#215. Hedvig Maigre & Ian Rogers

Hedvig's there too. If you want to, I don't know how we tell her to send a request.

Oh my god, great. Thank you. I'm honored. Really.

I did, I did. And I sent it to Hedvig early this morning. We're on different continents, but yeah, we are currently, you know, united through your photography.

Exactly, exactly. If you saw, you know, the one of Eric. So for people listening, if you go back a few days, our friend, an artist, Eric was in a video with his daughter. Very, really special. And Justin sent me a couple of Polaroids and I dropped one in his wallet as well.

Of course. I know. That's crazy. A whole like four days in New York City and I missed you.

Bottom left. You got to press accept.

It's good. Today's the seven-month anniversary. We still got five to go.

Amazing.

I mean, you know, everyday is such a great concept. Hey, Hedvig.

Awesome. But yeah, I mean, everydays, I love. You know, I'll tell you a story about everydays where I kind of figured it out. So once upon a time, the first time I met Mike, aka Bele, you know, I asked him what may have been a rude question, but I prefaced it by saying, I'm not trying to be rude, I'm trying to get the answer to the question. And I said, do you believe that the value, and this is right after he'd done the $69 million sale, and so the topic was kind of that, and I said, do you believe the value is in the name or in the art itself? And he said, well, I think today it's in the name. And the reason why is that there's no context for my art. It was really a brilliant and perceptive comment, I thought, you know, and he said, you know, right now people know this NFT thing, which is kind of madness, but there's not a context for the appreciation for the video loops and the everydays. And he said, you know, at some point there will be a kind of a history of digital art and that all of these things will be a part of it. And then when I went to his place in South Carolina, it was like a light bulb went off. I said, oh my god, he's creating the context for his art. And then the room, that's the everydays room, hit me really hard because it's like a shrine to practice. And practice is something that I really believe in. You know, it's like if you run every day, you're a runner. Doesn't matter if you win races, like no one can take it away from you, you are a runner. If you skateboard every day, you're a skateboarder. If you play guitar every day, you're a guitar player. And so, you know, that's why I think it's sort of like this is the joke on anyone who doesn't like people. You don't get to decide whether he's an artist or not. You know what? He creates art every day, therefore he's an artist, period. Doesn't matter what you think of it. And so I love that, Justin, that you're doing this everyday thing, like dedicated to it. I mean, you spent a year on the road, you know, you spent the time putting it all together, and now part of, and correct me if I'm wrong, but part of the piece is this thing we're doing right now, like every day, like you said at the beginning, we do this. And like, there it is. I don't know. That's my starting point.

And how often over the past seven months have you been able to get, you know, the people, the subjects into this conversation?

Love it.

I mean, just that my theory that it's a moment in time that it'll be very difficult to actually recreate, even the art moment of kind of 21-22. Is that what you mean, Hedvig?

I mean, yeah, thank you, baby. I like these, like, you know, to me, technology and culture are always inseparable. We would like to think they're separable, but they never, ever, ever are. You know, like I always use the example, and I said this on Peter McCormick's podcast a couple weeks ago, that there'll never be another Beatles because we'll never have another Beatles on Ed Sullivan. But I think there is kind of a generative art version of that, where there appears to me to be this very narrow moment in time when art was tokenizable, and we got a platform like Art Blocks, and we got a place like OpenSea where you could view your collection and easily trade. You know, like these sort of technological things came into being before you might code something like Chimera with AI. You know, I think that, like, you know, let's just use that example, what MP Coase did creating Chimera, you know, the way he did, the time he did, it's sort of like a Herculean thing that might not come back, or if it does, it'll be because someone said, oh, I'm not going to use AI, the same way that Steve Albini said, oh, I'm not going to use digital recording. Right? Like, but there was this relatively narrow moment in time when you could both tokenize generative art and kind of pre-AI coding boom that just feels to me to be, that's why I think Art Blocks 500 is probably even more seminal than we might think it is today as collectors, because it's such a unique moment of overlap and experimentation. So I think that's what Hedvig was referring to.

Hey, do you want to go first?

All right. Well, I'll tell the story briefly without being too personal, and then you can fact-check me. You know, I moved to Paris exactly 10 years ago to work for LVMH, and it was a while after I moved there. But, you know, you get to a place like that, you make a lot of friends, and someone, you know, just an acquaintance had invited me to a dinner party. I didn't really, it was one of those things where not something I knew super well. I wasn't planning on going, you know, or not. But I ended up going, and, you know, we were just sitting with a group of people I didn't know, mostly. I went with one person that I knew, and I knew the host. Everyone else was new to me. But we, you know, we just met there and just started talking. And that was really how it started. And we ended up, like, you know, we weren't together that night, but we did go from that party, which got a little decadent, if I remember correctly, for our tastes. And we just both love music, and we both love dancing. And Hedvig said, I know an amazing place, and she took me to a club that doesn't, if it exists, it's not the same anymore, but it's called Le Manoir. And there's this guy, Pablo, who's become a friend of ours. But neither of us really knew him personally that night. But it was one of the most, like, and I, you know, like I was in the music business for 20 years, so I've had lots of amazing music experiences. But, you know, this woman that I met took me to the most amazing club I'd ever been to, a place that was like a Mexican restaurant that, you know, closed down at midnight. And the people who came there didn't come to get bottle service and look fancy. The people who came there came to dance their asses off. And I had the best time, and we really, like, from that moment we became friends, and then, you know, and then we went from there, and that was how did I do?

And if I remember correctly, that night I had an idea that, and this is just going to tell you the random things that come out of my mouth in a place like this. But I was, I think, you know, it was 10 years, well, no, 8 years ago now. But it was the era of like Snapchat, and I was like, okay, whoever makes like the Blair Witch Project of Snapchat is going to, is like, this is, there's a movement here that's waiting to happen. Like, do real storytelling in this medium, not like, you know, not a video of, you know, people dancing, you know, to the latest song, but like, you know, real story. People like storytelling. Obviously, they'll listen to a three-hour podcast and they'll watch an eight-episode series. So you can't say that people have no attention span and that they don't like storytelling. So I was like, when is this going to come? And then I think we riffed on my concept for that first story. I was like, I'm going to straw man. One was a story called My Nuts. That was the story of someone on a, there was a person on a Southwest Airlines flight with a nut allergy. If anybody's familiar with Southwest, they always used to serve nuts. Very, very dangerous in today's environment when every restaurant server asks you, do you have any allergies? But anyway, yeah, ridiculous. Although I have wanted to use Rupert Renard's scriptwriting tool to actually finally bring that project to life.

Exactly. Well, you know, nuts are definitely a theme.

The opposite. Everybody has a nut addiction.

Yeah, and I think that is a good one. And I think there's something in it. I don't know. I'm trying to think how far back it goes. It definitely goes like, look, you know, 1994 on Lollapalooza, that was the day, Indianapolis, the day I met the Beastie Boys. It was actually the next day they dragged me with them to Detroit and I had to show the internet to a room full of people backstage at Lollapalooza. And like that was definitely the start of this thing that has always been a part of my career, which is explaining technology to people who are new to the technology. So I think, you know, again, come back to the concept of everyday is in practice. Like that's always what I've done is try to explain technology to people that understand it less. I don't know if I had it before that, to be honest. Maybe in some way, but I don't know how.

True. I like to try to understand things. I was talking to my dad about this last night because he's the same way. He likes to read things that are maybe like dense and nonfiction instead of something enjoyable, but simply because of being a curious creature.

I do like the concept. I think it was, you know, Yuval Harari who put it in these terms, but that humans are story-consuming creatures, period, right? I mean, if you tell somebody like a whole pile of facts, the chances of them, you know, remembering them are very small, right? But if you tell them a captivating story, the chances of them remembering that story are pretty high. And if you know, instead of telling them the year, if you tell them it came before this event and after this event, then they're going to have a much better chance of placing it on a timeline than the other way around. I think it's just fundamentally how our brains are built. We are story-consuming creatures. And I think also, like, you know, in many ways, like that's always, always, always, and whether it's, you know, religion however many years ago or politics today, it's always also always been weaponized against humans, right? So I think like really understanding the power of storytelling is, you know, it's super important, like because A, you need to use it, and B, you don't want to fall for it.

Well, I mean, if you want to, the way to become faster at running is to practice running fast. I don't think the...

Yeah, I don't think it's any more difficult than that. I really, my belief is that humans are just fun. Like the only thing we're actually good at is adaptation. I think like whatever you do today, you're going to go to sleep tonight and then your body's going to go, oh, if he does that to me again tomorrow, am I prepared for it? And that's why if you want to be like super good at watching Netflix, you should watch a lot of Netflix. But if there's something else you want to be good at, you should just do that thing. You know, if you want to be really good at playing guitar, you should play guitar every day and for hours every day. You know, not for five minutes, for hours. If I want to speak better French or better Italian, I should speak more French or more Italian. It's like, I don't think it, you know, if you want to be a better storyteller, tell stories. I was just with the author John Higgs and his wife. I saw them in New York, Hedvig. They came on Sunday night to the thing that Justin didn't get back in time to come to. And, you know, she's like, I mean, she writes, I think this is accurate, she writes self-help books, but she's like practicing stand-up comedy now. And it's so inspiring to be, you know, kind of our age and just be like, I'm going to learn this new thing. Like, well, how do you do it? You just fearlessly do it. And then the first time you're going to be terrible at it, the next time you're going to be slightly less terrible at it. And then, you know, you move forward.

So brave, right? She was telling me that she did it in New York. She's a Brit. She came to New York and she found a place to do like an open mic thing. She's like, I'm standing on the stage and like the lights are so bright I can't even see anyone in the audience. So I'm just trying to listen to see if anyone's laughing. I'm like, oh my god, it's one of the bravest things I've ever heard. I mean, going to stand up and trying and no one's laughing, you have to have some steel nerves there.

I mean, I love that he tied it back to the project that we're here to talk about, right? Because, you know, I think people had it right. It is about context. And I always said, you know, there's, you know, your music is never without context, for example. And my favorite thing to do when somebody sends me a new song or an album is to ask ChatBT to write me the three-page Mojo article about it because I don't just want to hear the song, I want to know the context of it. Like, where, who are these people? Where did it come from? And so like what you're doing, I mean, first of all, there's like the global context of your project. You're like, I'm going to do this for a year. I'm going to take a year of my life and I'm going to do this. And it's like, sure, it's fun to go around the world, but I know like it's also traveling is a nightmare and logistically, you know, you had to like really commit to this project. And that makes like the project itself has a context. And then you've got the context of each of the days and the way that you've broken them up and you've presented something and then you've written something personal that goes with each page. And then you have these, you know, you have these podcasts or Twitter Spaces, you know, where you discuss them. So it's that same thing, like that's why I mentioned the people thing earlier because, you know, it's like artists are very well, historically, you know, artists are very seldom, you know, appreciated in their own lifetimes. Well, why is that? Because it takes a long time to get that context created and it's, you know, it might be somebody who comes after you, but, you know, one thing that you can do as an artist, and you're doing it, and like, you know, people's doing it, and a lot of artists do it. I mean, in a way, like movie stars and musicians kind of do it out of necessity because they're operating such in this like fast-moving cultural space that you have to create your own context because otherwise people look at it and we all like the great thing about art, the great thing about, you know, music is that, you know, you and I can hear the same song and it could mean something different, you know, to each of us, but there's still the context of, you know, the artist and where are they and how old are they and what is their background and who are the musicians and why did they come here, you know, like that adds to the richness. Um, you know, so I think, um, yeah, I think that, yeah, storytelling and context are probably synonymous and, you know, your project isn't the project without it, right?

Oh, man. I have no idea. I mean, I think that that's, and I don't know, Hedvig, if you have an idea better than mine, but I just think it's really personal because I, you know, A, it would be different for every artist and B, like even for every, I mean, I'm much more, I'm the guy that reads Mojo Magazine every month, so I care a ton about the context around music, much more than most people, I would say, you know. And so some people, they, you know, every time I'm in an Uber, I'm like, they can hear the music too, right? Like that's the other end of the spectrum where they obviously don't care anything about the context and the music is just kind of background noise often. So like there are both kinds of people. I'm just not one of those people. But I also, you know, when I worked with artists in the music space, like we had a company called Topspin and we worked with artists directly all the time and we worked with some artists who were all about like really having that close connection to their fans. You know, Amanda Palmer comes to mind as sort of like the ultimate example of that where she was like, you know, almost had a personal relationship with her fans and other artists were just like, that's not me. I don't want to have that. You know, like, and a lot of, you know, many artists, like part of their appeal is their mystery and you don't really know, you know, who they are, what they're about. So I definitely don't think there's a right answer here. If there is, it's just about kind of being like true to yourself and who you are. Because best we...

I mean, it was Marshall McLuhan who said the medium is the message. And I think that proves true through the ages. But I also think that, like, you know, what I learned at working at LVMH is that, you know, the more time we spend, you know, on these devices, the more premium in person becomes. And I think similarly, the more that it becomes, you know, trivial to create an image or to create, you know, written word, the more valuable something that was, you know, created, you know, by hand. You know, I again, I said this, I've said this on a couple, on Rick Rubin's podcast recently, but also on Peter McCormick's podcast, that this quote from Bob Pittman from the eighties about MTV, where, you know, the reason they had VJs was because Pittman had this realization: people don't fall in love with robots, they fall in love with people. And I really encourage, like, listening to Bob Pittman, he was on Rick Rubin's podcast this summer because he tells these great stories about radio and why radio is different and why all advertising is not created equal. Because, you know, I think that it really, like, you know, who depends on the consumer, of course. But there will, I think that there will always be people who really appreciate, you know, kind of slow food in whatever format that comes in. You know, Hedvig's an amazing cook and, like, one of the ways that, like, she shows love is by cooking for you. And so she doesn't have to cook, could easily order, but...

You know, like that exactly. But like that for her wouldn't be, and I think it's appreciated on the other side too. You know, it's just calories at the end of the day, right? No, it's not like the act that went into creating it is also important, right? So if the robot ordered the dinner and the dinner appears, that's not the same as, you know, Hedvig spent the time thinking about it, gathering the ingredients, going into the kitchen, you know, making it, presenting it, and then finally, usually like an hour later than she intended, and you've been sitting at the table for twenty minutes before she finally sits down. But, you know, you then appreciate it more because you know how much she put into it. And I think that's true with everything. And I'm just using that as a very simple and obvious example, but I think if it comes to art, it comes to music, you know? I mean, look, we've had incredible technology to make records forever, but like, listen to the way Rick recorded, you know, Johnny Cash. Couldn't be simpler. Listen to Willie Nelson's Spirit. Listen to Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. Like, it couldn't be more stripped down. And there's like nothing that technology could do to make it better. And there's nothing that technology could do to take away its beauty. Like we're human beings and we therefore connect with it. And I think everybody has their version of that.

You know what I think of is that look back at the story of the way that Led Zeppelin was originally presented to the world. Their management was super careful to not show their photos. I don't remember for how long. Somebody should look this up and fact check it for me. But like, you know, part of the draw of Led Zeppelin in the early days was the mystery. And so, yeah, I think that that's definitely, like I said, for some artists, I think that really works. Like being elusive helps. Look at Sade. Come on, let's talk about Sade. I mean, you know, like she breaks every rule, every rule of what you're supposed to do with social media. Sade does exactly zero of them. And if Sade put on sale thirty nights at the O2 today, she would sell out every single one of them. You know, I think the probably step one is be extraordinary, you know. I mean, because if you are, then, you know, everything else is kind of logistics.