The Dark Forest of Creative Capital

FC - 377 - Yancey Strickler - Episode Audio

[00:01:24] Phillip: Yancey Strickler, welcome to Future Commerce.

[00:01:56] Yancey: Thanks. Thanks for having me.

[00:01:57] Phillip: Here's a question to get us started. Would you consider yourself a modern philosopher, or how would you consider yourself?

[00:02:04] Yancey: Well, it's funny. Last week, I made a Claude project of select writing and asked it to write a bio of me, did that whole thing. And I think that phrase did come out. I think of myself first and foremost as a writer, And I would say like an explorer of form is a little bit of just kind of what my brain does. And I now I felt conflicted about it for a long time but I really embrace now being an entrepreneur and the idea of exploring form, but also being able to do something about it. And being both... Just thinking about big shit that, I don't know, my brain is struggling to understand but it's just curious about like just hitting its own ceiling trying to make sense of things and then also just developing through my career the practical experience to make things and to put things into action, and I feel at a great fortunate place where I kinda have both of those skills right now. And yeah, it's exciting.

[00:03:09] Brian: That's really cool. Form is such an interesting concept to me. Do you believe in the platonic forms as a concept? Are you talking about form more specifically?

[00:03:19] Yancey: I guess I just think about it from my own personal experience of understanding the power of how we project ourselves into forms and how they really just create a shape through the other side. And the strong experience I had with Kickstarter with starting that was there was, like, 4 years of trying to explain to people the idea of crowdfunding and just struggling, struggling mightily. And then suddenly there was a website and a UI and people got it in a glance and were like, "Why didn't you tell me?" You're like, "Well I tried for a long time," and what it came to feel like was, oh, there always needed to be a door here. It's just one wasn't here yet. But once it appeared, it was quite natural and there was a form that just taught people how to enter and exit that type of space. And it's such a beautifully egalitarian empowering kind of structures like that. And I just very much believe in them. And believe in things that... I just believe in the goodness of people and their the brilliance that will come out of them and give them the right shape and opportunity. And yeah. So form has come to be a way that I've learned to not impose what I believe, but to create space for people to have a good experience in ways that I'm first honestly trying to serve myself.

[00:04:44] Brian: Do you feel like you're discovering forms that already exist, or do you feel like you're creating them?

[00:04:50] Yancey: For sure discovering. I think, in some cases, maybe other people have seen them before, maybe they have not. There's a quote, there's a great book by John Higgs about The KLF. Incredible book about how ideas work. And then he talks about how Alan Moore has the concept of the idea space and just as there is a physical realm there is a realm where ideas live that is just as real as our world and is in fact even more powerful than the physical world and gives the image of all of us, our minds are like homes in a cul de sac. And ideas are just like knocking on our doors and, you know, if you open, it will be there for you. And so I've come to feel like there is a source that I have through experience of making a lot of things have learned to listen to, to dance with. And that sometimes the things that are noticed in that experience are things that are true, but maybe have not been articulated in such a way. Kind of the most esoteric project in my career, something called bentoism, which is a framework for self interests, four boxes. I really believe in it, but struggled with how to explain it. But someone who is a professor of decision making at both Cornell and Wharton came to me this year to tell me that he's putting in a textbook and that it was used in state government and he's like, "This thing you mapped is real. It's real." There's a point in my life in which I had longed for nothing more than to hear someone with authority say words like that to me. But it was just, [00:06:39] it was first a noticing and just trying to express the noticing, and then sometimes you find something. [00:06:48]

[00:06:48] Brian: Observational truth that brings you a lot of personal fulfillment, it seems like.

[00:06:55] Yancey: Yeah. I mean, the current project that we're getting Metalabel began with me leading a community, being a content creator, being at the top of a hierarchy of an audience, and being just so bored by it. And longing for what you guys have, longing for a pure relationship, longing for someone that would make my ideas better or that would share the journey and really struggled with how do I do that other than starting a company? What is even the path? Do I have a band? What do I do?

[00:07:32] Phillip: {laughter}

[00:07:32] Yancey: And I ended up... Well, I ended up rereading an amazing book called Our Band Could Be Your Life, the story of punk and hardcore bands in America, and tells a story of how all these bands made weird music. No one put them out, so they put themselves out by starting their own label, which was nothing more than a logo and a PO box. And by virtue of putting a logo and an address on their own work, it legitimized it. And by the time that first release would come out, they would have four or five others lined up. And suddenly and just suddenly it was bigger than them. And so I saw that a label is not just releasing things. It is manifesting culture. It's teaching people to see. It's like, "Yeah, you like punk, so come make punk." And I came to realize that same moment, that same week that the Royal Society which created the enlightenment began in the same way. A group of academics that started meeting in a pub every week and started a club about proving facts through evidence rather than the decree of the church or the king. So in 1664, they started making the first zine called Philosophical Transactions. And that is where Isaac Newton's writings were published, where Benjamin Franklin's kite experiment, the Babbage machine was funded, like everything.

[00:08:49] Phillip: Oh wow.

[00:08:49] Yancey: Everything started in the zine. And it was 30 people who were all like, "Yeah. Let's prove facts through evidence." And I came to see that in both like a punk label or the Royal Society or projects like MSCHF, it's a group of people uniting around some shared vision, not making a product, but just releasing work by themselves or anyone else that fits whatever that vision is. And that actually that has been the most powerful and consistent means of producing culture for, like, 500 years. And it's a form that is so out of fashion now because the Internet has so individualized us and a lot of those labels are like extractive and are reached late capitalism stage or not the dynamic things that they once were to believe in, but that that form is actually what I needed to feel less lonely and is actually something that could be repurposed to make a whole new status quo. But that all started with why Yancey's sad, you know, and just trying to solve that question. But my brain, this is where you end up 4 years later, like, okay, there's an artifice to make Yancey not sad. But yeah.

[00:10:05] Phillip: It's amazing how much improvement in the world comes from people wanting to solve problems for themselves. So I think that that's kind of the, maybe that's the entrepreneurial arc in you and a reluctant one at that. It seems like bentoism is a really good example of the kind of thing that you've written about, something that you maybe you've internalized yourself, and now as you're externalizing it, there is this conversation that you're having with an audience around how we characterize ourselves and how we look beyond our present moment, which seems to be one of the traps that people are stuck in right now, especially creative people, there's a lot of conversation around creatives who can no longer be, uh, just an artist, but now you have to be a content creator at the same time in order to find that audience. So I think that gets us out of the mode of thinking about a future or what a future version of me looks like, and I'm stuck in the moment just trying to promote my current self. And so when I look at a bentoism, you know, this sort of quadrant basis where I'm looking at a future me, and I'm looking at a future collective like we. And that to me is a form of futurism that is really kind of the job of, you talk about making culture, that's kind of the job of people that create commerce in many forms. You've done that for your career. That's what you're best known for is enabling commerce and culture. And that's really what we aspire to do as well. So I'm curious what you think of, like, how futurism might play into that. And is that sort of a creative pursuit, or is that sort of a philosophical pursuit that finds a creative outlet?

[00:11:45] Yancey: Well, I'll start with something crazy and then we'll get to it. But the concept of creativity was invented in the 1940s and 50s based on funding grants from the defense department. And creativity research began for two reasons. Number one, to identify potential officers in the military. And number two, there was a widespread concern even in the United States government that people were becoming complacent and sad under capitalism. In the 1950s, especially, there was a golden age of America and people were not vibing with it. More white collars and blue collar workers than ever. And there was a lot of concern about, yeah, are people unhappy? And so there became this search for what is the answer to this? One of the first creativity researchers was Abraham Maslow. And even before the hierarchy of needs was a creativity researcher and ultimately together this process with the founder of BBDO being the person credited with inventing the concept of creativity, but made this democratic essence of genius. This way that everyone could have a little slice of genius and could aspire to something in their lives or in their work. And it was mainly seen as a tool of industry and a tool of commerce. And it began to enter culture in the 1960s through advertising. So [00:13:10] the concept of art and creativity that we think of today that we take as givens that we're like, oh my god I have to promote my drop again today are incredibly modern inventions.  [00:13:19]Art as we think of it now is only about 200 years old. Before that it had a lot of other purposes. It wasn't art the way we think of it today. So there is, it's just very helpful I think to see the context through which we got to now. Where I think like future really plays into this. I mean number one, culture and creativity have always been the things that have shown the future. Always. Always. And often with the opposite of their intended effect, you know, any warning supposed to be like a cautionary tale. Yeah. Good luck. You just painted a schematic whether you wanted to or not.

[00:13:57] Phillip: {laughter} That's true.

[00:13:59] Yancey: But I think in the same way we're talking about the idea space or the news sphere, I think there are ways in which we are being pulled forward or ways in which I believe a lot of reality exists in four dimensions of things that have already happened we are seeing. They are beginning. We are watching them begin, and they are beginning because they have already happened. And I don't know how to explain it, but I think that is a way the universe works. What's interesting is I think that we went from... I think it's an interesting moment in terms of capitalism, in terms of commerce, in terms of even for those of us who have wanted to produce alternatives to ways the world works. Everyone feels like they've kinda given up and it's like, "Well, I gotta get paid first." And we've reached this interesting post-meta state of things where we're all we're doing is making gift guides now for some reason. And it's interesting. I mean, as I was talking to Jack Self the other day behind The Real Review, amazing writer and someone I really admire. And he's like, "Yeah, you ust kinda have to, like, the only way out is through at this point." And so it's this interesting time, but yet at at the same time what I see is a clear systemic break from, I mean, I would really talk to your ear off, but a world that began in 1789 with the French Revolution. And I think now we're moving into a post-nation state world that is about dark forests, that is about Internet communities, that is about network states, that is gonna be about crypto and white flight from public spaces to a degree we haven't seen before. All those things are coming. The Internet and how we're financing each other in these little transactions. I mean, that is the heart of all of it. That's what's driving all of it.

[00:17:25] Phillip: You mentioned Dark Forest. One of the first releases that came through Metalabel. Right? Which would you say was that the primary?

[00:18:40] Yancey: The first drop we did was The Dark Forest Anthology. Yeah. So a book edition of pieces written by me, Venkatesh Rao, Maggie Appleton, New Models, the Stowa. Great, great, great people. So I anthologized eleven pieces we'd already written before into a physical collection. And it's amazing. We've sold 1500 plus this year. The Dark Forest Collective, our group, has earned $65,000. And all of that money, everything on metal label has the split. And so whenever someone buys a book, first cost gets paid back for printing then 30% of the money goes to our treasury that we're using to fund new work and then 10% gets split to each author automatically. So every author has just gotten passively $2500 out of this book this year. We as a group have $15,000 that we're gonna use for a new book that will be announced in the new year. And it's just all using this automated back end profit sharing. But, yeah, that was the first thing that we did.

[00:19:49] Phillip: And tell us about that, this platform. It's developed beyond your own release, and now you did a large, I'd say a collective of creators, people that we're very familiar with. Ruby Justice Thelot is a long time contributor and collaborator with us. Tell us a little bit about sort of this launch of it as a more public platform for Metalabel to have people create their own labels and their own releases.

[00:20:18] Yancey: Yes. All all year, we've been building out this platform that lets anyone create a page where they can publish and sell work, do it together or with other people, split money, archive their work. It's been curated for most of the year because we've been hiding the fact that we're still been building it. That process is we sort of got over that hump. And in October, we announced the opening season of Metalabel by introducing a collection, the fall winter collection, of releases that includes Brian Eno, Mindy Sue, the David Graeber Institute, Josh Citarella lots of amazing people. We'll have a new collection introduced in the new year for our Winter '25 collection. And I don't know. That's just felt like a fun way to announce all these amazing people who were collaborating with us. But the intention, so right now, it's still a curated space invite invite only, but in the New Year, we plan to open up fully. And we wanna be a Craigslist, wanna be Arena, wanna be one of those basic internet tools that you understand exactly what it's good for. And so there's a whole host of ways that we built it to be post platform like your catalogs are gonna be portable. You can combine digital and physical work together. I've sold a limited edition zip file, 500 editions of a limited edition zip. And then just today Brian Eno published a dollar edition of a new book as a PDF. So it's just trying to be like a new space where I'm especially interested in new media ways of expressing creative work. I'm very motivated by making digital work valuable. I think we can get there.

[00:22:07] Brian: I think this is super important, especially getting back to what you were saying earlier about how new culture is created, The Royal Society being a good example. But something that's really tough and you said the only way out is through. Out meaning that either people have enough money to keep making more cool stuff. They have enough money to live. They're making money off of building things in sort of this, you know, psychic space, if you will, in the idea world, being able to put those out and make money on the work that they put into that because it's actually a lot a lot a lot of work to make these things, because that world is real and it requires work. And so I'm curious. And what would be the end game? So I see this as the marketplace or the engine or the way for people to be able to take that mental work that they're putting in and find a way to actually make a living out of it.

[00:23:15] Yancey: Totally. Yeah. Totally. Well, I see three stages to our work. Right now is making this release platform. So it's creating a space where you can be collected, where there's a transaction, and where because there's a transaction, we can show you what splits are like and these ways that you can have a different kind of outcome. The second phase of the project which is really the focus of the second half of next year will begin is Fintech for creative people. Actually, most creative people I think are excluded from a lot of the basic financial tools that are made available to small and medium sized businesses. A lot of things that like a Shopify or Stripe might offer to a coffee roaster I think are things that could be offered to an artist of say cash advances or making the treasury product that exists in Metalabel something easy for you to like put money into or pay out of and making your Metalabel release, your Metalabel label a real kind of gray area bank account which you can use to do projects together. So the way that The Dark Forest Collective is publishing a new book, we're giving advance out of this pool of money instrumentalizing that and making that like almost a little bank. And then finally the third phase of this is about normalizing a new creative era, and there are two big platforms for that. Number one is gonna be it's already underway, will be announced next year, but a very, very significant legal project to create a new structure, a new structure that will support a lot of these outcomes, and that project [00:24:51] I believe will I think produce a world where 50... This is gonna sound ridiculous but that 50 or 60 years from now, artists and creative people are the most powerful members of society. They will have the greatest influence. They will have the greatest access to wealth. They will be the most powerful people in society, and this is a structure by which that will occur. And that's a project we'll announce next year. [00:25:17] And so there is a real clear endgame to that. And then the second part is just we started out blockchain adjacent, and we're very into post-platform, distributed everything, self custody cell phone data. We ended up building a platform that doesn't have that doesn't use any blockchains at all. However, we architected everything to have that capacity. And in particular, we use something like the AT protocol that Blue Sky uses.

[00:25:49] Phillip: Mhmm.

[00:25:49] Yancey: So that all the data within Metalabel is very referenceable using a decentralized identifier and can basically be part of an open Internet phone book. And so all of that is there hasn't been productized yet. But what it means is that the catalog you make on Metalabel, you will be able to embed that in your website and treat it as little objects that you can tweak how they operate. You can add APIs to them. It's gonna turn all of these things kind of inside out and just let it move around the web because again that's what do we all want? [00:26:20] We all want to be able to homestead and have our own spaces that are ours, but we also want to be part of spaces where we can be discovered. And so how can our catalogs exist in a world like that? So content wise, Internet wise, that is a vision. And then there's also just this legal vision that just says artists right now are excluded from capitalism. Let's change that. [00:26:44]

[00:26:44] Brian: That's so interesting to me. I think about what you said about how artists and creatives are gonna be the people that run society. They're gonna be the ones that get all the money. It's all gonna be funneled up to them. It's gonna be a new era. And I think about the video that Kirby Ferguson did recently for the New York Times, his op ed, that our friend, Matt Klein, was featured in from Zine. And Kirby explored this idea about how everything kinda feels the same right now, which is a constant theme you hear. We've covered it at length at Future Commerce. Blahification, premium mediocre, like, whatever you wanna call it. There's a million different terms for this idea that everything just sort of has gone to a meme.

[00:27:38] Phillip: Mhmm.

[00:27:38] Brian: But Kirby said underneath that, there are little pockets that you can get to, and I think you've referenced this quite a bit in your work as well. There's sort of things are splitting out into smaller groups, these dark forests, and it's different worlds. Kirby's viewpoint at the end of the piece was that he's really optimistic about a creative explosion that's gonna just surprise everyone coming out of nowhere. It's usually when you're in a position of buildup of really crappy material that seems bad. It's out of that that the next wave of creativity will explode. I'm curious how you see this coming about. Is it through a platform that gives these artists legitimacy in a way to actually legitimize what they're doing and receive benefit from it? Or is it because there's a whole bunch of creators that just aren't getting visibility they need? Tell us how how this might come about.

[00:28:39] Yancey: Yeah. Well, I think I saw that piece from Kirby, and yeah, it was great. I think that explosion is already occurring.  [00:28:53]I think that people are still just looking in the dead channel, the dying channels. They're looking in film. They're looking in certain elements of the music industry or certain elements of the publishing industry where we've been trained in the past to look for what is new and what matters. And the answer is that that's not where those things are happening now. [00:29:11] They're honestly, they're happening on substack. They're happening on Instagram. They're happening on TikTok. They're happening in zines that people are making and distributing to each other. I've had an amazing experience a couple times in the past year of making Google Docs of pieces that I didn't wanna publish because they're a little too spicy but I knew some people wanted to read them so I like just made them open for anyone to comment and would just be like don't tweet this but you could share it in like chats. And had multiples of those get like many many many comments and because it was private it had more cache. It was like more valuable because it was private. So that I saw as like a new type of luxury information economy that would happen. But the way I think that these things change, number one, is I think digital forms will emerge that are worth paying for. I think the notion of like only streaming or everything free... I think that there is still ground to be made in creating digital packaging. So I think can we invent the CD for the Internet. Yeah I think we can. You know can we create $5 of value a pop you know for certain pieces? Yes. I think we can. And if I look at the Dark Forest book or my post individual piece like Dark Forest book $60,000 republishing something already made post individual, like, over $2,000 for a PDF or for a zip file. Again, so I think that that is something that can happen. I think my optimistic take is just that this is already the way the culture is moving. That in a culture that's gonna be more and more commodified and just more and more a lot of same same products that it's gonna be creators and those voices that are distinguishing. That's where people will go to make their things stand out. That is who has interesting ideas. That is who's gonna break the AI algorithm of just shitting out the same things over and over to us. But right now, those people are not positioned to economically capture that value. They are treated as 1099 non entities that the ad agency pays as little as possible and they get nothing out of it and everyone else keeps the value. I believe all of that changes. And I think when that changes, I think that the amount of equity that those people have to play with changes. And I think that there's just the potential for, to me, the world of creativity is like I bring up the 1940s/50s it being invented thing just to say it's such a young industry. It's such a young industry. It is still operating according to pre wealth of nation times. You know, the two most significant innovations for creative people the last two decades have been crowdfunding or just patronage, which is like 600 years old. And salaries from Patreon, which is like, you know, 400 years old. Right? So it's like those tools are not there even as all the juice has moved into that segment of culture. And so to me that's just, there's just obvious limits there that don't need to be there. And just at no point in our history and our economy has it made sense has like there been anything there for people to think about in the same way, but things have matured and the Internet has produced such a different environment that I think that stuff just only gets bigger and bigger and bigger.

[00:32:36] Phillip: There are two directions we can go in this conversation, and I'll kinda jump ball it to you, Yancey, whichever way you wanna go. On the first is, it feels like we're circling a conversation where who are the most powerful people in society today, it's not the artist and creative. So if that's a future, who is? Well, we saw this We, Robot event that Elon held a few months ago. It's like to your point, artists and conceptual artists and potentially the science fiction authors and the Asimovs of the world sort of laid out a blueprint for other people to co opt and commercialize. It also at the same time is the homogenization, mass homogenization, has given us a moment for a sort of a creative reboot. It will literally any stimulus whatsoever, any friction whatsoever is interesting because everything is so smoothed over. So gray blobs driving around, they all have the same shape, Cybertruck. That's how you get that. So that's one path. The other path is how do we reenvision a future where if there's this idea space of simultaneous inspiration and we're all building, it's not that Metalabel is the future of commerce. It's that we're all being simultaneously inspired to build a future of commerce that is heading in this direction, this eventuality. So whichever path you wanna take here...

[00:35:06] Yancey: Let's do the optimistic one.

[00:35:08] Phillip: Yeah. I think, yeah, I think that's great. Let's do that. The clip of you dissing on Elon would probably do numbers, but... {laughter}

[00:35:17] Brian: {laughter}

[00:35:19] Yancey: Yeah. No. There was a great Tesla event 2014 where he pitched a Kickstarter at the end of it for Tesla to send something. It's just the first mission to Mars. He proposed Kickstarter, and they made a mock Kickstarter page, so respect. There's always been kind of an indie strand that has lived on the Internet. The Internet began that way. The Well, John Perry Barlow, Stuart Brown, like all this sort of OG culture, Blogger even pre-Google had a bit of that vibe. You know, these days, Kickstarter was certainly speaking to that of the brand and didn't all the way step into that or speaking to that space. But there's always been a notion of like, "Okay, the Internet is mass society. But even in this mass society, you can choose to not be ultimate mass and you can choose to be a little more opinionated about what you do and try to capture a more specific audience or speak to something that was more true to you." The project we should all learn from in a lot of ways is Arena. Looking at Arena over the past decade plus and what CAB and that very small team has done of making something truly for them, making something that had a very specific ambition, but not an unlimited one, recognizing how hard a path that has been to just grind on for years. Hard to stay focused, hard to not get distracted, and chase a new shiny object. Very hard to do. So that is like the number one to be able to do this, you must be able to be extremely disciplined. But what has ended up with is that I think Arena is one of the most meaningful spaces on the Internet. Everyone is a part of it, cares about it so much. I went to a super cool event in a great artist loft here in the neighborhood a few weeks ago and the emcee asked like, "How many of you uh have gone to an artist profile on Instagram?" Or "How many of you gone to an artist website recently?" Five people raised their hand. "How many have gone to an artist profile on Instagram?" Maybe half people raise their hand. "How many of you have gone on Arena?" Every single person's hand goes up. And that was just earned. That has been entirely earned through reputation word-of-mouth. And so that to me is... Craigslist is similar. Craigslist was earlier in the Internet. It could get bigger network effects but these projects have always been the ones that inspired me, and I don't think that projects like those are the future of the Internet but I do believe that we represent a federated set of projects that can mature a lot economically and that ultimately will be sort of a breeding ground for certain types of things that may graduate into bigger platforms. But I'm very optimistic about that. Just  [00:38:09]anyone who's 20 years old today, born and raised on the Internet, there's just like a mentality, a meta modern, just flat openness, super well curated sort of vibe that I just think actually lends itself quite well to operating very specific, but I think very successful, small to medium sized creative businesses. [00:38:32] I root for the unchainish future where we're all building on each other's things. We will certainly have APIs. I'm down for people to zap us into other products and things. Again, those are great things at the Internet that should only be turned on more. So I think I'm counting on those types of things, but then you start talking about AI and whatever everything voice, then I don't know. You lose me then. Maybe it all falls apart.

[00:39:01] Phillip: I hear you. Yeah.

[00:39:04] Brian: {laughter} Man, as you were...

[00:39:04] Yancey: I see that storyline too. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:39:07] Brian: As you were talking, I just had this thought, which is that maybe part of this also is that the speed at which things are moving now, artists and people who build in the intellectual world or the mind world, they used to not be as recognized for their work until usually after they died. Things just took so long for their ideas, for people to catch up to where they just emotionally already were and could sense. But now things move so fast that maybe there is a way to actually connect these things that people who are out in front actually have some sort of tieback to them before they die. Literally, the speed is actually what's gonna enable some of this revolution.

[00:40:06] Yancey: Well, I will often tell people that, yeah, the only real wealth creating move an artist has in their arsenal is to die. Nothing generates more wealth out of their art than their death.

[00:40:17] Phillip: Wow.

[00:40:17] Brian: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:40:19] Yancey: For sure. For sure. Art and creative work just has such a different place in culture now. I mean, we have certainly seen it in our lives. It's gone from a hobby, theater kid type of hobby to now it's really the center. It's like this it's right there with, like, sports and politics, you know, and economics. It's the center of culture. And that is a very recent evolution.

[00:40:44] Brian: It is. What's your process? You're super creative. You're out in front. You're, you know, as Marshall McLuhan called artists, the canary in the coal mine sensing what's next before anyone else and then finding a way to regurgitate that back. What's your process for how you get to where you're at? Because I feel like there is an art to this.

[00:41:11] Yancey: I read a lot of old books. Random old books. Currently right now reading the final of, like, these Eric Hobsbawn history of the world amazing books. Reading on Henri Bergson creative evolution book right now. But I just like read old things, just something that comes across me I just read it. I examine my own emo feelings all the time. I'm really good at that. Really good at hating on myself and trying to figure out why. How precisely can I be disgusted with myself today and that normally reveals something powerful. And then my favorite means of working is my cofounder at Metalabel is Rob Kalin, who started Etsy. And Rob taught me this way of working of when you start a project, you get a big butcher roll of paper, a big scroll. It's right here next to me. And when you start the project, you just start on the first page of the scroll and you just start sketching writing what you're doing. And as you go, you just pull the paper out more and you end up having a chronological timeline of your project. Exactly your thinking. And so I started that with Metalabel over 3 years ago. The very first page has my map out of what I thought our first ten releases would be and now it's like I don't know 50 feet long. I still work on it. The scroll is almost done but I give myself every chance I get, an hour of scroll time, which is I sit at this table with the giant white paper, I have Sharpies in my hand, I don't look at a device, and I don't know what's gonna happen. And I just start writing or sketching. And it has never not produced something that I had no idea was coming. And it's very much like the idea space flows through. But to have that on a big expanse and just like as a part of the practice feeding into just a curiosity that is always running, just works really well. And then I also have multiple like, I'm working on a book that'll come out next year that I'm constantly gathering and reading around. There are multiple of those big projects also always going in the background that I'm consciously or not just grabbing things, thinking about things. And somehow it comes together sometimes. Not always. Not always. But, yeah, I don't know. It's just it's a flow. It's really a flow.

[00:43:50] Brian: Is it a pleasurable thing, or is it a painful thing?

[00:43:54] Yancey: Oh, love. Every step of it. Oh my god. Love.

[00:43:59] Phillip: Pleasure and pain are like the horseshoe, Brian.

[00:44:00] Yancey: Yeah. Parts of it are so hard. I mean, writing This Could Be Our Future. That was like a two year process. Super hard. Loved it. Loved it. When I give myself a couple hours to, like, really write, oh, I'm so happy. And, well, yeah, I don't know. I feel like I'm learning how to be curious. And there's a quote I go to a lot from Joseph Campbell in The Hero With a Thousand Faces... Talks about how in the monomyth, there's a specific role of the artist, and the job of the artist is to remove themselves from society from time to time. Because it's only the artist by removing themselves that gives themselves the ability to be a truth teller. And so the artist must create a retreat to perform their duty for the rest of the tribe. And things like that I think help remind you what this is about. And it's very easy to mistake filling a box of content with creativity. It's not. It's a conjugation. It's an expression. It's a step that we cannot. It's kind of like capitalism at this point. You just can't imagine not having social media. You can't not do it.

[00:45:20] Phillip: Brian, you and I were at a Target picking up batteries for the live recording event we were doing in Brooklyn a few months ago, and I was blown away. I think I mentioned to you when I saw it. It's like, there's a big sign hanging from the ceiling that says, "Creator tools." You go down this aisle, and it's like podcast microphones and vlogging cameras, and it just kinda landed on me. Now granted the target in Wellington, Florida in the equestrian community doesn't have the creator tool section, but it's coming. And I really believe that we are at, when you say creator economy, economies to me get too big to fail. They become a dependable and important facet of society. And if a lot of our economy, if there's an appreciable size of an economy of people who are either supplementing their happiness or their income or both with this expression of making things, then I think that, it is here. It's here in a way that we can't easily get rid of, and we depend on in a way that no one really truly understands yet. And that's where I think it's kind of our job to imagine what a future of creator types who are now also your customers, the level of expectation they have is like a rising tide. You have a rising set of expectations. If you thought two day fast free shipping was a hard expectation to meet, an entire generation of people who grew up in a creator economy have an even higher bar to clear. And that's something that, on a positive level, AI can never live up to. On on a negative level, we haven't seen anything yet as far as height of expectations and also heights of creativity. That's where I think that something enabling people to do this with some frequency and giving them the structure behind it. I think finance is a really hard piece. I think that's a really clever thing to solve for up front. On the other side is there's just realities of creating things in the real world, physical products, that's just hard, and it most people just I don't think most people really realize what goes into it. So I think, yeah, solving one side of the equation for sure. The other side is, there are tools. There's also, like, the ephemera. There's, like, grit. There's things you have to just kinda work through to bring your thing to life. Anyway, I'm monologuing. ancey, we always ask people what the future of commerce is. I think you've that's what this whole thing has been about. But if you had to sort of sum it up, what is what do you think the future of commerce looks like to you?

[00:48:00] Yancey: I'm just gonna say a phrase. I don't know if I'll be able to define it after but I'll say many to many. We've had peer to peer. That's definitely a part of things I'm seeing with my self interest of my own project. But I think that if we look at what crypto primitives, which I think are part of future financial primitives, what they teach us, what we see online is that money flows and that's a success scenario when it's flowing. And I think that part of the way the world becomes more equitable and more people are able to make a living by what they do. I think it is not necessarily by the invention of just new money but it is about the flow of that money. And so I think that can be a thing that can be as simple as paying someone directly now and could definitely be a cultural belief. I pay the people who pay the most or some who knows? Who knows? But, anyway, that's many to many.

[00:49:05] Brian: So it's collective to collective almost. It's like groups building things together, selling to groups that need those things, and then reversing that back again. And it might be the same people in both groups. {laughter}

[00:49:20] Yancey: This is like OpenAI's compute credits with Microsoft for their, you know, $5,000,000,000 investment. Circular economies.

[00:49:28] Phillip: Yeah. Universal basic compute is a phrase that I never thought I'd hear in 2024. But here we are. That seems fundamentally opposed to a future that other platform creators have been predicting, which is the atomization of enterprise, where one person becomes a billionaire, a billion GMV organization or sort of billion dolar organization is built and maintained by one person. That doesn't seem as exciting or as fulfilling. {laughter}

[00:50:05] Yancey: But it's never one person. It's one person who doesn't do shit and ten people who work their asses off. And all the email addresses are assistant to whoever at gmail.com. It's not real. It's not real.

[00:50:22] Brian: It's not real.

[00:50:23] Phillip: Alright. That's well, that's a great mic drop. We have to have you back for a much longer form at some point. It's taken too long to get you on here in the first place. Really appreciate your time.

[00:50:33] Yancey: Yeah. Great. Really super appreciate it.

[00:50:36] Phillip: I'm excited to partner and use Metalabel for our release as well. So really excited. You can find that at FutureCommerce.metalabel.com. And we've got our new book coming out, and that's January 14th. Yancey Strickler. Thank you so much.

[00:50:53] Yancey: Thank you, gentlemen.