I first met SonOfLasG at an exhibition I held coinciding with a SuperRare XCOPY gallery exhibition. Of the people that attended, SonOfLasG was one of the most interesting. I was immediately engaged by his conversation. We started talking about Terraforms, and I could sense that he was a serious thinker about Web3 and crypto art.

Later, I discovered his writing. There are only a handful of art critics and writers in the Web3 space that can speak eloquently about the projects that come through with such a contemporary eye. SonOfLasG is one of them.

Knowing that we lived in the same city, I asked him to sit down for an interview. We had a two-hour conversation over lunch.

Here is a lightly edited transcript.

Interview: maxand98 & SonOfLasG [1]

Date: April 12 2026
Location: Fitzroy, Melbourne, Australia
Format: In-person conversation over lunch

sonoflasg: So you are local?

maxand98: Yeah, I’ve lived for 20 years just on this road here. But it’s a little townhouse with metal edge stairs, I can’t raise kids there so I’m moving.

sonoflasg: Yeah, so we moved—we were one road in from the beach. So we moved from there to an apartment.

[Waiter runs through the specials: Sunday roast beef joint with roasted carrots, potatoes, peas and pancetta, pumpkin, Yorkshire pudding and red wine jus at $38; market fish—a barramundi fillet with braised lentils, Tuscan cabbage and black pudding at $42; vegetarian risotto at $30.]

sonoflasg: I’m going to be really boring and get—do you have like a peppermint tea? I’ll do a peppermint tea. I’ve been eating cakes and coffee and stuff all day.

[continues…]
It’s cool [Fitzroy]. So we’ve hung out here—I’d often come and meet for like coffee or lunch or whatever. I’ve been to quite a few places around here.

maxand98: I mean, we’re like swimming against the tide trying to avoid moving to the suburbs. There’s just no place that’s big enough.

sonoflasg: Cool, cool, cool. So what are you thinking about the whole sort of NFT scene and collecting?

maxand98: Well, I’ve got obviously a lot more time—aside from changing nappies—I’ve got a lot more time to spend on it, which is what I want to do. There’s a whole lot of build-up of things that I just wanted to start paying more attention to. And medicine is kind of a black hole. It’s nice to be able to pivot to something more interesting. And I do think it’s the most interesting thing. So yeah, part of the reason I wanted to chat to you—I only thought about this because I was actually reading, listening to that James Bridle interview. It’s almost like seeing one of your heroes, you know, and I was thinking about it going...

sonoflasg: Did you not like it?

maxand98: I mean, no, just so underwhelming. Like, the early stuff he did—I was amazed by it. And I still look at it and I think no one’s done it better, that digital new aesthetic thing. That whole website and the talk and stuff. Just the way it’s framed. I’ve never seen anything like it. And that was like ten or eight years pre-NFT and he called it perfectly. Just the whole kind of digital-physical tension.

There’s one part of it where he talks about someone who put a huge number plate on the front of their car which was an ASCII code injection, that when you drove past those big roadside digital signs—it would say “slow down” or whatever—it would inject code into them. That is brilliant. All these juxtapositions of the bleeding of the physical and the digital worlds. It was all about things like where the undersea data cables went. And he did this really interesting Instagram channel called Dronestagram. He used to find the spots where the US drones—when that first Reaper drone came out in Afghanistan—he would geolocate where the drones had dropped their bombs or whatever they’d done, overlay the drone on the bomb site, and then put it as an Instagram feed. It was called Dronestagram and it was just such a really interesting thing.

sonoflasg: I thought the interview was good though because I know they weren’t necessarily talking about art, but I always find I really enjoy perspectives that are just very different from the norm, the status quo. Like everybody at the moment that I listen to—podcast-wise, Twitter spaces-wise, even people around me in real life—is talking up AI, how wonderful it is, how game-changing it is, how pivotal a moment it is. There were certain things he was saying that resonated with me. So the fact, for example, that we believe our type of intelligence is the pinnacle of intelligence—and he was talking about biological systems and planetary systems and that being different forms of intelligence. That really resonated.

There’s a conversation I have with my daughters all the time, and it centres more around the idea of consciousness and life. My older daughter—so both my daughters, I’m just very grateful that I have intelligent kids because I would be very bored otherwise. But my older daughter is very linear and sequential in her thinking. My younger daughter is very dynamic—she can process different perspectives, multiple thoughts at the same time. Having a conversation with my older daughter about the nature of consciousness and what life is, and trying to explain to her that a plant, a tree, is just as alive as we are but its experience of life is completely different—the time frames are different, the nature of it is different—she struggles with that. She really struggles with just assimilating what I’m trying to convey to her.

[Waiter interrupts to take food orders.]

maxand98: Do you think she’s got a very strong ego, strong sense of identity?

sonoflasg: It’s funny—if you asked her, she would say no. But as a parent looking at her, I would say definitely yes. And funny enough, my younger daughter—I think she has a very strong sense of who she is, but as a parent observing her, if you asked her I think she would say no to that. She’s still discovering herself and still a bit confused as to who she is as a person. But I don’t know, that might be stage in life, just being a teenager more than anything. Kids are so fascinating, young and old. So interesting.

maxand98: Yeah, they come out of the box in a certain way. My 11-year-old boy, I don’t need to speak to him. I know he thinks the way I think. He’s very similar, introverted. People often ask him what’s wrong. I know he’s just thinking. Whereas the other two—the newborn obviously you can’t tell—are much more like their mothers.

So I’m kind of interested in—what was your starting point? The internet tells me you lived in Spain for a while.

sonoflasg: I’ve lived all over, man. So I grew up—born in Nigeria. My dad is a multidisciplinarian, does lots of different things, but he’s essentially a businessman. He traded marble, he traded with—you know those massive planes the military use for carrying tanks and stuff? He traded those for a bit. He’s done all sorts of stuff. So as a result of that we travelled and moved around a lot when I was little. The two bases we had were the UK and Nigeria, Lagos. My home base was Nigeria up until the age of about six or seven, then transitioned over to the UK. Always kept in touch with both, but spent more time in the UK and started schooling in the UK.

maxand98: With a big family? How many siblings?

sonoflasg: Just me and my sis, just two of us. But then my dad went on to have—gosh—eight, nine, ten other kids with different women. Very much a Nigerian male thing. I mean, for that generation a lot of them did it. So there’s a lot of polygamy.

maxand98: Are they considered step-siblings, or…?

sonoflasg: Yeah, I mean, it’s an accepted, common thing in Nigeria.

maxand98: Is there a kind of hierarchy of the kids?

sonoflasg: Traditionally there would have been more of a hierarchy. But my mum is very independent, very strong. She was not having a situation where there were multiple wives in the house and that sort of very old-school hierarchy. That’s the sort of thing my grandparents’ generation would have done—multiple wives in the house, each with different sections, the first wife is the senior wife. I have friends now who have that sort of setup. They tend to be more the Muslim families, not the Christian families.

But yeah, that just wasn’t going to be our story. So I went through a very, very challenging sort of late teens when my parents split up. Just a lot of uncertainty around responsibility. I essentially raised my sister from that point on. We always had a roof over our heads, that was never an issue, but I was pretty much independent from the age of about 15, 16. I’d pick my sister up from school. I was driving illegally because obviously you can’t get a licence in the UK until you’re 18. I started driving when I was 15 because I needed to. I needed to pick my sister up, take her back to school, all that kind of stuff.

And then meeting my wife—we spent time in Nigeria, lived in Nigeria for about a year, spent some time in Ghana, lived in Spain for about three years. I have an uncle who lived in the south of Spain for two or three decades, and we’d always said if we got the opportunity we’d move out there and live near him. So opportunity presented, we took advantage of it. My second daughter was born there. Moved back to the UK, lived in Australia, lived in the US for a little bit as well. I’ve literally lived all over.

maxand98: And what sort of work were you doing?

sonoflasg: So in university I had two businesses. I had a car customising business and I had a web design business. Both just constant attempts to get back into creativity. So at GCSE level I had wanted to study product design. I got into St Martin’s, best school of product design in the UK. But that was the point in time that my parents split up. So my dad would not pay for the university, wouldn’t pay for the education.

For me, I felt like I fell off my path at that point because my dad had pressured me to study architecture. At that point in time in the UK, UCL and the Architectural Association were always jockeying for first place. And it just happened that the year I was going in, the AA was number one, and my dad was like, “You have to go to the best place.”

I got accepted into the AA, but the AA is a much more mature institution. It’s not like a university like UCL or LSE or King’s. It’s more like a small independent college of architecture. There’s no other faculties, you can’t study anything else there—literally just architecture, maybe some design-type courses. I got in when I was 17 going on 18. The nearest person in age to me was 24. This is what I mean by quite a mature institution. And I just did not want to do it. When you compare product design and architecture, yes, they’re both design-oriented, but there is so much more freedom and diversity in product design.

So I did that for a couple of years and I was like, I can’t—because that’s a seven-year degree. I can’t do this for another five years. So I left the AA. I remember the day I walked in and sat down with my lecturer, my main lecturer, and said to her, “As much as I love the design aspect of it, I can’t do architecture.” And she was like, “Just leave. If you don’t want to do it, just leave. You kind of have to want it to be successful at it, because architects don’t really become known and successful until much later in life. That’s just the way the profession works. You have the ability to do it, but you have to love it to succeed at it.”

So I went off and did a business degree, because that was all I could find to do. And then I went on to do a master’s in IT. And I’ve always felt like I’ve been trying to get back into something creative ever since.

I worked in education. My mum started a school—a sixth-form college in Nigeria—30 years ago. And I’ve basically gone on to continue her legacy with that.

maxand98: So was it work exposure in IT, to crypto, to art?

sonoflasg: No, not at all. From my master’s, I got recruited by a company that’s basically a recruitment agent for students for UK universities globally. They needed someone to run their Nigeria department. I ended up doing that for three years and then expanded from Nigeria to Kenya, India, Pakistan, lots of different regions. Nothing tech-related, nothing even business-related—more marketing. But through the connection with the school in Nigeria, I just ended up doing that.

Then from there I left and joined the school in Nigeria, developed a couple of programmes. Do you know what foundation programmes are? So a foundation programme—in Australia you do a VCE to get into university, in the UK you do A-levels. Both are designed for home students. Outside the UK, people adopted A-levels as a means to get into UK universities. Foundation programmes are designed specifically for international students to get into universities elsewhere. So with a group I partnered with in the UK, we designed a foundation programme specifically for Nigerian students. I launched that at the school and it’s now running in 20 to 30 schools across the country. That’s what I still do now.

maxand98: I have so many questions because there’s very little in that story that would kind of foretell where that writing comes from. Like, you’re writing like a professional.

sonoflasg: Well, first of all, thank you.

maxand98: I mean, that’s kind of the thing. I’m more interested in your Paragraph posts than I am in James Bridle’s writing. I’ve read his books. This is a guy who’s doing huge keynotes and all that kind of stuff. There’s not a lot of meat on it now. So suddenly, where does that appear for you? Like, what year? Is it 2018?

sonoflasg: I’ve always written. Writing has always been something that I do. I love the challenge of—I find language very limited. And I love the challenge, I’ve always loved the challenge of wrestling with words to try to convey ideas. That’s just something I’ve always done.

maxand98: So as a kid you were a book kid?

sonoflasg: I read a lot. I wouldn’t call myself a book kid. My older daughter is a book kid—she literally drowns in books. I read a lot but I was in my head a lot. I think you can probably tell that from the sorts of things that I collect, because I like things that are a little bit of a challenge to understand. Everything that I’m involved in, I tend to think very deeply about.

The writing in the context of Web3—I started to do it as a way to force myself to crystallise my thinking, because I would absorb so much information from Twitter, from listening to podcasts, from reading threads. Investigating is something I really enjoy doing. So a lot of the stuff I put out is processing lots of information that I’ve picked up from different places and applying my own thinking to it. That process I find really cathartic. I really enjoy it.

maxand98: I mean, people don’t just come across continental philosophers and that kind of thing. That’s a pretty deep well. You’re not going to get that on Twitter.

sonoflasg: When I really started to go deep with reading—this would be about six or seven years ago—I set myself a challenge of reading 100 books in a year. It was intentional because that’s a lot of books to read. Part of my process was listening to audiobooks as well as reading physical books. And at that point it was like turning the valve on a fire hydrant.

maxand98: Was that coming from “I want to better myself,” or…?

sonoflasg: I wouldn’t say it came from wanting to better myself. I just—the more you read and the more you digest, the more you listen to podcasts, listen to people who are masters of whatever niche they’re speaking about, the more you realise that there’s just so much information out there. It’s a bit like Neo in the Matrix when he plugs himself in and realises he actually loves it. For me, I just got to a point where I wanted more. I wanted to read more, learn more, understand more.

maxand98: And where does the time come from? You’ve got a family, you’ve got a job, you’ve got to keep everything together.

sonoflasg: Efficiency is something I excel at. Efficiency is something I do very well. One—I don’t sleep very much. I’m a very bad sleeper. I went to bed at 10 o’clock last night, woke up at one o’clock. I’d listen to an audiobook probably until about three or four o’clock before drifting back off to sleep. With headphones in. I actually go to a different room because I don’t want it in my ears and disturbing my wife. So I’ll lie and put one in. I’m a very light sleeper, easily disturbed, takes me forever to get back to sleep when I do wake up. I’ve done that for years—just put one headphone in.

My wife is forever having a go at me. She’s like, “Are you there? I’m talking to you.” I’m like, “Yes, I’m here, my headphones are in but I can hear you.” It’s just constantly…

My parenting style—I’ve been writing a book on parenting for a long time now, probably about three or four years. I’ll finish it at some point. I keep finishing it and then reworking it. I have no idea whether I’m just trying to get stuff out of myself or whether I actually want to share it with the world. But I’ve always raised my kids to be very independent. That has given me more time.

maxand98: Because that was your experience? You’re a 15-year-old driving your sister around and you’re like, it was good for me, it’s going to be good for them?

sonoflasg: No, I don’t think I thought about it that way. I think the sort of Western way of bringing kids up does a disservice to a lot of children. I think children are very capable. I just don’t think a lot of kids are given the opportunity to exercise that.

I remember when my older daughter was about six and they were starting to introduce homework. There was a talk the school put on for parents—“Next year we’re going to start giving kids homework, half an hour a day,” basically setting the scene. I’m listening to all of that thinking, this is all great, but I’m not going to coddle my kids when it comes to them taking ownership of their studies. Because project that a decade into the future and you’re going to be having shouting matches with your kids about whether they’ve done their homework. They’re going to go off to university and not be prepared to take full ownership. I was like, well, that journey literally starts from day one.

I sat down with my kids and said, from day one you guys are going to have to figure this out for yourselves. I will always be there if you need help. The first week or so was a little bit rocky—a five and a seven-year-old are going to make some wrong choices, spending time in front of the TV before dealing with homework. But I wouldn’t say a word. My older daughter maybe wouldn’t finish her homework one day and would come to me in a panic because it was approaching bedtime—“I haven’t done my homework, I need more time.” And I’d say, “You’re going to get into bed on time. If you need to finish it, you’re going to have to wake up early. If you don’t get it done, you’re going to have to explain to your teacher why you didn’t get it done. I’m not going to school with you. I’m not going to have to give that explanation.”

Literally within two or three weeks, since that point in time, I have never had to talk to my kids about homework. Whether they’d finished, how they were doing at school—nothing. Both of my daughters went on to be scholars at Brighton College in the UK, one of the best schools in the UK. At Albert Park College here, they both got awards for top this, top that. So decisions like that just meant I could focus on certain things I wanted to focus on, as opposed to being a helicopter parent.

And there’s ways I’ve injected efficiency. Like running and cycling to get to school meant I could put my headphones in and listen to a lot of stuff on the way. I introduced my kids to running when my older daughter was seven, younger daughter five-ish. We literally started with running around the block. By the end of it we were doing 10k runs. Throughout the whole of school we either cycled or ran to get to school and back home. I got a GoPro-type camera because I wanted to document it. There’s pictures of me and my kids, me and my rucksack, them and their rucksacks, six in the morning, running to school in the snow. This is how I inherited wearing a snood—because you can run in a snood, you can’t run in a scarf.

maxand98: And is this while your wife is training in her specialty? Because you’re the one…

sonoflasg: Yeah, I mean, you know what it’s like being medical. You don’t have time to raise children. So literally from birth I was the primary carer for both the kids. My life would be: get the kids to bed by a certain time, then I’m on the computer working until midnight.

maxand98: Is “LasG” your dad?

sonoflasg: No, so LasG is a part of Nigeria—it’s a part of Lagos, like downtown Lagos. The G stands for Gidi, and Gidi in Yoruba, which is my language, translates to something like tough, rugged. So “Lasgidi” is a local name for parts of Lagos that refer to the toughness of the place.

I remember when I joined Twitter because of NFTs, I was thinking I don’t have a username. I was never a gamer or anything like that. And I went through a phase where I was very into photography and I set up a Flickr account. I came up with the name sonofLasG because that was the most influential—it was a very formative, pivotal point in my life. Around the time my parents were splitting up, we moved into this neighbourhood, myself, my sister, and my mum. A lot of who I am now stems from that period. So SonOfLasG is the name I inherited as a photographer and it’s just the name that stuck.

maxand98: What’s your current thinking about Web3 anonymity? Because my view is that it’s brief—it’s impossible. In the last 30 years since Web2, you can create an account and be anonymous, but I think that window is probably closing. Even to the extent that I was asking the AI about you—there’s quite a lot that can come up.

My observation is that you see people in Web3 evolve into an identity. So the anonymous version is the proto-identity of what they really want to be. And then they kind of grow into it and they become big enough and confident enough and then they’re just that person. They may even flip the name.

For me, when I knew I was going to pivot away from clinical medicine and I felt that chapter was done, it just seemed a bit gutless to not just—I don’t have any anonymity qualms at all. I’m happy to use my own name. But it’s interesting how it’s still, to me, a signal of people still evolving into whatever they are. I still believe that’s probably their truer identity.

sonoflasg: I don’t have security concerns per se. For me, I like the fact that—I don’t think I’m under any illusion that it might be a facade of anonymity. But I’m still more comfortable in some degree of obfuscation. A big part of that is I’m quite a private person. I’m never going to share photographs of myself or my wife or my kids. I have a private Instagram for that.

maxand98: It’s so funny because mine is exactly the same. It’s got all these photos of my kids, same name, same everything, and I don’t use it. It’s private because I don’t want my kids on the internet. But at the same time, every time I change over my computers, I lose a bunch of photos, and the Instagram ones are actually the ones that will stay there forever.

It used to drive me crazy. I would have patients come in and put all these X’s on the form—“I don’t want to be on your computer system, I don’t want to be on MyHealth Record.” I was like, dude, you already are. When you came in the lift, there were six photos of you taken. Every blood test you’ve ever had is on the web. I understand it, but I think it may be paradoxically worse for most people because you’re not controlling what’s out there.

Maybe one of the paradoxes is, let’s say you did want to become anonymous, one of the best defences might be 500 SonOfLasGs with every different type of permutation, different hyphens and all this stuff. You just overload the system with content rather than trying to hide.

sonoflasg: I feel more comfortable knowing that it’s just not easy for people to piece it all together. Unless they really want to. I think the world we live in, if anyone really wants to do anything, you can’t stop it. It’s more the opportunists and the casual people that might have even mildly malicious intent—I just don’t have to deal with it.

maxand98: I already get a lot of spam through Twitter. I got a call from San Diego the other day. My data must be everywhere—I’ve got fingerprints on every exchange.

sonoflasg: And also, don’t forget that I still have very close connections with Nigeria, and Nigeria is the wild west. So if I’m a known face, and there’s the association with crypto and NFTs, and the transparency of the blockchain and being able to see exactly what assets I’ve got—to me that’s terrifying.

maxand98: Would that mean that when you fly into Lagos, someone’s going to…?

sonoflasg: Yeah. I know people that have been kidnapped, held to ransom, tortured, all sorts. And these are people that are managing directors of banks, own big family businesses. And this is within the fiat system, not even crypto. Crypto just makes it so much easier to move stuff around and get away with things.

To be honest, if it wasn’t for the Nigerian connection, I would probably be quite happy to be known. Aside from just wanting my privacy, I’d probably be quite happy to be doxxed.

maxand98: Because there is a paradox, right? You can’t write well and develop an audience and maintain that you want complete privacy.

sonoflasg: TBD on that one. Because I don’t write to build an audience. More recently there are things I’ve started experimenting with that will require an audience. But that’s the Tabcorp writing. That’s more creative writing that I now have the opportunity to practice. And I’m really, really enjoying that.

maxand98: But see, then kind of what I’ve done—which is like, who’s this guy, I want to pick his brain for all these ideas—it’s not that far a leap to go, okay, you’re on this podcast, then you’re on this stage…

sonoflasg: That’s so funny. That’s not something I think about, to be honest.

maxand98: You either have to say no or be uncontactable.

sonoflasg: I think there’s probably ways to marry the two if you got to that stage. Even a lot of authors—I might know the name, but I’m not necessarily going to be able to pick a face out in a crowd. I don’t know, cross that bridge when we get to it.

maxand98: I think what’s interesting is when you look at artists, musicians, writers—a lot of the time they may be doing stuff for cathartic reasons, working stuff out on paper for their own intellectual reasons, and then it might blow up. It was your PhD thesis but it ended up being made into a film. Or that guy who published his book chapters on a website and then someone said put it on Amazon and suddenly it’s a blockbuster. [Ed - Andy Weir]

sonoflasg: I don’t think it’s probably the rare case that it’s planned. They’re doing it and then it happens to them and then they cope with the fallout. Or the loss of privacy. Which I look at and I’m like, there’s no way I would want that. Imagine being someone like Justin Bieber. I cannot imagine anything worse.

maxand98: I’m reading this Lucian Freud biography and I’m only at the early part of it, but he’s exactly the same. No interest in interviews, none of that. He’s just like, do the work. So I think there are templates for it.

[Ordering another round of drinks. maxand98 has a pint, sonofLasG has peppermint tea]

maxand98: So as far as the things you’ve written about—I would really love your opinion on some of these questions I’m trying to work through. One of the ones is, for two years I’ve been going back and forth on writing a book. The whole thing for me is very literary. Books are the entry point. And I keep going back and forth on this inconsistency of digital purity. It must be all digital and then you go and make a book? Like, should you just spend your time doing the most digital thing?

I spend a bit of time on Mirror, and I think Paragraph—it’s sort of disappointing to me how slow music and writing have been on the blockchain. I see so many people start a Substack and I’m like, why Substack when you could do Web3? I will buy your writing with USD on Base or something like that. I love the Long-form art podcast from Wim—I was chatting to him on Zoom about whether he could do more of them and I’d be a subscriber. And then he started a fiat buy-me-a-coffee thing. I just found his Ethereum address and sent him money. It seems unfaithful to the medium not to do that and I don’t know why it has been so slow to change. 

sonoflasg: The thing that’s difficult with the writing—so I stuck with Paragraph because I wanted it to be more on-chain.

maxand98: Were you on Mirror first?

sonoflasg: I started on Mirror and then switched over to Paragraph. I think Mirror’s transitioning to Paragraph anyway. I sort of pre-empted that and copied it all over. For me it suffices, but there are limitations.

maxand98:I love referencing in more academic-type writing—I can’t do proper hyperlinked references or footnotes.

Sonoflasg: Substack, because the stuff I’m putting out now is more short stories, like weird stories—with Substack you plug into a network. There are network effects, so it makes it easier for other readers to find your stuff. That was the main reason I went with Substack for the Tabcorp stuff.

maxand98: I’m with you.

Sonoflasg: I think if I was writing more for an audience, it’s difficult because—I’ve been writing a book for a while on PFPs, because PFPs for me are still… I mean, generative art I love, on-chain art, systems art—love all of that. But I love PFPs. It’s almost like a guilty pleasure.

Maxand98: Like even the most PFP of PFPs, which is BAYC—are you going to buy one?

sonoflasg: I wouldn’t buy a BAYC, no. I came very close at one point. But I struggle with BAYC because the BAYC community, the sort of OG BAYCs—they’re not my favourite bunch of people.

maxand98: Because it’s anti-intellectual, or why?

sonoflasg: Terraforms is very intellectual. Terraforms is also very true to the art. BAYC is… it’s a cool kids club. I associate it with that. A lot of the OG BAYC holders are the LA influencer, New York influencer, club scene type. I’ve had conversations with many of them, listened to a lot of them in Twitter spaces, and they’re just not my people. And the community is a very strong part of a PFP.

maxand98: Well, one of the other unresolved things—I think it’s unresolved to me in my own mind—is what the physical presence of digital art should be. I’ve gone from a middle ground to an ultra digital maximalist to the opposite view now. And that was the reason I wanted to turn up and do something physical [An XCOPY exhibition]. I was just like, I want to know what it’s like. And why would I not do it? Because I’m worried about embarrassing myself and all this stuff. And I’m kind of in a phase where I’m like, yeah, unless it has an imprint on the physical world, I think it’ll die as a chapter of the internet, like Flickr, potentially.

And there are a lot of technical things about how it’s displayed and how you would reframe the museum structure. I’ve spent most of my youth going to the NGV and loving that institution. But lately, in the last decade—I would be highly critical of the direction. It’s gone a bit Disneyland. You know that Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama—the dots? It was the most bland exhibition. Just low IQ.

sonoflasg: The BAYC of an international art exhibition.

maxand98: No depth, no substance. So yeah, I’m interested in what physical manifestation—could you envisage some physical manifestation of Terraforms? Even just the thought exercise of what it could possibly be that would enhance it. That’s just an open question.

And the other one I think is really important is geography. I would have said confidently for the last 10 years that the cultural centre of the world is the internet. It’s not New York, maybe it was LA for a while, London before that, Paris. But now it’s like a borderless network. But at the same time, you may not enjoy the LA crowd or the New York crowd. You’re Nigerian, British, Australian—but even to the extent that your name is geographically bound. Does it become hyper-local and networked at the same time?

sonoflasg: That is very challenging because I think there’s a lot of evolution happening in that area right now. The idea of physicality, the idea of culture that is native to the internet—I think we’re still in the very early chapters of that.

I went through a period where I was wrestling a lot with those thoughts. And I consciously decided, okay, stop for now. Because I don’t see a world where the physical becomes the priority and we’re trying to bring things that have evolved in a very new online, digital context into the present physical world. I actually think the world has to catch up a little bit before we can genuinely start to explore those things meaningfully.

maxand98: In what way? Technologically? Culturally?

sonoflasg: All of the above. Technologically, culturally, people even being ready to receive and absorb that information and accept it. I talk to my wife and kids about everything I’m involved with—NFTs, crypto, all of it.

maxand98: Do you display any at home?

sonoflasg: Again, I went through a phase where I tried using projectors, I tried using physical screens. And I took a step back and thought, why am I trying to do this? Why am I trying to bring these things into my physical world? I essentially forced myself to stop thinking that way and to be comfortable with the idea of these assets being natively digital. That’s where they belong. They don’t belong printed out and put up on a wall.

maxand98: Do they belong on an OpenSea wallet page? Is that the best we can do?

sonoflasg: No, I don’t think that’s the best we can do. Far from it. But I don’t think the form factors are there yet to fully realise it. I think having a sense of space, having a sense of depth is important. Things like OpenSea have a place for now because we need somewhere to look at these things, trade these things, feel ownership of them.

maxand98: Were you early into Verse? I use Verse now to filter and look for stuff. That was one of the questions I had for you. I used to enjoy this Web2 guy, Jason Kottke—I don’t know if you’ve ever come across him. He’s been around for like 30 years and his website was basically curation of the internet. He would post links of stuff he’d found, very well curated. That curation aspect was really powerful—the content he was finding and the voice he put over it. And I think Verse is similar. I don’t know who’s behind it. Are they British or American?

sonoflasg: So Verse is British. Jamie Gourlay runs it. Layla used to work at Tate—she was a curator there. She’s responsible for Solos, which is the curation arm of Verse. It’s almost like Art Blocks Curated.

maxand98: What about Artie Hands? He fell out of the space, right?

sonoflasg: Artie is an interesting character. What he puts out and what he curates I found one of the most interesting. He’s very edgy. He’s sort of Midwest—former New Yorker, but now has three boys and a wife, literally Midwest. But he’s a volatile character. He’s quite New York in that way. He just got to a point where he had voiced a lot of frustration about the space. The whole sort of Sam Spratt stuff—he detests it, really hates it.

maxand98: With your kids, did they participate in the Masquerade?

sonoflasg: We all took part in the Masquerade. Because it was one of the deeper projects that they could participate in and I wanted them to participate. So I had one mask and they had a mask. They submitted one mask between the three of them—my wife and both my daughters. They sat together and developed their own observations that helped Sam create the masks. That was actually a really wonderful process, to sit down with my wife and kids and talk them through it. Both my daughters were very apprehensive, very hesitant in the beginning, but they really got into it. It was fantastic to show them the way and then just watch them run with it.

Maxand98: See, that all came out in my digital maximalist phase. So I looked at what Sam was doing and I was like, “This guy’s just doing paintings on an iPad with his little pencil.” And I dismissed it immediately. I made less of a mistake with Justin Aversano, because I looked at the medium and thought he’s just using film and scanning it. And I’ve always been very critical of the photograph-of-a-painting approach, like Damien Hirst then making it an NFT. It has to be digitally native. I went very heavily into Art Blocks and all that stuff. If it wasn’t on-chain, it wasn’t real. If you’re IPFS, you don’t know what you’re doing. And so I missed Sam.

He’s obviously used the blockchain and the network in a much more sophisticated way, with a very long-term vision. I think what he’s done is going to be—I can’t think of anyone else who’s done something like that. Which, again, I dismissed. And I think it’s as elegant as Terraforms.

sonoflasg: To me, Terraforms is much more accessible from a technical point of view. But I would never have envisaged or done something like what Justin’s done, or what Sam has done. They’re different angles at the same technology.

And it’s interesting because when we think about art on the blockchain as network art, there’s the technical network but there’s the human network as well. And I think very early on, this is one of the things I really like about PFPs—it taps into the humanity of the network much more than anything else.

Maxand98:If we go to BAYC and their little clubhouse—it just never renders well, the photographs and memes of nerds dancing.

Sonoflasg: But then there is the real network of those people who’ve never met and come together. I think probably Marfa is a better example. BAYC have done a decent job with ApeFest of bringing KOLs in their community together. I’ve never been to ApeFest, but I know people who have, and it is very much like the Marfa experience—almost like a pilgrimage. There’s a lot of emotional weight that comes with making that pilgrimage.

maxand98: So this is the thing, right? You can’t admit that and then not say that blockchain art is not fully formed until it enters the physical world in some way.

sonoflasg: I think it depends on the form. It depends on how it is transitioning. Getting a group of people together is different to trying to represent an artwork physically. I believe very strongly in the gathering aspect.

maxand98: But if you think about Sam’s work—the attention he pays to the physical display, he doesn’t just print it and put it up on the wall. All the physical installations of his work, he goes to great lengths to try to emulate what he experiences behind the screen. They’re beautiful displays, very technically sophisticated. Which, if you think of it as a ledger, you’ve got one strike for emulating a more traditional museum display, versus what could have happened—which even Zuck was $100 billion in the hole for—which is the metaverse version. I had an OnCyber and all that stuff for a while. You just use it once and never use it again.

sonoflasg: This is the thing. It’s unfortunate with things like OnCyber. But I definitely have much more belief in AR than VR. I think we will get to a point where we’ll have an iPhone moment for AR. And once we have that moment, it will make the marrying of the two worlds possible. Because that’s essentially what AR is.

maxand98: Is it a brain implant? Is it glasses?

sonoflasg: All of the above. It will start probably more in a glasses form factor before we get to implants.

Maxand98:I mean, that’s what people have said about the AirPod—it’s the first AR device that’s been mass-market successful. Apple haven’t yet triggered it so you walk into a room and it does something, but it could.

Sonoflasg: I think we’re very close to that moment because the pieces are there. The challenge at the moment is probably making the form factor small enough and easy enough. Putting on an Apple Vision Pro is a ceremony.

maxand98: I’ve never done it. I bought an Oculus for my kids. We all used it three times.

sonoflasg: It’s unfortunate. I’ve come very close to buying an Apple Vision Pro several times. I really want one. But I just know it’s almost like an iteration too early for the form factor that’s going to be the iPhone moment for AR/VR. One of the recent upgrades was persistent placement—prior to that, you could place a piece of artwork, but every time you did a reset or system upgrade, it would forget. But now you have persistence where even after resets, you can put the headset away for six months and whatever artwork you placed is going to be in the same place, same size.

Something that small is actually a significant step towards bringing these things into our physical world.

maxand98: I think something you said before is an interesting point—that you can be agnostic about what’s going to happen. You know something is going to happen. If you look at art history or the history of technology, it never plays out the way you predict. You can predict that something will change, but you can’t place a bet on what’s going to change. Or when.

I’ve been pretty heavily into Art Blocks with the idea that on-chain art on Ethereum is composable. Because it’s time-stamped—which has never been so easily done before in visual art history—someone has a technical innovation and it’s very clear on what day it happened.

One of the interesting ones recently is this debate about who minted the first XCOPY. It was on Ascribe, and Ascribe disappeared, and then there was a debate about whether it was Artnome or multi—and still no one can work it out. People think it’s Artnome but it’s hard to prove. I thought the whole point of blockchain was to prove that. But here we have an example where it’s the biggest NFT artist in the world and it’s hard to prove.

So the question is: one thesis is that these cultural artifacts that are the first of their kind—the first Duchamp urinal—it was a technical innovation that may not be impressive now, but at the time it was, and that’s what’s culturally valuable. Art Blocks is that, but a 2021 version. And so it will become more culturally significant in time because it accretes value—it gets referenced and remixed and composed into new things.

But then on the other hand, you have artificial intelligence reading all these cultural signals of what humans value. And when AI surpasses us, it can put all that aside and go, “It has no value for me because all I need is Bitcoin. It’s mathematical. I can transact and do all these economic things. I don’t need the human signals anymore because I’m now superior.” And therefore this whole cultural enterprise of whatever humans are putting on the blockchain becomes like—maybe it’s kind of valuable to you and me on our deathbed, looking back at our Instagram photos that someone put on Ethereum. But beyond that, is it still valuable? Is it a kind of human sunsetting?

sonoflasg: So I’m working on the assumption that humanity is going to persist. I’m not looking at a world that has AI and no humans in it. And I think humans will always put some value and emphasis on creativity.

I think the blockchain is the beginning of the beginning of the future, in a sense. AI and the blockchain are the foundations of pretty much everything that I can see coming. I don’t see a world that doesn’t involve AI and I don’t see a world that doesn’t involve the blockchain.

It’s almost like looking at cave drawings and thinking they have no significance because we have computers now. There’s still an immense amount of value in those things.

maxand98: But if you look at RJ, even XCOPY—and the artist you recently bought, Hasdrubal  Waffle—all of it is nostalgia. It’s Nintendo era. It’s the most modern platform showing me something that’s backward-looking.

sonoflasg: I think RJ and Waffle come from the same sort of school. They originated on Tezos, and Tezos is much more backward-looking in that sense. XCOPY, I would actually argue, is much more futuristic than Waffles or RJ.

maxand98: It’s not contemporary? He’s got a phone in some of the work.

sonoflasg: I think it’s a blend of stuff. But the glitch nature—if you peel back what makes XCOPY stand out, it’s the glitch nature of the work. And that is future-facing. Whereas Handrubal Waffle is different because he uses the constraints of very old mediums and pushes those constraints to their limits. He’ll pick an old console or an emulator.

maxand98: Like Lost Robbie—Robbie Barrat? He moved into resurrecting a video game.

sonoflasg: Yeah.

Maxand98: But to me that’s another eddy and side channel of this whole postmodernist project which has no durable meaning. It’s just the empty space before the new thing. And the new thing is probably Chromie Squiggles, not RJ who’s glitching a figure looking at a phone in a pixelated way. It’s still backward-looking.

sonoflasg: I think it’s different aspects of the point in time we’re in right now. It’s very difficult to compare a Chromie Squiggle to what Waffles does. Yes, they’re both NFTs, yes, they’re on the blockchain, but the origins of the work are all very different. I would struggle to have a conversation about Squiggles and Waffles at the same time.

maxand98: Do you still own both?

sonoflasg: Yes. And I love both and I appreciate both. I might own them for slightly different reasons. But one of the things I’ve thought about is you could bracket all of these things under systems art. Because what Waffles is doing is also systems art—he’s working within constraints of systems, might be older systems, legacy systems, but they’re still systems. There’s conceptual consistency between the different works he puts out. And you can have the same conversation about Art Blocks, Squiggles, Meridians, pull out Ringers—all of that is systems art. Terraforms is also systems art. So there are through-lines between all of these things, but they’re also quite different in what they are and what they’re trying to convey.

maxand98: Different in a kind of postmodernist way where there’s no authority, you can do whatever you want? Because my view has always been that the postmodernist gap is the vacuum waiting to be filled by something with significance. I do believe there is no other current candidate other than crypto art. And it’s still unsettled as to within that universe what would be durable. You can’t be certain about what’s going to be canonical.

sonoflasg: I think you can see signs. Part of the reason I pay such close attention—and I’ve said this to a few friends over the years in the space—part of the responsibility of being a collector is paying attention, because the story is still being written. We can’t say what is going to have significance down the line. We can’t say what is going to be canonised. We can see signs. There are signs right now about where significance is accruing and where value is accruing. But that cement is not set yet. It can still move and it can still change.

maxand98: Well, one reflexive aspect is that I would argue what you’ve written about Tabcorp is a substantial contribution to its significance. And it comes down to the difference between collector and patron. The patron is clearing a path to say, “This is significant,” and the other artists follow. If you write a Substack with Tabcorp fiction, then there will be others that follow. That’s kind of interesting because it’s a much more visible collapse between—there’s no Gagosian in the middle. The tastemaker, the influencer, the collector, and the writer—they’re all the same person. And they’re both artistic projects.

You can look at the cultural value of any art project by something as simple as the velocity of Discord messages. I remember in CryptoPunks, you literally couldn’t follow it. It was so fast in December 2020 that the stream would just fly. When I flick around Discord, I’m looking for the one where the blue bubble says 25+ or 50+, and I’m like, “Ah, there’s activity!”

sonoflasg: It’s a very interesting metric. I think if you say on the one hand, “I’m doing this for myself, to help me with the logic and what it means to me, I’m writing for myself”—you can’t deny the impact. Funny enough, I started writing before I started sharing on socials. I would just write and have it on my computer and go back to it every now and again and reread, try and evolve. Because one of the things I try to do a lot is evolve my thinking. Even with Tabcorp now, there’s a piece I’m working on that is an evolution of the pieces I’ve already put out—I’m pushing myself to follow a train of thought and keep pushing to see what’s beyond it.

The reason I started putting it out on socials is I think it’s very important—there isn’t much genuine discourse out there, people talking about the work.

maxand98: There’s like five people, and you’re one of them.

sonoflasg: This is what I’m saying. It was at the point that I recognised the importance of that, that I started sharing on socials.

maxand98: But see, now you’ve got yourself into the position with Tabcorp where you’re holding the PFP, you’ve got the security guard character, it’s on every official Tabcorp thing. And then you’re also the voice. Not cheerleading exactly—I don’t think it comes across as any sort of conscious thing. You’re just organically writing about it. But what would happen if you just suddenly stopped?

sonoflasg: I don’t know. It’s funny because I’ve been so immersed in it that I haven’t really thought about it like that.

maxand98: Have you had any kind of discussion with the artist?

sonoflasg: Yeah. I mean, I set up the Discord. As soon as the project launched—Verse are not PFP people. They don’t understand the PFP world. They’ve talked about that on their podcast. And I’m quite close to Jamie and Layla at Verse. Jamie, I speak to regularly.

One of the things I did was, as soon as I could see the project was going to mint out, I started putting a Discord together. One of the most important things for an early community is having a focal point for congregation. I spent three or four days working on the Discord and putting it together. Then I reached out to Tabor and I was like, “Listen, I’ve put this together, no pressure. I have no idea whether you’re working on something independently or whether you want to go with this.” He joined, had a look, and was like, “Let’s change these things around.” We had a bit of an exchange.

Tabor himself is an introvert. We communicate, but I’ve never spoken to him on the phone. I think I’m quite good at reading people. He doesn’t have to say much for me to really get what needs to be done.

All the writing I put out—I didn’t share any of that with Tabor. It’s literally just wherever I’m at, and when I’m happy with it, I put it out. I think the discourse is important. I wish more people would do it. I wish more people would build and riff off of each other’s arguments and points.

maxand98: Is he CC0? Is there any licensing?

sonoflasg: I don’t think he knows. So this is what I’m writing about now. The train of thought is: Human Resources is an anti-PFP. When you look at Punks, when you look at Bored Apes—the first article I put out, “The Flatness Problem”—a PFP is like a suit that you want to wear. It becomes part of your personality, becomes that personality.

Whereas with Human Resources, you’re buying a character. There are personality types, traits, clothing, a hierarchy within an organisation. What I think Tabor is doing with the daily prompts is almost like a form of conditioning. You roleplay this character that you’ve adopted. And with the repetition, more and more you are becoming this character.

Initially I thought it felt a bit cringe—him putting out the prompts and then everybody making AI images of their characters, taking on the voice of their characters. It’s like roleplay. But I think it’s actually part of the art. It’s literally turning something that is conceptual art into something that is performance art.

maxand98: How do you position it with something like Milady?

sonoflasg: Milady I think is different in the sense that it came at it from the same direction as Punks and BAYC—talked up a culture and a rhetoric around the ethos of what you’re wearing as a PFP. It’s probably closer to what Human Resources is, because not many stereotypically white males are going to want to put on a PFP that is a female chibi character. But Charlotte Fang did a really good job of creating almost doctrine around what that is, what it means to put on that character. And that appealed to a group of people. It’s more an ethos than roleplay. Roleplay is a part of it, but it’s the ethos that Charlotte Fang was selling.

maxand98: One thing I would credit Milady with is it’s almost the only project that’s in any way edgy. This is one of my theses—out of Web2 censorship, where you can’t put a nipple on Instagram, there is a universe where they could have said, you know, you age-verify in 1995 and then you’re an adult within the laws of a country, you can do whatever you want on that platform.

In film there’s this tradition where taboo-breaking is under the banner of—not just shock horror like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but in a Cronenberg kind of way where there’s an artistic vision. Or Gaspar Noé—big influence on me. Have you seen Irreversible? The most graphic, shocking film. That sort of artistic provocation is completely absent from Web3. There’s nothing.

The only thing I’ve got is a Pete Burkeet, who has this meat artwork that goes for like a minute and it’s very graphic. The only thing I’ve seen. And Milady I think went down that kind of edgy pathway just a little bit.

sonoflasg: Have you looked at some of the Solana stuff? The vvv.so stuff?

maxand98: Yeah, I’ve been on vvv.so.

sonoflasg: Because when you get into the lore of that, that’s very edgy. CryptoPunks more than anything was a technical exercise. I think the culture that developed around it was completely accidental. That was not the intention of Larva Labs.

maxand98: Which is really a microcosm of art in general, right? No one’s going to predict which direction it goes. Which is probably why you and I are attracted to it. You make a prediction, write it down in an article, it comes true or not.

sonoflasg: BAYC was more of a marketing exercise than anything. I don’t think the BAYC founders got together and thought, “We want to create culture.” So PFP as a medium is still very new. 99.9% of PFPs we’ve seen today are product, not art. This is one of the things that really excited me about Human Resources. Because it was approached as a medium and the artist is still seeing where that goes.

maxand98: I think at the same time they’re also static images. They’re also very templated. From a technical point of view, you’ve got code sitting there. It’s not that hard to envisage them being dynamic.

sonoflasg: This is a bit like the Sam Spratt work—where the dynamic aspect of it is not the artwork, it’s the community that forms around it. This is what I mean by what we’re seeing now with Tabor putting out the daily prompts and people enacting their characters. What I’m literally seeing is people becoming those characters. It’s so weird when you’re in the Discord and you’re aware of the people that are in there, but also the people posting AI videos and images in response to Tabor—they’re becoming those characters right in front of your eyes. It is crazy.

maxand98: Let’s say for example, the SHL0MS artwork where it goes from black to white over 500 years—you know, it changes one hue every year or something. You could envisage a Human Resources PFP that ages. Or when I look at Art Blocks—I’ve been through every single one of those 500 projects in detail, and this is one of the reasons I’m so interested—there’s a hell of a lot of depth. But there is no figurative work there at all. So generative figuration doesn’t exist?

sonoflasg: We’ve got Sail-o-bots on Art Blocks that comes close. I think that’s probably the closest.

maxand98: One out of 500. And no one else  did it. That’s interesting. I would argue that if you look at the evolution of XCOPY on something like KnownOrigin and all that experimental period, he very clearly realised that almost all of his abstract work just sat there. Then he puts figurative work on KnownOrigin and it sells in 10 minutes. The abstract stuff that he’d done for a decade just sat there. And even now the figurative work sells for much more.

So would someone from the Tabcorp universe make a feature film?

sonoflasg: Funny enough, there’s a lot of conversation about that at the moment. I think it would be a natural progression. What I’m trying to do with the Substack is explore the storytelling. I’m less interested in making film personally. But there’s one guy in there who has taken the first story I wrote and has started playing with it as a sort of narrated video. The samples he shared—I think they look really good.

One of the reasons I started the writing is that without even mentioning NFTs or the fact that there’s a PFP collection associated with this thing, I can see it gaining broad appeal. Turn it into a video and I can see that gaining appeal.

maxand98: Would it be a comedy or…?

sonoflasg: Definitely not a comedy. The thing with Human Resources is when you start to peel back the layers, it’s actually quite dark. There’s tragedy there and darkness.

maxand98: Sort of like The Office?

sonoflasg: It has that aesthetic. But if I think of it as a short film, I think something more like Severance. The Office is comedy. It’s comedy like Afterlife where there is a tragic part to it. But I see Human Resources as much darker than that.

maxand98: Like Cronenberg dark? Potentially?

sonoflasg: Potentially. I think when you translate it to video you have flexibility how far you take it. I personally would like to see it go quite dark. Because a lot of what we see on Twitter and social media in association with Human Resources is very heavy on memes and superficial humour. I get it, I understand it has a place, I see the relevance. But I almost feel like I’m the one sane person in a room full of crazy people. This is why I’m putting pen to paper.

There was a moment that the clowns were having. I was chatting in the Discord with a group of people and I said, the only reason clowns are having a moment is because they are the easiest thing for people to get. But even then, they’re not really getting it. They’re getting the superficiality. The clowns in Human Resources—try this for yourself. Just load one up full screen and just sit with it. It is heartbreaking. When you look into the eyes of the character and think—within an organisation, you’ve been given a role. You’ve been told how funny you can be. You’ve been told you’re going to be birthday-grade comedy funny and you have to wear that face. I can’t imagine anything more soul-destroying.

maxand98: Because your character is also clownish.

sonoflasg: Well, first of all—is that my character? That’s a very good question. I think it’s the face I’m happy to wear for now. Yet to be determined whether that is my character. That’s my honest answer.

When Jamie first shared Human Resources with me, I was like, “Yo, what the fuck is this? There’s literally nothing in this thing.” And it wasn’t until I forced myself to sit with it that I started to get more of an understanding. And it wasn’t until I got to that point that I started to get more comfortable with it.

maxand98: I mean, his artistic pedigree is very impressive. You have to pay attention to what he’s thinking. I think it’s very subtle.

I think one thing that’s confusing is that Verse are in more of a higher-profile role than maybe they would have been in the past. It’s almost like a Gagosian kind of relationship—they’re presenting this artist. Which is a more traditional model. I don’t have feelings about it, but when you come at it, you’ve essentially got two voices. Well, now three—yours and the community, the artist, and Verse.

sonoflasg: So funny, because I don’t see myself as a voice at all.

maxand98: You’re probably the strongest voice. And then Verse is number two. And the artist’s voice seems like the most quiet. It’s almost like he’s just pushed it out and said, see what happens.

sonoflasg: I get that. This is not a role that Tabor is comfortable with. You can tell—since the project launched, he’s hosted a couple of spaces and in the spaces he’s not himself. He plays the role of the Tabcorp CEO. Jamie pushed back a little on that and was like, “Well, we want to see more Tabor.” But I said to Jamie that this might be the only way Tabor is actually comfortable playing this role. He might not yet be comfortable being himself publicly. Tabor is Paris-based, but he’s American—I think he grew up in the US but has lived in Europe for a while.

It’s interesting watching him because he’s definitely evolved a little since being thrust into this position. I don’t think either of them expected what has happened. But part of the reason I supported very early is I know how PFPs work and I know how fast things can move. I was like, you guys are going to need some support here, because you literally have no idea what you’re doing. And it would be very easy to go wrong, very easy to be co-opted. For something that in my mind has a lot of potential to just go the wrong way.

maxand98: In what way? Like you’re starting to see…

sonoflasg: You’re already starting to see certain things. Like Nouns, right? It’s a pure project with great intent and then it gets driven into the ground. There is an element of the space that is only interested in the financials. And that is a very insidious presence.

maxand98: And Verse isn’t like that?

sonoflasg: Not in my experience. This is the first project of this scale that they’ve had exposure to. Up until now it’s been relatively small art drops. They’ve never done a PFP, never done anything the size of a 10K. And the gravity that brings is very different. The people it attracts is very different. And you’re already starting to see low-level KOLs wading in, trying to command some sort of presence within the community. Someone comes in and flashes a little bit of money and everybody privileges them.

maxand98: Where do you get your art criticism or media diet? Is it X, podcasts, YouTube?

sonoflasg: Probably podcasts and direct relationships with certain people, in the context of Web3. The broader art world—a combination of YouTube and podcasts. A couple of YouTubers, a couple of art magazines that put out commentary on YouTube.

In the Web3 context, it’s direct relationships with a handful of people, observations in Discord, things like that. Verse is probably the only podcast I listen to and rate in the Web3 context. Roger Dickerman as well, but he’s sort of transitioning and levelling things up with his production—he’s set up an IRL studio. I think Redbeard was the first person he had in studio.

I met Roger when I went out to Node for the Node launch. It’s so interesting to meet people in real life and contrast that to their social media presence. So NFT Stats—when you meet him in real life, he’s such an intense character. When you’re sitting down having a conversation, he just focuses on you. He doesn’t waver. There’s a depth to the communication that—nothing about it comes across as superficial. He’s someone I would love to sit down and have a two or three-hour conversation with, no distractions. Roger Dickerman is similar.

It’s funny—with the people I met at Node, I felt like I was being assessed quite intensely. Like people were trying to size me up.

maxand98: Did you meet Phil Mohun?

sonoflasg: I don’t think so. I didn’t meet that many people. I met a couple of Terraforms people, NFT Stats, Sam Spratt. Sam was great to me. And I met Eli. What do you think of Eli? 

maxand98: I’ve only had contact when he’s messaged me to buy and sell stuff. I think he’s been successful and a great leader. His Art Basel project was what got me off my chair to do the XCOPY exhibit. I think anyone, given how small this space is, if anyone is a professional and persistent voice, that’s a good thing.

sonoflasg: I met Artie as well at Node. I like him—an intense character.

maxand98: And Redbeard must be similar?

sonoflasg: I think Redbeard is different because Redbeard is more of a patron. He’s not trying to sell anything. He has a very strong network and he’s trying to further the space in his own way. I don’t think he needs to be making money from this space. If my understanding is correct, he made his money in film. Not in crypto. He doesn’t come across as a crypto person, like a financial crypto person.

Eli is clearly successful. I’ve known Eli since he was with Proof. That was his introduction to the space. He’s always had a presence. I’ve always felt he’s not haphazard in the way he does things.

maxand98: You have to admire the trajectory. I always think, if you had the space minus that character, would it be better or worse? And I think he has contributed a lot to the translation and authority and seriousness of the discussion. There was a pathway where crypto art is perceived as scammy and memes.

sonoflasg: If there was anything I would wish for with the Elis of the world, it’s more willingness to engage with genuine discourse. I think the space would be better for broader engagement.

maxand98: I’ve come around to the idea that the sclerosis is in some ways a feature, not a bug. It brings a stability. If you look at Doomed DAO and the collective expertise in that group—if I’m looking at something like writing a book, there are things I would never have understood or learnt. People there have spent way more time than I have.

The network, I think, has been worth the buy-in. And I would argue that whether they like it or not and name it or not, Tabcorp is a kind of a DAO already. In a funny way. There’s collective expertise, there’s IP if you want to call it that, there’s a network. You’re indubitably linked together. The difference between Nouns and where Tabcorp is at the moment is much more similar than people give it credit for.

And it’s also astonishingly small. You’re talking about 8 billion people on Earth and in Tabcorp there’s maybe 500 vaguely active people. And 99% of them are silent. If you’re an active member, you’re not that far below the artist.

When I talk to artists who have an exhibition, they’re so fucking nervous. And afterwards there’s often this really depressing hangover. All the adrenaline’s gone. And I think as patrons and collectors, we need to be exposed to that a little bit. What did you do, what did you contribute, was it meaningful, did it succeed or not?

sonoflasg: I think this is one of the fundamental propositions of this sort of networked art, where you are so much more bought in than traditional art. In Nigeria we have artwork from the best artists in the country. I’ve met one of them. I have zero relationship with them. Vice versa, they have zero relationship with me.

Whereas with Human Resources—and not just Human Resources, with a lot of Web3 PFPs and art—the cohesiveness of the community is central to the success of the artist. It’s very much linked. And this is part of what I find so valuable about it and interesting.

I don’t see a world where that doesn’t scale. We’re entering a phase now—I call it to myself an era of meaning. Society is approaching a crisis of meaning. And the other side of that is people finding religion again, finding camaraderie in some way. I just don’t see how this blockchain network is not a part of that.

maxand98: I totally agree, which is why any contribution at this stage will be outsized. Which is why even the early conversations about it—how it’s defined, what it means—it’s brand-new territory in a way that comes along maybe once every 30 years.

sonoflasg: It is definitely a moment. There was a community I joined maybe two years into NFTs called Midnight Labs, put together by Giancarlo. He had the YouTube channel.

maxand98: Yeah, I wonder what happened to that guy.

sonoflasg: He just ghosted the space. He was very good. And Midnight Labs was incredible—an incredible group of people. One day he just decided to nuke it. He got married and went back into whatever work he was doing before. Sales-related. He tried to tokenise internet memes and auction them. He did a couple successfully but never gained traction, bear market was coming off, and he just got frustrated and left.

Even his Discord—it’s a ghost town. Last message sent was in the middle of the last bear market, like two and a bit, three years ago. But there’s a couple of spin-off communities that unfortunately have become alpha Discords. A handful of people in there who were NFT people in the past—they refuse to believe anything can come from this space. It seems to be a very North American thing, people being so quick to proclaim something is dead.

I remember in 2022 or 2023, at the end of the 2021 hype era, I was looking at CryptoDickButts and CrypToads. I was in a group chat with people from Midnight Labs saying I just don’t see how these things go to zero. There’s too much culture here. At that point, CryptoDickButts were like 0.1 ETH. And they were all like, “These things will never come back, it was a flash in the pan, they’re dead.” And I was like, I refuse to believe that. And then we saw the last bull run and CryptoDickButt went back to an ETH. I went back to them like, “Do you guys see what’s happening?”

maxand98: I think I still own an OG CryptoDickButt.

sonoflasg: Don’t ever get rid of it.

maxand98: I can’t remember if I still own it. What I was pissed off about is the V2 collection, the 5,000 ones—it was never priced relative to the 300 original or whatever.

I’ve got too many wallets and OpenSea consolidated them. I’ll have to look.

sonoflasg: Try filtering by chain, because often a lot of the junk stuff is on Base or something else. If you isolate it to just Ethereum, that should narrow it down.

maxand98: They’re so illiquid though. You just value them at zero.

But I’m so glad to have done this. I’ve been wanting to reach out and say let’s meet up for a meal or coffee.

sonoflasg: We should, definitely.

maxand98: I only wanted this for my own notes. I might try to get some kind of transcript and edit it, take out personal information. There might be some elements I might try and put together. I have no concrete ideas, but I want to kind of timestamp and write stuff down about what the thinking is. Do you believe that CryptoDickButts in 2035 will have any ongoing value? Or where Tabcorp is so new—how would it evolve? Those kind of relics of conversations are just so easy to miss. Even if you look back over the last five years, you’ve maybe recorded like five percent of what your thinking was and how it evolved.

sonoflasg: I would encourage you to pursue it because I genuinely think—I remember having a conversation in the Verse Discord a while back, essentially saying that all of this stuff—the articles I’m putting out, the recording you’re making now, whatever you choose to turn it into—all of that is the museum of today. So I’d encourage you to pursue it because I think it’s so important. It’s so easy for a lot of people to think it, but nobody to do anything about it.

maxand98: I’m definitely going to go to Marfa this year. I’ve already booked. I want to try to be a bit more professional about it all.

Where the book is at—it’s with the designer. I’ve got a 90% finished draft to show. They’re really beautiful designers. It’ll be sort of like a Taschen kind of thing. It’ll look good. But I probably need another major revision to make it read well.

They linked me with an Italian publisher—I think it was the same guy who published the Meridians book. I actually think I might scope out a few local publishers and print it locally. But I want it to be a proper fat, hefty coffee table book with a sleeve. I think it’s going to be the same number of editions as the underlying artworks—about 500.

I’d be disappointed if I hadn’t wrapped it all up by the end of the year. Maybe it would be nice if I could get it to Marfa. Just to give out a few.

sonoflasg: Well, I look forward to seeing it. I think it’s so important because you never know the conversations that are going to get struck up around things like that. The more surface area we have for generating conversations beyond the space, the better.

maxand98: I think one of the lessons from that exhibition is that the traditional entry points have value. In other words, the intellectual journey you’ve gone on from 2020 to 2025 as an interested person has been long. You understand what on-chain means, you understand all these technical things at a very granular level. But that’s a long road.

sonoflasg: It’s quite a path, man.

maxand98: If you think about what you were thinking in 2020 compared to now—how does a normal person even access that? The only way they’re going to do it is at the NGV, or through a book, or a documentary, or a fiction collection. So I think that’s why I’ve leaned back into that pathway. Which is not what I would have said a couple of years ago.

sonoflasg: I think it’s valuable. I think it’s valuable.

maxand98: Thank you very much. We need to do this again.

sonoflasg: Yeah, definitely.

End of transcript.

[1] Here's what "LasG" means and where it comes from: --- Lasgidi / LasG Lasgidi (sometimes shortened to Gidi or LasGidi) is Nigerian street slang for Lagos. It's one of the most recognisable slang terms in Nigerian culture. The word breaks down as: Las (from Lagos) + Gidi (from Yoruba). As Son explained in the interview, "Gidi" in Yoruba translates roughly to tough, rugged, hardcore. So "Lasgidi" means something like "Lagos the tough" or "Lagos the rugged." It's an affectionate, streetwise name for the city -- not the sanitised version you'd put on a tourism brochure, but the real one. The Lagos that grinds you down and builds you up simultaneously. The city itself: Lagos is a megacity of roughly 17-21 million people -- the largest city in Nigeria, the most populous urban area on the African continent, and one of the fastest growing megacities in the world. It was Nigeria's capital until 1991 when the government relocated to Abuja. It remains the economic engine of the country. The indigenous Yoruba name for Lagos is Eko (from "Ereko," meaning farmstead). The Portuguese named it Lagos after Lagos, Portugal, during 15th-century maritime exploration. The city's motto is "Eko o ni baje!" which translates to "Lagos will not spoil!" or more colloquially, "Lagos will prevail!" -- which tells you something about the character of the place. Lagos has three main divisions: The Island (the wealthy, commercial core -- Victoria Island, Ikoyi, Lagos Island), The Mainland (denser, grittier, more working-class -- Surulere, Mushin, Ajeromi-Ifelodun), and Greater Lagos (the sprawling suburban expansion). "Gidi" as a term is associated more with the raw, chaotic, hustling energy of mainland Lagos and the original city centre -- not the glass-tower expat version.

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