Quirkie Connection with Papii and Sho — "A cowboy always finds a way to leave"

Sho sang "Choosing Texas" to start, then followed it with a Quirksville anthem — "doesn't matter when you came on the road." Sam immediately requested the sequel where the cowboy crawls back to Tennessee, and Sho shut it down: "Once you're in Texas, you gotta stay in Texas."

Papii is down to civilian energy drinks and suffering. The shipment was labeled, dropped at UPS, and then evaporated. Sho's theory was thirsty UPS workers; Sam's theory was that they chose Texas. Papii spent the rest of the hour yawning on-mic as a kind of live advertisement for the missing product.

Fresh off a week of handing out quirk-wheel prizes and two hours with two-time Super Bowl champ Leonard Marshall, Sam reported the fiancé life is good: "She didn't choose Texas. She chose Jersey." His future mother-in-law and aunt called him and simply sang into the phone for a full minute before he gave up and said hello.

Papii said he doesn't base conviction on "a temporary chapter in the book," noted the floor has held one ETH since February, and admitted the 2400 price level makes collecting harder at the pace he wants. His core argument: promise people A, B, C, D and fail to deliver, and you've manufactured both a seller and a hater — so transparency and consistent execution beat hype.

Sho brought up a comment from an earlier founders' Space suggesting that founders propping up their own floors are on the way out, and said it stuck in her craw — across the projects she's in, she sees founders buying one or two while the community buys triple. Papii's reply 19:29: if you won't put money where your mouth is, what are you doing it for? He noted he doesn't buy with treasury money, and that he recently covered part of a sale so someone on his team could get a quirky at a good price.

407 sales in the last 30 days; 20 quirkies bought by Papii in three months. He also described choosing to take out a floor-undercutting bot instead of buying a grail he actually wanted — laser eyes, a halo with the hockey mask, a zombie — and gave Jed credit for growing his regen bag from 20 to 122.

Asked about his roots, Papii opened with second grade: he taped a rare Pokémon episode and rented it to classmates. Price point: lunch money. Business ended when one kid handed over his lunch money instead of eating — "So I got cut off." From there: busboy, supermarket, pizza delivery, running three pizzerias where the owners never showed up and his friends watched baseball in the back.

The pivot came from a regular at an Atlantic City restaurant — Kobe, the first entrepreneur Papii ever met — who asked him what his actual dream was. The sports-writing plan died when a professor warned about the money and an NYC internship turned into a $30k offer. Kobe handed him a room instead: college party night, basket pong tournaments, a DJ contest with a residency on the line, and within months a Thursday with lines out the door.

Mid-story, Papii yawned hard enough that Sho deadpanned she was watching the guest fall asleep mid-sentence — then he landed it: "Formal education will make you a living. Self-education will make you a fortune." He paired it with the unglamorous part, $70k in credit card debt in the early years.

On updates: a near-complete in-house dev and creative studio, a new website, new staking mechanisms, new holder rewards, and no outside raise since the Inks. Papii explained why he passed on recent flywheel and token opportunities — he keeps asking whether a thing is still relevant in three months, and notes that token holders can dump a whole bag in one click, while NFT collections rarely see more than 5–10% listed because people are buying what they like.

Papii's framing for team-building: say what you want to be, loudly and for years, and you attract the people aligned with it while deflecting the rest. Some people, he observed, genuinely enjoy sitting in the mud — "it's like inviting a pig to a party, it's covered in mud."

Sam thanked PK and Bulldog for keeping the wheel turning, then described the crickets era: in his darkest NFT moments, telling himself "I can't be the only one" who loves the art, the community and the conversations. He came in through the art in '21–'22, reading crypto 101 books while having a blast meeting people.

A listener came up just to tell Papii that the story landed — that it takes real strength to talk about the hard parts, and that it was motivating. Papii's answer 57:29 was the closing thesis of the hour: "if we're gonna be here, it's not gonna be for theater." He pointed out that most people dip into this app for ten minutes at a time, so those micro moments are the whole impression you leave.