0:00
You don't get any data, there's no CRM for any creative.
0:02
You don't know who the top 1% of your Spotify listeners are.
0:05
You don't know who the top watchers of your YouTube videos are.
0:07
And you can't directly communicate with those people.
0:09
Creator platforms, you might pay somebody like $5 a month
0:12
to get access to their exclusive content.
0:13
But with Bond, what you're doing is you're actually only paying
0:16
or bonding $5 one time.
0:18
You can withdraw and get your $5 back at any moment in time.
0:22
But while you're bonded to them, they earn interest on your $5.
0:25
Bond is some middle ground where the fan and the creator
0:29
have that direct connection and it costs $0.
0:32
We think that relationship should 1,000% be on chain
0:34
because you can't take your audience with you if a platform like TikTok goes
0:37
down.
0:38
Justin, Michael, thank you guys both so much for coming on the show.
0:46
Thanks for having us.
0:47
What is the biggest misconception that people have
0:50
about the problem that you're solving?
0:52
I think we both have an answer, so you can go first.
0:54
You want me to go first?
0:55
You can go first.
0:56
My spicy take is that people assume all creativity
1:00
should be valued and that creators should be paid,
1:02
which I definitely believe to be true.
1:04
But the prerequisite to any of these themes of creator monetization
1:08
is actually knowing who your audience is.
1:11
Biggest problem in web 2, you don't get any data.
1:13
There's no CRM for any creative.
1:15
You don't know who the top 1% of your Spotify listeners are.
1:18
You don't know who the top watchers of your YouTube videos are.
1:20
And you can't directly communicate with those people.
1:23
And so I guess my take is before you start thinking about creator monetization,
1:28
just knowing who cares about you as a creator
1:30
is one of the biggest unlocks that blockchain provides.
1:33
And what I would say is there have been numerous,
1:37
as you know, creator crypto products that let creators earn on chain
1:41
on the internet in various ways.
1:42
And the way that usually works is through some form of like trading volume.
1:47
So whether that's, you know, a meme coin or a content coin trading
1:50
or an NFT secondary royalty, it's the same idea.
1:53
And what that means is that creators earn more money as trading volume grows.
1:58
But what we believe is that creators should earn more money as their audience
2:01
grows, right?
2:02
You could have a thousand very active traders trading your stuff
2:05
and make some good trading fees off of that.
2:07
But that has no tie at all to your content that you're creating as a creator
2:10
or how big you are getting in the world and how many people are seeing your
2:13
stuff.
2:13
Yeah, because trading is more of like a mercenary behavior.
2:16
You know, you're trying to make money off of something
2:18
versus this complete other type of thing where you want to develop
2:21
like a loyal fan base and a loyal following.
2:24
People who want to have this like long-term relationship with you.
2:26
Those two things would seem to be, you know, opposed.
2:30
A hundred percent.
2:30
Yes.
2:31
And we think that relationship should 1000% be on chain
2:34
because you can't take your audience with you if a platform like TikTok goes
2:37
down.
2:38
So why on chain?
2:39
Why is crypto necessary to solve this problem?
2:42
Oh man, do you want to take that to start?
2:45
Sure. I think I'll give two answers to that.
2:47
Yeah. I think the first is, you know, putting whatever this relationship is,
2:51
economic relationship in our case on chain is just that better because it's
2:55
open,
2:56
it's transparent, everything can be seen.
2:58
And especially with the fact that like typically it's through wallet addresses
3:02
so the creator might have a wallet address and the user will have a wallet
3:05
address.
3:06
Now in theory, they have a direct way to communicate with each other.
3:08
Okay. So that's like sort of like the table stakes reason.
3:11
But I think the more interesting reason is the way that our protocol works,
3:15
you need a blockchain to do it, right?
3:17
And so we could in theory maybe build it on centralized rails,
3:21
but that would require many intermediaries and lots and lots and lots and
3:26
thousands and thousands
3:26
of lines of code, whereas ours is 500 lines of code and simple.
3:31
Touchy BT said it's almost impossible for us to build what we've built.
3:33
Yeah. And obviously our rails.
3:35
I just do them.
3:36
It takes six to nine months to create an MVP.
3:39
Whereas we were able to do it in like two, you know, so.
3:41
So this speaks to the ability in crypto to have interoperability,
3:45
composability to sort of build off of the Lego blocks that other people have
3:48
already created
3:49
and instantly just sort of like be able to ship a product.
3:51
100%.
3:52
Which is the biggest problem that creatives have had
3:54
as they've like expanded across all these different social platforms is there's
3:57
no unified
3:58
database of who cares about the creativity that you've put out in the world.
4:01
But that's not even just as a creator, but even a social graph, right?
4:04
Where like nowadays on Instagram, you know, my friend, one of my best childhood
4:08
friends had twins.
4:09
I didn't even know because it didn't show up in my feed, right?
4:12
And so there's no real relationship that exists
4:15
beyond the algorithm in social media these days.
4:17
And, you know, the stuff that we're building and many other projects
4:20
are beginning to sort of explore what the alternatives look like.
4:23
I recently had a kid and I've not posted about it.
4:25
And I mean, this weird limbo area where I feel like a lot of people don't know
4:29
that I.
4:29
I didn't even get a photo.
4:30
You didn't even get a photo.
4:31
You know, it's kind of covert, you know?
4:33
It feels like it hasn't really happened.
4:36
We have a tree falls in the forest.
4:38
Does it make a sense?
4:39
Exactly.
4:39
Yeah, I like that.
4:40
That's good.
4:41
I get that.
4:42
That totally makes sense.
4:43
To your point about being able to sort of like bootstrap this thing on crypto
4:47
rails,
4:47
I think we're seeing something analogous in, you know, the neo-bank kind of f
4:51
intech area
4:53
where a lot of these startups are realizing that they can instantly go global
4:57
if they use stablecoins rather than having to like develop all these local
5:01
integrations
5:02
with different places and, you know, conform to various local markets.
5:06
They're able to sort of get up and running just by adopting crypto rails.
5:11
And so you're kind of seeing a similar benefit.
5:13
It seems like not in like the fintech area.
5:15
I mean, I guess it is a fintech product.
5:16
And what I'd say to the creator economy.
5:18
100% and what I'd say to is once you get the stablecoin,
5:22
you get access to like all these great things, right?
5:24
You get the vault.
5:25
You get the splits.
5:26
You get the payments, instant settlement, all the magic that we love.
5:28
The problem though is still actually getting the stablecoins, right?
5:31
So the on ramp is still a challenge, especially if we're looking to onboard the
5:34
mainstream.
5:35
That's going to have to improve.
5:36
What's the issue there and how do we overcome it?
5:38
The simple.
5:39
No one supports credit cards.
5:40
Well, yeah, that's the simple version.
5:41
I think people are so used to the convenience of Apple Pay and credit cards.
5:46
And, you know, you have all these different chargeback fraudulent issues that
5:51
arise when
5:51
you convert a credit card fee to a stablecoin.
5:54
And so we initially enabled debit cards for a lot of things.
5:57
And what's funny is I myself didn't even have my debit card and my Apple Pay.
6:01
And I couldn't even find it.
6:02
And it was expiring.
6:03
I started asking friends, I'm like,
6:04
how many of you guys actually use debit cards?
6:06
And the response mostly came back as like none, like zero out of 10 data points
6:12
to people
6:12
actually keep their debit cards on Apple Pay.
6:14
And so I do think the biggest barrier to entry for mainstream engagement in non
6:18
-speculative
6:19
crypto products is just that on ramp.
6:21
And I think that in the 11 years I've been doing crypto things, this is the
6:25
first time
6:26
the regulatory environment and the companies are sort of ready to take that to
6:28
the next level.
6:29
I've read about a trend of like younger generations, as particularly in the US,
6:34
liking debit cards and actually using them more than like millennials and so...
6:39
Oh, interesting.
6:40
I'm asking my millennial friends the question.
6:42
So, you know...
6:42
Yeah, I'm a millennial.
6:43
So this makes no sense to me.
6:44
I use credit cards.
6:46
My friends are not debit cards.
6:47
Okay.
6:48
Yeah, I mean, you know...
6:49
Also, I'm trying to fish around the points.
6:50
I think I'm technically Gen Z.
6:52
All right, I made that right.
6:52
Yeah, okay.
6:53
I don't even know.
6:54
Justin, this is a problem that is deeply personal to you,
6:58
because you are an artist.
7:00
You make music.
7:01
Tell me about your journey.
7:03
It's such a long and fantastic story, but I studied finance in college,
7:07
dropped out and became a DJ in the early days of dance music being a thing in
7:11
America.
7:11
So this is 2010, 2011.
7:13
And I actually met the Winklevoss twins while I was playing one of my shows in
7:17
2014,
7:18
while they were building their exchange called Gemini.
7:20
And that's how I discovered Bitcoin.
7:21
They've got a band, too.
7:22
Oh, yes, they do.
7:23
And they're quite good.
7:24
They've always been into music.
7:25
And so we sort of connected on the passionate about finance level, on the music
7:30
level.
7:30
And that's how I discovered Bitcoin.
7:32
But it didn't really start getting engaged in the ecosystem until, like,
7:35
Ethereum 2017, when I started realizing, "Oh, wow, there are all these
7:39
applications
7:39
that I wish I could have had as a musician when I was starting my career."
7:43
And I've kind of been focused on that since 2017 in lots of different realms
7:47
and lots of different experiments.
7:48
The biggest barrier to entry has been that on-ramp.
7:49
For me, though, my attraction to blockchain technology in general is my
7:56
experience as an
7:56
independent artist.
7:57
And I'm sure you've heard of a couple of these, but to give you an example,
8:00
there's Chance the Rapper, and there's another rapper named Russ who's really,
8:05
really amazing at telling his story about being an independent artist and how
8:09
challenging that is,
8:10
how it's been over the past 10 years, and how you just get no data.
8:13
And you don't know anything about, you sell tickets, you don't know who those
8:17
people are.
8:17
You don't get their emails, ticker master controls your emails.
8:20
You grow up following on Instagram, they change the algorithm.
8:23
How do you reach that fan base?
8:25
Those fans definitely still care about that music.
8:28
They're just seeing a bunch of slop that re-hypoticates their attention to more
8:33
advertising
8:33
revenue, because that's sort of what Web2 is incentivized around.
8:36
And so for me, crypto has been a force that I feel the next generation of creat
8:44
ives
8:44
across the board, not just musicians, can use to really maintain that
8:48
independence
8:49
and maintain their biggest share of the pie when it comes to their revenue.
8:52
As you know, most creators have managers, agents, lawyers, all of whom take
8:56
fees along the way.
8:57
And if you were to compare that to the structure of a company and a VC
9:01
investing in that company,
9:02
a lot of creatives actually end up giving over 40% of their income just in
9:07
commissions.
9:08
Wow, 40%.
9:09
Exactly.
9:10
And so the theory that I've always played with is in my head in crypto, like
9:13
the core theory is,
9:15
if you can align incentives and connect directly with a fan base,
9:19
they'd provide more value than the 40% commission you're paying your team.
9:23
And it's a relatively controversial taking the music business because, you know
9:26
,
9:26
there are lots of people that don't make music that have jobs based on these
9:30
types of roles.
9:31
And yet, the industry still lives in a world from like 20 years ago where
9:35
royalty accounting is
9:36
absolutely garbage.
9:37
There's tons of fraud.
9:38
I mean, the story just came out the other week that Calvin Harris is business
9:41
manager.
9:42
I ended up firing a while ago in Bezelton, out of like 22 million in a real
9:46
estate deal.
9:46
You know, and so these sort of like conventional slimy takes that you hear
9:50
about the music industry
9:51
are all true.
9:52
And blockchain as a transparent layer, as an open layer just was so obvious to
9:57
me back then,
9:58
could help solve all the problems that I was experiencing.
10:01
And so I've sort of dedicated my life to, you know, making it work.
10:04
And I think, you know, 2025 is the first year we have the regulatory
10:07
environment to push it.
10:08
I think people might be familiar with a service like Patreon where you can
10:12
support creators or
10:14
sub stack. You subscribe to various content creators and they get a portion of
10:17
the revenue,
10:18
a large portion.
10:19
What separates what you're doing from those existing options?
10:23
Like on Patreon or sub stack or even Instagram or any of these other creator
10:26
platforms,
10:27
you might pay somebody like $5 a month, right?
10:29
So every month you're paying the $5 to get access to their exclusive content.
10:33
But with Bond, what you're doing is you're actually only paying or bonding $5
10:38
one time
10:39
with the catch that once you bond your money, you get access to their exclusive
10:44
content,
10:44
whatever that might be.
10:45
Maybe, you know, it's a chorus, an exclusive, you know, song, a blog, etc.
10:50
But the catch is that you can withdraw and get your $5 back at any moment in
10:54
time.
10:55
But while you're bonded to them, they earn interest on your $5.
10:59
And so that's how they earn money.
11:01
And so instead of me paying you $5 directly, I am bonding $5 to you one time.
11:06
And as long as I'm bonded to you, you're earning interest.
11:09
And what this creates is this really cool new dynamic where now, instead of
11:12
being able to say,
11:13
you know, I have a thousand subscribers, you can say I have $1,000 bonded to me
11:18
, right?
11:19
Which is a very new social metric type of signal that I think creators are
11:22
going to
11:23
really like and use.
11:24
We started with your worth more than your follower count because there's so
11:27
many bots.
11:28
There's no way to really value your social graph as it applies in Web2.
11:32
And as Michael said, you know, if you get a thousand fans to stake or to bond $
11:37
5, that's cool.
11:38
You also have fans that are bigger that might want to get recognized by you as
11:42
a creator.
11:42
And they might be willing to stake a little bit more money and bond $5,000, $10
11:46
,000.
11:46
And now all of a sudden you as the creator can tell, okay, who really cares
11:52
about me?
11:52
Maybe I'll do a lot more for you.
11:54
And what bond is, is it's somewhere between a follower and a subscription where
11:58
, as a creator,
11:58
it's a lot to ask your fans to pay $5 a month for a subscription.
12:02
And, you know, you're then obligated to give them new content.
12:06
They might stop the subscription and you're like asking them for something that
12:09
feels like
12:10
sort of disingenuous when you ask someone to subscribe.
12:13
A follow is, you know, really worthless in the sense that, you know,
12:17
the algorithm then decides what you see and how you interact.
12:20
Bond is some middle ground where both the user, the fan, and the creator
12:24
have that direct connection and it costs $0.
12:27
The beauty of the mechanic is in the DeFi component where now, instead of
12:33
keeping your money
12:33
in a checking account, you might spread that money between a lot of creators
12:36
that you like
12:37
just to get access to them.
12:38
Something that you just couldn't do in an Instagram or a TikTok environment.
12:42
And you say cost $0 because you can bond some amount of money.
12:46
Like say I bond $20 to you as a musician. I like your music.
12:49
I want to get access to all the behind the scenes sort of material.
12:52
And then I can pull my money out pretty much whenever and have that back.
12:56
Exactly.
12:56
Yeah, exactly.
12:57
You're basically taking like a business model that it's well understood in
13:00
Fintech and finance.
13:02
There's this like shadow economy of, you know, the Starbucks mobile app is kind
13:06
of like a bank.
13:07
And everybody's accounts that they just leave their pennies in there.
13:11
You know, on an aggregate scale, Starbucks makes a lot of money off of that in
13:15
interest.
13:15
You're taking this sort of like business model that's pre-existing and is
13:18
almost like a bug
13:19
for user experiences elsewhere and turning it into a feature.
13:22
I'm actually going to choose to stake some of this money or bond it.
13:28
And it's going to be transparent and open that I know that the artist is going
13:31
to get rewarded.
13:32
Yeah, exactly.
13:32
And what I'm, you know, a problem that creators have is now with all the
13:35
different platforms,
13:36
right? It started out with just Facebook.
13:37
Now it's everything, you know, even before that Myspace.
13:39
Who do I even know to respond to, right?
13:42
Like, I owe the people that care about my musical response if they have a
13:46
question,
13:46
if they have a story.
13:47
There's just no way for me to filter how much someone cares in Web2.
13:52
With bond, if somebody has money staked on me, at the end of the night when I
13:56
go to sleep after a show,
13:57
more likely to respond to those people than the random spam that I get with
14:01
random ads on Instagram
14:02
or on TikTok or wherever it might be.
14:04
And so we think about bond, not just as a new mechanic for online relationships
14:10
.
14:10
We also think of it as the first creator CRM because there's literally no data
14:16
you have access to
14:17
when you build an audience on any other platform.
14:19
Salesforce for artists.
14:21
I mean, there's all these analogies, right?
14:22
It's like Patreon, but it's not.
14:24
It's Salesforce and it's not.
14:24
And I think that's our biggest challenge in starting this new idea is this is a
14:28
behavior
14:28
that users aren't used to and creatives aren't used to, right?
14:31
A user is not used to being able to get their money back instantaneously at any
14:34
time.
14:35
You know, they wait, let's say you buy something and you return it.
14:37
It's like, let's say you buy a bunch of T-shirts online, you got to wait a week
14:40
before the credit card payment gets reversed or with a ticket you buy it.
14:44
Maybe you don't want to go to the show anymore.
14:46
Now you have to list that on StubHub.
14:47
It's a lot of effort to receive that refund.
14:50
With stablecoins, everything is instantaneous, permissionless, and 24/7.
14:54
My favorite story about getting into crypto was just using Ethereum on the
14:58
weekend and
14:58
showing my dad that it takes a couple minutes to move money anywhere in the
15:01
world.
15:02
That was in like 2017.
15:03
And with stablecoins and with all the new positive regulation,
15:06
we now have new tools to create a completely new environment for creatives to
15:10
interact with
15:11
their biggest supporters.
15:12
We also don't even necessarily think it stops at creators.
15:14
You can imagine somebody who has medical debt that starts to go fund me.
15:17
Instead of now donating to pay off that medical debt, you can just bond to that
15:22
person
15:22
and they can use your interest to pay off that medical debt, right?
15:24
So this is just a completely new mechanic that begins with creators
15:28
because everything good usually begins with creators.
15:31
And we hope to just expand the idea of interest-bearing online connection
15:38
to lots of other spaces on the internet.
15:40
Why now?
15:41
Like, why is the world ready for this now?
15:43
I asked this because, you know, back in previous cycles of the crypto market,
15:48
there were a lot of hopes placed on being able to compensate creators for their
15:52
work.
15:52
There was a lot of interest in NFT royalties and things like that.
15:56
It didn't really pan out to the degree that people had thought.
15:59
What's changed between then and now and why is the world
16:03
you know, ready to receive this kind of new product?
16:07
I think a few reasons.
16:08
First, from a technical side, the tech is kind of ready, right?
16:12
Like, we have layer twos with like sub-penny transaction fees.
16:16
We have stablecoins.
16:17
We have really amazing SDKs and wallet infrastructure where people can come to
16:22
our site
16:22
and we can give them a wallet with them not even knowing that there's a wallet.
16:27
Like, they can just sign up with your email.
16:28
We can also sponsor their transaction.
16:30
So when you're using the bond website, for example, normally and you'll have
16:34
like
16:34
pay Ethereum gas to like do a transaction, you don't even know that there's an
16:37
Ethereum
16:38
transaction going on on the bond platform because it's all hidden behind the
16:41
scenes.
16:41
But that is because there have been many companies that have worked really hard
16:45
to build
16:46
really incredible infrastructure to enable such a seamless experience.
16:50
Because even like when you asked to describe what we're building,
16:53
we didn't even need to mention crypto, right?
16:55
It's not required.
16:56
And so if we're trying to get the mainstream onboarded, it's very important
16:59
that the experience just feels seamless.
17:01
That's from a technical side.
17:04
The other thing I'd say is that Patreon and Substack and these other
17:07
subscription platforms
17:08
have been around.
17:09
But other platforms that are like the Instagrams and the Twitters of the world
17:13
have started to incorporate subscriptions into these profiles.
17:16
So like you can subscribe to a Twitter profile or Instagram profile.
17:19
People just have like subscription fatigue, right?
17:22
I, there was like maybe 100 creators that I would love to support because I
17:26
read their posts.
17:27
I follow them.
17:28
But I don't think I'm going to pay them five bucks a month, right?
17:31
There are some creators that I see have like a quarter of a million followers.
17:35
And when you click in, only 250 paid them five bucks a month as subscribers.
17:39
That's a huge gap, right?
17:42
So what is a better mechanism for me to support these creators that I love?
17:46
It's cheaper, you know, it's easier and it's less of like a mental burden.
17:49
And so I think as everyone sort of warming up to this idea of subscribing to
17:53
people,
17:54
we think that this is a better way of doing that.
17:56
So you said subscribing to people, which, you know, just to push back a little
18:00
bit,
18:00
we're in this time when AI has made it so easy to generate content.
18:04
Some people might argue that the cost of content creation is crashing to zero.
18:09
What happens in that world?
18:11
What happens to the creator economy?
18:12
That brings me to my most controversial take.
18:15
Great.
18:15
I'll tell a quick story and then I'll go into the answer.
18:19
There's nothing like watching John Mayer play the guitar live.
18:22
It's one of the best music experiences I've had as a DJ.
18:25
I can play guitar, but not really.
18:27
And watching John play is something that is an indescribably valuable
18:31
experience
18:32
that, you know, I've had the privilege of hanging out with him
18:35
and watching him play a couple of times.
18:37
And every time it gives me so much value, like he's received almost no
18:40
compensation
18:41
outside of the ticket, you know, which is some money.
18:44
But realistically, he's given me way more value than the value of that ticket,
18:46
right?
18:47
And the merch.
18:47
And the merch that I don't own yet.
18:48
I saw him perform at Beth Elle Woods, which is like where the real woodstock
18:53
took place.
18:53
He played with the Grateful Dead.
18:54
It was fantastic.
18:55
Wow.
18:55
He's an incredible show.
18:56
Also talked to him about Bond a couple of weeks ago and he got it pretty
18:59
quickly.
19:00
My controversial take as it applies to sort of AI content is
19:03
people will find value in the human curation surrounding that content.
19:09
Because, you know, when things are just like prompt to content,
19:13
you can usually tell like eventually it will be relatively indistinguishable.
19:16
But the biggest variable in creativity is less the actual creative act and more
19:22
curation.
19:23
And it has been for a while.
19:24
So when I sit down to make a song, I'm curating all these different sounds
19:27
to create the final version of the song.
19:29
That's my skill set.
19:31
And that's what feels the most human to the listener.
19:33
And so I think in that sense, people will appreciate the human input.
19:37
It's just that the friction to execute your creative ideas has now gone to zero
19:41
,
19:41
which brings me to my controversial take, which is that IP as it relates to
19:44
creativity,
19:45
I think is going to completely disappear.
19:48
I don't think that any of the laws are actually enforceable,
19:50
and any of the precedents are enforceable.
19:52
And if you look at the history of copyright, it's not very old.
19:55
Especially it applies to music.
19:56
Master recording rights didn't even exist up until the 70s.
20:00
So no one even owned the underlying recording,
20:02
except for the record labels.
20:03
There were no laws because the labels just owned everything.
20:05
They owned 100%.
20:07
And it was only until the 70s that musicians actually even received
20:10
any portion of income from their recordings.
20:12
They also controlled, you know, the labels control the physical distribution as
20:15
well.
20:15
And so copyright as a concept is kind of becoming antiquated by the existence
20:19
of AI.
20:20
And I actually think it holds us back a lot.
20:22
And so the contrary opinion to this is well, like,
20:24
how do you pay all the people that came up with the ideas first?
20:27
And my response to that is,
20:29
work human beings were kind of unlimited.
20:32
If somebody had an idea 200 years ago, they couldn't even record it.
20:37
What if they influenced all these generations of people that led
20:41
the first copyright holder to their idea?
20:43
They're not getting compensated along the way when copyright didn't exist.
20:46
Johann Sebastian Bach was one of the first musicians of all time
20:49
to have any sort of rights associated with his music.
20:52
His value lives on through his provenance,
20:54
through his reputation of being one of the best composers of all time.
20:58
And so my opinion on this is we just need to create a new value system for
21:02
creativity.
21:03
Copyright is just not it and cannot be in a world of rampant quality level AI
21:07
content.
21:08
That sounds like a very scary prospect, probably, for a lot of creators
21:11
who are used to relying on their IP and making their entire living off of it.
21:16
That's the question is, in a world where they won't be able to do that anymore,
21:18
which I think is inevitable, what do they have?
21:21
Well, they have the human relationship with the people that appreciate their
21:24
work.
21:24
And so we need to come up with an entirely new value system.
21:26
Otherwise, I actually think all of creativity is doomed.
21:30
And so you've got sort of the incumbents that are like,
21:32
we got to pass for our rights and for the Mickey Mouse IP or for this song IP
21:37
that's really big,
21:38
that somebody remakes.
21:39
And in reality, I think it's so egotistic to think
21:42
that we could ever own an idea in the first place.
21:44
This might not be true of biotech, just to juxtapose it for a second.
21:48
When there's a lot of research and friction that goes into an idea,
21:51
patents and stuff, I understand are necessary because without that,
21:54
people aren't even incentivized to innovate, right?
21:56
Because someone could just copy, cat it, and all of your work and money
22:00
and time that you spent on research is irrelevant.
22:03
And so people would be less incentivized to build really complicated things
22:07
if that type of IP law didn't exist.
22:09
But as it implies to creativity where the friction is really going to zero,
22:12
anywhere where friction is zero with the advent of AI,
22:15
I just believe copyright is a huge force against innovation in those spaces.
22:21
This reminds me of a quote from Thomas Jefferson,
22:24
associated with when he was kind of developing the patent system in the US.
22:28
He sort of walked through the logic of it saying,
22:30
if I light my candle to yours, you can take my fire without diminishing mine.
22:35
And he talks about this as like an analogy for the spread of ideas.
22:38
You know, other people can benefit from and use your ideas
22:41
without it hurting you as the creator.
22:43
But it sounds like we need an update on some of these systems
22:48
that we've held for a long time.
22:50
It also reminds me of, you know, I think Charles Dickens,
22:53
he did a famous tour in the US when he was the most popular writer of his time.
22:58
And I think he was horrified because in America,
23:00
everybody would just rip all of his works and they were publishing it,
23:04
left and right, not abiding by any copyright and he thought we were savages.
23:08
But maybe this is the way of the future.
23:10
Yeah, who knows?
23:11
We're going to know in the next five years, that's for sure.
23:13
It's getting really good.
23:14
My controversial take, unrelated, is I've worked in this industry for many
23:20
years now.
23:21
And I've seen that.
23:21
You have including at A6 and C6 and C6. Yes. And I think like now going to the
23:27
builder side
23:28
and like starting to build things, I think what I'm starting to think about is
23:32
I don't
23:33
necessarily think that every, we'll call it crypto product or product built on
23:39
crypto
23:40
needs to be a decentralized protocol with a token.
23:43
And because of how big that word is, everything just kind of gets lumped
23:49
together into that.
23:50
But I think what we're seeing, as I've said before, is the tech is so good that
23:55
you can just build great apps, great businesses that don't necessarily need to
24:00
be decentralized.
24:00
And that's okay.
24:02
Using these rails to create a great experience and net new financial products
24:06
or net new consumer
24:08
experiences. And we're actually seeing that happen, right?
24:10
And so I don't know if I can name names or not, but there are many successful
24:15
crypto companies
24:15
now that are, you know, I wouldn't necessarily call like a decentralized
24:19
protocol, but they're
24:20
using the tech in a way that's really amazing to just create new products in
24:24
the world.
24:25
And that's exciting to see.
24:27
And I hope that that is, you know, something that builders out there who are
24:31
like thinking
24:32
about, like, I want to build a new product.
24:34
They shouldn't be thinking about, oh, do I want to build a crypto product?
24:37
They should be thinking about, I want to build this great thing.
24:39
And crypto is like a tool and a means to get there, but it's not like on
24:44
building a whole
24:44
crypto product, right? Like, it's a layer on the stack.
24:46
Yeah, I think we're seeing this, you know, play out in stablecoins where people
24:51
talk
24:51
about stablecoins, but it's going to just sort of transition to this thing
24:55
where people are
24:55
talking about dollars. Like, it doesn't matter that it's a stablecoin.
24:58
I'm just talking about what it does at the end of the day, which is it
25:00
represents some
25:01
value for you in a reliable way.
25:02
Something around this that I was thinking about the other day is like, what's
25:06
the difference
25:06
between crypto and AI? And I feel like AI.
25:10
I feel like this is a setup for a joke.
25:11
No, it's not.
25:11
It's not like I was really thinking about it.
25:14
It's not, but I was really thinking about like, what's the difference for the
25:17
user?
25:17
And the difference is the user is going to feel the AI, right?
25:22
They're going to feel it in the experience, right?
25:24
As we know, we've seen thousands of these products and whether it's generating
25:27
art or
25:28
talking to charging BT or whatever, right?
25:30
Whereas crypto might actually be completely invisible, right?
25:34
And that's kind of cool.
25:35
I love that it's sort of this front end, back end distinction.
25:37
Yeah, exactly.
25:38
We talked a little bit about Justin and his musical career,
25:41
but I have to also say, Michael, you're a magician.
25:43
Yes.
25:44
How does that inform your work?
25:45
How does it make you think about the creator economy?
25:48
Well, a lot of different ways.
25:49
It's funny.
25:49
Magic and IP has a very crazy history because you can't copyright magic.
25:54
Like you can't like copyright or magic performance.
25:56
Like I could write down something and maybe copyright that,
25:59
but you can't copyright a magic performance.
26:01
And so magic history is littered with people ripping each other off, left and
26:05
right,
26:05
and remixing ideas.
26:07
Like, oh, I might see you perform one thing and take it
26:09
and do it over here and this and that and this.
26:11
It's funny.
26:11
One of my mentors in magic quite I respect immensely.
26:14
His name is Aussie Wind.
26:15
He's incredible.
26:15
Yeah, you haven't seen a show.
26:16
Oh, he's amazing.
26:17
You have the best.
26:18
You have to see him.
26:18
He actually posed this question to me one time,
26:21
which was like, you know, you can go to a magic store and pay $20
26:25
for like a trick deck of cards or whatever.
26:27
And, you know, just do the same trick as anybody else.
26:29
It's the same trick, right?
26:31
But what's the difference between like a good and bad magician, right?
26:34
And they came down to like, what else are we saying?
26:36
It's the person, right?
26:38
When Aussie Wind performs trick A and I perform trick A,
26:42
him performing is going to be like significantly better.
26:46
Like a thousand times better because he's just amazing, right?
26:48
And so it's funny because in the world of magic,
26:51
people kind of gave up.
26:52
They're like, we can't even copyright this stuff.
26:54
Like it's people are just going to get ripped off, left and right.
26:57
And so it forces the performers to be even more unique,
27:00
to like differentiate themselves.
27:02
Because otherwise you're just the cookie putter of like,
27:04
anyone else that can go to a magic store.
27:05
So it's almost like sort of the status quo for the magic world
27:10
is kind of what Justin was saying.
27:12
Like that this is where all art is headed, right?
27:16
That like, you're not going to have this defensibility
27:18
around your IP, your product, your ideas.
27:21
Right.
27:21
And it's about the human aspect, the human element
27:24
that you bring to it that people are going to connect with.
27:27
What's that amazing quote?
27:28
Anything, any sufficiently advanced technologies,
27:30
indistinguishable from magic, right?
27:31
Yes, Arthur C. Clark.
27:32
Yeah, amazing quote.
27:33
It's true, like, magicians are always like two to three steps
27:36
ahead tech-wise from like the rest of the world.
27:39
And I'm not going to explain what that is on a podcast,
27:42
because they don't be really feeling secret.
27:43
It's about like, I'll just say that there are like tech things
27:46
in magic that I was playing with over 10 years ago
27:50
in high school that now are becoming consumer products
27:53
that we have in our pocket.
27:54
Really?
27:55
And I can't use them as tricks anymore.
27:56
A hundred percent.
27:57
Yeah.
27:57
Can you give any examples?
27:58
Like, this sounds kind of crazy.
28:00
OK, the new meta glasses.
28:01
Yeah.
28:02
Right.
28:02
You have this on your wrist, right?
28:04
And you can type by drawing with your hands, right?
28:08
Right.
28:09
Magicians were playing with that.
28:11
Not not the exact tech, but like--
28:13
Conceptually.
28:14
Conceptually things dancing around that using technology,
28:16
like, you know, 10 years ago.
28:19
Oh, that's fascinating.
28:20
Yeah, which is really fun.
28:21
Inspirations for you guys.
28:23
Who do you look up to?
28:24
Who do you admire?
28:25
Who personally inspires your own creative pursuits?
28:28
I already mentioned John Mayer from a creativity standpoint,
28:31
and I would say one of my friends, who I also look up to,
28:33
Zed, who's also always been very tech-forward.
28:36
Fantastic DJ, mega-hit maker.
28:39
On the sort of tech side, I would say,
28:41
I think Brian Chesky is just a really great human being,
28:45
and has done some pretty amazing things
28:47
in the face of a lot of challenges.
28:48
And to see how Airbnb just revolutionized
28:51
in so many things, right?
28:53
And changed our perspective on how the world works.
28:55
I can only hope for us to sort of do that from a crypto lens.
28:59
Hmm.
29:00
I'll bring it back to magic.
29:01
I'll give three magicians that anyone watching
29:03
should, like, totally look up and watch their stuff,
29:06
because they've inspired me.
29:07
And I'll choose ones that are alive today,
29:08
so that, you know, you can all check it out.
29:10
So, obviously, Aussie went, like, for sure 100%,
29:12
the best Doug McKenzie and David Blaine.
29:16
And I love them all for very different reasons.
29:19
Doug, specifically, is sort of, like, the tech-forward magician.
29:22
And so he's, like, the most advanced on that front.
29:25
And David Blaine, he's just incredibly inspiring,
29:27
because he just pushes himself so hard.
29:31
And, like, you watch him perform, and you're, like,
29:33
listen, if he could, you know, stab a stake through his hand,
29:37
like, I can definitely, like, do this other thing.
29:39
I remember him trying to hold his breath under water
29:41
for, like, however many minutes, that's the same.
29:42
Nine, yeah, exactly.
29:43
Nine, ten minutes.
29:44
Exactly, exactly.
29:45
You guys have time for a lightning round?
29:46
Let's do it.
29:47
Sure.
29:48
What is the worst piece of advice
29:49
that you've ever gotten as a founder?
29:52
This is a very specific take,
29:53
but just hire smart people.
29:55
They'll figure it out, I think, is wrong.
29:57
Especially in any blockchain adjacent
30:00
or blockchain-specific industry,
30:02
you must use the product to have
30:04
the right cultural perspective.
30:06
And I think that just hiring a great engineer
30:08
and hoping to train them in the ways of crypto,
30:10
unless they're truly passionate about crypto, it doesn't work.
30:12
So I would say that's, like, the worst advice I've gotten.
30:14
I was going to say, that's exactly what I was going to say.
30:16
That was going to steal hands.
30:17
Oh, shit.
30:17
So, yeah, only one of that.
30:19
No need to name names.
30:20
What is your biggest productivity hack?
30:22
Voice notes.
30:23
Like, voice note to AI summary.
30:25
So, like, I use meeting notes on Zoom.
30:27
I don't always look at them, but, like, if I ever have an idea,
30:30
now I know I can just, instead of recording it, transcribing it,
30:33
and then leaving it in its current form,
30:35
I can have AI take the idea, refine it,
30:38
and now it's there in my notes.
30:40
And I think that's been really helpful
30:43
for me recalling thoughts and things that I,
30:47
you know, we're just thinking about all this stuff all day long.
30:49
And then there's a lot of things we think about.
30:50
And so being able to distill all of that,
30:52
I think with some combination of voice,
30:54
an AI is great for me. I use, like, a lot of, like,
30:58
AI generated voice for, like, reading blogs and stuff.
31:01
And so I have this pipeline where I have, like, a Chrome extension
31:04
with Speechify, and it hooks into my email.
31:06
So when I'm reading emails, I can just have it, like, be read to me.
31:09
And if I like things, I can, like, another Chrome extension,
31:12
which, like, takes a snippet of, like, a quote or a concept that I really like,
31:16
and then puts it right into Obsidian,
31:18
which is, like, the other tool that I know a lot,
31:20
every day, six, since it uses it.
31:21
Yes.
31:21
I mean, a lot of people look at you, so it's like this whole flow.
31:24
One of my messages.
31:25
I'm, like, Speechify to, you know, Obsidian.
31:28
Obsidian's, like, note-taking app, basically.
31:30
I just use Apple Notes.
31:32
Oh, no, no, no, no, no.
31:33
Obsidian's, like, the greatest note-taking app of all time.
31:36
I tried using Obsidian.
31:37
I also reverted back out.
31:38
Just so used to it, yeah.
31:39
Just going with the basics.
31:41
I've been asking people for a book recommendation.
31:43
Given your work, feel free to recommend a song too,
31:45
or whatever kind of art you think people should admire.
31:49
I think maybe the book that I've read recently that, like,
31:54
I stopped and took so many notes.
31:57
I'll give you two books again.
31:58
Yeah.
31:58
I took so many notes, and, like, it really,
32:00
maybe think about a lot of things.
32:01
A lot of things was the Machiavellians.
32:03
Oh, yeah.
32:03
That one.
32:05
And then, as it relates to, like, tech and crypto,
32:08
and, like, how do you wrap your head around this whole thing of Bitcoin,
32:12
and crypto, and stablecoins, and dollars, and the Fed,
32:15
and money printing, and, like, how do you wrap that all?
32:17
Lynn Alden's book, I think it's called Broken Money.
32:21
Yeah, Broken Money.
32:22
Those are two really good books.
32:23
I've yet to read, and definitely should.
32:26
Fantastic books.
32:27
One on economics, one on politics.
32:28
Yeah.
32:28
I've read the Machiavellians.
32:30
This is a beloved book within A16Z.
32:33
Mark Andreessen talks about it all the time.
32:34
Yeah, yeah.
32:35
That's where I got it from, though.
32:36
Yeah.
32:36
It says a lot about politics.
32:38
If you want to understand it, you can...
32:39
Definitely.
32:40
Learn a lot from it.
32:41
My book was a gift from my brother, actually, on my birthday.
32:45
The courage to be disliked.
32:47
It's fantastic.
32:48
And at a time in my life, where a lot of people on the internet
32:52
disliked me, it was a very, very great read,
32:54
and changed my perspective on a lot of things.
32:56
So that's up there for me on books.
32:58
Who's the same word about that?
33:00
I DJed at the Presidential Inauguration,
33:02
and a lot of people hate Trump.
33:03
That was this January.
33:04
Dead Mouse, another DJ, said something negative,
33:07
and then a bunch of other people piled on.
33:09
And I actually worked with racial Horowitz
33:11
on my very politically correct response
33:13
on what it means to be proud to be an American.
33:14
And I would have DJed for a camel.
33:16
I would have DJed for any president if they ask,
33:18
because I'm a proud American.
33:19
I love the freedoms we have in this country.
33:21
And that says nothing about my political beliefs
33:23
about immigration, just because I'm DJing in inauguration.
33:26
It doesn't mean you can make all these assumptions
33:27
about my beliefs on other things.
33:29
Also, pro-crypto president is probably good for my shareholders
33:32
and our work, but it's beyond that.
33:35
And so I read the book around that time,
33:36
and it was very helpful to be.
33:37
That's a good pick for artists who are, you know,
33:39
in today's day and age, when you're trying to be loved
33:42
by everybody and gain the biggest following possible.
33:45
The best time to read that book, like you should buy it
33:48
and put it on your shelf, but don't read it
33:50
until you're feeling like really down.
33:52
Because that's what it's gonna happen most in back.
33:54
Yeah, probably.
33:54
If you're happy and you're like, flying high,
33:56
you're like, I'm really glad.
33:57
It won't really stir.
33:58
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
33:59
That's actually good.
34:00
That's actually a good tip.
34:01
On the music front, you know, it's a cliche answer,
34:04
but, you know, a lot of people spend a lot of time listening
34:07
to individual songs.
34:08
And I think that the album is a lost art, right?
34:11
When you can listen to something undistracted
34:13
for 45 minutes to an hour and 15 minutes
34:16
and really understand the story that an artist is trying to tell,
34:18
I highly recommend people listen to albums.
34:20
And then it's relatively a cliche answer,
34:23
but I think that the latest Rufus Dusseau album
34:25
is one of their best.
34:26
Their previous albums are also incredible.
34:28
I just really, really love the new one.
34:29
There's a couple songs on there
34:30
that I think push a lot of boundaries, sonically.
34:34
And it's definitely a two-listen.
34:36
Amazing.
34:37
Well, I have to plug this actually.
34:38
Our podcast is using your music, Justin.
34:41
Thank you for supplying it to us.
34:42
A track called Shine That You Created.
34:44
A track that never came out that now is in good hands.
34:46
And now we'll be listening to you by anybody
34:48
who tunes into A16Z Crypto's Media.
34:51
We love it.
34:51
Thank you for that.
34:52
And I recommend that to anybody.
34:54
Nice.
34:54
Final question in the light year round,
34:56
what is the smallest hill that you will die on?
34:59
I have a good one.
35:00
Yeah.
35:00
No outside clothes on Inside Furniture.
35:03
Fantastic.
35:04
You and my wife would get along very well.
35:05
That's, okay, that's a really good one.
35:07
I'll do one for Tech then.
35:09
I, to this day, still believe that
35:12
an NFT, or specifically like ERC721 or 1155,
35:16
is one of the coolest technological innovations
35:19
for representing digital objects on the internet.
35:21
And they are going to be everywhere.
35:23
So regardless of what people say in the media
35:25
what the headlines are, they are not dead.
35:27
What are people getting wrong about it?
35:28
They make all these assumptions,
35:30
I think, on the speculative front.
35:31
They think of it like the internet was a passing fad
35:34
that no one was going to use,
35:35
but yet it's an information superhighway
35:37
that's really valuable to everyone.
35:38
I think NFTs will sort of follow that arc
35:40
that the internet did,
35:42
where digital ownership is really meaningful.
35:44
The Instagram verified badge actually meant a lot for a while
35:47
and it's a combination of signal and digital identity.
35:50
And NFTs still do that today.
35:52
There were just a lot of projects
35:53
that maybe abuse some of the most popular narratives
35:57
to make a lot of money.
35:58
And I think those narratives remain true
36:00
that digital ownership is one of the most important things
36:03
to think about in the future.
36:05
And especially as it applies to the previous conversation
36:08
we had about AI and friction going to zero,
36:10
having representations of who originated something
36:13
of provenance, of a transparent ledger
36:16
of how that digital object has moved,
36:19
I think is just such an inevitability,
36:20
whether that's on the identity level
36:22
or the artistic level,
36:23
they're going to be everywhere.
36:24
It's just a matter of time.
36:25
I think it was Eddie Lazar said this at my time of day 16z
36:28
and I love this, it was great.
36:29
Yeah, he adds in our CTO, he's great.
36:31
Yeah, I forgot what the topic was,
36:32
but it was really like NFTs and ownership.
36:34
And he goes, you know, a side effect
36:38
of true ownership is ease of transferability.
36:42
And when you have some of this easily transferable,
36:45
you're going to get a lot of people transferring it
36:47
and trading, right?
36:48
But that's not the core thing, that's a side effect, right?
36:50
The core is true ownership.
36:52
And I like that, I like that frame.
36:54
It's like training.
36:55
True ownership, that's something we can all get behind.
36:56
Yes.
36:57
Michael, Justin, thank you so much for being here
36:59
and for taking the time out to chat.
37:00
Amazing.
37:01
Thanks for having us.
37:01
This is great.
37:02
Thank you.
37:03
Q shine.
37:04
Yeah, that's right.
37:08
[MUSIC PLAYING]
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