CryptoPunks creators: from art experiment to cultural movement

Before NFTs were a category and crypto was an industry, two artists released 10,000 characters into the world with no roadmap, no pitch, and no expectations. What started as an art experiment in code ended up flourishing into a movement about ownership and identity. In this episode of Possible, Reid sits down with Matt Hall and John Watkinson, co-founders of Larva Labs and creators of CryptoPunks, to trace how a small creative experiment became one of the most influential cultural phenomenons of the internet era. They reflect on what it means for art to live on-chain, why decentralization was a design choice rather than a slogan, and how digital identity became one of the most valuable real estates online. From museums and blockchains to profile pictures, permanence, the conversation explores how letting go of narrative control can allow culture and community to write the story themselves.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Before crypto was an industry, before NFTs were a category, two artists were experimenting with code, identity, and digital ownership, mostly just to see what would happen. They released 10,000 characters into the wild. No roadmap, no pitch, no expectations. What followed wasn't just a new kind of art. It was a new kind of belonging, a way that people began to relate to identity, ownership, and culture on the internet. Today's conversation isn't about markets or prices. It's about how meaning spreads, how movements form without leaders,

• 0:42Speaker 00

  and what happens when creators step back and let culture take the lead. Matt Hall and John Watkins are the co-founders of Larva Labs and the creators of CryptoPunks. Let's get to it. It is awesome to be here at the opening of the Node Foundation. It is appropriately celebrating the kind of intersection between art, digital identity, with CryptoPunks. And I've actually, unusually, because I was so excited about this, I've actually watched prior interviews with you guys. I normally don't do that, but I was like, no, no, I'm so excited about this. I want to do that. So it's great. So welcome to Possible, and this will be fun. As I was mentioning before, I spent a bunch of time choosing which punk,

• 1:28Speaker 00

  weirdly in Bhutan, with a few of our mutual friends, because I was thinking about how this next generation, the continuing evolution of art and digital identity, which we'll get into. And you know, you never should ask parents what their favorite children are. But you know, I can't help myself. I gotta ask, do each of you have a favorite punk? And what's the resonance? What's the, ah, this is my favorite because of X, even though I love all 10,000?

• 1:53Speaker 01

  That's definitely the case. We love all the children. But I think for both of us, it's the punkiest punks. Kind of, you know, the ones that have like Mohawks and are smoking cigarettes, the ones that just sort of... Put out that attitude, that punk attitude are probably our favorite. You can look at our collection and kind of get a vibe for that.

• 2:08Speaker 00

  And do the zombies or aliens count as punky as punks?

• 2:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the thing. They can look really punky too. Yeah, there's a few zombies that, you know, just are wearing the shades and just kind of looking, you know, just looking like kind of cool, punky, but dead people.

• 2:23Speaker 00

  Dead or alien, depending.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  And then, yeah, the apes, the aliens, yeah, they can all put that out there. So, yep.

• 2:28Speaker 00

  So one of the things I've loved about the punks' journey is there's a number of different museums that have now integrated them in the collection. It's part of the notion of what is, you know, kind of the history of art? What is the story of art? Museums being the caretakers and in a sense, the network nodes. You're right, here we're at the Node Foundation. So what are your reflections on punks entering museums? You know, it ranges everything from MoMA to, you know, here at Node.

• 2:55Speaker 02

  It's surreal in a way, but I think we did sort of go through a transition. Like when we first made it, we were like, we don't know what this is. And then there was a period of time where the art world got a little interested in like 2018. And then there was, you know, the majority of people were like, this is dumb. And for these reasons, and I think through that experience, we were like, actually, I don't think it's dumb. You know, we kind of got our like convictions got hardened a little bit. And like, I think maybe you're going to change your mind. Like, because I think there's something real here and like, it's pretty interesting. And it might be a little like hard to grasp if there's, there's a number of leaps to be made from traditional art to this. So, so in a way, it's sort of like, you know, makes sense in a, you know, sort of an objective way, but still weird personally.

• 3:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I feel like during that maybe first year, year and a half after we launched it, we were catching, yeah, maybe a lot of shit from the New York art community. But at the same time, they were, they kept inviting us to things, you know? It's like, well, why are we here then, you know? And, but then a handful of people did kind of almost pitch it back to us, you know? Like, especially people who had a strong interest in digital art. They were saying, you know, this solves a major problem for digital art. It was always so artificial to try to own it, you know? It never felt right. We'd get like a CD-ROM and a certificate, you know? And like, don't put it on the internet. You know, it's like, what? You know, that data, that's not natural for data. Data needs to be free, you know? I mean, we know, we're in the middle of Silicon Valley. We know that. We were getting increasingly convinced like this is a way to, and it's a method of ownership that you need to kind of sign on for.

• 4:24Speaker 01

  And that we weren't sure people would do that. But once you sort of go through that looking glass of like, oh, this is how you own this stuff. Then the ball just kind of starts rolling downhill. It's like, this is great. Everyone can access, everyone can view it. It's available to the entire planet. But here are the owners and that's, and that's completely visible and transparent. And it's mediated by the blockchain, this world computer. Like, it all just started to make sense. And so I think, yeah, we got, kind of got galvanized. And I remember even that, yeah, we had like our little catchphrase. I think we even used it as a password on a file for a while. It was punks to the number two MoMA. And it was a big joke, right?

• 5:00Speaker 00

  Who knows?

• 5:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 5:02Speaker 00

  And literally prediction of the future. By the way, I think it's a classic pattern in art when it's like the first thing is that's not art. And then, oh, and then some of it goes, no, no, that is art. And it's that challenge moment that is actually part important on the art thing. So, you know, back in 2017, when you guys hit publish, what did you think would happen? I remember having arguments because, you know, even though I was not then, unfortunately, part of the CryptoPunk community, which I now am a little tiny part, right? Like defending to my, my friends like, it's got to be more complicated than this number of pixels. And I was like, no, art is a question of perception. So what will you guys as kind of artists and technologists? What hit publish, what did you think would happen?

• 5:46Speaker 01

  At that time, we were just hoping it's like, will people just pick up on, on this? Like, will they think that they own it? I mean, that was the hardest thing is like, you know, and obviously we were using this analogy of like, well, people value their Bitcoin, you know? And so could that apply to a collectible? Could that apply to art? And so we just hoped people would just. Just grab a few and just kind of start to feel like they own them and trade, you know, we just, and we just, we're looking for just enough of a signal there to feel like it, you know, that it worked, you know, and so it really was an experiment, we thought of it as an experiment for sure, and it was something we just kind of fit in between other projects we were doing, but we really loved it and we just said, let's, let's just hope that just some, you know, this, like this happens, and initially it didn't, right?

• 6:27Speaker 01

  Like, we're not the best marketers, you know, and so we just sort of wrote, you know, kind of a nerdy post in the Ethereum subreddit, you know, and we're like, hey, this is an experiment in digital, you know, art and collecting, come and get one, they're free, you know, you just have to interact with the smart contract, and, you know, a handful of people did, right, but, and some people in there were like, this is cool, but then, what, maybe like a week later or a few days later, there was a Mashable, was it? Yeah, they posted an article and they kind of said all the right things that maybe we should have said, you know, it was like, this is the future of digital art, you know, like this could change, whatever, you know, however it was said, and then all of a sudden, this community formed up, you know, seemingly overnight, you know, it was overnight, because

• 7:09Speaker 01

  within 24 hours, they had all been claimed, and then just all the dynamics we had hoped for were suddenly happening, you know, Alien sold for three grand, you know, and when they were, it was all just free 24 hours ago, people started making them the profile pictures on social media.

• 7:24Speaker 02

  I can remember the first time something sold for $1, because it was free, and we were like, well, you'll get them for free, and then someone's like, well, I prefer that one, I got it for free, a dollar's nothing, and then it was like, well, if you're spending a dollar, I'm probably sending up to $10, you know.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  We might have been on the, we might have been on the sell side of that dollar, because, because we were just kind of trying to be market makers, you know, it's like, if anyone wants to buy one, I'm selling, I don't even really care what the price is.

• 7:44Speaker 02

  We're so happy if anybody just does anything with this, yeah.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  But we were buying too, you know, someone sold one and tried to sell them for 10 bucks, like, yes, I'll buy that, you know, we were just sort of trying to be market makers in those first few days, really, yeah.

• 7:56Speaker 00

  So that was the acceleration point, when did you kind of get to a, this is now part of the firmament of the story of crypto, the story of NFTs, the story of art, like, when did you kind of go, ah, I have that realization now, and how did you reflect on, huh, started with an experiment, hopeful experiment, you know, to mama, but, just like, hey, we're trying it and we'll see, we'll see what happens?

• 8:20Speaker 01

  Well, we went through the kind of that crypto winter phase, where, and that was really just more about keeping the lights on, you know, like, we had, we were running the Discord, and we were keeping the website up and everything, and we just sort of... There was very little activity, but there was sort of this, what, like a kind of a hardcore fanbase, right?

• 8:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, a couple hundred people maybe that would just check in and, you know, that's really what kept us going, kept us going too. Cause we're like, oh, they're into it. I'm still into it. We'll just keep it going, you know?

• 8:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, and there was, there was in particular, there was this one person who had claimed it like a thousand. And they were just relentlessly dumping them, you know, just soon as they saw, and just as low as, you know, they were just like forty bucks. You know, and that happened, that took place over the course of a year.

• 9:00Speaker 02

  A year.

• 9:00Speaker 01

  Right? Just this person just slowly unloading them and, and.

• 9:03Speaker 02

  We were buying them?

• 9:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, we bought them.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  We're like, we're buying our own ping files now? What is this?

• 9:07Speaker 00

  We sold it for a dollar, we're buying it for forty. This is a good business.

• 9:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is what seemed right, but.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so we had to get through all that and, but yeah, what I feel like the beating heart there was that there was this crew who was so into it. For no reason financially, you know, they just loved it now and, and we did too. So we just kept it going. Kept the lights on basically during that time. And then right at the end of twenty twenty, we, or even maybe in the mid twenty twenty, we just started to feel that little pickup. You know, where it's like, oh, wait, is, is more people in here, more energy, more excitement? Twenty twenty one just started with a bang. I remember just New Year's Day was just the biggest day by far. Just all of a sudden, I don't know, you know, what exactly the dynamics were, but.

• 9:46Speaker 00

  New Year's resolutions for digital identity.

• 9:49Speaker 01

  I will get myself, yeah.

• 9:50Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, to the day though, January first, it was nuts. And we, we'd seen like, there'd been like moments, like a week of excitement and then it would quiet down. So we just were kind of like, whoa, this is bigger than usual, but we'll just ride it out. And it just kept getting crazier and crazier. So, yeah.

• 10:04Speaker 01

  And so I think during twenty one, it just became obvious like, oh, this is a going, you know, this is, like, all the hopes have been achieved here, that, you know, this is like a worldwide.

• 10:13Speaker 00

  And, and when did it start like going, okay, we've, we've, we've launched the sailboat and now we're kind of like along for the journey, just along with everyone else. When, when did that moment happen?

• 10:25Speaker 01

  I feel like kind of early on in that, that was always our thesis, you know, like that was part of what we said was like, that was one of the, you know, we. Always laid out like what's different about this, you know, and one of them was it's like, okay, we kept some of these as part of minting them, but otherwise we're the same now. We don't have any special privilege, you know, we can't go in and change things. We can't make more, we can't assign yours to someone else, you know, none of that stuff. So we always made that claim that it's like this is separate from us now that we're just collectors with the rest of you, you know, and you know, whatever we at that time we still ran the website, but but really there's no special permissions. Anyone could run a website like that and there are other websites that have all the data and track all the market activities. I think we internalized that pretty quickly, but maybe everyone else didn't, you know,

• 11:08Speaker 01

  and in 21, it's, you know, it increasingly felt like, oh, we're responsible for a bunch of people's kind of financial decisions here, you know, got a little like, yeah, got, you know, it started to get very fraught where it's like, okay, the dollar values are extremely high now and everyone's looking at us for the next step and we're trying to say this is a decentralized experiment and it wasn't really holding up anymore. No, no, yeah, no, I don't think so. I think I'm going to blame you, yeah. I think I'm more comfortable with that idea.

• 11:36Speaker 00

  Part of I think, you know, obviously hindsight is always 2020 versus like looking through the glass darkly at the future, which is experiments and all the rest. Part of the magic here was you went, no, no, this is part of it's decentralized, it's part of, it's part of, you know, it's a collective community. No, because, you know, by the way, Silicon Valley, we only have dual class stock. We go, okay, we're we're going to control this more is like, no, no, we're going to be more like crypto founders with that kind of launch. Do you think anything would have been lost if CryptoPunks were upgradable? Does every kind of?

• 12:08Speaker 01

  Definitely.

• 12:09Speaker 02

  I think so, yeah.

• 12:10Speaker 01

  No regrets, you know, what how we did it, yeah.

• 12:12Speaker 02

  I think that's like a big deal to us and I think it will be increasingly a big deal. There's a number of people that understand this too, but it becomes, I think, a little more understandable as you get comfortable with the basics of all this, with the blockchain, all that kind of thing. But we really wanted this to be like immutable upon deploy. So we there's no at like we there's over and on one of the walls in this exhibition, the code is there and you can just take a look at what we did. And it's the same thing that we did as when we did in 2017. We have no, there's no admin functions, there's no anything. And so. There's a couple like crazy downsides to that. If somebody makes a mistake and they lose their punk, it's like, sorry, you know, like, nothing I can do. But the upsides are that there's nothing we can do, you know?

• 12:54Speaker 02

  Like, you can always, there's a market there that runs completely out of our control. You can always do anything you want with your punk. You don't have to go find, like John was saying with the certificate of ownership. You don't, hopefully, hope that gallery is in business to prove that you owned it. It's all there. It has nothing to do with us, so.

• 13:10Speaker 01

  And as we've gotten to know art collectors, I think it's easier for art collectors to collect this kind of work from living artists because these, these things are such immutable sort of things. You know, you don't have to wonder if, you know, someone was making the case that sometimes, you know, artists will have a show in New York and then they kind of quietly are selling a bunch of the same thing out the back door in Europe. You know what I mean? Like, it's like, you don't get that here, you know, so.

• 13:35Speaker 02

  I think you said too, like, one nice thing about this mechanism is it's a way for people not to wish for our death.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:41Speaker 02

  You know, like, the set sizes is set, you don't, we can't make more of them, you know, so.

• 13:46Speaker 00

  It's already a collectible.

• 13:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, leave us alone.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  I'd like to believe, yeah, that CryptoPunk's price wouldn't move up or down if we died, you know? And I actually want to broadcast that.

• 13:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 13:57Speaker 00

  But it might go down, so.

• 14:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, good point, good point, yeah.

• 14:02Speaker 00

  So, you know, one of the things I always think to myself, and obviously it's second guessing and amazing journey and success is always difficult, but like, if you could call yourselves, your younger selves, 2017, before you hit publish, is there anything you would tell yourself? Do this differently, ask this question?

• 14:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, it's, well, then another natural one of that is like now that the market's done 3.9 billion, like, you guys want to take a couple percent there? You know, like, that might start to add up. But I think, no, it's like surprisingly not many changes. And some of the stuff that probably we might have changed is, it's nice that that's sort of like locked in because it has a certain like authenticity to it, you know? Like, there's such a thing as like polishing it too much, like in some of the rough edges because it was something we were just doing for, you know? A small audience are kind of charming now, I think.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, it keeps it punk.

• 14:58Speaker 02

  True, yeah.

• 14:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, whenever we talk about, and obviously, it's a bad mindset anyway, just to say what we could have done or what we should have done. You know, it's not good to think through that lens. But whenever we've even joked about like, oh, would we change this in the art and that kind of stuff? You know, now that it's being scrutinized to a degree we never would have imagined. But then you just think, yeah, but this is part of, yeah, just its charm and authenticity. And, you know, it's like, this is internet art, like this is something that we just put out there and then this happened, you know? And you're right, if we go back in time and miser over every pixel, would it just feel kind of a little too well-rounded? And just kind of polished in a way that just loses that edge. And so I think in general, yeah, we don't spend a lot of time wondering what if.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  And certainly the royalty stuff, very glad we didn't do that because we just love the purity of it. That is just, this is pure decentralization.

• 15:47Speaker 00

  Very crypto, yeah.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, and even if you had put 1% or something, you don't know how that could have affected things early on. You know, it's, yeah, so I think that's all sort of hindsight bias, really, to think of all those what could have been, you know?

• 16:02Speaker 00

  Which, by the way, I think is the right answer, because when I thought about asking you guys this question, I always think, well, how would I answer the question? Very different, or maybe that first, that flaw that you had to correct in the crypto contract? That might be the one thing.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  That's for sure, yeah. Yeah, we had to redeploy immediately, basically, upon launch because we had a bug. And that felt horrible because there was this excitement from the community. And then we just thought we had sort of snuffed that out. It's like, it's going to take us, now we know we have to do this much more carefully. So we can't just tomorrow, put out a new contract and hope it works. You know, we have to now be much more careful with our testing and everything. And so it took us, what, a week or something to get that done, or a little more than a week? And even though that doesn't seem like much time, we just thought, well, that's it. Everyone's going to move on to something else. And we were quite, not only... Where we gratified that kind of everyone came back, but they even kind of replayed in good faith, most of the transactions, you know, that they had sort of done, but hadn't

• 16:58Speaker 01

  worked. And so, so they out, but you're right, it would have been nice to have that. But you know, even that, there's a difference because we didn't think of the, the bid side of the market. All we had was offer for sale and buy in the original contract. But then as part of redoing it, we were like, you know, we should have a bid side of this too.

• 17:19Speaker 02

  I remember you telling me that.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:20Speaker 02

  We should really have bids. And I was like, dude, we just blew it. Like, you want to make it like even more complicated?

• 17:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then now to look at it too, like we're looking at it just off camera here, the code, because it's up on the wall. And it's only like 246 lines of code. It's like, you can't get that much, that many lines of code, right? But it's like, it does have to stand for all time.

• 17:38Speaker 02

  It does.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  It is the craziest kind of programming, you know, we've been software developers for 30 years. And you know, nothing compares to writing a solidity contract in terms of just the pure, the pressure and everything.

• 17:52Speaker 02

  And you don't truly understand what immutable software means until you've blown it and you really can't fix it.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:58Speaker 02

  And then that, that enters your heart and stays there forever. And then every contract you do after that, you're like, I know what that feels like. So I'm going to do everything I can to not feel that way.

• 18:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. And in our career up to that point, we really, we were rapid prototypers. We used to do a lot of stuff with the Google Creative Lab where they're like, we need, you know, we don't mock up this product, or we want to do this thing for next weekend, you know, at an event. So we're just sort of running gun, you know, we can get things done fast. And so all of a sudden, we were working on that. The absolute polar opposite kind of work to do. And yeah, so now anyway, we have a good community of solidity auditors that we, that we now, that we now bring into anything we're doing.

• 18:37Speaker 02

  That was our first ever solidity. Code too. So that's how we do things too. We'd like, oh, we'll learn it by doing it, you know, which works fine elsewhere, but not so much. Immutable, a little harder. Yeah. A little harder.

• 18:49Speaker 01

  We only really even learned what Ethereum was in the search of how to do this. You know, we had the idea of a digital collectible and then you were talking about it should be, you know, it seems like crypto would be the right thing for this. We looked at how some people were trying to do it with Bitcoin. There were some attempts to use colored colored coins, that kind of stuff. But then we came across Ethereum and it's like, oh, this could work. But then it's like, okay, now what is Ethereum? How do you actually do this? You know, and yeah.

• 19:13Speaker 00

  So I want to come back to the community art narrative, etc., because it's part of, I think, some of the the kind of discovery of magic along the journey. But because you're also, in addition to being artists, you're technologists and geeks, using Claude code now, right? But how does, how is AI's code generation intersecting with the way you're thinking about the world?

• 19:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's been a real surprise because, you know, well, we went to, we did computer sciences where we met. We did computer science in the 90s. And this was like, you know, we took, both took an AI class. And there's like this real sad guy came out and was like, well, here's the textbook and we're going to go through it all. But nothing worked. So welcome to the class.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  The 90s was the absolute low point for AI. It was, yeah. And even, I mean,

• 19:59Speaker 02

  None of this works.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. We were at University of Toronto. Hinton was teaching there and, you know, Jeffrey Hinton. And, and I remember I almost took his class and then a grad student was like, do not go near that guy. Like,

• 20:10Speaker 02

  It didn't work, man.

• 20:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. He's washed up. None of that stuff worked out, you know, but he's like stuck on it and everything. And it's just so amazing to see that, you know, that how he's stuck with it and a handful of others to push it over the top. But in terms of using it ourselves day to day, I mean, it's amazing in that I just feel like now everything we're doing is, is like the creative part is the, is the hard part, you know, like, and we can just, you know, just skip over and just speed through all the kind of grind work that would just sort of slow you down or maybe kill inspiration, you know? And so I don't, I don't think either of us think of AI as actually being a creative tool in terms of like it has ideas or we're using it to actually make creative content. It's just more like it allows it frees us up to

• 20:55Speaker 01

  be just just working on on the cool parts, basically, or the really challenging, interesting parts from a tech point of view that are kind of a little beyond it right now. So it's immediately it went very quickly to just like required, you know, I mean, you can't you can't sit down and start coding without it, really. You just want that sidekick at all times, you know.

• 21:13Speaker 02

  I think yeah, around the time of the first reasoning models, we were just keeping an eye on it. We had like, you know, chat GPT subscriptions or whatever, and I'd ask it some question, but like, I don't know. And then and then around the time the reasoning models happened, I'd asked it to write something for me, and then I asked it to change it in natural language, and it made the change, like a fairly subtle change. And I was like, whoa, you got to check this out like, and then and then from there on, it was like, you know, it's radically accelerated our work and, you know, you couldn't couldn't do it without it now, basically, or it feels so slow and dumb. You'd be like, why am I like, I'm doing some API connection here? Like, this is so boring. Yeah.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. And our whole career, we've always been very kind of polyglot. Like, we've done we've done stuff with games, you know, with game engines. We were Java developers at our sort of core, old school nineties Java developers, but then we do a lot of

• 21:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, some people listening to this still know what Java is.

• 22:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. If you're out there, that one person.

• 22:04Speaker 02

  We see you.

• 22:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Because it's still amazing. And but yeah, then we switch over and have to do JavaScript because we're doing web stuff or or switching to solidity, you know, so it's just amazing to be able to do that context switch with the AI agents, you know, and and now we feel sort of enabled to go further afield. It's like, oh, we can get into anything now because we don't have that huge hill to climb to just get Hello World going, basically, you know. And so so we're I feel like it's really enables a wide range.

• 22:34Speaker 00

  One thing I'm curious about, because this is something I do, like I, you know, benefit of first commercial investor in OpenAI, was on the OpenAI board, you know, because I I got into the AI revolution because what I realized was, by the way, my undergraduate at Stanford was artificial intelligence.

• 22:52Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 22:53Speaker 00

  So I'm very much in the, oh, yeah, this is a winner. This is all not going to work. I went to philosophy because like, like, they don't understand what thinking or language is. But what I realized, and this is what the the first insight for DeepMind is, is, hey, if you can apply scalable compute to learning systems, which also, by the way, having scaled data helps. You can subtly create interesting functions. And it started with self-play. Right, it was the pong playing itself. It was go playing itself. It's like, oh shit, this is now gonna turn into something. What? I don't know, but that's when I kinda, that was my realization that turned me from, you know, the first couple of years being in the Bitcoin. I was so, always been very positive, but it's like, oh, I'm gonna stop focusing crypto. I'm gonna focus on AI now for it.

• 23:36Speaker 00

  Now, in the creative process, it is definitely a tool. It's definitely accelerant. It's definitely like encoding. But like, for example, for me, I, when I start approaching like some line that I'm thinking of, I actually use, it isn't as a muse, but it is as a foil. Right, like, so for example, I go, oh, I wonder what you would apply Wittgensteinian language games to reinforcement, uh, human feedback learning. Right? And is there something there? And I'll do a couple of, of, of quick posts with asking for citations. Now that there's deep research, I was doing this before deep research. Do you guys do any of that in your creative process? I'm just curious about like the, the also, not just the tool of accelerant, but the foil.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so. You can kind of vet ideas, right? You can just sort of get, try to pretty quickly figure out what the state of the art is, or whether it's possible, whether it's been done before, you know, that kind of stuff. You can, you can kind of quick study on it. And you have to always have enough sophistication to know, to take it with a grain of salt a little bit. You have to kind of follow up maybe, not just take what it's saying.

• 24:37Speaker 00

  Cause sometimes it's not right.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 24:40Speaker 02

  Or like, oh, this is an amazing idea. It's like, no, it's not.

• 24:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, there's been some people out there where like, oh man, I'm making major breakthroughs with quantum mechanics, according to my chatbot.

• 24:50Speaker 02

  My best bud here, who's programmed to love me.

• 24:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it's, it is good for that too, just what's possible. And, uh, and just what's the problem space, what's been done. So, yeah, I do feel like it does feed that, you know, it, it allows for kind of more ambition in those, in those categories as well.

• 25:08Speaker 02

  It's such an unusual tool, having, I mean, I don't know if you had the same experience, but having been in software for so long and software breaks in ways that you are comfortable with, you understand, like, oh, you got a null pointer, or there's an error or whatever.

• 25:21Speaker 01

  It doesn't lie to you.

• 25:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, it doesn't just be like, I don't really know, I'm just gonna say something. It's like, whoa, that's weird.

• 25:26Speaker 00

  You wanna hear, you wanna hear this, even though it's completely fiction.

• 25:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so that's been very unusual. And seeing people who, like, we have a pretty good mental model of what it's doing, but seeing people who don't have that, I mean, it's so convincing and that. You just, it's crazy, like seeing some of the models that people are like, oh, this actually is thinking about this, it's thinking about me, it understands what I'm saying, what I mean. And I'm like, I'm not sure about that, but yeah, it's a very interesting new thing.

• 25:54Speaker 00

  So, so back to the narrative side, I think this is like, like perhaps with the experiment, an intentionally designed feature, not a bug. But when you released in 2017, you actually let everyone else write the stories. You weren't going like, here is the story of CryptoPunks, here's the different groups, like here's a fun, cool thing. But it was deliberately, and there must have been kind of this, like, I hope that interesting stories are gonna be written. Like, it's kind of, there must have been an impulse to try to juice it some, and the restraint is an interesting, like, say a little bit about like the kind of narrative around it and like where you thought, okay, here is okay. And oh my gosh, it was really important to keep the hands off.

• 26:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think overall, we were pretty hands off in that, you know, just letting it happen. I know, you know, as a, we were, as nerdy kids, we were into, in Canada, we were into collecting hockey cards. And then I was into that Magic card, card game for a while. And the trading was so big in the, in that world, you know? And that was always like the big stories, you know, did you hear about the trade that happened? Did you hear that he has a Gretzky rookie now, or whatever, you know, like all those kind of stories. And so that was sort of our hope is that by having this sort of open marketplace, an extremely efficient marketplace, right? You can spend a dime on a million dollar transaction, basically, that, that there would just be those stories. And I feel like that is the case now. If you go to the CryptoPunk site and just look at the transaction history for each punk,

• 27:25Speaker 01

  and we put them up on the screen behind us all the time as part of the exhibition. Every one of them is like its own story now, and there's drama. And if you recognize the, you know, the ENS addresses, or, you know, or the address or the ENS names, then you kind of know who was involved. And yeah, one popped up, we were talking about how we were just, early on, we were just buying or selling. And there was one that I think I had sold, we just saw it pop on the screen yesterday, I sold it for about a hundred bucks or something, you know? And it's like, oh, that was a good one, why did I sell that one?

• 27:53Speaker 00

  Presumably now somewhere between a hundred and four hundred thousand.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, right, yeah. And so anyway, it's all those stories, you know, and then of course people taking it on as their identity and then, you know, so I just feel like each CryptoPunk is being kind of is this living entity now that that has all these layers to it. And yeah, there was one that popped up yesterday that had had been sold so many times, right? I don't know, what was it, forty times or something? It's like, is that the record? You know, it probably isn't. There's probably one that's been sold more. But and then there's others that have never been touched, you know, they just someone claimed them, still has them. And that's like our profile pictures are like that, of course. And yeah.

• 28:31Speaker 00

  So you brought up identity, which is a thing I was gonna move into next anyway. Presumably when you launched the experiment, you didn't think this is also gonna become an interesting thing in digital identity. I mean, or did you?

• 28:41Speaker 02

  We had a little bit, yes. So we had a little bit of an experience, like a project we made with Google was just an app, like they were changing their logo to the Android logo and or Android was, you know, sort of centering their marketing around the Android logo. So we made an app with, again, the Google Creative Lab to make yourself, you know, make the Android logo into you.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  And you put clothes on and you, you know, accessories, you know, not that, not completely unlike this, where you're basically kind of dressing up the Android. Yeah, and you had all these different choices of hats and clothes and glasses and everything. So yeah, definitely some like that was part of what led us to this.

• 29:14Speaker 02

  That went crazy. And it was a Google app. So that had a nice, you know, platform to start with. But people really loved it. They made it their profile picture. And we kind of realized like, oh, the profile picture is like the most valuable real estate on the internet, basically, you know, because it's beside every one of your posts. It's not just one post, like, I like this and it's gone. So that really was like

• 29:33Speaker 01

  Stuck with us.

• 29:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. And because we, you know, two guys know, can't market worth shit. And then like also no budget, no nothing. So we're like, we gotta think of some way where people get into it and start talking about it as themselves. So that was why the profile picture was, you know, yeah.

• 29:48Speaker 01

  And if you remember at that time, that was kind of the iPhone versus Android, kind of like holy wars, like people really identify with what phone they carried at that time, you know. And so the that Androidify really became like people were proud Android users. And and so that profile picture thing really took off. And and the numbers on that app went crazy, really. That was a big hit for Google, even though not financially or anything, but just as a marketing hit, it was. And And so, yeah, that it stuck with us to to think about that profile picture. And yeah, and whenever we thought about stuff we were making, we just kind of knew it's like, we're never going to be the great marketer, but could we make something that just has that? Where people end up kind of doing the marketing for us, you know? Do they kind of push it? And then this has been the most extreme version of that, where every next collector

• 30:34Speaker 01

  becomes becomes a big marketer of it, you know? Like, they love to talk about it. They love to make it the profile picture, you know? And so it that's part of this idea that having moved beyond us.

• 30:45Speaker 02

  You didn't hear about this from us, you know? Somebody else told you, you have to get a crypto box. Like, that's how this works. That's why people ask us like, what's what's this or what's that? And we're like, I don't know, like, this thing like is doing its own thing now. Like, they don't, nobody asks me, nobody tells me.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  I feel like sometimes we're the last to hear about things.

• 31:01Speaker 02

  For sure. Yeah. So we definitely underestimated the extent to which that was going to happen. We've kind of hoped like, oh, if you like it, you'll put it as your profile picture. We didn't, you know, I like this one rather than like, I am this one. I didn't expect that to happen necessarily.

• 31:14Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. So so one of the the kind of great experimental things was make the affordance so that it can become a profile picture, can be deployed and used this way. And and and maybe that will become part of people's story.

• 31:32Speaker 00

  So you've now launched other things, too, you know, me bits, etc. What are some of the principles that you've been learning of like, how do I? How do I launch these things in interesting ways now? So profile picture is one. There's probably stuff in digital identity. There's probably stuff in community participation. But like, what are some of the kind of guideposts of like, hey, we think about this when we're creating new projects, new art?

• 31:55Speaker 01

  I think each project was sort of like a response to something we had learned or a question we had been posed. So Autoglyphs is more, you know, a pure kind of art project, but it was related to the the feedback and pushback we got for the punks that were like, where's where are these images?

• 32:13Speaker 02

  How, you know, how were they generated? And we're like, oh yeah, that's actually not fully visible as part of the process. So can we make that fully visible and part of the process? So that was Autoglyphs. And I think that we sort of have alternated a little bit between like an identity sort of interactive thing and then more of like an art side thing.

• 32:33Speaker 01

  Tech exploration, kind of almost, yeah.

• 32:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, and we have the advantage now that like people care when we launch something. Like Punks was like, we had done, I don't know how many things, 40, 50 things. And you really don't, you know, there's a thing, like, one thing, do something good and like people like it. And there's another thing to do something you thought was good and no one even cares. They don't even not like it. They just don't even respond at all. So we really like, learned the hard way, like how to just build something in so that people reacted to it at least, you know? So we don't have to do that as much anymore. We get a little more freedom.

• 33:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, to make a subtler case, yeah. But yeah, I think, yeah, like Matt said, Autoglyphs was all about can the entire artwork be created on-chain in its entirety? So the entire process is visible and permanently on the chain. MeBits was moving into 3D space and there was a lot of metaverse talk. I still think there's something there of like 3D digital identity is still really cool and interesting. So that was the focus on that. And I think anything we do, Quine was about the self-referential, the program is in the art. And I think that we always still want there to be a tech challenge there too. We don't just want to just kind of put out content, kind of, you know what I mean? We want there to be something new, some twist, some, because we just love that stuff too, you know?

• 33:48Speaker 01

  We are nerds, you know? And we like tech challenges, we like to push ourselves. I feel like that's where our creativity comes from, is pushing up against a challenge. And so, so we always try to build that in. And I think we're still kind of not marketers, where we just like, we just follow our nose and we don't think a ton about like product market fit. It's mostly just sort of like. Does this, do we vibe with this? You know, does this feel right? Then let's, let's do it, you know?

• 34:14Speaker 00

  So what's the project? And this may be a question for each of you, but what's the project? And it probably is reaching back into those first 40 or 50 that you guys went, I love this one. And it didn't get that much attention. And it's probably more pre punks than post punks. But I'm just curious, like, what, what's the one that was like, ah, it was creative? Like, like.

• 34:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. And we didn't, it's funny because like we did, you know, things that were so impractical that they were probably best understood as art, you know? Like ideas that were like, yeah, this is really funny and weird, but like, why? You know? But we had it like, we started on mobile really early, like on the Sidekick and with Danger, which was like.

• 34:57Speaker 00

  Some people listening to this probably remember what a Sidekick is.

• 34:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Probably the same guy who remembers Java remembers the T-Mobile Sidekick.

• 35:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. And that was working, you know, they had an app store and everything in like 2005 and six. So that's how we went independent, actually, was like selling apps. And so we wrote a ton for them, had such a great experience with them and then did that with Android. So some of our early Android apps, we were obsessed with trying to make a, a new type of home screen that wasn't icons. We tried this several times, a couple of those, I think were really good. But we just couldn't quite get it over the hump, you know?

• 35:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 35:33Speaker 02

  So a few of those kinds of things. We've written some games.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, because the whole time we were like, why? We have all these new, we have the completely new platform and yet it's still kind of like Windows, you know, or macOS where it's like, click on the icon, you know? And we just wanted to like overcome that somehow. But I guess it was just so ingrained, people, yeah. So we had some faithful users on this totally kind of more like information notifications and just everything was just information driven and as opposed to app driven. And we thought that was really cool and there was something there. But yeah, maybe just the entrenched. Sort of way of interacting with tech was just too was just too strong there.

• 36:09Speaker 02

  A good example of a sheer insanity app was back when Android had no like very loose permissions. You could just do anything you wanted. We wrote a thing called App Chat, which was a chat room for every app on your phone. And so you could talk to other people using Calculator right now or whatever. And people and it was just like, people would be like, anybody got any good contacts out there? They'd just be like sending the weirdest.

• 36:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, but for some it was it was kind of exactly like some games. People would just be talking about the game, you know, and sharing ideas. But yeah, then people would be on Calculator and it's like, what words can you spell with an upside down calculator? You know, and every app had its own little culture, you know? Because you were just in the you could just basically it was almost like you could just open up the chat. Because you could overlay stuff. Android had no security early on. You could just overlay stuff right on top of other apps. So we did whatever app you're in, you could just kind of swipe from the corner. And you were now chatting with other users of that app. And it was completely wild. I was unhinged what was going on, but I didn't dare go into like the Tinder chat. I did not want to know what was going on there. But there were but there was lots of messages in that one.

• 37:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was like, we were trying to do a thing then where we were like, I don't want to do the pitching and raise money for startup. We had done that once and it was a fine experience, but we were like, let's just do weird stuff. And if one of them happens to become big. So this one, it's an insane idea, but then it was like, oh, maybe this could be like support for developers, for people using the thing. We tried to turn it into that a little bit, didn't quite work. But so, yeah, but that was the model we were operating under was like, make anything that anyone would care about. And just see if it was anything more than that, you know?

• 37:44Speaker 00

  One of the interesting things, which I'm sure you guys have kind of reflected on, is that in Web three, there's kind of a tension between, you know, code is law, you know, like a natural gravity and social consensus. Right? And kind of and how it plays in a community dynamics. Is there anything that you guys have? Thought about like what this tension is, what it gives this kind of artistic possibility, some of the kind of work you're doing like, because it's one of the things that it's kind of magical, but these human systems is that they're yin and yang together.

• 38:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that is a real tension, right? And we've seen the Coda's law kind of break down a few times, you know, with the Ethereum DAO with the first CryptoPunks launch contract. You know, we, you know, we said we're relaunching it because there was a problem, but it's that's still the community can decide what to do, you know? And so that that tension does exist. And so we love the Coda's law. And like I said, we think it is just such a great kind of artistic tool, you know, this digital permanence that you get from it is so great. So we love that. But yeah, there is also this interesting thing where the community does sort of make it happen and keep it going, you know, even just, you know, why are we

• 39:04Speaker 01

  confident that CryptoPunks will still exist in 10 years and 50 years and 100 years? Because the Ethereum community will keep going. They could just stop tomorrow, but there's all these reasons, including CryptoPunks, that it won't, you know? And so, yeah, so I'm not sure if we have any sort of specific things there, but we acknowledge that tension and it's interesting and definitely fundamental to all of this, yeah.

• 39:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I think, yeah, the tension between like the laws of the country it operates in and the Coda's law, which is almost more, it is convention, it's mechanical convention. But I sort of think of these things as like consensus machines, you know, like, and that's what, you know, that's the miracle of digital currency being worth something. And that's why the CryptoPunks are what they are, is there's like mechanism for you to have to achieve consensus around things and how they work. And sometimes people like defect from that system and go to like, you know, a court of law and decide like, I'm not playing by these rules anymore. But for the most part, that doesn't happen. So, so in a way it is pretty interesting and consistent, I think.

• 40:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, this may be very getting away from your question a little bit, but we were kind of surprised that the maybe the actual kind of Ethereum, the core Ethereum community, like the Ethereum devs, the founders, were quite slow to come around to NFT, CryptoPunks, all this stuff. And we never understood that because we were sort of thinking it's like you've made this system, this huge global system. But you can't be sure, you know, you don't know what's going to happen to it. You don't know if it'll eventually maybe threaten governments where they might make it illegal. There's been a bit of that. And it's like, but now this is culture. You have culture in this system. Like, that is extremely important. You can now make a case that it's not just money. It's not just transaction. It's not just a tool that drug dealers could use. You know, it's like, no, there's culture here.

• 40:46Speaker 01

  And so I think they've come around to that maybe just in the last year or two even. I feel like we felt more warmth overall from

• 40:54Speaker 01

  from the, you know, yeah, maybe like the hardcore kind of Ethereum dev community or something. But, um, but we think that's really important that it's like there's culture on this now. And that's, that's, that might end up being the biggest reason for it to continue. When you expand the time horizon out to decades or even centuries.

• 41:14Speaker 02

  It reminds me of a story we had. We talked to a museum who was acquiring a CryptoPunk and they're like, well, can we have the right? If Ethereum were to stop operating, can we have the right to re-mint this on another chain? We're like, no. And they're like, well, what do we do if Ethereum stopped operating? Like you, you can run a node and maybe

• 41:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, another museum can run another node.

• 41:32Speaker 02

  Maybe Ethereum just becomes a bunch of museums running Ethereum for the art. You know, that's possible. You can do that, you know, which is an interesting kind of way in which it could persist.

• 41:41Speaker 00

  In what ways do you look at CryptoPunks as finished art project? And which way do you look at them as a evolving art project?

• 41:48Speaker 02

  I think an interesting combination of the two. And depending on how much, what, how you came to it. If you think of it as visual, it's complete. It will never change visually, but we don't think of it as just that. We think of it as an interactive thing. And every transaction that occurs behind us on these screens is adding to the story is like those transactions are stored in that original contract alongside everything else. So really that's, that's the most interesting thing about it in a way, you know, is what's happening with it now and in the future and in the past, so.

• 42:18Speaker 00

  Rapid fire questions. It's questions we ask every guest. You can answer it any length you like, but it just kind of gets a fun through line. It's not quite artistic, but it's a fun through line through all the conversation. So is there a book, movie or idea that gives you optimism about the future?

• 42:34Speaker 02

  For me, it's, I don't know if it's any particular book or anything, but it's, I think renewable energy, which feel like, cause I was, you know, pretty bummed out about climate change for a long period of time. And now I can see. You know, I've got, well, we got people that just want to make money working on climate change effectively and at a scale that is on essentially unbelievable, especially for potentially people in our country. So I find that really inspiring and just the idea that, you know, energy might be so available ubiquitous and, you know, relatively harm free that I can't even imagine what that will be like. So that's optimistic in a way.

• 43:08Speaker 00

  I've made fusion investments exactly. Oh, okay.

• 43:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're definitely clean energy nerds. So yeah.

• 43:14Speaker 00

  What's a question about crypto or AI you wish people would ask more often?

• 43:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, something with crypto punks, it is about kind of the decentralized thing. You know, I feel like so many people just always maybe just focus on, on the art or even maybe just the community, but just like, and then part of this show is about like, this is how it works and that that's so fundamental to it, you know, once you kind of get that feeling of how it all works then. And so that, yeah, and I feel like crypto, because there's so much financial stuff going on and drama, it kind of always gets pulled away from the centralized. It's like, oh, this new stablecoin started up and everything. It's like, who cares? The fundamental thing is the decentralization and we're always preaching that, you know, we're sort of old school, I guess, or something in that way.

• 43:59Speaker 00

  Or original.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, original. Yeah.

• 44:02Speaker 02

  I think for me, on the AI side is a little more of like focus on what we can do with what we've got now. There's a lot of like, it's going to be AGI or it's or this thing sucks and it's using all our water, whatever. But there's so much amazing that you can do that's amazing about this right now that, you know, that is going to change so many.

• 44:20Speaker 01

  Good and bad, right? So rather than radical abundance, like let's just talk practically and rationally about, yeah, what it is, what it can do, good and bad, you know, instead of almost like, it almost feels like waving sort of this pie in the sky stuff in everyone's face rather than, you know, speaking kind of honestly about it.

• 44:39Speaker 00

  I think you may have already answered this question because renewable energy, but I'm going to ask it anyway. Where do you see real progressing progress happening outside your industry?

• 44:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is. It is odd in that we're in a time that does feel to me like the future now. You know, like, whoa, that's great. Like,

• 44:56Speaker 01

  A Waymo goes by.

• 44:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, we've seen Waymos driving around and we know about Waymos, but then there's like, there's nobody driving that thing like it had that visceral, visceral reaction to it. I mean, I think, um, yeah, we had that feeling, I think, first with smartphones when they rapidly progressed and we were like this, knowing where you are in the world at all times and knowing everything about everything, that's incredible. But now we're in another level of all that, you know? So, uh, I don't know.

• 45:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. I think maybe the other renewable energy.

• 45:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:24Speaker 00

  If everything breaks humanity's way over the next 15 years, what's the first or next step for getting there?

• 45:32Speaker 01

  Fix like fix how we communicate with each other, maybe, you know what I mean? Like, that's pretty bad right now. That's pretty horrific.

• 45:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, just maybe everyone start thinking more locally and, and building up from there rather than getting pulled around by the big, you know, global picture that's just so easily accessed and commented on and everything. I feel like that's kind of what we've tried to do when we think of things like philanthropy and everything. It's like, I think you kind of have to start in your own backyard a little bit or else it's just too intractable or something. So, so, yeah.

• 46:07Speaker 02

  That'd be nice to, like, we, you know, grew up basically in the era of like techno optimism, like the internet's going to change society in all these positive ways. And there's sort of like a darkness to it now that feels like, you know, surprising in a way and would be nice to find a way out of that, I think, back to sort of what we were hoping for a bit more in the web.

• 46:27Speaker 00

  Bring some light back.

• 46:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:28Speaker 00

  To the web.

• 46:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:29Speaker 00

  Matt and John, it's been awesome. I look forward to our future conversations.

• 46:33Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 46:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks so much.

• 46:35Speaker 00

  Possible is produced by Palette Media. It's hosted by Ari Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Sean Young. Possible is produced by Tenasi Delos, Katie Sanders, Spencer Strasmore, Imo Zoo, Trent Barboza, and Tefadzwa Nirmundwe.

• 46:50Speaker 03

  Special thanks to Surya, Yala Monchili, Sayida Sapieva, Ian Alice, Greg Beato, Parth Patel, and Ben Ralas.

• 46:58Speaker 00

  A big thanks to the punks community, Sean Bonner, Natalie Stone, Becky Kleiner, the Node Foundation, and its team.