How Physical Items Will Be Tied To NFTs | GVAE With Tyler Hobbs

there's not anything in the world that is art today that wasn't originally [ __ ] on by the prior art thing the garyvee audio experience podcast nation let me just say this very simply this is one of the most selfish podcasts in the history of the garyvee audio experience because i want to be able to have my grandkids ask me what it was like to know this gentleman because there is borderline 0. 0 percent chance in my mind god willing he stays healthy um that that he doesn't become one of the most profound most important artists of this generation and it is my incredible honor to have videnza tyler on the show tyler how are you oh gary i'm doing great i mean uh what an intro to the show uh i don't know i mean you're really setting a high bar there for me uh but uh i'm sandbagging yeah yeah maybe lower those expectations just a tiny bit uh but uh no i'm super excited uh it's a real pleasure to get to talk to you here today so let's really go into nft art like that's the punchline of this most definitely you know obviously i have a lot of entrepreneurs but i really want to go into the history of you and this moment yeah you know for people that see the title and click it you know that are really deep in our nft world i'm gonna say it so you don't have to because i know you're a humble kid like you know it's very difficult for me to think of 10 artists that have more of an opportunity to be you know truly one of the names that people talk about in 30 60 90 years i don't think there's any confusion for anybody paying attention that we're in this moment right now where the four fathers and mothers where the you know i read boom a couple some i don't read books and i read temporary art a couple five summers ago four summers ago three summers ago i can't remember now but mainly because i wanted more insight to what i saw happening in the sports card world okay i can't believe what happened because only a couple years later nft world happens and all and me mapped me not only reading that book but googling my ass off about going deeper on the little bit i already knew about pollock or warhol yeah yeah you know yeah my uh my friend kevin rose who i know is a big fan of your work right uh and i did a podcast yesterday we recorded which will be coming out in a couple days i don't know the timing you can see this and he told me i had not known this one i like this kind of stuff that when canvas first hit the scene that people in the art world said that wasn't real art because real art had to be on a wall yeah yeah canvas could be damaged and this and that right it was all frescoes and church walls before that right correct so humans continue to make the same mistake this is an art this is art and then that becomes the art that's right so i kind of uh i kind of honestly i'm surprised like i thought we'd seen that play out so many times that uh more people would kind of uh be looking for that same thing to happen again and it seems like uh nfts are just like the latest incantation of that uh humans are incredibly good at seeing the world through their selfish frame or the frame of their own insecurity yeah not from the lens of history most definitely yeah so and the nfts are it's just it's a neutral technological platform on its own um it's a sister system of record keeping um there is a particular culture that's associated with it right now but uh yeah to say in any way that uh real art can't be uh published as an nft sold as an nft you know design as a as an nft in mind uh seems pretty preposterous from where i'm sitting at me as well my friend and when people listen to this podcast in 39 years they'll be like wow they do so to that point let's get into it yeah uh i you know what i'm really excited about is you're really one of those icons in my mind so i think a lot of people are about to be inspired to start uh others are gonna be inspired to consider um and most and others will be inspired to collect your work or people like yourself so let's start with this how the hell did you get to the place in your opinion using candor not just don't be overly humble why are you how did you get to a point where you're sitting on my podcast yeah community and i feel compelled to say these things about you not because i'm being nice because i want to be historically correct right how'd we get here

uh you know i asked myself that um a fair amount but uh i think you know i think the most important uh aspect by far is just the artwork itself so you know most of my time has been spent um working on my artwork um refining that learning about other artists trying to spend as much time as possible developing my work and making it as good as possible and you know um i did that for you know a decade and a half before nfts were even something that i was looking at so um tyler that artwork was physical or that artwork was 100 digital yeah so i started out in the physical realm with traditional drawing and painting and kind of uh paid my dues so to speak learning all the kind of traditional backgrounds and uh graphic design and um uh yeah about 20 2014 is whenever i first started working digitally and that's when i started working with generative art with algorithmic cards so this is uh you know what i do today which is i write uh programs that generate artwork and um so about 2014 i started experimenting with that and i got super hooked on it i felt like it was much more interesting and much more relevant to our time uh and to me personally and so that's really what i focused on since 2014. uh i was 25 i think uh approximately what year was i born 1987. so wait uh you're gonna make me do math live on air uh yeah uh something close to that i'll save you time 27 okay there you go thank you yeah um so spoken like a true artist by the way um uh talk to like take me further back you're born war and what kind were you are we drawing at five years old and into it give me that yeah sure yeah i grew up in central texas so close to austin basically suburbs around austin i've pretty much lived here my entire life and yeah growing up i always liked making artwork i was not uh some kind of prodigy kid right so i was good but uh i was not picasso making you know incredible paintings at the age of seven um but i was fortunate that uh my parents you know uh got me into uh painting lessons after school where i was working with you know um are either of your parents into art not really my dad's a doctor and my mom uh well she um you know she raised us my siblings and i and uh she did uh do some really amazing quilting which i think has had has a stylistic influence on me but uh no not particularly creative and they definitely didn't know about like the art world and uh so i had a pretty average kind of um education along those lines but uh yeah i started you know getting books of like van gogh paintings and things like that and it just really resonated with me and say again siblings uh yeah i have older brother who was kind of a self-taught hacker and that's kind of how i got into programming and uh my younger sister has uh studied engineering um and has had kind of an interesting life but not really artistic either so um just me keep going you start you know you're into painting after school yeah i started doing things like copying uh van gogh paintings trying to like recreate them um actually did some pretty good versions of that those that's taught me quite a bit yeah did a lot of this kind of um semi-formal uh painting training and uh when it came time for uh college i wanted to go to art school but uh my dad was a little more pragmatic he wasn't a super huge fan of that for kind of obvious reasons and he encouraged me to go for computer science instead which i had been doing computer science at high school and my brother was kind of doing that so it made sense to me to do that as a career and it was interesting um so that's what i studied was uh computer science at the university of texas at austin and yeah start started working as like a programmer right out of school but art was what i was always working on in my spare time and it's always what i was thinking about long term and what i felt uh kind of had the most interesting challenges long term for me something i wouldn't get bored with and something that felt a little bit more personal and meaningful and uh so that's really why i've been pursuing art i think i love that so this is so cliche and obvious how we got here now based on that yeah but when do the gears really get going you started talking about i want to go back to it yeah make sense you're programming you're falling in love with art literally like when i first heard about generative

star stuff um you know 12 14 15 months ago i was like literally the person that i thought was going to most win in that was literally the story that you just told of your life yeah that's going to be for the kids that are nerds with tech they can do it yeah they code but they have an artistic streak oh like i always love when the technology comes along that's made for a certain person when that didn't exist before look at your life you were jekyll and hyde that you know bruce wayne batman you had to live like these different lives because they didn't come together all of a sudden the blockchain is at the right time at the right moment generative art movement happens and you're [ __ ] friends now yeah exactly i felt like um i was just teed up perfectly for everything that happened with nfts in 2021 especially you know art blocks um platform for uh for creating generative artwork on the blockchain right so the basic ideas you write the generative script itself uh to the blockchain and then you generate nfts uh from that script directly and you can sort of prove that the work that's coming uh into the hands of the collector is direct output from that script and so it's a really uh powerful way uh to create generative artwork and it creates a really uh interesting artistic challenge as well like this is uh somewhat different from the type of generative work that i and other generative artists were making prior to nft so it's actually really enabled a new type of artwork and i think the artists that have done well were ones that um maybe were open-minded and had uh that kind of that kind of work ready to go um as soon as uh you know these technologies around the blockchain started to develop um and then it just as you saw it took off like crazy in 2021 it was just like uh you know the curve went straight up uh at a certain point and uh yeah i feel really fortunate that i already kind of had my [ __ ] together at that point being empathetic to the crowd and you're saying some things that i can follow along because i've been deep in this last year and a half but you know knowing that most haven't talk us through we missed a pardon i'm gonna go to it now to connect on where you just went so now you're doing physical you're jekyll and hiding it blah blah and then you said 14 is when you started going digital right why how and exactly what were you making yeah okay so uh 2014 uh i've just been making traditional work i've been doing a lot of um you know a lot of studies a lot of like figure drawing um kind of getting all the basics uh really solid and i felt like my art was uh good but it was very generic like it was very generically good it wasn't really unique to me and uh some of the advice that i heard for artists that resonated with me was that you really have to make it personal you have to make the kind of work that only you could make you have to involve you know whatever special elements of your life you can bring to the table those are going to make your artwork more personal and i highly recommend this advice for every artist but for me that was programming like that was such a big part of my life and it influenced the way that i really thought about things so i knew i had to involve programming in the artwork um it wasn't exactly obvious how to do that i had quite a few failed attempts of like mixing math into hand-drawn things but eventually i had the idea of you know uh can i just write a program that generates a painting and um i kind of took the tools software tools that i had uh cobbled something together and uh what were the software tools you had uh this was a matplotlib which is like a scientific uh charting uh library you normally use it to draw like graphs but uh you can kind of finagle it into making artwork yeah exactly so it's kind of a hacky approach uh i didn't know that there were better tools for it at the time but what were the yeah so processing this is something that casey reese and ben frye put together and um it's really uh enabled a whole generation of uh of generative artists to work um so generous adore those guys oh absolutely they're legendary um casey's been so meaningful and so influential for the space probably the most important generative artist uh to date i would say is casey reese and uh and ben fry's still maintaining processing so you know uh huge uh props to them for doing that um and that that's a big reason why generative art is also having this moment um you know that these people uh put so much time and love into creating these tools that enabled a whole a generation of artists you know especially programmers uh to to be artists and to express themselves and um i think uh yeah i think it just it really resonates with people right

now because uh programming is so central to our lives right now like even if you're not a programmer you probably spend at least eight hours a day in front of a screen interacting with software right these are things that uh programmers have constructed and so kind of the those basic tools of code are what our whole environment is being built with today so i think it's really important that artwork is also built with those same things and i think that'll just help to you know kind of humanize our digital environments help us to have a better and more enjoyable uh relationship with software if it's not just all like written by you know amazon and facebook right like i want artists to be able to fully utilize those same tools and i think that's what's uh really important uh about generative artwork and other art forms that they work directly with programming and code you think the historical artwork felt that coding is too nerdy and two ones and zeros and two tech bro and [ __ ] this and big time victim yeah so general of art started in the 1960s and man it got uh they went through some hard time like uh really bad critical rap people were [ __ ] on it left and right i think uh the reaction there was that they felt like some element of humanity was lost by creating yeah it's easy to see like maybe why they felt that but at this point that feels like a really naive um assumption right i would argue that 95 of the people listening to this podcast right now who are incredibly curious and open-minded and entrepreneurial because my podcast which is like i just know that community even for them i think that they can easily feel the chemicals in their body of why well that's kind of weird like like write code hit enter and then there's art like that feels i'm empathetic to that i just don't agree yeah yeah i think it's i think um i think it takes a mental uh shift a little bit right like computers are the most powerful and important tools we've ever come up with um and they totally revolutionize everything and they enable uh just so much more that we haven't been able to do before and and that same thing applies to artwork like it would be just such a waste if we didn't create the best artwork we could by fully utilizing computers as well they're just a tool in the hands of the right artist they can make incredibly beautiful things and i think right it's really no different than paint versus a pencil like why is painting better than a sketch or vice versa it's not yeah it's not i mean this has been my biggest problem with the art conversation the hypocrisy is disgusting like you will literally watch someone talk about our eye of the beholder they'll talk about why they love something and then somebody brings something completely different like that's [ __ ] that's not art i'm like what the [ __ ] don't you understand that your thing was [ __ ] on too there's not anything in the world that is art today that wasn't originally [ __ ] on by the prior art thing absolutely every single artistic movement every new artistic technology like uh cameras right cameras came out uh people didn't think you could make real art with cameras it took like decades for that to be accepted and now we don't even think twice about that being a possibility right so um yeah i think people will feel exactly that the same way about uh generative art and uh ten years you're still a young guy very young and i'm listening to you talk and my observation is the following i started with this and now it's you're actually in those shoes do you have a and this is where i'm going to need you to you know like answer it actually and don't be too humble do you actually you know you've got some momentum obviously you're like hey i got a lot more work to do i respect all that sure but even where you're at in the space now and you and i can tell you know the timing of it do you think like oh weird i'm going to be 80 and 20 year old kids are going to be like tell me what you like in the old like do you have a sense that you're going down that path yeah yeah yeah yeah i think so i mean i think here's probably what's going to play out is like the kids that uh that are growing up seeing all this stuff uh being made right even just the people that are teenagers right now watching this going on they're going to absolutely uh dunk on my work in like no time right like i'm going to be the old old fashioned dude before no time that's right from a technology advancement standpoint they're going to dunk on it but let me give you an actual dunk on it okay lebron james would dominate oscar robinson in basketball yeah because of the evolution of the human right and the queen but i promise you when lebron james through the last 20 years crossed paths with the big o yeah the ring of the legendary status of it and that's what's cool about the game

yeah absolutely that's right the six-year-old today that will listen to this in seven years yeah that will crush you yeah 18 years from like a technical and did it right she will still always say that you like that's what's so cool yeah exactly that's how i feel about um all the predecessors right so like people like uh casey reese and all the traditional painters that um have massively influenced me i know i've been caught on this i'm sorry to interrupt i've been hot on this i like to give out roses more often you've already done a little bit of it just rattle off some names that you think deserve some googling from the people listening right now and do they have nfts for people to go discover and who do you think's underrated as a pioneer that has nfts that people because people love a good little alpha that might be nice for the community yeah okay uh i mean the alpha one person that just uh came to mind is uh this artist holger lipman who's uh he's a german artist and he was making generative work uh before i was he was one of the people that i saw um uh that really inspired me i think he has a great sense for color and for form and rhythm and uh so he was making really beautiful generative artwork that i saw when i was first getting started and he talked about that how's that spelled holger littmann uh h-o-l-g-e-r and then lipman is i think uh l-i-p-p-m-a-n-n and uh he just put out a hundred nfts with uh bright moments in uh their berlin show that's going on right now um i think he deserves a lot more uh recognition um other contemporary artists that are doing fantastic work let's see off the top of my head uh let's see sophia crespo is doing really amazing uh can work that i think is just a super high quality who there's a bunch of uh generative artists that uh i think are already uh you know making amazing work uh dimitri cherniak and matt delaurier and uh chettle golid and uh i'm gonna forget names ben kovach these are all people from the generative arts team that i've been watching work for you know five years or more at this point and they've been consistently making amazing work and so i think that kind of uh you want that type of track record you want to see that the artist has been serious for a long time i think that's a really helpful indicator you know i've really that's how you don't get rugged right yeah that's right like i as you could tell by my background love collecting things so i'm a little more chochkas collectibles comic book sports cards so as you can imagine the pfp thing really works for me right yeah so for me while everyone's chasing the 2021 2022 projects i want to buy plasma bears like you know mooncat i want to buy like you know strikers like i like the crypto skulls like anything pre-2021 it was maybe 2020 was like in between year but like for me if i find 2019 1817 ethereum projects i get excited yeah um yeah there's not a ton of uh super early uh generative work i mean uh auto glyphs are kind of the classic example but those things are already crazy expensive um you know if you want to go og uh the original some of the earliest generative art from late 1960s early 1970s is still massively underpriced in my mind um you can get amazing work for 10 20 30 thousand dollars um this is legendary tell me about that is that uh is that an nft or is that just digital art that's just uh in most cases this is work that uh was designed digitally but then plotted onto paper so they didn't even have uh normal printers at that point in time and these artists were working with plotters which were kind of like a simple 2d robot you stick a pen in it and you give it instructions for something to draw this is how a lot of generative artists started back in the day you can get these plotter drawings still for very reasonable prices and um all those artists had a huge uh influence on myself and many of the other generative artists that are working today and tyler those are framed framed like on paper yeah yeah and where does one find that ebay or is that more yeah it's more it's harder there you kind of have to like uh talk to the galleries and those types of places so i wish that it was as simple as nfts that's that's part of i think why nfts uh have such a big price difference with some of this traditional work is it just it's such a better marketplace like you can see everything that's out there you can tell exactly what everybody else is paying and you know how much they bought it for who owns what and so it's just so much more transparent and i think it just makes for a much healthier marketplace versus the traditional art world where things are kind of locked up and hidden away and sometimes

uh they only sell to specific people you they won't just sell to any dude who walks in the door with a you know a bag of money right so um yeah i think uh i wish the traditional art world was as easy to collect as nfts um not yet though not yet i think they'll figure it out over time now right because what you're alluding to is what i'm most excited about in this whole space which is the nftization of physical items that sit in temperature-controlled fireproof houses and now i'm creating an nft that represents the physical and if i want the physical in my apartment i burn the nft and get it otherwise it just keeps trading correct yeah i mean uh debatable about the burn the nft part i think we'll see multiple different arrangements of how the nft and the physical are related right like whether they're kind of like legally bound to be together whether they're allowed to to kind of be separate whether you have to pick one or the other right like there's uh the damian hurst uh project that's really interesting called currency so that was on launch where you made the decision where is what i'm talking about i'm sorry actually yeah so uh damian hurst uh the richest artist in the world uh right now uh last year came out with currency right he made whatever it is three thousand of his dot paintings they're like this big and uh so he sold all the nfts and uh i think this summer in like a one-year anniversary uh everybody that holds the nft has to pick do i want the nft or painting right and it's really fascinating to see what happens because you're literally have the option to have a painting from like uh the most successful living artist and i think most people are gonna pick the nft over the painting that's my guess and that'll be a really groundbreaking moment to really demonstrate um i think the seriousness of this new market um so yeah fascinating project by damien hurst yeah i totally agree i think it's one of the more interesting things going on in this space um to me it's the reverse because he launched it that way everybody knew from day one you were gonna have a one year to make a decision burn or keep right to me what i'm talking about is my michael jordan rookie card when i sh whatever company or companies you see where i'm going a little bit post game my michael jordan rookie card or for example i'm like googling as you're talking like i definitely want to buy some original 60s generally out because it's just cool when i have that if one day in 15 years i want to send that into a company that creates an nft that represents that exact thing yeah then i hold the nft then i could actually trade it like if my friend mike buys it he might buy it because he thinks i undersold it yeah but he doesn't have to take the physical he may continue to want to trade on it yeah yeah back to your thing on i wish it was as easy to collect well it can be if a comp if companies and i believe the future ebay will be this or ebay has this i believe much like data centers for amazon cloud services and all you know what's happened in your lifetime yeah because you know a little bit about enough about tech to know what i'm saying i actually think we're in the precipitous of having ungodly amounts of warehouses built around the world fireproof and temperature controlled to take on physical items to issue nfts that represent that physical item they're traded the sixth fire gal that gets the vase actually wants it in their home thus they want to call the nft they have to burn it so it goes off the blockchain to represent where i'm going yeah and now it's the vase and has it and if she seven years later wants to put it back up she resends it a new nft is rep and so they're tied together see what like a motorcycle yeah i think yeah no i think you're right i think um uh i think something along those lines could could really happen and one interesting element that will probably support this is uh you know what's awfully nice about nfts is it makes it so much easier to show your collection off to other people right so normally like you know i've got like uh painting on my wall right the only people that get to see this are people that physically come to my home uh when you have this uh digital work when you have something that's uh especially in an nft there's so much uh tooling and platforms to share that work with other people like people are enjoying other people's uh collections so much more than before with nfts because it's so much easier to show off your collection so i think a lot of physical work will be in a tised and uh and shown in like you know virtual galleries uh just because it's so much easier to for other people to enjoy that and uh you know a few people here and there will be able to see the physical work but really uh you know 99 of people are going to be

seeing the work on the internet or virtual reality or whatever so it makes more sense to have the work well documented and well um you know uh shown in that space uh to me so talk about the explosion of fidenza a have the name come up b your entire nft trajectory like i love these stories i have a lot of collectors and i think people will enjoy like oh you put it out and it was a dollar and now it's like oh give me that okay uh i'll try to stick to the facts here okay so early 2021 i done nothing with nfts and uh everybody i know starts dming me saying you got to get into nfts like this is the jam uh this one and this is not working every march january yeah exactly like january february yeah uh and so uh end of february i see i apologize real quick i apologize because this is important context the digital generative art you were making up to that point i was selling that as like unique prints uh rather than nfts yeah prints so it would do the thing and you would print it out and sell it yeah exactly and for everyone's contacts how much would those be uh you know those were selling between uh at that time like 500 and uh maybe 2500 something like that yeah a piece one of ones or yeah i was doing unique prints um so regenerative art you know i can generate multiple images that's pretty successful yeah for an artist i was able to support myself uh full time at that point not a luxurious lifestyle or whatever but uh i was able to eke it out at that point and it had taken me years and years of work and building up my collector base in order to be able to how much were your original pieces on print going for um uh you mean like whenever i first started the first prince i ever sold yeah they were like uh like 50 or 100 bucks or something like that so and where are those and who's got those and can you send them my yeah i have records of it um honestly i probably need to like email some of those people and tell them to like be careful with their prints yeah we'll talk offline video yeah all right okay 2021. uh i've been selling these prints right uh people are telling me gotta get into nfts i see um one of my favorite artists cheddar gola do this project called archetype on art blocks and i see the dimitri trainiac has also done ringers on art blocks and these are amazing projects and it just i can just tell right away i need to do this is this is like perfect for my work right you see two other people that you would say you aspire to be like you feel like they're kinship they're your people they did it i mean ringers is such a beautiful project and you're like let's go absolutely yeah so like uh that evening i sent in an email to eric and jeff at art blocks and uh and had you known snow fro already no i had not known snow fro apparently he had been following my work but i didn't know who he was and uh this was the first i'd heard of art blocks and so i sent this email and uh i was like hey i have this project uh you know it looks kind of like this i you know uh can i get in the queue to be an art blocks project i'm still going to work on it some but here's what i've got right now and uh he emailed me back and he was like you can't believe you know how excited i was to read your email like let's do this so i still had to wait in line it was like three months until uh fidenza would launch but i was working every day just uh really improving it polishing it doing everything that i could for it and so fedenza initially sold so it's 999 iterations 999 uh unique nfts from the same algorithm so they're related but each one is different and uh the initial sales price was like. 17 eth i think um so it was like something like 400 maybe 450 you can't remember um and uh so this was like um going to be by far like the biggest project i had ever done just with those numbers and that was really gonna you know in my mind help me get set up as an artist working full time have a little more financial security um so everything sold out in like uh 20 minutes something like that and uh and then people started getting uh i think really excited about the work they started to dig in and one of the cool things about fidenza is just it has a lot of variety and a lot of really interesting uh corners and outliers to the algorithm so as people started to look more and more at the output i think they really started to understand uh how generative r could work this way and and really get a feel for the algorithm and so the price just uh it just started going up and then it you know it was like at some point it was like doubling every week um and i mean the numbers got absolutely crazy they got crazy there was one point where um the you know the floor was like uh i don't

know like almost like 200 eth and uh i remember like calculating the valuation and it was like all of fidenza the valuation the floor evaluation was like a billion dollars for the whole algorithm and uh i was like okay i know this is like that you know seven eight months ago was that making you uncomfortable when they were you know i remember three thirteen for a thousand a theory right that's right yeah number three one three so a thousand each to uh punk six five two nine hope i got those numbers in the right order um and uh yeah i mean it was a total trip like i felt like i was like you know alice in wonderland kind of experience every day uh things were happening they were just blowing my mind and of course it felt great but it's also you know any sort of change is uncomfortable right even if it's like positive change and so i could feel that things were like uh totally shifting under my feet did you feel pressure do you like is there a part of you that likes that we're in the 40 to 60 range right now um do you feel like a hair more comfortable yeah it it feels more sane it feels like it has more basis in reality like in relation to everything else there's less mania going on right now you know there was definitely a moment yeah i think it's a healthier i want that like uh you know plateau of productivity and the hype cycle whatever i think that's what it's called uh that's where i want to be i want people to be making rational healthy decisions about what to collect not just uh fomoing into projects you know um there were people buying your project that knew nothing about it i was getting picked by people they're like should i buy a fidenza i'm like and literally every time the first thing i would reply is what do you know about it right yeah yeah that's great advice like uh don't just like throw your money at a random project like uh you know when i collect uh i collect artists who i know have been creating high quality work and are like committed to developing themselves as artists um and tyler do you feel pressure to justify how expensive this [ __ ] is like are you like [ __ ] this is awesome [ __ ] to like you know just getting a sense of you right we're going deeper and chopping it up like is there a part of you that's like okay um i you know this is amazing this is right i can't believe i can tell my parents somebody spent three million dollars on a piece of my art right like my brother and sister like what the [ __ ] like oh friends family i'm sure there's all these like fun stuff but there has to be nights i mean i feel it with the friends yeah i'm out here spewing that i'm going to build wall be walt disney and i'm like you know i really believe it i fully expect to do it i'm going to spend the rest of my life doing it right but occasionally in the shower brushing my teeth yeah all right like this is like a real like it's not even the walt disney i'm gonna build disney i actually fully believe that it's the day in the day out that like ping you know my the v friends bought ping somebody and it says somebody just spent 180 000 on this puffin right and i drew and i'm like man i really have you know my brain goes immediately to i'm gonna [ __ ] kill it for that puffing yeah do you yeah i mean i feel the pressure from like uh the perspective of i want to live up to uh i guess expectations in a certain way right like i want to make the best artwork that i can at this point it's really helped me to raise the bar for the type of work that uh i'll produce now you know i take it very seriously um but on the other uh hands i know that i have to divorce myself from the market and that the market doesn't uh doesn't reflect like the quality of the work right like fidenza sold at one value at one time they sold for a different value at a different time and now they sell it another value and it's the exact same work um so clearly there's like some disconnect between the market and the quality of work right and i think as well as the artist like to let yourself sleep at night just like uh you got to be more hands off from that that's what i tell every founder of every pfp project i'm like if you listen to your discord and you care about the floor price your data reliable yeah most definitely like that's not where your head should be at as the artist like that's not how you create good work do your best the best um make the best choices for your collectors either you know i think you have to uh think long term and um and and really make uh ethical and intelligent decisions about what you're doing you're here to that are you working on more stuff now oh god am i working first yeah the most stuff i've ever worked on at once um lots of cool projects and will these projects have different names like you know people refer to you as vadenza now yeah yeah are you gonna keep that as your kind of monarchy or you know that's just one project and uh yeah

you asked me to explain the name and i accidentally glossed over that i was trying to pick a name for the work and uh sometimes i like to pick things that don't have a real strong inherent meaning and so sometimes i use town names oftentimes small texas town names i was looking around for one in texas that fit and nothing quite did so i went in google maps over to italy and i was kind of panning around and this little town 25 000 people called vadenza just stood out to me as a cool name i was like wow okay i'm going to call this project for denzel so that's what that one was but every work every algorithm gets uh gets a new name and uh before i die i'm making this promise to myself before i die hopefully in 55 years i i am going to buy a fidenza while i'm infidenza yeah you know uh the mayor the mayor fidenza dm to me on twitter so i can help you set that up yeah yeah where is it it's like northern italy it's like three hours north of rome it's kind of in the middle of nowhere it's like there's literally not that much so what you literally are google mapping yeah you're looking at names you like the name you zoom in you make sure that you kind of get a little like vibe for it yeah that's funny yeah cool yeah i mean it's not like a special town you know it's just some town uh you know art really excites me i i've re this has been such a profound moment in my life you know i had so much more of it in me than i ever showed the world right but if you really peeled the onion it was there i'll give you an example i don't know what about you doing google map vedenza work made me just think about i literally was talking to somebody just now earlier this morning and realized i love optimism more than anything yeah which led me to say wait a minute i have not done enough character development around the optimistic otter and be friends yeah and like literally like have been for like the last two hours while i'm doing this podcast and thinking about my meetings and thinking about what i have to do there's like three percent of my brain that is working right now that i can feel that is ideating on how i have to make the optimistic otter a more important character in defense from a creative artistic lens yeah what is the otter going to do who's the otters it's going to be am i going to make it a cartoon do i make that a video game like i love creation yeah by the way how does it feel for you to be an artist now do you think of yourself as an artist you know i used to always think of entrepreneurship as art like i really think being an entrepreneur is incredibly artistic yeah you're a poor bred entrepreneur you adore artists because you know your your creativity your lack of fear if you're pure like the problem with entrepreneurship is there's money right what's also about art is like starving artists is romantic and respected the tough part of being an artistic entrepreneur is the money part clouds it and it can look dark but it's much a pure game of art yeah the motivation for the person running it if they're doing it well they almost certainly don't just care about the money right like i think or they barely that's just a weird place where it's outside collateral noise to the process yeah i'm aware of it i'm grateful for it it's not like i'm not demonizing it like i love it for people for me it's all about freedom which i don't think is just predicated about money right uh but of course money is one of the pillars of freedom depending on how one looks at the world i just like being artistic yeah and it seems like you're thinking deeply about uh at least the motivations for what you're doing right like optimistic otter right like uh i love that we need more optimism why why when i like really i've been saying it but only a few people are paying attention they okay a million that's a lot less than 8 billion when the world realizes what i'm actually [ __ ] doing with this project i'm very excited about the positivity and practicality that i'm going to bring into the world because of it yeah i mean i think that's super important um i've gotta run to something ironically in befriend's land i'm starting to cut surprises part two but you're fantastic i'm cheering for you heavy and uh if i could ever be helped please let me thank you so much gary yeah likewise uh it's been a real pleasure thanks brother take care you too