Raoul Pal: The Journey Man
01:00:37 · Micky Malka, Raoul Pal
[01:00:37] S1: Tim is pushing the boundaries on this. I agree with you. Pixel decks is one of the most interesting projects out there, and only a person like him can actually push the boundaries like that. And you gotta understand his background and his love for music and how he thinks about pixels as a unit of a token that talks to... Also to music in real... That are alive. It's just a beautiful concept. And we're starting to see more people like that coming and and pushing the boundaries. So what happens with them is where do they go? Where do they exhibit this? Where do they have the pixels talk to the pixels to each other? Where do people can see the difference between an RP with a million pixels and one with half a million pixels? And and that narrative and that storytelling is what we wanna start with allowing artists like Kim to show through the space at Node. So that's our first goal. [01:01:27] S0: I mean, I saw online you guys were posting. I think the node was posting that there's a bunch of screens just arriving. So what is that... When do you think it's gonna be up and running? I know it's hard, and there's a lot to do, and you need to break new ground yourself to get this done.
01:01:27 · Raoul Pal, Micky Malka
[01:01:27] S0: I mean, I saw online you guys were posting. I think the node was posting that there's a bunch of screens just arriving. So what is that... When do you think it's gonna be up and running? I know it's hard, and there's a lot to do, and you need to break new ground yourself to get this done. [01:01:42] S1: Well, you know, to to answer that question, it all starts with having a great team. And we got a team led by Phil, who was a... From the early days into brave moments and build a lot of their tours all over the all over the world who loves technology and those art. And we got a team. The team at Node, it's engineers and AI people. It's not art curators or museum people. So it's a very different way of of approaching the exhibition. So to answer your question, we will be soft opening the space sometime in December for us to test and how... And see how it goes. We'll officially open to public in January. I'm not sure yet on the date, but, we will definitely start with a collection that is close and dear to many of the art digital, holders of the world with what we think is one of the best brands worldwide. [01:02:41] S0: And that's what? CryptoPunks. [01:02:43] S1: And that is CryptoPunks. [01:02:44] S0: So talk... I know we're gonna we're gonna run out of time, but I need to hear the story of you ending up buying the IP rights to CryptoPunks and why you did it, because it's also important why you did it.
01:02:54 · Micky Malka
[01:02:54] S1: I think that if you wanted to... If we truly are right and we... This is a cultural moment in time and a society moment in time, you have to make sure that the best assets have a home that has no other interest, but their... The ability to tell the story forever. And the CryptoPunks IP for different reasons ended up in hands of corporate world. And they did as good as a job as they could to steward it, but they could not navigate it because it was... Corporations are designed to think short term in some of this stuff and and also have a different kinds of agenda. So, thankfully, the the... You guys did a good job managing the brand for a number of years, and they also agreed that finding a home like this was a better place for it. So, we did something that we've never done, which is contribute a lot of money to the... To Nodes so they can go buy this and find a permanent home for it. And and the beauty of this is that now every punk holder and every museum and every Node and everybody in the world knows that the brand, the attributes, the marketplace sit in a place that is gonna be thinking in decades, not in days, that is going to slowly allow the story to be unlocked, that is going to make owners feel proud of what they have. And I I do believe that there is no better object, no better portrait that tells the story of this cultural movement than crypto banks as a portrait, period. And as I told people ten years ago, you should at least buy 1% of your net worth in Bitcoin or just buy one, put it away, forget about it. I told people in this day, you should have Bitcoins for sure. Put them away. You should have one CryptoPunk. Forget about it. It will be one of the most rare collectible objects in in the next twenty, thirty years. So how how we got there, just to finish that, I was not prepared for this. I was... I didn't think about it that long. It wasn't a master plan design. It was an entrepreneurial moment of saying, this is the flag that is going to make the node have a story that can be shared worldwide. And let's let's take it, and let's see how much good we we can do with it.
01:05:21 · Raoul Pal, Micky Malka
[01:05:21] S0: And how I think about it, again, it's something you and I talked about. You know your mission is complete or not complete, but you're on the right track the larger the number of holders of punks there are. Because then you're creating... If you can have 10,000 nodes in that network, it's much more powerful than 5,000 nodes in the network. [01:05:42] S1: A 100%. I think the the true north star... If if I had a KPI, it will be that, that over the next ten years, we have 10,000 unique holders of funds. And maybe by then, some people are fractionalizing ownership and there's more. That's a whole different equation than smart contracts will allow to do or not. But I do think that that's the value of of this. It's it's what it means and what it will represent to society. [01:06:10] S0: And a final question on the on the art side is, how do we bring new people in, or do we just allow it to happen from the younger cohort? Because there was a whole moment in this space where they thought it was important to go to museums, and they thought it was important to get... To go to Art Basel and bring in traditional art investors. I just don't think that's the way. I think it should be crypto native, Internet native people who should be involved.
01:06:38 · Micky Malka
[01:06:38] S1: When when I started my first fintech company in the nineties, I really, really, really cared that the banks like me than the incumbents. And I did my best to work around them or with them, or I convinced Morgan Stanley to work with me when I was 22. Like, it was really important in my mind that those things happen. When I started Ribbit, we made sure that none of entrepreneurs spend time talking to the incumbents because all they can do was buy us their way of doing stuff. There's a set of artists that were born in an era where still showing up in museums is important. And I think it's really important. Hopefully, we get to see more of this. Like, I'm not I'm not against it. But there's also a new generation of of artists who see the museums, and they get zero excitement. It's like a bank branch for entrepreneur in fintech. And they're like, I'm gonna do it differently. I'm gonna do it my own way. And that's where I think we're gonna end. We're gonna end up having that transition of periods. And hopefully, the museums will adapt, and they will embrace it, and they will correct. And a few are, as you and I know. The Museum of Toledo, led by Adam, is doing a great job on on on forcing that function. And there's others that are really trying, and we will be here to help them if they want to. If they wanna come and see the space and copy it and replicate it or take some of the exhibitions and replicate them in their space, we'll be more than happy to, because it's for good of culture and society. But, also, you gotta disrupt them. It's it's not gonna... It's it's not working.
01:08:14 · Raoul Pal, Micky Malka
[01:08:14] S0: To tie all of this together, all of our conversation, there's something clear to me is that everything you do is based around really a simple premise, which is that the Internet, whatever that is, is eating everything. Money, art, literally everything we do, and it's creating new creatures in AI, you know, new populations. And all of this is all part of that bigger thesis about everything is tokenized because this is the way forward to feed the beast of the Internet. You know, as David Bowie called it was like this alien creature. He saw it a long time before everybody else in that snip when he talks about it. Yeah. He's like, it's not what you think it is. This is kind of everything, and it feels like that whole token factory idea is if you think of the Internet as the beast that we're feeding that's actually morphing into AI, art plays a part in this. It's all the same thesis, and it's just it's brilliant to see. I love to see somebody like yourself who wraps all of these ideas together, and you come at it from different ways, but they're all the same thing. [01:09:21] S1: You synthesize it better than I can ever, but I I see them all as the same thing. And I I wake up every day, and I feel fortunate that I get to work in figuring out how money, knowledge, and power changes on tokens and then work every night and every weekend or spend hours talking to Becky and filling the team on how we do this for art in the same... In our culture. And that is as much as I can ask for.