Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Lamina1: Building The Future of The Creator Economy

Episode Date: October 29, 2025

Sci-fi titan Neal Stephenson, whose Snow Crash coined the term 'metaverse' and Cryptonomicon, which foreshadowed crypto in 1999, joins Friederike to discuss his "hard sci-fi" method: building immersive, consistent worlds, not prophecy. He's now co-founder of Lamina1, aiming to restore Web1's ethos and give creators IP sovereignty with direct micropayments, breaking free from Web2's "walled gardens."Neal unpacks Web3's promise like "intent-casting" flipping ad models while citing its critical traps: abysmal UX, criminal stigma, and the "soul-crushing" risk of just upgrading incumbent systems.Spotlighting Lamina 1's game "Artifact," he argues Web3's true success will be measured when the technology becomes invisible and safe, proving its value by restoring sovereignty to its users and creators, rather than through speculative hype.Topics discussed in this episode:(00:00) Introduction to Decentralization and Blockchain(01:20) The Role of Storytelling in Technology Prediction(03:48) The Balance of Optimism and Pessimism in Fiction(06:27) Web3: Promises and Pitfalls(08:36) The Evolution of the Web: From Decentralization to Centralization(13:37) Metrics for a Decentralized Web(15:55) Lamina One: A New Vision for the Metaverse(23:44) Creating a Financial Layer for the Creator Economy(25:08) Legal Implications of Smart Contracts(27:38) The Strength of Smart Contracts(31:04) Decentralization vs. Centralization in the Creator Economy(36:21) The Decline of Centralized Platforms(41:23) Financialization and the Creative Economy(45:47) The Future of Web3 and User Experience(51:17) Potential Failure Modes of Web3Links mentioned in this episode: Neal Stephenson, Co-founder Lamina1: https://x.com/nealstephenson Lamina 1: https://lamina1.com/home Sponsors: Gnosis: Gnosis has been building core decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem since 2015. With the launch of Gnosis Pay last year, we introduced the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Start leveraging its power today at gnosis.io This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.

It's impossible to architect a compelling experience backwards from a desired financial outcome. So if you start with, let's make a lot of money and then you try to work backwards from that to make a story or anything creative, it's not going to work. Premature financialization is the root of all evil. If we try to resist that temptation to just immediately financialize everything and concentrate instead on the intangible value of what people are creating, that there's an opportunity. to make something that's going to be more stable. You've made that point again and again that kind of like we've gotten a lot of things wrong. So maybe let's talk about the things that you think

genuinely should matter in Web 3. Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution. I'm Friedricha Ernst, and today I'm speaking with Neil Stevenson, who is a visionary author,

whom many of you may know, and the co-founder of blockchain project Laminor 1. Few writers have had their fiction mistaken for blueprints, quite like you, Neil. Your cautionary tales somehow became the instruction manuals for a lot of the digital age. Super happy to kind of talk with you about Web 3 and your general take on the ecosystem. But before we do that, let me tell you about our sponsors this week. This episode is brought you my noses, building the open internet one block at a time. NOSIS was founded in 2015, and it's grown from one of Ethereum's earliest projects into a powerful

ecosystem for open user-owned finance. NOSIS is also the team behind products that had become core to my business and that of so many others, like SAFE and COSWAP. At the center is NOSIS chain. It's a low-fee layer one with zero downtime in seven years and is secured by over 300,000 validators. It's the foundation for real-world financial applications like NOSIS pay and Circles. All this is governed by NOSISDAO, a community-run organization where anyone with a GNO token can vote on updates, fund new projects, and even run a validator from home. So if you're building in Web3 or you're just curious about what financial freedom can look like, start exploring at NOSIS.io. Neil, it's a pleasure to have you on. Good to be here. Thank you, Friedrich.

So you've written so many books, and they often feel. eerily prescient. You wrote about the metaverse in the early 90s and about cryptocurrencies a few years later. And so many of those ideas have since come to pass that there's even in speculation that you might be Satoshi. Do you think of yourself as kind of predicting technology or do you just notice what others haven't yet articulated? I'm a storyteller and the primary job of a storyteller is to tell a good story or a yarn, as we say, that will keep people turning the pages and keep them engaged. And in science fiction, you're creating an imaginary world. And that world has to make sense because readers are very sensitive. If they see

something that doesn't add up, that doesn't make sense, that's inconsistent, they immediately lose their interest in the book. And so, you know, if you're creating an imaginary world that has some technology in it or that has a business or, you know, something, you know, people who are trying to do something in an organized way, that has to make sense. It's got to add up. And so in science fiction, particularly what we call hard science fiction, part of the right, job is to have fictional technologies that makes sense that are plausible. And so when we're building such a world, we try to think it through. We try to do some research.

We try to learn something about how these technologies actually work, what is and isn't possible. And then we make up imaginary rules for our imaginary technologies. Or if we're writing about a corporation, some kind of business, we need to have some idea of why that business makes sense. How do these people make money? You know, would it actually work? Because if you don't do those things, eventually the whole logic of the story breaks down somewhere. So in the case of books like Snow Crash and the Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon, you know, I tried to be so careful about creating these imaginary technologies and businesses and so on in that way. So I think that when engineers, nerds, technologists,

entrepreneurs, when they read a book like that, they can kind of see, oh, okay, you know, this sort of makes sense. You know, this could actually happen. So some of them may decide that some version of that imaginary technology or that imaginary business plan is worth actually trying to bring into the real world. When you kind of see your ideas come to life that way, I mean, sometimes decades later, does it do something to your own sense of reality? Kind of does it feel validating or creepy or unsettling? Or are you kind of detached from your ideas by then?

I'm pretty detached. I mean, the typical way it works when you're writing a book is that during the time, that you're working on it, you're completely immersed in that world and thinking about all of the details and doing all kinds of research. And then as soon as you're done with the book, you move on to something else and your memories start to recede into the distance. And you begin to take up all of that space in your brain with new stuff. And so, you know, by the time a book is actually out in print, I've already moved on to something else. And in the case of books like Snow Crash or the Diamond Age, these are things that I wrote 30, 35 years ago. And so it's been quite a while. And I don't

I don't think it would be healthy to just sit around, you know, decade after decade, you know, paying close attention to what was happening, you know, with such things. Because you do have to move on and kind of get on with your life. So it's, you know, it's always kind of interesting when something emerges that looks like it might have been influenced or inspired by something I wrote. But I don't go out of my way looking for it. Yeah, I hear that. And I think kind of like the fact that it's been so long adds to that for sure.

A lot of the people in this space see. you as this visionary. And I feel often people don't appreciate that a lot of your stories are actually, at least I read as quotientary tales, right? So kind of like it's not a techno-optimist inducement of everything that's going to happen. How do you feel when kind of like your books are almost treated like instruction manuals? Well, I think for the most part, they are realistic, kind of balanced treatments of these subjects. I don't think it would be very interesting to just be very dark and pessimistic about everything. I don't think it would be interesting either to just blindly optimistic.

And so what is interesting is, you know, if the characters in the books and the situation, in the books have a realistic degree of complexity and ambiguity. So in the case, for example, of the Metaverse and Snow Crash, you know, it's a lot, some people look at it and say, oh, well, it's very dark and dystopian. And I understand why the society that's depicted in the book definitely has some aspects, you know, that don't seem all that optimistic. I don't think that that world is much more.

dark or pessimistic than the world we actually live in. And I think it's got a realistic degree of good and bad. And if you look at the ways in which the metaverse is actually used in the pages of the novel, sure, there's some stuff in there that's kind of sleazy, you know, pornographic, whatever, appealing to the lowest common denominator. But there's also art. You know, people use it for communication, they use it to cultivate relationships, they use it to do business. And so it can be a, you know, a positive tool as well as, as, you know, kind of a sleazy strip mall. So I think that, and, you know, the similar statements could be made about the technology that's shown in the Diamond Age and in Cryptonomicon. And again, to do otherwise, I think would result in a kind of

simplistic storyline that most intelligent readers would pretty quickly get bored with. Yeah. You've had a somewhat complicated relationship with Web 3. So, I mean, there are clearly some kind of like some core promises that appear to you and a lot of other people. But kind of you've made the point again and again that kind of like we've gotten a lot of things wrong. So maybe let's talk about the things that you think kind of like,

genuinely should matter in Web 3, kind of the values we should try to imbue technology with. And where do you think kind of we stand with respect to these values and promises today? Well, to begin with, I don't claim to be an expert on the current state of things. It's a very fast-moving field, lots of companies, lots of people trying different things. And so I don't make any effort to really stay abreast of the very latest developments. I mean, I'm working on a specific project that we can talk about in a bit. But for me, it's always more interesting and informative to actually try to do something rather than attempting to understand and follow everything that's happening in the whole universe.

So having got that out of the way, I mean, the general trajectory of Web over the last 30 years has been that, you know, when it came out and during the kind of the early phase, the 90s, basically, it was, you know, if you want to call that Web 1, it was inherently decentralized. So anyone, I mean, the whole structure of the World Wide Web is such that anyone could put up a web page written in HTML, and it would be viewable on any browser that knew how to parse HTML and that was on the Internet. And so, you know, people began to put up simple web pages all over the place. And in that era, it was truly decentralized. and there was a kind of idealistic ethos around it that was very much kind of, you know, sort of grad student hippie idealist mindset of, you know, we're going to make all of this knowledge available.

We're going to allow people to communicate with each other freely in a decentralized way. And somehow that's automatically going to be a good thing. But even in the late 90s, you know, I began to hear from people in the sort of crypto, and privacy worlds who saw that this could lead to problems, that not all communication is good. And not everything that was going up on the Internet was socially constructive or was having good results. So I'm being distracted because a pop-up just showed up in my browser saying, try Gemini in Google Chrome. You know, I have to, this is classic.

Web 2 bullshit. Let me make it go away. So then Web 2 is the era of consolidation. It's the era of various players figuring out ways to create centralized platforms and services that turned out to be very popular and very commercially successful, but that we're going in the other direction, going very much into centralized. direction that that kind of contradicted the original, you know, Web 1 ethos. And that's what brought

us to where we are today. One hopes, one would like to think that, you know, with Web 3, we could go back in the direction of a more decentralized approach to things. And, you know, this has always been the mindset of crypto-libertarian tech nerds, the kinds of people I was writing about in Cryptonomicon, who are just automatically suspicious of any kind of centralized power system. You know, centralization of power always leads to bad things happening. And so, you know, we're going to try to use technology of various kinds to fight centralization. I think that's the, if you go to a conference where there's people from the crypto industry hanging around, you see a mix today of.

people who are genuinely driven by kind of the belief that they're doing something socially constructive for society by getting us away from centralized financial institutions and centralized information brokers and in the direction of decentralized versions of all those things. And that's mixed in with a lot of other attempts to commercialize this that I think are often driven by less idealistic considerations. But it's all, you know, it's a mix of those things. It's not one or the other. They're all kind of wrapped together.

And so you just have to keep your wits about you, I guess, and know how to distinguish, you know, between those things. What are the metrics that kind of would become better if the web became more decentralized again? I mean, I think it's very easy to kind of make kind of the criticism. of centralization. I mean, it's, it's become much more efficient in many ways, kind of like, if you look at kind of like, for instance, how much data kind of YouTube is able to stream. I mean, kind of like people in Web 1 kind of like would have blown their minds, right? And kind of, yes, we can say, okay, you can't really do anything on the internet without kind

of accruing value to kind of the same five corporations and kind of like, and somehow that's bad, I think. But what are the metrics that we should monitor to see whether lives for actual people actually get better? Because kind of like with any technology that's kind of aspirational in that sense, you kind of have to take it down from kind of this very abstract level of kind of like centralization is bad and decentralization is good to concrete value propositions, right? Well, I mean, one metric we might look at is how much do the creators of content get paid. Okay. So famously, musicians aren't making very much money at all from putting their stuff on Spotify or Pandora or YouTube or, you know, any of those. and yet those are profitable companies, right?

So somebody's making money. Value is accruing, as you say, but are the people feeding that content in, are they getting their fair share of compensation or even just enough compensation to make some kind of decent living out of what they do? And are they getting to maintain control over their data?

Do they have the mailing list of all the people who are subscribing to their service? You know, can they reach out to their fan base? Can they talk to their fan base directly without the intermediation of a company? Can they monetize their popularity in a way that, you know, compensates them instead of compensating the venture capitalists who funded the creation of the, the, the platform that they're using. This is also kind of where the story of laminar one kind of begins, right? So for listeners who might not be familiar, what is laminar one and what was the motivation behind creating it?

So it started out around the end of, I think, 2021 when the when Facebook changed its name to meta, and announced that they were now the Metaverse Company. And then a bunch of other big companies within 48 hours also jumped in and said, oh, no, no, no, no, we're the Metaverse Company also. And then a lot of startups in the wake of that began styling themselves as Metaverse startups because that was kind of the hot buzzword of 2022. I went to South by Southwest in March of March or April of 2022,

and you couldn't look in any direction without seeing the word metaverse somewhere. The idea was if there's going to be a metaverse, that's anything like the metaverse that's described in Snow Crash, what has to be true in order for such a thing to come into existence? In order to build a metaverse presence, you know, a place, a virtual space in the metaverse, basically you need to use a game engine as the two, the tool that you're working from because game engines have got all of the apparatus all of the code base

all the capabilities that are needed to create 3D environments that are interactive and that can be styled to look the way and behave the way that you want and if you look at game engines and the companies that build games on them you know it is a it's a every every game every experience is a package of many many different assets so-called so you know mesh animations, materials, textures, sound effects, logic, avatars. And each of those assets typically is created by a different category of artist. And so each one of them is an expert in using a different kind of tool chain, whether it's Blender, 3DS Max, or an audio mixing program.

And so you've got to create a sort of set of economic rails that makes it possible for all those people to collaborate and for their contributions to be tracked and for compensation to flow back to them to the extent that whatever they did is part of a successful project. and in a traditional game environment, that's all handled by having the whole game exist as an encapsulated thing unto itself. And so, you know, gamers buy the game. They give money to the publisher. The publisher gives money to the developer. The developer has some way of parceling out compensation to the people who worked on the game. And that all works as long as the game is a sort of, a freestanding system.

But that starts to break down when you think about how a metaverse would work. So if I'm running around in the metaverse, I've got my avatar. I've got the avatar's clothing. It's got a bunch of cosmetics, hair, makeup, you know, whatever, that all have to be designed and, you know, and created by artists who know how to do that kind of thing. I've got props, you know, I might have, you know, a magic sword that I carry around or what have you. And those could all come from different places. So, and every time I step across the boundary from one space in the Metaverse to another space,

I have to bring all that stuff with me and it has to be rendered. It has to appear to the people who are in that space watching me walk in the door. And so there's no longer this circumscribed boundary, this kind of cell wall that encloses the game. And instead, you know, what you've got is this complicated economy of assets that are crossing boundaries all over the place. And there's additional complications and details. You know, if I take a, you know, I might get a, say, the magic sword from someone. and then later maybe a new version of that gets created. It gets improved or enhanced somehow.

And in that case, you'd like to see some royalties, what we used to call royalties, flowing back upstream to the original creator of that prop. So when you think about all of these things that have to be true in order to actually make a metaverse that would work and kind of make a list of everything that has to, to be implemented, there's actually a lot of overlap between that list and the basic capabilities of blockchain systems. So, you know, blockchain systems, you know, are very good at things like

keeping track of who created a thing at a particular time. And they're good at handling transactions in which ownership, you know, changes hands between different parties and they're good at distributing funds to not just to one person, but potentially to a whole list of people who might have been part of a particular creative project. So the idea that that got us going with Lamin A 1 was to, you know, create a blockchain-based system that would be optimized to carry out all of those functions. And the I would say the only thing that's really changed that much along the way is that it's sort of occurred to us that there's all kinds of other creators who need the same stuff. Okay.

So if you're a movie maker, if you're a musician, what have you, that you could benefit from having the kind of system I just described, even if you're not yet or not today building the metaverse per se. even if you're just trying to release an album or get a movie project financed or in some other way make a living as a creative artist. So are we talking about a financial layer for the creator economy?

Or are we talking about a place where also kind of like the game engines and so on can live? Because kind of like, I'm confused, just a little bit because you talked about kind of the games and kind of like how people would cross over from one place to another. And I'm not quite clear what the exact specifications here. Well, I mean, at one level, it's just we need to keep track of who created what, when, and how that's being used, how it's being accessed. And then we'd like to see people get compensated for, for of that of that usage. And the game engine example is more complicated just because games have

lots of different types of assets in them all sort of working together. But a simpler way to think about it and take sort of an entry point to all of this is to start with people making so simpler and more traditional forms of creative art like just a movie or a song. Okay, I get that. Why did you feel you needed to create a new base layer for that? Because kind of like had you put it on an existing base layer, you could have integrated it much more easily with existing protocols. So for instance, say you want to finance an album or movie. You could kind of tokenize it ahead of time and already borrow against it and so on.

So kind of having these financial infrastructure tools around is super useful. And kind of like replicating them on every chain is compassam and kind of bridging is difficult. So you said in the past that smart contracts aren't contracts, right? So how do you make on-chain rights legally meaningful for creators and artists? Yeah, so the, you know, the issue was this is a couple of years ago that there weren't really enforceable legally binding contracts in these in these transactions. And there was a guy of the late, we're getting it, Josh, Josh Kramer. This is a piece he wrote four years ago. He was an entertainment lawyer with a technical background who wrote code.

And he had a company called Grapevine that was working on this. And he had come up with a system that crossed the boundary between blockchain and legally binding contracts. But sadly, he's no longer with us. Anyway, this gets into sort of almost metaphysical topics of what a contract. is. And it's kind of a deep topic. You know, if I have a house, say, this is my house.

What does it really mean to say it's my house? Well, it means that there is a bunch of paperwork that got signed. And according to our legal conventions, you know, this paperwork has the net effect of allowing me to say that this is my house. But at the end of the day, the ultimate source of authority is, at least in this country, is a government office at the county level that maintains a list of deeds to property. And basically, if push comes to shove, if there's a legal dispute, that is the ultimate

source of ground truth. And somebody can go to that filing cabinet, pull out the drawer, and look up the file for a particular piece of property and say, well, okay, the deed is registered, you know, okay, so-and-so owns this house. The world of blockchain, there's not necessarily that kind of ultimate source of truth. And so it raises questions about the enforceability of some of these contracts. And so really the question that kind of boils down to is, you know, is it good enough? You know, is it the smart contract, whatever it says, is it sufficiently strong or sufficiently enforceable that when push comes to shove, the creator is going to get paid, going to get

paid money. And so that's what that's what that was about. Okay, I see. So in the traditional creator economy, you rightfully said that creators often get squeezed and kind of like they put their songs on Spotify and they see almost no revenue and so on. Usually it's because there's some sort of monopoly that arises and really you can't afford to not put your stuff on Spotify or similar platforms. How do you prevent kind of the new creator platforms from simply re-centralizing power under different label?

Because kind of like wherever you kind of have these chokeholds on creators or these bottlenecks, kind of in principle, you could see the same dynamic, right? just by virtue of being decentralized doesn't mean something is morally good. That's not automatic, but I mean, there's no, so if you look at, if you take the example of music, it used to be that the only way for fans to listen to music was to go to a store and buy a piece of plastic. had the album pressed onto it and taken home and play it on their record player, right? And so the stores could be somewhat decentralized.

Anybody could open a record store, but the companies that pressed the actual discs and shipped them to those stores did become highly centralized over time. And it's because at the end of the day, there has to be a machine that presses the disc, you know, and there has to be a distribution network. that prints the album covers and puts them on trucks and ships them out to the stores. And you could make similar arguments about movie distribution

or the distribution of books or any other physical media. There is a kind of an inelectable physical reason why some degree of centralization is naturally going to happen in those situations. You're not going to have people stamping out LPs you know, in a cottage industry kind of environment. Now that everything's digital, that has gone away. There is no physical layer present that stands between people creating the bits and people downloading the same bits off of the Internet.

And so it kind of raises the question of, you know, what is it that these companies are doing that adds value? that, you know, adds more value than they're taking away. While I would certainly agree with you that just being decentralized, that doesn't mean it's automatically good. I think it's no longer the case that there's an inherent reason why these companies need to be centralized and kind of monopolistic to the degree that they are. But in some respects, haven't we seen?

the opposite. So kind of like if you look at how many publishing houses we used to have in the 90s and how many of them perished, despite the fact that kind of they had to have real printing presses and distribution networks and so on, in principle, I agree that distributing bits on the internet should be much lower barrier to entry. But nevertheless, we've kind of seen these enormous forces for centralization, right? I mean, even for something that's completely, completely digital. So kind of like say, I buy a Kindlebook from Amazon. In principle, there's no reason why kind of like I everyone or 90% of people who kind of read ebooks should buy them from the same place. Right. So kind of like what where do you think kind of like the architecture of the internet failed? Well, it's a big question, a very interesting question. The, you know, a lot has to do with just the convenience. So the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the. vertical integration of, I guess it'd be more like horizontal integration of different things together. So, you know, Kindle's connected to Amazon.

So if I have an Amazon account and I'm used to buying things on Amazon, it's very easy to buy things, to buy an ebook on Kindle or what have you. So the friends with Corey, Dr. O. who, you know, has been doing some great writing and thinking about and shitification, right, which is a term that Corey coined. And, you know, the basic story of it is that when these companies achieve that level of market penetration, they start treating their customers badly and they start treating their business partners badly in an effort to maximize the amount of profit that they're making.

So there are very strong forces, even in a completely non-physical, a purely digital environment, like you're saying, there are these strong forces that lead to centralization. As time goes on, we see that those centralized platforms decay, and they decay very, very rapidly in the quality of the user experience because of the powerful drive. towards end-shodification that they all seem to be susceptible to. And so while I'll agree that the trend towards centralization has been very powerful during the last couple of decades, I think that

we're beginning to see signs that it may have peaked and may be sort of in an advanced process of decay that could create some opportunities for new approaches. Which signs would you point to that? I mean, just when I was trying to start this conversation with you, I got interrupted by an unwanted advertisement that popped up on my screen, you know, from Gemini. I was irritated by that, you know. I found that to be intrusive and unnecessary. So that's just a small example.

of it. But, you know, another example is that it's very difficult to find things on Amazon now. So it used to be if I needed to find something or to buy something, well, it's very easy. I go on the Amazon side. I do a search and I, you know, immediately see a bunch of products that match my search terms. And now that's no longer the case. There's so much. sponsored content that it's extremely difficult to actually find what you want. And so instead, I have to sort of go on, I was going to say Google, but I can't use Google either because it's also been Insidified. So I use Kaggi, K-A-G-I, which is a service that you pay for.

It's a search thing that replaces Google. So I go there and I search for what I want and try to comb out the sponsored things in the AI slop and eventually if I'm lucky I actually find you know the thing that I'm looking for you know once I've identified it then I can sort of try to go back and find it on Amazon or some other retailer that'll sell the thing to me and so that's I mean those are just some small samples of this this trend and I think everyone who uses the internet is is being exposed to this every day So again, I think we're at the end in the sort of decline of the Roman Empire stage of Web 2 and that this might create some opportunities. Yeah, no, that's certainly super interesting.

And I think we also see it in streaming services, right? So kind of like when Netflix came about, it was great. You paid $10 a month and kind of like you could see all this content. And now a lot of it is no longer available, kind of like you have to subscribe to five other different platforms. And now it's much easier to just pirate it again. Yeah, yes. Yeah. Yeah.

In a lot of cases, in a lot of cases, I would happily pay some reasonable amount, you know, to watch a basketball game or something. But there's no way to do it. And you're navigating this maze of, you know, do you have an engagement? account here, do you have the right privileges there? And at the end of the day, it's easier to just find some pirate stream. Yeah. Yeah, no, I hear that. There's something I kind of just had to think of in the Cryptonomicon, this character, GoTo Dango. He says, I think gold is the corpse of value. And do you feel there's a parallel here with kind of the digital, the digital weather, kind of like, things have been

milked and kind of try to to kind of to turn into this extractive kind of apparatus that kind of sucks people dry for all their worth and kind of that this is kind of the digital equivalent of this goal you kind of put in your safe and kind of

have it forever more yeah well I did I did a talk at a dice which is a game development Convention a couple of years ago, it's up on YouTube, which is about some of these topics. Because at the time, a lot of Web 3 people had been trying to persuade game developers that they should make Web 3 games. And a lot of game developers were becoming very annoyed, very tired of it and extremely hostile in a lot of cases towards blockchain and Web 3 people.

So I was trying to have addressed this in my talk. And one of the quotes that I used is actually a quote from Rebecca Barkin, which was that it's impossible to architect a compelling experience backwards from a desired financial outcome. So if you start with, let's make a lot of money, and then you try to work backwards from that to make a story or anything creative, it's not going to work. And one of the things I said in that talk was that premature financialization is the root of all evil,

which is kind of a twisting a quote from Donald Canuth when I say that. But there has been a tendency, I think, in the industry generally to try to move to financialization as early as possible. And that might work if the, there was like only one blockchain, only one cryptocurrency, but if there's thousands of them, then it tends to make them all kind of fungible. And so the point that I was making was that if, you know, if there's only one currency in the world, the dollar or whatever, then the currency sets the value of things like potatoes, gasoline, steel, you know, whatever, those things are all denominated in dollars.

But if there's thousands of currencies, then the situation is reversed, and now it's the things you can buy that set the value of the currency. And in some cases, like in World of Warcraft has got an internal currency, gold pieces, which actually has a pretty stable value against the dollar. It's more stable than some national currencies. And it's because the people who play that game are sharing an experience that means something to them. It's got sort of intangible value.

And so the various items and so on the property that they've acquired during their adventures in Warcraft are important to them emotionally. And so they hold their value. And as a result, the gold pieces in Warcraft hold their value. So I think that there's a lesson in that for what we're trying to do. And if we try to resist that temptation to just immediately financialize everything and concentrate instead on the intangible value of, of what people are creating, that there's an opportunity to make something that's going to be more stable.

What are the verticals you're thinking of when you say that? Because when I think of the creator economy, obviously there are works of art that are being created. But kind of like what I see kind of the Web 3 layer being used for here is kind of the distribution of profits and kind of the kind of the kind of the creating a fairer monetization layer to go with it. And in some sense, that's also financialization, right? I suppose. What's your question? Yeah, so what are the non-financial use cases that kind of you see breakthrough?

Because I think my implicit question is a lot of the things that we do on the internet today are broken because there is no explicit financialization. So kind of like if you look at the advertising models of Google and so on, the reason they are resorting to that God offer model for everyone who uses it, it's because it is the one way that they can monetize it efficiently. Or kind of like if you look at social media platforms and how they kind of sell granular data about users and how to influence them, it's because the expectation is that social media is free, right?

And kind of as someone who kind of also runs a company, I can tell you kind of all the infrastructure is very much not free. Right? Kind of like you have to pay for your servers. You have to pay for transaction fees. You have to pay for all of those things. And because there's this expectation that things are free, things have kind of users have to be monetized in some other way.

Do you see use cases that are, truly remove from that? Well, Jaron Lanier has written really well about this, and we actually co-wrote an editorial on this a few years ago that got spiked by a major newspaper. Every time we click on something on a social media side, or even if we

look at it for a few moments, we're feeding data to that site, and we're contributing what Jaron calls micro-labor And so it's a very small, it's very small increments. So we don't notice that a company is big enough. It can aggregate all of that micro labor into macro labor. It's something that's really valuable.

And so it's kind of a crazy situation because like if General Motors came to you and said, we want you to go into our car factory for one hour a year and assemble cars for us and we won't pay you, of course you would never do that. That would be a ridiculous kind of offensive proposition. but it's effectively what we're doing with these social media platforms. And so he had an idea that he was working on it. He might still be working on it, which was to aggregate groups of people

and then sell essentially form labor unions. So if you're an enthusiast for photography, let's say, or bird watching, you could get together with a bunch of other bird watchers and say, you know, to a social media company, if you pay us, you know, we'll allow you to data mine our discussion threads about birds. And he was, what do you call it, Mids? Mediators of individual data to propose a new framework

for managing user-generated data, union-like organizations that would represent individuals in negotiations with tech platforms regarding the ownership, monetization, and ethical use of their data. So worth checking out if you're interested in this topic. Yeah, absolutely. I wonder, though, in as how much individual facets of kind of human behavior are monetizable that way, because a lot of the value kind of comes when you know an awful lot about a person, right?

kind of like whatever they Google, whatever advertisements, kind of like they look at kind of like what books they buy, what media they consume, what kind of they click on and so on. And kind of the entirety of that is much more valuable than any kind of like than the pro rater price of any particular thing. So kind of like breaking it down like that, I'm not sure how, how effective that would be. No, no, it's a good point. It's a good point. But it's that's that's that what you just described is exactly what most people find sinister and dark. And right. You know, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So to me, this is the key value proposition of Web 3, kind of like this idea that kind of like in principle we can have these platforms where people who contribute, kind of like who contribute data or whatever else, can have shared ownership without these corporate structures that kind of are forced upon us by states. So kind of, if you kind of, yeah.

And you can use, you know, zero knowledge proofs and so on to, you know, you can have a persistent identity that isn't traceable back. So you can reveal some aspect of yourself that you choose to reveal, but you don't have these data brokers sort of knitting all of these things together and, you know, learning things about you that you might choose to remain private. And you can also do it in a much more effective way, right? So kind of like if I say I'm interested in booking a safari in Tanzania and kind of in a way, kind of like I advertise myself as someone who's willing to buy,

kind of in principle, the sellers should be willing to pay for the right to kind of pitch me their travel ideas and travel packages. and in a way kind of like I can, if I am so inclined, I can monetize myself much more effectively and efficiently than kind of Google actually can, right? So, and I think kind of moving, kind of making this monetization layer more explicit, I think this is something that I would actually credit Web 3 with,

no matter how this tastes for it, may sound kind of like at first glance because kind of like, oh, kind of like the art, it's all about the beauty and so on. And then kind of like people talk about the money that kind of accrues. And kind of like typically that's kind of swept under the rug, right? So kind of people are meant to, meant to want to create art because kind of like they are so inclined and they shouldn't have, they shouldn't want to think about the money they can make with it and so on. And I think de-stigmatizing that in some way and saying, look, this is actually what this is, this is, this is, you should, you should, you should get paid for that.

And you shouldn't, you shouldn't, you shouldn't feel a shame for wanting to get compensated for this valley. I think that's, yeah. I do think that that kind of stigma has been weaponized in some cases to, to the detriment of artists, you know, saying, well, if you really cared about your art, you know, just making the art would be reward enough. and, you know, why should you get paid and all that? And it's, I mean, that's a new and very silly idea, I think. I think if you look at the history of how artists had been supported back in the day, many artists had wealthy patrons, you know, that was just considered a normal. Well, obviously, they have to eat.

They have to live somewhere. And so it's great if some rich, you know, Duke wants to subsidize what they're. they're doing and you know it goes all the way down to you know you're in the subway and someone's playing music and there's a tin can out in front of them that people are throwing money into you know no one is no one's well hopefully no one's look you know uh stigmatizing an artist you know for uh or questioning their purity um yeah just uh yeah for wanting to eat yeah yeah yeah yeah I hear that. Maybe kind of like as a final as a final exploration, what do you see as kind of the failure modes of Web 3? So kind of in my mind there's kind of like two that are both bad but in

different ways. So once instead of kind of empowering individuals, we're kind of building rails for an extremely efficient authoritarian state with kind of complete social credit and perfect surveillance and so on. Obviously that's that's extremely scary. And Then there's kind of the less catastrophic one, which I still worry about more because I think it's possibly the path we are on and I hate it. And that failure case is we've built all of this really cool infrastructure. And in the end kind of like it becomes an infrastructure upgrade for banks and other incumbents. And nothing changes for actual users. Kind of like we've built tiny rails for the Amazon's and Stripes and Microsofts and Googles of the world.

And the users are still being squeezed the same way. What are your thoughts about this? Well, it's a great question to ask, say, Joe Lubin because it's clear that he's not a fan of, you know, the incumbents. you know, and that he's motivated by a powerful passion to make sure that this doesn't just turn into a new, a shiny new feature for traditional banks. The, you know, it's, there's still a lot of stigma attached to crypto among people who don't, who don't follow it, right? And so I think a lot of people who aren't regular users of crypto view it as a dark, sort of tainted thing and sort of tend to stay away from it because they've heard bad stories about it or they associate it with the dark web or criminality.

And yeah, I'm not one of those people, but I know a lot of those people who, who, you know, get a little worried or a little skeptical if I, you know, tell them I'm involved in a blockchain thing. So I think there's a lot that has to be done in order to overcome that. And, you know, I think it will resolve in time. but it's definitely a warning, you know, flashing light on the dashboard at the moment. And I don't know, I guess that's for me the main thing that's standing in the way of broader adoption. How do you see this kind of in contrast with the user experience that isn't quite there yet? I feel like as someone who's been in Web 3 for a long time, kind of we've, we've,

adjusted to the terrible user experience that a lot of our products kind of offer, right? Kind of like if you look at is usable for a normal person, the answer usually is no, right? It's barely usable for us.

And if you look at how many people actually use Web 3 products because they're legitimately better than kind of what Web 2 has to offer and they're not just dog fooding and they're not in it for the technology and because they think it's cool and kind of like they want to be at the forefront of something,

it's very close to zero, right? So kind of if we were, and in some way, kind of abstracting a lot of that technical complexity way and just offering genuinely better user experiences to actual people that they can't find in Web2, I think this is where we'll see mass adoption. Because I don't think, kind of like, if you look at the internet, for instance,

almost no one knows how TCPIP works, right? And you shouldn't have to. And I think it's the same for kind of full blockchain. So kind of, I think it'll kind of, we'll see success when people don't have to understand that kind of like there's something blockchain in the background that kind of facilitates what they do. Yeah, I agree. I agree. You know, I think one of the big things that Amazon did was that, you know, up to a certain point,

the internet was kind of like the way you just described crypto was kind of mysterious and hard to use and people weren't sure if it was okay and then somehow when Amazon started people were fine with handing over their credit card numbers you know to this company and that led to an explosion in the number of people using it

so suddenly it was safe you know, it was welcoming. I just had, you know, a vibe about it that people found approachable and wholesome. So, so I think that's the next frontier for Web3. And we are, we are trying to do that with the UI and the user experience that we're developing for LAM and LAM and OMA. So when you kind of think ahead for LAMNA1, say for the next year or two years, what does success for you guys look like? Is it more creative, creators or more active users? Or what's the thing you're hoping for?

Well, we're kind of launching with a project called Artifact, where I'm a creative contributor. It's a game based in a fictional future world that I'm concepting. And so we're trying to make it a legitimately interesting, fun game, an interesting world. You know, we're working with Weta Workshop to produce concept art that we feel good about. And so at the end of the day, that's the only thing I know how to do is try to make cool stuff. and hope that people will like it. So what I'd love to see is more creative work going up on our system

that isn't just a crypto project or an NFT project, but it's just a movie or just a game or just a song. The blockchainness of it is a minor background detail that no one needs to really care about. So no speculation, just fun. Yeah, yeah, right. Cool. Fantastic. That sounds wonderful.

I've actually seen the trailer for the game and kind of like, I'm not a gamer myself, but it makes me want to be a gamer. So we're linked to it in the show notes. It's not a big video game yet. It's more of a, we're starting small. But I like what I've seen so far. Cool. Neil, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on.

the show we will link to other things you've referred to in the notes and we will also a link to the new game that's coming with us great