Ian Rogers tells me I need a crypto wallet
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From the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Channels with Peter Kafka. That is me. I'm also the chief correspondent at Business Insider. And today I'm talking to Ian Rogers, who is now the chief experience officer at Ledger, which may not make sense to some of you, but some of you may know who Ian Rogers is because Ian was a pioneer in digital music.

He started out helping the Beastie Boys get onto the web, ended up at important jobs at AOL and then Yahoo, and eventually co-founded Beats Music, which Apple. That is why I know Ian and I wanted to talk to him about some of those experiences and what he thinks about them now and if there are lessons to be learned from what now seem like arcane fights, fights like whether MP3 should have DRM. Trust me, this was a very big deal 20 years ago and I was curious whether it resonated with Ian today.

Ian's current job is helping to sell physical wallets for digital goods. And if that description confuses you, well, me too. And frankly, I remain confused and reasonably skeptical, pretty skeptical about crypto in general. So I wanted Ian to both explain what he's doing now, but also to make the case for why we should care and think about crypto in general in 2025.

So that's what we're doing here. I tried to keep the crypto conversation at the top of our chat and the digital music and culture stuff to the back half. But as you'll see, we ended up moving around a lot because that's kind of Ian's deal. My deal, too. I think you're going to like it. So now here's me and Ian Rogers.

Ian Rogers, you're a skateboarder from Indiana. You are also the chief experience officer of Ledger. You're going to explain what those two terms mean to me. I've known you and known about you for a long time back when you were, I guess I knew about you when you were at Yahoo Music. Yeah. Back in the day, you've got a long, illustrious career. I want to talk about that. We can start with Ledger, which is-

a crypto company. And you went there about what, five years ago? Four years ago, a little more than four. Okay. And at the time I thought, oh, Ian does a bunch of interesting stuff. It makes sense that he'd be taking a stab at crypto because lots of other folks really who were smart and curious about the internet, especially sort of when it first showed up, were equally interested in crypto a few years ago. I kind of assumed you would have moved on because I think a lot of other folks have moved on from crypto. Maybe they've come back.

But you tell me, what is Ledger? Why are you there? What is it? Well, I'll start with what is Ledger. So Ledger's a French company. It's been around for 10 years. And it really started, in my opinion, with the right idea. It's very first principles sort of company, which is what it is and why I went there and why I'm still there.

And it also is personal in that I moved to Paris almost 10 years ago to be the chief digital officer of LVMH. You were at Apple before that. We'll talk about that too. Correct. We can go backwards if you'd like. And two of the very first friends I made when I moved to Paris were Pascal Gaultier –

and Tony Fadell. And at the time Pascal was the first seed investor and board member at this small new French crypto company called Ledger. It's really a hardware company. And what they have done is they've built the first and only operating system and open development environment on top of smart card technology that's ever been built. So for me, it's not a crypto company, it's a security company. It's a hardware company.

And I think we're moving into a world where security is more and more important, more important than ever. You got to give me the one sentence description of what ledger is, because I'll answer it if you don't. So what ledger is, is the absolute best way to protect security.

Crypto and all secrets. It's a physical digital wallet that your crypto goes in. Correct. That protects your assets. Yeah. Right. So the way it actually works is it has the same technology that's in your credit card or your passport, a secure chip, and it uses that to protect your private key.

And in many things, whether it's your password or your crypto, the private key is everything. If someone has access to your private key, then they have access to your digital life. And this is why you periodically read stories about someone who had a gazillion Bitcoin stored on a USB drive and it fell somewhere and now it's in a

now it's in a dumpster somewhere and he's lost millions of dollars. It is actually incredible computer science, cryptography. And what's amazing about it is that you can protect basically anything digital with it, but...

If you lose access to it, then you lose it. Or if someone else gains access to it, then they gain it. And, you know, our phones are not designed to do this. Our computers are not designed to do this. Our phones are designed for performance and a plethora of applications, and they're not designed for security. So, you know, we live increasingly digital lives and, you know, digital value is a part, already a part of those digital lives, including identity, right?

Right. And you have to protect it. And this is the hardware that protects it. It's the companion to your phone that protects your digital value, whether that's your crypto, your passwords or your digital life. So on the one hand, I kind of get it because the last time I tried to sort of understand crypto was during the Web3 boom a couple of years ago and tried making a MetaMask account. And I think I actually wouldn't have been able to do that.

do it fully in New York, I think, at the time. There were restrictions around it. But I got to the point where they said, here are your 12 seed words. I'm going to get using the technology correctly. You need to commit these to memory and write them down and or bury them in your backyard or put them someplace that only you can have access. And I thought, one, I'll never do this. Two, I can't imagine a normal human

spending this time. Normal humans are the ones who use 1234 for their password, right? Or password for their password. So the idea that to get involved in crypto, you would have to have this new set of security that involves something physical that was only accessible to you. I thought this can't possibly be right.

So I kind of get that Ledger says, oh, we'll solve that for you with a physical thing. I'm holding it up. It's silly because we're in an audio podcast. No one can see it. It looks super cool. It's like a super small playing card with some thickness to it, with some groovy graphics on it. But what is the idea? Do I carry this around with me or I stick this in a vault? It depends on what it is you're protecting.

Right. So first of all, let's back up a little bit for your audience. I think your audience is probably, you know, very similar to you and I in terms of their time on Internet, maybe in a way. A bunch of old people listening to this podcast. Well, you know, I don't know. I'll talk to my kids and see, but I'm guessing it's people more in our... And so look, I've been working on the Internet since 1990. And I remember very well the days when you didn't say, go to my website or download my app. You said...

There's this thing called the internet. And if you get a computer and you get a modem and you get an ISP and you get this web browser, then you can download this web page with no background colors really slowly as long as your roommate doesn't pick up the phone. Right? Yep.

So that's how these technologies start. And this is, this is right. By the way, this is why when I would ask smart people about crypto, they tend often tend to be around our age and they go, this is like the early web. This is the early days. And we can have a whole separate discussion about whether this is the early web or not, but I get it. Yeah. And so, and I think so, you know, this is the technologies always go, you know, through these phases and you're right. So,

What I would say, though, is you have to think of it as the Internet was an Internet of information. Right. And what it fundamentally did that we're benefiting from right now by being able to talk into a microphone and have anybody listen to it asynchronously whenever they want to. What we're benefiting from right now is is the fact that information became unlocked. Right. It used to be hidden behind FM spectrum, et cetera. And now it's now it's like, you know, anyone can distribute anything anytime they want.

this is something different. It is an internet of value. So it's going to have its own kind of foibles, if you will, right? Its own hurdles to jump over. And one of them is like, man, if you have a lot of value and if it's as easy to lose that value as it is to like lose your car keys, it's a lot harder to lose, you know, a million dollars in gold bars, then, you know, you have a kind of a set of problems. So yes, what Ledger does is try to approach those problems in, you know, a very,

smart and user-friendly way. So our goal is to allow people to have and own digital private property and to be able to manage it really easily. So yeah, you can walk into Best Buy, you can buy a ledger,

You could buy your first Bitcoin. You can kind of back it up very easily and never have that like, you know, oh my God, my PC's in the landfill problem. We prevent that. We have a product called Ledger Recover, which is all about seed phrase backup and recover using your identity. As easy as, you know, verifying a bank account. It's that easy to recover your assets with Ledger. Yet, when you have a Ledger device, you are in possession of your device. There's no, of your value. There's no counterparty risk. There's no,

FTX gambled away my money. That can't happen with Ledger. What's the stock phrase? Your keys? Not your keys, not your coins. Thank you. So this was people who lost money in FTX, all the folks that come out and say, well, if you had worked with Ledger or the equivalent, you couldn't lose it because you own it. No one can take it from you. And this, by the way, Peter, is why I love this. Again, I am a skateboarder from Indiana, and I have learned everything.

so much about, you know, what is value, right? This all seems counterintuitive to the digital age where we move away from physical things and we don't have to worry about taking out a credit card, right? We've got all the information to store it somewhere else. All of this idea that you should have to worry about the physical security of your digital things seems counterintuitive to me.

I'm not sure. I think actually one of the, it's funny because I was looking back at some of my old music business presentations. I was looking at one from 2008, I think, where basically what I was telling the music business. Is this your DRM memo? Because this is on my list of things to ask you about. That one was earlier because that was Dave Goldberg and I from back in 2002. So I'm talking 2008 where what I was saying to the music business is you've lost scarcity. Right.

You know, you have to throw in the towel. And what was interesting looking back on it is I was saying that on stage a few months before Bitcoin was invented, before digital scarcity was invented. So now digital scarcity is just a tool. It will be used. Right. And the question you have is, you know, should Visa own the ledger?

Or should humanity own the ledger? That's a fundamental question. Yeah. I mean, it works pretty well with Visa owning the ledger, right? Or others centralized. For many people, it does. For many people, right? America is the most difficult place to explain Bitcoin, and Argentina is the easiest place to explain Bitcoin. Right. So crypto is easily accessible for even the dumbest person right now, that being me, right? I was able to buy Dogecoin online.

A couple minutes before Elon Musk went on SNL a couple years ago, and now it's still down 80%. I wanted to see how easy it was to do, and sure enough, it was very easy. You go to Robinhood, you go to Coinbase. It's on Robinhood. You go to Revolut. Easy. Maybe if I had an enormous amount of money there, I'd be worried about hedging it or concerned. You can buy Bitcoin with an ETF now. If I'm a normal person. Super easy interface. It can sit there in your account.

So I'm a normal dumb person who's interested in crypto, but also knows how to buy it from Robinhood. Explain why I need a ledger. Educated people become ledger customers. That's generally the path to that. What do these cost? Well, our least expensive one is $79. Our most expensive one is $400. So it's not, I can get into it without...

breaking the bank. Correct. Yeah. For 80 bucks, you can have top level security. And the reason is, it's because you care about security and you care about self-custody and you don't want what happened at FTX or even what happened with Silicon Valley Bank to happen to you. I mean, I certainly, the sort of FTX type disaster are the types of things that we have been predicting. The big by-bit hack, which 1.4 trillion to the

North Korean government. If that doesn't get you to care about our technology, I'm not sure what will. Well, it also, to me, that also seems like, I mean, it's a whole other crypto discussion, but like,

If this stuff can vanish that easily, if this stuff needs separate security, why are we dealing with it at all? Unless we are really committed either for criminal reasons or theological slash ideological reasons about not having the government be the ultimate sort of custodian of our money, which again I understand in different countries –

different things. But here, I mean, at least up until this year, we feel pretty good about it. There are things going on with the dollar right now that make the thesis, but I don't like that. The thesis of digital scarcity, um,

you know, quite, quite, quite relevant and worth reading about. I mean, I would, I would highly recommend reading broken money front to back. And then let's, let's have that kind of conversation again. I'm more worried about what happens to the rest of my life. If the dollar has those kinds of problems. Again, I think that, that look, I, I moved, I moved out of America 10 years ago and, you know, I'm very happy to be out of the bubble. And,

And I do, I definitely feel like I have a very different perspective at this point. How much of your time is spent talking to numbskulls like me who literally don't really understand the product or the concept or know just enough to be stupid about it? To be honest, very little. You know, I met,

Plenty of people, listen, here's what, I mean, back in 2002, I knew plenty of people who said, I'm never going to have an email address. That's not for me. Right. And I remember around that time, you know, a senior executive at AT&T telling me we'll never be able to do video on the internet. The internet was not designed for this. Why, why do we even need this? Remember the classic clip of Bill Gates on Letterman, uh,

You know, and Letterman saying, have you heard of radio?

And that's also one of the problems I have with crypto still is I'm like, I still don't have that aha, like, oh, this is – I worry that I am that AT&T executive in 2002 not getting it, right? That is part of the FOMO that makes me continually sort of look at crypto periodically and go, am I still missing something?

But I'm still missing something. I still don't get why I'd want it other than novelty. Okay, let's do this right now, Peter. You and I, we've known each other a long time. And the way is to come back at it from, again, very first principle. Think about just the primitives, right? Forget about, I know it's hard, right? But forget about crypto in the press. Mm-hmm.

I mean, honestly. Can't trust the press. I got it. No, but I mean, think about like the things that if we had, if you and I had been reading mainstream media in the nineties, what they were writing about the internet. I mean, I was written about in those times.

And it was so far from what we were seeing on the ground, like living in message boards, living in IRC. It's in the Napster book that I'm the person that called the RIAA and told them about Napster, right? Because they were living in the normie world and we were living in the digital native world. I'm with you so far. And so now there's never been a solution to this problem. Like how can we have digital scarcity? That alone has plagued.

plenty of use cases, right? To create a distributed ledger. Maybe it's an industry that wants to share data, but they don't want to trust each other. So they're going to do it, you know, on sort of a public or even public-private blockchain. Like the technology has use. Also, we're moving into a world of agentic AI.

unquestionably, right? And all we do is talk about how great that is and how NVIDIA props up the stock market. And so obviously the mainstream media buys this narrative, right? Well, guess what? You don't get a world of digital abundance without a construct for digital scarcity. How would a listener know 10 years from now that these are our voices coming out of this microphone? This really is all about proof. How can you prove that

That this is me, that this is you, that this edit was done by Vox. How can you prove these things? How will you have digital proof in a world of digital abundance? Think about AI agents, right? AI agents, I'm going to ask an AI agent to book a ticket to Miami for me.

Okay, it's going to scrape the web. It's going to have my credit card and my Delta login and everything else. No, as users, we should have ownership of our data and ownership of our preferences. Our preferences locked behind a login across thousands of sites of the internet is actually a really, it's an outdated design. The original internet was login with username and password.

After that, we got log in with Facebook, log in with Google, log in with Apple, which is really just asking who owns you. Right. And if you want to feel how owned you are, move from Apple to Android. Yeah. Right. I mean, it's have all your Apple devices break at the same time or have your Apple account stolen. Yeah. Right. And I've talked to people who have lost their iCloud account and they'll never get those photos back. Right.

That is ownership by oligopoly, right? There is, and it exists. If you look up a talk that our CTO gave at a conference last year, we have a product. It's a little technical, but again, you're asking, is there a use? It's called Ledger Keyring Protocol. We have an application just like everyone else, right? We've got a desktop application and a mobile application. We don't have a login.

Yet, we can store all of your preferences securely because you log in with your ledger. And when you log in with your ledger, all of your preferences are downloaded from anywhere, by the way, because they're stored encrypted in a way that only you with your key could decrypt them. And now you can have your preferences, own your preferences, and federate your preferences wherever you are. All this seems like work for me.

And we should be moving towards a world where I do less work and less thinking. It's one. What are you talking about? Like there's only two options right now. People either have terrible password hygiene, which is the majority of people, or they log into something like one password 50 times a day. Yeah.

That sucks too. This is the internet that we live in? No, all of that sucks. I'm giving you less work. I'm saying you have one device. By the way, there's two devices on the table in front of us, this one, another one, and they're identical. They'll both serve the same purpose. I could have one at home and one at work because they both have the same private key. To come back to your question, do you carry it around? Do I carry around a million dollars in Bitcoin? No, I do not. I just found my house keys that I had lost six months ago. It turns out they were still in my backpack.

But in the meantime, I had to replace everything. So you have this sort of magic safe that you can back up infinitely. You can put value on it, throw it in a fire, walk across a border, put 24 words in, have the value back. It can have your passwords. And you can have one device that controls not only all your logins, but actually it gives you ownership to all of your passwords. How many ledgers are in use today?

We have 7 million that we've sold, and close to all of them we see on an annual basis. What is your sense of the primary use case? Is it someone storing their Bitcoin? The primary use is protecting cryptocurrency. But increasingly, we've just last year launched our security key application, which does pass keys.

And as you know, PassKeys is something that's coming more and more. You've got Google promoting it. Microsoft just last week had a big announcement that they're trying to move everyone to PassKeys. You've got companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft all trying to go passwordless.

which means they're trying to move you to passkeys. And then the question is just, where are you storing those passkeys? You know, you're storing them in your iCloud account. Are you storing them in your Google account? Are you storing them in your 1Password account? And we're giving you a better option, which is storing them in secure hardware that you have possession and infinite backups of. We'll be right back with Ian Rogers, but first, a word from a sponsor.

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non-speculative crypto coins... Stable coins. ...is going to be? What do you think a normal person, is it where they're either going to knowingly encounter blockchain slash crypto or it just will be in the background and they won't even know it? Yeah, I think stable coins is that. It'll be, you know, whether it's knowingly or unknowingly, it is that application, you know, for a normal person. We're making... They'll be investing in stable coins. No, no, they'll be using stable coins to make a payment, to make, you know, to make a...

I mean, you may be using it and not knowing it, to your point. And you think they'll be using it in some sort of specialized application? Or will it be something I can execute from my iPhone or the equivalent of a Visa card? Yeah, not necessarily. I mean, you might be using PayPal, and in the background, it's stablecoins. It might be doing it today in that Stripe and PayPal both support paying merchants in stablecoin.

So it might be the case that you are paying a merchant online right now. Maybe you're ordering something from another country or something. And that merchant is already preferring to be paid in stablecoins. We already live in a world where if you hold pesos, you'd rather hold dollars, right? And a lot of that dollar holding is going on in stablecoins already.

If you hold dollars, you'd rather hold Bitcoin. And that is, there you go, there's the chain. And this is the point that I was going to make. Bitcoin is a specific application of a blockchain. And it's actually a really incredible one that already has a lot of, it's a very interesting thing to exist on planet Earth from so many angles. Having permissionless, uninflatable money

has a purpose. We have that already. It's called gold. And now there's a digital version of that. And that is interesting, but it's not the only thing. So I think that's why I always look at it separately. You've got this concept or construct of digital scarcity and you say, how will people use it? I mean, it was just announced yesterday that Tether, who's the biggest stablecoin company in the world, is creating an AI company. And what the AI company

company, its differentiator is that you've got this way to pay from agent to agent, right? So agents can now transfer value between one another. Having kind of digital money that doesn't require credit card rails is alone interesting. And then there are applications on top of it, like stablecoin, like Bitcoin, and like many others. Let me give you one more thing, again, in the Ian convincing Peter line of things. Yeah.

I was talking with someone, maybe I shouldn't say who it was, but it's a venture capitalist. And they said that one of the most interesting things they're noticing is that many of their not crypto companies are starting to adopt crypto on the back end. And they were describing a company that does something in the fintech space. It's around credit. And they are ripping out all of what they were really doing was trying to put a square peg in a round hole. They were trying to build this kind of credit product.

with the credit card system, which was definitely not designed for what it is they're doing. And now that we have, you know, a more friendly environment in the U.S. from a regulatory standpoint, they were doing just what they would do as computer scientists and using the better tool for the job and using that crypto backend to build this completely not crypto product. I did want to ask about that regulatory environment. You're in Paris, you're watching the bubble from across the ocean.

Donald Trump hated Bitcoin and then last year he got religion and a lot of people who are backing crypto broadly poured a lot of money into his campaign and they've now been rewarded with sort of a lot of keys to regulatory apparatus. Seems like you think that's a good thing. Well, I think holding back technology is a bad thing. And when I look at what the Clinton administration did for the internet, I'm very thankful. I looked it up actually because I was like,

I remember it being very friendly, was it? And there were many specific things that the Clinton administration did to make sure that the U.S. was a leader in the Internet. And it obviously worked. The next Google or Facebook will not come out of Europe as a result. Do you like a world where the government does have some sort of regulation around crypto, etc.? Or do you think this entire thing, the beauty of it, is that it should exist forever?

without being touched by governments. I like a world where consumers are protected from bad people. No question. That is not what the previous administration was doing. What the previous administration was doing was just stopping progress and they were not regulating. It wasn't

They were saying existing rules apply, come in and register. And then there was no way to actually do that. And what you had was you had very good actors, people that, you know, if you sat down with over dinner, you would say, oh yeah, that person is trying to do the right thing. And whether that's Coinbase or Uniswap is a great example, one based right here in New York.

They were doing nothing to stop the FTXs or the frauds or those. And then they were spending their time litigating people who were trying to do the right thing. I don't know what American thinks that makes sense. I'm not going to engage in that debate. I was just curious about your take and whether – because one of the things about crypto that appealed to a lot of people and probably still does was the idea that this is –

you know, it exists beyond borders, right? It's sort of what, it's the idea that a lot of us were excited about with the early internet, right? I think that's right, yeah. And we're finding that actually that turns out to not be true and the internet's kind of breaking and vulcanizing in lots of ways. Is crypto immune to that? I don't think anything is immune to that. I mean, for me personally, you know, when I first looked at Bitcoin in the very early days, just as a geek, my first take on this was,

ah, this will go the way of Napster and Nutella, right? Because it does threaten some of the existing banking system. And we saw what happened. When I was at Nullsoft, we made Nutella and released Nutella, which was the first peer-to-peer file sharing system. Nullsoft was a company that made Winamp. And

You know, it's not the case. You can't, you know, Nutella is just a bunch of code. You can't get rid of Nutella. It's, you know, it's just code, open source software. But you could stop BearShare, LimeWire, Kazaa, all of the companies that tried to build on top of the Nutella protocol. Yes, and you could sue their investors. Right.

Yeah. And really, you know, and we were, we, you and I know the story, but YouTube is really the only company that ever managed to go from illegal to legal. Yeah. Right. I can't think of another one. Maybe we put SoundCloud there, but you know, that's almost, that's its own cautionary tale in terms of dealing with, with rights holders and record labels. I think that the trick is that how do you do the YouTube thing? That would be the, that'd be the question that I would ask. You know, when YouTube started, it was unquestionably copyright infringement, unquestionably. Today,

I mean, it is, it's almost like I could get rid of every media service except for that one, right? Said the guy who made Apple Music. But you know what I mean? Because out

Audible Music, if I want that Elvis Costello appearance from 1978 on Rock Palast, I can't find it. I mean, what they did in a lot of ways was work with the system, right? They literally gave equity to the music labels. They spent a lot of time litigating and then doing deals with big media companies, spent a lot of time figuring out things like copyright ID issues.

And meanwhile, they kept growing with technology. It's a very hard trick to pull off. Well, I mean, by the way, the fix is in. I don't know if you noticed, but BlackRock jumped into this space more than a year ago, right? So talk about working with the system. BlackRock is all about Bitcoin. They're all about real world assets. They're all about having things work better on chain. Let me give you another example. I was chief digital officer at LVMH for five years.

If you go back to the end of 2021, we were talking about digital sneakers, right? We remember, you know, Artifact sold to Nike, et cetera. And it's also become its own story.

What are companies like LVMH talking about today? FX, right? Right now, think about LVMH, global company. They take money in every currency every day and somehow it's all going to make its way back to euros, right? That whole system, the whole FX system, it runs at the speed and the cost of banking rails. It's been optimized for the speed and the cost of banking rails. They're probably, and by the way, this is never my job there, so I'm using it as an analogy, not really with...

Any firsthand experience on how their FX system works, but you just puzzle it out. Okay, you now have a different tool. You have the speed and the cost of stable coins, low cost crypto rails. That entire FX system will be reworked

to adapt to the speed and the cost of that. Just like so many other things have adapted to the speed and the cost of technology. When I was in college studying computer science, I still had to go in and fill out my course form on a slip in person, right? And if you'd have told me that someday I would go to the, the way I would book appointment at the DMV would be online, I'd have been like, come on, man, that'll never happen.

Right? But that's where we are. And I would say BlackRock being in the game and talking about real world assets on chain should be your, like, your leading indicator that the fix is in. So we've been toggling back and forth between your old history. And I think it's worthwhile to do because... I hope people are enjoying this. I hope they will. We'll find out. Because again, I think of the enthusiasm you and other people I know have for crypto today and it matches sort of early internet stuff where that's the parallel. And you are someone who,

who's got a really interesting history. So I want to talk about some of it. If you want the full Ian Rogers deep dive, Rick Rubin did a great interview with you a couple years ago. It was a real honor for me. Check that one out. And by the way, I want to say, I don't feel particularly enthusiastic about crypto in quotes. You're spending four years on a crypto company, dude. Well, but to me, what we're doing is we are just continuing with the same timeline that for me, I started in...

before 1990, right? Because I was like on BBSs in the 80s. You know, technology moves forward. When we have new tools, they get used. So the question is, you know, how are we going to use them?

And part of the reason I joined Ledger, and I never finished that story. I feel like there are 10 stories we started and didn't finish. That's me. You know, in the summer of 2020, during COVID, Tony Fadell, who's the inventor of the iPod, co-inventor of the iPhone, founder of Nest. Has been pod on this very podcast. His family and my family are pod families. And we spent a lot of time talking about exactly this. We said the technology's here.

Look what's going on in the world. There's a global pandemic. You have two trillion of stimulus in the U.S. You have a trillion of stimulus in Europe. There are these new tools and these tools will get used. So that's outside of me. Whether or not I do this, we wake up 10 years from now and the back office of every company is using crypto rails. If I do nothing, if I walk out the door tomorrow...

So what I'm doing is with my friends, Tony and Pascal, trying to make great consumer products so that consumers have more control in this space and they have more options than I'm going to download an app from the app store and do whatever the company tells me to do. To me, that's exactly the same thing that I was doing in 1998 building Winamp. What's the closest analogy to Ledger? Again, they look great. Nothing looked great in early 90s internet. To...

to internet technology then? Is it a modem? Is it an AOL login screen that makes it easier to get to? So the realization I had about Ledger as a company and the thing that got me personally interested. So I met Pascal in 2015. 2017, in the world of crypto, you had this whole ICO boom. Everybody was creating their own token. Kodak. There was Kodak token. Really, that's a real thing. And

I was like, what's going on? And then when it was all over and there was a boom and a bust and the dust settled, I called my friend Pascal and I said, I finally understand your company. And I think you're going to do amazingly well. And the reason is because you remind me of Cisco in 1999.

In 1999, do you remember that great Ken Alouette book, World War 3.0? I know the title. Oh, it was an amazing book. And it told the history of the early internet through the eyes of three companies, AOL, Netscape, and Microsoft. And that was bananas when you think about it because I remember when Netscape was launched and it was like, they were unassailable. No one's ever going to stop Netscape. And then we watched Internet Explorer do it. And that was a real lesson for me as a young person.

And I realized that, you know, was it going to be Excite, Lycos or Yahoo, you know, all of that. And Cisco was just sitting on the side going, we're good. We have one question. Will there be more internet tomorrow or less internet tomorrow? I think more. Okay, we're good. In 2018, I called Pascal and I said, oh, there were a thousand tokens yesterday. They all died.

I was like, is it Bitcoin? Is it Ethereum? Is it something else? I have no idea. And then I realized, oh, Ledger doesn't care. Ledger has one question. Will there be more digital ownership tomorrow or less digital ownership tomorrow? In humanity, there will be more digital ownership tomorrow than there was yesterday. You're riding that wave. That's it. That's it. I'm not going to do your entire life history. No.

But there are a couple inflection points I wanted to ask about. So you mentioned a bunch of times you grew up in Indiana, didn't have a lot of access to the internet, got access to very early internet, and then at some point became the Beastie Boys webmaster? Is that correct? That is correct. How did the Beastie Boys find you? I built their website as a fan. What year is this? 1993.

So the internet really doesn't exist. No, I built the second ever music related website for the Indiana university music library. And there was a great Dean of that library named David Fenske who, um,

Paid me as a work study student $6.50 an hour to build what was really the first Spotify because they wanted to take all the reserve listening materials from behind the desk and put them at workstations throughout the library, which is in the early 90s was a crazy idea. And Dr. Fenske, I mean, it changed my life, no question. And he, I think he really enjoys the fact that there's a straight line between his idea in the early 90s and Apple Music.

And so you build and are running a Beastie Boys fan site. Correct. I maintained the Beastie Boys FAQ on Usenet, which- Chat rooms. Yeah. And then this thing called the World Wide Web came along, and I was like, well, if I just put all this information here, I won't have to post it to Usenet every two weeks. I can just post a link. Did you imagine at all there was a career path for you in the internet or technology or pop culture? Not at all. I was studying computer science in the early 90s. I thought maybe I was going to be programming ATM machines.

I had no idea. The Beastie Boys ring you up. Someone on their behalf rings you up, I guess their manager, and says, come build websites for us or come meet us or show us what the internet is. I thought for sure that I was, when I got the call from them, it was, you know what happened? They were on Letterman and I was living in Indiana and I had the QuickTime movie of their Letterman appearance on.

on the internet before it aired on the West Coast. Then I get a call from the management company. I was like, oh, here it comes. Copyright infringement. I knew enough to know. But John Silva, who's still a good friend, literally 30 years later, I met them summer of 94, Lollapalooza. I met Silva in 93.

He was like, no, I want you to do this for all of my bands. You know, he had managed Nirvana. They were not a thing at that moment, but he managed the Breeders and, you know, a bunch of other, you know, Sonic Youth bands.

a bunch of other great bands. And then I hadn't met the Beastie Boys until Lollapalooza of summer of 94. And then once I met them, they all had just amazing ideas. They were these guys that they got it immediately. I always say that if you ever made a fanzine with a Sharpie and a photocopier, then the moment you saw the internet, you got it.

Beastie Boys were those guys. And they had things that weren't, you know, they like Adam Yauk had a not-for-profit called Milarepa. Mike D had Grand Royal and Grand Royal Records, Grand Royal Magazine. And for them, they were smart enough to know that

If they have to rely on MTV and radio to get their message to people, that would dry up. That well would dry up for them at some point. And also that recorded music was one thing they were going to do and they were going to do other stuff that touched various parts of culture and experimented with a lot of different things. And to me, the Beastie Boys way of looking at the world, which I try to take on, which is abuse the medium.

If you think about it, whether it was a record or a music video or a magazine or merchandise or an arena, or more recently a book, and then a book tour that turned into a movie produced by Spike Jonze. It's like whatever arena you're in, do something creative that it wasn't made for.

And I was just so lucky to grow up around that. And you work with them. You end up doing other digital music stuff. You're mentioning AOL and Nullsoft. You get to Yahoo Music when? December 2003. And it's hard to explain to someone now that if you were interested in digital music and you wanted to do it legally...

that Yahoo Music was kind of it or the biggest game in town? How did that happen? - Man, it's so interesting. First of all, Dave Goldberg, shout out Dave Goldberg. If you think about it, Yahoo Music had number one music video service before YouTube, number one online radio service before Napster,

It was the number one music service or music website on the planet. You're talking about these days, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005. And is this just solely because Yahoo was so freaking big then and that if you had Yahoo Music, that would be big? Was it that simple or was there something special going on? They had a couple things. Like on the music video side, they had licensed all the music videos from all the labels and no one else had. So if you wanted to watch music videos online. If you wanted MTV online, that's what you did. And if you wanted it on demand, which was a hard thing to get at the time.

And also remember what was going on at those times. People were complaining that MTV didn't play music videos anymore, right? So there you go. There they were. Also, they had LaunchCast, which the recommendations are almost laughable by ChatGPT standards. But for the moment, that was really pretty cutting-edge collaborative filtering. And you could tune your radio station to be exactly your tastes, right?

And we had people that were, you know, going from like five stars to three stars on songs and creating kind of exactly the listening experience that they wanted to. That was really cutting edge for those days. We'll be right back with Ian Rogers. But first, a word from a sponsor.

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At the time, if you were interested in digital music, and I was writing about it then, the big controversy there was DRM, digital rights management, because the record labels were grudgingly selling music online. They were selling them with protective wrappers, so I couldn't, if I bought a song, I couldn't give it to you, right? Made total sense from the music

company's perspective, right? If I sell you a CD, that's the CD. You can't give it. If you give it to someone else, you don't have it anymore. But there was this big push to say, no, no, we shouldn't have DRM. It's slowing us down. You did a bunch of, I think, manifestos about this. I think Dave and I were... I think I can safely say that Dave and I were instrumental in getting it to be removed. And without EMI being the smallest label, we probably wouldn't

wouldn't have got it done. There's a couple, you know, there's always human stories in these stories, right? So what I'm trying to get at is this seemed like a huge, enormous inflection point for the music industry. People were really passionate about, you know, should we have it? Shouldn't we have it?

Cut to now, and really not that long ago, right? Even just explaining this debate seems like ancient history. Who cares about DRM? No one owns music, right? I think it's a really interesting story, though. But that's what I'm getting at. Is there a lesson that that fight taught you, or is there some parallel to that discussion, which was a nerdy technical fight that...

was really important to a fairly small number of people, but seemed life or death. Are there parallels to that today that you think about? Definitely. I think that the lessons, because there are multiple lessons to take from this, right? And the lesson is that, you know, no technology is future-proof. And that's the first one, because they made this standard, compact disks. And when they did, they thought it's...

crazy that anyone could ever have a copy of this data because it was so much data, you know, that, that, that it could only fit on. And by the way, this is, we love this because we're going to resell all the music everyone already bought on this new format. So they're, they're chomping at the bit to get this new format out. Right. And it did drive unprecedented revenue for the music business. If you look at the history of the music business, the nineties are,

like a huge bubble. Because, and I think that, you know, I know my friend Al Teller from the music business would say, it wasn't Napster that killed the music business. The day that the biggest resellers or the biggest, you know, retailers of music were Best Buy and Walmart was,

they had already lost control, right? Because record labels were selling a CD to Best Buy at $7.49 and Best Buy was selling it at $6.99. Because they wanted you to come in and then buy a fridge. Exactly. That's exactly right. And so that was where the music business was. So when people want to go back to the old days of the music business, I'm like, you mean at its peak with Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys? You think that was like the best? Or where you paid $10 or $15 or $20 for an album with one song that you wanted.

Exactly. You want one song and we're going to force you to pay $17,900 for it. I have the same argument about the cable bundle. There you go. And so I think that's one lesson. Like you deny consumers what they want at your own peril.

Look, in 1999, I was running winamp.com, which was the digital, you know, it was, I mean, we were four people with 30 million people, but again, 30 million people in 1999 was a lot of users, especially for a very small team. So I went to the record labels and said, hey, people really want these MP3 things. Why don't we sell them? You know, I was naive. I'm like 26, 27 years old. And they were like,

First of all, what's an MP3? Second of all, absolutely fuck no. That'll never, ever, ever happen. We're going to sell compact discs forever. That was literally what they thought. So now it took Steve Jobs to get him off that dime. Why did they do that? Because he had 2% market share. And also because Napster had come and beaten up their business. But also they only took the risk on Steve because...

Steve had a reality distortion field and he could convince anyone of anything. And in the back room, they could go say, look, he's only 2% of the market. Remember when Steve Jobs launched iTunes for Windows, the screen behind him said, hell froze over. That's what it said. Because no one ever imagined that he would attack Windows, but he did. And he did it very successfully. So they got to that point. But then what happened was,

Apple was so successful with iTunes and they really had a monopoly. And the DRM that the music industry fought so hard for became lock-in for Apple. And it meant that people like us at Yahoo couldn't compete. And that was how Dave Goldberg and I, because now you can see how the story unfolds, right? Because as you said, Yahoo Music was actually a very popular online music service that wasn't Apple.

Right. And we said, guys, we can't compete here with this DRM because people only have iPods. We're dealing in this like non-iPod world. We are partners. We're Creative Labs and iRiver. These locks you're putting on your music are preventing us from doing business, preventing you from making money. That's exactly right. And so that's how we managed to get it to go away. And you ended up with, look, in 2002, I had this, and Dave too, we had this very unpopular opinion that the future was subscription. Right.

And it would be probably around $10 a month and at 70 million subscribers, the business would grow again. And we were pariahs. People literally hated us. They shouted us about this. That's why 2005, we launched the first $5 a month, all you can eat music subscription service, Yahoo Music Unlimited. But Yahoo Music Unlimited only worked either on your Windows computer or on your non-iPod. And it was a very poor user experience on your non-iPod. Like you could go on vacation and your music would stop playing. Yeah, your music would stop playing because you didn't like...

you know re-register your licenses you know and so that's what that's what we were up against

So did you go from Yahoo Music to Beats? I went from Yahoo Music to a company called Topspin Media with the founder of Digidesign, Peter Gocher. So at some point you end up at Beats, which was, were you considered a co-founder of Beats? I was considered a co-founder of Beats Music. So we spun a software company out of Beats Electronics and created Beats Music. It was also brought the team from Mog, which is a great music subscription service started by Dave Hyman.

that Beats had bought slightly before I joined. So there were a bunch of, I guess that would be considered Spotify competitors. They probably predated Spotify. None of them had much traction. Spotify starts to get some traction. You guys launch Beats around the same time that Spotify is breaking through the U.S., I think? No, much later because, well, breaking the U.S. maybe. Spotify was started around 2009, I believe, and we launched Beats Music January of 2014. Wow.

So Spotify had come to the U.S., starting to get some traction. You've spun up this competitive music subscription service. And the big distinction, the big marketing distinction at the time was Beats has music playlists created by human beings, by DJs who are going to help you pick your music. And they're going to be awesome. There's going to be curation. And Spotify has algorithms. And again, at the time...

I was maybe less convinced this was a distinction, but you guys were leaning hard into it. There's a big debate, you know, where should your stuff come from? Should a human do it? Should an algorithm do it? Again, it seems like now we've kind of, we're well past that debate. Everyone just sort of assumes an algorithm is picking stuff for them. They may not even like it. Depending on who they are, they might actively fight against it. Most people just sort of accept that computers, software are spitting out lists of things that they should consume and they kind of have to do it that way.

way. I'm not so sure. I mean, none of that, because look, you know what makes the greatest best playlist today is ChatGPT. Just talk, mumble into ChatGPT where you are, what you're doing, who you're with. Yeah, and Spotify's got a good one built in if you know how to get to it. Okay, so but look how we got there. There was 20 years of kind of all of this music recommendation stuff before we started doing it at Beats.

There's a really interesting story here that I think very few people appreciate. And that is, I'm going to make the story short, but Trent Reznor was our creative director and he had very high standards. We had a team working on music recommendations and he was like, these guys aren't going to crack it. So we actually moved on from that team

And Trent says, you know, I met a guy in New York. I think you should go meet him. Okay. Trent met a guy. I got to go to New York because Trent met a guy. Okay. I come here to New York and I meet a guy named Adam Bly and he had a company called Seed Interactive and Trent was right. The guy's brilliant. He'd been doing data science work for the UN, for Audi, et cetera. And we talked about, you know, this music recommendation problem and he nailed it. You know, what he said was, look, I see what you guys have been doing. There's kind of two camps.

There's the technologist camp that says humans don't scale. And then there's a human curator camp that says a computer could never do what I do because I have taste.

And these two shall never meet, right? What he did, what Adam and his team at Seed did is they built an amazing system where those editors that we brought in, Scott Plagenhoff, who was the editor-in-chief at Pitchfork, Carl Cherry originally was with Apple. We had so many great music people. There are so many great, but we had so many truly top-notch music curators at Beats Music. And what the Seed Interactive guys did is they gave them tools

to curate because nobody, there's a hundred million songs on Spotify and Apple Music and nobody wants a hundred million songs. They want the one song they want to hear right now. And the reality is the vast majority of those songs, nobody likes.

They're, they're, you know, they're just, they don't have an audience. So if a curator goes through and takes the first pass and organizes things, and now you have only great music to recommend your odds go way, way, way up. Now, what's interesting is when Apple bought beats, I said to Apple, you

He says, we work with this amazing company on the data science part. They're called Seed Interactive. You should probably take them too. And Apple said, look, we don't need that. We just bought you for $3 billion that we're good. Yeah, exactly. And we have more data than God and we don't need that, right? So Spotify bought Seed Interactive.

So if you notice, there's a correlation between Spotify getting good recommendations and Apple buying Beats. Timing-wise, as a listener, you will notice the correlation. And so there was... Look, Spotify never talked about curation once before we forced them to. Spotify had no recommendations until they took the team that built our recommendations at Beats. I believe this to be true. Prove me wrong. I guess my point, though, is it seems like for...

A lot of people are, you know, everyone is interested in a specific thing, right? But for everything else, they're not that interested and they're happy to let radio pick their songs or let TikTok show them a bunch of stuff. Listen, the number one channel on Yahoo Music back in the day was 80s. Mm-hmm. Right? I mean. Just play me some stuff. Play me some stuff that I like that I've heard before. If I don't like it, I'll turn it off so you want to not offend me and that's why a lot of music.

A lot of music programming sucks. It's meant to not offend you, not to turn it off. But do you think there's a world where had you stayed at Beats, had Beats gotten bigger, maybe it doesn't become Apple? Who knows? There's some alternate world where people...

spend more time asking human beings to pick out music or whatever for them? Well, I don't think so necessarily. I think that, you know, I do think, you know, some of the things that I think about are, look, you're always going to have multiple types of listeners. It's always been the case, right? Even in the days when

you know compact discs were the main format the number the best-selling music were the ones that you would go to your friend's house and they have five CDs you know one of them was Bob Marley legend one of them was Kenny G one of them was maybe Willie Nelson Stardust maybe they had Back in Black or Metallica one you know the black collection you know like that's it that's their whole collection that's why those albums sit at the top of the best-selling album of all time list because most people are not active consumers and

At the same time, Mojo Magazine is still going strong and you can subscribe to it and get a compact disc compilation every single month. And that's for nerds. So you're always going to have this whole spectrum. I do think that music services could be a lot better. And I think the main thing that is missing is context. It's the same talk I gave in 2008. The internet is an incredible place to get context and

your music service is still a spreadsheet that plays music, right? And I mean, again, like ChatGPT is such an incredible music listening companion. It'll A, recommend just incredible records to you if you ask it the right questions. I mean, I've discovered music. I can't believe that I've discovered with AI over the past six months.

And then if you go, tell me the story of this album, you know, it will do it. The fact is most people don't seek it out in that way, you know, to your point. But I also think that we are for sure, you know, the next phase will be one where, you know, the music is really just chosen for you. It knows, it knows you, you know, already like the, the, the, the Ian Rogers station on Apple music, pretty damn good. Every time I'm playing it, I'm like, this guy has great taste. Beats got sold what, 2015? Yep. And how long were you there? Uh,

- Actually, no, we got sold 2014 and I left 2015. - So you were there for a year. As we've been establishing, you were kind of a counterculture, screw the man guy for a long time. You ended up getting acquired by Apple.

Was that an exciting prospect for you? Were you worried about what it'd be like to be part of the board? No, it was exciting. I loved it. I loved working with Jimmy. And then we immediately started working with Zane Lowe on Beats 1, which is what it was called then, the radio station that we started. That was one of the most fun things I've ever done in my career, building that radio station with Zane. I saw you once during that time. You'd come through to show off a new build of the service. Maybe it was just

Or maybe I was putting things together afterwards that weren't there. But when you left to go to LVMH, I'm like, it makes sense because Ian looked profoundly unhappy when he was here demoing music for me. No, because when we were launching Apple Music, A, I was really proud. Yeah. It was my life's work. And it was on every iPhone. And again, coming back to...

the amount of times that whether it was that teacher in high school told me i would never amount to anything or the the music business people in 1999 who told me we're going to sell compact discs forever get out of my office or you know what i mean so seeing it on every iphone was you know truly my life's work i really did i said this at the time and i i still see it now it felt like the finish line for me it really felt like okay we did this i would have happily stayed at apple you know i i

an earn out it was a great job it's a great place to be it's an amazing team um i just had something really interesting fall into my lap when lvmh called and said do you want to come move to paris and uh and check out this new thing i wasn't sure if anybody would ever pay me to do anything other than digital music you know what i mean so and also for me lvmh was this opportunity to say

What I'd really become was a student of how technology changes culture. And I had it nailed in music, at least as far as I felt like I understood the physics, put it that way. But I was like, does any of this apply elsewhere? And LVMH was a chance to try that out. We were talking before about your daughter. She's in college. My kids are teenagers.

Do you think about the future career paths for them in a world where a lot of jobs are going to be replaced by, especially a lot of entry-level jobs, I think, jobs that you normally might get out of college, that's going to be a chat GPT prompt or the equivalent. Do you think about...

sort of how they can make their way in a world where technology is going to strip out a lot of stuff for them and presumably open up other opportunities, but it's hard to figure out what those are. I do think about it a lot, and I'm worried about it. I'm worried about the asymmetry, in fact. I think, you know, one of the real... Again, it's about, you know, do you kind of bet on technology or not? But people that think ChatGPT is cheating have never used ChatGPT as a study guide.

Right. And like if you've probably done both. I'm not so sure. I mean, what I mean is, no, I see like I see that kids are taught that they're not allowed to use that tool because it's cheating. That is a huge disservice because it will be the way that they that they do their jobs. It will be the tool with which, you know, that provides them leverage in their jobs. And there will be an asymmetry between people who know how to use the tool and people who don't.

We had that with the internet, you know, and there were huge opportunities to people who invested early in that. Or even just could see it, right? Even if they moved to San Francisco and they got a job at a startup that blew up in the dot-com bubble, they probably then...

took that learning and went and did something else. So I think that, I think there's something, you know, very similar here. And I think, you know, related to, you know, the world of digital assets, you know, similarly, like I'm on the board at Dr. Martin's and a few years ago, I sat in a board meeting and I said, look, it's- That's Doc Martin's the-

The shoe people? The shoe company, yeah, the boot brand. And I said in the board meeting, look, it's 1998, and I'm that guy in here telling you the internet is going to be a big deal. And yes, there will be a bubble. And yes, the bubble will burst. And yes, there will be a trough of disillusionment. But there will be 30 years of sustained growth as well as there is with any technological innovation. And I think, I mean... But what does Doc Martens, who sells iconic boots...

supposed to do about the fact that AI is coming, that crypto is... Well, I mean, there are two things here, right? Two sides of the same coin, AI and kind of digital assets or digital scarcity. I think on the AI side, you know, I think if you look at what Stripe and, or wait, no, I'm sorry, it was Shopify and then more recently Duolingo has said about kind of their HR strategy relative to AI. Mm-hmm.

Being aggressive like that is incredibly smart. What can we do without hiring more people by bringing these tools in? And when we do hire people, we expect them to understand how to use this tech in the same way that we would have expected someone to know how to use a browser or Excel at certain points. That's exactly right. You're not going to hire someone on the finance team that doesn't know how to use Excel. There are many roles for which...

If you don't know how to use AI to get leverage out of your role, then you're not at the top of your class. And then I think for things like digital assets, I mean, look, I think the way this type of thing starts is, thank you for buying a pair of Doc Martens 1460. Would you like your free digital collectible?

Now you have a privacy-friendly, not email address, not spammy way of identifying fans of your brand. And you can do many different things with that and from that point. And then I think there will be many things in the back office where you're going to be using international –

um, you know, kind of stable coin crypto rails to do your business. Yeah. I thought you were going to tell me that the Doc Martens is uniquely, uh, uh, insulated from the digital world because it's shoes. You got to put them on your feet. You can't do anything else, but do that. You have to manage a global business. You have to take money in every currency every single day. Um,

You have to build some kind of a connection to your most passionate consumers. And that's the same for every brand. I love this framing of it. Every brand is really in the business of generating awareness.

And then, you know, transacting or, you know, kind of generating value, right? So you generate awareness and then from that awareness, you generate value. So in that way, Drake, Louis Vuitton, Damien Hirst and Beeple are all in the same business, right? So now it's just a question of how actually do you capture value on the back of that attention? And in that way, you know, Drake is actually the least efficient at it and Beeple is the most efficient at it.

If you put number of customers over revenue,

The efficiency of Spotify as a way to generate value. Drake is insanely good at creating attention. He has two ways of creating value. One is Spotify, not very efficient way of capturing value. The other is touring, where he's got to haul his carcass around the earth. And same thing for Louis Vuitton. They're actually very efficient at capturing value. Damien Hirst, super good at both generating attention and capturing value. But Beeple, who sells things that are digital,

I have not heard Beeple in a year or two. Is he still making? Absolutely. Okay. I will Google it after this conversation. And he's incredible. And I would highly recommend visiting his, he's built his own museum. That's not the right word. Facility in South Carolina because he's building his own context.

around what he does. Maybe I should cut this out so no one knows about this great story I'm going to write about people in South Carolina. All right, I'm going to go check it out. Ian Rogers, awesome to see you. Great to see you. Fun conversation. I hope people enjoyed it. Thanks, man. Thanks again to Ian Rogers. Very nice to see him again. Thanks again to Jelani Carter who produces and edits this show and is doing two of these in a row, two days in a row. Thank you, Jelani. Thanks to our advertisers who bring the show to you for free. Thanks to you guys for listening. See you next week.

After graduating from high school, Anthony needed a plan. He loves playing video games, but that doesn't cover rent. So he took a job at Amazon packing boxes. He heard about their free skills training programs to boost his pay. Now Anthony is a software developer for Amazon. With a bigger paycheck, he upgraded his computer system at home. With his new skills, he's developing a video game in his free time.

Grow your career and your pay. Learn more at aboutamazon.com. Support for the show comes from Mercury. What if banking did more? Because to you, it's more than an invoice. It's your hard work becoming revenue. It's more than a wire. It's payroll for your team. It's more than a deposit. It's landing your fundraise. The truth is, banking can do more.

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