Note: The Venly Expert Talk Show is produced for the ear and designed to be heard. If you are able, we strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes emotion and emphasis that’s not on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting it in print.
Alexandra Arens talks with Mack Flavelle, the brain behind Crypto Kitties and the Big Head Club, and also responsible for a portion of Dapper Labs This time around we are talking to Mack, a guy that has really gotten things done in Web3, about his tips on how to get things done in Web3. So what kind of tips can you expect? Here’s the first one:
“Design for the Degen’s when launching, aim for the tipping point but have a plan for muggles”.
Don’t worry, he explains it.
Mileage for those who want to listen on the go: This podcast clocks in at around 51 minutes… so head out for a six-miler and let Alex and Mack keep you company.
Overview
LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE SHOW:
- Venly Expert Talks
- Big Head Club
- Dapper Labs
- Crypto Kitties
- Oni Ronin
- Dr. Seuss
- Metamask
- Azuki
- NFT
- Aziom Zen
- Mack Flavelle
Podcast Transcript
[00:00:00] Alexandra Arens: Hi, this is Alex from the future. I just finished recording this awesome episode with Mack. And I just want to say a couple things. First of all, it was an amazing discussion with a lot of awesome content. I definitely recommend listening. However, it’s a little bit chaotic. Mack has COVID and this is definitely one of our more explicit episodes, but like I said, I completely recommend it.Where else are you going to get to hear such an interesting person talk about such interesting projects? So, enjoy.
Soft Music
Intro:
Welcome to the Venly expert talks, where we aim to inspire Web 3 builders with great stories from great minds. I’m your host, Alexandra Arens. And I’d like to remind you that you can always reach out to us on Twitter, Discord, or LinkedIn with ideas for the podcast and questions for our guests.
[00:01:06] Alexandra Arens: Welcome to episode 30 of the Venly expert talks today. I am joined by Mack Flavelle. The brain behind Crypto Kitties and the Big Head Club, and also responsible for a portion of Dapper Labs., is here to talk with me about his five tips for building success on the Web 3. So, thank you for taking the time, Mack. [00:01:28] Mack: Thank you for making room for me to take the time. [00:01:32] Alexandra Arens: Anytime. Yes, if we can start out with your background and life in crypto. Everything like that. [00:01:42] Mack: Yes, I got fired from virtually every minimum wage job in existence. It’s certainly like I’ve been fired for more jobs than most human beings will ever have in their life.And I was walking through my house one time, and I thought, I just want to make video games. And a friend was sitting on the couch, and said, “Well, then why don’t you go to video game school?” And my mind blew out the back of my head, and I was like, “That’s a thing.” and I thought about it and I was like, I guess it is like somebody has to make those video games they play.
So I went from having literally dozens and dozens of minimum wage jobs to working on video games and then, start-ups, and between those two things, I ended up working with a friend of mine. Roham worked at a company called Axiom Zen, which he and his brother Sam started. I did a bunch of different shit for them.
I helped them do recruiting and all sorts of crazy things. I introduced them to their first employee and that kind of thing. And then eventually I got really into VR. And so I wrote a blog post called “VR was going to change the world” the day before Facebook bought Oculus for 2 billion dollars. Whatever it was, I was like, I’m fucking prophetic.
This is amazing. It didn’t change the world, but I felt very much like Del fuck. Yes, no, I know. I know, you know? Yes. And it’s why you say to people like, “No, this shit is going to change the world.” just like on a timeline that I don’t have the patience for. I’m not fucking sitting around waiting for this.
So anyhow, Roham actually, at the time, was like, “Okay, we’re going to buy your VR boutique media business.” There’s a fancy-ass way to say I had a newsletter, but Roham was very good at that kind of thing at framing. Mm-hmm, the best introductions I’ve ever had in my life were Rohan’s introducing me to people. I would read what he said and I’d be like, “Holy fuck.”
That person is amazing. That person is me, and unbelievably. That is all true. It’s like he didn’t even mix it up. He just made you feel really good about what was true about yourself. That’s magic, man. That guy is magic. Anyhow, I went and worked with him at Axiom Zen. I brought over my hammer and tusk, which was a cool name for a VR thing because in, um, Alison Wonderland, the oysters get taken out of the sea by the carpenter and the walrus, and the tools by which they possess the minds of the children are the hammer and the tusk, the carpenter and the walrus.
Yes. I love the poetry there., Yes, I went working with Roham. Yes. I was very particular. I wouldn’t tell anybody where I got my name from for a long ass time. I was like most hipster names I could find, and we got a good hipster logo and all that shit.
but when I went work for him, actually, when I worked for, even when I started working with him, he was like, okay, like you have this interesting little media property built around this. What other kind of technology stacks did you build this around? What are other interesting technologies emerging? How about blockchain?
I remember being like, “Fuck no, that’s a stupid idea.” After a few years, we were building a lot of apps, including consumer apps, and he was like, “Hey man, it’s time for you to make the blockchain fun.””Hey man, no, it’s not,” I said. What a fucking dumb idea. Nobody likes the blockchain. It’s for anarchists and libertarian mouth breathing, neck-bearding pieces of shit.
And, I was loosely right at the time, at least. And he was like, “Yes, but shut the fuck up and do your job, you know?” And I was like, “Probably should.” do like my job. A great deal And so he did. And, I have been wanting to make a gardening game for at least 10 years where you plant seeds and then birds come on butterflies.
And you’re like collecting bird songs. I look forward to this classic sound of birds every morning. And I’m really compelled by that. Yes, it is. I’m like, “Yes, it’s that I haven’t made that game yet, but.” It mattered to me. Mmm-hmm. And at the time, with all the consumer apps, there was this premise that I had, which was, it sounds like I’m kidding, but I wasn’t.
And it was that you should not explain why you use cats. You should explain why you don’t use cats. They’re opt-out, not opt-in. It’s like, if you’re going to build a start-up and you’re not in San Francisco, that’s fine. But you have to explain why you are not in San Francisco. And, like, there are many valid reasons, but you must explain why you default to yes.
I’m not in San Francisco, and this isn’t a battleground for that city. The nature of that business and the nature of building consumer apps is that you should include cats. And I had finally seen Crypto Punks, and I really liked Wonder Woman. And I saw crypto punks that looked like Wonder Woman. And I was like, “Oh shit.”
I’m not going to tell anybody that I’m about to go spend $35 on a fucking JPEG, because that’s embarrassing, but I will. And so, I went and bought a $35 coin, which I still own. Wow. And so anyhow, after those three things, I went back to work and I was like, “Guys, we’re going to make cats fuck to mine bitcoin.” That’s obviously what we have to do now.
And the team, like I have no idea what you’re talking about at all. That doesn’t actually make any sense. And Didier is the CTO over there? He said no, but you know, if we wrote a new, I mean Dider, not me, he said, if I wrote a new proposal for the Ethereum consortium, we could get a new standard implemented on this programmable blockchain.
Then you could have cats fuck, because you will have non-fungible tokens. I was like, sure, man, I don’t understand what any of those words mean, but I just want the cats fucked for the Bitcoin and that’s where Crypto Kitties came from., and so that’s how I got into crypto and that’s where the 721 standard comes from.
Obviously, we did not invent NFTs. On the other hand, most of the JPEG empires that exist in this world did. Or a direct consequence of the cat fucking, and then that blew up. Right. It has become a big deal. And so, we started a new company. Ron gave me something like, “Hey, you’re going to be the co-founder and the chief creative officer on this one.”
I was like, “sure.” Babe, it’s super cool. Let’s do it. Yes. It sounds like a good time. And so, we went and raised a little bit of money, and then we made a thing called Cheese Wizard, which nobody remembers, but it’s fucking awesome. But no, it wasn’t. It was almost awesome. It wasn’t awesome at all, but it was almost awesome based on Highlander.
She made up what JB thought was the second-best show ever made. Then I went to New York with my friend KB and we walked into the NBA’s office and we were like, “We just made a lot of fucking money on pink cats, fucking on the blockchain.” And you had Steph Curry and LeBron James sitting on the bench.
What are you doing? And they were like, “I don’t know, can we do it with you?” We’re like, “Yes, man, that’d be cool.” And so, we signed Top Shop and we made Top Shop and then I left Dapper and I went back to making video games. And then I started Big Head, and that is my story of crypto and NFTs and such.
[00:09:07] Alexandra Arens: Great, detailed, wonderful trail through that. Okay, and when did you start the Big Head Club? That was definitely more recent.
[00:13:38] Alexandra Arens: All right.
[00:13:40] Mack: I ramble. Sorry. [00:13:41] Alexandra Arens: No, it’s good. Lots of them. Lots of yes. Rambling is probably a good word for it, but it’s fun. It’s interesting. So, it’s probably like picking your favorite child, but what is your favorite project you’ve worked on so far? [00:13:54] Mack: Oni Ronin. It’s not like making my favorite challenge. I have got two children. I’d have trouble picking my favorite, but these ones that are Oni Ronin are OK., So I guess it is amazing. So, I guess it’s like, somebody said to me, it’s like farts-to-heart humour. That’s really it, like it is fart jokes and mm-hmm, you know, it’s a bunch of stoner comedy, literally called stoner cats, and it’s also fucking touching. It’s like it’s about a woman who’s coming to terms with dementia and losing her mind. And it’s really done very poignantly, and it’s like, “Oh man, that’s fucked, it’s heavy.”But, but it’s also hilarious. And they’re like, you know, that’s obviously really neat to be a part of. And I fucking love Ghostbusters. And the fact that we got to be involved with bringing mini puffs to the blockchain. We also created one of the craziest mechanics I’ve ever seen. One reason that we are rethinking some of the celebrity work is that people miss the stake.
They’re looking at the sizzle. You’re like, “No, no.” That’s like some goddamn Wago shit under there. You know, like eating that. That is delicious. And people, have a look at the sizzle. That’s not good. The Ghostbusters We didn’t get to see the movie before we made the NFTs, but we’re talking to Jason and Gill, the guys who wrote and directed the movie.
And they’re like, “Do you like the state puff marsh man?” Of course, we do. I love the state puff marsh man from the eighties. What kind of stupid ass question is that? And they’re like, okay, but there are mini ones and they’re going in this movie. And we’re like, oh my God, that’s so fucking cool. And then they said they travel in packs. And we’re like, okay, we can. We can work with that. Like, that’s weird. And so, then we watched a couple of clips of them and we were like, okay, how do you bring that into NFT? Trying to push the industry forward, the medium forward, and expand the possibilities of the technology.
Remember that we started with cat fucking? Like, we don’t dig ourselves too seriously, but also, we like to do work that has a consequence. So, I have COVID, by the way. So, we’re like, okay if you own a mini puff, That’s in your wallet. Then we made 500 more mini puffs called the mob, and they will travel around from one wallet to another only if you own a mini puff.
So now you have a new NFT visiting you, and it’s got a fancy background and it’s different, but you can only capture it. If you have a ghost trap NFT, which we gave out to our community for free, and so then they take turns watching each other’s Wallace, looking to see the mob, moving through it and then messaging each other and being like, “Oh my God, you have, and it only lasts for like 40 minutes, because it’s like 250 blocks.”
And I always tell people, I am the kitty part of Crypto Kitties, not the crypto. So, I have no fucking idea. Why does the solidity contract allow us to only leave a 15-year wallet for 250 blocks? But that is a thing. And so, this mob roams around these airs and blockchain and it’s still is. It’s almost done, but they’re still out.
Visiting the walls So people own that’s cool ass, weird shit, but still, your question was what’s my favorite and it’s on Oni Ronin. And of course, the legacy of crypto kitties is fucking incredible. One of my favorite things I’ve ever worked on is Dr. Seuss because I fucking hail the God and you know, that’s really, really cool.
I don’t think any of the Dr. Seuss work did ever make it to market, but Susan, who runs Dr. Seuss, and me at Dapper, used to call each other and have a good old-time scheming about the future. Susan is one of the most inspiring and impressive people I’ve ever met, and I should call her. Yes, but, but Oni Ronin is unlike anything else.
Oni Ronin is like, you buy the NFT and we made this bravery mechanic, which is really crazy. And, like, yes, you can take your Oni Ronin to the Trial of Ascension. And see if you have one of the 88 golden Ronan’s in it. You probably don’t. But we have the real Haiku, written by real samurai at their death, like 800 years ago.
Well, from 800 to 700, or 800 to 100 years ago, we have history lessons. We have flower-arranging lessons. We have meditation classes; we have high-cool lessons. We have Japanese language lessons, and you unlock all of that shit by buying one of these on Ronan. And if you collect all the custom Oni, so when you send an Oni to the trial of Ascension, you get to hear it’s like a literally accurate historical Samurai written out loud. The scenes were written by a real samurai. These haiku were written by real samurai when they were dying, but most people don’t get a golden chance. They just got one of the fallen. And in order to make the fall slightly less boring, we made 10 different shades of fall.
So, you can have a blue dead one or a red dead one or a printed one or whatever. If you collect all 10 of those and send them to Ron, hell dot E, then the artist behind Oni Ronan will make you a custom. Ronan, I called you and I was like, “What do you love?” And then we go get a custom demonic made for you.
Seven people on earth have done this so far. And I’ve seen only two of the customs so far. And they’re fucking crazy. Somebody said strawberries. So we have a strawberry. I don’t know if you’ve seen the other Ronan, but they look like, fuck you. Heavy metal, hardcore, mm-hmm, fantasy shit. And somebody’s like, “Can you make strawberries?”
And we’re like, “Of course we can.” Of course, we can. And so, yes, I just saw that last night, and I’m like, “woo Lance.” You’re crazy, man. But it looks good. I think it’s cool. Awesome. Cool. So, I like this collection. And, and oh, the comic we’re making is fucking badass. This is very interesting to me. This is like Japanese history, but also not Otaku. We’re blowing this shit and fucking up. It’s just some dumb honky who goes stomping on some other people’s shit.
and doesn’t like to respect the traditions and history of the people. Right. I am not interested in doing that. So, um, we got this as an 84-page comic made. And the whole thing about Oni Ronan? is that anything that takes place, in reality, is historically accurate. We literally have like semi-samurai, we have fucking weird-ass shit.
Once they enter the onion realm, we get like these kit snakes coming with Venus fly trap tails and robot heads and all sorts of Dudy shit. But all of that is the Oni real realm, the fantasy realm. When it’s in real life, we are very, very historically. That’s very important to me. Mm-hmm, and so we got this comic written by Japanese people in Japan about Japanese history, and it’s really fucking cool.
You’re learning about things like no bongas nephews and all of that. And then, once the hero dies—spoiler alert—the hero dies—and he turns into an Oni. Oh man, it all busted out. Like it gets crazy. Having this super cool comic. And I think I just secured a pretty neat publishing deal with one of my childhood heroes, and da da.
So, I really love Oni Ronin. And that was, once again, a rambling answer to your question.
[00:20:50] Alexandra Arens: No, great. You definitely put across your love for it, so it’s good. Yes. All right. We’d better jump into your tips though. Can you tell me your first tip for success? [00:21:03] Mack: I think I can probably tell you that I think that something like design for Degen’s when launching, aim for the tipping point, and then have a plan for muggles. Right. I wrote these down. So, I’m reading what I wrote to myself. Mm-hmm. [00:21:18] Alexandra Arens: Tip one, design for the Degen’s when launching, aim for the tipping point, but then have a plan for muggles. [00:21:27] Mack: The world has changed, right? Five years is a very long time in crypto, but one of the lessons from Crypto Kitties was that we made a bunch of choices specifically for Degen’s.We didn’t call them Degen’s at the time. That word wasn’t a thing, but we made choices for people who loved Ethereum, and one of the most obvious, but I just like to bring it up as like an effigy of the larger series of choices we made was that we priced things in ETH. is still done on every major NFT. platform, marketplace, blah, blah, world.
That might be US dollar price as well or something else, but it’s probably not, but pricing is, we did that. We did a bunch of shit that was like very, very, and God, you challenged me to name more. I will have some trouble, but I used to have a better list of all the decisions we made, like when there was a fork in the woods and you could go left or right.
And the left was for the Degen’s. We went for the Degen’s. We did a bunch of shit that made this really, really blockchain native. And the reason that worked out for us is because it enabled these maniacs with their piles of internet monopoly money to come spend it. So this plotting of a tipping point is like, “We didn’t do this on purpose.”
We just stumbled through lots of things, but I was here in this. I’m now at my parents’ house. I live at my parents’ house. I didn’t live here at the time, but I was visiting them, and I was walking up the stairs at the end of the hall. And I got a text message that was like, “You just sold a $30,000 cat.”
Now, today, that doesn’t sound that crazy because, you know, we’ve done all, you know, it’s been the last five years, but at the time, nothing like this had ever happened. Ever happened? This was fucking ludicrous. The idea that somebody spent $30,000 on one of our cartoon cats so that they could fuck another cartoon cat to make a third cartoon is absurd.
The cat was absolutely preposterous, but they did. And then, I think within 24 hours, somebody spent a hundred thousand dollars on the cat, and this was just truly like We didn’t know what to do. We didn’t know anything. What we did know is that every major media outlet on earth called at that point.
So, we formed that tipping point where you’re like, “If so many people had bought these things for a hundred dollars each, nobody would’ve cared, but you sell them for a hundred thousand dollars each when you hit that tipping point, you hit that milestone.” It’s like he rings the bell and the fucking maniac comes out.
And so, designing yourself to have that kind of story and making it easy for people to like take the payments, well obviously we took them in ETH but price and Ethereum, these other choices we made now to be clear that we did a bunch of other cool shit, like Everybody at the time, this libertarian, you know, I lean on a bit, but there was some strong propensity to some counter-culture perspectives, et cetera, thought they were fucking Neo in the matrix.
And like blockchain websites reflected, the whole red pill, blue pill thing. I haven’t gotten totally under control yet, but like, oh, I can see the make-drag. And my website is vertical green fucking mono font text. And we made a pink-ass website. It was like, there was like, pastel pink. Nobody in blockchain has never done anything like that.
So, on the one hand, I mean, I’m contradicting myself. We made a bunch of choices for them, and there weren’t any NFT people because NFT people didn’t exist. But for the Ethereum people for the neckbeards, we made a bunch of choices to make this something that they could respect and something that was technically interesting.
If you looked under the hood, something that was designed in such a way, we made mistakes, like the art wasn’t on-chain, but we also understood the mistakes that we made. And for the most part, we didn’t make those mistakes, and yes, designing for the people who can do this, the people who are already in it, was really, really useful and helpful to us.
And I think that’s literally, probably the same today. right? If you can go convince You could convince a bunch of people to buy their first NFT, or you could convince the apes to buy your shit. You should convince the apes to buy your shit. Everybody else will come if the apes really snap up your shit. So, I think that rule is probably still applicable.
[00:25:40] Alexandra Arens: Okay.
[00:25:40] Mack: Boom. [00:25:41] Alexandra Arens: And then what was the third part of that tip? Have a, plan for the rest, [00:25:47] Mack: have a plan for the muggles. Yes, when they finally show up. What are you going to do about it? You know, muggles don’t do magic. So muggles in this expression mean, like, right, the people who don’t use blockchain or whatever.Yes, no, it’s just that, like getting those first people, getting the people who are Degen’s, getting the people who are obsessed with your stuff, not obsessed with the industry who you want, doing their stuff, getting them in is like getting to the roller coaster at the top of the first hill. But then, once you let go, it’s got to go somewhere.
You got to have some plan for how all these normies are going to show up and, like, enjoy your shit. And we never did that with crypto kitties. We didn’t figure that out. And like, when was the last time you bought a crypto kitten? You know, that story sort of speaks for itself about not having that plan started up.
I don’t know if there ever was a plausible plan like that. We could have long philosophical debates about what could have worked for making the muggle stick around for that. But the consequence, I mean, maybe the answer was that we had to top shop after that. That was our plan for the muggles, not direct one-to-one translation because they had switched chains, but that would, I would say, I would say like a design for the Degen’s. Everybody knows that’s not a mainstream success. You aren’t going to be the next Walt Disney. If you have 6,000 people willing to spend a hundred thousand fucking dollars on your apes, that’s not Disney-esque, and some of the blockchain people I talked to love to point out to me that there will never be another Walt Disney.
And I like that. That’s true. Mad Dog Jones is a big artist in this space. I said something to the next Da Vinci. And he was like, “There’s no fucking Da Vinci.” He said that it was an elephant. Now we are bees. There are thousands of bees that are the future of art. And I was like, “Oh, that’s fucking cool.” Yes.
And it’s like everybody has an audience, right? I met this guy named Noah in LA, and I had a crazy time in LA. I went and met some, like some people you’ve heard of. And the only one that anybody else gave a fuck about was this guy named Noah. And I was like, who the fuck is Noah? I don’t know who he is.
He’s young. He’s pretty. That’s all. I looked him up on the internet. He had 36 million fucking followers on Tik Tok. I like, you know, that makes Ashley Kucher look like an emerging star. That is some bonkers fucking numbers. That’s crazy shit., but he’s still not the Da Vinci of what he does. We now live in an era where there’s so much signal that the noise-to-signal ratio means that even if you thought you were an elephant-like Da Vinci shit, was not seen by 36 million people in this life.
But there will never be another da Vinci. There are no more elephants. There are only bees. Some of them are big ass bees, but they’re still bees. Hmm.
[00:28:40] Alexandra Arens: Okay, All right. Tip two: aim for wild transparency. They will find out. Tell them when there’s no gun pointed at your head.
[00:28:52] Mack: The most recent lesson of this is Azuki, right? The Azuki guy was trying to hide that he was involved in these earlier projects, which is too bad for him. It’s too bad for those projects too. There’s no point in hiding things in this space. As you have, you have a bunch of people with a significant financial incentive, um, in success, poking around your shit.It’s going to come out. So, with crypto kitties, I haven’t figured out, you know, the fish can’t smell the water or whatever. I’ve never been able to figure out how much of my blockchain indoctrination is fact versus just from the school of Dider. I was raised in the school of Dider.
That’s where I learned all of this. So, I don’t know how much of my opinions are tainted by just. You know, the fact that he had a bad morning once or something, or a good morning, but, we took some shit really seriously. In other words, you should not fuck with what is on-chain. Once something is on-chain, it’s supposed to be there forever.
And this idea that you would just pull down your contract and update it, that felt like sacrilege to us. We left the option open because this is a smart software design. You don’t assume that you’re smart enough to get it right the first time. So, we grow to contract essentially with a pause button, but we also put a string on that pause button.
And we did pull it down, and then we paused it, pulled it down, fixed something, and put it back up. And I think and hope we eventually pull the string off the contract so that anybody looking could be like, “Oh yes, I know, this is true decentralization.” They can’t even change this anymore., but the first thing was art.
We got, like, we fucked up some art versus the metadata. And now I see collections do it all the time. Now collections are semi-permanently changing their metadata, being like, oh no, no, no, no. We spelled blue wrong. I would’ve fucking died if we had smelled blue wrong on Crypto Kitties. By the time we made it to the last year,
Yes, I fucking mislabelled a trait in the metadata and I freaked out, and I was having it fit. And I think I called Jordan from behind doodles, and I was like, “What am I going to do?” He’s like, “Change it, man.” I’m like, no one told me, like, you could never change the metadata. This is a printing error. Oh my God.
Just like, relax, dude, change the metadata. It’s going to get you some gas. You’re done. And that was really, really hard for me to accept. But in the beginning, we also tried to not like the first time we fixed something on-chain. We tried not to tell anybody about it. And we got caught. Just, just tell people about the shit you’re going to do.
You’re going to fuck it up. And like, if the people that you’ve sold your NFT to cannot make room for the mistakes that you are going to make, you should sort that out very quickly, get them out of your community and keep people who understand the humanity of your own journey through all of this. Don’t fucking lie to people in NFTs on the blockchain. When there’s a bunch of money involved, they care. They’re going to find out. They’re going to fuck you.
[00:31:57] Alexandra Arens: Tip three. You’re not smart enough to get it. All right. Design flexibility into your systems.
[00:32:11] Mack: And you’ll hear me talk a lot about how, like what I’ve learned from Dider, Roham, and me, we’re the co-founders of Dapper, and those two are brilliant.Both are amazing for very different reasons. They punch way above their weight on QIS, or like they are way smarter than me. Neither one is as fun, though, and really, what are we optimizing for? But, um, we designed for flexibility. So, with Crypto Kitties, there were 32 genes possible in each category.
Like now, we called them attributes and inside categories. And when we launched, we had no idea what all of them would be or how we would use them. We essentially like, it’s like building a building and putting in some extra rooms and somebody’s like, “Oh, is that the nursery?” Or is that the pantry? And you’re like, “I don’t know.”
What I do know is that we plan on being here for a long time, and we aren’t smart enough to have perfect clarity on the future. So, I think it makes sense to build an extra room. Maybe it’s going to be your shy boyfriend. Who’s going to move in there? Maybe we’re going to have a kid, maybe your goddamn mother-in-law, whatever it is.
As you could imagine, there’s going to be room. A need for room in our home, in the future, designing the smart contracts and all this Web 3 stuff in a similar way. Things are changing so fast. There’s absolutely no way you got it. All right. Whoever the fuck you are, however smart you are, you didn’t get it.
All right. And so, you design flexibility into your system so that you can manage your own stupidity. And that of the other people you’re going to work with is a really, really good idea that takes different shapes depending on what kind of system you are designing, but like, flexibility as a principle in the joints, right?
I live near Vancouver, BC. As I told you before we turned on the thing, there’s not a single thing built out of brick around here. There’s nothing old around here. Everything is less than a hundred years old. It’s the anti-Europe in that way. And it is really neat in some ways. It really feels temporary and boring in some ways, because nothing is old.
But everything’s made out of wood that bends in earthquakes because we like earthquakes can fuck up our shit. And so, we have soft wood. I feel like too many people are building software out of NFTs and Web 3 blah, blah, blah, out of, um, cinder blocks. Not Cedar, and Cedar is a good tool for an unpredictable future.
Something that is a little bit soft in the joints. Eh, so like I said, the practical example was when we said in Crypto Kitties, “Okay, we’re going to have 32 traits and we don’t know what they all do.” Oh. And then, like, let me just put a point on that. We didn’t tell anybody about it. This is not the transparency thing from before, because there’s no negative consequence to the user for this.
There’s no such thing as a gotcha. It was just like, we’re in an action movie, and at the end of the action movie, the bad guy was standing over with the good guy, and he was like, “I’m a fucking get you.” And then the good guy had a gun in the, what do you call that? The ankle holster Nobody knew about it.
You designed flexibility into your defence against the bad guy system. You need an ankle holster gun, and you don’t fucking tell people about it., and in the case of crypto, that was like extra slots in the gene arrangement. So that one, because we just didn’t have time to design everything before we started shipping things, and unlike everybody else in crypto at the time, we at least built something. Everybody else is doing ICOs and trying to get you to give them money for their bullshit, being like, “In the future, we will do something.” We built a functioning fucking DAP called the Crypto Kitties through smart contracts wrapped together in a beautiful website, but as I said, we also had things where we were like, Yes. Another way to think of it was pressure release valves. How, if you are engineering a system? A system, by any definition of any system, will have pressure moving through it.
Typically, that’s the point of a system is having something like energy move from one side to the other. Energy can form pressure, and if you design the perfect system, then you don’t need pressure-release valves. But if you design the perfect system, why the fuck are you listening to me? You know.
[00:36:39] Alexandra Arens: Tip four: Nubes are expensive. Tread carefully. [00:36:43] Mack: Customer support is really, really expensive. Like it’s, um, a human problem. Still, after we launched Crypto Kitties, we didn’t expect it to go quite as it did.And so, I somehow ended up with my email saying, “Do you have a problem?” Press this button for support. Yes. Okay, so yes, that was my personal inbox. R. I P my personal inbox. It was not. It was not a good thing. Now, as I watched thousands of emails come in and just sat there and like wiped semi-openly and was like, “Oh,” I saw one of my heroes’ names go by and I clicked on that one.
I was like, “Land Lee, VLAN Lee.” Oh, my God. and I emailed him. I was like, “Can I talk to you about this?” And then I got to talk to a guy that I really, really looked up to. And so, that was kind of fun. But that’s not the point of the story. Funny. The story is that nubes are expensive. I think with Dapper with the basketball thing. I heard some horror stories about how they had to manage wild, wild, wild customer demands, but it’s like, you don’t like remember the dialup days of the internet?
Alexandra Arens: I do, thank you.
Mack: Wow, you are aging very gracefully. In the dial-up days of the internet, it was kind of frustrating, like waiting for them. beep beep, that was okay because you didn’t spend a million dollars on gas, you just waited. And when you were done, it was so that you could go read something like Crow fan fiction or something.
It wasn’t so that you could go sell an NFT for a hundred thousand dollars. And so, like, okay, app store, VR, blockchain app store, VR, NFTs. The App store started. It was a closed app store before they took the gates off. And let third-party developers build inside the app store. And you had millions of people using the app store before you opened it up to the world.
It was a battle-tested system, brought to life by corporate America with only as much openness as they could very, very carefully control. And there are lots of reasons to. Applaud or criticize that decision, but it worked really well. VR came out, and VR was crazy because people like me loved it.
And a bunch of very, very well-funded VC’s and corporations and other things were all like, “Oh my God, this is the future.” This is fucking amazing. Let’s throw billions and billions and billions of dollars at this. The VR didn’t really work for some people, but they still liked it. The number of people who love VR is very small.
Again, no money to be lost, right? You, you, you buy the VR game or app either downloaded for free in the old days or now you spend 30 bucks on it. And if you don’t like it, you’re like, “Oh, that was a cheap night at the bar.” And I’m not doing that again. But. Whatever, I have a bigger problem tomorrow than these fucking NFTs. The NFTs go wrong.
And like, somebody just lost a fucking car’s worth of value overnight because of where it is. So it’s a very different time, and there’s a lot of money involved, and it’s back to the rambling, rambling, not working of the early days of the internet. It didn’t matter. whereas now it really, really, really matters.
And, onboarding people is hard and expensive, and onboarding people, when there’s this much at stake, is really, really hard and expensive, and everybody really cares and everybody really needs to figure out this shit. And in, you know, that app ecosystem, millions of people were using the software before.
Any sort of openness was brought to that ecosystem. whereas we have started with a decentralized open ecosystem. We have a bunch of awful UX that doesn’t make any fucking sense. The Metamask has improved dramatically, but it’s still hard to use. I’m still trying to explain it to people. No, no, you’re just holding the keys on your cold wallets, not the NFTs, not there, but just to the thing so that you can get to the NFTs, which are still on the blockchain.
None of this makes any sense. None of this is easy. And so, onboarding people with this is really expensive. And if there’s a reason to do that, if you’re like Starbucks and you want to own the loyalty program or the future, and you think that’s powered by NFTs, then maybe it’s worth the cost.
But if you’re a cute little and non-project-doing, you know, the bearded goat ladies or whatever your cool little PFP project is going to be, you don’t want to. I mean, if you’re actually going to be a non-rugby bull and you don’t give a fuck, but if you’re not a shit Lord in that regard, then it’s really expensive.
And just like that, if you choose to sell things, the apes will be shitty online. Right. They’ll go and like give you a bunch of shit on Twitter, but they know more about NFTs than you do. And so it begins. Choose your poison. I would personally prefer that poison to onboarding new people for the most part.
[00:42:04] Alexandra Arens: Good. tip five. Your group of NFT owners is not a community. [00:42:11] Mack: Here is my measure of a community, tuna cast roll, in your time of hardship. Do they bring you tuna tartar? Because that’s what it’s like. When your shit is fucked up, when your mom dies, and you’re like, I don’t know, a place in the Midwest, and your neighbors hear that your mom died.They bring you enough food that there isn’t room in your freezer. And you sure as fuck aren’t going to be cooking for X period of time because the community rallied around you. That is what a community is, and people who all own the same NFT over 90% because they thought the price would go up. That’s what they’re here for.
Do you have a community of people that you collectively own stock with? No, if you have a financial advisor, you don’t know who else your financial advisor is, financial advisory. You don’t get together at a disco and be like, “Hey, sure, let’s do it, man.” Financial advice sure is a tough fucking bar these days.
Now, if you’re not buying NFTs as financial instruments, then maybe this doesn’t apply to you, but 90% of people buying NFTs are, to be clear. Bighead Club NFTs are not investments. Do not buy big head clubs, NFTs, or investments. This is not an investment, I repeat. This is not an investment. Having cleared that up for the rest of you buying NFTs as financial instruments, the thing that you do on discord afterward is not a community.
While the price goes up, you are all very nice to each other. And while the price goes down, you ignore each other or are shitty to each other. This is not a community. This is like, that’s, that’s just a group of people with an aligned financial incentive planning on spending a short period of time together.
and so on. I like it, I look forward to a world where we all recognize that one of the things I’ve come to realize to be true in my life is when my words and my actions align. It creates a minimal surface area for chaos. It is the path of least resistance. I can move through the rain drops. We are living in this world where we talk about the community to describe this thing that is very much not a community and that it will be easier for all of us when we’re honest with ourselves about what we’re doing here. And there are amazing communities in NFTs. I’m having trouble naming too many of them. The Big Club is pretty fun. I’ll be honest, but like, these people go take yoga lessons with each other and do Japanese history lessons with each other and participate in drawing contests together and do a bunch of weird-ass shit.
It may happen in the community as well, but yes, I think people need to be realistic about what their community is, right? When, when it stopped being really, really, really easy to make a lot of money playing crypto kitties, everybody stopped playing crypto kitties. The people who didn’t are now rich. The people who didn’t and who stuck around are Jordan and Jimmy. They are ducks.
And these are the monsters of modern NFT space. They’ve all done incredible things, but they’ve stuck through more than one winter. They stuck around when I didn’t stick around. They stuck around and loved this shit and were all about it. Those people, by the way, probably make up a pretty good community when Jordan needs something.
I don’t know if he and Jimmy like each other, but when they need something, they can call upon each other. because they’ve been through so much shit together. That is what a community has done. And when the going got tough, the tough did not get going. We’re like, “Okay, well, we’re going to watch all of our bags dissolve to nothing.”
And we’re still aren’t fucking going anywhere, and we’ll still, like, hang out together on Discord. And now you’ve brought yourself some digital ass to the caser.
[00:46:04] Alexandra Arens: I was a little cyclical. So, number five, have a group of NFT owners in the community. It is like a 50/50 thing. If I followed that, it’s, most of the time, if you’re in it for the money, not a community, but it can be built.
[00:46:24] Mack: still. Okay. Yes. [00:46:26] Alexandra Arens: Cool. Just wanted to make sure I was on the same page. [00:46:28] Mack: Yes, [00:46:30] Cool. That seems reasonable. [00:46:33] Alexandra Arens: Perfect. Yes, really solid five tips. Which of those do you think was the hardest for you to learn? [00:46:51] Mack: This is like the nature of community things. Okay, it sucks. We all want to pretend that, like, people are really happy at midday. They are genuinely happy for us and for the project and for the success and everything. You know, there’s like, as we all know, we tend to forget that there are human beings on the other side of all of these keyboards.So, there’s a woman in Bo Ren who I like a lot. And as Bo Ren said one time, there are some people. Who is better at being online than they are in real life? And there are some people who are better at being in real life than they are online. And I only met one person. It’s exactly the same in all contexts, and it’s Mac.
And that was like the highest compliment. I heard that. I was like, I fucking love you, man. That’s amazing. “No, right.” But I wear my heart on my sleeve, and there are lots of things. That’s awesome about that. And there are lots of reasons that serve me very well and blah, blah. It also means that I am very sensitive to the needs of the community and to the state of the community.
If this group of people who in some capacity look up to you or expect great things from you I think you’re an asshole. It sucks. Here’s what it feels like, and that’s not just a one-to-many system. You know, like when we launched Stoner Cats, there were a lot of people that were really pissed about gas prices and this kind of thing. We did not have a community a month after we launched Stoner Cats.
A year later, we have a much smaller, much cooler, active community. They show up and ask how each other is doing, and they play with each other on the weekends in this digital space, where they are learning each other’s kids’ names. I’m like, “Oh, that’s really cool.” And that’s like, that warms the heart, and I like it.
But learning these lessons about, like, just because you made them rich does not mean that they love you. That’s what’s a thing. That’s a thing.
[00:49:06] Alexandra Arens: All right. perfect, so kind of wrapping it up here. Is there anything you want to plug or?
[00:49:16] Mack: check out on your own into IO? The new website will be live by the time you see this I.It is the most beautiful website in the NFTs. The educational content it unlocks is crazy and super fun. The comic’s coming and they have the best art. And if she’s in 2021 and I haven’t seen anything in 2022, the beats, it’s not for everybody. It’s like, it’s not, it’s not a doodle. Fucking love doodles. I owned doodles on day one, but Oni Ronin is not doodles, but you should check it out.
Maybe you’ll love it. And if you do, you should get one because it’s been a pretty neat ride so far.
[00:49:51] Alexandra Arens: Perfect, and, who should we have on Venly expert talk next? [00:49:58] Mack: Mm, I don’t know. I have to think about it. All right. I always tell people, go talk to Jordan from Doodles, but like, yes, you talk to Jordan in the neighbourhood, but I’m trying to think of even better ones too. [00:50:13] Alexandra Arens: Okay, [00:50:13] cool. We’ll come back to you on that. [00:50:16] Mack: Okay. I’m fine. Perfect. All right. [00:50:16] Alexandra Arens: Don’t hang up. [00:50:18] Mack: I figure that was the thing. [00:50:25] Alexandra Arens: Thanks so much for your time, and it was a very interesting conversation. Yes, I hope one day I get to meet you in person and feel this energy in full. [00:50:37] Mack: See you in Munich.………………END………………….
