Let’s Form Group: Screening and Q&A with the Filmmakers & Subjects w/ Anjali Young & Thobey Campion

Transcript

This is a series of short documentaries that were produced by Collaband and created by Lore Machine. Um, and yeah, we're going to show them today and then we're going to do a little we're going to have a little Q&A afterwards with the filmmakers and the editors and some of the subjects of the movies. So, hope you enjoy them. And here's Toby Campion. Awesome. What's up, guys? Uh, thanks for coming out. Um, so last September, uh, and Jolly and James approached, uh, me, um, a guy who makes videos, uh, about doing a kind of love letter to web 3. Um, I had burned out on web 2 media and web 3 had provided all these solutions to problems that web 2 just didn't seem to have. And

so I felt like I was the right man for the job and raised my hand. Um, and with a huge group of people, we were able to put together seven episodes. Um, so we're going to show you the trailer. Um, and then three of the episodes today and then the subjects are going to join us to talk about some weird [ __ ] I don't even know what we're going to talk about. Yeah. Um, but either way, thanks for coming out and hope you enjoy. Yeah. In my mind, Ethereum [music] is feminist. It's a tool that allows men and women to use it equally.

Web 3 is a singular moment, and I just felt like the wheel was being reinvented in real time. It was [music] a big thing that I signed on to. Oh my god, this is a real thing. People really care about this. It's changed how I [music] visualize everything and I've gone all in. I genuinely think I'm changing the world. We were like, "Okay, this is it." Yeah. No looking back from there. [music] These tech companies had this promise of changing our lives, but really [music] they were just acquiring our data.

I was living in a dirt road town. The word NFTTS [music] wasn't on my radar. It clicked immediately. Hey, maybe there's something interesting with this blockchain stuff. It's ownership over your digital footprint. That's what's changed my life entirely. I said, I think I might have [music] signed a contract. And he was like, why did you do that? That's a terrible idea. I left everything I was doing the next day and I went all into NFTs and blockchain. The reality right now to the general public is, oh yeah, crypto is a scam. And then you see things like exchange collapses. It's all out wild west. But there's going to be a time where the real solutions are going to come to light.

Web 3 is a really unique space where you can have this buzzing community around you of really supportive people. Pizza brought together a million dollars in a month. I mean unprecedented. Thank you very much for all the free dough or d Web 3. That's where we'll do it. This is the most beautiful crossroads for what I've been [music] looking for. If I didn't build something now, I was going to regret it. You're able to control something in a world where we control nothing.

The game we're playing here is to leverage this digital scarcity to bring analog plenty. This is going to be the biggest massive [music] transition that we've experienced. I think this is still setting the stage for what comes after, which is then everybody does this and it's not weird [music] anymore and we don't need to make documentaries about it. If that's not enough to wake you up in the morning, then [ __ ] me, man. You know what I mean? If we're visualizing a new reality here

on [music] Earth, what is the ideal state of of Earth? Like, what do we actually want to do? If we could do anything on this planet and it's like, well, we probably should just like throw a party. Here we can go action. What do you need for that party, [music] right? pizza. So, that was kind of part of the how how we got where we are. We're going to throw a global pizza party that we're going to fund by selling blockchainbased NFTts of pizza, wanting to build towards a world where everyone can just eat.

People came to Pizza [music] because they wanted to bring the world together around pizza. And so having [music] like a really strong mission that people can sink their teeth into, that was our secret. We're here at Pizza Brain, Philly's famous pizza museum. All right. Pizza is a global phenomenon. It's beautiful, right? Every pizza is is kind of a work of art.

Every pizza is community in a box. because there are eight slices in there and you're probably not going to eat all of those alone. This is why pizza is what I came to as [music] this is the vessel to bring community ownership powered by the blockchain all over the world. [music] What am I going to do? I'm not going to eat it. Oh, a funny thing about me is that I actually cannot eat gluten or dairy.

[laughter] So, it is not actually about pizza. What pizza does for web 3 is uh instead of going to people and saying, "Ah, we we're web 3 and we're we say, "Hey, you want a slice of pizza?" So, it's a really good foot in the door to say, "Hey, maybe there's something really interesting with this with this blockchain [music] stuff." I run this Facebook group in South Philly called South Silly. And so, I have relationships with a lot of the local businesses.

When the pandemic hit, businesses [music] suffered, many closed, and it made me start to think really deeply about how to change ownership structures in neighborhoods so that communities could support businesses [music] in a different way. Everyone brought their skills together to make this thing the super grassroots pizza [music] place, you know, from the ground. Like I we put these floors in like everything in here we did ourselves. The pizza dow story in short is we brought together a community of artists from all over the world to make toppings for a digital pizza.

We made [snorts and music] a generative project of 10,000 digital pizzas. We sold them to bring in money. We took that money. We bought pizza with it and we gave it away all over the Thank you for our pizza. I love you. Free pizza. Pizza.

This is cheat. This is charm. Thank you very much for all the free dough or dow. Pizza D brought together a million dollars in a month. I mean crazy, unprecedented, impossible to do without web 3. Collaband serves a few roles in the pizza dow discord. It [music] token gates our proposals channel. So only people who hold the rare pizza NFT can see it. And this is the lifeblood of of how pizza [music] actually runs, right? We we put proposals in the channel and we vote on them. We want our voting to be uh anonymous and we want it to be one person, one vote. So this is actually how we make all our decisions now. It's

just a huge force for being able to organize people. I don't think that we should just reinvent what's not on the blockchain on the blockchain. Like that's not the assignment. The game we're playing here is to leverage this digital scarcity to bring [music] analog plenty. To date, Pizza D has given away about a half a million dollars worth of pizza in over 75 countries. We've partnered [music] with more than 400 pizzeras. Free pizza. We fed uh at a minimum over a 100,000 people.

And going forward, we want to keep spreading [music] community and the ethos of community ownership and web 3 through the vessel of pizza. Maybe, you know, there's a world where humans [music] don't really have to think about whether they can afford food that much. I don't claim to know how we get there, but I do want to [music] get there. What if Domino came and offered to buy you for a billion dollars?

[ __ ] off. [laughter] I ended up in the web 3 space. It's really because of a lack of art supplies essentially when it comes down to it.

The web 3 NFT space [music] was very far removed from what I was doing at the time which was living in a very remote Aboriginal community in the top end of Australia and Arnamland. not the case. It's a coastal community that's closed off to non-indigenous folk. Once the wet season comes in, you can't really get in or [music] out there by car. Unless you have a purpose to be there, and that's through government work. My husband Tom

was working. He's a teacher. [music] We'd been traveling for a year on the road living in a camper trailer with our four kids and I didn't have any art supplies with me. I didn't have any canvas. I was used to [music] making art. I tend to create no matter [music] what. So, I had an iPad and that was the only thing I had to create. [music] So prior to that, I didn't really work digitally [music] at all. And yeah, just trying to figure out what my own purpose for being [music] there was.

I was very much living in a dirt road town. The word NFTts wasn't on my radar, but I remember getting a message from Gina Anderson, [music] who is the founder of Honey Badges. Gina shared an artwork of mine that caught the attention of Allison Downey and Alex Cavalucos. Alli runs a tech [music] company. Alex had a very successful startup. this girl Gina saying these two women are wanting to catch up with you [music] don't mess it up they're really important I was like okay sick [laughter] got on the phone call with them it was

apparent that we were all mothers it was very comfortable I had to leave the call halfway through cuz we'd just gotten a new puppy I was like I'm sorry I've got dog wee and a a 2-year-old [music] that's rolling around in it I got to got to go and they were fine with that which made [music] me think I can work for these people. They had two NFT 10K [music] PFP projects. That's a lot of acronyms. Meta Angels, which came first, and then Honey Badges. It's essentially a membership token that people are [music] buying. So, they will buy one of these 10,000 and they get access to some membership that that project is offering.

What they were wanting was something that would stand out in the NFT space that set itself apart from the bro cartoons going [music] around. I signed on to both of them because I tend to just say yes and then figure out how I'm going to do it after. Tom came back from Outbush. I said, I think I might have signed a contract and he was like, why did you do that? that's a terrible idea. [music] So I was like, I think you just make some layers and like it'll be fine.

Turned out it was much much more involved. I needed Tom to come on board to be able to do it. It seemed like a worthwhile thing to do [music] in terms of my art career. We hightailed it out of Man Greeter. We went to the nearest main city, Darwin, and [music] lived out of Airbnbs over the 6 week school holiday with our kids. I [music] just smashed out images. It was a big thing that I signed on to. It's tough. It is tough work, but also it was an extremely exciting [music] time. It was a massive point of change for us. Then it all snowballed from

there. [laughter] I did get a lot of collectors that came on board because they discovered me through Meta Angel's Discord. [music] you of really supportive people. People are interested in who is creating the [music] art. They want to back someone that they believe in. I think if we have our mate doing his thing like that kind of scenario,

what I did find through web 3 is it can really snowball and open up doors that had, you know, never been there before or not been accessible before. The NFT space has been the most fruitful community that I've ever been a part of in [music] my life. Definitely in my professional life. Did you? A good work. I'm so proud of you. I love you. Have a great time. Congratulations on your [music] I am a one of one artist. The work that I focus on is really just the same as my work in the physical art world. It's just making art that I feel good about putting into the world.

focusing on [music] building myself as an artist that has agency over my work and over my life, whether it's in the NFT space or whether it's [music] not In my mind, [music] Ethereum is feminist.

It's a tool [music] that is neutral and allows men and women to use it equally. About 50 years ago, you still had to get credit under the name of your husband. The tools that we can build on things like Ethereum allow you to pick out loans from a money market program that doesn't care who you are so long as you have, you know, [music] collateral. These are important advances that are understated simply by just providing an equal playing field that otherwise was hard to come by. Like just having wallets is like an important innovation.

We like Las Vegas. Let's go around. Unicorns. Love it. The people that Ethereum and these new, more resilient financial systems can benefit are the people who are the most ostracized by the existing financial system. For years, sex workers have been kicked off of PayPal [music] and Cash App and had their bank accounts shut down. We have a company to bring the benefits of [music] blockchain to the adult industry. Our primary product is called Spank Pay. [music] It's a crypto payment platform to help you process payments.

All right, we're one down. I am a software engineer by training. I used to work at consensus as a Ethereum developer. How's it going? I was researching microp payments trying to figure out a good use case for this. After reading a bit about the adult industry and their struggles with the banking and financial systems, I thought that maybe this is a good match. Yeah, there was a lot of hype around crypto adult companies. I think we were one of the few that tried to pivot into useful services, so we're giving out swag to promote this stuff.

It used to be a meme that nobody pays for their porn. But clearly that meme was false because a lot of people are willing to pay for their porn if the payment isn't going to some weird studio and it's like going to the model that they actually, you know, fantasize about. Building more direct content and financial services that more directly connect the fans to their models actually unlocks a lot of the willingness to pay for content that previously [music] was a meme. Can you make it out to spank chaining? Spank chain. [music] We hired sex workers and we started going to conventions and meeting sex workers. And so one of the first things we did was come to this AVN and we gave out, you know, $20,000 in cash and

crypto for signing people up for wallets and trying to onboard [music] people. Is it okay if I take a picture? Yeah, I'm fine. Yeah, of course. Okay, thank you. Great. Spank chain was my introduction to this Uh, it's been pretty fun. I've learned a lot. The adult industry will try anything at least once. They have the benefit of being willing to experiment. You ever been spanked by a mermaid? And so they're learning a lot [music] about how to navigate this crypto world because for them the tools are just useful.

In the sex industry, you're constantly getting your account shut down and I exist in a legal capacity. Everything I do is legal. Um, so for me to get all these things shut down, it's it's [music] really terrible. When you build products that models use, it's [ __ ] huge for us. That's what we need. we need these problems solved. To have Spank like stand behind you, it makes you feel like you're not doing something wrong. You're a business business person or entrepreneur [music] as opposed to [ __ ] Um it gives you that freedom. It gives you that empowerment and you're able to control something in a world that where we have control nothing.

a lot of the legal money that she's made, you know, selling socks and whatever, being mean to men on the internet. Uh, she has a hard time cashing it out and even had trouble with like mortgages and credit. You wouldn't expect your utility company to like turn off your water because of something you tweeted. So the regulation conversation is a bit tricky because most of the rules aren't necessarily enforced by actual law. Most of the rules governing content you can post [music] and things like that are established by like Mastercard and Visa based on what they are willing to process [music] transactions for.

And so they impose their sort of morality. There is some legislation that's being proposed in Congress [music] on banking discrimination against sex workers. We're going to Washington and meeting with different committees about this type of financial discrimination. Like the lobbyists that we have for DC right now, testifying in front of five different committees about this thing that is probably going to be written into a bill. We start with financial [music] discrimination and work our way all the way up to decriminalization. That's the hope.

Financial discrimination is an easy one for us to start with because it will literally change every single person's life in the industry. Nobody has ever done anything like that before. It was [music] actually a historic event because no one has ever taken sex worker seriously partially because it was easier to not acknowledge that this is like a real economic thing. We want to change [music] the world. It sounds a little cliche, but like we just want the world to reflect our values.

One of the things that we [music] can do here is help counter the stigma. You know, making educational content, helping people on board. Like 5 years ago, we had to work hard just to get people wallets and now they all put their ETH on Twitter. It's like the best thing that's ever happened. Now we have like big name porn star selling NFTts [music] has ETH, right? I'm excited to see more models using [music] Dows, more sex workers using Dows to coordinate. Like that's where we've come, right? I think this is still setting the stage for what comes after, which is then everybody does this and it's not weird anymore and we don't need to make

documentaries about [laughter] it. Hopefully, we can figure out how to make this stuff useful [music] and uh bring the benefits of it to a broader population. Thank you so much everybody for coming out and watching the collab short films.

Um, we only have seven minutes left for a panel discussion. So, we probably won't be able to take any questions, but what I'm going to ask is for each of the people here to introduce themselves and tell you a little bit about themselves and where they could learn more about your project and maybe one memory of filming um, the short film. Um, Toby here was the director and so um, you probably all have some memory about him. So, in our seven minutes, I'm hoping to get the most high impact. So, shall we start with Toby?

Yeah. What's up, guys? Um, I'm Toby Campion, founder of Lore Machine. Um, and we are a uh next generation studio that harnesses AI and web3 tools to turbocharge storytelling on the internet. Um, and we kind of just traveled around through the US and Canada, uh, meeting with all the subjects, um, and really finding, uh, human thread through a lot of these organizations that are a discord or an NFT collection, a very kind of like there's a facelessness to it. Um, so what we strove to do with these films is bring a more human um, compassionate um, and relatable uh, set of um, uh, kind of circumstances to each one of the shoot

um, with the hope that we could um, inject some energy into the Ethereum community. Not that it needs any um, but also create a bridge uh, for people who have no idea what the [ __ ] this is all about. Um, so the hope was to straddle those two worlds and uh couldn't have done it without all these folks. So, thank you. Thank you, Toby. I'm Orin. I'm uh the editor of of the piece, so I won't take up too much time, but uh I own a company called Burnish Creative. So, we partnered with Lur Machine to put this thing together and we did the the post-production, the editing on it and just really learned a lot through it. I'm I'm a Bitcoin OG. I

I bought Bitcoin 2011, so I know a lot about that world, but this whole NFT world and everything you guys are building is incredible and I think it's really really cool. So, well done. And this is my first time meeting the editor in person. We did it all over the internet and I'm very pleased to discover that he bears a striking resemblance to Kurt Russell. So, congratulations. Yeah. Uh, I'm Snacks, uh, Pizza D founder. Uh, a funny thing, uh, also go back pretty pretty far with Bitcoin and, uh, I used to organize Bitcoin events in 30th Street Station in Philly outside the Pizza Hut, and we would push together tables and talk about Dows in like 2012, like pretty early, like $20 Bitcoin, you

know, $100 Bitcoin. And so, uh, it's kind of come full circle here with, uh, with Pizza D. And if you want to uh you know join our community, we're we're in 75 countries and uh we'd love to give you your pizza mafia name. It's a combination of your favorite topping and your favorite mafia movie. Um I'm Ali Knox. I've been in crypto since 2014 when I got kicked off on all the platforms. Um I've been with SpankChain since right before they ICOed in 2017. I'm an adviser there. um a fetish performer. Um thank you for having us and watching our story. We really appreciate it.

Give it up for Ally. Uh hi, my name is Mean Solommani. I'm the CEO of Spank Chain. Uh so it was a pretty funny documentary to film. Uh, I one of the things that happened while we were filming on the second day of AVN was that our payment processor actually went out of business or announced that they were. So, I was actually kind of managing like a whole crisis uh while that was filming. And while a week later they unwent out of business, I do regret to inform everyone here that 2 weeks after that we were targeted and

discriminated against by Sendwire because they had a new payment processor called Checkout.com that didn't want to work with adult companies. And Wire kicked us out sort of unceremoniously. and uh also refused to make any sort of public statement about it, saying that they lamented it or that they were forced to do it. Uh and so now next time we go back to Congress, which Alli was able to set up through her prolific documentaries uh describing all of the ways she's been kicked out of every payment system. uh and we'll get to say, "Hey, look at what

happened." Since we were here when last time talking about discrimination against sex workers and adult businesses, we also got discriminated against. And so, it's going to be part of our story and I appreciate uh Collaband helping us tell it. Thank you so much. You know, part of what we're trying to accomplish with these short documentaries is giving a human face. Like Toby said, it's to give a human face to what we're doing here in crypto. Our goals and aspirations for crypto are really to elevate and eliminate the problems from previous generations. Like can we do that? Can we somehow use this technology to undo some of the discrimination of the past and to

give people more opportunities for wealth building who have been cut out of wealth building before? So really I appreciate this opportunity. our our co-founder Raymond is here and James are here. Um, and really we just want to share with everybody like what's possible with crypto and with blockchain technology and through crypto communities. And so if anybody wants a final word about really what is it about community that has been powerful for you and that um do you think is the unlock of crypto which is like communities for from where Collaband sits?

So for us, I mean, just the promise of an NFT and what that meant as a symbol of uh contribution to our effort was enough to mobilize a community of thousands. I mean, for us, for the editing, I just focused on making uh the these things a bridge for people who don't really understand this world and look down on it or think it's just a big pile of [ __ ] So, that was that was my job. Um, I think that, uh, you know, I don't want I don't want to just talk the final word here if you guys have something more to say, but um, we look at these six documentaries as kind of an establishing shot for how we could continue to elevate storytelling um,

about web 3. Um, I think that one of the things I've noticed as a former outsider and now a sort of insider in this thing is that the community sometimes struggles to explain itself to the rest of the world. Um, so we're looking for all different types of partners um whether you're a subject, whether you're a sponsor, whether you're a community um to get involved, to continue to build um this type of storytelling. So if you are interested um by all means hit up me or James or Jolly um we're all ears. Um because this doesn't get done alone. Uh this very much gets done together.

Thank you so much for everyone for watching. The website of Collaband is collab.land. Um, also Lore Machine is the director and the filmmakers. And if you want to continue to watch these movies, we showed you three of them today, but there are seven in total. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel. It's collaband or let'sformgroup.xyz. So, you know, we hope you join us on our journey of short documentaries. So, thank you so much. And really truly and and and Toby said this earlier, which is it's a love letter to web 3. So, that's what we hope you enjoy and appreciate it as well. Thank you. [applause]