Orange Comet has captured the attention of some of the biggest IPs in the world. What goes into this massive success? Joining Jeff, Eathan and Josh is Dave Broom, who tells us how the world’s premier Web3 entertainment company helps drive the digital revolution by working with some of the biggest brands in sports, music, arts and entertainment. Dave discusses NFTs as content and how great content will always find a way to bubble up. Plus, for today's hot topic, we are joined by Jeremy Fisher, a talented stop motion director, animator, and founder of Lucky Ducky, who tells us all the cool projects they have going on in the intersection of NFT and animation. Join in!
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Dave Broome Of Orange Comet — The Platform That Is Pioneering NFTs In Entertainment and Virtual Worlds, Plus: Lucky Ducky Stop Animation NFT, Candy Digital Sale And More…
This is Dave Broome of Orange Comet, the Web3 entertainment company that has captured the attention of some of the biggest IPs in the world. I'm here on the Edge of NFT, the show that captures the attention of the finest builders and creators on the planet. That means you. Thanks for being here. Keep reading.
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NFT-curious readers, stay tuned for this episode to learn what incredible NFT experiences Orange Comet has co-created with some of the biggest names in sports, entertainment, and beyond, how much a family photo can be the sweetest treasure among one man's impressive set of possible possessions, and how Lucky Ducky managed to create a scrappy family-friendly stop motion project and turn it into something truly timeless. All this and more in this episode.
Don't forget that we put together a gathering called NFT LA that brought out thousands of the world's most innovative doers in the Web3 space. Head to NFTLA.live to get tickets to our bigger, bolder, and better but also as intimate and impactful event happening in Los Angeles from March 20th to the 23rd, 2023. We will see you there.
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This episode features Dave Broome, Cofounder and CEO of Orange Comet, the world's premier Web3 entertainment company helping drive the digital revolution. Orange Comet works with some of the world's biggest brands in intellectual property in sports, music, arts, and entertainment. Outside of his work with Orange Comet, Broome has been a Hollywood producer for nearly 25 years.
He produced NBC's The Biggest Loser, Ultimate Beastmaster, Netflix's first-ever unscripted competition series co-produced with Sylvester Stallone, as well as two Netflix documentaries, The Day I Met El Chapo: The Kate del Castillo and Sean Penn story and the Jennifer Lopez documentary Halftime. Broome leads Orange Comet by mirroring the storytelling and cinematic approach of Hollywood with the dynamic innovation of technological immersive experiences, driving the brand as a digital leader into the future of entertainment. Dave, welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to have you here.
It's great to be here with you. Those are some of my credits, but I like those and the three D's for the show, the Doers, the Dreamers, and the Disruptors. That's spot on. It's good to be with you.
It's a central rallying cry. I'm a musician as well. I trained in jazz at Rutgers University.
Are you a New Jersey boy?
I went to school there. Don't ask me why. New Jersey people are like, "What did you do? Why did you come from Chicago to New Jersey?"
We didn't come from California to Jersey. Don't tell me that.
I'm looking at your setup there. I'm like, "Let's jump in there. We can jam out. If you hop on the drums, I'll play the keys."
What do you play?
I play the keyboard and piano.
I got my keyboard over here.
I see that. I'm drooling. It looks good.
I started playing drums when I was about eight. When I was about eleven, my mom and dad rented a piano for one of my brothers. He never played it, but one day, I sat down, and my fingers fell on the keys. I've been composing ever since. I never took a lesson, but my grandfather was the stand-up bassist in Rudy Vallée's band. This is back in the '40s. It must be in my blood. When things don't go well in the world of Web3, I'm taking my frustration out on the freaking drums behind me right here.
That sounds like a good idea.
For our readers at home, we have some history with Dave. It was an honor to get to know Dave when we were putting together NFT LA version 1.0 back in March 2022. It's crazy to think about.
I can't believe it. Nothing happened during the course of that year.
It has always been normal day-to-day stuff.
It's the same shit.
This is the time when things are crazy. There are eighteen meetings a day for NFT LA. I get on a call with Dave. I don't even know who you were. I get thrown on calls. I start googling you. I was like, "We have people like this coming into our industry and bringing the heat." To see what you've done in the space in such a short amount of time, your reputation precedes you in terms of your passion and your commitment to the creative arts and how you've translated that to Web3. The genesis of Orange Come is this commitment, innovation, and proprietary technology. I know a little bit of the story, but I would love to share with everyone at home how the idea for Orange Comet came to be.
Thanks for the nice words too. You said the word passion. It is everything to me. I've had a very fortunate career. Eathan mentioned some of the highlights, but I'll talk about some others. I'm up here in my Lake Tahoe home. During the hard days of COVID, I had about seven shows in some form of production, shooting, pre-shooting, and post. All got shut down as the world did.
It came up from our LA place to Tahoe, "Chill out and hang." We thought it would be a few weeks, and we would be right back on the set. Back then, I certainly knew about NFTs, Web3, and blockchain because I stayed on top of that stuff in a big way. It was in the zeitgeist. I got a phone call from a good buddy. His name is Will Meris. He's the President of Orange Comet. He's got an entrepreneurial and investment background. He has done a lot of different things in a lot of different spaces.
He called me up and said, "We have been looking at this space. There's a huge opportunity. I want you to run this company." I said, "I'm flattered. Thank you so much. I'm not going to leave a 25-year career in Hollywood to run a Web3 NFT company. This is not going to happen." It's hard enough to climb to where I was and then walk away from it. He said, "There's a huge opportunity here. You have to look at this." I thought, "I will. What is he talking about? I'm not going to look into this," but I did.
It was gnawing at me a little bit. The deeper dive that I did into NFTs, blockchain, and Web3 at that time, the more of a head-scratcher it was for me. A little bit more excitement started to boil inside of me. The head-scratcher was, "What am I looking at here? What is this stuff?" I don't mean, "What is an NFT?" I'm thinking more like, "What are people buying at the end of the day?" I wasn't commenting on digital artists because artists are artists. You have to put them in their category. Art is art.
I was looking at brands, IP, entertainment properties, sports, music, and my world from a Hollywood TV and film production standpoint. I'm looking at stuff and thinking, "Quite honestly, this is the biggest shit that I've ever seen." It was regurgitating content. I called Will back up several weeks later and said, "I could be wrong or right." I built a very high-end 3D digital design studio for more than twenty years when I was in TV and film along with my Chief Creative Officer, Dante Ferrarini.
I thought, "If we could take Hollywood-style production quality and Hollywood-style content storytelling and combine it into Web3, could we have success?" I saw this from day one, not as a speculative play. I didn't care about somebody making money on these things. I still don't. We can get into that after. I cared about a value-add proposition by saying, "How can we deliver something that is the greatest content?" At the end of the day, a great NFT or Web3 project in my mind back then and still now should be no different from a great movie, a great song, a great book, or a great television series.
Great content is great content, but no one seemed to be looking at NFTs as a content play. There were certainly communities and utilities, but they weren't content-driven. Long story short, I said to him, "Either I'm way off, or we're going to hit a bullseye here. Let's take the dog and pony show out and see what response we get." Fast forward to a year and a half later, and we have been very fortunate.
We have been recognized as the best creative company in the world or this space. These are other people's words. There are some people doing some great stuff out there. I'm not sitting here like an egotistical asshole. I don't want to come off like that. For the most part, it's the most important thing. We're driven by passion and by trying to build something that is of value to the fan base.
I look at blockchain technology and Web3 as amazing technology and an amazing opportunity for creators and entrepreneurs to come in and build. I despise the motherfucking criminals, the hackers, the bullshit artists, the rug pullers, and everything that you would expect in a nascent industry, as you saw in the dot-com days of the '90s. That's what we're dealing with now. Those people are gone. They have gotten washed out, and now you've got real players and real companies building.
That's what we're looking to do at Orange Comet. There have been so many articles. The last project that I did prior to coming onto building Orange Comet was I filmed Jennifer Lopez for the last few years and made her documentary feature, Halftime. That was a four-year project. I'm very proud of it. We opened up at Tribeca. It was the last project I've done, and it will be the last project I do as a TV and film producer because I'm so embedded and passionate about what we're building here. Hopefully, that gives you a bit of the story.
We hear the passion. It's great stuff. To echo what you were saying, it's so interesting to be in the position that we're in where we get to see everybody at every level of what's going on here. It's fascinating to have this position of seeing certain things fall apart. At the same time, people are getting into the space like you who are like, "I'm keeping going."
It's very interesting and analogous to other technological revolutions. Thanks for sharing that. We know from the way you've been talking that what you're about is creating unprecedented ecosystems and other ways of engaging in the system. How do you see going about creating those types of things and those ecosystems in the world of Web3?
I look at NFTs. It feels like a dirty word. We're looking at whatever you want to call them as the basement floor into a much bigger play. That's where the industry is going to evolve. We are in the nascent stages of this industry. I'll take The Walking Dead as a good example. AMC saw our work. We ended up in a multi-year partnership for the iconic franchise of The Walking Dead. We started with selling Walker Access Passes, or typical passes that you would see, except the art that we were doing in it, and the 3D digital design was pretty spectacular. That got the fan base into the world.
You're accessing what we're building. From day one, we said, "What are we doing? We're building out a Web3 game environment." There's a purpose for every asset and NFT that you're buying, whether it's Darren Dixon's motorcycle that we're recreating, tools, weapons, or avatars. They're getting used in a game system. That's the ecosystem that we're building. There was a real value to these. They looked amazing. The animations were sick, but you're buying these for a real purpose. That real purpose is a video game. We know Web3 gaming is an interesting place.
It has to be great content in a Web3 game. First and foremost, it has to be fun and cool. If it's a play-to-earn or a collect-to-earn, that's great, but that's a secondary part of it. The ecosystems that I'm talking about as the CEO of Orange Comet means that whatever we're delivering on a project should be part of something much bigger. It shouldn't just be a PFP of something. Ape-type projects where you've got profile pictures built a tremendous community and did an amazing job, which is the meat behind that, but it's going to be a struggle for a lot of companies and players to come out and do PFPs.
To be clear, it has always been a struggle. There are 10, 15, or 20 PFP projects that rose to the cream of the crop, but there are thousands that did not. At the end of the day, being ecosystem-centric is critical to any brand that you're building. Any brand in Web2 and Web3 is not just a community. It's an ecosystem if it's done right.
That's an important part because what you end up getting are not crypto-savvy people, but my goal is to expand the base and the world that we're all in here. I want to keep the NFT and crypto enthusiasts intact because they're a critical part of what we're doing, but I want to expand beyond. Back to The Walking Dead, an interesting stat is that about 75% of the people who first bought into the project had never seen a second of the episode.
This is not some hardcore stat. This is based on our best determination. 75% had never seen an episode of The Walking Dead. They were NFT enthusiasts, NFT collectors, and crypto fans, but the better stat was that roughly 20%-something of the buyers came into the project as their very first NFT project ever. They never knew what an NFT was. They had no idea, but they were fans of the show. They saw our work. They were pumped on it. We got them in.
That is what I'm looking to do, and because of my unique background as a TV and film producer, I could be a voice among a lot of other people out there, too, who could onboard the masses. That's what I want to do. My goal is to find the next million people. The only way to do that, I believe, is to give them amazing content and make the system a lot easier to onboard, but the ecosystem is a critical part of it where they feel that there is a real purpose behind this shit and a real value for them to want to get involved.
That's fair enough, but that's not the only part of it. When you're putting together these projects, you're thinking about dynamic storytelling and gamification. Generally, creativity and technology play a role in creating these types of experiences. How do you infuse all these components and move the timelines from 4 years, which is what the JLo project took, to 4 months or even less?
It's funny because we're working with several game companies and traditional game publishers that take years. Let's go to a studio for a second. We're partnered with DreamWorks and NBCUniversal. These are amazing creative companies. You would say, "Why would they want or need a company like Orange Comet in this space? They could do great creatives themselves."
They're specializing in what they're doing, and we're specializing in what we're doing. We can shorten timelines and budgets and build out content in different ways. Because of my background as a TV and film producer, especially in the unscripted space and reality television since I started in reality television in the early days, I felt like I was one of the pioneers then, which is an interesting parallel to what I'm doing here. Back in the early 2000s, the reality was starting to take off.
If you can create content in a less expensive way than you can in traditional scripted shows, that is one of the appeals for reality television. The same thing here is I've been able to take those practices and move them over but let me tell you something. I'm not shy to say that we put hundreds of thousands of dollars into every single project we're doing.
You're looking at our creative and the Anthony Hopkins partnership that we had. He's one of the most iconic actors in the world and an amazing artist himself. We had tremendous success. We sold out in seven minutes on that collection. We put hundreds of thousands of dollars into creating the digital pieces to that, but we believe that we're investing in a long-term project and building content.
You have to shorten timelines. The first and foremost barometer for us is, "Do we care about the project?" We want to make a shit ton of money. We're not a nonprofit company, but that's not what's driving us. What's driving us is, "Can we tackle something that we feel great about creatively? Can we serve a purpose with that?" That's question number one.
We turned down many opportunities. Big celebrities and big music talents are attached only because we feel like either they're not in it for the right reason, or we can't be in it for the right reason because we can't see the vision of what it is. If we can find that vision, first and foremost, that's our gut check. It goes into, "What's our creative approach? What are we doing with this?"
I looked at Dapper and Top Shot when I first got into this space. I gave them much credit for creating that market, but at the same time, I told my guys in the company, "We will never be Dapper. I would love to be Dapper from financial success, but we're never going to regurgitate content that you can see on live television or online afterward and repurpose it. That's not us." We need a vision for everything we do.
It was innovative at the time. They went first but ultimately, they catalyzed a movement around pushing the envelope.
You have to give them a lot of credit for what they did. They created a market. They were visionaries themselves, but everything about Top Shot is the opposite of what I, as the CEO of Orange Comet, want to see Web3 being. This should not be about buying into a project and 5X, 10X, or 20X-ing. That is the wrong approach. That is the pure speculative aspect of this.
Let's look at Apple. They don't sit there and make computers, amazing phones, and all that stuff because they're trying to make their stockholders' money first and foremost. That's what they need to do. What they're first thinking is, "How do we create the greatest products in the world? How is this phone, this computer, or these buds going to change your life?" That then, in turn, creates value for their stockholders. There's a difference. That's what I'm trying to do. Let me create a project and content that delivers great value. If you want to go ahead 5X or 10X it, that's up to you, but that's not my goal.
Let's talk about the Anthony Hopkins project a slight bit more. It sold out in seven minutes. I visited the website. They're incredibly ornate, beautiful, and elaborate things you've created. Can you give us a little bit on how that all came together and the ethos of that in light of what you're talking about?
Eathan, I have to find out what that first conversation with Anthony Hopkins about NFTs is like.
First of all, it was amazing.
It looks a lot like the Donald Trump NFT project. There are a lot of echoes there. It's very similar. They're wearing different suits and stuff like that.
We ripped something off and said, "Here we go." Gloria and Emilio Estefan are Founders of Orange Comet and good friends of mine. I've produced Gloria on one of my shows over the years. It was funny because Gloria or Emilio called me up and said, "We want to put you in touch with Anthony Hopkins because he wanted to get into the world of NFTs."
As that was happening, another phone call was coming from another relationship. Bernie Yuman is his name. He's a legendary Vegas producer of Siegfried & Roy and all things. I have a relationship with him. He picked up the phone and said, "I know you might be talking to Gloria and Emilio, but I want to put you in touch with Anthony Hopkins. They have seen your stuff."
As that was happening, UTA was doing the same thing. I got a phone call in my car out of the blue. It didn't come from Anthony or Tony, as we're going to call him, because that's how he wants to go. It came from Stella first, Tony's wife. Stella Hopkins is incredibly smart and bright. She's a sharp cookie like you wouldn't believe. She said, "I've seen your stuff and know the work that you are doing. Tony has seen it. Aaron, who runs one of the companies in Tony's artwork, has seen it. We want to get involved with you. Tony has ideas on getting into the world of NFTs."
What's amazing about this is that Anthony Hopkins, at 84 years old at the time, is not the epitome or the poster child of Web3 NFT projects, but he's an artist. I don't know if you knew that or had seen that. A lot of people in the world may have not even known that. He's a real artist. His artwork sells for hundreds of thousands and, in some cases, $1 million-plus in his paintings, which was a great thing. That's first.
Secondly, he was genuinely enthusiastic about Web3 and wanted to learn and get into it. Third, he happened to be in a movie called Zero Contact, the first NFT movie ever created. There was real genuineness, real authenticity, real art, and an iconic legend. We said, "Where do we go? Let's jump in." In the very first meeting, when I said, "Anthony," he said, "Don't call me Sir Anthony Hopkins. You're calling me Tony." We recorded it. I have it. It's a Zoom meeting. It's the very first one.
We're going to do something with it because you're hearing me talk. You are struggling to get in a word getting wise with me, but it was the exact opposite. I've been partnered with George Clooney and Queen Latifah. I've had amazing celebrity partnerships over the years. I've been very grateful for that. That's sly. Listening to Anthony Hopkins talk about philosophy, his life, what was driving him, and why he wanted to get into this space and hearing it was an experience of a lifetime. It was one of those unforgettable and thank-God-we-recorded-it moments.
It sounds like a special episode of the show.
We could do that. We have not released that footage. Maybe we will put Tony on one of the episodes with us because we're doing a lot more with him. It was very apparent that when he was talking, he was so curious and enthusiastic about what this new medium of Web3, NFTs, and blockchain is and how we can reach a whole other audience. Anthony Hopkins doesn't need to make money. This is about getting his art out there and getting him immortalized on a blockchain.
We walked off that Zoom with so many different ideas. Tony had many different ideas. We eventually landed on the one that we came out with, which was taking Anthony Hopkins as an artist, taking him as all the kinds of archetypes that he has played in his career, and blending the two together. If you look at stuff on the Orange Comet website or if you go onto OpenSea and see it, you might think that you're looking at elaborate photographs of Anthony Hopkins, but none of that is real. It's all created by us in 3D digital design. None of those images of Tony is real. We sculpted it all in-house.
That's what blew everyone away. The Wall Street Journal and all these people reached out to us. What they said was, "This is a real art in many ways in the world of Web3 and NFTs. Outside of being an artist, you're taking an actor or an iconic legend and building art around this property." We have developed an amazing friendship. He and Stella are unbelievable salt of the Earth people. That is what's so exciting when you get somebody of that stature that is so grounded. I don't know if you've seen his TikTok videos. He's up there dancing up a storm to music and having fun with his life.
I'm on his Twitter. The dude is having a blast.
That's it. How awesome is that? What makes it so great for us and this topic is here's a guy at 84 years old able to bring people into Web3 and the blockchain. That's what we want. The celebrity who's in it for the buck, the quick hit, the money grab, and that shit we know doesn't work.
Here's a caption on one of his tweets from December 25th, "Born free. Be free. Happy holidays." The freedom of creativity is what's at the heart of the drop that you did with him. Speaking of living legends, you also had an opportunity to have a very successful drop with Scottie Pippen. I would love to at least touch on that drop as well as what it was like to work with another living legend, how you're thinking about these sneakers, and where they're going to go from here.
WME or William Morris Endeavor was representing me for years as a TV and film producer. They found out that we were building out Orange Comet and said, "We've got a lot of clients who are going to want to work with you because we know your 3D work." We said, "Who?" They rounded off a bunch of people. We said, "What do they want to do?" We've got Scottie Pippen and big names. We said, "What does he want to do?" They said, "He wants to do a line of NFT digital sneakers."
We knew from day one that we were going to be building out a very big digital wearable division inside Orange Comet, which in NFT LA, we're going to be talking about in a big way. It's the coolest shit. We took to that idea right away. The second reason why we took that idea with Scottie was that Scottie Pippen is not only an iconic legendary NBA Hall of Famer voted 1 of the top 75 players of all time, but more importantly, it's back to authenticity. His wanting to do a line of NFT sneakers was critical because he had a whole line of sneakers with Nike for years. It's his signature line.
This was all grounded in the world that he was coming from. He wanted to explore Web3. He created all these shoes with Nike, and now we get this opportunity to bring this into the Web3 space. First and foremost, he wanted to do this. Secondly, he was grounded. It was authentic. We knew what we wanted to do right off the bat. We looked at RTFKT, a great company doing great stuff with Nike, and said, "These guys are doing great work. We have to strive to be better." That was our barometer.
We only looked at them once. As a creator, it's hard because you don't want to look at other people's work and let it get into your head so much because it affects your shit. When I was making all my television shows over the years, I watched enough reality television to see what someone was doing but not so much that I wanted to sit there and copycat it because that's bad.
We wanted to do elaborate signature animations. What we do is difficult. You would think that a company like Autograph, which raised $170 million, would sit there and go, "Let's get the greatest creators in the world. We will make amazing 3D digital work." It's not that easy. It's hard. This is a team that has been with me for many years. It's the core we have built out.
With Scottie, in this case, we want to do very elaborate sneakers, and we wanted these sneakers to be all one-of-one designed. Every sneaker is unique in a 3D digital animation. That was number one. Number two is we wanted a real-world component to this. We're about to reveal the 1,000 shoes that are coming out. What's cool is that 33 of those, because 33 is Scottie's number, are going to get a physical prototype sneaker as well autographed by Scottie.
Imagine being 1 of 33 people in the world that own a Scottie Pippen sneaker that is a prototype of something that we hope we're thinking is going to be a brand new full-on sneaker line. The third piece to this back to the ecosystem and the real value is we said, "We don't want these things to look cool and be amazing in their digital design." Here's the thing. We wanted there to be a real purpose for the sneakers.
Those sneakers are designed to be able to go into various flexure mods in Grand Theft Auto. You can take these sneakers and put them on your avatars in other game environments. We're continuing to build that out. There are some utilities and real-world experiences, which are super cool with Scottie playing golf and doing other shit, but we wanted to build a real purpose behind what the sneakers were. That's where we went.
I want you to know this. We were promoting this. Scottie and I went to New York. This drop took place on December 20th, 2022. It's not the greatest time in the world, you would think. The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and CoinDesk asked me. You wouldn't believe how many outlets asked Scottie and me, "Why are you putting an NFT collection out now in a bear market during the FTX collapse?" I'm like, "FTX has nothing to do with what we do or what others are doing in this space."
Let's get it right first. Secondly, this is the time you do it because great content, which we felt like we had, will always bubble up. It will find its way. If you've got something that you think is great, and I'm talking to creators out there, great shit will find its way. Did we think we would sell out in 77 seconds? Not a chance, but that's what ended up happening.
I remember a conversation I had. It was in Miami during Art Basel. I was walking through SCOPE, the art gallery, and engaging with some people. A guy who didn't know much about NFT is saying, "What's with this? Is this going anywhere?" I hadn't thought about it in these explicit terms before. This is a movement in art but also many other domains. Let's talk about art because this guy was an art dealer. In the future, like any other movement in art, people are going to look back. It's going to be important. There are going to be important works of art, collectibles, and things like that.
People are going to want to own them. They're going to want the NFT as part of owning them. No matter what, it's always going to be a monumental moment in the evolution of art and all these other domains. It's so obvious. I want to quickly ask you this. We want to get Quick Hitters, which is our next segment, to get to know you a little better. It's going to be fun, but before we jump to that, are there any other collaborations you want to mention in the pipeline besides The Walking Dead, which you already referred to? Is there anything you can let loose?
There's a lot. We launched into the Anne Rice properties. AMC has all the rights to Anne Rice. She only sold 150 million books. They launched Interview with the Vampire. We sold 3,333 vampire coffins that bring you into the immortal universe that we're creating. We sold them. We sold out in a few hours back in November or December 2022. That project is about building the dark sea world of vampires and lust. The digital environment that we have in it is spectacular and jaw-dropping. You're going to go there and look to kill vampires and build out through these avatars. The coffins that we built are amazingly elaborate in their design. That's a project that's evolving.
We have projects coming out with NBCUniversal and DreamWorks. We've got music projects. There are about 27 projects that are on our slate. We will not put 27 projects out in 2023. I will mention something, though, that I want to bring also to NFT LA. Everybody can hear this for the first time. Barry Sonnenfeld, the iconic Legendary Director and Cinematographer of Men In Black, so many movies, and Addams Family, developed a property called Dinosaurs Vs Aliens. You probably get it right off the damn title.
He created years ago a project that started as a graphic novel. The hope was to bring it to traditional Hollywood and turn it into a movie franchise. It didn't work out years ago because the budget was too high, and the story still needed to be worked on, but when he got introduced to us and saw our work, we got it immediately and joined a partnership. We're doing Dinosaurs Vs Aliens as the most badass Web3 game you can imagine. I wish I had the 3D rigging here. Dante has it. He's our Chief Creative Officer.
When I show you what we built and how these dinosaurs move as NFT digital assets, your jaws are going to drop. You're going to think you're watching something better than Jurassic Park. The idea is we're going to be selling dinosaurs and aliens. They're going to kick the shit out of each other. There's going to be a massive Web3 game to it, which we will show and even use. NFT LA has the opportunity to do that. The timing is probably close to that. There are a couple of cool projects for us coming down the line.
That's beautiful and very exciting.
Eathan, I'll be a dinosaur and fight your alien any day.
Let's do it. Let's throw it down.
These aren't your typical dinosaurs. You can wait until you see what these things look like.
I want to see the Joshsaurus Rex.
It's the Joshsaurus Kriger. That concludes our normal interview. We want to get over here to Quick Hitters. Edge Quick Hitters are a fun and quick way to get to know you a little bit better, Dave. There are ten quick questions. We're going to do a short, single-word, or few-word response but feel free to expand if we do get the urge.
I'll give you very quick hits.
Are you ready?
I'm ready to go.
What is the first thing you ever remember purchasing in your life?
I remember purchasing a pair of ski gloves when I was a very young kid and skiing up in Northern New York. I used my allowance money to be able to get that for myself. I went to a ski shop with my dad. I was probably ten years old, and he said to me, "You're going to get ripped off in this ski shop." I said, "Dad, I'm not. Let me do this." I bought it. We went down the street to a supermarket. The same ski gloves were about ten times less money than what I paid for them. That was my first lesson.
I'm very proud. It reminds me of my son's first purchase. He had $1 or something. We went into this resale shop. There were these little golden emblem things that they were selling for $1 apiece. He said, "Dad, I would like two. Can I have two?" His mom said, "They're $1 apiece. You can only have one." I said, "Ask them if you can get 2 for $1." He's a cute kid, so he did. He got a deal on his first purchase. I'm proud of that.
You taught him how to negotiate at first.
The next question is this. What is the first thing you ever remember selling in your life?
Pencils. I was 7 or 8 years old. I would steal pencils from my classmates and sell them back to them before they got in trouble for not having a pencil in class. Does that tell you that I'm a thief or a criminal? I got called down to the principal's office after I had my racket going for about two weeks, and then my mom got called down.
I don't want to imagine what Kanye would think about that. What is the most recent thing you purchased?
It's lighting gear for a new YouTube studio that I'm building out and a lot of camera equipment.
Is that in California or somewhere else?
It's right here in California. This is a fantastic Sony FX3, which is a cinematographer edition. As a TV and film guy, I'm particular about that stuff. I just got it.
This episode is brought to you by Sony FX3.
There you go. What is the most recent thing you sold?
How about the Scott Pippen NFTs? Can I give you that?
If that's the most recent thing you sold, for sure.
I haven't sold anything in a long time. I'm a collector of shit. I don't get rid of it ever.
It's very common here on the show.
I know the feeling.
It's in the patterns. Next question, what is your most prized possession?
It's probably a family photograph. I've got two daughters. They had a hard upbringing, believe it or not. My ex-wife passed away when she was 50. There's a photograph of us. I don't think it can ever replace anything like that. I look at it all the time. It's in the hallway up here now in my Lake Tahoe house. They were younger back then in simpler times in a lot of ways. I'm a very emotional guy. I love telling emotional stories. I would have to easily say that it's a family photo.
That's a great one. Thanks for sharing. Next question, if you could buy anything in the world, digital, physical, service, or experience, that is currently for sale, what would it be?
I would buy an experience. I would have to think about what that experience would be. I'm 58 now. I've been fortunate. I've gone through my phases. I've had a fortunate career. I've gone through my phase of getting fancy cars and all kinds of shit like that. It's about life experiences. If I can find something that would take me around the world in a unique or one-of-a-kind opportunity attached to an NFT, which is something that we are working on in some ways, those are irreplaceable because life experiences are something that sticks with you forever. An asset is an asset. A fancy car is a fancy car. A nice suit or nice watch, I've had those things, and I still have them but it's experiences all the way.
An asset is just an asset. Life experiences stick with you forever. Click To Tweet
If you could pass on one of your personality traits to the next generation, what would it be?
It's drive. It's the one thing that I've been able to have. A lot of people are coming into Hollywood. There's a lot of talent. People are talented in this world, whether or not you're a musician, an artist, a creator, or someone who knows how to make great pizza but what happens is life gets in the way. People get in your way, knock you down, and try to jump you off of your course.
I do a lot of motivational speeches. The key to success for me and what I try and tell everybody or even if I'm talking to my daughters, is, "Fucking come back, not just get back up. You've got to get back up even stronger. You need to use the negativity to drive you forward, not come back to where you were." That is my best personality trait along with a lot of negatives in my personality.
I was listening to Andrew Huberman's podcast. He talked about stress. There are scientific studies. How you think about stress and whether or not you look at it positively or negatively impacts, whether it's a positive or negative consequence, your body and your mindset.
Josh, have you been listening to Andrew Huberman more often lately than previously? That's funny because I started independently checking out his content.
I'm a ball of stress, but I've got my Sleep Stack in order. I ordered all his Sleep Stack nootropics. I'm getting some deep dreaming going on. It's pretty cool.
Is it working for you?
Check with me in a month. I'll let you know.
You're talking to somebody who only gets four hours of sleep at night. That has been for about twenty years.
I'm going to send you his Sleep Stack. If you could eliminate one of your personality traits from the next generation, what would it be?
One of the personality traits that I would eliminate is my frustration. I get frustrated. I'm a control freak. I've had to learn to give up control. With control comes frustration. When you're a control freak, it's good in some ways because you're so on it, but it's bad in a lot of other ways. I've had to learn to trust people around me to deliver. That's important when you're building a company. Being a control freak is probably the worst part of my personality that I would love to see go away.
It's probably 90% of producers.
For the men and women who care about what they're doing, it's very hard to let go of their baby. You're probably this way. You're building your company, NFT LA, and Edge of NFT. You need other people, but you also don't want to let it go. That's a hard balance to figure out.
I want to let it all go.
That's good.
I figured Bruce Lee, "Be like water." It's more like that side of things.
Can you be like that?
Water can flow and crash. You can get there by letting go but it's a secret of the ninja kung fu format.
It's a tough one to find the balance on.
The last two questions are simple ones. Number nine, what did you do before joining us on the show?
I was on another Zoom. I'm finding myself in back-to-back meetings, which is fine, but that's what I did. That's what my day is comprised of as a CEO of a company but I find it best to be doing what we're doing, to be honest. I love talking about the industry that we're in. It gets me pumped, as you can tell. I did a presentation right before this.
The follow-up to that is number ten. Last question, what are you going to do next after joining us on the show?
Take a piss. I have to pee badly.
I hear you on that. That's authentic and true. We love it.
You're asking. I'm telling you. After my bathroom, I will do another meeting at 5:00 on the West Coast here.
Get some time to take care of yourself there for a few moments. Let's move on to our Hot Topic segment. We will announce that one and get into it at the moment. This Hot Topic features Jeremy Fisher, a talented stop motion director and animator and the Founder of Lucky Ducky. He has directed projects for Vice and Hallmark. He has animated on two well-known projects, the Marcel the Shell movie and the Robot Chicken Series. Jeremy, welcome to the show. It's great to have you here.
Thanks for having me. That's a fun little intro there.
Stop motion is pretty awesome. I did this project one time for a little wedding video with my wife. It was fun. I'm sure that, like anything, it gets old and hard if you do it for a career. I also love the Shaun the Sheep series. My son is into those if you're familiar with them.
It's also great to have two folks that come from traditional art and entertainment on the same show. Jeremy, I'm sure you had a chance to listen to Dave's passion. He likes a good fight. If you disagree with anything, we could talk about that, but I'm sure there's also a lot you can relate to here.
Without being too agreeable here, I loved hearing everything you mentioned. It's a lot of the same things that got me into NFTs and making art in this space. Talking about authenticity, creating passion, and all that work that goes into this keeps me coming back to the NFT space every day and wanting to figure out the next big thing I want to work on. It's super cool to hear the story and everything with Orange Comets. It's cool to listen in.
Congrats on Lucky Ducky because it's what I love. It's what we were talking about prior to coming on. It's real work. It's real content. We could see your passion in it. Congratulations.
Thank you. I don't have a big celebrity with me. I'm not a big name outside of NFTs. We had to do this small grassroots buildup. It's such a hard thing in this space to get your name across, but we have been pulling it off. We have had our ups and downs from the bull market to the bear market, but the projects that stick around are going to do well from here on out.
You can thank William Tong because he gave me the alpha prior to your project. I do whatever William says. The show is one of the early holders of your project.
He has been great. He's one of those guys. He happens to know all the right people in NFTs and elsewhere. When I chatted with him for the first time, he was like, "Whatever you're doing, I want to be a part of." That's how we got this conversation started. It has been awesome working with him ever since.
We hear that Director-Animator Peter Levin also wants to be a part of what you're doing. He's an advisor to Lucky Ducky. It sounds like he's going to support your animated series pitching efforts to the studios. Tell us a little bit about bringing him on.
When we were first coming up with his concepts for Lucky Ducky was the time when everything was a quick flip of pixel art. Bored Apes and Cool Cats had just started to take hold a little bit. Working in entertainment, I saw this as an opportunity. This is going to sound cliché now but back then, it was like, "What if we had a project that had a story and characters that you wanted to latch onto beyond a quick flip and PFP?"
What that led to was honing in on what are the metrics of solid character design and development, not doing stuff with cigarettes, gore, and all this stuff because working in entertainment, you have to deal with S&P. You're dealing with lawyers and stuff. A lot of these projects want to do animation and get into the space, but they have all these issues built into the project from day one. They can't throw it into the animation.
Baked into our project, we wanted to set off on the right foot. There are no Ethereum logos and projects that were embedded in the project that we have to make excuses for later on. It's all strictly the core characters that we love and care about in this project. That's where we led to with Pete. He is a producer, director, and animator. He produced a bunch of stuff for Open The Portal, which is a stop-motion studio. He's an Assistant Director at Marcel the Shell. It came out in theaters not too long ago. He is one of the best people I know in stop motion.
One of the things from day one that we have been trying to talk about is how we know people outside of the NFT space that is embedded in animation and entertainment. We're putting together the right people that we want to work with. It doesn't matter if you're at a studio or if you have nothing to do with NFTs. We can bridge that gap. Pete is our first showcase of that effort.
He's advising us when we're talking to studios, and they say, "How expensive is this?" He's our guy that can say, "It's going to take X amount of dollars for X amount of minutes. We need this amount of animators," because he has done all that work before. It's not a pie-in-the-sky concept. Many projects want to do animation, but they don't know how to do that first step.
He seems like a good guy to have in your corner. Dave, I have to imagine. If you're not directly connected to Peter, you have 100 common friends there.
For sure. I'm listening because I love what Jeremy is saying here. It's story-driven, story-focused, and character-focused. That is the right approach. Stop animation is difficult. It takes much talent to be able to pull it off. You can see what's being done here in work.
Patience. You're building a playable Ducky for the other side and another project that we love in Worldwide Web3. What does that look like?
That was the other side of it. We were talking about a lot of projects we're looking into doing their metaverses and games. That was the conversation back in June 2022, "Everyone is doing metaverses and games." We're not about that. We're about animation, storytelling, and getting in front of studios. We don't want to go down the side path of making our video game. It's an unheard-of proposition if you've ever talked to developers and game developers but what we have the ability to do in Web3 is we can craft sprites and character models.
Through the technology and your wallet connecting onto another side of the world of Web3, you can play as your Ducky in these different games. We don't have to do all the workload of building out characters, a story game, and all this work that goes into it. You can now be your character in these other places. It's incredible to even talk about this stuff as an artist and someone who played video games my whole life.
I can be like, "We have a Ducky that you can run around in the world of Web3." I didn't have to make everything from scratch. I'm not a game developer. I'm an amateur artist. That is an amazing use case for this work. You have a wallet. You have a Duck unit. You've unlocked all this potential and all these games you want to play. You can run around with your friends as Duckies in the metaverse. That is what part of this future is like.
That's fun. You are working on this community-driven claymation story and calling it Backstage Pass. Tell us what readers should know about that one.
Anyone who has been to LA on vacation maybe has done the studio tours where you go to the back lots and see how they make all the movies and the shows. It's great to peek behind the curtain a little bit and see the process of every show that you get to see on TV. It's all in warehouses and buildings that are nondescript. We want to take the setup of going on the little golf cart and going around to all the different shooting spots, but through the power of our project, we can do that with NFTs.
Holders can now be part of the process of making content with us. It's not just something like changing the color of a shirt on a character in a show. This is full-on. We are pitching the first stage of this, which is a Ducky who's picking a cake for a party. The community has said, "What happens next step?" We will collect in a writer's room on our Discord all the different ideas and all the things that people are pitching to us. We will pull some gems of ideas out of that community.
We build the 2nd part and the 3rd part. We have gone step-by-step with our community. They're building the story with us. I can't think of too many other places where that happens outside of Web3. It's such a unique type of experience. Along with that, we're doing the storyboarding and talking them through how this process works and the stop motion. We're going to be live streaming and showing them all the processes to building this.
That's so cool. Steve Aoki makes answering the question, "What do you do with the cake?" harder because you want to say, "Smash into someone's face," but that has already been done 1,000 times by Señor Aoki.
We ended up having a mouse that gets discovered. They have discovered the mouse. They decide if they're going to capture the mouse. We're figuring out the next stage of this and what they're going to do with this little mouse character. It's going to leave in a Tom and Jerry direction. Maybe there's a little running around and chasing after it, or maybe it will become more like Ratatouille, where they get together and be able to make a cake together.
Speaking of making the cake together, if you and Orange Comet ever collab at some point, it would not be the first time a collab came out of two guests being on our show.
That would be fun.
If you do a collab, I'll bake you a cake.
There you go.
I'm going to hold you to that.
We will take a little royalty and have you back to talk about it.
It will be gluten-free as well. I promise that.
Eathan is very strict on gluten-free.
Jeremy, I love hearing this. This is what we want more of. We all want more of this. Jeremy as a creator and his company is what it's about. This is what moves it forward. This is what gets people excited and brings more people into Web3.
Thanks for saying that.
It's great stuff. We're thankful that you have a very special giveaway for us. We've got this low-number Lucky Ducky Number 49 that has never been traded. We're going to share more about that contest on our social. It's the typical thing. Follow and retweet. We will need your ETH address. Thank you so much for that generous gift to our community. I'm sure some are excited and feel lucky to get their Ducky.
I hope so. That's the first time that joke has been made. I appreciate it.
Josh, that's very original.
Jeremy used a pun earlier, too. He's guilty as charged.
Let's make sure we know where people go to follow you and find out more, Jeremy, before we roll out.
Our main handle is @LuckyDuckyNFT on Twitter. That's where we post all the updates. If you want to get into Discord, I believe it's Discord.gg/LuckyDucky. That's where we have our holders' space where you can see some of the earlier work if you have a Lucky Ducky and chat with us. We're pretty friendly. It's a family-friendly project. That's part of the makeup of this. We're all trying to do something that can be all ages appropriate. Whether it's Discord or Twitter, you're not going to see anything that you wouldn't be offended by showing your kids or any older adults in the room. We keep that on all stages of this project from Discord to Twitter. The community replicates that as well. It's fun.
I'm trying to think of dirty things you could do with Lucky Duckies. I don't know why.
You could change the Ducky.
You can make a derivative series called Unlucky Ducky. Feel free. That is wide open right there.
We won't go too far down that domain to the interest of your audience. Thanks so much for joining us, Jeremy. We will catch you on the flip side. We hope to see you at NFT LA. We look forward to all the cool things going on with Lucky Ducky.
Thank you so much.
Congratulations.
We will catch you later. Josh, should we hit this other Hot Topic real quick? What do you want to do?
Let's cover one hot topic. One thing Dave has not shown is opinions. We like opinions. Let's chat about one of these interesting newsworthy topics.
"Fanatics sells its majority stake in the NFT Company Candy Digital." This is a big deal. Candy has been one of the major players that have come out, especially early on in this whole space. It's a big deal to sell that much. They've got some rationales for it. I understand, Dave, that you're the one that brought this Hot Topic to our attention. Tell us about your take here.
I'm hoping my opinions are driven by my passion. I don't know it all. I don't have the answers. I know what I want and what I'm looking to build as the CEO of this company, but in this Hot Topic, I was reading the article that broke. Fanatics is selling its 60% stake in Candy Digital, which is fine but what bothered me and upset me was Michael Rubin and his quote. Michael Rubin is the CEO of Fanatics. He's a very bright and smart guy. Fanatics is a wildly successful company but what he said is what pisses me off. You can read his quote.
I'll read it. You can pretend I'm Michael Rubin, "It has become clear that NFTs are unlikely to be sustainable or profitable as a standalone business," Fanatic CEO Michael Rubin wrote in an internal email according to CNBC.
That is a comment that upset this shit out of me, "It has become apparent that NFTs are unsustainable of their own business." That's not true. First of all, that might be his opinion but NFTs are massively sustainable. It has been proven that it's massively sustainable. What might not be sustainable is the content or creation that Candy Digital is putting out, the way that they're doing it, or the way that they have approached things. I'm not looking to rip their company or anything like that. I would love to see them succeed, but that comment gets picked up in the general media.
The next thing you see is Michael Rubin, CEO of Fanatics, is now being quoted in Forbes or Fortune. This is on CNBC. I don't want that comment to hold any water. That's a bullshit comment. Maybe you think the way your company is run is not sustainable for NFTs. That's fine. That's fair. You've got a very successful company in Fanatics but don't make that statement on the industry. Don't talk about NFTs, Web3, or blockchain as an unsustainable world by itself because that's not true.
I'm going to play devil's advocate for a moment. He says, "As a standalone business." I would argue what you're doing with NFTs and that some of the winning projects, like what Yuga Labs is doing, are not standalone businesses. It's an ecosystem. To me, maybe Fanatics has this bigger ethos. They raised a big round. The idea of cultivating something new is hard work.
Let me argue with you. Josh, let's define what's a standalone business. Tell me what you think a standalone business is in the way that Rubin might be saying it.
What he's saying by standalone business is you create an NFT. It works on its own, independent of a physical type of experience and physical products. The digital collectible in itself is not a sustainable business.
That's why I'm argumentative here. That's not what Candy Digital, to the best of my knowledge, what I've seen, was doing. They were putting content out and also marrying content with physical products. That's what Fanatics is all about.
There's some naiveté to his quote. There's no disrespect to him. It is an important distinction for people to have and for us to talk about on the air. No business in the current world is sustainable if it's a one-hit pony. It's like putting out one single and expecting to sustain a music group about that. You have to be thinking bigger across multiple business lines, multiple communities, and multiple types of product offerings. If you look at that independently, you're right but it's not applicable.
I don't think that's why I'm bothered by the quote and the way that the quote comes off without clarification. It needs context. Michael is running a great company in Fanatics. It's very successful. Candy has done some good stuff but to make that statement, which then gets picked up on CNBC and everywhere else, creates a tone and an attitude that's not accurate.
That's what I want. Many other people and I are doing work to try and blaze the trail here as Candy was. We have to be careful with what is being said out there. No one should be bullshitting and spinning, but don't say that NFTs are unsustainable. You better put some context to that. That's where the big mistake is. That's what I have a problem with.
That's fair enough.
I appreciate the share on that one. It's worth talking about too. Selling when the market is down on anything is an interesting choice, I suppose.
We want people to have skin in the game for projects that are relevant to them.
We all want to see everyone in this space who's a real player and committed to it succeed. That's the goal here. I don't want to see Candy suffer. I don't want to see anyone out there. I do want to see everyone step up the game, including us. We're constantly trying to improve. What we're doing a good job of is I know what we're good at and what we're not good at. Anyone who says that they've got this thing figured out is bullshitting, but I do know that we've got a good opportunity to continue to evolve the industry.
Let's do a little bit of a wrap-up here on the session. One of the things we like to do on the show and you were excited to participate in is a little bit of a shout-out, Dave. We like to give you the chance to let you recognize folks that you think are under-recognized or deserve a little love, or you want to make a little connection through our platform. I would love to hand it over to you and ask you who you think of in that context.
It takes a lot for anyone or a creator company in this space to move things forward. That's why I give credit to everybody who's trying. I want to encourage everybody. For us, there are two bodies that I would give a shout-out to inside Orange Comet. One of them goes to Yong Yam, who is our Chief Operating Officer. She oversees not every single division inside the company but oversees the strategy within what we're looking to do as well. She works her ass off.
This is about being passionate about living, breathing, and eating NFTs and Web3 technology. We're reading articles all the time. She's reading stuff, pushing it out, and talking in the wee hours of the morning to everybody. A huge shout-out to her is number one. We are such a creatively-driven company. As I've been seeing on this episode all along, content is our number one priority, along with this amazing community that we have built around our projects, which is so critical to us.
Here's a shout-out to Dante Ferrarini whom I mentioned earlier. He's our Chief Creative Officer. We had Jeremy on. There's the amount of work that somebody puts into physically and mentally working on creating something. I don't think the public understands what goes into this. Most people wouldn't. They just see something at the end of the day. For Dante, there is our creative team that he leads sleepless nights. He's falling asleep for an hour on a couch to try and get something done overnight. Here's a big shout-out there.
My last shout-out does go back to supporters who are around Orange Comet and all the projects we have. We have a fantastic base of people that became fans of the company and our work and have stuck with us in the good and bad. Believe me. We have made mistakes. We have had errors, technology issues, and all kinds of things like that. We're looking to improve every single day as a company. These people are fans, fanatics, collectors, and enthusiasts who have stayed and stuck by our side. I'm so appreciative of all of that.
That's beautiful. Thank you so much. From everything you were talking about when we were talking about projects upcoming and 27 different things, I can imagine that people working on this stuff have to be pretty adept at what they do to manage that many things going on.
It's tough. It's hard but we love it. We're in it for the long haul.
We're about to wrap up here. There is a couple of more fun but logistical things we want to mention. We may do a giveaway with you. We're percolating on that.
I do have a giveaway.
You have to figure it out already. If you want to share, you can, or we can announce it later.
I have one Scottie Pippen NFT left because we put a couple aside. Let me give it to you. You decide on how it's got to get used.
The winner has to be on Twitter. They have to win six World Championship basketball games.
We're going to do something special here for this NFT because this is a very special NFT. We're honored you're able to pull a rabbit out of the hat for us, Dave.
We love it. I appreciate all the time and support. Think about what you want to do with it. They're not revealed but by the time you do this, they will be revealed. Each one is legendary in its way because they're all unique one-of-ones. For all we know, this one has an extra special utility to it. It's coming your way. We will get it over to you.
Thank you so much. More detail on our socials is coming out soon. One last time, where can readers go to learn more about you and the projects you're working on?
I'm always reachable on Twitter. It's @Broome88. They can come to Orange Comet, our Twitter, and our Instagram. They can go to OrangeComet.com, see our projects and what we've got coming out, and go to our Discord. We're building a nice community. We would love to have anyone join. I'm happy to answer any questions I possibly can. I'm looking to help people. If there are creators and people who are looking to get into this space, please reach out to me on my Twitter and ask me to DM you. I'll come back to you and help in any way I possibly can.
That's very generous. Thanks so much. We have reached the outer limit at the show. Thanks for exploring with us. We've got space for more adventures on this starship, so invite your friends and recruit some cool strangers that will make this journey all so much better. How? Go to Spotify or iTunes, rate us, and say something awesome. Go to EdgeOfNFT.com to dive further down the rabbit hole. Look us up on all major social platforms by typing EdgeOfNFT and start a fun conversation with us online. Lastly, be sure to tune in next time for more great NFT content. Thanks again for sharing this time with us.
Important Links
- Orange Comet
- Lucky Ducky
- NFTLA.live
- Dante Ferrarini
- Dapper
- Top Shot
- OpenSea
- RTFKT
- Autograph
- Interview with the Vampire
- Dinosaurs Vs Aliens
- Andrew Huberman
- William Tong - LinkedIn
- Open The Portal
- @LuckyDuckyNFT - Twitter
- Discord.gg/LuckyDucky
- Fanatics sells its majority stake in the NFT Company Candy Digital
- Candy
- Fanatics
- Yuga Labs
- Yong Yam - LinkedIn
- @Broome88 - Twitter
- Twitter - Orange Comet
- Instagram - Orange Comet
- Discord - Orange Comet
- Spotify - Edge of NFT
- iTunes - Edge of NFT
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