Transcript
Jason (00:00:00) - It's like a new printing press moment, but our copyright laws and the way we think about it are still stuck in the Gutenberg printing press era. We have mountains and mountains of paperwork securing IP, and it just doesn't operate at the speed and scale of the internet. And there's a lot of market failures that happen as a result of this mismatch between how we think about IP and how the internet and generative AI actually work.
Daniel (00:00:30) - Welcome to the Five Year Frontier Podcast, a preview of the future through the eyes of the innovators shaping our world. Through short, insight-packed discussions, I seek to bring you a glimpse of what a key industry could look like five years out. I'm your host, Daniel Darling, a venture capitalist at Focal, where I spend my days with founders at the very start of their journey to transform an industry. The best have a distinct vision of what's to come, a guiding North Star they're building towards. And that's what I'm here to share with you. Today's episode is about the future of intellectual property.
Daniel (00:00:58) - In it, we cover programmable IP, the new economy of ideas, the convergence of fan and creator, tackling large language model data attribution, blockchain's gift to artificial intelligence, and the future of human creativity itself. Our guide will be Jason Zhao, co-founder of Story Protocol, who is building the programmable intellectual property infrastructure that is native to the internet. Built on blockchain, Story provides a neutral source to track IP origins, enables remixing of IP with multiple stakeholders, receiving attribution, and delivers an economic framework for everyone to participate in revenue that is created. Born out of South Korea, a global cultural innovator, the startup has raised over $50 million from the likes of A16z, Crypto, Endeavor, and Samsung to become the leading contender to reimagine how intellectual property is managed for a modern age. Prior to founding Story, Jason was at Google's DeepMind, focusing on putting novel AI research into production. He was an investment scout at Sequoia, a computer science graduate from Stanford, and can be seen lecturing about his passion and philosophy at Oxford University.
Daniel (00:02:06) - Jason, great to see you. Thanks for coming on to chat with me.
Jason (00:02:09) - Hey Daniel, great to be here.
Daniel (00:02:10) - Story Protocol's on this mission to introduce a new economic model and software infrastructure for intellectual property, right? And the objective here has the potential to impact everyone from lawyers to creatives to entrepreneurs, from the creative industry, the music industry, all the way to the pharmaceutical industry. So a huge swath of the economy. So before we chat through about how you're going to transform IP, can we just first talk about what is broken with IP and maybe specifically the stress that this digital age is putting on it?
Jason (00:02:44) - Absolutely. So just to start off, I think it's really important to align on what is intellectual property, what is IP, and why does it matter. Just to give a very high-level overview, intellectual property is extremely unique as a concept because physical property, I think everyone understands, you know, I have a beachside home and there's only so many houses you can have on the beachside, and that's why it's valuable.
Jason (00:03:03) - There's natural scarcity when you think about ideas, especially creative works, like I have an idea for a play or I have an idea for an invention. If I tell you about it, Daniel, and you go tell all your friends, then you know, we can all make use of that idea. There's no natural scarcity. You can infinitely replicate that idea, but it's actually technology that sort of really shapes the way the IP works. So the first IP law is the first origin of this concept of IP came about as a result of the Gutenberg press, the printing press being invented. And that made it really easy to copy text. And so now all of a sudden, if I write something down and I share it with one person, they can share it with thousands of people. And that's a big problem in many ways. Even though it's good for disseminating ideas, it's not good for incentivizing creators. So intellectual property, it allows creators. It allows the Shakespeares of the world of the day to have a reason to create things because they have some value capture over it, because they own that property.
Jason (00:03:48) - And so it's about injecting a notion of scarcity into a sort of space that doesn't have that notion naturally. And the reason I bring up the printing press is because as you alluded to with the internet giving everyone global distribution and connecting so many people around the world, and now with generative AI and these crazy language, image and video models giving everyone a Hollywood studio in their rooms, the way that creativity spreads is just completely different. It's like a new printing press moment, but our copyright laws and the way we think about it are still stuck in the Gutenberg printing press era, right? We have mountains and mountains of paperwork securing IP, and it just doesn't operate at the speed and scale of the internet. And
Jason (00:04:33) - there's a lot of market failures that happen as a result of this mismatch between how we think about IP and how the internet and generative AI actually work. And so that's kind of where Story fits in and you explain.
Daniel (00:04:33) - It really well. It's a great framework. So how do we create an IP regime that's native to the internet then?
Jason (00:04:40) - Absolutely. So let me just run through some of these sort of problems very specifically that we're seeing in this mismatch between internet and AI scale technologies and sort of like outdated IP regime. The first market failure is that there's no real business model to incentivize the creation of new content. Even though we have these godlike tools, people are not finding a way to monetize their IP because of this ever rising cost of marketing and attention. And so what Story is trying to do to solve this is turn IP into a network. Why can't IP be a platform and a network on its own and grow with the same sort of network effects that a business like Facebook or a social media network would have? And so what we've done at Story is build a sort of way to allow creators to register their IP on our protocol and hand out some skin in the game, some rights, some abilities to monetize that IP in a very easy way with a click of a button and align their community, align their fans to grow that IP together with them.
Jason (00:05:33) - And so as more and more people get aligned to build this IP together, then that it grows and grows in terms of the attention they able to grab in terms of the talent is able to attract, and it becomes a network and grows without needing to have this sort of artificial marketing spend. And so that's one of the big pieces of Story Protocol is IP is now operating in these silos. These silos are competing against each other in the zero sum game. What if we made it an infinite sum game where creators could build their communities, and those community members could also remix the IP, own it, and have some share in the upside as well. That's really what we're trying to do. And then the second market failure is around AI specifically, which is all this creativity is great. Like we're big fans of AI, but with the recent Scarlett Johansson OpenAI incidents where there's now a lot of debate right at the time of this recording about Scarlett Johansson's voice being used in a proper way for OpenAI or OpenAI being sued by the New York Times for sort of spitting out facts verbatim from behind the paywall we're seeing now the cracks at the edges of the IP regime and new technologies, and we think that it's inevitable that AI will continue to spread.
Jason (00:06:36) - Open source models are everywhere that Matt has created, and that's a good thing. At the same time, like people are going to do interesting things, they're going to want to make remixes of Harry Potter. They've already, you know, created a Drake in the weekend remix that went up to number one on SoundCloud that had to get shut down. But this is a new Napster moment. But trying to cease and desist the entire internet is not going to work. You can't shut the internet down and we shouldn't try to. And so we're at a situation where AI is inevitable, but it's also illegal, and it's a lose lose situation for the original creator of the IP, and also for any of their fans that want to remix. Like if I'm J.K. Rowling, someone creates an awesome video using an AI model on YouTube. It gets 10 million views. I don't get anything from that. That creator out of other than satisfaction doesn't get anything. So it's really a lose lose. What we want to do is make it a win win.
Jason (00:07:18) - And this goes back to turning IP into a network. Can we allow J.K. Rowling to register Harry Potter on Story and set the terms for who can use Harry Potter under what context and what revenue, shares or cost needs to be? You know, what are the economics of that relationship? And anyone can agree to those terms or disagree and just leave that right. But if you agree to those terms, you can create a video on any platform. We can track that and grow this IP graph where the remixers earning and J.K. Rowling's earning, and they're growing this IP together in a bottoms up way. So we're really trying to address some of the fundamental failures of the business model of storytelling by using blockchain technology as a vector to align incentives and coordinate people at scale.
Daniel (00:07:55) - Is blockchain technology that real sort of fundamental technology shift that enables you to take this network-first approach for IP? Or what was the technology innovations that had to come together to be able to produce this?
Jason (00:08:07) - I think the real unlock of blockchains from an abstract level is coordinating ownership at scale, right? You have this real notion of digital scarcity, and this is what NFTs first introduced, is can you actually have scarce objects in a digital world where replication is extremely cheap and easy? And I think that's what blockchains do, is they allow people to coordinate ownership at scale.
Jason (00:08:25) - But we take it one step further. It's not, you know, NFTs generally, they're just static pointers to a media file. And that's interesting, but it's not really robust, and it doesn't really lend itself to that vision of composability that blockchains can also unlock. So we've seen how blockchains have done this for money, where, you know, you take a dollar bill, you move it on chain, and now it's a piece of software. You have USDC, USDT, and you can actually swap that piece of software on any, you know, DEX, on any lending protocol. It can go through this entire roller coaster of different functionalities. Its functionality is only limited by the power of software developers' imaginations, right. With NFTs and just this current static JPEG sort of style of IP, it's not really bringing, it's just bringing the media on chain. But it is media plus rights. It's media plus the rules for how that media can be extended. I can browse all the IP on the internet and look at their terms and conditions and in this very simple, programmatic way of looking at them, and if I want to use them, I can just click a button and leverage the IP, almost like a Lego block in whatever I'm trying to create.
Jason (00:09:22) - And so that's really the unlock there. And then the second unlock is developers were asking real entrepreneurs to come and build businesses on top of these IP primitives. And we need to assure them that, you know, once we set the rules for how this works on chain, we can't tamper with them ourselves. And that's really important because this is a public good that people can rely on, that even we as a core team contributing to the protocol can't revoke or tamper with fantastic.
Daniel (00:09:47) - And and a cornerstone of all of this innovation is around making IP programmable. So maybe can you unpack a little bit of what that means? And then this developer ecosystem that would be building on top of that, what could that enable? Build them to, to actually build on top of it.
Jason (00:10:02) - Absolutely. So the real meaning of programmability is essentially to allow IP to become multiplayer. And so making IP multiplayer, what it means is that you have the media on chain, but you also have all of the rules for how other people can engage with you, almost like an API for rights for every single piece of content on the internet.
Jason (00:10:18) - And I can easily say I want groups in my next game, and I also want this. Daniel, if you have a pug, I want to license your pug and use it. And now I have like these two characters in a game, right? And I don't need to talk to anyone. I just click two buttons and then boom, I have the ability to use them. If I make $100 million off this game, then you get a share based on whatever you stated in your terms. So think about like Super Smash Bros or things like the Avenger. Like we can do that crossover. Instead of having these individual negotiations between companies, you can just click five buttons and be able to spin that up instantly. And as a creator, you also tap into the entire world's creativity to extend your IP in different mediums. So someone can, you know, if I created a story, someone can turn it into a comic book, and then I can be instantly earning revenue from that. That comic book can turn into a movie.
Jason (00:11:00) - Now it's like two, you know, this graph is growing over time, and all the revenues and all the relationships are tracked by Story. And so we're allowing like basically this organic bottoms up growth of IP across different mediums and across different platforms and allowing it to be multiplayer, almost like a Lego block in the same way that DeFi has money Legos. You can now say that I truly believe that the next Marvel, the next Avengers, let's say the next Harry Potter, they're all going to start in this new way. What we see as a future of entertainment and media and culture is essentially these evergreen, almost in the same way that you have decentralized autonomous organizations. This idea of like an organization that can exist purely on chain, we think there will be almost like decentralized autonomous IPS. So you have a franchise where all of the characters, all of the worlds, all the ships, let's say it's like a sort of space opera type sci fi film, like you have
Jason (00:11:57) - all of these ships on chain, you have all the assets on Story, and then anyone in almost like a Wikipedia-like fashion can contribute to maybe the core storyline. Maybe they can create like a side storyline for a specific character. And it's almost like this Lego block building world where you can go and take your contributions and add it to this, this tree of knowledge, and that's what's going to sustain the IP. People are going to participate in it, and that's going to blur the lines between who's a creator versus who's a consumer. It's not just me broadcasting to my audience. It's this network where everyone, maybe some people are governing what's canon and what's not. Maybe some people have more of a contribution, but everyone is both participants and consumers. And that's I think the real unlock is it's almost Wikipedia-style, but instead of for nonfiction, it's for fiction. And then lastly, I'll say, like Roblox is a great example, our thesis is that every IP will become a platform. So Roblox is a platform for other people to create games within a game. Minecraft is the same way. Fortnite is the same way. Gaming is really ahead of the curve in this, but it's really important that essentially every IP, not just games, can become like a Roblox-like community where people are building on top of it and not just engaging in the core experience itself, but the core experience almost enables these secondary experiences, which then become the core experiences to arise. Because now most people don't spend their time just generally on Roblox, they're playing these games that other people within the community have created. And so I think all of these trends kind of converge in this idea of networked IPs and IPs as a platform. That's what we're trying to build the infrastructure to unlock. But I think that what history shows, and this may not always repeat itself, but what history shows in the history of consumer businesses is that typically new consumer unlocks in the way that creativity works tend to start with a new class of creators that have been neglected by the previous system. So I think YouTube is a perfect example where as a platform, you know, the founders of YouTube, they didn't go to Steven Spielberg down in LA or James Cameron and ask them, hey, can you create a ten-minute film on YouTube? Because we really just need the top creators on YouTube, right? It was like the viral videos, the cat videos, and now Mr. Beast of the world, this class of people who didn't have any voice before, who had no path to monetization, no one had the ability to look at any of their work, but now they were the ones that got really big on YouTube. Right? So it's like the 99% long tail of creators that were neglected by Hollywood, that were able to come up as a result of YouTube. And we think the same way that it's more likely on Story that it's a new class of creators, maybe crypto native creators, maybe those creators don't exist today, but they'll come on board soon. That really understands how to leverage the community, how to build a sort of networked IP. And they're going to be the ones that build the biggest networked piece.
Daniel (00:14:22) - Totally. That makes complete sense. And with the rise of new creators, you also have the increased enablement via new generative AI tools, right? Which at their core can be used to create multiple media formats of extremely high quality with just a few text prompts. So what do you see on the horizon of content creation as we rocket along this pace of AI innovation?
Jason (00:14:45) - Yeah, I think that two facts are certainly undeniable. The first is that the world is everyone's stage literally now. It's not just a Shakespeare quote, right? Everyone can reach anyone else. That's fact number one, pretty much right in the sort of fullness of time. And then the second is that everyone can create near state of the art level content, right? I'm not going to say that, you know, like when I saw a model is going to be better than anything you can do in Hollywood. That's certainly not true, but I think we're getting to the point where you can most people in their bedrooms could get 80% of the way there, right? So if you take the facts of everyone as a global distribution, and then everyone has godlike Hollywood-like abilities, you had to contend with what the downstream implications are, right? So I think that what's going to happen is that we're going to have an even more infinite abundance of content. But unlike, let's say, the fanfiction on AO3, which is of varying quality, like some of them are very good, some of them are kind of a little spammy. Everyone's gonna be able to create really high-quality stuff, so you're going to have almost infinite amounts of content. Almost all of it is going to be high quality. And that's a great thing for consumers, I think. Right, because you have, you know, as someone who's a fan of a world like, you know, so many options of high-quality content, but the real question and the sort of open inflection point I think here is how exactly are creators incentivized? Because that's the ultimate question, is like, yes, as a receiver of this content, as a fan, as a consumer, we're going to ask participants like, this is great for me that there's more content out there that's more high quality. But as a creator, it's not always the case that that's good for them. Our sort of entire company's mission is how do we actually, like, create the right incentives for this future where creators, you know, they can create great content and they are incentivized to do so? And like I said before, like one of the problems is with more and more content, there's increasing competition. And so how do you actually get noticed out of the sea of awesome globally distributed content? You have to build a network around your IP. So that's number one. And then with AI, I think there's also an interesting factor where if you are a creator and some super powerful AI trains on your voice, in the case of Scarlett Johansson or your journalism in the case of New York Times, or your artwork in the case of, you know, countless, many artists that have had their art styles. Right. It's like in the style of Salvador Dali, right? Like if that happens to you and people don't need to buy your artworks because they can create your artworks by prompting an AI. The question is, you know, what's in it for you? So I think there's a real risk that we need to mitigate. What we care about is building an ecosystem of partners that are using Story as a source of truth. And of course, you know, it's an open protocol, so anyone can see that provenance attribution and leverage it because it's on chain. So definitely that's like the first piece of the puzzle is just knowing what's going on. The second piece of the puzzle is being able to create value around those relationships. And like if I, if I know who did what, I mean, that's good, but how do I pay them? Right? And that's another thing. Crypto is great. It's like settling, instantaneously financial value. So like, we're really building on these blockchain rails that help us provide a global source of truth that's untamable and has financial rails built in. And then Story adds in sort of like the IP specific logic to store and sort of license and remix and grow these IPs.
Daniel (00:17:38) - An underlying theme here seems to be this counter force between AI technology and Web3 blockchain technology, and they're often touted as two sides of the same coin. Right. But that's a pretty ambiguous statement that people just throw around. Yourself and Story are both at the center of these two worlds. What is your view of the interplay between the two technologies, and where do you see it heading?
Jason (00:18:02) - Peter Thiel is famous comment that AI is communist and crypto is libertarian. And I think what he's getting at there is that, like the economics of producing great AI models is all about economies of scale, right? You want to have all the data, you want to have all the compute, and you want to have it as cheaply as possible. So you want all in one place. That's why Google and Microsoft are just investing so much in AI. And that's why OpenAI is basically, you know, half owned by Microsoft, Amazon and half owns, right, and partially owned Anthropic. And the reason why is because, yeah, there's sort of increasing economies of scale, increasing returns to scale. It really allows for centralization in terms of who controls the AI and governments as well. Like you seen China, they have like some social credit system and a lot of facial recognition systems. So I think in that way that's true. And then in crypto, obviously, I think we all know like the sort of value of the network and the trust. Listening to the network grows with the more participants with more distributed nodes and, and the more different and diverse and, and and, you know, sort of multifaceted they are the more powerful and trustless and global system becomes.
Jason (00:18:58) - So it's almost like AI centralizing tendencies, crypto's decentralized tendencies. I think that's partially true from mostly from an economic perspective. And then there's this idea I think that's also interesting, which is that AI is infinite abundance, but blockchains are provable scarcity. Right. Like we talked about before, AI is just it's just like it's not just copying things, it's also generating things, and it's generating super cheaply and high quality. And so it's infinite abundance. It's like so much content, so much tech, so much knowledge. But then blockchains, they're you know, they're not about necessarily abundance. They're about providing proof and verification and scarcity and ground truth. In a world where the truth can be very liquid and more content can be very abundant, who actually did it first, right? Or who actually owns this right. That's a good interplay as well. Ultimately, like, to me, these are heuristics for understanding the tendencies of these technologies, but I think it's overly reductive to sort of slap the two together.
Jason (00:19:47) - And I think a lot of what's happening in crypto is extremely interesting. But what I'm really excited to see is not just decentralizing existing parts of the AI stack, like decentralizing inference, decentralized compute, not just the. AI to blockchain problems like using AI to like, you know, make intense easier and improve the UX of interesting elements. I think those are like surface level improvements that are like low hanging fruit. But the real interesting use cases to me, use cases where blockchains uniquely enable something for AI that AI cannot do it for itself. Right. And and that's that's interesting. So Story like is one example of this. But I think there's many other examples I think that will come up, which is, you know, when we talk to AI companies that don't use crypto at all, like they're very often excited to talk to us because they're hearing us something new and we're solving a problem that they can't solve. And that's really interesting. Right? So, you know, as a as someone who's observing the space and really excited about and crypto, you know, I spend some time at DeepMind, I love I think it's extremely interesting.
Jason (00:20:45) - But I'm really curious, like what are the crypto only use cases of AI? That's that's sort of open. And I think that's really where things are going to get unlocked at that level.
Daniel (00:20:53) - So what are the crypto only use cases of AI? It seems like you'd be a good person to to have a good lens on that.
Jason (00:20:59) - Yeah. I mean, to me what Story's doing is one example is this is this IP layer for generative AI as creativity is 90 to 99% of the content is created by some sort of algorithm, either enhancing or producing the whole output. Another interesting thoughts that I think is probably early is blockchains were, you know, are touted as a technology for reducing trust or the need for trust. And so you can trust anyone through technological means rather than social means or any other means. And that's useful for humans because there's reasons why humans may not trust each other without this. But humans, as you know, obviously, like we have many ways of trusting each other that don't involve blockchain.
Jason (00:21:39) - Like, I mean, I trust you that you're not going to use a deepfake and modify the things that I'm saying on this podcast because, you know, we have some like social connection. We've talked before like, I know what you're doing and all these other things. So like, we didn't need to use anything related to blockchain to do this right, to coordinate this. Machines don't have them. AI agents don't have that. AI agents can't KYC, they can't use the financial system, they can't do anything. And they certainly can't trust each other. Like the notion of trust is a very human concept. And so I think it could be argued that actually one of the big unlocks, like blockchains, aren't actually designed primarily for humans. They're designed for agents. When agents become autonomous, how do they pay each other? How do they trust each other? How do they interact with each other using a common language that may be the real crypto only unlock that blockchain offers, and it may be that blockchain is like somewhat helpful for humans in comparison to how hopeful it is for agents.
Jason (00:22:28) - I'm not saying that blockchain is helpful on this, it is, but I'm saying that these agents don't have any other way to trust each other. And so we do. Right. And so I think that's an interesting thought experiment, is what happens when 99% of users, so to speak, on chain, are not just bots, like not just airdrop farmers, but actually real robust agents that need to trust each other and can only do so in the context of this virtual computing environment, this world computer.
Daniel (00:22:49) - That's huge. That's huge. I love that that's such a great mental model to to think about it. And, you know, I think you have a really great lens on sort of where culture is, is going and where content is going. And I want to shift topics a little bit to something that I'm really interested in, which is around the incredible innovation coming out of South Korea. That's where your co-founder and CEO S Y is from and based, and it just feels that that is a market so rich in its credentials and creative arts and is a cultural powerhouse over there, and one that looks like from the outside to be living years ahead in the future already.
Daniel (00:23:25) - So other examples on the ground where the future's been pulled forward that you would think would come as a surprise to people outside of that market.
Jason (00:23:33) - Yeah, I think that two things like really interesting about Korea in Asia. I would say in general, number one is simply how open they are to new business models around content. And if you just look at the history of, for example, gaming or really any other form of entertainment, but let's just use gaming example, it's always Asia that comes up with the newest ways of creating games PUBG, which is, you know, like a battle royale game inspired Fortnite, right? PUBG is a Korean game. In-game transactions, micropayments, trading game like spending amounts of money to buy weapons that's super big in Asia. It's not yet that big in the US. And Fortnite actually, you know, it's kind of you can only buy skins, but in Asia you can buy literally anything. You have these full in-game economies. Eve online, for example. It's not an Asian game, but it's mostly Asian player based, right.
Jason (00:24:20) - And there's just so comfortable with in-game economies, digital assets having quote unquote real world value. Why is that the case? Like, why is Asia so ahead, why is Korea so ahead in terms of monetizing content and making content more immersive? I think it has a lot to do with, especially in the case of gaming, just the sort of historical developments where, in the US, you we were relatively developed as a nation. And so when you bought a game and you just buy the console and then you pay upfront for the game, right? That's how things work. That's why people don't like pay to play. Because you know why? Why am I paying more? I just spent 60 bucks on some Triple-A game in Asia. You know, like they were very much developing countries when this sort of like Triple-A games started coming out. And so people didn't. You went to an internet cafe, you still can go to an internet cafe in Korea or Japan, right? And you don't own the console.
Jason (00:25:04) - You don't even own the game, right? And you're not going to pay for the game. You're not gonna pay 60 bucks up front or whatever the equivalent it was. That's way too much, right? You don't even that's not enough to pay for a game. And so you have to onboard users in a freemium point. And as a business, you're onboarding users in a free way. Then you have to monetize later. And so the idea that in-game assets could be valuable and be paid for and be transacted was just realized way earlier in Asia. And I think that's that's a really interesting feature of why Asian entertainment is always sort of ahead of American entertainment in many ways, especially in terms of the business model, is because they have a culture of really taking this sort of digital asset space seriously. And and so I think that's one interesting thing. Another interesting thing I'll say about crypto in Asia, and especially in Korea, is that the cultural valence around it is different. So the top IPs are exploring crypto and blockchain in in Asia.
Jason (00:25:54) - They're willing to do that. And it's actually very much the interest is very much led by these big IPs. It's not, you know, bubbling up. Right. It's like the super established players looking to use technology to engage their users and engage their community and grow their business in a novel way. Whereas in the US, like this is slowly starting to change, but it's a very bottoms up movement. And crypto actually has in many places the negative valence and people feel like they don't trust it. Right. And so actually like the cultural level of adoption and the level of legitimacy that crypto and blockchain has in Asia is just much higher, which allows them to experiment at much larger scales with much bigger IPs. Whereas in the US we kind of had to create brand new IPs, which is fine. I think that's interesting too. We have to create Azuki, we have to create board IPs and sort of fight our way up. Like, I think that's very different in Asia, where everyone is already willing to experiment, especially from the top.
Jason (00:26:42) - It's actually being driven sort of from the top, so to speak. For example, hashed is one of our investors, a Story. We worked very closely with them, and one of their really interesting projects that they sort of helped spin off is triple S, and it's like kind of the perfect, you know, it's a perfect project because it is a K-pop group. It's a K-pop girl group that's completely run by like holders of on chain assets, and they're monetized through crypto as well. And so people actually, like vote on the songs, they vote on different decisions. And then also like the business model is purely based on this community governance as well. And so it's it's kind of an early experiment in can we take something that is extremely popular already and supercharge it with crypto. And I think that's something that's like really only possible in a place like Korea, because IP as a concept is so much more prevalent there and so much more ingrained in, like the South Korean economy than it is in the US.
Daniel (00:27:35) - Yeah. And it sort of furthers a lot of the thread of what you talked about, which is sort of breaking down the barriers of artists and creator and the fans and the consumers of that. From that, as well as tapping into a network and your community for distribution, which sounds like even more of importance in this area where creative starts to explode in terms of the amount of content that comes out there. That's awesome. That's that's what's really cool. And so Web3 and crypto has gone through a little bit of a winter over the last couple of years. It definitely feels like things are detouring in a massive rate. And you guys are a fantastic example of just how creative and enabling using blockchain can be and how disruptive it is. What does it look like from the inside at the moment? What's the temperature check within crypto? What are people sort of sinking their teeth in?
Jason (00:28:25) - Yeah, I mean within crypto I think things are optimistic. Certainly within Story we're very excited. Like we're moving very, very quickly. Everyone has a lot of responsibility, a lot of work. But I think it's all worth it. And it's all happening very quickly, I think within the crypto world. Right. Like if you measure things have happened, the first is and probably most importantly so far, is that there's a lot of institutional adoption. And that's both from a financial perspective and also from a legal perspective, where on the financial perspective, you're seeing at least a Bitcoin ETF is approved, which brought in a lot of sort of participants in the crypto ecosystem that weren't able to participate before. Right. And a lot of these participants are more risk averse. They don't understand the technology, but they can slowly get access to it through the ETF. And then that might happen with Ethereum. Who knows. But I think we're starting to see like more institutional adoption of crypto as an asset class, which is really important for being a global financial system. And the substrate behind that. The second is legal clarity. And so I think, you know, just today or yesterday, a new bill was passed in the US that really clarifies, you know, what is what is the definition of decentralization? What does it mean to be fully decentralized. And these sorts of things are really important to drive crypto into the mainstream. So I think we're seeing a lot of excitement from that. And then finally, I think we're starting to see, you know, in most nascent industries, this is very true of AI, but also true of crypto is that infrastructure tends to get built before applications. And that's just sort of there's always these cycles between infrastructure heavy development investments and then app heavy development investments. And you know, every time the iPhone comes out, then you have all these apps that can be built. And so it swings from iPhone to apps to VR to apps on VR to blockchain to apps and blockchain. Right. And I think within the.
Jason (00:30:15) - Industry. We're starting to see apps and the developers behind them getting a lot more power and a lot more investment, a lot more attention, because the infrastructure is very, very good. You can pay with anything credit cards, USDC, you can pay with crypto, whatever you want. You can basically achieve parity with any app anywhere.
Jason (00:30:15) - In terms of user experience. And so with this infrastructure really scaled out in with Story, you know, we're trying to power the consumers out of that. You know, you have the building blocks in place to build any sort of app you want. And I think we're just just now starting to see the pendulum swing to the app developer side of things.
Daniel (00:30:32) - It's so exciting to hear. And I think that, you know, signals a real boom ahead from from that perspective, because I know that there's been a lot of hard work being put in on the infrastructure during this period of time that enables all these application developers to really start to build some fantastic real world products. So look, we could talk for ages about this, and this is why I really like doing this podcast, because you're a perfect example of an entrepreneur, and a company that is bringing a huge paradigm shift, really feels transformative across many different types of industries, and can't wait to see this play out. So thanks for coming on and chatting with me.
Jason (00:31:06) - Of course, this is a really exciting conversation, so thank you Daniel for the time.
Daniel (00:31:09) - What an awesome conversation with Jason. It's not often you get to cover the technology trends of both AI and Web3, as well as our roles as both content creators and consumers, all in one discussion. It points to a convergence of technological and cultural tailwinds that can reshape our future. And this future feels here already, thanks to the remarkable innovations that Story is bringing about. What stuck with me was how putting IP on blockchain will allow for it to live on through its fans, remixed continuously, and taking on a life far beyond that of its originator. And all of that can be done without forsaking the economic incentives of creation, rather enhancing it to a new level. You can keep up with Jason and his writings and Story's progress via his website jasonjinzhao.com. That's jasonjinzhao.com. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please share it with a friend if you did, and be sure to subscribe to the podcast for more coming down the pike.
Daniel (00:32:05) - Until next time, thanks for listening and have a great rest of your day.
