Speaker A: All right, hello and welcome everyone to another episode of Waiting to Be Signed, a very special interview episode. We're joined by Trinity as always, and of course, Well, not of course. And for the first time on the show, Artnome, Jason Bailey, renowned collector and just advocate for art and NFTs. I think if you've been in the space at all, you're gonna know him, or you probably follow him on Twitter. How's it going, everyone?

Speaker B: It's going great. Been enjoying my summer so far, and I feel like we're in an interesting space in the NFT world, so looking forward to chatting about that a little bit. been trying to get healthy this year. I've been trying to lose some weight, get back to exercise, and, you know, get myself mentally healthy again. I think a lot of us went through a lot in the last 2 or 3 years, sort of the frantic nature of the NFT space. And these down periods in the cycle are really opportunities to kind of get our sanity back and slow down for a bit and get some distance and perspective on things. So I've learned that it's a marathon, a cyclical marathon, but a marathon and not a sprint. And to keep it going, you know, need to do better self-care over time.

Speaker A: For Trinity and I, we both went through the marathon of the bull market and then replaced it with the marathon of having babies. So we've had no moment of rest.

Speaker B: No break.

Speaker A: Yeah. I think we could use a little bit of like meditation retreat and mindfulness training at this point.

Speaker B: You've minted some humans.

Speaker A: Yeah, exactly.

Speaker B: Yeah, there's definitely a feeling at some point in the bear markets. I always confuse the two. I famously call the bear bull and bull bear or whatever. But in the bear markets where you kind of feel like you're still really into fidget spinners, and like everybody else was like, that wasn't even cool when it was cool. And it's really not cool now. And it's not even like ironically cool, you know, like, it's like you didn't get the message. That this is like not cool anymore. It's also a good test. 'Cause like, if you really, really sincerely, genuinely, truly are excited about something, it almost doesn't matter as much who else like really likes it, right? Like that's not the thing. And I think it's okay to like something because everyone else is excited about it. Like I should say that too, like riding a wave as a group and being into something isn't like invalid by any means, but there's also some value to when most people walk away from it and asking yourself like, Yeah. Oh, did I think this was cool because I think it's cool? Or did I think it was cool because it was fun to be part of sort of this massive movement of people getting really excited about something? Yeah, I could see that analogy. And over decades, in the case of creative coding, right, I've been interested in generative art and creative coding for since the late '90s. And unlike NFTs, where it was like spike, loss of interest, spike, loss of interest, like there was just Decades where you kind of just knew you were into a nerdy thing that probably wasn't going to have a broader audience until lo and behold, it kind of did. But I don't think that that was something that a lot of people, including myself, necessarily saw coming.

Speaker A: Well, I think that's a really good point to segue into a proper introductory question, which we totally skipped, which is to have you kind of introduce yourself to anyone who might not know who you are, Jason, Artnome. And perhaps you can give us a bit of that story of how you found generative art in a time when it wasn't easy to find, and also then how you kind of bridged into the world of blockchain NFTs and being such an early collector. 'Cause I think a lot of people know you for some of the stories that you tell quite notoriously at this point, right? About collecting like the first X copy, obviously having tokens like lost and compromised from platforms that were storing the artwork locally and stuff. We're gonna get into that and the, the whole backing up your NFT stuff. But can you give us a bit of that story of, I guess, your history as a collector?

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: Yeah, so I've always wanted to be an artist since I was like 5 years old and won best pumpkin drawing, but grew up in a family of engineers, but like really pretty consistently and intensely pursued art as something that I loved and wanted to do. Spent all my time in high school in the art room and went to art school, sort of traditional studio art in the early '90s or early to mid-'90s. And then later on went back and studied digital art and got a master's degree in sort of digital art. So art's been a big part of my life sort of from the beginning. And I think a lot of us as artists early on, trading work is, is pretty common, right? Like, there's sort of, you know, especially back then, the sense that like, you're never going to make a lot of money as an artist. That's a life that you sort of commit to. And, you know, I later on went into more of the corporate world and the tech world. But when you're an artist, like, some of the consolation for like accepting this like starving artist fate or whatever is that you can trade work with each other, right?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: You don't have a lot of money, but you love art, you're making art, and you're trading work with other artists. So I built up quite a large analog art collection full of meaningful work that I acquired largely through trading with other art students and artist friends. And I would say even when I was in art school, I was always a better art appreciator than an artist, maybe, where I'd get really excited in a crit and like go off and talk about other people's work. And like, you know, just genuinely made me feel really excited and good to see these things that other people were creating. And then when it was time to talk about my own work, I'd sort of turtle up and, you know, didn't have maybe the words to explain things or whatever. So I've always really defined myself and gotten a lot of joy out of other people's work and art and museums and collecting and things like that, and have always been in tech. So I think once I realized I wasn't going to do well as an artist when I graduated from undergrad, sort of went into the family side of the business more in like the engineering and tech initially as sort of a designer. And then moved more into like the marketing side, but really always felt a strong desire to try to blend art and technology together. And that's where my Artnome blog came from. I guess it's like 6, 7 years ago now, just writing out of passion about sort of the intersection of art history and data and art and tech, and really felt like there were these great artists that The traditional art world wasn't really taking that serious at the time. And I felt like maybe it was because they didn't have the link or bridge to why this work mattered in relation to traditional art history. It's not really this weird alien appendage that came out of nowhere or sits like way off to the side, but it's really a logical extension of a lot of what people have been trying to pursue artistically through the 20th century, right? So that was this article I wrote called Why I Love Generative Art. And the goal there really was to make it not so intimidating and help people see maybe how it dovetails and extends some of those things. So yeah, I think I had been writing about artists using AI and code-based art and, you know, things like that 5, 6 years ago. And a friend told me about the blockchain in 2017. And I thought, well, that's like about crypto and money and like, a different kind of nerd. Like, that's not something I'm going to be interested in. But I had a ton of respect for this. So this Ahmed Hosni was— is my friend's name. And he's like, no, these things that you care about, like provenance, you know, I'd been building this giant database of complete works from the 20th century and been advocating for digital artists. And he's like, these things you care about, like ownability and provability of like scarcity and provenance, like, it's all there in the blockchain. And like, you should go check it out. So rather than be Like a lot of people I met in the early days that were like big diehard crypto people who believed in crypto and were looking for ways to apply it. I had a set of problems that I was already deeply familiar with and had the blockchain sort of recommended to me as something that could be applied. So it was sort of the reverse of a lot of my friends from that time period. And after about a day's worth of research, just all the lights went off and I was like, oh yeah, this is like going to be super helpful in so many different ways for a lot of these issues. And in that research discovered things like Data NYC and Rare Pepe's and, you know, obviously CryptoPunks and some of these other early experimental projects and started collecting and was surprised, you know, the artists I think were just as surprised as the collectors back then that anyone actually went through all the steps and effort of trying to figure out how to use these things. And you sort of immediately made friends with the artists over pioneering this new technology, right? That was a great way to build a bond then and seeing it play out and work and then Being there for Rare Art Festival in early 2018 and meeting sort of all the people that came before me was just super inspiring. And the community at that size was small enough and intimate enough and weird enough that it fit my personality type. Like, historically, that's when I get most excited about things is when they're really like new and not really figured out yet. And like, you know, there's lots to be discovered and you can kind of get excited about where things could go. So. Yeah, started collecting on the blockchain in late 2017.

Speaker A: That's such an amazing background. Like, I actually was not familiar with the fact that you had such a formal art education, which I think adds a whole other dimension to it. And it makes me want to ask, like, in those early days of NFT collecting, do you feel like that's what like led you towards collecting from artists like XCOPY, Manolo?

Speaker C: The entire discovery piece.

Speaker A: Quibibi, right? I feel like you were one of the earliest people to get on Quibibi, just, you must have just seen him on OBJKT or HEN. I'm not even sure where you first encountered him. So what role does that play in like your taste, right? Like as a collector?

Speaker B: I don't necessarily have a lot of confidence in a lot of things in my life. I'm kind of an introvert and tend to keep to myself. But the one thing that I've had since, again, since I was very, very little, I have a ton of confidence in what art I love and why. Maybe that's my superhero or the one gift that I've had, you know, my entire life. So I think when I see work I like, I'm not like, should I get it? Should I not get it? Or like, who else is collecting it? Or, you know, like things click for me right away. And when I fall in love, I usually fall in love forever. I rarely look back and I'm like, oh, what was I thinking that time? Or this, that, and the other. It's just something where I feel pretty confident. And I think that confidence was probably matured and grew over time as I studied art history and learned to make art myself. Yeah. When I look at a digital artwork, I'm not just seeing the result. I'm thinking about how it was coded and the language that was used and the different algorithms that were produced and the art historical references that are there, or the art historical references that aren't there. Does this look like it's like something entirely new that I haven't seen despite decades of studying art history? Right. So all of that kind of happens naturally. And I think my high, or like the thing I get excited about when I collect is less about feeling like I'm a part of something like, oh, I've got this thing that everyone else wants that's worth a lot of money, and more about a really intimate relationship with what happens when I see art that I love, coupled with an excitement about potentially supporting an artist that maybe isn't getting recognition. And the same thing that I think a lot of people have, like when you find a great restaurant or whatever and you want to tell all your friends, or you saw a movie you really liked, right? Like when I find art that I think is underrecognized, It's really exciting to share that with other people and to be able to sort of express some of what it is that I like about it, right? So that actually even predates NFTs. I know what I want and like and why, and maybe have become better at writing about it and talking about it over time, just from lots of practice. You know, in terms of discovering or being hip to some of these folks early on, I'm not someone who's in like a bunch of chat rooms or like, I'm not actually socially all that well connected, ironically, within this space. I don't keep tabs on all the who's the coolest artists are. My team make fun of me sometimes about like how very well-known artists and collectors, like I don't actually know who they are. I'm a little bit of a lone wolf and I kind of just cruise around looking for work that I really like. And when the alarm bells go off, I let folks know, 'cause I'm just sincerely and genuinely excited about it. I think on Tez, I was probably one of the earlier like Iskra collectors, and I think there was Qbibi and a few other folks that actually people were collecting before me, but Those weren't like, oh, I'll buy this, everyone else will care about it, it'll go up in value, this person will become famous. It's like, this work is really amazing and maybe overlooked, and I'm excited to support it and to have it as part of my collection. Like, just to give a specific example, let's talk about Iskra. I think I bought a lot of her early work before anyone was really doing it. If I look through my feed back then of the artists on Tez, or really even more so on ETH, There was a lot of noise, like a lot of— and I don't mean to discount the work, I just mean like really bright contrasty colors and things whipping around the screen. And like, you know, it was just like, it's not that I hate that kind of work. I actually— there's artists I like that kind of fit that description too. But by contrast, someone who was being like really subtle and kind of quiet visually, presenting sort of meditative and sort of minimal work, her work was like almost like a balm or something, like a respite from all the other stuff that was going on. And then when I think about generative art more broadly and generative art history and my own generative art practice, one of the things about generative art is that it's easy to get really visually complex really fast, right? Because you've got the strength of code-based art. One of the many strengths is that you can repeat things endlessly and you can add in variation. So for someone to show that sort of ability to hold back from that, when a tool lends itself so much to that, it really stood out to me as special and interesting. And I still get excited when I see the new work that she puts out there. So it's not that same thought process for every artist, but like, that's as an example, like how I would've thought about Iskra's work very early on.

Speaker C: It's almost like you're the unintended tastemaker in a way. You're just excited about the things that you're excited about. And if people glom on, well, that's on them. It's just about the communication part. And I think that also really gets back into Your— I don't know if it's a slogan, I don't know if it's an adage, but buy art you love from artists you want to see succeed for prices you can afford with the assumption that you'll never be able to resell it and you will always be happy. And that was posted, well, most recently almost a year ago. I'm sure it's much older than that. It feels much older than that. It seems to be the tenets by which you appreciate and collect from.

Speaker B: Absolutely. So I think While that's probably always been true, it was probably late 2020, early 2021 when everyone started coming into the market that I felt the need to be a little bit more crisp about it because I was getting lots of questions. I had accidentally through fate become one of the early collectors and done well financially on the few things that I had sold. So a lot of the questions I was getting back then were like, Essentially, how do I get rich off of NFTs? Or how do I get rich collecting art? Like, how do I make money off of this? And my answer was always, you don't. That would just leave people flat or thinking I was like holding back secret keys or like didn't appreciate their question, which none of those things were true. So I needed a more nuanced way to sort of redirect their desires for a scratch ticket to point them towards the joy that art can bring to their life. Right, and not discourage the energy that they had towards being interested in the space. And that was sort of my distillation. And it is the way that I collect. And I think some people have thanked me because they kind of went down that path. And other folks have said, like, hmm, wish I kind of went down that path. And then I'm sure there are people that completely ignored that and got what they were looking for too. But I felt like as I was becoming more and more, like I was getting more and more attention, just from having been here early. And like, the outlets that were talking to me were getting larger and larger, kind of culminating with like PBS NewsHour. And my mom's like, you were just on PBS NewsHour. And I'm like, I know, it's fucked up, isn't it? Can I swear on this podcast? I should have asked that up front.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's fine.

Speaker C: Hell yeah. All right.

Speaker B: And I'm like, yeah, like, you know, I'm like this introverted goober with these weird random hobbies and I'm getting like more attention than I'm probably built to withstand. And that's when I realized I needed to be a little bit more careful and succinct about like, know, what my guidance is, um, and make sure that it's something that I can feel good about because people maybe listen to me more often than they should sometimes. So put a few guardrails in there.

Speaker A: Did that rise in notoriety cause you to change the way that you behave? I mean, I think you kind of said a little bit that you had to pull back or sharpen up a bit because of the requests that you were getting, probably in DMs and, you know, for things like public media. But I've kind of noticed in the last year, year and a half, like, I don't see you tweeting a about art that you've picked up. And also I've noticed like not so much action in the fxhash sales feed and stuff. So I was kind of curious to ask you, like, are you doing more to kind of disguise your collecting? Have you pulled back from collecting for whatever reason? I think for both Trinity and I, when we first started on fxhash, that's how we started collecting NFTs at all. We never did PFPs, right? We came right to generative art somehow. And we knew no one in the space and we'd be sitting in Discord and people would go like, Artnome just minted this. Artnome just bought one of these in the secondary. Artnome just—

Speaker C: who the hell is that?

Speaker A: And we didn't know who you were, but everyone just said, if he's buying it, you have to buy it, or you should look at this, right? So like, were you aware of that kind of like aura that you had around projects? And has that impacted the way that you behave now?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think a few things happened. So I was aware, I don't think I have that influence anymore. But there was a thing called the Artnome effect for a while, where if I bought something, a lot of the work by that artist would be sold you know, shortly after. And whether that was people liked my taste, or people thought it was going to go up in value, I don't really know. My brother, who used to work at Club NFT with me, was someone who was in the chat rooms much more on Discord and Telegram. And people in this space probably noticed that they don't see me in any of those spaces. It's just not my personality type to be there. So I actually don't know what that was like, because I wasn't in there when people were talking about those things.

Speaker A: It's just— Yeah.

Speaker B: Not that there's anything wrong with it. It's just not where I spend a lot of my time. But yeah, I am aware that there was a thing called like the Art NFT effect for a while where as an early collector, if I bought things, a lot of other people would then go on and buy those. The question about pulling back, I think in this most recent year, I'm really focused on trying to make sure that Club NFT and RCS don't collapse, to be honest. So as the CEO and founder of a startup that I think has great intentions for trying to make this a stronger space, We're trying to survive, to be honest, like a lot of the companies in this space. And I feel like that's got a lot of my attention this year. I do still collect, but I collect quietly. And I think some people may think my collecting style has changed, because they assume a lot of the famous works that I collected were famous when I collected them. My average price for buying NFTs has always been like $25, like for 5 years now or something like that. I bought one work for like 10 grand by Roman Vorozhko because I respect the hell out of Roman Vorozhko as like a historical figure. And that's by far the most I've ever spent. I generally buy artists and art that I like in higher volume for prices I can afford. So still kind of doing that. And I don't just buy digital art either. You know, I commissioned this crazy mask from the You Don't Know Who We Are folks who are pretty active in Tezos. So it's like a physical work. So I don't feel like my collecting is necessarily slowing down. I guess another part of that answer would be that I also felt obliged as maybe more of a public figure to model the right behavior. And early on, when people weren't necessarily collecting lesser-known artists in higher volume, I felt like there was an opportunity for me to express that through my Twitter feed and other things like, hey, I believe in this space. And I believe that we shouldn't all just collect the same 3 artists, right? And I could say that and people are like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But like, you know, doing it and trying to model that behavior, I think was important at an early stage. And once everyone came in and started doing it, quite frankly, I'm not needed as much there, right? And when I ask myself, where are you needed? It's probably more in thinking about the infrastructure side and the things that are less sexy that people aren't gravitating towards as much. You know, as with most things, it's sort of a nuanced answer. And while I'm not perfect by any means. I'm generally trying to be thoughtful and trying to model the behavior in the direction that I think is healthy for the, I would say, communities these days and not community singular, because I think we really, we're not monolithic. We have like a wide variety of sort of subcultures that are in this space for lots of different reasons. And to the degree that people care what I'm doing anymore, I still try to do things that I won't feel bad about or regret later, and that I think are trying to help move these communities in a positive direction.

Speaker C: I think the history and the evolution of these communities, as you're saying, is really quite fascinating to observe along these relatively longer cycles. You know, Will and I have only really been in this for about 2 years now, just about 2 years. So obviously not as long as you, but in crypto terms, that could also be seen as forever depending on how you think about these cryptographic ice ages. You know, and I think it is really startling to see even just in those 2 years how much the, specifically the Tezos community, because we're much more connected to Tezos than Ethereum. And I think that they've kind of changed with different trajectories and have had different types of life cycles. But seeing the way that things have changed so much since December 2021, January 2022, when we were so fervent, so excited, and we really saw a difference in the way that people were collecting. People were collecting everything. And then people became more attuned to cycles, as you were saying, and you started being a little bit more cautious with collecting or a little bit more practical with collecting. And what have you seen across these 2 chains on even the longer timeframe? And is that because people are getting more practiced at it? Is it because people are getting burned out? I'm just curious to kind of see what you think.

Speaker B: I think there's been a few different waves. I'll try to talk about them off the top of my head sort of broadly, and then maybe go in a little bit more detail and see if it jives with what you both are seeing. But I think in the early days, it was largely driven by people that were heavy into crypto and crypto culture. So, you know, a lot of the Ethereum-based collecting, you know, anything with a Bitcoin symbol was like worth 10x, because that was an important part of the history and the background of those folks. And I, you know, even as sort of a sometimes art snob, I actually grew a great appreciation for sort of the crypto aesthetic. So it wasn't like necessarily the case that a lot of people had like crazy art training. It was people that knew how to use Photoshop, but also like had a deep passion for decentralization and Ethereum and Bitcoin. And they were making works that really resonated to folks that had done quite well in crypto, right? So we had this new set of patrons that were collecting. And again, their background wasn't necessarily the case that they had lots of art history training or had collected NFTs. They were excited to collect artwork that reflect their passion for their culture, which was largely crypto-based. Then we started to see a broader group of digital artists come in in early 2018 to things like SuperRare and KnownOrigin and things like that, because they were like, oh, maybe this is a viable way as a longtime digital art— accomplished digital artist to come in and find potential collectors and support my work so that I can continue to make this work more full-time and be monetarily rewarded for it. And right around the time that started to take off a little bit, The market died. And the only folks that stuck around through late 2018 into 2019 and the beginning of 2020 were nerds. And I say that lovingly, like when the money's not there, you're there because you're excited about the potential and the tech and like it's a smaller group of people. So I guess before Tezos, we have the Beeple drop that everybody knows about, like the $70 million Christie's Beeple drop heard around the world that really brings in the prospecting. I consider that event sort of a double-edged sword. Without it, I'm not so sure that the whole world is like talking about NFTs and we have all these podcasts and things like that. Like, you know, it took that to get NFTs in front of so many people. But that also brought in the crazy prospecting side that kind of at times gets out of control. And I think we started seeing a lot of like commercially sort of design-oriented artists take off, folks that maybe had done well on some of these other digital art sharing platforms and things like that, but didn't necessarily have a way to sell their work. So that might be like the Xcopies and folks like that. And it was when Tezos came in that I saw through initially like Mario Klingemann, Helena Sarin, Matt Delaurier, folks like that, that I had recognized and known of from the generative art space for a long time. I think they almost signaled to the rest of the generative artists. And after that, maybe some of the better known digital artists in general that like, This space is okay, maybe not entirely safe, but like, it's okay to put your foot in and try this out. We forget sometimes that there was a lot of environmental stigma around Ethereum back then. And I think some of these artists that didn't participate, genuinely, lots of them were concerned about the environmental issues, but some of them, that was also kind of like a healthy excuse as to why they hadn't gotten in earlier. So they're like, now it's safe. This is an environmentally friendly version. Yeah. Mario and these other folks are doing it, we can come in. And as someone who loved generative art and was some part of popularizing NFTs, seeing those 2 things finally start to overlap was really exciting to me. So I think that drove a lot of my early intense collecting was like, oh, all these people that I've respected for, in some cases, decades are now making work in a format that I can collect. That's really exciting, right? And then we saw maybe like PFP waves and scam projects and rug pulls and all kinds of stuff come in pretty heavy duty and dilute the waters. And right around then is, I think, when things crashed. But I would say this year is sort of an interesting one, in that a lot of institutions— the art world notoriously moves sort of conservatively and slow, which is funny because artists are like the most progressive and experimental people, but often the people that sort of canonize or govern taste are sort of a little bit slower and more cautious. And I think we're seeing museums and more like established cultural institutions now feel like things have slowed down enough that they can actually kind of come in and figure out what's meaningful, what do they think should be preserved or stick around and what shouldn't. So I think in a weird way, this tiny part of the NFT universe that's more focused on digital artists that have been sort of established for the last 10 20 years has maybe sort of increased their interest, their active collecting this year at a time when the rest of the world is sort of dying down a bit. But anyway, that's, that's sort of like when I look broad brushstroke at like how I've been seeing what's going on, but I know everybody sees these things differently. I'd be curious if that resonates with you guys, or if you're like totally experienced it differently.

Speaker A: At least from my end, like one of the narratives I feel like as a collector As somebody who's only collected art, right, through all of this, has been that eagerness for institutions to get involved. Like, oh, well, we need galleries, we need museums, we need auction houses, because that's what's going to legitimize this and take it out of just something that might be dependent on bull and bear markets and crypto movement into like, we're going to figure out what this movement is, and there's going to be retrospectives on it and all this stuff, right?

Speaker B: Mm-hmm.

Speaker A: Like, I think especially for people who have one foot in the investment camp too, right? That narrative of like, they're going to come, they're going to pay attention to it eventually, has been a big part of it. But now I'm a little curious, and I wonder for both of you, Trinity and Artnome, do you get concerned at all too with the fact that like museums are coming in, auction houses are coming in, and like there's a lot of artists that we know and love who are not being picked up or paid attention to right now? Like once they start to put their label on stuff, that's going to be it, right?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Like there's going to be like the accepted few by the institutions. And I just kind of wonder like what that's going to do to the market actually, because there's a lot of artists out there that people really enjoy and have a lot of conviction in that so far we haven't seen getting a lot of attention.

Speaker C: I think in some respects, galleries and museums coming in, it's kind of like you're putting the primary use case of the blockchain into action, where it is that decentralized place where we're able to understand the provenance and everything. And so I think that's really exciting because it's actually showing the value of the technology versus anything else that's happening. And, you know, I think to that latter point, you know, I think Artnome was already talking about it a little bit earlier, like at the beginning, it's like, let's, we're all collecting these same 3 artists. How do we kind of scale out? And I think maybe we can say that the same, that we're still early, air quotes, but artists and museums and galleries, they're still early. And so we're just starting to see like the first initial waves of those expanding cycles of who becomes like a valid artist. Because I'm sure that many of the people that are being collected now would not have been collected by these institutions 5 years ago. I don't have as much historical knowledge, but I'm just hoping that this is the beginning.

Speaker B: I'm sort of an obnoxious brat on this point sometimes and contradict myself occasionally. So I love museums, grew up with museums as my safe space. Like, I consider them sort of my churches, considering that like art is sort of like my religion. So lots and lots of respect there, but As someone who participated in the early crypto art scene, I have a strong desire to see things get decentralized and to see a world where a very small number of people and small number of influential institutions become the ones that we sit and kind of hope get it right or pick, you know, the things that we believe are important. And as part of this NFT revolution and our move towards a digital world where we can consume particularly a lot of this digital art globally through our computers, I'm hoping that we don't only have to depend on a handful of tastemakers at well-established institutions in order for these things to be preserved or to be important or to make history in one form or another. When I say that, people are automatically like, well, museums are important and you hate museums. I'm like, no, I love museums probably more than most people, right? But I also think that we should evolve to a spot where Lots and lots of art can be meaningful for a long time across lots of different groups with different goals for lots of different reasons. And NFTs and NFT culture or crypto culture early on, part of that was like, how do we build a new art world? Like, that's literally, it sounds like laughably ambitious right now. But that was like what we were trying to do in 2017, early 2018. And we've seen that whole screw Christie's and Sotheby's and screw the traditional art world. That's like gotten super quiet in the last 2 years, because a lot of the rebels that were like, you know, let's build something new from scratch have gotten attention from the very institutions that they were kind of giving the finger to. It's like when punk bands got signed to record labels or whatever. So there's a little tension there. And I do tend to contradict myself. But I do kind of want to see a broader, more decentralized art world where we're not so like, oh crap, if this artist doesn't get into, you know, it used to be, and this is old man Jason talking or whatever, but like in the '90s, there was this book the Janson book. I forget the first name. But because we didn't really even have the internet at the time, it was like you were either in the Janson book, which every college sold, and that's where you learned about, like, let's call it 200 artists, or you weren't. And like, that's literally how you're either an artist that was going to be known or not known to some degree, right? But with the internet and all these different ways to consume and understand art, I would like to see us find ways to make art live on and become valuable, both financially and historically that aren't necessarily all bottlenecked through a handful of institutions and influential people.

Speaker C: I think that's a really great point. I would like to segue into, you know, the work that you're doing with RightClickSave and Club NFT, but, you know, I think that maybe there is a point to segue in between, which is like that talk of platforms, for instance, and the recent rise of generative art platforms, both on Tezos Primarily Ethereum. Again, we've seen so many new platforms say that they're the first open generative art platform on Ethereum, to the point where it's starting to become at least a running joke here on the show. I think there's something to be said about, you know, that we've seen some NFT platforms, Seaverso, for example, comes to mind, where a place where people have released some really stellar work and then those platforms disappear. As we think about more platforms versus sticking to the big players such as fx hash or Art Blocks or Super Rare. What is the connection there between that longevity and decentralization while also maintaining that sense of continuity within the art space and being able to find things where they need to be?

Speaker B: I would say that participants in this space have come in sort of classes, like maybe for convenience, we can say like every year there's a class of people that are sort of new to the space. And often when people first come in, they're very open to the idea of like more and more platforms and more and more artists. And then after they feel like they've become like a veteran or a quasi-veteran, which in this space can just mean like 2 years or 3 years, there's a sense that like the new stuff's not as good, or there's too many new platforms, or it's too much of this. And I've tried to fight that urge for 5 or 6 years. And I tell myself that we don't have it right yet. None of these platforms have it fully right yet. I admire them all. And I'm psyched that we have them. But we actually need more experimentation. We're still early. We need more experimentation. We need more platforms. And are there some platforms that are literally just trying to come in and squeeze some money out and then get the heck out of Dodge and are not innovating at all? Sure, that's part of it. And maybe I'm not necessarily excited by that as much. But just like there are artists now that everyone just assumes were like ridiculously popular always, but only 3 years ago no one wanted them or knew who they were, a lot of these platforms that feel like really well-established, like anchor platforms, if we think back to the beginning, there was no guarantee going to make it, and they were kind of clunky and awkward and went through their early stages or whatever. So I try to fight the urge to want to clamp down because I think we need lots of innovation and we need lots and lots of platforms that are trying new things so that we can figure out what's going to work. And I also don't think we ever want to end up with just one or two platforms because different platforms can serve different purposes for us in terms of like how we collect and what we want to collect and the types of artists that they serve. Now, the flip side of that is that there's no way that all these platforms survive. This has all happened before on a smaller scale in 2018. More than half of the marketplaces or platforms shut down when we went into the bear market because interest drops, right? It's not super mysterious. And the ability to support that many platforms sort of goes away. And that's when I started getting concerned as a collector that like, oh, Part of this decentralization that we thought we had is that we didn't have dependence on the platforms themselves. If you buy something, you have it and it's in your wallet and you're all good to go. But startups are fragile. All these marketplaces, by any definition I know, would be considered startups, and most startups fail. So I think it's a reasonable question to ask yourself as a collector or an artist, what happens to NFTs when the marketplace or platform that mints them fails. So to summarize that, I would say I'm super pro way more platforms and experimentation, because I think that's how we evolve. Like, as each new platform kind of comes on, we take and learn something new from it. But I'm super cautious about the fact that most of them won't survive in the long run.

Speaker A: Well, I think we've gotten a lot of new platforms in a bear market, of all things, which is what's kind of surprising. I imagine most of them if not all of them were conceived during the bull run. But I would say very few of them, if any, are truly experimenting or innovating beyond just trying to like be an open platform on ETH and see what that's like. You know, there's this line of like owning your own contract, and maybe that's innovation, giving artists a little more flexibility. But beyond that, there's not too much like novel new stuff.

Speaker B: Yeah, I would say I appreciate the trend towards giving artists more sovereignty. That's sort of like was a trend a while ago that's starting to come back, where artists almost want the tools to be able to produce their own work. Like a quick funny anecdote, and again, this sort of comes with the gray hairs that I have and having been in the space for a while, that you see things move in cycles, and I was guilty of it as anybody else. Early on, when we were like, screw, you know, galleries and, you know, auction houses and like all these quote unquote middlemen that are like skimming off of artists Like, we should build NFTs and contracts in a way that like artists get 100% of primary and secondary. Like, that was a huge part of the conversation. And then what we learned, myself included, is that if you make an artwork and you tokenize it, which is— talk about old school terminology— if you make it into an NFT, if no one was buying your art before, it's not like turning it into an NFT magically made collectors come running from the hills to buy it. Like, oh, it's an NFT now, ignored this artist before, right? So we learned like, oh crap, we actually need some of these other like marketplaces and people that are coming in to write about and talk about and promote and get this work in front of other people's eyes, right? And now I think we're in another cycle where we're like, screw them again. Like, you know, let's give all artists their own contract where they don't have to depend on anyone else and the tools where they can put out their own work. But again, if you're an artist who doesn't have collectors, turning your work that no one's collecting into an NFT just means you now have NFTs that no one's collecting. So I think We learn and unlearn these things, but I still think it's a healthy move to give artists these tools where they're maybe less marketplace dependent. The things that I think the marketplaces maybe are lacking, I would like to see them be a little bit more conscientious about how they construct the NFTs themselves so that they'll be around for the long haul and not do things like store the artwork on a private server owned by the company that kind of guarantees the artwork will be gone as soon as the company is gone. So that's kind of scary. I think maybe putting precautions in place to help protect collectors a little bit more. Discovery is a big thing. We've kind of tried to help work on the discovery side, finding ways to show people work that they'll love from artists that maybe aren't being collected as much yet. So we can avoid this, like everyone collects the same 3 artists kind of problem. Education is another big thing. We've done a lot of the things with Club NFT and RCS that we kind of wish marketplaces would do. Yeah. RightClickSave is really a serious attempt at like treating crypto artists, digital artists, generative artists, and collectors of all those things with the same level of respect that traditional art magazines would treat folks, right? And I think we all talk about how we want more writing and things like that. But a lot of these marketplaces that tried to go into editorial kind of have quietly pulled back, right? And I think if we're all just selling all the time, and no one's providing sort of education and context and protection and discovery tools and backup and preservation, We just have a million people shilling, and I think what we're seeing is the results of that. It's not sustainable in that format.

Speaker C: And that really starts to get into the value propositions, right, of everything that you're doing with Club NFT. I've used the pinning piece, I've used the discovery piece, and I think they're both really well executed. I'd love to hear more about the story behind getting into that, unless, Will, you have some other questions you want to follow up with.

Speaker A: I think the story, I bet some people have heard it, but I've never heard it told by the man himself. So I would love to hear the story of— the unfortunate story, right, of you kind of losing some of your early work. And I assume that's what inspired this whole endeavor. But also, I think the critical question, something that we've asked ourselves in discussing RightClickSave on the show and Club NFT, is like, what does it mean to back up your NFT? I still feel like it's hard to wrap my head around. So like, let's do the story. And then let's do like, what does backing up your NFT really mean to someone who just might be like us who just thinks, yeah, the NFT is just in my wallet, right?

Speaker B: Yeah, sure. I don't think I'm necessarily like the greatest writer or anything like that. But because the space was so small in 2017, like my podcast and my writing were some of the only choices really to talk about this stuff. And I got invited to kind of talk around the world. And through all those vehicles of communication, I really talked about how amazing it was that you as a collector didn't have to depend on anybody once you bought your NFT. You own it unquestionably, right? And when the market crashed in 2018, I learned that wasn't true. A lot of my NFTs broke when marketplaces went under, and I got real curious. Now, again, back then, people are spending $1, $10, crazy people like me, $100. So it wasn't like a massive financial loss, but it was like an emotional loss where I was like, oh, I cared about this stuff. And like, I kind of thought it like if I bought an NFT, that meant I owned it and it was going to be good forever. But like, wow, there's like this massive dependency on marketplaces in a lot of cases where the thing I own is a little piece of code called a token on the blockchain. And that points out to the JPEG that I fell in love with. When I go to a marketplace, I don't look at a bunch of token addresses. I look at the art and I fall in love with the art. So the art that I bought was sitting on joesmarketplace.com/jasonsartthathe loves. And when the marketplace went out, The art disappeared and my connection, like the meaningful connection between the token and the art was gone forever. I won't go into tons of detail about the XCOPY one. I use that because it's, you know, people gravitate more towards the money side than the art side a lot of times. I owned the first XCOPY tokens and they were minted on a platform called Ascribe. And they're not worth anything now because, well, it's not just because they stored the art on private servers. They had some other issues on the token side too. But even if I had the token stuff worked out, it'd still be problematic. I'm not mad at Ascribe, by the way. Like, they're pioneers that deserve to be applauded. Like, way back then, they were trying to figure out even what this stuff was. Like, people are like, aren't you pissed? Or you could sue. And I'm like, no, this is like, you know, we're crawling out of the swamp in terms of the evolution. And these people should be applauded for like laying the groundwork for what we're doing now. Right. So anyway, that was a problem. And 2021 hit and all the people that, you know, had been making fun of me for 3 years saying like, Why are you buying JPEGs everyone can see for free? That is like so stupid. And like then 2021 hits and they're like, hey, you remember how you were buying JPEGs that everyone could see for free? Well, that's a huge thing now. And we would like you to start a company and we would like to give you all our money. And like, you know, you should go start a company or at least like maybe you could buy us some of those or like, you know, like everything changed because, you know, it was all over the news and like people cared about it. And I was grateful for the opportunity, but I thought, I don't really want to build the 300th marketplace. Like, that's not exciting to me. I'd be competing with my friends who are doing a fine job, right? And I don't think I have anything to add there. But I thought, well, what's the most important thing that nobody's talking about? Well, we went from having like less than $1 million total in NFTs changing hands in like 2017, '18, you know, on the art side, to like quickly billions of dollars being injected into a space built on quicksand. So many of these NFTs, the art's just sitting on private servers. If you're lucky, they use this thing called IPFS. That's kind of nerdy. We don't necessarily have to go deep into that. I try not to get super technical, but the thing to take away is like more of the question than the answer. And the question that you should ask, I think, as a collector is, if the art's not on the blockchain and the art's the thing that I care about, where is it? You know, how do I preserve it? Right? I can make attempts at answering that, and maybe I'll stop to let you guys ask things more specifically, but like, Yeah, especially if you're spending like a lot of money or you have a deep emotional attachment to things. I think it's a pretty normal question after a while to start asking yourself, like, how is it constructed? Most things in life have a failure point. Like, entropy is real. Most things don't last forever. So when you start thinking that way, you don't ask, will these things break? You start to ask yourself, how will they break? Right? And then if it's something you care about and you want to preserve, You ask yourself, well, how do I preserve that? So this thing I care about doesn't break. I guess the last thing I'll say is, you know, I went back to those investors that wanted me to either do an art fund or to build a marketplace. And I said, if you'll let me work on the 3 things that I think this space actually needs to mature and grow in a healthy way, I will start a company and, you know, try to find super brilliant people that are way smarter than I am to solve these 3 problems. And the problems were preserving NFTs for collectors in a sort of a scalable, easy-to-understand, affordable way. Building a real publication that actually treats artists in this space with the same level of respect that artists in sort of the traditional art world have, and collectors in the space with the same level of respect that traditional art collectors have, and discovery. You know, I actually found it ironic that as more and more marketplaces came out, and there were more and more chains, it got harder, not easier, to find the work that I liked. And I was concerned that when faced with that kind of an environment, everyone's solution is just to collect the same artists. And I thought there was really an opportunity to build a tool that actually could use an algorithm to encourage the divergence of collecting rather than the convergence of collecting. And I got some great investors and great support and hired an amazing team. And that's what we've done.

Speaker A: Amazing. I have a follow-up. I don't know, Trinity, do you have a follow-up? I want to talk more about the tokens and saving.

Speaker C: I think my question or my follow-up is we're talking about pinning NFTs and talking about the different types of NFTs, or maybe it's not the different types of NFTs, but it's the type of different types of art, and obviously there are tons of things out there on the blockchain, but just to have a follow-up question based off of what you already said, you know, within our generative art space, I can think of 3 main scenarios. One, which is the fx hash scenario, in which case things are stored on IPFS. The Art Blocks use case, things are stored on-chain. And then to a certain extent, the Verse use case where things are stored on IPFS, but there's also heavy use of custodial wallets. And I think that is the large part of our ecosystem. And, you know, a lot of people put extra value on something being on-chain versus IPFS. What is the official Artnome/RightClickSave/Club NFT take on that dichotomy?

Speaker B: Yeah, really great assessment and a great question. And the caveat being that I'm the least knowledgeable in my company. I'm the art guy who has the problems. And like Chris King and, you know, other tech folks on our team are like the smart computer scientists who have the solutions. But with that said, I would say the fx hash, the fact that they're using IPFS, and by the way, the majority of Tezos NFTs, like 90% plus, are on IPFS. It's much lower on Ethereum. So the fact that fx hash uses IPFS, is phenomenal. IPFS essentially as the collector, as long as you keep a copy of all the metadata and artwork in the exact format that it was uploaded to IPFS when it was created, you can go and restore that later. Theoretically, there's some nuances there that we can get into later. That's a best practice in my opinion. Like fx hash is following the best practice. Like that's great. With Art Blocks and with a lot of on-chain projects, and this one gets us in trouble a little bit, like I love Eric and I love Art Blocks and would never want to discourage people from collecting there. But there are some components of Art Blocks that are not on-chain, some of the metadata like the rarity, I think, and a few others. And again, sorry to Eric or Art Blocks folks if I got that one wrong. But what our tool does is it doesn't talk about what it thinks is good or bad. We made a decision early on that could go awry and get into opinions and things like that. We actually look at the NFT and we look for any links out to other areas and we're like, okay, well, where are the links? You know, and I think there are links to some of the metadata for Art Blocks that aren't necessarily on-chain.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: chain. Now, is that a big deal? Like, you know, a lot of people will be like, yeah, but that's misleading because it's not a big deal. And I'm like, well, rather than us say it's a big deal or it's not a big deal, we're just reporting on where the dependencies are. Like, what are the part— what makes up this NFT and where do those parts live, right? And that's what Club NFT's tool does. It goes through all your NFTs and it's searching for external links and it tells you where each piece of that NFT lives, right? So does that matter to most people? Probably not, but it's a thing to know and our tool points that out. And the third one was Verse, and I'm maybe less familiar, but do they by default custody people's NFTs so that you don't have to go through the complexity of getting your own wallet and like you can use credit cards and things like that? Or is— am I in the wrong direction on that?

Speaker A: You're in the right direction. Yeah, you do not need to link a wallet to make an account. All you have to do is log in with Google. And if you like, you can just leave everything there. But they do, of course, allow you to take the tokens out to your own Yeah, so I think there are quite a few other marketplaces that still do that.

Speaker B: And in the first round of marketplace shutdowns, that was bad, really bad, for reasons that I think people can understand. It's not quite as tricky as trying to understand IPFS and things like that. If you bought something and you don't actually have custody of it, and the company that you bought it from goes out of business— when companies go out of business, generally it's not like super graceful. where they like are available and spend lots of money to keep things going for a long time. Usually companies kind of have like a week where they're just shutting things down sort of hastily and have to shut down. And the idea that they're going to be able to deliver, if they're custodying the token, they're going to be able to convince all these people who had no wallet in the first place to make a wallet, figure out how to set it up, and so that they can get the token over to them in sort of the throes of shutting down. Very unlikely. Again, This isn't Jason's guesses. This isn't me trying to predict the future. This is just me looking at 3 years ago, 4 years ago when we lived through this, right? So the marketplaces that custodied tokens, when they shut down, people, granted, didn't care as much then because the money that was spent was lower, but they also didn't realize that that was what was going on. And a lot of those people didn't get their tokens, right? So that was a little easier to understand. Like, if I bought a car and left it at the dealership and the dealership burnt down, I don't have that car, right? So if you buy something, you know, make the wallet and custody it. I know it's kind of nerdy and tricky, but like you need to custody your own stuff. And by the way, maybe one thing I didn't talk about with fxhash, IPFS is a best practice, but like if you're not pinning it, which is like a fancy word for making sure that it's still on IPFS or creating a backup locally, the fact that it's a best practice doesn't really matter. Like, you know, fxhash just got a bunch of money. I don't think that they're going to go out of business by any measure necessarily.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: But let's say if they did, or a comparable company did that was using IPFS and the best practice, that's not like magically going to protect you. That company's not going to pay to pin that stuff to IPFS after the company dissolves, right? So all it does is set you up to take the next steps to make sure that you can preserve the work, which would be to pin it yourself, which is kind of nerdy and complicated and hard to do, or to back up, download all the files in the exact format they were initially uploaded in so that you can upload them later. So those things are really tricky and nerdy and hard to do. They involve these things called CIDs, content identifiers, and like you have to make sure that you go and get them all like in the right order. And every NFT has multiple CIDs and like people own thousands of NFTs. So when I started Club NFT, it was because I was petrified that all my NFTs were going to break and disappear when the market went down. And And as a non-technical person, I couldn't figure out how to do all of those steps for my hundreds of NFTs. And I thought, well, why isn't everyone else going to have this problem? We should build a solution. So kudos to my investors, because in a way, like, not the most sexy, become like a billionaire overnight kind of a solution, right? But still, from my lens or experience, the biggest problem that we face in this space, even to today.

Speaker C: And really bringing that full circle, something that's going to become more and more necessary as these institutional investors and museums and galleries get into this space From a collection and preservation point of view. You know, we've heard stories about how, you know, early creative coding and early generative art just doesn't exist anymore because there isn't the infrastructure or the literal tools in order to display it. And that's even pre-NFT problem. So when you're trying to also have that on the blockchain with that token and that record of sale, then obviously things get blown up a couple thousand percent. So definitely interesting use case there.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: And, you know, even though the market is down, I think the service is still very much valuable and very much needed with these bigger players entering the space.

Speaker B: Thank you. Yeah, I actually think it's probably more valuable with the market being down, 'cause that's when the marketplaces shut down and that's when your NFTs break. It's funny, for even during the high years of '21 and 2022, people would be like, oh, we got Artnome on the show. This guy's been around forever. You must love NFTs and think they're gonna last forever. And I'm like, no, the whole market's gonna crash within the next 12 months and everything's gonna break. And they're like, what? Aren't you like the cheerleader for NFTs? And I'm like, yeah, I love NFTs, but I've been through this. A lot of us have. And it's like, again, I'm not predicting the future. I'm just telling you what happened and the problem hadn't been solved. I was like the Debbie Downer or whatever through a lot of that, but it's true. And unless we talk about it and work on it and help each other out, then we're not gonna get there.

Speaker A: Are you all looking ahead to like the next layer of problems of preservation? Because like, I think We kind of understand a little bit better now with your help what it means to back up an NFT. And if you're lucky enough to have an IPFS token or an NFT that points to an IPFS link, then you could, with some work, restore that token regardless of platform status, right? If fxhash decides to stop paying for the pinning, it sounds like there's still like kind of a class of NFTs that if they're stored on local servers, you might not ever be able to recoup them as NFTs without like the artist coming in and like say, yeah, burn that token, we'll mint you a new one or some really contrived solution. But in a lot of the debate between on-chain and IPFS, like there's some people who are on-chain maxis. Something that we hear come up a lot are like these other dependencies, right? Like, what if browsers stop being able to run JavaScript in 50 years? Or what if something happens to the p5 Foundation and they stop maintaining that library and it goes down? All the Art Blocks tokens that point to the external library for p5, they're all bricked now, right? Because they can't generate. So there's this whole other layer on top of it beyond just where the hosting of the images is. To me, it feels like too big of a problem for maybe one company to solve, but is this something that ever like has come up in conversation? Like, well, how do we— we've got this fixed. Like, how do we take ourselves from 50 years of preservation to 500?

Speaker B: Yeah, it's, um, we're always trying to help where we can, but we're an increasingly small team in a really challenging market. You can imagine that if people aren't really collecting NFTs that much, even fewer are willing to pay for services around NFTs. The analogy, and it's a very imperfect analogy, 'cause it makes it sound like I think NFTs are like Beanie Babies, which is an unfair comparison, but I still use it. When Beanie Babies were hot, maybe you could afford to have 2 or 3 companies making cases, protective cases for Beanie Babies. But when Beanie Babies were like, no one was buying them, there was no company that could just sell protective cases for Beanie Babies and exist, right? So we're like trying to survive through this time period when we think we're especially needed, but we're not financially in a position to grow super huge and like solve every preservation problem. We're actually trying to go almost more laterally and thinking about like, preservation's pretty nerdy. Most people don't think about it. We've done a good job solving 2 of the biggest problems. What are other management things that we can offer? Collection management things. We will always try to help out whenever and wherever we can. Like early on, story people may not know about, when HEN shut down with sort of no notice, Yeah. we jumped in. we didn't— we hadn't built out our backup solution yet, but we knew our mission was to help protect things. We jumped in and paid to make sure that every work on HEN was pinned for like a year and a half. Like, it wasn't cheap, but it was just because we're like, this is important, right? Like, this is our mission, this is what we do. And there have been other cases where marketplaces come to us or people ask for help, and it's not anything we've charged for or necessarily made money off of. I mean, we didn't even charge for our primary service for like a year and a half. Right? Like everyone was getting backed up for free. So we're very mission-driven, and where we can, we will help to sort of expand on some of these other preservation issues. But our abilities aren't unlimited. And the truth is, if we don't stay really focused and find a way to get enough users for what we have, that we may not be around forever, which actually comes to a good question that some people are uncomfortable asking, which is like, what happens to my NFTs if Club NFT goes out of business? Like if the marketplace goes out of business and my NFTs are screwed because they're not going to continue to pay for IPFS, or, you know, maybe they were stored on a private server. Well, we asked that question the first day because we're like, we don't want to just be just as vulnerable as a marketplace. Like, oh, marketplace went under and now we went under and you're screwed, right? So that's why we have folks download all their files locally to a local backup. We actually truly do believe in decentralization and self-custody and those things, right? So like, if you have a backup and you have it locally and we go out of business, You know, you're still covered. So that was sort of by design. Like a lot of people have asked, can I just pay you and I don't have to download them and you guys will just protect them? But the problem is that just kicks the can from the marketplace to us. And if we go out of business, then you're no better off.

Speaker C: You know, that really just brings to mind the recent closure of gen.art, eclipse.art as well. I know that one of the top replies to their statement closing is, I think, from Chris talking about, hey, we're here for you. I don't know if you can say, but has anything come out of that particular conversation?

Speaker B: Not that I've seen or heard from Chris, and I kind of get it and I want to be careful. I like, I know people are going to listen to this, but I think some of these companies are kind of like hoping that if they say the right-ish thing, they're closing down, they're probably kind of bummed out. This project they cared about is going away. And like, if they give a good enough answer, it'll kind of like, they can move on to the next thing. The reason I say that, and maybe I'm not giving enough credit, is because like We know how these things work. It's either not using IPFS and on private servers and you're kind of screwed, or it's using IPFS. And what company that goes out of business pays IPFS bills for the next 50 years? I don't know. I don't really see that, right? I'm not even sure if I were the CEO of a marketplace and I went out of business, how would I take care of the collectors other than to tell them to download a local copy themselves that they can restore from? So short of hearing that, I don't know how you could even protect somebody, and I don't think they've reached out yet, but I would encourage any marketplace that is facing— we're not gonna like make fun of you or like, you know, try to trash you. We actually, we care about art and NFTs and like we'll try to help find a way to protect your collectors. Maybe we can give them a discount or figure out a way. And it's not like it's all business driven. We point people to instructions on how to do this on them by themselves without us. You know, we just it's important that people think about the preservation.

Speaker A: I know Eclipse at least was on-chain. I don't know about Gen.art and if they used IPFS or not, but both those projects kind of being under the same umbrella.

Speaker B: Yeah, an interesting thing that I feel like I should probably get out there. I live on crypto Twitter. Like, I think, you know, I know you guys are on crypto Twitter or on Twitter a lot. You know, we do— I call it crypto Twitter, but it's just Twitter. And the amount of people talking about on-chain art and the how amazing on-chain is, and they only collect on-chain, or they only make on-chain, It's such a tiny fraction of NFTs. It's like, you know, we say less than 10%, but that's super conservative. It's probably closer to like less than 5% or something like that. And even those, a lot of those include like .ens names, like, you know, the domain name type things or whatever. And the reason is because it's not super practical to store large files on the blockchain. Like, it's super expensive. That's why the coolest projects are like things like CryptoPunks that only have a few pixels or like are super small, like, because it's a creative way to deal with the constriction of how expensive it is to store anything large on the blockchain. So it's just this weird example. Like, sometimes people are like, oh, well, you just don't like on-chain art, or on-chain art only, like, you know, would mean none of these backup problems are an issue. And I'm like, yeah, but if you look at the data, the number of NFTs on-chain is like super tiny, kind of the same with Arweave too. There was a while where everyone was Rweave solves all of this. And I'm like, well, A, like, I don't know anything that lasts forever. So that's like a weird premise to begin with. And B, the number, like, for a while when Manifold got popular, because they default to Rweave, we saw a little bit of a spike in Rweave NFTs, but vast majority of NFTs, about 40% of Ethereum ones were private servers, and another 40%, roughly, were IPFS. This is 2 or 3 years ago, 10% or less on-chain. With Tezos, for whatever reason, they've just followed the best practice for a lot longer, and the vast majority of Tezos NFTs are on IPFS, which is great. So another thing while I'm on my stump box or whatever, in addition to the fact that everyone talks about on-chain but no one actually makes on-chain, so the other one would be chain failure. So everyone talks about chain failure, like, you know, as Tezos fans, you probably get it from the ETH maxis every once in a while that like Tezos is a ghost chain. Tezos isn't going to be around. Like, you know, too bad all that great art's on Tezos. Like, Ethereum's the only chain that's going to last. And, you know, Tezos folks sometimes can be chain snobs too, and can be— we have our Tezos maxis too. And they really get fussed over like the other chain's gonna fail. I actually don't think the likelihood of Ethereum or Tezos chain failing anytime soon is like super high. But the likelihood of marketplaces that minted NFTs and stored all the art on their own private servers Super, super high. Like 90% of startups fail, right? Nobody talks about this. Nobody. It's not like, why isn't everybody talking about like the fact that all your NFTs that store art on private servers are going to go under? And why aren't— why don't we have more IPFS maxis, right? But I think it's because so many people hold crypto on those chains in addition to the NFTs and art. So that the strength of that culture and that battle carries over.

Speaker A: Yeah, we like Tezos here, but we've increasingly become exposed to ETH because so many Tezos artists that we started following, you know, 2 years ago are now becoming rapidly the darlings on the ETH side. You know, like they started here and they've branched out, which has honestly been an amazing journey to follow and kind of capture on the show. I kind of wanted to pivot because I know we've already gone for probably an hour or more at this point, ask you maybe one more kind of broad market question, and then maybe we can do some rapid-fire stuff to wrap up. So I'm not sure if you saw this tweet about people paying too much for art. I was going to ask you about it.

Speaker B: I put it— No, uh, I did see the link, but I don't think I— like, I would definitely need a reminder as to the context before I could weigh in.

Speaker A: It was a big Twitter thread from a week or so ago about how bad hype and overpaying for art is for artists and stuff, and I thought it might be an interesting question to ask you. But we can more broadly just ask instead You know, now that we're firmly in this bear market, everyone who's involved— collectors, artists, platform owners, and startup owners like yourself— are all kind of equally feeling the pain. Considering your history in art, considering your history in collecting, what advice do you have for artists and collectors both? And honestly, there's a lot of overlap there, right, too. There's a lot of people who make art to collect. So like, one of the mantras that we've seen, and we've even said on the show, has been like, everyone needs to slow down. Stop trying to pump out a project every week or every month, even take this time to really work on your art. But at the same time, like, that's not sustainable to someone who's trying to be full-time, right? And is relying on it for income. So how have you come to see it? I assume, you know, a lot of artists, probably talked to them at least sometimes.

Speaker B: Yeah. So I'm going to take a stab at the first question and then try to come to the second one. And I know I didn't necessarily go deep into that tweet, but in the early days, there were some of this, like, don't pay artists. And I think it's like a holdover from like the starving artist thing where like artists need to suffer to like make great work or like all kinds. There's been like such a long history of excuses as to why artists don't deserve to make enough money to survive. And I think it's like absolute bullshit, right? Like I used to put this meme up where it was like, you know, don't feed the animals at the zoo, like don't feed the artists or whatever. Like, you know, on the weekends when we have free time and fun time, what do we do? We go to like a museum or we listen to great music or we watch an amazing movie. But all these people, like all my musician friends and artist friends get paid shit, and then lawyers and doctors and people like that make tons of money, right? So I think like, you know, people that are making our lives better probably deserve to get paid fairly well. And while we haven't figured out exactly the right dynamic, one of the things I'm most proud of is my role, however large or small it was, in proliferating NFTs, particularly as something that serious art collectors are interested in. has helped get money in the pockets of lots of artists in the last 3 or 4 years. And I'm very happy about that. And I think it's very important and it's overdue and we haven't figured it all out yet, but it's a good first step. Let's pay the people that make our lives better and make sure that they can have good lives too, or at least find a way to sustain and make more work. So that's the first question. The second one, in terms of like, how do we react? You know, how do collectors and artists sort of sustain or find a way to keep going? Now is almost not the time for me to give advice. The time to give advice was last year and the year before when all the money was coming in. Like, a financial planner can't give someone who's 65 with no retirement saved, like, good advice. That's kind of too late, right? So, like, the folks that I tried to talk to last year and a year before, artist-wise, it was like, hey, you know, make sure you're saving enough money to pay your taxes. Make sure you're saving enough money for, you know, if this market moves in waves so that you'll be able to support yourself and your loved ones or any dependents that you have. Don't overspend it. Don't save it all in crypto, or maybe really much of it, because crypto is volatile and you'll have a double— you'll have the volatility of your income coming from NFTs and your savings being in crypto, right? So like, probably not a good idea, you know? And I was fairly vocal, I think, with a lot of my artist friends through the last 2 years on that front. Similarly, I think the advice that we quoted earlier that, you know, I've given collectors about Buy art you love for prices you can afford with the assumption you can't resell it from artists you want to see succeed. That's kind of code for like, hey, if you buy this thing for $100,000, not because you love it and can afford it, but because you think it's going to triple in value, and then it goes down to $5 in 2 years, for some people with deep enough pockets, maybe that doesn't matter. But accept and understand the volatility and buy things you could take the hit on and you'd actually still be happy to own. Now, people are gonna hear that advice and be like, too late though. I already did all of that stuff, right? I spent too much. And yeah, I don't know what you tell somebody when the market's sort of in a low period and you are counting on it to either as a collector for it to triple in value, or as an artist, you thought this fountain of funds was gonna come forever. I think we all just need to be thoughtful when things go crazy again and everybody's starting to spend money again to encourage folks, you know, be the voice of reason and encourage folks to, to sort of save for a rainy day.

Speaker A: We know a few artists who got wrecked holding their earnings in crypto over the course of a year and then having to sell at the end of the year and not even be able to cover their taxes because their crypto tanked like 80%. So I think there's a lot of hard lessons learned over this bear market.

Speaker C: I think we've all learned to take profit. Yeah, if that is how you are oriented when times are great, and you'll always have a chance to buy in later when times are not so great. So maybe that's a little bit too much on the speculation side for your personal taste. But if you need to sustain collecting, then—

Speaker A: The art will still be good, right?

Speaker C: The art will still be good, man.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I'm not like some, like, money's filthy, like, you know, let's not talk about money or whatever. Like, I did very well as an early collector because I owned all the early stuff. And there are a lot of people who it's almost more like a historical collecting thing than an art collecting thing. It's not my personality to go around and actively try to sell things, but I was lucky enough just by having been here super early that people came to me that wanted to own the earliest stuff. It's life-changing money. And I've tried to be smart about that so that I can take care of my family and continue to have the flexibility to do things like the, the reason I can do Club NFT, you know, sort of a thing that a lot of people don't know, and maybe isn't for this, the topic for the show, but like, startups are super risky for the founders too. And you don't make a lot of money and you do a lot of work, right? So like, the reason I could indulge in sort of doing a startup instead of like keeping a super corporate job is because I made enough in NFT sales that I could take that risk for a little while, right? Not forever. But the reason I don't talk about that isn't because I'm like, I don't want anyone to know I made money off of NFTs. It's because I don't want people to think, well, Jason made money off of NFTs, so I can make money off of NFTs, right? So that's why rather than go around bragging, like, look at all this money I made on NFTs, I tell people like, actually, Buy art you love for prices you can afford. Assume you can't resell it because like that's the more likely outcome. I basically won a scratch ticket and it would be like me telling everyone else like, it's easy. You just take a dime or a quarter and you rub it back and forth and like, voilà, the money comes out. Right. But it was really luck and like scratch tickets are a bad investment, you know, unless you're really into it. So maybe weird answer, but like, you know, I think that's probably fair and honest.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think an honest answer. It just brings to mind a topic we cover a lot on the show also, which is like, how do you grow the space and get beyond the current cohort of people here who did come from largely crypto speculative backgrounds? And despite the fact that they might engage with a tweet like that and retweet it and share it, you'd look at their trading behavior and you look at what they hold and who they collect, and you can't help but think that, of course, like, despite the fact that they might be retweeting you, they're also just like purely here for— not purely, but maybe like 80% here for like cynical reasons, not necessarily to ask you like, what's the secret to growing the space? Because I think no one knows that. I think we've just seen, despite the fact that people like yourself who are trying to create content, really good editorial content, or sites like Verse who are trying to reach out and get people from outside the traditional NFT ecosystem to come in, and Tonic too, it's a really difficult problem. And we're kind of just stuck with the people that we have here now. And that seems to be the prevailing sentiment.

Speaker B: I wonder, and it might just be because it's late and my brain's not working as well as it should, but I wonder, do we want to grow the space? Like, do we need to grow the space? Or is it possible that maybe the space grew too quickly in the last 2 years and that this contraction is something more natural? You know, I think the idea that growth is good can sometimes be a little bit overrated, but I don't know. What do you guys think? There's like, Is it necessary for it to grow in order for it to survive?

Speaker C: I don't know, to survive. I think to thrive in some ways. And I think we can possibly see that in the way that the prices for art has changed. Granted, we were talking about, let's say, Tez at $5 or $6 versus Tez at 80 cents or whatever it is today. But as you said, it was largely artists collecting from artists in the early days of HEN and what have you. It would be Tez for Tez week. You know, everything is one Tez. And now you see those artists being able to command much higher prices, like looking at Iskra, just as an example. And, you know, I think that there is the value in allowing more people to survive and to thrive as those artists. And I think that there's value in that if you think that art is something that you can live on or off of. I'm not quite sure what the best terminology would be there.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: And, you know, I think it's important to have these contractions and I think that the longer people are in this space, the more interest they will have. But similar to how we talk about the price charts for crypto, you know, it's going to be up and down and up and down and there'll be incredibly big contractions, but it's trending up generally. And so I think maybe that's kind of that sweet spot of, you know, we gain a ton of people, we lose 90% of them, but we're still up 10%. And we do that enough times and we have that sustainable population. That's just my late night thinking and thoughts. But, you know, I think that there could be something there, but I do agree with you that when we're out of these hype cycles and that people are here because they're genuinely interested, I think that's a really powerful movement. But when things are hot, it's, it is fun. It is exciting.

Speaker B: I like that answer. I want to hear Will's answer, but one thought is just that with crypto, Currency. I feel like we're trying to displace an existing model. Like everybody uses currency, fiat or whatever, and growth in crypto shows that we're displacing. And for those of us that prefer crypto or see its benefits, that feels like a win. I would argue that the number of art collectors prior to NFTs was pretty small. So it's not like we're replacing existing analog art collectors and like trying to grow into that space. I think we've created a massive new number, like large mass of art collectors, which often gets overlooked. People just write it off as like, oh, those aren't real collectors, right? Which I think I call bullshit. Like, we're not trying— it's not like electric cars replacing gas cars. I think even with the pullback, we've dramatically increased interest in art and the number of people that think collecting art is something they can do, which is pretty cool. So, Will, I want to get your answer on growth.

Speaker A: I mean, it's very easy to bait an anti-capitalist rant out of me, but I won't go too far down that. I mean, I'm not a believer in infinite growth or the benefits of that, certainly. But as it pertains to like the space, I mean, I think my concern not so much is like, do we need to grow for the sake of growing? I think I would like to see the space grow for the sake of providing balance to the cohort that we have here. Because A lot of the people who are collecting this art came from PFP or just token trading. And they're, in my observation, right, and I'm not even just talking about like the average person, I'm talking about people who have like really big accounts, or maybe have really big token-gated platforms and clubs of their own. When you listen to them, you can't help but sometimes think that this is like really inauthentic. And it sucks because in a space that is supposed to be at least what we talk about on the show, right? And like But part of the NFT space that we love, which is this art world thing, you want authenticity. I think that's what people come to art for in a lot of cases. To me, like, it's just a bummer when people dismiss NFTs and refuse to look into them because they just know all— they have all this bad association with like the monkey pictures and stuff like that, right? It's like, there's a lot of people out there, I think, who like me and Trinity, who neither of us, if you had talked to us 2 and a half years ago, we'd have said like, we'll never collect an NFT ever. Art was the thing that got us interested in it. And also like, it was the thing that got us interested in art. Like we didn't have an art background prior to this besides like a little bit of education, but not anything near, you know, like what you've done. So I don't know. I just think there's a lot of opportunity to get like more legitimately passionate, interested people here. But it seems like a really tough question, like a really tough problem to solve because it feels like it can only be done at the organic level of like, hey, you are my friend, come check this out. No platform's been able to do it as far as I can tell.

Speaker B: Yeah, I like that answer. So it's not that you want unbridled unilateral growth, but you would like to see more people sort of benefit from the life-changing discovery that, like you and Trinity have made, art is for you and collecting art can be something that you can engage with that can kind of enrich your life. And maybe NFTs are a way to expand that and make it more accessible. To folks, not just people whose parents collected or that have art history degrees or that feel like for some reason they were brought up in a way where they had regular access to that. That's great to hear. I mean, that was really a lot of what we were hoping for 5 years ago is like, let's make this something that's more broadly applicable. The only way that more and more artists can be supported is to have more and more collectors, right? It's not that complicated. And I think if we want artists to be able to make the work, kind of work that they want to make, we can't have them all depending on a handful of super wealthy people. The mission, for all the ups and downs of NFTs, the mission of a lot of the folks that tried to build this movement early on was to sort of broaden the type of folks that collect and try to have a more equitable and fair way for a larger number of artists, if not to do this full-time, at least to get some sort of reasonable payment for their efforts so they can continue to make work. And while we haven't gotten it all nailed down, I think a lot of it did work, right? We have a lot more collectors and we have a lot— the pain we're feeling now is sort of the pulling back from the flow, you know, that we had a year, a year and a half ago. And we need to figure out how to make it more sustainable. But I think some of it worked.

Speaker A: Definitely. I'm going to caveat my answer with, if any of those new people who do come in have an interest in the projects I've collected, I'm of course not going to be mad about it. You know, like, even I'm not going to pretend that I'm here for purely altruistic, just for the love of the art reasons, right? I mean, but certainly I think our journey here was less orthodox than most who are here, a lot of whom have made the life-changing money that I think would be pretty sick to make someday, personally. As the baby cries in the background. Normally we wrap up by doing a couple rapid-fire questions. So maybe Trinity, do you want to throw one out?

Speaker C: My question is not on our list, but how do you enjoy your NFT art?

Speaker B: Yeah, it's a great question. Early on, I looked at it regularly on my laptop and my phone, and in the 5 or so years that I've been into this space, at least once a month and more likely once a week, someone pings me because they have an idea for a company to make a better display. Like, everyone's like, well, paintings are on walls, these need to be on walls, there needs to be a display. And I say, that's probably a great idea, but I'm not the person to talk to. I don't have a problem. Like, I'm looking at my phone or my laptop all day, every day. I don't need another screen. I have a TV on my wall that I can look at art with. I have a screen, the laptop, which by the way was the environment in which a lot of this art was created. So it's not like it's a painting, but I'm looking at it in a crappy way on a computer screen. It was most likely created on a computer screen, much like my laptop. I look at my walls in my house on average 5 seconds a day if I average out across every wall in my house. My eyes are on screens almost all day, for better or for worse. So I'm more than happy with my ability to look at the art on the screens that I have. In terms of frequency, early on, I would look at, like, you know, in between calls and meetings, I'd go back and look through the works that I love and kind of just try to move them around and look at them together. More recently, I find there'll be like months where I don't go back through the collection, and it's kind of exciting actually to sort of get amnesia and go back and be like, oh yeah, I forgot about this and that. And like, you know, and I've got this. And like, I almost want a tool to scramble just at random my own collection, because I think seeing works next to other works changes the way I think about them, the context sometimes. And often it's just sort of chronological. Maybe that's something we can build or someone that's listening can build. Also, you know, I've done some curation. We didn't really get into that, but in earlier days when I was a curator, you learn that context is everything. When you put a work next to another work, the meaning of both works is completely changed. So, So yeah, I think that's kind of interesting.

Speaker C: And easy to do, hopefully.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Is it easy to do? Do you have like one big gallery? You have to go to OpenSea, then you got to go to this. I mean, it is actually kind of burdensome.

Speaker C: No, no, no. But if you're able to access somebody's collection, it's something that like OBJKT could do very easily or OpenSea could do or a wallet could do very easily or Deka could do very easily. It's just the shuffle. Randomized shuffle, not, not the Apple shuffle.

Speaker A: I've been slowly bringing a lot of my art over. I got a Samsung Frame and you can just right-click save and drag, put the file onto it. And I've been slowly getting art up onto that. Looks pretty good to have just like one screen, but just one. I only have the one. So soft recommend there. Uh, all right. Another rapid fire here and one that we do pretty much every interview at this point, which is who would you like to hear us interview?

Speaker B: Yeah, I was thinking about that and I had a few— have you guys interviewed Mario Klingemann yet?

Speaker A: No.

Speaker B: I don't know that he even wants the attention for it, but from where— and everyone has a different perspective, but from where I sat when HEN took off and Tez went from irrelevant on the art front to like kind of becoming the focus for a lot of serious digital artists, a lot of it came with Mario and people that trust Mario because he's been in the space for decades. So like I saw Mario come in and then I heard other people talk to me or to Mario that were like, oh, what's this about? And like, you know, that was pretty early on. I don't know even how active he is on Tez anymore, but I think it would be interesting to get his take on how the early Tez art scene took off. I think he'd have even more insights than I would. So that would be one person. I'd also love to hear you guys interview like an ETH maxi. A well-known big collector, ETH maxi, on what their objections are to Tez, 'cause some of them are pretty funny. There could be a little bit debate there on like, that might actually help other ETH maxis realize like, it's okay to collect on Tez and actually kind of fun and exciting at a time when, as you mentioned earlier, we are seeing some artists and collectors actually migrate more towards ETH. We have a newsletter for Club NFT subscribers that we're putting out where we go into more into analytics and data on collecting. And one of the things that we're noticing actually, 'cause we track these things, is the number of Tez-only collectors has been going down. The number of ETH-only collectors has been going up, and the number of people that collect across both is going up, which is contrary to what we thought. We thought as the bear market kicked in, we thought more people would go to Tez because it's affordable, but that's not necessarily what we're seeing. So anyway, I think it'd be interesting to have an ETH max. Maybe that's too intense, but that would be sort of my second answer.

Speaker C: We've definitely tried.

Speaker A: We've tried to get some people who like actually are like NFT haters on, not too many, but one particular like local art podcast from New York. I tried to get some of those people to come on because they're anti-NFT, just to talk to them, not even to like convince, right. But just to kind of like talk to them. But yeah, the second you say NFT to some people, they just kind of shut it down and don't want to continue the conversation. Unfortunately.

Speaker B: I might be able to help. I started all my collecting for years on ETH and I still collect periodically on ETH. So I sort of go both directions. on Tezos and ETH and don't have bias, I think, in either direction. But I think of someone like Colburn from Museum of Crypto Art, who I don't know if he's collecting Tez yet, for a long time. He's very open-minded, smart, nice guy, well-spoken, thoughtful about artists, but has just had hesitance to collect on Tez, but folks like that. So anyway, if it becomes something that you're interested in, I'm sort of Switzerland in terms of collecting, you know, and try to keep it that way. I'm more concerned about the art and interested in the art. than knowledgeable or concerned about a given chain. And that's sort of just been the way I've collected from the beginning.

Speaker A: Hell yeah. All right, you want to do one last one here, Trinity?

Speaker C: Do you have any questions for us? I mean, we've provided some answers.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, let me think about that. So what would be a good question? So, you know, I have the Dankness Podcast or whatever, and we have RCS with Alex that we're constantly looking at things to like write about and stuff. And I think one of the things that I hear about from other folks you know, do publications or podcasts is that there's a little bit of momentum loss or atrophy. You're asking like, have we covered everything there is to cover? Or now that the market's starting to die down, do we go on a hiatus or whatever? Or like, you know, just a general sense. Like we've talked about the impact of a bear market on collectors. We've talked about the impact of the bear market on artists, but we haven't really talked about the impact on folks like you guys that are putting out like this super great podcast. Yeah. How has it impacted you? Are you like, we still have a million people we want to interview and we're as excited as ever? Or is it like a little bit like, oh, I don't know, are people still into this? Are we like going to be shouting into a void or can we still grow our audience? Or how has it sort of impacted you in terms of energy levels and enthusiasm and ideas and content?

Speaker C: Well, I'll let you take this one first and then I will add on.

Speaker A: Uh, cause I'm the one who's like always having a nervous breakdown about it.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: Yeah. I guess the most concerning thing has been, despite, I think, the fact the show gets better and we get bigger, more interesting guests on all the time, or not, not even necessarily like more interesting, not that you're not interesting, but interesting in terms of the number of followers, right? Like interesting from an attention-getting standpoint. All of our guests have been, of course, interesting and great to talk to, but despite that, it definitely has felt like growth Growth is not to be had in 2023 compared to 2022, where every month, despite the fact that like Tez went down 80% and ETH went down, you know, 60%, like we still had month-over-month growth. And it was just a very great ride throughout that entire dip into what has now been like the proper bottom of the bear market. I think the upside has been that I guess we never really set out to make money with the show, like not explicitly, not to like a we can quit our jobs kind of level. It was kind of like maybe this can just subsidize some collecting for us. And it's done that to a degree. And not, again, not as much as it did in 2022. We got some great donations in 2022, but we've maintained our freedom and we still create the content that we want to create. We're not beholden to any sponsors or anyone. So we get to kind of say and do what we want when we want to. So all of that has been, I think, excellent. We did take a month off, but that was more just because babies and family and stuff, right? So we took a month off this year. If anything, I feel like we just have so much opportunity still to— there's so many people we haven't talked to in the show. Every week I feel like there's stuff we're cutting that we just can't get to that, or like we just don't have a fresh take or an interesting take on it, so we just don't put it in the show. But like, we're not fully covering everything. There's still art, there's still tons of stuff going on. So I don't know, how do you think, Trinity?

Speaker C: I think that from an art perspective, it's been an interesting transition. You know, when we started out, we were like solely focused on fx hash. If something like crazy cool happened over on Art Blocks, we might mention it for 5 or 10 minutes. And in 2022, it just felt like it was just hit after hit. Like we had to like cut content. There was art that we wanted to talk about. We just didn't have the time to talk about it. And we're kind of having the reverse problem of that right now in some respects, even though we're starting to cover nearly all of the platforms.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: Including the open generative art platforms, Art Blocks, Verse, you know, some of those one-off projects that come out of like Sotheby's or anywhere else. So I feel like we can have more focused conversations on a smaller subset of things. But again, I think that there's just that some of the pizzazz and like, just like the overwhelming—

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: Welmingness of life is not quite as much as it used to be. You know, there's some things that we used to talk about a lot. You know, it used to be a weekly market report, but then the market really wasn't moving week to week, so we We just like kind of cut that out to be more monthly and quarterly. But when things start to pick up, you know, and we've seen kind of like those little waves and blips in market activity and just times when like a ton of really great stuff has dropped all at once, or there's been like a crazy run on contras, then it's always like exciting to like kind of get in there and talk about like, people are here, people are back. Let's talk about what's happening. It's really energizing, to be honest. Yeah.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's such an interesting point. Like, I hadn't even thought of it in that way. But that is the underlying thing, which is that we used to sit and cull through like just fxhash projects, and we'd have like a list of 20 of them. And we'd be like, alright, this one minted at 10 and went to 100. And this one minted at 5 and went to 200. And we just had like this bountiful selection of projects that like minted out from up-and-coming artists like that instantly hit high floors and did almost like 100% turnover in the first day.

Speaker C: Mm-hmm.

Speaker A: And we just had like all of this market activity to talk about. And I think now, for whatever reason, the projects that— well, not for whatever reason, obviously, because it's a bear market, but now it's like just minting out is a win. And there's very little to talk about except for the artist, the project itself. Do we like it? And maybe it is without that hype of like people wanting to know that numbers went up. Like maybe that is a little bit of what has tuned people out. I'd be curious to talk to other shows that are bigger than ours. What is there even to talk about? You know, when it comes to the market, sometimes like all you can talk about is like, this piece of art is really cool. We like it. We like this artist. Here's a tidbit about them. And maybe that is just like, yeah, speaks again to the people who are here and what they want to hear, which is like, why did this project do a 20x? What was the piece of alpha I didn't know?

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: I think now we are doing a lot more research on the artist and the art itself, because it's, that's kind of where we are. We're in an art-first area of the market cycle. And then when we were talking more about the markets, it was understanding what are the narratives, what's happening, how are perceptions shifting within this space?

Speaker B: Mm-hmm.

Speaker C: And so it's actually been like a fun and interesting challenge from that perspective, because again, not artists, don't have that deep background, but I think it's made us better podcasters, that's for sure.

Speaker A: That's what makes me always afraid when people suggest to us like an artist like Mario, right, to interview, which is like, oh yeah, he's great. He's been around for so long. Like, to me, that's like a negative. It's like, I don't know what I can ask him. Be like, so what's up? Like, what do you, what do you think about, like, like, I don't even know. It would take me so much time and research to even come up with a way to talk to him. And same for like a lot of folks like of that era.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: I just don't even know what to ask, unfortunately.

Speaker B: I think just questions about, even if it's market-related, early Tezos and how this market was born, right, is sort of interesting. Also, I feel you, you know, it's funny, art people don't necessarily love or share my fascination with markets and really just complex systems in general. Like, I was a sports data and visualization nerd, like, is another part of my life people don't know about. And like, even if I wasn't into art, obviously art's core of my being and life and personality and existence. But I have this other part that's just interested in markets and human behavior and how these things, how and why things move and change and become popular and less popular. So I think it is sort of a rich space for a lot of my interests to see these markets grow and shrink so fast in real time. And the amount of data we have access to through the blockchain to try to make sense about it all is really interesting. But yeah, I wouldn't sell yourself short. I think one of the things these artists know they need in order to grow or to continue to make some money so that they can keep sustaining as artists is more collectors that are new to collecting and introductions to other collectors. So I think I wouldn't hold back from having artists on and talking to artists because you can help them understand what is it that's appealing to you as new collectors. And that's probably where they see— will see expansion, right? There's only so many, like, absurdly wealthy patrons out there. And so the scalability of that is fairly limited. And I think finding a way, like, what are new collectors from the art side? What is appealing other than just maybe it'll go up in value? Interesting topics there.

Speaker A: Yeah, what is appealing? That's a great place to end, I think, actually. A note of encouragement to us. I mean, we faked our way through some pretty intimidating interviews, so I shouldn't discount us. I feel like we've rose to the occasion quite a few times when we've kind of been like the dog catching the car kind of scenario with interviews, you know? That's actually kind of like the really refreshing thing about this space is that almost no one says no to anything. Like everyone is really nice on the art side of NFTs, which is what I think got us really invested in the first place here, that community thing.

Speaker C: And the accessibility. Yeah. It's everybody's just kind of chatting with each other. There are no pedestals.

Speaker A: You're always like 2, maybe 3 degrees at most removed from the most famous person you can think of in the space. It's actually, they're not that far away.

Speaker B: Yep. I agree.

Speaker A: Well, thank you, Jason. Is there anything that you want to plug before we wrap up today? Like anything that we should be looking out for? Right-click save, interviews coming up, features, anything cool you want to Plug, or should we just kind of wrap it up?

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I think I plugged without being overly shilly, you know, my projects. I mean, I would say my closing remarks would be like, get curious about what it is you're buying when you buy NFTs. Like, how are they constructed? Think about that. What are their failure points? Almost like people that collect like antique cars and things like that. Part of the pride is actually understanding how to keep them working and going and like, you know, functioning and not falling apart or disappearing. So in a downtime when you may not be collecting as heavily and things aren't as frantic, another angle in which you can enjoy this hobby is to sort of ask yourself a little bit more about what it is you've actually collected and how to preserve it. Whether you use Club NFT or not, I think it'll make you a better, a stronger collector. And likewise, reading about the space and listening to the artists and things like that on RightClickSave, I think hopefully is, you know, that's all free and hopefully folks enjoy that. Because that allows us to continue to write it. I guess maybe my closing remarks would be like, support the things you appreciate and enjoy and want to stay around. Because having been through down markets before, most of these things will disappear by the time the market comes back. And the ones that survive, it'll be a blend of the support from people like the people that are listening to this that actually care about things enough to proactively support them, and the gut check and will of the people that run those projects to be willing in downtimes to keep it going at times when it feels like no one cares anymore because they have faith that it's worthwhile and that the market will come back. So keep supporting the good stuff that's out there if you want it to be around.

Speaker A: Hell yeah. And our donation wallet is, uh, wtbs.tez and wtbs.eth. I feel like I might as well plug those, those there after your impassioned pleas for support. So yeah, that goes for little podcast like us too.

Speaker B: Absolutely.

Speaker A: All right. Well, Jason, Artnome, it's been amazing having you on. I hope you enjoyed coming on the show. We've been playing this for almost a year now, casually. So it was great to get to, to have it work out.

Speaker B: Shout out to Danielle King. Thanks to Danielle for making sure that we actually did make this happen and reconnecting us after a few false starts on my part. Danielle's great.

Speaker A: For sure. The only 2-time civilian co-host. of the show, subbing in for both of us when we had babies. So that's her cadence. She gets to come on at least once every 9 months moving forward.

Speaker B: It's awesome.

Speaker C: Please no.

Speaker A: Yeah, no more kids.

Speaker C: Unless you have an announcement to make.

Speaker A: No, no, no, definitely not. All right, well, let's end it there. Thanks again to Jason. I hope you all enjoyed that episode with Artnome. It was a pleasure having him on. That's it for this one, everyone. We'll be back again soon with another episode.

Speaker B: Till then, bye. The rail of the week. To be signed.

Speaker C: We're waiting.

Speaker B: Always sent.