Paper Buddha - Artist/Collector

We're thrilled to bring you an engaging chat with the enigmatic Paper Buddha, where we traverse the riveting crossroads of Pulp Fiction, Buddhist art, Wayang Kulit, and the crypto art world. Our dynamic guest draws from his colorful experiences in underground art scenes, LSD culture, and Buddhist practices, offering unique insights into the embryonic days of crypto art, the implications of mass adoption in the NFT space, and the role of varied perspectives in the ever-evolving digital art scene. Tune in as Paper Buddha shares his resilience mantra, a testament to his journey from the streets of East Oakland to embracing spiritual practices shaped by Japanese culture.

Are you ready to navigate the diversity in the burgeoning NFT and crypto world? We lay bare our concerns over the lack of representation in platforms and newsletters, echoing the importance of varied perspectives. We also stress the significance of welcoming rookies into the industry, highlighting the lasting impact of their first transaction experience. Not just that, we share our personal mantras and the pivotal role resilience plays in this exhilarating yet demanding landscape.

In the latter part of our conversation, we delve into the human connection within the NFT world. We discuss our preferred means to connect with other NFT enthusiasts, be it through in-person meetings or virtual platforms like Discord and Telegram. While exploring the fascinating realms of NFT projects and staking pools, we wrap up our dialogue with details of Paper Buddha's imminent Miami trip, reminding ourselves and our listeners of the importance of gratitude and connection. Don't miss this captivating and enlightening conversation that spans NFTs, art, resilience, and human connection.

https://twitter.com/paperbuddha

Transcript

NorCal Guy: 0:31

Hey everyone, welcome to this next episode of Noor Cal and Shill. Today's guest is Paper Buddha. Pulp Fiction and Buddhist Art, in combination with Shadows inspired by Waiyang Kulit, create Paper Buddha's signature collage style. Paper Buddha draws from a lifetime in underground art scenes, lsd culture and Buddhist practice. In this episode, paper Buddha talks about his affinity for luxury cars and possible artistic collaborations. Paper Buddha shares insights for his past in the LSD scene and his current involvement with NFTs, emphasizing the thrill of blockchain transactions and the importance of community. We delve into the significance of diverse perspectives in digital art and reminisce about our personal journeys into the NFT space. Paper Buddha reveals his mantra for resilience, drawing from his experiences from East Oakland to his spiritual practices influenced by Japanese culture. We also look ahead at the promising directions of the art community within the NFT and crypto landscape. Everybody, please, welcome Paper Buddha. Hey, paper Buddha, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today?

Paper Buddha: 1:56

Doing well. Thank you for having me, sir.

NorCal Guy: 1:59

Yeah, man, I'm glad we're making this happen. We haven't chatted a whole lot, but I always appreciate and value your thoughts on things. Whenever I see him, I'm like this guy is good for the space. He's doing great things.

Paper Buddha: 2:14

I appreciate that I try not to have too many hot takes. The Buddhist thing is it's difficult to make waves when you're trying to be in the middle Right right, true, true, but I'm glad we can make this work.

NorCal Guy: 2:26

We can just find out a little more about you, so I guess, just jumping right into it, what were your first thoughts when you heard about crypto art?

Paper Buddha: 2:41

Well, I've been on the blockchain since 2011. So I've been around for a while and I remember the first time I saw art on the blockchain it was, I believe it was the wax. Blockchain was probably the first time I saw any kind of art on chain and it was a mind opener. I was like, oh, we don't have to just spend all of our crypto on drugs and guns. Here's this other thing. And it was, I think, a garbage pail kid, something or other, and I was like that makes all the sense in the world. Man, I collected baseball cards. I played Magic the Gathering as a kid. I remember looking at what was at the Beckett magazine to see how much baseball cards were worth, and so it just instantly clicked, man. I was like, oh, this is amazing.

NorCal Guy: 3:33

Yeah, I feel you on that. I mean, I didn't find it was the NFTs that, because I remember hearing about the crypto kiddies and stuff. I was like man, these guys on ETH are just screwing around doing silly things, breeding cats. And then it wasn't until the art part and NBA top shots of what got me in, I was like, ok, this makes sense. And then transitioned over to the art, for sure.

Paper Buddha: 4:02

Yeah, I had a crypto kiddies. I found their Discord through Reddit and had 10 of them queued up and made all the sense in the world to me. I'm like yo, this is like Pokemon shit, I get it. And then the gas was like three racks it was like three grand.

Paper Buddha: 4:17

I was like no dude, no way. And then I saw NBA top shots as well. And then they had a couple other kind of like low key cool IP over there on Watt, like they had Voltron, they had. I remember Tops MLB did a drop over there. They had Atari was over there messing around and, like I said, a garbage pail kid. So you know, there was some cool IP. Unfortunately the chain economics weren't that great Right right.

NorCal Guy: 4:46

So what are the best things about Web 3 today, and do you have any concerns as it expands?

Paper Buddha: 4:54

Oh my God, so many concerns. So let's see, before I was an artist, I was an executive in the legal cannabis world and I come from a long background of outlaws and I come from the psychedelic underground and mom and dad did that and so the grandpa and you know. So it's like in my blood. And when I started in the cannabis world it was artisanal, it was cool, it was like everyone had a crew and we were all growing really great organic, well-made weed and we were about saving the earth and loving each other. You know what I mean. And like we're all going to make it and like that very much was the culture in cannabis.

Paper Buddha: 5:42

Fast forward 10 years to the corporate takeover a bunch of fucking chads with shiny shoes, you know, making decisions that don't even smoke weed, have never grown it before, you know, and that's the inevitable, that is the inevitable reality of mass adoption and I hate to be that guy that's bringing it up, but like you know, that's the same thing that we see here in NFTs really cool underground platforms or block chains. Or you know I was punk rockin around Tezos for a long time and that's super punk vibes. But eventually McLaren starts dropping shit on Tezos. You know, manchester United starts dropping shit on Tezos. You're like wait a minute, what I mean?

Paper Buddha: 6:26

I was like, you know, I'm in the same place as in the city of Havana, you know. So there's a graceful way to include everybody, and unfortunately, you know, history doesn't repeat itself. Often rhymes, though, and I think what we're looking at here is something very similar. You know, mass adoption of something we all pull for but maybe don't really want at the end of the day. You know, because my our pie in the sky. The vision of mass adoption is everybody using the technology the way we do and like, just like we thought everybody would smoke weed the way we did. You know that's not the case.

NorCal Guy: 7:08

Yeah, it's an interesting thought and I definitely feel you on that. I mean, like the early days of like Bitcoin for me because I like was a Bitcoin maxi for a long time no-transcript, the early days, you're just like why are all these? Why why are we doing all these other things when it could potentially be done on Bitcoin? Like, why are we doing that? Why are we doing that? Why are we doing this? Let's just focus on this or do it like this. Yeah, I definitely feel you on that, how things don't go as dreamy as you had hoped.

Paper Buddha: 7:45

Yeah, you know that's a great analogy in Bitcoin. I was also a maxi coming in 2011, obviously Right you definitely were.

Paper Buddha: 7:54

Yeah, true believer. I read sovereign individual multiple times. I was already like my faith. Being Buddhist, I'm already decentralized in my philosophy of the world. I don't believe in a monarchical, fucking centralized view of the universe, and so all of this stuff made total sense to me. And then, on top of that, being an outlaw, I'm like, oh, this is fucking great. And I remember like being in rooms with like guys swan and those homies, and when we first started discussing taproot we were like, oh my God, could you imagine? Or lightning channels, could you imagine? Oh my God, what are they gonna do? So yeah, that's a great analogy. And now here we are with ordinals and like inscribing and looking for rare sats, and it's really a breath of life into grandpa coin.

NorCal Guy: 8:50

True, very true, yeah, and it's funny, you know, because I mean it's getting used more and people, you get some of those maxes that are like, no, that's not what I was designed for either, but yeah, so where do you see this digital art going in five years?

Paper Buddha: 9:13

Man, I think I have a pretty unique view on it. I think because I was not an artist before crypto. I was not an artist before NFTs. I have no experience whatsoever in the traditional art world. When they taught art in high school, like I was selling drugs in the parking lot, I had no interest in making fucking pottery with the nerds, you know what I mean.

NorCal Guy: 9:40

I wasn't my thing.

Paper Buddha: 9:42

And so fast forward to 2020, I become a digital artist. I start minting on the blockchain my very first artwork I ever produced and ever made. I minted on the blockchain and so on, and so that was my direct experience. And to come into the bear market a year, year and a half, two, jesus, almost two years ago. At this point, I started looking for ways to diversify myself and that took me into traditional art and took me into web two, if you will Enter my move to Kansas City.

Paper Buddha: 10:19

I moved to Kansas City because of the traditional art opportunities for me here. The Nelson Atkins Museum has a huge Asian art wing, with Buddhist art is a 2,500 year old tradition that people go study for an entire lifetime and don't quite understand. And so how lucky, how auspicious to have run into the Nelson Atkins, to have run into an artsy city like Kansas City where there actually is a thriving Buddhist community, a thriving art community. Who've welcomed me and my career has really taken off in the real world, when it looks pretty slow motion on crypto, like, all of a sudden I've got a manager who's like meeting me every day and I've got calendar invites and shit and meetings and it's crazy and I don't call myself an NFT artist, nor does she.

Paper Buddha: 11:15

We call me a digital artist and I find myself on panels with traditional museums, answering a lot of questions, answering being a resource for Kansas City Dow, as they try to have a political organization that's decentralized here, and I think that that's what the future looks like. I think it looks like breaking down the barriers completely of web three versus web two, of an NFT artist versus a traditional artist. No, my medium is digital and that's great. I can just say I'm a digital artist and if people get into it, I'm like, yeah, I do digital collage man. It's like found objects online and then I mash them all together in Photoshop the same way I would with scissors and paste in the real world. And then people are like, oh, okay, no, I like that.

NorCal Guy: 12:04

I like that. So what would you like to see more of in this digital art space?

Paper Buddha: 12:12

What would I like to see more of? That's a cool question. I would like to see more diversity. I think diversity in my executive career One of the things that we really valued is called cognitive diversity, and that means that everybody that's around the table thinks differently. I'm hanging out with John Smith. That's the Mormon, across from him is the super wild punk rock guy with a mohawk, and across from him is the soccer mom, karen, and we're all having a conversation from completely different walks of life, and all of our input is what makes the thing so special. It's what allows us to problem solve quickly, to have an agile organization that makes a lot of money versus our competitors who have one track of thought, and so I would love to see us have more cognitive diversity in the space.

Paper Buddha: 13:09

If I read one person's newsletter, I've read them all for the day. I don't need to go read everyone else's. You know what I mean. That's a problem.

Paper Buddha: 13:19

The podcasting situation, I think, is actually pretty diverse. I can go listen to Waiting to Be Signed and get really into the weeds with FXHash. You know I can listen to you. I can listen to RD and I can get way onto the backstory of an artist, roger Dickerman with Origin Stories is kind of what really brought me into the podcasting space as far as being a consumer of Web 3 podcasts. And then I love listening to you because we get to dive into, you know, not the cheesy like tell me your art history ship, but like what do you think about this thing? And I really like that you get into somebody's head, like working into their head. So I love the diversity we have in the pod. I would like to see more of it in the platforms. You know we talk a good game about being decentralized, but why do I keep saying the same 50 people over and over and over and over from the same five people that run a platform? You know it's not changing. You got stale.

NorCal Guy: 14:21

True, true. I feel you on that one, I feel you on that one yeah, and you know, I think a good way to do that.

Paper Buddha: 14:28

A good solution is this is a contact sport. Still, I think about how tiny this is. Right Again, going back to selling weed, one of my territories and one of my smaller companies before would have represented a population way bigger than we've seen in NFTs. So relatively speaking, it's very small. We all need to do our part, quite literally, like I'm here to recruit you right now, everybody that's listening go spread the good word on board one person in a non weird culty way. Don't be all culty about it, just be like dude.

Paper Buddha: 15:06

Nfts and crypto I'm sure you've heard of it. It's pretty fun. If you got a hundred bucks, let me show you how to set it up and like don't swing for the fences and try to get a people. Just get the person to get some Fiat, convert it to crypto, put it in any damn wall that I don't care, and make a transaction and like if we can all do that once a month, once a week, oh my God. The space is going to grow so quick Because out here we find ourselves quite literally hosting onboarding events where people are coming to.

Paper Buddha: 15:38

I don't know if you've ever heard of the 21C hotel. It's a chain of like cool museum hotels that the bottom two floors are like really dope are mostly for sale. So it's kind of like a gallery meets a swanky hotel. But we're like doing onboarding seminars where the whole community is coming out going. What's this digital art stuff? We're so interested. How do we set up a wallet? So if we could get more people on that vibe then we'll start to see more representation across the board, I think.

NorCal Guy: 16:09

Yeah, I agree with that initial transaction type thing Because I mean, that's what really made sense when I first got in the crypto. It wasn't just doing that first transaction and be like oh wait, what just happened? And you're like I'm sold. So, yeah, I agree with that first transaction and even buying, if they buy that first piece of art or make a first piece of art and mint it, you're just like how that initial transaction does so much to making it make sense for them.

Paper Buddha: 16:47

Yeah, I think there's a lot of really cool brain chemicals involved. I remember minting and that feeling was really cool, like I completed something, I did it, I overcame this technical hurdle and I minted. And then I remember the dopamine hit when somebody bought it. Then I remember the dopamine hit the next day when he sold it for 10x and I got a royalty and so, like, all of these things are reinforced by this chemical reaction in your brain.

Paper Buddha: 17:16

And then I took that and I supported other artists and that was a whole other dopamine hit where I was like, yeah, I just made something out of nothing and I just like spread good, love and joy through like making a picture, selling it for internet money and buying other people's internet pictures. You know what I mean. And at any point in the chain we can just go I'm going to throw that to Cash App or Venmo or PayPal or whatever and pay a bill and like it's just crazy to be there compared to 2011. We were in Bitcoin meetups in rooms. I remember bringing hockey bags lined with a Faraday liner full of paper money and exchanging it for Bitcoin. Bro, that's how sketchy it was.

NorCal Guy: 17:58

That's awesome, oh man. So what is the best piece of advice? Or do you have a mantra that you kind of live by? I mean, I know you have your Buddhist mantra, but I mean, is there something else that comes to mind, like yeah, I think don't give up, like no matter what.

Paper Buddha: 18:22

You know, one of my favorite comic book sayings is it's not how many times you get knocked down, it's how many times you get back up. Right, that's the homies. That's the homie. Spider man yeah, I was talking this morning on a space is just about how unfortunate this birth was for me on the planet this time around and, like you know, I was pretty much Farrell. I was institutionalized, I grew up in jails and shit and, for all intents and purposes, should not have survived being a drug dealer in the corner in East Oakland. And yet here I am, and a lot of that is never giving up. Never, people gave up on me all the time, like it happened, nonstop people giving up on me not getting shine when I feel like I deserve it. That's my maladjustment to reality. That's what that is. That's my own entitlement, and so never giving up includes like working on myself and not accepting what other people think of me, breaking those molds and just continuing to trudge.

Paper Buddha: 19:33

Many times we feel discouraged and I think that's where having a community comes in, not a cheesy like I'm part of my PFP community, but like legitimately, you know where we're all holding each other accountable. It's a bad day and people say so and people are there to support them, like that's really really important. And that exists here in Web three. I mean that exists in my community. I know it exists in, like, shout out to JN, silva and Animus. I know it exists in that community because I'm a part of that, you know. And so there's really good communities all over town here that can hold you, help you when you feel discouraged. But it's really about never giving up. You're going to take licks. That's what it's about, right?

NorCal Guy: 20:19

For sure. So you kind of said well, I don't know if this is your final place where you would like to live, but if you could live or move anywhere, is there anywhere else you'd like to live?

Paper Buddha: 20:36

That's tough man. So I've lived all over the Bay Area, lived out in Hawaii for about a decade Now I'm kind of like, and I did Washington for a long time and now I'm on this kind of Midwest kick. So like I'm feeling pretty good about my saturation of the United States. My family lives in Indonesia so I can go there whenever I want. Grandpa lived in Thailand so I can go visit there. I'm a practicing Zen Buddhist and I've never been to Japan, so I mean to say that I want to go live there. Might be a bit much but I could definitely vibe out there forever, right, because it's kind of part of Japanese culture is ingrained in me at this point. Growing up on the West Coast, in San Francisco and Oakland and then being a Zen practitioner, it's like, yeah, that feels very home-like.

NorCal Guy: 21:34

Yeah, nice. Do you have a favorite movie quote?

Paper Buddha: 21:41

Do I have a favorite movie quote? Or maybe a song lyric. I got to think about that. So many good ones, actually. How about this? How about at the end of a living legends track called After Hours? There's this line where they're kind of giggling and he says don't do drugs that are harder than you, and I love that line.

NorCal Guy: 22:13

That's fair. That's a good one. That's a good one. I mean, more people should adhere to that one. I feel like.

Paper Buddha: 22:20

That's a really great rule of thumb, man Like I keep it to the organic stuff and the Lucy these days. You know I'm not hardcore anymore.

NorCal Guy: 22:32

So this is a good one. So what is the best thing and silliest thing you've spent money on and you can stick to just crypto or or in general?

Paper Buddha: 22:45

All right, the silliest thing I ever spent money on. Going back to my other career, I was a young man. I'll start with that. I was in my 20s, full of pride, full of ego, probably the second company I'd ever gotten funding for, and I paid a really cool local artist to come do a gigantic three story mural, full blown cardboard, cut out stuff and like Christmas lights and shit everywhere. It was a six figure lobby and that was definitely the silliest thing I've ever spent money on. It didn't make any money for me whatsoever or like, do anything other than have maybe 10 people go. Wow, what a cool lobby. Yeah, I think about that a lot. The coolest thing I ever spent money on. I don't know, I've got, I've got some NFTs that are probably up there, but I'm also like I love my car. I'm going to be really like I'm a kind of a nerd for Formula one, I'm a nerd for fast cars and, yeah, we've got a pretty nice car, so I do love that.

NorCal Guy: 24:05

That's fair. I can. I can relate to that, to having something nice that's just a comfort to drive or joy to drive.

Paper Buddha: 24:16

You know, and living in a sometimes in a noisy place, it's nice to get into those luxury cars where you shut the door and it's all silent, Right right, for sure, I get that.

NorCal Guy: 24:28

I really drive around a lot with like nothing on. Just is just nice. So this interesting question if you could commission a piece from two artists and they collaborate on it, which two artists would it be?

Paper Buddha: 24:49

Oh man, hands down. Rebecca Rose and laser Lou. Laser Lou, oh okay. So Rebecca Rose, one of my favorite collage artists, does a lot of really cool holographic work and I don't know if you know that or not and laser Lou working with lasers those two things really go hand in hand, and to see them do something together in real life would be fucking phenomenal, mind blowing.

NorCal Guy: 25:16

That would be cool. I didn't know she did holographic work, but I know laser Lou for sure. I mean I didn't really. I mean I didn't realize she did holographic work outside. I just knew she did the collage type work, stereographic type of work.

Paper Buddha: 25:33

Yeah, she's a big Disney, big Disney person and like they do a lot of holo tech there and she did a lot of like sound so funny foundry work. So she like literally built a foundry and it was doing really cool handmade jewelry shit and doing a lot of holographic stuff. She's a she's a polymath.

NorCal Guy: 25:56

She's incredible, nice. I am going to dive deeper. What is one interesting fact about you that people might not be aware of?

Paper Buddha: 26:11

that they might not be aware of. Well, people that don't know me are probably surprised to learn that I used to cook acid for about a decade and was very, very, very entrenched in the LSD scene. And yeah, that's probably something people don't know at first glance.

NorCal Guy: 26:33

Yeah, that's fair. What is your favorite way to connect with new people in the space?

Paper Buddha: 26:41

I'm a talker, so I like being on spaces. I like doing Discord live streams or telegram video chats. Really, I excel in real life, so I enjoy going to all of the different events. I host my own events as well at these major NFT things, so like the physical get-together is probably my favorite way and I make an effort to be in all different parts of the US throughout the year so that I can facilitate meeting everybody.

NorCal Guy: 27:17

Oh, nice, that's awesome. I definitely agree. In person is like the way to go. I was like nervous at first to like go to an event, but once I did I was like man, this is the way to meet people and be able to like have that face-to-face and just chat with them about whatever. It's just it's a different thing.

Paper Buddha: 27:38

Yeah, big time, and I'm of a certain age where being in real life together feels really, really comfortable Not to say that all mine doesn't because I'm a gamer, a hardcore gamer, and so I've got plenty of interaction with people online. That's super fulfilling, but being able to look at somebody in their eyeballs and give them a hug and be able to read the sarcasm, that stuff's really important For sure.

NorCal Guy: 28:10

Do you have any projects or anything you're working on that you'd like to talk about?

Paper Buddha: 28:18

Let's see. I just finished and dropped a collection a Bitcoin collection on an Ordinal's collection. Oh, wow, so that, as far as ever, green content. That'll probably be gone shortly, but that is live.

Paper Buddha: 28:37

This week I'm changing up the way I've been doing my mints. Up until now, I've been incredibly prolific and really wanted to build a base and get a lot of work out there, and recently, over the last six months or so, I've way slowed it down to the point where I've got one more drop in 23, a one of one, and then in 24, I'm only gonna do six drops total, and so I've been reconfiguring things in the backend. I'm a big believer in what Super Rare and their team have done with the RareDAO and with Staking Rare, and I've got a staking pool going on where 50% of my primary and secondary sales go back as rewards to my stakers, to kind of break that down. Basically, people are able to stake a coin on me and be part of a pool, and then every month they get rewards, and so I made a decision as an artist to when I mint on platform, then what I do is program in my pool's wallet so that it automatically kicks to them, and it's really an experiment. It's an experiment in giving people sufficient financial incentive to help promote a drop, to help get out there and talk about it, but also to participate in my career as I grow, you know.

Paper Buddha: 30:17

So it's quite an interesting protocol that you can look up. For people that don't know, you can go to rareapp and you can check it out there. And it's a social protocol. The idea is that we're able this is an open protocol anybody can use and we're able to look at it and see who's connected to who and what kind of a way right. So more so than just Twitter where we're able to follow each other. Once I would be able to follow you air quotes a thousand times by putting a thousand rare on you instead of one rare. So it adds this really cool depth to the social graph. So I think it's a game changer. I think it's a really interesting thing and I'm having a lot of fun. You know I'm really nerdy on the back end, so I'm having a lot of fun with the technical stuff and playing with the reward structure in 2024. Nice, that's awesome.

NorCal Guy: 31:17

I look forward to seeing how that goes in the next few months and years. Do you have any questions for me?

Paper Buddha: 31:30

How did you get into NFTs? You said you were a Bitcoin max. Was it a kind of a similar road? Yeah, kind of similar.

NorCal Guy: 31:40

You know, like I got in a couple of years after you and I remember like and it was mainly because I became a maxi, mainly because I lost money trying to like I was working on starting my wife's business and getting that going and also was like, oh man, there's all these other coins. I need to be like learning how to trade and whatnot. And I couldn't do both and I was not winning at all and I lost money when, you know, an exchange shut down and that I was like, oh, I thought I could just leave my money here. And the guy, like you know, just rugged and left and from that point on I was like F all these other coins, I'm just sticking with Bitcoin.

NorCal Guy: 32:27

Though I did like start buying Ethereum fairly early on, I didn't do the ICO on it. I was like kind of out of the scene at that point. But then I slowly got back into the scene and still, you know, as maxi, you're just like, nah, there's nothing else out there. I mean, why are you doing all these other coins? They all go to zero and most, you know, in granted. I'm not going to be doing all these other coins and most you know, in granted, a lot of them do go to zero over the long term. And then but ETH has, you know, been around for a while and they were doing interesting things and initially I wanted to make some extra money and NBA Top Shot seemed to be the easy way to do that.

Paper Buddha: 33:18

And then you came in hard on foundation, right, if I remember right, that's where you, like, really started collecting.

NorCal Guy: 33:24

Right, yeah, so it was in VAT shots and then I got in on art blocks and was flipping some of those and then I stopped flipping them because I was like this feels more historic and the fact that all this is on chain, I'm just going to sit on what I have. And I remember you know everything. Well, I came in hard with like photography because it didn't make sense to me that no one was collecting photography. Everyone was just kind of like watching these, everyone thought they needed to animate their photos and everyone was wanting like astronauts at the time and I was just like I'm just going to go with photography. It's I like photography I collected at home. So I'm just going to go with it because it makes sense to me.

Paper Buddha: 34:19

Yeah, that's right, and that's when there was that whole kind of photography, had its moment, like right at that same time, if I remember right, dave Krugman, and like Street Dreams Cafe and Jan and all of those guys.

NorCal Guy: 34:31

Yeah, they all came in and yeah, so I, yeah, I remember, like Dave Krugman's Genesis and considering bidding, bidding on that, and Cactus was around back then and he was just, you know, throwing out whatever money he thought it was worth instead of what the sale price was. So that made it interesting as well.

Paper Buddha: 34:55

We need that guy to come spice it up again.

NorCal Guy: 34:59

Yeah, it was good times. It was a good times, yeah, but it made me want to focus more on one of one type art, not necessarily one of ones, because I'm a big believer in additions, but the one of one artist, smaller batch mints and where you can actually talk with the artist.

Paper Buddha: 35:22

What do you think the future of that looks like? You know, it seems to me we're starting to see a little bit of a segmentation between PFPs and fine art. Do you think that's going to continue? What do you think the future looks like?

NorCal Guy: 35:37

Yeah, I think we're going to start dividing more, I think, because, I mean, I think not that we're going to like to. It's going to be a while before, like there's like this true, like art community and it's going to be a lot of crossover, because people are always drawn to making quick money. But I definitely feel like this cohort of like 2021 artists and whatnot got burned with the PF. A lot of them got burned with the PFP movement and they'll probably be more focused on the art this time around, I mean, and there'll be more that come in and that are wanting to trade the PFP. But I think we're we'll have more a bigger art focus community this time around, which will be nice, because sometimes I'm I wonder how good a PFP actually is sometimes.

Paper Buddha: 36:36

I think about that a lot too. Like no offense to our friends to throw yacht parties, but a yacht party like man. We've been doing that since the 60s. You know what I mean, like that's not innovative in any way, shape or form.

NorCal Guy: 36:51

Yeah, like, unless like, and the only community I feel that could do this currently would potentially be the punk community with their connections and doing something where, like oh, they get benefits, like it'd be like having a like potentially the that like everyone's. Like oh, I wish I had this AMX black card type thing and you get those funny.

Paper Buddha: 37:22

I was just literally thinking a black card Right.

NorCal Guy: 37:26

That's the so that's the thing that comes to mind like a PFP is only going to be good if you get these type of benefits from it.

Paper Buddha: 37:36

Yeah, like flying I was just telling a friend you fly Emirates business class because you get a town car, a blacked out town car that will take you in 100 mile or 50, I think it's a 50 mile radius of the airport like hello, right. Yeah, of course that's a huge benefit and so if you're a punk holder and you can just like automatically get those kind of perks, you know that's something that really attracted me to a few early projects. I remember there was a poker like gambling type of one that was spun up by a couple of VCs. Great concept, didn't really go very far, but you know that that kind of stuff is very attractive as far as rewards, like real life use case stuff, right, right.

NorCal Guy: 38:20

And so until we have a community that is willing in and I don't know how they'll go about it besides having connections and then in. And also, I guess punks for the most part have a higher net worth, it seems like, versus these other communities. So I feel like that's the community that it would happen in.

Paper Buddha: 38:45

Yeah, I think that's the organic community for sure. I think the thing that attracted me to that early project was the fact that it was some VCs from the entertainment world and I was like all right, you guys could probably leverage a lot of your relationships to make this work. Right, right.

NorCal Guy: 39:03

But yeah, other than that, I really I don't know what the benefit of a PFP is. Honestly, I've thought about it a lot. It may be just because I have different priorities and other people, but yeah.

Paper Buddha: 39:26

Yeah, I mean, I try to think about that a lot, you know, but it's essentially a membership card and you get perks and whatever club you're in, right, and you can only really go so far with that. I think that ERC 6551 is an interesting standard that could really shake up PFPs, right. Like another good use case of a PFP is like an avatar from a video game where, yeah, man, like I can collect NFTs as my PFP and then, like, have these kind of nested NFTs my gear, my whatever, my pictures, my coins, all of that stuff so that becomes interesting and opens up a whole new world.

NorCal Guy: 40:05

Yeah, yeah, and that's true. As things evolve and what you can do evolves, then, yeah, other avenues open up, other things are possible. So, yeah, I agree, you're smart. We'll be hanging out in Miami soon.

Paper Buddha: 40:28

Yeah.

NorCal Guy: 40:29

I expect biscuits man. Well, it'll happen at least one morning. Cool Well, paper Buddha. I want to just thank you for your time today. I really enjoyed the chat.

Paper Buddha: 40:45

It was an absolute pleasure, man. I can't wait to get a hug from you.

NorCal Guy: 40:50

It's gonna come. It's gonna come and we'll talk soon.

Paper Buddha: 40:54

Thank you.