CryptoPunks creators: from art experiment to cultural movement

16:48And we were quite, not only were we gratified that kind of

16:52Reid:everyone came back, but they even kind of replayed in good faith most of the transactions, you know, that they had sort of done, but hadn't worked. And so, so they, but you're right. It would have been nice to have that. But you know, even that there's a difference because we didn't think of the the bid side of the market all we had was offer for sale and buy in the original contract but then as part of redoing it we were like you know we should have a bid side of this too I remember you tell me that we yeah yeah

17:21John Watkinson:it's and I was like dude we just blew it like you want to make it like even more

17:26Reid:yeah yeah and then now to look at it too like we're looking at it just off camera here the code because it's up on the wall and it's only like 246 lines of code it's like you can't get that much that many lines of code right but it's like it does have to stand for all time it does it is the craziest kind of pro like programming you know we've been software developers for 30 years and you you know nothing compares to writing a solidity contract in terms of just the pure the pressure and everything and you don't truly understand what

17:55John Watkinson:immutable software means until you've blown it and you really can't fix it yeah and then that that enters your heart and stays there forever and then every contract you do after that you're like I know what that feels like so I'm gonna do everything I can to not feel

18:07Reid:that way yeah so yeah in our career up to that point we really we were rapid prototypers we used to do a lot of stuff with the Google Creative Lab where they're like we need you know we don't mock up this product or we want to do this thing for next weekend you know at an event so we're just sort of run and gun you know we can get things done fast and so all of a sudden we were working on that the absolute polar opposite kind of work to do and yeah so now anyway we have a good community of Solidity auditors that we now bring into anything we're doing. That was our first ever Solidity code, too.

18:42John Watkinson:So that's how we do things, too. We'd be like, oh, we'll learn it by doing it, you know, which works fine elsewhere, but not so much. Immutable, a little harder.

18:49Reid:Yeah, yeah, yeah. We only really even learned what Ethereum was in the search of how to do this. You know, we had the idea of a digital collectible, and then you were talking about it should be, you know, it seems like crypto would be the right thing for this. We looked at how some people were trying to do it with Bitcoin. There were some attempts to use colored coins, that kind of stuff. But then we came across Ethereum, and it's like, oh, this could work. But then it's like, okay, now what is Ethereum? How do you actually do this?

19:14Matt Hall:So I want to come back to the community, art, narrative, et cetera, because it's part of, I think, some of the kind of discovery of magic along the journey. But because you're also, in addition to being artists, you're technologists and geeks. Using Cloud Code now, right? Like, how is AI's code generation intersecting with the way you're thinking about the world?

19:37John Watkinson:Yeah, it's been a real surprise because, you know, when we went to, we did computer science. This is where we met. We did computer science in the 90s. And this was like, you know, we both took an AI class. And this real sad guy came out and was like, well, here's the textbook. And we're going to go through it all, but nothing worked. So welcome to the class. The 90s was the absolute low point for AI. Yeah, it was just, yeah.

20:00Reid:And even, I mean, Hinton. None of this works.

20:01Matt Hall:Yeah.

20:02Reid:We were at University of Toronto. Hinton was teaching there, you know, Jeffrey Hinton. And I remember I almost took his class, and then a grad student was like, do not go near that guy. It didn't work, man. Yeah, exactly. He's washed up. None of that stuff worked out, you know, but he's, like, stuck on it and everything. And it's just so amazing to see that, you know, how he stuck with it and a handful of others to push it over the top. But in terms of using it ourselves day to day, I mean, it's amazing in that I just feel like now everything we're doing is like the creative part, is the hard part, you know, and we can just, you know, just skip over and just speed through all the kind of grind work that would just sort of slow you down or maybe kill inspiration, you know.

20:41Reid:And so I don't think either of us think of AI as actually being a creative tool in terms of like it has ideas or we're using it to actually make creative content. It's just more like it allows, it frees us up to be just working on the cool parts, basically, or the really challenging, interesting parts from a tech point of view that are kind of a little beyond it right now. So it's immediately, it went very quickly to just like required, you know, I mean, you can't sit down and start coding without it, really. You just want that sidekick at all times, you know.

21:14John Watkinson:I think around the time of the first reasoning models, we were just keeping an eye on it. We had like, you know, chat GPT subscriptions or whatever, and I'd ask it some question, but like, I don't know. and then uh and then around the time the reasoning models happened i asked it to write something for me and then i asked it to change it in natural language and it made the change like a fairly subtle change and i was like whoa you got to check this out like and then uh and then from there on it was like you know it's radically accelerated our work and you know you couldn't couldn't do it without it now basically or they feel so slow and dumb you'd be like why am i like i'm doing some api connection here like this is so boring yeah yeah and our whole career we've always been

21:51Reid:very kind of polyglot. Like we've done stuff with games, you know, with game engines. We're Java developers at our sort of core, old school, 90s Java developers, but then we do a lot of Java.

22:01Matt Hall:Some people listening to this still know what Java is. Yeah, exactly. I know. If you're out there, that one person. We see you. Yeah, exactly, because it's still amazing.

22:09Reid:But yeah, then we switch over and have to do JavaScript because we're doing web stuff or switching to Solidity. So it's just amazing to be able to do that context switch with the AI agents. And now we feel sort of enabled to go further afield. It's like, oh, we can get into anything now because we don't have that huge hill to climb to just get Hello World going, basically. And so I feel like it really enables a wide range.

22:36Matt Hall:One thing I'm curious about, because this is something I do. Like I had benefit of first commercial investor in OpenAI, was on the OpenAI board. because I got into the AI revolution because what I realized was, by the way, my undergraduate at Stanford was artificial intelligence. So I'm very much in the, oh yeah, this is a winner. This is all not going to work. I went to philosophy because they don't understand what thinking or language is. But what I realized, and this is what the first insight for DeepMind is, is hey, if you can apply scalable compute to learning systems, which also, by the way, having scaled data helps, you can suddenly create interesting functions.

23:15Matt Hall:And it started with self-play, right? It was the Pong playing itself. It was Go playing itself. It was like, oh shit, this is now going to turn into something. What? I don't know. But that's when I kind of, that was my realization that turned me from, you know, the first couple of years being into Bitcoin. I was always been very positive. It was like, oh, I'm not going to stop focusing on crypto. I'm going to focus on AI now for it. Now in the creative process, it is definitely a tool. It's definitely accelerant. It's definitely like encoding. But, like, for example, for me, when I start approaching, like, some line that I'm thinking of, I actually use, it isn't as a muse, but it is as a foil.

23:54Matt Hall:Right? Like, so, for example, I go, oh, I wonder what you would apply Wittgensteinian language games to reinforcement human feedback learning. Right? And is there something there? And I'll do a couple of quick posts with asking for citations. Now that there's deep research, I was doing this before deep research. Do you guys do any of that in your creative process? I'm just curious about, like, not just the tool of accelerant, but the foil.

24:21Reid:Yeah, I think so. You can kind of vet ideas, right? You can just sort of try to pretty quickly figure out what the state of the art is or whether it's possible, whether it's been done before, you know, that kind of stuff. You can kind of quick study on it. And you have to always have enough sophistication to know to take it with a grain of salt a little bit. You have to kind of follow up maybe, not just take what it's saying. Because sometimes it's not right. Yeah, exactly.

24:41John Watkinson:Or like, oh, this is an amazing idea. It's like, no, it's not.

24:44Reid:Yeah, there's been some people out there who are like, oh, man, I'm making major breakthroughs with quantum mechanics according to my chatbot. Yeah, exactly. Who's programmed to love me. Yeah. No, it is good for that, too. Just what's possible and just what's the problem space, what's been done. So, yeah, I do feel like it does feed that. And it allows for kind of more ambition in those categories as well.

25:09John Watkinson:It's such an unusual tool having, I mean, I don't know if you had the same experience, but having been in software for so long and software breaks in ways that you are comfortable with, you understand, like, oh, you got a null pointer or there's an error or whatever. It doesn't lie to you. Yeah, it doesn't just be like, I don't really know, I'm just going to say something. It's like, whoa, that's weird.

25:27Matt Hall:You want to hear this, even though it's completely fiction. Yeah, yeah.

25:32John Watkinson:Yeah, so that's been very unusual. and seeing people who, like, we have a pretty good mental model of what it's doing, but seeing people who don't have that, I mean, it's so convincing. And that you just, it's crazy, like, seeing some of, like, the models that people are like, oh, this actually is thinking about this. It's thinking about me. It understands what I'm saying, what I mean. And I'm like, I'm not sure about that. But, yeah, it's a very interesting new thing.

25:55Matt Hall:So back to the narrative side, I think this is, like, perhaps with the experiment, an intentionally designed feature, not a bug. But when you released in 2017, you actually let everyone else write the stories. You weren't going like, here is the story of CryptoPunks. Here's the different groups. It's like, here's a fun, cool thing. But it was deliberately, and there must have been kind of this, like, I hope that interesting stories are going to be written. Like, it's kind of, there must have been an impulse to try to juice it some. And the restraint is an interesting, Like, say a little bit about, like, the kind of narrative around it and, like, where you thought, okay, here is okay.

26:37Matt Hall:And, oh, my gosh, it was really important to keep the hands off.

26:41Reid:Yeah. Yeah, and I think overall we were pretty hands off in that, you know, just letting it happen. I know, you know, as nerdy kids, we were into, in Canada, we were into collecting hockey cards. And then I was into that magic card game for a while. And the trading was so big in that world, you know. And that was always like the big stories. You know, did you hear about the trade that happened? Did you hear that he has a Gretzky rookie now or whatever? You know, like all those kind of stories. And so that was sort of our hope is that by having this sort of open marketplace and extremely efficient marketplace, right?

27:14Reid:You can spend a dime on a million dollar transaction, basically, that there would just be those stories. And I feel like that is the case now. If you go to the CryptoPunk site and just look at the transaction history for each punk, and we put them up on the screen behind us all the time as part of the exhibition. every one of them is like its own story now and there's drama and if you recognize the you know the ens addresses or you know or the address or the ens names and you kind of know who was involved and yeah one popped up uh we were talking about how we were just early on we were just buying or selling and there was one that i think i had sold um we just saw it pop on the screen yesterday i sold it for about 100 bucks or something you know and it's like oh that was a good one why did i sell that one presumably now somewhere between 100 and 400 000 yeah yeah right yeah and uh so So anyway, it's all those stories, you know, and then of course people taking it on as their identity.

28:06Reid:And then, you know, so I just feel like each CryptoPunk is being kind of is this living entity now that has all these layers to it. And yeah, there was one that popped up yesterday that had been sold so many times, right? I don't know, what was it, 40 times or something? It's like, is that the record? You know, it probably isn't. There's probably one that's been sold more. But and then there's others that have never been touched. You know, they just, someone claimed them, still has them. And that's, our profile pictures are like that, of course. And yeah.

28:32Matt Hall:So you brought up identity, which is the thing I was going to move into next anyway. Presumably when you launched the experiment, you didn't think this was also going to become an interesting thing in digital identity. I mean, or did you? We had a little bit, yeah.

28:43John Watkinson:So we had a little bit of an experience, like a project we made with Google was just an app, like they were changing their logo to the Android logo and, or Android was, you know, sort of centering their marketing around the Android logo. So we made an app with, again, the Google Creative Lab to make yourself, you know, make the Android logo into you.

29:01Reid:You put clothes on and, you know, accessories. You know, not completely unlike this where you're basically kind of dressing up the Android logo. And you had all these different choices of hats and clothes and glasses and everything. So, yeah, definitely some, like, that was part of what led to this.

29:15John Watkinson:And that went crazy. And it was a Google app, so that had a nice, you know, platform to start with. But people really loved it. they made it their profile picture and we kind of realized like oh the profile picture is like the most valuable real estate on the internet basically you know because it's beside every one of your posts it's not just one post like i like this and it's gone so that really was like stuck with us yeah and because we you know two guys no no can't market worth shit and then like also no budget no nothing so we're like we got to think of some way where people get into it and start talking about it as themselves so that was why the profile picture was uh you know yeah and if you remember

29:50Reid:at that time, that was kind of the iPhone versus Android kind of like holy wars. Like people really identify with what phone they carried at that time, you know? And so that Androidify really became like people were proud Android users. And so that profile picture thing really took off. And the numbers on that app went crazy, really. That was a big hit for Google, even though not financially or anything, but just as a marketing hit it was. And so, yeah, it stuck with us to think about that profile picture. And yeah, and whenever we thought about stuff we were making we just kind of knew it's like we're never going to be the great marketer but could we make something that just has that where people end up kind of doing the marketing for us you know do they kind of push it and then this has been the most extreme version of that where every next collector becomes uh becomes a big marketer of it you know like they love to talk about it they love to make it the profile picture you know and so it um that's part of this idea of it having moved beyond us you didn't hear about this from us you know somebody

30:49John Watkinson:else told you you have to get a crypto box like that's how this works that's why people ask us like what's what's this or what's that and we're like i don't know like this thing like is doing its own thing now like i they don't nobody asks me nobody tells me like this but i feel like

31:01Reid:sometimes we're the last to hear about things for sure yeah yeah so we we definitely underestimated

31:05John Watkinson:the extent to which that was going to happen we've kind of hoped like oh if you like it you'll put it as your profile picture we didn't you know i like this one rather than like i am this one i didn't expect that to happen necessarily. Yeah.

31:16Matt Hall:Yeah. So, so one of the, the, the kind of great experimental things was make the affordance so that it can become a profile picture can be deployed and used this way. And, and, and, and maybe that will become part of people's story. Um, so you've now launched other things too, you know, me bits, et cetera. What are some of the principles that you've been learning of like, how do I, how do I launch these things in interesting ways now. So the profile picture is one. There's probably stuff in digital identity. There's probably stuff in community participation. But like, what are some of the kind of guideposts of like, hey, we think about this when we're creating new projects, new art?

31:56John Watkinson:I think each project was sort of like a response to something we had learned or a question we had been posed. So Autoglyphs is more, you know, a pure kind of art project, but it was related to the feedback and pushback we got for the punks that were like where's where are these images and how you know how were they generated and we're like oh yeah that's actually not fully visible as part of the process so can we make that full that fully visible and part of the process so that was autoglyphs um and i think that we sort of have alternated a little bit between like an identity sort of interactive thing and then more of like an art side thing tech exploration kind of almost Yeah.

32:36John Watkinson:Yeah. And we have the advantage now that like people care when we launch something like punks was like we had done. I don't know how many things, 40, 50 things. And you really don't you know, there's a thing like one thing, do something good and like people like it. And there's nothing to do something you thought was good. And no one even cares. They don't even not like it. They just don't even respond at all. So we really like learn the hard way, like how to just build something in so that people reacted to it at least, you know. So we don't have to do that as much anymore. We get a little more freedom.

33:05Reid:Yeah, to make a subtler case. Yeah, but yeah, I think, yeah, like Matt said, Autogliss was all about can the entire artwork be created on chain in its entirety, so the entire process is visible and permanently on the chain. MiBits was moving into 3D space and there was a lot of metaverse talk. I still think there's something there of like 3D digital identity is still really cool and interesting, so that was the focus on that. and I think just anything we do, Quime was about the self-referential the program is in the art and I think that we always still want there to be a tech challenge there too we don't just want to just kind of put out content, you know what I mean, we want there to be something new, some twist because we just love that stuff too we are nerds and we like to tech challenges we like to push ourselves I feel like that's where our creativity comes from is pushing up against a challenge and so uh so we always try to build that in um and i think we're still kind of not marketers where we just like we just follow our nose and we don't think a ton about like product market fit it's mostly just sort of like does this do we vibe with this you know does this feel right

34:13Matt Hall:then let's let's do it you know so what's the project and this may be a question for each of you but what's the project and it probably is reaching back into those first 40 or 50 that you guys went, I love this one, and it didn't get that much attention. And it's probably more pre-punks than post-punks, but I'm just curious, what's the one that was like, ah, it was creative, like, zzzz.

34:39John Watkinson:Yeah, and we didn't, it's funny, because we did things that were so impractical that they were probably best understood as art, you know, like ideas that were like, yeah, this is really funny and weird, but like, why, you know? But we started on mobile really early, like on the Sidekick with Danger, which was like...

34:58Matt Hall:Some people listening to this probably remember what a Sidekick is.

35:01John Watkinson:Yeah, exactly. Probably the same guy who remembers Java, remembers the T-Mobile Sidekick. Yeah, and that was working. They had an app store and everything in like 2005 and 2006. So that's how we went independent, actually, was selling apps. And so we wrote a ton for them, had such a great experience with them, and then did that with Android. So some of our early Android apps, we were obsessed with trying to make a new type of home screen that wasn't icons. We tried this several times. A couple of those I think were really good, but we just couldn't quite get it over the hump. Yeah, yeah. So a few of those kind of things.

35:35John Watkinson:We've written some games.

35:36Reid:Yeah, because the whole time we were like, why? We have all these new, we have a completely new platform, and yet it's still kind of like Windows or Mac OS where it's like click on the icon. And we just wanted to overcome that somehow. But I guess it was just so ingrained. People, yeah. So we had some faithful users on this totally kind of more like information notifications. And just everything was just information driven and as opposed to app driven. And we thought that was really cool and there was something there. But yeah, maybe just the entrenched sort of way of interacting with tech was just too strong there.

36:10John Watkinson:A good example of a sheer insanity app was back when Android had no very loose permissions. You could just do anything you wanted. we wrote a thing called app chat which was a chat room for every app on your phone and so you could talk to other people using calculator right now or whatever and people and it was just like people would be like anybody got any good contacts out there they'd just be like sending the weirdness

36:33Reid:yeah and but for some it was it was kind of like some games people would just be talking about the game you know and and sharing ideas but yeah then people would be on calculator and it's like what words can you spell with an upside down calculator you know and if every app had its own little culture you know because you were just in the you could just basically it was almost like you could just open up the chat it because you could overlay so Android had no security early on you could just overlay stuff right on top of other apps so we just whatever app you're in you could just kind of swipe from the corner and you were now chatting with other users of that app and it was completely wild I was unhinged what was going on but I I didn't dare go into like the Tinder chat.

37:12Reid:I did not want to know what was going on there. But there was lots of messages in that one.

37:17John Watkinson:Yeah, that was like, we were trying to do a thing then where we were like, I don't want to do the pitching and raise money for startup. We had done that once, and it was a fine experience. But we were like, let's just do weird stuff, and if one of them happens to become big. So this one, it's an insane idea, but then it was like, oh, maybe this could be like support for developers, for people using the thing. So we tried to turn it into that a little bit. It didn't quite work. But so, yeah, but that was the model we were operating under was like make anything that anyone would care about and just see if it was anything more than that.

37:45Matt Hall:You know, one of the interesting things, which I'm sure you guys have kind of reflected on, is that in Web3, there's kind of a tension between, you know, code is law, you know, like a natural gravity and social consensus. Right. And kind of how it plays in a community dynamics. is there anything that you guys have thought about like what this tension is what it gives this kind of artistic possibility some of the kind of work you're doing like because it's it's one of the things that it's kind of magical but these human systems is that they're yin and yang together

38:22Reid:yeah and that and there that is a real tension right when we've seen the coda's law kind of break down a few times with the Ethereum DAO, with the first CryptoPunks launch contract. You know, we said we're relaunching it because there was a problem, but it's that still the community can decide what to do, you know. And so that tension does exist. And so we love the code is law. And like I said, we think it is just such a great kind of artistic tool. You know, This digital permanence that you get from it is so great, so we love that. But, yeah, there is also this interesting thing where the community does sort of make it happen and keep it going.

39:04Reid:Why are we confident that CryptoPunks will still exist in 10 years, in 50 years, in 100 years? Because the Ethereum community will keep going. It could just stop tomorrow, but there's all these reasons, including CryptoPunks, that it won't. you know and so yeah so i'm not sure if we have any sort of specific things there but but we acknowledge that tension and it's interesting and definitely fundamental to all of this yeah

39:27John Watkinson:yeah and i think um yeah the tension between like the laws of the country it operates in and the code as law which is almost more con it is convention as mechanical convention but i sort of think of these things as like consensus machines you know like and that's what you know that's the miracle of uh digital currency being worth something and that's why the crypto punks are what they are is there's like mechanism for you to have to achieve consensus around things and how they work and sometimes people like defect from that system and go to like you know a court of law and decide like I'm not playing by these rules anymore but for the most part that doesn't happen so so in a way it is pretty interesting and consistent I think yeah I mean this may be

40:06Reid:varying getting away from your question a little bit but we were kind of surprised that the maybe the actual kind of ethereum the core ethereum community like the ethereum devs the founders were quite slow to come around to NFT, CryptoPunks, all this stuff. And we never understood that because we were sort of thinking, it's like you've made this system, this huge global system, but you can't be sure, you know, you don't know what's going to happen to it. You don't know if it'll eventually maybe threaten governments where they might make it illegal. And there's been a bit of that. And it's like, but now this is culture.

40:36Reid:You have culture in this system. Like that is extremely important. You can now make a case that it's not just money. It's not just transaction. It's not just a tool that drug dealers could use. It's like, no, there's culture here. And so I think they've come around to that maybe just in the last year or two even. I feel like we felt more warmth overall from the, maybe like the hardcore kind of Ethereum dev community or something. But we think that's really important that it's like there's culture on this now. And that might end up being the biggest reason for it to continue when you expand the time horizon.

41:13Reid:out to decades or even centuries.

41:15John Watkinson:You know, it reminds me of a story we had. We talked to a museum who was acquiring a crypto punk and they're like, well, can we have the right if Ethereum were to stop operating, can we have the right to remit this on another chain? Right? No. They're like, well, what do we do if Ethereum stopped operating? Like you, you can run a node. And it may be another museum can run another. Maybe it just becomes a bunch of museums running Ethereum for the art. You know, that's possible. You can do that, you know, which is an interesting kind of way in which it could persist.

41:42Matt Hall:In what ways do you look at CryptoPunks as finished art project? And which way do you look at them as a evolving art project?

41:49John Watkinson:I think an interesting combination of the two. And depending on how much, how you came to it, if you think of it as visual, it's complete. It will never change visually. But we don't think of it as just that. We think of it as an interactive thing. And every transaction that occurs behind us on these screens is adding to the story. It's like those transactions are stored in that original contract alongside everything else. So really that's the most interesting thing about it in a way, you know, is what's happening with it now and in the future and in the past.

42:18Matt Hall:Rapid fire questions. It's questions we ask every guest. You can answer at any length you like. But it just kind of gets a fun through line. It's not quite artistic, but it's a fun through line through all the conversation. So is there a book, movie or idea that gives you optimism about the future?

42:35John Watkinson:For me, it's, I don't know if it's any particular book or anything, but it's, I think, renewable energy, which feels like because I was, you know, pretty bummed out about climate change for a long period of time. And now I can see, you know, I've got, well, we got people that just want to make money working on climate change effectively and at a scale that is essentially unbelievable, especially for potentially people in our country. So I find that really inspiring and just the idea that energy might be so available, ubiquitous, and relatively harm-free that I can't even imagine what that will be like.

43:07John Watkinson:So that's optimistic in a way.

43:09Matt Hall:I made fusion investments exactly on that. Oh, OK. Yeah. Yeah.

43:12Reid:We're definitely clean energy nerds. So we can tackle that. Yeah.

43:16Matt Hall:What's a question about crypto or AI you wish people would ask more often? Yeah.

43:22Reid:I mean, certainly with CryptoPunks, it is about kind of the decentralized thing. I feel like so many people just always maybe just focus on the art or even maybe just the community. But just like, and then part of this show is about like, this is how it works. And that's so fundamental to it. You know, once you kind of get that feeling of how it all works then. And so that, yeah. And I feel like crypto, because there's so much financial stuff going on and drama, it kind of always gets pulled away from the decentralized. It's like, oh, this new stable coin started up and everything. It's like, who cares?

43:53Reid:the fundamental thing is the decentralization and we're always preaching that you know we're sort of old school I guess or something in that way you know original yeah I think for me um on the AI

44:05John Watkinson:side is a little more of like focus on what we can do with what we've got now there's a lot of like it's going to be AGI or it's or this thing sucks and it's using all our water whatever I'm like but there's so much amazing that you can do that's amazing about this right now that you know that is going to change so many things.

44:22Reid:Good and bad, right? So rather than radical abundance, let's just talk practically and rationally about what it is, what it can do, good and bad, instead of almost like it almost feels like waving sort of this pie in the sky stuff in everyone's face rather than speaking kind of honestly about it.

44:40Matt Hall:I think you may have already answered this question because of renewable energy, but I'm going to ask it anyway. Where do you see real progress happening outside your industry?

44:49John Watkinson:Yeah, it is odd in that we're in a time that does feel to me like the future now. Like, you know, like, whoa, that's great. Yeah, a Waymo goes by or something. Yeah, yeah, we've even seen Waymos drive around, and we know about Waymos, but then there's like, there's nobody driving that thing. Like, it had that visceral reaction to it. I mean, I think, yeah, we had that feeling, I think, first with smartphones when they rapidly progressed, and we were like, this, knowing where you are in the world at all times and knowing everything about everything, that's incredible. But now we're at another level of all that, you know?

45:18John Watkinson:So I don't know.

45:21Reid:Yeah. I think maybe the add-the-renewable energy. Yeah.

45:24Matt Hall:If everything breaks humanity's way over the next 15 years, what's the first or next step for getting there?

45:33Reid:Fix how we communicate with each other maybe. You know what I mean? That's pretty bad right now. That's pretty horrific. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, just maybe everyone start thinking more locally and building up from there rather than getting pulled around by the big global picture that's just so easily accessed and commented on and everything. I feel like that's kind of what we've tried to do when we think of things like philanthropy and everything. It's like, I think you kind of have to start in your own backyard a little bit or else it's just too intractable or something.

46:08John Watkinson:Yeah, that'd be nice. We grew up basically in the era of techno-optimism, like the internet's going to change society in all these positive ways. And there's sort of like a darkness to it now that feels like, you know, surprising in a way. And it would be nice to find a way out of that, I think, back to sort of what we were hoping for a bit more in the web.

46:28Matt Hall:Bring some light back to the web. Matt and John, it's been awesome. I look forward to our future conversations. Thank you. Yeah, thanks so much. Possible is produced by Pallet Media. It's hosted by Ari Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Sean Young. Possible is produced by Tanasi Delos, Katie Sanders, Spencer Strasmoor, Imozu, Trent Barbosa, and Tafadzwa Niemorundwe. Special thanks to Surya Yalamanchili, Sayida Sepieva, Ian Alice, Greg Beato, Parth Patil, and Ben Rallis. A big thanks to the PUNKS community, Sean Bonner, Natalie Stone, Becky Kleiner, the Node Foundation, and its team.