Full Ep. 2 - Jordan Topoleski, founder Arkive

Welcome to Chaotica, a space designed to dissent, discord, and disrupt, where ambiguity and uncertainty are welcomed and imagination is the prevailing state of mind. Our aim is to explore the future of human experience as we dive into the virtual age. We seek the interesting and reject the similar. The only constant is to question everything. The following is a conversation with Jordan Topolesky, He's 22 years old, had the time to drop out of Harvard twice, and he's a truly amazing human being. He's a super clear thinker and has the ability to just dissect complex concepts into small granular pieces. At the moment, he's building Archive, the world's first decentralized physical museum, where its members get to vote, have a say about the curation processes of which pieces of art gets added to the collection, and then where it's exhibited. He just raised $9.7 million for it. And today I had a really, really interesting meta conversation with him about all sorts of things going from collective intelligence to literally asking ourselves whether free will is even a thing or not. So tell me what you're doing a little bit about Archive.

Yeah, so the idea behind Archive is trying to reverse the model of a museum. So basically, we're taking a system right now that exists and saying, instead of going into a place like a museum, public institution, where people have chosen to curate works and you're looking at them and consuming them, what if you flip that model around and you actually became the producer of it? What if you actually chose what was acquired and what was curated into the collection? And thinking about it without the constructs of the borders of walls or within a physical place in and of itself or one location. So the idea behind Archive is it's a whole global membership that comes together to curate pieces of art into the collection, and then also is displaying them globally. So you hop off a plane in London and Los Angeles and Seoul. The idea is that when works are actually acquired into the collection, members are also participating in the process of choosing where they're stored, you know, partnerships with other museums, maybe a store lobby, a hotel lobby. You can think about all different places where these pieces could kind of be co-located. And I think when you start to think about it that way, it opens up this really interesting idea of—

Yeah.

In the past, it's like the victors write history in a way. If you look at some of the models right now, I think there's an unfortunate level of storytelling being something that's super exclusive. The reason that something is chosen to be in a museum comes through, I think, less eyes and less minds than it should right now. The whole idea of Archive is saying, is there a way for us to rethink this and include access to more people, to more thoughts, to more diversity? into the question of what's worthwhile to be saved, what's culturally significant to us as a society.

That is— you're like completely flipping the idea of what a museum is, which is really interesting. And I'm thinking like, man, I really would like to have an archive piece in the Stride office. I'm thinking, man, it would work pretty well probably over there in the background of the podcast.

As long as you're willing to open it up for everyone to see. I think a really important thing for us is—

Oh, best that can be done.

Yeah, something that's out there right now, maybe a museum acquires works, But believe it or not, for most museums, it's actually about 90% of their works that are never on display, or at least are kept in storage warehouses at a single time.

That's crazy.

So we are kind of going out with this mandate of saying, can we try and have 100% public display of works at all times? So if you're a member or you're someone that's tangential to archive membership, is this something where you can see a work and not only see it, but can we as a membership also think about placing these works in places they're supposed to be? So I think museums traditionally have often been an expression of soft power in a lot of ways, in terms of standing as a public institution that's representing a country's interests or things like that. Also hard power. You look at museums that maybe are showing things of literal colonial rule, of imperialism across the world, and stolen artifacts that have literally shown their reign throughout the times. And we kind of say, okay, that's one model doing it right now, but what if we could also say, ah, the Benin Bronzes, for example, that are on display at the British History Museum right now.

Yeah.

Those probably actually belong in Benin or belong in somewhere that they're supposed to be displayed that can probably more appropriately tell the story in a little bit less of an imperialist way. And how can we take that mindset with the entirety of our collection?

Man, that is really interesting when it comes to like the place where something is displayed all of a sudden acquires a lot of value because you don't have the choice that is like, oh, are we going to put it in that angle or that angle over there? It's like, are we going to put it in this country, this country, where within the country, who gets to sort of place it, who looks over it? And I think that, like, that can add really interesting context because when you go to a museum, it's like, you know, you enter and you go into an experience. So this places the piece of art a bit outside from its— what I refer to it as nature, but should it? Should I?

Like, am I just being— Yeah. Context is so important, right? You can think about an item being placed in a different location. For example, you just mentioned if it was here in the office versus it was somewhere like a cultural heritage museum that was particularly focused on a very specific genre, you'd probably have very different interpretations. And even categorizing something, you can think of things like boxes and labels, even calling something contemporary art maybe has some loaded context behind it, or putting it in a different category. And the great piece of what we're super focused on at Archive is saying, In the past, that may have been a decision that's made by a select group of people. What if we actually thought about broadening that and said our community of thousands of people were actually all contributing thoughts on where it should be and coming to group consensus on what the exact best selection of works are, but also storage opportunities for putting it on display?

I like that. So I like also what you said earlier, where it's like often a museum is a sort of way to showcase soft power. It's like, it's a showcase of power for some countries, institutions, etc. And so I'm like, for them to portray some specific narratives, and I'm like, what narrative are you trying to portray? What have you chosen to portray at Archive, and how did you choose that?

Yeah, so what we kind of did at the beginning is come together as a community and say, for this first season, uh, season of curation, we want to be focused on a topic. And we kind of said to the membership, Let's all come together and think about what we want our first statement to be. We came together and we chose this theme, When Technology Was a Game Changer. The idea of that is really thinking of the primitives of technology, thinking about the influences it made from the earliest days to now, thinking about Archive, which undoubtedly is a Web3-powered organization, and thinking about this next chapter of technology. How can we pay homage with these themes of retrofuturism and thinking about the past? One thing we say at Archive is, can we shape the future by saving the past. And the first season, so the first 8 works that we're acquiring between basically when we kicked things off back in May to the end of the year, is works that fall under this theme. So it started with the Super Genesis work, where we actually acquired the ENIAC patent, the patent of the first-ever electronic computer. I think this was this really—

The ENIAC.

—statement piece in saying, wow, this was the first high-powered electronic numerical computer that really started off this whole movement from back in the 1950s. Also a work that was super interesting because it had an untold story to it.

What's the untold story?

We focused on a lot of archives. So there are 2 gentlemen that were actually named on the patent, but believe it or not, there are 3 women behind the scenes coming out of the University of Pennsylvania that did most of the programming of it.

No!

Super involved throughout the whole process of creation and even displaying it on, like, their demo day that they had, but no mention of them in a lot of the history books. So what we were able to do at Archive is highlight this as a super interesting, historically significant work that's, I think, a statement piece for the beginning of the collection, but also for what we're setting out to do at Archive, but also shed some light in saying, hey, we want to think about telling the story in an interesting way that might sometimes have been forgotten in the past.

I think, like, just before I said, wherever you place the piece of art, it acquires some sort of context. Being part of Archive itself becomes— almost adds to the art piece itself. And it's like, I know you're probably feeling a bit like, you know, those are art pieces standalone, but it's like, if— and I really hope so— Archive becomes this fantastic, long-lasting, uh, long-lasting community of people, it could really take another turn for a lot of art pieces that maybe didn't find the attention they deserved, didn't find the narratives they deserved, as you mentioned. And it's like it's a newfound life for these pieces.

And I honestly think— I mean, I don't think we're building a company. I think we're building an institution. And the institution has a little bit different of a mandate behind what it has. I think it's this underlying sense of longevity and thinking about, you know, if this was the last project I was working on, I'd be really excited about that. And there's something that's deeper. I think a lot of projects I've worked on in the past, you know, I've had a startup journey kind of passing through other endeavors in the fintech space and the gaming space and a consulting and developing company in the past. taking me to this point and saying, wow, this is something that's really special because it's trying to build something just like a museum that lasts for decades, that lasts for centuries as a statement that's bigger than itself as a company, but it does something that can speak on behalf of society. And that same soft power I was talking about before, it's really interesting to think how the narrative shifts that goes from being something that's maybe primarily government-sponsored or something that's speaking to a few select few that are kind of making these decisions to something that's representative of a population or thousands, tens of thousands of people that are actually contributing at the end of the day.

Yeah, no, I love it. I mean, it's incredible. And I am so curious about the origin story of how you conceived even this in the first place, how you guys were thinking, We should, you know what, we should make it accessible for everybody to own a little piece of something and have right over what gets added to the collection. And then we have so much more to talk about.

Yeah, totally. So I actually grew up in a really interesting household where my parents were both public servants. So my dad was a public librarian and my mom was a preschool teacher my whole life. And I think I'd always just had this sense of thinking about public goods in a really interesting way. And I still remember every Wednesday growing up, we'd go to downtown Toledo in Ohio where I grew up in the US, and at the library they'd have this like outside brown bag lunch with a jazz musician. And after, we'd always go down the road to the Toledo Museum of Art. You know, I'm 5, 6 years old at this point, and there's always this really interesting moment where you step into the museum and feel this incredible feeling of exploration. Toledo Museum of Art has a wildly large collection, actually donated originally by The Libbey family was one of the largest producers of glass, and when the founder of the company passed away, donated a lot of his money and also a very extensive art collection to the museum to kind of start it and found it. So growing up, there's always just this trove, this treasure trove, almost like stepping into the closet in Narnia and seeing this whole other world I felt like I was transported into, and it was something that always kind of stuck with me. And as I grew a little bit older and went to college, I actually focused a lot of my studies on the history of technology and the history of information. So a lot of these interesting underpinnings of thinking a lot about storytelling, thinking a lot about how it's really important thinking of the means of communication, but also the conception or the connotation, the context of how you're passing along a message. So when I'd been working with a few other startups, I met one of my co-founders, Tom. Tom had a really interesting background where before this he was working on an on-demand storage company. And basically what they did is kind of like Dropbox and Airbnb meets the real world. So if you have an item, say like a pair of skis on you, and it's the middle of the summer, you have no use for it, it's just taking up space in your house, you'd click a button and they would come pick it up from you, store it in their warehouse. And then when you want it back, click a button again, and they would come bring it back to you. While they're holding it, they'd also have the potential to rent it out to other people. And when they're doing this, they thought it was going to be skis, they thought it was going to be bikes, they thought it was going to be tents.

Oh, what?

It actually started to be crazy things. They had like an Apple Mac 1 computer, they had Rembrandt etchings still in the case. They had Marvel comic book rare collections of original editions.

They're like Cloud for physical. Pretty cool. And like you drop all sorts of things over there.

Yeah.

And so they, they had all these sort of crazy items.

Yeah, yes. They thought it was just going to be these like, you know, maybe like household goods, outdoor adventure things. But we were walking through and said, huh, you know, it actually kind of looks like a micro museum in here. It's all these really interesting pieces. And we know people love collecting, but unfortunately these items are on display collecting dust in a secure warehouse. What if we were to think about this a little bit of a different way? This is around the time we said, huh, what would it look like if the Smithsonian, for example, the British History Museum, the British Museum was curated entirely by the internet? This was a large group of people. And that was this time where it was really interesting because you started to see this uptick in a lot of the ethos behind Web3, which has this idea of democratization, this idea of pulling in more people. I think access is kind of this core theme. It was around the time you may have heard of ConstitutionDAO happen. ConstitutionDAO was this project that came together, and it was a group through crowdfunding through a crypto token that basically tried to raise money to try and buy one of the original copies of the US Constitution. It took 6 days. They raised close to $50 million.

Which is the biggest fundraiser, I think, in history.

Fundraise per day.

Yeah.

Yeah, it might be. I mean, I think it was a pretty interesting experiment. Well, the one thing it proved is, wow, you know, people have huge interest in being a part of telling the story of history, having ownership in history, having a part, a seat at the conversation in telling history. And we also have this really interesting new mechanism to think about both crowdfunding, but probably even more important, crowd participation, thinking about collective intelligence, collective decision-making.

Absolutely.

I think it kind of clicked.

So many interesting points that we can go on there, but I want to understand how members participate exactly in this. So how do you become in the first place a member? How the sort of selection process works on who gets to be a member? How do you choose who's a member? And then the actions that a member can take exactly. So I know they have some potential over sort of steering the wheel and where it goes, but I'm just curious to see exactly sort of the whole journey.

Yeah, absolutely. So I would love even for you personally to go check it out.

archive.net/apply. Okay.

Right now, we have an application for members. It's a little bit more than just a name and email. It doesn't take too long of an application, but we just ask a few questions to kind of see your thematic interests and make sure, you know, there's, there's real interest behind what we're doing. After that, we have a relatively large waitlist right now. It's over a few, a few thousand people, but we're trying to be really concerted and really focused in this early bit of the community and thinking about who comes in, making sure it's people that are really thoughtful and really have the best interests at heart. So after that, members are invited into the community. And in the community, you kind of go throughout this process right now of every 3 to 4 weeks going through an acquisition round. And how these acquisition rounds basically work is early members of the community were brought on in kind of a paid position on the core team to think about the acquisition rounds and make sure we're really creating sort of a thematic theme. thematic pathway all throughout these acquisition rounds. So instead of just having random items kind of spread around like, ah, here's one historical document, Right. here's one sports card, here's one painting, it's really thinking about crafting this narrative around what's eventually happening. So in these acquisition rounds, the curatorial team will present 2 to 3 works to the community who then actually gets to vote as a member on which of them is acquired. The idea is after we go through this first phase and this first season into next year, we start this process of opening it up even more.

Okay.

Where we start this process of basically forking off these original items. So we're going to have these 8 items, for example, everything from the INYAC patent to Seduction, interesting work commenting on the relationship between the feminine body and how pop media and television portrays it. All these different works start as a very genesis point, and then members can come in and propose off this work, to take it down a pathway by acquiring a new work into the collection that they can propose by tying it to the original. So one example is we acquired in our 3rd acquisition round the Moonman prototype, the Moonman being the MTV Video Music Awards trophy that they give out to people.

No.

It's actually this design firm called Manhattan Design by this lady, Pat Gorman. They created this prototype and we actually acquired it into the collection. But for example, say in this, in the 2nd iteration of Archive, the second phase, you could say, oh, cool, I want to fork off of the Moonman. One direction I might want to go is in music television history and think about something like Michael Jackson's moonwalk shoes, for example. It's super related. Or you might say, oh, this is space-related. I want to take this in a theme and go buy the RV van that carried one of the NASA ships out to the runway.

Interesting. But that's a limit in the sense that you need to think something that's bound, but it's also so limitless in the sense that anybody can make A narrative. I mean, you need to come up with something compelling, but it could go in every single direction. That's also what's really interesting. And then it creates a narrative that is like, why was this added to the collection? Let's see where it came from. What was the original piece? So it's really interesting how you're thinking top-down. The principles need to be in place so that everything can then spread bottom-up naturally.

Yeah. And I think this is something we've talked about a lot in our community, and we've used this example of a railgun shooter. There's kind of these games you may have seen in the past where your character is kind of following a rail and you can still choose to aim any which way, shoot in any which way. But at the end of the day, you're kind of on this rail that's guiding you. And I think one thing we really want to make sure is still there at Archive is make sure that we as a core team that are kind of building the foundations here are helping facilitate the process of still making this fun and still making this be a really enjoyable thing. I think You can err very quickly on the side of everything feeling like work and everything being something that is no longer fun or enjoyable to do. I think it's our job to put in place, especially at the beginning, structure around the pathways we want to take, structure around kind of how we think about, for example, acquiring something in the collection and creating these standards that just allow for a lot of longevity while still allowing our members the full freedom and flexibility to really be in control and say, At the end of the day, they're the decision makers choosing what's acquired into the collection.

Totally. I like it. You're sort of flirting with access and curation. It's an interesting— you're like, we want to make it curated, we want to make it super high quality and steer it one way, but also we want it to be the people's movement. This is supposed to be a community of people that comes together and brings ideas. Right? And I think this is actually one of the things that crowds are really good at doing is idea generation. I mean, it will never— it will always trump individual minds, in my opinion, in my eyes. When you need to generate ideas, I think crowds are excellent. I think when you need to find a specific resource, crowds can sort of ramify. I don't know how to say it, but like, yeah, just spread out and they find exactly what's helpful.

It's exactly actually what we're seeing at Archive, where a lot of the members of the community early on have been I'd say are very T-shaped people. And what I mean by that is they're super intense with their focus in one area. So for example, you could say, like a sports card collector that's the 3rd biggest sports card collector in the entire world. You know, they probably have a massive collection of sports cards. You see them as a member of community. And then you also see someone who's a contemporary art gallerist, super indexed on contemporary art and saying, you know, they are one of the foremost experts in that area.

Got it.

super involved, have a very big collection.

Right.

If you bring together thousands of these people that are all these T-shaped experts in their individual categories, you could say, oh yeah, I'm the sports card guy right now, the sports card gal right now, but oh, now I get to learn about contemporary art. Oh, now I'm learning about watches. Oh, now I'm learning about video works. Oh, now I'm learning about, you know, all these different areas that sort of start to come together. And when you do that, you can say, wow, you know, if you bring together people that individually have a lot of expertise, you can start to have this collective intelligence, this collective mindset that I think is the sum of the parts, you know, are less than the whole when it all comes together and adds those up.

Well, that is really, really interesting. And I'm starting to wonder which systems exactly sort of you have the best outcome when you let the people choose. And I kind of feel like culture is like, you know, if you're gonna define culture is probably like what people like. I mean, it's broad. Why would you define culture in the first place yourself? I know it's a big question. But, you know, let's give it a try.

Yeah, I mean, I think culture is the expression of people. I mean, quite, you know, quite broadly, I think, put. But I think when you think about culture, it's exactly fit for what you're saying in terms of defining because the issue is it's very hard to define because there's so many micro pieces that are kind of building up to it. So, if you think of culture as a collection of, you know, mindsets, of attitudes, of people broadly across the world, you think about why having different diverse perspectives into what culture means is really important. I'm sure if you ask that same question, what is culture to 25 different people, they'll give you a wildly different answer. And even more than that, they'd probably have to think on it for 90 seconds to actually come up with their answer. I think that's like the exact point is that there are very different meanings to what it is. So there isn't a reason in trying to define that in a top-down way. Instead, what if we think of a system bottom-up and something that I think Very uniquely right now, we're in this attention economy that's very poised to put that in front of our faces more and more. Social media does a great job of that, very new experiences of culture. Actually, one of our acquisition rounds was focused on that. We acquired this piece called Eulogy for a Black Mass by this artist, Aria Dean. It was actually focused on memes and thinking of memes as a form of expression, both a form of art, but something that's become super front and center for society.

Yeah.

Undoubtedly, a big part of the cultural story. This one was particularly talking about Black queerness, but I think there's so many narratives that kind of get baked into how these are being created, the origin story, things like that.

I mean, it's a really interesting thought in the sense that for, I think, for most of history, we didn't really have systems to engineer culture bottom-up. We only had systems to engineer culture top-down. Those were the only ones in the sense that you have individuals that sort of make an incredible theater piece, and then everybody that goes there is like super affected by it. And then all of a sudden you sort of steer how people behave, how people think. Everything that stemmed from the people was kind of natural. I mean, I think the only way is probably the political system in the sense that you're asking people, hey, how should we change how things are? But I haven't seen it applied. I haven't seen systems trying to engineer bottom-up culture. And I think it's almost frightening to think that we've never had the idea, oh wait, let's let the people choose what culture means.

Yeah. And that's the exact question. How do you define culture? It's an extremely difficult question, but part of the bottom of what we're trying to get here at Archive and saying, Again, I kind of mentioned it earlier, how do we shape the future by saving the past? Because what a museum is at the end of the day is a place that's chosen to tell the story of very specific works. There's a lot of this connotation on what works you actually chose, but what if you thought of expanding that? Say there's this glass of water right now, probably just a random glass, but if all of a sudden I told you, oh yeah, after one of her performances here in London, Madonna came and she actually used that glass and it was in one of her big interactions, it becomes this actually culturally significant item that has a whole story underwrapped in it. And—

That's exactly what I'm going to do with that glass. I will store it away so that alongside with this episode, this will come with it. But no, I think totally. I mean, you know, the banana on the wall, right? It's like, what is art? What do you define as art? And, uh, and, um, which is really like, It's mind-blowing to think, um, you know, curation has never been, uh, from, from the crowds in any sort of way. So do you think the crowds outperform individual, uh, quality of curation? I mean, how even can you define quality of curation? Do you think that your archive gallery is going to be more compelling than some, you know, sort of council curated by the British Museum? Do you think you're going to get there?

Yeah, I do. I think there's different types of strengths people can have. I think nobody can be a perfect generalist. You can't be 100% in every single category. And just the matter of fact is when you come together with the power of the commons, with this collective intelligence, you can, as one unified body in this organization, be one of those super well-rounded, almost 100%, because you have individuals in every single category that are thinking about things. And I think something that's really powerful at Archive is we allow ourselves as an organization to flex bigger and say, anybody that's one of these T-shaped experts, anybody that's super interested in these topics should be able to be a part of the organization, should be able to contribute, and should be able to come be a meaningful part of choosing how we tell the stories. I think the more perspectives you're gonna have in the conversation, the more powerful that the organization can end up being.

I kind of have this vision that is sort of, we're sort of shift—

and I'm not the first one to talk about this at all.

I think Kevin Kelly writes it in his book, The Inevitable, which I highly recommend, it's awesome. But he talks about this sort of new, like, new age and these big trends. And 2 of these big trends that we're seeing and that we're constantly noticing in the past hundreds of years is the age of accessing and sharing, in the sense that you access goods for the first time, in the sense that you don't have to really own a song for you to be able to access it. You don't really buy songs anymore. You don't have to own a car, you use Uber. So you just access stuff.

Or even think about what I was talking about, my co-founder Tom, we talked about that a lot, what they were doing in this past company where it's like, you might be storing an item with them, but they also think about renting it out to other people. It's a very new model of doing that. It's democratization in an interesting way, but also access, which is kind of the core theme of our conversation today, I think.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And then you think, what does it mean to actually own something in the sense that right now, if I write something on my phone, it's mine, but also it's on my phone, which is stored on the cloud. Notes are owned, like someone is handling that for me. So it's not like I really own it that much. But if someone took that away from me, I would feel like it took a part of me, right? So I think there is a sort of blurring of the lines of access and owning, which is Which is really interesting in my eyes.

Yeah, so many different pathways to take this down. I think there's this very interesting thought, and we think about it a lot at Archive, of what it means as we collectively as an organization own different works in our collection. A big piece of this, it's almost like thinking about if you are a curator of a work that's on display at a museum, you probably look at it very differently. So say, you're walking down a wall of works and maybe stopping to look at each piece for 15 or 30 seconds, but if there's one that you've been a curator of, you're going to go up to it and say, I made this decision. Me as a member of Archive who owns this work actually has put this on loan. Maybe even my name is on that as being one of the people that was in the community and participated in the process of actually acquiring this into the collection. Probably going to look at it longer than 30 seconds. In fact, you might even walk— right back to where that piece is displayed with your family, with your friends, and say, yeah, I was actually a part of this, and let me tell you a 15-minute story of why it's significant. I think this piece is tapping into is, uh, we're in a society right now where you can start to actually tap into these pieces that tie you closer to something. And I think that's a large reason why Web3 and crypto has taken off in a very interesting way, because it's allowed people to feel a more intimate connection and It's kind of this principal-agent problem piece where it's turned a lot of people who were previously agents or people who felt like they were part of someone else's system to now say, no, I'm a main character, I'm a part of the system, and I'm maybe exposed to equity, quote unquote, in the system by being a token holder, by being an NFT holder, something like this. It's changing those dynamics in a really interesting way.

But I think the mere fact of contributing to the selection process is already something really powerful that creates something that previously really was impossible. And I mean, I haven't, I haven't participated in any of the creation process yet. Yeah. But I wonder what the emotional feeling is for someone to have been part of that and going, then going to see that art piece. And it's like, does this really increase and create more emotional connection?

I mean, imagine like this. Imagine you're the kid in middle school who's never been able to sit at the cool kids' table or never been able to sit at a table with friends and you eat lunch alone in the corner. And then one day someone says, ah, we actually have this really new interesting table that allows a lot more people to sit at the table, be a part of the conversation, sit with the, sit with the cool kids. That is kind of exactly what's being done now. You're saying, hey, this is something that in the past you have never been able to be part of. You are going and you are a consumer. What if you're now a producer? What if you're part of telling the story?

Do you think that's, that's something that we're going to get used to? Like, do you hope that's something we're going to get used to in the sense that if you sit every day at that table, you're going to be like, yeah, I belong here. I'm part of this group.

Yeah, it's empowerment. I think it's people allowing to think about who they are as an individual in a lot more advanced of a way almost. It's allowing people to say, oh, I'm not just maybe unimodal. I have these different components to me and I'm able to contribute in very meaningful ways to society more broadly. I think that's a really inspiring and interesting concept. Honestly, at the end of the day, I think it's one of the most promising concepts of technology in general. It's like if you go back to the philosophy of technology, I think a lot of the earliest ideas of it were thinking through allowing people to have more time originally, more ways to express who they were in the most human form, in the most human essence. And art just plays such a big part of that conversation.

No, absolutely. And the things that you do digitally, we're really never able to draw them back to the people. It's like, you know, what do you mean by that? Well, what I mean is I think there is a, there is a component where people are portraying themselves through digital art. For instance, you see on Twitter, it's like pretty much everybody has an NFT, maybe not anymore in 2022, but, uh, you know, people are portraying themselves, um, people are creating more than ever digital artwork of some, of any sort. Um, and so I, I'm sort of seeing that there is some excitement around creating emotional experiences in the digital. And that means contributing to selecting, curating, but also representing yourself as part of it.

Yeah, I was talking to a friend about this the other day and he kind of asked me, he said, what percent of people's identity do you think will be totally digital? It's like when you meet someone, which honestly is common, I think our generation is probably one of the first that's experienced this where there's maybe even a majority of people in my life that I first saw online before I met them in real life, right?

Mm-hmm.

So if you get introduced to someone, you might go check out their LinkedIn, you go check out their Instagram, you check out their Twitter, you have this whole impression of their identity without even meeting them. And I think especially this is accelerated by COVID, where there are friends I made over COVID that I'd only met through a screen. I'd never seen them physically in the real world. And we're in this era where a lot of that's transitioning. That said, there's nothing like sitting face to face right now and feeling that emotion. And I think there's still this grounding. And it happens a lot in this conversation with VR versus AR, where it's like, I'm very bullish on the thesis that AR is a lot more powerful, that it's going to be a mix between the real world and all these powerful things that we know exist there. It's human nature, but augmenting it with other things and not saying, oh, let's abstract it away and say, let's have it be a totally different digital era that's basically the same as you and me interacting on Zoom, for example, or putting on the headset and sitting in our bedroom. There's still something that we can go so much deeper in with physicality. And I really hope that doesn't get lost in this movement.

Well, I like that thought a lot. And I'm like, personally, I feel that with VR, you can sort of dream bigger in the sense that you're like, we can properly go beyond our physicality. You're not bound to you being a human anymore. All of a sudden, you can be anything. And you've seen Zuckerberg's video on the metaverse, right? You had the robot and all of it. But which doesn't necessarily need to be the representation. But what I mean is you can abstract your physical form and you can go beyond those boundaries. Now, do we need the boundaries is another question in the sense that the moment you abstract the boundaries and you just go explore, I think for anything to feel really innovative, it also needs to feel somewhat grounded, which is why we do all of these experiences that are somewhat—

Grounded.

related to the physical world. Like, you go shopping in the metaverse and you see you're going in a shopping mall. It's obviously not going to work like that, but we need to have some sort of connection. So that's why I think AR could take more foot in the first few years and probably be a much stronger application in the medium term, I think, because we need grounding. We need some grounding.

I think it's actually funny if you think about this whole concept of metaverse. If I had to think back and say, what has been the most successful version of it? In my mind, it's Pokémon Go. This massive sensation. What Pokémon Go in a really interesting way is it added a digital layer on top of the entire world. But instead of saying there's this ecosystem that you're used to, it's physical, it's the sidewalk outside, it's the bushes in your front yard. But what if there's more there that you're not looking at right now? In a lot of ways, it's very similar to what I think we end up doing at Archive in this project. And what we're doing is creating this Pokémon Go-like system of having items placed all around the world in different locations where you got to catch them all on the way. You got to go see these different works. But also, there's definitely eventually an AR, maybe even VR concept of archive where you start to also augment the storytelling. When you're looking at a certain work, you could think about its story being embedded within it.

Yeah.

You go and visit an experience and have it be so much more than just that work on the wall. It's context, and you start to embed that into the picture of how you're interpreting the world around you. And that's what we're getting to, right? We're getting to an era where information is becoming more enriched around everything that we do. And storytelling is one of the most emotional and powerful forms of information in my mind.

No, and I can only start to think about the sorts of enriching that can happen from the community where you go to see the art piece and it has all of this contextual information, not necessarily even added by Archive itself, like you guys, like the team behind it, but by the users that are enriching with stories that is like, I actually came to visit this piece with my girlfriend and we ended up, you know, sharing a beautiful moment under this. And I think this was interesting because of this and this. I think our experiences are going to be so enriched by other people and you're trying to enable that. And I really, really like that notion. I think that can be applied, by the way, not just to art. It can be applied to anything in the sense—

To all human experience. Yeah, I mean, seriously, it's like, it's storytelling at the end of the day. What we hope to do is collectively storytell in an interesting way that might not have been done before. So you might look at one work and have one interpretation, but maybe hearing mine would be even better. There's a reason why sometimes, if you and I were to go to the museum together and we could have a really long conversation afterwards about how we interpreted a piece, and you say, oh, I thought this was framing a conversation this way, and I was like, wow, I interpreted that totally different, and it gets to— a core of our assumptions in a fun way. We can have all these pieces kind of glued and attached to that work in this whole other layer of interpretation that we don't have right now.

Yeah. What's the relationship, you think, behind the crowd and the storytelling? Can a crowd create an original thought?

Hmm. Interesting. Uh, ooh, that's, that's a really interesting question. I wonder if when a crowd comes together, they're at least able to give a more holistic picture. So if you think about telling a story right now, there might be different angles to take. But I do think when you come together and have all those different angles told, you get a much more holistic picture. I mean, maybe someone has a really personal connection. Oh, hey, my artist was— the artist was my mother. I remember when she was painting this in the childhood bedroom that I was in and how this went. Someone else, it's the first time they've ever seen it. In fact, maybe they're not even a fan of the work. They have a very different interpretation. And what you get is this layer, maybe the objective storytelling of the work. isn't necessarily different. There's facts. Yes, this was created in 1994, for example, but the subjective nature of it and the interpretation of it, which is really the fun, creative storytelling element of it, starts to just enrich that objective data.

It does.

If you look at a lot of works right now, right, like the story that you get behind it is the artist's name, the year, and maybe a description of the material that it's on. I think that's doing the bare minimum. You know, there's so much more that you can add on top of that.

No, absolutely. Which is like the beauty, the beauty also of like having enriched data is exactly as you said, you have sort of the person that is really saying this thing and the person that is saying this thing, and it kind of evens out in the sense that you had, you have one side and the other side. And so which is why the question is like, you know, can we get away from the mean? So is there a way to engineer a crowd that can sort of break out from the, from the sort of averaging out? Or If crowds are bound to end up with the average, can we engineer a way in which we do enable some specific aspects of the crowd's brains to arise?

Yeah, very good question. I think this is maybe sometimes what we've seen with the downfall of direct democracy and the reason we've kind of gone to systems that have added more nuance. It's a little bit of a question in my mind that comes down to how you're allowing pathways to contribution. You know, and maybe in a conversation, something that you've thought a lot more about than I have, you're probably more qualified to talk about it. You've spent— if you're an expert in a certain field, you know, you probably deserve to have a little bit more weight. I think a lot of the focus that we have at Archive is trying to think through this and say, hey, you know, when it's the contemporary art round, the person that's a contemporary artist or someone that's a contemporary art gallerist, you know, might have an opinion on it that's a lot stronger than other people. So when we even think about voting on works, We're shifting to this system of delegation where you have a set amount of points, say 1,000 points, that you can choose to allocate over the entire season. Instead of just saying, oh, it's one vote, yes or no, you can choose to allocate, like this one, 400 points. It's 40% of my vote for the whole season, but I really care about participation in this one because I'm either very knowledgeable about it or because this work means a lot to me and I want to be center stage in telling the story of this work.

Nice. So that system sort of embeds the depth of connection that you have. And really, you really believe in something specifically. And so you need to allocate all of your— do the votes get more expensive the more I allocate on one candidate? In the sense that I know there is a system in which every single vote, if you vote for every single candidate, you have just enough number of votes.

Yeah.

But then if you allocate all of them, they become slightly less powerful.

And so do you have any sort of linear Yeah, like even quadratic voting where it's like first vote is 1, second vote is 2, third vote is 4. No, but I think we're really open to being experimental with our community and trying to think about what is the way that we can get to the best decision being made. And we're at this super primitive stage in all these organizations right now where with a lot of DAOs and a lot of Web3 organizations, it's one token is one vote. To the end of the day, what that means is the person—

So basic.

The person with the most amount of money is the person that Look at these votes. It's 5 to 10% participation, a lot of them. A lot of times it's 3 or 4 people that are the majority token holders, a VC that's delegating their— no shade, no shade— a VC that's delegating their token vote to maybe a blockchain organization. It's someone on the founding team, and it's a bag holder that's overly financially incentivized. For us, it's saying, how do we abstract away some of this financialization? In fact, this is the reason we actually chose to go out and raise raise venture money early on because there's one way in running these organizations that's introducing this financialization directly away, saying the first thing we're going to go out and do is sell a token, sell NFTs. And a lot of projects have done that. You can bring in $5 million, $10 million, whatever it is.

Yeah.

Kind of a cash grab. And now you're in this system where everything is financially motivated because that's the first thing that you did. What we said is the reason we want to go out and raise money is because we really need to set the stage for what Archive is going to be. An archive is an institution at the end of the day. For it able to have a lot of longevity, we need to really be able to set the tone, really be focused, really have a concerted effort around setting the barriers, setting the tone of what wants to be done here, and build it out in a correct way so that the core team itself can slowly move out and have those rails in place for the community to be able to carry this on for Hundreds of years and beyond. And I think introducing financialization has been a really tough move, oftentimes in a negative way for projects early on, because it kind of flywheels out of control.

Absolutely. It makes total sense. And I'm so interested to see the correlation that you're going to create between the type of curation and voting of the members and the art that actually comes out. what art pieces are bound to what systems and why. I think that's going to be really interesting to see. I'm not sure if you're ever going to be able to draw any sort of connection, but I think so.

I think we will. I think we will. I mean, we've seen little interesting examples in the way we've been doing it early on is very 1.0. For our first few acquisition rounds, we just went out and these works were presented and community members could say, I vote for option A, I vote for option B, I vote for option C. And it's 3 options, you have 1 vote, and it's done.

Very basic.

As we start to expand, see people say, oh, like, I think it was our second week, uh, you know, member reached out and said, hey, uh, these 3 works are great, but I want to abstain. I feel like I'm not, you know, the right person to be commenting on this. Like, huh, super interesting. They still wanted to say, hey, I'm an active member, I'm still super participating, but on this round, I don't want to vote. I very much engaged with the materials, I read everything, I tuned into the calls of the community, I thought about this deeply, At the end of the day, I said, I actually don't feel like that. Or it's even different. Some members say, hey, of these 3 works, I don't feel like we should acquire any of the 3. I feel like this is one where I want to not just abstain, I just don't want to vote for any of them. I want to pass on this round. And as we continue to grow, we have to build out a system that allows all these variables to come into play. And that's kind of what makes this so crazy in this Web3 world is once it's out there, it's out there. It's a running system.

And you're going to build all of these different systems one way or another in the sense that you think Like, Archive itself is going to fork all these sort of different curated communities that have different rules for selecting the art pieces. And anybody can subscribe to whatever they subscribe to in the sense that I think that the art pieces that we select should be decided by highly experienced people that have done specific things in their life. And so you're going to curate the curators themselves through that. And then other, someone else wants actually pure democracies, like everybody's got one vote, which doesn't necessarily end up being the best outcome always, but maybe the most interesting one. For instance, I think there is a funny event that happened. I have very blurred memory, but I know they kind of needed to decide the name of a boat. I think it was like the Royal—

The Boaty McBoatface story.

There you go. And so if you let everybody come up with names, and then which one is the winning name? The absurd one that everybody's like, ah, it's gotta be that one.

It's funny you bring that up. sometimes joke in our community archive that we've messed up if we end up acquiring Boaty McBoatface into the community, partially as a joke. But I think there's maybe actually a little bit different of a way we look at it, which is it's our goal to find and experiment to the systems that work best.

Interesting.

Obviously, we still want to have the system at the end of the day. And if we could jump to the final stage where we have the voting system that we feel like as a community, is working in the very best way. We want to get there. We don't need to mess around with systems that we feel like aren't accurately representing what our membership wants. What we do do, however, though, is I think graduate to this model where we start to form guilds. I think what guilds look like is something that's a specific way for you to be involved with Archive. So right now, you're a member of Archive. There's different themes that come about. One was music television, one was focused on INIAC patent and historical documents, one was focused on video works, one on design and architecture, for example. Right now you're voting in all of these. In the future, you might say, hey, I'm going to join Archive and I'm going to join Archive in the Watches Guild. I love watches. The rest of the stuff, I love being around. I love seeing the conversation, but I just want to be a voting member of Archive for the Watch Guild and specifically involved with that one. So we start to allow all these pathways of introduction for people that might have these specific interests, still want to be exposed to everything else, Both in terms of the people that are around and in terms of a collection building strategy. But their contribution is going to be a little bit more focused on where they feel their expertise is. I think starting to allow these little modal pieces to build out starts to build this honestly complex organism itself that's kind of exploring all these different directions. Can we have the VC archive?

No, I'm joking. It's the last thing you should do. But quick one. No, it's actually not a quick one. I think it could be a hard one. But tell me, what I'm thinking is you're saying that you're going to be experimenting with different types of voting systems so that you can figure out which one the best way is, right? And the question is, how do you know when you've found it? How do you measure the outcome of a selection process?

Very good question. I think the answer is simple. The answer is when the community collectively feels like it's the best pathway for choosing the right items. And I think I say this to people a lot. I say everything we do at Archive right now is an experiment. The whole project is an experiment. And what we need to do is make sure that as a community, we're supporting the community itself, that the members are feeling like this is an accurate process for representing the collective interests, which why, again, to go back to this original point we were talking about, potentially forking off at some point is very important because people that are in the Watch Guild, for example, and people that are in the Contemporary Art Guild, might have very different opinions of what should be brought into the collection. We have to make sure these different modals all at the same time. By we, I mean the community. This is eventually an organization where it's just a group of people all doing this together. And it's me as someone who's on the core team right now, participating just alongside hopefully someone like you who ends up becoming a member and participating member of the community.

So I love how opinionated you are in the sense that you're like, You accept, totally accept the fact that Archive may be a success for the members, but may also be seen as a massive failure for non-members. It's like, oh, they select absolute shitty artworks. And you're like, yes. And that's— but in our definition, these are a fantastic phenomenon, and that would define a success.

Interesting. So I think it's our job at Archive to make sure that our membership continues to be representative of the best group of people. that are there to tell these stories, acquire works from the collection, et cetera. So a lot of the job and a lot of the system that the community and the core team is really focused on right now is how do we make sure we have a system with longevity that makes sure we can both add new members in that have phenomenal perspectives in making these decisions, and also how do you prune the membership sometimes? So if someone is saying, hey, I no longer am able to be an active member, or hey, I'm not participating in a way that's productive to the community, There's also ways for people to roll out. And I think that's actually something that's super interesting in Web3 right now. It's allowing people to now have this exit to the market almost in a way.

Totally. Which is something that we haven't thought about. Everybody's engineering system. Yeah, onboard, onboard. What about offboard? What about someone's contribution to a DAO is done?

Say it like this. Say you're a member of a country club right now and you're 9 months in, you're like, I don't get a lot of value out of the country club. You're not getting your money back. Hey, man, we enjoyed having you here, Michelangelo, but we'll see you later. That's this really interesting thing. You're actually voting in a way, your confidence in the project as a member. So if you say all of a sudden, hey, I no longer am getting a lot of value to this organization, you now go out to the market and you sell your membership for whatever the market price is for it. You're literally voting with your membership by actively choosing to stay there, and you always have exit liquidity to be able to sell this to someone else if you don't feel like this is a place you belong. So this is a really interesting metric that I think talking to other operators in the DAO and the Web3 space are really thinking about is this metric of how many people are flipping, quote unquote, the membership or how many are listed for sale. For example, you can go look at it on OpenSea, becomes this interesting metric of thinking about how tightly aligned and people are tied to the community. If there's 10,000 memberships and only one is listed for sale or one is sold in the past month, you must say, wow, there's this very interesting mechanism where people feel like despite there being offers out there for maybe tens of thousands of dollars for their membership to have access to this community, to have access to voting power, I still feel like staying there. Probably a pretty good success metric for engagement.

Yeah, but at the same time, the more you grow, the more Archive is going to evolve. And so you're not always going to be able to accommodate everyone. So you should actually hope for some members to roll out because otherwise it's just stagnating.

No, I agree. I agree. There needs to be an out system and That's why it's so interesting. No one's forced to be here, and there's not always such a high level of sunken cost of being there. If you want out, you feel like this is no longer a community for you, it means we as a community need to make sure that's not happening for bad reasons. But that naturally happens.

Right.

I think you have to think every year there's probably a certain percentage of people that say, hey, I no longer have the time for this. Hey, my interests have changed, and I feel like I no longer want to be actively participating in these votes. There naturally needs to be a level for kind of circling the community. And we as a team and as an organization really need to think about creating those pathways out just as strongly as we create the pathways in and allowing there to be that continual rotation. So the best of the best are basically always there and have the infrastructure to attract them and have them be contributing members long-term.

And then offboarding them as well when the time is ready, because yeah, you don't want them to stay there when they want to offboard and just out of complexity, they're not onboarding, or maybe because the price is high and they want to wait until they speculate. And they're like, I don't— which is why engineer— like, adding the financial layer is like, it's quite tricky. You gotta think it well because you create incentives whether you like it or not. Uh, and if your incentives are not aligned with the community members' incentives, all of a sudden you create a system.

Yeah. So there's this big discussion right now of like utility in, in Web3 communities. And I think it's interesting because there's 2 ways you can look at someone choosing to hold their membership. One way is saying, I'm holding this membership because I think it's going to appreciate in value. It's not because you're seeing utility, it's because you see financial returns of holding this as an investment asset. I think we really are trying to find ways that we can avoid that at Archive and make sure if people want to sell or want to hold for speculative reasons, we can actually think about enforcing mechanisms for trying to make that not happen. On the other hand, what you do want is people continuing to hold because they say, wow, even though on the market, someone's offering me $5,000 to buy my membership in, I perceive more than $5,000 of value, because every year, I have access to events, to cultural conversations, to voting and selecting and allocating millions of dollars to be able to actually acquire works into the collection. That's the metric we're competing against, is saying, Are people holding membership in Archive because they really feel like they're getting that value out of it? And they say, oh, of course, I'd never sell it for $5,000. This is really valuable to me. And I think the whole Web3 space is just kind of trying to come to ground and saying, when financial incentives are introduced like this, it's really hard to tell the root cause of why someone is selling something. Is it speculators? Is it flippers? Or is it people that are maybe exiting the community in a more graceful way because they feel like, oh, if someone's like, hey, I literally started a new job, I don't have as much time to do this anymore. Perfectly valid reason. And it's how do we create the right collection, the right curation mechanisms in a way to say natural filtering out and bringing people in that are going to be there for the long term or mission aligned. And how do we too, as a community and organization, provide real utility?

Yeah, no, no, absolutely. It makes sense. I think a lot of Web3 teams have been thinking about how they can actually embed some proper utility that goes beyond the project. I think until now, I've seen a lot of like really easy, as you were saying, you just drop the promise of utility, you haven't really figured it out. You drop the financial aspect though, that one just comes straight away. But then the utility, you got to wait a little bit.

Yeah, there's this funny analysis I actually saw it said, believe it or not, projects, NFT projects that don't announce a roadmap tend to trade higher volumes and at a higher price than projects that do.

No way.

And I think that's representative of this whole financial speculation piece a little bit. There's this mystery to it where if someone's saying, hey, I'm going to deliver on X, Y, and Z promises, you should be involved with it.

Hold up. Is this the same concept as when VCs drop the valuation because you start having a little bit of revenue? In the sense, the more abstract it is, the more you can imagine, this could be incredible. It could be literally something.

But there's a reason you're using— I think there's a reason you're using VCs as an example. VCs are venture capitalists, people that are trying to make a return on their money. And as an investment strategy, I think that concept makes sense. And it's the onus of DAO builders right now in the space to kind of say, hey, we have to take this the other way around. There's a route we can go. We can say, hey, we financialize and then we try and create value. There's another route you go where you say, hey, we can create a lot of value and then we can introduce financialization or some type of layer on top of it later on. But something we've been super focused on at Archive first is saying, how do we first hit community market fit? How do we make sure we as an organization are providing lots of value to everyone in the ecosystem and not just going out and doing a rampant cash grab?

What you're really selling is experience. Experience. Like you're selling the journey of being part of a community, of people that are thinking with you on how to curate specific art pieces and then having an enhanced experience when you go look at that art piece and where you don't and you feel like you have to go look at that. So you're an experience provider. It boils it down to a horrible noun and we don't have to categorize it, but it's just, it's an interesting framework to think about it.

Yeah. And I mean, I think that's a really popular theme right now. We've talked a lot about the attention economy, and in the attention economy, experiences, curation, cutting through the noise, and actually thinking about what constitutes something that you enjoy is super important.

Yes, I think that's a phenomenal point in the sense that right now you could experience a lot of things. Like you go on the web, there is so much noise, so much information everywhere. How do we get to a point where I can choose and align only with the experiences that I want to be part of, the communities that I want to be part of, So I think there is a sort of— I see this shift that it's like all of a sudden the really valuable aspect of a lot of startups that are arising right now is actually the curation is the value add.

Yeah. And I think that's why communities are becoming so front and center, community-first organizations. They're seeing in order to do that, you can't have one person that's just curating the experiences. You have to think a little bit bigger picture from that and saying we still have to have an experience that's connecting on a human level, an experience that's comprehensively including lots of different views into the picture. So curation is just this huge theme right now. I'm super bullish on it. Community-led organizations and curation as a theme of becoming a really important commodity.

And then we go back to, okay, let's think about which system is most effective for the specific purpose. And I think you guys are trying to figure out the best way for curating art pieces. But the tasks may be very, very different. If it was producing art pieces, you'd probably not want to have a very democratic and fair system. You probably want to index towards outliers in the sense you want to sway one way because that's where I feel most originality comes from. No? What's your thought on this?

I think just because extremes are introduced to a community doesn't mean that you need to necessarily have a reversion to the mean. And what I mean by that is it goes back to that T-shaped theory where you can think about different people introducing very unique takes to a community and people trusting them as an expert to put their vote of confidence behind them. So, for example, you could think of this, think of it almost as what's become popular to delegate your vote, right? Where, say, there's something on a contemporary art round and I'm saying, oh, I'm not very knowledgeable about contemporary art per se, but Michelangelo is super knowledgeable. He's super involved in the contemporary art world. Very, very known collector there and has a very vibrant mind and being creative and being a trendsetter and thinking about pieces early on that are going to become very big cultural statement pieces in an artist's collection. I'm going to say, ah, I'm going to delegate my vote to Michelangelo because he probably has the more refined perspective to be able to be more creative, more original here, and I'm not just blindly voting. I think what we can start to do is have these systems, again, going back to governance systems, that allow for these spikes of creativity, for these spikes of almost sometimes what could be more extreme takes, more risky bets, quote unquote, on what's being brought into a collection to make a statement than what's there right now.

Yeah. And you're sort of describing as an engineered centralization, recentralization. So you're like, we're starting from the decentralized aspect and then we're sort of rebubbling up the power wherever it's needed.

Say it's like direct democracy versus representative democracy, right?

Yeah, very simplistically though, because there are so many nuances and systems that you can do within it.

Of course. But the idea is direct democracy was phased out for a reason. It was phased out for a reason because at some point there's choice fatigue. And if you have to, at some point, right now Archive's doing every 3 or 4 week acquisitions. At some point, I mean, you could realistically be having acquisitions every 2 or 3 days, every 3 or 4 days. When that's happening, it could be You know, a non-insignificant amount of work for someone to have to come in every day. And, you know, our members right now are pouring in, you know, 45 minutes, an hour, 2 hours, and reading all the background materials, thinking really critically about these works, sharing 500 to 1,000-word essays in our Discord into the community about which ones they feel like— some members even coming in saying, hey, I'm going to try and whip votes. I'm going to go on and try and convince other members to vote for this piece inside of the community. It's a lot of thought that's put into that. We have to really make sure as we introduce more and more votes, we don't dilute the importance of each individual decision.

Because otherwise it becomes like if you leave complete, you know, I mean, I wouldn't, I don't want to describe it as anarchy, right? But if you leave just one vote per person, it becomes, I mean, it's not a market, but I'm trying to understand, you know, the market right now is we kind of self-decide and allocate resources wherever the most leverage happens, right? Like, If I'm really good at doing something, I specialize in that. And then you give me my resources and you do something else and you specialize in that. And then we exchange, right? The very basic principles. And so I'm like, you kind of want to— I don't know if you do, but you have to think, how do we engineer some market aspects where that sort of facilitation happens? But also, what do we control? Actually, that's a very delicate thing and human experiment to do. You guys should have a psychologist on your team.

Yeah, I think we actually have a couple of members that have psychology backgrounds in some form along their career. So I agree with you a ton. I think it's a tough one, but it's an important one. And I think it's not just a question for Archive, it's a question for every organization right now that's thinking about collective participation and collective decision-making. I know there's a lot of power in collective intelligence. The idea is being able to direct that in the right way.

Do you think we're ever going to master this field? Are we ever going to really get an understanding of What works, what doesn't, for what purposes? Because right now we're kind of like going blind and sort of tasting around, but I think we've got a bit far off.

No, I think there's things you can get to that are more right and things that are more wrong. But at the end of the day, it's— we're looking back to history in a way that's very similar to considering government in this way. And it's kind of like asking the question, do you ever think we'll have the perfect government? It's a very hard question for you to sit there and say yes to.

Yes.

Probably like, oh yes, I think we're going to have the perfect government. Here's what it looks like, because your answer to that is probably very different than my answer. What I do think we can do is make tangible steps forward as a community to say, hey, let's define what's working and what's not. And having a system, for example, where the large majority of people feel like an incorrect decision is being made, probably isn't the right answer at the end of the day. So it's trying to find those pathways to have representation in the community.

No, absolutely. And this brings me to my topic, which is, I mean, I don't want to really put names on top of the system, but I kind of feel like we're seeing this very unprepared thought. So I may be very easily wrong on this, but it feels as though we're seeing a new sort of age of, of a different type of socialism in the sense that all of a sudden, uh, we have systems to— that are able to, um, give people access to goods and, and people contribute to the system collectively and do so with like— well, do so willingly doesn't— is not part of this, but you're creating a system that enhances the collective and the individual experience at the same time, in the sense that we're contributing and together we have a better outcome than we would alone. And we're sort of all organized. And the difference is that it's not a top-down system. It's not like a super centralized system that gives exact rules on how it works precisely. You guys are like working with the community together on how to do that for a cultural purpose. But it's a new form of— we shouldn't call it socialism, but it's a new form of collectivism.

It's funny that you say that because I find in the Web3, in the crypto space right now, there's a lot of different perspectives that try and draw parallels like this. And you have the people that are saying this democratization thesis that looks something a little bit similar to socialism, or that's thinking about people who are producing the goods having a higher stake of ownership in the goods. itself. There's a team of thought that says that. There's another school of thought that looks at it and says, actually, crypto is hypercapitalism. It's late-stage capitalism, and everything is being financialized and overexposed to market dynamics. This piece, we're really excited about that. There's another fraction of people, and I think this was especially popular early on in the crypto days, that was maybe libertarian, libertarian anarchists that said, we want crypto because it's an immutable system that's removed from government being able to interfere and it runs decentralized. Fuck the state. It's funny, because I think crypto is still searching for what its political or philosophical narrative is behind it. There are a lot of people that are trying to come and be the thought leader in defining one of those pathways going forward. At the same time, you have these very interesting things happening, like theories of people being able to be more involved in the process of doing something, people being able to be involved in ownership of something they weren't able to in the past. Very popular example that's often cited is like music producers or musicians, you know, and thinking about, oh, like, how can my fans be more involved in directly supporting me as an artist instead of 80% of all the money that's made being going to middlemen, for example? Obviously, that's a little bit more on like the democratization socialism type theory, but it's like, where does this end up falling? It's a question that still needs to be answered.

I mean, to me, obviously, I'm a crypto optimist in the sense that it seems as though it's drawing a bit of the best from all of them in the sense that it allows an incredible amount of permissionless experience and you sort of don't need to ask for justification. And these are protocols that run forever. They're everlasting, decentralized. Everybody has access to them. And it sort of, it becomes a sort of anarchy in the sense that everybody can create whatever they want. And so it's a form of market where, you know, human creativity stems and is just at its best. But also it allows these enhanced common experiences that we can all have and have access to shared sort of goods that we share all of a sudden and that we have access to. So in my eyes, I don't really even want to define it that much. I just have a feeling that it's drawing a lot of really interesting principles from a lot of these systems. And I think the composability of it, which is a big word, but the pieces of it allow us to just recreate it and pull it together however we want.

I think even more than the socialist point of view, the piece that's really interesting to me is granularity. And I think the one thing that crypto is allowing is being able to reward people for the granular contributions that they make. So you're able to take something before where you say only big picture things can have a holistic representation of what you're doing. And you can only reward or compensate someone for what they're doing at that scale. What it's allowing is it's splitting this up with this whole thesis of fractionalization in a way. And they get about these granular bits and saying in very small pieces, you can be an owner, you can be a voter, you can be a curator. And doing that in a way like before just means you have a lot more voices sitting at the table.

Yes. And all of a sudden, all the lines between the big labels that you have. Are you an investor? Are you a creator? Are you a contributor? All the lines start to blur because you're a little bit of everything. And all of a sudden, we abandon ourselves to human nature, which is not so fucking one-sided. I'm an investor.

But I mean, that's what's happening. I largely attribute that to the internet in a lot of ways where you start to have different forms of identity. Even look back to our parents' generation, our grandparents' generation, right? It's people that very often had one career their entire life. Travel was a lot less accessible. Meeting people outside of your state and out of your bubble, outside of your country was a lot less accessible. We moved to an age now where the average millennial has 5 or 6 jobs in the course of their career. Career is like stepping stones to different things. In the same way, digital identities, even think about what you present yourself as on Instagram versus what you do on Twitter versus what you do on LinkedIn. It's kind of different identities of how you're expressing yourself, and you can start to experiment with these different versions and variations of who you are. I think basically what's allowing with granularity is having people to have different versions of representation of them where you're kind of contributing with your special expertise in different ways to different communities. So I find the originations of a lot of people getting involved in these early Web3 communities interesting because It's a lot of people that are moonlighting, a lot of people that have a 9-to-5 job and are coming home after work and still getting involved in other ways. We even see it in the Archive community. Most of our members are still working full-time jobs, 2 full-time jobs, founding a company of their own, running an art gallery of their own, and they're still coming to the community and participating. And it's almost like this extracurricular activity where you're able to contribute in a really meaningful way beyond just what you're doing.

And that adds to your identity.

Yeah.

It does, even though it's not your main label and your main job. Right now, it's not really rewarded. I mean, the only time you feel like you've really been part of that community, if you are a museum subscriber, is when you have a get-around every 3 months with all the members that go there with a glass of champagne. Champagne. But it's like, right now, it's like, isn't that a beautiful vision to give everybody a chance to just be more themselves? And it's okay because you're going to be rewarded in one way or another. It doesn't mean financially rewarded. But it can be through the community that you have access to every day. It can be through so many ways.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's financial. It could be community-based. It can be access-based. It can be culture-based. So many different ways to think about this, uh, the answer to that question. It just, it's a lot of fun. And I think starting to be able to price things that markets haven't traditionally priced is super interesting, uh, where it's like, I think there's oftentimes been these, you know, mindsets where it's like, You know, the hardcore economist mindset where it's like, oh, this utility function didn't max out because utility equals money. But you know, there's, there's these other pieces that matter a lot. It's embedding things like social capital into the picture, status, access, you know, friendship and talking to other people. Yeah, it's this really interesting thing to kind of tap into nowadays.

Yeah, granular output of whatever you do is suddenly recorded. And how small can you get? That's a question I don't know the answer to, in the sense that you could even record me lifting this finger and possibly it has some— then you think butterfly effect, right? You think, should I be rewarded in one way or another? Let's think financially because it's the easiest way. But should I be rewarded if I add— it's like concept of open source. So if I create something on top of which someone creates something else, on top of which someone creates something else, and that one thing really hits, makes it big, I contributed maybe 0.01% of it, but because it was such a foundational piece of infrastructure, I will— now we have a structure in which you can circle back and work backwards and go to the principle of granularity. But then the question is, how granular do you want to go? Because I can argue that probably in one way, shape, or form, the thing I do today does have an impact on the president who gets elected next. Not really, but maybe.

A lot of our issues, I think, in the past with organization building has been a coordination problem because we haven't had the proper incentive systems to bring groups of people together. And I think you even see this transition from early when the internet was created in late '90s, early 2000s, there's this really big open source movement very early on. A lot of protocols that were created, base layers that a lot of the foundations of the internet are were like open source type projects with people building on top of each other, things like that. The issue and why things started to become centralized is because it's really hard to be rewarded for your work in that way. It's really hard to not only measure contribution, but reward you in granular ways for your contribution.

Yeah.

So what happened is we see this open source world, but no incentive mechanism. So you shift over to what's been prescribed as Web2, or you move into the 2005, 2010 era and you see, okay, well, if we want to be able to accrue the power and accrue the value of what we're creating, it's let's run it like a dictatorship. Let's have a monarchy or oligarchy. Let's have a small group of people come together, be the owners, and then you can actually capitalize on the value of it. I think now, we're seeing this new transition out again, where when you can get to this granular element and introduce smaller mechanisms of contribution and compensation, you can again say, oh, what would it look like if it was open sourced again? But now you can granularly reward people? Or what does it look like? It's some of the early things we've already seen in some crypto and Web3 projects where it's like, ah, you mean I can fork something? A lot of these protocols, I think Uniswap, which is a very popular decentralized finance protocol, is a very interesting example. Someone said, ah, I disagree with some of the way it's being done. I'm going to take their code, I'm going to copy and paste it and make a few changes and launch this as a separate protocol. called SushiSwap. Now you're saying, wow, they launched that whole product in like 3 or 4 days because they were making this decision to take something that was out there open in the world and have a way to be compensated for these small changes that they made on top of it.

Right. Because that's a faster— ultimately, if you have centralized top-down decision-making, it's much faster. It's more opinionated. I mean, personally, it seems as though we kind of disagree on this one. I personally believe that the more centralized it is, the more opinionated, strongly opinionated it is. And it's also how we make investment decisions here at Stride in the sense that We don't necessarily need conviction from everybody at all. Actually, it's like one person, if they feel amazingly convicted, they can go with the deal, which is why we want to play— it's a strategy, it's a structure so that we play a lot into not necessarily evening out with the consensus on what's the best outcome. But going back to the builders, it's like if you're top-down centralized, you can build probably faster. That's the advantage and more opinionated product. If you create an effective system in which you tap into some specific personalities and intellects, you can probably outcompete that, though.

Yeah. I mean, I think you can start to have more interesting nuances where some version of this is saying, is there a collective nature to it? Some version of it is saying, can a dissenter take things in a different direction? So what essentially happens in a lot of these quote unquote Web2 organizations is that It gets down such a pathway that the barriers to compete are quasi-monopolistic. There's such a big barrier because a centralized team has focused so many resources on it with hundreds or thousands of engineers on a team that there's really no way to compete with them because they have these massive barriers around them. When things are open source, you're saying the code now is not the piece that's our competitive barrier.

Right.

It's the community. It's the value that people are getting out of it. It's something else that's needing to be remote to other products and it's people believing in it and being involved with it. Now what you can say is you can even take this perspective of someone who extremely disagrees with something and say, hey, instead of voicing my concern to my boss who's going to maybe voice that concern to her boss who's maybe going to voice that concern up the ladder, I can say, hey, you know what? Screw this. I'm going to go and fork this and build my own version of it and do a vampire attack or try and pull people over to this new ecosystem who all agree with me. And that's where you start to see all these micro projects start to build up. And it's like the question there then becomes, is allocation of resources being done in a way that actually the best product is winning at the end of the day?

Yeah.

And I think that's the notion that's kind of being challenged, that is X popular tech platform the market leader because it's the best platform or because they've hit a point on this inflection point in their growth that no one can realistically compete with them anymore.

So are you suggesting that you think we're going to be able to see more innovation? I mean, yes, I think we're going to be able to see more innovation because of the sort of newfound access to information, which is now incentivized all of a sudden where previously it wasn't. And so this newfound access to information, which is structured and incentivized, is going to lead to the sort of justification of human originality.

What it's going to lead to is more at-bats. The thing is more at-bats. So it's going to lead to more tries. It's going to lead to a lot more experiments. And I think that's generally a good thing. I think there is this—

It has to, no?

I mean, I think it just happens in any form. If you think of ebbing and flowing from decentralization to centralization. And I don't mean that in the form of how the technology or ecosystem is structured. I mean it from thousands of people exploring different directions to one team with all 1,000 people working on it. You're just naturally going to get a lot more creativity being functioned and factored into the product itself. The question becomes, as you often see in saturated hype cycle VC markets, maybe like a year ago from now, possibly, you have 20 teams being funded doing the same exact thing, which then is like, in my mind, potentially a negative thing because it'd be better instead of 2 teams doing the same thing to maybe have 4 people thinking through the same problems together. But the corollary of that is it allows for a lot more experimentation. So maybe you say, oh, these teams are doing the same thing. What really happens is one of them pivots and finds this other new direction and you have 2 completely different products going in different ways.

Yeah, no, absolutely. Because you have a more granular way and efficient way of rewarding people. It's not just either make it big like a startup, So you grow, you get VC funding, you make it either massive, and it's literally the game. So you make either up above a billion or it just doesn't cut the return metrics. I think this new fund granularity now allows all sorts of people to find reasons to build anywhere, anything that they get their minds to.

Yeah, at least think about, yeah, at least allowing for a little bit more expression of of creativity. And I think that's net very positive.

Yeah, no, for sure. And then I'm thinking, it's just the beautiful compounding of human— I think it kind of feels like we're kind of finally finding a way to just enable humans to be its best. We're sort of finally engineering systems that enhance human creativity instead of hindering it and centralizing decision-making, which maybe was needed, by the way.

Yeah, I think there are a lot of unanswered questions there, but it definitely feels like a fun, exciting pathway to go down. I think there's this energy of people that are building in the space right now that really think about, wow, there's this newfound energy, people that are coming in with very opinionated viewpoints on why this is important. I'll sit down to conversations with people that are building in community-led organizations, building in Web3 organizations building DAOs and saying there's a reason everyone is there, and it's because they see an interesting potential in kind of redefining the way things are kind of done right now. And it's this interesting mix, though, I think. And it's like something we go think about very consciously at Archive. It's kind of like finding this middle ground still, where it's still a market where what Web3 is on one end is hyperfinancialization, like CD degen culture a little bit. On the other end, it's kind of like a barbell. It's people that are like, oh, I've never heard of Web3. I don't even know what's— I think my son told me about Bitcoin once, that type of energy. And it's like, what crypto has nailed has been participation, and it's been adoption flywheels in a really interesting way. It's yet to ground itself in this security of the real world. And I think the moment we shift from being able to realize all these great things we were talking about is when there's the projects that can ground these things in the real world and have it be a pathway for people to understandably get involved with it with something that they understand, where it's not just like maybe pixelated profile picture of a monkey or something like that, but it's something that's saying, oh, wow, that's a really interesting way. This is something that, for example, is giving me access to something like curating a museum, for example, that I'd never had the ability to do before. I'm super bullish on this space of projects that are able to consider what this middle ground is that pulls in the next million people. And I think Archive is really well positioned to do that.

No, I mean, absolutely. Thinking of enabling human creativity, I'm kind of thinking if right now creativity is sort of you put stuff together in your brain and you sort of yield something else, put very— I mean, how I see it, but I really don't know if that's the case. But you sort of somehow you engineer something new. And going back to the granularity aspect, everybody is now empowered to build whatever they want and to have some sort of impact. And so I'm now thinking, I hope we can also incentivize people to be original in what they create. And this goes into defining beauty with like, what is beautiful? What do I think is beautiful?

Yeah.

What do I think is original? I hope we can find a way to incentivize people to really double down in what their strengths are and what they think is beautiful, because now we have a found system to do that. But how do you do it when, when we're sort of in our bubbles anyway?

Yeah, I think you're zooming out to a lot, a lot larger of a question. You're saying like, at the end of the day, we're probably still operating within an economic system and within a political system. And I guess for both of us, both here in the UK and also in the US, it's a system of pretty intense capitalism. So at the end of the day, it's still thinking about, can you ever escape the economic system that you're living within, or is that the ultimate force that's coming on you? It's going back to ages and ages of theorists from Adam Smith to Karl Marx that have talked about this stuff. But it's saying, Are these things able to be changed as economic systems? And there still is very heavily a system of compounding returns and a power that you feel that's like concentration of power at the top, and that things that are hyperfocused end up oftentimes accruing most value. Number 1 versus number 2 is a very big difference in systems. that operate like that. So it's saying, is there a way that thinks about doing this differently? And the question is, can that be done within a system or does that just mean reconstructing an entire political economic system, which are 2 very different tasks to take up?

Yeah, no, definitely. I mean, I'm just worried that we go into the imitation game where it's like, because I've only experienced these things, I'm only going to be able to create and appreciate things that go along those lines?

I think that's a really interesting question. It's like, is there such thing as creativity? And the question is like, how much of us as humans are simulation or mimic machines?

What do you mean by that?

By simulation, I mean like I'm simulating what you're doing, or by mimic machine, I mean how much of my behavior is learned from the people in and around me and is just like regurgitating concepts I've heard in the past, taking a vision I saw or taking one piece of art and one piece of art and making a different piece of art from that versus what really is the definition of creativity or originality? How does that come to fruition? It's a pretty tough question to think about.

Yeah, I mean, I really don't have the answer.

Me neither.

What I do know is that I know that DALL-E 2, the GPT-3 enabled design system for illustrators that you can just insert some prompts and it just yields out some images that represent what you wrote, is doing that, what we are defining creativity, pretty successfully using existing data. So all of a sudden, yes, it's a sort of similarity-driven mechanism.

Yeah.

But it does yield an original outcome.

Well, I don't know if you've seen too much of this dialogue, but I think there's some pretty heated debates.

Yeah.

I've seen it in different conversations I've had where someone is like, oh, look at this piece of art I created. I was in a group chat with some friends and this came up. Someone had sent a picture and one of my friends in the group chat was an artist. She was like, that's not art. And the guy's like, yeah, it's art. It's algorithmically created art. It's art. She's like, no, it's not creativity. That's just scanning a database of existing images and blending them together. And my other friend was like, yeah, but like, isn't that just what our brain's doing? And now code is doing it instead. And it got to this really interesting kind of back and forth debate.

Well, it's cool.

We're kind of considering this question and saying, huh, like, can a computer mimic the human brain? And like, what is the separation of difference? If this is starting to do things that we'd originally consider as creativity, like, can a computer just replace the human brain? There's a lot of kind of steeped implications here of what that means if you do 100% consider algorithmically created art as art that is mimicking the human creativity. It's like you can kind of see a pathway where that eventually means like, what else can it do?

Yeah.

You see it with GPT. I saw an example on Twitter the other day where someone had written a line in GPT-3 to create a script to then create a GPT-3 command to create text for something. And I was like, oh boy, why are you getting all these intermediate levels now?

What's the outcome? What was the outcome? Oh no, yeah, but I mean, I'm, uh, yeah, I don't know.

Outcome is like, what's the outcome when it scales is the question, right? Like, where are we at? It leads us to a question that's been talked about for a long time, you know, artificial general intelligence. Like, what does that look like in the future? Is there something such as a superintelligence? No, I know. And that's kind of a question that I have, and I'm I'm actually pretty curious to get your take on this. Can a computer with just zeros and ones at the end of the day mimic the human brain? Is the human brain just zero and ones or are there other pieces that are baked into this?

I don't know. I kind of feel like we really like to think of ourselves as really complex beings that are really hard to be understood. And then slowly, slowly we have every single piece of ourselves taken away. What do you mean by that? What I mean by that is that it's like, oh, yeah, robots will never replace us when we do this or when we drive cars or when we do whatever. But slowly we're seeing that we're advancing and working outside from previous professions that we used to do, like specific things that we're industrializing, productizing, and we're creating other things that do it for us. So slowly we're reducing the number of things that we need to do in the sense that we're going back Or I don't know if going back is the right word, but we're sort of shrinking to a central line of what we are in the sense we don't have to— like, if you're born in 1940s, you're born in a village, like, you need to fulfill a specific function because otherwise the village won't work. Right now we're connecting everything. It means that you don't need to fulfill a specific function. You can be yourself and that thing is going to be somehow valued by the system. Mm-hmm.

You know, but the question then is, is that a good thing or a bad thing? Because what it also has meant, right, is a tremendous transition from manual labor to like brainwork, basically.

Yeah.

And what, like, you know, the knowledge economy has only been possible in a lot of ways because of technological advances we made, where it's like, yeah, you know, we don't have people that are just sitting there and, you know, at the same number we had before and like picking up a piece, putting it in a piece, and handing it to the next person on the assembly line. Automating that is probably net positive. There's plenty of other brainwork jobs that we can create out there.

Oh man, for sure.

The question becomes, what happens at the next level? What happens when the knowledge labor starts to become automated as well? And is that the path that we're headed towards?

There you go. And then he's like, yeah, but knowledge, okay, maybe we get to knowledge and okay, we go to creativity. And it's like, do you really want to go to creativity when you have those kind of debates in the Discord group chats where it's like, Are we sure that we have anything at all that is not replicable by zeros and ones? Because we are going to get there and it's going to hurt.

Yeah. I mean, it's a really hard one. And I don't know. I mean, quite frankly, I don't think I'm even a smart enough computer scientist to really understand all of the underworkings here, but there's something about human expression and perhaps it's just a self-centered human take for me to have. But that feels like there's some quantum nature to how things happen sometimes where it's not just the zeros and ones. There's delineation. There's this state that's somewhere in between where it's flashing back and forth between the two that has this interesting piece of creativity. But to be honest, over the last 5 years, I've always been like that the confidence percentage in that belief that I just stated is kind of slowly going down because you read things like, oh, like you can have a full conversation with somebody via GPT-3 where it's like responding to you. Yeah, for sure. Like all these, you know, different technological advances that you come to see, you're like, oh, that human behavior is replicated. Or I was— I live over in San Francisco and I walked outside of my apartment the other day and there was, uh, one of the Cruise cars there. And, you know, normally they're driving— if you go to San Francisco, it's people driving them around all the time. You know, you just see them on the road and they basically have tons of cameras and they're training the data. But this one, I thought it just like, you know, someone had parked it there. So I went up to it because I was like, oh, they're parked right in the middle of the road. And I'm looking in the window and stuff, and someone yells, hey man, what are you doing? What do you mean, what am I doing? I'm just like looking inside his car. I think it's frozen here. He's like, no, no, that's my ride. Like, what? What do you mean? And he comes up and opens the door. He's like, oh yeah, it's Cruise. They're actually doing self-driving taxis around San Francisco now. Gets in, he puts on the buckle. It's like, welcome, Jim. Please fasten your seatbelt. Headed to 581 Post Street. You know, and he like gets in, buckles up, and he's like, oh yeah, man, like, isn't this pretty cool? And it drives away. And I'm like, wow, man, I'm gonna tell my grandkids one day like, oh, I remember back in 2022 when I saw the first ever self-driving car.

Just like my grandpa used to tell me about the first time they went to the cinema and they had the picture of a train coming towards them and everybody fucking ran outside. Everybody ran outside.

Yeah, so it's like, you know, what's the next step? Yeah, but it gives that example because it's like, cool, that's one thing, you know. Now you start to see language things, you start to see stuff like deepfake that starts to come out. It's like, how far can that stretch? I mean, even like, you know, computers that have played chess and Go and beat world champions, but the limit to which that extends to is just— it's really hard to imagine that there's truly a level of consciousness that's ever developed by by a computer system for me. The scarier piece is not that as much. The scarier piece is like, we think we've engineered a system that has consciousness, but really it's just following orders in a way that's potentially destructive.

But then you go into the definition of what actually consciousness means, and then it's like, if it behaves like it, if it says it is, you can't really test whether it does feel like it, which is why the big—

Yeah, classic Turing test, right?

Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

I don't know. It's a really tough one. It's equally scary and exciting to think about, which I think is really fun. I think that's why there's such a strong AI thesis right now. I find it really fascinating because it's one of those things that's such a seismic step change that the advancement of something like AGI or artificial general intelligence or super general intelligence would be so impactful that so many other things that are happening in society are measured. It's called It's called Pascal's wager or whatever. It's like if something has infinite expected value, regardless of how low the percentage chance of it happening is, you should be spending time on it.

There you go. Yeah, the math works out. But I think one of the reasons why we also really enjoy talking about this and why we're so intrigued about this is because there is a natural inclination of humans, I suspect, of sort of thinking what differentiates us. We're thinking really hard, what makes us humans? We need to have something different. And it's like, never before had we been scared by something that covers the whole spectrum in the sense that even if the AGI doesn't reach the full spectrum, even if it's missing something, But there is some part of the spectrum which is covered by the animal species, some part of the spectrum that is covered by the plants, et cetera. And then some part of the spectrum that is covered by AGI, et cetera. It could happen that we're like, we really don't have anything left that is just unique to the human species. It's just going to be the combination of features. And I think we're— I don't know if we've If we've given it some thought. And at that point, we could still make arguments. It's like, oh, we've got spiritual connection and all of that, which I really hope it's the case.

Yeah, I mean, it's kind of the question of, can you program the human brain, right? Like, is the brain just chemicals firing? Is it just like, ah, dopamine release, serotonin release, ah, this? And like, is it all just a reaction? There's something like deeper there. But I think the question of like, but can the human brain be replicated is a really, really tough question to answer. I have no idea.

But then even if you say you can't, can you replicate the system? Because we were created one way or another to reach something, and that can probably be represented somehow. And so now we're going really meta, but there is some ways in which you could argue that whatever representation of physical reality this is, Even assuming that this stems from something more spiritual, third party, even that can be engineered and codified.

Yeah, now you're getting out to like simulation theory and all these things that like, oh, like, is this all a—

Yeah, we don't know.

Is this all a—

Look, why don't we ground it back down and I go into the chaos questions just to make it a bit more grounded.

But you know what the chaos questions are? No, what is that?

Not at all. So chaos questions is a term that I coined here for Chaotica to stay in theme. And I'm gonna ask a bit more. Yeah, I'm just gonna be a bit more wild in these questions. So we're gonna go away from the topics that we just discussed in a sense.

Can we get more wild? I think that was pretty— I agree. Now that I'm saying this, I feel like a fool.

I'm just joking. But no, maybe also more personal in the sense that I think we touched on a lot of meta topics and it's like, I've got you here, so why don't we use that? Yeah, let's do it. So first question is, What's the single individual event or moment that is having the biggest impact in the direction and approach that you have today?

In my personal life?

Yeah.

Great question. I think it's this event that actually happened early on in high school for me. I was actually in the marching band in my high school. I played the big bass drum, like the one you wear over your shoulders. And back then you're 14 or whatever. I'd gone off to band camp where we like went to a local university over the summer for a whole week with the band. We marched like 30 miles during the week just to prep for the season. And coming back home, uh, you know, I actually started to get a lot of pain in the side of my leg. Um, and it was this really weird thing where like it started to grow more and more. I was like walking around with like this leftover cane we had in my house. My parents are like, okay, what's the issue with you? And one day it was just like so painful. I was like, hey, I think we should go to the doctors. And, my parents kind of took me in and they're like, oh, we think you have sciatica, which is a back nerve pain. But, they're like, oh, it's really weird. We've never seen this in someone over 40. Remember, I'm 14 at this time. So, I'm like, okay. They're like, what do I do? And, they're like, oh, we'll get you into a specialist next week. Just kind of keep it going. And, it's 2 or 3 days later and I can't get out of bed. I literally am laying there and go to the bathroom in my own bed because I can't get up anymore. I'm just yelling in pain. My parents picked me back to the hospital and they're like, yo, this isn't sciatica. Like something, something's kind of funky going on here. And what had basically happened was, uh, they took my, my blood and my white blood cell count, which normally is like a sign of, you know, how your body's responding to infections. It's called your sed rate. It's normally supposed to be around like 20, 25. Mine's at 140. They're like, wow, we don't know exactly what it is, but you have some type of crazy— Infection. We need to send you to a bigger hospital. I'd grown up in a little bit smaller, smaller of a town.

Wow.

So, they rushed me over there and basically what had happened, I got a staph infection, which is something that's like, you know, relatively rare to happen, but they thought I'd basically just like tripped in a parking lot at some point a few weeks before and it just got infected. And what had happened, it had gone into my hip bone. And because the infection had been there for like 2 or 3 weeks and they didn't know it, it had like basically eaten away a lot of my hip bone. And, you know, it was kind of just like happening there. So, I had to have— I was in the hospital for like 11 days. I had like 4 emergency surgeries and just this really interesting moment for a few reasons. One was they told me at the end that 25 years ago, they hadn't invented the technology to actually cure this and actually like filter the bone out of your blood, just like really crazy thing.

25?

You wouldn't have died. So 25 years earlier, had I gotten this, you know, wouldn't, wouldn't be around anymore. Um, just like a really, really, really wild notion to have. Um, second, uh, I think you're just like sitting there kind of experiencing this and this feeling of such uncertainty. And I was on tons of morphine and meds and all this other stuff, but like, remember moments of coming in. I remember this one moment that's probably the most formative, you know, impactful experienced during that time is like, I woke up from one of my surgeries and like my little brother, who was I guess 11 at the time, was like sitting there crying and he's just like, oh, Jordan, like I hope you don't die. You know, and to like see that as a 14-year-old, to like flirt with death a little bit and just kind of feel that so visually and impact your whole family in and around you. And coming out of that is something that you can never look back on. And I think I kind of made, made it a promise to myself at that moment that's like, I'm living on borrowed time and I need to recognize every day that I need to be an optimist. I need to go out there and like really try and make the most of my life with the incredible amount of drive and incredible amount of passion and think about, you know, using my time in a way that's really impactful for the, for the entirety of the world, because there's a very real chance that out of randomness, you know, you, you don't make it much, much larger than this. So, uh, I still remember like 11th day, I wheeled out of the hospital in a wheelchair. And it was the first time, it was like, you know, late August, hot sun hitting the wind. I just started crying. So I was like, hadn't been outside in 11 days. I'm like, ah, like Rocky at the top of the staircase. I'm like, we did it, you know, we made it, man. And you know, it's, it's, you know, no, no huge lingering effects anymore. I feel extraordinarily blessed. There's just this moment where you're like, wow, this is, this is really a very interesting life that we all live that can be taken away from you like this. Because you just have to treasure it every day and always have a big smile on your face.

Wow. What an amazing story. Yeah, I'm gonna leave it there. I don't think it's necessary to comment. I think you already had your enough thinking about all this.

And it's just one of those things where you look back on it, and I think at the time I really didn't understand the impact that it had on me, but it just kind of knocked this sense of really being contemplative and trying to reflect on things over the years since and say like, ah, interesting. When you go through these exercises of talking to others, whether it's friends or whether it's a therapist and trying to dive into, you know, what's really motivating you, I realized like everyone kind of has their story of baggage along the way.

Yeah.

Whether it's an injury they had or, you know, tough relationship with their parents or, you know, a sibling that had passed away. You know, everyone's kind of carrying that stuff with them. And it's just really important to kind of think about that context and interactions with other people.

Yeah, I think you wrote a beautiful blog post on this. So I'm plugging in the sense that you go from— I mean, it's your blog post, you should know how to explain this better. But it's like, you know, you're very— we live in a life that is like every day, every day, or when we Like, we rarely have the privilege of stepping back and realizing, okay, let's go back to zero principle thinking and think about why we're doing this. What are we exactly doing? And all the inner drivers and motivators. And you finally can stop living paradoxically and actually, you know, think, let it go.

Yeah. And there's this concept that Immanuel Kant talks about a lot. It's like the sublime. And he says like there's kind of this differentiation between beauty and sublime. And sublime is just like one level higher than beauty where it's all-consuming and at the same time all-removing. And kind of what that concept means, and you've probably felt it visually, or maybe you have. I feel this when I'm like, I've gone on a hike in the night and you're like maybe on a cliff or in the mountains or on a hill and you just look up and you look at space, a lot of times it invokes feelings of this where you're like, wow, I'm realizing I'm just a small being here and it's all-consuming all around me. But at the same time, it's all fulfilling in a way too. I'm like, wow, this is an amazing universe and I'm the main character in my story, kind of controlling my own conscious pathway through the world. And it's these experiences that pause time, that remove you, that take you back That's like beauty. And I think it's one of the reasons I just love, love art so much is because it encourages you to just take this reflective stance. It encourages you to just like take a step back and pause and say like, huh, interesting. Like maybe I haven't thought about that, but I feel like I believe it to be true even though I've never heard it before. All these different interesting pieces, but the contemplative nature of it is just really interesting.

Yeah, it throws you off and then you're forced to, you know, just all of a sudden not behave like you do every single day.

Yeah, I really like statement pieces for that reason sometimes, or it's like maybe you have to look at it a few times, maybe you have to read the book a few times if it's a piece of literature, but like once you understand the meaning behind it, you can never unsee it anymore. It's kind of this red pill a little bit.

No, I love it. You know what does that for me a lot? Theater.

Tell me more.

Well, it's the moment where you're sitting there in theater and you're looking at the at the piece, and all of a sudden you realize that you've been looking at the piece. It's like, oh, what just happened there?

Did I just, you know, was I still myself?

Where did I just go? Like, where was I? And so theater is my form where I really have that, and I appreciate in people the ability to do that in things that maybe other people see mundane.

Yeah, I guess if you think about it, you're literally like Stepping out of your own shoes and putting yourself into a literal out-of-body experience in a way by being someone else. It's just, you know, I wonder if there's a correlation there between people that are involved with theater and like levels of empathy for that reason. It's probably a really interesting study there.

I think it's a really cool topic. But let me get to the next chaos question. What would you change about the way you were raised?

It's a really tough question. I think my parents just did a really, really wonderful job raising me. And actually, a lot of times as a person, as a founder, I kind of feel like this superpower a little bit of being raised in Toledo, Ohio. It's not like, oh yeah, growing up in the Upper East Side or something like that, a little bit, I guess, more non-traditional in a background in terms of location and also just parents that were like solidly, solidly middle class, like, you know, librarian and a teacher, like that. I think the one downside of it, and it's something I've begun to appreciate a little bit later in my life, is getting to travel a little bit more to areas and be exposed to cultures that I wasn't as exposed to. I think something that happened when I went to college is I got to, you know, start to experience traveling internationally for the first time, like literally be involved in it in another country. I did the— I did Model Congress in high school, which is like we ran youth government conferences for high school students all around the world. And it meant like getting to go to Singapore and Thailand and Cambodia and even Italy I got to go to for a little bit. And I think I remember the very first time I— Italy was actually the first country I went to. And I remember stepping into Milan right where I landed, and it was this really interesting feeling of first off, being disoriented by this like 6-hour time zone difference. Second off, seeing these people that were living their entirety of their life at the same time that I had previously been living my life in a very different way, in a very different community. And it was this feeling of knowing these 2 simultaneous worlds are going on at the same time. Which, by the way, I learned there's a word for that the other day called sonder. Sonder is—

Hmm.

It's a word that's It's you recognizing that the people in and around you are living a life equally complex and unique as your own.

Mm-hmm.

It was this feeling of sonder that I had for the first time, and I think it just opens your mind up to understanding there's a lot more possibilities, while at the same time kind of drawing these through lines of similarity between different cultures and understanding all these different pathways. And I feel like one of the things I wish I was a little bit more involved in my childhood is just like getting exposed to these pieces outside of your own bubble. I think it's probably an experience that a lot of people have, that when you start to grow older, you start to look at ways that people in your community had thought about things that you always thought was like the commonly held belief. And you now realize like, oh no, it was a commonly held belief in my city of 40,000 people. But like, you know, the world's a lot bigger than 40,000 people. You know, there's—

Totally.

Think about how many 40,000-person communities there are. You start to see these perspectives and it just like, it's really grounding for you to zoom out and see yourself as a part of a much bigger, more complex system. Totally. I didn't think I realized the full potential of the possibilities and unique ways of looking at the world, and even just different opinions and tolerance that comes from that, things like that, until I was, you know, into my 20s.

Totally. I, I feel like also we, we come from— because you're 22, right?

Say again?

You're 22, right?

Yeah, I'm 22.

Yeah, exactly. So I think we come from a generation that is— has felt that specific feeling much more than anybody else in history. And I say that because I think we grew up without internet. I mean, I grew up, I didn't have 4G, any, any of that. I actually had a Nokia phone when I went to school and everything, and it's still much more access than a lot of people previously had.

Yeah.

But then all of a sudden internet happened and it really happened like proper internet, social media, and all of a sudden you can access someone talking from the other side of the planet and information and building and And so I think it exploded. And we had— we were brought up at the moment of like bubbles. So we were brought up in our own little bubbles and local communities, and then internet exploded. And so this moment of thunder where you're like, wow, what is all of this? I think we felt it well.

So I'm curious how you think that gets interpreted today. And I've thought about this a lot recently that with, you know, say there's a child that's born now in 2022, when they're 10 years old and starting this really formative phase of development into their teenage years, they probably have a smartphone or have very fast internet connection. They probably have very easy access to people that are in the exact opposite time zone of them in a different country, in a different continent. How does that change society in a way? And I feel like you and I probably experienced that to some degree. I think I got my first phone, I think when I was— it was my 8th grade year, so I was probably 13 years old, but it was Flip phone. It didn't have internet connection just to text. You had to press 1 3 times and all that, all that stuff.

So 0 and 1s.

Yeah, and 2s and 3s and occasionally 4s and 5s. But like, you know, when that changes now where it's like, you know, I really started getting like on social media probably when I was like 16 or 17. You know, what happens when that happens at like 8 or what happens when that's like such an instrumental part of you early on? And I think you and I probably already have this unique feeling of global relationships where it's like, you know, I think my parents, for example, don't have like a ton of international friends. And for me, by ways of just like being a very internet-forward person and like always being in different Discords and Slacks and thinking about communicating with other people and to some degree traveling as well, which I totally understand is a part of the picture, it's meant just like this feeling of connectedness where all of a sudden like it's not Italy, it's such a different country. It's like Ah, like multiple friends that are from or living in Italy, and it's like, you know, we're just a connection away. How do you think that changes things for like that happening 10 years earlier than even we experienced it?

Man, I, I, I'm really torn. I think it could be two ways. I think on one side it could even out. On one side, it's like you've got so much access, you don't have time to develop a personality. You're like, because if we think that you as a person, you're formed through your experiences that direct you a specific way. If you're like, if you have access to everything from the first moment, it's like you haven't had time to be limited in your nature and to have to, you know, be affected and really imprinted by something specific. And then all this noise just ends up making you a complete white slate that never really gets to go any direction. And on the other side, you have the opposite, which is what I imagine could be the most intelligent generation that was ever yielded, that has access to limitless And then because they already have a sort of initial seed that just amplifies and compounds them. I don't know which one is going to be the case, but I hope the second.

Yeah, it's a really interesting question again of curation of information in a way where it's like, one thing I felt very strongly is there's a lot more information, which in one way helps because you have instantaneous access to anything. In one way, it makes things a lot harder because now you have information overload. And it's like, what do I choose to read? What do I choose? And one thing I find that I think is a little bit more prevalent in our generation is people that just have a lot less certainty in like their pathway a little bit because they start to have exposure to like so many different pathways.

Yeah.

You know, maybe it was like this before, but I think it was a little bit more linear where it's like, oh yeah, here are like the 5 professions I can go into and like this is what I've seen around me. Now it's like, Oh, yeah, like, I have a friend that's an Instagram influencer and makes more money than I do, you know, doing that job. Wow, that's a career. Wow, this person's doing— and you see like thousands of options and you have— optionality is great, but it's also information overload and making a choice in a lot of ways.

Are we even wired as humans to do that? Like, there is a really nice movie, The Pianist, which is like, you know, the moment the guy steps outside of the ship, He realizes the world is so limitless, I have no reason to be in the sense that if I stay on my piano, I have a limited number of— how do you call those?

Keys.

Oh yeah. If I stay on the piano, I have a limited number of keys and I can play anything beautiful, right? The moment I step outside and the number of keys are infinite, there is like— it loses its purpose. Is art dependent Very tough question.

No, I think that's the exact question you have to ask yourself. And even if it progresses, I think the question that comes first is, what are the limits that something needs to ground itself within? Are you asking, is art, is a painting limited to the canvas? Or are you asking, is it limited to how a brain can cognitively interpret what's being presented in front of it? There's so many maxims that you can start to think of. I think it's a deeply philosophical question for a lot of people need to answer for themselves and saying, is ignorance bliss? I think I'm definitely of the mentality that optionality is a very good thing, and it's net positive for people to be able to make more decisions for themselves and I think I just personally very much value autonomy for myself. And because of that, it's like my personal preference is probably projected into a lot of my beliefs and saying the most important thing for me is knowing, at least the guise of knowing, that I have some control over making decisions and being a body of free will throughout society.

Right. I mean, I think then there is so many interesting things to say, which I hope I can get in a conversation with you. Maybe we'll film it someday, but in terms of free will, whether you actually do have any, like whether you do have any choice or whether it just stems from the experiences you had.

Yeah, and I think my TL;DR summary of it is like, regardless of whether or not you actually have free will, it's a very important principle in my mind that you at least believe free will is a thing because it's very empowering to like take agency in your life.

Are you just arguing that in order for free will to exist, we need to ignore the fact that it doesn't?

Well, you could interpret it that way, or you could interpret it that rather it doesn't matter if free will exists or not. It's what we will into action in believing.

Yeah, but if you insert free will, if you insert ignorance within the equation of whether free will exists or not, all of a sudden you're contaminating it to the point where I think like The reason why we ask the question in the first place is because we need, we want an answer. And right, like, I'll behave as if, like—

Is it— it's a super meta question, right? Like, oh, is it free will to ask yourself if you have free will? Like, your ability to say yes to that is your expression of free will. If you're saying no, is that your expression of free will and choosing to believe that free will doesn't exist? It's like a whole rabbit hole we can kind of go down there.

Yeah.

You know, the summary in my mind is that I think it's, it's in order to feel empowered in society, and I think that's something that's lacking for, for a lot of people and is a very sad truth in society that I think is like a very important thing to effectively work towards changing, is, you know, giving people more of a feeling of like agency and competency and feeling like, oh, I can do things. And I think I've been fortunate enough to have a pathway that's like Pointed me in that direction, supportive parents, you know, like going to university, going to college and like feeling like, oh wow, like you can actually do these type of things. And that feeling is like the one that's really important to me. And I think it's love to try and create situations where people also feel that type of situation.

Yeah, because otherwise we fall into the infinity. It's just like, you know, we're meaningless. Same equation as you mentioned earlier, right? Yeah. Anyways, Let me get to the last question.

Okay, drum roll.

I want you to look at the camera and say something to yourself in 15 years. So something that you need to get off your chest or something that is really important. But basically, imagine if I gave you a smart contract that ensured that you were talking to yourself in 15 years. What would you say?

That's a tough one. I think honestly what I'd say is remember to enjoy life. Um, and I think it's really easy, and I can see this happening, just get like caught up in the day-to-day of things sometimes. And I think it's really important. And one thing I really want to make sure I still have in 15 years is like a big abundance mindset and this thought that, you know, you can really do so many things in this world, and it's just up to you to like craft a pathway where you're happy. And you feel like you're learning. And as long as you fulfill those 2 things, I think you can generally have a really exciting life. And I really want to make sure I don't feel trapped inside of, inside of what I'm doing and I'm able to kind of know that I still have these, this possibility to always, always enjoy what I'm doing. And if not, life's too short for me to, to keep doing that.

Yeah. And this is a call option for you to unplug.

Say again?

This is a call option for you to unplug. This is a call. When this happens and you look at this, this is a call for you to unplug once you're there.

You step back. I like that. Maybe go into the, go into the woods and get all consumed by a starry night sky.

Sander!

Oh, Sander Löfgren. Space some Sander, stuff like that.

Awesome. Good, my man. Thank you so much. I really, really enjoyed it, and I hope you did as well.

I really appreciate you being here. I'm glad I could stop by. You're awesome, man. Appreciate it. Thank you.