I am super excited that the Crypto Talks podcast is back and from now on you will have fresh conversations broadcasted live on my socials and later turned into an audio episode!
Today I am speaking to Vesa. For those of you who don’t know him – Vesa is
Vesa has been a monetary activist since 2006. He has produced a documentary about the monetary system back in 2010 with his own funds, time, and resources. He’s been advocating crypto and is on a mission for more people to start understanding the space.
This interview ended up getting quite deep and had many thought-provoking concepts and discussions, so I would encourage you to listen/watch it, but below I’ve tried to highlight the main
About Bitcoin and Art
Essentially you could say that up until crypto art in the past four decades the art has been about finance art. And crypto art as a movement stopped that. So in one way, you could say the Renaissance is coming to space in the form of creativity. And what it stands for is that a lot of the investments of the past four decades of the art world are going to lose a lot of value….
And you listened to some people like Michael Saylor or someone who was almost like a poet, in the form of a businessman when he talks about all of this stuff. You can’t help, but get inspired and energized and you make art about it or even NFTs.
About Bipartisan Media
What I haven’t heard up until now is that what if it’s a way to fund a bipartisan media?
What if it’s a way to start?
Helping research papers in the scientific community to come out of their wilderness. We have all of these crumbling institutions everywhere.
For the early OGs, it was already allotted that they needed to grow into bigger boots from essentially, nerds. They became business owners and they need to all of a sudden to hire a hundred people and do things like that.
But now that the next phase is that they need to understand that they are the people who will fix the things that Bitcoin and they themselves critique.
So the point is not for them to become the next fortune 500 crypto magazine heads and make their fourth superyachts or any stupid Lambo bullshit. It’s for them to assume responsibility for fixing the world as opposed to building their citadels.
About the State of Art
Because of all the things that happened to art no one serious has really looked for any kind of solution for art anymore. It’s at best, a sort of “Gucci bag” type of attitude of what people have for it.
And if you go a little bit back to what’s the foundations of artwork, arguably the two oldest forms of art are body painting and cave painting, and people did them in a ritualistic setting.
And because we’re in a merciless biological machine and we die – we wonder what the hell it is that we’re doing over here. And it’s painful and weird.
So art had a very distinct purpose in helping us survive, but because it hasn’t really done that function for a long time or it’s just portrayed something demonic or deconstruction or things like that, it hasn’t really helped us elevate.
And I think that the real cost of that is the disposable and sort of plastic art and these bananas on the wall, what it (people can’t see yet) the direct relationship to the depressions, to the meaninglessness of life, or the kinds of crises of us as human beings altogether, or even in the art sense, our obsession with things that are kind of machine-like or soulless.
About the role of the artist
We’re talking about very big themes here of what the job of an artist is, is to go to the psyche of the whole space. And of course, in the crypto sense, it’s to help in terms of the public relationships of condensing art into a form that would communicate to those who are yet not really understood what Bitcoin is or crypto is. It’s to help make impactful things that might invite people into sort of realizing what it is.
It’s one form of public relations. But at, and there are similarities, some similarities to marketing and PR and, and this is why this talk is exciting, but it’s also different. So there are overlapping things, but it needs to be able to be its own thing in a certain sense. And it needs to be respected as opposed to just flattery or Gucci bags.
If we collectively understand a little bit more of what it is that we’re doing and how we’re meant to be helping one another feel good in the face of AI and automation and all these kinds.
Why are we doing this? What, what is the value that we have for one another?
About NFTs
First of all, it’s all the brands that are coming in: all the Marvel studios and star Wars. And the film productions, the music, everything that we already know and have a lot of love for in pop culture and Netflix on whatever they will tokenize their own culture. That is one thing.
And you start to think of how much money that is altogether and how we get through the trillions very soon.
But what’s more even close to my heart in a certain kind of sense is thinking that the government-funded institutional art has been quite, excuse me, subservient to ideologies.
NFTs are really a liberation for you to finally be an artist – free to say who you are and what you stand for and what you want to do. You don’t have to count on an old broken system anymore. So that’s wonderful than for digital outcomes.
Even if you’re working for Pixar, you’re still working for a massive company or a Marvel movie or something, you have the glamour of it, but you have very little personal freedom.
In terms of actually expressing yourself if you’re a 3d artist or even an illustrator or all of these wonderful creativity tools, even from painting, you can tokenize your paintings and you can make them move.
So what it is is a liberation of a whole creative class of people.
The old model of funding for their lives is going to dry out. If they, God forbid would be themselves.
And I think this is why what I’m learning in the process of all of this. Um, so that’s the most beautiful part of it. And w w so you can have your land bows in your money, fine. Uh, but let’s also pay attention to what this really is and why it’s significant and how that can help the survival part in a different kind of way.
About dinosaur blood
One of the fascinating things about Elon Musk is that his current life mission is defined by a great irony that it’s all about harnessing the power of the sun and reworking the whole energy grid.
But then in order to do the Mars missions or the SpaceX missions, you need dinosaur blood in order to escape the gravity of the world.
And I’m in a slightly similar situation. I’ve built such a thing, that it requires someone really, really dedicated to taking some time to learn what it is and why it’s significant and what it can really do.
About true marketing
True marketing. Like, let’s say what BMW knows about marketing and how it’s not about the product. It’s about the experience. And what’s been learned over in PR during the last, let’s say 60, 70 years or something like that, that it’s not about the glamour of the person or the brand. It’s about the experience of what it can offer.
All those kinds of things. They would not be easily understood nor appreciated yet in the crypto space because of the very short amount of time that this whole evolution has happened. And people there’s a big discrepancy in between how different crypto is as an island in the sea of the Fiat world.
So there is this mismatch between a really high-quality artistic painting or anything that is turned into NFT, would it be appreciated enough among that crowd and keeping their culture and that vibe of the demand generation.
Wanna get into crypto? Here is where to start
Andreas Antonopoulos – the guru himself.
He is so incorruptible, but also so intolerant of some ideas. He certainly punches you in the face with the truth and perspective you’ve probably never heard.
If you want a “softer ride” check out the Bad Crypto Podcast.
Joel and Travis were the ones that I started listening to, uh, almost simultaneously as I did Andreas. It’s been a real pleasure to become friends with Joel and Travis as well and, and doing projects together.