Signals Through the Noise: Do Creators Need Permission Anymore?

[00:00:04] This is the Crypto Hipster Podcast. This is not a traditional interview show. These are perspective-driven conversations with founders, builders, and independent creators shaping what comes next.

[00:00:26] We go beyond headlines, beyond hype, and beyond price to explore ownership, freedom, and opportunity in the digital economy. Where builders talk freedom, not price.

[00:00:48] Today's conversation is interesting to me because I don't think it's really going to be about just crypto or NFTs. I think this is a conversation about creators, financial stress, participation, and who actually gets access to emerging systems. So a lot of creators live under prolonged economic instability. And that changes how people think about risk, technology, trust, and opportunity.

[00:01:18] So today, we're going to explore the interaction between creator survival, community funding, economic pressure, and the psychology surrounding participation in digital systems. My guest today is Sergey Garysin-Mashiv. You're going to correct me here. You know, nobody knows how to pronounce this name anyway. I do Garysin-Mashiv. Great. But anyway, it's probably correct. Thank you for joining me.

[00:01:47] So, let's kick things off. And I'm going to ask you first, you know, what makes, what made you start, you know, thinking about creators specifically? Well, I've been a creator my entire professional life ever since university. You know, I was taking some classes, and they were kind of noise. And then I had my own ideas, and they were much more fascinating.

[00:02:16] And because I was a computer science major, I could build them. I was like, okay, more way more interesting. And then I got that bug, you know, I was like, I'll make stuff. And in parallel, as I was doing software and building different companies, and, you know, a lot of times trying and failing. I was also very creative in terms of being artsy. I make music now.

[00:02:39] And so I've just always had that parallel thread of those kind of two lives, you know, being nerd in one way and a nerd in a totally different way. But always creating things. And for a long time, like it's a struggle. You know, if you get a nine to five job, it's a different kind of struggle. Like maybe you're pressed for time, and the job isn't easy. But you have this financial security.

[00:03:05] But if you go out and pursue your dream or, you know, step out to any kind of risky venture, it's suddenly a freefall because, ah, there's no more paycheck. Ah, ouch. You know, and you always want and hope to solve that way sooner than it happens. Just because, you know, you always hope for the best case and what happens usually the average case. So the hope versus reality just doesn't compute.

[00:03:34] And I ended up living kind of, you know, going from a software engineer salary to a no salary, where I was for some time kind of trying to make money with my little startup ventures early on. And it was like budgeting on a napkin, you know, $100 from this source, $200 from this client, and I can make rent some months. And that lasted for a long time for me until I figured things out and I made my business grow.

[00:04:00] And that chronic stress was a profound experience. It really made an imprint on me, which is really why I wanted to build something for creators, which was my whole life, so that they can get a little bit more help in that.

[00:04:20] Because it wasn't just profound for me later, I learned all the science of that and the trauma and the damage from the chronic stress and how it even changes your brain biologically. You know, but it's a universal experience that isn't just specific to me. It's really broadly experienced. You know, I'm sure that during that chronic stress period, you notice certain patterns, right?

[00:04:48] What patterns did you notice that really bothered you? The one thing, and this again is not me, science backs this, but I experienced this before I learned all the science. I just kind of, oh, it's happening to me, you know. But when you are under extreme stress, your brain cannot focus on the long-term planning. You know, the right thing is the hard thing long-term. Can't do it.

[00:05:17] You're only able to try to relieve your short-term pain, which leads to short-term focused decisions, which leads to poor work, shortcuts, right? And actually, I struggled longer because of the inability to step back and think, okay, what will make me stronger long-term? What will make me better at my craft?

[00:05:47] Instead, at that time, I was making a lot of content, and I wasn't working on how can I improve my content. I was like, I just need to churn up more and more content, but it wasn't, you know, per piece of content. I was generating very little revenue, and it was kind of like spinning my own wheels, where I was creating content, poor quality now in hindsight.

[00:06:09] But it was the only thing I can do to kind of inch up rather than if I had taken a step back, thought, how can I get better? Maybe got some coaching, maybe took some more intelligent steps, more long-term thinking steps. I could have solved my own problem better. But, you know, it was in hindsight, I can see it, but I also see how it just, there was no help also. Like, there was nobody to give me that magical advice.

[00:06:41] You mentioned, and when you first reached out to me, you said that creators often reject crypto because they cannot afford to participate in risk systems. What do you mean by that, and why the contrary imbued for what I've heard otherwise? So I think we should make some distinctions.

[00:07:03] The creators who are into NFTs, they are like 1% of creators who are very early adopters. So, of course, they'd be into it because they are the early adopters. But if you talk about creators and like a person who's writing a novel on their piece of paper, you know, pen and paper or on their laptop, but they're not in crypto, right?

[00:07:34] They're just not native in that universe. For them, it's really hard to get into it because probably if they are writing their own novel, they're likely financially struggling because most people don't have a book deal. And if you don't have a book deal, you're probably investing your time and effort into a later payout, meaning you're not getting paid now unless you have like a part-time job, which if you do have a job,

[00:08:00] it relieves some stress, but it only leaves you like weekends and evenings to write, which is when you're tired, when it's not optimal. So your best time is given to your job, not your creative work. So, but if people sacrifice and risk, then they're really living on a financial freefall. And so they don't really have the extra money to go, hey, I'll experiment with crypto risky investments, right? They're the furthest thing from that.

[00:08:29] And when I leave the nerdy online world where everybody seems to be up on crypto and AI and that whole universe, it seems to be like everybody's into it. When I turn the computer off and go to like offline, you know, like writing workshops or music workshops, I haven't met a person yet who's like really into crypto. So some people can tolerate it, but most people are like really averse.

[00:08:56] They see it as a scam and it's just a different population, right? Because the NFT crowd, we call them creators, but we should kind of decouple the different creators. Like in the past creators were more like traditional artists, musicians, actual artists, you know, sketch, sketch, actual art, art, which in my case would be like stick figures, but better than that. Or writers. That would be that those that was the definition of creators, right?

[00:09:26] In the online world. Now we have YouTubers are creators and streamers are creators. So that definition got very conflated. And of course, these people are a lot more entrepreneurial in the online sense. They're more native to it. And the step towards crypto is a more natural step. But even so, a lot of the online entrepreneurs, they're, you know, not everybody's into crypto, right? So it's a subset of a subset of creators that were ideal for NFTs.

[00:09:56] But NFT, you know, like we chatted a little earlier, a lot of NFT was like 2% art, 98% crypto. So it was really coming, everybody who was, you know, if you define the word art, and if you were a little bit strict about how you called, whom you call creator, the actual art, artsy musicians and artists and authors would not call the kitty NFTs.

[00:10:25] Remember those, I forget the exact name, but yeah. And all the other ones, they would not call that art. They would laugh at it. So a lot of the NFT creators, they're not really creators. Oh, God. But then they say if the real creators are struggling financially, the novelists, that's going to impact the quality of the novel, isn't it? For sure.

[00:10:51] Because, well, table that maybe and likely because you are quite a bit pressured. Now, some people do amazing work when they are pressured because if you have to be homeless next week, you will really, really, really work so much harder than you would otherwise. Because fear is a, people don't like to talk about it, but it's an incredibly strong motivator.

[00:11:15] So if you are really struggling and the alternative is even worse financial situation and the way out is the book or is launching off whatever you're creating, it will get you to focus.

[00:11:31] Now, the quality of the work, yeah, maybe full of shortcuts, maybe not as exquisite as you would wish, but it would certainly have those trade-offs, but at least it would more rapidly get created and launched. So there are some trade-offs, but yeah, you're right. A lot of quality suffers. Got it.

[00:11:52] So as the creator economy, like, I guess it has an improved creator stability or fragmentation, has a focus that has a creative fragmentation? I think the fragmentation is probably the right view because there are some people who are the slow adapters,

[00:12:19] who they still live in that universe of 1990s or 80s or before where, like take authors, for example, or musicians, they don't understand the gift that they've been given with free publishing, right? Like self-publishing, whether it's a book on Amazon, biggest bookstore in the world. In the 90s, that was Barnes & Noble or whatever. You would beg for that, right?

[00:12:44] Here, it's available to you and they still don't think of it as first step. They're like, oh, I'm going to get a book deal. They live in that universe from 30 or 40 years ago. Same with musicians. They need a record deal. No, not really. Maybe, right? And so a lot of people just haven't taken that step.

[00:13:09] Now, why there may be multiple reasons for different people, why they don't venture into this new world. I guess that's just human nature. You know, some people adapt sooner than later and some people never. But when I turn the computer off and when I go into actual like real world, actual artsy communities of, you know, very grassroots one, not of like necessarily successful creators.

[00:13:37] Although successful creators very often are the very few that get deals. Then they go out and brag, oh, you know, my publisher. And everybody's like, oh, publisher. And I'm sitting there thinking like, why in the universe would you give 30% to a book agent? Sorry, 15% to a book agent, 15% to a publisher where Amazon is right here. Just like it's faster even, right? But I learned to be quiet because it's usually me who is one against like the many in that group. So I'm quiet.

[00:14:06] But, you know, I am personally like I over 10 years ago, I wrote some, I've written some books that are, that have had commercial success and have been used at some universities. Which I didn't think that was ever going to happen. The universities found me on Amazon without me reaching out to them. So I'm very pro self-published. Like I'm like, wow, it's a gift. Because I don't think in the gatekeeper world of publisher, I would ever gotten accepted.

[00:14:37] So I'm like, wow, it's an amazing gift. But some people just, just don't. So it definitely is fragmented. But very surprising to me, the fragmentation seems skewed in that most creators are still in that old world thinking. Got it.

[00:14:59] So let's, let's take a piece of that fragmented population and talk about the ones who are online and on Amazon and now building their, their, hopefully, you know, notice people notice their books through social platforms. Okay. Okay. How much of the modern creativity is now focused on performance metrics for those creators than, than, than before?

[00:15:31] Do you mean in terms of when they're self-publishing or? Yeah. So I'm wondering if those creators are becoming, you know, less creators and more algorithmic labor. I think so. It is definitely that because. Well, it really depends on how strictly again, you define art. When you go. On TV today, they call just about anybody artists. Right.

[00:16:00] But then you look at it and like, wow, this is really horrible quality. I would not actually call this art. I could have tweeted that same, you know, the lyrics of that song reads more like a Twitter than a beautiful art, arty poetry. So there's definitely what, when I was learning about art, I'm not seeing that in the online arts. Not even in the strict definition, but in any form, almost.

[00:16:31] I see like poetry and I look at poetry and I'm like, well, this really just could have been Twitter posts. Look, I don't see any imagination, metaphor, simile, imagery, like, you know, anything that has to, like you would, you know, things that go into defining a poem or whatever. Right. And also broader works, larger works. So there's obviously different taste is subjective.

[00:16:56] But yeah, certainly online, you don't survive unless you're growing. And if your audience likes what we might call some kind of a more base content, you know, like there's a woman I know, I won't say anything, but her poetry is just all sexual, like all sex. It's totally fine. The topic never matters. But there is a certain audience that is like, ooh, cool.

[00:17:27] Right. Whether, but if that same quality of poetry was about flowers or something, whatever, something benign that doesn't really get attention, something a little more boring. That audience wouldn't be there. Right. So you kind of have to almost pander, but, you know, create content that audiences want and online audiences. They really only seem to want a few verticals of topics.

[00:17:52] Also, if you're any kind of political, you'll get, you know, it's hard to say, but you'll be, you know, immediately more, you'll get a lot more attention because we live in a kind of a political age. Whereas if you try to write about, here's what's true beauty, like zero viewers or some politician sucks or is good.

[00:18:17] Those, you know, the names of politicians today, they're very emotionally evoking. And so, of course, the audience will look at that, click on that. And so I think creators, any creators from many podcasters to artists are focused to go where the demand is kind of. Got it.

[00:18:37] So you're saying a point that creator stops being a creator and becomes a financial operator managing expectations is the point where they have to pander and they usually have to pander about politics and sex. Or other topics that get a lot of attention, which, you know, I can't blame people because everybody has to make enough revenue to pay rent. Like without that, it's a feeling of desperation like we talked about. And then it's just like, how do I solve the rent problem? And it's very human nature.

[00:19:05] I mean, people ranging from top CEOs do this, right? Like how do I make enough money so that my company can, you know, have a good balance sheet next quarter or something, right? So it's a challenge that is like a much broader challenge of like, how do I make enough money for certain goals next? And then I got to do whatever I got to do to get there. Got it. So you are working to help creators with funding, right?

[00:19:31] So what problems are you actually trying to solve? And where do traditional funding systems completely fail creators? So traditional funding systems for artists tend to be websites like GoFundMe or the most popular one is Patreon. The Patreon is great at the moment.

[00:19:53] But when I looked a little deeper into it, I was like, huh, they take from 5% to 12% commission depending on certain pricing levels. And when I looked deeper in cryptocurrency, I'm like, wow, okay, the great hedge against the dollar is the deflationary nature of a lot of cryptocurrencies, which is another 3% to 5% on the dollar, closer to 5%, despite what the government says. Because when I did the calculation with Chad GPT, it was close to 5%, government says 3%, let's settle on 4%, whatever.

[00:20:22] So if you couple the fees of Patreon, the loss of value by raising money with dollars and holding dollars, and on the flip side of that, you can add benefits of actual financial real benefits of cryptocurrency, like staking rewards, airdrops, and other real potential benefits.

[00:20:49] I calculated a turnaround of 15% to 25% on every dollar that people get raised, right? Once you add all those factors. And I thought, ooh, you know, that's incredibly compelling. Especially, I thought it wasn't good to take money in commission fees from creators. If you're a Patreon, you have to pay rent, I understand. But you're also taking money from mostly not the wealthiest.

[00:21:19] So I tried my best to create a financial system, you know, with the token, the SPRK token, that really fights for the creator. And the problem I tried to solve is the problem that I faced, what I hoped was months, but turned out to be years of chronic financial stress.

[00:21:45] Because to this day, even though maybe I've turned into like a crusty old man, you know, in my old age, but I still, when somebody's telling me about how much they're struggling, or like they're trying so hard, it's not working, and they're kind of early in their journey, like my heart like opens up to them, you know, like in a natural way. I really feel a ton of empathy, because I go back 20 years, or maybe 15. I don't know, depends how you count.

[00:22:14] But I go back too many years, a lot of years. And I still see myself, you know, back then, like struggling, just trying to make YouTube videos at that time, or whatever. And, you know, try just getting by. And I'm kind of always transported to that time in my life. And I try to solve that for, you know, whoever kind of I have these conversations with, not always successfully, I can't help everybody.

[00:22:43] And, you know, there's only so much you can do. But that's really why at the heart of it, I created this. And to a smaller degree, I did want to do something to support creators, because like we talked about earlier in our conversation, like, it's all I've been doing my whole life is like, creating this, creating that, living in a world that's a product of my own curiosity, which I think has been really invaluable to me, like, it's been a fascinating journey.

[00:23:12] Um, but it's totally hard, because, you know, you're going to pay for that out of your own pocket and with your own struggle, which maybe is good, because you kind of have to go through some challenges to become more resilient. Because if everything was so easy, just, you know, then, I don't know, like, some things have to be hard to be to feel valuable.

[00:23:40] Um, or I don't know what the right way to phrase it is. But you kind of have to get that resilience muscle at some point in your journey. So can't solve every problem. But certainly, I think if you help people get through the financial stress, and, you know, trauma is a like highfalutin kind of fancy term.

[00:24:08] But it is close to that, you know, the chronic stress over years that a lot of creators and some, some creators never solve that, they keep struggling. And if, if I can help people expedite that process, uh, then I think it's a fantastic project, you know, because it shouldn't be like, how can I make money? I think at some point, I was like, what kind of a nice thing can I do in the world? Got it. So, I think you phrased it pretty well.

[00:24:37] Um, but I'm drawing a, as you're speaking, I'd grow, I'd grow a parallel here. I'm looking at financial startups and their relationships to VCs. And I'm comparing that to creators and their relationships to donors. Right? Right? Do donors subconsciously behave just like VCs, even if legally they're not?

[00:25:01] It's a hard question because I haven't quite crossed that bridge in this project, right? Because one of the features of this project is that if a creator meets finance, you know, attained some financial success from a funded project, they're able to redistribute some of the funds as a volunteering, as a volunteer decision. Like, Hey, thank you for helping me succeed. Here's 10% of everything I made.

[00:25:30] Totally trust-based. I made X amount. Here's 10% to the original donors. So, it's a unique feature that I built, which, you know, you're right to, uh, I think brainstorm here in that because it's unique, there really isn't a lot of precedence to it, not just in my project, but in general.

[00:25:54] Um, I'll tell you some things that I, you know, as we've emailed about it, I've thought about it. Well, certainly most projects fail anyway. So, some expectations have to be set. I think most businesses fail and there are no immediate statistics of it just because it's possible to track, but most artistic projects, I think fail at an even higher rate because it's just so hard to make money from artistic projects.

[00:26:23] Um, like if you want to be a musician, great, but it's for losing money, not making money for like most people lose money. Right. Um, so there's some expectation on the part of the donor because a lot of the donors, they are friends and family. They're not looking to make money necessarily. Their friends and family just want to support their fans who just want to support.

[00:26:46] So, that's the angle that I think is closer to reality here because I will be very careful to say, Hey, it's possible to, from, you know, you started as a donor, but you might actually make some, some money as a profit, or at least get some money back. If it's not everything, it's an interesting, unique feature, but it's not the goal.

[00:27:11] And I'm going to, in my messaging, be very careful because I think people are going to be disappointed and wait long and hard if they want a return on their investment. Um, because, you know, being a creator myself in business ventures and in artsy ventures, in artsy ventures, it almost never makes money, any money, like forget profit.

[00:27:40] Uh, and even business ventures. Now, even though I have some experience and some success under my belt, I know that ego aside, if I start 10 projects in the future, even with experience and knowledge and et cetera, et cetera, nine of them probably will fail. It's just the nature of the, you know, a lot of things aren't even up to me. There's economic cycles, there's competition, there's ever changing, you know, today it's things, something's popular the next day, AI killed it.

[00:28:09] So it's so hard to succeed that I wouldn't make the culture of this project that I'm building and this token that donors should feel like they're investors. Now they, all, everything I said may fall on their fears, um, which is a real challenge.

[00:28:34] I think, um, but at the same time, even, even investors, they might ask, Hey, how is my project going? Oh, it failed. All right. Well, what else can I do? Um, so I think there is an actual that ends to projects that just don't make money. Um, so I'm, I'm, I'm looking at, you know, the traditional financial route.

[00:29:00] I'm looking at the Patreon and looking at, you know, um, GoFundMe and I'm looking at your, your cryptocurrency project. And I'm just wondering if you're recreating the same exclusion patterns that technology claimed to solve or not. Partially, right. Because when I tell like the offline, you know, artsy, artsy people, the non NFT, the exact opposite of them, when I tell them, Hey, I've got a crypto project.

[00:29:28] They hate crypto, right? So yeah, it's not for them. And I've learned that very quickly. So the right audience for my project are more tech savvy who are already interested in raising money through Patreon, already interested in a few factors. Maybe they're open to crypto. Maybe they're just need funding.

[00:29:53] And they know that the traditional route of, you know, agent and publisher isn't the way for them, but they still want to raise money somehow. And they're open to ideas. Some of them are maybe open to cryptocurrency because they're probably a little bit more tech savvy already. So that's my audience. People who are already a little tech savvy, already open to raising money with donations,

[00:30:20] already looking for maybe, uh, Patreon alternatives, which there are plenty of people who are searching that, like even on Google keyword tool, like that search is not a small search. I mean, it's not giant, but it's, it's, there's some, there's, it's significant enough. So I've just got to thread the needle the way this usually works. And I've experienced this myself in other industries because I've succeeded as a online course creator on Udemy.

[00:30:48] And when I started on Udemy, people were like, uh, why would I make a course on this? It seems a little strange. And then somebody is like, yeah, here I am making $10,000 a month. And then nobody ever asked that question again. Why would you make a course? Everybody is making courses. And that case study is what I'm hoping to create.

[00:31:13] So at first, at the moment, I'm looking for a small group of people that I can aid to raise money through, through my project. Um, they would go post their projects on sprktoken.com, have it be live there. I can promote it, you know, not infinitely, but to some degree. And hopefully we can raise money, which I can then post as a case study. Hey, this thing works.

[00:31:40] Not only it works, we raised X and this person got X and 10, X and 110% of X, right? Because they didn't lose money through inflation and fees, but got extra rewards through staking and, um, other crypto mechanisms like airdrops and et cetera. So, oh, wow. It would have been 85% of the total money with that. They would keep with Patreon. But here instead of 85%, they keep 110.

[00:32:09] Let's, let's, let's step back from the cryptocurrency aspect of blockchain itself and talk about the decentralized system altogether. Right. So can decentralized systems remain decentralized? If you mentioned earlier, resiliency, if, if participation is only concentrated among financially resilient people.

[00:32:33] Well, this particular project never was meant to be a hundred percent decentralized in the pure, pure, pure, pure sense, because, you know, somebody has to be there to manage it. Like you have to manage the token reserve. There's has to be a team, right? Like if you build, if you create a totally fresh token, there's like that you got to go on day

[00:33:02] one, you have to create tokenomics, right? Who's gonna, you know, like, let's say there's X number of tokens outstanding. There's a founding team that gets certain tokens. There's certain number of tokens go towards marketing. It's pretty standard in like the tokenomics world. So there's a lot of people who hold a lot. And certainly it's, it's centralized in that sense, right? There's an initial founding team that's centralized in this particular project. It's central.

[00:33:31] It's, it's not purely decentralized. The hope is that over time, the founding team can take a step back and the project can just roll on its own once it's a household name. But the journey from this moment to then is so long. That is, I have made peace with the idea that it's, you know, it's not going to live up to the decentralization promise, that pure promise of decentralization.

[00:34:02] It's, you know, it's not something that's in the perfect world that would be, but, you know, somebody has to push it up and make it, make it a thing and make it work. And basically the centralized systems increasingly don't offer decentralization at all. Hopefully in the future, like it's not something that I'm saying like, no, never, but in practice,

[00:34:28] there's so much work that's, that the founders have to do. You know, like if you look at Ethereum, you know, what it would, where would it be without the founder? Right. I think it had to become, in the very, very early days, I don't know the entire history, but, you know, he had to push it, right? Like, you know, he, the, you know, Vitalik, he was like kind of almost synonymous with Ethereum. He was a large part of the growth.

[00:34:57] So it also depends how you define, you know, pure decentralization. Like if you just look at the economics, it can live on its own. The founder doesn't have to intervene, but in the real world, the founder has to do so much of the initial pushing of the project that I think in, if I was being transparent, I think there is some, you know, centralization here. So basically if downside risk becomes unbearable for financially stressed populations, they

[00:35:24] effectively become locked out of technological innovation. Well, not due to the decentralization, but I think due to, it's hard for them to adopt cryptocurrency, right? Because if you have money to risk and invest like a typical professional, right? Like, you know, I'll allocate something for my 401k, some little bits of risky investments and here comes crypto. Perfect. Okay. You can play around with crypto and you can get your feet wet and get up to speed.

[00:35:53] But if you're an artist and you're in financial struggle, you literally can't put extra money. I mean, you can put like a hundred dollars, $10, but it's so not worth your while to dabble. Okay. Well, I'll triple my hundred dollars in the great case. Right. And it's not going to make a difference. So people are like, well, what's the point? And they just don't. And so they miss that little opportunity, which leads them to miss the second, third and fourth and 10th and 20th opportunity.

[00:36:23] And I actually, I found that to be the case for me because this is the saddest part of my own crypto journey. I heard about cryptocurrency, about Bitcoin when it was way below a dollar. Like, I don't remember the exact amount, but it was something ridiculous. And I remember I was walking, I was like, I should look into this. And then I was so, that was my period of like a lot of struggle. And I was so just in that relief, stress, relief, stress, make my current thing work.

[00:36:53] I just couldn't devote time and energy and mental energy to another project. No matter how little it was, it's not like I had to build Bitcoin. It was already there. I just had to buy it, but I didn't. And then I bought it a lot later and I was like, oh, what if I? Okay. So, you know, I've been there myself. A lot of the things that I'm trying to help people with, it's like, I kind of see myself. Oh, I've been there. I've been there. I've been there.

[00:37:22] I felt that. Yeah. Got it. Yeah. You have to be in early. So, you know, I wasn't either. But yeah. So I want to find out, you know, what about your project? You know, what worries you the most from a social perspective about your model?

[00:37:46] I think it's that reluctance of artists to work with cryptocurrency because the very reason I made it, so it can be for artists, is the very reason that the biggest problems can come from. Because just so many of the people who are artsy, they're not even open-minded.

[00:38:13] You know, it's one thing if somebody is open-minded and you can explain, well, here's the math of it. That would be great. But what I'm finding is the resistance is just toddler level where it's like, no, I'm not eating that and there's nothing you can do to make me eat that food. Right? And then it might be that if they try it, they love it, but they're not trying it. And that's the resistance that I see.

[00:38:40] So in the best case, I will have an incredibly hard time and slow adoption curve. I don't need a rapid adoption curve because it's a relatively small project. You know, it's not meant to be a gigantic project. And I'm currently just looking at more and finding that perfect audience that I mentioned rather than the traditional artists.

[00:39:04] artists, hopefully long-term, once the math is there and once the case studies are there, it will be self-evident. Like, oh, why didn't I do cryptocurrency all this time? Right? When people see examples of how it works. So, but together, the journey is hard and it will come from the very nature of the people that I'm trying to help is that they have, there's in this community, there's just a big reluctance more so than in other communities.

[00:39:33] So you have challenges. You also have optimism, right? Or you want to be doing this. So what makes you optimistic that you will be successful? That's a good question. Most projects fail. So I may appear optimistic. Well, I actually, I love this project because one is I know that I'm doing something that's, you know, a benevolent business. I've always done benevolent businesses.

[00:40:02] Like, I've never been a person who's like, here's some cash. I'm just going to go and grab it. And I don't care what other people, if, you know, if it hurts them or like, it's never, I see it online all the time. You know, just go to YouTube and everybody's selling something that's not really honest or great or whatever. Right. You know, you're always one step away from a scam online, but it's just never been interesting for me. I always felt like if you help people, you'll come out of it better in the other, you know, on the other end. It's not a fairy tale like that in the end.

[00:40:32] You know, it's not always like that. But especially because I resonate historically, like my own experience is precisely the kind of person I'm trying to help. I kind of see like, hey, earlier me, like if you had only gotten help, your life would have been so much easier. And that gives me a lot of hope because, you know, the earlier me really could have used the hope. And there's a lot of earlier me's all the time.

[00:41:01] And I really love it for that, you know, because in my current work selling, you know, creating and selling online courses, it's also been very rewarding because a lot of people come to me and they're like, you don't know me, but I took your class five years ago. And now I made six figures with this. And I'm like, that's unbelievable. And that's rewarding.

[00:41:21] It's rewarding, but I feel like this, something about it is even a little bit more invested from me, me personally. And so that really gets me excited to work on it and think creatively, like what's the next thing? What's the next thing to try? What's the next thing to try? Okay, the first 20 things didn't work. What's the 21st thing? That is exciting.

[00:41:51] WD-40. They took 40 tries to get it right. Yes. It's a story of my life, you know. I wish it's like that bell curve, you know, where you wish you were like the 99th percentile, the best case happened to you, but you're really always mostly in the middle. And that difference of like where you were wishing, what you were wishing would happen, but what actually happens. Story of my life.

[00:42:13] What kind of society do we become when creativity itself increasingly depends on financial survivability inside algorithmic systems? Do you mind being inspired by it? I wish I would. But I think I could. Thank you.