9: Jacob Horne - Markets for What Matters

Welcome to Dialectic Episode 9. Jacob Horn is co-founder and CEO of Zora, a platform that allows you to tokenize media. I don't know many people who are more energizing to spend time with than Jacob. He is so generative and full of ideas and is eloquent in explaining even the most esoteric of them. Jacob started his career at Coinbase when he was effectively plucked off of Twitter and flew across the world from Australia to join them. And he spent several years there, including on a small team that started USDC, the stable coin. But he's really spent most of his career in the last five years working on Zora. Jacob is somebody who is ultimately excited about and focused on how people coordinate. For him, that means an obsession with the internet, with memes, and with currency and tokens. For all of the people in the world who give crypto a bad rap, for being short-term, uninspired, and purely transactional. Jacob is the complete other end of the spectrum. This is a conversation that I think gets into some profoundly important ideas as we have over the last 15, 20 years, and certainly into the future, move from a world where information was scarce to a world where it is not only abundant, but effectively infinite. And in that world, we have to radically... rethink how we think about information. There's a core idea in this conversation that ties back to a Stuart Brand quote where he says, information wants to be free, but also expensive. And you'll see how Jacob interrogates this idea around the internet and cryptocurrencies and tokens and content in markets and describes a world of future where we actually might want markets around attention and around content. If you're skeptical, I'd encourage you to come in with an open mind. If you're curious, I think Jacob will inspire and challenge you. This is a conversation that is heavy on many elements of crypto. And so as I've done in the past, I'll make a note in the timestamps in the description that allow you to skip over the hour that is heaviest on those parts. The beginning, I think, is still quite important as Jacob describes those core ideas around why he's so interested in memes and coordination.

and why markets might actually be a really good way to think about information in the future. And then afterwards, you can tune back in if you did skip, as Jacob talks about his history at Coinbase, and then we zoom even further out, and the conversation really just puts on display why he's such a fascinating guy. With that, I hope you enjoy the conversation with Jacob. Here we are. All right, we made it. I'm very excited for this. I also have to say up front, you are at least a... component of my inspiration to do this and how I've approached it. So I'm appreciative of you. And I don't think there are very many people who I have more generative conversations with or have had over the years. So I'm quite excited for the rest of the world to get a piece of that. I want to start with something that I think you clearly seem to be obsessed with, which is symbols. Put another way, memes. And there are a few components of this. Obviously, I think, and we can talk about it too, that you're interested in language and naming things and coining phrases and titles and things like that. But the heart of it to me seems to be the image or the symbol. And so my first question is, what is a meme? Why do you love memes? And why are they valuable? Straight to the fundamentals. I love it. What is a meme? It's a shared idea or it's an idea that is going to spread. To me, memes are obviously, there's like a million different ways you can come at this. It's like, yeah, it's the image that you're going to share with your friend or that's going viral on Twitter. It's a large idea that maybe an industry or a group of people organize around. And at an even higher level, it's like, yeah, there are kind of like large visions or shelling points or these kind of things that you can organize around. why am i obsessed with them is i don't know exactly uh my journey yeah i guess uh i think memes are actually related to this thing that i've been the idea i've been like chasing for like i guess like the better part of 10 years from now like 10 years now is um how do you organize and get people to work together um and that was actually my way into

crypto interestingly like i kind of came across bitcoin and i thought it was cool but the big idea for me was actually like how do you create a cryptocurrency for anything how can i like you know i was in sydney on my laptop just you know vibe me out on the internet it was like how can i do all these big crazy ideas i have in my mind with anyone in the world because i can't find them here with me in sydney right right um and memes are kind of that which is just like it their most fundamental it's just like oh cool like this is funny picture But at their higher level, it's like, oh, like we have this shared idea that we want to work towards. And it's both in our mind and in many people's mind. Then like, yeah, what is that thing? And how do you put them forward? How do you make them? How do you spread them? How do you own them? How do you change them and everything that comes with it? And obviously, I think we have a kind of last 20 years idea in our head of capital on meme growing from the kind of early. block text, 4chan thing to stuff now. But I think one of the things that you've articulated well is the cross is an incredible, powerful meme. The American flag is an incredibly powerful meme. You have this, one of my favorite, I guess, memes you've created is this like atom diagram where the center of the image or the center of the overlapping circles is the meme. And there are all these ideas on the perimeter. And you could... Literally, like one of the more interesting ideas you've ever shared is this, like if you put the American flag at the center of that overlapping circles, the truest or almost like the most American thing is the flag. On the perimeter, you could have liberty and you could have freedom and you could have different versions of what. being American memes. Yeah. American dream, like all the surrounding memes and ideas and around it and symbols. So it's like, Oh, you need your house. So it's like, um, right. I'm in the free land of the brave. Like every cultural tenant is actually anchoring around that single. Yes. It almost distills into the image of the symbol. Yes, exactly. Yeah. I think it's a helpful way to realize too, that this isn't a new thing. Like we've had memes forever. Obviously we, we were, we're calling it something in the internet native form, but in fact, like these things are the,

Maybe the true shelling point for movements, for maybe even religions, these types of things. Yeah, exactly. And it's actually funny. That image came from me thinking about memes in the terms of competition and companies. Okay. Which I was just like, oh, you build a product or a business around an idea, and then you have a lot of other companies who are also competing around that idea. And the aha, which was like... in some sense your competitors are closer to collaborators than they are true competitors because they're just trying to achieve the same thing from a different angle yes or with a different group of people or with their own like ownership incentives around right right but it's like actually like you're closer to them than they than you are anyone else that's doing the same thing so i was just like uh yeah and then i and then The follow on thought from that was like, oh, actually, like VCs are an interesting meme ownership vehicle because they are able to let you get exposure to multiple different competitors towards a meme. Right. So it's like I am a venture capital firm that's organizing around a particular industry or whatever. But like they're really just higher level memes. And then that has its own coordination and stuff around it. Yeah, it means all the way up and down. Yeah, it's interesting that in our current system, obviously this maybe gets to where the world could go with crypto. And one of the reasons you and I have been excited about it is in the current capital market structure and LLC or C Corp or whatever. To build a company, you are by definition sort of like not higher on that ladder of abstraction. You're definitionally choosing a horse. To your point, it's very classic for a public market investor to say, I'm going to have a basket of horses in this category because I believe in the thing. It begs the question, of course, could we have different ways for people to work towards a shared vision mission meme? Exactly. There's a bullet point on this that I don't know if you explained it to me or maybe someone, maybe Alex saying that he had heard from you, which is this.

This idea of the meme and the memo that I believe you got from Balaji's turn of us and while at Coinbase, do you want to talk? And that obviously combines what we were talking about with the language and naming piece of it. Do you want to talk about that? Yeah, meme and memo is something that Balaji taught me at Coinbase. He was my manager there for a year, which was insane. And I got like a first class experience or front row seat in what it looks like to coordinate an increasingly large number of people to get things done. So I was like, I can't remember exactly how large Coinbase was when biology joined. It might have been 200 or 300, but it was big enough where coordinating was a challenge. And I remember him saying, it's like, if you want to get anything done, you have to have like, usually people would say you have to write it in a like crisp doc. You got a good document and you go from that. Right. But he was very adamant that the title, the meme was the most important. like aspect of that almost start with it because your your like idea or goal is not going to travel if the meme for the thing is not strong enough right so even in a 200 person group let alone on the internet yeah exactly so like i i was already in a very good habit of writing my thoughts into docs and like here's what i think we should do and articulating it and then his level up and his kind of push was like yeah now what's the meme that goes with this what's the one sentence that when people are talking about this in a meeting or in a room or to like another colleague or whatever that is just going to like communicate the whole thing in a second totally that will 10x its ability to um get done basically and in some sense you've you've taken that maybe even a step further and coined new words or new language do you embody this idea in the past yeah i would yes exactly which is just like okay like when zora is building something that is like net new on some dimension or is trying to capture some broader idea you don't want to give like a word salad or even something that sounds like particularly heady and it's just a lot easier to try and come up with a new word that may sound weird at first glance or whatever but if it gets enough traction then you've got you've suddenly got a whole new ball game to like work with which is a lot of fun and the hit rate's quite like it i've tried it a lot and like the hit rate's pretty low but when it works it's like oh shit okay

That actually worked really well, and now the cognitive load of explaining what you're doing goes down quite a lot. Yes. Yes. Yeah, we don't think often enough about language as prompting other people. Like, literally, I'm going to tap into your brain and program something. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I kind of love, like, three fundamental questions I love asking is, like, where do words come from? Where does money come from? And where do laws come from? And then it's like a good thought train to work upstream into like, okay, well, what is actually required to change or modify any of those things? And the words ones are really fun. Yes. Well, and those are three things that I think by definition, most people assume are fixed. Exactly. Words, ironically, because obviously words are changing in front of us all the time. But I think people don't take agency over those things. Usually they treat them as the sort of like rules of. law, no pun intended, like the rule, the, the, the sort of, um, nature of the world that you can operate within. Yeah. You're, you clearly love poking. And maybe that's what's inside the meme thing is memes allow you to traverse through those. Well, each one of those three things are memes on different levels. If you really want to look at it, it's like, yeah, but words, money and laws, they all require some sense of shared vision and understanding and coordination to, to actualize them. Right. That's very cool. Okay. Well, we'll talk more about some of the meme and memo type, um, ideas you presented in the past. Before we leave memes, do you, maybe two questions. One, I'm curious specifically about the midwit meme and why you think it's so, it's clearly a meme that you enjoy, I enjoy. I think it's one of the best memes of the last 10 to 20 years. And then do you have other or an other favorite meme? Yeah, great question. I love the midwit meme because it's mostly a vaccine for myself to stop thinking too much. I have a tendency to extrapolate too far or go to big extremes or constructing worlds or potential scenarios or products that might not exist. I can just look at that image to remind myself to just think way, way, way less.

It's ostensibly the most dumb version of the thing, which is the most simple version, which is probably more correct. Yes. Yeah. You're better off moving left on that graph than trying to move right. Yeah, exactly. The easiest way to be gigabrain is to be smooth-brained. And I think that meme resonates so much with me because I can be the midwit very often. Yep. So it's like a nice mirror to just be like, no, chill out and stop thinking here. Well, there's something inside that, too. I noticed in myself and in lots of other people this tendency to, like, anytime you read anything criticizing the world or people or some group of people or noticing some sort of issue. I was reading this Derek Thompson piece on Loneliness recently. The default that everyone has is, like, I know so many people who need to read this. And I've been trying to get better, like, when I have that. feeling in my body to immediately like rubber band it back to like oh wait why am i skipping over myself and i think the midwit meme is one of the best possible version of this which is that most people do not use that meme or do not think about that meme in the way you just described they think about it is like let me show why i'm it's a dunk or whatever exception right right and in fact by definition it's a bell curve most of us are the midwit yes you're better off starting that place yes definitely so i would say that my ability to think about um strategy or most decisions day to day like i will be like am i am i in the middle of the curve right now or not and it's like if i was to be on the left side and just really simple and as dumb as i possibly can or i like to say like what's the one iq thing to do here and i would say like um overall improvements in outcomes since since channeling more of that energy that's awesome yeah okay and then any other memes or a favorite meme two like two ones that i i really like there's this pepe sunrise one which is just like okay it's it's more of an emerging meme i think but it's like there's this pepe he's kind of like uh looking over a hill the sunrise is coming up and it's like really beautiful and it's just like new eras kind of ahead cool like i really like that one uh just vibes wise just vibes wise i'm just like what an image uh and then sometimes it's that simple maybe more often it should be that simple yeah i think so and then

I mean, I should just go through my screenshots. I've got infinite. I like the one on the bus where it's like, which side of the window are you looking at? What's your energy? I think that's great. Banger. Yeah, they're probably the main ones. The main two, yeah. All right. Let's talk about what you've spent most of your last at least half decade, if not longer, on professionally. We talked about memes. What makes information, and specifically content, art, media, intrinsically valuable? Or is it intrinsically valuable? What makes it intrinsically valuable? Wow, that's a really big question. Or why should we even think about, assuming it's just a way to convey information, why should we think about the objects themselves as valuable? Yeah, good question. I think my one IQ answer here is because it's useful and it provides utility. Like the right piece of information will... like uh can change your life at the right point in time yeah a piece of information or yeah it's like you could have something that's like a piece of knowledge and it's like having that knowledge allows you to do better things or you know get get more value yourself in a different way and then if you have like uh pure utilitarian information on one side of the spectrum and then pure vibe based art on the other end of the spectrum um yeah feeling something and the emotions as well like that that is um i guess it's a form of knowledge and experience as well so if that's going to help you navigate the world better then that is intrinsically useful to you on some dimension right that'd be like my immediate answer into like why is it valuable and then i guess the other side is like why would we want it to be valuable yeah it's because there's high there's a high cost to produce valuable information or there is labor required to discover it or construct it or distribute it do you think that cost is increasing or decreasing um well with ai probably decreasing but then um it causes an increase on the other end because now you have to sort through right and an increasingly vast ocean of information right and even on maybe even on the creation end

There is still a high cost. It's a different type of cost. Yes. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So the rate, the type of information being produced is probably going to change dramatically because now, you know, more people can produce images that look like, you know, something that would have required a lot of skill five, 10 years ago. Right. Or write, you know, a sequence of words that maybe you didn't have available to you beforehand. But yeah, the cognitive load of that and the work required to be like, well. of all the information that exists or like what i'm trying to say which one is still the best of now the 10 options i have instead of the two yes um so there's still there's still the amount of um it's kind of famous uh cyclist quote which is like it never gets easier only faster so it's like the amount of exhaustion is probably the same but the output is increasing yes um totally so maybe that cost is the same So, yeah, that would be like why information probably inherently has some value and then also why we would want it to have some value because there is a cost associated with it. And then there is a benefit to knowing it or sharing it as well. Yes. Yeah. And maybe the big idea there is that it scales even into a theoretical and infinite amount of content. Yes. I like the first thing you said, too. about even like the object so much as it is a prompt for an experience and i think like that is a really rich way to think about all information and why it to your point it should should have so much value digging in a little for as long as i've known you you have been enamored with at least what you've called in the past this idea of crypto media and maybe our language has changed around it but this notion that basically The Internet should have its own value system for information and content. And more specifically, I think you've been convinced that Ethereum is a network that should have content on it or that it needs content. And again, I'm sure that's evolved. But in some sense, something like that seems to be the defining thesis of Zora. What is Zora? Yeah, great question. Zora is a product that makes it very easy to tokenize media.

So you can tokenize a picture, a video, a song, a podcast, whatever piece of content you may have. We make it as easy as possible for people to bring that on chain and then form a market on it. So on the supply side, we have creators who basically produce their content. They tokenize it. And then on the demand side, we have a group of collectors and traders who want to buy and sell that content. The core problem that we're getting at is that We think that crypto can lead to way better economics for creators, like what they're producing, but then also solves a fundamental problem of the internet, which is information wants to be free, but it also wants to be expensive. we think we're able to solve that tension by using crypto as the value system. It also wants to be what? Expensive. Expensive. Yeah, so Stuart Brand has this favorite. You have another version of that quote, which is information wants to be free, but it also wants to be valuable. That's an interesting tweak. So expensive is the original Stuart Brand quote. So Stuart Brand, everyone knows information wants to be free. But there is a second half of that quote, which is information also wants to be expensive. And that tension will not go away. So when I describe it in the context of Zora, it's like, yeah, information is valuable. It wants to be valuable. And the way that we've been able to capture that value up until this point is you kind of construct a wall out of ads or a paywall or some type of subscription or whatever. And that kind of speaks to the tension because it's like you're simultaneously trying to constrain that information within a platform. But obviously that information wants to flow as freely as it can. and spread as fast as fighting gravity in some exactly so you're fighting gravity versus um with crypto it inverts that which is if you put that um piece of content on chain it's publicly accessible to everyone including you know any other developer or platform that wants to access it like it will spread and far as wide as it can because there's no there's no api around it there's no gate um and then the value system is quite different

Because now you allow a market to form around the attention on that piece of content. And then there's also like a patronage aspect to it as well, where there's like a status game where people, they want to be seen as a large collector of a thing. And you have both of those two things kind of leaning into a market that prices it and then leads to more value capture for the creator. And then, you know, the people on the collector side too. I think people probably have different varying degrees of familiarity with. the word cloud you just said yes and for a lot of people also like the sirens go off when they hear the word token or they hear the word nft or things like that you didn't even use the word nft yep um there's a specific idea that i think is like running through all of this that i want to interrogate more deeply which is prominence um and so i think at a very basic level talked about this briefly Around the fighting gravity point, IP and copyright and access and ownership of information or media, I should say, sort of fundamentally breaks down or at least gets fuzzy in a in digital space. Yeah. And to your point, information wants to be free. We tried a whole bunch of permutations of trying to get access to information from buying a song for a dollar to paywalls and ads and all these different types of things. Yeah. And. I think AI obviously is only going to accelerate this. Like you're going to have so much more content. You're going to have content based on derivative works. Like how do you manage this? And so if we're going to live in this world where AI is, or excuse me, where content is abundant, if not probably at some point infinite, like literally infinite, you can create an image with an imagination in one second with natural language. Like maybe all content is just like feeding a hive mind. And so it's like really, really hard to apply this traditional. scarcity model to the way the world is going. Um, the only remaining scarcity is your time and attention. And so you have this like really complicated idea. And to me, at least the through line seems to be this, this idea of provenance. Um, there, there are two ideas from you that I want to read quickly that I think explain pieces of this and an alternative to you. First you say,

Crypto is an alternative IP system in the same way it is an alternative financial system. This means we will see venture scale returns on the units of content, information, and ideas themselves without the need for a corporate structure to capture that value. It will, by and large, make all IP publicly available and remixable by anyone. So you're getting at some of that. Non-scarcity piece, you're getting at some of the cost piece. And then maybe more simply, you have another line where you say a painting is part the work itself and part the provenance and moment it was created, in quotes, aura. At least some of the value of the work is derived from the moment it was a part of. And so it's loaded, it's confusing. Maybe provenance isn't even a useful word sometimes for a lot of people. I'm curious for you to try to describe what it is and why leaving a trail of provenance. in this digital future of abundance and particularly AI, like why, why it actually matters? Yeah. Easy questions. Yeah. That's, it is a big question. That's not usually how I come at provenance in the context of tokenizing things. Okay. Yeah. So I, provenance. Yeah. So that was a lot of like Walter Benjamin. Uh, I was like citing them, which is just like, yeah, wait for a given piece of information. You have the information itself. You have the creator of that information and then you have the context in which all of that exists in. And if you were to just take the and all three of those things are actually like kind of helpful to triangulate. Like, why should I care about it? Why does this information exist? Why was it produced? How should I think about it? How do I relate it to all other pieces of information? Right. So then they're really valuable and important signals to help you understand like. Just fundamentally, should I be paying attention to this thing at all? Right. So I come at it from more of the market sense, which is just like, what's the amount of, what do you need to put forward such that the market can make an assessment of like, should we value this or not? One example is the Mona Lisa is in the public domain. Right. Anyone can reproduce that image and remix it, which means it's like the, if I shared the Mona Lisa image on like Twitter, for example, it's like, well,

Yes, that image and that comes with a lot of weight inherently in and of itself because it's so widely known and seen. But the context of what's come from Jacob and it's just shared on Twitter, what's happening here? Was Jacob the creator of it? Clearly not. It's just helping me triangulate, should I be paying attention to this? Right. And why that's important in the context of tokenizing it is... And then, you know, meme coins are kind of the most raw form of this is that these are attention markets, which is like people. There's the side of this where you can come from the provenance and patronage side, which is I want to buy this because I want to support Jackson. And I want to make sure that he's getting value from this because I want to see him keep doing it. And that's like one pocket of demand. And is patronage very simply just like supporting a creator of information with it? out asking for anything yeah exactly it's just like i want to support them because i want to see them succeed and keep doing what they're doing i want to see more of this oftentimes we pair patronage with other things including markets or exactly yeah there is so it's like oh i'm gonna get this painting back and there's a speculative dimension to it which is like i believe in you long term and i think a lot more people are going to but there is it's like yeah you just want to see also a pure patronage exactly but then if you go more to the like speculative end of the spectrum It is more about this attention game, which is just like, where do I think this is at in terms of its distribution on the internet? Am I early in how viral this is or how widely shared it is, or am I late in it? And then based on that decision, you now have a financial market where you can express that opinion, which is just like, oh, I actually think I'm pretty early, and there's going to be more people behind me who are going to pay attention to this and express a similar point of view. So I'm going to buy this token. Why do we want markets for attention? Great question. Because I think we want markets for attention because I think that is the most open and transparent way to navigate like how to make sense of this information. So right now we default to algorithms that we have no sense about how they work. They're like an entire black box and they're dictating what we see.

and what we pay attention to. Which back to your point, maybe the most powerful idea of information being expensive is it is literally expensive in terms of time. Attention is not, it's zero sum. Yeah, it has a, yeah, your attention is like one of the most valuable things you've got. Right, right. So it is free, but it's also quite expensive to the extent I am not in control over what I am. Your brain's getting injected with brain rot, you might not want that. So markets are a way where you can have adversarial, it's an adversarial environment. where there's skin in the game and like, yes, you could try and manipulate it, but you're going to eventually like lose all your money or it's going to be extremely costly. Yep. So in a way that isn't so costly when you spam the Twitter algorithm. Exactly. So it's like you can only, you can only spam or comport or shift the market so much, you'll run out of capital if you're like not kind of aligning with what the market's agreeing with or valuing. I think having markets for information or every piece of content will increasingly be important to help us discern what information is most valuable or most important for people to see. Where is it at in terms of how widely distributed it is? And then more importantly, it's like, what is the difference between that value in the short term and long term? We're kind of seeing an insane mania right now with meme coins, which are very kind of... raw forms of attention markets where it's like yeah you can go from zero to a billion in a day but i'm more interested in like well what's the market cap of this thing going to be five years from now ten years from now most of them nothing well yeah and it's like i think it's it's the case that most of them should have non-zero value they just shouldn't be billions of dollars of value um so it's like the fact that you could have a picture that we can agree that the market is telling you is worth a hundred dollars is actually kind of an insane breakthrough The problem is, is everyone in crypto has brain damage. It's like, well, if it's not a billion dollars, that's nothing. But it's like, well, I'm saying that, well, if every tweet or picture or blog or essay was giving you, it's like, well, it's worth $1,000 right now or $100 or $10,000. Like that's actually extremely valuable signal that's going to tell you like, oh, okay, there's some consent. That's telling me something that I'm not getting otherwise.

And then in the context of AI, I guess it's like, yeah, that market signal is probably going to be extremely valuable as a training factor as well. But I think just for people, it's like, yeah, you've got a sea of information. It's like, why rely on a platform's black box algorithm for what you should look at? And then metrics like likes and retweets that can be gamed versus a market cap value and who's holding it. How much should Jackson spend on... you know buying x amount of this post or whatever like i think that's that's going to be increasingly important signal that uh helps us make sense of like what is real or not on the internet or what's what should we pay attention to or not on the yes yeah we we are currently in this maybe one one take on this movie that we're in this currently like immature version of the information age where it effectively for the last 20 years has been free to Shout something into the Internet and hijack other people's brains on the basis of somebody's arbitrary algorithm. And unless we develop a more explicit way for people to have skin in the game of what they're trying to share information wise, you're just going to have all noise and no signal. Like this is a way your your your your root argument in some sense is that markets are a way to actually. have no excuse me signal in a world of truly infinite content yes truly infinite content and adversarial it's just in an adversarial environment where people have different incentives and goals to spread different forms of misinformation right and what's great is that like for most people like to participate in this system you don't have to pay anything like you can you can you don't have to pay any money to create markets for these things or tokenize them you and then even to consume the content You don't have to pay anything either. So it's not like, oh, why am I going to have to pay to read every single thing? Like, that's not the case. What's happening, though, is like, well, if you want your thing to be distributed, yeah, there's now a new mechanism or a new algorithm called the market that is going to decide, like, how useful is that information? Do we think it's going to be more widely spread than it is right now or not? Right. And then on all different time horizons. What would you say to somebody who's sitting here being creative and it's just like, that sounds like.

a bunch of money coming like currently maybe this is naive maybe this isn't actually how the world works but the take would be currently we evaluate art information media on its merit and now you want this wall street guys to come in and decide what information is valuable on the basis of speculation and money like that seems to at least the instinct i think for a lot of people will be that just sounds like bad and contrived and worse Yeah. Do you have like an optimistic cut on that? Yeah, I think in the case where it's like only Wall Street is trading that, then yeah, that would be really bad and kind of boring. And also, I don't think it would be particularly efficient. I think what's happening here is that like maybe one of my, I think everyone has a little degen in them or some speculative capacity. And what's happening is that the scope or the universe of things that can be speculated on is massively expanding and meeting people where they're at. And this is kind of like a behavior you see on social media today. Like you're on TikTok comments. People will be like in before viral. Right, right. Or investing in. Or music in 2009. Yeah, investing in 100 likes. Totally. And I think if, I would bet that more, we would be surprised at the percentage of people who, if they could, you know, express their opinion on that particular thing financially, they actually would. Right. Like we had an interesting, one of the more eye-opening experiences at Zora was it was like a really diverse team. And Mudank was a surprising moment because I saw, you know, people on the team who like were kind of coming at, they were like working on the marketing team or like they're kind of, they're not that deep into crypto. They love the, the like kind of the art and the NFT side, but always straight away from just like the raw trading and speculative game. And then when they learned that it was like, wait, I've been following Mudank for like two to three weeks on TikTok. I was ahead of this. Yeah, I was ahead of all the crypto bros. And you're telling me they made billions of dollars on this like meme coin. Like, wait, what? I'm upstream of like all of this market activity.

or like i'm i'm upstream of this and then now now they're like oh wait like what is now what's happening on tiktok and like now seeing them become traders in a way that i never would have expected it's interesting because now they feel like they're like wait i i have a strong opinion here or i feel like i know i'm ahead of right some sense of the world so i think the more optimistic view is it's like i think uh every person probably has a unique point of view on something and is more like they're early on some curve or some niche or some interest that they have yep and now that now the market is meeting them it's like well yeah not only can you like capture some kind of social capital or benefit from that or saying you weren't able to say like you were early or i i liked this before anyone else maybe you bought like five dollars of the coin for this video that you really really loved um and it went viral five years later ten years later and maybe you've got thirty dollars or forty dollars now and yeah you can scale it up you could you buy one cent you could buy a million dollars like you get that level of granularity yep It's opening and expanding the amount of people who can participate in a market in the first place because it's aligning with their interests. Back to the idea of meeting people where they are, there are two components of this that I think are worth talking about. One is actually like these types of behaviors living natively in where we consume content, which is for people who are totally unfamiliar, what you built with Zora at this point is effectively like an Instagram-style feed where you're actually scrolling through content instead of liking your minting. Yeah, you're buying and selling. So part of that is actually removing the abstraction of going to some exchange somewhere and the hyper-financialized part of it. I think the other part that maybe, and that feels pretty inevitable, whether it happens on Zora or elsewhere, maybe the part that I'd be curious for you to talk a little bit more about would be, for most people, NFTs are like monkey pictures. There's 1,000 of them or 10,000 of them. That's not actually really where this stuff is today, but that was where it was at the peak.

And so you just described a world where you watch a video and you buy a cent of it or 10 cents of it or $10 of it. How do you think about this world where there are editions of a piece of media? Maybe there's one, maybe there's an infinite amount. In 2022, I think Zora, early 2023, Zora had this moment around what you called open editions. And Jack Butcher doing this thing where he actually said, I'm going to allow an infinite amount of people to mint this thing for. a period of time, um, this podcast, people can go mint and there's like something oxymoronic around it in some sense, which is I've said it, that it's free to mint or it costs like whatever, a dollar, a few dollars. It's open forever. I mean, it can be minted forever. Like what actually that, that might break people's brain in terms of the value of this stuff. Like, wait, shouldn't there be, there's one Mona Lisa. Yeah. Like how, how do you make sense of this world? Are we, or are we just headed toward a world where the idea of an NFT goes away and there's just basically like a open-ended token market on every piece of media. Yeah, more of that. Like in two days from now, we're kind of at that point. So it's like everything, instead of it being an NFT with this kind of multi-stage market process around it, everything's a coin. And it's just instantly tradable. So this podcast, Dialectic Episode 9 with Jacob, I can buy... anywhere between 0.0001 cents to infinite as much money as you want um almost like a prediction market or well this is this is getting to the attention market thing which is another way you could describe that is it is a prediction market on attention right and i think their uh their attention markets i think you can come out from the attention market aspect which is like you are purely just playing that prediction market game and it's a game of musical chairs that's like very open and transparent and everyone can see it And then I think the bet is that there is actually an information market here as well, which is like, yes, in the short term, you could be trading the swings on how much attention is being paid to it or not. But ultimately, the weight of that information is what will, you know, five years from now or 10 years from now. The weight, what do you mean the weight of that? Say with meme coins, for example, I've got a meme coin of like an image. And if I'm playing the attention game.

It is how much attention is this going to get in the next, like, day or two, right? You could play, you could have a longer-term time horizon, which is, like, you know, five years or ten years, but it's so frothy and there's a mania going on that it's all probably overvalued. But the information, the information aspect is, like, imagine it's a Mr. Beast video and, like, Mr. Beast is starting today. And it's one of his first videos. And it's like, this will probably still be getting attention. Like this podcast. Yeah, exactly. A thousand times as many videos. Yeah, 10 years from now, it's like, oh, this is, there are still people coming back to it. Not because it's just going viral in a particular moment in time. It's because it's actually got interesting information. You're talking about like digital durability. Yes, exactly. Durability. Like how durable is it? Which we don't really, I mean. One meta thing running through all this I can't help but think about as you talk is just like you want to imagine a world where like crypto's hyperbolic sine wave curve of everything starts to sort of smooth out. And one of the reasons it partially hasn't are obviously is crypto's immaturity. But the other is that. ignoring crypto or ignoring markets, we have an information environment that is extraordinarily obsessed with the current thing and basically everything else isn't very durable. Yes. And so part of this maybe is actually, or at least intertwined with this, is getting to a world where we have more things that are worth coming back to. Definitely. I also, I'm not sure if the sine wave behavior will ever go away. I don't think any of this hinges on that. Okay. I think... You see these manias where it's like some breakthrough model emerges and gets consensus. That model may be correct or not in the long term. It doesn't matter. It's like in that point in time, it's like that is kind of what everyone wants to participate in. Right. That's just how markets are. That's how markets are. But what usually happens is that you have outsized demand for a relatively low amount of supply. So like I would say in meme coins right now, there's huge outsized demand for meme coins. And even though there are tens of thousands of these things being created every single day, I don't think the amount of supply is actually keeping up with that demand. And there's also misunderstandings about what people are actually buying. I think most people are coming to these things going like, this is a new form of startup or company or project that I'm investing in and I'm expecting a creator or a group of people to work for it over time.

I don't know. I mean, that even is a little idealistic, maybe. Yeah. I think most people are probably just like, they feel like they're playing. It's like something like sports betting or casino. Yeah, exactly. And then the casino part. But I think what's actually happening is that like, well, the market will get increasingly granular. It'll go down to the most atomic unit, which I think is a piece of content. And that, yeah, we shouldn't be expecting tens of millions or billion dollar market caps. I think we should be seeing. sub $[redacted address] up to thousands. We'll get the full spectrum and we'll find a coin per piece of content. Literally anything you consume in 10 years, any video, song, gif, whatever, you could theoretically say, hey, what's the market on this? Yes. Which is kind of almost an amalgamation of people who consumed it right when it came out, people who have found it later. I know we're jumping around a little bit. People used to speculate a lot about there being sort of like equity in people or we've called it different things, creator tokens, social tokens. You've described a world where it's every piece of information not oriented around, I want to bet on Mr. Beast earlier. I want to bet on Taylor Swift early. Yeah, I think we will get to that, but it will require us getting what they're producing on chain first. So it's like, do I think you will be able to invest or speculate on a creator? in the future and crypto is going to be a huge part of it? Absolutely. Do I think it's like you can just yeet a token out there and then make some vague promises or there's no clear way of like, well, what is actually driving value back into it? There's been so many attempts at it currently. I don't think that's going to work. But it's like, well, if you imagine that every piece of content that they're now constructing or producing is on chain and we've got a market that's trading the attention or the information value of that piece of content. You can then start to bundle them or like you could create basically coins on top of that. Like it might get infinitely fractal, but I actually think that's like where it's going to go. And then you are now buying one of these coins, like a creator coin, knowing that it's going to be a function of the markets on everything that they've put on chain and will continue to put on chain. But that's abstracted and probably farther. We need a lot more. Yeah, I think like that's like five years from now, maybe we're there.

One of the things that maybe NFTs and the NFT wave also maybe confused people around is this notion that these are sort of objects that you're going to own because of maybe collectible value or because of some kind of utility that you're going to get from the person who created the thing. In some sense, people have tried to map something like Patreon or something like buying merch onto these ideas. And in fact, that could have been a... confusing false path because it those are ultimately schemorphic ideas and everything you're talking about is actually like really trying to imagine a world where just like information truly is free and like these existing value models from the physical world don't make sense because there's no distribution or if they exist in the physical world it's like the mona lisa model which is just like mona lisa is in the public domain we know where the original is it's in the louvre right and even though that ip is completely unrestricted and everyone can reproduce it and that that level of fame and distribution actually plays into the value we know that it accrues into that original and now with crypto we can have originals on the internet right um but zora's journey has been like in a sense finding a thousand ways not to tokenize a picture because we started with that very skew morphic model of like here is a one-of-one nft that's going to go up for an auction and that was like actually worked pretty well at the time because it was like well it's easy to understand right but in fact it was a bridge it was a it was i would say it was actually a really important bridge because i think that was closer to the truth which was people just they were collecting the image and then they were that opinion was informed by who the artist was of that like of that piece of art and they knew the game they were playing which is like this is like an art collection like i'm collecting it like it's art The market will probably be illiquid, but there is a market component to it. And there's also like the patronage side to it. The problem was is that, you know, selling one of ones on the Internet doesn't just doesn't scale. Like you've only got one person who can walk away as the owner. You may have had hundreds of people competing in that option. And then that's how we made the jump to then the open edition model, which was like one step more to the crypto native side, which is like, actually, it's the moment in time.

Like if you have all of these people who are coming to your auction to buy it, you should just let everyone buy it because the supply is arbitrary. Like there is no constraint. It comes back to fighting. So much of this is actually not fighting gravity. Exactly. Yeah. Which was like kind of counterintuitive at the time. But and then also people not thinking big enough where it's like, well, 20,000 people in the scheme of the Internet is still tiny. Right. So if you think one of one is rare. You know, 20,000 is actually still very rare in the scheme of the Internet. But what we found was is that the kind of the secondary market, you're kind of extrapolating this art model out is just so inefficient. So if you had like 20,000 editions that people are like holding in their wallet, there's no there's no kind of liquidity pool that you can trade on. So if someone was placing a bid to buy it, you needed one of those people to like check their phone. want to accept that price right and we've just found our way to make it more efficient it's like actually the most liquid and efficient market possible is the thing that's going to drive the success we know that there is some growing pocket of patronage driven demand and then also speculative demand and yeah getting as close to a liquid and open market is the important thing and that's how we've arrived at like it's just pure coins like every image is a cryptocurrency in a way I think a lot of the allergic reactions that people have come from one, I think capitalism just gets a bad rap on that front. And then if you go like, Hey, it's hyper capitalism, then it's like, okay, I just don't want that. And then two, I think people expect it to add a lot more friction into their current experience of the internet, which I think is actually a reasonable position to be coming from. But I don't think that's going to be the case. Like if you just want to be a read only participant and, or if like you're, posting and consuming information. I don't think there's going to be any additional cost or friction added there. And then three, it's just like, I don't know if we fully understand all of the benefits that will come from it, but I think there's like tiny little details that maybe help it make sense, which is like, okay, let's say that everything is a coin. It's like you have that one friend who's just always spamming you with like 50 reels or TikToks or whatever like that.

It's like, well, how does that dynamic change if for them to send anything that's going to capture attention, they have to send you a little bit of that coin for it to show up in your inbox or whatever like that. Just add tiny amounts of skin in the game too. Again, such a powerful idea is this comes back to the idea that information is expensive. It is expensive. From a time currency standpoint. Yes. And I think we just – we haven't maybe necessarily – because information used to be scarce and thus in some sense like not as expensive, we haven't fully evolved to adopt this view that actually our discipline over what we consume or what we give our attention to should be – rigorous and maybe it should there should be more cost associated with it yeah and then it could be the other way too like maybe a video is literally paying you in its own currency to watch it and there's a market like a like one way to come out of this is like should your phone be paying you roughly the amount of your salary or more for the amount of attention it's consuming from you and like if you have an open market for attention in this sense it's like oh well You know, my feed is actually different pieces of content competing and paying me for my attention as well. So it doesn't always have to be the I'm coming at this from the speculative side. It also means like you may be getting compensated in these new forms of value as well for participating. It also may never happen to like this could all be completely wrong. But the foundational idea is an important one, which is I think whether people like it or there's a little bit here of like seeing the world as it actually is. But there's also a world back to why markets for attention might be good is that. There are lots of people, I would argue, and granted I'm a capitalist, who benefit from speculation in the stock market, in the American equity market, who never participate in it. It is actually a regulatory invisible hand. You still need regulations. You need some of these things. And it's possible that in some future world, we may just use markets as a way to have a healthier information ecosystem. Yes.

Because right now, by the way, I think everyone's relationship with information, especially digital information, seems really bad. I think that's right. In the most optimistic case, it will change the incentives for the types of information produced in the first place. So it's like right now, the ad model incentivizes kind of hijacking attention and capturing it. And you don't actually have to convert that into anything else. And short-term thinking. Exactly. So it's like clickbait exists because all that website needs to do. is get you to click the link, but they don't actually have to deliver on anything. And you get no signal as to whether or not that you're getting baited or not. Yeah, it's like a penny stock. Exactly. And then the types of video, like Mr. Beast, I love his videos for what it's worth, but it's like those videos are kind of perfectly crafted to play by the rules of the YouTube algorithm. And he's like that content, if the algorithm was different. would look very different like it wouldn't be as successful or widely distributed right so can we actually change the rules of the game yeah exactly so it's like if now the way that producers of information and monetizing and what their business model is isn't just the fact that you won the attention you got them to look at it but the person has to think that that information is valuable enough that it's worth it's going to get more attention or that they think it's going to be durable or useful then maybe that creates the incentive to produce more durable and useful information right um to get rewarded and that would be like one of the more optimistic extrapolations of what this would unlock yeah yeah yeah you wrote a post once about why speculation could be good and positive some maybe relative to just gambling you want to talk about and we've talked about aspects of that through this whole conversation you want to talk about that a little bit yeah i think um people conflate speculation and gambling And I think that you can speculate on, you know, a football game, for example. You can also speculate on the stock market as well. Like you can come at this from a purely gambling, you know, in it for the game, like point of view. But speculation, I think, is fundamentally how you express an opinion and is how like you can take some agency over like what do you actually want to see happen in the world? So it's like it is an idea, but you're expressing it financially.

And you may be wrong and you may be right. So it's like venture, for example, is like speculation that leads to, in the average or the success case, like net better things for society. There was a speculation that the world doesn't have this right now. The world probably wants this or needs this in the future. That's going to take capital to happen. And then that speculative act led to the world. improve in many cases not only capital it's capital it's reputation it's everything it's time everything yeah so um and that's also by the way the market using greed as a way to actually hopefully make the world better yeah let's do that but exactly so it's like um i think when i wrote that that i opened it with like speculation is imagination with action right and cool and then yeah i think that Maybe millennials or the Zoomers to a lesser extent. I think we all have a bad relationship with speculation because the only way we've been able to speculate has been through either betting markets or the stock market. And it's like, well, the stock market, it's like, well, there's only so many companies in there that I don't understand. There's only so much upside that you can get from it. And I think what's happening with crypto is it's actually democratizing access to speculate on things, anything. But also showing that, for the most part, we're pretty immature in terms of how we do it. For sure. Yeah, exactly. I actually think we should be probably investing more in helping people get better at speculating so they're not wiping themselves out. And this may be idealistic and impossible. Do you have any ideas of seeds? Because the alternative view is actually like ban sports betting. People shouldn't be able to invest in private companies. Oh, I'm saying like sports betting, like that should probably go because it's not productive. Like one of the cuts I make is like, is this zero sum speculation or positive sum speculation? So it's like betting is zero sum. Like someone was a counterparty to you and they lost money. on that trade versus if I am investing in a company that is creating and generating wealth that wasn't there and there isn't a counterparty betting against you financially to help you realize that. How do you map that onto the information stuff? Why is that positive sum? Just to spell it out for people.

Yeah. Company creates value. It creates cash flows. It creates productivity growth, whatever. Yeah. So the case where the information market is positive some is that it's leading to the creation of information that is durable, useful to the people consuming it. Right. It's useful information to have for the world. And filtering, making it more likely that more people consume that useful information versus the incremental click. Yeah. It creates an incentive to spread that information as well. Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So in the short term, there's absolutely the zero sum game that's part of it, which is just like you're essentially gambling on like what is the attention going there and that's following it. But then there's the longer term like, yeah, is this information, where is it going to be five years from now, 10 years from now, one month from now, whatever time horizon. One other piece of this that you wrote about actually, I think first over a year ago, but obviously is especially relevant now, this idea that the market is the algorithm. One, I think, recent tweet, you said, one new thought is that I increasingly believe the primary reason AI will want training data on chain is not for ease of access, but the signal of the public market. Market data, market cap, volume holders, et cetera, becomes extremely valuable weighting factors. And you have a piece on, you called AI Plus, where you're basically talking about the world where so much of what we're saying, you're adding signal to information by way of market. I'm curious how you think about maybe this new amorphous but emergent creativity. You have training data and you have prompts. If we're really approaching infinite possible creation, it is actually about pulling what sort of like frame I stopped the infinite LLM on. That becomes creativity. There's some remix in there. There's different pieces. Obviously in crypto, people have explored generative art and art blocks and these different ideas. Can you talk a little bit about the way we might see markets and value coalesce with the infinite creation possibility of AI? It's a good question. When I originally wrote that, I was observing that we have a relatively high percentage of things that bought, sold, and traded on Zora actually AI produced, interestingly. Then we've seen a number of different teams and projects experiment in how much of

How much of what goes into AI can you bring on chain? The training data is obvious. It's relatively small to the scale of the internet, but there's millions of pieces of content on chain now. Instead of having to fight your way around the platforms like closed off website, now you can just go direct and access free. Something being on chain almost definitionally offers itself. It makes it trainable. Yes, exactly. Then it's like, well, okay, then the training data is on chain. Should we put the model on chain? And then the output unchanged. And then for a given piece of output, can you verify that it came from a model? And then you can verify that it came from this thing. And then where should we form markets around these? So you can start to decentralize and open it up. But I guess the original question of how will markets pair with AI creation? I think it's... I would imagine it's helping us pay attention. If there's this increasing amount of content that are being produced at increasingly high quality, then deferring to the market, one crude way is you could sort all content created today by market cap, and that's going to give you some proxy of what is worth paying attention to right now. I don't know how obvious it is in this conversation thus far. It's the extent it's not. despite someone who clearly, being someone who clearly believes in markets, you're also someone who like, I know for a fact, deeply, deeply values creativity and art specifically. Maybe as a more open-ended question, like how do you actually think we're going to, and there's so, I mean, I saw something on the Twitter timeline today about some protests of a bunch of artists about. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it's like, I think creative people feel. They feel, um, ignored. They feel, and then like, frankly, the, the two core enemies of the creative person today, at least nominally are like technologists and capitalists. Yep. And so in some ways, obviously AI is going to be this amazing tool and it allows us to make things faster. Maybe the right question would be, could you postulate on like where the,

persistent, scarce value in creativity will sit or how we'll make sense of creativity and value in creativity. Assuming that, again, anyone can do it. Anyone can rip out something out of mid-journey instantly. Maybe part of what's interesting there will be what information in the model they use or the algorithm they use is based on whatever. the markets that are embedded in content and we'll have a better idea of like how valuable something is. Um, but maybe we'll also get better at verifying like who, whose work contributed to that output in the first place. Cause if that's like, do you think that could actually really happen? I don't know. That feels like I would put like 5% confidence on that. Yeah. Cause right now it's just like every, every platform makes a fair use argument. They'll take all the training data they can from all these types of sources. And then, you know, um, no one who produced that training data gets paid um right or if they do it's like very minimal maybe there's a case where if you assume the entire pipeline of ai finds its way on chain it's all verifiable and then we know that this output would came from this model that was trained on this data and then you know maybe it's better better for model producers to be in this world because one They're able to expand the amount of training data they'll get, minimize the amount of lawsuits they'll get for copyright infringement and all that kind of stuff, maybe. But yeah, I'd put low confidence on that train of thought right now. I think where my mind's going for your question is, yes, it's the case that the barrier to entry is lowering, and that is true. But that typically means that the distribution of output, is going to get even more extreme so it's like yes i can go create an image uh in mid journey and i can like rip that out and like you know it looks kind of cool but how do i then compete against the person who's taken like 10 images on mid journey compose them run them through the like runway and has now produced like a short film with that and now has a score and it's just like i think the

yeah we'll just start to see like even more incredibly high quality content at the extreme end and like yes there's all of anyone can produce the slop on the bottom end but it doesn't right it's just like that's like me taking a photo of my breakfast and posting on instagram like anyone can do that and it's not particularly interesting and yeah maybe it's interesting 2011 but yeah exactly so it's like yeah there's some ob right now which is like oh cool you're producing like a great image that you weren't able to do but right as more people learn how to do that that's going to get less interesting and less valuable and more noisy yeah Yeah, there's, in my interview with Stefango, recently he talked about sort of just this, like, in some sense, like, the core dimension of anything creative is just, like, how much do you care? Yeah. And maybe one cut on why a creative person should be inspired and energized by this stuff is just that, like, if you really care and you're willing to care more than the incriminal person, like, yeah, maybe the skill you trained for a large period of time, like... has diminishing returns, although I think there will be human-made stuff too. The world is still, I think we have to bet or believe that the world is still going to be good at rewarding people who care more. Yes. And then I would say as well, it's like on the crypto side, while there is a lot of stigma and negative perception around crypto just generally, it's probably the case that if you have some audience or community or work that you're already producing, and sharing that on social media, that you will get non-zero value back from doing that in crypto. It's not going to be thousands of dollars or tens of thousands of dollars in most cases, but it will probably be non-zero, which is more dollars than you would have got from Instagram directly, for example. Crypto is a medium. If it does one thing really well, it unlocks unbounded upside potential on a lot more things. photo image or video, whatever you've produced by essentially turning it into a cryptocurrency. Now it's unlocking. It's not, I'm not saying that's going to happen, but the potential for it is there. And then it's as an, as a medium, it's just interesting to be able to hand out ownership and distribute ownership in that way. Like crypto does really well with airdrops, like maybe more people, you know, in 2021, it was like, you know, put your work on chain as an NFT and then you sell it. Maybe there should be more like, Oh my.

song is now a coin and i'm just going to give it away to all my fans in the same way i would do giveaways for t-shirts or whatever yeah it's like what does it look like to actually start putting that new form of ownership in people's hands and play around with it that way as we wrap up this part of the conversation if i were to reflect on this at a super kind of zoomed out level how do you if we we are moving to this world where we have markets around attention they seem at least the way we've talked about it seems somewhat unsophisticated in the way that they trend towards rewarding pop information rather than different levels of... A very simple analogy here would be the way we measure things determines how we value them. There's a great paper on this around Twitter by this guy, C.T. Nguyen, and he talks about this metaphor. If a teacher is in a classroom and they say something interesting and 29 students kind of like... Don't really care. And one student's face lights up. There's a lot of information resolution there. And the teacher can know actually like even though it was one out of 29, like that was really – the depth of meaning there was huge. Yep. When I send out a tweet and it gets six likes or it gets 300 likes, all I know is that six people liked it or 300 people liked it. It could have been that six people loved it and 300 people thought it was incrementally fine. Yeah. Do you think that markets are or at least will be able to – express the robustness of fandom and interest? That's where the one cent or a million dollars thing comes in, where it's like, okay, maybe you had six likes on that tweet, but imagine if the coin version would be like one person bought 20% of the supply. But isn't there a meta piece running against that, which is, I might have a million dollars of interest from a patronage standpoint, from a pure patronage standpoint, that also acknowledges this thing isn't going to be one day so huge. Like some of the most beloved musicians and successful musicians aren't the ones who are so popular. Taylor Swift, it's sort of like the everyone knows them, but no one loves you. Yeah. Maybe it's just an unsophisticated market where we are today. Yeah. It sounds like you're...

layering the scale of the outcome onto that, where it's just like, not everything is going to get multi-million dollar market caps, but maybe for like one person, it's like, oh, I've got, you know, 35 or, you know, a hundred people who care about this thing and they're holding, you know, maybe it's only worth, it's worth only $20 or something like that, but it's non-zero and that's still, it's like a $20 vinyl in their, their shelf or something like that. Yeah. At the very least markets don't discriminate. They are just a blank canvas. Yeah, exactly. And it might be really dope that you've got like, 30 people on the internet that are holding $20 worth of this thing. Or maybe it's not even worth anything. It's actually worth precisely zero, but you can still see that you've got 20 people who are holding on to X amount of the coins of the thing. We assume it fails if not everything is worth millions or hundreds of millions of dollars, where it's like actually, it's almost sacrilegious to say in crypto, but it's like, no, I think there's something fascinating and as close to non-zero as possible. And for a lot of these things, which is just like, yeah, maybe there are one cent or like micro cent values on for any of these coins, really. But that's actually still useful and interesting. And we could probably go like way, way lower than we ever thought. Right, right. But yeah, crypto kind of gives you brain damage in that sense where it's like, if it's not a billion dollars, then it didn't work. We talked about a little bit with the good speculation piece. Crypto, I think in today's world, maybe not in the last six months due to the regulation change, but it's like. Like amongst people that you and I spend time with, especially who aren't in crypto or amongst technologists, like AI is very high status. Crypto is pretty low status. Yeah. Do you have an outlook on crypto? Aside from this being your thing, you're in the hole and you're going to keep doing it regardless of what anybody else thinks. Do you have an outlook that Ben's more optimistic on how some of this will shake out in the near term? Yeah, definitely. I feel like. At least personally, I had to comport so much of my thinking to what the regulations were that you end up constructing systems that kind of fit the current interpretation of the law. But it's like, well, I think that thing isn't going to work, even though it kind of passes what you think Gary Gensler is illegal or not.

But it's like, I don't want to build that because while yes, it checks those boxes, I don't think this is fundamentally going to work or is useful or interesting. Kind of makes you think about how do you construct this technology through the lens of companies and like how you create ownership and things today. I kind of got into crypto from, I actually really love it at the high, like I'm operating at the information and content level, but I'm like most. fascinated in the level above and that was the original spark for zora which is like how do you let groups of people come together right organize and essentially create what looks and feels like a company but is entirely internet native and they're using like tokens at their core to go achieve some huge ambitious mission now i think i've just been like especially the past three months have just been deleting and trying to come back to like what would 18 year old me be doing right now because i can shed a lot of the constraints that i would put on from my coinbase experience or from just like my understanding of like navigating the regulatory uncertainty for the past four years right and it's actually like no do the more radical version or the more raw version of the thing and everything that gives me kind of a little bit of would have given me heartburn like a year ago in terms of like, well, I would do this, but it comes with all of this like risk. Right. Like actually, well, that's probably more right than wrong. And then how do you, how do you keep extrapolating out? So it's like within the crypto industry, like right now, like everyone's now just talking about like buy back and burn as like the most simple mechanism of like, how do you drive value back in the token? And it's a very... I would say that's kind of where one of one NFTs were in 2021, which is the skeuomorphic and obvious starting point that kind of makes sense because it's similar to a dividend, but it kind of works in crypto. But I think that's just one of many new mechanisms that can create a positive feedback loop and value within a token and a protocol or whatever's being put on chain that...

yeah i'm spending my time thinking there because it's like it's you can you can consider a world where it's possible to do that and you're not going to have a heat-seeking missile from gary g coming towards you well it goes back a little bit to the words money and law thing which is like implicit for i think a lot of people in crypto ideologically and certainly in part of what you're saying is like i want to go to the future yes like part of that implies like some of the current system breaking or changing yeah exactly exactly And, like, on the meme thing, it's like, yes, meme coins right now are kind of dumb pictures and videos or content or just, like, completely absurd things. But if you start to scale it out, like, well, imagine there was a meme coin for, like, Mars or, like, pick huge, ambitious shelling points. Then I think that's where I'm like, okay, well, now what do you – if you've got – 300 000 people on the internet who are bought into this shelling point or into this meme right not doge but something or maybe like doge was like i think an amazing window into the future because uh in like 2016 there was a subreddit for doge that was starting to learn how to coordinate and meme it further which was like oh we should send the jamaican bobsled team to the olympics the winter olympics right we should um sponsor a nascar team for the next three races and just put the doge on it That, to me, is starting to get way more interesting because, yeah, you have 300,000 people who are bought into a thing and aligned. Now, how do you help them start spending this magical capital to continue to further and achieve that meme? While it looks really dumb and unserious right now, it's like, well, that clearly might be the more fun or interesting way to build and produce new things together. And it's like, and I guess back to that original diagram that you were citing at the beginning, I was like, man, I kind of wish that whatever this meme is that Zora and all of our competitors are working towards, I bet we'd all own the same meme coin. And we're like, we'd probably be funding each other on different dimensions or like coordinating and there'd be more, like there should be more, it feels like there could be more alignment there. And it happens by proxy through VCs, I think.

who are kind of the, the ones holding that point of view, but it's like, Oh, I feel like that actually could be much more open. Right. Um, yeah, this is what the internet should be great at at its best is like, how do we coordinate information, attention, capital to do stuff that we care about with our tribe? Exactly. Do you want to speculate a little on one of my favorite ideas you ever discussed is this notion of like, what would a organization or company whose core thing or core product is a token be another? uh, maybe primitive version of this would be talking about St. Fame and, and maybe like some of the, you were just talking about like your earliest areas of excitement for this or what this could, what maybe it's mischief, maybe it's something else, like what something like that might look like in a totally, um, emergent future. Yeah. Yeah. St. Fame was kind of the project that I got a nerd side myself and left Coinbase. Now it's like St. Fame was the side project I did that led to Zora and I had two pieces that had the, the Dow. which I don't think would make sense today, but I tokenized the brand, St. Fame, with Saint Token. And then I was like, okay, let's go crowdsource and produce a long-sleeved shirt with a designer and spend a lot of money in getting that, and then tokenize the shirt, let it trade. And the reason that we started with the tokenizing... The objects first was because everyone cared about that and that had all the traction and no one gave a shit about the DAO sign. But the DAO, in fact, was a label. It was a label, yeah. But it was basically like, oh, how do you create ownership in a brand or a community or an idea? It was super early. I think if I was to start that today, the literal first thing I would do would be create a token and pick a name and a symbol for it. And I would probably go a little bit more reflexive, which is I want to create the tools and the infrastructure to help people do the same thing. I don't know if I would start with I'm going to do a fashion brand or a particular instance of it. I would go I want to put out this goal, which is help people use tokens to coordinate and work together on the internet.

um the first thing we're building is the tool to help other people do that and that's tokenize and then go from there i just i think um that'd be like a really fun way to do it because then you'd need you'd just be building for yourself as the customer the whole time which is just like oh how do i pay people in this token okay i should probably stream to them over like two years instead of them instead of giving them a lump sum How do you let a market form around different ideas? You become sort of the meta instance of this. Yeah, exactly. I think that'd be like, that's how I would do it if I was going to do a fully featured project around it. But I actually think some meme coins are actually kind of finding their way into this state already. And I'm seeing them run into a wall, which is just like, okay, we've got something that's worth tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars. A lot of people who are bought in, now how do we do? It's not, I actually think they're really good ideas for what do we do. And like, um, I think those ideas exist, but they fall apart at like, wait, how do we pull the capital together? How do we, who do we trust in the community to like, it's like, yeah, we could just send, you know, a million dollars to this address, but how do we know that this person's going to be good on it? Like what's their reputation and like, how do we move the funds around? You know, 2020 crypto would be like you have a DAO with proposals and voting, but that's very stale and slow and confusing. Right. Maybe it's instead of it being a DAO, it's just a token on an open market. And instead of proposals, it's just open crowd funds. And like anyone can put forward crowd funds and then the community is like you can choose. You can choose. Opt in to fund. Yeah. Anyone can opt in to fund it. And then you're letting people build their reputation. Yeah, a creative director emerges out of Doe. Yeah, exactly, exactly. What did you learn from, it was very popular and talked about for a little stretch, and you spent a lot of time on it, less so now, but I'm curious what you learned from the experience in the world of nouns, given that they obviously ran through a bunch of proto-ideas here, and maybe what could, what are you?

Is there anything you're still optimistic about and or what do you think could be learned for people kind of going forward to the next phase of this? Yeah, I think nouns, I thought about this a lot. I think where nouns fell down is it didn't have an efficient feedback loop with all of the attention and value it was creating and its own tokens. It was just an extremely illiquid market where it's like there's only so many people who can pay 80 ETH. It's like the NFT versus meme coin thing. Exactly, which is just like there's only so many people who can pay 80 ETH or 100 ETH. And then the nature of the daily auction just meant that it was just so inefficient. I think if I was to do an iteration on mountains now, it would just be pure coin. And, uh, it would be much more like nouns. I think it's peak market cap. If you just took like the most recent auction times the total supply, it was like $120 million or something like that, which in the scale of meme coins is like, it's actually quite low. Um, and it's like, well, if that had been, it was way harder to get there and it was way harder to get there versus like, if that had have been a liquid coin. It's like, well, maybe that market cap feedback loop and the meme value capture back into the token would have been... The difference, though, of course, to your earlier point, is that meme coins don't have $120 million sitting in a treasury that can actually be used. That's true. But it does seem like there might be a proto version of this that learns some of those lessons. You could just take nouns and swap the NFT option where it's just distributing ESC20s and then... it worked it it may work a lot better than that version i don't know if it would work forever can these things be built and this goes back to this like old uh other internet toby shoren idea of like headless brands can these things clearly they can with vitalik and ethereum to some degree it's a little different with sadoshi bitcoin but like something like doge

classically like the the original creator has like sworn it off he hates it like they it seems that these things at their best are rarely designed yeah and so then maybe that would be the only like somebody listening to this who wants to i think they do well with a champion like elon elon champion dojo is like cat like i mean there's a literal government agency and sometimes that can be the creator but it involves yeah it involves certain things that are maybe outside of your control going right yeah and if i if i think through A lot of the larger meme coins currently, like I can think of a single person on Twitter who is just like an incessant champion and director of that thing. Right, right. And yeah, if you imagine just an increasing number of these things, like maybe the winning, maybe there are ones that crack this code where it's like it's completely open and decentralized and it's a competitive ecosystem for, you know, there's many people who are producing under it. I think I might be more interested over the next little while seeing the ones that actually have an explicit leader. Right. And they're organizing and driving it with their point of view. Yeah. The closest comp to me has always felt like creative fashion labels. Yeah, exactly. You have Jonathan Anderson, Louie, you have Virgil LV. I was going to say Virgil would absolutely crush it in this format. Right. Yeah. Right. But the mechanisms of how that shows up, is Virgil the one who starts it? It would be interesting. one of these, maybe a smaller, somebody like higher goes in, um, which is a meme coin type thing. It's kind of like this and goes and actually says, Hey, so-and-so can you be our creative director for the next 18 months? But again, that feels skeuomorphic. So I don't know. Yeah. I think it would, it would be, um, there's this whole like CTO meme in, uh, meme coins, which is like, um, imagine it's, it's like a private equity firm coming in and just being like, we're taking over this. We're going to like make it a huge thing and get at attention. I think it would be more permissionless. Someone would just show up in higher, for example, and being like, I've just bought this amount of the coin. Here's what I'm going to be doing over the next year and a half. And then just like powering ahead. And then the community may reject it. They may not. But there's almost nothing that they can do about it. So I think it would be less being elected and more people spotting like an arbitrage, which is like there's a good seed of a community here and enough attention and distribution.

But it could go further in this direction, so I'll buy enough to make it worth my time and then push it there. Okay, speaking of permissionless, I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about one of your, or at least reflect on one of your classic meme and memo ideas, which is one of the OG major nerds type, maybe tar pit. ideas in crypto is this idea of like digital public goods and protocols and this idea that we can actually have sort of very positive sum large valuable infrastructure similar to early internet protocols like htcp and html and stuff like that um You wrote a piece called Hyperstructures, one of the classic Jacob new terms. One quick excerpt from that. You say a hyperstructure can simultaneously be free to use and also extremely valuable to own and govern. This is a familiar value model that we observe in NFTs. The media can be universally free to consume, yet valuable to own and control as an individual or group. We obviously litigated some of the reasons why some of that has evolved. You wrote that piece in 2022. The main idea here was literally, like, could you have big pieces of public infrastructure almost akin to, like, really long-term durable physical world things like dams and museums and power grids and canals, ancient roads? There are a few ideas in this that are interesting to me. One is that, to the earlier point, we have very few long-term oriented durable digital things in general. And then there's the premise of around, like, how do they show up? How durable can they be? Who owns them? We don't need to go into all of the weeds of exactly what you got right and wrong, but I'd be curious for you to reflect on it. What maybe hasn't bared out yet that still could, what your learnings have been since then, and really most importantly, how we should think about building large, durable, digital infrastructure that is good for everyone. Yeah.

I wrote that. That might be one of my most idealistic. It's almost science fiction. I look at it back now. That was me channeling. I don't know if it was peak midwit or just peak ideal. There was a particular phase I feel like I had which was just like, okay, throw away all constraints. What is the best possible version of this? One thing I will say is there are aspects of it maybe that were midwit, but it wasn't. It was actually quite simple. It was just very idealistic. Yes. I think what I still believe is that you can have permissionless protocols and that you can have permissionless protocols that aren't possible without blockchain and that that is a huge win for society. There's probably a lot of emergent properties from that and value systems that come from it that we haven't fully figured out yet or learned how to tokenize. But I still believe that to be true. One of the things I felt strongly about at the time, which I don't feel strongly about at the time, which was it was like, well, if you can deploy one of these protocols and there's no cost to run it, so the team who originally created it could go out of business and fail, but the protocol is still going to exist for as long as the chain will, then that will create a market structure that means that the It's a race to zero essentially at the protocol level. So you would have these protocols that exist that for as long as they're useful, they're going to be very valuable, but they're not going to be extractive. An assumption there, which I think is wrong, was that I assumed that you could just put out a protocol and then you are updating them very infrequently, which was the case at the time. But that's absolutely not the case now. That also might have just been a slightly skeuomorphic idea back to the physical world. Exactly, yeah. Which is just like, well, no, this is software. Software updates. Yeah, software updates. It's only going to get cheaper to change. Yeah, exactly. It used to be everything was one way deployed on-chain, which meant that no one could change or update that system. But now it's much more common to have upgradable protocols and upgradable smart contracts.

instead of having to migrate an entire ecosystem. There are some cases where that makes a lot of sense, like Uniswap probably being one notable example. But I think in most cases, you remove yourself from as much of the protocol as possible, and then you can make it easy to upgrade new versions and migrate between them. So that's something that's definitely changed. And then I also think in the case that these things need to compete in an open market, they need to upgrade a lot. then they do need to extract some capital to keep funding the production of that thing. So instead of it being entirely free at the protocol level, there is a fee. And then the interesting thing that you can do in this context is you actually make that fee open to anyone to claim. So whoever's providing the value for that function is the one that can claim the fee. And that was one of the sparks in the essay that I think we've continued to extrapolate and lean into that's been really good for us, which is, oh, We as Zorro aren't the ones that have a monopoly on the fee. We actually create an open competition for anyone to claim those fees. Positive sum. Exactly. And when we made that shift, it was one of the biggest growth factors that we ever did because then we turned a lot of competition into collaborators. Yeah, back to the original point. Yeah. So I think that's something where – that's one where the spark was right and it's held up and we've continued to extrapolate that. That's cool. Yeah, that was – It can run forever. I said it's valuable to own, free to use, and they were kind of like the three things. And then the valuable to own piece, I think I was too wet at the time to like everything will have a DAO and then governance is the mechanism in which you capture value. I think that's completely wrong and has proven to be wrong over the past few years. And I think... It'll be much more related to the fee side, which is like, well, you've got this permissionless and programmable revenue coming in. Now, what are more interesting ways that you can wrap that back into the token and make it much more explicit, which is way more simple and less heady. There's a market maximization theme over the conversation that isn't...

It's it's in some sense less naive, but it's not bad. It is all about this North Star of coordination. And part of what maybe what I sense is you just over time coming closer and closer to the idea that like. people are predictable actors for the most part when you give them incentives yeah that's the best way to get coordination yeah which is kind of like um if i was to have this conversation with myself like 10 years ago or australia me like i would be like wait what like what happened to you this is sounds yeah you're so nihilistic or whatever yeah no no i don't i don't think nihilistic just like i wouldn't have thought i would be so i would be building around markets so much like i just never expected that but as a Yeah, as I've just followed this train of thought, it's like, yeah, how can you use open markets and then technologies like crypto to kind of put those things in place to help people do things together? Yeah, it's part of some competition. Yeah, exactly. A lot of language I would have used back then is like the hive mind. How do you help the hive mind do things together? And then the hive mind is like, that's where you've got the shared symbols and then the incentives and then all of... Those kind of, I guess, those three things I mentioned are kind of like core tenants or glue that help the hive mind do things. But yeah, the market, yeah, open market. How do you create the most efficient market is somewhere. I'm just like, yeah, that sounds so simple. Markets are the ultimate strategy, at least until we get to an actual hive mind. Yeah, yeah. Or, well, actually, said another way, the market. if you think about it, if you zoomed out, it's like, what is, if you look at ants, they're coordinating, they've got some magical system. It's like markets are our magical system. Capitalism is the rogue. Yeah. Is Ethereum itself the closest thing to the truly like hyperstructure shaped thing that could actually last a really, really long time and be something that everyone gets, or maybe let's call it blockchain itself. Yeah. I think blockchains generally, I don't know. That's also something that's changed quite a lot since. the hyperstructures thing, which is like, okay, like more networks exist. And Ethereum is taken a very, it's like optimized for decentralization as much as like Bitcoin is maximized for decentralization. It was like Ethereum was a response to Bitcoin not being programmable. And then Ethereum, I think as a network, has had a hard time scaling. And I've got things like Solana, which is like as a response to

ethereum not being scalable enough so i think like um i think ethereum will definitely still be around 10 years from now but i don't know like what the dynamic if it all needs to be on ethereum or not is like a more open question this goes back a little bit to the earlier point around like why are we all competing when we have the same meme i'm not definitely not asking for financial advice here but how are you thinking about ethereum The whole complexity on top of Ethereum, Solana, additional block space. In some sense, competition is really good. It produces all this emergence, et cetera. In the other sense, it's sort of like the VCs invested in companies who are all trying to do the same thing. Yeah, the way the through line I pull is like, yeah, like I remember trying to build like tokenizing things on Bitcoin using counterparty. It was impossible. And then Vitalik was trying to do that. And then there was this whole opcode thing. It's just not going to happen in Bitcoin. And then Ethereum emerged out of that, which is like, we want a programmable blockchain. And now I think it's the same thing happening here, which is Ethereum won't make certain decentralization trade-offs. It won't make those trade-offs. And it's not able to get to the level of scalability that Solana is able to get to. So I also view it as much as like a generational divide. All the Zoomers in Solana look at Ethereum people the same way Ethereum people look at like all the Bitcoin maxis. And for a lot of what we do, which is like content, internet, culture driven, it's like, yeah, we very clearly should just be on Solana. And it's like, it also is just a lot simpler too. Like Ethereum, it's like, well, there's 50 different L2s. And it's like, well, what's an L2? Which one should you go to? The UX is pretty confusing versus Solana. It's just like, well, it's just all on the one network right now. Maybe there's some uncertainty of whether that can actually continue to infinitely scale. Well, this goes back to the time thing, too, which is that am I obsessed with the current moment and the current thing? Yeah. And the age-old question, I think about, do you know of Stuart Brand's Pace Slayers? Yeah, exactly. I think about that as kind of overarching, just constantly coming back to it in our current landscape, which is that how do you know when to over-rotate into where fashion is going versus trust-lindiness? It's certainly embedded in these questions.

Definitely. And I think for us, well, the markets just so clearly been screaming at us to like move to Solana that it's like, yeah, well, we'll just, we'll do that. But there's been in that same period of time, there's been like seven or eight other networks that are like, Hey, can you add? three years from now are we in the solana's for boomer gen z people yeah well it is interesting alphas on xyz yeah yeah i mean solana is uh they they're the what they call their l2s and network extensions which i really like because i'm like whoever thought of that is like really thinking about the what the language at a very deep level because that is uh That's easier and easier to wrap your head around where I'm like, oh, I'm still on Solana and it's not a separate thing. It's just extending the network. I was like, beautiful two words. If you were a creative director of Ethereum, do you have any ideas along those lines? I wouldn't creative direct it. I just say we need to get to sub one second block times and sub one cent transaction fees. Language is cute, but let's focus on them. Yeah, literally. It's like if you would just compare like, well, Solana is extremely cheap and way faster than no amount of branding. I think there is some branding. It's like you could go pure institutional and it's like, we'll be here 10 years from now. It's going to be much slower. And you're winning a subset. You're talking like a subset of transactions that are really high value. But I don't think that holds up. But who knows? It also could be true that it's like Ethereum is ahead on the scaling front in the sense that it's not one big monolithic network. There's many L2s. And then when Solana eventually does reach a ceiling and they have to go into the network extension world, then sure, they'll probably be able to learn a lot of the hard lessons that Ethereum went through. But Ethereum may have solved some of them themselves at that point. And then there's a network effect where it's like, actually, in the future, there's going to be way more chains. And you should think about chains more like websites or platforms more so than these huge monolithic things.

as solving the interoperability between them is more right. But who knows? Maybe you can scale a monolithic chain way further than we'd ever imagine. Solana ends up being the right one. I actually don't know which way it would go or will go, so it'll be a fun one to pay attention to. But we more so look at it from a lot of our... There's a pocket of users that want us to be there already, and then there's a whole bunch of people that we would love to be using Zora that won't use it. unless it's there so that's like it makes an easy decision for us right you started your career at coinbase uh an interesting monolith in so much of the conversation we've had but we also have been mostly talking about really big open public permissionless things i want to get into some of the aspects of coinbase but first you as i understand it you basically were an australian college kid who got plucked off the internet yeah um I asked a few people, Dan Romero, our mutual friend said to ask about the internship that never ended, which I'm not sure if that's related to that or something else. But yeah, I'd be curious about the story of how, um, how you got found slash found them and made your way. Yeah. So I was, um, I was studying computer science in Sydney and I was like hacking my journey up until that point was like, I learned about Bitcoin. I was studying economics. I was like, wait, you create a cryptocurrency for anything or currency for anything. That's crazy. So I transferred into computer science. And I was just hacking on tokenizing creative projects the whole time. So I was originally creating, they were called colored coins on Bitcoin. Ethereum came out and I was like, oh, finally, so much easier to build. And I was just tweeting about it the whole time. Mostly because... How did you get into Twitter? I just had that thought and I can't remember. I think I went to a startup event in Sydney. And someone was like, oh, follow me on Twitter or you should be on Twitter. And I just kind of took that blindly and then did it. Cool. And then I just started tweeting awkwardly. And then I had opinions. And then I was like, here's what I was doing. And I think this was right. You had opinions? Yeah. Who would have thought? And then Coinbase was, at the time, they were just navigating adding Ethereum to Coinbase. Like Coinbase was a Bitcoin company. It was actually like a really big change. And they'd be like, no, we're going to have multiple cryptocurrencies.

um i i think i came on they were looking at ethereum and stuff and i came on their radar at the time and uh yeah it was basically like i did an interview and i think they were like weighing off it's like should we hire this guy full-time or is like still in college kind of young junior but energetic like they were like would you want to do a three-month internship and they're like well you can see if we like you and you can see if you like us in my head i was like hell yeah what big fan of coinbase and then i'm in sydney going to san francisco sounds great yeah but i was like i'll go to coinbase for three months i'll learn everything i need to about startups and then i'll go back to my hacking on these like ethereum things i'm trying to do classic and i even told that to my girlfriend who's now my wife at the time i was like i'm gone for three months i'll be back like don't worry about it and then uh what was the internship for or was it like they they brought me on for product design which you had never done uh i was so i was doing that for all my side projects and i think it was just like I was doing it just because I had to, but I think I was relatively good at it, and I enjoyed it quite a lot. And I was just totally self-taught. Yeah, exactly. I was just messing around. So I joined, and then in my first week, they were like, do you want to join full-time? I basically had a crazy first week where they were stuck on this margin trading product for a couple of months. Brian kept toning down the reviews and was like, go back, go back. And I just kind of locked in for three days. used every margin trading product I could, and then made it as dumb. I just didn't understand. It took me a while to understand how it works, so I just designed it in a way that I could understand how it worked. And Brian, in my first review with me, was like, this is great. We can ship it. I remember Adam Wyatt, who was the head of GDAX at the time, was like, hell yeah, okay, great. That's not how most internships go, Adam. Yeah, and then, so yeah, it was like on the Friday that week, they were doing a joint full-time, and I was like, yes. So then...

Call your offense. Yeah. So I was like, hey, I'm going to be here for at least four years or whatever like that. Oh, my God. And it was a crazy time because this was before it went through the crazy 2017 run. Okay. It was big enough. Did you join in 2016? No, no. It was January 2017. Okay. So it was still quiet. There was nothing too crazy. And then it was March of that year where everything went bonkers. Right. So I kind of joined. I missed 2015 and 2016 by all accounts from what I heard. It just sounded horrible because it was like we don't know what's going on. But yeah, I guess I started as the intern and then I just, I kind of had like a really lucky trajectory and journey there. And, you know, started as a product design intern, went into product design, ended up in product and then ended up leading USCC and like kind of working to get that into Coinbase and bring Coinbase into the stablecoin game. So this is what Fred told me to ask you about, which is... the the actual story behind usdc coming out of a i guess you're probably a little older at the time but a 23 year old and a couple engineers i think i was 26 26 at the time yeah so i have a lot of opinions and i like sharing them i think i had had uh my first big one was actually leading the acquisition of a team called paradox which i was like hey i'm noticing these decentralized exchanges on chain This feels like it's strategically aligned with us in the long term and we need to build this capability out. That idea was kind of directionally correct, but the instance of it was wrong. So I was like, I don't know if Coinbase needed to do that, but they were like, okay, that was a big shot or whatever. And then that was already kind of clear to me. And I guess I don't know, I was just using so many things on the chain at the time that there was DAI, USDC, paxos and tether were kind of like that was the stable coin scene at the time and i was just like there's no way that this just isn't stable coins i are sort of this like long running idea in crypto yeah someday we're going to get to this world where we have dollars on chain yeah and tether was like it was relatively big at the time like it was it was certainly in i think it was larger than hundreds of millions in total supply it might have been the billions at that point i can't quite remember

But like USDC and DAI, USDC was like $8 million in supply on chain. And Coinbase is fundamentally like an on-ramp. It's like you go from dollars to crypto. And I was looking at like, well, I'm able to now trade on chain using decentralized exchanges. And now I'm able to buy and sell crypto with dollars on chain. There's no way that this isn't just like a huge disruption to Coinbase's core business. And also a huge opportunity that is perfectly in line with Coinbase because Tether's got a whole other journey. But I was like, Coinbase is the most trusted. It's got the best fiat on ramps. And the core business is buying and selling between fiat and crypto. So I put that in a meme and a memo. What was the title? I think it was just like Coinbase on chain or USD. I'll have to pull it up. Not a great meme if I can't remember it. But the idea was good enough. Yeah. But I think I was super lucky because like Bologi was my manager at the time. And he was just like kind of incredible at just like multiplying and like putting a tailwind behind me and kind of advocating for this kind of thing. So I ended up working with Mihar and Maxim, who are like two very early longstanding engineers at Coinbase. And then Bologi and Jim Migdal on the business side. So like doing the deal with Circle. And it was basically like, yeah, Coinbase should... We went through a whole build, buy, or partner analysis. We ended up aligning on partner with Circle. So we did that deal. And then, yeah, it was like Mija, Maxim, and I locked in a conference room in Coinbase for like four months just building it into the business and into the core product. That was a really fun experience because it was able to ship something through the whole company. And then, you know, having to, like, articulate and battle test the rationale with, you know, varying levels of leadership and then the board and, like, getting all that buy-in and then kind of seeing it through was just, like, kind of wild and fun. And then, yeah, I remember it went live. And then we had to go through the QBR process. I remember Balji was just like, yeah, pick the goals and then set them.

And I just had no idea what I was doing. So I set the most ambitious. I was like, yeah, QBRs is where you set the most ambitious things possible. And it was like, I think it was like $10 million or $15 million in circulation at the time. And I was like, yeah, we can get to, you know, I think it was like $100 million or $200 million in the next three months. We got nowhere near that. I remember him being like, yeah, QBRs are more of a negotiation more than an ambition exercise. But, you know, now as there's like 50 billion in circulation or 40 billion, it's obviously a critical part of Coinbase as a product and a company. And it's like opened up a whole new expansive. I mean, arguably one of the most important crypto products that exists. Yeah. And I think. Yeah, I guess I was already involved in like there was kind of a product strategy group and, you know, I was like. Pretty junior in the company, but I was in a lot of senior rooms very often just because they were kind of looking to me. It's like, well, what's actually happening at the forefront? And I would spend a lot of time writing about it and then designing it. And to the extent possible, like working it into the core product, which is a lot of fun. And then it's also just like a crazy journey. I don't know exactly how large Coinbase was when I joined. I think it was like 80 to 120, somewhere in that range. And then by the time I left, it was like 1,200. 1300 people crazy talk about needing to coordinate yeah and then it's also wild now because like uh you know working with jesse pollack at bay who's running bass was like him and i were at the office late nights for all of 2017 dan romero was always like a good kind of um he was like almost like a really great mentor and like kind of pointing give me good feedback and pointing me in the right direction channeling my energy and that's really cool to kind of be like working alongside them yeah yeah the coalition It was really fun. It was an amazing internship. The whole thing was an internship. Crypto is a category, ironically maybe, given that it's at least inherently financial, that has very little trust and very few products with trust. I would argue Coinbase is a company defined by its user trust. What did you learn about building for

either explicitly or implicitly, users that will actually trust you there? Simple user experience is like the main one. That was like probably the biggest. It's like simple user experience, easy messaging, easy product naming, like simple product naming was something that Brian actually obsesses of quite a lot, just like call things what they are. And then I think Coinbase puts a lot of time and energy into. actually like drawing a line in the sand and fighting against regulators and various institutions publicly in that it actually builds that actually engaging to engaging yeah so like um you know obviously he's been doing a lot of that now but even back in the day when like the irs was trying to do like sweeping data requests of all um coinbase's customer information like taking the irs to court and then beating them and actually like you know both engaging and building those relationships with banks and regulators but also fighting back where it needs to for what it believes is right like that's kind of the best branding ever like you can make a great a great video or an amazing creatively directed campaign, but it really comes down to the actions and the ease of the experience and is it solving a problem? And it compounds over time and isn't necessarily an overnight thing. I mean, I, I remember definitely not three years ago, maybe four years, whenever it was like FTX and finance were quote unquote crushing Coinbase. You're like, Oh, are they schmucks? Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's definitely, it's like greatest strength, greatest weakness. Cause yeah, it was Coinbase was super slow to adding all of those tokens in 2017, but, um, yeah you have to play the long game because you don't want to end up like cz and you know in big trouble but yeah i actually there was like a biology thing around this which was like it's some of the best things are paradoxical which is like yeah you would never have expected that one of the most successful companies in crypto would be the most trusted thing and being the most trusted in like a trustless environment and so it's like it's a good that's a good frame for like any any situation like find

find that extreme, what's at the other end? And there's probably some opportunity there. Yeah, some traction. Yeah, exactly. What did you love about Bloomberg Terminal's design? It was just so absurd and chaotic. Yeah, I built one of my side projects just before Coinbase was called Coin Terminal. And I was aggregating. This is when most of crypto chatter was Reddit-based. So I built a terminal, which was just like, pulled all the coins from CoinMarketCap. And then did like a very simple text search for mentions of those coins in Reddit and then like format it. And I just loved the Bloomberg Terminal as a reference just because Bloomberg Businessweek at the time actually had like really insane website design. And they're like magazine covers that I just found them so aesthetically interesting and kind of bold and fun. And then once I learned what a Bloomberg Terminal was, I was like, oh, this is like you got people like crushing it on 1980s computers. So like. moving around as i go that just feels fun that's cool okay my last section is going to be a little over the place um sort of a lightning round but it doesn't have to be that fast okay first you have a tweet recently you say technology itself isn't disruptive consumer adoption of technology is you expand uh that is caught i think in the next tweet i say this is copy paste stolen from jeff bezos um Uh, I saw a, I saw a clip of Jeff Bezos talking about, uh, how you can, uh, it's very easy to get excited about the technology in and of itself. And I've fallen into this trap a lot, which is just like the technology is really interesting. You get nerd sniped or one shot by it and you just obsess over the technology and you think that's going to be sufficient for it to become a reality and be widely distributed. Exactly. Thus is what actually leads to Disruption is rapid and mass adoption by everyday people using the thing. You need both to be true. You need the technology or the thing in and of itself to be disruptive, but it needs to be adopted such that that disruption can play out. You can map that to the founder truism where it's like, first time cares about product, second time cares about distribution. It's the same idea from a different angle.

I think why it resonated at the time was, you know, we have a really large and vocal community that can be very creator and artist centric. And this was wrestling with the evolution from like NFTs to Coinbase, like to Coinbase. That's funny. It sounds like like meme Coinbase. And it's just like, yes, I wish that I could extrapolate this like NFT model to a scale or like help it find a market. And it reaches that ideal. But after like, you know, years of kind of taking it to its extreme. Yeah. The, I like, I have tried everything to, we've got it for, we got it from a thousand and monthly transacting users to 10,000 to a hundred thousand to 500,000. And then just kind of, we reached a ceiling there. And it's like, look at the adoption of what's happening in this much more pure form, which aligns with our vision of the future. Anyway, the market is pulling something out of you. The market's pulling it out. I just feel so obvious. And ironically, it was the precise first version of Zora. We did like the, with the, instead of, when we were tokenizing t-shirts it was the coin and this version of the protocol is um is actually more close to that than not but um yeah that's where that was coming from you had to move a little left on there and then yeah and then yeah shout out to jeff bezos he has incredible he he crushes a meme in a memo i think like yeah yeah yeah definitely the memo but he's got a like a lot of his like one sentence uh bars are great including that one you haven't quite an old tweet And this is sort of in the weeds, but I'm interested in it. You have an old tweet about tokenized identity. You say a verifiable on-chain identity will ultimately lead to self-tokenization. Your reputation may resemble something more like market-traded value than 4.89 out of 5 stars. Is that like 2018, I think? Yeah, okay. High utility, new sovereignty, control over self and data, cons, immutable, unforgettable, potentially dystopian. Yeah. And obviously a little bit antiquated, but running over that whole sort of market thing, like, are we going to have markets, maybe not just on celebrities, but markets on people and their reputation? Like, are there good ways that this could be seen recently? I don't like anything in that direction. Okay. I think I remember experimenting and...

a friend like a bunch of friends were were tokenizing their their time their labor yeah labor they're like oh like i had there were friends who were designers and lawyers didn't matt vernon did that for saint fame exactly yeah so i bought a bunch of his time off the open market and then he ended up hating it because he was like wait my time's actually like super valuable why am i just you know james making me make a dumb t-shirt right right right um time is expensive yeah And it's also, it's not about it being valued. It's actually choosing if you want to give it away at all in the first place. So that was like a very rudimentary idea. I like the version where it's more on the output specifically versus everything de facto being the person. So it's like every single profile on the internet has like a tradable price I'm like less enthused by. But... Maybe it's inevitable. Like there's so many, there's been so many attempts at this. And then maybe the fact that I have such an allergic reaction to it as well probably means that it's, it's probably more true than not. Or like, that's the, that's the opportunity. I think you also recently tweeted tokenize everything. So it subsets. Yeah. Yeah. I'm being logically inconsistent here, but I think, um, I am, I like the version of it where it's less. In the same way, Mr. Beast isn't Mr. Beast. I like it where it's like there are identities that are being created, kind of like brands. There's one step of separation between legal name and online name. Then there I'm like, okay, I can see that being really interesting and powerful. But it's like, oh, should it be every legal name, your exact identity is like that? Then I'd probably not. Not a whole can of worms, but I think pseudonymity is partly interesting because it is a non-skeumorphic identity system that doesn't require Jacob or Jackson being in my social security number. Exactly. And it can be as fragmented or as concentrated as plurality there. But wow, that's a deep pull. I can feel the 2018 in that tweet. I don't think I went through all. I think it was linked in some blog post. It's amazing. What did you learn from Matt Dryhurst and Holly Herndon?

Great question. I think they're just so... They just think they're so far ahead on AI from the creative perspective. And they're this rare mixture of being like deep, like they are artists, like deep down they're artists, but they also are exceptional technologists as well that... can kind of phase shift between seeing through the point of view of like, how is this actually going to affect people who are just doing this for a living or like artists and then move towards like, well, but if I'm building this technology, what is the most powerful form of it? And they're kind of like negotiating that tension between the two for themselves. Right. Because like they're, you know, they, they just released, um, public diffusion which was like okay they took like 15 million pieces of training data that they ensured every single one was in the public domain created a model called public diffusion which is like a starting point for a model where it's like we know that there's not going to be any copyright infringement here so now for any developers who want to start to expand or add to the latent space of that model cool we have a strong foundation to do that yes and it's like that's it and then they're kind of coming at it from like okay well how do we fill in that weight in space how do you create um incentives or business models around that such that you know artists are getting paid for their data they can opt into it and i think um yeah they what i learned i don't know it just helped me kind of like see the future in a way and then i come at it from like mostly the technological side or i just love going like okay like how far can we push this right And then I just can't help but to rat brain go like, well, how could we use crypto to solve it? And they're raring that they're like, they're actually down and open-minded and totally get it, which is not usually... To engage. Yeah, you don't usually get that from people who are in the AI world. They have like an extreme visceral reaction. What makes me think of that Bezos tweet again? It's like...

Being someone who can participate both directly and then participate in the meta, be the observer and the observed at the same time. Yeah, exactly. Really, really. And you could extrapolate that across so many different contexts, but especially in something as ideological as art. Right. And what's so cool is that like the art is like genuinely really like I love it. It's amazing. And then the technology, like just the way they kind of talk about it and try and educate and everything. I'm just like, it's at a level that I really admire. So I'm like, OK. If I was able to go like more future project, more like artist mode, then they would be someone I'd like strive to reach or like admire or model after. That's cool. Yeah, it's clear. Do you have an idea that the world has refused to come around on yet, but you still think you're right? I think Zora is that. I think it's like within crypto, definitely there's a subset of people who are like, this makes sense. And then even just outside, like within. just that one extra orbit outside of um crypto and tech i think that that's the same thing but if you're trying to explain like why every piece of information should have like a real-time market value that's pretty that most people have don't react to that particularly well yeah um yeah my best way i always bring it back to the stewart brand quote though because it's like i do think it is a fundamental problem with the internet itself it's like the internet is really good at sharing and um distributing and you know, moving information around, but it's horrible at capturing the value for that. And we've had, this is like being a 30 year problem that's had many different iterations. Yes. My point of view is that you can, if you like tokenize all information, create an efficient market for it, then it will solve that problem, which lets us have free to consume information and also have some semblance of value capture for the creators of it, the distributors of it, consumers of it. I still can't get over how much. I mean, for me, a truly novel unlock this notion that if you actually think about information as expensive on the time bank, you allocate time, we allocate money. Right. That is a problem that we need to coordinate to solve. It's really, really powerful. How would you describe your taste? Or if that's too vague of a question. Yeah, that's like how do you describe your size to a white person? What are the aesthetics of the Jacob AI model? Oh, fuck. Good question.

There's a lot of sun. I love... It's such a simple answer, but I love... Lens flares. I love the sun and light and the colors that come off it. It's also probably a slightly more muted color palette. I always find myself thinking it's going to be a very saturated output, but I end up... finding myself gravitating towards there's a lot of rich color but it's slightly more muted um yeah which is i yeah that would be one thing what else i just see a lot of words like white background black text is like probably in there somewhere uh like some very i like making very simple diagrams yes yeah that's probably amazing diagrams um You did have a meme go quite viral this year on TikTok. TikTok, Twitter, like I have friends, like it shows up on Instagram all the time. Like a truly viral image. It's in the lexicon or it's canonized. And it was like many steps removed from you too. Yes. For people's contacts, I'll link it in the description. But this is the like blurry horse running. It's majestic horse, which is everything I just kind of, there would be a lot of animals in there as well. But it's like kind of what I'm describing, like slightly muted color palette. It's a little dreamy, a lot of lens flare and everything like that. And I'm so happy. The universe loves irony because it was an amazing moment for me because I knew precisely at that point in time that the Zora model, as it was working, was broken. Whoa. Because I did... Give it a tribute to you. It wasn't the attribution. It was that the market couldn't keep up with the amount of attention it was getting. Right. And I saw multiple multi-million dollar coin versions of that get instantiated. And I was like, ah. Because your version was an NFT. It was an NFT. Right. And it was like, okay, I did everything right in that the first place on the entire internet the image showed up on was Zora.

It's in token form. It had the provenance. The ideological stuff was right. It was all there. But then when it actually went gigaviral, like tens of millions of views on Twitter and everywhere, the token couldn't keep up with the virality. And I watched the market attempt to keep up on Zora and on OpenSea and all these different markets. And I was like, ah, that isn't... We were fighting gravity. Fighting gravity. And I was like, you need the... market to be as liquid and as fluid as the content is moving around the internet. So that was, it was kind of incredible because it was like, whoa, out of all people on the planet, I probably should have been able to tokenize that correctly, but I didn't. And then that kind of pushed us into like, okay, we need to go to the more market driven and liquid system here. But yeah, that was like my second super viral image. The first one I had was this dumb screenshot of chat GPT. which was just like asking it to like what's a word for when you um accidentally open the dishwasher and it's still on and then it's and then its response was just disrupts and like disruptants and such a dumb joke but like that way i think it got like um it got like it was like millions of views on twitter blew up my twitter for like a week and i was like that's the dumbest thing but but yeah can't predict it yeah that's a great image though i um i have been weighing up like should i post it again on this new model to kind of like the horse yeah But maybe if I don't have a thing. Things are hard to put back in the box. Yeah, exactly. It's kind of like I like taking the L, taking the lesson, and yeah, I'll try the next one. Speaking of images you've created, word text memes you've created, I mentioned at the top you're like a wildly creative and generative person. I feel like I see you every, whatever, three months, and every time I see you there's some new, crazy new idea. And I once asked you about this, and you brought up the FAFO zone, the FAFO zone, as a path to solving local maximums. Excuse me, can you talk about that? Yeah, this should actually – I haven't written anything publicly in a while, and I think this is the thing I would write. This one's a banger. Yeah, local maximums, which is basically –

there's this uh the innovators dilemma there's a famous diagram of it where it's like you know you've got one curve local maximum and then if you imagine just below it there's something there's the next uh s curve there's a trough there's a big trough and then ultimately it goes way higher yeah and um my i just think of everything as local maximums and it's like how do you know you're in one and then how do you break out of them and Why that's really important, I think, as a founder is like that's the only way you solve the innovators dilemma, which is like you basically have to disrupt yourself. And I put this into a... The presentation I did is a town hall, which I should probably just put into an essay, which is like, how do you get comfortable with this and actually make this the standard practice for the whole company? Most people are terrified of adding entropy when they think they're at a top. You're at a mountaintop. Exactly. It's like pretty comfortable. Yeah. And I think there's like, there's import. So like, basically it's like, how do you know you're in one? Usually it's like very well understood. It feels very stable. You're in refined and refactor mode. You're optimizing very small percentages and it's like comfortable and actually like a little bit boring. and then uh and like usually you're also like your growth rates aren't as great as well so just like calling that out and it's like here's what it feels like if that is resonating then you're probably at or close to a local maximum and then i call it the fuck around and find out zone because like well how do you break out of it uh you just have to i use i say like you have to do whatever there are two ways to come at it one if you were to start again from scratch what would you do And you should probably do something along those lines. Right. The other way to come at it is if you were a direct competitor, what would you do? And how would you exploit whatever gaps that you have? Yes. And like some comp there's, that's like a, uh, passion driven angle in, and then there's the fear driven angle in and both of, if they end up being the same answer, like definitely do it. But sometimes those answers are different and you kind of like pick whatever one's giving you the most amount of energy. And it's much more of an intuitive.

like especially for data-driven companies like no you're explicitly going into like you're in a vibes based mode for a little bit and it's just like whatever is going to give you the most amount of energy and lead to high cycle like you know high throughput high experimentation yes you're just trying to cover as much ground as possible and then whenever you're finding sparks of traction double down on it immediately if it's not working kill it and let it die as fast as you started it don't get don't like don't chase it don't chase the dragon And what's really important, and I found this really important in helping build it into the culture, is acknowledging that there is going to be a big trough. And that is actually part of it. So it's like, you're not going into this thing being like, we're going to disrupt ourselves overnight. We're going to see the media 10x. You're actually taking like, no, we're going to make the business and product probably explicitly worse on some dimension. Yes. We're going to lose motivation. We're going to lose momentum. We're going to enter the trough of despair. Yeah. Yeah. But that's putting you on the new path to the next global maximum. And you should have an idea of what that is. So it's like you may like it's like our local maximum, like one simple one was like, oh, we're web only platform. We should have a mobile app. We're going to have to divert focus and attention away from this growing web platform into the mobile app. and the mobile app's not going to be as good, but then we have to bring it back up, and that's a very simple example. Yes. Yeah, so you keep doubling down on what works, and then you go through the trough of despair, and you're kind of figuring it out, and you just repeat the process endlessly. And by the way, I think this applies to certainly relevant for founders and companies. I think it applies to everyone in every context of life. Yeah, exactly. And the critical thing, and I think the thing that... I noticed that you're so good at and is actually the input to why you're so creative is that you're really good and not holding on to the good feeling at the local maximum. You're good at jolting yourself out of that. Yes. I, um, I don't think I've ever got comfortable at the, that stage. It's a great way to fight inertia. Yeah. I also think it's like, um, well, actually maybe, maybe the one like hyper growth is probably the one.

I remember like at Coinbase, at least in seeing that go on, you feel pretty comfortable when it's little like multi hundred million billion dollar number go up for a period of time. But actually, but even then, no, it was like, oh, well, there's a new competitor that's like eating our lunch on some dimension. I'm always thinking about like, if I was doing this from day one, what would I do? And then it's not always like one way that I find good ideas is. Not by imagining like what my competition would do. I just like to put myself in the CEO role of companies I find interesting. And then it's like, what would I do? What would my three, six, 12 month plan look like? And it's just like a, it's a good way to get some entropy and farm a different context and pull yourself out of your world. And then you can kind of get a fresh look at a different problem space. And your approximation is probably pretty bad, but just the fact that you're... Well, it's allowing yourself to be the observer and the observe again back to the dryer. Yeah, exactly. Right. Exactly. And then, so this is a good practice, but then the challenge that comes with it is just making sure that you're not doing it too often. So you can actually jump off. Like a failure case is you're actually not letting something ride long enough and you're killing a good product or a good feature too early. Shiny object syndrome. Yeah, exactly. usually growth rate and if you're still excited about a feature and you can see it makes sense strategically like that that usually helps you like stick with it for as long as you can but plug in relationship uh career path all of the above yeah exactly um but yeah that's like uh you have to make sure you don't just over run that they yeah i i kind of um I guess by nature of my role, I'm thinking about this at like the highest levels of the company and like when we need to make big bets and big moves. But it applies to all levels of a product and business, I think. What would you have done if you hadn't discovered Bitcoin? What do you think you would have done professionally? Great question. The path. Well, actually, that's actually crazy because, yeah, I was doing economics at the time.

It felt interesting to me. What would I be doing? I remember at the time being interested in the advertising and the marketing world, mostly for the creative aspect. There was this show on every week in Australia called The Gruen Transfer. What is it? The Gruen Transfer. And it was basically a weekly show where they would like deeply analyze advertising campaigns happening in the world at the time. Cool. And I found it so fascinating that something I just took and consumed at face value, I just didn't have an appreciation for the level of thought and position. Feeling back the curtain a little. Yeah. And I remember that being super minded. I just got so intrigued by that. And I was like, oh, wait, I didn't realize you could have. I didn't know that's how much work and thought and positioning and strategy went into it. Right. So I remember. looking into like what would it look like to go into that world um there's some of that in what you do there's a little bit of that i think um hmm what else was i interested in the time i was also pretty interested in like i was starting to find my way into like the digital art world still um like i um even in my first year of college like i was kind of both seriously and sarcastically like participating in like the art competitions and got my i would do things sometimes as a joke and they would end up like featured in the gallery and all that kind of stuff so there was a joke calling it a joke sometimes is a defensive mechanism that's why i was saying it was like it was it was it was um it was definitely a defensive mechanism like it was it was like uh like that joke in the other guys where he's like, you've learned to dance sarcastically. It was like that. It was, it was definitely from, it was like, I definitely wanted to do it, but I didn't know how to, you know, do it sincerely at the time. Um, so probably something in there. I probably would have just, yeah, I actually don't know. I feel like if I think about that more than it has been the first, like, I think I'm coming up on it's five years of Zora this year and

What year is it? It's 20, 25. It's eight years since I moved to the US and then basically being in this tunnel vision, getting plucked out of Australia, going into Coinbase and continuing the crypto thought train. It is the first time where I'm like, okay, is it going to be crypto still 10 years from now, 20 years from now? It is interesting to track where my mind wanders when I just remove the assumption that I'll always be doing crypto. yeah and even elements of what will it look like to have sort of done what i came here to do yeah exactly there's a there's this guy ian rogers maybe you've run in with he's he's now uh some creative role at ledger but he did like bc boy's website and then worked on early like i forget what it was one of the napster era things culminated with apple music yeah and he talked about it in some interview he was like After Apple Music, I was kind of done. We did the thing. You reached the point. Yeah, yeah. Interesting. Obviously, it can become an infinite game, too. Definitely. But yeah, I didn't have a clear answer other than they were my rough interests. I definitely had the ambition to be a founder and start my own thing. So I probably would have found a way to do that one way or another. Do you have any... cultural or artistic inspirations that kind of immediately come to mind as being really influential over you definitely um virtual abloh big one for sure then why why i love the figure of speech like the quotes yeah and then um i also love just how I loved his talks and the way he presented his practice as much as I loved his output from it. Yes. I would argue maybe that was the output. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. But like, for example, his slide from his Harvard talk where he's just like, here is my method in 10 points. Like, here is my signature. Yes. And, you know, it was like red background, yellow text. And like, I just loved.

I was like, Oh wow. Like that is, that is as much what he's the output as like the sneakers or the installation or that. And then his, um, he also, he's just like memes or is like the 3% rule is king. Yeah. Just all of these little things. I was like, damn, that's, that's, um, just tweak it a little bit. Yeah. I just, I just found that super inspiring. And then also just like the rate of output and that he had, he put no constraint on. what his like uh title was in a way like he didn't identify with just being like a designer or you know a photographer or you know an architect or whatever it was just kind of I'm just all I'm just doing all of these things and expressing expressing um expressing through it who else is in there I really like um Christopher Nolan He's one of my... I love the way he approaches just the fact he has no phone and is constructing these infinitely complex universes and then his approach to trying to make the film as timeless as possible and making sure he's setting these constraints such that you don't over-rely on CGI or all these things that still holds up. I actually just love the ideas themselves. Um, taking, I love how you can infinitely rabbit hole and extrapolate out. Right. He's a filmmaker who loves ideas. Yes. Yeah. I really, really, I, um, yeah. So I love, I love that. I saw a headline about him building a six meter by six meter animatronic Cyclops. Yeah. That's great. Um, what else is in that? Stuart Brand as well, like the Long Now Foundation and the 10,000-year clock. I just love thinking at that scale. Yes. That's always amazing. Yeah, more will come to mind, but they're like the three immediate ones. Those are three pretty strong ones. One of the things I believe very strongly, it's adjacent to sort of like dysfunction and genius being two sides of the same coin. We often get it our own way.

The things that make us who we are and make us great are exactly the thing that create hurdles for us. And if we were only someone else or only someone else could save us, you have an idea that I wasn't familiar with until I did this prep. And I'd love for you to talk about what are Patronus problems and what is your, do you have a favorite example of one that you've had and solved? Yeah, I forgot about that. Patronus problems are problems that you think someone else is going to solve for you, but it ends up being yourself. This was like the end of one of the first era of Zora where that whole instance and everything about it just kind of died. And one of the things that I thought that was wrong was if you build an open protocol with the right incentives, that platforms will just magically start building on top of it. And that'll bring the distribution and you just have to nail the protocol level perfectly. But in reality, it's like, no, if you want to take a protocol to market, you have to build that product yourself and you have to, like, you have to rely on you. And I kind of pulled from, this is something that, like, Balji, again, he's kind of amazing, like, maybe one of the best managers you could have. I would notice that he would, like, lean on, like, references more than you would ever expect in a professional context. Like, he's like, oh, have you ever seen this movie? Like, what about the scene? Or, like, did you read this book? He's, like, trying to find a shell, like, some kind of common ground. And, like, what are references I can pull on here that will communicate it? And I think I did that here by pulling from Prisoner of Azkaban in Harry Potter where he's, like, learning how to do the Patronus charm and he gets, like, you know, gets the shit beaten out of him by some Dementors and he gets saved by someone and he thinks it's his dad. But then the twist, spoiler alert, if you care, is, like, he is actually the one saving himself because he goes back in time. He saved himself the whole time and he had it within him and he should have just like, right. You're looking out externally. And it's like, you're the one to solve that problem. And I think that's a really common thing, especially I think more early in your career or when you're learning like how to get agency for yourself. It's like actually more things that are like Patronus problems than you think. And you shouldn't be asking someone else or looking to someone else to solve it. You should just do it. And that's probably the opportunity.

That one generalizes. Yeah. And that one generalizes as well. So, um, yeah, it's a lot of, it works in, you know, professional life and personal life. And yeah, I liked it because it was an alliteration and then Harry Potter reference. And even the memo. Yeah, exactly. What is your favorite thing about Australians and your favorite thing about Americans? We won't go negatives. We'll just do positives. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, Australians are just so open. and i think default to being happy regardless of like i think this is afforded by the fact that the weather is so incredible and the safety net is so high that you could be in any sort of situation and you can just like sit on the beach and you can you'll be in some form of paradise no matter what right on average obviously right um but the result is like you can you will be saying good morning and hello how are you to people on the street every day um and it was actually kind of a shock like you do not do that in san francisco because people were like what are you talking to me like what uh a little la and new york in that yeah um so it's like very yeah very open i think is the right word like you can you can go talk to a stranger there and it's you could cool yeah um my favorite thing about americans is just like the raw ambition and I think like it's so high agency or the the default is that like you can you can do it Australia is on the opposite end of that spectrum where there's actually a term for it it's called tall poppy syndrome which is like it's a cultural trait of Australia to see like any success is actually chopped down and looked down on and it's very hard to um Success is actually seen more as a negative thing. What scam did you pull to get here? I guess your parents are super rich. That's actually the default. Versus here, it's the ideal. It's celebrated. It's like that people are more willing to... Australians are more open, but the Americans, I don't know, they're like, yeah, let's fucking go. You're more willing to help.

make it happen and i love just how it's like yeah anything is possible yeah versus in australia it's like you're downstream of so much culture like um it was just so mind-blowing go to going and seeing things i saw in movies in australia for example just really simple things like that where it's like oh no that's actually real yes and it's not like this made-up world that is being um characterized in movies that is actually coming from like that's actually more real than you would imagine and that was kind of like a mind-blowing realization to have where i'm like oh this isn't dramatized like it is dramatized but it's closer to the truth than it's not well and by the way in some some of these cases like i could go do that yes exactly i could go there and see the thing or go do the thing yeah i love that about about being here yeah it's fun my penultimate question do you have a favorite idea or an idea a brain worm whatever something that we i think we talked about i have a few that i hold on to that i'll like kind of just write in a note and come back to um which ones to pick one is like i love cookies but my obviously they're like one of the least healthy foods to have um And I've always been like, okay, if I was to just like rabbit hole and go eccentric and, you know, do a really small thing, it's like, what is simultaneously the world's healthiest cookie and the world's most delicious cookie? And can they be the same thing? I just want to slam chocolate cookies when I want and then know that I'm not going to work against it. It's like a really small one that I'm just like, I would love to. And then it's also, yes, it's like, how would you attack that? Because obviously there's like. molecular constraints of like what flavors map to what ingredients like how much can you change it you know if you solve it for cookies can you solve it for other food which ones would you start with i don't know it just was like a really fun it's almost like is there free lunch in the universe yeah exactly so that's that's one uh another more recent one is just like ai translation between people who speak the same language um

which is just like, you know, there are different ways. There's infinite ways you can communicate an idea to someone, but there are ways that are going to be more likely to land and be grumped faster. So it's like, you know what? Yes, there's a lot of amazing stuff coming for translating between people speaking different languages, but like what would it look like to really optimize on people speaking the same language? Yes. A similar related idea, which I've been thinking about a lot. Also, I almost wrote a Harry Potter-themed thing on this. I guess I like, that was obviously childhood, like the sorting hat, which is like, imagine an AI model that you could give it one minute, 10 minutes, one hour, and one day to have a conversation. What is the shape of that conversation such that it can ascertain that person's unique passions, abilities? asymmetric strengths and weaknesses and then start to rank them amongst every other person that's ever spoken about and then what would that conversation be in one minute like what after say it had meaning what could you ask no what i would just love to know like say that say this um the sorting hat has had 10 million conversations right what has it figured out is its best conversation to have in one minute to ascertain that information from someone and then how different is that to 10 minutes and to And, like, how long does it actually need to get, you know, 99.9% accuracy? Well, this is, like, I always joke, like, the best thing for the blind date would just be you scroll each other's TikToks for five minutes. That's a good one. That's sort of a proxy sort of guy. Yeah, that's the more, there's, like, definitely a passive way, which is, like, you could just input everything you've ever done and you can figure it out. But what's the active way? What's the active conversation? And it's, like, that would be pretty. This podcast host is, well, I'll either be out of a job or really enabled by that. Yeah. Another one, this is very in vogue now with Don't Die and Brian Johnson, but this was when I read the last question, Isaac Asimov. I just recently read it for the first time. Yeah, I extrapolated out, I think I was, this was like a 3 a.m. thought or something like that, but it was like, okay, if you had to define a meaning of life, you could say it's to keep the universe alive. There's this Alan Watts,

i think it's alan watts alan watts quotes something along the lines of like life is the universe perceiving itself yep and it's like well maybe the like life is the universe keeping itself alive because if you play out the don't die you know thinking fight entropy well yeah it's like yeah for you to not die you have to make sure the earth doesn't die so you have to make sure the solar system doesn't and then eventually you'll run into the walls of the universe you have to figure out how to like yeah have to hold it open steph um he has this great essay i'll send you after called um the thinking earth is sentient earth is becoming sentient and it's sort of a he provides like we're not building some god machine god we're actually like part of the body of earth exactly yeah exactly launching spores and former rockets yeah yeah i love that i love that line of thinking my favorite one that's a that's i think zora is my favorite idea i think for as long as that's true i'll keep doing it um it's a great answer but Yeah, there's a lot of little ones. It's hard to not rabbit hole off into side projects. It's been very hard to stay focused. That's the benefit of having your favorite idea. Yeah, exactly. You work on. What specifically in the vein of creativity do you hope to impart on your children? Creativity. So those three questions came from thinking like what, like those are three questions I want to, like once they get to like, I don't know if they're teenagers or something like that, like where do words come from? Where does the law come from? Where do prices, where did money come from? I feel like are ones that you can have so many conversations around and just like peeling back the curtain and it's like, hey, like you have way more agency than you may think. And most of the world is like human construct. So don't get lost in the sauce. Um, and I think having, making it through that, that I think makes it easy to be creative because now you're looking at everything from the sense of like, well, this is like manmade in some dimensions. So like, how do I want to contribute to it? So, yeah, I think my answer to that is actually those, those three questions are the, the starting point. And then it's just chasing there or pushing it, you know, helping them follow whatever they're.

in whatever internal passion or desire or you know interest that they have helping them realize it's like you you know make sure you can when you have the idea now how would you make that idea reality is actually the next step this is like a simple thing in investing where it's like it's one thing to be right but then it's more important to figure out how do you capitalize on being right yes and i think that holds true in creativity as well which is like you have the the spark of the idea now it's like how would you actually get to the point where you can realize that idea right and that's where the pain and true challenge and the the triumph comes from which is like making sure you do that otherwise you could just get stuck in that loop of being oh there's so many great ideas and you can't express them through your hands and then that that's tough so i think the sum total of those things is probably what i would focus on I think there's that old Steve Jobs video where he's just talking about like once you realize that the world was created by nobody smarter than you, whatever, you can change it. You can push into the matrix and have that feedback loop. The empowering thing about those three ideas is they allow you to look at the world like a canvas. Exactly. And something is fixed. Yeah. That's all I got for you. Okay. Nice. That was fun. Thank you. This was really fun. Yeah, it was great. I'm happy we were finally able to do it. Indeed. Maybe another time sometime in the... When the world has become market-sized. See you soon. See ya. Hey, Jackson again. Before I leave you, a couple of quick notes. One, if you're enjoying Dialectic, I'd really appreciate a rating on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or a thumbs up on YouTube. The podcast is new and every little bit helps. You can also subscribe or follow on any of those platforms if you haven't found them. I'm posting the videos on Twitter and YouTube as well as the audio. If you'd like to stay up to date on future episodes, you can subscribe on all podcast platforms as well as YouTube, and Dialectic is also on Twitter and Instagram. We also have a Telegram channel that I've linked to in the description, and you can find the full transcript for episodes on my website and also linked in the description. If you have notes on the show, feedback, or even guest ideas,

I'm all ears. You can email me at pod at jacksondoll.com or message me on social platforms. Thanks again for listening. It means a whole lot. See you next time.