually, funny story. So we actually bought a Bored Ape early on. Our head of social media, Tyler, said, hey, you got to buy this Bored Ape. I said, how much is it? He said, 25 grand. I said, you're out of your mind. That's insane. But the rest is history. I think it's worth a few hundred grand now. But we animated the Bored Ape, which was the first one that I was on there. And what's interesting, it's one of our free characters that people can use. But we started showing that to a lot of these celebs, right. That have this profile picture and that's their flex, uh, now. And so we said, look, what if we could, what if we could create, um, what if we could actually animate

Starting point is 00:11:00 those board apes for them? Because it's one thing to have it as your profile picture, but why not bring it into the world with you and create content with it? So in the last 48 hours, I don't know if you've seen Snoop Dogg has posted four videos in his ape and augmented reality doing his, doing his crip walk dance and all sorts of fun stuff. Paris Hilton has posted hers. We've created one for Jimmy Fallon. We're working on Steve Aoki's. We're working on a bunch of these board apes. So that's kind of a fun project. And what's, what's more interesting is the scalable aspect of this, meaning we're actually, there's a project that we're working on with the studio here. That's called My Pet Hooligan. My Pet Hooligan is an awesome NFT

Starting point is 00:11:39 project. It has 8,888 unique one-of-one characters. And so what we've done is we've compiled those and rendered those characters in the cloud. And so soon those owners of those NFTs, instead of just having a profile picture, they're actually going to be able to link their wallet directly to the app and it will identify that they own that NFT. And then that NFT will show up in the app for them to do exactly what we were doing here, which is create content with, stream with, and really let it become part of their digital identity. And then thirdly, we're going to launch our own NFT series sometime later this summer so that we'll be the first fully animated NFT genre that's built for user-generated content.

Starting point is 00:12:21 So you can imagine this kind of, you know, Marvel of the metaverse, if you will. We have this Emmy-verse of characters all, you know, from a variety of different characters and a variety of different IP. so when you start to think about uh kind of the business behind this you all have now raised a pretty significant um amount of capital uh those investors include paris hilton mark cuban tony robbins pitbull steve aoki g money uh and a number of other individuals what what is kind of the business here you license the technology you have the app in the app store and you monetize that like how do you think about building a business uh to uh be able to make this sustainable there's

Starting point is 00:13:02 so many paths to revenue. As you know, when an app like this, a revolutionary technology comes where last week people couldn't make animated content and today they can do it on their phone in real time. You really want mass adoption first, right? So you don't want to monetize too early. So our goal is to make this worldwide mass adoption. I think that when you look at the potential revenue streams, there's a variety of different methods you could go. One is in-app purchases, the ability to buy characters, licensed IP, NFT mintings, NFT secondary sales, merchandise. People can build their own merchandise here. Subscription, premium features. I mean, there's so many different potential directions that we could go here that'll be

Starting point is 00:13:43 fun for us. Promotional revenue, like those conversations, like I mentioned, like a movie studio or a gaming company or a toy company wants to add this into their elements of how they're engaging fans. I think there's numerous ways in which we can monetize. And then down the road, you look at what we call character portability. We build all of these characters before we kind of shoehorn them into an iPhone. We build them in the Unreal Engine, which is what Epic Games has built and is powering a lot of different metaverses, et cetera. So when you look at character portability, being able to not only have your character there for user-generated content, But maybe you pay a small fee to take that character into a gaming environment, right?

Starting point is 00:14:22 A metaverse environment, if you will, where, you know, you're not just floating around as an avatar with no legs. You actually have something fun and animated and really cool that is more of an embodiment of who you are or who you feel like being in that moment. Got it. And so when you start to see this, what do you hope comes out of the technology? The technology is so cool. Is this a thing where you guys will actually open source some of it and allow people to

Starting point is 00:14:46 kind of build on top of it? Is it something where you'll continue to develop it internally? Like, how do you think about the relationship with the developer community and kind of pushing it this forward so it gets better and better over time? That's a great question. So kind of two parts. What I want out of it, I think, is obviously we want to create a viable business. But I think the fun and the joy and the delight of even you just smiling when you see the

Starting point is 00:15:08 characters and me talking for the first, that's what gets us excited, is watching people have so much joy and fun, frankly, in a time when we need more of it in this world. And then in the long run, I think it's going to be interesting to see how we engage with the developer community. I mean, right now, the capabilities that we have in this studio to animate characters, we're working on scalable solutions to that. So it's like I said, instead of animating one character, we can animate this 9000, you know, my pet hooligans. But in the developer community, you can see building a set of specs where you can say, you know, a lot of these NFTs now, for example, are giving you 3D files. and they might give them to you in a T-pose and that's an animation, you know, nomenclature,

Starting point is 00:15:50 but it's kind of like, no one knows what to do with it. But in a perfect world, we would build the ability maybe for a marketplace or for developers in the world, creators to say, hey, if you submit these according to spec, right? According to a certain spec, we could maybe rig those into an animation body that we already have set up.

Starting point is 00:16:09 So all of a sudden now people around the world could be creating characters, submitting characters and then selling those characters, potentially you know in a marketplace as well so there's lots of opportunity down the road for us to figure out how to how to engage that but um you know we got we got a lot to accomplish before that as well got it and so when you start to see this um is this where the future is going is that like we get more anonymity or pseudonymity we get more uh kind of digital interactions but maybe not with our real faces or those real identities like how do you see this playing into the bigger trend

Starting point is 00:16:42 that play. Yeah, I do see that for sure. I think people, we've kind of had this, what I'll call the narcissistic period of social media, where it's all about people. It's all about looking a certain way, trying to become a certain way, using filters, all these things that try to make yourself look better. At some point that just runs its course. And I think so for when I look at this is kind of, this is a nice way out. This is a nice way for people to go, oh my gosh, how much more fun can i have when it's me piloting the character's voice and or having fun with it as subverting that character or just having a conversation as that character that's way more fun um and i think that's kind of where we're headed in terms of people have this conversation about the metaverse

Starting point is 00:17:24 and right now it's a there's a lot of marketing um but we'll see where that ends up going i kind of fall in the in the into the realm of the camp of where apple's headed which is kind of more of a mixed reality augmented reality and that's why you know our characters are you could put them in augmented reality. You can make them walk around in space. So I think this is definitely where the world is going for sure. But I still think that there's a point of human connection and, you know, humans love humans. We need connection. It's not going to just become this, you know, dystopian world of strapping on your headset. I don't envision that as well. So we'll see where it goes, but I think we're well positioned either way. Yeah. And then when you think about the team

Starting point is 00:18:05 itself uh how do you how's the makeup of the team like how many developers versus non-developers and kind of how do you think about the body of work ahead yeah so we have a a big animation studio that's our strategic partner amgi about 40 animators character developers and we have a team of about uh at any one time about 20 to 25 full-time developers uh on the app side kind of enterprise level app technology so this thing's totally scalable and uh like i said we have the mobile app available now people can go on download it um check it out have fun with it look at some of the clips that people are making and and uh have just have a blast and then ultimately we'll have a desktop app very soon as well so people can start doing zoom calls and twitch streaming and

Starting point is 00:18:49 and and all that so it should be a lot of fun and we'll continue to expand the list of celebrities and people that want to be involved and you know build their own characters their own identity you know personas and identities and it'll be it'll be a lot of fun yeah it's uh it's pretty cool Yeah, it's a shift in the power dynamics is what it really is, which I know that that's a theme, right? Throughout your shows and your conversations with the world is disruption. And I think this is a democratization as much as cliche that sounds. It is a democratization of animation. It is disruption in the power dynamics between leaving the creativity into the hands of studios only, right? Why not empower the people, right? And that's what social media did. It took the content away from the powers that be and gave it to the ability, the citizen journalists and everybody else in the world.

Starting point is 00:19:38 And we're just wanting to give them more tools to be able to do that as it relates to the fun and joy of animation, which is a worldwide language that everybody loves. Got it. And then when you think about where people can go and use this technology, is the app the best place for us to send them? Absolutely. Yeah, just go. I mean, it takes a minute to onboard yourself, to pick a character.

Starting point is 00:19:59 There's 20 fun characters to choose from. You can just have a blast. You could upload different backgrounds from your camera roll and even videos. So you can insert characters into environments and you could put it in AR. Have fun. Send messages to your friends. Start sharing it on social. Tag us.

Starting point is 00:20:17 We'd love that. And yeah, our website is immi.io. You could go right there. there's a link to the app store and, uh, there's, there's, it's a lot of fun. You guys will really enjoy it. I love it. This makes a, this makes a ton of sense. Um, awesome. Where can we send people to find you on the internet? Uh, you know, I, right now I'm just using, I'm, I kind of like just to focus on our, our Twitter or our Emmy handles, to be honest with you. Um, I kind of keep my personal life a little bit, you know, behind the scenes off the internet. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:20:45 But our Twitter is, uh, Emmy underscore IO. Uh, and then our Tik TOK and Instagram is just Emmy.io. So, uh, we'd love to, we'd love to engage with, uh, all your, all your fans out there and all your followers as well. We'll have a blast. I love it. Awesome, man. Well, listen, thank you so much for doing this. I don't think that we've ever had anyone come on and, uh, and have a virtual character, uh, participate in the interview, but, uh, but it's very, very cool technology. I highly suggest anyone who's interested, go check out, uh, the app itself and then also the technology that, uh, that makes this all possible. But Josh, this is fantastic. So thanks so much for taking the time to join us. Thanks, Pomp. Thanks for having me on, buddy. Have a good one.

Starting point is 00:21:21 Sounds good. Talk soon. There it is. Ready to go. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you guys enjoyed this one. Make sure you're subscribed on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to try to transition to get a new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to pompscryptocourse.com. We've developed a curriculum with the top teams across the industry it's a three-week intensive training program with over 50 events packed into that three-week time period go to pompscryptocourse.com to learn more and i'll meet you guys for the next episode

The Pomp Podcast - #956 Josh Jenkins-Robbins On Creating Instant 3-D Animated Characters For Everyone

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