Lamina1: Building The Future of The Creator Economy - Neal Stephenson. Ep622

Transcript

It's impossible to architect a compelling experience backwards from a desired financial outcome. So if you start with let's make a lot of money and then you try to work backwards from that to make a story or anything creative, it's not going to work. Premature financialization is the root of all evil. You know, if we try to resist that temptation to just immediately financialize everything and [music] concentrate instead on the intangible value of uh of what people are creating that there's an opportunity to make something that's going to be more more stable.

>> You've made that point again and again that kind of like we've gotten a lot of things wrong. So maybe let's talk about the things that you think genuinely should matter in web 3. Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution. I am Fria Ans and today I'm speaking with Nia Stevenson who is a visionary author whom many of you may know um and the co-founder of blockchain project Lamina one. Few writers have had their fiction mistaken for blueprints quite like you Neil. um your cautionary tales somehow became the instruction manuals for a lot

of the digital age. Super happy to kind of uh talk with you about uh web 3 and your general take on the ecosystem. But before we do that, let me tell you about our sponsors this week. >> This episode is brought to you by Nosis, building the open internet one block at a time. Nosis was founded in 2015 and it's grown from one of Ethereum's earliest projects into a powerful ecosystem for open userowned finance. Nosis is also the team behind products that have become core to my business and that of so many others like Safe and Cow Swap. At the center is Nosis Chain. It's a low fee layer 1 with zero downtime in 7 years and secured by over 300,000 validators. It's the foundation for real world financial applications like Nosis

Pay and Circles. All this is governed by Nosis DAO, a communityrun organization where anyone with a GNO token can vote on updates, fund new projects, and even run a validator from home. So if you're building in web 3 or you're just curious about what financial freedom can look like, start exploring at Nosis.io. >> Neil, it's a pleasure to have you on. >> Good to be here. Thank you, Fred Rica. So, you've written so many books and they often feel eerily precient. Um, you wrote about the metaverse in the early 90s and c- about cryptocurrencies um a few years later and so so many of those ideas have since come to pass that

there's even been speculation that you might be Satoshi. Um, do do you think of yourself as kind of predicting technology or do you just notice what others haven't yet articulated? >> I'm a storyteller and you know the primary job of a storyteller is to tell a good story or a yarn as we say that will keep people turning the pages and keep them engaged. And in science fiction, you're creating an imaginary world. And that world has to make sense. Uh because readers are very sensitive. If they see something that doesn't add up, that doesn't make sense, that's inconsistent, they immediately

lose their interest in the book. And so um you know if you're creating an imaginary world that has um some technology in it uh or that has a business or uh you know something uh uh you know people who are trying to to do something in an organized way that has to make sense. It's got to add up. [snorts] And so in science fiction, particularly what we call hard science fiction, part of the writer's job is to um is to have fictional technologies that that that make sense, that are plausible. And so when we're building such a world, um we uh you know, we try to think it through. We try to do some

research. We try to learn something about how these technologies actually work, what is and isn't possible. And then uh we make up imaginary rules for our imaginary technologies or if if we're writing about a corporation, some kind of business, we need to have some idea of why that business makes sense. How do these people make money? You know, would it actually work? Uh because if you don't do those things, eventually the whole logic of the story breaks down somewhere. So in the case of um books like um Snow Crash and The Diamond Age and Cryptonnomicon, you know, I tried to uh to be sort careful about um uh creating these imaginary technologies

and and businesses and so on uh in that way. So I think that um when engineers, nerds technologists entrepreneurs when they read a a book like that, they can kind of see, oh, okay, you know, this sort of makes sense. Uh you know, this could actually happen. So some of them may decide that some version of that imaginary technology or that imaginary business plan is worth actually trying to bring into the real world. when you kind of see your ideas come to life that way, I mean sometimes decades later, um does it do something to your own sense of reality kind of

does it feel validating or uh creepy or unsettling or are you kind of detached from your ideas by then? >> I'm pretty detached. I mean, the typical way it works when you're writing a book is that during the time that you're working on it, you're completely immersed in that world and thinking about uh all of the details and doing all kinds of research. And then as soon as you're done with the book, you move on to something else and the your memories start to recede into the distance and you you begin to take up all of that space in your brain with new stuff. Um, and so, um, [snorts] you know, by the time a book is actually out

in print, I've already moved on to something else. And in the case of books like Snow Crash or The Diamond Age, these are things that I wrote 30 35 years ago. And so, it's been quite a while. Um, and I don't uh I don't think it would be healthy to just sit around, you know, decade after decade, you know, paying close attention to what was happening uh, you know, with with such things. um because you do have to move on and kind of get on with your your life. So, it's, you know, it's always kind of interesting when something emerges that looks like it might have been uh influenced or inspired by something I wrote, but I don't I don't go out of my way uh looking for it.

>> Yeah, I I I hear that. And I think kind of like the the fact that it's it's been so long adds to that for sure. A lot of the people in this space see you as this visionary. Um, and I feel often people don't appreciate appreciate that a lot of your stories are actually at least I read as cautionary tales, right? So kind of like it's not um a technoopoptimist endorsement of everything that's going to happen. How do you feel when kind of like you your your books are almost treated like instruction manuals?

>> Well, I think for the most part they are realistic kind of balanced treatments of these subjects. I don't think it would be very interesting to uh just uh be very dark and and pessimistic about everything. I I don't think it would be interesting either to uh just uh blindly uh optimistic and so uh what is interesting is you know if the characters in the books and the situations in the books have a realistic degree of complexity and ambiguity.

So um in the case for example of the metaverse and snow crash um you know it's a lot some people look at it and say oh well it's very dark and dystopian and I I understand why the the society that's depicted in the book definitely has some aspects you know that that don't seem all that optimistic. I don't think that that world is much more dark or pessimistic than the world we actually live in. And I think it's got a realistic degree of good and bad. And if you look at the ways in which the metaverse is actually used in the pages of the novel, sure, there's some stuff

in there that's kind of sleazy, you know, pornographic, whatever. Uh appealing to the lowest common denominator, but there's also art. You know, people use it for communication. They use it to cultivate relationships. they use it to do business. Um, and so it can be a uh a a you know a positive tool as well as as as you know kind of a a a sleazy strip mall. So I think that and you know the um similar statements could be made about the technology that's shown in the the diamond age and in cryptonomicon and again to do otherwise I think would would result in a kind of simplistic storyline that um

that most intelligent readers would pretty quickly get bored with. >> Yeah. You've had a somewhat complicated relationship with web 3. So, I mean, there there are clearly some kind of like some um core promises that appeal to you and a lot of other people, but kind of you've made the the point again and again that kind of like we've gotten a lot of things wrong. So, maybe let's talk about the things that you think kind of like genuinely should matter in web 3. uh kind of the values we should we should try to imbue technology with and where do you where do you think kind of we stand with respect to these values and promises today

>> well uh to begin with I don't claim to be a expert on the current state of things it's a very fastmoving field lots of companies lots of people trying different things and so um I don't make any effort to really stay a breast of the very latest developments um I Uh I'm working on a specific project that we can talk about uh in a bit, but it's um for me it's always more interesting and informative to actually try to do something rather than attempting to understand and follow everything that's happening in the the whole universe. So having got that out of the way, um I mean the general trajectory

of web over the last 30 years has been that um you know when it came out and during the kind of the early phase the the '9s basically it was um uh you know if you want to call that web one it was inherently decentralized. So anyone I mean the the whole structure of the worldwide web is such that uh anyone could uh could put up a web page written in HTML and it would be viewable on any uh uh browser that uh that knew how to parse HTML and it was on the internet.

And so um you know people began to put up simple web pages all over the place. And in in that era it was uh it was truly decentralized and it was there was a kind of idealistic ethos around it. Um that was very much kind of um you know sort of grad student uh hippie idealist mindset of um you know we're going to make all of this knowledge available. We're going to allow people to communicate with each other freely in a decentralized way and somehow that's automatically going to be a good thing.

But even in the late 90s, you know, I began to hear from people in the sort of crypto and privacy worlds who saw that um that this could lead to problems. Um that not all communication is good. Uh you know, not everything that was going up on the internet was socially constructive or was uh having good um good results. So, um the uh I'm being distracted because a popup just showed up in my browser saying try Gemini in Google Chrome, [laughter] you know, and I have to This is classic web web two Um let me make it go away. So then web two is the era of consolidation.

It's the era of um of uh various players figuring out ways to create centralized platforms and services um that turned out to be very popular and very commercially successful uh but that uh you know were going in the other direction going very much in a centralized direction that uh that kind of contradicted the original you know web one ethos and um that's what brought us to where we are today. One hopes, one would like to think that you know uh with web 3 we could go back in the direction of a more decentralized uh approach to things. And you know this

has always been the kind of the mindset of crypto libertarian tech nerds, the the kinds of people I was writing about in um cryptonomicon um who uh were just automatically suspicious of any kind of centralized power system. you know, centralization of power always leads to bad things happening. Uh, and so, you know, we're going to try to use technology of various kinds um to fight centralization. I think that's the if you go to a conference where there's people from the crypto industry hanging around, you see a mix today of people who are genuinely driven by uh kind of uh the belief that they're doing

something socially constructive for society by uh getting us away from centralized financial institutions and centralized information brokers uh and in the direction of of decentralized versions of all those things, you know, and that's mixed in with a lot of other attempts to commercialize this that I think are often driven by less idealistic considerations. Uh, but it's all, you know, it's all it's a mix of those things. It's not one or the other. They all they're all kind of wrapped together. And so, you just have to um keep your wits about you, I guess, and uh and and know how to distinguish, you know, between those things.

what are the metrics that um kind of would become better if the web became more decentralized again? I mean, I think it's very easy to kind of make kind of the criticism of centralization. I mean, it's it's become much more efficient in many ways kind of like if you look at kind of like for instance how much data kind of YouTube is able to stream. I mean kind of like people in web one kind of like it would have blown their minds right and uh kind of yes we can say okay you can't really do anything on the internet without kind of acrewing value to kind of the same five um corporations and kind of like um in somehow that's bad I think but what are

kind of what are the metrics that we should monitor to see um whether whether lives for actual people actually get better. So, kind of because kind of like with with any technology that's kind of aspirational in that sense, you kind of have to take it down from kind of this very abstract level of kind of like centralization is bad and decentralization is good to concrete value propositions, right? >> Well, I mean, one metric we might look look at is um is how much do uh the creators of uh content get paid?

>> Okay. So, so famously, uh, musicians, um, aren't making very much money at all from, uh, putting their stuff on Spotify or, uh, Pandora or YouTube or, you know, any of those. Um, and yet, uh, and yet those are profitable companies, right? So um so somebody's making money, value is acrewing as you say, but um are the people feeding that content in are they getting their fair share of of compensation or even just enough compensation to make some kind of decent livinguh out of what they do? Um and are they getting to maintain control over

their data? you know, do they they do they have the mailing list of all the people who are subscribing to their their service? You know, can they reach out to their fan base? Can they talk to their fan base directly without the intermediation of a company? uh can they monetize their popularity um in a way that uh uh uh you know um compensates them instead of compensating the the the venture capitalists who funded the uh the creation of the the platform that they're using.

>> This is also kind of where um the the story of Lamina one kind of begins, right? So for for listeners who might not be familiar um what what is laminina one and what what was the motivation behind creating it? So, it started out uh around the end of I think 2021 when um the uh when Facebook changed its name to Meta and announced that they were now the Metaverse company. And then a bunch of other big companies within 48 hours also jumped in and said, "Oh, no, no, no, no.

We're the metaverse company also." Uh, and then a lot of startups in the wake of that began styling themselves as metaverse startups because that was kind of the the hot buzzword of 2022. I went to uh South by Southwest in March of March or April of 2022 and you couldn't look in any direction without seeing the word metaverse somewhere. The idea was if there's going to be a metaverse um that's anything like the metaverse that's described in snow crash what has to be true in order for such a thing to come into existence in order to build a metaverse presence you know a place a virtual space in the metaverse basically

you need to um to use a game engine as the tool that you're working from because game engines have got all of the apparatus all of the code base, all the capabilities that are needed to create 3D environments that are interactive and that can be styled to look the way and behave the way that you want. And if you if you look at game engines and the companies that build games on them, um, you know, it is a uh it's a uh every every game, every experience is a package of many many different assets so-called. of, you know, meshes, animations materials textures sound effects logic um avatars and um and each of those each of those, uh,

assets typically is created by a different category of of artist. uh and so uh and each one of them, you know, is is an expert in using a different kind of tool chain, whether it's Blender, you know, 3ds Max or an audio mixing program. And so, um, you've, uh, you've you've got to create a a sort of set of economic rails that makes it possible for all those people to collaborate and for their contributions to be tracked and for uh, compensation to flow back to them to the extent that their whatever they did is is part of a

successful project. And in a traditional game environment, that's all handled by having the whole game exist as a encapsulated thing unto itself. And so, you know, gamers buy the game, they give money to the the publisher, the publisher gives money to the developer, the developer has some way of parceling out compensation to uh the people who who worked on the game. And that all works as long as the game is a sort of um a freestanding system. But that starts to break down when you think about uh how a metaverse would work. So if I'm running around in the metaverse,

I've got my avatar. I've got the avatar's clothing um that it's got a bunch of cosmetics, hair, makeup, you know, whatever that uh that [snorts] all have to be um designed and, you know, and created uh by by artists who know how to do that kind of thing. Uh I've got um props, you know, I might have, you know, a magic sword that I carry around or what have you. And those could all come from different places. So um and every time I step across the boundary from one space in the metaverse to another space um I have to bring all that stuff with me and it has to be rendered. It has to appear to um to the people who are in that space watching me

walk in the the door. And so there's no longer this circumscribed boundary, this kind of cell wall that encloses the game. And instead uh you know what you've got is uh this complicated economy of assets that are crossing boundaries all over the place and there's additional there's additional complications and details you know if I take a uh you I might get a say the magic sword from someone and then later it might I maybe a new version of that gets created it gets improved or enhanced somehow uh and in that case, you know, you'd like to see some royalties, what we used to call

royalties, flowing back upstream to the original creator of that that prop. So when you think about all of these things that have to be true in order to um actually make a metaverse that would work and kind of make a list of uh everything that has to be implemented. There's actually a lot of overlap between that list and the basic capabilities of blockchain systems. So, you know, blockchain systems, you know, are are very good at things like uh keeping track of who created a thing at a particular time. And they're good at handling transactions uh in which ownership uh you know changes hands uh between different parties. And they're

good at um at uh uh distributing um funds uh to uh to to not just to one person but potentially to a whole list of people who might have been part of a particular creative project. So the idea that that got us going with Lamina one was um to to you know create a uh a blockchainbased system that would um be optimized um to um to carry out all of those functions. And uh uh the um I would say the only thing that's that's really changed that much along the way is that it's it's sort of occurred to us

that there's all kinds of other creators who need the same stuff. Okay. So, um, if you're a movie maker, if you're a musician, uh, what have you, that you could benefit from, uh, having the kind of system I just described, even if you're not yet or not today building the metaverse, per se, even if you're just trying to release an album or get a movie project financed or um, you know, so in some other way make a living uh, as a as a creative artist. So, are we talking about a financial layer for the creator economy? Um, or are we talking

about a place where also kind of like the game engines and so on can live? Because kind of like I'm I'm I'm confused a little bit because you talked about uh kind of uh the games and kind of like how people would cross over from one place to to to another. And I'm I'm not quite clear what the exact um specifications are. Well, I mean, at one level, it's just we need to keep track of who created what when, and how that's being used, how it's being accessed, and uh and then um you know, we'd like to see people get compensated for for for any of that of that usage. And uh the the game engine example is more

complicated just because games have lots of different types of assets in them all sort of working together. But a simpler way to think about it and to sort of an entry point to all of this is to start with people uh making sort of simpler and more traditional forms of creative art like just a movie or a song. >> Okay, I get that. Why did you feel you needed to create a a new base layer for that? because kind of like had you had you put it on an existing base layer, you could have integrated it much more easily with existing protocols. So for instance, say you want to you want to um

finance an album or movie, uh you could you could kind of tokenize it ahead of time and already borrow against it and so on. So kind of having having these financial infrastructure tools around is super useful and kind of like replicating them on every chain is uh is cumbersome and kind of bridging is difficult and um so you said in the past that smart contracts aren't contracts, right? So h how how do you make onchain rights legally meaningful for creators and artists?

Um yeah, so the you know the issue was this is a a couple of years ago that there weren't really enforcable uh legally binding uh contracts um in these uh in these transactions and um the uh there was a guy the late um forgetting it Josh Josh Kramer this is a piece he wrote four years ago he was a a entertainment lawyer with a technical background who um who wrote who wrote code and he had a company called Grapevine that was working on this and he had come up with a uh a system that uh crossed the the boundary between

blockchain and and legally binding contracts but uh sadly he's he's no longer with us. Um anyway, this gets into sort of almost metaphysical topics of of what a contract is. Yeah. Um and uh it's kind of a deep topic. You know, if I uh if I uh if I have a house, say this is my house, what does it really mean to say it's my house? Well, it means that there's a bunch of paperwork that got signed. And according to our legal conventions, you know, this paperwork has the net effect of uh allowing me to say that this is my house. Um but uh at the end of the day the the ultimate source of authority

is at least in this country is a a an office a government office uh at the county level that maintains a list of deeds to to property. And basically, if push comes to shove, if there's a legal dispute, that is the ultimate source of ground truth. And somebody can go to that filing cabinet, pull out their drawer, and look up the the file for a particular piece of property and say, well, okay, the deed is registered, you know, okay, so and so owns this house. Um, the world of uh of blockchain, there's not necessarily that kind of ultimate source of of truth. Uh and so it raises questions about the uh the

enforcability of some of these these contracts. Um and so really the the question that kind of boils down to is you know is it good enough? You know is it the smart contract whatever it says is it is it sufficiently strong or sufficiently enforceable that when push comes to shove the the creator is going to get paid going to get paid money. And so that's what that's what that was about. >> Okay. I see. So, in in the traditional creator economy, you rightfully said that creators often get squeezed and kind of like they put their songs on Spotify and they see almost no revenue and so on. Usually, it's because there's some sort of monopoly that arises and really you can't afford to not put your

stuff on Spotify or similar platforms. How do you prevent kind of the new creator platforms from simply recentralizing power under different label? Because kind of like wherever you kind of have these um choke holds on creators or these bottlenecks kind of in principle you could see the same dynamic, right? Just by virtue of being decentralized doesn't mean something is morally good. >> That's not automatic. But um I mean there's no so you know if you look at um you take the example of music it used to be that um that the only way for fans to to listen to music was to go

to a store and buy a you know piece of plastic had the um the the album pressed onto it um and take it home and play it on their record player right and so the stores could be somewhat decentralized anybody could open a record store, but the companies that pressed the actual discs and shipped them to to those stores did become highly centralized over time. And it's because at the end of the day, there has to be a machine that presses the disc, you know, and there has to be a distribution network that ships that prints the album covers and puts them on trucks and ships them out to the stores. And you could make similar arguments about movie

distribution or the distribution of books or any other physical media. There's a uh kind of a a inelectable physical reason why some degree of centralization is naturally going to happen in those situations. You're not going to have people stamping out LPS, you know, uh in cottage uh in a cottage industry kind of environment. Um the now that everything's digital that has gone away. There is no physical layer present that stands between uh people creating the bits and people downloading the same bits you know off of the internet. And so um it kind of raises the question of

you know what is it that these companies are doing that adds value um that you know adds more value than they're they're taking away. While I would certainly agree with you that just being decentralized that doesn't mean it's automatically good, I think it's it's no longer the case that uh that there's a uh an inherent reason why these uh companies need to be centralized and kind of monopolistic to the degree that they are.

>> But in some respects, haven't we seen the opposite? So kind of like if you look at how many publishing houses we used to have in the '9s and how many of them perish despite the fact that kind of they had to have real printing presses and distribution networks and so on. In principle, I agree that um distributing bits on the internet should be much lower barrier to entry. But nevertheless, we've kind of seen these enormous forces for centralization, right? I mean even for something that's completely digital. So kind of like say I buy a Kindle book uh from Amazon in principle there's no reason why kind of like I everyone or n% who of people who

kind of read ebooks should buy them from the same place right so kind of like what where do you think kind of like the the architecture of the internet failed? Well, it's a big question, a very interesting question. Um, the, uh, you know, a lot has to do with just the convenience, you know, the the vertical integration of or I guess it' be more like horizontal integration of different things together. So, uh, you know, Kindle's connected to Amazon. So, if I have an Amazon account and I'm used to buying things on Amazon, it's very easy to to buy things to to buy an ebook on Kindle or or what have you. Um so um um

the uh um friends with Corey Dr. who you know has uh has got been doing some great writing and thinking about enshication, right? Which is a a term that that Corey coined. Um and you know the uh the basic story of it is that when these companies achieve that level of market penetration they start uh treating their customers badly and they start treating their business partners badly in an effort to maximize the amount of profit that they're making. So um so there are very strong forces even in a completely non-physical

purely digital environment like you're saying there are these strong forces that lead to centralization. As time goes on, we see that those centralized platforms decay and they decay very very rapidly in the quality of the the user experience because of the powerful uh drive towards endification that they all seem to be uh susceptible to. And so while I I'll agree that the the the trend towards centralization has been very powerful during the last couple of decades, I think that we're beginning to see uh signs that uh it may it may have peaked and may be sort of in a advanced

process of decay that could create some opportunities uh for for new approaches. >> Which signs would you point to there? I mean, just when I was trying to uh start this conversation with you, I got interrupted by an unwanted advertisement that popped up on my screen, you know, from from [snorts] Gemini. I was irritated by that, you know, I I found that to be uh intrusive and unnecessary. And uh so that's just a a small example of it. But you know another example is that um it's very difficult to find things on on Amazon

now. So um it used to be that if I needed uh to to find something or to buy something, well it's very easy. I go on the Amazon site, I do a search, and I, you know, immediately see a bunch of uh products that match my my search terms. And now that's no longer the case. It's there's so much sponsored content that um it's extremely difficult to to actually find what you want. And so instead, I have to sort of go on I was going to say Google, but I can't use Google either because it's also been in shitified. So, I use Kaggi, K A GI, which is a service that you pay for.

It's a search thing that replaces Google. So, I go there and I search for what I want and try to comb out the sponsored things in the AI slop. And eventually, if I'm lucky, I actually find, you know, the thing that I'm I'm looking for, you know, and once I've identified it, then I can sort of try to go back and find it on Amazon or some other retailer that'll sell the thing to me. And so that's I mean, those are just some small samples of uh of this this trend. And I think everyone who uses the internet is is being exposed to this every day.

Uh so again I I think uh I think we're at the end in the sort of decline of the Roman Empire stage of um of uh of web two and and that this might create some opportunities. >> Yeah. No, that's certainly super interesting and I think we also see it in streaming services, right? So kind of like when when Netflix came about um it was great kind of you paid $10 a month and kind of like you could see all this content. Um, and now a lot of it is no longer available. Kind of like you have to subscribe to five other different uh platforms and now now it's much easier to just pirate it again. So yeah.

>> Yeah. >> Um, >> yeah. In a lot of cases, in a lot of cases I would happily pay some reasonable amount, you know, to watch a basketball game or something, but there's no way to do it. uh and you're navigating this maze of, you know, do you have an account here? Do you have the right privileges there? And at the end of the day, it's easier to um to just find some pirate stream. >> Yeah. Yeah. No, I hear that. There's something I kind of just had to think of kind of in in the cryptonomicon uh this this character go to Dango, he says, um I think gold is the corpse of value. And do you feel there's a parallel here with kind of the digital um the digital world

that kind of like um things have been things have been milked and kind of tried to to kind of to turn into this extractive um kind of apparatus that kind of kind of sucks people dry for all their worth. and kind of that this is kind of the digital equivalent of kind of this this gold you kind of put in your safe and kind of h have it forever more. >> Yeah. Well, I did I did a talk at a DICE, which is a game developers convention, a couple of years ago. It's up on YouTube. um which is about some of these topics because I was at the time a lot of web 3 people had been uh trying

to persuade game developers that they should make web 3 games and a lot of game developers were becoming very annoyed very tired of it and and extremely hostile in a lot of cases towards blockchain and web 3 people. So I was trying to kind of address this uh in my talk and um and one of the quotes that I used is actually a quote from Rebecca Barkin which was that it's impossible to architect a compelling experience backwards from a desired financial outcome. So if you start with let's make a lot of money and then you try to work backwards from that to make a story or anything creative, it's not going to work. And uh and one of the

things I said in that talk was that premature financialization is the root of all evil which is kind of a I'm twisting a quote from from Donald uh when I say that but there is a tendency uh I think in the um in the industry generally to to try to move to financialization as as early as possible and and that might work if there was like only one blockchain, only one cryptocurrency, but if there's thousands of them, then uh it tends to make them all kind of fungeible. And so the um point that I was making was that if uh

you know, if there's only one currency in the world, the dollar or whatever, then the currency sets the value of things like potatoes, gasoline, steel, you know, whatever. those things are all uh denominated in in dollars. Um and uh but if there's thousands of of currencies, then the situation is reversed and now it's the things you can buy that set the value of the of the currency. And in in some cases like um in World of Warcraft uh has got an internal currency gold pieces which uh you know actually has a pretty stable

value against the dollar. It's more stable than some national currencies and it's because the um the people who play that game are sharing an experience that means something to them. um it's got sort of intangible value and so the the various items and so on, the property that they've uh that they've acquired during their adventures in Warcraft uh are important to them emotionally and so they hold their value and as a result the the the gold pieces gold pieces in uh in Warcraft hold their value. So, uh I think that um there's a lesson in that for uh for what we're trying to do. Uh

and that um you know, if we uh try to resist that temptation to just immediately financialize everything uh and concentrate instead on the intangible value of uh of what people are creating that there's an opportunity to to make something that's going to be more more stable. What are the verticals you're thinking of when you say that? Because kind of when I think of the creator economy, obviously there are works of art that are being created, but kind of like what I see kind of the web three layer being used for here is kind of the distribution of profits and kind of the moni kind of the kind of the um creating a fairer

monetization layer to go with it. And in some sense that's also financialization, right? >> Uh I suppose what's your question? >> Yeah. So um what are the non-financial use cases that kind of you see breakthrough? Because it it kind of I think my implicit question is um a lot of the things that we do do on the internet um today are broken because there is no explicit financialization. So kind of like if you look at um the advertising models of Google and so on kind of the the reason they they're they are resorting to that god offer model for everyone who uses it. It's because

it is the one way that they can monetize it efficiently or kind of like if you look at social media platforms and how they kind of sell granular data about users and how to influence them. It's because the expectation is that social media is free, right? And kind of as someone who kind of also runs runs a runs a company, I can tell you kind of all the infrastructure is very much not free, right? Kind of like you have to pay for your servers, you have to pay for transaction fees, you have to pay for all of those things. And because because there's this expectation that things are free, things have kind of users have to be monetized in some other way. Do you see use cases that are truly removed from that? Well, Jiren Laneir uh

has written really well about this and we actually co-wrote a an editorial uh on this a few years ago that got spiked by a major newspaper. Every time we click on something on a social media site or even if we look at it for a few moments, we're we're feeding data to that site uh and we're we're uh contributing what Jiren calls micro labor. And so it's a very small it's very small increments. So we don't notice that a company's big enough it can aggregate all of that micro labor into macro labor. It's something that's really valuable. Uh and so it's kind of a crazy situation because like if General Motors came to you and said, "We

want you to go into our car factory for 1 hour a year and assemble cars for us and we won't pay you." Of course you would never do that. That' be a ridiculous uh kind of offensive proposition. But it's effectively what we're doing with these social media platforms. And so uh he had an idea uh that he was working on he might still be working on it which was to uh aggregate groups of people um and then sell essentially form labor unions. So, if you've uh if you're uh an enthusiast for photography, let's say, uh or bird watching, you could get together with a bunch of other bird watchers and say,

you know, to a social media company, if you pay us, you know, we'll allow you to uh to data mine our discussion threads about birds. Um [snorts] and I can't he was what do you call it? MIDS. Uh I'll look it up. um mediators of individual data to propose a new framework for managing user generated data. Union-like organizations that would represent individuals in negotiations with tech platforms regarding the ownership, monetization, and ethical use of their data. So worth worth checking out if you're interested in this this topic.

>> Yeah, absolutely. I wonder though um in as how much individual facets of kind of human behavior are monetizable that way because kind of a lot of the value kind of comes when when you know an awful lot about a person, right? Kind of like whatever they Google, whatever advertisements kind of like they they look at kind of like what what books they buy, what media they consume, what kind of they click on and so on. and kind of the the the entirety of that is much more valuable than any kind of like than than the prorator price of any particular thing. So kind of like breaking it down like that. I'm not sure how how how effective that that would be.

>> Yeah. No, it's a good point. It's a good point. But it's it's that it's ex what you just described is exactly what most people find sinister and uh uh and dark >> and right kind of like this is uh yeah so to me this is the key value proposition of web 3 kind of like this idea that kind of like in principle we can have these platforms where people who contribute kind of like who contribute data or whatever else can have shared ownership without these corporate structures. is that kind of are forced upon us by states. So kind of if you kind of Yeah.

>> And you can use you know zero knowledge proofs and so on to um you know to you can have a persistent identity that isn't traceable back. So you can reveal some aspect of yourself that you choose to reveal, but uh you don't have these data brokers sort of knitting all of these things together and and uh you know learning things about you that you you might choose to remain private >> and you can also do it in a much more effective way, right? So kind of like if I say I'm interested in booking a safari in Tanzania um and kind of in a way kind of like I advertise myself as someone who's willing to buy. Um kind of in principle the sellers should should

should uh should be willing to pay for the right to kind of pitch me their their their travel ideas and travel packages. Um and in a way kind of like I can if if I am so inclined I can monetize myself much more effectively and efficiently than kind of Google actually can. Right? So uh and I I think kind of moving kind of making this monetization layer more explicit. I think this is something that I would actually credit web 3 with no matter how distasteful it may sound kind of like at at first glance because kind of like oh kind of like the art it's all

about the beauty and and so on and then kind of like people talk about the money that kind of grew and kind of like typically that's kind of swept under the rug, right? So kind of people are meant to uh meant to want to create art because kind of like they are so inclined and they shouldn't have they shouldn't want to think about the money they can make with it and so on. Um and I think dstigmatizing that in some way and saying look this is actually what this is this is you you should you should you should get paid for that and you shouldn't you shouldn't um feel ashamed for wanting to get compensated for this valley. I think that's that's uh yeah >> I do think that uh that kind of stigma has been weaponized in some cases to um

to the detriment of of artists you know saying well if you really cared about your art you know just making the art would be reward enough and you know why should you get paid and all that and um it's a I mean that that's a new and very silly idea I think um I think if you look at the history of how artists had been supported back in the day. Many artists had wealthy patrons. Uh you know um that was just considered a normal well obviously they have to eat, they have to live somewhere. Um and so it's great if uh some rich you know duke wants to uh to subsidize what they're doing. And you know it goes all the way down to you know you're in the subway

and someone's playing music and there's a tin can out in front of them that people are throwing money into. Um, you know, no one is uh no one's well, hopefully no one's look, you know, uh stigmatizing an artist um you know, for uh or questioning their purity um just >> for Yeah. for wanting to eat. Yeah. Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah. I I hear that. Maybe kind of like as a final as a final exploration, what do you see as kind of the the failure modes of web 3? So kind of in in my mind there's kind of like two that are both bad but in different ways. So one's one's instead of kind of empowering individuals we we're kind of

building rails um for an extremely efficient authoritarian state with kind of complete social credit and perfect surveillance and so on. Obviously that's that's extremely scary. And then there's kind of the less catastrophic one um which I still um I still worry about more because I think it's it's possibly the path we are on and I hate it. Um so and that failure failure case is um we've kind of we've built all of this really cool infrastructure and in the end kind of like it it becomes an infrastructure upgrade for banks and other incumbents. Um and nothing changes

for actual users kind of like we've given we've b we've built tinier rails for the Amazons and Stripes and Microsofts and Googles of the world. um and the the users are still being squeezed the same way. What are your thoughts about this? Well, it's a it's a great question to ask say Joe Luben because there's it's clear that he's not a fan of, you know, the incumbents, you know, and that uh he's motivated by a powerful passion to to make sure that this doesn't just turn into a new a shiny new feature uh for for traditional banks. um the uh uh you know it's there's still

a a um a lot of stigma attached to to crypto um among people who don't who don't follow it, right? And so, um, the, uh, um, I think a lot of, of people who aren't regular users of, of crypto view it as, uh, as a, a dark sort of tainted, uh, thing and sort of tend to stay away from it because they've heard bad stories about it or they they associate it with, uh, the dark web or or criminality. And yeah, I'm I'm not one of those people, but but I I know a lot of those people uh who um uh who who you know get a little worried or a little

skeptical if I you know tell them I'm involved in a blockchain thing. So um I think there's a lot that has to be done um in order to uh to overcome that. And you know I I think it will resolve in in time. Um but but it's definitely a warning, you know, flashing light on the the dashboard at the moment. And I don't know, I guess that's for me the main main thing that's standing in the way of broader adoption. >> How how do you see this kind of in contrast with um the user experience that isn't quite there yet? I feel like as someone who's been in web 3 for a long time, kind of

we've we've um adjusted to the tech to the terrible user experience that a lot of our products kind of offer, right? Kind of like if you look at um is this usable for a normal person, the the answer usually is no, right? Kind of it's barely usable for us. And if you look at many how many people actually use web 3 products because they're legitimately better than kind of what web 2 has to offer and they're not just dog fooding and they're not in it for the technology and because they think it's cool and kind of like they want to be at the forefront of something. It's very close to zero, >> right? So kind of if we and um in some way kind of abstracting a lot of that

technical complexity away and just offering genuinely better user experiences to actual people um that they can't find in web 2. I think this is where we'll see mass adoption because I don't think kind of like if you look at the internet for instance almost no one knows how TCPI uh TCP IP works right >> and you shouldn't have to and I think it's the same for kind of for blockchain so kind of I think it'll kind of we'll see success when people don't have to understand that kind of like there's something blockchain in the background that kind of facilitates what they do.

>> Yeah, I agree. I agree. You know, I think one of the big things that Amazon did was that, you know, up to a certain point, the internet was kind of like the way you just described crypto. It was kind of mysterious and hard to use and people weren't sure if it was okay. And then um somehow when Amazon started people were fine with handing over their credit card numbers you know to uh to this company and uh and that led to an explosion in the number of people using it. So suddenly it was uh safe you know it was welcoming uh it just had a you know a a vibe about it that uh people found approachable uh

and wholesome. So um so I I think that's the next frontier for web 3 and we are we are trying to uh to to do that with the UI and the user experience that we're developing for for Lamin. >> So when when you kind of think ahead for Lamina one um say for the next year or two years um what does success for you guys look like? Is it more creative creators or more active users or what's the what's the thing you're um hoping for?

>> Well, we're we're kind of launching with a a project called Artifact where where I'm a creative contributor. It's a game uh based in a uh a fictional uh future world that I'm um concepting. And so we're trying to make it um legitimately interesting, fun game, interesting world, you know, with uh we're working with Wet a Workshop to to produce concept art that we feel good about. And so at the end of the day, that's the only thing I know how to do is try to make cool stuff um and hope that people will like it. So, the uh what I'd love to see is is more creative work going up

that um on our system that uh isn't just a crypto project or an NFT project, but it's just a movie or just a game or just a song. The blockchainess of it is a minor, you know, background detail that no one needs to to really care about. So, no speculation, just fun. >> Yeah. Yeah. Right. >> Cool. Fantastic. That sounds wonderful. I've actually seen the trailer for the game and kind of like I'm not a gamer myself, but it makes me want to be a gamer, so we'll link to it in the show notes.

>> Yeah, it's not a big video game yet. It's it's more of a uh we're starting small, but um but we you know, I like what I've seen so far. >> Cool. Neil, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. We will link to um all the things you've referred to in the notes. Um and uh we will also link to the new game that's coming out. Great.