Nathaniel Whittemore: Marketing in A Blockchain World

Nathaniel Whittemore is one of the best known voices in Crypto. He has pioneered Long Reads Sunday, where he summarizes the top news of the week in a single long thread. In this conversation, Whittemore and Anthony Pompliano cover everything from Bitcoin to crypto-marketing to fraudulent ICOs.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off the Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off.

• 0:15Speaker 01

  Nathaniel Whittemore is one of the best-known voices in crypto. He has pioneered Long Read Sundays, one of my favorite things on Twitter, where he summarizes the top news of the week in a single, long thread. In this conversation, we discuss everything from Bitcoin to crypto marketing to fraudulent ICOs. Nathaniel has some of the most interesting perspectives in crypto, so you don't want to miss this one. I hope you enjoy it.

• 0:37Speaker 00

  This podcast is presented by Blockworks Group, the only blockchain event and media production company I trust. If you're an investor, lawyer, accountant, or entrepreneur, and want to attend exclusive events and dinners, visit them at blockworksgroup.io. I promise you won't be disappointed.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 1:21Speaker 00

  Before we get into this episode, I want to give a quick shout out to one of our sponsors. Soluna is a blockchain computing company powered by its own renewable energy. The team is planning to build a 900-megawatt facility on top of a 37,000-acre location, one of the best wind sites in the world in southern Morocco. You'll hear more from them later in this episode, but I'd love if you could go check out their website. You can find them at soluna.io.

• 1:45Speaker 00

  Alright guys, I'm here with Nathaniel. I'm super excited about this, so thank you so much for coming.

• 1:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's great to be here.

• 1:50Speaker 00

  You have blown up on the internet, and I feel like I'm gonna learn a lot from you. So, before we get to all that, though, why don't we just go through your background?

• 1:58Speaker 02

  Awesome. How the hell did you get to crypto? Yeah, that's a, it's an interesting question. So I, I, I have, um, there's like two, two versions of the story. There's the obvious sort of tech side, which I'll start with, which is I lived in San Francisco for about a decade, uh, kind of bouncing back and forth between venture type roles and operator type roles. And the last company that I was working on there was a, basically it was a platform that helped big brands figure out what new technology to work with. And it actually had gone through, uh, Y Combinator, the same class as Coinbase, summer 2012. And so we were doing videos about Bitcoin and blockchain for paying clients like Coca-Cola in like 2014, 2015. And so there's kind of always this like side eye to this space.

• 2:41Speaker 02

  And I felt like if I really let myself spend any meaningful time thinking about it, more than it took to just kind of do a brief overview video, I would be hooked. And I was so laser focused on like actually seeing through this company that I really didn't let myself do that until we wrapped last year. And then last year, uh, finally wrapped that company. Um, and, and when I did, I knew that I wanted to work with sort of just private clients, companies that I really liked around different communications things. And I, I wanted to let myself go down the crypto, the proverbial crypto rabbit hole. And so that's kind of the, the obvious story. But the interesting thing is I've been thinking about this a lot recently. And, and actually the, the, probably the more relevant part of my life as it relates to why I find crypto so much more engaging and compelling than anything else I've done

• 3:25Speaker 02

  is when I was in college, I was convinced that I was going to work in post-conflict zones. So I was spending time in the Balkans, the Middle East, East Africa, and kind of really like rubbing my nose in, in everything bad about the world that I could find. And, and part of that was that I always found that there was this really interesting dichotomy where things that on the surface are as bad as they can be, are also the places where you see the most inspiring sort of glimpses of humanity as well, and people's resilience and their ability to come out. And so I had actually spent, I went to Northwestern and I spent like three years after I graduated, building programs for students who wanted to go abroad, make a difference, just generally be involved with the world. And, um, and I was always like really interested in the idea.

• 4:08Speaker 02

  Idea of how do you shift the power dynamics such that you actually allow people wherever they are to take control of their own lives because the one lesson when you dig into the history of people trying to make a difference is that it has to come from the people who are experiencing the problems, right? Like long term, there's ways to help that are better or worse than others. But when it comes to long term structural change, people have to have agency and autonomy and own their own solutions. And, and so, you know, it was interesting, I had this very pivotal moment where I was either going to move to San Francisco to work in technology with a company called change.org, or I was going to go to Britain and study the history of the British abolitionist movement. And I was in an interview, it was like a finalist interview for this scholarship that I

• 4:50Speaker 02

  was, I was applying for. And I talked, you know, my, my nice speech about why I wanted to go sit in a library for three years and study this like 200 year old social movement, all of which are like interesting points and true. But the interviewer stopped me after a minute, he was like, look, I'm not arguing with anything you're saying, but there's no part of me that thinks you want to spend three years in a library. I think you want to spend three weeks reading every book about this and then go start something. And I was so taken aback, I basically like shook everyone's hand, left the interview and moved to San Francisco. And so when I discovered, or when I let myself really dig into crypto beyond just the surface level of, you know, the, the interesting things that we all talk about, the explosion of interest from a capitalization standpoint that changes in

• 5:34Speaker 02

  how venture and startups are going to work. What I found underneath there was something that actually spoke to that, that earlier part that was about autonomy, agency and human freedom. And that, that to me is just, it's much more compelling than, you know, the, the technology stuff that I've been doing before. And so I kind of just let myself go all the way in. Absolutely. And so, why did you not do it before? Honestly, just the unbelievable, I have a like almost a diseased level of laser focus. And I had the the previous company that I was telling you about had a structural flaw, which is that it was always supposed to be a consultancy, but we raised money for it like

• 6:17Speaker 02

  it was a, you know, a LinkedIn competitor. It was a disintermediated network. And so it was always right on the verge. It was doing well enough to keep going, but not well enough to actually break out. And it took a, it took an acquisition actually falling through at the 11th hour to really finally like wrench me out of it. But that that's why, because honestly, it was just so focused.

• 6:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, opportunity cost, absolutely. And so as you got into crypto, right? And you've got kind of this communications or, you know, kind of just public marketing and all that perspective, what did you notice at first, right? So you kind of came in somewhat cold and you start looking around. What are the takeaways?

• 6:56Speaker 02

  So I feel like the, what I tend to be interested in is always like, what are smart people talking about and thinking about? And I get really passionate about trying to root out what the interesting threads are. And and that's almost like it's this interesting mystery. And so, you know, obviously, over the course of last year, you had simultaneously the emergence or just the explosion of interest around ICOs obviously brought a huge number of people in. And that brought a lot of bad stuff, not even bad, but just whatever, there's a lot came with that. But it also created a platform for a lot of really, really smart people. And so I feel like the first thing that I started to notice was there were some folks

• 7:38Speaker 02

  who maybe didn't have as much background then, but who are emerging as like, they were so clearly heads and tails, thinking above the space differently. So a great example of this was Nick Carter. I mean, Nick Carter 18 months ago was still kind of like really just starting. He was still, I think he might have been still doing his thesis about, you know, about governance and things like that. But he was so clearly so smart and thinking on a level so different and actually using data. It's like, I want to find more people like that who are just on the next level. Thinking. And so I feel like the first part of my journey in crypto was just kind of like trying to root out who who those folks were. And I, you know, I think we, a lot of them are now the people that get referred to a lot, like Arjun's another great example of people like that.

• 8:23Speaker 02

  And I think that this is, so, so one is that that's kind of part of of where I was. I think that reflects, though, you know, your question was, what did I notice? This is a space that's still so nascent. And I think frankly, as much as it feels like it's getting not, it's going to be like this for a while. Where it kind of needs and wants all the different types of brains, all the different types of perspectives, all the different types of thought. To come in and kind of battle it out in this grand royal, you know. Melee for for what the future is going to look like and how these new technologies and these new approaches to money and value exchange can can actually play out. So I think that part of what was exciting was to see not only that there were these.

• 9:06Speaker 02

  You know, really interesting voices emerging, but that that was a feature, not a bug of the system. Where it actually thrives on new ideas, kind of battling it out with what are starting to become truisms in the space.

• 9:21Speaker 00

  Absolutely. And so as you're looking at what people are doing, who's in the space, etc. Was there a feeling of missing legitimacy? Was there a feeling of, hey, these are really smart people and, and, you know. I can't wait for the adults to show up. Was it maybe just, look, this is awesome. And there's some of the smartest, you know, kind of most successful people in the world here. Like, as that outsider coming in, what was that initial reaction?

• 9:47Speaker 02

  I think it's a really good question, actually. I think that it.

• 9:52Speaker 02

  It's, I feel like so I have a very, and it'll probably come out like too painfully, but I have a very sort of historical, like historian type perspective on things. I just, I kind of always like zoom out 50 years and think back to how we'd write the story. And I feel like.

• 10:12Speaker 02

  It was, it was sort of been a, you know, it was a place where there was clearly an established set of folks who had been here for a while. Who had battle tested ideas, who had battle tested technology. And at the same time, sort of the barbarians, you know, were already inside the gates as well of all these new ideas. And, you know, some of them are good, some of them are bad, some of them were, you know, kind of just taking advantage of the general new capital sloshing around the space. But I think that it's, it was certainly when, when I was starting to come into it as compared to, I don't know, three or four years ago, when we had been producing content about the space, just for, you know, brand clients.

• 10:56Speaker 02

  There was a different level of this is a thing. I feel like the biggest difference maybe between those two periods was in 2013, 2014, when we were kind of doing these, these explanations and this educational stuff. It was, this is, it's still in the category of new technology, right? Like this is, you know, you can sit alongside AI or VR or whatever, as you're thinking about technologies that may or may not be relevant for your business. By the time last year happened, it was, this is a kind of a more structural economic force that is going to have a lot of dimensions, some of which are technological, but it doesn't feel like it's going away, you know? And I feel like even over the last year, I don't see people caveat things with, hey, this could all go to zero in quite the same way that it, that it used to.

• 11:38Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Well, and, and part of that is they've got more confidence, right? Some of it is there's more infrastructure, there's just more people, more capital. And the other piece too, I think is, you know, a lot of people don't think about, but there's more regulation, right? And so it's the chicken and egg. I think crypto has this crypto ethos around, you know, forget the government, forget whatever. But we forget that there's also reasons for those rules, right? And so it's not so much that we should have no rules, it's just we should have a good set of rules.

• 12:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. In fact, I actually think that over the course of the last six months, and part of the stagnation that we're feeling right now has to do with the fact that the lack of clarity around regulation and around token security designation is actually causing more harm than most fathomable types of regulation that we could see, just based on what we've seen before. I mean, this is, the SEC could go crazy and go ban hammer now. It's like, I'm not saying that that's not a possibility and obviously that would have a really deleterious effect on the industry. But I think that in general, most people, most projects that I know, they want clarity around what things are. And I'll give you a specific example that I've been thinking about a lot recently. So to me, you have, you know, outside of the projects that are really just clearly trying to be global money, right?

• 12:50Speaker 02

  You have actually a spectrum of what these new things called tokens can do, where on the one end, it's like money like properties, right? On the other end, it's equity like properties. And I feel like we've entirely missed experimenting with those equity like properties for fear of them being deemed securities, right?

• 13:09Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 13:09Speaker 02

  Which is insane. It's literally half of the experimental sandbox is cut off because we decided to use them as the lever to pull to raise money. And I feel like that's a thing that's going to change just because of, it feels inevitable. Like, people are going to experiment with, with what these tokens can do in terms of actually conferring rights that are more meaningful than, than just like, hey, maybe they'll raise in value.

• 13:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's funny because a lot of people don't remember what equity was in the beginning. So equity was not something that I sold to you as an investor, right? And I'm the founder and then I take your money, I go build my company and at the end we look for an exit. Right? So this idea of enterprise value, there was no concept of that, right? It was if you want to invest in my company, you own 10%, let's say. And that means that you have a claim on 10% of the economic performance. And so the profits at the end of the week, the month, the year, or whatever, you get 10%, right? And so it was a claim on the cash flow of the business, right? At some point, a founder probably went to an investor and said, hey, I'm actually not going to give you the 10% this month

• 14:20Speaker 00

  because we're going to reinvest it, right? And we'll make more money in the future. And so this idea of reinvesting profits to grow a bigger company took over. And then eventually it was, I'm actually not going to give you any of the cash flow back, right? Because we're going to build this thing called enterprise value and eventually someone will come buy the company. And so we've kind of just like really gone down that path. And today, when somebody invests in early stage. Startup, especially in the technology sector, it is as a goal of building enterprise value.

• 14:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think this is a historical accident that has is showing to itself to have huge effects right now. Right. And I think actually part of the appetite in Silicon Valley for something different and to look to tokens as sort of a different way to approach the equity and, you know, early incentivization is that this exit based equity mindset that is totally normal in Silicon Valley was has been broken for a long time.

• 15:15Speaker 02

  Right. I mean, you know, I lived there for a decade and even between the beginning of that and the end of that, like, people aren't interested in your, you know, four year vesting terms and, you know, the idea that like, they're not going to take, let's put it this way, people started finally to say like, well, if I could make 200,000 over here or 100,000 with you. And it's going to take at best five years to exit, then I'm foregoing a half million dollars of, you know, income that I would have made. And what you have to sell, like what the company has to sell for, for me to get that value back is actually like $300 million, not including additional financing rounds.

• 15:57Speaker 02

  Wait a second, this is just insane. Like, A, I can't even wrap my head around it. And B, like, it's just, it feels off, right? And so it actually, it didn't do this thing where anymore where everyone is excited about being, you know, in on the upside or whatever. It just shows us like, you know, I guess it's kind of a, the price I pay for the privilege of being a part of this startup is that, you know, half of my salary is deferred for the five years. Obviously, that's different for founders and so much of the dream of Silicon Valley is wrapped up in the like the founder belief set. But I don't think it's an accident that some of the earliest companies in crypto and the earliest people in crypto had been playing around with things like secondary markets for equity and trying to make, you know, tech equity work better before they got over to crypto.

• 16:40Speaker 00

  Absolutely. And so I guess the other piece of this is there might be a solution with blockchain and crypto specifically, right? So this guy Lawson Baker, for example, who talks a lot about like on-chain cash flow, right? And so if you as a network participant or an investor are able to stake tokens or somehow get a claim on that cash flow, well, that might be your ownership. And so it's not because this, you know, entity, which used to be a for-profit entity, maybe now in the token world it's not, it's not building for enterprise value. No one's going to come buy the not-for-profit, you know, entity that is governing some distributed or decentralized network.

• 17:21Speaker 00

  And so if there's a way to invest to give founders the capital necessary to build the early stages of the network, and then I can get a claim on the cash flows that are derived from that network, this idea of equity starts to change. And the example he gave me once that just resonates with me so much is he's like, you know, in the beginning of the internet, people could have taken a letter and they could have just, you know, PDF and just scanned it onto the internet. And we'd have a letter and now you could send it to some more people. It'd be a little bit cheaper, do all the stuff. But the real power of the internet is not taking a PDF and scanning it onto the internet. The power of the internet is that you and I can go into the same Google Doc while we're sitting in completely different geographic locations

• 18:02Speaker 00

  and we can get in and we can start typing, that we can delete, we can comment, we can, you know, do all this stuff. We can change the font, the colors, you know, all of these different edits that we can do. And then at the press of a button, we can send it to millions of people, right? And actually, we can send it to them as a PDF or we can send them a link and they click on that link and then they can come in and they can edit it, right? And you get all of these possibilities with the internet. And so imagine if we can take that type of powerful, you know, change and apply it to equity. I mean, I don't know. Maybe you have ideas. It's like, what is possible?

• 18:32Speaker 02

  No, I mean, listen, I think changes at scale at some point become so great that they become changes in kind, right? And we've seen this pattern over and over again with, you know, when I was randomly, yesterday I was relooking at Uber's first deck that they sent out to people and they were targeting the $4.2 billion US taxi market. I was in 2016, Uber made $6.5 billion in revenue, right? And so

• 18:55Speaker 00

  That's more than 100%. I'm no mathematician.

• 18:58Speaker 02

  Right? And you see this a lot, like that we start trying to disrupt things and then we discover possibilities that were, you know, previously unable to be imagined and it changes things. And I think, I believe that it's probably too early to have, to really understand what that's going to look like in the future. I do think that one thing I'm excited to see, and that I think has emerged in the course of this bear market is, I mean, basically, look, like people, like capital is going to flock to wherever it's easiest to make the most capital, right? Like, that's just the way that it works. And I think that's fine. One of the things that's very cool and I think very important about down cycles, or whatever you want to call this, sideways cycles, it doesn't matter, is people start to get creative. They start to look for new ways.

• 19:41Speaker 02

  And I think that there's the emergence of this group like Lawson, like the guys at Coinfund, who are really thinking about where the line between capital and labor is and is it different? And I think that right now, we're starting to think about this in terms of like investors adding mining operations as an early one and, you know.

• 19:59Speaker 00

  Was this the mining 2.0 thesis, right?

• 20:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a lot of this. But I think even that, like, it's actually interesting. That's like a brand that's so clearly not long for this world because it can't possibly capture this. What I think people are referring to is this idea that if we're talking about new ways to organize and incentivize networks, the set of activities that it takes to build those networks is beyond just injecting capital. It's injecting work, it's injecting time, it's injecting staking, I mean, whatever it is, right? And it's going to be, I think we're going to have a huge amount of experimentation with that, circling in a big way back to the point about regulation. I think that part of what has cut that off is we start to get into security-like properties that just people don't want to touch, right? I mean, I think we were just talking about this a little before we started recording,

• 20:44Speaker 02

  but I don't think it's an accident that you're seeing some of these experiments that are actually starting with this sort of on-chain cash flows, they're from anonymous. People, there's from anonymous projects, you know, with anonymous groups doing them because in the absence of a clear kind of like security type token structure, they're just gonna do it, you know, below board, but anonymously or pseud anonymously. And so, you know, Pixelmaster, the thing that's going on, the EOS thing right now, that's kind of like Satoshi's place, or the Reddit thing that happened before, where people are drawing pixels on a map, but then when they draw over someone else's pixel, they have to pay 1.3, 1.35 times whatever that person paid for the pixel.

• 21:27Speaker 00

  Oh, interesting.

• 21:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, and of that like 35% premium, that's split 75/25 between the person who was the, like, the previous, you know, owner of that pixel, and this slush pool, basically, that's like a long-term incentive fund. And so, it's an experiment and something that's, there's sort of a game-type aspect to it, there's this collaborative art project aspect to it, but they're experimenting with this sort of on-chain cash flow stuff. But I think, and I could be wrong about this, but I'm pretty sure that Pixelmaster as an idea came out of like a hackathon with someone who wasn't anonymous, was part of a project, their lawyers like slammed the door, so they just put the code up and let someone do it, and it was an anonymous group that kind of took and ran with it.

• 22:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is, there is security and anonymity, right? But I think that the bigger theme here is that people would not have to be anonymous, people would not have to tread so lightly if there was an answer to, what are the rules? Right? Once that uncertainty is removed, then you basically, you put all the artists into the room with the paintbrushes, and you say, what can you create? Right? And then you just let them go to town. Right now, I don't think that we quite have all the artists in the room, because a lot of the artists are scared, right? And they're saying, hey, I don't know what those rules are yet, so I'm not gonna go play and tell you what the rules are.

• 22:45Speaker 02

  I also, I agree completely. I also think that, you know, to the, to the potential counterpoint that regulation would somehow cut some part of the artists off. Artists are real good about figuring ways to color outside the lines and they don't like the rules. I don't think we have to worry about artists being restricted in their way of doing things. Like, life finds a way and so do hackers to do interesting things, right? You know, more regulatory clarity is going to do nothing, I believe, but bring more people to the legitimate table and let the folks who are willing to already do things like make themselves anonymous and do these interesting projects, they're just going to do it too, you know?

• 23:22Speaker 00

  Absolutely. No, I definitely agree with that. Alright, so let's talk about like other big themes that you see in crypto right now.

• 23:28Speaker 02

  So one that's emerging, well, I mean, the idea of what a theme is emerging or not is kind of interesting, but one thing that I think surprises me that there's not a little bit more conversation about, but I think might be starting, is governance is more than just something that people kind of have as a slide in their deck or a section of their white paper, where they say like some future promise of on-chain governance or something, but where people are actually asking how protocols are going to evolve and what does the governance model as articulated today say about how it's likely to evolve or who

• 24:09Speaker 02

  gets to evolve it? And to me, like as we're talking about, so one thing that I think has happened this year is there's been a much bigger rally around the idea that one of, if not the most important kind of battle in crypto is what becomes digital money in the long term, right? The real like, holding is a use case of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is competing to be, you know, it's an SOV first competitor to be like long-term global money. And even other things that weren't trying to position themselves that way before speak about it now, right? Like people talk actively about whether Ethereum could become long-term money and for what reasons and why the properties would be different. So that's happened. I think people are talking like that. And they're not maybe, there's some folks who think that's

• 24:52Speaker 02

  the only important conversation. There's a lot of folks who think it's one important conversation. But in that, in that contest, as we're talking about things, it feels to me like the, there's not- Not yet a real active kind of pricing in of how people think different governance models are going to work. And there is to some extent, right? Like you saw this a little bit with placeholders decreed thesis when they wrote about, you know, a big part of their decision to invest so heavily in that network was they liked the way that they were purposefully keeping it open about how it was going to be governed, but making it very important and central to the community's evolution that it was getting to make those decisions.

• 25:32Speaker 02

  I think you're starting to see this with, there's more conversations, I feel like today than there were three or four months ago about how Bitcoin is governed, right? As Ethereum, it's more people are talking about it. And, you know, it's interesting to me. So, so where this really was highlighted was for me was last week when the Andreessen Horowitz investment in Maker happened, right? And so I think that like, you know, the dust has settled a little bit. This is, this is a good thing for that community, right? Like the one of the most premier sort of investment firms in the space, buying 5% of the tokens, you know, and allowing the, the team behind it to have something like three years, right? Of just being able to build. Like, there's a lot of reasons to be very excited about that. But it was interesting because the, the sort of emergent critique that happened wasn't about

• 26:18Speaker 02

  whether the deal was good. And there's a little bit of talking about like whether the discount was appropriate or not, but really that wasn't the point. The point was some people were like, well, but we talked about like transparency as one of the key values of this and sort of the, you know, governance is one reason why you would want to be involved with Maker as a stablecoin versus, you know, versus something else. And no one was consulted, didn't have a, didn't have a chance.

• 26:41Speaker 00

  Well, and just to be clear, the project, that was some of the things that they had talked about during the pre-sale, the sale, and kind of as they were building was this idea of these being core tenants of the project, right? So it was something that they were, it wasn't just, oh, they should do this and the team's not aware. The team is actually saying that stuff, right?

• 27:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, and what struck me as so interesting about it. So there, there are a couple of people who had, I think the, the most thoroughly articulated critique was a tweet from Meltem about this. And it wasn't like- Like ripping on them or anything. It was just like, this is the type of thing that feels like it needs to be more transparent. I know Eric Meltzer felt the same. You kind of like wished that they had done it in a different way. And to me, it was less about they, it feels like they were almost caught up as just an early example of a conversation that's going to happen a lot more where decisions that we're making in decentralized networks are inherently political, right?

• 27:34Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 27:35Speaker 02

  We talk about governance, but we don't talk about politics. And this is crazy to me. Like you don't get one without the other. Like, politics is the process by which people exert their will and, and try to advocate for what they believe is the right way to sort of move a, a system forward. And maybe the governance process might be, be there, but like, we talk about the US, we don't talk about the governance system. We talk about politics. And I think that you're going to start seeing this a lot more. And, and it's, you know, I wrote about this a little bit. And even with, with Maker, I feel like I can see being in their shoes and being like, this is too important. Like, I don't care if we get some heat. It's too important to risk it in a community and we know. And, and to me, that's part of why we are, I think for a while, going to be in an intermediary stage where there has to be a bit of a push and pull

• 28:16Speaker 02

  between project stewards and the larger network in terms of, uh, who gets to make what decisions. And, and it's going to be a tension, but that's something that I think is, I'm interested to see whether over the next, call it six months or a year, people start to more actively say, I don't like how this protocol is setting up its governance. I don't like how I get to sort of influence the decision-making over there. Um, I wanna, I wanna go kind of make, make an investment, make a bet on this other protocol, you know, that, that this other protocols community, because I think that there's more room for me to exert, you know, my will.

• 28:49Speaker 00

  All right, guys. Before we continue this episode, I just wanted to spend a few minutes talking to John, the CEO of Soluna, uh, who's one of our sponsors. Uh, so John, you're building this, uh, really large blockchain computing facility in, uh, in Morocco using wind power. Uh, why did you guys choose Morocco?

• 29:06Speaker 03

  Good question, Anthony. Thank you. The, the reason we chose Morocco, um, the best way to, to, to explain it is to tell you a story about that area. Um, in southern Morocco, uh, every year, some of the best athletes converge, uh, in a part of the country called Dakla, Morocco. And These athletes are some of the best kite surfers in the world. That part of Morocco is otherwise known as the kite surfing capital of the world. And the reason is because it has some of the best wind in the world. We're here in New York, and in New York, on the best days, wind travels about eight and a quarter miles per hour. When it's really windy in Dakla, Morocco, wind travels at 22 miles an hour.

• 29:49Speaker 03

  And so if you look at a wind almanac, you'll find that that area is one of the reddest parts of the world, making it one of the best wind sites in the world. It's flat, close to the coast, cool temperatures, perfect for building an amazing utility-scale wind farm to power the blockchain.

• 30:07Speaker 00

  So John, you seem to be driven by a number of core values at Soluna. Why don't you tell us a little bit about those?

• 30:12Speaker 03

  You're right, yes, we do have a set of core values that really ground us. What we're trying to do is very ambitious. We're building one of the largest vertically-integrated computing centers focused on blockchain in the world. And the team wanted to put something together, a set of core values, to really ground the company and keep us focused. There are three core values. The first is total transparency. We really strive for openness in everything we do. As we power this new generation of blockchain computing, and as our operation becomes, our business becomes operational, we want to make sure we're sharing as much information with our broader community, investors, people in Morocco, the blockchain community, about what we're doing on our site. The second is 100% renewable energy, always.

• 30:57Speaker 03

  We're really fully committed to clean power, both now and for the long term. Our flagship site is a wind site, and as we expand to different parts of the world, we really are interested in places where we can energize more renewable power that can add to the global footprint of renewable power going forward. So we'll look at hydro sites, biomass sites, in different parts of the world where that resource has not yet been turned into value, and this is a great way to monetize that. So we're really excited about what we're doing, being a new business model for renewable energy. And then the last is supporting local economies. We really believe in supporting the communities where we do business.

• 31:40Speaker 03

  We will plan to recruit and train local talent in the regions where we operate. And really form partnerships with universities and trade schools to train and employ the top technologists in the area. And really add to the global ecosystem of blockchain expertise everywhere we go.

• 31:58Speaker 00

  Great. Thanks, John. All right. Now let's get back to the podcast. I think you're bringing up a good point about the difference between politics and governance, right? But the other piece of this is the amount of knowledge in which a politician has in the democratic system is drastic, is a drastic advantage over those without the information. So an example is we don't send all of our citizens to go vote on every bill. We actually elect an official whose job, right, whether they do it or not, their job is to be aware of the facts, understand the pros and cons, look at the bills and vote according to what they believe is in the best interest of their constituents, right? What their constituents would vote.

• 32:43Speaker 00

  But they're educated, they have staffs, they're, you know, all these advantages, and then there's a vote and that's the democratic process. What we're seeing in the crypto world is not only governance, conversations, controversies, debates, et cetera, the politics which you highlighted, but I also don't see people talking about the idea that most of the people who are involved in the governance system, if it is a democratic or meritocracy type system, are not educated, they're not paying attention, right? It would be like every, I don't know, every single citizen being able to vote on their phone.

• 33:21Speaker 00

  And every time there's a local law going to be changed about, you know, the water sanitation standards. Well, good luck, right? It'd be like requiring everyone to vote and saying, I hope we get this right. Would you actually want every single person voting on that? Or would you rather have a group of elected officials that have spent the time learning about it, studying it and actually make an educated vote and decision? I actually think the last, you know, the latter part of that is probably more impactful and important.

• 33:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, and I think this is, to me, this is exactly where the different lines of these protocols should be drawn is answers to that question, right? Like, you just answered that sort of in a way that I think EOS is a system that has that type of idea built in. You know, we could argue about the specifics of it, but I think that's kind of the core idea. And just delegated proof of stake systems in general, right? There's a bit of that. I think other companies are going to try, you know, totally more democratic things, and it could be chaos, you know? I think that there's other protocols that are about governance minimization, right? That kind of view governance as another attack vector, another threat vector.

• 34:30Speaker 00

  But I think that, so, and now we're getting deeper and deeper in the rabbit hole, right? So, once you get into the governance and who's voting, there shouldn't be, right? Or at least it appears not, a black and white solution to who should vote, right? So it shouldn't just be everyone votes on everything, or only these, you know, small group of people vote on everything. It's almost like a sliding scale, right? So I think about, again, if you go back to the democratic system, when we vote for the president, everyone votes, right? As long as you're within kind of the most generic, you know, largest criteria, everyone gets a vote. The local sanitation bill, not everybody votes, right?

• 35:10Speaker 00

  And so if you then go to, you know, securing the Bitcoin blockchain, right? The network and the transactions validation, everyone gets a vote, every node gets a vote, right? Well, when you move to other types of voting, should we actually not have everyone vote? Let's say if you're building a consumer product and there's a decision around financing, right? And so I think that's what we saw kind of with Maker.

• 35:34Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 35:35Speaker 00

  It's, should it just be the team? Should it be the team plus the community elects, you know, five people, kind of like in a community board? Should it be the team, some community board, and, you know, some subset of users? I don't know what the answer is, right? But I think that's the, you get really deep in the weeds and you've got to navigate that stuff because ultimately, there will be a standard set.

• 35:56Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 35:57Speaker 00

  Right? And everyone will agree that this is how to move forward. But I think we've got to do a lot of experimentation before we get there.

• 36:03Speaker 02

  Exactly, and I think that it's supposed to be like the way that we count the votes on which voting system to use is probably just a market function of which protocols actually, you know, start to thrive, right? But I think that it's going to be, it's going to be weird for a while and people are going to try lots of different things. People are going to do a version of EOS that's a little bit more decentralized, but still retains some centralized power. It's going to be, I mean, you know, it's just, this is, I guess this is sort of where, where I've been, what I've been thinking about a lot lately is that I feel like we're, we're poised for people to be more, have more clarity about which of these, like, factoring in these conversations or their preferred answers to these questions as a part of which communities and networks they want to be involved in.

• 36:47Speaker 00

  Absolutely. All right. So that's a huge theme, obviously, right? We could go for different days on that one. What other themes are you seeing?

• 36:55Speaker 02

  I think the, so the, the generalized mining thing is something that, that we're, you know, we've seen a ton of, just start to emerge. I think it's another area where there's going to be experiments. Another thing-

• 37:09Speaker 00

  Well, go deeper on that, right? So explain a little bit about-

• 37:13Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 37:13Speaker 00

  What, what is the kind of, I don't even want to say prevailing thought process as much as just like, what are some of the, the thought processes right now there?

• 37:22Speaker 02

  I think that the interesting conversation is, does capital in, does, do capital investments, or should capital investments in these protocol networks be working capital in some way, right? Should they be more than just, here's an investment, but, but participating in network building activities, right? And so people are experimenting. So the, the part of it that's, that's happening now, I think, is experiments around the structure of firms and financing operations. So like, if you look at Coinfund, a lot of what they're thinking about is, you know, they kind of have a couple of projects that are their test beds of, of how they're involved and what they're giving that's sort of beyond just traditional capital. But what they're thinking about, I think at core in some ways, is what does the fund

• 38:04Speaker 02

  of the future look like? And, and how do we kind of start to, to evolve that now? So that's, that's the part, that's the kind of the- That I see that happening at. That's why a lot of that conversation is happening with like Eric Torreberg hosted a podcast about that. And you know, it's a lot of folks who are thinking about it from the financing side. And then again, I think on the completely other end of the spectrum is are these projects that are that are really trying to experiment with. I mean, they don't, I don't think that they think about themselves in necessarily the same breath, but I see the two ends of the spectrum as funds experimenting with sort of staking and mining type activities. And these projects that are experimenting with, you know, quasi Ponzi scheme style cash flows on the fully other end of the spectrum.

• 38:47Speaker 02

  But I think that kind of they're going to be working towards the middle of, you know, how do how do projects actually distribute value across networks?

• 38:53Speaker 00

  Absolutely. I think that whole thing is fascinating and somebody's going to again, figure it out. And once it gets figured out, everyone will copy.

• 39:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, that's the thing. I think it's going to be, it may not even be that someone figures out the whole thing. It's that like, okay, so here's a, here's an example. Web 2.0, people learned from specific UX features that they could then take and put into other places, right? It may not be that like, everyone does a collaborative art project from now on. But this idea of buying a piece of digital real estate for a premium on the last person that owned it and having some equitable share of that. That might be the way that we incentivize early network building activities, right? I mean, because look, a lot of the, a lot of the challenge that we don't necessarily articulate it this way, but, but a big part of what got people excited about tokens, certainly from the Silicon Valley side,

• 39:41Speaker 02

  was the idea of an answer to the bootstrap problem early in networks where networks get more valuable, the more people participate, right? So for, for every new user, it increases the value of the network for every other user. Well, the inverse of that is that at the beginning, it's really not that valuable for anyone because it's so small. And so networks take a long time to evolve, basically, because you kind of have to find the exact right person who's willing to, you know, deal with whatever type of value it is as it grows. Some point you start to hit, you know, network effects which kick in and, and it just grows and grows and grows. But then on the, the top end of that curve, you have a problem where if at the beginning, a network owner and a network participant have the same incentive, right? Which is to grow. Facebook and its users always had the same incentive at the very beginning. Growth, growth, growth, growth, because the users wanted more people on too.

• 40:26Speaker 02

  They wanted all their friends, all their family. It's the same, same aligned incentive. At some point, if the network owner class is separate from the participants, they now have an incentive to extract value, right?

• 40:37Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 40:37Speaker 02

  So there's a woman in San Francisco, KJ Erickson, who has a company that's kind of taking on Amazon, that wrote this essay about the extraction imperative, which is that that idea that at some point, networks, even if they very well intentioned had the same incentive as their users forever, if their, you know, their ultimate obligation is to their shareholders, and at some point, you can't grow enough in pure terms anymore. You have to get more from each of the units that are in that network already. So a lot of the excitement for, I think, especially the group coming out of tech, was that idea of, well, are there ways to distribute value in networks that are different, that don't have the same business model? And the first, I think, very nascent version of that was, well, tokens will appreciate in price, and so everyone will be an owner, right? We'll eliminate the distinction between owners and participants.

• 41:21Speaker 02

  I think that some of the stuff that's happening in this Pixelmaster may be other ways to go at that that actually makes sense, right? Where there is real rev sharing and you're cut into the way the company makes money right from the beginning, you know? And it's not, it's neither the just waiting for a token to appreciate in value, loosey goosey, but nor is it waiting for the company to exit and your tiny fractionalized percentage of equity to have value.

• 41:46Speaker 00

  I'm laughing because I don't want to say who said this, but somebody jokingly said to me, the token mania was because the tech people have never seen liquid stock before. And so all of a sudden, it's like they discovered it.

• 41:59Speaker 02

  I actually really think there's something to that. By the way, like, this is, I think it's both true and also not that much of a critique in the sense that, you know, like, it's a, people, people build things to respond to problems they're experiencing, you know? And you have a bunch of people who have spent the last half decade or, you know, 10 years or whatever, building companies that maybe just didn't have the exit that they wanted, or, you know, it comes time to end and their investors have a 2X liquidation preference. And all of a sudden, they're like, you know, and they're like, well, God. God, there has to be something better than that, right? Like, so no, I don't think that's wrong necessarily.

• 42:36Speaker 00

  Absolutely. So you recently started Long Read Sundays. And I'm fascinated by this. I read it every single Sunday. There used to be only one thing that I did. My girlfriend writes a newsletter called The Profile, and so every Sunday I get to see a curated list of the best profiles.

• 42:53Speaker 02

  Oh, that's amazing. I didn't know that that was your girlfriend. That's all I love.

• 42:56Speaker 00

  I just outed her, so she got doxed. It's fine. But so get a wake up every morning and I read this thing, right? And it's great. And then all of a sudden, now on Twitter, I get Long Read Sundays where I can go and I can basically get this summarized version of all the crypto content news of the week. And, you know, it's got to take you a while to do this. So just kind of walk me through like, why'd you start doing it? How do you put it together? And then kind of what the response has been?

• 43:23Speaker 02

  Sure. So I mean, I guess the relevant context for me is like, what I spend my days doing like for money to be human. And I didn't buy Bitcoin earlier. We talked about it. It was the first thing we talked about. I wish I maybe made the wrong decision about which YC summer 2012 class to try to work with. But I help companies think about their position and kind of their very foundational like marketing and communications relative to what the market is saying, right? Like, I really believe it's not marketing per se, because I'm not trying to help them get consumers. It's like, what is your place even in this market? And sometimes that means like, maybe you're not building the right thing for the market, right? So it's this very nascent thing, but to do that, a lot of what I have to do is try to understand everything, right? This is also personally interesting to me. I love trying to kind of absorb a huge amount of information and pull out patterns.

• 44:09Speaker 02

  And so there's a part of me that's kind of just always doing this. Like, it's a perpetual learning thing. And I think that one of the things that's amazing about crypto is I've said this a couple of times, but it really is a learner's paradise. If you like having your brain kind of like triggered in lots of different ways, and there's nothing like it that I've ever found. And so I was spending a bunch of time just reading everything that I could. And one of the things that I found really, really interesting was that the a huge majority of really interesting insightful thoughts weren't being constructed as full essays. And maybe they started on podcasts, but they kind of like then morphed, but they were in Twitter. They were in Twitter threads, right? They were in tweet storms. And I think there's a lot of reasons. I could go on about all the different reasons that it is.

• 44:52Speaker 02

  I think the balance of like where your audience is, is a factor. I think that it actually gets back to like a fifth grade writing paradigm where it's like, what's your thesis statement? Where are the topic sentences? And don't worry about all the fluff.

• 45:04Speaker 00

  Dude, I tell you all the time, tweet storms are just the outline. Yeah. Right? Of like a long blog post that you shouldn't write.

• 45:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:10Speaker 00

  And that's why I think everyone loves it. It's like, oh, I just did the outline. I don't even have to write the blog post.

• 45:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. And the thing that's cool too, is there's a like this reflexive relationship where you know, if you need to expand it into a blog post, right? So you can try out new things as well. But so anyway, so I was, I was like, this is, this is the actual like, the atomic unit of ideas and insights in crypto is the Twitter thread. It's not a medium post. And there were tons of great newsletters that were, you know, kind of summarizing all the great medium posts out there, right? Like token economy is a gift. I have no idea how much, how those guys do it, right? Because it's not just, hey, here's the best articles. It's like sub essays about each of those articles, right? It's amazing, but there was so much just lost in the flow, right? Especially because if people were writing crazy out there ideas, they're going to do it at like,

• 45:57Speaker 02

  you know, 10:30 in the morning Eastern time when like, you know, everyone's just getting into work over here and no one's really up yet in San Francisco or wherever. And, and so it fades away really fast. And so anyway, so I started to notice this and I was like, I really love, you know, I bookmark things, try to go back to them. It's like, you know what? Screw it. Let's, let's try to put it together as a thread. I'm kind of doing this process each weekend as well, because it's kind of like similar to you. I had like a Sunday morning routine or it's just like reading in bed, you know, like thinking about things. It's a really good time to like go, you know, zoom out, not think about like necessarily exactly what you have to do next week. And so I just experimented with it. It's kind of putting together a thread of threads, really. And there are some times that essays are in there, but it's, I would say it's predominantly things that actually happened natively in Twitter.

• 46:42Speaker 02

  And people really, really responded. People really liked it. I think that it kind of goes back, actually, to your first question a little bit. There's, there's more room for a lot of those, the voices that are kind of new and fresh and maybe we'd kind of get lost in the shuffle just because there's so many great content creators and great, just great thinkers, not even content creators.

• 47:00Speaker 00

  Absolutely. How do you find them? How do you find all the content? Are you just glued to your phone and you just never put it down?

• 47:07Speaker 02

  It's sort of a, I have like, so I use, I like my flow is if I see something that's interesting, I'll, I'll actually flag it with Pocket. So I've got like the extension in so that I can from Twitter, tag something in Pocket. I just tag it LRS. And then I start to come back towards, towards the end of the week. And so a lot of times I don't have it like, it's, I feel like it's, if you're, so it's almost like the, the threshold is, does the first tweet make me want to read the rest of the thread?

• 47:36Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 47:37Speaker 02

  And that actually doesn't take that much time to determine. Right? So like as I'm going through about my like normal, you know, weekly business or whatever, I'm, you know, going outside to just chill on my porch for a second, you know, like look, flag anything that's really interesting and then come back to it. And so that's part of it. So the part one is just kind of that, like the habitual process. Part two is that there's a set of people, you're on there, a bunch of other people. There's probably, I don't know, 50 to 100 people that I'll try to actually like, I'll go back through and read their whole week's like Twitter thing, just to see if there's anything that I missed.

• 48:07Speaker 00

  Oh, I'm sorry.

• 48:09Speaker 02

  Because it's very, it's very.

• 48:10Speaker 00

  I'll tweet less.

• 48:13Speaker 02

  And it actually, again, it doesn't actually take that much time. I think that the, the bigger thing, the more time consuming thing is like, what are the patterns that this fits in? Because I think that what people are responding to is not just, hey, here's a list of good stuff, but I really try to make it flow from one thing to another. So it's like, like I always try to start with the thing that I think was the dominant piece of conversation, but find a way that that hooks into the next thing into the next thing. And you'll even see in them sometimes, like at some point around like tweet 17, I'm like, and by the way, here's a bunch of stuff that's really good that I didn't have a chance to like actually summarize, like figure out how it fit into the themes.

• 48:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I think that's part of the value, right? It's not just the content, but it's the context around the content and you do a great job of tying it together. So for everyone else, thank you.

• 48:55Speaker 02

  I appreciate that.

• 48:56Speaker 00

  And then, so you took that and now you've got, I think you just did the first one recently, this Long Read Live, right? Where you're basically talking about content with people on video live.

• 49:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's similar in the sense that I felt like there was this opening or this need in the in the content media space with Twitter threads. So right now it's happening. So again, I think it's actually unbelievable to me how much good content is produced in the crypto space. Like, I feel like everyone feels like they're invited to produce content. Like, they're invited to be a part of telling the story of this space, to assert what they believe in it, which is amazing. That's very different. I mean, even like, even in other technology sectors, I don't believe that that's the case. You have to like, use hacks and whatever and become an influencer. It's like, in crypto, it's just, there is still, I think, a real, real,

• 49:47Speaker 02

  legitimate meritocracy of ideas. And so, part of that right now is obviously a million podcasts are blooming, right? And there's been so much, so much great content in that, in that kind of format. And one of the things that I felt like, as I was watching all these things, was the piece that I wasn't finding very often was the same great people who are going on podcasts, talking about just what was happening that week, right? So just riffing on the stuff that's happened. And this is like, there's no great innovation here, right? This is basically like ESPN and every other, you know, media companies' business model for the last like, 20 years, is to just get interesting people to comment on things, right? I think that it was very natural to go from this curatorial

• 50:30Speaker 02

  thing with Long Read Sunday, to then pull in some of those folks to actually expand out and just, and just kind of riff on, riff on what was happening that week. So it's, it's very much like ESPN around the horn, where there's a guest host each week. I mean, I've done this once, so who knows how it'll change. But the idea is that there's a guest host each week, we kind of riff for 20 minutes, bring in the first person, all three of us chat for 20 minutes, bring in the, like, the third or fourth person, and then everyone just kind of like, talks for a little bit more. And again, it's always about the stuff happening that week. And response is good to the first one. So we'll see.

• 51:01Speaker 00

  I love it. I love it. We just got to get better content than ESPN has sometimes. They're really stretching lately.

• 51:07Speaker 02

  Well, this is, I mean, this is, I think the thing that's really like, I, I'm really excited to see like, there's, you have a lot of new entrance into the actually building a media business space. Like, I'm super excited to see what Mike and Frank and the block do, right? I think Missouri doing content around its data, like, there's just like, there's so much better, like, more like, actual businesses doing it.

• 51:30Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 51:31Speaker 02

  But the cool thing about, like, the compliment to that of being able to not have your business model tied to the media, so you get to experiment a little bit more, right? And so I think that, you know, a network like ESPN, there's really a volume like need, you know, and anyone who's just producing media on any sort of traditional model, you just have to get more people, right? Like, you have to get more people in. If you're just kind of doing it because it's fun and interesting, the threshold is, do people find this fun and interesting?

• 51:58Speaker 00

  Absolutely. No, I completely agree. All right. Before we wrap up, I usually ask people some rapid fire questions.

• 52:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:04Speaker 00

  And first, what do you think is the most important company in crypto?

• 52:08Speaker 02

  Ooh, that's a, that's a good one. Most important company in crypto, Bitcoin. And because it's not a company, because I think that we're going to see the company model evolve.

• 52:17Speaker 00

  I love that answer. That would probably be my answer as well. All right. If you had a magic wand and you could wave it and change any one regulation or improve any one regulation, what would it be?

• 52:30Speaker 02

  This is a super kind of like wonky, boring answer, but I would love to see, I would almost love to see there be a phase where we create just like mandated safe harbors, where it's like, okay, to experiment with these types of things, right? Like, go off and do these things. We know that they're kind of securities like, but we're going to figure that out later. It's okay, right? Like, if you do this sort of warnings, you know, like, if you look back at like, the history of securities laws, the first steps before they got formalized were disclosures and things like that. It was just like, you can't actually sell snake oil. Like, you have to at least say that this is like, you know, like, not proven or whatever it was, right? And I think that I would love to see us be in a, I don't know, a few year period of, of, you know, disclose. Be real clear, really like cut out the bad actors, but let people experiment.

• 53:15Speaker 02

  I think that there's a risk, you know, agreeing with everything that we were talking about before of wanting more clarity. There's a risk that we over clarify, right? So I think that I just saw that there there's like a bill circulating to try to define blockchains. Like that doesn't, I haven't read it, so I could be wrong, but that on the surface doesn't strike me as super productive and in fact, potentially counterproductive.

• 53:35Speaker 00

  So yeah. Well, one, so one thing that we've thought about, and I don't know how you could implement it other than you just say, let some people figure it out, but if there was a peer reviewed disclosure system.

• 53:49Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 53:49Speaker 00

  So if you create a project and you do whatever you want, right? But you have to create disclosures, the disclosures in your project only get published and launched. When me, your peer or your competitor reviews it and says, yes, you're accurately describing through the disclosures what you're doing. And now all of a sudden it's just now we're truth seeking.

• 54:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:14Speaker 00

  Right? And so there's no marketing language, there's no sugar coating, right? Cause, cause actually what I want is I want you to, I'm actually going to make it sound as realistic as I possibly can, right? Cause then that's my personal incentive.

• 54:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, you have an incentive to actually be more.

• 54:27Speaker 00

  Aggressive.

• 54:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. I think that's super interesting. I, so the thing that I like about that is two things. One is I actually like the specifics of that idea. There was something, it's not exactly the same, but I feel like I read about earlier in the year. There was some idea floating around, I think it was France, in France or Paris or something where there would be voluntary disclosures about certain things. And I think that the, the principle behind it, and there's probably a lot of ways to be skeptical of this, but the principle behind it was that if you could create a scenario where 90% of the markets voluntarily disclosing thing, like the 10% that doesn't want to is like, well, no one's going to invest in them. So it's like, you know, like it's self solved.

• 55:05Speaker 02

  So I'm a big fan in general of things which are, keep autonomy within sort of the people in, in the community and the space as it's being defined.

• 55:15Speaker 00

  And the reason why I think crypto specifically lends itself to this is because this is what happens with ideas on Twitter.

• 55:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:20Speaker 00

  Right?

• 55:21Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 55:21Speaker 00

  You have an idea, you throw it out there, like I tell people, most, in most industries, you can throw an idea out there and everyone like. Shows up and has pillows to catch it.

• 55:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:30Speaker 00

  Right? And it's so soft. Oh, you're so smart. Also, in crypto, you'll get called an idiot before you get done with a tweet.

• 55:36Speaker 02

  I spent five years like talking to companies like Samsung and Coca-Cola about new technologies. It was like a pillow fort of total irrelevance. Like, you know, like, it was just, wow, yeah, this is a great idea. I feel very informed after this luncheon, you know, like.

• 55:52Speaker 00

  By the way, we're not gonna tell you that we think you're wrong.

• 55:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. By the way, 95% of our spend's just gonna go to Google and Facebook. Maybe we'll do a $50,000 pilot with Reddit. You know, you really did it.

• 56:03Speaker 00

  Absolutely. All right. So next question, what is your most controversial thought in crypto? So if you, you know, said it publicly, 90% plus of people would disagree with you.

• 56:15Speaker 02

  I'm not, I'm not convinced that there, I'm not convinced that we know how people will use tokens in the long run.

• 56:23Speaker 00

  Oh, come on, that's not controversial. You think people, you think people believe that?

• 56:27Speaker 02

  No, no, no. In the sense that like, everyone's going to, people have become very like the fashion of the day to be like, you know what, this, how many people are right? Like, all tokens are gonna be valueless, except, you know, the very bottom of the barrel, right? I'm not convinced that, like, I don't think that we, I don't think that necessarily we're gonna find on a mass scale, people optimize to have like the best store of value with their tokens sitting in digital wallets. I think that a huge number of factors are gonna go into this, like the UX of wallets. Do wallets encourage you to instantly convert into Bitcoin? Or do they actually incentivize you to stay in Amazon coin or Starbucks coin for long? And then you have just-in-time conversion to whatever the dominant store of value is, right? I think that the super loyalty point thing actually may have, I think

• 57:11Speaker 02

  that we outrun the risk of throwing out the baby with the bathwater of all utility tokens, because so many of them were so transparently useless. I think that there's actually more room for experiments, and I wouldn't be surprised if we're surprised with the fact that people actually use to keep some value in tokens that are not long-term earning, if for no other reason than laziness.

• 57:33Speaker 00

  All right, that's fair. Aliens, ready?

• 57:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:37Speaker 00

  So, we just gotta admit that they're real, they exist. Do they have pets or not? Are there alien pets?

• 57:44Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 57:45Speaker 00

  Why?

• 57:46Speaker 02

  Because.

• 57:46Speaker 00

  You said that, you said that like you've thought about this before.

• 57:48Speaker 02

  I actually have. So here's my like very.

• 57:51Speaker 00

  Perfect.

• 57:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, here's my very.

• 57:56Speaker 02

  My very like optimistic view of aliens.

• 57:59Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 57:59Speaker 02

  I don't believe that a civilization, like a sentient civilization, could advance far enough for space travel, like to come actually to Earth, without having solved big fracture of social issues. Like, I think that basically worlds implode on themselves. And like, if we go colonize other places and actually become sort of a galactic species, it will be because we figured out how to live, you know, like relatively in harmony, not blow each other off the face of the planet, right? If you look at the two extremes.

• 58:31Speaker 00

  Or the face of multiple planets.

• 58:32Speaker 02

  Or the face of multiple planets. And this is, this is not a total kumbaya thing. I think that obviously like this is not the elimination of tension and stuff. But I'm pretty sure that if aliens rolled up in here, or maybe they already have, it's not a civilization that's on the brink of disaster. It's a civilization that's really figured some stuff out.

• 58:51Speaker 00

  Well, like, we haven't figured out how to build spaceships that go to other planets.

• 58:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:57Speaker 00

  Think about that. So if they figured it out, are they smarter than us?

• 58:59Speaker 02

  Yes. Yeah. If they figure that out, they're farther along for sure.

• 59:03Speaker 00

  Right? Like, that gets lost in the conversation, right?

• 59:07Speaker 02

  I mean, here's the other, here's the other one, too. It's like, I think one of the big, I mean, this is, now we're getting way sci-fi, but one of the interesting things that I think about, so I have, our first kid is coming in the next three weeks, probably.

• 59:19Speaker 00

  Okay. Congratulations.

• 59:20Speaker 02

  Thank you. Yeah, the first daughter. And I feel like in her lifetime, there will be a meaningful competition for her, her time and devotion between the physical world as we've known it and digital worlds that allow her to basically kind of like, you know, tune in, turn on and drop out into this like Ready Player One type space. I think that that's going to be an actual thing. And I think that you're already seeing the beginnings of it, right? People who live in kind of like their internet communities that are really separate. And we still see a lot of blending. I think that there's a lot of room for healthy balance. But, so another thing that's interesting to think about, like, So in Ready Player One version of the future, there's no space travel because people, there's no, like, people don't care about that. They care about just kind of like zoning into

• 1:00:02Speaker 02

  this sort of alternative virtual world. So, I don't know. I think, I think that basically, for me, like, every time I really play it out and think about aliens coming here, it's they, like, they've got stuff figured out, not they're, like, warring and conquesty. However, the history of human expansion, at least, tends to kind of be rooted in conquest, so who knows?

• 1:00:20Speaker 00

  Look, I, I sometimes I gotta remember people, their dogs are smarter than them.

• 1:00:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:23Speaker 00

  Right? So it's not, it wouldn't be that big of a leap for an alien to be smarter. Alright, so I end each podcast, let somebody ask me a question. So what question do you have for me?

• 1:00:33Speaker 02

  What would you be doing if you weren't in crypto?

• 1:00:35Speaker 00

  Oh, man. Um, I would be investing, and the two other areas I think are really interesting are all the things around, like, longevity, brain preservation, kind of all mental and mind and body. And then the other is artificial intelligence. So, and those are somewhat related now, as people are trying to figure those two out. But I've previously invested in a couple of companies, you know, in both those spaces. One of them, actually, is a pretty funny story. So, one of them is a guy who is incredibly smart. He has figured out how to preserve

• 1:01:15Speaker 00

  brains with this technology that keeps structural integrity. So, you know, kind of, the belief is that, hey, if I can preserve your brain, there should be a bunch of value as you pass away in terms of either using it for research, or if we believe that we can actually preserve your experiences, your knowledge, all this stuff, could we even, like, some point in the future, when the technology's already uploaded to a computer and do all kinds of crazy stuff, right? So part of this is you have to do this when somebody is dying. And so obviously anytime death is involved with a company, right? That everyone gets all nervous and everything. And so we invest in this company and we've just been watching them execute.

• 1:02:00Speaker 00

  And it's fascinating to see what they've been able to do. And they've won a bunch of awards for, you know, I think they, they preserved a rabbit's brain, that a pig's brain and they kind of, you know, continue down the path. And in my mind, that type of stuff is work that you hang your hat on at the end of a career. Right? And you say, you know what? Like the day that I leave, right? This is what we did. This is what we figured out. Like we solved a problem that humanity in general will benefit for, benefit from for decades, you know, centuries. And so I think that's around like that health side, longevity, et cetera. And then the artificial intelligence side is like, you know, look, no one's stopping crypto and no one's stopping artificial intelligence.

• 1:02:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:45Speaker 00

  Right? Those two, those two Mack trucks are coming down the road and either you can, you know, get on board or you can get run over. And so I think that that's the kind of thought process there.

• 1:02:54Speaker 02

  I think that the hang your hat on thing is interesting too. I think this is one, one of the things that I like to remind myself and, and others if I'm, you know, kind of riffing with them. One of the things that makes crypto so interesting is that, you know, there's so much fascinating here. I mean, we just went on a tangent about governance systems, which is ridiculous and nerdy and stupid. But like at the end of the day, I think part of what, why sometimes the conversation feels so heightened as compared to like, where people are, why are people so intense about this versus like some other industry, right? Even like AI or something is that actually like the stakes are so high in terms of, these are very fundamental macro issues, right?

• 1:03:36Speaker 02

  So one of my favorite movies of all time is SLC Punk, which is about this kid in 1985, whose parents had moved them from New York City to Salt Lake City, Utah. And he's a punk and he's got like a, you know, three foot mohawk or whatever. It's about this summer between college or high school and college.

• 1:03:49Speaker 00

  Badass.

• 1:03:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. And he, you know, he's like, he's like theoretically a punk and all hardcore and stuff. He's still got straight A's in high school, right? And it's like all about his relationship with his dad. He wants him to go to Harvard. And the last scene is he's sitting there in a suit. And I won't spoil it why he's in a suit or whatever. But he's like, and now is the final irony is like, I was just a big sellout. But you know what? You do a hell of a lot more damage from within the system than outside it. And I think that part of why that that feeling is so intense around something like Bitcoin is like, we feel like maybe there's this thing where, again, the barbarians are not just outside the gates, but maybe we jammed our foot in just enough that we're actually going to get into this system that has felt so abstract, so obtrusive and so far away from the actual ability of normal people

• 1:04:34Speaker 02

  to influence like the monetary system for forever. And so, you know, I always kind of try to, like, when things get intense, it's because the stakes are high, you know? And if you can assume that why people are feeling so intense is that they believe like you that the stakes are really high, I feel like it allows for more space to just appreciate the intensity as not anger or causticness, but just a part of the journey that we're on.

• 1:04:59Speaker 00

  Bitcoin's kicking down the gate.

• 1:05:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:02Speaker 00

  All right, man. Thank you so much. I really appreciate this. This is a lot of fun.

• 1:05:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, great to be here.

• 1:05:05Speaker 00

  Do it again. All right, see you. Hey, guys. Thanks for listening. We're back with the CEO of Soluna, John Bellzir. John, what are you most excited about right now?

• 1:05:15Speaker 03

  What excites me the most is that we're really in the midst of a revolution. Satoshi Nakamoto's paper that came out eight years ago really launched a revolution globally. And the blockchain is definitely here to stay. Today's blockchains are predominantly seen as the core technology for cryptocurrencies, among other things. But in the future, blockchains will do more. They'll be the foundation for entire new ecosystems. They will revolutionize a host of different industries around the world. And taken as a whole, these new distributed applications will form a new kind of internet, one where protocols replace companies and algorithms choose the best computing backend and solutions that they can find. This new ecosystem, this new internet, if you will, will need dedicated infrastructure to power it.

• 1:05:59Speaker 03

  And what excites me is that Soluna aims to be the key part of this infrastructure. We have the opportunity to build the next great infrastructure company to power this revolution. Thank you for taking the time. If you'd like to learn more about Soluna, please visit soluna.io.

• 1:06:15Speaker 00

  Hey everyone, Popp here. If you liked this episode of Off the Chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the Apple, Spotify, and other podcast charts, please do us a favor and rate, review, and subscribe. To review, simply go to the Off the Chain homepage, scroll down until you see the five blank stars. Taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts. I appreciate you listening and see you next time on Off the Chain.