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Mezzanotte Podcast #4 feat. Three
120 Plays1 year ago
Three is an artist behind the Nonon collection, Mini Labo and the chief design officer of Scatter
https://www.nonon.house/
https://mini-labo.org/
https://www.scatter.art/
https://twitter.com/mezzanottenft/
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:00:02
Speaker
Okay, hello. I'd like to welcome Three, who is an artist that runs Minnie Labo and the Chief Design Officer of Scatter. How's it going? Yeah, not bad. Not bad. It's been another busy day. I'm just kind of wrapping up kind of early for a change. I might even get to bed before midnight, so that'll be a treat. How's everything on your end? It's good. It's good. It's the morning here.
Balancing a Busy Schedule and Focus on Projects
00:00:26
Speaker
So what's going on? What are you working on these days? Um, that's kind of a tough one. I mean, it's, I've definitely got my plate full. That's kind of my happy place. Um, you know, I'm thrilled to be working on so many things and I, I do have this kind of problem where I have an inability to like say no to helping people out. Cause you know what it's like, like everyone's always cooking something up. Um, but the big things at the moment are like scatter is, um, my big focus.
00:00:54
Speaker
So, uh, as the chief design officer there, um, and we've got, you know, a million things we're cooking up, uh, chiefly the splinter, uh, product offering, which has been under some pretty heavy development that takes up most of my time at
Launching Non-On: A Generative NFT Collection
00:01:08
Speaker
the moment. Um, and then we recently launched non-on of course, which is, uh, at non-on house on Twitter. That's not on anyone's radar just yet. Um, that one's yeah. That's your artwork that you made. Yeah.
00:01:24
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. Yeah. I want to ask you more about that because there's like a Tamagotchi element to it that I would think is, that I think is pretty cool that I kind of want you to explain so people understand that.
Innovative Elements of Non-On: Friendship Mechanic
00:01:37
Speaker
Yeah, totally. I'd love to talk nonon. I mean, I can talk a lot about nonons. So, um, forgive me if I get a little too deep in the sauce. No, please.
00:01:53
Speaker
There's a few things going on. It's one of those things where like we went to great lengths to kind of keep it
00:01:58
Speaker
very novel, we're doing a lot of things that I know for sure no one's really done before. So I'll try and make it not sound complicated because I promise it's not. But it's a generative collection, so 5,000 pieces, you get the usual beautiful NFT art, at least I hope it's beautiful. A lot of love went into it. They're all hand-painted.
00:02:22
Speaker
It literally took like a year of like six hours a day painting to get them all done. It was way more work than I thought it was going to be. But then that's paired with, so I've got a very talented developer, co-founder of Minilabo. I work the office down here in Australia and then he operates out of Tokyo.
00:02:47
Speaker
Um, he cooked up, um, this friendship mechanic. So every time you mint or pretty much any time you interact with the non-on contract for the first time, you'll also receive this soul bound friend card. The friend card is that Tamagotchi that you were talking about and it's a fully on chain.
00:03:08
Speaker
And it has an evolving pet, the pet evolution fully on chain as well. It's dynamic based on how many friend points you accumulate. And the kind of goal is to see how people grow these pets. The points themselves are accumulated
00:03:25
Speaker
just by receiving and sharing your nonon NFTs. So every time you, let's say, touch a nonon for the first time, you'll get one point for that ID. And then every time you send that nonon to someone else, whether that's on a secondary market or gifting, you'll get one point for that as well. So it's a total of two points per ID.
00:03:51
Speaker
the more points you accumulate, the more your friend card, which is your little Tamagotchi, evolves. And people have been having a lot of fun with it, which is really, really lovely to see. That's great. No, I mean, that sounds really cool. Yeah, I have one that you gave to me, actually, the number 569. And I love it. I hope you're taking good care. What? I hope you're taking good care of him. I'm taking really good care of it. Yeah, it's safe. It's safe in my wallet.
00:04:19
Speaker
And then there's also this friend card, yeah, the friend card angels, like that is, comes with it, I guess. Yeah. That's the soulbound token. So your first interaction with nonon, you'll always get that soulbound token. So is there an equal amount of that to each nonon or I guess like that's the confusing part to me in a way.
00:04:45
Speaker
Sure, yeah, maybe. Maybe I am making it sound more complicated than it is. Yeah, keep going, sorry. That's all right. Every nonon in the collection, so there's 5,000. That means there's like a total possible 10,000 points you could accumulate because you can get one point for receiving every nonon for the first time, so it's per ID, and then one point for sending that nonon for the first time. And then they all go to your soulbound friendship card.
00:05:14
Speaker
So are you encouraging people to share them? Yeah, we actually launched. We've cooked up quite a lot of things we haven't rolled out yet. We're kind of phasing things out.
Community Interaction in Non-On: Swap System
00:05:28
Speaker
describing non-on as being this dynasty type operation, because we're thinking pretty long-term with it. And we launched without the non-on swap mechanic, partially because we were curious how people were going to explore the friend point mechanic organically.
00:05:47
Speaker
And it was pretty amazing on launch day. We were looking at different Discord channels and things like that. And people were just organizing these trust-based trades. They were like, I'll send you this one. You send me that one. Who's got this one? Send me that and I'll send you this, which was so cool to see.
00:06:05
Speaker
And then, of course, a few people beat us to the punch. They were like, oh, we need atomic swaps. And then we rolled out the non-on swap. You can access all of this for anyone curious, by the way, at nonon.house. We rolled out the swap system. So you can post swap offers if there's a specific ID you want. You can request a swap for that, for instance. And that's been huge. We've had hundreds of people running these swap offers.
00:06:34
Speaker
and accepting swabs, making swabs. And then on top of that, there's some people cooking up like custom contracts. Like someone is making a, they're calling it the non-on water slide. We've got a non-on super lovers chat for our megafans. And they've been cooking up this non-on water slide, which is
00:06:55
Speaker
I believe a way to expose a large number of nonons to a large number of people all at once, it's pretty wild. Yeah, the site is really cool, the nonon house site. I like the duality of the sort of like pixel Tamagotchi creatures, and then also the actual 3D art of the actual collection.
00:07:24
Speaker
And how that interacts with each other is really cool. Yeah, this is great. I mean, I'd love to bring like more awareness to this project, of course, because I really like the art. And I feel like you and I talked a really long time ago briefly. I didn't realize that you were doing so much stuff, to be honest.
00:07:43
Speaker
like when did you get started making art in the in like I guess you could say in general yeah man that's a that's a big question I mean like art in general I've been doing you ask artists this question they're pretty much all going to give you the same answer and it's really cheesy for better or worse but I've just been you know I've been doodling forever I remember
00:08:06
Speaker
like in primary school. My like favorite way to wow people was I would like go home and I would like trace Pokemon art and things like that and then I'd bring it in or like Dragon Ball Z stuff I would like print off and then I'd trace it and bring it in and show it to people and they think it was so cool and I feel like I was one of the the first kids
00:08:28
Speaker
in school to have internet access. So I'd Google like, you know, in Australia, we were always a few years behind with Pokemon and Dragon Ball Z and all that. So I'd like see what was happening in the current season in Japan and like trace that and bring that in and everyone thought it was so cool. And I just kind of stuck with it. And, you know, now I'm a lot older. I think there's probably
Artistic Journey and Personal Expression
00:08:51
Speaker
more to it than that. It's probably a good reason why most artists give that answer. And I think it's because
00:08:56
Speaker
Like it's really archetypal. There's people who, for whatever reason, the way they think is just really conducive to visual communication, which can make you a good designer as well. And I've had a pretty good career in the design world, but then there's this layer above that, which is like not wanting to just make something pretty to sell something or make something pretty to make it more usable or whatever, but just to want to like put something pretty into the world as well. I think there's some,
00:09:26
Speaker
archetypal magic there as well. And then sort of pairing that with crypto, to me it was like a bit of a no-brainer. There's like, again, some kind of long boring answers I could give for that, but I think the simple way of looking at it is there's like demons, right? There's demons in the world, you know, figuratively or literally speaking, whatever excites you the most to think about that.
00:09:55
Speaker
But you've got to think about these demons as things that hate beautiful things, right? They hate beautiful art. They hate beautiful music. They hate beautiful, simple, elegant systems. And they hate honesty. And they love ugliness and making art ugly. They love complexity and bureaucracy. And when I first got into crypto, I saw NFTs.
00:10:24
Speaker
Crypto, scatter.art, you know, non-art. And the Ethereum world computer, these are like a, they're like a flaming sword that will be plunged into the throat of these demons. So I really like that aspect of crypto. I think there's a lot of like liberation potential for artists who just want to put their ideas out into the world without like being beholden to
00:10:49
Speaker
you know whoever they're working for or whoever's bankrolling them you know they don't necessarily need to go the old master route play the da Vinci card of like finding patrons like the Medici family
00:11:05
Speaker
or the more modern equivalent would be like becoming one of the top zero one percent most talented artists in the world and still groveling for a job and trying to complete some DEI bingo sheet to get a job with Blizzard making like sexually diverse cow people for some World of Warcraft game or something. You know, now that you can just make something that you believe is beautiful, put it out there and people will create value from it if they resonate with it. So
00:11:35
Speaker
Like creatively I'm all in on block tech for that reason. Yeah, I agree with everything you're saying for sure. Were you working with scatter from the start of scatter?
00:11:51
Speaker
Uh, not quite the start. And I kind of lament that because I, um, like I, I'm really intimate with everyone involved at scatter. Um, and they are seriously, I'm sure a lot of people have said this already. They're the most amazing people in crypto, some of the smartest, um, and easily just the most beautiful people.
00:12:11
Speaker
in crypto, they I think like scatter itself is this kind of like bastion of preserving and cultivating the real romance behind why we're all doing this stuff in the first place. So I'm a little bit sad I wasn't there from the beginning, but I was there pretty early on. I think you mentioned a moment ago, like I was working on Nonon ages ago, sort of like
00:12:35
Speaker
around the time you dropped White Hearts, I think. And that's funny to think. That was October 22. So yeah. Forever ago. I mean, that's how much of an exhausting tribulation getting not on together was. But around that same time, I'd been learning a lot about
00:12:58
Speaker
blockchain development, building dApps and things like that. Started doing a lot of work with Scatter and then eventually sort of formalized with them and became part of the team. So yeah, I've been there since then. So it's been a while and it's exactly where I want to be, which is great. And then of course I've got Minilabo as well, which has been... And that's your like design studio somewhat.
00:13:27
Speaker
Yeah, so we sometimes kind of agonize over exactly how we communicate what we do, but we're essentially like a creative blockchain development studio. We really focus on like this intersection of art and technology. So not necessarily just like useful blockchain tools for accounting or whatever, but exploring what the potential is with like putting creativity first as well. So
00:13:55
Speaker
Like the first product we did was Tokyo 23, which I believe is... I gotta double check in case I... I'm gonna look at it. I see it on your site. Yeah, tokyo23.app. Dealing with so many URLs and web app deployments at the moment, I always gotta remind myself what they are. I get it. This is awesome.
00:14:17
Speaker
Yeah, so that was not the first thing we did. And that was like, what if we took a kind of Pokemon Go style ARG and made it all like digitally permanent. So, you know, my co-founder and I, we've got a lot of very like romantic pillars, we kind of build this studio on.
00:14:37
Speaker
And digital permanence represents a lot of that because I think it's a big part of the value that working with the blockchain brings to the table. So we were like, well, what if we give people this really special guided tour of Tokyo? It's kind of like going on a treasure hunt throughout all the 23 wards of Tokyo and you can
00:14:57
Speaker
confirm your location, gasless signature to do that and it'll tell you like how close you are to the nearest goal and then you build out this special uh fully on-chain so of course digitally permanent uh like postcard or treasure map of your adventure through tokyo um we did that we learned a lot and then we moved on um helped a lot of other people with other things and uh cooked up non-on
00:15:21
Speaker
in the meanwhile as well. So I feel like where we're, you know, fully cooking with gas these days, we got a couple really clear touchstone pieces under our belt. Yeah. And you know, there's the aesthetic is clear from looking at like the Tokyo 23 and the other stuff that I've seen.
00:15:45
Speaker
It's pretty cool that like, you know, the identity of your aesthetic is, is strong and it's also universal in a way to, it appeals to, like, I like the, um, everything about it really. Very open. So I feel like it could also be kind of malleable for, you know, people that you work with or like, you know, someone that has a kind of different type of vision or something like that you would work with and stuff like that.
00:16:13
Speaker
What was the visual inspiration for Nanan, the collection?
00:16:18
Speaker
I feel like I'm going to say this a lot. Maybe it's just because I'm so exhausted, but there's like another tough one to answer as well. You might have seen back when we were originally talking and we first touched base, the original non-on-design was quite different. And then it went actually through a few evolutions after that as well, where like my big thing initially was there's a lot of
00:16:47
Speaker
like really ugly art in the NFT space and that's a shame because and when I say ugly I don't even just mean it in like a I'm looking down on artists I don't like um kind of way it's like you've got when people think NFTs they think about these the board apes right um and they're just so like hideously grotesque that you can literally smell them through the screen and they're synonymous with NFTs and I was like like
00:17:15
Speaker
there has to be room in the market for something with some really self-evident creative passion and charm. And this was around the time the AI tooling, AI image generation was kicking off as well. And I still really believe this as well is that I think we're going to see a bit of a renaissance for clearly very personal art.
00:17:38
Speaker
And then that was very much galvanized by, you know, my introduction to the, the Remilia sphere and the lady where there's this art that isn't necessarily like
00:17:53
Speaker
clinically or traditionally very beautiful. I mean, I think they're gorgeous, but there's this self-evident, charming quality they have. There's this really beautiful naivety where you know that a human created it and had a lot of fun doing it.
Creative Inspiration for Non-On
00:18:10
Speaker
And I think that's resonated with a lot of people. So I really wanted to roll that into non-on.
00:18:15
Speaker
And coming into this space, having been an artist my whole life as well, and growing up alongside people who are still desperately trying to make it as artists, which is almost impossibly difficult given the traditional options available to most people, I really wanted to prove to them
00:18:37
Speaker
that you can do something you're personally passionate about that speaks in your creative voice that isn't, because like I said, the main options for a career as an artist now, like you go be a concept artist in games or animation or whatever, and someone will tell you exactly what you need to do. And you do need to be very talented to do those jobs. They're very coveted jobs for a good reason.
00:19:04
Speaker
Um, or you can go the, uh, like the academic art route, which is a complete disaster these days. You know, you'll go to do a four year degree and then two years of post grad or whatever. And the whole time you'll be taught by people who have never picked up a brush who keep telling you anything is art. They'll encourage you to make like the most hideous dog shit you can possibly imagine. And I wanted to show all of these people who are suffering from those old problems that you can just do your thing and put it out there and create value like that. So.
00:19:34
Speaker
I wanted to do it hand painted with some kind of like, I described it a bit as like neoclassical almost, like old painting techniques. I hadn't really seen any collections that were so heavily rendered with their, or hand painted at all for that matter.
00:19:52
Speaker
And then for the themes, like the iconography for anything, I wanted it to be kind of anachronistic, where it's like kind of sweet a lot of the time. And then this is kind of like edgy or sinister elements elsewhere and have this kind of mix of influences that was very, just something that people had never seen before. So there's, I mean, that's a long answer, but that's the thing. Well, I think you post a lot of like,
00:20:21
Speaker
I don't know how to say it, but like sketches that look like, you know, you were, you, you've studied art in a traditional sense or like maybe cartoon comic animation or something, you know, from just the Twitter, like you post a lot of like kind of work in product or sketch stuff, which is cool, you know, and a lot of people don't do that. And, um, I personally think like that's good to do.
00:20:51
Speaker
to get people interested in your work, you know?
00:20:56
Speaker
Does that make sense? Yeah, no, I totally get it. And I hear that a lot. My output as an artist is predominantly my sketchbook. And it's bittersweet. It's because of the situation I'm in where I didn't go down those two routes. And a lot of people will think, surely there's other jobs an artist can have. You don't have to go the retarded postmodern academic art route or the concept art.
00:21:24
Speaker
the games and animation route, but I think they'd be shocked at how much those are really only the two realistic options. Anything else is a compromise where you go and do design. And I love design as well. I taught design at three of Australia's top 10 universities for several years as well. So I take design really seriously too.
00:21:44
Speaker
But it put me in this unique situation with art where because I didn't go down either of those two paths, all the art I was making was really just for me. It still is in a lot of ways. So I've just been posting like my daily sketchbook online in various places pretty much my whole life. So people kind of know me as the sketch guy. And you pointed something out that I'm kind of proud of.
00:22:10
Speaker
For a long time I saw it as like it's just me being completely schizophrenic as usual. Where there's this huge anachronism between I do this like classical traditional realism stuff. I haven't really studied formally but I've like studied the work of a lot of the the old masters. I really like the pre-Raphaelites. For living artists I study Steve Houston a lot for instance. So I do a lot of this kind of
00:22:39
Speaker
a little bit more traditional stuff. But then, like I said, I started drawing Pokemon in Dragon Ball Z when I was a kid. So there's a lot of that that comes through as well. And I love the exploring the contrast between the two. And I think that's actually the most beautiful way to explore, because there's a lot of people doing that kind of thing, the anachronism between the new digital world of art and the old traditional world of art.
00:23:07
Speaker
So I'm kind of proud of it now. But yeah, I'm kind of glad you picked up on it. It's something that a lot of people comment on with me. I'm usually just the sketchbook guy.
00:23:19
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, it's probably interesting because you've worked on this for so long and then like, you know, posting your sketches and everything like that to actually kind of drop a collection. And then, but the thing that I think is interesting about your collection is that this, this swapping friend, like points aspect of it, um, that's like in development still. And like, you know, I mean, that's pretty impressive basically. And, uh, I just think it's good to spread awareness about this in general and get people out and then know, cause sometimes it's difficult.
00:23:49
Speaker
for people to see this stuff. But yeah, I mean, we're really on the same page in terms of why I'm into NFTs as well, like working with artists and stuff in this sort of way, because I really don't... I got sick of just attending gallery shows and crap and whatever. I've talked about this before, it's boring. But what else, like, I guess,
00:24:21
Speaker
What's your day look like when you wake up? What do you start doing? How do you do this?
00:24:28
Speaker
I think, thankfully, there's kind of a simple answer to this one. It's literally like I just I get up at like usually five o'clock in the morning because I got two kids at the moment, two under two. So my my oldest, he's he's a cool kid, but he's so chaotic. He will literally just kick me in the head to wake me up at like five, five thirty in the morning every day. Get up. I go to the office. I work until dinnertime. I come home. I eat.
00:24:56
Speaker
put the kids to bed and then I go back to work until like usually between midnight 3am kind of thing, which I know sounds completely insane and it's because it is. But for anyone who like doesn't have kids, for example, one of the coolest things you learn with that is you can operate pretty effectively on like two or three hours of sleep.
00:25:15
Speaker
a night, you definitely like dials up. Like if you're a little bit schizo, if you feel like you've got like a predilection for insanity in general, it's going to dial that up a lot. But you can still be high performing and very functional on no sleep. So I mean, that's pretty much it. I literally just work. That's it. So you get like how many hours of sleep a night?
00:25:45
Speaker
So I was kind of laughing at this looking at my like alarms recently because I set like alarms for bedtime reminder and everything as well. I at best I average like four hours and then usually on a weekend I can get like a babysit for one day or something and I'll literally just sleep for as much as I possibly can. It keeps me going. That's cool man. That's inspiring to me because
00:26:10
Speaker
I have friends from all different spectrums, like some that's like a lot of them sleep so much and they're like old and married and don't have kids. And I'm like that to me, that makes it seem like really depressing. Like you're keeping away your life, you know? And like, I also think it's cool to start a family and raise children and stuff. So that's really impressive to me that you're able to do all this stuff.
00:26:33
Speaker
Oh, it's impressive to me. It doesn't even feel possible. And also like working in this space that is non-traditional and you're, you know, you seem to have multiple things going on. Obviously you do have multiple things going on. So it's like the organization elements of that are pretty chaotic and all over the place.
00:26:56
Speaker
So like, yeah, do you have anything to say about that? Yeah, possibly like nothing valuable. It's really like it does force you to live in the moment. I was kind of galvanized a bit to this because so, you know, I, for the last several years, I was juggling before I before I moved into like Web3 Crypto.
00:27:20
Speaker
exclusively. Like I ran my own freelance design thing. I did the startup scene as like a UI designer for a while and then while I was doing that, after hours I would teach design and front-end programming at university.
00:27:36
Speaker
but so like I was kind of already used to juggling a few things but before that as well and this is like a hilarious analog that I feel like I'm one of the only people in the world who gets to talk about so I used to have a career in politics so I was a an advisor here in federal parliament so I worked in parliament house Canberra
00:27:58
Speaker
And I advised in the Senate and working in politics, like for anyone who's not familiar, you should, I guess it's obvious, but your whole job, like it never ends. Your whole job revolves around the 24 hour news cycle. So you got to have alerts set up so that any time a story breaks, you can react to it. You just don't have a choice. It's like a media job.
Political Career and Crypto Comparisons
00:28:22
Speaker
Yeah, I guess it's very similar. I actually hadn't thought about that. But yeah, I was really used to it, just the chaos and like things change. So, you know, in politics, there would be something would happen in the news and the whole public sentiment would change. You know, we had this whole thing in Australia where one day, I hope I'm getting this right. I think it was Section 48C.
00:28:46
Speaker
there was this huge thing someone brought up where it was like, oh, yeah, by the way, like half our members of parliament are illegitimate because they hold dual citizenship or whatever. So you just wake up one morning and it's like, oh, like half of our government needs to get reelected. You better like start running some campaigns, which is just, you know, retarded. And then you got to go do it.
00:29:05
Speaker
But then crypto is kind of the same, you know, like ESC 404 shows up and then it's like, okay, guys, all hands on deck, we got to implement this. So like we just rolled out Dn 404 and scatter.art, for instance, we've already had some people launching with that. But you've just got to be prepared to respond to everything because it's constantly changing. And
00:29:26
Speaker
for better or worse it's it's very fun and you just learn to be very much in the moment and responding and to just triaging everything by the hour kind of thing yeah i'm more into this way of then sticking to your like weird like i think a lot of people don't
00:29:45
Speaker
Like there's a skepticism of certain people that, that they don't adapt to new technology or even like a new chain, for example. And that like hurts them in the end because instead of embracing something that they might've not thought would have worked, they are doing the opposite and being ignorant of it, you know? So I'm all for, you know, like being surprised by some new tech thing and not like,
00:30:14
Speaker
You're not resisting it. Like a fearful standpoint, basically. Yeah. Yeah. So that's. Yeah. And create in a creative way, basically. Yeah, I think that's one of the things I appreciate about the scatter team is like, hopefully I'm speaking fairly for everyone. But I don't think we see ourselves as the dictators of what people should be doing with, you know, block tech or Ethereum or crypto or whatever.
00:30:41
Speaker
it's more like we're cultivators so I always use this kind of cute example of things scatter as a garden you know and it requires nurturing a lot of people to grow the garden and we don't necessarily get to decide like what those people are creating and how they're creating it but we want to cultivate them and help them
00:30:59
Speaker
um grow so like I think uh 404 for example is quite it's pretty wacky um I think like as I can see why a lot of people would resist it um you know got a lot of empathy as an artist because uh not only do not like most people not know or care that there's you know artwork attached to it um but like the most optimal way to uh use it is just to kind of disable that and trade the shit coin uh however
00:31:29
Speaker
You could say the same thing about like any of this, just NFTs in general, you could be like, oh, that's silly. It's not useful for anyone. And it's like, obviously, that's not the case. You know, we just need some bright people to, you know, this might fit the mold for their vision. And they're going to create something beautiful with it. Totally. Yeah, that's completely true.
00:31:53
Speaker
So like what are you working on at the moment currently? Like I know that it's probably a lot of things, but I think that like the thing that you were like doing just before you got on this call.
00:32:03
Speaker
Um, so that was, um, actually that was another kind of like chaotic thing where I was juggling a few things as well. So we're kind of finalizing. I don't want to spoil too much for not on in particular, but we've got a lot. We're still rolling out for that. Um, we've got like a leaderboard, for example, so our power users who are accumulating the most points. And we've got some like serious power users, um, which is, is great.
00:32:28
Speaker
I think we're setting a good pace based on what we kind of expected for a new IP. And we're just sort of finalizing some merch incentives for that at the moment. And then the other thing I'm really focused on at the moment is Splinter.
00:32:45
Speaker
Which is the new experience. Yeah, please go into that. Please explain that to the audience.
Introduction to Splinter and Decentralization
00:32:50
Speaker
Yeah, so I can't go into huge amounts of detail, but Splinter is really, to me, it feels like the ultimate realization of, like, first and foremost, it's the next evolution of Scatter.art itself. Scatter.art will be a Splinter instance, for example. So Splinter's like this engine that powers that.
00:33:10
Speaker
But to me, it's this realization of the original romance with NFTs and crypto and everything where we were like totally against centralization and we wanted to really liberate people and let people own the things that they were working with and on.
00:33:27
Speaker
So Splinter is kind of like you can just create your own scatter.art and you can customize it. You can draw on a contract marketplace to have fully verified and audited contracts that are kind of a little bit more bespoke to your specific offering. You can curate any number of collections you want. You can focus on your own stuff.
00:33:51
Speaker
It can be just a single collection mint app, but it's totally yours. You know, you will help you deploy it, but ultimately you own it. And we're really trying to set a standard for like at a macro level, set the standard for preserving that original romance with crypto. And then at the kind of detail level,
00:34:13
Speaker
implementing as many best practices as possible. So, you know, having a front-end for your DAP that isn't janky where you expect, you know, people to spend like $5,000 in one transaction and not even get any feedback in the UI about like what's going on with that transaction, for instance. So, it's the new frontier to put it. So, you're enabling people to make their own like kind of
00:34:41
Speaker
customizable platform. Yeah, exactly. Like their own marketplace or you can kind of frame it any way you want based on how you customize it, but you might be making your own marketplace, your own hub for your collections, for instance, or like I said, just a single collection minting dapp. So it's aiming to service a kind of broad range of tenants. And are you deving this or mostly doing the design?
00:35:11
Speaker
Um, so I, is my co-founder is really nice. Um, the mini labo co-founder, he constantly tells me, uh, actually I should be a lot more gracious. A lot of people tell me like I'm a really good front-end dev. I did teach it at university for years, but I've always considered myself like a fake dev, uh, because I don't know anything about the backend. Um,
00:35:36
Speaker
I pretty much only did front-end and web development courses when I was studying Konsai. And I really like to focus on the product design itself on a cosmetic level and a user experience level, and then building the front-end around that. So I do all the front-end development. As much as I think of myself as a fake dev, I literally do code six plus hours a day for the last several years as well. So maybe I should. What are you coding with?
00:36:07
Speaker
Yeah, what language or whatever. Yeah, I'm strictly just a web cowboy. It's just what I know. And I love the browser, which probably makes a lot of real, quote unquote, real developers just want to puke. But I love the browser because it's like this environment that just works on every machine, every machine on the planet, which is insane, right?
00:36:28
Speaker
So I'm like HTML, CSS, cowboy, which again, I know it's fake. That's fake programming, but I'm very good at it. I know every CSS trick in the book. And then I do JavaScript for all the logic, of course. And my personal favorite framework at the moment is Svelte. So we use Svelte for all the Minilabo apps, but for the more scalable stuff, still using a lot of React.
00:37:00
Speaker
That's cool to know. I'm a very novice dev. Mostly I'm doing everything else with what I do, but I have deployed some contracts and looked into a lot of various things, but it's an interesting time for things like this because I feel like
00:37:21
Speaker
The goal is to have the idea of what you want to make before you kind of get started a lot of the times, even if that's loose or weird. And then you can really do anything in a sense. What was I going to say? So do you drink a lot of coffee or how do you keep going? It was crazy. Man, that's another good question. Yeah, I mean, do I strike you as a coffee guy? Is it that obvious?
00:37:49
Speaker
I'm on a lot of coffee right now. It's noon, and I've made more than usual, so I'm not sure. Maybe you do strike me as that, yeah.
00:37:56
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, look, I'm definitely a coffee guy, I drink. It's funny, like I'm about to tell you that I don't actually drink a lot of coffee at the moment, but by that I mean I've only had like four today. When I was really young, I used to do, I used to work for, man, this was like back when I first started university. What is it called? An espresso.
00:38:19
Speaker
You know, they make the little coffee pods. So it's like a coffee specialist for them, learned everything about coffee. They even had this thing where you had to like blind taste test, all bloody 20 different types of coffee origins they had. And if you got them all right, they'd fly you to Sweden or whatever. I totally nailed it. And then I had to quit my job because I got a big break in politics like that week as well.
00:38:42
Speaker
So I'm a huge, huge coffee guy. But these days, right? So I've got a secret weapon, which saves me having to make so much coffee. And that is a absolutely grotesque nicotine addiction. And I really don't like smoking. I got nothing against cigs or anything. I love cigars, but they're just very expensive here. But I really don't like vaping either. But the Zinn pouches,
00:39:10
Speaker
like the Swedish nicotine salt pouches. Man, those things have changed my life. Oh, you're doing it. You're on the Zins too. Yeah, they are. He's on the Zins, like the last Ver, Ver is the last podcast I did. He's on the Zins too. Yeah, it's, it's, it's worrying me, dude. It feels like a bit of a top signal because like they, I'm pretty sure they are just fully banned here. And it's like now that everyone's doing them, then there's no way you're banned.
00:39:36
Speaker
Oh, so I ordered them, um, through like gray market, uh, straight from Sweden. Yeah. It's so, dude, I don't know how much you know about Australia, but like cigarettes costs like $40 a pack. Oh, I know that. I know that because I've been there for sure. So even if you're like, you like smoking, it's not sustainable. Meanwhile, it's expensive too. Cause the baristas are like famous.
00:39:59
Speaker
Oh, yeah. But I mean, I'll try not to fly off the handle too much. But those expensive coffees at all the Australian cafes and everything and the baristas, they're all getting paid like sixty, seventy thousand dollars a year to just be like professional losers. They all make shit coffees and no one's willing to admit it. You know, like I've got a really nice like old school Italian espresso machine here. I remember saving up for it for years.
00:40:24
Speaker
Um, and, uh, so I, I make all my own coffee. Um, yeah, I make my own coffee too, but I don't, I did, I did filter coffee from the beans. I have like, just like a normal filter coffee machine that like grinds the beans on the top. It's like by Phillips or whatever. Yeah. Here in Greece, people are really into coffee and they drink a lot of it too, but it's like really bad to me. It's like they call it Freddo espresso. It's like ice to good. It's like.
00:40:49
Speaker
Dude, I love Frito Espresso. That is my jam. Well, you know, there's a huge connection between Greece and Australia because the largest population of Greeks live in Melbourne, I think, but outside of Greece. But and I've had been to Melbourne and I've had a really good Greek food before I lived here.
NFTs as a New Frontier for Artists
00:41:09
Speaker
I just don't like going to go to a coffee shop, so I like making it at home first thing in the morning. It's kind of like that's my jam and I just buy really cheap beans that I like. Actually, it's hilarious, but it's from America, from Amazon.
00:41:27
Speaker
life or whatever like was like these beans are really good and I was like I'm gonna start buying these because and you just get a big bag and then when that runs out it's kind of a problem because like here it's like it's a little bit I should just find a coffee bean that I like that's made here something like that to make coffee but no it's really important but I vape I haven't gotten on the zins yet I'm a little scared because I'm like into amphetamines and uppers in a way where I just like being kind of
00:41:54
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, propelling through the universe driven to just focus on something and not distracted because like anyone else I feel like, you know, we're all really ADHD or whatever in some way.
00:42:08
Speaker
Yeah, you should probably be a little bit. Look, it's kind of difficult for me to like make particular statements about the nicotine pouches, the zins and all that because like on the one hand, I think they're pretty like nicotine in general is pretty close to being like a benevolent supplement. It's not truly benevolent because you know, you take too much and like
00:42:30
Speaker
I've many people know what this is like, uh, within a minute, you've got to like expel 12 demons from your body. If you have like one milligram too much nicotine at once. So it's, you know, there's that minor risk, but at least it, it goes away quickly. Um, but man, like you pop a pouch, uh, no smoking, no yucky stuff, no spitting. And then you're like locked in for the next, uh, you know, 20 minutes to an hour. What gives you that boost, the nicotine in the Zen?
00:42:58
Speaker
Yeah, it's just the nicotine. And I really don't want to encourage people to do this, because honestly, I'm kind of considering cutting back a bit for a very important reason. But you know, coffee, you take that and you get that kind of jittery high, where you're vibrating on a higher frequency kind of thing.
00:43:19
Speaker
uh nicotine actually maybe this is one way of looking at it like coffee is like diesel and uh nicotine is like high octane petrol it's like this clean burn you're like revving really smoothly every cylinder is just firing away in perfect precision uh like you can just see through walls like everything you just locked in uh however
00:43:42
Speaker
the catch there, of course, and why I wouldn't mind cutting back a bit is when you're locked in and then that starts wearing off, you're like, well, why am I not just locked in 24 seven? So sooner or later, you end up like me where literally I import these 20 milligram pouches. I eat a whole fucking tin a day. I'm locked in from the second I wake up. I'm actually not even from the second I wake up. I just there's enough in my system while I'm sleeping that I'm like just sitting there sweating, still locked in in my sleep.
00:44:12
Speaker
You never get a break because you're, you're just 24 seven on lock. Um, which is cool. It's really good for productivity. If you've got, you know, several full-time jobs with things to do, like I do, but it is, uh, it's an exhausting habit. That's probably one way of putting it. Um, I just found just a place that sells them here. I'm pretty stoked about that, but, um, I gotta try it out now.
00:44:39
Speaker
because everybody's talking about it. It's interesting. But yeah, I mean, no, sleep is important, obviously. I just think it's like a balance. It's like if you're just happy with what you're doing, you know what I mean? And if you catch up on sleep at some point after getting a lack of it for a week, which seems like you do, then it's like, whatever, who cares? I really think it's just whatever floats your boat. I think some people genetically require a lot less sleep than other people. That's just their body type or whatever, the way they're made.
00:45:10
Speaker
I wanted to ask you about, like, I don't know if there's anything else you want to touch on before we end this. How long have you been going for? Oh, 45. I'm going to ask you not to sign off at the end because I have to wait till your audio uploads.
00:45:25
Speaker
But that's, that's simple at all. It won't take that long, but. Oh yeah. Yeah, no stress. So like, yeah. Oh no, I was going to say like, um, I was curious as well, if you don't mind me kind of quizzing you, uh, like I've always, I originally connected with you because like, I just liked what you were doing. I recognize you've got a good eye for, uh, lovely, charming things. Uh, and I think people like that are really important at the moment.
00:45:51
Speaker
I know like everyone's really proud of what we've created with crypto but there's still these kind of little battles going on and a lot of it is like we've got these warm-blooded like people with red blood and like souls and things going on behind their eyes who are able to like look at something and be like yeah that's this pretty it's beautiful it makes me feel good versus like these small sold insect people who were buying apes and shit like that
00:46:16
Speaker
Um, so I really value the people that those former people, those angelic people, the white hearted people like yourself who are trying to put prettier things into the world. Uh, you're always cooking things up. I saw you had a couple on the timeline recently. You got a city in, which looks really cool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, I, it's, it's hard to earn. It's not hard to, I like working with people that I, that I like that are,
00:46:45
Speaker
like-minded in a way. And like, I got into this because of Malady. It was really simple. I was like always into art in general. And also as a kid, I was into comic books, music, everything. And like, when I saw Malady and I was like, oh man, this is cool actually. Like then I feel like I knew people that could make art that would work in that context. And like, I feel like,
00:47:16
Speaker
you know, a lot of the artists that I work with, they don't have an outlet that's good until not until this, but like, this is another outlet that they could use. So like, Laura, who's the artist of white hearts, like, like, I don't mean to blow up her spot, but she's applied to like the Fine Arts University of Paris, like multiple times and got rejected. And they've dropped her. They dropped their comic
00:47:41
Speaker
illustration department completely, you know, like the finest art university of Paris. And it's so frustrating because like, her parents are like, you got to go to school, you know,
00:47:55
Speaker
And I don't try to be influential in that way at all, because she's had a following before we even met on Twitter of her own art before we started working together and stuff, which is impressive when somebody could do that on their own, just using the internet or computer. So for me, it's like what you're saying. I mean, you were a teacher, it seems like, of design at universities.
00:48:19
Speaker
Like I try to be hands off in that department and just encourage people to just go with what they like to do, you know? Um, but it is cool that like now she's getting commissions of people, you know, people will hit her up on Twitter and be like, Hey, can you draw this thing? And like, they'll send her some ETH and like, that's amazing to me because it's like really awesome that people like her work and stuff like that. And, um, what I've realized from even doing this podcast for like a couple of weeks is that like to talk to the people that are doing the art that are making the art.
00:48:50
Speaker
is the most interesting to me because there's two aspects of this world. There's the creative side and then there's the finance trading side. There's another side too, but I don't care. There's other sides, but obviously it's multifaceted. But the artist part to me is really interesting because I think that people are so afraid of this space and think it's a fatter trend.
00:49:17
Speaker
I don't know if it is, there's going to be new technology that's going to change it. I don't really care to be honest, but like, um, just to have people being able to be supported and work on their art independently and see other artwork is kind of like this weird thing that harkens back to like the early days of the internet that we missed for a long time. Like for like years, maybe like a decade, I feel like everyone saw bullshit and crap and was just not able to see anything cool.
00:49:47
Speaker
on the internet or even in real life out walking around, you know? So like to me, like the timeline in a way is like you're going to a thrift store and looking for like the best stuff that you like or something that really speaks to you, you know, or like a library basically that's kind of constantly changing, which I think is so important for anyone, any age to get into. So,
00:50:14
Speaker
For me, it's like, yeah, like you have to trust your taste. Your taste is valuable. Your taste means something to other people, means something to yourself. And you've got to go with your instinct in terms of what you like. And it's really hard to do that because you can get distracted in so many ways, you know?
Cultural Impact of Digital Art and NFTs
00:50:30
Speaker
Yeah, you raised like, I'm glad my initial assessment was correct, that I wanted to connect with you because, you know, we're on the same wavelength. It sounds like we definitely are. You raised some really good points, right? So like that web, the early web days, it's kind of crazy because there's so many like, there's a lot of young talent now. I think you're probably nurturing some of those people. Scatter.art definitely is. I'm helping this young talent as well.
00:50:59
Speaker
They weren't even alive to see what that like young web garden was like. We went from people being able to deliver like just these crazy ideas and their own honest vision and honest voice to every machine on the planet to suddenly, you know, after the 90s ended or whatever, there was literally only like three websites for a while. It's like Facebook, Google and YouTube. And that's kind of almost true still, you know, give or take a few extras.
00:51:25
Speaker
But we're back with that opportunity again to, you know, like shape things. We're at this new frontier where if we're willing to kind of work for it and fight for it, we can take ownership, which is obviously what crypto is all about, taking ownership of your own things. We can help other people do that. We can teach this the young bloods that they have the ability to do that. So it's huge, right?
00:51:53
Speaker
And there is obviously that other point you raise, like there's still so many people who are willing to dismiss it all. And again, I can't really blame them for that because NFTs are not unfairly synonymous with hideous apes and grifters, but we can't just like let them set the standard and just like ruin the frontier again.
00:52:16
Speaker
For everyone, it's kind of up to us to work that out. And I think like I've got a lot of faith people are going to come around, right? Because if you look at like two potential cartoonish visions for the future, let's say like 20 to max 50 years from now, we go one way where like this bull run right now just goes absolutely nuclear and never ends. And within 50 years, AI is doing everything for us. So everyone's on UBI. Everyone weighs like 500 kilos and floats around on those wall leeches looking at screens all day.
00:52:46
Speaker
Well, at that point, digital art is the only real art. And then there's the other kind of pessimistic outcome where, again, I'm being intentionally cartoonish here. The whole world gets obliterated. All the Blackrock elites go and retreat into their bunkers for a while. All of the work of the old masters is just reduced to ash. There's no beautiful sculptures left. There's no real art left.
00:53:15
Speaker
in like a hundred years, kids will be going to university and they'll be like digital neo-archaeologists and they'll be like digging up white hearts and not on a milady and like studying this digitally permanent on-chain artwork. And then that will be the only real art, you know? Time will make it all very true, I think.
00:53:37
Speaker
Yeah, time reveals all. That's why people are really into 90s music right now. It's like after a certain amount of time, people are like, oh, wait. It's just that I love that. That's so interesting to me. That's the cool thing about time. But no, I mean, I think that that's a really good point. I think that it's weird because I feel like it's hard to speculate in terms of things like that. But I like what you just said so much. But for me, I can see it sort of in
00:54:05
Speaker
through people that I know in real life. Because like, if you instinctively like, for me it's like, there's like an art scene here, I live in Athens and it's like, I don't go out to these things. And when I do, I'm really bummed because I'm like, the same people are at everything and this shit sucks ass. And there's like no kind of connection or growth happening. I don't mean to like dismiss it in any way because I'm not really a part of it at all and I don't wanna like,
00:54:33
Speaker
Nobody listens to this. That's going to be that's into that or whatever. But I know that there's like that. But then in terms of the NFT space, there's there is these artists that are like post-net artists that that have really valuable. I'm doing air quotes, NFTs, which is kind of separate from the world that we're in. Right. We're in this weird. It's so sort of it's we're in our own thing. That's like it's completely separate from harm vanned and durable.
00:55:01
Speaker
or whatever like digital blockchain art, because like, the people I know that are that I've met that were in the IRL art world that, you know, kind of look at the NFT art space as like kind of with like, with like, rolling their eyes, you know, in this kind of cringe way.
00:55:21
Speaker
there's that world. And that's sort of, somebody explained that to me as like that sort of world eats its own tail and then survive in that own way. Yeah, it's purely onanistic. So this is a huge threat to that. Say that again, that word. Like onanistic, like as masturbatory, all of that like, like traditional academic art world, like it kind of just exists to jerk itself off. So this kind of thing is a huge threat to it, I think.
00:55:48
Speaker
It is and exactly and it's like what I think is interesting is like the fact that like, like, you know, it's been a couple years now, you know, like Malady didn't mint out right away. And when I got into it, I think it wasn't minted out and then it minted out and that was like the beginning of 2022, I think or something like that. Maybe it was the end of 21. I don't really remember but I just remember like,
00:56:14
Speaker
most of the same people that were in it then are still involved in some way now, you know? And like Scatter has come such a long way and done so many collections since then, which is really impressive to me. And it's just cool, it's not pretentious, it's not judgmental, and it's open and cool in a way. And that's kind of the thing that I like about it in general is that like,
00:56:42
Speaker
You know, there's no room for negativity here in general in this world that we're in. It's just about like supporting people even if you don't like something or whatever. So like for me, what do you want to say? I was going to say there's kind of some nuance to that because it's like everyone who's worthy of support in this space is going to get it.
00:57:01
Speaker
And like yeah like maybe sometimes people will do something that's either like low effort or misses the mark. I mean I'm absolutely capable of putting a lot of effort into something that just misses the mark. Maybe it won't get a lot of support but there will be that level of support there almost guaranteed to some degree because yeah like
00:57:18
Speaker
People, they love more. They love a lot of the romance going into this as well. They love knowing that there's like real people behind it. They love seeing them grow and support them. And for me, you know, seeing a lot of these young guys and girls show up, I'm happy to support them through all of their failures because I know that they're going to make something meaningful with all of this. So it like it totally makes sense, right?
00:57:43
Speaker
Yeah, it does. It does. I feel like we should end it here because this is a good note. What do you think? Yeah, yeah, totally. Maybe I can treat myself to an early night. Oh, do you mind if I squeeze a couple plugs in? Please, plug away.
00:57:57
Speaker
Yeah, awesome. So Nonon, like I said, you are absolutely not too late if you haven't checked out Nonon yet. We've got a ton of free. We've still got some free mints unclaimed, I believe, for certain collections. And we've got half price mints for a lot of collections as well. So white hearts included, of course.
00:58:16
Speaker
So if you haven't minted yet, please go in there and grab that. But also, I think you've got probably like 12 or so hours left for a big non-on giveaway we're doing at the moment. You can check on the Twitter. It's at non-on house. We're giving away a ton of non-on for the Oakaki Connect, who we're partnered with, BBS Art Challenge. So really easy to enter. There's been some awesome stuff. Come get involved. I promise you, you're going to love all the non-on people you're going to meet.
00:58:46
Speaker
and we just announced that all Nanana holders are going to get a free kemono kaki mint as well which is an upcoming collection that's looking really beautiful from our kaki connect team as well so plenty of goodies there