Lawson Baker - Social Tokens to Incentivize Followers

JohnPaul: [00:00:00] Hey everyone, welcome to the podcast. I’m your host JohnPaul and this is Digital Gold. Known to many as the Bitcoin Kid, I started my own cryptocurrency out of my parents’ basement back in 2013. The goal of this show is to simplify the crypto world and explore how it changes the way the world thinks about money through conversations with thought leaders [00:00:16] in this space.

[00:00:17] JohnPaul is the founder and CEO of Orm Capital Ventures. All opinions expressed by JP and podcast guests are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of Orm Capital Ventures. This podcast is intended for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for investment decisions.

JohnPaul: [00:00:31] Welcome to the Digital Gold podcast. Today I’m here with Lawson who is a digital nomad internet native in crypto enthusiasts. As the founder of Rau Rau Rau, Lawson’s dream is to increase the velocity of money on the internet with crypto, social experience. Rau Rau is a social crypto company creating experiences around the crypto media, AKNFTs [00:01:02] and social money which consists of personal and community tokens. Lawson is also an advisor to Hashflow which is a DeFi bridge between Off-Chame liquidity and AMMs. He is an on-deck founder fellow. Additionally, Lawson has served on a variety of nonprofit board of directors including Chairman of the Monos United International and Nonprofit Bending Special Needs Schools

JohnPaul: [00:01:23] in Peru. Lawson, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining me. I’m excited to chat today. So just to kind of fully wrap up the intro, I’m Lawson, founder of Rau Rau Social and been in and around the crypto space for it’s hard to count the years now. Since probably [00:01:44] like 2014-2015, my background was in investment banking, left investment banking to join Synapse in the U.S. and our first customers in 2014-2015 were crypto exchanges and crypto apps. As a result, I had one foot in the future of banking in FinTech for banking APIs. So APIs are basically tools to allow for FinTech’s new tech companies to easily connect to essentially banking infrastructure.

JohnPaul: [00:02:09] Anything a bank can do, Synapse essentially turned it into an API. As a result, I had one foot in FinTech and one foot in crypto. And over time, obviously completely fell down the crypto rabbit hole and was essentially observing the innovation in the space. And what it came down to is the FinTech and banking apps were really more of just pretty UIs and [00:02:33] pretty apps on top of banks. Banks aren’t great at building apps and so FinTech’s are. While the crypto companies, this was still pretty early. This was still predominantly like the Bitcoin tipping days. I think you’ve been around for a long time, JP, but the

Lawson: [00:02:44] consumer like Change Tip and the groups like that, they were doing micro tipping and stuff like that. In addition to lots of exchanges, most exchanges in the 2014-15-16-17 era, if they were in the U.S. Coinbase, Avro, Zepo, Kraken, you name it, they all use us in a warm, full, form or fashion. And over time, the innovation I was seeing on the crypto [00:03:04] side definitely seemed much more novel than they can build a pretty app. It was more critical like infrastructure. They were changing the way money works. And obviously that kind of took me down this path of like, I had to work full time in crypto. And so I actually left early 18 to go full time where I worked at briefly at a company called TokenSoft, where

Lawson: [00:03:25] basically building an Emily Financial Assets on blockchains and left there in early 2020 to start working on RIA. So when I left TokenSoft, I felt like a time to go out to consumers. Basically two B2B companies were first, kind of the future of FinTech and banking. Second, TokenSoft is the future of what a financial assets look like on blockchains like Ethereum. [00:03:48] And I left there in March of 2020 and started working on what was MoneyMell at the time, which has since been rebranded to rah-rah.social. And MoneyMell and rah-rah are basically a combination of two narratives. The first is our relationship with money is changing. And the second is we’re leaving the information age and entering an age that is based around connections,

Lawson: [00:04:12] engagement, and essentially entertainment. And so the narratives are, I’ll dive into each of those. First, our relationship with money and what leads to social money. Our relationship with money over the past, you know, thousands of years, everybody’s, everybody in crypto’s red books on money. But I’ll just start with paper money. Paper money, as we [00:04:32] see it today, if you still have some, first, it’s got your home team on it, i.e. your government. Second, it has somebody you saw in history class on it. And third, there’s a tactile relationship to spending it, right? And so money has utility, but it also has this social signaling thing. For example, if you were to spend $100, Chris, $100 bill,

Lawson: [00:04:52] a Benjamin, that has a different social signal than spending a five or even a $20 bill. And there’s something about spending that one that says a little bit something different about you. And in the same way, when we moved to debit cards and credit cards, it was that we were doing that as well. First, it was really just marketing and branding. So it [00:05:08] had a Bank of America logo on it or whatever your bank was. But then we started basically creating a class system, silver card, gold card, platinum card, black card. And that black card was heavier than those other cards. And that heaviness. And when you handed that whatever color card that was, black, gold, platinum, whatever, you were trying to pace

Lawson: [00:05:25] for something, but you were also signaling something about yourself. You were saying, you know, I’m in a different class than other people, right? And so there was, there was this very signaling nature around money separate from just the utility around it. The problem is when we went online, we lost all essentially social metadata around the utility of money. [00:05:44] We had debit card and credit card, digits, a string of digits, expiration dates, billing addresses. And if it was a banking platform, it was really just like, here’s my balance, send and receive purely utilitarian. And that actually fits a whole lot into, you know, kind of what the information age is. The information age is all about it’s very transactional in

Lawson: [00:06:01] nature. The information age, you know, this is part of the second narrative. The information age has been incredible. The internet opened up and unlocked all of the information in the world to make it easily accessible by anybody and also, frankly, free. And so if you were going to transact for something online, traditionally, it wasn’t something that was media based, you [00:06:20] know, music, pictures, things like that. It was normally like for some sort of service, or you were buying something off Amazon. And while everything was really utilitarian with the spending and the money, you know, fast forward to today, I believe we’re leaving the information age and we’re entering an age of connections and engagement, entertainment, influences are

Lawson: [00:06:40] a good signal of this. The corporation is dead. The influencer is live. Start up founders, you know, I believe we’re trending away from start founders needing to be technical to start up founders needing to be influencers in a weird way. They can essentially bootstrap the goodwill of a company that doesn’t have an exist, it doesn’t have a name brand or at all with their social [00:07:00] clout, there are tons of followers on YouTube or influencer Instagram or Twitter or TikTok or whatever. And as we head into this age of entertainment and connections, essentially, what we observed as we were researching and testing ideas for money mail and now rah rah is people don’t want to spend money for entertainment and they don’t really know how to quantify it. The example I give is

Lawson: [00:07:23] like if you were to post an Instagram post, right, like the person who posted it and the person who consumed it really have no way to objectively say what is the value of this. And so right now, the things that are having traction for social platform social social media influencers are kind of sort of tipping solutions. There are things like Patreon is like authoristically giving to [00:07:46] someone, right? There’s a portion of the pie of people who will authoriously give to influencers and creators of things they like, but the most people kind of want something extra for it, right? And so that’s kind of the nuance we started to understand when we were money mail and essentially what’s happening is where society is starting to change that connection and how you connect with

Lawson: [00:08:07] those people essentially with digital objects. In video games, we’ve had social money like things and digital objects for a long time. Most video games have their own currency, Fortnite has Fortnite be bucks, and that currency is meant to buy things to consume in the game. If the game’s like a shooter game, it’s like bullets and shields and stuff like that. If it’s a different game, it’s [00:08:27] maybe to build a house or something to like communicate or connect with other people. Taking that over to social, we’re effectively entering a very similar type of thing. And NFTs are kind of a good example of that. NFTs are ownership of what would have otherwise been a Instagram post, right? Or social money, i.e. money of the community, could be a combination of a few things. Today in crypto,

Lawson: [00:08:52] we have personal tokens, community tokens, and maybe even community money in some cases. Personal tokens are influencers. Community tokens are communities of people around ideas. Good examples of that outside of crypto would be something like Wall Street Bets inside a crypto. A good example of a community token would be something like FWB, Friends with Benefits or RNG, [00:09:13] Random Number Generator, or maybe even Whale Token. Whale Token started off as a great NFT creator who stuck all his NFTs into a DAO and gave or sold away tokens to ownership of the DAO. But there’s this community thing that’s almost separate from the art. And so some community tokens start off as a DAO and become a community. Some community tokens start off as a community

Lawson: [00:09:36] and become a DAO. FWB and RNG are good examples of communities, tokens that are becoming DAOs, while Whale Token is a good example of a DAO that’s becoming a community. And what those things represent social tokens, personal money, community tokens, and NFTs is exactly everything that exists in social media today. Individuals, communities, media, content of music, video, gifs, animations, [00:09:57] reactions, whatever. And so at Rara Social, we’re essentially trying to lean into that. We say we’re a social wallet and crypto experience company. And what we mean by that is crypto for 10 years has also still been pretty transactional. But we’re pretty good with memes. And yes, like DeFi is all about making field farming and earning interest on tokens and using DAI

Lawson: [00:10:19] to pay for a contractor in UK. I pay a lot of my contractors in USDC or stablecoins. That’s very transactional. But as the DeFi yield farming summer of last year, Lewis’s huge meme quality was all around farming, yams, sushi, basically every food group that we could find the emoji for. We created a meme for it. I would argue probably Dogecoin was the original meme [00:10:42] cryptocurrency. And I was tweeting about that a year or two ago. And it was true at the time, and people knew it, but we didn’t fully understand it until what’s happening now. I mean, like, Doge is up. I don’t even know how many thousand percent now. But it’s a good example of that Doge has a utility. You can use Doge as money. But there’s this meme quality to it that

Lawson: [00:11:01] is something else, but something very special. And that meme quality effectively aligns people who relate to one idea or one thing and kind of helps them kind of connect. And so Rauraw social is trying to amplify any type of social experiences around personal tokens, community tokens, and NFTs. And so how we’re doing that is essentially we’re starting with social NFT auctions inside [00:11:21] of telegrams and discords. I’ll pause there. You probably have a few questions. Yeah, that was a great representation. I think of the social money space for the listeners. When it comes to personal

JohnPaul: [00:11:30] tokens, how do you see those evolving? And what are use cases that people are using to use them

Lawson: [00:11:35] right now or to use social tokens to create social tokens to work with social tokens? Yeah. So in the context of social money, the personal tokens, the community tokens, I think the community tokens are the ones that are a little bit more innovative right now. The personal tokens need a little bit more, any more innovation, but it also just needs to marinate. [00:11:51] Like, I don’t think we fully understand what we should do yet with personal tokens. There’s a lot of great personal tokens that exist right now, but their use cases is very transactional and not very novel yet. And so, you know, what areas that we could innovate in personal tokens and even community tokens is A, how they’re distributed and B, how they’re used. Today, individual personal

Lawson: [00:12:10] tokens are primarily distributed via putting up, you know, LP interest in Uniswap and anybody can go buy it there or somebody like Alex token or a coin artist. Occasionally they give them a way to people who help them do something like find an engineer for Showtime and Alex or are somehow contributing to something they need help with. And so it’s kind of like a back and forth. Like, [00:12:30] here’s my token for helping with something in the context of many of those, you know, personal tokens. There’s another one here’s first. Here’s first is a DJ who has a discord. He’s a good example of one that’s a little bit started to innovate. And so he’s combining effectively access with use. And so both community tokens today are primarily used to gate access

Lawson: [00:12:52] to something. They get access right now to in some cases, maybe media like NFTs, but most of them are primarily being used to gate access to chats. And these chats is essentially like this power communities. So RNG, FWB community tokens, and first are our first personal token all have token curated chats. And these token curated chats are using tools like CoLabland. There’s another [00:13:16] group called Alti, Alti does stuff on like WhatsApp primarily at Telegram. And while CoLabland is killing it on discord and and telegram. And what this does is this tool is bought effectively checks your MetaMask or your wallet to see if you have a certain number of a specific token in the context of first. I think it’s 300 first tokens or maybe a thousand to get in or something like FWB.

Lawson: [00:13:42] FWB. I think it’s now 60 FWB tokens that you must hold in your wallet provably to gain access to the chat. And so those are good examples of like use access restrictions at social tokens. In the context of use, you know, back to just to finish up the personal token narrative, Harrison first, he DJ’d our holiday party. So we closed the safe round and so we did a safe fashion show safe [00:14:05] from the money simple. And it was basically a huge party in our discord server. And he was DJing it and I paid him, I forget how many thousand first tokens. So I went and bought them and I paid him to come DJ there. And we did like, it was like a fun fashion show. It’s basically best masked, best catwalk and most memeable. It’s kind of the idea behind it. But yeah, so so payment,

Lawson: [00:14:23] payment was the other use of personal tokens. I think there’s a lot more innovation left for personal tokens beyond that, which we can kind of get into separately. I’d like to talk about that farther, Lawson, because like, you know, for myself and the cryptocurrency mining space, I’m always kind of considering, okay, how do you get people into mining easier? And one of the biggest things, [00:14:42] you know, the reason why someone buys a Bitcoin miner or a unit that generates revenue is to get that cash flow from the unit. So for social tokens, how do you connect someone’s income stream to their personal token? And do we run into SEC laws there when you start doing that? And how does that work? Because like, is this is this going to be possible? Is this going to happen outside the

Lawson: [00:15:02] United States first and just overtake, you know, the communities like that? Like, because that’s where I see a huge opportunity for tokens is if you have revenue stream from YouTube, how do you tokenize that? Is that is this become a security or is it still a social money? I know that’s a very touchy topic, because there’s no right answer, I don’t think right now. But I want to hear [00:15:20] your thoughts on that you’re willing to share. I went to law school to get into investment banking. So I’m going to turn it, I’m going to license attorney, my general counsel for Synapse and I was general counsel for Microsoft. So I understand this problem deeply. I frankly grew my whole Twitter following basically doing early analysis in like 2017 and 18 on like,

Lawson: [00:15:36] how you look at these things for a regulatory standpoint. And what it essentially comes down to is most of its rather gray. In some cases, you know, it may look like a regulated asset. In some cases, it just doesn’t. With all that being said, the cat is out of the box and jurisdiction is no longer geographic. It’s the internet. You’re not going to stop this period, right? [00:15:56] Fraud is illegal with or without securities laws. So with that said, like, what are we doing here? Like, why do we care if you, what do we call it, right? And so fraud is illegal, no matter what, you don’t need security laws for that. And so if it is security, it’s not like, you know, there are a lot of smart ways to release a token and avoid, you know, control by the creator. And there’s a

Lawson: [00:16:15] lot of dumb ways to do that and mess it up. And I always encourage people to talk to people and try to learn in the space. We need good actors and we need to effectively self-regulate. If you see a scam, call out the scam. But in the context of like, let’s just talk about, let’s get to the tech stuff because I left working for other companies and as general counsel because I want [00:16:33] to create stuff, not talk about what we can’t do. I want to live. Why are our socials actually working on this problem? Our belief is those three nodes, communities, individuals, content, personal tokens, community tokens, NFTs, there’s going to be effectively an entire economy around that. That’s, that was essentially the second narrative I was saying. Our whole goal is to throw

Lawson: [00:16:50] cash at all of them. And so whether they want to earn cash and maybe a security or not, something like Rob Ross social is essentially going to give them incredible amounts of cash flow opportunities. And so the reality is they’re all going to have cash flow associated with it. Does that mean any one of them are security? It’s a case by case analysis and it depends on how it’s created and [00:17:07] who’s in control of it. But you know, kind of moving beyond that, like, I feel like I need to answer your specific question and then talk just broadly your specific question, Bitcoin miner, right? And you create tools for them, correct? I would probably create a community token for that rather than a personal token. And I would probably create it around a loose structure of

Lawson: [00:17:24] people can earn it or buy it. And in doing that, they gain access to a community and at different levels of that community, different. So you can, you can think of this as like a sales funnel. People once out of your, your discord server with no tokens are at the top of the funnel. People who get enough tokens to get in the token curated chats are in the middle of the funnel. And then [00:17:39] 80 people down here have enough tokens to vote or propose things for you to do. They’re, they’re governors. Okay. So maybe it’s 50 tokens to get in and 1000 or 10,000 tokens to vote and govern. Right. And so what you’re, what you’re doing there is you’re allowing for your community to effectively self-opt into helping control or guide or carry this project beyond just you.

Lawson: [00:18:02] The power of community to always in my opinion, like, you know, the court, again, I wrote forever ago, like 2018, this article about the corporation is dead, the internet is alive. And in the context of that community tokens, a really great example of that, you can motivate and incentivize people to do anything is how your community, if you have a tool to pay them with. And if they have an [00:18:18] ability to effectively self-opt into upside. And that’s, that’s going by and on the, going by and on the free market while also they could earn it for maybe throwing an event or doing some engineering work for you. And in the context of the governors, people who can vote, once they’re controlling who’s doing what and why tokens are being thrown out, like you aren’t in control.

Lawson: [00:18:37] And so at that point, like, you start to have lots of great arguments that this thing’s not security. It’s like it’s controlled by like anybody. I don’t know. This is the internet. Who has them? I don’t have no idea. Yeah. Anyone could buy the tokens. They don’t get that access to control. You vote on the membership, all that stuff. That sounds 100% where I think this is going, [00:18:53] the future of social money. Because I’m thinking about the burn mechanisms. Like, if you have a revenue stream, you can honestly burn your social tokens so that over time they become even more valuable. Have you seen any really cool burn mechanisms that do create stuff value? Burning is interesting. I think that, I think that kind of what happened in the context

Lawson: [00:19:07] of like, I want to eventually work on this idea of community money. I keep getting pulled in other directions. This idea of community money is basically stable money that matches the meme of the community. And so in my opinion, most people don’t want to spend upside money. We have 10 years of proof of that. Every time a people use a whole lot of a token to spend for something, [00:19:24] they regret it after the token moves. Every Bitcoiner who was using Bitcoin for tipping on change tip in 2016 and 17 probably regret it now. Once ETH pops, which it’s trying to right now, we’re going to have a whole lot of tweets about how much the value of the gas they were spending on, I don’t know, buying a T’s or something like that. The reality is, I think for the most part,

Lawson: [00:19:42] from a spending standpoint, I think we’re going to live in a predominantly a two token world in most communities. And so that’s going to be in the context of the personal token, the community token and this like stable type thing. And in that context, I think there’s some interesting ideas of how you could create a deposit and burn a deposit, kind of like a maker system where you [00:20:00] deposit and generate out a community token, but then in the context of using the community money, when the community money is used, a portion of that is burned backwards and throws in because when it burns, it would burn part of the community tokens to positive to do that. That’s a whole rabbit hole, probably a little too much for this podcast. In the context of things are like easily

Lawson: [00:20:17] implemented all day that don’t involve something like that. I haven’t really seen any burn so much right now. Although I think there’s opportunity for that again, the way these are being used right now is very manual. You did something for me or you applied for this grant, the Dow approved it, here’s some tokens or come DJ for me, I’ll go buy them and here’s some tokens. I mean, [00:20:36] it’s just kind of passing back and forth a little transactional nature. I think in the future, we’re going to be a little bit more problematic nature. When it’s programmatic nature, some of those could be burned or we’re just throwing a different cash flow at you. And that’s what kind of a raw rise working on the second one of those, you know, right now, NFTs and all of crypto

Lawson: [00:20:51] are capital assets. Capital assets are things that you can buy or acquire or mine in the context of Bitcoin or most later once. And you generally get those things, they exist forever. And you eventually want to sell those things for a higher price. Bylo, so high, that’s capital assets. The reality is though, our economies, like all IRL economies, exist of a whole lot of other stuff. [00:21:16] Today, 20% of the US GDP is capital investments, while the other 80% are things like consumables or other types of assets that exist inside of economies. And so I’ve been working on this idea of crypto consumables, which is essentially the other end of the spectrum of a capital asset. One is provably ownable and exists forever, while the other is provably, provably ownable,

Lawson: [00:21:38] but also provably spendable and usable or, you know, you were mentioning burned, you probably could maybe use the burned concept there as well. Essentially, we are, I think there’s an incredible opportunity to allow for more novel income streams for NFT owners or community tokens or personal tokens. So today, NFTs represent ownership as an agreement between the creator and subsequent owner [00:22:06] or owners of a piece of media. Maybe it’s a song, maybe it’s a video or a movie or some sort of gif, you know, most of the kind of images thing. I think in the future, they’re going to be a little bit more programmatic. They’ll be stackable and layerable, kind of like the money legos of DeFi or NFTs are going to be like effectively media Legos. But in the context of that, yes,

Lawson: [00:22:25] the creator can make money from the sale of it. And that’s actually what they do for the vast majority of their media. They sell it off many times or their musician, you know, they enter into agreements to share their royalties with the producers or the whoever is helping them make this thing known and spread throughout the world. Today, that actually doesn’t exist inside [00:22:45] of crypto. You can own the asset, but there’s not really a way to earn cash flow off of the asset. And so the idea of crypto consumables is basically have approval consumption of an ownable asset in a T’s and in the process of that approval consumption throw cash flow at the NFT owner or potentially the personal tokens. And so the idea of a crypto

Lawson: [00:23:04] suitable is it’s essentially a wrapper around NFTs. And that wrapper essentially introduces a programmatic approval consumption. And that consumption can be an on chain event event or events or a timeframe in reality in the future, it’s likely to be a formula of that. I don’t know, something is basic is like you can use this thing 50 times within the next 10,000 blocks is an example of a [00:23:28] formula that could be wrapped around it in a T. And in doing that, you start to introduce exactly what you’re alluding to like value beyond the meme. The meme is very valuable in a community token and personal token. But you know, most most investable assets today tend to have a balance sheet and cash flow associated with as well. And so crypto consumables are essentially a way to start

Lawson: [00:23:48] throwing cash flow first at the NFTs, but with the raw rock social wallet, eventually with the personal tokens and community tokens as well. I love that explanation. It helps people really understand what’s the difference here, what’s happening and how are these two worlds. And as we

[00:24:02] move forward into the NFT. Orm provides a bridge to the digital currency mining world for individual

Lawson: [00:24:09] investors, financial institutions and energy companies. By combining over 70 years of mining experience, 24 seven management and directly aligned incentives, Orm’s managed mining program is the simplest way to enter the digital currency mining market. To learn more, please visit Orm Capital Ventures dot com. What are you most excited about with wal-rah over the next six months? [00:24:33] We did our first kind of public launch with C club at the creator and crypto summit on March 31st with the first ever social NFT auction on mainnet in in their discord server. And actually, as of this Friday, we will be publicly launched and available for anybody to install in their telegram or discord servers to run their own social NFT auctions. So frankly, I’m stoked about the

Lawson: [00:24:54] launch and what that means is anybody will be able to go to our website, click on the link and install our rah rah bot and be able to throw auctions at any time inside of their communities. And the reason we’re doing that and we can kind of get we can get to the demo in a second is essentially this that the NFT space has been exploding for you know since late last year to early you know [00:25:16] 2021 and they’ve done that because then you know we just started finding ways to it you know, graders were sick of not making money for their content you know it’s definitely a timey thing NFTs have been around for a while and the platform’s just gotten better and so OpenSea’s been around for a long time a great you know kind of marketplace that is kind of an aggregator of many of them.

Lawson: [00:25:32] But we also have things like foundation and Zora and super rare and you know Async are in all these really cool platforms that are kind of going at different angles and different types of artists and innovating on the the NFT design itself. Zora has done some really cool stuff there, rarerables that done some really cool stuff there, creator share, sell-on share and a lot of these [00:25:52] kind of social things you know Zora came up with this idea of basically being able to select who you sell it to and what asset you select i.e. you may not sell it to the to the highest dollar value one you may sell it to somebody who has the ability to make sure the second sale afterwards is higher and in the process they’ve created these really cool platforms that’s attracted basically the best

Lawson: [00:26:12] artist of today to the NFT space and and you go to these platforms and they’re very beautiful websites and you can see these auctions happening in kind of real time right it feels rather Async in nature you’re on this beautiful white website and maybe you see you know JP Barrett just bid you know the one one e-th on it or maybe you just see this string of digits bid some sort of amount [00:26:35] and analogy i give is that it’s kind of like going to a gallery an art gallery and not being able to talk and not being able to rub shoulders and not being able to meet the artists and that’s where discord and telegram come in basically there there are tons of telegram and discord groups that are doing auctions all the time and they’re doing auctions because they want to throw parties and they want

Lawson: [00:26:52] this to be a more social experience the white website is not enough it’s pretty but that’s not where communities exist communities exist in telegram and discord and so these telegram and discord there’s one called auga there’s 12 hundred people in it and they throw six hours of live auctions every day and that’s one of many there there there are some with even more community members [00:27:11] than that i would think auga is probably the most active of stuff being sold and they’re doing it completely trust-based and completely manual you basically type in albida eath and the moderators just kind of keeping track and the seller and the buyer just have to mainly settle and if they don’t we get booted from the group and and that’s kind of how it’s being done today but if you want to we

Lawson: [00:27:30] could scroll down in the discord server to the alpha rod channel and i can actually show it to you if you’d like basically the raw rod bodice is attempting to both automate the stuff for the monorator make it a little easier for but also lean into that social experience yeah let’s jump in there i just got in that channel now if you haven’t already typed launch rah rah one word and [00:27:50] pop that up in your browser it’s definitely geared towards mobile but it is a web app so you can pull it up on your desktop the idea again you know i use a lot of analogies we like to think of the rah rah social wallet is like a joystick with a wallet while the discord and telegram are for your eyes for a variety of reasons in crypto especially most of us experience crypto on our desktop

Lawson: [00:28:12] you know that’s that’s the combination of apple restrictions on dapps and in-app browsers in addition to it’s just faster to build on the web and so as a result most people are interacting with crypto on their desktops and that’s true for it also of discord and telegram people are going to parties or events inside of tell your discord’s you know for the most part on desktop and so people [00:28:32] are attending you know let’s just pretend you’re at you’re in rah rah house rah rah.house is our community where we basically test out ideas and features for all alpha rah members which eventually make it out towards these other communities and gives them kind of the capacity to get early glimpses of ideas and we’re going to launch a token eventually this will give people basically

Lawson: [00:28:52] a way to give us feedback in real time on that so you guys are launching house parties on rah rah can jump into that a little bit more about what’s what’s the plan for that website and that kind of part of the organization. Rah rah house is is our community and so we’re gonna we’re gonna release a community token in advance of our eventual protocol token and that community token is [00:29:12] going to do the same thing that fwb or rng is trying to do it’s just making sure that the people who are the deepest in the funnel of our community actually care to be there there a lot of times when people join communities they come once and never come back and that doesn’t that’s not really good like total member counts not good what’s good is total like active member count and so

Lawson: [00:29:29] community tokens essentially allow for you to reward active community members incentivize them to throw events and do things like that in addition to you know we’re a little bit different than many community tokens we’re building products and services and eventually protocol and so it’s essentially a vehicle to you know affect influence what we build and why and so you know us releasing [00:29:51] you know eventually the the afro token is well essentially be doing that primarily just trying to get people who care the most about af about rah rah to stake a little bit and help us but yeah so the rah rah house is basically a place for us to throw parties i love to throw a iRL parties and i believe that the future of of social is is likely to be geared more around experiences and

Lawson: [00:30:12] when i say experiences basically something that’s ephemeral you must have been there to experience it clubhouse is a good example of this you could record a clubhouse and there’s even tools that are made for that now but the reality is kind of like going to boneru these days or or woodstock decades ago there’s something very different about saying i was there and so voice and live events in discord [00:30:35] a telegram discord telegram or do a killer at killin on voice as well or clubhouse clubhouse is kind of the twitter sphere of your spirit well i think discord telegram or kind of the the internet spirit and in that context there’s this wide open media strategy effectively for internet events and so we’re throwing events here to test ideas but but frankly we want to and we’re trying to

Lawson: [00:30:54] throw a lot of colab events in other people’s servers rng tomorrow at four eastern we’re gonna be throwing a party in rng when you actually can join rng for free we’ll be tweeting out instructions on that later on today i guess it’s gonna be a little late for this recording but we’re gonna be doing a lot of colab events in other people’s other people’s communities as well and as we do [00:31:12] that you know leaning into you know making it cool to live life online rara’s mission is actually to enhance people’s ability to live work and play on internet live on the internet we’re kind of doing that now we’re literally we’re at an event in discord there’s a few people that are coming to kind of come in and go in and listening to it twitter we live a lot on twitter as well and

Lawson: [00:31:31] in so that’s part of the living the work part is where rara comes in to be able to work online you need to be able to make money nft’s are a good start but in the future it’s going to also include cash flow and then the last thing play it needs to be fun and so rara social you know one of the things we talk about with every feature is is this cool it’s like a it’s just like thing that’s [00:31:50] impossible to define but it’s essentially a striving for like this this nuance that the term cool i think some people probably have some negative or positive connotations the current term cool but i’ll try to define it as this cool is very contextual it’s not something that’s definitive and it’s contextual to who you are to be cool you must first understand yourself

Lawson: [00:32:12] and understand what value you bring and what is unique about you but in the process of understanding what’s unique about you you must understand what’s unique about your immediate surrounding that’s your environment that’s rara house and then beyond that the entire the entire community around you right and so the immediate people around us that’s the people in this rara [00:32:31] house stage right now but the community itself has a slightly different version of cool and it’s always like this community consensus of people with similar ideas and similar desires and so with live events and with what rara house is doing is we’re trying to lean into fun things that are cool on the internet things that are picking up speed picking up

JohnPaul: [00:32:50] traction and seem to be building that community i mean i love that and i’m excited to jump in to to the demo that we you know you hinted on can you explain for people that was thinking of what

Lawson: [00:33:00] we’re about to do and then let’s jump into that so if you have your rara social wallet up right now you see basically what was the last auction up on the screen you’re really kind of this pending state you’re waiting for the next auction and so let’s do it i’m going to type start start auction and i’m going to link to an open c asset and when we do that both in the discord [00:33:17] server and in the rara social wallet you see the item for sale and when we get into it you’re going to start seeing the interaction of the community the social stuff in addition to the actual bidding so today with open c you you need to bid or or bid with e or c 20 assets and so today we’re bidding with we’ve wrapped eath and what’s happening on the back end is all of the bidding

Lawson: [00:33:38] is actually off chain we do that for speed and scalability purposes with the final winner being the only one that goes on chain and so once you win you actually sign a transaction which we broadcast to open c for the seller to accept and so jp you just came in with 0.01 weath and what are we bidding on here well it looks like we’re bidding on a digital gold token like individual [00:34:00] just for this podcast it looks very very cool i like it while it’s pulling up now yeah so if you click on the if you’re in front of the social wallet you can click on the nft image and it’ll pull up the open c asset so mik on our team has been making these he’s he’s doing an incredible job he does these cool co-op nft’s so mik made this one for you it’s a combination of figma and spline 3d image

Lawson: [00:34:20] tool that’s kind of figma like and obviously it’s got rah rah and digital gold podcast on it with jp berry and so this is a little bit of our gift to you if you can win it if nobody else in the crowd comes in to win it and speaking of the crowd is rying right now and so let me talk about that a little bit briefly so rah rah phonetically is a cheer and if i say rah rah like that’s me kind [00:34:41] of cheering on something if a bunch of people say rah rah that is an entire crowd getting involved and cheering on that they are emoting they like something or they’re saying you know weird way that’s like them saying something’s cool right and so we’re called rah rah specifically for that reason and so with the with the rah rah social wallet you can actually earn and spend rah

Lawson: [00:35:00] through out the experience and so when you set up your rah rah wallet you got a hundred rahs and if you hit that raw button down at the bottom you hit it real quick yeah you can hit it once oh it’s giving or you can hit it giving more rah to the token yeah hit it hit it hit it a bunch of times hit it real fast go boom boom boom boom boom yeah 31 and so what we’re doing here is we’re [00:35:19] recognizing the reality is most people at an nft auction are not buyers 1% of the crowd are going to own ft’s the other percent of the crowd and maybe they’re going to buy nft’s or bid on other ones but they’re not going to bid on everyone right they’re there for the experience they’re there a party and so rah’s get them involved and they let them party that’s that’s great because i

Lawson: [00:35:37] launched when i watched snoop dog launches and ft i was like damn this is great this is cool but like i don’t really want to buy any of these they’re all really expensive and the whole feeling was still great to to watch the draw up and everything there so this is i love the people can still participate yeah so rah’s eventually will be crypto consumables and rah’s will throw cash flow [00:35:56] at nft’s and community tokens so imagine rah’s having a specific sound to it kind of like an emoji where you select emojis that you like or you relate to the raw could be you know my male voice or your male voice or a bare tone or like this robot voice or it could be something like rah or l-o-l sound is a wide open space in the context of social and in the context of of social you

Lawson: [00:36:23] basically need ways to react facebook has thumbs likes twitter has hearts medium has claps rah’s are are at temped at creating a brand new class of reactions but definitely leaning in towards audio based reactions and in doing that we’re again we’re playing with crypto experiences when a crowd is is emoting all at once you’re going to have crowd effects crowd sounds like [00:36:49] a concert like the sound of a concert has a specific sound because so many people are making so many noises at once yeah no i definitely agree with you i think that’s super cool to consider like everything needs something to participate in and you guys are adding in not only this participation you’re adding in cash flow tokens and sounds like every like is is worth something that’s

Lawson: [00:37:11] huge for a social platform because like you know i just got banned from instagram like so i had in person yeah i had impersonators and they banned my account because everyone they reported as a spam and they were like oh you’re impersonating someone else i was like what do you mean i’m a person so else here’s my idea and then they’re like oh sorry your idea isn’t valid i was [00:37:28] like what so i would have lost my account if it wasn’t for some internal facebook connections that i had that i like you know had them fix it and then they’re it was solved but it’s just like that’s such a huge problem there’s no need for i guess proving that it actually it costs something to have this account or that you’ve actually invested money and capital into it it’s very easy for

Lawson: [00:37:46] scammers come in duplicate it look really similar and then just take over that brand so i’m glad to hear that these are going to have real value and you are you telling me they’ll actually be like a sound when you use them you guys like similar to like an emoji it’ll be a sound and the actual picture that’s super cool so i don’t know if you have your sound on your phone or whatever device [00:38:02] you’re listening to the the social wallet it actually makes a sound right now but right now that sounds just for you we have some crazy ideas of how to throw a blended sound of portions of that into discord as well and so so so let me get that let’s let’s get back to the auction i’m gonna i’m gonna go second i’m a bit second here and so for those of you who are just listening you you use what happens

Lawson: [00:38:20] is inside of the social wallet you see now lahson is the current highest bidder at point oh two weath along with inside of the the discord you’re seeing i’m also the highest bidder and the reason we’re throwing it in both spots is because the community is incredibly important the reality is people do these intelligence and discord because they like to throw jiffs they like emojis they like [00:38:41] they like to to laugh and joke and react to what’s happening and especially when an auction is heating up you start to see this a lot right people people are throwing lots of gyps and emojis around the activity of the actual auction and so now let’s i’m gonna start the countdown um let me start the countdown we’re gonna end this thing so currently i’m the highest bidder and so i just did i just

Lawson: [00:39:03] did the command start countdown and it’s like going around like the green circle it’s going to change colors too and so this is a 30 second countdown and if nobody bids i’ll win it but if you bid you should bid hit that button so it adds 30 more seconds and you’re now the highest bidder and this is your this is your podcast i’m gonna let you win this bad boy but that’s the demo that’s ri-rara social wallet [00:39:24] and that the auction but social npt auction bought today and we have lots of crazy ideas of where it goes the future but essentially we’re leaning into the crowd in and around social experiences like npt auctions no i love this and how long have you guys been working on this this like future this website this idea of this auction i’ve had two months we’ve been dancing around a whole lot

Lawson: [00:39:43] of similar right but this one felt the most right this one’s this one’s got legs and so we’re running this one right now i love it yeah i know i really feel like there’s a lot of unique interactions here

JohnPaul: [00:39:52] i like that it is super fast to use and i like the raw aspect of it i’m excited to see how you

Lawson: [00:39:57] guys integrate that into you know ecosystem of a big coin holder as well when she came in the podcast spots and then definitely we’ll be buying some ri-rara is it already out can you buy it now it is not what we’re kind of looking working on a little bit of a strategy on how to get it out to the wild you know we want to get some attention of some communities that we like and creators that [00:40:14] we like and so we’re working on some some novel ideas there but you know that’ll be coming out eventually you know at this point we want people who are less so about the financial motivation so much is like are around the space and are excited that what’s happening to give us feedback and so the ri-rara house community is very critical for us so the people who are most interested in at least

Lawson: [00:40:33] falling along and contributing to go to ri-rara.house you can join our discord you can sign up for public calendar you can also join our telegram so again ri-rara bot works in telegram we’ll start throwing more events over there but most of the activity today is in our discord server yeah right now i would just join the server and jump in and start asking where you can help or pop an ideas if [00:40:53] you got me you know that that’s great so for people who you know need want to join ri-rara and the and follow loss and loss and where can they follow you online you specifically so i am l ws in baker so it’s lost and without the vowels and then baker um ri-rara is ri-rara underscore social and twitter and instagram our community is ri-rara.house that’s the actual domain for the

Lawson: [00:41:16] for the young people in the crowd you can actually use the derelict house emoji.fm and that’ll take you to ri-rara house we also have flying money emoji.fm and the peacock.fm which we’re going to do some cool stuff with later as well that’s the community if you want to jump into the community for people interested in using or installing the social entity bot in their telegram or discord [00:41:35] go to our our website for ri-rara social which is ri-rara.social so ri-rara.social and ri-rara.house that’s how you get to the community and our bot install. no i love it i definitely want to figure out if i can bring that into a discord server that i’m i’d say it’s a men’s group and be interesting to see if you can connect you know the social money we’ve been trying to figure out

Lawson: [00:41:53] how do you build that community token how do you grow the men’s group at the same time incentivize people you know that you can pay member dues to grow the group to keep running the group so this is

JohnPaul: [00:42:02] something that i want to integrate more into and follow along and watch and so lost and i appreciate

Lawson: [00:42:07] you coming on the show today to talk through this concept of money and how it’s changing how we’re joining from you know that team money on our on our on our dollars in our pockets to you know whatever virtual team we want to join this is going to change money forever and we’re seeing that community based money is i think it is how we maybe we started you know selling she shelves back in the day [00:42:28] using that to trade and now we’re getting on the computer and in the same type of fashion that where it’s you know very very small very unique very community based non-essential global currency which i like and i think there’ll be a lot of use cases so i’m glad you’re working in this space and appreciate everything you’re doing for the community because i know there’s big things

JohnPaul: [00:42:46] ahead before we’re all in for yourself in this space yeah GP thanks for coming out man make

Lawson: [00:42:51] sure you hit confirm transaction on that winning bid and what that’s going to do is send that transaction to be accepted by on open c and once it’s accepted that that nft will be in your ri-rai social wallet so you can log in at wallet dot ri-rai dot social at any time to to withdraw it or keep it there we’re going to be expanding the wallet beyond just experiences but right now

JohnPaul: [00:43:10] it’s it’s really good around experiences but it’ll show up in there and it’s it’s yours man i appreciate

Lawson: [00:43:15] i definitely am going to to claim it right now and i did claim it and uh had to log back in but i

JohnPaul: [00:43:21] will see so i’m glad i was able to win that i thank thanks again for the auction let’s see

Lawson: [00:43:26] confirm purchase let me click that button again and it’s it’s loading but this was great loss and

JohnPaul: [00:43:31] i appreciate it that was an amazing experience and a really nice easy to use interface so if you haven’t checked it out guys rarar social check them out thanks for talking about the future of money

[00:43:40] yeah JP this is great rarar man thanks i hope you enjoyed today’s episode of digital gold be sure to subscribe so you’re notified when the new episode drops don’t forget to leave us a

Lawson: [00:43:51] five star review to support our journey to become the number one crypto podcast thanks so much for listening and until next time mine off so