Web3 Galaxy Brain 🌌🧠

Nicholas: Before we get started, if you love this episode, please write a review for Web3 Galaxy Brain. Thank you. Welcome to Web3 Galaxy Brain. My name is Nicholas. Each week I sit down with some of the brightest people building Web3 to talk about what they're working on right now. Today, I'm joined by GAMI. GAMI is a crypto creator and the founder of Narsdau, the skateboarding-centric Nounish community. GAMI is one of a small number of practitioners in an emerging discipline that I call crypto production. GAMI led the creation of several on-chain happenings, including Narsdau, a DAO dedicated to onboarding skaters to Web3, Forgeries, a Nounish open edition, an on-chain noun raffle, as well as an arts patronage DAO, an on-chain tauntine, and much more. In this episode, GAMI and I discuss his creative practice and how he manages to be so prolific. We discuss his positive sum philosophy, his belief that crypto is a countercultural movement, and his collaborative working relationships with Ian Nash, Volke, and Light. It was great getting a chance to chat with GAMI, who's doing fascinating work summoning on-chain happenings with social media and the blockchain. His perspectives on leadership were particularly surprising and exciting. I learned a lot from GAMI in this call, and I hope you enjoy the show. As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice. Or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks, and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions. GAMI, welcome.

Gami: Good morning. How you doing?

Nicholas: Oh, it is morning for you, isn't it? I'm doing well.

Gami: Yeah, it's just after 7am here, but I'm glad to hear you're doing well.

Nicholas: You're a hero. But you said it wasn't early for you. You said, I checked that wasn't too early.

Gami: Yeah, it's usually pretty good for me in the morning. It's just been a particularly big week, so I might be sounding a little bit rusty.

Nicholas: Do you want to get a coffee in first? We can take a minute if you want to go.

Gami: I've already done all that. Been for a walk, got some sun rays deep into my retinas. I'm all good.

Nicholas: Wait, what does the Huberman say? You got to walk and look at the sun?

Gami: Yeah, let in as many of those photons as you can.

Nicholas: I like the thing about, I mean, a lot of it seems like, anyway, it's just suggestions, but I like the thing about forward locomotion. Like kind of wakes you up and it's sort of keeps you engaged. I'd heard of stuff about like 20 minutes of sun or whatever, but I totally agree. You know, it's good to go for a walk in the morning. Don't do it enough.

Gami: Yeah, it certainly is, but I've heard some pretty weird alternatives to just getting outside. Like there's a guy who got dunked on pretty hard by crypto this week. Andrew Wilkinson, he's the CEO of Tiny, which is listed on Canadian Stock Exchange. And I think he was making fun of, he said how those crypto punks working out. And then people referred to his share price, unfortunately.

Nicholas: I bet the chart, I'm afraid the chart might look exactly the same. I don't know that person.

Gami: He has a weird morning routine where he has one of these, it's a pair of glasses that emits blue light straight into your eyeballs when you wake up. And I heard him on a podcast say that, you know, you don't even have to go outside. And it's like, I don't think that's a feature. That's a bug.

Nicholas: Definitely. Wow. Okay. So people are listening, they may be listening to recording. I think of you like one of the pioneers in this business of on-chain production. You're making happenings on-chain. You're making cultural events with crypto affordances. And I love this domain. I'm interested in it and I'm interested to talk to you about it. I feel like I actually thought you had a much bigger account, honestly, but not everybody knows you. But to me, you feel like a staple kind of character creating projects in the space. So when did you go full time in crypto?

Gami: First time was in 2017. So I'd sort of been lurking around a bunch of projects in 2016. I'd just gotten interested the same way that many people do with, you know, purchasing certain paraphernalia on a certain network. And yeah, since 2017, I just got involved through writing and helping out in different ways that I could as I was learning about the tech.

Nicholas: So yeah, it's been full time since then.

Gami: Yeah, it's like my background is in engineering and in distributed systems. So it's like there was a sort of serendipitous moment when I came across the Bitcoin white paper, where it all sort of made sense to me, maybe more quickly than it could have otherwise. But yeah, I'm not like the most technical person, though. I've always sort of leant more towards the marketing side of things and having ideas and bringing the right people together. So I think that was a big part of it is just like, I sort of experienced a lot of, you know, in real life, sort of network effects through different community things that I was involved with. And crypto was the first time that I experienced that, like in an online setting. So it was, yeah, it just sort of like amplified everything for me. And that's where I saw the opportunity, I think, was more in the way that it brought people together online in a much stronger way than what I'd experienced previously.

Nicholas: It's actually much, I mean, it's so compatible with that. And it's also so underrated. And I mean, a lot of people know, but a lot of people don't know that the social element of bringing people together is more relevant in crypto, even than any kind of traditional market where things are figured out and there's ways of doing things, just being able to get people to come together. And you've done it so many times. I mean, there's really too many projects for us to talk about today. It's not going to be possible to get through everything that you've done on Ethereum. Was there like a philosophical or ethical reason why you were interested in distributed systems in the first place?

Gami: Yeah, there definitely was. Like a lot of sort of my cultural upbringing centers around skateboarding. And I'd grown up in really small rural towns, like literally in the Australian outback with 2000 people. And then, you know, moved to larger towns and then to the city and so on and so forth. But there was always like a deep interest in counterculture, whether it was at school, like finding better ways and easier ways to do things, or if it was just like directly related to, you know, what I was emulating as a young person who was very interested in skateboarding. And as someone who's just like innately curious, I would always dig deeper into anything that I was exposed to and try to understand, you know, how it came to be. And yeah, skateboarding has been through so many cycles where, you know, it's something that impacts culture. And so it affects the people that take part in it, are sort of exposed to these effects outside of the culture itself, you know, through corporatization and sort of culture vultures and all these sorts of things. And I just, I really loved the idea that crypto was your sort of way to opt out of the conventional way of doing things. And for me personally, that's like how I've lived my whole life is opting out of the status quo to try and forge my own path. And I think that sort of even relates back to childhood and sort of quite a messy family and all that sort of stuff. So it gets deeply personal for me, I think. And that's probably why I've been working in crypto for so long and then plan just to continue doing it for as long as I can imagine.

Nicholas: You were saying something about how in the crypto environment, it was your ability to bring people together to do projects was more valued.

Gami: Yeah, like I'd previously done quite a online stuff before crypto. Like, you know, I had a couple of businesses where I had a YouTube channel that did reasonably well and I was selling certain products. And then I actually created a skateboarding community here in Australia back in around 2011 that, you know, grew to around 5,000 kids in a Facebook group. And I haven't had Facebook for years since but...

Nicholas: It's okay, we'll let you off.

Gami: Yeah, I deleted that stuff as early as I could, to be honest. But once I sort of brought all these people together online, we started doing fundraising events and getting brands involved and basically just bringing kids together and their parents and, we'd have 500 people turn up to an event, plus their parents, you know, and it was just...

Nicholas: And what would happen?

Gami: This would pretty much just be like a skate jam, you know, it'd be just like, let's get a bunch of kids together and they can have fun and we'll give away prizes and have music and all that sort of stuff. And that sounds very connective, right? It sounds like, wow, all these people came out of the woodwork and they came together and it's like that IRL component is something that's very special. And, you know, a lot of people in quote unquote, web three are trying to, you know, make that happen for whatever it is that they're working on now. But I find that it actually carries through into the online realm, you know, IRL through to URL. And it's sustained over time. Whether it's because people have an economic connection or if it's just something because we're in such a niche industry where we've already got aligned ideal ideologies, I think there's just so many different aspects that sort of bring that sort of feeling that you have with an in-person event to the online arena. And I guess like to mention a project that I've started, you know, in the last couple of years, NAS or NARS for the Americans listening. It's very much just an emulation of what I had created around sort of what would it be 11 or 12 years ago now. It's just back then we didn't have the same tools and it's kind of in reverse. Now it's rather than feeling those feelings that we would in an in-person event and then that be what forges these relationships. I feel that in crypto, I forged the relationships online first and then we don't even meet sometimes for like two years. So like some of my best friends in the space, I knew for like three, four years before we even saw each other in person. And I just think I've never experienced that in a way. Yeah, true. There's actually a whole bunch of people that I've never met in person and consider friends. And I think that's pretty weird.

Nicholas: It is weird.

Gami: Like beforehand.

Nicholas: I mean, you feel like you can know someone. I mean, I don't know, are you missing? Is it creepy? because you're missing so much information that they could be really not what they present themselves as over text only. But if you interact with someone all the time, I mean, for long stretches of time, it feels like you get to know them. And they could. just at that point, I mean, if they're a fraud, then they could just as easily be a fraud in real life, pretending to be someone they're not. So can you have just as close relationships and never meet? I don't know.

Gami: I think that highlights maybe one of the points that I'm trying to tease out of my early morning brain is like everything is about context, right? So like in crypto, you know, I talk a lot about sort of like prefixing everything with hyper at the moment. People like me and 0xLight and a few others sort of pushing this movement. And part of that is the fact that like in crypto, I feel this experience of hyper contextualization, where it's like you're already somewhat aligned with the people that have arrived in this certain space and time. And there are all these other criteria that have already been ticked off. And they're not just like people saying that they like something or pretending like you can verify that they literally bought something that aligns with the same values that you might have. So while you might not be able to know all that much about somebody, you know a lot about them in that context. And I think that's perhaps what sets up this environment for just making friends online and having fun on chain.

Nicholas: That's a great way to look at it.

Gami: It's definitely weird.

Nicholas: Because like really what we're saying is not actually a physical or virtual relationship, but instead all the context that the physical relationship has is the sort of the premise, the hidden premise in what makes in-person interactions different. And you're saying in a niche enough environment like NFT, Twitter or something. Or NFT, I mean, not just Twitter, but I guess you tell me if that's not where you spend the most time. But that meeting these people in this context with this shared context, you do know something about them. So you have the practical part of what an in-person interaction gives you. that's unique. You get a different form of it, but it serves the same kind of, I know something, I can make guesses about this person that are accurate because of all the context we share.

Gami: Yeah, I think that's exactly what I was trying to lay down. Yeah, it's like there's certain things that you can deduce about someone in real life, but not necessarily verify because what a weird environment to rip out your phone while you're meeting someone in person and be like checking what you can learn about them. Whereas online, especially in crypto, you can gather that context before you even make contact and it's already an innately social environment because while it's very much an arena of business transacting and all that sort of stuff, it's first a social environment. And I think that's what's so fun about it to me is just that there is this tendency for people not to take things too seriously. And then if you think about all human interactions, and if you're a markets maxi or whatever, you can say that everything in your life from the day to day is a transaction. You and I have been in this conversation with transacting and worth. right now every breath that I'm taking is a transaction. It's all momentary and fleeting. It's like this breath could be the last. So there's just so much importance around context and how much time it saves you and how much it can bring the right people together. To go back to our original touch on this point, I think it's just that crypto does speed run through a lot of things that bring people together. And the fact that it's based in ideological reasoning is a huge part of why it's so interesting to all of us. But shout out to Satoshi for laying it down. Yeah, like, you know, counterculture all the way. A lot of people forget about the Genesis block and the protest statement and a lot of the sort of Easter eggs that he left laying around to or they or whoever it was.

Nicholas: Does the NSA know who Satoshi was? I mean, they must, right?

Gami: I don't know. Surely.

Nicholas: Right. They have like an Intel management engine. They know who everyone is.

Gami: Yeah, it's scary to think. But I'm always been pretty convinced that it was that it was Hal Finney. But could be wrong.

Nicholas: You know, I haven't done enough research.

Gami: It's just a stab in the dark.

Nicholas: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, there aren't so many people who you'd think could do that. But I have a friend who said years and years ago that Satoshi is the greatest artist of the century. And yeah, it only gets truer every day. So what you're saying is that the ideological context, connective tissue between people in crypto now and in the recent past is gives the context in which you can do happenings. And that really, you don't, although the blockchain gives you some form of permanence, you actually it is actually more fleeting, temporally situated and transient and more of the stuff for making events. And actually, history comes from events, not things that are overly concerned with maybe the raw technology ness of blockchain, but instead using it as a kind of material for performing.

Gami: Yeah, yeah, definitely. It's like, I think I put a tweet out the other day. I can't remember exactly what it said. But it was, it was something around this idea of how, you know, we're, we're moving through, through space and time. And historically, we've had to make a lot of assumptions because like, the ways that we recorded our history were also very fleeting and ephemeral, just as the moments or the events that took place. And so, you know, I watched this talk, this TED talk recently, which is from 2018. And you need to watch it, it just like blows your mind. It's called Hyperreality by a South Korean artist. I can't remember his name.

Nicholas: It's like a video video.

Gami: Yeah, I think it might even be on YouTube. Like if you just, if you just search Hyperreality, it's like the first TED talk that comes up maybe like number four in the search results. But he, he basically, he paints this example. So he's this guy who does hyperrealism painting. And, you know, you can barely distinguish it from a photo. It's just incredibly real. But people would say to him, like, why bother if it just looks like a photo? Like, why not just take a photo? And he said, well, because it's art, and I'm trying to make you think. And he goes on to use these examples through history. So he brings up one in Vincent van Gogh, where he says, nobody alive today has seen Vincent van Gogh. There were no such things, photographs back then. All we have is, you know, his self portraits. And we know from his writings and from his art that he was a troubled person. And perhaps that's nothing like what he looks like. But then he said, at the same time, he goes, I could depict that person with a newer technology right now. And he shows this painting that he'd done of Vincent van Gogh, based on a person that he hired as a model, who fit the description of a Vincent van Gogh self portrait. And he said, so we're living in this time already of hyperreality, where we don't really see the real thing for what it is anyway. And so if you look back through history, we're sort of depending on, you know, stories passed down through generations. And as we know, stories tend to change as they exchange one mind to the other. And the difference now is that what we're doing on chain by just minting things is potentially one of the most important things we could be doing with our time as creative people, artists, developers, thinkers, whoever, because we're doing it on a truth machine. And, you know, it's infallibly true, at least to the point that you can verify it. But if it's like, you know, when you're thinking about the way we're hurtling through time and space, block space is actually a lot more significant than one might realize, because we're actually sort of like, we're recording our stories and doing it in a way that's never been done in history before, to provide a sort of clarity that we've never seen before. So it's one of these things that I just can't stop thinking about, where it's like, you know, there's questions around like, is this whole on chain movement and minting just a fad? And I think it can't be because it's positive some and human evolution is positive some and it's just going to be one of those things that just continues to be.

Nicholas: What you just said there reminds me so much of things Jacob from Zorro was saying in 2020, 2021, like with that crypto media dot WTF, which were kind of really inspiring when I was starting to think more seriously about all this stuff. Yeah, it's a history machine with a economic incentive to keep the history.

Gami: Exactly. It's like, I'm heavily influenced by Jacob. So there's a lot of things that I speak about are definitely things that were seeded by his ideas. He's also from Sydney. So we've only ever met once in person. But shout out Jacob because yeah, huge, huge influence to me and many others, you know, like, he's consistently right.

Nicholas: Well, I mean, there's, yes, but I do feel the need to say like, look, Zorro made lots of technology that did not take off.

Gami: Totally.

Nicholas: And that's actually kind of the genius of it, that I'm really much more interested in teams. And I'd love to ask you about the people you work with. I know you worked with Ian Nash and Emory from OXChain Heart.

Gami: Yeah.

Nicholas: What was it like working with them? And are those people you work with frequently? Or who are you working with frequently?

Gami: It's a really good question because it changes all the time. It's like, it's as fleeting as the things we've discussed so far. So I guess, like, to start historically in crypto, you know, I would just like, work with whoever would have me.

Nicholas: And then that's the way to do it.

Gami: And then, yeah, exactly. Like, I just annoyed people enough until they gave me a job to do. Then I, you know, tried working with some contractors. And that was a nightmare because as we all know, crypto is full of scammers and been ripped off a bunch of times.

Nicholas: You self-funded. And then, yeah. Ouch.

Gami: I've never taken outside capital before. So it's like, yeah. And then, yeah, more recently, like the most sort of notable collaboration prior to my current one is with, yeah, Ian Nash, who's an engineer at Zora. He's done a lot of amazing solidity work.

Nicholas: Previous guest of the show also.

Gami: Yeah. Yeah. And he's a fascinating person and just like, very inspiring.

Nicholas: Powerhouse. Oh, yeah. Big reason for Zora's success. Ian Nash, huge influential developer building so many things.

Gami: Totally. And he'll just spit out a really complex smart contract in like a couple of hours. And you're like, what the hell? How did you do that? But yeah, that collaboration with Ian.

Nicholas: The answer is probably experience, actually.

Gami: But yeah, I think it must be. But yeah, Ian. and then Emre and Jordan, who are both from Zero Exchange and Emre is now working on something in the stablecoin arena called Parabol. So he's a great guy to talk to as well.

Nicholas: But who was the third person? Jordan. Yeah.

Gami: Yeah. Jordan Punzalan, I think is how you say his surname. We live in the same city. We'd never met before. And we met like six months after we did a project together. But that was a project called Forgeries, which was inspired by Mischief, who had a project of their own called Museum of Forgeries where they bought a hand sketched Picasso. And then they counterfeited or forged the original and made 999 forgeries. And then they mixed them all together. So nobody knows which the real one is and sold them all for $200 each when one's worth like $20,000. So we essentially did the same thing with a noun and as an NFT. And the way the collaboration came about was similar to like the birth of nouns. I just like tweeted this idea and said, here's what I'm going to do. And I had no idea how I would do it. But I told everyone, here's what I'm going to do. And then within actually within 24 hours, I got a DM from Ian saying that he was interested in doing the smart contracts for this idea and that he'd already like slapped together a bit of a prototype. And then, yeah, like that was a huge moment for me because I've been a big fan of him and his and we'd only sort of like exchanged a few messages here and there. But then Emra and Jordan came in and the four of us put together this, you know, really great front end experience. And we essentially sold forgeries of noun 401. And then one of the people who minted the forgeries walked away with the real noun, which I paid around 95 each for.

Nicholas: How many forgeries were there? Or it was just like an open edition or timed edition?

Gami: Yeah, it was an open edition. I didn't sell anywhere near enough because what happened was...

Nicholas: Oh no. Awesome.

Gami: Yeah, it's like, you know, it's just part of the story. Like, I don't even care to be honest. Like part of the history that I'm weaving on chain, I suppose.

Nicholas: This is forgeries.wtf for anyone who wants to check it out. Forgeries.wtf.

Gami: That's right. And then the tech, you know, we built, which is essentially a drawing protocol for NFT. So it's like, you know, you have a prize, which would be a high value NFT that goes into escrow. And then you're referencing like an NFT collection as essentially tickets. And then...

Nicholas: So cool. A raffle.

Gami: Withdraw. Exactly. Yeah. And it's using Chainlink VRF and, you know, it's built as a hyper structure. So anyone who were to replicate what we did with forgeries would be able to do it. And the factory contract spits out the contract that you need for your own and it's sovereign and all that stuff. So off the back of the project, we spun out a mega dot build, which is essentially just the front end to the protocol. And it's free to use. You just need to have a bit of a link token to pay for your on-chain randomness.

Nicholas: Has anyone used this? Because this is a great resource. But I haven't heard of any project.

Gami: There's been a couple of people use it like, you know, the artist Pixel Lord. I think I've seen that. Yeah. Yeah. So he's like a really cool Russian artist with all sorts of crazy digital and 3D and AI generated stuff. So he did a collaboration with Nas actually, where we did a open edition of his own rendition of my noun, number 189. And then after the editions had sold, he gave a one of one piece away to one of the collectors using the tool. There's been a couple of others, but I haven't really pushed it too hard just yet. Ian has lots more ideas and potentially ways of like integrating it in Zora. I think we'd like to see it on. We'd like to move it on to a couple of layer twos once the chain link services have caught up. So it'll be a lot cheaper and easier.

Nicholas: Be a great module. on Zora.co creator tools.

Gami: Yeah. Like my idea for it is like, you know, I'm not like a technically skilled artist, but I put out a lot of creative stuff. Right. And a lot of the time, you know, you have an idea and you want to get like the minimum viable idea out there straight away. Like this is sort of what someone like Jack Butcher talks about. And it's like, sometimes like a lot of people lack the courage to do that, but then they also lack like the incentives because it's like, well, I could spend all this time working on this piece and nobody even cares. Right. So I had this idea like, well, why don't you just do a quick sketch and then sell that as an open edition and then raffle off the one of one to people who have minted the sketch. And so one person gets like the finished piece and everyone else gets like the, you know, the work in progress. And I think there's something there that would be interesting to play with. But I also think like, there's just because of the way that Ian has like created the protocol, there's a lot of other sort of on-chain games that you could sort of experiment with because it's, it's all dependent on, you know, these, these Merkle trees and which is, you know, essentially a list of addresses. And so you could, you could have as simple as what we did with forgeries or you could potentially build a squid game on chain. You know what I mean? Like it's all about last man standing. And that's why I called it Omega because, you know, that's one of the meanings of the word Omega is essentially the last one, or, you know, last man standing. So yeah, I haven't done too much else with that yet, but you know, plenty of other distractions.

Nicholas: Do you find you're already reusing things that you made in previous things? Like NARS was, was it even pre-Nouns.Build? It was quite a bit pre-Nouns.Build, wasn't it? So you forked nouns yourself? Or I mean with help.

Gami: It was, yeah, the original version was like, the original version was even before Little Nouns, but it wasn't a DAU. So basically it was a fork of nouns where I took away the treasury and just had the slider when you bid and you could either send, you know, a percentage to me or a percentage to charity. And so we donated through, like when I first launched the project, it was the slider said skate or DAU and DAU actually was referring to endowment, which was the protocol I was using to donate money. Yeah, yeah, it was. It's like, but it was because it was also an experiment to determine if I should make it into a DAU.

Nicholas: So it was like, Market testing the DAU with the pre-sale.

Gami: Yeah, exactly. So there's like in skating, there's like skate or DAU. So it was like skate or DAU. And I was just paying attention to what people were doing. And like people were very generous towards me for creating this, you know, riff on nouns where they were all holding skateboards and like doing the, you know, sign of the horns, like the Nile's logo. Yeah. And yeah, it's sort of, it took off reasonably quickly once I started a discord and a few people gathered around and we're just like, Hey, there's lots of skaters in crypto. Who knew? And so, and so it kind of had to become a DAU at that point. And so we donated the eight and a half grand, I think it was that had gone to the DAU portion of the slider. We donated that to the skatepark project from Tony Hawk foundation. And we received a letter from Tony Hawk, signed and a special thank you, which was really cool. Cause I think we were the first yeah. Like on-chain donation that they'd received.

Nicholas: And DAU is so cool for that.

Gami: It really is like, they take care of like all the rigmarole that you really don't want to have to bother with. And you just, yeah, you just use their smart contracts. It's really cool. But yeah, from there we got to work on sort of, yeah, rolling NAS as a, you know, sort of an art project into a full blown DAU. I got a shout out to Volkey, so Volkey underscore ETH or no, just Volkey ETH on Twitter because he's my current foremost collaborator. He's done majority of the heavy lifting with NAS, NAS HD, and then our potential migration over to the Zora network, which is being proposed at the moment. So shout out Volkey.

Nicholas: Wow. So Volkey, where did you find Volkey?

Gami: He was floating around the Nounds ecosystem and Ben Boddy, who a lot of people know from Nounds Square and the founder of AlpsDAU, which is a spin out of NAS. Ben Boddy was the first person to rock up to NAS and we lived just a few hours away from each other. Another example of someone I didn't meet until like a year after we became friends in crypto. And he introduced me to Volkey and then Volkey and I like clicked so much that like all this demand for Volkey is outweighing his supply. So sorry, everybody, but I've been been hogging him lately. But yeah, we just vibe a lot on our values and similar interests. So we've been working together on a few different things lately.

Nicholas: That's sweet. And you're able to kind of bounce around encounter. There's other people who are looking for the same kind of project based work that are down to collab in that way.

Gami: Yeah, that's right. And I think like the best way to find them is just to like not be precious about your ideas because like nobody's gonna steal your idea. Like, you know, like there's a lot of people who have these grand ideas and they don't want to tell anyone about it and then get to work on it. And it's like, just tell someone about it because you'll figure out pretty quickly if it's worth doing. And you'll likely attract people that are, you know, the right people to work on it with you. And you're also going to attract a heap of spammers and scammers in your DMs like trying to offer you their services as well.

Nicholas: You're also not only saying ask on Twitter. You're maybe also saying you could ask privately, but ask.

Gami: Yeah.

Nicholas: Tell your idea. Tell people your idea. It doesn't have to be on Twitter. But do you find it useful to say the idea? I mean, you said forgeries came directly from a tweet.

Gami: Yeah, it was purely a thread just to say like, I think I, you know, was a little bit sensationalist with the tweet to get attention. But then once it got traction, once it got traction and people would say, oh, the first tweet's just attention grabber. And then they read through the thread people were interested in.

Nicholas: They get to the fifth tweet and they're like, I'm blocking this person.

Gami: Yeah, that happens to a lot of people. So yeah, you got to be careful with how you go about threading. I'm a bit off the threads these days. Like as soon as I see a spindle of thread and a down pointing finger, I sort of, I wince at it.

Nicholas: Do you do mega tweets or do you keep it under 280?

Gami: I've done a couple of mega tweets. Like I tweeted out my manifesto, Hyper Commons, before I published that as an HTML NFT and then a website.

Nicholas: But what's the gist of Hyper Commons?

Gami: Yeah, it's a manifesto for a positive some world. So it's like, sorry, our conversation is so meandering. So apologies to anyone listening, but this is just how I roll.

Nicholas: No, no, I think they're going to like it.

Gami: Okay, good. So I'll go back to the source of Hyper Commons. So Jacob Horn wrote an essay quite a while ago called Hyper Structures, where he describes essentially what Zora is and other things like Ethereum, where you release open source protocols and you make them free to use, but you monetize like at the fringes. So, you know, like Zora is a great example. They have all these protocols and tools you can use for free, but they provide a really seamless experience and you pay about a dollar to mint something as a user, which I think is brilliant, especially now with protocol rewards and being able to monetize free mints, etc. So it's sort of like creating...

Nicholas: It feels pretty ethical. The only part I don't like is that the free mints part. They're not free. But anyway.

Gami: Yeah. You got to put the R in brackets. That's all.

Nicholas: Oh, that's good. That solves it. I think it's a great model. I think it's a very ethical kind of business model, regardless of papering over the freeness thing.

Gami: Yeah, I think it's nice.

Nicholas: It's nice.

Gami: Yeah, I think where they work really well is they make small pivots and they run like these minor experiments and then they can sort of make decisions on the fly pretty quickly. And people for the last year have been happy to pay a dollar or so when they mint stuff. But back to the essay. Please. So another friend of mine, Light, on Twitter, he's 0xLHGT, so Light without the I. He essentially forked hyperstructures to write an essay called Hypercultures. And then I essentially forked hypercultures to write Hypercommons. And Hypercommons is just like a pure optimistic vision for the future. I subscribe pretty heavily to writers like Robert Wright, who wrote Nonzero, where he essentially argues the fact that through history, just the destiny of humans is a positive sum endeavor, like throughout every sort of era of humanity, we've had these examples of the positive sum prevailing. So while we're in crypto, where everyone talks about, you know, PvP and zero sum game and the strongest win and all this sort of stuff. Yeah, that's true in some of the really boring parts of crypto, but in the more expansive and interesting parts, it's full of positive sum outcomes. So I was really interested in this, having experience at Nansdao and founding Nansdao and doing a lot of stuff on Zora and reading things like, you know, essays by Toby Shorin from other internet and just stuff from organizations like Funding the Commons. And I just got really inspired to sort of like, imagine what the future would be like if positive sum prevails with the tools we have now, just like it has through every other era in history. And so it's like the easiest way to imagine the Hypercommons is like, right now we go outside and we enjoy all these public goods. Like I live in a beautiful city with clean air and parklands everywhere and some of the best beaches in the world. And it's all free, you know, aside from paying some tax. And I think it's completely worth paying tax to enjoy those things. But Hypercommons is like, it's not just public goods, it's public luxuries. So it's like, instead of private luxury, it's more about public luxury and sharing in these amazing, you know, experiences that we can have communally and these amazing resources. And I'm a big believer in sort of, you know, like when it comes to architecture, like I just recently bought an apartment. Rather than buying a large home, I thought it's much nicer to buy a small apartment and make use of existing buildings and repurpose this space to be very functional for the life that my partner and I want to live. And I think that, you know, that's a very, you know, it's a meaningful way to look at how you live and to make the most of what's already existing instead of knocking down buildings and building, you know, McMansions everywhere. And then I like to spend the quality time, like, you know, of course, relaxing at home and enjoying our space, but I like to spend quality time in the things that our community does for us. So, you know, there's always live music and, you know, beautiful festivals and events and things happening around us every weekend. And I just love to get out and enjoy that and go to used bookstores and go and look at art and dig through record crates and talk to people and hit up a skate park. And I just really, really want people to get behind the idea of like choosing positive sum and rejecting the zero sum and just rejecting that idea completely because it's boring, you know. And historically through history, through our evolution, positive sum has always prevailed. And just one other point to sort of like angle this back towards NAMSDAO is. I noticed that the 156 or whoever wrote the copy chose to use the word proliferate when it comes to what is promote our brand. And in biology, proliferation is the splitting of the cell. And when a cell splits, it splits from the culture, which is, you know, the medium that it's in. It splits into media and that new medium is a subculture. And that's how it's scientifically referred to. So I've always viewed NAMSDAO as essentially a serendipity machine where what I think it should be outputting is, as Yancy Strickler would put it, a meta label machine. So it should be outputting meta labels, which are essentially just groups of people who have a shared interest producing things together and releasing them and sharing in the spoils. So that's very positive sum thinking. And that's probably a big part of why I was sucked into NAMSDAO.

Nicholas: You say subculture. I've always rejected this idea of like a sub-DAO. I feel like it's just a DAO. It's its own legitimate, but I guess you're saying just sub in the sense of like a historical provenance in a genetic sense or something, a biological sense. Subculture is the word used.

Gami: Yeah. Yeah. Purely like referencing that sort of like biological sense. And then like, I think I've pushed those ideas before and then maybe sub-DAO has been like overused. And then I've more recently been trying to say to people, no, it shouldn't be called sub-DAOs. They should be called extensions or NAMSDAO plus or something that's positive sum. because yeah, sub, subtract, negative, minus sign.

Nicholas: Or submit. I mean, I think a lot of the logic of the financial, the logic of taxation that dominates revenue models is one where it's subordinate or I always read it as subordinate DAO.

Gami: Yeah. And submissive.

Nicholas: Yes, exactly. And essentially that you're going to pay some kind of tax. But it's interesting because I got a bit the creeps from that word early, early on. I was in SharkDAO, early on mainnet. Yet early in the life of a subculture, depending on where its source of locomotion is coming from or its gravity, center of gravity is, you maybe do want to signal, no, no, we're like really a part of this community. We're not extractive. We're additive to the NAMS community, for example, not trying to make something that is insists on being independent from day one.

Gami: Yeah, that's actually like a really interesting point to bring up regarding NAS. So like I'll say in American accent again, NAS. Originally, I was like being encouraged by some Nouners that, you know, I was sharing this draft idea of, you know, I wanted to get some funding to help make NAS a thing. And the idea behind NAS is that they shred the nouns. So it's like taking nouns and embedding them into street culture and through action sports like skateboarding, because, you know, that's essentially what we already do is we go and we, through performance art, we express ourselves on the, on the objects that surround us. And we've done that, you know, like we have giant noggles that are permanently placed in a town square in Prossa 15 and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and skaters every day go there and shred the nouns. It's like, there's this, this element there that was always from the beginning. I had a lot of pushback where people were like, why would you call it NAS? Like it should be called Gnarly Nouns or Nouns Athletes. And so I originally called it kinda Nouns Athletes and then just like deleted that account. And I said, it's NAS, like you guys have to realize like that is proliferation. The idea is that it's positive sum. You shouldn't be taxing creators. You chose CC0 licensing, you chose open source. And that's the point. If you go on something like GitHub, what's the biggest button on the page? It's the fork button. Usually it's at least the prominent or the first button anyway. And it's in that right hand segment in the top quadrant. And that's known through, you know, pattern studies and everything and online interactions to be where people look first. So, you know, it's the point.

Nicholas: You were maybe the first project to deviate. I mean, you do have a noun-like auction, and the aesthetics of the NFTs are noun-like, but the branding is also very independent. And you must have been one of the first ones because, you know, that's been an issue for a long time. And Gnarly Nouns is quite early in the history of nouns funding projects.

Gami: Yeah, definitely. It was proposal 51. So it was like, I think it was pretty early and I joined Nouns at Noun 189. So I've been like lurking since the beginning. I just hadn't scurried together the funds yet. And there hadn't been a skateboard head yet. I was the first skateboard head that pops up is mine. And then of course, the day it pops up, I get a DM from 4156 essentially saying you're up. That helped me to the promise. But I'm glad that I did it. Yeah. Look, I think branding independence is really important because I originally shared this idea when I was developing the brand for Gnar. If you see Gnar in the audience at the moment, you know, I've got my laptop listening as well. But the logo is literally eight pixels. And, you know, much like nouns are very lo-fi, I wanted to do the same thing because I want Gnar to be a canvas for other people to express themselves on, just like skateboarding, you know. A skateboard is a memetic icon, just like the nouns glasses, but it's a much more advanced memetic icon, which has far more utility. But that only came about through collective creation of skaters expressing themselves through different foot movements and placements to be able to achieve thousands of tricks. Shout out Rodney Mullen for creating like a good couple of hundred of those. So there's this brand identity that I think from the very beginning should be its own. If you're working on something now, it shouldn't be called Gnarly nouns, it should be called Gnars. Right. So I was very adamant at the start. And then I formed this idea of what I called ShadeMark instead of Trademark. So it's weird to me that like Trademark, the TM, you know, you see top corner on a trademarked brand. It's weird to me that that's self-referential. Like, it's just like, you put this thing there and it's just like, yep, I'm referring to myself. It's a brand. It's official. Yeah.

Nicholas: I pay for it to be a brand.

Gami: Yeah, exactly. It's like, it's kind of like, if something is a brand, it's not really up to you. It's up to people that adopt it and care about it and care enough about it to tell people about it. And then when you look at something like Zora, they've just used the Zorb and it's now their entire brand. identity, you know, was very different before. You know, Zora was originally called Saint Fame and it was a t-shirt project, right? And then there's like, it's evolved and Jacob and the other founders like Tyson and Dee and that have sort of left it to the community to form the brand. And I think that's really important with these kinds of experiments. And so what I put out into the world to suggest as an alternative to trademarking was ShadeMarking. So use your own brand, but top right where you would normally have a TM, you know, reject to zero sum, it's no trademarking, but just put a tiny little set of noggles where the TM would normally be in there. That's your ShadeMark. And then instead of it being self-referential, it's actually the origin. It's referencing the origin of where your brand came from. So whether you were funded by Nouns or you use Nouns assets, it's just a nice way to add to the culture. And, you know, some people have caught on to that and used it, but not very many. Sometimes my ideas are a bit silly.

Nicholas: If I understand what you're saying, like a ShadeMark, I mean, you could imagine someone putting some kind of like Kanye reference like that on their brand just to be like, this is, I'm trying to be in that lineage.

Gami: Yeah, totally. Like it's a subtle badge of origin. Cause like when you read the literal definition of a trademark, it essentially reads as self-referential badge of origin, which just doesn't make sense. Like that's, it's like, it's paradoxical, right? It's like, it's kind of cool. Okay. Yeah, it is. It is in a way. But in the context of something where it's, you know, CC zero and you're borrowing from other assets and stuff, it's actually kind of like beneficial to make reference to Nouns, for example, in some small way. But just not, you know, don't call yourself Gnarly Nouns. Cause you're just limiting your potential, right? Like, and it just sounds whack. Like, don't think anyone, I don't think anyone should sort of like limit themselves to be, like you said before, you know, a sub-Dao, submissive, you know, subversion, subordinate. Yeah. They're all negatives. Some words you should be more positive.

Nicholas: How do you think about making projects that are open-ended and yet not, how do you, how do you design the projects so that they can have these open-ended community elements without taking on too much long-term burden to animate all of these communities that you're involved in starting?

Gami: It's a good question. It's one of the ones where you take a moment to think and people think that you've dropped off the call.

Nicholas: But I mean, like some of them are not open-ended, like Forgeries, for example, has a closure.

Gami: Yeah. Yeah. So the way that I look at these sorts of, let's just call them problems because like, it is a problem depending on the context of the idea that you've had. I tend to just sort of resign myself to the fact that everything is a remix and that you should borrow from everything around you and sort of subscribe a little bit to like, the Virgil Abloh concept of, you know, 3% change and it's yours. So I think that's like, the prime sort of like design philosophy for something in crypto, because everything is already so abstract and like, can be really overly technical. And it's easier just to sort of like, make a slight adaptation of something else. And we see that in NFTs, like, in a big way, right? Like everything is referencing something else. Like, even though Bored Apes and Yuga Labs were, you know, such a huge success, like, it's literally just a copy of like, other stuff before it, right? It's like, it's just the space and time and the people involved in whatever meant a different outcome to others. And so I think like, in terms of that open-endedness, it's very much like, getting rid of any semblance of ego and talking about everyone else from the Because like, I've remained pseudonymous, and I'm not leaning on my previous success in the skateboarding community realm. I'm not even tapping into that original community. Well, not yet, because I didn't want to sort of like, lean on what reputation I already have, because it's not about me. You know, like, I can go around and flash people like a magazine I've been on, but I'm not going to. There are a couple of people I've shown because we've become close. But with Nas, for example, like it was, it was never to be about me. So I think there's, that's probably the secret sauce.

Nicholas: I just find that so many projects are ultimately animated by one motivated person or sometimes two or three, but often it's very few people who are really behind whole organizations. And, or like I think about maybe not even organizations necessarily, but things like the way Tim Schell animated the LÜT-verse last year, two years ago, was like one person deciding is kind of what made that happen. And the illuminator role, it doesn't necessarily confer responsibility. So I'm not trying to imply that everything you do, you should feel responsible for long term or anything like that. But it does seem like it's a kind of has to be a factor somehow in how you're designing. I guess, I guess you're saying you don't make it about you. The projects have their own momentum.

Gami: Yeah, it's really interesting that you bring up Tim because we've actually collabed on something as well.

Nicholas: Oh, cool. What? I don't even know this one.

Gami: At Eats Denver, the most recent one, I wasn't able to be there. We, Nas Dao put on the Gnarly Smoke Lounge, which was Brett from the community, essentially proposed to get some funding and take over the cannabis lounge. that's just down the road from where the conference was.

Nicholas: Proposed to who?

Gami: And to Nas, and we funded the event. And basically, Tim Schell got involved by doing an exhibit of his project Chainspace, where I think you may be familiar with it. It was a Bitcoin ordinals project where he'd essentially deployed a web app onto a Satoshi. It would open your webcam and then like render you in ASCII characters. And so he made a Nas version of that where, you know, the sign of the horns emoji, skateboards and noggles made up the image. And he actually collabed with Ian Nash to create a device to put it onto an old 1960s television. This beautiful vintage piece, it's amazing. It looks like glass and just incredible, like the casing of it and everything. This beautiful dark olive green color. And he wheeled that into the venue and put it on display. And you can imagine people smoking cannabis and looking at this art. It's interactive. It would have been a great experience. Unfortunately, it wasn't there. But it sounds amazing.

Nicholas: Ian has a background in hardware electronics with his original passion, I think.

Gami: Sure does. Yeah.

Nicholas: Yeah, it's cool.

Gami: So yeah, anything like Arduino and Raspberry Pi based, like just hitting it up, that's for sure. And that's sort of like my engineering background. originally too, was, you know, those distributed systems, I was mostly doing like low level serial communications stuff, different data systems, electrical systems. But, um, full circle.

Nicholas: So different from what you do now. Did you like it?

Gami: Yeah, I loved it. But it's not actually that different. You know, it's like, like, conceptually, it's quite similar. Like we're still just transmitting like, these sort of like data packets at different board rates and, you know, different bandwidths. And those different data packets are different resolutions. And it's all energy. And, you know, we're all part of this sort of like mycelium network. Like I can get pretty, pretty, you know, expensive on some of those thoughts. But it's, yeah, everything just sort of comes back to that connective tissue that we were discussing at the start of our conversation. And, you know, to even though I'm meander so much, I do want to come back to the point with, with designing projects certain ways. And I think like Tim Schell is a great example of that. Like, he is someone who has a million ideas, and he puts, you know, tens of things out at any given time. And there are things that are, you know, set up for, you know, a one-off purpose. There are things that are designed to live on for potentially forever. And there are things that are ephemeral for, you know, a certain output, or a certain purpose or an event or whatever it might be. And I think there's like, when you're designing around an idea and what its life cycle or lifespan should be, I really always go back to that video that Derek Sivers, I think, voiced over called Dancing Guy. I think it is. And it's basically this video of a guy at a music festival. It's from like 2009 on YouTube, if you look it up. And it's called Lessons from Dancing Guy by Derek Sivers.

Nicholas: Oh, I think everyone knows the Dancing Guy video, right? Like the guy who starts to dance on like a hill at an outdoor festival. On the hill. Yeah.

Gami: Yeah. So Derek Sivers, he basically laid commentary of this video and its lessons in leadership. And the idea is that it's you as the founder, just need to be the crazy nut who attracts his first follower, or attracts their first follower. And then the first follower becomes the leader. And that's why I think it's really important to think about like how we word things and how we instantiate memes. And I don't mean like memes as in just the format of like memes as we think of them today. But yeah, the more, you know, darkened. Yeah. And I think that's really where my passion lies. Like I love to seed sort of ideas and inspire somebody else and then let them run with it and be able to look back like a year later and be like, I was the first person to say that thing. You know, and often I'll like if I come up with a new word, I'm into it. Like, like droposal. Like the droposals are now a big thing in nouns and in other DAOs where it's a proposal that drops in NFT. And that was just a word I came up with after a proposal I saw that Jacob did. And I was like, ah, cool word, I'm going to mint it. And now it's like on the front of all these different clients. And there's a new nouns client being built that I think would be like drops.wtf or something like that by Yutong from Agora. And it's a droposal platform. And it's like, that's so cool that like, I just got to mint something and now it's like, it's part of the crypto canon. You know, it's like people use it as a legitimate word. And I love that. That's the thing I enjoy most.

Nicholas: When you mint it, I'm curious how you mint it.

Gami: Various different ways. So like, often I'll like, you know, web2, grab a domain because I'm a domain hoarder. Then I'll look for the ens.com or you'll go off road? Off road. Anywhere. If .com's available, I'll take it. But I'll take like various variations just in case ideas pop up later that I could use it for. ENS definitely.

Nicholas: Yeah, gotta get it.

Gami: And then I can't believe I wasn't a huge ENS hoarder because like the amount of domains I have is ridiculous. But...

Nicholas: Too bad.

Gami: Yeah, like actually I have one really great domain, which is Toshis. So T-O-S-H dot I-S. And the email address is S at Toshis. So it's the Toshis.

Nicholas: Wow, nice. I've thought about doing ones like that. Like I was going to get a Nicholas that was like C-H-O-L dot A-S or something like that.

Gami: Oh, yeah. There is a dot A-S T-O-D. So yeah, that'd be sick.

Nicholas: It's kind of cool, but it's kind of like, is it too weird? Maybe I'll do it before I post the recorded version.

Gami: I think it just looks great. It's really like not optimized for audio. Like actually, that's one piece of advice to crypto people. And one that's kind of like not exercised very well with Nas because of my accent. But come up with names that you don't have to spell out on a podcast. Exactly.

Nicholas: Exactly.

Gami: Yeah.

Nicholas: I say that, but I violated that with my Twitter handle. It's very painful to communicate to someone, but it's a tradeoff for it being very easy to search for.

Gami: That's so true. It's just NNN. But I always just assumed that your name was Nicholas.

Nicholas: And I've committed a cardinal sin. Jesus, the second time I say cardinal sin the past couple of weeks on this show. I'm not obsessed with cardinal sins. However, I did sin when I changed my name on Farcaster. It's just Nicholas because I was able to grab it.

Gami: And I hate when people have different names.

Nicholas: I hate it so much.

Gami: I did the same. I went from 0xigami to Gami.

Nicholas: We went back and forth on this because I think the I in your name is invisible. I never read it until you pointed at it.

Gami: Do you want to know the reason that it's got the I?

Nicholas: It's origami, right?

Gami: Yeah, it was originally an art project I was doing called 0xigami, as in origami, which was meant to be origami unfolding on Ethereum. So it was just a portmanteau of 0x address and origami.

Nicholas: There is a difference in your work. I took a brief look at that project, and it's aesthetically very different from your work. after encountering Nouns. Did something happen?

Gami: Yeah, I became hyper fixated on Nouns.

Nicholas: Maybe I didn't make it all the way to the website for that. But did it have the same... NARS has a lot of, I imagine, your aesthetics in it. The parts that are not Nouns-like.

Gami: Yeah.

Nicholas: Did something change in your practice about executing frontend or branding?

Gami: Yeah, I think it did. It was because of a realization that I had with. What's Genius about Nouns in terms of the CCO realm, is the fact that lower fidelity artwork is easier to remix. And so you get far more people involved. And testament to that is Jack with Chex and now with Opep. He provides very simple constraints that anyone can participate in. And all of a sudden, you're an artist. So I think it was a purposeful choice at the time. Because I've made quite a lot of work previously. I've done a generative on-chain, actual fully on-chain, not what we refer to as on-chain now. I did something called Embryonic, which was... If you go to embryonic.me, I think was the... I just have to check the web address. Yeah, embryonic.me. It's just like a smart contract that generates an SVG thing that looks like a cross between a Zorb and an embryo.

Nicholas: When did you drop this?

Gami: 2021, 2020. I can't remember. It wasn't super early. I'd done some other NFT stuff before that. I did a project. You're so prolific.

Nicholas: I don't understand how you're so prolific.

Gami: I'm just obsessive. I have chronic neck pain from doing too many things. I'm starting to get better at balancing my life out.

Nicholas: At all times, it sounds like you must be working towards a creative output. It sounds like, just thinking, calculating it, it doesn't seem possible that you're spending a lot of time researching without a purpose.

Gami: Yeah, exactly. It's almost to a fault. It's just really lucky that my partner, that she's also very prolific, creative. She gets it. She's like, holy shit. Yeah, that's cool. She's written well over 100 songs and I've heard most of them played live. She's incredible.

Nicholas: Is it in the water?

Gami: I don't know. It's just people around me are the same. Her sister is a quite well known musician in Australia, but has fewer songs than my partner. But my partner doesn't release any music because she's very private. My brother-in-law is a live sound engineer for all the biggest names in Australian music. So I'm just surrounded by a lot of creative people. So I think that rubs off on me a lot.

Nicholas: Does it make you want to be creative, to do creative work when you wake up in the morning?

Gami: Yeah, it's the first thing I do is I do something. that's an output. A lot of people wake up and read social media. I don't even open Twitter. I just open Typefully, which is a tool for writing tweets. You can schedule it or you can tweet it straight away or whatever. But it helps you avoid reading any tweets. I love that. And so I just get up and I walk and if I have an idea, I just put it in there straight away. Exactly.

Nicholas: I love that. For many years I wanted to make and I actually did. One of the first things I ever did when I learned JavaScript was write what I thought of as a personal Twitter, which is just like the joy of the Twitter compose. But just for you. I love that. In the end, it ended up looking more like a chat, but like just with one player. But searchable, you know, isn't that great?

Gami: I love that because I'm all about like information diet and distilling things down. Like right now I'm thinking like on the homepage, you should like release that JavaScript as a Chrome extension because there's already on Twitter for you. There should be just for you as well.

Nicholas: Yeah. Well, I was thinking they should do. I mean, Elon never listens, but they should do just fully private tweets. I would just use Twitter for that. It would become my and it would be so sticky as a user interaction. And if it just became a journal. Yeah. It would be a great journaling experience. The other one, I'm curious. what you think is, I wish I do use Twemx on Twitter.

Gami: No, I haven't even heard of it. I'm excited to hear what it is.

Nicholas: It's a little obscure. T W E M E X.

Gami: Yeah.

Nicholas: And it's it basically just gives you the Twitter search, advanced search with on the right side of the Twitter window, it will be completely replaced with a new column. that is Twitter search. And when you go to anybody's page, it'll automatically bring up like their most liked or recent interesting tweets. And if you search, it will search only within their tweets. And it has.

Gami: That's great.

Nicholas: You can do other kind of things to like, you know, tweets where this person mentioned me, or you can do advanced kind of things. But really, it's just like amazing search at your fingertips, like on everybody's page, and it customizes to the page you're looking at, whoever's profile you're looking at right now.

Gami: I love that.

Nicholas: But what I want is I feel like I just meet so many interesting people. I want a CRM for this. Like, I just want to be able to like take a note on like some interaction we had or, you know, something so that I remember because I just meeting so many people on Twitter, especially, it's like impossible to remember everybody. To just add a little note and then have those be searchable. in the same way you just search, you know, who is this person? Or it just shows like WeChat. Have you ever used WeChat?

Gami: Yeah. Yeah.

Nicholas: You know how they have. like when you I'm obsessed with. when you add a person, you can choose either a business contact who doesn't get your feed of posts or like a friend contact. And then you can add a little note to the person and it's like, that's great. That's perfect. It's so simple.

Gami: And it just makes perfect sense, right? It's like, it's like what you're doing in your head anyway.

Nicholas: Exactly. Or what you have to reverse into your DMs.

Gami: And I'm a big believer in that. Yeah, yeah. And also the DM experience on Twitter is just garbage. It's like, it's like just embed telegram in there if you can, please. Like, we have search now.

Nicholas: Yeah. We didn't used to have search over messages. So I'm happy. I don't complain anymore.

Gami: We have encrypted DMs now too. I noticed.

Nicholas: I think that's vaporware. I haven't seen that. I don't know. Is it real yet?

Gami: I can start. I can start a message now. Like, I'm gonna send you an encrypted message now.

Nicholas: Oh, sick.

Gami: But I don't know if it's actually encrypted.

Nicholas: If anything, so it'll only be on the app on my phone, I guess.

Gami: Yeah, it's only on the phone and it says early access messages are encrypted. Learn more.

Nicholas: Oh, cool.

Gami: Yeah.

Nicholas: I think they should all be that way.

Gami: Yeah, I sent you my home address. Yeah. No, it's just a GM. It's just a GM.

Nicholas: That's where you live though. Okay, I know we went a little long. Do you mind if we talk for a few more minutes or do you have to run?

Gami: Oh, I've got heaps of time. It's Saturday.

Nicholas: Okay, great. I have like a few other things I wanted to ask you about. I'm looking at all the things I want to ask you. I'm going to find the most interesting thing here. PoApp.eth says that reserved issuance creates a free rider problem. What do you think about reserved issuance? And is it a useful lever for building communities in this nouns model? Reserved issuance as in like the noun is for one? For example, yeah. Or Zora in builder or, you know, it's used in many nounish stuff.

Gami: I think.

Nicholas: Do you like do you find it a useful lever? Maybe that's a politically clean way to answer the question.

Gami: Yeah, look, I don't have a problem with it. Like not in NAS, I don't get it. Like instead, it goes to a multi-sig that's used for onboarding shredders. So like people who are new to web three, we give them one for free and get them involved as long as you know, they're able to shred. But I do get a bid tip, which is up to the bidder. They select, you know, by default, it's set to 10%, but they can move the slider. So I think I'm not actually like that sold on some of the problems like tragedy of the commons and free rider problems. Like, I think that, you know, there's, there are quite a lot of studies out there that sort argue against those problems. And look, no assumptions, like I'm not gonna, you know, off the top of my head, sort of like been up any really strong opinions because I'd need data in front of me first. But I would say that like, in the nouns example, there needs to be some incentive for them to care, because it's a trustless protocol that would run if they weren't around, no matter what. But they put in all the work to start the project. And it's good that some of them stick around. And they're not equally getting, you know, 1% each, they decide how to distribute it amongst the 10 nounders over time anyway, because, you know, someone like Dom, who is very busy with SUP and other projects, and is a very prolific coder and creator, you know, he's not gonna, it's obvious that he wouldn't have been as involved in nouns, right? Like he came in and did a lot of the smart contract work for the encoding of the art on chain. It's essentially like an SVG printer, what he did. So there's like, it's a tough question, especially with because of the environment of nouns at the moment, who is like the impending fork and like, I'm pretty sure I feel like Patricio would be forking away because of sort of like the sentiment I've seen that he has around nouns. So I would sort of my question would be, is the statement impacted by apathy? And is it? Is it just, you know, is it emotionally driven in any way? And or is there, you know, data that backs up that statement?

Nicholas: Yeah, I want I could summarize what he told me, but I won't try and argue his point. But maybe actually what I'm more interested in is like, you're even with like nouns HD, for example, where you released an open edition that I guess funded the illustration of all the nouns assets. Yeah. With hand like hand illustration, right?

Gami: Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

Nicholas: But you did, but you you I guess paid out of pocket in advance for the illustration or someone partnered and for a share of the proceeds or something?

Gami: Yeah, that's correct. So about about what? about the same amount that the protocol rewards were, I paid Illustradora.eth from from Brazil, she did all the hand drawn art, and I involved a couple of other people from the NAS community to help bring it to life. And so, yeah, I paid up front and then recovered the cost and made a very small profit on top of that.

Nicholas: So I think it's take a pretty big risk because you didn't know how many would mint.

Gami: Yeah, yeah, it took a sizable risk. Yeah, like, you know, $15,000 or something like that. But it was like, in celebration.

Nicholas: I'm asking is because it's like, it's all right. Yeah. And the art looks great. And if people go to the Narsdao site, you can see the art, you can flip to the nouns HD mode. And they look great. Frankly, I think I might like them better. At least looking at them right now. They're a lot of fun.

Gami: Well, that's how it came about too is that I originally had the idea to reward the NAS community with an extra free NFT. That was just this idea of like, what if we flicked a switch, like what would the 32 pixels look like in 4000 pixel 4000 by 4000 4k, you know, so I was like, that was the idea. And then Dora had created all the assets for that. And then I said, Oh, it's now anniversary. Why don't we also do another rendition where, you know, the bodies are not wearing t shirts like the NAS do and instead it's like the original nouns and we could release a collection on Zora and base as part of on on chain summer. So there's like 222,000 on Zora and on base. The base one hasn't been to that yet, but it's at around 50%. And so there's sort of like these distinct collections. There's like nouns HD, you know, free mint that was to proliferate nouns to layer twos. And now there's like 13 and a half thousand new people owning an announce asset that didn't before that we can interact with. later, you know, been doing some airdrops going to do some prop house rounds and stuff like that where they get to vote and they can have a taste of like what on chain governance is. And then NAS HD is just purely a thank you to the community that has so much for me because all the amazing things that have been output by NAS, I didn't do like, I've just set the environment for those things to happen created that serendipity machine. How? Comes back to that video a little bit, you know, like I just sort of like, get out and wave my hands around and do some dance moves until somebody else copies me. Like, I know that's a really abstract definition.

Nicholas: But I mean, I think there are some things that okay, so that that piece is amazing and sort of the most awe inspiring piece, but there I think the actually the maybe more practical steps are actually the piece that eludes people and stops them from doing things similar. This kind of what I'm thinking of as crypto producer. That's my title for it. And it's like a music producer. But for things that happen on chain, could call it an on chain producer. I'm saying crypto producer because I'm sort of still uncomfortable with the word on chain evolution. But I love it. And I was saying on chain, I was complaining on Twitter about, you know, on chain shouldn't have a hyphen in 2020 or 2021 or whatever. Like, I'm on board for that piece of it. But the just the I don't know. However, I think ultimately, I'm already like a week or two weeks into being annoyed about quote unquote on chain summer, just at a taxonomical level. I'm you know, I've given up. There's no point in fighting. It's better when it means on chain culture rather than on chain technically. Yeah. It will dominate because it just means more.

Gami: I totally vibe with what you're saying, because like my original attraction to NFTs was the fully on chain technical side of things. And that's how I found Nounds too. It was through M-Rays website, actually through 0xchain.org. Yeah, it is. I don't know how well maintained it is nowadays because they're busy with other things. But if anyone's interested in contributing, I know it's the whole open source.

Nicholas: Yeah, super cool. Yeah, yeah. It's culturally it's a little challenging, but things are evolving and it does feel like we're really turning a corner in terms of mass adoption, just given the cost reduction and some UX improvements that really, I think, make it 100x easier to get involved in crypto.

Gami: Yeah, definitely. I think like that. I think like a really strong name at the moment is that on chain is the new online and off chain is the new offline. Yeah, there's, I think like the to reference light. So if you go to like mirror.xyz forward slash lght.if, you know, friend and one of my favorite artists and writers, he's been exploring a lot of stuff around, you know, what we're what he originally called the hyper stack, which is, you know, hyper structures, hyper cultures, hyper commons. And yeah, like I describe myself as hyper punk these days because like, it's a, you know, a hark back to cypherpunk, which is what inspired me to enter crypto in the first place, that counterculture and rejecting the zero sum. And there's, it really just highlights the point that like, crypto is a cultural movement, right? Like, first and foremost, like, its birth was countercultural, and its success will be counter cultural. Like, there's a lot of talk about like, we need institutions, we need ETFs, we need this, we need that. It's like, no, no, no, we need courage. That's it. It's a courageous endeavor, like any cultural movement. And I don't want to like, shill my own tweets too much. But I brought up this tweet that I wanted to reference earlier.

Nicholas: It's only cheesy because it's a tweet. If it was a book, you wouldn't be giving a caveat. Anyway, go ahead.

Gami: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Nicholas: Sorry, it's a post on X. We should be.

Gami: Oh, yeah. I don't know how I feel about that yet either. But what I wrote was that history has been a tapestry of events woven with threads of time and space. into the era of hyper event, block space immortalizes moments in both dimensions. And then I go on to say that I'm starting a metal label to produce the hyperpunk handbook so we can all make sense of our hyper reality. So, you know, just to sort of, you know, belabor your point around culture, we're in a hyper cultural moment. It's taking off every which way, yeah, at every possible time. And there is like, you know, you've just got to look on the fringes of crypto. Like, the worst thing about crypto is how bad most of the larger media groups within crypto are, because they're who the mainstream media look to for story ideas. But it's people like yourself, and groups like Forefront, and podcasters like Chase Chapman, and just all these incredible people like UFO, Dot FM, Nick Collins, you know, there's people who are on those bleeding edges telling those stories of culture, the people doing the greatest work to help push the space forward. Because if you're creating art, writing code, you know, creating films, doing anything that's a creative output, you're creating culture. Like that's what culture is. And I think, unfortunately, because there are a lot of, like, I'll use Australia as an example, no offense to any Australians listening, but the NFT scene here, it's about two years behind where it should be. Right? Like everyone, a lot of people are still like, Oh, what's the next mint? Like, let's get in on this collection.

Nicholas: And it's like, they don't know that you're supposed to sell generative collections as if they were open editions now.

Gami: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. There's the best place to play is like just behind some of these crazy nuts that are going out on the hill and dancing alone and trying to attract that first follower. And I'm not saying that that means that I should have more followers.

Nicholas: Although you should.

Gami: I think I just cracked 6,000, which is like crazy for a new account.

Nicholas: I mean, I've always thought that just in terms of who cares about appealing to a large group of people who don't really have anything to do with you. And also any inflated follower counts are rampant on every platform. But also even numerically, there was a tweet recently about how you, I forget who it was who said it, but you just get shown to the people who are not interested like. I interpret it as the algorithm is so piss poor that it doesn't thematically direct your tweets to the people who will like them amongst your followers. It just has a kind of rough sense of people who have recently interacted with you and should be exposed to the tweet. And so there's no, it doesn't feel like there's enough segmenting. So if you have a huge audience, even if you have a great tweet, it's possible that it doesn't take off because I noticed this also with saying the same thing over and over again, that, you know, like sometimes just the third or fourth time you say something, it doesn't even, maybe even an error in the tweet. And that's the one that people flock to. I think it has a lot to do with the velocity around interactions. That is a bit, just a consequence of how the Twitter algorithm is sort of lame at choosing who the first people are to show.

Gami: Yeah, dude, like I, I personally hate the whole concept of being fed an algorithm. Like it's literally the matrix of plugging this spike into the back of your neck and like being fed this you know, false reality. Like I truly believe that because I grew up, you know, I'm in my mid 30s. Like I grew up in the era of the internet where it was the innately curious people had a fantastic time. Right. It was like, every day you would discover like three new websites and then you would like write them down. Exactly. And then you'd be like, you go to your friends and you're like, Hey man, I made some copies. Here's some new websites to check out. Right. And it was like mixtapes with music. Like I want to be, I want to be receiving thoughtfully curated lists from people that I admire. And that's why like on Twitter, like for you tab sucks, like following tab, great lists even better because like on a particular day, I might feel more about music than I do about visual art or nouns or NAS or skateboarding. And I'll just only have my Twitter tab on that particular theme or that list for that day and not even bother with the rest. And then I use tools like Mailbrew to just feed myself, you know, a distilled version of the media that I'm consuming. And like, it's like, why FOMO? You're not going to miss out on too much. Like you're better off spending your time curating instead of like, just consuming this like fire hose of mostly garbage.

Nicholas: Yeah, it does feel like whenever people come back from a break, they're always like, what did I miss? And the answer is definitely nothing, nothing serious. But at the same time, I do love the algorithm or I want an algorithm because there's so much out there that I can't one to one follow everybody. You know, like I want to see the best of what's out there, not just what happened. right as I was like, I like to have access to that too. But I think frankly, I want like, you know, there's such amazing things people are saying on Twitter and on all these other networks that are popping up. What you say makes me think of Farcaster. I don't know if you're a fan.

Gami: Yeah, I'm on Farcaster. Like there are things I like about it and things I don't. But I think like the point that I'd like to make is like, not fully against algorithms, but I'm definitely much more interested in personalized algorithms. And I think like, that's what platforms like Twitter should really focus more on, especially now with AI being where it is, is like, for you should be for you, but it's not. It's for the advertisers, right? Like, because that's the incentive model of a platform. that's advertising.

Nicholas: It'll be interesting to see if the system prompt user experience from ChachiPT starts bleeding into other things and you do get some kind of opportunity to inform the algorithm what you want to see like with text. That would be very cool.

Gami: Yeah, yeah, I would love that. Like that, you know, there are obviously loads of ways that you impact your experience on a platform like Twitter or X. But the results haven't been great yet. Yeah. On that personal level. Like, you're right that sometimes, yeah, you discover new things, thanks to algorithms. But I don't want to, I don't want to lose that feeling that you get from curation because like me personally, one of my favorite things about who I am is that I always have something to talk about when there's a dinner party, right? Like I'm, I'm not a motor mouth. I'm a listener. Like I love to have really, you know, well balanced conversations. So we go to a dinner party and I'm usually pretty anxious in that kind of situation, right? Like to be completely honest, but my coping mechanism is to make sure that everyone's comfortable. So the way that I do that is I have an ability to multi-thread when, when it comes to conversation. So I can listen to various things at once and I can, and I can converse while listening. So that's my unique ability that perhaps helps me do some of the things I do.

Nicholas: That's your ability in Professor X's academy.

Gami: Yeah. Yeah. Mutant, mutant gummy. So there's, yeah, there's this element of, of that situation that I really enjoy. Like I get a huge kick out of this and it's like, Hey, did you guys hear about this thing? Right? Like it's, it's curating the conversation through the innate curiosity that led me to that point. And it's, it like makes your own experience better. It enlightens other people. It makes them, you know, have a better experience at that dinner or that party or that meetup or whatever. And I'll just find like, it just harkens back to the nostalgia of making a mixtape for a girl you like, you know, like it's, it's romantic. It's like, like friendships are romantic. Like, and I don't mean, you know, in an intimate sense, but I mean that there is a certain level of intimacy that you can only achieve with your friends through curatorial experience because you're sharing the world with one another. You're bringing these moments in time and space into another time and space. It's, it's almost like these, you know, crossover realities and stepping through portals, you know, like don't mean to get too woo woo, but it's, but that's, that's how I connect with people. Like I love, I love that feeling.

Nicholas: Interest in them, but also making a convivial context.

Gami: Totally. And like, this is how simple it is for why I feel so strongly about this. Now, if you think about like, any person you've ever met that you have gone on a date with, and you wanted to see again, like nine times out of 10, you share some music, right? Because it's, it's revealing something about yourself without having to say too much. And it's saying something to that other person without having to say the words yourself. And in my life, I've had, I've had great partners through my life. And now I've finally found the right partner for me. And despite the other ones not working out, they were right at the time and they were great. And I had great experiences. and it always revolved around curating something for one another, whether it was a choice of a restaurant or try this cocktail, or, hey, check out this playlist I put together on Spotify. And it, it brings love. It's that simple, man. It's like, that's how you find love. is you curate for one another. That's my, that's my belief.

Nicholas: It's kind of considerate curation.

Gami: Yeah. Yeah. It's, um, I don't have like a special word portmanteau that I've come up with.

Nicholas: You gotta write a blog post about it. You gotta mint it. If you're not going to mint it, what's the point?

Gami: I forgot the ENS. But yeah, it's, um, yeah, that's all part of it, I think. So yeah.

Nicholas: There was a question that kind of got lost in the shuffle, which was, so we get that you got to be the first one dancing, but you don't need to be the one to do everything piece of, of, of leading the creation of a, of, of a happening, but, or even a community. But the question I want to jump into a little more deeply is, I think there are sort of practical decisions that you're making that stop other people from proceeding like, oh, but what about this concern or that concern and not knowing how to narrow options or take a leap of faith with some practical question. And I feel like that doesn't seem to bother you as much, or you have some technique for navigating the fog of not war, but creation.

Gami: Yeah, definitely. That, that's, that's definitely something I take a lot of pride in is like, this type of sensitivity that I sort of described before at a, you know, it's, it's almost like spatial awareness that I'm very tuned in with in, in, you know, real life setting, but also can manifest that

Nicholas: online. Empathy?

Gami: And it's definitely empathy and it is, it's compassion. and more practically speaking, it's, it's, it's being selfless enough to do the work and learn and then speak what you learned in the language that it needs to be heard in. Basically, it's like, it's like, don't speak down on anyone. Don't speak down to anyone. It's, you know, distill information in a way that's digestible for whatever, you know, forum you're in and respect. It's, and, and it's, it's being very aware of like what other people are good at or what they might struggle with and just genuinely help them. And then it makes it much easier to reason with people because, you know, you show that you've done the work and you, and through compassion and, and empathy, you, there's, there's some love there, you know.

Nicholas: It's an act of service.

Gami: It's totally. Yeah. Yeah. And I get a kick out of it. Like it's, it's, and when there is a disagreement and we need to reason, like, I, I, I don't get emotional about any of that stuff. Because like, I'm not too attached to anything because I know that things change and perhaps that goes back to childhood through the very transient and, you know, quite challenging childhood. I wouldn't wish on anyone. That resilience is something that you learn. And, and I think once you've learned that kind of resilience, you can't help but put that kind of love out into the world and the people around you. And that sounds very airy-fairy, but it's like, that's the practicality of it is, yeah, it's, it's, it's about showing up and, and doing the work.

Nicholas: I listened to Jesse from Bass on Sina's podcast Into the Bytecode yesterday. And Jesse describes personal philosophy when prompted to do so. And it resonates a lot. He also mentions, it's worth hearing firsthand, but he also mentions in describing what he says, he doesn't engage in negative talk with people. He's not gonna be critical or negative about things. And he just won't. And if people bring that energy to him, he is just appreciative that they care enough to say something and not, doesn't get into it. I mean, it's easy to say on a podcast. I don't, I don't know him personally, and I'm sure everybody has bad days. So it's not, not possible to imagine that you're just going to treat everyone nicely all the time. But it does sound like there's some resonance with that, like, just what kind of energy you reproduce in your interactions. You're not defensively trying to hold on to power and something. And so you don't need to get emotional about someone suggesting an idea that's maybe threatening of what your idea was.

Gami: Yeah, totally. I have like a really good real example, by the way. So within Nas, I had this idea where I was like, what would shred to earn look like? You know, and I don't mean like a Ponzi-nomic token where you walk and get tokens, right? I mean, like, I mean, like, how could you earn badges or verifying things you can do? Like, there's proof of work, but proof of skate. So it's like, could you have an app on your phone where machine learning can recognize what trick you did? And then like, you've got it on video and it's verified and it mints and you earn a badge that says you can do a kickflip, right? And I thought like that, that's a really compelling way to gamify and Tony Hawkify, make the real world THPS, you know, Tony on Pro Skater. And, you know, I got, I started investigating the idea and I'm like, you know what, the tech isn't quite there yet for me to go down this route. Like I don't have the capital for that kind of thing. And I'm not interested in fundraising. I don't want to give equity. I want to just do collective creation. So I started talking about the idea of this and it sort of evolves. And then I get talking to Will and a few of the guys from, I forget the name of their original, there's a guy called Will and he goes by Rocketman on Twitter. I forget the name of their actual like company, but they had this other product and they since pivoted to create a platform called That's Gnarly, which is at that'sgnar.ly. And basically it's like Top Shot, NBA Top Shot, but for amateur extreme athletes. So basically we onboard people from Instagram. They connect up, they have an account in a couple of steps and then, you know, they post their trips. They go onto the platform just as posts, then the Gnar's community upvote what they like and whatever is sort of like hot and trending becomes the daily drop as an open edition. A small portion goes back to the Gnar's treasury and the rest goes to the creator. or there are other causes that you can opt into, different charity organizations, foundations and whatnot, such as Bob Burnquist's Skate Creator. I'm pretty sure I pronounced that wrong, but this platform was inspired by original ideas that I'd put out and I worked closely with Will and the team as they produced this platform and a protocol behind it called Revolution Protocol, which is now powering platforms for other projects like Shredding Sassies, who are a snow sports project. And there's That's Gnarnish, which is like to help creators within the Gnarnish ecosystem to be rewarded for, you know, art and different things that they produce. And it's led to a whole swag of things, Surf Guru. There's a whole bunch of different communities running on this platform now. And it's completely different to what I had originally thought, but it adapted from an original idea. And I'm really glad it did. Because like, these guys are working on it full time. And it's very professional.

Nicholas: Yeah, it is. And the guys are a very capable team who just ship new features every week.

Gami: And we're in a bear market where it's like super hard to get people interested. And still they've onboarded like hundreds of skateboarders, snowboarders, surfers, all sorts of people. I think we've got some numbers up on the website here. So yeah, 337 creators have come onto the platform. Over 5000 people have supported the movement through minting and raised around $15,500 for the revolution. So there's, you know, it's just an example of getting out of the way, just sort of inspiring others with your ideas and realizing that it's positive. some because this platform feeds back revenue to NAS and it promotes the brand and the mission.

Nicholas: So it's very cool.

Gami: There's a real example.

Nicholas: It's very cool. And it deviated. and yet, do you think it's better than if you had pushed for your idea? Or if you had pushed it just wouldn't have even happened?

Gami: I think that like, it's taking care of like all the minimum viable product and cold start problem. So that say someone releases a library for visual recognition of skateboarding tricks, well, it's going to be quite easy to produce an app to start rewarding people for basically turning real life skateboarding into a video game. And I would love to see that happen at some point in the future. And I don't care if I have a vested interest in it or not. I just want to see it happen.

Nicholas: So cool.

Gami: Just fun.

Nicholas: Right.

Gami: This stuff's fun, man. We're just having fun on chain. You know, that's, that's right.

Nicholas: It's not driven by a strategic interest. It's driven by let's have fun and make these, mash these things up. It's very authentic.

Gami: Yeah, let serendipity take care of it. That's kind of like, there's a new proposal from NAS coming to now. I think it'll be published as a candidate proposal on Tuesday, your time, no Monday, your time. And yeah, came to realize that NAS is also a great acronym for explaining the NAS hypercycle as I like to put it. And it's basically goodwill. I'm stumping on it as I tell you. It's so I'll just bring it up in front of me. So it's goodwill for the G, network for N, then you got advocacy releases serendipity. And so the idea is that you put out goodwill into the world, like refurbished skate parks, like we've done around various locations like Brazil. And that, you know, increases your network because it exposes the movement to more people through that goodwill, and then gives you the opportunity to onboard those people. And that creates advocacy for the movement. And then together, we collectively create and release, you know, all sorts of things like video parts for skateboarders and artwork and merchandise. And we've done music, we've got an EP with Lil Bubble, famous crypto rapper. And then, you know, the last part is serendipity. And that's sort of the whole point of, you know, putting that goodwill out into the world is that it brings in this environment of serendipity where new doors can open. And all of a sudden, the goodwill that we put out might adapt because this is a, you know, a virtuous feedback cycle. And I'm excited about us potentially migrating to Zora network to reduce our operating costs by, you know, 95%, align ourselves very strongly with the artist movement because skaters and other action sports participants are performing artists. And I just look forward to us being able to do more of what we do at a lower operating costs that we can, you know, save our contributors and people who contribute to our treasury, we can save them some gas. Because when you have fully on-chain NFTs, it's quite expensive to settle auctions and stuff on mainnet. So yeah.

Nicholas: Incredible. Gami, this was a great conversation. Thank you so much for sharing and a lot of personal stories as well. This is really great.

Gami: No problem. It's an absolute pleasure. And I love doing stuff like this. And once the link for the recordings out, I'll be adding it to gami.wtf, which is my personal site. Awesome.

Nicholas: The market quality. Thank you so much. And thank you to everyone who came through to listen live. Next week, I'll be talking with Vivian Fung of Snowball, which is a new wallet login technology. that's pretty exciting. So if you're interested in this, come back same time next week, next Friday. Gami, thanks again. Thanks everyone for listening. See you next week.