IFH 561: How to Raise $2 Million Using NFTs with Arel Avellino

Alex Ferrari 0:00
I'd like to welcome to the show Arel Avellino, how're you doing Arel?

Arel Avellino 0:14
I'm doing good how you doing Alex?

Alex Ferrari 0:16
I'm doing good brother. I'm doing good, man. Thanks for reaching out because I this is going to be a very interesting conversation I, I've had other conversations about NFT's on the show before and kind of were like one of the first shows to even discuss NFT's as a way to generate revenue, sell collectibles, things like that. But you have a very unique way of approaching NFT's. And we're gonna get into that in a second. But before we started talking, or before we started recording, you told me that you had been in the indie film world, you come from the indie film world. So tell me how you got involved in the indie film world? And why in God's green earth did you, were you in this world?

Arel Avellino 0:54
So good question. So when I got out of high school, like literally from high school, I knew I wanted to be an indie filmmaker. Like, that was the dream. Cuz I had a teacher who was a major film buff, and just, you know, talking with that guy about movies just suddenly gave me this, like, massive appreciation for the art form. Storytelling, all of that really interesting to me, especially visual storytelling. So I went in, I didn't know what the path I said, I wanted to be a filmmaker, I didn't even know that there was like, a different classification of filmmaker called an indie filmmaker, I only learned that trying to just find out what the path was at all. Right. And it's very clear path, right? You know, you have, you know, you go to school for four years, and you do the, you know, work on on on set for free, another free or nothing. Yeah. All right. Yeah. So basically, I found out that there is no path and I went to college for a little bit dropped out of that. Then just started finding sets to be on. I played that game for like four years, met a lot of great people. And then I started a podcast where I was still looking for, hey, how do people even make a living doing this, because it feels like it feels like everybody was just inventing it. Like I would talk to people on sets. And I was like, everyone kind of just invented how they made this sustainable. So talking to enough people, I started interviewing people who are in just different cities and stuff like that, give them excuse to talk to me. And after talking with enough people I just started realize that the the path is essentially just go do enough things continue to offer yourself up to enough people. And you'll you'll start to develop what starts to look like a career, but it's always going to kind of be this like freelance lifestyle. And so that kind of actually started me on a journey in business, which ultimately kind of led me to where I'm at right now. But we can kind of break the story up a little bit, too.

Alex Ferrari 3:04
Yeah, absolutely. So um, and then you you said you were, you've been following Indie Film Hustle for a while, and you're the younger back older days.

Arel Avellino 3:11
I read the book.

Alex Ferrari 3:12
Oh, thank you.

Arel Avellino 3:13
Yeah, man. Cuz I, I, to me the most interesting part about filmmaking, like that has just like, even now, even though I'm not making films right now, I you know, it's not to say that I've stopped, right. Still talk about scripts with friends.

Alex Ferrari 3:32
You can't get rid of it, brother. It's, it's, it's a beautiful illness.

Arel Avellino 3:36
Even with what I'm doing right now has major crossover, which I've had to explain to a couple people like, yeah, why are you? Why are you doing, you know, the game stuff? Like, you know, is that really going to, like, you're going to be in this for like, two, three years, at minimum on this game, you know, are you are you sure you're gonna be able to go that long, perhaps about making a movie, I'm like, Hey, I might still make a movie in there. But at the same time, it's not going to be like, you know, somebody else is going to have to go make that movie. I'm going to just help that person out with that movie, or help with a script, whatever. But anyway. So point being is is, yeah, follow your work, phone, a lot of the guys who have been in the indie space, just trying to speak to people who are up and coming just because the thing that was most interesting to me about indie filmmaking is it was an art form that had to in some way, be a business, because it requires collaboration, perhaps more than most other art forms, you know, save a few others that are kind of like in the immediate space. This is one of the like art forms that requires the most collaboration. So you have to have it be a business otherwise, you can't, you can't do it. You know, you think about how many times a painter punches out a painting. It's so many times, but a director, how many movies does he punch out right so

Alex Ferrari 4:54
Exactly at the best case scenario at the highest end, you get Ridley Scott who put butts out one every three months. Especially nowadays, and then you've got in then you got Kubrick and Malik, who you know, busted out like, nine or 10. And their entire life, you know

Arel Avellino 5:09
Right right!

Alex Ferrari 5:10
So it's, it's, it's, I always say that to people like as an artist, you, as a director, you very rarely get to do your art. It takes years, most of your career is getting revved up to do your art as opposed to a painter or a musician or a writer. It's it's a pretty brutal but we love it, but we love it. There's the craziness.

Arel Avellino 5:34
Definitely takes a different type of person for sure. And I think that that's kind of what cued me up into wanting to do anything else that felt like that, like I couldn't, I don't think I could ever go to even even though business has always interested me especially need to get into it with filmmaking. I don't think I could do a business that was just, you know, trying to sell widgets, you know, or you're trying to do some type of other service other than, you know, creating things for people.

Alex Ferrari 6:05
Yeah, no, I completely understand. Now. We're gonna talk about NFT's can you tell people listening? What are NFT's if they don't know what they are already?

Arel Avellino 6:13
Yeah. So I've always had a struggle with the word NFT. Like just the the term because there's very few things that we refer to by such a technical term, but literally, NFT all it means is non fungible token. And it's very technical, because all those words existed before the term non fungible existed before, but we just, you know, call this thing a non fungible token, because some developer said, you know, this makes the most sense to call it this, because that's great, right, it is a non fungible token, then basically, you've probably explained it before in other episodes. For anyone who's hearing this for the first time fungibility is literally just, if I have $1, that dollar is always the same dollar like it doesn't change in value from $1 to another you can have any dollar and it will always be worth the exact same you know, same thing with if I bought an apple apples are always the same value from apple to apple, so long as all things being equal that apples the same no matter what, but a non fungible asset is essentially an asset of any type, where the specific the specificity of that asset itself is important. So for example, a, a baseball card or any collector's item is considered a non fungible asset. Because you know, when that card was minted matters, you know what the what the cards overall value in the marketplace matters. So the almost the serialization of it is what really matters. So you see this a lot with collectors stuff. Probably collectors are some of the most familiar with non fungible assets because they've literally been dealing with these you know, from the get go shoes to one person might be a fungible asset, but shoes to another person might be a non fungible asset, because you know, the the shoe collector is looking at well which print was the shoe the shoe come from, you know, what is the you know, basically going into the specs from every single shoe not just you know, this particular not just this particular brand, or even that it's a shoe this specifically the manufacturing line this thing came out of

Alex Ferrari 8:34
So basically an apple is an Apple because an apple when it was manufactured still had the value of an apple and when it was grown, it was the value of Apple. Whereas a baseball card for example, or or a Pokemon card for the for the youngins listening today, that nods that back man, they're hot now still, like they're huge now apparently.

Arel Avellino 8:56
Way back for me. Yeah. I dont know the names of the Pokemon anymore.

Alex Ferrari 9:03
I mean, I don't even know I didn't know then dude, um, dude, I was Garbage Pail Kids, man if you want to go real back. First series Garbage Pail Kids. Anyway, the but the cost of the creation of that item. Let's say it's five cents to print the baseball card for just better or worse, it's five cents. That is the actual value and cost of creating that, that asset. Now, the in the collectibles world if it's a printed or if it's a printed baseball of a baseball card of a guy you've never heard of who batted you know 150 It costs the same to make him as it did to make a Mickey Mantle rookie card. It's the exact same cost, but the value is associated with that non fungibility into it which is the collectible aspect of it. And that's the difference between us. So that brings us to NF Ts. So now we've actually brought in baseball cards and comic book ideas into a digital space. So the cost to mint as they say, a non fungible token, argue, let's say to argue we'll say still five cents. But the value of what has been minted is in the eye of the beholder based on the collectible market fair, a fair way of saying it?

Arel Avellino 10:28
The reason why the reason why I say it's bad, like it's a bad name, or a bad because NFT, you have to do all the explaining to simply say, Hey, this is actually just a digital item, like this is a way for us to prove ownership of a digital item. And why that kind of matters, is, we've never had the ability for us to sell digital goods on a secondary market. Great. So it wasn't possible. Think about it. If I buy a DVD, or sorry, if I buy a DVD, yes, I'll go down that rabbit hole, I buy a DVD, which very few people do anymore, we have moved mostly digital, I can sell that DVD to yard sale, I can sell them on Amazon, I could sell it on eBay, like I truly own that DVD. But if I were to buy a digital copy of that, and now it's on my Amazon library, I can't sell it back to Amazon, like I now have that stuck in my library. I couldn't sell it to another person, I couldn't give it to a friend. Like it is stuck in my library and it's trapped there. And FFTs actually give us the way to make that function more like an item. So rather than it being about, you know, essentially just you know, you once you have this digital thing, and you got from that guy, yeah, now it has to stay on that guy's website. And you can only go to it when you go essentially to that guy's house. That's kind of a bad deal. Right? Correct. So now we're treating these like real items that you really own, which is you own it. So now now that you own it, you can go sell it to, you know, one of your buddies, you can sell it to somebody online, or you can give it to them doesn't matter. It's yours, you do with it what you want

Alex Ferrari 12:21
It it's the thing is fascinating to me, because when I discovered, you know, I had the same problem with the NFT name and understand it and I'm a fairly technical and educated man. And I had to go really deep down the rabbit hole, I read probably five or 10 books on blockchain. And crypto. And I really just wanted to get understood. I just want to understand this new world. And then NF T's came out and I just educated myself. I watched every movie I could get my documentary on as I could. So I became a fairly well versed in this world. And yet, it didn't click for me until I said, Oh, this is a digital baseball card. God Yeah, it's a digital comic book guy. Because I've been I was a collector for a long time collected comic books, baseball cards, Garbage Pail Kids, since I was a kid, all that kind of stuff. So I was like, oh, that's what this is. But they're, they're so confusing everybody with this terminology in the way they're trying to explain him like, Dude, it's a digital baseball card. And the NBA is literally made digital clips now with NF T's and they're doing they're doing okay, they do. And Major League, Major League Baseball starting to get into it. It's a whole, it's a whole new world. And for people who don't understand why because if they if they're if you're holding on to a book or a DVD, I hold on to like, Okay, this is something I could hold on to this is a product. But to mentally think about that book as a digital item. It's hard for certain people to grasp that concept, because it's, it's beyond their ability. Whereas the new generation growing up, who's been playing, Roblox has been playing all these role player games, who are literally paying sometimes 1000s of dollars for a digital X that they now own, that makes them more powerful inside of the game. That's a digital item that there's so it makes sense to that generation, but not so much to the baby boomers, if that makes sense.

Arel Avellino 14:10
Yeah, yeah. Because they're used to dealing in digital economies already. And so for them, it makes for most people who are, you know, kind of locked into that digital economy. I mean, we now have a generation that's literally only dealt with digital economies. And so, those guys, yeah, just comes very intuitively, that this makes sense. But for the rest of us, what matters the most here is that the innovation itself, there's a ton of hype, there's a ton of hype, right? But the innovation itself that this is a digital item is is the massive part of the innovation, not just the you know, if we're trying to get all technical, like the the non fungibility asked like, if we try to talk about what NF T's are, I think if we keep the conversation on that, hey, these are digital atoms, it starts to simplify it for everyone else. And then they can start to understand the implications or the implications of that. Because again, like, I think what made it click for even people who I know who have been in the crypto space a long time, very educated in blockchain more than I am, when I told them that what I'm trying to make is a game, that when somebody buys it online, like let's say that steam is selling it, which by the way, they said, they won't, they won't sell it. But we'll come to that whatever version of steam sells this game, somebody, somebody, the person who buys it should also be able to sell it themselves. And what's even more is, me as the developer, that game or any indie developer, who makes a game should also get a cut of every single sale of that of that item, that digital item, which is something you cannot do with a physical item. Correct. But at the same time, it's now possible with the digital stuff. But every other rule of what's possible with the physical stuff as far as being able to do a secondary marketplace, is also now finally true digital stuff, which has been a huge user experience problem with the digital space, held back a lot of Indies from being able to really take advantage of their community, essentially helping to market this thing, because sometimes you get a movie because somebody recommended to you or gave it to you or sold it to you. Or you get a game because somebody gave it to you sold it to you,

Alex Ferrari 16:34
Yeah, I mean, back in the day, I mean, I'm dating myself when CDs there used to be CD. Yeah. There used to be CD stores where you could just buy new and use CDs. Yep. And it was cotton into a lot of the market share of music, an artist. And I remember Garth Brooks, like sued to get to stop that. And the Supreme Court said not when you buy an item, it's yours and you can resell it. And it's just like if you bought a refrigerator, you can resell a refrigerator. A CD or movie is no different. But in the digital space, we haven't been given that option up into this time. Like when you buy a movie on iTunes. I've got movies on iTunes, I can't resell it. I can't sell that same movie that I bought for 10 bucks for two bucks later if I want to in a garage sale or in a digital version or in a Metaverse garage sale. Something like that, which will happen for you go. Yeah, imagine if there will be eventually Metaverse Metaverse to garage sales because there's Metaverse real estate too. There's people buying so much Metaverse real estate since like, and that's another thing you can't even comprehend. Like how much did you just spend? I just saw this whole thing was it on? I think it was on 60 minutes or CBS or something like that, where they're doing Metaverse sale real estate deals, and Snoop. Snoop Dogg bought a big piece of real estate. And then the value of the space is next to him. Just blew up and then people bought in because why? Because they want to be neighbors with Snoop Dogg in the metaverse. It was just like, it's, it's, it's hard, it's really hard to grasp, because it's so new and so revolutionary, that people can grab it. But we can go down the NFT and blockchain rabbit hole for at least another 15 days. So the reason I wanted to bring you on is what you've been able to do with an IP. So can you tell me how you use NFT's to launch your new IP strange clan?

Arel Avellino 18:31
Yeah, so So one of the things that I realized real fast and probably most filmmakers realize this is that nobody cares about your story, because the intellectual property behind your story is brand freaking new. And that's why we don't see original ideas anymore within the film space. So we, me and my brother, both been creative guys, we we've had a creative career for a long time, you know, essentially being creative for other people, most of our career has been creative for other people. So when we were watching kind of like the development of NF T's, and you know how people were using them, one of things I kept telling him and I couldn't commit, I felt like I couldn't convince other creators of this. But one of things I was telling them is like, Hey, this is like a launchpad for intellectual property, because I'm seeing board apes now all over the place. So why, like that's, that's brand new intellectual property that if somebody were to then take that, and now make a board a TV show now make like, now people will recognize it, right? And the value of that asset is going to go up similar to Snoop Dogg moving next door. Like the more the more things you begin to attach to these brand new piece of intellectual property, the more you start to get really interesting, but I wasn't seeing projects do that. I was just essentially seeing a ton of like, you know, spammy looking. You know, images come out with no vision of like, where we're supposed to go after this? So we started talking about what what would it look like if we did a, an NFT launch? And where are we do it and, and all that stuff. Because a cerium, the two main problems with Aetherium. It thought the, there's a, there's lots of different reasons why there's a problem with Aetherium. But one of them being that you, if you bought something for 100 bucks, you might spend $200 in fees. So that's kind of an issue. Plus, also the that area is very saturated. So we looked at several places to try to do this. And that was a huge factor into it. And I'll get into that. But basically, what we want to do is we want to create something brand new, completely unique. And we want it to be something that was unique. The second you saw it. So we came up with this idea for strange clan, because we had a guy on our team. He's a concept artist for us, and he really loves art for for our team as a whole. And we started to really grow out our art team underneath him. And he just said, Hey, man, like, we're, this is totally exploratory, like we really want to try to do something, here, come up with some images. And we want to do like animals, we want to do animals that look like people. And we want this to be like kind of a fantasy esque thing. But we also want to look really like lots of different styles present in it. And my brother did a, we did a talk together, just essentially, like every single day, we kind of have this where we're bouncing ideas back and forth. And one of the big conversations was, well, what's the name going to be? And because we kept talking about having like, Well, lots of different, lots of different looks and styles and feels kind of at the start of it. We, we had this feeling of like, well, it's really, it's really just a strange group of people. Because originally, the idea was actually that we're going to pull in more artists. So we wanted the style of our characters to look really wild for a second. So that other strange looking styles that came in would also match up. And the more we looked at the idea of actually collaborating with other artists, the more realized we were it was it was mainly for us to do kind of a community thing, where all of our IPs started all come up. And maybe we do something where we're trying to make sense of why they're all connected. But it actually turned out that our IP took off. And we really didn't need to like pull in other IPs to make that work. So going back to it, we came with this idea of strange when we said hey, it's a clan, it's a family. It's a it's a, it's a tight knit group of people. And there's kind of a strange environment about the world. And the more that we let that idea play, the more the so you'll see over the last several months of like, our development on our social channels, that idea has grown into a much more mature IP, at the very beginning at the launch of these NFT's. This looks like really raw, like the beginning development of what even this IP is supposed to supposed to be. And that's what's strange about the the NFT world and the way that people are treating these because it's almost as if they are looking to the future of what it's supposed to be very similar to how people treat Kickstarters. But instead of it being you know, all about getting a t shirt or you know, getting a hat or getting a copy of the movie. Instead, they're they're taking the messy artwork that you're producing or, or the things that you're producing. And eventually they'll have to get more mature over time as as people get used to seeing a lot of the same style, right? But they're looking at that and they're looking ahead and saying, Okay, how important is it going to be that this with a vision of where the craters are going? How important is it gonna be that I own a piece of this intellectual property, they own a piece of the starting launchpoint like the first Pokemon card as it were like if Pokemon cards came first and launched that IP, it certainly launched in the US but if Pokemon came for Pokemon cards came first and really launched that IP. This is like the Pokemon card and owning the first Pokemon card, especially projects do it right, because that's kind of what we're trying to say is we're only ever going to do 10,000 of these only ever going to do 10,000 of these. So Amelie that set the value of our if we're successful with making a great looking game, then the collector's cards that we're making at this side of things will always be very rare and always have value on a secondary marketplace.

Alex Ferrari 24:42
So yes, kind of like if you would have owned the NFT's of the original concept art of Star Wars

Arel Avellino 24:50
Yeah, yep.

Alex Ferrari 24:51
If that if that would have been a thing if George was trying to get things off the ground and there was a studio in the Susan environment and he had those those awesome Some, I don't know, 10 or 20 paintings Yeah, put those out on NFT. What would the value of that be based off the backtest IP that is Star Wars. So similar, you're doing that similar for a game, but easily this can be translated into a film as well, if properly. So, okay, so you also told me that you raised a substantial amount of money? How much did you raise with this NFT in launching this IP?

Arel Avellino 25:30
So we only launched 5000 of the 10,000. NFT's and with that five, those 5000 NFTEs, we raised $2 million.

Alex Ferrari 25:37
So like every other independent film, basically, so every other Yeah, generally easily, easily can raise $2 million.

Arel Avellino 25:44
We also raise that money for an independent game with unknown developers. You know, they those, those usually get about $2 million.

Alex Ferrari 25:52
So if you're not if you don't understand this as sarcasm, this is extremely people because so people might be listening like, oh, it's that easy. Am I doing something wrong? No, you're not, it is extremely difficult to raise $2 million in any space under any circumstances. But for an independent game from unknowns, is is the equivalent of trying to raise $2 million for an independent film, with unknown actors with unknown filmmakers with unknown producers and everybody else involved as well. So that is a feat that caught my eye when you when you reached out to me, how did you first of all, how did you? Because it Look man, I could I could tomorrow, I tomorrow, I can come up with some strange pictures, and some cool characters, which there are billions of out there right now. And especially in the NFL space, how did you target the audience? And convince the audience on your vision? That was you able to do this fairly quickly? This was not like over five years.

Arel Avellino 26:51
Yeah, we're talking about two to three months worth of time for the even the lead up to it. So if I were to chart the timeline, we came up with the idea in the the conversate. Wall, between me and my brother. We're like, Oh, hey, one. That'd be a great idea around July time. All right. And then last year of last year, of this past year, yep. Yeah. 2021. And then, in August, was when we started some of the art. We opened up the Twitter in September, and I believe one of our first posts on the strange plan quitter was September like early September, September 1, September 2, like with literally within the first week, and then September, October, October, October 15. It was when we launched, we lost the first time and we actually broke our website. So we actually had to launch again, we were open for less than an hour, probably 30 minutes, we broke the website. We took a week to fix a lot of the problems

Alex Ferrari 27:54
Alright so stop for a second how did you generate enough interest to break a website from an unknown IP and unknown creators?

Arel Avellino 28:03
Yeah, no ad spend,

Alex Ferrari 28:04
Right! So how so how did how did they find out about it? How did how did you target your audience? Yeah.

Arel Avellino 28:10
Yeah, so I've This is really hard for me to like, this is really hard for me to also then make sense of with a lot of the things that I have told people and I have also thought myself, but the people who came on were solely people interested in the technology more than they're interested in the IP. And because we were supporting the technology of what they were doing, the IP became important to them so we grabbed on to a neighboring thing that they cared a lot about, and then the IP became important. Okay, so let me just get specific so the, the place that we chose to build on is Cosmos so what for people who don't know you know, you have Bitcoin you have Aetherium, you have polka dot, you have Cardano Well, Cosmos is within like the top 25 blockchains. And the reason nobody was doing a piece on Cosmos the reason why we said that we needed to go to Cosmos was one it was actually it was blue ocean, and I think you've talked about Blue Ocean. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yep. It's a blue ocean. There's not there's not a lot of people who are over there. But also very different from other blockchains was Cosmos reminded me of where the ball is going versus where everybody is paying attention to the ball right now. Because cosmos is not all these all these blockchain, Bitcoin Aetherium. They're what are called layer ones where basically, this is the blockchain like if you want to build on it, you're basically saying, Okay, I'm gonna try to take a piece of this. I do a little copy code and try to make a weird little copy of it that borrows security borrows a lot of different features from this thing, but it's also kind of like a Frankenstein off of the the original blockchain because block chains were not meant to build these Frankenstein blocks. chains off of them. So what cosmos is, is it's basically the internet of blockchains. It's not really a layer one blockchain, it is a thing that you build block chains on. Because it was meant for that, if you think about Bluetooth, and how your phone can connect so seamlessly to your bluetooth headphones, even though they're made by completely different people. The reason is because there's a standard that says, oh, every time Bluetooth every time we're trying to enable Bluetooth, this is the standard for Bluetooth. And this is how we're going to make this connection. So where I saw the ball going, and where my brother like, honestly, here, I'm gonna actually give all the credits like says, Lex easily prove the idea to me, he said, Errol, I think cosmos is the place to pay attention to, because of interoperability. There's a lot of smart people over there who doing some really cool stuff. And he was basically telling me like this concept of Bluetooth, I got it really quick, because I was like, the way that this is going reminds me a lot of the.com Boom. And the way that we saw the internet develop was you had all these disconnected websites. But even before that, just creating the standard of you know, the internet as a whole was important to even get to that place. And then things have become more and more connected. As we have progressed. So much so that I can log into a website using my Facebook login, right. So as we develop these standards, the standard is going to be what's really important. So I saw cosmos is hey, they are setting the standard. And so if we build here, we actually should be able to connect to anybody else in the in the blockchain world. So we build here we might not have ever have to build anywhere else, again, the people who are in the cosmos space, there they are, oh, and also it's green, like I this is important, too. I think a lot of people, it's green, we're not dealing with a lot of high energy usage. You You also have the community as a whole is actually very positive. I like that about them right away. But anyways, to the community that's there. They believe in this idea that this is going to be the internet of blockchains. Everybody, all the blockchains that are out there are going to try to conform to the standard because they're talking about it now. And ultimately, that standard has to happen. And this is the only blockchain that's really said, Hey, we're setting the standard. This is what the standard is, you know, go out and make your blockchains.

Alex Ferrari 32:20
Does it does does Cosmos have a token? Or is it it doesn't have crypto versa? How do you how do you work with that?

Arel Avellino 32:28
Yeah, so cosmos itself is is the standard there is what's called Cosmos hub, which is essentially the first blockchain built on this cosmos standard. So if you want to think about it, like, Hey, this is the web. Well, what if the, you know, internet said, Hey, we're gonna make the very first website internet hub.

Alex Ferrari 32:47
It's like HTTP. It's HTTP basically. Yeah, it's like that's Yeah.

Arel Avellino 32:52
So Cosmos, hub has a coin. It's called atom. It's available on coin base. It's a way to get your dollars into the whole,

Alex Ferrari 33:00
How much is it right now? How much is it right now?

Arel Avellino 33:03
I think it's like 20 27, it hangs around about $30. So so at the time, we, when we launched our entities, we actually had to do a lot of blockchain development, we had to, we had to find guys who could do the blockchain development, which is actually becoming easier and easier. So that part's actually not terribly hard. And the people who are coming into the cosmos space now including us, are helping, you know, essentially set up marketplaces so that it's easy for people to make, make NF T's and mid 80s at without having to go and build, you know, essentially your own blockchains stuff like Juno stuff like stargaze. And then us.

Alex Ferrari 33:46
So So alright, so just so I can I'll kind of translate that for everybody. And because there's, there's a lot though you discussed there. So basically, one of the big pluses you did is you decided to leverage a community that existed already, which is the cosmos. And by leveraging that, that community, it wasn't particularly ready for you, but it was ready for you. Because there was nobody else doing what you were doing in that community. So that you built a product in that community, which is your IP use, like let's put it over here. And they're just like, Oh, my God, you're over, you're over and our party. We're gonna support you purely because you decided not to go to the cool kids party, you came over to us because we're, we're cool, but nobody really knows that. We're cool. And that's and you kind of leverage that. And that's what built the speed up so fast, as opposed to you going to a general marketplace. Right. So the equivalent

Arel Avellino 34:44
Projects,

Alex Ferrari 34:44
Just before I lose my train of thought. It's the equivalent of you trying to sell a movie about aging athletes. Let's say there's a I'm using this as an exact example there. was a documentary about aging athletes, that are athletes who are you know, Centurions and they like go to the Olympics and said, Now you put that into the iTunes marketplace, you might sell some. But if you head over to a convention that is aimed at retirement homes, and they're looking for entertainment, you're going to clean up. And that's exactly what that filmmaker did. They made over a million dollars in a weekend by selling rights to his movie. That's what you basically did with this is a fair a fair analogy.

Arel Avellino 35:33
That's it. That's a That's exactly right. Because the community, so so the way that we also build our audience up, because we have about 20,000 people in our audience, which, you know, pretty decent for only being around for, you know, five, five months, absolutely. And the way that we kind of made that happen is, you know, we went and engage with the people who are already talking to people in the cosmos space, we talked with the influencers, which is a big, it's that that's a that's a word that's probably a little flexible here, because literally, they only had like 2000 followers or 3000 followers. But that starts to add up over time. And then you start to talk to more people or get to know more people who have actually a lot of influence in the space, that seems actually pretty subtle, because they don't necessarily have the follower count that makes you think that but they know all the guys because they've been around for, you know, years. And everybody respects them in the space in the second. And they can give you an introduction to the guy who actually has, you know, 20,000 30,000 or 50,000 followers. Right, right. And so most of you

Alex Ferrari 36:41
You were leveraging you were leveraging the influencers inside of the community to get the word out on your new IP and your new basically everything you were doing. See, I mean, so so that so you know, ad spend, so everyone listening, no ad spend, it's just understanding the community and then going after influencers in that community. And now when you're going after them, did the influencers just were very happy? They're like, dude, I'm just, I want to support you because it's a school? Or did you have to like, hey, you know, I want a piece of the action. How does it How does that work? Generally,

Arel Avellino 37:10
Ohh dude 100%, there they came in, they're like, Hey, this is cool. Because the the thing about thing about a lot of these very connected ecosystems is they have many ways to win without needing to say, Yeah, I need a piece of the action. Because if let's say you launch an NFT collection, and they know about it, like one they can, they have more time to be able to convince you, maybe they can get on the whitelist it so whitelist, by the way, within the NFT world is just essentially like, Hey, you, you, not everybody's gonna get the chance to even buy this thing. And we're making sure that you're on the list to be able to even get into by it. So there's a lot of exclusivity there. So we can make sure we get them on the whitelist and certain things like that. But at the same time, there isn't a there isn't a agreement, essentially that like, hey, you know, you do this for me, I do this for you, it's really trying to develop that relationship with them. Because when we talked to a lot of these guys, it was, you know, Hey, we love what cosmos is doing, we want to make sure that we are supporting that ecosystem, and adding a lot of value to it. So they're all about that. Because, you know, when you're an influencer in a very tight arena, it feels like pulling teeth to get people to even notice this space that you're talking a ton about. Whereas, you know, somebody comes just comes to you and says, Hey, I already love what you guys are doing. I want to come in and support that. I want to bring my project into that. That gets people really excited. And just so you guys know, this isn't a ship that's like sale. Like if you're listening to this. Oh, so we're so we're extremely early, even you don't have to go find your own cosmos. If you were to bring a project in the cosmos. Right now, the community within cosmos is extremely hungry. You can't be a prick. So don't go in and be like, Alright guys, I thought there was a lot of money in here. So fork it up. But at the same time, there's way more opportunity than you're probably used to, in most other avenues because I've tried to launch projects on Kickstarter. I like Indiegogo. I've had to ask for investment money. I've raised 100 grand on Kickstarter, and I felt really good about that one time. And I raised or I was a part of the raised for 200 grand on a but it was all investment money that was coming into this film. And it was just like pulling teeth it was an absolute nightmare. Launching strange plan was one of the easiest things I've ever done. And that was the most amount of money that we have ever seen. especially for a brand new IP.

Alex Ferrari 40:03
Now, um, yeah, it's it's the equivalent of being on MySpace in the early days or being on Facebook in the early days or being on YouTube in the early days. I interviewed a bunch of guys who were on YouTube early on. And it was so early that they were able to figure in seven. Yeah, I mean, I was on I was, I was there in 2005. And I just stopped and I wish it would have kept going. And that's a whole other I actually have minted, and FTEs of the very for I have the have the privilege and the honor of being the first filmmaking tutorials ever on YouTube. I have Yeah, i and i minted those NF T's. And they sold out like that, because I did only one offs on them. But the thing is that early on, if you're in a platform early on, there's things that you'll be able to do there, that in a few years, you won't be able to do so like I interviewed some I interviewed the RocketJump guys, who are very big in the filmmaking, like showing you how to tutorials and stuff like that. But they Freddy, and those guys, they started in like 2011 2010. And even then, they they were like, oh, yeah, man, we figured out how to hack the front page. So we would do stuff to get our stuff on the front page. And that's how they got to like 11 million followers over the bright, right, but you can't do that now. Like, that's, that's gone. You know, but but that's kind of like what you're able to do here, because it's just so fresh

Arel Avellino 41:29
Because like when when they came in, they were doing something different that you hadn't seen yet, right? You too. And so even though it was not day one for YouTube, it was still new for the platform. So if you even as the space within Cosmos, or any one of these marketplaces starts to fill up, there's a lot of new things that you can bring in to these spaces, especially when you think about, you know, well, who is it that I'm that I'm talking to that needs to buy into this. And I would just start that exploration because we had no idea whether or not this was going to do well, it was all exploration all trying to say, you know, alright, let's just have this conversation with them, you know, let's continue to paint our vision. But our vision was always for that for that to three months, our vision was always kind of like, only about a month out really, for what we were like, really trying to plan. And so everything was, you know, making decisions on the spot, really trying to cultivate, you know, what is it that we're, we're ultimately trying to bring to this and listen to people when they said, Hey, I love what you're doing. I think that if you just did this over here. So for example, we didn't even consider the idea of trying to launch your own token, because none of us were like, particularly blockchain developers. We just happen to have some people who had a gist of it. We had no concept of launch our token, people convinced us to do it. And now we're about to do it. And that's a much bigger money raised for the stuff that we're trying to build. Because now we're getting way more ambitious as far as like, the the types of things that we're trying to take on. Yeah, there's

Alex Ferrari 43:12
Multiple, multiple, multiple IPs, multiple everything. All right, so if you are going to go into the cosmos space right now. Yeah, with an independent film project. Mm hmm. How would you go about it?

Arel Avellino 43:25
Yeah. So for me, I would try to pick something that you could actually carry on because there's a difference between, you know, like, for example, you know, you have the, the point about the, like, retired athletes, right? If you're looking at that project, and you're saying like, yeah, I just want to do like this one off thing, right? I don't know, that's a great place to start, I would say, if you if you're wanting to do that project, think more like the the toys that made us or, like brand like IPs that actually have, you know, longevity to him. Because when you think about the toys that made us that's something that could go on for a long time and continue to go on have a life of its own.

Alex Ferrari 44:07
So you wouldn't say so let's say I just want to do I'm going to create an IP. Um, I have I have I'm not doing this by the way. So everyone's like Alex is fishing. I'm not gonna do this, but I have I have a short film called Red princes blues. It's an entire universe that I created years ago. And I created an animated short film prequel of it, I created a full length you know, had some Oscar winner Oscar nominees in it, it was a big IP. It was an IP that was trying to launch back in 2010 before any of this happened. Now don't get pulled up. It is known as a pretty it's pretty badass is a pretty badass idea. But um, if I would bring this to them and go look, I want to make a feature film of this. I need $2 million to generate revenue. I've got this person involved in this person involved in this person involved. Then I've already packaged a nice, you know, I've got this actor who's thinking, this actor is committed, this actor is committed. I've got this Oscar winning producer on I've got this Oscar winning screenwriter on, you know, and I create a really cool package and go, How would you approach that? I'm not doing this, by the way. So no one email me, but I'm just using it as an example.

Arel Avellino 45:21
Yeah. So the I use the I use the example of the toys that made us thing because I there's probably somebody out there who's like, maybe Oh, well I'm not I'm a fantasy guy or I'm not trying to tell like fiction stories like, that's fine. You can tell like real stories, but there's a way to frame it so that it's actually a unique IP, versus like, the toys that made us create a brand, right? And now they've created a brand that's all about idealizing, you know, brands from the past. That's cool. There's something about that, right. But for years, it's that's easy to talk about. Right? Okay, so step one, you got to be on Twitter, if you're not on Twitter, then you're not talking to the community, especially when we talk about Cosmos, but really all of crypto talk and discussion and, and where the real influences are. Like, that's Twitter. I was not a Twitter guy for the longest time because I freakin hate, like the

Alex Ferrari 46:20
Tweeting, you hate tweeting,

Arel Avellino 46:22
I hate tweeting. It's just obnoxious. So the the problem with well, okay, so go to Twitter first. And then when you talk about this package, to me, that's that's your roadmap, right? And everybody understands, like every project needs a roadmap, because if all this is going to be is just an image that lives on a marketplace, then all those, you know, right click copy, guys, you know, those guys are all right there. Correct. Which basically is like, there's a whole argument to well, it's just a freakin image or a JPEG. You know, if I copy this, and then I go mint, this on the same place that you did, what's the difference between yours and mine? Well, alternately, if you have this roadmap laid out, yours is the only one who's got commerce roadmap ideas are worthless, unless there's actually the ability to back them up. And that's what that roadmap is all about. The Roadmap says, Alright, I'm not just going to make these images. I'm bringing on these actors, I've got this plan for where this is going. So mine is valuable because mine has all these things versus yours, which is just a copy of mine. That's it. Okay, so. So I would say that step one is going on Twitter. Step two, is people are gonna start asking you, okay, Discord, what's the discord, you want to go follow the people who are following influencers within the blockchain and trying to build on I would obviously push towards Cosmos, because I think that's one of the greatest communities that's out there. As far as crypto goes. And you want to go follow the people who are talking about projects, especially ones that are in NFT world, because the people who are looking at those, they not only want to support the ecosystem, but they also believe in the power of NF T's and what what that technology is bringing to the ecosystem, which is most of the guys to be honest, you're rarely going to miss. And then from there, it's all about one continuing the dialogue with the community as far as like, you know, this is what we're doing to lead up to the launch. These are the conversations that we're having. I have we have somebody hired on our team who literally her only job is to every single day, have coffee in the morning with our community answer questions, and then tweet out updates. And, you know, post discord updates, you know, all that stuff. So there's a whole process of engaging with community while you're going through this development process. But then leading up to the launch of just ENFPs that first like two months, let's say it's, you know, make the artwork, the posting little bits of the artwork, find ways to collaborate with the influencers, doing giveaways, potentially giving people whitelist spots on onto your NFT launch. And, I mean, all these are very, like community engagement oriented things. But that's, that's, that's where that's where I would lay the groundwork. That's where I would say that that's the that's the foundation point of it.

Alex Ferrari 49:30
And then from there, you launch and then you will launch NFT's. So when you say and if so, because it's such a broad term, when you raised money for your IP, were you selling collectibles, or were you selling pieces of the will you're selling pieces of the IP or the owners? How is that work?

Arel Avellino 49:49
Okay, okay, so we were selling images of the characters that would be in the game, and these would all be characters that were playable in the game. Our main goal was We were trying to launch this IP was one, we wanted to want to be able to make a game. There were several reasons for that, because we were actually working on a project that could essentially be a form of a Metaverse project. Everyone started calling it Metaverse, we called it a virtual event platform. And we wanted something that we could show like, Hey, this is the power and the complexity of what this thing can actually do. But we want it to be very, like, customer focused. So we're like, Let's build a game on this thing. You guys, if we build a game on this thing, I think that people will people come to the game not knowing all what we're doing. And then there'll be attracted to what it is that we're doing with this platform. So the game itself was kind of like always part of the plan. So when we priced out what our NF T's were going to cost one, we knew they were going to be the playable characters. So that was always something that oh, God, we made a ton of artwork around what the character playable characters were. And then I've been by I've been mentoring another guy who mentoring, mentoring is a big word, I would, I would say that I have been talking with a good friend of mine who has a pretty big audience that he wants to launch NF T collection to. And I've been giving him the same counsel, like, you know, these should be playable characters, or these should be access points, you know, into a community, depending on whether or not he wants to go down the route of making a game or whether or not he wants to, you know, give people access to just a community.

Alex Ferrari 51:26
So in other words, I would if I would do references blues, I would actually introduce my main character or multiple characters, I could create NFT's that were playable inside of strange clan, or another community as a as a way to generate revenue. If we wanted to. Yeah, even though it's based on a movie, it's just using those NFT's inside of one more

Arel Avellino 51:50
Metaverse project, because that is that's the other thing too is, so long as somebody is building something on on the same thing that you are building, there's ways to make connection points that but even the easiest thing, because this does not take a lot of money to do is creating a community. The only people with these NFT's get access to the whole board is Yacht Club, the reason why people spend like half a million dollars on a yacht club is because it is a access card into a private community. And if you don't have that access card, you don't get in, it doesn't matter how many times you try to copy that NFT and mint it yourself, it does not matter you cannot get into this community unless you have that NFT.

Alex Ferrari 52:28
So would you would you like be doing you know, concept our character artists, and NFT's? Would you

Arel Avellino 52:36
Character art, Concept art, I love all that.

Alex Ferrari 52:39
You know, you could you could do you know, anything, you can do 1000 Different kinds of NFT's and you can meant, you know, 100 of them, you can one of them, you can make 500 of them, depending on how you want to do it and price them accordingly. But for an unknown IP, but because I've seen this, I've talked to other filmmakers who have gone on to like the main NFT platforms, and they made a little bit of money with it. And some of them has sold their distribution rights through NFT's and you know, all of that, wow, whole life, all of that world. But it's so early on, it's hard to even fathom how that is going to work. Like you're then

Arel Avellino 53:15
I would say that I would say that there's you're not gonna you're probably not going to make too many mistakes here in the beginning, because we don't even know what the mistakes are. So

Alex Ferrari 53:22
It's it's the internet 1997 Man, that's where we're at

Arel Avellino 53:25
Yes 100% percent. So what I would say is, is there's, there's, there's a few big things to watch out for, if you're going down this space, there's a few big things to watch out for. One is creating something that ultimately has absolutely no utility whatsoever. And you don't put any kind of utility into the plan. Like, honestly, I would just say from the get go say this is going to be access point into a private community, at least have that. And then when you do your agreements and stuff with actors and stuff, you know, I would say try to pull those guys into the private community, at least for you know, a time period q&a, stuff like that, like that should be part of the agreement. The second thing is is you have to watch out for language that's insinuates, unless you're ready to do this insinuates that this is going to be a security. So this is what we're dealing with right now.

Alex Ferrari 54:22
That'd be real careful.

Arel Avellino 54:23
Yeah, this is what we're dealing with right now. Because we're now talking about why our RFPs are totally safe. Now we're talking about better offers offered any like profits and stuff if you own the entities or anything like that. The the main thing that we told people was, this is what we're building this is gonna be the starting price. You know, the we never speculate on what the future price could be. We let other people speculate on that. And but the second you say that, hey, you're going to have the profits from x, which a lot of people even Gary Vee has been like, you know, hey, if you if you're a music guy If you make an NFS, if you make your song into an NF t, and then just share all your profits from that, you know, you can make you can make a ton of money doing that. Yes. If you're also ready to, you know, make an agreement with the SEC, and label this as a security, which you can totally do. They're down with it, they'll let you do that. The only issue is, is are you ready to go hire that lawyer? You can, and you can do it in the reverse. And you can, by the way, this is not legal advice is not financial advice. Yeah, of course. Of course, yeah. 100 of that 100% Entertainment is just my opinion. But what you can do is you can say, I'm going to launch this project, we are going to share the profits. And you build into your pricing and your budget, like whatever the prices, you're going to sell each individual and yet, with the understanding that you're going to pay for the lawyer who's going to help set you up with the SEC to be able to do this legally.

Alex Ferrari 55:54
Man, this is man, we are in the wild, wild west right now. It is it is crazy. Even in the short time that I've been talking about NFTs, and blockchain and crypto and all the stuff that we've been able to talk to you about on the show. It's changed dramatically. someone like yourself comes on and does what they do, man, it's just like, I mean, I had a website in 98. I remember what it was like, I mean, I was making $6,000 a month back in 1997. But unfortunately, my server bills were 6000 bucks a month. So really, yeah, it didn't really,

Arel Avellino 56:30
The price of things goes up, the price of things goes down as development continues. It's crazy, man.

Alex Ferrari 56:36
It is. So I remember the wild wild west at that time. And like nobody even remember flash. Like everyone's Oh, Flash is the future. Like, so so many things are in flux right now. And there is opportunities just like there was in the wild, wild west to you know, put a stake in the land that might be worth worthless now, but oh, yeah, I was. I was in California. And I went to Hearst Castle, up in Northern California, where, you know, the guy that they built the basis again on, but he bought mountain side, real estate on the ocean. 19 cents an acre. Wow. 19. So he owns I think about like 10 or 20,000 acres on the ocean in Northern California. That's insane. But that was the wild wild west of the time. Like if you could afford to buy 19 cents of it to buy an acre. You could you could buy it, other people were buying other things. But so it's the exact same thing. We're here. But now we're in the digital world, where real estate and NF T's and you know, crypto and all this kind of stuff. It's still very volatile, and still very crazy. Yeah, but but it is the future

Arel Avellino 57:58
It is more of the more of the things that you want to see happen. Like, honestly, it's a good thing that we have regulators who are now taking it seriously. What they are saying is, is, in a lot of ways, they're saying that what is happening is legal, or just trying to figure out how to treat it. And so like the internet, for example, the internet, like, you have things like regulators, I mean, literally, so this is what we're dealing with is we talk to our lawyer, probably three times a week. And every time we do a conversation with him, not only do we get an update on how things are going with us setting up some of the regulatory needs, because there's very, there's a reality in which we if in order for us to launch the token that we're applying the launch, we will have to be we will have to be a security, there's a reality in which that happens. And so the crazy part is though is that every single week, we have a new update about what the government is still figuring out about whether they want to treat it as a security or what they even consider to be security when it comes to crypto, and there's constant pushback. So we're literally at the bleeding edge of a lot of stuff like you're saying, and so when it comes to when it comes to some of the unknown unknowns, there's a lot of potential upside. You just also have to prepare for the very worst case scenario. And and that's something that we just knew going in was yes, we're going to we're going to have a lot of money suddenly come in. But then how do we also protect our butts? When while the government is still trying to decide how things are supposed to go? So always back to that subject.

Alex Ferrari 59:37
It is it is a crazy, wacky world that we're going into and man I can't see I honestly can't see. Excuse me a a future in the next 10 or 15 years. It doesn't have this stuff. I mean regarding ingrained in our not only society but specifically in the film industry. It is the future I think people will start to Manding fungible copies of their movies and music that they can resell on a secondary marketplace that will become a thing in the future No, no question because it's just people will start demanding it and, and then films will start, you know, Studio will one studio will do it. The studio that's the scrappy one in the corner, like Cannon Films back in the day. I don't know if anyone listening, I just did an episode with one of the founding guys from Canon, who was one of the directors there. He basically he directed American Ninja. So back in the day, and he was telling me he's like, the reason why can and blew up in the 80s was because the studios were scared to get into VHS. Hmm. So because no studio wanted to put their movies up on VHS. There were all these video stores opening up across the country that needed content needed product. So all the independents started coming in. And that's when you had, you know, not the Terminator, but the exterminator and all these other B movies. But they made so much money. I mean, the American Ninja IP was massive around the world. And then after the studio said, well, we'll wait wait a bit. Well, we can't let these guys make all this money. And then the studio showed up and they start throwing their weight around. So that's what's going to happen here too. Right now. Everyone's dipping their toes. Look when Tarantino just dipped his toes into NFT's and and got his hand slapped. I do I'm on. I'm on Team Tarantino on this. Because I think he does have the right to do whatever the hell he wants to do with that. But yeah, it's but I even said it on the show. I'm like, imagine if guaranteed or bust out an NFT. Like who listens, man? Yeah. Well, then if you're listening

Arel Avellino 1:01:47
And he was like, Hey, I that's a great idea.

Alex Ferrari 1:01:49
If someone from Quintin's team is listening, can you come on the show Brother? I would really appreciate it. I'd love to talk to you.

Arel Avellino 1:01:55
So we're trying to did he actually tried to like tokenize each of the frames?

Alex Ferrari 1:01:59
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, not frames, original copies of the script. And he had an audio commentary explaining why he wrote some scenes like complete, original and NFT. But then, the company Miramax sued him? Because like, Oh no, we own the copyright to the pulp fiction trademark and, and the script that we purchased. And so now you're like, Well, wait a minute, this is a one. This is our this is a one off, we're not mass produced. Like there's a whole thing. So it's a really interesting conversation to be had. But like I always said, Imagine if if George Lucas busted out and NFT for Star Wars back in the day, or Raiders of the Lost Ark or any of the Spielberg's movies or any of Cameron's movies or any of that kind of stuff. You know, it's only a matter of time before we have the avatar and a tease, you know, that yeah, you know, James talking through it, and there's two of them. Yeah, is that gonna be valuable? Same way Mickey Mantle rookie cards valuable man or Babe Ruth card is valuable is because there's, there's there's scarcity of it, and so on and so forth. But again, do we could keep talking for hours, but I really appreciate you coming on the show and explaining your process on how you were able to raise $2 million for a brand new IP, it is a really interesting way of looking at how to raise money for independent films, especially, you know, in a world that it is getting tougher and tougher for independent films to get financed. Is this going to be for every project? Probably not. But can it be, but can it be? Can it be, you know, framed in a way like that could sell in a cosmos or an Aetherium, or in another community, another blockchain community. And if you guys want it.

Arel Avellino 1:03:42
The framing is way more forgiving than people think. I almost just want to say to the community, like hey, go give it a shot, go go, like start talking to people, you know, in Cosmos community in, you know, other crypto communities, especially ones where there's a lot of there's, there's there's two different types of people in the crypto world, you got the builders, and you got the hype, guys, and most, most communities are very much filled with a lot of the hype, guys, but not so much the builders, the builders became a very small percentage. There's a massive amount of builders within the cosmos community, and not quite as many hype guys. So the people who the people who are talking right now are people who they're very level headed. It's a very cooperative community because they just need more people present in order for mass adoption to kick in. So the more you find communities that have that kind of sweet spot where they they're in this collaboration mode, they want to be able to connect with, you know, other audiences get more attention, all that stuff. That's a that's a massive sweet spot for a filmmaker to come in and say, you know, all I want to do This documentary or I want to do, I want to actually launch an IP. Because that's the other thing too is there's lots of people out there who are trying to be the person who's going to launch that first major NFT documentary. And I've seen quite a few, raise your hand and say, yep, we're gonna jump in we're gonna be wants to do it.

Alex Ferrari 1:05:21
So it's and Listen, guys, if you want to get more information about blockchain and NF T's, I'll put the other episodes that I did in the show notes as well, because they're, they're pumped full of a lot of information that we didn't cover. But arrowmen I want to appreciate I appreciate you coming on the show. I'm gonna ask you a couple questions. I asked all my guests. What is the lesson that took you the longest to learn whether in the film industry or in life?

Arel Avellino 1:05:44
Hmm, the lesson that took the longest to learn, probably, I'm a slow learner. So it's probably more to do with patience and planning. Because I tend to like to just jump straight in and not take my time. Taking that time like in pre production in setting methodical goals, probably planning,

Alex Ferrari 1:06:11
And three of your favorite films of all time.

Arel Avellino 1:06:16
So Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, massive one, um, I would say this is kind of funny, because it's like a completely different type of film. But Incredibles, if I somebody asked me and somebody asked me, What is the film that you've watched, like, 12 times? The first Incredibles movie, I watched that so many freakin times. So I have to include it because Sure, sure, sure. I'm grateful. Yeah, yeah. Um, and then the third one, I would say, Hmm, this one's there. There's a lot of good ones, but I'm just gonna be kind of like basic and I'll say inception. Because I felt like that movie. Ah, no, I'm taking it back. Sorry. Inception. You don't get it. You don't get it. Grand Budapest Hotel because that movie I was just about to say that inception was like Christopher Nolan's like, that was what put it all together for like a lot of things that he was on a trip to try and bring together but Grand Budapest Hotel to a whole nother level of that. Sanderson

Alex Ferrari 1:07:16
I love Grand Budapest Hotel great, great film, brother, man, I appreciate you coming on man continued success in the in the wild west. That is the NFT space and, and and please, if if you raise it, let me know how this goes, man. I want to see where this goes. So let me know if you if you're pulling in 10 15 20 mil let me know. I want that success. I want the success story to come back on the show. So I

Arel Avellino 1:07:39
Yes sir, absolutely.

Alex Ferrari 1:07:40
I appreciate you.

Arel Avellino 1:07:41
Let's talk. Let's talk in maybe three months.

Alex Ferrari 1:07:46
That would be an amazing conversation. I appreciate you, brother.

Arel Avellino 1:07:49
All right, appreciate you too.