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Arranging Tangerines Episode 32 - A Conversation with Ryan Tanaka
6 Plays2 years ago
On this week’s episode, we are joined by Ryan Tanaka, co-founder of Teia Surf, musician, and crypto-historian, to discuss the crypto space and it’s overlap with music and art, the promise Web3, Ethereum’s fallibility, diversity within the crypto ecosystem, the potential of Tezos as a blockchain for art, the challenges the Metaverse faces, and the importance of the intersection between the humanities and technology.
Closing Track: The Third Web - Chapter V (Interlude/Transition) by Ryan Tanaka
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Overview
00:00:03
Speaker
Welcome to Arranging Tangerines, presented by Lady and Stater.
00:00:05
Speaker
Conversations with contemporary artists, curators, and thinkers about the intersection of art, technology, and commerce.
00:00:10
Speaker
Your hosts are me, Alessandro Silver, and Joseph Wilcox.
00:00:13
Speaker
I know what to do.
00:00:14
Speaker
I know what to say.
00:00:17
Speaker
I just know I don't want to be like you.
00:00:20
Speaker
I know what to do.
00:00:20
Speaker
I don't know what to say.
00:00:22
Speaker
I just know I don't want to be like you.
Guest Introduction: Ryan Tanaka
00:00:34
Speaker
This week's guest is Ryan Tanaka.
00:00:36
Speaker
Hello.
00:00:38
Speaker
Hey, what's up, Ryan?
00:00:40
Speaker
Hey.
00:00:41
Speaker
How's it going?
00:00:42
Speaker
Good.
00:00:42
Speaker
Yeah, I tried something out.
00:00:44
Speaker
I'm in my studio right now.
00:00:48
Speaker
Can you hear me?
00:00:49
Speaker
Okay.
00:00:49
Speaker
Yeah, we can hear you just fine.
00:00:51
Speaker
Okay, cool.
00:00:52
Speaker
Yeah, I love that headphone microphone combo setup.
00:00:59
Speaker
We're still figuring out the best...
00:01:03
Speaker
the best gear to use for the podcast.
Podcast Gear and Performance Challenges
00:01:06
Speaker
And sometimes it's nice to see what other people use.
00:01:10
Speaker
Yeah, it's tricky.
00:01:12
Speaker
Like we had these kind of like crazy ideas about like, you know, Twitter Spaces was pretty big, right?
00:01:19
Speaker
For a little while.
00:01:20
Speaker
And then we were like, why don't we, could we possibly like do a performance there, you know, and do something weird, but.
00:01:28
Speaker
Oh yeah.
00:01:28
Speaker
Yeah.
00:01:29
Speaker
I never got around to it, but the equipment's still here.
00:01:32
Speaker
So yeah.
00:01:33
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
00:01:34
Speaker
Nice to see you again.
00:01:35
Speaker
It was a lot of fun in New York.
00:01:37
Speaker
Yeah.
00:01:38
Speaker
Yeah, we had a blast.
00:01:39
Speaker
It was really, it was nice to meet you there and connect and all of that.
00:01:43
Speaker
Yeah, I was like kind of busy running around everywhere.
00:01:47
Speaker
But, you know, the few moments we had was, yeah, I don't know.
00:01:52
Speaker
It's been a long time since I went to like an art event too, you know, because of COVID and COVID.
00:01:59
Speaker
So, yeah, you seem like you seem like a fairly busy guy.
00:02:06
Speaker
Not really.
00:02:09
Speaker
But I am I do a lot of things, you know, and so maybe it seems that way.
00:02:14
Speaker
I'm like kind of all over the place, you know, a lot of different things.
00:02:17
Speaker
So sure.
00:02:19
Speaker
Well, well, we appreciate you taking the time to come on the podcast.
00:02:24
Speaker
No, I appreciate it.
00:02:25
Speaker
I just kind of excited to be here.
00:02:30
Speaker
Not sure what to expect or what to say, but... It'll be great.
00:02:36
Speaker
We typically just kind of let the conversation move organically.
00:02:39
Speaker
And then Alex and I usually have a few questions that are like overarching questions that we'll use to kind of guide the conversation.
Ryan's Musical Journey and Academia Exit
00:02:48
Speaker
But mostly we just want to like...
00:02:50
Speaker
Talk to you about, I think both like your experience in the crypto space and then also, you know, your experience in music and art in crypto and outside of crypto also, because I think that there's, you know, there's overlap, but there's also worlds that exist apart from each other.
00:03:07
Speaker
Yeah.
00:03:09
Speaker
And so I think maybe a good opening question would be to just like maybe hear a little background on you.
00:03:16
Speaker
Cause I think I like know your website and I've looked at all the things you've done, but I don't really know.
00:03:20
Speaker
Like you look at my janky IPFS one.
00:03:23
Speaker
There's no styling.
00:03:26
Speaker
Yeah.
00:03:26
Speaker
It's like all text, right?
00:03:27
Speaker
Yeah.
00:03:28
Speaker
Yeah.
00:03:29
Speaker
I love it.
00:03:29
Speaker
Do you have like, do you have like a more designed one?
00:03:32
Speaker
That's like, I used to, but I went like all in on the web three thing and,
00:03:38
Speaker
So kind of never looked back, you know?
00:03:40
Speaker
Yeah.
00:03:40
Speaker
And yeah, so I can start with like a background.
00:03:44
Speaker
So I come from, I've done a lot of things over the years, but I mainly identify as a musician.
00:03:54
Speaker
And I have a composition degree, a bachelor's from University of Illinois.
00:04:01
Speaker
And then I went to CalArts for my master's.
00:04:05
Speaker
And you know my training is in classical music, you know music composition, but I do do improv I love doing that.
00:04:15
Speaker
And I'm also very interested in music tech so that's kind of how I ended up you know getting involved with all this stuff.
00:04:25
Speaker
Kind of going way back to like, like I was doing a PhD in musicology at USC, but the program didn't really work out.
00:04:35
Speaker
So I dropped out early and then I was kind of like, oh, what do I do now?
00:04:40
Speaker
You know, and, you know, like academia and like a lot of those institutional places, you know, I had aspirations of like, you know, working my way up the ladder or whatever you want to call it.
00:04:54
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:04:55
Speaker
But it's brutal, man.
00:04:57
Speaker
It's like brutally competitive for one, but also it's just like, you know, yeah, if you're on the blockchain, you kind of understand like, yeah,
00:05:11
Speaker
the issues with institutional, the way institutional art is done, you know, these things.
00:05:18
Speaker
So, yeah, there's like so many, I mean, I assume kind of like academia around music is similar to the visual arts, but it's, you know, there's these like very historic systems that are in place and you have to go through these very specific ways.
00:05:35
Speaker
And I would probably argue that they become a little out of touch, you know, with the,
00:05:40
Speaker
what is actually happening in the real world i remember getting punished for trying to um tie my artworks with social issues you know and it never made sense to me i'm like why are we actively avoiding talking about real things you know and there's a certain pride i feel like in like
00:06:05
Speaker
not being part of all that riffraff, you know?
00:06:08
Speaker
And yeah, well, anyway, you know, that's a good reason why it didn't work out.
Crypto's Impact on Art and Music
00:06:16
Speaker
But yeah, you're like, if you saw my bio, you know, I've been involved with crypto since like 2013, you know?
00:06:25
Speaker
And it did came from, I wasn't like looking to get rich or, you know, it's just like back then it was just like, huh, this isn't an interesting thing.
00:06:35
Speaker
idea that could potentially help artists you know and smart contracts uh but with the problem with like hollywood and a lot of the um institutional um art places right now is that they didn't do a very good job adapting to the uh digital space you know so like in music uh
00:06:57
Speaker
like ASCAP, BMI, I don't know if you know those institutions, but they're a performing rights organization.
00:07:04
Speaker
Yeah, nobody even knows about it anymore.
00:07:06
Speaker
Like it's a little sad, but they are the kind of the nonprofit or, you know, they're supposed to be kind of like the umpire, you know, in the entertainment industry.
00:07:19
Speaker
They go out and they're supposed to collect royalties on behalf of artists.
00:07:27
Speaker
So like they have a good, they have a, like they had a model where like, for example, you know, if you're a business, right.
00:07:37
Speaker
And you want to use music and you want to license that from an artist, that's really hard, right.
00:07:44
Speaker
It's very time consuming.
00:07:45
Speaker
You need lawyers.
00:07:47
Speaker
But what these are going to stay up on it too, right.
00:07:48
Speaker
You have to like renew.
00:07:49
Speaker
Yeah.
00:07:50
Speaker
Yeah.
00:07:50
Speaker
It's a nightmare.
00:07:51
Speaker
Right.
00:07:52
Speaker
Yeah.
00:07:52
Speaker
But they came up with this.
00:07:55
Speaker
concept of the Performer's Rights Organization, which basically, if you're a business, you can pay into that organization in exchange for basically being able to use whatever you want, you know, in the library.
00:08:09
Speaker
And so in theory, this was supposed to like work to the advantage of everyone, right?
00:08:13
Speaker
Artists get paid, they're happy, business is easier.
00:08:15
Speaker
And I've always been like advocating for that model to like emerge in on the internet or the Web3 in particular.
00:08:25
Speaker
But yeah, so it hasn't happened yet, you know?
00:08:30
Speaker
Yeah.
00:08:31
Speaker
And I wonder if there's, if there's, if you've seen kind of like an analogy between when streaming kind of took off, well, I feel like there was like MP3s obviously, and then, and then people learned how to monetize them.
00:08:45
Speaker
And then we moved to streaming.
00:08:46
Speaker
And I feel like when streaming happened, people were like having a hard time giving up this idea of owning their,
00:08:52
Speaker
owning their music that they've bought if they've been buying it on itunes or something like that and so i feel like there's always this like lag of the mainstream companies kind of like supporting these things until the market is for sure gonna kind of support the model right um so yeah i i wonder what you think about that uh yeah um so
00:09:15
Speaker
Okay, well, I'll finish up my bio real quick.
00:09:17
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, sorry.
00:09:18
Speaker
No, no, no.
00:09:19
Speaker
It's a very interesting topic.
00:09:24
Speaker
Back then, you could not buy a Bitcoin at an exchange.
00:09:30
Speaker
The only way was to mine it yourself by buying a rig or...
00:09:36
Speaker
find some guy on the internet.
00:09:40
Speaker
Who had minded himself, right?
00:09:42
Speaker
Or herself.
00:09:43
Speaker
Usually, yeah.
00:09:45
Speaker
And that's where the story of the pizza thing came from, right?
00:09:48
Speaker
Sure.
00:09:49
Speaker
Yeah.
00:09:50
Speaker
They wanted Bitcoin, so here's some pizza.
00:09:52
Speaker
But yeah, I was able to, I just did it because it was interesting, and it was like a new technology that was just emerging.
00:10:01
Speaker
But I mined enough Bitcoin to get into the Ethereum ICO back then.
00:10:07
Speaker
And back then, Ethereum was like $0.32 or $0.24 or something like that.
00:10:12
Speaker
And so I got really lucky.
00:10:14
Speaker
I was able to...
00:10:17
Speaker
kind of, you know, sustain myself that way because I live in California and, you know, like I also lived in the Bay area and, you know, you probably know how expensive it is, right?
00:10:30
Speaker
Just to exist there.
00:10:32
Speaker
Sure.
00:10:32
Speaker
And it was pretty brutal, you know, it's like, not just, not just like web two or like the industry practices that tend to be very unfavorable for artists.
00:10:43
Speaker
Right.
00:10:43
Speaker
Um,
00:10:45
Speaker
it really was just like everything, right?
00:10:47
Speaker
Like a lot of my friends just got priced out.
00:10:50
Speaker
Um, they couldn't afford to be here.
00:10:51
Speaker
I just never saw them again.
00:10:53
Speaker
And a lot of the venues I used to frequent, uh, just got shut down cause they couldn't afford rent, you know?
00:11:00
Speaker
And so I feel like, you know, like right now, um, so that, you know, if you're an artist, you're feeling the squeeze, right?
00:11:09
Speaker
It's just like, everything feels like it's against you, you know?
00:11:13
Speaker
And, uh,
00:11:15
Speaker
So it's not surprising that NFTs and like Web3 crypto things kind of took off because I think I really tapped into that.
00:11:23
Speaker
Oh, maybe there's a better way, you know?
Ethereum Investment and Living in California
00:11:25
Speaker
Yeah.
00:11:26
Speaker
And so I've been doing that for a while and I've been involved with like political things and like, um,
00:11:35
Speaker
I supported Andrew Yang with the UBI initiative, which also kind of made its way into Ethereum.
00:11:45
Speaker
Vitalik talked about it a few times, too.
00:11:49
Speaker
So there are a few UBI coins up there.
00:11:51
Speaker
It's pretty hard to pull off practically.
00:11:56
Speaker
So since then, I've been a very...
00:12:05
Speaker
involved with Ethereum, you know, that was kind of like my main thing.
00:12:09
Speaker
I think for a long time, that was pretty much, you know, like if you were doing crypto, Ethereum seemed like it was the only option, you know, if you're thinking about the future seriously.
00:12:24
Speaker
But I feel like in the last few years, it's changed, you know, and
00:12:29
Speaker
And with the gas fees, you know, we kind of found out that the system wasn't as, you know, infallible as we thought it was, you know.
00:12:39
Speaker
Sure.
00:12:39
Speaker
And then I know, like, Bitcoin, you know, they haven't really done much, like, development, you know.
00:12:48
Speaker
Yeah.
00:12:48
Speaker
And I don't know enough about...
00:12:51
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know enough about Bitcoin to know how easy it is to build on top of it.
00:12:57
Speaker
Because I've talked to some people who are like, oh, we're doing a level two for Bitcoin.
00:13:04
Speaker
And I kind of understand what a layer two is with Polygon and Ethereum.
00:13:11
Speaker
But I thought that wasn't possible on Bitcoin.
00:13:14
Speaker
But people talk about doing smart contracts.
00:13:16
Speaker
It's not possible.
00:13:18
Speaker
I mean...
00:13:19
Speaker
So the way a layer two would work for Bitcoin or even Ethereum is that you have all the transactions stored off chain and then you upload the aggregate of it on chain.
00:13:34
Speaker
And that's
00:13:35
Speaker
That's how they get around the gas fees and things like that.
00:13:38
Speaker
Yeah, that's one honest way.
00:13:41
Speaker
If you're doing it honestly, that's kind of how you would do it.
00:13:44
Speaker
But there's always been this weird incongruity between, especially the Bitcoin folds, that is all into decentralization.
00:13:54
Speaker
They're very idealistic.
00:13:56
Speaker
But they just don't want to think about that part, you know.
00:14:00
Speaker
Sure.
00:14:00
Speaker
Yeah.
00:14:01
Speaker
And, you know, there's like issues like governance, you know, as if you're familiar with the Tezos network, you know, they talk about it all the time, right?
00:14:10
Speaker
Like, like Tezos does on-chain governance and, you know.
00:14:17
Speaker
So, yeah, this is a very recent thing, and it was actually, I was prompted by my current co-founder for TASurf, Carolyn.
00:14:27
Speaker
She's busy with Taya.
00:14:30
Speaker
She often does the PR messaging things there.
00:14:34
Speaker
But, yeah, we started talking about a year ago, and she's like,
00:14:39
Speaker
oh my God, Ryan, you got to check out this Hicketnuck thing.
00:14:43
Speaker
And I'm like, what's Hicketnuck?
00:14:45
Speaker
What is that?
00:14:45
Speaker
And he's like, oh yeah, there's like this crazy Brazilian guy.
00:14:48
Speaker
And like, for a while, like it took a while, like a couple of months, you know, because I was like so steeped in the Ethereum system at the time.
00:14:57
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:14:58
Speaker
And then the more I learn about it, I'm just...
00:15:02
Speaker
I'm like, wow, there's some cool stuff happening in Tezos.
00:15:07
Speaker
And because I'm a musician, really, we kind of fell in love with Hen Radio.
Hen Radio and Taya Surf Creation
00:15:16
Speaker
So I'm not super familiar with Hen Radio.
00:15:18
Speaker
I know it through you, and that's about it.
00:15:20
Speaker
Yeah, it's struggling.
00:15:22
Speaker
It's struggling pretty hard.
00:15:24
Speaker
I saw a tweet a couple months ago where they're like, we can't afford our domain name.
00:15:32
Speaker
So we're going to have to switch over all the hell, you know, and I did a little bit of research.
00:15:38
Speaker
I mentioned this at New York as well.
00:15:40
Speaker
But, you know, right now on Taya, there's about 750,000 plus objects.
00:15:46
Speaker
Out of those, I think there's only like maybe two or three thousand audio objects.
00:15:54
Speaker
like music yeah but but you know as a musician like on it i can honestly say like hidden radio was some of the best most inspired things i've heard in a long time like because i've been to like museum you know museum shows and like you know concert halls and like um you know you just go on the internet looking for random music but um
00:16:21
Speaker
It's just like, yeah, Web2 is not very friendly to music, you know?
00:16:25
Speaker
Yeah.
00:16:26
Speaker
It's sort of washed out.
00:16:29
Speaker
Is Hen Radio, was it kind of like, it was a group of people who wanted to showcase the audio works that were put on the Henunk?
00:16:40
Speaker
Yeah.
00:16:41
Speaker
And it came from a hackathon.
00:16:43
Speaker
Okay.
00:16:44
Speaker
So, yeah, it's not a company.
00:16:46
Speaker
And, you know, it's understandable that it's not being updated all the time.
00:16:50
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:16:51
Speaker
There's some issues with the playback.
00:16:55
Speaker
So our whole Teya Surf company idea came from we like listening to the radio, you know, and we're just like listening to random songs on there.
00:17:07
Speaker
And then we just started clicking on the random button on Teya.
00:17:11
Speaker
You know?
00:17:13
Speaker
And then they were like, oh, yeah, this is kind of fun.
00:17:15
Speaker
Yeah, why don't we keep on doing that?
00:17:17
Speaker
So I wrote a little script that just refreshes it over and over on the random.
00:17:22
Speaker
And then that's basically our script.
00:17:25
Speaker
That's the whole thing.
00:17:26
Speaker
And sometimes the objects don't load properly because of IPFS, right?
00:17:34
Speaker
But it's just like we felt like the quality of art, and especially when you look at the site, it's just
00:17:43
Speaker
You know, there's varying skill levels, but you can tell people are inspired and they're like having fun, you know?
00:17:50
Speaker
Yeah.
00:17:50
Speaker
I mean, that's, I think that my, my entry into, um,
00:17:56
Speaker
crypto and NFTs, uh, sounds similar to yours post, uh, I don't know.
00:18:02
Speaker
Yeah, I know.
00:18:02
Speaker
I know you've done, you're a filmmaker or.
00:18:06
Speaker
So I do, I do some, I do some video art and I, I do some kind of, um, photographic based work.
00:18:13
Speaker
Uh, and, um,
00:18:15
Speaker
But I so I when I learned about NFTs, I learned about Ethereum first.
00:18:20
Speaker
And so I was like diving into all of those platforms that were coming up in kind of like February and March of last year.
00:18:28
Speaker
And then same thing, a friend sent me and he's like, hey, here's a weird one.
00:18:32
Speaker
And he sent me the Hickett Nunk.
00:18:34
Speaker
page and I was like and I was like and I was like oh I was like this is so like bare bones DIY and so at first I was like you know this isn't because there's so many projects that come and go yeah yeah yeah um I was like this is cool but like am I gonna put my stuff on here or we were starting this kind of curatorial project and we're like are we gonna put our
00:18:53
Speaker
artists on here if this might not exist next month, right?
00:18:56
Speaker
And so I just like, I kept an eye on it and I did, I minted some early NFTs on there just for fun of some of my older work.
00:19:05
Speaker
And then we kind of went all in when we did our first exhibition because of the things you were talking about with Tezos being like a much more, I don't know, inspiring place where artists were doing things that seemed like it was really fun.
00:19:18
Speaker
Yeah, keep artists nicer, you know?
00:19:21
Speaker
It's a lot nicer.
00:19:21
Speaker
There's a lot less like noise.
00:19:23
Speaker
Yeah.
00:19:24
Speaker
And at the time, I mean, specifically at that time, it was just it was like a nice antithesis to everything that was happening in the Ethereum NFT ecosystem where that was that was like why me and Alex got excited.
00:19:38
Speaker
We were like, we know so many artists whose work we like love.
00:19:42
Speaker
Let's see if we can kind of like push it into the space.
00:19:44
Speaker
And so that was, you know, I'm glad you did that.
00:19:47
Speaker
Yeah.
00:19:50
Speaker
Yeah, like Ethereum used to be better, you know, and I do have a lot of respect for like, you know, Vitalik and, you know, I have Miyaguchi, you know, who's the
00:20:01
Speaker
executive director.
00:20:02
Speaker
A lot of people don't even know that.
00:20:03
Speaker
But there's a weird thing when you go online where people think Vitalik is the CEO of Ethereum or something.
00:20:16
Speaker
It just takes five minutes to look up and know that's not true.
00:20:19
Speaker
Yeah.
00:20:20
Speaker
But there is this kind of understanding of how systems and companies work.
00:20:23
Speaker
from the from the mainstream world and so everybody's like okay i guess that makes that makes sense yeah and he's become sort of like the people see him as the bridge you know like sure yeah someone some nerdy white guy they you know the the industry can identify with right so he can speak to he can speak to both sides yeah so i don't know
00:20:48
Speaker
So, but, you know, like Ethereum used to be better.
00:20:51
Speaker
You know, a lot of the artists were there and there are some cool things happening on Ethereum as well.
00:20:56
Speaker
Like Async, you know, Moniverse is looking kind of interesting too.
00:21:03
Speaker
You know, there are good stuff happening on there, but it's just the gas fees, right?
00:21:07
Speaker
Just squeeze everyone out.
00:21:09
Speaker
Yeah.
00:21:11
Speaker
And if you're an artist, you can't afford
00:21:13
Speaker
you know, $100 transaction fee, right?
00:21:16
Speaker
No, I mean, especially, I mean, it's better now, but yeah, last year, it was just, it was wild to see the gas fees.
00:21:25
Speaker
Yeah, I remember it was as high as $600.
00:21:27
Speaker
Yeah.
00:21:29
Speaker
her i'm like are you fucking kidding me right like no i remember we we helped or we worked with an artist to mint an nft on foundation um and we we did like a collaborative contract with it and i remember waking up at three in the morning to try and like catch the best time and it was still 150 i think we all did that a little bit um
00:21:50
Speaker
But yeah, that's kind of the nature of decentralization, right?
00:21:55
Speaker
Is you can lose control of the culture really quickly if everybody pours into it.
00:22:00
Speaker
And especially if there's money to be made, it's just going to, you know, everything's going to kind of like funnel into this.
00:22:05
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's what happened with Ethereum.
00:22:07
Speaker
So like, you know, I noticed that a lot of them...
00:22:13
Speaker
especially the leadership, you know, they take pride in the idea of being neutral.
00:22:19
Speaker
So, you know, even with the scandals that happened with like ENS and, you know, a couple other unsavory things that, you know, they don't like to talk about.
00:22:30
Speaker
Like, it's like they defended their decision not to do anything because, you know, they're
00:22:36
Speaker
neutral but unbiased unbiased right but that's a very that's a holdover you know like vitalik's a field fellow you know at the end of the day right and so all that um
Critique of Song-a-Day Model
00:22:48
Speaker
silicon valley sort of you know unilateral decision making asymmetrical growth you know all those things are all still there you know and uh the thing that really
00:23:04
Speaker
Not bothered, but really crystallized.
00:23:08
Speaker
Some of the problems in Ethereum was during ETH Denver last year.
00:23:14
Speaker
I don't know if you paid attention to that, but they showcased the musician there.
00:23:24
Speaker
his name was Jonathan.
00:23:25
Speaker
And like, it's just weird because I went to grad school with him at the same time.
00:23:29
Speaker
Okay.
00:23:30
Speaker
But his thing was like, so his thing was a song a day, you know?
00:23:35
Speaker
And I remember when he started that 13 years ago, like started this and he's like, I'm just going to make a song every day.
00:23:43
Speaker
And, you know, he has his guitar or whatever instruments he has around him.
00:23:47
Speaker
And he makes these little cute songs, you know, like very, very quickly on mass, you know?
00:23:53
Speaker
And in a way, you know, it's pretty, like, impressive, you know, that he kept it up for that long.
00:24:00
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:24:01
Speaker
For 13 years.
00:24:02
Speaker
Yeah, and he's a nice guy.
00:24:03
Speaker
I know him, you know, and I'm nothing against him.
00:24:07
Speaker
But then he got showcased at ETH Denver as, you know, sort of the, this is our ideal musician, you know, and they had a little song, and he wrote a little song about being at the conference.
00:24:20
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:24:21
Speaker
you know, but when you like think about it, it's like, so is that the future of musicians?
00:24:27
Speaker
You know, like you're going to have to grind away every fucking day, make a song a day.
00:24:33
Speaker
And if you can't do it too bad, you know?
00:24:35
Speaker
Right.
00:24:36
Speaker
Right.
00:24:36
Speaker
Cause this is the model that we're using now that I know.
00:24:39
Speaker
I'm just like, Oh God, I don't want to, you know, like, yeah.
00:24:42
Speaker
You know, people have different ways of creating, right?
00:24:45
Speaker
Some people can turn them out like he can.
00:24:48
Speaker
I mean, there's nothing wrong with that, but.
00:24:50
Speaker
You know, some people like to spend time on writing one song over several months, you know, and just did it.
00:24:58
Speaker
I don't know.
00:24:59
Speaker
So with TESL's, but TESL in particular, I feel like, you know, there's a little bit more stylistic diversity, you know, you know, it is still a little bit of a bubble of its own, but yeah,
00:25:16
Speaker
I feel like, yeah, the artistic quality is unmatched, even now.
00:25:23
Speaker
Yeah.
00:25:25
Speaker
I'm glad you brought up the kind of neutrality thing, too, because that was something that I think that I didn't necessarily know, kind of like what the culture was around politics, but I could tell that most people were either kind of like of a pretty hard libertarian stance that they thought these kind of like, quote unquote, woke issues were not a part of their
00:25:47
Speaker
a part of their world that they should care about.
00:25:49
Speaker
And, um, and on, uh, on Hicket Nook, I remember going on the discord and seeing that they had like a fem space channel.
00:25:57
Speaker
And I was like, Oh, this is, I was like, this is awesome.
00:25:59
Speaker
Cause like, you know, it was, there was such a crypto bro narrative, especially in the beginning of last year that it was like really nice to see a platform that had this kind of space, uh,
00:26:08
Speaker
Yeah, even in New York, you know, I did notice there's quite a few women there, you know, at least compared to what I'm used to, which is, you know, tend to be like 10 tech pro.
00:26:20
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:26:21
Speaker
Oh, you mean at the Taya party?
00:26:23
Speaker
Yeah, the TF party, yeah.
00:26:25
Speaker
I don't know if it was like one to one, but it was much better than everywhere else.
00:26:31
Speaker
Yeah, every crypto event I've been to.
00:26:33
Speaker
Sure.
00:26:33
Speaker
Yeah, and we work with a lot of female identifying artists.
00:26:37
Speaker
And so that was a big part of the reason of using Hicketnunk too.
Hicketnunk and Community Dynamics
00:26:45
Speaker
Yeah, I'm not really into woke politics or anything, but...
00:26:54
Speaker
It's more about like having a spectrum of representation, right?
00:26:59
Speaker
And like without that, you know, it does get a little stale, you know?
00:27:05
Speaker
Sure, sure.
00:27:07
Speaker
And, you know, you need that diversity if you want to keep things interesting.
00:27:11
Speaker
And so, yeah, the issue kind of with Ethereum is that, you know, as the gas fees went up, it's like,
00:27:20
Speaker
you know, all the people who couldn't afford to be there got priced out, just like in the real world, you know?
00:27:26
Speaker
And then all you're left is a bunch of rich people with, you know, I'll often have nothing to say, you know, I don't want to,
00:27:35
Speaker
to like sure it tends it tends to be shallower a lot of the time yeah yeah it's like yeah what was the the the uh the champagne is bubbling over my glass you know those sorts of problems right yes oh no yeah it's like not even first world problems it's like uh yeah one percent of one percent one percent problems yeah yeah yeah
00:27:59
Speaker
um i did i wanted to jump back to to the to the teo radio project that you that you started because i just um like i i think pairing the kind of like uh teo feed with the music that's on there on hen radio i think it's awesome but like just the idea of having a visual radio station i think is like i mean a very novel idea i've never really thought of that where you can like um
00:28:25
Speaker
either just let it scroll
Teosurf's Visual Radio Concept
00:28:27
Speaker
or flip the channel.
00:28:27
Speaker
I mean, if there was channels, that would be a whole other thing.
00:28:30
Speaker
But just to have a visual representation radio and then to attach it to music, I think, is a really fun idea.
00:28:37
Speaker
Yeah, it just kind of happened by accident almost.
00:28:42
Speaker
But then we just started.
00:28:44
Speaker
We did it for ourselves.
00:28:46
Speaker
It was just fun.
00:28:48
Speaker
But we thought about it like, yeah, we haven't seen anything like this up there because I write like the Web2 model is this like in your face marketing, you know, consume, consume, right?
00:29:00
Speaker
And, you know, like all the all the
00:29:04
Speaker
content is getting shorter and shorter, right?
00:29:06
Speaker
For like shorter attention spans.
00:29:08
Speaker
Yeah.
00:29:08
Speaker
We wanted to try something, do something different from that for one.
00:29:12
Speaker
And so, you know, this is something like we started this company literally like a week before I went to New York.
00:29:19
Speaker
So it's this brand new, like we're working on things now, but, you know, but, but we're trying to,
00:29:30
Speaker
I guess the way Carolyn explained it to me was it's like a shopping network aesthetic, like QVC and a lot of those.
00:29:41
Speaker
More TV, right?
00:29:44
Speaker
And there's a lot of upsides for having the interactivity of online and mobile stuff, right?
00:29:51
Speaker
But I think there's a side...
00:29:55
Speaker
that people are tired of it, you know, and they just want something like chill and the background just runs on its own.
00:30:03
Speaker
And yeah, so that's kind of where the aesthetic part comes out.
00:30:08
Speaker
Longer term, our business plan really is,
00:30:14
Speaker
We want to focus, like a lot of NFT platforms focus on minting, right?
00:30:21
Speaker
As their business model.
00:30:23
Speaker
We're probably going to avoid that.
00:30:25
Speaker
And what we're going to focus on is curation.
00:30:28
Speaker
So, you know, there's so many NFTs out there right now and like people are having trouble finding the things that they like, you know, and we want to build tools to help with that.
00:30:39
Speaker
And I do think like there's a potential there where
00:30:43
Speaker
we can get curators paid, you know, and that's the big difference from what other people are doing.
00:30:50
Speaker
Like, so we're not there yet, but where our goal is to say, if you're anyone, you know, this is really anyone, they can create a playlist on our site and then they will get a commission for sales.
00:31:07
Speaker
As far as I know, there's not really anywhere doing that right now.
00:31:11
Speaker
No, I mean, you know, like you can get kind of like social clout for having followers on Spotify for your playlists, right?
00:31:17
Speaker
But you're not getting paid.
00:31:18
Speaker
I mean, maybe Spotify does have some people on payroll for that, but not regular folks who are putting together.
00:31:22
Speaker
Yeah.
00:31:23
Speaker
So you want to kind of like create a scalable model where, you know, anyone with tastes, right?
00:31:32
Speaker
And share.
00:31:34
Speaker
And if they make a sale, then they get paid and ours get paid.
00:31:40
Speaker
And yeah.
00:31:40
Speaker
In theory, everyone's happy.
00:31:43
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
00:31:45
Speaker
But yeah, I think there's a need to separate.
00:31:50
Speaker
This kind of relates to the culture of Web2 too, but the thing is the problem with Web2 content platforms is that they treat the artist like the customer.
00:32:03
Speaker
And if you're a customer, they encourage you to become artists.
00:32:07
Speaker
And
00:32:10
Speaker
basically not pay you, right?
00:32:12
Speaker
Right.
00:32:13
Speaker
Sure.
00:32:13
Speaker
They want everyone to be a content creator.
00:32:15
Speaker
Yeah.
00:32:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:32:17
Speaker
More, more product.
00:32:19
Speaker
But I think in reality, not everyone wants to be an artist, you know?
00:32:24
Speaker
No, some people, I mean, most people have jobs that they need to do and they just want to have, have something that they enjoy and it might be music or it might be art or it might be these things, but they don't want to have to like,
00:32:37
Speaker
they don't want to have to have a side job in order to listen to music, right?
00:32:40
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:32:41
Speaker
So we have a weird, we live in a weird time where we treat everyone like celebrities, you know?
00:32:50
Speaker
I don't think that's a good thing.
00:32:52
Speaker
Right.
00:32:53
Speaker
Yeah, you know how screwed up a lot of celebs are.
00:32:56
Speaker
So I feel like, you know, Web3 has the potential to kind of like...
00:33:05
Speaker
Establish stronger identities for like what artists are, what a curator is, you know?
00:33:11
Speaker
And I feel like for the average person, like being a curator is more comfortable than, you know, creating content themselves.
00:33:20
Speaker
And so, yeah, so I don't know.
00:33:23
Speaker
That's our hypothesis.
00:33:24
Speaker
I think I think it's super interesting.
00:33:26
Speaker
And I think as kind of like, you know, once once there's 200 NFT platforms that do the exact same thing where they let people mint and you can sell, it doesn't make sense to start another one necessarily.
00:33:39
Speaker
And so I think people are starting these platforms.
00:33:42
Speaker
you know, these new companies that are doing things a little bit differently.
00:33:45
Speaker
We just, we just talked to somebody from JPEG who does kind of a similar, it sounds like they're doing a similar thing with visual arts.
00:33:55
Speaker
So like people can curate a collection of NFTs in, in a virtual reality gallery.
00:34:01
Speaker
And then if somebody buys that from that specific gallery, then the curator gets paid and the artist gets paid.
00:34:06
Speaker
Yeah.
00:34:06
Speaker
It doesn't surprise me.
00:34:07
Speaker
I mean, I feel like that's where things are going to hit.
00:34:11
Speaker
So yeah.
00:34:13
Speaker
Yeah, it's tricky because curation is not easy.
00:34:21
Speaker
It's like, well, good curation.
00:34:24
Speaker
Well, the whole good idea itself is controversial, right?
00:34:28
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, sure.
00:34:29
Speaker
It's like, oh, who are you to decide what's good and what's bad and aren't right?
00:34:33
Speaker
And like, yeah, but.
00:34:37
Speaker
Yeah, but yes.
00:34:39
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:34:41
Speaker
So a lot of companies I've noticed do this thing where it's like, okay, they like OpenZ or I shouldn't use a big name like that.
00:34:53
Speaker
You know, just some generic...
00:34:57
Speaker
minting platform and they reach a point, you know, maybe they get lucky and they get some success and they have some, you know, some artworks on their site.
00:35:06
Speaker
And then it's like, well, now what, you know, then they have to deal with the curation problem.
00:35:13
Speaker
Right.
00:35:13
Speaker
Eventually, no matter what.
00:35:15
Speaker
I feel like, I mean, I feel like known origin, which is a very big platform has just kind of started doing curation in the last,
00:35:22
Speaker
yeah five or six months or something but what ends up happening is that it ends up being the personal tastes of the people who happen to be working there you know yeah and you know as uh you know when it's done in a bad way it becomes like this uh ego thing right like here's my tastes and you're gonna like it right and then uh
00:35:49
Speaker
So it's very tricky where, you know, we have our biases too.
00:35:52
Speaker
You know, I like certain things over other things, but we're really trying to keep in mind, like we need to empower people.
00:36:02
Speaker
to be able to share their tastes and try not to get in the way of that, you know?
00:36:10
Speaker
Sure.
00:36:10
Speaker
Because if you have, because, you know, if you have a curator and it's, you know, if you convince kind of like,
00:36:20
Speaker
somebody who doesn't have a curator as a real, as a real job, but you have them curate some things and they're into it and they're knowledgeable, their taste is going to overlap with lots of people's tastes that they don't even know exist yet.
00:36:33
Speaker
Right.
00:36:34
Speaker
And if you can kind of offer that, um,
00:36:37
Speaker
If you can offer that space, then people can discover lots of things from lots of different kinds of curators that aren't just these very top-down models that you're talking about.
00:36:47
Speaker
Yep.
00:36:47
Speaker
And if they're getting paid for it, you know, that's what was missing this whole time.
00:36:52
Speaker
Like the incentive, right, to keep on going.
00:36:55
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:36:55
Speaker
Because it does, you know, I've made playlists before and curated things before, but it does get a little old.
00:37:01
Speaker
It's work, right?
00:37:02
Speaker
It's work.
00:37:02
Speaker
It's work and you're not getting nothing for it.
00:37:05
Speaker
Right.
00:37:06
Speaker
Right.
00:37:06
Speaker
What's the point?
00:37:07
Speaker
Right.
00:37:07
Speaker
Yeah.
00:37:08
Speaker
So.
00:37:09
Speaker
Are you familiar with with the the idea of slow television?
Teosurf and Slow Television Comparison
00:37:14
Speaker
This like this genre of TV?
00:37:17
Speaker
Oh, no.
00:37:17
Speaker
I want to hear.
00:37:19
Speaker
So I just like kind of I know about it kind of in passing, but I was just reading I was just looking at the Wikipedia.
00:37:25
Speaker
I think it was really big in Norway and kind of the early and late 2000s.
00:37:29
Speaker
But they would show like they're like these really long programs.
00:37:33
Speaker
And I think the most popular one that like hit the mainstream news in the
00:37:38
Speaker
um, on a lot of, on a lot of the news sites was about like this broadcast of a, of a burning fire or something like that.
00:37:45
Speaker
So it was just this like, like 12 hour broadcast of, of a, of a fire burning from start to finish or something like that.
00:37:53
Speaker
Um,
00:37:54
Speaker
It's almost like ASMR.
00:37:56
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, totally.
00:37:57
Speaker
And I think ASMR is kind of like a quick consumable version of kind of what maybe you are talking about with Teosurf, right?
00:38:07
Speaker
And I think the challenge is convincing people that they should slow down and take the time to just like... Yeah, but last year I was doing an ASMR project.
00:38:16
Speaker
I don't know if you saw that.
00:38:18
Speaker
I didn't, no.
00:38:19
Speaker
I had a friend...
00:38:21
Speaker
Yeah, long story, but yeah, I made some money with Dogecoin and then we used that fund to do an ASMR project.
00:38:31
Speaker
Okay.
00:38:33
Speaker
It's weird.
00:38:34
Speaker
Yeah.
00:38:37
Speaker
But yeah, I don't know.
00:38:38
Speaker
But yeah, you know, I make, so I guess if I had to classify like the kind of music I make is... Yeah, I was curious.
00:38:46
Speaker
I wanted to get into that.
00:38:47
Speaker
Yeah.
00:38:48
Speaker
So yeah, so it's like a classically trained, but I have a sort of a soft spot for like ambient music.
00:38:55
Speaker
Okay.
00:38:55
Speaker
So a lot
Ryan's Classical Ambient Style
00:38:56
Speaker
of times I call my music like classical ambient, you know?
00:38:59
Speaker
I don't really write lyrics.
00:39:01
Speaker
I'm really into...
00:39:03
Speaker
electronic and instrumental.
00:39:05
Speaker
Actually, I have my keyboard right here.
00:39:09
Speaker
Yeah, that's coming through.
00:39:12
Speaker
So, yeah.
00:39:13
Speaker
Did you want to play something?
00:39:15
Speaker
Oh, yeah, sure.
00:39:15
Speaker
I could.
00:39:15
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely.
00:39:16
Speaker
Maybe this is short.
00:39:18
Speaker
Yeah, I'm really into it.
00:39:19
Speaker
How's the volume?
00:39:20
Speaker
Is it low?
00:39:23
Speaker
I mean, on my end, it sounds similar, or maybe a little quieter than your voice.
00:39:28
Speaker
Okay.
00:39:33
Speaker
you
00:40:16
Speaker
That's a little snippet, but you know, thank you.
00:40:21
Speaker
That's awesome.
00:40:22
Speaker
Is that kind of improv or is that a track that you've worked on?
00:40:25
Speaker
No, this is improv.
00:40:28
Speaker
I should have mentioned, I only do improv.
00:40:30
Speaker
Oh, okay.
00:40:33
Speaker
I used to write a lot of composed music.
00:40:38
Speaker
In particular, I wrote a lot of string quartets and have a few recordings of that, but
00:40:46
Speaker
Yeah, it's like classical music world is not in great shape either, you know?
00:40:53
Speaker
Uh-huh, yeah.
00:40:54
Speaker
And... But yeah, I... Like... I guess it's a thing where... Like, improv, like, is... It's like a weird thing in classical music where...
00:41:16
Speaker
When you're in that world, you find out a lot of people do not improvise.
00:41:20
Speaker
They're used to... It's hard for me to explain this to musicians of other genres because pretty much every other music, they improvise.
00:41:32
Speaker
They jam out, they have jam sessions, they make things up.
00:41:35
Speaker
Over there, they have a very top-down structure where it's like composer, performer,
00:41:41
Speaker
And you just do what you're told, you know?
00:41:43
Speaker
Yeah.
00:41:43
Speaker
And so, yeah.
00:41:45
Speaker
So this has always been like that, but, but yeah, that's kind of a little bit snippet and, you know, imagine like playing that for, but for maybe like 15, 20 minutes, you know, and just kind of let it run in the background.
00:41:59
Speaker
And I've always been like interested in that idea of like music that doesn't have to be paid attention to necessarily, you know, it,
00:42:09
Speaker
And it's more about like evoking, evoking like a mood or a setting rather than is what I have to say, you know?
00:42:18
Speaker
Sure.
00:42:19
Speaker
Yeah.
00:42:20
Speaker
And, and also, I mean, you know, we only, our brain only like, uh, consciously catches what, like, I can't, I don't know what the percentages,
00:42:29
Speaker
but we only catch like a tiny bit of all the stimuli that's actually like coming into our five senses so like even if even if something's on in the background and you're not like listening to it right it's still it's it's still hitting your brain it's still affecting you it's still gonna like be in there somewhere yeah it just it just isn't the same way as if you were kind of like directly it's like a point of debate in the music world where it's just like active listening versus passive right language is better and
00:42:57
Speaker
So then so forth.
00:42:58
Speaker
I think, you know, both sides have their thing, but for me, like personality wise, just my style kind of more suited to that.
00:43:08
Speaker
And that shows up even in our company, right?
00:43:11
Speaker
Like we kind of imagine people using Taya Surf as backdrop.
00:43:17
Speaker
So it's like, you know, if you're a small business and you just want something to
00:43:24
Speaker
kind of pleasant and cool, you know, running in the background, you can just put it on your TV screen and, you know, and then maybe make a little bit extra money, you know, someone sees something they like, you know, they could.
00:43:36
Speaker
So, yeah, that's the dream, you know, especially if like NFTs start getting tied into like, you know, licensing and copyright and, you know, all those things,
00:43:50
Speaker
uh though that's the hard work you know that right we have ahead of us um yeah and there's i'm sure there's i mean there's got to be thousands of people working on all that stuff right now right yep and it'll just it'll it'll be you know time will tell how much it gets sifted out and and yeah i think in the long run like the whole idea of like flipping nfps to like get rich is probably not gonna
00:44:16
Speaker
seem that great, you know?
00:44:18
Speaker
No, definitely not.
00:44:19
Speaker
I mean, we're, we, we present a lot of artists work that, that I would call a slow burn.
00:44:29
Speaker
You know, we have, I mean, one of the, in our first show, we had a video piece of,
00:44:34
Speaker
that was, I think it was 11 minutes long, which back in the early Hicket Nug days meant they had to be 50 megabytes or less.
00:44:42
Speaker
So we really had to like, yeah, we really had to, yeah, it's up to a hundred.
00:44:47
Speaker
We had to mess with the file to make sure the video fit and still looked okay.
00:44:50
Speaker
But it was, it's like a performance piece from this artist, Victor Yanez Lascano of him, like putting a water drop on his finger and then just letting it dry out.
00:45:01
Speaker
um and and like and like this this kind of like similar you know it's it's hard sometimes to get people to like slow down and like we're not expecting people to watch 11 minutes of that but it can be really nice to watch you know two or three um if not if not the whole thing right yeah i mean it depends what you're doing right so right right it can be on in the background you can like check in on it um yeah
00:45:25
Speaker
Well, the one, like there's a silver lining, I guess, like, you know, even now, like it's really hard to sell NFTs.
00:45:31
Speaker
Like, you know, the data says majority of NFT sales are actually at a loss, right?
00:45:38
Speaker
Something like 90 plus percent.
00:45:40
Speaker
Yeah.
00:45:42
Speaker
But the one thing that is worth keeping is the royalties, right?
00:45:46
Speaker
And because that set you up for something, for, you know, potentially something happening in the future.
00:45:55
Speaker
what was that again keeping the uh royalties you know oh the royalties yeah yeah absolutely because that's baked into the smart contract uh especially on pezzles so yeah that was yeah the stuff around it needs to get built and that's the frustrating part i think yeah because i've been here i've been in this thing since 2013 and i'm just like waiting around i'm like okay someone's gonna do it like say the same thing every year
00:46:20
Speaker
And like, oh, yeah, we're going to do like copyright DRMs and like, you know, PR is going to get paid.
Future of NFT Royalties for Artists
00:46:26
Speaker
But like it's been eight years, man.
00:46:28
Speaker
Like, where is it?
00:46:29
Speaker
You know?
00:46:30
Speaker
Yeah.
00:46:31
Speaker
It's a big industry to be up against that likes doing things the way they're doing it.
00:46:35
Speaker
Right.
00:46:35
Speaker
Yeah.
00:46:36
Speaker
And they don't want transparency.
00:46:39
Speaker
That's the reality.
00:46:40
Speaker
You know, I talk to people who worked in there and, you know, when they're being honest, that's pretty much it.
00:46:47
Speaker
They don't.
00:46:47
Speaker
They like transparency.
00:46:49
Speaker
that people don't know what they're doing.
00:46:51
Speaker
Yeah.
00:46:52
Speaker
I mean, consumers and, and musicians alike.
00:46:55
Speaker
And it's the same, you know, it's the same in the art world too.
00:46:58
Speaker
It's trying, you know, transparency is, is definitely not what collectors, most collectors want.
00:47:03
Speaker
They don't want people to know what they spent on a thing, what they own.
00:47:07
Speaker
You know, most, I feel like most blue chip collectors are anonymous to everybody except the art dealer for, for a lot of the time.
00:47:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:47:18
Speaker
Yeah.
00:47:18
Speaker
And, and,
00:47:19
Speaker
similar, we're into the transparency idea because it's for the artists.
00:47:25
Speaker
I think for people getting into Web3, they should probably understand that.
00:47:34
Speaker
I know this best because I've started music companies before in the past.
00:47:40
Speaker
And pretty much every advice I got from more experienced people
00:47:47
Speaker
was that this is going to be brutal okay you know like you're in the worst possible industry ever yeah and you know even like you know crazy startup vc people they avoid music because they know how difficult it is to like get a return you know and a lot of it has to do like
00:48:08
Speaker
The internet right now is very visually driven, right?
Web2's Visual Bias and Audio Presence
00:48:10
Speaker
Yeah.
00:48:11
Speaker
There's definitely a bias.
00:48:13
Speaker
I don't know if you're old enough to remember MySpace, but... I do.
00:48:19
Speaker
Yeah, you know, they had audio.
00:48:20
Speaker
I remember MySpace.
00:48:21
Speaker
Yeah, they did.
00:48:23
Speaker
You could have your profile song.
00:48:24
Speaker
Yeah, your profile song, right?
00:48:26
Speaker
I remember how cool that was that you could have that.
00:48:28
Speaker
It was amazing.
00:48:29
Speaker
It was fun.
00:48:29
Speaker
It was a little annoying sometimes, but it was fun.
00:48:31
Speaker
Yeah.
00:48:33
Speaker
But after Facebook and so on, they just kind of erased all of that.
00:48:37
Speaker
Yeah.
00:48:38
Speaker
And I always say, like, the internet these days is very quiet.
00:48:41
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:48:43
Speaker
Because, you know, it feels very clinical.
00:48:47
Speaker
Yeah, I wonder if that has to do with also the fact that we're... I mean, I...
00:48:51
Speaker
I don't know if it's like chicken or the egg, but we're always like always on the internet now.
00:48:56
Speaker
And so to have audio can like disrupt whatever else is going on.
00:49:00
Speaker
I mean, there's a good reason why, you know, whereas before in the early 2000s, if you were on the internet, you were kind of probably in your room on your computer.
00:49:09
Speaker
And so music coming on wasn't like, uh, playing over the conversation next to you at the restaurant or in front of like somebody else is watching TV and you're on the phone or whatever, but yeah.
00:49:20
Speaker
But the whole idea of like giving people, like the whole idea behind a lot of the music tech products was giving people choice, right?
00:49:31
Speaker
So like, yeah, it started off as radio TV and they're like, aren't you tired of like other people telling you what to watch, you know, and what to hear?
00:49:40
Speaker
Here, now you have, yeah, the freedom of choice, right?
00:49:44
Speaker
And then,
00:49:46
Speaker
But then after a while, it's like you're kind of listening to music in your own bubble.
00:49:52
Speaker
It's not a shared experience anymore.
00:49:56
Speaker
But I feel like it's a very fundamental common need.
00:50:00
Speaker
People go to music festivals.
00:50:04
Speaker
They want to hear live music.
00:50:09
Speaker
So we know that demand for that exists in the real world.
00:50:14
Speaker
But we haven't really
00:50:16
Speaker
figured out how to digitize that yet you know that makes sense yeah because i've seen a few what was that called turntable oh i remember it was a really it's basically a app it's like a chat room with a dj okay yeah i don't know the specific one but yeah yeah yeah but so
00:50:40
Speaker
Yeah, it's like, you know, they're trying to reproduce the communal experience, right?
00:50:46
Speaker
Have you seen these YouTube channels of DJs?
00:50:49
Speaker
They do these hour-long videos of them playing at a club with people dancing, but they have a really nice video feed of it, and you can put it on your TV.
00:51:02
Speaker
Oh, yeah, I've seen a few of those.
00:51:05
Speaker
There's a few of those on Twitch, too.
00:51:08
Speaker
Oh, yeah, Twitch.
00:51:09
Speaker
I'm not into Twitch, so I don't know what's popular on there.
00:51:13
Speaker
I just remember seeing that on YouTube and thinking it was a novel thing.
00:51:16
Speaker
Yeah, actually, me and Carolyn, we went to a Metaverse concert event in CryptoVox.
00:51:28
Speaker
It was a while ago.
00:51:29
Speaker
Yeah.
00:51:30
Speaker
A similar thing, right?
00:51:33
Speaker
But I don't know, you know, like there's a need for it, but like the right now, the hasn't really been systematized yet, you know, especially with like Web3 things.
Metaverse Live Music Events
00:51:45
Speaker
Yeah.
00:51:46
Speaker
Like there's a lot that goes into an event, right?
00:51:49
Speaker
Like it's like.
00:51:50
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
00:51:51
Speaker
I mean, even virtual or IRL events.
00:51:53
Speaker
Yeah, you know, like say like a pure virtual thing, right?
00:51:58
Speaker
The metaverse, right?
00:51:59
Speaker
One, you got to get permission of the owner.
00:52:02
Speaker
Uh, you have to find the musicians to go play.
00:52:05
Speaker
We got to promo it.
00:52:08
Speaker
Um, yeah.
00:52:10
Speaker
And just like, you know, there's a lot of work getting people into one place, even digitally.
00:52:15
Speaker
Yeah.
00:52:16
Speaker
And, uh, a lot of the, uh, financial incentives aren't really there yet right now, you know?
00:52:21
Speaker
And, you know, ideally if you have a, put on a, put on a event on the metaverse, you know, like,
00:52:29
Speaker
all the songs played there will get tracked.
00:52:32
Speaker
That's what the performing rights organizations did in the real world.
00:52:36
Speaker
But they just couldn't keep up with the digital part, right?
00:52:41
Speaker
Because they couldn't... Basically, what happened was Hollywood had a few pretty good mechanisms in place, like performing rights organizations.
00:52:53
Speaker
That's...
00:52:56
Speaker
I feel like that's needed in the digital space, but we haven't figured out how to automate it yet to meet the demand, you know, of like the millions of things happening online, right?
00:53:07
Speaker
So.
00:53:09
Speaker
Have you performed at a live metaverse?
00:53:16
Speaker
Not yet.
00:53:17
Speaker
I was planning to, but then the gas fees.
00:53:22
Speaker
I'm a little bit in limbo right now.
00:53:24
Speaker
I like kind of... Wait, explain the gas fees for a live event.
00:53:28
Speaker
Where does that come in?
00:53:29
Speaker
When do you have to pay gas fees?
00:53:31
Speaker
Well, yeah, it's not my bar.
00:53:36
Speaker
I do own a plot in Decentraland.
00:53:40
Speaker
Yes, I visited recently.
00:53:41
Speaker
Yeah, it's...
00:53:45
Speaker
Right now, I'm letting a friend borrow it for an event that he put on.
00:53:53
Speaker
But the one way I could make money from it is by renting out the space.
00:54:00
Speaker
That's not quite there yet.
00:54:02
Speaker
But the gas fees make that like basically impossible.
00:54:05
Speaker
It's just like the money you get just gets overridden, you know?
00:54:09
Speaker
Right.
00:54:10
Speaker
But if you were going to host, let's say a concert where you're playing and people can come into Decentraland and watch and you're going to charge admission, is that that all happens on the blockchain and there's gas involved?
00:54:23
Speaker
It's possible, but it's not easy.
00:54:25
Speaker
Okay.
00:54:27
Speaker
Yeah.
00:54:28
Speaker
To be honest, like the,
00:54:30
Speaker
Again, it goes back to nobody thinks about the artists, but doing basic things in the metaverse right now is really hard.
00:54:40
Speaker
I remember, this is one example.
00:54:43
Speaker
I had a video of our TSR thing that I wanted to promote there.
00:54:48
Speaker
There's an object you can put in and then put in the link of the video.
00:54:53
Speaker
And then when I put it in, the image is upside down.
00:54:57
Speaker
And it's just like, wow, nobody bothered to even, you know, oh my God.
00:55:07
Speaker
So right now, if you look at Decentraland, it's probably still the case.
00:55:11
Speaker
The only traffic they have there right now are speculators.
00:55:17
Speaker
Big companies included in that too.
00:55:21
Speaker
People playing play to earn games.
00:55:24
Speaker
And then casinos.
00:55:26
Speaker
Okay.
00:55:26
Speaker
So it's a pretty seedy neighborhood.
00:55:32
Speaker
But if you did want to put on a concert for free, people could come watch for free, right?
00:55:36
Speaker
There wouldn't be gas stations.
00:55:36
Speaker
Yeah, if you want to do it for free, that's fine.
00:55:39
Speaker
Okay, okay.
00:55:40
Speaker
But if you want to make money, well...
00:55:42
Speaker
It's a different story.
00:55:43
Speaker
Yeah.
00:55:45
Speaker
What about Tesland?
00:55:47
Speaker
Is that how people are saying it?
00:55:48
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
00:55:50
Speaker
No, it's a very early project, but things are coming along.
00:55:55
Speaker
I know the TAF folks are involved with that, too.
00:55:57
Speaker
Yeah, so you could do a similar thing there and there would be much less gas fees in terms of US dollars.
00:56:05
Speaker
But I think the biggest roadblock right now is just usability.
00:56:08
Speaker
It's really not that easy to use blockchain apps.
00:56:12
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely.
00:56:14
Speaker
If you expect people for this to become mainstream, you have to make it easier.
00:56:22
Speaker
I still have a hard time, even in Decentraland.
00:56:25
Speaker
For one, my computer can't handle it.
00:56:27
Speaker
Yeah, that too.
00:56:29
Speaker
So getting in.
00:56:30
Speaker
And then voxels, I have an easier time getting in and moving around, but it's still a little clunky to me, which I'm sure you get used to.
00:56:39
Speaker
But I think if you're inviting...
00:56:43
Speaker
anybody who's not kind of native to that world, they're going to be like, I don't understand what I'm doing here.
00:56:48
Speaker
Yeah, he doesn't want to give up.
00:56:51
Speaker
Yeah, one of my friends was telling me, I was talking to him a while ago about
00:56:57
Speaker
You know, he's not a crypto person, but he worked in tech.
00:57:01
Speaker
Smart, smart person.
00:57:02
Speaker
Right.
00:57:03
Speaker
And he's just like, yeah, like, OK, like, what am I supposed to do?
00:57:07
Speaker
I was like, I get money and then change it at an exchange and then put the money in the wallet and then log in with the wallet.
00:57:14
Speaker
And don't lose your, you know, when you just start talking about what you have to do to get there, it's it's like.
00:57:21
Speaker
Kind of ridiculous, right?
00:57:23
Speaker
It's extremely ridiculous.
00:57:24
Speaker
I just did the same thing to help somebody purchase one of the NFTs from our current exhibition.
00:57:28
Speaker
And it was, you know, it was all of what you just said.
00:57:31
Speaker
And they did it and it was awesome.
00:57:33
Speaker
And that's like, you need to have a willing participant who's like, yes, I'm interested in this very new thing because it is still really new that they're willing to kind of like jump through all those hoops.
00:57:43
Speaker
in order to do it, but it's, you know, like even that is work, right?
00:57:47
Speaker
I know.
00:57:47
Speaker
I mean, people are, I mean, people are working on it, you know, they know this is a problem.
00:57:52
Speaker
So, but it's going to take a while.
00:57:55
Speaker
But I think like the more, the most interesting thing about Web3 is like, I've always been like kind of a advocate for like the best, you'll get the best results when you combine things
00:58:12
Speaker
tech knowledge with the humanity, you know, and not that one is better than the other.
Intersection of Tech and Art in Web3
00:58:19
Speaker
They need each other, you know, to like kind of flourish, I feel.
00:58:25
Speaker
And I think that's NFTs are where it's going to happen, you know, because it's like, yeah, I feel like Ethereum tends to be too like tech and STEM oriented, you know?
00:58:38
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:58:40
Speaker
And it's also like shows like Silicon Valley historically has not been very good at doing like political or cultural things, you know?
00:58:51
Speaker
Yeah.
00:58:52
Speaker
A lot of them have kind of a libertarian attitude where it's just like, yeah, we don't want to, we're not going to touch it, you know?
00:58:58
Speaker
Right.
00:58:58
Speaker
Right.
00:58:59
Speaker
But in the long run, you see them, they get, they get screwed over by the system, you know, like when I was living in the Bay area, um,
00:59:09
Speaker
the housing crisis up there, the tech industry took the brunt of the political backlash.
00:59:19
Speaker
Basically, the politicians didn't want to get blamed for their policies.
00:59:23
Speaker
They pointed fingers at the tech industry, who they personally invited there, by the way.
00:59:30
Speaker
They're like, they're driving up the prices.
00:59:32
Speaker
Right.
00:59:36
Speaker
But when you're an average person, if you don't push back against that, that becomes the story.
00:59:46
Speaker
And so it gets into this weird loop where they don't want to hear about it.
00:59:52
Speaker
They're getting blamed for problems that they didn't necessarily cause.
00:59:56
Speaker
But yeah, so I don't know.
01:00:01
Speaker
I'm hoping that would change because...
01:00:05
Speaker
you know, NFTs are at the intersection of like the humanities and like tech, you know, in a very tangible way.
01:00:12
Speaker
It didn't happen before, you know?
01:00:14
Speaker
Yeah.
01:00:15
Speaker
Yeah.
01:00:16
Speaker
No, I like that optimistic outlook.
01:00:18
Speaker
Cause I don't, I don't always have it.
01:00:21
Speaker
No, me too.
01:00:22
Speaker
It depends on the day.
01:00:23
Speaker
Right.
01:00:24
Speaker
Yeah.
01:00:25
Speaker
Yeah.
01:00:28
Speaker
I had one other.
01:00:29
Speaker
Oh, sorry.
01:00:30
Speaker
Go ahead.
01:00:31
Speaker
I don't know.
01:00:31
Speaker
I was just like,
01:00:33
Speaker
Yeah, when you do political things, it kind of darkens your look on humanity sometimes, you know?
01:00:40
Speaker
Yeah, that's a hard agree on that one, for sure.
01:00:44
Speaker
Yeah.
01:00:45
Speaker
I know you've done political work too before.
01:00:47
Speaker
I've seen your website.
01:00:49
Speaker
Oh, cool.
01:00:50
Speaker
Thanks for checking it out.
01:00:51
Speaker
Yeah, I know you did some things with the CIA and things.
01:00:56
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
01:00:57
Speaker
That video has got a lot of political over or undertones, but mostly that piece, I mean, it is a political piece, but it's also hopefully...
01:01:09
Speaker
humorous and more than that.
01:01:10
Speaker
But I was going to ask you about your recent foray into the typed platform, which like when I saw it, because it's like
Text-Based NFTs with Typed
01:01:21
Speaker
what?
01:01:21
Speaker
It's been around for like a month maybe or something.
01:01:22
Speaker
Yeah, Carolyn told me to get...
01:01:25
Speaker
She was all excited about it.
01:01:28
Speaker
I just thought it was such a fun, novel, interesting way to do NFTs.
01:01:35
Speaker
And of course, somebody did it on Tezos because that's the people that are over there who are doing those things that offers this...
01:01:44
Speaker
like almost blogging type platform if you want, or this like visual art platform that's like really kind of... ASCII art and... Yeah, which like has a history that I'm not familiar with, but I know that ASCII art has been around since the internet's been around, right?
01:01:58
Speaker
So to like bring it back into this Web3 thing I thought was really cool, but how have you been using it so far?
01:02:07
Speaker
Well, I've been, you know, I do also write a lot, so...
01:02:12
Speaker
Um, yeah, I've been publishing, you know, just like blog posts and articles since the very beginning.
01:02:19
Speaker
Like, yeah.
01:02:20
Speaker
Um,
01:02:22
Speaker
But the same thing, right?
01:02:24
Speaker
Like I remember getting checks from, you know, medium, medium.com.
01:02:29
Speaker
Oh yeah.
01:02:29
Speaker
I didn't even realize medium cut checks for people.
01:02:32
Speaker
We did it.
01:02:33
Speaker
Started doing recently, but the last checks I got was like eight cents, 24 cents, you know?
01:02:42
Speaker
And then I made one sale on type.
01:02:45
Speaker
For like one test, I'm like, wow, this is like the most money I've ever made.
01:02:51
Speaker
It's amazing, right?
01:02:52
Speaker
Yeah, but it's like interesting because it's like, okay, like everyone's like fawning over like low res images right now, right?
01:03:00
Speaker
For NFTs.
01:03:02
Speaker
But like, why not make it even more simple?
01:03:05
Speaker
Just text.
01:03:06
Speaker
Yeah.
01:03:07
Speaker
This is like the simplest thing.
01:03:09
Speaker
Anybody can do it, you know, almost.
01:03:11
Speaker
Yeah.
01:03:12
Speaker
Yeah, I love it.
01:03:13
Speaker
We do all of our press releases and essays when we have an exhibition.
01:03:18
Speaker
We meant the press release as like a PDF, which I thought was kind of as low res as we could get.
01:03:24
Speaker
But now I'm excited to also use types for our next one so we can.
01:03:28
Speaker
Yeah, so I've been kind of doing that.
01:03:30
Speaker
Like I do rant a lot on the Internet.
01:03:32
Speaker
And so I'm not getting paid for it.
01:03:35
Speaker
So I might as well.
01:03:38
Speaker
You know, someone is very long, you know, and like, yeah, I spend a lot of time on it, especially if it's like a issue I care about.
01:03:45
Speaker
But yeah, I've been minting things on there and just seeing what happens.
01:03:49
Speaker
I've seen that, I saw that a few places have like adapted that site into like creating a blogging platform.
01:03:56
Speaker
Okay.
01:03:57
Speaker
So I don't think it's released yet.
01:03:59
Speaker
I think that maybe doing it just for themselves, maybe kind of like what you're doing where things that you would have published anyway, you might as well just mint it.
01:04:07
Speaker
Right.
01:04:08
Speaker
Yeah.
01:04:09
Speaker
Yeah.
01:04:10
Speaker
Yeah.
01:04:10
Speaker
I'm just experimenting right now.
01:04:12
Speaker
Like I have no idea where it's going to go, but it feels a lot better to do that than just like posting it on Facebook and giving it to Mark, you know?
01:04:21
Speaker
Sure.
01:04:22
Speaker
Yeah.
01:04:24
Speaker
I agree.
01:04:26
Speaker
um very cool well we're we're about hitting the hour um did you did you have any other last uh pitches you wanted to make or any last thoughts that you had about art and crypto and music and where we've been and where we're going um i think uh you know maybe i had to say one thing i guess we're going into a recession right now and things are going to get weird i think yeah um
01:04:56
Speaker
But I think if you can like, you know, now's the time to like really like try new things, you know, stay true to yourself.
Optimism for Future Opportunities
01:05:06
Speaker
Right.
01:05:07
Speaker
And I do think like there'll be opportunities that come up that you would have never imagined before, you know, because we're entering a new era.
01:05:14
Speaker
Right.
01:05:16
Speaker
And so, yeah, I just want to kind of leave on the optimistic note, you know, and to like try to look for the bright spots, you know, out there.
01:05:23
Speaker
There's going to be a lot of like,
01:05:25
Speaker
fud and people like telling you like the world's coming to an end you know but um you know not necessarily right at all yeah i i like your wits about sentiment i like that sentiment as a closer well thank you thank you so much for coming on appreciate your time thank you for having me here that was a lot of fun yeah absolutely all right we'll we'll talk to you soon yeah yeah talk to you soon thank you
01:05:53
Speaker
Arranging Tangerines is recorded, edited, and produced by Lydian Stater, an evolving curatorial platform based in New York City with a focus on the intersection of contemporary and crypto art.
01:06:03
Speaker
You can learn more at lydianstater.co, find images at Lydian Stater NYC on Instagram, and follow us at Lydian Stater on Twitter.
01:06:11
Speaker
Thanks to Ryan Tanaka for taking the time to speak to us this week.
01:06:14
Speaker
If you'd like to learn more about his work and his interests, visit his website at ryantanaka.org.
01:06:18
Speaker
Big thanks to Tal Wan, who graciously provides our intro music.
01:06:22
Speaker
His albums are available at talwan.bandcamp.com.
01:06:26
Speaker
And thank you to you, listener, for spending your valuable time with us.
01:08:17
Speaker
you