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Jenkins The Valet On His BYAC Tell-All Feat. Guest Neil Strauss, Plus: Instagram NFTs, Ghost Recon Breakpoint NFT Backlash, Guzzler Car Part NFTs And More...
Today’s episode features BAYC’s boss butler Jenkins the Valet and bestselling book begetter Neil Strauss. In this riveting session they share how they decided to work together and how each of their identities were born and made. Jenkins and Neil team up with hosts Eathan Janney and Josh Kriger in a tell-all chat about on The Bored Ape Yacht Club and their developing project. Jenkins the Valet is the head valet at the Bored Ape Yacht Club and has assisted many of the clubs’ wealthiest patrons with odd jobs, some of which also lead to odd stories just waiting to be told. We can only imagine what Jenkins has seen and heard with the BAYC growing in popularity and profligacy. Neil is a 10-time New York Times best-selling author, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, and an awardee of the Taylor Award for Excellence in Music Journalism in 2018. Join us and take part in the privilege of hearing what these legends have to say about NFT backlash, NFT secrets, and much, much more.
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Jenkins The Valet On His BYAC Tell-All Feat. Guest Neil Strauss, Plus: Instagram NFTs, Ghost Recon Breakpoint NFT Backlash, Guzzler Car Part NFTs And More…
This episode features Jenkins the Valet and Neil Strauss. Here’s a bit about each of them. Jenkins the Valet is the Head Valet at The Bored Ape Yacht Club. He has helped out many of the club’s wealthiest patrons with odd jobs and has seen and heard many things. With the BAYC growing in popularity, it is time to write a tell-all. That’s why he has teamed up with Neil Strauss.
Neil Strauss is a ten-time New York Times bestselling author, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, and a former music critic, culture reporter, and columnist at the New York Times, where he won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for excellence in music journalism. In 2018, Neil was honored with the Los Angeles Press Club’s Journalist Award for his Rolling Stone 50th anniversary cover story, Elon Musk: The Architect of Tomorrow.
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We are privileged to have both of you here. Welcome to the show.
Thank you so much. I’m super pumped to be here. I’m glad to steal a few minutes away from the Valet Stand to talk with you, Josh, Eathan, and Neil.
It’s a busy time of the year for a prestigious valet such as yourself. We appreciate that. This is our last episode of 2021. I couldn’t be more excited to end on a project that speaks in a lot of ways, in my opinion, to the future of NFTs and what’s possible with them in terms of publishing, IP, and the evolution of projects into new adventures that no one could have predicted. Jenkins the Valet, it’s hard to think of a better person to collaborate on with the tell-all book like this than Neil Strauss. It’s hard to think of a more entertaining and purposeful group of folks than the folks of The Bored Ape Yacht Club. How did this dream mashup come together? Give us the scoop.
Not a day goes by where we are not pinching ourselves that we get to work with someone as awesome. We are in this New Year’s time of the year, so I’m thinking about what I’m grateful for and thinking back about the 2021 and things like that. People say it takes a lot of luck for something to be built. One thing that we have been lucky about is that no one could have imagined that the BAYC would become as exciting and as big of a deal as it is.
Eathan, when you were giving a bit of my bio, there’s that line that the BAYC has grown in popularity, so now it’s time for a tell-all. The first time that I, as Jenkins the Valet, set a line like that was when the BAYC flew across one ETH. We were freaking out because it was like, “We are rich. Our profile pictures are worth $3,000.” It has only continued to grow, and we are all incredibly fortunate to be part of such an incredible ecosystem of creative people who are building IP around their avatars. Jenkins the Valet is a character who is based on this idea that in NFT is like the tip of the iceberg.
That storytelling, IP development, and deepening backstory can turn an avatar into a character. When we started doing that and posting to Twitter, my partner and I realized that we had an opportunity to build a whole media business around this, continue to build IP around characters like Jenkins, and eventually do it with others as well. We set out to find great advisers in the space who could help us do that like people who have been in the NFT community before and are building other things.
One of those advisors is GMoney, who to us, is one of the OG NFT personalities, someone who disassociated themselves from their online identity and has posted amazing things online for a lot of time. GMoney is a mutual friend with Neil, so GMoney made that connection between us and Neil. The first time we had a call with Neil, we were sold. We knew that was our author. We had faced about 500 rejections from other literary agents and authors at the time.
When we had momentum by Jenkins, the character, and we were trying to find someone to help us write this story, people said no. Ninety percent of people didn’t respond and 9.9% of people said, “This is the stupidest thing I have ever heard.” We were lucky that someone, a futurist like Neil, who’s incredibly open-minded and looks to skate to where the puck is going rather than where it was willing to take a call from us with the GMoney introduction. That’s how the dream mashup came together.
I met Neil at an event in LA around the time that he was mulling over this possibility. We were doing some whiskey shots, exploring what the future of NFTs could be like, and talking about the evolution of the industry. What’s your perspective on what went down there? Why did you choose to be part of this project?
What went down with the whiskey shots or with Jenkins?
The whiskey went down. I felt pretty good the next day. We chose some good whiskey.
The worst decisions are made under the influence of whiskey. This remains to be seen as to whether it will be the book that finally makes my career.
The truth is when you are under the influence of the whiskey, they are the best decisions. When you are not under the influence of the whiskey, then they become the worst decisions. Keep drinking the whiskey. Everything is going to turn out fine.
There’s a thing called state-dependent memory, which is if you are studying for a test while you are stoned, you should take the test while stoned. You remember things in the same state you are in. That’s not a recommendation. I’ve got excited because of all the rare Apes that Jenkins has had the experience and the privilege of meeting at the Yacht Club, and to know all those stories and be willing to tell them is one thing. To me, when I do a book with a celebrity such as Jenkins, it’s got to be about more than the people you know and the stories of other people. It has to be about your story.
What is your personal story? That has to be the heart of it. Jenkins has been in some situations that are toe-curling and spine-tingling. I’m excited to share the story. The other rule I had with Jenkins is that, “You have to be willing to tell your whole story with no fear of what the other Apes, Mutants, and your family will think and be willing to share the whole truth.” Jenkins was willing to go there.
That is the question of what made you come to a yes. With your experience as an author, that all makes a lot of sense.
We all want to know what’s going on inside the Yacht Club. What does it look like? What are the membership credentials? What happens in that secret locked room in the back? There are so many questions that will finally be answered.
Eathan and I are part of a group. One of the members of our group brought this project to our attention right after it launched on Clubhouse. This was early in the evolution of NFTs. I’m not a member of the club yet, and I want to know. I have been living on the outside of this amazing ecosystem, and I need to know what’s happening there.
I am going to restrain because there’s so much that will be put into this book that I will wait until you read it between the pages but I can attest to the fact that Neil has pushed me in a way that I thought I would not be pushed to divulge the things that have happened. I thought, “Here’s a tell-all. I’m going to run to Neil Strauss. I will show him my notes of the different things that I have done. He will make it nice and spicy.” The trick has been to pull out the real feelings about how it went down, why it went down, and what the motivation was, things like that. It’s going to make quite an interesting story.
I’m not privy to this behind the scenes but I have heard that supposedly Jenkins has these holders of this Writer’s Room. I’m not sure but there might be more going on in the decision-making process about what happens in the Yacht Club than even I may be aware of. I don’t know if Jenkins has discussed and revealed some of this yet, but I think it’s interesting if any of it can be shared or any of the results.
We’ve got almost 2,800 unique holders of our Writer’s Room NFT. Those Writer’s Room NFTs do two things. The first is that they allow members to exercise voting power on the creative direction of the stories that we tell. What that means, in this case, is when I’m coming forward and doing my tell-all of everything that I have done, Neil has questions for me sometimes but I can’t answer them by myself. I turn around, and I ask my 2,800 unique holders to help me figure out what’s the best way to answer it.
There’s something interesting about that too, which means that sometimes the answer that you get is a fact but sometimes there are questions, opinions, or something like that. Neil has to deal with the fact that he’s not just interfacing with the Valet at the Bored Ape Yacht Club. He’s interfacing with a large number of Apes and Mutants. He’s getting the collective Ape brain giving him some of the answers that he needs. I will divulge some of those answers.
Bored Ape Yacht Club: Bringing a successful book to market obviously requires incredible creative. But there are also very important pieces of that puzzle to make something successful and it’s important that the community gets to participate in all of it.
The other thing that these holders can do is that they can license their own IP to the story. There are a number of different characters with who I have interacted with doing different jobs as the Valet at the club. The way that those characters bubble up to Neil, the author is that, they are licensed. This is an interesting use case and the first of its kind, and this mass licensing of IP in the NFT space. We have, at this point, December 28th, 2021, over 2,000 individual Bored Apes.
New Apes have been licensed to this book, and they will be featured in some capacity. Some as main characters, some will be illustrated, and some will show up in a game of Where is Jenkins? That will be inside the back cover of the book. A large number will be included in a special acknowledgment. That’s interesting. There are so many avatars and people who own these avatars who will participate in the financial upside of the book.
That’s a fascinating thing to explore here. There’s so much to experiment with, and you are going for it. There’s the IP as you are talking about the utility of the NFTs. You have brought into the equation brand-building strategies. These are all open fields with NFTs. You mentioned IP, licensing, and sharing. I can imagine it can get complicated. I’m curious if you can share a little bituse of the inner workings starting with the IP. Was that as complicated as it sounds? Are there contracts people have to sign? You own your Bored Ape if you own that IP, character or NFT. Can you explain a little bit more about how that pans out?
My partner and I, every day, we are wearing a different hat. Sometimes it’s a creative project, software project or community building but more and more, we have felt that it’s a legal project. Jenkins the Valet has been signed to CAA across books, films, podcasts and more. We have access to CAA’s in-house counsel. We have our IP attorney who crafts the licensing agreements that we sign. That gives someone who holds the commercial rights to an NFT the ability to license those commercial rights for us for the book. We have entertainment counsel and blockchain lawyers as well.
There are a lot of different lawyers that are working on this. It’s a new frontier. Often we are in these conversations, and the realization is that it hasn’t been done before, and we have to try our best. To that end, we are open-sourcing every piece of legal that we develop because our idea here is to contribute back to the space as best we can so that other projects that come after us will have the opportunity to use the same types of agreements. Beyond the legal implications of somebody being to take an NFT that they own and license those rights to us, there’s a whole bunch of other IP that exists as well.
When I’m not docking boats and doing odd jobs for patrons at the Bored Ape Yacht Club, I have spent a lot of my time in software development. We have built a custom web app that allows people to engage and vote on the questions that Neil might have for us. A series of questions ended that we will come to define the genre and the early plot. For example, “What pivotal event has happened in Jenkins’ life that makes them want to tell his story?” Fifty-three percent of our 2,800 community members have voted that he’s convinced that the fate of the Yacht Club is in his hands.
Now, we know where this begins. Jenkins, for some reason, is convinced that the fate of the Yacht Club is in his hands. He goes searching for a reporter and there’s a question of Jenkins, “We are looking for a reporter to tell his story. Where would we find them?” Sixty-two percent of those 2,800 holders have decided that he would go to the offices of The Bored Ape Gazette. You’ve got Jenkins, who is convinced he’s got the fate of the Yacht Club in his hands, and he goes to the Bored Ape Gazette.
Here’s another answer. This was a close one, and 24% is the majority here. It says, “The writer responds to Jenkins and says he will only write the story anonymously because of how dangerous it could be.” These types of things come together in this dated web app you can only access if you hold a Writer’s Room NFT. That comes to setting the guidelines for how the story is written. We believe that community generative and crowdsourced content can make for a better book than what any of us could do on our own.
You can see why I was excited to be involved in this project. How cool is that? I have never done anything like this. It’s such an exciting concept, and the results are so great. If you read the book, The Wisdom of Crowds, there’s great wisdom in the community and the choices they are making. I’m so nervous to say I’m outsourcing these decisions to the community, then they make these incredible decisions, and you end up writing the book that’s exactly right for them. We are co-creating the book. How cool is it to have this many additional authors?
This is not your only foray into this idea of decentralized publishing. Talk to us for a moment about how you think decentralized publishing fits into the broader spectrum of what’s possible with NFTs. How important of innovation is this in the grander scheme?
We all have an incredible opportunity with Web 3.0. Besides everything that technology makes possible, we can try to right the wrongs of Web 2.0. The Web 2.0 was supposed to level the playing field, and instead, the playing field became grossly disproportional. We all have this opportunity and not Jenkins, myself, and what you are doing with the show.
Everybody has an opportunity to work, fight, and lead by example that model. You are referring to it to that end as an experiment, which is not about the creation side but it’s different than what Jenkins is doing. If I understand it correctly, Jenkins, the readers participate in the backend of the book as well, not just the NFT holders. Is that correct?
You can find great wisdom in the community and the choices they’re making. Click To Tweet
That’s exactly right. Each of our NFT holders who licensed an avatar to the work end up in a pool of licensors who split 50% of the net profit that the book makes. Beyond that, each of our NFC holders receives a free book NFT for having contributed. That book NFT has an entire roadmap that has game theory associated with it. It’s taking the NFT and burning the NFP for other things.
Participating in the creation of this book is as much about participating in the business of it, and the strategy of future NFT drops as it is in plot and creative direction. All of those pieces are coming together. Neil, you know better than anybody that bringing a successful book to market requires incredible creativity. There’s an industry around bringing a book to market that is also an important piece of that puzzle to make something successful. Our community gets to participate in all of it.
The follow-up question I have for you, Jenkins, is around the community and the role that they have played in the process of launching such a unique co-created adventure. What have been some of the challenges that have come along with the ride? How has the community been part of addressing those challenges?
An immediate challenge comes to mind. This is more of a one-off instance than something that happens that’s more systemic. Our Discord was hacked. Somebody came in, impersonated Jenkins the Valet, banned all of the admins, and then brought to market a fake scam Jenkins project. Unfortunately, that’s a challenge that comes with any project in the space these days. It’s one of the biggest issues when we are on the precipice of mainstream adoption with NFTs. When events like this come up, it sheds a negative light on the entire space.
Interestingly, having a strong community is an incredible way to play defense against some of these challenges. In that instance, for example, when the Discord was hacked, we had hundreds of community members who immediately stepped up. It was in the middle of the night on the East Coast where my partner and I were. We were asleep but we’ve got all these community members. For some, it was the morning for them in Asia but they are on Discord and Twitter posting, acknowledging what has gone wrong, looking out for each other, and things like that.
That’s a one-off example of why community building matters so much. It matters when things are going well because you’ve got this amazing and positive energy where people are pinging off of each other, and great ideas come up. It also helps when things go bad because you’ve got people there to support you. If I was going to give a broader example of challenges that come from having such a big community, it’s an ambitious endeavor to try to license so many avatars to a book. We’ve got over 2,000 now.
That’s a challenging thing to do in a distributed way, and there’s no answer for it. There are a lot of moving pieces, and you need to equip people with the information that they need to make decisions. You can’t run everything through yourself. That feels uncomfortable when you have been programmed to do things in a Web 2.0 way. For us, we are taking it as it goes, trying our best and to write well, and provide assets for our communities so that they can make decisions based on where we are trying to go. Doing it on such a broad scale has been difficult.
**It’s new muscle memory. I’m thinking about a conversation we had with **FCF
I’m sure you will love it.
I will see you there, Neil.
Thanks for joining.
A Charizard Pokémon card.
What is the most recent thing you purchased?
Groceries.
You traded for ETH, not USTT.
For me, this is Fiat now. It’s unsettling.
What is your most prized possession?
What are you going to do after the show?
I’m going to go back for another one.
Important Links:
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Elon Musk: The Architect of Tomorrow – Artcile
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FCF – Previous Episode
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@JenkinsTheValet – Twitter
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iTunes – Edge of NFT
About Jenkins The Valet
Jenkins the Valet is a digital character and writer created by Tally Labs, a content and technology company in the NFT space. His Twitter following has grown to more than 12,000 followers since May when he first shared his origin story online.
About Neil Strauss
Neil Strauss is a ten-time New York Times best-selling author. His books, The Game and Rules Of The Game, for which he went undercover in a secret society of pickup artists for two years, made him an international celebrity and an accidental hero to men around the world. Both books topped The New York Times best-seller list and were #1 on Amazon, and the former has the dubious distinction of being the most stolen book at Barnes & Noble besides The Bible.