Raoul Pal: The Journey Man
00:45:31 · Micky Malka
[00:45:31] S1: So I missed the whole free to claim CryptoPunks 2017. I never bought CryptoKitty when Ethereum showed up. I saw them. I saw how it collapsed the network. I I saw the punks, but I was too busy doing my stuff and missed the whole thing and missed the NFT craziness of '21 or twenty twenty one, twenty two. I stumbled into digital art in 2022, just three years ago. And, it was in the bear market, and I was, the the markets had calmed down. World was a little bit slower. We were reshaping our thesis and our thinking. And on Twitter, was scrolling, and I saw an art piece posted that looked very similar to an art piece that Becky and I have from a Brazilian artist that was painted in the eighties. And it was very similar, and we were like, woah. This is beautiful. So ended up going online, buying it. It was from a Mexican artist one called Juan Carlos Garcia, and he had done it on a bright moments Mexico exhibition. And and so we bought our first NFT. And then our journey was more like, let's pair... Because we have an art... We've been collecting physical art for a while. Let's pair some of our physical art with our digital art. And we we went and saw the Autoglyphs, and they matched with something we had from an artist from the fifties. And and so our journey was not a crypto first journey. Our journey was not a trading journey or a looking for the hard, to find stuff. It was very artistic by nature, just trying to pair. And then... And along that journey, when we bought The Autoglyphs, we got a chance to meet John and Matt, the Larva founders. And then we talked about the Cryptopunks and about the pixels in the Cryptopunks and where it comes from and we're the same age and how it was the same games we were playing when we were kids and the psychic and the whole story about and how it was free to claim. And that was the day that we just... The moment came. And trying to convince Becky to shift from physical art to digital was a journey of itself, and now we're fully, as as as you can imagine Well, because you... I mean, I
00:47:53 · Raoul Pal
[00:47:53] S0: remember following you earlier in the journey, and you were comparing Latin American and South American arts that you'd had physically and that art history of that region and then showing the art history of that region continuing into digital art and how they were referencing each other. So you really came from art itself.
00:48:14 · Micky Malka
[00:48:14] S1: We came from art itself completely. We were just doing the pairings, and our first website was just pairing our stuff and... For ourselves and showing our kids how how art can talk in different generations to different people, but it still rhymes. And that was our our our whole thing. I will say we... Along the way, three things happen. One, you encounter amazing people that are so creative that inspire you. And that is people that, you know, have become our friends, like Eric from Snowfro or my people or Sam Spratt or and and or Michael and Picos. And when you start to meet them and you see the human behind them, you've even fallen in love more because inspiration of what they're doing goes beyond just what they're expressing. It's what they feel. So that was really refreshing in a world where art has become extremely stale and politically heated and in many ways boring. I remember we went to the Biennale in Venice in 2023 maybe. When was it? 2024. 2324. And we walked the Biennale, and it was boring. It was dead. There was no energy. It was just all of this. And it was curated by a Brazilian curator. We thought it was gonna be tropical and colorful and beautiful, and it wasn't. And then we walked down, we walked through Venice, and we went to the Bright Moments finale, the last exhibition. And all of these young artists and energy and creativity and pushing each other and collaborating and clapping for each other's success and the new stories. And you just feel like you were back in Paris nineteen tens or nineteen twenties when the artist had that kind of energy. So we left that place saying, we're do something about this. This is bigger than just this because that curation in the Biennale and Venice or the museums, they feel like in fintech analogy, they feel like going to a bank branch. Yeah. Why would you go to a bank branch anymore? They're... They don't talk to you. They don't need anything from the bank branch. That's how museums are talking to people and art is talking to people. So we we got more excited to spend more time in this side.
00:50:34 · Raoul Pal, Micky Malka
[00:50:34] S0: And, also, you know, I've talked ad nauseam about this. It's a cultural moment. It's like Paris in the nineteen tens. It's like London or New York in the in the early two thousands. It's like... Or or New York and Warhol factory. There's everything around this, and it's exciting, and it's young and creative and different and unique. And those are magic moments. And we're going... You know, this whole trajectory of the Internet, crypto, AI, all of this is about to change everything, and this is that moment. And this moment is going to be relevant to humanity forever. And so artists tell stories, and so... And particularly cultural stories, and that's... It's so attractive. It's just fun. [00:51:22] S1: It is. And you call it artisanal stories. We describe it as artists are here to tell you the future before we get there. And they are. They're telling... They're doing both. And and the best ones are just magical. I mean, can you go to sleep every day without looking at what people does for you every day? [00:51:40] S0: Can. [00:51:43] S1: And it's it's magical. It's a storytelling. And and and each one has a different way of doing it.
00:51:43 · Micky Malka, Raoul Pal
[00:51:43] S1: And it's it's magical. It's a storytelling. And and and each one has a different way of doing it. [00:51:49] S0: So how... So once you had the moment and you got Becky across the line... Or how did you get Becky across the line? From here's some really kind of interesting contemporary art to, listen. There's a pixel image with a hoodie and glasses, and this is a really good idea. Tell me about how you got Becky across the line, and then we'll talk about what you've what you've been building because it... It's really important what you're doing.
00:52:12 · Micky Malka, Raoul Pal
[00:52:12] S1: I wish I could tell you that it's... I take credit for it, but I didn't. It wasn't me that got across the line. You know, after being together for a lifetime, this is what happens. But she joined a call put together by the curated team. We were investors in curated at the beginning. And they had brought Matt and John from Larva to explain crypto banks. And they went online and they show the... Hey. There's five types of funks. Here they are, female, male, zombies, apes, and aliens, and here are the rarities. And there's 87 attributes, and here's how we play with them, and here's how we put it together, and here's how we did the collection. She finished a phone call, looks at me and says, I get it. I love it. We should do this. It was like a moment of storytelling when they understood the magic, And it's no surprise that it starts with portraits because every art movement in history starts with faces. Every single one. So there is some cultural moment, a technological moment, a a moment with 10,000 portraits. That was the beginning of this cycle. And that was how she saw it, and that's how she said, alright. What what do we do now? [00:53:33] S0: So what did you do then? So the the canvas, the node, punk, some of that stories is a really interesting story as well, and I think it needs to be told.