Hedera Corner Twitter Spaces hosted by Genfinity with BATTY HATTIE (Part 1)

This interview was originally published by Genfinity.

—

King Solomon interviews Batty Hattie’s NFT Emporium as part of the Hedera Corner in the LightHouse by Genfinity! Brought to you by LightHouse Report sponsor Hedera Hashgraph and in collaboration with our partner and Hedera wallet provider HashPack.

Transcription

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍To give you guys a heads up, you guys know that we do tons of Hedera ecosystem interviews through Genfinity, on a pretty much a weekly basis, and releasing all that content, I think we're going to try to start moving those towards more of a Twitter spaces aspect and get some of these projects on because obviously a lot of the community is on Twitter. It might be a mixed bag, we might still be doing some of the video interview type stuff as well, but for us, I mean, it just kind of makes sense, everybody's here already, we can still record these, we can still push out content around them. I know and I'm excited to have Tyler from Upside Co-op and Batty Hattie from the Hedera ecosystem here today. So this is kind of the first one that we're doing in the Twitter spaces way, so definitely want to, I want to allow I think within this, like it to kind of be just a natural conversation as well as just kind of ask some targeted questions, to each of the individual projects that we have up here as well. All right, so I think we're gonna get started here though. So I guess to start with, give you guys a little bit of a background. As I already stated, we do tons of Hedera ecosystem interviews, we're going to start kind of moving them towards Twitter spaces around this time, every Monday, and yeah, so super excited to have Batty Hattie and Tyler from upside Co-op today, I guess we'll start with who had the first slot, I think it was you Battie for today. So, and again, open forum, so Tyler or Batty, if you guys you know, if you guys see Synergy or you want to inspect or ask questions, I mean feel free to do that as well. But Batty  if you could give us maybe a brief overview and introduction into yourself, that would be fantastic.

Batty Hattie - Founder
‍Yeah, so, hi everyone, my name's Batty, and I'm part of Batty Hattie's NFT Emporium. Hattie is my daughter and I'll sort of go into a little bit in more detail I suppose, how we came to be in a little while I suppose, but about myself, I'm an educator, I've been in the education system for a couple of decades, started off in construction actually as a young lad, but re-educated myself, and yeah, so essentially, we are a family-run project, and we focus in on raising awareness of social mental health issues through creativity, education, and fun. And we look to onboard new people into the ecosystem with a key focus on young people, and we try and share our journey, through that process, so I mean, I might as well just go into uh how I came into web 3 and how we kind of formed the Emporium really. So, for me as an educator, I like to try and learn something new all the time. And many years ago, I was watching a documentary about the Silk Road and this thing called Bitcoin popped up. And I think at the time, Bitcoin was cents or a few dollars, didn't think nothing of it but something caught my ear in terms of a digital wallet, but I didn't know what that meant. Roll on a few years and Bitcoins are a hundred dollars, 200 dollars and again I hear this thing, and I'm not really bothered about it, and other things were more interesting to me. And then all of a sudden, the kind of first bull run, if you like, happened and Bitcoin was thousands of dollars and at that point I was like, "well, what is a digital wallet, what is this, what is this thing?" And I happen to just come across it one of the first meetups in New York for hashgraph at the time and it was Mance and Leemon and a few early investors I think before it was Hedera. Watched this meet up and I generally watch like New every day, just to try and learn and that led me on to Mike Maloney's Hidden Secrets of Money and I'm a stereotypical H-Barbarian who's had that journey through Mike Maloney. And not only did I learn about what a digital wallet was and I learned about Bitcoin but I actually learned about this thing called Hashgraph and this was my moment, if you like, to get the opportunity that I'd missed before with Bitcoin. Because even when it was a thousand dollars, I mean, I'm an educator, I don't earn lots of money but I scrimped and scraped every penny I could, got together, you know, I fundamentally resonated with Mance and Leemon from day one, just the way they conducted themselves, the way they spoke. And then when I was part of the trials with daily time stamp. So, for those of people that are new to they're there or in the community now, originally you'd get your Hedera wallet and you would be able to look at articles in on the line and you’d earn hbar. And that preceded kind of launch day. Launch day, I got quite badly burnt because I might have been educated but I was a really bad investor, luckily the one cent days allowed me to do this thing I've never heard of before which has done a cost average, which meant that actually I was able to kind of limit the damage but again it was a question of scrimping and scraping every penny I could because I just believed in this technology and I believed in this company about the same time as that journey --  my daughter Hattie, who was probably six or seven at the time, started to suffer from quite debilitating anxiety. And when we started this project, we didn't share this -- it was only later on when we felt comfortable within the community that we shared it. And everything I share today, Hattie is more than happy for me to share. She's a great advocate for sharing our story because, every little helps and I do so freely and I do so with her consent. So it's her story to tell and she's happy for me to share it. So, she started suffering anxiety. She loves school, she loves being with her friends. And she would get really anxious and have sleepless nights. And some days she'd be physically sick at the school gate. And she's a brave girl, and she would dust herself off, have a few tears, walk into school, get through the day, come home, be happy that she'd had a great day, and then the cycle would start again. As an educator, I felt helpless as a parent. My wife, who's amazing, we asked ourselves, "What will be done? What have we done? What could we do?" And I started to delve really deeply into mental health issues, especially as an educator, because it wasn't just Hattie who was affected, other people were too. And I could actually see on the ground, young people starting to suffer from anxiety and depression more. So I did more research, and you know while I'm here and I've got the platform, I'll share a few statistics just to kind of capture what is a global issue. And bear in mind, since COVID, these statistics have risen by about 25 to 30 percent. So in 2019, one in every eight people, that's 970 million people across the world, have suffered from a mental health disorder. 301 million suffer from anxiety, 280 million from depression. And in terms of children, anxiety alone equates to 58 million children, and that was 2019 pre-COVID. So add 25, that's a huge number, and depression is around 23 million. So I knew that I had to help my daughter. I didn't want her to be left with no strategies. And there was no traumatic event that led to those feelings and that mental health issue, it was just what it was. So I did my reading. I found out about exercise, creativity, fun, play, whatever we could do, we threw the kitchen sink at this thing. And at the start, we tried to deal with it ourselves. We would sit across the table, we would draw, do scribble monsters, which I know King Solomon's done with his daughter. We would just use our creativity as a forum for "how are you feeling? What's going on?" To try and explore emotions and feelings through that journey as an educator, I learned that actually, there is a systemic issue globally, especially with young people. They are bombarded on a daily basis. We get in a day the equivalent of six months' worth of information that people got in the 60s. For instance, young people are more engaged with electronic devices, and there are downsides to that. But we created, eventually, we went on to get more professional support and help. And we were fortunate enough to do that. And one of our drives is the fact that you know we want to share our journey to highlight the things you can do to try and help and support and be aware of those issues. I myself have had mental health issues. I was quite significantly affected earlier on in my career. I kept it to myself for a few years and then I met a guy that I worked with called Mac. He's from Trinidad. I called him Mr. Sunshine. And to cut a long story short, essentially we went out for a coffee. It got me pinned down for a coffee at this really busy coffee shop, and there were two seats left, so we sat next to a couple who were on their first date, if you like. And within about five minutes, Mac was literally holding me up off the floor and I had my breakdown, ruined their date. I don't feel really sorry for, went home, spoke to my wife, said, "Yeah, I know you've not been yourself for a while," and it all came back down to the kids. So I appreciate that sharing is really important, and that's why we do what we do. So, yeah, so we move forward. And part of learning, I said to Hattie, "Look at this crypto punk, look at this, this is going for like sixty thousand dollars, etc." and she was like, "Well, what's an NFT?" So we started to learn about that, and we then well she said, "Well, why don't you put your pixel art on as NFTs, just as an experiment, let's see what it's going to see what's going to happen." So we did, so we launched our, if you like, the artwork I'd worked on go mint, and Batty Hattie is NFT Emporium was formed, and her artwork was left to one side, we didn't know if we wanted to put it out there or what was going on to us for her to decide. So we were very fortunate enough that the community embraced us, and we hadn't really shared our story fully, completely at that point, and that came out as we progressed. So, yeah, we had a H bears and hash blobs and things like muddle Earth, and we were having fun, and yeah, things took off. And I remember being in spaces with Tom Saw from HBAR space, and he said, "Look, before you know it, you're going to be doing merch and you're going to have a community," and I didn't have a clue, we didn't know anything about that, and as it turns out, here we are now with exactly that. So, we really focused our ethos and culture on sharing our journey and highlighting those mental and social health issues, and we've been learning along, along the way. Education's so important, having fun and being creative is fun, and we got to a point last year where we collaborated with some amazing people in the community. We were educating ourselves on how to build and be part of this amazing ecosystem that we're in.