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Mezzanotte Podcast #6 feat. Daniel Keller
104 Plays1 year ago
Daniel Keller joins us to discuss net art history, his first forays into crypto, his work at Vaporware and a lot more...
https://twitter.com/DnlKlr
https://vaporware.network
https://twitter.com/MezzanotteNFT
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Transcript
Early Parenthood Experiences
00:00:00
Speaker
It's an octave. Cool. Alright, man. Congratulations on being a dad. That's really cool.
00:00:10
Speaker
Thanks. Yeah, it's been pretty cool so far. She's almost five weeks old. Doesn't do much yet, but it's very cute. Gurgles and cries and poops and stuff. It's always reassuring whenever she does any of those things because it's like a sign of life though. Basically, it's like keep
00:00:33
Speaker
keep her alive until she's a little bit more conscious and then we'll start thinking about other benchmarks. That's been the game so far. How has that changed the past five weeks of your life?
00:00:48
Speaker
Well, I mean, to be honest, it was the anticipation, the pregnancy was that changed much more. There was just so much more anxiety and pathos or whatever wrapped up in that period. And then once she was born, it just sort of was like, okay, well, now she's here. And it's just like kind of slotted into the life. It hasn't felt like
00:01:15
Speaker
a revolution or an apocalypse. She just sleeps in between me and Masha now and cries a couple of times in the night. Masha wakes up and feeds her, but as far as our lifestyle, it's not that different. We weren't party animals before. That's good.
00:01:38
Speaker
But yeah, it's been good and it's you know, my the job is working from home so plenty of time to gamble which is it feels like a kind of like a You know, I owe it to I owe it to my daughter to to make the most of this moment and really Get degenerate. So that's what I'm trying to do
00:02:02
Speaker
Yeah, that's, that's a good mentality to have. I kind of feel this in a similar way, although I don't have a kid.
Art to Crypto Career Transition
00:02:08
Speaker
Um, but, uh, and you, you started working for vaporware recently. Yeah. So, I mean, it's been a legal.
00:02:16
Speaker
weird winding journey for me starting very much as an artist in the art world, but always making art about technology or more specifically about tech companies and Silicon Valley mentality and Californian ideology and all that stuff. Then I got sick of
00:02:40
Speaker
only interpreting those things from afar, from my provincial hovel and Hanoi clone in Berlin. During the last bull run, moved back to America because it felt feasible for the first time in my life a little bit and tried to start a company called Channel.
00:03:01
Speaker
which was a sort of attempt at decentralized Patreon podcast network, starting with podcasts. Got somewhere, but didn't really succeed as a company. So after that, moved on to just sort of trying to do more independent things in crypto. And that led me to working with Vaporware on another sort of attempted project called MiladyOS, which is, I guess,
00:03:28
Speaker
where we met in assembly in Lisbon last fall. So we did a lot of work on that together. And then Vaporware decided that Urbit doesn't work well enough for the type of applications that they wanted to build. So they switched to a, well, more or less a fork of Urbit called Plunder. And
00:03:54
Speaker
Yeah, and then that's where after they did that, that fork, they unfortunately had to like lay off all the urban specific developers and stuff they have and kind of like reboot the company. And that's when they invited me to, to, to join and be my technical, my role is a cultural strategy lead. But that kind of just means doing all the non-technical stuff at this point and helping chase the CEO with
00:04:20
Speaker
business strategy and, you know, branding and partnerships and all that stuff.
Vaporware and Portable Servers
00:04:26
Speaker
And what exactly will you be like making with vaporware? Well, I mean, I think that's a little bit too DVD. So sorry, my one second. Take your time. My dog is all asking for attention. Dogs hate it when their owners talk on the phone in the morning.
00:04:50
Speaker
Well, actually, Volvo generally gets really excited about it, but I think maybe he's frustrated because he can't hear you because I'm using headphones. But he actually loves FaceTimes because sometimes it's my parents and he really gets excited by that.
00:05:06
Speaker
Anyway, so yeah, the first thing I did with them was this, I made an NFT actually, which was my like first, I guess, like, well, publicly produced under my name NFT that I've ever done. Well, it wasn't under my name. It was for vaporware, but either way. And that was just sort of a, I think a sneak peek at the types of applications we're thinking about building.
00:05:32
Speaker
Broadly, what vaporware is, similar to Urbit, it's like a portable sovereign server that you can either run in the cloud or on your own hardware relatively easily. You can migrate it around.
00:05:47
Speaker
That's generally the backend, but Vaporware's specific innovation is that you can boot up these servers with just an NFT mint, and you can also represent applications on those servers as NFTs. And those applications actually get distributed peer-to-peer from different Vaporware nodes that already have the application running. So it's similar to Arbrit, but it isn't trying to build its own
00:06:16
Speaker
its own network. It's going to be much more integrated with Ethereum and with other blockchains and with Farcaster and yeah, kind of like existing networking layers as opposed to trying to like build its own universe like Urban did. Cool. That's awesome. That's exciting. And so like, yeah, I wanted to ask you at first is like, how did you first actually get into crypto?
00:06:43
Speaker
So yeah, like I said before, as an artist, I was very online and interested in internet culture. So I heard about
00:06:56
Speaker
you know, Bitcoin really, really early on. And they didn't touch it. I remember, well, I guess it wasn't really early on, because it wasn't like 2009, it was probably 2011. So the first kind of like, initial pump that Bitcoin had. And I remember like,
00:07:14
Speaker
the week where it went from $11 to $30 and I was like, this is ridiculous. Fuck this bubble. And I justified it to myself. Were you like, where were you? Were you doing in your life then?
00:07:30
Speaker
Yeah, I was an artist in Berlin. On the side, I've always been a bit of a, not a day trader, but a trader. My origin story of that is I bought Apple stock with bar mitzvah money when I was 13 in 2000.
00:07:53
Speaker
Actually, when I bought it, it was at the top, the current top, but at the top of the moment before the dot-com crash, but it was still at like $1 or $2 a share. So I held onto that and had a bit of money that I could play around with, even though I was otherwise not making very much money and living in a very cheap, flat, and like, basically living in some sort of weird internet bubble, but in Berlin.
Missed Crypto Opportunities
00:08:21
Speaker
And yeah, I saw that stuff and I was pretty conservative about what I expected out of investment. So it just seemed a little bit too good to be true. And then the first time I ever used it was not first Silk Road, but some of the after Silk Road got busted and all of that, there were a lot of successor markets. And I
00:08:42
Speaker
played around with some of those things. But I still thought of Bitcoin as being that the only use case was dark market markets. And I didn't want to hold on to any of it. I was like, I'm going to buy it. I'm going to spend it as soon as possible because I don't want it to lose value. That was my thinking at the time. I mean, it's very
00:09:02
Speaker
sad to imagine. I remember then also that I was in Berlin. That's where Ethereum launched in, I think, 2015 there. Basically, I got invited to be in the
00:09:16
Speaker
in the ICO for Ethereum. And at that point, it was really, really bearish on crypto. I thought the whole thing was kind of all just unnecessary. And I was a naive liberal, I guess. I kind of believed in all the institutions just generally working. This was actually before, I guess it must have been after the Ukraine invasion, but it still felt like
00:09:39
Speaker
you know, like two countries with McDonald's never will go to war era of me just kind of assuming capital would kind of flow and smooth everything out. And that crypto was very much dependent on this narrative of like an emerging cyber Hitler, like there has to be if there's cyber Hitler comes, then you're going to really be thankful for all these other, you know, these alternative institutions and financial institutions.
00:10:07
Speaker
So anyway, I didn't buy into it yet. And it took me a long time to get into it from an investor standpoint. And it was actually not until 2017. And then I listened to, it was actually like I was sitting at the A16Z podcast when I was walking around Berlin and heard an episode about ICOs in I think March of 2017. And that was when I had sort of
00:10:32
Speaker
I had been like, okay, I'm going to get into it then. And I realized like, okay, this is another like killer use case besides drugs. So, uh, yeah, that was when I got really convinced and I, and I went kind of like deeply in, in 2017 and have been involved more or less ever since.
NFT Evolution and Perspectives
00:10:51
Speaker
But was there, was it, were you aware of NFTs when you heard that podcast about ICOs?
00:10:58
Speaker
Um, I knew that, so they weren't really like, well, they didn't call them NFTs yet. That's for sure. Um, back, back then, but, uh, there are all sorts of the same time. There are people that just constantly pitching these, um, these sort of, there were like provenance blockchains for art. That was kind of how they thought about it at the time. It was, it wasn't really specifically for digital art. It was just sort of like you would have a register. One second. One second.
00:11:26
Speaker
What were the use cases that you were appealing to you? Well, so before the ICO thing, yeah, people were always, especially in Berlin, I was always hearing about things like there's something called a scribe was a project. It was all using Bitcoin, or at least built off of Bitcoin at the time, or similar things to Bitcoin. None of these things were Ethereum yet, really.
00:11:55
Speaker
And there was also, you know, an artist that I was friends with, Harm Band and Dorple. He had a gallery called Left Gallery that sold digital art with some sort of crypto backend. It wasn't NFTs yet, not like as we know it today. And to be honest, yeah, I always was really kind of like skeptical, cynical about that stuff. I didn't really think there was,
00:12:21
Speaker
a market for digital art. I never saw there being one. Part of my whole, I wouldn't call it a thesis, but my game plan for contemporary art was taking internet culture and bringing it into traditional gallery spaces. That was
00:12:38
Speaker
that was our initial shtick basically. And that's what led to the mini post-internet market boom. It was very much that. And I thought those kind of compromises were necessary for actually making it as an artist. And I think that was true at the time. And it really wasn't... Yeah, so I was
00:13:03
Speaker
Even when I saw the initial NFTs, I thought CryptoKitties was cool. I thought that was an interesting use case, but it was much more akin to a game than art on chain. And that's why I thought it had something, had an advantage over just simply putting art on the blockchain. And I think that's also, that plus whatever model CryptoPunks laid out,
00:13:33
Speaker
It needed that extra gamified conceit and limited structure as far as 10,000 unique, but within a set. All of these things were essential variables, I think, for it to find product-market fit. None of that existed at the time. I didn't buy it for so long. I don't know.
00:13:59
Speaker
Yeah, I faded a lot of faded so much stuff basically as being a curmudgeon. I don't know. That's that's like the story. I kind of understand because I think we're similar ages. We're both middle age. And so it's like, yeah, at the time, it's like the ethos of everyone you're around is not thinking about what would be happening now at all at that time. Like there's no proof of it or even foresight really into
00:14:28
Speaker
like 2024 or like 2020 or 2017 even. Yeah, I mean, I was going back that far. I mean, I think it's more general than that for our generation of like, it was not cool to be optimistic or think that
00:14:48
Speaker
things were undervalued and going to grow. It was much more fashionable to be talking about collapse or potential collapse and cynical because of the global financial crisis.
00:15:03
Speaker
I know, personally, one of the things that I was always speculating on was this instrument called the VIX, the volatility index, but it's also known as the fear index. I was just, for years, just waiting and hoping for the next big crisis to
00:15:24
Speaker
make a fortune on the VIX. That was my- What was that instrument that you used for that VIX? Or was that- Well, there's ETFs that track- Yeah. There's VIX futures that are specifically, I think, S&P 500 futures and it's tracking the volatility of the prices on those futures. But there's just ETFs that, and there's leveraged ETFs. So there's this one called UVXY. And then there's also
00:15:49
Speaker
It follows a very consistent pattern that whenever there is a crisis, it spikes up like crazy and then it's designed to go back down forever. You also have these beautiful short moments. I was waiting for something like the COVID crisis for years actually. When that happened, I got tons and tons and tons of puts on
00:16:15
Speaker
casinos and cruise lines and airlines and all this stuff in the first. You were shorting a bunch of stuff. I was shorting a bunch of stuff. And like tripled my money in a couple weeks, I was too pessimistic. So I lost some of those gains, still doubled it. And then with that, I kind of like,
00:16:33
Speaker
in 2020 went even harder into crypto. And that was when I kind of full-time, well, I wouldn't call it full-time, but that was my main source of income since then. But yeah, what I'm trying to say is that it required a big shift in my, just like,
00:16:56
Speaker
general mindset towards technology and markets and the future and being generally more open-minded and optimistic and less cynical about things just because I've seen a lot of things that seemed implausible
00:17:12
Speaker
happen. Even things like Ethereum managing to move from proof of work to proof of stake. For years, people were like, it's never going to happen. This is vaporware. This is bullshit. Then they did it. I don't know. There's all these sorts of
00:17:28
Speaker
at least individual examples of human coordination working and really achieving awesome things. I'm much more of a fundamentally optimistic person now, and I'm not looking for the next big short in the same way anymore. I'm much more looking for the opposite and interested in starting companies and working with early companies and
00:17:53
Speaker
And yeah, looking towards the future with excitement, as opposed to just fear, which was really how I lived, I think, most of my 20s. Yeah. Yeah, especially if you're an artist. It seemed like you were pretty successful with A3D early on. When I was like 2009, 2008,
00:18:20
Speaker
Yeah. We were successful in the sense of we managed to capture attention, but we did not make substantial amounts of money from that attention. It was way too early for that. There was not a market for that stuff, and we were also 21 or 22.
00:18:38
Speaker
retarded and incapable of following through to the degree that we would have had to to really capitalize on the tension. But yeah, we got this crazy burst of attention when we were really, really young. And then it went away. It's a good question. I don't know.
Impact of Millennial Net Art
00:18:59
Speaker
Partially we just like we made the domain AIDS 3d.com. I remember I we were just like made a list of like Funny domains that we were thinking about buying for different projects. That was one I bought I Just started uploading some random stuff to it. Basically. I think it got passed around in like
00:19:20
Speaker
whatever net art surfing club scene existed then. People like Patrick Court, right? And Corey Archangel and stuff. I know they all saw it. And so we got then curated into this Younger Than Jesus, the first new museum triennial in 2009. We were the youngest people in that.
00:19:46
Speaker
And that really catapulted things. So we just got like a bunch of attention from that. And like really funny, like nylon guys, it was like in fact, weird fashion magazines. It was like it was just so it had what's it called? Oh, fuck, I just forgot the name. It was like a vice AI, not AI, but ID magazine.
00:20:09
Speaker
Oh, yeah, like stuff like that. Yeah, definitely. And and vice, you know, we were like, we had vice did a little of a little video feature on us that is still uploaded. And it was this kind of attention that just like didn't
00:20:22
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. I like really love that all that stuff is collapsing now in this really crazy way. Yeah, definitely. I mean, for sure. It's time. I definitely think it's served its purpose. It's over now. Yeah, it's like it's like really cool to witness like this collapse of, of like,
00:20:42
Speaker
I mean, look, I'm not an anti-journalist in any way, but I feel like a lot of journalism in a way is just copying a press release
Journalism and AI Critique
00:20:50
Speaker
and changing some words. It's actually still that way. It's always been that way. I mean, that's why AI is good for writing these things. Definitely.
00:21:01
Speaker
That is such a weird world that exists in such a small faction of people's minds all anyway, really, like, I don't know, like, it doesn't hold that much weight, or it never really did. It seemed like a facade. So the fact that like these media companies are firing all these journalists is and then like crypto is like raging is like a really interesting
00:21:27
Speaker
It's definitely an interesting moment. I definitely think it's connected. Just to comment on that, I do think the press release thing that you mentioned, that was really true. And I think when it was a lucrative industry, it was even more true, especially within
00:21:43
Speaker
let's say, art criticism, not that that's an important part of journalism, but one that I'm exposed to. That was explicitly, if you got a full page ad in the art form, you'd get a good review, and you'd get a review at all, guaranteed. It was just how it worked. It was that system. And I feel like as, this is more broadly than art journalism, but as that capital, advertising capital started drying up,
00:22:10
Speaker
it was a scramble for some sort of legitimacy. And that came just from reflexive oppositional attitudes towards, especially, let's say, tech journalism. Looking at what Wired magazine used to look like in the 90s versus what a Wired take on, the average Wired take on any new technology or startup plan is derision and calling them tech bros, which is just sort of like,
00:22:36
Speaker
I don't know. I feel it's an attempt to reclaim any agency or power that obviously just doesn't exist within those institutions anymore. I don't know. Good riddance because that model doesn't work anymore and you can mourn these things. This is just generally how I feel about history. Generally, it's just like,
00:22:56
Speaker
It's not worth sitting around and mourning about the things that were lost. You just gotta like move, move on, move forward, you know?
Generational Optimism and Art Evolution
00:23:05
Speaker
And this applies to like geopolitics as opposed to, in addition to- It's a more Gen X mindset. I have too many close friends that are Gen X age and it's like, it's frustrating to be around them sometimes because they are still stuck in that mindset really.
00:23:23
Speaker
Yeah, and I remember feeling very much that opposition to Gen X when I was first starting out, especially that was like
00:23:34
Speaker
It was like uncool for Gen X artists to have an artist website or to self promote or do any of these things. And that was like the millennial innovation, which obviously seems really cringe now, but, you know, we'll have an artist website, we'll somewhat shamelessly self promote ourselves online, we'll like play that meta game, and then like it led to, you know, Amalia Ullman playing that game as like, you know, as the medium itself and then so on.
00:24:01
Speaker
And then Charlotte Fang being very deeply inspired by Amalia and doing the same thing in a schizo-zoomer, alias way and then it led to Malady. I mean, I feel like it is a direct- Well, he was on the Fox podcast recently, Charlotte Fang, and he was talking to Zuzu, you know, from like three hours or whatever. And he was, he did say explicitly that he was inspired by net art. And that's why Malady started or how Remilia started.
00:24:31
Speaker
I only listened to the first few minutes, but I heard that part of it. It was very funny to hear him say that. I think I had heard him at least read tweets of his saying that before. He was one of the top posters on Arena, which was founded by a couple people from the surfing club scene. Yeah.
00:24:56
Speaker
He grew up on these millennial net art institutions, which I think is a funny although maybe he's not as young as, I don't know how old he is. I think he's just an early young millennial. I think he's probably early 30s, early 20s. I don't know. It is interesting to me though because
00:25:17
Speaker
net art died and paintings and sculpture and physical objects were really popular for the past 10, 15 years in the art world. And people were like, net art is cringe, like kind of for a really long time, you know, not a really long time, but like, no, definitely no, I for sure. I mean, maybe not net art, but media are new media art. That's for sure. New media was like it's on ghetto. There was like,
00:25:43
Speaker
their own separate festivals and biennials for that. It was like its own ghetto, and you did not really want to touch it. And that was something that we were very afraid of as AIDS 3D. I did not want to be associated with trans-medial art or any of that stuff. It was just basically like
00:26:03
Speaker
cool data visualizations or projection mappings. I thought that stuff was really strange for sure.
NFT Art and Street Art Integration
00:26:11
Speaker
It's still kind of busy, I guess, but at least it found a new home as pure digital art again, I guess. Yeah, I think now it's just more broad in a way, and I think it's a little bit more working class in a weird Twitter timeline way. This is my idea of it. It's like,
00:26:32
Speaker
live journal like emo culture in a weird way is like all wrapped into this one thing where like it's less about pretension and then there is this and you're aware of this obviously but there is this different NFT art world that kind of eats its own tail of like certain artists that's completely separate from
00:26:59
Speaker
Well, I mean, actually, I guess street art kind of got fully merged in. And I will say that even that like separate NFT, like grail tar like market, which I personally, I just like, I still don't, I like, I don't like generative abstract.
00:27:20
Speaker
art. I don't care that much about that as a medium in general. I want more content in my art, so I never really focused on any of that stuff. I never really paid attention to it. But Sotheby's and Christie's have done a really good job at somehow becoming the main institutions that support those things, even more so than any new NFT-specific institutions. They've done a really good job at assimilating it in the same way they did with street art, I guess.
00:27:49
Speaker
But yeah, I don't know. There's not that much of a place for the really NFT-specific aesthetic art yet within the art world, I think.
00:28:07
Speaker
and definitely feel like, you know, Malady is an example of that. Obviously, your stuff is as well. And like, whatever is going on in like, Solana right now with the Avante NFT thing, I think is like, I personally feel like it's like the first, it's the first time that all of the like,
00:28:27
Speaker
affordances and constraints of NFTs as a medium have been fully expressed aesthetically, where the hyper-referentialism, the layers, rarity, all of those aspects are really integral to the actual work and it could not have existed in another time or another form, exactly. It's lost any kind of Skrimorphism at this point. When I see that stuff, I'm like, oh, that's like,
00:29:05
Speaker
Yeah, like that. I'm talking about dry fellas and horses and the NFT cards that just came out from the same artist, the dry fella artist, the little fellas as well, fella verse. Yeah, I don't quite understand 100% what's going on there, and that is very alluring to me because I think that's rare for me to feel that way, honestly, online. That's interesting. I generally don't feel bewildered.
00:29:18
Speaker
pure NFT art. I don't know.
00:29:35
Speaker
So, it's cool. I don't know if it's generational shock or what, but I feel bewildered in a genuine way from when I see that stuff and it's exciting. So, I don't know. I'm hoping that
00:29:50
Speaker
I'm hoping that as Zoomers start accumulating wealth themselves that they will champion this type of art and start valuing it very highly. That's my bull thesis on Soylana Avant. Yeah, I wonder. That would be really cool. It would be cool. I don't know if it's going to happen.
00:30:15
Speaker
I mean, it's just good that something that is gaining traction and gaining popularity in, you know, in general, because definitely good. And it's awesome. In that way. It's simple to me in that way. But, um, yeah.
00:30:29
Speaker
You could also say that rug core aesthetic is the first NFT native aesthetic. That's probably true, but let's say this is the first one that is good. It isn't only good because it's bad. It doesn't require any type of ironic detachment. You actually can just like it, which I prefer to engage with things that way, ideally.
00:30:53
Speaker
Yeah, and it's a good like continuation or progression from like when I got into NFTs like early 2022, it was like this avant NFT thing and it was a lot of the same people like super metal Mons was Bosch the guy that's doing swag world and I did the first podcast I did was with the jabber forms artist. And like he was feeding like, just
00:31:15
Speaker
his drawings to AI to make those collections. I didn't even realize that. You couldn't even really tell that it was AI. Then it's kind of the same thing with Little Spike World. It's modulated or affected in a way that takes clearly a lot of effort, but these are AI generations partially or something. Yes.
00:31:42
Speaker
That is an interesting new turn. And yeah, I mean, I think obviously AI art is hated probably more than NFTs, at least by a large group of, you know, maybe it's a vocal minority, actually. I don't really know how big, but yeah, like seeing some examples of like, yeah, obviously it's just, taste becomes more important than ever.
00:32:09
Speaker
There's also some level of skill and technical savvy you need to be able to actually use these tools in a creative way. I think also like John Rothman's latest Kanye video, that kind of pushed, I think, AI, that was legit.
00:32:27
Speaker
Good. I see a few examples of these things that I do think they're not just relying on novelty value. I don't know what threshold I used to judge that, but I like it, I guess. I don't know. Little Swag World definitely passes that test of it is
00:32:55
Speaker
I don't know. It's using AI in a really actually genuinely creative way, which is exciting to see. And difficult to do, I think. Definitely. Which is weird because I don't know. Effort is such a weird thing to talk about with art or time, but I feel like the time it takes to make something. But when you're making a collection, I feel like
00:33:16
Speaker
I've gone through this process a lot of times and like also talk to artists that I haven't worked with that are like too lazy to put in that much effort into it because they don't even care about it themselves. And then when I realized that I'm like this is not going to work immediately like even from the start because like this person doesn't want to put any time or effort into this. But also it's like
00:33:36
Speaker
That's sort of, I mean, yeah, I don't know how to think about that. I don't think labor should be fetishized, but obviously thoroughness matters and only things that are really
00:33:52
Speaker
exhaustive or interesting. I'm paraphrasing. There's an actual quote that I'm paraphrasing. I forget what the original is, but yeah, you do something 10 times, it's boring, but the same thing. A million times, it does push it into somewhere else, I guess. Quantity is only one way of one dimension there, but I do think
00:34:20
Speaker
Yeah, care or being methodical. I don't know. Those things count. And then there's Bitcoin puppets too though, which is really like the opposite end of the spectrum in some weird way that is like it's sloppy in a cool way and it's really valuable and it's on Bitcoin, which means people that hold Bitcoin that have a lot of money can buy
00:34:49
Speaker
do something with their Bitcoin finally and took a use case for the Bitcoin when there's not really many other use cases, like with the ordinals and stuff. I don't own any of the ordinals or whatever. I don't either. I don't own any Bitcoin NFTs actually at all. But I see why, I don't know. I guess it's interesting, but only in a like, for me, it's only interesting in like a game innovation, like unlocking a new
00:35:20
Speaker
flow of capital, but it's not. I don't know. I don't think it's very aesthetically interesting. I do think sloppiness or whatever, I'm certainly not against that. And you can do something that is both meticulous and sloppy intentionally, that's for sure. Definitely not against that aesthetically. Just
00:35:42
Speaker
Yeah, I don't. It can count if it looks like labor, but you also get this effect where we're like compare like schizo posters to
00:35:53
Speaker
I don't know, Malady itself, it's like, actually Malady itself looks sloppier. Um, and it kind of probably was more haphazard. Uh, and that obviously is like, just, it's much more valuable than, I mean, okay. It's good to pose her as a derivative, but I just think like aesthetically, it looks like more like schizo posters looks like effort, effort posting. And like Malady did not. Definitely effort maxing the schizo posting.
00:36:20
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, it's clearly impressive. It's impressive, but it only gets you so far. Yeah. Also, people only look at certain things for such a little amount of time anyway. So the impressiveness is like this quick millisecond of a thought, and then it goes away maybe. And then you're just staring at other things. So that's where Bitcoin puppets kind of wins. Yeah. No. I mean, you do have to acknowledge the medium that you're working in, I guess.
00:36:50
Speaker
It's the same thing as like design. If you're designing a billboard, you don't like putting a bunch of small text because that's not what it's for. So like, yeah, make something that's immediately eye catching and people are going to like looking at, you know, as they scroll through a portfolio or something, but that's like what that image is for. So accept it. So I wanted to ask you, I listened to your Joshua Sintrella podcast and in that you're talking about, um,
Crypto and AI Future
00:37:19
Speaker
artificial intelligence and how we'd be using crypto in a way. And that was fascinating to me. And I kind of wanted you to go over that a little bit. Yeah. Um, well, okay. So currently I think you can see just like a market. There's a huge narrative in the market now of like decentralized AI. Um, largely I think this is just,
00:37:47
Speaker
vaporware in the pejorative sense, not vaporware in the company sense. I always have to be careful with that now. So that looks like things like BitTensor or Ritual, which is basically splitting up either model training or inference models to distributed computing and then incentivizing tokens. So there's going to be a huge wave of that this year. That's for sure happening. But what I'm actually interested in is
00:38:17
Speaker
Yeah, crypto is more like, I guess, once it becomes more integrated with real world assets and just like economic systems at large, it just becomes this sort of medium for autonomous agents to interact with the world. To me, that always seemed like
00:38:41
Speaker
why we want to build crypto in the long run or why it's being built, even if we don't know it. That's the telos of crypto was just an autonomous infrastructure layer for securely transacting value. And I almost feel like
00:38:58
Speaker
while the period while humans are using that, that's just sort of like, we're like beta testing it. And we're gonna figure out a lot of the structures that work and don't work. And then obviously AI is bull. Once agents, like autonomous agents, I don't know if we call them AI or what.
00:39:15
Speaker
start using it more actively. Eventually, there's going to be many orders of magnitude more AI agents operating on this infrastructure than people. Obviously, this is also why you see things like Worldcoin get built and
00:39:30
Speaker
Sam Altman specifically sees this future very clearly, sees how important it's going to be to be able to prove personhood. I don't necessarily believe that Worldcoin is the solution to that, but you can see that the reason why it's happening at all is because this is going to be a huge problem, or at least an opportunity, let's say, if not a problem, to whatever, create new systems.
00:39:57
Speaker
Anyway, so yeah, that both obviously is very exciting and terrifying, but that's just like, it's going to happen. It's happening already. You can see something akin to that happened in trad markets long ago with high frequency trader bots.
00:40:21
Speaker
A lot of the problems with that is because they are pretty stupid and they could easily break and cause flash crashes and all these things, and sometimes intentionally cause flash crashes. That's working as intended just because you can create all sorts of insane volatility by just shuffling orders around basically.
00:40:45
Speaker
Yeah, we don't have exactly the same thing as high frequency traders in crypto just because block time isn't nanosecond. We have MEV, I guess that's the equivalent. A lot of money using MEV bots though in 2021. Yeah, no, I think in 2020, there's a lot of
00:41:06
Speaker
older zoomers that like, I've like talked to that have used in membots. I personally never did. But yeah, it's too opaque to me. But you know, what's interesting about about that, whatever is, um,
00:41:23
Speaker
Just that was not expected part of the system. It was not designed in at all. And there will be things like that that are exploitable pretty much in anything you design. And yeah, I don't know. That's an interesting thing. I don't have a value judgment to say about that. But I guess if there's any value judgment, it's just that you've got to ship things and see what happens.
00:41:52
Speaker
really, it's impossible. As much planning went into Ethereum and thinking about all the edge cases and stuff, it's impossible basically to think about all that. Well, that's why there's a whole business bonding of auditors. Well, absolutely. Auditors miss things all the time. I don't know how you would audit for... Well, now that you know that MEV is possible at all,
00:42:17
Speaker
you would audit to see how resistant it is to it or not. But before that was a category, you wouldn't look for that. So I think there's just always going to be
00:42:28
Speaker
similar exploits in the system. And so it is scary to think about AI agents exploiting those things, but that's what I mean by the human period is the long beta test to make it harder for agents to game as well in theory. Yeah, that's true. I mean, this is totally different from art, what we're talking about in a way. I wonder how that would be
00:42:56
Speaker
combined. Yeah, no, this is very different than art. I'm talking about pure economic transactions, but obviously the content apocalypse, that's a whole other story. And I think that is
00:43:14
Speaker
maybe more of a, it's like a darker, I guess that also just betrays my bias of thinking art is a little bit more sacred than financial transactions. Well, that's the thing that I like about the whole crypto Twitter NFT space is the combination of art and financial assets because in a weird way, it's the transparency of that and it's like,
00:43:42
Speaker
We were living in a time period where it wasn't cool to outwardly want to make money. And anyone that did like was lame or like that was like bad or something. And then we suspect for sure. Yeah, definitely.
00:43:58
Speaker
Uh, there were made it in a way. Yeah. Matt Dryhurst always calls it like the, as opposed to the fear of the new, it's the fear of the nude. And it's just sort of like all these systems that were there underlying in the art world before they just made like transparent for the first time. And that's like very disgusting and, uh, lurid, you know, to people, but, uh, it's just the same old, same old, basically, I guess.
00:44:26
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's also interesting to me in the sense that like, you could be working at a tech company for a long time, like, like, like, you know, a Squarespace type company like this, like a web 2.0 company, you know, and, you know, just immediately be laid off. And then you're, you know, approaching middle age or something like this. And then, you know, there's this other the entrepreneurial side of
00:44:49
Speaker
being a freelance artist or promoting yourself or marketing yourself. I feel like Sam Hyde has a lot of interesting things to say about this stuff because he was banished from the Hollywood media system or just TV for having a show and now he's a really huge icon on the internet because of how much content he's released and just this sheer effort of this.
00:45:19
Speaker
of all the work he's put out. And there's something that's really interesting to me about this, like, yeah, this duality of these worlds that we're living in, where it's like, you know, it's just a matter of, I feel like,
00:45:35
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know really what I'm trying to say about this, but I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about that. Yeah, well, I mean, I think it's like, yeah, obviously that is, I mean, we can go, we can talk about cancel culture a little bit. I think that's what, I think that's where we're going. Yeah, I mean, obviously part of, I don't,
00:45:57
Speaker
I got somewhat, I got somewhat canceled from the art world. I'm not, I don't really feel like I, I got a fully. It doesn't seem like you are expelled. Yeah. But would you say it seems like I am? No, it doesn't seem like it seems like you are canceled from the art world. But what is interesting is my friend that went to Stadl school and when I brought you up to him, he was like, Oh yeah, I was, I would try to, I would ask students and he went there after you was, I would ask students about them at Dan and they felt like they couldn't talk about him or something like that.
00:46:27
Speaker
at the school, but these are just younger kids that were going to the school then that were extremely woke. That's for sure. There was a period where I was not being invited to things for sure anymore, and now I am just starting to โ well, because
00:46:47
Speaker
Basically, because there's finally exhibitions that are re-examining, I don't know, my generation. I don't know, whatever. I'm in a show now in Kunstferke in Berlin, and that's going to travel to Kunsthal Strelottenburg in Copenhagen. I was also in a
00:47:08
Speaker
the Sea Art Festival, which was the Busan Biennial in Korea. I stopped making work years ago. I haven't made new work. I think probably if I actually tried to participate, I would be invited back to some capacity. But there's certainly
00:47:25
Speaker
you know, with the like the, the Orthodox woke part of the art world, I don't think I'll ever be invited back. And I, I've only kind of gone further down that route. Like I now work at a, at a company that is like, I'm like the least and cap person there. I'm like, it's, it's like anarcho capitalist, like,
00:47:51
Speaker
I mean, yeah. Vaporware is not... I mean, Urbrit was pretty reactionary. Vaporware people are not in the same way, but certainly libertarian and market friendly from the intrinsically market friendly. So I think that alone would be like
00:48:14
Speaker
would make me seem extremely suspect to a lot of the European heart rolled people that don't like me. And yeah, there was a moment, especially Trump arrangement era, I guess, where
00:48:30
Speaker
you know, people called me dangerous and thought I was somehow like a conduit for neo reactionary thought into the art world. And there were all these like Marxists that were talking about destroying my career and stuff. And you know, it like, yeah, it kind of worked. But it also just was like, okay, yeah, I don't want to participate in your dead system that isn't gonna pay me shit. So I can keep living in my shitty apartment in Neukholm. I want to get paid.
00:48:59
Speaker
For once ever in my life and crypto. Yeah is allows you to do that directly and you can just bypass all those like gatekeepers I think gatekeepers in the sense of like taste making it's very important and I'm not against that but like
00:49:16
Speaker
gatekeepers that are trying to enforce a political orthodoxy, that's different, and you can certainly bypass that. Long story short, whatever, Sam Hyde obviously managed to do that, and he's probably much better off
00:49:33
Speaker
I don't know exactly how he's making money from a fish tank or whatever. He's probably making more money from that than he was from Adult Swim. He's probably overall going to be better off longer term with this alternative institution that he's created where he's really fully in control.
00:49:54
Speaker
crypto rails, I don't know how you're going to censor that necessarily. And my own personal, whether or not I like a lot of his stuff or not, that's besides the point. I do think it's important to prove that you can do that kind of thing. I just do think, yeah, I'm that level of libertarian where I do fundamentally believe in
00:50:17
Speaker
freedom of speech and expression and I value those things and I care about there being places where
00:50:25
Speaker
They can persist, but I don't
Freedom of Speech in Crypto
00:50:29
Speaker
know. Yeah, that's why I'm rambling a little bit. That works hand in hand with crypto in a way. Most people are, I wouldn't say they're right leaning, but they're just open-minded in the entire space or something. I think leftists would say it's right leaning, but those are the same people who will just write an article and use late capitalism unironically in the headline because they
00:50:53
Speaker
hope that it is. I don't know. I just think, yeah, I don't know. It's interesting to me is like, in America, at least it seems to me that there's a much forward thinking culture of what we're discussing now. And in Europe, like where I live, which is funny, because I'm from New Jersey, but a lot of the people I interact with, like I have this one friend that's
00:51:18
Speaker
from the German speaking part of Italy, Suterl, and he's obsessed with American politics. He's watching MSNBC. He's talking to me, he's saying, US is going to be fascist. And I'm like, dude, you are from like a fascist, what was formerly a fascist country in Germany, which was formerly a fascist country. Like there is no way that the US will ever be a fascist like dictatorship.
00:51:47
Speaker
I don't know, man. Maybe it will. But I just think, yeah, Europe, what you're saying there just shows you how culturally colonized Europe is at this point. I don't even think it was the case as Thoreauly when I moved there. I moved there in 2006 in Germany. I mean, that made it in the tail end where some cultural things would come from Europe first. Especially in England, I don't know.
00:52:15
Speaker
would be genres that came out of Europe and then spread to America. I just feel like that doesn't happen anymore in any way and it's especially with political culture. It's just like everything is such several year late reverberation of American shit. Yeah, it is. That's definitely happening in Germany right now. They're having
00:52:39
Speaker
an absolute meltdown culturally over Israel in a way that it's just comical to me from afar. Even though I am generally Zionist, I'll admit, I'm more friendly to that side. Like I said, I very much believe in freedom of speech. I do not think from the river to the sea should be banned. I also don't think people saying that should get their
00:53:07
Speaker
exhibitions canceled or lose public funding. That account is hyper-allergic. It's all about this. Hyper-allergic is one of the most garbage publications in the world. I fucking hate them. They have absolutely canceled me multiple times. It's just some rich dandy who has a sugar daddy that basically supports him that just
00:53:38
Speaker
runs this thing. It's just, I don't know. It's just all about institutional lives canceling. That's all what that website's about, basically, or whatever. It's just, it's just clickbait. It's just clickbait. Yeah, it's institutional cancellation as clickbait. It's definitely the combination of those things that makes it so crass, for sure. It's hilarious.
00:54:01
Speaker
It's just a funny thing that you could just like DM somebody and be like, Oh, look at this. Wow. Um, that's like the effect that it has really, um, in, in my mind. Yeah. No, I mean, yeah. I don't know how to like bring this back to, I mean, so you went to state school, right?
00:54:18
Speaker
Yeah, I did. But briefly, so I went to an exchange program.
Early Art School and Career Reflections
00:54:23
Speaker
I went to I was going to School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and they did an exchange program in Utica in Berlin for a year, me and Nick. And then we applied as like one artist to Shadle Shula in I think 2008.
00:54:38
Speaker
We were the first dual artists to, I think, be accepted into the school. But when we got there, everyone was really mean to us. And it felt like there was literally lunch table politics in a way. And we were having fun in Berlin. We were already getting a career. We had gotten invited into that.
00:55:06
Speaker
into the biennial like a few months into being in school there.
00:55:11
Speaker
And so it just sort of was like, why would we put up with this bullshit? What is the fucking reason? So Nick actually just left after two weeks. I stuck around for a little bit longer, but we were still commuting back and forth between Berlin. We never moved to Frankfurt. And the year that we were there, also our professor, Mark Leckie, who I think is a really good artist, but he won the Turner Prize. So he just sort of pieced out. He wasn't ever there.
00:55:37
Speaker
and his replacement was his actually like ex-girlfriend is this artist Bonnie Kamplin and she was just super Gen X and we had one meeting with her
00:55:49
Speaker
where we kind of like showed her a portfolio and she was like, I don't know anything about mass media or the internet, so I don't think I can help you. And we're like, okay, well, fuck you. I don't know. It was like, it was also like the fact that she conflated those two things was so funny to me. This was back in, you know, 2009 or eight or whatever.
00:56:08
Speaker
And yeah, so that was like the end of that. So we went to Stadelsville technically, but I didn't graduate and- You didn't get the master's school there. I did not get any degree. I don't have any art degree actually because of that. So that was my end of my schooling was that. And by that point we already, you know, like had a career going on. And so it just didn't feel like we needed it. Yeah, like I would have like, I think a semester left.
00:56:32
Speaker
in Chicago to get my BFA. I don't have a BFA, but whatever, I guess. How long were you guys working on stuff? Well, I guess like 2007 to 2012, 2013. Then you did good models.
00:56:52
Speaker
Well, then I was working, I did some art on my own for a couple of years. And then I did new models starting in 2018. So there's a little bit of a gap. Was like a platform about art cultural platform with media and podcasts and or like, how would you explain?
Creation and Growth of New Models
00:57:13
Speaker
Yeah. So it was definitely new models really came out of the last, the first, well, not the first script, the 2017 crypto boom. It was like, I was friends with Carly. Carly was like, uh, she was an editor at art form. And then she was, um, one of the editors at a texture. She was the editor at textures, which is like a very influential, but tiny word sell journal magazine. Yeah. It's like,
00:57:43
Speaker
It has been very good in the past. Anyways, but I had worked with her and I had written for Testaments a Couple Times and she was actually getting canceled for working with me at that time in 2017, 2018. Before the new models. The publisher was like, we cannot publish Dan Keller anymore. He's a fascist basically or something. I don't know what they thought. Anti-Semite.
00:58:12
Speaker
I don't know, something like that. And so she was just like, well, no, he's not. And this is bullshit. And I think she also was feeling very bearish about, you know, legacy media in general. So she wanted to start her own thing. We basically started it together. And then she started she was like dating on and off little internet. So he joined very soon afterwards. And we it started off as, yeah, sort of like an attempt at being
00:58:41
Speaker
art and tech, intersection of art and tech platform where there'd be some original content and also just an aggregator sort of like based off of Drudge Report.
00:58:52
Speaker
for that type of content. Then we started the podcast and that got pretty, again, very marginal, but got some influence, I think. Then we launched Discord and that community became really the actual nexus of what new models became. It was turned into a proto-DAO. There was no
00:59:16
Speaker
There are certainly no token incentives or any other incentives, but there was a lot of just collective information organization that happened. And we eventually collectively published a book together, like a yearbook, Y2K20 yearbook, which we helped, but it was basically user-generated. And that was really cool.
00:59:46
Speaker
that experience of basically operating an online community more than the media side of it was a big eye-opener for me.
00:59:59
Speaker
was sort of where I think FWB formed out of actually originally was Trevor was in new models.
Friends with Benefits Community
01:00:06
Speaker
Trevor was a friend of both mine and Julian and Carly's. Yeah, I think he realized like, oh, we could just token gate this instead of do Patreon. And I was like, as soon as I saw him do that, I was like, ah,
01:00:24
Speaker
I knew, I mean, well, obviously it's, FWB has more or less failed at this point, but I knew that that model was going to like extremely out-compete new models.
01:00:37
Speaker
And it did obviously I mean it was very different but it was just like as far as this gate it, you know Monetized discord communities. It was like it became at its peak a 200 million dollar Company and I don't think that would have happened with patreon gating so there's definitely that was like a big eye-opener for me as far as the power of of token social tokens and meme tokens and and just like
01:01:07
Speaker
how important it's going to be to have some aspect of your project touch that if you want to have success in the 2020s. That's just like, I feel like-
01:01:22
Speaker
If it doesn't go well, then people judge your whole thing on the price of the token and things like that. But NFTs, token gated things, it's a whole different thing. But I feel like it's like, yeah, I don't know. There's like a million lessons that were learned since that started, for sure. And there's a lot of times when you don't want to add a token to your project, that's for sure. You generally don't want a token, but they can supercharge things. FWEB still exists, though.
01:01:50
Speaker
It does still exist, for sure. I'm still a member. I just mostly go there and hate on things, but yeah, it still exists. I do think FWB is a really interesting case study.
01:02:06
Speaker
why DAOs don't work or at least one way a DAO can not work. But yeah, now it's basically an event company that has this weird vestigial token attached to it that doesn't do anything. Yeah, and it's kind of like indie in a weird way. They have parties in Big Sur where it's like a curated festival or something like that.
01:02:29
Speaker
It's a bit indie. I feel like it got fully infested by PMC culture and then those people who are middle managers at tech companies that became the staff, they just really, really steered the culture into looking like that. It was not really how it felt in the beginning.
01:02:56
Speaker
It was like rich guys taking mushrooms in like the desert or something kind of well, it's like it's like that or like Yeah, I mean there was there was like it's not like full it's like
01:03:09
Speaker
little heavy on the on DEI kind of just like lip service not even really doing it but I guess that's what DEI is but um there it was a lot of that and like you know we they they kicked out I mean Koopa Koopa Troopa for instance is obviously his cringe and his for his own reasons and probably shouldn't have been invited in the first place but they like kicked him out because
01:03:35
Speaker
that he had these tweets that had the n-word, but soft a n-word from when he was 18. Talking about basketball, it was mostly stupid for him to have not deleted that stuff. That was a really bad obstacle for somebody in his position, but they kicked him out of the dow for that. I was just like, come on. That's just so
01:04:02
Speaker
I don't know. There was other moments like that that happened in crypto, like with Brantley getting attempted to be kicked out of ENS because of being homophobic, Catholic homophobic, whatever. They're interesting case studies for where the limit is of permissionless culture, I guess. I don't know.
01:04:28
Speaker
There's still going to be groups of people that try to hold people accountable for their actions, you know, to say it neutrally. No, of course. Yeah, that's not going to go away. That's always going to be a thing. It's just going to happen more fast and quickly, I feel like, and then be less of an event, maybe, unless it's like, I have no idea really. This is, I'm just riffing on this.
01:04:55
Speaker
I do think that there is some potential for AI DAOs that are controlled by autonomous agents and stuff like that. And that is really interesting. That's really
Accelerationism Interpretations
01:05:05
Speaker
interesting. I think that's what is needed for DAOs to... Yeah, that's the need of technology. We need AGIs before... We need AGI to do self-driving and we also need AGI to do DAO management. It's not going to be people running these things, for sure. That defeats the entire purpose. They're not autonomous if...
01:05:25
Speaker
It's people. It just becomes a debate club. That's basically what a DAO is at this point. I'm looking at the list topic that I sent you and then speculations on accelerations trends or no? Would you want to talk about that at all at the end? Yeah, sure. We can talk about it.
01:05:48
Speaker
I don't know anything about EAC or any of this stuff. So it's like, I feel like you can kind of go into it. We don't have to talk about it. But yeah, I mean, I think like, obviously, accelerationism, it's a meme. It's proliferated a lot in the last year to the point of like, full diffusion into meaning something. Well, I mean, I think also acceleration, what's confusing about the term accelerationism,
01:06:16
Speaker
is it's already had so many different contexts. Like you hear people refer to like, there's a sort of like collapse accelerating accelerationism of like Boogaloo boys where you're like, they call themselves accelerationist, I guess, but it's like accelerate the collapse of the state so you can have a race war. And that just seems to be like a very limited
01:06:43
Speaker
window of imagination, if that's the best thing you can think of doing after the collapse. Whereas in Landian acceleration is about techno-capital basically pulling itself from the future, pulling intelligence out of the past.
01:07:07
Speaker
Yeah, basically just like AI inventing itself out of techno capital with human interaction and intervention, but more or less happening autonomously. They're very different meanings and I think they've also become conflated and obviously there's overlap sometimes in those scenes and certainly more and more what you see
01:07:35
Speaker
the tech acceleration is people being very obsessed with IQ and race and stuff online. There's clear overlap in just what gets talked about in those scenes, even though they're not at all the same ideology exactly. That's my take on it, I don't know. But yeah, with EAC, I just feel like, well, I don't know, once Beth Jezo's face docs and he was a big fat guy, I don't know,
01:08:05
Speaker
It's very like, uh, Sam, not Samuel. No, it's not. I know. I know what you're talking about, but I mean, like is Santa, Sam Altman, like yak, like, is he part of that at all? Um,
01:08:20
Speaker
Officially no, but I have actually heard, yeah, I heard that, you know, there's a lot of speculation that he has alt accounts, for instance, that are like more unabashedly pro, you know, pro AI. Yeah, I think that, you know, basically the business model there is, it is EAC, even, you know, people can complain about all of the censorship that's happening.
01:08:46
Speaker
Yeah, I, I don't, I think it's very annoying. Um, and I do think like it, that does show you that it's not complete, again, pejorative vaporware to like have decentralized AI alternatives. But yeah, like he's basically pushing, he's like going, he's trying to have a hard takeoff into AGI. Like that, that's about as EAC as it gets, like he's not, he's not really concerned with safety in the same way that, you know, you'd have ski is he's not like, he's just, um,
01:09:17
Speaker
going balls to the wall. Basically, he's talking about raising $7 trillion to summon AGI. I don't know. I think so. Yeah, I would call him IAC. But I think IAC as a moniker in general, it's not going to last is my prediction because of like
01:09:39
Speaker
the founder face-doxing and being a loser, kind of, seemingly. Also, from what I've heard, I cannot evaluate it all myself because I'm not technical. But I've heard that, again, his project is pejorative vaporware.
01:09:57
Speaker
He doesn't sound very smart to me, but he seems like... My favorite was always Goth 600, and then I think he had a big schism with the rest of the Iac people long ago. And so if they pushed him out, then I'm no longer bullish whatsoever on the meme.
01:10:18
Speaker
Yeah. It is funny though, because I did notice like maybe a year ago when everyone started putting EAC in their accounts, or maybe a little bit less, it's on Twitter, that seems really like a big trend, probably from
01:10:33
Speaker
based Jeff Bezos or whatever. Yeah. Partially anyways. Yeah. I mean, I think it was, it also felt at least last year, the safety stuff was, it felt much more present in my feed anyway.
01:10:50
Speaker
I think it was also like GPD4 coming out was more shocking to people than whatever is coming out now. There's this more incremental thing that happened this year. That was just a big funny meme of the Google. Right. Well, yeah. The Google controversy from two years ago was firing somebody because he thought it was already sentient and going from that to not being able to draw white people. Yeah.
01:11:18
Speaker
the safety argument has the pendulum has swung fully back to a different, like, so I think, um, yeah, like EAC as a, it's just not as needed as a, uh, uh, antidote to that kind of like level of fear mongering. Um, Jared Guerra posts a lot about regulations of AI and seems to be like actively like,
01:11:42
Speaker
trying to, you know, spread awareness about about in what regard about the dangers of AI and censorship of making controlling models that are being made like the tools to make the AI models and stuff. Yeah, that's actually looking really bleak. You're right. Yeah.
01:12:04
Speaker
There was a law that I don't think it's a long way until it's passed, but it might completely kill vaporware's business model, to be honest, because it would require people who set up virtual machines like cloud hosting
01:12:22
Speaker
to do AI or any kind of other compute require them to do KYC on those customers. And Vaporware's whole thing is you can boot up a cloud computer if you're NFT, and you can run software with NFTs. And the whole point of that is that it's uncensorable, and there's no KYC, and it's full crypto rails. So it might be that we have to set up
01:12:49
Speaker
a subsidiary company or just sell it to some foreigners, I don't know. But yeah, there's a lot of chilling regulation that's going to make things a lot more difficult and it's going to make things like
01:13:05
Speaker
or whatever are these startup city zones, I think much more appealing to run crypto companies out of. So that's an emerging trend that I'm definitely watching for this decade. I think it might fully start happening. I don't know if it's going to be Praxis, but there'll be things like Praxis for sure. Yeah, that's exciting in a way for sure.
01:13:32
Speaker
Is there anything else you want to talk about before we end it or anything, last things you want to say? Check out Vaporware. We're going to release some new basic features soon. If you already have a Vaporware appliance NFT, that will get you access to them before other people stay tuned for more. That's all I got. All right, cool. Just stay on. I'm just going to stop the recording. It's an octave.