Raoul Pal x Micky Malka: Fintech Is Dead—Everything Gets Tokenized

31:21So why did AI start coming into your portfolio? How are you thinking about it in context with all of what we've been talking about? yeah so we tried to write an essay that didn't mention the word ai as much because we think we're all ai has a different definition to all of us we asked 10 people what's ai and you'll get 15 answers um so basically the but the underlying what pins everything is tokens and if you are listening to your podcast and you are listening to google's earnings calls they talk about how many tokens they do a month. And they brag about how they quintuple the number of tokens per month that they process.

32:01If you listen to the earnings call of Visa and Ryan's the CEO talking about it, he talks about tokens. And yet they're different tokens. And if you talk to energy compute companies, they talk about tokens. And you've talked about energy should be measured by the power of the output of intelligence that it creates. And that's a token in many ways on a measure or a unit of measure, which is different than just gigawatts. So society is moving to measuring everything in token, but it has a different meaning. So we took that principle and said, okay, what does it mean? It means that we are all companies are token factories.

32:41You have a supply of different tokens that you need to do something. You create something new and you have an output of tokens that are given to somebody else to do something new. And if you think like that, then you can say, okay, if I'm a factory, what tokens do I need to do what exactly? And we basically categorize them in four different buckets. We call them the identity tokens, the tokens that talk about you, have information that is only you will know about yourself, your personal name or driver's license or your ID or your bank accounts or your credentials to banks or your healthcare records, anything that is about you.

33:18Those are needed in different ways depending on the kind of factory. You have what we call the knowledge or expert tokens. These are tokens that are provided in a service that you don't know yourself, but there's an expert that doesn't. It could be your wealth advisor. It could be your tax planner. It could be your travel planner. Any kind of expert knowledge token that you can use. You have the asset tokens, which are the tokens that are used to actually deliver the goods, the exchange of goods and it could be stable coins it could be equities in the future it could be anything that is tokenized and they're all machine readable and the last but not least are the real world tokens which is for the first time in history energy money and power are tied together knowledge we have no energy there's no money we have no money there's no energy we have no money there's no knowledge we have no energy there's no knowledge This has never happened like this.

34:17So those tokens are really important for the future. So that's basically how we've expanded the way we're thinking about our thesis. And I think it's genius to think of all of these as, you know, tokens of various types of information. They're all the same thing because they need to be all readable by the machines, whatever we define the machines as, right? This whole internet digital world. and then when you look at it through that lens you come back to the same lens of crypto is we just have an interoperability problem that needs to be solved correct then there's a distribution problem that needs to be solved and then there's a um a transfer um and value system that needs to be solved because everyone's going to be needing to buy and sell tokens and store tokens at scale whether they're information for the ai or information about ourselves and that suddenly blows the whole fintech out idea out to oh my god it's actually everything exactly and yeah and you were one of the ones that gave us the best feedback you made us think with your comments on our letter because it's exactly what you said it's like okay then what happens and um i think you went forward even further and you said something that everything's a marketplace that's what's stuck in my head because i i'm very visual so i just think about all of these tokens and we need to transfer them whether it's agents doing it or us as people or governments or whatever it is somehow we need to organize these things where we can buy and sell them and transfer them and that to me sounds like oh my god the future of the internet is basically a gigantic market i think that's where we're heading and um and there's people already working on this in different ways.

36:07And if you think about it, even OpenAI is a gigantic market of tokens. It's just you give them certain tokens and it comes back with other tokens and you're paying for that as a subscription or as a per API call or whatever. But that's a marketplace of tokens right there. But I think everything's going to move in that direction. And also, you know, I've talked a long time about the fact that we have a lot of information ourselves that we hold. In a future world where AI becomes more imposing on the workforce and other things, we have plenty of things that we can offer to this token world, like every photograph I've ever taken or every conversation I've ever had or my personal information or my attention.

36:50All of that gets tokenized, and it can release capital to people for the quality of the tokens that they hold. That's exactly right, and I think that's where we're heading. And that's where your data is as valuable as any other data for these token factories. They're going to find a way to incentivize you to share them. Yeah, because now they've scraped the public web. Really, the way you need to build this is with all of the other data that's available. And they're going to have to pay for it because they're in private hands. So that becomes a very interesting proposition for businesses, people, everything else.

37:29or you can trade it for other things. You know, you trade it for free services. You know, we've seen that in the internet model. I give you attention, you give me free videos. You know, we're all happy. So there's a whole bunch of ways that this is going to play out. But I think it's the most unique understanding of the whole thing that I've seen, the most cohesive vision of how this all comes together. Thank you. I hope we are right on it. I don't see how not. I don't see, I honestly don't see how not because we're seeing marketplaces already for some of this stuff. I know we've written about it at Global Macro Investor that this seems to be the way for everything, that everything gets tokenized, both in a monetary token attached to an information packet token because it's the only way that we can allow agents to operate in an economy and collect the information it needs to do its stuff.

38:22If you want to start a company around it, we're happy to talk to you on it because you're spot on. And I think that's where the agents are going to be amazing. Because in Web2, it's still really hard to organize your personal data to know how to get a benefit out of it. But imagine if you had your own agent that can actually do that for you. And it organizes your data to figure out how to create the tokens that are needed for somebody else for you to exchange value. And I think that's where it's going to get super interesting. And how do you think about agents, autonomous agents as investable entities?

39:02Are you starting to think, well, there's clearly just going to be a RIA or wealth advisor agent? And these are not necessarily companies per se. How are you thinking about that transition? I think that I was throwing a controversial statement a couple nights ago talking about, you know, I got three kids during one of them is in college. The other two are going to be in college in the next few years. How hard is the labor force going to be for them when they graduate? And I had three hardcore statements. The first one is, in this era, you only go to college if you either get a scholarship and you can graduate debt-free or you have some trust or family that can afford it or grandparents that can help you afford it, but you should not go to college if you're going to finish with debt right now.

40:00The second big statement was a bunch of people are going to have a hard time finding jobs, but I think there'll be the entry workforce maybe that we work for agents. An agent will hire young people to do tasks. which is very different than a company hiring them. And I think that's coming sooner than we expect. So I think that's how agents are going to enter the economy. It will take a while. We're not there. The agents are very buggy. The user interfaces are not great. I don't find the phone is the right element to connect with agents. The phone is quite clumsy to do that right now. I find, I don't know you, but I find myself using more AI on my laptop than I am on my phone.

40:45Yeah. I can put more features, more applications. I can have more access to enhance the experience of my hard drive, my voice, my notes, my video than I can on my phone. So I think we're still missing a new interface. Maybe it's the new glasses. Maybe it's something around the glasses. I don't know yet. But we need all of that to make these agents really take off the way they should.

41:26It was interesting, Fiverr, the platform that, you know, you can hire people to do stuff, made an announcement, they're cutting like 30 % of their workforce because of AI. I'm like, why don't they just become an agent platform? And I think of agents as bundled tokens, because they use different tokens for different outputs. And they're like, there's baskets of tokens being used for different applications. Feels like there's a Fiverr or something like that could completely take over a marketplace because that's all it does anyway. A hundred percent. I agree with you. It's going to take them a little bit of time.

42:05It's always an innovator's dilemma. And if they don't do it, there'll be a 21, 22-year-old kid who, think about it this way, There's already two full grades of college students, almost three, that since they had to apply for college, ChatGBT was around to help them write the essays. And in a few years, no one's going to know how it was before that. And that generation is going to build applications and agentic experiences because they are building agents at school already for their classes. And it's going to be much more native. So I'm very bullish on that generation coming up. Yeah, you said this to me the other day when we were together.

42:46You said, I'm spending all of my time with 21, 22, 23-year-olds because they're native to this and they're the only people who are going to get it. Yes. It is like going back to 1996, 95, 97, 98 and trying to talk to somebody about the internet that is not actually playing with it 24-7. What could they tell you? how would they describe a page view or a html website or a browser or a smt like they they had no content we could try it but it was not the same as the guys that were building it we were lucky as a generation that we grew up with the infrastructure of the internet showing beginning built so we understood what was possible we understood that hey the packets on tcpip can actually be compressed more and you can send video and you will understand yeah i can see that happening i can see how packet because i understand how tcpip works so you can understand yeah voice video yes it's cool but it's it's possible and and better and better these kids are the same for ai they understand foundational models they understand the application layer they are they are they are they don't take notes on anything but on an ai agent uh they do the homeworks there they're just different.

44:03It's the same way as the kids of the 90s were. It's fascinating. And do you think the businesses they build will start falling in the category of one employee style? You know, you can build a billion dollar business with one employee idea. Are we getting there yet? I think we're on our way faster than we think. I think using historic context, you know, when And 100 years ago, 110 years ago, the vanguards of entrepreneurship in America, the barons, when their companies went public or when they got really, really big, they still own 70, 80 % of their companies. And their friends on 10 % and their merchant banks on 10%.

44:43And capitalism and society moved that equation from a founder owning 80 to the founder owning 20 and the financial investors owning 80. I think we're going to start to see the move back where companies have less employees, hence less dilution. They're more capital efficient because of all these agenting experiences and the founders will probably own more other companies. So we'll see a proliferation of new companies. That's fascinating. We've seen crypto go the other way that they've tried to force as much out of the hands of the original founders. and it loses alignment of interest. It does. And it was doing it because it was trying to use money as a battle for attention.

45:31Yeah. Because you were trying to solve a problem. But here, I think this combination of token factories actually sold attention. And if they sold the attention, the money is not needed. You got the attention. Now it's what do you do with it? Yeah. And also because of the old system of the rigidity of having to go through a seed raise and affect friends of family and then you need to go through a VC and all of this, you are naturally just losing equity of the firm. But if we take forward the conversation we're having before about instant capital formation, you actually don't need to go through that process in the same way.

46:06That's right. Fascinating. So more importantly, digital art. Where did this journey start with you? And I want to talk about this journey because this is another amazing thing. And we've both been going through this whole journey at the same time as well and thoroughly loving it. So give me that whole story. Where did it start for you? So I missed the whole free-to-claim CryptoPunks 2017. I never bought a CryptoKitty when Ethereum showed up. I saw them. I saw how it collapsed the network. I saw the punks, but I was too busy doing my stuff and missed the whole thing and missed the NFT craziness of 21 or 20, 21, 22.

46:52I stumbled into digital art in 2022, just three years ago. And it was in the bear market and the markets had calmed down. The world was a little bit slower. We were reshaping our thesis and our thinking. and on Twitter I was scrolling and I saw an art piece posted that looked very similar to an art piece that Becky and I have from a Brazilian artist uh that was painted in the 80s and it was very similar and we were like whoa this is beautiful so ended up uh going online buying it it was from a Mexican artist one called Juan Carlos Garcia and uh he had done it on a bright moments mexico exhibition and um and so we bought our first nft and then our journey was more like let's pair because we have an art uh we've been collecting physical art for a while let's pair some of our physical art with our digital art and we we went and saw the autoglyphs and they matched with something we had from an artist from the 50s and and so our journey was not a crypto first journey our journey was not a trading journey or a looking for the hut uh to find stuff it was very artistic by nature just trying to pair and then and along that journey when we bought the autoglyphs we got a chance to meet john and matt the larva founders and then we talked about crypto punks and about the pixels in the crypto punks and where it comes from and we're the same age and how it was the same games we were playing we were with kids and the psychic and the whole story about and how it was free to claim and that was the day that we just the aha moment came and trying to convince becky to shift from physical art to digital was a journey of itself and now we're fully as as you can imagine well because you i mean i remember following you earlier in the journey um and you were comparing latin american and south American art that you'd had physically and that art history of that region and then showing the art history of that region continuing into digital art and how they were referencing each other so you really came from art itself we came from art itself completely we were just doing the pairings and our first website was just pairing our stuff and for ourselves and showing our kids how how art can talk in different generations to different people but it still rhymes and that was our our our whole thing i will say we along the way three things happen one you encounter amazing people that are so creative that inspire you and that is people that you know have become our friends like eric from snowfro or my people or sam spratt or and and or michael and because and when you start to meet them and you see the human behind them you even fall in love more because the inspiration of what they're doing goes beyond just what they're expressing it's what they feel so that was really refreshing in a world where art has become extremely stale and politically heated and in many ways boring i remember we went to the biennale in venice in 2023 maybe when was it 20, 24, 23, 24.

50:20And we walked the Biennale and it was boring. It was dead. There was no energy. It was just all of this. And it was curated by a Brazilian curator. We thought it was going to be tropical and colorful and beautiful. And it wasn't. And then we walked down, we walked through Venice and we went to the Bright Moments finale, the last exhibition. and all of these young artists and energy and and creativity and pushing each other and collaborating and and rad and clapping for each other's success and the new stories and it just felt like you were back in paris 1910s or 1920s when the artists had that kind of energy so we left that place saying we gotta do something about this this is bigger than just this because that curation and being Allen Venice or the museums they feel like in FinTech analogy they feel like going to a bank branch yeah why would you go to a bank branch anymore they don't talk to you they don't need anything from the bank branch that's how museums are talking to people and art is talking to people so we we got more excited to spend more time in this side and also you know I've talked at Nauseam about this it's a cultural moment it's like Paris in the 1910s it's like London or New York in the early 2000s, or New York and Warhol Factory.

51:44There's everything around this, and it's exciting, and it's young and creative and different and unique. And those are magic moments. And we're going, you know, this whole trajectory of the internet, crypto, AI, all of this is about to change everything. And this is that moment. And this moment is going to be relevant to humanity forever and so artists tell stories and so and particularly cultural stories and that's it's so attractive it's just fun it is and uh you call it artists tell stories we describe it as artists are here to tell you the future before we get there and they are uh they're turning they're doing both and um and the best ones are just magical i mean can you go to sleep every day without looking at what people does for his every day you can't and uh it's it's magical it's a storytelling and and and each one has a different way of doing it so how so once you had the aha moment and you got becky across the line or how did you get becky across the line from here's some really kind of interesting contemporary art to listen there's a pixel image with a hoodie and glasses and this is a really good idea tell me about how you got Becky across the line and then we'll talk about what you what you've been building because it's really important what you're doing I wish I could tell you that it's I take credit for it but I didn't it wasn't me that got across the line uh you know after being together for a lifetime this is what happens but uh she joined a call put together by the curated team um we were investors and curated at the beginning and they had brought Matt and John from larva to explain crypto punks and they went online and they show the hey there's five type of funks here they are female male zombies uh apes and aliens and here are the rarities and there's 87 attributes and here's how we play with them and here's how we put it together and here's how we did the collection she finished a phone call looks at me and says i get it i love it we should do this uh it was like a moment of storytelling when they understood the magic and it's no surprise that it starts with portraits because every art movement in history starts with faces every single one so there is some cultural moment a technological moment a a aha moment with 10 ,000 portraits.

54:21That was the beginning of this cycle. And that was how she saw it. And that's how she said, all right, what do we do now? So what did you do then? So the canvas, the node, punk, some of that story is a really interesting story as well. And I think it needs to be told. I think as a collector, what we do is we believe in this idea that trying to be the trusted friend to the artist and in art world that's called like a patron model i don't know exactly but i i don't think we're art we don't get the joy of doing this if we don't get to spend time with the artists meet them and encourage them to push the limits of their imagination because that is the best way that's where art should live the same way entrepreneurs are the best when you push them to the limits of their imagination and you just give them the support and the trust and the comfort that you're there for them if shit goes bad right so that's how we feel with the artist side what happened was um we started to talk to museums about this how do we get this art into the museums and the answers were extremely like talking to banks 10 years ago uh well you can talk to the committee for 2028 and we can maybe do something in and we We will need to prepare for three years and we'll have to curate it.

55:46Like, it was just a language. It's just a language that doesn't speak to the culture moment that we live right now. How people are connecting to right now in the moment. Like, you're trying to explain an exhibition to 28 to people doing an art piece every day. Like, they don't connect. By the time you exhibit it, they lost the moment. The art needs to be expressed daily and shown and broadcasted and tell the story. in a different way so we looked at each other and said how do we do this let's not work in their system let's be the rebels like in rivet where we consider ourselves to be rebels how do we do the same in this world because it's very similar in so many ways people don't see it the older generation are not going to be the the people who are actually the collectors um it's going to be the young generations who understand it and they live it and they're okay with digital art and living in pixels or on chain or the world seeing it but only one person on it so we put the challenge of how do we do this and that's where we came up with node a a foundation that we we spearheaded that we're we're we're backing with three very clear purposes first node is a network and it starts with a concept of a network it's not a destination it's a network so So a note has no value if there's no more notes.

57:11So the more notes, the better. So we're starting with note one, with an idea that will be more of them. But there's three concepts. One, exhibition. How do you make people feel about this? Museums are not wired to show the little art. This is not supposed to be on screens on the walls. It's supposed to be alive. It's supposed to feel immersive. It's supposed to feel like you're walking through the story of the art. You don't need a small letterhead of 10 lines telling you what the artist meant or a QR code to take a photo. You don't need that. You need something very different. So people want something very different.

57:49So we had to design a space from scratch that allowed for that creativity. And what better place than Palo Alto? Why? It's where computers got started. It's where Steve Jobs started the first Apple store a block away from Node. And I remember seeing him going to the store every day for the first year, tweaking how things were shown, how things were presented in the store, because that was a place where they started. They designed the store here. And then they took it, and then it became a Node network of itself with the Apple stores. So we're trying to replicate. We're no Steve Jobs. We're not Apple.

58:26But we're trying to replicate that sensation, that feeling. It's also a super interesting choice of location because obviously there's Stanford there, there's all of the technologists, and none of them actually own digital art. There's very few of these guys who built this whole digital world own any of this stuff. It's weird. That's correct. It's very weird. And I think it's going to grow on them. And I think once they see it, they can not unsee it. They connect with it really fast. we've been at our home we have been exhibiting digital art and physical art together you can see how digital art attracts everybody young and they get embedded in it and they get absorbed by it and they ask questions and they want to come back and see it again so you can see this is going to happen it's just it hasn't been in their place you don't expect a techie guy to go to the museum and walk for two hours and find one piece in a led screen this size and a wall that's not going to make the connection to them it's also interesting to see the collector base change as well we're starting to see there's very little trading goes on now it's just a it's just a bunch of collectors coming into the space and trying to build serious collections i think the whole space has changed a lot of people don't understand this when i i mentioned i was at some family office event in la and talking about it nfts they're like oh my god that was awful i'm like you don't understand what's happening is like there are serious collections being built serious relationships with artists and it's less financialization and more the traditional art curation and collection that's happening i agree with you i think we're we're just starting the storytelling phase and and even the artists are getting more comfortable telling their story because they were the first entrepreneurs this is like the first entrepreneurs that started the internet they're not they just saw technology in a way that no one else understood it they saw the future way way before and now you're starting to see how they're getting comfortable telling the stories sharing how this has happened and on top of that there's a whole generation of new artists that you've met and i'm meeting that are just special also because for them it's like there's no other way there's no turning back they didn't even train on on the old mediums they went straight to these new mediums.

1:00:47And I think it's going to push mediums even further. You and I were talking about holograms. Holograms. Yeah, all of this. And the artists are pushing it, really, because they're pushing technology. I mean, they were using AI. There's so much interesting stuff going on because of the forefront. How I've split my own collecting is cultural stuff, which is the commenting of what's going on in society. Yes. Or there's the cutting-edge stuff, which is like, here's some incredible things that are happening. You know, I always refer to the Kim Asendorf pixel decks because it's like, it's unbelievable as a concept where every single pixel is a token in its own right.

1:01:25There's something in that, which is something about what you're talking about, that everything is a token, that's a really interesting statement. Kim is pushing the boundaries on this. I agree with you. Pixel decks is one of the most interesting projects out there. And only a person like him can actually push the boundaries like that. And you got to understand his background and his love for music and how he thinks about pixels. as a unit of a token that talks to also to music in real life it's just a beautiful concept and we're starting to see more people like that coming and pushing the boundaries so what happens with them is where do they go where do they exhibit this where do they have the pixels talk to the pixels to each other where the people can see the difference between an art piece with a million pixels and one with half a million pixels and and that narrative and that storytelling is what we want to start with uh allowing artists like him to show through the space at node um so that's our first goal when i saw online uh you guys were posting i think the node was posting that there's a bunch of screens just arriving so what is that when do you think it's going to be up and running i know it's hard and there's a lot to do and you need to break ground yourself to get this done well you know to answer that question it all starts with having a great team and we got a team led by phil uh who was a sunday early days and great moments and build a lot of their uh tours all over the world over the world who loves technology and those art and we got a team the team at node it's engineers and ai people it's not art curators or museum people so it's a very different way of approaching the exhibition.

1:03:09So to answer your question, we will be soft opening the space sometime in December for us to test and see how it goes. We'll officially open to public in January. I'm not sure yet on the date, but we will definitely start with a collection that is close and dear to many of the art digital holders of the world with what we think is one of the best brands worldwide. And that's what? CryptoPunks. And that is CryptoPunks. So talk, I know we're going to run out of time, but I need to hear the story of you ending up buying the IP rights to CryptoPunks and why you did it, because it's also important why you did it.

1:03:51I think that if you wanted to, if we truly are right, and this is a cultural moment in time, and the society moment in time, you have to make sure that the best assets have a home that has no other interest, but their ability to tell the story forever. And the CryptoPunks IP, for different reasons, ended up in the hands of corporate world. And they did as good as a job as they could to steward it, but they could not navigate it because corporations are designed to think short-term in some of this stuff and also have different kinds of agendas. So, thankfully, the Yuga guys did a good job managing the brand for a number of years.

1:04:35And they also agreed that finding a home like this was a better place for it. So, we did something that we've never done, which is contribute a lot of money to Node so they can go buy this and find a permanent home for it. And the beauty of this is that now every punk holder and every museum and every node and everybody in the world knows that the brand, the attributes, the marketplace sit in a place that is going to be thinking in decades, not in days. That is going to slowly allow the story to be unlocked. That is going to make owners feel proud of what they have. and I do believe that there is no better object, no better portrait that tells the story of this cultural movement than crypto punks as a portrait, period.

1:05:28And as I told people 10 years ago, you should at least buy 1 % of your net worth in Bitcoin or just buy one, put it away, forget about it. I tell people in this day, you should have Bitcoins for sure, put them away. You should have one crypto punk, forget about it. it will be one of the most rare collectible objects in the next 20, 30 years. So how we got there, just to finish that, I was not prepared for this. I didn't think about it that long. It was a master plan design. It was an entrepreneurial moment of saying, this is the flag that is going to make the node have a story that can be shared worldwide.

1:06:10and let's take it and let's see how much good we can do with it. And how I think about it, again, it's something you and I talked about, you know your mission is complete or not complete, but you're on the right track the larger the number of holders of punks there are. Because then you're creating, if you can have 10 ,000 nodes in that network, it's much more powerful than 5 ,000 nodes in the network. a hundred percent i think the the true north star if i had a kpi it will be that that over the next 10 years we have 10 000 unique holders of funds and maybe by then some people are fractionalizing ownership and there's more that's a whole different equation that smart contracts will allow to do or not but i do think that that's a value of of this is it's what it means and what it will represent a society.

1:07:06And a final question on the art side is, how do we bring new people in or do we just allow it to happen from the younger cohort? Because there was a whole moment in this space where they thought it was important to go to museums and they thought it was important to go to Art Basel and bring in traditional art investors. I just don't think that's the way. I think it should be crypto-native, internet-native people who should be involved. When I started my first fintech company in the 90s, I really, really, really cared that the banks liked me and the incumbents. And I did my best to work around them or with them.

1:07:49I convinced Morgan Stanley to work with me when I was 22. It was really important in my mind that those things happen. When I started Ribbit, we made sure that none of entrepreneurs spent time talking to the incumbents. because all they can do was buy us their way of doing stuff. There's a set of artists that were born in an era where still showing up in museums is important. And I think it's really important. And hopefully we get to see more of this. I'm not against it. But there's also a new generation of artists who see the museums and they get zero excitement. It's like a bank branch for entrepreneur in fintech.

1:08:27And they're like, I'm going to do it differently. I'm going to do it my own way. and that's where I think we're going to end. We're going to end up having that transition of periods and hopefully the museums will adapt and they will embrace it and they will correct. And a few are, as you and I know, the Museum of Toledo led by Adam is doing a great job on forcing that function. And there's others that are really trying and we will be here to help them if they want to, if they want to come and see the space and copy it and replicate it or take some of the exhibitions and replicate them in their space will be more than happy to because it's for good of culture and society but also you gotta disrupt them uh it's it's not gonna it's it's not working so tie all of this together all of our conversation there's something clear to me is that everything you do is based around really a simple premise which is that the internet whatever that is is eating everything money art literally everything we do and it's creating new creatures in AI you know new populations and all of this is all part of that bigger thesis about everything is tokenized because this is the way forward to feed the beast of the internet you know as David Bowie called it was like this alien creature he saw a long time before everybody else in that snip when he talks about it yeah he's like it's not what you think it is this is kind of everything and it feels that that whole token factory idea is you think Think of the internet as the beast that we're feeding that's actually morphing into AI.

1:10:03Art plays a part in this. It's all the same thesis. And it's just, it's brilliant to see. I love to see somebody like yourself who wraps all of these ideas together and you come at it from different ways, but they're all the same thing. You synthesize it better than I could ever, but I see them all as the same thing. and I wake up every day and I feel fortunate that I get to work in figuring out how money, knowledge and power changes on tokens and then work every night and every weekend or spend hours talking to Becky and filling the team on how we do this for art in our culture and that is as much as I can ask for it.

1:10:46Yeah, it's a very lucky position to be in to be at the forefront of all of this in the biggest change humanity will ever go through, and you're playing a part of that. And it's an honor and a privilege, and it's a testament to you in seeing all of this as well. So well done. It's going to be an exciting journey. I can't wait to come and see the Node once it's up and running. Me neither. We will have you. We'll have all of you come. And more importantly, there's a design concept that we're doing where we're going to allow artists to curate their own exhibitions. Think about it. You're just disrupting the whole middle layer of organizations.

1:11:29It's going to be fun. It'll be very different, and we're going to learn. We're going to make a bunch of mistakes, I'm sure, and we're going to learn from them. Last week I was on my first punk brunch ever after the Toledo exhibition, and we were sharing with them that we will make a bunch of mistakes. and expect them and but the fact of the matter is if we don't make them we're not telling the story and we're not pushing it and we got the artists back john and matt are back working in crypto punks um we have other artists working on exhibitions and ideas on how to showcase and use a studio and that's what we're super excited about and i urge people to follow Canvas, which is your art collection that's being built because you're documenting history.

1:12:21It's just a good place for people to start because you've built one of the most unbelievable collections. So that's an amazing thing. Final question, because I know people are going to say, what is the Riveter thing? What is the little autonomous agent that's on X? I have no idea.

1:12:45I don't believe you for a second. Listen, my friend, thank you. Great to see you as ever. And I'll see you very soon somewhere. Take care. I'll see you at Martha. We'll see you at Martha. Bye. Okay. Fantastic conversation with Mickey. I think we could have spoken for hours. I'll probably have to finish it with a glass of wine with him at some point. But the point being is how all of these things are all part of this much bigger picture. the idea of the tokenization of all information to create well to render our new digital world for us is powerful how that fits in with blockchain technologies why it happens where the fintech revolution is going and then why art matters and how that plays a role as well incredible conversation i'll see you next time you obviously enjoyed the episode because you're here with me at the end but listen don't forget to go to realvision.com forward slash join and grab a free membership.

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