The Future of Art Is Interactive

0:00Don't touch the art. How many times have we said that? And it made this negative spin in my head. It was like, why am I telling my kid not to experience something in the way that he wants to? This mantra drove me to look at my own practice in a way that invites people to experience art.

0:20Raoul Pal:I don't know what you're talking about, but it sounds cool as shit and I trust you. But I've just seen it grow over time. It's like, wow, this is incredible. It truly was magic. and a lot of times in the creative process, I try to get out of my own way. It's almost like a movie where you just have to keep playing the scene and you don't know what's going to happen next. But if you allow yourself to detach from expectations and anything like that, that's where the real cool shit happens. Even the story of you have the piece of paper issued by the US government, you go into the bank and try and exchange it for a fungible and you're told it's non-fungible.

0:53Raoul Pal:I mean, that's wild. Join me, Raoul Pal, as I go on a journey of discovery through the macro, crypto and exponential age landscapes. In The Journeyman, I talk to the smartest people in the world so we can all become smarter together.

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2:13Raoul Pal:Coldy, welcome to Real Vision, my friend. What's up, Raul? How are you? I'm great. I'm really looking forward to this, actually, because in this whole series of The Journeyman, I spend time, a lot of stuff on macro, crypto stuff, but I try and bring everybody along the art journey. And I've explained to people that art is clashing, what always clashes with culture and with technology all at the same time. And you're kind of at the forefront of all of that. And I've been following your journey forever. So I just can't wait to dig into all of this. Yeah, that's awesome. know i'm we we've hit it off at marfa you know that was super fun we're kind of uh in an art camp i'd call it where we're just like kind of roughing it but having a great time so yeah it's gonna be fun so listen start people off with your journey how the hell did you get to where you are today um you know it's funny growing up i would never uh was thought of as like an artist or creative.

3:13I was more like I was kind of a jock kid. So I was always doing sports and staying active with that. I never really cared about drawing, but there's this weird little thread that wove through my life kind of subconsciously. And it's really wild to look back. I actually, I brought a couple of little things to share. And it all, it all revolved around stereoscopic images okay and we're talking about i have born in 82 so we're talking mid 80s somehow these stereoscopic devices were weaved into my life okay um so these are the little yeah so the these are um view masters right yeah um and this is actually one i made for a project but I had these I'd flip through this and basically these are still image VR so I had these discs so you had these these discs I remember these well yeah and I remember it was a Taiwanese street market I don't know I just happened to have it and I when I put that into the viewer I lived in Orange County, California.

4:29I was transported and I imagine I was stuck in a spot, but I was living this scene because it had depth and it was real. And I was eight years old and it, it made this like deep seated connection in my brain. Um, after that, I don't know how we got these. It was like my grandparents. Um, this is from like the 1910s. Wow. this is the same technology two images create a stereoscopic picture this is a wild west with a um you know lasso guy i had that around just instead of watching a movie i'd look at 3d cards it was very odd but it was there and i like i liked it so time goes on you know i don't even i'm not even thinking about stereoscopics but then i go to high school and i have this amazing uh video production graphic design class um i was surrounded by guys who later went on to be like early uber uh dp for like uh i'm on a boat music video like really really high-end guys and we're just these nerdy mountain kids right if you looked at us they were like this is a ragtag group of kids i don't know the cosmos aligned and we were doing cool shit with each other.

5:52And then we all went off into the world. And through that, I went to get my art on my art degree. And all of these things that I had been planting seeds in my mind, I knew that I was like, I want to go after that stuff because I connected with it. It was a weird like mix of science and math and art in these weird ways. And I guess, long story short, that's what kind of wove me into what I'm doing now. So where did technology, blockchain,

6:30Raoul Pal:all of these things start layering into this? Because you come out of art school, all of that stuff, great. But dot, dot, dot, Coldy becomes one of the best collectors in the space, one of the pioneers of the space somebody who's representing the culture of the space and building it all on blockchain i mean that's quite a big leap from yeah we're doing cool shit at the university yeah yeah sure so um i get my art degree and i'm living in la and one of the biggest um kind of paths that opened up for me was one of my professors at school um set me up with an interview to work for la weekly which is the biggest um alternative paper it's kind of like the village voice and it's the same company as village voice yeah new york every week uh we had a hundred thousand uh readers i was designing the covers from those right out of right out of school wow um and jumping into the fire right like if you fuck up on that cover and it goes to print with a typo 100 000 people are gonna dog on you right like it was it was no joke and um i i remember it went to press on tuesday night i'd stay late till like 2 a.m doing cover sometimes the cover would change if there's a news story at like 11 p.m editor comes down and says cool job on that one but that's out here's your new cover i need it in a half an hour let's go so you know i got used to designing extremely quickly and efficiently um but every morning when it would hit the news stands i had a stand like near my house i would anxiously like speed walk to that stand and pull it out and make sure i didn't fuck up because like even though i looked at it a thousand times it's like did i spell the headline wrong like i don't even know you know so la weekly opened up everything You know, I got access to art show openings.

8:32I was doing concert reviews that they were publishing. I just got to fit in where I wanted. I was like, hey, I'm going to go see. Actually, I want to go see Tool. They're like, oh, I can get you a photo pass or a review pass for that. I was like, oh, OK. And the same night that I did Tool, I also did a review for Obama. like he was doing a i i had to leave obama's talk halfway through and then go to tool and he was that was la weekly right so i bring that up because i was going to art shows throughout all of this these great graffiti shows like i went to the banksy show before it got announced um i was going to see roger gasman who's a great curator um yeah go ahead yeah because um banksy did that famous exhibition early on in la didn't he it was the the painted elephant that's right yeah so my boss comes up to me randomly on a tuesday she's like okay so you're done for today um here here's an address and just go and pretend like you're supposed to be there that's all she said i was like maybe this is some scouting trip for a cover i have no idea i walk in there like i'm the boss right just people are working shuffling around and i walk into the banksy exhibit as they're setting it up and i'm like holy shit like i was i was not prepared for that so i'm playing it cool you know it's kind of walking around meandering and then like macaulay culkin is next to me like buying art you know it's just some weird la shit and my whole mantra still to this day um i grew up i i never had money to buy art i'm an artist right but i would go into every single show with the vision that i want to pick my two favorite pieces from this shoe and if i was a collector i would buy those right so every show i would study everything and at the end of the night i'd kind of be like yeah i'd get that one now Right.

10:41So after, you know, dozens and hundreds of shows and exhibits and examining things, not only did I kind of train my my mind for what I would collect, but I was also training my artist self. Like I always looked at the side of canvases. I always looked at the imperfections of the signature or, you know, like what was it to be an artist in the gallery? like what what did it what does it take and not take you know there's there's an interesting um research study so i would go into all these events and just literally download as much as i could and then it just like the stereoscopic stuff it pops out in weird ways so um that's kind of how

11:26Raoul Pal:you like learn to collect i'd say um and then where's that where does it all fit in with blockchain because you were again very early to art on blockchain as a collector and a creator yeah so um while i was while i was in la weekly i i was got my first stereoscopic um job doing a 3d glasses campaign for a concert and through that i i started making lenticulars so i was developing my art repertoire of what i wanted to create and then in 2017 i was watching a podcast about gold and silver and what the what the fuck is money right i went to art school i literally didn't know shit about finance so i was like i gotta learn something inevitably somebody came on talking about crypto and bitcoin and it clicked all of i was like oh okay like it just registered and i quickly saw this like emerging you know it'd been around for what six years but like it was still very early i was like what year are we talking um 2016 17 yeah and um you know i was like how do i like help promote this new thing and my tangible skill on this earth is art so i typed in block has you been selling art at this point yeah i'd started getting into gallery shows yeah so i've been getting stuff going but you know art is a really arduous long task so i was doing it people were responding to it and i was creating a body of work right which is the hardest part for an artist is to get together a group of things that are cohesive right that's when you can then take it to a gallery and say hey here's what i do um so i typed in blockchain art in google 2017 uh we got crypto punks um rare pepe crypto kitties um there's not very much uh dada nyc i love them and then there was this website called rare art labs and they allowed artists like myself to tokenize their digital artworks and put them on chain uh erc 20 tokens and that was the start i thought of it as a dating site i was like you know i had this stuff that i'm making and i'm doing shows and i'm you know i'm doing my normal deal why not make a profile so that if somebody across the world happens to see this site so kind of thinking like a myspace for your art or something it was it was a zero risk opportunity to share my art and there was no one buying anything like there was was this was xcopy around by then or he was also yeah it's funny um we he was also on rare art labs and i was recently looking at the different token mint dates and I minted like a day before X copy but like we didn't know each other.

14:41We were like, there was no like, Hakatao was on there, Osanachi, Missile Simpson, Rare Skrilla. There's a lot of good people. I'd be remiss to name everybody but none of us, there was no community. It was just some random dude over in UK. I don't know. Um, and that's how, that's how, and then it went under, like there was no, no collectors really cared. And you sold anything. No. Um, mostly to either like the platform owners or like, if I hustled, um, at like an event and found one person, you know, I, and everything was 10, 15 bucks. Um, I, my first Vitalik portrait was on there and no one ever bought one.

15:31So I ended up burning all 25 tokens and then reminting it years later as the lost vitalik and then sold so it was it was a crazy time there's there was like i said zero expectations and then nobody

15:45Raoul Pal:gave a shit it was it was weird and then you you kind of started coalescing around a couple of kind of cultural ideas that you wanted to explore uh one being obviously filthy fit and the idea behind money itself and the other about technology and what's happening. Talk us through, because I've always thought of your work as very prescient about what is really happening to culture, to society, expressed through this medium. It's always, you know, that's why I've collected your work, because it's just, it's super appealing to me because it's the language I speak and how I think, I think. yeah when i got into the space um i always feel like for me art that i can connect to in in a way that's abstracted is there like is like a fun way to create so as i'm living this blockchain life there's different people who kind of raise their hands they do certain things and that i i chose people who i thought would be important to the movement in crypto right so vitalic buterin um andreas antinopolis let me let me show you this is an old uh lenticular of andreas antinopolis you can see the the stereoscopic effect um very cool so in terms of crypto i was i was like making portraits and things that were a scrapbook item for me that i was living through but then i also thought about in the future you know like we went like an andy warhol exhibition you see all these faces on a on a in a wall or in a gallery and it's a time and a place each thing is there for a reason right so because it's it's the recorded storytelling of what it meant to be alive today yeah yeah yeah and like you know john mcafee if you were around in 2017 you would definitely remember him saying he would eat his blank on national television if bitcoin was not a million dollars right it was that was well-known information that john was going to do that so i put that in my in the portraits of him you know that has to be recorded and it was funny to put that in there right but i'm like he said it like yeah i'm just the recorder here um so it became really important to me to have this time and places and like you're talking about the latest portrait series is called tech apocalypse um which you have collected and thank you for supporting that um it's meant to be an educational um study right where you see these faces of people and you can be like oh my god is that elon musk right if i have that conversation at the gallery i've already won right because they're looking at the art and they've connected to a face then the next question is why did you do a portrait of elon musk or why is jeff bezos like why jeff bezos and that's perfect right that's the exact reason that this is here is to teach people about what what is happening you know what they're doing to help us and like control us right so um yeah i mean you know what what i loved about this series was and you've been kind of working towards it anyway but even the name tech apocalypse is both things it's the epoch of today that's all technology technology is culture is everything right now in fact it's going to be everything um and yeah sure we'll have a counterbalance of nature and stuff but really is the main focus of humanity and is it good or bad well that's the lips at the end of it you know and i and then having those key characters because these people are the probably the most important people in all of humanity because they're going to shepherd us from being apex intelligence to sub apex intelligence and will have birthed the new super creature and our entire existence is in their hands i mean it's wild yeah yeah it's it's fascinatingly scary um because we're putting trust in these people and you know we've already giving them all the data without even knowing it i know people say oh yeah you know restrict up data we don't want to share it with the government i'm like fucking hell your google knows more about you than your wife does yeah 10 years too late buddy and you don't think the bank have the government have access to your bank account you're really stupid exactly yeah so it it became educational for me as well right because i'm making this series and then i'm digging more to what these people are doing.

20:27Raoul Pal:But why did you feel like you had to comment? It's not that you did comment, but what made you as an artist think, this is really important, I need to do this? Because as far as I can see, there's only two people who are commenting on this specific thing right now, it's you and Mike, people. Yeah. You guys are both coming in from a similar, but different angles, but you're both trying to say the same thing. What made you really want to say it? you know i think it started everything is a rabbit hole right so i i was wanting to do this elon portrait for a while i've been working on and working on it um and then i i started looking at it i was like well if elon's doing this but what what about jensen wam like what about like these people ever like i said everyone starts raising their hands and i like we have a group like it's hard to explain it other than i think story my in my own art making storytelling is is taking a front seat and while i want to have a conversation about vitalik buterin right i think it's a lot uh deeper to have a talk about what all these people are doing because it's not just one guy right you couldn't tell the whole story just with mark zuckerberg but mark zuckerberg makes a whole lot more sense when you got sam altman jensen wong like it's like a superhero story right yeah it is i think for me or super villains and nobody's quite sure which is what the story is exactly yeah yeah they're the overlords right and i made a website called knowyouroverlord.art and the bigger piece of this which is kind of an evolutionary movement in my career is um i want people to touch the art and this this came about because i have a son and i take him to the galleries when they're traveling or wherever it's like hey we're going into a pottery shop we're going into a studio don't touch the art right how many times have we said that like to our friends and family and kids like don't touch it out like don't do it and it made this negative like spin in my head it was like why am i telling my kid not to experience something in the way that he wants to like how dare how dare i as a good parent do that and literally in the gallery i'm having this existential talk with myself like whoa whoa and and the mantra snapped in my head is no touch the art i didn't tell him till after we left but this mantra drove me to look at my own practice in a way that invites people to experience art instead of what i called sidestepping at a gallery where you kind of look at something for 20 seconds and you sidestep to the next thing are you even looking at it like are you even registering what you're doing or are you just sidestepping this forces people or invites them in to physically move the screen i want to can i show you can i show you this thing yeah yeah yeah yeah okay um because raul when you collected this this thing didn't even exist no i know i just because i loved your work you said i'm doing something new i heard about i'm like this is so right up my street in terms of a how clever it is the cultural references you taught i just thought it's brilliant so i was like yeah whatever you're doing i'm in yeah and this is the fun part because i'm creating this series in real time so and and i told you this going in i'm like i got this token and i can update it as we go but i just got to start making shit now i'm like i don't know what you're talking about but it sounds cool as shit and i trust you it's hilarious because i've like i have no idea what you're talking about yeah um but i've just seen it grow over time it's like wow this is incredible yeah and and it's fun because i was like fuck around and find out like i have all these plans in my ahead and i'm gonna execute them but if it if i waited till i executed all those things it'd be freaking years i it's gotta start now like hop on like if you want to if you want to be on the train it's leaving and let's go um okay let me hop over you know just talking that while you're doing that is ares i don't know if you know sarah's yet um he's like a an generative artist from argentina who uses emotion by putting it through a machine and then turning it into stuff.

24:58Raoul Pal:He hit me up and said, I'm just developing the pieces that I've done for you further now. Now you can plug in like a brain sensor and have your own emotions onto the artwork. And also the other person who just hit me up today was Carbon. He's like, oh, by the way, in the background, I'm building, I'm going to change all your gifts. I'm going to turn them into some cataloging via AI of all important news flow. plus i'm like why are you doing this i bought your piece of art a year ago because i just want to evolve in it's cool and you're doing the same thing you're like even though i've got your art like this is not the final state of where this is going and i don't know yeah so can you see this yeah okay so this is a uh this is the elon musk european variant um this is going to be in a villes gallery in june and what i've made is a wow put this into a touch screen where you can move all the pieces around and then because the actual ones already do this but not you can't touch them you can touch them with your pixel with your mouse i mean they're amazing to play around with how you can create your own art build your own art change it yep you can add effects to it and you know this will be live at a gallery in lisbon and this is the first test of letting people play with the art uh you can delete items and really just like feel something you know and i think that to me that is a great evolution for this because well you've also done these style portraits in physical 3d art as well haven't you layered art you know again you've been manifesting this idea in many ways.

26:46Raoul Pal:You started with a simpler format, then you started building the physical format, then you've started building an interactive digital format as an NFT, and then you've gone even further and now created a physical digital format. So you're just exploring kind of every angle of this, which I find is fascinating. Yeah, it's becoming this like internal dialogue back and forth and I'm kind of the middle man the very first piece I made was a physical portrait that uses magnets and each of the pieces is made of a dive on sheet metal and the magnets hold it onto the backboard at different levels the the magnets are different lengths right so you can move the portrait all around and choose how much depth it has.

27:41And that was very satisfying. I could check the boxes of, like if I'm not amused or if I'm not like kind of scared or, you know, if there's not this like, you know, here's a wonderful analogy. And I tapped back into this feeling again, just over the weekend. I grew up listening to a lot of music. like you know i was i was a kid of the 90s so i was like a grunge baby but i went deep back into the 70s 60s i know a lot of shit and there's there's a certain essence when you hear music at a very high level of orchestration and proficiency where it's just that it factor right when you can't describe it until your body is like taken over by it and you feel it right there's a visceral feeling and i felt that driving in the car when i was like i forget if it might have been elo um just some of these orchestrations just hit me hard and throughout my life i would make art to music and only when the stuff i was making personally felt right just in my own vibe that I was hitting what I could execute at a level that I could hear sonically, if that makes sense.

29:09Raoul Pal:I see and feel art the same way as I see and feel music. So a quick break in your regular programming. If you're serious about your future, grab my free report called Prepare for 2030. I think you've got five years to make as much money as possible. And this guide will help you navigate what's coming the link is in the description download it now um exactly the same thing for me it's always the you know i grew up in the late kind of this awful stage in the uk where there was race riots and there was recessions and everything was changing and everybody was angry and music was angry and we had from punk to things like the specials and all of this commenting on the decline of british society and and it became the cultural flag and then somewhere in the 80s it switched to Wham Club Tropicana and Duran Duran Rio and it was like fuck it we can be happy again and get suntan and drink cocktail and I've always noticed how music is incredibly good at driving culture and I think a lot of it's disappeared now but what I've seen is the cultural things are important now I've found in the digital art space it's the people the most progressive the most interested connected trying to understand what the hell is going on that used to be in music it's now really in this space yeah yeah and i definitely feel the same way and in one one band i'm actually wearing their shirt tame impala um there's some they're a kiwi band i think from new zealand i think yeah absolutely yeah um it's it's when when especially live music man when i when you're in the presence when you're in the presence of these people live and they're performing and they're doing it oh my god ultimate nirvana like i my cup is overflowed when i can go to those and then i go back to the studio and it probably if i pinpointed when i went to a legendary show and then what i created over the next month i bet you there's a strong correlation because i just walk out of there like the vibrations are just like oozing where it's like what can i react like i need to react to what i just did um and that's what these magnets were to me where it's like how can i push myself to the very brink of utter chaos but at the end of it there's there's there's form and function and beauty and and a message like how how can i encapsulate a thought to embody all that and it takes a lot of time and it was like i was more of an engineer at a certain point than an artist learning about how much weight can you hang from a neodymium magnet right like i learned a shit ton about magnets um but that was part of it that was that was the art journey right it wasn't it wasn't about like well i'm gonna cut this eye out and place it over here i'm sick of things being stuck in place you know like as a collage artist you know how hard it is to pick a spot that's very hard you know like what scale what size and now with this new method it throws it out the window like i could put the eye wherever i want you could put the eye wherever you are but the weird thing is is the very people you're commenting about in this shock horror delight are the exact same people who've allowed you to make art in this way there's like a this is like a nice little subplot within that that you've now become a technologist because you had to because that's the medium that you have to use to express it in the way that you want to express it yep absolutely yeah and there's a little nod inside of that because um it's like i said it's formula here's the sorry but here's the art rebellion actually being controlled by the overlords in the end of course yeah if if if the internet goes down um i mean luckily it's it's stored on chain and we can you know look at it otherwise but they do control freaking everything yeah um yeah because you need the gpus from from bloody what's his name jensen to even do any of this it's made yeah there's jensen chips in there there's you know i have a you've talked about it on x so there's elon being a vital role and you've probably used instagram somewhere so there's zucker you know it's like oh wow oh yeah even your art is controlled yeah i mean i've i've used uh chat gpt on on some parts of this i mean literally it's encoded with them which is part of the story which is i love it did i go into it with that exactly in mind not specifically but that's how art happens right so it's it's and it's still happening as you know you know and i tell you like hey when there's a major update i'm going to push updates to your token and then you're you're set you're like what and i don't even know but it's great it's going to be fun so you so you can honestly say you have no idea what you're doing you're just doing it and seeing what it goes in the flow like i can tell you i have a hit list of of even even after now i already have one massive update that's gonna take some r &d that might take a year um that's gonna blow what once i do it it'll blow my fucking mind and then that's when i can release it um but things are happening so incredibly fast that i don't want to have like a strict roadmap because that's not creation i might as well have a fucking dumb dumb job um so there's that flow that's open with the north star of a couple things that i will get to um because you know when i started this there wasn't even claude coke like there was like i had chat gpt light when this started so you know doing this whole touchscreen thing no way like that would have been way more difficult than um i was speaking to kim assendorf about this and also beeple as well is i know where this is going it's so obvious it's going to hologram oh yeah yeah and people don't realize because people think hologram is still some sort of science fiction thing people don't realize abba has been on tour for four years in the uk they've got that own arena really it's sold out almost every single night and it's all hologram and you can't tell um boom that's it yeah and you know i love it because i've been kind of playing with stereoscopics which is a hologram um it's and it's all trending that way you know and in yeah because i can just think therefore i can just have your piece of art here and i can move it around and it's oh yeah If it's hologram, it doesn't take up space, but it can take up all the space.

36:06Raoul Pal:It's interactive, but it doesn't get in the way. You know, there's a lot of interesting things you can do with that, but it's here already. Yeah, no, it's absolutely here. Yeah. And that's the fun thing about this is like that thing I built, you know, super alpha, like there's like stereoscopic screens that could just run it. Like it's all there. and you know it's like the holodeck so once we get that and we can just play with things in space and like you said scale it it's yeah the future is moving so incredibly fast the flip side of this is we're at martha together and you you kindly offered because we had that great party where we had a lot of people doing some really cool shit and you kindly offered to come along and make a filthy fiat stall where you this is the opposite end of the spectrum we're now really physical because you're you've got shitty notes and painting them with dirt and cocaine dust which wasn't but you know just the whole what's the whole idea behind filthy fear as well because i think it's also another really good project that you've been working on it was first of all doing this project was like coming home in a lot of ways because for the last six or seven years i've just been pushing pixels and it's great i love digital art but it hits different than physical art and and really like narrative based again educational art um i can give you a quick story do you want to hear the the story of the yeah yeah always okay um Let me let me grab a problem.

37:46Okay, so I live in the forest and houses burned down, you know, shit happens. And part of that is you have to be ready. It's called a go bag. You have to have a backpack that's got stuff. If you need to run, you go. So we had all that stuff. But then I was also thinking like, well, instead of like having everything in my backpack, I'd like to go bury some stuff so i'm not running around with more heavy stuff so i buried a box that had um a bunch of singles a bunch of like single bills like if i needed to get a hotel room or you know something so i buried a stack of uh 200 singles i have some silver pieces and you know it was kind of a um a doomsday box right so buried that in my parents backyard and my parents were like whatever like go go do your weird thing um a couple years later i was like man i wonder how that box is doing because i've never buried a box so i went out if it's gonna last 10 years i'd want to know now if it's still doing good so i went and dug the box up and i opened it up and i thought i did pretty good i had layers upon layers upon layers and duct tape and layers and layers did i did not do good like the just you could feel the the moisture of mildew and mold as soon as i cracked the box i was like oh shit so i i pulled out this brick it was like this thick of solid white mold that had money inside of it and i was like oh this ain't good so i went down to my local bank in my tiny town and just walked in there like any other normal customer and I walked to the desk I was like hey I'd like to get a fresh set of money for this thing and the manager is like sprinting over to me he's like you have to get out of here that's an active live biohazard you have to get out of this building I was like oh like I was wishing I had cameras on at this moment I was Like, wow, this is really juicy.

39:59Okay. And they said the Treasury Department will send you a bag and you can put your money in there and they'll send you fresh money. And I was like, okay, cool. I just want to get my, at that point, this was not an art project. I just wanted to get my money back. I was like, okay, fine. Months go by. Treasury never sent me money. It's been years. Treasury's never sent me a bag. so i'm you know looking at this chunk of moldy shit and i was like what it's unbelievable

40:29Raoul Pal:because you suddenly realize it's not your money yeah they can decide if it's your money or not even in physical form yep absolutely and then i realized like money is only valuable if someone's willing to accept it right if i if i took this moldy bill to in and out burger they're not going to take that shit they're gonna be like nah i'm sorry that's not gonna fly so as i'm living through this i'm learning about the impermanence and fragility of fiat currency right how deep is that so i was like what do i what do i do with this stuff and then it just kind of clicked it's like i'm a collage artist and i die for good textures and i was like there's got to be something cool inside of this money so i put my biohazard mask on and got my little exacto knife and started tweaking at this brick and u.s currency has like fibers for a reason to keep it intact so it's very fragile but i was able to extract some bills some some of it's just flaking away and gone but i was able to get some bills and um that's that's the essence of this filthy fiat project and um then this then the art started i'm like oh i'm working with nature generated art and so it's like we we live in like art blocks land of like generative art it's happening we don't control it i wasn't controlling this for the two years that it was underground water dirt everything around it was creating these pieces right so kind of a glare but you can see these are these are one of one bills right every single bill tells its own story and it has its metadata that is unique like the serial numbers where they're from how much mold content is on it um so i'm i'm looking at these things as metadata i'm looking at these things as one-on-one artworks and it's performance art that i did not intend and that starts checking the boxes of like is this art to me like is this something that i want to explore and it was you know all signs were like And also, again, perfectly played into, I love the nature creating art as the juxtaposition to the other side of what you're doing, which is using AI and technology to create art.

43:10Raoul Pal:Then it's the whole process of which you stumble into the core thesis of crypto is the debasement of currency, that owning fiat. I mean, how it all comes together is just like a piece of magic, right? Yeah, and it truly was magic. And a lot of times in the creative process, I try to get out of my own way and see this as like it's almost like a movie where you just have to keep playing the scene and you don't know what's going to happen next. But as if you allow yourself to detach from expectations and anything like that, that's where the real cool shit happens. And I just kept going, you know, and, you know, you saw these these bills.

43:51if you noticed they're certified by a company called pmg and um because people collect currencies old bills and stuff like that and i wrote pmg and i said hey man hi um i'm an artist i'm doing this project where i buried money um you know i saw somebody used to they buried a db cooper money and you know the company certified that would you guys be open to certifying my filthy fiat bills you can't you it's like you gotta shoot your shot you know like what what i'm gonna say no it's like okay fine they barked it up the chain of the top dog and he's like that sounds cool so i've i have 50 bills that have been certified by pmg and i'm creating this body of work that again is just it's for education you know it's art but i want this to be in a museum or an exhibition space where people can come in and they can see these bills and they can understand and have that conversation of what is fiat currency and why are these bills here and like then inevitably bitcoin fixes that right there's there's a there's a there's a tie-in that i'm not even i don't even have to say it it's just like do you trust this piece of paper or do you want to find something

45:17Raoul Pal:else that might like be better for even the story of you have the piece of paper issued by the u.s government you go into the bank and try and exchange it for a fungible because this is a fungible thing and and you're told it's non-fungible i mean that's wild really yeah yeah and my only you couldn't have invented the story better no and that's the magic of it because like i've even thought like do i bury more money you know like because i got this cool thing going and i may or may not do that to keep telling the story but the core magic of this whole thing was it was not an art project right like that and and it happened to me and i happened to think about it right like all these different things lined up and i and i and i want to honor art in that respect too is like um it came to me i had i had the the foreknowledge to look at this moldy chunk of bills instead of throw it away and just move on um and i told my mom i was like well i'm gonna make art with it and get my 200 bucks back you know like i gotta get my money back somehow so i'll make some collage art and try to recoup the 200 bucks um and now i'm doing ai shit and like Like it's all these, you know, Raul, it's just all these things.

46:38Like I got to get out of the way and just allow the process to happen at the right time. Right. And I know Fiat's always dying. Right. It's like it's going to become out of vogue. No, that's right.

46:53Raoul Pal:And what it's being replaced with technology, the whole thing. It's just it's just really clever and how you've become this kind of observer and a sponge. somehow it comes into you and back out through you in ways that don't you don't even know because hearing the the money story it's clear you had no idea what you were doing or where it was going but it kind of just it's there suddenly it's like oh this is super interesting i've i've always um i've always had a a sense um a perceptive sense in my life in many very weird ways um i it's it's like it's like reading billboards or like you know seeing things um god yeah i wish we had three hours i'd tell you a thousand stories um one story that ties to a piece of art it's called trust your intuition and i it was new year's eve up where i live um and we're we're gonna go out to the bar and do the bar thing and i'm i'm just like watching people waiting for my friends and you know it's a public setting and this group this couple walks by to me and goes downstairs and gets a tattoo and i'm just like taking all this stuff in right just enjoying the moment and then all of a sudden i hear like it's not like someone was hitting a street sign or something and i was like oh what's that like that was a loud sound i see mothers dragging their children like a war zone i was like holy shit that must have been gunshots so all of a sudden i'm into like survival mode and all these things that i was paying attention to earlier right these little billboards i call them ended up saving my life i crouched down behind a trash can and this literal voice in my head like i'm not schizophrenic but there's a guy in there he's like you gotta run downstairs right now right and i'm like i listen i was like i gotta I go downstairs right now because, you know, I was told I have to do that.

48:58So I told my roommate, I was like, dude, I'm going. We have an active shooter. I was like, I'm running downstairs right now. He's like, fuck, okay. We took the stairs from the tattoo parlor, okay? So I pay attention to weird things. It turns out I still get chills. Cops show up, safe to leave. As I walk out of there, this girl runs out and she's like, we need a paramedic. this guy has been shot in the face he was standing right next to me the guy who got shot in the face right as the money falls over um so my life is very intuitive and and i bring that up because i the more i can pay attention to those weird little things i believe that they're um opportunities right just the same as this money in the ground why did i bury money why was i acting super paranoid to bury a box don't worry about it do it because there's something there's something

49:57Raoul Pal:right like just go with the flow let's talk a bit about your collecting as well because how did you start um why and who and what appealed to you so it was uh you know 20 clearly you've got intuition here as well because you've done quite well from what you chose thank you yeah no i'm um again all those years in la learning about what i liked that was that was the core tenant to all of this is like what is my taste because if you're tasting what someone else is doing you know you're not even tasting so 2018 is happening we're selling art on super rare one of ones and the market decides the value of art it's not my job i make the shit other people decide so we're selling stuff for 50 100 bucks 50 or 100 dollars if you're if something popping you might get 150 bucks i'm just making art it's not my job to say hey this should be worth more it's not so as i'm selling these things and i'm looking around to other people too you know all the people in the space i innately know also that this stuff is worth more than a hundred dollars right and i'm like oh these collectors are gonna really come out good like thank you for collecting my art but wow dude like congrats like kind of congratulations you got really nice piece of art for 100 bucks um and it kind of like dawned on me that i want to participate in my friend's art and i want to buy cool shit because i'm on super rare all the time and i see this thing that's 50 I'm like, I want that.

51:42And I just sold something for 150 bucks. I made this rule where I would take 30 % of my earnings and reinvest in my friends and crypto art. And again, I didn't have any money aside from what I earned selling art to reinvest. And I'm like, well, you know, I believe in my friend more than I believe in most other people. So that's what I started of doing um and i i had a savvy eye um i really loved um early ai art and nobody gave a shit about it it was ugly and you couldn't even tell they were images but i just like the tech and the art thing was like hitting for me early on so i was buying a lot of pieces for five dollars i met a guy in crypto voxels metaverse crypto voxels crypto i'm building my virtual gallery in a metaverse super nerdy like super nerdy okay my avatar is building block by block another avatar walks up to me in the metaverse extremely nerdy shit and he says his little dialogue box that says hello do you want to check out my art i'm like wow this is wild shit i'm like hey dude what's going on you know like i'm having this like real he didn't know who you were no no we were just two avatars in space

53:14Raoul Pal:and i'm your life is weird i don't know if you know that but it's weird yeah oh yeah and i'm i'm loving it i think my son was there like dude check this out so we're chatting and he's like hey man like you know i'm not shilling stuff i just made this art series check it out and a lot of things dawned on me right there that exact moment is still the future of metaverse commerce where you can sell in a metaverse peer-to-peer and i was like whoa it's like dude i'll help a homie out they were five bucks each bought four of them 20 bucks i didn't really know what they were but he told me they're ai and they're like abstracts for years i looked at these things in my wallet and i was like it's kind of like that's either the best decision of my life or i just you know threw 20 bucks away either way is fine but i for a long time i was like i don't know how i feel about these things they're kind of weird well they're weirdly awesome now and they're one of the early you know uh jedi who does the uh you know history of ai under the gan collection he's got definitely in that so it my life and collecting has had these weird um narrative circumstances um you know like this piece up here uh pindar van armen i was about to say Pindar's another person that I I it took me a while before I realized how important Pindar was and he's such a sweet guy that I just just bought a ton of Pindar as well because it's so important because he tells his story all the way through yeah yeah so like with things like do I want a portrait of myself from a robot absolutely like yes right like that was not on the bingo card right uh this one here i minted this on a mint day this is a ringer which i call the baby maker you can have the goose or you can have the baby maker i mean come on um and and synchronistically too like this was an algorithm i didn't choose this thing and i looked at it for years until i really put it together i'm like wow that looks like something you know like it's abstract until a human puts the meaning to it um and that's how my collection is like all of these things are super have you been mainly focused around ai and generative or have you collected a lot of culture stuff as well because i kind of for me the market splits into those two extremes and in the middle is finer art let's call it that i have a very diverse taste i'll say um I always put something through two quick little tests in my own mind.

56:12Okay. I look at a piece of art and then I say, okay, so what? Right. And that could take me anywhere. If there, if there is not an answer to the, so what, then I call it a 3d bouncing ball. I'm like, that's a cool. Okay. Like I see what you're doing. Eh, not my thing. but if it starts checking off the so what is it the more the more and more so what's that come off the more and more i connect with it and that's what i want to bring in as a as a collector right i'm not a flip i suck at flipping things like it's not it just doesn't resonate with me i'm no good at it um so i think one other like early um theme that i got into was covid covid art and because it was happening at the time like you're a guy you're a culture guy right yeah it's so obvious to it's so obvious to me yeah so i knew a big comic art who's an og on super rare he was living over in china at the time when it when it started like right out of the lab and they were getting messed up over there we were just chatting he was living all alone he's like dude like he was like a friend who needed a vent he's like dude it's scary over here like there is some wild stuff and we didn't know about it yeah and i'm i'm listening to this like is this i just thought it was their problem he's like no dude like this is like i think it's going to be a problem problem i'm like okay and he minted this piece called masks one and i i collected that to first of all help a friend but i was also like this is some crazy shit i'm pretty sure that's the first tokenized covid piece and then from there i just the the sub genre of of covid art you know like i have a pretty nice covid art collection

58:13Raoul Pal:you know you know when i look at this again i know people uh want to kind of get that period out of their heads because of all of the complications around it yeah some people had good times some people had terrible times you know people gained faith in government people lost faith in government it was a big but all of humanity went through a moment in time yeah one year was shared by humanity and i think you're right i've not heard anybody talk about covet art but i've thought about it a lot because you can see it in some of the artists that were were expressing it but i think people will look back like this was a specific moment in time and it was also the point of which after which everything accelerated yeah yeah oh yeah yeah Yeah, the whole timeline shifted after that, for sure.

59:07Raoul Pal:How do you discover art? Because this is the thing that artists really struggle with. As a collector, it's the same. I end up using a bit of social consensus and occasional piece of luck. Like, you just randomly find some piece of art. You're like, oh, wow, I love that. Yeah. Happens rarely, but it occasionally happens. I found that the Argentinian artist, Saros, just randomly just saw it and thought, okay, this is cool. And then I went down the rabbit hole and thought, oh, okay, this is wildly cool. But how do you discover stuff and how should artists get discovered? Two wildly different questions, but I'll let all in.

59:46Raoul Pal:I know, because I know both sides of the equation here because artists themselves really struggle with this. I see where you're going. and like i i do have to say as i would call myself a creator and not as much a consumer and for that reason i find myself like more often like uh segmented into what i'm working on which is good in some ways but not good in other ways i think a lot of ways i find art personally is through culture i mean i i more so like back when i went to like record shops um and you can you flip through album covers there's a lot of great artists that are that got the commercial work that way um and that trained also my own design sense um have you got the tash and coffee table book um album cover art i do oh that's really good oh yeah oh yeah i got uh i i need more coffee tables for all the coffee table books i have um i think that consuming art like you said happens i'm not actively so much like going out looking for art but i think art binds you and it's it's getting harder with ai um just to consume so much information um but i love going to like local i love going to like local art shows i think you know you're talking about how do people get discovered and stuff like that yeah particularly in this digital space because it's so vast yeah um and it's just very i know artists get super frustrated they blame the collectors they call it a cabal all of these things but it's the same discovery problem that every startup has everybody doing anything if you're the local plumber somehow you still have to get known so people book you but people really struggle with this yeah um i'm what the issue is is when you started there's a small group of people yeah so as the space grows they kind of know you yeah But your social graph grows with the space.

1:02:01Raoul Pal:Now it's like this. The social graph, you start, it's hard to connect all the way back down. Oh, for sure. Yeah. And it's a fractal, right? Like I'm 20, 25 years in making art, right? It took me 15 years to get a gallery, a first gallery piece into a show, right? but then two years after that i found crypto art and then that grew you know like it takes art is a forever journey like if you're if you're an artist you're gonna do something and then you're gonna like grow but then you still have to start over at that spot that you grew into right so it's not like oh i've i made it made it you know i'm set it's never and i love that part of it is like you know as soon as you think you've made it that's a really scary territory to be in first of all because it pollutes creativity first of all you know it's like all the bands like pearl jam made some banging albums early on but their new music fucking sucks because because they're rich and they don't know right like it's also because you then just think well people want a specific thing from me so i'm just going to produce a specific thing yes yeah and and with the portraits i knew that that could be a path like i talked to plenty of people they're like dude you're so lucky you can just make portraits forever and that scared me i was like portraits forever like i love making portraits but that is not i don't want to be defined as like well if you're not doing a portrait or like ah like so you as an artist i think you also have to be very nimble and not become like a one-trick pony but the other side of the issue and i'm you know i'm advising a few young and young artists just trying to help them in their journey if you don't have a consistency yeah yeah then you never get recognized either because there's no familiarity so it's like a real balance of when do you say okay i can move on versus let Let me explore this enough so everyone understands it.

1:04:13Raoul Pal:And you said the same thing. You had to create a style and a cohesive body of work. And the cohesive stuff is hard. And the beautiful thing, when I get vaporized, hopefully, and knock on wood in many, many years, when you line up my body of work, there's little veins that go off. But there is a through point to every single piece that I make. And I think that as an artist, it's always super important to take two steps back and look at what you're doing and hold that core tenet. Like for me, stereoscopics in 3D. The whole thing has to tell a story. If not, what's the point? Yeah. Yeah. If not, you're just throwing darts, right?