From Breakdancing Medical Student to NFT Artist

0:02Hey, everyone. If you like this podcast, go behind the paywall to get privilege access to the smartest minds in finance. Visit realvision.com slash RVpod and use the promo code podcast10 to get 10 % off our essential membership for the first year. Join the Real Vision community and learn how to become a better investor. And now to today's episode of Raoul Pal Real Vision.

0:32Hey, I'm Ralph Howell. I'm the host of The Journeyman, and this is my podcast. And what this is all about is taking you on my journey at the very nexus of macro, crypto and technology, where all these megatrends come together. And my role here is actually to just speak to as many of the key people in these spaces as possible to help us all in our journey of understanding. These times are moving fast. They're complicated. It's a confusing world out there. And I'm trying to help us make it a little bit clearer, to feel a little bit more in control. Because out of all of this is massive opportunity.

1:15And I want us all to find the opportunities. Now, NFTs have been a space that I've been interested in for a long time. It's one of the kind of mega component parts of crypto. And NFTs have a broad range of use cases, everything from ticketing to derivative contracts. But really, it all came out of art, which was an amazing place for it to start. But that's where it started. It birthed some incredible artists in the space, people like Beeple or Xcopy or FuckRender and many others. And I've always found this a really interesting start to proving out that an NFT, its real purpose is a smart contract on a blockchain that allows for scarcity.

2:06You see, in a digital world, you can make endless amounts of everything. So how can anything hold value? As we move into the metaverse experience that we're headed towards, where all this technology all kind of comes into the same place, we can't have assets that go to zero. We need to protect scarcity. Scarcity is what gives things. Scarcity and utility are the two things that give things value here. So scarcity allowed artists to create a new experience. experience and artists being artists experiment faster than almost anybody else. So we've seen an incredible array of stuff coming out of the NFT space and the artists themselves.

2:51So this time, I want to speak to Grant Yuan about what he's doing, because he is a really preeminent artist, incredibly respected, but he didn't come from this background. I mean, he's starting to be a doctor. It's a ludicrous transition that he's made, but he's been incredibly successful. And I'd love to get in the minds of an artist. What creates their art? Why do they do this? And why does blockchain technology really help them in that? And you see, as Tarnamith speaking, which is in September 2023, the NFT market is imploding. It's a lagged asset compared to crypto itself, much like housing lags the economy or housing lags the stock market.

3:38That's maybe the best way of looking at it. And the lag is pretty significant, about 18 months or so before we start to see it. So the crypto markets fell apart in kind of May through to October 2022. And now we're recovering and we're up a significant portion from that as the crypto economy starts turning into springtime, early stage, and NFTs are hitting their lows. and that's typical, but there's going to be opportunities to buy NFTs. Now, it becomes very hard to choose what you buy because there's so many of these projects will go to zero, as many, many things do. But art, if you find the right artist, you've probably got a higher probability.

4:26So that's why I'm really interested in this space as well from an investment perspective. So it's the knowledge learning perspective and the investment perspective. And again, I know there's a lot always to take in because there's so many confluences of ideas and thoughts and developments all happening. And it's something we do have to keep on top of. The other thing you have to think about is with this much going on, how do you find life balance in all of this? And that's something I'm even struggling with right now. I've got so much going on at Real Vision as we're building out our new platform with incredible new features.

5:02I've been retooling the global macro investor experience. We've been retooling exponential age asset management. So we've got the world's preeminent asset management firm, all sorts of things. And it becomes overwhelming. And then I'm trying to learn what's going on and stay on top of these megatrends, macro crypto technology. And it kind of hurts your brain. So what I try and do is I find that nature is one of the things. It's easy to use a wine bottle, and I do use that from time to time. I'm a big fan of wine. I'm sure I'll talk a lot more about wine in this series. But also, we've got to find nature.

5:37We've got to find nature. Don't touch grass, as people say, in the crypto industry, because it has this calming effect. And really, if you want to actually think, don't try and think. The best thing is absorb information and then take yourself out into nature. Go for a walk. Go for a walk, and what happens is ideas pop into your head. when you don't spend time thinking is when you do your best thinking so try and do that spend less time thinking and allow the thoughts to come to you just get the quality information follow my journey follow the other journeys on real vision and you'll find that suddenly it'll all come together anyway let's get to my interview with grant see what he has to say join me Raoul Pal as I go on a journey of discovery through the macro, crypto and exponential age landscapes.

6:25In The Journeyman, I talk to the smartest people in the world so we can all become smarter together.

6:35Grant, fantastic to get you on Real Vision. Thanks for having me. Listen, this is going to be fun because you've got a great story from, as far as I understand it, break dancer to medical student to um a very highly regarded artist in the space it's kind of must be head spinning for you but let's start from the beginning what talk me through this break dancing business yeah um i started in middle school just kind of in gym class with a bunch of people um but i it was something i never let go of and when i went into college i think i wanted to identify with a group of people you know as as young adults do and that was just kind of a category of my life that I wanted to really explore and so I've always been a huge fan of like funk music and kind of like jazz and blues and so I think all of it just culminated to me wanting to explore this art form so was it the music or the dancing or the combo that the mix between it it's a combo i think a lot of people and the culture as well i guess yeah yeah the culture as well i think a lot of people assume like um a lot of break dancing you're dancing to kind of like hip-hop music but in reality what it is is uh you know kind of like hip-hop dance emerged in parallel with the music and so the foundation of it really is focused on um kind of like funk and blues and kind of that era of music and i think that's you know that along with classic rock is something i grew up on as a kid and so it was just a match made in heaven for me and there's you know a competitive aspect of me and i try my try my best to tell myself i'm not a type a person but i think over the years it's become pretty clear i am a type a person and um look the really important question is which is the best stevie wonder album if we're going to talk funk or even more on the family's the best stevie wonder album the best stevia wonder album is uh the one with the golden lady on it uh it's called uh inversions i can't remember innovation innovations there you go yeah i think that's the one that has golden lady on it um yeah and uh yeah yeah that's all of that i'm a huge fan as well all of it i just love music and i you know i was blown away i grew up when i was kind of teenager it was grandmaster flash and the whole start of the whole hip-hop movement and break dancing became huge over that period it's just it's just fascinating that you got into it and you kind of when you when you went to school you treated it like a um like some people would do a sport so it's the way of making friends building a culture a community where you've got a commonality of interest right which which comes up later i guess in nfts which we'll get to in some thing but did you find that it helped you find your kind of crowd yeah I think it did I think there's kind of a crowd of people I hang out with in academia just because I've been in it for so long and maybe you know some people in the art community as well but whenever I go and meet people in the dance community it's extremely light-hearted and people kind of express themselves was extremely honestly and that's something I really appreciate about that group of people um and uh and yeah yeah so so then you went to med school is that right what was yeah I what's the journey here so I graduated from the University of Wisconsin in Madison 2018 I believe and then I spent a couple years applying to medical school kind of just working as a freelance artist and then got accepted to the Medical College of Wisconsin, which is about an hour away.

10:34And I've just been here since. So it's been about three and a half years here in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. So talk me through the artist journey then, because you've met, you mentioned, oh, I was freelancing as an artist. You just kind of dropped that in there. So when did you start in art? How did you get your involvement in art? Yeah. So my mom and my aunt, who both helped raise me, they have their masters in art from Seoul, South Korea. And they both worked as art teachers, basically, as I grew up. And so and my dad was an electrical mechanical engineer, which is why I was in the Bay Area at the time.

11:10And so just, I think between my dad bringing home these intricate diagrams of whatever he was doing at work, and seeing my other family members, you know, subconsciously, but, you know, I would say subconsciously as well. And I took it to heart. And when I went into college, I did my best to try and just pick up digital art. So I first started, I talk about the story a lot, but I actually started doing digital illustrations on PowerPoint because I had no other, I didn't know of any other like medium through which I could do digital art. So I went to stack the shapes tool in PowerPoint. And it worked out for a couple of years.

11:53And then And I was like, oh, you know, I should move over to more dedicated illustrating software. And so I picked up Adobe Illustrator. But I built a foundation up from illustrating in that style. So I still use it to this day. And it's really from there, it's just been kind of a journey of kind of improving and grinding. So have you been, were you ever kind of somebody who painted or sketched or are you just digitally native? That was just the way you figured art out for yourself? No, I think early on in college, I did my best to try to explore a ton of medium. So I did a lot of painting, whether it was oil, acrylic, or spray paint.

12:32And then I have like books and books of just illustrations I've done in pencil and in marker, etc. But I think the reason I stuck with digital is because when I first started, my mindset was I wanted to distribute my art as much as possible. I never had this intention of wanting to make as much money or anything like that. My whole goal as an artist, because I was trying to do this on the side, was really just I wanted to share my art with as many people as possible. And I found that digital was the best way to do that. and did you start in something like deviant art or did you what platform how did you start sharing it yeah i actually started no no i started sharing on reddit actually and i think a lot of people picked up on my art through reddit and that's how actually i got most of my commission work um early on i just did my best to just spam it through like all the subreddits and sometimes it would like make it to the front page of reddit for a few days and and uh you know those are the days i would get a lot of commission work and and so that's kind of the way i really worked my way up the ladder so talk me through the crypto journey and how nfts talk me through that whole journey yeah so you know kind of working my way up the ladder through reddit i um you know i always thought I had the potential just mentally to become an artist who was recognized in fine art.

14:06But as a digital artist, it's extremely difficult to go through that journey. And no one really, I at the time, didn't know how to do that. And especially because I didn't study art, I was studying biochemistry. I just had no guidance. And so what I did was I would just submit my art to galleries or online magazines or just anything I could find. I would sit down with this huge spreadsheet every other week and I would just submit. I would just submit away, are there opportunities for this and that with my art? And one of those opportunities that I came across was just a super rare link. I was into crypto, but I didn't really know or care for what nfts were at the time and this was i'd say november december of 2020 and so i was i was just i found the super rare link they said you have to submit this video of yourself talking about why you like nfts um and then um to submit your portfolio and so i try to learn like in 30 seconds about what nfts were and i kind of just lied myself you know through the through the video saying i was you know super into nfts and then um i just submitted it i completely forgot about it um for a couple months and then randomly one day i got this email saying i was accepted to super rare so i remember that day i i learned like what metamask was and i and i learned about like what these tokens were um and then that that was really the start of my journey really and so what happened with super rare what was the first thing that you published or minted how did it work yeah so i it's a funny story because the day though two or three days before i minted or i got accepted to super rare two or three days before i like gave away my seed phrase like yeah it was it was a total disaster I had like lost all my money I have like no money left in my bank account and at the time the gas fees were like 200 or something and like$200 to mint something and so I barely had any money and I was like you know this is this is just a leap of faith that I'm going to take.

16:27And so I minted one of the illustrations I had. And then I remember a few hours later, I get this offer for like 0.2 or 0.4 ETH. And I'm like, should I take it? Or maybe I can go higher. So I wait. And then they withdraw their offer. And then I'm like, oh no, maybe I won't ever sell anything. And then eventually I think, I can't remember the exact ETH amount, but it was like$700 and that was the first thing I ever sold on SuperRare. How did it make you feel? So I guess I'd like to preface this by saying I did, at the time I did understand what NFTs were. I mean, I learned very quickly, but I understood that this is a digital asset that's been tokenized and it's a very unique one of one.

17:18And, you know, there's like a kind of a gentleman's agreement that I probably won't mint this particular piece of art again, right?

17:30So it felt, at the time, it felt like I was part of something so novel, but also part of a movement. and something that gave me this idea that I could achieve something more with my art as a digital artist. I wasn't too akin to any of the communities on Twitter at the time, but just like peripherally looking into all the super rare artists that were selling things, I felt like I was part of a movement and part of something special because as someone who is in their mid to late 20s now, I think I'm part of a digitally native generation. And in being part of that, NFT has just made sense to me. And I think I just felt like there was a lot to be done.

18:33And I was kind of at the beginning of it, whether I'm going to be considered a pioneer 30 years from now, I mean, you know, that's for people in the future to say, but I definitely felt like I was part of something special. Were you a gamer? So did you understand digital assets in different ways? Or was it just the art element? So you were a gamer. Yeah, yeah. I, you know, I played games throughout my childhood. And then in recent years, it's really been about StarCraft and Counter-Strike. But, you know, even in, you know, a little bit of League and stuff like that. But, you know, like the idea of skins and kind of closed, close tokenized economies that, you know, these video game manufacturers have, you know, they just make complete sense to me.

19:21And so just converting that idea to more decentralized and more public economy of tokens was just something that I think what I learned about it blew my mind, but also was something that I wanted to actively be a part of. well we'll get into philosophizing about nfts in a bit and where this is all going but talk me through the journey of your art because you know there's you suddenly you're at med school you've you're super rare you mint your first thing 700 bucks next minute christie's or sotheby's i mean yeah what the hell happened tell me that story of your first mint through to suddenly you're one of the most renowned artists in the space yeah um so i kind of from that february of 2021 i you know for the next few months i was selling things between 0.5 to 1 e maybe on a lucky day to e and then a couple things happened that really kind of defined the trajectory that i would take um in the years to come and one of those was the person that actually accepted me to super rare he reached out to me on twitter one day and he told me that a lot of collectors were interested in my art but i was minting a lot of different styles and so it was kind of difficult for the collectors to understand or to they just you know didn't know what to expect the next thing i minted um and the moment he said that like that literally that moment I read that text I knew what style I wanted to pick and that's the one that I've been writing with thus far and that's because that's the one that I identify with most I think it's the one that I've been exploring the most and the one that speaks to me personally and then so from that point on I can't remember exactly what date that was but sometime in 2021 he told me that and and from there I was minting a particular style which is the one I have today and then I would say sometime between June and August of 2021 a couple collectors one day I woke up and a couple collectors had swept my floor just they bought all the the the unsold pieces that I had minted so it was Anonymix, Tappy and I think I believe a couple others and so it was just like four or five eighths of sales but in that moment I knew that Twitter was actually an extremely important vehicle for artists in the NFT space.

21:55And prior to that, I had no real engagement on Twitter. I just kind of posted something, forgot about it, went to Instagram or went to another social media platform. But in that moment, I think I realized that Twitter was actually very integral to communicating with collectors and other artists and communities. And so ever since then, I've been doing my best to, you know, not only support other artists, whether it's financially or just with the voice that I have, but also communicating with collectors. And I approach NFTs the exact same way I approached my art journey before that. You know, I was talking about going through these spreadsheets and applying to things and doing this and that.

22:36Very similarly, I still continue to, you know, reach out to companies and reach out to collaborators, potential collaborators, if there's any opportunities because at the end of the day, you know, it never really hurts to ask if you're interested in something, right? And so a lot of the opportunities I found were just by simply asking. And the worst that could happen is you get ignored or you get rejected and, you know, there's really no harm in that, you know. So why did you settle on the style you did? It's very unique it's kind of a very beautiful simple but not simple style why why that style and where were the influences in that yeah so when i attended the university of wisconsin the university of wisconsin actually has a as a world-class art collection um at the museum called the the chase and art museum it's attached to the the art building there and it's a public free museum for everyone.

23:37And so I would go there every, I don't know, at least like once a month, a couple times a month. And there'd be so many amazing pieces. One that stuck out to me was Ed Ruscha's Standard Station, which is, you know, one of his most iconic pieces. And I would stare at it and try to appreciate what the meaning of that work was. I think without an art education, formal art education I just did my best to try to learn about the artists in that museum and so I did my best to kind of replicate that style except in the way that I knew and with the kind of the technical restrictions by you know from you know using powerpoint and so the combination of those two things kind of resulted in something that was uniquely my own and then one year I went to the Whitney Art Museum down in the financial is it in the financial district or Soho I can't remember at this point but but you know downtown New York and there was a kind of a retrospective Grant Wood exhibition there and I think that's the moment that it really like was an eye-opener for me where what looking at his style and how he approached art and what he wanted to convey through his art was really something that I wanted to incorporate with my own practice and so I went home after kind of going to that exhibition and I started to create some of the pieces that I did and the first one is called after kind of that whole experience the first piece I created was called Midwest which was actually the piece that was sold at Christie's earlier this year and that was a piece that actually got me to the front page of Reddit that after I uploaded it to Reddit and kind of got me more jobs and you know as a freelance artist and also kind of motivated me to create a series on my own personal reflections of living in Wisconsin, coming from California.

25:38And so ever since then, it's kind of been exploring the medium that I would use and also my own kind of my own personal experiences in my life. Your favorite neighborhood spot grows with Square. Indeed, my favorite neighborhood spot has quickly become Todd Snyder in Williamsburg. Todd Snyder is one of my favorite menswear shops and has supplied me with all the clothes I have needed this quite hot summer. Every business has different goals, but Square is the business platform that supports them all. From opening a new location, selling something new, or just expanding their reach. Indeed, I've seen it with Todd Snyder.

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26:45So how do you adapt from here? Because you don't, you know, you're an artist. you don't want to be stuck in the same thing even though it's successful you have collectors and they'd like it and you know you're getting all the confirmations but you know an artist at some point has to take risk again and get outside their comfort zone how do you do that yeah i feel like our conversation is about to get a little bit more esoteric but um the way i think about this is And NFTs, beyond the financial freedom that I've obtained, to a certain extent, and some other artists as well, from a strictly art perspective, what I would have to say is being in NFTs gives you the opportunity to have a possibility for a career in art.

27:38there is no guarantee and i think i say this because there are very few players who are coming from contemporary art spheres who are interested in nfts a lot of it is people a lot of it are companies and entity entities that are crypto native and so it's a sustainable to an extent it's a sustainable ecosystem for artists who want to be creating nfts but to branch out there's really no guarantee. And as you mentioned, this is a risk that I have to take if I want to do something that's beyond kind of in the crypto native spaces. And so really, it's about doing the exact same thing. I view myself as someone who has achieved some noise in the art world.

28:27Sorry, very minimal noise, but at least has the door open to try and attempt make an attempt at a career in art. And so I'm going to do this. I mean, I don't want to give too many details, because I'm working on things behind the scenes, but I'm going to approach this opportunity with the same mentality of, you know, I'm at the bottom of the ecosystem here. And sure, I have this experience in digital art, but how am I going to translate it to the world of contemporary art where there are more established artists and there are people that know significantly more than i do who have had more experiences than i've than i've had um and so it's really for you know just building the foundation from the bottom up yeah look i think it's interesting because i do think all of the mediums are kind of coming together so you know we've certainly seen Damien Hirst go from one to the other.

29:27Beeple go from the other back to the other. You know, Beeple's now doing physical kind of objects like Damien Hirst had done with the shock and the formaldehyde. And we're seeing, and then we had the explosion of generative art, right? This is now giving it over to the AI. It feels like there is a Cambrian movement going on in a broader sense that this is all enabled technology's enabled art in a way that maybe photographs and photoshop and stuff did but this is this feels big yeah i i tend to agree but at the same time sometimes i i think about the exact conversations we're having and i think to myself you know this is someone you know i am someone who is tunnel visioned and because i you know i spend all day on twitter in spaces that are crypto native.

30:22I think it's important to get the opinions of people who are on the other side, you know, in more kind of traditional established spaces in art and seeing what their opinions are. And I think there are a lot of people, I know for a fact, there are a lot of people in museums and auction houses and galleries who are interested in what we're doing. But I just think that there just needs to be a more, there just needs to be more development to happen and more collaborative efforts to occur for for myself to feel like I am genuinely part of an art movement and I think part of that is up to me like that there is a set of responsibilities that I have to uphold as well to make sure that we as a digitally like native movement are able to be accepted into contemporary art art world yeah because if you're going to be at the forefront of a movement you have to make the movement um you know there is no way and there's you know i mean how what is the the size of of kind of globally respected artists in nfts it's still it's still small yes there's been some real breakout successes and that's amazing to see but it's very early days it's like you know rock and roll music just being invented you now got to get it broader acceptance within the global art scene but just more public awareness.

31:47People don't really understand what NFTs even are yet. They're like, well, it's the right click save argument, right? Yeah, I will say it is reassuring to know that a lot of space is definitely self-sufficient in the sense that collectors, most collectors are NFT native, right? They're digitally native, crypto native. And so we can technically exist, in my opinion, without the validation from the art world. It would just be nice if that were to occur. And, you know, I am hopeful because you kind of shouldn't want the valid. If you want to be a rebel and you want to be at the forefront, you kind of don't want the validation.

32:30They will come and validate you because because. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's a poor choice of words. But, you know, the more I learn about art in general, I mean, it's always about trying to question the foundations of the incumbent, right? And so it's now is kind of trying to see how generative art, how NFTs, how AI art is going to question what defines art and what makes art special in reference to the traditional art world. And I think it'll take time and I think it'll take a lot of innovation and just strength from this community. And the other thing that's about to happen, 6529 has spoken about it a bit, is we're about to go into 3D in the AR space, right?

33:30We've got a whole new medium that's never existed before, another new medium that's about to come onto the world and it's happening already. yeah i i think um i think nfts as tokenized assets are are an inevitability um as long as there's a use case to have decentralized tokenized assets i mean tokenized assets exist today within closed ecosystems but you know having like um but i think there is definitely a use case to have them kind of on decentralized platforms like Ethereum and other L1s and L2s. But yeah, I think running in parallel with technological innovations like AR and VR, I think are just going to further increase the rate of adoption once kind of that threshold is met.

34:22And I don't know when that'll be, and I don't know how that will occur, but I think it just is an inevitability how do you deal with living your life in a different currency than your bills the bills that you pay are in dollars the income you receive is in eth which is a very volatile currency how do you deal with that because that's a whole subset that i was speaking to um fuck corinda about this and a few others they're like nobody taught us this nobody taught us that we're actually got foreign exchange risk and stuff like that it's complicated all right the the way i see it is i'm an adult um i have to follow the law and i have to pay my taxes and as an adult i should accept the risks of getting paid in whatever currency and um it's up to me to make semi-smart financial decisions and and i think that's about it i think um yeah it's just it is hard though because you know it is what it is financial decision is suddenly 85 on wrong side and then it's 10x upside it's just very difficult to plan a life around it if your primary source of income comes from from a different currency yeah yeah it is really strange to think that like the the the prices of my works can fluctuate fivefold depending on the price of eth that day um which is just uh you know growing up uh like growing up i mean starting my quote unquote career in art in nfts that has just been my norm i i feel for people who have spent decades working in usd and then suddenly they sell nfts and those are the people i really feel for yeah well it's kind of like your parents and uh that you know relatives from korea had to deal with the asian crisis in 1997 you know it's all amazing and then suddenly the currencies fall 75 percent and just you know yeah but i guess you're used to it now but a lot of people struggle with it because you know some people just that they're not thinking about economics but suddenly they realize oh my god i need to understand economics as well how things work yeah i think that my biggest fear honestly is legislation um at kind of uh on an eth level like on a protocol level but also also like on an individual level you know whether it's like tax taxes and whatever it's a nightmare in the yeah um but you know it is what it is i mean it's just something that i have like uh those are the risks that you just have to take if you want to be part of something special you know so where do you think the space is going um the nft space overall so let's get outside of art now and let's just think about okay we've got this new technology it's a smart contract that we can do stuff with what would you think about you know because you know there's i think there's all sorts of other use cases that will only bring in so if you think about the eth let's use eth for now or the crypto economy let's use the crypto economy to bring people into the crypto economy where they buy assets they buy art because they've done well in the eth economy that's how art works always right you do well you store some of your savings in art it's an asset um but you need to bring people in i look at stuff like ticketing and think that's an obvious area uh where tickets come in i think music i don't know are you thinking through other stuff where this might go yeah i think uh the first thing i would like to say is um when i think about like these ideas it really comes down to establishing for lack of a better word like hegemony within uh all the protocols and i think obviously the best and most prominent L1 is Ethereum today.

38:30And as long as that remains the case moving forward and then whatever L2s exist on top of that, I think the first thing that I think about is like what foundations are these tokens being built on? And for the most part i imagine they'd be built on ethereum and you know some l2s on top of that um but you know if that foundation is shaky then i think the adoption for nfts also will come later on um but once something like that has been established then when i think about tokens and nfts i mean the whole ticketing idea i think i i think it it will happen but i think there's a lot more use cases for nfts the only question is like at what point does the tokenized asset need to work in a decentralized protocol versus a gated ecosystem right i mean we're selling we're selling um you know counter-strike you know like like first person shooter skins i mean they can operate on their closed video game ecosystems without the need for for uh decentralized protocols to exist and they work just fine and they've been working just fine for decades now.

39:48And so the real question I have is what use cases are for these decentralized protocols for companies to move to, you know, move them over to these, to these protocols. So I think, I think in terms of that, additionally, when I think about like art in general, I think I've said this a couple times, but I'm pretty set on this prediction that I think all NFTs, except for art-related NFTs, will be considered digital assets in the future, whether that's gaming, whether that's, as we mentioned, tickets or anything that has to do with tokenized assets, a blockchain, I think will just be called digital collectibles or digital assets.

40:34But I think people in such niche communities in art will still call these things that are important, like a Fidenza NFT and not this is a digital asset. And that's just kind of a random little side note that I had. But I'm pretty set on this idea that NFTs have been grandfathered in as a word in the art world. And I think they will continue to be NFTs in the future. I think you're right. So which artists do you look up to in the space? To be completely honest with you, I really look up to all the generative artists. and recently I would say a little bit more AI artists as well. I'm still trying to navigate all the arguments behind AI art, the pros and the cons.

41:24But as an artist myself, I support these artists who are creating AI art, whatever their practice is revolving around AI art. because I think when your favorite art critic and your favorite artist and your favorite art collector are downplaying the importance of AI and the impacts it'll have on the art world, I think there is something special there. And I think there's something that you should be paying attention to. But beyond that, I would say the generative artists really inspire me a lot. I think abstract art, just like abstraction in the 1900s, has always inspired me as an artist. And I'd say generative art is kind of a little branching point for abstraction kind of within the realm of art and how these generative artists explore abstraction through this manner.

42:28I think it's something that's really inspiring and eye-opening to me and inspires me to approach art in different ways as well. The other one that really floored me when I saw it, it's almost a complete juxtaposition to your work. Yours is kind of sort of utopian. It's that, it's the Midwest and it's green, it's got cows and it's nice and it's pleasant, right? It's a green and pleasant land. And the other side of that I found was the Rupert Ernesto's Life in West America which was the the kind of warped photographic art and it was like the American dream warped it's like a Hunter S Thompson novel um just I just think there's a lot of really interesting new perspectives that are happening and it's it's happening in this space now because art can have value more than it would do if that art was on DeviantArt because DeviantArt you know there's 70 million users of which how do you find anything it's just a it's nothing but now creates value so that creates attention and that creates an economy i think um what i'm about to say might be a little bit premature uh from just like not having uh compiled my thoughts properly but what i what i want to say is because ai art gives the opportunity to create an infinite amount of outputs at a speed that's probably unprecedented compared to people who have to manually paint each canvas.