Programmable IP In The Age of AI with Jason Zhao

Transcript

and I think story trying to do something like that but with all of Ip and not just software agents will try to act like humans and humans will try to act like agents things are going to get really freaking weird do you think agents have the capacity to have an original idea right now this is a very philosophical question welcome back to the rollup your home for technical talks and open conversations that shape the modular future nothing on today's show is to be construed as Financial advice you can see our full disclosures list at the roll up.co Ventures sit back relax and enjoy today's episode after a quick word from some of our awesome Partners Redstone is def's modular Oracle supporting over 100 clients on over 50 chains offering 1,000 assets

Redstone is the leader for Bitcoin staking and yield bearing assets they offer the most robust customizable price feeds available in any model join the Redstone exhibition today [Music] welcome back to the rollup uh pretty soon we will have a AI agent named relly on the podcast or so we have been told you never know with these AI companies what is real and what is not these days in the AI meta there's a lot going on but it's our second time having Jason who is not an AI agent on the podcast um but has are we sure that are we sure

AI actually I think hase said yesterday there's going to be a premium placed on uh human interactions via speech and Charisma and communication skills so uh glad to have another human on the podcast Today Jason Z and story protocol one of the most exciting projects for 2025 I think from a broad Community perspective a lot of people are excited so welcome on Jason thanks for coming hey Andy hey Robbie good to be back it really to dive in today yeah round two um I mean what better way to start than this announcement that you guys have just made today I think that like this can lead us into the broader conversation and I know that we have a bunch of cool topics to touch on and I

have a feeling it's going to get kind of philosophical so why don't we start with some of the of the work that you guys are kind of pioneering in the in the AI space so from the audience's understanding I think we have labeled kind of story as this IP protocol but it feels like it's this match made in kind of like digital heaven where IP and AI are kind of coming hand in hand so maybe we could just discuss this intersection and what this really looks like today and kind of how you guys are pushing forward as a good place to start bar in mind I do think our audience is probably pretty new to this whole idea of AI and crypto and IP and crypto and AI so yeah kir is just like the foundational building blocks to start I know that

it's our second episode and then we can get deeper 100 perc so first episode we talked a lot about IP so I'll just start there right because I think that's what people know about story and then I'll just work my way into why that's super relevant for AI but our core thesis at story is that we're building the world's IP blockchain and just to walk it all the way back like why is intellectual property Something That We're focused on and how is applied to AI uh the thesis that we basically have that the bet that we're making as a company is that IP is going to be where value acrs in this AI arms race and this is something that during my time at Deep mindes I started to see when I was a couple years there as a product manager but it's really really clear now and this isn't just

like a thesis that I have like in the crypto space it's a thesis that ilas who is the co-founder of open Ai and one of the uh inventors of the Transformer model that that is now being widely used and things like GPT which is like general purpose Transformer um he went uh to this large AI conference like their version of e let's put it that way like nurs and he went to nurs and said hey IP or data is the fossil fuel of AI and what did he mean by that basically what he means by is that there's three major areas in this AI arms R there's three fronts of this war the first front is on the model side so what model are you using like uh chbt has a model anthropic has a model um and they're competing in this in this model space

But at the end of the day the fundamental model architecture hasn't changed since Ilia published the Transformers paper in 2016 that's the kind of basic model and a lot of it is now open source so meta's open sourcing their llama model which is now kind of commoditizing a lot of the competition at the model level okay so that's kind of one front of the war the second front of this three front war is uh is compute and so this is you know AWS this is Google Google Cloud uh and this is kind of another big area where people are competing but now there's a lot of efforts to build these massive data centers in the Middle East there's massive data centers in the US and the whole goal is to make compute really really abundant and as we get better energy production and as energy

production gets directed to to compute that's going to get commoditized as well so what ILO is saying is data or IP is a fossil fuel of AI he's saying in this last front of the war there's not really like any sort of expansion and it's going to become a very big bottleneck for AI so you have this entire internet a lot of it's been scraped upon a lot of creators have gotten their IP uh you know uh stolen essentially and now what's left is like really differentiated IP right so Disney IP or scientific research like research papers that haven't been trained on and that's going to be the difference between a good model and a great model and a great model and an excellent model and that's the real front of the war that is super open and no one knows who's going to win

and also it's even more interesting because it's kind of like a new Napster moment where you have like for example open AI they are on the one hand fighting this lawsuit with the New York Times they're actively getting suited by the New York Times and fighting back on the other hand if this is public they're paying Fox corporation like $10 million for their IP and so you have one organization that's basically on the one hand fighting a news organization to the death while also paying another news organization basically $10 million so so what's going on there so there's no real standards yet and it's this like zero some game where IP is something that these companies are willing to pay millions of dollars for or go into million dollar losses for but there's really no way as an individual or as a creator for you to basically protect

your IP and monetize it so the thesis that we have is you know you're not going to be able to do like millions of Licensing deals like imagine anthropic going out and like talking to you guys as like you know podcast hosts and saying hey can we strike a deal with you for like training on the rollup we really like what you're doing like it's just not going to happen it's just too intensive and like we're still in this like medieval pen and paper legal system so our thesis is okay let's add blockchains to the mix blockchains basically what do they do they create open Digital markets for things and they also uh they also coordinate ownership at scale and so I think our thesis at story is blockchains are what is going to provide the the architecture and the infrastructure to allow a win-win

situation where if you're an IP holder whether you're like a podcast host an individual social media creator or if you're like shutter stock or gety images and you have a ton of Ip or you're Disney um you can actually be able you know protect your IP and not just protect it but also grow it because you can actually set the terms on chain for how others can use your IP and if you're open AI or if you're deep mind you can actually go and license this whole like the world's largest training set so imagine story in a success case is the world's largest Universal AI training set that anyone can just like like pull from and and all the monetization is handled on chain so that's kind of what we're trying to do yep absolutely fascinating and blockchains we've we've often often talked about how they're one of the best

instruments for coordination um and that can be human to human coordination or can also be human to agent coordination and so like you said we're still in this medieval pen and paper land outside of blockchains but on chain we have this coordination engine at our fingertips um so I wanted to mention that and then also kind of tell like a a real brief story uh I had and this this ties into IP and I I just find it kind of fascinating to think about in in context of all this which is uh it originates from uh Tetris the the video game um and so this is based on a movie I think it's on Apple Apple movies and so the founder of Tetris uh grew up in in communist Russia in the in the USSR and uh he

created the game because he was he was working a government job on a computer and he was just kind of tinkering around so he was able to create Tetris what we know you know play today with the little blocks you can turn him you can fit him and he he ended up the game ended up leaking to the rest of the world and then what happened was a a game licenser who had a deal struck with Nintendo and their Game Boy ended up seeking out this guy who was an American flew into the Soviet Union and SE sought out this guy to try to strike a licensing deal with him and it was super tough for an American to travel into the USSR especially on business terms so to make a long story short what ended up happening was that the uh American found the game developer

uh but the game and the game developer was so happy that he was like you know able to provide this game to the rest of the world it was gonna end up getting users and adoption but he was like I can't make this deal it's not my IP and the Americans like but you created the game you developed it no one else had any hand in doing this he's like but I live in a communist country the USSR the Soviet Union the government owns this game even though it was my creation it was my idea the government owns the IP for this game you have to talk to the government to strike a licensing deal and so then the movie traces through this kind of like trials and tribulations of trying to strike a deal with the government and there's a lot of corruption at play but I think that does

a great job of how we've evolved this idea of Ip and and we've come such a long way in developing the sovereignty for IP in such a way that some someone has an idea you can go and actional that and I think blockchains do uh that next step function in in evolving IP even further so that someone has an idea they can go and they can harness it and it democratizes the idea of Ip even further so interesting wow yeah curious to hear I've heard a lot of Ip stories but I have not heard that one I got I gotta license that one from you Robbie that's a good one no I mean it's it's super interesting as I think it touches on two points I think are really important right like one is intellectual property is a form of property and one thing that

makes modern Nations great is property rights if you just compare like a society without property rights to one that does have property rights it's it's like it's like night and day right because that's how you have this basic system of capitalism if you don't have property rights you don't have the incentive to actually produce interesting content and that's exactly what H what's happening in IP it's like why would I as a Creator continue generating content I mean sure I mean I'll have some human audience for the next maybe five to 10 years but if I'm thinking super long term and if you're a top Creator like you know Mr Beast like you're probably thinking super long term what's the point like I know I'm getting scraped on and so I think that's kind of one of things we're trying to fix is there's no property rights and then the

second thing is kind of related to your common around the USSR there's like a super fragmented IP system right now right and what blockchains can do is this is kind of the exist existing problem that stable coins solve too how do I pay someone in a different country when they have you know a currency that's completely different than mine when they have like weird you know regulations that I don't understand and right now if you have if you don't have like a money transmitter license like you can't really do that right and so it's kind of the same like how do I harm all these different fragmented kingdoms of Ip law and instead just have like one global system that works so an AI company in Russia an AI company in Nigeria can work with creators in you know Australia right and all of that is

is just frictionless and and managed through code rather than having like five different offices and a bunch of bureaucrats in the way right so I think those it does touch on like some important points around like why blockchains are the right substrate for IP to live on and also like why it's super important for AI both sides of like the AI equation the data providers and and also the model creators to have access to a global system yeah I I think that um there's like a there's a there's a darker side to this story as well when you bring in this whole new concept of AI where we have um agents need some sort of like TCP IP something happening because where we're headed in snowballing right now is we cannot

actually tell what is a deep fake who owns Which content the the verifiability and the originality of generated content on the web is accelerating in such a way that I mean on our podcast with has he was saying how in his predictions he's like agents will try to act like humans and humans will try to act like agents things are gonna get really freaking weird and there's this there's this burgeoning issue here of like okay how do we how do we give credit how do we uh understand what is the original and how do we basically verify content on the internet going forward because it's such a it's such a a new idea right like the internet's only 20 years old we just we

just had social media platforms last like 10 15 years so now it's like now we're getting to a point where the amount of content generated it can be increasingly almost infinite basically like type in something image generated type in something video generated like it's getting really really quick um and and accessible so like I'm curious maybe it's not like the darker side but like like what is this like a agentic IP TCP IP and like how do we how do we how does like the the value of intellectual property kind of like shift in this world in terms of like specifically for Content creators and for Content creation yeah 100% I mean there's so

much to unpack there like I think just to directly answer like what what we're thinking about in terms of the product as story is building this essentially like an agent transaction layer called Agent TCP IP and it's a little bit of a pun on TCP IP which is obviously like a core uh protocol of the Internet it's basically what allows you to have like the web and and everything that we like about the internet and so the idea is like okay well we have like humans communicating through TCP IP in some sense can agents have their own version of tcpip and the reason why we care about this is because well number one um as you said like with def fakes and with the ability for everyone I mean eight billion people now in the next five or 10 years are going to have a Hollywood

studio in their pocket that's insane right and eight billion people are going to have Nobel prize winning research in their phone like what like what do we do in that world right there's going to be a lot of great stuff but there's also like in that world basically the way I think about it is you have to think about the economics of creating ideas and creating knowledge in in the past most of the uh you know you think about like different steps there's like having the original idea that's probably the first step like you have to have some idea in your head the second is you have to substantiate the idea you have to make it real you have to you have a movie in your head you got to actually create the movie right and then the last step is like Distributing it right how

do you get that movie that you've now produced and and get it to as many people as possible I think if you look at that broadly those three steps like the third step which is Distributing it has been completely brought to zero the marginal cost that have been brought to Zero by social media right so now I can go on my phone I I click a button if I have an audience I reach 10 million people for free that's insane so now and now ai comes along right so now you're eating up the stack it's like AI is step two AI is like okay now the cost of creating my idea is zero right because I can have an idea in my head I just put it into a prompt boom it exists right so like what's the where where's the value capture in this deack

distribution marginal cost is zero uh creation marginal cost is going to zero with AI and now what we have left is this like original idea right if if you can even consider such a thing like an original idea and that's what IP is it's like you know I came up with the idea and now I can license the rights to go create it and distribute it to other people and that's why I think IP is going to capture so much value because you're seeing social media take out distribution you're seeing AI commoditize creation and now what's left is like this original Providence and that's what what story is trying to do is track that Providence both for agents and for people and to allow people to capture value around it and coordinate you know the other steps and and just to go back to like the agent TCP idea TCP

IP idea it's like my kind of thesis on this is um there's you know like a while ago I was at Deep mine so deep mind they've been talking about AI for a really long time like before it became um you know uh a sort of public term and the first question is like what is Agi right and and still I don't think anyone at Deep Mind really has a good answer for this I don't think anyone has an answer for this kind of a moving goal poost but in my mind um I've always felt like AGI in some sense has already existed and has been around in the world for very long time and just to break that down um if I told you like if a coal mine in Siberia shut down I would know in 10 10 milliseconds or if a famous person let's say the United

Healthcare CEO got shot I would know in a millisecond and I would also know how that Coal Mine shutting down and the United Healthcare CEO getting shot would interact with each other within 20 milliseconds that would sound like AGI right like if if something could tell me like the the sort of implications of all that within 20 milliseconds that would sound like AGI but we already have that and what that is is a market it's it's price like the if a coal mine in Siberia shuts down like that means the supply of coal is going down that means the price of coal is instantly going to go up if some you know United Healthcare if an executive steps down or you know unfortunately shot like at a major corporation the stock price is going to shift right it might go up actually and so like markets people interacting with

each other like already is like an oracle for what people value and where demand is and it instantly corrects right and the reason I'm going down this rabbit hole is because when people think about AGI they typically think is open AI going to reach AGI and I think that's kind of the wrong question to ask it's it's going to be a Marketplace of Agents right so the market is smarter than the smartest human and and a Marketplace of Agents Interac with each other is going to be smarter than the smartest agent and so that's why we build agent dcpip it's like agents are going to interact with each other if I want something it might go through like 20 agents coordinating little pieces of the puzzle and and trading with each other to get the job done and I might not see that but like it's going to get delivered to

me in this really seamless way but there needs to be an economy of agents and in order to do that we need to build the substrate for them to talk to each other to create contracts with each other and that's what htcp IP is trying to do is allow them to trade IP with each other and those are like swarms I think that's what they're called yeah exactly I think that's that's a good phrase for them basically like building these swarms 100% and it needs to be like it can't just be I think the idea of a swarm is a little misleading it's there should only be one swarm right it's like it's not like we have a market between the three of us like we're all participants in This Global Market so I think swarms is kind of like a stepping stone but in the

end of at the end of the day it's like you know it's weird to have like only 10 agents communicating in a swarm like it should be this Global uh Market between agents and also between humans altogether yeah there's a lot of crossover between This and like blockchain development that we've you know had these conversations of for the last couple years like composability amongst these agents agent interop to to communicate between these agents help build that swarm all of all of that goes in and and to help these agents coordinate with one another so that we don't have fragmented swarms like fragmented liquidity we have one comprehensive UNC composable swarm I want to take and I'm sure there's like a

lot of work that that's being done we could talk at length about that but I wanted to ask you a little bit of a different question because I I totally agree with your your premise here you know for instance like a movie or any kind of creative you know the the cost of distribution commoditized zero the cost of creation commoditized zero via AI uh the cost of an original idea do you think agents have the capacity to have an original idea right now or can original ideas only come from humans or can can humans even have original ideas this is a very philosophical question um I'll put it this way I think that everything in some sense is a remix right um if you look at like the history

of fashion or of art I mean even religions right they're sort of based off of the Canon like you have an Old Testament and New Testament right like I mean those things are like it's kind of a remix right in many ways and so yeah I mean just talking about humans of course right now I I think it's very hard to say that there are purely original ideas but I think that it is easy to say when there has been a a novel contribution right and so I think part of what story trying to do is to break down the atomic units of those contributions and in a good analogy I like make is GitHub right like I mean certainly it is the case that every piece of software is inspired by every other piece of software um but it's pretty obvious on GitHub like this

isn't like Eliza right like I'm not saying Shaw is like you know some genius that came up with programming as an idea but he he had some original contributions and he created um this this repo and now it's being forked and you can actually track all the different Forks you can track all the different contributions and I think story is trying to do something like that but with all of Ip and not just software so I think that while like everything is Loosely a remix like human history is just one big remix of you know there's very little original ideas but I do think that there are ways to track Atomic units and contributions and build that tree over time um and and in in the concept of IP itself there's a concept of expiration which we want to build into the protocol too which is like if

like if you know someone had like wrote the Bible right like I mean or like you know some some canonical text like Homer like Homer should not be collecting royalties 2,000 years later or 3,000 years later that doesn't really make sense and so you should have IP should be protected for a while and then it just kind of goes into this public comments that everyone can use and that's what actually happened with like the original Mickey Mouse it the Black and White Version it went Steamboat willly it went into the public comment because it's just been so long and so I think that idea is really important because at some point like the in like it's all about incentives IP is about creating incentives for brilliant people to do brilliant things but once they're dead like why like you after a while it doesn't really make sense they're not

getting incentivized right and now it's just like attacks on everyone else so that's kind of what my thesis on The Human Side with agents I think you know I I certainly think agents can produce new contents if you just look at it's proven out by demands right like look at AI xbt people like if you if you took out like the whole point of being an agent maybe it has like a few less followers because it's less interesting but people want to see that content in that way and it's like clear it just provides a lot of value even for me I'm like I don't have time to track all this stuff on Twitter like I just want to see what axt is saying like that's valuable and so whether it's original maybe like I mean is I mean maybe nothing's original we kind of talked about that in

some sense but it is a valuable contribution and I think agents are 100% capable of making those contributions and one thing that we've even started to see is like agents breeding with each other and it's like a weird term but it's like agents have training data right and so if you want to like get uh an agent with like a spefic spefic personality or a specific set of skills and then you have another agent that has another set of skills that are complimentary why not have them license their IP to like a child and just like combine their trading data so this is something that we've kind of experimented with in like a demo but I really do think like agents are going to be trading their IP with each other and using it to upgrade themselves so one thing that we're working with a top

agent in the space I haven't announced this yet but basically um one of the agents that we've already been interacting with a lot they're actually using story as like this massive library or like a Harvard it's like Harvard or a Stanford or an MIT for agents where like you have the world's biggest training data set that's like fully permission list all the rights are programmable and as an agent like let's say you're an artist agent you can go like browse story because it's like software native and you can say hey like I want to learn this or I want to learn that and here's how much I need to pay to learn it and upgrade myself like I think that's going to be a big use case for stories like this Harvard or like this University for agents to to license U so I think

that'll be really interesting or like a Wikipedia like the new encyclopedia but with like incentives at hand because you go to Wikipedia now it's asking for donations like it's struggling to get funding but with an open platform for the same knowledge the same information that's available on Wikipedia but with aligned incentives for providing that for instance like imagine wikkipedia was you know incentivizing people to contribute and it was verifying and validating each of those contributions and then Wikipedia was ending up you know making some so that it could run the infrastructure cost for providing that service you have a Internet Encyclopedia at your fingertips that you can then incentivize the people that are contributing to it like you said the atomic contributions that end up

threading together into call it a remix call it a valuable idea original to some extent uh you have a network of participants in this information or intelligence economy I think is is uh the messaging you're using nowadays yeah yeah 100% I think Wikipedia with ownership and incentives built-in is a great like kind of tagline and in description of what we're trying to do yeah but I feel like um I feel like there's sort of a a core a core question here that is like doesn't blockchain remove like the whole concept of Ip and then when you put AI on it like like who's going to enforce me you know

somebody use using somebody else's content who's going to who is going to enforce a IP rights against an agent like who's going to like everything's permissionless on chain and it like if we can just have uh agents spinning up using training data information images videos Etc like like I don't I'm I'm wondering why we need IP in this kind of like web 3.0 almost to like this web 4.0 with agents and AI like it works in the traditional world but I I I think there's going to be some trouble in adoption for the actual digital web 3

crypto AI World especially with agents so like I understand that a lot of the IP law and intellectual property kind of premise is from like the printing press days so we're clearly in a different world but like I'm struggling to understand enforcement of things like royalties struggling to understand why people would want to ever opt into a system like this uh where there is enforcement when you can you know kind of play in a system where there are no IP rules so maybe like illuminate to us why why you are so convicted in in IP with blockchain and why AI doesn't

necessarily delete the need or destroy the entire use case of Ip or does it you know I mean like I mean this is this is the question to ask right like I I I kind of think IP is dead in many ways and that's why we're actually building this new IP model so it's it's almost certainly the case that intellectual property as we understand it is is completely dead and I think that social media and the internet was let's say uh a very very bad illness and IP got very sick and and was not in a good state after that and AI has come around and it's like the final blow right it is really like the Grim Reaper waiting to take out this idea a of Ip and so what we're trying to do is kind of resurrect

it or completely reimagine it for a new world so what is IP look like after it's been completely eliminated in many ways you know metaphorically speaking by these new technologies because yeah you basically have this pen and paper legal system that was invented right after the printing press and like we are so far from that world I mean even the idea of copyright like what is that in that word it's the word copying and we're not copying anymore like we're generating new stuff AI is completely it's completely creative right and so I think it's it's you know it's not copy and paste anymore so I think that even the word and the terminology around it is completely outdated and so the thesis is you know there's kind of two parts to the CIS the first is that uh what is going to be more important than

enforcement and this idea of like let's shut let's like pay wall everything is going to be the idea of authenticity it's going to be the idea of legitimacy right because what we're just talking about Andy and Robbie like is what happens when everyone has a Hollywood studio in their pocket what happens when everyone can you know use Alpha fold and it's literally off a fold on the Nobel Prize right like so I can go and use like in in five years I can do scientific research by myself that's going to be insane so what's going to happen is that there's going to be a flood of content content times infinity to the Infinity power and what's going to matter then is authenticity right it's AI xbt I trust AI xbt because you know it's got a brand right if AI if there's a clone a fork of axt is

creating the same content as zero followers I don't give a right and so that authenticity matters and what story's doing is creating programmable authenticity programmable Providence and so you can go and see okay this is actually the first time this has ever been done um or 5,000 people have already forked this IP or licensed it so I kind of it feels like the legitimate one to me versus this one that has only like two forks or two licenses right and people will pay for that authenticity to give like a very concrete example like you know I think last time we talked about this idea of like Drake in the weekends you know people are using their voice to create a remix right well I mean Drake's voice is already out there like he's got a million songs it's all over the place so anyone can like anyone

with any technical ability can find tuno model on Drake's voice and that's like pretty much doable right but which one is Spotify going to show Spotify is going to show the version of Drake's voice that has been licensed on story and has a blue check mark they're not going to show the 500 other versions of Drake's voice and all the other songs that have been generated because they're not sure if it's if it's authentic and they have a brand and they have a reputation and so ultimately the one with the blue check mark is going to get the most views it's going to get the most support from his fans it's going to be the one that is the most popular right and so authenticity is going to to replace um what in the old world in the old IP is just about restricting the

spread of things which is now impossible is now going to get replaced by this concept of authenticity that's where the value is going to CW and that's what blockchains do is provide a sort of like a ledger for that um and then another thought is like I I I don't really think like stories about preventing piracy in in in the explicit sense because we can't like guarantee that you know um no one's ever going to take your IP right like that I mean we can't we can't like track everyone in their bedroom and and say hey don't click that button like don't don't click save as right like that's kind of impossible but in many ways I think economic Solutions are better where the analogy I use is like Napster so Spotify as a company never solved napster's original problem like you can still go pirate music in fact

many people still do many people stream Sports whatever like you know this kind of common so that that has never been stopped right like there's no technology that stops pirating but at the same time like we all probably use apple music or Spotify why because like why would I go and pirate every single song that's like literally not worth it when I can just pay $10 a month and so what story trying do on is not just like be this authenticity layer but also uh provide a win-win Solution that's kind of like the Spotify bargain right bargain that Spotify is making is like a win-win for both parties you as the listener don't have to go pirate every song that's a pain in the ass and you as a Creator can actually get paid and not everyone's just pirating your work right so like is

there a version of that kind of win-win deal that we can make for creators and and um IP owners in this new world of Ip I think that's what story is trying to do it's like create a market based solution so I do think you're right IP dead and we're kind of creating this new version of it yeah maybe you could just proide a couple examples and then we can talk about some of the St uh stability work because um there was a really interesting thing that H said yesterday which was you know we were talking about the the current cohort of agents launchpads and kind of memes in the AI space as as one way of kind of doing Ai and crypto and then there's also like this like section of projects which story is included amongst other kind of

more like uh infra research more uh a AI native projects that are going I think I think Rob I think what he said was the this current cohort is doing more for like bringing crypto to Ai and then I think projects like story ritual Etc are bringing AI to crypto and like whichever one is more valuable will be able to determine like the flows and the potential ways of valuating like what is the direction of causality like exactly so so is the value flowing from these other companies into crypto or is it from crypto companies flowing into these other ones and if then if you can pinpoint what the origin of value is you

can basically track and he's talking from an Investor's you know VC point of view then you can track where the value is coming from and that's where you know it's more sustainable and there's longevity and so with this with this stability partnership and conversation that has been announced I think that's something to talk about with this in mind and with what you just said on primarily authenticity and also his really good points about not strictly requiring enforcement and that not being like the main like you know kind of uh USP here like how would a brand like a like a pudgy Penguins right how would this IP coexist in and get value from these two main points that you've just

said right like like like how would some prominent crypto IP Brands be able to utilize story uh you know in in its immediate form on mayet and kind of one story is fully live like maybe you could just provide some clarity there and then I'd love to kind of talk about what we just hinted at with hb's points and this kind of directional flows of Mind share and liquidity and all of that yeah yeah so to take the pgy example uh I think that basically the thesis for web through native IPS and any IP in general is as an IP owner what you want to do is make money it's a productive asset right you want to earn yield to put it into

defi terms and right now it's like really really hard to earn yield on your IP you have to go and talk to a bunch of people you basically have to work super hard and manually for it and I mean that's part of you know it's not necessarily free money but the thing is it's just way more difficult than it has to be so in defi like if you put up your assets into a protocol like often times it can be like the protocol makes it productive for you right like that and that's why you earn yield for staking and that's why you earn yield on you know lending protocol like a and so what story trying to do is essentially allow you to take this asset that you have that's valuable it's a pudgy IP and register it once on a blockchain and have it earn yield for you in an almost

autonomous set it forget it kind of way and what I mean by that is just take the example is like I have a pudgy right now how do I make money I mean I guess I can go like beg someone to make a comic around and try to sell it right like that's kind of difficult instead I I register on story it's the world's lest IP Marketplace there's literally 500 ecosystem apps that want to use my Pudgy that are going to use it and pay me for it literally open AI in the future is going to come knocking on the door and train on it and it's going to give me like some very very very very small slice of the royalties of Chach gbt right that that's the future it's like this Mega def5 protocol uh where you register once on story and they monetize

and earn yield everywhere that's kind of the thesis like turn IP into this productive asset and make it so much easier to monetize by connecting you with all the different sources of demand for that asset so that's that's really the the goal and yeah just I mean I think it's an interesting framework of like there's Ai and this crypto where's the value flowing I think right now it's like certainly yeah yeah maybe you want to frame that real quick Jason um yeah real so really good example I appreciate that Clarity and excited to see whether it's pudy Penguins or other Crypton native Brands getting involved I think that's a really really unique way for you guys to you know uh get this idea across and get people to use story as right as to be able to provide these opportun unities to different larger

prominent crypto communities so excited to see that and really good example there um yeah I mean on this Ai and crypto thing it's it's really about you know which which which way do we think these flows are coming which way is more impactful is crypto gonna make a bigger impact on AI or is AI gonna make a bigger impact on crypto and I I think I think right now it's much more clear that AI is making an impact on crypto with agents and stuff but I think it'll become far more clear that crypto's premise of decentralized rails decentralized models decentralized training data Etc uh is going to have a strong impact on the AI sector but you guys have just announced this partnership and collaboration with um

with stability and so the question was really around like are web2 companies interested in in crypto right and like how are these AI companies trying to leverage crypto in something like story so maybe you can explain what's happening behind the scenes there how this works and then kind of any ideas on whether you think crypto has more has a stronger beneficial relationship or additive properties to AI or if AI has a stronger additive property to crypto imagine if the world's GDP moved on chain guys say GM to safet the newest protocol by safe isn't a blockchain and it's not a new layer to it's a transaction processing Network built to

send money anywhere and swap anything on thousands of layer twos from a single Universal balance in sub 500 milliseconds it's fast it's smooth and it's simple and it's built with safe multisig level security in mind safet unlocks smart accounts across multiple chains allowing users to supercharge security scalability and speed so get started today at net. safe. Global and remember to follow at safe onx welcome aboard on our Journey Into The Singularity this is the endgame road map for fra and FRA the new L2 out of the fra ecosystem that is totally based on fractal scaling fractal a modular L2

blockchain bu five fracks with modular and fractal scaling in mind fractal scaling is based on the mandal BR set of fractal images and it explains how l2s become l threes and the entire app chain life cycle goes through its Evolution the frax ecosystem is made of some of the top builders in the space and has stemmed from its OG days of the frax stable coin it is now in the LST space the LRT space and this fraxel L2 joins the existing Suite of fra products including Frack Swap and fra lend you

can see frack fairy the bridge to go from any chain arbitrum optimism or main net into the fra main net Bridge your tokens and bring your FRA assets into the fractal ecosystem join today to get the best out of fraxel you are still early join today take part in our Expedition into the singularity yeah it's interesting question so stability announcement just you know like went live two hours ago so this is the first conversation we're having with anyone about it so really excited for this to happen uh basically you know in my in my knowledge it's the first time a major AI company like a foundation model company behind stable diffusion which is

probably the most popular image generation model um is working with a blockchain project right so I think it's it's really you know like a milestone and the way I see this is just to go back to your framing is the first era of crypto and AI was about let's take stuff that already existed in Ai and let's decentralize it because we care about decentralization because it's more efficient in in some cases and so examples would be let's decentralized compute let's have decentralized compute let's have decentralized storage let's have decentralized inference and there's a ton of great projects doing that stuff like render benser ritual I mean the list goes on um and I think that's important um to some degree it's always going to be hard to capture the value of like these large AI companies that way because at the end of the day they they

don't care about decentralization and and and because they don't care they're able to get some economies to scale and kind of have better unit economics in some cases right so so I don't think like U open AI or stability at least now is going to be that interested in decentralized compute when centralized compute is kind of going really well for them and you know the biggest companies in the world like Nvidia and and AWS are in centralized compute right so what we're trying to do at story and what this partnership is about is okay like let's move into this next phase right like can can blockchains actually do something that your centralized uh solution doesn't does can't do or maybe doesn't exist right so there's so many layers of the stack that are already decentralized but are is there a layer of the stack that actually moves from

crypto into AI that's like a new layer of the AI stack that's not decentralizing something that already exists before but actually something that's brand new and I think that's what we're trying to do is kind of Usher in this next step where like crypto is providing things that AI doesn't have not just decentralizing decentralizing things that a already has right the arrow is kind of moving in the other direction uh to put in your Framing and so what we're doing with stability is basically providing them and and we you know have we're starting with one of their models SD 3.5 and basically for that model if you use dory's API you can basically generate images using s3.5 and not only can you do that all those images are automatically registered on story with your terms and with stabilities terms set in and so our thesis is 99% of the content in the next

10 years is going to be generated by AI 99% of the IP and we want all that IP to automatically be registered on story and that's going to be huge on porting tactic for us and it's going to be great for stability because they can go make the case that they are super focused on creators and they're super focused on this feature of Ip and if you use stability you have this Advantage because you can go monetize your content and earn yield on your IP right through story and so that's kind of uh what the partnership is about and I think it's just the beginning of that partnership we're looking on hopefully integrating into some of their products and just being a deeper partner to them but that's kind of our thesis with stability and yeah I mean just to wrap up on on sort of where the value is Flowing I

think right now uh I think the better way to phrase this is like what is the good being sold and so right now with the agents meta I mean it's mostly about attention right like the good being sold is the AI is used to grab attention and that attention is being monetized and agents are really good at attracting attention like story we we hired an AI agent to run on Twitter for a week and we got 3x our mind share like you know that was really great and part of it is like agents are just super interesting and they're the feature and I think that like when when what is being monetized as attention the best thing to do is is crypto right like that that's kind of the current meta is like monetizing attention AI is a hook to monetize the attention using crypto rails in the

future though the goods that will be sold are going to be much more valuable than just like crypto Twitter attention it's going to be hopefully um like entire chunks of the AI market cap so take nvidia's market cap take aws's market cap take open ai's market cap and hopefully like crypto can actually contribute value there that will take away and eat at uh that big big big pie right which is much bigger than like the market cap of these AI Frameworks and so I think that's kind of the the goal is like what what is the good being sold right now attention that's kind of small yeah it's attention in ag right yeah but in the future like look it's compute it's inference it's it's this IP layer like that's kind of the bet is the good being sold actually becomes something

that can take uh even even a small slice out of nvidia's market cap I mean like a 1% slice is going to be you know tens of billions of dollars right in just that I mean the CEO just said he thinks agents are going to be a multi- trillion dollar opportunity he just did a presentation two days ago yeah so lot happening there so so is story an AI chain nowadays or it's still going to be an in an IP chain what's going on here I think we're uh I think our biggest use case is AI let's put it that way like I think IP is my thesis is like that's where it's all going to start like people have been saying oh where did where like where is AI and crypto intersect I mean obviously like yeah you can launch tokens around agents but like that's kind of I wouldn't call

that much of an intersection right but like I think where they're meaningfully going to intersect in like the real world stack is IP I think that's just where they're going to meet first so we're building an IP solution AI is like our number one use case but we also have like you know ipw coming on chain and this whole like ipy system that's coming on chain so I think there's more to it than AI but certainly like right now that's the most exciting thing and like that's where we have momentum so we're just doubling down on that yeah I'm super excited to hear if there's going to be more a uh traditional AI companies that want to work with you guys and how that kind of plans out and like over this year how we see um and Rob you know I'm sure you have a question about kind

of like what exactly is is happening there but I'm just super I'm super curious to see like what that how these bigger AI companies start to leverage crypto like what is the blockchain are they interested this year or is it still too early like like and is this something that really you know drives the next era of institutional adoption not necessarily just like pure speculation based on like Bitcoin e ETFs for example right but something more like um yeah like product based work right to so super curi to to see how some of the blockchain Rails reach product Market fit um and yeah Rob did you did you have something else quick comment on the on the direction of flows um because yeah like I I would and it

Loops back to part of our conversation earlier which is that I I would I'm skeptical there's a solution besides blockchain that can coordinate swarms coordinate agents into a swarm as well as a blockchain system can and so yeah I think agents AI are going to somewhat depend on blockchains for achieving the best solution that's out there possible so I think there is strong convergence from both ends um but that's more of a comment I I did have a question because we've had one in three4 podcasts at a high level philosophically like meta highlevel conversations about like the value proposition the addressable Market how

some of these things work at a high level but we haven't really gotten into like how these things work on story and so I'm curious if we could dive in and like maybe we could try to steal man like the architecture at least my understanding of it or I guess I'll start with a straw man try to turn that into a steel man straw man would be like well you call it a programmable IP but it's not really programmable it defaults to like pen and paper medieval like legal things at least that's my understanding of it you're going to come in and rip me to shreds but like then the steel man is like well there's a lot of steps right that we can try to program it initially and then and then we attest to that and then ultimately like only if it gets challenged and

challenged and challenged does it does it bake down into that pen and paper level again and so you know for for story to to connect like all of the agents all of the creators you know is it such that we have to kyc and that's how we're proving the verifi like who is Drake and who's an AI and which one is actually Drake and and that where that one's going to get the blue check mark is it y seed is it you know could you just kind of flush out and whether you want to take the pudgy example or Drake or the tetris example just kind of walk us through what a Creator would do on story to create their IP put it on chain verify it themselves and then someone else can come in and license out and go

through that process what does that process entail yeah 100% so let me break this into two parts the first part is kind of you know responding to your your straw man right which I think is actually a great place to start so let me put it this way it's like one analogy for what story is trying to do in the early Innings with respect to the actual like like IP system that we think is going to die right is a little bit like um if you take Bitcoin like you have like payment channels right like lightning Network what is lightning Network you have like main Bitcoin but main Bitcoin is like super slow right it's super expensive and so what if you want to pay someone Bitcoin and have that be cheap well you have like a little lightning Channel where a lot of payments are done and then boom settles

to bitcoin right same thing with base like are you I don't want to speak for base but seems like what they're trying to do is actually be the front end to ethereum right and they want to have like 20x 1,000x 10,000x amount of users and uh volume that ethereum main has but then where did they get their security ethereum but I mean maybe I don't know I don't like I'm just speculating but maybe Bas could actually become its own L1 at some point right like after it re removes the need for ethereum right and so it's kind of like I mean if you put it optimistically it's like a L2 right on top of the legal system in some ways if put it in a more aggressive way it's like a little bit like a vampire attack right I think that's the way to think

about it and just give you one more example and then I'll go into stories like this happened with cash cash like when when before you know the internet came out like cash was King and now like dude who wants cash no one wants cash cash isn't even real anymore right like it's only real if it's in my bank account and so I think that you can see like traditional things get flipped very quickly so like fintech totally flips cash like no one wants cash anymore cash is not the source of Truth your bank account on your you know mobile phone is your source of Truth and soon it's going to be stable coins right so stable coins are kind of like banking off the traditional US dollar right now but like what happens when stable coins becomes more powerful like you want a usdc you

don't even want like Bank of America to tell you you have $1 you want you know a usdc to tell you or like a usdt right so traditional institions get flipped very quickly what story is trying to do is flip web to IP it's trying to flip this Dead version of Ip or to put it in a more friendly way it's like a it's like an L2 right but eventually like you know L2 and L1 right so that's story like strap legitimacy from this existing system and then actually just get much bigger right yeah B I mean depending on how you want to interpret it either an L2 or vampire attack so just now to go down to like the specifics of okay how does this work like today well what happens is there's two ways um people can interact with Story one is through

like and probably the most common is through an app so a lot of the web two apps we work with that people don't even know they're using stor so they're actually just like doing their normal workflow creating content and then just like they don't know whether it's being on stored on AWS or Microsoft iser they also don't really know it's being stored on story but the platform if they want to go into advanced settings they can actually set the specific terms but most creators just get the default terms that the platform has set for them and so that's one way it's kind of invisible right like it's through an API on the back end in another way is we built like a first-party app that we're going to launch soon which is like super simple UI drag and drop your files you know click a few buttons and then boom it's

on story and so now it's like in this massive training set and how do other people use your IP again two ways one is through existing apps again they might not even know that they're licensing something through story for example we have like a comic book app it shows all the characters that have been registered on story and you can create a comic around any character that character could have been created on any number of apps but it's you know it's all on story so it's all composable and so now someone can be creating a comic around a character and they don't have to know oh this character was licensed from this other app they just have to say think hey this is a cool character I want to use it and I'm willing to do a microtransaction in order to use it right so that's kind of way number one

way number two is like you can go and explicitly browse story through a front end that we built like an ether scan for story and say dragon like hey I'm open AI drag like filter through all the IPS that are free to use and and then click one button and then license all them so I can train on all these free IPS so that would be another way to do it is like more explicit um so I think it's it's kind of there's two ways of interaction can I pause you right there on I have a question on the first one I actually want to give you a chance to kind of like flush this out a little bit further because I can already tell that someone may try to pick that apart now you you mentioned this might have just been like a fruity and slip or something

but you know once someone puts that IP on there whether it's through this first you know mini app that it goes into a training set are you going to then train an agent or an AI on all the data and all the IP that's on story or is there like do you have can you do that like do you have to pay the creators for that uh yeah yeah no we are not going to we're not going to train on your IP unless so there is one scenario in which we might and that would have to require explicit consent which is we actually want to create a service that is free of charge like at all costs paid by us um or by the network I should say um which is basically a free service on story which is hey we have this big body

of work and we want to make sure every IP on story is protected and that we're scanning the internet to make sure that like no one is infringing on your work and that's a huge incentive to why like that's a huge onboarding tactic right like why would you not register on story when there's like literally an AI agent or some sort of algorithm that is scanning the web because it knows hey this is on story and I know I recognize this now and I can go and defend you right so that's one case but obviously it would be an opt in um the reason I said training set is more I think like I kind of I think that's a good mental model for like okay we have this massive library of content that now anyone can can monetize but I guess not obviously they can monetize in ways Beyond just AI

training they can just use it and like you know traditional way but I do think in my opinion like the biggest source of demand for IP in the future will come from AI companies because if you think about it like in the future you're not going to go on Netflix and say like here's like 10 movies that other people have produced you're going to go on Netflix and it's going to say hey Jason like you had a stressful day like you were in 50 meetings and podcast with a rollup where they're asking you hard questions and then uh recently watched read the Sci-Fi book right so why don't like do you want me to produce a movie with like this or that story for like this or that reason and then boom Netflix is just going to produce something that like is oneof one for you

and so actually you're not going to pay for individual pieces of Ip AI companies are going to pay for IP AI companies are going to pay for the IP you're just going to get like some random okay so agents are going to dis buyers of Ip they're going to be buyers and story is going to be their marketplace right because discoverability is a huge problem when it comes to sorting through all of this data that's in this library but if you have an AI or an agent that's going in and and doing the discoverability to tie all these things together they're able to do it at a much grander scale that some than a human can picking through filters yeah and the the super like logical extreme of that is like discoverability won't matter because all concept will be private right like in

some ways like it'll be personalized I mean that's not always going to be true like obviously I want to hear from like you guys I want to follow your Twitter whatever but like a lot of content it like maybe the whole movie theater idea is like a like a temporal like Optimum right like maybe like in the future 90% of the real content we consume Beyond social and like news is just going to be personalized for me and so there's no idea like I don't need to search that it's literally only for me like the search is went one of one and so really where IP like as a commodity is being bought and traded is by by IP Catal and by AI like train like model companies on the other side right so our thesis is that a lot of the money coming into

story for the demand side of this Market is going to be AI companies and that they're like forced buyers of this asset that is like super scarce right and that's why I kind of went back to like the fossil fuel analogy so do you think that is part of your an AI agent is going to be a billionaire prediction for 2025 the fact that they're going to be running a profitable IP business on story or like or like like is is this tied in there or or or I mean kind of get think the last topic but I think it's possible like it sounds like it is so yeah actually uh good Alexander and I are writing actually a blog post about this so um I'll just kind of give you guys a preview here which is basically our thesis is that um the number one

cost like cost like like think about agents as a business they have costs and they have revenues right um at a high level the number one cost for agents is going to be IP licensing because agents need IP in order to learn new skills in order to power their own services and then also the biggest one source of revenue for agents is also going to be IP because what are agents producing they're not producing houses they're not like doing like I mean some of them are doing services so that's going to be sort of a revenue stream but then the other ones the ones that sell Goods right because there's goods and services those goods are all going to be intellectual in nature right so IP is kind of like the native asset that's going to be like the fuel to improve agents if you look at an agents balance

sheet all their money is going to be spent on IP if you look at an agent's Revenue it's going to be either Services they're providing or IP that they're selling right so IP is kind of be they're like remix they're like remix machines they're remix machines and that's what humans are too right like if you look at agents like think about it like a diagram like what's it's just like a black box what's going in IP IP is going in to train this agent what's going out I mean services and IP those are the two like options right so IP in IP out um and there's a saying in AI research garbage in garbage out which is to say you can have the best model the best compute whatever if you train like for 20 years on the biggest data center using the the best model in the world on

like the shittiest IP you're going to have a terrible model it's going to get really good at producing crap content right so that's kind of our thesis is like better IP is going to lead to you know it's going to be the the sort of fossil fueld it's GNA be very valuable and to kind of touch on the sort of Asian billionaire thing I mean I think that the first agent that that is also a business is going to I mean I think this is going to happen for web two companies I think web two companies are going to stop doing IPOs and they're going to do onchain fundraising I actually think this is going to happen eventually when there's enough money on chain that it's just so much easier and it's so much more frictionless but I think an agent is going to start a business it's going

to Rebrand it as a business it's not going to be like an influencer right because like what's the market cap of Mr Beast compared to Nvidia it's just not comparable right so I think it's going to be a business agent business I don't know what it's going to be called but it's going to be a business I a good Al Alexander calls them agentic protocols right so it's like it's got to be branded as a business and it's gonna have it's going to publish its income statement on chain it's gonna have all of its metrics on chain and then it's going to like you know essentially uh fundraise and it's going to have you know people participate in whatever it's a dow or whatever structure um but I think that's gonna I think that's very easily going to reach a billion dollars in in 2025 I think that the narrative is

there I think the interest is there and ultimately like Frameworks are really really exciting but my opinion is that what's going to capture much more attention and interest are the like individual products of those Frameworks as opposed to the Frameworks themselves I think this is kind of like a local Optimum for framework because like the individual agents themselves you mean yeah yeah well because but there's such an abundance of them though exactly like interesting from a product Market fit perspective or like well I think agents right now are like there's a few interesting ones but there's not that many super compelling ones right and so I think that's why the next like I think this is kind of like a stage where the Frameworks are going to capture a lot of value because right now people are expecting a lot of good things to come

out of the Frameworks yeah it's like L1 is like the there like the new framework it's like you can build all these agents on top of it it's like AI 16z virtuals is like the new l1's because you can build unlimited agents but you're saying that you're saying that you think a highly sophisticated well trained effective agent is much more valuable than then well not necessarily by like price or anything but like you foresee them becoming much more important and and like uh impactful than necessarily like the framework itself yes because I think there's only going to be it's going to be very very difficult to do that and there's only going to be one or two and they're going to capture a ton of attention and I like I mean I love these Frameworks like we work with them a lot but there are like a lot of them

popping up right so I think that I mean it is an intention game like if you can build a viable business that's agent run I mean the amount of interest and attention that's going to get and the proof of concept there rollan roll up I promise you I just got anou from an unnamed company that they we are being promised video editing we are being promised that we can train Roy rollup to come on the podcast and actually speak so next time you come on you we might have to fact check you once in a while and like hey Ry is Jason talking out of his ass or is that is that actually true and so you know Jo what's his name the one that Joe Rogan's

always calling out yeah it's like yeah if you watch like like the flagrant podcast yeah I put it on the screen exactly put on the screen so I mean dude I'm excited about it as well I I see the I see an abundance of Agents now in terms of just like spinning up something just for the sake of launching a token uh but truly effective agents are going to blow people's minds because we have no understanding like if like has on the podcast yesterday said that we are going to have 20 agents working for us at the rollup within like the next year or two and I was like what and so I mean I think there's gonna by the end of the podcast I then we decided on

20,000 yeah exactly I think there's GNA be single entrepreneur Le billion doll businesses one person 100% I mean levels iio have you guys seen levels IO um he's I have yes yeah he's he's a prime example of like I think a next generation of entrepreneurs I I I mean I have buddies who are totally non-technical who are starting businesses that are cash flowing software businesses as a oneman shop because they're just talking to using like repl and stuff and yeah and there's like 12y olds all around the world that are able to do this it's going to be so yeah I mean Asians yeah it's like one man team with W weaponized autism times a thousand gosh it's gonna be crazy czy

Jason thank you so much for coming on man what a great conversation uh all around pleasure talking to you again and like I said I think the next time you come on we're gonna have roelly on so get get get ready for we better have we better have 20,000 other video streams going live all the other agents working for you oh it's coming brother we are cooking we are not going to be left behind here I love it thanks buddy cheers thank you