Pizza as a Public Good w/ Snax from Pizza DAO

On this episode of Public Goods Podcast, we have Snax, Dread Pizza Roberts of Pizza DAO, covering his journey organizing from early Bitcoin meetups, to building community in the early Ethereum ecosystem starting Pizza DAO, evolving to a global organization, and the future of the food based network states. .

Snax Twitter

https://twitter.com/snack_man

Pizza DAO Discord  https://discord.com/invite/PizzaDAO 

Organize your own global pizza https://parties.pizzadao.xyz/ 

Rare Pizzas https://www.rarepizzas.com/ https://twitter.com/RarePizzas

Pizza DAO Mixtape mixtape.pizzadao.xyz

Clothing brand pirateprintingcompany.com

https://globalpizzaparty.xyz 

https://thinkingaboutit.xyz 

https://sheeets.xyz 

Mentioned

• 4156 https://twitter.com/punk4156?lang=en 
• Nouns Vision Glasses https://opensea.io/collection/nouns-vision-glasses?tab=items 
• College DAO https://collegedao.io/ 
• Colored Coins https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Colored_Coins 
• BluntDAO https://bluntdao.org 
• GroundsDAO https://groundsdao.wtf/ 
• Bored and Hungry Brand https://justboredandhungry.com/ 
• Solana Pay https://solanapay.com/ 
• SuperFluid Streaming https://www.superfluid.finance/ 

Public Goods Podcast https://publicgoods.fm 

Public Goods RSS https://publicgoods.fm/listen 

Public Goods Podcast Twitter https://x.com/publicgoodsfm 

Potlock Youtube https://youtube.com/@Potlock 

Transcript

0:00

Hello everybody on this another edition of the public goods podcast we have in my opinion one of the most public goods of all time and successful case studies Pizza DAO and Snax one of the stewards or delivery people for these great pizzas and Yeah, I think there is a lot to be learned if you don't know about Pizza DAO their DAO about pizza and Yeah, they they not only throw global pizza parties around the world, but they're one of the only Web3 communities that consistently ship exactly what they promise, which is pizza. And they've never failed one time in any of my experiences around any event worldwide. So yeah, welcome Snax to the pod. How you doing? thanks. And yeah, and my title within Pizza Now, along with some others, is Dread Pizza Roberts. This is what we eat. Yeah, can you give some context on that name, actually? Uh, so Dread Pirate Roberts, right, is, uh, is actually what Ross Ulbrich went by, uh, the Silk Road guy. And, uh, and, you know, it's the idea of, I think it's the, the, the way that Dread Pirate Roberts is set up right in the, uh, in the Princess Bride is that it's this, uh, you know, this leader that can always be replaced within this organization. So the organization sort of lives on with the new Dread Pirate Roberts. And that's kind of the idea of Dread Pizza Roberts, I guess. is that it's to be replaceable. that is an amazing backstory. Free Ross Albright. Shout out to one of the earliest use cases of Web3. And I think a lot of our first introductions into the space. And I wanted to kind of give a little backstory before we go into the pizza, like, Dao and everything in terms of the evolution. Like, kind of how did you originally... get into the space, was it inspired by the dead pirate or was it more like, kind of like, yeah, what re -impaired you into the space? was spending a lot of time on the internet in like 2010, 2011 and just really deep in like tiny chat and I think I was on Twitter, I was in like random old Facebook groups and just spending. I had just dropped out of college and I was just like, I was living in my buddy's grow house and just like a little depressed honestly. And I heard about LulzSec had hacked Sony. If you remember, I don't know if people remember this, but they were just clowning on Sony publicly for how poor their security practices were. And they had ripped a bunch of emails and passwords out of them and they're making funny videos. And they started accepting donations in Bitcoin. And I studied math before I left school. And so I looked at the white paper and I said, oh, a currency backed by math seems good. People agree on math. So I started buying. And every few months to a year, I felt like I would have another eureka moment. Like, oh, shit, Bitcoin is really going to do it. Like, it's, you know, there's a lot of value here. just for having different kind of moments of clarity. And so I started organizing community around Bitcoin pretty early in Philadelphia and a little bit in Portland before I left. I came back home, I'm from Philly, and actually started making t -shirts that were like, I sold for Bitcoin, and one of them is a Silk Road shirt. that actually if you've seen the Silk Road documentary that Alex Winter made from Bill and Ted, which is a great, great one. I think it's called Deep Web. Amir Taki, who's like a Bitcoin core dev, kind of a wild guy. He fought with the Peshmerga and he's just been all over the world, but he is wearing my Pirate Printing Company Silk Road shirt in that movie. So. So I was pretty early and then learned about NFTs through a co -organizer of my Bitcoin group in Philly. He took me to this, it turns out, famous event in January of 2018 in New York where I saw Matt Hall and John Pence from CryptoPunks and I saw the Dada folks and Decentraland and RarePepaG community and just was sort of pushed right into the deep end of the NFT scene at the time and went home, bought CryptoPunks and just kind of like started working on a project that I never launched, a Tulip NFT, which we maybe we'll launch it one day. We always say, this is the spring, but it hasn't happened yet. So, you don't want to launch something bad, not on the blockchain. Yeah, that's incredible. There's a couple threads I want to pick on there, especially like there's the whole coordination that pizza doubt. But early on, I think the essence of the Web3 before you, it was even called Web3, the crypto community before it was even called that it was just Bitcoin. And a lot of that happened early at these meetups and from organizers there. And a lot of times with, you know, big, you know, billion dollar blockchains and now professionally event organizers, it takes way more. capital to do something so simple. But back in the day, it was way more lean, way more just do it at a train station and bring some pizza. So can you kind of outline what the culture was and how those early meetups started? It's hilarious you said train station, because that is exactly where I hosted the Philly meetups, was that 30th Street train station. And it's funny how it came full circle, because we would actually just push tables together outside the Pizza Hut in the train station. And it would be like 30 people, sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less, and just exchanging information. And now we come full circle, Pizza DAOs throwing these like, We throw a 700 person pizza party in Denver and like comparing that to, you know, a bunch of people pushing together tables in a public train station outside of Pizza Hut. Yeah, we've definitely come a long way. Yeah, I mean, and there's still meetups like that. I think it's to the very core. So is there like, how did that original outreach happen? Are you doing stuff on Reddit forums? Are you reaching to the Bitcoin core devs? What is the formation? Is there programming involved? So that was mostly through meetup. Meetup was pretty huge back then. I think it's still people still use it, but it's not as huge. I came back to Philly from Portland. I was already going to a bunch of meetups out there. Like there were just tons of interesting ones. I went to this statistician meetup where I learned tons of interesting stuff. I went to, there were some Bitcoin meetups out in Portland. So I just hooked up with the Bitcoin meetup and it was already going and I became. I joined the organizing team because I was just, you know, I was ready to educate and I was ready to show up and help plan. And I, you know, started bringing us to the train station because it was just a really easy place to meet. And yeah, we built a Facebook page. We built, I think we had a Twitter. We may have posted on Bitcoin Talk. But we would just go out to all the different communities. Like, did we post on Reddit? Maybe. I don't remember. But Meetup drove a ton because people would just go on Meetup and search cryptocurrency. They would search Bitcoin. And we made sure we would do. It's really just consistency, right? We would have an event at least every month. And eventually, people just, the word gets out. And how would you describe the culture of the meetups and the ethos at this snapshot in history? Is it more anarchist? Is it more developer related? Is it people just wanting to learn? Not so many devs, a couple devs, more anarchist, libertarian, tech nerds, revolutionaries, people who wanted to see new systems developed on earth for coordination. So we were talking about DAOs at these early meetups. And we didn't, I don't think we fully understood that humans were the hands and feet of DAOs. And we thought about DAOs as these more autonomous entities that were even more like living as code. And maybe we'll get there actually. But you know, we would talk about how like, oh, it's a cell phone taxi, but you know, in practice, we're definitely not there. And where we are now, it's DAOs are very human. So like what like were there early attempts at you know, dialifying these meetups or even dialifying organizations and like what did what did that look like? you repeat? There was a little lag. Yeah, like where were there early attempts at like, dowifying, you know, these meetups or any organizations that this early on, like before the Snapshots and the colonies and the, the, the, the Aragon's and the tools that we have like today, like what, what did that even begin to look like on Bitcoin? Like, you know, I was on the colored coins mailing list and people were talking about that stuff. And then when the ICOs started coming out, you know, in, in 2017, like people were talking about those, but in terms of like community organizing, um, and treasury management, we were definitely not. Even we had no treasury and what coordination there was, was within the team of moderators. I mean, I do think that in some ways, um, Internet communities are a precursor to DAOs maybe in a weird sense, or at least I think many of them maybe can be ported into the DAO ecosystem. Certainly admin controls and permissions and ownerships, they vary across all the different platforms, whether you're on Meetup or Reddit or Facebook or now Warpcast or... Or Twitter. I think that control over admin keys is pretty important. I like another thing I do. I run a Facebook group in Philly which has like 14 ,000 people in it these days that's based in South Philly. And it's the third iteration because two of them got deleted or or you know taken over because of like admin control problems so. Maybe that's a bit of a rabbit hole, but I do think there's something to be done with. DAOs and access control to organization. Yeah, OpSec and Managing Keys, especially in these poorest organizations, are utmost essential. And people stay at companies they're at for two years. And it's really hard for, especially a lot of these things that come out of passion, to keep these people engaged. And when there's money and treasuries involved, that's one of the biggest fears of a lot of these crypto projects. And you also mentioned color coins. I don't want to go over that. That's some OG stuff I think a lot of people in the audience won't recognize. We have Ordinals nowadays, but there was already Coins and there was Pepe's and all this before Pepe's on Ethereum. Can you kind of outline what those were and how those emerged? Colored coin was a labeling system for Bitcoin, right? And it was a way to like XCP actually used this, these ideas, right? That was Counterparty that issued the Rare Pepe's. So it was, you know, it was the precursor to a lot of this stuff. And I think it was made easier with some... with some later additions to like, I think Taproot is a thing that really made Ornoles feasible. And now they're pushing for the Opcat change as well, right? Which just makes deploying it easier. But this was the early strain of thought. Like, of course we were thinking about, you know, how do we make anything on these blockchains? Like that was always, I think, the goal. Yes, so what kind of changed from the realization of color coins to the event in 2018 and going home and buying crypto punks on Ethereum? Like what what was really enabled that kind of allowed a new class of assets? So I another legs like I heard going home and buying CryptoPunks. So what changed for me though like between colored coins and that I think it was just time and it was the ecosystem developing and This was pretty early, I mean I was it was January of 2018. So CryptoPunks had only been out for a few months like they launched in I think mid to late 2017. And I bought them, they were a hundred bucks each, like 0 .1 to 0 .13 ETH was what I was paying per punk. So it was like there was only, there was CryptoKitties and there were CryptoPunks. There were a bunch of like kind of crappy early NFTs that maybe weren't so cool. And then there was Dada and Decentraland. And that was it. There were not so many. projects out there. So, and we have hepes, right? and then so when was kind of the gap between this and Pizza DAO? Like what actually happened? Was this a direct, hey, we like need, we've already been doing this pizza thing, we need, we'll do NFTs on it? Like what was kind of the eureka moment? I hung out in the punk community for years, right? On Discord. I'm a mod actually today since like, you know, it's changed a lot over the years and the NFT scene didn't really pop off until 2020, like late 2020. And I know, There's a lot of history there that people don't really know that happened pretty quickly, you know, month after month that I think is responsible for punks raising in price and then the whole ecosystem that kind of followed. Um, and clubhouse was huge as a part of this, I think for onboarding retail and education. I was, I was pretty early to that. I joined clubhouse in, well, I was actually kind of late to clubhouse, uh, but I was early to the NFT scene on clubhouse and helped, I think helped really. Kick it off because I had a lot of knowledge from having been in Ecosystem so long and there was just not that much stuff to know and I knew it So I just shared my knowledge on Clubhouse from I think I joined in November 2020 and Then was I was just building community there and so that was actually the seed of the pizza doubt community It really came from that Clubhouse NFT community that's also a very historic piece of time, especially with COVID. Everyone's at home. Everyone's trying to get these exclusive invites to club out. I know people spend spending days actually building communities and curating there. And I've heard a lot of OG communities come out of there, like people talk like C club and things like that. were really like bred from the whole clubhouse era. So what was that kind of coordination of, all right, we're going to do a Pizza DAO. What was the origin? Was it, okay, let's start doing meetups. Let's drop like a Rare Pepes NFT. Like how was that kind of coordinated? first, I was talking to people a lot about building blockchain accounting systems for small business so they could be tokenized and owned locally. Because from the beginning, for me, cryptocurrency is about reinventing economic systems for the future that we want. And that's about strong communities, which I think is about locking wealth in communities and also about properly valuing the local commerce, which I think our system doesn't do a perfect job of because banks don't have the time or inclination necessarily, right, to look at a small business and understand what its value is to the community because many of those people working there don't even live in that community the small business is serving. So maybe moving that finance towards the neighborhood. is a good path. So that was where I was coming from. And people would just glaze over about that. Like it's just a lot. Whereas packaging that within a pizza box is a lot more attractable for people. So that was sort of how that developed for me. And... And I was already running a lot of rooms on there. So one day in one of my rooms, um, someone brought up the, like this woman, Monica brought up the idea of, of making an NFT that was like the hash masks. And I was like, Oh yeah, we'll make, you know, Rare pizzas and we'll have an individual artists for every topping. And so we made this Google sheet that was just open edit and we said, Hey, have that it artists of clubhouse and if the artists of clubhouse sign up for a topping. And we had a hundred people sign up in the first few days and opened a Discord which grew to hundreds of members really quickly. And then we increased our toppings. We allowed 200 and then we settled on letting 314 artists in. And this happened February 18th. I started talking about Pizzadel a lot in January of 2021, but the Discord... launched in February, February 18th. We had an NFT actually we launched on March 15th and the initial sale raised like a bit over 300 ETH. And then two months later we threw our first global pizza party. So it was super fast. you already NFT poppings? Was this right before then was by the smart chain out where people doing like pancake swap and names like, OK, OK, that's that's where we were. was we were right after hash masks aren't we really starting to TV for board apes? and There were there were not that many projects yet, you know punks were really Becoming noticed and understood especially because everyone was wearing their punk on Twitter and on Clubhouse and then You know, so we launched right before the kind of like PFP season really hit and took hold after the board apes. Binance punks had just minted and I remember all the crypto punks were complaining and I was telling them, y 'all like the whole point is that we have provenance, who cares? So actually illegalpunks .com is a website where I've archived some of the memes they were making, which I thought were pretty funny. So, Yeah. So we were just right at the beginning of that. And then it was this crazy rush to onboard, um, pizzerias for May 22nd and to distribute the money and get everyone their stickers and their brand packages and like, and really spread the word. And, and it, yeah, we ended up spending, I think we, we deployed like $300 ,000 on May 22nd. 2021 directly to pizzerias. Well, and so that was the initial launch was the NFT sale and then actual Global Pizza Day. Can you go over a little bit? We have Global Pizza Day coming up again, you know, May 22nd, it's March now. And so what is Global Pizza Day? What's kind of the significance behind that date? Bitcoin Pizza Day is a celebration of the first Bitcoin exchange for real world good, which was pizza. This guy, Laszlo Hanyic, he traded 10 ,000 Bitcoin for two pizzas. And this was May 22nd, 2010. So, you know, very early. It actually took him four days to get the pizzas. He posted on May 18th. And then this guy, Jeremy Sturdivant is his name. He ended up Buying the pizzas from Papa John's for he called in the order on his behalf. So we celebrate that because You know, that is the first time that we really exchanged anyone exchange cryptocurrency for something quote -unquote Useful or you know or in the real world I joke that it's like when the metaverse reached out and touched the physical world and So we celebrate that because It's you know, what's global the Internet's global Cryptocurrency Bitcoin is global And pizza is global. So these are three easy things to connect the world around. And they're also hard to disagree with, I think. The internet is here. I think we like it. Pizza is good. And cryptocurrency is here to stay. So these are three easy things that I think the whole world can come together and throw a pizza around. I mean, a pizza party around, yeah. Throw a pizza. Yeah, and so can you kind of talk about that coordination? Like what was the initial outreach for like, I remember getting involved, we did a pizza day in Africa and it was like, it was kind of incredible to see different nodes pop up and there just be a system for reusing the branding, how to reach out to community partners, like Discord onboarding, and then really coordinating around having like hundreds of cities throw a pizza party. So like, what was that? logistic wise, like early on look like. The first year, the first year it was COVID. So we did a totally different, we went directly to pizzerias because we couldn't host events in most places. The people weren't going to gather. So we actually called pizzerias and we said, hey, we'd like to buy $500 a pizza, but we actually want you to just give it away. And we're going to tip $125 on top for the trouble because we know it's not easy to just go out and give pizza away. But you know. And they were like, what? And they would transfer us to the manager and we would convince them and show them, you know, tell them the story and then send them the money ultimately and, and the graphics and you know, they gave away pizza and they had a lot of fun. So, so the first year was really focused. It was almost like an airdrop to local pizzerias of like, you know, $300,000 in pizza that they got to give away. Um, we also bought $55,000 worth of slice codes. I think we're $20 or $25 at a time and just distributed them like crazy, like online, just sent them everywhere. FaZe Clan gave a ton of them out on Twitch streams. We gave a ton out to Twitter. We gave them to celebrities. It was hilarious. We bought, if you remember, Anthony Pompuliano launched his Bitcoin pizza brand that year and there were 10 ,000 Bitcoin pizzas. We actually purchased 10 % of the supply and miracle them to the people who ordered them. They got their pizza for free from pizza now. So that was the first year. The second year, we realized that we could actually throw events. So we sort of transitioned and focused. We still did a lot of pizzeria support, but we focused more on bringing people together. And that's the direction that it's taken since. you know, the third year we just did, we had 116 cities. I think the year before we probably did like 60, you know, somewhere between 60 and 80. And, you know, and now we're looking at 150. So how we coordinate that is spreadsheets and it's like, it's Google docs, it's telegram chats, and it's, it's Figma for, for, um, assets and it's Twitter. for some announcements to the global community. It's a website to direct people. GlobalPizzaParty.xyz has a list of all the cities so people can kind of funnel into their local. And then we used Eventbrite to post the events, or some people used Luma. And that was kind of the stack, like organizationally. We used Mercury to do our... you know, our banking, which has been really useful because we can mint debit cards. So that was really great. People, you know, we could give a local host their own debit card, just send them a screenshot of a virtual card that we minted that had a limit on it of what we expected them to spend. But like really it kind of it came back to a ton of spreadsheets and telegram chats fundamentally. Yeah, and I remember even on the spreadsheets people kind of requesting funds and they're like they're being fiat options They're being options on polygon and x -dai there was it was really accommodating to like whatever you need to get this pizza Pizza DAO got you and That yeah, that's that's incredible So how does that work in terms of like people always ask me and the first time I heard about Pizza DAO was I ended up being at a Pizza DAO party in Miami, I think early Basel a couple of years ago. So this might have been like before the second global pizza day. And then I was like, what? Like there's a pizza, there's a pizza down that gives away pizza? Like what? That's, crypto is awesome. Like Web3 is awesome. And yeah. And then one of the main questions is like, how does pizza now still have money for all this pizza? Yeah. So the answer is we sold our NFT. It's actually still for sale. So people are still minting it every now and RarePizzas.com/mint I think one day it will mint out. People will realize that we're a historic organization, a DAO that has really delivered a lot of pizza. So that's how we built our initial treasury and we continue to get some sales. But we've actually really transitioned. We get a ton of sponsorship and grant support these days because... We're bringing out we're doing two events a month almost now at conferences and we're bringing out routinely, you know 150 300 in Denver 700, you know huge amounts of people and we're pretty good We're pretty good at throwing pizza parties. I gotta say like we've been throwing a lot we have thrown hundreds of pizza parties as a global community at this point, so Yeah, we our pizza parties are pretty much break even, you know, it's not like we're And it's a lot of volunteers. It's a lot of volunteer effort. We're doing our best to start to pay our community. And you can even check mafia .rarepieces.com has like our four payment epics that we've done so far. And we've been starting to build in some of our costs like on our events, but we're really breaking even. These events are not making big money for the DAO, but we, I mean. We wouldn't do it any other way. Like these events have been great. I think, I think we're doing a lot for the community. We're doing a lot for, for pizza down. You know, everybody knows us now having from all these events we've thrown. It's been, it's been quite a transition over the years from like, Oh wow. Pizza down. Like what? That's silly. That sounds fun. What's that too? I, Oh, pizza now. Like you, you fed me pizza. Oh, sorry. Bad podcast etiquette. Um, you, you fed me pizza in like, You know, in Miami, in Dubai, in who knows, you know? And that's really rewarding, actually. Now it's been a beautiful thing. I've seen you everywhere. I've been working at Nia for a long time. We've been supporting in terms of pizza parties. I think we did one most recently at Lisbon. I saw you on the street randomly in Singapore on to another pizza party. I'm like, what? Max? It wasn't even near any venue space. I was like, what? We got a pizza party there. I remember seeing in Vietnam. And so where have your... been your most memorable pizza doubt moments in the world and where has the pizza taken you? man, for me, I mean, traveling, like we did a little, there were a ton of events in Asia over in Southeast Asia, right? Last year. So that trip was really amazing. Just like when I, our Korean community has been huge from the very beginning. Actually, like I think almost 10 % of the pizza toppings on our NFT were made by. Korean artists because one of our really early members, Wadji, is he just knows everybody over there and was super early to NFTs. And he's like a very successful rapper. He's a great dude. And so going there and getting to meet our community there and then, you know, and then hitting Singapore and just starting to meet the Pizza DAO hosts from all over the world. Like I would just be going around and, oh, like, oh my God, you know, you hosted the event in Indonesia or, you know, or, and, um, like getting to put like a hug even on like this, this telegram, um, name that I've been interacting with was, I mean, incredible. Uh, so just, so that's like the most rewarding thing for me is being at an event somewhere in the world. and meeting a host from one, you know, from two hosts from different parts of the world and getting to introduce them to each other. Be like, oh, pizza mafia, Frankfurt, you know, meet pizza mafia, Maui, you know, like that. And then, and then they can tell each other, right? Their pizza mafia name, you know, which immediately they know the other person's favorite topping and like their, their mafia movie. Have you gotten a pizza now, a pizza mafia name? Nah, I don't have the pizza mafia name, no. I like mushrooms. what's your favorite mafia movie? I like it's been it's been a while honestly I used to consume a lot of content but um Yeah, I don't I don't really I don't really remember maybe maybe Scarface is a good choice. So then, I think we have a mushroom Montana, but I don't think, oh, and we have a mushroom Pacino, but I don't think we have a Manolo mushroom. Is that me? Did I just? Okay, I gotta get back on Discord. I'm just now getting back on Discord. I've completely converted to Telegram, but I need to claim the name. using both. You could also become a junior. Sometimes we could be like mushroom, Pacino Jr., which is kind of funny. But Manolo mushroom is pretty sick, man. Double M. But yes, speaking on the thread of just international expansion and going around the world, I mean, it's incredible. Just as a volunteer effort alone, I think international NGOs should be studying Pizza DAO to see how people coordinate and how people are truly passionate about the mission. And yeah, so how does that coordination work and what are some unexpected like... places where pizza parties have been thrown that people would be surprised that this is happening. So yeah, bringing people together is about finding, you just need one person who is passionate about throwing the party and you need the right, like I think our number, which we say, look, we have $625 towards you buying pizza and throwing a pizza party. I think it's a great number where it's like, that is enough money to have a pretty decent pizza party. Like you can get a bunch of pizza for that. So it's. So it's an offer they can't refuse, I think, a little bit, right? It's like, hey, here's $625, go throw a pizza party, and then we throw in a bunch of marketing material and a deck and do all, you know, we have all the design, all the hard parts are sort of like set. We have a template for the event, you know, we make it, we really put you on rails to have a solid event, and we give you an opportunity to grow your organization, right? Because like, Most of the people who end up coordinating our local events are already local community leaders. That's the point. We, we, the first thing I ask my local contact is, Hey, who are the local blockchain community leaders in your, you know, in your city, let's get them all in a room. Then let's say, where should we throw this event? Then let's say, are there any companies that we have relationships with that might want to have a presence at the event that could help us go a little bigger? You know, maybe $625 is not going to buy enough pizza. for how many people are gonna come. Maybe we wanna have drinks for them. Maybe we wanna have entertainment. Maybe we wanna go for a venue. Who knows, right? So we give people all the tools to do that. And it grows their local scene when we give them the tools. Like our partner organizations get to scale, especially like the locals get to, if they bring on sponsors, then guess what? Those sponsors can help them throw blockchain community events all year. And they can even, And those companies can even program those community events with the, you know, whatever they want devs to be working on with their API. Like they can start to build those relationships with that, which I think it's super important for actually building things in the ecosystem. So like I was talking to, you know, college now was telling me he grew his, um, his university base from 41 to like 84, just from the kind of Pizza DAO onboarding. Um, message. So it's about I think it's just about incentives and and it's and it's really simple that people want to get together. They want to build community. They want to connect around these ideas and technologies and we just give them the rails and we and we and we make it as easy as possible. And then I mean it's just so easy to be a pizza doll compared to. a more abstract DAO. Like that we can say, look, we're pizza DAO and we throw a global pizza party and we throw pizza parties. It's hard to argue with. And it's easy to get behind. No, it really is a beautiful experience, especially doing that in Morocco where honestly, like crypto is low key outlawed and having a scene and even educating is very under the wraps and coming especially like I traveled everywhere where crypto is hot and it's popping in there's community and having being in a place that's dope but has no real community. It was, it's pretty awesome to bring people together. And I see like PizzaDAO as one of the onboarding mechanisms for bringing up regional communities without shilling a block chain or getting too technical and kind of showing that real use case. So in terms of like where like, so where are kind of the most far off cities or villages that you guys got into and then where you try to target this upcoming Pizza Day. we have some amazing photos from Easter Island from the first year of people with our brand and with the pizza, like in front of the Stoneheads or Rapa Nui, I guess is how a lot of people know it. And like actually we in Latam, I think pizza, I think the blockchain community as a whole has a lot of opportunity in Latam I think it's a region that has unstable currencies, unstable governments. Everybody speaks Spanish. A lot of Americans speak Spanish. I speak Spanish. Like a lot of people in pizza now speak Spanish. And so, and our coordinator in Ruben, Don Malbec from Chile is just, I mean, he's, he's phenomenal at bringing people together. He's been crushing it. Um, he, so he also brought us to the top of a volcano. Is so like, there's a guy who makes pizza on a volcano. So the pizza party was on the volcano. We. I mean, in South Africa, we have this footage of kids in Lesotho, many of whom are having like their first pizza. That was really amazing. We were working on getting to Antarctica every year. We joke like that we're going to get, there's this Chilean research facility in Antarctica and like, we're going to get there. We try, we've been trying to get into space also because Cyan Proctor was like a friend of ours pretty early. Um, she had an NFT called the, uh, the mutt necks, I think they were called. And, um, So, but you know, I mean, I can tell you the smallest pizza party last year was three people in Billings, Montana. And like one of them had to drive quite a ways. Um, the biggest was 307 in, uh, in Argentina and in Buenos Aires. So like, um, we're, I mean, this year we're really starting to dig into like we have, you know, five cities in India. I'm working to have more, like, I think we have five or six signed up for China. So you asked me, yeah, where are we trying to go? We're really focused on the Middle East. We're focused on Africa. We're focused on Asia. We think we can really grow our presence there because these are, I mean, it's a huge, you know, Americans, like we don't know beyond the first five cities in China, but that's missing, you know, that's missing a billion people. that are in these other cities. It's a huge place. And they have pizza in all of these cities. So we're really focused. I mean, I'm gonna pull up, actually we have a chart. If you go to parties.pizzadao.xyz anyone can actually do this. And that's our big master, our spreadsheet of all of the events. And if we look at the chart, like, yeah, so we had seven cities in the Middle East signed up. We have 12 in Africa. I want to double those numbers. We have 26 in Asia. I think we could double that number. 52 in North America, like we're doing pretty well. 16 in South America, 13 in Central America, we could onboard some more. 36 in Europe, pretty solid. But Eastern Europe, we could do more. And to anyone who's listening, if you're in a place that we don't have a party, the offer is real. We have $625 for you to spend on pizza. on May 22nd to bring together your local community around Bitcoin Pizza Day. Like we are ready and willing. Just join our Discord, tag us on Twitter, pizza underscore DAO, globalpizzaparty.xyz. Yeah, and it's an amazing like offer, especially like pizzas are so cheap everywhere else, like 600. Like even if we're throwing a party of 50 people, we're going to one venue, giving everyone pizza, going to another even like could not run out of pizza. And I mean, there are also cultures associated with the pizza party. Let's not kind of go over that. There's... the whole stacking of the pizzas. Can you kind of explain, like, there's a pizza album, music to play, that's all pizza related. How did that come about? There's like teenage ninja turtles that are doing kick flips over pizza boxes. So like, what is, how did all this pizza folklore kind of start around and the culture and the art around this? its own origin story. So like why do we have Ninja Turtles? It's actually because In the early days we were planning for our our New York party and we talked to Andrew Wang about it if you remember Andrew Wang who he's still around I think he was like doing a lot and he was like how do we make this party more crazy like we gotta make and we said ah Well, we'll hire Ninja Turtles and so, you know, it's eight hundred forty dollars to hire for Ninja Turtles for an hour. I And we do, it's really worth it. It's amazing. It's hilarious. So we do that. Why do we stack pizza boxes? We threw this party at the Lambo dealership in New York, which was just a hilarious party. We put like a pizza delivery topper on the Lambo. And one of the pizza down members asked me during the party, like, what do we do with the boxes? And I was like, dude, we throw them out. Like, what are you thinking? And then I thought to myself for a second, I was like, you're a genius, you know, we're going to stack the boxes. And so ever since that event, actually, which was at NFT NYC 2023, we have started to stack the boxes. And it's great because nobody does that for like, I mean, we get to, you don't need anything to rep Pizza DAO, except a bunch of pizza boxes. Like it's, you know, it's such a cheap kind of symbol of the DAO to make a stack of pizza boxes. And the volume and we're in a unique position. Like what do we have? A lot of empty pizza boxes. Like we're eating a lot of pizza. So, um, that's been hilarious. Like I was watching the global zoom and Vienna and Berlin were having their party at the same time and looking at each other on the zoom and competing to have a higher stack of boxes. Like literally you have people in Berlin going to pick up more pizza because they need their stack to be higher than the one in Vienna. It was hilarious. Um, Yeah, we had actual ceiling limits. We already had hit the ceiling and we had to like, like actually like start a new one. We were in like a low gamer studio. But yeah, like what, I see a lot of, I mean, we didn't, we didn't mention the pizza DAO-lbum or you call it a DAO-lbum? community mixtape, which everyone can check out. It's at mixtape.pizzadao.xyz Or if you just search Rare Pizzas Volume 1, it's on Spotify. It's on all the platforms. And it is way better than it has any right to be. And then we also have a house band. They're called Pizza Collection. They're actually Philadelphians. I happened to have gone to school. I didn't know that she was in this band. But one of the band members, her Her older brother's also in the band. She was a year below me in high school. So in Philly. So I got introduced to them. I'm actually forgetting who introduced me, but I mean, they're, they're hilarious. They have like two or 300 pizza covers of famous songs. So yeah. And they're NST holders. They've performed in our events. Um, they are, they are members of the DAO. So we, we joke that there are pizza, DAO house band. What and then other I mean we have so much lore that we've built up over the years like we you know we play that's a more a the the Dean Martin song at the end of every community call because when the moon hits her I like a big pizza pie that's a more you know so There's uh there's some there's a lot of sauce to draw on I mean pizza is really a rich you know it's a rich a rich culture and Like pizza down, who do we follow on Twitter? Right? We follow Bitcoin pizza, this account that tweets the price of the 10 ,000 pizzas. We follow a Molto Benny, our mascot, the three -eyed pizza, because Molto Bene, you know, he's Molto Bene. And then we follow our NFT Rare pizzas and we follow the fourth account is Neil Stevenson. And we follow Neil Stevenson because Snow Crash, the kind of introduction of the term metaverse, right, to the world. One of the primary entities in the Snow Crash future is, you know, the, quote unquote, the pizza mafia and Uncle Enzo, who kind of runs it. And they play a large role in the book. So that's also, you know, we really tap into that as well. I love to see the proliferation of culture. I mean, I also notice everywhere I go, I see you repping the noggles and the nouns. And there's a bunch of tangential communities that either like co -organize events or that have a lot of, you know, alignment in values. So can you kind of speak on like you mentioned, like, you know, oh, yeah. I go. Oh wow, I need to get me a pair. It'll look way better with the get up. But yeah, you have all these changes. You mentioned crypto punks, you got the Noggles Pizza DAO. What are really communities you resonate with? And was Nouns in tangent with pizza? How did that kind of evolve? I mean, I watched Nouns launch. You know, I've known 4156 from, not personally. I mean, we know each other, but not like super well. I don't chat with him or anything. But I watched him launch Nouns. I was really inspired by it. I thought it was super awesome. And, you know, the idea of Nouns Dao for me, it's kind of this meta Dao. And that was how I thought about Pizza Dao. Like we put the word pizza in front of Dao and then we go for it. And we saw that as a model for any community to take a word, put it in front of Dao, and then try and live up to the shelling point of that word. Right? And what a Dao. And the way I think of it is like, you know, pizza is our boss, sort of, you know? So what does pizza want was always what guided our early community. What does pizza want? do you think? That's what everyone says. So like we immediately have alignment. So then pizza DAO's mission is to make sure that pizza gets eaten. And so that's like that's strong alignment. And I think with any DAO maybe this is a useful question to ask. So like we've been saying what does a noun want? I've been saying I think is really an interesting one. What do you think? to be used in referenced everywhere. trickier, I think, but, but yeah, along those, I say to mean something, which is basically what you said to mean something is kind of what I've been pushing as the, which I think is, is sort of what now is, is accomplishing, right? Is to, is to be this symbol of a certain type of collaboration and of CC0 And so I also, I mean, I really believe in the CC0 idea. I think humans. Uh, I think permissionless collaboration is, is really strong. You don't know when somebody is going to come along and have some energy to do a sprint and improve a thing. And you want to make sure that they are in a position to do that. I think because if everyone is in a position where they can see a thing that needs improving and then get it done. This planet is going to be way better. So that's kind of how I, you know, I. That's where I want us to go as a species is to enable each other to improve our surroundings because I think that's one of the most fundamental pleasures of being a human is just making incremental improvements in how things are. Like I have this laundry bin and I broke the handle and then I used super glue and I used it once and it broke again and then I tried again and now it's been holding and I get so much pleasure out of using my mended laundry bin. So I look at him like, look at that super glue doing its work right now. That's pretty inspirational. I love what Nouns does. If people don't know the actual auction system that Nouns has been doing, I think it's a beautiful mechanism that's been forked a lot and just kind of like a high level overview. It's essentially a regular auction that happens every day. All the money goes to the treasury. Holders get to decide where that money goes. And essentially Creative Commons Zero is... making it the first open source brand where people can proliferate that brand. And there's been so much culture that's actually not only been just driven by lore, but actually funded. And there's been amazing initiatives. And I know like Pizza DAO has probably gotten some funding, you know, like Zora, like Superbowl commercials. There's been so much and it's still going on. And there's now even like forks, like Nouns Amigos and Public Nouns focused on public goods and people iterating on, you know, the auction. original primitive. So it's one of the dopest things I've seen. What are your kind of favorite nouns moments? I just like when NounsDAO launched, I was so impressed just with... I mean, it was just such a perfect execution. I was just really... was... Yeah, I was just happy that someone else was doing it for the people. Like, you know, this is something I would have... I felt like there was a weight off my shoulders almost, right? Like we needed NounsDAO and they made it. And I just felt so happy that it existed. And, and then, I mean, as it's developed, like, I mean, we've worked with so many of the nounish DAOs now, like Public Nouns has supported PizzaDAO, Nouns Amigos has supported PizzaDAO, GnarsDAO came to Denver and, and Vlad, uh, allied over a bunch of pizza boxes. It was hilarious. Um, We're gonna we're working with Nouns eSports We want to bring Smash Bros tournaments to some of our pizza parties this year on May 22nd. I think it's going to be awesome. And like nouns, what I guess my favorite thing is just seeing the Noggles's take hold. Because yeah, there you know, it's been a storied history, right, of nouns and there have been disagreements in Noggles communities and there have been. And you know, people, but I just, what I see is I see Noggles's catching hold. I see the general population within the ecosystem. Really getting to like Noggles's like people want to rep nouns because they like what noun stands for. And I just see the, I just see it every year. It is more widespread and it is like the proliferation is working. It is, it is like. It's going to win in the long term. I love watching it. Yeah, I mean the the the Noggles is iconic. It is something that can be unicoded. It is something that you can add to any collection. It's something that's open source. Like, I mean, you know Russ, like Russ got that tatted on him recently and he don't even have it now. It's like... Also, by the way, anyone watching, like these are the are the awesome Salvino Noggles. And I think you can get these for like really cheap if you put a sweet Offer in on OpenSea. This is some alpha that like I I'm going to buy more myself. So like just they're like I I know they're so cheap. I'm about to check out how cheap they are these days, but they're called Nouns Visions and they are the dopest way to rep nouns, I think. how much they are. Yeah, you guys also at the latest Denver party had like the cardboard noggles too, some nouns tattoos. It was pretty dope. And the one thing I like about pizza dot party is like even if like some people say pizza's not disagreeable and then they're like, well, I'm allergic to gluten and I'm vegan free. They have that. They always have that. And that's like one of the most, I think, respectable things. I'm like that and yeah, Pizza DAO has all types of pizza. Like don't get it twisted. Like Pizza DAO got everything. that's the beautiful thing about pizza. You can invite everybody to the pizza party. If you're a vegan, guess what? There are vegan cheese substitutes. If you're gluten free, yeah, there's gluten free pizza. Although I think it's a little harder because there is cross contamination for people who are gluten free. So that's something that, you know, maybe will ultimately help some of our pizzerias to be better about that. I don't know. I think that the pizzeria industry has like a ways to go there. But we do. We really... We strive to be welcoming to everyone because we want everybody at the pizza party. What's the Noggles price by chance? You find it? like 0 .02. Weeth people are letting them go recently. Three of them sold for that, which I think is super cheap. And the floor is 0 .05, but I would put in a Weeth offer. So 0 .02, that's like what, 60 bucks? Yeah, pretty goddamn cheap. Yeah, it's pretty cheap. If you just look up Noggles right now, it's like 20, 40 bucks for some general generic stuff. So that's the deal. Get your Noggles for... I'll just have to miracle him a pair because he deserves one. Yeah. shout out to proof of vibes. What, what, oh, what, so in terms of like, like coordination, it's like, there's so much going on. Like, what is like, what's your, what's the day in the life of Snax? Like, are you, are you, are you like doing Pizza DAO full time or like, what's the vibe on that? lot of my time. I mean, I have some other initiatives that I'm working on in the back. I'm also, I'm moving soon. I've been renovating a house, which takes, oh my God, I don't recommend it unless you got contractors in the close friends or family. But a day in my life is like, I have this 49 inch screen in front of me. Maybe I'll just let people see it. So this is my... My daily position is in front of this screen and I have I have discord on the left usually and I have telegram on the right and then I have you know, two chrome windows usually in the middle. So I have four windows across and I am just fielding messages. You know, replying to tweets, pushing around numbers and spreadsheets and and talking to people like you know now it's busy season, so I'm having meetings. You know, pretty much from when I wake up to, to when I'm going to sleep a lot of times, um, you know, I'll, I'll get some hours in between, but, but it's, it's busy season now, right? Cause it's March and May 22nd, like it's a lot of coordination. We've got to get a lot of people on the same page. So, um, I run Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, I run a Twitter space at a nine AM Eastern for an hour called the room about nothing, which is actually. That was the name of the room on clubhouse that pizza now spawned out of. So keeping that, that vibe going. Um, but yeah, mostly I am just, you know, besides like the normal stuff, cooking, cleaning, um, seeing, you my local community, my family and stuff, like, yeah, I'm spending a lot of time on pizza now. Um, and it's, uh, it's a, it's a gift. Honestly, it's, uh, it's. Yeah, is it hard at times? Do I get stressed out? Like, do we have catastrophes? Oh, absolutely, but... There are moments where it just feels like it is all totally worth it. And those moments, I feel like they're happening more and more frequently lately. So I'm like, I don't know. I'm feeling happy about the doubt. Nah, the DAO is beautiful. Literally everywhere I go in the world, Pizza DAO is the most reliable DAO. I think it's inspiring. What you said earlier about having a word in front of the DAO and then really going and living up for that, I think Pizza DAO has inspired a lot of that. And yeah, I mean, even like, you know me originally from Blunt DAO, I don't really talk a lot about that, but even that in itself, are there like... Other examples of maybe word based dows that you want to see, maybe other food based dows. I heard of a ramen down or like what's if you could manifest dows or give props to dows that that you're seeing that you hope live up to the name, what would they be? Oh, okay, sorry, I got a lag spike. I was waiting. So if I could manifest a DAO, so we actually, I have tacoDAO .ETH and tacoDAO.XYZ and a bunch of the tacoDAO social assets. And we even joked on April Fool's last year that we were switching our branding to tacoDAO and like soft launch tacoDAO. So ultimately I do want there to be a tacoDAO, definitely. And you know, like part of our mission here, right, is building, software for small businesses. So if we build software for pizzerias and if we build ownership and governance solutions for pizzerias and we build real estate investor syndicates for pizzerias, I think it turns out that we actually have built that for any small business because they're not that different. So ultimately, I would love to plug in with all these other DAOs. Like, GroundsDAO started recently. My buddy Orin from Gnosis is spearheading that and I'm super excited. I don't know what form the DAO is going to take, but there is already a NounsDAO Cafe that is in the press of opening. Drew Kaufman is doing that. There's a NounsDelhi in Melbourne that my buddy Bones does. So starting to stitch together, like there's a Bored Ape, Bored and Hungry brand. There are a ton of Bored Ape brands that I think are kind of in the same ecosystem. So, Starting to stitch this network of small business and food focused Web3 ecosystem players together is really exciting to me because I think we're going to be able to build amazing things. Yeah, that makes me think it's like, I mean, you guys have OG engineers within the Pizza DAO community, but I haven't really seen like, like kind of software primitives to enable it. That's actually the first time I heard like we need software to enable small businesses like very onto the ethos you were talking about earlier. And so like for, you know, the Pizza DAO community and devs that want to pay it forward, like what, what do those primitives look like? What would be maybe the first Highland initiative that can be done to maybe invest in a local pizzeria or create this accounting and invoicing tool or maybe pass sponsors, they actually build these primitives. Like what do you envision the rollout of the pizza labs? so we want to build the entire small business stack open source. So that means everything from point of sale to inventory to delivery to payroll to social, like website, like the whole stack. And that's. In practice, I think that's going to be about stitching together a bunch of other projects products that actually work and maybe building some bridges and building some extra stuff here and there. One of the first, then there are a bunch of like pizza hacks, which I think are fun. And we've been talking a lot about lately, just doing fun pizza focused hack projects, because it turns out that you can actually swap pizza in for like any word in the context of making like a hack. And it. can make it kind of fun and you're still solving like maybe a math problem, maybe a distribution or a supply chain problem, but you're just using pizza as the flavor on top. So I think like one thing we've talked about is RSV .pizza we wanna make, which is just like an ordering tool where guests can say, this is the pizza I like. And then the organizer gets a feed out that says, this is the pizza you should order. Although distribution at the party, I think is its own problem there, because the pizza all comes and then we know people go crazy. They just take all the pizza. How do you make sure the person gets the pizza they ordered at the event? But you know something to think about payroll though is what I think is a really. It's it's it's a tractable portion of the stack that I think we can actually deliver on. We did it for the hackathon at eat Denver. We actually we didn't get a lot of code ship, but we did the whole design. And the idea is just you clock in, you get streamed USDC, you clock out and the stream stops. Um, you know, and our Pizzeria partner, um, Aaron from Williamsburg pizza, he actually was open to trying it out. So I think we're going to ultimately build that. Um, you know, it's not, it's like a, you know, it's maybe a hundred thousand dollar in dev time kind of a project, you know, whereas. I think building a full point of sale, you start looking at, it's a pretty big build. That could be a million dollars. Yeah, I mean, I mean, I feel like a lot of primitives are there. I mean, you got streaming, you got payment like Opulence, you got Superfluid, you got even on the point of sale system. I know a lot of people are working on that. I think Solana Pay does that like pretty, pretty well. There is a lot of these primitives that can be stitched together, but that is just manifesting it here. I would love to see the whole pizza stack come about too. Also, I'm building a generalized purpose funding stack too for public goods as well. So a lot can be. reuse there, but no, that would be awesome. And I think, yeah, even syndicates for pizzerias, that is something. I mean, there are already tools that exist. There's syndicate, there's enzyme for decentralized hedge funds, there's PartyDAO. Have you guys explored that? gonna do our first ones, I think just as traditional like trad SPV type stuff. We're gonna token gate participation to members of PizzaDAO who have our NFT and then they get to contribute and we'll just limit it. It'll probably be, it's not what we wanna do ultimately, but we're fine for the first few, it's gonna be like a hundred limit, right? So we will raise like 10K minimums and we just buy the pizzeria with our partner. Um, and this is because currently, especially in the United States, I think it's easier in some other jurisdictions, but like it's pretty unclear what, what the, um, legal wrapper is that you need around, around doing these. I think there are some, there's some co-op law that can maybe be applied. Um, you know, and maybe that's the direction we'll go or, um, but we're, but we're really looking at a lot of systems, a lot of different solutions. Like there's realty .io there's home base, which is a Solana product. We talked to that team. So we're looking at these products as they come out. I think ultimately our real estate syndicate solution is we'll probably have different partners in different regions. So like whoever is the best in class at putting together tokenized real estate deals in Southeast Asia, like, you know, we want to work with them and same for, you know, everywhere else. Now we're actually looking for that. There's a whole, and I had one of the first guests I had with my boy Noah, they're building like an archipelago of like network states between token 2049 and in DevConnect, like probably in Chiang Mai, but the amount that you spend like on rent, I mean, that can be used towards actually getting like a physical place. And so that is definitely something that needs to be explored. I haven't really seen that like. taken in into tech or into like a native investment vehicle. So that's another thing for people to explore. But. as that, but I do think we're a really great example of a network state. I don't think many other orgs in our ecosystem can actually make the claim maybe as strongly as we can. So I want people to recognize like look at us. We're out here. Balaji come angel invest in the next pizza tech because yeah, you are a network state. I mean, right now in terms of the network state, what it's considered, it's like city DAOs. Like our example, I don't think no one's really doing it too well. There's like ATX DAO, there's like community -based stuff. Then there's like local nodes, which is a lot like what pizza DAO does with like... You have like refied out green pill, but honestly, those aren't as strong and mission driven and as consistent as pizza down. And then there's the whole, you know, Honduras, Roatan, Vitalia, pop up cities that are happening, economic zones that are forming. And then there's the kind of idea like the Native American church where they're recognized by external laws and there's kind of different variations of how it's coming. But yeah, you guys are definitely considered a network state. Are you coming to consensus by chance? presence, whether or not I go, um, is up in the air. And I, and this isn't a competition by the way, I just want us to get recognition as a network state. And I, and all these other network states, I want them to build their network state with our frame, like with our existing, you know, they are welcome to our social graph. Like, please come in here and build your network state on top of the Pizza DAO substrate. Like we are here. This is what we're doing. Yeah, and again, it is that strategy for basically bootstrapping your node and getting leaders together. But I was mentioning, because in Austin, during consensus, me and Russ are organizing a network state Austin event. And I would love to catalog the journeys of Pizza Dog, because I do think it's part of that stack. But yeah, we covered so much. We're coming to well over the hour. Is there anything that you would like to say for the young kids at home that want to get involved in the space or pursue their passion? Yeah, we'll. blockchain community and go to, you know, you should be able to find it online. Go meet them and go to the Pizza DAO party. Like May 22nd, it's a Wednesday night. There's going to be a Pizza DAO event within 30 minutes of the majority of people who are listening to me right now. Like anyone who listens to this podcast, there is very, very likely a pizza party you can attend. And if there isn't a pizza party that's close enough to you that's in your city, we will fund you to throw one. We have $625 for you to spend on pizza to bring together your local crypto community. So reach out, pizza underscore DAO on Twitter, globalpizzaparty .xyz. Let's throw a global pizza party. Awesome, this has been a phenomenal time. We went over crypto history, the cultures that I love, and yeah, the future of Pizza DAO. So yeah, thank you so much for coming, Snacks.