Interview with Jamis MacNiven, owner of Buck's Woodside, who recently turned the restaurant into an NFT
"I had access to Silicon Valley and the world, but infinity turns out to be a lot bigger."
A couple of weeks ago, I got a comment on an NFTimes issue from Jonathan Buckley, whose team has brought the first fully immersive 3D model to auction as an NFT. That NFT was a 3D model of the famous Silicon Valley restaurant Buck’s of Woodside. Sitting right between Sand Hill Road and Stanford University, Buck’s gained fame as a meeting spot for tech entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, and has remained a fixture of Silicon Valley to this day. Opening in 1991, early meetings of Netscape, PayPal, Hotmail, and Tesla Motors took place there. When Jamis MacNiven, the owner of Buck’s, reached out and told me that I could interview him to learn the backstory of the NFT, I scheduled a call right away. We talked about Buck’s Woodside, Jamis’ opinions on Silicon Valley, blockchain, NFTs, and how he got the idea of making the Buck’s NFT. Renowned for his fantastic stories, Jamis told me about getting arrested in Russia, buying a Russian spacesuit, his travels and work in psychedelics. Buck’s NFT, whose sale ends on August 19th, currently has a bid of 105 ETH ($316,932.00).
In this special edition of NFTimes, dive into the amazing story of Jamis MacNiven and Buck’s Woodside. (FYI: TLDR at the end of the piece)
Aleyna: Can you tell me a little about yourself and how you founded Buck’s?
Jamis: I used to build restaurants for a living, I built a lot of prominent places. And I actually got my start in remodeling a house in Atherton, right near San Francisco, and my second job ever was with Steve Jobs. I studied a year remodeling his house when he was twenty-four and twenty-five. I was really incompetent, but I lasted a whole year so I sort of was self-taught, then I built restaurants and then I decided to go into the restaurant business. My wife and I bought a restaurant, change the name to Buck’s, and just started rolling. That was thirty years ago. It started really quietly. But then in about ‘92, there was a mention in The Economist that John Doerr was having breakfast at Buck’s. I thought, ‘Wow, that’s amazing’. And then in ‘93, a TV crew came in to interview somebody because there’s a lot of local venture capitalists here, and in ‘94, three TV crews came, and I thought, well, this is amazing. And then in ‘95, maybe a hundred and fifty TV crews came in and then all the print reporters and everything that went along with that.
To me, Netscape is the biggest thing that ever came out of Buck’s because they had a lot of their foundational meetings there, and it broke the internet open and made it available to everybody. Because of the foundational meetings so many companies had there, it became a thing to have breakfast at Buck’s and to say that your company was founded there or funded there. PayPal, eBay, Tesla, so many others, Hotmail got their start at Buck’s, really hundreds of firms, so it just was a self-generating publicity engine, and it was really a lot of fun. And then when the 2000s came, there was this huge internet stock market crash, and all the venture capitalists and entrepreneurs ran for cover for about a year. But more TV crews and journalists came in than ever before, wanting to talk about the demise. It is hard to believe now, but twenty years ago, people were asking themselves, ‘Is this internet thing real?’ Or is that just like that just a thing that was temporary because it really was a hard crash. The crazy valuations, so many firms just dropped significantly or to zero, and there was a questioning. Now we think that’s crazy, internet is like water, and of course, it’s real. It’s everything. They came in looking for the other people, and all they found was me standing there, so they interviewed me. Really, I’m just holding the door open, but I did a lot of speaking, a lot of interviewing, and ended up being a lecturer at Oxford about Silicon Valley, and so that’s kind of fun. As things rolled along, it just kept on building, and Silicon Valley kept on becoming a brighter star than ever.
Aleyna: What a great story! After that, how did you encounter blockchain?
Jamis: Starting about four or five years ago, that brightness [of Silicon Valley] started to dim with the shenanigans of Zuckerberg and the eventuality of monopoly starting to dominate industries. It put a whole new cast on it. We were no longer the bright, shining beacons for the future, and that’s now a big issue. And then, blockchain started rolling along. I got involved in crypto back in, it must be eight or nine years ago. I was having dinner with some people really, a lot wealthier than me. They said, well, we should all buy Bitcoin. It’s interesting when you first look at crypto and Bitcoin; it’s very confusing. And then later, it’s really obvious. And so when NFTs hit, it was easy to understand. I had a really good run there. I got Bitcoin at $900, and then it went up to $21,000, and I sold it. I felt like a loser even though I was a winner. And so, it’s like, ‘Oh, I hate this game,’ but then I got back in, and I’ve done really well, and that that’s been fine.
Aleyna: How about NFTs?
Jamis: When Beeple hit, that got everybody’s attention. On my website, I talk about Buck’s NFT right now, and I talked about the burnt Banksy. I just think that story is amazing. I’ve always thought Banksy was delightfully, appropriately edgy with his lithograph. Those were $20,000 apiece, and then the guy burns one and sells it for $380,000. But anyway, I’ve been telling NFTs to people. Simply that ten years ago, a print photograph of Billy the Kid showed up, went for auction, and sold for over 2 million dollars. And so, somebody owns that original, and there’s just one of them and it’s got it somewhere on the wall. But there are a limited number of digital copies of it in high resolution that you couldn’t tell from the old one except for the aging. Right? So they’re in even better shape than the original. So all you have to do with an NFT is just visualize removing that original like a burnt Banksy, and you are the owner of the original even though it’s digital. With the younger people especially, you get the reality of digital assets. Years ago, I used to collect books. And we needed the tangibility; it was in your hands. When you think about it, it’s just in one hand at a time. You can’t ship it to anybody, and you can’t really display it to a broad audience unless you put it in the museum. So, I have no trouble with the mental leap into digital assets. Then we have all these different classes from high-resolution photographs to prints or whatever, some of it edges to the absurd. But that’s fine because art is always have been about the absurd. You look at Jackson Pollock. He really did just throw paint at a canvas; people say, ‘Oh, there’s tremendous subtlety there. It’s really important the way the dots are going out.’ Yeah, right. He just threw painted canvas, in my opinion. Some of his stuff sells for over a hundred million dollars and hangs in somebody’s house.
Aleyna: How did you come up with the idea of Buck’s 3D immersive NFT?
Jamis: I think there’s a great liberation to be seen in digital assets. We have all this iconographic stuff [at Buck’s], we got some fun stuff, like Apple 1 and the Russian spacesuit, some really great things. But only a limited number of people can come in and see it. So about four years ago, we did a virtual tour and put it on our website. We had a lot of visitors to that, and then I saw the world of NFTs rising up, and I thought, ‘What if this makes a good NFT.’ I got a hold of Tim Draper; he’s a pretty well-known venture guy who co-founded Hotmail with Steve Jurvetson. He said, ‘I think it’d be a perfect NFT.’ You may know he’s a big player and Bitcoin. On the strength of that, I put together a team with my photographer, John Buckley, whose name is on the cover sheet there and then a marketing guy and we got ahold of Alchemy to mint the token and the OpenSea to run the auction and Matterport who run the back-end cloud. They were already cloud serving us. This promoted us to about 12 to 16 people in four companies. In three months, we’ve managed to grind this out. And you see, there are stories and videos buried in there. I think there are about a hundred eighteen stories embedded along with everything else, and also you can see this in 3D. It’s very disconcerting actually to put on 3D glasses and to float around. So we say it’s 3D, but in fact, the experience is 2D online on a laptop, but if you put on 3D goggles it’s definitely 3D. Weirdest experience is to put goggles on and see it in 3D while you’re sitting in the restaurant, looks like you’re literally here and you’re twenty feet over there. So there is a bid, it’s up to, you know, five hundred five Ether. It’s a guy I know, and he says, ‘I really want it,’ and so when we launched, we said, ‘What do you think the price should be?’ ‘Well, how about two hundred grand’ and at the time he put his bid in, and it was $186,000 but now it’s more like $330,000 with the jump in Ethereum. So, the way this works, of course, I have to pay out my marketing, my starter, and all that that I’m happy to do. Alchemy takes 5%, Open Sea takes 2%, very reasonable, and so, there you have it. That’s how we got where we are now.
Aleyna: Such an amazing project. How was your experience with making this NFT?
Jamis: It’s been such a privilege to work with the people I’ve worked with. I love cooperating. I’m a take-charge person, but I also love to cooperate with others, and this has been one of the larger cooperative events, and we all get along so well and negotiate all the points and get it all straightened out and get all the specs right, so it’s been a really fun experience. And I’m really gratified to hear from you because you’re right in the thick of things. I mean, you’re creating the story as well as reporting on the story because this is all so new. It’s another new horizon. No NFT five years ago, you know. This is it’s great to be still part of the zeitgeist here.
Aleyna: I read about the different items in your restaurants a lot, and unfortunately, I haven’t been there yet. But through — and thanks to— the NFT, I was able to see the items, the stories, and I thought that was incredible, just being able to walk around and experience it. NFTs are forever immortalized.
Jamis: It is, and we also occupy a very weird zone between a video and a still; it’s not really a still photo, and it’s not a video because you can back up and stop and dive in. So, it’s a virtual world which gamers could get and they understand that. But everybody else goes, ‘Virtual world… What does that mean?’ It’s fun to be in that new arena.
Aleyna: Virtual worlds, metaverses... It’s all coming slowly but steadily. What do you think how the space will be with AR/VR?
Jamis: We’re still on the crude side of the uncanny valley where you put these 3D goggles, you are always wishing the resolution was higher, especially when you have seen an HD TV. But we’ll get there. The father of virtual reality, Jaron Lanier, lives in Berkeley. He basically did the coding that allowed this 3D travel through a virtual environment back in the 80s and then went hiatus. He didn’t put much muscle into it, and everything was 2D and it’s a little artificial in general. It’s always right around the corner, high-resolution virtual environments are coming but they’re really not here yet. And until it’s not real enough. But any minute, it could switch.
Aleyna: Did you work in AR/VR space before?
Jamis: Jaron and I worked on the idea back in the 90s of trying to do a live video wall with a Finnish restaurant because the time difference would allow our breakfast people to see their dinner people. We worked on trying to build a screen with embedded cameras so we could actually talk through the wall to these other people, but we could never get the point of view correctly. You would have to all wear goggles to make this work because it just doesn’t work in the real world, even if you embed cameras every three inches along the screen. Nokia was going to give us the bandwidth, and Hewlett-Packard was going to build some equipment but it just did not work. It still doesn’t work. You’d have to sit way back to make it work, and we wanted you to sit right up close. Anyway, that was just a fun project that we kicked around. We at Buck’s are the first wireless hotspot. Bill Gross from the Idea Lab brought us the equipment and the big fat line back in the nineties, and we could actually go wireless at the tables, which was a real innovation at the time because now every gas station has one.
Aleyna: What excites you most about blockchain technology?
Jamis: The indisputable ownership of things. But I think blockchain will even extend to other industries. Title searches are this giant thing, and there’s lots of legal action and confusion around contracts, so that’s going to be a big deal once it shakes out. I also think just watching the regulatory environment is very interesting because the people in government, they think it’s still a bunch of tubes and pipes, and they’re scratching their heads to figure this whole thing out. The whole thing about blockchain and crypto, you could start moving all these things sideways, completely bypassing the regulators and the IRS and, for good or bad. And from an NFT standpoint, I think it’s nice to unleash all sorts of creativity; people are going to be, -- they already are making things to sell, and some of them will sell for pennies and some will sell for a lot. It’s going to completely revamp the copyright world and the patent industry. Blockchain is powerful. Everybody was talking about nanotechnology thirty years ago. Little tiny, atomic size machinery and even though that’s a real thing, nobody cares about nanotechnology now, but I think the whole world of blockchain and NFTs is going to be an explosive topic. That’s why it’s so great you know where you are in your career here because you can become a leader in a spokesperson in journalists.
Aleyna: Thank you. I have a lot of artist friends who are photographers, digital artists, and musicians. What excites me most is how it gives back the agency and the ability to connect with their fans directly rather than having to go through an intermediary all the time.
Jamis: Yeah, and not only that, but I perennially get 10% of the tip when it’s resold. So who knows? This could be a new world where some of these items continued or sell and resell, and then the artist continues to get paid. They’ve tried this in the Fine Art world, but it never worked. And they certainly haven’t succeeded in music, and musicians get paid nothing. Van Gogh, when he was painting at the very end, was painting for a penny a day and some of his paintings are selling for $200 million. So basically, you know, of course, he was long dead but two hundred million dollars a day is a pretty good haul. You know, even Bezos doesn’t have a day that good generally, he does but not generally. Actually, some of these guys have made billions of dollars a day on a stock rise. It’s inconceivable. But there you go. I tried to get Elon to tweet about this, he’s a friend of mine, but he said that he didn’t really trust NFTs and that he’s going to wait to see where it’s going before he could endorse it. There is a tweet of his on Twitter, if you shut down if you ever need to friend, you know, call on me. But it wasn’t me that he was disrespecting; it was NFTs that he doesn’t have confidence in. He said that publicly as well. And then, of course, his girlfriend Grimes has NFTs, but she’s a separate person.
Aleyna: Elon is a pretty controversial person in the crypto scene. Some people love him, some don’t. Almost everybody listens to what he has to say though. Very up and down.
Jamis: He does tend to change his mind on things a lot. Yeah, but to me, he’s the most vital businessperson in the world. That guy brings it.
Aleyna: When you compare web 2.0 development you witnessed with the web3 developments that we see right now, do you see similarities or differences in between?
Jamis: Starting back in literally ’79 and then ’80 when Steve went public with Apple, that was the first foray out there. His big idea wasn’t the beauty of his design, that was helpful, but that wasn’t the big idea. The big idea was that the common person should have a computer. And before that, computers were institutional, military; they were for the government. I mean, and now, of course, we think that’s absurd. We can’t function for an hour without our computers. So that was his big idea. And then when he came up with the transportable device, the iPhone, and the touchscreen. I thought, ‘Well, people are never going to want to greasy screen’. Of course, he really understood the zeitgeist and all that. You know, they never did any consumer testing. They would not put their products out to a group of people and ask their opinions. They developed the opinion and gave you the opinion. And so technologically, they’ve always been the leaders.
So then, when the internet really opened up, actually the first incarnation of the internet was the well, the whole electronic league. It grew out of a big magazine about an inch-and-a-half, thick called the Whole Earth Catalog. The whole catalog was with just a thousand pages of books, tools, techniques that you could buy by mail order at the counter by Stewart brand, and some others. And so that group got together and launched the electronic version of this catalog. That catalog was one of the precursors to the internet, that along with the World Wide Web where you combined all that, an idea that goes back three hundred years finally came into fruition. Gottfried Leibniz, a German philosopher who invented calculus, came up with the idea in the year 1700 that there should be some sort of a machine or technique or a library. It could collect all information, all music, all philosophy, all of history under one banner and have it accessible to people. So he’s the first guy to articulate the idea that there could be a universal machine that contained everything. He had no ability to do it, but it was then Babbage came along in the nineteenth century and with his different engine to try to create the first, you know, workable, a programmable computer which they proved on paper, but never really got out and then still led up to the pre-internet. But then, the government came along in the 60s and came up with ARPANET. And the whole idea of ARPANET was to connect the military with this defensible system because parts of it could be broken, and it could still communicate with it all. And so that was the distribution idea. And now that’s, of course, our downfall. Now that everything’s connected to everything else, people, trolls can crawl through, and the Russians can crawl through. And back in the analog world, you could actually shut the door and isolate. Now, there’s no way to do that.
So, it’s hard to define internet one, two, and three. But clearly the first internet where it was dial-up, very slow, and it was stick figures and just text. And, and that was the first incarnation, then it sort of burst into color and we got the videos, we could, I remember walking around Buck’s with a laptop and sitting down and saying, ‘Look, I just put a disk in and I can show you a movie on my laptop.’ There’s like, ‘What? I can show a movie? What?’ It goes back to the 90s and now with the ubiquity of mobile and AR/VR you know, we’re seeing this new third wave and I think that the blockchain is going to actually launch a fourth wave, depending on how you divide them up, you know, you’d know more about that than I do, but it’s just, it’s fun. I’m 72, but I really feel like I’m still vitally involved in the evolution here. I’m right here in Silicon Valley. But I also, and it’s just as an aside and computing regions, way beyond the internet now, psychedelics. And so, a lot of the internet was developed by psychedelic people. There used to be something called hyper card, which was an early iteration of the search engine, that was developed by a guy who was on LSD, and Steve Jobs credits a lot of innovations to LSD and Stewart Brand [editor of Whole Earth Catalog], him too.
Aleyna: Can you tell me more about your work with psychedelics?
Jamis: Well, I help found a clinic in Mexico years ago where we treat Navy Seals who were severely debilitated, with PTSD and traumatic brain injury with a very esoteric drug from Africa called ibogaine, not expecting you to have ever heard of it. And we also use another material, probably called the toad, which is psychedelic from the secretions of the skin of a desert toad. Those two in combination approved to be shockingly effective to reorient somebody’s life for the better in just one weekend. It’s pretty provocative stuff. We went from a scrappy startup with just four of us to a more mainstream company where we treated close to 400 patients, and of course, there’s been an explosion now, and psychedelic therapy and therapy is just part of it; therapy is the Trojan Horse, really because many do need therapy. But then there are many people who are looking for transcendence, who want to be the best people that could possibly be. And we’re often restrained by our upbringing where and not just in our parents and peers, but the fact that to get through the day we could only see a little part of the world. We got to see the road in front of us because that’s what’s going to keep us surviving. We have to think about what’s going to be for dinner and how we are going to raise the kids, or what we’re going to do our time. But with psychedelics, you have the opportunity to see a much bigger picture, it doesn’t have any words really attached to it. But by going, I see the bigger picture, you could get just a deeper and more full appreciation for life. You could be, you have the opportunity to be the best person you could be and very few people are. Very few people self-identify as “Yeah, I’m the person I want to be.” I was in my late sixties before I achieved complete integration with the person I pretended to be and the person that I really wanted to be. I was close, I was happy, but I wasn’t really that person until I discovered DMT, which is one of the very esoteric drugs.
Aleyna: I heard before that it’s the shortcut to meditation. I think it’s important to realize that the reality that we experience is limited to our perception and how we put meaning into things that we perceive, whereas the reality itself is so much bigger than us and our narrow sense of self.
Jamis: Yeah. Well articulated. That’s true, and once you see that picture, you can’t unsee it. It just becomes part of the fabric of your existence. It’s really like a magic trick from the universe. It turns out to be quite ancient too. There’s only one society that didn’t use mind-expanding chemicals and that’s the Inuits and Eskimos at the far reaches. They didn’t have that. So pretty much everybody else historically has you know, from the Persians all the way through to today, they had something: caffeine, alcohol, mushrooms that enhance their perception.
Aleyna: Looking to the future, do you think you’ll do more NFTs in the future?
Jamis: You know, I don’t think so, this one is so big and so complete that I think this will probably satisfy that need. It’ll be curious to see whether we get another higher bid, it may or may not happen. I don’t know. I’m not motivated by money. I’m much more interested in furthering the psychedelic work, which doesn’t really - I don’t see how that ties in the blockchain and NFTs. And there’s a lot of grandchildren, a lot of activities. I spend a lot of time at sea on my vessel and travel, as much as I can, which is not as much as I used to be.
Aleyna: I have seen that you’ve been traveling and writing about it in recent years. Are you following a certain path or just going to wherever comes to your mind?
Jamis: One thing we do is we were supposed to go to Kazakhstan in a month, we had a distinct schedule, -which we haven’t officially canceled, but I think we’ll have to- to meet the landing Soyuz Capsule because they let civilians come and let the cosmonauts out. We’ve been to the Russian base where they launched the rockets from, and I’ve been a fan of the Russian space program for a while because it’s really accessible. In the US, it’s all very hush-hush. And you can’t even get near the launch. There, you know, you can stand back quarter-mile and watch the launch. They are launching from the same place they launched Yuri Gagarin from back in the sixties and the same path of concrete. I’ve been all through the Middle East and Central Asia, and now, once it opens up, I’m going to spend more time in the Southeast.
Aleyna: Do you prefer to sail?
Jamis: I’m a powerboat guy. When we get to the islands, we sail, but in San Francisco, I’ve got a powerboat.
Aleyna: So you plan on continuing your work in psychedelics and traveling.
Jamis: Oh definitely. I’ve got free range now. As soon as the world opens up, I’m out of here. A friend of mine just came back from Rome and Venice, and he said the cities are empty. Simply empty, will never see that again, you know, like I would love to go to Venice when it’s not crowded. I guess I’ll be going the other way back to Fiji; I’ve got a whole tour in the South Pacific, I’m anticipating. I want to get to Argentina soon. I’ve been to a lot of places in the Middle East, but I wouldn’t mind returning to Jordan. I’m sure it shut down. But have you ever been to Petra? Do I not miss Petra. It’s just an ancient city. And I tried to go to Turkmenistan, but they wouldn’t let me in, they consider me a provocateur or something. I was prevented from entry, but I did go to Saudi Arabia and Syria and a lot of places. I’d like to see western China, but they’re not letting people in there right now. My favorites are Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
Aleyna: That sounds like a great trip waiting for you, I do miss traveling a lot. As the great storyteller you are, can you share a favorite story from Buck’s?
Jamis: Well, one of the most interesting things that happened was this our secretary of defense brought in the head of the Russian army General Leonid Ivashov and three other generals and we all had breakfast. I was brought up during the Cold War, you wouldn’t visit with Russians and Soviets. I mean, that’s crazy, cuz they’re the enemy even when we went to war with them, we’ve never fired a shot. And so we got along really well, and he gave me his business card. He said, if you’re in Russia, look me up. So I went to Russia because I wanted to get an American spacesuit that they wouldn’t give me from NASA. They said, they loan me one for two weeks, but I wanted to buy one. So I went to Russia and went to his office, he was not in, but using his business card, I went to the place where they make the Russian spacesuits and banged on the door with my interpreter and said, the general sent us. They were so awestruck, they sold us a spacesuit, and it’s hanging up at Buck’s. I got arrested in Russia on the same trip. We were getting around in the public marketplace. These policemen with machine guns grabbed us and took us into this little room that they had. This was in the nineties, and we were still shooting film and we had a film camera and all and this little package of film that we’ve been shooting for our whole trip, they said we need to have your camera and all your films. You have to give it to us, we said no way, we shot all this film, we’re keeping it. Our interpreters said you got to do what they say. I said, look, I’ve been arrested by more dangerous people than this. There’s nothing they can do. And there are three guys holding machine guns. So then through the interpreters, they say just give us the film and the camera, I said ‘niyet niyet’ so he swings his machine gun over, sticks it right in my face. My friend sticks, his finger in the barrel and pushes it aside to the side. He says, ‘Why don’t you show him our hosts card’, so by then I know the general’s card opens doors everywhere. I pull out the card and say, ‘Why don’t you call our host? He will straighten this out’ and their eyes just shut. And they’re thinking, oh we’re all going to die. They said, please, please could you leave. Please just go, we just laughed and laughed. So it was fun having those connections. I met the head of the Radisson Hotel once, and he put us up at the great suit in Moscow. And so I’ve met so many fun people at Buck’s that have just turned into other adventures. It was really, I had the world’s best job. I would just wander around meeting amazing people, the president of France or Sean Penn or Robert Redford, and it could be anybody, a little kid with a funny joke or really old people like a woman for her 102nd birthday. So I had the best job in the world, but then I got a better job and now, working in psychedelics. It’s a better job. I mean, they’re both good jobs. But this one, I have access to infinity. Well, I had access to Silicon Valley and the world, but infinity turns out to be a lot bigger.
Aleyna: It’s amazing that you met so many astounding people there, but also those connections opened more doors in the world to various experiences. It’s a unique thing to have.
Jamis: It is, yeah. I really cherish the ability I had to move around the world because of the wonderful people I met. And the incredible thing about the world of psychedelics is you can go into this transformative state where my ability to judge others is completely disappeared. So I have no criticism of other people. I used to think the world was composed of about 1/3 of assholes. But in the last year, they all cleaned up their act. There are people I may not agree with, people that do bad things. But typically, they’re people that were just babies looking for love that couldn’t find it and were badly brought-up and a few psychopaths, but mostly it’s just great folks. Like I love driving down the freeway cuz I’m surrounded by thousands of people where everybody is trying to get along, don’t bump into each other, you know, let me in, I’ll you in, and the sense of cooperation. So I love traffic.
Aleyna: What do you think is next for a Buck’s now that your sons are running it?
Jamis: Well, they have five other restaurants, and they’re pretty modern guys. They all work together. They’ve always worked together, and they want to bring it into the 21st century. They want to keep the artifacts but revamp the menu and we have this new outside seating. So the restaurant group is growing, and they’re also in the frozen pizza business. The interesting thing is, my wife and I were there for thirty years and when we left it was, there was a little separation anxiety for about a month. And then, I was really glad to move to the next chapter. I go down there and I visit with friends sometimes, but I don’t miss being this guy in charge at all. I don’t need to be in charge.
After chatting about his visits to Istanbul, his recommendations of places to go in Los Angeles for me, and my recommendations of where else he should visit in Turkey, I mentioned that I’m working on an NFT collectibles project called “Cacti Club” and that I’m very excited to not only report on what happens, but also create something of my own as well. He asks if I know about San Pedro (which is one of the types of Cacti from the Cacti Club) and then makes me an offer I can’t refuse.
Jamis: San Pedro is what they get mescaline from. It weighs about a thousand pounds. I got it from Steve Jobs, he gave me a cutting back in 1979 and I planted it. And now it’s all over the neighborhood here. And it grows really prolifically just from the cutting, and it’s called the Steve Jobs San Pedro because we’ve all got some of it. My kids have it, I have it, it’s everywhere. So this could be a thing, you know. It originally came from his garage that I remodeled. Yeah, you just provide me with the address and I’ll mail you some and it’s really easy to grow. You just chop a piece off and drop it in dirt, and boom it goes. It could become a fun thing cuz it is directly handed to me from him.
Aleyna: I would love to have a piece of it! And will send you the link to the Cacti Club once the website is up next week! Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me. It was amazing to talk with you and hear your stories.
Jamis: Absolutely. It’s been a thrill for me, and I wish you great good luck with your endeavors here. Sounds so exciting, I can’t wait to see it.
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Links: OpenSea & immersive 3D model
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TLDR;
Jamis MacNiven is the founder of Buck’s Woodside, a fixture of Silicon Valley where Netscape, PayPal, Hotmail, and Tesla Motors got their fundings.
Jamis got into blockchain 8-9 years ago, and when NFTs took off, he had the idea of bringing Buck’s to the NFT scene.
The idea behind the NFT was to showcase the iconographic pieces at Buck’s and make them accessible to everybody.
Buck’s is the first fully immersive 3D model to auction as an NFT.
He worked with Jaron Lanier on a VR project in the nineties.
Ownership, regulatory environment, and copyright are couple of topics in blockchain that excites him most.
Burnt Banksy got his attention, and he wrote about it on his website.
He says Elon doesn’t have confidence in NFTs yet. To Jamis, Elon is the most vital businessperson in the world.
He now works in psychedelics and founded a clinic in Mexico that treats Navy Seals and assists people looking for transcendence.
He went to Russia to buy a Russian spacesuit and had some crazy experiences thanks to meeting with the Russian army general at Buck’s.
He has a 30-year-old San Pedro cactus that Steve Jobs gave him after remodeling his house. (that I get to have a piece as well!)
Buck’s will continue to be a stable of Silicon Valley, and while keeping all the artifacts, his sons who are running it now are revamping the menu.
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Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.