Jacob Horne (Website, Zora, X, Farcaster), is co-founder and CEO of Zora, a platform that allows the tokenization of media.

Jacob started his career at Coinbase where he was a product lead and helped create USDC. Five years ago, he left to wade deeper into the waters of internet and crypto-native coordination and creativity and co-founded Zora.

His central interest is how people coordinate together using the internet—the includes currencies, markets, ownership, art, speculation, and memes. We discuss how memes and symbols enable coordination, "The Meme and the Memo," words, money, and laws, Zora's premise built on Stewart Brand's "information wants to be free but it also wants to be expensive," a case for markets around attention, the new version of Zora and "a coin for every piece of content," speculation vs. gambling, token-powered brands, Ethereum and Solana, Coinbase and USDC, and a wide-ranging personal section that showcases why Jacob is so generative.

The parting prompt I hope this conversation leaves all of us with is this: while information is ~free today (and also abundant, infinite), it is also quite expensive to consume in terms of time. We ought to think carefully about what content we spend our precious time consuming and rewarding. That you would spend some of yours listening to Dialectic is as always a privilege and I hope you find it worthwhile.

Transcript available here.

Timestamps

(3:03): Obsession with Memes: How do you get people to organize?
(8:46): The Meme and the Memo via Balaji Srinivasan
(11:32): Three Fundamental Questions: Words, Money, Laws
(12:39): The Midwit Meme and other Favorites
(15:55): What makes media and information valuable?
(19:26): Zora, Tokenized Media, and Information wants to be Free and Expensive
(22:53): Provenance
(28:30): Why Do We Want Markets for Attention?

Deeper Crypto Section

(37:08): A coin for every piece of content: prediction markets on attention
(42:49): Investing in People or “Creator” / “Social”Tokens
(44:14): Not fighting internet gravity: NFTs, “utillity,” 1 of 1s, and skeumorphic ideas along the way
(47:52): Speaking to potential concerns and incentivizing more durable and useful information
(52:23): Speculation vs. Gambling: positive sum vs. zero-sum
(56:00): AI: Market Data as an input for for Models
(58:56): Speculating on how a future of AI and attention markets will be good for creatives
(1:04:50): Small market cap content can still be meaningful
(1:08:11): Crypto-optimism and regulation
(1:13:52): Saint Fame, Nouns, and Ideas for Future Token-Coordinated Orgs
(1:22:32): Reflecting on “Hyperstructures”
(1:28:55): Jacob's shift toward market-oriented thinking for solving coordination problems
(1:30:40): Ethereum, Solana, and Blockchain Competition

Coinbase

(1:36:23): The Coinbase Internship that Never Ended
(1:40:49): Starting USDC
(1:49:14): Bloomberg Terminal's Design

General Jacob

(1:50:09): Bezos and adoption of technology
(1:52:47): Tokenized Identity
(1:55:41): Matt Dryhurst and Holly Herndon and Bridging Art and Technology
(1:58:43): What idea has the world not come around on yet?
(2:00:12): What are the aesthetics of Jacob's AI model?
(2:04:20): The FAFO Zone and Local Maximums
(2:11:03): The alternate reality where Jacob didn't discovery Bitcoin
(2:14:54): Cultural and Artistic Inspirations
(2:17:55): Patronus Problems
(2:20:44): Australians and Americans
(2:23:42): Jacob's Favorite Ideas
(2:28:27): Lessons for Jacob's kids about creativity

Links

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Joyce Salisbury, “Rome’s Christian Empress: Galla Placidia Rules at the Twilight of the Empire” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2015)