One of the Many Matts
Urbit, Yves Klein, emergent panpsychism, all things Japan
Today’s guest is One of the Many Matts, an artist and engineer who’s been beeping boops in crypto since before you were born.
Stat sheet
💼 Occupation: Technological Hijink Artist / Modern Mage
🏠 Neighborhood: As Close to the Park as Possible
🌎 Origin: Cajun Backwaters (the suburbs of Louisiana)
💪 Notable work: Digitally Rare, has NFT chip embedded in hand, Aleatoric.art, OpenZeppelin contributor, Counters.sol Maximalist
🪜 Socials: Twitter, Personal site
So how’d you end up here, doing this interview?
Who knows at this point, but Kevin and I met through some combination of NFT twitter + Brooklyn crypto scene, right? I’m an incorrigible yes-person for anyone doing something new (that spark of motivation feels like the scarcest resource in the world sometimes), so when Kevin asked for an interview of course I was in.
Let’s check in with where your head is at right now. What tabs do you currently have open on your phone?
My phone is at 0 tabs thanks to a recent cleansing, so here’s a collection of recent phone tabs that had lived there for months + some current long-lived desktop tabs:
A nice hat with a band made of mushroom leather, as part of an older rabbithole on synthetic biology and MycoWorks.
The latest ZachXBT thread on the SIM-swapper from the last few weeks.
The Compound III docs 👀
v0.dev from Vercel, an AI UI-generation tool that I’m procrastinating on trying out
The Ikon Pass pricing page has been on my computer for weeks now, waiting for me to make a decision.
This jargon-studded profile of a trucker.
My Urbit ship, ~littel-fodrex, is a pinned tab, as well as
WaniKani, a Kanji-optimized flashcarding tool
I’ve been meaning to check out The Art of Visual Design, which I hope flips a visual design switch in my head.
The beta version of Are.na, accessible to subscribers — it’s so fast, so good
How about the Platonic form of Matt—what people, places, or activities make you feel most yourself?
The past era was one of Urban Maximalism: I was walkability-score-core and entirely transit-pilled. I’ve learned over the last few years an enjoyment for quietude, simplicity, and reduced entropy, which means not NYC and more capital-N-Nature. For a specific place: the Shimanami Kaido—a bike route over a cluster of islands between Honshu and Shikoku in Japan—is a happy place, along with anywhere I can snowboard, surf, or trail bike.
What do you do in your spare time?
Besides the predictable ‘side projects of the tech and/or art variety’: I’ve been reading with a fixation on stories like ‘Into Thin Air’, ‘Endurance’, and ‘The Perfect Storm’. Plus recent historical accounts like ‘Kill Devil Hill’ about the Wright Brothers and ‘Empires of the Sky’ about the rise and fall of the Zeppelin.
Of physical activities I prefer the sort that engages the mind as well, so I try to (kite)surf, trail bike, snowboard, etc, whenever it’s accessible. The best days start with 6 hours of powder snowboarding.
What makes you forget about checking your phone?
Anything flow-state-y (see: coding, reading, those physical activities), but I feel that it’s kind of a hack: stimulation maximalism doesn’t necessarily improve my ability to resist the unconscious pull by default. It’s a work in progress.
Wind it back. What’s your favorite memory from the past year?
Who could choose?
Late into the winter season jumping a crevasse in the snow, making it out alive, and speeding through well-remembered tree fields on the last run of my season. What a rush.
Somewhat similarly: We’ve Lost Dancing at 6am (editor’s note: ❤️🔥).
Now fast forward. What are you most looking forward to in the next month?
I’ll soon be doing a week-long hike along a portion of the Kumano Kodo pilgrimage route as a bit of meditation practice, and hope to feel the frequency of my brain ratchet down as I spend most of the day walking from town to town. It’s also a chance to see if I enjoy the idea of a thru-hike, in preparation for something like the PCT.
I’m in Japan primarily for Doge Day, Kabosu’s (yes, the Doge) 18th birthday and unveiling of a bronze statue in her favorite park. It’ll be weird and joyful and I can’t wait.
Time to get weird. What’s the weirdest thing you believe?
Consciousness is an echo of any dynamic system, all dynamic systems are ‘conscious’ (in that there ‘is a thing that it feels like to be that thing’) but to a spectrum of degree. Emergent panpsychism or something idk.
Back to normie questions. What’s your dream job?
I think I speak for the rest of us when I say I don’t want to have to work, but I want to want to work towards something. So my ideal job is, perhaps selfishly, doing whatever makes sense to me at the moment, and getting paid about it.
What work of yours are you most proud of?
In general, I’m proud of all of the work I did in the early days of NFTs, between the Digitally Rare podcast and my work as maintainer of OpenZeppelin while ERC721 was designed, coded, audited, and merged, as well my small part in drafting EIP1271. We must also mention the legacy of Counters.sol, of course, bane of all optimizooors. RIP 2018-2023.
From an artistic perspective I’m proud of Aleatoric: it embraces so many of our modern topics—namely NFTs and AI—and our favorite questions, especially around our modern sense of authorship.
I’m also proud of having accidentally been the node by which a few mutual friends have found each other for collaborations—my legacy will perhaps be in enabling others.
What are two goals, one personal and one professional, that you have for the next year? For your lifetime?
Personally; next up is finding a place to call home after a decade of wandering, in one form or another. Not all who wander are lost, but sometimes it can feel that way.
Professionally; who knows! For now I’ll just go along, sense what motivates me, and observe which doors open and close.
Last few questions, focused on mapping your socio-creative world. Who are your creative inspirations?
Though, I’ve not been someone to have a specific hero or icon I’m looking up to for inspiration, beyond whomever is related to what I’m interested in at the moment: it was Neal Cassady, it was Wilbur Wright, it was Ferdinand von Zeppelin, recently it’s Shackleton—anyone could be next.
How about among people you know or are friends with?
My good friend and former co-founder AJ is an incredible designer who maintains, from my perspective, an unending well of motivation, tenacity, and positive vibes in any situation. I suspect I’ll be a student of his version of life for a long time now.
Similarly, in the sense that ease involves a graceful reception and response to life’s inputs, I admire friends like Zencephalon, Cyril, Aleeza, Ayako, and Waj, who seem to me to surf the infinite sea of vibes with ease and grace.
What creative scenes or movements are you most excited about right now?
Off the top of my head: Urbit, Cabin, USB Club.
If you could have a sleepover with anyone in the world, who would it be?
Honestly I bet Dr. Huberman would be an ideal sleepover companion.
Send the last pic in your camera roll, no context.
Wow! Okay, who should we have on next?
Aleeza would find this fun, perhaps. Zencephalon is NYC-crypto as well, though not necessarily in the ‘scene’.
Matt’s List
Five recs for right now
🎧 These responses were written under the influence of: Casiopea, T-Square, and Masayoshi Takanaka.
📚 Endurance by Alfred Lansing.
🎨 I can’t not say Yves Klein.
🧢 Acronym lmao…But actually: Outlier.
🥖 I highly recommend sourdough baking: turns out that you can make bread as good as anything you’d find in a store/bakery, and it wasn’t nearly as difficult as the internet suggested it might be. I may have gotten lucky with my starter and the fact that baking and programmer-brain go together well, but idk it feels like a major hack to walk out of the grocery store with flour and have everything you need to make extremely dank bread.
Want more? Go follow Matt at the links above. To collect Matt’s trading card, find him IRL and ask to scan. Scan the chip embedded in his hand too while you’re at it.