![[9-Jacob Horne.jpg]] *Dialectic Episode 9 - Jacob Horne - Markets for What Matters - is available on [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/episode/1Z80plZyqGxvejklyO0tOm?si=UZHCcp_3S7qsqHgXJ63v6w), [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dialectic/id1780282402), and [YouTube](https://youtu.be/OTVBeLhEDAI?si=Czl9iHTMIjcjd0ar).* <iframe style="border-radius:12px" src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/episode/1Z80plZyqGxvejklyO0tOm?utm_source=generator" width="100%" height="152" frameBorder="0" allowfullscreen="" allow="autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" loading="lazy"></iframe> <iframe allow="autoplay *; encrypted-media *; fullscreen *; clipboard-write" frameborder="0" height="175" style="width:100%;max-width:660px;overflow:hidden;border-radius:10px;" sandbox="allow-forms allow-popups allow-same-origin allow-scripts allow-storage-access-by-user-activation allow-top-navigation-by-user-activation" src="https://embed.podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/9-jacob-horne-markets-for-what-matters/id1780282402?i=1000693974247"></iframe> <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/OTVBeLhEDAI?si=0dt7qn7ZUP4_flXa" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe> # Description Jacob Horne ([Website](https://jacob.energy/index.html), [Zora](https://zora.co/@jacob), [X](https://x.com/js_horne), [Farcaster](https://warpcast.com/jacob)), is co-founder and CEO of [Zora](https://zora.co/), a platform that allows the tokenization of media. Jacob started his career at Coinbase where he was a product lead and helped create USDC. Five years ago, he left to wade deeper into the waters of internet and crypto-native coordination and creativity and co-founded Zora. His central interest is how people coordinate together using the internet—the includes currencies, markets, ownership, art, speculation, and memes. We discuss how memes and symbols enable coordination, "The Meme and the Memo," words, money, and laws, Zora's premise built on Stewart Brand's "information wants to be free but it also wants to be expensive," a case for markets around attention, the new version of Zora and "a coin for every piece of content," speculation vs. gambling, token-powered brands, Ethereum and Solana, Coinbase and USDC, and a wide-ranging personal section that showcases why Jacob is so generative. The parting prompt I hope this conversation leaves all of us with is this: while information is ~free today (and also abundant, infinite), it is also quite expensive to consume in terms of time. We ought to think carefully about what content we spend our precious time consuming and rewarding. That you would spend some of yours listening to Dialectic is as always a privilege and I hope you find it worthwhile. # Timestamps - (3:03): Obsession with Memes: How do you get people to organize? - (8:46): The Meme and the Memo via Balaji Srinivasan - (11:32): Three Fundamental Questions: Words, Money, Laws - (12:39): The Midwit Meme and other Favorites - (15:55): What makes media and information valuable? - (19:26): Zora, Tokenized Media, and Information wants to be Free *and* Expensive - (22:53): Provenance - (28:30): Why Do We Want Markets for Attention? **Deeper Crypto Section** - (37:08): A coin for every piece of content: prediction markets on attention - (42:49): Investing in People or “Creator” / “Social”Tokens - (44:14): Not fighting internet gravity: NFTs, “utillity,” 1 of 1s, and skeumorphic ideas along the way - (47:52): Speaking to potential concerns and incentivizing more durable and useful information - (52:23): Speculation vs. Gambling: positive sum vs. zero-sum - (56:00): AI: Market Data as an input for for Models - (58:56): Speculating on how a future of AI and attention markets will be good for creatives - (1:04:50): Small market cap content can still be meaningful - (1:08:11): Crypto-optimism and regulation - (1:13:52): Saint Fame, Nouns, and Ideas for Future Token-Coordinated Orgs - (1:22:32): Reflecting on “Hyperstructures” - (1:28:55): Jacob's shift toward market-oriented thinking for solving coordination problems - (1:30:40): Ethereum, Solana, and Blockchain Competition **Coinbase** - (1:36:23): The Coinbase Internship that Never Ended - (1:40:49): Starting USDC - (1:49:14): Bloomberg Terminal's Design **General Jacob** - (1:50:09): Bezos and adoption of technology - (1:52:47): Tokenized Identity - (1:55:41): Matt Dryhurst and Holly Herndon and Bridging Art and Technology - (1:58:43): What idea has the world not come around on yet? - (2:00:12): What are the aesthetics of Jacob's AI model? - (2:04:20): The FAFO Zone and Local Maximums - (2:11:03): The alternate reality where Jacob didn't discovery Bitcoin - (2:14:54): Cultural and Artistic Inspirations - (2:17:55): Patronus Problems - (2:20:44): Australians and Americans - (2:23:42): Jacob's Favorite Ideas - (2:28:27): Lessons for Jacob's kids about creativity # Links & References - ["Meme Structure"](https://zora.co/collect/zora:0x46161b8f823a744b5546de63cc1ca50a2747bdd4/3) - [Midwit Meme](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/iq-bell-curve-midwit) - [What is Cryptomedia?](https://cryptomedia.wtf/) - [Jacob's Mints on Zora](https://zora.co/@jacob/created) - [Mintellectual Property](https://zora.co/writings/mintellectual-property) - [Onchain](https://jacob.energy/onchain.html) - [Predictions](https://jacob.energy/predictions.html) - [AI+](https://jacob.energy/ai.html) - [Saint Fame](https://www.instagram.com/saint.fame/?hl=en) - [Nouns](https://nouns.wtf/) - [Hyperstructures](https://jacob.energy/hyperstructures.html) - [Stewart Brand Pace Layers](https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/issue3-brand/release/2) - [Tokenized Identity Tweet](https://x.com/js_horne/status/984601017500094464) - [Herndon Dryhurst](https://herndondryhurst.studio/) - [Jacob's Horse image meme](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/horse-running-past-mountain-3-coffees-no-lunch) - ["The FAFO Zone"](https://zora.co/collect/zora:0x46161b8f823a744b5546de63cc1ca50a2747bdd4/7) - [Patronus Problems](https://jacob.energy/patronus.html) - [Earth is becoming sentient — Steph Ango](https://stephango.com/earth) - [Steve Jobs on agency](https://youtu.be/kYfNvmF0Bqw?si=ZNBLaetfuoRwGwNk) Dialectic is available on all platforms. [Join the ⁠telegram channel⁠](https://t.me/dialecticpod) [Follow ⁠on Twitter⁠](https://x.com/dialecticpod) [Follow on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/dialecticpod/) [Subscribe on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@Dialectic) # Transcript **Jackson:** [00:00:00] Welcome to Dialectic, Episode Nine. Jacob Horne 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. He spent several years there, including on a small team that started USDC, the stablecoin. 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, moved 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." You'll see how Jacob interrogates this idea around the internet, cryptocurrencies, tokens, content and markets. He describes a world of the 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. 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. 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. **Jacob:** [00:02:40] All right, we made it. **Jackson:** [00:02:41] I'm very excited for this. I also have to say up front, you were a, 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. ## [00:03:03] Obsession with Memes: How do you get people to organize around something? 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 to 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? **Jacob:** [00:03:33] Wow. Straight to the fundamentals. I love it. What is a meme? It's a shared idea, or an idea that is going to spread. Memes are obviously… there's like a million different ways you can come at this. 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. At an even higher level, there are large visions or shelling points that you can organize around. Why am I obsessed with them? I don't know exactly. My journey... I think memes are actually related to this thing that I've been chasing for, I guess, the better part of 10 years now: how do you organize and get people to work together? That was actually my way into crypto, interestingly. I came across Bitcoin, and I thought it was cool, but the big idea for me was, how do you create a cryptocurrency for anything? I was in Sydney on my laptop, just vibing out on the internet. 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. Memes are kind of that. At the most fundamental, it's like, "Oh, cool, this is a funny picture." But at their higher level, it's, "We have this shared idea that we want to work towards." And it's both in our minds and in many people's minds. Then, what is that thing? How do you put them forward? How do you make them? How do you spread them, own them, and change them? Everything that comes with it. **Jackson:** [00:05:29] We have a kind of "last 20 years" idea in our head of capital-M "Meme," growing from the early block-text 4chan thing to stuff now. But one of the things that you've articulated well is: the cross is an incredibly powerful meme. The American flag is an incredibly powerful meme. You have this—one of my favorite memes you've created—this atom diagram, where the center of the image (or the center of the overlapping circles) is the meme. Then there are all these ideas on the perimeter. **Jacob:** [00:06:02] Yep. **Jackson:** [00:06:03] One of the more interesting ideas you've ever shared is, if you put the American flag at the center of that overlapping circles, the truest, almost *most* American thing is the flag. On the perimeter, you could have liberty, freedom, and different versions of what being American means. **Jacob:** [00:06:24] Yeah, the American dream, all the surrounding memes and ideas and symbols. It's like, "Oh, you need your house," or "Home of the free, land of the brave." Every cultural tenet is actually anchoring around that single thing. **Jackson:** [00:06:35] It almost distills into the image or the symbol. **Jacob:** [00:06:38] Yes, exactly. **Jackson:** [00:06:39] Yeah. It's a helpful way to realize, too, that this isn't a new thing. We've had memes forever. Obviously, we're calling it something in the internet-native form. But in fact, these things are maybe the true shelling point for movements, maybe even religions. **Jacob:** [00:06:57] Yeah, exactly. It's actually funny, that image came from me thinking about memes in the terms of competition in companies. **Jackson:** [00:07:04] Okay. **Jacob:** [00:07:05] 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. 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, with a different group of people, or with their own ownership incentives around them. **Jackson:** [00:07:31] Right. **Jacob:** [00:07:31] It's like you're actually closer to them than you are anyone else that's doing the same thing. Then the follow-on thought from that was, VCs are an interesting meme ownership vehicle because they are able to let you get exposure to multiple different competitors towards a meme. **Jackson:** [00:07:52] Right. **Jacob:** [00:07:53] So it's like, I am a venture capital firm that's organizing around a particular industry or thesis. But they're really just higher-level memes, and that has its own coordination and stuff around it. Memes all the way up and down. **Jackson:** [00:08:06] In our current system, and this maybe gets to where the world could go with crypto, and one of the reasons you and I have been excited about it. In the current capital market structure, to build a company with an LLC or C Corp, you are by definition 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 they believe in the thing. **Jacob:** [00:08:37] Right. **Jackson:** [00:08:38] It begs the question, of course, could we have different ways for people to work towards a shared vision, mission, or meme? **Jacob:** [00:08:44] Exactly. ## [00:08:46] The Meme and the Memo via Balaji Srinivasan **Jackson:** There's a bullet point on this, I don't know if you explained it to me or maybe someone, maybe Alex Zhang, that he had heard from you, which is this idea of the meme and the memo that I believe you got from Balaji Srinivasan 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? **Jacob:** [00:09:07] Meme and memo is something that Balaji taught me at Coinbase. He was my manager there for a year, which was insane. I got a first-class experience, a front-row seat in what it looks like to coordinate an increasingly large number of people to get things done. Coinbase was big enough where coordinating was a challenge. I remember him saying, "If you want to get anything done, you have to write it in a crisp doc. You have a good document, and you go from that." **Jackson:** [00:09:44] Right. **Jacob:** [00:09:44] But he was very adamant that the title, the meme, was the most important aspect of that. You almost start with it because your idea or goal is not going to travel if the meme for the thing is not strong enough. **Jackson:** [00:09:57] Right. So even in a 200-person group, let alone on the internet. **Jacob:** [00:10:00] Exactly. I was already in a very good habit of writing my thoughts into docs, articulating what I think we should do. His level-up and his kind of push was, "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, in a room, or to another colleague, is just going to communicate the whole thing in a second?" That will 10x its ability to get done. **Jackson:** [00:10:28] And in some sense, you've taken that maybe even a step further and coined new words or new language to embody this idea in the past. **Jacob:** [00:10:36] Yes, exactly. Which is just like, okay, when Zora is building something that is net new on some dimension, or is trying to capture some broader idea, you don't want to give a word salad or even something that sounds particularly heady. It's just a lot easier to try and come up with a new word that may sound weird at first glance, but if it gets enough traction, then you've suddenly got a whole new ballgame to work with, which is a lot of fun. The hit rate's quite low, but when it works, it's like, "Oh shit, okay, that actually worked really well." Now the cognitive load of explaining what you're doing goes down quite a lot. **Jackson:** [00:11:22] We don't think often enough about language as prompting other people. Literally, I'm going to tap into your brain and program something. **Jacob:** [00:11:30] Exactly. ## [00:11:32] Three Fundamental Questions: Words, Money, Laws I love asking three fundamental questions: Where do words come from? Where does money come from? Where do laws come from? It's a good thought train to work upstream into like, "Okay, well, what is actually required to change or modify any of those things?" The words question is really fun. **Jackson:** [00:11:51] Yes, well, those are three things that I think, by definition, most people assume are fixed. **Jacob:** [00:11:58] Exactly. **Jackson:** [00:11:59] 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 rules of law (no pun intended), the sort of nature of the world that you can operate within. You clearly love poking, and maybe that's what's inside the meme thing. Memes allow you to traverse through those worlds. **Jacob:** [00:12:20] Well, each one of those three things, and memes on different levels, if you really want to look at it: words, money, and laws all require some sense of shared vision, understanding, and coordination to actualize them. **Jackson:** [00:12:31] Right. That's very cool. Okay, we'll talk more about some of the meme and memo type ideas you've presented in the past. ## [00:12:39] The Midwit Meme and other Favorites 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 it. I think it's one of the best memes of the last 10-20 years. And then, do you have other, or an other, favorite meme? **Jacob:** [00:12:57] 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 construct worlds or potential scenarios or products that might not exist. I can just look at that image to remind myself to think way, way, way less. Like, what is ostensibly the most dumb version of the thing, which is the most simple version, which is probably more correct? **Jackson:** [00:13:28] So you're better off moving left on that graph than trying to move right. **Jacob:** [00:13:31] Yeah, exactly. The easiest way to be gigabrain is to be smooth brain. I think that meme resonates so much with me because I can be the midwit very often. So it's a nice mirror to just be like, "No, chill out and stop thinking here." **Jackson:** [00:13:46] Well, there's something inside that, too. One of the things I've been thinking about recently… I noticed in myself, and in lots of other people, this tendency to… 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 at… When I have that feeling in my body, to immediately rubber-band it back to, "Oh wait, why am I skipping over myself?" And I think the midwit meme is one of the best possible versions 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 as like, "Let me show why I am the exception." And in fact, by definition, it's a bell curve; most of us *are* the midwit. **Jacob:** [00:14:40] Yes. **Jackson:** [00:14:40] You're better off starting from that place. **Jacob:** [00:14:42] Yes, definitely. So I would say that my ability to think about strategy or most decisions day-to-day… I will be like, "Am I in the middle of the curve right now or not?" 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, "What's the one IQ thing to do here?" I would say, overall improvements in outcomes since channeling more of that energy. **Jackson:** [00:15:09] And then any other memes, or a favorite meme? **Jacob:** [00:15:12] Two ones that I really like. There's this Pepe sunrise one. It's more of an emerging meme, I think. There's this Pepe; he's kind of looking over a hill. The sunrise is coming up, and it's really beautiful. It's just like a new era is kind of ahead. I really like that one. **Jackson:** [00:15:31] Just vibes-wise. **Jacob:** [00:15:32] Just vibes-wise. I'm just like, what an image. **Jackson:** [00:15:36] Sometimes it's that simple. Maybe more often it should be that simple. **Jacob:** [00:15:39] Yeah, I think so. 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. They're probably the main ones. ## [00:15:55] What makes media and information valuable? **Jackson:** 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? **Jacob:** [00:16:13] What makes it intrinsically valuable? Wow, that's a really big question. **Jackson:** [00:16:17] 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? **Jacob:** [00:16:29] Yeah, good question. I think my one-IQ answer here is because it's useful and it provides utility. The right piece of information can change your life at the right point in time. Yeah, a piece of information or. You could have something that's like a piece of knowledge, and having that knowledge allows you to do better things or get more value yourself in a different way. If you have pure utilitarian information on one side of the spectrum and then pure vibe-based art on the other end of the spectrum, feeling something in the emotions is also a form of knowledge and experience. If that's going to help you navigate the world better, then that is intrinsically useful to you in some dimension. **Jackson:** [00:17:18] Right. **Jacob:** [00:17:18] That would be my immediate answer to "Why is it valuable?" And then I guess the other side is, why would we want it to be valuable? Because there's a high cost to produce valuable information, or there is labor required to discover it, construct it, or distribute it. **Jackson:** [00:17:36] Do you think that cost is increasing or decreasing? **Jacob:** [00:17:40] Well, with AI, probably decreasing, but then it causes an increase on the other end because now you have to sort through an increasingly vast ocean of information. **Jackson:** [00:17:51] Right. And maybe even on the creation end, there is still a high cost. It's a different type of cost. It's not skill. **Jacob:** [00:17:57] Yeah, exactly. The type of information being produced is probably going to change dramatically. More people can now produce images that look like something that would have required a lot of skill five or ten years ago or write a sequence of words that you maybe 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 ten options I have instead of the two?" There's this kind of famous cyclist quote, which is like, "It never gets easier, only faster." The amount of exertion is probably the same, but the output is increasing. Maybe that cost is the same. That would be why information probably inherently has some value and also why we would want it to have some value because there is a cost associated with it, and there is a benefit to knowing it or sharing it as well. **Jackson:** [00:18:58] Yes. And maybe the big idea there is that it scales even into a theoretical and infinite amount of content. **Jacob:** [00:19:05] Yes. **Jackson:** [00:19:06] I like the first thing you said, too. My friend Tajo has this idea that "arch" isn't necessarily about the object so much as it is a prompt for an experience. I think that is a really rich way to think about all information and why it should have so much value. ## [00:19:26] Zora, Tokenized Media, and Information wants to be Free *and* Expensive 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. Maybe our language has changed around it, but this notion that basically the Internet should have its own value system for information and content. More specifically, I think you've been convinced that Ethereum is a network that should have content on it, or that it needs content. 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? **Jacob:** [00:20:00] Zora is a product that makes it very easy to tokenize media. You can tokenize a picture, a video, a song, a podcast, or 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. On the supply side, we have creators who basically produce their content and they tokenize it. 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 for 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. And we think we're able to solve that tension by using crypto as the value system. **Jackson:** [00:20:55] It also wants to be what? **Jacob:** [00:20:56] Expensive. **Jackson:** [00:20:56] Expensive, yeah. **Jacob:** [00:20:57] So Stuart Brand has this favorite... **Jackson:** [00:20:59] You have another version of that quote, which is, "Information wants to be free, but it also wants to be valuable." **Jacob:** [00:21:02] I think you can tweak... "Expensive" is the original Stuart Brand quote. 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. When I use 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. 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. **Jackson:** [00:21:47] Fighting gravity in some sense. **Jacob:** [00:21:48] Exactly. So you're fighting gravity, versus with crypto, it inverts that. If you put that piece of content on chain, it's publicly accessible to everyone, including any other developer or platform that wants to access it. It will spread as far and wide as it can because there's no API around it. There's no gate. The value system is quite different, because now you allow a market to form around the attention on that piece of content. There's also a patronage aspect to it as well, where there's a status game where people want to be seen as a large collector of a thing. 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 the people on the collector side too. **Jackson:** [00:22:37] I think people probably have different varying degrees of familiarity with the word cloud you just said. **Jacob:** [00:22:44] Yes. **Jackson:** [00:22:45] For a lot of people, the sirens go off when they hear the word "token" or "NFT." You didn't even use the word "NFT." ## [00:22:53] Provenance There's a specific idea running through all of this that I want to interrogate more deeply, which is provenance. At a very basic level, and we 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 digital space. Information wants to be free. We tried a whole bunch of permutations of trying to gate access to information, from buying a song for a dollar to paywalls and ads and all these different types of things. **Jacob:** [00:23:33] Yeah. **Jackson:** [00:23:34] AI is obviously only going to accelerate this. You're going to have so much more content, and you're going to have content based on derivative works. How do you manage this? If we're going to live in this world where content is abundant, if not probably at some point infinite (like literally infinite, where you can create an image with an imagination in one second with natural language), maybe all content is just feeding a hive mind. It's really, really hard to apply this traditional scarcity model to the way the world is going. The only remaining scarcities are time and attention. So you have this really complicated idea, and to me at least, the through line seems to be this idea of provenance. There are two ideas from you that I want to read quickly that I think explain pieces of this, and then I'll turn it over 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." You're getting at some of that non-scarcity piece, you're getting at some of the cost piece. 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." 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 with AI, actually matters. **Jacob:** [00:25:22] Yeah, that's a big question. That's not usually how I come at provenance in the context of tokenizing things. So that was a lot of Walter Benjamin. I was citing him, which is just: 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. All three of those things are actually kind of helpful to triangulate. 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? They're really valuable and important signals to help you understand, just fundamentally, should I be paying attention to this thing at all? **Jackson:** [00:26:13] Right. **Jacob:** [00:26:14] I come at it from more of the market sense: what's the amount that you need to put forward so that the market can assess, "Should we value this or not?" One example is the Mona Lisa, which is in the public domain. Anyone can reproduce that image and remix it. If I share the Mona Lisa image on Twitter, for example, that image comes with a lot of weight inherently, in and of itself, because it's so widely known and seen. But in the context of, "Well, it's come from **Jacob:**, and it's just shared on Twitter," it's like, "What's happening here? Was **Jacob:** the creator of it?" Clearly not. It's helping me triangulate, "Should I be paying attention to this?" Why that's important in the context of tokenizing it -- and meme coins are the most raw form of this -- is that these are attention markets. 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." That's one pocket of demand. **Jackson:** [00:27:23] And patronage is, very simply, just supporting a creator of information without asking for anything. **Jacob:** [00:27:32] Exactly. It's just, "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." **Jackson:** [00:27:38] Oftentimes, we pair patronage with other things, including markets or... **Jacob:** [00:27:42] Yeah, there is. So, it's like, "Oh, I'm going to get this painting back." And there's a speculative dimension to it, which is, "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... **Jackson:** [00:27:52] There's also a pure patronage. **Jacob:** [00:27:54] Exactly. But then if you go more to the speculative end of the spectrum, it is more about this attention game. Which is just like, "Do I think... 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?" Based on that decision, you now have a financial market where you can express that opinion. You can say, "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." ## [00:28:30] Why Do We Want Markets for Attention? **Jackson:** Why do we want markets for attention? **Jacob:** [00:28:32] Great question. We want markets for attention because that is the most open and transparent way to navigate how to make sense of this information. Right now, we default to algorithms that we have no sense about how they work. They're an entire black box, and they're dictating what we see and what we pay attention to. **Jackson:** [00:28:53] 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 zero-sum. **Jacob:** [00:29:01] Yeah, your attention is one of the most valuable things you've got. **Jackson:** [00:29:05] Right. So it is free, but it's also quite expensive to the extent I am not in control over what your brain's getting injected with. **Jacob:** [00:29:11] Brain rot. You might not want that. Markets are a way that you can have adversarial... It's an adversarial environment where there's skin in the game. Yes, you could try and manipulate it, but you're going to eventually lose all your money, or it's going to be extremely costly. **Jackson:** [00:29:29] In a way that isn't so costly when you spam the Twitter algorithm. **Jacob:** [00:29:32] Exactly. You can only spam, comport, or shift the market so much. You'll run out of capital if you're not 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, and where it is in terms of how widely distributed it is. More importantly, what is the difference between that value in the short term and long term? We're seeing an insane mania right now with meme coins, which are very raw forms of attention markets. You can go from zero to a billion in a day. But I'm more interested in what the market cap of this thing is going to be five years from now, or ten years from now. **Jackson:** [00:30:25] Most of them, nothing. **Jacob:** [00:30:26] Most of them should have non-zero value; they just shouldn't be billions of dollars of value. The fact that you could have a picture that the market is telling you is worth $100 is an insane breakthrough. The problem is everyone in crypto has brain damage. If it's not a billion dollars, then it's nothing. But if every tweet, picture, blog, or essay was giving you a signal, saying, "Well, it's worth $1,000 right now," or $100, or $10,000, that's an extremely valuable signal. That's going to tell you something that you're not getting otherwise. In the context of AI, that market signal is probably going to be extremely valuable as a training factor. But for people, you've got a sea of information. 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? Who's holding it? How much did **Jackson:** spend on buying X amount of this post? I think that's going to be an increasingly important signal that helps us make sense of what is real or not on the Internet, or what we should pay attention to or not on the Internet. **Jackson:** [00:31:50] We are currently in this immature version of the information age, where effectively for the last 20 years, it has been free to shout something into the Internet and hijack other people's brains on the basis of somebody's arbitrary algorithm. 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. Your root argument is that markets are a way to actually have signal in a world of truly infinite content. **Jacob:** [00:32:33] Yes, truly infinite and adversarial content. It's just an adversarial environment where people have different incentives and goals to spread different forms of misinformation. **Jackson:** [00:32:43] Right. **Jacob:** [00:32:44] What's great is that for most people to participate in this system, you don't have to pay anything. You don't have to pay any money to create markets for these things or tokenize them. Even to consume the content, you don't have to pay anything either. It's not like, "Oh, why am I going to have to pay to read every single thing?" That's not the case. What's happening though, is if you want your thing to be distributed, there's now a new mechanism, a new algorithm called the market, that is going to decide how useful that information is. Do we think it's going to be more widely spread than it is right now, or not? **Jackson:** [00:33:22] Horizons, what would you say to somebody who's sitting here, maybe creative, and it just sounds like a bunch of money coming? Maybe this is naive, maybe this isn't actually how the world works, but the take would be, currently, we evaluate art, information, and media on its merit. And now you want these Wall Street guys to come in and decide what information is valuable on the basis of speculation and money? 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. **Jacob:** [00:33:56] Yeah, I think in the case where it's only Wall Street trading that, then yeah, that would be really bad and kind of boring. Also, I don't think it would be particularly efficient. I think what's happening here is that maybe one of my, I think everyone has a little degen in them or some speculative capacity. 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. This is a behavior you see on social media today. You go into TikTok comments, people will be like, "In before viral," or "Investing at 100 likes." **Jackson:** [00:34:28] Or music in 2019. **Jacob:** [00:34:29] Yeah, investing at 100 likes. I think if I would bet that we would be surprised at the percentage of people who, if they could express their opinion on that particular thing financially, they actually would. We had an interesting, one of the more eye-opening experiences at Zora, was we got a really diverse team. Mudang was a surprising moment because I saw people on the team who were coming at, they were working on the marketing team, they're not that deep into crypto. They love the the art and the NFT side, but always strayed away from the raw trading and speculative game. And then when they learned that it was like, "Wait, I've been following Mudang for two to three weeks on TikTok." **Jackson:** [00:35:17] I was ahead of this. **Jacob:** [00:35:18] Yeah, "I was ahead of all the crypto bros, and you're telling me they made billions of dollars on this meme coin? Wait, what? I'm upstream of all of this market activity? I'm upstream of this." And then now they're like, "Oh, wait, what is, now what's happening on TikTok?" Now seeing them become traders in a way that I never would have expected is interesting, because now they feel like, "Wait, I have a strong opinion here," or, "I feel like I know I'm ahead of some sense of the wild." So I think the more optimistic view is it's like, I think 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. Now the market is meeting them. It's like, "Well, yeah, not only can you capture some kind of social capital or benefit from that, or saying you weren't able to say like you were early, or I liked this before anyone else." Maybe you bought like $5 of the coin for this video that you really, really loved, and it went viral 5 years later or 10 years later, and maybe you've got $30 or $40 now. And yeah, you can scale it up. You could buy one cent, you could buy a million dollars. You get that level of granularity. 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. **Jackson:** [00:36:33] 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 these types of behaviors living natively in where we consume content. For people who are totally unfamiliar, what you built with Zora at this point is effectively an Instagram-style feed where you're actually scrolling through content. Instead of liking, you're minting. **Jacob:** [00:36:52] Yeah, you're buying and selling. **Jackson:** [00:36:53] Part of that is removing the abstraction of going to some exchange somewhere, the hyper-financialized part of it. That feels pretty inevitable, whether it happens on Zora or elsewhere. ## [00:37:08] A coin for every piece of content: prediction markets on attention 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 a thousand 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. You just described a world where you watch a video and you buy a cent of it, or ten 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." This podcast, people can go mint. And there's something oxymoronic around it in some sense. I've said that it's free to mint, or it costs like a dollar, a few dollars. It's open forever, meaning it can be minted forever. What actually...that might break people's brains in terms of the value of this stuff. Shouldn't there be...there's one Mona Lisa. How do you make sense of this world? Are we headed toward a world where the idea of an NFT goes away and there's just basically an open-ended token market on every piece of media? **Jacob:** [00:38:22] More that. We're kind of at that point in two days from now. Instead of it being an NFT with this multi-stage market process around it, everything's a coin and it's instantly tradable. **Jackson:** [00:38:36] So for this podcast, Dialectic Episode 9 with **Jacob:**, I can buy anywhere between 0.0001 cents to as much money as I want. **Jacob:** [00:38:43] To as much money as you want. **Jackson:** [00:38:46] Almost like a prediction market or something. **Jacob:** [00:38:49] This is getting to the attention market thing. Another way you could describe that is a prediction market on attention. I think there are attention markets. You can come at it from the attention market aspect, which is like you are purely just playing that prediction market game. It's a game of musical chairs that's very open and transparent, and everyone can see it. The bet is that there is actually an information market here as well. 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... **Jackson:** [00:39:26] What do you mean the weight of that? **Jacob:** [00:39:28] Say, with meme coins, for example, I've got a meme coin of like an image. If I'm playing the attention game, it is: how much attention is this going to get in the next day or two? **Jackson:** [00:39:38] Right. **Jacob:** [00:39:39] You could have a longer-term time horizon, five years or 10 years, but it's so frothy and there's a mania going on that it's all probably overvalued. But the information aspect is like: imagine it's a Mr. Beast video, and Mr. Beast is starting today, and it's one of his first videos. This will probably still be getting attention. **Jackson:** [00:40:01] Like this podcast. **Jacob:** [00:40:04] Exactly. Ten 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, but because it's actually got interesting information. **Jackson:** [00:40:16] You're talking about digital durability in some sense. **Jacob:** [00:40:18] Exactly, durability. How durable is it? **Jackson:** [00:40:21] One meta thing running through all this that I can't help but think about as you talk is that you want to imagine a world where crypto's hyperbolic sine wave curve of everything starts to smooth out. One of the reasons it partially hasn't, 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. Basically, everything else isn't very durable. **Jacob:** [00:40:50] Yes. **Jackson:** [00:40:50] So part of this, maybe, is actually intertwined with getting to a world where we have more things that are worth coming back to. **Jacob:** [00:40:58] 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. **Jackson:** [00:41:04] Okay. **Jacob:** [00:41:05] 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, that is kind of what everyone wants to participate in. **Jackson:** [00:41:19] Right. That's just how markets are. **Jacob:** [00:41:20] That's just how markets are. But what usually happens is that you have outsized demand for a relatively low amount of supply. I would say in meme coins right now, there's huge outsized demand for meme coins. 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. **Jackson:** [00:41:59] I mean, that even is a little idealistic, maybe. **Jacob:** [00:42:01] Yeah. **Jackson:** [00:42:02] I think most people are probably just feeling like they're playing. It's something like sports betting or a casino. **Jacob:** [00:42:07] Yeah, exactly. And then the casino part. But I think what's actually happening is that 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, you know, sub $1 all the way up to, you know, thousands or we'll get the full spectrum. And like, we'll find a coin per piece of content. **Jackson:** [00:42:35] So any literally anything you consume in 10 years: any video, song, gif, whatever, you could theoretically say, hey, what's the market on this? **Jacob:** [00:42:43] Yes. **Jackson:** [00:42:43] Which is a 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. ## [00:42:49] Investing in People or &quot;Creator&quot; / &quot;Social&quot; Tokens People used to speculate a lot about they're being equity in people, or we 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 early," or, "I want to bet on Taylor Swift early." **Jacob:** [00:43:07] We will get to that, but it will require us getting what they're producing on chain first. Do I think you'll 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 just, you can yeet a token out there and then make some vague promises? There's no clear way of like, well, what is actually driving value back into it. I don't think that's going to work. There have been so many attempts at it currently. But 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. You could create coins on top of that. It might get infinitely fractal, but I actually think that's where it's going to go. And then you're now buying one of these coins, 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. **Jackson:** [00:44:07] We need a lot more abstracted and probably farther. **Jacob:** [00:44:11] That's like five years from now, maybe. ## [00:44:14] Not fighting internet gravity: NFTs, &quot;utillity,&quot; 1 of 1s, and various skeumorphic ideas along the way **Jackson:** One of the things that maybe NFTs in 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. It's like in some sense people have tried to map something like Patreon or something like buying merch onto these ideas. In fact, that could have been a confusing false path because those are ultimately skeuomorphic ideas. Everything you're talking about is actually like really trying to imagine a world where information truly is free. These existing value models from the physical world don't make sense because there's no distribution cost. **Jacob:** [00:44:57] Or if they exist in the physical world, it's the Mona Lisa model, which is just like, the Mona Lisa is in the public domain. **Jackson:** [00:45:04] Right. **Jacob:** [00:45:05] We know where the original is; it's in the Louvre. Even though that IP is completely unrestricted and everyone can reproduce it, 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. Zora's journey has been, in a sense, finding a thousand ways not to tokenize a picture, because we started with that very skeuomorphic model of like, here is a one of one NFT that's going to go up for an auction. That actually worked pretty well at the time because it was easy to understand. **Jackson:** [00:45:41] In fact, it was a bridge. It was a half step. **Jacob:** [00:45:43] 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 piece of art. They knew the game they were playing, which is like, this is an art collection. 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 the patronage side to it. The problem was that selling one-of-ones on the internet doesn't scale. You've only got one person who can walk away as the owner. You may have had hundreds of people competing in that auction. That's how we made the jump to the open edition model, which was one step more to the crypto native side, which is: Actually, it's the moment in time. 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. There is no constraint. **Jackson:** [00:46:40] It comes back to fighting gravity. So much of this is actually not fighting gravity in digital space. **Jacob:** [00:46:45] Which was counterintuitive at the time. Also, people weren't thinking big enough. 20,000 people in the scheme of the Internet is still tiny. If you think one of one is rare, 20,000 is actually still very rare. But what we found was that the secondary market, extrapolating this art model out, is just so inefficient. If you had 20,000 editions that people were holding in their wallet, there's no liquidity pool that you can trade on. If someone was placing a bid to buy it, you needed one of those people to check their phone and want to accept that price. We've just found our way to make it more efficient. 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 also speculative demand. Getting as close to a liquid and open market as possible is the important thing, and that's how we've arrived at pure coins. Every image is a cryptocurrency, in a way. ## [00:47:52] Speaking to potential concerns and making a case for expensive information:  creating the incentive to produce more durable and useful information I think a lot of the allergic reactions that people have come from one, capitalism just getting a bad rap on that front. If you say hyper-capitalism, then it's like, "Okay, I just don't want that." Two, I think people expect it to add a lot more friction into their current experience of the internet, which is actually a reasonable position to be coming from. But I don't think that's going to be the case. If you just want to be a read-only participant, or if you're posting and consuming information, I don't think there's going to be any additional cost or friction added there. Three, maybe we don't fully understand all of the benefits that will come from it. But I think there are tiny little details that maybe help it make sense. Let's say that everything is a coin. You have that one friend who's just always spamming you with 50 reels or TikToks. 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? Just add tiny amounts of skin in the game. **Jackson:** [00:49:04] This is such a powerful idea. This comes back to the idea that information is expensive from a time currency standpoint. **Jacob:** [00:49:14] Yes. **Jackson:** [00:49:14] We haven't fully evolved to adopt this view that our consumption discipline, over what we consume or what we give our attention to, should be rigorous. Maybe there should be more cost associated with it. **Jacob:** [00:49:37] It could be the other way, too. Maybe a video is literally paying you in its own currency to watch it. One way to come at this is: Should your phone be paying you roughly the amount of your salary or more for the amount of attention it's consuming from you? If you have an open market for attention in this sense, my feed is actually different pieces of content competing and paying me for my attention as well. It doesn't always have to be that I'm coming at this from the speculative side. It also means that you may be getting compensated in these new forms of value as well for participating. It also may never happen, too. This could all be completely wrong. **Jackson:** [00:50:16] The foundational idea is an important one. Whether people like it or not, there's a little bit here of seeing the world as it actually is. There's also a world, back to why markets for attention might be good, where lots of people benefit from speculation in the stock market and the American equity market who never participated in it. It is actually a regulatory invisible hand. You still need regulations and these things. It's possible that in some future world, we may just use markets as a way to have a healthier information ecosystem. **Jacob:** [00:50:52] Yes. **Jackson:** [00:50:52] Because right now, everyone's relationship with information, especially digital information, seems really bad. **Jacob:** [00:50:58] 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. Right now, the ad model incentivizes hijacking attention and capturing it, and you don't actually have to convert that into anything else. **Jackson:** [00:51:15] And short-term thinking. **Jacob:** [00:51:16] Exactly. Clickbait exists because all that website needs to do is get you to click the link. They don't actually have to deliver anything, and you get no signal as to whether or not you're getting baited. **Jackson:** [00:51:28] Yeah, it's like a penny stock. **Jacob:** [00:51:29] Exactly. Then the types of videos, like MrBeast -- I love his videos for what it's worth -- but those videos are kind of perfectly crafted to play by the rules of the YouTube algorithm. If the algorithm was different, that content would look very different. It wouldn't be as successful or widely distributed. **Jackson:** [00:51:49] Right. So, can we actually change the rules of the game? **Jacob:** [00:51:51] Yeah, exactly. If the way that producers of information are monetizing and their business model isn't just the fact that you won the attention and you got them to look at it, but that the person has to think that that information is valuable enough that it's worth getting 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 to get rewarded. That would be one of the more optimistic extrapolations of what this would unlock. ## [00:52:23] Speculation vs. Gambling: positive sum vs. zero-sum **Jackson:** You wrote a post once about why speculation could be good and positive-sum, maybe relative to just gambling. We've talked about aspects of that through this whole conversation. Do you want to talk about that a little bit? **Jacob:** [00:52:34] Yeah, I think people conflate speculation and gambling. You can speculate on a football game, for example. You can also speculate on the stock market as well. You can come at this from a purely gambling, in-it-for-the-game point of view. But speculation is fundamentally how you express an opinion, and how you can take some agency over what you actually want to see happen in the world. It is an idea, but you're expressing it financially, and you may be wrong or you may be right. Venture, for example, is speculation that leads to, in the average or the success case, net better things for society. **Jackson:** [00:53:19] Right. **Jacob:** [00:53:19] There was a speculation that the world doesn't have this right now. **Jackson:** [00:53:23] Right. **Jacob:** [00:53:23] The world probably wants this or needs this in the future. That's going to take capital to happen. Then, that speculative act led to the world improving. **Jackson:** [00:53:31] In many cases, it's not only capital. It's capital, it's reputation, it's brands, it's time -- everything. **Jacob:** [00:53:37] Yeah. **Jackson:** [00:53:38] And that's also the market using greed as a way to actually hopefully make the world better. You can always do that. **Jacob:** [00:53:43] Exactly. I think when I wrote that, I opened it with, "Speculation is imagination with action." **Jackson:** [00:53:49] Right, cool. **Jacob:** [00:53:50] Millennials, and to a lesser extent Zoomers, 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. With the stock market, there are only so many companies, many of which are hard to understand, and there's only so much upside that you can get from it. Crypto is democratizing access to speculate on anything. **Jackson:** [00:54:20] But also showing that, for the most part, we're pretty immature in terms of how we do it. **Jacob:** [00:54:24] For sure, exactly. We should probably be investing more in helping people get better at speculating so they're not wiping themselves out. This may be idealistic and impossible, but I do think... **Jackson:** [00:54:37] Do you have any ideas or seeds? Because the alternative view is to ban sports betting and argue that people shouldn't be able to invest in speculative assets. **Jacob:** [00:54:43] Sports betting should probably go because it's not productive. One of the distinctions I make is whether speculation is zero-sum or positive-sum. Betting is zero-sum: someone was a counterparty to you, and they lost money on that trade. If I am investing in a company, that company is creating and generating wealth that wasn't there, and there isn't a counterparty betting against you financially to help you realize that wealth. **Jackson:** [00:55:09] How do you map that onto the information side? Why is that positive-sum? Just to spell it out for people. **Jacob:** [00:55:15] Yeah. **Jackson:** [00:55:16] A company creates value, creates cash flows, creates productivity growth, whatever. **Jacob:** [00:55:20] The case where an information market is positive-sum is that it's leading to the creation of durable, useful information--information that's useful to the people consuming it and useful for the world to have. **Jackson:** [00:55:32] It's filtering, making it more likely that more people consume that useful information versus incremental clickbait. **Jacob:** [00:55:37] It creates an incentive to spread that information as well. **Jackson:** [00:55:41] Right. **Jacob:** [00:55:41] Yeah. **Jackson:** [00:55:42] Right. **Jacob:** [00:55:42] In the short term, there's absolutely a zero-sum game that's part of it, which is essentially gambling on what the attention is going to be. But then there's the longer-term question: is this information going to be valuable five years from now, ten years from now, one month from now--whatever time horizon. ## [00:56:00] AI: Market Data as an input for for Models **Jackson:** One other piece of this that you wrote about over a year ago, which is especially relevant now, is this idea that the market is the algorithm. One recent tweet 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, etc.) becomes extremely valuable weighting factors." You have a piece called "AI Plus" where you're basically talking about the world where, as we were saying, you're adding signal to information by way of market. I'm curious how you think about this new amorphous but emergent creativity. If we're really approaching infinite possible creation, it is actually about pulling what sort of frame I stop 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. **Jacob:** [00:57:06] Yeah. **Jackson:** [00:57:06] Can you talk a little bit about the way we might see markets and value coalesce with the infinite creation possibility of AI? **Jacob:** [00:57:17] It's a good question. When I originally wrote that, I was observing that we have a relatively high percentage of things that are bought, sold, and traded on Zora that are actually AI-produced. We've seen a number of different teams and projects experiment in 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 are millions of pieces of content on chain now. Instead of having to fight your way around a platform's closed-off website, now you can just go direct and access it. **Jackson:** [00:57:58] Being on chain almost definitionally offers itself. **Jacob:** [00:58:01] It makes it trainable, yes. And then it's like, well, okay, the training data is on chain. Should we put the model on chain and then the output on chain? For a given piece of output, can you verify that it came from a model, and then can you verify that it came from this thing? Where should we form markets around these so you can start to decentralize and open it up? But to address the original question of how markets will pair with AI creation, I think it's about helping us pay attention. If there are increasing amounts of content being produced at increasingly high quality, then deferring to the market is one crude way. 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. ## [00:58:56] Speculating on how a future of AI and attention markets will be good for creatives despite current fears **Jackson:** I don't know how obvious it is in this conversation thus far, but despite being someone who clearly believes in markets, you're also someone who deeply values creativity and art, specifically. Maybe as a more open-ended question: how do you actually think we're going to-- and I saw something on Twitter today about some protests. **Jacob:** [00:59:20] A bunch of artists about Art Basel. **Jackson:** [00:59:23] Yeah, exactly. Creative people feel scared, they feel ignored. Frankly, the two core enemies of the creative person today, at least nominally, are technologists and capitalists. **Jacob:** [00:59:42] Yep. **Jackson:** [00:59:43] 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 where the persistent scarce value in creativity will sit? Or how we'll make sense of creativity and value in creativity? Assuming that anyone can do it, anyone can rip something out of Midjourney 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 the markets that are embedded in content. We'll have a better idea of how valuable something is. **Jacob:** [01:00:31] And maybe we'll also get better at verifying whose work contributed to that output in the first place. **Jackson:** [01:00:37] Because do you think that could actually really happen? **Jacob:** [01:00:41] I don't know. That feels like I would put 5% confidence on that. Every platform makes a fair use argument. They'll take all the training data they can from all these types of sources, and then no one who produced that training data gets paid, or if they do, it's 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. Then we know that this output came from this model that was trained on this data. And then maybe it's better for model producers to be in this world because, one, they're able to expand the amount of training data they'll get and minimize the amount of lawsuits they'll get for copyright infringement, all that kind of stuff. Maybe. But 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 in Midjourney, and I can rip that out, and it looks kind of cool. But how do I then compete against the person who's taken ten images on Midjourney, composed them, run them through Runway, and has now produced a short film with that and now has a score? I think we'll just start to see even more incredibly high-quality content at the extreme end. Yes, anyone can produce the slop on the bottom end, but it doesn't... **Jackson:** [01:02:22] Right. **Jacob:** [01:02:22] It's just like me taking a photo of my breakfast and posting it on Instagram. Anyone can do that, and it's not particularly interesting. **Jackson:** [01:02:27] And maybe it was interesting in 2011. **Jacob:** [01:02:30] So, there's some arbitrage right now, which is like, "Oh, cool, you're producing a great image that you weren't able to do." **Jackson:** [01:02:36] Right. **Jacob:** [01:02:36] But as more people learn how to do that, that's going to get less interesting and less valuable and more noisy. **Jackson:** [01:02:41] In my interview with Stefan Sagmeister recently, he talked about this core dimension of anything creative: How much do you care? **Jacob:** [01:02:53] Yeah. **Jackson:** [01:02:54] Maybe one cut on why a creative person should be inspired and energized by this stuff is just that, if you really care and you're willing to care more than the incremental person, then... Yeah, maybe the skill you trained for a large period of time 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. **Jacob:** [01:03:20] Yes. And I would say, on the crypto side, while there is a lot of stigma and negative perception around crypto generally, it's probably the case that if you have some audience or community or work that you're already producing and sharing on social media, that you will get non-zero value back from doing that in crypto. I don't know if it'll... 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. **Jackson:** [01:04:00] Right. **Jacob:** [01:04:00] If crypto as a medium does one thing really well, it unlocks unbounded upside potential on a lot more things. **Jackson:** [01:04:07] Yep. **Jacob:** [01:04:07] It's like this photo, image, or video that you've produced, by essentially turning it into a cryptocurrency, now it's unlocking. I'm not saying that's going to happen, but the potential for it is there. As a medium, it's just interesting to be able to hand out ownership and distribute ownership in that way. Crypto does really well with airdrops. Maybe more people, you know, in 2021, it was like, 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. 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? ## [01:04:50] Small market cap content can still be meaningful **Jackson:** As we wrap up this part of the conversation, if I were to reflect on this at a super zoomed-out level, how do you...if we are moving to this world where we have markets around attention, they seem, at least the way we've talked about it, 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. He talks about this metaphor: if a teacher is in a classroom and they say something interesting, and 29 students don't really care, and one student's face lights up, there's a lot of information resolution there. The teacher can know, actually, even though it was 1 out of 29, the depth of meaning there was huge. **Jacob:** [01:05:43] Yep. **Jackson:** [01:05:44] When I send out a tweet and it gets 6 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. Do you think that markets are, or at least will be able to express the robustness of fandom and interest? **Jacob:** [01:06:06] 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, like the coin version, would be like one person bought 20% of the supply. **Jackson:** [01:06:17] 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 aren't the ones who are so popular, like Taylor Swift. It's sort of like, everyone knows them, but no one loves you. Maybe it's just an unsophisticated market where we are today. **Jacob:** [01:06:50] Yeah, it sounds like you're layering the scale of the outcome onto that. It's just not everything is going to get multimillion-dollar market caps, but maybe for one person, it's like, "Oh, I've got 35 or 100 people who care about this thing, and they're holding..." Maybe it's only worth $20 or something like that, but it's nonzero, and that's still, it's like a $20 vinyl on their shelf, right? **Jackson:** [01:07:16] Yeah, at the very least, markets don't discriminate. They are just a blank canvas. **Jacob:** [01:07:20] Exactly. It might be really dope that you have 30 people on the internet holding $20 worth of this thing, or maybe it's not even worth anything. Maybe it's worth precisely zero, but you can still see that you've got 20 people 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. It's almost sacrilegious to say in crypto, but I think there's something fascinating in as close to non-zero as possible. For a lot of these things, maybe there are one-cent or micro-cent values on any of these coins. But that's actually still useful and interesting. We could probably go way lower than we ever thought. **Jackson:** [01:08:05] Right. **Jacob:** [01:08:06] 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. ## [01:08:11] Crypto-optimism and regulation **Jackson:** We talked about this a little bit with the "Good Speculation" piece. I think, in today's world, maybe not in the last six months due to the regulation change, but amongst people that you and I spend time with, especially those who aren't in crypto or amongst technologists, AI is very high status. Crypto is pretty low status. **Jacob:** [01:08:27] Yeah. **Jackson:** [01:08:28] Do you have an outlook on crypto, aside from this being your thing and 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 bends more optimistic on how some of this will shake out in the nearer term? **Jacob:** [01:08:41] I feel like I'm taking off. I had to comport so much of my thinking to what the regulations were. You end up constructing systems that fit the current interpretation of the law. But it's like, "Well, I think that thing isn't going to work, even though it passes what you think Gary Gensler thinks is illegal." 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. It makes you think about how do you construct this technology through the lens of companies, and how you create ownership in things. I got into crypto from, and I actually really love it at the high— like I'm operating at the information and content level, but I'm most fascinated in the level above. That was the original spark for Zora: How do you let groups of people come together, organize, and essentially create what looks and feels like a company, but is entirely internet native, and they're using tokens at their core to achieve some huge, ambitious mission? Now, especially the past three months, I've just been deleting and trying to come back to: 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 my understanding of navigating the regulatory uncertainty for the past four years. It's actually like, "No, do the more radical version," or the more raw version of the thing. Everything that would have given me heartburn a year ago in terms of like, "Well, I would do this, but it comes with all of this risk," is actually more right than wrong. Then, how do you keep extrapolating out? Within the crypto industry right now, everyone's just talking about buyback and burn as the most simple mechanism of how do you drive value back in the token? I would say that's kind of where one-of-one NFTs were in 2021, which is the skeumorphic and obvious starting point. It makes sense because it's similar to a dividend, but it 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. I'm spending my time thinking there because 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. **Jackson:** [01:11:30] It goes back to the "words, money, and law" thing. Implicit for a lot of people in crypto ideologically, and certainly in part of what you're saying, is: "I want to go to the future." Part of that implies some of the current system breaking or changing. **Jacob:** [01:11:45] Exactly. And on the meme thing, meme coins right now are dumb pictures and videos or content, or just completely absurd things. But if you start to scale it out— imagine there was a meme coin for Mars, or pick huge, ambitious shelling points— then I think that's where I'm like, "Okay, well, now what do you do if you've got 300,000 people on the internet who are bought into this shelling point or into this meme?" **Jackson:** [01:12:18] Right. Not Doge, but something. **Jacob:** [01:12:20] Doge was an amazing window into the future. In 2016, there was a subreddit for Doge that was starting to learn how to coordinate and meme it further. We should send the Jamaican bobsled team to the Winter Olympics. We should sponsor a NASCAR team for the next three races and just put the Doge on it. That is starting to get way more interesting because you have 300,000 people who are bought into a thing and aligned. 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, that clearly might be the more fun or interesting way to build and produce new things together. Back to that original diagram that you were citing at the beginning, 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. We'd probably be funding each other on different dimensions or coordinating. There should be more alignment there. It happens by proxy through VCs, I think, who are kind of the ones holding that point of view. But I feel like that actually could be much more open. **Jackson:** [01:13:41] Right? **Jacob:** [01:13:42] Yeah. **Jackson:** [01:13:42] This is what the Internet should be great at. **Jacob:** [01:13:44] Yeah, exactly. **Jackson:** [01:13:44] At its best is like, how do we coordinate information, attention, capital to do stuff that we care about with our tribe? **Jacob:** [01:13:49] Exactly. **Jackson:** [01:13:51] Exactly. ## [01:13:52] Saint Fame, Nouns, and Ideas for Future Token-Coordinated Organizations **Jackson:** Do you want to speculate a little on... One of my favorite ideas you ever discussed is this notion of what would an organization or company whose core thing or core product is a token be? Another maybe primitive version of this would be talking about Saint Fame. You were just talking about your earliest areas of excitement for this or what this could... Maybe it's mischief, maybe it's something else. What something like that might look like in a totally emergent future? **Jacob:** [01:14:21] Saint Fame was the project that I got nerd sniped myself and left Coinbase. Saint Fame was the side project I did that led to Zora and it had two pieces. It had the DAO, which I don't think would make sense today, but I tokenized the brand Saint Fame with Saint Token. **Jackson:** [01:14:40] Yeah. **Jacob:** [01:14:41] And then I was like, okay, let's go crowdsource and produce a long sleeve shirt with a designer and spend a lot of money on getting that, and then tokenize the shirt, let it trade. The reason that we started with 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 side. **Jackson:** [01:15:04] But the DAO in effect was a label. **Jacob:** [01:15:08] Yeah, it was basically like, how do you create ownership in a brand or a community or an idea? It was super early. If I was to start that today, the literal first thing I would do would be create a token. You pick a name and a symbol for it. 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. Instead of starting 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 to help people use tokens to coordinate and work together on the Internet." 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 think that would be a really fun way to do it because then you'd just be building for yourself as the customer the whole time. How do I pay people in this token? Okay, it should probably stream to them over like two years instead of giving them a lump sum. How do you let a market form around different ideas? **Jackson:** [01:16:19] You become the meta-instance of this. **Jacob:** [01:16:21] Exactly. That's how I would do it if I was going to do a fully-featured project around it. Some meme coins are finding their way into this state already, and I'm seeing them run into a wall. They've got something worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, with a lot of people bought in. The question is, what do we do? There are really good ideas for what to do, but they fall apart. How do we pull the capital together? Who do we trust in the community? We could send a million dollars to this address, but how do we know this person's going to be good on it? What's their reputation? How do we move the funds around? Around 2020, crypto would suggest a DAO with proposals and voting, but that's very stale, slow, and confusing. Maybe instead of a DAO, it's a token in an open market, and instead of proposals, it's open crowdfunds. Anyone can put forward crowdfunds, and the community can choose. **Jackson:** [01:17:28] Opt in to fund this. **Jacob:** [01:17:29] Yeah, anyone can opt in to fund it. Then you're letting people build their reputation. **Jackson:** [01:17:34] Yeah, a creative director emerges out of Doge. **Jacob:** [01:17:37] Exactly. **Jackson:** [01:17:39] What did you learn from Nouns? 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 ran through a bunch of proto-ideas here. Is there anything you're still optimistic about? What do you think could be learned for people going forward to the next phase of this? **Jacob:** [01:18:01] I've thought about this a lot. Nouns fell down because it didn't have an efficient feedback loop with all of the attention and value it was creating and its own tokens. It was an extremely illiquid market. There are only so many people who can pay 80 ETH. **Jackson:** [01:18:27] It's like the NFT versus meme coin thing. **Jacob:** [01:18:28] Exactly. The nature of the daily auction meant that it was just so inefficient. If I was to do an iteration on Nouns now, it would just be pure coin. Nouns' peak market cap, if you took the most recent auction times the total supply, was like $120 million, which in the scale of meme coins is actually quite low. **Jackson:** [01:19:04] It was way harder to get there. **Jacob:** [01:19:06] Way harder. Versus if that had been a liquid coin, maybe that market cap feedback loop and the meme value capture back into the token would have been the difference. **Jackson:** [01:19:18] Though, of course, to your earlier point, meme coins don't have $120 million sitting in a treasury that can actually be used. **Jacob:** [01:19:25] That's true. **Jackson:** [01:19:26] But it does seem like there might be a proto-version of this. **Jacob:** [01:19:30] That learns some of those lessons. You could just take Nouns and swap the NFT auction with distributed ERC-20s, and then it may work a lot better. I don't know if it would work forever. **Jackson:** [01:19:45] Can these things be built? This goes back to this old internet idea of headless brands. Clearly, they can with Vitalik and Ethereum, to some degree. It's a little different with Satoshi and Bitcoin. But something like Doge, classically, the original creator has sworn it off. He hates it. It seems that these things at their best are rarely designed. And so maybe that would be the only thing for somebody listening to this who wants to... **Jacob:** [01:20:16] I think they do well with a champion, like Elon championing Doge. There's a literal government agency now. **Jackson:** [01:20:23] Sometimes that champion can be the creator, but it involves certain things that are maybe outside of your control going right. **Jacob:** [01:20:29] If I think through a lot of the logic of meme coins currently, I can think of a single person on Twitter who is just an incessant champion and director of that thing. **Jackson:** [01:20:39] Right, right. **Jacob:** [01:20:42] If you imagine an increasing number of these things, maybe there are ones that crack this code where it's completely open and decentralized, and it's a competitive ecosystem. There are many people producing under it. But I might be more interested over the next little while seeing the ones that actually have an explicit leader reorganizing and driving it with their point of view. **Jackson:** [01:21:09] The closest comp to me has always felt like creative fashion labels. You have Jonathan Anderson at Loewe, you have Virgil at LV. **Jacob:** [01:21:17] Virgil would absolutely crush it in this format. **Jackson:** [01:21:22] But the mechanisms of how that shows up: Is Virgil the one who starts it? It would be interesting if one of these, maybe a smaller somebody like Hire, goes in (which is a meme coin type thing that's kind of like this) 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. **Jacob:** [01:21:41] There's this whole CTO meme in meme coins, which is imagine a private equity firm coming in and just being like, "We're taking over this. We're going to make it a huge thing and get it attention." I think it would be more permissionless. Someone would just show up in Hire, for example, and being like, "I am, 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 powering ahead with it. The community may reject it, they may not, but there's almost nothing that they could do about it. I think it would be less being elected and more people spotting an arbitrage, which is like, there's a good seed of a community here and enough attention and distribution, but it's not-- it could go further in this direction, so I'll buy enough to make it worth my time and then push it there. Okay. ## [01:22:32] Reflecting on "Hyperstructures" **Jackson:** Speaking of permissionless, I want to shift gears a little bit and reflect on one of your classic meme and memo ideas: digital public goods and protocols. This is one of the OG major nerd snipe, maybe tar pit, ideas in crypto. We can actually have very positive-sum, large, valuable infrastructure similar to early internet protocols like HTTP and HTML. You wrote a piece called "Hyperstructures," one of the classic **Jacob:** new terms. One quick excerpt from that: "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: could you have big pieces of public infrastructure almost akin to really long-term, durable, physical-world things like dams, museums, power grids, canals, and 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: how do they show up? How durable can they be? Who owns them? I don't think we need to go into all of the weeds of exactly what you got right and wrong. I'd be curious for you to reflect on it. What maybe hasn't borne out yet that still could? What have your learnings have been since then? Really, most importantly, how should we think about building large, durable digital infrastructure that is good for everyone? **Jacob:** [01:24:27] I wrote that, and that might be one of my most idealistic pieces. It's almost science fiction. I look at it back now and think that was me channeling 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?" **Jackson:** [01:24:54] One thing I will say is, there are aspects of it maybe that were made with, but it wasn't complicated. It was actually quite simple. It was just very idealistic. **Jacob:** [01:25:01] Yes. I still believe that you can have permissionless protocols, and that you can have permissionless protocols that aren't possible without blockchain. That is a huge win for society. There are 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 now, was: if you can deploy one of these protocols and there's no cost to run it, then the team who originally created it could just go out of business and fail. But the protocol is still going to exist for as long as the chain will. That will create a market structure that means that 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. **Jackson:** [01:26:18] Right. **Jacob:** [01:26:19] Which was the case at the time, but that's absolutely not the case now. **Jackson:** [01:26:23] That also might have just been a slightly schuemorphic idea back to the physical world. **Jacob:** [01:26:26] Exactly. This is software. It's going to need software updates. **Jackson:** [01:26:31] It's only going to get cheaper to change. **Jacob:** [01:26:32] 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 upgradeable protocols and upgradeable smart contracts. Instead of having to migrate an entire ecosystem, there are some cases where that makes a lot of sense (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. That's something that's definitely changed. I also think that in the case that these things need to compete in an open market and 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. The interesting thing that you can do in this context is you actually make that fee open to anyone to claim. Whoever's providing the value for that function is the one that can claim the fee. That was one of the sparks in the essay that I think we've continued to extrapolate and lean into, and that's been really good for us. We as Zora aren't the ones that have a monopoly on the fee. We actually create an open competition for anyone to claim those fees. **Jackson:** [01:27:54] Positive-sum market. **Jacob:** [01:27:55] 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. **Jackson:** [01:28:03] Yep. Back to the original point, right? **Jacob:** [01:28:04] Yeah. That spark was right, and it's held up. We've continued to extrapolate that. It can run forever. It's valuable to own, free to use, and they were kind of the three things. I think I was too wedded at the time to: "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. I think it'll be much more related to the fee side, which is: "Well, you've got this permissionless and programmable revenue coming in. Now, what are more interesting ways that you can route that back into the token and make it much more explicit?" Which is way more simple and less heady. ## [01:28:55] **Jacob:**'s shift toward market-oriented thinking for solving coordination problems **Jackson:** There's a market maximization theme over the conversation that isn't, in some sense, less naive, but it's not bad. It is all about this North Star of coordination. Part of what I sense is you just over time coming closer and closer to the idea that people are predictable actors, for the most part, when you give them incentives, and that's the best way to get coordination. **Jacob:** [01:29:17] Yeah. If I was to have this conversation with myself like 10 years ago, Australia me, I would be like, "Wait, what? What happened to you? This sounds..." **Jackson:** [01:29:26] Yeah, you're so nihilistic or whatever. **Jacob:** [01:29:28] No, no, I don't think nihilistic, just I wouldn't have thought I would be so... I would be building around markets so much. I just never expected that. But as I've 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? **Jackson:** [01:29:54] Positive-sum competition. **Jacob:** [01:29:55] Exactly. A lot of the language I would have used back then is "hive mind." How do you help the hive mind do things together? The hive mind is where you've got the shared symbols, the incentives, and all of those kinds of things. I guess those three things I mentioned are core tenets that all glue and help the hive mind do things. But the open market, and how to create the most efficient market, is somewhere where I'm just like, yeah. **Jackson:** [01:30:22] It's almost like markets are the ultimate strategy, at least until we get to an actual hive mind. **Jacob:** [01:30:28] Or, said another way, if you zoomed out, the market is our magical system. If you look at ants, they're coordinating; they've got some magical system. ## [01:30:40] Ethereum, Solana, and Blockchain Competition **Jackson:** Capitalism is the rogue AI. Is Ethereum itself the closest thing to the truly 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. **Jacob:** [01:30:52] I think blockchains generally. I don't know. That's also something that's changed quite a lot since the hyperstructures thing. More networks exist, and Ethereum has optimized for decentralization as much as Bitcoin has maximized for decentralization. Ethereum was a response to Bitcoin not being programmable. Ethereum as a network has had a hard time scaling, and now you've got things like Solana, which is a response to Ethereum not being scalable enough. I think Ethereum will definitely still be around ten years from now, but I don't know if it all needs to be on Ethereum or not; it is a more open question. **Jackson:** [01:31:42] This goes back to the earlier point around: Why are we all competing when we have the same meme? I'm 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's really good. It produces all this emergence. In another sense, it's sort of like the VCs invested in companies who are all trying to do the same thing. **Jacob:** [01:32:09] The through-line I pull was like, I remember trying to build tokenizing things on Bitcoin using Counterparty. It was impossible. Then Vitalik was trying to do that, and there was this whole opcode thing. It's just not going to happen in Bitcoin. Ethereum emerged out of that, which is like, we want a programmable blockchain. Now, I think it's the same thing happening here: Ethereum won't make certain decentralization trade-offs, and it's not able to get to the level of scalability that Solana is able to get to. I also view it as a generational divide. All the zoomers in Solana look at Ethereum people the same way Ethereum people look at all the Bitcoin maxis. For a lot of what we do, which is content- and internet culture-driven, it's like, we very clearly should just be on Solana. It also is just a lot simpler. With Ethereum, it's like, well, there's 50 different L2s. What's an L2? Which one should you go to? The UX is pretty confusing versus Solana, where it's just all on the one network right now. Maybe there's some uncertainty of whether that can actually continue to infinitely scale. **Jackson:** [01:33:16] This goes back to the time thing, too: Am I obsessed with the current moment and the current thing? The age-old question... Do you know Stewart Brand's pace layers? **Jacob:** [01:33:28] Yeah. **Jackson:** [01:33:28] I think about that as kind of overarching, just constantly coming back to it in our current landscape. How do you know when to over-rotate into where fashion is going versus trusting "lindiness?" It's certainly embedded in these questions. **Jacob:** [01:33:42] Definitely. The market's been screaming at us to move to Solana. In that same period of time, there have been seven or eight other networks that are like, "Hey, can you add it to Zora?" **Jackson:** [01:34:03] Are we in the Solanas for boomer Gen Z people? **Jacob:** [01:34:07] Yeah. **Jackson:** [01:34:08] Gen Alpha is on XYZ. **Jacob:** [01:34:10] Solana calls their L2s "network extensions," which I really like. Whoever thought of that is really thinking about the language at a very deep level. It's easier to wrap your head around, where I'm like, "Oh, I'm still on Solana." It's not a separate thing, it's just extending the network. Beautiful: two words. **Jackson:** [01:34:32] If you were a creative director of Ethereum, do you have any ideas along those lines? **Jacob:** [01:34:36] I wouldn't creative direct it. I'd just say we need to get to sub-one-second block times and sub-one-cent transaction fees. **Jackson:** [01:34:43] Language is cute, but let's focus on... **Jacob:** [01:34:45] If you were to skip ahead, Solana is extremely cheap and way faster. No amount of branding can change that. I think there is some branding. You could go pure institutional and say, "We'll be here 10 years from now. It's going to be much slower," and you're winning a subset of transactions that are really high value. But I don't think that holds up. Who knows? It could also be true that Ethereum is ahead on the scaling front in the sense that it's not one big monolithic network. There are many L2s. When Solana eventually does reach a ceiling and they have to go into the network extension world, 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. Then there's a network effect. It's like, actually, in the future, there are going to be way more chains. You should think about chains more like websites or platforms, rather than these huge monolithic things. 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. We look at it from the perspective of our users. There's a pocket of users that want us to be there already, and 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 makes it an easy decision for us. ## [01:36:23] The Coinbase Internship that Never Ended **Jackson:** You started your career at Coinbase, an interesting monolith in so much of the conversation we've had. We have been mostly talking about really big, open, public, permissionless things. I want to get into some of the aspects of Coinbase. But first, as I understand it, you basically were an Australian college kid who got plucked off the internet. 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 would be curious about the story of how you got found, found them, and made your way. **Jacob:** [01:37:01] I was studying computer science in Sydney and hacking. My journey up until that point was: I learned about Bitcoin while studying economics. I was like, "Wait, you can create a cryptocurrency or a currency for anything? That's crazy." So I transferred into computer science and was just hacking on tokenizing creative projects the whole time. Originally, I was creating what are called colored coins on Bitcoin. Then Ethereum came out, and I was like, "Oh, finally, so much easier to build." I was just tweeting about it the whole time. How did I 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 said, "Oh, follow me on Twitter," or, "You should be on Twitter." I just kind of took that blindly and then did it. **Jackson:** [01:37:49] Cool. **Jacob:** [01:37:50] And then I just started tweeting awkwardly. Then I had opinions, and then I was like, "Here's what I was doing." **Jackson:** [01:37:57] You had opinions. **Jacob:** [01:37:58] Yeah, who would have thought? Coinbase, at the time, was just navigating adding Ethereum to Coinbase. Coinbase was a Bitcoin company; it was actually a really big change for them to consider having multiple cryptocurrencies. I think I came on their radar as they were looking at Ethereum and stuff. I did an interview, and I think they were weighing off whether they should hire this guy full-time. I was still in college, kind of young and junior, but energetic. They asked, "Would you want to do a three-month internship?" They were like, "We can see if we like you, and you can see if you like us." In my head, I was like, "Hell yeah." One, I'm a big fan of Coinbase, and I'm in Sydney, going to San Francisco sounds great. 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 Ethereum things I'm trying to do." **Jackson:** [01:38:52] Classic. **Jacob:** [01:38:53] I even told that to my girlfriend, who's now my wife. At the time, I was like, "I'm going for three months, I'll be back. Don't worry about it." The internship was for product design. **Jackson:** [01:39:03] Which you had never done. **Jacob:** [01:39:05] I was doing that for all my side projects. I had to, but I think I was relatively good at it, and I enjoyed it quite a lot. **Jackson:** [01:39:16] And that was just totally self-taught. **Jacob:** [01:39:18] Yeah, exactly. It was just like messing around. So I joined, and in my first week, they asked, "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 turning down the reviews and was like, "Go back, go back." 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 worked, so I just designed it in a way that I could understand how it worked. And Brian, in my first review with it, was like, "This is great, we can ship it." I remember Adam Wyatt, who was the head of GDAX at the time, was like, "What? Hell yeah, okay, great." **Jackson:** [01:40:02] That's not how most internships go. **Jacob:** [01:40:03] Yeah, and so on Friday that week, they're like, "Do you want to join full-time?" And I was like, "Yes." So then, yeah, I was like, "Hey, I'm gonna be here for at least, you know, four years or whatever." **Jackson:** [01:40:20] Okay. **Jacob:** [01:40:21] It was big enough. **Jackson:** [01:40:22] Joined in 2016. **Jacob:** [01:40:23] No, no, it was January 2017. **Jackson:** [01:40:30] Right. **Jacob:** [01:40:30] So it was still quiet, there was nothing too crazy. And then it was March of that year where everything went bonkers. **Jacob:** [01:40:31] I joined, and 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." ## [01:40:49] Starting USDC But I started as the intern, and then I had a really lucky trajectory and journey there. I started as a product design intern, went into product design, ended up in product, and then ended up leading USDC, working to get that into Coinbase and bringing Coinbase into the stablecoin conversation. **Jackson:** [01:41:03] So, this is what Fred told me to ask you about: 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 of engineers. **Jacob:** [01:41:15] I think I was 26 at the time. I have a lot of opinions, and I like sharing them. My first big one was actually leading the acquisition of a team called Paradex. I was noticing these decentralized exchanges on-chain and thought it felt strategically aligned with us in the long term, and that we needed to build this capability out. That idea was directionally correct, but the instance of it was wrong. I don't know if Coinbase needed to do that, but they were like, "Okay, that was a big shot," or whatever. That was already clear to me. I was just using so many things on-chain at the time. There was Dai, USDC, Paxos, and Tether. That was the stablecoin scene at the time. I was just like, "There's no way that this just isn't..." **Jackson:** [01:42:09] Stablecoins are sort of this long-running idea in crypto. Someday, we're going to get to this... **Jacob:** [01:42:17] ...world where we have dollars on-chain. Tether was relatively big at the time. It was certainly in, I think, the hundreds of millions in total supply. It might have been in the billions at that point; I can't quite remember. But USDC and Dai -- USDC was like $8 million in supply on-chain. Coinbase is fundamentally an on-ramp. It's like you go from dollars to crypto. I was looking at it 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 a huge disruption to Coinbase's core business and also a huge opportunity." That is perfectly in line with Coinbase because -- Tether wasn't. 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. **Jackson:** [01:43:28] But the idea was good enough. **Jacob:** [01:43:29] Yeah. I think I was super lucky because Balaji was my manager at the time, and he was just kind of incredible at multiplying and putting a tailwind behind me, advocating for this kind of thing. I ended up working with Miha and Maxim, who are two very early, long-standing engineers at Coinbase, and then Balaji and Jim McDal on the business side, doing the deal with Circle. It was basically like, "Yeah, Coinbase should..." We went through a whole build, buy, or partner analysis. **Jackson:** [01:44:02] Right. **Jacob:** [01:44:02] We ended up aligning on partnering with Circle. So we did that deal, and then Miha, Maxim, and I locked in a conference room in Coinbase for four months, just building it into the business and into the core product. That was a really fun experience because we were able to ship something through the whole company. Having to articulate and battle-test the rationale with varying levels of leadership and the board, and getting all that buy-in and then seeing it through, was just kind of wild and fun. I remember it went live, and then we had to go through the QBR process. I remember Balaji was just like, "Yeah, pick the goals and then set them." I just had no idea what I was doing, so I set the most ambitious goals. I was like, "Yeah, QBRs is where you set the most ambitious things possible." It was like $10 million or $15 million in circulation at the time. And I was like, "Yeah, we can get to $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 than an ambition exercise." But 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. It's opened up a whole new expansive area. **Jackson:** [01:45:29] It's arguably one of the most important crypto products that exists. **Jacob:** [01:45:31] Yeah. I guess I was already involved. There was a product strategy group, and I was 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 as like, "Well, what's actually happening at the forefront?" I would spend a lot of time writing about it, designing it, and to the extent possible, working it into the core product, which was a lot of fun. It was also just 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 1,200–1,300 people. **Jackson:** [01:46:10] Crazy. Talk about needing to coordinate. **Jacob:** [01:46:13] Yeah, and it's also wild now because, working with Jesse Pollock at Bate, who's running Base, we were at the office late nights for all of 2017. Dan Romero was always a really great mentor, giving me good feedback and pointing me in the right direction, channeling my energy. Now it's really cool to kind of be working alongside them in their projection. So yeah, it was like an amazing internship. The whole thing was an internship. **Jackson:** [01:46:45] 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 sort of defined by its user trust. What did you learn about building for, either explicitly or implicitly, users that will actually trust you there? **Jacob:** [01:47:14] Simple user experience is the main one. That was probably the biggest. It's like, simple user experience, easy messaging, easy product naming. Simple product naming was something that Brian actually obsesses over quite a lot, just like, call things what they are. Coinbase puts a lot of time and energy into actually drawing a line in the sand and fighting against regulators and various institutions publicly. **Jackson:** [01:47:44] Actually engaging, too. **Jacob:** [01:47:45] Engaging. Obviously, he's been doing a lot of that now. But even back in the day, when the IRS was trying to do sweeping data requests of all Coinbase's customer information, he took the IRS to court and beat them. He was both engaging and building those relationships with banks and regulators, but also fighting back where it needs to, for what it believes is right. That's kind of the best branding ever. You can make a great video or an amazing, creatively-directed campaign, but it really comes down to the actions, the ease of the experience, and whether it's solving a problem. **Jackson:** [01:48:18] And it compounds over time. It isn't necessarily an overnight thing. I remember, definitely not three years ago, maybe four years ago, whenever it was, FTX and Binance were, quote-unquote, crushing Coinbase. You're like, "Oh, are they schmucks?" **Jacob:** [01:48:29] Right. It's like greatest strength, greatest weakness. Coinbase was super slow to adding all of those tokens in 2017. But you have to play the long game, because you don't want to end up like CZ, in big trouble. Actually there was a biology concept around this, which is that some of the best things are paradoxical. You would never have expected that one of the most successful companies in crypto would be the most trusted thing. Being the most trusted in a trustless environment: that's a good frame for any situation. Find that extreme, what's at the other end, and there's probably some opportunity there. ## [01:49:14] Bloomberg Terminal's Design **Jackson:** What did you love about Bloomberg Terminal's design? **Jacob:** [01:49:17] It was just so absurd and chaotic. I built one of my side projects just before Coinbase. It was called "Coin Terminal." I was aggregating--this is when most of crypto chatter was Reddit based--so I built a terminal which pulled all the coins from CoinMarketCap, did a very simple text search for mentions of those coins in Reddit, and then formatted it. I just loved the Bloomberg Terminal as a reference. Bloomberg Businessweek at the time actually had really insane website design and magazine covers. 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 people crushing it on 1980s computers," still moving around. I thought that just felt fun. ## [01:50:09] Bezos and technology vs. adoption of technology **Jackson:** That's cool. My last section is going to be a little all over the place, sort of a lightning round, but it doesn't have to be that fast. First, you have a tweet recently. You say, "Technology itself isn't disruptive. Consumer adoption of technology is." Can you expand? **Jacob:** [01:50:26] In the next tweet I say this is copy-paste stolen from Jeff Bezos. I saw a clip of Jeff Bezos talking about how it's very easy to get excited about the technology in and of itself. I've fallen into this trap a lot, which is just that the technology is really interesting. You get nerd-sniped or one-shot by it, and you just obsess over the technology. You think that's going to be sufficient for it to become a reality and be widely distributed. **Jackson:** [01:50:53] The way the world should be. **Jacob:** [01:50:54] Exactly, versus what actually leads to disruption: 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: the first time cares about products, the second time cares about distribution. It's the same idea from a different angle. But I think why it resonated at the time was we have a really large and vocal community that can be very creator- and artist-centric. And this was wrestling with the evolution from NFTs to Coinbase, like to "coinbase." It's funny, it sounds like meme-coinbase. It's like, yes, I wish that I could extrapolate this NFT model to a scale or help it find a market and it reaches that ideal. But after years of taking it to its extreme, I have tried everything. We've gotten it from 1,000 monthly transacting users to 10,000 to 100,000 to 500,000, and just kind of 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. **Jackson:** [01:52:14] Anyway, the market is pulling something out of you. **Jacob:** [01:52:17] The market's pulling it out. It just feels so obvious. Ironically, it was the precise first version of Zora we did. When we were tokenizing t-shirts, it was the coin, and this version of the protocol is actually more close to that than not. That's where that was coming from. **Jackson:** [01:52:33] Had to move a little left on the. **Jacob:** [01:52:34] Shout out to Jeff Bezos. He has incredible. He crushes a meme in a memo, I think. He's got a lot of one-sentence bars that are great, including that one. ## [01:52:47] Tokenized Identity **Jackson:** You have 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 five stars." **Jacob:** [01:53:07] Is that like 20? **Jackson:** [01:53:08] 2018, I think. **Jacob:** [01:53:09] Yeah. Okay. **Jackson:** [01:53:10] "Pros: High utility, new sovereignty, control over self and data. Cons: Immutable, unforgettable, potentially dystopian." **Jacob:** [01:53:16] Yeah. **Jackson:** [01:53:17] And obviously a little bit antiquated, but running over that whole sort of market thing, are we going to have markets maybe not just on celebrities, but markets on people and their reputation? Are there good ways that this could -- have you seen anything recently? **Jacob:** [01:53:32] I don't like anything in that direction. I remember experimenting, and a bunch of friends were tokenizing their time. **Jackson:** [01:53:47] Matt Vernon did that for Saint Fame. **Jacob:** [01:53:49] Exactly. Yeah. So I bought a bunch of his time off the open market. Then he ended up hating it because he was like, "Wait, my time is actually super valuable. Why am I letting Jake make me make a dumb T-shirt?" **Jackson:** [01:53:58] Right, right. Time is expensive. **Jacob:** [01:54:02] 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. That was a very rudimentary idea. I like the version where it's more on the output specifically, versus everything de facto being the person. I'm less enthused by every single profile on the internet having a tradable price. But maybe it's inevitable. There have been so many attempts at this. Maybe the fact that I have such an allergic reaction to it as well probably means that it's more true than not. Or like, that's the opportunity. **Jackson:** [01:54:38] Also recently tweeted, "tokenize everything so it subsets." **Jacob:** [01:54:42] I'm being logically inconsistent here. I like the version of it where it's less, in the same way that Mr. Beast isn't Mr. Beast. I like it where there are identities that are being created, kind of like brands. **Jackson:** [01:55:00] Yeah. **Jacob:** [01:55:00] There's one step of separation between, you know, legal name and online name. Then 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. **Jackson:** [01:55:16] Well, this goes to the whole can of worms, but I think pseudonymity is partly interesting because it is a non-skeuomorphic identity system that doesn't require **Jacob:** or **Jackson:** being in my Social Security number. **Jacob:** [01:55:27] Exactly. And it can be as fragmented or as concentrated as you'd like. There's plurality there. Wow. That's a deep pool. I can feel the 2018 in that tweet. **Jackson:** [01:55:37] I don't think I went through all. I think it was linked in some blog posts. **Jacob:** [01:55:39] Okay. **Jackson:** [01:55:40] It's amazing. **Jacob:** [01:55:41] Yeah. ## [01:55:41] Matt Dryhurst and Holly Herndon and Bridging Art and Technology **Jackson:** What have you learned from Matt Dryhurst and Holly Herndon? **Jacob:** [01:55:46] Great question. I think they're just so far ahead on AI from the creative perspective. They're this rare mixture of being deep artists, but they also are exceptional technologists as well. They can phase shift between seeing through the point of view of how this is actually going to affect people who are just doing this for a living, or like artists, and then move towards, well, if I'm building this technology, what is the most powerful form of it? They're negotiating that tension between the two for themselves. **Jackson:** [01:56:40] Right. **Jacob:** [01:56:40] They just released Public Diffusion, which was like, okay, they took 15 million pieces of training data that they ensured every single one was in the public domain. They created a model called Public Diffusion, which is a starting point for a model where it's like, we know that there's not going to be any copyright infringement here. So for any developers who want to start to expand or add to the latent space of that model, we have a strong foundation to do that. **Jackson:** [01:57:10] Yes. **Jacob:** [01:57:10] 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 latent space? How do you create incentives or business models around that such that artists are getting paid for their data and they can opt into it? I don't know, they just helped me see the future in a way. And then I come at it mostly from the technological side, or I just love going like, okay, how far can we push this? **Jackson:** [01:57:40] Right. **Jacob:** [01:57:41] And then I just can't help but to rat brain go like, well, how can we use crypto to solve it? They're rare in that they're like, they're actually down and open minded and totally get it, which is not usually... **Jackson:** [01:57:58] To engage. **Jacob:** [01:57:58] Yeah, you don't usually get that from people who are in the AI world. They have like an extreme visceral reaction to it. **Jackson:** [01:58:05] Well, it makes me think of that Bezos tweet again. It's being someone who can participate both directly and participate in the meta, be the observer and the observed at the same time. **Jacob:** [01:58:08] Yeah, exactly. Really. **Jackson:** [01:58:09] Really. And you could extrapolate that across so many different contexts, but especially in something as ideological as art. **Jacob:** [01:58:14] Right. And what's so cool is that the art is genuinely really like, I love it. It's amazing. And then the technology, just the way they 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, okay, if I was ever going more future project, more like artist mode, then they would be someone I'd strive to reach or admire or model after. **Jackson:** [01:58:40] That's cool. It's clear. ## [01:58:43] What idea has the world not come around on yet? Do you have an idea that the world has refused to come around on yet, but you still think you're right? **Jacob:** [01:58:50] I think Zora is that. Within crypto, there's definitely a subset of people who are like, "This makes sense." Even just one extra orbit outside of crypto and tech, I think that that's the same thing. But if you're trying to explain why every piece of information should have a real-time market value, that's pretty... Most people don't react to that particularly well. My best way, I always bring it back to the Stewart Brand quote, because it's like, I do think it is a fundamental problem with the Internet itself. The Internet is really good at sharing and distributing and moving information around, but it's horrible at capturing the value for that. And we've had this has been a 30-year problem that's had many different iterations. **Jackson:** [01:59:38] Yes. **Jacob:** [01:59:40] My point of view is that if you 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. **Jackson:** [01:59:57] 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. **Jacob:** [02:00:08] Right. **Jackson:** [02:00:09] That is a problem that we need to coordinate to solve. It's really, really powerful. ## [02:00:12] What are the aesthetics of **Jacob:**'s AI model? How would you describe your taste? Or if that's too vague of a question... **Jacob:** [02:00:18] Yeah. **Jackson:** [02:00:21] What are the aesthetics of the **Jacob:** AI model? **Jacob:** [02:00:24] Oh, fuck. Good question. Um. There's a lot of sun. Like I I love... **Jackson:** [02:00:37] But I love... **Jacob:** [02:00:39] ...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. What else? I just see a lot of words, like white background, black text is probably in there somewhere. I like making very simple diagrams. **Jackson:** [02:01:19] Yes. **Jacob:** [02:01:20] Yeah. **Jackson:** [02:01:20] So you do some amazing diagrams. Um, you did have a meme go quite viral this year on TikTok. **Jacob:** [02:01:29] TikTok, Twitter like I have friends, like it shows up on Instagram all the time. Like it yeah. **Jackson:** [02:01:32] Like a truly viral image. **Jacob:** [02:01:35] It was. It's it's it's like it's in the lexicon or it's been it's canonized. **Jackson:** [02:01:39] And on Know Your Meme, too. **Jacob:** [02:01:42] Yes. **Jackson:** [02:01:43] For people's contacts. I'll link it in the description. But this is the like blurry horse running over the field... **Jacob:** [02:01:46] It's a 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, like, um, the universe loves irony because it was an amazing moment for me, because it was, I knew precisely at that point in time that the Zora model as it was working was broken. **Jackson:** [02:02:13] Didn't attribute to you. **Jacob:** [02:02:14] It wasn't the attribution. It was that the market couldn't keep up with the amount of attention it was getting. **Jackson:** [02:02:20] Right. **Jacob:** [02:02:20] And I saw multiple multi-million dollar coin versions of that get instantiated and I was like, ah. **Jackson:** [02:02:27] Because your version was an NFT. **Jacob:** [02:02:29] It was an NFT. And um and it was like, okay, like 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. **Jackson:** [02:02:42] It had the provenance, the ideological stuff was right. **Jacob:** [02:02:45] It was all there, but then when it actually went giga viral, like tens of millions of views on Twitter and, you know, everywhere, it um the token couldn't keep up with the virality. And I watched the market attempt to keep up on like um on Zora and on OpenSea and all these different markets. And I was like, ah, that isn't... **Jackson:** [02:03:05] You were fighting gravity. **Jacob:** [02:03:08] Fighting gravity. You need the market to be as liquid and as fluid as the content moving around the internet. 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. Then that pushed us into, "Okay, we need to go to the more market-driven and liquid system here." That was my second super viral image. The first one I had was this dumb screenshot of ChatGPT, just asking it, "What's a word for when you accidentally open the dishwasher and it's still on?" And then its response was just "disruptance." It was such a dumb joke, but that got millions of views on Twitter. It blew up my Twitter for a week, and I was like, "That's the dumbest thing ever." But you can't predict it. That's a great image, though. I have been weighing up whether I should post it again on this new model to beat the horse, but maybe if I don't, I won't. **Jackson:** [02:04:12] Things are hard to put back in the box. **Jacob:** [02:04:14] Exactly. It's kind of like I like taking the L, taking the lesson. **Jackson:** [02:04:18] Yeah. **Jacob:** [02:04:18] Yeah, I'll try the next one. ## [02:04:20] The FAFO Zone and Local Maximums **Jackson:** 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 three months, and every time I see you, there's some new crazy idea. I once asked you about this, and you brought up the FAFO zone as a path to solving local maximums. Can you talk about that? **Jacob:** [02:04:45] I haven't written anything publicly in a while, and I think this is the thing I would write. **Jackson:** [02:04:50] This one's a banger. **Jacob:** [02:04:51] Local maximums. There's the innovator's dilemma. There's a famous diagram of it where you've got one curve, a local maximum, and then if you imagine just below it, there's the next S-curve. There's a big trough, and then ultimately, it gets way higher. I think of everything as local maximums. How do you know you're in one, and then how do you break out of them? Why that's really important, I think, as a founder is that's the only way you solve the innovator's dilemma, which is like you basically have to disrupt yourself. I put this into a presentation I did at the town hall, which I should probably just put into an essay: How do you get comfortable with this and make this the standard practice for the whole company? **Jackson:** [02:05:40] Most people are terrified of adding entropy when they think they're at a top. **Jacob:** [02:05:44] Exactly. **Jackson:** [02:05:44] You're at a mountaintop. It's pretty comfortable. **Jacob:** [02:05:45] There's an important question: How do you know you're in a local maximum? Usually, it's very well understood. It feels very stable. You're in "refine and refactor" mode. You're optimizing very small percentages. It's comfortable and actually a little bit boring. Usually, your growth rates aren't as great as well. So, just calling that out. If that is resonating, then you're probably at or close to a local maximum. I call the next part the "fuck around and find out" zone, because how do you break out of it? You just have to... I use, I say, like you have to do what... There are two ways to come at it. One, if you were to start again from scratch, what would you do? You should probably do something along those lines. The other way to come at it is, if you were a direct competitor, what would you do? How would you exploit whatever gaps that you have? That's a passion-driven angle. Then there's the fear-driven angle. If they end up being the same answer, definitely do it, but sometimes those answers are different. Pick whatever one's giving you the most energy. It's much more of an intuitive, especially for data-driven companies. You're explicitly going into a "vibes-based" mode for a little bit. Whatever is going to give you the most amount of energy and lead to high-cycle, high-throughput, high-experimentation. **Jacob:** [02:07:11] You're just trying to cover as much ground as possible. 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. 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. That is actually part of it. So, you're not going into this thing being like, "We're going to disrupt ourselves overnight. We're going to see an immediate 10x." You're actually taking, like, no, we're going to make the business and product probably explicitly worse on some dimension. **Jackson:** [02:07:50] Yes. We're going to lose motivation, we're going to lose momentum, we're going to enter the trough of despair. **Jacob:** [02:07:54] 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. You might, like, it's like, oh, our local maximum... One simple one was like, "Oh, we're a 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. That's like a very simple example. You keep doubling down on what works, and then you go through the trough of despair, and you figure it out, and you just repeat the process endlessly. **Jackson:** [02:08:31] This applies to everyone in every context of life. **Jacob:** [02:08:38] Exactly. **Jackson:** [02:08:39] The critical thing, and 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 at not holding on to the good feeling at the local maximum. You're good at jolting yourself out of that. **Jacob:** [02:08:52] Yes. I don't think I've ever got comfortable at that stage. **Jackson:** [02:08:57] It's a great way to fight inertia. **Jacob:** [02:08:59] I also think, at least at Coinbase, I remember hypergrowth. You feel pretty comfortable when it's a multi-hundred million or billion dollar number going up. You want to feed the beast. But even then, there's a new competitor eating our lunch on some dimension. I'm always thinking about what I would do if I were doing this from day one. I find good ideas not by imagining what my competition would do. I just like to put myself in the CEO role of companies I find interesting. Then I think, "What would I do? What would my 3, 6, and 12-month plan look like?" It's a good way to get some entropy, farm a different context, and pull yourself out of your world. Then you can get a fresh look at a different problem space. Your approximation is probably pretty bad, but just the fact that you're doing it is helpful. **Jackson:** [02:09:59] It's allowing you to be the observer and the observed, back to the Dvorak point. **Jacob:** [02:10:03] Exactly. This is a good practice, but the challenge is making sure you're not doing it too often. A failure case is you're actually not letting something ride long enough, and you're killing a good product or feature too early. **Jackson:** [02:10:24] Shiny object syndrome. **Jacob:** [02:10:26] Exactly. Usually, growth rate, if you're still excited about a feature, and you can see it makes sense strategically, that helps you stick with it for as long as you can. **Jackson:** [02:10:37] Plug in relationship, career path, all of the above. **Jacob:** [02:10:44] Exactly. You have to make sure you don't overrun that. By nature of my role, I'm thinking about this at the highest levels of the company, where we need to make big bets and big moves. But it applies to all levels of a product and business. ## [02:11:03] The alternate reality where **Jacob:** didn't discovery Bitcoin/crypto **Jackson:** What would you have done if you hadn't discovered Bitcoin? What do you think you would have done professionally? **Jacob:** [02:11:10] Great question. I was doing economics at the time just because it felt interesting to me. Hmm. What would I be doing? I remember at the time being interested in the advertising and marketing world, mostly for the creative aspect. There was this show on every week in Australia called *The Gruen Transfer.* It was basically a weekly show where they would deeply analyze advertising campaigns happening in the world. **Jackson:** [02:11:58] Cool. **Jacob:** [02:11:58] I found it so fascinating that something I just took and consumed at face value, I didn't appreciate the level of thought and positioning. **Jackson:** [02:12:06] They peel back the curtain a little. **Jacob:** [02:12:07] Yeah, I remember that being super mind-blowing. I just got so intrigued. I was like, "Oh, wait, I didn't realize you could have...I didn't know that's how much work, thought, positioning, and strategy went into it." **Jackson:** [02:12:19] Right. **Jacob:** [02:12:19] So, I remember looking into what it would look like to go into that world. **Jackson:** [02:12:25] There's some of that in what you do. **Jacob:** [02:12:27] There's a little bit of that. I was also pretty interested in the digital art world. Even in my first year of college, I was both seriously and sarcastically participating in art competitions. I would do things sometimes as a joke, and they would end up featured in the gallery. **Jackson:** [02:12:55] Calling it a joke sometimes is a defensive mechanism. **Jacob:** [02:12:59] That's why I was saying it was a defensive mechanism. It was like that joke in *The Other Guys* where he says, "You learn to dance sarcastically." It was like that. It was definitely from wanting to do it, but I didn't know how to do it sincerely at the time. I'm coming up on five years of Zora this year. It's eight years since I moved to the US. Basically, being in this tunnel vision, getting plucked out of Australia, going into Coinbase, and continuing the crypto thought train, is the first time where I'm thinking, "Okay, is it going to be crypto still 10 years from now? 20 years from now?" **Jackson:** [02:13:55] Yeah. **Jacob:** [02:13:55] It is interesting to track where my mind wanders when I remove the assumption that I'll always be doing crypto. **Jackson:** [02:14:02] Yeah, and even elements of what will it look like to have sort of done what I came here to do? **Jacob:** [02:14:07] Yeah, exactly. **Jackson:** [02:14:09] There's this guy, Ian Rogers, maybe you've run in with him. He's now in some creative role at Ledger, but he did the Beastie Boys website and then worked on early, one of the Napster-era things, and it culminated with Apple Music. He talked about it in some interview. He was like, "After Apple Music, I was kind of done. We did the thing." **Jacob:** [02:14:31] Reached the point. Yeah. **Jackson:** [02:14:33] Interesting. Obviously, it can become an infinite game. **Jacob:** [02:14:36] Definitely. I didn't have a clear answer other than 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. ## [02:14:54] Cultural and Artistic Inspirations **Jackson:** Do you have any cultural or artistic inspirations that immediately come to mind as being really influential over you? **Jacob:** [02:15:03] Definitely. Virgil Abloh, big one for sure. **Jackson:** [02:15:16] Why? **Jacob:** [02:15:17] I loved the figure of speech, like the quotes. And then, I also loved his talks and the way he presented his practice, as much as I loved his output from it. **Jackson:** [02:15:29] Yes, I would argue maybe that *was* the output, in some sense. **Jacob:** [02:15:33] Definitely. For example, his slide from his Harvard talk, where he's just like, "Here is my method in 10 points. Here is my signature." And it was red background, yellow text. I just loved that. I was like, "Oh, wow." That is as much the output as the sneakers or the installation. His memes, like the 3% rule. **Jackson:** [02:16:05] 3% is king. **Jacob:** [02:16:06] Yeah, just all of these little things. **Jackson:** [02:16:10] Just tweak it a little bit. **Jacob:** [02:16:11] Yeah, I just found that super inspiring. And then also, just the rate of output, and that he had no constraint on what his title was, in a way. He didn't identify with just being a designer, or a photographer, or an architect, or whatever. It was just, "I'm just doing all of these things and expressing through it." Who else is in there? I really like Christopher Nolan. He's one of my favorites. I love the way he approaches things, like the fact he has no phone and is constructing these infinitely complex universes. His approach to trying to make the film as timeless as possible, making sure he's setting these constraints such that you don't over-rely on CGI, so it still holds up. I actually just love the ideas themselves. I love how you can infinitely rabbit hole and extrapolate out. **Jackson:** [02:17:15] Right. He's a filmmaker who loves ideas. **Jacob:** [02:17:17] Yes. I really love that. **Jackson:** [02:17:25] I saw a headline about him building a 6 meter by 6 meter animatronic cyclops for some cave. **Jacob:** [02:17:34] That's correct. The Long Now Foundation and the 10,000-year clock are also great examples. I just love thinking at that scale. That's always amazing. More will come to mind, but they're like the three mediums. **Jackson:** [02:17:54] Those are three pretty strong ones. ## [02:17:55] Patronus Problems One of the things I believe very strongly is adjacent to the idea of dysfunction and genius being two sides of the same coin. We often get in our own way. The things that make us who we are and make us great are exactly the things that create hurdles for us. It often seems 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 it. What are Patronus problems? Do you have a favorite example of one that you've had and solved? **Jacob:** [02:18:26] 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 came from the end of one of the first eras of Zora, where that whole instance and everything about it just died. One of the things that I thought was wrong was the idea that if you build an open protocol with the right incentives, platforms will just magically start building on top of it. I thought that would bring the distribution, and you just have to nail the protocol level perfectly. But in reality, if you want to take a protocol to market, you have to build that product yourself. You have to rely on you. Balaji is kind of amazing, maybe one of the best managers you could have. I noticed that he would lean on references more than you would ever expect in a professional context. He's like, "Have you ever seen this movie? What about this scene? Did you read this book?" He's trying to find a shelling point, some kind of common ground. What references can I pull on here that will communicate it? I think I did that here by pulling from *Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban*, where he's learning how to do the Patronus charm. He gets beaten up by some dementors and gets saved by someone he thinks is his dad. But then the twist, spoiler alert if you care, is that he is actually the one saving himself. He goes back in time, and he saved himself the whole time. He had it within him, and he should have just realized it. **Jackson:** [02:20:04] Right, you're looking out externally. **Jacob:** [02:20:06] You're looking around, and it's like, you're the one to solve that problem. I think that's a really common thing, especially earlier in your career, or when you're learning how to get agency for yourself. Actually, more things are Patronus problems than you think. You shouldn't be asking someone else or looking to someone else to solve it; you should just do it. That's probably the opportunity. That one generalizes to professional life and personal life. I liked it because it was an alliteration and a Harry Potter reference. ## [02:20:44] Australians and Americans **Jackson:** What is your favorite thing about Australians and your favorite thing about Americans? We won't go negatives; we'll just do positives. **Jacob:** [02:20:51] Australians are just so open and I think default to being happy. I think this is afforded by the fact that the weather is so incredible and the safety net is so high. You could be in any sort of situation, and you can just sit on the beach, and you'll be in some form of paradise no matter what, on average. Obviously, there are extremes. The result is you will be saying good morning and hello, how are you to people on the street every day. It was actually kind of a shock; you do not do that in San Francisco because people are like, "Who are you talking to?" **Jackson:** [02:21:35] What a little LA, New York in that? **Jacob:** [02:21:38] It's very open. You can go talk to a stranger there. **Jackson:** [02:21:48] Cool. **Jacob:** [02:21:49] My favorite thing about Americans is just the raw ambition. It's so high agency. The default is that you can do it. Australia is on the opposite end of that spectrum. There's actually a term for it called tall poppy syndrome, which is a cultural trait of Australia to see any success as actually chopped down and looked down on. It's very hard to... Success is actually seen more as a negative thing. **Jackson:** [02:22:25] What scam did you pull to get here? Who did you cheat? **Jacob:** [02:22:29] Yeah, like, oh, I guess your parents are super rich. That's actually the default. Versus here, it's the ideal. It's celebrated. People are more willing to... Australians are more open, but Americans, I don't know, they're like, yeah, let's fucking go. We're more willing to help and make it happen. I love just how it's like, yeah, anything is possible. Versus in Australia, you're downstream of so much culture. It was just so mind blowing going and seeing things I saw in movies in Australia. It's just really simple things like that where it's like, oh no, that's actually real. **Jackson:** [02:23:09] Yes. **Jacob:** [02:23:09] And it's not like this made up world that is being characterized in movies. That is actually coming from... 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. It is dramatized, but it's closer to the truth than it's not. **Jackson:** [02:23:28] Well, and by the way, in some of these cases, I could go do that. **Jacob:** [02:23:31] Yes, exactly. I could go there and see the thing or go do the thing. Yeah, I love that about being here. ## [02:23:42] **Jacob:**'s Favorite Ideas **Jackson:** My penultimate question. Do you have a favorite idea? **Jacob:** [02:23:52] I have a few that I hold on to that I'll kind of just write in a note and come back to. Which ones to pick? One is like, I love cookies, but obviously they're one of the least healthy foods to have. And I've always been like, okay, if I was to just like rabbit hole and go eccentric and 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 chip 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, yeah, it's just like, how would you attack that? Because obviously there's like molecular constraints of like, what flavors map to what ingredients. 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 feels like a really fun. **Jackson:** [02:24:51] It's almost like, is there free lunch in the universe? **Jacob:** [02:24:53] Exactly. So that's one. Another more recent one is AI translation between people who speak the same language. There are infinite ways you can communicate an idea to someone, but there are ways that are going to be more likely to land and be grasped fastest. There's a lot of amazing stuff coming for translating between people speaking different languages, but what would it look like to really optimize on people speaking the same language? I've been thinking about a similar related idea a lot. I almost wrote a Harry Potter-themed thing on this. Obviously, in childhood, I liked the Sorting Hat. Imagine an AI model that you could give 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? Then start to rank them amongst every other person that's ever spoken about. And then what would that conversation be in one minute? **Jackson:** [02:26:02] Meaning, what could you ask? **Jacob:** [02:26:03] No, what? I would just love to know. Say the Sorting Hat has had 10 million conversations. 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? How long does it actually need to get 99.9% accuracy? **Jackson:** [02:26:23] This is like the... I always joke, the best thing for the blind date would just be you scroll each other's TikToks for five minutes. **Jacob:** [02:26:30] That's a good one. **Jackson:** [02:26:31] That's sort of a proxy. **Jacob:** [02:26:33] Yeah, that's the more... There's definitely a passive way, which is like, you could just input everything you had done and it can figure it out. **Jackson:** [02:26:38] But what's the active way? **Jacob:** [02:26:39] What's the active conversation? That would be pretty... **Jackson:** [02:26:41] This podcast host is either going to be out of a job or really enabled. **Jacob:** [02:26:46] 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" by Isaac Asimov. **Jackson:** [02:26:59] I just recently read it for the first time. **Jacob:** [02:27:01] I extrapolated out. I think I was... This was like a 3:00 AM 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 quote, something along the lines of, "Life is the universe perceiving itself." Well, maybe life is the universe keeping itself alive. Because if you play out the "don't die" thinking far outside entropy, for you to not die, you have to make sure the Earth doesn't die too. 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 hold it open. **Jackson:** [02:27:41] Steph Ango has this great essay I'll send you after called, "The Thinking Earth is Sentient; Earth is Becoming Sentient." He proposes that we're not building some machine god, we're actually part of the body of Earth, building its brain. **Jacob:** [02:27:56] Yeah, exactly. **Jackson:** [02:27:57] Launching spores in the form of rockets. **Jacob:** [02:27:59] Yeah, I love that. I love that line of thinking. My fav orite one, that's a... I think Zora is my favorite idea. I think for as long as that's true, I'll keep doing it. **Jackson:** [02:28:23] It's a great answer. **Jacob:** [02:28:25] 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. **Jackson:** [02:28:23] That's the benefit of having your favorite idea. **Jacob:** [02:28:25] Exactly. You work on... ## [02:28:27] Lessons for **Jacob:**'s kids about creativity **Jackson:** What specifically in the vein of creativity do you hope to impart on your children? **Jacob:** [02:28:42] Those three questions came from thinking: Where do words come from? Where does the law come from? Where do prices and money come from? I feel like those are ones that you can have so many conversations around, just peeling back the curtain. It's like, "Hey, you have way more agency than you may think. Most of the world is human construct, so don't get lost in the sauce." I think making it through that makes it easy to be creative because now you're looking at everything from the sense of, "Well, this is man-made in some dimensions. How do I want to contribute to it?" My answer is actually those three questions are the starting point. Then it's just chasing, or helping them follow, whatever their internal passion, desire, or interest is. Helping them realize: one, you have the idea. Now, how would you make that idea a reality? That is actually the next step. This is a simple thing in investing: it's one thing to be right, but it's more important to figure out how to capitalize on being right. That holds true in creativity as well. You have the spark of the idea. Now, how would you actually get to the point where you can realize that idea? That's where the pain, challenge, and triumph comes from. Otherwise, you could just get stuck in that loop of having so many great ideas, and you can't express them. That's tough. The sum total of those things is probably what I would focus on. **Jackson:** [02:30:37] I think there's that old Steve Jobs video where he's just talking about how once you realize that the world was created by nobody smarter than you, 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. **Jacob:** [02:30:53] Exactly. **Jackson:** [02:30:54] And nothing is fixed. **Jacob:** [02:30:55] Yeah. **Jackson:** [02:30:55] That's all I got for you. **Jacob:** [02:30:57] Okay, nice. That was fun. Thank you. **Jackson:** [02:30:59] This was really fun. **Jacob:** [02:30:59] Yeah, this is great. Happy we were finally able to do it. **Jackson:** [02:31:02] Indeed. Maybe another time, sometime in the when the markets, when the world has become markets. See you soon. **Jacob:** [02:31:09] See ya.