Upclose with Corey Cotrell
Months ago, the Shipple community decided to help EmpowermeEOS via their shippleshoe contest with our latest EmpowermeEOS student, Bolaji being one of the beneficiaries of that donation. In this exclusive interview, we speak with Shipple and MotherEos founder, Corey Cotrell. Enjoy!
So just as a prelude, can you tell me a few things yourself. Who is Corey and what do you do?
My "day job" is musician. That's how I've been making money as a "job" for the past 15 years. However, in 2015, I taught myself to trade forex and actually called the bottom of the bitcoin chart by a week. ALMOST invested 10k with my wife but didn't. I literally lost out on 1 Million Dollars. So, in 2017, when a friend of mine got me to start looking into crypto again, I was all in. I started with a few hundred dollars and traded it into a decent sized little portfolio.
A lot of people started asking me for help so my partner and I created haystack10.com which is an index based trading method to basically save people from themselves and make considerably more than just holding bitcoin. 5X more in 2017 as it turns out. So.. in this long dark crypto winter i started reading up on EOS and was instantly fascinated and REALLY fascinated with all the tools and dapps and wallets getting created so early that all had interoperability. We didn't have anything like this in 2017!
Once I started playing with the meet.one wallets and the eoslynx wallets and linked right to multiple DEXes, I realized this is going to be revolutionary. The way EOS is built allowing everything to work together in ways that people entirely new to crypto can figure out very quickly! That's when I started working to learn how to launch a token. Didn't even know exactly what I wanted to make, what kind of project, just knew that I would, and that it would be on eos. It took about 3 months to figure out (I'm not a dev. at all. just someone who loves blockchain and the philosophy behind it).
We'd actually like to know about the musical part of Corey too though. Being a musician myself, I can't help but wonder how you manage to shuffle between crypto and your music career.
Check out Corey's music page on Facebook
I've been doing it a long time. I have no desire to be famous or go on tour. I play mostly cover gigs locally and frankly could do that in my sleep. 😉 Don't tell anyone. (Laughs). I still do a couple gigs a week, and its actually a welcome change of pace for me now. Like taking a break from the hard work.
Tell us more about Mothereos and the MOM token. What's it all about? What was the idea behind it?
I created the MOM token first which is now a kind of test bed for new ideas like shipple and the projects that will come after. mothereos.com is up but its crap. I need a web designer incidently, to save me from myself (laughs). . . not a forte
THIS POST probably has the best info out there on MOM. . . probably needs updating. Although the article above explains MOM and mothereos pretty well but basically its like the mothership, an idea factory. I have about 6 really fun and some important ideas for tokens moving forward that will be built. SHipple just jumped to the front of the pack because everyone wanted it RIGHT NOW!! Always strike when the iron is HOT.
So. . . tell us about shipple
Image from @Shippleio on twitter
(deep breath) ok. . . for a deeper understanding of why I hate the modern banking system watch "The Big Short". Then remember that the whole thing from top to bottom is no less ridiculous and predatory as mortgage backed credit default swaps being traded by banks that are leveraged 300 to 1, meaning it's all pretend money they get to play with the second anyone puts the down payment on a loan, AND in a lot of cases, it's federally insured in the states, so the losses get covered by tax payers. It's a whole thing. All that just so that when we talk about why bitcoin and crypto are so important, it's because of that. The system is rigged GLOBALLY to screw over working and normal people. The banks are the gate keepers and they want us all to bow and scrape for the scraps. Crypto-currency blows that up completely and there's nothing they can do about it (although they will try).
SO. . . watching people talk about Ripple drives me insane. The XRP token is completely useless. They don't even use it for their "bank transfers". No normal people use it that I've seen. Its like a mystery security token to take money from dumb traders and crypto noobs and that pisses me off. So I made a post in the Crypto Coin Traders group one day saying that if the post got 100 likes, I would make the ANTI-Ripple token called shipple. It would have the same supply and be idiotically inflationary like ripple (they release 1B a month, mostly in secret OTC trades) but because SHipple would be build on EOS and would be avail in wallets like EOS LYNX, on DAY ONE it would actually be far superior to Ripple. Turns out that was FAR more accurate than I thought.
What started as a joke quickly turned into a community, and reminded me of the DOGE coin experiment. Where a community believes in a token or coin so much that it just becomes true. Its valuation is literally derived from the communities belief and it's really obvious once you start digging under the surface, that this is actually always true. The dollar is a dollar because we all agree to believe it is. Same for bitcoin or any other means of exchange. It's all just a story we are telling each other and agreeing to believe in. I find that DEEPLY fascinating and so I started to openly talk about that belief in the SHipple community, to honestly suggest that if we all wanted to believe in it, wouldn't it be interesting if that breathed true value into it and almost immediately it did. Mostly because of what Greg did with the first SHipple Charity thing.
So, the Shipple community had been growing for about 10 days BEFORE i launched the token. I did an airdrop of the MOM token so everyone would know that I could actually do what I said I could do, belief/trust being the core presupposition.
Right after i launched the SHIL token, and everyone was clamoring for it (demand), I gave 10Million first to my buddy, Greg, and told him to just do something good with it. At 2am he made a post in the group saying he would give 1M away to the first 10 people who donated to charity and brought back proof. It was gone by morning and people had done things of real world value for this token we invented from air. The community had breathed life it its own currency. It's obviously gone crazy since.
Let's talk about EmpowermeEOS. How did you learn of the community and why did you choose to support us
Well, I started noticing these guys (Toju and Samuel) on FB a while ago, before shipple. and was impressed. When Stella and I were working on our goofy shoe on head idea originally, it was just going to be a fun game for shil but I wanted to see if we could add a charitable component to it. She mentioned you guys and I got to hear about all the details. just a couple days ago.
But my buddy Greg (who runs the SHipple Charitable Flying Circus Tribe now) has been talking about trying to fund some way to help Africans take advantage of the crypto revolution. The second that Stella filled me in on what you guys were doing it was an obvious HECK YES from us. You guys are clearly doing great work!! And Stella, who's opinion I came to trust very quickly, really loves what you guys are doing!
Moving on though.. Recently, you came up with the idea of the #shippleshoe challenge to help spread the word about Shipple and EmpowermeEOS. Can you tell us the background story?
Stella has a great piece up about how this all started. It actually started with me trying to Mortys Bribe my wife to put a shoe on her head. She wouldn't do it. (Laughs). But our friend, Donna (nick-name & eos name: laughtrack11) decided she would take the mission and made a video of it. She got mortys AND SHipple for that one and that was that until Stella saw Donna's video and came up with the idea of creating a giant SHIL Mission/Social Media Challenge to have everyone do it. The idea caught on VERY quickly. In fact, we weren't supposed to launch for a few weeks but so many people wanted to just do it that we pulled the trigger quicker.
There's a bit of a controversy though linking the #shippleshoe challenge to some obscene practice. Care to clear the air on that?
So, we heard about this being an old meme after we came up with the idea. Apparently, some arsehole trolls were using the shoe on head thing to demean women in some way? So far, after talking to 100 people about this challenge, only 3 have brought it up. We talked about maybe changing it but, there's already a massive upswelling of good will and intense fun around what we're doing so we will just change the narrative around having a shoe on your head as something goofy people do for a good cause. The old story is a bad one about people being disrespectful to each other. By the time we're done, it will be about people having fun and connecting over a goofy challenge for a very good cause.
this is my Aunt Gail in Canada whose #shippleShoe video got shared by her new Phillipino friend who works in Saudi Arabia. This was our intent. . . The connection and joy over something pretty absurd and funny. If we do our work right, no one will ever remember that having your shoe on your head was anything but something kind people do to support a good cause.
Yes. It's awesome to give a new meaning to a formerly terrible act
That's where we landed on it ya. And have you seen all the selfies? Its like an avalanche of goofy smiles!! its working.
So, all things being equal, the #shippleshoe challenge would attract donations for EmpowermeEOS and in turn allow us sponsor more students into the program. However, we do have about 100 students at the moment, of which 20 are on sponsorship. What's your advice to these students?
Truthfully, the fact that they are working with you means they probably already see the vision i would share with them! If i could add some things you are probably teaching them already. Be Bold! Never take anything at face value and work to understand things from first principles. Always find a way to serve others, and this new world of cryptocurrency means your market will truly be global.
DON'T. WAIT.
The learning and building you do today will have massive cumulative effects in the future. very likely the near future
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