Speaker A: All right, hello and welcome everyone to another episode of Waiting to Be Signed, a special interview episode. We're joined today by Seth from Bright Moments. Of course, Trinity is here as well. How's it going, everyone?

Speaker B: Hi, Will and Trinity.

Speaker C: Hello.

Speaker A: Seth, you're out in Japan. Very exciting. How was your flight?

Speaker B: Flight was good. We, um, Christie and I got here on Tuesday, I think. We left LA on Monday. Now it's Friday morning here and it's Thursday evening, I think, for you on the East Coast, right?

Speaker C: Yes, you are in our future.

Speaker B: How is the future unevenly distributed?

Speaker A: Yeah, should we be buying Bitcoin, selling Bitcoin? What should we be doing right now, Seth?

Speaker B: I mean, wasn't how a lot of this got started years back, which is that the informational asymmetries between Asia and the States, and particularly, I guess, Korea, opened up all these Bitcoin trading, crypto trading arbitrage strategies?

Speaker A: That's how FTX Supposedly got started, right? Sam Bankman-Fried was arbitraging between Asian markets and the US.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: If the question is why are generative art floor prices so low right now, you just blame it on that.

Speaker A: All right. I love that.

Speaker B: We're done. The episode's over. We concluded.

Speaker A: Okay, perfect. I mean, that actually sounds like a good place to say, of course, none of this is financial advice.

Speaker C: That part is.

Speaker A: That part is.

Speaker C: You might go to jail, but it's also financial advice.

Speaker A: Again, we're joined by Seth today from Bright Moments. And I think, Seth, let's start off with the usual question. Tell us about yourself. What's your background in art and how'd you come to crypto and NFTs? And in particular, I think we're both curious to hear a lot about your background in traditional art, because not many people in the space come from that angle. Usually they come from the coding or technology side.

Speaker B: I don't want to disappoint you, but my— I wouldn't call it a traditional art background. I definitely grew up, I was really interested in theater. as a kid, and I was a child actor, and then I went to performing arts high school in Michigan called Interlochen. Coming out of high school, I really wanted to be in New York. I'd grown up in Boston. I spent my senior year in Michigan, and I went to Columbia undergrad and studied dramatic literature and comparative literature, and I helped organize the Columbia Players, which was like the Columbia Theater group. Just like embraced the avant-garde theater scene of the, like, late '80s in New York City and was really inspired by one theater and opera director in particular named Robert Wilson, who is still around and kind of famously did Einstein on the Beach in 1976 with Philip Glass. I became his archivist after college and went really deep into his work from the '60s and '70s and very involved with that whole era of the New York avant-garde, you know, everybody from Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Robert Mapplethorpe, you know, Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg, the Wooster Group, Bread and Puppet Theater, and just a lot of different forms of performance art. And the way I got involved in technology was that I started to think about ways of how could I make these archives that were time-based. They weren't just paintings and they weren't just drawings, even though we did a lot of that. How could I represent his creative process? And it required something that was nonlinear. The internet hadn't really emerged commercially yet. There was no World Wide Web, maybe except in the research labs, you know, in the early '90s. But at the time, the only medium was CD-ROM multimedia technology. This was like '93, '94. I remember working on a project to like bring his, one of the pieces that he did in the late '60s called The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin. To bring it to life using interactive media, which is a precursor to the web and a precursor to all of this, you know, digital media, digital art, crypto art, etc. And in doing so, I went over to Germany and I started to go deeper down this rabbit hole of documenting performance with multimedia and then just got to a point where it just felt, not that it was a dead end, but I had to go all the way to Germany to really to work on this and there wasn't the same appetite for this intersection of art and technology that we see today, but it really wasn't, it wasn't available in the United States. And then at the same time, the web was happening in '95, and I shifted into a more tech entrepreneur mindset, and I started an early web advertising company called Site Specific. And really since '95, up until Bright Moments, you know, I'd say those 25 years-ish, 30 years, we're really focused on building companies that use technologies in interesting creative ways. Starting in '95 in Web 1.0, and then I went to work for Union Square Ventures and the investor Fred Wilson, who's remained a really important mentor and friend of mine and a big supporter of Bright Moments. That was from 1999 through 2006. I'd call that Web 2.0. I moved out to California from New York. I did an investment research company called Majestic Research that used internet data to figure out how public companies were trading based on data that hadn't really been available before the internet. I worked on a music technology startup called Turntable.fm that a lot of people remember fondly, but online music is a really difficult business for a bunch of reasons. And then a few years ago, the blockchain kind of started to come into being. You know, I'd say after the invention of Bitcoin, 2014, 2015, I got curious for the first time in smart contracts, in Ethereum, There were no NFTs per se at the time. It wasn't really an artistic medium because it was so— it was just hard to put any data on chain. It wasn't visual. It was much more conceptual and much more back office. And then around 2016, 2017, I was living in San Francisco. I had gone to Burning Man a few times and I got exposed more and more to that kind of crypto-inspired lifestyle. I had this idea of starting a community center in North Beach, San Francisco called Node, N-O-D-E. And the idea was to provide a space for people in the crypto community, in particular the Ethereum community and the blockchain community, to network and learn from each other. The ICO bubble burst, and so that became more difficult to execute. I've always been creative in different ways, and I start— I was painting a lot, and I started a— I kind of opened up a painting studio in San Francisco in Fisherman's Wharf called Water Studios. So I was painting, trying to forget about like how much of a struggle it was to be a startup entrepreneur. So all the seeds were there, I guess. And then Christie and I moved during the pandemic to Venice Beach in the middle of 2020. I'm old, so I'm like 52. So this is a long story when you ask someone like me to kind of give you their background. I apologize. So I came to Venice Beach, middle of 2020. I was working on a privacy company called Spartacus and trying to help people, you know, give them tools to scrub their profile, scrub their presence online. protect their privacy. And I'd raised some money for that and the pandemic hit. I just remember there was a moment where I realized like we were buying ads on Facebook to promote a service so that people could erase themselves, you know, from Facebook and social media. And it was just bizarrely nonsensical. And so the end of 2020, I gave up on startups. I gave up on that kind of venture capital driven capitalism. I was living in Venice Beach. I started taking a lot of photographs of the waves at sunset. And I was playing with Runway ML, the AI platform, and starting to turn these images into GANs and making synthetic videos. So I guess this was pre-post photography. And around that time, I'd also been getting involved with NBA Top Shot and collecting Top Shot moments, which sort of hints at, I think, one of the inspirations for the name Bright Moments. So I was checking out NBA Top Shot. I was learning about Foundation and Super Rare.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: There was obviously a huge, all this demand from people who were in the pandemic to collect things and trade things online. So you could feel like with Gamestonk and what was happening with retail investing, that everything was primed for this moment such that, you know, we saw it and I felt it in February of 2021, something started to happen with NFTs. You know, there was obviously a brief moment in 2017 when CryptoKitties and CryptoPunks emerged.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: But really didn't cross the chasm in terms of any kind of mainstream adoption, but the seeds were there. And then it happened again in 2021 early. And I think there's an adage in just technology, which is things don't happen twice with new technologies unless they're going to happen 3, 4, and 5 times. So it was like the second pattern now of seeing, okay, NFTs are back. This is an interesting emerging file format. And then the light bulb moment for me was one of these videos that I had posted on Foundation sold as an NFT. Wow. And it just blew my mind, this idea that instead of printing photos and dropshipping them via Shopify and trying to sell photographs online, that I could, or anybody could, sell an image permissionlessly. And I had ETH in my wallet. And I guess my first collector, Rudy Adler, had an NFT of mine in his wallet. And I remember waking up, you know, the next morning and definitely things felt different. And I got really excited about NFTs and this unlock for artists. And so I started to just dig in more, and that was really kind of the precursor to Bright Moments.

Speaker C: That's an amazing story, and just kind of that through thread of being on the cutting edge of the latest technology as it's coming out, seeing what's possible. And then I think also like that interest in new applications of technology and what this allows us to do. It's really interesting, and I think that crypto And Web3 and blockchain and all of that is one of, I guess, the 2 to 3 big technologies that are at the forefront right now. Generative AI, and I guess mixed reality used to be a really big thing the last couple of years. I think we've kind of moved past it, which I'm kind of thankful for. But it really is the culmination of blockchain, plus, as you said, like this COVID-era space that really enables all of these things to come together.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: So what was the creation of Bright Moments like then, now that you could kind of reach this culmination of all these different pieces?

Speaker B: I think the formative bit was to go back to, you know, February, you know, March 2021. I don't know if there's a cultural term for where we all were, but it was kind of like NFT spring. And there was a lot of sudden hope, you know, Ethereum had been dormant for a while and suddenly went from $1,300 to maybe $2,000 over a few months. And all these artists started to release work on some of these platforms like Super Rare and Foundation in particular is what I was focused on. You know, Christie's a painter and we took like some of her paintings and turned it into a GAN and she released an NFT and it sold to a collector. And so, you know, we're both artists and we moved to Venice Beach to pursue art, but we also felt like, wow, like something just unlocked for me, you know, creatively. It just felt like, wow, what would it be like if we made an NFT gallery? And what if you could take these new assets that we were seeing floating around and being created and sold online? And what if you created an offline experience for that? That was like March or April of 2021. The name was inspired by Rahsaan Roland Kirk, the blind jazz saxophone player or the winds player. I guess he played flute as well in the '70s. He had a famous album called Bright moments, and I think that combined with the NBA Top Shot, you know, the fact that these collectibles were called moments just gave me a name that felt like positive and uplifting and dynamic without being like overtly technical or nerdy. And so many creative people who live, you know, in and around Venice Beach, and they were all trapped at home during the pandemic. So there was a lot of like pent-up creative frustration there. And meanwhile, I was seeing all this activity starting to bubble up. with NFTs and with these kinds of digital collectible models and platforms, you know, I think it was, okay, well, how do you combine these 2? And Venice, among all places, was open because it was open to the beach. People could go out and breathe. And that wasn't the case in a lot of other communities and a lot of other cities around the world. So we're like, okay, why don't we open up a gallery? We hung a couple screens. It was steps away from the boardwalk under the Venice sign on Venice Beach. That was the idea. And it so happened that the first artist we decided to work with and reached out to was Jeff Davis, who's an amazing, you know, minimalist abstract digital artist, who's also a generative artist, and who also happened to be one of the early partners and chief creative officer for Art Blocks. And so that was, you know, example of being, you know, you got to be smart to be lucky, but we were definitely lucky to work with Jeff for our first show, which I think started to then tip us beyond just NFTs, but specifically into generative art. And that's something that I hadn't really focused on or learned or known a lot about leading up to it. I was definitely a fan of conceptual art. As a person, I love Sol LeWitt. I love Joseph Kosuth. I love Lawrence Weiner. But I didn't really think about art history in the context of generative art until I kind of red-pilled into Art Blocks with Jeff. saw what it was like. And it kind of leads into, okay, what, how did we get started with CryptoVenetians and CryptoCitizens? In this case, we were preparing for Jeff's opening. It was in the middle of June of 2021. And, you know, Venice Beach is a weird place and there's a lot of tourists and there's a lot of foot traffic. And we're like, okay, what do we do during the daytime to bring people to the gallery that we had just put down? You know, I think it was like $10,000 a month in rent for. Yeah. And while it would be great to bring people once a week for, you know, in the evening for shows, how do we bring people during the daytime and keep the gallery busy? And the thought was, okay, well, why don't we give away NFTs to people that show up live and onboard people into Ethereum wallets, help them download MetaMask, teach them how to write their seed phrase, and then they'll be ready when they come to the art show once a week in the evening to maybe buy some art. And that was kind of a very just pragmatic entrepreneurial marketing technique that we thought of to drive foot traffic. And as we were thinking about what kind of NFTs we could make, we thought, okay, well, let's call them Crypto Venetians, kind of modeled after CryptoPunks. And they'd have attributes and characteristics of the Venice Beach community. And because we were working with Jeff to prepare for his show, he's like, you know, you could do these on Art Blocks.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: They could be generative. I was like, what do you mean? He said, well, you could live, I don't know if we called it live minting, but you know, you could live mint these and reveal them on the spot and people could send a token into the smart contract and it would generate in real time a unique, you know, one of one from this algorithm. You know, lo and behold, in a few weeks we put this project together. We were the 95th project on Art Blocks because they were, you know, they're all numbered.

Speaker C: Wow.

Speaker B: I'll never forget, you know, the late June that year, this experience of giving away these NFTs to people who showed up off the street, who just came in because we had a sandwich board outside that said, I think it was called NFT minting in progress, or come mint your CryptoVenetians for free, or whatever it said. People would come in, we'd open up a wallet most of the time because they wouldn't have one, and then they would go to the back of the gallery, they'd choose their walkout song, and they'd walk out and voilà, we would reveal their CryptoVenetian. Somehow that butterfly wing led to me being in Tokyo right now, about to put on the show. But that really was the germ of it, is seeing that very human experience of people minting generative art IRL. And it was a sense of wonder and it was really beautiful and people were excited. And part of it is, you know, they were at home for so long. And so like you would be excited about doing anything with other people. And I think we really tapped into that.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And so we kind of brought these 2 worlds together where there's, you know, so much online collecting and online degeneracy happening during the pandemic and such a need for those kinds of identity tribes to form. And then at the same time, people were so tired of being stuck inside and they wanted to go out and experience things. And so our timing was really perfect.

Speaker C: It sounds like an amazing real live human experience, which is something that I don't think brands can pay enough to get. And there's something there that you tapped into and were able to make happen, especially with The music, the experience, the unveiling, it sounds all amazing. I'm just really curious as to the types of people that would walk in. I mean, I think that if you asked me, depending on when in summer 2021, about NFTs, I'd be like, what's that? To a certain extent. So, would you find that crowd that came in was like self-selecting in that sense, or was it people who were curious? What was the audience?

Speaker B: It started super local. So, at first it was literally just like surfers and skateboarders and stoners and, you know, friends of ours in or around literally the Venice Beach community. And we had to like convince them to come and get these NFTs because there was no financial context. And we were concerned about the gas fees. Like, okay, how do we, you know, yes, we're giving these away for free, but will somebody pay $20 or $30 for the gas to mint one of these? And I'd say that was the first couple of weeks. And I think what, you know, a couple of things changed. One is We had no idea of the kind of global appetite that Art Blocks had been developing among collectors for their generative art drops. Every single Art Blocks project up to ours allowed people to simply, you know, buy a token on Art Blocks and mint a piece of generative art, whether they were in Switzerland or Singapore. And then suddenly in the end of June or July of that year, we weren't curated, so I don't know if it was in BlockTalk at the time, but like, These Art Blocks fans would start to see these weird crypto Venetian characters show up in their feed, and they're like, okay, I want to buy one of these because I have a Fidenza and I have a Ringer and I have every other one of the Art Blocks projects. And then they realized they couldn't buy one directly on Art Blocks. They actually somehow had to show up at this weird gallery in Venice Beach. A lot of them couldn't travel. So what happened is they looked on OpenSea and I'm sure some of the surfers and the skateboarders figured out how to list their Crypto Venetians on OpenSea. And I'll never forget, you know, one sold for $300, 0.2 ETH at the time, or 0.1 ETH or whatever it was. And it just like, it just shocked us that like, wait a minute, like what's happening here? It was like an exercise of market structure from the inside of the belly of the beast is seeing this weird market form where there was demand.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: particularly overseas. And there was supply from these crypto mules who were minting NFTs and then selling them to people thousands of miles away to pay for their rent. It was just bizarre. And it felt a little bit like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. And then I remember, you know, Bob Iger, who was CEO of Disney at the time, through a friend of a friend, he showed up one day and he minted a CryptoVenetian. And then just like all hell broke loose and it got super hypey and You know, we had a 2,000-person waiting list and more and more artists and collectors would be flying in to mint their CryptoVenetians because it's a cool project. And then at the end of that summer, we got heisted. One of our original DAO members emptied out the contract and minted all the remaining 300 CryptoVenetians out of 1,000 that we were going to mint. And long story short, it became a really interesting story. It was really authentic because we were just a bunch of crazy It was like a circus, you know, in Venice Beach. And Christie's daughter Amicia was working there, and my sons Jacob and Charlie, and Phil and Liam, and a whole cast of characters, Gary, like a bunch of people in and around Venice Beach who had met at the coffee shop were in the middle of all this. It was fast and furious and fun. And we were like, you know what? What if we made 1,000 crypto New Yorkers? And what if we went to New York in the fall? And that's when this kind of roadmap opened up where we're like, okay, let's do 1,000 Crypto citizens in ten different cities to get to ten thousand. We didn't consider ourselves a fine art gallery. We weren't coming out of traditional art. We really didn't have any of that in mind. We're just like kind of more like a bat out of hell. This is somehow working. We're bringing a lot of joy to people, and we're really enjoying it. It feels fun, and we're not a company, and we haven't raised startup money. We're this new kind of thing called a DAO. We're all participants in this DAO, and we're governing it together. And we have tokens around that. And this is when the mint pass kind of concept emerged for us very pragmatically, because we gave away all the CryptoVenetians for free. We never sold them. But there was so much interest and appetite for this that we said, well, what if we mint 1,000 CryptoNew Yorkers and sell mint passes for 200 of them in advance to pay for us to go like Muppets Take Manhattan? We go to New York, we rent a gallery and put on shows. And sure enough, we, we Listed 200 mint passes, we called them, I think at the time, or we called them golden tokens. And we sold 200 of them for 2 ETH each. ETH was close to $3,000 at the time. And so that was like more than $1 million. We went to Manhattan, we rented a gallery on Wooster Street, we subletted some apartments for a few months. Pretty much all of us headed to New York. And then good things started to happen, which is just because we were really enjoying what we were doing. And we were so dedicated to this craft of IRL minting and revealing these NFTs on bigger screens, other artists started to take notice and were like, hey, I have an idea for this. And so the Crypto Citizen and Crypto Venetian and Crypto New Yorker minting experiences started to inspire artists like Aaron Penne and Tyler Hobbs to come to us and say, well, I've got a project I'm thinking about that would really work well in a live setting. And that's what led to rituals with Aaron Penne and Beretta when we were in Venice. And it's what led to incomplete control with Tyler Hobbs in December of 2021. And so before we knew it, we were, you know, these crypto citizens that we were minting became kind of like a passport to other forms of generative art that we were starting to exhibit and reveal for third-party artists, you know, not ourselves. And then that kind of became our model. And then when we head from New York to Berlin last April, that was when we said, okay, we're going to mint 1,000 Berliners. And we're going to work with, in the case of Berlin, it was 10 different artists, one each night, to mint their own collection of 100 NFTs live IRL. And that's kind of what we've carried along from Berlin to London to Mexico City, and now in the biggest way yet here in Tokyo.

Speaker A: Seth, I have like a million follow-ups based on all of that. Just to start with a statement here, I love your story. The arc of being someone who was young in New York, interested in archiving art, and the follow-through into NFTs just feels like such a logical extension to me. Taking art forms that can't be traditionally preserved and finding a way to preserve them, in this case on the blockchain, it feels like such an obvious fit. Living the life of an early adopter, it sounds like, and constantly embracing new technology instead of pushing it aside. This is a constant challenge we have right now in the NFT art space, is the battle for acceptance. So one part of me wants to ask you about that, to inquire, like, have you ever tried to cross over into the traditional art world more formally and have conversations? But the other side of me also wants to investigate more like this whole DAO thing, crypto citizens, like, what's the plan? So what do you think? What's the right way to go with this right now?

Speaker B: Maybe start with the beginning, because I really like the way you I'm so close to it, it's hard to see it, but I think that what you suggested, which is like there is a through line here from trying to archive art that's unarchivable to doing what we're doing in terms of helping artists put their art on-chain. I think it's really important and I hadn't really thought of it in those terms. And we'll probably get to this later in the conversation. Like there's a huge, wonderful struggle to figure this out for AI. Kind of jumping to the endpoint right now is like, okay, would AI art which is the sharp tip of the spear of crypto art and NFT art, how can we and who is going to ensure that this explosion of generative AI art is going to become future-proof the same way that we can say Fidenza is future-proof or Meridian is future-proof or Zancan is future-proof for that matter? There's a way of looking at all this from a perspective of archiving and preserving that I think is really, really important. It's something that Artnome is thinking a lot about with just preserving, you know, NFTs that could go away and people don't realize that. I think the other thing you said is, I think for all of us creative people, there are times when we're really comfortable and there's times we're really uncomfortable. And I find that, at least for me personally, like I found my fit as an entrepreneur and as a creative professional in this world of generative on-chain art and bringing that to real life. The 30 years before that and all the things I described, I was always kind of, I felt out of place because there were a lot of traditional structures that separated the art world from the technology world. And I find that what's so liberating right now, regardless of supply-demand dynamics and Ethereum and Tezos going up or down, what is rewarding right now is I think that there's a symmetry and there's a balance right now of art and technology where they know they need each other. The most successful artistic projects right now have figured out how to become self-sustainable by doing smart things with tokens, and the most successful technology platforms and products are proving that they need to be really creator-friendly.

Speaker C: What are some examples of art projects that are using this tokenization method that you think are successful? And it definitely speaks to the corporatization I think of the art space, which is not a bad thing. It's something that I think has always been necessary and it's always been, it's just expressing itself in new ways. I'm assuming that you're talking about something that is different from a typical PFP roadmap type project, right?

Speaker B: Yeah. And I think maybe it's some artists and, you know, folks like, you know, I think what Tyler Hobbs has been doing across a number of his projects on Art Blocks with QQL. Take QQL as an example. I think what Tyler has done in terms of like, it's not— QQL is not a company. It's also not just a piece of art. It's not quite a platform, but it has aspects of all of them. There's a very sophisticated set of dynamics that are aligned through the tokens, those 1,000 QQL mint passes, 200 and some of which I guess have gotten minted into QQL NFTs. That just pulled together a lot of different constituencies and aligned a lot of different collectors and parametric artists. And now Pace on the traditional side has been involved with helping to showcase his work traditionally. And Artmatr was helping to print the QQLs that Tyler chose into 4 by 5 foot paintings. And even Bright Moments was involved a couple of weeks ago in New York, helping people live mint their QQL seeds. I know there's a lot to unpack, but to me that's an example of a really interesting, successfully tokenized art project that is way more artistic than most startups and way more successful than most art projects, if that makes sense.

Speaker C: It's kind of the culmination of both things, right?

Speaker A: But also at the same time, I think it's fascinating because the Pace QQL push, a lot of those pieces that included physicals where the The actual seeds themselves were curated by like other really notable generative artists like Mapan and Claire Silver being another, right? Those projects with the physical included sold for under floor of like a typical QQL, just purely NFT. Even though that's a great example of a traditional gallery embracing NFTs and also trying to convert these digital pieces into a physical medium. How do you look at the space and see these challenges that we have?

Speaker B: I think we're just early. I think it's hard to communicate all this across traditional and crypto collectors. Whoever bought the William Mapan curated output for 4 ETH is a hero. That could be an essential piece long-term. These are complicated stories to say, and I think I just take my hat off to Ariel and other folks at Pace for pushing the envelope. So I'm less concerned about outliers like that. One thing that I think is really interesting, and we talked about it when we just got on the call, was I asked you, you know, how long did it take you to mint your charcoal seeds from Zancan? And I think you said you waited till 36 hours, I guess, before the cutoff. But you also said that you did a livestream or you did a call with somebody and you were doing it together, right?

Speaker A: Yes, correct.

Speaker B: And so like, I think that touches on like, And I think this is great about QQL, and I think it's great about what Zancan just did with fx, and obviously a lot of the stuff that we do at Bright Moments is combine this purely online tokenized transactional world with real-world social dynamics and pressures. And the fact that I had a QQL mint pass that I was holding on to because it never expired, and there was no— what's the tax on the— what's the— it's called the Herberger tax.

Speaker C: Harbinger tax.

Speaker B: Harbinger tax. Sorry, I was close. You know, QQLs don't have that. And so one of the issues with QQLs is that there's no incentive to mint. Why not just sit on the optionality of the pass? It becomes too speculative. But when you introduce, okay, Pace is going to have a show, and in that show on a certain time in New York City, Tyler is going to be available to sit with you as a collector and go through your seeds. And help you choose, and then together with other collectors, you can reveal those choices at the Pace Gallery in Chelsea, you know, one evening. It's just a really interesting example, similar to what I think you felt with the social context for when you minted the Charcoal Seed. We need these real-world experiences and these physical frictions to make crypto more successful and make NFTs more successful and make generative art more useful.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: memorable and meaningful. And it's not one or the other. It's not, do I choose the physical or the digital, that they just, they're starting to resonate and reinforce each other in really interesting ways.

Speaker C: And I think that what you're saying is obviously sitting with Tyler Hobbs in person to mint your QQL seed is not necessarily a scalable event, putting my business strategy hat on, but something like what fxhash is doing with params is. It helps when there is that social pressure and/or that social camaraderie. to really help drive it forward. But ultimately, I think what you're speaking to is that there's an interactivity there. You know, a lot of what we've been seeing in the generative art space has been you click the mint button, you get a random output. It's very dopamine heavy in its execution, but you don't have agency within that. And the addition of the agency or any sort of interactive experience, such as going to an in-person event for Bright Moments and minting your pass, right?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: That's the thing that makes it feel human in many respects.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think there's probably a lot of attachment theory work to be done around this, which is, you know, why do, of all of your collection of fx hash mints, if you had to choose 1 or 3 that are the ones you'd hold on to, if you had to let go of everything else on a desert island, what would they be? It's not necessarily the one that's worth the most. based on current floor price. It's the one that's most meaningful to you. And it might be economic purely, but it might also be where you were in your life or how quickly you found out about it or how well-known the artist was when you minted it, right? There's a whole bunch of factors that relate to how you value something and value something as part of your identity that is partly economic, but also— emotional and social. And, you know, what's your story and what's your own roadmap as a collector and as a person? And so I think what we're trying to do, or what I'm— what my project is, and I think what we're trying to do as a team at Bright Moments is externalize that. And, you know, I think scale is a really— it's a triggering word for me because when I— when you say, oh, it doesn't scale, like, I just think of like traditional asshole capitalism where the only thing that matters is scale. And I lived in the Bay Area for 15 years from 2006 to 2020. And like, I had a front row seat at Groupon and Uber and how, you know, just, it was all about scale at any cost, led by socially awkward kids who were typically running these companies and where a lot of them were just assholes, but they knew how to scale things.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: I want to get away from that.

Speaker C: That sense of the word scale is maybe there are different ways of it. Like obviously scaling from a business sense is one thing and I think one that I also prefer to shy away from. But when I'm thinking about the scaling of a human experience, right?

Speaker B: Mm-hmm.

Speaker C: Because there's the exclusive factor of if I am the weird awkward kid who doesn't run a very successful business yet, I might not have the ability to have that experience to engage with Tyler Hobbs and like have that interaction. But what are some ways to make something feel special to more people? I think that's more of like the version of scaling that I'm thinking about. of how do we spread the excitement, not necessarily to growth at any cost, but to making it available to those who want to engage.

Speaker B: Inclusive and participatory. And I think the trick is, is how do you create experiences that are inclusive, participatory, but also valuable, valuable in terms of scarcity, because a lot of what drives value in crypto is programmatic scarcity. And that if suddenly you woke up tomorrow and, you know, back to Tyler Hobbs, you said, okay, you know, there's now another Fidenza, there's now going to be 1,001 Fidenzas, not just 1,000, the value would plummet. Or if someone woke up and said, now there's more than 21 million Bitcoin or more than 10,000 CryptoPunks. Like, we hold these things dear as stores of value in a world where we don't trust the news and we don't trust governments and inflation is rampant. And so how do we balance the need for certainty and scarcity that we can prove with, at the same time, not wanting to be so exclusive and not wanting to be so elite and giving people the opportunity to get involved at the ground floor?

Speaker A: I kind of want to tackle this scale question from a different angle. I think that we've been observing a lot in the show recently, and I think a lot of people in the NFT ecosystem, the gen art ecosystem, have been seeing as well. Coming off of the boom from 2021, early 2022, I think a lot of people got the idea, let's start a platform. We're gonna start a platform. Like they see the success of Art Blocks, FX Hash, Bright Moments, a couple of the other early DAOs that were in the art mix and that timeframe. And now in 2023, we've seen so many new things open up, many different chains, many different platforms. Artists are all over the place. So we're seeing scale in the sense of there's all of these new platforms for artists to drop on, but we're not seeing scale on the collector side. An FX Hash artist that I love is now dropping here or there or there, but I'm still just the one person and there, there's not 4 more of me being created. So as someone who's been in the space for a really long time, as someone who's been involved in crypto, as someone who owns a platform, how have you observed this last 18 months of this rapid expansion into now this bear market and all of these new platforms coming me out. What is your general take on the vibe of the ecosystem now, the sustainability of it, and where things are going?

Speaker B: That's a big question, not a simple answer. It's a weird time, it's a scary time, because there's more and more supply. And I think we're all— we don't know what to do with it. And it's sort of like, be careful what you wish for, because all we wanted was more art. And guess what? We have a lot of art. And we've empowered artists to work across multiple platforms, to work across multiple chains. to produce more and more art. As the tools for artists have expanded and proliferated and the platforms and services and galleries and experiences for these artists have also opened up, it's kind of got— it's at least in the States in particular, it's kind of going the other way, which is I think it's getting, you know, harder and harder for new collectors to collect. The crypto crackdown is real. There's a lot of FUD, there's a lot of snarkiness, And it's going in the wrong direction. It's refreshing to be here in Tokyo and I guess Asia in general, because I think there is a willingness and an excitement around Web3 where you can say the word NFT in Tokyo and it's something people get excited about and curious about, as opposed to something that people get cynical about, which is the case in LA or New York these days. You know, I think there are opportunities globally and I think Bright Moments is kind of programmed to do that. Every few months we go to a different city.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And we go to cities that really are at the beginning of their adoption of this new format and this new kind of ownership culture around NFTs and generative art and AI art specifically. I don't want you to think I'm avoiding your question, but I'll come to it, I guess, maybe in a backwards way, just through our own experiences. You know, going to Berlin last year in April was really powerful. We went to London. The London market's fairly mature. Mature. There's obviously a ton of collectors, and that's when I got introduced to fx hash. I'd heard about it when I was in Berlin, but I really got deep into the community when we were in London, thanks to Proof of People and just a lot of stuff going on in London last summer, and got to meet a lot of Tez and fx hash artists that I hadn't met before. Mexico was really interesting in November, educationally, and doing generative art workshops. And now Tokyo just feels like it's a ton of hope and optimism and interest from potential collectors and not the kind of supply dynamics that we're seeing in the States. And then in October, we're going to be going to Buenos Aires, which will be equally fascinating. Now, circling back to, it's like, are there too many platforms? I think, you know, be careful what you wish dynamic here is that in the old days, I think artists were told by gallerists how often they could release And what they can release. And it was a very gallery-friendly, you know, institution-friendly balance. And I think the scales have sort of tipped now and the artists are in control. And if you're an artist, you can release on fx hash one day and Art Blocks Engine the next day. And you can do something on Verse and you can do something on Tonic and you can do something with Bright Moments and you can do something with Proof and you can do something with LACMA. And there's more and more opportunities, in particular as a generative artist, to get your work out there. But to your point, collectors get overwhelmed with supply, and it's very hard for some artists to know when to stop and when to make themselves scarce. Bright Moments' role is to provide artists with opportunities to showcase their work and generate it publicly and give people really meaningful emotional experiences. But After you do something with Bright Moments, it's really on you. We don't have an ongoing relationship in any contractual way, the way a typical gallery might with their artists. And so it's challenging right now. Some artists, I think, are just more private and precious with their output than others. And other people are doing daily coding and showing their work every single day, but maybe not minting it. Other people are minting every platform they find.

Speaker C: We're also seeing within the Web3 space kind of the proliferation of and the introduction of new artists to the community. You know, one of the big benefits of Web3 is that your audience is no longer local, although having that locality, like with what you're doing with Bright Moments, is super special and super cool. But you're also opening yourself to a global audience of people who want to purchase your art, maybe sell your art, print it out, put it on their walls, whatever. Because of the financialization within this space, at least as it exists now, I think there are people who are producing art that would've never produced art before. One of the people in my mind who has grown tremendously as an artist, at least since their first release on fxhash through to the Bright Moments drop, is Nat Sarkissian. He's not one of those people who's been around and producing digital art since '93, '94. It's an interesting dichotomy of you have these people who are seasoned professionals who have been doing this for decades. But you also have these people who've been doing this for months or years.

Speaker B: No, and I think those are some really powerful, positive outcomes of all this. And to see, you know, Nat in particular be seen. I'd seen some of Nat's work on fx hash, and then Adam from TENDER helped to curate part of the gallery when we did Piter Pasma's Industrial Devolution drop in September last year. And Nat's work looks so beautiful printed out. And he was there and we talked about doing something together in the future on $ETH, you know, on Art Blocks. And he came to Mexico in November and got to experience some of the workshops and get to see the live minting. And then we worked with him to do his show this past February.

Speaker C: And I think that's one of the first ones that I've paid a lot of attention to because obviously Nat is kind of a homegrown fx hash artist. And, you know, Will and I are both fx hash natives for what it's worth, right? I think that was a huge moment for him as well, being there and seeing things in person and just having— it's almost, it's a celebratory event, your birthday and brand new job all in one.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think to your point, like a lot of these artists, Emilie Xie is another, you know, there's just a lot of these, some of these amazing artists that really have come of age as an artist in the last couple years during the pandemic when they were locked in. And so coming out of that, if you're growing as an artist and your work gets better and better and you have collectors appreciating it in so many different ways. Like, why wouldn't you want to have a show in New York or London or Venice Beach? It's a culmination. It's not a distraction. It seems so natural. And yet none of the online platforms have really been set up to do that, to give you your first physical or your second physical show. And the flip side is a lot of the traditional physical galleries and institutions don't really know how to go crypto-native and don't know how to do some of the on-chain stuff that we do around tokenomics and mint passes to enable the artist to get paid properly.

Speaker A: Seth, I want to talk about Japan, and I also want to talk about the future of Bright Moments because there's still a few cities yet to go according to your roadmap, and I want to get into that with you. But before we jump into that, you know, you mentioned Tezos Industrial Devolution with Peter Pasma. You know, more recently we had Klein Tepech from Andreas Rau, and even just last week we had Reflejos from Juan. So how do you think about Tezos versus Ethereum? Are you chain agnostic? How does Bright Moments feel about this versus Seth? When you put a piece or when Bright Moments opts to put a piece on Tezos, does that mean anything different from when it goes on Ethereum? Or from your point of view, is it just art first, chain second?

Speaker B: I think it really, it depends on the moment. It depends on the artist. Because I think we've gone both ways. You know, there's been some examples like with Nat, where, you know, he was really well known, you know, among the Tez and the fxhash community, and we did an Art Blocks drop. We did that with Jacek as well with Cantera last month. You know, what's interesting about Juan RG and with Reflejos is that when we worked with him in Mexico, it was an Art Blocks drop, and then we just did this fxhash drop with him in Mexico.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: Last week or the week before. Here in Japan, there's a couple of artists that are amazing Tez artists like Okaz and Exotic, Y-K-X-O-T-K, who did—

Speaker C: Flower Arrangement?

Speaker B: Flower Arrangement. And yeah, and the other one, the sci-fi one.

Speaker C: Yeah, Travelers.

Speaker B: That one, Travelers, right? So he is going to be doing his first ETH Art Blocks drop, you know, next week in Tokyo in collaboration with Suntory. It's a long-form generative drop. It's going to be 100 outputs. They are beautiful generative woodblock paintings of fireworks. They'll be etched onto the outside of a box holding a bottle of Suntory whiskey that you'll get after you mint his piece, and you'll also get a small pour from one of the leading bartenders who's being flown in from Hong Kong to pour you from this ancient bottle of whiskey. While you're revealing your NFT for the first time. And that'll be done on ETH and Art Blocks. So I'm not chain agnostic because I do think there are different situations for different artists at different times. And I think I have so much respect for the fxhash team and for the fxhash community. You know, it's why I'm here with you and I love it. And it's really a really powerful soul and creative force within this community. But there's also a lot of challenges with Tez.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: As a chain in the minds of larger investors and larger collectors. And there's a lot of FUD around that in terms of its sustainability long-term. I don't buy into it entirely, but it is a thing. And so at least we're past the environmental stuff because now it's at parity with ETH, but there's a different debate going. I think FXHash is going to matter for a very, very long time and hopefully forever. I think Art Blocks will matter forever because of how committed they are to doing everything on-chain. Those are the 2 platforms that I'm mostly tapped into and we work with and we organize ourselves around and through within Bright Moments. We obviously have our own contracts as well for certain projects, but most of our stuff, you know, we try to push towards being fully on-chain generative work.

Speaker C: Why is that important to you? I mean, obviously it's the on-chain-ness of it all, but is there anything specific that you would like to call out? And this is something that comes up in conversation a lot. And we talk about the discrepancies between not necessarily the platforms, but I think within the ideologies, because we know that fx hash is going to have on-chain solutions at some point in the hopefully near future.

Speaker B: Yeah. And then there's the elephant in the room being AI, which is how do we move AI on-chain and what parts of it move on-chain, what don't, how do these models live? Can we recreate the works in the future without having access to the models on-chain? Yes.

Speaker A: There's a great fx article on this exact problem, which is that even the most on-chain projects are not as future-proofed as you might think. I think it's going to be a perennial issue regardless of whether or not you use IPFS or whether or not you reference outside libraries.

Speaker B: You know, I think it's a way for people to sleep at night. There's some of that going on, which is just kind of emotional or mental insurance. But then at the same time, William Mapan did Strands of Solitude on Tonic, and that's not particularly on-chain, but he's an amazing artist. And it's hard not to want to collect all of his work.

Speaker A: If you can't achieve your work on-chain, then does it mean your work's not valid? Like, I think that's a huge question, and I don't think we're going to answer it maybe in the next even couple years, potentially.

Speaker B: It's very near and dear to us here in Tokyo. We have 4 collections here in Tokyo. We have 1,000 CryptoTokyoites that we'll be minting May 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th. The artist is Chan Chan, who's our pixel artist and our creative director at Bright Moments, who done all of our Crypto Citizen collections from the get-go. And as with each collection, there's 4 different backgrounds. And so there'll be 4 different backgrounds of the Tokyoites. So we'll be minting 1,000 of those, 250 per background, 4 different backgrounds, which represent the seasons. Then we have the Tokyo Collection, which is 11 generative artists, all fully on-chain on Art Blocks, including quibibi, which will be his first ETH Art Blocks drop, including Takuo, including Kim Asendorf and Jeff Davis and Licia He and Kjetil Golid and Lars Wander, and just an amazing lineup. And Melissa Wiederrecht, who I listened to the podcast with you before. So that's all fully on-chain. That will be in a historic temple, sort of shrine called the Asakura Residence. That's about 10 minutes away from Digital Garage where we will be.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Minting the Crypto Tokyoites, and we'll also be exhibiting the AI collection. So we have 11 AI artists that we'll be revealing, and then 11 Japanese contemporary artists, including Okaz and Exotic and Ei Mashiro, Daito Manabe, among others. It's the AI artist that is just a really interesting test case for this dynamic of on-chain, off-chain. Does it matter? Does it not matter? On the one end of the spectrum, you have Helena Sarin, who is 100% curating her outputs. She's not leaving it to chance. She's using these models that she's been training for years and years, and they're not going to move on-chain. They're not going to fit on-chain, and there's no issues with that. And on the other extreme, you have Pindar von Aarman, who's writing his own smart contract to make sure that his GANs are going to be fully on-chain because that's what he wants to do. And then there's Claire and Sophia and Ganbrud and others who are somewhere in between.

Speaker A: The whole Tokyo event sounds amazing. Obviously you're there right now. This episode is going to drop right at the start of Bright Moments Tokyo, the whole multi-day event. To someone who has never participated but has observed from afar, this sounds like it's the biggest Bright Moments event by a big step. So one of the questions to ask you would be, from an artist standpoint, what is it like to coordinate a huge event like Bright Moments Tokyo? Is there a lot of inbound artist interest, or do you have people on the Bright Moments side who are sending requests out like, hey, we're doing Tokyo, it's going to be 9 months from now, we'd love for you to be included? What is that process like of getting all these artists together? Because art on a timeline is a very difficult thing to achieve, saying like, here is the date. We know often, right, on the fxhash side and observing other platforms, like art is a hard thing to put onto a deadline. And yet Bright Moments seems to achieve it pretty consistently. So what's that process like? And then I think after this, let's talk about also like, where is Bright Moments going for City 8, 9, and 10?

Speaker B: So a lot can go wrong in the next week. I'm knocking on a lot of wood, you know, like at the scale of 30+ artists, the likelihood is that there'll be at least 2 or 3 that will be down to the wire, that will be high drama, that miss the deadline, right? That's just life. And so we try to be prepared for it. We also, in the cases of the AI artists and the generative artists, the Tokyo collection, we sold mint passes, you know, 2 months ahead to get them paid. You know, we give 70% of all proceeds, you know, goes to the artist after the platform fees. So if Art Blocks takes us 10%, if we're doing using the Art Blocks contract, we then split 70-30 with the artist. And because we're selling the mint passes in advance, that's what we're using as well as selling our own CryptoCitizens. We sell a third of the thousand for each city to fund that city. Those mint passes, which we sold in February, were used to allow us to get space and produce Tokyo in May. We have that dynamic going on. It's a lot to coordinate. You know, we have people like Malta and Fed on our team who coordinate with artists as curators and artist relations. And Samir, who's known as Spongenuity, who's one of the artists in the Tokyo collection, has also been working with all the AI artists to corral them and try to get their work up on testnet and then up on mainnet ready for next week.

Speaker C: Logistics aside, I think this is probably one of the most ambitious Bright Moments events to date, both from an experiential side, but also from the lineup of artists that you have here is just absurdly amazing. You know, you just look down the—

Speaker B: It's absurd.

Speaker C: Down the sheet from like the generative artists, the AI artists. What was the thinking behind bringing this group of people together and making something spectacular happen?

Speaker B: I'll go back before Mexico. I'd say we didn't know it was going to be Tokyo because we vote as a DAO. Everybody that holds a CryptoCitizen gets a vote. It'll be 7,000 after Tokyo, but there's 6,000 minted CryptoCitizens so far. Everybody gets to vote on what city's next. That was the case for Tokyo, and the choices were Tokyo, Singapore, Seoul, Bangkok, and Hanoi. Buenos Aires won the vote over Sydney, Melbourne, Rio, and São Paulo, so Southern Hemisphere. We didn't know exactly it was going to be Tokyo. I had a hunch though, and so around last fall, I think the artists that really resonated with me that I felt were really important artists that we hadn't worked with before were Zancan and Kibibi and Kjetil Golid. were all on the generative side, just really important to reach out to and see if they'd be interested in working with us. And in the case of Kjetil, he had come through London last summer. He minted a Crypto Londoner. I think it got the wheels turning. Zancan also came through London, minted a Crypto Londoner while he was there for Proof of People. He had that experience of what it was like to sit in this boutique in Mayfair across from the Browns Hotel and have a cup of tea while we minted him his Crypto Londoner with on-chain generative music. And Compressing, you know, a beautiful experience into a couple of seconds. But net-net, we really try to make sure that artists have live minting experiences viscerally, not just that they read about it or they see a video on it, but they actually feel it. And it gives them ideas of what they could do with their work that might be different than if it was purely online, even though the work itself ends up online. So I think I sent feelers out in particular, I remember, to Zancan and Kjetil and quibibi, you know, we try to work with new artists each city. And so if the artists that are part of the Tokyo collection are unique, we haven't worked with them before, just like the artists that were part of the London collection, like Matt Delaurier or Emilie or Thomas Lynn Peterson, you know, they were only in the city collections once. The only artist that breaks that mold is Jeff Davis because he was our first show in Venice Beach, and he's actually done a project in every single city that we've gone to, including Tokyo. On the AI side, and this was what was fascinating, is I think we had a really strong hunch that we should do something with AI more systematically. We had done a project with Ivona Tau. We'd done a project with Beretta in Berlin working through AI outputs. And we thought, well, we're going to be in Tokyo. It's the city of the future. It seems natural to do something at a bigger scale along with the generative artists doing the Tokyo collection. Why don't we invite a group of artists to be part of an AI collection. And we reached out just to our wishlist. Let's just pick the greatest living AI artists that we could think of, invite them to Tokyo. And by and large, they all said yes, which kind of shocked us. And so that's really how it happened. There are other artists like Gene Kogan and Memo Atkin, Robbie Barrett, that I would love to have involved. I just didn't invite them because, you know, we had 11 that said yes first.

Speaker A: We've interviewed Ivona for the show too. So if you haven't listened to that episode, listeners to go back and check that one out. She's released some great projects on FX Hash. But Seth, I'm curious to know, so what is the future of Bright Moments? A couple times now you've mentioned the fact that the presales of Crypto Citizens or mint passes is kind of key to moving forward and setting up these events all over the world. The roadmap says there's only gonna be 10K Crypto Citizens. So that's what, city 8, 9, and 10 coming up? That's gonna conclude sometime Q1, Q2 next year.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So what is the longer-term roadmap for Bright Moments? Once all the CryptoCitizens are minted, is it going to be like fully a DAO controlled by these 10,000? And what's also the fundraising going to be like? So is it going to be entirely MintPass driven? Like, how's it going to work?

Speaker B: All good questions. So what we know is Tokyo's next. Buenos Aires will be October. We voted on it. City 9 will be February. It'll be a wildcard. 8,000 citizens will vote on where they think we should go next. It could be a write-in ballot. Up until now, we've kind of arranged the choices geographically, but I think for the 9th city, I could imagine it could be Paris, it could be Lisbon, it could be Sydney, it could be Istanbul.

Speaker A: Jersey City.

Speaker B: Could be Jersey City, Tallahassee, Tucson, I don't know. But that'll be city number 9. And then city 10, we just announced that we chose Venice, Italy. So we're going to finish the CryptoCitizens minting for 2024, which is a palindrome, at the beginning of the Biennale in Venice, Italy next April, so that the journey will be from Venice to Venice, from Venice Beach to Venice, Italy, and that'll be the culmination of this phase of the project. We're going to try to restage as many of the exhibitions from the past 3 years as possible and invite all the artists who've been with us along the journey to come be there for the grand finale retrospective, and it's going to be an amazing narrative And an amazing experience to see how this strange band of misfits from Venice Beach emerged and evolved and grew communities as we went. To your point as to like what comes beyond that, you know, there's a couple of things we're doing now in preparation towards this progressive decentralization where every city that we activate, we establish a subDAO that has its own local signers on it and its own treasury. And they have access to the brand and the software that we've developed for minting and displaying NFTs.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: IRL and the communities that we've built so far. So there's a subDAO in New York and there's a subDAO in Venice and there's a subDAO in Mexico and London and Berlin and Tokyo now. And the idea is, I think, after the 10th city and after minting is complete with the crypto citizens, there'll be these 10 independent subDAOs that will all have access to the same shared network of services. They'll have access to the brand. And they'll be encouraged to keep doing things like minting artist residencies. Maybe we do a maybe more of an annual experience, but we don't know entirely yet. I think we know that if we execute Tokyo and the next couple of cities, and we continue to lean into connecting artists with each other and connecting artists with collectors and doing workshops, I think we'll be in a really good place next April when we mint Crypto Venetian number 999. And have a moment to look back over 3 years and figure out what's next.

Speaker C: It's beautiful and the end of an era, so to speak. And it'll be interesting to see what, not from a SubDAO perspective or a DAO perspective, but from a Seth perspective and a Bright Moments perspective, what comes next.

Speaker A: What is Seth's role in all of this when all 10,000 crypto citizens are done? Like, did you build this entire platform just to step back and give it to the people? That's such an unusual path for a startup.

Speaker B: It's hard to say this in a world where we're so used to pretending like we're going to do things forever. In order to raise capital traditionally, you have to say that you're going to do it forever, even though you know in the back of your mind you'll only be judged successful if you exit. And what's, I think, liberating about what we're doing is it's an art project. It's designed for completion. It doesn't mean that there won't be value that accrues to Crypto Citizen holders in the future, because there will be. It's not because we're some traditional Web2 company with the Series C funding dressed up in Web3 clothes. Like genuinely, like all we are is just a bunch of Crypto Citizen tokens. That's the only mechanism we have to govern what we do. There is no other equity. There's no other board of directors. And in that regard, it is an art project and it is going to come to an end and that's okay. And because these NFTs are forever. They don't go away. You know, they can still be collected, they can still be traded, they can be bought, they can be sold. And my hope is that they will tell a story and they will be powerful and they will mean something to a lot of different people in and around the generative art space. And there's no reason that the communities that we formed along the way can't continue to generate art together, because in the end, That's all we're doing. Every single ETH and every single Tez that comes into our system is somehow used to produce more art. And that's just a really beautiful thing. It's a way of thinking about all of this as art. And if we can navigate supply-demand dynamics of this world that we're living through, through all the FUD and the FOMO cycles, I think we'll have something that everybody who has been a part of will feel really proud of and will want to continue to see grow, even if it's not through a traditional kind of startup or company lens.

Speaker A: What you described to some degree sounds very much like a podcast to me.

Speaker C: Oh, I was going to say a TV show.

Speaker A: A project that does not have a very defined ending. You have no idea where it's going to go or who's going to care about it. That is, I think, mirrors our experience very much doing this show for the last, what is it, 16 months, 17 months now.

Speaker C: But we'll keep putting out episodes and episodes and episodes.

Speaker A: It'll never end.

Speaker C: Yeah, we don't have no doubt. I was thinking it's kind of like a TV show in a way where there's the end of the series, but that doesn't mean that the show ends, you know, it lives on in the hearts of the people, but there's time to move on to new things while still being fond of all the memories that were created and continuing to create content and new communities around what was already there. It's very poignant and I love it.

Speaker A: Thank you.

Speaker C: As you said, it's so antithetical to like this Proto-capitalistic structure that we see ourselves living in. We've already mentioned startup culture. I love it.

Speaker B: Thank you. I know you couldn't come up for Tokyo, but maybe Buenos Aires or Jersey City along the way. I'll be there.

Speaker A: Jersey City. I'm writing it in. You said there's gonna be a write-in. I'm writing it in for City Nine.

Speaker B: Two votes for Hoboken.

Speaker A: I can think of some great beer gardens that have a lot of space out here. I mean, Jersey City is full of space. So Seth, I know you've been with us for a while now. If we can ask you one rapid-fire question, maybe as a way to end cap this and drive us towards a conclusion, one that we like to ask a lot of our guests: who would you like to hear us interview next? You can propose multiple people— artists, platform owners, anyone that you'd be interested to hear a long-form interview with.

Speaker B: I would say Matt Delaurier is, is wonderful and thoughtful and pretty extraordinary. You know, conversations I've had with DefBeef. Like, these are great minds who I think would be really interesting to your audience. I would love to get closer to Manolo and understand the way he thinks and where he is in his life and his journey. I think a lot of us would. He's pretty hard to access. Have you had Marcelo and Iskra on? That would also be fascinating.

Speaker C: We had Marcelo on with Andreas Rau to talk about Takata. Mm-hmm.

Speaker B: I got the chance to interview the two of them on stage in Mexico. is really wonderful. And just the way that as partners, how they explore each other's struggle through their work. You know, Karate Kid, James Higgo, is amazing and is so well-versed across both fx hash and the AI and the Art Blocks ecosystems. You know, Derek Edwards does the podcast with Proof with Kevin. He is probably like just the smartest counsel that I have access to strategically for Bright Moments. They're big contributors in our community. of CryptoCitizens, and he really helped us, I think, through this roadmap with his partner Stephen McKeon. And he's obviously way more versed in the Art Blocks ETH ecosystem because he's been one of the first investors in Art Blocks. But I think it would be a good perspective for the fxhash community to understand where things stand on that side of the equation. So those are the ones just off the top of my mind.

Speaker A: A lot of people that have not dropped an fxhash, so it gives us an excuse to reach out to them and try to get them to notice us. So thank you. It's a big goal of ours for 2023 and beyond to try to engage with the broader generative art ecosystem because it's clear that not everyone's going to come to Tezos, even though we would like them to.

Speaker B: But I think fx hash will come to ETH in all sorts of different ways. So I feel like, to me, like what you're doing and the conversations you're having are way bigger than Tez. They're really important conversations with artists who are thinking about generative art in the most fundamental ways. So, you know, I just really appreciate all the conversations you've had and all the time I've spent listening to the different podcasts and the respect that people have in the industry for what you're doing. And just happy and proud to be part of this. So anything I can do to help.

Speaker A: Well, thank you, Seth. That means a lot, and we really appreciate it. We love the space. We love what's going on.

Speaker C: We're at the point where we can no call ourselves an FX Hash podcast. I think we're now a generative art podcast.

Speaker A: Anything else, Seth, before we depart? You've given us a ton of your time, really grateful for that. Anything else you want to leave us with before we conclude the episode?

Speaker B: Only that, like, for anybody that's interested in Bright Moments Tokyo, like, it's open for anybody. It doesn't mean that you necessarily are going to mint something because you have to have a mint pass for that, or you have to buy an NFT. But if If there are listeners who are in and around Tokyo, Friday, May 5th through Wednesday, May 10th, we are at Digital Garage. It's super interesting. Come to brightmoments.io to get information on how to show up. We're going to have general admission tickets. We're having a final show at an amazing nightclub in Shibuya called Woom on Wednesday, May 10th, where all of the 4,000+ NFTs that have been generated will be shown over the course of one night, VJ'd by Beretta and Daito Manabe and an amazing group of DJs that'll just be spectacular. So just above all, if anybody's interested and they're not sure if they can come, the answer is yes, please come, please check it out because we're not going to do this again. I think this will be peak Bright Moments and I'm just really excited for it.

Speaker A: And the Venice location, like Venice Beach, and you have a place in New York too, right? Like, are there other galleries that people can drop by whenever they feel like it?

Speaker B: And every Thursday night we have a meetup in the different locations. So there's meetups every Thursday in every one of the locations. Some of them we have a permanent location like Venice Beach, others it's more pop-up based, but that's pretty easy to find. And we also do artists in residences every month so that we're able to live mint that month's artist in residence live in person at the meetup. Camille Roux was a great artist in residence. Last month we did Fingacode, back last summer, Junior. So there's been some really great artists that have come through this program who are all emerging and are wonderful. And in the case of Junior and Camille, they're both fxhash artists as well.

Speaker A: All right, Seth, thank you so much. This has been an amazing episode. We really appreciate you taking the time, especially considering the time difference and the fact that you have a big event next week. It was really a pleasure to talk to you. Hope you enjoyed your time on the show.

Speaker B: Thanks for having me. This was great.

Speaker A: We're very foreign to ETH. We're starting to like dip our toes into it in 2023, but talking to you, hearing about your whole story, I think it just broadens our perspective on generative art in general across all chains. So we really appreciate it and we hope everyone who's listening appreciates it as well.

Speaker B: One thing we didn't mention is like, just, it's kind of an aside, is like, I was just thinking earlier before we talked about how The chain comparison thing and how for so long Tez was seen as somehow inferior to ETH, but the more that ETH has gotten caught up in all these DeFi scandals, I wonder if like there's a tarnish to it where you can point to Tez and be like, look, the only use case here is art. And maybe that's a good thing because it hasn't gotten ruined through all the just like financial charades the way that ETH has.

Speaker C: That's what I love about it. It's a very secure chain just from the lack of shenanigans. And, you know, thinking back to the story that you had from the very beginning of Bright Moments, getting people to walk in off the boardwalk and mint a semi-free NFT minus gas fees, and thinking about the transaction costs on Tezos. When we were just at NFT NYC last week, all of the free mints were on Tezos, presumably because—

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: It's so easy to transact. That's a different type of utility that just makes me believe in the scalability of the platform overall.

Speaker B: I agree.

Speaker A: I'm very tempted to ask you some more questions about the Philip Glass days. We can save that for another episode, maybe.

Speaker B: Another time.

Speaker A: Awesome. Yeah, I'm sure you've got some great stories from back in that era.

Speaker B: That was kind of the highlight for me at Berlin as we staged this 15-minute NFT that was a 15-minute kind of reconstruction of Einstein on the Beach that Bob Wilson and Philip Glass were both part of in Berlin. And every night we showed this, you know, on a huge screen, this NFT of this like light orb moving to Philip Glass music in front of like 1,500 people, and it really blew people's minds.

Speaker A: Thank you again, Seth. Thank you, Trinity, for recording as always. I hope everyone enjoyed this episode. It was really a pleasure to talk to Seth. Check out Bright Moments Tokyo. There's more events coming in the future. Hope you all enjoyed. We'll be back again with another episode soon. Until then, bye everyone.