Speaker 1: Okay. So, so let's take a step back. Let's look at the publishing industry, where does the money go in the publishing industry? Why are so many people kicked out of it? Because, you know, uh, it really has to do a lot more with, um, sort of social stuff than it does, you know, real raw talent, or even like the, the potential applicability of a creator's voice to a given audience. Right? Yeah. So, you know, you, you have like this kind of thing where, you know, these business people or these celebrities will write these books or get these books ghost written rather. And, and they're just instantly New York times bestsellers and it's like, wait a second. A lot of times, those aren't even very good books. They don't really have all that much to say what's happening here. And, and the answer is that the, the, the, the, the content is being kind of foisted upon an audience that the publisher has curated.

Speaker 1: Um, and so, so what happens in the publishing industry? Isn't like this great search for the next American novel it's, you know, it's, it's more of like, uh, I don't know, it's, it's kind of like marketing for hire type stuff. And, and if you're a big enough time writer, you can certainly afford the biggest gun in terms of marketing. And, and then you get out there and people are gonna buy your book because you're marketing it. Not because it's great, or because it's literature or any necessarily. Um, and, and so what happens here is that we've got like this highly nepotistic culture where it's very difficult to break into these social circles if you're not already a part of them. Um, and, and so, so just, yeah, I mean, like every writer that doesn't fit, that particular social bill is being neglected by this market. Um, so what we want to do is we want to take the smallest simplest most basic tools possible, and we wanna start providing this toolkit to authors so that they can use web three technology just to do better for themselves.

Speaker 2: Welcome to story first, a podcast where we shine a light on the web three Mavericks that are leveraging the power of narrative to create immersive NFT worlds. We investigate the art and science of story building through insightful interviews with creators, collectors, and investors. For those who seek a richer NFT experience. This is your portal to a vivid new realm of fiction. Story. First is a production of story prima whose mission is to encourage the growth and success of story focused NFT projects through research, education, and project incubation story prima doo brings you the blockbusters of tomorrow.

Speaker 3: Hello, and welcome to hashtag story. First. My name is Devin Sawyer, and I'm joined by my esteem co-host and co-founder Barry Donaldson crayons say, hello?

Speaker 4: Hello everyone. Good morning. Good evening.

Speaker 3: Together. We represent story prima, which is a decentralized autonomous organization with a mission to accelerate the growth and success of focused NFT projects through media research, education, and project incubation today, on story first, we welcome Dylan Daniel from the page Dow community page Dow is a revolution and literary technology solving a very serious issue for creatives in our world. Today Dylan's white paper describes the problem. Well, there is an uncountable number of authors and ideas that will not be allowed to move forward with their dreams, their work, or their obsessions. So we love this Dylan because, um, you know, the view and the problem statement there really aligns well with the mission of story prima. And that is to tell the stories that are untold in the world, by the individuals who have the passion to tell them. So let's jump right into the conversation. Dylan, tell us your origin story. How did you get into web three and why page down?

Speaker 1: Oh, Hey, thank you so much for the introduction. Um, and thanks for having me, um, I I'm very, uh, happy to be here just because it's always a pleasure to be able to come and tell this story of the thing that I am most passionate about in the world, which is the page do, um, the page Dell was founded last July, um, by myself and, and the other folks from, uh, the, the work in progress publishing company that we had founded earlier last year. Um, and before that, we were part of a project that was called the library night. And before that it was called Alexandria after the great library of Alexandria, which I'm a big fan of just, you know, historically I, I was reading an article the other day about when it was destroyed and apparently Cesar is the first person who destroyed at least part of it.

Speaker 1: But, you know, I guess the tradition was strong enough to continue despite, um, part of the, the building and part of its working ruined, um, for, you know, hundreds of years. And in fact, uh, there's actually still a library of Alexandria today. So we had to pivot away from that name cuz you know, I mean, what, what they're doing is great and we don't want to, uh, try to compete with them or anything. Um, but okay, so first things first, um, the library of Alexandria historically was more than just a building full of books. Um, it was a rich culture. Um, there were lots of scholars that lived full time at the library. Um, you would sail your ship into port and these folks would come and search it for books. And if they found books, they would potentially pay you to be able to borrow those so that they could copy them and translate them into other languages.

Speaker 1: Um, so, so what we see here with the library of Alexandria is it's not a library that you go down to and check a book out today, although it served that function as well. It was a robust and proactive culture, um, which existed to create and reify written knowledge and spread it throughout the world. Um, so during the destruction of library of Alexandria, what happened was you, you saw the world go from having more information that could more readily spread from one place to another because it was being actively translated into all these different languages bought and sold on the market. Carried around books were very, very valuable. Um, but you see, uh, sort of the dark age or the middle age of history occur, um, when this library is not actively taking Aristotle's books in particular, um, it's hard to say, uh, you know, that, that anybody is that important, but if, if there is anyone who is, I, I think Aristotle is that person, um, because we see sort of the loss of, of Aristotle, you know, corresponding to the early dark ages, we see the rise of the church, we see the death of science, um, and all of these problems that happen when you stop doing the first principles, thinking the Aristotle shows you how to do in books like the Nicki Maki and ethics, um, much less the metaphysics.

Speaker 1: Um, anyway, so, so steering clear of the deeply theoretical aspects of this. Um, I, I think that we can say, uh, with the recovery of Aristotle and the, um, excommunication and then later canonization of St. Thomas Aquinas, um, which basically happened because Thomas Aquinas was the guy who found Aristotle and started writing about him again at the end of the dark age. Um, we, we see science come back. We see first principles thinking, come back after the Aristotle, um, after the recovery of Aristotle. And so, so this is just kind of my favorite like philosophy story from history here, right? I mean, it's just, um, it goes to show, uh, the, the real, tangible impact that having open unfettered, proactive access to written and, um, red materials can create. Um, and it goes to show what happens when we have that and then when we take that away.

Speaker 1: Um, and so, so, you know, this being a core, uh, ideal of my life from the time that I, uh, I, I actually have a master's degree in philosophy applied philosophy and ethics to be specific, and I wanted to be a philosophy professor. Um, but that didn't quite work out. So I ended up teaching for a little while and then going to biotech and then getting pulled into blockchain, uh, by one slack post that a friend of mine made. It said, uh, it said Ethereum use cases, three words and it was a link to sent dot code. Um, and so I went and, uh, started experimenting and was getting tipped in Ethereum and had to figure out what Ethereum was and, you know, pretty much, uh, from there, you know, as they say, the rest is history, I, I wrote about blockchain until I understood it well enough to try to start building one of my own.

Speaker 1: And that's what I've been pretty much up to at the page Dow ever since. Um, but, but our ideal here for the page Dow is not to take a bunch of VC money and, you know, run some famous book by some famous author named Neil up the flag pole and say, Hey, you know, like, look, Neil, did you, can you, you know, write, write, you know, your book and publish it on the blockchain too? No, we want to take, um, publishing as a concept and we want to refigure that concept to make it more open. Um, you can see this at work, in a variety of places. I, I would argue that, um, our friends at scent have recently, uh, done something incredible regarding decentralized social media by, uh, turning app.bio into the first sent.co official, um, app. And then basically you can go and you can make a post and people can, uh, you know, they can subscribe to you and get emails when you make new posts and they can collect an FTS of your post and stuff, but there's no newsfeed.

Speaker 1: So, so it's, um, it's very, very decentralized. And you can just see in, in the way that it works, um, what that looks like in a way that it wasn't possible to see that about social media before, because, you know, if you ask somebody what their Facebook is, they're not gonna say it's their profile. They're gonna say it's their feed, right? And so they make post to interact with other people's user feed. So cutting that out is a really interesting, uh, sort of rub on the social media thing. And, and we want to do that same type of thing, but for books

Speaker 3: Love it. So how do you, so how do you find the books?

Speaker 1: Well, um, we talk to the people who write them. Sure. Makes sense.

Speaker 3: Yeah. So, so, so it's, it's more organized by author rather than topic.

Speaker 1: Oh yeah, absolutely. Well, if you were to look at the page do as like the people who created it and where they all came from, most of them have written books. Um, those who haven't probably will, at some point, we're a, uh, metaverse writer skilled at heart

Speaker 3: Yeah. I love what you say, uh, in your white paper. I'd love to talk, to hear your perspective on this. A little more, um, page represents a network of human beings who support the idea that creating things should provide a viable income, no matter where a creator is from or what the creator, what that creator's role in the greater ecosystem of the creator life of human beings happens to be. That's a pretty powerful, ambitious, visionary, all those buzzwords of greatness you can think of, tell us, like what, tell us about that in your mind as a driving force in page, down your vision around it, and how is the technology coming up to enable something like that?

Speaker 1: Sure, sure. I, I, I think, uh, most of what happens in cryptocurrency these days is something that ultimately enables this in one way or another. Um, I mean, whether it's defi and being able to take the page token and par it to other tokens and, you know, kind of follow the, the, the progression of the development that way through the markets, um, or whether it's more like you're, uh, I don't know. I mean, so, so what's really important here. I, I guess one of the big things that, that really matters the most in terms of bringing people, the opportunity to create a living, um, has to do with sort of SC, right? Because this, the, the creator's network I believe was, was one of their old taglines. And, and they used to say like, you know, Hey, we, we just, we want to make $5, the new, like, um, and that's not what we're doing at page out.

Speaker 1: Exactly. Um, but you can really see a deep inspiration there because one, one of the things that we're experimenting with a bit is right. To earn slash read, to earn, um, and we've got a variety of different experiments in different stages of development. We've got, um, the idea for a new token that would just, you know, be issued and kind of support this and, you know, have, uh, have various different impacts there. Uh, I won't go into it though, cuz that's kind of like beside the point, um, the main goal of the page do is to, I mean, I mean, okay, so, so let's take a step back. Let's look at the publishing industry, where does the money go in the publishing industry? Why are so many people kicked out of it? Because you know, uh, it really has to do a lot more with, um, sort of social stuff than it does, you know, real raw talent or even like the, the potential applicability of a creator's voice to a given audience.

Speaker 1: Right? Yeah. So, you know, you, you have like this kind of thing where, you know, these business people or these celebrities will write these books or get these books ghost written rather. And, and they're just instantly New York times bestsellers and it's like, wait a second. A lot of times, those aren't even very good books. They don't really have all that much to say what's happening here. And, and the answer is that the, the, the, the, the content is being kind of foisted upon an audience that the publisher has curated. Um, and so, so what happens in the publishing industry, isn't like this great search for the next American novel it's, you know, it's, it's more of like, uh, I, I don't know, it's, it's kind like marketing for hire type stuff. And, and if you're a big enough time writer, you can certainly afford the biggest gun in terms of marketing.

Speaker 1: And, and then you get out there and people are gonna buy your book because you're marketing it. Not because it's great or because it's literature or necessarily. Um, and, and so what happens here is that we've got like this highly nepotistic culture where it's very difficult to break into these social circles if you're not already a part of them. Um, and, and so, so just, yeah, I mean, like every writer that doesn't fit, that particular social bill is being neglected by this market. Um, so what we want to do is we want to take the smallest simplest, most basic tools possible, and we wanna start providing this toolkit to authors so that they can use web three technology just to do better for themselves. Um, in, in some cases, Amazon takes royalties of over 65% plus the cost to print the book out of the writer's pocket. Um, page Dell, I mean, 5% that, that's what we ask. Yeah. Um, so, so just absolutely nowhere near the same order of magnitude in terms of, um, you know, fees that are, that you're having to pay as, as a writer. Um, and right now the, the fees, um, on the readme collection, actually, do you guys mind if I just do a quick little intro to read me right quick for everybody?

Speaker 3: No. Yeah, let's do it.

Speaker 1: Yeah. The page dial tech is important too, right?

Speaker 3: yeah.

Speaker 1: Oh, okay. So what read me books is, is it's a, an NFT membership that you can buy it's at membership dot NFT book.com and you go and you pick up this NFT. And then what that NFT does is it gives you permission to go to mint dot NFT book.com and access the NFT book mentor. And basically it takes a PDF. Um, you can go look at it anytime after you get your membership card and kind of see what the fields are that you can fill out and maybe write your book description and, you know, try, try to do a good job with all that stuff. Um, and then from there, what you do is you , and it goes to open sea and it's available on the readme collection. You can do one to a thousand. Um, you can set the price anywhere. You like the books, just come to your wallet after you min them. Um, and you can go put it on open sea and, uh, ask whatever you like price wise. Uh, people may be more likely to buy things at a lower price, but, you know, it's in FTS. So, uh, sometimes just setting a randomly high price is a great way to get, you know, your start. Uh, so anyway, uh, it's is whatever you

Speaker 3: So min. Uh, so it meant to the open sea collection under the readme collection, but also for me is the mentor and book author. It's under my collection and I set the price. Right. That's right. So I'm taking advantage of the scale, hopefully, as you build out the read me brand, I've got the scale and discoverability through, read me as well as I'm recognizes the author and all royalty rights there in the come with on the blockchain. Wow. That's, that's great. Great setup.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, cool. And, and I'm glad you like it because, uh, just as the pay style has the readme collection, we're, we're looking at doing additional collections, that'll have their own membership and FTS, um, and they'll min to their own collections. Uh, and then like, you guys could do one, you know, if you, if you wanted to hire riders and start a magazine or something, you could, you know, uh, mint everything via this, you know, theoretical mentor that would look a lot like readme, uh, to opens sea. And you could have your own page there. And, you know, I mean, whatever the content you put up there would be what would show up. Um, so, so you could work with riders and, and do that whole thing if you wanted to. And you know that, so, so the way that page style grows is not necessarily just by growing the read meat collection.

Speaker 1: Um, and the reason why is because the royalty goes straight to the paged out treasury, um, and part of it is slated for a page token. So if you hold page tokens and you're an author, um, meant to read me, you actually might end up seeing, uh, a little bit of an uptake on the backside in your page position, if your book did really well. Um, but so, so, so it's kind of like this communal project to build readme together, um, that we're all working on right now, but you know, other communities are gonna have their own ability to do this. Um, we're working a lot on token G uh, right now I'm trying to learn COSO laws, smart contracts. Um, I, I guess you could just say I'm learning right, but, but I mean, it's disorienting cuz I don't come from a computer science background. So, uh, I, I dunno, hopeful.

Speaker 4: I've been trying to convince my, my partners here that we need to figure out, uh, or at least at least think more about quadric quadratic funding for art as, and treat art as a public good. There's obviously issues around quality of art. I can't just draw a stick figure and expect to get paid for that's nonsense, but, um, unless it's super, super good or somehow fits the awesomeness anyway. But uh, you guys think about that at all.

Speaker 1: Yeah, no, uh, absolutely. I mean that, that's literally what we hope to use the page token for, um, you know, the idea is that this is a token that if you're a rider, you can earn it by writing somehow. Um, we're still working on the mechanics. Uh, so, so our short term term roadmap is I'm gonna figure out how to write a cosmos and smart contract and deploy one somewhere just to confirm that it can be done. And then, um, my partner, uh, my better half , uh, Robbie is, uh, working on an L one, uh, that'll be its own cosmos SK blockchain, be able to, you know, interoperate with, you know, basically wherever we can set up the smart contract for it to talk to, I think. Cool. Um, and so yeah, like we're, we're about to scale laterally across all different places and it'll be really cool as a reader too.

Speaker 1: Um, because you'll be able to find, you know, paged out books, wherever you go. Uh, we're gonna put 'em on Stargate. We're already listed on orbital market. Um, although we're not doing a bunch of traffic on emos yet or anything, but we've got the, obviously the polygon membership N Ft that I was talking about earlier and the re collection that's on polygon, but we also have stuff on Ethereum main net. And I mean, we're, we're just gonna be everywhere before you know it and, and that's kind of our strategy, right? Like we haven't been loud, we haven't raised a bunch of money. We haven't gotten, you know, anyone famous , um, involved yet, you know, and, and the, the reason for that partially is because we're, we're confirming that this is possible still , you know, we don't wanna go out there and, you know, blow a bunch of smoke up everybody's butt if it's not, but you know, at the end of the day, like we're getting closer and closer.

Speaker 1: So, so I, I just, I don't know, it's kind of like one of those things, like I expect the marketing to kind of start doing itself at some point, because yeah, I mean, this is just really the only decentralized publishing solution, unless you do a book like this, you know, nobody else is even really close and, and the people who could potentially be close to us doing it, then they're deciding to do more boutique stuff instead. Um, so, so that's really interesting to me as well. I, I feel like we, I feel very, it's funny, my bags are down like 95%. I was like all in, on cosmos before the terror collapse. And I mean, that has got well for me. So I'm sitting here, like in my apartment, like, you know, kind of broke, like not really doing much with my life right now, but I am completely happy with the direction that the page down is taking.

Speaker 3: love it.

Speaker 1: So, uh, you know, I wish my bank account was doing as well as my, uh, is my charitable, you know, sort of, uh, you know, uh what, what is it like an effort to, to, to help out mankind ?

Speaker 3: Well, I think it's true to the cause and true to the ethos of web three, or at least the more pure form of what the intention of blockchain and decentralization and, you know, crypto cryptocurrency being in decentralized digital asset. And you're kind of seeing it all come together and, you know, it sounds like you're building some good token systems for page do to enable that vision of, um, let me say it again. And network of human beings who support the idea that creating things you should provide a viable income. Right? So, yeah, I mean, I think, I think it's pretty interesting that we came, oh, I know Barry was a part of your down and found you, but, you know, I came to know about you through the, the viral network, like a, a whole bunch of publisher, not publish, sorry, authors who are in the self-publishing industry, keep talking about this page now and how it just might be the thing that cracks the nuts.

Speaker 3: So I think your strategy for building, um, and making it work and trying to figure out is certainly drawing the right crowd of people who are in the self publishing space. Wanna see publishing flipped on its head, wanna see the gatekeepers not removed, like, you know, executive producers, literary agents, I'm sure they have a role in the future. I just think it needs to change. I think we all agree that the gatekeeper's role needs to change that there needs to be more of discoverability of people. Who's not, um, I don't wanna say sell out, but, you know, who's more pure to their craft and, and can be discovered in new ways that aren't defined by algorithms and or what already makes money and what already celebrity status book contracts look like. And I think, uh, I think, yeah, we, you know, we wanted you on the podcast cuz we support that. It sounds like you're doing it. So, and to be building while you're broke in the bear market, that's amazing. Like that is true heroism in our book. So we love you for us. Yeah. We're doing the same thing. Right. We're all trying to make it work, right. Oh yeah.

Speaker 4: Dylan, have you listened to, uh, the Bankless podcast with bla? I think I talked about this on every freaking podcast, but like everyone we've done, I think I've brought it up, but it's such, uh, I think it's a very valuable insight when people trying to do like what you were doing and what we're trying to do. It's uh, it is the first one they did it's about a year ago, but it's right after he auctioned off an album for like 13 million. Um, it's about finding your true fans and letting your true fans

Speaker 3: Prove that your true fans and all that. So if you hadn't listened to it, it's good.

Speaker 1: Awesome. Yeah. Um, I will definitely listen to it. I've I've got it up now. I, I think I may have listened to it like a year ago, but anyway, uh, definitely a good thing to, to kind of hear um, yeah, I mean, wow. Like, uh, Devin, like what you just said, man, like, uh, I, I don't know. It's, it's kind of like crystallizing this for me. It just starting to focus it in maybe a way that it wasn't really, I don't know, quite there before or something, but really, uh, thank you man. That, that was um, yeah, that was very moving for me to hear.

Speaker 3: Well, I just re replayed what I heard from you. So it's coming from you. So thank you for the time. So yeah, I think, you know what, I, we really like the, um, you know, the many things about you and what you're doing, which we just mentioned, but the fact that you kind of come from this philoso philoso, Phil philosophical background is kind of clearly influencing kind of your direction here and this opportunity to create a decentralized, um, publishing protocol essentially. Um, tell us a little more about that. Like what is it about philosophy that kind of drives you to, to transform the publishing industry?

Speaker 1: Oh, wow. um, okay, so I've got a story for this one too, actually, uh, back in 2016 when I was still teaching. Right. Uh, let's see. Yeah, it was spring 2016 and I, I was driving, I, I had two classes that I was teaching on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Um, and I had to commute about a hundred miles to get there. Right. So I, every Tuesday and Thursday I a hundred miles, you know, two hours driving to Curville, Texas and then back to Austin at the end of the day. Um, and , and, and I love teaching community college. I mean, it was great. Um, but I had applied at Alamo com or at Austin community college locally, and just wasn't able to get caught my foot in the door. And I believe I was making about $3,000 for each one of these 16 week long classes.

Speaker 1: Um, so, so , it, it was not a lucrative profession. Um, and that, uh, semester I did Uber all, um, all, all week during, so by Southwest, uh, so like the whole spring break nine days, um, and I made, I think like $3,500 or something. So it was more than I did for either one of these classes, teaching them for a whole semester more than I had made teaching for a whole semester, my classes at Texas state before. Um, and, and I just thought to myself, my God, but like I am being penalized by my society for my philosophical interest here. You know, like my society values my activity, um, on these intellectual fronts. So little that it actually pays more money to get in my car and drive people around than it does to shape the virtues in the next generation of human minds that are coming up here.

Speaker 1: And, and that just was so profoundly wrong to me. Um, that, that like, I, I just, I mean, it made me like kind of sick, you know, and, and, and, and so I had to quit teaching after that. I, I couldn't teach anymore. I, I just, it was, um, it, it was like, yeah, I was, I was like bummed out about that, you know? Um, and, and so I got up and I went from that to starting startups because I wanted to try to make an impact. And my first startup was a disaster. It was called paradigm automation. It didn't go anywhere. Um, it was basically me and one of my buddies from college, like, you know, trying to kind of get our legs underneath this, but we never really found like whoever it was that we needed to go meet, to get our together and make that a real thing.

Speaker 1: Uh, so that exploded. I just drove for Uber the whole time. And then I went and started the biotech company. And that was a really transformative experience too, because I got to see a different side of like, kind of the academic injustice that's happening in the American university system right now. So on the one hand, you have passionate people that really give a about what they're trying to do, and they can't do it. They can't get in the program. Right. And the reason for that is not because they're not good enough is because they don't have the right connections because, you know, um, the social thing, you know, again, it's, it's just, it's hard to be as autistic as you have to be, to be really good at some of this stuff and be as social as you need to be, to get where you need to go in the bureaucracy to be able to professionally do it.

Speaker 1: Right. I mean, I'm sorry. like, there's just, it's tough. Um, but, but the thing is that, um, in science it's entirely different. Everybody's really upset with their professors. I worked with a bunch of PhDs from like UT for example, and, you know, um, these professors that have, you know, the PhD students, uh, working for 'em in general are people who are working with, uh, well, there there's two types, right? There's either the people that are really working closely with corporate interests and those people like to party a lot, and don't necessarily like to do that much work and kind of put it all on their grad students. And then you have the people who really do kind of give a about it. And they tend to kind of get run out of the institution by the other people who make better bureaucrats, cuz they, you know, they're more social, they party all the time.

Speaker 1: And, and so, so, so it's kind of like this crisis here and then you take the literature side of it, which you have to get involved with if you want to learn anything. Right. I mean, we, we started a biotech company, we had a novel theory. Um, I correctly predicted, um, the, the, the flow of the, the COVID 19 disease. Um, and I predicted the inital cystine would be an effective therapeutic, um, which it actually was proven to be in research. Um, so I mean, you know, we're, we're not disconnected here, but the thing is that what it took was 5,000 articles in 18 months and that volume of articles is not something that you can go pay 50 bucks a piece for. Right. So what we're doing right now is we're telling a generation of young researchers, you don't have enough money, you don't get to do this and what the would we do that for?

Speaker 1: It's just insanity. Um, so, so there was a Russian website that was called, uh, Cy hub dot T w. And I mean, I, I don't know if the statute of limitations is up yet or not, but I went and literally downloaded thousands of articles, read them all. And that's where I got my science education. Um, you know what I mean? And, and so, so that is the type of thing that if I was, um, you know, more of a straight laced, uh, type of person, there would just be no way that I would have access to that. Right. Um, but I'm a computer walk. And so of course I'll turn on my VPN and, you know, go find the information that I need to find, to make my company successful wherever it is, and, and try my best . Um, but at the end of the day, the, the problem is just that, that wherever information is flowing from human to human on these networks, um, there are these impediments that people have been deliberately manufacturing.

Speaker 1: Uh, a lot of it looks like bureaucracy. A lot of it looks like, you know, these, these ridiculous, like accusations of like professors being too leftist or whatever the that's supposed to mean, you know, on campus. And, and it's just. And, and I mean, like it, it is that is designed to further the corporate interests that are controlling these revenue streams, because they're investors like putting some of that money in their pocket and it's not the right thing to do. It's not the right way to structure the market. Um, but you know, I mean, it's, it's the way that the people with all the power say it should be done. Um, and then, so as long as the centralized establishment persists, we're going to see more of this type of stuff. Um, so the one goal that the page do really has at the end of the day, the core of it is simply this speed up the flow of information on human networks, by removing barriers to entry and by making it more equitable to be a creator. And, and so all that means is that if we, you know, if I, if I write something or if you write something, we can then trade that asset on the market, you know? And, and I think the creator benefit from that. Yeah.

Speaker 4: If you can remove the gatekeepers and you can remove more friction from the system, then you have a better chance of finding, um, of, of properly valuing whatever the, the, the produced project is, the, the art. So not artificially changed.

Speaker 1: What if we didn't remove the gatekeepers entirely?

Speaker 4: No, that's not what I meant,

Speaker 1: Reshape their incentives to where they became curators instead of gatekeepers. So now it's like, like if you're a really good writer, you know, okay, I've got 50,000 followers on Twitter, I'm gonna find your book and I'm gonna recommend it to my people, you know? And then, so you're representing something, you're building something now, you know, and instead of it being this thing where you've got like this, you know, stable of buyers and you just kind of charge them rent regardless of what you find , you

Speaker 4: Know, right. I'm a, I'm a pretty firm believer in, it takes skill to produce good art. Um, it's not just random, good luck. And I don't think all art is equal. Like everybody has the right to make art, whatever they want. Right. But DaVinci pretty talented. Mike and Angelo, pretty talented. I can't do anything with Plato, right. It's not the same. Um, but the idea of curation, I think, is a valuable skill. And I don't know, in today's economy, one problem we have is information overload. There's a million good podcasts and there's a million good books and whatever, but if you can find somebody that can curate sort of to your taste and, you know, they can judge good art, whether it's books or art or music or whatever that I think is a valuable thing too. So save me time from having to go and search around.

Speaker 3: I think it goes back to, you know, Dylan, what you described the current gatekeepers is the kind of two things, right? There's a problem with the incentive model, the publishing industry, which is what makes good money and how to make good money again, which is repeating. And then there's the algorithms, which just kind of reinforce back to the user to curation system that this makes good money from you and people like you as opposed to, well, when's the time for the shift. When is the time for us to take our eyes off? What we think is good and look at something that maybe is ugly and is actually amazing. Right. And I think, you know, to me, that's, what's really happened with web two is it's taken our eyes and just put them on one thing. So we don't even know what we don't know anymore.

Speaker 3: And you described when we met earlier, I think the words you used was the open flow of knowledge. And I think that's what you're talking about enabling through page do. Um, so I'd like to go back to that and talk about, so in the context of you, the experience you would have in sort of, you know, the way content is curated today, or the costly, the, the cost of it being, um, you know, prohibitive versus what the blockchain does to fix it, what decentralized does to fix it. Let's go back to that and talk again about how page down is solving in that context.

Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. Um, okay. So in general, what happens when someone writes a research paper is they send it to the magazine magazine, does some things to it, generally layout formatting, uh, they'll have it peer reviewed probably if it's a scientific type of thing. And then after all of this is done, they put it on a server and they put it behind a token gate, or, uh, , you can tell my web three routes thrown deep because I'm defaulting to that. It's a paywall in web two, actually. So it's not a token gate, it's a paywall. And, and so basically the thing is, if you are a subscriber, you can pay a certain amount of money and you can go access the content until the centralized server takes it down. you don't own anything. What you own is the right to view, um, what they already have there.

Speaker 1: Um, and that can be conditional. It could just be for this paper, it could be for all of the papers from, you know, say this journal. Um, but, but at the end of the day, the problem is that the, the information is not the property of anyone except for the journal and the author and the author to publish in the journal, oftentimes signs away the right to publish somewhere else. Um, and so this exclusivity is basically keeping the content from being available via other channels. Um, like the ones that I use back in my biotech days to do all the research. Um, and, and essentially the, the problem here is that we, we just aren't disseminating the content. We're, we're putting it in one place and we're saying, okay, like, you can pay a certain amount, you know, for the right to copy. Right. And, and so if that centralized server was hit by a cyber attack and went down, right, or if there was an MP and it went down, um, you know, I mean, locally, those things can be taken offline and they can be destroyed and, and that's not good for science.

Speaker 1: That's not good for knowledge. That's not good for maintaining the, the, the library of Alexandria, right. To take the metaphor from the store earlier, right. Like that allows the library of Alexandria to be partially destroyed and some of that knowledge to be lost forever. Um, so our alternative at the page though, is to store all of these things and as decentralized away as possible. Um, so right now, what that looks like is a very redundantly, pinned, uh, I P Fs, uh, file system that basically, uh, it's distributed, you know, it's global, you know, something happens to me, that file system can be okay, you know? Um, and, and so there's that component. And then there's the on chain component, which obviously is even more IMM. Um, and, and so the idea is that as people purchase the assets that we're going to create here, um, there will be value there because there is a need, um, on the market to preserve this information.

Speaker 1: Um, so when you're purchasing an NFT book from the page Dow in 10 years, or from someone who worked with page do in 10 years, the thing that you're gonna want to do is probably create your own, uh, redundant IPFS filing system. Maybe, um, you can possibly buy a bunch of these books and start reselling them in your own bookstore as like a, you know, a, a web three, uh, book vendor. Um, you know, you can do these types of things because you actually own the assets. Um, and, and so you can take some responsibility for their, uh, continued imutable storage on the network, if you want to, and you can come and use the assets, even if you don't do that. Um, and, and so there's just this, um, you know, what we've done is we've completely, uh, turned everything upside down and flipped it around. So now it's backwards and now it looks like the incentives line up, right. So what we gotta do is we gotta figure out, Hey, can this thing scale? And we think so. And so we're working on it.

Speaker 3: Yeah, no, I love it. I mean, it, you know, when I think about some of the web two concepts and a lot of, you know, some, we talk a lot about on story first podcast, particularly when we talk to those people kind of thought leaders are building infrastructure like you are, and really thinking about doing things differently. So much of what we're talking about. And it's really a big part of the problem is like education. And we have to change the mindset because people are so stuck in how things work, that the concepts you're bringing up that bring more freedom, more ownership, greater incentive, greater, greater, greater, greater is literally foreign to people like literally foreign. What do you mean? I own the asset. Like you're not dependent on Spotify or Amazon or Netflix for watching a show. You're not hooked into paying them in perpetuity forever. That's what I mean, that's crazy. Is it

Speaker 4: but also like Coinbase or like finance, like the people that are so into defi web free still don't understand say they, I mean, this is a stereotype or generalization, but there's so many people that still don't understand centralized versus decentralized, even in context of, of, of defi. It's just nuts. Like somehow Luna is, is decentralized. Like absolutely freaking not. Yeah. Like, like, uh, it's, it's amazing. I don't know. We're Devin and I, and the other two guys are totally in it for the, uh, I am in it to help humans evolve. Right? If, if you can make humanity a little bit better through this technology, that's what I want. If I can make a living doing it also cool. But this technology I think, has got long legs. We fast forward 50 years, then things hopefully run a bit better. And the tag's always talking about coordination technologies by MOOC. So yeah, if you can, you can make society run a little smoother. That's a good thing. So,

Speaker 1: Well, min um, during my ethics education there, there was just, there, there was this thought that I just repeatedly had, which is that ethics has to be the most complicated discipline in the world. You know why? Because it involves the interrelationship of the human mind , which is the most like thing in the world. So if you're taking, you know, a human mind, which is so complicated that we can't really model it with computers very effectively, despite our massive computing power, and you multiply that by 7 billion, that's the problem of ethics. And it's just this coordination problem. It involves, uh, yeah, like, uh, so one of the celebrities I got to meet here in Austin was Bob Metcalf. And he, uh, he came up with Metcal's law, which I can't even remember. Um, but, but I got to talk to him about some like network theory stuff. And, and so I've, I've got this kind of principle that just whatever flows, the information faster, um, is better. And I'm not sure that, uh, anybody in the world agrees with me on that at all. Um, but I've been testing it for a while.

Speaker 3: dude, you gotta keep it up. Like, you know, like, as we're talking use cases are coming to mind, right? Like the idea that you're not only decentralizing the publishing process and the reading process and bringing asset ownership to what you read. You're, you're also, if we remember the fundamentals of blockchain and what the wallet is, and everything's there and transparent as, and you're in control of transparency that now I can know, if you read a thousand books and 70 books are the, or 70 articles are the ones I wanted to read, and I wanted a somebody else's point, I can go find you. Right. So when you think of read to earn a wow, a tokens model that would incentivize you to read, but then a model that would like, dude, why wouldn't I pay a thousand bucks for an hour of your time?

Speaker 3: You read the 60 articles. I was about to spend 80 hours reading. why wouldn't I start with you, right? Like, just to, to your point earlier, like, why wouldn't we, uh, what's your word again? The, the open flow of knowledge is a massive market. And what corporation benefiting from the current model wouldn't wanna benefit from the new one. It's just education. They gotta learn that as well. So I love that you said earlier, it's not removing the gatekeepers, it's incentivizing them differently. And the incentives are magnificent if they're willing to capitalize it, but you know what, I'm glad it's you and Paige now, um, cuz you're figuring it out. And um, it sounds like you're also on the cusp of, of scaling it across chain so that you're showing up everywhere. And I want to come back to, because you know, I mentioned, um, that people are hearing about you, these self-publishing authors that are innovators and thought leaders, they're talking about you and they're like, yeah, page do is on it. So obviously you said earlier, you know, you're building to get awareness. Are you doing anything else to get awareness? Can you share with the audience, are you doing anything else to kind of make people wear a page down what you're doing over?

Speaker 1: Oh sure. Um, yeah, I mean we, we do a bunch of stuff. Uh, the, the, the, the primary engagement driver that we currently have makes me smile a lot right now it's, it's called past the pin. And what it is is a show, um, that a bunch of us, um, I, I guess most of us met on sent and then there's a, a community on discord. This form called token smart, highly recommend it, uh, at NFT smart on Twitter as handle. Um, and these folks are, uh, part of NF 2 42, which is a company that was created by Jimmy dot E who is kind of like a, you know, like the kind of quintessential syn, uh, success story, you know, he's, he's been in everything forever and he's just awesome. Um, but, but so token smart has been supporting, uh, us, uh, since I think we were Livet and then when we were wi publishing and now we're paged out.

Speaker 1: Um, and, and so, yeah, token smart is awesome. We really enjoy going over there. Um, why I'm telling you about it is because we have a show every Friday from noon, uh, or 1230 to 2:00 PM, uh, central, um, 10 30 to, I guess, noon, uh, Pacific, uh, and basically it's this really crazy free for all where, you know, uh, there's this guy named easy and crypto, he's been kind of my co-founder at page do since the beginning. Uh, just always huge support from easy, really appreciate that guy. Um, but he has for over a year now been running a, uh, show and, and basically like, we're getting really good at creating these, uh, these, you know, kind of group written stories. And, uh, we, uh, Eric St is another kind of original paged out member who has really just picked up, uh, the pace there and just been, uh, helping a lot with the, the describing of the stories and has just left an indelible imprint.

Speaker 1: So, so what it is lately is we've, we've been getting these, uh, NFT projects first. It was bit electro labs next. It was, uh, the fly frogs. And I believe after this, it's gonna be strawberries.wtf. Um, and so the creators come in, they could be as involved or not involved as they want in the story creation. Um, the NFT community that's being featured can come in and participate if they want to. Um, and we, we just write these really awesome, uh, stories. They just make everybody smile and laugh and we, you know, we, we have a lot of fun with it. So, so yeah, you know, it's, it's one of these things like you, listen to me talk about the philosophy or like the academic side, or like, you know, the, the way that the power structures have been set up to kinda like keep me out of science, you know?

Speaker 1: And, and, and it's like, yeah, okay. Like I sound serious then, but like, you know, you can't spin your whole life just being serious all the time. You know, you gotta have some fun and, uh, and get the word out and just, just let the vibe spread sometimes too. So, so there, there's definitely that component of, uh, of the page now as well, which I mean, I'm super proud of. Um, and then of course, you know, we've got the authors, um, some, some of our folks, uh, some of our new members, uh, from the hive community have produced just absolutely incredible marketing materials, and we're getting better and better about getting the word out. Um, but if you are hearing this podcast and would like to help us get the word out, uh, that is probably the single best thing that we could do. Um, because at the end of the day, the thing that's happening is we're all just getting covered up. It's just a tsunami of to do, you know? And, and so every new human being that comes in and, and says, Hey, I want to help with this. And then starts doing something, you know, is obviously a really, uh, a really big, um, improvement for what we've got here.

Speaker 4: Uh, I've got an article coming out. I next issue of theall magazine, so,

Speaker 1: Oh, fantastic.

Speaker 4: Yeah. That's cool too. Push that out there.

Speaker 1: Oh, that was cool. So,

Speaker 3: Well, we'll definitely, um, you know, I think, yeah, I think I instill your vision and your passion for what you're doing is very clear. So, you know, I don't think we have to do too much to say, Hey, check out page Dow. Um, join the cause. Um, I think you'll attract a ton of attention, but to be more specific, if let's say I'm an author, um, and I wanna hop in and publish some paged out, where do I go?

Speaker 1: What do I do? Okay. Um, yeah, the first place is membership dot NFT book baar.com. And then once you've got the membership Ft, you just go to mint dot NFT book, bizarre.com, and you can, uh, you know, mint your book there. Um, also our discord is phenomenal. Uh, we've got a lot of different people from all different walks of life. And if you have questions about any of this stuff, you can get answers in our discord. That's what it's there for. Um, so it's just a really effective coordination tool. Um, and then there is a centralized page where everything is linked to, and it's, uh, formerly our app.bio created by the team at sent, um, who are great friends of ours. Uh, and it's just page.sent.co and sent is spelled C E N T. Yeah. I'm not saying S E

Speaker 3: Page sent.com. Yeah, we'll get you. Um, we'll get you to send us the, a list of links with brief descriptions, uh, Dylan, and we'll post that, uh, in the PO in the podcast description. So folks can click on those lakes and follow from there. Um, before I jump into my last fun kind of, uh, question, um, which draws different perspective from you. I just wanna open up for, uh, my colleague, uh, Barry AK grounds, any, any final questions for Dylan before we,

Speaker 4: Um, have you guys looked into, have you guys looked into, are we at all

Speaker 1: A little bit? It's, it's been a while. Um, I met the guys from storage at the, uh, at consensus here in Austin recently, and I, I think that there is a potentially like a really strong privacy based play or privacy oriented play that you could make, where it would be storage for the storage. And then, uh, what was the front? I, I can't remember what technology the front oh, secret network. Yeah. A Cosmo secret network, uh, contract, because the assets that you meant to a secret network are private by default. Um, so that's just a really interesting property, uh, that, that, you know, I think a lot of people that are involved with page do, would love to experiment with, um, so yeah, I feel like a plumber, you know, it's like I put the pipe together and then I kind of like, you know, like get it there. And then I want people using the pipe to see if it leaks, you know, I gotta turn the water on.

Speaker 4: Yeah. I don't know a ton about, are we, but what I'd read was that their play or their, their interest is long term storage. Like mm-hmm, , you spend a hundred bucks or whatever, and you've got 200 years worth of, uh, censorship resistant storage. So that, that just fits in with what you're talking about, preserving knowledge and helping people increase the wheels.

Speaker 1: Oh yeah. And it brings up a shout out too. I got a shout out, Alex Woff, uh, he, he was my, he was one of my original founders at the library net. He's now had a product at steak fish recently had me on for a podcast, uh, during consensus at, uh, worst of labs here in town. Um, and so, so that was awesome, but he, he runs in, uh, he runs distributed.camp, which is where, you know, a lot of the, the storage projects, uh, go to kind of sharpen their skills sometimes. And anyway, lots of fun stuff. Shout out, Alex.

Speaker 3: No awesome Dylan. So we're gonna come to a close here, uh, as we pass the hour, but, um, one final question for you. Um, we asked this of all our guests on the podcast. So you may have an idea what it's coming, if you've seen any, um, the big question is how long in time, um, years, weeks, months before, in your opinion, before a decentralized autonomous organization, such as page now is awarded with a mainstream award. So it could be a litter literary award that would typically be given to someone in a traditional publishing network. Um, how long do you think until a decentralized publisher, um, accepts an award on behalf of community.

Speaker 1: Oh, wow. And so, so I'm to assume that this has not already happened. um, I don't think so June. Yeah. I feel like this is like, I mean, there's some stuff out there that I, I think should already be probably on a nomination list for, for various different awards. And, uh, I don't know, let's say 18 to 24 months tops probably sooner.

Speaker 3: And you think there's stuff out there now published, um, decentralized self-published that's likely potentially picking up steam that it could be, could be rewarded and recognized if not already.

Speaker 1: We'll see. I, I, what I'm gonna say here is that I see quality. I, I see quality that is indisputable. Um, the it is funny. Uh, yeah, my, my partner paged a indefatigable Robbie, um, is actually who I'm thinking of that probably deserves an award for some of the things he's created there. Um, anyway, there are some unbelievably, prolific, unbelievably talented creators in the web three space and yeah, I mean, like, honestly speaking, I, I think that, uh, there are already things, uh, that are worthy of that and the place that I would start looking if I was somebody who was looking to nominate someone, uh, would be no further than Robbie .

Speaker 3: There you go. All right. Well, take a link for that for, for his work as well, Dylan. Sure. And, uh, yeah, cuz you know, we talk about that, you know, at some point the, the tide is gonna shift when the mainstream can no longer, um, ignore what we're doing here. And we think that, you know, the traditional reward systems that are highly publicized to promote winners and losers will ultimately, um, give a voice to some of the web three to your point. It's quality that wins out in the day. So we, we believe that when the mainstream award is starting to recognize the quality coming out of web three projects and web three communities that, uh, the shift will be beginning and, and, and waters will flow in the right direction. So yeah, that's why we ask that question and, uh, thanks for your answer and, and your optimism.

Speaker 1: Hey, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I know everybody hates NFTs right now. The hatred of the thing is like the last step before acceptance of the thing, you know, and anyway, I put a tweet out the other day that I thought was kind of funny. I said, uh, I also think it's dumb that an NFT allows you to store whatever you want on a blockchain I don't know.

Speaker 3: Nice. Love it. Awesome. I think that's a good, closer, cuz we, we are ultimately a show about, uh, about the, the NFT technology. So with that, yeah, we love it. Uh, Dylan, thank you so much for your time. Uh, an absolute pleasure. I hope in the future, we get to collaborate between story prima and your work. Uh, we hope TAVI on the show again and ultimately we hope for your, um, absolute success with what you're doing. Um, we appreciate you

Speaker 1: Too much. Thanks Dylan. Bye guys.

Speaker 3: Thank you. Easy man. They greasy man.