Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to Arranging Tangerines, presented by Lady and Stater.
Speaker: Conversations with contemporary artists, curators, and thinkers about the intersection of art, technology, and commerce.
Speaker: Your hosts are me, Alessandro Silver, and Joseph Wilcox.
Speaker: I know what to do.
Speaker: I know what to say.
Speaker: I just know I don't want to be like you.
Speaker: I know what to do.
Speaker: I don't know what to say.
Speaker: I just know I don't want to be like you.
Speaker: This week's guest is Ryan Tanaka.
Speaker: Hello.
Speaker: Hey, what's up, Ryan?
Speaker: Hey.
Speaker: How's it going?
Speaker: Good.
Speaker: Yeah, I tried something out.
Speaker: I'm in my studio right now.
Speaker: Can you hear me?
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Yeah, we can hear you just fine.
Speaker: Okay, cool.
Speaker: Yeah, I love that headphone microphone combo setup.
Speaker: We're still figuring out the best...
Speaker: the best gear to use for the podcast.
Speaker: And sometimes it's nice to see what other people use.
Speaker: Yeah, it's tricky.
Speaker: Like we had these kind of like crazy ideas about like, you know, Twitter Spaces was pretty big, right?
Speaker: For a little while.
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.
Speaker: Oh yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I never got around to it, but the equipment's still here.
Speaker: So yeah.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: Nice to see you again.
Speaker: It was a lot of fun in New York.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, we had a blast.
Speaker: It was really, it was nice to meet you there and connect and all of that.
Speaker: Yeah, I was like kind of busy running around everywhere.
Speaker: But, you know, the few moments we had was, yeah, I don't know.
Speaker: It's been a long time since I went to like an art event too, you know, because of COVID and COVID.
Speaker: So, yeah, you seem like you seem like a fairly busy guy.
Speaker: Not really.
Speaker: But I am I do a lot of things, you know, and so maybe it seems that way.
Speaker: I'm like kind of all over the place, you know, a lot of different things.
Speaker: So sure.
Speaker: Well, well, we appreciate you taking the time to come on the podcast.
Speaker: No, I appreciate it.
Speaker: I just kind of excited to be here.
Speaker: Not sure what to expect or what to say, but... It'll be great.
Speaker: We typically just kind of let the conversation move organically.
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.
Speaker: But mostly we just want to like...
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.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And so I think maybe a good opening question would be to just like maybe hear a little background on you.
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.
Speaker: Like you look at my janky IPFS one.
Speaker: There's no styling.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's like all text, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I love it.
Speaker: Do you have like, do you have like a more designed one?
Speaker: That's like, I used to, but I went like all in on the web three thing and,
Speaker: So kind of never looked back, you know?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And yeah, so I can start with like a background.
Speaker: So I come from, I've done a lot of things over the years, but I mainly identify as a musician.
Speaker: And I have a composition degree, a bachelor's from University of Illinois.
Speaker: And then I went to CalArts for my master's.
Speaker: And you know my training is in classical music, you know music composition, but I do do improv I love doing that.
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.
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.
Speaker: So I dropped out early and then I was kind of like, oh, what do I do now?
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.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: But it's brutal, man.
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,
Speaker: the issues with institutional, the way institutional art is done, you know, these things.
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.
Speaker: And I would probably argue that they become a little out of touch, you know, with the,
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
Speaker: not being part of all that riffraff, you know?
Speaker: And yeah, well, anyway, you know, that's a good reason why it didn't work out.
Speaker: But yeah, you're like, if you saw my bio, you know, I've been involved with crypto since like 2013, you know?
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.
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
Speaker: like ASCAP, BMI, I don't know if you know those institutions, but they're a performing rights organization.
Speaker: Yeah, nobody even knows about it anymore.
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.
Speaker: They go out and they're supposed to collect royalties on behalf of artists.
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.
Speaker: And you want to use music and you want to license that from an artist, that's really hard, right.
Speaker: It's very time consuming.
Speaker: You need lawyers.
Speaker: But what these are going to stay up on it too, right.
Speaker: You have to like renew.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's a nightmare.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But they came up with this.
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.
Speaker: And so in theory, this was supposed to like work to the advantage of everyone, right?
Speaker: Artists get paid, they're happy, business is easier.
Speaker: And I've always been like advocating for that model to like emerge in on the internet or the Web3 in particular.
Speaker: But yeah, so it hasn't happened yet, you know?
Speaker: Yeah.
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.
Speaker: And then we moved to streaming.
Speaker: And I feel like when streaming happened, people were like having a hard time giving up this idea of owning their,
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
Speaker: Okay, well, I'll finish up my bio real quick.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, sorry.
Speaker: No, no, no.
Speaker: It's a very interesting topic.
Speaker: Back then, you could not buy a Bitcoin at an exchange.
Speaker: The only way was to mine it yourself by buying a rig or...
Speaker: find some guy on the internet.
Speaker: Who had minded himself, right?
Speaker: Or herself.
Speaker: Usually, yeah.
Speaker: And that's where the story of the pizza thing came from, right?
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: They wanted Bitcoin, so here's some pizza.
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.
Speaker: But I mined enough Bitcoin to get into the Ethereum ICO back then.
Speaker: And back then, Ethereum was like $0.32 or $0.24 or something like that.
Speaker: And so I got really lucky.
Speaker: I was able to...
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?
Speaker: Just to exist there.
Speaker: Sure.
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.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: it really was just like everything, right?
Speaker: Like a lot of my friends just got priced out.
Speaker: Um, they couldn't afford to be here.
Speaker: I just never saw them again.
Speaker: And a lot of the venues I used to frequent, uh, just got shut down cause they couldn't afford rent, you know?
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?
Speaker: It's just like, everything feels like it's against you, you know?
Speaker: And, uh,
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.
Speaker: Oh, maybe there's a better way, you know?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And so I've been doing that for a while and I've been involved with like political things and like, um,
Speaker: I supported Andrew Yang with the UBI initiative, which also kind of made its way into Ethereum.
Speaker: Vitalik talked about it a few times, too.
Speaker: So there are a few UBI coins up there.
Speaker: It's pretty hard to pull off practically.
Speaker: So since then, I've been a very...
Speaker: involved with Ethereum, you know, that was kind of like my main thing.
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.
Speaker: But I feel like in the last few years, it's changed, you know, and
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.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: And then I know, like, Bitcoin, you know, they haven't really done much, like, development, you know.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I don't know enough about...
Speaker: Yeah, I don't know enough about Bitcoin to know how easy it is to build on top of it.
Speaker: Because I've talked to some people who are like, oh, we're doing a level two for Bitcoin.
Speaker: And I kind of understand what a layer two is with Polygon and Ethereum.
Speaker: But I thought that wasn't possible on Bitcoin.
Speaker: But people talk about doing smart contracts.
Speaker: It's not possible.
Speaker: I mean...
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.
Speaker: And that's
Speaker: That's how they get around the gas fees and things like that.
Speaker: Yeah, that's one honest way.
Speaker: If you're doing it honestly, that's kind of how you would do it.
Speaker: But there's always been this weird incongruity between, especially the Bitcoin folds, that is all into decentralization.
Speaker: They're very idealistic.
Speaker: But they just don't want to think about that part, you know.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Yeah.
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?
Speaker: Like, like Tezos does on-chain governance and, you know.
Speaker: So, yeah, this is a very recent thing, and it was actually, I was prompted by my current co-founder for TASurf, Carolyn.
Speaker: She's busy with Taya.
Speaker: She often does the PR messaging things there.
Speaker: But, yeah, we started talking about a year ago, and she's like,
Speaker: oh my God, Ryan, you got to check out this Hicketnuck thing.
Speaker: And I'm like, what's Hicketnuck?
Speaker: What is that?
Speaker: And he's like, oh yeah, there's like this crazy Brazilian guy.
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.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: And then the more I learn about it, I'm just...
Speaker: I'm like, wow, there's some cool stuff happening in Tezos.
Speaker: And because I'm a musician, really, we kind of fell in love with Hen Radio.
Speaker: So I'm not super familiar with Hen Radio.
Speaker: I know it through you, and that's about it.
Speaker: Yeah, it's struggling.
Speaker: It's struggling pretty hard.
Speaker: I saw a tweet a couple months ago where they're like, we can't afford our domain name.
Speaker: So we're going to have to switch over all the hell, you know, and I did a little bit of research.
Speaker: I mentioned this at New York as well.
Speaker: But, you know, right now on Taya, there's about 750,000 plus objects.
Speaker: Out of those, I think there's only like maybe two or three thousand audio objects.
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
Speaker: It's just like, yeah, Web2 is not very friendly to music, you know?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's sort of washed out.
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?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And it came from a hackathon.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So, yeah, it's not a company.
Speaker: And, you know, it's understandable that it's not being updated all the time.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: There's some issues with the playback.
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.
Speaker: And then we just started clicking on the random button on Teya.
Speaker: You know?
Speaker: And then they were like, oh, yeah, this is kind of fun.
Speaker: Yeah, why don't we keep on doing that?
Speaker: So I wrote a little script that just refreshes it over and over on the random.
Speaker: And then that's basically our script.
Speaker: That's the whole thing.
Speaker: And sometimes the objects don't load properly because of IPFS, right?
Speaker: But it's just like we felt like the quality of art, and especially when you look at the site, it's just
Speaker: You know, there's varying skill levels, but you can tell people are inspired and they're like having fun, you know?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, that's, I think that my, my entry into, um,
Speaker: crypto and NFTs, uh, sounds similar to yours post, uh, I don't know.
Speaker: Yeah, I know.
Speaker: I know you've done, you're a filmmaker or.
Speaker: So I do, I do some, I do some video art and I, I do some kind of, um, photographic based work.
Speaker: Uh, and, um,
Speaker: But I so I when I learned about NFTs, I learned about Ethereum first.
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.
Speaker: And then same thing, a friend sent me and he's like, hey, here's a weird one.
Speaker: And he sent me the Hickett Nunk.
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
Speaker: artists on here if this might not exist next month, right?
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.
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.
Speaker: Yeah, keep artists nicer, you know?
Speaker: It's a lot nicer.
Speaker: There's a lot less like noise.
Speaker: Yeah.
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.
Speaker: We were like, we know so many artists whose work we like love.
Speaker: Let's see if we can kind of like push it into the space.
Speaker: And so that was, you know, I'm glad you did that.
Speaker: Yeah.
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
Speaker: executive director.
Speaker: A lot of people don't even know that.
Speaker: But there's a weird thing when you go online where people think Vitalik is the CEO of Ethereum or something.
Speaker: It just takes five minutes to look up and know that's not true.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But there is this kind of understanding of how systems and companies work.
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
Speaker: So, but, you know, like Ethereum used to be better.
Speaker: You know, a lot of the artists were there and there are some cool things happening on Ethereum as well.
Speaker: Like Async, you know, Moniverse is looking kind of interesting too.
Speaker: You know, there are good stuff happening on there, but it's just the gas fees, right?
Speaker: Just squeeze everyone out.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And if you're an artist, you can't afford
Speaker: you know, $100 transaction fee, right?
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.
Speaker: Yeah, I remember it was as high as $600.
Speaker: Yeah.
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
Speaker: But yeah, that's kind of the nature of decentralization, right?
Speaker: Is you can lose control of the culture really quickly if everybody pours into it.
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.
Speaker: Yeah, I think that's what happened with Ethereum.
Speaker: So like, you know, I noticed that a lot of them...
Speaker: especially the leadership, you know, they take pride in the idea of being neutral.
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.
Speaker: Like, it's like they defended their decision not to do anything because, you know, they're
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 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
Speaker: Not bothered, but really crystallized.
Speaker: Some of the problems in Ethereum was during ETH Denver last year.
Speaker: I don't know if you paid attention to that, but they showcased the musician there.
Speaker: his name was Jonathan.
Speaker: And like, it's just weird because I went to grad school with him at the same time.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: But his thing was like, so his thing was a song a day, you know?
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.
Speaker: And, you know, he has his guitar or whatever instruments he has around him.
Speaker: And he makes these little cute songs, you know, like very, very quickly on mass, you know?
Speaker: And in a way, you know, it's pretty, like, impressive, you know, that he kept it up for that long.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: For 13 years.
Speaker: Yeah, and he's a nice guy.
Speaker: I know him, you know, and I'm nothing against him.
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.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: you know, but when you like think about it, it's like, so is that the future of musicians?
Speaker: You know, like you're going to have to grind away every fucking day, make a song a day.
Speaker: And if you can't do it too bad, you know?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Cause this is the model that we're using now that I know.
Speaker: I'm just like, Oh God, I don't want to, you know, like, yeah.
Speaker: You know, people have different ways of creating, right?
Speaker: Some people can turn them out like he can.
Speaker: I mean, there's nothing wrong with that, but.
Speaker: You know, some people like to spend time on writing one song over several months, you know, and just did it.
Speaker: I don't know.
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,
Speaker: I feel like, yeah, the artistic quality is unmatched, even now.
Speaker: Yeah.
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
Speaker: a part of their world that they should care about.
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.
Speaker: And I was like, Oh, this is, I was like, this is awesome.
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,
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.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Oh, you mean at the Taya party?
Speaker: Yeah, the TF party, yeah.
Speaker: I don't know if it was like one to one, but it was much better than everywhere else.
Speaker: Yeah, every crypto event I've been to.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Yeah, and we work with a lot of female identifying artists.
Speaker: And so that was a big part of the reason of using Hicketnunk too.
Speaker: Yeah, I'm not really into woke politics or anything, but...
Speaker: It's more about like having a spectrum of representation, right?
Speaker: And like without that, you know, it does get a little stale, you know?
Speaker: Sure, sure.
Speaker: And, you know, you need that diversity if you want to keep things interesting.
Speaker: And so, yeah, the issue kind of with Ethereum is that, you know, as the gas fees went up, it's like,
Speaker: you know, all the people who couldn't afford to be there got priced out, just like in the real world, you know?
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,
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
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
Speaker: either just let it scroll or flip the channel.
Speaker: I mean, if there was channels, that would be a whole other thing.
Speaker: But just to have a visual representation radio and then to attach it to music, I think, is a really fun idea.
Speaker: Yeah, it just kind of happened by accident almost.
Speaker: But then we just started.
Speaker: We did it for ourselves.
Speaker: It was just fun.
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?
Speaker: And, you know, like all the all the
Speaker: content is getting shorter and shorter, right?
Speaker: For like shorter attention spans.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We wanted to try something, do something different from that for one.
Speaker: And so, you know, this is something like we started this company literally like a week before I went to New York.
Speaker: So it's this brand new, like we're working on things now, but, you know, but, but we're trying to,
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.
Speaker: More TV, right?
Speaker: And there's a lot of upsides for having the interactivity of online and mobile stuff, right?
Speaker: But I think there's a side...
Speaker: that people are tired of it, you know, and they just want something like chill and the background just runs on its own.
Speaker: And yeah, so that's kind of where the aesthetic part comes out.
Speaker: Longer term, our business plan really is,
Speaker: We want to focus, like a lot of NFT platforms focus on minting, right?
Speaker: As their business model.
Speaker: We're probably going to avoid that.
Speaker: And what we're going to focus on is curation.
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.
Speaker: And I do think like there's a potential there where
Speaker: we can get curators paid, you know, and that's the big difference from what other people are doing.
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.
Speaker: As far as I know, there's not really anywhere doing that right now.
Speaker: No, I mean, you know, like you can get kind of like social clout for having followers on Spotify for your playlists, right?
Speaker: But you're not getting paid.
Speaker: I mean, maybe Spotify does have some people on payroll for that, but not regular folks who are putting together.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So you want to kind of like create a scalable model where, you know, anyone with tastes, right?
Speaker: And share.
Speaker: And if they make a sale, then they get paid and ours get paid.
Speaker: And yeah.
Speaker: In theory, everyone's happy.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Speaker: But yeah, I think there's a need to separate.
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.
Speaker: And if you're a customer, they encourage you to become artists.
Speaker: And
Speaker: basically not pay you, right?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: They want everyone to be a content creator.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: More, more product.
Speaker: But I think in reality, not everyone wants to be an artist, you know?
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,
Speaker: they don't want to have to have a side job in order to listen to music, right?
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: So we have a weird, we live in a weird time where we treat everyone like celebrities, you know?
Speaker: I don't think that's a good thing.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah, you know how screwed up a lot of celebs are.
Speaker: So I feel like, you know, Web3 has the potential to kind of like...
Speaker: Establish stronger identities for like what artists are, what a curator is, you know?
Speaker: And I feel like for the average person, like being a curator is more comfortable than, you know, creating content themselves.
Speaker: And so, yeah, so I don't know.
Speaker: That's our hypothesis.
Speaker: I think I think it's super interesting.
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.
Speaker: And so I think people are starting these platforms.
Speaker: you know, these new companies that are doing things a little bit differently.
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.
Speaker: So like people can curate a collection of NFTs in, in a virtual reality gallery.
Speaker: And then if somebody buys that from that specific gallery, then the curator gets paid and the artist gets paid.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It doesn't surprise me.
Speaker: I mean, I feel like that's where things are going to hit.
Speaker: So yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, it's tricky because curation is not easy.
Speaker: It's like, well, good curation.
Speaker: Well, the whole good idea itself is controversial, right?
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, sure.
Speaker: It's like, oh, who are you to decide what's good and what's bad and aren't right?
Speaker: And like, yeah, but.
Speaker: Yeah, but yes.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
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.
Speaker: You know, just some generic...
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.
Speaker: And then it's like, well, now what, you know, then they have to deal with the curation problem.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Eventually, no matter what.
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,
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
Speaker: So it's very tricky where, you know, we have our biases too.
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.
Speaker: to be able to share their tastes and try not to get in the way of that, you know?
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Because if you have, because, you know, if you have a curator and it's, you know, if you convince kind of like,
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.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And if you can kind of offer that, um,
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.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: And if they're getting paid for it, you know, that's what was missing this whole time.
Speaker: Like the incentive, right, to keep on going.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: Because it does, you know, I've made playlists before and curated things before, but it does get a little old.
Speaker: It's work, right?
Speaker: It's work.
Speaker: It's work and you're not getting nothing for it.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: What's the point?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So.
Speaker: Are you familiar with with the the idea of slow television?
Speaker: This like this genre of TV?
Speaker: Oh, no.
Speaker: I want to hear.
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.
Speaker: I think it was really big in Norway and kind of the early and late 2000s.
Speaker: But they would show like they're like these really long programs.
Speaker: And I think the most popular one that like hit the mainstream news in the
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.
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.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: It's almost like ASMR.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, totally.
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?
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.
Speaker: I don't know if you saw that.
Speaker: I didn't, no.
Speaker: I had a friend...
Speaker: Yeah, long story, but yeah, I made some money with Dogecoin and then we used that fund to do an ASMR project.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: It's weird.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But yeah, I don't know.
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.
Speaker: I wanted to get into that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So yeah, so it's like a classically trained, but I have a sort of a soft spot for like ambient music.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So a lot of times I call my music like classical ambient, you know?
Speaker: I don't really write lyrics.
Speaker: I'm really into...
Speaker: electronic and instrumental.
Speaker: Actually, I have my keyboard right here.
Speaker: Yeah, that's coming through.
Speaker: So, yeah.
Speaker: Did you want to play something?
Speaker: Oh, yeah, sure.
Speaker: I could.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: Maybe this is short.
Speaker: Yeah, I'm really into it.
Speaker: How's the volume?
Speaker: Is it low?
Speaker: I mean, on my end, it sounds similar, or maybe a little quieter than your voice.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: you
Speaker: That's a little snippet, but you know, thank you.
Speaker: That's awesome.
Speaker: Is that kind of improv or is that a track that you've worked on?
Speaker: No, this is improv.
Speaker: I should have mentioned, I only do improv.
Speaker: Oh, okay.
Speaker: I used to write a lot of composed music.
Speaker: In particular, I wrote a lot of string quartets and have a few recordings of that, but
Speaker: Yeah, it's like classical music world is not in great shape either, you know?
Speaker: Uh-huh, yeah.
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...
Speaker: When you're in that world, you find out a lot of people do not improvise.
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.
Speaker: They jam out, they have jam sessions, they make things up.
Speaker: Over there, they have a very top-down structure where it's like composer, performer,
Speaker: And you just do what you're told, you know?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And so, yeah.
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.
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,
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?
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Yeah.
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,
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
Speaker: So then so forth.
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.
Speaker: And that shows up even in our company, right?
Speaker: Like we kind of imagine people using Taya Surf as backdrop.
Speaker: So it's like, you know, if you're a small business and you just want something to
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.
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,
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
Speaker: seem that great, you know?
Speaker: No, definitely not.
Speaker: I mean, we're, we, we present a lot of artists work that, that I would call a slow burn.
Speaker: You know, we have, I mean, one of the, in our first show, we had a video piece of,
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.
Speaker: So we really had to like, yeah, we really had to, yeah, it's up to a hundred.
Speaker: We had to mess with the file to make sure the video fit and still looked okay.
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.
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
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.
Speaker: Like, you know, the data says majority of NFT sales are actually at a loss, right?
Speaker: Something like 90 plus percent.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But the one thing that is worth keeping is the royalties, right?
Speaker: And because that set you up for something, for, you know, potentially something happening in the future.
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
Speaker: And like, oh, yeah, we're going to do like copyright DRMs and like, you know, PR is going to get paid.
Speaker: But like it's been eight years, man.
Speaker: Like, where is it?
Speaker: You know?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's a big industry to be up against that likes doing things the way they're doing it.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And they don't want transparency.
Speaker: That's the reality.
Speaker: You know, I talk to people who worked in there and, you know, when they're being honest, that's pretty much it.
Speaker: They don't.
Speaker: They like transparency.
Speaker: that people don't know what they're doing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, consumers and, and musicians alike.
Speaker: And it's the same, you know, it's the same in the art world too.
Speaker: It's trying, you know, transparency is, is definitely not what collectors, most collectors want.
Speaker: They don't want people to know what they spent on a thing, what they own.
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.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And, and,
Speaker: similar, we're into the transparency idea because it's for the artists.
Speaker: I think for people getting into Web3, they should probably understand that.
Speaker: I know this best because I've started music companies before in the past.
Speaker: And pretty much every advice I got from more experienced people
Speaker: was that th is 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
Speaker: The internet right now is very visually driven, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: There's definitely a bias.
Speaker: I don't know if you're old enough to remember MySpace, but... I do.
Speaker: Yeah, you know, they had audio.
Speaker: I remember MySpace.
Speaker: Yeah, they did.
Speaker: You could have your profile song.
Speaker: Yeah, your profile song, right?
Speaker: I remember how cool that was that you could have that.
Speaker: It was amazing.
Speaker: It was fun.
Speaker: It was a little annoying sometimes, but it was fun.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But after Facebook and so on, they just kind of erased all of that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I always say, like, the internet these days is very quiet.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: Because, you know, it feels very clinical.
Speaker: Yeah, I wonder if that has to do with also the fact that we're... I mean, I...
Speaker: I don't know if it's like chicken or the egg, but we're always like always on the internet now.
Speaker: And so to have audio can like disrupt whatever else is going on.
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.
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.
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?
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?
Speaker: Here, now you have, yeah, the freedom of choice, right?
Speaker: And then,
Speaker: But then after a while, it's like you're kind of listening to music in your own bubble.
Speaker: It's not a shared experience anymore.
Speaker: But I feel like it's a very fundamental common need.
Speaker: People go to music festivals.
Speaker: They want to hear live music.
Speaker: So we know that demand for that exists in the real world.
Speaker: But we haven't really
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
Speaker: Yeah, it's like, you know, they're trying to reproduce the communal experience, right?
Speaker: Have you seen these YouTube channels of DJs?
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.
Speaker: Oh, yeah, I've seen a few of those.
Speaker: There's a few of those on Twitch, too.
Speaker: Oh, yeah, Twitch.
Speaker: I'm not into Twitch, so I don't know what's popular on there.
Speaker: I just remember seeing that on YouTube and thinking it was a novel thing.
Speaker: Yeah, actually, me and Carolyn, we went to a Metaverse concert event in CryptoVox.
Speaker: It was a while ago.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: A similar thing, right?
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.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like there's a lot that goes into an event, right?
Speaker: Like it's like.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: I mean, even virtual or IRL events.
Speaker: Yeah, you know, like say like a pure virtual thing, right?
Speaker: The metaverse, right?
Speaker: One, you got to get permission of the owner.
Speaker: Uh, you have to find the musicians to go play.
Speaker: We got to promo it.
Speaker: Um, yeah.
Speaker: And just like, you know, there's a lot of work getting people into one place, even digitally.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And, uh, a lot of the, uh, financial incentives aren't really there yet right now, you know?
Speaker: And, you know, ideally if you have a, put on a, put on a event on the metaverse, you know, like,
Speaker: all the songs played there will get tracked.
Speaker: That's what the performing rights organizations did in the real world.
Speaker: But they just couldn't keep up with the digital part, right?
Speaker: Because they couldn't... Basically, what happened was Hollywood had a few pretty good mechanisms in place, like performing rights organizations.
Speaker: That's...
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?
Speaker: So.
Speaker: Have you performed at a live metaverse?
Speaker: Not yet.
Speaker: I was planning to, but then the gas fees.
Speaker: I'm a little bit in limbo right now.
Speaker: I like kind of... Wait, explain the gas fees for a live event.
Speaker: Where does that come in?
Speaker: When do you have to pay gas fees?
Speaker: Well, yeah, it's not my bar.
Speaker: I do own a plot in Decentraland.
Speaker: Yes, I visited recently.
Speaker: Yeah, it's...
Speaker: Right now, I'm letting a friend borrow it for an event that he put on.
Speaker: But the one way I could make money from it is by renting out the space.
Speaker: That's not quite there yet.
Speaker: But the gas fees make that like basically impossible.
Speaker: It's just like the money you get just gets overridden, you know?
Speaker: Right.
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?
Speaker: It's possible, but it's not easy.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: To be honest, like the,
Speaker: Again, it goes back to nobody thinks about the artists, but doing basic things in the metaverse right now is really hard.
Speaker: I remember, th is is one example.
Speaker: I had a video of our TSR thing that I wanted to promote there.
Speaker: There's an object you can put in and then put in the link of the video.
Speaker: And then when I put it in, the image is upside down.
Speaker: And it's just like, wow, nobody bothered to even, you know, oh my God.
Speaker: So right now, if you look at Decentraland, it's probably still the case.
Speaker: The only traffic they have there right now are speculators.
Speaker: Big companies included in that too.
Speaker: People playing play to earn games.
Speaker: And then casinos.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So it's a pretty seedy neighborhood.
Speaker: But if you did want to put on a concert for free, people could come watch for free, right?
Speaker: There wouldn't be gas stations.
Speaker: Yeah, if you want to do it for free, that's fine.
Speaker: Okay, okay.
Speaker: But if you want to make money, well...
Speaker: It's a different story.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: What about Tesland?
Speaker: Is that how people are saying it?
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: No, it's a very early project, but things are coming along.
Speaker: I know the TAF folks are involved with that, too.
Speaker: Yeah, so you could do a similar thing there and there would be much less gas fees in terms of US dollars.
Speaker: But I think the biggest roadblock right now is just usability.
Speaker: It's really not that easy to use blockchain apps.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: If you expect people for this to become mainstream, you have to make it easier.
Speaker: I still have a hard time, even in Decentraland.
Speaker: For one, my computer can't handle it.
Speaker: Yeah, that too.
Speaker: So getting in.
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.
Speaker: But I think if you're inviting...
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.
Speaker: Yeah, he doesn't want to give up.
Speaker: Yeah, one of my friends was telling me, I was talking to him a while ago about
Speaker: You know, he's not a crypto person, but he worked in tech.
Speaker: Smart, smart person.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And he's just like, yeah, like, OK, like, what am I supposed to do?
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.
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.
Speaker: Kind of ridiculous, right?
Speaker: It's extremely ridiculous.
Speaker: I just did the same thing to help somebody purchase one of the NFTs from our current exhibition.
Speaker: And it was, you know, it was all of what you just said.
Speaker: And they did it and it was awesome.
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.
Speaker: in order to do it, but it's, you know, like even that is work, right?
Speaker: I know.
Speaker: I mean, people are, I mean, people are working on it, you know, they know this is a problem.
Speaker: So, but it's going to take a while.
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
Speaker: tech knowledge with the humanity, you know, and not that one is better than the other.
Speaker: They need each other, you know, to like kind of flourish, I feel.
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?
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
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?
Speaker: Yeah.
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?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
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,
Speaker: the housing crisis up there, the tech industry took the brunt of the political backlash.
Speaker: Basically, the politicians didn't want to get blamed for their policies.
Speaker: They pointed fingers at the tech industry, who they personally invited there, by the way.
Speaker: They're like, they're driving up the prices.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But when you're an average person, if you don't push back against that, that becomes the story.
Speaker: And so it gets into this weird loop where they don't want to hear about it.
Speaker: They're getting blamed for problems that they didn't necessarily cause.
Speaker: But yeah, so I don't know.
Speaker: I'm hoping that would change because...
Speaker: you know, NFTs are at the intersection of like the humanities and like tech, you know, in a very tangible way.
Speaker: It didn't happen before, you know?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: No, I like that optimistic outlook.
Speaker: Cause I don't, I don't always have it.
Speaker: No, me too.
Speaker: It depends on the day.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I had one other.
Speaker: Oh, sorry.
Speaker: Go ahead.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I was just like,
Speaker: Yeah, when you do political things, it kind of darkens your look on humanity sometimes, you know?
Speaker: Yeah, that's a hard agree on that one, for sure.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I know you've done political work too before.
Speaker: I've seen your website.
Speaker: Oh, cool.
Speaker: Thanks for checking it out.
Speaker: Yeah, I know you did some things with the CIA and things.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
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...
Speaker: humorous and more than that.
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 what?
Speaker: It's been around for like a month maybe or something.
Speaker: Yeah, Carolyn told me to get...
Speaker: She was all excited about it.
Speaker: I just thought it was such a fun, novel, interesting way to do NFTs.
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...
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?
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?
Speaker: Well, I've been, you know, I do also write a lot, so...
Speaker: Um, yeah, I've been publishing, you know, just like blog posts and articles since the very beginning.
Speaker: Like, yeah.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: But the same thing, right?
Speaker: Like I remember getting checks from, you know, medium, medium.com.
Speaker: Oh yeah.
Speaker: I didn't even realize medium cut checks for people.
Speaker: We did it.
Speaker: Started doing recently, but the last checks I got was like eight cents, 24 cents, you know?
Speaker: And then I made one sale on type.
Speaker: For like one test, I'm like, wow, this is like the most money I've ever made.
Speaker: It's amazing, right?
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?
Speaker: For NFTs.
Speaker: But like, why not make it even more simple?
Speaker: Just text.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: This is like the simplest thing.
Speaker: Anybody can do it, you know, almost.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, I love it.
Speaker: We do all of our press releases and essays when we have an exhibition.
Speaker: We meant the press release as like a PDF, which I thought was kind of as low res as we could get.
Speaker: But now I'm excited to also use types for our next one so we can.
Speaker: Yeah, so I've been kind of doing that.
Speaker: Like I do rant a lot on the Internet.
Speaker: And so I'm not getting paid for it.
Speaker: So I might as well.
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.
Speaker: But yeah, I've been minting things on there and just seeing what happens.
Speaker: I've seen that, I saw that a few places have like adapted that site into like creating a blogging platform.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So I don't think it's released yet.
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.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I'm just experimenting right now.
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?
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I agree.
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
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.
Speaker: Right.
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.
Speaker: Right.
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.
Speaker: There's going to be a lot of like,
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
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.
Speaker: You can learn more at lydianstater.co, find images at Lydian Stater NYC on Instagram, and follow us at Lydian Stater on Twitter.
Speaker: Thanks to Ryan Tanaka for taking the time to speak to us this week.
Speaker: If you'd like to learn more about his work and his interests, visit his website at ryantanaka.org.
Speaker: Big thanks to Tal Wan, who graciously provides our intro music.
Speaker: His albums are available at talwan.bandcamp.com.
Speaker: And thank you to you, listener, for spending your valuable time with us.
Speaker: you
