ep 4 – Decentralized Creativity & Collaboration, with special guest Rob McElhenney

Transcript

welcome to web3 with a6 and z a show about building the next generation of the internet this show is for anyone whether artist developer company builder community leader or others seeking to understand and go deeper on all things crypto web 3 and the future of a decentralized community-governed and creator-owned internet this episode was recorded live earlier this week at an event we at asics and z crypto co-hosted during nft nyc in new york city with adam and special guest and celebrated creator rob mcelini chris dixon and myself more background and context to follow but in the conversation we covered the theme of decentralized media decentralized content creation collaboration community

and more and we also touch on topics such as the metaverse storytelling writers rooms favorite tv shows nostalgia and much more as a reminder none of the following is investment legal business tax advice please see asics and z.com disclosures for more important information including a link to a list of our investments okay the rest of what follows is all from the live stage hi everyone thank you for coming i'm sonal choxie i'm editor-in-chief at asics and z crypto long-time editor-in-chief at andreessen horowitz and showrunner of the asics and z podcast and now host of the new podcast web3 with a6 and z and this is actually the first live taping of that show so that's kind of

exciting you're all part of that and now let me just quickly introduce our guests on behalf of asics and z crypto and adam i'm excited to welcome chris dixon long-time technology investor former startup founder founding and managing general partner of asics and z crypto and rob mcelhenny long-time writer actor and executive producer known for the critically acclaimed comedy series it's always sunny in philadelphia it's it's 15th season recently in december and broke records as the longest running live-action tv sitcom that's insane yeah it's pretty wild and he's also the creator among many other things i'm just highlighting a few things of mythic quest which premiered a couple years ago

on apple tv and is set in the development studio one of the most popular video games in the world and i mentioned that because we'll touch on gaming in our talk and finally and probably most importantly for today rob is the co-founder and chairman of adam which is a community of storytellers and fans working together to create and own a new generation of characters and stories where the ip can be collectively owned by the communities who develop them and the reason i gave you all this context is because it's one of my pet peeves when you tell people to introduce themselves because it's like wait let's get to the real stuff so we're just going to jump right in and start with before we go into the specifics of what you do how you got here

let's start with the big picture which is decentralized media like what does that even mean decentralized content creation and i don't know if you want to take that one first chris and then rob sure i mean i think one of the promises of the internet was if you think about things like wikipedia as an example or even going back earlier before wikipedia to kind of the ability for anyone to come along and create a website one of the great promises of the internet was to democratize things that were previously controlled by a small group of people there's a very famous essay about open source software called the cathedral and the bazaar that kind of i think is a nice characterization of this and the idea is you sort of have two models for how to build software how to build systems how to build information

systems or content creation or whatever it might be one model is you have kind of a priesthood a kind of an elite group who kind of controls things and the other model is you have just an open system where anyone can come along and through hard work and merit and creativity and whatever else it might be come along and make their contribution yeah i think of wikipedia as like a canonical example of this when wikipedia first came out in 2001 there were a bunch of encyclopedias digital encyclopedias including for example in cardo which was made by microsoft or if you went to in carter and you looked up let's say a giraffe you'd see a beautiful photograph of a giraffe and maybe some text written by a draft scholar and it was like really nice and well put together wikipedia came along

and it was this open system and literally anyone can come even without your real name and contribute and at first wikipedia was sort of chaos but over time it got much much better and people came together and they kind of self-organized you know people interested in chemistry went off and edited the chemistry stuff and it turned out as we know today to be this incredible repository of human knowledge that's edited in this open decentralized way and really kind of replaced you know when carter i think went out of business in 2009 or something so this was always kind of the promise of the internet going back to the early 90s or even the 80s this idea that you could democratize first information in the first era and then the next era you could democratize publishing which we've seen with things like twitter and facebook and obviously

that's played out really interesting ways in social media but now we have the possibility to kind of go further and decentralize ownership and creativity and all other kinds of aspects of the human experience and that's what adam's focusing on i would say i really like the idea of owning what i make that's for sure but just in terms of the idea of decentralized content creation that's a phrase i've heard a number of times and i've read it a few times and i don't know what it means yeah what does it mean i don't know how how do you do that i've never well i want you to answer that yeah well i think that anybody who's ever built something created something let's talk about a tv show specifically because that's what i do yeah they recognize it's a it's a collaboration but there is a certain

amount of curation that goes into it and i think any rational person can recognize that there's a curative level that's a part of the creation of anything however who has been the curator traditionally is a question that needs to be asked and is being asked culturally right now and has been up for at least the last 10 15 years and it's an important question because as we look around we realize well okay so just because we need to curate these materials how do we open up the space to allow for other curators to come into the process and i think that the ability to scale like that is so exciting so i want to pick up on something you both mentioned chris mentioned the cathedral and the bizarre

which is actually an idea as he said that's been around for ages but when i think of a bazaar i think of a very messy crowded kind of chaotic place where frankly you have thieves you have people running around you have a lot of noise you can't get anything done necessarily and it's insane to me that you are talking about i get the curation part but bringing a more collaborative creativity and decentralizing that because i think of curation and creation as a very not only cathedral-like enterprise but there's a showrunner and someone who has a vision yeah i mean i'm preaching to you you were a very renowned creator how do you think of that playing out and as you've been building and thinking about

adam yeah so i think it helps to start with how a writer's room generally works because a lot of people don't work in writer's rooms they don't necessarily know and they think there's a level of mystique about it but truthfully it's not that complicated you get a group of people together generally curated by their scripts or word of mouth and it could be anywhere from three to 25 people in a room all working towards a common goal and everybody has a certain set of talents and abilities some people are really great natural storytellers some people are really great in my case with my shows they can tell jokes they're really funny some people are just really weird and bring in a completely fresh and different

perspective but you can't have 25 people talking at once in the same way you can't have three people talking at once you'll set up a situation where a showrunner for example would suggest okay today i'd like to talk about this and then that person would would be the arbiter of where things headed because if you just had again 25 people all with different ideas where something could go you'd never be able to get anywhere exactly right so you wind up with a person who's ostensibly up at the white board with a marker saying okay that's a great idea that's a good idea that's a great idea that's a great idea now that is a very centralized model and there's a reason for that it's because otherwise it would be chaos so we create this situation where the

showrunner is using the talents of everybody in the room and when they come into the room it's agreed that that's the vision that's the person who we're working with and for and we're following his her or their vision for what the show might be and so traditionally as i mentioned before right now there's still hundreds of opportunities and shows but it's very difficult to get into that position yeah and the way that i think of decentralized content creation and the approach that we're going to take is essentially just scaling that system up so the way that it would work is the very first round we're going to have four rooms four writers rooms four writer's rooms

well let's even back up let's start with the application process so it was really important to us from the very beginning that we didn't want to have a pay to play model we wanted it to be merit-based so we just simply asked the community actually we asked the world who is your favorite character of all time and why and you had 500 words or less to explain who your favorite character was of all time and why and the answers we got back were stunning stunning because you realize wow people identify with different characters for different reasons and yeah and they have a very specific point of view and they're going to bring who they are to that answer and you're going to see who they are through that

very very simple answer the idea is we would then curate those and then select 100 people this for the first round we would break those rooms up into groups of 25 and in the beginning we'll have a room lead and a room lead in each room a person that i've found over the years through mythicquest or through sunny or through my years of running rooms i've identified a few key writers that could run those rooms so the people that you've designated the people around the room these are people that work for adam and then there's a second lead and the second lead would be somebody who is an assistant or somebody who's been around a pa or a writer's assistant or somebody's who's learning and is on their way up now traditionally they would both be working their way up and

then going to either be in other people's writers rooms or create their own shows very small and a very elite amount a group of people so to scale that up what if we created a room full of 25 people the room lead and the second lead would work together with those groups of 25 and they would create something together yeah each group will create a character so right from day one things got really weird in the best of ways because i sat there with the entire team and we talked about how would this actually work and i said they all know how i run a room because they've all worked with me in the past so i just assumed this seems to be the easiest way to start and then we'll see

how things diverge from there but right from the very beginning one of the room leads said i wouldn't run my room the way that you would interesting so they push back on that to do it their own way that's the whole point right and we asked him how would you run the room he would do it this way and then we asked kiana taylor who was our chief creative officer how would you run a room completely different somebody else completely different then we asked the second leads well when you're going to be running the rooms how would you do it i think i would look at it from this perspective and already you're realizing what's happening is that it's not that i'm passing the baton off they're ripping them away from me and creating their new system they're in fact whacking you in the head with the

exactly so the idea is when we get to scale that those groups of 25 people what will start to happen this is a something i noticed over the years too which i've always found fascinating it's about an average of 10 of any given writer's room goes on to create their own show it's about that so if if there's a room of 10 there's usually one person that goes off to create their own room around 20 there's two people i don't know why that is it just seems to be the case and so our thought is that when you start to open and expand those ideas that there's going to be 10 of those groups that are gonna just naturally rise up and say i'd like to now spin out my own room and do my own version of it and that's where we

start to get decentralized i feel like we should coin a phrase right here on stage like mcelenny's rule the rule of ten percent like that in any given cause if you extend your idea even further you could almost argue that in the entire population of potential creators that one out of every 10 is someone who can actually go and create their own creative enterprise however i would say this and i think this is a really important distinction i think this is also what separates adam from say just a traditional writer's room or traditional approach is that simply because of scale regardless of how much money hollywood has regardless of how big these budgets are there are certain things that are valued and you have to for example curate the writer's room because you only have a limited amount

of budget some shows are really big some shows are really small but at the end of the day you still have to make decisions so generally what's valued in a writer's room is the ability to execute drafts or the ability to break stories and those are the two most important things in a writer's room okay but does that mean if you're really good at identifying the specifics of somebody who's experienced a tremendous amount of trauma and you can bring that into a character and imbue that character with those very specific characteristics why do you have any less or more value than anybody else that's in that room well only if you're working with a very

constrained budget or idea if you start to expand from there and say well maybe the criteria through which we're looking for writers or it's really creators starts to expand and i think we're already seeing that with the applications it's really that's fascinating so i have to say though and i hear that what you're saying is that's phase one but a question here what about that is uniquely web3 because quite frankly a lot of that could be done in web 2. like you could use crowdfunding there's fan fiction there's kicks i mean chris you were formerly an investor in kickstarter and one of my all-time favorite shows veronica mars was like crowdfunded to be made now granted that was by the original showrunner another rob but i'm still not quite hearing what's unique here about web3 so

i'd love you guys to share more of that because i'm sure our audience wants to know too well i think in the beginning it is more just as sort of a way to kind of keep things less chaotic and sort of controlled and kind of ease into the full vision in the beginning it is something that probably could and is run on a kind of conventional website model the thought is that over time you want to use blockchains for a couple of reasons one is blockchains have this feature that i like to call can't be evil instead of don't be evil so google famously had this the saying this was sort of their motto early on which meant like don't have too many ads on the page don't take too much money from the ecosystem but then over time the founders retired and management took

over and all of these kinds of promises they'd made have not been kept and that's just kind of the story we've been now have 30 years of commercial internet and that's basically been the case for almost everything that's existed is that over time the kind of charter of the corporation and the management team and things end up overwhelming the promises of the website one of the nice things with blockchains is you can commit architecturally in the blockchain itself in the software itself to a certain system and including the economics of the system the rules of the system the rules if you're for example a third-party creator and you want to invest in this system and you want to you know build a livelihood on it you know what the rules are going to be you know what they're going to be forever if you're a software developer and you

want to build around this ecosystem you want to build a new interface or a new game or some other new kind of experience you know what the rules are right and so that's one very important feature is down the road as you build this kind of bigger system you want to make these various guarantees in order to grow the ecosystem blockchains also allow for some really interesting features one of which we call composability so composability is a software concept that i think really explains is a concept that essentially you can treat software and services and various things on blockchains as kind of lego bricks so for example if adam creates a set of characters people can go you know fork those characters they could make an alternative version of those characters that exist in a different universe they

could make a derivative version of the character they can add to the character and they can kind of treat it like little pieces which is a very powerful concept you mentioned before that these bizarres can be chaotic it's a very important organizing principle that we see in things like open source software for allowing millions of people to collaborate in a kind of coherent way right and so there's a bunch of features like that which i think you're the entrepreneur not me but like i believe down the road those features will become more salient in the beginning it will be kind of a more controlled web 2 kind of experience to kind of figure out the group dynamics and all the other things yeah i think for me to accurately answer that question i would have to start with why i became interested in web 3 in the first place and it wasn't

until i started listening to a lot of podcasts but specifically chris talking about his approach to why he felt it was important and it's because it's taking the speculation out of it that i understood and it's approaching web 3 as a means by which people are going to build the next version of the internet for some reason whatever chris was saying unlocks something in my brain in the way that i look at things the way i look at the future and the way i think we're headed based on leaders of the field and metaverse technologies and things like that but in the short term i love the idea of again using web3 in our business to

open up opportunity and access and to build a community that i understand and very specifically in fact it was tim i had research on this very podcast who said it very succinctly that to think about a blockchain as a super computer in the sky that has no owner yet can enforce property rights in a way for digital assets that has never been able to be done before but the idea that it can track ip and the transfer of ip and the enforcement of usage is really fascinating when you think about it to scale because you have

massive departments in we'll call it web too but like in the in the studios right now whose sole job is to just track the usage of their ip most of the time it's to stop people from using it well what if you look at it differently and try to figure out ways in which we could use that technology to track bits of ip essentially nfts moving forward in the future but moving towards a completely different way of interacting with stories i mean we can still work this company probably 90 this company could work using an old traditional web 2 model but it's that last 10 percent that's the most important when you get to scale yeah because to track that many transactions which is what we're talking

about it'll have to be a computational power so you mentioned rob that the media world's used to stopping stuff they're used to blocking stuff i would argue this is not in their interests that this is a pre-internet way of viewing the world that the internet is by its nature wants to copy things information it's the video game industry has figured this out and they've embraced copying and so if you go on something like steam there's mods there's you know forks streaming as an example some of the more forward-thinking games company embraced it at first but some of the older games companies like nintendo they fought it they saw this copyright infringement eventually they realized the marketing benefits outweigh the infringement cost and i think a similar thing using web3 i think will spread to movies film

writing and they'll realize that it's better to have this giant engaged audience and then maybe figure out how to monetize some small portion of them the way that ford knight and league of legends does right so fortnite it's a free game this is the modern way to make games they're free and only a tiny percentage will buy things but that's enough because people love it and they spread it and they pay your marketing costs and i think this like with adam i think one of the fascinating things right is you're not just going to have this community of creators you're going to have this community of marketers yes right they're going to go out and they're going to evangelize and they're going to own it and that's a very powerful thing i think that's one of the things that explains the popularity of something like dogecoin which is a

ridiculous cryptocurrency it's created as a joke it is kind of a joke yet it's popular because people have felt on the sidelines they felt disenfranchised and now they feel a sense of ownership what if instead of some silly coin like that they actually own the next marvel like how passionate will they be they will overwhelm any any movie marketing budget like you could spend 300 million dollars marketing a movie if you have a passionate community of 50 000 people markets itself tweeting and writing about it it will be the most powerful so i think these all combined you have this creative thing you have financing you have creation but then probably most importantly have the evander right yeah absolutely i mean that's a huge tenet of what we're doing which is community building that's a huge aspect of what we're talking about i mean just today i

went for a walk around the city and you see a line around the corner and it was for night it was for sneakers and you realize there's a massive sneaker community and everybody's hanging out and talking and they're really excited about the release of the new sneaker and at the end of the day it's just a variation of a bunch of cotton and plastic that's put on and yes there is a status element to it but i think what people really identify with is the community of people that they can talk to about it it's a collectible but it's also something that you can engage with other human beings about and you see that of course in the entertainment industry with marvel with star wars or with pixar where people fall in love with the characters and the movies and the ethos of those companies well

what we haven't seen yet is a company that's built from the ground up which is that if it's built by the people who are a part of the community well they're already in love with the characters themselves and they can't wait to share those with the world and again if we continue to scale up from there then i'm no longer very quickly in the position of being the arbiter to suggest that's a good character or not a good character the community will create and it could spin they can eventually spin off into rooms of where you could be a curator of one and that's where the true decentralization comes in once we've got the ball rolling you have rooms that are spinning out where people are contributing these characters that

they've created into this atom universe which the atom versus that's right that's right which is owned specifically by the community itself so i'm bought in on this and i agree that there's a distinction between what you can do with web 2 for instance with fanfic you can't own you don't get any upside you don't have the discretion to decide the direction of your character if you want to kill off jar jar beings who's like annoying you know you can't decide that like there's still someone deciding that yeah i want to talk now though a little deeper about the mechanics of how all this works so specifically one is what becomes canon is there a canon i'd love for you to answer that rob and then along those lines i also want to know

specifically we're at nft nyc this week where do nfts come into all this but maybe we can start with the candidates and these are great questions these are the questions that we're constantly asking ourselves and i kept coming back to the same issue which is i should not be decided that it should be a collective but how big is that collected so we started just with the room of leads and second leads and i said okay just for the sake of conversation i'll start i believe that we should start here and then very quickly i started hearing people saying well uh that's not such a great idea old man i think the way we should do is actually start here because something that i learned a very long time ago is if you hire young people listen to them young

mentors is what i call it yes and you have these 23 24 year old people who look at the world from a completely different perspective and it's now shaping the way that we're setting up what those parameters are even to start with but we will have to start somewhere and what we came up with is that we'll come up with 13 rules and it was an arbitrary number that seemed like unlucky in the best of ways 13 rules of the universe that are immutable at least to start and then we'll build from there and by the way when you say immutable do you mean encoded into the smart contract or just kind of guidelines just into the lore and one of those for example would be if you think about it like the marvel universe

the only real rule that you see is that they're all existing in the same place and time insofar as they can interact with one another yes but it's essentially our world plus superheroes and time travel right and all sorts of different things so we're figuring out what those immutable rules would be to begin but then hopefully what happens is just like any amendable document let's just say that made sense at one point to govern large groups of people in 25 years time if that no longer or if there are aspects of that document that are no longer valid or valuable they'll vote to change it one thing i could add is also that i think there's so i think

rob's at the sort of most advanced end of the spectrum but i think generally i would argue the media world i think there's going to be a really interesting partnership between web 3 for a couple of reasons one i think that the media world is not particularly happy with the current configuration of the internet specifically all the intermediaries that stand in between them and their audiences yeah and so there's sort of an economic motivation i think secondly the media world when i speak to people that work at google nfts and all these other things seem very abstract to them media folks are used to selling kind of virtual experience is good it's not strange to them that makes a lot of sense so where did the nfts come in then beyond the canon where does that play because we are

talking about web 3. so let's get into the mechanics of nfts let's talk about dows like decentralized autonomous organizations and how that plays here like how does a governance well certainly from a governance perspective i mean that's how we're tracking everything so when people are admitted into the initial room let's just use that as an example they're given an nft which is their ticket it's their past it's not transferable however as we move forward and the community continues to grow we'll be issuing other nfts and that will be our way to create governance to track ip to make sure people are again all built to the smart contract that people are being compensated because we are all of us will own those characters together we will eventually become decentralized at

a certain point because the community will be able to dictate where those characters may be used i see a lot of people roll their eyes when i'm having a conversation with them and i say well the community will decide what happens well how can a community of 10 000 people make a movie exactly really work that way right but what they can decide is we really love this studio and this filmmaker and this writer and we trust her to take our canon and of course you build out what it is that can be changed what can't be changed and to take this grouping of characters and write her version of what that might be and that includes licensing that ip exactly so you see that actually happen in marvel where they will have different tones different

filmmakers come in essentially you're building different levels of curation it also by the way just speaking for myself personally there's an aspect of what characters get to be made and not just who gets to decide and who gets to make it but what gets made which is actually one of the tag lines in our trailer for web3 with a6 and z as a premise of web3 but it's very salient to me that you use the marvel example rob because i was just thinking about how the spin-off ms marvel character is a pakistani american woman and i'm sorry that would never have been green lit like you know 50 years ago but you can only imagine what's possible if more things and more communities and more stories are being made by people who don't traditionally

have a spot to decide that so we don't even know what stories are possible actually 100 and even the criteria by which someone is judged as a creator as a filmmaker as a writer as is changing yes because you can get very granular and you can still have value that is really exciting to me that truly opens up access and opportunity because you're not saying sure okay send me your script i've just opened up that opportunity but what if you say i'm not a writer and then people say well then you shouldn't be in the writing business why just because you can't execute a fully realized script doesn't mean that you don't have a point of view doesn't mean you don't have a story it doesn't mean that you don't have something to say and that makes you valuable and that's

what makes you a part of this community that's why people fall in love with the characters that they're working on and there will be an emotional investment for example when we say okay this is a character we created in the original round and it's this beautiful monster and she's horrifically misunderstood but she's considered a villain but it turns out she's a hero and we follow her arc and we have this backstory written in this canon written and then maybe it's even been licensed and made into a movie and everybody falls in love and then somebody suggests should we kill her and then the community has to come in and there would be massive amounts of debate and i think that level of emotional attachment now you don't just get to

experience it in the second person you're now a part of this it's not just passive it's interactive i also have to say excuse my language but [ __ ] only the emotional attachment because i want the financial state to wait for that's pretty good that's why we're all here no but i mean like literally in those characters if i i mean i'm not just saying this because i feel it like i feel like i own gilmore girls because i can quote every line but if i'm contributing to that canon and i am creating things i want financial statements that's why the nft is important because the nft so an nft very simply it's people think that jpegs and art and things nft is a unit of digital ownership it's the first time we've had this concept of like true digital ownership on the internet if you go to

twitter slash c dixon i don't really own that handle you don't own it economically you don't own it control wise and nft you truly own it's the first time you can really domain names maybe but that was sort of a niche thing but nft is a very generalized concept it can represent anything that the creator wants to imbue into that nft it's a unit of digital ownership so it's giving those creators true ownership and they can take that and they can do things they can you know stake their claim to make money if it appreciates they can potentially descending system works they can have governance rights decide what's canon maybe creative decisions maybe other kinds of you know business decisions they can take their nft and take their ball and go home they can go somewhere else they can fork off they can leave the ability to have exit is a

very important thing to kind of give power back to individuals right they can leave the system in the same way you can quit a job if you couldn't quit a job the employer would have all the power and nft lets you quit a system it lets you quit an application it lets other applications pop up that accept that nft they compete with the original application adam will be one of many that have to compete and earn the users earn their loyalty instead of demanding it the way that twitter does i'm stuck on twitter i'm stuck on youtube so it's about shifting power to the individual by giving them true digital ownership so some of the properties are i've heard ownership non-fungibility the unique you know you can kind of partially fractionally do things as well what about you alluded to this the data portability what about interoperability

and going across mediums exactly stories don't live in one medium as you well know yeah you have a show that's also like about gaming i mean living in a gaming world like ubisoft yeah look if i'm being dead honest i've been working in tv now for almost 20 years and i've made a few tv shows i'm really proud of and i'm less interested in working in traditional storytelling just because i've had the privilege and pleasure of doing it for so long i want to look see what's next so the idea of just going to make a movie or making another tv show is not that interesting to me so i'm really looking to see how are people going to be interacting with story moving forward and nobody can say for sure but i can tell you once again if you look at what

young people are doing and i mean even younger than the 25 year olds i mean my children how old are they 11 10 great ages and the way that they interact with story and with gaming and with social with a friends is all just intertwining and this has been predicted for many years however it's just starting to happen that the metaverse itself is starting to unfold now whether or not it actually does and what the time frame is who's to say there's a lot of conjecture out there however we do know that we're headed to a space where people are going to interact with narrative in a completely different way

and i think that's what i'm most excited about for adam is not the next two years it's the next five to six years when we get into some really weird [ __ ] okay i want to riff on this for a bit so let's talk about the really weird [ __ ] for a while so i mean we're about the future we're talking about the future let's start with the metaverse we can't predict the future it's always in the hands of creators to sort of figure it out as we go along and users too but what are some of the things that excite you and that you think are possible here well i just finished this book hasn't come out yet but he's by matthew ball and he wrote a book about the metaverse very creatively titled the metaverse he's not taking a position either way

he's just going to the people leading the field in the technology and asking questions he also goes on to say that there's not really a complete definition of what it is but he supposes and i think this is fair that a version of the metaverse would be a scaled up a massively scaled up series of networks that render real-time 3d worlds that can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an infinite amount of users that's incredible because really what you're talking about is ready player one and i know that like stories like snow

crush yeah well yeah i mean metaverse is one of these kind of overloaded terms people mean different things the original snow crash was very vr ready player one's very vr i think matthew ball might define it more as i believe sort of getting more the internet becomes more immersive more important part of our lives potentially 3d well he specifically says that it doesn't need to be ar vr related but i don't quite follow that and if he was here i'd ask him call [ __ ] matt i don't understand how it can be a more immersive experience i think the argument would be you know if you're deeply into a discord right now you could have sort of this flow state and you can have immersion in other ways i think it's a counter argument but but most likely we know the

trajectory like the oculus is already pretty good apple's got their vr headset like we know how this movie is going to go the hardware is going to get tiny and light and deeply immersive and probably extremely popular and the games will get better and the experiences will get better and you know it'll just be look i mean all the trends people i think on average you know it's five billion people use the internet five hours a day now which has gone up dramatically in terms of hours we might be capping out in terms of people but certainly the level of immersion the number of hours the kind of importance in your life both like right now we think of vr as playing only it'll probably do work as well right there'll be all sorts of like opportunities education yeah i mean all sorts of things will probably move

virtual and there will be sort of some kind of blurring of the lines probably between work and play right in that world but how do you get in that version of it where ar or vr isn't necessary how do you because i think it's really important maybe it's impressive it's multimodal right like there's a moment where you're on your phone reading text and then you go back i mean i don't know i certainly think some kind of deep 3d experience will be an essential part of it and like i have always been more bullish personally on vr than they are for this use case because if you're going to go in the metaverse you want to go in the metaverse you don't want to see your couch and your coffee pod like you probably want to go all the way in the virtual experience and so no i personally think it will be

3d virtual experiences in vr and new interfaces you know could be brain interfaces it could be whatever it might be but the trend certainly seems to be a deeper and deeper immersion right like why wouldn't it be i watch my children and the way that they interact in the oculus which i'm super open to but even in innocuous eye i think old people we have this prevailing wisdom that if kids are playing games inside that they're wasting their lives i think first of all we have a whole generation of people already in their 20s and 30s who would suggest otherwise however what i'm watching are these kids locking in to a digital real it's not fully rendered 3d and you are experiencing it

synchronously and persistently but it's not a fully rendered 3d world so you don't have a sense of presence quite yet however roblox minecraft those are social gaming experiences as much as they are and storytelling experiences and you are interacting with characters that have been created but you're also socializing but you're also gaming now imagine a time of course it's been imagined in sci-fi for years where you can really tap into that i find that riveting and i feel like specifically adam is and was created to facilitate a narrative experience in that world that's fantastic i just wanna make one note on the ready player one

analogy i'm a huge fan of the book and the movie i didn't read the second book but one thing that does strike me is that the oasis which is where the ready player one universe plays out is owned by a single corporation and i would just put a point of differentiation here that with web3 it would not be that i mean that's the whole that's the entire premise of the book which is that it was created by a benevolent creator nevertheless still an authoritarian and then he passes on and then the whole movie is about who's going to control the oasis and that's one of matthew's very big concerns as it is in anybody in the space which is if you get these massive whoever it might be tech conglomerates i mean let's just say let's just say it let's call it meta

like let's just say it out loud i'm not gonna pick a fight we will that's your job i literally work for apple and disney right now i see a world where we're all working together come on no but i truly do i fee i do feel like there's no i don't i don't think it's either or i agree with you there's room for everybody i think if people are open to it and i think chris's point is that people are not which i understand but i think the people in the entertainment space are open at this point to a myriad of possibilities otherwise they're going to get swallowed whereas i think some of the big tech companies they don't have as much fear of that so i do think i

mean i don't want to keep saying the same thing but i do think the architecture of that world is important and specifically the question you brought out should it be kind of oasis style ready player one i think at the end didn't they end with they split the keys among the five protagonists so they had like a multi-sig and they shut it down and they shut it down on like thursdays or something which is probably like to hang out in the real world not optimal like you should just create like an experience that doesn't need to be shut down but but i think for example it could be like the early web was where anyone can put up a website and anyone can put up a you know a house of whatever a digital lot a plot of land a world whatever it might be and that

there's some kind of standards and i think probably blockchains and fts and other kinds of things which let you kind of interoperate between them let people have real economics let them really build businesses build lives right have some kind of governing control you know i think of an analogy we like to use is like we're in new york city right now one of the beautiful things about new york city to me is it's a city that evolved organically it evolved in many little plots of land i mean some of it was city planning right it was yeah roads and sidewalks and parks and those are very important but then it was you know you divvy up everything into little nfts and people come along and they buy them and they decide to invest in them and they build things they interoperate and they interact and you have this

really interesting kind of interplay between the public and the private you know if you didn't have the sidewalk you wouldn't have the stores right that's right you wouldn't want someone to own the sidewalk and you'd have all sorts of weird and that evolved in a way that i think you don't really see in planned cities there's been attempts to do it and think about them they've actually failed all the planets yeah and so i think it's important for a lot of reasons including the fact that i think it'll be a much more interesting and popular and successful metaverse if you let it kind of grow organically and be community owned and be built on standards and i think right now actually we're at the point we're probably at the critical moment for making these decisions right now because when these things happen in tech they happen very

quickly right i mean they happen gradually then suddenly right like these smartphones coming along okay it's this niche thing and then boom everyone's got a smartphone right it's just gonna when it happens it's gonna happen and now is probably the time for figuring out what's the architecture of that system gonna be so before we wrap up i'm gonna ask you guys a couple of quick lightning round kind of a pseudo commercial break on the podcast some quick lightning round style questions and have you guys give me quick answers on each of them and then i'll sort of wrap this up but kind of going to sound like it's a not a segue it's going to sound random for a second but i have a plan okay which is what's your favorite tv show or movie that you've watched recently and you can't say your own shows

why why would i say my own show i'm just making sure wow i actually before i met rob i don't watch much tv i'd actually watch all of mythicquest and i liked it a lot he had never seen sunny there's there's like three people on the planet earth who have never seen sunny but have watched mythicquest are you one of them that's four wow i had like a 10-year period where i was an entrepreneur where i watched no tv and that happened to fall under that window but i went back and watched a bunch of it and i watched the first five episodes i honestly did it was one of the few tv shows i've watched before i met rob originally because i like video games and i was like oh yeah about video games that's cool but then it was really funny and well done so i don't know does it

hold up those early seasons are that was a different time chris your answer is mythic quest what was yours we were just talking about dead wood that you just started watching everyone says you got to watch dead wood and i hadn't ever seen it and of course i immediately was thinking about how the plots of land were like nfts and cities and everything else but i do the same thing so i'm watching stranger things with my kids oh because they're just now at the age where it's not terrifying but it's still [ __ ] terrifying and these kids are so young and i'm not sure i'm a good parent but we're we're watching them all together right before bed but the reason that that show works so well is that it's tapping into the nostalgia the things that we loved when we were kids and now we can pass

those on because they transcend generations and you're watching a show about a community of kids who are like the outcasts that got together but they're also using the way that we interacted with story at the time to pull us in so now there's this massive community of people who love stranger things oh my god i'm so glad you mentioned nostalgia because that's one of the lightning rounds on my list because i'm obsessed with that topic and i finished chuck klosterman's the 90s everyone and my team was obsessed and tired of hearing me talk about this book because i love it so much but i love it for the nostalgia and one question i have for you guys about that it's a book called the 90s by chuck klosterman i mean it's about i guess we're all gen xers on stage and it's

really much about us but it's also fascinating and this goes to your point about stranger things and your kids coming to it at the right time i'm obsessed with this idea that people come back to things that they never experienced and even on our team there are people who are like 20 years younger who are like suddenly rediscovering the 90s and 90s culture and like you know vaporwave and like cypherpunk and all these cool things and i'm very struck by this phenomenon and do you guys have any theories or just quick lightning round thoughts on nostalgia and if you even have a thesis about how your kids can experience something that you loved as a kid but yet have no reference well i can tell you just in going through the applications for adam what we're finding that's really fascinating is that i truly thought

there was going to be a lot of people that were suggesting super just because the massive success of superhero yeah movies and it feels like that's what we're asking for is like to create superheroes not at all what we're getting we're getting human beings we're getting some it's kind of an even mix between villains and heroes i mean as portrayed in the movies protagonists and antagonists and i would say that the vast majority of them are movies that people connected with when they were younger interesting because it then when you are forced to ask yourself that question and that was done on purpose which was we're not looking for writers we're looking for something that touched you yeah and if you can explain and do a

little self actualization and try to understand why you connected with that character then you have the ability to create a version of that very interesting thesis so mcilhenny's rule number two just kidding keep going so what we're finding is that people are coming out and saying i connected with this character at 8 9 10 11 12 13 at those formative times where you're taking a narrative but it's also when you're trying to figure out who you are and the kind of person you want to be or the person you don't want to be and who is it that's having those impacts in popular culture and those are the kinds of characters that we're getting so i think nostalgia plays directly into that the reason we love

the thing is that we're still trying to hold on to or recreate consciously or subconsciously the things we had in our youth but just to make sure i double underlined what you just said there in the macalene's rule number two here it's also what you're saying is that the ability to then be aware of and know what you're connecting with is actually another indicator that you may be able to be one of those one out of ten who can then take those ideas and actually create things yes from them which is also very interesting extension because it does open up the world of creators yes or you could even go a step further which we're trying to do now which is to go through some of the applications that were originally we said well this isn't up to the standard of some of

the others we dug a little deeper which is they might not know the right questions to ask themselves beyond who's your favorite character because sometimes people are even intimidated by writing 500 words so you could put up a video of you explaining it but really what you're asking somebody if this is the most important part is who are you and because the truth is you have a story whether you know how to tell it or not we know how to ask the right questions and people are just fascinating everybody's fascinating and everybody has something to add that's fascinating nostalgia one thing i think about a lot is you know when you look at really impactful technologies in history so like the automobile the real impact of the automobile was like 30 years later when suburbs and highway systems so i

think social media is probably a technology that is at the scale of the automobile and importance and i think we've seen some of the second order effects playing out so for example in politics i think everyone has seen that like this has clearly changed the way the politics works and i think we are only beginning to understand how it's changing culture i haven't fully thought this through but my feeling is kind of part of the nostalgia is kind of a yearning for a time when there was a centralized kind of narrative there used to be the media and there was a thing and there were stars and there were sort of maybe there were some sub narratives but there was sort of a narrative right and the internet's kind of collapsed all that you can experience any year at the same time everyone sort of fragmented in

the sub communities i think some of them maybe it's just the age thing or something but i feel like some of the nostalgia and something like strangers things also is for a time when it was just sort of simpler and there was like you know yes it's like 10 tv shows and 10 things and 10 you know top 40s music and it was like just sort of a unified culture and now it's this kind of complicated thing that we don't fully understand that's fascinating that you say that because when i was at wired i edited an op-ed by douglas rushkoff on narrative collapse and one of his theses was that netflix and binge culture was yet another form of narrative collapse as was game of thrones by turning a tv show into essentially a big game that didn't necessarily have an ending hence like the whole mess at the end when they

had to accelerate the storyline and all that stuff so i'm going to skip the last one and actually bring it back to adam and rob you know you didn't actually finish your story when you were telling us your story of how you got to web 3. you started with dixon and the podcast that you liked but i would love for you to close the thread for how you took that and this is including building on everything we've been talking about here your kids and the experiences of watching them like how does this all come together to you and how you actually started adam yeah so i was at a point in my career and life again i've just been very fortunate and i realized that i had spent a lot of my life just building

television shows that i was both writing producing and acting in and it was a blast but i realized that i i just had 15 seasons of a show yeah what am i going to spend the next 15 years of my life doing and it just seemed really worthwhile to help other people to find their own path to be able to do exactly what i was doing which was again whatever their version of it might be and so one of my kids actually both of my kids were taught by the same woman named kiana taylor and she is a teacher a t-shirt yep at my kids school and she was everybody's favorite teacher she was the kid's favorite teacher everybody loved her

and i don't know three four years in she did something up on a stage where was a presentation for the kids and she made a comment that she was a comedy writer and i'd known her for four years by this point so i go up to her afterwards and i said do you know what i do for a living and she said yeah i said why have you not told me that she said well i thought it was inappropriate because i'm teaching your kids and i was like well now i instantly fall in love with her even more but i say hey send me your stuff she does it's undeniable and we hired her for a mythic quest she then wrote for sunny as well she was a part of that 10 percent she created her own show which she's now making at fx so

there was a clear path at least in my mind for her to go from teaching which is a wonderful position but her dream was to make her own tv show so i look at that and i say well that's a clear path well the four years that she already knew me and it wasn't really clear at that point yeah there was also the decades before that it was like a very clear path for me and she didn't feel that level of access and opportunity and so it's been just unbelievably satisfying for both of us and she's taken the baton from there so you can only do that so many times because if you're just creating shows it just takes time and there's just a level of scale that you can't

achieve i mean you were approximately close to her because she was yours correct it's a teacher there's no better access than right right literally right there yes and yet when i started to think well how can we maybe expand upon that yeah you could start a production company and just look for writers but then that's when i started again questioning the criteria so i'm setting my expectation of what the criteria would be for a creator but doesn't that leave you with only your own myopic view of what something could be right right at the same time i'm hanging out with my friend rich rosenblatt who i've known for a bit and he started this company with tom brady i believe that company is autographed that company is an autograph

yes and i just didn't understand the company at all as we started but hey great to each their own but rich said why don't you speak to my son chase who's just native web three and again going back to my old adage of if you ask a young person what they're working on and you yeah you listen to them young mentors yeah and he started pitching me something and i'm like i'm to keep listening because this is what he and his community of young people are all talking about this seems fascinating and then he's the one that turned me on to podcasts he turned me onto a whole different way of sort of approaching things and then we were kind of pitching back and forth something that he was thinking something that i had been trying to do which was a scaled-up version of the

experience that we had with kiana and we just kind of had this like light bulb moment i think he called chris that day and chris texted and said i'll be in l.a tonight these people don't [ __ ] around usually in hollywood yeah i'll call you next week and you don't hear from me for a month i mean within you know a couple of weeks we were up and running and i think it's just because we're just hitting that inflection point where all the things were kind of working together and now kiana is our chief creative officer she gets to not only run her own show but build something that you know four years ago would be impossible and how many other kianas are out there like the idea that the current system

is discovering all the best talent yeah seems pretty far-fetched but think and if you just think about the funnel that kiana had to go through to get the access and even that i mean we were standing next to each other for five years yeah before the gate essentially was open well i think that's a great note to end on i just want to make sure that people know what to do and where to go next if they're interested in learning or doing more on our end at a6 and z crypto two people on our team and there's more than that actually but elena berger jane lippincott chris lyons are all very actively involved in in looking for in these companies decentralized media whatever we want to call it and i like the centralized media decentralized content

creation decentralized i think it's just it's a misnomer and so far as the process yes but definitely the community itself and the ownership 100 would you have another name for it by the way no because you're going to make it a mackerel honey rule or something that's going to get even weirder i was i probably would have done a mclenny rule i love that and how do people get involved with the atom verse you can go to atomverse.com well characters welcome and thank you everyone for joining this first live taping of web3 with a6 and z and thank you chris and thank you especially rob thank you thank you thank you everyone [Music] thank you for listening to web3 with a6 and z you can find show notes with links

to resources books or papers discussed transcripts and more at asicsncrypto.com this episode was produced and edited by sonal choxie that's me the episode was technically edited by our audio editor justin golden credit also to moonshot design for the art and all thanks to support from asics and see crypto to follow more of our work and get updates resources from us and resources from others be sure to subscribe to our web3 weekly newsletter you can find it on our website at a6ncrypto.com thank you for listening and for subscribing let's go chris i'm going to help you out here watch this i'm going to fix your money i was just wondering if that was like in the back of it no it's my man's collar

it's just getting better also wait a second hold on [Laughter] it's a tech thing you know it's composing his appearance on stage that is thank you