This Noble Family's Art Was Taken by Nazis, But Is Being Saved by NFTs - Ep.300

Transcript

hey all before we begin a couple quick announcements first i'm doing an end of year show with crypto predictions for 2022 by you please make a video or an audio recording of your 2022 crypto prediction or predictions and email it to hello unchainedpodcast.com with the subject line crypto prediction by the end of day tuesday december 28th and although i have asked people to send their name and where they're from as somebody pointed out to me on twitter if you don't want to dox yourself i guess you don't have to do that either unfortunately i do need to give a forewarning that if you excessively promote anything we will not include your prediction if you just want me to read on air a prediction that you just email that's

okay too it's just a little bit less fun don't forget the deadline is tuesday december 28th and the email address is hello and unchainedpodcast.com please put crypto prediction in the subject line also a reminder my book is coming out onto 22 22. if you're looking for a holiday gift pre-order it now to deliver later pre-order sales really helped that book that first week to help establish further demand and get it on any lists if you want to get a normie into crypto this fun tale just may do it someone who worked with me on the book and knew nothing at all about crypto when we started and after just two days of reading it and being nowhere near done with it was asking me such intelligent

questions about crypto that i asked how do you know so much about crypto their response from your book by the end they were completely obsessed and had already ordered a hardware wallet pre-order the kryptopians idealism greed lies and the making of the first big cryptocurrency craze today at bitly cryptopians that's bit.ly c-r-y-p-t-o-p-i-a-n-s and now onto the show hi everyone welcome to unchained your no hype resource for all things crypto i'm your host laura shin a journalist with over two decades of experience i started covering crypto six years ago and as a senior editor at forbes was the first

mainstream media reporter to cover cryptocurrency full-time this is the december 21st 2021 episode of unchained the nodal cache app makes earning crypto on your smartphone as easy as turning on your bluetooth nodal cache is private secure and available on ios and android visit nodal.io unchanged that's nod l e dot io slash unchained to start earning nodal cash buy earn and spend crypto on the crypto.com app new users can enjoy zero credit card fees on crypto purchases in the first 30 days download the crypto.com app and get 25 with the code laura link in the description

brave wallet is the first secure wallet built natively in a web 3 crypto browser with no extension required you can store manage and grow your crypto portfolio all from a safer wallet visit brave.com unchained to get started today's guests are william lapkovitz director of digital and media innovation at the house of lakovitz and michelle choi nft strategist welcome william and michelle hello thanks for having us thank you so much for having us we're excited to be here i met you both at the nf castle in prague in october which was an nft conference with an interesting purpose that's different from what we've typically seen

so far with nfts will why don't you start by just explaining your family's background and then we can get to the conference later absolutely well uh it's a long story that spans over 700 years um i come from an old bohemian noble family that have been patrons of the arts for over 700 years and uh over that time period there were pieces collected by paintings by bruegel velasquez caneletto krana we have hand annotated musical manuscripts by mozart beethoven and haydn along with decorative arts and ceramics and these collections uh have been lost twice and regained twice first under the nazi occupation in 1939

and then eventually with the communist occupation in 1948 and um after living in exile with my great grandfather being an outspoken critic of adolf hitler and also a critic of the communist regime we were forced to live in exile in the united states and then in 1989 after the enlightened leadership and vision of batslav havel we came back to this country to see what would be left of our family's heritage and we really didn't know what we would get back when we returned here and it ended up being one of the largest restitutions in the country consisting of collecting uh 20 000 movable objects that were spread across 100 different locations now while that sounds like a wonderful

fairy tale story of course there are a lot of issues that go around cultural preservation and taking care of care of these things and uh for over 60 years these pieces hadn't really been well cared for nor had the cultural monuments that we uh got back been taken very well care of so we had to sell off a lot of real estate assets and invest into the different cultural heritage sites to really preserve them and protect them and as a family we came to the decision that what we really wanted to do with these collections was open them to the public for the first time in history with the mission of preserving studying and sharing them with the world and that's what our family's been doing over the last 30 years we don't live in any of these uh palaces and castles that we manage today uh instead we try to look

for ways where we can really inspire people so that we can share the past and really create the future and just to clarify for listeners you know you described your family as a noble family but you know as far as i understand they were the royal family of i well i don't know if the czech republic is the correct term but uh of bohemia or whatever um and it was your i believe it was your great grandfather who abdicated the throne because he believed in democracy well there were many noble families that were across europe during this time period and in my family in particular was one of uh four major houses here in bohemia that were uh helping manage the kingdom of bohemia for the habsburg emperors at the time so my

direct ancestor the first prince lobkovitz was made a prince of the holy roman empire and served as chancellor of bohemia managing the kingdom of bohemia for the habsburg emperor and they were really the monarch that were reigning over this region and then in 1918 after the first world war and the establishment of the czechoslovak state here my great-grandfather uh who represented our family was actually a great believer in uh democracy and actually gave up his title and the the aristocratic title that we've held for hundreds of years so that we could support this new republic that was being created here and he was quite a pivotal figure for us as a family because he really redefined what our role would be and over the years i think and up till today

our family has always adjusted based off of the different time periods that we've lived in and uh my great grandfather i think was a great visionary in seeing where the world was going and new types of republics that were being established across europe during that time period and to give further background why don't we now explain how it was that you two met or how you two know each other and it can either be will or michelle who describes this i i can start because i think that much like a lot of the nf castle project will and i's friendship happens mainly virtually i think that we never had met in person before will happen to be in los angeles for a track wedding and my

and a lot of my friends were also staying with me at the time and so my friend said hey i have this great friend who's also from the czech republic why doesn't he come join join us for spring break and my family happens to be very generous in hosting guests and thinks it's so important to build community my family came to america when my parents were in around the high school age and really building a home base in the united states is important and so it's always been important in my family to bring friends together new and old and so will was a friend of several of my friends stayed with my family and really won over the heart of my family since he's just the most incredible house guest he always makes the best dinners and throws the best parties and cleans up and

everything and so we we came together because we had some mutual friends that brought us together and then since then stayed in touch throughout college but really after graduation haven't seen each other a lot until will's sister reached out to one of my friends and said hey will is doing virtual tours it's the wake of covid we haven't had interesting ways to fundraise given that museum visitorship and tours are really going down without people coming in person so why don't you check out this tour will is doing and so i logged on i saw will giving this incredible tour to a very small audience and right afterwards in the faq to will said why don't you start selling these as off-sites to tech companies people love different ways of meeting together

virtually even if we can't have offsides today and they also love something that's a little bit fun and interesting i worked at google in the past and google loves to have holiday parties at museums and i thought what better way to still bring in that spirit as well as the community building in a culturally interesting way through will's virtual tour so that's how we started working together again well did you want to add anything on that well i'll just add when when i'm giving my tours i'm really focusing on the history and the art and it's one of my favorite things is really finding ways to share these fun stories with everyone and michelle has been such a critical part of helping us share this story with other people her background as well lends to really thinking about how to

actually uh utilize better technology look for ways to connect with different people as well and uh this is where this kind of partnership really has started and and um it was wonderful to get a chance to work with her a little bit more and think about ways where we could continue sharing this story with more people which is really what i i enjoy the most and so how did that go well actually in both why don't you describe a little bit more about how you how your family has traditionally funded these efforts to maintain and restore uh your cultural objects and then why don't you also describe how these pandemic efforts went with the corporations so when we uh first came

back after the revolution and we started establishing um different museums across these different properties uh we had to think about ways to actually finance the care and upkeep of these collections we've primarily relied upon uh cultural tourism activities and different events that have been held in these historic properties to help finance the care and upkeep of these collections we also have a very generous donor basis that has made it possible to support these collections i have to acknowledge my grandmother as well who is 91 and is in the united states and helped establish a 501c3 that helped a lot of these efforts and one thing that um is uh quite difficult i think sometimes to understand is what what goes into some

of the piece of some of the upkeep and care of these places while we do have works of art that are worth large sums of money they're also all declared czech cultural monuments meaning that they can't leave the country and be sold so we have a responsibility to take care of these objects that are incredibly precious and are public goods and are something that's really important to world cultural heritage um but we uh there we've never had the opportunity to uh sell any of these things in order to finance our other educational programs or public programming but i think this also presents a very interesting case because this collection despite all of these moments in history uh nazis communism um uh there are different world wars that

have happened over these 700 years they've all stayed together as a collection and that is unique and you don't see that with museum institutions and very often you don't see that with a lot of private collections for us especially when covet hit we really had to think creatively about ways to support these collections when we had to close our doors there was still work that had to take place we have an entire collections team that we have on staff that does an incredible job making sure that we're able to share these things with people and we had to think creatively about how do we make sure that we can continue with those good works and continue sharing uh these things with the world and that's when we started slowly approaching uh and looking at the

blockchain space which came out of uh sort of our virtual tours and some of the work that we've been doing together uh with michelle yeah and can you elaborate on that like how did you end up turning to nfts i i guess it was michelle who had that idea or maybe not i'm not sure it certainly was not my idea it was an idea that was brought to me from some of the people we started to meet while we were selling virtual tours will and i were just looking back at our okrs we planned our 2021 very much like i would typically plan a product team at google deciding what's an okr it's an objective or key result and so very much like a classic corporate company would say what

is the end goal for the year will and i at the beginning of 21 thought what is important to us what would be considered a success at the lockwood's collection and what i really loved about working with the lapkowitz is is their commitment to retaining their staff during a financially hard time will was telling me about everyone on his team that has been working so hard in maintaining these collections about this group's dedication to despite financial hardship despite hitler despite the communists make sure that these collections and pieces stay together and that mission was really beautiful to me i am a classical pianist myself my mother has always taught me to love art history and when i heard about this story of people who despite the fact that they could not bring people physically together and

these beautiful spaces still wanted to share them virtually so that none of their staff had to be let go just like a lot of businesses were struggling with kovid it's a tough perception problem will and i faced where we thought all right we're going to be advertising the restoration of these beautiful castles and how do we dispel this image of a fancy prison prince in a castle in reality it's an incredibly passionate lover of culture a whole family of them that is upkeeping museums and people don't enter the museum industry for the finances it's really for the arts and the culture and i thought that that was so beautiful so we looked at the course of the year and said this is how much money we'd need to raise in order to fund will's digital media staff and from there backwards approach the problem of

all right how do we fundraise for that let's sell virtual tours let's have people visit the castle but from the comfort of their desks with their teams at the googles at the facebooks of the bcgs of the world we sold to all different types of companies that were looking for ways to have community building amongst their team and some of the people that we've met particularly from some of my recent companies said you guys have a physical collection that can't move and you need fundraising for it have you ever heard of crypto art and then it was kind of history from there we were introduced from some of my colleague former colleagues to someone named richard from manifold who gave us our first introductions in smart contracts and as soon as will and i understood

that nfts were so much more than a piece of digital artwork but rather an entire set of financial tools to empower creators we turn from virtual tours and fully committed to the nft space and so when you say that like what were your first thoughts that i mean obviously that you would sell nfts to fund uh the restoration and maintenance that you needed but like how did you go about starting this journey i if i just from the perspective of us as a cultural institution exploring this it was a scary moment i will say because we were definitely going into a field that was unknown to us

and if we were going to do so we said that we wanted to make sure that we did so thoughtfully that we didn't rush into the space and to us it wasn't just about finding a financial mechanism to support these collections but also finding a new community of people who could start engaging with these collections and i think the more and more we started exploring this we saw the value in a sense of community that could be created in this space and for me as a next generation or in our family thinking about how we can continue sharing this art with people and get people excited about the arts i love the idea of connecting with a younger audience that uh could feel a sense of pride or a sense of ownership or a part of this

community so that not only will they learn about these works of art and get excited about them but they'll continue to share that with other people and if we had learned anything from the virtual tours we had done we had people tuning in from six different continents at the same time for a virtual tour and that impact that we had was incredible we had more digital visitors than we had physical visitors and that excited us even further uh in terms of think our our thinking really broadening it to think about how we can connect culture to people uh without physical barriers i think to build to build on that also what we really saw was that the hardship of kovid could also

force the industry to move more digitally that just like we had our hands forced i always described the problem will came to me with this impossible escape the room he said we have this collection we have no fundraising mechanism and nobody can travel in our revenue sources or for events and visitorship there weren't a lot of different options and i think when your back is against the wall you are forced to be creative and so will's family really embraced the fact that hey there aren't really any other fundraising opportunities for a physical visiting business in a digital age of covid what options do we have and so when we started looking at out of teas it became really very apparent to us that there are a couple of assets of nfts that are important that as will is saying they

build borderless communities that the people who visit us no longer are constrained by the countries they're from but rather their interest and so now we have people who are interested in child heritage i'm korean for example koreans love czech heritage i don't exactly know why yet maybe we'll get explained but now we have all of these koreans tuning in and writing in the youtube channels in korean and i had my aunt translate since you have this global community so the borderless component was really exciting it's also extremely accessible instead of only being able to partake in the history of the lobkowitz is by having your name next to a plaque next to a big painting you can buy an nft for ten dollars you can be part of the entire mission to preserve our history without having a really large wallet it's also accessible

because it's visual people now understand when i donate to the lock glitches i get a visual image that represents my donation in a way that right now when i donate for example through google i get a receipt but it doesn't look very pretty nfts are much more beautiful and interactive type of receipt and finally it's transparent when i give my money to the lobbyists is through blockchain i know where that money goes i know it goes to the lockwood's wallet and then in the future we'll have wallets for the different real estate assets that they're trying to fundraise so you know exactly where your money is going to so that's how we thought about it is that nfts have all of these different components that make it a really compelling strategy and financial mechanism for fundraising and at that time were there other cultural institutions that you know of

that were doing something similar or looking at the space or were you really just um kind of pioneers in in this i think there were many a lot of cultural institutions are looking at it right now and there were many that were sort of exploring it the uffizi made a sale of their uh michelangelo during that same summer the carrollino museum and linz also held an exhibition about nfts as well so it's definitely something that was being explored but uh at a very minimal level actually and um for us before we went fully into it this was this kind of we wanted to make sure that we brought

in all of the players from the space so that we could learn from many other people uh before we fully went into all of this and that's kind of how this idea of nf castle was born was um inviting a whole bunch of people to prague uh so that we could interact connect with people see what are some of the frontiers of this technology what are some of the risks associated with it and test some things it's really an experiment and from that experiment we're very interested to see what comes from it but i think for us we we really took the long-term approach coming from a family with a long history i think it's very important that we think thoroughly about the things that

we create in the future so that they have a long lasting history um and so when michelle and i first started exploring this and she can talk a little bit more about this process but we we took months uh where we were just talking to people asking questions because we were very new to this space and we wanted to make sure that we respected the people that have been exploring it for a long period of time who've really been thinking about thoughtfully about and making advances in the space and make sure that when we really started doing it ourselves that we did so properly and so yeah tell tell me a little bit more about like how you came up with the idea for nf castle what your initial vision was etc

so to will's point we all started with user research just making sure we understood the space the fundamental question that we had to answer was do we bring people who are interested in the physical art world into the digital world where crypto is thriving or do we bring people who are what we call digital native using crypto tools turning digital assets into the cultural world which direction did we want to go to and pretty quickly we decided that we wanted to bring the crypto native people into the arts world since art is often easier to explain than crypto and because it is a cause that people can get behind if they understand the right context and so to do that we as great as meeting on the internet had been we decided to all meet in person and by us all i mean the entire

team that put together out of castle so will and i had been working together for several months at that point on virtual tours but i had also met a colleague a former calling of mine named ben rosenbluth who had joined along in helping us figure out what is the long-term strategy you can probably tell will and i are very fast-paced let's go at full speed types of people and we needed someone with a little bit of balance and perspective to remind us look this technology is here to stay let's not follow the hype cycles let's look long term and ben was the person who said if we want to set tastes within the nft world we need to speak to the taste makers let's not look at what's happening here and there day to day but let's talk to the people who collect art let's talk to the people who understand

the value of a crypto collection so that's what we did he also then enlisted his high school friend jake l hafar who has a design background who has just been our creative genius in all of the artistry behind the nfts and the exhibition and we met in person we had the fortune of my parents really understanding blockchain for various reasons and being willing to have the four of us sit basically like google started and susan kiki's garage a lot of castle basically started in my parents garage of the four of us having a list of all the requirements of how do you build an nft that suits a crypto buyer thinking through all of that and spending about three weeks traveling of california interviewing everyone we

spoke to about 100 people in the course of just that three weeks of gathering information we did a similar type of road show through the east coast to talk to people more in the art space to go to sotheby's to see the auction houses to see the nft galleries we took our time to understand the space before we then decided what is the first best move and we had gone to a couple conferences at that point to bitcoin miami to ethereum paris and ben said well the key distinguisher for these projects is clearly community the way that you bring people on to the long-term vision of your project is you show that you have long-term vision and will have the long-term vision they've lasted for 700 years they'll only invest in things that last for 700 more years let's make sure

we take the time to find our buyers to find people who support us and so we decided let's bring everyone together in prague let's show them what we have and so that's where enough castle was born as an attempt to bring together a community and we unfortunately felt we had to do it quickly since we didn't know when the world might close again so we wanted to bring together the community before covid might make it impossible for us to do so again i think bridging the crypto and art worlds are something that is very often quite intimidating to both groups actually because uh very often both worlds live in their own worlds as well and what we really wanted to illustrate is what sort of a merger between those two spaces could achieve i mean michelle and i are a very good example of that

because michelle is far more tech savvy than i am she has a much better understanding of how to help cultural institutions with institutional planning where i'm thinking about the arts and trying to share a great history with people and uh share my own knowledge and when we merged and worked together we were able to create something wonderful with those virtual tours and it's the same idea with this concept and so when nf castle was being created we really wanted to make sure that we had builders artists uh investors different people who've been operating in both of these spaces for a long time and have uh an intimate setting for people to get to know one another and then build the

future together which is exciting and that kind of culminated with uh three things that we wanted to do the first was putting together an exhibition which we open to the public entirely free of charge so that people can understand what is an nft and what are the different ways uh they can be shown uh what are some of the examples of great uh nfts that we're seeing in this space and how can we create pieces that um can be inspired by the collections that are also quite interesting and then we also held a conference where we were very happy to have you laura as well um where we invited different thought leaders in the space to really think not just talk about how wonderful nfts are but what are some of the issues in the space as well and how can we try to

correct those things by working together and uh it's really about bringing people together which is what we love to do so much yeah and so when you had those hundreds of interviews with the different or more than 100 interviews with the different nft people what were your conclusions about how you could use this technology for the mission that you had i think the fundamental conclusion from talking to people was that nobody had any idea what an nft was and that fundamentally the reason that nfts have not taken off in the way that i envisioned them in the future is because of a lack of education where fundamentally nfts have existed for

longer than the loftwids families have existed mesopotamia has had ledgers tracking where goods are passed for thousands of years that's where the origin of a ledger came from and likewise nfts are just a ledger for different types of assets and nft fundamentally is just a notarized proof of payment for a good or service and right now everyone is completing nfps with nfts that are on the blockchain putting physical goods on the blockchain but an nft is a concept that's existed far before then it's proof that i've paid for something just like when i first will has this large collection of physical artworks nothing on the artwork says the love quit's name on it it's or maybe maybe some in your collection do well but in

general a lot of the art history provenance tracking is not tracked on the back of a painting it's tracked in a ledger somewhere either it's held by sotheby's but actually right now there's not a good understanding of where the ledger of different art assets are passed along and so what we saw in the technology of blockchain is a very fair way to keep track of who owns different assets whether they not be digital assets we can have the entire provenance history or basically history of ownership of one of will's pieces which went from the lap quizzes to the communists to hitler back to will that's where a lot of the value is generated in that ownership history we can have all of that stored in a database that is transparent and accessible to everyone as opposed to just held by a couple of art gallerists or whoever typically

manages that and so we saw this as an opportunity to introduce people to a concept that they're very familiar with but just as notarized in a different way rather than sotheby's telling you yes in fact this painting came from this owner from this artist all of that is now already on the blockchain so i don't need to go through a metal man to look it up and so we saw just like will's family has always been keeping track of provenance history will's dad brought the collection of 20 000 objects together by going around and showing the receipts that he had for everything in the collection that's what nfts are we are likewise demonstrating to other people this is how you continue to take ownership into sorry your cultural heritage object or also to patron them to show people look

this is a digital representation of for example a verneze piece a beautiful renaissance painting in wills collection we demonstrated that if you show the x-ray underneath it there's a whole different layer of the painting and so now there's a digital way for people to understand what they're buying into that's really educational and we'll teach people how cool our history is which is kind of what will and i are about we want to bring people who are interested in the digital age into historical culture and recognize that there are a lot of cool artistic opportunities if you merge the two and we'll actually just want to elaborate on what michelle mentioned about your dad using receipts to pull the collection together yeah absolutely well the first thing when we came back

when anything was taken from us either by the nazis or the communists they always issued a receipt of some kind they were very bureaucratic and in order to make any official seizure uh legal they needed to offer us a receipt to prusa so these were the first things in restitution that we actually had to get back and um so it involved first restituting those papers using a passport that my grandfather had held before he was named a stateless citizen and a refugee and he presented that proved his identity and then with these receipts which we had both from the nazis and the communists we then used them and presented them at different locations to actually reclaim all of

these different works of art uh across these hundred different locations so provenance history is incredibly important to us it's provenance history is actually what has made it possible for us to get these pieces back and just from my own study of art history and also i've spent some time uh at some of the auction houses as well it's i i see a lot of uh use cases with this technology that can actually very much improve uh the way the art world works actually um ways for us to be able to properly track where these things have gone over time and there are all sorts of issues with profiles that exist today and uh tying that to ownership is really a novel an exciting concept and

something that i think we will be seeing a little bit later on but time will tell but it's important to us for that reason too yeah that's such an incredible story about how your father pulled this collection together um yeah and it's so so relevant for the nft discussion and just yeah really interesting um but okay so in a moment we're going to talk a little bit more about nf castle and you know what eventually happened with your effort but first a quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible web3 means freedom from big tech and wall street with more control and better privacy but your crypto wallet is a weak point most wallets are browser extensions a web 2 technology that means the same old

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[Music] back to my conversation with will and michelle so how did you end up picking which artworks and restoration projects you would target as being ripe for your first nft offering for us uh we had a team we had a conversation with our internal team here at the lockheed's collections to identify projects that were a priority when covet hit actually we had many plans for different restoration projects that we were already looking at things that were at risk of permanent damage if we didn't address them immediately and uh there are a couple of examples of that including just to name one there are these glass negatives that we have in the collection

which uh have documented all of the different pieces and paintings that were once on display in many of these different uh castles and estates and that collection also contains paintings that have been lost uh during the nazi and communist period and they have very important information for our own research and studies now the issue with these glass negatives is that actually they were at risk of permanent damage because they had been taken over 100 years ago and so there was a process of digitization that needed to take place of these things so we didn't lose this very important historic data and then we also needed to make sure that we uh put them in climate controlled conditions to preserve them uh in perpetuity

and uh that was one project we identified as something we wanted to fundraise for so the we um introduced this concept of proof of patronage where we uh found two um paintings that we've actually lost that we had and we took little pictures of the glass negatives themselves and but with the purchase of these two glass negatives you were financing that entire restoration project so that we could continue finding these uncovered stories so that was a really exciting concept to us and this is how we identified a lot of the other priority projects that we had that we were trying to fundraise for throughout the course of the the entire event

wow yeah that's i i really like that example and can you actually maybe talk some talk about some of the other projects that you felt were especially ripe for being nfts there i felt there were so many that just seemed you know very appropriate for for this um first nft offering absolutely um and i can't take credit for all of this as well i wanted to quickly mention jake huffar who had curated the entire exhibition that we had on display but also helped develop a lot of these great ideas of working with us but there were pieces that we created that were artistic derivatives of underlying works of art which were really quite exciting so one michelle was mentioning

earlier which is called unseen gays and we took a painting that we have by paolo vernez which shows david and the head of goliath and this is already a very well-known work of art but we thought how do we show something that you can't see in the physical world and we added infrared and x-ray photography in an animated uh version of that painting where you could actually see the underpainting on that canvas and there you see a ghostly head uh which was an earlier sketch that was done by veronese so we're really seeing a second painting that you would never see in the real world and that project uh and that was another project that helped fundraise for us as well we had another piece which was really quite exciting called

uh uh minuet which was written by one of my ancestors anna villaminathan altan who by virtue of being a woman was not recognized for her musical abilities at the time and so we took this handwritten minuet by her and recorded the music which hasn't been played in over 250 years so it's the first time that you really are hearing this for the first time and we also animated how she would have written this piece itself and that for us was exciting because not only are we sharing virgin material with the world but we're also trying to find a way to write some of these wrongs of history and really acknowledge some of these

very key players and if you go through the history of the lobkowitz's and up until this day nothing would have been possible by the strong lup give its women throughout the course of this story and i really we all really were thinking about ways where we could share those histories and the last piece which was also quite interesting with the technology showed the degradation of scrafito this was a animated cgi that was created where we took a panel off of the exterior of nello josef's castle which is just 35 minutes outside of prague and the entire castle is decorated with scrafito which is the technique of scratching to stone to create a design well in the case of this graffito it needs to be

restored every 30 to 50 years over time there is degradation that takes place due to the weather we've had a tornado that hit once in that area as well that had damaged that and so consistently that's a project that we need to continue working on and so we wanted to create a piece that was uh educational that could tell people about what actually happens when those elements hit that scrofita so we showed it degrading over time we showed weather hitting that piece as well and then we showed it rebuilding itself because with the purchase of that nft you are financing that project to redo that scrafito and thinking about it from a long-term perspective any royalties with the resale of that piece that are created will go towards that

project because that is an example of a project that will need to be continued to be restored over time no matter what for another 700 years and the idea that this can exist permanently on the blockchain and continue preserving that was a really exciting concept for us to explore too and what did you set the royalty rate at because i would imagine yeah i mean obviously secondary trading has been such a huge thing for nft so i could see you know if these nfts do get traded then yes that would bring some sort of regular revenue but obviously if it's quite low i you know i don't know do you expect that it would you know be an amount to

you know whatever it is that you need to continue doing the restoration i i doubt that it would actually fund the entire thing in all honesty um just to give you an idea of the cost of just redoing all the scrafito on that castle it's a one million dollar investment and that's an example of an when you're thinking about that from the perspective of a business regularly you know normally you get a return on an investment of something like that the harsh reality of what we're working with day by day is that we consistently have to just preserve and protect these things first and so with that piece we've uh i believe royalties are set at 10 and we don't expect that to probably finance the entire thing unless we get a massive uh buyer um and we need to keep

thinking about creatively uh finding other ways through secondary sales that that we could potentially uh do that but for us right now we wanted to kind of test some of these concepts that we're exploring and with what we've learned from uh the sales that we've made in the conference at the conference that we held we can start identifying what works well and what we can uh present as an example for other cultural institutions as well or non-profits for ways they can finance and fundraise for their own project and also i'll push back a little bit on will's point that it's not possible for the secondary sales to do substantial revenue work in that as it currently stands that is true our

team is not interested in pushing out sales that have fast turnover and have large secondary scales immediately but we do believe in the long-term value of our projects and we also understand the economy of nfts where we are no longer the primary salesman of these nfts the new owners are and so in terms of the future value of those that's up to the new owners sure we'll take some of the royalties because we helped start the foundations but the whole point of nfts and the providence history and the royalties is to keep passing on that responsibility and so i'm really excited to see where the community of people who have purchased our nfts will continue to advertise the resale of these nfts because both for their own speculative upside but also for the ultimate cause

that they donated for and the second point i'd add will is that there also is a plethora of opportunities of collaborations with artists that beyond the work that we've done for the lockwood specific collections which were all collaborations since we had incredible artists in the background who piece those togethers we've linked everyone's information on our credits page that's linked on this podcast it's just not enough time to to list everyone who's participated but we also had a couple of artists who did very explicit collaborations such as matt stone who did his piece derived off of inspiration from the cabinet of curiosity or alexa meade who had inspiration from kronac as well as obvious who made all of these scan generative pieces of art based on this incredible historical map collection that the leftwitzes have and

so we have various artists that we plan to continue to serve as the inspiration for these castles and palaces existed so that you can bring artists together with patrons and then create new beautiful work and that patronage will influence what that work looks like and so those are other ways that cultural institutions can continue to generate revenue while collaborating is to not just make new iterations of the old but create completely new digital iterations that have some inspiration from what might have existed but are completely standalone pieces so all sorts of interesting ways to continue to gather funds so i actually wanted you to expound a little bit further on those artworks that were created specifically like how did you come up with the idea of

creating brand new artworks and you know when do you think it makes more sense to do that versus when to create an nft that is more directly tied to what it is that you're trying to preserve there were two types of ways we wanted to really explore how to show something that could be really quite exciting that it's inspired by the collections and the pieces that we had created uh were an excellent opportunity to showcase things that you can't see in the physical world but for us as a institution and a cultural institution we're consistently trying to look for ways where we can inspire other people from these collections to create things in the future and the idea of working with different artists is incredibly

exciting to us because it means that these paintings aren't just sitting on the wall but they're helping create something and create a new future and uh that was what was so exciting about these collaborations we had with these um artists with obvious uh which michelle was mentioning earlier they got access to a maps collection which we don't have on public display actually typically so it meant that we were able to actually showcase more of these works of art in a new digital format where we were also able to experiment a little bit with a new artistic technique that is actually quite controversial in the art arts world which is this uh generative art and for us it was not only an exploration uh which was quite exciting for us as an

institution but it was also an exciting way to get artists excited by these works of art and find sources of inspiration to create and when matthew stone created his piece which was inspired by a cabinet of curiosities painted by bayer it was also so interesting and fun to see how this can be reinterpreted in a different way that could speak to people in a way that maybe that underlying work of art might not have spoken to other people very often we're always trying to look for ways to excite people in different ways i'll when i do my tours i'll sometimes talk more about music or decorative arts or the arms or the paintings depending on what our audience is and when artists

are able to take those pieces and take it to a new level where they're using these new techniques that make these collections even more relevant that's exciting to us in many ways yeah and i will write up an article with some of these artworks as images in it so people can see um the matthew stone piece for sure it just looks very contemporary and it's animated or i don't know how how you would describe that but you know it's it's sort of like a looping video type thing and so it looks very contemporary and just yeah it's kind of like more similar to the kind of notes that people are that people think of when they hear the word nft so let's now talk a little bit about the

event how was that you know pulling that together given that the purpose of it was pretty different from what people you know typically thought of when they were thinking of nfts was that was that a challenge or did people seem to understand or was it just trying to attract them with the promise of a gala at a castle which is definitely one of the enticements for me i can start with that where i think what ben and i realized pretty early on in the crypto space is that as much as people talk about spending all their time with the friends their friends on the metaverse people liked to go to a fun gathering and so when we were at

bitcoin miami and we saw the number of people who were meeting for the first time despite being long-term metaverse friends it became pretty clear to us that that was the right first step if we wanted to enter the space in a way that brought along the community we needed to build a community and so we did have a couple of different headlines when we when we came into the space of sometimes we would approach people and say hey do you want to come to our castle party in prague we knew that that was sticky but at the end of the day that was not the actual message that's just what got people listening and then what got people to stay was understanding that this was not just another conference in a cool location it was a conference to bring people from the

digital world into the physical world and to remind them that if we don't continue to take care of the world that we live in irl and just focus on the digital world then we will lose some of this cultural heritage that some of the superfito on this castle will not exist anymore that some of these class negatives that are functionally digital artwork not just visual artwork need preservation and care and so while we led with a bit of a pitch of trying to get people excited about joining us in an interesting space we then use that initial hype to educate people on the long-term mission of this so that i think laura even when you were at nf castle quickly realized that the actual message that we had when we were in

person was very different because it's impossible to properly communicate what we were doing which is a fundraiser at a castle for a cultural heritage institute and that really needed to be messaged in person so that's how we saw it one thing that really struck me during that weekend was the two-hour tour you gave the next day where hilariously people just so you know how the gala went i went to the tour at 5 00 p.m and i said to well good morning so anyway but uh you know during that time i mean you know you just talked so much about your family's history and it was so rich and so fascinating and it clearly needs to

be like a book or a movie or something i mean it was just there were so many twists and turns and you know then it really became clear what the mission was and what the purpose was and you know even though i sort of understood that obviously going into the event once i really heard what the collection had been through in terms of just its own basic survival um then you know the the purpose of what you were doing really became clear but and did you want to add on something on anything michelle said or well it's exactly what you were saying laura it's it's a very uh it's a complex story with lots of twists and turns and i think when we first started uh talking about

this this entire concept is ridiculous in itself um inviting a whole bunch of people to prague to come to a conference that looks at a bridge between the art world and blockchain and i think a lot of people when i was just sending cold uh twitter dms uh definitely thought that this uh was a fake thing um where it sounded like a scam and so um so i think it took uh some time for us to really uh connect with some of our friends and explain no this is a real thing we're really trying to do and put this together but i'm so happy it did because what really stood out to me was uh how wonderful it was to see that uh

overlap with different people i i love sharing stories with people but it also led to so many uh wonderful thoughts and ideas growing from that which can really create something quite beautiful and some really important relationships i think we're excited to have met you laura and to have met all of the other guests at nf castle who are now doing various collaborations with it's a good place to inspire and to start building and so how did the event and the auction go in your view you know what are things that you think went well what do you think could have gone better etcetera will do you want to start with what well sure i uh i think it was uh what was really wonderful was the ability for people to

come and discover during the exhibition that we held learn what an nft was what is blockchain and see some of the examples of that in space and i think the people who came really appreciated uh the time we took to try to explain some of these concepts and very often when people don't understand something they immediately put up barriers to it and uh what we wanted to do was explain how this technology could be used and it's really quite an exciting and novel concept so the exhibition was a great success in that sense and then um the conference i was incredibly happy with um we the panels we talked about i thought were uh quite balanced we were able to bring in juan mata saviana who is the head of the

dali foundation uh was able to speak about things from a very important uh side of a very important cultural institution uh we brought in uh dr albrecht veitinga from the uh cavallino museum in lenz who put on one of those for the first nft exhibitions and we also had uh some wonderful people who have been operating in the space i'm not gonna i can't credit everyone because there's just so many uh maria maria shen who really was someone who brought us into this um we have people a will paper who spoke about things from the dow perspective and it and we also looked at things from a legal perspective too and seeing what are some of the issues uh that are surrounding the space and what are some of the things to come so it was

a success in that um we had a gathering of some very different people who were able to think quite critically about how to move forward um and of course i think everyone really enjoyed gathering and getting to know one another which was really nice and the fundraising ankle was was quite a proof of concept for us we fundraised enough to cover the restoration of all of the urgent projects we'll can speak to that a little bit more but i mentioned that will and i originally said our okrs our goals for the year and we so far exceeded them that now the bottleneck is no longer about fundraising it's about finding sufficient conservators who put the criteria to do the conservation work and that's a really powerful story for us

that in the course of a weekend we can bring a group of people together who believe in our mission enough and who believe in philanthropy in the form of crypto to really change the course of this cultural institution and that was powerful for us and is motivating us to continue to share how we did it and get other on board i'll add that this space i'm standing it i'm in right now is actually a space that has been in desperate need of restoration actually there are huge humidity issues that uh have been taking place here for years and that's due to these windows in the space and it's a very specialized space to restore but the chinese belvedere we have here is going to be completely restored as well which is a really exciting concept along with 31

different restoration projects which some of it which we've been trying to fundraise for over seven years um so that was very exciting to us so in the uh funds that were raised from the auction have also allowed us to help um with some of the operating expenses uh just to manage these collections day by day and keep our incredible staff going so that they can keep researching and sharing more of their discoveries with all of you so i know that for the auction there was one person in particular who ended up buying um i don't know if it's most of the nfts but at least many of the nfts and what impact do you feel having this single patron account for so much of the sales does for your effort um it really made a large

difference we actually had two major patrons that um were responsible for uh most of the nfts that we'll be creating and and supporting those things and it really makes the huge huge difference and for us we want to make sure that those donors and people who have supported us uh really are taken in as a part of this entire experience and get to see where their good works are going um so some of them have actually are going to be visiting our restoration studio with um our chief restorer who's going to be working on some of these things we're going to be documenting that process as well so that people can learn about what goes into it for us it's made a world of difference

and we'd love for people to understand where that difference is going and i think that's what's exciting about this concept that we're exploring and it's very often many people don't get to see where their philanthropy is going and uh understand uh what goes into it so the some of the proof of patronage pieces that we've created you get to see what the underlying work of art looks like in its current state before restoration and then you get an nft that shows you what it looks like after restoration so people can not only take pride in this but you could show this in a virtual environment for instance in a digital environment where you could share this story with other people so not only is it something that i think people can take pride in and be excited by but it's also

a way of sharing a story with other people which we always like to do as storytellers and to build on the point about patronage i think to what mitchell chan said actually out of castle patrons shape the art that you have and so we're excited that we have some major patrons that will help us decide what the future of crypto art within the cultural institution spaces the lock quotes has first inspired me because they are the primary patrons of beethoven multiple of his large symphonies are dedicated to the loftwood's family and that tells me that the reason beethoven had the opportunity and creative liberty to really rewrite musical history was because he had a patron so he did not have to worry about money he could focus on the arts and so we really believe in

the value of patronage and that patronage is an art form as much as the creation of the art itself so we're excited about this and so what lessons do you feel you learned about nfts and how they can be used for this type of work and you know i don't know if there have been cultural institutions that have approached you about you know what what your learnings have been but i i was curious about that i can start with the learnings just from a technology and personal perspective and then i'd love you to talk about the cultural institutions i think one of the big lessons that my team then jake will and i learned is to remember that the space is not going anywhere anytime soon that there isn't a

huge rush that yes there is this feeling of speed just like at the beginning of the internet both pets.com and amazon.com existed there are a lot of things that are moving quickly and this temptation to move as quickly as possible but just like the quits has lasted for centuries we really believe that blockchain enabled technologies will be here for to stay and just like joining the internet in it doesn't make any sense to be like i have to join the internet right now that concept doesn't make a lot of sense to me i think that people need to come at their own time and people need to take their time and learning about the space because it is a long-term durable infrastructure and so i think my biggest lesson was to slow

down to to enjoy crypto to work on projects but do it at a pace so that i will stay in crypto for a long period of time rather than burn myself out after i've what it's called eight into various projects one-on-one i want to be here for blockchain for decades not for days and so sustainability in the working style was really important first lesson from castle yeah i completely agree with that sentiment and um for us as a cultural institution i think we were pioneers in many ways with the ways we were thinking about this we're seeing a lot of institutions now that are looking at ways of tokenizing works of art or just creating copies of underlying works of art as

well as a way of fundraising and keeping things up you're seeing this explored by the british museum the hermitage has done an nft sale the mucho foundation has recently announced that they'll be doing some pieces too and for us what we want to do is think about we're going i think we're still very interested in operating in the space and to look out for more projects that we'll be doing but we also want to make sure that we help our fellow cultural institutions in seeing how we we can help them and share whatever we have learned from this experience so the first thing we did is we made all of our conference recordings public and have shared that with the entire world so anyone can see that at

any time and just uh coming up as well we are also hosting a symposium for czech cultural institutions uh so that we can share some of the things that we have learned from this experience some of the things to be careful of uh some of the things that uh we think are great opportunities in the space and some of the frontiers of where where is some of this technology maybe going um because we're not the only ones in a very difficult situation we want to acknowledge the other cultural institutions that are uh struggling and other non-profits that are trying to find ways to support themselves so we're very happy to share our uh learnings with more people and continue to help okay it's so crazy that you just mentioned that the mufa foundation is

doing nfts because i am a huge huge huge fan of alfons muha to the point where so i went to there was a an exhibit in prague when i happened to be there and so i went there and um at the end i was talking with the person working in the gift shop and i mentioned oh i actually realized later that i had actually seen the same exhibit and when it came to new york and then i said oh but you know i'm such a big fan of wuja i'm so glad that i did it and she said i can tell you're a big fan because you pronounced his last name correctly which was really funny um but anyway okay so i'm gonna have to check those out but so now that you've had this experience and you've done your first nft collection what are your next

plans for nfts going forward you know for the mission that you have for house of lobkabits for now we're trying to finish off everything regarding enough castle make sure that we've developed all of our nfts properly for all the people that have been so generous to support us uh make sure that we've found a mechanism to stay in touch with people and keep up the wonderful community that we've created and the wonderful people we've met and then coming into the new year i think we're very excited about uh exploring the frontiers of this technology and seeing what are the other ways we can really be working with this collection to continue in our mission to uh share the past but create the future so in terms of what's coming next uh all i can say

is get ready for some wonderful announcements that are going to be coming up i'm not going to share those just yet but uh you should definitely follow us on this journey as we look at those frontiers but we really are thinking about how to do this properly uh as michelle and i both said i think it's important that we think slowly and carefully about doing this make sure that we put everything together correctly and then we'll be able to create things that won't just benefit these collections but i think we'll be have utility for people who actually decide to support and care for these collections in the future all right well we will have to see where you go with this so where can people learn more about each of you and your

work the best place to follow all things related to nfts created by our specific team so will myself ben jake and i is on nfcastle.com we have all of the educational resources we've mentioned the conference recordings how we've built our own nfts the nfts themselves as well as some remaining collectibles that we are selling in order to fundraise for the collection all of that can be found on nfcastle.com as well as we've linked our social profiles in the links of this page and will and i have all sorts of ideas that are upcoming but as will said we want to think before we we announce them and so we're taking a little bit of time to reflect to digest the craziness that was

2021 and then we're really excited to do other types of collaborations between artists technologists and public good projects to demonstrate how crypto can really be used to fundraise across borderless communities in transparent ways for for people for for causes that have been affected by covet or for for any other reason so stay tuned there and on that uh subject there's a wonderful platform if uh we're speaking to the crypto community called the giving block which is uh an incredible organization that has partnered with some uh non-profits across the entire space that has made it uh possible uh to seamlessly give using crypto and i think over 45 different uh currencies and if

you're interested in you can support the lock of its collections there if you're interested which is the friends of the laptops collections but towards the end of the holiday season if you also find any other charity or some nonprofits that you'd like to support there are some fantastic initiatives there so i highly encourage people to look there as well okay great well this has been super fun so i i've really just enjoyed chatting with you both so much thank you both so much for coming on unchained thank you for having us thank you laura thank you for coming to prague oh yeah i honestly i mean i've just been holed up working on my book and this was kind of the first major social thing i did in a very very very long time and it was

incredibly fun so yeah i really enjoyed it well we'll think about it oh yeah yeah well you know if you have any other events going on in castles definitely let me know we'll keep starting but yes okay well thanks to everyone for joining us today to learn more about will and michelle and the house of lobkovitz and their nfts please check out the show notes for this episode unchained is produced by me laura shin with help from anthony yoon daniel ness and mark mordock thanks for listening [Music] you