The Song-A-Day Man | Jonathan Mann (Layer Zero)

Jonathan Mann writes and publishes a song every single day. He's done this without missing a day since January 1st, 2009, and holds the Guinness World Record for most consecutive days writing a song. His inspiration, passion, consistency, and all-around charm really comes through as he explores his journey in both music and crypto. Infatuated with the ideas and methodology behind CryptoPunks, he's launched his own NFT project for his daily songs with an accompanying DAO - SongADAO. Creation, labor, value, and scarcity blend together in Jonathan's world. He exemplifies Layer 0 brilliantly -- a mortal human behind lines of code, expressed through music and commitment. When you stretch art this far, cool things emerge. Tune in to find out what they are! ------ 📣 ALTO IRA | THE CRYPTO RETIREMENT ACCOUNT https://bankless.cc/AltoIRA ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 👀 POLYGON | LAYER 2 DEFI https://bankless.cc/Polygon ❎ ACROSS | BRIDGE TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Across 🦊 METAMASK | THE CRYPTO WALLET https://bankless.cc/metamask 💳 LEDGER | THE CRYPTO LIFE CARD https://bankless.cc/Ledger 🧙‍♂️ ALCHEMIX | SELF REPAYING LOANS https://bankless.cc/Alchemix 🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING https://bankless.cc/UniGrants ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 4:00 Finding Crypto 8:33 Writing a Song a Day 16:14 Inspiration & Emotion 20:46 Creations & Crypto 24:16 Storytelling 28:20 One Thing a DAO 31:03 Because We Die 36:14 The Value of Scarcity 44:17 Product Market Fit 47:38 Proof of Work 55:20 The Song a Day NFT Project 1:00:53 SongADAO 1:04:36 Governance for Creators 1:10:29 Impacting Creativity 1:14:46 Community & Get Involved ------ Resources: Jonathan on Twitter: https://twitter.com/songadaymann?s=20 SongADAO: https://songaday.world/songadao/ Fuckin Trolls: https://fuckintrolls.lol/ Songs Hat: https://cottonbureau.com/products/songs-hat#/12607532/dad-hat-unisex-yupoong-dad-hat-black-100percent-cotton-one-size-fits-all Jonathan's Website: https://www.jonathanmann.net/ ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:30David Hoffman?

  Welcome to Layer Zero. Layer Zero is a podcast of unscripted conversations with the people that make up the Ethereum community. Crypto is built by code, but it's composed by people, and each individual member of the crypto community has their own story to tell. Cypherpunks understood that the code they write impacts the people that use it, and Layer Zero focuses on the people behind the code, because Ethereum is people all the way down, and it always has been. Today, I'm speaking with Jonathan Mann, who might be known as the "Song a Day" Mann. Jonathan Mann has been creating and singing and producing one song a day for a really, really, really long time, something like over four years now. And so, we talk about, and I also discovered him for the first time in 2019 at ETH Denver,

• 1:15David Hoffman?

  where he was kind of just an emcee of sorts, and where he gave his talk about his journey of creating one song a day. And there's a number of these "a day" people that have gravitated in towards, into crypto, Beeple being one of them, but there's others as well. Another previous podcast guest of Layer Zero, Justin Avversano, also took a picture of somebody's, of someone on their birthday every single day for a year. And there's a conversation to be had about the relationship between creative output, hard, just work, provably hard work, because if you do something one time a day for years, you know you're putting in the work, and also the power of assets, crypto assets.

• 1:59David Hoffman?

  So we unpack that a little bit, and we also go into what Jonathan has been up to with his DAO, the "Song a Day" DAO, and so that'll be in the second half of the show. So let's go ahead and get right into it. I bring you. Jonathan Mann, right after we get to some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. If you're going bankless, you need MetaMask. This is your tool to unlock the world of DeFi without giving up custody over your private keys. MetaMask is both a secure in-browser wallet and also a secure bridge for your hardware wallet. You can now trade tokens on any Decks or Aggregator. MetaMask Swap gathers real-time pricing information across all the DeFi exchanges, allowing you to select your best price while getting all the MetaMask benefits of self-custody, lower gas costs, and increased transaction success rates.

• 2:44David Hoffman?

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• 3:26David Hoffman?

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• 4:39David Hoffman?

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• 4:50Speaker 02

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• 4:59David Hoffman?

  Hey Jonathan, what's up?

• 5:00Speaker 03

  Hey, good. How are you doing?

• 5:03David Hoffman?

  Good, really good. The first time I ever discovered you was at ETH Denver 2019?

• 5:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, 2019.

• 5:13David Hoffman?

  Is that when you were like the emcee of sorts?

• 5:16Speaker 03

  I was the emcee for like one minute. So what happened was they were trying to do like the judging of the Hackathon? And all the judges were taking too long. And so John Paller of ETH Denver was like, Jonathan, like go up on stage and do something, stall them. And it just happened that I have, I like had my computer ready and like I had this talk that I used to give all the time, like ready to go. So I was like, I'm on it. And so, yeah. So that's probably where, that's probably where you saw me, if you saw me there at that time.

• 5:51David Hoffman?

  Right, right, right. You gave the talk about your story of making one song a day, which that story I don't think has stopped at all. Ever since then.

• 6:00Speaker 03

  No. Yeah, it's, song a day is nuts in that way in that it's just kind of relentless and, you know, that's like, that's literally a thousand songs ago. That's how I think about it. That's a thousand songs ago. Three years is a thousand songs. So that's like, that's pretty intense.

• 6:17David Hoffman?

  So most of these Layers Zero episodes, I start with somebody's backstory and then try and lead it into crypto. But with you, I actually kind of want to do the inverse because of just the nature of who you are. So

• 6:29Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 6:29David Hoffman?

  Let's start with crypto. How did you find crypto?

• 6:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's fine.

• 6:35Speaker 03

  Well, from listening to the podcast, I know that you came in around 2017 also. That's like, that's my, that's my entry point. I was at a conference in, in Ontario, in like, at a summer camp. And I saw a talk by Ethan Buckman, who does Cosmos. And he's just, he was just great. And I had never been interested in it before. It seemed like it wasn't really for me. It seemed like a finance bro kind of thing. It didn't really seem like it vibed with, with, just didn't really see how it related to me. But something about his talk, and I can tell you exactly what it was. It was like, he explained proof of work in a way where I, I kind of got it for the first time.

• 7:18Speaker 03

  And I started, and then he also sang a song, which helped. Like, he had a little, like, ukulele and was singing. It was great. And I started, I had this really dumb thought, like, looking back on it, it's kind of dumb, but also it makes sense, which is like, oh yeah, proof of work. Like, I have that. Like, like, I've been doing a song a day since January 1st of 2009. Like, that's my proof of work. Like, and then I was like, oh, like, is there some connection between like blockchain and my Song of a Day project? And like, what could that be? And I talked to Ethan about it, and he was like, really supportive. And then I got home and I tweeted, and you can find the tweet. And I said, like, hey, like, does anyone know anything about the blockchain? Like, I have this crazy idea for a project.

• 8:00Speaker 03

  And my friend Boris reached out, sent me some ETH, said, "Go play." That was literally his words. And, and about a week later, he showed me CryptoPunks. And that was the moment. That was like, that was the real lightning bulb, lightning strike, light bulb moment for me, was seeing CryptoPunks at that time, which was, you know, like... Um, maybe six months, five months after they had launched. Uh, and it just blew my mind, wide open.

• 8:32David Hoffman?

  Okay, so let's, let's put a pin in that part of the story. Now let's do Song A Day. How did you start doing Song A Day?

• 8:41David Hoffman?

  And also, what is Song A Day?

• 8:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, Song A Day is an ongoing project where I write and record and make a video for a song every single day. And I've been doing that since January 1st of 2009. I started really just trying to go for a month. It was literally just 31 days that I was aiming for. Um, within that 31 days of January of 2009, um, I had a couple of songs go kind of mini-viral and like, it just was going well and I was unemployed. I was like 26, living in Berkeley. I had nothing else going on. And so I decided to try for a year. And then at the end of 2009, I just kind of, I just kind of decided to keep going and not stop.

• 9:22Speaker 03

  And that's how, that's how I'm here, you know, 4,766 songs in to the project.

• 9:32David Hoffman?

  But why?

• 9:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Uh, well, that, that answer has changed so much over the years. If you asked me back then, and people did, and I, this is the answer that I would give back then. It's basically like, um,

• 9:48Speaker 03

  it basically like talked about how as a creative person who, I'd been writing songs since I was 12. And like, well, I've always been somewhat prolific. There was a piece of me that would often run up against some kind of form of writer's block. Where the problem with writer's block is like, you, you feel like you want to make something. You have like the urge to create, but nothing comes out and that's very frustrating. And, um, I found, I sort of stumbled into Song A Day as like a, uh,

• 10:25Speaker 03

  Just a writer's block proof method of creating. And that's like one, that's one reason that I used to give. And then another reason was, you know, to get attention. It's like in this, in this day and age, you need to have a hook. And like, that's my shtick, like, hey, I'm up here doing a song a day. Like, that's just like a good shtick to have. That's another reason.

• 10:53Speaker 03

  But as time goes on, you know, it's, it becomes, it's become something quite different in a lot of ways. It's become almost like, I don't want to say spiritual, but it's become like, it's become just a practice, you know? It's, it's just become something that like, there's, there's a, there's a weight to like, sitting down and just doing something every single day and doing it. And there's something, there's just like, I just find so many benefits that come out of it, that, that it just has become part of my life. It's like part of the firmament of my existence now.

• 11:27David Hoffman?

  What are the, what are some, what are some of those benefits?

• 11:31Speaker 03

  So the only way to get good at something, right, is to, is to, is to fail a lot, is to make, is do a lot, is like to fuck up a bunch. And Song of Day is a really great framework for fucking up and for like, making a lot of shit and a lot of crap that's bad, you know? And, and even for me, like doing that in public, for all these years, you know, they all live on YouTube. There's like, there's something about that, that is

• 12:04Speaker 03

  humbling, I guess, but also, also is, teaches, teaches me a different thing, which is that like, no one really cares whether you suck. You know what I mean? No one real, like, like, there's haters and there's trolls and stuff, but like, in the grand scheme of thing, like, no one's really paying attention to you most of the time. And, and so, like, what's wrong with making something shitty on the way to making something good? And to not be afraid of that? So that's, so that's like a lesson that I learn over and over and over again. And then just in like a, a pure kind of practice way, just gotten better, just gotten better at things. Uh, as a musician, as a producer, as a singer.

• 12:48Speaker 03

  I've just gotten better from literally doing it for 13 years, like every day. Um, yeah.

• 12:55David Hoffman?

  Do you feel like it takes a similar, um, role in your life as perhaps like meditation or journaling does for other people?

• 13:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's definitely the case. I would say, you know, I, again, like back in the day, I wouldn't have, I wouldn't have said that, you know? I wouldn't have like, it's, that's not something that I set out to do. But looking back on it, especially now, you know, if you go on the songaday.world and like you just like, like shuffle through the songs, you know, you get a real sense of like, of my life in a lot of ways. Like it, it is literally a record, um, of my life. You know, there's people, you know, Ghazali just went, uh, viral for taking a picture of himself every day for five years. And my friend Noah Kalina has done that for like 21 years now.

• 13:49Speaker 03

  Um, you know, there's something about like documenting yourself, documenting what's going on in your life every single day. That's kind of, that's really intense. And then, um, what was the other, what was the other part? I don't remember what you just said. There was a.

• 14:05David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I just asked if it feels the same niche as somebody who like meditates or journals.

• 14:09Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, for sure. The meditation part, uh, absolutely. In fact, um, like the one time that I feel, uh, um, free from anxiety, the one time that I'm like not anxious, well, it's two times. One of the times is when I'm sitting down writing my song, like when I'm really lost in creating a song, um, and like in that state of flow, if you're, if you're familiar with that idea, the, the idea of flow is where you, the, the task that you're trying to do is right at the edge of what you're capable of doing. And you know, you're pushing right up against that edge. That's when you get into that flow state.

• 14:54Speaker 03

  And I find myself in that all the time when I'm doing a song. It's never boring. That's not true. It's boring a lot of times, but when I get into that zone, it's like, it's and, and, and, and I get, and almost every day I can get there, even if it's just for a few minutes. If I don't have a lot of time to work on my song. But when I'm actually in it, it's the only thing I'm thinking about. You know what I mean? Whereas every, all the other times of the day, I'm like anxious as shit about everything. But when I'm like actually in it, doing my song.

• 15:28Speaker 03

  I'm so present like with the song. So in, in that way. I don't know if it, you know, I don't know if it, um, in the meditation sense, I, I haven't gotten as good at like taking the benefits of that, you know, taking that kind of uh, here-ness that I feel when I'm doing a song and applying it to other places. That's a sort of key of meditation is like, you learn not only to do it when you're sitting there, but also you're just like standing there doing the dishes and you sort of notice yourself like, whoa, here I am.

• 15:59Speaker 03

  That is a, that's, I think that's a different muscle than, than this one, but, but for the purposes of like an everyday moment when I am just here with myself. Song of the day, I would say fills that for sure.

• 16:14David Hoffman?

  I'm sure there's gotta be like days where, I don't know, it's in the last part of the day. And you're like, damn, I haven't done my song today. God damn it. I just have to bang this song out. How, how often are, how do you get through those days?

• 16:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So, um, by giving myself a lot of leeway, basically, I call those phoning it in. Phoning it in days where, where, um, sort of to, to what I was saying before is like, no one fucking cares. No one cares. If you're gonna phone it in one day, who, who the fuck, who gives a shit? And so, and so ultimately I give myself a lot of latitude to just suck. If I need to suck on, at a particular time, that's cool. That's all right. Uh, and so I'll phone it in. I'll just, I'll literally just like improvise a song on the spot. I will, there's days when I put like as little effort as possible into it.

• 17:08Speaker 03

  The other thing that I've learned about that though, what's, what's wild is Another term I have for it is like these songs that I just sort of poop out. Like the songs that I just sort of poop out in those times when I'm like, I don't feel inspired whatsoever. And I'm like, like you said, end of the day, I'm exhausted. You know, especially my kids are, you know, four and seven, but when they were infants, forget it. I mean, that's like, when you have an infant in the house. But, uh, what I found is like oftentimes those songs, they still resonate with somebody. Somebody's, somebody still hears it and says, wow, I really liked that one. Or like, wow, that one really like, that one really hit me at the right moment or whatever. So, so who the fuck knows?

• 17:48Speaker 03

  Like I, I'm not, you know, you, we're like not the best judges of what we're, what we make. Um, and it's easy, it's so easy to get in your head about like, is this good? Is this bad? When the, when the fact of the matter is, is what you think about it, kind of doesn't matter. Because somebody else is going to think something completely different about it.

• 18:09David Hoffman?

  There was a, a podcast that Ryan and I did, a Monday podcast, like one of the big ones. And I won't name the guest just because of the nature of the story. But both, as soon as we got off of the podcast, him and I were both like, oh God, that podcast was awful. Like, do we even release that? Like, that was so bad. And we just didn't have enough time to like scrounge up another podcast in time. So we released it and it turned into being a number three most downloaded podcast in that spot for a really, really long time. And we got so much positive feedback about it. And we just learned a lot about ourselves. Like sometimes like what we think is good and what the enjoyment that we got out of it is just not at all. What like everyone, all the listeners get out of it.

• 18:55Speaker 03

  I can't tell you how many times that's happened to me where, where like songs that I think are great and I'm like really excited by do nothing and then. Songs that I literally put no effort into, people are like, "This is the best, I love this one." Like, you know, there's a famous story about how, like, Tom Petty wrote "Free Falling", where it was like, he was just trying to make everybody laugh. Like, he was singing this song, and he's like, he's just like making up the lyrics, and he's like, "She's a good girl, crazy about Elvis", and everyone's like just cracking up about it, and it turns into like literally his biggest song ever.

• 19:31David Hoffman?

  His best song, yeah.

• 19:32Speaker 03

  You know? Uh, there's something about, um, too, about, about like, uh, you know, a lot of people will say like, "Oh, you gotta like, to make good art, you have to like be all emotional, you have to put your emotions into it, it has to be like this deep thing." That's bullshit. Like, you know, what, if you sit down to try to be emotional, and if you sit down and you're like, "I'm gonna write an emotional song", you know, and I'm gonna make it all come out, you put a lot of pressure on yourself to like, to live up to that. Whereas if you just sit down, and you're like, "I'm just gonna write something, let's see what comes out", you're not putting any pressure on you, and that's when, that's when you can just like open up and let something come, you know?

• 20:15David Hoffman?

  Mm-hmm.

• 20:15Speaker 03

  That's, that's how I see it.

• 20:17David Hoffman?

  I don't think you can, you can actually like, go, go for emotion, right? Like, that's not something that you can optimize for.

• 20:23Speaker 03

  No.

• 20:24David Hoffman?

  Right? You can't, you can't just decide that you're gonna be emotional today.

• 20:28Speaker 03

  Exactly, and, and sometimes you feel emotional, and sometimes you're able to like, to channel your emotions, but on days when you don't, to try to do that, you know, is fruitless, I think, but also on days when you don't, there's a lot of power in just sitting down and showing up.

• 20:45David Hoffman?

  Mm-hmm. Do, what, do you have any of, uh, like your, your favorite songs that you've written? Either, uh, judged by the output of the songs that you created, or the process of you making them?

• 20:57Speaker 03

  Um, like a lot of my, a lot of the stuff I'm most proud of making are on like albums and things that I've done. Like a big part of what I do with Song of Days, I go back and kind of mine the songs for things that I think could, could stand to be polished, you know? Cause, cause a lot of times what comes out of Song of Day sort of is, is, you know, ultimately like a demo in a lot of ways. Um, so I'd put out an album like 2019 that I'm really proud of and um, I did this narrative fiction podcast called Songonauts and the music for that I'm super, super proud of as well.

• 21:37Speaker 03

  So those would be, I'd say like the, the, the ones that I'm like most, because I put so much work into them. Uh, to talk about like the process, like I really, you know, I really honed and, and tried to get to the heart of like what each song was. And so, yeah, that, that's, that's like, that's definitely what I'm most proud of, I'd say, are the ones I like the most.

• 21:59David Hoffman?

  So picking up the crypto thread, uh, crypto is a very interesting industry. Do you think that like you've used crypto just as like inspiration to like, yo, crypto has so much content inside of it. Uh, like I can just get a lot of inspiration for my songs. Crypto is going to make writing about songs so much easier. Are these some of the thoughts that went through your head?

• 22:20Speaker 03

  No, but, but I, in my life, you know, because Song of Day is just part of my life. Like I said, the firmament of just what I do, anything that I get into, I end up uh, folding into Song of Day, right? So you can, you can look and like on, I think it's September 17th of 2017, I wrote a song about CryptoPunks because I was just so into CryptoPunks. And that's just sort of naturally what I do, you know? I wrote a song about Dada, like Dada, um, the Dada art people I wrote a song about. And I did a song about, what's another one? I did, I did several CryptoKitty songs back then because I was just so excited about NFTs.

• 23:05Speaker 03

  They weren't called NFTs back then, but like that's what I was excited about. Uh, and, and so that sort of, that sort of continues now where now I'm like really deep in the space and so. Yeah, there's just like, there's just so much, so many different things to write about. I'm working on, today I asked Twitter what to write about and, and some people said, uh, and I also put, I said, I said, "What should my song be about?" No shilling was the, and then like, because I didn't want people to come in and be like, "Write a song about this project, my project, this project."

• 23:35David Hoffman?

  Write a song about my bags.

• 23:37Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly. And so, several people were like, "No shilling, that's a great song, that's a great..." And I was like, "Oh yeah, you're right."

• 23:43David Hoffman?

  That is, that is a great song.

• 23:45Speaker 03

  That's a fun one. So, so, so yeah, so, so that ended up being, that ended up being a song. And, and that's, you know, oftentimes like, there's so many projects in the space that I, that I just love, you know, that I'm like really aligned with philosophically and just, that I'm such a fan of. And I'm gonna write a song about all of them eventually, you know? And that, and that's just sort of like, got a lot of songs to write, so, so why not write them about things that I enjoy?

• 24:14David Hoffman?

  One of the, um, more recent songs in your trajectory that you've written is the ENS DAO one.

• 24:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:21David Hoffman?

  That was super catchy, by the way. Uh, I posted that into a couple of my discords, like, "Yo guys, like, uh, this, look at this, look at what the energy of ENS DAO created." Like, we have, you know, singer-songwriters writing songs about it, but also listen to how catchy it is. Uh, and also I think a little bit of what's going on here is, uh, you're becoming a bit of a storyteller, or you, you have been, right? You're like, so much of the story of ENS got baked into that song. Maybe it's me reaching for something when I kinda say like, the vibe of the song is also part of the vibe of ENS, like the melody and the tune, is it very, very ENS-like? But also just straight up, the lyrics were illustrating two people

• 25:03David Hoffman?

  about what it was. Uh, and the fact that like, somebody would write a song about ENS DAO. It's not like you wrote about like, uh, like Coinbase, or insert your equity company here, or, or, you know, like, showmybags.com. You wrote about ENS DAO, a community project. Uh, and so that is also part of the story. Uh, have, do you see yourself as a little bit of a storyteller in like, these short little snippets of songs?

• 25:26Speaker 03

  That was my job pre-pandemic. That was literally my job. The reason I had, you know, when you saw me at ETH Denver, the reason I had this talk all ready to go is because I would go around to conferences, give that talk and then watch all the other talks at the conference and get up at the end of the day and recap everything that everyone said. And that was literally, that's what I was doing like, I was doing like, maybe like 15 of those a year. And like, that was my, that was my main job, right up until the pandemic.

• 26:01Speaker 03

  So yeah, that's a huge part. And, and I, stories are compelling and I find, obviously, and I, that's sort of a dumb sentence, stories are compelling. Yeah. But like, the stories that are within, the stories and lore of this culture, I'm sure, I'm sure like every culture has, has amazing stories and lore. And so because I'm so steeped in this one right now, I can't help but just be attracted to the different

• 26:35Speaker 03

  narratives that are popping up. You know, for a long time, it was all about CryptoPunks for me and like the different kinds of like, like I wrote a song about Snowfro, you know, who, who made art blocks. His, his burned zombie punk, like he, he accidentally burned a zombie punk, which I love. Like, there's a great story about like how that happened. And even the story of how he made art blocks, where he sold a bunch of his really valuable punks to fund art blocks. And then art blocks becomes this amazing, like, that's just a great story, you know? There's all these amazing stories in the space. And so ENS Dow is just one of those stories, you know? It's just like, what an amazing project and what an amazing kind of like,

• 27:16Speaker 03

  coming to fruition of something in the space. And so it was a no brainer for something like that to write a song. Whereas like, you know, not to shit on this or anything, I absolutely do not mean to do that, but like, everyone's like, when are you going to do a song about Irene Dow? And I'm like, I'm not sure what the story is there necessarily. If there's a story there that pops up, then I'll be compelled.

• 27:41Speaker 03

  Whereas with Ghazali, did you see Ghazali, this kid who took a picture of himself every day? So there's this kid from Indonesia, took himself, took a picture of himself every day for five years, and made a PFP project, basically by accident. He like up, he like upload, and it's, it's just, it's, it's great. And like, so that to me, it's the guilelessness of him that like makes it compelling. And he became like an instant meme overnight. Uh, and that to me was like so compelling. And I was like, he has this long history of like all these other people who have done picture a days, things and like, that to me is an interesting story. So that's something that I'm gonna write about. There's just a lot. There's just so much in the space to do.

• 28:21David Hoffman?

  There's, I feel like there's enough people at this point in the world doing one thing a day. Yeah. That could turn into a DAO.

• 28:28Speaker 03

  Like, like. Oh, yeah. The thing a day DAO. Yeah, yeah.

• 28:30David Hoffman?

  Oh, is that a thing?

• 28:32Speaker 03

  No, it should be.

• 28:33David Hoffman?

  Yeah, right. For all the people that do one thing a day and have been doing so for a while, like, we should get all those people in the same Discord, just.

• 28:40Speaker 03

  I've always, I've always had a fantasy of doing a conference that was just a conference where all the speakers were people who do, do things a day. You know?

• 28:49David Hoffman?

  Uh huh.

• 28:49Speaker 03

  Cause there's a ton. There really are. Like you, you know, uh, um, I feel like I'm, I feel like even, you know, uh, I find out about new ones all the time. Like, like people will show me folks who are doing it. I'm like, I didn't know this person existed. Yeah.

• 29:06David Hoffman?

  Are, is there, is there like a thing a day community out there? Just like all the people that know all, they know?

• 29:11Speaker 03

  That, no, there isn't. I mean, you know, when we find each other, I think we feel some kind of kinship. Um, I know, so Noah Kalina entered the space recently and he's gone viral many times for his, um, a picture of himself a day thing. And I knew, I knew of those and I'd been following the project. Um, but we were able to connect over crypto because he started messaging me asking about song a day and NFTs. Um, and it's great, you know? It's just great to connect with people who do it because they, they sort of understand things on a, on a really specific level.

• 29:45David Hoffman?

  So there's another layer zero that I did with Justin Aversano, who took a photo of somebody's birthday every single day for a year. And so like you, you have the challenge of you need to put output like a couple of minutes of creative output every single day. His challenge was that he needed to go find somebody whose birthday it was every single day for a year, which is a very different challenge.

• 30:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:08David Hoffman?

  And there's just something about doing something a day that was, people find really compelling. And like the cool thing about Justin's story was that you couldn't, I don't think you could have taken any single one of his photographs and created the value that he got out of the whole entire thing, right?

• 30:26Speaker 03

  Like, right.

• 30:26David Hoffman?

  The, his photographs are great, but like it's not, one photograph isn't going to do it. It's the fact that he did something every single day for a year, which was challenging, that created the story, that created the total like valuation of his combined work. Like, why do you think humanity, and one of the things that I think is cool about humanity and crypto assets is that like, we actually find ways to put market value upon the things that we value. And all of a sudden, there are these people out there that are doing these a day things. And they're, they're gravitating towards crypto to be able to find a price tag for these things, a valuation for these things. But before we get to the crypto part, like, why do you think humans value the a days?

• 31:08David Hoffman?

  The, the people that do things a day and like, why, why do we like that?

• 31:13Speaker 03

  Cause we die.

• 31:15David Hoffman?

  Hmm.

• 31:16Speaker 03

  We like it because we die. We like it because time is literally the most scarce thing that we have. And the every day-ness of something is a reminder of that. It's sort of, it's the most grounding kind of way of structuring something.

• 31:38Speaker 03

  And so I think a lot of it has to do with death. It has to do with like our connection to the fact that we have only so many of these days on the, on the planet. And, and that ties right into crypto, honestly, because what you have and what you have with NFTs especially is,

• 31:58Speaker 03

  You have this artificially scarce thing, right? Because in the real world, everything is scarce, just by its nature. That's just how the real world operates. But in computer land, as we know, like, you know, things are infinitely perfectly replicable. And so we have suddenly this way of making digital things scarce, which is holy shit. That's like amazing. But then we have to, then we have to confront this idea of, well, what does that mean? Like, how can we make something digitally scarce in a way that feels legitimate?

• 32:43Speaker 03

  That feels true? And, you know, we would talk about this kind of shit all the time back in the old days. You know, back in 2017, 2018. And a lot of it was sort of theoretical, whereas like, you know, on my podcast, Digitally Rare, we would often say that like, you know, for this to work, there's going to have to be a really strong narrative. Like, any, any project that's going to succeed is going to need a really clear story about like, why it exists, which, which is not true. That's not turned out to be true at all. That, that was a theory that we were sort of working on back in the day, before there was very many projects.

• 33:25Speaker 03

  But, you know, ultimately, we are still confronted by what is, and we're so early that actually we don't really know the answer, because in the long term, 10 years from now, you know, who knows? But when we're confronted with the idea of this artificial digital scarcity, what can make that feel real? One of the things that we're seeing now is that, you know, OG projects, you know, and depending on how you, that's one way actually to, to value something, because it came before all the hubbub and, you know, it's, it's scarce.

• 34:05Speaker 03

  But the fact is, you know, when Larva Labs decided to do 10,000 CryptoPunks, they could have easily have decided to do 5,000, or 20,000, or infinite, I mean, near infinite CryptoPunks they could have done out of that, out of those combinations. So it's sort of an accident that they chose 10,000, in a lot of ways... You know, to me, that's a really interesting philosophical thing is how do you ground? How do you ground this artificial scarcity in something that feels real? And doing something once every day is one way to ground it. Time, put it in time.

• 34:44Speaker 03

  My compatriot, Matt Condon, one of the many Matts, is also obsessed with this question. And he's come up with two other really great ways that I love. And so one is that you may have heard of this. He has a chip in his hand. Do you know about this?

• 34:58David Hoffman?

  Yes, I've met him, yeah.

• 35:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, so Matt has a chip in his hand where you scan it with a near field communicating thing, NFC, and it gives you an NFT. So the scarcity comes from proximity to him. Whoa, that's like, that's really cool. And his new one is even cooler where he sleep talks. Have you seen this, Aleatoric? So Matt found out that he sleep talks. And so he decided to make this NFT project where when he sleep talks, his phone records it, it gets translated, it gets like Google translated into text. The text gets fed into an AI thing that shows it as a visual thing. And that gets sold as an NFT on Zora.

• 35:44Speaker 03

  And so the scarcity of this project, he has no control over how many are going to happen. It only happens when he sleep talks, which, you know, there's been months now where he hasn't. He set up this whole project, he was sleep talking all the time, and then he set it up and he hasn't been sleep talking, which is just fascinating. So that's another way of creating real scarcity in this digital realm. You know, so that I just, I find all of those experiments like the most, the most fascinating.

• 36:13David Hoffman?

  Can you elaborate on the relationship between scarcity and market value of assets? And what the blockchain has to do with that?

• 36:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, although, you know, I'm skeptical of most of the ways that people use scarcity to assign value to most NFTs, because it all feels so arbitrary to me.

• 36:40David Hoffman?

  Let me actually ask that question slightly differently. Can you elaborate on the relationship of the scarcity of human time and labor and creativity?

• 36:48Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah, okay.

• 36:50David Hoffman?

  And the market value of assets on public blockchains?

• 36:53Speaker 03

  Yes, yes. Well, that to me is way more interesting than, you know, the other thing that I was thinking when you were saying that is like, you know, this one is, this one has like lasers shooting out of his eyes and that's rare. It's like, okay, really?

• 37:06David Hoffman?

  Right. I could just go into 100 ERC 20 tokens and say, scarce.

• 37:10Speaker 03

  Yes, yeah, yeah, exactly. It needs to have, when, I didn't realize this for a long time, when like, you know, when, when, when projects are choosing, like, Bankless, how did you decide how many tokens to make? What was your rubric?

• 37:24David Hoffman?

  A billion is a big, big number.

• 37:27Speaker 03

  You just picked the number. Like, this, this to me, like, I didn't realize, like, you mean, there's no, and people were like, of course, there's no, it's just you can make up any number, it's just whatever. I'm like, oh, yeah, right. Oh, man, that's crazy. And so like, ETH Denver, you know, they decided to do like the, the, the length of Colorado or something and the, the height of the mountains and they multiply, like, but in terms of like, yeah, labor and time and putting that into, I don't know, I don't think that right now we are at the point where we are ready to actually value these things correctly. In the NFT space, I think that there's too much froth and there's still too much, like,

• 38:11Speaker 03

  Wild West-ness of it, but I think there's a chance that like, over time.

• 38:21Speaker 03

  NFTs can become, it's not gonna be perfect. I don't think it's ever gonna be perfect. I don't think it's like a panacea in any way. It's not gonna like solve this. But I think that it has a chance to be a really powerful tool. For um. Rewarding creative work. Uh, in a way that hasn't existed before. And certainly hasn't existed for the last 20 years. Um, and we, you know, when you, when I.

• 38:53Speaker 03

  I come at everything thinking specifically about music. And what's crazy about music is that. You know, prior to the invention of recorded sound. Uh. The, you, music was ultimately extremely scarce in the sense that. The only way to hear it was in person, when someone was playing it for you. Like, that's crazy. Uh, and then suddenly we have this ability to copy it. And we lived through this sort of golden age of musicians being able to get paid for their work. Uh, because it was copyable, but not infinitely copyable yet.

• 39:32Speaker 03

  And that was one age and now, and then for the last 20 years, we've been in a completely different place where mu, the value of music just plummeted. It went, it went away. Um, completely. And.

• 39:47Speaker 03

  I don't think, I don't think NFTs or digital scarcity is gonna solve that. But I think it, it, it's just gonna, it's this, it has a potential to be this really powerful tool. Uh, to, to help alleviate some of that. And I don't know how much of it has to do with scarcity or not. I think that sort of still remains to be seen.

• 40:10Speaker 03

  I wouldn't be surprised if everyone's obsession, if, if, if our cult, our crypto culture's obsession with scarcity itself. Becomes. Uh. Not the thing. I wouldn't be surprised if that sort of goes by the wayside. And ultimately, it's, we, we settle into something that's more just about like. Another way to show your appreciation and support. For a piece of art. But yeah, I think the speculation has to, the like wild rampant speculation has to die

• 40:48Speaker 03

  down for that to happen. And that honestly did happen, you know, 2018, 2019, things died down so much. And that's when a lot of so many interesting things came about in that space.

• 41:05David Hoffman?

  That's definitely true. And that time was for DeFi, really, where like we had like early DeFi, which were ICOs before we called it DeFi. And then it went away. And then we actually had true DeFi come after the fact. And so like we're having this first NFT frothy movement in 2020, 2021. And there's a ton being built right now, but you still that a lot of that froth hasn't left the market quite yet.

• 41:29Speaker 03

  No, no. And it will eventually, I assume.

• 41:35David Hoffman?

  Hey, guys. In the second half of the show, we get into the subject of the Song a Day DAO, which is the DAO that Jonathan has spun up to help manage the funds of all the money that is raised from his Song a Day sales and other conversations around this topic as well. So let's go ahead and get there right after we get up to some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. Polygon is Ethereum's largest and most vibrant scaling solution to date. With millions of monthly users and all of the biggest DeFi apps, the Polygon ecosystem has turned into a blossoming metropolis of DeFi activity. Transactions on Polygon are quick and cheap, allowing users the freedom to achieve their DeFi goals, all while being economically anchored to Ethereum. But Polygon isn't just the proof of stake sidechain. The Polygon team is building

• 42:17David Hoffman?

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• 43:02David Hoffman?

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• 43:43David Hoffman?

  Uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on Ethereum that lets you trade any token at the current market price. No human counterparties or centralized intermediaries, just autonomous code on Ethereum. Input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy. The Uniswap Grants Program is accepting applications for grants. Do you have something of value that you think you want to contribute to the Uniswap ecosystem? No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply it for a unique grant at uniswapgrant.org and help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. Thank you, Uniswap, for sponsoring Bankless. My hot take that I think is true is that these a day artists, people that do things every single day, find crypto sooner than all the other artist types of the world.

• 44:29David Hoffman?

  Do you think that's true and then why?

• 44:33Speaker 03

  I think that, I don't know if it's true that we find it faster. I know that, I feel like we, um, maybe we get it faster.

• 44:45Speaker 03

  I feel like, as soon, like I said, as soon as, as soon as I was like properly explained what, what proof of work was and how that operates, it really fit for me. And then, and then, and then seeing CryptoPunks.

• 45:02Speaker 03

  10,000 CryptoPunks, 3,000 songs, you know, there's 10,000 of those, there's, there's as many of I can make until I die of these, like, it just, there's something that's sort of like, there's something that clicks in that realm.

• 45:18Speaker 03

  It's hard to know now because, because now there's meant, there's quite a few of us thing a day people who are doing it. Although it's worth noting that like, you know, Beeple, when he came into the space, unless I'm wrong about this, he didn't, it, he didn't like make it into, into something that had to do with his everydays. It wasn't like he put out all of his everydays. He was like much more curated about it and it was like, here's this everyday and here's that everyday and then, you know, he did his big sale, but that was like all of his everydays all at once. It wasn't quite the same kind of like, here, you know, here's the group and I'm gonna put them all up for sale.

• 46:00Speaker 03

  I think that, I think that it's the people that get, at least from the NFT side, the people that get it the most are the people who have been,

• 46:11Speaker 03

  robbed of the ability for their artwork to be valued.

• 46:18Speaker 03

  And Beeple is, was a prime example because, you know, he makes these really cool images and there's just no way to monetize those in a way that is, you know, clearly what they're worth and, you know, I talk to Eclectic Method all the time and like, you know, he was tired of DJing. He's like, that's how he had to pay his bills, but all he really wanted to do is make like, cool little 3D music pieces and like, who the fuck wants a cool little 3D music piece? Like, what are you gonna do with that? You can't do anything with that. But, but now you can and those, those are the places, those are the spaces where,

• 46:56Speaker 03

  I think people ultimately really get it, is where the thing that they make has no, like, place to live, you know? Has no place to like really reside, which is true of me, you know, like I,

• 47:11Speaker 03

  writing a song a day for 13 years, putting them all on YouTube. That's not a living, you know, that's not even like, that's not even like an eighth of a living, you know?

• 47:23Speaker 03

  So that's why, that's why it was, I think we, it's, it's maybe less to do with the everydainess and it's more to do with like, the lack of, of, of value put on the stuff that we create.

• 47:38David Hoffman?

  I'm glad that you took us here because if you hadn't, it was gonna be my, my next question because there's a, there, there's something I'm trying to circle, circle around and I think it's time that we descend there. You started off with talking about the connection between what you're doing and proof of work. And in, in another way, like, one of the ways that I like to explain proof of work to people that are asking like the 101s is like, I, I point at the Egyptian pyramids. Because when you go to the Egyptian pyramids, like, it's a proof of work. Like, you know that that took a lot of work. Like, you don't have to verify it, you know that it's true. You just have to look at it. And so that's one of our early OG, like, proof of works. Like, if aliens came to planet Earth, they could see the pyramids, be like, oh, that took a lot of work.

• 48:26David Hoffman?

  And then they can go to your YouTube channel and see your upload rate and it's like, oh, one, one song, one a day. They're all unique, they're all different, oh, man, that, that took a lot of work. And you're telling me that like all these adayers, these creative adayers, are finding crypto because of a, and some sort of need to fill a monetization niche. And one of the fascinating aspects, I've already said this once before and many, many times throughout the bankless ecosystem, like, one of the cool things that really makes me bullish about crypto is that, in Ethereum specifically, the ability to tokenize stuff, allows, and tokenize stuff on open, public permissionless networks that allows the whole entire globe to come and impart their perceived value upon these things.

• 49:09David Hoffman?

  That we now have ways to produce market assets, financial assets, that more closely aligned with our human values. So we have the market value of our assets more closely aligned with our human values. And so I think we have like the These creative adayers that are putting in the work that is verifiable and that's backed by time. You have provably burnt time to produce this output.

• 49:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:36David Hoffman?

  And like, maybe it's not a financial asset like staked ether is, or a bond, a treasury bond. But at some point, like, it doesn't matter because so many things and so many market, the value of our market assets are perceived. Right? We tell us, we have these narratives of like, the price to earnings ratio, or price to sales ratio. And that's a, that's a value, a fundamental valuation, but it's also perceived.

• 50:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:01David Hoffman?

  And then we got, and then we start to zoom out a little bit and like, oh, well, what else is perceived?

• 50:05Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 50:06David Hoffman?

  A Monet is also perceived, but no one's gonna like, argue with you about like, the value of a Monet. And at some point, like, what's really happening here is like, we have so many creatives out there in the world. Burning their time in the same way that proof of work miners are burning their electricity to produce some sort of creative output. And you don't need like, a whole entire financial system to agree upon, oh yeah, this, this token has strong fundamentals. You just need a hundred people, or a thousand people to be like, yo, like, the waveform of this guy's like, sleeping words is like, kinda unique. I guess I'll pay a couple hundred dollars for that. And all of a sudden, like, we have enough people to like, support up these creators.

• 50:47David Hoffman?

  And the only thing that the creators really need to do is provably burn their time in honest and real fashion.

• 50:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, and just to keep doing what they've been doing all along anyway. And, and I think that gives it a, that gives it like, another layer of legitimacy, I think, you know, where. You look at someone who's been doing it every day anyway, or has been creating their songs, even if they're not doing it every day. They're just, you know, someone like Latasha has been like, putting in the work for years and years and years. So many people in the space doing that, you can see that, that there's, you can't, you can't fake that, right? There's no, there's not, there's, yeah, so, um, yeah, absolutely. And, and I mean, you know, um, I love that.

• 51:35Speaker 03

  I, I take a, I take a, you know, I take a pretty like, measured approach to this. And like I said, I think it's, it's more, for me, it's just like, it's gonna be another tool in the tool, in the toolbox. Ultimately, same with DAOs, same with everything, like, ultimately.

• 51:54Speaker 03

  They're all just gonna be like this really cool tool that we can use.

• 52:01Speaker 03

  Uh, where appropriate to like, to like, make cool shit. And it's fun. I have so many, I keep getting calls from far flung friends now who like, dude, tell me about NFTs. You know, that's, that's happening more and more now.

• 52:19David Hoffman?

  So, but when you discovered Ethereum and crypto and NFTs before they were called NFTs, you didn't really see this as like, oh, this is how I can monetize my, my Song of Days. You were just drawn to it for whatever reasons?

• 52:33Speaker 03

  No, I was immediately. I was like, I, I immediately saw it as, there's a great, there's like a video that I found, actually. Um, we can maybe share it in the show notes. A video of a talk that I gave in, uh, right in 2017, not long after I had discovered CryptoPunks, where I lay out the entire Song of Day NFT project in 2017. Like, like I didn't know this video existed. My friend had sent it to me. And I give a talk about CryptoPunks. I'm like, here's these CryptoPunks. They're so, aren't they so cool? Like, and I point to this zombie one. I'm like, this one, for instance, like there's only blah, blah, blah of these. And so it's really rare. So it's very valuable. See, it's $333. Somebody is willing to pay $333 for this zombie.

• 53:18Speaker 03

  Uh, but then after I talk about that, I'm like, oh, and like, here's what I want to build on top of that with, with Song of Day. Um, and from the very beginning, I saw it as like this way that maybe if, you know, if I could, if I could be putting out my song every day and even just making like a hundred dollars or something, somebody paid me like a hundred dollars in ETH every day for my song. I'm going to come out so far ahead than if I wasn't able to do that. Um, and that, that was like the impetus for me from the very beginning, uh, was it, was, was the monetization part. Uh, you know, and then the, the further I got down, like, just like you said, you, you start going down these rabbit holes and you start discovering like,

• 54:03Speaker 03

  oh, right. Everything is made up. Like everything is completely just made up. Uh, it's all stories. Stories like entirely down.

• 54:10David Hoffman?

  Stories all the way down.

• 54:11Speaker 03

  It's all stories. And so whoa, oh, that's, that's, that's mind blowing. And then, uh, you know, and then back in those days too, there was so, nobody. I've heard you talk about this too, like even Vitalik, like nobody got NFTs. Nobody gave a shit about NFTs or understood. And, and there was a small group of us, like me and like the Dada people and the super rare guys. And Jason Bailey from Art Gnome, there was a bunch of us in New York and we would have all these meetups and we would just get together and just like geek out about NFTs in digital scarcity.

• 54:50Speaker 03

  Uh, and yeah, anyway, I don't know where I was going with that. That was a really nice time. That was like a really like warm, fuzzy feeling time for me because it was like, it seemed like endless possibilities at that point. It was like, we don't know what we're doing and you know, uh, but a lot of it holds up. A lot of the things that we wrote back then, a lot of like the podcasts we did, it holds up. We, we, we called this, I think in a lot of ways, like we called the NFT, what would be compelling about NFTs?

• 55:20David Hoffman?

  So what was the original monetization plan for your song a day with using NFTs? And how did it start and did it change over time?

• 55:29Speaker 03

  It did change over the time, but the basic idea, again, you can go watch this video. The basic idea is exactly the same from the very beginning. Take CryptoPunks, make it into Song a Day. Like that was like, that was my goal from the very beginning. And what's so funny is that like,

• 55:44David Hoffman?

  But not, not the generative aspect, right?

• 55:46Speaker 03

  Like not like, There is even the generative aspect.

• 55:48David Hoffman?

  Oh, really?

• 55:49Speaker 03

  If you've seen it, well, because there's the images. I, I hired a different illustrator for, for each year of Song a Day. And they each made layers of the illustrations, which is like old hat now, right? Like now that's just like, oh yeah, of course you would do that.

• 56:04David Hoffman?

  Table stakes.

• 56:05Speaker 03

  You know, but back then it was like really, like I had to explain it. It was like really hard to explain to anybody. It was, there's like, it was, it didn't make any sense, but I was like, but look at CryptoPunks. Now imagine that and each song has an image. It's generated from these layers and each layer, each song, each year is done by a different person. And I did all that, like that, that ended up being my project and that was there from the very beginning. Each, each CryptoPunk has all these traits. And again, the traits were like, yeah, of course, of course you're gonna have traits. Like what, your, your thing isn't gonna have traits? But it was like, no, no, no, you don't understand. Like, no one got it. They're like, traits? What are you talking about traits? What are traits? No, no, no. So like, there's a location, like I sing my song and like, there's a topic and there's like, there's all these different traits of the songs. And they're like, what are you saying? Like, it doesn't make any sense.

• 56:51Speaker 03

  But from the very beginning, that's just what it was. It was just take CryptoPunks and, and map it onto Song of Day. And the main thing that changed, actually, was the DAO. The main thing that, that changed from then to now was, uh, seeing some of the amazing experiments, specifically like Noun's DAO and, and the song that owns itself, and those blowing my mind in a whole new way, and deciding to like, bring that part of it and glomming that onto the Song of Day NFT project that I had been building forever, anyway. Um, uh, yeah. So that, that, that's the main thing that changed was, was bringing in the DAO aspect.

• 57:30David Hoffman?

  Yeah. So what's this state of the Song of Day project now? Like, as of right now, where is it at?

• 57:36Speaker 03

  So, we on, it was a ton of work. It was like ridiculous amount of work to, to get this project going. Um, I spent, I spent probably like, like $600,000, maybe more total, building this project. Which is like, more than I normally make. I make, I, up until this year, I made about $100,000 a year for the last 10 years. That's like, that's been my, my, my, where I've been.

• 58:09David Hoffman?

  Basel level, yeah.

• 58:10Speaker 03

  So the idea that I spent like, six years worth of that, just this year, just in creating this project. And funded through this other project I made called Fucking Trolls, which is a PFP project making fun of other PFP projects.

• 58:29David Hoffman?

  I have to look at this. I did not know this.

• 58:32Speaker 03

  Many people sell their trolls for zero, so you can get some, which is just glorious. It's just wonderful. But we made a shit ton of money off Fucking Trolls. I made a shit ton of money off of just selling random NFTs this year, and I was able to finally fund this project that I'd been dreaming of since 2017. I hired 13 different illustrators. I paid them each like $50,000 to make, ultimately, they made around 1,200 layers all combined. I hired Raid Guild, which is a wonderful DAO collective of people who who you can hire them to just slay your project. They call it slaying dragons,

• 59:15Speaker 03

  and build it. So they did all solidity work and all the front-end work and all that kind of stuff. And we launched on December 31st, and it sold out, like roughly 4,000 songs sold out in like an hour and a half, which was amazing. That's a whole other story of like how that happened. Very specific to crypto story, actually. We can get into that if you're interested. But now, what's been happening since January 1st, and this has always been part of the plan, is that I have been selling my songs on my website, songaday.world, every single day. There's a new song. It's being auctioned each day. And all the money from those auctions goes to the DAO now.

• 59:59Speaker 03

  And so the DAO has roughly, I don't know, 31 ETH now in its treasury, just in like the last 16 days, 17 days. And that will go on, you know, indefinitely. Every day, I'm just gonna sit down, do my song like I always have, and tokenize it, sell it. You know, we're gonna see each other at ETH Denver, right? So like,

• 1:00:20Speaker 03

  I'm hosting the Shelling Point Conference that Awaki is doing, Awaki and Simona. And so I have this plan where I'm hoping, I don't really know if they're gonna let me do this, but like my idea was, I'm gonna bring each of you up on stage with like a little verse of a song that I'm gonna write about you, and I'm gonna have you stand there while I sing your verse. And then I'm gonna stitch all these verses together, and that's gonna be my song for the day. Then that song is gonna get sold on my website, it's gonna be tokenized and auctioned off. And that money-

• 1:00:49David Hoffman?

  I'd imagine there's gonna be some bids for that one.

• 1:00:51Speaker 03

  I hope so, I hope so. And so that will, you know, that money goes to the DAO. And it's fun, it's been super fun. People are coming into the DAO, we're still getting our feet under us. Like, we're working on the voting, of how we're gonna do voting, because the way we're doing voting is one person, one vote. We don't have a token, we just have the NFT, there's no token in this DAO, yet, maybe someday.

• 1:01:16David Hoffman?

  And it's an NFT curated DAO, rather than a DAO about a New York City 20 token. It's if you own one of the songs of a song a day, DAO?

• 1:01:23Speaker 03

  If you own one of the songs, you are eligible to be in the DAO. The only thing you have to do to become fully in the DAO is to get verified on Bright ID. And then you can vote, once you're verified with Bright ID. And that's what we're trying to do right now, it doesn't actually exist. This is like a, we're hoping to make this like a public good thing that doesn't exactly exist yet, which is a snapshot instance, or whatever you call it, that has Bright ID as part of it, so that you can have a snapshot where you're sure that everyone who's voting is a person. Every single person who's voting is one person. Which not a lot of projects are doing currently, because it doesn't exist.

• 1:02:04Speaker 03

  And that's what we're building right now. And it's cool, man, it's like, it's crazy. It's a crazy world. And I'm just so like excited, and as jazzed as I was the first day that I saw CryptoPunks.

• 1:02:21David Hoffman?

  How much do you let the DAO dictate what your decisions are?

• 1:02:26Speaker 03

  So the DAO, the, all, anyone who holds an NFT ultimately is welcome to-

• 1:02:36Speaker 03

  Have creative input.

• 1:02:40Speaker 03

  And at some point, once we have like the voting up and running, we will be doing, you know, things where we'll, we'll take certain questions toward to the DAO. Like, I have a lot of like collabs that I want to do and we can, we can have them like suggest collabs or like, uh, steer the collabs in a different way. The DAO, ultimately, if you are a voter, if you, if you're verified with Bred ID, that's when you can deploy funds, you know, to, to do grants or to do whatever ultimately.

• 1:03:12Speaker 03

  I would say that like, the creative direction stuff is more of a suggestion.

• 1:03:18Speaker 03

  And the, the treasury stuff is more binding. Like, that's the, that's the idea is like, once you're, you know, once you are verified that like you are you and you're going to be one person, one vote, then we're gonna, you know, then we'll abide by what everybody wants, you know? Like, we have, we already have proposals to do like an NFTX vault for the songs and like, you know, I'm down for it, but like, depending on what people want to do, then we may or may not do that.

• 1:03:47David Hoffman?

  Does allowing the DAO to dictate your creative output make you uncomfortable?

• 1:03:55Speaker 03

  No, because like I said, it's not, it's not binding, that part. The, the part that's-

• 1:03:58David Hoffman?

  But as, because it, because perhaps it would make you uncomfortable if it was?

• 1:04:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, well, um, I just think it would be less interesting because, um, uh, I found that like, most people don't give great suggestions.

• 1:04:17Speaker 03

  Is, is what I found, and sometimes they do, but like, but I found that like, you know, it's, it's more interesting to me what they will do with the money than it is to me what they will do with me, with the songs. Leave the songs to the professionals, I guess, is like, is, is, is the way I'm thinking about it.

• 1:04:36David Hoffman?

  So what about the dynamic of like, there's only one of you?

• 1:04:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:41David Hoffman?

  And so like, the DAO is really a DAO around like the treasury, not the song creation. What's the dynamic like of you have this one guy who's responsible for the actual inflows of ether into the treasury? What's that like?

• 1:04:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, what's interesting about that is that, I mean, so we're only 17 days in. So I don't really know what it's like yet. And I would like to get to the point where, you know, part of why I wanted to do one person, one vote, and that includes me, is that I tried to, because it's so me focused, I wanted to give as much power as I could to everyone else. Knowing that I wield, obviously, way outsized influence. I wanted to find a way to like, to counteract that as much as I could. And so that's the part of the idea behind one person, one vote. But ultimately, you know,

• 1:05:38Speaker 03

  it remains to be seen ultimately, like, like how people are going to respond to it or what it's going to look like. So far, it's been really fun. And I would like to get to the point where, where it's not just me bringing in the money. Because there's a lot of opportunity for other people to, if someone got a song placed in a movie or something, that could bring in an enormous amount of money to the DAO. And we have pathways for, because the DAO is a legal co-op, like Spork DAO is, we have pathways where if you do something like that, you can get paid by the DAO in ETH.

• 1:06:21Speaker 03

  You can, you can get paid from money directly from the treasury. If you bring in, it's called patronage activity. There's this, there's this, there's this co-op term called patronage activity where things you do that Benefit the co-op, entitle you to money from the treasury. So yeah, I just imagine someone being a music licensing person and you know, there's a lot of songs to choose from like listening through and being like, oh, I like this one. Like maybe this one could fit here, maybe or something. And then if that happens, all that money, all the royalties and everything flow into the DAO, all the off-chain royalties.

• 1:07:02Speaker 03

  I mean, like from Spotify and from the, the ideally, I would like to get to the point where Paramount Pictures is not doing a, a deal with me. They're doing a deal with my DAO. And, and ultimately it's the DAO has, who has a lawyer who's deal, who's hammering out the details. And all of that money flows right back into the DAO and the person who was responsible for that can see some of that upside.

• 1:07:29David Hoffman?

  How do you think the mere existence of the DAO impacts evaluation of the NFT songs? Do you think like, because like you could have just pocketed all the money for yourself, right? And be a lot more direct.

• 1:07:41Speaker 03

  Yes, I mean, for, for a long time, that was the plan, right? And, and part of the reason I valued, part of the reason I, I minted the songs, the original songs, the, the archive of the songs on January, on December 31st. I had the mint price at point two, which is like really high for a project like this. Uh, but the reason I did that was because that was the number that I needed to feel comfortable to give the rest of this money to the DAO.

• 1:08:08Speaker 03

  But I think ultimately it's a long-term prospect, right? Like, uh, I don't know what's going to happen and like right now, we're living through this moment. It's really interesting in NFTs that I've, that I've noticed, I keep talking about this because it's on my mind. We're living through like a, it's, it's burgeoning, this like really burgeoning pure meme NFT time that we're living in. Olive Garden was, was maybe like the, the first that I noticed. Ghazali is another example of this kid. And now Irene Dow, just like these three, just like pure.

• 1:08:47Speaker 03

  Almost a reaction to the rallying cry that's been around for the last like six months of like, utility, what's the utility of the art? The art needs to have utility. And now there's a reaction that we're like, fuck utility. This is a pure, we're going Dogecoin people. We're just going like pure meme. There's, it's just a, it's a funny fucking thing and we're all getting behind it.

• 1:09:11David Hoffman?

  And you're buying it.

• 1:09:12Speaker 03

  And you're buying it. Yeah, yeah, right.

• 1:09:18Speaker 03

  So ultimately, I don't know what's gonna happen, but I've set up Song of Day in a way that I think, you know, I think in like really long-term ways, you know, because I, I, I think about, you know,

• 1:09:38Speaker 03

  three, like I said, three years is a thousand songs, which sounds like a lot, but honestly, man, like the first thousand felt like they took forever. The second thousand kinda took a while. The third and the fourth thousand went like that. They're just like going so fast. So I think about like three years in the future, when I've done, I've literally auctioned off a thousand songs.

• 1:10:03Speaker 03

  And, and all that money goes into the Dow. What are NFTs even gonna look like? Like, is, is any of the stuff that's around now still gonna be around? I don't know. But I, but I've, I've built Song of Day specifically to like, to be able to hopefully weather that. Weather whatever comes, you know? Um, having lived through the one, the one, uh, winter that I did.

• 1:10:29David Hoffman?

  Do you see yourself, um, changing what, changing the songs that you write and how you write them? Or how you sing them or what, what they're about? Because you now know that there's like a Dow behind this and you're trying to wanna be like a prophet maxi on behalf of the Dow?

• 1:10:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, definitely. And I, and I, I talk about this even in the, in the, that very first talk that, that the CryptoPunk talk that I was talking about from 2017. I sort of was aware even back then and I thought. I thought what the vector was gonna be actually was rarity. I thought the vector was gonna be rarity because that's what CryptoPunks was. And that's how people were valuing different CryptoPunks. Um, so I thought, oh, like, maybe when I'm doing my song a day, like, if I play with an instrument I've never played with, and I do it in a location where I've never been, and I sing about a topic that I've never sung about, and I'm wearing an outfit that I've never worn, like, maybe, um,

• 1:11:29Speaker 03

  which I don't think is the case anymore, and it's more about the stories about the space that, that are, that people want. Um, now, that's not surprising to me in the least, because always the songs that get the most views are the topical songs.

• 1:11:47David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:11:47Speaker 03

  Um, all of my most viewed songs are either political in nature, or about pop culture, or whatever. Like, those are all the ones that have the most views.

• 1:11:57David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:11:57Speaker 03

  Uh, so songs about crypto, you know, makes perfect sense that those would be the ones that people are willing to pay the most for.

• 1:12:07David Hoffman?

  Uh, usually, I would imagine that, like, if the ENS DAO song, for example.

• 1:12:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:12:11David Hoffman?

  It would be really compelling for the ENS DAO to make an offer on the ENS DAO song.

• 1:12:17Speaker 03

  Well, they own it. They, so it got minted.

• 1:12:19David Hoffman?

  Oh, they do!

• 1:12:20Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. It got minted. It got minted, you know, I minted all the songs randomly in the drop.

• 1:12:27David Hoffman?

  Uh huh.

• 1:12:27Speaker 03

  And so somebody got it, but then they bought it off them. They, they, they were able to secure it. There's a bunch of ones like that, where the people who ultimately the song was about, like, they were able to secure it after the fact, because I did it randomly. I wanted it to be fair, and that's why I did random. But, uh, yeah, they own it. They own it now. Um.

• 1:12:49David Hoffman?

  It, it'd be really an interesting strategy to make a bunch of songs about a bunch of DAOs. And then allow the DAOs to bid for the songs, perhaps even in their native token, so they don't actually have to keep or give up any of their USCC or ether.

• 1:13:02Speaker 03

  Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:04David Hoffman?

  And then, and then your DAO has just shares of all the other DAOs, and just buy it just because you sang a song about them. They kind of have to buy at that point.

• 1:13:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah, and there's, you know, I did a song about Constitution DAO when that was a thing. Um.

• 1:13:20Speaker 03

  I've done, yeah, I've done a bunch of, I've already done a bunch of DAO songs. I have a bunch of like collabs lined up with, with NFT projects that I love. I should probably do some more DAO aligned things.

• 1:13:30David Hoffman?

  Do you allow your songs to be commissioned by projects?

• 1:13:34Speaker 03

  So that is something that I've not explored in this new setup because, because, um, because of the auction nature of the thing. Basically, there's been a few times now in the last couple of weeks, people have come to me and I said, well, listen, I can't let you pay me directly. Uh, it needs to go to the DAO because, because if I do it, I'm, I'm gonna make it. I could do a song outside of Songaday, you know, it could be like a separate song. Don't really want to do that. Don't really have time to do that. So it would have to be a Songaday song. And so I was like, you're just gonna have to, you're just gonna have to like bid on it and just hope that no one's bidding against you. And that's fine. And then I'd be like, I'd be like, I guess what I would probably say is like, you know,

• 1:14:19Speaker 03

  bid at least like two ETH or something. And then, and then like, then I'll just, I'll do the song for you and you just have to promise that you're gonna bid at least two ETH. And then that's, and that's probably how I would do it now, if I was gonna do that. Um, yeah. And I'm, I'm open to that. I've done a lot of commissions over, over the years, you know, a ton. Uh, that's part, you know, part of how I made my living. And so, um, as long as it's like something that I don't totally hate, I'd probably do it.

• 1:14:47David Hoffman?

  Have any, uh, community members from the DAO stepped up to, uh, wear a leadership hat?

• 1:14:52Speaker 03

  Yes, they have. It's been super exciting. Um, uh, my friend Boris, who was like the first person to introduce me to crypto, is in the DAO. He's been helping a ton. I have a couple like mods that I picked out and they have like, a couple of them have like some really good, um, technical skill and they've been like just taking the lead on this voting thing, which is like really helpful. Um, cause it's a, it's a, it's a conundrum. It's like a, it's a, there's a lot of like things to solve. Um, and, uh, that's like the most pressing thing right now is getting voting up and running because we can't do anything until we can vote. Um, and yeah, it's been amazing. I, it's, it's, it's been so cool to see that happen and really gratifying.

• 1:15:36David Hoffman?

  Well Jonathan, if listeners want to go join your DAO or just find out more about what you're up to, where should they go?

• 1:15:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, come to songaday.world. That's the place where every day, right there on the front page, the song is auctioned off.

• 1:15:50David Hoffman?

  Wait, so it's not called Song a DAO?

• 1:15:52Speaker 03

  No, it's songaday.world. We also have songadao.org, which is our discourse place.

• 1:16:02David Hoffman?

  Alright, so that name is somewhere. Okay, I'm glad about that.

• 1:16:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, songadao.org. But to see the daily song, you go to songaday.world, where you can link to the OpenSea. Because of all the de-gens, the songs are like way below mint, so you can get them for real cheap. Real cheap right now. And, yeah, that's the place to go. I also want to plug this hat. I'm currently selling this hat. You have seven, let's see, whenever this goes live, when's this gonna go live when? Like roughly... So you have five days to order this hat. We'll put the link in the show notes. The Songs hat. Doesn't give you anything other than a really cool hat that says Songs on it. And so, you can support your love of songs with this hat.

• 1:16:50David Hoffman?

  Jonathan, if there's one lesson that you've learned that you wish more people had learned in their lives, what would it be?

• 1:16:57Speaker 03

  Sucking at something is the first step to being kinda good at something.

• 1:17:01David Hoffman?

  That's a quote from Adventure Time, right?

• 1:17:04Speaker 03

  You got it.

• 1:17:05David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:06Speaker 03

  It's one of the most wise things that anyone's ever spoken. Jake the Dog.

• 1:17:11David Hoffman?

  And who in the world really needs to hear that? What cohort of individuals?

• 1:17:16Speaker 03

  I mean, anyone that wants to do anything. I mean, like...

• 1:17:27Speaker 03

  There's no, there's no, like, anything that you're trying to do, and I have to tell myself this constantly too, about things that I want to learn, like,

• 1:17:38Speaker 03

  anything that you've been thinking about, like, "Oh, I would like to write songs", or, "Oh, I would like to write a novel", or, "Oh, I'd like to, you know, make podcasts", or, "Oh, I should do blog posts on this", or, "Oh, I want to do Twitter threads",

• 1:17:51Speaker 03

  You know, just sucking at something is really the first step. You have to go through the sucking it. And, and, and it never really stops. But you just have to sort of accept, accept the sucking sometimes.

• 1:18:09David Hoffman?

  The LDR of this episode, you gotta accept the sucking.

• 1:18:11Speaker 03

  That's it.

• 1:18:12David Hoffman?

  That's it. Awesome, Jonathan.

• 1:18:13Speaker 03

  Roll, roll credits!

• 1:18:14David Hoffman?

  Roll credits. There we go, Jonathan. Thank you for coming on this episode of Blazer Zero.

• 1:18:19Speaker 03

  Thank you. My pleasure.

• 1:18:21David Hoffman?

  Cheers.

• 1:18:24David Hoffman?

  Hey, we hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, head over to Bankless HQ right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from banks and gain your financial independence. We recommend joining our daily newsletter, podcast, and community as a Bankless Premium subscriber to get the most out of your Bankless experience. You'll get access to our market analysis, our alpha leaks, and exclusive content, and even the Bankless token for airdrops, raffles, and unlocks. If you're interested in crypto, the Bankless community is where you want to be. Click the link in the description to become a Bankless Premium subscriber today. Also, don't forget to subscribe to the channel for in-depth interviews with industry leaders, Ask Me Anythings, and weekly rollups where we summarize the week in crypto and other

• 1:19:09David Hoffman?

  fantastic content. Thanks, everyone, for watching and being on the journey as we build out the Bankless Nation.