Jeremy Ryan AKA NFT Demon Of Super Gremlin Society, Plus: Casey Craig Of ARCrypto, Why These Gary Vee & Mr. Dayger Músic Vids Are Viral, And More…

November 5, 2022

Jeremy Ryan was diagnosed with terminal cancer and was told he had no chance of surviving. But by some miracle, he did not only survive, but he even became a remarkable artist. He now uses his passion for creating NFT art collections to support cancer patients. Jeremy joins Jeff Kelley, Eathan Janney, and Josh Kriger to share how his collection Super Gremlin Society documents his battle with brain cancer and allocates funding for cancer-related research. For this episode's sponsored Hot Topic, Casey Craig of ARCrypto jumps in to share how they educate people getting into cryptocurrency and DeFi. And for the show's brand new segment Why It Is Viral, they feature a video of Gary Vee pushing his interviewee into an information overload and a pretty sick bassline from a music NFT sample by Mr. Dayger.

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Jeremy Ryan AKA NFT Demon Of Super Gremlin Society, Plus: Casey Craig Of ARCrypto, Why These Gary Vee & Mr. Dayger Músic Vids Are Viral, And More…

Find out how mischievous gremlins are super communities battling cancer.

What the heck banana cream jealousy is.

Plus, incredible access to education and giveaways from the Web3 Expo DC pitch winner. All these and more on this episode.

Don’t forget we put together a gathering called NFT LA a few months back that brought put thousands of the world’s doers in the NFT space. Head to NFTLA.live to get tickets to our bigger, bolder, better, but just as intimate and impactful of that happening in Los Angeles, March 20th to March 23rd 2023.

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Our guest is Jeremy Ryan, the creator and artist behind six incredibly successful collections. That's six, including Cartel Punks, Bad Ass Doggos, and GamingShiba, and he is now in his latest project Super Gremlin, which is his first collection on Ethereum. Super Gremlin Society is made up of disruptive creatures that can take anything negatively formed against them and turn it into their power, knowledge, and skills.

Together, the Super Gremlins form a courageous, bold, and resilient collective. Jeremy's story is that he was diagnosed with brain cancer and cancer throughout his body and told he had zero chance of survival. His battle against cancer resulted in a medical miracle. He not only survived but was transformed into a remarkable artist.

His story is even more remarkable because, before his diagnosis, he had little interest in art and no detectable artistic ability. As he battled his unlikely way to remission, a profound change occurred in his brain. Medical science attribute attributes it to neuroplasticity. If an area of the brain becomes damaged, the brain can reroute processes by developing new neurological pathways.

In Jeremy's case, he developed the ability to see the world through his own creative lens and represent it in unique digital art. Now, creating art NFT collections is his passion. It shows within a month of entering the finance smart chain, he became the largest artist on the entire chain. What an incredible story, Jeremy. I'm sure we'll have a lot to talk about here. Welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me. One thing I do want to notate is Binance smart chain is the third-largest chain for NFTs in the entire world. It wasn't when I started, but it is now.

It's all because of you.

Let's give you all the credit.

Thank you for that.

As we get into this too, we have our resident Doctor of Neuroscience here in Ethan, PhD. We’ll hear about some of the intersections. I'm sure you got a lot of questions, Ethan, but let me start. Jeremy, welcome, of course. Super Gremlin Society documents your journey from brain cancer to a real-life superhero. Walk us through this awe-inspiring journey.

In 2014, I was diagnosed with brain cancer. By 2015, it had spread from the knees to the lung to the brain. 2015 was when I was diagnosed with brain cancer. I was diagnosed with malignant fibrosis histiocytoma for the fourth time in 2014. Malignant fibrosis histiocytoma is a soft tissue cancer. By 2015, it had spread from the knee to the lung to the brain. That's where this real transformation had taken place. I'm not sure whether it's the brain cancer itself and the damage it did or the actual brain radiation. I did four years of brain radiation. Anyone who's been through radiation or knows somebody who's been through radiation, which is most people in this country, at least probably this world, knows somebody who's been through radiation.

It's a horrendous process. Fortunately for me, it formed new pathways in my brain that allowed me to do art. That trauma and damage that was done to my brain allowed me the artistic ability that I have now. The other part of my journey that is noteworthy is that I did it all alone. I didn't have a family and friend support system back then. Don't get me wrong. If it were to happen again, I would have a whole different system. Back then, I didn't have the support system that I have now. Super Gremlin Society is an effort to make sure that nobody in this world ever doesn't have a support system for their cancer battles or their battles with any other condition that is life threatening.

We're not sticking just to cancer. If somebody comes in with, say, AIDS, the stigma around AIDS is a little bit different and it's not quite as deadly as it used to be, but let's say they are in the deadly portion of it and they want some help or let's say if they're not in the deadly portion of it and they still want some support and help, that's what we've created this community for. Terminal illness and helping people, families, and anybody affected by it. That's the purpose of this community.

That's powerful stuff.

Full recognition, as I'm sure you're well aware, stories like this are great, and then there are people that are toughing and it's hard to find that silver lining. A lot of empathy for folks who are dealing with all sorts of issues. I want to give a shout-out to a good friend of mine, Anthony Patak, who also had a brain cancer issue developed that was diagnosed as terminal.

Some star surgeon was able to show up and remove this thing, but he was left not the capacity to control one of his arms, all these crazy things. Shout out to Gilda's Club. I don't know if it's a national organization or it’s just in New York, but I know that he spent a lot of time engaging with them and they were helpful in providing a support network.

It was founded by Gilda Radner, famously from Saturday Night Live. To follow up, that's part of what's been fascinating to me about the brain, about how it gives us all a different window into the world. It can even change the window that you already have if you're able to reformat the brain or learn something new. It's fascinating. Examples like this help us learn more about what goes on.

Terminal Cancer: The brain provides a different window into the world. It can even change the window you already have if you can reformat it to learn something new.

The capacities and limits are way larger than we think. Your artistic talent's been described as out of body where you created these six exceptional collections, and apparently, Eminem owns three of them, which is pretty awesome. I would love to hear more about the collections themselves and the process that that got you there. What was the process like?

First, let me start off with Gilda’s Club. This club is a national organization but is foreign by local chapters. That is one place that I believe that some of the money will go to. Some of the Gilda’s Clubs across the country, I believe some of the money from this project will go to because our project is geared around money going to cancer awareness and cancer research. Gilda’s Club in Dane County or Madison, Wisconsin, where I was living at the time when I was dealing with this battle, was beneficial as well. Gilda’s Club is a wonderful organization, but they're not a national organization per se, even though they have branches all across the country.

I do believe that we will end up supporting Gilda’s Club in some of their local branches through this project. As far as my history goes, I started with Cartel Punks. Cartel Punks was a punk-type collection in the same vein as Crypto Punks. Cartel Punks was a collection that took off pretty quickly in BSC. It was the first collection ever in Binance smart chain to mint out in less than three weeks. We do have some historical precedent there. I moved to Badass Doggos. Bad Ass Doggos is the only collection that I have that hasn't minted out. The reason for that was because a contract I had dealt with had said that it was their collection.

For a whole week, there was this he said, she said. I said it was my collection. They said it was their collection. Unfortunately, that he said, she said was enough to pretty much destroy the whole collection for a week because we had minted out about a fifth of the collection in a day and a half, and then all of a sudden, this contractor comes and says it's theirs. What they ended up doing is they ended up draining everybody's wallet. It was clear and indisputable who was real and who was not, but it took a week for that to happen. A week in NFT is like a year in anything else. It's like a year in stock. It would be like a whole year of some problem in stocks that wasn't resolved.

That was what happened with Bad Ass Doggos. We had that minted out 10,000 on BSC, and then we had GamingShiba, which minted out entirely in presale. For BSC, I became the largest artist rather quickly. Unfortunately, BSC fell down. None of those projects are rugs. All of those projects still have open socials, open Telegrams. Telegram is what BSC uses. I know for people who are reading this who were Solana and ETH, it’s a little weird, but Telegram is what BSC uses. We did have Discords for two of my projects and nobody used them. I stuck with the Telegrams, but my Telegrams are still open for e single one of the projects.

Not a single one has been rugged. That is one thing that you have with me, is you have a long history of consistent non-rugged, is the best way to put it. That's where I don't get people like Zagabond. I don't get this whole notion of in order to learn, you have to rug. I don't get that because you can easily keep your socials open. The community might die down, but that's even easier to keep up with than when the community was active. It may pick up at some point. You may end up getting a pump at some point that you never expected because you're still around and nobody else is.

Terminal Cancer: There is the notion that you have to rug in order to learn. However, you can easily keep your socials open. The community might die down, but that's even easier to keep up with than when it was active.

That's what I'm seeing in BSC. All these other projects are rugging because BSC tanks, so there's no money coming in. There's no money coming into me for my BSC projects. There's no money coming in for anybody for their BSC projects. They're all rugging, but I would never do that because it doesn't take much to keep that community open. Once the next bull run comes, you're going to be looking pretty good. Right now, I'm moving to ETH where you can build a project in the bear market. BSC, I don't think it's possible to build a project in the bear market, but ETH, there’s enough liquidity to build a project during the bear market.

#NoRug. This path you were on, we talked about all these projects. Now we got Super Gremlin Society. It's 10,000 project. You got a number of different elements to it. We wanted to give you a chance to talk about some of those nuts and bolts for our readers.

The one thing about Super Gremlin Society that's a little bit different than most projects and all of the projects so far that I've done that I'm lucky to have been the benefit is that we've been able to put a massive amount of money behind marketing and PR. We've been able to put a massive amount of money behind our Metaverse Club. We do have a Metaverse Club that is completely and entirely built before mint. That will be Token Gated after mint. You will only be able to get to the club after mint.

We're going to host financial education ceremony celebrations with people in real estate, people in crypto, people in all sorts of things at that private club. We'll have events with DJs. We'll have a bunch of fun stuff going on at that private club, but we also, before format, have a real-life event. I believe we'll get into that a little bit later.

Many cool things about it. Also again, to reiterate, we already talked about it, but again, allocating some of those proceeds to cancer-related nonprofit research. Kudos.

Thank you.

It's fascinating stuff. I'm realizing we're going to move on to another segment, a few questions to our Quick Hitters. We didn't ask you this before the show started, and maybe you would've mentioned it, but is there a loss of brain function affects the way that we ask you questions? There was a woman that I heard interviewed on another podcast, and she's like, “Bear with me. There may be things I forget in the middle or this or that.” Have you remained pretty functional in terms of day-to-day conversation and things like that?

For the most part, my day-to-day function is the same as it was before. There are some small little things like I can't drive a stick shift car anymore, where I used to be able to drive a stick shift car before. Although thankfully, that's not something that gets too much into your life nowadays. There are certain processes within the brain that don't act the same way that they used to. Fortunately, none of those have to do with my ability to run a project. That helps out.

I would trade stick shift car driving for artistic abilities.

I was in Scotland and Ireland and I rented a car and I'm driving a stick shift, sitting on the right side of a car, driving on the left side of the road and shifting with my left hand. That was a challenge. It's all manual over there. I would avoid that, regardless.

Another question I was curious about other upcoming campaigns that you're going to be having leading up to the mint, and how our readers can participate. That's part of why we're talking to you. I'm sure people are interested. How do you suggest people pay attention and remain able to keep involved?

We'll have different campaigns going through our Discord and Twitter. I recommend people follow our Twitter and Discord. They'll see the campaigns going on. Right now, even for some people who might be reading this, they might be interested in our Discord giveaway competition. Right now, we're giving away money for the person who invites the most legitimate people to Discord. If you're planning on inviting thoughts that won't work, we have a system that tracks that.

It's not going to work too well, but if you invite legitimate NFT people to our Discord, then the person who does the most by November 6th, 2022, which still we got quite a decent amount of time, then the person who does the most invites by November 6th will end up winning 1 of 3 prizes, $100, $50, or $25. That'll be in USD. Anybody can take part in that. There will be similar competitions like that, similar engagement types of competitions. We're looking for engagement because that's what drives NFTs, which is engagement? There will be different types of competitions to try to boost engagement and try to get people more engaged.

NFT drives engagement. There will always be different types of competition to make people constantly engaged. Click To Tweet

We talk about it all the time. We have a lot of things we think about around engagement and community involvement in our world. It's stuff that we care deeply about. Once you cross that threshold into the world of engagement and community and building that rapport with people in those relationships, for any community, that's an inflection point. Speaking of that, one of those places that you do that, and we do that, and most people do that, is when you're live and in-person. You have some cool stuff forthcoming here. You got a DCENTRAL at Art Basel in Miami coming up here. What should we expect from Super Gremlin Society?

That's our first in real life event. We have a booth at DCENTRAL and Art Basel. DCENTRAL is one of the biggest conferences of the year. NFT LA is another one of the biggest conferences of the year, but that's at a different time of the year. DCENTRAL is also one of the biggest conferences of the year. We have a booth there, so people can come meet me. I'm going to be the one staffing the booth.

People can come to do a meet and greet, come meet me, come talk with me, ask whatever questions you have during that. Also, the other thing that I want to mention is I will be there for several days after DCENTRAL. I don't have a particular plan. If people are there for Art Basel and they want to meet up with me, I'm more than willing to meet up.

Let's meet up. Let's smoke a joint. Let's have a good time. Let's say hi to each other. Let's get to know each other if you want to. Feel free to hit me up @NFTDemon420. That's my personal Twitter. If you hit the Super Gremlin Society Twitter, it might be one of the social media people that responds, but if you hit my personal Twitter @NFTDemon420, then I will be the one who responds. I'm down to meet up with whoever is in Miami during Art Basel and have a good time. That's the whole point. The whole point is to meet up with people.

Getting people together, inspiration, education, connection, little bit of entertainment, lots of fun. Big shout out to the DCENTRAL crew, Justin, Michael, Esther, that crew. I’m close with them. I love what they do. Great event. Check out Jeremy and Super Gremlin Society out there, for sure. Much love.

Art Basel is a great opportunity to have a great time. My favorite comment that I like to pull out e once in a while from Josh when we were doing things in Miami during Art Basel. We rolled up to this yacht party and he was like, “I was already on this yacht a couple of days ago.” Once you're saying stuff like that, you're having too good of a time, I suppose.

I don't know that I've heard that one from you.

It was totally authentic. He was not joking. He was like, “I was already on this yacht. I know this yacht.” I can't wait to get to the Quick Hitters. I know this is going to be super fun. Last question in the interview portion here, what other projects have you been following in the Web3 space? What's inspiring you these days?

One project I've been following pretty closely has been Sappy Seals. Their community has taken over Twitter and now in Reddit. The new thing is Reddit. That's starting to take over crypto. Twitter is the intersection between Reddit. Sappy Seals has been doing a good job of creating fun vibes and a fun community. I was in Psychedelics Anonymous. I was close with them, but unfortunately, they screwed me over. Right now, Sappy Seals is the only blue chip that people would know that I'm invested in. I've got a bunch of DEGEN PLAYs that I'm invested in as well. It's hard with a DEGEN PLAYS to get all of those out. Plus, they're still DEGEN PLAYS, so I'm not going to go too much into those on here because this isn't the format for DEGEN PLAYS.

Terminal Cancer: Sappy Seals has taken overTwitter, Reddit, and crypto, and they are doing a good job of creating a fun community.

That's true, but fun nonetheless.

That will be the format for DEGEN PLAYS. A badge of honor.

You're covering the top 1%. DEGEN PLAYS are at the top 1%.

This is true, but they can always dream. That wraps segment one. We appreciate it. Super Gremlin Society, your whole story, it’s super inspiring. We’re excited about where this can go next for you.

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We want to move to segment two, and that's Edge Quick Hitters. It's a fun and quick way for us to get to know you a little bit better. There are ten questions we ask e single guest of our show. We're looking for short answers, a single word or few words, but we might dive in a little bit deeper here or there. Question number one, what's the first thing you remember ever purchasing in your life?

I would say a baseball card.

You still got a collection floating around?

No, I don't anymore, but when I was a kid, I was into baseball cards.

Question number two, what's the first thing you remember ever selling in your life?

An actual rock. When I was a kid, I was homeless. In order to survive, I sold rocks as a five-year-old kid to people in the street. They were regular rocks, but they were pretty looking rocks.

You had that eye toward that artistic beauty.

I learned win-win propositions.

Question number three, what's the most recent thing you purchased?

An NFT.

Anything you care to disclose on that one?

The most recent NFT I bought was a DEGEN PLAY. It was a rug that was trying to come back from being rugged.

Rug back from the dead.

It's called Renga Ape Club. They're trying to come back from getting rugged. They do have ownership of the contract. We'll see what happens. That seems to be the new meta. There are 5 or 6 other communities that are trying to come back from rugs right now. That seems like it could start the new meta, but I'm not sure yet.

We'll see where it goes. Question number four, what's the most recent thing you sold?

An NFT.

There's a theme here, guys.

That was Psychedelics Anonymous because they threw me over.

Question number five, what's your most prized possession?

My most prized possession is my dog.

Your pup that we heard scratching around over there. What's your dog's name?

His name's Riot.

What kind is he?

He's part mastiff, part pit bull.

Tough guy. I thought I heard a little pitter-patter of nails. I thought it might be a little guy, but I'm guessing that's not the case.

His nails are well-trimmed.

Question number six, if you could buy anything in the world, digital, physical, service, and experience, that’s currently for sale, what would it be?

Probably Twitter since Elon hasn't closed it yet.

You got to get in there still while there's a window. Question seven, if you could pass on one of your personality traits to the next generation, what would it be?

Persistence, without a doubt.

I get that, brother. Question number eight, if you could eliminate one of your personality traits from the next generation, what would that be?

Probably my extremely high level of independence. Not necessarily independence as a trait, but I would not want my future generation to have my level of independence because I'm unhealthily independent.

I need you to talk to my child about that one, too, because that guy, he's off and running. Question number nine, what did you do before joining us on the show?

I was giving my dog belly rubs.

Spoiled, for sure. Question ten, what are you going to do next after the show?

I'll probably smoke a bowl of some Banana Cream Jealousy that I have, 30% THC.

You know exactly where you're going. It sounds pretty cool. That's question ten. Looks like we might have a bonus question. Ethan, do you want to do the honors on picking one of these bonus questions here?

Would you ever run for public office?

Yes, I would. In fact, I've run for congress twice, as you can find out on my Wikipedia page. I might well run again.

Get after it. There we go. That's Quick Hitters. We appreciate you sharing with us. Lots of fun and cool insights.

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There’s a word on the street. There’s a pretty special Hot Topic. What’s the scoop?

Our sponsored Hot Topic is all about AR Crypto, which won the VC pitch contest at Webex in Las Vegas. We have guest, Casey Craig, with us. She is the Director of Education at ARCrypto, which is leading cryptocurrency in DeFi education company. Casey, jump on. We have heard that you're passionate about teaching crypto security, risk management, and strategies needed to generate wealth no matter what the market does. How are you doing? Where are you joining us from some nice broad, expansive place, the United States, am I correct?

Yeah. I'm here in Montana. Thank you, guys, for having me.

It’s great having you here, for sure. Tell us about ARCrypto. What's the scoop?

We are a cryptocurrency and DeFi education company. We teach all of it. We teach onboarding new people into cryptocurrency, what it is, how to get into it securely. We prioritize security and risk management so that people are getting in the space and staying in the space and not just coming in, getting robbed and leaving. That’s what we all don't want in this space. That's a big thing for us. We're primarily, again, cryptocurrency education company. One of our main focuses is DeFi and how to generate passive income in cryptocurrency and DeFi or Decentralized Finance.

It's hard for newbies coming into the space. There's the lingo side of it and then some of the core categories and then the functions within each category. It can be overwhelming. Having folks thinking about how to educate people and bring them along in a reasonable way is important and critical. We do some of it, but that's not our core mission to the show and who we're speaking to. It's usually folks that have at least that baseline, that foundational level of info. There's a big gap out there. It's surprising that even after a couple of years of intensive growth and a move toward Web3 that we're still slogging away with the education side of things.

One thing that I tell people oftentimes, I joke, “At some point, you all have to do my job. I never have to do yours, but at some point, you all have to do mine.” That’s where we bridge the gap. We come in as the education partner or the educator. We help people so that they can get into NFT projects, but we also do it securely and safely.

In our bio on you, it says that within nine months of learning about DeFi, you left a career at a Fortune 200 commercial real estate firm has created a six-figure passive income in DeFi, all without having some traumatic brain overhaul. How did that happen?

First and foremost, not to get super personal, but out of the gate, I want to give a huge shout-out to Jeremy. My mother was involved in a car accident and had a traumatic grade injury. I personally can't relate, but closely, I can relate to a lot of what you've gone through. Massive props to you for everything that you've overcome. I was in a 9:00 to 5:00 job. I was working in commercial real estate for a firm called JLL. It wasn't necessarily that I hated what I was doing, but I hated the lifestyle. I hated having to go sit in an office for 8, 9, 10 hours a day, and outside of work, having no windows, not being able to touch grass, that kind of lifestyle. I wanted a better way. I tried a lot of different businesses.

I had an eCommerce store. I opened a women's clothing boutique. I tried a bunch of different things. Finally, I had been dabbling in cryptocurrency for some time and then I heard about DeFi. I took the course that I'm now the Director of Education at the company. One of my business partners, Gven, founded the company. I took the course, went through it, and I was like, “This stuff is life-changing.” It did that for me. It changed my life. Now I have freedom of location and time and my finances. I can do whatever I want and be wherever I want. That's what I want to help other people to accomplish.

I have to give a shout-out and maybe we'll have to make the connection to one of our major sponsors, Block Trading Alliance, you're reminding me. We're all about education here, of course. That's what we're doing. We're trying to get the word out and get people established. Maybe there's an interesting introduction to be made there, for sure.

Tell us about the role that passive income plays in what you're teaching and sharing about. Is that something that people can learn about specifically or just an outcome of having learned? What are your thoughts on that?

One of the primary ways that we make passive income in DeFi is through liquidity provision. Think of it like how if you want to go trade your cash for Apple stock. You want to go buy the stock of Apple. Somebody's providing liquidity so that you can facilitate that transaction. There's Apple on one side and cash on the other side. You want to go buy some stock. There's Apple, you want to sell your stock, there's cash. That's the Goldman Sachs or providing liquidity to the Nasdaq, New York Stock Exchange, big institutions. When that happens, when you go and you get your Apple stock, you pay a small fee.

That fee's going to the liquidity providers. In our case, what happens is I go provide my liquidity on Uniswap. When you go and you swap your Bitcoin for Ethereum, I make the liquidity provider fee. It helps facilitate this decentralized ecosystem where I'm providing the liquidity so you can go swap your Bitcoin for some ETH so you can go degen into NFT projects. We're all helping each other out, but at the same time, you can earn a massive class of income, especially on these decentralized exchanges that have a high trading volume and daily user activity.

I can see it in Jeremy's eyes. He's like, “How do I sign up? This is interesting.”

I'll teach you, Jeremy.

Jeremy, you have such this interesting community. A lot of the folks have followed you throughout your journey and these different projects you've launched. You got to have a bunch of folks that are just coming on board now. How do you handle education?

A lot of it's done through Discord. One thing that I forgot to mention is that we do have credit and debit card integration. People who are new and don't have quite yet a MetaMask or a Trust Wallet or a DeFi wallet that they can hold these NFTs in can still end up buying them through credit and debit cards. Most of it is through Discord or Twitter, just onboarding people and explaining it to them. A lot of people feel bad asking. Don't feel bad asking our community.

I'd imagine Casey would say the same thing, don't feel bad asking her community as well, but there are certain communities that don't feel bad asking. That's what we're there for. We're here to onboard and bridge people. Especially something like cancer, it's something that affects a whole lot of people that know anything about NFTs.

Don't feel bad about asking NFT communities for help, especially if they are dedicated to onboarding people into this scene. Click To Tweet

We're still trying to bridge those people over. In all aspects, I believe that eventually, just about everyone's going to be bridged over one way or another. The sooner that people can get bridged over, the sooner that they can learn through safe, comfortable, positive communities like ours that will be happy to lead you through it and not like, “What am I doing? Why do I have to help this newbie?”

That's not the mentality that you'll find in our community and in a lot of communities. That's something that everybody should start to get to know because eventually, all of our house deeds and all of our car titles, I believe, will be on NFTs. Eventually, everybody will have to figure out NFTs and crypto and all of that. Better get started now, especially when plenty of positive communities are happy to help you on your journey.

Casey's here to help. I'm wondering, Casey, will you pull that guitar off your wall and have an educational song about crypto? You got a ukulele.

That's a good way for it to be sticky is to start singing about MetaMask, connecting your ledger. We can have a connecting your ledger to MetaMask tune.

If somebody's not doing that already, that's a sticky one. Before we roll out of your segment here, we want to hear a little bit more about that VC pitch contest at Webex in Las Vegas. What was that like? Did you imagine that you'd win? Was it stressful? Were you like, “This is a shoo-in?” Tell us more about that.

I'm not going to lie, it was fun. It was on a limb. It was last minute that they had asked us to participate in it. A few days before the event, they were like, “Can you guys come up with a 90-second pitch?” They asked me on Thursday and it was on Monday that it was taking place. I'm like, “Yeah, I can talk about us for 90 seconds.” What's cool is it was like a Shark Tank-style pitch with pretty high-level VCs in the space and some high-level founders in the space. The first day was a 90-second pitch followed by about 15 minutes of questioning. I had to answer a lot of questions. On the first day, there were sixteen companies that participated. I went first at everybody, so I just got fed to the wolves.

It was fun. It was good. On Wednesday, they let us know, “You made it to the final round. It's going to take place on Thursday.” Thursday was a ten-minute pitch. Wednesday night, I'm in my hotel room making a slide deck, making sure that it looks good. I did a ten-minute pitch on Thursday and we won the competition. It was super cool. What got us was some connections that we've made with you guys and then with some of these larger VC firms, we’re able to pitch for your SAS Fund and Morgan Creek Capital, which is impactful for our business.

It sounds like maybe somebody said, “Can you come up with a 90-minute pitch? There are 15 minutes of questions after.” They mumbled that other part.

It was funny because I didn't know that there were going to be fifteen minutes of questioning in the next. An email came out that said, “Here's how the flow of the day's going to work. It's going to take this long.” I'm like, “That's going to take a long time to do these 90-second pitches.” It said, “ARCrypto, 90-second pitch, 15-minute questions from judges, and then 5-minute questions from the audience.” I'm like, “There's probably the question and you have the 90-second pitch.”

That's how they get you. You crushed it, obviously. Congrats, a big win.

Thank you. It was a ton of fun.

Let's make sure we know where to direct folks to follow you and ARCrypto and everything you guys have going on. Where should we send it?

Our website is ARCrypto.io. My socials are Instagram @Casey_Craig. Our founder and CEO, he’s where a lot of our social presence is. His name is Gven, but his nickname is Swami Crypto. It's at @SwamiCrypto. Get connected with us. I know also we'll have the giveaway where you guys can book a call and have a session with me. I'll do a strategy session with the readers. I'm happy to see how we can help you achieve your goals in crypto and earn a passive income to create freedom in your life.

Check that out. Keep an eye out on our socials for that giveaway. Get a mini course, get a consultation. It'll be cool. Casey, thanks so much for joining us. We appreciate it. Readers, check out ARCrypto. There’s something going on over there.

Thank you, guys, so much for having me.

---

Should we try this next segment, Jeff?

I don't know too much about it, but I think we should dive in.

I thought this would be cool. Tentatively the name is, Why Is It Viral? For me, that's inspired by a Saturday Night Live skit that people should look up at this game show called Why'd You Like It, where they quiz people on why they like things on Instagram. It's pretty hilarious. Anyways, let's jump over to some viral content and let's see what it is. We'll take a quick look at it and then we'll have a quick chat and see if we can figure out what's going on with this. Is this interesting or not? This one's from Gary Vee. I don't know if you guys have heard of him.

“Do you need an NFT? Why do you need to use this technology in order to do what people are already doing for customers already?”

“That was literally the question that people asked me about the internet, ‘Why would you need to buy wine on a computer? I can go to the store.’ When you do an NFT, you can put things into the contract. Lou's Pizza Shop can issue NFTs and that make a thousand tokens. The regular pizza pictures just give you a 10% discount. The gold one gives you unlimited free pizza after six months if they've had enough pizza or they move can sell it on the blockchain.”

“Lou gets a royalty on that transaction because you can put royalty contracts under these NFTs. It keeps making financial on the back end of the royalty. For every small business, personality, and intellectual property, the token is also a marketing collateral. The way everybody in business needs a social media account to be relevant in 2021 is the same way in 2025. Everyone's going to need a NFT strategy.”

My reason why this went viral is the confused look on the interviewer's face. He’s listing all these nuanced things that you can do with NFTs in a pizza place. She's just squinting and nodding and follow up and say, “Explain further.”

One, Gary talks about everything with intense passion. It's a good simple example that he gave there.

I don't know if I can see how many views it has from the look I have, but it had 25,000 likes, 382 comments, 355 shares. This is from a TikTok video. By the way, it's not a Gary Vee TikTok video. Your NFTs is the name of the channel. Part of it is Gary Vee. What's interesting too is this is not new information. As we look out on the socials, there's a lot of stuff that's popular.

It just goes to our point, there are still a lot of people who have a lot to learn. There are the folks that know that are probably like, “This is cool. Let me share this with someone so that they can find out what's going on.” There are the other people that are just learning about it and so that they're watching it and sharing it. Any thoughts on that, Jeremy?

It might have to do a little bit with the fact that he's throwing many different use cases in at once and he's throwing a whole bunch of at once, but it might also have to do with Gary Vee's general demeanor. He always seems like he's jacked up on caffeine or something, but you know that's him. That's what we love about Gary Vee, though. That's not a dis at all. That's Gary Vee's presence and how he is. A little bit of it, she's thrown off by Gary Vee being Gary Vee, and a little bit of it, she's thrown off by the fact that he's producing too much information in such a short amount of time.

Drinking from the fire hose there. When it comes to moving the needle for any individual, you got to figure out, we always have this conversation, “What's that person passionate about? What are they super pumped about?” Tap into that community and how they think about that community to start to draw out the why behind NFTs and Web3 and what's right around the corner for everybody.

To your point, Jeremy, there's a lot of information in there. To be honest, even though that was all real legitimate use cases, it is a little bit confusing. It does sound a little bit overwhelming and it sounds like, “Pizza place, I just want to get a slice of pizza.” It's useful information. It’s could be like watching it over and over again, like, “What did he say? What's going on?” Let me throw in another one. We all have headphones on, which is cool because this one says put on your headphones. Let's check this one out. This is by Mr. Dagger music. It's some music player. This one's boring. I got to be honest. It's cool, but I didn't see why it needed a million views. This one had 4.7 billion likes. Is that worth it?

That’s a music NFT.

Would you have liked it? I don't know that it was music NFT. We're just checking in things out here. This is my guilty pleasure. I know I shouldn't be watching TikTok videos, so I'm going to insert them here and see.

Maybe they were buying lights.

It was a different bassline. It's not your typical. There's some funky distortion in there and weird reverb going on. There's something cool about it.

As a musician and a fan of music, I can certainly respect it. I thought they said if you needed headphones, I thought it would be a thing where if you've ever listened to a thing, there's a famous one with a barber cutting your hair. You can hear them walking around your head. They use 3D sound, changing the level of sound, talk about neuroscience and the way the ears work and stuff.

They changed the levels of volume, but it sounds like someone's walking around your head and stuff. There's a little bit of that with this one, but it was cool. It was groundbreaking. Let's leave it at that, guys. Interesting shot and a guilty pleasure of looking at TikTok videos that make no sense to me and potentially making us look old and unwitting.

Let's move to the next segment, which is our little shout-out that we like to do. We've been doing this to give love to folks in our orbit that are making a difference to people that move the needle for us personally and at work and whatnot. Jeremy, we wanted to give the floor to you to give a little love to somebody doing that in your world.

As far as moving the needle forward in my world, it's the community that does that. It's the community that does that, we're trying to build the community. Super Gremlin Society, we have an open white list. We're also giving away ten Super Gremlins for the audience. That will be on a campaign that you'll find over there. Also, I want to shout out to Ryan Matta, who was instrumental in my early days. He was a big influencer that took me under his wing in the early days and helped me move forward.

Moving the needle in the NFT world requires building a strong community that does that for you. Click To Tweet

That was a mutual friend.

I would say a congruent experience that we have with him. I met him at TNYC first time. We were doing some live shows for the first time with our crew in one place because we're normally virtual. It was super helpful. He went out of his way to give us a hand. We're borrowing pieces of equipment from him and all kinds of stuff. He was gracious and helpful. We appreciate it. A super smart dude. Super valuable contributions and recommendations and input. Ryan Matta, shout out to you, brother. Much love.

It goes without saying, if you need a microphone recommendation or camera recommendation, he’s your guy.

Along with many other things. Ten Super Gremlin NFTs, which awesome once the minting starts. What we're going to do is we'll have all the details on how to enter to win this amazing prize on our socials. Follow our socials. We'll give you all the details that you need to enter the contest and score one of these bad boys. Thank you so much, Jeremy, for that. We're grateful. Before we wrap this episode, though, we got to make sure that we send people to the right place to follow you, to follow all of your projects. Where do we send people so they can get on this train?

The best place right now is SuperGremlinSociety.com. You can join the Discord and the whitelist through there. Joining the Discord, you can obviously talk to me, which will help you find my other social media. @NFTDemon420 is my social media on Twitter and Instagram. That's another good place to find it. SuperGremlinSociety.com and Super Gremlin Discord is probably the best place because then you can ask any questions you want, and they'll also get answered.

If you forget, you can also ask what my personal Twitter is, and I'll easily give it out. I don't do a whole lot on Instagram, but I do quite a few tweets. I'd be glad to give anybody my personal Twitter. It's @NFTDemon420, but if you forget that, feel free to go to SuperGremlinSociety.com, join the Discord, and ask for it or ask any questions that you have. We're happy to answer questions for you.

If you haven't picked it up from this show, guys, as a special community, even among the special folks in the world of Web3, it's a real standup. Get in there and mix it up. We've reached the outer limit. Thanks for exploring with us. We've got space for more adventures on this starship. Invite your friends and recruit some cool strangers that will make this journey also much better. How? Go to Spotify or iTunes right now, rate us and say something awesome. Go to EdgeOfNft.com to dive further down the rabbit hole. Also, 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.

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