Riley Walz auctions naming rights to a San Francisco alley he bought — Notion wins at $140K

Speaker 1: Yeah. What a feat.

Speaker 2: What a feat. Well, we have Riley Walls in the waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TBPN Ultra Realm. Riley, how are you guys doing?

Speaker 4: How are you guys? Are you We are good.

Speaker 2: Are you where I think you are? Introduce yourselves. Explain where you are.

Speaker 4: Are at the alley. We're live at the alley.

Speaker 2: Live at the alley.

Speaker 4: This is this is the street right here. Okay. Yeah. Life is good. This is my friend Patrick. We worked on the alley together. Yeah. This is a really fun project. Yeah. We yeah. It's it's been a blast.

Speaker 1: Give us the full history Yeah. Of of the alley, how you guys came to own it, and then we'll get into this project.

Speaker 4: Basically, we learned that this this alley was foreclosed on. It's kind of a long story where this this woman actually bought it thinking that she was buying this house right here. No. That is No. Is this one. Oh, is. Which which was which is worth like a million dollars She bid 25 k on it thinking that she was getting the steal of a lifetime. She won.

Speaker 1: Is this the kind of thing she didn't she didn't want to tell anyone like because she was like, okay, this is like probably thought it was too good to be true but then like Yeah. Maybe it was real so she didn't want to tell anyone if she she

Speaker 4: knocked on the doors because this is an apartment building and she knocked on the doors and told the tenant she was not raising the rent. So she was she so she really thought she owned this and then she realized she didn't and then there there was a whole news story about her mistake. And then we we eventually reached out to her and and negotiated for a little while, and we we bought it for a little more than she actually bought it for. So she got bailed out, and we we were able to do a nice thing and still do this crazy project.

Speaker 6: That's amazing.

Speaker 2: So did you find this alley from the news article? Is that how this all started?

Speaker 4: Yeah. We we had the the Patrick and our friend Theo and I, the three of us, we had been talking for, like, a a while before that about buying a different alley in San Francisco. Sure. But we we couldn't end up buying that one. But we we saw this news and were like, oh, this is perfect.

Speaker 11: Yeah. Yeah. And we we tried to we tried to email her to to, you know, get us get us the offer. But Riley had to send send a letter in in the mail.

Speaker 2: And she got the letter physically?

Speaker 4: Yeah. Physical sale mail

Speaker 2: works. Okay. So it transfers to you. You you own it. And then what what rights are you entitled to? Because clearly it's not the house next door, but you own something. Right. What exactly do you own?

Speaker 4: We we spent a a good amount of time with lawyers to figure out what actually is allowed. Yeah. There's actually a car. It's driving right at us right there. We have to move out of the way.

Speaker 2: If you need to move, you can show us wherever. Take us on tour. What neighborhood is this by the way?

Speaker 4: This is in the Sunset. Okay. Just like the 24th

Speaker 9: in 23rd. Yeah. 24th in Kirkland. Okay.

Speaker 11: It's sort of middle of Sunset. Sorry.

Speaker 4: It's live on air. There's a car coming.

Speaker 2: There's a car coming down the alley. Okay.

Speaker 6: So it's

Speaker 4: a This fun actually a great question because we we yeah. Live demo here.

Speaker 7: We we

Speaker 4: so we we legally can't block the alley, so we are obliged to move. That is actually in tandem with the the question you guys just asked. Yeah. We we can't block it. Cars have the right to drive down it because there's there's easements

Speaker 2: Okay.

Speaker 4: Here. But we do have the right to paint anything on the surface of the street.

Speaker 2: Okay.

Speaker 4: And we also can give the alley a name.

Speaker 2: Okay.

Speaker 4: So yeah, it's it's

Speaker 2: already assigned? Does the alley have a name? Has it historically had a name?

Speaker 4: No. So it it Google Maps calls it Dirt Alley. Dirt? We think that some editor randomly added that like a couple years ago but it's nowhere else.

Speaker 2: Okay.

Speaker 11: It says that name. No official name.

Speaker 2: And then and then is there any square footage that anyone could build on? Is it or is it just the actual road?

Speaker 4: It's it's just the road. It's it's it's literally like eight feet wide and Yeah. Nothing else. So So do you

Speaker 2: Well, and and the

Speaker 1: aura of, you know, if if you become the owner of this of having an alley named after you in the great city of San Francisco.

Speaker 2: Yeah. So, yeah, take us through the process to actually auction this, set up the website, draw demand. How did all this play out?

Speaker 11: Totally. Yeah. So when when when we when we first bought it, it was it was actually dirt alley. Right? Like, there was there was nothing on it. So so first, had to pave it. And so we we we found some pavers. You know, they paved it 80 feet of it or so. You know, built the website in in in a weekend, I think Yeah. With our our friend Theo, who's who's helping us with the project. And yeah. And then and then we we we thought about how to go live, and I don't know if wanna say more.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah. I think this has been cool because, like, the the art side of it like, people can go to paintindustry.com. It actually just ended five minutes ago. But for, the the during the weekend, people could submit little, like, 48 by 48 pixel drawings and we have space to paint like 1,200 of them on the street. And that's like totally free. And then to to kind of cover the entire project and be a little more like capitalistic, we we auction off the naming rights. So that ends in like fifty five minutes or so. And yeah.

Speaker 2: So the full street is going to be painted with this this full alley? Like this whole mural of everyone that picked something?

Speaker 4: Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2: And this was free. Basically anyone that wanted to could go and was this inspired by Reddit the place, that idea?

Speaker 4: Yeah. That's been a huge inspiration. That's been really cool to see. So yeah, we're kind of reviving that and making it IRL and SF.

Speaker 1: Talk talk about the expectations because when when we first chatted about this, we were like, well, we'll we'll be we'll be we'll be the early bidder to to at least make sure you guys get your money out. And then by the time you actually sent us the the auction, it was already well well well above. So how's the response been?

Speaker 4: Yeah. It's been because we were we were kind of stressed because we're like putting a lot of money on the line and we're like, we we either this will either like flop and like or it'll actually do really well and it has done really well which is which is good. Right now the the highest bidder is is WordPress. Yeah. WordPress Way. Yeah. WordPress Way. 135 k which is which is insane. And how

Speaker 1: is the auction gonna work at the end? Is it gonna be like I forget the terminology of it, but if somebody places a new winning bid within the last, let's say minute, does it extend the auction? Are you expecting like, a are are people circling now? Where I feel I feel like I saw Josh Browder. Mhmm. I know that Josh is probably thinking, I'm gonna wait until the final minute and come in with the top offer. But how how what's the dynamic gonna work like?

Speaker 11: So in in the last five minutes, if somebody bids, then it gets extended by another five minutes

Speaker 6: Mhmm.

Speaker 11: Until until it ends. So so it'll be a

Speaker 8: while.

Speaker 2: And then once the auction closes, what's the process like to actually rename it? Have you have you traced through, like, what does it take to update Google Maps, Apple Maps, Waze, all the different mapping features? Do you think that would be pretty easy, or is it is it like is there like a self serve portal for like renaming streets? How do you prove this?

Speaker 4: There is this is a unique street because it's privately owned. Okay. And as the owners, we we kind of the source of truth for a name like this is the sign itself. So putting up a sign and then we can I I think Google Maps, like, you take a photo or something and you submit the edit and it should should appear soon? I actually when I was in high school, I I maybe I shouldn't share this on the Internet, but I I as like a senior prank, I installed a street sign like on an unnamed alley in my hometown named after my high school track coach. And it got renamed on Google Maps and it's been like five years this road has been

Speaker 8: on there.

Speaker 2: It's still on there.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah. Five years later the yeah. Wow. Like people think it's real. It's really funny. Yeah. The mayor has mentioned it in a in a meeting before. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Did you did you have to do anything to sort of I mean, these projects, they always run the risk of like vandalization. Basically, I'm looking at someone clearly tried to paint wrong way on the street. Although, they couldn't quite get all the up votes to land the way they wanted, so it's a little bit out of order. But did you have a process for reviewing submissions or was this all community led? Like, how did you think about Yeah. The risk of someone putting up something that was, like, offensive?

Speaker 11: Yeah. We had we had some attempts at this, but but we we had some automated stuff remove it and then we were the, you know, the entire time it's been up since Thursday, we've been manually reviewing it. Yeah. You know, as a team, have a group chat and we're just, you know, reviewing it and and Yeah. Someone's taking the the turn and wake up in the morning and there's some stuff we remove it. But it's not it's not been so bad. It's been the Internet has been pretty friendly to us relative to how how bad it could be.

Speaker 2: It gets crazy. I remember didn't Justin Bieber put out a post? I'm like, I'll I'll go wherever the audience votes me for my next tour and they tried to send them to North Korea. It's a famous example of like the Internet going wild. At the same time, Bodhi McBoatface, successfully named Boat. You know, everyone enjoyed that one. Give us an update on some of other projects. How is the the Pokemon GO payphone project going these days?

Speaker 4: Yeah. That that ended a few weeks ago. Basically, I I had gotten a list of all the payphones in California. There's still like a few thousand that work. Yeah. And then made like a Pokemon Go type game where you have to go to different payphones and you can claim them by calling a number and yeah. Like, three or 400 pay phones were called from and it was really really cool to see people go out and and find them all.

Speaker 2: And there was a leaderboard but no specific prize?

Speaker 4: No no prize. Yeah. Just just the memories.

Speaker 2: What who who won? How many calls did they make? How much did they travel?

Speaker 4: This girl named Maggie won. She won by one point. Woah. And yeah. She she was she's driving all over the state. Seemed like there

Speaker 2: was there

Speaker 6: was a

Speaker 4: lot of lot of phones. I think I I nerd sniped quite a few people. That's cool to see.

Speaker 2: What what other projects are on your plate right now? Are you still working on the j suite or is that project sort of done at this point? I know that there's a whole documentary you can talk about, but what what else is in your world?

Speaker 4: Yeah. Jmail has been pretty crazy. There's, like, 15 or so people that are that have helped in some way for that project, and it's it's kind of died down now. Maybe there'll be some resurgence in the Epstein files. Maybe. We'll we'll see. But, yeah, that that's been really really crazy to see. Project that I'm I'm probably going to drop this weekend is we scraped a bunch of data about The US, like, much money the US government spends.

Speaker 5: Okay.

Speaker 4: And we'll hopefully make like a like a Spotify wrap style like, oh, here's here's how much you paid in taxes this year, like, oh, this much this many dollars went towards like defense or social security or things like that. Interesting. That'll that'll be cool to see.

Speaker 1: I'm sure Yeah. I'm sure that'll make a lot of people really happy.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy to see like I'm like, oh, actually like I kinda, you know, seeing these actual numbers like where things actually get spent on like is is Yeah. Feel like it just makes you think a different way.

Speaker 2: Yeah. In general like with something like that, Spotify Wrap works so well because people screenshot it, they share it. How do you think about the user generated viral loop for these projects? Is that like a key piece of the the idea phase you you think about, okay, how can I actually create some sort of flywheel for generating attention? Or is this just like sometimes you get lucky and people share and and it's sort of an afterthought?

Speaker 4: I think it's fun thinking about like, I mean, like the Alley project, it's just like a fun idea. Like we were actually talking at like a party like a year ago.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 8: And I

Speaker 4: was like, oh, wait, there's some some Alley's that get foreclosed on in SF like Wouldn't be a ball line. Yeah. And I said it as a joke, then Patrick and Theo were like, let's let's actually do it. And then there was a girl that was like in law school at the party. We were talking to her about like the legality of it and then it just it took a a while to actually make it happen, but like it's just kind of fun for us. And then thinking about how to actually make it go viral is also like a kind of a secondary thing, but it it is framing is so important for these sorts of things and like we also wanted something cool like this is kind of just like cool like thing to to to do for SF like Yeah. It's cool putting SF on the map and and doing things like this, especially when there's like yeah, think I think we're really really lucky that these sorts of things can get funded too. Yeah. I think SF is a very special place for that.

Speaker 1: What kind of inbound what kind of inbound pitches do you guys get at this point? Like, I'm sure people are DMing you like, hey, I found this weird kind of anomaly. I think I think I think you could turn, you know, something like an like an alley. Is there an inbound flywheel yet?

Speaker 4: There's sorts of weird things. I don't know. Like, someone's like, yeah, we have like a tank in SF, like, ideas for that. Like, there's like there's like a lot of weird things.

Speaker 1: I'm expecting you guys to to figure out some mechanism to, like, effectively take over a country at some point. Maybe that's the next step.

Speaker 2: I wouldn't put it past you. Well, congratulations. Where can people go to actually bid?

Speaker 1: Paintastreet.com/auction. Mhmm. Forty six minutes, twenty eight seconds left. We're gonna be keeping our eye on this. It's still at WordPress. As down. It

Speaker 5: I mean, you're

Speaker 8: pretty soon.

Speaker 1: Yeah. I'm very interested to see how people react when there's only when there's only a few minutes left.

Speaker 2: Yeah. This will be very fun. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come give us the update and and chat with us. Congratulations on a huge success. I mean, I this is well well above. I mean, a $135,000, that seems well above what you paid and you should be able to recoup all the costs. Do you have a plan for what to do with the money?

Speaker 4: Yeah. Not going to use it for ourselves at all We're to be going to we'll it'll take some money to to paint the actual mural on the street, but there'll definitely be something left over. We'll just keep it for the next project of this sort in San Francisco. Some kind of IRL project here.

Speaker 2: That's amazing. Well, what a fun project. Thanks for coming on and sharing with us. Yeah.

Speaker 4: We'll talk to you guys as well. Yeah. It's crazy that we're yeah.

Speaker 2: We're complete. Yeah. We're gonna be having SF next Tuesday. Let's hang in person.

Speaker 1: We'll have to do a show from the alley at some point.

Speaker 2: That'd be amazing.

Speaker 11: Yes. Awesome.

Speaker 1: Guys. We'll talk to you soon. Congrats. Goodbye. Bye. Cheers.

Speaker 2: The Have you seen this map of the surface of Venus? Did you know that Venus has land surface?

Speaker 1: I did not.

Speaker 2: The land surface of Venus has some insane RPG world potential. Someone needs to vibe code a video game where you can go run around on this or or play some sort of four x game. Yeah. Someone says Hasbro is really messing up not releasing Risk Venus. There's another cool AI project that launched from Netflix. There's a video here showing their new project Void. The AI removes objects from videos, But it even corrects the physics after the objects or people are removed. And there's a demo in the comments here. So you can see that the bottom is the element that's being removed. And so if you have the kettlebell is deforming the pillow, once the AI removes that, which is often a very, very time intensive VFX task, the physics of how the scene would have played out if that character had not been in the scene are then recalculated. And so the duck, not only is the duck not being smashed, the duck just appears like normal. And this is just a project that will if you've ever done any of this type of work, it's incredibly cumbersome. And so I think this will be adopted very, very quickly. Nishan says he had a use case four years ago. A big Hollywood VFX company came to us, the company I was working with, and asked us to remove freckles and pimples from the face of actors and actresses four k movie footage. At the time, we really struggled and failed to do it. If it was now, we would have easily tackled the problem. And there are so many examples of this. The physics weight, the physics correction part, removing stuff from video isn't new, but making the background actually behave correctly is a completely different problem. And so this is a huge huge move for the VFX industry in Hollywood.

Speaker 1: Also, this has does Netflix have a history of contributing to Yeah. Source?

Speaker 2: I think so. They've done yeah. They've done I mean, they've done a lot of they they've done a lot of standard setting around cinema camera gear. They were a big proponent of the Blackmagic ecosystem, I believe. Great, like, price per value for shooting a film and delivering in four k, which is something that they sort of mandate across their entire ecosystem, but can be cumbersome for creators if they have to go shoot on a very expensive cinema camera. They've done a lot of stuff there. And then, of course, they acquired that AI company from Ben Affleck, I believe. Wasn't that the story?

Speaker 1: Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2: And I I don't know. It's possible that there were some researchers from that team that bled over onto this project, although this seems like it was in flight for longer than before. I agree. Corridor crew needs to do a video on that feature. That would be very cool to watch them road test it and see, you know, where the boundaries are because I'm sure it doesn't work in every possible scenario. The demo footage is always gonna be the best, but very, very cool. Anyway, without further ado, we have our next guest, Aditya Bandi, from noon in the waiting room. Let's bring Aditya in. How are