The Startup Ideas Podcast - Winning at Startups and the Future of Culture

Episode Date: August 25, 2022

How do you lose millions, hire hundreds, raise millions, and sell companies by 30? Today Sahil Bloom and Greg Isenberg unpack why VC & PR can both save you and kill you, share why the greatest entrepreneurs live slowly, divulge the secret to winning every negotiation, and unpack Greg's viral tweet around building startups. Later in the episode, our hosts are joined by Tom McLeod, the 5x serial entrepreneur who helped build over 15 profitable iPhone apps. He is now solving the problem of how to bring museums into the Web3 world. Together they explain how to bring the culture and community of art into the future while simultaneously increasing the adoption of Web3 by all generations.►► Want more community? Learn more here: http://trwih.comSPECIAL THANKS TO OUR SPONSOR►► This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens https://athleticgreens.com/wihAG1 by Athletic Greens is incredible and we have been starting every day with it for several years. It’s just one scoop in 8-12 oz. of water each morning, and you're getting 75 high-quality vitamins, whole-food sourced ingredients, probiotics, and adaptogens to help you start your day right. It's one daily habit that supports gut health, supports the immune system, recovery, energy, and focus!Right now, Athletic Greens is giving you a free 1 year supply of immune-supporting Vitamin D and 5 free travel packs with your first purchase. Take ownership of your health today by going to https://athleticgreens.com/wihLINKS FOR THIS EPISODE:Greg's Guide To Building Startups Tweet: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg/status/1540735241706504192Tom McLeod: https://twitter.com/tmcleod3Arkive: https://arkive.net/Production & Marketing Team: https://penname.co/FIND US ON SOCIALSahil Bloom: https://twitter.com/SahilBloomGreg Isenberg: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergTwitter: https://twitter.com/_trwihInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/_trwihTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@_trwihWeb: https://trwih.comSpotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6aB0v6amo3a8hgTCjlTlvhApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/where-it-happens/id1593424985SHOW NOTES00:00 Sneak Peek00:40 Sahil & Sam’s First Meet-Up05:02 Why IRL Intellectual Chemistry Matters08:15 Greg’s Guide to Start-Ups09:43 VC & PR Are Like Drugs13:50 Great Entrepreneurs Garden19:42 The Internet has Leveled the Opportunity Playing Field24:22 The Listener Wins in Negotiations27:46 No Rejection = No Progress29:52 Welcoming Tom McLeod and Compartmentalizing Rejection38:04 What is Arkive?46:14 How Does a Museum Look in Web3?54:33 Abstracting Crypto from the Future of Art1:01:44 How Arkive Actually Works1:05:50 Earning vs Buying

One of my oldest memories is going to the Met. And there's sort of an Egypt room there with this giant sloping glass. You can look out and there's a Cleopatra's needle and there's water in the room. And I used to think this was the most amazing room in the world. It was just I'd never seen anything like it. There was architecture. There was historical art. And I can visualize.

I stood with me forever. Yeah, it's like romantic. It's romantic. I literally, I romanticized it in my head. I've drawn it. Like there's pictures from when I was a kid drawing that room. And that always stuck with me. My man.

How you doing? What's going on? Dude, I'm great. I'm a little under the weather. And I can give you the context on that because it's related. But you look great. I like your hair is looking good. You look like you just, you're either going with the slick back look or you just took a shower.

Let me guess that the reason you're sick is because of the event that you were at. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Much to my wife's chagrin, yes, I think that is the, I think that is the culprit here for sure. So can you talk a little bit about that? I think people kind of want to hear about it. Yeah, so for people that didn't have context on this or didn't see it on social or wherever, last, I don't know, it was like a week ago or so now, hosted an in-person meetup with our friend Sam Parr, you know, host of, co-host of, my first million and founder of the hustle, which he sold to HubSpot. And basically the whole thing came around in a pretty funny way. But like Sam was in New York the summer. We were hanging out a bunch,

you know, our wives or friends, et cetera. And he like texted me one morning and was like, yo, we should do a meetup in New York. And so I just said, yeah, cool, right? Like I was just like doing something else. I was like, all right, cool, Sam. Yeah. And then a few minutes later, he's like, all right, I tweeted it out. And I was like, what? And I look. And he's created an event bright link that says like Sam and Sawhill meet up. It's got my face on it. And he's picked a date for it without asking me the date and sent out this whole thing. And then literally like, you know, it was like three weeks in the future. And for the like two and a half weeks leading up to the event, I'm getting daily texts from Sam, just being like, yo, 600 people of RSVP, yo, 700 people of RSVP. And I was like,

dude, do we have a venue? Like, I didn't know what the hell any of the stuff was happening for the event. Like, I literally had zero context on it. Um, so in the end, we ended up having this event, I think in the, in total, like 1,400 people RSVP'd saying they were going to come to it. Um, these two guys, Andrew and Tops, like, basically volunteered themselves to, uh, to coordinate the event, found this insane venue in lower Manhattan, um, that we kind of got comped. And, uh, hosted this event, like a thousand people showed up, dude. So, I don't mean this to come off the wrong way, but I love both you and Sam. But the fact that you guys could just like tweet and 1,200 people are going to show up in a room to hang out with you with no agenda.

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To make it easy, Athletic Greens is going to give you a free one-year supply of immune-supporting vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first purchase. All you have to do is visit athletic greens.com slash WIH. Again, that is athletic greens.com slash WIH to take ownership over your health and pick up the ultimate daily nutritional insurance. You won't regret it. So first off, I think most people probably thought there was going to be some sort of agenda. To Sam's credit in the event bright description, he was like, don't fly in for this event. That's too much pressure. He was like, it will be at least okay, but probably not great or something

like that. And so there wasn't really an agenda. The one thing I will say is like, I don't know how people showed up to hang out with us as much as like to meet us potentially plus get to hang out with each other like you know i said it when i was speaking at the event we we did a little bit of speaking and when i said it at the event but like one of the amazing things about a city like new york is that you can go out on a thursday night to something like that for free basically and there's just like there was a thousand other like young ambitious excited people there that were all there because they wanted to learn and, you know, and be around other smart people. And that was so cool.

Like the, you know, I called it intellectual chemistry, but like the intellectual chemistry in that room was really inspiring to me. It also just left me feeling like we need to do more in-person events again. You know, even, even us, like with, you know, with our podcast recordings, like we need to get back to doing more of these in person because it's just so much fun when you get people's vibes in person and you start coming together in that way. And then my final realization, which kind of ties directly to some of the stuff I want to talk about to you around your guide to startups, which we can dive into, is like the power of community is really hard to overstate. I came away from the event saying, like, man, I need to do more community building on my platform.

Like the fact that I have this newsletter and this Twitter is great, but there are thousands of people within this. those communities that want to be interacting with one another and that I can, you know, help bring together and facilitate. And so I need to figure out the right format to do that. But there is something really, really powerful there. I also just want to go do meetups in like every major city in the world now. It's also a testament to people are tired of, uh, of being in front of their screens all the time. So like they see a tweet about, hey, there's this in person event. And I follow Sahel and I follow Sam and they're so excited about just actually RSVPing and going. So the same sort of like energy that we saw like around digital products in early 2020, you're kind of seeing with

IRL type products. Yeah, it's a good point. I mean, we've seen it with some of these different events, right? Like Art Basel where we were filming last year, like the excitement to be back in person, some of these NFT weeks that people have had, LA Tech Week, you know, happening right now, Miami Tech Week, like all of these things. I do think the energy around in person is pretty unparalleled right now. So I'm excited to start doing more in person, hopefully not, you know, getting sick from it. I don't have COVID, by the way, but did come down with a little head cold here. So pivoting a little bit, I texted you prior to this episode or maybe like a week ago that I wanted to

dive in on a tweet of yours, which is kind of like a weird backdrop to a to an episode, but this is like, it's such a prime tweet and thread that I feel like it bears,

I mean, you could probably write an entire book on this, Greg, someday. And so let's do an episode on it. We could start with that. And if you decide to write a book on it, I'll hook you up with somebody.

But your tweet was, it was called My Guide to Startups. And, you know, as context, everyone knows you, you know, probably that's listening to this, but you've spent your entire career in life working on, you know, businesses, startups, ideas, et cetera. And so you have, as you said in the tweet, you've lost millions, hired hundreds, raised millions, and sold companies all before the age of 30. And so this is like your guide.

It's like your hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy for the startup world. So what I was hoping we could do, if you're a. open to it is basically go through this. And it's, it's sort of like a set of distinct principles. And I imagine each one comes with some sort of story or experience you had and insight. And so I'm kind of hoping we can like dive into, um, hopefully all of them. But, but, but if not, you know, some of the most salient ones for you and, and, uh, and go from there. Let's do it. All right. So the first one on the list is something that we've definitely talked about in the past. He said venture capital and PR are like drugs.

Drugs can kill you or save your life. Use accordingly. So I thought that that was really interesting because of the juxtaposition of can kill you or save your life. So it would love for you to just like kick off there and tell me what you were thinking around that. So I've seen what, let's just talk about VC first. I've seen what, how helpful VC could be.

And I've also seen it destroy. you know, lives and destroy companies. You know, the last company I was at, WeWork, you know, famously is, I mean, it's the poster poster child for where venture capital could go wrong. You know, I joined the company. I think I was the 13,000 employee in acquisition. By the time, you know, I think it was like four or five months later,

I remember someone telling me that there was, They were already at 17,000 employees. So imagine hiring a thousand people per month. You know, it's just so insane. It's so insane. And I think with VC sometimes comes this growth at all cost mentality, which sometimes works and sometimes, you know, in the WeWork story, obviously doesn't work. Yeah.

I mean, there was like a, during the race. raging bull market, there was an assumption that you could eventually make a business model work. And if you just kept growing, you'd eventually figure out how to make the unit economics work. I think people have now come down to earth and realize that generally that's not the case. It's very hard to like all of a sudden find a unit economic model that works. And so to your point, like that VC like raise at all costs, grow at all costs mentality that existed, I think led to a lot of bad decision making along the way. What about the PR one?

So, like, PR is like a drug. What did you mean by that? So PR, like, it feels so good when you're on the, you know, front page of tech crunch. You're on CNBC. Like, it feels really good. But it's very fleeting. So it's a very fleeting feeling. And, you know, for startups, the most important metric, as you know, is just it's product

market fit. Everything should be around product market fit. And you know it when you have it. The PR could be helpful like VC in the sense like it's good for like finding new customers or hiring people. But again, it's very fleeting. What I had before, actually I'm remembering what I had before writing this that, you know, VC and PR were drugs. I had VC and PR like fast food. they taste good while you're eating it but afterwards you're probably not going to feel so good but i removed it i was feeling i was feeling a little pessimistic on PR and uh and VC so I removed it and I said you know in some cases PR and VC makes sense yeah I like that I mean I like both of those analogies I do think that the um the thing with PR and with journalists in particular is like it's great when they want to write the positive story on you.

Like great fundraising round. You raised all this money. Like fast, that company, you know, the one click checkout company. Like every journalist, tech crunch,

Forbes, all of them were like touting this as such an amazing company. He raised all this money. It's like growing like crazy. It's amazing. And then as soon as the company was going under or like challenged, every single one of those publications was like dunking on them to with like zero regard for the things they'd written previously.

And so it's one of those like easy come, easy go, right? I mean, it's the same thing with venture capital, PR and BC. So that's a good starting point. Your second one, I think, is the most liked one in the entire, in the entire thread. And it said, Okinawa is an island in Japan with the highest life expectancy. It's called the land of immortals. The secret, almost everybody gardens. Entrepreneurship is a marathon, not a sprint, be sustainable, find your gardening. I love this one because it's like, it's so, your vibe and, like, personality around these things. So please, please speak to this one.

You know what I did about an hour ago? Gardened. I went and go picked some blueberries from my blueberry tree. You know, it was four o'clock on a Wednesday around there, 3.34 o'clock. And I took a break to go outside, pick some blueberries, eat the blueberries. Like have a connection with the food.

Like sit, look around, look at the tree. Get a little sun on my face. I know you talk about that a lot. Get some vitamin D on your face. And then come back, took a shower. That's why my hair is a little wet. And here I am. And I'm a big proponent of just, you know, slow living.

This is called slow living where, you know, it doesn't mean that you're not. not working hard, it just means that you're also taking a little bit of time to connect with nature or connect with yourself and be really creative. And, you know, we had a discussion with Delian on the pod recently. And he talked about, you know, how IRL work, you know, is sort of, you know, you're not serious unless you're doing IRL work. And, you know, that might mean for a lot of people, like, you know, taking the subway into New York takes, you know, an hour to get to the place. And you're, you know, there's people everywhere and you're catching your colds and COVID and stuff like that.

And you're, you know, you're eating, you're eating food instead of taking a lunch. You're eating right in front, you know, while you're typing an email. And I think what we're going to learn is that people who live sustainable, slow lives are going to live long. longer. And that's why I put the story about this Japanese island. I mean, this is one you, this is probably my favorite one in the whole list, because this is something that I have like really viscerally wrestled with both sides of, as you know, you know, like I spent the first seven years of my career in a hardcore finance track where it really was like, you know, work till you drop 90, 100 hour work weeks and like that was, you took pride in that. Now, you know, it's like Delian, right?

Like you take pride and that grind and, you know, not sleeping and not having balance. And, you know, having balance, but I'm going to make money and I'm going to do something, hopefully world-changing and, you know, create a bunch of value, et cetera. And I don't know if saw the light as the right answer for it, but I definitely have found a world of a lot more balance and fulfillment on the other end of this. And, you know, for me, like my gardening is taking a walk with my son or, you know, with my wife and son, just being outside, getting sunlight, cold plunge. Like all of these things that I'm doing now where I've tried to kind of find and strike a balance, I would argue were actually productive for, you know, my end goals of creating value. And so like I, I've wrestled

with both sides of this exact one. And I definitely have found, you know, anecdotally, that this balance lends itself to higher feelings of health, both physically and mentally. I mean, my actual health metrics have improved markedly from from my kind of before state to where I am today. Like all of my blood, blood readings, et cetera, are better. And mentally, I mean, my mental health is way, way better than it was, right? Because I'm sleeping more and I, you know, get to spend more time doing things I love and with people I love. So there's really something to this.

And I think the point you're making is a is a well-made one in that it doesn't mean you have to do what we're doing. right like it doesn't mean that you have to have the lifestyle gregg has where you know you're really you know moving slowly on things and finding time to do throughout the day and like you know working less and creatively and um or that you're doing what i do and um you know taking five walks a day with your kid like you don't need to do that it might just be that you're in a high crazy you know stress environment but you find that one time a day where you are able to do your quote unquote gardening where you're able to do that one thing that unlocks you and kind of opens you up And so I thought the way you said it was really important because it just means that you need to find time in your daily life for that version of gardening for you to take that like one step that sort of allows yourself to unwind and to unlock.

I mean, I'm not a religious person by any means, but like the whole idea of a Sabbath, you know, one day a week, you turn off your phone, turn off electronics, you spend time with friends and family. I think there's a reason why that, you know, comes from thousands of years ago because I think we're not meant to be in at the 75th floor, you know, in Midtown, New York for 18 hours a day. I don't think that's, you know, a sustainable way to live. And I also don't think that if you're in, a lot of people listening are like creative people. If you want to be your most creative self, I just don't believe that you can be that. in that lifestyle. Yeah. That's a great one.

Let's jump to the next one, or another one rather. I'm going to jump around a little bit here in the interest of time. For most people, forget Harvard or living in SF. With the internet, you're more powerful than you think you are. Learn anything you want, connect with anyone you want, be anyone you want, and do it all hyper-efficiently. What a time to be alive. Again, something that we've talked about in passing with different

guests on the show, curious for like your most recent take on this? I mean, just yesterday, we're in a group chat and a pretty well-known, we were talking about money with a pretty well-known founder. I won't name him, but I told him, I was like, do you want to be 10 times wealthier? You want me to tell you the secrets of being 10 times wealthier? And he's like, yeah, leave New York City. like leave new york city like it's one of the most expensive places in the world to live and that means everything you know food uh rent uh entertainment everything is more expensive and comparisons comparisons

comparisons are the most expensive fucking thing in the world excuse my language man where you're like because your friends doing this thing so then you start doing it and you don't think about it and you're not like you know planning to do that thing but when everyone is doing it or when you're trying to keep up with the Joneses as like part of your existence, life gets really, really expensive. Exactly. So that being said, like, do I believe that new, you know, we just talked about New York, like you had this really amazing event and there was a lot of value there.

Do I do I do I, I, I see value there. I just think that, uh, there's so much high leverage work that you can do on the internet by building your personal monopoly posting on Twitter. posting on LinkedIn, creating a blog post, creating a podcast, and then do what I did, which growing up, which was I would go to New York City for doses of inspiration. I call it doses of inspiration. So I lived in a way cheaper city, Montreal, where at the time, you know, the average apartment was $500 a month. And I would drive, you know, five and a half hours and I'd go to New York City. and I sleep on a couch.

And I get some inspiration and then I drive back. And then you know what the best part about that is you spread that inspiration to your hometown. Yeah, I mean, what you're hitting on is like this powerful point that, I mean, I think of it as like opportunity playing fields. There's that there's that really famous, I don't know if it's a quote or like an adage that talent is evenly distributed, but opportunity is not. And traditionally, historically, opportunity has. has really not been evenly distributed. And what it required was you going to Harvard or you living in SF or you living in New York in order to have opportunity. And what you're hitting on is that that is no longer the case. You actually don't have to because of the way the internet and the digital age has

proliferated opportunity. And it's not to say that opportunity is evenly distributed yet, but we're certainly closer. And you can certainly be a kid, you know, growing up in rural India with access to the to the internet with access to discord servers with access to online courses, online training, et cetera. And you can come up the curve and have the same opportunities, hopefully, in the long term. And in the future, I do think that actually will be the case. It's still not perfect, but it's getting there. And I think the last thing that you hit on is a really cool one, which is like visit, go to those places and bring your energy back from those things, the things you've learned, and bring it back and spread it back to where you are.

It's like, you know, like that used to happen with like with plagues, right? Like the plague was spread. Sorry, the Spanish flu was spread after World War I because all the soldiers who had come together and gotten it went all back to their home countries and it spread, like the virus spread. But the same applies to good things. Like you can go get energy from these places where you go and come back to your hometown or to where you are and spread that winning feeling and spread that energy in a positive way. That was a really cool way that you put that.

I love that. All right, a few more from your guide to startups. And by the way, if you have any like absolute personal favorites that I'm not hitting on, please jump in and let me know. All right. I'm going to hit, let's see, how to negotiate well? I love this one. Listen 90%, talk 10%.

Listening equips you with the info that you can use. The listener usually wins. This is like interesting contrarian advice to me because I always think when I think of negotiating is like you've got to be the like, you know, the negotiator. You've got to be talking and constantly, you know, constantly saying things. So what's your perspective here? And what was this, what was this guided by like personal experience wise? I think who told me this was at the time I almost regarded him as my my Indian uncle, Ram Sharam. I don't know if you know Rom.

No. Ram is like an OG Silicon Valley legend. He sold his company, I believe, to Amazon in like the mid-90s. He was an executive at Amazon. He was the first dollar into Google and sat on the board of Google from Seed up until very recently. And yeah, just a prolific investor. And Rom was sat on a board of a company called Stumble Upon. And in 2012 or 2013, I sold a company to stumble upon.

And I believe I asked him, I was like, Rom, like, you know, it was 20, I don't know, 22, 23 at the time. I was like, how could I have gotten a better deal? Because I remember when they offered me the deal, I was like, great. Where do I sign? You know, like, I didn't negotiate at all. It was just kind of like, this is amazing. like this is going to change my life. And Rom said,

if only you just listened more. If you, you know, you came into that meeting and you were just like pitching, pitching, pitching. And we offered you something and you're like, okay. And that was it. If only you just sat there and let us do the pitching and let us kind of sell you, I think you would have gotten a way higher. multiple. So since then, even though it's sometimes really painful to be in a negotiation and to be silent more than you are talking because you're so excited about getting the deal done,

it's kind of counterintuitive, but it's, for me, it's been super effective. Yeah, it's like that epictetus, I think that's how you pronounce it, the stoic philosopher. We have two ears in one mouth so that we listen twice as much as we speak. It's sort of like the practical application of that idea. I've always called it the paradox of words. Like you talk less in order to say more. And in those situations, when you said it, when you wrote it, I was like, oh, that's different than what I would have thought. And then you think about it more. And you're like, oh, yeah, that actually is what a great negotiator does. They kind of sit back, listen. And then when they strike, they really strike. And they have the really thoughtful perspective and the idea. So

It makes a lot of sense. I love that one. I think we've got time probably for one more before we have Tom come on from Archive. Which one should we hit? How about this? Startup life is a life full of rejection. No rejection, no progress. What was your big rejection?

What kind of cemented that realization for you? well so I feel like there's a whole generation of entrepreneurs that watch the social network and was like this is a romantic basically job I like they basically the social network romanticize entrepreneurship for a whole generation of entrepreneurs like our generation and it's you know I think uh what I don't like about that movie is it kind of of like you see him at Harvard, there's like a bit of struggle a little bit, then all of a sudden he's in San Francisco, Palo Alto, and like Facebook is all of a sudden like big.

Like it, you know, what Scott Belski calls the messy middle, the middle of the startup isn't really there. It's just like from small to really big. What that doesn't capture is that like literally every day of a startup, you're kind of like, you check product times in the morning and you're just like, I hope. a big competitor didn't launch a competing product. Yeah. And every founder has that experience of like, oh, my God, Google just launched this.

Oh, my God. Facebook just launched this. Oh, my God. They're going to. And then you get like 10 texts from your investors. Hey, have you seen this? Yeah, man. Of course.

What do you mean have I seen this? Like, I'm literally crying inside, you know? Yeah. So if you're not okay with adversity, I just don't think that startup life is for you. And, you know, I can tell a lot of stories about how, like, I've gotten rejected over the years, but, like, I'm constantly getting rejected. And it's, and it's just about being okay with it. Maybe it's from your dating life. On that note, I mean, we do have, we have a guest joining for the latter half of this discussion, who is a serial entrepreneur, also a friend of yours, who I think,

you go back a long way with and who's building something super, super cool at the intersection of like in real life and Web 3. So it relates to a lot of what we talked about, you know, the through line of this whole conversation. So why don't we go ahead and bring, bring Tom in and we can jam with him. What's up, everybody? What's up, man? Hey.

Nice hat. I love that. I need one now. I've got my black dad hat. I got to get an archive black dad hat. Dude, when I tell you, I've got a lot of dad hat. I've also got a lot of logo hats from prior companies. I've got I've got walls of historical shots on goal.

Well, we were just talking actually right before you came on about how the ability to like handle rejection is a key trait of successful startup entrepreneurs. Any thoughts on that? I mean, handle rejection is certainly part of it. I think you almost have to compartmentalize rejection into just like, you know, a bad conversation. You've got to kind of assume that that's going that way. I think it's almost the, I have this kind of thesis where it's kind of like a boxing thought process where most of the time being a founder is like trying to avoid getting punched in the face. It's like you can take a lot of body blows.

So things like people saying no or rejection or you didn't meet the quarterlies or the app didn't ship on time. those were like, you know, it's like, oh, a kidney, oh, the lower back, whatever. But you're like probably not going to get knocked out by that. But you're really trying to avoid the like, like that one that really put you on the map. So I think that there's something about resilience there and like get back upedness. Yeah. I like that.

I like that analogy a lot. Like I've thought about this in the past how there's sort of two types of people. There's like, you know, you encounter the like glancing blow in life, right? where like you almost get knocked the fuck out, but you like somehow, you know, dodge it slightly. Like it just kind of is a glancing blow. And there's two types of people coming away from that. There's a person that is like, oh, who good, missed me. Like, I'm good. I'm cool. And then there's the person who's like, why did that happen? Why did I almost just get knocked out? Like, what did I learn from that? What? How did I leave myself open to it? And you got to bet on that second

person to win in the long run because you just learn so much more from those glancing blow situations, if that's the approach you take versus just feeling fortunate for not getting knocked the hell out. I mean, it's like we're always just going through like repeats of childhood loops, right? And like if you never fell, you probably never learned to walk efficiently. If you never missed a shot, you never got it, became a better basketball player. Like, find me the person who's never had, has had just a streamlined like tailwind the entire time. They're going to fall hard whenever actual adversity shows up. I think there's something to be said for, you know, the advantage of having a tailwind for a while and how that probably sets you up for something.

But adversity isn't the thing it sets you up for. So at some point, you will be challenged. I think that's a tough, that's a tough pill to swallow if you've never really been in that circle or have never been in that, or in that ring, if I'm going to keep the boxing metaphor rolling. Yeah, yeah. Oh, hey, Greg. Thanks so much for joining, man. That's how I saw you, you were at my house at dinner. It was a while ago.

Dude, that was when you were, uh, uh, what, gentrifying Bayshore? I mean, that's one way to put it. That's, you know, definitely, basically here's, here's the story style. So I, I got a house. Okay, people like to go left. I like to go right. 100%. I'm aware of that.

Um, you know, I like to be alternative for a lot of reasons. And I found this incredible house. It was amazing. It was kind of legendary in San Francisco. It was in a neighborhood called Bayview, which at the time, this is 2015, was like no one in technology in our world, Tom, was like spending time there. And I kind of made this house like a destination for founders, creators, musicians. artists come and hang out whatever they wanted. And we had some good times there. Definitely. It was a good dinner. So I didn't realize until like just before the episode that you guys had gone way

back in the day. I've like, you know, Tom, I've been kind of following all of your your recent exploits, which I want to get, want to get deep into. But I had no idea, you know, of all of your, you know, your experience as an entrepreneur and all of the different things you've done. We have a and friend and Nate Bossard, who was the first one who brought to my attention what you're building with archive. But I mean, you've had like a super long career as a founder. Sort of uniquely long. It feels like, I mean, you've done a bunch of different things, had several exits along the way. I'm like, is this shade? I can't. No. No, you're still standing, dude. No, exactly. That's kind of my point. I'm like, man. Like, no, like, I mean, you've like,

you just continued to like roll out new ideas, new things. Like, what has been kind of the the common thread through all of this that, you know, that's kept you energized. A clearly masochism and self-flagellation at scale. No, you know, I think I'm like perpetually curious. And I think the one thing that's kind of unique sounds like I'm to do my own horn or whatever, but I really haven't stuck to a genre. I like get obsessed with sort of these different sectors. So like my degree was audio engineering. I started on the music side. like a record label years ago, ended up in like, you know, doing a content management system for freelance web designers. That was like a SaaS business. Ended up moving that into mobile, you know,

like literally at the turn of mobile doing about 17 iPhone apps. Then went full like operational logistics. I ran 100,000 square foot warehouses with Omni, you know, like physical objects on a grid moving bodies, bifurcated workforce, hourly employees, hard tech problems on scale and logistics. and now kind of jumping in with, I actually think this is the most bullseye on all of those things. So this one actually feels somewhat natural. Like I can track how the different things I've done in all those different places kind of aligns with archive broadly. But yeah, you know, every time I get this moment where I kind of have this feeling where I could, I could tap out at any time. Like I've been around long enough that I could go, I could probably join a fund.

I could probably go to a fang and, you know, get paid. and chill. Like, you know, I could, I could manage someone's family office. Like, there's a lot of things I could do if I just wanted to, like, double down on, on, like, knowledge and capital as a way to, you know, expand my, my time. But then something hits. Someone, someone says something in a conversation. I'm like, oh, what if we, and I just like, I guess I'm doing it again. Like it, and this, like, I swear to y'all, like, I was not going to do this again. You know, like, you know, Omni We exited to Coinbase right before the pandemic. It was two years.

I'm bouncing around. I'm doing a bunch of different things. And I was just like, huh, I kind of get this life. I can do this thing. And then it's like, got dragged back in, man. Drag back in. And it's like, I don't know. I guess there's some like obsession with doing it.

I think I have a chip on my shoulder. I think any second or third time founders who did okay, but didn't like crush, didn't get the thing. You're always like, well, I want to do. I want to get there. I want to feel that other wins. I think those things are all a part of it, too, you know, where you place your egos. Well, I will say, like, the thing you are doing now is one of the cooler startups that I've seen in recent memory.

And so, like, I want to get into it because it ties to so many things we've talked about on this podcast. And more broadly around the entire, like, narrative and discussion around, like, actual use cases of web 3. that are interesting. You know, there's this whole meme on the internet, right? Like, you have your Packies and, you know, Chris Dixon's on one end, you know, talking about Web3 and writing about it. And then you have your like, I forget what the names of these guys are. Like, Zach Weinberg, you know, has kind of made a brand for himself as the like Michael

Burry of crypto or like that guy, Leron Shapiro or something like that similarly. And it's like, you know, it's become this whole thing on Twitter, like the back and forth. them like there's no real use cases, etc. Archive, which is what you're building, um, strikes me as like one of the most interesting use cases that I, that I've seen because it, it combines some of the like super cool aspects of like in real life culture and

community with web three. Um, and just as context for people, um, who are listening. I'm going to have you talk about it, but I want to read just really quickly one quote that I found cool from your kind of launch,

uh, blog post, which said, quote, museums have historically relied on curators, collectors, and benefactors to decide which artifacts are important and worthy of display. As a result, the history available for the public to experience is still largely determined by exclusion and not inclusion. With that kind of as a backdrop, Tom, can you just give us the overview on what archive is? Today's episode is brought to you by a company and product that has literally changed my life and one that I use every single day.

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You won't regret it. Yeah, so I think the ideas that we're simply reversing the museum system, right? And what does it look like if instead of going to a thing and experience what people are presenting to you, you're participating in the experience of what gets presented to the world. So you know, you remove the confines of the physical walls. You don't have to be in this specific space. It doesn't have to match exactly what the location is. You can maximize where objects are placed on a global scale to focus on impact.

So instead of it saying, hey, it's impactful because it's within the confines of this building. You can say, no, it's impactful because it's out in the place where the artist most wanted it to be or representative body of that. So if you're thinking of it that way, you can kind of change the narrative there. And then in terms of the way it operates, you're going down up instead of top down. So you're saying, hey, I think thousands of individuals at some level have a deep, call it the genius of the commons, have a deep, seated understanding of many different things. And when you put them together, they actually can create with the same degree at some level of curatorial thought and education around why things are impactful.

And what does that look like if you do it? How do you unlock the potential of the masses? I've always had kind of an obsession with pop music broadly. And this idea that, you know, like someone can sit in a studio for six hours and make something that a billion people listen to in multiple languages and are just resonate and how there's always been this like, well, pop music isn't whatever. And I'm like, well, that's kind of insane. Like you would like to make something that a billion people resonate.

and I think we're kind of doing that. We're kind of looking at it from the reverse. Like, could you put something together that because a billion people find it interesting, that drives the value and that drives the impact. Yeah. So that's the, that's the overall vision is, you know, reverse the museum. Could you, could you, could you, only because Saip brought up, what's his name, Zach Weinberg, could you do a Zach Weinberg take on archive and can you do a Pachy McCormick take on archive? Like how does this succeed? Like what does this look like if it succeeds beyond your wildest imagination?

And what does it look like if, you know, how does it fail? Sure. The, the detracts. So you want me to do my own detractor? Yeah, I'm just curious. Sure. I'll jump in on it if you want me. Totally.

If you're doing your own detractor, you would say. By the way, I find this, I do this for all my projects. Yeah, I'm fine to do it. Yeah, that's not that's not the problem. If I was going to be my own detractor, I would probably go down this path of saying, does the world need another museum? This is just random crypto tech people showing up into a space that they've never been invited to on purpose. And they're trying to change something that has existed for hundreds of years. And then they're throwing a crypto layer on it because that sounds cool. And they want to financialize everything. So, The last thing we need is the financialization of museums. They should be standalone democratized things controlled by people who are, you know, spend the time to do the educational research around them. I think that's probably one way that you could go after it. And then you might go down a path of like, could you do this with a database or something?

I think you can try to pull that card. Could you do this with a database? Is the could Amazon build this of six years ago? It's like anyone will ask. you that question and the kind of the conversation becomes, well, could it scale in the same way in different places? I think it's probably the Zach Weinberg take. The Packy take is, you know, you open your phone anywhere in the world and it's Pokemon Go for culture. You see art on a grid around you that you help participate in curate in the most impactful places in cities all over the world.

you now get to participate in increasing the cultural value of those locations as well as the objects themselves, raising them to a position of permanence through decentralized voting and community curation. And then you're also opening up a sustainable channel for maintaining provenance, maintaining curation, and maintaining the actual institution and items ability to exist because the financialization on the back end can support preservation and conservation of those things as well. So you get to go faster than any building or any museum that was ever tied before, and you get to go bigger, wider, and touch more people. And that is what Web3 is all about.

Put it back in the people and put it back out into the world as rapidly as possible. I think that's probably the Paki Anger. I thought that was really well done for what it's worth. I mean, I think the interesting thing to me, I'm sort of the, I don't know, skeptic is the right word. I'm like the observer, the Web3 observer of this podcast. Greg is is more of the bull. And I think the interesting thing to me about this in particular is that it falls into the bucket for me of like, how do you envision a world where more quote unquote regular people are onboarded into Web3?

And is that possible? And if the answer is it's not possible, you're going to have a lot of challenges with Web3 because normal people, like my parents need to understand it. Like people who aren't necessarily like techno optimists or, you know, technologists. And stuff like this matches that for me, where I just think like, okay, how do you reimagine the museum for the future? Like forget crypto. Don't even think about crypto for a minute. Just say like, what does a museum look like if you remove the geographic bars from it?

If you're like, hey, I don't need to be in New York City to go to the, I grew up going to the natural history museum. So many of my like amazing memories with my parents are like going and just staring at the T-Rex there for however long that I did that. And now, you know, I live in the New York area. And so I'm fortunate that, like, we just have a, we have a young son. And I'm so excited to get to take him and do that. Well, if I was born in India, you know, in Bangalore or something, and I didn't have access to that, what would I do? And if you can envision a world where you can, like, reimagine what a museum is in the context of the fact that we now have technology that enables you to experience these things all over the world and wherever they are, it's pretty interesting to just like all of a sudden unshackle yourself from something that was, previously a massive constraint. And that's like,

crypto aside, just a very noble mission in my view. I'll tell you two anecdotes around that. One, I'm from New Jersey, grew up going into the city all the time. One of my oldest memories is going to the Met. And there's sort of an Egypt room there with this giant sloping glass. You can look out and there's a Cleopatra's needle and there's water in the room. and I used to think this was the most amazing room in the world. It was just I'd never seen anything like it. There was architecture. There was historical art.

And I can visualize it stood with me for forever. Yeah, it's like romantic. It's romanticized it in my head. I've drawn it. Like there's pictures from when I was a kid drawing that room. And that always stuck with me. I've also learned over time that, you know, it's kind of odd in some cases that antiquities from other countries and places have been

pulled into institutions. not where they're from, right? That a lot of times that is the spoils of war or the spoils of imperialism or all these different things. So there's a lot of nuance in the way museums actually function at scale. A lot of times there's soft power representations of political power, certainly a British museum, for instance, things like that. So I think one, we can we can start to look at it as we don't, we aren't really forced to tell a narrative around a stance that is tied to like a government hegemony or something, right? So we can say, if we had curated a piece of art from Benin, it's probably going to go back to Benin. If we curate a Frida Callo,

let's put it in Mexico City or is Iwatinejo. It doesn't have to be on display in Seattle. Just because we have it, we can think about impact first at a global scale, which I think one completely changes the paradigm on that side. And then to your statement around onboarding of just normal everyday people who would participate in anything, consumers broadly, I do think the first decade of crypto has been largely tied to what it's worth like back end tech, which was the same thing with the internet. You know, you're building out TCPIP stacks and things. Like before you could get to AOL, you had to kind of get everything up and running for that.

And I would say I think there's two sectors in that. There are people that are, that is the way crypto, Web3, et cetera, should be. It is a purely enabling technology. And everything needs to be done on chain completely. and that is how it works. And then there are people who are more on the side that I am, which is I don't think the average person will care at all until it's tied to in-person experiences, access, physical objects,

things that they can touch, feel, do, like involve themselves in, and it provides actual reasons for being a part of a community or participating. So I'm all in on that side. And I think the other one is always a part of it. I'm not, I don't disagree with the infrastructure, but I'm all in on if we want to get, your mom to care or someone randomly in Bangalore that discovers they'd like to see that Frida Kahlo, it's probably better to figure out how to participate in a large community that can get

them there as opposed to just wishing on a star that they can, you know, go to the Denver contemporary. So, so functionally, is the way that it works that you become sort of like a curator or a patron or what I'm curious what the terminology is that you're using, but you become one. And then effectively you're kind of like part of the community, both in terms of voting on artworks, where they are, you know, all of the governance around that pieces that are being acquired, where they're being placed, how they're being shown, et cetera. And then also that, you know, in the future, call it 10 years in the future as this continues to build out, I am on a trip with my family in Florence, Italy, and I pop open the archive app or whatever it is experience on my phone. and I can see, oh, there is this piece of, you know, this old Michelangelo work is being displayed at the original place where he created it here. And I can go with my family and say that I was a part of that experience of bringing this

and acquiring this piece. And it becomes this like much deeper connection that I have with the artwork and with the culture around it. I think you sum that up pretty well. I think there's two layers on that. There is this idea of when you tie impact, it also can be just impact. could simply be the most people possibly able to see it, as opposed to a lot of items that you find, or at least we're finding, are in private collections or vaults or mountains in Switzerland.

Like there's, you know, a lot of this stuff is just hidden from the world. So there's a world in which we're functionally repatriating it out into the planet. So that's just going to private collectors saying, hey, this is a great way to get this out into the world. Your name can be a part of it. You're forever etched in the blockchain as being the original last provenance owner of the item. This is a great way to put that out there. I think there is a layer where membership, yep, when you, the capital that raises from membership goes into the pot, which we then vote on how the allocation is. That's basically just swapping, right? So you're swapping, either USDC or however that you, you joined into a physical offline asset that has its own value, tried to offline provenance

and appraisals, right? So you have that side. And then I think there is a pretty core part that we can unlock a lot of other value. So we think of it almost as we're creating almost like a cultural perks card where every place one of those objects is, we also have somewhat of a BD relationship, right? So it didn't just show up there. We have the patent for the Inniak computer. We'd love that to live at the computer history museum in the Bay Area. If it ends up there, most likely we will also negotiate that any archive member gets 5% off at the gift shop, for instance. There's a lot of other things we can do by every piece of art becomes both a billboard to drive new membership. So It's an out-of-home virality strategy.

So if you see it and you're not a member, scan the QR code, tag the NFC. This is how you can join and you could have been a part of the curation of this. There's most likely a perk that's attached to the membership already from being in that space. And you also get this somewhat ego-boasting vanity, good service feeling that you helped this happen and establish there. So when you're sitting there with your mom, you can scan it and show your name just like you would. the Fisher family is all over the MoMA SF. You know, suddenly it'll have, you know, Bloom right there as, you know, one of the people that helped to participate in making this happen. So I think there's a lot of good that happens on there.

It's a pretty virtuous circle. And those places now get art. Like, they get stuff that they didn't have to raise grant money for, for instance. And we don't have OPEX. Can you abstract all of the crypto complexity away from, for people? Like, that's the thing. that I find always holds back, you know, my own understanding or like, you know, my willingness to really buy into the adoption of something is like, ah, there's just still so much complexity

on the surface. But like, say, you know, you, you say this vision of like a museum of the future, what does it look like? A lot of people's eyes light up. You say, you know, here's the experience. Here's how it's going to be. You can be a part of the kind of governance around what we require. Like a lot of people's eyes continue to light up. Then all of a sudden you say like, okay, now go send me some ETH through this wallet address and send it to here and you do this and, you know, exchange it with a bridge, whatever. And all of a sudden, like, you know, 90% of the people that were lighting up are like glazed over at that point. So how do you do that? Like, how do you abstract that away? Is that part of the experience today? Are you planning to sort of abstract

that complexity in the future? Can you talk a little bit more about that? I do think it's mostly abstracted, right? Because the reason that you're using it, the reason that the NFT, the crypto of it all on the membership side is for a couple reasons. One, it means that you can choose when you want to exit. So if you no longer think that this is something that is providing value or community or working, it's a straight up we're going to leave. And I'm not, I didn't invest. I didn't, I didn't lose this capital. I can, I can find someone else who is, who is excited about the direction. So you can legit. but with your wallet as opposed to, you know, if you exited the Soho House, they're not giving you a refund, right?

So you can determine that this is something I want to continue to participate in. And then if you're looking at it from a, why do you do it in this manner, period, the art world broadly is unbelievably obtuse and opaque. People are building very billy businesses simply just trying to data mine what is going on at any time vis-a-vis the values, collection. why things are happening. In this case, we're putting massive transparency on that. So again, this is abstracted out because all you need to care about is, hi, I'm Sahil, and I, you know, I'm a member and I voted to be a part of this, et cetera. But if someone was going down to look, they can literally prove he did this, he voted for this piece, he didn't vote for this, he's been a member for six months. Here are the other people

he knows. Here's like, it's taking what's been going on behind closed doors and putting it permanently on chain, which I think both increases the likelihood that provenance matters, which is extremely important in art and collectibles and antiquities. And it also maintains a steady database, similar to the way like the Library of Congress would for books around why things are and where they're at. And so that changes the whole, that sort of changes the whole reason as opposed to just like, I've got my membership card and I get to scan things. You know, that's that's one. Sahel, the way, the way I think about it is very similar to basically what Tom's doing is

making almost an interactive game in a lot of ways. Yeah. And like when I think of like watching a film, which is very like you go to the film, you go to the film, you go to a movie theater, you watch it and you have like thoughts in your head about the film versus passive experience. Passive experience. versus you're playing Fortnite or Roblox and there's like Robux that you're earning and there's this whole economy on top of it and there's other people and multiplayer. What Tom is doing and I'm curious your thoughts is almost fortnight fortnighting, you know, roblocksing the museum space to make a way more community owned.

and interactive. Yeah, I mean, we truly, I mean, I use the Pokemon Go reference a lot, but we legitimately do feel like that. And we mean that from multiple layers, right? So if you've ever played Pokemon Go, right, you land in a new place, you find out that there's something around you, you go and scan it, et cetera. We're actually doing that. So the act of scanning an item when you go there earns you internal points

that increase your voting weight, et cetera, it also functionally maintains the network. So you have to have a network that shows that the items are where they are. And functionally the same way that a validator would do that for verifying a transaction on blockchain, you now have humans all over the world participating in the provability that the items are where they are. So you can continue to have functionally a trust network that is not incentivized negatively to prove that things are existing in the spaces in place they are. And for that, you get to continue to grow within the community and,

reap more benefits. So there is a whole sort of gamified museum layer there that allows for more interactivity. You're really a part of it. What are some of the other project that have gotten you excited, Tom? Like I'm curious, you know, you're building something that strikes me is extremely exciting. And, you know, I think it like, it also just bridges a lot of my interests. Like when I think about culture and I think about the community angle of what you're doing, bringing people together. and the gamification of it, as Greg just pointed out, like, all of that gets me really excited. And I'm going to message you afterwards because I want to figure out how to get involved personally. But like, what are some of the other, what are some of the other projects you've seen or people that are building cool, exciting things within Web 3 in this same kind of vein?

So directly art related, I think there's quite a few people who are just trying to tackle that problem. So just this, there's 4K, there's particle. I think they rename themselves today, so I don't know their new name. But there's Americana. There's a lot of folks coming at this just bringing physical assets online. So you can start to tap into that latent value, utility, shareability. I think there will be an interesting kind of AR layer that comes out of that where people start to experience items in a different manner. So all of those are pretty exciting.

Kind of anything that's touching those spaces, then this is not necessarily NFT base. There's a there's a company called Alongside that's doing like cross network giant index funds. I'm personally just a big index fund person. Like I don't think I'm I don't have the patience to pick a winner. Like I'm not a same day trader. But the idea that you can get a on chain full basket of, you know, let's say at the top 100 cryptos, but not not in a weird like literally provably backing a token and an asset seems like kind of a revolution. So I'm, I'm super bullish on them.

Also, candidly, three of the founders worked at Omni. So it's kind of like I'm backing my, my former squad at some layer or people from my team, or teams that I've been a part of. So I find that super exciting. Yeah. I have one just like, sorry, this is going to, this might be like a really simple, functional question. But how does the actual acquisition process work at archive for a new work?

Like, I'm on your website. which I highly recommend people go to. It's A-R-K-I-V-E-E-D-N-E-E-E-E-A-R-C-F-E-E-A-Rchive. And I clicked into the, like, the ENIAC. Is it ENIAC or ENIAC? Yeah, it's an acronym. Yeah, so I clicked into the patent. Go, go down.

And, you know, you've kind of like, it's very cool. Like, there's storytelling around each thing that you guys are requiring where you're kind of telling the story of the, you know, the item that's being acquired, et cetera. But how does it actually work when you guys are acquiring one of these? Like, functionally, how is it? How am I interacting with it if I'm part of the community. Sure. So we have kind of, we have quite a few phases for how this is all

rolling out. Phase one is what you're seeing right now, which is we've brought on a pretty intense set of like vetted curatorial individuals that have access in these spaces. So rare book collectors, fine art collectors, people who've worked at the Guggenheim, the Whitney, editors for cultured magazine. And they kind of come together over what was agreed on early on in the community, they voted on one-year theme for the first theme. And that theme was when technology was a game-changer. So every item that was proposed to the community in this run is tied to this overarching curatorial theme, right? And so the Genesis item there was the patent for the first computer. It's kind of makes sense. If you're now building on a global supercomputer, what's the Genesis there?

When was the technology game changer? The first major mainframe that could actually outpeat, outpace humans at scale, right? And then every item that's come from that has been tied to that in some different way. So the Lynn Hirschman-leason photograph called seduction is looking at the intersection of the female form and objectification through the technology of television. So it ties it to there. The prototype for the MTV Moon Man was looking at the convergence of music onto television, so playing off of TV again into music and then starting to look at sculpture. And we're about to announce a new one that's at the intersection of like digital and and film and video. And so that is presented in the community votes.

In phase two, the current plan is that every one of these items that were presented in can now be forked by the community. So the community can say, I think an object that we should acquire because we now have the moon man is the shoes that Michael Jackson wore the first time he did. moonwalk because that was he won a MTV award for that. It's tied to music. That's an interesting item. And you start to build collections now against the items. And that's where so you set this sort of, you set the intention at the top from people who are kind of focused on the actual overarching theme. And then everyone gets to start forking and voting against that. And that is budget allocation that's voted on by the community. So we say, cool, that's great. Everyone comes together and picks that out. So that's kind of where we're moving into phase two is like extension

against it, just like you would fork a GitHub project. You're going to start forking different things. And then as they scale, the idea is we build out guilds. So we're sort of mimicking the Smithsonian where the Dow operating side is kind of like the Smithsonian Institute. We're creating content. We're putting out the magazine. We're doing podcasts. We're doing, we're finding the artists and putting out Twitter spaces with them. Then the community is slowly forming the Air and Space Museum, the portrait gallery, et cetera, over time, the science museum at scale. And then eventually you'll be able to choose to just be a member of one of those if you want or delegate your voting towards doubling down and growing those collections, etc.

So we have kind of a strategy for rollout. It's going to take probably about 36 months to get that into a scale of something meaningful. But that's basically you join. Items are presented to you that are kind of incredible. You vote. And then over time, you get to choose what to vote on internally based off of those items in it. TLDR. How do you think about earning, you know, earning versus buying? You know, I feel like what some of the best projects are doing are having just really smart ways to allow anyone to earn

tokens so that, because obviously some people can't afford, can afford it. So I'm curious, your perspective on that. Yeah, I think it's also really critical on our side specifically, because a lot of the folks that are joining archive, you know, it's not like it's, you know, they made a bunch of money flipping crypto punks. Like it's, it's trad traditional art folks, heavy duty collectors, academics, super curious people that just like love sports and memorabilia and watches. But it's, it's certainly not like everyone here has a lot of money to go buy art. And so we're all coming together to buy art. So one of the things we've been thinking about, We have an internal system we call archive points, which are not tied to any value.

They're tied to engagement and interactivity. So there's a bunch of things that you can do to earn more points through participation and functionally keeping up the engagement of the community broadly and bringing in great people. And that can actually earn you a spot in terms of the ability to vote and participate. It may not come with all of the perks of the membership vis-a-vis discounts or anything that comes out of the long-term business relationships, but it fully can get you a membership into the museum to help put your say and to have a voice and to participate. So that's one way that we're looking at doing that.

But I think there's a long way to go on that. There will also be different tiers. So we're thinking about there's a founding membership, which is mapping similar to patronage at a museum where like this is the people who were there early. Their names are on a brick. And then over time, there'll be slightly lower voting weight memberships that come in at lower price points to get more people in. Oh, cool.

Yeah, I was going to ask exactly that. Yeah, very, very cool. So where can people, you know, like me, because I'm going to message you otherwise, like where can people learn more about this and sort of, and find a way to get involved? Yeah. So, I mean, archive.net slash apply right now. There's a kind of a crazy waiting list. I think we're over 2,000 people right now.

And we're only letting in like 30 a week. So it's a little backed up. But the idea there is we're being, like, extremely careful about what it looks like to be a founding member. And so there's a pretty like there's a full onboarding process. There's a why there's a you know, it probably takes five minutes to apply not like just an email. We're asking some some like questions that we're interested in understanding what you collect or what you care about. You know, where do you where are you passionate those types of things so we can understand who's joining in. And so that's that's basically step one right now over the next six

months, there'll be about four more curations on that first collection, leading with most likely a mint for a membership in Q1, 2023. So that'll be, you know, pretty much an easier way to do it. But most likely, there'll be a white list based upon members already in the Discord. So you kind of want to apply now, probably would be my first statement there. Well, I'm super excited about it. I mean, I said it up front, but I'm kind of the cautious observer on most of these things. But the way it kind of brings together culture, community, you know, my romantic visions of museums that have now, you know, been extended from my own childhood to my son's childhood. Yeah. I'm really excited to just see, you know, this reimagination of these old institutions.

And to your point, I had never really thought about, you know, the idea of where things exist and where they sit in the world. being so important here. And it really is. I mean, like, it's like the history, you know, is written by the victors thing, right? Like, we can sort of, um, remap that in a lot of ways and like, you know, kind of tear down some of the walls of like, um, you know, colonialism and imperialism that I think have, have largely informed where some of these works exist. So, um, I'm super excited about what you're building, man. And I really appreciate you, uh, you running us through it. I'm, I'm excited to see it continue to grow and, and hopefully be a part of it. Uh, if I can make it through your 5,000 person waiting list here soon.

We'll work on that. Well, thank you so much, man. Of course, thank you guys. I am really, really excited for you. So thanks again for joining and look forward to having you on again soon once the vision gets further along. Yeah, could people, if you're listening to this, could people watch this on YouTube so you can see Tom's Sweet Hat and also subscribe to our YouTube? Also, your sweet hat style? Yeah, I got my, dude, I'm actually going to, I'm, I got to sell a, a small batch of these intellectually curious dad hats that I got made.

So I don't have them that, you know, luckily they're drop trips. I don't have like 5,000 of them sitting in my garage. But, but I am going to sell a bunch of these. I'm going to start giving them away to people that, uh, that refer enough people to my newsletter to. See? Always an opportunity, man. Always an opportunity. Tom, thank you so much, man.

And where are you based, by the way? I'm in Santa Monica. Oh, bummer, man. I was hoping you were still in New York. We could get together and go to the museum. I would do that. Next time you're out in New York, hit me up. I would love to go reminisce on Cleopatra and Natural History Museum.

Same. Later. All right, brother. Thank you. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you have any questions that you want featured in a future episode, email us at hi at t-R-W-I-H.com. Leave us a review at Apple or Spotify.

to help us grow the reach of this podcast. Until next time, we will see you soon.