Jaeson Ma - OP3N: The AI-Powered Web3 SuperApp For Artists & Creators

Full transcript: Jaeson Ma of OP3N on London Real

0:00 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Jaeson Ma, the media executive, serial entrepreneur and artist. You have a long track record of launching successful companies with a particular focus on the Asian market, such as EST Media, Stampede Ventures, East West Ventures and 88rising. You’re also an investor, advisor and partner in several entertainment funds, having raised capital and advised on transactions totalling over one billion dollars.

After selling drugs as a kid, taking part in rap battles, getting involved with gangs and being arrested on multiple occasions, you found God, became a missionary and later worked with MC Hammer before pursuing a career as a venture capitalist. In 2021 you launched the social media platform OP3N, a Web3 super app for artists and creators, building a decentralised world where communities can come together to create, own and bring their ideas to the world. Jaeson, welcome to London Real.

Jaeson Ma: It’s an honour. Thank you, Brian.

Brian Rose: I’m really excited, man. I just want to start by saying that OP3N is actually one of our portfolio companies here at London Real Ventures. Jaeson, super excited to be part of this journey with you with OP3N. You’ve had a crazy life, a crazy journey, and I want to get into that, but I did want to start with OP3N. Tell me about this Web3 super app, and maybe in doing so you can tell me about EST Media and your mission to bridge East and West through media, entertainment and technology.

4:53 Jaeson Ma: Maybe I’ll talk about the story of how we got into OP3N. It was actually by accident. Pre-pandemic, I wanted to start my ultimate platform bridging East and West. My mission has always been bridging Eastern and Western media, entertainment and technology through stories and talent. That’s been my mission statement since I was 19, and I’m 42 now.

When I had started these East-West media companies like 88rising, East West Ventures and Stampede with my partner Greg Silverman, I was thinking about how I could create the ultimate platform leveraging media and tech to create understanding between the two cultures, East and West. At the time I was really sick and tired of Western media controlling the Eastern narrative, meaning Fox, CNN, “red dragon China”, the New York Times and so on. I kept thinking: why does the East, Asia, the largest population on the planet, not have its own media platform and its own media voice from Asia to the rest of the world? Why is it always controlled by Western media?

Why don’t we have our own New York Times, our own CNN? So I envisioned EST, which stands for Eastern Standard Times. You can go to easternstandardtimes.com. EST Media would be Asian-owned, from an Asian perspective, talking about current events, culture and what’s happening in the world. When I started it I raised capital, and it was actually very difficult; there’s a whole story behind that.

Once we were able to raise our seed capital, I wanted to leverage tech and media, with my experience in both. I had three divisions: UGC, user-generated content; PGC, professionally generated content; and studios. The whole idea was almost like a Wattpad or Webtoon for news and journalism. The UGC side was a citizen journalism app, similar to TikTok or companies like Triller that I had invested in, where anyone could be in Bangkok filming a protest live on their phone, commentate on it and upload it to the network.

If that story went viral within our network, then our professionally generated content team would say, “That news story is going viral, let’s do an article, a video, a mini documentary,” similar to Vice, Vox, the Huffington Post or the New York Times. If that article went to 10 million views, our studio division would say, “We have a story here that is potent, that we can develop into a long-form premium piece of content: a feature film, a TV series, a documentary.” As you know, Spotlight was a Boston Globe article that won the Academy Award, Hustlers was a New York Times article, Argo was a Vanity Fair article and Narcos was a book. It was this whole farming system of IP, from user-generated content to professionally generated content to premium studio content.

8:29 So I raised the capital. My investors in 88rising, Stampede and other companies all backed me in this, and then Covid hit. I’m stuck at home, and I was one of the first 3,000 invites on Clubhouse. Everyone’s stuck at home, everyone’s on this live audio app, and it was going viral. Around that time one of my investors at Galaxy Interactive, a guy named Richard Kim who’s actually based here in London, said, “Jaeson, have you ever heard of a phenomenon called social tokens? We have this social token called RNG, we have a Discord group, it’s built on blockchain, we’re leveraging NFTs.”

I’m like, what are you talking about? I had invested in Bitcoin since 2015 personally, Bitcoin and ETH, but I never felt it. There’s a whole other story with me and Paris Hilton, introducing her to one of the original founding team of Ethereum. At that time they wanted to make her the Martha Stewart of blockchain, which she has kind of now become, but it was too early. We invested in a few companies, a few dapps, but I never felt it.

So he gets me on this Clubhouse panel with other social token and NFT experts: one guy named WhaleShark, who’s the number one NFT collector in the world with over half a million digital art collectibles, and a buddy of mine who was a founder of FWB, Friends With Benefits, one of the first and largest DAOs in the Web3 ecosystem. They’re talking about Web3, DAOs, decentralised autonomous organisations, social tokens and NFTs, and I’m like, “I’m just being honest with you guys, I literally don’t know what you’re talking about.”

It brought me down this rabbit hole where I started talking more to Richard, WhaleShark and my buddy at FWB, and I’m like, wow, this is really interesting. It’s a whole decentralised network where communities can gather and not be owned by a centralised system, be direct with their communities and their ideas, monetise, and communicate whatever it is they’re about. I started going deeper and testing some of these Web3 NFT projects, and I realised there was just a lot of complexity and disparity.

There was a platform, mirror.xyz, kind of like a blogosphere for Web3, and there was an Ethereum documentary that was trying to raise a million US dollars in Ethereum, I believe in 24 hours, through a crowdfunding campaign. Everyone would put in an ETH to get a credit in the documentary and access to the red carpet or the film festival opening. What was interesting was that if it sold to a network or a streamer like Netflix, those who invested an ETH would get dividends. This isn’t Kickstarter, this isn’t GoFundMe, where I donate 100 dollars and get a wristband. There’s actually a level of ownership.

They launched the campaign and raised over six million US dollars in Ethereum in less than 24 hours. I contributed, and I’m like, whoa. Not only did I invest in ETH and get credits, perks and access, but I also get dividends if this monetises, and we all own a piece of this film. This is really, really interesting.

12:44 Because I came from the music industry with 88rising, I know how the music industry works. I started with MC Hammer when I was 17 years old, and he taught me everything, from payola to Clear Channel, Radio One, DJs, money under the table, and how little music artists get paid. That was in the CD era. Fast forward to digital streaming platforms, Spotify for example: my top artist at 88rising has to get a hundred million streams to get paid 300 grand. So you literally have to get almost half a billion streams to make a million dollars on Spotify or Apple. How many artists are actually getting a billion streams? We’re talking about the top 0.1 percentile. It doesn’t matter if you’re getting a million streams or 10 million streams, you’re not making money.

Then I saw this rap artist, and I don’t want to mention the name because it’s too controversial, but he got cancelled. He had no way of distributing his music on Spotify, Deezer or Apple because they all took him off, and he got dropped by his major label. He literally had no other options, and I thought he was the perfect guinea pig. Our team met with his management and said, “You should make your next music album an NFT.” They had no other options, so they went for it.

He put seven songs he had not released and connected each one to an NFT with a piece of digital art, made one million albums and priced them at one dollar each. He put it out on his social media, where he had 10 million followers on YouTube and Instagram, and said, “I’m making the first rap NFT album.” It went viral in 24 hours, and when the mint dropped it sold out in less than 60 seconds. Servers were crashing. About 80 percent bought with credit card and about 20 percent with crypto. There were over 600,000 transactions on the back end. He made a million US dollars in less than a minute and went platinum. That would never have happened to him even if he wasn’t cancelled.

What was even crazier was that the 20 percent who bought with crypto started reselling the album on NFT marketplaces like OpenSea. He loses his mind, he’s on Instagram, he literally does a backflip into his pool, and he’s like, “Y’all don’t understand. Not only am I making bread, y’all are making bread. We’re making money together, my fans.” That’s when light bulbs started going off in my head.

16:25 But looking at this whole experience, it took a team of over 10 of us, from engineering and devs, to create a separate website with a music player that could connect a crypto wallet and a credit card, then market it on Clubhouse, Discord, Twitter and social media. You had to connect a MetaMask, talk to your community on Discord, create another website. Everything was disparate and disconnected, and it was so difficult just to buy this one-dollar album. So I thought, Web3 is hard, it’s complex. There’s got to be a better, seamless UI and UX to streamline Web3 access and ownership.

I spent time living in China, and I saw the rise of WeChat in 2010, 2011 and 2012, when it started as a walkie-talkie app. Now it has over a billion daily active users and it does everything. It is the world’s first and only truly major super app: payments, food delivery, paying your phone bill, the electricity in your home, everything through one app. In the West we segment everything: I tweet over here, I pay over here, I shop over here. I believe there are cultural reasons and timing reasons. When Tencent launched WeChat, China didn’t have all these other segmented services, whereas in the West you had DoorDash, Airbnb and Uber before a super app could come along.

So I’m looking at this and thinking: crypto is its own community, its own country. It has its own language, its own people, its own belief system, its own governance. Crypto needs its own super app. If I could streamline the UI and UX into a seamless Web2 experience powered by Web3 and blockchain technology, there is a massive opportunity to solve the issues of complexity and serve an entire community, country or industry.

I went back to Galaxy and said, “Guys, I think there’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I want to pivot the citizen journalism app that feels like TikTok or Triller and make it a Web3 super app.” That’s how OP3N was birthed. They extended our seed round, and then I brought in Warner Music Group, Yat Siu, founder of Animoca Brands, Jiho, founder of Axie Infinity, Gabby, founder of YGG, and WhaleShark. I call them the Asian Web3 mafia; these are my buddies, and they all came into my seed extension round. I hired a whole team of blockchain engineers out of Vietnam, and we started pivoting our UGC citizen journalism app into a Web3 super app, which became OP3N.

Brian Rose: You made an announcement earlier this year on TechCrunch, talking about a 100 million dollar valuation and 28 million dollars invested, with the who’s who of investing alongside you. Avalanche was in there as well, and Yat Siu, chairman of Animoca Brands, who’s been here on the show. He said, “OP3N is creating a platform where artists and creators can significantly increase their revenue streams while enjoying true digital ownership of their assets. This model is revolutionising the way people create and interact in the digital world in a way that Web2 simply can’t. Jaeson and Eric, his co-founder, have a strong track record in media and entertainment and abundant talent and tenacity, and I believe their vision of the OP3N super app could powerfully impact entertainment, community access and ownership.” Strong statements from probably the most important guy in the metaverse right now.

Jaeson Ma: It really is an honour and a blessing to have Animoca and Yat not only personally invest but lead our Series A through Animoca. I’ve known Yat since before Animoca became this multi-billion dollar behemoth in Web3. I still remember, it was 2018, we were in Hong Kong at the RISE conference, which is kind of like a Web Summit in Hong Kong. I don’t remember the exact details, but I remember him either being delisted from the Australian Stock Exchange, and there seemed to be no hope for Animoca. I said, “Any way me and my friends can help, let us know.”

I had not talked to Yat since that point, and then in 2021 I’m sitting with a major venture capital firm and they’re saying, “Animoca, Yat Siu,” and I’m like, there’s only one Yat I know. So I text him and we catch up. It could not happen to a better founder. I look at Yat as a founder of founders. He’s been in this space for two decades plus, with incredible successes, ebbs and flows, highs and lows, but through it all resilient. He truly is a leader of leaders, a technologist and a visionary. So I’m very honoured to have him on our cap table, on our board and leading our Series A.

23:14 Brian Rose: It’s a big deal, and it’s great having him out in front, going around the world trying to explain to people what’s happening here. Digital property rights is something he’s so passionate about. Even if we unpack that example of the rapper who was cancelled and then created IP in a direct relationship with his fans, a lot of us have been cancelled over the years by media companies and technology platforms. That layer was standing in the way of all this incredible engagement and commercial success, and when you found a way to take it out, you had an artist connecting with fans and both creating great value. For people who don’t understand what Web3 is, is that the essence of it, a direct peer-to-peer connection between people without a middleman? How do you explain that?

Jaeson Ma: For me, OP3N is about empowerment. How can I empower any human being to own their ideas and be direct with the communities that believe in their ideas, without a middle layer? Web1 was about what we understand as “read”. I could go on Netscape, then Yahoo, then Google, and read and receive information. Web2 was about “write”. After the first dot-com bubble, in 2004, 2005, 2006, came Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, and now Instagram and TikTok, where I as a user or creator can publish content that others can receive.

The problem with Web2 is that it’s owned by centralised technology companies like FAANG, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google, that control your data, your information, your followers, your ideas and your IP. Whether you’re Donald Trump or Kanye West or Brian Rose, if these giant pyramid companies, these new Egyptian pyramids with their pharaohs, the Zuckerbergs and Elon Musks, don’t like your content or don’t like you, they can censor you, filter you, cancel you, take you down. In other words, you own zero in Web2.

The technology companies of Silicon Valley own everything. They own your data, which is the new oil, the new gold, and they’re selling that data to advertisers. That’s where they make their wealth. Spotify is literally making billions while our artists are making crumbs. There’s writers’ strike after strike happening right now in Los Angeles, and you have the heads of the studios and Netflix outwardly saying, “We’re going to starve them out.” It doesn’t matter to them while they’re on their yachts at the top of these technological and media pyramids. Those who actually contribute the value to these corporations don’t receive any of it. So how do we win? You cannot win at Web2. The only ones who win are the pharaohs of the new pyramids created in the Web2 era by Silicon Valley.

I remember meeting a TikToker at NFT Art Basel Miami two years ago. She had a song that went viral and she was signed to a major label. She said she’d been signed for almost five years, her album had been shelved and she hadn’t been able to release her music. She had over half a million followers on TikTok, one of her songs had over half a billion views, and she said, “I have not seen a thousand dollars from TikTok, because I don’t know how to communicate with my fans. I don’t know who they are. I have VC guys and fans who want to support me, buy my music, invest in me, but I don’t even know where to start.”

I said, “I’m building a little platform called OP3N that will give you the ability to be direct with your fans, chat with them, and monetise and sell your merch and your music through our streaming platform, our video platform and our shop. You’ll still be able to live stream and do everything you do on all these other platforms, in one place, but you are direct with your fan base.” At that time we hadn’t figured out our take, but we were thinking maybe 10, maximum 20 percent, and you keep the majority, 80 to 90 percent.

She looked at me and said, “Are you serious? So it’s like YouTube and a music label in an app?” I said yes, and she asked how she could get on it. She said something very interesting: “This is the first time I’ve had a conversation with an executive in media where I felt the conversation was level, not top-down.” She literally had tears in her eyes, because my point was: how can I empower you as the artist to own your IP, your ideas, your music and your content, and be direct with your community, without me filtering or controlling how you do that?

29:57 That was when the light bulb went off. Web3 truly is about this one word: ownership. Because of decentralisation and the blockchain ledger, things cannot be taken away. It’s an actual digital receipt on the blockchain that says if I create this idea and it is authenticated and historically recorded, no one can take that idea from me.

My best friend Phil Chen, who was my board member at 88rising and is now my board member at EST and OP3N, was the first one to introduce me to blockchain, back around 2014. He introduced me to the first major DAO, called The DAO, and to founding members of the Ethereum team. I asked him, “Because of blockchain and this decentralised internet that’s not controlled by any centralised platform or corporation, but is mined by a decentralised network of computers with consensus, you’re saying it doesn’t matter whether I’m born into the royal family of England or into a homeless family on Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles? If I come up with an idea and it’s recorded on the blockchain, no one can take that from me?” He said yes, and I said, wow, this is powerful.

Anyone and everyone can own their ideas and their IP. That’s what the Western world was built upon: patents, the idea that we can legally own our ideas. With technology, everyone can now own their ideas and be direct with the communities that believe in them, without a middle layer or a middleman. That is what OP3N is here to solve. When I decided to go full force on OP3N, it was to bring together all this disparity. I’m on Twitter to talk about politics, the open town hall for my views. Then I go to YouTube for longer-form content, TikTok for viral content, Instagram to market and show my best self, and Clubhouse or Discord for an AMA. I’m not monetising on any of these. OP3N becomes the place where you can actually monetise all of that demand, which you can’t do in Web2 but now can in Web3.

Brian Rose: How many Web2 creators out there are dying for something like this, and how many don’t even know they need it? Take us, or a politician or a commentator, across the spectrum. Most people have no idea how to monetise, or they’re definitely under-monetised on whatever platform they’re on. There’s a Patreon here, an OnlyFans there, but they’re probably sitting on tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue and value creation. The label could never have come up with that rapper’s idea, and now he’s generated that revenue and everyone wins. It sounds like everyone is waiting for something like this. How do you build something like that?

Jaeson Ma: It’s a great question. Regardless of whether you’re extreme left or extreme right, look at Robert F. Kennedy Jr. saying he’s been filtered, regulated and cancelled, that his content has been taken down by his own Democratic Party and the Biden administration. Or Donald Trump getting cancelled off Twitter and all the other platforms and saying, “I’m going to create my own platform,” Truth Social. Or Tucker Carlson, who gets fired from Fox and is now getting 100 million plus views on every video on Twitter. They’re all asking: if Web2 cancels me, filters me, censors me and controls me, where else can I go? All of them are trying to figure out how to create their own platforms.

34:49 I have a crazy story with Kanye West. I’ve never shared this, but I might as well. I was developing OP3N before we closed our Series A, and a friend of mine who was one of Kanye’s close strategic team members was catching up with me: “Jaeson, teach me more about Web3, blockchain and crypto.” I told him I was building this super app, and he said, “You need to present this to Kanye. Kanye wants to build the Apple killer.” He warned me Kanye would ask for a large percentage. I said I didn’t think I could give more than 10 percent, and he said, “He’s going to need a lot more than that.”

The next day I’m on a call with an investor and my friend calls: “I got you a meeting with Ye. Come to Nobu Malibu right now, and dress in all black. No labels, no logos.” I told my investor, “Kanye West, right now, do you mind?” and he said, “That’s crazy, do it.” A few minutes later my buddy calls again: “Not Nobu Malibu. Soho Warehouse, downtown LA. Sit out front. If you see Ye walk by, do not say hi. His assistant will come down and bring you up.” I believe it was the fifth floor.

So I find anything all black, without any label or brand, and drive downtown to Soho Warehouse. I’m sitting out front, an all-black G-Wagon or something pulls up, and of course Ye walks up in a ski mask with his bodyguard. I don’t say hi. He walks right in. About 20 or 30 minutes later the assistant brings me up to the fifth floor. He had rented out the entire floor because he was making Donda 2. I’m sitting there under security, people coming in and out, and they say, “Just wait a while, he’s in the studio having a session.”

It’s all good. I swear, from Hammer: Hammer would sometimes make me wait two, three, four hours for a meeting. I used to tell everyone he’s just on Hammer time. There are only two kinds of people in the world who make you wait for hours: presidents or rappers.

Brian Rose: There’s a line in his song Stronger where he says you should be honoured by my lateness.

Jaeson Ma: There it is. So an hour goes by, the assistant comes back out: “I’m so sorry, he’s in the zone.” He’s literally making the song with Alicia Keys, City of Gods, and I can hear the music blasting. Another hour goes by, and the security guards are like, “Yo, this is fire.” Then she comes out: “I’m really sorry, he’s really in the zone, but I’ve for sure got him between nine and noon tomorrow. Can you please come back?” No problem.

Next morning I head back to Soho Warehouse around nine or ten, and she brings me right into the room. He’s having a session. Future was there producing, with an engineer and his whole crew, maybe 10 or 15 people, everyone in all black, and Kanye’s just going off, just being Ye. If you watch the Jeen-yuhs documentary, what I love about Ye is that he’s 100 percent Ye, unfiltered. Whether you believe it or not, he’s just being him. I remember it was Black History Month, and he said something like, “This is not Black History Month, this is Black Future Month.”

They make this track for about an hour and finally take a break. He walks past where I am, by the water machine with my friend, and he’s really cordial. My friend says, “Ye, this is my friend Jaeson, he’s the guy who’s going to talk to you about Web3.” Kanye looks at me and goes, “Hey man, you’re Web3?” I said yeah, and he said, “A few minutes, we’ll go to the other room and talk.” Twenty minutes later we go next door to the suite. I won’t say who was in the room, but there were a few figures everyone would know, and his team. He’s going off about personal stuff, what he’s upset about, what he’s going to change, and I’m just watching him preach.

41:51 There are probably about 15 people there, and all of a sudden he looks at me and goes, “Web3. Stand up. Present.” I look at my friend, and I’m like, okay. He posts up next to the TV, waiting for me to present. So I say, “Web1 was about read. Web2 was about write, but it was controlled by these corporations: Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google.” I could see his eyes engaging: “Uh-huh, that’s right, Apple controls everything.” Then I said, “But with Web3, you’re now able to own,” and I can see him nodding his head. “This is why I’ve been building the Apple killer, the Facebook killer, whatever you want to call it: OP3N. It’s a decentralised platform where you can own your ideas and be direct with your communities without a middleman.” You could tell he was into it.

Then I said, “And this is all going to be made possible through an NFT, a digital asset.” Right when I said NFT, I could see his demeanour go from engaged to backing off. As I’m showing the beta of the app on my phone, he says, “Can you stop there? Are you done?” And, paraphrasing, he said, “You had me. Everything you’re saying I believe in. We don’t own anything, we need to own. Everything you were saying made sense, but when you started talking about NFTs, that’s where you lost me. I don’t f with NFTs. Everyone’s pitching me this crypto, this NFT. I’m about real people, real food, real housing, the real world.”

Then he says, “Web3, I don’t want you to be thinking about what you can do in Web3. I want you to use your mind, because the way you talk, shoot, you could be the president.” And then, I kid you not, this is a true story, he goes, “Web3,” he keeps calling me Web3, “I don’t want you to build Web3. I want you to build for me Web4. Without a phone. How are you going to do it without a phone? I don’t want my kids on social media killing their minds.”

I said, “You want me to build you Web4? I need to talk to God about that.” He kind of looked at me, a little shocked, and said, “He needs to talk to God. I like that answer.” I said, “Well, technically the metaverse is the fourth dimension. It’s just a human interpretation, a virtual reality, of the spiritual realm, of what’s infinite and impossible, whether you want to call that heaven or hell or multiple dimensions.” I told him I used to be a missionary and used to cast out devils as an exorcist, and we started going off.

I can’t get into all the details, but he said, “I want you to consult. Talk to my lawyer right now.” His lawyer looks at me and says, “Let’s go meet right now and talk about how we’re going to build Web4.” We go up to the sixth floor, where the restaurant is at Soho Warehouse, and I ask him, “How long have you been working for Ye?” He goes, “A week.” Everything I’m explaining about NFTs, decentralisation and blockchain, he agrees with. He said Ye actually believes in all the values and principles of Web3; he’s just really annoyed and didn’t fully understand NFTs at the time. “Let me talk to him and see if I can change his mind.”

I kid you not, an hour after we met, Ye posts on Instagram, basically saying, “I don’t f with NFTs, don’t ask me about it right now,” and then in parentheses, “ask me about it later.” My buddy calls me: “Did you see what Ye just posted? That’s a good sign. I think he’s not fully against it; he’s actually open to it.”

48:09 The reason I share the story goes back to the point about people. I’ve been saying since about 2020 that the three most influential people on social media are Elon, Trump and Ye. Anything they tweet or post will literally change markets and shake the equilibrium of society. Trump says, “You’re going to cancel me? I’m going to create Truth Social.” Ye, I was able to have a conversation with, where he was asking how to create an Apple killer, his own platform. Then you have Elon, who says, “I’m going to buy Twitter for 40-plus billion,” because it is the social town hall of our modern day. Elon’s going to build a super app, X, for 40 billion. I’ve raised about 40 million with OP3N, so, hey Elon, come and buy me.

At the end of the day, the reason I’m building OP3N is truly for freedom of speech, for freedom of ideas, for the freedom and the ability to live out the American dream: to pursue your dream and your passion, and to make a living and monetise without being controlled by anyone or anything, whether that’s a corporation, a CEO or a billionaire trying to control your voice, your thoughts and your ideas.

For me the goal for OP3N is to create a platform for anyone to own their ideas, their dreams and their destinies, and be direct with the communities, the fans and the people who believe in their ideas, without a middle layer, a middleman or an organisation that extracts all the value from your ideas and your IP, through technology that enables you rather than takes away from you. Whether you’re Kanye or a young artist or a TikToker or someone on OnlyFans or YouTube, and you really want to proliferate your ideas and your dreams, that’s what OP3N is for.

51:05 So if you go to op3n.world right now, we have our first beta. We’re testing with AI and Web3, where you can create your own webtoon, your own comic, through AI. You can type in your prompt, say, “Brian Rose having an interview with Batman in Tokyo,” choose that first comic panel, then say, “Next scene: Batman now knights Brian to become the new Robin,” and choose that scene. When you finish the story you can publish it as an actual webtoon or comic, and later you’ll be able to put it on a mug, a T-shirt or a hat and sell it.

We’re testing it because we know anime is very sticky. If this works, we’ll be able to give anyone the ability to use AI to publish their ideas, put them on a smart contract, own them and deliver them to whoever they want. It will be part of a super app with five tabs: Discovery; Shop; Spaces, where you can create everything and anything; Chat, just like WeChat, Telegram, WhatsApp or Discord; and your profile, Me. Instead of having to go to Shopify, Amazon, Discord, Telegram, Facebook, TikTok, WhatsApp and WeChat, you can have it all in one super app, and monetise, manage your community, sell your products and communicate your content and your message all in one place, without anyone telling you what to do.

52:55 Brian Rose: Wow, so exciting. And you’re hiring people from WhatsApp, the best of the best, to put this together. You mentioned AI; how will AI fold into this? And second, we briefly mentioned NFTs and crypto. The NFT market had a boom and then a bust, and crypto has come off a little. How does that affect where you are today and people’s perception? Kanye didn’t have a great perception of NFTs. Does that change your business model or your rollout plans?

Jaeson Ma: That’s a great question. I’m a venture capitalist, so I’ve been through all the cycles of what’s hot and what’s not. Back in 2011 and 2012, VR and AR was the thing. Everyone was getting into virtual reality and augmented reality, you had Magic Leap, Oculus, HTC Vive, and VCs were throwing billions into it. Then people realised it was going to take time, it was actually hard, and Magic Leap didn’t become what everyone thought. It was a ten-year trajectory. The technology was real, the metaverse before the term metaverse came out, but it was still very early, so it cooled down. Only now, ten years later, with the Apple glasses, XR and Snapchat, is it becoming practical for consumers to actually use.

Then you saw ICOs. I still remember going to Consensus in 2017, and you could see the greed in people’s eyes; everyone was there to make a quick dollar. That came and busted, but out of it you saw real layer 1s and layer 2s and DeFi Summer. Similarly with NFTs in 2020, 2021 and 2022, you saw OpenSea go to a billion US dollars in volume in just a month, and now it’s down 99 percent, to tens of millions.

The technology of blockchain, Web3, DeFi, decentralisation and crypto is real. It’s not going anywhere. It has efficiencies and applications that solve real-world problems, like the transfer of money and payments, which is so antiquated and can now be streamlined and done instantly. That is the power of crypto, the power of digital currency. Whether you’re the World Bank, the Chinese government, Coinbase, the SEC, or now BlackRock launching an ETF with BTC, the technology is not going anywhere.

Like any technology when it first comes, people ride the hype train and try to make a quick buck, and I think that is what happened with NFTs in the last few years. A lot of these projects came and went, they got rugged, they made everyone buy into the hype without delivering a real product. It was too fast, too soon, and, just being straight up and honest, the majority of it were Ponzi schemes. But the technology is real. I look at blockchain, digital assets, cryptocurrency and the decentralised internet as ownership, as distributed value versus centralised value, and it’s here to stay.

57:10 As for AI, I would say Web3 is hard and AI is scary, but Web3 is real and AI is exciting. I believe AI is a tool to help our ideas create more rather than less, and we have to look at AI as a companion, a friend, rather than an evil enemy, Skynet, that’s going to take over the world. Now, there is real danger in AI. Whether you’re Sam Altman, Elon Musk or Google, they’re all saying the same thing: there is inherent, real risk that it will take away jobs and that it can control outcomes with enough data through these large language models.

People like Andrew Yang have been saying it since his campaign, I believe in 2016 or whenever it was: AI is coming, it’s going to take away your jobs, this is why we need UBI and everyone should get a thousand dollars a month, because truck drivers will no longer be truck drivers, it will be AI, and retail workers at McDonald’s or Uniqlo will be replaced by AI. That is the reality, and it’s already happening. But at the same time, it’s going to create other kinds of jobs. The one thing AI cannot do is originate original ideas. It has to learn from human ideas. From those human ideas it can iterate, but there will never be an original Mozart, or even Eminem, from AI. It might be an offshoot of Eminem or an offshoot of Mozart, but it will never be Eminem.

Brian Rose: But was Eminem an offshoot of everything?

Jaeson Ma: That’s true, but how many people could come from 8 Mile in Detroit, in the real world? There are arguments on both sides. But I believe AI and blockchain, or Web3, are two sides of the same coin, and they work together rather than apart. If I can use AI to proliferate, diversify, differentiate and create off an idea, and then authenticate it through the blockchain with smart contracts, that’s very powerful, because now anything can be created but everything can also be authenticated, so that you own what you create. There are going to be many iterations that come from AI and Web3 technologies working together, and at OP3N we are building for both.

1:00:13 Brian Rose: If I can stay on that a second more: how is the music industry dealing with AI? You see people like Grimes actually encouraging people to use her voice and potentially get royalties on the back of it, really embracing it and potentially creating a lot of value. And I’m sure there are people at the labels thinking, “No, this is terrible, we don’t want these AI Drakes out there.” How is it dealing with this, from what you can see?

Jaeson Ma: It’s similar to every major disruption where technology meets the entertainment or media industries. When YouTube first came out, Universal, Sony and Warner were suing YouTube and freaking out. I remember seeing Chad and the guys back in the day with MC Hammer at the YouTube headquarters, when they were basically breaking all the copyright laws and saying, “It’s not our fault, it’s our users.”

Brian Rose: People forget YouTube wouldn’t be YouTube unless it literally broke the law in the early days.

Jaeson Ma: That’s right. That’s the way a lot of disruption happens. All disruption breaks laws until it becomes normalised and accepted, and then, I would say, corporatised. If you can’t win against them, you work with them. I remember Hammer and I in San Mateo, above a pizza parlour, and he was like, “Jaeson, new company, YouTube, uploading content, servers, on your laptop. We’re going to shoot the next music video on a camcorder and deliver it over the internet.” They were making million-dollar Britney Spears music videos at the time, and I said, “This is going to be horrible, this is going to be whack.” It was Chad, Steve Chen, just five of them, and I don’t think anyone knew it was literally going to disrupt content forever. Content was no longer going to be controlled by studios and news conglomerates like CNN, Fox and News Corp. Everyone could become their own Ted Koppel, their own Diane Sawyer, whoever they want to become.

I had a song with Bruno Mars; that’s a whole other story. Right before Bruno got signed to Atlantic, he did a song with me about Jesus Christ, about John 3:16. It was about God’s love, a Christian gospel rap track, and it went viral on YouTube, with millions of views. About six months later he dropped his first single, I think it was Nothing on You with B.o.B, and then Billionaire, and I got a cease and desist letter from Atlantic and Warner saying they were taking down our song from YouTube because it wasn’t authorised by Warner Music. I called my music lawyer, one of the most powerful, who helped create Def Jam, but basically Warner didn’t want Bruno associated with a gospel track. Why, when people search Bruno Mars, is this random Christian rap track with this random Asian dude named Jaeson Ma coming up? I couldn’t win. To this day that song has been silenced on YouTube.

That was 2010. YouTube launched in 2005, and in 2006 and 2007 Warner, Universal and Sony were suing YouTube, saying this is taking away from our bottom line and will ruin our entire distribution and label business, only later to say, “We can’t win against them, we have to work with them,” and they created partnership deals. I believe the same thing is happening with AI and with Web3 right now. You saw Universal issue a cease and desist and sue whoever created the AI Drake song with The Weeknd.

Then you have disruptors, independent artists like Grimes, whom I’ve been able to work with through the Avalanche fund. I know her manager; he’s a disruptor, an entrepreneur, brilliant. She’s all about: let’s not fight against AI or technology, let AI be our companion, our friend, let’s work with it. You make a song with my voice, I’ll give you 50 percent of the royalties. That’s where it’s going. Instead of being afraid of people using my IP, if you’re a true fan and a believer, create with my IP, my voice, my content, my ideas, but through a smart contract we share in that upside together.

Every great rapper came from a rapper before; every great musician was inspired by a musician before. But now you can authenticate that, track it and show the receipts: this actually came from Grimes, this actually came from Drake. My point is that AI is an open door for more creation, not the suppression of creation but the proliferation of more creativity. Web3 is going to be able to protect your IP, and AI is going to give you the ability to create and iterate off IP into new dimensions and new possibilities.

1:07:24 Brian Rose: What makes OP3N different is that you are an artist and a creator. When I look at most of these massive platforms, I don’t think they come from artists and creators. YouTube didn’t, Spotify didn’t; they don’t seem to get what an artist struggles with. But your life has been that: these hip-hop tracks, gospel tracks, hanging out with Hammer. 88rising is this massive platform you founded with over 6 million subscribers and billions of views, and you were an early investor in Musical.ly before it became TikTok. What different perspective does that give you when you build something like this? Do you understand what art or creation is, and how it has to be treated differently from the next tech platform?

Jaeson Ma: It’s a great question as well. I’m a serial entrepreneur who has founded media and tech companies, but deep down I’m an artist, a storyteller, a performer, as you can tell from the Kanye story. When I was a kid in the late 80s, in elementary school, we had our first Apple computer and played Oregon Trail. When my teacher asked what I wanted to do when I grew up, I remember thinking, as an eight- or nine-year-old, I want to tell stories.

When I was seven, my dad asked me in Cantonese what I wanted to be when I grew up. I took out a piece of white paper and some crayons and drew three pictures of myself. One was me in a suit and tie with a briefcase in my hand. One was me in a French beret with a paintbrush and a paint palette. And the third was me behind a church pulpit with a crucifix behind me, preaching. My dad said, “What is this?” I said, “Dad, Monday to Friday I’m going to be a businessman like you, Saturday I’m going to be an artist, and Sunday I’m going to be a preacher.” He looked at me and said, in Chinese, the equivalent of “you’re a little smart alec.”

I never would have thought that 30 years later I’d be able to live out each of those pictures at a different season of my life. I always say, if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans, because it never happens in the sequence you think. I thought I was going to be a rapper first; I actually became a preacher and a missionary first. My 10,000 hours of preaching became the catalyst for me being a gospel spoken-word rap artist, basically preaching over hip-hop beats. If it wasn’t for that, it wouldn’t have opened the doors to entertainment, and then to venture capital and technology, where I became a serial entrepreneur.

At the core, I’ve always realised it especially as an Asian American growing up in San Jose, California, in the Bay Area. I was fortunate to grow up in Silicon Valley, which was very multicultural, but 30 or 45 minutes away, in Danville or Gilroy, there were hardly any Asian people. Growing up, I always had this chip on my shoulder because I never saw Asian representation on the silver screen, television or the internet. The only Asian people I ever saw were Bruce Lee and Yan Can Cook, an Asian-American chef who taught you how to cook Chinese food on PBS.

But from five or six years old I spent my summers in Hong Kong with my grandparents in Kowloon, watching Hong Kong action cinema, John Woo movies like Hard Boiled and A Better Tomorrow, with Chow Yun-fat with two guns in his hands and a cigarette, Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung, and I’m like, there’s this whole other world where Asia is badass. So I was always conflicted. Why in the West am I underrepresented, and why in the East am I overrepresented? How do I create a story that can bring understanding between these two worlds? That became my mission: bridging East and West through media, entertainment and technology, through stories and talent.

Coming into Hollywood and Silicon Valley, I knew they were owned by gatekeepers who didn’t look like me. The traditional route in Hollywood is to start in the mail room at CAA or William Morris, grind your way up to become an agent, a partner, a producer, and I’d never get to the top, because there’s always a glass ceiling of people who don’t look like me and are never going to let me into their inner circle. I knew it was the same in Silicon Valley. So I always knew: I can’t wait for a seat at the table, I have to create my own tables, and leverage my resources, my network, my hustle, my drive and my ideas to do it myself, because no one else is going to do it for me.

That’s why I started East West Ventures, then 88rising, then Stampede, got to invest in Musical.ly and Triller, and now EST Media and OP3N: because I do not want to answer to anyone but myself and, ultimately, God.

1:14:34 I think of entrepreneurs as creatives. I always host Chinese hot pots. If you’ve never had one, it’s the most amazing experience, and at every Web3 conference I go to, I hold a Web3 hot pot. What I love about hot pot is, number one, it’s the spiciest thing on planet Earth, Sichuan spice. Two bites and your face goes numb, you’re not yourself, and however you look or whoever you are doesn’t matter any more. And it’s always around a pot, usually a circular table, so it’s a very communal experience.

Before Web3 and the whole industry became this massive thing, I would travel every week or two to a different city, and I would normally meet three types of people: artists, business leaders, and people doing interesting things, whom I’d call community specialists, whether a former CIA agent or someone running an NGO saving kids from sex trafficking, doing God’s work. I used to bring artists, VCs, founders and entrepreneurs together.

I realised they’re all very eccentric, enigmatic, creative people with crazy ideas, risk-takers willing to do things most people wouldn’t do outside their safe nine-to-five. By the time we’re done with hot pot, whether you’re a major celebrity with millions of followers on TikTok or Instagram, a founder or VC creating or investing in new ideas, or a former government agent or a social worker for the UN who is a real-life Rambo, nobody cares what your title is. Everyone just wants to become best friends, love each other, do stuff together and become a community.

The reason I share that, back to your point, is that whether you’re an entrepreneur, an artist or a social worker taking life-risking actions for the betterment of others, creativity is about disruption, creativity is about risk, creativity is about faith. It’s believing in something that is not yet. Hebrews 11:1 says faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen. I always say faith is spelled R-I-S-K. As an entrepreneur or an artist, you’re constantly doing something other people have not yet done. So I’m always thinking, as a risk-taker, an entrepreneur, an artist, a missionary: how can I create tools that make what I haven’t yet done possible? Every company I’ve started has been something that had not yet been done.

OP3N is a risk. I don’t know if it’s going to work, but that’s why I’m asking the questions. Brian Rose, you’ve literally been persecuted by YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. You’ve been cancelled, filtered, censored. How can I create for you a platform with real technology, real products and services, that solves your pain points as a communicator, a content creator, a host, a truth speaker, that isn’t filtered or censored? If OP3N can be the place for the Brian Roses, the Kanyes, the Joe Rogans and the Robert F. Kennedy Juniors, and the millions of other young and older people who aren’t given a voice by the current centralised platforms because they don’t agree with their values, principles or worldview, then maybe I’m solving a real problem, because the world needs to hear truth, not something that is controlled.

1:19:41 That’s what I’ve always aimed to build. With 88rising, no one believed an Asian hip-hop artist from Asia could make it in the West. When I started the company, Universal, Sony and Warner were never going to give me a deal. So I went to the Asian venture capital mafia, my buddies, including Steve Chen, founder of YouTube, one of my first seed investors, and said, “Give me capital. I know how to find the talent. There’s YouTube, Twitter, social media; I can distribute without a major label, but I need capital to create premium content and market it on these distribution platforms. If I have the capital and the talent and I build the brand, we’re going to reach billions.” That’s what happened. We’re having our fifth music festival this weekend, Head in the Clouds at the Rose Bowl, 40,000 people a year. It’s like an Asian Coachella.

Don’t tell me Asian music and Asian artists are not in demand, not just by Asians but by the rest of the world. BTS, Blackpink, Squid Game, Everything Everywhere All at Once: Asian content is now proliferating and becoming mainstream. In 2015, when I started 88rising, everyone was like, “An Asian YouTube channel? Asian what?” Before it was 88rising, I would go to VCs and say I wanted to build an Asian media platform on YouTube. They’d ask what it was called and I’d say “Ryce”, R-Y-C-E, and they’d say that’s funny. I wasn’t really going to call it that, but I’d ask, “Have you heard of Vice? Do you know its current valuation?” This was 2015, and they’d say five billion. “We’re Asian Vice. Ryce.” People started writing me checks.

There was a youth media platform on YouTube reaching billions and making hundreds of millions of dollars, and Asia’s the biggest population on the planet, so how can you tell me there isn’t a market for Asia? I’m doing it again with EST, to create the most powerful and largest distributed media platform for Asian content and news. VCs and Wall Street are all looking at me saying, “We see it, we believe it, but how’s this going to work?” It’s all good. I’ve done it before, I’ll do it again.

1:22:36 Brian Rose: This whole concept of East meets West: there’s a lot to that narrative. If you go to America and turn on the television, there’s this East versus West narrative, and people don’t know why it’s there. I grew up in the 80s in America and I was terrified of Russia. I used to have bad dreams as a kid because I thought we were going to get hit with nuclear missiles. We had this enemy we had never met, that was the enemy because everyone told us it was. I feel like that’s what China is today. And yet there’s a massive number of people over there with their own culture. We’re all humans; we can communicate and create with each other. Talk to me about this ultimate mission of yours, and how challenging it is.

Jaeson Ma: It’s very challenging, especially post-pandemic. From 2010 through 2016, China was pouring billions into Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Wall Street and real estate, and America welcomed it with open arms. I was able to build my businesses off this arbitrage, this East-West transference of capital, wealth and ideas. Then of course Trump came and created a very polarised conversation that China is the enemy, the red dragon. And I don’t fault him in certain aspects. I’ve been in China since the early 2000s, and Google, WhatsApp and Facebook have been banned there for a reason. So it raises the question: why is TikTok not banned in the US if it’s a Chinese-owned company? Fair is fair. When it comes to technological wars, censorship, politics and governments, there are real threats and real differences.

But I look at China and the US as two superpowers with two very different worldviews. The US is about independence, whereas China is about community, cohesiveness, oneness, unity of mind, values and purpose. In Asia, similar, some might say, to Jewish or Italian communities, it’s all about family. It’s never about you; it’s about us. When you grow up in an Asian family, you do not dishonour your father or mother. We have this concept of face: if you disrespect yourself, you’re disrespecting the family. In China specifically, Confucianism and filial piety, honouring your elders, are an intrinsic disposition of “we are one”.

For five thousand plus years, China has literally been called the Middle Kingdom, the centre of the world. Through wars, disruptions, industrialisation and technological evolutions, China is not going anywhere, and the values are more or less the same: filial piety, the unity of the family, us. The Western world is me versus them; it’s always about the individual voice. To me it’s not right or wrong, it’s just culture: two very different value systems for how people live, do business, raise their children and look at education.

Look at China: the surveillance, everything has AI. If you want to talk about AI, China was there ten-plus years ago, with Face++. Everywhere you go you’re tracked, and everything is, quote unquote, censored. You don’t have issues like in the West, left versus right, Republican versus Democrat. In China there’s one party, you do as the party says, and if you veer off, you will be handled. There are pluses and minuses to that. There is technically no freedom of speech, except according to the party. But the Chinese look at America and say, “You guys are a mess.” It’s going further and further apart, more and more dislocated. Most of the world probably looks at America or the UK and says it wouldn’t be surprised if there’s another civil war, because of social media and these AI algorithms feeding you what you want to see, or what they want you to see, creating this split between conservatives and liberals, the woke and those against it.

I live in both. I live half the time in Hong Kong and Asia and half the time in Los Angeles and Hollywood, and I have to deal with both cultures and both perspectives. The reality is we are in a new Cold War, but it’s not a Cold War of just nuclear bombs. It’s a Cold War of economies and technologies, specifically chips. Read the book Chip War. The battle over Taiwan is not because China, Biden or Trump just want this little island of 25 million people. There’s a little company that’s the most important company in the world, TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor. Without its semiconductor chips, no electronic device in the world can operate: not your microwave, your Tesla, your camera, your iPhone, not a nuclear missile.

That’s why Taiwan’s important, and that’s why there is a new Cold War that’s cyber, technological and economic. Ultimately it’s not a battle of values, it’s a battle of power: who is going to control the technology that controls the world, the East or the West, or can there be some type of consensus and understanding? That’s what I’m trying to do with Eastern Standard Times: this is how Asia views American politics, North Korea, what’s happening in Myanmar, rather than only one, non-Asian perspective from Fox or CNN. It’s like me talking to you in Japanese for this whole interview; you’d be looking at me like, what? That’s how Asia looks at Western media: that’s not how we’re experiencing it. To me, media is the platform to tell stories that create understanding between both cultures, so hopefully we find some middle ground and can work together rather than apart.

1:32:21 Brian Rose: It’s an important mission, maybe the most important mission over the next hundred years. This conflict isn’t going anywhere. You mentioned one of those pictures you drew for your dad, the guy with the briefcase. What’s it like being a venture investor? What have you learned the hard way? That’s maybe a third of what you are, and now you spend time investing in a massive number of companies. What does it take to be a VC?

Jaeson Ma: A venture capitalist is an investor in ideas. A venture capitalist has to always stay curious, and also needs to do their research and keep their fundamentals and core competencies intact. I remember talking to one of the top VCs in China, Anna, of ZhenFund, which is kind of like SV Angel. Ron Conway’s SV Angel was the first angel investment firm in Silicon Valley, and twenty years ago he and Hammer were best friends; they went everywhere together. People ask me how Hammer got into tech: through Ron Conway, the godfather of angel investment in Silicon Valley. Hammer was his unofficial best buddy and adviser who saw every deal. That’s why we were at YouTube when it was five people, at Twitter when it was three, at Salesforce when it was fewer than 100. It was insane, and I was this 18-year-old wide-eyed Asian American kid driving Hammer around to these meetings, back when there was still a magazine called Business 2.0 and he was speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt and Stanford Business School.

Hammer has done very well for himself, and I have nothing but the greatest respect for him. He’s like my dad; I call him my Black dad. He taught me everything. Think about it: I wanted to be a serial entrepreneur, an artist and a preacher, and Hammer was all three. He was a serial entrepreneur and a VC who started multimedia entertainment and tech companies, he was still performing at halftime shows and the American Music Awards, and at the same time we would go to prisons and churches and hold revivals, and he would teach me how to cast out devils, heal the sick and preach the word of God. I could not have had a better mentor in my 20s. Shout out, Hammer. I call him Pastor. I love you.

Going back to the VC question, I asked Anna, “How do you invest in companies? What’s your secret sauce?” She said, “I invest in founders.” I asked how she knew a founder had what it takes, and she said, “I can’t explain it. It’s just a gut feeling. I meet a founder and I just know he or she has it. Their idea might pivot or change.” Twitter was not what it is now; Facebook was Hot or Not. But if you find a tenacious, resilient, committed founder, you can win. She was an early seed investor in Didi, the Uber of China, because she had a gut feeling those founders were winners.

As a VC you do have to have this sixth sense. It’s just like an A&R finding the next big music artist, the next top model, director or actress. Whether you’re a VC or in music, film or the creator economy, it’s about how you spot talent, how you smell that a person has the X factor. Talk to Clive Davis, Lucian Grainge or Jimmy Iovine: they just know it when they meet a superstar. In a documentary about Clive Davis, he meets Whitney Houston for the first time, singing in a gospel choir, she sings her first song on the spot, and he just knows she’s going to be a superstar.

That also happens through chance, luck or providence: meeting a founder or a talent with that X factor, that victorious spirit that says, no matter what happens, I’m not going to give up until I figure out a way to make this work. So for me it’s investing in founders where you have the faith, conviction or gut check that they’re true visionaries, with the work ethic and the idea, who can bring the team, the technical side, the sales side and the fundraising. That takes a certain type: the Elon Musk, the Steve Jobs, and on and on.

1:39:02 The other thing that’s really important is to invest in fundamentals, not hype. I’m a big MMA and boxing fan. The other night, even though I had a meeting the next day, I stayed up until six in the morning watching Nate Diaz and Jake Paul. It was a great fight, and it’s always interesting to see the trash talk before and the respect after. What I have to give Jake respect for is that he’s putting in the hours of training and studying the craft of boxing. He’s not just saying, “I’m this big YouTuber with a hard punch.” He’s working with trainers to understand defence, offence and all the technical aspects.

Then there was the recent Crawford versus Spence fight. I originally posted on my Instagram story that Terence Crawford was going to beat Errol Spence, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Spence won because of his power and pressure. Then I saw he’s from Texas. I was born in Lubbock, Texas, so I deleted my story and went with my hometown. I always forget to go with my gut, because I know Terence Crawford is a fundamentalist. He’s technical, and his boxing IQ is insane; I’ve never seen a boxer like it. Errol Spence is exciting, fast and furious, with flurries, power and pressure, but to me it’s more hype than substance. And you saw Crawford annihilate Spence like a Harvard PhD ripping apart a high schooler.

Go back a few months to Tank Davis versus Ryan Garcia. Ryan Garcia looks like Oscar De La Hoya Jr. He’s a superstar: young, fast, undefeated, flashy, good-looking. Tank Davis is short and kind of looks like a gremlin, but fundamentally he’s got it together, and when they fought, Tank destroyed Ryan. My point: focus on fundamentals, not hype.

Even with Web3 and AI you’re seeing all this hype. AI is now the new craze. There are now 10,000 new AI companies, and a16z, Sequoia and Lightspeed are all pouring billions into AI, whereas two years ago it was Web3. You’re going to see 99 percent of these AI companies vanish, and maybe the one percent whose founder had the X factor and the fundamentals will build a lasting company. There’s a reason Jensen Huang’s Nvidia is the number one AI company in the world: he’s been doing it for 20 years. Before anyone was shouting about AI, before ChatGPT, Nvidia was pouring tens of billions, if not more, into AI research, AI tools and AI software, which is why Nvidia is at the market cap it is now. Fundamentals, focus and a visionary leader with the resilience to do it before it was hyped and popular.

That’s the same way I look at what we’re doing at OP3N and EST, on the media and content side and on the Web3 and AI super app side. There’s all this noise: “Web3, NFTs, no.” Take away the hype and the noise, look at where the technology can actually be applied to solve challenges people need solved, take a long-term view and build towards that. That way we will win in the end.

1:44:57 Brian Rose: Founders and fundamentals. That’s how you do it. I thought there might be a third F.

Jaeson Ma: Founders, fundamentals and faith.

Brian Rose: Well, let’s talk about faith, your Sunday job, which is preaching. A lot of people don’t know, but right before this episode we had a little bit of a prayer. It was pretty epic actually; I was really feeling that. You also have a really fascinating pendant on your chest. Could you tell us a little about both and your faith?

Jaeson Ma: I got this pendant when I was 40, because in my early 20s I met a witch who put a curse on me. She said I was going to die before I was 40, and she saw me in an aeroplane crashing over Buffalo, New York, or upstate. When people say things like this you want to reject it or brush it off, but in your subconscious it haunts you. Through my 20s and 30s I had this haunting thought that would come back when I was weak, tired or vulnerable: maybe I won’t make it past 40, maybe the devil will try to take me out. Because I had experienced so many spiritual, supernatural occurrences, it wasn’t like, “Oh, that can’t happen.”

I believe that when you make a commitment to do God’s work and submit your will, for me as a Christ follower, to Christ, you immediately become a target for the enemy, for evil forces or darkness, because you’re not just living your own life; you’re on the side of light, of God’s kingdom, purpose and plan. Like a founder, if you’re committed, resilient and determined to do God’s will, you automatically become opposition to the enemy.

At a very young age, at 17, I was on my way to jail for grand theft, and God supernaturally, miraculously acquitted me of all the charges. Even though I pleaded guilty, the judge said, “You’re not guilty, you can walk out of this courtroom like nothing ever happened.” It was impossible. I say justice is getting what you deserve, mercy is not getting what you deserve, but grace is getting what you definitely don’t deserve. It’s a miracle only given by God. When I walked out of that courtroom in San Jose at 17, the birds were chirping, the sky was blue, the sun was shining, and I said, “God, you’re the nicest dude I’ve ever met in my life. I’m going to get out of the driver’s seat of my life and into the passenger seat. Jesus Christ, you get in the driver’s seat and take my life wherever you want.”

I was in Lisbon recently when the Pope was there for World Youth Day, and one of the priests shared a quote, I believe from Pope John Paul II: a life with Christ is the greatest adventure. When I first became a Christ follower I found a little plaque at a garage sale that said, “To see God in everything makes life the greatest adventure,” and I had it in my room as a teenager. I grew up watching kung fu dramas, always the same story of a nobody who falls off a mountain cliff into a cave, finds a kung fu manual, masters it for years and comes out a kung fu superhero. I told my mum when I was 10 or 11 that I wanted to shave my head and become a Shaolin monk, and she said, “No you will not, you’re going to Harvard.” When I became a born-again believer, I told God, “I do not want my life to be boring. Make this Christian adventure like a kung fu story.”

I started encountering not religion but a relationship with God. People know I used to be a missionary, but if someone asks if I’m a priest, a pastor or a missionary, I say no, not any more, although I’m technically licensed to marry people. I know myself too well; I don’t live up to the standard a public servant of God should be held to. I drink whiskey, I smoke cigars, I curse more than I’d like. But deep down in my heart I love God, I have a relationship with him daily, and I do everything I do not for material reasons but for spiritual reasons, because I have not just a theoretical understanding but a deep, intimate relationship with the person of Christ.

I always say religion is man reaching out to God; Christ is God reaching down to man. Whether Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Catholic or even Christian, religion is often “what good can I do to cover up my bad”, so I can feel better about my sin and shame and find acceptance or appease God. Grace is not about what you can do; it’s about what Christ has done for you, dying on that cross, not because you’re good but because he’s good and his love is unconditional.

1:52:57 When I understood that… it’s a crazy story I’ve never really shared in a secular environment. I had been going to church for about a year at 17, and I was struggling with all the sins I was ashamed of. In youth group it’s don’t look at naked girls, don’t drink, don’t smoke, and I couldn’t beat it. Why couldn’t I stop doing bad even though I wanted to do good? Paul talks about that in the Epistles: the good I want to do I don’t do, and the bad I keep doing. And then he says it’s the Spirit of God living in me that empowers and enables me to do good.

My mum started going to a mystical Christian church in Milpitas, California, with a little Taiwanese pastor named Pastor Grace, who taught everyone to wait upon the Lord in silence, like Christian mystics or Quakers, for an hour or two before the service. My mum was chronically suicidal and depressed; my parents had a really rough marriage and I had a rough childhood. And I saw my mum transform from darkness to life, from depressed to full of joy and light. I asked, “What happened to you, Mum?” and she said, “You come to my church, you’ll understand.” She’s like a little Yoda.

So I go with her to this little church called Zion Church of Praise, and we sit in the pew for an hour, an hour and a half, everyone in silence. I’m peeking around, my ADD is kicking in, but I force myself to meditate, pray and focus on Christ. Maybe 30 or 40 minutes go by, my thoughts start to subside, my body is no longer the focus, and all of a sudden I feel this presence of God come over me and fill me. I go out of body and get taken back 2,000 years to the actual crucifixion of Christ, and I see him hanging on the cross, profusely bleeding, for me. I feel liquid love pouring over my body and I’m weeping, and I knew at that moment that God loved me.

I open my eyes and the whole chapel is empty. Apparently two and a half hours had gone by. I came back into my body, and my mum was waiting in the parking lot. I literally got taken out of time and place. I walked to my mum’s car, opened the door, and she looked at me and said, “I told you so.” She gave me a seven-part series of cassette tapes called Waiting Upon the Lord, from Isaiah 40:31: “Those who wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.” The teaching was that you have to wait upon God daily until your physical body and your soul, which is made up of your mind, will and emotions, are submitted.

For the next four or five years I practised every day, praying and waiting upon God for a minimum of two to six hours a day. It was always around the two-hour mark that my physical hunger would disappear. My mind, will and emotions, thinking about a girl I liked, my schoolwork, how I was going to make money, the news, all those thoughts would disappear, and my spirit would awaken and connect with God’s Spirit, and we would become one. Every day, for about four hours at a time, I would start seeing visions, seeing things that were going to happen that hadn’t happened yet. I would know things about people. I was deep in the fourth dimension, the spiritual realm, on a daily basis.

More than that, I felt complete ecstasy, joy, peace and an unexplainable energy that I knew was not just crystals or ayahuasca. I’m not against ayahuasca or DMT, but I think humans will use drugs or plants or whatever they can as a medium to try to connect with a higher power or their spiritual self. I realised I didn’t need any of that; I just needed to connect with God.

2:00:06 I realised we’re made up of three parts: body, soul and spirit. If you only feed your spirit once a week, going to a church service for one hour, it’s like eating once a week. Would your body be nourished? We eat three times a day. Our mind, will and emotions are constantly being pulled and extracted by social media, and our attention is constantly being taken. How many of us actually have time to feed our spirit?

As I spent those four or five years praying, meditating and waiting upon the Lord for hours a day, I didn’t try to become an exorcist, heal the sick or preach the gospel. I couldn’t help it. People with demons started manifesting in front of me, because there was so much of God’s presence that anything dark would begin to react. That’s where the first deliverances started happening. I started seeing people get healed, I started being able to read people’s mail and know their past, present and future, and I have probably personally done over 100 exorcisms, maybe more. The Exorcist was based on a true story. I recently watched The Pope’s Exorcist, based on Father Amorth, who claimed over 200,000 exorcisms; he was the chief exorcist of the Vatican; Russell Crowe played him.

My point is that the spiritual realm is more real to me than the world I’m looking at with my physical eyes. It’s more real than my skin, this watch or this chair. I’ve experienced demons, angels and God, and I’ve seen Satan twice. That is the reality that drives what I do. It’s not “I’m just here to be another tech founder, make a billion dollars and make the world better.” I believe technology is a tool, an apparatus, a platform that can do God’s will or the will of evil. It’s how you use it. Money is neutral, fire is neutral, blockchain is neutral.

When I was a missionary we would hold stadium revivals of ten thousand, twenty thousand, even more, and in a Muslim country and other places we would have thousands come to the altar and thousands at a time start manifesting, coughing up blood, eyes turning black. We had to train volunteers to physically and spiritually deliver each person. I’ve seen that reality. In the Western world, in a studio in London, New York or San Francisco, God doesn’t exist. But try telling someone in Africa, Nepal, India, the outskirts of South America, Indonesia or Thailand that God doesn’t exist, and they’ll laugh at you, because the local witch doctor or shaman is the one who gives them medicine. People will say it’s just in their mind or mental illness, but I’ve seen supernatural occurrences where people do things that are not humanly possible in front of my face. I respect you if you’re an atheist, but you can’t tell me, Jaeson Ma, that God isn’t real or that angels and demons don’t exist, because I deal with them consistently.

2:05:12 I don’t want to get too deep into that. When I first came to London the other night, I was at dinner with two VC friends and two private equity friends they brought along. One of the VCs knew about my past as a deliverance minister and said, “You have to tell everyone your exorcism stories.” I didn’t think those two friends would vibe with it, but I told them one story that happened just last week. It wasn’t a crazy encounter, just something interesting. Psalm 37:4 says, delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart.

A few weeks ago I watched The Pope’s Exorcist with Russell Crowe at home. It was Hollywood entertainment, but certain things in it were very real, practices I’ve done and experienced. In the movie he has an exorcism kit with a badass metallic silver crucifix, a purple sash and other items. For the last two weeks I was thinking, I need to find a legit exorcism kit. Then I was in Lisbon last week for a friend’s wedding, and we had no idea it was World Youth Day and the Pope was going to be in Lisbon for five days, with two million Catholic youth from almost every country in the world. There were hundreds of thousands of kids all across Lisbon for Jesus, but no one was drunk; everyone was orderly, singing hymns. It felt like a little piece of heaven on Earth.

In downtown Lisbon my friend says, “Let’s go into this little bookstore.” I see all these Catholic relics, and I just had a sixth sense. I said to my friend, “I’ve got a feeling I’m going to get my exorcism crucifix here.” We walk through the bookstore, and to my right there’s a little locked, clear cabinet of relics, and I see a metallic silver cross with Christ hanging on it. I said, “This is mine. This is meant for me.” The Portuguese owner comes over, says everything is for sale, opens the cabinet, takes the crucifix and says, “It also comes with this,” a black leather case. He opens it: a full exorcist’s kit, with a holy communion cup, a holder for the bread, a bottle for holy oil, a rosary and the purple sash. The bag looks like a Saint Laurent bag. I bought it for 100 euros, and I thought, wow, God really loves me. My point is that nothing is by accident.

As for this pendant you asked about, it’s a famous sculpture of Saint Michael the Archangel, who was in charge of the entire heavenly military, stepping on the neck of Satan. I was always fascinated by it, because my whole life I’ve felt like I’ve been fighting darkness, demons and evil. I told myself that if I made it to 40, I would get this sculpture tattooed on my back. I had everything set up and was on my way to get the tattoo when I had lunch with a friend who brought along a jeweller friend from Beverly Hills. I told him about the tattoo, and he said, “We actually have this pendant in our store. I can make a personal one for you.” Right then I heard a voice saying, “Don’t get the tattoo, get the pendant.”

Only the wings are iced out, and on the back is Isaiah 54:17: “No weapon formed against you shall prosper, and every tongue which rises against you in judgment you shall condemn. This is the heritage of the servants of the Lord, and their righteousness is from me, says the Lord.” In other words, no weapon of evil formed against you will prosper. The battle doesn’t belong to me, and it doesn’t belong to Brian Rose; the battle belongs to God. It doesn’t matter if your battle is against YouTube, Twitter or the powers that be trying to stifle you and suppress your voice. If God is for you, no one can be against you, and you have to believe that. That’s what drives me to do what I do.

2:12:01 Brian Rose: It’s beautiful, man. I always ask at the end of these conversations if you have any advice for the young people listening. Since you’re East and West, what would you say to a 20-year-old who’s deep into the East and a 20-year-old who’s deep into the West? What do they need to be aware of over the next 10, 20, 30 years, especially when they’re told certain messages by the media?

Jaeson Ma: Don’t be quick to judge, but be quicker to listen. I’ll give you three Ls. Number one: listen. Before you say anything, hear the other side and understand where they’re coming from. Number two: learn. A true leader is a learner, a true leader is a reader, a true leader seeks to understand the people, what they need, what they’re crying out for, why they believe what they believe and where they’re hurting. And number three: love. It’s not about you. If you want to live a life of significance, live for a purpose bigger than yourself.

That’s what Jesus did. He didn’t come for himself, he came for us. He laid down his life so that we can have life and not death, and he has become the greatest leader in the history of humankind. The way you truly serve the world is by listening, learning and unconditionally loving. Laying down your life for others is the greatest act of sacrifice and ultimately the greatest act of love. Whether you’re Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, atheist, Jewish, Christian, Catholic, non-religious, woke, conservative, left or right, can we first just listen to each other and try to understand and learn by empathising, and from there start with loving instead of attacking? I think the world can be a better place.

Brian Rose: What a beautiful concept. I think we can do it. You’re in the media business, which starts with listening. We all need to listen and try to understand what’s going through everyone’s minds. That’s what I’ve been doing for 12 years: the power of a conversation. You think you know somebody until you walk a mile in their shoes. I’ll be the first to admit I’m in the media business and I have media biases about people, and I should know better. Joe Rogan had RFK Jr. on his show the other day and opened by saying, “I’ve been biased against you, I’d heard you were this crazy guy, which is why I haven’t had you on.” If people who are knee-deep in independent media are biased, imagine how all of us walk around with these knee-jerk judgments that separate and divide us.

Jaeson Ma: Allen Ginsberg said it best: whoever controls the media controls the minds and behaviour of the culture. That’s why I’m in the media business, and why to me it’s missional. I don’t want to control media; I want to help create new media, true media, a free media where anyone can speak and anyone can learn, rather than imposing my viewpoint. Then I think this world will have a lot more understanding rather than division. That’s what I hope to do with OP3N and with EST: media that’s neutral, that gives you a voice but also gives a voice to the person who disagrees with you. Everyone can have a voice, and that’s why it’s called OP3N.

Brian Rose: That’s the only way we’re going to solve all these potential problems coming down the pipe: allowing people to communicate with each other openly and honestly, in a non-controlled way. About a year ago one of my guests, Dr Joe Dispenza, came in here, and I went to his seven-day workshop in London and started doing walking meditations every morning, about 90 minutes. It reminds me a lot of what you were describing. Maybe it’s my own little spiritual practice, but ever since, I’ve been drawing amazing people and opportunities into my life, and I feel like that’s a reason you’re here and why we’re investors in OP3N now. So I want to shout out the higher power that brought us together, because this is a very special conversation.

Jaeson Ma: I changed my flight and my schedule because I knew I was supposed to be here. I believe God is using you, not just to interview people like me, but others who have been suppressed, marginalised and ridiculed unfairly and untruthfully. What you’re doing here is about truth, and that’s why you’ve had the persecution and attacks of the past decade-plus: the devil doesn’t like you either. What you’re doing is so important, not just for those who watch this episode but for all 800-plus interviews and the 800 more to come. This is just the beginning, and I believe this will be a turning point for London Real to reach not just tens of millions but hundreds of millions, billions of views once again. It will not be suppressed; it will become a platform for the voices that need to be heard. You’re a warrior. You don’t give up, because of those 90-minute walks and this higher power telling you to keep going, even though so many people think you should quit. You know the truth deep down, and you’re faithful to that voice. I’m happy and honoured to share a conversation with you.

Brian Rose: Thank you, man. I appreciate your perspective, and I’m super grateful that I get to do this, have incredible conversations and put them out to the world. What more could I ask for? It’s not a boring life, is it?

Jaeson Ma: Definitely not. It’s not every day I get to talk about demons and blockchain in the same conversation.

Brian Rose: I love it, and I really respect that you keep it real. It would be very easy to put a little polish on the product and not talk about the realness, but then you’d rob the world of a commodity that’s very rare these days, which is the truth. And I’ll say this to anybody out there: when you self-censor, you ruin the opportunity to find the people who are going to be your people for the rest of your life. Put out your vibe, find your tribe. When you’re honest and really you, you’ll find your soulmates. It’s op3n.world, that’s O-P, the number three, N, dot world. Big things coming. We’re really excited to be part of it. More power, God bless, looking forward to this amazing adventure together.

Jaeson Ma: God is good. Thank you, Brian.

Brian Rose: Thank you, brother. Appreciate you.