Can Pudgy Penguins Flip DOGE? | Luca Netz

I like the mic category because technically the way that penu is structured is very much like a meme coin but it's more than that saying it's a meme coin I think is doing it a disservice it's a culture coin it's a community coin it could be one day a gaming coin or an AI coin but I think in its principle that's the beauty of meme coins right is they can be a lot of different things while still you know remaining a meme if you understand you know pudgy penguin's marketing strategy and Our Roots and our origin stories it's very much a medic culture when we're getting 300 million views a day on gift you know gifts are memes right I

said a interesting thing a year ago but you know the person who controls the gifts controls the memes and the person who controls the memes controls the world welcome to bankless where today we follow the pudgy Penguins to the frontier of in real life consumer experiences and the gift layer of the internet and overall the growth of the pudgy penguin meme across both the real and the virtual worlds this is David Hoffman and I'm here to help you become more bankless Luca Nets is on the podcast today he is The Man Behind pudgy

penguins which is perhaps crypto's most beloved nft project but today in January of 2025 pugy Penguins is just so much more than an nft project it's now also a token it's now also in real life plushy animals and also a layer two as well lucanet is building an empire all around growing the pudgy brand and the penu meme he's rewriting the meme game strategy from the ground up and if it works then I think he's going to change the game of what it means to to launch a meme in crypto we had Luca on the

podcast almost a year ago in February of 2024 and we were bringing him back on to update us as the pangu universe continues to grow and evolve to new heights so let's go ahead and talk to Luca Nets right now but first a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors then make this show possible Bank list nation very excited to introduce you to Luc andet the CEO of igloo Inc the company behind the iconic pudgy Penguins brand after buying the pudy Penguins IP in April of 2022 the nfts rocketed off the floor of the bare market and became maybe the only nft brand in ecosystems that actually

fulfilled some of the promises made by the nft movement in 2021 today pudgy penguins are the number two nft bu market cap rough roughly valued at $620 million behind crypto punks at 1.3 billion and not too long ago the Penguins launched their penu token coming in at $ 1.5 billion in market cap Luca welcome back to bankless hey David thanks for having me Luca my friend Peter Pan wrote this tweet thread that I want to propose a positioning of the penu token as it is in the rest of the

crypto Market he compared penu to Dogecoin as salana is to ethereum and he calls penu the pangu token the first meaningful Dogecoin competitor now I want to read a little excerpt from his tweet thread where he put this all together he says Dogecoin resembles the dominance of ethereum both highly Grassroots ecosystems that grew organically in a fairly decentralized fashion Solana was written off as it looks nothing like ethereum but yet it optimized in the areas that mattered such as performance and marketing it had a core team that executed and outpaced

everyone else the headlessness of meme coins are both a weakness and a strength but most importantly is pangu's opportunity pangu will win the game of meme coins and out execute better than anyone it has a world-class team and one of the biggest communities in crypto that is day in and day out executing and grinding a way to win like salana rewrote the Rules of Engagement for growing blockchain pengu will do the same for memecoins too in under a month of trading has become Solana's biggest memec coin in under 2.5 years pudgy Penguins has generated 37 billion views

via gifs 1.6 million followers on Tik Tok 1.7 million followers on Instagram and 2 million toys sold globally pengu's success so far is arguably has been largely due to its ability to bring crypto well beyond crypto natives into the broader Mass market now I want your opinion your reflection on that positioning for the penu token how do you like The Branding that it is uh it is uh the the Dogecoin as salana is to ethereum uh I think it's really I think Peter really wrote that eloquently um

you know from our perspective I think that's our thesis now that isn't just our thesis for pangu I think that's been our thesis for the last three years which I always thought you know both nfts and now memes you know are categories with huge pmf and an Ever growing Tam yet for some reason they're the most underdeveloped out of all of the different categories and so you know figuring this has a huge you know uh finger on the pulse and and obviously attracts you know consumers in a way that I think very few you know categories really do you know I think

from our perspective you know how do you develop this stuff so that they're more than just non-sentient stagnant mimetic you know pictures with uh you know good communities trying to drive that forward you know ultimately when we do things like you know put products in toys or do long form content whether that's a movie or a TV show or games you know these things are really doing two things they're creating demand and they're also creating love and Affinity within the existing holder base which creates conviction and naturally you know tokens are very simple in the sense that they

uh they are they succeed and fail based on uh the elementary school model of supply and demand and uh you know the more demand that you can create and the more conviction you can create with the existing holder base ultimately you kind of have a path toward success you know sometimes you can't control at least what I think happens in the short term and I think our history at pudy Penguins has shown that uh but over the course of time as we continue to push the ball forward uh and we create more Demand by creating more Headlines by bringing new people in through new initiatives and then also while creating you know love

and Affinity with the existing holder base ultimately you have a recipe for success and this has ultimately been the Playbook that has you know driven us you know from the the best performing nft project of the last couple of years I think it's the same line of thought that is going to lead to pengu's ultimate success and dominance within the meme quid category and the hope is really to develop this and kind of set a Playbook around memes which is you know memes shouldn't just do nothing uh that idea of them doing nothing I think is irresponsible and I've always taken the approach that you know if Doge had an

operator behind it or one of these major projects had operators behind it I think they'd be exponentially more successful than they are today for the reasons I just explained so you know I think we're going to be the first real team to give a a crack at this thesis uh it's going to be uh one that I think uh over the course of time is going to rain true and uh excited to put our hat in the ring in uh yet another category I find the positioning of pangu as a meme coin interesting because previously that would be considered like insulting I think maybe in years past in the crypto

world where if you're the founder of a company and somebody's telling you yeah your your token is a meme coin your token is a meme that's that would historically be an insult uh but I think you're kind of turning it on its head and you're saying well there's this brand called penguins pudgey penguins and there's this team that I've built that I'm the CEO of and we are just going to push that brand forward and that brand is the meme how do you how are you explain a little bit more elaborate a little bit more on how you're kind of like reformatting the idea of a meme coin here yeah I think from our

perspective you know what can penu be I think it can be a lot of things and I think it can tap into a lot of different categories I mean we could do something on the AI side and ultimately like insert ourselves into that narrative we can do things on the gaming side and ultimately insert ourselves into that narrative I like the mic category because technically the way that penu is structured is very much like a meme coin but it's more than that and I think just like saying it's a mem coin I think is doing it a disservice it's a culture coin it's a community coin it's an ecosystem coin it could be one day a

gaming coin or an AI coin but I think in its principle that's the beauty of meme coins right is they can be a lot of different things while still you know remaining a meme if you understand you know pudy penguin's marketing strategy and and Our Roots and our origin stories it's very much mtic culture right like that's how we've gotten this far that's how we've permeated into the real world when we're getting 300 million views a day on gifts you know gifts are memes right I I said a interesting thing a year ago but you know person who controls the gifts controls the memes

and the person who controls the memes controls the world you know gifts are just embedded mimetic distribution in all of the top social networks and you know and media channels and you know on 300 million views a day there is no mimetic you know character that is getting that many Impressions a day uh not even Doge and so you know eventually that will catch up and and and that that will be priced in at some point uh and the goal is to make those numbers even bigger I think right now that's growing 10% mon month over month uh I think we

can probably get it to 20 25% and then ultimately I think you have a a recipe for success and that and that's just one vertical right there's so many different verticals with when with within what we're doing uh but I like the mcoin category because I think technically penu is that the beauty of memes and this is you know an unpopular opinion but they can be many things right while also being a meme first I kind of look at penu as like this meme coin Plus+ right which is this idea that like technically it is a meme the meme category is severely underdeveloped I

mean literally nobody does anything in the category uh with the exception of probably Bon I mean Bon has uh you know as I'm getting more entrenched into the ecosystem I'm starting to learn that Bon is probably the only meme coin that actually does anything uh and and and it's been nothing but a net positive for them in in many different ways I mean it's probably been one of the best meme coins of the you know Blue Chip meme coins of the last couple of years so give them credit where credit is due uh but this idea that that they they have to remain stagnant and underdeveloped I think is fiscally irresponsible it's

doing a huge disservice to the community it's doing a huge disservice to the character and the IP and the meme uh and ultimately I think we're going to reinvent that narrative and so you know how do you go into this category that has huge pmf huge Tam that is severely underdeveloped how do you develop it and ultimately set the playbook for everybody to follow I think this is going to follow the exact same trajectory and the exact same Playbook that pudgy penguins in the nft has followed you know it might not feel like it in in real time uh again like you know my my my my take to the community was like look you can't control what you

can't control in the short term but in the mid to long term it is very obvious to me that this model and this line of thought uh is the model that's ultimately going to win and and ultimately it's going to be you know which memes are actually doing and building something tangible and real and trying to push the boundary and break the barrier and which ones aren't and I think the ones that are you know trying to push that boundary are ultimately going to be the ones that see the most success and there'll still be tons of success with the ones that don't do anything I mean you'll never be able to stop that the Pandora's Box is now open

but I I think if uh if you really want to ultimately I think become a cultural phenomenon which is the highest point that any of these coins can ultimately become uh I think uh I think you have to do this uh or or just pray and get lucky and hope that you get lucky which I think is a recipe for failure not a recipe for success is the world that you're illustrating something like the current instantiation of memes in the crypto space meme coins M tokens in the crypto space is is something like Stone Age memes like uh caveman era memes

where they're just in ner and like the pictures are funny and they make us laugh but they otherwise don't really build and they don't really much and what you're trying to do is help evolve that part of the crypto sector the mcoin sector and help bring it into like the industrial era where we can put you know productivity and growth and development into our meme coins and just bring it into like a higher state of being and and a more productive state of being and it's still memes there still memes they're just better more engineered uh Stronger memes and it's just a more

advanced is that kind of like what you're trying to do here totally I think it's sentience versus non-sentient like ultimately you're not going to be able to beat a driving force that's inserting itself you know in relevancy every week every day every month you know every quarter that that recipe is just too much of a successful recipe I think and so you know I think from our perspective you know what does it look like if uh you know you know you you see shibi enu you see pep you see some of these huge mimic coins you know that have you know you know to be frank like unparalleled

valuations compared to traditional IP like imagine how much could be done with that resource I mean I mean Pepe Pepe you know Shibu could be on Netflix and Hulu it should be everywhere right you know Pepe could be everywhere uh and they should be uh and and and as you guys have seen with paju penguins in our small little case study you know when we do these things like put products in Walmart and do these huge Partnerships with you know major Asian conglomerates like ultimately that has been huge for the space that has made people feel good

about the space that has taken the taboo and the intimidating nature around crypto and made people feel a little more comfortable uh made people feel like there was some hope and so you know imagine you know and and duly Justified right like I just I just don't and and I don't think the era of stagnant memes is ever going to go away like that is the the the origin story and the foundation to these things but again I think over the course of time who is really going to lead the charge who's going to be an industry leader who is going to win this

race I think that is going to be predicated on the people and the groups and the communities that rally Behind These initiatives and push things forward and by pushing things forward I mean more Partnerships more initiatives more places in which the IP is relevant and again don't mid curve it when you do these things these things are simple they are creating more demand and they are creating more conviction to a finite supply of tokens which ultimately if you have enough people holding and enough people you know creating demand and enough new people participating then

ultimately you get what everybody in crypto majority wants which is something that goes up and to the right right like that's just the elephant in the room and you have to sit in it and you have to understand it and you have to realize that is the truth and uh predicated and based around that truth I think it's just a uh a fundamental Playbook that again I'm not really theorizing it at this point that's why I'm so confident in how I speak about it because again like we didn't beat everyone in nfts because we had more money than them or because we had more resources I mean it was actually the complete opposite it was it was a complete you know opposite

of of that story right there's 60 70 nft projects that have more money than us even probably today uh and and and our success was really predicated around this line of thought and and I refuse to believe that that is diff you know that is different in in the liquid token land well if we're going to extend this metaphor pangu is to Dogecoin as salana is to ethereum salana changed the game as Peter said and changed the game of how to build a blockchain and and you are changing the game of what it means to build a meme but then what happens next is that you give other people

people the road map you give other people the blueprint to to follow in your for footsteps which I'm kind of hopeful for because I think multiple different projects being productive around their own memes uh going in different directions is validating of what you're doing and also is just net good for the space at large but I personally haven't seen any maybe I'm naive what what does the the salana competitor the apto suie say of pangu look like what what's that sector look like I think uh right now I I would

probably say in the salana ecosystem it's probably Bon uh would probably be the the main one though I don't really look at it as net competitive I actually really love that team I think N is a phen a phenomenal founder and leader of of what they're doing over there and you know ultimately at the end of the day it's one of the first times salana is a little interesting in the sense that it's one of the first times I've ever been a part of an ecosystem where I feel like you know it's not necessarily to PVP now naturally the chain can be that in the sense that you know rotations and

it's really easy to kind of go into one thing and into the next but you know working adjacent to some of these Founders in the space you don't really feel the same way like an nft land it feels super competitive and uh and then and then specifically the salana ecosystem land I'm less focused on you know how do we beat Bon I'm more focused on you know why is shibba enu still worth1 13 billion do when we are getting 300 million views a day and you know we are probably the most beloved and popular crypto character of the last couple of years and that is where I see

the discrepancy uh so I don't really look within the salana ecosystem because it's such like an uplifting ecosystem and one where everyone's like helping each other it's like super strange to kind of feel that um and uh and I'm more looking at to looking at the the incumbents and thinking to myself okay you know really looking at Shibu and saying to myself like right you know I I I get it and it had its time but I I don't see a world where penu doesn't beat that and and that's really what I Look to towards from a competitive standpoint but Bonk again like I said I

think is the only thing in the top 10 that is actually trying to push a needle and move move something forward that is trying to be proactive in posting content that is trying to be proactive in creating syncs and it's maybe taken a little bit of a tradition uh a more like traditional approach you know to how people run tokens and then just like a a a no nothing you know Meme that just ultimately you know does nothing and is nothing so I I I I I appreciate their stance on it I actually didn't realize that until maybe a couple of weeks ago that they were so Pro Pro active uh and I respect that and and that's just it's

just necessary right when you have when you have communities and and and things that are worth billions of dollars you have to you know if you don't put your best foot forward and you don't try to develop and you don't try to push that boundary I actually think it leans into the meme coin stigma which is like what is this and why is it this way right and ultimately I think a huge part of what we've been trying to do over the last couple of years is reinvent that stigma and give people uh a a a drop of legit legitimacy you know and something that is really easily digestible and understandable you go to your Barista

you go to your local waiter you go to the person who is you know gardening your front lawn like they understand pudgy Penguins it's probably one of the most easily digestible things to understand in the in the right curve Normie World um and and that is predicated on the development that we've made and again you know Meme coin adoption and mcoin success is predicated on digestability normi adoption all of these things you know ultimately you know when everyone in the world Ely catches on that penu is is is existent and that this brand that they've been participating in is actually crypto

native I think uh you know the floodgates will open and then we'll continue on our path to success I think the most relatable part of the pen puggy pudgy Penguins strategy is this these GIF Productions uh the the stats that I have from Peter's tweet thread I don't know how accurate they are is 30 billion total views on on a pudgy brand on a pudgy via gifs and now last time we had you on we asked about this and you said yeah we just have a team that's just like pumping out gifts left and right can you talk about the impact that that

has had over the last like 12 months since we last talked uh what how has that impacted the brand how has that D driven adoption what has that really done for the pugy brand yeah I said this six months ago but it's a pretty obvious one I basically said if you're a meme team the first thing that you should be doing is developing gifts I mean it is it is the most underutilized now nobody goes to gifts and no performant marketer like goes to gifts as a marketing strategy because there's no no conversion right like if I get a billion views it's not like I make $10 million in sales and so it's completely underutilized but actually gify in a

world where you take intangible value intangible culture and you tokenize it and you put a value on it right with something like gifs it is unbelievably powerful probably the most powerful and it's the cheapest to probably distribute and to get impressions I mean my CPM on a on my CPM on gifts is probably 0.0000001 cents right so you know the the amount of money I on a monthly basis on gifts and The Impressions that I get which is about 3 and a half billion Impressions a month right now uh if I told you what it cost you'd freak out you'd be like that's impossible now for

most people again performant marketers are not going in this direction but when you're looking at character proliferation like when you're in when you're running a meme coin again comes down to supply and demand how do you create demand it's character proliferation right so if I go and do gifts that's more of my character proliferating into the subconscious of crypto Traders and non- crypto Traders right if I'm doing a movie right I am proliferating to non- crypto Traders into crypto Traders and ultimately Pro proliferation Segways into the demand it's not maybe instant it can be right

depending on the initiative I'd probably argue a movie probably is uh but uh you know the gifts create an underbelly right like there's some sort of minimum float in terms of what penu is worth just simply buy those gifts assume you do nothing else right because it is such a it it it is embedding yourself into internet culture and into messaging cure culture and into communication culture in a way that ultimately I think contributes to this becoming one day hopefully a cultural phenomenon uh which again is the highest point that I think these things can go so you know it's

it's been a strategy that I think was obvious the second I saw it work you know two years ago it's been one we've continuously leaned into we'll continue to lean into it uh and I think again if you do not if if Penguins has nothing else but but continue to scale those gifts I still think it's a top three meme coin uh because I think it's just too much proliferation and it's too much subconscious marketing that I think will eventually convert how does the gift system work every once in a while I'm in my like iOS I'm on Telegram and I'm looking at some gifts I'm looking for a

gift that I want to send a reaction gift a gift to to send to a friend and every once in a while I see a pengu gif I see a Pudu penguin gift and I'm like oh interesting like look look at that that's a little penguin gift uh in my little Library how how does that work how do the penguin gifts get elevated inside of like I literally I or telegram or wherever else I'm sending gifts How does it go from production to actually like something I can select in these apps it just it's probably tributes to a couple different facets I think the first one and the most important one was

three months into me seeing like how powerful this was because the community aided up the second we started doing them uh because we used to do them around people's penguin right so you know there's pretty much isn't an nft that's on the floor right now that doesn't have its own GIF so you can kind of tie the two together and it kind of creates again love and Affinity which creates conviction right if you're messaging your friends and family with your gifts of your nft you're less likely to sell it because now you're using it as a form of expression right uh I think uh the most important one is uh and I kind of just did this being a

marketer staring at it for three months was there's actually a way to index it kind of like how you do SEO on Google there's a way to do like a gif GIF GIF uh GIF optimization for those key terms and then probably the second one is just understanding viral key terms and getting quickly and indexing them quickly enough so like RZ and like there'll there'll be things within the internet culture around gen Z and gen Alpha which they'll start speaking about or Trends right like you know if uh if Trump is viral today right like my instruction to the team is 100 Trump

gifts now right so index for the word we need more gifts need more gifts on the specific category if Riz is trending then you'll do RZ and and then you'll kind of you know and then you'll kind of just go through the framing so you also need somebody with a real finger on the pulse to make sure that you're catching those trends because like me indexing for something like love is really competitive because everyone's posting love but no one's competing for Riz right and all the kids and all the people that I want you're using it right and then the influencers are using it and the celebrities are using it and then it just becomes a compounding

effect so those would probably be the two biggest points of Alpha and I don't mind sharing it at this point our moat here is so big and and and like you know yeah I actually want more people to do it at this point so it just makes our moat look even cooler uh so so you know but that's the secret sauce between the two facets of how I think those two things succeed my intuition here Luca is that the reason why this works is because you have a token that monetizes this effort by proxy not directly like you said very indirectly but by

embedding uh the pudgy Penguin brand into the meme layer the culture layer of the internet via GIFs that has some feedback into the value of the penguin token and I'm I'm guessing that no one really no one else is optimizing for SEO in inside of gify inside of like the GIF layer of the internet so it's free real estate for you but that real estate is valuable because you have a token because you have tokenized this brand and that's really why you can pour resources into embedding the the Penguin brand into the gift layer of the

internet is that correct analysis yeah it's it's a correct analysis so unless you're somebody like me who has that type of tokenization mode or you're like a Disney where you have billions of dollars like you fiscally can't justify spending $50,000 a month on it if you're not one of those two things right like if you don't have a movie or a premier Legacy IP then it makes sense to spend $50 to $100,000 a month on that they should be and none of them are doing it right but that's the nature of some of these conglomerates that have just been stagnant for a long time and then on the other side I've been making a call to action all the crypto folks that have

token as D assets which is like it's not that hard to stand up a team for $25,000 a month of five six seven eight people you know in in different parts of the world that are all like you know just have a system and a machine like we have a whole back and interface that we built for this so we have like a whole you know $150,000 $200,000 build around how the the gifts are organized so it goes in we have like we've we've built it out so now it's like actually quite literally a machine and a software uh but uh you know it's it's really not and with a this was before AI so with AI you

could probably do it for a tenth of the cost uh and you could build something pretty incredible to your knowledge is Disney or some other large brand like that optimizing SEO inside of the gift layer of the internet or or is it really to to your knowledge only you so the the way that we're doing it from an indexing perspective I wouldn't know until unless I talk to one of their teams but I know there's a couple you know companies like Spongebob like some certain IPS really value it and and and it's been huge for them right uh you know the the real Epiphany for me is when I went to Asia

and I learned that Lon friends built a billion dollar business off of sticker IP right so when you look at you know the gifts the gifts are not just gifts they're stickers so you look at you know the the metric that Peter gave was actually wrong it's about 40 billion on GIF today so you go to gy.com pudgey Penguins you'll see the number it's like 39 billion and some change so call it 40 billion but then you have tener which is like another 30 billion like the Imp like I'm not even I'm giving you the the metrics that I know you can go and fact check but if I give you the metrics that you can't go and fact check because the back-end portal will just you know there's no way for you to verify it I

mean it it's it's it's half a billion views a day you know or or Impressions right you know through through these channels and and and they're real like it it actually does create a mo for the IP and for the brand and if you don't believe it from our case study look at line friends look at some of these other Asian IPS Asian IPS have completely succeeded you know off of this one vertical and then obviously growing the brand outside of that but this is the origin story for a lot of these new Next Generation IP businesses so I'm assuming because of the success of this effort people are sharing the pudgy GIF without

knowing that there's like a crypto Community crypto project crypto token that they just like are looking for a gif to react to to use to express themselves they see the pudgy GIF and they just select that one for whatever reasons and then that has some positive feedback into the the whole ecosystem talk are there any like stories or anecdotes that you can give of like somebody so far away from the pudgy brand using the pudgy GIF in some sort of way that has like impacted or or brought attention to pudgy in any sort of way yeah Cynthia lumens posted the

pudgy money printer right when she's talking about one of the one of the things I mean you know I there's so many celebrities and influencers that I can name you know biggest K-pop stars in the world you know Andrew Tate went on a week when he was just like every day was using pudgy gifts uh and do you know that they don't know that there's a crypto project associated with the gifts most of the time they don't right but the impact is is not necessarily like I don't I'm not necessarily too focused on that because I think that crypto is ever growing and eventually it will click and that aha moment and that moment of

Discovery I think is really meaningful what's really what's even more meaningful in terms of direct conversion today is when your mom or your girlfriend sends you a pudgy gift and you are in crypto and you're thinking to yourself like they could have picked every G any other gift there was something subconscious about the Penguin and again that's Maybe not maybe might not drive you to buy penu or to buy an nft right but it'll be the first starting point and then I'll go so that will be your first point of impression so touch Point number one then maybe I do a headline that shakes up the space once again and then you're like damn

right and then you go to a friends and family you know you know a a a friend's you know daughter's birthday and then you see she got a pudgy penguin toy and then you get in all these different touch points and then and then at a certain point it becomes fiscally irresponsible for you if you have nft exposure or mem coin exposure to not have exposure here because one is clearly impacting and transcending into your everyday life while the other things that you're rotating in or gambling on are not right and so then you make the then you make the decision are you a Trader are you an investor and

obviously I think we've been a great ecosystem for investors for that reason you know if you're a Trader that's your prerogative and you have your own plan and your own thesis on how you kind of deploy your Capital but we tend to really have a home for people who invest in things long term because that that that point of Discovery and that sequence has happened many many times right I I you know just recently a guy in Singapore was at an arcade you know and and Singapore of all places and at time zone and at time zone he just saw some pudgy toys in the arcade machine he went and bought five big Pudgies 20

little Pudgies and is now uh you know he he he crushed you know this was this was a couple months ago so you know he's now made a ton of money on all of that now has penu and a stok that he made that Revelation and had and came to that choice and that decision and and and again that's the recipe right that is the line of thought that's how we've won I haven't won because I outspend somebody or because we had more resources I outw I I we beat everyone at least you know up until this point because of this line of thought of like hey this is how this stuff works and

though it might not give you immediate gratification it will give you long-term success which is ultimately what we're optimizing for last time we talked it had been on the back of the uh Walmart announcement where Walmart was going to be selling uh physical plushy pudgy penguin toys uh and then that went when those went on sale that went very very well I believe s Walmart sold out very quickly and had to reup uh and that was also in a very dark era of crypto's History like the penguins at the time defied the status by making very real