Jack Butcher: Why Crypto Punks Are "Worth More Than the Mona Lisa"

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0:38Join the thousands of seasoned traders who trust Kraken Pro. Visit realvision.com slash Kraken Pro. Hi, I'm Raoul Pal and welcome to my show, The Journeyman. The Journeyman is really my exploration and my journey to that nexus of understanding of macro, crypto, and the exponential age of technology. You see, I try and take you with me as I go and learn about this stuff because most of this is new. Most of this all fits together in this new world that's coming in front of our eyes that we're all trying to make sense of. and we can also profit from as well. New technologies allow us to participate in ways that we couldn't do before.

1:24You know, I think of blockchain technology as the most egalitarian thing I've ever seen. If you think of Bitcoin itself, it's the world's only homogenous asset that is fractionizable, instantly tradable by anybody anywhere in the world. That's incredibly powerful when the network grows and you're actually buying a share of the network. It's like having a share of the internet. These are really big concepts. As I've been following this story, I've also been following the story of NFTs and I've taken many of you with it. It's interesting to me to see the engagement on NFT interviews outside of Beeple are still less because people don't really get it.

2:03And yes, art itself is more niche, but it's not only about art. It's about culture. It's about the internet. It's about what blockchain technology is really empowering and I think it's incredibly fascinating so over recent times I've started to interview some of the great artists of the space people like Fuck Render, Grant Yoon, Beeple which was an extraordinarily good interview one of the best I think I've ever done incredibly thoughtful person I was at Beeple's place recently talking to many of these artists and I met many more of the best artists Sam Spratt Sam I bought on Real Vision as well super interesting guy the other guy was Jack Butcher Jack floored me with a view he had on CryptoPunks he told me that's the most expensive portrait in the world and it's fractionizable and it's worth two billion dollars and that sent me down another rabbit hole and you know Jack's incredibly thoughtful but incredibly successful artist in the space but he's more than an artist he understands the culture philosophy in ways that most people don't and many times in the conversation that you've got coming up I was stopped in my tracks in realizing the depth of his understanding of what's really happening here I think it's super fascinating at a broader level I am developing a larger thesis that I've been dripping out over time that NFTs really are a capsule of culture particularly the art ones and they're the culture of now and this now is this real explosion of when digital art happened and the mass understanding of blockchain technology so it happened in the last cycle it kind of happened in 2018 but really happened in the last cycle over the pandemic and is now happening again with the ETF and just the broadening of the space.

4:03And in it, this culture is being celebrated, the culture of the internet, where it meets the immutable blockchain. And that, I think, is going to create huge value in the same way that Warhol or Damien Hirst have created cultural values of years gone by. And that's happening in front of our eyes. And it's a rabbit hole that I'm going down to try and truly understand the magnitude of what is happening. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this interview. There's going to be a lot in it for you. So grab a pen and paper and a stiff drink or a coffee. Join me, Raoul Pal, as I go on a journey of discovery through the macro, crypto and exponential age landscapes.

4:45In The Journeyman, I talk to the smartest people in the world so we can all become smarter together.

4:56Jack Butcher, great to have you on Real Vision. Thank you for having me, mate. So listen, there's a lot going on in Jack World. We will come on to that in a bit because I want to find out what the hell you're up to because it's always amazing to see what you do. But as ever, I just kind of wanted to go back a bit, just give people the Jack Butcher story. How the hell you got into all of this in the first place? why isn't Englishman living in Tennessee just the whole Jack story I'll try and do the TLDR but I grew up in Swindon in England and studied graphic design in Cardiff for three years and then graduated university and ended up doing some internships in London for I was commuting back and forth from swindon for a summer and i met two lads in a weatherspoons in swindon actually one thursday night who had a friend that worked at virgin atlantic swindon swindon the least glamorous things in the world well this is the origin story yeah yeah so um i met these two lads in a weatherspoons i had a friend who worked at virgin atlantic who could get uh essentially free flights to New York.

6:18We just pay the tax. And at that point in time, that was economically aligned with my situation. So I was like, all right, I'll jump on that. And I was probably a week away from getting on the plane. I was like, oh, maybe I should get some experience and meet some people while I'm in New York. I know it's big, obviously incredible design talent in New York so I went I think I googled design internships in New York Craigslist was the first result and I sent 150 emails to every single listing on Craigslist at the time I got one response from a guy who was a ex-Madison Avenue JWT creative director who just started his own shop and he's like yeah you can come in and you know make the tea basically and see what's going on see how it works and that that first experience led to basically you know the the visa bounce around all these different agency jobs in new york for close to 10 years and these are mainly ad agencies so all sorts so the first one was really a like a bit of a multi-disciplinary disciplinary creative shop so ad campaigns we did like ralph lauren tv ads print ads um and these tiny little new york boutique brand jobs too so just all sorts of uh scales and and types of deliverables and then over the course of the next 10 years basically every kind of creative every sort of commercial design discipline possible i worked at like these big digital consulting agencies doing um like massive digital systems design and then back to these tiny little boutique shops in between uh worked at an experiential place for a while museum exhibits point of sale retail stuff just kind of exposure to every not every but a good chunk of commercial design work and then finally got to the point where i think this was around 2017 had the hubris to start my own agency and kind of that that really correlates to getting to the point in your career, at least it did for me, where you see the economics of the business and, you know, the arrogant 20-something-year-old version of me is like, they're charging how much for this?

8:46And I'm getting paid, you know, I'm getting paid 3 % or whatever it was. And that was kind of the catalyst for me, like, I can do all of this myself better. And I tried that for about a year landed my dream client so I was working with a a supercar brand for nine months I was like this is it all good like this is exactly what I want to be doing I'm on the road shooting car commercials and but I was also acting as like 15 corporate employees at the same time you know I was like waking up in the middle of the night doing the conference calls that like all of that uh margin that I was hoping to capture was all the stuff I didn't want to do basically so uh yeah very obvious in hindsight but at the time yeah I didn't understand it that well so I did that for about a year bounced around and then just kind of decided to to really pivot my focus through this is like a brute force thing there was there wasn't uh necessarily an obvious transition but it's like one one uh pivot at a time to get to something that was way more specific as a creative service so that's where visualize value this idea and this business was originally born which was first of all i kind of pivoted away from working with big corporate entities because you kind of realize your incentives are like basically completely divergent it's like they're trying to you're trying to solve the problem sorry they're trying to get a problem solved and you're you're building time and materials so the quicker you solve the problem the worse off you are bizarre so i started working basically exclusively with entrepreneurs and founders where it's like you have direct insight into the problem and they have the agency to actually implement the stuff that you make if you work in a big agency one percent of the work you do sees the finish line So basically a political game rather than anything you build making it as far as you want it to.

10:53So that sort of led me to uncover this thing that I was good at that I hadn't seen as a commercially viable thing. So in the agency business, you pitch for work, right? you're spending about 50 % of your time responding to RFPs, going into conference rooms, giving the pitch, and you don't get paid for that portion of the work as an agency. You just hope that it converts. And I got, that was my like, that was the thing that I was good at in those contexts. I would be, do the pitch, refine the story, make it clean and simple and clear, and then go in the room deliver the pitch and what the agency normally does then is put the interns on it after you've won the business right so you don't actually get to deliver on the story so in hindsight that's what I realized I was good at it's like I can take all of this convoluted information and turn it into something consumable simple easy to communicate and that was the first iteration of visualize value i've worked with founders entrepreneurs to distill either like make materials to explain their product to the market or to investors or to employees and those were really unsexy jobs to begin with because it was by definition complicated or invisible stuff so like 3pl logistics companies that are trying to compete against dhl and there's like a 10-page document that shows why their fulfillment solution is 4 % more efficient and how that scales out to a couple million bucks a year in saving.

12:39So just really gruesome stuff, but very engaging. I think that was where I got the hook in, was when you're able to basically explain something back to someone better than they're able to explain it and they're in the business of delivering that thing, that was the kind of the epiphany that I was chasing over and over again and in doing that in basically trying to create a lead gen system for that business I started a Twitter and an Instagram account where I would take ideas that resonated and and turn them into these visuals so be a book I was reading or there's a few people who were like really influential at the beginning of that journey, Naval Ravikant, the founder of AngelList, Nassim Taleb, I was reading all that stuff voraciously.

13:32And to remember it and put it into practice, I would make these visuals to accompany those ideas. And that initially served as this lead gen for people who'd be like, oh, that's cool. Can you do this for my, you know, programmatic hedge fund and like this like 40 page document and it wasn't actually until I kind of outgrew the service component of that business that I got introduced to the world that we're here talking about so the step between that was this went from a service business to a product business I built a design curriculum and that kind of took over from the service work in the short term where I just focused on putting stuff out on Instagram and Twitter and that would build this network of people that wanted to learn this very specific strain of design which was take an idea turn it into a diagram communicate something way more simply and stuck at that for probably two years through the through the pandemic that was really a massive inflection point right everyone's at home trying to pick up a new skill trying to figure out what's going on uh how to like almost go fully remote or how to use the internet to communicate what you're good at because as soon as you lose that in-person connection like for a lot of people it really reduces your ability to show what show what you can do explain what you're you know interested in and good at so that that got a lot of traction during that point in time and it was through building that network that there's probably three or four thousand people in a discord at the end of that period and a couple people reached out to me like hey have you seen um do you know what nft is like you've been making digital art for three years and i would love to collect it and i was just like at the time i was like what is this guy talking about and he sent me a link to openc i remember going on OpenSea, I was like, I have no idea what I'm looking at here.

15:39This is like probably$5 CryptoPunk era, you know, maybe not$5,$500 CryptoPunk era. And I remember seeing OpenSea, I was like, oh, there's something here, but I don't get it. And it took about six months later for me to see Foundation. Hey, everyone, we're going to take a quick pause and hear a word from our partners. We'll be right back. Kraken Pro is the powerful crypto platform for experienced traders who demand the best. With advanced charts, real-time market analytics, and lightning-fast trade execution, Kraken Pro empowers you to trade your way. Customize your setup and make every pixel count by rearranging and stacking trading modules in a way that makes sense to you.

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17:47Did you understand the difference between OpenSea and let's say DeviantArt? because everyone was doing art but like what did you did you understand what that at that point in time i don't think not distinctly no not distinct because i didn't understand the underlying rails of it at all and there's some commercial component to deviant i think like there's commissions happening there and there's like transfer of value happening on some of those networks but I did not dig into the nuance of it like I fell down the Bitcoin rabbit hole in 2017 as a function of getting a hedge fund as a client that explained it to me so that was the that I met this guy actually who was buying Bitcoin through the post in uh at the beginning uh well this must have been 2009 2010 he was sending a dollar in the post for one bitcoin and he started this fund and this is a long story but the guy's obviously done incredibly well and uh i i got introduced to that world and and that was the extent of my knowledge at the time like i didn't dig past bitcoin as a as an idea and so it wasn't immediately obvious to me when i saw open see what was going on it wasn't until somebody sent me a invite to foundation if you know that auction platform the one of one auction platform which i think tied it all together as like this is just very obviously a digital curated gallery experience auction house all of those things so So that would have been March 2021 when I started minting my work as one of ones.

19:35And more specifically, just started to apply that visualized value, discipline, idea, process to the technology itself. So all of the pieces that did well in 2021 were really ways to explain the phenomenon that was happening at the time. was this very meta commentary on the actual underlying principles of the space and it got it must be quite exposing at first because now you know you're not pitching to a client you're not doing what you did you're now just putting something out there and seeing does it create value to somebody else isn't it how was that process you know what's fascinating is there was some, I had a distinct advantage in that because of the network that I'd built up prior.

20:26And I think because the ideas that were interesting to me and the people that I was reading were so heavily concentrated in technology, venture capital, markets, all of these ideas basically became this magnet for people who appreciate those things. so what was interesting is I had the I can't remember the exact sequence of events but I kind of had the ability to tease that out before just jumping off the cliff as well where I discovered what this technology is I'm like visualized value at the time probably has 200 ,000 Twitter followers so the idea that I could say oh would anybody be interested in collecting this stuff before making that leap.

21:14I mean, the result was absolutely astounding either way, but I think just retrospectively thinking about it, I had a massive advantage in the fact that basically the entire audience that had been following this journey was probably on a very similar trajectory and understanding and appreciating this stuff. So it wasn't like pivoting from this completely other world into what I think people would think of as this like value extraction hey I'm now gonna like take my painting take a picture of it and uh upload it to foundation or wherever it was uh and one of my early collectors actually gave a really succinct explanation as to why he was interested in collecting one of the early pieces on Instagram there's this if you click on a post on instagram and go to the like the extra information there's like view story reshares and if you go to back in 2021 if you went to a post on visualized value and see how many times it had been shared like propagated across the network that was his collecting thesis at the time was like that your ability to build and maintain a network is the thing that's interesting and obviously that's these are chicken and egg things like you're making work that people want to consume but at the same time there's this propagation happening almost naturally so yeah it was it didn't feel I think there's definitely been this bifurcation of like people who are absolutely opposed to it and don't want to learn anything else about it and people who are like completely down the rabbit hole it's a very marmite situation um yeah and and i've gone like i imagine there's people that started following visualized value in 2020 2019 that look at my twitter profile now it's like what are you talking about you know it's like complete there's people who i've met in person who like two years ago would have a two-hour conversation about something very specific now they're just like i have no idea it's like a you know completely different language that you're talking back in that early time did you get introduced to some of the other artists because when i was speaking to mike um people he was talking about you know people had been because he was the same kind of thing he was in the graphic design everything else and before you knew it he started reaching out to people like x copy the real early pioneers said look what the fuck is going on who did you reach out to or did you know any of these people at the time or were you just a different network man i'm trying to think back that far oh i have uh had the pleasure to meet a lot of people since then but at the time i didn't really so bpo is a great example i was downloading his uh like tutorials when i was at university like i did not know he was participating in this at the same time yeah so so he's always been like this uh a very prominent figure in the design community like just created a ton of resources early I don't even know if that stuff is even live still but um I followed him for a long time but when I first got into it I was really it wasn't really until the collectible phase of it or when that like real networked part of it kicked in for me that I started to make those connections and and uh start to have relationships of people that were involved in it.

24:45And that's been really interesting, I think, for people to discover this whole network idea that the network can have value in itself and it creates more things as opposed to artists thinking about one of ones or series and then you kind of don't have a super connection with the end collector and then suddenly the series start taking off. I mean, we saw it, I guess, with CryptoPunks and even bored apes that people were like, we're going to come together around these things. And then you ended up launching Chex right in the middle of the bear market. Is that right? January 23, yeah. Yeah. Why? Well, you know, it's funny, actually.

25:30I had - What's the story behind Chex as well? Because it's super interesting. Why? Yeah, thank you, man. I will. So, was not planned whatsoever. Actually, we had a baby four days before Chex Open Edition was launched. So it was a completely stupid time to launch that and get deeper down any kind of project, but this one specifically. So the whole idea goes back to the acquisition of Twitter is one of the biggest undercurrents thematically in that, which was maybe a year worth of the conversation that was, you know, I spend probably 10 hours a day on Twitter. you know so that's like it's like where my life occurs is the culture that i'm that i'm consuming all the time and i thought so much about the implications of verification previously when i was building a social media following i couldn't get a blue check mark like couldn't get one and i went to these conferences and stuff people like oh you can just you know pay a journalist to like get five articles in forbes and then you can like wrangle it that way and i was like i'm not going to do that like if i can't get one by merit i'm not going to bother and that was you know that's very naive whatever but um so i'd been like this symbol had meant something to me previously whereas like oh you that's the you know that is the symbol of verification right that's the that's the idea that there's a conference room in san francisco deciding that this person is worthy of the blue check mark right their opinion is more valuable than someone who doesn't have one and the very act of making that something that's just available to anybody with$8 is a fascinating idea that turns that all on its head and it's since like propagated out to all of these other social networks.

27:34So cryptography, social networks, all of these things that I've been fascinated with is like bottom-up consensus, right? Like the network is formed around something that they decide is interesting and or notable and that you can keep building on top of that and basically write your own provenance story. you have control of the composable base layer of the stuff you're producing, as opposed to the top-down social media, the previous paradigm. And this is not to say that the platform itself isn't centralized, all of those ideas, but the idea that you can make yourself notable is something that I think is extremely aligned with the crypto ethos.

28:24You build something that adds product market fit and you're good so all of these ideas were basically distilled into this single image and minted as an open edition it's a grid of eight by ten check marks and what it did I think is the way I wrote a manifesto that went with it that essentially was a more succinct and eloquent version of what I just explained and it resonated with a lot of people who had felt the same thing that I'd felt for a long time, I think, where, you know, there is a, there's a lot, I think he described it as a lord and peasant system on social media. And that was inverted overnight.

29:11And this, this little unlock, I think that happened with that was there was a format in there. So the eight by 10 grid became this very replicable, memeable thing that just took on a life of its own over the course of the next three or four months it's just there was probably i don't know hard to even count the number of variations and remixes and the the it was cci cco yeah yeah so the symbol itself is like you can't copyright a check mark in a circle just by function of it being a shape so this is also thematically interesting to me around ip ownership all of that stuff in the context of crypto and that unlocked all of these remixes and then that piece was an open edition that i had control over right so i could go in and change the metadata of that token whenever i wanted to and there was this dialogue happening between that piece of work and the people that were consuming it and remixing it and these events that were happening in the world would get remixed back into the work so it's just like taking on all of this context and then we developed this basically second component of that um of that collection where you can migrate the addition to what we call an original which is completely immutable on-chain one-of-one piece of art and And there's a lot of mechanics that would take a long time to explain, but essentially there's a mechanic within that second part of the collection where there's this thing, there's three possible black checks which would require 4 ,000 pieces of the original supply to create.

31:08And there's just been this incredible response to it where people, the collectors essentially decide the fate of the collection. So you either keep these things as additions, you migrate them, you combine them together, and there's all different tiers of combinations that you can produce. And there's this kind of end goal that I think would require collaboration to make happen at this point. So the commentary there is you can kind of compete with each other at the bottom for this status, or you can essentially collaborate to make this thing that is, you know, signifying the degree of collaboration that can happen permissionlessly with crypto, because people are already trying to build DAO structures and all of these different custody solutions to make this happen.

31:57We'll see. I think some people are getting quite close to that now. Why did it resonate so much? What happened there that this really took a life of its own, that people, you know, just took this whole journey with you? I think there's so much context in that symbol like I think I think that was one component of it is like especially people who had been watching my work for a few years it was so aligned with the things I was interested in and talking about and then I do think there is this just mechanical component to it where it really lowers the barrier of entry to remix stuff so there were projects that were you know take your logo and put it in the 8 by 10 grid and then there were people who were like hand drawing floral arrangements in this same grid and building sculptures and making concrete it was like it had these these two interesting ingredients or catalysts I think that just exploded the amount of it was that it was it was that the template could be remixed but also the symbol itself could just be integrated into any piece of work and we saw that happen too whereas like there was probably 80 percent of it was just a remix of the grid and then 20 percent was like okay we're taking this symbol back as a like we are the ones who are verifying this stuff now and And it started to get integrated into one of one work and just like a nod to that idea that this is a inflection point in culture where potentially, you know, we kind of divert it.

33:43We took the fork in the road away from like complete social centralization and censorship. And everybody's interested in crypto and the principles that underlie it. I think that rationale resonates and people wanted to build on top of that and spread that message, I think. That's my understanding of it. Hey, everyone. We're going to take another quick break and hear a word from our partners. We'll be right back.

34:11And it's a pretty brave thing to do also, to do an open edition, which wasn't common then, and then CCO as well, which seems like you're kind of giving up control of everything in one go what what was in your head because that was quite pioneering to do that when you did it well you know i think is interesting about the economics of the internet that i think is underappreciated is i learned this obviously through before i knew what any of this stuff was the incentives people have to propagate the work that you're doing and that was really that's what changed when I went from the old agency work where I would build these what I think of as great solutions to problems and you know uh like post my work to social media and and just no traction whatsoever like these things were not inherently shareable or interesting to people that were outside of that private conversation.

35:14So putting any limitation on the propagation of your work if the internet is your canvas, is like you're kind of working against the underlying infrastructure of the thing. And there are people who have articulated this far better than I can, but there's two, they almost feel at odds. like IP and crypto and the idea that you can establish provenance in such a provable way that all the value that gets created around that the thesis is like a small percentage of it will flow back to the original right but if there's the bigger that network grows the obviously the more that that small percentage becomes but it is definitely a much much longer term game where to make that symbol meaningful and to map it to that moment in time which you know a blockchain is a time machine that's just stamping that entry on the day that in 10 years 20 years 30 years is the check mark representative of this shift in culture or this thing that happened in art and had you not allowed people to or not encouraged I should say people to remix and celebrate that I think it completely changes the message and this is not me saying that everybody should do this but it is in the same way that time is a component of your work like that the decision to make something copyable or not is an artistic decision as much as it is like a commercial decision it's if this message is going to evolve into its maximum potential then you want to really limit the constraints for people to go out and add context to it i guess the next big thing after that was the using the pepe imaging kind of making it your own and then creating another huge thing with that what was what was your head around with that it was the internet it was it was the kind of main cultural meme of the whole thing so there's a there's an artist called obviously matt fury the the original pepe creator incredible there's an artist called bat stew used to do these uh geometric pepes he had a collection of 100 and uh my collaborator a guy called jalil had this project called scapes which was the first banner project on ethereum and basically through all of the exposure to those projects there's this incredibly recognizable constraint that came out of remixing three or four things together which is like in four blocks you have this character's face yeah you managed to distill complexity down to a very simple form i guess that's what came from the work beforehand right that visualized value was essentially that the silhouette the constraint like this one thing i didn't mention about visualized value was this the black and white constraint there's one typeface and there's a there's a constraint where you only use shape so there's no stylistic decision happening when you sit down to the computer to work it's like here's the idea here are the very simple constraints with which i have to put that idea through to communicate it and what i think that does is it like loads loads up the you don't waste any brain power on trying to uh make these stylistic choices so you have this constraint let's take there's a tim ferris quote make one decision to save you a thousand decisions it's been applied retroactively to this stuff but that's definitely the case and that and you get the a bit of the muscle memory of that from working in commercial advertising too where this is why companies don't change their logo every week like there's this equity that gets built up in this style that's recognizable and yeah the the evolution of that though is like the original thesis for the Opepun was a was a sort of a piss take on the open ai thing at the start where i got the i got image making is getting so commodified like the the actual like act of producing a beautiful image the cost of that is going to zero basically so the idea is the thing that becomes way more valuable and it was almost supposed to be this life raft in the beginning for distinguishing between AI and human output because even though the images would be generated by AI the silhouette itself would be recognizable it's almost like because you have taken that one constraint you've allowed a million people a billion people to participate and create ideas around this thing and you just continue to embed this very simple silhouette with meaning very similar to the Chex grid where people were just like, oh, I recognize that outline.

40:40You don't even really know what it is or where it came from. And then the idea just got so much bigger after my original plan was to do 16 ,000 AI-generated versions of this by hand. So it was like this paradox of like, that would have taken me probably a year to do that. But in sort of pursuing that in public and developing the idea in public, there were so many people contributing remixes of this thing again and it was like oh this is really under this is really under doing the potential of this thing just like making it this you know uh one artistic style one commentary in a moment of time so we went down and like an absurd rabbit hole with this to get the mechanics right of this thing and it's now 16 000 pieces is released 80 at a time so there's 200 events that occur across this collection and the collectors decide which artwork makes it a part of the collection so anybody can submit a set and we have a consensus mechanism on the website where people who own the blank tokens vote on what becomes part of the final collection so that's evolved over the last few months to get more and more decentralized and community run we've had some like we had snowfro do a set uh there's been this massive variety in the profile of artists that have contributed to this so there are people who have yeah fuck when did they just the other day as well didn't they yeah yeah yeah came out a couple of days ago and then we've had people that were not not practicing art full-time at all with 500 twitter followers that have gotten sets approved into this thing too so a lot of it is trying to solve the cold start problem for artists but at the same time borrow equity from these massive artists to get attention on people who don't have those audiences so it's it's like it's all network effects again exactly so um and and there's this really fascinating in the same way there's this like market component to checks and there's like this this deadlock that happens at certain points in time where right now the supply of checks is like 50 50 editions and uh originals there's like this tension that's also happening around these sets too so there was this was all designed to be commentary on all the things that i found myself fascinated with when all the um all the like the massive collectible wave happened with board apes for example like why is a golden board ape worth 80 times the the cheapest but it's just like it's the most obscene thing in the world and trying to like design the mechanics of the collection to reflect some of those things too is uh was all part of the process i mean that's a lot of complexity to try and figure out or did you just try and figure some of it out as you went you kind of knew vaguely or you had a full mapped out roadmap no so the the pep and open edition was in one hour one per wallet open edition that was it was open for an hour and 16 15 984 tokens were actually we rounded it up to 16 000 eventually because 16 000 is divisible by 80 which is the number of checks in the checks grid and we had this system in checks there's this uh it's called a semi-perfect number so there's there's uh six tiers to it there's there's 40 20 10 5 4 and 1 which was that accounts for every check on the grid and those map those are both the the different iterations of checks as you go down the the hierarchy and they also map to the addition sizes in a pepon so you have this like you have it's almost like a prism where the checks collection is is like going down to this finite very very very scarce thing and then a pepon is doing the absolute opposite it's like how do we propagate this as far and wide and like there are people minting separate collections with that uh on other chains and like the stuff that's not part of the permanent collection but if you didn't have this scarce component you can't get attention on anything you know for it to just be like this is a free-for-all go for it just completely dissipates but the fact that there is this finite component to it really does keep people engaged and obviously collectors have a vested interest in curating this into the best thing it can possibly be artists you know an artist with zero twitter followers if you publish a great Opepins set it's getting sent to 15 ,000 people instantly people who are who are trying to curate a collection into the best thing it can possibly be who are incentivized to promote your work so this whole system is really trying to um trying to accomplish the things that i saw people i myself struggle with earlier on but also saw people struggling with when visualized value was in its education phase where it's like everybody building their own network and creating their own distribution is just completely unrealistic and almost a waste of time too it's like that's one of the amazing things about crypto and crypto art and media to me is you can tap into these networks and get like some what's the term when you're driving behind a truck on the on the uh motorway yeah it's not tailwind it's uh yeah i know what you mean yeah you know i'm talking about yeah you're like drafting streaming slip streaming exactly exactly So like the friction is reduced as a function of you attaching yourself to these networks where previously you could kind of create derivatives.

46:57And, you know, that's interesting. Let me commission like a version of my punk in this style. Right. Where this is an evolution of that is like, no, you have an opportunity to be part of this permanent collection alongside the likes of. ACK, Snowfro, you know, there's just a totally different mechanic and hopefully outcome. Maybe either purposefully or not, that you're also making a comment on the gamification of everything. Because I mean, this is all highly gamified, right? And life has become gamified on the internet. Yeah, it's all markets, right? Especially when you get into practicing anything by yourself, you really understand the brutality of that as well.

47:49It's like your intentions and the things that you care about and the things that you want to happen are in completely irrelevant. The market determines the outcome, right? You have a, what was it? The, someone's bot, But the CEO's boss is the market. And a lot of the thing that's, I guess, fascinating about this world to me is you see all of these themes from the old art world and just like the corporate world in general come into this world where the 50 % commission on selling your work. and the don't promote your work as an artist you know it's like this really odd culture around that where the stuff that i was doing before this i think gave me enough experience of like no if you're proud of the thing you made go out and shout like crazy about it promote it promote it promote it promote it and in the same way that what we were talking about earlier the degree to which you won't promote yourself is how much margin you're going to give up the idea that crypto as an underlying set of tools and infrastructure can fundamentally change that i think is is has we've proven that that's true people that have launched art careers off the back of contributing to these things from from zero like full-time architect during the day now oh we get you get a pep and set approved i'll launch my own art collection now i'll curate another set of artists and the ripple effects of this can just go on and on and on um um and there's also crazy speculation and like this this is none of this stuff is without downside on the like what you experience as you're trying to build these types of things but again it's like if you want the upside you got that's the dolly parton quote right a little office reference if you want the rainbow you gotta fight over the rain and so you know as i'm talking to you i'm seeing the checks behind you and there's an obvious reference to damien hirst that leads me into what's just happened over the last few days as well so let's talk let's talk damien hirst yeah so this is actually was inspired by and i forgot to mention this when we're first talking about it but the the caption for checks originally was this artwork may or may not be notable because when you hovered over the legacy blue check mark on twitter on the day that uh that the the purchasable blue check became available that's what it used to say it said this is a legacy verified account it may or may not be notable it's this incredible troll and that was the idea right it was like who's the most famous artist i can think of damien hurst you know growing up where i did and that's you know up for debate among the art world once you know if you live the 90s and 2000s damien hurst is everything right he's the most them and banks here the two most culturally relevant artists of the uk in the last 40 years you know building an art career like that and the stuff that is it is mind-bending so the idea of referencing the old guard in some way you know like this is the this is up for the crowd to determine now is uh that was the original commentary and then although he did a cool thing as well with his own currency and the burn list that was amazing incredible yeah he uh i i wrote a long thread about checks and that's like the third tweet in there is like this is obviously inspired by this and the idea of currency and an evolution of that in a sense where social currency is literally embodied by this symbol you know and to your point the gamification of everything like if you're making a comment about the most successful quote-unquote one-of-one i ever made was called nfts explained and it's two white rectangles the one on the left says jpeg and on the right says nft and the nft has a blue check mark in the top right corner so this was two years before that the checks project was born and that idea of an nft is a social contract basically right it's it is this immutable record but it is a social intangible here are these like things that we've established to be true as a market over time damien hearth's work is valuable because 10 million people have seen it and you know it's it's valuable and this story that came out last week about an idea determining the published date or the the uh the date of an artwork so let's explain to people because we've both followed this story other people like what are they talking about there was a really really famous it's probably what made damien hearst famous was the shark in formaldehyde um i think it was first collected by chel saatchy and then in the saatchy gallery and then it was stevie cohen i think i think it was stevie cohen made it famous paid a lot of money for it um it kind of rocked the art world but recently it's come to light that there's several more of these and they're dated but the date is the idea from the 90s while the actual shark from this particular one in Dubai was made four years ago something like that 2018 I think it was yeah yeah yeah yeah and so people are like is this provenance is this real what's real Damon Hirst is a fraud he's just knocking stuff out so well you saw this and you thought I want to comment on this tell me so I think that piece of work particularly is like iconic in the minds of so many as like is that art right and that's the like the thing that you're actually trying to achieve as an artist is like get as many people as upset as possible about what you're doing and he's done an incredible job of that but this idea of provenance is obviously it's been a theme in my work for since i began to use ethereum as a medium and the perfect opportunity to play with this idea and also the checks the checks project and the check story jillil the guy that the writes the the technical side of checks his kids they asked him can you show can you show me a picture of the black check so the black check is this thing that's almost unattainable and uh brought it up on the screen and he's like oh it doesn't exist yet now like what do you mean it's right there it's like the token itself hasn't been minted but the thing exists like the idea exists so people who are like incredibly far down the checks rabbit hole there's this parallel there to the three checks because those three things you know uh there's technically the the idea deployed to create them is done but they don't exist like the token doesn't exist that maps to that idea so that's the one part of the commentary and i called the piece 1988 that was the year i was born because you know in the art world when you see an auction of christie's or whatever it says born the birth year of the artist and i guess this is some obsession with like i don't know try and use the earliest number you possibly can in reference to a piece of artwork no i think it's not i think it's really straightforward what's culturally relevant to you and me is different to what's culturally relevant to a baby boomer right so if you see artist was born in the 1940s or 50s they're going to be relevant to boomers or 1930s right because that was their cultural history if we see somebody born in the late 60s 70s or 80s they're going to be relevant to us that's why you do it it's like what is your cultural pocket you know it's also interesting as i get that gives you a reference point for how ahead of their time they were right that that idea of you know is a great example of that you know ed ruchet incredible american artist that you look at his work is published in like 60s 70s it looks like you know could have come out yesterday it's just unbelievable like the vision and foresight so that so they're incredible merit to that idea and obviously the reference to uh i think 99th like predating predating the inception of that work because if you really want to get philosophical about it it's like the butterfly effect of someone being born is where that idea started right and there's something fascinating to me about the physical construction of work in some ways it is arbitrary right it's like when this thing arrived in a museum or when the last piece of wood went on the end of the formaldehyde and the you know yeah i mean when do you date the gaudy cathedral this regard of familia that's been 120 years what's the date why this resonated so much with me is it's so convergent with all these themes of consensus Like, when does the network agree that this was created?

57:17And overwhelmingly, the traditional old art world network does not agree with the dating of the shark at 2018. Sorry, at 1993. They believe when the last piece of wood went on the thing, and maybe when it arrived at Gallery X, is when it was made. Damien Hirst is laughing about this, because he's made himself relevant yet again, right? incredible yeah yeah and like at the same time it's like the physical I think if you're thinking about this stuff from like why am I making this and if the first piece of that collection was produced in 1993 and the like template was set in many ways like there is an argument to be made it's obviously going to get dumbed down to put in the Guardian for people to be like look what Damien Hirst is doing again you know like but in the same way that like check's contract was written in 2023 the final iteration of that may not be created for 100 years 200 years may not ever be created and would you date that the year it came out or the year the the the original piece was written yeah it was just there were so many so many parallels and then what i try to do is like respond to it as quickly as possible so the first thing i did was go find the image of the shark retouch it this is perfect there's three boxes we put the three black checks in there posted to her and i don't think the the network was really didn't really care about it wasn't thinking about it that much so it was like oh you know performance of the post did okay right there's a couple people like really deep down the art rabbit hole that are like uh that's funny and it just kept bugging me i was like ah man i have to like i have to just i'm making an argument about provenance and i'm posting to twitter right this is this is dumb i have to mint this thing and x copies edition from last week was the mutatio the model that blew my fucking mind right we know x copy like one of the single most important artists of the entire space maybe the most important artist yet how on earth did he mint a million of those things for 30 something thousand people right that blew my mind and then you did it again with the same you know 40 ,000 different wallets I mean there's something happening it's incredible I think the like big props to the L2 narrative there too where well not narrative the infrastructure that exists on L2 which means the transaction cost is much much much less than that would have been in 2021 to like mint a million like that there would have been twice that in gas to pay in 2021 maybe four times that to create that collection which those economics on the infrastructure side change what's being uh produced as art like that that is something that i think we're just basically on the cusp of now is I don't think a lot of people that are practicing, this is actually maybe a generalization, but I don't think the magnitude of low transaction costs can be overstated in terms of the abundant amount of participation that that unlocks relative to like in 2021, it's$50 to mint a one-of-one.

1:00:53For a lot of people, that's an absolutely crazy commitment and you know nobody like you're doing that without a network nobody sees it blah blah so being able to mint something for five cents being able to like move it around what's it going to enable i can do the dot dot dot lots of things but i don't know what those lot of things are what are you thinking apart from just scale i mean scale's obvious you know you can resonate and we've just seen something break out but there's something bigger happening here and i can't yet put my finger on it well i think i we had this conversation before but the the i think the philosophical change will go from i own one piece of this thing to this moment is ownable by a million people and like the the nuance of that understanding i think is is changing well like an x copy one of one this and i think this is like taking the mechanics from the old world it's like in design we would call it skeuomorphic right as whereas like you just copy the patterns from the old world and and people are so stuck in that but the real potential for changing this is understanding that this is one piece of art that happens to be owned by a million people as opposed to this is a million pieces of art that's your idea with um crypto punks as well isn't it this is yeah yeah yeah yeah because you and i had this conversation at people's place and i'm like okay this bent my mind yeah this is really interesting so this so the headline or the hook for explaining this idea i always use is um crypto punks is the most expensive portrait ever sold so salvator salvatore monday sold at christy's i think in 2017 2018 for 470 million dollars or something the market cap of the crypto punks collection is two billion dollars to that roughly something like that so four times and people think of that as 10 000 pieces of work and it's like that is completely the wrong frame in my mind it's like lava labs have deployed like five pieces of work you know like five masterpieces and it just so happens that crypto punks the portrait of crypto punks can be represented 10 000 different ways and it makes that network so anti-fragile and resilient and oh just as we're speaking my punks in the bag i just saw that up in the top like seven seven years on the resilience of that network is incredible and um the liquidity of that portrait is unbelievable too if you want to get into the like so it's a two billion dollar fractionalized portrait of which each person can own a specific individualized part of it exactly and represent themselves and get that

1:04:03connection personally with that individual visual representation of the thing there's obviously like the benefits that the digital Rolex that people have been giving the the thesis for for years and years at this point it's like yeah that's the most basic way to tout the benefits of these things I went to um free's art fair and did a like little talk in the Deutsche Bank lounge there and they're like wealth management uh here buy art and put it in a vault on the free port and loan against it and whatever else it's like crypto punks is a is a infinitely better product for what you're trying to do here and like even trying to explain that to them they're like what are you talking about and the the conversation i tried to tee up was like okay if say like one of your clients wants to liquidate their fine art portfolio how do you do that oh well you gotta get uh you know an appraiser in here you gotta like see the tax jurisdiction for where the thing is and then you have to find a buyer within the network and it's like you can't just go open up your ledger and just like sell it into a bid you know like that is a completely different all of these themes of consensus to me are so fascinating yeah i mean we just need 16 million dollar apes trading and punks trading relatively liquid i mean that bidding war was going on for a while i mean that's mind-blowing it's it's insane yeah and and like all of the cultural side of this i think is um you know i think we i think we might have discussed this before but it's like art as a or like the high end of the art market is reflective of the methods of wealth generation at the time that's right they're capsules of culture as well one example i have of this is a did a small collection last year with a screen printer in la who was actually ed ruchet's master printer back in the 80s and 90s called checks elements and we had it at art basil exhibit and the people that came over and started conversations around it were one guy was the first 20 employees a square or something like that it was like just instantly the things that that represents to that person everybody else walks past it's like what is that And that, to me, is so fascinating, is being on Twitter and basically living your life digitally.

1:06:45You have a completely different relationship with these symbols than the rest of the world. And punks is just such a fantastic example of that, too. is um i think relative to its like if you if you stop people on the street and said salvatore monday and a punk you'd have to probably i don't even know what the percentage difference would be of like do you know what this is do you know what that is it would be absolutely mind-bendingly different in favor of salvatore monday would be my thesis and still this thing the value that exists in it and the value it secures that there's this whole other tangent here on like the fact that this is natively this exists natively on a network of money where you have ordinals is an incredible example of this too where you have this like reinforcing effect where it's like the the trophy asset or the prize piece of culture ethereum's growth is beneficial to punks and vice versa and like remember i showed you that chart of uh of the punks price and ethereum price yeah a beetle studio and the punks price really interesting was going up right back in 2020 2020 the moment eke hit its high punks did 24x yeah suddenly people were recycling gains into trophy assets or a cultural representation of what was happening.

1:08:18And you know, I think that is too. Yeah. Yeah. Like your second point is like, we won the game. Now we lift the trophy, right? It's like all time high is like, what is the thing that represents like my understanding of this phenomenon before everybody else? It's the punk. That's why ordinals are doing so well right now is because Bitcoin hit its new all time highs before anything else has. and so they're celebrating first the this the trophy recycling of wealth yeah it's fascinating and and like the stuff that's being built over there just unbelievable too it's just hard to keep up with everything as a practitioner it's just unbelievable the amount of quality work and thinking that's gone on in the last two years while the stuff has just sat flat it's but then how do people deal with that can we kind of grab because it is all attention right all of this is attention even art itself traditional art is attention banging earth classic example of warhol is there enough attention for the number of things that are happening or are we diluting ourselves for attention attention is a finite resource i think for sure it is i think and the idea that I don't know these objects like the market cycles are kind of it's probably similar to traditional markets but I don't know a ton about but collectibles is kind of you have this wave of speculation and you hope for a small percentage of those people to become interested in this thing for its fundamental qualities quote unquote and then through each cycle that that percentage kind of increases slightly in the same way like the price of an asset hits its new all-time high and then a higher low and then it so i know a very hard question to answer i think like i'm struggling i'm i think we're all struggling i can't i have no idea what's going on in ordinals i just don't have the time i just don't have the time because it's transitioning from this like incredibly niche thing that you could keep abreast of to like the analogy you could use is like what's happened on the internet today it's like whoa you you have no hope of even beginning to understand that right this has gotten to a point where it's culturally big enough whereas oh what's happening in america today that's the interesting thing is like i think people have been interested in this and for a long time mistakenly believe that because you're crypto native you can keep up with all this stuff because you have been able to but it's just a function of it it's it's grown so big horizontally that now you have to like pick your lane what you're great at what do you understand what do you care about dial in and you know i find myself have to talk myself out of running these like experiments that would lead to way less focus on the stuff that you know you've already poured years and years and years of time into and that's the and that's the conundrum for everybody right it's like the shiny object versus the you know the value the slow incremental and so where's next for you with all of this is it is it like a cohesive narrative that sucks everything together in the end kind of like checks distills down is everything that you're doing part of a larger meta-narrative you might not have figured out what that meta-narrative is you kind of know directionally but is that how you're thinking about it yeah yeah i think that i like the body of work is really the in a strange way it it becomes a more practical version of the stuff that i was trying to communicate with visualized value right it's like visualized values uh original body of work is this network of ideas that are theoretically true.

1:12:25Like, here's how markets work. Here's how you build something valuable. Here's how you get the attention of people. The visualized value art practice is an attempt to actually do those things. And like, weirdly, art is the last thing you think of as the best vehicle for that. but with crypto as the rails somehow it seems to be the most direct translation of those ideas like you can this object either has value or it doesn't that's determined by the market there's a i have to send you a link to a guy that i met through just posting on twitter his name's anthony Morley and he's been writing a lot about like the intrinsic value of information and over time his thesis is these objects gain value relative to how true they are how beautiful they are and how true they are and that idea to me is is reflective of or it's like the inverse of the experience I had at the beginning of my career I was like what are we doing here like this is just nonsense we're having nonsensical conversations like all of our incentives are completely divergent and misaligned and weirdly a grid of check marks and a cartoon frog have been a much more profound and like accurate representation of reality you know it's very it's a very fascinating experience to go through this where like you think you're like smart and proper and clever going to a conference room on madison avenue but when you're like outside of that it's like if you're the degrees to which you're removed from the market which in that case you're like you couldn't almost couldn't be further away versus hey here's this thing i made do you want it or not like as an individual the feedback loops are so aggressive and hard to weather but the things that come out of that in my mind are like incredible so like continuing to just push on that and at the same time try and build these things that grow the pie and i think that is a like use the analogy like plant the apple tree anybody doesn't believe in economic growth give them like bag of seeds that's the idea here is like these things might not be obvious in the short term but the things that convert people from just consuming to creating value and contributing to something and increasing the attention on this thing while being able to have exposure to the upside of it as a at the asset class level or at the collection level or whatever it is, to me is a fundamentally different paradigm of value.

1:15:31My view on this as well is that what we are seeing is the coalition of people in societal groups on the internet, whether they're based around everything is a mimetic, everything is a social contract. We're seeing something happening here at scale to do with community, the blockchain technologies enabling. and I've been speaking to Yatsui about this around his idea which is what we're actually ending up doing is creating a purpose for humans in an AI world because we we can create these online digital societies we can participate in the economics of them and you create something like universal basic equity because it could be Manchester United Football Club or it could be checks or it could be punks either way you're part of a society a group of like-minded people with a group of shared ideas and if that if you can get that idea to propagate you're going to do well from it because the value increases because of metcalfe's law it's all network effects so it's really fascinating to me and that's what i think is going on i think somewhere within that that is what happened with x copy last week is something i don't know a million something happened there that we've not seen you can go and look back at screenshots of uh x copies work from 2017 2018 where he's selling stuff for 50 cents you know like this that i think a lot of it is that that's the for average to be a fascinating juxtaposition i'll maybe i'll go look into that after this but like his first piece of work and his latest piece of work selling for the same amount quote unquote like that that is a million dollar 3d fly there but it's also a well it's a two point i think it's 2.4 million dollars you're right yeah yeah um as you said incredible 2.4 million dollars and that and like that's that really is a i think the the other thing is that really is a fraction of the value that has been created from the x copy body of work and that seems like a crazy number but if you look at like the work moving through christie's every day there's there's tens of millions of dollars of art being sold a christ that has and this is not me you know criticizing any of that stuff it's like this is an established world and there's value been assigned to stuff but that stuff is so much less resilient than something like an x copy there's like 40 000 people will come out for you in 24 hours and support your work like in the traditional art world that's just completely unheard of yeah and you've just had that as well i mean 40 000 people i mean it's unbelievable listen my friend we could talk for hours there's so much fascinating stuff um that was really really insightful really interesting I just love what you're doing it kind of makes my brain hurt a bit though the gamification element is just you know it's hard but the simplicity of what you do and the messaging and the messaging and the simplicity always strikes me um and I just it's just brilliant what you've done and I saw the shark in formaldehyde thing got it in about one second for that's genius well done oh respect thank you very much they're 40 000 people so anyway well let me get let me give uh let me give one more 60 seconds on the on the uh the yeah yeah the shark thing um that model the next stage of this thing we're going to try and get it installed the MoMA the VNA the Tate literally permissionless global art exhibition where people will go and put that thing in every museum every notable place in the world so I just wanted to I forgot to mention that before but that's the the second tier there because it's an ar model so you get your phone uh point it you drop the model anywhere take a video walk around it and we'll have proof of uh participation at all of these notable institutions also really fucking interesting because where we're going to go with ar and vr and that blurring between what is physical what is digital um again i don't think people are yet understanding how big and the big of a change that is because as you say anybody can exhibit in any museum right you can you can have it in time square you can have it in trafalgar square yeah top of everest you can exhibit your art anywhere it's kind of like i mean that's genius this man you are appreciate that all of your stuff is just really really really interesting i just love it that's brilliant so well thank you mate i appreciate and hopefully get together in person at some point soon somewhere in the world let's do it love it all right great to see you thanks mate you too so there you go really fantastic it's really interesting to see that Jack had similar kind of background to Beeple although he'd actually learned from Beeple's videos about you know how to be a graphic designer which is kind of mind blowing it shows how interconnected this all is how all of these people kind of met in the same way the way that Beeple had reached out to Xcopy he was an earlier artist in the space and they all kind of have combined ideas and thoughts and moved the space forward but Jack's simplicity of his design is what makes it so striking.

1:21:05It's the complete opposite to Sam Spratt's, which is like Renaissance art on blockchain and Jax's commercial art in this distilled, incredible format that encapsulates culture at its simplest level. But it's not simple. It's really complex. It's about the understanding of community and network effects and gamification and a whole host of other things, comments just dropped in around what is happening in the world and what it all means to all of us. It's all cultural capsules as well. Anyway, I thought it was going to be a fascinating discussion and it exceeded everything. So I hope you enjoy it and I'll see you next time somewhere on this journey at the nexus of macro, crypto and the exponential age of technology.