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The Plague is coming to Coffee with Captain from @dGenNetwork
Recorded: Dec. 20, 2022 Duration: 2:18:01Space Recording
Full Transcription
Thank you. mgm the twitter spaces background music is in full effect i guess
sorry sounded pretty good
yeah i don't know what the first version was but we'll uh we'll play around with that a little bit
twitter definitely upping their social audio game and uh excited to see it because the reality is
as much as like you know you know we use whether you're using an irig or a roadcaster like the reality is i think
in today's world of tech we shouldn't have you shouldn't need all this hardware to pull off
a high quality hosted space and good to see some advancement here hey real quick we'll do an intro
and then we'll get rolling this episode is brought to you by DGEN Network, the only community-based Web3 media network, bringing you the very best content in the NFT and cryptocurrency space.
Please visit DGEN.network and check out our other great shows. That's DGEN, D-G-E-N.network.
Welcome to the future.
GMGM. Good morning, Steve. Welcome to the end of the year for sure.
You know, it's really interesting.
This is the time when a lot of corporations I've worked at sort of step on the brakes a little bit.
You know, everybody's like, you know, you start talking to people around probably at this point
already. And people are saying like, oh, let's go ahead and meet in 2023. Let's go ahead and meet in
the new year. But, you know, it's interesting. And as I've been working in Web3, I'm finding that,
you know, obviously, there's not a lot of breaks. We're keeping our foot on the gas for
everything. But especially right now, I mean, it just feels like there's a million things going on.
There's so many great things happening.
We're talking to the plague today.
I know nothing about the plague.
I'm excited to talk to Ponds because I'm familiar with Ponds,
but, you know, that's one that I'm pumped about.
I know we have doodles going on.
And, yeah, I think a lot of NFT brands are getting ready to sprint
into the next year.
And also, let's not forget the first Starbucks Odyssey stamp people are starting to bring home.
Did I hear that the floor on OpenSea is 2 ETH?
Not sure we've had a sale at that level yet.
But is that right, Bunch?
These things, might we have an unexpected, unintended cook here?
Yeah, I think that's the current floor on OpenSea.
There's only a couple listed on OpenSea,
but the actual sales that were happening on the Starbucks marketplace,
I haven't checked this morning,
but there were a bunch of sales yesterday around like the 0.15-ish
if you're doing ETH terms, which is pretty cool.
But again, not a ton of stamps out in the
wild yet probably less than 200 when i saw yesterday and this one will specifically if
you are in the beta will probably be the lowest supply stamp maybe ever because of just like the
sheer amount of people that can actually complete it, which is interesting.
I feel attacked there with that comment.
I feel a little slight jab.
Well, I got the classic Captain text this morning of,
wait, wait, wait, how long do I have to do this?
Because I need to make sure that I remind myself of Dave Breyer.
Well, I don't know if I can.
Don't I have to buy coffee at least five days in a row?
Isn't that part of this first journey?
No, no.
That's the heritage journey.
So that one's going to go.
That's part of why this one's going to be super low supply.
That heritage journey is always on.
So as people come into the ecosystem, that will always be the first one that they do so supply of that one will you know
uh there'll be like additions of that one like a season one of you know that they'll cut off at
some point and then kind of reissue uh as you know hundreds or hundreds of thousands or potentially
millions of people come onto the platform but like this first uh the first holiday one you
don't need to buy multiple weeks worth of coffee so you're safe
so i literally had the thought i thought i was gonna have to be like hunting down a starbucks
it's open on christmas day or something just to complete this challenge it's the thought that it
hit me this morning i was listening to night shift like my my bet is you're probably gonna see
like 3 000 of these things maybe and um you know when you think about how they could potentially
program to them in the future around other holidays and maybe do exclusive journeys for those who have
been around the whole time like it's pretty interesting to think about and you know just
from a collectability standpoint as this platform grows having the first stamp is pretty cool uh so
you know you'll probably see some rabid starbucks collectors uh that are really interested in having every stamp,
or at least the very first one as part of their collection.
So there's a lot of really cool things going on with this first one.
So if you're in the beta, I encourage you to finish it.
If you're not, and you can swipe a cheap one on the Starbucks.
I kind of feel like I should do the three-pack because this feels like it's going to be...
I'm not going to be able to sell one right
the one i complete that's the other thing here i feel like maybe not everyone maybe we're obviously
closer to this and so there's the personal connection but i feel most that are in this
beta like there's it's almost going to be like a you know like their their grail pfp type
attachment for those that are going to continue to stay keep it you know continue to complete journeys and and i just i feel that just knowing who i think most of these beta users are
feels like there's a lot of diamond hands and i feel like i might i should probably go ahead and
pick up a couple on the uh on the second it's also like insurance in case i fail to complete
the journey as well well it's totally right like i actually went to go the first one went up for sale
yesterday for like 150 bucks and i was like rushing to go try to buy it because i wanted
more than one too because i think that they're going to be a collector's piece and i wanted to
have more than one and uh i got sniped right out it's got sniped right out from under me and so
like because and then because of like how little there are uh
like the next floor price was like 0.69 east for the culture you know and so uh i didn't go get
that one so i'm waiting to see if more of them come around that uh you know 150 200 dollar mark
and i would probably buy a second one at that point just for that just for that same reason
right it's like i you know personally obviously i'm super
super close to it so i want to uh i'm going to collect all of them and um but like you know i
do think you know you've got these like rabid starbucks fans that are going to come into the
ecosystem and want to collect every piece of the the puzzle here so i definitely think uh you
couldn't go wrong holding the first one especially
if it's short supply this this is one i i think i don't know when but i mean outside of just the
original like the the beta testers those that are native to web3 i absolutely think you'll see a at
some point they have such a large fan base at some point you're going to have people come in and
they're just going to want to be complete setters right they're just going to want to go collect the complete set and whether they
join a year from now or two three four or five years from now i can see some individuals just
going back and especially some of the early ones maybe not every single stamp that's ever been out
there but uh i could see some of these first runs being definitely some of the early ones and
probably some of the seasonal ones right like you can see a theme around seasonal and stuff like that. And,
you know, so I definitely think so. And I think like, I think like it's on the table. Again,
I'm not speaking for Starbucks here, but just the way we've talked about this program, right? It's
on the table where next holiday season, we come with this, you know, really cool program
and collab. And it's on the table that you may need to own the first one to
have some kind of access to a tiered program you know which is which is interesting to think about
the problem this morning is so much i'm getting teased and like kirsten huddle just says you know
this holiday one could be theoretically completed in one day so he's enabling my procrastination
not only is enabling my procrastination it's like is enabling my procrastination, it's like a challenge.
Now it's like,
it's just tempting me to wait until New Year's Eve to complete this thing.
You're going to go New Year's Eve party.
Nope, nope.
I've got some Starbucks grinding to do.
Sorry, you guys go have fun.
I'll be over here on my phone.
The real question is,
I think your daughter is in the program as well.
The real question is, is she going to complete it before you do?
And how is that dynamic going to work?
If she completes it and you procrastinate,
are you going to make her a floor offer or what?
Well, I've got a legitimate excuse.
She had her tonsils out this week, actually, or end of last week, and went great.
Oh, that's so brutal. But yeah, she's laid up recovery mode for a couple weeks, so she's got extra time to
just grind journey.
So unfair advantage.
Maybe that's what I should do.
I should just share the logins, and we'll get a little...
Actually, that is the question is how many how many
of these will the will the bark household complete are we going four for four steve
uh so the kids are not but um this is nft bark and i will both complete the journey we simply
need to buy the gift card at this point the physical gift card which is the last part of
the journey and we will be done um so yeah no i'm speaking of gift cards we've buried
the lead talking about the journey and gift cards out giving our guy boots a shout out
yeah shout out to boots well first of all shout out to boots obviously for uh just being an all
around great guy but uh he's regularly throwing gift cards out to the timeline and uh you know
appreciate him uh every you know not just today but every day also everybody you know, if you're out there, do us a favor,
throw a GM in the bottom right there as we continue to warm up the spaces.
It always helps us to get those GMs out there.
I see one in a million, Chris Hottle, Mackie, as always, aspiring nobody.
Appreciate you all showing up this morning.
Dow Jones, always a regular.
Kenny, by the way, hurt me.
GM who had a hot shower to start this beautiful day
after we talked about the
cold plunge and cold showers yesterday. I'm going to be honest, cap.
I had taken a shower prior to coffee yesterday. It was such a blur.
I got like four hours of sleep going into yesterday's show.
And I forgot that I woke up and showered and worked on stuff in the morning
before the show. So I, I was like, okay, well,
I'm not taking a shower now, but maybe I'll take a cold one tonight took the garbage down last night uh and it was like you know 19 degrees when I took
down the garbage and I came back in for my for a shower at night and I'm like there is zero chance
I'm going to take a cold shower right now so uh that did not happen yesterday um I will again
skip saying GM to your brother Cap I see Hepasi outazy out there. Fasero as well. Dort.
Always good to see you.
Drop us a GM down there.
Tell us what you're excited about.
Tell us if you're in a Starbucks Odyssey, if you're a FOMO-ing as we talk about it right
now.
It's exciting.
I'm going to steal your shout out thunder a little bit.
I'll go to you.
Go ahead.
Just a special shout out to BAYC1404.
I don't know how long ago it was, but called out, wanted to get a space ape and traded his way up into this fine.
It's the blue fur space ape.
I love the blue fur apes.
I don't think we see, I don't know if, I know it's not a rare fur, but I just don't think you see too many.
And I think it really pops with the spacesuit.
So congrats.
There was a time where it's like every single ape sale or every trade was like a day long celebration on Twitter.
ape sale or every trade was
like a day long celebration
on Twitter and as the
space has matured we've got a way
from some of those big celebrations
but I can think of like Druset
grinded for his mutant and traded up into that
and just some of those when you're
able to get that grail whether it's
a mutant or an ape or a doodle
or anything else out there I think it's a big moment
I just wanted to pause and recognize
the milestone and uh the fire ape i yeah definitely a little
biased with the uh the space apes but fire nonetheless well but blue i mean blue um you
know i think the blue fur in general pops like i have a very basic ape you know what i mean like
it doesn't even really match it's a it's a weird like it's like why is he wearing a stunt jacket
and a spinner hat? Nobody knows.
The background's boring, but it is what it is.
Those blue apes, space apes, I mean, I bought, like, I was shopping floor last May because I didn't mint.
I bought on secondary.
And I had about .35 of liquidity at a .27 floor or whatever it was at the time.
So I was kind of threading the needle as much as possible to try to buy this ape. So this one had the, uh, had, had the, uh, the highest appeal to me. I looked
at a zombie one. My kids thought the zombie one was a little creepy, so I didn't buy the zombie
one. Uh, so it could have been a zombie. I had a Weethe offering on one before I got this one,
but, um, yeah, blue, blue, the blue pops blue beanie space ape is a really good looking ape
down there. So BAYC 1404, shout out to you.pe, is a really good-looking ape down there.
So BAYC1404, shout-out to you.
And shout-out to everybody from The Plague who's here today.
I know we're talking in about 45 minutes to Pons.
I'm looking forward to having that conversation.
Again, I know nothing about The Plague,
but I do know that they're out here and they're excitable
and they're ready to rock.
They bring the memes.
The only other, I think of Pete with the goats,
but the only other rival community that's,
that's popped on my timeline without me being like deep in the weeds is,
is the plague is the frogs.
Shout out to Odeka.
I don't,
I think Odeka probably made the one I dropped in the gym and I'll go grab
one of my other probably,
probably favorite coffee with captain custom.
One of ones I will, I'll drop in the chat
as well, but yeah, really looking forward
to this conversation today, it's one that
Steve and I both have this problem of
pumping bags that we don't hold, and
this will be one that will probably
end up being an expensive coffee for both Steve
and I.
Yeah, it's a classic move that we will be
talking about, some sort of topic
or project that we're just absolutely in love with.
I think I pumped Moonbirds and Gutter Cats and all these other ones.
Like, Gutter Cats last year before I owned one.
It's like I was pumping them when they were like point.
Honestly, after Mint, I was like congratulating people on the Mint.
I didn't buy one until 2 ETH.
And now with, you know, it happened with Moonbirds where like I pumped
Moonbirds, I was talking to how much I love Moonbirds for such a long period of time until
I traded for one.
And this will probably be another one.
You know what?
Honestly, like Cap, I think it's good because I mentioned to somebody, as I've, Bunchu
was saying something to this effect yesterday where, you know, when I think of Bunchu and
I think you're probably the same way, Cap.
And for those who don't know, Bunchu is our DJ Network co-founder behind the DJ Network
handle right now.
He's like one of the smartest, best traders I know.
And so when I think of Bunchu, I always think of him as a trader and not traitor.
He's actually the opposite of a traitor.
He's actually quite loyal and friendly.
But he's somebody who trades extremely well.
And he was mentioning on Main Condition yesterday, I haven't been in these flipping streets because I've been busy.
And I'm sort of the same way where it's like, I like to know everything that's going on in our little Web3 ecosystem.
And I feel like since I've taken four jobs, I am not in the world as much learning about these things day to day. So for me, like this is one of those, I don't know,
it's one of those situations where I'm excited to learn about the plague
because I feel like seeing the Jenkins vote and having seen them on my timeline,
I think I put two and two together where I'm like,
oh, those are the people that have the awesome memes
that have been showing up in replies.
We've seen Odeka, I've seen Pons on the timeline,
and I'm like vaguely familiar it exists
but know nothing about it so like i'm super excited to get educated today on what is clearly
a really really top-notch community um with that said let's let's run some hands let's go ahead and
go i know knocked you were up here right away you you flew up when we were maybe talking starbucks
and then remind me though steve after we go to a quick round of hands i do know we touched on it yesterday, but before we get too long off into the show today,
I do want to spend at least just a couple minutes on doodles.
But, yeah, Nock, GM, welcome.
GM, yeah, I'm having a – I'm actually in the beta,
and I'm still FOMOing just trying to, like, get these things, these tasks completed.
It's been fun.
I was looking at the market just now, and I'd posted some pictures.
Currently, there's only two stamps listed on Nifty Gateway.
The last one sold for $89, but the current floor price is listed at $898.
So there's still some pretty significant market making and price finding going on there.
But it looks like I saw the Christmas one, which is, I guess, technically the second one or the holiday one.
Looks like there's going to be 5,000 of those total, or at least it indicates that there's going to be 5 000 of those uh total or at least it indicates
that there's going to be 5 000 total um and as far as the uh i forget the name of the first
challenge i you know i i have no idea how many of those are going to be but like you know the
the desktop is is definitely behaving like a beta and that's fine. But yeah, a lot of fun.
A couple things.
One, well, yes.
I didn't even know there was a desktop version.
This is some alpha.
It's the same as the mobile site.
It's just on desktop.
It's probably preferable
if you're hanging around your desktop
to use the desktop
just because it's the easier experience right now.
But one, yeah, we broke a lot of stuff yesterday. So thanks, Knock, for being patient. the desktop uh just because it's the it's the easier experience right now but like one yeah
we broke a lot of stuff yesterday so uh thanks knock for being patient i wasn't i i didn't i
didn't it is a beta in that spot very much so and uh so it's you know we're gonna break things along
the way so that's it's a good thing but uh so appreciate your patience. But two, just to clarify on the stamps and the numbers.
So the way that you have to mint the custodied ones on Nifty, right?
Like, because Nifty is the marketplace partner, is they actually, you have to kind of like
annotate what the max supply can be.
So the max supply of those holiday stamps is 5,000. So if everybody in the
beta completed it, there will be 5,000. That's unlikely to happen. So there will be probably
less than that. And the ones that don't get completed will get burnt. So it will actually
be a one-to-one supply of literally how many people complete it. so my guess would be it would be pretty um it'll be less than
5 000 but that's uh just clarification on why that is and then that heritage journey that one's going
to be always on so like um you might see additions of that one like the heritage journey um season
one or something and that might have a certain supply and then heritage journey season
two because that one's going to be kind of like your intro into odyssey in general so um you know
that would be the first one everybody completes over time i had one question uh so i'm down to
on the journey one it says i have to complete uh one drink for five weeks in a row.
Does that mean I have to wait one week between each one, or can I just buy five, like, five days in a row?
You actually do have to do it weekly,
so don't go buy five drinks today.
You'll wait a week.
Unless you normally buy five drinks.
Unless your move is you get five espressos just to get your day going.
I feel kind of guilty because actually where I'm living right now, I don't have a Starbucks very close to me.
And I like halfway want to make a mobile order just to get the star and never actually go get it.
Well, somebody was talking about Boots throwing out those starbucks gift cards the other day
or just just a couple minutes ago and i was i was thinking to myself i'm like it's not all
altruistic boots he's throwing that gift card out and getting credit for his order
it's going to be start being like ten dollars per card now once once a week will be the new
boots meta on uh on the Starbucks. He's just,
he's just trying to rack up Odyssey points.
I see you.
I see you.
Brilliant.
it's brilliant.
It's a,
it's fun.
And it's fun to just like,
I mean,
like,
again,
like this is one of those situations where I'm,
you know,
like Mrs.
NFT bark is the ideal.
I mean,
I love Starbucks and I love collecting.
So obviously I'm ideal for this program.
But this is NFT Bark, who is somewhat into NFTs, not like nearly as deep as me, obviously,
but somewhat into it.
She's like the perfect example of this because she's already playing Starbucks for Life every
day, which is their mobile game they do once a year, you know, around the holiday season.
And she is excited about collecting all the stamps
and kind of completing the tasks.
So it just shows that there's this like more mass appeal
when you already have,
because a lot of NFT projects,
like they have to build in that sense of obviously ownership
and utility that makes you want to own it.
But that sense of identity is formed over time
when somebody makes it their profile picture,
when somebody talks about it and goes, and then forms it into a sense of community by connecting with other people.
Starbucks already has sort of that sense of identity built in with people because people
see themselves as Starbucks people. They see it as something that is a core part of their being.
I mean, when I am at an airport and I walk past a Starbucks, I basically float in the air like a
cartoon that's sniffing a pie on a windowsill and walk over to the Starbucks to get myself a drink. So like, that identity is already
built in me. So like, for me, physiological next step to community and utility as they kind of,
you know, bounce around the things that you know, for that classically exist in NFTs,
is a given. So I'm excited for this one. I know Mrs. NFT Barkas as well as we complete the journeys.
And we both need to buy gift cards so we can get our first stamp. We've been like
FOMOing hard in, you know, seeing everybody sharing the stamps that they've gotten,
knowing all we need to do is go to our local Starbucks and pick up a gift card.
But yesterday was a rough one so hopefully today
or tomorrow and actually tuesday is my buzzsaw day so today is probably unlikely to happen but
maybe on wednesday but um one more shout out one more shout out no good punter we gotta give rook
some credit for somehow this is unplanned it's he's not a plant but somehow the chamber roast
has uh worked its way into the coffee monologue as well. It's just, if you listen to any DGN shows,
part of the cold open now will be Roasting Chamber.
I'm not sure how it became a thing,
but it's apparently becoming a thing.
Punter, GM.
GM, part of the entire show will be Roasting Chamber.
GM, everybody, excited for the plague.
And as Steve alluded to, shout out to everyone,
all the communities who participated in Jenkins and came through.
Des was talking about the goats last night on Spaces.
So really, congrats.
I can't wait to hear from the plague later on.
And I do want to say shout out Bunch for doubling down this morning on motivating me for the Odyssey beta, because on mid-condition last
night, he started to drop a little bit of that alpha, that this first stamp will likely be the
rarest, right? Because the beta is such a small number of us. So shout out to that. And I do want
to say I share a little bit of that tendency with Cap where I might get a little distracted,
and I might not complete the things that I need to do. Like I've gone to Ryan Carson space like maybe 30 times and I only have one POAP.
So Cap, that'll be our goal the next couple of weeks to get this done together, buddy.
Okay.
Yeah, I'm probably the...
I've definitely...
I'm not able to attend many of those spaces, but I've probably attended far more spaces than POAPs I have.
And I've had a little edge on the POAP collection game.
I've even failed to do that.
Steve, go ahead.
No, I was going to say, you know, I'm similar.
I've spoken on stage at Ryan Carson's space more times
than I have POAPs at this point.
I think I have three, and I've been there certainly more than that.
I think Punter was doing this with intent, though,
before you go to James.
Good chance to reset the room, talk about me a little about tomorrow's guest, our special show on Thursday. I have three and I've been there certainly more than that. I think punter was doing this with intent though, before you go to James good,
good chance to reset the room.
Talk about be a little about tomorrow's guest, our special show on Thursday,
and then we'll get to James.
Yeah,
a lot,
a lot going on.
I would say,
you know,
again,
like reset in the room,
coffee with captain.
We're on this thing back every Monday through Friday,
8 a.m.
Eastern time.
Really excited by the way,
like plague folks.
Again,
I cannot shout out the plague folks enough in the comments down there, seeing them just show up. I think we're at 64
comments. Now, we usually end with about, you know, a little over 100 comments, but 64 by 825,
and a lot of them are Plague memes. Y'all are out here, which we appreciate. So drop us a GM down
there. You know, we're going to be talking to Pons at 9, probably after our sponsored update by
Mintify. We're going to talk doodles here in a little bit as well um you know i know
cap with the starbucks odyssey journey is probably waiting for me to book it book it for us together
so that i you know we can uh you can be my you can't be my plus one on the starbucks odyssey
journey though cap i gotta tell you you're gonna have to do this one on your own um for those who
don't know when cap and i travel um you know from time to time i'll just like plus one among things
as we go, particularly Miami.
That was a thing.
And Cap, he did his part.
He drove around Miami.
He drove from Tampa, so he well earned those spots.
But yeah, this week is an exciting week on Captain.
Tomorrow we're going to have Violetta on to talk about her music, NFTs.
We're going to have her sing.
You're not going to want to miss that.
She's a phenomenally talented, extremely hard worker.
So we're having her on tomorrow.
And then Thursday, we're sort of doing this this sort of mega space type thing with Ryan Carson, where he'll be coming on with us.
We'll be going on with him.
So that should be a fun one on Thursday just to run through as we roll into the sort of holiday season here.
We'll throw it down to James.
And again, as always, please drop us a GM or whatever.
Questions, comments on the show
down in the purple comment box.
We'll appreciate it.
But James, GM.
GM, GM Steve Kapp.
I heard the roast of Chamber
and I kind of want to take credit for that.
I think that was one pushing for that,
although I did want it to be
a Daily Roast sponsored by Starbucks.
I don't know if that's going to happen um i was a beta or i should say
i don't know if that's within 10 or not but that's perfect like the daily roast i don't know if i'm
just the only one that yeah no that was that was the idea i was like this would be perfect this is
the bit like we've been talking about how can we have bits that are sponsored segments sponsor bits
that that we can keep true to our authentic content
and not have to shill other projects or brands.
And I can't think of a better fit
than the Daily Roast powered by Starbucks.
Yeah, and I'm sure Starbucks would be thrilled.
They hate chambers.
Starbucks hates chambers, so it might happen.
Okay, so that does work.
I was going to say, I'm sure Starbucks would love us
to hear us roasting a vulgar Canadian regularly and be like, that's what we want to sponsor.
They probably took a look at, they watched the show, they saw Chamber, and they're like, this isn't happening.
It's a great idea.
It's just probably not in the cards.
I think if anybody has a chance to watch Chamber and Bunch on this show, and they do it quite often now, you're not going to be let down.
They've got incredible content.
They're great.
Besides this show, I was like, okay.
But, you know, it's awesome to see.
It's awesome to see.
It's just awesome to see people actually stepping the game up and creating content that's enjoyable and informative at the same time.
Not unlike this show.
So anyway, what I was going to say is the Starbucks beta, once again, you know, I just continue to be impressed with things that it seems like they're going to do with that tech.
I'm super excited to see where it goes.
It's almost endless what you can do with it.
And I'll be shocked if companies don't look at this from a B2B angle and say, how do I implement this into my business and into our business?
into my business and into our business because it's just,
when you kind of strip away the branding,
the tech that's behind that and everything that they're doing,
I think it's going to do wonders for the space.
And anybody in Web3 would probably want to use that to help their community
gain loyalty through a variety of ways.
The other thing yesterday I realized, this is this is crazy J web lives not even 15 minutes
from me which I just think is wild that you can interact with somebody in the space for so long
and then find out that they're you know he like gave me some crossroads I'm like yeah that's that's
up the road so just learning those types of things about people in the space I look forward to seeing
him when he gets back from his vacation and and cap i'm going to see you over the break and
i'm super excited about that as well yeah likewise looking forward to it yeah cool and that was it
just uh hope everyone's having a good morning looking forward to uh to hearing from uh the
plague and ponds yeah cap i do think we could do uh go rotate into doodles a little bit because I know yesterday we intended to talk about doodles.
Give me a sec.
I am also mid lighting a candle for some ambiance in my basement because I got these awesome candles that turned to rocks glasses after they are after they are burned through.
And they're wonderful, wonderful types for my buddy's company who started a company, a local company here.
But anyway, I think doodles is a good one to chat about
because I know we were going to talk about it yesterday,
and then Yuga went ahead and hired a new CEO.
Hold on, who had Steve lights candles on the bingo card?
This might be a new one.
I mean, it checks out, but it was not something I had,
I thought we'd be hearing this morning.
This is not a surprise, but a new little tease there.
New Easter egg on coffee as Steve lighting candles.
For ambiance, no less.
Oh, yeah.
Got to have the ambiance.
My good friend of mine, her and her husband,
her husband's actually Mrs. NFT Park's boss, long story.
But he ended up, they got us a holiday gift,
which included these wonderful candles.
But, you know, all that said, you know, I uh it's a uh you know doodles is uh doodles
is one that i think like we were going to talk about yesterday yuga hired a ceo we went deep on
that about uh what he brings to the table why it's exciting the direction that we see some of
the bigger nft brands moving and i think that's a relevant part of this discussion because um you
know we saw yuga make a clear decision to hire someone from, you know, Blizzard and Activision.
Obviously, we had Susan, who's on stage now as well, who talked a little bit about her experience.
So Susan, so if you don't know, was a founder of 2K Games.
So she has a lot of experience and is able to give us an informed opinion on this.
We're really lucky to have people like Susan here on Captain.
Had a really lengthy discussion about his gaming background, which maybe not as extensive as his Google background, but has those connections, probably a little separated from the product itself,
but a good hire nonetheless, as good of a hire as we've had in the space.
And then the other one that comes to mind when you say that, because they're clearly
picking a direction with Blizzard, Activision, Google, who they're bringing in to run their
company, right?
They could have had virtually anyone.
And this guy left, I believe we looked it up in $18.4 million, uh, salary to do
this job. So it's probably a pretty good job. So that, that happens with the, uh, you know,
so that happens with, with Yuga and they're clearly picking a direction in a lane. Doodles
is another one that is clearly picking a direction in a lane, right? They, uh, brought in Pharrell to
be, uh, uh, to be, uh, to be their chief. I, culture officer was his title. I'm trying to remember
his exact title on the team. I'm blanking. It's been a long couple of days. And they hired Julian,
Julian from Billboard, right, who was a president over at Billboard to be their CEO because they're
choosing a clear direction. And we're starting to see this with the bigger, well-funded NFT brands.
Kevin Rose already is sort of the CEO that has like that big background.
So Kevin and Justin and Stevie and all that team and Harry and what they're
building, you know,
they're building tech and art and innovation and builders and community.
So sort of that's where they're going.
Board Ape Yacht Club, they have this sort of punk rock feel.
They're going to put on their music festivals,
but they're also going to build out a game.
They're taking other sides seriously.
So you see that coming on with them
bringing in Daniel yesterday. And then you
have Julian coming from Billboard
and Doodles is going to be culture. They're going to color
the world with joy. They have this sort of clear
direction. So they announced on
I believe it was
on Sunday, I want to
say it was, we get an announcement that basically says
duplicator
first utility will be revealed
in 2023 the genesis box will be a fast follow doodles to close beta will start sometime in
2023 and then i want to read this just because i think it's important for everyone to get the
context because we have banged on doodles for communication um and they said they want to
apologize for the lack of communication and the product delays historically they've worked to hit all of their promised product timelines
and pull off flawless releases using their learnings.
We've seen that with things like Space Doodles,
which is a cool innovation and some other things that they've done.
But as it turned out, they had planned initially to release the duplicator
and usage with the Genesis box in summer of 2022.
The timeline slipped because they weren't a fan of the product.
They maybe weren't a fan of what they were building on. And basically what they've figured out is that they
now have an exciting product that they're ready to bring to market. They put out a teaser video
yesterday that kind of showed the duplicator, you know, helping you a perfectly doodle teaser
video showing how you can take elements from your current doodle, which I'm pumped about because my
doodle is frigging fire. It's like a hoodie glasses doodle with pink hair i tried to get one to match the original burnt toast art from uh
bubblegum future so i kind of traded around until i got that so just to have everyone on the same
page announcement came out on sunday apology for their sort of lack of communications which i think
is a solid sort of mea culpa and good communications a video comes out yesterday on twitter showing the
duplicator in action.
We know that Genesis boxes are going to unlock traits
and are going to be the only way to get the initial
new Doodles 2 traits, or at least, you know,
varying levels of rarities of Doodles 2 traits.
So we know that Doodles 2 is coming.
It looks like it's going to be sort of an interchangeable
layer 2 to onboard average people.
And the example I'll give, and then I'll take a breath here cap and kind of let you react is you know when doodles talks about like you know having like
you know doodles that are affordable for the masses that have an unlimited supply and people
say oh that sounds so inflationary it's not going to dilute the utility of original doodles but what
doodle two means is that my kids love doodles. They see the art. They're big fans. They recognize it.
My daughter, I got her a Doodles.
Like I told her I was getting something from Miami from an NFT project.
She goes, is it Doodles?
And she was right.
It was.
I got her a keychain.
And thankfully, I got two because she lost it.
It fell off at school.
She was crying and terrified to tell me when she came home.
Of course, I gave her my second one, right?
I immediately went to the basement,
got the one I got for myself, handed it to her.
And so she was thrilled about that.
But my kids love doodles.
I can't get my kid a $12,000 NFT for Christmas.
It just doesn't happen, right?
Or Hanukkah or whatever.
I can't get it for their birthday.
I could get them a doodles too, though,
if those are affordable and have interchangeable
varying levels of rarity and spend on something like that and they have been building space doodles which appears
to be moving towards a game obviously there's attributes in there that's something that we all
noticed right away so in general it seems like they're building sort of this music fun almost
roblox meta-like ecosystem of customizability so i do see a lot of potential for doodles and
look let's face it at the end of the
day, burnt toast art, we
know it appeals to my kids. We had somebody on the show
talking about how their grandmother loves it and loved
doodle putt. So they're able to appeal to
a wide swath of generations who don't even know
what NFTs are. So
I actually
thought at first, just based on some
of the reaction that the market was not going to
respond well to the news.
On the surface, nothing really new other than maybe some more detailed timelines, more specific timelines, and one of them coming soon.
I just looked at the boxes. They jumped from, looks like, around 0.22, 0.23, up to currently around 0.275.
Duplicator is still holding around an eth floor and the rares though seem to seem to run there was no news on difference between the common the
very common and the the rare duplicators was there the rare because there's the split now
one eth floor to all the way up to almost a four eth floor on the rares. No, the suspicion, by the way, on that would be that you are able to get
more rare traits, whether they exist in Doodles 1 or not,
by having a duplicator that is more rare.
Like, you're going to be able to transfer or get more rare traits over.
We don't know for sure, but it'll be interesting to get that.
It'll be interesting to see and follow how that goes.
But, yeah, I mean, I have a common.
And again, the Doodles team, they're just like a top-notch team.
I know I talked about like, you know, when I got a duplicator,
I put a collection offer in because I was excited about duplicators
and somebody accepted it.
Well, it turned out it was a compromised asset.
This was before the OpenSea policy.
And I tweeted about it because I was just bummed with OpenSea.
And I'm like, this stinks.
Like, you know, somebody flagged this and the person who stole it
just accepted a Weeth offer so they get out nice and easy
and I'm sitting here with an asset I can't sell
and Jordan from Doodles Poopy just basically replies to the tweet
and is like, I'll trade you.
So he ends up trading me one of his clean duplicators
for my compromised one because he's like, whatever,
I don't care if it's compromised.
Just to sell a team the way that they go about things like that.
And, again, they continue to run these amazing IRL events,
which I'm so bullish on when you have – you know, we went to Doodle Putt
and we all said – and, look, I'm sure they have IRL plans down the line.
I'd be shocked if they don't.
Julian had teased it on their space when they came out
after their sort of month of silence.
But, like, everyone who did Doodle Putt that I know was like, that was a blast.
I would pay to go back to that.
So if you can run a sustainable business IRL with things like that.
And again, Cap and I talked about it.
Maybe we'll get into it in a little bit here.
The doodle pot experience was incredible as well as their Genesis factory and things they've done there.
It's just, I don't know.
Sky seems like the limit.
It's one of those brands that like, there's a few brands that are going to survive this era, which, you know, we'll get to,
I'm sure in a little bit, but like doodles feels like one of them, but, um, punter, I'll go to you
punter, get in here. Yeah. Just a real quick. Um, you know, I'm no doodles maxi or anything. I,
I tend to sort of live vicariously through you on that. But when I saw your announcement the other day, I couldn't help but think that ultimately,
especially since you were so positive, Steve,
but I'm tending to think that this non-communication thing
might ultimately flip to their advantage.
People in the NFT space have kind of a short-term memory, obviously.
And I feel like if you don't have anything to say,
then there's no need to, you know, endlessly pump out useless announcements.
So when they give you something, when they give the community something really meaty like this,
I think it's a good strategy.
You know, having been part of a team, I know there's a constant demand for stuff from the community.
But I think doing it in large chunks like this and really delivering and giving
people stuff to stick their teeth into, I think that's a really good strategy. So I just wanted
to commend them for that. Yeah, I think it's a good take. I think, look, I mean, for those who
don't know my backgrounds in communications and marketing, so I'll kind of give a little bit of
my take on how I think a lot of these projects should approach it um i think proof is probably the closest to what i would
do at from a communication standpoint uh if i were leading communications for one of these
one of these brands and you saw it when i was at on chain monkey for a period of time right
it's like we would do we would probably talk to the community say at least once a week or every
other week uh in some sort of recorded space.
So what that did was it was sort of like a town hall where if you had minor announcements or things to discuss about updates with the project, it was a good time to remind your
most fervent supporters of what was going on.
What that does is, one, it makes it so you have little communication.
Because part of the problem with communications is that, like what you just said, Punter,
is that the only way a lot of these brands are communicating is they're having someone who's more of a product person
put out an announcement when they have the littlest thing.
And then people get underwhelmed and say,
wow, this is an announcement.
Who cares?
I'm selling bearish.
But like, if you have a space, say like every other week
or a town hall of some sort, at least every month,
what you have is a touch point to talk about those little things
because not everything is going to be some monumental announcement, but some of it's
pretty cool. And I think that's okay if you have just a regular announcement to say,
you know, here's some different updates on some things we did that also empowers your
most fervent supporters with the information to then go tell other people why they should
buy the product that you have, right? So not necessarily shill, but when somebody asks,
like, what's going on with
on-chain monkeys, they're pretty good at communicating all the different things they
have going on. So you talk to someone in that community and you'll hear like all the reasons
why it makes sense. And I think doodles could be doing that as well. But I think like I would have,
I would have a communication strategy where it's almost a cadence of like,
every week we have this touch point, every month we have this touch point, every quarter we have
this touch point. I'd probably do like a quarterly update similar to what we've seen out of Proof where we talk about like what's coming and what's come
because that's very businesslike, that's what we see in the business world.
And then have more frequent touchpoints of varying types of like blogs and things like that that maybe talk about the little things.
Because look, it may not move the floor price if you donate $100 a hundred thousand dollars to a charity but it's worth your community knowing and it's worth them having that information
doing it in the same announcement where you talk about duplicators and utility
might not be the best crossover so i do think that there's an opportunity for a lot of these brands
to have like because it is okay when you have nothing to have no update it's okay to say you
have no update but giving sort of some thoughts and some progress like you know i talked about doodles like if doodles would show pictures
and they've done this since it's funny they've done it since i tweeted about it it's like
if they showed pictures of pharrell in the studio or doing interviews or maybe a clip of something
he's working on it doesn't have to be an announcement but a teaser a teaser of doodles
to get away from get away from the thought that all communication has to be an announcement
it's i think that's the big miss is like this fear of like okay every time we say
something it's an announcement and then the market has to react it's it's create a regular cadence
of communication whether it's weekly spaces or monthly calls or quarterly updates or all the
above or or like you said just teasing some some back-end, behind-the-scenes material that doesn't, it's just content.
It's not an announcement.
And back to, I know we've said many times,
it's in this world moving forward, Web3 or otherwise,
any big brands or any companies that aspire to build big brands,
the sooner they realize they're in the content game, the better.
And that is, if I were to have a critique of Doodles,
it's that nothing new,
but that communication piece in between the announcements
has now made every announcement
or every communication seem like an announcement.
I think that's a shift that would be beneficial
to get away from every time they speak a word
or tweet something,
it's considered an announcement.
Yeah.
Go ahead, Butter.
Go ahead.
No, I was going to say both solid takes.
I totally agree with the community engagement side of it.
And then also, it doesn't have to be an announcement, right? Just show us something, show us some progress, get us excited and keep our interest, right?
The only thing I was going to pop back in to say was, shout out to Jenny from the blockchain, who did a tweet about
the Doodle Putt and like walked all around the event, I think ran into Girl in the Verse. I might
pin that if you guys don't mind. But it gave the plebs who couldn't make it to Miami a chance to
sort of really, you know, immerse themselves in the activation. And boy, Doodles does it right.
So shout out to them for that.
Yeah, Jenny and Girl in the Verse, by the way,
I'm going to be interviewing Girl in the Verse
for Inside the Clubhouse.
For those who don't know,
I'm a chief culture officer over at Clubhouse Archives
with James here, who's on stage,
building a solid Web3 apparel brand.
It's going to be between NFC chips, AR.
There's a lot going on with
what james is working on um you know and and uh he's got 20 plus years in the fashion industry
uh so he has this great network so i've interviewed people like matthew willard who was in scream who's
somebody who you know that's one of my favorite movies of all time and that was he's just an
amazingly charismatic person uh too i've interviewed punter and cap actually who i'm both on stage with
and bunch you actually i've interviewed everybody uh almost everybody on stage at this point
hunter look at us did you ever think we'd get name dropped by steve in the same sentence as
matthew lillard look at us the cap that's our look at us moment we got to do it but yeah so
so check it out today i pinned it to the top it's a few tweets back but i'm gonna be talking to
jenny from blockchain'm excited about that.
But yeah, no, it's definitely good to see people like Jenny and Girl in the Verse going
through and creating content when they go to these things.
Because I know with Cap and I, we go to experience it because part of our job is we come and
talk about it.
We tweet about it, but doing this show, we want to be able to let people know what we're
seeing, how we're seeing it, and give an opinion based on that.
And we're sometimes we're bullish.
Sometimes we're bearish.
Sometimes we have critiques.
Sometimes we have praise.
And so that's kind of how we tend to experience it.
People like Girl in the Verse and Jenny from the blockchain are doing the real work out there because we see them going in, showing up, filming the video, getting really solid shots.
You know, so I appreciate them kind of being out there.
And yeah, Punter, feel free to pin that video to the top
because I think it's good for people to see, like, how immersive it was.
And the fact that they had, like, even down to the,
I scanned my badge because I had a doodle.
Cap didn't have a doodle but was my guest, right?
If Cap scanned his badge, nothing happened.
If I scanned my badge, my doodle would, like, show up on a rocket ship
or show up on the hole.
Sometimes it would make an easier route to the hole where like there was like a big thing in the middle that you
had to like go around but when you scanned your badge it lifted up so you can get past if you had
an og doodle so very cool the way they built out doodle putt and i mean i'm just like i said there's
a few that i'm excited about right i'm excited about what doodles is going to do and what board
apes are going to do and not just because they're big floor prices but because it seems like they've picked a clear
direction you know they're a big i'm not going to name them but there are big nft brands who are
sort of doing a lot of the same and i think with doodles like we're seeing that they're choosing
a very clear direction and the other thing with these venture-backed ones is they're going to get
a shot to try what they want to do at the end of the day um and similar you know i've said this
before and i'll sound like you know i'm beating a dead horse but it's to do at the end of the day. And similar, you know, I've said this before and I'll sound like, you know, I'm beating a dead horse, but it's like, look, at the end of
the day, just like Web2, we had Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter come out of Web2. And we had brands
that said, okay, like DiGiorno said, we added Twitter, it's going to make us better. Or, you
know, Wendy said, let's get really snarky on Twitter. It's going to make us better. It's like
you have web existing brands that take,
took web two and use it to their advantage.
And you had web two companies like Twitter, Facebook,
and Instagram that came out of it.
And you had web two companies like MySpace,
Daily Photo, and Friendster that didn't make it out of it.
So we're going to see the same thing with web three.
We're going to see native web three brands succeed.
We're going to see companies like Starbucks use web three in a way that
changes the world. And ultimately it's just going to weave into our lives where we're not going to say companies like Starbucks use web three in a way that changes the world.
And ultimately it's just going to weave into our lives where we're not going
to say I'm using an NFT.
We're just going to say,
I've got my ticket to the game and your ticket happens to be an NFT,
which gives you a PO app or some sort of a collectible when you scan into
the game,
which can then be used to retarget you in the future,
which can then be used for other things.
So that's the direction we're going,
but I know we have hands.
Let's do our hands sponsored update.
And then ponds,
if you are out there,
please request up.
It is a deep ICU ponds.
I'm going to invite you up ponds for now.
We'll get to you probably in about the next five,
five to 10 after we do hands in our sponsored update and we'll be talking
play,
but feel free to request up if you don't see my invite.
Let's go circles.
Then Susan,
then we'll do the Mintify sponsored update.
Circles, GM.
Hey, GM, GM.
So you had kind of responded fairly well
to what I was thinking for Ponder's point
about the doodles communication.
I think it's going to be interesting
kind of watching it all play out
because we haven't,
this is basically the first time
we've seen companies be built so publicly.
And obviously, we've got pretty decent communication from Midbird.
Like you said, those weekly or monthly talks versus doodles.
Kind of, we'll announce something when we have something worth announcing.
So it's going to be kind of interesting to see how that plays out in the future.
If we are kind of all goldfish or if it is really beneficial
for there to be a fairly consistent communication style from what you were saying and what we've
seen people want that constant communication but is that going to have an ultimate like bearing on
how the company does in the future is going to be interesting to see it play out it's a good it's a
good point i think like there's two things to separate
here there are the people who want their bags to pump so they could get liquidity which you know
you see a lot of times with you know you see a big announcement and then people start selling
into the buy and you don't see the floor move much um you know we frankly we saw this a little
bit with gutter cat game where you know people were waiting to sell into gang token and then
when they announced gang token wasn't happening it happening it dumped which i get
uh but you know a lot of people were holding just for gang token because you know they're like because
i heard people say why do i own multiple cats then and you don't hear a lot of people say
why do i own multiple apes or multiple doodles when these sort of things happen which you know
showed sort of a fracture there and again i love the leadership and gutter cat gang and I have a lot of friends in that community. But that was an example of like,
you go from a 70th floor to like a two eighth floor. And I know a lot of other stuff dropped
too. But pretty quickly over the course of a time when you announced that you're not dropping a
fungible token, because you don't want the project to be in regulatory jeopardy. And you know, to have
that sort of thing happen, you realize there's a lot of people who maybe were holding for that
token wanting to sell for that token.
And they were holding multiple cash for that reason.
So there are people that are holding for the flip and the sale, which I don't blame anybody.
Everybody likes making money.
I'm not knocking anybody who sells or sells shaming by any means.
But, you know, you have that versus running a sustainable business that you keep people updated on.
Versus running a sustainable business that you keep people updated on.
So, you know, there's this sort of like balance of getting people into your ecosystem who say, I want to be in this world for the network, for the utility, for the identity that I feel with this thing, for the fun that I'm going to have along the way.
And the more of those people you have, the more of those consistent announcements are helpful.
And also the more you can do a strategy where, again, your minor announcements can come through a town hall or something else and then when you do give a major announcement in town hall it becomes a huge deal
because if your town halls are just sort of like hey opportunity to talk to the community um again
a proof was doing this regularly for a while it's not a sustainable model always but they would have
a weekly parliament where like you come in and literally anybody could request up the stage and
talk to kevin and just No problem. Have that conversation.
Which is really cool.
So I think like those are the things that like when you have those sort of quote unquote unremarkable community events where you can just have a conversation.
It makes it so your leaders are more approachable.
You give the general information.
And if you do happen to drop a big piece of alpha, great.
People get excited.
But if you don't, like that's okay too. You save those for announcements like what doodles put out recently is how i would
approach it so um i don't know circles of your thoughts on that if not i can i can run to susan
no i'm good we can jump over cool cool let's go let's go susan then we'll go to mintify here in
a second gm um i think that there's probably like a learning here that can be taken from the game industry and live support. I can't remember if I ever had this conversation here, but I have another space.
a lot and none of it's there and it's not there for a while, like in the case of games,
because they take a long time to make, or people launch everything at once and then
there's nothing for a period of time, for a long period of time.
And that seems to be the biggest problem.
And so I think that people need to start asking like more definitive questions about how the
cadence is going to work.
Like that's something, sorry, I've got the post on the door.
That's something that we're spending a lot of time planning out is the cadence post, you know, post mint,
the app that's coming at launch, what's coming a month after launch, what's coming the month after
that and how we can turn this into like a monthly cadence of stuff. And so I think it's really
important that people realize that just because you even have a bunch of stuff, you shouldn't
throw it all out there at once. Like the game industry is kind of like
I had to learn that the hard way over the years
that if you put out too much,
people have no reason to discover the new things
and no reason to get excited.
So you always have to leave people wanting a little bit more
and you have to be a really good communicator
about the when and the why.
And I think that that's going to become
more and more important
as we try to get to a broader market.
Along with the other question
I think people should be asking
is what's your strategy for the mass market? the other question I think people should be asking is,
what's your strategy for the mass market?
That's what I think is really cool about Doodles and why I like the Doodles project is because I think that they've said they're definitively thinking long-term
about how to get millions of Doodles out there.
And that's not easy to do whilst not pissing off your Genesis collectors.
That's a really hard fundamental problem that I'm sure I'm not the first to mention,
that you've got your 10K collection collection how do you get to the 25
million and any project out there that expects to be a blue chip important project should have
an answer to that question and should be asked that question what is your strategy how are you
going to do it 1000 i absolutely love that um because like, that's, again, these are the things that like,
it was so funny to me. Like, I won't say who it was. I think it was,
I actually won't, I won't even make a comment about who it was. But I remember when we were
in NFT NYC, I was with, you know, B-Love and Julesy, who are now on the DJ Network. They do
a show weekly, as well as a couple other folks, you know, Phonics, who does our NFT night shift.
And we showed up to the Doodles event.
And it was an NFT NYC in this sort of basement and like this basement of like this really
cool, like, you know, theater or whatever.
It was like downstairs.
So not a lot of cell phone reception.
But we showed up and there were seats in this auditorium.
And then there was this standing room only.
And I looked at one of the security people.
I'm like, can we just go right up against the rail there?
And they were like, yeah, with Sammy Dubbs as well,
a war room and a DJ network war member.
And we walked right up to the rail
and Doodles gave this like, you know,
PowerPoint slide deck presentation
about the future of Doodles,
which had a mission statement, a vision statement,
how they plan to scale to the masses,
their different lines of business
that they saw fitting and mapping back to their main mission and vision statement, how they were planning to
onboard millions. And people would say, first of all, there are people who said, I just want to
come here to party. Why are they talking about what their business plan is? Which, okay, cool.
Like, I'm not knocking anybody who wants to have fun, but like, I really enjoyed that. And by the
way, they did like, you know, 45, you know, half hour, 45 minutes later, have a Chainsmokers concert, which was absolutely lit,
which was like really fun.
But like, you know, they presented like this whole deck
of like what they're planning to do.
They talked about Pharrell.
They announced a fundraising round by Alexis Ohanian.
And again, people in the space were like,
oh, are they really going to scale to millions?
Is that diluting my doodles?
It's like, try to see the forest from the trees
that like they brought in a real CEO, like which again evan and jordan and that team and like burnt toast they're competent
they scaled a major major brand that at that point was like a 13 8 14 15 8 floor during a bull run
maybe even 20 i don't even remember it was high but they brought in a ceo who had a scalable plan
so um i agree with you susan i think it's cool to see and see them execute on it.
And I'm also cognizant of the fact that one,
these companies are building in public for the first time in human history.
We've never seen anything like that.
I'm sure Pons will talk about it a little bit,
how tough it is being a founder in this space, number one.
But like, number two, like this is what a business looks like.
They've been around for less than,
or just over a year at this point.
Doodles, like, right?
They just celebrated their one year anniversary.
So like people demanding them to be like,
you know, Google at this point or Amazon, it's like, it's just not realistic to expect
a company that it's existed for less than 18 months
to go out there and be, you know, this game change.
They're working towards it.
They're building in public.
They're bringing you along as much as they can while holding back things.
It's a very hard dance to do.
So I totally agree with you, Susan.
Go ahead and respond.
Yeah, I was going to say 100%.
You know, I was introduced to Jordan, like, at the end of last year
as we were closing our funding round by a mutual friend.
And I was so impressed with him.
He was so open about, like, what they'd done so far, what worked, what hadn't worked,
why they made certain decisions and everything. He was awesome and I really was fond of their
vision and so you know it is one of those projects that I've found to be super validating in the way
we're thinking about the space and the way we get to the mass market. It doesn't have to, you know, I can totally understand why someone would say, you know,
when you look at scarcity and quantity, what's that going to do? But you have to look at the
bigger vision as well. There are ways to protect the Genesis holders and still go to a mass market.
You know, we have our plans about how we're going to do that. And it's totally possible.
It has to be possible. We have to make that work. Or this is just never going to work. 10,000 people is not enough of an audience for anybody. And we saw
this with MMOs. MMOs back in the day charged like 10 bucks, 15 bucks a month. And that was the
biggest thing that destroyed them is because how many of those are you really going to do?
You're obviously going to keep jumping ship and going to a different one. You can't. No one's
going to spend hundreds of dollars a month on their MMO habit. And so
we have to find a way for that mass market side of things to work. And I think it's really exciting.
And the same way I look at sole license and giving out full rights to your one-on-one
as being something really important and fundamental in Web3, other people are like,
fundamental in web three other people are like oh but you're leaving so much money on the table
oh, but you're leaving so much money on the table. It's like, yeah, but on the other hand,
it's like yeah but on the other hand i think that's what's led to the cultural relevance
of the board apes is the fact that they were the first to really do that and they were right and
that's the relevance of the project if they'd taken a different approach to it i don't know
that would have happened great takes james get in here real quick and then i got a quick update
we'll get our market update and then we'll get to ponds. James. Thanks, Cap. Yeah, after my take, I'll hop to listeners.
Super excited to listen to ponds and whatnot.
I love Susan's take.
And, you know, everyone's probably heard me say this numerous times before, but I'm experiencing it kind of more now.
You know, we're going through our seed round raise.
going through our seed round raise. And I can tell you with 100% absolute, these, you know,
these VC, these investors, these individuals that come into the space to say, hey, I'm going to
deploy capital, they want to understand your go to market strategy. And they don't want it to be
limited to, as Susan said, 10,000 people that you're selling the same products to over and over
again. That's not a sustainable revenue model. So I'm just glad to hear so many more individuals now kind of preaching this,
right? And really delivering this message consistently because it needs to be said,
if you're a new founder of a business in this space, you've got to have a strategy beyond the small community.
And look, 10,000 is small, right? In the grand scheme of things, it's very small.
You've got to have plans beyond that. So I love every time I hear these types of takes,
and make no mistake, if you don't have a plan like that, please research and figure out how
you're going to expand beyond
that initial community, because it's going to be the lifeblood of your business as you move forward
to be able to continually sell either products and or services, you know, perpetually recurring.
So anyway, that's just my take on that. And I will step down, but I'm really looking forward
to hearing ponds and everything about the plague.
Likewise.
And again, good takes.
Appreciate you, James and Susan both.
Before we get to our sponsored update from Mintify, the daily market update,
I know everyone's curious about my daily Fortnite update.
Well, thanks to Payne and Mark, we won our first Battle Royale trio yesterday.
I'm sure I was not the one that carried
the team but you can't say i'm not undefeated in in a group battle royale so i also am one of the
open tabs on my macbook right now is an xbox series x we have decided to up the game for
the kids for christmas and um any any recommendations for headsets hit those up in
the chat or the DMs as well.
I said this was going to be an expensive coffee beyond more than just probably
picking up a frog or two.
We're Xbox shopping.
On that, Mintify, GM,
thanks for joining us. And if you're new
to coffee, we're fortunate.
This is Steve's favorite part of the show
every morning is getting our daily update
from the pros at Mentify. GM.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Thanks for that.
Congratulations on your trio win.
That's awesome.
I would never be able to do that, personally.
I'm not great at Fortnite.
But let's check out this market update.
And as Mark says, as long as you're having fun
and you've got good teammates that know what they're doing,
it's a fun game.
There you go.
Yeah, I don't have many friends who play Fortnite.
I used to, but it kind of turned into other games in the years.
But I do know it's a very, very, very big game still.
It's a wonder, honestly, that they're still doing so good.
My fifth-year-old daughter started trolling me.
It's like, Dad, no one plays Fortnite anymore.
I'm like, well, I beg to differ.
Really?
Yeah, I mean, I still hear things about it uh and i don't even play it so um all right let's check out this update the total 24 hour market volume 9.75 mil uh down a little bit from what it was
averaging around last week uh the highest last sale 73.37 eth for crypto punk 7008 the top collections based
on volume board apes number one today 840 eth traded 67 eth floor price wolf game uh is doing
really well i believe they just had an announcement um last night or early this morning with an update
to their white paper on game mechanics.
Wolf Games, 715 ETH traded, 0.95 ETH floor price just under 1 ETH.
And Wolf Games Farmers, 422 ETH traded, 0.87. I believe that's an all-time high, and if not, it's very near it.
The top gainers for today.
Wolf Games would have been on here if these two weren't uh quite a bit higher 590 percent up
for field art labs i believe that's a collab with uh yolo yolo labs or yolo holiday i believe i
believe uh you can confirm that and then uh ecotars up 97 percent i believe the wolf game farmers is Wolf Game Farmers is up just about 50%. And the top losers, Elon Trading Cards down 62%, and Discrete.eth down 53%.
Some interesting noteworthy market updates, in my opinion at least.
Moongate is powering Taipei Blockchain Week with a QR code ticket token-gated system.
week with a qr code ticket token gated system and visa's leadership proposes a solution for
facilitating automated crypto payments from self-custodial wallets meaning that the users
would not have to approve the transactions on the spot and they would actually be automated
for things like paying for bills and yeah like subscription based or my is that yeah exactly
it's interesting i don't I'm not sure how I
feel about it, but it's definitely interesting. Market stats, global crypto market cap falling
under 800 billion, 792.86 bill. Bitcoin dominance, 39.92%. Open interest, 5.82 billion,
fear and graded 29. Bitcoin and Ethereum on the highs of the lows.
Bitcoin at $16,800 and Ethereum at $1,210.
Bitcoin's not getting as much gains, but that's pretty normal.
It's a little less volatile than Ethereum.
Bitcoin up about 0.5% and Ethereum up about 2.5% with the S&P.
Or I should say S&P 500.
$38.17, just under 1% down.
Nice. Very exciting.
And, you know, I always wonder whenever you say Bitcoin at the highs and lows,
I'm like, and I am not a trader, so I wouldn't even purport that anybody should do this,
but I'm always like, should i be doing something here
should i be you know should i be looking at like trading this the upside or the downside i won't
but i'd be curious for you who trade ranges how they how they handle that but um with that said
uh two things one i want to uh i want to i'm just making a decision here we've been doing obviously
a lot of giving and it's the season of giving right now um i'm gonna go ahead and say it like odeka uh send me your uh your wallet address i want to send you a dgen network token whether you
want to uh pop in or not we'd love to have you in the discord if you want to if you don't already
have one um it's a it's a cool discord that we have dgen network where um it's you know there's
it's not an alpha group but there's certainly alpha there it's a supportive group uh it's a
place where we you know we we hired someone to help us get a allow list for the group
so that we can constantly have the flow of that going, giveaways in there,
and again, just all around events, sort of like a community.
So Odeko, if you get a chance, DM me your wallet address,
and we'll get you a DJ Network token.
And I don't know, Kat, maybe if we get crazy,
we can give a second one out to someone in the play before the end of the day
because I think that it's a . maybe if we get crazy, we can give a second one out to someone in the plague before the end of the day because I think that, you know, it's a 0.2 floor,
I think, right now because this group really came out today.
I'm really excited about the plague.
So with that said, I want to welcome on our special guest, Pons.
Pons, I know I just shot you a DM out of the blue last week, but I constantly am seeing
you all on my timeline.
I know you're out there.
You're thoughtful.
You have really good insight on the markets.
First of all, how are you doing this morning?
Good morning.
I'm doing well.
Thanks for having me.
Appreciate you guys giving me the opportunity to highlight the plague this morning.
Yeah, and I've said before, like, so this is a major blind spot for me
because I feel like the plague's rise has come right at the same time
that I have been starting to work in Web3.
So my days are more consumed with, you know, a lot of the things I'm working on versus getting to know the market quite as well.
Can you give us some background on, like, the launch as well as sort of your rise to where I'm now constantly seeing the plague on the time?
Yeah, we minted in April. And when we did our mint, so we minted right before the bear, like literally the week before the bear really went into full spring there, full action.
And we build using the Web3 ethos that in the long run, and we're playing the long game, we'll build a formidable Web3 brand.
And we'll be able to not only use the network effect that comes with that community, but reward them for helping us succeed. And so we can dig into that later. But we we didn't give out we gave out no white lists
to alpha groups, none to influencers. We didn't do any discord grinding. I think we may have been
the first ones to say, hey, we're not we're not going to do any discord grinding. And everything
we did was random and on Twitter. And and we set expectations early about, uh, our focus, not being on the floor
price that we're, we want to, we legitimately want to build a community. And that's what we've
been doing ever since. And I think, like you said, you see the frogs all over the timeline, but,
uh, and I don't know how much you guys pay attention to NFT inspect, but from a community
reach, there's been, you know, I don't even know how many projects, but I know there's been close to 6,000 or more projects, minted NFT projects.
And the plague is number 13 in community reach.
I mean, we're up there with what most people consider the blue chips.
And from a PFP usage, we're in the top 30, again, of the, you know, thousands and thousands of projects.
And that's been our focus.
That has been the message to the community is the apes became the apes because of the community.
With all due respect to the devs, they haven't delivered anything, a product yet.
And same with most of the blue chips.
Those communities became where they are because of the community.
And that's been our focus from the beginning.
Yeah, it makes sense. And it shows, right. I mean,
it shows with the excitement because it's not about like,
as we've seen, it's not about the floor price. As I,
as I can tell by the community there really is a culture and sort of the
means. And you talked about like sort of no influencer,
no sort of crazy pump going into it.
I'd love for you to talk even a little bit about more about that strategy and what you've done to sort of foster influencer, no sort of crazy pump going into it. I'd love for you to talk even a little bit more about that strategy
and what you've done to sort of foster this community engagement.
Yeah, so again, if we're really trying to,
when I first got into the NFT space specifically,
I saw the Wagme, you know, culture and the everybody's going to make it.
And of course, that's not true right but
if you look at the if you look at if you take a step back and say okay what are you really trying
to say there it's like okay if you use the blockchain one of the things it does is it
creates transparency it and it you know we can get into this later but it allows brands and businesses to reward those who help support them. And that's
what we wanted to do. And our mission is to decentralize opportunity. And so what that means
is, hey, there's going to be different outcomes, but we want to give everybody that is a holder
and even beyond the opportunity to succeed using blockchain and Web3 technology.
And if we started out by giving the whitelist bots to the influencers like every other project does
or the alpha groups and we didn't start with the equal opportunity of getting that whitelist
when we meant it, then we were already starting off against what we said our mission was.
And so that's why we went that route. What was the second part of the question?
Yeah. And then you've got this community that is just absolutely engaged. Are there things that
you've done to almost foster that? Did it form naturally? Like, how did this happen where you
became sort of the sort of most organically excitable community on my timeline right now?
Yeah.
So, again, it's just setting the proper expectations and saying, hey, if we're going to succeed,
it's got to be the community that helps us succeed.
And then as a founder, I have to be active, too.
I can't expect – and a lot of founders do this.
They sit back and they expect everybody to spread the message for them.
And that worked for what we consider the blue chips today.
But this is a different market now.
It is constantly changing.
And I think for a successful project, you have to have an active founder.
You guys were talking about communication with the Doodles.
A new project could not succeed with the communication plan that the Doodles have been.
And I'm not knocking on it. I'm just saying they can do it because they already have the brand presence but a new
project that minted today could not succeed if they weren't constantly communicating and engaged
with their community i think it's a i think it's a really good take i think that's uh totally fair
um you know as you've as you've gone about it. So, okay. So, so you meant the, you meant out obviously, you know, the plague, the frogs make sense.
The tie in there exists obviously like Pepe is a big sort of you know,
well-known meme within the, within the NFT space as well.
So there's a lot of really, really fun tie-ins there.
If someone comes up to you and says what, you know,
at a basic level before we get into sort of the staking and all the other
things, I know a lot are stake.
If someone comes up to you and says,
what does the plague stand for? Like, who are you?
What would your sort of, you know, short elevator pitch be to somebody if you're running into them at NFT NYC or something like that?
Yeah, so again, our mission is a decentralized opportunity.
So how are we doing that? Well, one example is our frog tank.
We've got four businesses that have come out of that so far.
And what that is, is it's a knockoff on the shark tank.
There's lots of those.
But what we say is, okay, if you're a holder and you've got a good idea, but you don't have the resources, whether that resource is money, whether that resource is dev or marketing ability. We'll fill the gap there. So you bring
the idea and we'll fill the gap. And again, we've had a few businesses that have come out of that
already. That's one way we're going to decentralize opportunity. The other way, and we can get into
this dating all this stuff, is we have our FRG token and we are working in the background on
several businesses that will utilize the FRG token. And so if you're a holder,
bringing that utility through the token is another way that will decentralize opportunity
as a reward for what you have done to help us get to this point. So all three of the businesses
we're working on in the background, at some level, is either further along, or the genesis
was because of a community member bringing it to us, again, through the network effect
and connections they have.
And so we're leveraging what we believe the Web3 ethos is, was meant to be, which is,
again, the decentralization of opportunity. And that's our goal.
Now, we may fail in the end, but that is how we're going to go to business. And we're going
to try and do it so that if you're a holder with us and you helped us succeed, we're going to reward
you through utility. And that's a great mission, I think, overall. I mean, and you can tell, like,
again, just in talking to you, it's not like this was some false business pitch to sell a product.
Like, you can tell that you actually are, you know, making an effort to move towards this
just by sort of the way you've approached it, the way you've approached the Mint.
Your actions have spoken louder than your words to show that you're actually moving towards
what you're saying you're moving towards.
I want to go through those things a little bit at a time here and have a conversation
about each one because I think those are all really, really fun sort of executions.
So can you talk about the Frog Tank a little bit and how that started?
Obviously, the goal was to decentralize the opportunity, like you said, but how you kind
of ran those and ended up ultimately choosing sort of those winners and what are some of the things that are coming out of that?
Yeah, so we have a committee of frogs that are part of the frog tank feasibility committee is what we call it.
And so I actually review all of the intakes, the initial intakes,
and then I pass them on to them if I think if they have a chance.
And ultimately, it's their decision.
They say, OK, yeah, we think this has a chance and or no, we don't. And again, it's crowdsourcing
ideas. And we've had a ton of ideas, a lot of good ideas. Unfortunately, just because of the
nature of the space that we're in, a lot of the ideas are games and games. That's a sticky one
for me to I think there's only going to be so many, and there's definitely going to be only so many that people play.
So we aren't really focused on the gaming side of it.
So an example of one that came out of the Frog Tank is Acorn.io,
and they're an on-chain escrow service.
And so if you think about one of the target markets that they're going after,
if you think about Upwork and Fiverr, those guys charge up to 20% of the sale or the job.
And part of that 20%, so some of it is, of course, because they're bringing clients to these
freelancers. But the other part is because they're providing security and the money as far as,
you know, if I have a thousand dollar job,
how do I know this person is going to pay me? Or if I'm paying a thousand dollars for this person
to do a job, how do I know they're going to do a good job? And so you get that thousand dollars
in their escrow, but they'll charge up to 20%, especially if you're a smaller freelancer. And so
acorn.io, again, this is just one of the things they'll do is they're providing an on-chain escrow
service and the fees will be less than what it would be for a credit card fee and they'll
decentralize the arbitration process if there's if there's a dispute um so that's one that came
out of the frog tank and actually i don't know if we have time to get into this but we're we are
doing a what's called a nf ede earn earn nft mint with them, meant with them that it's only a quantity of 700. But if you hold one of
those 700 NFTs and you execute upon some measurable marketing objectives, you'll earn a commission
in the form of some of the revenues that Acorn does for the life of the time that you hold an NFT.
That's super interesting. And I like that you all are sort of,
because, you know, it's so interesting.
Like, one of the things that you said there
that I think is important is you did mention, like,
yeah, it's a game, but I only, you know,
only so many games are going to succeed.
So, you know, this isn't necessarily like,
you know, for lack of a better term,
it's not like you're running for school president.
You're like, everybody's going to get funded.
You're going to get funded.
You're going to get funded.
It seems like you're being really thoughtful
about wanting to sort of push the space forward at the same time that these are actual businesses that are running.
Would that be kind of accurate to say?
For sure, yeah.
They've got to give us their financial plan, what their projections are, how they're going to manage their funds for the first, however, couple of years.
Because all those things are important.
And we're not taking a ton. And really what we're looking for in these opportunities as as a business of being the plague is we want to figure out, okay, if we if we help this group out,
how can we use them to help us utilize FRG, our token? And so like with Acorn,
them to help us utilize FRG, our token. And so like with Acorn, one of the things they're going
to do is as a part of their revenues over the first three years, they're going to buy back
FRG token and send it to our DAO. And of course, once it gets to the DAO, the DAO can decide what
happens to it, whether they burn it or they put it back in the staking pool or whatever the case
may be. So for sure, there's been a lot more turned down than there has been
that's been passed through. Yeah, no, that's awesome. I think that's a great example of a
legitimate real company being built and then how you tie it back to your actual project. So
obviously it's not just like, you know, sort of a handout, so to speak. It's something where
you're working alongside of them with the community and you have this built-in community
to work with it, which I think is pretty cool.
So with that, you mentioned the FRG token quite a bit.
Obviously, you know, I've seen that, you know, the majority, I think it's 80% was the number I saw when I was looking up are staked.
What is, talk a little bit about the FRG token, the staking mechanism, because I think it's one of those ones that I think everyone's really interested to hear a little bit more about, because staking is, you know, some projects do
it well, some don't. Explain the staking mechanism, how it works, and then what the FRG token is.
Yeah, so today our staking mechanism locks up your frog, and then it gives you a staked frog.
So if you go to OpenSea and you search for the plague, we've got our regular collection that
comes up, and then there's a staked collection. And then so the emissions on the token are, it's a time-based reward. So
the first 90 days, you're earning 100 FRG a month. The second 90 days, you're earning 200 FRG a month.
And then after that, you're earning 300 FRG a month. And so today it's worth nothing. And we've not set up a liquidity pool.
We've not added utility for a lot of reasons. One, we wanted to get the Dow form and actually
it's legally formed in the state of Wyoming. Now we just have to map out the governance.
And so our plan with FRG is that the Dow will manage the supply. The project will not have any say in the supply of FRG. In fact,
my goal is to not even be a member of the Dow myself, recuse myself of the Dow so I don't have
any control over the supply decisions for FRG. And the project, the plague and the businesses
that spur out of the project will focus on generating utility and demand for FRG.
No, that makes sense. And so the non-liquidity was so it's a fungible token, but no liquidity.
Was that that was a deliberate sort of regulatory plan to ensure that y'all were safe?
Correct. So I don't I don't want to the plague doesn't want to say, Hey, we we've created these frogs. These frogs emit FRG. Let's
go create a liquidity pool. Now, if the Dow wants to create a liquidity pool, they can't,
but the plague, the project is not going to make that decision. So, um, and really there's no
reason to, uh, a lot of, I think that's a mistake that a lot of these other projects have made.
And I don't know about a lot, but some of these other projects that are made, they put the token in.
They added liquidity to it because they want to appease their holders.
And of course, the first thing that happens is that pool gets drained and they put themselves at risk at creating a security.
So we're not again, we have set the expectation from the beginning that this is not a, we're not running a sprint, we're in a marathon here. We are building the infrastructure first
while the frogs help us build our Web3 brand. And then ultimately our goal is to reward everybody
that helped us get there. Ponder, go ahead. I saw you throw your hand up.
Yeah. Thanks, Steve, for letting me pop in uh ponds first off
uh congrats to you and the plague and uh for all that's uh that all that you've done and built uh
specifically thank you yeah no especially uh in light of the fact that you launched right as we
were sort of descending into you know what's been you know a non uh a less than favorable uh market
let's put it that way um one of the things and and you touched on this, I'd love to get a little
more insight into, I love the frog tank idea. How do you vet? I'm sure you've had a lot of people
pop up in the community and say, oh, I've got this amazing idea. Can you talk a little bit
about the vetting process and how people present those ideas? Is it in Discord? Is there an
application process and how you sort of sort through and find the best opportunities for the project?
Yeah, so the initial intake is actually through a video or audio pitch.
So I think we use videoask.com is what it is.
And so you get two two-minute sessions.
One of the two-minute sessions is to say what the resources you are, what the resources you need and why.
And the second two-minute session is to pitch why we should choose you to go through the frog tank.
And the reason why we did it that way is because I like putting people on the spot.
And so letting them ramble too long.
I believe if you can't put your plan in a concise, two minutes is even too long, really.
If you can't put what your plan is and your mission is in two minutes or less, then you probably need to keep thinking about it.
And so that's the initial intake.
Those are the videos and audios.
And I personally listen to all of those.
That's why they're behind, actually.
And then if I hear it and I say, okay, this one has a shot, I'll throw it to the committee.
And then the committee sends out a questionnaire and it asks the traditional type of questions.
Okay, who's your target market?
What's your financial projections?
What's your staffing going to look like?
What do you think that's going to cost you?
How are you going to generate revenue after the mint outside of royalties?
All those questions that are important for another
business. And then the feasibility committee, after they get that questionnaire back, will sit
down with the presenter and spend an hour or longer with them on a call and just grill them,
ask them questions. And if they are satisfied, then they will throw it back to me. And then I'll
talk to the project again again and we'll just talk
through some of the questions that may have come out of the feasibility committee and then we'll
pull them through if they satisfy everything. Pons, what about post-Mint? Let's say you fund
a project and it mints, it goes live. Other than the FRG integration and community support,
is there any sort of advisorship that yourself or the committee
or community is providing these other startups in any way?
Yeah.
Is it just the funding?
No, yeah, we are.
And that's one of the asks for most of them is marketing help.
And so we'll advise them on that side.
But in general, if they become part of our ecosystem, then we will hold their hand as much as they need it along the
way ponds i'm curious what is your um because normally the way we do these interviews i think
i was so excited to hear about all these frogs in my mansions that i probably need to take a step
back so we're almost doing this like a this interview like a christopher christopher nolan
movie we're kind of we start at the end we're going back to the beginning. What is your actual background personally? Like, what is your background if you're comfortable
sharing on that? Because it seems like you have, like, the way you just went through,
it clicked for me that I didn't ask the right questions here to start because it clicked for
me as you're talking about, we want to see their staffing plan, their sort of, you know,
target market fit, all these things. That's not like,
you know, one-on-one stuff from like a founder that, that, you know, people are, I mean, that
is actual thinking about like this, like a business, which you don't see as often. So I'd
love to hear your overall background and how you got there and, and, and that part. Yeah. So,
Memento, Memento with coffee, uh, or Memento with Steve on next week's coffee.
Interviews in reverse.
That was a good movie, by the way.
Yeah, so my background.
Well, first of all, I'm affectionately known or I guess affectionately known as an NFT boomer because I'm 43.
And so I.
Welcome.
I knew we liked you for a reason on here.
Yeah. Like starting in reverse. We've buried the lead. This is affectionately known as the 40 plus club or almost 40 plus in Steve's case.
But yeah, welcome.
Yeah, it's amazing. Somehow we're boomers. So my background really is diverse. I started in retail, grew up in retail, then in manufacturing, always on the sales and operations side of both.
And most recently, executive at a large manufacturer, again, on the sales and marketing side.
And so, yeah, that's my background is building organizations, sales and operations organizations, leading teams.
And I've been managing a P&L for
20 years. I mean, since I was, yeah, 22, I've been managing a P&L. So yeah, that stuff all comes
natural to me. It really is. It's a weird experience, you know, pretending to be a frog
on Twitter for lots of reasons. One, I never had social media before Twitter. The only reason I got
for lots of reasons.
One, I never had social media before Twitter.
The only reason I got Twitter was because I was becoming more interested
in the NFT space, and I realized you had to be on Twitter
to know what's going on.
And, yeah, so my first social media account was Twitter
in late October of last year.
And my first – I bought a couple of NFTs.
Well, I bought Decentraland. that's what really got me into it i bought decentraland in the sandbox because i think the virtual
before there was a million metaverses the virtual um land appealed to me and then i started getting
more involved and minted a bunch of crap that you know is now rugs um and then then my first real purchase was a mutant. And then I bought an ape shortly after
once I really dove into it and I saw it was entering into the pop culture. And of course,
once you have an ape in your PFP, at least at the end of 2021 or 2022, everybody thinks you're an
expert. And so I just started gaining followers because I had an ape um but that that's how i got here it's really a surreal experience
so what interest it's also the only reason steve i have any sort of audience they
somehow the exactly it pulls people into thinking we know something yeah shout out shout out to
ponds taking a shot at the hosts of the show yeah it's it's it's well stated and absolutely true i am uh i am completely lost and
so uh the ape is the only thing i've gone for me um you talked about some of the stuff that
interests you but and you mentioned you got on social media because you started getting interested
in web 3 and twitter was sort of the thing you set up what um like just one more step back what
interests you about i mean i probably can can guess the answer based on the ethos of the frogs, right, of the plague.
But, like, what interests you in Web3?
Like, what did you see?
Like, what was your moment that kind of got you onboarded into this world?
Yeah, I mean, I came for the money in 2017.
Like, I was trading coins, and I got wrecked like everybody else that started at the end of 2017.
Went dormant for a little bit, came back in 2020.
And so I was I was in the NFTs for the money.
And then I started paying attention to how these communities interacted, what the apes were doing specifically.
And then shortly after that, doodles and those kind of things and i saw the opportunity and i started understanding the technology more um and realized that these pfps are just scratching the surface of what the opportunity is with nfts the pfps are a great way to build community that's one thing that
in the token world everybody's shilling their bags but you don't really you know you never know from
who you're interacting with who's shilling what or or whether they're sincere or not, whether they even have the coin, you know, those kind of things.
And in the NFT world, people are shilling, but they're also representing the brand for you.
And so I saw that as an opportunity of, OK, you can you can create a brand with the community.
a brand with the community.
And then from a business standpoint in the Web2 world,
and a lot of them haven't seen this or realized it yet
because they're scared of it,
but if they can insert their brand
into some of these communities,
they've got an easy built-in customer base,
just like Adidas did with the apes
and those kinds of things.
I mean, how many people you got that own apes
are now walking around with Adidas
that maybe weren't before
because they've got this tie with the bored apes?
And I haven't seen one on the streets,
but I'm guessing there's thousands of people
walking around with those mint green Adidas joggers
that would have never worn that before.
And so I think that there's,
I just saw that opportunity that,
okay, hey, this is a great way
to build a community and a brand.
And it's a better way of doing business.
Presumably, we'll find out,
it can be a better way of doing business
by having a community buy-in.
Instead of paying somebody to be an affiliate,
you have 10,000 affiliates that are helping you and they're
rewarded in turn by helping you.
Yeah, it's something that I've frequently said where it's like in Web 1, you were the
customer, right?
You went on and you bought from a company like an Amazon or whoever it might be.
In Web 2, you were the product, right?
They sold your information on social media sites to advertise to you. And in Web 3, you were the product, right? They sold your information on social media sites to advertise to you.
And in Web 3, you are the brand.
You are the ones that sort of are holding down the fort.
You have invested interest because, to your point, like if I go out and wear a Disney shirt, you know, that I bought at my Disney trip,
it doesn't really do anything for me as the underlying person.
It doesn't add value to
anything I'm doing. But if I go out and I talk about something with board apes, or I create a
business around it, it certainly enhances the value of the underlying board ape brand. So,
you know, with that said, I guess question related to that, you know, as you talk about,
you know, like the plague and the direction you're going, I don't recall if you said this,
do people have IP rights?
Are people, you know,
you mentioned that their business is being built
from the frog team.
Are people actually building their businesses
around their frogs or how is that working?
Yeah, some are.
Well, one of the projects that came out
is Swamp Water.
It's a beer.
And so they're using the frogs on their beer cans,
but also we've got Thread Guy on a beer cans, but also they, we've got, uh, we've got
thread guy on a beer can. We've got a sappy sours and they're, they're collaborating with other
communities also. Um, and, uh, so yeah, there are, I obviously, uh, today having a frog on a,
on a product isn't like having an ape on a product or a doodle or whatever the case may be.
Uh, but they do have the IP rights. We kind of mimic the way Yuga did it, actually,
as far as the IP rights go.
I think that ultimately that is a good model.
And that's how our lawyers mimicked it.
No, it makes a lot of sense.
And you mentioned ThreadGuy.
You mentioned Sappy as well.
So do you encourage your sort of holders,
and do you specifically work with sort of other sort of projects
and brands in that way to try to almost like,
I mean, you mentioned Wag Me up top, and that feels very Wag Me.
Yeah, well, for sure.
But that doesn't mean we're all going to make it.
It just means the ones that we're collaborating with hopefully make it, right?
Unfortunately, it's just that's not how the world works. There's going to be winners, and there's going to be it. It just means the ones that we're collaborating with hopefully make it. Unfortunately, that's not how the world works. There's going to be winners and there's going to be losers.
And we're trying to set ourselves up and our holders up to be winners.
No, it makes a lot of sense. Go ahead, Ponder.
Yeah, no, Steve, I actually like the way you did this one. Sometimes you've got to back into the really
meaty topics, right? And I think you got there, bro. But Pons,
just real quick. So I believe you said it was Acorn, right? And I think you got there, bro. But Pons, just real quick. So I believe you
said it was Acorn, right? Was the name of the first starter, right? So you really got my mind
going here because if you're able to launch and develop, let's say a handful of these, three to
five or whatever, pick a number, right? Is the idea, you know, help us flesh this out a little
bit. Is the idea then that like the
plague becomes like the overarching brand and you sort of have a consortium or conglomerate of
companies underneath the umbrella? Or is it not necessarily that way? You would launch and spin
them off. Can you talk a bit about that? Yeah. Well, so it's not the umbrella. They're
definitely branches. And the reason why it's not the, we don't want all these businesses under the plague itself, uh, for lots of reasons, right? We, who knows there's the way my lawyer
said is you separate the businesses, um, and you, you try and keep the money where the least amount
of risk is over time. And so, um, they're, they're, they're spurned out. Um, their charters might say,
Hey, we're going to, we're going to buy FRG, umG or we're going to utilize FRG, but they don't own the plague LLC and vice versa.
And so, yeah, the goal is to have multiple businesses that are born out of the plague that benefit the plague, but they're not necessarily under one corporate
umbrella. For sure, they won't be. That's that we're setting it up. So that won't be the case,
actually. Awesome. Got it. Thanks. No, that's, that's great. I mean, honestly, like super
interesting kind of what you're building. And I think one of the things that's foundational is
you can't put a price on community per se. Like that's one of those things that's foundational is you can't put a price on community per se.
Like that's one of those things that you don't see.
And besides like the amount of people who have come here today,
obviously with an engaged community to kind of hear you talk,
I see it on my timeline.
I see him in the comments.
So it's a very engaged, excited community.
I guess like with that said, anything else?
Because, you know, I, I, I'm so
curious, anything else that y'all are working on or anything I've missed so far about the plague?
Because I think like, you know, from the ethos to how you got NFTs to sort of your, your overall
goal to the, to the FRG token and the way you're approaching it sort of very thoughtfully. What
am I, anything I'm missing that I haven't asked you so far on the play?
Well, yeah, so I can hint just like,
I think it was Susan said,
nobody gets credit for giving
all their business plans up front.
We have not done that and won't do that,
but I can give you some hints
on some of the things we're working on.
So I think one of the other things she said is,
you know, the founders should know
how they're going to bring other holders
and grow their community without
diluting their community. So we've got two things we're working on on the outside. One of them is
an NFT supply chain solution. I'll just leave it at that. And so we are again, we're trying to
utilize NFTs in a unique and different way. And so this one is one that can be used with
many different products.
But we're starting with a very common product.
And we're excited for that one.
Hopefully that one's going to be near the end of January when we launch it.
And the other thing we're doing is we're talking.
You hear people say, we want to bridge the gap between Web 2 and Web 3.
And it's kind of like, it's almost like Wagme now.
Everybody's saying that. But we are in talks with a couple of brands. And the reason why we were able to have these conversations with these brands is because we have frogs that have connections
that would bring those brands into the NFT space using our trade market, which we're developing in the background. So the trade market
is not a novel idea, but our goal is not to have a trade market because we want to sell holders
traits or those kinds of things. It's to make it easy and seamless for brands to come into the
community and integrate with PFPs or eventually avatars.
And so we're having those conversations in the background.
And so, yeah, I'll just stop there. But again, our goal is to try and use Web3 for what I believe it's what Satoshi originally said.
It's a we want to bring transparency to everything we're doing. That's the last thing, you know, I'm going to go on a tangent here. Transparency,
I think, is one of the things that would help clean up the space and would help build confidence
in holders. And so one thing that we have done from the beginning is we post all of our
monies, our transactions. We have a transparency section in discord.
I post bank statements with line items so everybody can see where the money is,
what we're spending it on.
And I think that if a lot of businesses did things that way,
we would have a, it would be a healthier environment in general.
Yeah, I guess like that's a you know, I appreciate that point of view because I do think it's it's it's you know, you're like I said, you're it's no shocker.
We're getting along well, because I think you fit right into me and Caps Wheelhouse, not just age wise, but from a sensibility perspective it seems like you're uh sort of aligned with those sort of ethos um you know i'd love to hear your thoughts
on the overarching space based on that oh go ahead cap i just wanted to dial down on something
because you say the word intentional a lot and i came off mute there just to before pons even
mentioned the trans the transparency piece nft dan commented it NFT Dan called out the
intentional and transparency
at which you approach the space.
I think it's worth
just double tapping
on that one and I'll kick it back to you because I know
that intentionality is something that
is probably at this point a bingo
card item for you, Steve.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
There's a level of intentionality that I've, that's kind of something I've started to say a lot more because I think
it's like the right word where I think a lot of founders, like, I think there's a place for
experimentation. I think that's what the space is all about. But at the same time, I do think that
there's a lot of brands that are just sort of like throwing things at a wall or just trying to get,
you know, hype get, you know,
hype or, you know, get it going versus actually having intentionality about what you do.
And that's kind of the direction I was actually going to go, Cap, which is, you know, I, you know, as somebody who's obviously like, you know, somebody who's thinking about the space in a way
with your sort of traditional business background, you're posting these things transparently,
you're being very open and
honest. Where do you think this space is headed from that perspective? Do you think in 2023,
for example, NFT breads are going to be able to survive without that sort of level of transparency?
Yeah, I think they'll be able to survive. I'm hoping that more and more projects will move towards this more transparent model.
But I think ultimately, at least in the short term, anything that can pump somebody's bags is going to survive.
Because that's that's you guys mentioned building in building in public.
building in public, it's an amazing, or surreal is a better experience.
It's surreal to see the amount of shilling and funding each other's projects and looking
for something to latch on to, to fund, because you don't want that person's project to pump
and you want them to come buy yours and those kind of things.
So I think in the short term, as long as there's a potential that somebody can make good money on it,
that they'll look the other way.
I think in the long run, maybe that'll clean up, but that's just part of human nature.
It's never going to go away completely.
Yeah, and with that, you mentioned big brands at one point earlier
and having sort of a trade marketplace for IP with big brands at one point earlier and and you know having sort of a trait marketplace for ip with big brands along those same lines are there other ways that you think that uh the plague and
you with your especially with your business experience like you know as an example and i
won't you know i'm not going to put words in your mouth but like something you could do is like big
brands coming into the space like we've talked a little bit about starbucks being in the space and
obviously they're being shepherded in by people like Bunchu, who is co-hosting with DGEN Network here today.
And Adam Brotman, who has been in NFTs for a while,
but also worked at Starbucks for years
as chief digital officer.
Is there a world where the plague can help big brands
enter into NFTs in an authentic way?
And because it seems like you have the business experience,
you have the ability to help with something like that.
Do you think that's something you would ever look to do
beyond just like PFP usage?
Oh, for sure.
Yeah, for sure.
And actually, so one of the businesses that has jumped out of this is called Leap Media.
And that's the purpose of that business.
And I've had conversations with one of Starbucks' competitors, actually.
Now, whether it goes anywhere or not, we'll see.
I have no idea.
But for sure, that opportunity is there.
But to be honest, we're not even really going after the big brands.
I think everybody's going to go after the big brands.
I think our sweet spot is all of the other brands that they're good,
they're well-known, but they're not necessarily big.
I think if we go after them, there's a lot more blue ocean there than there is.
Everybody's going to be going for the Gucci's
and that kind of stuff, the sexy brands.
We want to go after the brands that they have money,
but maybe they're not the first brand
that pops into somebody's mind.
Yeah, I love that.
I think that that's something that
maybe people don't think
about quite enough is that, you know, NFTs work for Starbucks, but they also work for the local
coffee shop and everything in between. And so when you have that level of sort of, you know,
ability to like use Web3 to enhance your business, it doesn't have to be this big grandiose thing.
It can be, again, Starbucks, the local coffee shop, everything in between.
So I think that's the right approach.
And I've said before,
a lot of these brands are interested in Web3,
but they don't know how to do it right.
A lot of them see it as a material risk.
It's hard to get them to do it
in a global economic bear market.
But having the ability to authentically
be shepherded into this space
by folks who are native to it,
I think is just such a major... It's an opportunity like I haven't seen for,
I mean, all 328 people in this room.
You know this better than the executive at a Fortune 500
or somebody who's at, again, the local coffee shop and can help them do that.
So I think that's great.
Punter, I saw your hand fly up.
I'll let you get another question in there.
Go ahead.
No, this's great. Punter, I saw your hand fly up. I'll let you get another question in there. Go ahead. No, this is great. And Ponce, appreciate all your time that you're spending with us this morning. And it sounds like your ethos might align a lot with a lot of ours in
the room. So I don't know if you've been lurking, but a lot of the things you've said really,
I'm sure, hit home with Cap and Steve and myself. I do want to touch on
something real quick, if you don't mind. You talked earlier about we want to decentralize
opportunity. And we talk a lot in this space about how decentralization is a buzzword, but
it's kind of overused and it's often not the best way to do things. But when you said that,
it sort of hit hard with me. Can you talk a little bit about, is that just something that you guys say to one another in
the community? Or is that really part of your overarching brand at the plague that you want
to be that spot? No, yeah, we do. That is our, that is, I mean, so I'll tell you, we have,
we've, one of the reasons we have not delivered on some of the things that we wanted to be done
with by now is because frankly we've hired frogs because we want to decentralize opportunity
and it's a weird world i don't know how much business you guys are doing um you know within
web3 in general but uh you know everybody's anonymous so when i'm i'm anonymous so what
am i going to say i need you to i need you to give me your resume and his other things. And so it's, it's tough.
It's tougher to get things done the way that we're doing it.
And like, let me say, take a step back and I didn't explain what we're doing.
So like we have a couple of websites that we are working on that, that correlate with
correlate with the products that we're doing. And we hire frogs to do it. And, you know, I've,
the products that we're doing.
And we hire frogs to do it.
I've been a part of multiple big website designs. It does not take as long as it's taken us to get
this stuff done. These are relatively simple websites. And it's because we're saying, okay,
if we're going to decentralize opportunity, we at least got to give the frogs a shot.
individual frauds are sought to get these things done.
Some individual frogs are sought to get these things done. So it is something we live by.
So it is something we live by.
It is tough to manage a business effectively and efficiently that way.
And we are learning as we're going and maybe being a little bit more thorough
and saying, hey, I know it's hypocritical that I'm an undoxed founder,
but if I'm going to hire you, I've got to have more info.
And so we're learning as we go.
But, yeah, we are for sure trying to live by that ethos. We're not gonna be perfect, but we're trying to.
Now, when you say like you're an undocs founder, is that something that is a deliberate because I was going to ask that, is that a deliberate decision? Is that something that you will eventually modify? Do you have plans about it? Like what goes into that?
Yeah, it's deliberate. And it's mainly because it would be hard for me. So I, my, I don't, one of the reasons why, um, we are able to thrive in the bear is because I don't pay my bills with
the plague. In fact, um, you know, I, my salary with the plague, I get a, I get 10% of the plague
royalty. So if we have a hundred, a hundred ETH volumeTH volume month, 10 ETH, I get paid an ETH.
Fine, I just put that away and I'm saving it.
And so I do things outside of the NFT space in addition to what I'm doing with the plague.
And I will tell you, it would be very hard for me to explain why i'm cosplaying as a frog on twitter um in this
crazy world to some of the people that i'm sitting across from at different tables and so uh it's
intentional um for the one that's one reason the other reason is you know frankly this place is
crazy you've seen and heard the stories of um you know people being called ruggers or reputation
reputations being drugged through the mud. And that's something that concerns me and for myself and for my family.
And then the other one is I believe that the mystery and the mystique
is actually a big pro of the anonymity because, well, two things.
People have to judge you by how you're acting.
Now, it could be an act, but they have to judge you by your acting and your actions. Two, it eliminates the barriers of the stereotypes that people can put on you. And three, again, they create this picture in their mind. I'm convinced most of our holders think I look something like between Gandalf and Yoda, right?
between Gandalf and Yoda, right?
And I think that's a competitive advantage.
They think I'm some old wise wizard
because I'm 43 years old and they're 20, you know?
So all those reasons,
and I plan on staying anonymous as long as I can.
I think eventually I'll have to.
I'll have to dox,
but until then I'll stay anonymous.
Yeah, you're probably wiser than I.
Not only did I dox right off the bat,
like last March or April or something,
immediately when I got into the space,
I'm like, oh, of course, I'll put my face out there.
I then told all my background,
I was working at Nestle at the time.
I was leading PR for all of their
sort of like frozen food stuff at Nestle.
So if you think about like Stouffer's,
Hot Pockets, New York Cuisine, DiGiorno, all that good stuff
in there, innovation brands and a few others.
And I probably foolishly explained to all of my coworkers,
like, yeah, I essentially do LARPing
as a picture of a monkey on the internet.
So that's something that happens.
And it was a lot of interesting conversations you would run into with people where they'd be like okay what's
you're doing what now and uh you know I even had to like and I wasn't gonna if they said no I was
just gonna quit on the spot anyway but I even had to ask permission to like co-author the Harvard
Business Review article in November because I'm like I'm not gonna mention Nestle it's not gonna
be Nestle it's just me doing it on my own behalf. But, you know, stuff like that in the corporate world,
it's kind of good to be able to bifurcate those, I think.
So I think you might be onto something there.
That said, again, like, you know, I think, like,
we've covered a lot of ground.
So if people want to learn more about the plague
or want to get more involved with the plague,
so obviously they can go to Olimp and see they can buy the frogs.
If someone just happened to pick up a plague a frog here while uh during this space what are
their next steps i think adekha said something about uh going and staking somewhere what where
should people get started uh yeah if you want to learn about it i would go to the plague um
twitter profile and start with the pin post it kind of gives you an idea of our ethos my pin post is a
good example too so one thing i didn't mention you know and it goes back to punter's question
about decentralizing opportunity we've spent quite a bit of money just helping people like the
the first hundred thousand hundred and forty thousand dollars of our our mint went to the team not myself um and uh so a portion of it went to the team
that was there helping a big portion of it went to our artist rimbic who uh is based in india we
we are helping pay for his masters he's going to go to europe and get his masters and then another
big chunk of it went to pay for our buddy sean who's a he's a kid in niger Nigeria. He was actually one of my followers before we
started the plague and I was interacting with him and those kind of things and we helped pay for
life-saving surgery for him. He actually went from Nigeria to India to get his surgery and he's back
in Nigeria now. So all that being said, you start with the plague pin post, you'll see that and it's
all the things that we're doing in the community and then then if you buy the frog uh you'll get a i would post about
it and then you'll get you'll you'll see this the strength of the community when everybody comes and
blows up your notifications and then we'll add you to a group chat that's a welcome to the frog
group chat so that we can you know you can meet some of the, of the longtime frogs in the community.
And then if you jump into this cord, we'll, we'll, we'll, uh, hold your hand through the rest of the process, whether it be staking and, and, and those kinds of things. So yeah,
I think, I think I answered that question.
I love, I love the first, I love the first, I was going to say, Cap, sorry. I love the first part
where it's like, well, first I would post about it. Cause you're going to hear from the community
there, which I, I think we've learned today.
If there's nothing else we've learned, the community is out there in these streets.
Definitely.
I don't know.
And I'm getting a big wind frog from people, so maybe we'll see.
Out there, but it's an authentic, genuine approach, though.
It doesn't come across as disingenuous.
It doesn't come across rady.
It's like on stuff like this,
it's welcoming new members of the community.
It's supporting others in the community.
It's just really, it's being out there.
It's showing up in spaces.
And I just, it's, there's been others
that have been loud on Twitter.
This is a respectful loud if
that's uh uh maybe one way to put it hunter go ahead yeah and i don't know how much uh how much
time uh you know i don't want to keep you here too long so just uh you know i don't want to take
over the show either but uh i when we have a founder like you i just my mind starts racing
just real quick another project we had on recently uh Killebears. I don't know if you saw, there was a tweet from the project that we talked
about on the Midday Show yesterday about how they recently turned down, I believe it was $10 million
in VC funding. And the tweet thread sort of elaborated. It was a pretty long thread, but it
sort of elaborated on the when, where, what, and why of that decision. Can you speak to Pons, like, maybe your thought process on that?
If somebody approached the plague and wanted to drop some funds into –
I don't want to put you on the spot with that, but maybe overarching thoughts
or, you know, you don't have to drill down too hard.
No, for sure, if BC approached us, we would say no for the plague specifically
because, again – and I don't want to vilify VCs.
I've dealt with plenty of them indirectly.
I've never raised funds for VCs,
but I've been a part of businesses
where some of our big customers
or partners got bought by VCs.
And I've seen what happens to a business
when they take over.
So I guess that's different than getting funding from them.
But anyways, the answer is no, we would not.
We want the plague to be an organically built community by the community.
And so now some of these other businesses that we're spinning off,
so our plan would be there,
like the supply chain solution we're working on.
It's going to take money to market it properly,
more money than what we have in our treasury
and our coffers today.
So we can come back to the community at large
and say, okay, this is how much money we need
to make this happen.
We can raise it with the community or we can go make a pitch to a VC.
And I'm confident that this idea and the solution would get the funding.
The frogs are still the benefits of it, but we went a VC route to do it.
So those are the ways that we're looking at it.
But the plague itself, the NFT project, we're not in in the bc money appreciate that thanks sure when you say not interested do you mean never
or do you think there would be potentially a time when that would change do you think you
always sort of build organically from the ground up i mean i mean never really i mean i i i hate
saying the word never because you never really know.
But I think that if we got to that point, it would be hard to continue with our strategy and maintain our ethos and our mission and our vision.
Because VCs, rightfully so, have an expectation.
And their expectation is if they invest X, they're going to get Y back.
And if our focus is on making a return for an investor, it's going to be hard to focus on.
We make decisions all the time that are not great ROI decisions, but they match our project's ethos.
decisions, but they match our project's ethos.
Like hiring frogs that we don't have
great background on to build websites.
Yeah, I can associate with that. I mean, we do that with DGen Network all the time where we
bring people in from the DGen community. I mean, part of the advantage of being
there is, you know, everybody in the, for example, everyone in the Starbucks
sort of
like initial Starbucks group, um, that, you know, that was in everyone in DGEN got into that initial
Starbucks group. Like it was, it was anybody who wanted to got the opportunity to, cause you know,
bunch who works on it. And we wanted to make sure that we were bringing in the right people. We knew
it was the right culture of people for Starbucks, but it's a good, you know, it's, it's one of the
things where it's like, Hey, we can give to our community. We will. And whether it's hiring people or,
you know, supporting creators within the community, it's something that we,
we want to do. So no, I appreciate the, that perspective as well.
I would say, I would, I would say, I don't, I don't think,
I think that I think getting BC money is the easy way,
but I don't think it's necessary.
I think that lots of these brands can be successful without the VC money.
But getting the VC money is the easy way, and we're not going to take the easy way.
Again, our objective from the get-go was to say we could build business a different way.
So we might fail or we might be overly successful with it.
Hopefully it's the
the latter but um we're gonna stick to that from the project itself now the other businesses that
spur out of it we'll see what happens yeah it's funny uh speaking of you talk about the community
um you know obviously cap's getting some love but anybody anybody who joins it looks like get some
love so my buddy my buddy tebow who is a college buddy of mine who got into NFTs relatively recently, he must be listening in.
He's on the West Coast, but he got a really badass.
In fact, I'm going to pin it to the top if people want to bug him
just because it's actually one of the better-looking recent frog buys I've seen.
I just liked it.
It's got the bubblegum.
He loves the bubblegum trait, but a good bubblegum
trait on a camo-looking frog.
It's funny because I was telling
him, I'm like, we're talking. I just was DMing
him on the side. I'm like, we're talking to the founder.
The community's really strong.
He must be listening. He goes, look at my last
tweet. He goes, 50 likes and I'm
not even out of bed yet. It sounds
like the plague is out there letting him know.
I pinned it to the top if anybody wants to give Tebow or bug him for,
not bug him, but, you know, give him a welcome.
He's a college friend of mine who's relatively new to NFT.
So I appreciate y'all welcoming someone like that to the community
because he's the one who's here for the right reasons,
doing the right things,
and it looks like he might have found a good home with the plague.
Yeah, we're glad to have him,
and we'll definitely blow his notifications up he's in trouble now
yeah i'll um i'll be looking uh i'm poking around i might do some shopping today i'm
relatively low on liquidity but it might be might be a worthwhile venture we shall see so
um you know with that said i know we're running right up against 10 o'clock hour so punter i'll
go to you and then we'll probably uh probably wind through go ahead go ahead just real quick
shout out to tebow congrats um and i don't know if this is as much of a question
or just as a follow up to say, boy, it makes me awfully bullish when founders are talking about
not taking the money and staying here and building long term. So, yeah, shout out to you for that. I
just wanted to follow up and mention that because, you know, as we're all sort of feeling around for
a bottom here and wondering what the
future holds for people that want to roll up their sleeves and stay here
long-term and build something frigging awesome.
I applaud that.
I appreciate that.
And that, that is the goal for sure.
Yeah.
With that, look, Ponce, thanks for joining us.
Thanks for joining us on a relatively short notice here, especially, Ponce, thanks for joining us. Thanks for joining us on relatively short notice here, especially.
You know, y'all are obviously out here.
We appreciate everybody from the plague who came here today.
Any last things you want to get across before we close down space?
No, again, I appreciate you guys having me.
Always enjoy coming up on Spaces with good conversation,
and this was definitely one of them.
So I appreciate what you guys are doing here every morning, and thanks again for having me. enjoy coming up on spaces with good conversation and this was definitely one of them so i appreciate
what you guys are doing here every morning and thanks again for having me awesome one more thing
i want to plug um i don't have the link at the top let me let me find it real quick all right
for that puns i just yes thanks so much for joining us really really enjoyed the conversation
it's been great to connect with many of the community members here in coffee and on twitter and excited to connect with many more this frog tank idea it's i think
it's one of the most it's not i guess maybe not by itself novel or innovative but you know i guess
it is a derivative of another show in a sense but but the way you're going about it and actually
it's not just theory or conceptually
you've actually shipped a few products a few few businesses is uh is really exciting and and to me
that's that's really the ethos of web3 that's what got me so excited about this space you know
shortly after well it wasn't led by you know anything formal it was like shortly after
you know the apes minute it was that sort of like community i i i'll never forget it i said i felt like i i joined a startup with like 2500 of my
closest friends that i've never met before and it's just i i i i'm not even going to say the
words because i'll get i'll get fudded for for for using the cheesy line but um it it's exciting to
see and to think he launched this year and we're able to catch that, you know, that lightning in a bottle in a sense.
I think it says a lot about your leadership and the community leaders that you do have and excited to learn more.
Yeah, thank you. I mean, that's the point of this.
I've said this many times. If you just want to start a business or launch a product, I would say the NFT space is the worst place to do it
because you change a couple of loan sharks out for 10,000 of them.
But if you want to build it from a community standpoint up,
it's the best place.
And so, yeah, I'm right there with you as far as the potential here,
and we hope to be a part of it for sure.
Very cool.
Well, thanks for joining us today.
We obviously appreciate the the time one quick plug
before we go um not the top pin tweet from tebow but the one right before that uh rigs who does a
dj network show as well is interviewing luca nets from pudgy penguins today at noon that happens in
about two hours so if y'all are feeling like uh you want some more uh some more great founder
interviews uh check out rigs and j-Web talking to Luca Nets.
Looking forward to that one as well.
I also love the
friendly peer pressure to
win PFPs.
Just picking up the frog is not
enough. I respect the
asks. And this one I can
pawn off on Elon right
now. Steve, unless you figure it out.
I think I'm prevented from changing my PFP
if I want to keep my blue.
But we'll see if I can get creative.
Maybe there's another account I can do a frog for a day PFP from.
It's standard operating procedure for us now.
We don't expect many apes to change PFP.
I love it.
But we're going to ask.
And Luke is a super smart guy too, by the way.
Actually, I sat down with him yesterday. I was in his and and luca's a super smart guy too by the way actually i i sat down with him yesterday i was in in his office there he's a super smart guy and
pudgies are gonna be pudgies are gonna be a force to reckon with yeah love that love the
never in my life did i think uh steve opening the show name dropping bunch and i and punter along
with math Matthew Lillard would would be the the, the second, uh, would, would be second to name drops of the day as, uh, as pawns, you know, drops with, with,
with Luca from a project called pudgy penguins. Like I didn't, I didn't see my life quite evolving
this way, but here we are in a fully embracing it. So cap sounds like the beginning of a joke.
So this frog walks into an office and sits down with a penguin.
Yeah. Well, again, that's why I don't tell people what I'm doing outside of this place.
It's crazy.
Even in the airport, when I was talking to somebody, I said, oh, yeah, I met with the
guy from Pudgy Penguins.
You know, people are looking at me like I'm like I'm insane.
Yeah, it's amazing.
It's funny because one day this will probably all be completely normal.
I have no doubt, but it's definitely hilarious because at the moment at least it's uh a little odd speaking of normalcy if anyone is still playing bingo at this hour um
just so we can get the the check box i dropped up above state uh from our friend near uh state
farm filed trademarks steve they're making a move arguably potentially they're uh front-running
progressive here and um maybe we'll have to save your thoughts on that until tomorrow but i just had to had to call some attention to it before we forgot i dropped that
up above that state state state farm is apparently front-running your your favorite insurance company
yeah i'll have to dig dig in more on it uh obviously that's something i know that's a
space i'm uh pretty familiar with something to do with virtual merch i don't know who's going to be
rocking uh state farm hoodies in the in the metaverse but i guess that's that's my understanding
anyways maybe i'll send it to uh some of my friends over there who are um uh working on the
who i spoke with at progressive last week we'll see um or in a month ago we'll see either way um
awesome appreciate you stopping by this morning ponds this was this was so fun thank you to the
frog community for coming out this was so cool y'all are welcome back anytime uh we appreciate you
ponds appreciate not just your interview today not just what you've built your general leadership
in the space i see you commenting on things that are out in the wild in the nft world um
you have a very level head not overly surprising considering um you know you fall you fall into
agree you know sort of'll fall into agreeing,
you know, sort of having a similar ethos to me and Captain,
because it sounds like we're in the same age bracket.
So that's where we live today.
But, you know, I appreciate you stopping by this morning.
And for everybody else, you know, again, thanks for jumping up.
You could have spent your morning anywhere.
We appreciate you spending it with us.
Got a great discussion about doodles, great discussion about the plague. I think those
were sort of the two heavy topics today we covered. Plenty to cover tomorrow, including
my feelings on insurance and where that's going in NFTs. I need to definitely read up on that
on State Farm. Got a ping from our boy Von Fronten who said, we don't bother NFT Bark
enough about his Hot Pockets
work, so who knows? Maybe I'll dive
into a little bit of that. I showed him a tweet from an
NRG jersey I have, actually, the
gaming team that I got from Hot Pockets.
Looking forward to chatting more tomorrow about
everything and all things NFTs.
We have Violetta on. She's going to sing
a song for us tomorrow, so that should be one that you
don't want to miss. I also have a
surprise guest tomorrow, Steve. I didn't even share with you but superspaces.ai they're going to be joining us
their founder tomorrow i know we have violetta and i'm really it's one of my one of my favorites
in the space um but i know she also hosts a lot of spaces herself and i thought we'd get a quick
preview maybe some alpha from uh from the superspace they have a new dashboard, AI analytics dashboard that is its next level
from anything I've seen
in this world
in terms of data
and analytics on spaces.
So for anyone that is hosting spaces,
whether you're leading a community
or Riggs and others out there,
tomorrow will be a show to,
I don't know if we have any goodies
from them or not.
I know they're doing some lifetime promos.
We'll see if we can,
we'll see if we can get them in the mood since steve uh started it off this
morning uh with the dj pass we'll see if we can get our guest tomorrow to to uh ante up for some
future passes but it is a i think it's free seven day trial right now so we'll we'll dive more into
that tomorrow as well but sorry for the interjection steve i just figured i'd at least share with you
um before tomorrow's show that we do have another guest as well.
No, no, I love it.
I need to, like I said, I'm low on liquidity, but I need to be looking.
I am very much like. As long as I remain rank above Steve in the leaderboard, if that flip flops overnight.
Because Steve definitely beats me in the spoken hours, the spoken minutes and hours.
Steve laps me on that one.
So as long as I'm still leading the the
leaderboard post rankings we'll have them on if not if steve leapfrogged me we'll we'll rug super
spaces but in all seriousness shout out to our boy goody i don't know what the contest actually was
but he did finish i saw he's in the top 10 at the moment ahead of thread guy and many others
including you and i in the space so shout out to to goody for his hustle i'm really bad even
though i am hyper competitive when i care about something by the way i'm very bad at like this
sort of stuff like i don't really pay attention to nft inspect uh even though like i i check it
for like collection rankings and things like ponds was mentioning how they have a disproportionately
high part like ranking nft inspect for what you might realize because again we didn't know as
much you know they're right there with sort of the quote unquote blue chips,
the frogs are.
And so that's why I'm kind of frog trait shopping right now,
debating if I'm going to,
if I'm going to snag one this morning, potentially.
But with the super spaces stuff, it's like,
Cap, I have no doubt that on NFT and spec and super spaces,
you're super high because the space you do every morning,
it's got to run up huge numbers from a retweet and the likes perspective and a comments we have 152 comments there so that's great i'm really it
probably hinders me from a growth perspective from my twitter account how poorly i pay attention to
these things my general philosophy on twitter has kind of been like i'm gonna tweet the things that
i like and care about since we're doing one of these look at us moments i just happened to check my profile and similar to you i'm not we're not doing this for
the for followers or anything we truly enjoy being here and we're grateful every each and
everyone of you tune in but this this frog the frogs this morning put me over 20k so
little little milestone we'll take a little victory lap here as you sign off congrats on
that that's cool no it's it's great i think like you know for me and like i'll go to punter in a second before we close. I know we're running a little long as we go. But like, and for those who don't like obviously know, in between Riggs is space and ours, check out Ryan Carson at 1030. He stops by frequently, we're going to be doing something with him on Thursday. But my general philosophy has been like, I tweet the things, you know, ever since I got any sort of scale early on, I did like giveaways to try to scale followers and that got me to like 200 or something i'm like look at me run um but in the in the
recent days it's like i've basically been like i'm just gonna tweet what i think i'm gonna give
my opinions and people are gonna like them or not and if it gets one like fine if it gets 100 likes
great half the time the things that run are like i tweet about some time when my like eight-year-old
dumped on me but with a comment inadvertently.
And those are what runs up or like I talk about stopping the microwave at one second.
So I don't need to hear a beep. And those run. So you just never know what's going to run and not.
So I'm really bad at checking rankings, but I probably should be better because those are probably meaningful analytics.
I should be paying attention to. But I don't know.
Punter, go ahead and go ahead and get in here and then we'll close it.
I'll tell you what. Putting out a banger tweet has nothing on these spaces.
People hearing from you, hearing your point of view, hearing how you run a show,
that's how you're really going to really tick those followers up.
That would be one thing.
But I did want to react to something Cap said earlier.
Don't play around with the PFP because I fucked around and found out that they will take your blue checkmark from you.
I just got it back this morning, but I was in the penalty box for about 10 days
because, as you and Steve both know, I like to change my PFP up from time to time.
So you can put the frogs at bay by letting them know that I've got to hold on to my blue check, Captain.
Sorry, meant on mute. There you go you go i was gonna say so pfp change probably i've been teasing the
the bring back of the ape and pony show i don't know the doesn't have quite the same ring to it
but i don't know if i could pull off the ape and frog show maybe maybe there's something there steve
but you you're the you're the marketing mind maybe you can think of some branding for me
frog frog and pony show it rhymes with the original phrase so just think about that frog
and pony show yeah it's it's uh it's something where you could definitely use i'll think some
branding around it caps like cabuzzi turns me to the branding he's like i think we're doing a
sponsorship uh sponsored uh segment with zed run i was like well why don't we do which why don't we
do a segment called which horse are you backing and we choose three things under a specific topic
of the week and rank them and he's like all right we got, we got it. So I'll do some thinking on that.
I've done some similar stuff with DraftKings and some other stuff.
So we'll see if we can come up with something for Cap related to the frogs as we go.
Because I can tell Cap is very excited about his clean hoodie frog purchase as he's going.
But that said, I'm going to go.
Win frog hoodies.
Is this a thing?
Like the one in my frog?
No, no.
So that's one of the things we said from the get-go is merch is not a utility.
And so we're not going to create merch.
But if one of the frogs wants to create merch, they can use the logo and pay us a royalty on it.
And they can make the money on it.
I know a guy.
Steve, you might have to – that might be your project.
There you go.
Yeah, these frogs are – also these frogs are just unbelievably jacked.
The pectorials and deltoids on these frogs are pretty impressive sternums you built on them.
So I think –
I modeled them after myself.
Of course.
I was going to say, was this beside Doc's and you modeled them after me?
No, that was mine.
I modeled them after myself for sure.
All of us in the 40-ish.
I'm 39, but I'll be in the 40 club in June.
All of us in the 40 club range look exactly like these frogs
from the neck down sans the green skin.
Or maybe with the green skin.
I don't know.
We don't know what Pons looks like.
But that said, thanks to everybody for stopping by this morning.
It has been a wonderful morning.
Looking forward, like I said, Ryan Carson in 17 minutes. No affiliation outside of the fact that he's a homie who shows up
sometimes and we show up to his show as well we appreciate him uh rigs interviewing luca at noon
did you tease thursdays we talked about tomorrow's show i don't know if you teased thursdays yet
yeah earlier teased thursday we're going to be doing a uh sort of a super space back to back
with ryan carson So exciting times there.
Violetta and apparently super spaces tomorrow.
So we're going to have a pack show tomorrow,
pack show Thursday,
and then we'll roll into the wonderful holiday weekend with everybody.
Cop and I are obviously going to be here on Friday. We do co-ops one of these days.
Ryan's in charge of that because when Steve does the co-ops,
it's like whack-a-mole with 150 links.
This is not even an exaggeration. Steve's co-op game has been lacking. It's a whack-a-mole with 150 links. This is not even an exaggeration.
Steve's PoAp game has been lacking.
It's a slight exaggeration.
There's 100 links, okay?
So the way it's worked is, for people who don't know,
when Twitter Space is Rugged, we did a Discord show.
We got two colorways of PoAps made by Outer Lumen and Clubhouse Archives,
James Costa.
But because I couldn't figure out the secret word at the moment
because I haven't done a lot of PoAps, i just spammed 100 links in the discord and was like
click one it's dead after it's used good luck to y'all and so uh we've been doing that a little
bit with the po apps and then did a similar thing for the mint condition spaces yesterday it was
also very poorly designed because i have no design i have the design skills of a uh i don't know
like i'd say a four-year-old but four-year-olds could probably outdraw me a lot of times, so it's not
good. But that said,
No daily dose today.
Oh, no daily dose, mate.
I'm a liar. No daily dose.
You have nothing to do at 1030. You can actually get
some work done or pay attention to your family
until Riggs goes. And Circles, go ahead and plug.
Hey, two things real quick.
One, there is no daily dose today.
He's taking the day off, but he will be back on Wednesday.
And then if you want me to plug, I can plug Afternoon NFT,
but I don't have to.
Give it a plug before we – you're up here.
You're a DJ Network member.
Let's go.
Yeah, I'm Art and our Bundy down there.
We have a daily show afternoon NFT from 1 p.m. Eastern,
typically an hour,
kind of just continuing the vein of,
hey, let's keep talking about stuff
and having good conversations.
So yeah, that's about it.
Steve, I just wanted to say,
you guys,
I'd be more than happy to make us POAPs
if you ever want.
I will bother you for that, Mike,
for sure.
We need all the help.
I'm on it.
Hit me up.
Yeah, this has been my way of passively aggressive
asking for a POAP intern.
So thank you for coming to the answer.
We'll also passively aggressive
taking a shot at my ability
to make and distribute POAPs,
which is 1000% fair,
but 100% understandable.
You can teach me how to distribute them
because I have no idea how to do that
and I'll make them for us.
Awesome.
We'll figure it out.
I've got to look at some frog traits.
So I've got to go to some plague and look at some traits and decide, you know,
if and what I'm buying, depending on liquidity here,
if I can sell some things and move some things around
because it sounds like all the cool kids are doing it.
Thanks again for everybody who, you everybody who jumped in this morning.
We will be back bright and early at 8 a.m. tomorrow morning.
Have a wonderful, wonderful day, everybody.
This episode is brought to you by DGEN Network,
the only community-based Web3 media network,
bringing you the very best content in the NFT and cryptocurrency space.
Please visit DGEN.network and check out our other great shows. Thank you.
