AI Is Changing the Internet. What Does It Mean for Creators? (with Justin and Michael Blau)

You don't get any data. There's no CRM for any creative. You don't know who the top 1% of your Spotify listeners are. You don't know who the top watchers of your YouTube videos are. And you can't directly communicate with those people. Creator platforms, you might pay somebody like $5 a month to get access to their exclusive content. But with Bond, what you're doing is you're actually only paying or bonding $5 one time. You can withdraw and get your $5 back at any moment in time. But while you're bonded to them, they earn interest on your $5. Bond is some middle ground where the fan and the creator have that direct connection and it costs $0. We think that relationships should 1,000% be on chain because you can't take your audience with you if a platform like TikTok goes down. Justin Michael, thank you guys both so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having us. What is the biggest misconception that people have about the problem that you're solving? I think we'll have an answer so you can go first. My spicy take is that people assume all creativity should be valued and that creators should be paid. Which I definitely believe to be true. But the prerequisite to any of these themes of creator monetization is actually knowing who your audience is. Biggest problem in Web 2, you don't get any data. And so I guess my take is before you start thinking about creator monetization, just knowing who cares about you as a creator is one of the biggest unlocks that blockchain provides. And what I would say is there have been numerous as you know, creator, crypto products that let creators earn on chain on the internet in various ways. And the way that usually works is through some form of like trading volume. So whether that's a meme coin or a content coin trading or an NFT secondary royalty, it's the same idea. And what that means is that creators earn more money as trading volume grows. But what you believe is that creators should earn more money as their audience grows. Right? You could have a thousand very active traders trading your stuff and make some good trading fees off of that. But that has no tie at all to your content that you're creating as a creator or how big you are getting in the world and how many people are seeing your stuff. Because trading is more of like a mercenary behavior. And you're trying to make money off of something versus this complete other type of thing where you're going to develop like a loyal fan base and a loyal following people who want to have this like long-term relationship with you. Those two things would seem to be you know, opposed. 100%. Yes. And we think that relationship should 1,000% be on chain because you can't take your audience with you if a platform like TikTok goes down. So why on chain? Why is crypto necessary to solve this problem? Oh man. Do you want to take that to start? Sure. I think I'll give two answers to that. Yeah. I think the first is you know putting whatever this relationship is, economic relationship in our case on chain is just that better because it's open, it's transparent, everything can be seen. And especially with the fact that like typically it's through wallet addresses so the creator might have a wallet address and the user will have a wallet address. Now in theory they have a direct way to communicate with each other. Okay. So that's like sort of like the table stakes reason. But I think the more interesting reason is the way that our protocol works, you need a blockchain to do it. Right. And so we could in theory maybe build it on centralized rails. But that would require many intermediaries and lots and lots and lots and thousands and thousands of lines of code. Whereas ours is 500 lines of code and simple. Churchy.com.com said it's almost impossible for us to build what we've built. Yeah. And on your reals. I just do them. Yeah. I think they said it would take six to nine months to create an MVP. Whereas we were able to do it in like two, you know. So. So this speaks to the ability in crypto to have interoperability, composability to sort of build off of the Lego blocks that other people have already created. And instantly just sort of like be able to ship a product. 100%. Which is the biggest problem that creatives have had as they've like expanded across all these different social platforms is there's no unified database of who cares about the creativity that you've put out in the world. But that's not even just as a creator but even a social graph, right? Where like nowadays on Instagram, you know, my friend where my best childhood friends had twins. I didn't even know because it didn't show up in my feed, right? And so there's no real relationship that exists beyond the algorithm in social media these days. And you know, the stuff that we're building and many other projects are beginning to sort of explore what the alternatives look like. I recently had a kid and I've not posted about it. And I mean, this weird limbo area where I feel like a lot of people don't know that I've. I didn't even get a photo. I didn't even get a picture. I know it's kind of it's kind of covert, you know. It feels like it hasn't really happened. Yeah. If a tree falls in the forest doesn't make a sense. Exactly. Yeah. And I think that's good. I get that. That totally makes sense. To your point about being able to sort of like bootstrap this thing on crypto rails, I think we're seeing something analogous in, you know, the neo-bank kind of fintech area, where a lot of these startups are realizing that they can instantly go global if they use stablecoins rather than having to like develop all these local integrations with different places and, you know, conform to various local markets. They're able to sort of get up and running just by adopting crypto rails. And so you're kind of seeing a similar benefit. It seems like not in like the fintech area. I mean, I guess it is a fintech product. And what I'd say to you. For the creator economy. 100%. And what I'd say too is once you get the stablecoin, you get access to like all these great things. Right. You get to get the vaults. You get the splits. You get the payments. Instant settlement. All the magic that we love. The problem though is still actually getting the stablecoins. Right. So the on ramp is still a challenge, especially if we're looking to onboard the mainstream. That's going to have to improve. What's the issue there? How do we overcome it? The simple no one supports credit cards. Well, yeah, that's the simple version. I think people are so used to the convenience of Apple Pay and credit cards. And, you know, you have all these different chargeback fraudulent issues that arise when you convert a credit card fee to a stablecoin. And so we initially enabled debit cards for a lot of things. And what's funny is I myself didn't even have my debit card at my Apple Pay. And I couldn't even find it. And it was expired. I started asking friends, I'm like, how many of you guys actually use debit cards? And the response mostly came back as like none. Like zero out of 10 data points to people actually keeping their debit cards on Apple Pay. And so I do think the biggest period of entry for mainstream engagement in non-speculative crypto products is just that on ramp. And I think that in the 11 years I've been doing crypto things. This is the first time the regulatory environment and the companies are sort of running to take that to the next level. I've read about a trend of like younger generations as particularly in the US liking debit cards and actually using them more than like millennials and such. Oh, interesting. I'm asking my millennial friends the question. So, you know, I'm a millennial. So this makes no sense to me. I use credit cards. My friends are not having debit cards. Okay. Well, I think I'm technically Gen Z. All right. I don't even know. Justin, this is a problem that is deeply personal to you because you are an artist. You make music. Tell me about your journey. It's such a long and fantastic story. But I studied finance in college, dropped out and became a DJ in the early days of dance music being a thing in America. So this is 2010, 2011. And I actually met the Winkleboss twins while I was playing one of my shows in 2014 while they were building their exchange called Gemini. And that's how I discovered Bitcoin. They've got a band too. Oh, yes, they do. And they're quite good. They've always been into music. And so we sort of connected on the like passionate about finance level, on the music level. But it didn't really started getting engaged in the ecosystem until like a theorem 2017 when I started realizing, oh, wow, there are all these applications that I wish I could have had as a musician when I was starting my career. And I've kind of been focused on that since 2017 in lots of different realms and lots of different experiments. The biggest period of entry has been that on RIM. For me, though, my attraction to blockchain technology in general is my experience as an independent artist. And I'm sure you've heard of a couple of these. But to give you an example, there's Chance the Rapper. And there's another rapper named Russ who's really, really amazing at telling his story about being an independent artist and how challenging that is, how it's been over the past 10 years, and how you just get no data. And you don't know anything about, you know, you sell tickets. You don't know who those people are. You don't get their emails, take a master control through emails. You grow following on Instagram. They change the algorithm. How do you reach that fan base? Those fans definitely still care about that music. They're just seeing a bunch of slop that is, you know, re-hypothicates their attention to more advertising revenue. Because that's sort of what Web2 is incentivized around. And so for me, crypto has been a force that I feel the next generation of creatives across the board, not just musicians, can use to really maintain that independence and maintain their biggest share of the pie when it comes to their revenue. As you know, most creators have managers, agents, lawyers, all of whom take fees along the way. And if you were to compare that to the structure of a company and a VC investing in that company, a lot of creatives actually end up giving up over 40% of their income just in commissions. Wow. 40%. Exactly. And so the theory that I've always played with is in my head in crypto, like the core theory is, if you can align incentives and connect directly with a fan base, they'd provide more value than the 40% commission you're paying your team. And it's a relatively controversial taking music business because, you know, there are lots of people that don't make music that have jobs based on these types of roles. And yet, the industry still lives in a world from like 20 years ago where royalty accounting is absolutely garbage. There's tons of fraud. I mean, the story just came out the other week that Calvin Harris's business manager, I ended up firing a while ago, embezzled him out of like 22 million in a real estate deal. You know, and so these sort of like conventional slimy takes that you hear about the music industry are all true. And blockchain as a transparent layer, as an open layer, just was so obvious to me back then, it could help solve all the problems. that I was experiencing. And so I've sort of dedicated my life to, you know, making it work. And I think, you know, 2025 is the first year we have the regulatory environment to push it. I think people might be familiar with a service like Patreon where you can support creators or sub-stack. You subscribe to various content creators and they get a portion of the revenue. A large portion. What separates what you're doing from those existing options? Like on Patreon or sub-stack or even Instagram or any of these other creator platforms, you might pay somebody like $5 a month. So every month you're paying $5 to get access to their exclusive content. But with Bond, what you're doing is you're actually only paying or bonding $5 one time with the catch that once you bond your money, you get access to their exclusive content, whatever that might be. Maybe, you know, it's a course, an exclusive, you know, song, a blog, etc. But the catch is that you can withdraw and get your $5 back at any moment in time. And so that's how they earn money. And so instead of me paying you $5 directly, I am bonding $5 to one time. And as long as I'm bonded to you, you're earning interest. And what this creates is this really cool new dynamic where now instead of being able to say, you know, I have a thousand subscribers, you can say, I have a thousand dollars bonded to me, right? Which is a very new social metric type of signal that I think creators are going to really like him. We started with your worth more than your follow account because there's so many bots. There's no way to really value your social graph as it applies in Web 2. And as Michael said, you know, if you get a thousand fans to stake or to bond $5, that's cool. You also have fans that are bigger that might want to get recognized by you as a crater. And they might be willing to stake a little bit more money and bond $5,000, $10,000. And now all the sudden you as the creator can tell, okay, who really cares about me? Maybe I'll do a lot more for you. And what bond is, is it somewhere between a follow-on and a subscription where as a creator, it's a lot to ask your fans to pay $5 a month for a subscription. And you know, you're then obligated to give them new content. They might stop the subscription. And you're like asking them for something that feels like sort of disingenuous when you ask someone to subscribe. A follow is, you know, really worthless in the sense that, you know, the algorithm then decides what you see and how you interact. Bond is some middle ground where both the user, the fan and the creator have that direct connection and it costs $0. The beauty of the mechanic is in the DeFi component, where now instead of keeping your money in a checking account, you might spread that money between a lot of creators that you like just to get access to them. Something that you just couldn't do in an Instagram or a TikTok environment. And you say it costs $0 because you can bond some amount of money, like say I bond $20 to you as a musician, I like your music, I want to get access to all the behind-the-scenes sort of material. And then I can pull my money out pretty much whenever and have that back. Exactly. Exactly. You're basically taking like a business model that it's well-understood in FinTech and Finance. There's this like shadow economy of, you know, the Starbucks mobile app is kind of like a bank and everybody's accounts that they just leave their pennies in there. You know, on an aggregate scale Starbucks makes a lot of money off of that in interest. You're taking this sort of like business model that's pre-existing and is almost like a bug for user experiences elsewhere and turning it into a feature. I'm actually going to choose to stake some of this money or bond it and it's going to be transparent and open that I know that the artist is going to get rewarded. Yeah, exactly. And when I'm, you know, a problem that creators have is now with all the different platforms, right? It started out with just Facebook. Now it's everything, you know, even before that my space. Who do I even know to respond to? Right? Like I owe the people that care about my musical response if they have a question, if they have a story. There's just no way for me to filter how much someone cares in Web 2. With bond, if somebody has money stakeed on me, at the end of the night when I go to sleep after a show, more likely to respond to those people than the random spam that I get with random ads on Instagram or on TikTok or wherever it might be. And so we think about bond not just as a new mechanic for online relationships. We also think of it as the first creator CRM because there's literally no data you have access to when you build an audience on any other platform. Sales force for artists. I mean, there's all these analyses, right? It's like a Patreon, but it's not. It's sales force and it's not. And I think that's our biggest challenge in starting this new idea is this is a behavior that users aren't used to and creatives aren't used to, right? A user is not used to being able to get their money back instantaneously at any time. You know, they wait. Let's say you buy something and you return it. It's like, let's say you buy a bunch of t-shirts online. You got to wait a week before the credit card payment gets reversed or with a ticket, you buy it. Maybe you don't want to go to the show anymore. Now you have to list that on stub hub. It's a lot of effort to receive that refund. With stablecoins, everything is instantaneous, permissionless, and 24/7. My favorite phrase about getting into crypto was just using Ethereum on the weekend and showing my dad that it takes a couple of minutes to move money anywhere in the world. That was in like 2017. And with stablecoins and with all the new positive regulation, we now have new tools to create a completely new environment for creatives to interact with their biggest supporters. We also don't even necessarily think it stops at creators. You can imagine somebody who has medical debt that starts to go fund me. Instead of now donating to pay off that medical debt, you can just bond to that person and they can use your interest to pay off that medical debt, right? So this is just a completely new mechanic that begins with creators because everything good usually begins with creators. And we hope to just expand the idea of interest bearing online connection to lots of other spaces on the internet. Why now? Why is the world ready for this now? I asked this because, you know, back in previous cycles of the crypto market, there were a lot of hopes placed on being able to compensate creators for their work. There was a lot of interest in NFT royalties and things like that. It didn't really pan out to the degree that people had thought what's changed between then and now and why is the world, you know, ready to receive this kind of new product? I think a few reasons. First, from a technical side, the tech is kind of ready, right? Like we have layer twos with like sub penny transaction fees. We have stablecoins. We have really amazing SDKs and wallet infrastructure where people can come to our site and we can give them a wallet with them not even knowing that there's a wallet. Like they can just sign up with their email. We can also sponsor their transactions. So when you're using the bond website, for example, normally and you'll have like paid Ethereum gas to like do a transaction, you don't even know that there's an Ethereum transaction going on on the bond platform because it's all hidden behind the scenes. But that is because there are many companies that have worked really hard to build really incredible infrastructure to enable such a seamless experience because even like when you asked to describe where building, we didn't even need to mention crypto, right? It's not required. And so if we're trying to get the mainstream on board it, it's very important that the experience just feels seamless. That's from a technical side. The other thing I'd say is that Patreon and Substac and these other subscription platforms have been around. But other platforms that are like the Instagrams and the Twitter's of the world have started to incorporate subscriptions into these profiles. So like you can subscribe to a Twitter profile or an Instagram profile. People just have like subscription fatigue, right? I, there was like maybe you know, a hundred creators that I would love to support because I read their posts. I follow them. But I don't think I, like I'm going to pay them five bucks a month, right? There are some creators that I see have like a quarter of a million followers. And when you click in, only 250 pay them five bucks a month to subscribers. That's a huge gap, right? So what is a better mechanism for me to support these creators that I love? It's cheaper, you know, it's easier and it's less of like a mental burden. And so I think as everyone sort of warming up to this idea of subscribing to people, we think that this is a better way of doing that. So you said subscribing to people which, you know, just to push back a little bit, we're in this time when AI has made it so easy to generate content. Some people might argue that the cost of content creation is crashing to zero. What happens in that world? What happens to the creator economy? That brings me to my most controversial take. Great. I'll tell a quick story and then I'll go into the answer. There's nothing like watching John May or play the guitar live. It's one of the best music experiences I've had as a DJ, you know, DJ, I can play guitar, but not really. And watching John play is something that is an indescribably valuable experience that I've had the privilege of hanging out with him and watching him play a couple times. And every time it gives me so much value, like he's perceived almost no compensation outside of the ticket, you know, which is some money, but realistically he's given me way more value than the value of that ticket, right? And the merch and the merch that I don't own yet. I saw him perform at Beth L. Woods, which is like where the real Woodstock took place. People played with the great full dead of his band, TASK, his incredible show. I also talked to him about Bond a couple weeks ago and he got it pretty quickly. My controversial take as it applies to sort of AI content is people will find value in the human curation surrounding that content because, you know, when things are just like prompt to content, you can you can usually tell. Like eventually it will be relatively indistinguishable. But the biggest variable in creativity is less the actual creative act and more curation. And it has been for a while. So when I sit down to make a song, I'm sure in all these different sounds to create the final version of the song, that's my skill set and that's what feels the most human to the listener. And so I think in that sense, people will appreciate the human input. It's just at the friction to execute your creative ideas has now gone to zero, which brings me to my controversial take, which is that IP as it relates to creativity, I think, is going to completely disappear. I don't think that any of the laws are actually enforceable and any of the precedents are enforceable. And if you look at the history of copyright, it's not very old. Especially it applies to music. Mass recording rights didn't even exist up until the 70s. So no one even owned the underlying recording, except for the record labels. There were no laws because the labels just owned everything. They owned 100%. And it was only until the '70s that musicians actually even received any portion of income from their recordings. They also controlled, you know, the labels control the physical distribution as well. And so copyright as a concept is kind of becoming antiquated by the existence of AI. And I actually think it holds us back a lot. And so the contrary opinion to this is, well, like, how do you pay all the people that came up with the idea first? And my response to that is, work human beings were kind of unlimited. If somebody had an idea 200 years ago, they couldn't even record it. What if they influenced all these generations of people that led the first copyright holder to their idea? They're not getting compensated along the way when copyright didn't exist. Johan Sebastian Bach was one of the first musicians of all time to have any sort of rights associated with his music. His value lives on through his provenance through his reputation of being one of the best composers of all time. And so my opinion on this is, we just need to create a new value system for creativity. Copyright is just not it. And cannot be in a world of rampant quality level AI content. That sounds like a very scary prospect, probably, for a lot of creators who are used to relying on their IP and making their entire living off of it. That's the question is, in a world where they won't be able to do that anymore, which I think is inevitable, what do they have? Well, they have the human relationship with the people that appreciate their work. And so we need to come up with an entirely new value system. Otherwise, I actually think all creativity is doomed. And so you've got sort of the incumbents that are like, "We, you got to pass for our rights and for the Mickey Mouse IP or for this song IP that's really big, that somebody remakes." And in reality, I think it's so egotistic to think that we could ever own an idea in the first place. This might not be true of biotech, just to just oppose it for a second. When there's a lot of research and friction that goes into an idea, patents and stuff, I understand are necessary because without that, people aren't even incentivized to innovate, right? Because someone could just copycat it and all of your work and money and time that you spent on research is irrelevant. And so people would be less incentivized to build really complicated things if that type of IP law didn't exist. But as it applies to creativity, where the friction is really going to zero, anywhere where friction is zero with the advent of AI, I just believe copyright is a huge force against innovation in those spaces. It reminds me of a quote from Thomas Jefferson associated with when he was kind of developing the patent system in the US. He sort of walked through the logic of it saying, "If I light my candle to yours, you can take my fire without diminishing mine." And he talks about this as like an analogy for the spread of ideas. Other people can benefit from and use your ideas without it hurting you as the creator. But it sounds like we need an update on some of these systems that we've held for a long time. It also reminds me of, you know, I think Charles Dickens, he did a famous tour in the US when he was the most popular writer of his time. And I think he was horrified because in America, everybody would just rip all of his works. They were publishing it, left and right, not abiding by any copyright and he thought we were savages. But maybe this is the way of the future. Yeah. Who knows? We're going to know in the next five years that's for sure it's getting really good. My controversial take unrelated is I've worked in this industry for many years now. And I've seen you have including at A66. And CIS and ZXZ, yes. And I think like now going to the builder side and like starting to build things, I think what I'm starting to think about is I don't necessarily think that every, we'll call it crypto product or product built on crypto needs to be a decentralized protocol with a token. And because of how big that word is, everything just kind of gets lumped together into that. But I think what we're seeing as I've said before is the tech is so good that you can just build great apps, great businesses that don't necessarily need to be decentralized. And that's okay using these rails to create a great experience and net new financial products or net new consumer experiences. And we're actually seeing that happen. And so I don't know how I can, if I can name names or not. But there are many successful crypto companies now that are, you know, I wouldn't necessarily call like a decentralized protocol, but they're using the tech in a way that's really amazing to just create new products in the world. And that's exciting to see. And I hope that that is, you know, something that builders out there who are like thinking about, like I want to build a new product. They shouldn't be thinking about, oh, do I want to build a crypto product? They should be thinking about, I want to build this great thing. And crypto is like a tool and a means to get there. But it's not like I'm building a whole crypto product, right? Like it's a layer on the stack. Yeah, I think we're seeing this, you know, play out in stablecoins where people talk about stablecoins, but it's going to just sort of transition to this thing where people are talking about dollars. Like it doesn't matter that it's a stablecoin. I was just talking about what it does at the end of the day, which is it represents some value for you in a reliable way. Something, or this, the next thing about the other day, is like what's the difference between crypto and AI? And I feel like AI? I feel like this is a set up for a joke. No, it's not. It's not like, like I was really thinking about it. I was, it's not, but like I was really thinking about like what's like the difference for the user and the difference is the user is going to feel the AI, right? They're going to feel it in the experience, right? As we know, we've seen thousands of these products and whether it's generating art or talking to a chat, or you'd see or whatever, right? Whereas crypto might actually be completely invisible, right? And that's kind of cool. I love that. It's sort of this front end, back end distinction. Yeah, exactly. We talked a little bit about Justin and his musical career, but I have to also say, I know Michael, you're a magician. Yes. How's that in form of your work? How does it make you think about the creator economy? Well, a lot of different ways. It's funny. Magic and IP has a very crazy history because you can't copyright magic. Like you can't like copyright or magic performance. Like I could write down something and maybe copyright that, but you can't copyright a magic performance. And so magic history is littered with people ripping each other off, left and right, and remixing ideas. Like, oh, I might see you perform one thing and take it and do it over here and this and that and this. It's funny. One of my mentors in magic, I respect immensely. His name is Aussie Wind. He's incredible. Yeah. You haven't seen a show. He's amazing. You have to see him. He actually posed this question to me one time, which was like, you know, you can go to a magic store and pay $20 for like a trick that can cards or whatever. And you know, just do the same trick as anybody else. It's the same trick, right? But what's the difference between like a good and bad magician? Right? And it came down to like, what else are we saying? It's the person, right? When Aussie Wind performs trick A and I perform trick A, him performing is going to be like significantly better, like if now is a times better, because he's just amazing, right? And so it's funny because in the world of magic, people kind of gave up. They're like, we can't, we can't even copyright this stuff. Like it's people are just going to get ripped off, left and right. And so it forces the performers to be even more unique to like differentiate themselves. Because otherwise you're just the cookie cutter of like, anyone else that can go to a magic store. So it's almost like sort of the status quo for the magic world is kind of what Justin was saying, like that this is where all art is headed. Right? That like you're not going to have this defensibility around your IP, your products, your ideas. Right. And it's about the human aspect, the human element that you bring to it that people are going to connect with. What's that amazing quote? Anything, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic? Yes, Arthur C. Clarke. Yeah, amazing quote. It's true, like, magicians are always like two to three steps ahead tech wise from like the rest of the world. And I'm not going to explain what that is on podcast because that'll be really really secret. It's like, like, I'll just say that there are like tech things in magic that I was I was playing with over 10 years ago in high school that now are becoming consumer products that we have in our pocket. And I can't use the metrics anymore. 100%. Yeah, can you give any examples? Like this is that sounds kind of crazy. Okay, the new metaglasses. Yeah, right? You have the sanerists, right? And you can type. By drawing. Yeah, with your hands, right? Right. Magicians were playing with that. Not not not exact tech, but like. Conceptually. Conceptually things dancing around that using technology, like, you know, 10 years ago. Oh, that's fascinating. Yeah, it was really fun. Inspirations for you guys. Who do you look up to? Who do you admire? Who personally inspires your own creative pursuits? I already mentioned John Mayer from a creativity standpoint. And I would say one of my friends who I also look up to Zed, who's also always been very tech forward, fantastic DJ, mega hitmaker. On the sort of tech side, I would say, I think Brian Chesky is just a really great human being and has done some pretty amazing things in the face of a lot of challenges. And to see how Airbnb just revolutionized and so many things, right? And change our perspective on how the world works. I can only hope for us to sort of do that from a crypto lens. I'll bring it back to magic. I'll give three magicians that anyone watching should totally look up and watch their stuff because they've inspired me. And I'll choose ones that are alive today so that you know, you can all check it out. So obviously, Aussie went for sure, 100% because he's the best. Doug McKenzie and David Blaine. And I love them all for very different reasons. Doug specifically is sort of the tech forward magician. And so he's the most advanced on that front. And David Blaine is just incredibly inspiring because he just pushes himself so hard and you watch him perform and you're like, listen, if he could stab a stake through his hand, like I could definitely do this other thing. I remember him trying to hold his breath under water for however many minutes that's what I'm saying. Exactly. Nine, ten minutes. Exactly. Exactly. You guys have time for a lighting round? Let's do it. Sure. What is the worst piece of advice that you've ever gotten as a founder? This is a very specific take, but just higher smart people, they'll figure it out. I think it's wrong, especially in any blockchain, Jason. or blockchain-specific industry, you must use the product to have the right cultural perspective. And I think that just hiring a great engineer and hoping to train them in the ways of crypto, unless they're truly passionate about crypto, it doesn't work. So I would say that's like the worst advice I've gotten. I was gonna say, I was gonna say, I was gonna say, I was gonna steal his coins. Oh shit. So yeah, only when I had that. No need to name names. What is your biggest productivity hack? Voice notes. Like voice note to AI summary. So like, I use meeting notes on Zoom. I don't always look at them, but like, if I ever have an idea, now I know I can just instead of recording it, transcribing it, and then leaving it in its current form, I can have AI take the idea, refine it, and now it's there in my notes. And I think that's been really helpful for me recalling thoughts and things that I, you know, we're just thinking about all this stuff all day long. And then there's a lot of things we think about. And so being able to distill all of that, I think with some combination of voice and AI is great. For me, I use like a lot of like, I generated voice for like reading blogs and stuff. And so I have this pipeline, or I have like a Chrome extension with Sputiefi, and it hooks into my email. So when I'm reading emails, I can just have it like, like, be ready to me. And if I like things, I can click another Chrome extension, which like takes a snippet of like a quote or a concept that I really like, and then puts it right into Obsidian, which is like the other tool that I know. A lot of everyday systems it uses. Yes. Everyone, a lot of people attack you. So I don't think it's whole flow. What am I missing? I'm like speech of I to, you know, Obsidian. Obsidian's like this is like note taking out basically. I just use Apple notes. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, I'm sitting like the greatest note taking out more time. I tried using Obsidian. I could I also reverted back to so you still. Yeah. Just going with the basics. I've been asking people for a book recommendation. Given your work, feel free to recommend a song to or whatever kind of art you think people should admire. I think maybe the book that I've read recently that like I stopped and took so many notes. I'll give you two books again. Yeah. I took so many notes and like it really maybe think about a lot of things. A lot of things was the Machiavellians. Oh, yeah. That one. And then as it relates to like tech and crypto and like how do you wrap your head around this whole thing of Bitcoin and crypto and stablecoins and dollars and the Fed and money printing and like how do you wrap that all? Lynn Alzen's book. I think it's called Broken Money. Yeah, Broken Money. Those are two. Which I get to read and definitely should. Fantastic. It's one on economics, one on politics. Yeah. I've read the Machiavellians. This is a beloved book within A16Z, Mark Andrewsson talks about it all the time. Yeah. That's where I got it from. Yeah. It says a lot about politics. If you don't understand it, you can definitely learn a lot from it. My book was a gift from my brother actually on my birthday. The courage to be disliked is fantastic. And at a time in my life where a lot of people on the internet disliked me, it was very very very great read and changed my perspective on a lot of things. So that's that's up there for me on books. Who's there more about that? I DJed at the presidential inauguration. A lot of people hate Trump. That was this January. Deadmouse and other DJs said something negative and then a bunch of other people piled on. And I actually worked with racial horwits on my very politically correct response on what it means to be proud to be an American. And I would have DJed for a camel. I would have DJed for any president if they ask because I'm a proud American. I love the freedoms we have in this country. And that says nothing about my political belief about immigration. Like just because I'm DJing in inauguration doesn't mean you can make all these assumptions about my beliefs on other things. Also for crypto presidents probably good for my shareholders and our work. But it's beyond that. And so I read the book around that time and it was very helpful to me. That's a good pick for artists who are you know in today's day and age when you're trying to be loved by everybody and gain the biggest following possible. The best time to read that book like you should buy it and put it on your shelf but don't read it until you're feeling like really down. Because that's when it's going to happen most in the day. Yeah, probably. Yeah, if you're happy and you're like flying high you're like, you're like, you're like, you won't be a star. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's actually good. That's actually a good tip. On the music front you know it's a cliche answer but you know a lot of people spend a lot of time listening to individual songs and I think that the album is a lost art right when you can listen to something undistracted for 45 minutes to an hour and 15 minutes and really understand the story that an artist is trying to tell. I highly recommend people listen to albums and then it's relatively a cliche answer but I think that the latest riff is to soul album is one of their best. Their previous albums are also incredible. I just really really love the new one. There's a couple songs on there that I think push a lot about Rees sonically and it's definitely a two-listen. Amazing. Well, I have to plug this actually. Our podcast is using your music Justin. Thank you for supplying it to us. A track called Shine that you created. A track that never came out then now is in good hands and now we'll be listened to by anybody who tunes into A16Z Crypto's media. We love it. Thank you for that and I recommend that to anybody. Nice. Final question in the light around what is the smallest hill that you will die on? I have a good one. No outside clothes on inside furniture. Fantastic. You and my wife would get along very well. That's okay that's a really good one. I'll do one for tech then. I to this day still believe that an NFT or specifically like ERC 721 or 1155 is one of the coolest technological innovations for representing digital objects on the internet and they are going to be everywhere. So regardless of what people say in the media what the headlines are they are not dead. What are people getting wrong about it? They make all these assumptions I think on the speculative front. They think of it like the internet was a passing fad that no one was going to use but yet it's an information superhighway that's really valuable to everyone. I think NFTs will sort of follow that arc that the internet did where like digital ownership is really meaningful. The Instagram verified badge actually meant a lot for a while and it's a combination of signal and digital identity and NFTs still do that today. There were just a lot of projects that maybe abused some of the most popular narratives to make a lot of money. I think those narratives remain true that digital ownership is one of the most important things to think about in the future and especially as it applies to the previous conversation we had about AI and friction going to zero. Having representations of who originated something of provenance of a transparent ledger of how that digital object has moved I think is just such an inevitability whether that's on the identity level or the artistic level they're going to be everywhere. It's just a matter of time. I think it was Eddie Lazarin who said this at my time at 8/16 and I love this it was great. He said it was a nice CTO. He's great. I forgot what the topic was but it was really it's like NFTs and ownership and he goes you know a side effect of true ownership is ease of transferability and when you have something that's easily transferable you're going to get a lot of people transferring it and trading right but that's not the core thing that's a side effect right the core is true ownership and I like that I like that for me to trade me true ownership that's something we can all get behind yes Michael Justin thank you so much for being here and for taking the time out to chat. Thanks so much. Thanks everyone. This is great thank you. Q Shine. Yeah straight.