Redefining Digital Trust: Web 3.0 and Blockchain Technology Are Reshaping Digital Security and Transparency

Ladies and gentlemen, listeners and viewers, it's time for another episode of where we talk to the seemingly ordinary people who are making an extraordinary impact out there in what I would describe as this five g wired workforce augmented, technology interconnected, globally interdependent, pandemic interrupted, AI accelerated, web three, wow, world of work. And today, we have an epic guest on with us, and it's, none other than Jared Fink from Blazar and now from Cosmic Wire, who's gonna help us unwind and unpack a lot of what's going on with an explosion of new technology. So, Jared, welcome to the show. It is so great to have you. Thank you so much, Ron. It's great to be here. Happy to try to unpack. So yes. So we're gonna have you unpack in your basement high fidelity studio there. And, the first thing I want you to do is Jared comes to us with an extraordinary background. Now as I have it, he started out in med school, went on to become, a very successful musician and recording artist, and then, started working on the technology and is now working in web three. So, Jared, if you might share a little bit more of the details of this extraordinary career journey that you've been on because very few people could claim expertise and success in various fields as you have. Well yeah. Thank you. It's been been an interesting journey. You know, I did I I my family's from a a really small farm town, in Washington called Odessa. And, you know, I I I would say, like, my my entire background kinda started there, just learning kind of, farm life. And, you know, when you live in those kind of environments, it's really just working and, you know, at the start of the day till the very end. And it was it really just kind of instilled a work ethic in me, because, you know, my family, we didn't come from a lot of money or anything. My dad actually worked the same job, you know, since he's was eighteen until he just retired. And so, you know, going to college for me was was a big deal. And, you know, trying trying to find it and pave a path forward and pay for that, you know, was a big deal. And so, I was spending most of my summers, you know, in the early two thousands, working down in Silicon Valley, doing a lot of tech startup stuff. I was doing SAP assist admin hardware bills and cybersecurity for a million and a half companies. Wanna say that the longest was, Nokia during that period, and that's kinda how I was paying for college. And like every other kid in college, I was playing in, like, a, you know, a a shitty Weezer rock band kinda cover band thing in front. He's doing the thing like we all do. I've been playing music my whole life. Rock star? You don't look like one. You know, I've been I've been in music kind of, like, since I was a kid. My family was heavily musical. My my grandparents were a touring country act. My other side was, like, they sang in the local choir. It was just kind of like music was just always there, and it's always been, like, a deep, deep piece of me. And, I started playing trumpet when I was, like, five or six and then piano, and then kinda just went around a bunch of different instruments. And that always followed me into college. And I was always, a big part of my my life. Like, part of my scholarship was to play jazz. And I was doing that and then working to, you know, to go through that. But my my focus was in mental health and medicine because I was trying to get a real job to no no one expects to ever get a record deal. And so I was doing that, and I kinda went through. I became, PSR and a target case manager for Medicare and Medicaid, through some mental health institutes institutes in Washington and Idaho, and got really deep into that. Went into my residency program, and then I ended up winning a a pretty high profile, singer songwriter contest in two thousand eight. That was part of VH one Save the Music, which ended up getting me a lot of attention and a manager. And then I ended up signing a deal with, you know, a part of Warner Brothers and, through Rockridge Music. And, my life really changed. I remember calling my dad and saying, hey. You know, all that all those parent plus loans and all the stuff we did to get here through med school. I'm gonna go play guitar now. And, you know, he basically had a seizure. But my dad, to his credit, you know, has always been just incredibly supportive on on all the things that I've, tried to do. So, basically, since that time, I've been doing, you know, large scale publishing, licensing and sync, producing, being an artist, touring or ghostwriting for other people, writing for other publishers, just heavily in the music industry on in all pieces. And that that was really what my life was, for a long time until the pandemic came. And, like everyone else in entertainment, my career got, you know, shut down almost entirely, the second that it was announced. And it for me, it was really, you know, upsetting. I just signed, like, my newest deal, and it was it was one of the larger ones, probably the largest of my career. And, I had, like, my first, like, magazine cover and a bunch of other stuff, and things were really moving well. And it was about six weeks later when we got the notification that all of our tours were canceled, for the year. And, you know, that that was it was pretty devastating. I just had a son. He was my son was born that March. And then I had a three year old at the time. They're three and six now. But, and so other than that, touring and and music stuff, I was doing a lot of, like, sync for TV or scoring for film and TV. And so, you know, I was like, okay. Well, I can fall back on that. And, Hollywood got shut down too during the pandemic. So it became Right. Real real fast. And, I'd I'd been working on this, idea of cosmic wire. It didn't have a name at that time for the better part of a decade. And this really just kinda kick started it, and and I was like, well, I'm just gonna dive full into this because I'd always had this idea about kind of, like, roping in blockchain for, kind of, like, derivative royalty usage, IP collection, around, like, these kind of immersive environments because the thing that I've learned through the music industry over the last, like, fifteen fifteen years or so is that the music's almost become free. And, the artists and the people that are in the middle of it are what the sticky environment is. It's, you know, people get attached to all the anecdotal stuff, and the the songs and all the stuff is kind of a hook to bring you into their life so they can get closer to you. And that's just really the change in social networks and how the zeitgeist has moved throughout the time, through time. And so my idea was, like, you know, by creating these more immersive environments, and and tying it into blockchain, we could scale artists, give them a transparent way to collect royalties, and also bring people back into that community with all these kind of advances in XR technology and so forth. And And at that time, at the start of the pandemic, I was working on a record, with an artist that I grew up with as a kid, Afroman, who had the song because I got high. And he, was in my basement in in Washington state, and we got we got stuck there for a little bit. We were recording his tracks and doing a bunch of, like, immersive stuff and some esports things and other kinds of things. And it was really the genesis of cosmic wire, that has just While he's he's living in your basement during this time. So this is this is classic entrepreneurism, rock muse. I mean, it's everything. Right? It's, just this cosmic ride, basically. Right? Yeah. And then that's what it was. And then, the company just started exploding. And so my wife and my, like, four week old son and my three year old daughter, just drove down to LA and, like, left our house. And we were coming down for a couple weeks just to do meetings, and we never went back. So it's literally been like that. We got a hotel, and then we were like, wow. We have to, like, stay here because it was just going so fast. So we just moved here, and my house was just sitting there in Washington, which it still is. And my dad lives there, and he was, like, mowing the lawn and taking care of it and things like that. But it it was it's it's been the most just insane experience of my life. But when I look back at, like, everything that cosmic wire is, it really is, like, weaving, like, the science and the stuff that that that came out of, like, the the medical side. Because what I was really doing there was, you know, learning just how, awful these systems are because they're they're segregated where you have, like, ERs are not talking to GPs, and GPs are not talking to insurance companies, and there's different region codes across the country, and there's no symmetry for anything. And so it's just a mess. And that was the same thing I saw in, the music industry with, like, all my royalty collections from publishing licensing and sync and trying to track down royalties and going through audits and managers and all the obfuscation. And it was just it's these broken systems of collection around all of these kind of, like, IP centers that really resonated with me and with my tech stuff. When I when I first started Silicon Valley, the first thing I worked on, it was baptism by fire was the SAP implementation team at Nokia. So I got I mean, that was, like, the very, very start of all these ledger based systems where we were trying to, you know, basically put checkbooks into digital, you know, databases and and JWT tokens and things like that. And so I kind of smashed all that together, and I'd been in blockchain, you know, since since the genesis. I mean, I've been to degen as long as degens have been around. And so when I saw all this, I instantly, like, just thought this is just the next iteration of systems that we can go and put around IP centers to run all of their businesses. And it's it scales everything. It's transparent, and we can create zero trust environments and people sign on both sides of dynamic deals and tying that around artists to give them transparency into their business so that it can build businesses. It was really the genesis, but then it just went everywhere. It's and we're, with the military. We're doing infrastructure with, like, large scale distribution companies like AWS and Google. We have massive IP partners, and it's just really scaled in a way that's that's overwhelming, but also super inspiring because everyone's kind of seeing the same thing. So it's been a interesting journey for sure. So what we basically just, exploding all this technology and all this brain work that you did going through medical school and going through the music business. You know, it seems to me that one of the things that you've unleashed is ultimately a way to democratize exchanges on the Internet. In other words, keeping them transparent and keeping them honest and, accountable. Because in my brief experience in the nineties in the music business, artists continually complained about the deals they had with record labels that they were not equitable, that they couldn't find or keep their royalties, that they were not making money the way they should have. And so a lot of people were moving off of one label to the next, and there's all this churn because they didn't feel like they were getting a fair deal. And it It ultimately sounds to me like what you're building is a correction to that so that you're going to unleash networks, viral networks that will allow that to happen transparently and ethically so everyone in everyone is whole in the in the system. Is that a fair way to say it? Yeah. I mean, the big thing is that in this new iteration, this is I I believe this is, like, the true genesis or the true thought behind what the Internet was. It's this interconnected network where we would all come together and share information and ideas, and everyone would grow together. Unfortunately, they got that got turned into kind of rabbit holes and click funnels and, predatory companies that are, basically buying and selling our data and and our interests, and that's what this has turned into. What what really I I came from the, you know, the vantage point of an artist, but in this new Internet, I think all people are creators. Everyone is. I mean and that's what it is right now. Everyone that's on Instagram or to, you know, TikTok or Twitter, it doesn't it doesn't matter x, I guess. Whatever it is that you're using, like, if you have five, ten, fifteen thousand followers and you're talking about a shampoo or eating a you know, drinking a Red Bull or whatever it is, like, you're basically an advertising tool, and that's how people have been using our data. And and this whole thing is about taking that back because we should control our data. And from the point of the medical, you know, it's like, why aren't we controlling our own medical records? Why don't we have access to that? Why don't we have autonomy over our systems? Or if it's, you know, your bank accounts, why am I living in someone else's database? Why are the deeds to my house sitting out here that where things are hacked and all these systems get compromised? Or if just what you talked about as an artist, Why am I not able to see my royalties? Why do I have to go through all these obfuscated smoke screen? Because the truth is everyone's skimming and lying, and that's kind of, like, the the meat in all of these systems. And there's a there's an entire business of that. Right? And the the pushback against these kind of systems, as I've, you know, learned, has been like, well, we're gonna come in and create transparency and efficiency, but that's gonna, you know, definitely impact their bottom line, in in a in a very impactful way. But the, education process is that if we implement the system and if we collect all of these nickels and pennies that are out there and if we are more transparent with our record and if we empower people, what it does is create more symmetry across the whole system. And it really is an all ships rise thing where everyone makes more money. It's more efficient if everything is working more efficiently. Right? And if you can get past the scare tactic of, you know, AI is gonna take jobs. No. AI is gonna accelerate jobs and make all of our lives more efficient if used correctly. We're not replacing things. We're augmenting things. Right? And that's what humans have been doing since the start of time. Everything that we're doing from, you know, going from fire to light switches to microwaves to air conditioning, It's all about enhancing our experience. And what comes out of that is, like, the evolution of where we're going, which is this next kind of digital revolution. And And so I really think that we're on this just constant trajectory. And the more that we can create systems of efficiency for people to go and control their autonomy and control their data and make their own sovereign kind of autonomous self, it makes for a larger economy for the world because everyone can transact in a safe and secure environment, and it really is removing the kind of, like, the malarkey that's been in the middle of these systems all the time. Because there's an entire business in all of these fields from medical to commodities to music to any of these things that is just on creating obfuscation and creating, like, a leverage positions to go and, like, milk that in between. And that's what this is getting rid of. And that that's why it's so impactful. So, yeah, it's built for artists, but, really, all people are creators in this new world. Every like, what we're doing right now. Right? This is your it's the same thing. Now, I mean, you have an excellent way of describing very complex things in ways that people like me can understand. And so I'm gonna repeat back what I was reading earlier today on your website, and then I want your translation of this. So, Cosmic Wire is at the forefront of web three innovation and blockchain solutions with proprietary technology and decentralized applications that provide a distinctive infrastructure in the backbone operating system powering today's web three ecosystem. So for the person who's trying to figure out the impact of all these new technologies and what's happening with Web three, How would you distill that statement down to those of us who are just embracing how profound the changes in technology that are being ushered in are going to make on our our way of life and our way of doing business? Yeah. No. It's it's a complex question, but I think that the biggest problem that we've had with blockchain in general is that, it was too much tech. I mean, it it is it is super exciting for a person on the inside that's, like, building and watching these systems to get out and talk about But to the average person, no one cares. It I say this anecdote a lot, but people, when they when they get a Ferrari, they wanna drive the car. They don't necessarily care how it's put together. We use Visa every single day of our life. No one understands the Visa network system, which is not a lot different than this. Right? But we've got caught up in seed phrases and wallets and, like, swaps and, all this stuff that just scares people because it's an entirely new nomenclature. It's an entirely new language around stuff that that really doesn't matter. And my thesis for the company was, technology functions best when you can't see it. Right? It's like, we we just want to, like, show and it's quiet. Right. Right. And so Cosmics, you know, whole mentality as we went forward was to use blockchain, in a way that would be interoperable. We're not stuck on an island. You know, like like, my first thing with the company was, like, we're building bridges. We're building connections. We're dendrites. We're not we're not, trying to be the platform. We're the thing that allows all platforms to work because this idea that you're gonna go and buy a Ford truck with Ford coin and a Chevy truck with Chevy coin, and there's no way for that stuff to go without this, like, amorphous kind of, like, coagulated process is nonsense. Like, people just want to transact, and and it's what you're trading for is the value, not the thing that you're trading. Right? And that there's in this whole, like, thing in the middle. And so when you say words like NFT and blockchain, people's eyes glaze over metaverse like, oh, it's all just garbage or it's a pink stock scam or it's, you know, an ICO. I mean, whatever it is, it's just got because it was. I mean, it really got tainted, but we were always building infrastructure. Like, the SAP stuff I was talking about, I'm like, this is ledger. We can plug systems into this, put variables to it, and do entire tables for functions just like people do in Excel or or JWTs now or any other system, and that's what blockchain it is it is guided ledger driven by smart contracts. Those smart contracts are driven by us, you and I. The same thing like we just did when we did this Zoom meeting where you said, do I agree to be recorded? Yes. I do. That's going up and being written, called in some kind of database where it allows that function to happen. We can put that entire thing on blockchain, and that's all that this is. Right? And it's it's not this, like, light switch moment into web three. It's a constant evolution of us becoming more efficient. And so when I talk about that, what we created was an interoperable solution. We have the patent on a thing called interchange messaging. It was probably one of the biggest things inside of my company. What that is is our technology speaks to all chains at all times. Right? Because it doesn't matter. We are literally that piece of data that can communicate with everything at the same time, all the way over to crypto, all the way over to fiat because that's what people want. They wanna be able to go into, seven eleven and buy a Gatorade or a Snickers or jerky or pay for their gas and not care how that process is happening. And that's what we've been focused on because the technology is supremely powerful if you don't get hung up in the tech of the technology and just let people use it. And so that's that's what we've been focused on. That's a big that's a big, uptake because what you're saying, basically, And what's going to really happen is you're going to just open up more democratic ways of people to network and people to connect and people to transact business with each other in a way that's transparent and fair and equitable. And that's what makes me really optimistic about the take you have on this. Now one of the things that Cosmic Wire has been talking about is the power of immersive storytelling in all of this. So can you speak to that? Because I think, ultimately, all these advances in technology in this disrupted world that I keep describing with those who are on the show, It's all about telling the story. Right? And so how would you describe the advances in storytelling and immersive storytelling that are gonna come out of this technology and come out of this next, digital revolution? Yeah. Absolutely. And we're we're there. Right? The Internet, XR, kind of immersive websites, all this stuff has been around for for over a decade. The problem with immersive spaces, has always been compute, and that's it's it doesn't matter, you know, on the receiving side, like, if you have an Oculus or or whatever whatever it is. Like, if you have a PlayStation five or a gaming PC, like, when you receive that application, we have these monstrous machines that are able to do super high fidelity graphics and run these, you know, deep physics systems and AI engines. The problem is how we transmit that data, and that's always been the bottleneck. People have been trying to do cloud based computing, plat cloud based spatial, multi server instancing, all these kind of different concepts to go and transfer data as much as they possibly can. And we took kinda kind of a unique approach because, I realized that, you know, the the power blockchain was automating the system, but there was still there's, like, only so many lanes on the freeway still. Right? And the only way to get more cars on the freeway is to make smaller cars. Right? So we took that approach. I you know, my my tech stuff, I started in literally year two thousand. I graduated in ninety nine. I know I'm old now. No. But in in in tech. Right? And but the the power of of, like, my generation, like, literally, you know, the the kids that were born in, like, nineteen eighty through, like, nineteen eighty three. I call us the Oregon Trail Kids. We are the last generation that is ever going to remember an analog time before this kind of digital because we lived through it. Like, I was in, you know, junior high when when Internet kind of got turned on and we had our first class, and here's AOL one disk. And, like, oh, I mean, I remember that stuff vividly. And when I went to work in two thousand, down in Silicon, where I I was living in Mountain View at the time, there were all these, like, little round tables, and they had, you know, flags. Like, here's Netscape, and here's Explorer. And, like, that was just starting, and I was like, this is this is gonna be crazy. Like and no one really understood the Internet. And then we're in that same point right now. When I was first doing kind of all the blockchain That's exactly right. We're at this point where it's all happening again, and none of us really truly understands it, which is why I find this conversation so mesmerizing. I mean, you're kind of planting a stake there and saying, well, here's what's actually going on. I I really appreciate this. No. And and everyone has their own vantage point. You know, when I started talking about this stuff three years ago at all these conferences or four years ago, everyone thought we were crazy because everyone was just running with, you know, NFTs. And, like, we did a couple drops too because we were a startup and had to stay alive, but we were always building this. And now I go to these conferences, and it's only this. Like, we were just at CES, and, like, the entire web three division of CES was exactly what we're talking about and what we've been building. And and everyone's like, this is spatial compute. And so the point of all that conversation was that, you know, we as a company, early two thousands, heavy, like, just old school, like, c plus plus, c sharp, a lot of, like, DCT compression that the old school fundamental stuff. Because back then, when you were, like, putting programs together, applications or games or anything, you had no space to work with. Right? It was like, we had to fit things onto these floppy drives and or if, like, my computer in two thousand, my Windows ME machine was like a two thirty three. You know? It's like, no. Probably, like, nothing in it. Right. And as technology has gotten bigger and more profound and we have, you know, terabytes of data now and ninety six gigs of RAM in your computer and just massive amounts of space, people have gotten lazy because there's more room for error. Right? And so the genesis for my company was I went out and I found all of those old school DCT guys. My CTO is a triple PhD who has the patent on peer to peer networking. He built, like, the first node based network. And I just came in with a thesis. Like, guys, I wanna go back and pretend like we have nothing. Like, we've only got, you know, half a gig of RAM, and we have to cram all this stuff in there. And that was the WebGL. It's like, we will need to stay under fifty megs because that's when browsers start falling apart in spatial. It's like, how do we get a super high fidelity experience? How do we crack this code to be able to push this? And everyone's been talking about it, but people are using different techniques. We went back just to do fundamental basketball, and I brought in the best compression guys that I possibly could. I have an entire team of that. And that was our first kind of Genesis thing into, like, that world. We had our interchain messaging that we could go anywhere. And, like, how do we take that and let it be able to transmit really high fidelity experiences? And so we did, and we started getting, like, thirty to fifty percent optimizations on top of all known methods because we're running everything like Adobe and Ghostscript and every all the library systems that everyone else is, but we're also doing our own kind of, like, surgical work. And that led me to a company that I found out of Israel, called Mantis. And they had invented a thing called the depth lens about ten or fifteen years ago, which is on every cell phone on Earth. And it's it's what determines foreground from background. And in their, algorithm for that, they had a temporal compression, in a file format that they had been working on. And so I started talking to them. We ended up purchasing that original algorithm, that IP, and we brought those original Mantis guys into our crew, and created, like, our own kind of, like, Nexus and just glued all this together. And what came out of it was a universal file format called Rysk, r y s k, that we took their stuff and turned it into a generic volumetric, file format, which is spatial compute three d objects, and, compressed it with our engine to the tune of getting a ninety to ninety nine percent optimization on OBJ sequences, which are three d objects, on all known methods on planet Earth. And we we patented that technology and turned it into an infrastructure play so we can send out these massively high fidelity environments over a website because that is the future of spatial compute. That is the future right there. It's high fidelity, high speed, high quality, high resolution, all of that. That is next gen. That is totally next gen. You've been listening to me, Ron Stefanski at Disrupted, talking with Jared Bink, who's about to explode the Internet with some of the high powered technology and web three innovations he has unleashed at CosmicWire. Please give us your feedback. Give us your, likes. Share this broadly because I think more and more, all of us need a primer like this, although it's a little head spinning, on how this is all gonna work. Because when you clear the air and when the dust settles, what I come to, Jared, and I'd like to hear how you'd summarize this in your closing comments, is I hear a world that's ultimately more optimistic, that's not as fearsomely anxiety ridden about the future of AI, the potential for misinformation. What you're really doing is clearing the clouds in the way for a blue sky future, if I'm not mistaken. I I absolutely think that I'm incredibly optimistic about all this. You know, I remember it reminds me of to a lesser extent in music, like, when auto tune kinda first started permeating, it was like, oh, no one has to sing anymore. No one needs talent. But but what really came out out of that was that now anyone can be a musician. Right? And there's something really beautiful about that because, there's all kinds of arbitrary anecdotal things that impact humans. And I've said this a lot. You know, like, the best violin player is probably pushing a plow somewhere in some third world country that we will never discover. Right? I mean, on on my street alone, like, I was a I I am a, you know, endorsed professional guitar player, musician. There's probably a better guitar player, you know, blocks away from me that will just not get the same circumstances or options or, you know, opportunities that that led me down my path. And that's where I think that this is coming together as we are creating kind of a we're raising the floor. Like, I've I've always thought there's not a lot you can do with kind of the malarkey on top, but what you can do is impact the bottom, and that forces the top to adjust. And that's the that's the mentality that we've taken is by creating this technology, we can go and use existing infrastructure to allow access at a global level that hasn't been there before, and that's what's coming out of this. So the blue sky is like, yeah. AI is coming, but AI is like a tool to be used. Right? And we're creating infrastructure that AI can leverage. Like, with our technology, with one of our patents, it's called uniform mesh that basically allows for static coordinates over moving three d objects at a very macro level. We can now use AI in three d design, and it's been a huge bottleneck, and we created it as a production tool because what that does then is in the same iterative cycle for production people, you get more iterations. Right? Instead of three works this year, we can do fifty. And what does that do at a macro level? That's human creativity and genesis and everything else that's going on. It's the scalability of us as a people. And so as we build more infrastructure and more interoperable technologies, cosmic is not the driver of the forefront of this. Like, in my vision, I think cosmic is like Intel or Microsoft where we've created baseline architecture. People are gonna take this in all kinds of crazy macro, you know, fractal expressions of this thing, and that's that's the exciting piece about it. So I think it's absolutely blue sky because even the people that I'm working with inside of my network, they're going all over the place and creating all this crazy stuff. Right. I mean, it's just starting, and I think it's amazing. Like, the fear is just, I I think, largely based in ignorance, and the ignorance is largely based because we're not we're not doing a good job talking about what this is. All we're talking about are all the things that isn't. And when you posit things in that kind of discussion, you're you're losing the the focus, and I think that's because there isn't one. I think people are just kind of inventing things right now, and we've been super focused on just, like, let's deliver real utility and application and show people how this can positively impact systems they're already using with technology they already have. And if we can do that effectively, then it scales. And that's the whole idea. That is totally blue sky. So thank you, Jared, so much for joining us today. This has been another edition of Disrupted where we have talked to the seemingly ordinary people in their basements talking about a blue sky future that's infused by the promise of technology unplugged, exploded, and on web three innovations and platforms to come. So thank you for joining us. Share your feedback. Share your comments. Share this show with others, and we'll see you on another edition of Disrupt Ed. Thanks so much.