46. Building Doors (w/ Yancey Strickler)

This is the greater podcast. Hi and welcome back to this Integrated Podcast. If you've listened to this all before, you probably know how our conversations usually start. We identify a problem, our guests come in with a diagnosis and we spend an hour testing how far it goes. But today's guest arrives with something radically different. A form you can file with the state. Most of you may know Jansi Strykler as the co-founder of Kickstarter. The platform he launched in 2009 that went on to move close to 10 billion dollars to more than 250,000 projects. And that he made one of the first public benefit corporations in the United States. And early-signed, if you want, of the question that runs through everything he has done ever since. Now, what shape should creative life take when it has to survive inside an economy that loves art, or at least it claims to do so, but stays indifferent to artists. Since stepping down as Kickstarter CEO in 2017, he has answered that question again and again and again, always inventing new forms. Bentoyism, a decision to look for thinking past immediate self-interest. The creative independent, which is a free library of advice for working artists, this could be our future, a 2019 manifest of an economy that measures more than money. Metallable, a platform for releasing an own new work as a group. The Dark Forest Collective and its books on the private internet and most recently, two projects that give those instincts the force of law and the reach of a protocol. Descorporations, the A-Corp's and the Dark Forest operating system, the DFOS. That first project is why this episode is timely in our head that we didn't plan. We recorded with Jan C in the last days of May and he told us that the governor of Colorado would soon sign the country's first artist corporation into existence. That happened on June 2. The Colorado Artist Company Act is now low and you kind of come up with the artist who keeps majority control, intellectual property reverts to its maker if the company dissolves, and artistic mission is written in above the profit motive. More than 4,000 creators have already signed up. At least six other states are drafting their own versions. A thing that did not exist when we had recalled is a zoolism real. In our conversation we follow Jan C across the full span of his work. We talk about the protocol artist and what the designing of a legal form is itself an artistic act. We talk about this holding towards as opposed to artists and corporations in a single breath. And here's Jan E. he reached for to make peace with him. We discuss the Dark Forest operating system. We discuss the group chat as the central social form of this century and what it takes to keep an agent out of a room meant for humans. We also talked about intellectual property in the age of Suno and Claude about who actually pays the real cost of AI and about the cash in he sees opening. There's no one in charge finds the nerve to act. And underneath all of that we keep returning to his aim provocation. This so usually works by critic, say we take a part for example how power and capital operate. But Jan C does something else. He builds working alternatives and even gets and rid them into law. So we ask him again and again. When criticizing the system is the easy and admired thing to do. Is building something real, the truly radical art? Or does anything you build inside the system end up serving it? My career began writing about music and culture for places like the Village Voice and Spin Magazine. I was one of the first writers for pitchfork. And through that was always starting projects, zines, little publications, a record label putting out music from bands I would see at basement shows. Eventually that led to me making a new friend who had the idea for what came to be called crowdfunding. And this is Perry Chen and the idea that became Kickstarter. We met in 2005 and started talking about this idea together and spent the next four years with our co-founder Charles Adler turning conditional purchasing mechanism controlled by a group dynamic into a platform that people could use. And in the Kickstarter story, we were always very aware of being creative people, not business people. And we always wanted to instill more deeply into the org. So we were one of the first companies to become a public benefit corporation. And so embracing that idea of being a corporate structure that isn't explicitly just only pursuing profit and actually lays out a different philosophy for how it operates. And I left Kickstarter in 2017 while I was there and launched the Creative Independent as a project after creating a PVC because the PVC charter mandates we create work that benefits artists beyond our walls. So made a free resource about creative and emotional advice for artists. And in the 10 years since leaving stepping down as Kickstarter CEO, I've been in a strange string of projects that are often working in forms combining a lot of emotions I experience with structures to help make sense of those emotions. Those range from bentoism, which is a philosophy for a different view of self-interest to medallable, which is a structure imagining how creative people could cooperate together. Dark Forest Theory of the Internet, a way of understanding how we were behaving online. And now in artist corporations and in defos, both also projects that are trying to take structures and forms and empower them in different ways. One with the power of the law, another with the power of protocols and open data and a different vision of the internet. Nothing in my career has been premeditated. It's simply been doing what appears and like what feels like a fun interesting thing to do following my curiosity. There's been three books written during that time as well. And I've now come to see that there is a coherent body of work that has emerged, but that is purely, I won't say accidental because it is an expression of who I am, but it was unintentional and it has been a surprise to me. Maybe even more of a surprise to me than other people who maybe who follow my work and the things I do feel obvious. They never feel like that to me. So I've just always been kind of straddling the lines of different worlds and I think part of my personality is to try to make peace between things and conflict. Part of how I grew up was about that. And so I'm someone that can be a bridge between what seemed like incongruent ideas or philosophies. And at my best, my projects sort of find a way through that honors all truths, ideally, that allows us to move forward in some way through some door. I think of Kickstarter as there was a wall where no one could get funding and we just built a door where that wall was and it felt as obvious as could be. And so at its best, that's what these projects do. But my experience is that deciding to commit yourself to a project, you've just set the course for your next 12 years. That's how long it takes to do something. Well, there is no quick in and out. If you want to make something that matters, it's a grind. If you earn it gradually, you go from unknowing to knowing to unknowing again over time. It's only when I'm asked to reflect in moments like this that I feel like maybe I've learned something. The walls I'm just still just at the next dark room trying to figure out what I'm supposed to do there. A lot of things that you describe, for example, it's like uncanny belief to negotiate between different services and spaces, this project way of thinking and working. You sound like an artist to me. That's something that I would associate with those dynamics. And the talk of the town at the Venice Biennale this year was around this idea of the protocol artist. Essentially, the idea that art is changing, it's maybe for the most part somewhat assumed that content production is less and less critical to the productive component of being an artist. AI gives us this ability to generate tons and tons of content. Artists are now thinking deeper into the stack, thinking about actually positioning themselves at the protocol level. But I remember talking about this with Poncell Ricobris a year ago and then this came up at the Biennale. It's kind of difficult to think of people who are really protocol artists. There's not so many of them out there. And I was like, but yes, he's trickler. It's like for real. So how do you relate to that? I'm sure you're familiar with the idea of the protocol artist. If not, we can hash it out. But what do you think about it? I think I was only tangentially curated into that show. So I guess it's not true. Matt and Holly and Josh are show. I do think Josh and I's books are in there, but I don't rush to claim the word artist. I mean, I think writer, but I think writer is a subset of artists. But it is for sure that all of my work is driven by creativity, like a drive for coherence of ideas for finding connections for looking for beauty and meaning. And the business outcomes of those things, I have an awareness of because the context I'm in, but I'm not motivated by them. I really don't care. To start my career, I was initially a writer and I got a full time job inside a.com that had an editorial platform as a part of this is the early 2000s. And that was my first time working at a proper company. And I began to be included in meetings about strategy and corporate things. And I surprised myself by it being good at those things, apparently. I kept getting asked back to those meetings. People wanted to know what I thought. And I personally felt a sense that I am betraying my clients. class by doing this. Because if you're thinking early 2000s, like the line between art and commerce was still very, very strong. And even a lot of what we were doing with Kickstarter was kind of sacrilegious of blurring this line of making money, something that we visibly talk about, and acknowledging that creative projects, even though their whimsical have a budget. And I often felt a real tension and internal conflict for crossing that boundary and saying, there are connective tissues between art and business, creativity, and business. Even though my own taste is that I don't like that. That is not what I'm drawn to as a listener, a reader, as a spectator, but I found my projects were always sort of bridging those things. And I think what I observe is that there is a lot of creation of form and a creation of form and structure that is meant to be not just owned by me, that is itself a type of a public good or a structure that could be reused by others. And through that just manifests much more. I mean, that is how I personally experience the projects. When people say nice things to me about Kickstarter and talk about projects, they've gotten funded or backed. I just want to hear about the projects that happen. That's what's cool to me. I'm like, yeah, let's talk about what happened. This is awesome. It's awesome that your friend did that. It's awesome that you got that. That is what I personally am motivated by. There's some deep wiring that comes from the ways I grew up and being a child of divorce and having a lot of skitzo sort of experiences growing up. I think all of that lends itself to a personality that even to its own detriment constantly seeks to create harmony around them. So remarkable. It brings me so much joy to hear you talk about all these different projects that you've done and what drives you because that seems like the through line is just your personality in your genuine drive. So yeah, it's very inspiring for me. I'd love to hear actually about whether there was a bridge that you and teams and supporters and whatnot collaborators managed to build that you were surprised actually worked. Like something that was uniting a very seemingly complex problem and solving it with a seemingly easy solution. For sure, there was a good four years where the idea of Kickstarter and crowdfunding and conditional group purchase mechanisms were fully designed as schematics and as models. But when I would talk to someone in a bar, when I would talk to an artist and try to explain crowdfunding, I routinely saw people's eyes just go blank as they stopped listening to me because I was just boring them. And I iterated and learned, okay, how do I say this where people's eyes stay bright the whole time? So you'd like find your way, but it was extremely hard to explain crowdfunding through words. But the second we had the website, and like it took forever to make the website, but the second we had a website and the whole model was explained through a UI, it was instant and people would be like, bro, why didn't you tell me? I'm like, I was really trying. This stuff is like so murky if you try to put it in English. And so that was a powerful lesson of some ideas or things just need the right form in which to be expressed. And without that, they're just like completely illegible and useless. But when the idea finds the form at which it is to be expressed, it does its own work on its own behalf. I think about the idea of like an artist format fit, that the same way there's like product market fit for a lot of us as creative people, we are ultimately iterating through ideas and things we find interesting or aesthetics that we like to play with. Until at some point, I think we're hoping there's a click of like, oh, that major chord and that minor chord send a great together or that fits that. And I think what that taught me is that you can have a great idea that's impossible to engage with or consume unless it is expressed in a way that reaches people. That's a lesson I still am constantly struggling with of taking what our esoteric, maybe overly intellectualized ideas, but trying to think about, how is there something that could just work for somebody and they don't have to think too hard and it's just clear what it's about? I want to ask the opposite question. So there's an understanding of what things are and how things work. Going from bentoism to this idea of financing and maximization and it's a project that makes a lot of sense from different perspectives. But my question has more to do with friction. Have you ever found friction, say, with the art world or with artists or with creators? And I know you're differentiated between this where you are like, wow, this is unexpected and it's making me feel like maybe these doesn't make sense. Yeah, I mean, I think that there's a lot of friction with Kickstarter and sharing with artists. How people relate to Kickstarter? Is a reflection of their standing in the official quote unquote world where it's seen as low status or high status whether or not you engage? And there's people's own context really shapes how it is that they experience something. There was the time when Kickstarter had like Hollywood movies for a moment, Spike Lee, Zach Braff, Veronica Mars. These really came in part from years of me meeting with people in filmmakers and different folks and trying to be like, hey, I'm a David Lynch fan. I would pay for anything David Lynch made like empower the fans. And finally, that message clicked with a series of projects that were in the right moment in time. And you know, what was interesting is those projects all did really well when they happened. But then they got like a gocker blowback of how dare you rich people. And then it shifted what the permission logic seemed to be. The other funny thing that happened in that moment of time was that there was a next series of films that were preparing to launch on Kickstarter. As a result, one was a new Peewee movie. It's been a lot of time with Paul Ruben's great, great, great person. And in the midst of the success of those Kickstarter projects, Netflix stepped in. Netflix and Ted Cerando stepped in and said, oh, these fan driven sort of movies are the sorts of things we should be acquiring. This is what Netflix own studios should be about. And so there was a series of films that were going to be Kickstarter projects that Netflix began to acquire. Because they're like, hey, there's the public demonstration of support. And so there did start to be more fan-funded projects or sort of the fan-led projects got made. But it was now Netflix funding them versus the people. Was it funny thing? I experience friction on all of my projects. I assume friction. I've learned my ideas are like, can be overly intellectual. I'm still learning how to express myself in 15 seconds versus let me give you three blog posts you understand the context. And there's like these ways that my mind works that I think other minds must work that they don't work. I assume no institutions are going to support what I do or care about it. I assume I'm going to look like an alien to all of them. I assume that a significant portion of the population is never going to care about what I do. And I'm constantly in conversation with myself to not care. Remember not to care about those things, but it's hard. I want to. You want the universal recognition. You want the love. You don't want the friction. But it's there. And I assume it's there. And I'm learning over time not to fear it. But like the A-Quart project has been another interesting one. I'm just talking to people trying to make a new legal structure for artists. And I've spoken with artists and industry people at every level. The heads of major studios, Rick Rubin, someone that's been a big help to this project in different ways. Blue Chip artists, very famous artists, TikTokers, YouTubers, like every level. And there are have encountered every type of range of reaction. And I think that it's very hard to hold all truths simultaneously. But that's sort of exposure and having ideas that get reacted to from such a wide set of people is instructive because it is almost like a sonar to find what is true about it. What pings back, what does not? This sounds like a very productive recent session I had with my therapist. So it's good. It's good to hear this, but so beautiful. It's a good-- A thermometer today. I'm just warming up. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Let's talk about A-Quart. Because I think we want to talk about A-Quart. We want to talk about D-Fos today, like as primary things to center on. So let's start with A-Quart. If you don't mind for the uninitiated, what is it? Why is it necessary? And then I think the kind of annoying question we want to ask about it is like, what is it about creative work specifically or the kind of work that would come under the auspices of A-Quart that requires its own special legal infrastructure, as opposed to any other business? So there's a project that we've been working on for two years and changed now. And its origins are with Kickstarter becoming one of the first companies to change our legal structure to become a public benefit corporation. Through that, I learned that legal structures underneath your business have a material effect on what you can or cannot do or how you're treated. And I also learned to that experience. I watched how public benefit corporations became law. And they became law from a group of people advocating state by state. And it's at the state level in the US that corporate law is set. So they went state by state and got this law passed. So I just sort of clocked that many years ago. Oh, this is so technical. No one cares. And because of that, they're able to make things happen. Two years ago, the Dark Forest Collective, a group of writers that I've gathered together, we've put out three books. Our first book was having a lot of success. We were selling six figures worth of books each year. And all of that money was going through a split. We made on metal label. But there was no legal entity underneath what we were doing. That was kind of just yolowing it. And. the dollar figures were getting big enough that I needed to be smarter about it and started going down the process of okay, I'm gonna make an LLC and just make a structure to encapsulate us and instantly was hit with the struggle and alienation of how do I make this LLC form reflect how we work together and like where do I write this how do I make this how do I do this found it very challenging even for someone that's made you know entities in the past so actually like I want to design something for a group that was very challenging I knew I'd need a lawyer would be expensive and at the same time I was speaking with a friend of mine who's at a big foundation and she was talking about how they were repeatedly hiring law firms to make these custom structures for artists of like 25 grand a pop and they would make these super bedazzled things to do with the artist needed and then they were trapped in this administrative burden forever and everyone ended up unhappy and I just thought about these things and just thought about the PBC and thought could you create a new lane for a creative work where you could take what are the best practices that entertainment lawyers now use when they acclient ask them to set up a new entity so what are those things that you do is a default to make an entity that works for say a creative business that produces copyrighted material intellectual property royalties you know different sorts of revenue so what are the best practices that exist and where does the current system fail people and so we spent a year interviewing artists and at every level of their career and I was working with this group of lawyers including a woman named Susan McCormick who's globally recognized as like an innovator in corporate forms she was part of the Patagonia public trust structure and part of the PBC law and she's done this before and so Susan was my co-writer and so we basically integrated things that were best practices alongside what emerged as pain points from artists and creators today and used that to make a new custom type of LLC so it's an LLC form that has a preset operating agreement where there's about 15 different checkboxes or radio boxes that in the UI we've made you choose like is our entity more about art or is it more about money you know are we democratically owned or is it more of a dictatorship and just try to make the sorts of choices that you need to make when creating an entity make those understandable and relevant and so we drafted that as a statute and began working first in Colorado for the past year building a community there and having that be the first place where the AcorP laws pass there's a lot of reasons for why Colorado and there we've found bipartisan support our sponsors are leading Democrats and leading Republicans the Republicans who are co-sponsoring or from the western slope ranch areas of Colorado very rural Colorado and I thought I was going to have to convince a lot of people of the merits of creative work AcorP is not framed as like art is pure and true if therefore it must be protected AcorP is framed as artists and creative people are huge value creators in all kinds of ways they're currently under equipped here's something we can do that makes them more capable and what I found in talking to a Republican Senator or Republican mayor is that they know that some towns are more attractive than other towns because literally because a sculptor lives there and because they have work in their front yard property values are different tourist destinations are different and what controls that to a large degree is culture and so if you're a Republican mayor John Clark of Ridgeway Colorado it's important to him that his town have great of people and have heritage arts all these sorts of things and those folks also know that those artists tend to struggle and don't do as well and so there was actually an even greater understanding of the dynamic than I had a more practical understanding and so people were excited to yeah let's do something let's do this and so we've worked our way through the house in the Senate we've passed both the house and Senate by big bipartisan majorities and the governor of Colorado Jared Paulus will sign this law sometime in the next week so it'll officially be on the books there's some time of like the law has to be transitioned into practically being available that will probably take about six months and so you'll see the first eight corpse actually existing by January of next year in Colorado Colorado does allow you to create businesses from anywhere and as of next year there are as of right now somewhere between six to eight states other states are going to launch a corp bills the only one that's been announced so far is California but in major areas so we're going to see the a corp as a new potential standard even globally I think within the next couple of years now making a corporate form doesn't solve anything on its own you could pass a law but the law has to be accessible it has to be usable has to be understandable there's a whole ecosystem that must be built around this and so that longer project is what we're assigned on to and so we've made a nonprofit the artist corporations foundation which will solely work for economic rights for creative people and I personally do not care whether an artist uses an LLC an escorp an acorp an nonprofit to like legally structure what they do what I care about is access to benefits and services being empowered being looked at as an equal in broader society and you know seeing acorp as a subtle but long-term structural project that's trying to change that and so it's going to take a long time I think we'll see the first real practical benefits of acorp's in the next two to three years and I think we'll see financial benefits maybe in five years and you know maybe in a decade this is like so accepted and boring no one even thinks about it anymore that would be the ideal but yeah so it's taking a bit of what we've learned what I've seen in the past applying it to existing pain points that I was going through friends were experiencing and playing with law exploring how it is law happens and I've really loved that part of the process I've never done anything like this before and seeing on a local level how the right and the left can work together just fine on things that are practical and you know it's just a very different world and makes me view sort of civic life in quite a different way just seeing sort of how Colorado has worked and yeah hopefully we keep having success so at risk of sounding like a pureist and quite a socialist I do have a question about the identity or the practice the life of being an artist and that kind of positionality also in the economy in a larger sense when we think about the art object it is something that has a specific almost separate kind of category like economically like it doesn't function with like use or exchange value and an entrepreneur or somebody who is producing something that functions differently in that kind of circulation the reason why I talk about market is because of this merging here of the artist and the entrepreneur and from my experience a lot of artists are particularly interested in being entrepreneurs or kind of engaging in entrepreneurial activity when I look at it from the perspective of the United States I completely see how the A-Corp is like a solution that allows artists to make a living considering that the public infrastructure is not that anymore it is to support that but I wonder what you think about because you talked about the A-Corp going global I wonder what you think about some alternative visions for how artists might be able to make a living and be a part of the economy in this kind of way like for example in Ireland the basic income for the art scheme I usually live in Austria but also in Germany we have like just general cooperatives different already embedded structures for shared ownership or for self-defining shared ownership I just sort of wonder what the precedent would have to be like what the discussions would have to be around like what kind of a person in the economy what kind of an actor in the economy is an artist today so many great questions there I definitely am approaching this as an American and so as an American I do not foresee a world in which UBI exists in my country ever hard for me to imagine that the US would get there maybe maybe so I don't go to that as like a solution I think that capitalism loves art doesn't care so much about artists from the perspective of the economy a work of art is a capital good that can be exploited and fragmented and done all sorts of things with that the artist today only sometimes participates in right you don't on this any secondary sales so like the economy I think is already determined that a lot of forms of art are sort of capital assets and they are moved around in that sort of way but care for the artist themselves it's just not a part of it there's a subset of artists who are comfortable with the business side of things most or not most are brought up the way I was brought up of thinking like the money side of things is gross and you want to stay as far away from that as possible but if you intend if you pursue your practice with any seriousness you do interface economically with the world in some way and our survey found that this is of I guess it's probably a largely American artist that answered but we found half of the artists had some sort of legal entity for their work about 70% are LLCs about 20% are S-corp which makes them make more money and 10% were in like nonprofit We had 1600 respondents, I think there were like three that were parts of co-ops as artists. Because as an artist, you know, I don't think you're democratically making your work, most likely you have a practice you're pursuing. So half of people already have a legal form of some type. That doesn't mean just because as an artist has an LLC, that doesn't make them a sell out or do anything at all. It just means they have legal protection, and they want better tax treatment for how they make money. And so similarly, in a corp, because it has this oxymoronic combination of artists and corporation together, it seems to imply some change in the soul of this or something. But in reality, anyone who is making a living from their work at least here in the US, they likely have some sort of entity representing them. And so this is just meant to be a replacement for that. So like, this is more our option versus being the rounding error in a larger system that is not really ours. Now, the reason why I think this becomes a global standard is that, and that's hopefulness on my part. But one of the things that the ACorp does is it creates shared benefits like pools of services you can get access to by being an acorp. So maybe you could get workers comp, which you can normally get as an artist in America, or you can get easier access to health insurance, or you could be a part of trusts or co-ops of larger goods or services that are available to you. The acorp also creates a new form of security, the acorp share. So you can choose when creating an artist corporation by checking a box to say we would like to fractionalize into shares and equity to be shared with our collaborators. So okay, we all own 25%. So we all own that many shares worth. And so the creation of a new form of security that allows us to value creative work of the A share. To me, that could become something like a global standard for what it means as creative people, what is our economy? We have acorp shares that we create when we create new works or institutions. We trade those with each other. We sell them on online markets. We whatever. Who knows how that develops. But I think it's possible that with something like a designation of value, a vehicle for value like that, that is something that could come to be a type of a default and a type of a way that certain types of work are organized. Now, I fully believe that lots of people will reject this. Lots of artists will reject this. They'll reject it from the name alone, the name corporation alone. And that's totally fine. As I said, I don't care what legal entity someone uses. That is not my motivation. My motivation is empowering them. But by virtue of more people being in the same form, it creates collective power. It creates collective bargaining power. It creates all sorts of other benefits that I think we can convince people with over time. After I first had the thought and the name, artist corporation acorp came up pretty quickly. And then I spent maybe about two months sitting with the name and being kind of upset about it. Because I'm like this name feels kind of messed up. This is deeply wrong. Artist incorporation are there two words more oppositional than this? Have I committed some sin against the universe? I was reading hero with a thousand faces, the book about the monomyth and in it, the author talks about how in the hero's journey, when the hero has to eat all the shit and goes through all their trials and is denied over and over, what happens at their lowest point is that they look up and they're able to see something that no one else can see. And what they're able to see is the doors of transformation. And the point of the hero's journey is for the hero to be so humbled that they walk through these doors of transformation. And the doors of transformation, he writes, across all of these different societies and myths, the doors of transformation are locked in a specific way. They're locked by opposites, life and death, light and dark, fear and love. And that because we see those as being so oppositional, we perceive no space in between them. However, what the hero's journey does, it allows you to see this gap, you step through the gap by virtue of one person stepping through the gap, their job is then go back to the village and tell everyone about this transformation they just learned. It enables the whole group to go through that same process. The point of the hero's journey is not for the hero, it is for the group actually and it's to bring back that sort of transformation. And so when I was reading that, I just thought maybe that's what this is. Maybe these things are so oppositional and I, whatever, I was so humbled, not that I'm a hero in this point, but I was so humbled by lots of things that I could perceive like maybe there's a way. And so in that tension, which I think is innate to this, there is also a power and maybe a potential to hold both those things true at the same time without betraying them, but that is the trick of this project. I keep telling everyone I work with on this project like this is a the multi-century project if we do it well. And we have like dug up a ton out of the ground and it's our job to like protect it and pass it forward. And I think of my role in this early stage is my role is to represent, it sounds cheesy, but to represent the soul of the artist. Because there's lots about this project that will just default towards market demands and like that is the default of all the world and like every conversation someone's trying to do that. But of course that is not as your question said Elena, that question is not how an artist is motivated, right? And so how does this, how can this hold both those truths at the same time? And it's tricky, it's tricky. And I put you with great humility and think, you know, all skepticism and wearing this like totally completely understandable, I would feel the same. But when you dig into it, it's like this is the world we live in and people are needing to engage with it and we're doing it in like not the best ways right now. So what are we protecting? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. That's a great answer. And one that I really appreciate. I think like a part of this as an American myself, I'm extremely grateful for the pragmatics of this particular operation. So maybe that leads me to the next thing I love to touch on, which is AI, which for me is the most like a giant kind of cliff of like we need you be I immediately. You're going to starve to death kind of moment. But putting that aside, like I am kind of curious how Acorp thinks about the specific kind of affordances of AI. And ultimately kind of brings me to this question that I really want to ask you. And like absolutely no kind of judgment behind the question at all. But we talk to you, the musician Jennifer Walsh, who is a hero of mine. And she also put this very plainly about intellectual property, just the basic kind of question. And she noted this like incredible irony over the past 50 years or so where in the past intellectual property was kind of the enemy of the artist in some respect. Like intellectual property was a thing that a lot of artists kind of held with the label. Artists were sampling and committing all kinds of intellectual property crimes. And the goal of the artist was to delight in the abundance of intellectual material that existed out there and to comment and to balance this and to play around with it. And then here we are 50 years later AI ascendance. We've had our reckoning with Metallica and Napster. And now we're on the other side of it where interestingly it is precisely the artists who are saying intellectual property is important. My data is important. My sovereignty over my data is important. These are things that I own and I consider to be like a critical part of not just how I monetize my activity, but really who I am. And of course then you have Suno and Yudio and Anthropic saying, okay, like intellectual property, like it's maybe nothing important. We all should actually maybe play freely and the beautiful abundance of intellectual material that exists. I respect what Jennifer is saying, but I think that is a very minority group of artists that we're doing that. You're talking about negative land and whatever Paul's boutique, but the BC boys wouldn't let someone sample them the same way now. So I don't think that has been a dominant strand at all. I think there's a certain sort of puckish type of artist who delights in that. You know, I don't think we build the law around them. A puckish artist who delights in the ability to sample the world. Just pushing the boundaries. Pushing the pushing boundaries. Like how can I miss you? How far can I miss you something before someone gets mad at me? It's almost like a form of trolling convention. Like if I think of the band negative land in particular, they made very weird. About thinkative like hip hop. Like sampling is like instrumental to the logic of hip hop. No, like I don't think that's just puckish material. I think that does genuinely result from delight. Yeah, but I don't think that's like ripping off IP. I think when that started, there wasn't yet a legal form to represent it, but I don't know that a hip hop producer minds paying someone that they sampled just a part of the culture of it. We're in the Napster era of AI. There's all sorts of illegal things going on, but we don't know yet what is legal and what's not. There's basically no cost. No one is paying anything like the actual cost of AI right now. All those are being kicked away down the road. If I look at how DeFos say is using how we're using Claude agents and code, probably we would have been spending three million to four million dollars a year on the developer bandwidth that we're getting out of Claude agents and instead we're spending probably 30,000 a year. And that delta is going to get squeezed over time. And Anthropic is going to eat that delta. Anthropic could probably charge us 10 times as much right now. And we would be essentially trapped and probably in the summer. Probably in the summer. Yeah. And maybe another competitor offers us a deal temporarily. But like, so we are in a weird period with AI where the actual consequences are being ignored intentionally. And also because a lot of it's beyond our understanding. So I do think that the intellectual property for artists is critical. It is the thing that every corporate institution is trying to acquire from the artist. That is the single most important thing they want to acquire. And contracts are tilted to make those hard for artists to own. And you just look at how every element of business is structured, it is all about owning the underlying rights to what these things are. And so you're seeing labels comfortable playing with, you know, and these things now because they own those rights. No one can take them away from them. They're just simply looking for further ways of exploitation. You have to look at major labels as estates. They're managing dead material in a way. And so they're just constantly looking for what else can I do with it. If you're like a startup and you try to get a living artist to do something with you, they're going to be skeptical for all kinds of reasons. If you go to the estate of someone, there's like, well, what do we make? You know, can we make money off this? Sure. Let's make a whatever and a Nat King Cole coffee cup or something. That's a terrible example. But I think those things are still it is the prize. It is the prize in these creative worlds and the powers that be you're willing to exploit them in Trashham because they already own them. Like they own the entire history of music. They only have to worry about music made from this point forward. And if more of that is made as derivative of things they already own, even better, they're killing it. In terms of what ACorp specifically say about IP and AI, there's nothing in there explicitly about AI, but there is a lot of thought that went into intellectual property and there's limits to what you could do because it's a state law and federal law overrides. But the one thing we put in was that intellectual property rights, these are reversionary rights in an ACorp meaning you essentially as an artist you can agree for the ACorp to hold your work to sort of license it, to house it. However, in the invent of the ACorp going away, the default as it just returns back to you. It doesn't go to the creditors, it doesn't travel with the corporate form, it stays with the artist, which is a pretty radical stance that we'll see how that plays out in the industry. But I think what the form itself can allow to happen, you know, I look at say Holly Hunden and what they did with Holly Plus as an example is it does allow you to do to create an entity that is a license of a model or okay, you want to use my work as a model for your work, fantastic. Like engage with this platform. I've set up that let's use it, pay a certain fee. Here's the structure. I get a certain percentage of what gets made. Like there are things like that that are I think are clearly going to be the way to do this. And right now we're relying on, you know, sooner or these big platforms that have no interest in artists protection whatsoever. They're just interested in engagement and content that are definitely going to be antagonistic to the rights of artists. But you know, if you could get Holly and Grimes and you know, five artists to band together and be like, here's our shared model, you like our beads, you like our things, whatever, you can license us. This is how it works. Or you know, you can get a Timberland track from his official model, but he gets 5% in the songwriting credit. There's ways I can imagine this goes that try to hold all sides as being valid. Where it gets hard as if it's happening through Claude or OpenAI or these models where you don't know what's being processed. But again, that's where I think we're in this Napster era where it's like, oh, what can we do? We put up our hands. But we saw that, you know, once there was payments architecture, once there was certain pipes there, the industry was could fully shut things down and change things over. And that is going to be possible here too. Just no one is actually incentivized. And we are in a raw power grab of trying to write the future where it's a battle over who gets to write the future that's happening right now. And it puts me in a strange position of, for say, DeFos, incredibly reliant on AI could not be doing what we're doing as a four person studio, which is how we operate now. We would have to be way more expensive. It just would not be possible. And the ability to have an idea and to treat software as an input output, very simple process. Like it totally changes the nature of working. As a leader of a team, I've gone from needing to, how do you give people feedback in a way that doesn't hurt their feelings or how do you like Helena hasn't had a win in a while. We got to make sure one of her ideas happens, you know, so that she's engaged and happy. And like all these things you think about to like keep everybody happy, that has all sort of left the table. And now it's about what do we do? And let's try and, you know, it's just so it's so dramatically different. But yet when I play out the map of what's happened where, you know, maybe we could be a 20 person team and instead we're a four person team. And you just roll that map out across more and more parts of the economy, definitely leads to an outcome that you're like, how does this make any sense? What is at the end of this? It seems there is no end to this. And so I'm constantly enjoying the benefits, fighting areas where I feel it encroaches on my own mental sovereignty and also really fearing where it's going. And what's clear is that no one in charge has the courage to really do anything. So what that means is that we're going to head into a massive chasm of some sort of crash of a social order and that people are only going to do something because they're provoked by unavoidable, insurmountable pain. And that means suffering. That means widespread suffering. And another conversation with my therapist right here. So what do you do? Yes, what do you do? Yeah. There are a few ideas that come back. Both for your work, your ride in everything you've produced. I can think of mainstream extractive web as a concept, an idea of platform capture. So my question with the force has to do with this idea of a private internet. And the extent to which it may be in a way represents a return to what the internet could have been. It flourishes from a sort of optimism that could have been like late 80s, early 90s. Is that something that you sense is that maybe part of the vision of the project does it emerge from that sort of historical impetus that was kind of a thing back then before the internet became that sort of backforest. I grew up on that early internet. I was a message board person. I blogged daily for years. So that's definitely my online origin point. But I'm not interested in going backwards. I don't think of this as backwards. Maybe it is a path not taken where once the feed was introduced in the late 2000s, the feed is what really shifted everything about how the internet worked. And just led to all the social dynamics we currently know. Defos, which stands for dark forest operating system, is almost like a internet like companies or universities have internet like your own private internet that everyone there can access and you do things together, but it doesn't leak out into the outside world. So I feel like we have made intranets almost like a consumer product to where creative community, a group of collaborators, a group of friends can easily set up your own shared communication, planning, money sharing, resource, distribution space that is private just to you, if you wish. It can also be more public if you want. And that is built on top of a protocol that uses decentralized identifiers. So did, which is what AT protocol is based on. And creates a model where your data is always owned and controlled by you. You can export, you can create a mirror or relay of your defos space somewhere else very easily. And so it's like providing that protective space like an internet and doing it in like a pro social post crypto way of we want an interoperable web. We want portable identities. We don't want to be trapped. And we believe that trusting corporate entities to not trap you is a promise that's going to disappoint you. But trusting protocols, trusting certain types of software, trusting that rules based systems can function as they are presented. There's reason to have more trust in that. Those things can also change too. But I think there's reason to have more trust in that. So I think we're trying to do both of those. And there is an edge and much that like artist corporations has an uncomfortable edge. There is an edge to the idea of private internet. Because I think some people go to privatization. And they think, well, I want the internet to be public. And the internet hasn't really been public for a while. It's ad supported in public. It's exported in other ways. And it's public. It's always public with an asterisk. And one way of looking at private is, oh, it's discriminatory and exclusive. Another way of looking at private is like inclusive to specific groups of people who want to be able to have real conversations with each other that are harder to have and spaces where you don't know who all is watching. I kind of view it as an obvious reaction to where the web is now. And the way we've built it is a reflection of when we're making it. So because we started this a year ago, we were able to build on top of like decentralized identifiers. We used a lot of stuff we've made and metal able before. We're able to take advantage of agent coding and to make things very fast. And my original vision was we need to make an operating system. We need to make an operating system for groups of people where the LichisLisim install the apps they need and have like a shared data set to them. And so our internet idea, the D-Foss idea came out of that. And so in an agent coding world, OS with apps is actually a really fast way to build because the OS can just hold protections and rules and privacy and you know, the hard boundaries of the system. And then each app can reflect a different function, discrete thing that if it makes sense to people, they install it and use it if they don't. It doesn't. And I think what that leads to is a to use a Vincotesh term, a cozier type of an internet. Imagine an Instagram feed or a shared space where you know exactly who's there. You know, you can browse the internet together basically with exactly who's there. You don't have to worry about who else is looking. And you just show up differently in that space. And so that's what group chats have been the last 10 years. First group chats really happened in 2010. So we're like 16 years into group chats. But I think dark forest group chat. I think that is the most important social structure of the 21st century. What nations were to the 19th century, what corporations were to the 20th century, like the group chat dark forest is to the 21st century. It is this social structure through which change will be made. Influence will be influenced. We take that seriously. We think, okay, if this is the key social structure, like, what does it need? And so money, greater operational prowess, a memory, more sovereignty, more portability. Those are the sorts of things we think about. I have no idea whether or not there is a specific expression. Is on point or not, we'll find out over time. I have no doubt that this is the next phase of the internet. That like the public internet is kind of cooked. Agents are going to make it even more so. All the things to be built now. I think are in this fuzzy land of private or beyond the easy reach of agents, bots, advertisers, surveillance, all of them. I'm really, really interested in this question. My background is in the AI industry. I spent a lot of time actively destroying the internet with agents as part of how I make my living and how I think about the world. Open source feels like it's dying at this particular moment. I was just watching this amazing video yesterday of someone going through every single Linux OS and being like, "Hacked, hacked, hacked, hacked, hacked." This was cooked. This one's cooked. It is incredibly, incredibly difficult to build any kind of open source software. It's also really difficult to, let's say, manage permissions in a way that actively segments humans from agentic users. That's a really, really tough thing to do. So I'm really curious how you guys think about encryption and how do you think about actually building a kind of firewall between this more kind of cozy human internet and an agentic internet that is almost by definition loves spilling? It's really hard. It's very tricky. The first thing we do is we do allow spaces. We haven't fully rolled this out yet, but we've couple of spaces we've done this. But, say a space can choose whether or not to enable MCP access, their defaults. So like, do you want to let agents plug directly into our space? Okay, you know, we will allow that or not allow that. But you can't block an agent from appearing to be a user. You can try to promise that. It's a whack-a-mole that you're going to lose. And there's a degree of like, you need to have some social rules to protect that. But it is going to be hard to make it like truly black and white. A hundred percent know agents are in this space unless it's like a small number of people that you actually trust. I don't know who's making this. I hesitate to say this because I feel like it's such an obvious product. This has to be a trillion dollar company already. And we've talked about it for D-Foss. I think we'll make it. But it really just feels like we need to make blade runners. You know, the job of a blade runner, the blade runner was an agent whose job was to detect other agents. And so, you know, one thing we've been experimenting with is, let's make a blade runner. Let's install a blade runner in a space and just let you know on a percentage probability. Is this an agent or not an agent? But I think you have to do more things like that because it's so hard to tell. And so that could end up being something like, you know, some sort of score that shows up on certain messages. If you have blade runner mode on, wouldn't want it to be that like they used chat GPU to write this post. But more like, is this an authentic user or not? But clearly the internet has to move in that way. And I'm just waiting for blade runner as a service. And it's yet another thing we have to pay way too much money to have. It's a type of a detente that is just going to be forever escalating. And like whatever you do to try to limit, there will be a counter force to push against it. And it's tough. So, you know, my assumption to be any space that has over X people, they're probably as an agent, probably any public space. Someone will probably send an agent in there. And we're going to have to, I think, be smart and clever about how we think about that. Also worth noting that like having agents in a space, super legit. You know, you could have the community manager that welcomes each person with a personal note. Or that could be an agent that actually welcomes them and tells them where to go. And it's smart about it. There are spaces that are using agents to be the in keepers. And just to do some of the logistical things in a space. And honestly, I think that's cool. Maybe we make a safe version of that where it's like, hey, it's one job. You know, it doesn't have an ulterior motive. That's where I think things will net out. AI felt more to us like R2D2 and C3PO, dweebs with British accents that people felt like they could push around. You know, it's a very different vibe than the way AI feels to us right now. I want to ask about the new creative era. And I want to ask this question about like AI optimism because like, as someone who's deeply immersed within this space. First, I am really aligned with the kind of general principle of the new creative era. This sort of idea that there is a pretty incredible opportunity ahead of us. The pretty amazing opportunity for democratization of access to resources for creative work at like an unbridled scale. Like, I do think that there is for better or for worse, there's an abundance narrative here that does not not make sense at this particular moment. At the same time, saying that in public sucks. Like, that's not a pleasant thing to say. And people hate it. I mean, truly, my bet on, you know, Pauli market is like, we'll be actually achieve real, but Larry and G.Hod, but through like the artists of the world right now against the AI technological apparatus. The backlash is so huge and so populist on both sides of the political spectrum. It feels universal. So I guess like the question that I have is, what do you think about the backlash? How do you think about talking about it? And I think the more important thing is, how do you like the optimistic about creative futures at this particular moment without actually like enriching people? Yeah, nothing you have, but like I certainly have. And I wonder how you think about that problem. I think that maybe the past year might be the highest approval rating for AI we will see in maybe the next 20 or 30 years. We've already experienced sort of peak belief through a small subsection of people. And the wider it goes, the more discomfort you see. Every reaction I had to AI as it was building up was just my only answer was shut it down like nobody wants this shut it down. I still feel that is a very defensible position and that is still my core position. Like I think, yes, let us have more engineers. Let me edit my own work like these are work or reasons to talk to each other and to do things together. Like these are good things that we're losing in many cases. I think that the backlash is on a right side of history. How big the chasm gets is a question of how that plays out and what happens. But my reasons for optimism are even just thinking back farther. There's a book called the Cult of Creativity. I read a couple years ago that really blew my mind by Samuel Franklin University Chicago and it talks about how the concept and word creativity were inventions of the Rand Corporation and Defense Department after World War 2. As a way of addressing what was increasingly depressed American populace that didn't like the white collar lifestyle they were entering into. And so there became this desire to try to find like this sort of essence of life that people could believe in. And so they studied artists and they studied engineers who would work all night on projects to find like what makes these people tick. And these Stanford and Rand researchers came back with this theory of creativity this essence that was alive and certain people and initially they tried to like do Worshack test to discover who had more of it or like find it on the brain with brain scans. But like the word creativity entered the dictionary in 1966. In 1959 there was a bill signed by Eisenhower which remade the American education system to become creative. So by the late 60s creative thinking brainstorming was being taught to American children. I am a second generation creative American. And this was this idea of like we can teach people the skill of sort of self actualization through commercial applications of work creativity was always seen as a commercial idea was an industrial commercial motivation. You know now I see a world that has been remade by that idea. And an idea that started in social sciences was like a deep legislative hit nothing that visible but yet as it's played out we can just see that the status of creative people creative works place within culture overall is just like straight up. So I compare where art and culture and books were when I was in high school versus what they are today like night and day different so much more respected so much more time spent so much more legitimate so many more people making living from it and like the charts of like Moore's law and all these things they near the charts of creative output like it's just one of these things that is just keeps going. And so I just look at that and I can't argue with that now there are downsides to that there's more competition there's less resources there aren't the gate kept walls that protect the 5,000 artists who can make a living you know back in Florence there was like 36 registered painters in the city right so it's like very different worlds we find ourselves in. But yet I just can't help just to look at the raw change of things I just assume and to see that like things are shifting in this direction and I think that's only going to increase and that doesn't mean we're going to stop complaining that's an important thing to also realize is that even the world of like everything works out great. The amount of complaining will be the same if not more it's not going to change the tenor of what we hear of how people are critical we have an art world that rewards problematization and that attacks solutionism that attacks optimism right there's lots of these values that are embedded in this but if I do. just look at the overall movements, the movements of demographics and how people spend their time and 70% of people end at the age of 25 when it be a full-time creator growing up. And if I look at the AI world, I think actually they're rational. They actually might be reading the job market correctly. What's the path for me to supply myself with what I need? The institutions are not the answer. Sure, you could get a job at one of the 10 big companies or something, maybe that's an answer. But people, I think people are being drawn to a truth. And I think that truth is all around us and it's been hard to notice because it's been both so big and yet subtle at the same time. But overall, it just leads me to think this will be seen as the creative century, the period of time in which the way we solve problems, the way we approach politics, the structure of society, we do it from a cultural and creative lens. We look for elegant solutions, we look for culturally resonant solutions. There's like aesthetics and values, all these things embedded into more things that we can imagine. They're embedded into how you get a cup of coffee and like what type of car are you by? And that is just going to keep growing and we're nowhere near the crest of this. And so I think that is the bigger story going on. AI will change parts of that. I hope the ACorp can make that more manageable in some ways. And I think that was something unleashed by very forward thinking people who had quite beautiful solutions to how to think about a disenfranchised and unhappy populace and embedded a change so slight, debated in academic circles for a decade before it hit the mainstream. He had, I would argue, that's maybe one of the three biggest forces of the 21st century. I'm still long all of these practices. I think we're nowhere near the top and how people get paid and how many listeners you have, there's so many secondary things and challenges to sort through that are incredibly important for people to be able to do this and have security doing it. But big picture, you know, I think this was our destiny and I think that we're finding it. We're finding it. Subscribe to this podcast for more analysis at the intersection of algorithm, subjectivity, and the odds. (upbeat music)