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Raamayan Ananda And Christopher Pitcher Of Creation - The Platform Powering Creativity 3.0, Plus: Starbucks’ NFT-Based Loyalty Program, And More...
Creation, previously known as VEME, is the Web3 creator network that focuses on transforming fans into co-creators and investors. In this episode, we are joined by Creation founder Raamayan and his Chief Strategy Officer, Cristopher Pitcher, who explain the rationale of the rebrand and the unique value their platform is bringing to creators and fans alike. Web3 is enabling platforms to push the definitions of co-creation to the outer edge, and the folks at Creation are making the most of that ability. Join in and learn how content creation is going to change forever with this new platform built on the edge of NFT. Plus, learn how Starbucks is going about its NFT-based loyalty program and a bunch of other hot topics from this episode.
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Raamayan Ananda And Christopher Pitcher Of Creation - The Platform Powering Creativity 3.0, Plus: Starbucks’ NFT-Based Loyalty Program, And More…
NFT curious readers, stay tuned for this episode and find out how VEME is launching a bold new rebrand as Creation and bringing their intentional, thoughtful, and inspired approach to supporting Web3 through DAOs, why you might be inspired by one of our guests to create an altar that honors your most meaningful life experiences, and finally, how the coffee house that seems to be on every street corner everywhere is diving deep into NFTs in a powerful but also subtle way. All this and more on this episode.
Don’t forget that we put a gathering together at NFTLA that brought out thousands of the world’s most innovative doers in the NFT space. Head over to NFTLA.live to get tickets to our bigger, bolder, and better but also just as an intimate and impactful event happening in Los Angeles from March 20th to 23rd, 2023. See you there.
This episode features Raamayan and Christopher Pitcher of Creation, the NFT-powered Web3 platform to launch, fund, and run your creative projects. They are announcing the rebrand of their company, which has been known as VEME into Creation. Raamayan is the Founder of VEME, now known as Creation. He works at the intersection of creative expression, new economic systems, and spirituality.
Raamayan is a Cofounder of Unify, a conscious media platform which broke the Guinness Book of World Records for the world’s largest online synchronized meditation with Deepak Chopra and has reached over two billion worldwide. His vision is a world where creators unify to become the bridge to post-capitalism.
Christopher Pitcher is Chief Strategy Officer at Creation. He is a catalyst for a regenerative and prosperous future. He has his Master’s in Design as well as an MBA. As a serial social entrepreneur, he has focused on using design, technology, and creativity to build a thriving future for all life. Creation is a new Web3 creator network that transforms fans into co-creators and investors. In Creation, rather than subscribing to your favorite creators, you play and earn together. Welcome to the show. It’s great to have you here.
It’s so good to be here.
Thank you.
You are a great intro person. I want to hire you.
It’s great to see you. It has been a minute. As is the LA tech scene, Christopher and I originally met years ago before the big boom. That was cool when we found out. I was introduced to you from Austin. Here’s a shout-out to Austin. You were part of NFTLA and all that fun stuff that we had. I didn’t know at that moment that Christopher was part of VEME. It’s a small world.
I didn’t know that you were connected until this moment. I love that I found that on the show.
We found a text exchange between us from 2018 or something.
We had a great conversation in an apartment at a friend’s dinner party. I was like, “Is this the same Josh Kriger?” I text him. He is like, “We are at NFTLA together.” I was like, “Snap.”
Here’s to dinner parties. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody say something like, “That dinner party was a total bust.” If you get people together for dinner, and if you’ve got that momentum behind it, probably some good things are going to happen if you are the type of crowd that does that.
As long as it’s not one of those dinner parties where three people bring chips and salsa.
You have to bring some good grub.
You have some good chow at your events.
I’m Indian ethnically. We have a dharmic responsibility to feed people well. It’s in our lineage.
There’s one more sidetrack here. We better not get too many sidetracks. I have an Indian friend from college. We went to an Indian neighborhood for my birthday because I wanted to go to an Indian buffet. She humored me. We went to an Indian buffet. We sat down and ate all the Indian buffet food. She said, “What do you think?” I said, “This is delicious.” She said, “This is not Indian food. You have to come to my house and have my mom cook for you.”
It’s what we will always say. That will be the collective response of all time. Unless you step into a gurdwara, we will tell you that.
Josh has had the privilege of spending some time with you locally in LA. I’m in Chicago. I’m now in Peru. I haven’t got to know you this deeply. I would love to hear a little bit more about the origin story of VEME and what’s going on. Can we start with you, Raamayan, on that?
VEME started as a short-form social video network. We started right before TikTok came out. I was deeply entranced with blockchain technology and saw the potential of what it could do. I was disillusioned with social media. I witnessed the ill effects of Facebook long before we had things like social dilemmas. I saw the negative effects it had on the population.
Creation: Frameworks and agreements are the basis of the healthy society. When you’re able to form clear agreements and embed them in NFTs, those NFTs can now represent any asset class properly with a sense of confidence that when you buy that thing, you will be able to redeem it.
We were running Unify in full force at the time. We had about two million people on our page. We had over 10,000 creators. We built this large following. With one algorithm change, 90% reduced our traffic, trying to funnel us into paid ads. We realized, “We don’t own our audiences at all. These are not our people. We have put over $1 million into building our Facebook page. We don’t have any of their email addresses. We are gated to reach them.”
We were building a network with 10,000 creators and making the Guinness Book of World Records. At one point, we had 300 million reach in a month. We had to sell affiliate ads to pay for our nonprofit. We are like, “This is ridiculous. This is a completely broken system.” We had thousands of creators writing to us every month being like, “Please post our stuff.”
We wanted to share the stuff and the content but there was no easy way to create reciprocity and a mutually supportive network. We got a-ha insight at a very early age into how extractive these networks were. We almost couldn’t believe how much we invested into a network that we didn’t own. We were like, “This is ridiculous that we would do this.” We have to create a different way.
Malcolm CasSelle turned me onto NFTs back in 2017 or ‘18. We were there as soon as CryptoKitties came out when they were Axiom Zen. We were there in little Vancouver basements when the Axiom Zen team presented CryptoKitties in small basements and worked with the early team. We saw NFTs as the first immersion technology. Immediately, I was like, “This is the future,” early on.
We started to develop a protocol for NFT copyrights. We developed a one-click copyright patent. We were deep in NFTs. I’m like, “Short-form video and short-form content, every piece of content is an NFT with a legal license embedded into it. Develop a system to fractionize the revenue from that content among different creators. Automate it on smart contracts. This is the future.”
Malcolm got on board. He invested. We built the whole app but it turns out that Apple and iPhone didn’t like our idea. They didn’t understand NFTs. They didn’t like it. They didn’t like crypto. They wanted to have nothing to do. We got booted out even though we built up a beta. We built up 10,000 users. We were excited. We had investment capital. We built natively.
The thing is, we couldn’t switch at that time to web apps because web apps didn’t deal with short-form social videos. You had to go native. We hit a roadblock in being able to bring what was a pretty early visionary idea back in 2018 forward. Even now, we are still at the moment where they are okay with NFTs. You probably know about these challenges better than we do.
You are not our first guest that got kicked off Apple with a great idea.
Here’s a shout-out to Malcolm. For the readers that don’t know, Malcolm was the original Founder and CEO of WAX and OPSkins. He’s a true pioneer. We all know that a lot of this NFT stuff began in the gaming industry. I met him at a conference before WAX was launched. I can tell this guy was onto something big. He died at 50. That’s too early for such a genius.
It was tragic because we built much of our vision around deploying their architecture. We had such a deep mesh of what we were wanting to do in the world. When he left, it was like, “Who do I do this with now? Who has the vision, the ability, the resources, and the understanding of how this needs to be deployed and the deep pockets who gets it?”
It set us back when he passed away and the partnership that we were forming. We had to go back to the drawing board. VEME shut down for a while. We were like, “We have to rethink how we are approaching this. We have these amazing technologies and licensing infrastructure for NFTs. We have built an amazing brand. Where do we want to move moving forward?”
Here’s a little bit of backstory. Back in 2009, I met this amazing man named Elijah Ignatia. He built a system called the Inflammatrix. His vision was always to create something called a nexus. He understood that our economic system was broken. The way that capitalism operates is that you are trying to create something for as low value as possible because capitalism is raw materials, plus labor, plus capital, plus entrepreneurship equals a product.
You try to sell that product for as much as you can and take the surplus out of the system as fast as you can. That’s how wealth is forwarded. He was like, “Unless we figure out how that loop is solved and how to take the surplus and put it back in circulation to the system, we are never going to be able to move beyond the exploitative capitalistic model.” He had the vision of a DAO way before we knew what a DAO was. I was right alongside him. I was working in cooperative frameworks.
We were looking at how to create multi-company employee structures. We were looking at how to create incubators where many different companies could share people resources among shared value frameworks to bring products into the world and recycle surplus back into the system. When DAOs came out, I was like, “We now have a smart contract mechanism to do exactly what you have been envisioning for the last ten years that I have written a full white paper about.”
Creation was the place where all the work I have done in new social networks, the creator economy, and NFTs merged with this transitionary post-capitalistic bridge structure that we have as DAOs and created something called Creation. We have been working on augmenting DAOs and building a structure that is not flat from the get-go and that uses NFTs as the basis for DAOs rather than ERC-20 tokens. We can get into why that’s important, maybe in a little bit of a silo, later.
I want to go into the NFT side and the relationship between DAOs and NFTs a little bit more. You have been in this space for a long time. You’ve thought a lot about NFTs. I would love to understand. In your opinion, what is the true North Star or the true guide to creating NFTs? What does true utility look like? There’s a relationship with DAOs but there’s a reason why that’s important to you.
One thing that’s interesting in this industry is that initially, when NFTs started coming out as JPEGs, I was pretty taken aback because we were working on a pretty sophisticated copywriting framework. We were working on these very vast utility mechanisms. The world started to know NFTs as a JPEG. It’s cool in one way to popularize the front-facing of that but also harmful because it gave rise to a lot of scamming and exploitative mechanics where NFTs got a bad name unfairly because NFTs are an underlying tech.
You have a fungible token and a non-fungible token. That’s it. A fungible token means that one Bitcoin is the same as another Bitcoin. A non-fungible token means you have a container that’s unique in which the token can have unique dimensions and properties that are different from another. That’s all an NFT is as a technology. How is that applied? You have something on the blockchain which is unique, which you cannot double spend, and which you can authentically verify.
That can be used across such a wide variety of use cases. You can use these as membership keys to communities. You can use this for storing advertising contracts, which have automatic distributions and payouts towards the holders. You can use this to fractionize assets in a meaningful way. You can use this to be able to legally store and register copyrights. You can use this to embed any legal contract and allow that NFT to become a legal register of that contract. You can use it for university degrees and identities.
The amount of things that this technology can be used for is vast. That’s why I like to say that there’s no such thing as an NFT. There is a utility that uses the technology of an NFT to enable its behavior. As a society, once we make that shift of understanding as a collective, it will open us up to realize that this is a technology that has vast applications. That is the next bridge. A lot of the people who are in the NFT industry, and you can confirm this for me, are now on that next wave.
That’s what we see every day now. We get anywhere from 100 to 200-plus suggestions for shows. It’s incredible. Every day is a trip to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, where anything is possible. With the types of utility that people are creating in this space, it’s mind-blowing, to be honest. What keeps me so excited about working long hours is knowing that this is a radically disruptive technology that’s going to change pretty much everything. William Quigley, who’s also with the WAX crew, said at one point, “Everything that we don’t eat will be tied to NFTs within five years.” At the moment, I was like, “That’s a bold prediction,” but fast-forward to now, I can see that happening.
It’s a representation of an asset. Once you go a little bit further into DAOs, you will realize that NFTs are the assets of DAOs. The end. NFTs are the ways to represent assets. DAOs own NFTs when they are properly tied to legal contracts. This is important. We have this super rebellious edge of Web3 that wants nothing to do with any system, which is great to have that ethos because it pushes the rebellion forward. It pushes the drive to be able to create things that are outside the purview of our current system but at the same time, when you want to function and operate in a healthy society, you need to be able to have clear agreement frameworks.
Agreements are the basis of a healthy society. When you are able to form clear agreements, embed those agreements inside of NFTs, and have a methodology where you are able to have arbitration around that, those NFTs can now represent any asset class properly with a sense of confidence that when you buy that thing, you are going to either be able to redeem it or justify your use of it. If it’s not being able to be used in the way that you want it to be used, you are going to have a methodology to be able to get reparations for that. That’s the basis of society.
We had Nicole from Christie’s on the show. She was sharing that the reason that Beeple’s drop stopped was that it bid at $1 million. It was like, “Send me the contract.” When you start to think about higher-value items, fine jewelry, fine art, and cars, then you need to have a little bit of KYC in there.
This is why our Voltage protocol is embedding legal agreement frameworks and signing systems into the NFTs themselves, creating validation methodologies. It’s important to take us to the next level so that the NFTs can truly be representational of a very wide pool of assets. When you get into DeFi, DeFi makes sense now because you’re not collateralizing tokens that somebody minted for more tokens with an APY with some other token. It’s Ponzinomics.
When you have DeFi related to NFTs that are real assets, that have legal contracts that back them, and that you can recoup, DeFi starts to get interesting. This is where I see the evolution of NFTs. We are so young. People have barely even figured this out. We still have blue-chip NFT lending, which is better JPEGs, which is cool but where is this going to go in the next five years? It’s a decentralized banking infrastructure. This is the real deal.
That’s a relevant quote, Josh, “Everything not edible becoming an NFT,” but that also makes me want to try some edible NFTs if possible. I would like to eat an NFT if I can. Somebody probably has to work on that. We should have some at NFTLA.
We keep pushing the boundaries. NFT CBD gummies, there you go.
I want an NFT where I eat it. Once it gets fully digested, the NFT is burned. Why not?
That’s next-level dynamic NFT. The other thing about the Quigley quote is that you won’t know that everything is attached to an NFT in five years. It will be behind the scenes. Great technology disappears. We always lead with it at the beginning so that we can be gung-ho and be like, “Pay attention. This should get money. This should be adopted.”
What ends up happening is that they’re talking about the technology when it’s always about what the technology enables us to do. What Raamayan was speaking about is the amount of utility that the unique digital container allows for. They sold a house in 2022 as an NFT. You are like, “That completely changes the dynamics of how fluid an asset is.”
It makes me think about how we always have to label things as humans to be able to have a conversation about them but we are talking about Web3 these days. We also talked about Web2 back in the day but in essence, it’s like you are saying. There were several aspects. My encounter with Web2 is, “All of a sudden, I can have some animations on a webpage that are integrated right into HTML. This is cool,” but nobody calls that Web2 now. They go, “That website is cool. It has some animations.”
As we converge on this nomenclature around Web3, which helps gives us a focus and a direction, you talk about Web2.5. Why do you think it’s useful to have a term like that? Is there something integrated there that has to do with decentralization, centralization or lack thereof? I want to see if Christopher has something to say on this.
When we speak about Web2.5, it’s about once again where technology is not at the forefront. It’s about what it’s enabling. Web3 is pretty hard. I grew up a geek. I sold computers and built them by hand. Sometimes I get into places and I’m like, “What do I do here?” There’s some cool technology. That gives me a lot of the power back in this whole system that I like to be a part of, yet the front end of it and the user journey sucks.
This is the game flow portion.
Candy.
Popeye Sticks.
That is a confession.
I remember that CD.
Opposites Attract.
“Straight up, now tell me.”
I have that one too. I’m guilty.
Custom-built computers.
It’s a clock. My friend is an artist.
You are beaming in from Morocco, which is fun.
It was a VEME Genesis NFT.
Compassion.
What about you, Christopher?
Awareness.
Raamayan, what about you?
He was on the call.
Are you getting scrub too?
Important Links
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Starbucks to Offer NFT-Based Loyalty Program Using Polygon’s Blockchain Technology - Article
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Instagram - VEME
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Twitter - VEME
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Spotify - Edge of NFT
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iTunes - Edge of NFT