September 3, 2024 • 49 mins
Welcome back to the State of Flux podcast. Today's episode is truly one for the books. Our guest, Tyree Robinson, has led a life filled with incredible experiences and achievements. From his early days as a trumpet prodigy in New Hampshire to his acting role on Boardwalk Empire, and his unique experiences living on a houseboat and participating in Occupy Wall Street, Tyree's journey is nothing short of extraordinary.
Currently, Tyree is at the forefront of blockchain, crypto, and AI innovation. In this episode, he shares insights from his diverse career, his passion for the arts, and his revolutionary spirit that drives him to disrupt and evolve continuously. Whether you're interested in music, acting, or the latest in tech, this conversation promises to inspire and captivate.
Join us as we dive deep into Tyree's life, his pivotal moments, and his current endeavors. Sit back and get ready to be inspired. Let's dive in!
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Episode Hosted by Rich Nardo.
Intro contains music from "Plan A" by Dmytro Somov.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Music.
(00:13):
Welcome back to the State of Flux podcast. Today's episode is truly one for the books.
I'm thrilled to introduce Tyree Robinson, a guest whose journey has been nothing
short of extraordinary.
From his early days as a trumpet prodigy in New Hampshire, to his acting role on Boardwalk Empire,
and his experiences living on a houseboat, participating in Occupy Wall Street,
(00:35):
and now leading the charge in blockchain, crypto, and AI, Tyree really has done it all.
I've been friends with Ty for about four years, and even I learned a lot in
this interview. So sit back and get ready to be inspired. Let's dive in.
Are you ready? How's your morning going?
Good. Just crypto land, you know, talking about markets and working on too many startups.
(01:01):
You've got a lot of startups in the queue. I have two major ones right now.
And then an infrastructure that we built really recently that really needs to
be its own company. It's this huge piece of infrastructure that everybody needs,
and it's connecting a $20 billion ecosystem to a $30 billion ecosystem.
You are the chief ecosystems officer at Arai Chain.
(01:23):
Yeah. Before you did that, you were an actor and a musician.
That's a very interesting career change. As we're getting into that,
I just want to talk a little bit about your origin stories growing up in New
Hampshire, how you ended up in New York at Carnegie Mellon, and what drew you
to acting in the first place.
So to start off, being black in New Hampshire was a hilarious thing growing
(01:44):
up. And I always knew that it was funny.
And I'm half black, biracial, right? So growing up in school as a kid,
there was always this thing where it was like, you're the athlete,
you know? And I was terrible at sports.
I was awful. I played a little baseball. I was okay. But I was not a basketball
player. Football terrified me. I did not play soccer.
I ran cross country. I played baseball. And I played baseball because my dad
(02:07):
made me play baseball. ball.
I liked it, but it wasn't like a thing that I was going to do for my whole life.
And so in the third grade, I had been doing little league already for a couple of years.
And my mom and I went to this yard sale and saw this trumpet and picked it up. It didn't work.
And I messed around with it at home, twisted in all the little knobs until I
(02:27):
could actually get air blown through it.
And then I would bring it to school and sit out in the playground by myself over in a corner,
trying to blow into this trumpet and make noise and in the
third grade the music teacher mr joseph saw me and he was like yo i've never
seen a third grader play the trumpet ever in my life you should come and join
the elementary school band which was fifth graders so my first experience in
(02:52):
the arts and at the time by the way in third grade.
I was listening to Miles Davis and learning little bits and pieces from ear,
not being able to read music, and just being able to play little bits and pieces
of So What, his solo in So What and something. Is anyone in your family musical?
For a third grader to even know who Miles Davis is, that's impressive to begin with.
(03:14):
So my mother had really good-tasted music, I would say.
My dad Dad listened to a lot of R&B, 90s pop R&B stuff.
We listened to Luther Vandross and Keith Sweat. And my dad also was into West Coast rap and stuff.
But my mom had a great taste of music. And she had a lot of jazz and Marsalis, guys, Arturo Sandoval.
(03:37):
We listened to just a lot more jazz and also some classical music.
And we had two Miles Davis albums, Kind of Blue and Sketches of Spain.
And they were my favorite records.
As a kid right and we you know cds were just kind
of like popping off right we went from having tapes in the car to having cds
in the car and i would listen to that i would listen to jamiroquai i was listening
(04:00):
to we had desiree playing in the car a lot we had prince playing in the car
a lot so i had a lot of these really diverse musical influences that were like funk pop but then also.
A lot of jazz and that was sort of my introduction to
music when i realized because you know in third grade you go from knowing nothing
to knowing everything and that's sort of what i felt like it happened in every
(04:24):
way of my life but specifically in music i didn't know what the trumpet was
i didn't know that miles davis played the trumpet it was just an album my mother played in the car,
But then all of a sudden, it was the pictures of Miles Davis and him playing the trumpet.
And all of those things started to create this deep vibe in me.
So that's where I started.
And then I ended up sort of picking up the trumpet and playing and then getting
(04:46):
into the band scene again in third grade, which always kind of made me feel like a snob.
You know, I was this overachiever.
I had private lessons every Saturday. and huge shout out to Glenda Pine.
A trumpet teacher who took me on in third grade, had never taught a student
so young as me, and we were not well off, right?
(05:07):
He charged my mother $5 for an hour lesson for the entire time I played from
the third grade until I graduated high school in 2006.
I paid $5 every Saturday for my lesson. It was incredible.
So got me off on a really good start. Also gave me a lot of confidence that
I think that some people don't have when they enter playing music for the first
(05:29):
time. I'll just call it an ego.
I had a big ego that I just had dreams. I was like, I can do anything I want
because I'm already ahead of everybody.
So that's where I started. That's such an important lesson. And it's so important
for children to be exposed to art or sports or both or whatever it is,
because for a kid to actually have the confidence to go on and decide who they are, who they want to be.
(05:52):
They need that kind of sense of achievement and pride in something that you're
doing that comes along with learning some form of the arts or playing sports.
Even if you're not great at sports, it's like, well, I was on the team. It's a sense of pride.
And I think the arts is a great way to do that. Yeah. And I think that everything
was much more well-rounded when we were kids.
I think that there was a strong attention to arts education where every maybe
(06:15):
once or twice a week you would have like the music class and the arts class.
And to my understanding, at least here in New York, they don't have that.
And last time I was up in New Hampshire, like the music building was gone at
my elementary school. They had torn it down.
I'm not saying that there isn't a music class anymore. It's just not where it
was. So I just wonder how kids get their start these days.
(06:36):
Maybe it was part of just the political situation. You know,
Clinton was president, saxophone playing, just a different attention to the
value of arts in our culture. I mean, 2.67 million artists are currently in our workforce, right?
That's 1.6% of the American workforce is an artist.
(06:57):
And that's just the people that are sort of in director, actor.
Artist, creative director roles.
That's not everybody else that's influenced by art in their life and contributes our huge GDP.
Art infuses so much money into the economy
so having the creativity be a
part of your upbringing in the beginning is i think so important so every two
(07:18):
months i go down to texas and help this organization called texans for the arts
build policy positions around how to advocate for art funding in a state where
that's basically impossible yeah that's awesome.
25 slashes of the art budget as a
new york by way of new hampshire person how
(07:39):
did you end up getting involved with the texas arts program through
okay so let me this is actually this will get back
into the story about like where i came from a little bit so i went to public
school in elementary school and then i went to public school in middle school
sixth grade i should say was my only year in public school there because you
know you start chasing girls and all the things at the time the music in our
(08:01):
world was Backstreet Boys,
NSYNC, Cisco was my jams.
Thong Song was my go-to at the talent show.
I'd spray painted my hair silver and got up there and all, you know,
a Cisco dance to Thong Song. And I think I got detention for it.
So I had only been sort of a musician up until that point in my life.
Between sixth and seventh grade, my mother was like, you should think about
(08:24):
going to the Derry Field School in New Hampshire, which was on the other side
of town, but it was a private school.
And the only way I was going to go there is if I got a scholarship.
Luckily, being black in New Hampshire, maybe that was part of it.
Maybe it was just all merit.
But, you know, I did get a scholarship to go to this private middle school.
And that's where everything really became real for me in terms of being a musician,
(08:46):
because before that, I was like, oh, yeah, you're playing the elementary school band or whatever.
But now I'm in a private school where you have this beautiful auditorium music facility.
I met one of my biggest sort of guiding forces. Her name is Laurel DeVino.
Know, who was both our middle school teacher for the band, but she was also
the person that did the musical every year.
(09:06):
And that was sort of where the acting thing started to come in.
So now I never thought about being an actor ever in my life.
I knew that I was a clown and I knew that I loved playing the trumpet and that
I was a musician and I could read music and all of that, but I didn't know that
I could sing or any of that stuff.
Right. And so, you know, Mrs.
DeVino said, you know, you should try out for Oklahoma in the seventh grade.
(09:30):
And I tried out and I was terrible and I was in the chorus.
I had no lines or anything like that. But now after being this achieved trumpet
player up until a certain point in time and really being serious as a musician
between the seventh and eighth grade, I was like, I'm never going to be in the
chorus ever again in a musical.
I can do this. I'm going to be a singer. I already know that I can act whatever that means.
(09:54):
I can do all of that. I'm a good clown performer guy. Between that time and
eighth grade, I like took it really seriously. I took singing lessons.
I did all these things. But at that time, my worldview was musicals exist only in middle school.
I didn't even know about Broadway, right? I didn't know about any of that.
What I knew was that there was like a middle school musical and that I wanted
(10:16):
to be the star of that in my like senior year of middle school, which was eighth grade.
That was sort of the evolution for me that then led to seeing the rest of the
world. I had seen Les Mis on video, which sort of changed my life and realizing
that there was a real world for this.
It sort of brought me back to the childhood opera hearing like Oh Solo Mio and
(10:38):
like the three tenors and stuff and being like, OK, that's where this fits into my world.
Now there's a profession in this.
And then I started seeing community theaters in New Hampshire.
One of them was called the Peacock Players. Now, when I say that there are certain
places that have gravity, that they just attract a lot of talent,
(10:58):
more professional actors came out of that little tiny community theater than
any other community that I've ever come across.
Carnegie Mellon, sort of flash-forwarding ahead a little bit,
is like the most exclusive acting and musical theater program in the world, basically.
Like, they accept 10 to 12 people in the musical theater program,
10 people in the acting program.
(11:19):
In the two or three years on either side of me, we had eight people from our
little New Hampshire community in the most exclusive acting and music school
in the country, which was just mind blowing.
And I don't know if that's continued or whatever, but you know,
it was a special time, I think.
And in the process of that, I met one of my best friends in the world.
(11:39):
His name is Chris Kiley, who after his whole acting career went on to be the
head of Texans for the arts, the director of Texans for the arts,
which is this big art advocacy organization.
And him and I have always talked about, oh, one day we're going to do this,
we're going to do that in terms of creative things, projects in the future.
But when AI became a thing, he started saying, all of my constituents are asking
(12:00):
now what our policy position is going to be when we go into the 2025 Texas legislative session.
And we don't have a strong position right now. So like a year ago,
he was like, I just want you to come on board and as an advisor, and we're going to,
panels travel around texas and do talks and sort
of share what we are learning along the way and also
(12:21):
hear from all of the art communities to see what they
want which was just an incredible experience because i've been through chris
we're in these rooms of like anywhere from 16 to 80 year old artists everywhere
every demographic race gender across the spectrum and we're talking about ai
and we're talking about blockchain solutions for ai and intellectual property
(12:41):
and And these were people that were anti-AI when we walked in the room,
that were anti-crypto, that thought NFTs were a scam.
But at the end of every single one of these talks we would have,
they would all come away and be like, that was incredibly informative.
And I actually do see a pathway forward with this technology to help us as artists.
So let us know when there's a product that we can use.
(13:04):
Now, we weren't trying to sell anything, right? We were just going out there
and doing the route and trying to hear from people. But now we're in this really
special place where everybody's looking to us to find a product.
And there are also all of these startups out there building great products in IP and AI.
That we're connecting the dots. So really exciting stuff.
That's sort of where I got tied in in Texas, but I've never given up on arts
(13:27):
being a central part of my journey.
And yeah, it's still a very big driver for me, even though I'm in DeFi land most days of the week.
So does that mean we're going to see you acting again someday?
I don't know. You know, I guess we can talk about this a little bit.
Acting was really my favorite thing. I didn't want to do anything else.
When I discovered acting, I decided that it was going to be either acting or I played the trumpet.
(13:50):
And that was a hard decision for me. And I decided that I was going to be an
actor and that trumpet was going to take a backseat.
And that was when I was like 18 years old. I had applied to all the colleges.
I was getting a full ride scholarship at Carnegie Mellon to go and be a singer, an actor, and a dancer.
And I had never danced in my life. I was the worst dancer on earth.
I still am. But that was a thing. And I said, this is going to be real.
(14:12):
I'm going to go and do that.
And the four years of college, I just think for me, were an incredible experience
for building relationships with the people in my class.
And I would say that some of those people are still my best friends.
And I would say that some of the best education that I got, absolutely,
in terms of acting from a lot of teachers that are no longer at Carnegie Mellon, actually.
(14:34):
And that was enough getting through that hard four years of acting education
to sort of send me into the New York career.
Now, you know, Rich, you see me, I've got these gap teeth.
You know, I wanted to go to Hollywood straight out of college.
I had offers from representation and all that.
But two agents that I met without in LA were like, you have to knock your teeth
(14:55):
out and get veneers if you want to come to LA.
And I was like, I never want to do this. You know, I'm not going to give up
who I am. It's a huge part of who I am.
I'm confident in who I am. I don't have a problem with my teeth.
So you're pointing at something I think
makes me very unique and trying to diminish it and make me feel weak.
And I vowed in 2010, I'm never going to L.A. to go and be an actor or do business.
(15:18):
It's just not interesting.
And I had sort of decided at that point that I was only gonna go after doing stage.
The joke was on me because at the time, I didn't realize that the TV industry
was so big in New York, and most of the work that I did that was important in
New York ended up being on screen anyways.
I was always out auditioning for musicals and all of that.
(15:38):
Of course, in college, I picked up the smoking habit at one point,
so I was smoking a lot of cigarettes, smoking some weed, drinking and partying
too much, whatever it might be.
So I couldn't keep up with the musical theater kids that are militaristic in
the way that they approach their business.
They go to sleep early. They wake up early.
They go to the gym. They work out. They're very precious.
(16:00):
Their bodies are sanctuary. I was not like that. I was like,
you know, I'm going to be this natural talent, whatever it's going to be.
And if it works out, it's going to work out for me.
And so the stage thing was just not going the way that I wanted it to or imagined
it would straight out of college.
You know, I was getting a lot of audition and I was getting callbacks,
but I wasn't getting the job. And so I went out for like one of my first big
(16:21):
TV auditions, which was Boardwalk Empire, Meredith Tucker's office over on 38th Street, I think it was.
And I had slicked my hair down and parted it. I had this little pencil mustache.
I was also sort of this like method person that would always go too far on dressing for an audition.
Like I didn't just like as I am. I always got into like the mood because a lot
(16:42):
of people say that the directors, they don't have that, you know,
no offense to any directors out there.
But they don't have the imagination to necessarily see you in the role if you
don't look like the part.
And so I would always go and try to look the part. And so I did that for this
Boardwalk Empire audition.
And, you know, I got my call back and I went in and this kid,
(17:02):
Kyle Beltran, who went to Carnegie Mellon with me is down to the final callbacks with me.
It's the two of us. And he has been getting every job out of school that he
wanted and was on Broadway.
I was like, Like I'm just, I'm not getting this, you know, but then I ended
up getting it and it, and it went well, I went and did my first episode,
my first season on boardwalk empire, did my scene in one take.
(17:23):
You know, which was like a whole thing for everybody. They were like,
this is your first time on TV and you did this in one take. That was incredible.
And again, that was like this boost of confidence that I had that took me through
the next six years of my career, essentially, you know? I mean,
on my first episode, I was working with legends.
Mike Williams, RIP, is one of the best actors of all time.
(17:44):
In my opinion, in terms of people that you work with on set.
There's never been anybody so gracious as him and kind and immediately was like,
take my cell phone number.
Tom, if you want to hang out sometime, invited me to his birthday party.
And I swear to God, me being on subsequent seasons of Boardwalk Empire absolutely had to do with him.
(18:06):
Yeah, I know that the executive producer liked my
work and Terrence Winter liked my work on that episode but
it wasn't until that next season that i
like felt the love where in my second season i
had scenes with steve buscemi and then i was working with jeffrey
wright and i was working with just these people that like you glorify so much
as an actor getting respect and all of that and of course then they killed my
(18:28):
character off my wife while i was off screen which was fine but going back to
music for a minute mike williams had just done this miles Miles Davis biopic.
And he was working with Toronto Film Festival on it.
And he had actually asked me to teach him how to play the trumpet again,
because he hadn't played in a long time.
(18:48):
So I gave him my first learner's trumpet, and I taught him a little bit.
And then my friend, Dave Levy, who's this really fantastic trumpet player had
gone on after we were sort of like kids playing, he was a real pro.
And I was like, yeah, done with me. Now you should go and learn with Dave and
he had given him a really nice trumpet and was giving him lessons all the time.
(19:08):
It was just kind of this amazing thing. And then whatever it was,
Mike was like, we were shooting in Soho and he was like, come down,
we're going to shoot the trailer or something.
And he was in his full like seventies, Jerry curl, Miles Davis with big furs on.
And that was incredible seeing Mike as Miles Davis.
So full circle from my first sort of musical experiences and to like the most
(19:29):
impactful acting experiences, you know, Miles Davis was always there.
So now you're here, you go to this prestigious school for the arts,
you come out, you land this massive opportunity.
Now you've been on this show, you've got integrated into that world a little
bit. Where are you at mentally?
Are you like, this is it, I'm off to the races, I'm going to be an actor for the rest of my life?
(19:51):
Or are you still scared of what's to come next? Like, when's my next role coming sort of a scenario?
Unfortunately, for my career, I've always been
a revolutionary in 2011 occupy wall
street happened and that ate my soul i was
like this is this is my calling and so the acting stuff
really took a back seat in a lot of ways to being a
disruptor in general you know what i mean like a political
(20:13):
disruptor being there throughout occupy wall street trying
at the end of occupy wall street in november trying to move
the occupation into central park me and
like a couple of buddies did that and led a
big march from all the way from downtown up to central park
and try to like start the camp there and my friends got
arrested and we kind of slank our way back downtown
(20:34):
again and then we tried again to start the occupation
union square in in 2012 at that
point i had decided i wanted to be an artist i wanted
to be a musician a singer still i wanted to
go after all of those things one thing that was really sort
of hard for me was giving up the new york lifestyle so
soon after being in new york right i had moved to
(20:55):
new york i moved to mcdougall street i was like in the part of
everything and i stayed in bushwick for
a long time where i was mckibben lofts when that was popping
and very ragtag and then after that i had moved to chinatown which is a whole
nother year-long conversation where we can talk about chinatown and dame dash
(21:16):
and like my whole experience in that scene but But that was like a whole thing that I had in Chinatown.
And then I think it was in the end of maybe it was 2011, 2012,
Hurricane Sandy happened. 2012.
It was 2012, right? End of 2012. So Hurricane Sandy happened.
A friend of mine said that he found a boat that was $1,000, a sailboat that
(21:40):
was going to cost us a lot more.
There was no mast on it. The mast had gotten knocked down in the storm, all this stuff.
We used JB Weld to put the mast on. It fell off.
It was like this whole thing, right? But we went and bought this boat,
put a motor on it. The motor didn't work.
And then we paddled the boat from Howard Beach out to Rockaway,
which is six miles across the bay, like giant oars, landed in Rockaway and never looked back.
(22:06):
I had decided that boat living was going to be like what I did.
If I wanted to live in New York and be an artist, it was all about sort of lowering
my overhead so that I can be an artist full-time and not feel the pressure to work, basically.
I just didn't want to work. I just wanted to create.
And that's what we did. So I had a few friends. We had a music studio in Bushwick. We had boats.
(22:28):
A friend A friend of mine had a sailboat. I ended up buying a houseboat for
like five grand, sold it for five grand too when I finally sold it.
So I got a plane and I lived on this houseboat in Rockaway from 2013 until 2015
or 16 before sort of like moving back on land. And that was kind of a crazy time.
(22:49):
But in that time it was also i would say the most
freeing i had ever been as an artist i wasn't stuck in new
york anymore it was like okay you know i've got
this really cheap and sustainable thing in new york that i can
always come back to but i got to go to miami and like help run a film festival
with a buddy of mine down there i also went to go work with moises kaufman on
(23:10):
this new production of carmen set in cuba and it was a very cool production
where like there was no money but it was going to be like working with these legends.
I never would have done that if I, you know, had to pay $1,500 a month to live
in Chinatown or something.
And as you know, I'm still in Rockaway Beach today and now raising a family
in Rockaway. So I've never left. Not on the houseboat anymore though.
(23:32):
No, if I raised a family, I do want to raise my family on a houseboat,
but my wife is not open to it yet. Keyword yet.
Yeah. I mean, look, it's all, it's all about business, right?
Like you have to make sacrifices in certain ways.
You know, quality of life is great, right? It's great. I'm lucky to have what
I have here in Rockaway beach, which is a $2,600 two bedroom,
(23:54):
two bathroom place in bell Harbor.
It's unheard of. I have neighbors that are paying five grand a month for less
space than us, but we just got lucky, you know, to have people that are very
local that gave us an opportunity here.
And we've been in this place. We're not going to give it up.
And the good thing thing is that I'm always close enough to go to the city,
to go to Long Island, to go to the Children's Museum,
(24:15):
to go to the Whitney, wherever, wherever they want to go, where we're close
enough to, to be there, but far enough that we can still have space,
which has really been important.
I don't remember what your question was anymore, but as I got sort of to this
point of being out here and being free of everything, it let me stretch out a lot more.
(24:36):
I had been associate director of operations at Knockdown Center,
and I went to a consensus event on crypto, ran into my buddy Rob.
Who was the head of Halborn Security, which is a huge cybersecurity company down there.
He told me about some things. A few years later, I hit him up and was basically
like, I have some freedom now, and I want to start doing some things in crypto.
(24:58):
And he would just put good projects in front of me.
What I was doing was just going and writing blogs. I knew that I wanted to be
in the space, but I didn't know what that was going to look like.
But I knew that in order to sort of continue my education, that I had to be
very active about my approach.
And so I was just blogging a lot about crypto projects. But then also as the
AI thing started to come in in 2020, that was really starting to catch my attention a lot.
(25:23):
And I saw that that was going to be the new frontier. tier.
And so I was looking for a home and a ride chain.
I was writing about them at the time, you know, which was like one of the most
hype things, you know, the company I'm with now. And they offered me a writing gig basically.
And they said, come on board and be a writer for us. You know,
we, we like your blogs, you understand our tech and you break it down well for the general audience.
(25:45):
So can we get you publish everything under our name rather than sort of independently?
And that was where my crazy crypto journey began.
Cause I had been like dabbling and like trading and losing a lot of money on
trading because I'm a terrible trader.
But I was like, I'm in it for like the trading, right? I'm like one of those
guys that's like in it for the tech and will probably ride crypto to zero someday.
(26:07):
Well, that was going to be my question too. When you first discovered crypto
and you were drawn to it, was there any correlation between what drew you to
crypto and what drew you to the Occupy movement?
Yeah, absolutely. Well, it's no coincidence. I think that Occupy and Bitcoin
were both started around the same time and same year.
I don't know if there's any direct correlation, but it's such a convenient time
(26:30):
for those things to line up together in the same exact year.
And so the maturity of crypto has always been about sort of letting everything
go in terms of our government.
I'm not going to say that I'm anti-government, but I'm anti the government that exists today.
I'm a libertarian for all all intents and purposes, I would say that the Occupy
(26:50):
movement was not liberal or conservative in any way, right?
I would say that everybody was very libertarian and.
One of the big failings of occupy wall street is that we never unified around
a single demand we just wanted to overthrow everything
because it was a movement of discontent where we knew that we
were not happy with the circumstances and we
(27:12):
knew that finance was a part of it we
knew that wall street was a driver but we didn't have like policy positions
we weren't going to go lobby we were not organized in that way we didn't know
what we wanted and crypto really did become a moment where I realized that this
was a technology that enabled a new type of democracy.
(27:32):
The problem is that like all democracy, even Occupy Wall Street or anything,
that there's a lot of apathy that comes in to that democracy over time.
So what you have is in the beginning, this huge groundswell of revolutionary
spirit that kind of like drives the tech and the adoption and all of that.
And then slowly you see the grifters and the scammers and the gamblers and all
(27:57):
of those people become the user graph.
And then you have very small percentage of people that actually are purists
and care about the revolutionary potential of the technology.
So I think that some of the big venture people that I like really look up to,
I don't look up to them because they got a lot of money.
I look up to them because they have an agenda that's real.
Like A16Z is absolutely a champion for the startup culture in the U.S., but in the world.
(28:23):
When you look at somebody like that and their ability to sort of take apart
the little tech agenda and align their politics with advancement of startup
culture to disrupt the next generation or the past of technology for the next
generation, I think that it's really important.
Looking at the failings of what happened previously, I think one of the biggest
(28:44):
things that we find here is that artists, content creators.
Anybody in that field, they don't get their cut, right? We all use social media.
We rely on social media to be an advertising tool for us.
But the relationship between AI and this IP that we basically put out there
as advertising, but then it's used to train these AI models or used to help
(29:07):
and create algorithms for marketing, you know, all of these things.
There's so much profit being extracted from the content creator,
from the creative, from the user, right?
In general. So this has always been like where I see the biggest opportunity in Web3.
It's not just sort of the financial rails that it sets up, but it's also the
(29:28):
graduation of the primitives to more appropriate solution sets like dealing
with digital IP ownership,
provenance, dealing with royalties downstream.
And eventually finding common ground to advocate for policy that will actually
enforce royalty protections for creators in these platforms.
(29:49):
And so that's actually what drives me still to today in a lot of ways.
From my experience with OriChain and working with you guys for three, four years now,
just getting to be friends with you, I feel like there's a lot of correlation
between those values that you just mentioned and what OriChain is trying to
do with all their many different ventures in the space.
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So like, I would say one of the first things that
(30:13):
I had taken over in a ride chain was I was chief strategy officer for AI right.
And AI right was an AI generated copyright protocol,
you know, that we had a patent for, or we, that we do have a patent for that
basically ensured that whoever was prompting the AI,
as well as the AI developer and all the people that contribute data to that
(30:36):
AI model development could share royalties.
And it was this primitive royalty system that was very exciting to me.
We didn't know where generative AI was gonna be then.
If we would have, with very tight focus, only spent time dealing with that and
didn't sort of also dabble in DeFi and all of these other things,
(30:56):
I think that AraiChain's overall position.
In the generative ai market would actually be
a lot stronger even than it is today but being
so early in this space it's also allowed us an opportunity to see people that
solutions that have gone above and beyond where we have built and find ways
to connect them to the network of people that we've already sort of worked with
(31:20):
on the ai side we are absolutely advocates for ownable ai AI,
we're absolutely advocates for private intelligence,
and we are all about preserving.
Data privacy or the option opt-in approach to monetizing data and IP.
So I think a lot of our AI and data products have always sort of come out of that.
(31:41):
And then again, you have the DeFi side. Centralized finance is a hornet's nest
for anybody that wants to get into it.
But basically it's just disintermediation, right, where we don't want every
transaction to run through the bank.
We don't want to have to wait days and have permission to withdraw our money.
So we're moving towards a peer-to-peer finance system, which is really the grassroots
(32:04):
of where Bitcoin came from, where we're able to transact with each other,
create liquidity for everything.
And then also the ultimate dream here is to take all of this creative IP and
be able to unlock the value in that, where people can borrow against IP that's
nascent or sitting somewhere and let it sell it directly in a peer-to-peer marketplace,
(32:24):
be able to actually borrow against it or go like Bowie Bond,
where you can take your whole catalog and leverage that to release your next
album and pay it off from the proceeds.
All of that is sort of the future of where our industry is headed.
And again, you can see that one of the biggest fundraisers in the past year
was a project called Story Protocol, which I think they've raised $140 million,
(32:47):
which for crypto is huge.
But Story protocols raise $140 million for an artistic IP blockchain that is
just for registering your IP and being able to.
Protect it and monetize it effectively. Yeah, that's awesome.
Yeah, I'm stoked. I think the IP protection is the major thing that needs to
(33:08):
be figured out for AI and for blockchain to be more generally accepted with artists.
And I had a great conversation with a friend the other day about how current
consumer behavior around how people consume music and media in general is they
want to be participants in it.
There's all sorts of things that you could do with music using AI and AI avatars
(33:31):
that will allow you to create passive income as an artist just by having an
AI set up, an AI model that allows fans to participate with your music,
use it to create specific songs for certain people,
personalization, all that sort of a thing.
So there is so many great tools that I think AI is going to be providing for
the creative world here in the near future. Yeah, the biggest misstep for me
(33:53):
was when Drake sued the deep fake guy who used an AI model to make like a Drake and Future song.
For me, that was a moment where Drake should have said, wow,
this technology just makes me so incredibly scalable as an artist.
And I should absolutely bring this person on to my team.
And I should create a model where anybody can go in and say,
(34:14):
I broke up with my boyfriend today.
And I need a Drake song to talk smack about him. And they would get a song with
Drake's voice on it, and it would be personalized for their experience.
And maybe it's a hit, maybe it's not, maybe it's just for that person.
But being able to create that personal touch with music, I mean,
this is sort of why some music memorabilia has lived on forever,
(34:36):
right? It's because a person stood there and was at that concert or had this thing signed.
It's not so much that it's like this great piece of paper.
It's that there was an experience tied into it.
And the more personal of that experience, the more cherished it is, the more it's worth.
Right. So huge unlock for, for brands and, and artists.
(34:58):
I think we're only in the beginning of that phase right now.
Udio. Are you familiar with Udio?
Yeah yeah i've used it it's incredible
and really scary it always makes me think like whose
voice is this on these yeah you know
yeah same with the other one suno you ever
use suno as well you use suno yeah i actually use suno more than i use udio
(35:21):
but they're both great i was doing a thing on my substack for a while doing
a monthly playlist tied to like my listening habits and i was making the playlist
on spotify but then i would write the lyrics myself and then use udio or Suno
to create the composition for the song.
So it wasn't just another, hey, here's a monthly playlist of what I'm listening to.
It was also, and here's an AI-generated track built around lyrics I wrote that
(35:46):
tie into why I'm listening to these other tracks.
This is one of the things about AI that I think people, I think everybody knows
it now, or maybe we're all starting to get it now, but it's such a great Kickstarter
for your creative process.
Even if you might not be good at this or that,
it can help to compensate and give confidence for somebody that isn't a great
(36:09):
visual artist or, you know, not a great musician or maybe you're good at concepts
but really bad at doing the thing.
It's the unlock to let people be creative.
So one of the first things I made with Udio was actually a potty training song
for my daughter. That's amazing.
And to go and use the toilet and set. that. And it was this very incredible
(36:31):
song. I'll send it to you after you can use as the outro for the podcast.
That's awesome. Yeah. And I had this conversation with my friend.
I don't know if you're familiar with the band Red Gold Green,
but the singer King Green is a good friend of mine and such a big part of their
presence is that they're a phenomenal live band.
So that's where they make a lot of their money. So during the pandemic,
obviously that was taken away from them.
(36:53):
And he started just going on TikTok and talking about music and his process and that sort of thing.
And he built this huge following, turned it into what he's calling the King Green Show.
And he and I were talking the other day about just the pressures.
If you're an artist, it's hard to just say, I'm a trumpet player or I'm an actor
because the money is so tight now in any creative field you go to.
(37:16):
So what we were saying is the market dictates now that that artists need to
be very diverse in what they're doing if they want to find success.
But you're not going to have the time to be a great graphic designer and video
editor and social media guru and writer to keep your sub stack or whatever you want.
So the great thing about AI is it allows an artist to respond to the conditions
(37:40):
needed for success where they're just always present, always on top of mind
for people doing a million different things.
You could use AI to handle all the things that aren't your strong suit so you
don't end up losing hundreds of hours down YouTube rabbit holes trying to learn
how to make a proper graphic on Photoshop or Illustrator.
I think it's an opportunity to increase monetization as much as it's a missed
(38:02):
opportunity being replaced on other projects.
This is sort of something that we were talking about the other day,
too, with MetaMerch. Like, why go to market fast?
Why get out there and put something in people's hands right away?
The truth is, as an entrepreneur, when you're in the startup world,
the most important thing is to get something out there and test it and get feedback on it.
(38:24):
Get people using it and see if it has market fit.
Otherwise, you spend a lot of time assuming market fit and waiting for validation
and thinking that you're just, oh, if I add one more feature or maybe I tweak
this or I use a different type of wording around this,
it's going to change the way that my product is perceived.
There are people that start a startup and after three or four years are like,
(38:47):
I'm almost ready to go to market.
And when I go to market, it's just going to, it's going to boom, you know?
And it's just, you end up in this thing where, you know, obviously sunken cost
fallacy and all that, where you invest a lot of time and then you expect a return on that.
So you keep investing, but on the other side of it, it's also for artists.
(39:07):
It's the same thing. You talk about your friend getting out there on Tik TOK.
Well, we've seen the change in how advertising is done.
Even sort of traditional brands that are coming to TikTok, they're not like doing commercials.
They're saying like, give us an influencer or give us a meme,
give us something that's fast and dirty, that feels appropriate for the medium,
that is going to be cheap for us to do, that we can put out in volume and always
(39:31):
sort of be there in front of our audience.
For any startup, whether you're a music startup or a musician that's trying
to get going or a tech startup and defy, whatever it is, it's like, don't wait.
Don't expect the product to get to a point of polish before you go to market with it.
The most important thing is just get the most crude version of that product
(39:52):
out there right away as you can so that people can say, hey,
this is cool or hey, I'll never use this.
Right. But you need to have that right away. way. Or like, I yeah,
the song or I don't like this song.
I don't know. TikTok is like instant gratification, right?
Where it's either a person like watches your whole video or the drop off is
(40:13):
like three seconds or six seconds or whatever it is.
No, whether your content's working or not.
It's an interesting world. But AI lets you go very quickly to market with anything,
you know, even going to market on like our weekly dietary schedule for my family.
This is what I've got in In my cabinet today, I asked ChatGPT to give us a menu,
and that's where we start, right?
(40:34):
It's like spending budget for the week. Give us a menu based on our dietary restrictions.
We literally use it like that in my family. Because me and my wife could sit there.
We could walk through the grocery store, fill the cart with things we don't
need, or we could argue about what
we want for dinner and know that our daughter is not going to eat a bit.
Or we can offload that really trivial sort of task and then curate.
(40:59):
From that and it's almost like if you think of it
like you're the creative director and you're using these
ais to give you inspiration all you
have to do is say this works that doesn't work that doesn't work
that doesn't work that's okay and then bring it all together and then you know
even if you are a creator that wants to put your original touch on it you can
(41:20):
take that form and give it something put it out there very quickly and be like
okay this is what it kind of of looks like, this is what I'm going for.
Do I like it or is this a waste of time? Do they like it or do they want something
else? And that's important.
Beginning that feedback loop as early as you can, both for yourself and for
your audience, is really important, I think.
(41:41):
One thing that I think was very common throughout your entire journey is the
importance of just doing.
When you were a kid, you bought that trumpet, it didn't work.
You figured out how to make it work and you sat there and you learned, you played by ear.
You talk about changing careers, every step of the way you've just pursued.
You did it, you put in the work. Caution is not really my thing.
(42:03):
My marriage is the best example of this. I met my wife in June.
I knew that I wanted to be with her by September.
And by December, her and I said, let's have a kid and let's just do this.
So in six months, we had made like the active decision to say,
we want to build a family right now. This is where we're going.
And her and I are very much that same sort of way. This is what we want.
(42:27):
We're going to do it right now. Deal with everything else later.
And we continue to be like that and never going to give that up.
I would rather fail fast than fail slow. up.
Failing the first time is the only thing that you can do in order to eventually get to success.
If you don't fail fast, then you can never take a step forward and you can make
(42:49):
yourself feel like you're working and like all of those things.
But the truth is you just have to go and you have to get it wrong.
And then you have to get it wrong again.
And you have to, you know, I don't like the term fail up, but that really is the truth.
You have to keep failing up those stairs until you get there.
I was talking to a friend of mine recently about why I left acting.
He came out from LA. It was the first time we had seen each other in like five years.
(43:11):
He asked me, do you feel like you failed at being an actor?
And that was a hard question for me to really answer, right?
Because I was still acting a year ago.
Or two years ago. I did a short film that went all over the country.
I don't think of myself as an actor anymore, but if anybody ever calls me up
and is like, hey, do you wanna do something?
You know, I'm all about it. I'm not going to pursue something with so little
(43:34):
return financially ever again as my whole commitment, because I learned my lesson on that front.
That was an industry that either you can use acting or acting uses you, right?
The entertainment industry can either be something that uses you as a resource
or you are building something and you take that opportunity to go and be a performer or do something.
(43:58):
And that becomes amplification for all the things that you do in your body of
work as a creative or your personal brand. And that really has been my approach.
Build what I want to build and be creative in terms of business,
separate from my artistic work.
World and if they overlap then they can add value
but without sort of hedging my bets right i
(44:18):
would say that i'm all in on building businesses
not like a gambling mindset which is what acting is
i'm gonna do an audition hopefully i get it i can do that
and i would just say that i am an actor still getting up on stage as a guy you
know who is traveling the world and talking all the time there's all kinds of
times when talking with a panelist that i have no idea what they're building
(44:41):
You have to pivot so fast and like hear what they're saying,
interpret it and say, this is how it fits into like my worldview, my perspective.
So a lot of transposable skills from being an actor, a performer,
musician to getting into the real call and response of talking to VCs all the
time, going to conferences,
(45:02):
you know, doing partnerships with billion dollar projects.
That stuff is like music. It really is. I'm happy you used the word pivot there
because the other thing that I was going to say that I really take out of your
story and that I have a lot of admiration for, your ability to evolve and to disrupt.
Every step along the way, it seems like you've really committed yourself to
(45:25):
embracing disruptive technology or evolving what your focus is without losing
that core sense of self and their passion for creativity.
Because at the end of the day, what you guys are doing at Arai Chain is extremely creative.
That's another thing that I really admire about you and that I really take out
of your story. Thank you, man.
I also, as you know, admire you, Rich.
(45:48):
When you see, I don't know, maybe MetaMers is out there in public.
Yeah, maybe it's not. I don't know where it is right now in terms of your audience
knowing about MetaMers.
But I'm just going to say that when you showed me and told me about MetaMers
maybe six months ago, i immediately was like this is something that we need and seeing the problem.
(46:09):
Right space is so often like the biggest thing and
we know we talked about social media logo we know
that the attention spans are are so short so
like being able to create a product that is built for helping to keep people
engaged with brands and content that's creatives we're talking about creatives
and tech and film people and everything right and influencers like we're all
(46:33):
sort of struggling with the same diminishing attention span,
diminishing return on content that we put out.
So like finding a way to bring new life to that man, like that is something
that I'm super hyped about.
I appreciate it, dude. And you've been a tremendous help on the consulting front
as we're getting this thing further out there to the public and working on this.
(46:54):
So really appreciate that.
I know we said 1230, we're going to wrap just by asking closing,
is there anything you want to promote or where else can people find you if they
want to follow you in a ride chain? Definitely recommend following AraiChain
on Twitter, O-R-A-I-C-H-A-I-N.
You can also follow me on Twitter, if you dare, Tyree Robinson.
(47:15):
T-Y-R-E-E-R-O-B-I-N-S-O-N.
Those are really the main things. If you're bold enough to be on Telegram,
come find AraiChain on Telegram the same way.
That's mostly it. Short plug on my next big venture, which is a DeFi product.
If any of you guys are into DeFi or into crypto at all, I really think that
(47:36):
our industry has been really progressive in the way that we view finance.
But what we've done really poorly is build interoperable technology.
And we've built a lot of bridges. Bridges get hacked, all these different things
sort of transfer money between blockchain.
And so right now what I'm building is called Thesis. And it's sort of the culmination
of what is sort of everything in crypto so far.
(48:00):
But I'm focusing instead on native blockchains. So creating a unified clearinghouse
and communication layer for native blockchains to work together through a standard protocol.
So this is going to allow for a brand new unlock of value from Bitcoin and Litecoin
and all of those sort of traditional big tier one blockchains all the way to
(48:22):
sort of smaller blockchains.
And I think that it's going to be a great and very fertile ground for people
to access liquidity for hopefully creative IP in the future and everything else.
So trading, lending, all of that. So Thesis Foundation, Thesis FND on Twitter,
please come check that out.
There's not too many posts yet, but all that's going to be flowing pretty soon.
(48:46):
And yeah, that's it for me.
Awesome. Well, thank you again for doing this. Thank you very much for having
me on the show. I hope that people enjoy hearing about my little slice of pastry.
I'm sure they will. I know I did. Yeah, thank you, man. I appreciate it.
Music.
Music.
(00:13):
Welcome back to the State of Flux podcast. Today's episode is truly one for the books.
I'm thrilled to introduce Tyree Robinson, a guest whose journey has been nothing
short of extraordinary.
From his early days as a trumpet prodigy in New Hampshire, to his acting role on Boardwalk Empire,
and his experiences living on a houseboat, participating in Occupy Wall Street,
(00:35):
and now leading the charge in blockchain, crypto, and AI, Tyree really has done it all.
I've been friends with Ty for about four years, and even I learned a lot in
this interview. So sit back and get ready to be inspired. Let's dive in.
Are you ready? How's your morning going?
Good. Just crypto land, you know, talking about markets and working on too many startups.
(01:01):
You've got a lot of startups in the queue. I have two major ones right now.
And then an infrastructure that we built really recently that really needs to
be its own company. It's this huge piece of infrastructure that everybody needs,
and it's connecting a $20 billion ecosystem to a $30 billion ecosystem.
You are the chief ecosystems officer at Arai Chain.
(01:23):
Yeah. Before you did that, you were an actor and a musician.
That's a very interesting career change. As we're getting into that,
I just want to talk a little bit about your origin stories growing up in New
Hampshire, how you ended up in New York at Carnegie Mellon, and what drew you
to acting in the first place.
So to start off, being black in New Hampshire was a hilarious thing growing
(01:44):
up. And I always knew that it was funny.
And I'm half black, biracial, right? So growing up in school as a kid,
there was always this thing where it was like, you're the athlete,
you know? And I was terrible at sports.
I was awful. I played a little baseball. I was okay. But I was not a basketball
player. Football terrified me. I did not play soccer.
I ran cross country. I played baseball. And I played baseball because my dad
(02:07):
made me play baseball. ball.
I liked it, but it wasn't like a thing that I was going to do for my whole life.
And so in the third grade, I had been doing little league already for a couple of years.
And my mom and I went to this yard sale and saw this trumpet and picked it up. It didn't work.
And I messed around with it at home, twisted in all the little knobs until I
(02:27):
could actually get air blown through it.
And then I would bring it to school and sit out in the playground by myself over in a corner,
trying to blow into this trumpet and make noise and in the
third grade the music teacher mr joseph saw me and he was like yo i've never
seen a third grader play the trumpet ever in my life you should come and join
the elementary school band which was fifth graders so my first experience in
(02:52):
the arts and at the time by the way in third grade.
I was listening to Miles Davis and learning little bits and pieces from ear,
not being able to read music, and just being able to play little bits and pieces
of So What, his solo in So What and something. Is anyone in your family musical?
For a third grader to even know who Miles Davis is, that's impressive to begin with.
(03:14):
So my mother had really good-tasted music, I would say.
My dad Dad listened to a lot of R&B, 90s pop R&B stuff.
We listened to Luther Vandross and Keith Sweat. And my dad also was into West Coast rap and stuff.
But my mom had a great taste of music. And she had a lot of jazz and Marsalis, guys, Arturo Sandoval.
(03:37):
We listened to just a lot more jazz and also some classical music.
And we had two Miles Davis albums, Kind of Blue and Sketches of Spain.
And they were my favorite records.
As a kid right and we you know cds were just kind
of like popping off right we went from having tapes in the car to having cds
in the car and i would listen to that i would listen to jamiroquai i was listening
(04:00):
to we had desiree playing in the car a lot we had prince playing in the car
a lot so i had a lot of these really diverse musical influences that were like funk pop but then also.
A lot of jazz and that was sort of my introduction to
music when i realized because you know in third grade you go from knowing nothing
to knowing everything and that's sort of what i felt like it happened in every
(04:24):
way of my life but specifically in music i didn't know what the trumpet was
i didn't know that miles davis played the trumpet it was just an album my mother played in the car,
But then all of a sudden, it was the pictures of Miles Davis and him playing the trumpet.
And all of those things started to create this deep vibe in me.
So that's where I started.
And then I ended up sort of picking up the trumpet and playing and then getting
(04:46):
into the band scene again in third grade, which always kind of made me feel like a snob.
You know, I was this overachiever.
I had private lessons every Saturday. and huge shout out to Glenda Pine.
A trumpet teacher who took me on in third grade, had never taught a student
so young as me, and we were not well off, right?
(05:07):
He charged my mother $5 for an hour lesson for the entire time I played from
the third grade until I graduated high school in 2006.
I paid $5 every Saturday for my lesson. It was incredible.
So got me off on a really good start. Also gave me a lot of confidence that
I think that some people don't have when they enter playing music for the first
(05:29):
time. I'll just call it an ego.
I had a big ego that I just had dreams. I was like, I can do anything I want
because I'm already ahead of everybody.
So that's where I started. That's such an important lesson. And it's so important
for children to be exposed to art or sports or both or whatever it is,
because for a kid to actually have the confidence to go on and decide who they are, who they want to be.
(05:52):
They need that kind of sense of achievement and pride in something that you're
doing that comes along with learning some form of the arts or playing sports.
Even if you're not great at sports, it's like, well, I was on the team. It's a sense of pride.
And I think the arts is a great way to do that. Yeah. And I think that everything
was much more well-rounded when we were kids.
I think that there was a strong attention to arts education where every maybe
(06:15):
once or twice a week you would have like the music class and the arts class.
And to my understanding, at least here in New York, they don't have that.
And last time I was up in New Hampshire, like the music building was gone at
my elementary school. They had torn it down.
I'm not saying that there isn't a music class anymore. It's just not where it
was. So I just wonder how kids get their start these days.
(06:36):
Maybe it was part of just the political situation. You know,
Clinton was president, saxophone playing, just a different attention to the
value of arts in our culture. I mean, 2.67 million artists are currently in our workforce, right?
That's 1.6% of the American workforce is an artist.
(06:57):
And that's just the people that are sort of in director, actor.
Artist, creative director roles.
That's not everybody else that's influenced by art in their life and contributes our huge GDP.
Art infuses so much money into the economy
so having the creativity be a
part of your upbringing in the beginning is i think so important so every two
(07:18):
months i go down to texas and help this organization called texans for the arts
build policy positions around how to advocate for art funding in a state where
that's basically impossible yeah that's awesome.
25 slashes of the art budget as a
new york by way of new hampshire person how
(07:39):
did you end up getting involved with the texas arts program through
okay so let me this is actually this will get back
into the story about like where i came from a little bit so i went to public
school in elementary school and then i went to public school in middle school
sixth grade i should say was my only year in public school there because you
know you start chasing girls and all the things at the time the music in our
(08:01):
world was Backstreet Boys,
NSYNC, Cisco was my jams.
Thong Song was my go-to at the talent show.
I'd spray painted my hair silver and got up there and all, you know,
a Cisco dance to Thong Song. And I think I got detention for it.
So I had only been sort of a musician up until that point in my life.
Between sixth and seventh grade, my mother was like, you should think about
(08:24):
going to the Derry Field School in New Hampshire, which was on the other side
of town, but it was a private school.
And the only way I was going to go there is if I got a scholarship.
Luckily, being black in New Hampshire, maybe that was part of it.
Maybe it was just all merit.
But, you know, I did get a scholarship to go to this private middle school.
And that's where everything really became real for me in terms of being a musician,
(08:46):
because before that, I was like, oh, yeah, you're playing the elementary school band or whatever.
But now I'm in a private school where you have this beautiful auditorium music facility.
I met one of my biggest sort of guiding forces. Her name is Laurel DeVino.
Know, who was both our middle school teacher for the band, but she was also
the person that did the musical every year.
(09:06):
And that was sort of where the acting thing started to come in.
So now I never thought about being an actor ever in my life.
I knew that I was a clown and I knew that I loved playing the trumpet and that
I was a musician and I could read music and all of that, but I didn't know that
I could sing or any of that stuff.
Right. And so, you know, Mrs.
DeVino said, you know, you should try out for Oklahoma in the seventh grade.
(09:30):
And I tried out and I was terrible and I was in the chorus.
I had no lines or anything like that. But now after being this achieved trumpet
player up until a certain point in time and really being serious as a musician
between the seventh and eighth grade, I was like, I'm never going to be in the
chorus ever again in a musical.
I can do this. I'm going to be a singer. I already know that I can act whatever that means.
(09:54):
I can do all of that. I'm a good clown performer guy. Between that time and
eighth grade, I like took it really seriously. I took singing lessons.
I did all these things. But at that time, my worldview was musicals exist only in middle school.
I didn't even know about Broadway, right? I didn't know about any of that.
What I knew was that there was like a middle school musical and that I wanted
(10:16):
to be the star of that in my like senior year of middle school, which was eighth grade.
That was sort of the evolution for me that then led to seeing the rest of the
world. I had seen Les Mis on video, which sort of changed my life and realizing
that there was a real world for this.
It sort of brought me back to the childhood opera hearing like Oh Solo Mio and
(10:38):
like the three tenors and stuff and being like, OK, that's where this fits into my world.
Now there's a profession in this.
And then I started seeing community theaters in New Hampshire.
One of them was called the Peacock Players. Now, when I say that there are certain
places that have gravity, that they just attract a lot of talent,
(10:58):
more professional actors came out of that little tiny community theater than
any other community that I've ever come across.
Carnegie Mellon, sort of flash-forwarding ahead a little bit,
is like the most exclusive acting and musical theater program in the world, basically.
Like, they accept 10 to 12 people in the musical theater program,
10 people in the acting program.
(11:19):
In the two or three years on either side of me, we had eight people from our
little New Hampshire community in the most exclusive acting and music school
in the country, which was just mind blowing.
And I don't know if that's continued or whatever, but you know,
it was a special time, I think.
And in the process of that, I met one of my best friends in the world.
(11:39):
His name is Chris Kiley, who after his whole acting career went on to be the
head of Texans for the arts, the director of Texans for the arts,
which is this big art advocacy organization.
And him and I have always talked about, oh, one day we're going to do this,
we're going to do that in terms of creative things, projects in the future.
But when AI became a thing, he started saying, all of my constituents are asking
(12:00):
now what our policy position is going to be when we go into the 2025 Texas legislative session.
And we don't have a strong position right now. So like a year ago,
he was like, I just want you to come on board and as an advisor, and we're going to,
panels travel around texas and do talks and sort
of share what we are learning along the way and also
(12:21):
hear from all of the art communities to see what they
want which was just an incredible experience because i've been through chris
we're in these rooms of like anywhere from 16 to 80 year old artists everywhere
every demographic race gender across the spectrum and we're talking about ai
and we're talking about blockchain solutions for ai and intellectual property
(12:41):
and And these were people that were anti-AI when we walked in the room,
that were anti-crypto, that thought NFTs were a scam.
But at the end of every single one of these talks we would have,
they would all come away and be like, that was incredibly informative.
And I actually do see a pathway forward with this technology to help us as artists.
So let us know when there's a product that we can use.
(13:04):
Now, we weren't trying to sell anything, right? We were just going out there
and doing the route and trying to hear from people. But now we're in this really
special place where everybody's looking to us to find a product.
And there are also all of these startups out there building great products in IP and AI.
That we're connecting the dots. So really exciting stuff.
That's sort of where I got tied in in Texas, but I've never given up on arts
(13:27):
being a central part of my journey.
And yeah, it's still a very big driver for me, even though I'm in DeFi land most days of the week.
So does that mean we're going to see you acting again someday?
I don't know. You know, I guess we can talk about this a little bit.
Acting was really my favorite thing. I didn't want to do anything else.
When I discovered acting, I decided that it was going to be either acting or I played the trumpet.
(13:50):
And that was a hard decision for me. And I decided that I was going to be an
actor and that trumpet was going to take a backseat.
And that was when I was like 18 years old. I had applied to all the colleges.
I was getting a full ride scholarship at Carnegie Mellon to go and be a singer, an actor, and a dancer.
And I had never danced in my life. I was the worst dancer on earth.
I still am. But that was a thing. And I said, this is going to be real.
(14:12):
I'm going to go and do that.
And the four years of college, I just think for me, were an incredible experience
for building relationships with the people in my class.
And I would say that some of those people are still my best friends.
And I would say that some of the best education that I got, absolutely,
in terms of acting from a lot of teachers that are no longer at Carnegie Mellon, actually.
(14:34):
And that was enough getting through that hard four years of acting education
to sort of send me into the New York career.
Now, you know, Rich, you see me, I've got these gap teeth.
You know, I wanted to go to Hollywood straight out of college.
I had offers from representation and all that.
But two agents that I met without in LA were like, you have to knock your teeth
(14:55):
out and get veneers if you want to come to LA.
And I was like, I never want to do this. You know, I'm not going to give up
who I am. It's a huge part of who I am.
I'm confident in who I am. I don't have a problem with my teeth.
So you're pointing at something I think
makes me very unique and trying to diminish it and make me feel weak.
And I vowed in 2010, I'm never going to L.A. to go and be an actor or do business.
(15:18):
It's just not interesting.
And I had sort of decided at that point that I was only gonna go after doing stage.
The joke was on me because at the time, I didn't realize that the TV industry
was so big in New York, and most of the work that I did that was important in
New York ended up being on screen anyways.
I was always out auditioning for musicals and all of that.
(15:38):
Of course, in college, I picked up the smoking habit at one point,
so I was smoking a lot of cigarettes, smoking some weed, drinking and partying
too much, whatever it might be.
So I couldn't keep up with the musical theater kids that are militaristic in
the way that they approach their business.
They go to sleep early. They wake up early.
They go to the gym. They work out. They're very precious.
(16:00):
Their bodies are sanctuary. I was not like that. I was like,
you know, I'm going to be this natural talent, whatever it's going to be.
And if it works out, it's going to work out for me.
And so the stage thing was just not going the way that I wanted it to or imagined
it would straight out of college.
You know, I was getting a lot of audition and I was getting callbacks,
but I wasn't getting the job. And so I went out for like one of my first big
(16:21):
TV auditions, which was Boardwalk Empire, Meredith Tucker's office over on 38th Street, I think it was.
And I had slicked my hair down and parted it. I had this little pencil mustache.
I was also sort of this like method person that would always go too far on dressing for an audition.
Like I didn't just like as I am. I always got into like the mood because a lot
(16:42):
of people say that the directors, they don't have that, you know,
no offense to any directors out there.
But they don't have the imagination to necessarily see you in the role if you
don't look like the part.
And so I would always go and try to look the part. And so I did that for this
Boardwalk Empire audition.
And, you know, I got my call back and I went in and this kid,
(17:02):
Kyle Beltran, who went to Carnegie Mellon with me is down to the final callbacks with me.
It's the two of us. And he has been getting every job out of school that he
wanted and was on Broadway.
I was like, Like I'm just, I'm not getting this, you know, but then I ended
up getting it and it, and it went well, I went and did my first episode,
my first season on boardwalk empire, did my scene in one take.
(17:23):
You know, which was like a whole thing for everybody. They were like,
this is your first time on TV and you did this in one take. That was incredible.
And again, that was like this boost of confidence that I had that took me through
the next six years of my career, essentially, you know? I mean,
on my first episode, I was working with legends.
Mike Williams, RIP, is one of the best actors of all time.
(17:44):
In my opinion, in terms of people that you work with on set.
There's never been anybody so gracious as him and kind and immediately was like,
take my cell phone number.
Tom, if you want to hang out sometime, invited me to his birthday party.
And I swear to God, me being on subsequent seasons of Boardwalk Empire absolutely had to do with him.
(18:06):
Yeah, I know that the executive producer liked my
work and Terrence Winter liked my work on that episode but
it wasn't until that next season that i
like felt the love where in my second season i
had scenes with steve buscemi and then i was working with jeffrey
wright and i was working with just these people that like you glorify so much
as an actor getting respect and all of that and of course then they killed my
(18:28):
character off my wife while i was off screen which was fine but going back to
music for a minute mike williams had just done this miles Miles Davis biopic.
And he was working with Toronto Film Festival on it.
And he had actually asked me to teach him how to play the trumpet again,
because he hadn't played in a long time.
(18:48):
So I gave him my first learner's trumpet, and I taught him a little bit.
And then my friend, Dave Levy, who's this really fantastic trumpet player had
gone on after we were sort of like kids playing, he was a real pro.
And I was like, yeah, done with me. Now you should go and learn with Dave and
he had given him a really nice trumpet and was giving him lessons all the time.
(19:08):
It was just kind of this amazing thing. And then whatever it was,
Mike was like, we were shooting in Soho and he was like, come down,
we're going to shoot the trailer or something.
And he was in his full like seventies, Jerry curl, Miles Davis with big furs on.
And that was incredible seeing Mike as Miles Davis.
So full circle from my first sort of musical experiences and to like the most
(19:29):
impactful acting experiences, you know, Miles Davis was always there.
So now you're here, you go to this prestigious school for the arts,
you come out, you land this massive opportunity.
Now you've been on this show, you've got integrated into that world a little
bit. Where are you at mentally?
Are you like, this is it, I'm off to the races, I'm going to be an actor for the rest of my life?
(19:51):
Or are you still scared of what's to come next? Like, when's my next role coming sort of a scenario?
Unfortunately, for my career, I've always been
a revolutionary in 2011 occupy wall
street happened and that ate my soul i was
like this is this is my calling and so the acting stuff
really took a back seat in a lot of ways to being a
disruptor in general you know what i mean like a political
(20:13):
disruptor being there throughout occupy wall street trying
at the end of occupy wall street in november trying to move
the occupation into central park me and
like a couple of buddies did that and led a
big march from all the way from downtown up to central park
and try to like start the camp there and my friends got
arrested and we kind of slank our way back downtown
(20:34):
again and then we tried again to start the occupation
union square in in 2012 at that
point i had decided i wanted to be an artist i wanted
to be a musician a singer still i wanted to
go after all of those things one thing that was really sort
of hard for me was giving up the new york lifestyle so
soon after being in new york right i had moved to
(20:55):
new york i moved to mcdougall street i was like in the part of
everything and i stayed in bushwick for
a long time where i was mckibben lofts when that was popping
and very ragtag and then after that i had moved to chinatown which is a whole
nother year-long conversation where we can talk about chinatown and dame dash
(21:16):
and like my whole experience in that scene but But that was like a whole thing that I had in Chinatown.
And then I think it was in the end of maybe it was 2011, 2012,
Hurricane Sandy happened. 2012.
It was 2012, right? End of 2012. So Hurricane Sandy happened.
A friend of mine said that he found a boat that was $1,000, a sailboat that
(21:40):
was going to cost us a lot more.
There was no mast on it. The mast had gotten knocked down in the storm, all this stuff.
We used JB Weld to put the mast on. It fell off.
It was like this whole thing, right? But we went and bought this boat,
put a motor on it. The motor didn't work.
And then we paddled the boat from Howard Beach out to Rockaway,
which is six miles across the bay, like giant oars, landed in Rockaway and never looked back.
(22:06):
I had decided that boat living was going to be like what I did.
If I wanted to live in New York and be an artist, it was all about sort of lowering
my overhead so that I can be an artist full-time and not feel the pressure to work, basically.
I just didn't want to work. I just wanted to create.
And that's what we did. So I had a few friends. We had a music studio in Bushwick. We had boats.
(22:28):
A friend A friend of mine had a sailboat. I ended up buying a houseboat for
like five grand, sold it for five grand too when I finally sold it.
So I got a plane and I lived on this houseboat in Rockaway from 2013 until 2015
or 16 before sort of like moving back on land. And that was kind of a crazy time.
(22:49):
But in that time it was also i would say the most
freeing i had ever been as an artist i wasn't stuck in new
york anymore it was like okay you know i've got
this really cheap and sustainable thing in new york that i can
always come back to but i got to go to miami and like help run a film festival
with a buddy of mine down there i also went to go work with moises kaufman on
(23:10):
this new production of carmen set in cuba and it was a very cool production
where like there was no money but it was going to be like working with these legends.
I never would have done that if I, you know, had to pay $1,500 a month to live
in Chinatown or something.
And as you know, I'm still in Rockaway Beach today and now raising a family
in Rockaway. So I've never left. Not on the houseboat anymore though.
(23:32):
No, if I raised a family, I do want to raise my family on a houseboat,
but my wife is not open to it yet. Keyword yet.
Yeah. I mean, look, it's all, it's all about business, right?
Like you have to make sacrifices in certain ways.
You know, quality of life is great, right? It's great. I'm lucky to have what
I have here in Rockaway beach, which is a $2,600 two bedroom,
(23:54):
two bathroom place in bell Harbor.
It's unheard of. I have neighbors that are paying five grand a month for less
space than us, but we just got lucky, you know, to have people that are very
local that gave us an opportunity here.
And we've been in this place. We're not going to give it up.
And the good thing thing is that I'm always close enough to go to the city,
to go to Long Island, to go to the Children's Museum,
(24:15):
to go to the Whitney, wherever, wherever they want to go, where we're close
enough to, to be there, but far enough that we can still have space,
which has really been important.
I don't remember what your question was anymore, but as I got sort of to this
point of being out here and being free of everything, it let me stretch out a lot more.
(24:36):
I had been associate director of operations at Knockdown Center,
and I went to a consensus event on crypto, ran into my buddy Rob.
Who was the head of Halborn Security, which is a huge cybersecurity company down there.
He told me about some things. A few years later, I hit him up and was basically
like, I have some freedom now, and I want to start doing some things in crypto.
(24:58):
And he would just put good projects in front of me.
What I was doing was just going and writing blogs. I knew that I wanted to be
in the space, but I didn't know what that was going to look like.
But I knew that in order to sort of continue my education, that I had to be
very active about my approach.
And so I was just blogging a lot about crypto projects. But then also as the
AI thing started to come in in 2020, that was really starting to catch my attention a lot.
(25:23):
And I saw that that was going to be the new frontier. tier.
And so I was looking for a home and a ride chain.
I was writing about them at the time, you know, which was like one of the most
hype things, you know, the company I'm with now. And they offered me a writing gig basically.
And they said, come on board and be a writer for us. You know,
we, we like your blogs, you understand our tech and you break it down well for the general audience.
(25:45):
So can we get you publish everything under our name rather than sort of independently?
And that was where my crazy crypto journey began.
Cause I had been like dabbling and like trading and losing a lot of money on
trading because I'm a terrible trader.
But I was like, I'm in it for like the trading, right? I'm like one of those
guys that's like in it for the tech and will probably ride crypto to zero someday.
(26:07):
Well, that was going to be my question too. When you first discovered crypto
and you were drawn to it, was there any correlation between what drew you to
crypto and what drew you to the Occupy movement?
Yeah, absolutely. Well, it's no coincidence. I think that Occupy and Bitcoin
were both started around the same time and same year.
I don't know if there's any direct correlation, but it's such a convenient time
(26:30):
for those things to line up together in the same exact year.
And so the maturity of crypto has always been about sort of letting everything
go in terms of our government.
I'm not going to say that I'm anti-government, but I'm anti the government that exists today.
I'm a libertarian for all all intents and purposes, I would say that the Occupy
(26:50):
movement was not liberal or conservative in any way, right?
I would say that everybody was very libertarian and.
One of the big failings of occupy wall street is that we never unified around
a single demand we just wanted to overthrow everything
because it was a movement of discontent where we knew that we
were not happy with the circumstances and we
(27:12):
knew that finance was a part of it we
knew that wall street was a driver but we didn't have like policy positions
we weren't going to go lobby we were not organized in that way we didn't know
what we wanted and crypto really did become a moment where I realized that this
was a technology that enabled a new type of democracy.
(27:32):
The problem is that like all democracy, even Occupy Wall Street or anything,
that there's a lot of apathy that comes in to that democracy over time.
So what you have is in the beginning, this huge groundswell of revolutionary
spirit that kind of like drives the tech and the adoption and all of that.
And then slowly you see the grifters and the scammers and the gamblers and all
(27:57):
of those people become the user graph.
And then you have very small percentage of people that actually are purists
and care about the revolutionary potential of the technology.
So I think that some of the big venture people that I like really look up to,
I don't look up to them because they got a lot of money.
I look up to them because they have an agenda that's real.
Like A16Z is absolutely a champion for the startup culture in the U.S., but in the world.
(28:23):
When you look at somebody like that and their ability to sort of take apart
the little tech agenda and align their politics with advancement of startup
culture to disrupt the next generation or the past of technology for the next
generation, I think that it's really important.
Looking at the failings of what happened previously, I think one of the biggest
(28:44):
things that we find here is that artists, content creators.
Anybody in that field, they don't get their cut, right? We all use social media.
We rely on social media to be an advertising tool for us.
But the relationship between AI and this IP that we basically put out there
as advertising, but then it's used to train these AI models or used to help
(29:07):
and create algorithms for marketing, you know, all of these things.
There's so much profit being extracted from the content creator,
from the creative, from the user, right?
In general. So this has always been like where I see the biggest opportunity in Web3.
It's not just sort of the financial rails that it sets up, but it's also the
(29:28):
graduation of the primitives to more appropriate solution sets like dealing
with digital IP ownership,
provenance, dealing with royalties downstream.
And eventually finding common ground to advocate for policy that will actually
enforce royalty protections for creators in these platforms.
(29:49):
And so that's actually what drives me still to today in a lot of ways.
From my experience with OriChain and working with you guys for three, four years now,
just getting to be friends with you, I feel like there's a lot of correlation
between those values that you just mentioned and what OriChain is trying to
do with all their many different ventures in the space.
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So like, I would say one of the first things that
(30:13):
I had taken over in a ride chain was I was chief strategy officer for AI right.
And AI right was an AI generated copyright protocol,
you know, that we had a patent for, or we, that we do have a patent for that
basically ensured that whoever was prompting the AI,
as well as the AI developer and all the people that contribute data to that
(30:36):
AI model development could share royalties.
And it was this primitive royalty system that was very exciting to me.
We didn't know where generative AI was gonna be then.
If we would have, with very tight focus, only spent time dealing with that and
didn't sort of also dabble in DeFi and all of these other things,
(30:56):
I think that AraiChain's overall position.
In the generative ai market would actually be
a lot stronger even than it is today but being
so early in this space it's also allowed us an opportunity to see people that
solutions that have gone above and beyond where we have built and find ways
to connect them to the network of people that we've already sort of worked with
(31:20):
on the ai side we are absolutely advocates for ownable ai AI,
we're absolutely advocates for private intelligence,
and we are all about preserving.
Data privacy or the option opt-in approach to monetizing data and IP.
So I think a lot of our AI and data products have always sort of come out of that.
(31:41):
And then again, you have the DeFi side. Centralized finance is a hornet's nest
for anybody that wants to get into it.
But basically it's just disintermediation, right, where we don't want every
transaction to run through the bank.
We don't want to have to wait days and have permission to withdraw our money.
So we're moving towards a peer-to-peer finance system, which is really the grassroots
(32:04):
of where Bitcoin came from, where we're able to transact with each other,
create liquidity for everything.
And then also the ultimate dream here is to take all of this creative IP and
be able to unlock the value in that, where people can borrow against IP that's
nascent or sitting somewhere and let it sell it directly in a peer-to-peer marketplace,
(32:24):
be able to actually borrow against it or go like Bowie Bond,
where you can take your whole catalog and leverage that to release your next
album and pay it off from the proceeds.
All of that is sort of the future of where our industry is headed.
And again, you can see that one of the biggest fundraisers in the past year
was a project called Story Protocol, which I think they've raised $140 million,
(32:47):
which for crypto is huge.
But Story protocols raise $140 million for an artistic IP blockchain that is
just for registering your IP and being able to.
Protect it and monetize it effectively. Yeah, that's awesome.
Yeah, I'm stoked. I think the IP protection is the major thing that needs to
(33:08):
be figured out for AI and for blockchain to be more generally accepted with artists.
And I had a great conversation with a friend the other day about how current
consumer behavior around how people consume music and media in general is they
want to be participants in it.
There's all sorts of things that you could do with music using AI and AI avatars
(33:31):
that will allow you to create passive income as an artist just by having an
AI set up, an AI model that allows fans to participate with your music,
use it to create specific songs for certain people,
personalization, all that sort of a thing.
So there is so many great tools that I think AI is going to be providing for
the creative world here in the near future. Yeah, the biggest misstep for me
(33:53):
was when Drake sued the deep fake guy who used an AI model to make like a Drake and Future song.
For me, that was a moment where Drake should have said, wow,
this technology just makes me so incredibly scalable as an artist.
And I should absolutely bring this person on to my team.
And I should create a model where anybody can go in and say,
(34:14):
I broke up with my boyfriend today.
And I need a Drake song to talk smack about him. And they would get a song with
Drake's voice on it, and it would be personalized for their experience.
And maybe it's a hit, maybe it's not, maybe it's just for that person.
But being able to create that personal touch with music, I mean,
this is sort of why some music memorabilia has lived on forever,
(34:36):
right? It's because a person stood there and was at that concert or had this thing signed.
It's not so much that it's like this great piece of paper.
It's that there was an experience tied into it.
And the more personal of that experience, the more cherished it is, the more it's worth.
Right. So huge unlock for, for brands and, and artists.
(34:58):
I think we're only in the beginning of that phase right now.
Udio. Are you familiar with Udio?
Yeah yeah i've used it it's incredible
and really scary it always makes me think like whose
voice is this on these yeah you know
yeah same with the other one suno you ever
use suno as well you use suno yeah i actually use suno more than i use udio
(35:21):
but they're both great i was doing a thing on my substack for a while doing
a monthly playlist tied to like my listening habits and i was making the playlist
on spotify but then i would write the lyrics myself and then use udio or Suno
to create the composition for the song.
So it wasn't just another, hey, here's a monthly playlist of what I'm listening to.
It was also, and here's an AI-generated track built around lyrics I wrote that
(35:46):
tie into why I'm listening to these other tracks.
This is one of the things about AI that I think people, I think everybody knows
it now, or maybe we're all starting to get it now, but it's such a great Kickstarter
for your creative process.
Even if you might not be good at this or that,
it can help to compensate and give confidence for somebody that isn't a great
(36:09):
visual artist or, you know, not a great musician or maybe you're good at concepts
but really bad at doing the thing.
It's the unlock to let people be creative.
So one of the first things I made with Udio was actually a potty training song
for my daughter. That's amazing.
And to go and use the toilet and set. that. And it was this very incredible
(36:31):
song. I'll send it to you after you can use as the outro for the podcast.
That's awesome. Yeah. And I had this conversation with my friend.
I don't know if you're familiar with the band Red Gold Green,
but the singer King Green is a good friend of mine and such a big part of their
presence is that they're a phenomenal live band.
So that's where they make a lot of their money. So during the pandemic,
obviously that was taken away from them.
(36:53):
And he started just going on TikTok and talking about music and his process and that sort of thing.
And he built this huge following, turned it into what he's calling the King Green Show.
And he and I were talking the other day about just the pressures.
If you're an artist, it's hard to just say, I'm a trumpet player or I'm an actor
because the money is so tight now in any creative field you go to.
(37:16):
So what we were saying is the market dictates now that that artists need to
be very diverse in what they're doing if they want to find success.
But you're not going to have the time to be a great graphic designer and video
editor and social media guru and writer to keep your sub stack or whatever you want.
So the great thing about AI is it allows an artist to respond to the conditions
(37:40):
needed for success where they're just always present, always on top of mind
for people doing a million different things.
You could use AI to handle all the things that aren't your strong suit so you
don't end up losing hundreds of hours down YouTube rabbit holes trying to learn
how to make a proper graphic on Photoshop or Illustrator.
I think it's an opportunity to increase monetization as much as it's a missed
(38:02):
opportunity being replaced on other projects.
This is sort of something that we were talking about the other day,
too, with MetaMerch. Like, why go to market fast?
Why get out there and put something in people's hands right away?
The truth is, as an entrepreneur, when you're in the startup world,
the most important thing is to get something out there and test it and get feedback on it.
(38:24):
Get people using it and see if it has market fit.
Otherwise, you spend a lot of time assuming market fit and waiting for validation
and thinking that you're just, oh, if I add one more feature or maybe I tweak
this or I use a different type of wording around this,
it's going to change the way that my product is perceived.
There are people that start a startup and after three or four years are like,
(38:47):
I'm almost ready to go to market.
And when I go to market, it's just going to, it's going to boom, you know?
And it's just, you end up in this thing where, you know, obviously sunken cost
fallacy and all that, where you invest a lot of time and then you expect a return on that.
So you keep investing, but on the other side of it, it's also for artists.
(39:07):
It's the same thing. You talk about your friend getting out there on Tik TOK.
Well, we've seen the change in how advertising is done.
Even sort of traditional brands that are coming to TikTok, they're not like doing commercials.
They're saying like, give us an influencer or give us a meme,
give us something that's fast and dirty, that feels appropriate for the medium,
that is going to be cheap for us to do, that we can put out in volume and always
(39:31):
sort of be there in front of our audience.
For any startup, whether you're a music startup or a musician that's trying
to get going or a tech startup and defy, whatever it is, it's like, don't wait.
Don't expect the product to get to a point of polish before you go to market with it.
The most important thing is just get the most crude version of that product
(39:52):
out there right away as you can so that people can say, hey,
this is cool or hey, I'll never use this.
Right. But you need to have that right away. way. Or like, I yeah,
the song or I don't like this song.
I don't know. TikTok is like instant gratification, right?
Where it's either a person like watches your whole video or the drop off is
(40:13):
like three seconds or six seconds or whatever it is.
No, whether your content's working or not.
It's an interesting world. But AI lets you go very quickly to market with anything,
you know, even going to market on like our weekly dietary schedule for my family.
This is what I've got in In my cabinet today, I asked ChatGPT to give us a menu,
and that's where we start, right?
(40:34):
It's like spending budget for the week. Give us a menu based on our dietary restrictions.
We literally use it like that in my family. Because me and my wife could sit there.
We could walk through the grocery store, fill the cart with things we don't
need, or we could argue about what
we want for dinner and know that our daughter is not going to eat a bit.
Or we can offload that really trivial sort of task and then curate.
(40:59):
From that and it's almost like if you think of it
like you're the creative director and you're using these
ais to give you inspiration all you
have to do is say this works that doesn't work that doesn't work
that doesn't work that's okay and then bring it all together and then you know
even if you are a creator that wants to put your original touch on it you can
(41:20):
take that form and give it something put it out there very quickly and be like
okay this is what it kind of of looks like, this is what I'm going for.
Do I like it or is this a waste of time? Do they like it or do they want something
else? And that's important.
Beginning that feedback loop as early as you can, both for yourself and for
your audience, is really important, I think.
(41:41):
One thing that I think was very common throughout your entire journey is the
importance of just doing.
When you were a kid, you bought that trumpet, it didn't work.
You figured out how to make it work and you sat there and you learned, you played by ear.
You talk about changing careers, every step of the way you've just pursued.
You did it, you put in the work. Caution is not really my thing.
(42:03):
My marriage is the best example of this. I met my wife in June.
I knew that I wanted to be with her by September.
And by December, her and I said, let's have a kid and let's just do this.
So in six months, we had made like the active decision to say,
we want to build a family right now. This is where we're going.
And her and I are very much that same sort of way. This is what we want.
(42:27):
We're going to do it right now. Deal with everything else later.
And we continue to be like that and never going to give that up.
I would rather fail fast than fail slow. up.
Failing the first time is the only thing that you can do in order to eventually get to success.
If you don't fail fast, then you can never take a step forward and you can make
(42:49):
yourself feel like you're working and like all of those things.
But the truth is you just have to go and you have to get it wrong.
And then you have to get it wrong again.
And you have to, you know, I don't like the term fail up, but that really is the truth.
You have to keep failing up those stairs until you get there.
I was talking to a friend of mine recently about why I left acting.
He came out from LA. It was the first time we had seen each other in like five years.
(43:11):
He asked me, do you feel like you failed at being an actor?
And that was a hard question for me to really answer, right?
Because I was still acting a year ago.
Or two years ago. I did a short film that went all over the country.
I don't think of myself as an actor anymore, but if anybody ever calls me up
and is like, hey, do you wanna do something?
You know, I'm all about it. I'm not going to pursue something with so little
(43:34):
return financially ever again as my whole commitment, because I learned my lesson on that front.
That was an industry that either you can use acting or acting uses you, right?
The entertainment industry can either be something that uses you as a resource
or you are building something and you take that opportunity to go and be a performer or do something.
(43:58):
And that becomes amplification for all the things that you do in your body of
work as a creative or your personal brand. And that really has been my approach.
Build what I want to build and be creative in terms of business,
separate from my artistic work.
World and if they overlap then they can add value
but without sort of hedging my bets right i
(44:18):
would say that i'm all in on building businesses
not like a gambling mindset which is what acting is
i'm gonna do an audition hopefully i get it i can do that
and i would just say that i am an actor still getting up on stage as a guy you
know who is traveling the world and talking all the time there's all kinds of
times when talking with a panelist that i have no idea what they're building
(44:41):
You have to pivot so fast and like hear what they're saying,
interpret it and say, this is how it fits into like my worldview, my perspective.
So a lot of transposable skills from being an actor, a performer,
musician to getting into the real call and response of talking to VCs all the
time, going to conferences,
(45:02):
you know, doing partnerships with billion dollar projects.
That stuff is like music. It really is. I'm happy you used the word pivot there
because the other thing that I was going to say that I really take out of your
story and that I have a lot of admiration for, your ability to evolve and to disrupt.
Every step along the way, it seems like you've really committed yourself to
(45:25):
embracing disruptive technology or evolving what your focus is without losing
that core sense of self and their passion for creativity.
Because at the end of the day, what you guys are doing at Arai Chain is extremely creative.
That's another thing that I really admire about you and that I really take out
of your story. Thank you, man.
I also, as you know, admire you, Rich.
(45:48):
When you see, I don't know, maybe MetaMers is out there in public.
Yeah, maybe it's not. I don't know where it is right now in terms of your audience
knowing about MetaMers.
But I'm just going to say that when you showed me and told me about MetaMers
maybe six months ago, i immediately was like this is something that we need and seeing the problem.
(46:09):
Right space is so often like the biggest thing and
we know we talked about social media logo we know
that the attention spans are are so short so
like being able to create a product that is built for helping to keep people
engaged with brands and content that's creatives we're talking about creatives
and tech and film people and everything right and influencers like we're all
(46:33):
sort of struggling with the same diminishing attention span,
diminishing return on content that we put out.
So like finding a way to bring new life to that man, like that is something
that I'm super hyped about.
I appreciate it, dude. And you've been a tremendous help on the consulting front
as we're getting this thing further out there to the public and working on this.
(46:54):
So really appreciate that.
I know we said 1230, we're going to wrap just by asking closing,
is there anything you want to promote or where else can people find you if they
want to follow you in a ride chain? Definitely recommend following AraiChain
on Twitter, O-R-A-I-C-H-A-I-N.
You can also follow me on Twitter, if you dare, Tyree Robinson.
(47:15):
T-Y-R-E-E-R-O-B-I-N-S-O-N.
Those are really the main things. If you're bold enough to be on Telegram,
come find AraiChain on Telegram the same way.
That's mostly it. Short plug on my next big venture, which is a DeFi product.
If any of you guys are into DeFi or into crypto at all, I really think that
(47:36):
our industry has been really progressive in the way that we view finance.
But what we've done really poorly is build interoperable technology.
And we've built a lot of bridges. Bridges get hacked, all these different things
sort of transfer money between blockchain.
And so right now what I'm building is called Thesis. And it's sort of the culmination
of what is sort of everything in crypto so far.
(48:00):
But I'm focusing instead on native blockchains. So creating a unified clearinghouse
and communication layer for native blockchains to work together through a standard protocol.
So this is going to allow for a brand new unlock of value from Bitcoin and Litecoin
and all of those sort of traditional big tier one blockchains all the way to
(48:22):
sort of smaller blockchains.
And I think that it's going to be a great and very fertile ground for people
to access liquidity for hopefully creative IP in the future and everything else.
So trading, lending, all of that. So Thesis Foundation, Thesis FND on Twitter,
please come check that out.
There's not too many posts yet, but all that's going to be flowing pretty soon.
(48:46):
And yeah, that's it for me.
Awesome. Well, thank you again for doing this. Thank you very much for having
me on the show. I hope that people enjoy hearing about my little slice of pastry.
I'm sure they will. I know I did. Yeah, thank you, man. I appreciate it.
Music.
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