PleasrDAO's NFT Auction House with Jamis Johnson

Transcript

welcome bankless Nation 2 a special live stream because we have a very special event that I want to talk about pleaserdale is launching something extremely cool uh and so we are bringing on the chief pleasing officer out of pleaserdale to discuss what exactly they are building in the web 3 world uh if you are unfamiliar with pleaser Dao please or Dao we'll go through the beginnings with uh with James the guest I'm going to bring on here in a second we'll talk about how pleaser Dow was created uh but it really got started with the release of uniswap V3 and an artist called people pleaser who release an nft which a an or just a random collection of friends decided to get together to form a Dao to purchase it

but that's really just where the story began and now pleaser Dao has taken on a life of its own to do some very ambitious things in the world of Internet culture and nfts on ethereum and also fighting for freedom in so many different ways and respects and an adventure that has brought in Edward Snowden into the org as well as a number of other people as well so we're going to tell a little bit of that story and also what pleaser Dao is releasing into the world of web 3 today so I'm very excited to tell this story and just as a disclaimer I am a member of pleaser Dao and so I own the peeps token which is the peeps token is the token of pleaserdale and so this is a a doubt I'm a part of as well and so we're going to

tell this story and more as soon as we get back from hearing about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this episode possible Kraken has been a leader in the crypto industry for the last 12 years dedicated to accelerating the global adoption of crypto Kraken puts an emphasis on security transparency and client support which is why over 9 million clients have come to love kraken's products whether you're a beginner or a pro the Kraken ux is simple intuitive and frictionless making the kraken app a great place for all to get involved and learn about crypto for those with experience the redesigned Kraken Pro app and web experience is completely customizable to your trading needs integrating key trading features into one seamless interface Kraken has a 24 7 365 client support team that is globally recognized Kraken support is

available Wherever Whenever you need them by phone chat or email and for all of you nfters out there the brand new Kraken nft beta platform gives you the best nft trading experience possible Rarity rankings no gas fees and the ability to buy an nft straight with cash does your crypto exchange prioritize its customers the way that Kraken does and if not sign up with Kraken at kraken.com bankless hey bankless Nation if you're listening to this it's because you're on the free bankless RSS feed did you know that there is an ad-free version of Bank list that comes with the bankless premium subscription no ads just straight to the content but that's just one of many things that a premium subscription gets you there's also the token report a monthly bullish bearish neutrals report on the hottest tokens of

the month and the regular updates from the token report go into the token Bible your first stop shop up for every token worth investigating in crypto bankless premium also gets you a 30 discount to the permissionless conference which means it basically just pays for itself there's also the airdrop guide to make sure you don't miss A Drop in 2023 but really the best part about bankless premium is hanging out with me Ryan and the rest of the bankless team in the Inner Circle Discord only for premium members want the alpha check out Ben the analyst Degen pit where you can ask him questions about the token report got a question I've got my own q a room for any questions that you might have at banklist we have huge things planned for 2023 including a new website with login with your ethereum address capabilities

and we're super excited to ship what we are calling Bank list 2.0 soon TM so if you want extra help exploring the frontier subscribe to bankless premium it's under 50 cents a day and provides a wealth of knowledge and support on your journey West I'll see you in the Discord bankless Nation I am here with Jameis Johnson out of uh pleaserdale jamus welcome to the show thank you for having me back David yeah it's good good to have you back my man and uh it's been a while since we've talked about pleaserdale on the show I've mentioned it a few times in weekly Roll-Ups here and then uh but uh there's been a bunch of new listeners into the bankless world since I've had you last on to talk about the last Innovation out of police or Dao so maybe you could introduce yourself a little bit who is

Jameis and how did he become the chief pleasing officer at pleaser Dowling what the hell does that even mean yeah I mean please right now is a very interesting organization with a very fun history but it all goes back to a Friday in March uh of 2021 when unisot V3 was basically doing a nft auction to commemorate their new protocol launch as you mentioned earlier people pleaser was the artist behind that piece and I think that um you know if you are in D5 summer if you participated if you knew her as kind of the tone Setter of all designs back then so it was kind of this obvious moment of

everyone wanting to bid on this piece uh Leighton Cusack tweeted we should form a Dao so I grabbed him I grabbed Blue Kirby and I grabbed andy8052 and it just began to snowball from there we threw a ton of people into a telegram chat uh I chose to name it pleaserdale as a tribute and it's kind of just been this snowballing crazy almost like Katamari Dynasty ball effect since then um I think the things that we're more well known for uh are our Acquisitions so you know we've been part of some very fun auctions and to name a few we have a um Nadia

from Riot we have a vial of her blood in Cold Storage literal Cold Storage what um we bought Jimmy Wales iMac that he programmed Wikipedia on that also came with the uh an nft that was the original code for Wikipedia and then I think the two that were probably most known for are the Doge the image of the original Doge from atsuko sedo from Japan who owns kabuso who is now I believe 17 years old and on her last leg we bought that the Doge that is the Doge picture and that was minted into an nft during the nft season uh which yeah which

please her down purchase so the doge is what you're talking about the ethereum foundation has a close relationship with atsuko atsuko I believe it's pronounced and so the woman who took the photo on you know the original she actually took the original jpeg from her camera and uh uploaded as an nft so we got that provenance locked in um we did end up fractionalizing that on Sushi swap and got it out to the masses so you can own a piece of the Doge today and and then I think maybe the most notorious thing that we are known for is we purchased the never before heard album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin uh the Wu-Tang album

from the Department of Justice legally speaking it was not actually directly from the Department of Justice but this album used to be owned by Martin shkreli he uh forfeited it when he went to prison and we were able to acquire it we are working on something for everyone but I'm not totally at Liberty to talk about that we got the uh we got the New York Knicks going on here beautiful you can see that in the video stream if you're watching but I mean you know that that first run was just so unbelievably exciting uh we helped raise a lot of money for really good causes raised a ton of money for free Ross ulbricht uh free Ross Dow

um it's just been really fun to be a part of so many good wonderful missions and I think that we have always since Inception wanted to kind of shift gears from buying things for lack of a better word to kind of giving back to the community and creating Willy Wonka ideas that other institutions may not explore um we have a lot of interesting people in Dao from mathematicians to programmers to designers to venture capitalists to eight ounces we got a lot we got a lot of banans um and so kind of with that entire brain power we we wanted to kind of throw some ideas at the wall

see what sticks and and just try a few fun projects so this is kind of the first foray into US putting something out into the world this being what we are going to talk about today on the show and why we were doing the show at all but I really just kind of want to run through that history just because it really puts into context uh the the auction house that we're going to talk about and uh one of the reasons uh I was actually the my claim to fame inside of the pleaser ecosystem was actually being the first member in pleaser Dao after the Tao was formed so I was the first new member into pleaser Dow and I did it because I realized what just happened and you said it was a Friday in March uh still during like kind of the depths of

covid and uh this x times y equals K uniswap uh GIF uh I wish you know people will will remember got got released and it just caused an absolute Mayhem in the in the space uh just because this unit swap V3 was released this was a around the release of the token maybe a little bit after the token there was just like a ton of hype and this awesome awesome MP4 got released by people pleaser and was auctioned off by Unison this really kicked off uh pleaserdale right and so I wrote this story inside of the bankless newsletter talking about the significance of this where this experiment really started and the ability for it Dallas to come together to buy objects uh that that everyone in

the Dow really enjoys uh I interviewed Leighton Cusack about the beginnings of this and also people pleaser herself and really wrote the story of what happened and it was actually pretty cool because one of the the I think one of the cool stories about pleaser Dow was that many people in the pleaserdale were bidding against this guy Andrew Kang who many of us in pleaserdale knew Andrew and so I could I don't remember who in the Dow dm'd him but they were like Andrew stop having a bidding war with us just join the Dow uh and that was really the last thing the last uh moment that really needed to happen for the pleaser Dao to win the auction for the uniswap gift but ever since then pleaser Dao has really been experimenting every single step of

the way like what do we do next what do we do next no rules no nothing set in stone other than buying cool uh that is related to internet culture as nfts and creating some sort of loose plan as to what to do with that uh James I mean you you've been uh Super Heads down in in the weed with please or Dao ever since what would you add to this the story of how pleaserdale came to be what it is today from the moment point of buying x times y equals K to to where it is today like how did this trajectory unfold I mean I think that was one of the trickiest parts and still is this day I'm pleaser now is it was not necessarily formed with any uh singular

Mission I think that over time that ethos has kind of uh bubbled to the top um more so than any that happens during auctions when people are asked whether they want to participate in an auction and it really shows what the entire job stands for I think that the first moment that occurred was our second uh auction that we participated in which parlays perfectly into what we're going to talk about a little bit later but we did participate in the uh Edward snowden's first nft stay free that was right after the x times y equals K piece but the you know like I said earlier it's kind of this Katamari Damacy ball

of chaos um as I think anyone who is in a dow is well aware it's it's kind of uh unorganized chaos at times and so I'm showing the stay free nft on openc which is owned by pleaserdow.eth can you talk a little bit about uh Edward snowden's nft he created nft it was uh how much did did we buy it for we have something like 2.4 million dollars I think it was 4.5 4.5 million dollars uh and then can you talk a little bit about this process and and how pleaser Dallas fostered a relationship with Edward Snowden since yeah so the process back then was really

cumbersome we you know put all of our money from an eoa into a gnosis multi-sig we had Mariana Conti mint a token we started to do snapshot votes um I believe our first snapshot vote was whether we should have our color be purple or blue um you know this was clearly the first vote where everyone was extraordinarily excited to participate in this auction and a lot of these processes are automated uh pleaserdale is the inspiration for party bid or party down if you're familiar so you can do this now uh all just natively in a smart contract but we ended up winning that auction by the skin of our teeth and overnight we essentially doubled the

budget the annual budget for freedom of the press you know talking to Trevor at Freedom press he he speaks a lot about how hard he has to work with individual donors and spend hundreds of hours a year just to get a measly uh budget for freedom of the press and so it to them this was basically the biggest game changing moment since uh you know they formed they realized the the all of the proceeds from Edward snowden's nft sale which uh with which please or doubt all of the proceeds went to the freedom of the press Foundation correct yes and so you know at the time I was uh we were considering

fractionalizing and Snowden piece and uh I was lucky enough to be sending Ed one-way DMS and that was an extreme extraordinarily exhilarating moment in my life uh now today I guess we're on a first name basis I think I can say that which is pretty cool um but they you know they obviously have we have a wonderful relationship with them and so we decided that we were going to put this product out this this uh live show this auction house out and we reached out to them and serendipitously enough that's a word um they told us that they had been working on something and wanted to

collaborate oh okay all right so let's get into modern times now that we've established that you know how pleaserdale came to be uh and also it's actually worth just drilling down on uh the x times y equals K uh uniswap uh GIF that was made by people pleaser which is where pleaser Dow got its name from uh was also donated a hundred percent of all the proceeds to uh do you remember the charity that that was was against Asian hate right yes even in Pacific Islander hate right yeah uh and so it's been in pleaserdale's culture to buy very high profile internet cultural nfts uh the pleaser uh x times y equals K Edward

Snowden uh Doge a few others there's I saw a unisox token in openc as well uh very big cultural icons of the internet as nfts and also have the nfts that please or Dallas purchasing go to a good cause so this is like been built into the pleaser Dao like code of ethos if you will or cultural conduct uh ever since uh from the very beginning yeah last time I checked I believe um we have donated over 10 million to good causes so that's a very good it's a large number that's a very large number all right James let's uh bring us forward into today what's next in the pleaser Universe what are we doing here

yes so well credit where credit's due Andy had this idea and we basically took a five minute conversation with him and decided to build an entire product around it it is a live interactive show that is accompanied by an nft auction simultaneously so everything is built on the rails of web3 and basically we felt like there was a massive uh lack of attention to special pieces you know you have high volume nft marketplaces that are churning out nfts

left and right but there's really no intimacy there you also have the kind of Old Guard brick and mortar auction houses that are entering the space but still are not really doing it properly and then I think the third component here is we could have maybe built this on YouTube twitch Netflix well not Netflix but but there's really no participation from any of the web 2 streaming Platforms in web3 so we just kind of built this entire thing from the ground up it's a live streaming show you can think of it as like The Tonight Show meets twitch meets Sotheby's all combined into one live

episodic moment um you're gonna have the best elements of kind of a opening monologue in an intro you're going to have uh jokes and recap of news you're going to have very well produced uh high quality content that focuses on the piece and the guess that are on the show and then everything is going to eventually move into an interview and our first guests are none other than Daniel Ellsberg and Edward Snowden which is really exciting for us um just real moment real real quick for a moment who's Daniel Ellsberg for those that don't know so Daniel Ellsberg is basically the most gangster

whistleblower that exists I know everyone thinks it's Edward Snowden but I'm pretty sure Ed would agree with this he is the first individual to be prosecuted by uh the Espionage Act of 1917. oh yeah it's right there and he basically took two years to hand copy seven thousand classified documents from the Pentagon keep in mind to make one copy you've got to use a xerox machine to copy seven thousand Pages you had to make multiple copies um on some of these Pages you see a small child's hand because he he enlisted his children to help him scan these documents and he tried to do it

through the proper channels tried to submit it to the Senate um they wouldn't release it or talk about it but these documents basically show that the US government was hiding and lying to the US public about the Vietnam War so he brought it to some journalistic entities and put it on blast basically saying I sacrificed myself for the good of the people and this was really the beginning of the Turning of the tide of the Vietnam War he so this nft in particular is kind of a spiritual successor to stay free artistically it's very similar it's his face superimposed on a lot of the documents from well in this case the Pentagon papers in the Edward Stone case

it was the hearing or sorry the um judgment that deemed the NSA wiretap um unconstitutional but in this case it is the Pentagon papers all seven thousand of them and they are flickering behind his face superimposed on them and it is a video of him exiting the Boston Courthouse steps and reporter asks you know did you realize the implications of this did you realize you know you could go to prison for this and he essentially just says wouldn't you go to prison to help end this war which is the most gangster thing in the entire world um just to really hit that home we had a conversation with him a few days ago he is 91 now and he has been

according to him he has been arrested 89 times um he recently posted the Pentagon papers in digital format online just in an attempt to poke the governmental bear one more time he also publicly speaks about knowing about the Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange leaks prior to those going out to the public which again is throwing caution to the wind just saying you know I put myself up against the US government and so this guy is like this guy is the real real deal um okay so multiple times over and and plea okay so pleaser Dow has created

this auction house I I was debuting the website or showing the website on screen but it's a little bit of a coming soon teaser page but the idea here what we're what we're announcing today is that pleaser Dallas got this web3 auction house where you can bid on nfts and the first nft that's going out is uh is is Daniel's uh an nft of Daniels and the uh just like instantiating the Pentagon papers into an nft is that what we're doing here correct the first nft is from Daniel Ellsberg and freedom of the press and we will be interviewing Edward Snowden and Daniel Ellsberg while the auction is kicked off so the auction is a short form of auction so that it's more similar to a traditional auction house than it is to

say a 24-hour nft Marketplace it will have some shortened period of time uh allocated to the entirety of the auction so that we can get some commitment to the interview and then there will be extensions within the final minutes if any bids happen in those final minutes to kind of keep the guests um you know keep them there as long as the auction's running keep the guests on our toes of course all of this is built on the blockchain so no email no password you sign in with your wallet there's a live chat on the side it connects to your ens has greens Avatar people can see other people's uh

you know wallet Holdings by simply clicking on that user you can bid right from the app whether mobile or desktop there are going to be polls um and obviously you know we can't give everything away uh but participation is usually rewarded at some juncture in the crypto sphere I nothing there are no plans that are concrete I'm just you know throwing that up there oh and most importantly obviously uh this is in two days this is on Thursday at 3 P.M Eastern Standard and that is going to happen on pleaser.house there is no e in pleaser I'm sure that

some people will mess that up 3 P.M Eastern Standard Thursday pleaser.house okay and uh is the proceeds for this nft going somewhere I it would be very fitting absolutely absolutely so the proceeds will be split 50 50. 50 is going to the freedom of the press foundation and 50 is going to a Daniel Ellsberg Initiative for peace and democracy that is at you Mass Amherst I think I have sometimes messed that up in the past but I think I got it right uh so Daniel as a initiative out of UMass Amherst that he is establishing um and then freedom of the press is

obviously going to receive a portion of the proceeds they build software that helps whistleblowers come forward in a safe manner when Snowden um you know he leaked these NSA documents in 2013 with New York Times and Glenn Greenwald there was a mess up with the redaction of the documents and people were able to discover some private information which put some people out in the field at risk and so freedom of press is kind of dedicated to building a lot of these software tools that essentially Aid in truth finding and um

assisting whistleblowers so that they don't get murked by their government [Laughter] well I just I just love how aligned this is with the crypto space in general like the the beginnings the the our founding fathers if you were if you will are like the The Cypher punks right the people that fought for pretty good privacy the ones that took the government to court about making sure that cryptography is just treated like speech and it's a very like in alignment with a lot of a lot of the ethos that this whole entire cryptocurrency space is built on top of and now we have the the Vietnam whistleblower Daniel uh Ellsberg how's how do you pronounce his last name that's right Ellsberg Ellsberg and then

also Edward Snowden of course whistleblowing about privacy violations which is the same exact concern that David Chom was worried about uh back in like 1980s and so I just really see like and I really want to impress upon listeners just like the degeneracy of the nft Mania yes super super Degen like so many like uh crazy nft things happened but we have this young upstarting Dao that came just because a group of friends wanted to bid on an nft together and have that like snowball and snowball and snowball into a web 3 native auction house which is using sign in with ethereum rather than email and and like you know identifiable

information from the web 2 verse to bid on this like nft of this guy that helped turn the tide of the Vietnam War which was also a very like uh uh establishment versus anti-establishment War uh and now like djends in the crypto space get to buy this nft to help to donate to all of these like freedom of the press foundations and Daniel I think this like story arc is absolutely amazing yeah it's kind of the quintessential uh a butterfly flaps its wings moment you know um we're gonna see what happens we've got a lot of other episodes lined up okay so this is episode zero episode one if you will uh and this is also the kicking off of the pleaser Dao auction

house so this is just this is the initiation and it's also being like in alignment with like how pleaserdale got uh built in the first place and then also this is the debut of many many more nft auctions just like this right that is the plan we have a handful of really fun episodes lined up um I don't want to give anything away right now but I think people are gonna really love them a lot I think it's it's going to be a combination of Education uh a combination of the absurdity and mimification and stupidity of the space mixed with the extreme seriousness of this being a world-changing technology I

think that's kind of my favorite part of the culture of crypto is that marriage between not taking yourself too seriously while also believing that this is a revolution that's kind of the the vibe we want to bring to the table and I think I think we have something solid here so I would I would hope that everyone Tunes in for the uh the pilot episode uh yeah that's uh it's the Degen in the front and the region in the back right it's like hey we can we can uh we'll make like funny funny jokes and we'll won't take ourselves too seriously but also we will absolutely move the needle when it comes to like human rights and you know improving The Human Condition and all this kind of stuff is that the is that the new CD

final it yeah yeah Degen in the front regen in the back yeah yeah one more time James when is this auction going live so this is going to be Thursday 3 P.M Eastern Standard Time uh and you can tune in at pleaser.house if you need to uh be notified we you can sign up for notifications right now at blazer.house we are taking phone numbers they will only be used for sending out notifications about episodes they're not tying you at all to your um your wallet and we are looking at other Solutions there but it felt like the the um best in terms of trade-offs so go to

pleaser.house you can get notifications sign up for notifications if you don't want to submit your number put a calendar event down for Thursday 3 P.M Eastern Standard Time pleasure that house and then what's the schedule for further further episodes how does that work what's the Cadence oh we're not gonna get again we're gonna keep that if would it be Alpha to go explore the nfts that pleaser Dow dot ether pleaser e.eath owns on the blockchain would that be Alpha well hmm I would say yes and no um let's I don't wanna no Financial advice

this is not a financial advice well um James I know you and uh all of the Dow uh has been hard at work at helping build this auction house to uh to get this thing out the gate and uh I think I just want to share my screen one last time to uh show something I think is pretty cool while we see uh while we see Cosmo on the screen there uh this is a tweet out of Edward Snowden not too long ago I think just a few hours ago uh gonna be a big week that Snowden because he's uh retweeting the pleaser Dao episode one to uh to the pleaser house uh yeah Edwards not everybody not every day you get a uh Edward Snowden Twitter yeah definitely not oh and there's a little video there's a little video here

as well a little bit it's a little bit it's a little bit different when Edward Stone tweets that instead of someone like Barry silbert but all right well James thank you so much for coming on and helping debut the uh the pleaserdale auction house again that's coming at Thursday at 3 P.M eastern time uh I've also got an actual little uh little GIF loaded up and so we will go out on that but before we do got to do as this video plays risks and disclaimers bankless nation of course crypto is risky eth is risky Bitcoin is risky nfts are also risky and you could probably lose what you put in you could also lose in a bet in an auction house if you choose to partake but you could also win that too nevertheless we are headed west if we're on the frontier

it's not for everyone but we are glad you are with us on the bank list Journey thanks a lot thank you