Intrepid - Artist

Imagine trekking through the high altitudes of Nepal, with only your camera and a few Sherpa guides for company. This was the reality for our guest Robert Downie, a world-class adventure travel photographer, whose tales of such expeditions are as thrilling as they are inspiring. Robert, also known as Intrepid, has seen and captured the world through his lens, and in this episode, he brings the journey to us. From shooting film in the most challenging environments to the intricacies of the burgeoning NFT space, Intrepid's experiences are a captivating blend of the past and the future.

What does the sea have in common with a hardware wallet? Both embody a sense of freedom that is intriguing and exhilarating. As we navigate through the world of NFTs with Robert, we also get a taste of his love for travel and the sea, and the lessons they have taught him. We discuss the significance of hardware and provenance wallets, the need for web 3 education, and the transient startup culture that characterizes the NFT space. We also uncover the power of reverse search engines in establishing the providence of photos, making us appreciate the wonders of technology and the endless possibilities it brings to the world of art.

Transitioning into the digital art space can be daunting, but Robert's advice to focus on honing your craft and building relationships is a beacon of hope for many artists. We delve into the concept of decentralized curation and its potential in creating a unique historical record of artists and their work. The conversation wraps up with Robert’s views on the importance of storytelling and emotion in art and the power of a positive mindset in achieving success. This episode is not just a conversation; it's a journey through the lens of a world-renowned photographer, and a voyage into the future of the digital art space.

Transcript

NorCal Guy: 0:31

Hey everyone, welcome to this next episode of Noor, cal and Shill. Today we have Intrepid, also known as Robert Downey. He is a world-class adventure travel photographer. He has received millions of photo views across social media and published by high-quality publication houses including National Geographic and Lonely Planet, and exhibited in galleries around the world. In this episode with Intrepid, get ready to dive deep into his journey as an artist, his experiences on high-altitude expeditions dealing with film assignments and his valuable lessons learned in the ever-changing world of NFTs. Join us on this exploration of art, technology and personal growth. Everybody, please welcome Intrepid. Do you use a hardware wallet? Do you have a hardware wallet?

Intrepid: 1:28

I do have a hardware wallet. I'm a big fan of hardware wallets. I've watched, sadly, quite a few people get hacked that I've known and quite a few photographers get or artists get hacked as well, and even if they haven't lost a lot financially, they've lost their minting wallet. Which is, I think, even more important for artists is people. There's a lot of focus, like I'm a big fan of the 6529 memes ecosystem and they've got this TAP protocol, the Three Kingdom protocol that 6529 has been promoting for having a minting wallet, a transaction wallet and a vault wallet and trying to popularize that as a concept. But I think for an artist, you actually need a fourth wallet and that's your provenance wallet, because provenance is everything and if you've sold work like I've got quite a big collector base now and if my wallet was hacked, then essentially those collectors, their assets, have a provenance that's traced back to a wallet that's no longer under my control. So I think your brand is protecting your brand through that. Provenance wallet is really important for artists and a lot of artists come to the space not really being crypto savvy, more so than a collector who might have had experience with crypto and developed some wealth through crypto, and now they're looking to diversify into art.

Intrepid: 2:56

A lot of artists come to the space.

Intrepid: 2:58

They might download the Metamask extension, click Mint and Mint a few things and then, before you know it, your provenance is on this really flippant software wallet, probably with passwords that you put it that were easy to remember.

Intrepid: 3:14

You probably cut and paste your seed phrase into a Word document or something. And I think it's really important and people don't really understand as well, that you can set up a ledger using a historical seed phrase and even though it was once hot, you can kind of make it semi-cold, in the sense that you can transition your hot wallet to a cold wallet, and it won't solve any legacy hacks. So if you've had compromises to the legacy, it won't solve, but it will at least protect it going forward from future hacks. So I recommend that anyone does that. If they're still minting their art or a hot wallet, it's just get a ledger it's only $80, and put the seed phrase into the ledger and actually transition it across and then just wipe all of your browser history and wipe the Metamask extension, et cetera, because it's certainly eventually it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when.

Intrepid: 4:13

I think with hacking, once you're, as soon as you're successful, you become a target, and then there's just so many people out there there's millions of people out there so that someone is going to try and hack you if you've got something of value that's easily obtainable.

NorCal Guy: 4:28

Right. Yeah, it's definitely one thing that a lot of people didn't think about was the protecting, that minting address via a hardware wallet, and then everyone started off with just the Metamask, which is unfortunate that that was not something that was thought of or utilized or educated about. But yeah, I agree.

Intrepid: 4:57

Yeah, I think that's something. There's a big opportunity, I think, for Web3 education. I've got a technical background, though, and it's even in this people with technical backgrounds. It's just such a complicated minefield Web3, people are saying, well, what do we need before we're onboarding the masses? And it's like, well, it's hard enough onboarding the engineers at the moment. We need to simplify the whole wallet architecture for the majority before anyone is coming close to the space.

Intrepid: 5:29

I think, yeah, it's not a bad thing, because these early stages where you have these peer-to-peer relationships and you can talk to people, they don't last. It's a bit like Facebook in 2005 or something. That early phase. It's really transient and people will look back, I think even on this bear market, as something that with fond memories, because it's such a small, accessible space. At the moment, you can talk to anyone, and there's not many industries like that, right. So it's just that kind of startup culture where everyone's in it together and everyone's happy to help each other, and I think that's all the grifters aside. It's a nice feeling at the moment, and I think there's a lot less noise than there was in late 2021, when everyone was just minting random stuff and trying to sell it quickly and then just staring into the sunset.

NorCal Guy: 6:27

Yeah, it's definitely been a nice space so far, especially right now. People are here for the right reasons and it's nice that everyone is so helpful and willing to help and reach out and answer questions. It's been really nice. What were your first thoughts when you heard about NFTs, this on-chain digital art?

Intrepid: 6:57

Yeah, so I guess I came from a slightly different angle in that I was blogging on-chain on Steam, which is, you know, steam was started by Darren Larmor, who then went on to study us. So I was attaching imagery and text to a chain since 2017, and I guess each blog post retrospectively. We didn't call it then, but each blog post was almost like an NFT. Well, they couldn't monetize them, but essentially you created a post on-chain and I guess I first started looking at NFTs as something that might be relevant to me in my work in 2020. And I had a look at SuperAir and it was a pretty close shot.

Intrepid: 7:45

Back then there was a lot of anger against photographers, so I basically spent six months in late 2020 begging to try and get onto a platform I couldn't open C. At that time there was no kind of ability to promote your work, so I didn't see a lot of points. I actually minted an NFT onto Hive, but there was no collector base on Hive, so that was kind of end up burning that, and so I had a reasonable following on Instagram. I had 50,000 people at the time and so I just went on DM mission on Instagram, just basically spamming anyone that was going through the foundation, going through artists that was on foundation, looking at their Instagram link and then sending them a DM saying, hey, do you have any invites for a foundation? But there was basically that they didn't want at that point, didn't want photographers on the platform. This is the other artists and kind of the community and eventually I found someone, nomadic Frame, who wanted to. He gave me an invite and it took me until May 2021, before I got onto foundation and minted some work and then sold it within a couple of weeks and I was like wow, but it was. Yeah, it was hard, and I think that's people look back at those days and things. Oh, if only I was there in 2020, but I was there in 2020, it was pretty hard not to crack. And so for me there's.

Intrepid: 9:22

My first thoughts about NFTs are basically that it was kind of like an epiphany that this solves this provenance problem that we've had for a long time. So I'm in my early 40s now, so I've been a photographer for 25 years, and when I started back in the late 90s I was just a teenager going to finish school and thought I'm going to travel the world, become a documentary photographer, and back then there were magazines. I grew up reading Nat Geo and Nine Magazine and Life Magazine and that was kind of my idols were all these Nat Geo photographers from the 80s and the 70s, and so I basically got a camera and went traveling and shooting slide film and back then you used to be able to get assignment work, no-transcript, and you would go with, you know, and in late teens or early 20s you didn't need a lot of money, you had no dependence. So basically we'd just go and live like a vagabond and then do this assignment and you'd come back and my wife and I, for example, in 2004, it was 24, then I did a.

Intrepid: 10:44

We did a high altitude assignment in Nepal, in Himalaya, and I used to do a lot of rock climbing and ran was a secretary of a university rock climbing club, and so we did this assignment for a trekking alpine company called Eco Trek and you know they paid a down payment for you know, I think I had 900 slides, so it was about 25 rolls of film and we had for five weeks. We had two Sherpas and my wife to be and I went, so it was only the four of us on the expedition. So we basically they'd like, okay, you've got a month, where do you want to go? And we basically drop a plan. You know we want to get out to these base camps and do these high passes and try and get some angles of various different mountains, and so you know.

Intrepid: 11:35

but it was a different time. So you imagine, like now with the proliferation of digital, and you take a photo and you instantly get that feedback. You know we did this and back then you know digital cameras are maybe two or three megapixels.

NorCal Guy: 11:50

Yeah.

Intrepid: 11:50

And the batteries would last for like 20 minutes and you couldn't. There was no way to charge them while you're in the Himalayas with no power. So you know, digital wasn't an option. Even they had issues with high altitude with some of the digital cameras and the hard drives that they were using for backup photos. The density of the air was such that the little wand on the hard drive would often sometimes delaminate. And so you know we're shooting film and you got no feedback for the whole five weeks you're shooting and you know we didn't shower for 30 days, like we were basically spent a month over 3,000 meters, spent a couple of weeks at over 5,000 meters, which I'm not sure if you've ever, you know well over 15,000 feet for For the North Americans, but it's, you know, that altitude like even sleeping. You feel like you're walking and then when you're walking you feel like you're running and I lost, you know, over 20% of my body weight In that month. You know we were pretty thin when we got back and I used to shoot a lot of Kodakrime because I had kind of idolized that 1970s. You know, my dad had this back catalog of Nat Geo and I hadn't idolized that 1970s. Look from Nat Geo, which was kind of that warm kind of Kodakrime, grainy Kodakrime, look and so.

Intrepid: 13:14

But at that point they were phasing out Kodakrime and so the only place to develop it in the world was in Switzerland. So you'd get home, you'd five weeks later, you'd then have to send your film to Switzerland. You'd process it, you'd then send it back to Australia. Then it would have basically the slides. I would then scan the slides on one of those little loops that you know, put it up to your eye and look at the slides. I would then get the shortlist, would send the shortlist off to a drum scanner, which is like this big scanner that they used to then scan. You'd get 30 to 40 megapixel scan from Kodakrime 25. And this is why it was hard to transition to digital when you're getting a 30 megapixel scan from a slide and they're saying get these new digital cameras, and it's only three to four megapixels. But the whole process could take two to three months by the time you finish the assignment, got the slides, got scanned and then basically after two or three months you would then submit your work to the magazine or the company that had put you on assignment. So the feedback loop was quite slow, but what we did have back then was providence, because you could walk into the magazine office with your slide and say, check this out, and they would put the slide up to their eye in the little loop and basically say you know, that's amazing. And they would know it was yours because you're holding the slide Right. Right, there was a physical providence to it.

Intrepid: 14:37

And then, of course, that 2004, that era basically in the next few years, you had Facebook come through, you had basically the start of Web 2 and that transition to Web 2. And with the transition, basically by 2006, anything you put online within a few weeks was just stolen and then everyone was just basically posting as their own, right, yeah. And then you had trouble even proving it was yours, right? Because people are like, oh yeah, but I've already seen that this was posted by this other account. And then, basically, how do you prove it's even yours? And so we went through that really ugly watermarking phase where people are looking, you know, let's put this ugly watermark right across the photo, that so that everyone knows it's mine, but then no one wants to look at it, right? So you had this.

Intrepid: 15:23

You know you could keep your providence by destroying the image, and so it was a challenging time and I guess you know, one of the things that really clicked for me with NFTs is that, like this gives me that providence back. You know, it was something that I felt like I had and then I lost, yeah, and I finally I could get it back. So you know people could steal it. It's like the whole concept of CCO as well. You know, like people can steal it, but you've always got that providence. Everyone knows that it was originally yours, right, and so as long as that that credit flows back, it doesn't matter how much it's copied or you know who uses it, because ultimately people can put it into a reverse search engine and look at the hash and say, okay, the first time this was ever put on chain was by this, this account, and there's no debate then. So that was really, you know, powerful for me and what one of the key reasons I was really keen to get into web.

NorCal Guy: 16:21

Web three Right, that's so interesting to think about. I never really thought about all those that different, those different aspects. Like I took some photography classes in like 2002, black and white, and it was all film, you know, like, like you said, like digital cameras weren't really more than toys and just the thing. And then I like got out of it and then touched another camera, tell like 2022. And it's just interesting to hear your, your description of all that and I just missed all of that thinking about it.

Intrepid: 17:01

Yeah, and I think it actually like I think photographers from that period have a different way of composition to, because it, you know, the feedback loop was much slower. So I think now you see photographers and you know six months later they've they've honed their craft and that that might have taken six years previously Because the feedback loop is so hyper rapid, like you take a shot, you get to review it, you can then edit it, then you put on social media and you get all this feedback like within a week. You feel like, okay, that shot worked or that shot didn't Right, whereas the cycle back then you know there was no, there was no in camera feedback and then by the you had to take notes basically, Okay, this shot was ISO on this film. You know it was taken under these conditions so that by the time you got it back you could actually remember what the settings were that you took it. Otherwise, you know you had no memory of how to, how to replicate what you did Right. But I feel like, because the cost aspect as well and this is why these assignments were so critical, because you know it was almost I think it was about 50 cents to per slide, like for the film, okay. And then it used to cost about $1 to process the slide and then it was almost another 50 cents to get a drum scan, wow. And so it was $2, you know, probably $3 Australian to to get per shot. So every time you push that shutter, you know, and this is 2004,. You know 2002 prices, so probably five bucks a shot now Every time you push the shutter.

Intrepid: 18:35

And it made you basically premeditate every composition. And on an assignment like that, like if you have got five weeks and only 25 rolls of film, you're like, okay, is this one of the top 20 experiences I'm going to have today? Because if you blow all your shots too early and then you know something amazing happens you've got nothing left right Because you're hiking and you've got no shot. So it made you think about composition almost obsessively and you know, is this the right composition? Is this worth the click? And I think now there's a tendency, you know just, to massively click. You know just, it's like a sniper versus, you know, someone with a shotgun, right, it's like the buckshot approach. Now you just take every shot from every angle and then you craft the shot in Photoshop retrospectively after going through the. You know the back catalog, but it's, it's a different way of developing. I mean, there's no right or wrong, it's a wouldn't I wouldn't go back and I'm not shooting slide film now, obviously it's.

Intrepid: 19:37

You know, I do like the feel of slides and I miss the social aspect. Like used to come back on an assignment and you could run like I used to run Exhibitions and you'd run a physical exhibition of the work. You'd try and chase print media for it, so you talk to journalists and try and get some of your shots in the paper and get some print media for the exhibition. And then you'd have a slide night right, which is just like a party where everyone would be drinking and you put the slides up on.

Intrepid: 20:03

You know it was like being on a billboard right, because there's old slide projectors and you could kind of relive, you know, as a dark room with the slides and it was. There was a social aspect to that. That's kind of been lost Right now. I guess we've got the online side of it, but it was a really in real life and people didn't have that saturation of imagery they have now on social. So they would come out to the slide night to see these places that they couldn't get to. But yeah, different times yeah that is for sure.

NorCal Guy: 20:36

It's crazy to hear about and think about it like that. Oh man, so transitioning a little bit, if you were an animal, what would you be and why?

Intrepid: 20:51

Yeah, so I like this question. I think I'd have to say you know I was thinking about it because you always ask this question, but it's initially I was thinking an eagle, you know, because they just look so majestic and flying around. But you know they do see the Eagles, particularly up in Northern Canada, like and they have a pretty harsh go of the winter. So I don't know about that. So I think a dolphin.

Intrepid: 21:19

You know, we spent a lot of time sailing, obviously, and when you're sailing along, you know the dolphins have just come up to your bow and they just surf that bow wave for just hours and hours, just like playing and frolicking, and it just looks so free.

Intrepid: 21:34

You know it's like almost human intelligence but with no human responsibilities, and you know they just having so much fun and obviously you know, in that period of our lives it was a pretty crazy time obviously with all of what we explained earlier. But there's just something so peaceful about them when they're surfing and doing, you know, just enjoying themselves. I think you know they're one of the few creatures other than humans that actually take leisure time like you see them, and I like surfing and you know you be out paddling into the wave and the dolphins will just be there with you surfing and they're just doing exactly what you're doing. They're just trying to get a little bit of a little bit of a stoke into their lives, catching the wave, and but then they don't have to worry about building a house and, you know, feeding the kids and all that kind of stuff that you, the humans, have to worry about.

NorCal Guy: 22:27

Right, no, I like that one. It's a good choice. Do you have a favorite food?

Intrepid: 22:36

I do. This is a tough one also. I mean, I travel a lot. I've shot in 50 countries, I've lived in four countries long term, so I love food. One of the things I love about Australia is how good the food is here and how multicultural food is. Like any kind of immigration country has great food because you basically take people from all around the world and you've intermeshed it into a single society but you bring kind of the best food and.

Intrepid: 23:06

But I think if I had to choose like I I love sushi, so I love Japanese food, but I'm not sure I could eat it. Like if you said to me, if you had to eat one food for the rest of your life every day, I'm not sure I could say sushi. I think there's times in my life like if you're hungover, you don't want to be eating sushi. I love Italian food, thai food, I love Mexican food, but if I had to eat it every day, I'd probably go with Italian food. I think that you know as a, yeah, I don't know, it's a hard question. Yeah, being either Italian or Italian or Mexican, I think yeah.

NorCal Guy: 23:50

It's a good choice. I mean, you can't go wrong with those with pastas. There's endless amount of pastas, sauces. I don't know if you would throw pizza in without maybe.

Intrepid: 24:01

That's right, like, if, if, if, like, if you said to me you had to eat just the one food, you know I just get a cabin in the mountains, drink red wine and the Italian food. That'd be like the food retirement, you know you can no longer eat any Great Any other food, whereas I feel, like you know, like Mexican and Thai food are amazing, but whether I could just eat it every day for the rest of my life I'm not not sure. And then, of course, you know, obviously, for desserts. You know it's interesting, the cultures that make amazing main courses tend to make Bland desserts and vice versa, I think.

Intrepid: 24:36

So you know, a lot of Central European, western European countries make amazing desserts and often the main course is pretty bland but the dessert, like they live for the dessert, right, so it's. I think that's an interesting little observation, but it's. You know, if you have hot, spicy food, you know amazing main courses, then typically the dessert is kind of secondary to the experience, where you know if you, if you we're in Belgium or you know something like that, like you're living for the dessert, right, like you're just getting through the main, so you, can get to the dessert, for sure.

NorCal Guy: 25:12

Do you have a piece of advice that you live by, like a mantra, or just something that keeps on coming back, that you keep coming to?

Intrepid: 25:24

I've got. Yeah, I guess there's a few things I love, the it's too long to say on a podcast, but there's a there's a quote by Sterling Hayden in a book called the Wanderer about Basically going off adventuring, and you know it says that if you have a means to do it, you know, abandon the venture until you don't have the means and then go without the means. And I think it's an interesting concept, because people often delay things until they have the money. And you know, what we don't realize is that we actually you know, the majority of us have more money than most of human history, that people had money right and people used to go off adventuring or traveling with nothing and kind of figure it out along the way. Now we have this kind of concept where you actually have to have created some kind of store of wealth that you then then can kind of draw down on while you're traveling with a kind of zero risk way, and so I think that's that's something that I've tried to. You know, you only have one life. You've got to actually get out there and do it, and if you wait until you have like this perceived amount of money, then you basically you'll either never get there or you'll be too old to actually to do it by the time you do get there. And I think, particularly now with the internet and the ability to work remotely, and you know there's a lot of. You know, I think we saw that with the sailing and it's interesting. Like the French, you know, all of the French sailors would be like families in their 30s and 40s and they're just sailing around the world. It's like almost like a French Odyssey, they would. There's a saying you can sail the world and never leave France because they, you know Napoleon never gave up the territories, right, they just converted them to, converted them to. There's only one Frenchman essentially. So you know, when you're in Martinique, you're actually in France. You know, if you're in Reunion Island off Africa, you're in France.

Intrepid: 27:32

And whereas the British kind of gave independence, which is a, you know, a kind word for abandonment for a lot of these places, in the sense that you know they, after World War II and the Geneva Convention, they basically said you have to have one class of citizenship, you can't have these second class citizens like. So, either give independence or give full citizenship. And so you know, the French went down the full citizenship route and the British went down the okay. Well, we can't make everyone British, because that would make a quarter of the world British. So we'll basically give independence to a lot of places and obviously for larger countries it's something that they desired. But for these small countries like Grenada, where you have 50,000 people, it's hard to run a little country with 50,000 people. So, you know, independence may not seem, as you know, seductive as a word for a large country which has its own, you know, ability to generate enough revenue.

Intrepid: 28:30

But you know, I think in terms of advice, you know that's more of a kind of a philosophy I've tried to live at in terms of you know there's no perfect time. You know you can't wait for the perfect time, you just have to go. But in terms of you know, specific advice, you know there's a my wife is telling me, you know the kids are always trying to roll me up. Or you know people I think it applies into this space like people often criticize. You know there's a lot of criticism in Web 3 because everything is transparent, right. So you post something out there, you get a full spectrum of opinions and something my wife always says.

Intrepid: 29:13

Basically, you know it's a conscious choice to get agitated by other people's judgments or by their criticism. You know, often, you know, you kind of get enraged at something without realizing that's a conscious choice. And there's an old Buddhist saying and it's I can't remember it exactly, but it's something like you know, if someone offers you a gift and you refuse to accept it, who owns that gift? Now, with a physical thing, that's quite obvious. So if I bring you a gift and say, you know, guy, here's this, here's this laptop, or here's this, you know, here's some biscuits, if you know, if you refuse to take it, then it's obviously still mine, right, because you've refused to take it. And we kind of. That seems perfectly logical.

Intrepid: 30:01

But with intangible things we often don't realize that we have that same conscious decision. You know, if someone offers you criticism and you refuse to take it, who owns that criticism? It's not yours to basically take the burden of, it's theirs. You know that's a reflection of their mindset and their opinion, based on their construct of their life that they've lived right, right. And so I think once you, you know, if you can think of it through like that, when you receive that criticism and you know, after 25 years as an artist, you've got pretty thick skin, because if you're not offending people, you're not trying. Hard enough is maybe old saying, but you know, to me that's something that's important because you know you learn from criticism and it helps you Evolve. But if you can't take the criticism Without you know having an emotional response to it, and then you know it can be quite detrimental to your mental health, I think so right. So I don't know, that's two pieces of advice probably, you know, not really answering the question with a single one, but that's good.

NorCal Guy: 31:06

Do you have advice for artists coming to this digital art space? And you kind of went over, you know, having your minting wallet following the three Address protocol, was there anything else you'd like to touch on?

Intrepid: 31:24

Yeah, so I think you know I've thought about this a lot because I've seen a lot of people come and go, but I think you know people Particularly in the boom and I think this is almost like the people coming in the space now have here for the right reasons. But Basically, my advice for an artist is just to focus on your craft and building relationships. I think this is Something that is, you know, timeless. It was the same. If you're in the Renaissance, you know, like it, you focus on your craft, like you need to have the best art that you can produce, and then you have to have relationships with people that might appreciate that art. Right? So, you know, when you boil it down, it's quite simple from that, you know.

Intrepid: 32:07

But what's happened with web three is that Cycle has become like a hypercycle, right? So it seems so fast and it seems like everyone is selling and and then people get almost the desperation for sales when, ultimately, if you focus on making your body of work the best body of work that you can produce, and then just building relationships with people, I think that's that's that's the best advice I could give. You know, sales are byproduct of quality and interpersonal connections. To me like it's. It's not. You know, there's something that comes with the maturity of that right. So people and if people often think it's the other way around, like you just put something up and people click by and it's like it rarely works like that. Like people I find, at least with the type of work that I do like people are buying a Little piece of the story in a lot of my work. So it's like for sure they want to understand the story, they want to understand where you're coming from and the experience and and the emotions behind it. And of course, you know there's some art that's less Emotion driven or less story driven. But humans connect with stories. You know we used to evolve sitting around a campfire telling stories, right, drawing little sketches on the wall, and I think that's what we're doing here on web 3 is we're drawing little sketches in a cave, sitting around a campfire telling stories, but in a, in a metaverse version of it. But that's a fundamental human driver and I think that won't ever go away. You know, you'd bring AI into the equation and it can try, and it can try and you know, replicate those human emotions. But that's the fundamental reason that we like to connect with people and hear the stories and imagine ourselves in that situation and then look at the art and Feel the emotions that come out of that art and connect to it, and I think that that connection takes time.

Intrepid: 33:53

I Guess one thing that I wouldn't do is, you know, yes, I've seen a lot, particularly as the bear got worse and worse, of this kind of Woe is me sympathy tactic. Oh yeah, it's a, it's a. You know, it's a big put off for anyone. Like it's like. Imagine if a sportsman for your national team you know whether that's football or, you know, or whatever, whatever the national sport is in your country like it's.

Intrepid: 34:19

Imagine if you leave sportsmen came out and like, oh yeah, well, we're not feeling it today. And you know my perp, my ankle, and you know these guys, they're all taking steroids and you know They've just been handpicked by the, by a core group of elite people. And you know it's not fair and and it, you know, people want to bet on winners, right? You, you know sportsmen are often over the top, arrogant, and the reason is because that's, you know, at some level, that's what people like.

Intrepid: 34:43

And I think you know artists, you know that we don't have to have that level of arrogance, but it's you have to think you're gonna win Right. Because if you, if you don't have belief in your own ability and your own success, how can you expect others to have that belief? And so I think that tactic, where it's like you know my Twitter reach, is terrible. No one buys my art. You know collectors keep buying the same group of small people, like we all know those things, these are just human nature and but you need to, even if you're inwardly thinking, that you need to outwardly express, you know, a positive we're gonna make it and vibe on your own art. You know, like we're not, we're not all gonna make it in the sense that wag me in terms of, in terms of Everyone in the space is not gonna make it. But if you don't believe you're one of the few that's going to make it, then how do you expect anyone else to?

Intrepid: 35:34

And my experience also is like in you know I've been fortunate to sell, you know, quite a lot of work in the last two and a half years, almost 101 ones, and Most of them, you know, there's probably been three or four short little bursts of activity where the market turns some Driver, whether that's mean coins or you know, just a different driver kind of there's a liquidity flow into the market and Then people that you've been developing relationships with for the last six to twelve months All of a sudden have some liquidity right and a feeling a little bit more confident in their financial position that they can put some of that liquidity into art. And then you get this little burst of Sales that comes from that liquidity flowing in. And I think you know, if you understand financial markets, you kind of understand how that works. But you know a lot of people think that it's gonna be like this. You know, every, every week I'm gonna get one sale, every month I'm gonna get one sale. But it doesn't work like that. You might go five months with no sales and then sell 25 pieces or so, five pieces.

Intrepid: 36:37

Or, because you know people, art is a Luxury item, you know. You know you know if your kids are starving you're not buying out right. So you have to kind of give you think a Maslow's hierarchy of needs. You have to have all the other needs satisfied.

Intrepid: 36:54

And in crypto, because of the hyper pace of the cycles, you know people go from. You know there's that hype cycle graph. You know people go from crazy expectations to absolute depression in the space of six weeks, right, so no one's buying anything. And then six weeks later, people, you know the liquidity might come back temporarily and people might look at buying some art, and so I think that's where, if you just focus on the relationships and then if you're there, if you like to rock in the space, right, and you know, six to twelve months later and people have some disposable income and they're like looking For art to buy there, you know it's the people that they have developed that rapport with, that are still there, still doing their thing, that are going to get those sales right.

Intrepid: 37:35

So I think you know, don't panic in downtime. Hold your value, like don't. You know there's been a lot of Drive. You know drop your prices. You know bring down to zero reserve all of that stuff. I'm not a huge fan of that. I've. I think that comes from having a little bit longer with my own art in terms of 25 years of photography, but you know it doesn't really change the price of my work so much, depending on the market, because I can just wait for the next cycle, and so for me it's kind of just hold your value, develop relationships, be patient and and you know look outwardly like you're confident and that you're a winner. Right, because people like winners.

NorCal Guy: 38:17

So I know you've traveled quite a bit. So if you could live or move anywhere, where would you live in? Why? Or you just? Or? Is the nomad life the life?

Intrepid: 38:30

Yes, I thought about this question a bit because it's a tough one for me. I'm a strange combination of, like a hermit, nomad. So I live on a small ridge in extra wilderness area in Australia. We have a little cabin and you know, it's full drive on the access up to the top of the ridge and it's Can't see any other houses on 40 acres. And so I, like you know, being away from society, that's part of my brain just needs to be in that kind of wilderness zone.

Intrepid: 39:01

And but I love, you know, I love the mountains and I love the ocean. And you know I, you know, bizarre way of kind of drawn to these climatic extremes. So you know, like, it's Typically like I would try and travel around and, you know, get a little bit of each climatic extreme every year. You know like, so I used to do a lot of rock climbing. I'm, you know, nick, my 40s doing that much now. But you know, lived in Canada and Switzerland over the years, and so I, if the ideal place would have to be somewhere near some big alpine mountains, but then I love the ocean, I love surfing, and so trying to think of somewhere that would have both of those things is pretty, pretty difficult. I don't know, maybe Southeast Alaska or something might not tick that box. It's a little bit cold in the water.

Intrepid: 39:56

But you know, we met this family, or it was a couple, that they had a boat in the Caribbean and then a boat in Southeast Alaska and they said, basically sick, they did the winter in the Caribbean and then the summer in Southeast Alaska. It seemed like a pretty amazing, yeah, lifestyle. Yeah, you know. But also, you know, being Australian and I, I love the desert and I love there's something about the outback and the vastness of just of that. You know, going places where there's just a few people, and so I'm drawn to that. So, look, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not sure. I mean, japan is another place that you can basically even the same day go skiing and then scuba diving. Oh yeah yeah, but then there's a few too many people in Japan for my Normal life, even though as much as I love the culture.

NorCal Guy: 40:44

So so, yeah, I don't?

Intrepid: 40:48

I just not even sure I can answer that I I imagine what if I wanted to be living with a boat, even though I live in an island, and and and weird things that.

NorCal Guy: 41:03

Really satisfied with that one, but that they don't really make sense in any way for the world to take a that for the experience itself.

Intrepid: 41:10

So well, yeah, you know, and I, we're childhood, you could learn or master. Like what would it?

NorCal Guy: 41:20

be Whoa man, that's a hard question. That's a really hard question for me, partly because the reason why it took me so long to go through school is because I tried so many different things and I love doing so many different things. So I don't know Like I just enjoy learning so much, like I've done like auto body, auto paint, upholstery, and I was doing art classes, drawing and photography, and I loved it all. And even like woodworking, I enjoy woodworking but and I wish I had more time to do that I wish I had a shop to do that and actually get really good at it. Man, it's hard to pinpoint one thing that I would. And now I also have some photography equipment that I've really enjoyed just taking photos of the family and learning that little aspect. There's so many things that I enjoy to do and learn. It's hard for me to commit to just one.

Intrepid: 42:41

You know I appreciate that Also someone that likes to obsessively, compulsively try and do everything myself Build my own house and run my own businesses and do my own tax and I think it's part of the hermit mentality is that self-reliance. One of the things I have on my bucket list is to actually learn a language. You know most likely Spanish, to a level that fluency you know that you're dreaming in it or you can daydream in it. I think it's a curse being an English speaker in a lot of ways, in that we, everywhere you travel, everyone speaks a little bit of English, so you can kind of get by everywhere with English, and so you tend to find Americans and Australians and Canadians and New Zealanders and British people like this. The amount of second language is very low because you just become lazy, right. But I think you learn. You know your construct of how the world is often determined by the way your language is structured, and that fascinates me in the sense that if you can think in a different language, you can actually think about the same problems in different ways, and I think that's something that you know that English speakers are missing out on. And so, hopefully, my Spanish.

Intrepid: 44:10

Over the last 20 years I've been trying to, you know, learn Spanish here and there, but unless you're living somewhere with that level of fluency you know, I tried to learn German when we were living in Switzerland and because they speak a Swiss dialect of German in the part where you're living, you know it's completely different and it's like it'd be like moving to an outback country town in Australia and trying to understand the slang when you're just trying to learn English. True, so yeah, and I guess, another question this is more of a, I guess, a commercial question for you guys, but I was just wanting to get your opinion on where you think Clickcreate is going in the next five years. Oh, yeah.

NorCal Guy: 44:56

so I mean we wanted to.

NorCal Guy: 44:59

We thought we could do a like a collective or a collecting project that would have a long term staying with using decentralized curation.

NorCal Guy: 45:18

I think a lot of these projects are really interesting and have a lot of potential, but I feel like they're a little too focused maybe, and not that ours is super focused, but you know we have a different curator every month and then having it that month being cohesive with like a theme to that month, we felt it could be something interesting over the long term Having different seasons and being able to go through the seasons and see like okay, especially after like say, a year, and then you can kind of go through and be like okay, I can see the theme here and the theme here and tell that these are different months.

NorCal Guy: 46:08

And we wanted to also highlight and kind of document the artists throughout this project. So it's kind of like a historical record in a sense that also artists can use it to as like a promo video for themselves, but that we're also documenting this and doing a good job at the documentation and having like a little snippet of what who they were at that time. So I guess it's just all the different things coming together and you know after five years it's a lot of interesting content for people to look at and hopefully appreciate and enjoy.

Intrepid: 47:01

That sounds exciting. I think it's. The perennial bugbear in the space is the artist's discovery is something that's been historically broken, and click create know I would throw a noble and even six, like two, nine memes in those kind of projects I think are amazing for artists. Discovery yeah, because there's no easy way to find people and you know Twitter. We're stuck with Twitter, which is like everyone standing in a town square screaming at each other Not the most relaxing place to discover art. I don't think Right. Well, yeah, I wish you the best success with it because it's certainly something that we need.

NorCal Guy: 47:46

Yeah, and that is part of why we wanted a different curator each month, because you know, like you said, we get we do get stuck in these algo bubbles. You know, I don't, and in each month I've learned about a new artist that I hadn't heard about before. And it's all because you know you have a different curator and they bring in. You know different artists Some of you've heard of, some of you have not, and you know it can learn about these new artists and appreciate the art.

Intrepid: 48:26

Yeah, do I have time for one last question? Yeah, yeah, let's do it. So I was wondering what made you start the podcast, like what, when you woke up one day and thought I'm going to start a podcast?

NorCal Guy: 48:41

So I hate long form podcasts where they just kind of go on for like two hours, usually just partly because I, you know, I'm a stay at home dad for the most part and I don't have time to just I don't want it just sitting on in my ear for like two hours while I'm trying to like play with my kid or something.

NorCal Guy: 49:03

I wanted something that was relatively short. So with this podcast I had, like you know, the same set questions I knew would be approximately the same time each time I did it, which was like 30, depending on the guest, like 25 to 40 minutes, and and there are questions that can kind of give you insight on who the person is. So that's why I just kind of went with it and thought it'd be kind of fun and also an interesting way to document the space. You know, at asking everyone the same questions, I guess it could kind of get a little monotonous. But you know, I feel like each podcast is different and you know we it goes off on different tangents, even from these same questions, and so it's just been fun the last two years, now just over two years.

Intrepid: 50:06

Yeah, it's certainly it's good to look back on who's come on the show too, I think, and, as you said, the documentary side of it in terms of I think in 10 years when people look back at the start of start of this space of NFTs, you show it be one of the earliest podcasts about it, I think.

NorCal Guy: 50:25

Yeah, yeah, definitely is one of the earliest ones, I think rug radio, and I don't know how many shows they have recorded, but there are definitely. I remember them starting at the same time and I feel like Roger Dickerman's also was maybe a month ahead of mine, but those are like the three that stand out to me that I remember. But, yeah, do you have any upcoming projects you'd like to talk about or any shout outs?

Intrepid: 51:01

Shout outs. Look, I think obviously my collectors have a big thanks to all my collectors to shout out to them. It gives a lot of meaning to my life to have people that connect with my work. In terms of communities, shout out to the. I'm pretty engaged in the memes community with 6529. I love that community. It's such an eclectic group of people from diverse obviously, with groups, photographers or groups of. There's various different subgroups and a lot of the mindsets can be similar, whereas I think what the memes do is bring everyone from different walks of life together and I think that's a valuable cross fertilization of ideas.

Intrepid: 51:51

The NFT photography community has been pretty amazing to me, so shout out to them. A lot of the MFs have been super supportive of me over the last couple of years and I guess only one specific shout out to these who really helped me when I came to the space two and a half years ago, I think D's, and he had about three or four thousand followers, but he hosted my initial drop spaces for me the Intrepid Falls and Northern Exposure and he just helped me get my feet when I started. So I'll never forget that. You don't want to forget who helped you along the way. And so shout out to D's. It was actually a really good time I finally got to Medium, because when I started I actually started in this space, I was still on the boat and then got back to Australia and Australia kind of remained pretty closed in the sense that flights were so expensive. So I finally got to meet D's in New York NFT last this year. So that was really good to actually finally meet him in person and yeah, so in terms of what I've got upcoming heading back to the boat, so my going to have a renewed figure into my ocean series of work and Tribulation series, so that's a series that I've crafted around the story of being on the boat and the time I've spent on the boat and I think I'm going to try and immerse myself in that environment.

Intrepid: 53:33

And for me that's going to be pretty emotional, like we left the boat and we had a pretty intense emotional time on that boat with the lockdowns and stranded at sea in hurricanes and not being able to.

Intrepid: 53:46

There's a sense of abandonment when your country abandons you that it's hard to explain, and so going back to the boat will bring back all of those memories and I feel like I'm going to try and channel that energy into that series and I tried to. You know it took me like years before even really wanted to talk about the time on the boat, and so part of that series has been trying to mint the story as well as the imagery. So I've got kind of long text with all the images to try and actually help express, you know, work through it's almost like a PTSD in a way, to try and help work through that. So you know, pretty excited about that, we had it off in a week. We went down to the last week of packing up their lives and sold their cars and etc. So renting our house and yeah, so it's going to be a bit of a crazy whirlwind and so that's going to be the focus Nice.

NorCal Guy: 54:47

Amazing, well, intrepid. I just want to thank you for taking the time and coming on the pod today, and I really enjoyed our conversation. It was very insightful and eye-opening, for sure.

Intrepid: 55:05

Thanks, yeah, I appreciate you having me on. I'm a big fan of this podcast. It's been a good way to discover you are and hear some perspectives of different people around the world. So it's thanks, appreciate you having me on.

NorCal Guy: 55:21

Yeah, I appreciate it and, man, I hope you have a great rest of your day and good luck in the next couple of weeks.

Intrepid: 55:31

Getting back to the boat yeah, I know I appreciate that and hopefully I didn't sound too. I'm not the best person in the morning who started at 7am for me, so I had the double shot espresso and hopefully didn't sound too too asleep.

NorCal Guy: 55:43

But now it's great, it's perfect.