Raoul Pal: The Journey Man
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.
00:53:45 · Micky Malka
[00:53:45] S1: I think as a collector, what we do is we believe in this idea that trying to be the trusted friend to the artist. In in art world, that's called, like, a patron model. I don't know exactly, but I I don't think we're... Our... We don't get the joy of doing this if we don't get to spend time with the artist, meet them, and encourage them to push the limits of their imagination because that is the best way. That's where art should live. The same way entrepreneurs are the best when you push them to the limits of their imagination and you just give them the support and the trust and the comfort that you're there for them if shit goes bad. Right? So that's how we feel with the artist side. What happened was we started to talk to museums about this. How do we get this art into the museums? And the answers were extremely like talking to banks ten years ago. Well, you can talk to the committee for 2028, and we can maybe do something in... And we will need to prepare for three years, and we'll have to curate it or... Like, it was just a lang... It's just a language that doesn't speak to the culture moment that we live right now, how people are connecting to right now in the moment. Like, you're trying to explain an exhibition to 2028 to people doing an art piece every day. Like, they don't connect. By the time you exhibited, they lost them... They lost the moment. Their art needs to be expressed daily and show and and broadcasted and tell the story in in a different way. So we looked at each other and said, how do we do this? Let's not work in their system. Let's be the rebels like in Ribbit, where we consider ourselves to be rebels. How do we do the same in this world? Because it's very similar in so many ways. People don't see it. The older generation are not gonna be the the people who are actually the collectors. It's going to be the young generations who understand it, and they live it, and they're okay with digital art and living in pixels or on chain or the world seeing it but only one person on it. So we put the challenge of how do we do this? And that's where we came up with Node, a foundation that we spearheaded, that we're backing with three very clear purposes. First, Node is a network. And it starts with a concept of a network. It's not a destination, it's a network. So a node has no values, there's no more nodes.
00:56:12 · Micky Malka
So the more nodes, the better. So we're starting with node one with the idea that will be more of them. But there's three concepts. One, exhibition. How do you make people feel about this? Museums are not wired to show digital art. This doesn't... This is not supposed to be on screens on the walls. It's supposed to be alive. It's supposed to feel immersive. It's supposed to feel like you're walking through the story of the art. You don't need a small letterhead of 10 lines telling you what the artist meant or a QR code to take a photo. You don't need that. You need something very different. So people want something very different. So we had to design a space from scratch that allowed for that creativity. And what better place than Palo Alto? Why? It's where computers got started. It's where Steve Jobs started the first Apple store a block away from Node. And we... I remember seeing him going to the store every day for the first year, tweaking how things were shown, how things were presented in the store because that was a place where they they started, they designed the store here. And then they took it. And then it became a node network of itself with the Apple Stores. So we're trying to replicate. We're no Steve Jobs. We're not Apple. But we're trying to replicate that sensation, that feeling.
00:57:34 · Raoul Pal, Micky Malka
[00:57:34] S0: It's also super interesting choice of location because, obviously, there's there's Stanford there. There's all of the technologists, and none of them actually own digital art. There's very few of these guys who built this whole digital world own any of this stuff. It's weird. [00:57:51] S1: That's correct. It's very weird. And I think it's gonna grow on them. And I think when... Once they see it, they cannot unsee it. They connect with it really fast. We've been... At our home, we have been exhibiting digital art and physical art together. You can see how digital art attracts everybody young. And they get embedded in it and they get absorbed by it, and they ask questions, and they wanna come back and see it again. So you can see this is gonna happen. It's just... It hasn't been their place. You don't expect a techie guy to go to the museum and walk for two hours and find one piece in a l e... LED screen this size on a wall. That's not gonna make the connection to them.
00:57:51 · Micky Malka, Raoul Pal
[00:57:51] S1: That's correct. It's very weird. And I think it's gonna grow on them. And I think when... Once they see it, they cannot unsee it. They connect with it really fast. We've been... At our home, we have been exhibiting digital art and physical art together. You can see how digital art attracts everybody young. And they get embedded in it and they get absorbed by it, and they ask questions, and they wanna come back and see it again. So you can see this is gonna happen. It's just... It hasn't been their place. You don't expect a techie guy to go to the museum and walk for two hours and find one piece in a l e... LED screen this size on a wall. That's not gonna make the connection to them. [00:58:31] S0: It's also interesting to see the collector base change as well. We're starting to see... There's very little trading goes on now. It's just a it's just a bunch of collectors coming into the space and trying to build serious collections. I think the whole space has changed. A lot of people don't understand this. When I I mentioned I was at some family office event in LA, and talking about it, NFTs, they're like, oh my god. That was awful. I'm like, you don't understand what's happening. It's like, there are serious collections being built, serious relationships with artists, and it's less financialization and more the traditional art curation and collection that's happening.
00:58:31 · Raoul Pal, Micky Malka
[00:58:31] S0: It's also interesting to see the collector base change as well. We're starting to see... There's very little trading goes on now. It's just a it's just a bunch of collectors coming into the space and trying to build serious collections. I think the whole space has changed. A lot of people don't understand this. When I I mentioned I was at some family office event in LA, and talking about it, NFTs, they're like, oh my god. That was awful. I'm like, you don't understand what's happening. It's like, there are serious collections being built, serious relationships with artists, and it's less financialization and more the traditional art curation and collection that's happening. [00:59:11] S1: I agree with you. I think we're we're just starting the storytelling phase. And and even the artists are getting more comfortable telling their story because they were the first entrepreneurs. This is like the first entrepreneurs that started the Internet. They're not... They just saw technology in a way that no one else understood it. They saw the future way, way before. And now you're starting to see how they're getting comfortable telling the stories, sharing how this has happened. And on top of that, there's a whole generation of new artists that you've met and I'm meeting that are just special also. Because for them, it's like there's no other way. There's no turning back. They didn't even train on on the old mediums. They went straight to these new mediums.