Raoul Pal: The Game of Art with Sam Spratt

33:43And what I said is I have created a skull called the Blueprint Skull. And anyone that enters these auctions has gratitude for helping me take a leap when, quite frankly, right now, I need as many people behind me as possible because I've been a coward my whole life hiding behind other people. That if you are willing to give me even just a gas fee, a little bit of energy, that I'm not going to convert it back and whatever, send you back some ETH, but I'll use the one thing that I have, the one variable that separates me, which is painting. And I will make a derivative of this blueprint skull for whoever enters it.

34:22And that's where the Skulls of Lucy were born. And so it began as kind of a thank you, a gratitude, a claim to take something I had observed of this auction history that was unique to the blockchain, but try to handle it in a way that was not cynical or transactional, but rather, I kind of need you right now. And I will back up that emotion with my time and my labor and my thought. Yeah, you're sharing how much you appreciate them. Look, thank you for playing a pass in this, you know? Exactly, exactly. And so Six months later, in creating this concept, I had an amazing protocol engineer named Zach Cullen.

35:11He was the protocol engineer at SuperRare at the time. And he had never heard of this concept of using everyone in the auction before. And he thought it was a very sweet idea. And so he offered, when I knew very little about the space, to write my very first smart contract and to build a claim portal. so that all the people that entered onto the ledger could come in and once I finished them, could claim their skull. So essentially, rather than just airdrop them to people, you did this intentionally for me. I now do this intentionally for you. Here's our digital handshake acknowledging that. And so they began as free gifts and nothing really happened with them.

35:51I kept moving. I started working on Lucy Chapter 2. and how was the reception for lucy chapter one it was it was amazing it blew my mind it was uh you know those first auctions were very dramatic very frenetic three went to um victor anchor drops and then chisomo collected my very first piece birth of lucy for 50th which at that point was october 21 so that was uh you know getting towards the peak of last cycle and it's funny to kind of be spinning everything back up as we watch nature turn itself over um and the decay of the last year is now fertile grounds again but uh i think there was something you know cause really set a lot of what has unfurled after that in motion also your before we move on with this your style was so different to the other early artists right because you were using this old master style but in digital format strikingly different to x copy for example it to be frank like i was a little concerned about it you know i when i when i first got in there because this is all i've ever known you know i have a deep love and nostalgia for the technique that i was trained under obviously but you know the same thing that uh i would say points me to the old master is out of a desire to honor something handmade in the past has always been, I just want to take the feeling or the values of the morals behind it and bring it digitally.

37:32I don't actually care about it arbitrarily and nostalgically. I think there's something beautiful and human about what took place at that period of time that's worth preserving in this moment while things are easier to create. So building all of these things up bit by bit and holding the mistakes inside them, as well as an enormous amount of time, was the thing that I can't really even help. It has all of my strengths and flaws in it simultaneously. It has my fixation on detail, my fixation on colors and movement and melodramatic emotions. It's got all of me. And for digital art, it's so textured.

38:20That's the amazing thing is how the hell you get such texture from what is really a flat medium. Yeah, it's about building up mistakes mostly is just stacking them all on top of each other and not trying to undo them along the way. And I think that that very much echoes my life and my path. When I look back at my commercial art career, a lot of it is online. You can see some of my old clients. You can see these, I would say, odd and embarrassing jobs, but they're part of me. I kind of hold them a little bit sacred as funny little scars of making your way to eventually doing something. We're all the sum of our stories.

39:07We couldn't be ourselves without them. That's right. And you can sometimes wish that you had a slightly more elegant or poetic story, but in the end, I think exactly what takes you there, whether it begins at a tech blog or not, is just, that's you. Can't help it. so we're into season two now of lucy and the skulls are now out what's the next story part of the story here yeah so over the last two and a half years lucy has gone through five chapters so that was lucy chapter one the skulls two three four and the most recent was chapter five which constituted the Monument Game, which was the largest project created.

40:02And after spending a year creating the Monument Game, which was this intricate and elaborate one-on-one painting, an edition of 256, and an entire platform to be able to have the edition collectors come in and observe and leave on-chain coordinates and preserve their thoughts and their feelings within the metadata of their edition and the money itself, all while competing to collect a skull of Lucy and have that competition be judged and deliberated on by the other skulls. That project was for me a manifestation, a culmination of the last couple years of observing the space of these strange concentric circles that can form through social dynamics of the one of ones being the heart, the center, the fire of what I'm doing.

41:00It's where the most time, the most energy and emotion is in. The skulls of Lucy are both people that were there from my very first steps or who have bought into it as those things have moved and went from free gifts to I think the most recent one sold for$250 ,000. And to have that group of people that covers a gamut of some of the spaces best, those are my people. That is my collection, to be honest, is I've collected people, some of the best that I could possibly have near me. And many of them have become dear friends and advisors. And then you've got the players. And these are the people that are looking at that center with the one-of-one, but competing to be in the skulls and the council.

41:44And I think the ethos of this decentralized network and being a part of this undulating organism that is the market and its funny little emotions as people try to manipulate it or build within it has really dictated, or I should at least say inspired, a part of my art and a central part of Lucy that exists at a plane separate from the imagery. It is in these dynamics, these connections that you can find an on-chain transaction or timestamp to point to where an origination of a connection began. It's kind of like the log or ledger of it. It's a lot of real human beings that have all started gravitating and getting rather close to one another as things have spiraled out.

42:36So when I think about the next steps, for me, it is what follows this design? and what follows this design in a way that doesn't just create a larger outer rum to spread and i would say like before we go into that clarify to people who aren't that familiar how the hell the game works because it sounds incredibly complex and somewhat daunting because you go in there's a lot of kind of well-known people there's the skulls there's this beautiful piece of art there's some way you need to be involved in the coordinates competing for some But talk us through that. What was this madscape that went through your mind to say, this is what I'm going to put down and this is what it is before we go on to where we're going?

43:19Definitely. So The Monument Game is one massive painting. I spent a year creating this and it is basically my exertion of the many intertwining and overlapping paths that one can take in life. The moment they exit isolation and want to connect themselves to the broader network that is humanity. And this is where you can grow, where you can learn, where you can stumble and fail, and where you can get lost and wander along the way. But in this work, I wanted to make this dense and complex scene filled with hundreds of little stories from both my own life and life that I've observed. But I felt when I go to a museum and I see a very large work, Just because it's large doesn't mean that I have an intimate relationship with it.

44:14Just because it's complex doesn't mean I have an intimate relationship with it. But digital, for all the bad things about it, where it can be this kind of dissociative place where you're swiping through, you're scrolling past. As most people, and certainly you know, it's also an incredible and infinite rabbit hole when you have a thing that you really want to get down into. And it is actually an incredibly intimate experience. And so in creating it, I wanted to make sure that if I'm going to create this image, imagery is only one part of this artwork. The people that I would like to congregate around it and leave a piece of themselves behind within it require a system around it.

45:00And so basically you have this painting, but then you also have a viewer to zoom, pan, get as close to it as humanly possible, look through every little detail. But then you also have a game, an incentive structure. And this to me is something that I have come to over the last couple of years of being in this space and getting to know many of the people, both in the council as well as just in crypto in general, is there's a lot of really brilliant, really thoughtful, really soulful people, people that love art, that want to be, I would say, like closer to beauty and truth, but also are in this, for lack of a better term, the devil's casino.

45:46and they yeah they love gamification i mean it's part of the they love it it's it's not a it's not a judgment call so the key parts of the space of people and gamification those are two core factors that kind of are everywhere exactly exactly and i think rather than viewing the gamified bits of this, the casino aspects of it as purely some kind of terrible thing, I actually see it as it's actually a beautiful place to meet people and to say, there is something in here that you know how to do that I don't really understand anything about, but you're having fun and go at it. Go bonk your life away.

46:29I am enjoying the show. And instead, see that as that bonk, that shit coin, whatever it may be, has a path to actually becoming the beginning fertilizer of a digital art renaissance. And that there is a pathway through meme coins, through the coins themselves, through PFPs, through art that is not to be judged or looked down upon, but is actually to say, what can you put forward that I personally treasure or view as sacred or beautiful in the world that looks at those people and says, I want you to come closer. I want you to look at this thing that I spend a year of my life putting all of these little stories into all of my soul, all of my heart, into all of my failures, into and I want you come as close to it as possible.

47:32And I want you to do that, not to worship it like an altar, but rather treat it as a mirror and write with a rather crude tool, which is your own words, something like a fairly long tweet and preserve at a timescale that will last as long as this piece lasts on chain, what you want to leave behind. And to ask that of someone, not just their money to collect the edition, but their thought, their time, their words, and the responsibility or duty around it meant for me, I'm in a market. I'm not just creating paintings for the beauty of the world, and I'm in a total bubble separate from the network.

48:17Meet people where they're at. And so with the concentric circles that I built of the one of ones, the heart, the story, the skulls of Lucy, which are outside of that, and now the players. I'm of a belief that if you are to build concentrically outwards, you have to do it like a seashell. If you are spiraling outwards, you have to create strengthened bonds as you begin that because as it gets wider and wider the it becomes more brittle and if you expand too fast it actually is faster to become worth nothing or to completely fall because you lose the intimacy of what you've created right right now it's very intimate and if you expand too fast it's gone yes and and the i would say the social component of Lucy is really testing out, how do I grow this in a way that doesn't lose that intimacy?

49:16And so one of the things was to have that outer circle of the players, the additions, those who are leaving observations, leave observations on top of a one-of-one. So they are essentially honoring or looking or analyzing within a work that only one person, in this case, Ryan Zurr over at One of One Words, could collect. And then to incentivize that behavior, the skulls of Lucy or the council, which are all of the collectors closest around me, I had three remaining and I put them up as the rewards as judged by the other skull holders, so my existing collectors, to say, who has given of themselves?

49:56Who has really left a piece of themselves behind and taken this seriously and to then take their words as valuable, as something that means something that isn't just a tweet into the void, but that I'm going to hold those things as sacred. And even the contract we built for when the three individuals won the game was to say, I will give you this Skull of Lucy if you give me your player edition with the words that you wrote and I will hold on to this. And I'm never going to sell those. Those are mine. This is our fair trade. And so even though the addition cost$5 ,500 and the Skull of Lucy at the time was selling for$100,$150, we just broke that this week, but that's an outlier.

50:42It's to say that, do the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory competition. Find your way to move up a rung separate from what you began at, but don't see it as something that what you've contributed is less in value. Because I actually view the time and effort that many of those people that played the monument game as more than most people have given me, uh, in my whole life. Like the, the amount of thought and care and energy that is in some of these observations that stay with the provenance of this piece for as long as it exists, uh, is unreal. People dumped out their, their traumas, their letters to their children, confessions to their brothers.

51:27There's some beautiful, beautiful, crazy things, as well as some disturbing things. But, you know, you got to take all of humanity. It's a jungle out there. So then where does the Monument Game go? When is it won? And what is the next phase? What happens to the council? You know, where's the expansion here that you were talking about? Yeah. So the Monument Game has been won. The three people won their Skull of Lucy. And the future of the Monument Game, for me, goes in two directions. The first direction is how it is exhibited in the world, right? Our bubble of digital art and NFTs is small. It's incredible and it's passionate and it's kind of hard, honestly, to engage with other parts of the world because I've fully been pilled on it and I'm truly immersed inside it.

52:25It is my whole existence. And yet at the same time, there's a whole other world of people that haven't discovered it yet. And much like with the creation of the Monument Game of acknowledging the casino and meeting people where they're at, I think so too, if I'm going to take this project. I have to meet people with that. But the second path really for me is just the path of Lucy and really just the path of how I see what can be done with this technology, which is to say the space between myself and a collector is the closest it has ever been in history. The space between a collector and another collector is the closest that it has been in history.

53:09So too with the viewer. How do you take that closeness, the reduction of space between each increment and a network, and make sure that those that give you fire and fervor to take this beautiful gift of being able to go out on my own, essentially create monkey paintings and have a beautiful life in it that I get to share with my wife and amazing friends and collectors around me. How do you just not like discard and dispose that? Because I know who they are, and I know how close they are, and I know exactly when they entered my life. And so the future of the Monument game is to take all of those players.

53:50And as we go into chapter six, to just bring them with us, and essentially to say, my life here is being handled episodically. I'm released chapter one, three paintings. Chapter two, one painting. Chapter three, and so on. With each one, I'm learning, and I am both succeeding and failing, but I'm trying to learn from each one of the steps. If you want to be along for the ride and see what this is about, I will do my damnedest to not squander the gift that has been given. And for most people, I think just knowing that you care and you want to improve yourself is enough to bet on. Most of the people around me, it's not like the council isn't a bunch of guys that all need to be a part of some secret club or cult.

54:50They're all lone wolves. They're all successful people for the most part. That's not really the thing that they're after right now. A lot of this is just saying, keep going in a rather significant way. And I see it, if I were to view any relationship that an artist could or should have with a collector, it should be to say, you don't owe them anything, but you do owe yourself to not squander the gift. to keep going there's also something i've been thinking about i was as you do on open c i was buying a x copy and i was beautiful just scrolling through the ownership and there's a story to be told yeah there's something in that that i was just going through that thinking there's a story here that's not being told you know why did pranks see why was he the first person to buy this?

55:49Why did he sell it? And who did he sell it to? And what was the story? And what was going on? Anyway, it was just a side when you were talking about this, I'm thinking, there's a lot of stories to be told that the chain actually records, but the stories aren't expanded on yet. Exactly. And I think that, you know, our space getting more sophisticated, there are I know a number of people that are working on trying to record the story, you know, not just the data transaction, but record the story. And as the skulls have moved, each one has its own funny story. Just today, this happened maybe an hour ago.

56:31I don't know when what we're doing is going live, but Zach, that protocol engineer that helped me create the very first contract, we had had a chat way back when skulls were selling for maybe like 30 ,000 pounds. I was like, look, man, if this is ever at a place, just understand, I don't know where any of this would have gone if you hadn't given me your knowledge or skill set right out of the gate. I will never judge you. I will never feel a sense of like whatever betrayal or loss if you ever sell this thing. If it does something meaningful for you to propel you at a certain moment in life, like, please, like that is nature's design.

57:10Like it requires movement. It requires turnover. her. And so at the same event that I met you at, I met Beauty and Punk. And she's an amazing collector. And we spent some time in Paris and she wanted to join the council, but she wanted to do it in an unusual way. And so she is trading her Punk and some ETH for his skull. And so that happened like an hour ago. And so that to me is like, she has this whole story of these branching paths in the crypto punk community. She has been kind of like a mythic figure in the background, just whispered about as very kindly, fondly by most people in the space.

57:52But then to finally just cross real life paths and to see both someone that supported me from the get-go be rewarded with something, as well as have someone beautiful new come in and be able to share this in unison it's kind of the like i it's so much more interesting than just anonymously collecting things and anonymously collecting the money from those things here's a question for you i've been thinking about ever since that event when we're all together is clearly there is a movement towards the physical world um you know you're talking about it. Dimitri's obviously doing it. Rafiq kind of did it in digital format, but in such a kind of, oh my God, way.

58:42Obviously, Beeple's done it. ACK's done it. And you can see it's happening everywhere. And I think the movement is because our world of the digital art space is still really for only people from crypto. You know, it's the people of that world who are the patrons, the collectors. It's all of that. And the trad world, there's not very few. There's sure, there's Alan Howard and there's a few, but there's very, but Alan's really a digital guy anyway. And there's this definite movement. Talk me through that movement because there's a fear within it that it's all going to get subsumed by the trad art, money, world, mystique, Because there's a certain, there's a fear within me that people are going to look to that world for some sort of confirmation, some sort of, you know, well done, you're meaningful, when the real meaning is in the revolution you've all guys have just started.

59:46And there's something, I walked away from that very duality of thoughts around it, thinking, we could lose everybody to this, because that lore of Sotheby's Christie's museums is so alluring that we lose the essence. How do you think of that? I don't have the same fear, mostly because I think what is being created here is so compelling and so interesting and is a just far broader tool set. Take the monument game, right? If it existed just in the trad art world, it's a painting on a wall and it's static, right? And, okay, let's even just take and make it digital. And let's say I animated it and suddenly it's moving, right?

1:00:40To me, that's the least interesting thing that could be done with digital art. All of these social dynamics, these communal dynamics, these participatory dynamics, like look at what we're doing right now. It is the most incredible thing. The space between where I am and you are has been fully closed, right? There's only one step further that can go of seeing each other in person. But right now, we are about as close as we could possibly be. And that is only going to get closer over time. So lifting up, I think things that once were abstracted or intangible, connecting each element of the network as part of the art, right?

1:01:18It's not a tertiary thing. It's not just your art market. It actually is central and woven into just as much of a pillar as the imagery itself is something that it may take the tradar market a very long time to come this way. if you're thinking about it as pure binary. But I see it more as if you build compelling things that demonstrate the power, much like all things in life and all things throughout history, the most curious will find their way. And it's not a matter of having just the right conversation with a trad art collector to convince or evangelize them that you should start buying digital art.

1:02:06my personal quest is not to dismiss the Trattar world like we're in some kind of purely punk digital revolution there's a lot that was created on a curatorial sense that this space dismissed three years ago and then has slowly been coming to all the same revelations that were already in place by auction houses and galleries and things like that so it is to say there's a lot of learning that the space can take from them. You don't need to utterly discard it. You just also don't need to bend it to that. If I'm going to continue Lucy, it should be in a way, and it will be in a way, that is home. This is where I build my story, right?

1:02:48And whatever I create in and outside of Lucy will all be expressions of my soul that are removed from trying to cater to some kind of like existing old guard. It's just to say, you do need to ride out and meet them, right? You do need to be like, this is what's happening over here. If you are not curious enough, if you are not interested enough, that's fine. All of these things have an odd way of eventually rippling in the right direction. I first heard of Bitcoin over 10 years ago, right? And it seemed absolute nonsense to me at the time. And I was cynical and skeptical about it most of the time because the first time I ever saw it being used was to purchase drugs.

1:03:32Like, you know, my friend buying Modafina. Like it was not something that I saw as like profound. And yet, if I was actually paying attention, and if I knew a little history, I would actually view that little glimmer I was seeing right there through that drug purchase as something rather profound. And what is beginning to unfurl in our world, and certainly as the chain gets used by more and more people,

1:04:06I can't really imagine a scenario where the whole world isn't operating on it personally. And so let them come in time. I don't think there's a rush. I even look at the last cycle where certain bits of our space were tried to be inserted through like blunt force and price action into the Trattart market, it was largely rejected. Not entirely. There's a few outliers and exceptions. It was largely rejected. But much like you talk about a lot, most forward progress is not like week to week or even season to season. It is these lessons learned through growth and decay cycles. And these things that get separated out each one, these like rhyming lessons or values that seem to repeat themselves over time that you can use if you study them enough as you head into the next one.

1:05:03I think as we head into, I guess, what would be considered the second NFT cycle right now, just knowing that there's a second one, I think will profoundly change how people come to respect this space rather than seeing something that's going to be co-opted and taken. Yeah, because people will see that this is non-cyclical. We're not talking price here. We're talking about movement, momentum, meaning it's not cyclical. Well, it is cyclical, but it's in a secular uptrend. So each phase moves further on than the next. So as you rightly say, people have only seen it once. They're like, was this a flash in the pan?

1:05:45Was this a moment of madness? What was interesting? Surely these people are just going to grow up and come to the normal art world or whatever it is, right? Or go back to being graphic designers. But I think they'll see this time around that, oh, okay, there's something bigger and it's more meaningful. And as the space also has more capital in it, as it creates so much wealth, it creates new opportunities, brings new artists into the space and new mediums. And I think that's going to be interesting. That's a question I want to ask you as well. So if you're thinking about Lucy and the world that you've created, how do you think about new mediums?

1:06:25Because the mediums are changing so fast too. The mediums of whether it's AI or whether it's the 3D medium that is immersive AR going into VR. How do you think about that? Is it something that's in your curiosity set? Or is it like, no, I'm kind of, this is who I am and I'm happy with that. And there's no right or wrong answer. Totally. Most of what my time butting up against this space has revealed to me is this is the first time in my life I've collided with people that are not just artists. You have protocol engineers, financiers, poker players. That's why I love it. builders you never get people around a dinner party and it's incredible when you do it's it's it's a bizarre situation where you you really get many different you know to bring it back to the first drawing class like many different angles of light all bouncing in a common direction and it is illuminate in a way that it is just not if it's just you.

1:07:38And butting up against this, I would say, futurist space, this thing that is looking towards the future, I see some of my role as trying to not let it slip so out of control that we forget what it is to be human and forget at what is important about the past along the way. But I also see it as this is, humanity is rarely kind to those that bury their heads in the sand. And these things that are growing, expanding in a rapid breed are there to be studied and learned from. And as you connect to a network, my personal thesis is, I believe the thing that will make us whole as the space shrinks between each of us is if we are the rawest version, the most potential of ourselves realized version pushed out within that network.

1:08:42And so what that requires is being vulnerable, preserving your flaws, exerting your strengths, and trying to not get subsumed by the ease and access of the tools, but more so seeing can you, your individual identity, much as it is on the transactions on chain, be concrete, preserved. This is you. This is exactly the origin point of an artwork. This is the exact origin point of a collection. So too, if we are talking about AI, for example, can myself, Sam, if I were to ever mess with these tools be maintained within it. And I think when I look at the future of those tools, I think they are already changing the world as far as on a retail level of mid-journey or dolly or anything like that.

1:09:39But I think what many artists that haven't gone through the process of honing a craft will bump into is if their flaws butting up against their strengths is not present in there. I always say, you can find me in the flaws of my work. I am there. I am not in the best version of it. I am very much in the trying to be the best version of it. And here are the ways in which I am struggling that you can see inside. And so in handling AI, I think that great work will get made with it that preserves that individual humanity. I think that if it is just a replication of the hide mind, if you say, then it's for everyone and therefore no one.

1:10:29It demands the thing that you are struggling most with. And as I begin and experiment with all of these tools, whether or not they find their way in is going to be entirely contingent on whether or not I'm still there. And not just stylistically there, but systemically there. I've been playing around because somebody reached out to me and said, hey, listen, we'd love to train a Raoul bot. And I'm like, okay, let's give this a go. Really interesting. So what they trained it on was my Twitter feed, all the free YouTubes out there. So nothing behind a paywall. And then, so that was the first iteration.

1:11:07I'm like, it's not bad. Then it now speaks in my voice. So I speak to myself, which is weird. And then what I did was I gave it encyclopedic knowledge. so I gave it the books that were important to me including wine history books and music and stuff and I gave it all the background plus all the finance books and all this stuff and it starts to piece together some sort of characterization of who you are now it's not perfect yet it's early days but it's kind of startling because you can actually create some of the elements of yourself. Now, I was thinking that through as like, okay, Apple or somebody's going to have a on-device AI that sees everything you see, hears every conversation you hear, and helps you in that.

1:11:57It'll see every tweet you've ever read, every YouTube, every phone conversation, everything. Now, how different is that from you? Does it get the emotions that you get from it because it sees how you react it's just going to be very interesting where i don't know whether we cross over that boundary you're talking about between it just being this flat digital thing the hive mind everything and nothing or whether it actually becomes us and ourselves i i can see it branching in all directions but i'd say at least at its current epoch that it's at. I don't know about you, but using chat GPT has helped me ask better questions because I've realized how stupid it is if I don't, that it has unbelievable power, but it really is reliant on you going back and forth with it.

1:12:53And to me, that is obvious almost You go back thousands of years to the Talmud. The Talmud is you're taking the Old Testament, you're going line by line, and there is midrash. There is a multi-century discourse between rabbis and scholars arguing and debating over what something means. And leaving that conversation teaches you, as a student of it, how to ask a better question. And I think so too with these tools, much like wanting to leave your flaws inside a piece of work if it is assisted with AI in some way, that getting to see them as they will only be as great as you are. they they they are not actually quite as supplementary uh in a way of like they become you but it's to say that like you you have to almost clone them to be the perfect recall version of your most curious and active and growing self because if you get lazy with it it will be lazy too it's super interesting so what's the next step this year will be filled with Lucy Chapter 6, which is a couple of branching directions, but it is nonetheless something that I am playing with tools that I have never played with.

1:14:25I am pushing my craft in a way that I never have. I am building the communal and social elements around it in a way that I hope demands more of people, like makes them compete with a greater fervor and brings out a little bit more darkness, ideally as well. Sam, listen, thank you for everything you do in this space. Thank you for pushing boundaries. And we'll be following you very closely in this next journey to see where it all goes as well. Thank you, Will. I got to say, before we go, there was something about when we were all together and this was early January. And so you're giving this articulation of what you see coming in the market, in the world, in life.

1:15:18And there's this moment where you are both taking in what you are trying to pass on and convey it to me, to the audience, as well as a moment for me of observing the observers and just looking at the room of people and how they're taking in what you're saying. And it was really interesting because the sense I got was even though that room I would define as like a fairly successful room of people, I think they were all pretty stark. Like I think everyone had been brutalized in some way. They had made some misstep even with holding that successful title. And the things you were saying were so bullish, if you will, that there was a moment of fear and terror of like, what is this guy selling?

1:16:10You know, I've seen his YouTube videos and he's got the fire behind him and the Bitcoins and the big grin. Like, what is he doing? What kind of like, you know, fool's errand am I on right here? But it's like as you walked through it, you got to see this light in everyone's eyes begin to change as they started to get out of the zone of thinking, I'm being fed Kool-Aid. And in fact, I'm being fed wisdom. I'm being fed someone who has watched the cycles unfold. And when I look at the months that have followed since, we're back. And also, you know, one of the things I wanted to do in that presentation, because I know how artists are, they always think it's their fault.

1:16:58My art's not selling. My prices are miserable. Everybody hates me. I'm just a flash in the pan. And I know what that is. And I could see it in everybody's face. And the moment I validated everybody by saying, well, here's all of the price charts of all of you. You're pretty much correlated. You sell at different prices because you have different demand structures. and it's all driven by something out of your control everyone's like thank you and that thing that's out of your control is looking quite positive everyone was like oh thank you that was there was a real sense of relief I think from that because everyone had this little feeling inside that little inner child which is like maybe I just told myself a story that wasn't true about myself and that's what i saw and almost everybody without exception came up and thanked me because it wasn't about because i was bullish it's because i validated their experience of i feel like it's me and it's like no it's not you it's okay we all wanted to know that the story we were telling ourselves was a communal and collective one and i think they did accomplish that yeah brilliant my friend great to see you and we'll catch up again soon hopefully somewhere in the world soon as well in person that'd be lovely good seeing you thank you so much for having me so look i really enjoyed that conversation sam is a lovely human being amazing artist he thinks about things in ways that others haven't yet he's one of these pioneers of the space pushing boundaries pushing himself and even pushing the collectors.

1:18:39I love the way that he's creating networks and connections and stories within stories within the art itself. And that's really magical. He's a magical storyteller at heart. And, you know, very kindly, we spoke at the end about the presentation that I'd given at Beeple Studios. That's the same presentation that was on the crypto gathering. So the links below, if you were going to watch that because I think it's a very important space. And it was really nice to hear from me, the validation to me that actually it resonated with, you know, some of these amazing greats. They were like, okay, this was really useful.

1:19:18So that's my piece about NFTs, how they're macro. And I think you'll enjoy it. If you're interested in NFTs, you certainly will. And check out the rest of the content from the crypto gathering. Anyway, the link to that piece is below. Also, make sure you watch the Beeple interview as well. That was a hell of a lot of fun, but also some really profound insights. Anyway, take care. See you next time.

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