A Chat With Robin Schmidt

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
The coin Bureau Podcast is a production of My Heart Radio.
The metas should be a social experience, So if people
can't come and join in when we're doing stuff, then
it kind of falls down. If it's just a recording
of an event, No, well it's okay, But like we
need to do events where people can be part of it, participate,
win prizes, you know, all of that kind of stuff.

(00:20):
So we have to figure out a lot. Yeah, it's
quite hard work, it sounds it. Welcome everyone to the
coin Bureau Podcast. My name is Guy and I have

(00:41):
a very special guest with me today. Now you may
have heard me in the past mentioned one of my
favorite YouTube channels of all, the Defiant, and we are
very lucky to have today Robin Schmidt, the man, the
face behind the Defiant. Robin is a content creator extraordinaire.

(01:02):
The work that he has done not only with The
Defiant but is now moving on to do elsewhere is
just incredible and very lucky to have him on the
line today. So Robin, thank you so much for joining us.
Oh that's a very very kind I mean, you probably
the face behind in front of something, but really taught you.

(01:23):
I'm the Assine which which I'm also fine because I
really did mess about and everything else. But I mean,
I would like to say that, um, from one content
credit to another, like what you've managed to accomplish with
Combia is impressive. I couldn't do what you do and
I couldn't do it the way that you do it. UM,
So you know, admiration is mutually my friend. Thank you. Well,
I mean right back at you as well, because I

(01:45):
remember we've we're we're all big fans of of of
the work that you do here. And I remember we've
watched so many of your videos and just gone, how
are they doing that? That's extraordinary? And you know obviously
because I think, well we'll talk about this in a
moment hopefully, but you have, UM, you have a filmmaking background.
That's been your Is it safe to say that's been
your whole career? Yeah, no, that's very safe to say.

(02:09):
For twenty three years. I think film has been the
love of my life. It was the thing I grew
up on and it was the thing that I thought
wasn't for me when I was growing up because I
was a musician. Originally I played the violin, the piano,
I led orchestras, and I was a singer of chorister
in Westminster Cathedral, one of the foremost boys choirs in

(02:30):
the world. So that was the training that I had.
And then around about the age of sixteen seventeen, I
realized that I just had enough of it. I've been
performing in front of audiences up until that point, and
I just hadn't ever met a girl, and I hadn't
done sports and all these things that were just like,
I want to do that. And I also realized that

(02:51):
like the world of classical music was just not where
I wanted to go, and the film just seemed completely remote.
It seemed the thing that other people did, very expensive,
very difficult to break into. But it just the thing
that I was determined I was going to get into.
And basically I became a content creator using the same
tools and things that people use now. Just back in
the days when it was Mac cos nine and you

(03:12):
had a little DV camcorder that you plug into an
iMac and that was how you record video. But fast
forward to where we are now, and yeah, I've spent
a long time looking at stuff through a lens and
then editing it in such a way as to make
it entertaining, so you pick up a few tricks along
the way, that's for sure. Yeah, and and so how
did you how did you kind of make the move

(03:33):
from from filmmaking, How did you how did you discover crypto?
How did you get to the defiance as it were?
It's a really sad story, right. There's there's this phrase
which is nothing is more destructive than mediocrity. And I
know it's kind of a weird thing to say, but
like I was moderately successful for most of my career.

(03:54):
You get these little moments where you're like, I'm about
to break out and I'm about to be successful. And
I never maximized those moments for various different reasons. I
think one of it was a little bit to do
with fear not trusting that I was good enough because
the thing, like I said, I think I'm really really
good at his music, but I don't do music. And
it's weird because that's the thing that I naturally am

(04:15):
the best at, but I don't do it. I do
film instead. So there's always been this feeling of imposter
syndrome when it comes to film, that it's someone else
is much better than me, and I'm simply meaning on
this thing that I had and using it for film.
And so all these little kind of periods in my
life where I won awards and I started to get openings,
you know, into bigger productions everything else, I kind of

(04:37):
fudged them. The last one I had was about ten
years ago where we suddenly blew up went viral and
we were making silly music video skits around the plot
of east Enders. So we take the plot of east
Enders that week and then in like turn into a
rap song, shoot the rap video, but do it like
to make it look like the original, so we do

(04:58):
like pop it like it's heart and it'd be and
why being a studio and like, but it was the
plot of EastEnders, and we got featured on radio while
we got featured on Fern Cotton if you know Fern Cotton,
Ferns the one um. But playing music videos on the
radio is so bizarre. And Saturday of this blew up.
But I just had my first child. I'd also just
shot a feature film, and so my wife was like,

(05:21):
it's time for you to kind of be a dad
and a husband and like probably be at home. So
I just kind of stopped and I moved to Holland
with my wife, and I was doing really well as
a commercials director. But I was shooting vacuum cleaners and
coffee cups and like plenty of budget everything else. But
I was just so bored and starting to really get

(05:42):
to that point where like you reached a certain age
and like I should be more successful than this. I
believe I'm better than this. What has gone wrong? And
I was just poor, broke and just trying to figure
out what to do in my life. And I was like, well,
what I need to do is I need to completely
reinvent myself and shoot a completely new bunch of work
because the word that I've done but previously doesn't represent me.

(06:04):
It's not honest, and I need to show what I
can do. But problem is, filmmaking is expensive. So I
thought I need to find a way to solve the
problem of money, because I thought not having any money
was my problem. What I have come to realize through
crypto is that money itself is the problem. But that's
a whole other story. But it was just a random
discussion with my boss on the way down to a

(06:26):
shoot in Belgium where he was talking about this cryptocurrency
the board. He was like, oh my god, look it's gone.
Whoa Jesus. I was like, cryptocurrency? What is that? And
then then that was early two thousand and seventeen, that
cryptocurrency was eight and he was basically able to pay
off his entire mortgage. And I was like, well that
sounds like fun. Let's see what this is all about.
Fell down the rabbit hole of that and just kind

(06:47):
of looked at it and said this, this entire industry
is It is about storytelling. Everything is a story that
one person tells another in this very kind of linear fashion.
It's oral storytelling. Someone on Twitter says, oh, this is
going to go up, this is going to do this,
and everyone just buys it or figures out their own
version of that story, or they tell themselves the story,

(07:09):
which is I have done a good thing here. I
have bought this token and it will make me rich,
or I'm absolutely sure that this is a good investment
because this guy told me so, or you know, I
have done my homework because I have learned how to
be an analyst, and therefore this is a good investment.
We're all just telling stories. The Friends Center, So, well,
what I was also really kind of kind of I

(07:33):
found really weird was that no projects were any good
at telling their own story, and that's probably because they
didn't even know what that story was. If you're a
layer one, you literally are everything. You're just a blank
piece of paper essentially on which you can do anything with.
So how do you tell that story? So it's very,
very slowly I started to get to a position was like, well,
I know enough about this space where maybe there's a

(07:53):
room for someone like me to tell these kinds of stories.
And the rest was who would I do it with?
Where would I do it? So I was still working
shooting commercials at this point and just just having all
the creativity just bled out of me because like it's
particularly in bene Lux, like bene Lux's Belgium, Holland Luxembourg,

(08:14):
it's just boring. Everything is like we have to run
this decision via the team in Germany. I actually know
we have to run this decision by the team in China.
It's like why, like why why why can people in
China not see trees out of their windows? Well, because
there are no trees in China, but that's not true.
There are cheese. But this is an air filter product.
So you're imagine someone living in a fifty you know,

(08:36):
fifty story high block of flats. They don't see trees,
so they cannot be trees outside the window. I was like, okay, sure,
so there's the kind of battleity fighting it, and that's
that's why I was just like, I need to do
something different. And this opportunity came up to go and
meet the team at Harmony because I had invested in
them and had a chance to go through a syndicate
to invest in them. And I went to meet them

(08:57):
just on a whim, paying my flights out there, and
then pitched them an idea for a documentary, which is
to essentially take what is good about blockchain and get
it in front of an audience that didn't know anything
about blockchain. This is two thousand and eighteen. I pitched
this and it was It was basically one of those
crazy ideas where I wanted to see if we expose
the ideas of blockchain through pop culture through doing something insane.

(09:21):
And the idea was, how could we incentivize people to
not use Facebook and WhatsApp for an entire weekend and
how can we then pay them back the money they
would have made for you know, in terms of the
data they would have generated for the platforms. We will
return that value to them through Harmony tokens and then
maybe they can stay those tokens, maybe they can exchange them,
but at least get them into people's hands in a

(09:42):
way that was kind of positive. And then it was like, well,
if we're getting people just to step off Facebook for
a weekend, what does that time look like? What are
they going to do with that time? Well, you know,
can we put on a festival? Those kind of things.
That was sort of the idea, and it was going
to be this big, kind of tilted a windmill to
see if we can make something happen. We weren't able
to make that happen. But what it did do is
it got me a job with Harmony as their creative director.

(10:05):
And even then I wasn't making films, it wasn't making videos.
And about four months into that job, I realized that
I missed making films so much that I was like,
I need to offer this up to Harmony as a
thing I can do in my role as credive director
and start telling their story. And then that's how we
sort of got into making YouTube videos for Harmony as

(10:26):
a really tough time. Oh my god, it was. It
was tough because making videos for a project is tough anyway,
because things moved quite slowly, but the audiences expectations move
very quickly, so they always want something new, and if
there isn't anything new, then you're kind of fidgeting around
trying to tell the story of maybe there's a project

(10:47):
that's building on it, maybe there's a new kind of
piece of tech. But on these remote layer ones like
Harmony was, there's not a lot being built, and it's
hard to get excited about a little bot, but we
tried to make it fun and creative. The other problem
was that Harmony had launched on Binance. It was one
of the first Binance I e O s that went
on the Binance decks, and there was just such a

(11:08):
bad smell about all of it. A lot of investors
got very badly burned by the performance of that token
and the promises that were made by that token, and
it just looked bad. And then we just got slaughtered
by the community and fighting our way back from that.
We're super tough because like everything you did was just
like no, you guys are scammers. Your scammers, your scammers,

(11:30):
you scamras, scamras, scamras, scammeras, and like whatever you try
to do, put the CEO in front of the camera,
try and tell the positive story. Yeah, it didn't didn't work.
So um, we guysally got to the kind of Defy
summer phase of things, and I realized that Harmony probably
wouldn't have enough to kind of attract this kind of
Defy that was out there. But DeFi was the big story,
as you remember, So I thought, instead of us having

(11:52):
a product, maybe we could tell the story ourselves and
tell it in a really interesting and weird way. So
I reached out to the two defined us that is
that I knew, which was Bankless and the Defiant, and
they already interviewed Camilla away back and I went down
a certain way with Ryan Shawn Adams and then he
ghosted me. So I and well, you know, maybe we
should just shoot some videos with the Definer because that

(12:14):
seems to be a more positive place. Kamilla said yes,
So then we did this co production. Then we started
doing a weekly video where we would just tell the
story of Defy. What's going on Wifie all these different things,
um and that was a weekly thing and it did
really well, and then she offered me a job and
I was like, Okay, maybe this is what I should
be doing. And that's when we started building the defined
YouTube channel and grew it too. I think a hundred

(12:38):
and seventeen thousand subscribers in about fifteen months, so not
too shabby, not too shabby at all. It was. It's
an extraordinary channel. And I mean, just just going back
to what you were saying about this idea of you know,
feeling kind of creatively upper cul de sac, I guess
when not being able to show a Chinese audience trees.

(12:58):
I mean watching thinking back to thinking back to so
many of the videos that you made with a defiance
that that just seems the whole thing just seems to
be like this massive release of creative energy. And it was.
I mean, it just ticks. It just does so many
things so brilliantly. And I mean I think the best
of your videos were, you know, slightly just an archic

(13:21):
in a way, like you know, you could you could
see like the the ideas Department had just gone just
been allowed to go absolutely insane, and so you had
this kind of anarchism. You had this just boldness of
what you would what you would try. Obviously that the
skills that you and Alp as well just you know,
brought to the table in terms of in terms of

(13:43):
what you're able to do with a with a camera,
and then on top of it all, it would be
this incredibly like informative and often like brilliantly opinionated thing
as well. It was, it was absolutely it was. I mean,
some of those videos are just just extraordinary. UM And
I should say for the audience, I'm for those listening
and and watching, I'll I'll leave some links if that's

(14:06):
okay with you, Robin to to to some of my
favorite UM of you know, some of my favorites that
you you did with the Defined and in particular I
think that the work you did on n f T
S um the greatest n f T film ever made.
And then just this extraordinary light mic drop that you
did with um Why Gamers Hate n f T S

(14:26):
the two part, which I watched again the other day
whilst I was, you know, whilst I was kind of
gearing up for this is extraordinary, Like what you were
able to, what you're able to achieve and I remember
sort of me and my a lot of my colleagues
here at you know, coinbea just sitting around and going, wow, okay,

(14:47):
uh so the bar has the bar has been raised
quite quite high. And it really and I think, you know,
it's it's a it's from from from my point of view,
was kind of exhilarating and also a bit scary at
the same time, because you you suddenly see the bar
being raised this high and you're like, wow, this this

(15:08):
has come such a long way since a guy, you know,
since dudes just with a webcam kind of mounted awkwardly
on top of their monitor, just kind of yelling into
that with half their face showing. And suddenly here we
are with these really you know, amazingly kind of high
concept movies in a way. But yeah, it's that's it

(15:32):
was just such a such a such a glorious thing
to watch. But also, you know, crucially, and I go
back to what I said about, you know, the informative
nature of it, Like you seem to you seem to
be able to not lose sight of the fact that, okay,
this is this is great entertainment. But you've got it,
as you say, you've got to tell a story. You've
got to you've got to shed light on this project.
And and of course defy itself is such as such

(15:56):
a dense topic. I mean, it's one of the ones
that it's one of the Narlie Yeah, it is. And
to try and try and explain that to you know,
someone who who might be coming to it for the
first time is is so tricky. It really it really
keeps you on your toes. Did you, I mean, how
how easy was what was the I guess what was

(16:17):
the easiest part of all that for you? No, what's
the easiest part. But I think probably what we should
say here is that my background. Yes, I'm a filmmaker,
but I'm also I've always been a multi hyphen it
so I was always picking up a camera, trying to
understand how to use it, learning about lenses, learning about

(16:38):
specifics of you know, lighting has actually been one of
the latest skills that I learned. But I was always
shooting my own stuff and editing my own stuff and
then writing on top of that. But I also you know,
I read English at university and a lot of that
is to do with like just hardcore research. You just
read a lot, so I sort of had these background

(16:59):
skill sets that were setting me up for that. That's
that's sort of sitting in the background. And I've done
a lot of filming and lots of different types of situations,
particularly music videos or I've directed a feature film, so
I kind of understand the different ways that you can
tell a story and lenses can do certain things to
be you know, we're shooting this on seventy at the moment,

(17:21):
but it's like it's quite tight, it's quite photographic and nice,
but you can shoot things on wide lenses and suddenly
they become more cartoony in with There's a lot of
versatility in terms of what a camera can do that
people don't really exploit when they're shooting beautube videos, and
that's a shame because it's a storytelling tool at the
end of the day. So you learn all these tricks.
You know, how to tell a story in a different way,
why you use handheld, why you'd use a moving camera.

(17:43):
And we've done a lot of kind of tabletop product
photography type stuff where it just looks really expensive, but
like it's just a thing on a mirror with a
couple of nice lights, and that's it. It's very very
simple to do. But that's that all feeds into it.
So when you're asking me what's the easiest part of it, Honestly,
making films is the easiest part for me because like
that's what I've done my whole life. And I sort

(18:04):
of funny for me hearing you looking to go, oh,
ship the bar is raised. But like in the world
that I come from, that's normal. That's just the way
we do things. Um. But I realized then that I've
spent a long time just making that normal and getting
my ten thos in so that I can pick up,
you know, put something in the script and know that

(18:25):
even if you've only got two hours to shoot it,
we can still get it done because we know what
the solution is. Whereas for a lot of people like
just figuring out, oh, you need to put the light
here or that won't work because of this, like you
just kind of know that already. That's the easy bit.
The harbit for me in terms of all of this
is well, the couple of bits. One, like you said,
understanding defy and understanding where all the information was in

(18:47):
defy was a thing. But again, if you're in the
right telegram groups through in the right disco groups, you
can get that information that The next bit was just
probably trying to figure out like when enough goofing around
was enough. I was always right, just I wanted to
make stuff that I wanted to make, and like we'd

(19:08):
always come up with a story for the week, and
I'd be like, well, this is the story, and maybe
I'm just gonna use tomatoes this week. I'm just gonna
tell them like I did the video on the Merge.
I was just like, I just had this vision in
my head of tomatoes, and I think it's because the
merge in my head was these two things squashing together.
I was like, that feels like tomatoes soup. It's like
blending tomatoes soups. So like, why don't we just use

(19:28):
tomatoes as a metaphor for all this? And that's a
really important point because, as you know full well, the
only visuals you get when talking about this business our websites.
So you do screen grabs of websites, and you do
screen grabs of Twitter accounts. That's it, and I get
so stale so quickly, So trying to find other ways
of telling these stories and maybe I'll do a music

(19:50):
video this week or maybe I'll do something else like.
That's how I kept it interesting for me. I'm just
trying to find these weird visual gags and that. You know,
it got to a point when we were producing six
or seven videos a week where I could only put
that into like the first minute of the video. But
that first minute was always the most worthwhile bit, and
it gave you the springboard to make, you know, the

(20:11):
twenty five minute video that followed something at least um.
But yeah, that that that was some of the gold.
Particularly difficult when we'll be putting a video out on Monday, Tuesday,
Wednesday to on Thursday, live stream on Thursday, as well
as one on Friday. Yeah, that was a lot. That
was a lot. Yeah, And and that's that was That
was something I wanted to ask you as well, because
obviously from you know, from a filmmaking background, you're you're

(20:34):
used to, I guess to deadlines, You're used to things,
you know, being you used to having to run a
kind of tight ship to get things done on time
and keep things within budget and all that sort of stuff.
Did but I mean, how did you how did you
cope with that sort of that kind of growing demand,
because I guess, I guess because as we've you know,
as as as me and the guys here have sort

(20:56):
of gone along with coin beer. I mean, for instance,
I remember reading reading a comment ages ago, now is
when we were still you know, when we were still
like in the maybe tens of thousands of subscribers, and
we couldn't get a video out on our kind of
regular day because either I'd had the either I'd been ill,

(21:16):
or I think actually it might have been just everything
had gone wrong because none of us were none of
us were filmmakers here, So the the the amount of
footage that just sort of never got recorded because the
camera was the camera battery had run out half an
hour ago or something like that. But I mean, I'm
sure this is all stuff that you went through many
many years ago. But I remember just reading this comment.

(21:39):
We eventually got the video out like twenty four hours later,
and it was it was fine, like you know, everything
was everything was cool. But I remember reading this comment
from someone um and seeing a couple more like it
along the lines of like, oh hey guy, UM, great
to see, great to see you got your got the video.
I'd wonder, I wondered where you've got to yesterday, and
I just remember thinking, it's, oh my god, who just

(22:01):
we're just kind of locked in this now, you know,
And and it's it's great, it's it's it's amazing, it's
you know, it's the best job in the world. But
it's still it. Suddenly you have that you feel that
responsibility you have you know, you have to keep pushing forward.
And YouTube is all about it's all about growth, it's
all about eyeballs, it's a it's about you know, you
can't stand still. Did I mean did that kind of

(22:23):
did that take you by surprise at all? Or was
it was it something you were kind of already familiar
with from from making films outside of YouTube. Yeah, it's
so much time pack there's I mean, the financial reality
of it was one was the year that you signed
sponsors and you rent the sponsorship money as much as
you could because people were cash rich and ready to spend,

(22:46):
and they wanted to spend on a niche channel within
a niche industry, which was what we were. So we
just put out more videos and attached more sponsorship to them.
I mean, that's basically the way it work. Way it worked.
And also because the La Chryptim moves so quickly. The
story changes every twenty four hours. So if you can
stay on that and become a kind of regular habit
for people, it's quite important. The problem is then that

(23:07):
you and then a regular habit for people, and if
you don't show up, it's problematic. We never didn't show up,
but that's something I'm really proud of. We always put
a video out and you should see some of the
stuff that we had to do. Like we would get
to Friday a lunchtime having shot, you know, a thirty
minute video, and then we'd have to deliver it at
five o'clock, and we did because we had to output

(23:30):
take half of it. I would take the other half.
We would just blitz it. And it's amazing what you
can accomplish if that time pressure is there. And one
of the things I was very very clear about was
if for whatever reason, then the imperative to deliver forces
us to work beyond the normal working hours of the day,

(23:52):
it's over because you do that once it becomes twice,
becomes three times, and then your capacity to absorb all
of that it goes away. You're it's it's never gonna last.
So I was always very clear that working hours and
working hours, and if we cannot deliver the video within
working hours, and something's gone wrong and we need to
do a better job. So it was always delivered within

(24:13):
those parameters. And then go home and sleep and rest
and and make it, you know, make it not become
a thing where you're resenting it because you're working late,
and then like the comments, you know there we we
should spare moments to talk about the comments. I I
think from probably February last year, maybe March, until I
left the defined didn't read the comments anymore. I just

(24:35):
stopped um because I realized that I was starting to
become that thing where you're trying to make the content
for your audience, and I don't think that's the way
you've got to do it. There was a reason you're
audience stuck around, particularly during the bear market, and if
you change that, then it's gone wrong. So but it
was also the comments got really nasty at a certain point,

(24:59):
and it's we're and how like I am? Now I'm
now dealing with someone who's trolling me on on Twitter,
who seems to have a real problem for me and
seems to know not only where I live, but also
where my kids go to school. It's a problem. Geez, yeah,
it's a problem. So I'm like yeah, so I'm I'm

(25:21):
I'm like what. There's a part of me that's like,
why do I want to go back into this pit
and do this again? Because I left for like, I'm
a pretty mentally strong person. I can deal with a lot.
I can I can put up with a lot. But
this got me, and it got me because we um
that film a lot of the line goes up by

(25:43):
Dan Olson that came out last year, massive kind of
excoriating diet tribe against n f t s in which
there were many good points, but one of the things
he he did was he made us pointed out my
boss Camillariso and quarter of Feil journalist and called her
book an abortion of a book. And I was like,
we can't let that stand. So I wrote, I made

(26:05):
a video and it was a bit of a hot take,
released it, posted it on his channel in response, and
then and then they came brandishing their pitchforks and I
was like, WHOA, what's happened here? And then for the
next three months they were just like they were they
were there, and that was that was rough. And then
like the worst thing was in the middle of all
of this, our sponsor was next, so and next, so

(26:29):
I cannot say anything about next. So other than that,
for most people, that's problematic. And so I was saying
these sponsorship messages and like, you know, that's sitting there
in amongst all this other stuff, and like, ah, the optics,
the optics. So so that that was problematic. So I
just stopped reading the comments at a certain point and like, yeah,

(26:49):
I gu said, I'm still dealing with someone who keeps
saying karma is a bit karma is a bit like
karma for what what did I do? It's this extraordinary thing,
isn't it. It's like, you know, you become you become
the focal point for people, and they project, they project
any sort of disappointments that they may feel or anger,

(27:13):
you know. And obviously at times like this, when when
crypto is is a tough place to be at the
best of times, you know, there's just so much going on.
Obviously we're talking today on a on a day when
lots of people are you know, speculating about f t
X and the markets are going heywire and all this
sort of stuff, and it just seems that you're Yeah,
sometimes it seems that you know, your friendly neighborhood content

(27:36):
creator is now is now just the target for for
all sorts of all sorts of vitriol. It's like, how
do you you know? How well you you and I
are both grifters. That's that's been adjudicated in the court
of public opinion. Were grifters? Yeah, plain and simple, just
gotta we just got to own it, haven't we, Robbin,
There's there's no choice. We're just grifters, you know, I know.

(27:58):
But but but how how how is it that the
things that are positive about this space are so rapidly
and easily overlooked easily because yeah, yeah, and easily forgotten.
And then it's just like, oh, no, you're a grifters, Like, well, no,
I can have an opinion about a thing and and
be concerned about the state of well everything and where

(28:21):
it's going, and you know, be curious about the world.
But anyway, that's I mean, I think that's something that
people understand, and um, the mental health side of this,
I've never really been that challenged by it, and that
there's a very simple reason for that, which is I
could leave this space anytime I wanted and go back

(28:41):
to the world that I was in and have a
career and glad to be fine. I'm just too curious
about what's here and too interested in it to to
do that. And honestly, it boils down to this, I
can I can be a big fish in a small
pond or a small fish in a big pond, and
like the opportunity to to create in the world where
there's no rules yet, when nothing has been set yet,

(29:03):
where you get to really explore and you can't really
fail either in the in the world that any of
this because no one really has the answers yet. That's
just way more appealing, to be honest. So I'll put
up with the haters and the you know, the the
grift abuse, because fundamentally I think there is something interesting here. Yeah,

(29:23):
it comes with the territory, isn't it. It's an occupation
or hazard of of doing, of working in a space
that's you know that there seems to be you know,
there are there are no rules. It seems a lot
of the time. You know, you you you have to
kind of you know, you have to adapt so quickly
the space itself as you say is changing all the time.
There are there are just so many that the parameters

(29:44):
just aren't even clear. So yeah, I mean it makes it,
It makes it an exhilarating place to work in. But
as you say, there's there's this dark side lurking underneath,
and unfortunately times like this it seems to it seems
to rear its head a lot more. What are you

(30:14):
working on now? What's what's the next what's the next
step for you? So I was I was thinking about
where I would go next for some time, and it
wasn't because the Define was going badly. It was more
if we were going to grow the Defined and I
would kind of develop a new things like what would

(30:35):
I want to be doing for the next five years,
and how would we then bring new people onto the
team to manage what we had been doing, and then
I could develop this new thing. And where I was,
where I was leaning was like, you've sort of pointed
out the fact that I overproduced the videos that we
put out on YouTube and do all sorts of crazy things.

(30:56):
I wanted to carry on doing that and and do
more kind of store rework in and around that, and
just sort of as it happened during the pandemic, I
kind of landed on this thing called virtual production, and
that's basically if you saw the Mandalorian and you saw
they use unreal engine screens everything else behind, you know,

(31:16):
to make the bad drops. That's really interesting. And then
you have these PRPs that grew up, and those could
also be three D characters and they could live in
their own worlds. What you're getting too is the metaverse,
and so there are these two worlds colliding. My interest
in virtual production using undreun engine to to create worlds
that I couldn't go and visit or were too expensive
to go and visit myself. That was really exciting. And

(31:38):
then just this growing narrative around the metaverse and what
it was, and so that was kind of where my
head was at. And then, you know, when the time
came to move on from the define, it was really
about what what would I do next? If I was
going to do YouTube, what would that YouTube channel be about.
There's a couple of reasons why I wanted to focus
on the metaverse, and the first one is it's in

(32:01):
my opinion, going to be the biggest story and technology
in the next ten years. It's sort of inevitable now.
I think the the really fun thing about it is
that it sort of touches everything if you think about it,
is the new version of the Internet. It has a
place in gaming, of course, it has a place in
VR A r AI, actually everything like. And I look

(32:22):
up with the way my kids play roadblocks and see
them interacting with other people, thinking about economies, the way
they want to present themselves in the world, and it
feels like they're very much ready for the metaverse in
ways that more grown ups, more grown up people are not.
And so a lot of the pushback on the METAVERSEI
people who simply don't think like a ten year old kid,

(32:43):
and I think more of us should because then we'll
start to understand, I think, where technology is going and
where the world is going in that sense. Also, just
you know, thinking about an iPhone. An iPhone is fundamentally
a horrific thing for the human being because if you
think about it, you're hunched over like this, and apparently,
like the fourth and fifth vertebrae in in young people

(33:06):
now is so messed up because of just being hunched
over a phone. The entire anatomy of the species is
being changed by this piece of technology. I was like,
this is a bad thing, Like we need to get
away from that as soon as possible. So I'm sort
of fascinating the technological side of it because I think
this piece of technology, the the iPhone format is on

(33:28):
its way out, So what's going to replace it? And
you start to get into glasses and all these kind
of things and wearables, and that's again that plays into
this story of the metaverse. But your nose. I haven't
mentioned Crypto or web three at any point in this.
That's also very important to me because, as you know,
when you're in the cycle, you go up, you go down,
and then you're down for a really long time, and

(33:48):
you're apologizing for and defending Crypto in a way because
you have to. I don't really want to be doing that,
Like I I still love Crypto, Web three, n f
t S, and I'm there's still going to be part
of what I'm doing. But the opportunity to tell our
larger story that isn't wedded to that, that can be
connected to something very much universal, which is what is
a human being in a world that is virtual? That's

(34:12):
a really big question and gives you lots of interesting
stories to tell. So the other thought of it is
that I probably I am an extremely vain person. I
saw the size of the audience that we were able
to grow with the defined and I loved it, but
it's very niche, and I want to see how big
of an audience I can build outside of that, because

(34:33):
I think with a big audience you can start to
really do some interesting things and start to do a
lot of the things that I think website and energies
have hinted at and promised that but have been unable
to do because they can't scale up in the right way.
So I'm sort of trying to trojan Horse in some
ideas about n f t s and by what I
want to do with enerties, but through I guess through

(34:56):
content and telling stories in the metaverse. So that is
that's basically what basset af is going to be. It's
going to be a metaverse content monster, that's what we
call it. And the style of film we're going to
make is going to be not educational. That's very odd
for people because they've seen me educate them in all
sorts of weird ways. But no, I'm just going to entertain. Um.
We're gonna do essentially what Mr Beast would do, which

(35:19):
is take the most ridiculous idea we can think of,
wrap it around something to do with the metaverse, and
then just push it as humanly far as possible. Um.
And when I say humanly far as possible, that's very,
very important because I think there's this vision of the
metaverse that it's like the end of Wally when you
see all these fat human beings in the spaceship and
there's just being whizzed around all over the place, fed

(35:41):
stuff and given everything. There's a real danger that we
could go that direction. So thinking about the human at
the center of the metaverse experience, thinking about identity, and
trying to make what we shoot in the metaverse as
physical as possible and give it that physical component, that
human component. That's how I think the metaverse, sorry, will
get really interesting. If it's just about technology or a

(36:03):
platform like the Other Side or decentral Land, it's dehumanized
and we need to rehumanize that side of things. Um
and it you know, it sort of helps and doesn't help.
The Mark Zuckerberg presents like the most advanced Android you've
ever seen, but at the same time, you know underneath
it all there is. I guess what I'm saying is

(36:26):
I'm teams Auck. I may not be Team Facebook, but
I am teams Uck. And I think, having listened to
a lot of what he's had to say, he may
be very awkward in expressing it. I kind of see
where he's going with it. I've also got a quest
pro now we need it for the first film that
we're doing. Okay, uh, you know, I can't tell any
much about that or why because it's a bit of
a secret moment, but like we need it and we're

(36:48):
gonna push that thing as far as it goes. But
you put it on and you start playing around and
it's like it's not the future, it's the now, but
it points the way towards the future, and you can
kind of see it now. You can kind of see
it with that device. It's like oh yeah, yeah, yeah,
it's like get rid of this, this is gone and

(37:09):
you're just there and like it's goofy as hell and
the battery runs out, but you get yeah, it's yeah,
it's pretty good. Wow. So, I mean, I guess, going
back to what you're saying about about, you know, telling
sort of human stories, I guess putting a human angle
on the metaverse, because this seems to be I think

(37:29):
the stumbling block that that so many people have, and
I must admit like i've I've I've kind of struggled
with with the metaverse idea as well from from the
kind of tech perspective, because it's so I don't know,
it feels sometimes so hard to envision what exactly it's
it's supposed to be, and I don't know, I don't

(37:50):
know about EU robe and I guess I I guess
the answer to that question is it's not it's not
yet supposed to be anything. It's it's we're in the
you know, we're in the process of building it. It's
still very much, uh an intangible thing, you know. It's
it's going to be what we make it. But I
guess it's it's going to be so important for for

(38:11):
people to be able to to visualize it, to to
kind of to see it from a human angle. Otherwise
it is is it not just going to be you know,
guys wandering around with with VR goggles on. Yeah, Well
that's the fact that you think about it. And the
one of the thing about having a channel that's devoted
to the meta verse is that we don't have to
have the answer to that. We can test stuff out

(38:32):
and if it's BS, well, we'll say it's BS. And
if it's goofy, will say it's goofy. What I think
nobody has really done yet is try to explore the
metaverse from the inside out. There is a lot of
there's a lot of chat about the meta verse. Is
this you know, ten trillion dollar opportunity from vcs who
are investing in pumping their bags and all this kind
of thing, And they're sort of right, and there's a

(38:54):
lot of money being invested in it, in the infrastructure
to be able to render three D through a web
browser or through goggles or through whatever it might be.
But you've got this kind of confluence of all sorts
of different things technologically that have been promised for like
the last fifty years. But they're sort of finally kind
of there, a little bit sketchy, but they are kind

(39:15):
of there. On Facebook's pumping so much money into the
middle accelerate. Again, that doesn't have anything to do with
human beings. The technology is the bit that gets in
the way. What again, you have to do is go
back and look at ten year old to play video games.
Look at the way that they their their brains think
and the way they observe and navigate these worlds. I
give a shit about any of that stuff. It's all

(39:36):
about social presence, about being with your mates in a
space that you completely controlled and have ownership of, and
none of the other stuff matters. Will get so obsessed
over owning land and um, you know, I'm close to
the center of this land. Kids don't care, they don't
care about any of that stuff. It's just a social
presence device. And the technology enables you to be in

(40:01):
a different place from where you are in a way
that is delightful. That sensorial. It's multisensory, and it will
be because you'll be able to smell things, It'll it
will have all of those experiences built in, and it
will be a secondary layer. It's basically the Internet in
three D. And that's really again, it's pretty hard to

(40:21):
kind of wrap your head around even what that means.
But that's because we're so god damn early But like
I said, with the Quest proyer, you put it on
your like I start to get there, I start to
get there, I start to feel like, this is not
a restrictive device that I'm tethered to a computer. And
even with the quest too, it's in black and white.
When you look at past through, it's still like it's
a thing on your face. Crest Pro doesn't sit on

(40:43):
your face and sits on your head. It's more like glasses,
and it's like, Okay, I can, I can sort of
get there. And again I I don't have all the
answers to all this, but what I do know is
that there are certain things that I'm asking myself, certain
questions I'm asking myself that I'm signed to use as
kind of springboards for videos we might make, for instance,
like what does taste manifest as in the most verse

(41:06):
because it's one of those senses that cannot be kind
of delivered virtually or through a computer screen at the moment.
But you're gonna want it. Guarantee you that you're gonna
want that piece of it, and someone's going to build it,
and it's going to be toxic and it's probably going
to cause some accidents, but it's gonna be amazing and
when they figure it out, like yes, Mr Beasts Virtual

(41:27):
Burgers in the metaverse, you can actually eat and taste.
I'm down for that. Like I I am that kid
that like used to just just absorb as much about
new fangled tech as I possibly could. And I remember
the old days when I was when I was growing up,
Like my friends, like one of them might go to
Hong Kong and they would come back and they would

(41:47):
have come back with this swag bag full of the
most insane technology I've ever seen. It would be like
a TV on your wrist and you and like, I
never thought that's crap and the areas are gonna work,
It's gonna be a crap signal. I just thought, there's
a bloody TV on your watch. Obviously, in this day
and age, that's not very remarkable, but back then that

(42:08):
was insane. And so that's kind of where we're at,
which is sort of busting through this wild technological phase.
At the moment, we're going to have holographic displays, Like
trust me, if it's been in a in a film,
in some kind of science fiction film, someone's building it
because that's where we get all our best ideas from. Yeah,
I love all that stuff. I can't help it. It's

(42:28):
so it's so refreshing to hear to hear you sort
of talk about it like that, Robin, because I think
so much of so much of the talk around the metaverse. Now,
you know that the D word comes up all the time,
doesn't it This this idea of it just being some
dystopian place, you know something I guess, you know, I
guess kind of Blade Runner ish and and well, you know,
snow like snow Crash for those who for those who

(42:49):
have read it, um, snow Crash isn't even that dystopian.
Weirdly enough, it's it's and I mean it's just it's
just mad. Yeah, it's mad, and it paints it pends
a pretty you know, even like how how long is
it now? Like thirty years on from when he wrote it.
It's pretty on point, But it doesn't it doesn't present
dysturb because they love the world they're in. Like the
main characters, like this fourteen year old skater kid career,

(43:12):
she loves the world she's in. It's just fun for
so yeah, I mean, but I take your point. The
dysopient part of it is is is always there and
like we are rightly concerned about the role of technology
in our lives, but at the same time, unless we
unless we look at it from a different perspective and
take a contrarian view, which is like, what if this

(43:32):
is actually going to be really awesome? What if this
is actually enables breakthroughs in medicine and enables breakthroughs in
education and mental health, which all of those three I
think really can be helped. I mean, the military is
basically where the metaverse comes from, and so let's not
talk about that. But you know, fundamentally, yes, that those
three things for starters could be really amazing. And again,

(43:55):
I don't know, I don't know what it's going to be,
but what I do know is that we've started a
company whose sole focus is the metaverse, so we need
to get really good at understanding what it is. But
at the end of the day, you me everybody, there's
a massive gap between what we think the metaverse is
and maybe what it is right now as a storyteller.
That's awesome. And what this is sort of coincided with

(44:17):
is like this new phase of YouTube where it's becoming
we're sort of moving out of the Mr. Beast phase
where it was just like everyone was copying him and
taking suitcases for the cash and throwing them at an
idea and then suddenly that was that was success. Um
a Mr. Beast is a very different animal from everyone
who copied him. But that model where you just scream

(44:40):
and shout and then like here's the prize, a hundred
thousand dollars um or like the weirdest, wackiest thing you
can possibly think of. Um, we're started moving away from
that into more storytelling based. I think the ideas are
still going to be wild, and when we come up
with our ideas, they have to meet that criteria, like
the the thumbnail has to be like, oh my god,
what did they do? And like that's what we're gonna

(45:02):
have to hold ourselves too. But do you mean, Robin,
do you mean that you're not You're not going to
go for the for the orgasm face on the thumb? Now,
I don't know how to do it. I don't know
how to do it. I mean, there are there are
mirrors in the office, and when I look at them
and I see that, and I am forced to confront
sex face. Robin, it's not going to work. So we

(45:25):
have to come up with some other stuff to do that.
But yes, it never to be. You've done it. I know.
I know. I'm yeah, it's it's it's a really interesting conversation.
It's an interesting conversation to have. Way around it. People go,
you've got to put your face on the thumb mel Man,
because I don't be your face and thumber. How good

(45:45):
are people going to know to be excited? It's like
that is that? What is that? Where we are exactly?
That's what you've got. You're scrolling through, you scrolling through
like this going oh look, that's really really wound up
about to jizz. Let's watch that video. I hope no one.
I hope no one's looking over my shoulder whilst I
scroll through all this. Oh no, that's terrible. But that's

(46:09):
kind of the game you have to play. So that
that whole YouTube algorithm bating thing is you know, the
click through rate. It's like nobody's watching your video if
they didn't decide to click on it. So you've got
to get the click right. Um, So we we're sort
of engineering all of that out at the moment. But
when people do land on the video, there is there's
a lot of attention retention tactic stuff that you can

(46:31):
put in and a lot of it's very immature, which
is just keep talking. I mean something that quick, that's well, wow,
it's not gonna work. It's gonna work, it's not gonna wait.
Now that the returns every tip and you're like, wow,
that was ten minutes of my life, I won't get
but now I'm deaf. But at least they but at
least they're still watching. Yeah, but le's just a watching.

(46:53):
But my fundamental belief is that if you tell a
good story, you don't need to do any of that.
Like if you are, if you doing proper set ups
and payoffs, if you are, if your concepts good, and
if you have a if a really good ending and
you know what that ending is, you can design it
in such a way that it builds and rises and
falls in succession. Um to keep people hooked eat any

(47:14):
of any of that stuff, But that's just a harder task.
And I think the first film that we're making, we
have been working on the script NonStop for about two
and a half months now. We're still not finished, just refining, refining. Obviously,
it's a pilot, so it has to be good. But
that that's the that's the bit that I think we'll
hopefully keep people coming back because they know that our

(47:36):
stories are nuts. They would just not go where you
think they're going to go. And I love, I'm going
to really enjoy seeing whether that works, whether that tactic
is valid um, and if it's not, well adjust But
that's the hell I'm going to die on, at least
for now, storytelling. It sounds I mean, it sounds amazing.
And you've also I mean, I guess you've got this

(47:57):
kind of blank canvas in a way, because going back
to what you were saying about the metaverse, you know
that it's we're still figuring it out. So you've got this,
You've got this kind of blank canvas to work with,
which I guess is must be really kind of must
be really liberating and also kind of daunting at the
same time. But I mean, you don't strike me as

(48:18):
you don't strike me as being at all phased by that.
That that seems to be, That seems to be like
just a kind of a red rag to a bull
for you. Well, it kind of was. It kind of was.
I mean, we we raised some money from vcs to
get this going, and they believed in me enough. I
guess they saw that I was fearless enough to take
this on there is. There's an increasing level of technological

(48:41):
competence required in all of this, and it's not just
the filmmaking. For instance, if you want to inhabit the
body of a digital character, there's a few different ways
you can do it. You can go and be our chat.
It's pretty limited the expressiveness that you can put in there,
but that's also kind of part of its charm and
that's fun. But if, for instance, you know, we see

(49:02):
the Other Side trailer, Okay, so that the Other Side
trailer was amazing and it's a glorious piece of animation.
It was beautiful put together. So much work, so much
post production, so much effort to get that onto the screen.
You know, that's very labor intensive, and you can't just
jump into the body of that character and perform as
that character. So we're looking very carefully into motion capture

(49:23):
so suits that you can put on that you can
then pilot a character with. Because as much as it's
nice for me to present a story and it be
an in real life story with the metaverse, comes in
expectation that some of it will look like it comes
from the metaverse, and it has to be beholden to
rules that are metaverse rules, whatever those are. So you
have to kind of start thinking about what does this

(49:45):
virtual life production look like? How do we shoot in
the metaverse? Um? And like really quickly, any platform you
go onto it's just sucks. You can't You've got no control,
no subtlety, and it's really takes a long time to
shoot anything in there, so you just end up with
this very goofy kind of proxy of stuff. So for us,

(50:06):
the logical conclusion was look at the suits. The suits
again a little bit limited. They have inertial sensors in them,
like an iPhone um, and so the sensors can kind
of know where you are in relation to other sensors,
but they don't really have an understanding of where you are. Specifically.
They're getting a lot better, but they lose kind of
contact with the ground, so you end up then sitting

(50:28):
in a chair, and again that's pretty limited. And then
they sort of lose touch with the coordinates that you've
programmed into them, so that you have to reset them
halfway through. So I wanted to stream as a character, um,
something weird might happen. Then you have to have a
helmet on and a phone and all these kind of things,
and facial motion captures particularly difficult. Um So a long
story shot, where we ended up was we basically built

(50:50):
the system that they used for Avatar Wow, which is
which is nuts. So we were sort of on on
its way being built the moment, but we put together
they're a an optical motion capture system, which is so
we've got twenty viscon cameras, which are these infrared kind
of cap motion capture cameras. You put twenty of them
around the room and then at any time they can

(51:11):
triangulate your position. You wear a suit with pink pong
balls on it, still have to wear a helmet with
a phone on it, and we still need to figure
out how to do the facial motion capture. But with
that system, basically what it means that we can have
more than one person in the room at the same time.
We can trap props. So I could have this bottle
and I could throw it to someone else and it
would track perfectly, pretty much in real time. And that

(51:33):
means that we can then live stream as those characters.
We could just do a variety show, we do a
chat show, and it would just be a question of
putting the suit on, stepping into the volume we call
it the Holiday deck, and then spinning up the environment
that we want to be in, so it could be
anything we choose. So that level of technical proficiency is
is it's it's taking a bit of time. And then

(51:53):
just like we want to build stuff in the metaverse,
and you end up then needed to do custom Unity
builds a customs script, and those custom scripts are incredibly
problematic when it comes to UM plugging in metal mask,
So anything that has a metal mask wile it component
and an external script big no, No, okay, as you
as you can probably understand, So you know, figuring out

(52:16):
what platforms to use and how to use them and
then make them safe for people to use, because you know,
the meta should be a social experience. So if people
can't come and join in when we're doing stuff, then
it kind of falls down. If it's just a recording
of an event, no, well it's okay, but like we
need to do events where people can be part of it, participate,
win prizes, you know all of that kind of stuff.

(52:37):
So we have to figure out a lot. Yeah, it's
quite hard work. It sounds it. It sounds it, and

(52:58):
I mean going back to what you were saying about
you know that the meta verse has to be a
social space and stuff. Do you do you feel that obviously,
the Internet came along and no one was adequately prepared
for it, and it's morphed into this amazing and at
the same time terrifying thing. There is. There is so

(53:19):
much that's good about it, there's so much that is deeply,
deeply wrong about it. And do you think that with
the metaverse, this is this is a chance for us
to you know, to to to build it, to make
a better Internet. Do you think that the lessons of internet,
you know, the first age of the Internet, if you like,
do you think those can be learned? Do you do

(53:41):
you think we have do you think people like yourselves
and others sort of building in the metaverse? Are you
going to have the opportunity do you think to shape it?
Or do you think it's going to be something that's
just gonna, like the original Internet, just kind of become
so organic that it kind of gets a little out
of control. Well, that's a big question. So you have

(54:03):
to look at it this way. There is there's a
hardware interface version of this, and that's that's hard because
Apple has basically exerted such an iron grip over everything, Yeah,
taking its cut over everything that it's like, we need

(54:24):
to get off that as soon as possible. And I
you know, I have a lot of love for Apple
products and always have done, but like the iPhone is
is bad news. And then you look at the Quest
pro and the Quest platform and it's like, are we
just repeating the same thing again? And Zuck is making
a lot of noise about embracing you know, decentralization full
short of Web three and everything else. But that's understandable,

(54:46):
but you know, where does that really sit and what
Once you kind of dig back into the history of
the Internet and the open source standards, the drive it like,
I mean, I there, these things need to work at scale, right,
they need to be delivered at scale, and everyone's sort
of fighting for their piece of the pie that they

(55:07):
can control and ring fence. And you know, it would
be weird if all of our websites were served up
by private servers and it wasn't an open source standard
and you had you could only if you had an
IBM subscription, you could only access a certain chunk of
the Internet. That would just be so weird. But that's
kind of where it was heading at one point. So
we do need these open source standards and that when

(55:28):
you dig into the what's needed to deliver a fully
fleshed out metaverse, there's a bunch of stuff that's like
it's really hard to do. And it's not just interoperability,
which is just such a misduding term anyway, but it's like,
what does the economy look like? How do we make
payment rails that don't go via Apple for instance, or
Android or one of these other platforms that are just

(55:50):
there and just work. Um, it's really tough. I I
think we can play a role in shaping it. I
think I guess where I sat with all of this
is that there are there are going to be a
bunch of really interesting people who might not take a
look at this space. But if I can make the
story about the metaphors really fun and entertaining and not

(56:12):
this top down twenty training dollar opportunity, we should invest
or here by this land and it's going to go
up a thousand decks next month. Um. But it's just like,
here's a really interesting question about the metaverse. What's the
weirdest way we can tell that story? Um? That might
get somewhere, that might get somewhere, but I just don't
know what what I what I fundamentally believe though, is
that the growth potential for anything that's sort of around

(56:35):
the metaverse is off the charts. So I'm I'm keen
to kind of plant my flag here and see see
what we can do with it. Yeah, it's so exciting,
and I mean it's interesting too. It's interesting to hear
you as well talking earlier about how your how your
team's up, because I mean what you say makes a
lot of sense. I guess I think, you know, the
fact that the fact that Facebook now meta has has

(56:58):
has made such a strong play for this, you know,
it's it just seems, I think to so many people,
myself included in to a large extent, it just seems
like such a kind of power grab, you know, in
the same way that in the same way that Bezos
and Elon Musk and Richard Branson all seemed to be,
you know, kind of trying to grab a chunk of

(57:19):
space before everyone else. It's, you know it, I think
there is still this deep unease that people have with
the fact that, oh, you know, web web two, that
the facebooks and the Google's and and everyone else are
already kind of you know, they're already trying to get there.
They're already ahead of us in so many ways. But

(57:40):
but do you think you get more of an impression
that he's I don't know, it's kind of more in
it for the tech do you think or is it
kind of perhaps perhaps has better motivations than we than
we give him credit for. Well, I wouldn't presume to
know what what I what I do feel is like
I I kind of get his philosophy around the metaverse,

(58:03):
particularly when it comes to things like it's physical, it
makes you move, it makes you think. There is a
sort of element of creativity that jumps out of all
of this. Obviously, if the way that we experience it
is through one single company and their vision of it
and there gatekeeping processes, then yeah, that's problematic. But again

(58:25):
that's meta and not Zack like the Zark sort of
vision of all of this, and he takes a lot
of crap for it. That's kind of where I say,
beyond that, Mom, I'm not going to say I support
all of what they're about, because yes, that is that
is a problem. Yeah, if there's too many yeah, there
are shades of gray, of course, And I mean where
the message with where we are, with where we're at

(58:48):
with the metaverse now, you know, it's it's so it's
so easy to kind of for people to sort of
pile onto it, especially especially at a time when you
know the kind of where the whole kind of where
Web through to some people is just you know, almost
a taboo subject. And n f T s are you know,
just said with you know, people almost spit when they

(59:10):
say that, when they say the phrase, now, oh, I
know this, this whole this whole Reddit thing where Reddit
released n f T s but they didn't mention the
word n f T and everyone was like, Wow, that's
how you do. I'm like, grow a pair. Just call
it what it is. It's an n f T. Like
that's fine. It is an n f T. It's a
piece of technology. Like all the other crap that comes

(59:33):
around in TASE, Yes, problematic, but the thing itself, it's
like getting angry at a JPEG or PDF. It's like
it's so dumb, but I'm not gonna I'm not gonna
fight that fight because I've I've said that in publicly
before and got crucified for it. But it's so so
ridicuous if you're gonna release n f t s, call
them what they are, own that ship. Yeah, yeah, And

(59:57):
I mean, before I'm rubbing, I'm I'm conscious that I'm
taking up a lot of your time here, But I
wanted to ask as well, I mean, do you think
do you think we're we're in a good place with
the metaverse in terms of you know, when you consider
and I think it was it was Matthew ball in
In in his article and he was talking about it
in Time magazine recently. You know, he made the point

(01:00:17):
that that the way the Internet is set up is,
you know, it can't handle what we're what we're trying
to do with it at the moment, you know, which
which is why it's it's so difficult to make to
make a voice call and all these sorts of things.
You know, do you think, with with the tech that
we have and the understanding that we have, do you
think we're in a good place with the metaverse? Or

(01:00:39):
are you do you think we've kind of do you
think we could could be could have done better by
this stage? Well, that's a difficult question to answer because firstly,
I don't have the answers to it. What I do
know is that there's a lot of money being spent
by a lot of different companies on it. The most
knows to being better, of course, and they are. If

(01:01:01):
they're not developing it, they're buying the companies that are
developing specific pieces of technology. And again, try the the
quest pro and you can see the fruits of those labors.
But it just takes a long time to get a
device like that into production and then through testing and
everything else. So in terms of that, no, But then
I look at what Adobe is doing and the way

(01:01:22):
that they're sort of setting up these open source standards
for three D rendering all these kind of things. It's
on its way. It's happening, whether we call it the
metaverse or not. That vision of things is inevitable, I think,
in terms of whether they're in a good place for it.
But it comes bring the Internet crashing down, probably, there's

(01:01:44):
the answer. Probably, you know, um, but then you you know,
you just build more capacity and some tycoon will get
incredibly rich building the chips that we need all the
you know, yeah, well that's but that's another fascinating thing,
like the the race to create silicon, you know, transistors

(01:02:06):
that are one nanometer one name, that's like one atom.
Like there's been this arms race between Intel and TSNC,
the Taiwanese chip manufacturer, and this is a whole crazy story, right,
and we should probably cover it on base. But like
seven nanimeies used to be like really like a lot

(01:02:29):
that was that was that was hard to pull off.
And then it became five, and then it became three.
And they the rumors that TSMC are about to build
a factory that can do one. And that means you
can make these tiny, tiny, tiny tiny chips because it's
very difficult to make them faster because they just melt
if they get to a certain point. So you can
make them smaller, and like, how can you make something

(01:02:49):
smaller than an atom? I mean wild stuff? This is
what this is what I get to nerd out on.
How are un animator? Good? Lord? It's um you know, yeah,
it's so exciting too. I mean, it's so exciting to

(01:03:10):
to hear your you know, to hear your kind of
I guess just enthusiasm for it, Robin. And you know,
as I said that it comes in the metaverse and
web three and you know, crypto, the wider world of crypto.
There's there's so much, there's so much negativity around it
at the moment, and to hear someone like yourself, you know,
you've gone from you've gone from this amazing thing that

(01:03:32):
you've built with the Defiant and now it seems like
you're you're, you're, you're, you're just times in that by
a hundred, you know, to to to make to start
this new crazy project which is going to I think,
I mean, I I personally can't wait to you know,
to see what you guys come up with. But yeah,
I'm also just I'm also just intrigued not only to

(01:03:54):
kind of watch what you're going to produce, but actually
you know, just see what it is, do you know
what I mean? And it's it's so I think everybody
is well that we we were doing and a prep drob,
oh god, oh no he's doing but like we we
are and there's a very specific reason why we're doing that.
But it's you know, there's there's this idea that there's

(01:04:17):
like nine percent of your audience is really the valuable
bit and like your super fans, and we wanted to
kind of reward them with the thing that represented them
and that gave them sort of passport to be a participant.
I'm going to fall short of saying the word owner,
but have some form of ownership over a YouTube channel
in its inception and the rate that we are kind

(01:04:39):
of hoping to grow shouldn't make that fairly meaningful over
the course of a couple of years or so. And
so that that's launching probably the beginning of December. Stuff
is going to get really weird around me and around
what we're doing in the run up to that, because
we don't believe in doing things the normal way. So
that's something of a clue. And then the first film

(01:05:02):
we're doing is going to go out, um, just before Christmas.
That's sort of our pilot. So we we thought, basically,
do one film before Christmas and then we start production
next year. But um, it's so balls out this first film.
I'm actually a little scared, to be honest. Yeah, it's personally.
It's going to put me through some stuff that I

(01:05:23):
I don't know if I'm physically or mentally prepared for. Um,
So we shall see if I if I survive what's
coming for me, because it's it's gonna be nuts it's
almost it almost sounds like a kind of meta metaphor
for the metaverse itself, like be prepared to just to
just experience some completely wild chip because you just no

(01:05:46):
one is no one is ready. Well, that's exactly it.
So this is where the rubber hits the road, because
if you think about really Play one and snow Crash,
you have these fully fleshed out, gory, glorious, three D
rendered versions of everything, and we're not there. We're basically
you know, it's the wild West. It is. It's basically garbage.

(01:06:10):
That's the metaphor that we're leading into trash land. It's
it's a kind of repository for a bunch of really
terrible ideas, and somewhere in the middle of all of
that crab is something good. And that's a much more
apt metaphor because actually, out of garbage you can create
an awful lot. You can recycle it, you can you
can do wonderful things with it. But if you start
from that position that that shiny version of things, that

(01:06:33):
kind of glossy you know, isn't as beautiful, isn't this
render amazing? That's not it. It is going to be
scrappy and slimy and a bit weird. And that's kind
of something that I am looking forward to. It's primordial
sup in a sense, a new beginning. It's um, it's
so exciting new hope. But war with Guy and Robbin

(01:06:55):
the metaverse. They didn't think two English accents on the
same podcast could good work, but it did. They thought
the air waves would explode. Gosh yeah yeah, I um yeah,
I'm not sure. I'm not sure what people are going
to make it this Robin to to English crypto bros.
It doesn't it doesn't sound it doesn't work. It doesn't

(01:07:17):
sound quite right, does it. I could I could just
go California for you. So I was like, you know,
I was buying with half brow. I was like, anyway, yeah,
that's not there. People get angry with me. Yeah, yeah,
you can't. You've got to. You've got to. You've got
to keep keep these people happy. It's um, it's that
extraordinary thing, isn't it about just just to just to
touch on this idea of communities which are obviously so

(01:07:40):
important in crypto and web three and they're going to
be I think a massive part of the messaverse as well.
But it's yeah, it's this. It's this amazing thing of
you know, you have these groups of people, but they
can be such a toxic entity as well. And you know,
I think we've all kind of fallen foul of one
or other sort of crypto community in our time. It's

(01:08:01):
um Again, it's the kind of thing that you hope,
I guess that we can move away from in in
the metaverse, but perhaps perhaps not. No, there's this, there's
this sense of entitlement that communities have, and it boils
down to one simple things. People in your community think
they're working harder than you are, which I find insane,

(01:08:21):
but that's that's basically where it's at. They think, oh,
we're working really hard to kind of find stuff, and
we've given you our time and and you're not working hard,
and you're like, dude. So one of the challenges that
we have is to prove beyond a shadow of a
doubt that we are indeed working extremely hard. I think
one of the advantages that we have is a lot
of energy projects in particular, find it really hard to

(01:08:44):
have that second album. So they you know, they launch
and they have the art and that's great, but then
what follows it up whereas whereas we we are not
an n f T project, we are a YouTube channel,
and so our cadence is going to be weekly. There's
always going to be probably the other short form content
coming out. You're not gonna be bored. You'll see stuff
coming out, and there's always going to be something new

(01:09:08):
to show you what we've been up to. So I'm
hoping that that will kind of mitigate that to a degree.
But I'm not naive enough to think that we won't
trip up and getting you know, get our community angry
with us at certain points, because unfortunately, that's just the
that's just the world we're in. It comes with the territory,
doesn't it. It does. Yeah, well, Robin, I mean I

(01:09:28):
think you know, here we are, we're staring we're staring
down the barrel of of of a bear market that
is that is going to last for god knows how long.
But I really feel that we've you know, with what
you're doing with with bassed af. You know, it ain't
gonna be all bad. There's gonna be there's gonna there's
still cool stuff happening. And I mean I hear, I

(01:09:48):
hear anecdotally just in the crypto space in general about
all the building going on and you know, all the
crazy stuff that's happening behind the scenes. And I try
to you know, I try to tell people that, I
try to let people know that it's it's hard because
there's so there's often so little in the way of
tangible results, and you do sort of feel it's like, well,
you're just you know, you're just gonna have to wait
to see what these projects are doing. But I think

(01:10:10):
I think based a f is going to it's just
gonna you know, just put it out there and and
provent and let us see some let us see some
building and some experimentation just just happen in real time.
I think I think it's going to make make the
bear market that that much more bearable. Well, I hope.
So we're we're definitely not leaving anything on the table

(01:10:30):
when it comes to this, because we can't you know,
the name Basically, it's the demands that we that we
go there and we push things for the max um.
But that's kind of why I wanted to do this.
I wanted to, you know, go out with a bang.
What can I see myself doing for the next ten
years and like try and build something that that had
my stamp on it, because I think, you know, there's

(01:10:53):
a lot of the work that I've produced over the
last years was dishonest. If I'm honest, huh is it
was just me past teaching other people or you know,
trying to punch in a certain weight class and so
presenting word that I thought would do that. Whereas now
I don't give it monkeys anymore. I'm just like, what
I want to do? How am I going to do it?

(01:11:13):
I've learned all this stuff, I know how to do this,
Like where where am I going to find the creative
satisfaction of just pushing the boundaries? And I'm going into
places that just no one's ever been to before? Okay,
well here it is so knowing that it kind of
gives you a lot of confidence that you you can't
really fail. Um, you just got to be bold enough

(01:11:35):
and brave enough to to make those decisions that are
going to scare you a little bit. But again, why
else do it? There's no point unless you're going to
really commit. Yeah, there's no And there's no point unless
you're going to to enjoy the journey, enjoy the ride.
Oh yeah, and what a rat it's going to be
let stay tuned. Yeah, absolutely, Oh it's brilliant. Well, thank Robin.

(01:11:59):
I really appreciate you taking the time to to to
talk to me today about this because it's it's just
great too. It's just great to cover something you know,
so positive and exciting and just mad. I've got to
say it. It's it's bad. There's method in the madness.
Trust me, I'm sure it's sometimes I'm like, why, why

(01:12:21):
why did we decide to do this? It's funny. Well,
it's just great to hear that, you know, after after
all the the amazing work that you did with the
Defined and I should say as well that the Defined
is still you know, a great and amazing channel that
I recommend to anyone. But it's it's great Robin that
you're going to be back doing this, doing this mad

(01:12:42):
stuff on our screens very soon. I really can't wait.
And yeah, I really appreciate you, you know, coming to
coming to tell me about it today. Um so where
can people where can listeners follow you that there? Listen
They've listened to this and gone that sounds insane? How
do I get more of this? How do they? How
do find you? Okay? So The best thing you can

(01:13:03):
do is just follow me on Twitter. We are doing act,
we're just just not doing it in the normal way.
So just follow me on Twitter. I am supermassive one
and yeah, that's probably the best thing to do. It'll
it'll become clear, it'll all make sense into your course. Exactly. Excellent, Robin,
Thank you so much. This has been great, Um, and

(01:13:24):
thank you everyone for listening to this week's episode of
the coin Bureau podcast. Myself and Mike possibly will be
back very soon, so stay tuned. Thank you so much
for listening to the coin Bureau podcast. If you'd like
to learn more about cryptocurrency, you can visit our YouTube
channel at YouTube dot com forward slash coin Bureau. You
can also go to coin bureau dot com for loads

(01:13:46):
more information about all things crypto. You can follow me
on Twitter at coin burea or one word, and I'm
also active on TikTok and Instagram as well. First of all,
it's not thank you for listening, you're welcome for great contact. Yeah,
like this is free and they're learning about a fairly
great topic in a non boring way. If you'd like

(01:14:08):
to visit me and hear more about me go to
mooch about m o O c h A b o
U T or else. For more podcasts from I heart Radio,
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

(01:14:31):
we get your podcasts. The coin Viera podcast is a
production of I heart Radio. Pots going on n

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

Stuff You Should Know

Dateline NBC

On Purpose with Jay Shetty

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}A Chat With Robin Schmidt

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}Stuff You Should Know

Dateline NBC

On Purpose with Jay Shetty

All Episodes

A Chat With Robin Schmidt

Stuff You Should Know