Punk6529: Why Crypto Matters

Transcript

if you can exit the provider's behavior I don't need to exit Gmail or Outlook because in Gmail and Outlook they broadly behave reasonably because you can access and so I am in no way against the economies of scale of big tech companies to be able to deliver high performance applications what I am in favor of is that the network affects accrue to a protocol not to service this episode of Empire is brought to you by thales markets an options platform on arbitrum and optimism that gets you exposure to crypto in the simplest way possible they've made it as easy as simply choosing up or down you'll hear more about dailies later in the show this episode is brought to you by carbon

carbon is a new Dex on ethereum that makes concentrated liquidity super easy with carbon LPS can now automate your liquidity strategy with custom on-chain limit and range orders all from a beautiful UI check out carbon today for unprecedented control over your liquidity all right everyone very fun episode we've got coming up we've got uh Punk 6529 joining us I got another Punk Santi as always uh co-hosting with me so uh I got you guys welcome to the show thank you so much thank you for having me yeah good to have you um so here's what we're going to do with this uh with this episode um obviously I have to get both of your

takes on punks right now um 6529 you just also had a big acquisition with uh with the goose acquisition so I want to get your take on that uh I want to get your take on a couple different buckets of nfts like pfps digital art royalties things like that and just like state of like nfts how you're feeling about things but I think it'd just be very very helpful to get your high level framework right I think uh Facebook changing their name to meta kind of like marked the peak uh of the metaverse right and it feels like that kind of metaverse narrative has turned over so I'd like to get your take on just like what is your working framework for the metaverse today and what is your working framework for like why it's important that we build an open permissionless metaverse instead of this kind of closed

metaverse from from a company like Facebook sure this is I think one of the most important topics in technology today I think it is I misunderstoods the wrong word effectively nobody's talking about right and I think it's critical to what our lives look like let's say in 2030 and Beyond in order to have a coherent discussion about it I'd like to lay out some assumptions which are my assumptions or my priors I think they are accurate but if someone doesn't believe the things I'm about to say they probably aren't going to believe the conclusion

either so let me start with the with the priors first of all first prior the metaverse is just the internet right when I've noticed when talking to people who maybe haven't thought about this so much they think I'm talking about some video game we're gonna go into some new second life and dress up like Monsters and run around with battle axes and they think to themselves well I don't do any of that stuff like my kid does that stuff I'm a serious professional I make Financial models I manage groups of people I'm a politician responsible for my town I don't need this cool

kid no matter something's great I'm glad people play these video games but it's not for me right and so Theory one is the metaverse is the internet and I'll come back to what that means but that's important and it's the internet with better visualization and persistent digital objects and my view here is that from the early 90s until today it has been a spectrum of improvement on these two topics right the internet's always been with us but it used to be the case that it would take half an hour to download a low resolution 30 second video clip that was pretty exciting wow

look I can play a video clip on my computer and I download it from some other computer it took half an hour and now of course you can watch Netflix 4K movies by the touchable button it used to be the case that doing live Global video conferencing you needed a big Cisco system whenever you go back far enough this conversation we're having would have needed a quarter million dollars of equipment and now it's free and available to every single person in the world in a wide variety of applications where you can real live video chat with people and this pathway of improved visualization is not

going to stop here it's not like the end state of visualization is looking at you guys two-dimensional a few inches Square on my screen I assume you're full-size human beings and I also assume that in the future I will be looking at you and you will be full-size human beings in my field of vision and then this is where it goes oh well I don't want to wear those big heavy goggles No No One's Gonna wear those big heavy goggles I mean people might use those for um special cases but even those wonderful Vision Pros no I don't think anyone's gonna really be able to tolerate them all day but within

seven eight years maybe ten I think we'll get down to the size of a pair of thick sunglasses and they will be not virtual reality but what is known as mixed reality which is a mix of reality reality as you see an augmented reality where you see what's around you plus additional objects maybe you guys are in full size in virtual reality where we make the reality reality go away and we're on Mount Everest or and where are they art gallery or what have you right so my view is and you know it doesn't matter if this happens in 2028 or 2032 it's very clear it's going to happen and

it's not going to take 100 years right so if you look at the research Pathways you look at the experts in Hardware where about this far away and it's not one of those things that's always permanently this far away it is very obviously the case that visualization on the internet has gotten better every year since the internet has been formed so that's number one number two I say the thing persistent digital objects and it's not a great term because I don't think with people so I need a better kind of more emotionally resonant term but if the as the internet becomes more visual then

there's more value in persistent objects in that space and so what does that mean well your Avatar and social media as they persist them digital object here as are your profile picture right to use our terminology pfp but you know for most people think of it as their their picture on social media and this isn't an nft thing right people have had pfp since the beginning of social media and they use different pfps on different services most people likely have a different pfp on LinkedIn versus Instagram versus I don't know Tinder versus Twitter each one is a different type of audience and

a different presentation and will we also have three-dimensional avatars that are not just our face sure will we address them in markings that reflect our identity whether our identity is the New York Knicks or um that Ohio State Buckeyes or um Gucci or something else that reflects your identity of course maybe it's um the environmental defense fund right people people use markers of identity in community in every single aspect of their lives they

paste bumper stickers on their cars they buy T-shirts with logos on them they donate to their local uh church or synagogue or mosque and this is very very common standard human psychological needed that's not going to change it virtual but it's not going to stop there no some people play video games well you have characters and objects in those video games some people like to collect art and some people like to collect the drawer and if you spend a lot of money in a piece of digital art you certainly hope that it is persistent right I would certainly hope that the goose doesn't go

away right and it's certainly digital like the you can of course create a print of the goose but the default object there is digital and so there's a persistent digital object but it's going to go further than that we will have our own three-dimensional spaces right now we are in I guess Riverside it's a podcasting software right and then when we're in a fairly flat block ordered two-dimensional space I have a hundred percent certainty in the future and just pick this could be three years from an hour 13 years from

now we will have this discussion and it's going to look like your office or your Virtual Office or my home or my art gallery there's no there's no technical challenge to having the space reflect the situation reflect the use case reflect your identity my identity and or all those things together for this particular discussion we're having so let me recap that and then there's something important to say so it's just the internet it's not an application it's all the applications

it is the applications are going to become more and more engaging and compelling and when you have that world you will need things that persist from one moment to the next right you will you want your Avatar to persist from today till tomorrow you want your Virtual Office to process from today until tomorrow and I said okay well that's still fine but like I don't do that type of thing and I'm going to argue but everyone is already living in the metaverse or in the digital sphere already certainly all white collar workers like if you're a white collar

worker how many hours a day do you spend looking at do a computer screen your laptop screen your iPad screen or most of all your phone screen and is it basically for certain some classes of white collar workers like us all your waking hours in those moments where are you right like I'm sitting in my office on a chair I am putatively in the physical sphere but not really like the things around my office my eyes have focused out and like don't even I'm not even noticing right now I'm looking at the two of you

and I'm looking at the two of you in a shared digital space and I'm already as you are living in a digital space and those digital spaces will become more and more compelling more and more immersive completely ambient around us we say this is great it is great it's about all these things are huge improvements in The Human Condition right but the most important thing is every one of those digital spaces is owned by a corporation right now all right so 6529 before you I just want to almost recap that definition is it fair to say like in one or two sentences your definition of the of the metaverse is basically just the internet it's the

internet but with full connectivity between all these apps better visualizations and like better engagement of like you you know you describe this app Riverside is very 2D so it's like the internet full connectivity of applications better visualizations and then like digital things that you can basically own is that a fair yeah I think the digital things that you want to own are an emergent property of the first two when the internet was a text-based um very simplistic ux there's not really any concept of how you would own on the internet share on

the internet photograph right and so as the visualization gets better there's more rich and expressive digital objects that you can that you will want to have and own so I guess then the question is like why why does it matter that these are on like you know I've heard you talk about the the movement from web one to web 2 to web 3 right like why does it matter that these digital objects are on a permissionless protocol like why does it matter that this is uh you know that this whole metaverse is built on web3 Rails instead of I don't know Facebook built pretty good products right and Google builds pretty good products so why why is it important that they don't own the metaverse yeah no it's a great question I think this is the single most misunderstand

misunderstood Topic in technology governance and regulation and I am absolutely in favor of large companies building compelling applications and I think it is important to understand the difference between how that happens on web one protocols and web 2 protocols web one protocols came out of Academia basically with DARPA Academia et cetera no one really thought there was any money in the internet right so all of the web one protocols were released as open public domain protocols a great example is email is a protocol called SMTP and is Gmail a superb service yes it's

fantastic I'm very glad Google built it and the fact that Google has built Gmail does not trigger this same negative reaction for me because if for whatever reason competitive economic um my point of view I don't want to use Google or Google does not want me as a user I can go use Outlook and if I don't want to use Outlook I can use Yahoo and I can go all the way down the line and by the time I'm at the end of the line I can plug my own email server into the wall and run my own email server and the fact that the protocol

and the applications are split creates a huge difference in both commercial and socio-political behavior and I'll come back and hold this it's it's so obvious but it's never talked about what's a counter example the best counter example in the west is Twitter and prediction not Facebook Twitter because Twitter actually flirted with the idea of being a protocol um you could see a Jack Dorsey and Fred Wilson struggling with it in 2010 20 to 2009 000 they were tempted that way and obviously you can see this the Jack Jack's a big believer in

decentralized systems but by the time one could imagine how to do it the path depends on Twitter had happened and it was a public company and it's quite hard to change your whole revenue and business model once you're a public company protocols tend to have winner take all effects like we all use SMTP and nobody uses some other email protocol and if you thought of Twitter as kind of the short messaging on the Internet Protocol for the English language world at a minimum then yeah it has picked up a very strong Network effect itself like what's the market share of the number two Twitter very low what about the

number three non-existent what about the number 10 effectively a kid's toy right in terms of market share so the network effects are around Twitter well what does that mean well the first thing it means and this is not an economic issue it's a socio-political issue we have had a two-year National level battle about who is allowed to use Twitter which is effectively a bottle of who consent broadcast short messages to large groups of people and apparently the way apparently is a very important topic because everyone's very upset about it whether you think Trump should lose his account or have

his account both sides are very upset about it and apparently the correct way for societies to discover the right answer on this important topic is whatever the CEO of Twitter from time to time thinks which of all the governance mechanisms for the internet I assure you this is not the right like I can think of different ways you can govern whether you think Trump deserves this Twitter account or you think Trump is a huge threat to democracy and shouldn't have an account the answer to that question for sure should not change based on if Jack Dorsey is the CEO of Twitter or Elon Musk right like there's no way that a Democratic Society if this decision is

as important it should be determined by the CEO of a semi-random company I'm a tourism of a company it was a random company right that's just a company it's not like it was founded by the state or we all have a stake and it's just a company it was a public company now it's a private company and it's very easy to see by the big societal battle we didn't have what's the big societal battle we didn't have if Donald Trump should have an email account email is a very effective mechanism to communicate with people and if you believe Donald Trump's a threat to democracy right we'll take any position that's right Brazil will you send me all the email

people either but we didn't have that discussion we didn't have that discussion because there's no one single email provider and so there's not one place where you say the CEO of email has to decide if Donald Trump should have an email account and you know I don't want to say this because you know take you to talk with the United States but the one has to look at the principle it is irrelevant if you like or don't like Donald Trump right the idea that someone any someone and it's easiest to think on email can sit there and rank order 8 billion people and decide on any given day who has been

sufficiently nice or sufficiently naughty to have access to SMTP is impossible right it is an impossible job and it is an impossible job for the simple reason that humans disagree on things right you can have the Ukrainian View and the Russian view on who should have an email account it's polar opposite right the Israeli and the Palestinian Jew is polar opposite are you Democratic in the Republican view let's play our episode and it is not the role of a tech company CEO to solve every Global dispute

because if a tech company say oh could solve everything we should put them in charge of the world right like nobody's going to solve any Global dispute so what ends up happening is you take a wide range of topics and somehow don't resolve them in some type of logical democratically it's a random quite frankly oligarchical way I know in the list we don't like to call our multi-billionaire CEOs oligarchs but okay that's just marketing right that the that a non-western multi-billionaire is an oligarch but a

western multi-billionaire is an Innovative Tech Champion that's just marketing it's propaganda and it's the same person it's someone with a lot of financial power who controls a lot of resources Who as a general rule should not also be given political power unless they've earned it in some democratic way right and so you come to the structure and you ask yourself would it be better if we had one email provider would the world be better we all have to use Gmail is that would that be an improved outcome on any Dimension is it better if you're a socialist

if you're a socialist would you believe that it would be better that everyone has to use Google's email service and the only acceptable speech is speech that is acceptable to Google okay is it better if you're a capitalist it doesn't matter if you have a better mousetrap if you can make email cheaper faster more effective irrelevant only Google can offer email right to me there's obviously no Theory why everyone should have to use a product from one company right no reasonable and these specific problems are obvious the first problem is you

will have rent seeking and you see that companies the exact same companies that rent seek in areas where they have a monopoly or oligopoly don't rent seek in other areas let's look at a very practical example if you put your app on an Apple phone Apple will take 30 of your revenue is that right and thirty percent of your revenues are pretty high tax it's higher than the most socialist country in Europe that's for sure I know look at these socialist countries are very bad they hate capitalism though okay no no European countries are socialist as Apple that takes 30 percent of your Revenue not your profit your

Revenue that very same company Apple when you use apple for your email does not take 30 of the revenue you transact over email on the Apple servers why because the second any email provider said hey 6529 you just did an advertising deal over my servers you're only 30 advertising deal would lose every single of its customers to another email provider who would not charge you 30 and what we discover in the market clearing price of what percentage of your Revenue a commodity provider of email communication should take is actually zero right that's the correct

price no they don't charge 100 bucks a year for an account right or zero but they're not going to take a percentage of it so that's what I'm seeing and rent seeking happens when you have a monopoly slash oligopoly and a side note that I don't want to get into like this is where competition law for physical products where we're not zero marginal cost runs into Network effects and zero marginal cost digital products and it just doesn't fit like I am not saying these are monopolies by the way the antitrust laws are in the United States today but nonetheless they have these types of effects the number one number two chorus attacks on Innovation I don't

want to pick on Apple and apple is a beloved company but good luck running a crypto app into the Apple App Store okay I mean that's kind of weird crypto assets are illegal in the United States Apple controls half the phones in the country not if it's half but like a very large percentage and all the phones of wealthy people affected and Apple has decided for a variety of reasons which might be sensible business reasons for Apple they don't want the heart ache of dealing with crypto apps right like not saying they're making a bad decision for Apple but Apple has decided to ban cryptocurrency and half the mobile devices in the country I

mean I'm not sure the Google App Store is much better well that's weird why would a company get to ban something that's legal right so this is classic you know it's a suppression on Innovation you might say oh well it's not it's crypto Bros talking I think no I mean you cannot buy in-app a book from Amazon anymore in the Kindle app which is the most logical and sensible way to buy it because apple is saying to Amazon which is a behemoth guess what you sell a book on my phone my phone not the user's phone Apple's phone

right is there any question on Apple user would prefer to buy the book in the app itself and instead we have to push people to go to the web browser I don't know when you see things that are obviously ridiculous for the customer you know markets are not in play right because if markets were in play and there were two waste two places you could buy a book on a mobile device and in one place you press a button another one you have to go log into your account and download whatever obviously that company would lose and then the third thing the one that really bothers me

is well effectively they become corporate speech regulators they want to be very clear at my positions I do not believe the first amendment applies to companies right the first amendment applies to the government I do not believe the government should force apple or Twitter or Google to host speech that they don't want to host I believe Apple and Google and Twitter and anyone else just like me if I have my own server and someone wants to say something that I think is obnoxious I should not be forced to host it it's normal but effectively the net effect of

everything that I just said is in web 2 ish protocols because they consolidate and Monopoly become Monopoly like you have the CEO of private technology companies being effectively the speech regulator not legally effectively the speech regulator that's weird right it's weird all of this is about to get Giga Infinity Wars I don't know if you were watching The Vision Pro right impressive device I can't wait to get my hands on how does it work though right

it makes you know we've gotten to a world where we carry around with us a GPS device a microphone and a video camera in our pocket and stream you know all of this back to a company but you know if you had told I don't know the Stasi and 40 years ago hey can you get every East German until I carry a microphone with them everywhere and the tracking device so you know exactly where everyone is and know which people are talking to each other because you can see from their GPS and when they got in their car and if they're speeding and oh then take a bunch of pictures of what they're doing and put them on your server so we know what they did and when they're at the

beach and what I'd say wow this would be amazing this is the greatest spy technology we've ever had right and what's going to happen with these mixed reality goggles is going to make the phone look like a privacy preserving device because the way the Vision Pro works and all these other things work well first of all there's a camera permanently pointed in your field of vision right it's not just there's a camera in my pocket there's a video camera looking in front of me that's how you do the overlays in AR you have to see you have to see what's in front of the person that's number one number two they're using Biometrics they're looking at your eyes

right they are literally if I look at your eyes and run machine learning algorithm campus I can tell how you're feeling I can tell if you're stressed I can tell if you're happy I can tell if you have diseases and so on and so on and then there are AI algorithms that are placing things in your field of vision noticing if you're typing clicking Etc and this is effectively prototype one the Prototype of 10 years from now will have a coherent view of the world around you it'll understand you in the world around

you it'll have a coherent view about how you're feeling down to the physiological level and it will have a machine learning algorithm that is personalizing the environment around you to you and of course there's a version of that that's wonderful like I'm going to be living in a exciting World Super customized to me I'm gonna be driving down the highway and I'm going to see the Tulip on the Billboard's not like stupid ads that's great it's fun but also I don't think it takes even the slightest leap of imagination to understand there is no platform more prone to abuse than this

right because all of that and the example I give and this is not a negative statement about Mark Zuckerberg market doing I think what I would do crossword except I'm sure more competently if I ask Mark or Tim Cook I sent them a pair of goggles and I said I'd really appreciate it if you your family members your kids why are these at all times and streamed all the data of Mark Zuckerberg's field of vision and you know what it is his family are doing back to the 6529 servers the thing I have nothing to worry about as you can see my terms of service would never allow me to do anything

inappropriate for the state what do you keep doing or would I get like laughed out of the room right and instead we are going to do it another Direction and by the way it might not doesn't reflect well are people going to care about individuals I mean there's plenty of evidence that this happens right like the Uber god mode or you could see every passenger and where they are got abused right people track celebrities or their ex-girlfriend or what have you so yes it'll be abused almost at the divisional level but even the aggregate data is amazing if you know if you know that on average people in a uh close County in a certain state are

feeling a certain emotional state and what you can feed them in their field of vision is ABC and this is very powerful it's extremely powerful and it's one directionally powerful I'm curious like obviously the skeptic would say there's always a choice to leave apple and use a different I understand the Nuance there is no choice SMTP you have multiple email providers and of course this sort of monopolistic tendencies that's applications built on top of these protocols have people always you know this aggregation theory is at play people don't leave these platforms

because it's convenient and they have Network effects so back to like how does the how does crypto web 3 platform change that you have their open permissionless they're also not private at the moment there's a huge privacy area so if we could touch on that that'd be great a little bit but let me answer the first part of your question don't think we can leave I am as pro-decentralization as I you can be and I use Twitter because that's where the whole audience is and I have a choice from using the Apple app store or the Android App Store both of which operate and broadly the

same way and that's it what's my choice where is the third fourth fifth tenth eleventh phone I can and has a different one there's little if I go to the telephone store there is no other choice you know I'm going to roll my own cell phone I'm going to order my own hardware and run Linux on it as a read accounts of course you can't do that right and so this is a this is a fake choice the reality is even someone who is very famously concerned about these things I spend all day in centralized systems

and the only ones that have true exit are the web ones Nemo and it's interesting I think one of the things that's a nuanced part of this if you can exit the provider's behave I don't mean to exit Gmail or Outlook because in Gmail and Outlook they broadly behave reasonably because you can accept and so I am in no way against the economies of scale of big tech companies to be able to deliver high performance applications what I am in favor of

is that the network affects a crude or protocol not so service so in email a network affects the true Network effects on SMTP not in Gmail there is literally not a single alternative to SMTP ever news and so if you can get the network effects to accrue two protocol yes are there some issues with centralization in nothing is an absolute in life it is a level that is one can be comfortable with and I keep repeating this example because it's so recent and so obvious

where was the long U.S debate about Donald Trump's having an email account there wasn't practically speaking there wasn't now one more I think concept but it's a very crypto concept I think is right we don't own anything in British Oscars whereas our instincts in a democratic country are very well honed that if someone told you you can't own something in the physical world you'd freak out right like we have hundreds of years in

many countries and dozens and others where the ability of citizens of a country to have to own private property is considered a very important right and if the state or companies told you you couldn't own private property the reaction is horrible because the situations where that happened or like company towns where the you know miners were kept in some form of indentured servitude right or feudal Estates where there was a local number of royalty and yeah you could

work the fields but they weren't yours right you couldn't have them you could not own the fields the Lord was on the fields right all our instincts are good when it comes to if I said Hey I've thought of a greater way a better way to organize Society me I'm gonna own everything and you guys can just use it in terms of I said and in fact it's going to be between illegal and impractical for you to own anything this would not win a lot of votes for my presidential candidate campaign and I would correctly be thrown out of any civilized debate in a constitutional democracy right and yet

we do not seem to be able to make the sleep into the visual space in the digital space every single thing is behind an end user license agreement you're a customer of someone else to everything on your bank account that's not true your access to citibank.com is governed by the terms of service agreement of Citibank and Citibank can wake up one day in a bad mood and say please get off my servers and the money you have in Citibank is not of course cash it's not a rare instrument you are a unsecured creditor

to Citibank with whatever the FDIC decides to do in the you know credit or Citibank who gets to use their servers at their discussion the same is true in gaming the same is true in social media the same is true and um office productivity apps whereas we spend I spend my physical day largely around spaces and or objects that I own I own my desk my car my art on the wall my clothes my home uh not my office but someone owns my office right not Google

[Music] um and for some reason we haven't been able to articulate that this is just as important that you can have private ownership and public comments in a digital space and here we'll go to mfts and we'll go to the simplest most clearly it's important because it's not important if I told you I very famously tweeted about owning an Andy Warhol soup can I own it in my house it's on the wall it is a non-custodial piece of art look

at how it's been turned around right it's not that Credit Suisse owns it and lets me use it on terms they decide I own it by owning it there are a variety of risks to me and others I could very theoretically use it to commit a crime I don't know so the Warhol and buy drugs highly theoretical are they good right nothing stopping me I could suffer loss I might not insure it properly and someone might steal it my roof might leak and it gets ruined and we as a society consider it

perfectly normal and acceptable that I can do that in any societies that no no you cannot own an Andy Warhol and you cannot put it on your wall because non-custodial wallets are used for money laundering and terrorism and unregistered Securities offerings and for your safety six five to nine we are going to have to hold this piece of art at Jason we'll have to use it under these certain terms and conditions and if I want to give my Warhols why why what's the reason I need explanations your default not allowed to do this and if I said this about a painting everyone like this is a wholly ridiculous position for democracy to have right does it feel the physical world

feels real to people I'm here to tell you that digital world is just as real arguably more important because the whole economy X certain physical items the whole Services economy runs through digital world and so we are actually having a debate it is a position in Congress by some parts of a major political party that we should not have quote unquote non-custodial laws that they should be illegal there are parts of political parties in the European Union who also believe this it is there are days when it is like 60 40 whether the EU or the United States will

ban non-custodial wallets right which means they are Banning the ability for their citizens to own something digitally they are saying to their citizens we do not trust you to own anything and we need you to go become customers of some large corporation whom we trust more and this is not to say that there is not money laundering in the world and that there is not crime in the world of course these things exist but one of the fundamental characteristics of a constitutional

democracy is when you have that slider that says on one hand how much private crime can we tolerate and on the other hand how much State Crime can we tolerate you don't take the slider and Max it over to the stateside right that's how you'll end up with totalitarian regimes in totalitarian regimes in the end cause much more damage than criminals all right like if you think about you know take the worst gangster like just be clear I am not in favor of terrorist impregularism obviously not in favor of Al Capone writes a famous gangster

how many people did Al Capone kill um 200 right I mean is I think this idea like you know back to your point around like there is an infringement on the ability to own property in this case it's digital and it's equally or more important because we're spending most of our lives in the digital context and Congress or government should not have an opinion on that and it's unconstitutional to ban your Liberty to do so and the second point is back to your point on Gmail you know we don't talk about how much nefarious activities enabled because people send each other emails and may enable fraud or Terror I mean I'm sure these people communicate on these protocols but you don't clamp down

on that you don't talk about WhatsApp or say like you know I mean these pieces of Technology are neutral and they facilitate communication people see a lot of stuff but but having an opinion on on those type of services seems like a huge contradiction because we haven't done so for there's a it's sort of like a we're drawing lines here between we don't go after the GMOs of the world but we are going really focused on crypto and so it feels very contradictory right well I haven't even stronger view than you I don't think governments should be neutral I think governments should favor public protocols right I agree with that and and all of the issues

that you know the EU does a lot of stuff I'm like oh you need to have interoperability and have all these rules on all these rules for providers and they're very complicated and you need like an army of lawyers to do them so the net effect of this it just solidifies the big American tech companies as the winners right that's what actually happens but in any case the spirit of those things is good just that approach is completely backwards the way you have interoperability is let the user own their data let the user own their avatars and let application providers compete for the user so it's not a question of having to beg the application provider to give them the data right and you know we're in the nft space so it's easy I don't

have to beg anyone not open C right not um on Cyber to give me my punk I have my part it's in my wallet I don't need anyone's permission to export my data I don't need the US government or the European Union to mandate The larva Labs gives me like where you go gives me my punk if I want to take it somewhere else I already own it it's a better system it's a simpler system it's a system that is solved we solved it with Bitcoin for fungible tokens and

we know what what is fungible in the world usually financial instruments money and stocks and bonds and those types of things and so that's solve for there right so you can hold you can hold a store of value yourself and that's fine and that's good and with nfts we've solved it for literally everything else and everything else you need in the digital world is all in with this oil your whole life is digital right heart of the heart of the major issue I think we have with the people at large and why we have not been able to create the Groundswell on this topic is people haven't quite felt emotionally that their Digital Life is Real

right and it's partially because most people have not yet had some type of disaster individual life but the disaster is going to happen I'll give you an example on Central Bank digital currencies what I think is going to happen well I'm thinking as much lobby as I can that doesn't happen it's very interesting watching the discussions of the governors of the European Central Bank and not all of them but some of them say you know what's great about having a central bank digital currency which of course a permission system and we are not going to we'll get rid of cash too right some of them wanted to cash for the same reasons it's not just there they don't like Bitcoin they don't like cash either I didn't say worldview

they say look we'll eliminate crime and money laundering into activation all these things if I have positive social objectives but long before you eliminate crime because no Society has eliminated crime here's what's actually going to happen some political leader I don't know pick your least favorite political leader before the elections is going to make sure none of his political opponents can buy a tornado doesn't have to be privately it can be for like 30 days they flag them somewhere in some unreviewable AML system in the Central Bank of Hungary suddenly their campaign grinds to a halt

as a campaign [Music] that's what's going to happen when you create the world's most in attractive Honeypot being in charge of who can spend money quote unquote Stalin never had that power right Stalin sitting there in Moscow you're somewhere in Siberia you want to buy a tomato from your neighbor it's literally impossible for Stalin to stop once everything is on a permissioned digital rail well now in fact you can do that as well but it's still a lot of people are transactional hello that's how we have machine learning

right you can have much our behavioral patterns both in spending and in how we interact socially are predictable I'm 100 certain if you gave me the data of every single person's transactions and I ran a machine learning model I could classify Republicans and Democrats but perfectly right now this is John whatever your different political uh groupings are in any country and if you have that and you have that an automated scale and you can just freeze people's payments freeze people's Digital Life you know there's a vague Terror in the back of my head that

someday my Twitter account will be suspected one of our Twitter accounts the one for almost got suspended last night I didn't know why I have to go like trying to get unsuspended but why should I have that Terror I don't have any Terror that my printer is going to get suspended but no one can keep me from printing things and distributing posters and things in the ordered large right but I do have like a vague term like for some reason not I haven't planted anything bad I don't know I'll trigger some algorithm in my calculator it's ridiculous why should we have to think about this why should I have to think about who gets to decide what I spend on things I mean I can imagine why

this would be a good system if your political beliefs are totalitarian sum up this first part of the conversation which in my mind is like you have a map you have a metaverse which is basically just the internet with better visualizations and these persistent digital objects it's very important that uh this is built on like open web3 rails and open crypto rails and permissionless protocols instead of corporate uh corporate rails and inside of these like permissioned walled Gardens and the reason for that is you don't want uh the the end goal here is to have zero ownership like zero counterparty risk of uh of of owner of like digital ownership basically there

are going to be two places that you store your digital your digital things your digital Goods one is either on crypto rails and the other is inside of a corporate service that could and probably will either at some point in time censor you or censor someone you know or will most likely just shut down because companies shut a lot of things down does that feel like a good way to summarize this kind of first part it's great and I'll simplified there's two places you can store digital objects in a database or in a blockchain and data basis by definition centralized because ultimately there's a database administrator that can go into MySQL or postcode SQL and change the interest right so you uh a major innovation of

blockchains is you have a database without one person in charge so right now this date is pushing us towards corporate databases as opposed to public Community databases which are blockchains and any properly Democratic State Should prefer the latter not the former this episode is brought to you by thales a new frontier in simple on-chain options here's what you do you choose an asset a strike price and the market you want to participate in and that's it with its powerful and capital efficient amm based architecture thales is able to offer low fees automated liquidity and

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now let's get back to Empire all right take me into your so this is like really interesting conversation on like big Frameworks for the metaverse let's go deeper into nfts because I want to end up at this acquisition of the goose that you just made I've heard you describe uh nfts is like an nfts untie viewership from ownership of art so maybe just like I'd love to just hear how you're thinking about like there are these big buckets of nfts like pfps digital art in-game nfts nfts being used as royalties from kind of traditional like web 2 Brands what is your like working investment thesis and like just framework for how you're thinking about nfts then that can lead us into this conversation about the goose

sure and I think what you described as my view on Art nfts before I do that I want to note I think nfts are a very broad technology I think nfts will transport art they will transport avatars they'll transport pfps they'll transport digital wearables but they'll also transport in-game objects Brands Community identity and then in time they'll even transport off-chain non-fungible objects right so today why are we talking primarily about art well because art can be natively digital so you don't need any Bridges to the physical world for it to work

and artists tend to be um or some artists Cutting Edge and do things early and it makes sense that the first person to try a new medium is an artist not a big company but I think in time you will have an nft that is your not just a piece of art but it is your nft for donating to your University and for being a season ticket fan of your sports team and for buying 11 burritos in a row a Chipotle and for being your neighborhood Pit Master and the barbecue club right so nfts themselves are not just art nfts now for art nfts

I think nfts are exceptional and they're exceptional for the reason you just mentioned how do how does physical art work a successful physical art you become famous or Bosque right so it becomes valuable okay great which means someone wealthy buys it now that someone wealthy can be an individual in rare cases a corporation usually individuals are then or a cultural institution like a museum a very common pathway is rich person buys an important piece of art and you know puts it in their house or even I know some very very wealthy people that have a lot of Art and even

very large houses most of their art is in stores they're like oh look I feel good I've bought this important piece of art it reflects something about my identity you know the years pass and now it's in their house so the original pieces in their house and they realize like a picture of it in a felon book or you can see something on the web but it's a copyright it's not the real thing it's not the actual thing that they've bought it's a derivative representation of it and the years pass and they get old and they're going to pass away or they passed away and depending on the pathway their life took their kids auctioned off and take the money right or maybe they're more civically minded

and donated to a museum and they donated Museum often so people can see it that's a very common pattern I feel all this Art's important I have lots of money my kids are all set I would like not my kids to solve this piece of art to buy another yacht like I think the people should be able to come to physical Museum and see nfts short circuit all of that you don't need to wait till the rich guy dies right because nfts separate ownership from viewership and even better cc0 public domain activities separate use from ownership we can come to that as a more advanced topic

but even normal entities most nfts are issued under a normal copyright license like you know the artist has the copyright to the piece but let's take an art nft it is natively a digital good it is minted the joy and every single person on planet Earth with access to the internet can see it in as much detail as it was originally created you have the real thing the authentic thing say oh well and I love this class of complaint well doesn't that suck for the owner that everyone can see it as an owner of a lot of nfts a lot of our entities

no that doesn't suck at all right my idea of buying art whether it's physical or digital is not to hide it so only I can see it in fact if I could take the physical art that I bought and found some way that like everyone could come look at it as well without having a bunch of random people traipsing through my house I'd like to do that too except I don't know how to do that right like it just can't be like hey my front door's open I'm gonna go in and find someone in my living room looking at the warholm it doesn't work right so who sees who sees my Warhol I don't know my 20 close friends will come over right who doesn't see my world everyone else is this a bug or a feature from my

perspective it's a gigantic bug the warhol's really cool I'd love for you to see it I'd love for you to see it without booking an appointment with me I would love for you to decide if you like it or not and I gained zero value negative value from saying I'm going to hide it from you even worse there's a lot of Art in like tax uh efficient reports AKA just sitting warehouses nobody's seeing it even the owner's not singing right what's that typical case I don't know they don't have a place for it on the wall well they might as well defer the tax so it sits in some Warehouse somewhere right I I don't know people have many theories

about art but I'm pretty sure there's no important theory about art that a very good outcome which is a common outcome in pre-nft art is that artists do their absolute best so then we can then stick it in a warehouse where nobody can see it that seems like a very bad framework for art so everyone can see it but also I can own it why why bother buying it if you can see it anyway right well that's true of many things that's also true physical why do you buy

a piece of art do you buy a piece of art because you're going to get cash flows from it no buy a piece of art because literally I didn't previously know what an Andy Warhol looked like no when went to the moment many times I've been talking about the original I've seen the princes so many times you buy it I think ultimately to express something about your identity yeah I guess I mean you just had this I'd love to maybe segue that into this conversation about the about the goose right so the goose was originally purchased post-men for I think one or two each if I remember correctly and then there's this uh this fun kind of I

don't know if there's a bidding war I guess you could call it when it sold for I think it was 1800 eth um bought by three arrows actually um I think it was Van doe maybe bid like five or six hundred each on it um but I I remember seeing one of your tweets that you I mean you've wanted this for a while and you just uh you just bought it at the Sotheby's auction so big congrats to you um you just bought it for 6.2 million roughly I think closer Minds yeah yeah plus or minus a little bit so I would love to hear the story of that the story but also the like yeah just the why and like is this a collector's item is this something you're planning on Flipping is this like a light a light hold like your your warm-up he's like yeah let me come to

that because there's some nuances in that let me finish I think nfts are arguably the socially optimal way to distribute art no digital art if someone wants to make a sculpture and if T is not a great way to distribute a sculpture and they're not saying all art needs to be digital but in the digital world we're going to need a lot of digital art we spend a lot of time in digital spaces and so artists generally prefer that their art is seen right they make art because it has some meaning they want to express a certain view about Society so is it better than everyone can see their art from the day it's made not 40 years later when everyone's dead yes The World At Large it's considered socially beneficial with world of large

can see art that's why the public funds museums if we do not think it's socially beneficial we don't have art museums right and people both through taxes and through donations fund museums because it's socially beneficial for even people who cannot afford the ice cream go see it and even then do you know how many people visit the moment every year it's like 1.7 million 2 million something in that range I would have said like 20 million right it's a tiny number wow it's a number that's Gigantic by you know Museum numbers but it's tiny by internet numbers right

two million is not a lot of people in the course of a year um I just thought which I was writing that's right yeah I mean I guess like New York gets 61 million tourists give or take so that's like a lot of corrupt let's see so pick one Wikipedia well not including the people of New York they could go see it says here Wikipedia I don't know if that's right 3.9 million people right it's single digits Millions yeah right and then it's like less than 10 percent right well but I think the issue is like if you want to see the moment step one is you have to go to New York I'm going to New York's expensive

proposition that for like 90 of the world awesome it's like you can't afford it right now if some people cannot afford to go to New York I mean we shouldn't get mixed up by the fact that like everyone we know can do a weekend in New York I like oh absolutely right when I highly misrepresentative slice of society right so magnificent people can literally never go on them even the ones that can it's in usage you have to fly there you have to stand in line you have to do all these things and if you believe that one of promoting art is an important function of museums the fact that one of the greatest museums on the planet has fewer quote unquote users than a fifth tier internet service right

is a bug not a feature and so with nfts the second it is minted the second the art is created and for the rest of everyone's lives it is available to all eight billion people on planet Earth with internet access what if it's 9 billion it's six billion four billion forever that is a huge Chiller feature and it does not impact the owner this has never impacted me one bit if anything it's better absolutely and if anything I can say like look I own this piece and I'm glad you can share it with me and we all know that we're on this

piece I mean you know me because of the tool for someone you don't know me because of my warholm hello how would you know it's in my house right so yeah the provenance of it is is huge right because anyone can view it and no one can dispute the ultimate owner and the veracity and the authenticity of said Peace like you will own the goose people can look at your wallet you know you own that cryptographically like there's proof that you are the owner and there's also richness I guess in the collect the the history of the collection of the nft itself you can go and see who's owned in this case you bought it from Sotheby's well you Sotheby's auctioned it but it was starting out I guess it

was a three Arrow collection and so there's some history behind that right um and it's all available to everyone you know there's a lot of complaining from the art World about nfts I was gonna ask you that a lot of complaining you know for a while the complaining was all like ethereum was boiling the oceans and then you know ethereum moves from proof of work to proof of stake at which point ethereum is obviously vastly more energy efficient than going to Art basil and having parties and flying everyone to Miami and renting huge conference halls and boiling the oceans but suddenly the people who are really concerned that nfts were boiling the

oceans when ethereum was proof of work did not come out and say cool let's cancel all the art shows since now we can distribute art without burning any carbon whatsoever oddly they just now now we never heard their deep interest in carbon afterwards right even though obviously the environmentally correct choice now for art is nft is not physical right they're vastly more efficient but I think the art world is acting it's very amusing to see it's acting like every incumbent industry that has ever met the internet it is the greatest thing that could happen to the art world you can expand

artists you can expand collectors you can reduce the very narrow distribution channels of the art galleries and sure when you hit the internet will there be things that you look under God this is terrible Archer you know when I remember uh editorial once by the New York Times it said this was my 90s who is going to be the editor of the internet who is going to decide what news is fit to print and you know for their world view this is really painful and when we decided we decide if it's important oh what we all get to decide

this was very shattering to your world view if you have spent the last 100 years everyone telling you that what the editor of the New York Times thinks is like a globally important topic and all the News That's fit to print they decide not anyone else things well you don't expect that party to react well to them right like you've taken them off a gigantic pedestal but everyone can write whatever they want they want though that has some bad but overall exactly nobody is lobbying to shut down the internet and go back to a world where the editors of five

newspapers a few publishing companies and a few magazines decide who can get words into print like obviously Society will be vastly worse off if that happens and the exact same thing is going to happen with art right this just like we have a lot more written word when a written word doesn't have to go through a bunch of extremely slow and painful distribution channels now that art doesn't need to go through a bunch of extremely slow pre-internet distribution channels we're going to have orders of magnitude more art and all over the Spectrum and just like internet videos are Netflix dramatic series on the high end and like stupid

YouTube videos on the low end and everything in between show will art and it's a wonderful thing unless you hate people right unless like you think like people should not express themselves and that the point of art is to keep people from expressing themselves and you want to decide who should Express themselves and who should appreciate that expression and if you think that and also think you're Pro art I respectfully submit you're not in any way Pro art you are just excited about your own ego that's it I mean ultimately all this really boils down to we have a new New Concept here which is digital property uniquely enabled

by crypto and proving who who created that who owns that and that's powerful and we should make sure and Advocate that we have the right to do so uh and and the freedom to do so in the same way that we have the ability to own physical property um and and so I'm curious and of course like you know the art war was interesting because like a lot of the more celebrated artists now in their lifetime didn't achieve any success and the art world has kind of had this income like innovators dilemma if you will the problem of incumbents I want to get your opinion on the goose you know I heard you say that when you were betting there was folks from the traditional art world you seem to think that the second

highest bidder was from the not a non-crypto native um this piece is unique I think because it's generative art and so the question I want to ask you is like some people as it relates to AI generally you know how do you think humans will perceive art that is created by a machine either assisted or fully created and and is there like how do you think about the value of that and the perception of of that in in everything that is kind of Art in the beauty of art itself which is highly subjective okay I've now stacked up three things I need to answer let me do the briefly the mechanics of the goose then we'll do

your question and then we'll talk about the future of these so the goose was invented for around 0.18 or whatever there was all Ringers in early 2021 a nft collector called pixel Pete bought it for a couple of these and then in summer of 2021 when um the world really discovered art blocks are the nft world discovered art blocks and generative art and you started seeing the separation and values from the top pieces and the rest of pieces um Vincent van dogh was a big uh collector and Creator tried to buy it for 500 even

that offer was completely rejected as being uh you know completely not appropriate very low and the last week of August 3ac being advised by Vincent offered 1750 East so about five point something million then and in that same August uh for the 6529 Museum and I'll describe the difference between the two later I had decided that there were three very big purchases I wanted to make are important or important to me here I thought important in the context of how

I think about this one was summer.jpg which I succeeded at the beginning of a month for no auction the other was a tulip which is a very well known for Denzel that looks like a tulip and given we have spent our whole history in crypto with the traditional Financial system telling us were trading tulips unwanted tax reveals I guess in fact we are imperialism sorry beautiful it's also a tulip and music right we are trading clothes spend a lot of money for this tool um Andrews like the Tulip and the goose were the two most memetic generative art pieces and I separate that from aesthetic Fine Arts I don't know I don't know I mean they're beautiful

aesthetically and there's other beautiful pieces aesthetical you know aesthetic generative pieces there are dozens and dozens that are superb but most of them don't have also the capacity to transport through culture right um and we'll come to what I think this means specifically for the goose so anyway I find out I wanted the goose I find out 3ac had put an offer in and I had just bought the Tulip too I mean those guys like broke and I went and gathered like every penny I could find I was hitting up my friends like dude you got to send something right now

um and I could get to like 1700 I was also 50 East short so I was texting pixel people like he had given a deadline on Friday I think I said give me until Monday I'm only 50 short I'll find another 50s over the weekend I'll go out and like Panhandle 58 I'll find 50. I don't think he said well no I mean I told the guys Friday like I'm gonna stick with my word and then through AC through another like 50 eth on it just to finish me off and so it traded at 1800 eighth and I came very very close and okay I said that's that's a shame

because I thought the Tulip on the goose together would be really truly incredible anything too most nomadic um but on the other hand what I just said a second ago was also true well I can still look at it it's not like suzu is going to go hide it in his house right like so okay I mean I was sad but like luxury rich person problem sound right like is that like that's not like actually like a real problem it's there was a theory and a thesis and it didn't work but it's not like the goose was gone forever I could still go on Xbox and look at it and you know maybe some days that have gotten displayed together and do a show together and that's okay from a social perspective it was fun

and then for everyone's surprise I was just as surprised as everyone else when the events with 3ac and as soon as that happened I was like first I was like good Lord how'd that possibly happen literally my second thought afterward good Lord how the possibly happiness wait I don't know what's going to happen to the goose so I have spent the last year worrying about what was going to happen to the goose I mean like genuinely worrying like genuinely worry like I thought this the original Theory made sense and I wanted and through what I consider basically a miracle

I was getting a second shot at it because once a multi-millionaire buys something you want your general view is like oh you're not going to get to buy it back right like that's it it's gone I need to move on to other theories and so I mean I have literally spent the last year thinking planning trying to make sure nothing goes wrong uh in terms of the girls and fortunately we've done a bunch of things and it worked out and I'm very very very very happy about it and I'm very very happy about it for the Boost itself I mean why is the goose important so and I know we have some people in the audience who are not generative art or Unchained generative or a long chain long form generative art specialists so

I'll try and explain because there's a reason it's important so generative art is Art that's generated by an algorithm but with nft collections Circa a couple years ago we can generate his existence since the 1950s this is not new this wonderful General artists that have wonderful pieces and major museums is a small but well-regarded part of the art history of our world what is different with long-form generative entities is the fact that the artist does not know in advance what the pieces are going to be

so what the artist does is they release an algorithm to the blockchain that algorithm takes in random data from the environment at the time that someone mints it so every time someone mints an nft in a long-form genre of collection you have astronomical odds against the same nft will ever appear right like astronomical it's not going to happen and so both the minters the initial collectors and the artists are engaging in some Act of Faith on what's going to come out you're asking someone to spend 0.20 for one Ethan Zone you'll find out after you press the button what's going

to come and the artist has an even bigger Act of Faith because they're putting the algorithm out they're putting their reputation on the line and if the the mints don't come out nicely everyone's going to be like oh okay well that wasn't great whereas if you're working generatively or another in your studio you work for a purpose now this is good now I'm comfortable showing you so I think there's no greater leap of faith in art than onshamed long-form generative art you start with that you say all right well what typically happens how are collections valued then our piece is valued in collections

collections are valued very broadly with lots of exceptions based on are the pieces are artistically are the pieces in general artistically interesting and beautiful and people like them and they mean something hey B are the pieces across the collection sufficiently different one from another that it's not like looking at effectively the same piece a thousand times and see while they're being sufficiently different do they still obviously look like they're part of the same collection so you know two of the most famous collections are ringers and finances and they share all these characteristics

right many most almost all individual ringers and individual franzas are attractive in their different ways right one is more abstract and conceptual one is more classically beautiful they don't all look like each other right there's significant differences between the two but also you have no doubt when you see a ringer or a fidenza that you're looking at a ringer reference right there is a very strong DNA running through the collection and with so this this is what makes a collection itself appealing attractive and valuable and then and you know I'm taking some shortcuts right we're talking to journalist audience but I think these are like useful you know useful ways to

think about it the second thing is within the collection in 99 of cases the things that drive value are some combination of aesthetic Beauty when it exists and Rarity sometimes you know when the collection's not very pretty rarely matters more right and the collection Rarity by hearing means certain traits in the collection when the collection is extremely good and the pieces are very good Rarity matters less and sometimes you have both Aesthetics and Rarity but in a collection that has genuinely differentiated Aesthetics the Aesthetics are going to Trump threat and in some cases it's other way around and this is the normal case

and I'm going to add one more Factor though that is emergence an emergence is something very rare it is when the algorithm produces an effect that nobody expected huh I'm 100 certain when Dimitri released the algorithm he did not expect that the most famous ringer was going to literally be called and look like a goose all right you could rerun the mint a thousand times and you won't get another goose don't get various combinations of pegs and

strings right the ringers isn't conceptual exercise of how you can wrap strings around pegs right and there's different numbers of pegs and different numbers of strings and different colors and it turns out it's one of those like hyper exponential problems that there's like an almost astronomical number of ways you can wrap strings around text and so even the project itself is a big Merit project right like this is like oh it's factorial math project and it turned out that the average render will try nice in a kind of minimalistic abstract way and it's a nice thing to have in your wall and for the lucky people who have like four or nine and can make a grid then it's really powerful and Demetra always says this that was the plan for the collection and it's the default way to really show off

the collection because then you can see the different types of ways that the colors and the pigs and the strings come out differently for each one so if you're looking at a grid of nine it's really interesting and this is what the collection was meant to do and what the collection did very successfully [Music] except for the goose that went in a completely different direction randomly just luck of the astronomical draw and once you see it you can't outsee it unsee it it's very much a goose and an elegant minimalistic stripped downwards so what

what's the chain of events that then happen right well the fact that it is a goose was interesting to the genitive art nerds for all the reasons I just said it's not interesting if Dimitri just went tomorrow and draw drew a cow or something by hand no I don't care this is where there's a huge gap when people don't understand like wait a second why did this idiot spend six million dollars on something that looks like you first grader could draw right that's no sense whatsoever well now the interesting part is not that it's a goose the interesting part is this algorithm of pegs and strings through astronomical odds against

produced a goose right and it's not just it looks like it's elegant it's attractive it's an attractive and elegant piece of art in its own right and so that would draw the first attention the first amount of attention and then because of that so that draws attention and then people start chasing it and it picks up a second aspect that you know the reason for attention is this nerd aspect but then it became mimetic we know it's nomadic because if I ask you to name five other ringers you can't right

what's the other ringer that you discuss by name there's one that the Nerds will say right the god-bringer but even that we're talking about generative Partners but what's the fifth one a fifth one that you know by name no nobody knows it even I can't tell you I couldn't tell you what like the fifth one I would know by name would be right and so then this becomes um not just an important piece of art from a technical art sense that I can have a discussion with someone who's really into General why it was really important Let It Go it becomes a part of our combined

nft slash crypto culture and then like us all pieces of important art you know someone asked me I think a reporter asked me is it more valuable because 3ac owned it it's another questions backwards three AC owned it because it was valuable if you're a valuable piece of art interesting people will try and own it right you will go on an interesting journey in life because you're an important and valuable piece of art it's the the directionality is another way and so that's I think I answered how it got sold so they didn't answer your question was another part to your question this is

why I think it's an important piece oh and then you asked oh who was who was the counter bidder I'm not 100 sure but like for what I know I have a very strong view of Suspicion of who it is and it is someone who as far as I know is not uh visibly active in the crypto space but but he's active no I just don't know I don't know it's a very wealthy person from a traditional industry is he based in the UK no okay because I I don't know I do know someone in the UK is like he's um or this a very large nft collector and you had

no no no no no I I know who that is that's not it yeah yeah I'm curious like well before we get there like you talk about the museum but you also have a fund correct and I've heard you say look some of these things may not obviously talk about value and for me collecting I don't think about as as investing because I'm attached to these things and I I'm not going to sell them I hope to not sell them right it's been very difficult for me to get rid of stuff I think I've only sold one nft and it was a particular reason to do that it was more like a attached to an investment in a metaverse project anyways someone wanted it and it was he was a huge part of the community so sold it to him and the team wanted me to do

that how do you think about and I guess what is the the function of the fun I mean at some point you return Capital maybe not is it Evergreen like I'm curious how you think about these things in it from excellent questions excellent questions and you know we have a sufficient now for this topic the audience is sophisticated so we will describe this in sophisticated terms the museum is what you just described I am never selling this and for sure I have a bunch of pfps in there from different collections I'm not saying I won't sell them eaten deeply but that doesn't matter the art there is never getting sold it is a one-way you go in you don't come out the museum is primarily my money plus some close

friends some of them well known in the crypto space that I harassed at some point when I ran out of money you know let me know I was like what 30 million dollars at some point outside about to look so well my car in my house will never heard alternative to you so there is a limit you could never I hit my limit too right and but even when like one of my very best friends sent me some money I told them what sure you'll have them some small percentage of this is are we going to sell them later for more money I said no are we gonna sell the whole thing I said

no also no but like I think we should buy them and so let's buy them and just but like I said look if you're gonna ask me about an exit don't send me money okay and so the majority of the money is mine there there's some from what friends and they invested under the very unusual proposition if they will send me the money and I'm not telling them if it when I'm sending it back um um the idea there isn't the important part isn't the capital structure right the important part there I thought two things were needed and were missing from this place

one thing that was needed is the space is a bunch of Traders right this makes sense because they came out of the crypto space and like you know all you can really do with like a bunch of fungible tokens is like most tokens sadly to say all you knew is like sell them among each other right like so you have this culture in the space of a bunch of nfts were getting flipped at all times and in some collections I don't know pfp collections kind of who cares right who cares if someone is flipping apes and monkeys and cats and dogs to each other how do they matter so much but when an artist makes a beautiful work of art a photographer a graphic artist an animator

their needs and I still have no I'm not going to shame people who sell or trade that's fine absolutely if I'm going to do that but there needed to be at least one space and I think now other people are doing it too and it's very healthy let's say it comes in then that's it like I'm not buying I didn't buy the Tulip at summer.jpg or this Photograph or that's like to help like a year later someone's gonna buy it for more than in fact on many of these pieces it's hard to imagine who the person in the world who's going to Value them more than right like I value them tremendously I mean emotionally right unfortunate emotionally so that was one number two and this is Nuance for things important

I said you know what's gonna happen if nfts work these things are going to get bought by centralized players that's what's gonna happen in the case where they have that it doesn't work okay fine and if these all go away we're all forced into custodial wallets I don't know crypto dies don't worry about that halfway in the world I don't think it's going to happen but if it happens then none of this matters anyway if it works should these things be owned by Goldman Sachs shouldn't these things be owned by Facebook should these things be owned by I don't think so are they going to use them to promote crypto native values I mean you know a bunch of the financial

sector is going to absorb Bitcoin into centralized structures right and Bitcoin most Bitcoin does not trade on chain right trades and centralized structures and so you buy um synthetic Bitcoin right your Bitcoin on coinbase is synthetic Bitcoin right your Bitcoin in an ETF is synthetic Bitcoin you don't actually touch the Bitcoin I said well I mean that's fine I have no objection to bitcoin ETFs I think they're a good thing but the whole point of all the stuff the thing that motivates me because we're up in the morning is that we promote things operating operating on chain not decentralized structure around right

okay so the museum has another characteristic it's going to live in untrained spaces so we started working on um open metaverse a protocol for decentralized metaverses it has a ton of work ahead of it but the reason I did that is I said okay cool I have this now where am I going to put it I shouldn't put it in someone's centralized space as its main home because the whole Theory the whole values and principles here is to try to figure out how to do things decentralized and if I can't figure out how to do it to some cross like when you tell me like buy a decentralized phone no I'm telling you I can't do it right when you tell me find a way to display nfts and even the spatial display is decentralized yeah that I can do it's

work except for developers and Graphics it's Doom and so I thought okay so the museum is going to solve a very specific problem I want nfts and I want nfts to be seen by The World At Large and have a reasonable experience and also not hit an Oracle database no disrespect Mentor I want to be able to do it without hitting a database I want to be able to do it in a way that you can come replicate it without asking my permission right so that's a big science project right now I think we'll get there but it's a big science project and then the combination of one and two that these things aren't just being treated as

trading tokens but actually is Art and art that always reflects some of our crypto values anyone who's an artist in 2021 and 2022 and nfts is one of us right they've somehow fought the gigantic fud from their peers I I deserve permanent respect and these parts of our you know crypto native culture and despite it a Kryptonite of way I think helps coalesce a culture that this matters because otherwise you know you can't expect the people who don't already believe in

this stuff to think you take it seriously that these public comments are important in this crypto stuff's important if literally everyone's just trying to dump tokens on everyone else at all times right like it plays into the narrative but everyone's just here for like some form of gambling right and if all crypto ends is some form of gambling well it's not actually societally important and so who cares how it's operate right we need to build actual activities institutions communities that are doing something else on a decentralized blockchain and gambling their money this is a vaguely controversial position

in this field it's right no one's going to take us seriously if we can't do this too right like you can't say that the societal value to crypto isn't speculating on tokens right like do I say we shouldn't have markets sure no you need markets because markets you need markets the price things officially you know are outside of the very big tokens are crypto markets or nft markets efficient no they're not completely absurd in stupid market so I click there like there's nothing there's nothing societally meaningful and that the price of a board ape is 16th a week ago on 40s today and maybe tomorrow I'll be 50 and you know everyone's going to get their Apes liquidated on some lending protocol now and I mean

it's kind of vaguely amusing if you're into this type of stuff to watch it but like it's not societal and particularly valuable and this is the stuff that people see this is the stuff that people who don't understand crypto and you don't get like three hours to smile let me see this stuff I'm like wait I have my law enforcement people saying money laundering's Happening Here I look at this activity the activity looks wholly ridiculous people are basically gambling with animal animal collectible cards what's the social value of this right limited sure fine do whatever you need to in a law enforcement perspective to stop the terrorists if I understand crypto I think this too so it's important for our field for us to do things that are

unquestionably not crypto speculation and I think nfts are a very powerful thing because nft is an art nft is not promising you investment returns in fact it's not saying oh look if you buy Salon it's going to be up in price right but The Narrative of ypsilant is a useful High throughput blockchain is mostly Lost In The Narrative of like if the token has gone up or down three dollars or 250 or whatever whereas you buy a I was arguing with well he'll remain unnamed but a prominent tax

complainer and Porter wallowed basically like all nfts are [ __ ] for gambling and money laundering the normal stuff you hear right and I shot him away on this graffiti anadol rafik as a amazing generative artist who's had this long-running show in the moment now it keeps getting extended it's the most popular I think Obama has done in years and he made a nft of the projection of light projection on site and they're like 50 000 people that came and then he turned into nft and it's absolutely stunning and it's amazing art and math will have you know it's like

mobile level work right they're like okay so just because of the ownership record of this isn't a signature on the back and it's a token this is no longer art right and it's powerful because it's a way to start telling the story of why crypto is more than financial speculation and then I'll take it one step further and what I'm about to say only works for expensive pieces and for me to have this argument with people I have to have done it I can't just talk about it right because all this stuff's

worthless they're tricking people they say yeah you know I bought several tens of millions of dollars nfts instead of buying like I don't know yachts and vacation homes and things like that and I'm pretty sure I haven't been tricked by anyone right like I'm pretty sure no one has like tricked me into accidentally buying a crypto puck and what I tell them is the phone do you accept as a matter of principle that digital art can existence okay I'm gonna say you don't like you like desire you're accepted like there's a category of Art that's called a digital art and I think you know with anyone who's not completely ridiculous you can get them to accept and do you accept that like some digital art pieces might be valuable like that

here's one I paid a million dollars for and the question I would like you to ask is if I wasn't what could you offer me as an alternative as how I buy this truly digital art in a centralized service that I would have confidence paying a million bucks for because the centralized service would look something like Google art database service or something right and have an email account and then sign up and they'd hold the record that I owned this piece of digital art and AD feel pretty uncomfortable even in the base case spending a million dollars for an account on Google

to say nothing of the fact that with mathematical certainty three to seven years later who will do some strategic review and shut down that service and then you'd have spent a million dollars on God knows what right whereas I have a significantly higher confidence level about the neutrality of ethereum you know my ethereum literally disappear ance responsibility I think it's hard it's hard for literally all all validators in ethereum to disappear forever um Can ethereum is ethereum in any way going to decide like we don't carry art nfts anymore we're shutting down that division no that won't happen right like I don't it's a neutral space it's a

public Commons it is something where I don't have to worry maybe I like my piece in the future maybe I don't like it maybe it's worthwhile but it's not worth money but someone independent of me the artist and the artwork doesn't have a say right and if you're going to put real money into the stuff you need them and so a lot of this is a combination of so I am a C tier art collector pre nfts right so I'm neither like some big swinging buying 10 million pieces on canvas nor was or nfts the first time I collected her right so I'm somewhere in

the middle and so part of part of my collecting is scratching that personal art itch that I had even before this season right that would mean something that's beautiful alone um when I was a kid I was a pretty decent photographer so I have a really soft squat for photography entities even though they are literally the most illiquid part of the NFC Marketplace like all those I'm not going to flip them even if I wanted to [ __ ] him no one's gonna buy them you buy those and the the if goes away and is never seen again right yeah but the other part of this because I think it's important to send a message

and its message is those things because if if even someone as crypto friendly as me is not willing to put some scam again and say I am doing this not because I hope I'm going to have a return tomorrow but I'm doing this for cultural reasons but then we'll never get there I mean people like me should do this other people should do it I don't want to be there on the museum now a lot of people do it too it's good for the culture it's good for people to represent a culture in something other than financial terms so that's the museum you said oh there's a fun too right so let's talk about the fund the fund has the following characteristics uh the

base level is why more precise when I speak throughout the fund the fund doesn't structure today is a normal fund it has a 10-year life and the base level expectation is that it will solve the assets at the end of the tenure period that's the that's what the perspective says it's and so on however many other people have invested in the fund are also crypto native in fact 88 and one of the things that I keep telling people and no one listens to me but there's nothing more obvious I think in aggregate I have brought more fear incentives than anyone in the world

400 million dollars if not I'm close but I don't actually the most so I don't know if there's too many more people who know about what the psychological profile looks like if people are willing to spend millions of dollars in nfts but I can tell you none of them have just discovered crypto and immediately jumped into nfts without buying Bitcoin in material first you know an English art collection ah huge crypto exposure for long time before like it is a leapfar to tell someone to expect someone who in 2023 14 years after Bitcoin was launched who has not had the

intellectual interest or curiosity to go buy like 10 Bitcoins or 100 Bitcoins you know what I'm a rich people here right never bothered to think about them who is going to somehow make the leap that Bitcoin isn't imaginary kill of beans and the theory was an imaginary Hill of beans and therefore a JPEG on a non-fungible token sitting on a thing isn't an imaginary elephants it is impossible I'm not saying like that someone some big guy or a person will buy their first group of soldiers nft but it is a vanishingly small case so one of the things that I see in my Twitter feed that I think is completely like detached from reality is oh it's really important that we get

non-crypto native money into nfts hey this is gentlemen that's not happening right like what we want to do is get people into nft so they become crypto people I mean for nothing other reason they need to buy if one I can buy their nft on the blockchain I mean if someone doesn't know how to use a wallet they shouldn't be buying expensive nfts but where are they going to put it how are they going to use it how are they not going to get it lost are they going to just give it to custodian right so everyone is going to have and you know it's I mean there's tons and tons of millions of people in the world on crypto in just the United States I think in the world is over 100. Sundays if I'm not

mistaken let's get the people who have already found it in their hearts to buy some Bitcoin and ethereum and God knows what else which is nine figures I think number nine digits number of people let's get them to buy some entities so we go from one million ft holders to 100 million ft holders and then let's worry about the people who aren't even convinced by Bitcoin right I don't even understand what the psychological profile of this person is supposed to be thinks Bitcoin is a scam but is going to buy a jpeg I mean who who who thinks that I've never met anyone like this but I've never I don't think I've convinced a single person out of several dozen and I think I'm very compelling

about nfts to give us money to convert it into jpegs who hasn't previously bought Bitcoin right and so and the people who say we should do that should go do it I don't think they can if they can more power to them and I'm very happy if someone can go and take people who dislike crypto and get them to buy nfts I'll be very very impressed and my hats off to them and they should go do it but I just don't see how it's doing I just don't see it I don't think it happens now why do I say this every single person we talked took money from for the fund for the museum we're not selling it so if you don't like this don't send me money

fundraising strategy but what I told them was the fall I said we're going to have a fund but my preferences and my objective is that we don't solve the peace and you're gonna say oh okay well hold on how does that work right well I believe these important pieces in fact this is a good example you don't think the best outcome for it is but it is later bought by some other founder now or rich person I think these nfts and I'm going to say stuff where I'm now heading into wait what's he talking about because what I'm about to describe doesn't exist yet okay

I just have a feeling it can exist I think they should be in let's pray what the definition of community is let's park it these things need to be community-owned [Music] some of you if you want to exit you can some of you don't say you can but then we keep the collection together now that we're trying to put it together as a collection not as things we're going to flip later now unlike the museum where I am in legal control of it and if I say that's not the plan of the museum I can back it up it's my decision I don't have to ask anyone else right

this there's a step in between and the step in between says what does Community ownership of a digital Network Museum what might that look like and how is it different in a digital non-rival is good that it can be displayed all over the world at the same time and you can think about ownership in tiered ways and how is that maybe different than what you do in the physical world and you're gonna say like are you talking about fractionalizing the pieces and the answer is no it's not them I have tried fracturization not as a seller but as a buyer and I found it killed the magic and I went and bought a little bit of

you know there was that ape Punk that was fractionalized I think nothing bought some of the brc20 token and I felt a dead inside and the one thing that's true enough to use I don't feel at all that inside right I'm like wow this is like reverse Financial engineering you take something and apply Financial engineering and it gets like 20 times worse than those before you applied Financial engineering right because owning an nft is like fun and interesting and cool and owning a erc20 token that represents six percent of that nft it wasn't cool at all right so it's not bad I'm pretty sure it's not that um the design spec is what does a museum

look like in a digital on-chain Global era where it doesn't have to be rivalers that like if the mama buys challenging science and the mama and if the Abu Dhabi Museum buys it it's an Abu Dhabi but it can't be in most places once the fact that it can be in both places once the fact that you can separate viewers of promotership I think opens up a completely different design space that is today unexplored because as of two years ago you couldn't do it as of two years ago that was impossible if you wanted to see the real thing the real thing right in quotes you have to go somewhere

so you don't have to you can see the ownership from anywhere and you can see the object from anywhere which means we will make a network model don't ask me the details yet I'm working on right so if you look at method what I said is the following and I will repeat it here because I believe in being precise the rules in the museum first before I don't plan to solve I hope I give myself over 50 chances but I will find the solution for the fund as well and I have about a decade to figure it out it's a lot of time this place

and you know one aspect here is there's a lot of ideas that could be good ideas that are effectively illegal in the United States right like most variations of fractionalization of things are actually not just like maybe not nice feelings but they're also definitely Securities a lot of stuff's security you know I'm gonna gather a bunch of people and say we're going to buy nfts together and they're going to end up in value and the value of your units and then if T's are going to go up most most versions of that I think today's SEC is going to say it's secure now it's weird like should you be able to like get together with your friends and buy a piece of art yeah I think so right but any type of semi-scaled version of that I think

given the lens that SEC has today is tricky however I do not believe the current approach to crypto Assets in the United States is either correct or the Final Approach I think an approach that says in effect if you're running in internet service in exchange and you want to reward your users with tokens that this is legally questionable seems like a bizarre outcome for not just investment protection customer production dude so I suspect we're going to see overtime some Nuance to the regulatory regime for

crypto now this hopefully is not help you um it's obviously that time is not now and not in the next couple years but I have a decade so over the course of a decade um I think a lot of things can happen let me um before we this has been an amazing conversation there are two things that uh I want to get your take on before we wrap this one is uh one is Punks and one is crypto dick bots so I will leave it to you to talk about which collection you would uh you would like to talk about here well obviously punks I think are a very special Pace in the nft universe

um I've been asked many times what I think the punks institutionally should do well-known punks holder and I think my advice was do nothing right like most things I could imagine doing with the punks would hurt them not help them the punks need to solidify into history of what they were as a rather incredible piece of art themselves right like the amount of expressiveness that is built into 24 by 24 pixels in the pumps is off the chart for something and it's they are you look at pfps with many many more pixels and

they don't give the same feels as the punch Stone right so it's really an incredible work of art in addition to so My Hope for the punks is that um they are basically left alone because if they're basically left alone I think in time they will achieve and I don't think an actual word is the right word here they they will um become recognized by more people for what they actually are um I think what they are is important um the reason I ask I've talked to Santi a lot about this I remember um

like height of the bull market I was like if we ever get into like a raging bear Market again I'm buying a punk and here we are and I think the I think the floor of punks are what Santa you probably know about probably around 50 I'd say um and I think they've probably held up better than any other collection out there um but you know what is what is 50 today probably around 100 95 000 dollars yeah one of my predictions last year was that Apes would uh never kind of surpass the floor of punks I was wrong temporarily but uh yeah I mean it's a iconic collection no question and it arguably makes it less

iconic the more you add utility which is I think something that most people yeah kind of just they're lost where they got without utility and like nothing nothing will be helped by adding utility to the folks people should go out and look yeah yeah less utility the better and six six five two nine I I mean and like a lot of the um there have been a couple like big themes that you've talked about as you've that you've woven through um in this conversation in the last two hours and one of them is memes and just like the power of memes obviously and um I think I've seen you tweet a couple times about about dick but so we'd love to just get I know it's a for people not in crypto listening to this that almost feels comical to talk about but would

love to hear like your thesis around around the DBS um yeah look the crypto thick butts are super fun and I think we uh semiotics of Aesthetics though something like that of them is a very deliberate I don't take myself seriously right and so the message is not strictly speaking about dicks and butts right and you know if someone sees it the naive view you come outside you're like okay these people are just being like super crude right

but like it's just the reverse psychology inside joke of like I am not showing a rebel in good oh look here's this I'm going out as it's empty right with a multi hundred Heath gfp that's like sure counter cultural in some way but nonetheless within this space not countercultural right it's it's the blue chip whatever you want to call it right and the crypto thick but it's like no I am going to actually present myself in the most like absurd way possible like and it's one of these things it's like peacocks growing big Tails right like it's actually I can afford if I can afford to present myself

this way and take the theoretical social pain of that then that's actually a sign of Fitness well I mean maybe this I'm like ruining the whole crypto big butts fondness by saying this but I think it's that right it doesn't take yourself seriously and that's why they work and they're super fun and honestly I I they are accessible right they're still accessible what are they like one eighth or something yeah it's interesting I think they have somehow more cultural power than their metrics they don't have very many holders I think it's like the people who get into

them get obsessed right like people get into them and they're like unlike pumps for a lot of people buy one right except for little early holders I think people once they start buying crypto dick butts it's like Lay's chips that there's a lot of people I want like five and ten and fifteen and twenty and thirty so what the collection's five thousand something and there's uh 1600 holders if I remember 1700 so it's small a lot of people and they're not particularly highly valued and aggregate right like the floors are very high the totals are very high so if you looked at them purely on holder or financial metrics you would say it's not a very successful

or important collection but they have substantially more social capital than those metrics and um more about a capital and you see them on the feed and you ask me about them and you didn't ask about you know they are the 63rd most valuable collection right and the punks are the most viable collection and I think this is a reflection of how the social capital of the crypto think what's somehow exceeds them that you asked me about the first n63 most valuable collection so I've always found this an interesting uh situation just just to be clear I

never make a prescription about anything this is not they'll look they're undervalued no they're this has always been the case with crypto liquids you see them on the feed but no one goes and buys them I'm so the and the reality is I think there's only a certain number of people or type of people who are willing to put them out publicly right now 1869 for what I can say um I'll say this I'll tell you my last Thoughts The Following we're very very very very very super early in nfts everyone's theories are likely wrong the space is Tiny

it reminds me of Bitcoin 2013 and now we're in 2014. I have no idea if crypto markets go up or down but certainly early stage crypto has seemed more severe and long bear markets than this I was complaining about that bear Market no there's people around and they're tweeting and they're doing stuff a real bear Market everyone goes home there's nothing happening right like that's like the the definition of a bear Market isn't anger or sadness it's indifference right and so I don't know it could get better it could get worse um I think a lot of business models and

nfts are broken they are designed on exclusivity um but they're prematurely optimized right a lot of the 10K pfp collections that have groups of two or three or five thousand holders who have sold their holders on the idea that was very exclusive that's fine and that could be fine for an art collection like the punks but you can't really expand it then right like the pathway to expand is difficult for a lot of these and we have to expand you know I sometimes get crap from the feed

on like well why are you doing this and writing that look because right now we are nothing right a group of a few thousand people is like a Facebook group it's not a competitor to Facebook it's like one community group on Facebook of which they're like tens and tons and tens of thousands right now the staff that always sticks in my mind Rolex sells a million Rolexes a year average price on a twelve thousand dollars what's that six Eve if I told you I have a new nft collection supplies a million dollars a year and I expect to sell them at six eighth you'd say this is the most ridiculous thing in the world right but that's you know the high end of

identity luxury consumption so we have a long way to go most theories are going to be wrong people should try a bunch of different things but we do have to focus on getting non-financial messages out and also um getting more people in like politicians aren't going to care if there's a million it's not gonna matter so I'll stop there since I know you have to go and I've been talking constantly so um thank you for giving me the floor as a very quick follow-up and and um what is what are your thoughts on something like Louis Vuitton for instance using the ethereum protocol to issue their nfts and as a mechanism of I mean would you

be are you positive from an onboarding perspective because at the end of the day you know they're still using incredibly neutral protocol to settle is digital in a property like if we say this is this is like saying do I feel comfortable that Louis Vuitton uses SMTP and TCP or should they go use some centralized internet Transport service because I don't want them polluting with the centralized one the whole point the way you win the network Effect game is to get everyone to use your protocol right right so this idea of like people yelling at Adidas or Louis Vuitton or whatever for using ethereum is literally the exact optional shooting everyone

should come along I want Walmart to use it I want like Chipotle to use it I want everyone to use it doesn't mean you should buy spend forty one thousand dollars in a Louis Vuitton trunk but quite frankly if you're forty one thousand dollars just finally with one trunk you don't need my financial advice anyway right like you're this is not like any normal person's problem right it's a rich person's problem so if rich people want to spend forty thousand dollars just like if I want to spend a million dollars in nft who cares why is this anyone's problem right like well the freedom for transact well fellow Punk holder uh most people at the very beginning thought we were

the same you are far more uh nuanced and intellectual and uh for anyone out there still has any modicum of doubt he is a man of his own and much smarter than I am so really appreciate you taking the time and coming on the Pod to share your views and it's been a real treat um so um thanks again for for everyone and I think our listeners really enjoy it well thank you both for having me um I think we're all on the same team here and I think everyone's doing great work in the same direction [Music]