Top Podcasts
Jeremy Ryan AKA NFT Demon Of Super Gremlin Society, Plus: Casey Craig Of ARCrypto, Why These Gary Vee & Mr. Dayger Músic Vids Are Viral, And More…
Jeremy Ryan was diagnosed with terminal cancer and was told he had no chance of surviving. But by some miracle, he did not only survive, but he even became a remarkable artist. He now uses his passion for creating NFT art collections to support cancer patients. Jeremy joins Jeff Kelley, Eathan Janney, and Josh Kriger to share how his collection Super Gremlin Society documents his battle with brain cancer and allocates funding for cancer-related research. For this episode’s sponsored Hot Topic, Casey Craig of ARCrypto jumps in to share how they educate people getting into cryptocurrency and DeFi. And for the show’s brand new segment Why It Is Viral, they feature a video of Gary Vee pushing his interviewee into an information overload and a pretty sick bassline from a music NFT sample by Mr. Dayger.
Listen to the podcast here
Jeremy Ryan AKA NFT Demon Of Super Gremlin Society, Plus: Casey Craig Of ARCrypto, Why These Gary Vee & Mr. Dayger Músic Vids Are Viral, And More…
Find out how mischievous gremlins are super communities battling cancer.
What the heck banana cream jealousy is.
Plus, incredible access to education and giveaways from the Web3 Expo DC pitch winner. All these and more on this episode.
Don’t forget we put together a gathering called NFT LA a few months back that brought put thousands of the world’s doers in the NFT space. Head to NFTLA.live to get tickets to our bigger, bolder, better, but just as intimate and impactful of that happening in Los Angeles, March 20th to March 23rd 2023.
Our guest is Jeremy Ryan, the creator and artist behind six incredibly successful collections. That’s six, including Cartel Punks, Bad Ass Doggos, and GamingShiba, and he is now in his latest project Super Gremlin, which is his first collection on Ethereum. Super Gremlin Society is made up of disruptive creatures that can take anything negatively formed against them and turn it into their power, knowledge, and skills.
Together, the Super Gremlins form a courageous, bold, and resilient collective. Jeremy’s story is that he was diagnosed with brain cancer and cancer throughout his body and told he had zero chance of survival. His battle against cancer resulted in a medical miracle. He not only survived but was transformed into a remarkable artist.
His story is even more remarkable because, before his diagnosis, he had little interest in art and no detectable artistic ability. As he battled his unlikely way to remission, a profound change occurred in his brain. Medical science attribute attributes it to neuroplasticity. If an area of the brain becomes damaged, the brain can reroute processes by developing new neurological pathways.
In Jeremy’s case, he developed the ability to see the world through his own creative lens and represent it in unique digital art. Now, creating art NFT collections is his passion. It shows within a month of entering the finance smart chain, he became the largest artist on the entire chain. What an incredible story, Jeremy. I’m sure we’ll have a lot to talk about here. Welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me. One thing I do want to notate is Binance smart chain is the third-largest chain for NFTs in the entire world. It wasn’t when I started, but it is now.
It’s all because of you.
Let’s give you all the credit.
Thank you for that.
As we get into this too, we have our resident Doctor of Neuroscience here in Ethan, PhD. We’ll hear about some of the intersections. I’m sure you got a lot of questions, Ethan, but let me start. Jeremy, welcome, of course. Super Gremlin Society documents your journey from brain cancer to a real-life superhero. Walk us through this awe-inspiring journey.
In 2014, I was diagnosed with brain cancer. By 2015, it had spread from the knees to the lung to the brain. 2015 was when I was diagnosed with brain cancer. I was diagnosed with malignant fibrosis histiocytoma for the fourth time in 2014. Malignant fibrosis histiocytoma is a soft tissue cancer. By 2015, it had spread from the knee to the lung to the brain. That’s where this real transformation had taken place. I’m not sure whether it’s the brain cancer itself and the damage it did or the actual brain radiation. I did four years of brain radiation. Anyone who’s been through radiation or knows somebody who’s been through radiation, which is most people in this country, at least probably this world, knows somebody who’s been through radiation.
It’s a horrendous process. Fortunately for me, it formed new pathways in my brain that allowed me to do art. That trauma and damage that was done to my brain allowed me the artistic ability that I have now. The other part of my journey that is noteworthy is that I did it all alone. I didn’t have a family and friend support system back then. Don’t get me wrong. If it were to happen again, I would have a whole different system. Back then, I didn’t have the support system that I have now. Super Gremlin Society is an effort to make sure that nobody in this world ever doesn’t have a support system for their cancer battles or their battles with any other condition that is life threatening.
We’re not sticking just to cancer. If somebody comes in with, say, AIDS, the stigma around AIDS is a little bit different and it’s not quite as deadly as it used to be, but let’s say they are in the deadly portion of it and they want some help or let’s say if they’re not in the deadly portion of it and they still want some support and help, that’s what we’ve created this community for. Terminal illness and helping people, families, and anybody affected by it. That’s the purpose of this community.
That’s powerful stuff.
Full recognition, as I’m sure you’re well aware, stories like this are great, and then there are people that are toughing and it’s hard to find that silver lining. A lot of empathy for folks who are dealing with all sorts of issues. I want to give a shout-out to a good friend of mine, Anthony Patak, who also had a brain cancer issue developed that was diagnosed as terminal.
Some star surgeon was able to show up and remove this thing, but he was left not the capacity to control one of his arms, all these crazy things. Shout out to Gilda’s Club. I don’t know if it’s a national organization or it’s just in New York, but I know that he spent a lot of time engaging with them and they were helpful in providing a support network.
It was founded by Gilda Radner, famously from Saturday Night Live. To follow up, that’s part of what’s been fascinating to me about the brain, about how it gives us all a different window into the world. It can even change the window that you already have if you’re able to reformat the brain or learn something new. It’s fascinating. Examples like this help us learn more about what goes on.
Terminal Cancer: The brain provides a different window into the world. It can even change the window you already have if you can reformat it to learn something new.
The capacities and limits are way larger than we think. Your artistic talent’s been described as out of body where you created these six exceptional collections, and apparently, Eminem owns three of them, which is pretty awesome. I would love to hear more about the collections themselves and the process that that got you there. What was the process like?
First, let me start off with Gilda’s Club. This club is a national organization but is foreign by local chapters. That is one place that I believe that some of the money will go to. Some of the Gilda’s Clubs across the country, I believe some of the money from this project will go to because our project is geared around money going to cancer awareness and cancer research. Gilda’s Club in Dane County or Madison, Wisconsin, where I was living at the time when I was dealing with this battle, was beneficial as well. Gilda’s Club is a wonderful organization, but they’re not a national organization per se, even though they have branches all across the country.
I do believe that we will end up supporting Gilda’s Club in some of their local branches through this project. As far as my history goes, I started with Cartel Punks. Cartel Punks was a punk-type collection in the same vein as Crypto Punks. Cartel Punks was a collection that took off pretty quickly in BSC. It was the first collection ever in Binance smart chain to mint out in less than three weeks. We do have some historical precedent there. I moved to Badass Doggos. Bad Ass Doggos is the only collection that I have that hasn’t minted out. The reason for that was because a contract I had dealt with had said that it was their collection.
For a whole week, there was this he said, she said. I said it was my collection. They said it was their collection. Unfortunately, that he said, she said was enough to pretty much destroy the whole collection for a week because we had minted out about a fifth of the collection in a day and a half, and then all of a sudden, this contractor comes and says it’s theirs. What they ended up doing is they ended up draining everybody’s wallet. It was clear and indisputable who was real and who was not, but it took a week for that to happen. A week in NFT is like a year in anything else. It’s like a year in stock. It would be like a whole year of some problem in stocks that wasn’t resolved.
That was what happened with Bad Ass Doggos. We had that minted out 10,000 on BSC, and then we had GamingShiba, which minted out entirely in presale. For BSC, I became the largest artist rather quickly. Unfortunately, BSC fell down. None of those projects are rugs. All of those projects still have open socials, open Telegrams. Telegram is what BSC uses. I know for people who are reading this who were Solana and ETH, it’s a little weird, but Telegram is what BSC uses. We did have Discords for two of my projects and nobody used them. I stuck with the Telegrams, but my Telegrams are still open for e single one of the projects.
Not a single one has been rugged. That is one thing that you have with me, is you have a long history of consistent non-rugged, is the best way to put it. That’s where I don’t get people like Zagabond. I don’t get this whole notion of in order to learn, you have to rug. I don’t get that because you can easily keep your socials open. The community might die down, but that’s even easier to keep up with than when the community was active. It may pick up at some point. You may end up getting a pump at some point that you never expected because you’re still around and nobody else is.
Terminal Cancer: There is the notion that you have to rug in order to learn. However, you can easily keep your socials open. The community might die down, but that’s even easier to keep up with than when it was active.
That’s what I’m seeing in BSC. All these other projects are rugging because BSC tanks, so there’s no money coming in. There’s no money coming into me for my BSC projects. There’s no money coming in for anybody for their BSC projects. They’re all rugging, but I would never do that because it doesn’t take much to keep that community open. Once the next bull run comes, you’re going to be looking pretty good. Right now, I’m moving to ETH where you can build a project in the bear market. BSC, I don’t think it’s possible to build a project in the bear market, but ETH, there’s enough liquidity to build a project during the bear market.
#NoRug. This path you were on, we talked about all these projects. Now we got Super Gremlin Society. It’s 10,000 project. You got a number of different elements to it. We wanted to give you a chance to talk about some of those nuts and bolts for our readers.
The one thing about Super Gremlin Society that’s a little bit different than most projects and all of the projects so far that I’ve done that I’m lucky to have been the benefit is that we’ve been able to put a massive amount of money behind marketing and PR. We’ve been able to put a massive amount of money behind our Metaverse Club. We do have a Metaverse Club that is completely and entirely built before mint. That will be Token Gated after mint. You will only be able to get to the club after mint.
We’re going to host financial education ceremony celebrations with people in real estate, people in crypto, people in all sorts of things at that private club. We’ll have events with DJs. We’ll have a bunch of fun stuff going on at that private club, but we also, before format, have a real-life event. I believe we’ll get into that a little bit later.
Many cool things about it. Also again, to reiterate, we already talked about it, but again, allocating some of those proceeds to cancer-related nonprofit research. Kudos.
Thank you.
It’s fascinating stuff. I’m realizing we’re going to move on to another segment, a few questions to our Quick Hitters. We didn’t ask you this before the show started, and maybe you would’ve mentioned it, but is there a loss of brain function affects the way that we ask you questions? There was a woman that I heard interviewed on another podcast, and she’s like, “Bear with me. There may be things I forget in the middle or this or that.” Have you remained pretty functional in terms of day-to-day conversation and things like that?
For the most part, my day-to-day function is the same as it was before. There are some small little things like I can’t drive a stick shift car anymore, where I used to be able to drive a stick shift car before. Although thankfully, that’s not something that gets too much into your life nowadays. There are certain processes within the brain that don’t act the same way that they used to. Fortunately, none of those have to do with my ability to run a project. That helps out.
I would trade stick shift car driving for artistic abilities.
I was in Scotland and Ireland and I rented a car and I’m driving a stick shift, sitting on the right side of a car, driving on the left side of the road and shifting with my left hand. That was a challenge. It’s all manual over there. I would avoid that, regardless.
Another question I was curious about other upcoming campaigns that you’re going to be having leading up to the mint, and how our readers can participate. That’s part of why we’re talking to you. I’m sure people are interested. How do you suggest people pay attention and remain able to keep involved?
We’ll have different campaigns going through our Discord and Twitter. I recommend people follow our Twitter and Discord. They’ll see the campaigns going on. Right now, even for some people who might be reading this, they might be interested in our Discord giveaway competition. Right now, we’re giving away money for the person who invites the most legitimate people to Discord. If you’re planning on inviting thoughts that won’t work, we have a system that tracks that.
It’s not going to work too well, but if you invite legitimate NFT people to our Discord, then the person who does the most by November 6th, 2022, which still we got quite a decent amount of time, then the person who does the most invites by November 6th will end up winning 1 of 3 prizes, $100, $50, or $25. That’ll be in USD. Anybody can take part in that. There will be similar competitions like that, similar engagement types of competitions. We’re looking for engagement because that’s what drives NFTs, which is engagement? There will be different types of competitions to try to boost engagement and try to get people more engaged.
We talk about it all the time. We have a lot of things we think about around engagement and community involvement in our world. It’s stuff that we care deeply about. Once you cross that threshold into the world of engagement and community and building that rapport with people in those relationships, for any community, that’s an inflection point. Speaking of that, one of those places that you do that, and we do that, and most people do that, is when you’re live and in-person. You have some cool stuff forthcoming here. You got a DCENTRAL at Art Basel in Miami coming up here. What should we expect from Super Gremlin Society?
That’s our first in real life event. We have a booth at DCENTRAL and Art Basel. DCENTRAL is one of the biggest conferences of the year. NFT LA is another one of the biggest conferences of the year, but that’s at a different time of the year. DCENTRAL is also one of the biggest conferences of the year. We have a booth there, so people can come meet me. I’m going to be the one staffing the booth.
People can come to do a meet and greet, come meet me, come talk with me, ask whatever questions you have during that. Also, the other thing that I want to mention is I will be there for several days after DCENTRAL. I don’t have a particular plan. If people are there for Art Basel and they want to meet up with me, I’m more than willing to meet up.
Let’s meet up. Let’s smoke a joint. Let’s have a good time. Let’s say hi to each other. Let’s get to know each other if you want to. Feel free to hit me up @NFTDemon420. That’s my personal Twitter. If you hit the Super Gremlin Society Twitter, it might be one of the social media people that responds, but if you hit my personal Twitter @NFTDemon420, then I will be the one who responds. I’m down to meet up with whoever is in Miami during Art Basel and have a good time. That’s the whole point. The whole point is to meet up with people.
Getting people together, inspiration, education, connection, little bit of entertainment, lots of fun. Big shout out to the DCENTRAL crew, Justin, Michael, Esther, that crew. I’m close with them. I love what they do. Great event. Check out Jeremy and Super Gremlin Society out there, for sure. Much love.
Art Basel is a great opportunity to have a great time. My favorite comment that I like to pull out e once in a while from Josh when we were doing things in Miami during Art Basel. We rolled up to this yacht party and he was like, “I was already on this yacht a couple of days ago.” Once you’re saying stuff like that, you’re having too good of a time, I suppose.
I don’t know that I’ve heard that one from you.
It was totally authentic. He was not joking. He was like, “I was already on this yacht. I know this yacht.” I can’t wait to get to the Quick Hitters. I know this is going to be super fun. Last question in the interview portion here, what other projects have you been following in the Web3 space? What’s inspiring you these days?
One project I’ve been following pretty closely has been Sappy Seals. Their community has taken over Twitter and now in Reddit. The new thing is Reddit. That’s starting to take over crypto. Twitter is the intersection between Reddit. Sappy Seals has been doing a good job of creating fun vibes and a fun community. I was in Psychedelics Anonymous. I was close with them, but unfortunately, they screwed me over. Right now, Sappy Seals is the only blue chip that people would know that I’m invested in. I’ve got a bunch of DEGEN PLAYs that I’m invested in as well. It’s hard with a DEGEN PLAYS to get all of those out. Plus, they’re still DEGEN PLAYS, so I’m not going to go too much into those on here because this isn’t the format for DEGEN PLAYS.
Terminal Cancer: Sappy Seals has taken overTwitter, Reddit, and crypto, and they are doing a good job of creating a fun community.
That’s true, but fun nonetheless.
That will be the format for DEGEN PLAYS. A badge of honor.
You’re covering the top 1%. DEGEN PLAYS are at the top 1%.
This is true, but they can always dream. That wraps segment one. We appreciate it. Super Gremlin Society, your whole story, it’s super inspiring. We’re excited about where this can go next for you.
I would say a baseball card.
You still got a collection floating around?
You had that eye toward that artistic beauty.
I learned win-win propositions.
An NFT.
Anything you care to disclose on that one?
Rug back from the dead.
An NFT.
There’s a theme here, guys.
My most prized possession is my dog.
His name’s Riot.
What kind is he?
He’s part mastiff, part pit bull.
His nails are well-trimmed.
Persistence, without a doubt.
I was giving my dog belly rubs.
Would you ever run for public office?
I’ll teach you, Jeremy.
Thank you. It was a ton of fun.
Thank you, guys, so much for having me.
Should we try this next segment, Jeff?
That’s a music NFT.
Maybe they were buying lights.
That was a mutual friend.
Important Links
-
@NFTDemon420 - Twitter
-
@Casey_Craig - Instagram
-
@SwamiCrypto - Instagram
-
Spotify - Edge of NFT
-
iTunes - Edge of NFT