How Pplpleasr Helped Fortune Magazine Sell More Than $1 Million in NFTs - Ep.268

Transcript

heads up everyone this recording is a bit shorter than usual because it originally featured two guests ultimately one guest's audio and video did not survive however i do promise to have them back on another time soon if you're watching on video you may notice some discrepancies since we had to re-record a few questions however hopefully tweaks to the audio make for seamless listening despite the snafu this turned out to be a great episode enjoy the show hello everyone welcome to unchained your no hype resource for all things crypto i'm your host laura shin a journalist with over two decades of experience i started prepping crypto six years ago and as a senior editor at forbes was the

first mainstream media reporter to cover cryptocurrency full-time this is the august 31st 2021 episode of unchained my book the cryptopians idealism greed lies and the making of the first big cryptocurrency craze is available for pre-order on amazon barnes noble bookshop.org or any of your favorite bookstores go to bitly cryptopians that's vit dot l-y c-r-y-p-t-o-p-i-a-n-s poly market is the leading information markets platform where you can trade on the most hotly debated topics whether it's politics coronavirus current events and more all on the blockchain with over 130 million dollars traded on the platform poly market is the go-to place

to settle the biggest debates of the day for a limited time sign up with referral code unchained to get your first trade reimbursed up to 100 the crypto.com app lets you buy earn and spend crypto all in one place earn up to 8.5 percent interest on your bitcoin and 14 interest on your stable coins paid weekly download the krypto.com app and get 25 with the code laura the link is in the description today's guest is people pleaser a digital artist who has dropped quite a few popular nfts over the past six months welcome people pleaser hi thanks for having us let's start with you telling us what it

is that you used to do before crypto how you got into crypto and what it is you do now um hi so i basically i'm a digital artist i specialize in sort of like 3d animation i've been doing it for the past six years plus and previously i was working in sort of film and television and commercials also was on the cinematics team at blizzard and then um starting last summer i got into working with like collaborating with d5 protocols and just working crypto and also making nfts and so that's what i'm doing full time today yeah and one thing i love about your

story is that kind of what maybe i don't know if it was the precipitating event but you had accepted a job at apple and then that got rescinded because of the pandemic and basically after that you stumbled into crypto and so your life i think would be quite different if you had ended up with that job at apple i we would not have be having this conversation right now and i would probably just be rendering iphones somewhere in northern california so and you would definitely not be allowed to talk about your work i'm pretty sure probably not we can maybe talk about your uniswap v3 video first i mean i know you had done

d5 videos before then but i think that was the one uh maybe that was kind of the the first big one that you did um so why don't you tell us that story about how that came about and then what happened with it totally um so basically what happened was yeah like starting from last summer i was just collaborating with different d5 protocols um same thing i would just make animated um short form videos or hype videos that just you know sort of is my visual representation of what i think the d5 protocol represents and everything and then in january unislop had reached out to me asking um actually they reached out to tyron chitra who um asked if he knew me and they could like put he could

put them in contact with me because they wanted to talk about something and so when they did they asked if i would be interested in making an animation for them for the v3 launch which obviously anybody who was in d5 at the time would have been like this is the biggest announcement of the year basically so i was like of course i can't believe you guys would put so much trust in me to you know basically help set off such a big announcement and so um you know conversation started kicking off like around and end of january and then um i really started production on it probably sometime in february and um you know my process usually with especially with bigger projects like this because they did give

me a little bit more time um so i wanted to be a little bit more ambitious with it you know i make a storyboard and we go over the idea you know i sketch it out um you can see this in my sort of behind the scenes video um that you can find on twitter and then uh you know we move on from the storyboard to like making what we call an animatic which is just a very very rough um animated representation of what the animation might look like and um and then that was also when you know we kicked off uh scoring the video as well so you know like i i originally put in a piece of music from this uh underground uh musician that i really like

um as sort of like a reference and then we found an actual um composer his name is isaac as isaac horse on instagram like he's so isaac's leader but it's like of course on instagram he's so talented anyway and then so you know he basically like drew my the one that i put in as a reference and then um it was inspired by that but um it was kind of like a i was doing the animation um with the help of like two of my friends because it was a lot of work um it was a 45 second a long animation that overall basically from start to finish took about at least a month and a half to finish and so yeah i mean i was a whole process you know i was also obviously directing it like giving notes on you know everything like lipstick from the music to just

creating the whole vision really and then um when it came out and yeah end of march which is when they announced v3 i mean when they first tweeted out the video it got like more than half a million views within 24 hours um i think everybody on crypto twitter had probably seen that video at that point and um it was a really special moment you know i think this is sort of like my magnum opus i guess um and you know everybody it kind of you know following that obviously we sold it or i sold it as an nft which all went to charity but then that's sort of what put me on the map for you know like the nft community but um you know a lot of people think that oh that was like the headline of it saying oh people pleaser you know raise

this much money after selling an ft because nfts were all the talk at the time right but to me at least the um most special part was just when unisoft tweeted out the video before it was even an nft and just to see everybody sort of react to that and just that my animation has an impact on people um was so cool and so yeah that was obviously like a project that has a very special place in my heart yeah and that nft if i recall um it raised it went for like 300 and something eve yeah 310 ethereum yeah so were you expecting that or was that a surprise that was definitely a surprise i was

speaking with a dear friend at the time um about what we think what the piece would go for and i set like a range i said okay i think you know maybe low uh on the low end of expectations maybe would go for single digit east and then high end of expectations would be uh probably 100k in us dollar you know which at the time because specifically when i sold the piece the um dollar value of ethereum was kind of low it was like you know i actually almost didn't i'll drop it that week because i was just like the prices are so bad right now i'm not sure if this is a good time in the market to drop an nft but at the end i was just like you know what i'm just gonna go with whatever i

originally planned so let's just do it anyway um so yeah that was the expectation but obviously it ended up like way exceeding my expectation so that was cool yeah yeah i i think it's an amazing story and i i just love um again like i said you know a year ago you thought you were going to be working at apple and and instead that you know you're kind of you're your own brand and you're connecting directly to your fans um so i think it like is a really good example of how nfts are changing things for creators before we get into a broader nft discussion would you like to tell us about one specific project that you're especially proud of you have a few to choose from either your old d5 videos or

your fortune cover you can pick whatever you like um i mean i think i can probably talk about the fortune one because it's just like more uh recent and um you know fresher in people's minds basically i think like a few months back uh alex i'm going to butcher his last name it's like he's like the founder of showtime yeah i don't know how to pronounce it but that's what it looks like i'm sorry if i butchered it yeah yeah so he um originally made the connection basically he reached out and said that somebody from fortune want to talk to me um and if i'd be interested and then i said yeah sure and then so i think

originally you know that that was a few months ago i i just thought that you know maybe they were just trying to do another nfte collaboration or something you know i wasn't really sure but then um you know and then nothing yeah kind of nothing nothing happened until like a few months later when their creative director peter herbert uh just called emailed me and said hey do you want to do the cover for fortune magazine um the next issue that we have coming out is a special one that's covering cryptocurrency and defy yeah like they were just like and we watched your unislop like behind the scenes video and we thought that you would be you know really perfect for this and then you know for me i think right now hopefully i'm trying to make all of my collaborations or nft projects

something meaningful or something that like elevates the crypto community um and so this seemed like a perfect platform for it i was obviously down but you know it was a blank slate in the beginning i didn't have actually any ideas for what i would actually do for the cover um and it's one of those things kind of similar to the unison v3 thing where i'm just like i think this is going to have a lot of eyes on it so i better take it seriously here i need to you know really make the most of it and then um i was chatting with leighton cusack uh founder of pool together um a little bit later and then i was just sort of lamenting my woes about oh i don't have any ideas for the cover and there's a lot of pressure i don't know

what to do and then he being a genius obviously went home that night and then texted me the next day he goes oh i was thinking about your fortune cover and i thought it'd be kind of cool if you did something like a portal or something that represents like going down the rabbit hole of crypto and then you know inside there's all these like uh crypto anonymous twitter avatars or something because we had previously floated around you know some ideas because around the time there were some nft projects that were you know either including like famous vcs or you know famous influencers crypto punks or something to sort of gouge engagement and then so but then um you know fortune were like oh we had elon musk on one of our previous like covers and i think

there were some legal issues with including like actually famous real people or something and then so leighton was like look if you did it with anonymous twitter people like you wouldn't have that problem and then i was like this is genius and so you know i am like full credit to him for the idea um but you know i still had to obviously like think about how i was actually going to visually present this and put it together and so that's pretty much what i spent all my time doing you know and i i made a tweet that was sort of i guess you could say crowdsource where i was just like uh without any context who are the most famous crypto twitter anonymous profiles um and then you know obviously a lot of people commented and contributed so

in the future if people want to know like you know about things like this they should look out in my tweets sometimes there's alpha week um and then so yeah i kind of source that together and put it together and you know and then i obviously spent the rest of the time making sure that the artwork looks polished and professional and you know presented in a visually pleasing way uh because that's my job after all and then um i think yeah fortune have been a really good sort of like collaborative partner on it they were so willing and open-minded to learn anything more about crypto and defy you know you're like uh i was saying like i'll probably name these pieces like something like to do with a chat and they're like what does

chad mean and then you know it's like and then they started they started using the term now themselves like it's great um and then so yeah you know when i uh posted on twitter initially for the first time i think it shocked one of you people a lot of people thought it was a joke at first they were like there's no way like this is real yeah i mean i also feel like it's almost like i was like i can't believe they let me do this like it's like you know i got away with murder or something you know i was just like this is not allowed like um and it was a pretty provocative title as well or tagline that they had on the cover like crypto versus wall street because i'm being fortune and uh the fortune 500 companies mostly are you know sort of

not that and so um the whole issue but i think you know meant a lot to me myself you know because obviously crypto awareness is something that i care about um and i think the community as well and so that's kind of why this cover is currently still like sold out at all new stands um because everybody just felt very like represented by this um issue and you know even just the articles inside or sort of educating people about d5 you know the cover art is merely just an initial means of attraction but the whole entire issue itself is um i think a meaningful one so yeah i'm just glad that it turned out really cool

you know based on your experience how would you say with the way artists make or creators make or can make money with nfts differs from how they made money previously and and you know how has that affected your life previously um you know being a digital artist i i feel like sort of the direct path of monetizing your work is literally just posting if you're doing you know your work for yourself then you post art on instagram hopefully get engagement and likes and then through traction attract clients who then you do work for if that makes sense and otherwise you know if you were sort of like going my route which was i was just trading my skill set um to

create other people's visions so movies um tv shows commercials you know that kind of stuff and so uh nfts obviously really changed the game for a lot of digital creators because other than maybe physically selling like prints of your work um that was kind of like the only direct way to monetize your digital work and so uh that's where nft came and you know uh previously we were based i i think i tweeted this once where it's like in the old world i guess we digital artists were helping instagram make money while they were paying us in likes and but now um with sort of nfts you can actually have utility and value to the work that you're creating you know not

to mention that royalties our thing now um with blockchain and everything so yeah i mean it's been wildly different for me especially you know like we said i would just be still rendering iphones uh like you know 3d iphones right now if like i didn't get into nfc where i didn't like stumble into crypto um so yeah that's my take on it great yeah this is it's just been so fun researching this episode all right so in a moment we're going to talk a lot more about kind of the financial aspects of nfts but first a quick word from the sponsors who make the show possible with over 10 million users crypto.com is the easiest place to buy and sell over

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laura the link is in the description today's sponsor is polymarket the world's leading information markets platform where you can trade on the most pressing global questions all on the blockchain choose from a variety of markets will cardano support smart contracts by october will the u.s have more than 200 thousand covet cases per day before 2022 will trump run for president again with over 130 million dollars traded on the platform poly market is the go-to place to settle the biggest debates of the day want tomorrow's news today use polymarket to see real-time data on what the market thinks will happen no fake news no pundits without skin in the game

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very much rely on like visual imagery to sell the work you know and i think that the general public when they think about nfts it's almost synonymous to them to nft art or like visual art and you know it's gotten to a point where even like musicians or you know people who have previously been making creations or art uh and other mediums that are not visual are having to sort of like reach out to visual artists and um it's almost like having a visual representation is a vital part to anything being an nft and i hope that that changes in the future just because you know nft is just the

technology itself right like if you're trying to nft book you shouldn't have to also have a visual counterpart or something you know the content is the content um but that being said you know i think obviously it's a with especially with smart contracts i think it's created or opened you know so many doors as to what's possible and we are currently in the process of discovering that everybody together i think um so you know just like an example of something like cool that i i experimented with you know especially with the recent fortune cover um nft drop that i did was i was like look if i want if i'm gonna do an nft drop like i don't want it to just be a drop of the cover i think we have an

opportunity to do something a little bit cooler here and so um you know one of the people who are or the guys that are best at doing um the smart contracts for a lot of the stuff right now are manifold which are um they're like a smart contract like nft mending company and i'm sorry what name did you just say manifold oh and so i um collaborate i mean they've collaborated previously you know with all the biggest artists like pack and um you know like render and slime sunday and so um what we did with them was that uh with you know because the cover fortune magazine that i did features so many different like crypto influencers as avatars and a lot of them

you know with their wallet addresses being public um we fed into the smart contract to target their wallet addresses so that the artwork will actually so i made special versions that basically feature them let's say really largely on the cover and so you know for example let's say laura shin placed a bit then it would just be laura's face like plastered all over the cover or something and that um it's just meant to be a fun like interactive experiment you know especially just trying to do something a little bit new with um nfts and you know even now it's like i think the like the apis for a lot of platforms are still a little bit limiting like for example openc was a little bit slow to like update their metadata so

you know in an ideal world when somebody places a bid it would immediately update but in this case just because that was just not ready on open season so it was taking a few minutes to update so you know in a really intense auction actually um that wouldn't have really flown by well because then be like laura would place an auction and i'll place one right after it doesn't even have time to update for the laura version before you know so that's how we know we're still early i think it's just because so many of these things are so lacking when we have the ideas um and we can taste the possibility of it happening but um a lot of the platforms and everything are just slow to catch up i mean um you know openc actually couldn't uh

ended up you know having a lot of issues on their end even just supporting the auction itself um because there was like too much traffic and they got das attacked and so uh two of the pieces closed prematurely um you know there were all these issues with the auction itself which uh is unfortunate but yeah like i said it's just an indicator of how early we are um and so hopefully in the future you know when all this kind of like but these are things that affect it financially right because of these two options um being closed prematurely due to the platform they sold for one of them sold for i think less than half of the value that it was supposed to sell for you know this is a real financial impact and so

you know just talking about like finance and nfts like obviously it's great that there's this new um way for us to monetize our work but there is you know sort of a lot of other dependencies that factor into like the finance of things with nfts for sure so hopefully you know we're working towards a future where a lot of these things go a lot more smoothly one quick question before we move on i really want to discuss dao soon however during the week this episode was recorded we saw two institutions by nfts visa bought a crypto punk and budweiser bought beer.eth which is a domain name nft obviously you have now worked with an

institution fortune magazine and i was curious to know where you thought this institutional interest in nfts would go i feel like there's almost like two tracks of this interest in nfts there's kind of the discord chat rooms where people are waiting for the nft drops but then you've got this other end so i was curious to hear how you're perceiving these two constituencies that are interested in nfts well i mean i think uh clearly you know a lot of i i'm i'm sure without a doubt a lot of it is financially motivated um let's be real you know i mean us being in crypto we find the technology really cool and everything in it for the tech but what generates headlines is at the

end of the day you know all the headlines that you ever see are just this nft sold for this much money or this company make this much money selling nfts you know nft's money number and so um i feel like maybe that's what initially attracts you know a lot of these major corporations to you know sort of like dapple but i do think that you know there is a difference between the ones that actually are you know open-minded and willing to learn about what the space is really about and um you know honestly i really felt that with fortune is just you know after this whole experience they were like we're gonna open like a fortune vault and uh start just like holding nfts now so you know i think i

thought that was really cool right you know we helped them set up their first nikon chain identity they bought fortune media or fortune magazine.e um you know they have a hardware wallet now and then you know i didn't even think that they would want to start collecting enough tees but they do um you know it wasn't just a and you know they're holding their crypto so this is just an example right i'm just using this because i directly work for them so i can actually say this or at least i know my information is accurate um and i'm sure there's other corporations who you know obviously after having these experiences also sort of like open up their eyes to what is possible like within the space and it's not just a come and do nfts cash out and you know

go back to their old corporate lives kind of situation um which i hope yeah happens more and more uh because it's yeah i mean i think you know there's so much at this point i feel like it's almost hopefully like undeniable that this is just a technology that will be so existing in our lives constantly in the near future and so the earlier a company can be onboarded probably the better for them so a new trend in crypto is this trend of dows and nfts specifically curation dows though i don't know all the different terminology for these different types of dows how do you see dao is changing nfts art curation

collecting etc i guess the sort of elephant in the room that i should bring up at this point in the episode is that when i sold my unisoft nft in march uh it like incepted the creation of pleaser dao which are now sort of like one of the big players and sort of like collector dallas and honestly like i think that at the time it blew people's minds because you know around that time even though nfts were you know such a big thing and then you know everybody was like buying and selling nfts but it was very much a collector's dominant like whale collector's dominant game right like as in individual whale collectors and you

know sort of like at least anybody who's dabbling in ft space knew that there were a few notable collectors you know who are famous within the space um and then so when pleaser dao was formed um you know not just with my piece but immediately after when they bought the edward snowden nft it kind of like woke people up to being like okay there's a new sort of player in the game now which is a dow which um at the time you know like even with my auction it's like uh how do you beat a dow when you know a bunch of people have sort of like a collected common goal and then they're just like we're going to stop at nothing to get this piece you know and then so it's a very similar kind of like movement that you're seeing you know

with the whole uh wall street bets um subreddit thing that happened it's just collective coordination and the power of that right and when i was like selling my piece um i i honestly for me personally i envisioned um hopefully some whale collector was going to bid on it and when the piece so when people were telling me oh there's this like dow that's being created right now where people are pulling funds together to you know win the auction um it blew my mind in the sense that people were down to collectively own something and i think that's what makes dallas so powerful and you know sort of like i didn't catch on to this until way later but basically somebody uh explained it really well in police or down they were like look just imagine there's like a future internet

moma or something but when you're going to like all the people who visit the museum they also own um a bit of every piece of art that's in that museum and i i just think that's that's so special and cool at the same time you know and so i thought that's kind of like you know what they're doing right now is and i mean obviously compared to old traditional corporations dows are so scary because you can do everything over the internet you're pulling funds on the blockchain like you know with the edwards donor piece they got together that 5.5 million within 12 hours which is insane and just doesn't happen in a regular company um and you're like recruiting members it's just like you know it's like a monster or like a machine of a startup

that just expands and like recruits extremely fast and like no one can stop is literally an unstoppable force so you know i think that obviously like you know we've already seen this happen with like even subreddits subreddits honestly are like kind of a doubt they're just like not monetize or they don't have like tokens or governments but you know it's the same concept right and it's like you can't you know stop like the army of the money is how they put it and so yeah like dows are a huge game changer it's exciting to see where this is gonna go so i'm so curious um based on this discussion i did see someone tweet something earlier today and i don't have the exact tweet but um it was something like

you know you could own one of a limited edition run of 500 of the same nft or you could own one 500th of a single unique nft and kind of posing the question like which do you think is more valuable and i was curious to hear your answers to this question i think that depends on the project itself right um you know with everything well i feel like that's just such a an obvious answer but you know like i can own like one crypto punk there's 10 000 of them but that owning that is gonna be at least monetarily um more valuable than owning like a one-on-one of an art piece that maybe doesn't have that kind

of like value discovered or determined yet you know and then selling for like one ethereum for example and so there's no like right or wrong answer to this question i think it just depends on the piece itself you know at the end of the day value is speculative or subjective and it changes all the time and you know to own like obviously for example like the pieces that please or now go after they hope are going to be pieces that everybody wants to own like one one thousandth of or something for example like the doge nft or um you know looks like any piece that they like acquire is hopefully like a very very unique and significant one of one that is going to uphold its value down the line and that everybody wants

to own a part of um but at the same time you know you can own like a board ape which is you know one like i think it's 10 000 right but that in itself has like a different set of values than owning like a portion of something and out of curiosity for damian hurst's latest project the currency in which he sold 10 000 nfts of hand-painted dot covered works on paper and then each buyer can decide if they want to redeem the nft for the corresponding physical artwork but they only have one year to uh you know to do that and if they don't request the physical artwork then it'll be destroyed i was curious um how what percentage of people you thought would

um choose to redeem the nft for physical artwork yeah i mean like being a digital native myself obviously i'm biased towards anything digital i also just don't like a lot of stuff right so it's like to me it's perfect that i can move artwork like without any effort on the blockchain as opposed to having to carry something physically it's me like more expensive probably um to do that and so just from like a practical standpoint i would but at the same time you know i don't know like there's still a lot of real people out there who aren't like nerds who live in a cave like me so all right yeah we'll have to see what happens then okay so last question um

where do you think the nft space will go in the next year or so i like i have been saying this so many times that i am looking forward for it to be way bigger in the gaming space i don't know why it isn't already i think that it has something to do with the fact that our hardware technology has not caught up with what we imagined to be possible with metaverses and immersive experiences but um yeah you know at least for me um like i said previously as well with nft being just like the technology and it's not just art right like nft is not you know art is one subset of like what an nft is possible for i mean we've seen like some sort of real world implementations of um

nfts already like that are beyond just art but i hope to see you know way more of this you know trading of assets um in-game economies which already happens and is a huge thing um you know for example i don't know i think obviously you know blizzard are you know they have like their own whole like own ecosystem warcraft with even like individual games that they have it's just like there's a crazy economy that already exists for that um and you know like hopefully in the future with the metaverse it's like not only cross game but cross like platform you know it doesn't have to be like um blizzard currency is only used in blizzard games or like riot you know it's like maybe in the beta versus like all of those assets are transferable you

know because for example like 3d assets are at the end of the day kind of almost the same way you know more or less and so there's a reason why yeah it could be like cross-transferable like in platforms and games and i hope to see way more of that in nfts um yep where can people learn more about you and your work i'm mostly spending my time on twitter um i'm just people pleaser one on twitter because when i created my account there was already a people pleaser um but i'm just people pleaser on instagram that's where i post more of my sort of personal artwork and yeah to learn more about people pleaser check

out the show notes for this episode unchained is produced by me laura shin without from anthony yoon daniel ness and mark murdock thanks for listening [Music] you