Hello friends and welcome to the very first episode of club see clubs podcast. This has been a long time in the coming and I'm so so excited to bring it to the world. Today we have Aaron Wright. Aaron is the co founder of open law team behind such projects as the LAO, Flamingo Dao Neptune Dao, and a whole host of others that he'll share about in this conversation. We talk about all things Dows. And the value of having a sense making organism we talked about his excitement for the metaverse being the next big play in crypto. And of course, we dive into social tokens. A couple notes. Before we jump into today's show, we are very excited to be collaborating with our friends at song camp to create our very own jingle song. I don't know we'll end up calling it but music for this episode. That project kicks off shortly. So stay tuned. As always, you can check them out at song camp on the Twitter's or on the internet generally, until that project is complete, we have the pleasure of using music from Matthew David from leaving records, who used Holly plus, that's a project that we're going to have to touch on at some point in this podcast series. Oh, okay. Yes, the reason for this podcast, here's the big, big picture, I get to have very interesting conversations with people pushing at the edges of the social crypto space. And I thought it was an absolute shame that those were only going into my brain and not into yours. So that's the intention here. We want to bring the future of social crypto to you through conversations with the people building it. I am so excited to bring this to you. And I guess we should just jump right into the show. Aaron, welcome to the pod man, welcome.
Hey, thanks so much for having us. It's really an honor to be on.
I love these conversations that we're having here with the podcast because you know, I feel like it's such a privilege, I get to speak to people like yourself on a regular basis and just get to forum and inform and update my worldviews on this wild worldspace that we're sort of playing in. And so my hope here today is that we can dive into just a conversation that we probably normally have, but make it available to others. So you know, I know who you are, but maybe a good place for us to start is for you to give yourself a bit of an introduction. Yeah, sure.
And I love that I think that's one of the best parts that the crypto space is the conversation. It's like living and breathing, constantly evolving. So I'm I'm Aaron Wright, co founder of open ma we're actually rebranding the whole project attribute labs, got into the crypto space in 2011 played a role helping to launch Aetherium, also called Professor co authored a book on blockchain law and policy that Harvard published from that research began to pull together put on our tribute labs. And we've been building a whole bunch of different tabs over the past year, including the allow for me to doubt Neptune, and internet museum called Museum. Great to be on and great to chat.
Yeah, so I think you touched on a few of the subjects that I want to get into like, I think this is going to bridge a few few areas that I think are very tightly intertwined, but worth diving into separately, sort of Dows social tokens, and the metaverse and like NF T's sort of playing in between all of those things. So a tweet I saw recently that I saw a response from you, too, was I think the question like, What are Dows even good for? And I think the the tweet was, it seems like it's a structure searching for a problem. You've obviously spent a lot of time thinking about Dows, being really early into Dows, which are just you could just sort of what is your answer to that? Are Dallas just a structure of searching for a problem?
No, I actually think that there's a solution to a problem. And I think we feel it in the crypto space more than other areas, which is there's just a torrent of information that's being spewed at every single person online. And it's really hard for any one individual to kind of stay up to speed. If you want to kind of keep up to speed in crypto as an individual, you could be spending 20 plus hours a day, literally, like cracked out on an Adderall, like pounding down energy drinks, just to stay awake, and you probably wouldn't be able to really have a strong pulse on what's going on. And I think we're kind of at this point where the only way to begin to marshal information online is to band together in groups. And I think that's what does fundamentally do, or at least kind of word as our today, they create this opportunity for a bunch of different people that have their own networks or an interest to come together. And by adding in a bank account, you know, the ability to kind of align people's incentives in some way. And also some like governance rules, you can begin to have kind of structured conversations around that. So I think that they they solve issues that they're not really looking for a problem. And I think if we fast forward out 510 15 years, I think we'll see that dabs are superior structures to what we have today. And that could be on the investment side, which I know there's a lot of that activity today, but I also If it's going to be on the community side, too, it's going to enable groups of folks that are interested in a particular topic particular and a tee, or set of NF T's particular person or celebrity, a particular particular area, they can all band together and begin to do things more productively together. And I think we feel this online. If you've spent a lot of time online. When I see tweets like that, I just worry that that person isn't as internet native as others.
Yeah, that's gonna be my next question is like, where are we seeing the big barrier when people like either get it or don't get it? Do you think it's just that they're not living internet natively? Or is there sort of like another confusing piece of dowsing is acting as a barrier to adoption?
Yeah, I mean, I think it's like all of crypto. It's like, it's the jargon like what the heck's a Dao decentralized? Autonomous, what nobody's gonna understand that the tooling is super rough. And I think we both feel that between some of the communities that you're helping to support and see club and the communities we're working with, and I think it is impart just folks that really live and breathe online versus writing for traditional publication or, you know, not not really diving in this deep into the nooks and crannies the internet. And I just think that they, their world is a little bit different than folks whose world is either primarily entirely internet native.
So I want to jump into a couple of like the Dow's that you and the open Law Team slash sort of what's it called? Tribute? Tribute labs. Yeah. Tribute labs. Alright, I have created but I get the sense. I mean, I think I first met you in Berlin in 2019. And that's when I fell down the dowel rabbit hole. And I remember my experience in 2019, being one of more frustration, I would say, then excitement, or maybe excitement, turn frustration, just seeing how tools were even more rough. But But there's still like a lot of didn't feel like we were making a lot of progress. And I know you've been focused in in rent house for probably many years before that. I'm curious, like, how has your understanding or maybe the ways that you described as shifted from when you first got interested in the topic to today?
Yeah, I mean, I, the first time I remember reading that as it was, even before theorems launched, there was Dan Larimer, who wrote this really interesting article on Bitcoin magazine about decentralized autonomous corporation, or DAC. And I just thought, it's fascinating, because it was one of the first major attempts were part of a whole bunch of kind of early attempts to generalize Bitcoin. And folks were geeking out around the time of color coins, and a whole bunch of different abstraction layers that could be built on top of Bitcoin and Aetherium really kind of captured that that energy, I think the core concepts around houses has largely stayed the same, right? There's kind of a wing where the thought is that you can use democratic processes to kind of channel group decision making. And then there's a more futuristic wing that's really focused in on even replacing humans. And as part of the decision making process and using algorithms at its core, you know, that energy, not surprisingly, first manifested with the DAO itself with the first experiment with a Dao and the theorem ecosystem, that was a spectacular disaster. I mean, it was spectacular, you saw all these different folks around the globe pulling capital, I think the core vision of what the Dow wanted to do was a good one, it just ran into technical and then event to legal issues. And then people just got kind of swept up in the token mania from 2016, to 18. And I think, as the hangover from that media began to subside, we started to see what I think is one of the strengths of the Etherium ecosystem, which is the devs really focus in on some of the narrow issues that the Dow itself exposed. And also, some of the additional tech tooling around it is constantly improved. And by 2019, when we first met Jess, I think I saw cuz I remember walking in, he throw it in and just being like, dowser and hit their moment soon. And I kind of internally had a hypothesis about that before Berlin, and I walked out after Berlin, just saying that this is, this is the time that the timing is not right. And that's in part why we kind of jumped in with two feet into the pool without,
I mean, the number of doubts that you have been a part of, at least through now tribute labs, I think is, you know, quite outstanding. And so I guess it started with with allow, and then more recently, Flamingo, Neptune, museo. Can you maybe just give a high level overview of each? And then I'm really interested in sort of what's next?
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So the concept with allow was we should reboot the DAO itself, the original Dao experiment, and try to do it in a way that complies with US law. So in my mind, it was a little bit like the movies off from Mount Gox to Coinbase. So mount Gox was was pretty awesome, you know, kind of pioneered the exchange model. It had security issues that were created by the team itself or an outside attacker, and then it had a whole bunch of regulatory uncertainty surrounding the exchange model. We saw in the US at least Coinbase dot i's and cross t's on the legal regulatory side and really paved the way for all that. digital assets, including Bitcoin, ether, and all the other assets that we see now. And that really opened up a really broad area for people to experiment and play with our thought was like, wow, we could try the same thing. Without these data models were interesting that groups of people that were connected via smart contracts and different tooling could make better decisions than more traditional venture capital fund or something that was aspiring to back projects. And that's where we started. So we opened it up to the public in April of 2020. It took a couple months for folks to kind of pile in. And this is when eath was kind of at its one of its low points around that time. And so we got a whole bunch of, you know, true believers that work together. And the experiment seemed to work, but we had pretty good deal flow projects and teams like that the community was backing them. And we were, we were able at that time and continue to support a whole bunch of fantastic projects in lots of different categories from NF T's and social tokens to defy to infrastructure. To that tooling, it kind of runs the gamut. But the concept around the DAP that allow itself was not just to be one Dao, it was really to foster an ecosystem of doubt. So the notion was, that allow would be kind of the first time and over time, we'd see more and more doubts emerge. The first data members allow incubating conceived of was Flamingo we made and saw the growing NFT ecosystem, we were early backers of superare, Gottschee flow and a t pi, a whole bunch of others and just began to really develop a core hypothesis around NF t's the thought was that a separate that would make more sense to collect NF T's then they kind of appending that directly into the lab. And so we launched Flamingo. And at this point, I think we've acquired about 1600 NF T's. And so some equity investments to that tattoo, which is pretty awesome. And it's the same story with the with Neptune. And Neptune really was kind of the brainchild of Penfield members that allow even before we saw different ways to participate and support defi projects, we were thinking about something like Neptune, it took a little bit of time to get the structuring done right. But once we know that we open that up to and the same thing with museo museo was kind of a reaction to some mechanics that we saw occurring organically. After Flamingo down acquired a high priced proto punk and alien with a purple cap, we began to see people just kind of shooting NF T's to the address that the alien had, it was like they were providing the alien with tribute, like some sort of recognition, they wanted the alien to see their work. So we thought that was a fun mechanic. And we wanted to pull on that thread too. And we also thought it made sense to not just have groups of people collecting NF T's but also preserving them and kind of maintaining them for the for the long haul, which we thought was missing in the ecosystem. So that's kind of the process in terms of how we've been able to support Dows. It's been very organic and curated, it's very member directed and driven. The members hop in and give product feedback and really begin to kind of support and really think through what these dashes look like. And I think that gives the ecosystem the ability to time things right? I think the time the NFT marketplace, right? Hopefully, you know, some of these other opportunities we can write to.
So I'm curious, just for context, like how many members what's what's the size of the communities normally and like PhilaU in the flamingo?
Yeah, so due to us regulatory constraints, we cap it at 99 members, that's not my choice. Just when you get above that you run into some potentially very complicated legal issues. So we wanted to avoid that each Dow has at this point between 60 and 70 members, a nice group of folks, it's not too big, it's not too small. And across the dabs, I think there's about 160 members. So there's some overlap between that and the folks that are members, they have built significant projects in the space or many folks have been floating around Bitcoin or Aetherium, or some combination of two, pretty much from the beginning. There's a lot of like OG blood flowing around different hours.
I love it tribute labs OG blood. So I think it's really interesting the number of people because I think we see such a variety of sizes and structures of projects. And one of the things that always just I think blows people's minds a little bit and consistently blows my mind is just like the the amount of value that can be created by a small number of people holding tokens or holding membership in these organizations. You know, I think about the social token space, where there's two or three 4000 people holding these tokens and and the network value of these projects being in the multiple millions, and just trying to cast my brain forward a little bit and think about what scaling and I think I saw some stats where there's like 100,000 collectors in the NFT space, and it's just like, so small and so early and so many ways. So for there to be less than 200 people in the broader ecosystem around those projects. I think it's quite fascinating. One of the other things that I think many folks are interested about is like how does work get done in these organizations and think the way that you that you guys have built out these structures, you know, there's for everybody has skin in the game, but they also are more like funds and funds traditionally have passed. have investors and, you know, core teams that are managing them? Is there sort of like a rule of thumb or like a general breakdown that you're seeing across these organizations as far as the the number of people who really lean in and do the work? And how does that dynamic work out?
Yes, they're different than funds, there's no, there's no one party that's in charge. So it's entirely managed by the members very flat. So I think we've seen some other Dows that in many ways are just recreating the past, they're just setting up like governing boards are kind of like a small group of people that are managing assets and making decisions, it doesn't really work like that, instead of flamenco for the LAO or, or Neptune. Instead, it's really starts as a conversation around a particular topic or opportunity, you kind of see some energy forming around it. And folks, whether that's members or sometimes will help kind of push us along, almost like a mod on the subreddit, will begin to put up some soft polling to see if people are interested in a particular topic. And then eventually, it will gravitate and get memorialized into a more formal governance of some sort. And through that, you know, people participate at different levels, we have some members that have joked that like participating in these days, it's their favorite game, like their favorite video game, like even though they manage other people's money, they run their own fund or something like that, they tend to come to the conversation inside of the LAO, Flamingo Neptune first, just because they're well structured. And you can kind of get a clear pulse on what's interesting, at any point in time, there's some folks that are more passive, and that's fine, too, in my mind, and I, this is an analogy I've used for a while, it's like a message board, right? If you're gonna have people that are heavy posters and participating a ton, you're gonna have people that are working, and you don't know if they're participating or not, but they're voting, they're like participating that way. And then you'll have people that can check in that often or kind of periodically check in. And even there, it works. You know, one project that we backed and Flamingo, was a project involving an artist, Michael Johnson, he put together this character, black astronaut called aku. And the member that flagged it is not one of our heavy folks that participate heavily. But he thought this was a great opportunity, just a handful of times that he's kind of jumped up and raised his hand to notice to other folks, and that meant a lot. And I think that that's part of the reason why it works. When you get like a smaller group manager, or like a board that's in charge, it's really hard to kind of capture some of that emergent energy and see opportunities, because they're kind of laser focused, a bit of a group thing kind of sets in amongst amongst those handful of people. And by making it a little bit broader and making it a little less structured, making it a little bit more flat. Thank you, you gain opportunities for a bit of a better noise to signal ratio.
I love the idea of like multiplayer games. And that's it sounds like the core of what's working there. It is fun, it is social. And what why were people on early message boards, it was for, you know, to learn to be a part of something the sense of belonging, but there's also a sense of momentum that I think exists as ideas and projects get pushed forward or discovered. And it is interesting to see,
yeah, there's capital. I think that's the other thing, right. But once you find people together, you know, through capital, or through an asset of some sort, whether that's ether, whether that's native token, it just kind of pushes people in the right direction. So our approach to government governance has been much more flat than I think some of the other down models that have emerged. And what we do at the tribute lab side is for like a mod on the subreddit, we kind of push things forward for like a helping hand. And that just like clearing out some of the like administrative cruft and like adding a little bit more structure, just in terms of getting people to focus on different things like vote voting, or a conversation that's probably worth weighing in on and enables things to push forward, I think more rapidly than what we've seen in other other days.
Yeah, to me, it seems like the the sort of, you know, evolving organizational structure is one of the core areas of innovation. And I think we'll see creating value in a little while. It's I think, like in a structure like likes hit allow or Flamingo there's it is still fairly structured, even if like within your world, and it is unstructured, like the structure is who gets in and who doesn't. So I think there's like these levels of, I guess, gravity or sort of network, just distribution that are very interesting. And I'm curious of your thoughts on like, are we going to see million person Dows? Or are the ones going to work and be much more smaller, tighter collectives?
Yeah, I think the answer is, you're probably going to see both right? I don't think at this point. We've done that innovation when it comes to governance yet to know how to manage something as complex as that collectively. And I think we're gonna see a whole bunch of folks experiment with it. It'll probably be a whole bunch of challenges at the tech level related to it at the regulatory layer related to it, but they'll get sifted through over time. And I imagine in the long run, we'll see some very, very large dabs with lots and lots and lots of different members that are part of it or participants. I just don't know if we're there yet. And frankly, I don't know if the tech is kind of there yet. So our thought was start to sort out some of these issues in the smaller groups, and then you can begin to generalize it out over time. It's like scaling, right? Like, if you can't figure out how to serve, let's say, like a website up to a million people, you can't expect to serve that up to a billion people until you kind of sort out those technical and governance patterns.
Yeah, I think I both agree with that. And think that the thing that gets us to a million users is going to look so different than in these approaches we're taking right now that that's it, I think the hardest part for me is to both scan for things that are going to solve the immediate problems that we're facing and see clever in some of our projects, but also try to stay open minded enough to see how the next level of evolution might come to be.
That seems right to me is like, even if you think about like social media, right, like, Let's do like a quick archival history of social media, you can almost pull it back to like AOL Instant Messenger and await messages, right? Like that was pretty much a similar kind of concept is like the initial like script like, you know, feed or a wall that, you know, Facebook, and Instagram and all these other Twitter, right, they all kind of rest on. So I think we'll see like the threads of it. And folks will in like, some of these smaller doubts, and then people pick up on it and run with it over time. I think they're things always kind of rhyme or things get magnified in different ways. But the initial patterns I think we'll begin to see in some of the smaller groups, or at least that's my hypothesis. Yeah,
I think that makes sense to me. You're someone who has, you know, think through your career made a bunch of early bets, like, you know, early on an Aetherium, very early into Dows. Very early into NF T's. I'm curious, like, what are you excited about right now, when you kind of look out over the next six to 18 months?
metaverse? Yeah, 1,000% and that's what's us his question before I didn't get to it, but the other devs that are kind of forthcoming at the Lau ecosystem. There's going to be a Metaverse style called neon that we're pulling together with the folks from Emmerdale and artifacts, there's going to be an attorney formulated that earned out called Ready Player down, which is pretty cool. Everything's a little tongue in cheek, we've taken our fake internet money to buy fake internet horses and are breeding out morphic internet horses and helping to build the kind of first or one of the first internet stables around the project called Zed one. And then the last thing that we're interested in is kind of NF T's is characters and we're beginning to explore that with high value crypto punk. We're gonna roll out something called Alien data that's coming in, I'd say like the next two to four weeks, some of them already in progress. They just haven't been publicly announced. Yeah.
It's amazing. So curious if you can maybe highlight your Metaverse thesis. What is getting you excited about the metaverse?
Yeah, I mean, I think I think for me, the metaverse is gonna be the context for the generation that's coming up. So you know, folks that are between the ages of like eight and 18 have probably spent more time over the past couple years in some Metaverse or Metaverse type environment than they have surfing the internet, right like to the World Wide Web. And I think that the tech is finally there, both on the graphics side on the blockchain side, and just in general, through Web GL and some other tools such that we can begin to see like an open permissionless Metaverse emerge one or more of them. And I think it's going to take some time to build these out, they're going to probably need to be open and permissionless for people to feel comfortable building on them. And there's a lot of work that needs to be done to kind of mature these ecosystems. So it feels to me like early Bitcoin, really eath or some of the other early projects. And I think in terms of like the opportunity, you know, it's unclear if there's gonna be one or more meta versus my senses. There'll be more than one. It's unclear what will drive value in these ecosystems. But I have a feeling folks will figure that out. And it feels like that the metaverse that will win will require either degree of scarcity or just lots of people building on it for it to kind of break away from the rest. We've seen larger tech companies like Facebook indicate that they want to build the metaverse. I don't think folks want to build in like a close Metaverse, especially one that's controlled by a company kind of feels like a company town. It feels like the blockchain base meta versus probably will win in the long run.
Although there's two pieces of that. The idea of like Facebook being Metaverse being a company town versus sort of more of like the Wild West is really interesting to me. And I can imagine to try to think through like what is the relevant example of the railway coming to town as a way of driving value in these in these open sort of more organic organizations. And then the second piece was that I think the idea that most young people have spent more time in these Metaverse worlds than surfing the internet. That's frankly a pretty big aha there that I hadn't quite thought through so these are like Roblox and fortnight and sort of the the game worlds is that right?
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, I think that, you know, during COVID and and probably before, you know, just that's the context for most folks. Hey, they're playing a tremendous amount of video games be the difference between like meta versus in video games is narrowing, and it's more social. It's like kind of threads, a couple lines, it's not as cold and barren as something like Twitter or Instagram or some of the social media channels. So there's a social dynamic these meta versus I think we see this in crypto people like host events there, you see this affinities, people built galleries that walk around it. And it's nice, like it just a whole different context. And then even going back historically, when people began to think about the internet, and conceive it, they conceived it as a, as a virtual world, right? So I think timing is becoming right for that to every flower and blossom, release. That's hypothesis.
Okay, so it sounds like you have like a number of things ahead of you. As far as launching new projects, one of the things I spent a lot of time thinking about is distribution, or launching, you know, we work with a number of creators that have significant audiences, the thought of sort of putting a project out into the world project out to millions of people, it's kind of terrifying, especially seeing as how, how fast speculative interest can flow into these communities obviously have a little bit of a different structure given that they're highly curated, accredited, only sort of joining these these organizations. But I'm curious if you've noticed a difference in launching something like the loud during a bear market and launching something like Neptune or museo during a bull market.
Yeah, completely, you know, with the LAO and Flamingo It was first come first serve. And it took a couple of months to kind of have all the initial members join with Neptune that began to shift, we, we tend to open the doors up to members first, so that they can join, and then if there's anything left over, and we open up to the public, and for Neptune, it's like about a $35 million vehicle in US dollar terms, it took an hour to close. So in the context of like a fund or fund like structure, that's, that's really fast, you know, if somebody was going to go out and raise like a very traditional investment vehicle, it would take them months to raise that capital, it took an hour for for Neptun, to kind of reach a comparable level, which, which is pretty astounding, I do think we're and we are sifting through different mechanics and had a rule roll things out to kind of balance some of these competing interests. It's not my choice to limit it to a great investors. Frankly, it's not. If I was in charge for day, I'd probably change a lot of these rules, but we're kind of taking the ruleset Bert is and doing our best to work with it.
Yeah, cuz I mean, I think it just speaks to that. So many challenges in the structuring of these beyond just legal structuring, but like the practical nature of it, because, yeah, great to be able to sell out $35 million worth of allocation in an hour. And also, I'm always like, I can't ever who said it, but the sort of belief that the smartest people, you know, don't work for your organization, or maybe the smartest people aren't in your Dow. And so this idea of how do we know if the goal of these organizations is to be a sense making organism? How are we ensuring that we're reaching out into the fringes that maybe we were once a part of before we kind of became a center of sensemaking in the space? How are you thinking about like, going to the edges and bringing people in from those edges?
For me, and it's good example. I mean, we have 20 plus builders craters in the metaverse, they're just super close to the metal. And, and they're kind of really going to be driving neon, and our kind of our endeavors into the metaverse, we started that process in Flamingo that's part of the strategies. It's a metaphor strategy. And we just realized that there's so much opportunity for potential opportunity that we wanted to get even closer to it. So I think finding this
makes sense or sort of like embedding them early the beginning spots, like sort of like the the first seeds that are planted are, you know, either of those people, and then the community sort of forms around it.
Yeah, exactly. And, you know, I think with anything you want, like a mix, right? If it's all just very early, folks, maybe they're young, maybe they're inexperienced, maybe they don't have enough capital, you kind of want a mix of a whole bunch of different people kind of working together. I will say, like, across the Dow's that there tends to be a preference for folks that are actively involved, right, that are close, so that you can have that sense making machine, which is a nice way to phrase it. Yes.
I mean, I think that's like, when I think about the biggest difference in my career over the last year or so it was just like the, the number of new nodes into my sensemaking. Network. You know, it had a number from been in the space since 2017. And so it's slowly building up. But, you know, sitting here today, having these conversations and many more like it. I can only imagine like, it's just, I feel like I have a hard time keeping up with anything, even though I have an amazing network of folks like yourself that are thinking about things and expanding my mind in pretty much every conversation we have. So I think that's, it's pretty much the biggest bull thesis for Dows ever really, if you think about the importance of filtering information in even a web to context, you know, the billions of dollars of value hundreds of billions of dollars of value created there. This is just a surface level notion of social and technical evolution from that, I think is fascinating.
I wanted to just underline that point, just because I think it's really wise. I've been thinking of things in somewhat similar ways. It's like, Gauss may be the filter to kind of this emergent, more free market that sits underneath the Etherium ecosystem, you do need those filters, you have those filters today, if you look at even like how scientific knowledge is produced, right, it goes through these pure peer reviewed organs to kind of make sense of all the data information innovation that happens. Or we have trade organizations or all these other kind of filters that kind of support a robust, healthy economy, and also a productive one. That is where I think as we'll sit, and then your questions which are circling on, I don't think anybody would frankly, claim to be an expert. I definitely don't, I think we still have a lot to learn there is how do you structure these the right way? I think that's gonna just be a journey. And we're kind of on that journey together to figure it out. And, you know, we're doing our best I know, I have a tremendous amount of respect for the work that you and the rest of the folks at C club are doing. And I feel like we're all learning from each other. And it's through that kind of iterative, collaborative learning process that won't tackle this. He did something even better than what we have today. Hopefully.
Yeah. Hopefully. Like that's, I mean, I think that yeah, there's, there's so much like, you need to have that sort of thing, hopefully, that that last line, there is absolutely essential, because I think there's a lot of naivete. And I mean, I was early into social media, and I felt it very viscerally. Right, this is gonna change the world. And, you know, I was not expecting this sort of, you know, aggregation theory to be such a thing. And so, but I do think there's a lot, I mean, at least the folks that I get to spend time with, like, there's a lot of consideration for that, whether that's enough, you know, in any new technical, technological evolution, I don't know, but I share your, your desire, at least of hopefully. Okay, I'm going to switch topics here a little bit, because I could talk to you have doubt forever. But you know, that the thing that brought us together in the first place was social tokens. And, you know, the sort of, but I've seen you, you sort of opine on Twitter recently about some of these things. And I think there's meaningful daylight between the topic or context of social tokens and Dows. But in other ways, probably very, very related. I'm curious, like, what's your interest in social tokens generally? And how do you see them relating to Dows?
Yeah, I think social tokens are fascinating. One way of kind of conceptualize just what's going on with Bitcoin and Aetherium. And a whole bunch of other token base projects is that they act as a shelling point for an ecosystem to just rally around and coordinate activity. And so it makes a lot of intuitive sense to me that not just broad networks around something like a store of value, like Bitcoin, or web, web three, which I think is the broadest vision for a theorem and ether token, which is the shelling point for it. But other smaller networks and ecosystems would also benefit from a token to kind of coordinate activity. So I've always kind of find that found that fascinating from kind of the earliest experiments that I remember here, which would be like gap coin, which is one of the first proofs of concept on Eve Tatjana coin, which kind of bridge the coin at 3am, to the Alex token, which, which I thought was fascinating. And suddenly the other social tokens that we're seeing whether that's friends benefits, or GE, or Brian, Brian and Jim, they're all pretty fascinating. So it's just something I've kind of always been paying attention to. I think that that's coming, there is like some weird confluence, like you noted, I think, a couple minutes ago, around like social tokens and FTS Dows. I don't fully know what the construct looks like yet, in my mind, but it's something I'm constantly always trying to figure out work through.
It seems as if like, the category just keeps expanding, as I try to think through like the perfect way to sort of describe this world we plan with, you know, C club, and the, it's get even more complicated or interesting, I guess, with fractionalization, and party bids, and the sort of new tools that are allowing for different types of coordination and mutual ownership or gameplay. There's a joke, every time I speak with PRI, actually, we joke about, you know, just just douse all the way down. And I think it's that, you know, coordination layer at every single layer, even even, you know, around a single NFT that maybe has two or 200, fractional owners around. So a term that you'd use quite a bit as it relates to social tokens is this idea of digital salons. So as a tweet that you sent out as social tokens will first find your footing supporting a new generation of digital salons. What do you mean by that?
Yeah, I mean, I think you know, somebody just spent way too much time on mind. You just feel like every message board eventually gets watered down and destroyed. You know, if you go to like, earliest subreddits, they were great, right, they felt like intimate, they felt a little bit more friendly. The quality, I think, you know, at least early on was pretty high. And then as those platforms and as that kind of core use case, like a message board or subreddit or, or other art online community grows, it just kind of dies. Like some of the specialness of it. I think social media, just go back to what you said before was a little bit like that, too, right? Like Facebook at 20 million users feels a lot different than Facebook. Today, Twitter at 20 million users feels a lot different than Twitter at 200 Plus, or whatever the total number of users is now. And a lot of like the the bad parts of those systems get magnified. And some good pieces are lost. I think one of the advantages of social tokens is they create scarcity. And that scarcity means that you can have tighter groups of mine, which should increase the quality of the conversation there by like using a token as a, as a gatekeeper in some sort of way. I just think you can keep all my communities open ended and fluid and you know, somewhat permissionless. But at the same time, you know, not make them so unwieldy, that the core benefit of that devolves, and I think, you know, friends of benefits is a great example, early example that I love checking out the conversations that happen there. It's, it's pretty standard. And to me, that feels like a like a digital salon. Which is funny because I, you know, if you go back to like web, one, people constantly wanted to build digital salons. That's why salon.com was started. Simple. So I just think we're kind of going back to some of the core concepts around the internet, we just have better tools to implement them now. And so I'm super excited about that kind of concept. I also think a lot of dentists, maybe this is the New Yorker, me, just like having constraints and scarcity kind of provide some of the magic. So the fact that you can only fit like X number of people in like a bar or in you know, restaurant or in, you know, a bakery, it just creates like a lot of buzz excitement. And it just has a whole different field and something that just given away for free and open ended. And I think that's kind of we're getting back to that the ability to begin to, like model out some of the good parts of physical spaces in the digital world.
Yeah, I think that's fascinating. The idea of an occupancy limit for digital space, I think you've seen you tweet about before.
Yeah, I don't know how you think about it. I mean, I be curious, just but to me that towards one side is just, you know, conversation, but to me, that's like what's special, right, but the fact that you can create these, like smaller groups, like you noted before, right, like these groups can become pretty powerful. In terms of their impact, right.
Yeah. I mean, I totally agree. And I think like the I mean, there's, there's a couple levels, I find this stuff fascinating. One is, you know, is that this this community, first focus, so C club is really focused on community tokens. And it's really sort of leaning into this insight that I think you're sharing here, which is, you know, if you get great people together on the internet, interesting things happen. So collaboration leads to cool stuff. But the thing that was missing from most Facebook groups is the fact that there isn't sort of a shared skin in the game are upside, this idea of having a cap table on a bank account that's run by members, I think is the is the thing that gives these communities superpowers. And so I think one part is like, yeah, like when we're seeing some of our communities have 100 people in it and the conversation be phenomenal, and could go on to build really meaningful organizations, purely with even an upper limit of 100 people in a in a broader social context. And also, at the same time, I'm thinking of just these like, massive swarms, like the the Wall Street bet world that, you know, for better or for worse, will make use of these tools to really coordinate around really impactful financial outcomes. So I think it's just going to be a whole host of different experiments. But the one of the core things we look for is proof of community. Because I believe that's the sustaining thing beyond and maybe a contrast that with like, an artist or creator that launches a token in and around, you know, their fame, maybe a bit clout as an example, that just feels like there's, you know, at the very least, there's sort of an end date on that, right, somebody is going to die eventually. And does that live on or not? I mean, you could probably make arguments for both sides. But to me, like a community that has a mission and a y and is sort of like working towards something and is designed properly ultimately should be able to remove, you know, a core member from that team and maybe even get stronger. Yeah,
completely. Yeah, I think that's what I said.
What do you think so like, implied in I think your tweet here about social tokens finding the first finding their footing in in digital salons like what Is that enough? Like, is it enough that we have communities that are like tokenized? I mean, we look at Friends of benefits. So much of I think like the the magic, there is the early community that they were able to bring together. Interesting dynamic, it's novel. You know, the token model is actually pretty brilliant in that people are holding these tokens to be able to get access. But it also feels like they're sort of like an upper limit in that, like, at a certain point, like, what is it 5000 to 10,000 100,000. Like those, Discord becomes just like a cluttered, crazy ineffective place to hang out together. And we sort of seen them start to build out, you know, I irrelevance tools that support IRL events, I think they just launched are working on launching an editorial and media section. Like, what's your sense of how something like that evolves?
Yeah, I, I think that that's going to be one of the interesting conversations, I do think that we'll see outside of like, more these like social salons, people create content together, you know, I did a lot with wikis and Wikipedia, before got into all this, and you kind of saw similar dynamics emerge there. A lot of people use this cumbersome wiki software, which was pretty hard to use to filter out into a smaller group of people just so that they could create content together. So I think some of these like went to concepts like user created stories, fanfiction user, user created, media of some sort, that requires more than one person to create is probably an area that I think we'll see more and more use cases for social tokens, you know, I think it's pretty easy for one person to make, let's say, like an NF t that selling super rare or a handful of people to work on something like a generative NF T drop. But there's a lot more complex media that we haven't figured out how to collaboratively make online. And I can imagine social and community tokens helping to facilitate those conversations being used as some way to coordinate more complex media creation, when when you're able to freely sell or trade that via an NF T, I think you have the incentives in place to begin to pre start some of those experiments. So that that's an area I'm pretty, pretty fascinated in what a digital salon evolves into I'm not 100% Sure, maybe that's enough, right? Like maybe people just need, like, a community that isn't that many people to join, and people can kind of float in and out of it. Maybe like a five or 10,000 person online ecosystem is pretty cool. And good enough. Yeah, I
think, I mean, I think actually embedded in your experience from the lounge to Flamingo and these other douses, probably what we're gonna see happen really sort of like early organizations are, he's going to build a brand and a name and attract really great people, and then they're going to be sort of directly related to or new things will be spun out of them, or new sort of partner communities will kind of fragment out and in the best possible way, sort of focus in on a more niche aspect. I see it in C club already, where I think like maybe one of the best business models for these, you know, tokenized communities is kind of doing what we're doing, which is like, you know, backing really great projects and providing resources and insight to help them do it. And then also creating a sense of belonging so that there's like a, a community feel there at the same time. And like, does it make sense for C club to go be in like the, you know, to be launching something in the Zed ecosystem or to be trying to build like a collaborative, you know, Media Creation Engine, as ourselves? Probably not. But we want to support somebody who's doing that? Heck, yes, there's probably a lot of insight we can provide there, I see it within the have to be ecosystem as well, where there's, you know, apes online and a bunch of other sort of derivative communities. And not to mention the fact that they're really leaning into building new products and tools. And so yeah, I think there's like, the the salon is enough, and it's probably a lot more than we're giving it credit for.
Yeah, I mean, I think that makes a lot of sense. I mean, we definitely see this with Promega itself metastasizes into like a whole bunch of smaller ecosystems or opportunities. And maybe that's awesome. Maybe that really is, you just kind of let it grow organically. I think that's what makes it hard to kind of give a crisp answer to what that looks like, I guess I'd worry that if you veer too far away from the core mission off the bat, that it may or may actually kill the project, right? Like if you really start as like a salon off the bat, and then all of a sudden, you're turning into like a tech ecosystem. I just feel like the field may get diluted over time.
I think the interesting thing is if and we're seeing many of these projects structured as essentially, you know, token graphs, or there's a series of tokens of finite supply own partly by the Dow and probably by by members. And so there's this like, ability to to have this network reflected in token ownership for many of these types of organizations. And so I think like the splitting into other focus groups is the way to avoid the the watering down The mission, like that core mission can still be the thing and needs to be the thing. And that why, and I'm assuming the wire will evolve and change, just like, like any. But I think that the ones that sustain what will hold true to the core insight as best as possible over the years, and as people, you know, I think it's like, well, one of the reasons I'm so excited to be a member of F WB and why I see so many of our projects through C club, excited to be a part of C club. So there's this, like, there's resources and attention and momentum that kind of is inherent to being a part of these communities that can help launch something with more velocity and credibility and momentum, ultimately, then people would be able to do by themselves, I think that's kind of a core thing, at least I'm trying to design for it in the project. So you know, especially in C club, and so through, through sort of, like, you know, building a rocket with a different target planet to sort of rock it off to allows you to sort of maintain that strong core mission within the salon or the original social token, and yet still provide a way for people who have inspiration or insight or excitement about something else to, to go do it. And there be like a financial or at least an ownership tie back between the two organizations.
Yeah, I think that sounds right. It's like, if you were gonna, like design from first principles, and ecosystem, you probably would want it so that you could trade like social currency, social token for cultural currency, let's say like NF T's or, you know, tech currency, maybe that's what we're seeing the glimmers of what some other blockchain projects, please open permissionless defi protocols being like an early example that, and maybe that's kind of a flywheel that gets everything moving. I just think it's, like, I think all this stuff, it's eventually going to gravitate there. Because it's hyper efficient. I think it has like a nice feel people like it with NFPs, and also social tokens. To me that really feels like what three? Like I don't know, if we can we have as clear of a picture of where it's going. It's going to just take like experimentation and brilliant entrepreneurs and, you know, brilliant folks to, to kind of sift through that a little bit. Like, if we went back to web one, I don't think anybody could have predicted social media, right? Maybe a handful folks did. Not that many,
well, and not in the in the way that it ultimately manifested. Like, we're timing, there's so much. That's what I like to call it, what we're doing here muddling. Think we're just like, modeling forward, I think it's like the fairest description, at least, how my brain feels like it's approaching things.
I think it's more than modeling, you know, I'd say it's, you know, it's, it's like we're running experiments, you know, and that's the most exciting, exciting part of it. And like picking up threads and things that worked before or didn't work, and just, you know, re mixing them, it's where like, the most fun is, like my working, I really an increasingly bullish on this point, I just think, defy to me feels like ecommerce, it's like people trying to basically rebuild what we already have. And NF T's and social tokens really represent to me where things are going, well, we get to this point where you have kind of a efficient pricing networks, which I think maybe a decent way to describe social tokens, helping to support and create the representation of culture, whether that's NF T's or other memes, ideas, intellectual property. And that's where this is all going. Right, we're not going to create and have folks that are buying, selling, trading crude financial instruments, or just kind of governance, which is how it's constructed. Now, instead, it's going to be these cultural, social artifacts that that people are the most interested in acquiring. And once that ecosystem emerges and grows, I think the whole world looks different. People who are creative, are going to, frankly, be rewarded for their output. And that could be creative in terms of making beautiful, interesting things that could be creative in terms of helping build communities and ecosystems. I just think that that's where most of the world's value as at this point, in the information age, it's not like trading as a securities. Like who wants to do that? Not me,
man, I couldn't think of a better line to enter or call here on. Aaron, I really appreciate you taking the time to join this very nascent, burgeoning muddling of a podcast. We're more than
modeling just, and you're amazing. And sequels amazing. And we were huge supporters. I know, we backed it inside the allow and we're happy to do so. And lots of folks just channeling conversations from our ecosystem. They love what you're doing jazz. They love what you know, all the different communities that are emerging out of C club. I think we're really starting to figure it out together.
Yeah, it's the you know, as somebody who really felt like I was out over my skis quite a bit. And about a year ago when we started C club, the so much of the progress and yeah, the momentum we have here today is because of the support of folks like allow and specifically pre from your team whose absolute star and just a couple Unity generally. So I think that it's for folks who are on the outside of this world, maybe that's not quite as visible you normally see in the trading of quasi securities, etc, a very thin view of what's happening in the web three space. And I totally agreed, you know, for all the reasons you gave, and also just the support and, you know, caring I think that exists in this community. It's incredibly bullish about the near and far future. Where we're in this world should we be pointing people to better get to know you or tribute labs?
Yes. So an attribute lab said if you're interested in gout tooling, you can go to attribute data calm. If you want to check out the Lau it's the loud.io Flamingo dal, it's Flamingo data XYZ. Neptune it's Neptune data XYZ museo it's museo with is 09 is an eau de XYZ. Twitter, a W ri ch H 01
Rubin comm do this in a year. And that's gonna be an absolute impossibility for you to actually list out every single one of those. Take a whole podcast here and let's just have a podcast where you just list out all the different debts that have come out of the ecosystem, which is kind of a joke, but probably not a joke, man, like the speed at which these things are evolving is fascinating.
It's moving fast. It's gonna be great. I hope we get to do this. Every couple months. Just be great.
Yeah, totally done to make that happen. Appreciate it. Man. Thank you so much, and I will see you on the internet. Later.