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Brad Kam – Unstoppable Domains Transcript
Note: This transcript was automatically generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and therefore typos may be present.
Rob McNealy
Hey folks today Rob McNealy here. And I am talking to the co founder of unstoppable domains, Brad cams. Brad, welcome to the show. How are you today?
Brad Kam – Unstoppable Domains
Great. Thanks for having me.
Rob McNealy
Well, I appreciate you coming on. I’ve been a big fan of what you’ve been doing now for. I don’t know, I heard about you guys probably about a couple months back. And I actually got to talk to you offline, because I actually think I want to buy one of your domains. But you’re going to educate me and the audience today about what your domains are doing. And what I’m, before we not kind of get into all that. Let’s talk about you a little bit. Give me a little bit of history about you. What’s your background?
Brad Kam – Unstoppable Domains
Yes, I’m from Atlanta. I’ve been starting companies since college days, started out in the real estate world and actually after the last economic crash started buying up homes during this period where they dropped by like 80 90% in Atlanta, so it was pretty, pretty wild, pretty wild, pretty wild situation, but eventually kind of realized I needed to, I needed to get into the software game needed to get to San Francisco needed to get into startups. That’s really where the big change was happening. So I moved to San Francisco in 2012. And I moved into this house called 20 mission, which has been referred to as a house that Bitcoin built in various publications. Because it was a Bitcoin hacker house where the second Bitcoin exchange in the US launched in our basement of Vitalik came and gave a talk before Ethereum launched in the courtyard, pretty much everybody there was doing something Bitcoin related. So I kind of moved to San Francisco and at the same time, just kind of completely dove into crypto related things and kind of haven’t looked back since then. But in general, been doing startups.
Rob McNealy
Very cool. So tell me what is Unstoppable Domains all about?
Brad Kam – Unstoppable Domains
So it’s about free speech tech, it’s about creating a censorship resistant internet and we’ll We do is we build domain names on blockchains. So we have a domain registry similar to like a.com. Except for it’s part of a smart contract on a blockchain. So we’ve got crypto Ethereum. And the way it works is is every domain is stored by you in your cryptocurrency wallet, a traditional domain would be stored by like GoDaddy or your registrar or something like that. And because you have this mandatory custodian, they can move the domain around, they can take it away. So a blockchain domain is is one that you can that you control, it’s a self custody. ERC 721. And you use the domains. For websites for censorship resistant websites, you store your website content on IPFS or another decentralized storage network. And you can also use them for payments. And this is kind of weird. This is different than a traditional domain. The same domain can work for both websites and payments. So I’ve got Brad crypto, you could type that into a browser and see my website or you could type that into a cryptocurrency wallet, and you can send me Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever you can send any currency essentially to one domain. Okay,
Rob McNealy
so how does that work is how does it work? So how do you make money? How do I get a domain?
Brad Kam – Unstoppable Domains
Yeah, so the way it works is is you can go to unstoppable domains calm, it’s gonna look similar. It’s kind of like our version of a GoDaddy, you can type in domains into the search bar, you can check out you can pay with credit card or crypto. After you do that you can manage your domain meaning that you add your crypto addresses so you can receive money to it and launch a website, a website on decentralized storage. So we’ve got a bunch of little tools in there kind of like a decentralized Wix where it’s really easy with a few clicks to go and build your website and launch.
Rob McNealy
So is this a one time payment one and done thing or is this like a subscription model like an annual model like a lot of much of the other registrar’s that are out there?
Brad Kam – Unstoppable Domains
Yeah. This is a one time fee. And the reason why is because it should just be something that you control and feel like you can control forever. If you have a subscription, you have these risks where the registry could just jack up the price on you. And there was a really kind of crazy thing that’s been going on in the traditional domain world around.org, where they’re selling the what was previously a nonprofit to a for profit company and talking about jacking the prices by three x. And all of these essentially, most nonprofits in the world are using.org. And now they’re all kind of at risk, where they’re under the you know, they’re under the under the thumb of this, of this registry that can just change prices whenever. So a once simple, easier, safer for the user.
Rob McNealy
So do you so the I guess the question I would have, and I’m just trying to understand because I’m actually kind of interested in this project for Tosca, actually. And so if you go away, Does it still work?
Brad Kam – Unstoppable Domains
Yeah. Yeah, you’re relying on a theorem and you’re relying On the ipfs protocol, which is a decentralized storage network, although Pretty soon, you’ll be able to rely on many different decentralized storage networks. So I would say that’s a little bit less of a risk, because you can always just put your website on multiple networks. For aetherium, though you are relying on on a theory and still being there and stable, so doesn’t doesn’t rely on unstoppable domains. Once you have the domain, it’s yours doesn’t really matter what happens to us you already control it.
Rob McNealy
So essentially, when you say it’s on a theory, does that mean that that’s where the DNS is located? So I’m hitting, that’s where the I type in POS network and then all or whatever it would be on your protocol. I’m hitting the Ethereum network and that’s just a permanent DNS record through a theorem.
Brad Kam – Unstoppable Domains
Yeah, so if any of your any of your your community has ever used like my ether wallet, for example, which is a theorem wallet, so there, they have my ether wallet, crypto, and so you can type it into it. browser and you go there and when the browser when you type in my ether wallet crypto the browser goes and reads the Ethereum blockchain, finds the my ether wallet crypto domain, and then goes and looks for the hash where the content is located at the ipfs. Hash, and then it shows you the shows you the website.
Rob McNealy
So you said you can put it on multiple networks. How does that work?
Brad Kam – Unstoppable Domains
Well, I said that I don’t want to maybe over complicate something, I said that purely to say that you don’t need to bet on any one storage network. Right now we’re using ipfs, because that’s the one that’s the most mature and has, you know, great tools and a lot of developers already using it. And so what the way that works is I upload ipfs and then people anywhere can store and share my website to the network. So instead of having my website stored on Amazon Web Services, where if they decide they don’t like what I’m doing, they can just flip me off. I can just turn me off. Instead, I have dozens or hundreds or maybe even thousands of different people all storing a copy of my website and unlikely they’re all just going to decide to turn me off all at once.
Rob McNealy
Exactly. So for this way, do you notice any kind of lag time or speed difference between DNS on a traditional registrar or a DNS on unstoppable
Brad Kam – Unstoppable Domains
so the theory of look apart is quite good, quite easy, quite fast. The IP Fs the how fast website content loads is based on to things it’s based on how many people you’ve got, that are storing and sharing your website. And you it’s also based on how like close they are geographically to you. So what this leads to is, if your website’s popular, then it’s also performance. It also works well, which is kind of like in a weird way. It’s kind of like the opposite of a lot of traditional web systems where you like get DDoS like you get too much traffic. And things go down. Whereas here, if you have a whole bunch of demand, you’re probably also going to have a whole bunch of supply of websites of copies of your website being stored around. So I guess that’s the long answer. The short answer is right now because it’s early. It doesn’t work that well. But the moment something gets popular, it’ll work quite well. So it has this kind of like opposite of the regular internet approach. As it scales as it scales, it gets better.
Rob McNealy
Is there a way to then to use unstoppable for the DNS, and then just pointed to a normal web server host somewhere?
Brad Kam – Unstoppable Domains
Sure, you could do that I think you would lose, lose a little bit of the advantage, though, because what we’re really the purpose of all this is to have a censorship resistant internet is to have essentially self custody of both your domain and your website so that neither of those can be points of failure where you have to rely on other companies like you control that stuff. And no one can really stop you from publishing A browser might say, like, Hey, this is a really, you know, you know, this is illegal, what you’re doing, and we don’t want to show this record. So there’s always like that level of place where somebody could try to, you know, block you from being seen. But that’s different than somebody just being able to take you down. Like right now, registrar can just say, we don’t like what you’re doing, we’re going to, we’re going to, we’re going to take the domain away, you know, right now, Amazon Web Services can just switch you off. And, you know, of course, you know, in the US, I don’t think this is, you know, as big of a problem, although there are certainly issues here as well, but around the world, there’s, you know, all kinds of issues with these tools. So,
Rob McNealy
so do you think that going forward, especially with crypto, do you expect that there’s gonna be actual censorship of different types of cryptocurrencies now, and I’m not trying to argue with you, I’m trying to play devil’s advocate a little bit because, you know, I’m involved with a crypto project as well. And the one thing you hear about everything from all these kryptos essentially censorship resistance censorship resistance, the most important thing, blah, blah, blah. The question is, you don’t really hear about too many kryptos actually being censored. Yet, do you expect that that will change in the future?
Brad Kam – Unstoppable Domains
Well, I think the very nature of it is censorship resistant, like so for example, like Bitcoin and aetherium, do not require permission in order to get an account from anyone, they’re able to be sent anywhere to anyone. So they’ve already proven their censorship resistant use case in the market very early on. And this was very controversial. One of the early use cases of Bitcoin was sending money to WikiLeaks when they got shut off. And regardless of how you feel about them, the fact that there was no way for anyone to stop that was, in a sense of first the first time that somebody was ever able to publicly fundraise for a lot of money completely against the will of the United States and various other countries. And they had no way to stop because of its censorship resistance. So it’s really about like, how do the tools work? And I think you can do the same thing that you can do for currency with domain names. Right now. domain names On the sort of fundamental level, they get taken away, they can get taken away. And if you change the power structure, then you kind of change the entire ecosystem. So that’s that’s the idea is like cryptocurrency is like a safe, open source permissionless space to build tools on top of where everybody can, everybody can join in, everybody can be a part of it. And that’s part of the reason why I, it’s important on the fundamental layer. It’s not like every single person is getting censored, they’re not. But we all benefit from the open source, the open source tech because of this, like social, social, you know, social cooperation thing. We’re all working on the same stuff. We’re all building stuff that’s more and more interoperable. There’s innovation all over the world, like so. It’s not just about the people getting censored, although they matter. And I think in the on the website side, it’s a pretty big deal. Like there’s, you know, a law in Turkey that says that a read that a hosting service is not allowed to happen. Have the word gay on any website content automatically pre banned naked as well. You see a lot of this in particular, there’s been some pretty weird cases with startups using l y dot L y. And when the Islamic in Libya came, took over, they started taking down some websites, including porn websites and things like that. Your basic internet infrastructure should not have those kinds of random points of failure, where people can its problem is people, like people that you shouldn’t have anyone in charge of what’s okay to say. Applications can still create an experience where they, you know, remove the harshest or the most offensive voices if they choose, but it’s still a better internet for everybody. If I can then go choose a different browser. If I don’t like what they do, and I think that makes a lot of sense.
Rob McNealy
Do you feel that Going forward, as demand starts increasing that, that the speed to deliver these on, you know, unsensible website, do you think that’s going to improve over time? And you said, there’s gonna be more options? What options are there going to be for? You know, besides IPFS?
Brad Kam – Unstoppable Domains
Yeah, well, so there’s there are, you know, several in the works that are, you know, advancing very quickly. ipfs is a couple of years ahead. But there’s there’s several that are advancing very quickly. And I think the idea is, is that you’re going to want to have your content on maybe three to five, just a sort of like an extra, an extra safety layer. But in regards to kind of the speed and performance, it’s really about how many people are storing and sharing that website. And so that’s about, in part how popular the website is. And so I think right now, the only problem is, is is not so much the way the tools work, it’s that there aren’t enough popular websites yet. And those are coming And I think the tools are just getting Easy enough where people are starting non technical people are starting to build stuff all over the place. And that’s been kind of one of the new steps. That’s happened really just in 2020. I would say, even before now it wasn’t. And now we’ve got this thing with browsers. So Opera browser, which 80 million users on their Android app can now just type in a dark crypto domain, just like they would a.com. And that just happened today. That was kind of the big, big, decentralized web news for us today. So I think it’s really just that there aren’t enough. There aren’t enough websites yet. But the stuff the stuff actually works, you would just need a lot of people storing it in order to get really, really good censorship resistance and really good uptime.
Rob McNealy
So what do you see about protecting websites from denial of service attacks? does this affect that in any way or help with that at all?
Brad Kam – Unstoppable Domains
I yeah. Because essentially what happens is if you get a whole bunch of traffic, it as long as that well, so It doesn’t, it doesn’t automatically prevent malicious actors. But you can do things like say, I will only permission these wallets or wallets with these criteria to visit a website in the first place. So you can create like easy kind of locks on your website if you don’t want to, if you if you’re at risk of those types of things. Ultimately, I would just say that, in general, if you think about, like, what’s really happening if Amazon Web Services, you know, used to store essentially all the website data on their servers, and now all of a sudden, we allow anybody in the world who has extra storage space to offer it up to anybody in the world. We’re going to get a marketplace and it’s going to be a lot more efficient than what we’ve got over here. So I think it’s just that like this model of open source marketplace, you know, peer to peer marketplace for storage space, just I think it just makes the internet better and basically every way over the long term. You know, if we’re talking if we’re saying like, you know how performant is it over the next year, I would say, you know, it’s going to be a little, it’s going to be a little inconsistent, depending on geography, depending on the specific website, some websites are going to work far better than others, because they have more, they have more nodes sharing them. So you’re going to have these kinds of clunky things. So it’s kinda like 1990s level internet. But the point is, is that it works like it does work. We do have a decentralized web, that functions, it’s going to need all the tools and it’s not it’s going to need a lot of love before it, you know, it can really, you know, migrate over the previous, you know, the previous kind of internet infrastructure stuff. But it does work for the censorship resistant use cases. And it does work for daps you know, cryptocurrency applications that, you know, are trying to remove all the points of failure in their applications, but they still have the domain name problem, and they still have the website on Amazon Web Services problem. So it solves, you know, these these two key problems for them. And then we’ve also got the youtubers so the crypto YouTubers have you know been getting their videos taken down. And you just put up those videos on decentralized web and then no one can take them down. Now we’re going to need aggregators to make it easy for, you know, for everybody to find that stuff, YouTube’s great at the discovery part. So obviously we have some work to do. It’s not going to work tomorrow, but you can go ahead and put them there. Especially if YouTube takes him down. Definitely go put them up. And you can do new things like you can charge for them, you charge 25 cents for them. You could have a tip button in case you don’t want to charge but it’d be great if it’s easy when someone likes your video that they can just easily tip you crypto. There’s all kinds of new stuff you can do.
Rob McNealy
So are your unstoppable domains, would you are they compatible with things like NginX and CloudFlare
Brad Kam – Unstoppable Domains
CloudFlare has done a lot of has done a lot of things to integrate with Etherum and IPFS. So CloudFlare is is kind of very far along I would need to look a little closer at what engine x is doing. I just don’t have I don’t, I don’t actually have enough personal knowledge. They’re
Rob McNealy
very cool. So where would you say you are in your roadmap? What’s next for you? You got the opera integration done now, which is a huge thing. Where what’s the next big thing you guys are working on?
Brad Kam – Unstoppable Domains
Yeah. So we’ve got, you know, we’ve got our registries out, we’ve got crypto and dot zil. We’ve got over 200,000 domains registered. So they’ve been started. That process started about a year ago. So there’s domains that have been being being registered unclaimed ever since then. We have been mostly focused on the wallets so there’s like my ether wallet, trust wallet, my crypto coin Oh, me atomic, several others coming soon, where you can send money using the domains. There’s also a Chrome extension. So it’s a unstoppable Chrome extension. So if you prefer to use Chrome you can use it also works in brave and then opera. So that’s the that’s the that’s the native announcement of the first browser. The first major browser to ever support a non DNS domain name. Attention so far as we know because it’s pretty much been all DNS before this it’s not just about blockchain domain you know blockchain Domain Name System they’ve never supported anything that wasn’t you know just part of this this one kind of I can I can control DNS system now it’s all about making the tool is easier to build build websites. So that’s a that’s a big focus there’s templates like I mentioned for decentralized Wix there’s people at Cairo crypto you can easily launch your own decks there’s a bunch more stuff like that that are that are coming tools just to make it easy to build websites.
Rob McNealy
Very cool stuff. Bradley cams. Where can people find out more about your domains unstoppable?
Brad Kam – Unstoppable Domains
Well, you can do UnstoppableDomains.cam. or check us out on Twitter, UnstoppableWeb or Telegram UnstoppableDomains. There’s always a conversation going on in there.
Rob McNealy
Very good. Bradley, thank you so much for coming on the show today. I really enjoyed our conversation.
Brad Kam – Unstoppable Domains
Thanks a bunch.
Episode Links
Lenni Uitto – Xelot Film Transcript
Note: This transcript was automatically generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and therefore typos may be present.
Rob McNealy
Hey, today guys, this is Rob McNealy and I have an awesome guest on the show today. It’s someone I’ve known for a while, and I think it’s gonna be a fun show. So I want you to listen along. We are talking today with Lenny you Ito is the founder of zealot films. He is an indie filmmaker, director, producer and actor. And he is someone I would even call a personal friend, and definitely a colleague and so welcome to the show. Wendy. How are you doing, buddy?
Lenni Uitto – Xelot Film
Thanks, so good know Glad to be here.
Rob McNealy
Well, I’m glad that you could take time out of your quarantine to take your time with us. Seems like everybody’s got a lot of spare time these days to make content on the internet.
Lenni Uitto – Xelot Film
Definitely,
Rob McNealy
But, so for the people who don’t know you yet, give us a little bit of background by tell us about you.
Lenni Uitto – Xelot Film
A little bit background. I mean, filmmaking, it wasn’t my first thing I was. I’m a software engineer, honestly. So I’m a little bit of a nerd.
Rob McNealy
A little about you.
Lenni Uitto – Xelot Film
I know. I’m like six foot four. I’m a big guy. Like, I got into filmmaking about like, what was it like four years ago? And well, four years. Okay, so we gotta go further back. I started I was I like to camp. I like to go camping. I found that I like to also make videos and edit them and it kind of like, it scratched an itch that I had. And so I found that I really liked doing that and then I I started taking an acting class with a local actor here in Utah, a cool guy, Jim Stevens. And it’s kind of where my my whole film career started. And I made my first short film called The trap, which is part of the WR o L series. Excuse me. Um, but yeah, so started out. And that’s where I’ve kind of gone that, but that’s trajectory and started making short films and other film related things. And I’ve been doing it for about four years. I’d say four years professionally, but I mean, probably more like 10 years, like goofing around with filmmaking. doing like a YouTubecamping videos and stuff. But.
Rob McNealy
Well, you know, everybody’s got to start somewhere, right? I always joke around and say that as a grown up, I went to welding school because I didn’t get a chance to learn shop class when I was a kid. And like as it is, I’m like, I’m like, I want to learn something new. And I just had this interest and it just kind of I took a little welding class started goofing around with a welder and I’m, like, really want to learn welding because I’m really passionate about making art and metallurgy and being able to make stuff. And then next thing, you know, I’m like, in a full blown, you know, act, you know, not acting but welding program. And so I understand, like, you know, it’s interesting, seeing a lot of people that are older, like my age and your age, that are trying new things, you know, and just following their passion and kind of finding things that help them express their creativity. And I think that’s kind of a I think it’s an important thing.
Lenni Uitto – Xelot Film
Yeah, for me. I mean, I’m the kind of guy that I like to get stuff done. So I mean, I like trying new things. Like if there’s, if I got to fix my car, like, I’m happy to go and learn how to do it. So like learning something new is kind of fun for me, and not expecting others to do it for me, I guess. So that’s kind of where I like to do a lot more than just, you know, I don’t just Direct to film or accident film all end up editing as well as editing as well and doing other parts of the filmmaking because it’s a huge process. There’s a lot involved when you actually start to look at it. But I’m always puzzled. I mean,
Rob McNealy
Well in my limited exposure to working around, you know, making videos and things like that is you don’t realize there’s you know, there’s the artistic piece right, the whole warm and fuzzy artist kind of nonsense that goes along with it right? They always hear the stereotype of bad actors are always in in this spacey artistic zone. But all right, maybe not. But that’s my side view of it. But But what you really find there’s a ton of technical stuff that goes into it too. That is just like, you need to know how to assemble this piece of equipment you need to know how to work this piece of software. Tell me a little bit about that. What are all the pieces you’ve had to learn about to get where you are right now.
Lenni Uitto – Xelot Film
That you go so in depth with that I mean, the camera department, you know, there’s so much to learn about, technically how to use the camera as well as like artistically how to convey a message with movement and with different lenses. And like, there’s just, there’s, there’s a huge depth to that, that you can explain about cameras. And then I mean, then when going to editing, like editing is also a huge area of expertise that like, you can go and get yourself a Novus editor that knows how to put together a little clip, but then you can also get an editor that can do something that’s really amazing. I mean, I’m not sure how familiar your audiences with films and stuff but like Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, if you ever watched that film, that film is like, that shows you how doing some crazy editing can make things funny, as well as really cool. So I mean, there’s the editing aspect, there’s What else? I mean, there’s even like, the artistic aspect of the costumes that like things that people are wearing during your film that make it like better also vocations. Like, there’s so much you have to like really nail to, like, make something amazing. And it takes a while to learn. I don’t think I’ve ever even touched it, you know, I’m still I’m still learning myself. So, but I’m getting there.
Rob McNealy
So, um, these days all the rage is pandemic and the whole seems like everything’s melting down like the economy. We got a global pandemic now. It’s like a whole bunch of big movies slapped together in reality and you got a weird corrupt politicians being inept. It’s just like a really bad movie. You know, it’s almost like wag the dog really happened. kind of stuff. And, and it’s finally interesting part of the film and artistic things that you’ve worked on with me films have been kind of in that apocalyptic kind of feel and journey as far as the topic and can you talk a little bit about, you know, you know your series that you’ve been working on, and what kind of was the genesis idea for that?
Lenni Uitto – Xelot Film
You’ll find that most filmmakers, they make stuff they enjoy, like they like to make, and that for me, I love sci fi eyes. I love post apocalyptic stuff. It’s a lot of what I really am drawn, drawn to when I want to watch something. And so for me personally, that’s what kind of made me make the first episode of WRAL was that I just love post apocalyptic stuff. So I made the first one and then I realized, like, there could be more depth to this, this world to these characters. And so we made a second one and that was the loaner. And after the loaner, then we’re like, Okay, this This can go even more. And like we’ve got all these bad guys are obviously part of this world. And so then like the third one was the town business with what is called. And it basically shows you the bad guys, the leader of them and kind of the business that they’re dealing with in this post apocalyptic world. And then after that, the third one, we went back to kind of the roots of the whole how the whole apocalypse began, and what set it all going and it kind of follows one of the bad guys and his introduction into this bad guy game. And But yeah, I mean, like, we just started going with it. And now we kind of have like this huge story and world that we’ve built. And so now we’re writing in and it’s kind of like we’ve, we’ve got rules as to how things happen and what can happen and stuff. So it’s kind of fun. Like we’ve built this imaginary world. No, but
Rob McNealy
I like imaginary worlds. One of the things that I find that’s fascinating about, you know, telling a story with film is and especially with the indie stuff, because I’ve been on a couple of your shoots now and seeing some of the stuff that you guys have done. It’s been very impressive. And it’s really fascinating how you can really tell a story. And and to me, I you know, I’m not creative, like you guys, right? But I think like a business some days, my wife says, I’m full of shit. I don’t know if that counts. But, uh, but whatever the thing is, as I see is that that the skills that you’re developing have direct applicability to business, and telling commercials and building commercials and telling stories of companies of startups of kryptos in our case, and you’ve been working on some of the first stuff for Tosca, and so we plan is as a project we want to use the basically the Indian media me, you know medium to go through and tell our story in funny and humorous ways. And tell me a little bit about how you could see filmmaking in general. Help people in their small businesses tell stories.
Lenni Uitto – Xelot Film
Well, I mean, if you go back to this is called film, business and film business succeeds, not only with just film and so there’s a huge business aspect to it all and knowing how to market get your story across. So it goes hand in hand I think with like, what we did with the #TUSC commercial. We’re trying to get everyone to be introduced to #TUSC first of all so that people can learn about it and know how its utilized by the average person, not just the crypto person because #TUSC is it can be used by whoever and it’s got value, it’s money. I mean, it’s got value. So, but getting people to laugh and I think that’s common is a natural, mutual thing. And most people get it. And so for us, like, coming up with a comedic commercial for #TUSC was a great way business wise to introduce people to the cryptocurrency.
Rob McNealy
I think makes a good point. It’s like a relatable, like, everybody uses money for something, even if they you know, and even digital. I mean, you look at we most people already are used to the concept of digital money with like credit cards and debit cards and other payment systems like PayPal, Venmo and things like that. And to me, most people don’t care how it works under the hood. It’s just being able to use it and transfer value electronically. I mean, that’s all crypto is it’s just another way to transfer value. But I think one of the things that I really like about what you guys are doing was Sell it and how we’re working together. Going forward on these, you know, new kind of commercials is I think it’s important that people understand that if you’re going to get mass adoption with crypto or with any business, let’s just say I mean, it doesn’t have to be crypto, but it’s something that I’m familiar with is that you got to be able to make your system your product, your project, relatable to the everyday person. And I think, and you got to make it interesting. If you just get up there and say, yeah, we’re blockchain and there’s digits and you know, Merkle trees and SHA256, and people don’t care.
Lenni Uitto – Xelot Film
People won’t sit there listening to that
Rob McNealy
People don’t care about. People just don’t care. It’s just not relatable. It’s like, okay, whatever. You know, people don’t understand that there’s this whole thing called swift and that’s how banks move money around in the real world. People don’t care. They don’t want to know Just not interesting. And and the problem is, I think a lot of people, especially tech guys, and you get this, and I’m kind of a tech guy is that a lot of people? You know, they go through and tech guys are really into the tech. Right. And but they, I think sometimes they forget that most people don’t care about the tech. They just want their stuff to work. And so we get hung up on the thing that we like, Mm hmm. And I always say you gotta you gotta meet people on their level. And, and I think with making things funny people can relate to funny stuff. People have a harder time, I think, at least when you’re dealing with the masses have a harder time trying to get excited about the technical stuff. It’s like, I don’t know, trying to get them. You know, you know, people that are really into like anything sports or automobile racing or whatever you get, you pick someone who’s got a real passion about those things. And if they’re talking to other people that are also passionate about those things, it makes absolute sense. on how they focus on that one topic, but when you’re talking to people that don’t care about sports, or don’t care about automobile racing, you got to figure out another way to reach them. And I think that indie media and I think film specifically, is a great way to do that.
Lenni Uitto – Xelot Film
That’s, honestly what you’re trying to do with a film is relate with your audience, get them to, to find it important. And that’s, yeah, so that’s what you do with that medium as well. You know, try and get your audience to relate to it. And so..
Rob McNealy
So, getting into film, how did you get how did you get your start? So you said you started getting into this about 10 years ago, and you started working for money four years ago? Mm hmm.
Lenni Uitto – Xelot Film
So yeah, 10 years ago, I was was playing with a cell phone when I went camping, and then put together a little YouTube video from it and then I think I moved to like a GoPro after that, and then from the GoPro. I do, I was just like a candidate. RX was it. It was like a little camera, a little camcorder, you know, one with a flip out screen. And so I’d use that to set up the tripod and put it places and, and film, little expeditions out to the woods and stuff. And then that after that kind of when I got to filming, like more short film narrative stuff, that’s when I got like a, a seven s and a seven s to Sony, which is a nice DSLR. And that’s what I started filming on. I’ve kind of moved to a Blackmagic. And I’m not sure why I’m talking about cameras, but I’m sure.
Rob McNealy
People that are into cameras really understand that.
Lenni Uitto – Xelot Film
Totally. Yeah, yeah. So I mean, like 10 years ago started just like, Yeah, I would say four years ago is when I really got serious about it. I started like, looking up how to do filmmaking like all the difference theory and stuff behind it. Just Yeah, that’s it. Closer.
Rob McNealy
So say I so say someone listening here will had an interest in film, do they need to go to film school? No. Did you go to film school? How do you get started? I mean, if say like, I just have an interest, what do I need to do? Where do…
Lenni Uitto – Xelot Film
If you’ve got the drive, then understand that you’re able to do it all. Now, do you have the time to do it all that’s really what it comes down to? Because it’s a lot of self learning. So I did, I would watch a lot of videos on YouTube with, there’s a YouTube channel called Film Riot. But there’s also a lot of other good channels out there that teach filmmaking. And so I started with that stuff and film, right. It’s cool because they goof around. They have fun while they’re teaching stuff. So you learn and you laugh at the same time. So I really like their content. So I don’t think you need school. School definitely gets you connections, but you can make connections through other means and so I made connections through acting classes. Meeting actors and then making films and then like, some people knew other people like and then like, if you kind of just really dive straight into it, you start to create, like, you start making friendships and meeting people, just all around you because everyone interacts in the film community here. And so as soon as you dive in, you can start meeting people who you can work with and collaborate with.
Rob McNealy
So one of the things that I really liked when I started kind of, you know, dipping my toe into the community, right is that there’s so many people that are really supportive and just want to help out and really just help support the projects, you know, sometimes for cheap, sometimes for free. But that’s what’s interesting is that there’s a whole community of people that are really passionate about helping other people succeed and learn and and and there’s a lot of collaboration is so far. That’s It’s been real exciting for me
Lenni Uitto – Xelot Film
Right. Now that’s, I there’s there’s tons of people that just they want to learn. They want to make something. You just have to meet them. And once you meet them, then you guys can start working on stuff. And that’s kind of what I’ve been doing.
Rob McNealy
So long term, what would you say your your professional filmmaking kind of goals are?
Lenni Uitto – Xelot Film
Long term. I mean, I want to make a feature film. That’s kind of a that’s a main goal that I’ve got right now. When I do it, I want to do it. Well, though, that’s kind of my main motto is, I got to do it well, because if I just do something, and it’s, you know, kind of crappy, I’m not gonna be satisfied with that. And I don’t think it’ll represent truly what I can do with it. And the people that work with me could do that. As a long term, I’d like to make feature films. Right now I’m doing short film, like episodic stuff, because that’s what I can afford to do because filmmaking is expensive.
Rob McNealy
It’s kind of like owning a boat. It is keep dying. I keep getting upgrade, keep in the tail kind of like guns too, right? You just gotta keep upgrading those things. It’s expensive. And that’s one of the things that the equipment is pretty expensive. What would be? That’s another question. I guess. What would be a good budget? Say you wanted to make a short film? how cheap and what’s a realistic expense? Like we’re talking every everyone’s getting paid? Are we talking? It’s a passion project, a passion project? If I want to just make my own film, and it’s a passion project, how much could it cost, like a short indie kind of thing.
Lenni Uitto – Xelot Film
So Bug Out. Bug Out was probably the more expensive, but it was a few grand but then you could go to like What we shot not too long ago, which was second episode of Airborne and we had like, you, me, Musa like four or five, like it was three people. Three, four people. It’s four people. And we shot that with zero budget. I mean, it was just food, food was really the budget. People got fed who participated. So I mean, it just depends on what you can get, what people are capable of and what people are passionate about. If you’ve got passionate people, I think you could do a film an amazing film for a very small amount of money As long as they’re happy with what they’re doing. You know.
Rob McNealy
So do you think the technology has come a long way though, so for instance, you know, I’ve seen things that are unlike shot on an iPhone now that like Wow, that’s pretty impressive stuff. So technologically, it seems that the the editing software and some of the hardware that is pretty affordable seems to be Offering really almost, you know, cinema level quality in some instances, what would you say to that.
Lenni Uitto – Xelot Film
Um, I think that there’s always a place for a professional camera. And I say that because like iPhones where they’re at right now they don’t do the same stuff that you know professional lenses and stuff where you’ve got like the bokeh or you got the blurry background up here. and stuff. I’m pretty sure this isn’t that blurry. It’s still somewhat in focus on mine, but most cameras, they don’t allow you to do artistic stuff, when they’re, I mean, like your iPhone, like, it can take some artistic photos, but I feel like it can’t do the shallow depth of field that a professional camera can’t and so and then also like colors like the really professional cameras that cost $20,000 to a little bit more, you’re getting a lot more color in the data that is picked up by it and so You can kind of capitalize on that. It’s like if you take a picture of the sunset, you’re like, it doesn’t look the same when I when I, when I could see it, like the camera can only get so much those colors that are that are in that sunset. And when you get a better camera, it starts picking up more and more of it. So it just kind of it also costs a lot more.
Rob McNealy
Always the problem.
Lenni Uitto – Xelot Film
I mean, you can rent them though. So if you wanted to rent a really expensive camera, it’s like three 400 bucks per day.
Rob McNealy
So there’s so you can then figure out a budget if you want that level and move to that next. So what would say you want to break into the business and you want to do a film? The one thing I don’t know how do you get the How do you get distribution? What are the strategies to get distribution in the indie film?
Lenni Uitto – Xelot Film
Oh, man, that’s, that’s complicated. That’s kind of where I’m at. Like, I think when I make my first feature film, I’m gonna really start looking at distribution. There’s Obviously, distribution through Amazon Prime, which you can do yourself doesn’t cost you anything, it literally is just filling out some forms and then it gets sent to Amazon Prime. YouTube is another medium that you can put stuff on there. And you can create an audience through that, through people that find it. It’s really finding it. I mean, distribution is a way to reach your audience. And most filmmakers, they make something and they don’t know how to show it to people, like they don’t know how to reach their audience. So they make something and then it kind of dies in the water unless I can find distribution. And so it really comes down to how much of the filmmaking process you can do if you know how to market you can get your stuff to people a little better than someone who has no idea how to market it’s a business So, but distribution like there’s there’s also things like Sundance, if you can get to Sundance, which is a complicated thing. But if you can get to Sundance, that’s where people usually sell their feature films. that’s usually where people make a little bit of money. But an indie film, I say, it’s extremely difficult to make any money off your film. Not until you’re in Hollywood, are you actually making money that like, you know, is an excess, like, it feels like when you’re in any film, you make money, but it pays back exactly what you put into the film kind of thing. So it’s like, you didn’t really make money and stuff, you’re just kind of breaking even. So and that’s where, you know, hopefully the you start getting side hustles and start doing things like commercials and where you get paid. You know, maybe not as maybe not as fun. But right. It’s getting you paid and you’re when you start a film career, and you start meeting people, you start making things you start making a name for yourself, you start making, you’re building that relationship with the community. And so people start seeing seeing things. And so, yeah, you’re always, you’re always doing that. But at some point, like after you’ve made something awesome, and like, you may not have made a lot of money off of it, but you did get people who want to work with you or something, so that then now you’re, you know, at the next level that you need to be.
Rob McNealy
So one of the things that, you know, I’ve heard a lot is how do you start like, do you? You want to be an actor or you want to be a director, you don’t want to go to film school? Like literally, where do I start? I say I live in Ohio. But I don’t want to move to Hollywood. What can I do if I live in? Oh, you know how old I don’t wanna live in Ohio. But let’s just say I lived in Ohio and I wanted to make films what where would I start? Or would I’d meet where would I meet other actors or people that are in this space?
Lenni Uitto – Xelot Film
So Well, do you got friends who are actors?
Rob McNealy
Well, Pretend I don’t.
Lenni Uitto – Xelot Film
You don’t. So you’re literally just a person in the woods in the way that I like to say like you should reach out to your friends when you’re just starting because like, their level of acting is probably the same level of your filmmaking. So, like, meet at that same level and make something it might, it might be crap, but you guys learn something in the process, and then the next one you do make it better. And steppingstones, it’s really what it is. And so like, if you want to meet people who act then there’s Facebook groups that I mean, Utah has Facebook groups, that’s kind of how I got involved with a lot of other people who I didn’t know and then also I was taking an acting class and I had to find that acting class how did I find it Facebook group? So I mean, there’s so many social media methods to to connect with people nowadays that it’s kind of amazing that you can just find stuff at the at your computer. It’s nice, nice
Rob McNealy
Yeah, I think, you know, even like background acting, you know, sometimes there’s one group. That’s kind of where I started, you know, and mentally I met you a few years ago doing an acting class. And so, you know, go online and see if you can find an acting class in town there. And at least, you know, from what I’ve seen, there’s acting classes in every state. That seems like they’re pretty common, where people have an interest. But, you know, it’s interesting, because there’s a lot of cool stuff happening out there. And and I think, you know, as technology gets more decentralized, and the technology is just getting better, I mean, let’s just be honest, something that would have been 10 years ago, $100,000 cameras now like $5,000. And so you can get some amazing quality stuff if you want to buy your own cameras and stuff really, really cheap now and the software some of the best software out there is even cheaper, free as well for editing and things like that, so but I’m really Uh, I’m you know, I’m learning and you know, I’m getting it’s funny because I’m getting the bug to make stuff in film now that I’ve been kind of working around it a little more and I’m like, Oh, I kind of think I dig this. And so I can see that is gonna cost me money. It’s just gonna cost Yeah. But I take my hobbies very seriously. Definitely So, so Lenny, where can people find out more about you?
Lenni Uitto – Xelot Film
Well, there’s YouTube channel about me or find out about Zola film and the stuff mentioned. Like how about both? I’ve got an Instagram. That’s a great place to start post a lot of like projects. I’m working on pictures from them. I keep that interesting. And then there’s art film on YouTube. So if you look up x e l ot film on YouTube, you’ll find a link to all the videos and stuff I’ve been making. We get Can you show a teaser of why well can you give you that And then you could play it during this. I will link I will post it on the page posted on the page. Okay, cool.
Rob McNealy
Yeah, that’s all embedded. Absolutely. Wonderful. Well, Lenny, thank you so much for your time and Sir, you have a wonderful night.
Lenni Uitto – Xelot Film
You too and everyone else who watched and hung out for this little podcast. Thanks, guys, whatever, whatever it is. This little chat.
Rob McNealy
Alright, let’s say you have a great one.
Episode Links
Lewis Dartnell – The Knowledge Transcript
Note: This transcript was automatically generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and therefore typos may be present.
Rob McNealy
This podcast is sponsored by Tusk, an open source non Ico crypto project powered by community. Check them out on the web at task dot network. That’s TUSC dot network. The Rob McNealy program is the nexus of cryptocurrency, blockchain technology and entrepreneurship. Now, welcome to the program. Today, folks, we’re gonna have a really good show. We are talking to Professor Lewis Darnell. He is professor of astrobiology at the University of Westminster in the UK. And he is a best selling author and his latest book is called the knowledge how to rebuild civilization in the aftermath of a cataclysm, and I can’t think of a better topic, or that’s more prescient than that is right now. So, Louis, welcome to the show. How are you today?
Lewis Dartnell – The Knowledge
That Rob I’m doing well. I’m self isolating in my flat in West London at the moment. I’m not getting outdoors. Nearly As much as I’d like to at the moment,
Rob McNealy
So that means you get less sun than you normally would I’m guessing and..
Lewis Dartnell – The Knowledge
less less less vitamin D. Yeah, well we’ve so we live in London we don’t have anything even remotely approaches a garden or a backyard. But we have got a little bit of terrorists on the roof. So we have about a 20 square foot of outside space that we’ve been taking our lunch on, just to get just get a little bit of the sunlight.
Rob McNealy
Well, I think that’s really important because we personally in my household, we’ve been self isolating for approximately two weeks now. And but even at night, my wife and I are still going for walks in the neighborhood. And if there’s somebody else we see we walk way around them and give them a wide berth. But
Lewis Dartnell – The Knowledge
Basically, yeah, so I’ve been I’ve been taking runs along the river running along the River Thames between the two bridges, but it’s just getting like busier and busier. I think people are starting to get a bit Cabin Fever cooped up at home and going out again, which you know, as you all know, is The last thing you want to be doing in terms of social distance, and you want to be kidding apart from people not congregating. Even if you’re hungry eating outside,
Rob McNealy
I couldn’t imagine what it would be like for people in major cities like New York and London to have to self isolate like that. I think it would be really hard if I have a pretty big lot for my yard. And if I couldn’t get out there and the sun and work around the garden, we’re getting ready for the year, it would be really, really hard. If I couldn’t leave the house. That would be I would go nuts. I absolutely would. So tell us a little bit about your background.
Lewis Dartnell – The Knowledge
Yeah, so I’m a research professor and summit University of Westminster here in London. And my research field, as you mentioned, is in a very new field of science called Astro biology, which is all about looking at the possibility of there being life beyond the earth. So my actual background in science is in biology. I was at Oxford. We in biological sciences, my PhD University College London and What we’re trying to do with astrobiology is extend our understanding or knowledge of life on Earth of hardy bacteria, and the conditions they can survive under. And extending that knowledge to see if there could be the possibility of material life microbial life beyond the earth. So in particular, I spend my time thinking about our next door neighbor planets, which is Mars, and could they be highly bacteria in the dusty desert surface soil of Mars? And if is there, and importantly, how could you detect it? How could you design some kind of experiment or instrument you strapped to the front of the Mars rover to look for signs of life while it’s there? So NASA is launching this summer. It’s Mars 2020 rover, and the European Space Agency was due to launch this summer as well. It’s ExoMars rover, but that’s had to be pushed back two years to the next launch window. But that’s that’s the bread and butter of what I do. I’m a scientist. I Help and hunt for aliens, if you like in terms of Heidi bacteria, fossilized life forms and bio signatures, we call it on Mars. But alongside that research and having PhD students working with me and running a laboratory, I do a lot of science communication. I write books about things I think are of interest or of interest to the general public. And my last book, in fact, I’ve had a new one out since but my last book is one we’re talking about, which is called the knowledge and as you said, it’s it’s becoming, unfortunately, particularly pertinent right now with this coronavirus global pandemic. But what the knowledge does as a science book is it’s not really a prepper book or survival manual. It’s a science book that uses the conceit uses the premise of some kind of global catastrophe, some kind of Apocalypse, that pushes the reset button. And you are now part of a post apocalyptic survival community, trying to work out how to make and do things, everything from scratch yourself, how? How does our civilization run behind the scenes providing stuff for us making things appear magically on the shelves of the supermarket? How does that work? by imagining that it stops working tomorrow, and then therefore trying to explore all the science and technology through the pages of the knowledge this book?
Rob McNealy
You know, it’s weird. I actually think about weird things like that, because I’m just built experiments. Yeah. You know, I do a lot of that a little bit back to your, you know, study of microbiology, and then in foreign places, do you look at things like on Earth, like in Antarctica or sea floor vents are those places to kind of get an idea of the kinds of biological agents or, you know, microbes that live in harsh environments?
Lewis Dartnell – The Knowledge
Yeah, absolutely. So a lot of my work is focused on what we call extremophiles. So extreme tolerant, extremely loving microorganisms on earth. And these are kinda like survival superheroes, there are bacteria growing at 120 degrees Celsius. So beyond the normal boiling point of water, there are bugs that can still survive those incredibly hot temperatures around hydrothermal vents on the sea floor, or what’s particularly relevant to my studies. And the possibility of life on Mars is by going to the most Mars like places here on Earth. So very cold places very dry places, like Antarctica, you mentioned and in particular, the Antarctic dry valleys, the McMurdo dry valleys, which is one of the driest spots anywhere on the planet is in Antarctica. It’s night by the South Pole, but it’s not covered in ice and snow. It is incredibly dry. So it’s got a Martian like environment. So I’ve got samples From those Antarctic sites by studying, analyze and lab, finding how the life survives that environment, and importantly, what signs of its existence, it betrays itself with what bio signatures we can detect. It’s not just based like Antarctica, the Atacama Desert in Chile in South America is also exceedingly dry as a high powered core looking, we can also look at life that comes from, you know, top of mountains, over acidic places, very alkaline places, like the soda lakes in Kenya, or I grew up, I grew up in Nairobi. So a lot of astrobiology is trying to understand as much as we can about the survival limits of life on earth. And what is what is the total range of climactic conditions and environmental conditions that biology can tolerate?
Rob McNealy
But I’d love to have a show just on that because I’m going to come back. Well, my my undergrad degree was in geography. So I was really into earth science. Anyway, just kind You know, as a hobby kind of thing, and
Lewis Dartnell – The Knowledge
we know what we can come back to this in another episode, but the new book that came out in paperback a few weeks ago. It’s called origins, how the earth shaped human history. And that is right up your streets. There’s very much a geography book about how things like plate tectonics, or continental drift or atmospheric circulation, or the distribution of metals and resources have deeply influenced the human story from from our very evolution, across thousands of years of the development of civilization and current affairs and modern politics. today. That’s very much geography.
Rob McNealy
We call that’s another topic of population geography. And I took that course in uni.
Lewis Dartnell – The Knowledge
So yeah, it looks like Guns, Germs, steel by Jared Diamond or tuck ins by Yuval. Noah Harare, it’s along similar lines. It’s kind of big history, kind of human geography type crossover interdisciplinary.
Rob McNealy
It’s a good stuff and I actually fascinated that you know, you’ve got back from A lot of academics have a hard time, kind of going from the theoretical, really, really narrow and specified niches of their, their topic and then being able to extrapolate how that affects the bigger picture. I think a lot of people miss that in academia. So you actually are kind of cool,
Lewis Dartnell – The Knowledge
right? Yeah. So like that I’m cool. But like that it’s important to do that.
Rob McNealy
I do think you’re cool. So. So the book at hand, the the knowledge tell us about the things that we need to know about to rebuild civilization.
Lewis Dartnell – The Knowledge
Yeah. So this thought experiment of imagine everything has disappeared, everything you take for granted? And how do you start pulling yourself back up by your own bootstraps? How’d you get the resources and the materials and the substances that you need to support your lifestyle and that of your society, you’re rebooting from scratch, you’re recovering. So in a sense, what I’m talking about in the knowledge is Could you do Minecraft for real? assuming you’re not a prepper, you notice a survivalist. You haven’t stockpiled things to keep you going for for several years. And even if you are a prepper, things are going to run out in your own stockpile sooner or later. And when that happens, you’re going to have to ask yourself a question and know the answer, which is, how do I do that myself? How do I make that myself? Where do I go to to extract what I need from the natural environment to meet these things. So in each of the chapters of the knowledge, I’ve looked at the different sector, different areas of our everyday lives, whether that is the basic chemistry that supports us, or technology for communication, or for transport, or agriculture and where food comes from so you starve to death. And the beginning of every chapter is absolute. Back to Basics, fundamental type stuff. This is what you most need to know in a company. densed boil it down to its essence kind of way. And then over the course of every chapter, we allow that fundamental knowledge to expand and kind of unfurl again. It’s almost like an acorn, growing over time to an entire tree. So that over the chapters of this book, we’ve reestablished the entire network of capability of scientific discoveries, and technological inventions and how they connect to each other, and enable each other to coexist. And we develop that network over the course of the book.
Rob McNealy
So I’ve always wondered about weird things in my thought experiments and I think people listening to this will think I’m really nuts but like, I think like, if I was, you know, in that whole Naked and Afraid kind of environment having to start over, how do you make wire? How do you get to making wire? How do you make things precise? That was one of the things that I always was wondering about, like, you know, how do we make things super level just basically precision, where does it start? Yeah,
Lewis Dartnell – The Knowledge
it is a cracking question. And I think what most people overlook or misunderstands is that yes, the Industrial Revolution was about steam engines and coal. And that kind of fossil energy was important for pulling us out of, you know, basically agrarian society into an industrialized manufacturing, mass producing, dripping with energy type society we live in today. But it was all the prerequisite technology and knowledge you needed that enabled the industrial revolution in the first place. And one of those things that we just overlook, it kind of seems boring into understand why it’s phenomenally fascinating is that idea of precision, and exactitude. There was no point trying to make a cast iron or steel, cylinder and a piston for steam engine, or internal combustion engine. If you can’t make it to Within, you know the range of tolerances that allow the piston to smoothly move up and down within, within the cylinder so it’s not just having the material of steel, or the coal is the fuel, you’ve got to have the basic button standing and knowledge of how to make things accurately. You’ve got to understand the science as well about you know, expansive power of steam science and technology, interacting history, which one of the things I explore.
Rob McNealy
One of the things that I do as a hobby as welding and and when you start looking at how well if I’m so I know how to make things with metal. And yeah, it’s kind of weird. I got an MBA but I’m also a certified welder one through a full Walden course and everything for a year and a half just because I really liked my hobbies and now now the funny thing is I said okay, well how would you make a welder to join metal because joining metal is critical for building and and so then you go back well what did they do before welding and they’ve had rivets before welding right is for Joining metal and that’s back into the steam, you know, days back the Industrial Revolution, you know, metal that’s, you know, the Titanic was riveted together for instance. Yeah. And welding processes are only like 100 years old. And people don’t understand that that it’s like how do you get to welding? And if you just ask that question, wow, that’s that’s, that’s complicated.
Lewis Dartnell – The Knowledge
Yeah, well welding is a very interesting topic to brought up and is something I explained in the knowledge about how you can do welding from scratch Could you do like caveman welding? Because you’re right, it’s a relatively recent invention and our technological development and in our history, and what you need for welding fundamentally, is either a gas fuel that burns exceedingly hot, so you’ve been probably using something like oxy acetylene gas mixture, and to explain that the actually really basic chemistry that you can use to make an oximeter Clean gas mixture for yourself, which you can then ignite with a spark. And as long as you’ve got kind of a metal tube to feed it through that does melt, you can then start using that chemistry of combustion to get to very high temperatures to melt metals and fuses and sticks together. Your welding is basically the trick of gluing metal together by melting the metal itself. But actually, one of the ideas I play with throughout the whole of the knowledge throughout the whole of the book is this idea of technological leap frogging. Just because we did something in a particular sequence in a particular order in our history, doesn’t necessarily mean that’s the only order you could do it. And you could probably like, you don’t need to go to rivets than welding, you can jump right to welding.
Exactly Could you go right back from primitive beginnings and leapfrog back to welding directly going via rivets but they’re not a necessary prerequisite. And electricity is a really interesting example of this. And you mentioned wires earlier because There’s no real reason that electricity was discovered in our history kind of around about 1850 it’s halfway through the 19th century. And in fact, I took in the knowledge that there’s a little bit of I can illogical evidence of the being electrochemistry. So the basic chemistry behind a battery existing in some area, you know, 2000 years ago a long, long time before Michael Faraday and kind of worn institution and people and voltar electrocuting frogs legs and trying to understand this weird phenomenon of electricity that the chemistry behind a battery is actually pretty simple. If you’ve got two different kinds of metal and something like vinegar, you put between them, and you can generate your own electricity. If you’ve got something as simple as a coil of wire, and a magnet. And the ancient Greeks knew about magnets and load stones they knew about these kind of weird rocks, you could dig out of the ground and they kind of dangle them through a piece of string Lee pointing the same direction. You know, the basic understanding behind the compass and they attract each other. And so one of the could have other ways of framing this thought experiment isn’t just how could you reboot civilization as quickly as possible, often Apocalypse, if only you’ve got the most useful things written down in a manual, as this knowledge book is, could you jump into a time machine? Go back, let’s say 2000 years into the past, whisper in the air of one of the leading thinkers of the time whisper into one of the philosophers in ancient Rome, ancient Greece, and and tell them something so that they go hard course. I never thought that I had access to all the basic war ingredients and materials and substances that I needed. I had the basic understanding, but I’ve not made that small conceptual leap. So could you teach an ancient Greek philosopher who had bronze they had a conductive metal, how to beat that or draw that out and wire, I think coil that wire and create an electromagnet or use it to create a primitive telegraph system. So they didn’t need physical runners or, you know, messengers on horses. If the Battle of mouth and they didn’t have to send a runner, sprinting 10s of miles to take the message back, we’ve had a primitive telegraph system. Would that work? Could you take technology out of its own time and our history and neatly implanted 500 years earlier or thousand years earlier, we’ve had the basic understanding, to know what you’re talking about, and how to put it to good effect.
Rob McNealy
I mean, I think you have some examples of that. If you look at the Dark Ages, for instance, and a lot of your own history, even in the dark ages, they forgot a lot of the technology that the Romans actually were actively using, even in What’s now the UK?
Lewis Dartnell – The Knowledge
Well, concrete for example, concrete was a lost technology. It was lost a history through the through the dark ages, architecture, arches and the architecture behind it. Exactly. Yeah.
Rob McNealy
So what would you say would be some of the most fundamental basic principles that people can learn from your book? What would you what would be the things that people should be thinking of?
Lewis Dartnell – The Knowledge
So let’s let’s pick two examples. We can talk about them in more detail, we can we can pick up on things later as well. But if I were to my argument for what is the most useful piece of knowledge, piece of understanding you would hope would never be lost again to history but never be forgotten, after some kind of Apocalypse, some kind of break in the historical record. And I would argue the most useful piece of knowledge for humanity would be the idea of germ theory, that this notion this understanding, that the reason people get sick For L, and can pass that plague from one person to the next isn’t because of bad air. It’s not because of mouth area, which is the original talion translating translation of why people think they got sick. It’s not because of some fractious God who is punishing you for your sins. There’s a very simple mechanism for why people get sick of contagious diseases. And that’s because there are living organisms which are so unimaginably tiny that they are invisible to your eye, but it gets inside your body, and they reproduce and grow and make you sick, and they get out of your body and you can transfer them to someone else if you cough or sneeze or touch them, and then that person gets sick as well. And, in fact, you can prove that for someone as well rather than just writing it down or chiseling into a piece of granite as a new commandment to leave the post apocalyptic society. You can do something even more important which is explained to them How you can demonstrate this for yourself. It’s the very essence of science. It’s not just accepting something that an authority has told you, you don’t just receive things, you demonstrate them for yourself. And you can demonstrate germ theory really easy by creating by constructing a simple primitive microscope. And all you need to make a microscope that is capable of seeing micro organisms, microscopic organisms is a rod of clear glass, which you then melt in a flame, you know, using your oxy acetylene torch or using a candle. And that glass drips and cools as it falls and two sets as a almost perfect sphere, which which can be used as a tiny lens. So this is basically what leeuwenhoek was doing. The early 17th century was creating primitive microscopes and discovering the microscopic world never been seen before. But if you use this kind of thought experiment about jumping in your time machine back into the past, the ancient Romans had everything they needed for making a primitive microscope. They had very high quality pure glass. They were expert glass makers. And they’d even noticed, if you have a vase, made of glass and full of water, that things behind it appear to be bigger. They appear to be magnified somehow. But he never made that next conceptual step of how about we try to deliberately mold glass into that particular curved shape to make a lens so that we can see small things we can design a microscope from scratch, but they had everything they needed to do that. And one of the things that I wanted to do that I was keen to pull off when I was researching and writing the book, The knowledge was not just treated as an academic exercise as a labor project. Act of speaking to hundreds of people and then condensing down their background and their expertise and reading lots of books. But I want to get hands on practical experience myself, I wanted to make and do things from scratch myself. And I wanted in particular, to do the ultimate Robinson Crusoe experiment, because it turns out that all of the raw ingredients you need to make glass from absolute scratch, you can get on the same beach, you can get silica from sand, you can get soda ash, which you need is a flux unit to help melt that silica at lower temperatures. And you can get that from seaweed. And you need some line which you can get from coral or seashells or chalk. And you grind those up, you melt them together in a kill using the heat of fire and you produce a very good quality glass of that recipe. And I did that I made glass from scratch in the course of a weekend on a single beach, that kind of ultimate Robinson Crusoe experiment and how you could make a microscope for yourself if you’d washed up on a desert island. But the beach clay went to more than a particularly pleasant one. It wasn’t the sort of beach you might find in California or some other sunkissed part of the world. This was a beach in Britain. This was a beach in Norfolk, which on the East of England, and it pissed with rain for the entire weekend, I was trying to do this experiment. But I was able to make glass from scratch and therefore in principle, create a simple microscope that could prove the existence of germs and bacteria, which can then prove the importance of germ theory and why you need to keep your drinking water separate from your human waste from excrement about why you should wash your hands during a plague or in general before touching food or touching yourself, incidentally, but the chemistry behind making soap is Also phenomenally simple. Once you know how, and you just boil some animal fat or some plant oil with an alkaline and you can get the alkali from soda ash, which the same compound you need to make the glass or potash, which you get out of. It’s just normal word.
Rob McNealy
So the germ theory is basically to prove Well, that would then increase human lifespan. And so, so let me I’m just, I’m just doing my own brain exercise here. Right? So I’m trying to figure out, why would you think that’s the most important thing? Let me ask you first.
Lewis Dartnell – The Knowledge
Well, if if you’ve only got like 30 seconds to explain something, or you’ve got a very limited paragraph of text, you want to get something which is absolutely true, but it’s also a practical use. It’ll actually change your life will help you out. You We’ll explain how to make a steam engine in a paragraph. And for the reasons we’ve talked about, there’s a whole network, you know, there’s a whole iceberg below the surface you can’t see, you actually need to make a steam engine from scratch or a car engine and then talk about an engine. But you can condense down to the very nuggets, three kernel of understanding the idea of germ theory, it’s very simple idea that this invisibly small things get inside your body, you can also very, very simply explain to someone how to prove that for themselves. And the practical aspect, the application of that is an owl tells you why and keeping your drinking water and your excrement apart from each other important why should always dig you know, well or borehole, at least 20 foot uphill if possible, from where your cesspit is, for basic germ theory. It explains why you should wash your hands. It gives you the reason behind things that we take for granted not in our modern lives because we’re Hold them as a child, but we don’t really know why, what what’s the fundamental reason behind the existence of soap or a flushable? toilet?
Rob McNealy
Wow, that’s actually pretty deep. So but it’s there. And we still don’t wash our hands. So, go figure. So, what would be the next thing what would the so germ theory is number one, what would be like your number two most important thing that people should be looking at.
Lewis Dartnell – The Knowledge
So Gen Z was was was an example of a nugget of condensed knowledge that you would you would preserve you put that in your apocalypse bunker and hope it was never lost history that the survivors community could could put that to effect and, and kind of run with it and it would expand afterwards like this, this oak tree idea idea. And the other example I had was of a physical object, an artifact of a tool that I think is the most useful tool you would hope for Never be lost again. And this tool is the lave. Now if you don’t know if you’re not already, someone who’s conversant the kind of workshops in carpentry or metalworking, Aleve is the simplest machine tool. It is a tool that you use to make other tools that use to mass producing, manufacture things. It’s one of these fundamental tools that enable Industrial Revolution. And that sits visibly behind the scenes in basically every piece of technology or object you ever touch your day to day lives right now. And the leave fundamentally, is just a flatbed. So kind of a rail you lay down on the work surface. And on one end, let’s say on the left hand side, there is a headstock and a spindle and an chalk that holds your workpiece but the thing you want to work on and you spin that work piece And then from the other side, along that rail, you bring in a tool, maybe a cutting piece, maybe a drill, maybe a boring instrument. Or you can bring stuff along the side of that workpiece as it spins on your legs. So everything from candlesticks to table legs to baseball bats are turned on a leaf, but also much more fundamental technology for the running of society, like the cylinders and pistons of a steam engine, are turned on a lathe. That’s the fundamental tool that you need to make a steam engine, and indeed our own history. The cylinder of the steam engine is direct descendant from basically a cannon, you make a cannon for fighting wars. In the same way you make a steam engine for replacing human labor or the horse for moving things around. And what blew my mind when I found out this when I was researching The knowledge is lay there’s not only required to make all other machine tools in the modern workshop that the drill press that the pillar drill or the milling machine, a lathe is also able to make other leads. That leave is like a machine that can reproduce like an organism. It’s almost like a metallic organism that can replicate itself. And there’s a phenomenal example of a machinist of a metal workshop guy called Dave gingery, who in the 1980s, made himself a lave from absolute scratch and then use his leave to make each of the other machine tools you need. And I’m not in a modern workshop and workshops and industry revolution. So a drill press and a milling machine. And in order to make his leave, all he started with was a pile of clay. Basically rhythm and a pile of sand you can get from a beach Dig underground and a pile of trash, tin cans. So basically scrap aluminum, and then just some fuel, some charcoal or you just make your own charcoal by heating wood and turning timber and into charcoal. And using his clay which is a refractory material, he lined trashcan to make a very simple Forge, which had burnt the charcoal in that forge to melt the elementium and then pour that Molten Aluminum into casts the made in the sand. So he had a very simple way of casting new metal components to make his leave out of and then once he’d got a half finished leave, he could then use that half completed leave to turn the remaining components needed to complete that first leave. So I cannot think in the whole of the modern world that a better example of someone bootstrapping of someone pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps from apps Scratch, starting with basic raw materials like sand and clay, making one machine tool blade, then making all the other machine tools in a workshop and then using those to make pretty much any piece of technology any piece of machinery Do you would you would use in an in an industrialized world. But that to me that’s still you know sends tingles down my spine thinking about that phenomenal idea of deep gingers project.
Rob McNealy
I think I want to party with you.
Lewis Dartnell – The Knowledge
Know, I’m quite I’m, I’m one of the things that saddens me about researching writing knowledge is I got to talk to a huge amount of fascinating people of preppers and survivalists, and SAS survival guys and historians and technologists and scientists, but I missed a gingery by about six years. He sadly died in 2007. And I missed in my couple of years and myself researching and writing this book. I’ve loved to have sat down on a beer with this guy, or at least have a chat over Skype before passed away.
Rob McNealy
You know, it’s kind of interesting. I grew up in the Metro Detroit area in the 80s. When I was kid, I was in high school in the 80s. And back then, that was when Detroit was that was B. I grew up before Detroit started outsourcing. So, I grew up and and so I’m in my late 40s now, but when I was growing up, there was still a ton of that Detroit Auto worker machinists were everywhere. In the Metro Detroit area, everybody, you know, had a hands on skill. And so I knew a lot of those old timers that were like the machinists for the auto industry for decades, and that generational knowledge is gone now. I was fortunate, though it’d be illegal today but I worked when I was 16 and a starter in generator rebuilding store or shop. And so I mean, when I was a kid, and so I was working on machines and and rebuilding starters and alternators and things like that, and that would never be allowed to From OSHA, I mean, a kid would not be allowed in an industrial setting like that. But it was still, there was still lots of these like little plating shops like these little two to five to 10 man shops all over the Detroit area that provided just they made one part for like the auto industry,
Lewis Dartnell – The Knowledge
kind of specialized knowledge that we want to make it very, very well. And very exact, and very quickly, and then someone else makes something else and you combine it in one column.
Rob McNealy
And so I grew up in that environment, and that environments gone now. And it just just doesn’t really exist anymore. And it’s unfortunate because I think that knowledge that you’re talking about is something that’s vital for society to have that and I think we’re seeing that now with people are people are all of a sudden starting to care about their supply chain being completely everything being manufactured abroad in China right now. And then I think as the week’s go on here, that’s going to become ever more important. topic of conversation. I
Unknown Speaker
think you’re absolutely right. So I as I said, I am I am not a prepper myself. I’m a scientist, I live in a tiny flat in West London. I’ve only got more than a week’s worth of food now because of this current crisis. But I think all of us are now starting to ask these questions like the things they just took for granted. It isn’t magically appearing on the supermarket shelves anymore, but there are breaks and strains showing in the supply chains. And people now starting to see these questions and think about where does actually come from in the first place? Is it made 10 yards 10 miles down the road? Is it made in the US? I mean, the same country as me, or has it been shipped 5000 miles across the greatest ocean on the planet from the other side of the world from China, and therefore we’re gonna start having supply problems. And I think this is what I wrote the knowledge for x and the knowledge isn’t really about the apocalypse is just using that as a thought experiment to peer behind the scenes and ask where things come from. And how it works. Bless you. I’m glad you raised your child in Detroit, Rob, because clearly that the very heart of the Detroit economy used to be based around the internal combustion engine, but based on the the automobile industry. And one the other stories I tell in the knowledge is the idea of where inventions come from. And on the whole, you know, it’s the whole Shakespearean quote about that there’s nothing new under the sun. And even something like an internal combustion engine wasn’t really invented from scratch. It was just a new arrangement, a new configuration of tried and tested components that the inventor literally picked off the shelf of history’s workshop of mechanical components and parts. And so if you look at internal combustion engine, the car engine and dissect it in the way you would dissect an organism on animals understand what you actually find is just a mess of components, each of which has got a really long history, a thread stretching back across the centuries and millennia of time. And so something like the piston the beating heart of the combustion engine, is based directly on an ancient Chinese water pump is designed for getting water out of the river and into the paddy field to irrigate or to drink. The flywheel is descend directly from ancient Sumerian Potter’s wheels for making clay pots 3000 years ago that is now embedded, and under the hood of your car, and the crank and the camshaft and all these other bits and pieces that make the car engine and made Detroit what is today of each got these long histories stretching back that have only been recently combined into a particular pattern and a particular arrangement. And again, I think that that’s a fascinating idea to kind of play around. With your head.
Rob McNealy
I think that’s all really, really good stuff. So the people listening today, to this, this podcast, they’re they’re really freaked out about what’s going on today with the pandemic. So, is there anything that you can do to recommend people at least even just to keep their minds occupied? What would be the things that you would recommend people to do now to make as a little as a whole, how they might be able to contribute to society to make society a little more resilient?
Lewis Dartnell – The Knowledge
Yeah, so I think you know, you and your listeners, Rob, you’ve already got a very good idea of how to protect yourselves, and what sort of things are useful to make sure we’ve got enough of to be resilient to breaks the supply chain, so make sure you’ve got enough drinking water or means of purifying water. Make sure you’ve got enough preserved food cans of food or food stored in dry condition on a mason jar or whatever. I think what is a golden opportunity right now, with people self isolating, and nation after nation around the world is now going into almost complete lockdown. And people have been cooped up at home is take this opportunity to learn some things to try something out that you haven’t tried before. Even if it’s just, you know, looking through Google or YouTube, watch some videos about how something is made. Maybe go out with your kids in the backyard if you’re lucky enough to have some outside space, and try and making something as a family. On the knowledge is websites, I talked about how you can make a gasifier stove, which is a really simple bit of technology that illustrates the principle of gasification how you turn wood timber into a combustible gas, which you can then burn very cleanly and efficiently. And you can interestingly therefore, run a car, run an auto using wood as fuel Rather than diesel or gas or gasoline or petrol, as we call it in the UK, and indeed in Scandinavia, because they’ve got large areas and natural forest, they have entire modern power stations, burning wood, burning timber, to generate electricity and heating the entire community. And you can demonstrate that process of gasification with a really simple and fun maker project of using your own hands with your kids in the backyard. And just make something as a family. Learn learn something new, try new craft, maybe try doing some knitting or weaving or stitching or something, you know, to keep your mind active. But also I think you’ll find it incredibly satisfying and fulfilling, making something yourself rather than just ordering off Amazon having delivered and it magically teleports to your front door. When the delivery guy turns up.
Rob McNealy
You know, I couldn’t agree with that. That advice anymore? I think making things is not only good for the mind, but I think it’s good for the soul. I think it builds confidence. And Louis, where can people find out more and get the book The knowledge?
Lewis Dartnell – The Knowledge
Yes. So the the US subtitle of the book is the knowledge, how to rebuild civilization in the aftermath of capitalism. So you can get that on any good bookshop or online, but completely for free. You can explore a whole lot of stuff and all the things we’ve been talking about in this podcast on the books website, which is www dot the hyphen, knowledge. org. So the dash knowledge.org. And you can order the book through the website, but you can also watch lots of videos of how to make things from scratch fun maker projects, craft projects, you can do at home with your family, with your kids, your local community. There’s lots of recommended reading lists. So, books that deal with the same idea of being resilient, and working out how to make and do things from scratch yourself. So there’s a lot of nonfiction books, a lot of kind of practical books, but also a lot of novels. books like Robinson Crusoe, or Swiss Family Robinson, or the Martian, which was made into film much more recently with Matt Damon. And if you’ve seen the Martian is basically Swiss Family Robinson, but not a shipwrecked, maroon sailor on a desert island. But the 21st century equivalent, which is an astronaut, marooned alone on Mars and having to work out how to make things from scratch to keep himself alive. So there’s a huge area of fascinating literature, and stories and novels of these sort of post apocalyptic scenarios of people picking themselves up, brushing off the dust, pulling together into community of people, who then work together. To recover, and rebuild, and learn how to make things from scratch themselves. So was all of that to explore on the books website, which is the hyphen, knowledge. org.
Rob McNealy
Lewis Dartness, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
Lewis Dartnell – The Knowledge
Well, this has been a fun chat. Thank you so much for having me. And we should, we should chat again about astrobiology and geography in the course of human history, and origins, the new podcast and other time.
Rob McNealy
We absolutely will do that. Thank you very much.
Lewis Dartnell – The Knowledge
Cheers and take care.
Rob McNealy
Thank you for listening to the Rob McNealy program. Make sure you check us out on the web at Rob McNealy calm and subscribe to our podcast at YouTube, iTunes and on the Google Play Store.
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Pascal Hügli – Ignore At Your Own Risk Transcript
Note: This transcript was automatically generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and therefore typos may be present.
Rob McNealy
This podcast is sponsored by Tusk, an open source non Ico crypto project powered by community. Check them out on the web at task dot network. That’s TUSC dot network. The Rob McNealy program is the nexus of cryptocurrency blockchain technology and entrepreneurship. Now, welcome to the program. Today, I am talking to Pascoe higly. He is a Swiss author and we’re going to talk a little bit about the book that he put out recently called ignore at your own risk, the new decentralized world of Bitcoin and blockchain. So Pascal, how are you today?
Pascal Hügli-Ignore At Your Own Risk
Well, I’m good. Thanks for being here for taking me on. It’s a great pleasure. And yeah, I’m good despite the virus and the lockdown we have in Switzerland, but everything’s good.
Rob McNealy
So I think your book is actually fairly timely. So before we jump into kind of what you wrote about in the book, tell us a little bit about you. What’s your background?
Pascal Hügli-Ignore At Your Own Risk
Well, yeah, I’m, as I already said, on a scale from Switzerland. I work as a journalist and analyst and also just writer. I do it for a company called financial media. That’s what I work for. And then I also do some research for another company, which is called Schlossberg and co it’s a company where we manage like a portfolio for other people. And yeah, where we especially have a vision for the future, and we want to help people protect for what might be coming along our way. And yeah, I mean, I studied economics and politics at University of Zurich and then quickly at university when I started my master’s I actually came across Bitcoin, you know, which I really liked. And yeah, I found it really interesting, like also theoretical endeavor, you know, to dig ever more deeper into and I did this And then I actually dropped off from from school, you know, because I actually canceled my Masters because I didn’t see any more. Yeah, real value in doing it and it just tried to be I spent my time researching on Bitcoin and other things. So I got evermore deeper into the topic and that’s why I also Then, finally 2019 it was last year when all my friends told me you, you have to write a book on the topic. You know, it’s, you know, so much. And I mean, there’s already lots of literature in English, but not in German, or not that much. And that’s why I was convinced writing the book and yes, so that’s why I did it then. Exactly.
Rob McNealy
So what part of Switzerland do you live in?
Pascal Hügli-Ignore At Your Own Risk
In Zurich. Well, I mean, switch lenses so small, so I don’t live in the city, but I live close to the city. I mean, it’s 20 minutes and then I’m in the center of Zurich, but it’s still not civic anymore. So that shows you like kind of like the proportions of how small Our country is
Rob McNealy
very nice. I’ve been only been to Switzerland once, but I really, really liked it. And back in my past, I worked for a Swiss company for a few years. So kind of an endearing affinity for the Swiss culture. So you wrote a book about Bitcoin when you started researching Bitcoin Did you come at it from the standpoint that you thought you were suspicious of it? Or did you come at it from the point of view that you think it’s a good thing and you want it invested in it?
Pascal Hügli-Ignore At Your Own Risk
Well, I thought it was a good thing, but I didn’t want to invest you know, hey, it was like it was at university maybe because I studied economics you know, was really hit by all the the mainstream economic theory, you know, Keynesianism neoclassical ism, you know, and I found this very interesting, but I still always thought that can’t be the end of the line. You know, there must be more so, back in university I started researching the whole Austrian economics thing you know, that might be familiar with that, you know, because I also lived Indiana For quite some time and there, then I like met like some other people who really are still standing the tradition of all these, you know, real Austrians living from me says hi Eric and like many more that actually lived in Ghana and around Austria as well. So then I kind of familiarized myself with these topics, you know, found it very interesting because I never heard about that university. I also went up to my teacher one time and asked him Do you know who looked big for me? He says, isn’t he didn’t so I was kind of like, Okay, if he doesn’t know, there must be something to it, you know, so I started looking into it. So I already came from this very theoretical background studying Austrian economics because I just found it to be a more realistic way of approaching economics, you know, to see it as a social science, not that much of a of a science where you can get yourself a good job and earn a lot of money. It was literally like trying to understand the real world, you know, and And also the epistemological questions, philosophical questions that these guys really touched on. So I really liked it. And there I kind of then bumped into bitcoin. So for me, it was theoretical, really interesting. Like, then or was really interesting going down this route, but still it was more theoretical. I was like, wow, there’s something happening in the real world. And it really didn’t really came. I didn’t really come to my mind to start investing, you know, I only did this, like two years later, so I got to know Bitcoin back in 2014 and then only invested like, after two years of more research, maybe 2016. So yeah, but it was still okay. Yeah. And then I didn’t have any money anyways, you know,
Rob McNealy
What about now?
Pascal Hügli-Ignore At Your Own Risk
Yeah, I still like mean, yeah, still interested. And, but I mean, I’m not one of these really crypto builders. Aires I have some friends in Switzerland because actually, you might have heard of it the krypto Valley, it’s a space where we kind of we framed it, it’s around Zurich and Zurich, you know, like in, in opposition to Silicon Valley, if you will. And that’s it’s well known actually for being the krypto Valley. And there we have like lots of friends even which are younger or that are my age that actually are really well off now, because they just had some money invested even earlier. And I’m around these people. So it’s kind of cool. But still, I myself I always, yeah, I mean, I I have it with Ludwig von Mises, actually, one time said, or like his wife, he called his wife confronted him and was like, well, you study money so closely, but you probably won’t ever have that much money. And it’s probably the same with me. You know, I’m just too interested in all the theoretical stuff. I forget everything around me and then I don’t even invest but
Rob McNealy
Yeah, sure. Well, in your book, you talked a little bit about how we left the Industrial Revolution. But yet our money is still kind of in the industrial revolution. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Pascal Hügli-Ignore At Your Own Risk
Yeah, sure. I mean, yeah, when I started, like writing the book, or even like really like trying to understand Bitcoin I saw that it’s all about money as well. You know, as with Austrian economics, man watch is about money. And at university I never really studied money because it’s to me money as well as a social phenomenon. So it doesn’t really have to do anything or like also like normal, like mainstream economic economists, they don’t really look at that, you know, because they say everything needs to be in equilibrium. And we’re so many times we’re not there, but the economic or like economies strives towards the equilibrium. So something that’s really a phenomenon that’s that is emerging And that might be out of equilibrium is not something worth to be studied. So that’s why at university you never really studied it, you know? And with Bitcoin I found it really interesting that it not only before, if you want to understand and if you want to understand what money is you have to go into psycho psychology, you know, you have to go into history, you have to go in all these other goal and go down all these other routes, you know, and that’s what I did. And then, especially history was something very interesting for me, you know, where I actually found Well, you can maybe say that you’re you. That’s what my view is, you can try to say that our world is kind of can be divided up into these arrows, you know, and then I kind of found that there might be an era called the Industrial Revolution, you know, or industrial era that started back in the 19th century, going out of Holland and then especially Britain, you know, wherever grew ever bigger. And that’s where also like society as we know it today maybe started to scale up, you know, because we had all these big banks, you know, that started to finance industry and then like railways came along and all these things. And finally, also then European people went over to the United States and built up the same big Empire over there, you know, but there we are, really was the beginning of bigger institutions of corporations. You know, the joint stock Corporation, as you can, might be able to call it and all these institutions we have now also the state maybe then started to really grow and take over more responsibilities. So we’ve all these institutions, and I would argue we are still in this age, you know, that’s what I figured out with the book. And that’s what I tried to write. But now with with the internet that’s been emerging in the last 20 to 30 years, there’s been a new force that’s coming up you know, that can be kind of or can be seen in somehow in in line with This whole thing because like normal economies to state, you know, and like corporations, they also use the internet. But there’s a whole new world that seems to be kind of in juxtaposition to that, you know, and Bitcoin is a new iteration of that, you know, that’s also pushing in another direction, if you will, you know, and that’s what I found really interesting that we might see new institutions enabled through the internet emerge that could be really saw institutions that challenge our older institutions that I would call the industrial age institutions. And as I said, the internet and Bitcoin and maybe blockchain as a institutional technology could really do a lot of in the future, you know, when it comes to changing how our society works, and that’s what I kind of try to expand in the book as well.
Rob McNealy
So how did that so how do you envision the future look as far as money goes, What does The future of money.
Pascal Hügli-Ignore At Your Own Risk
Yeah, the future of money? Well, I would say I mean, there’s so much because again, as I said, money is a social phenomenon. So there’s probably not this one money will be like the thing dominating in the future, you know, but also due to this Industrial Age, or we could call it you know, we had paper money emerge, you know, national stage currencies emerge, and they used to be tied to gold, you know, as we know, because otherwise, states probably couldn’t have really like bootstrap these state national currencies, you know, but as we also know, 1971, like the gold window was closed, like, permanently. And, yeah, I mean, we have these monies, they’re still really prevalent today. But I think with Bitcoin, I mean, we really see that there’s been a new competitor out on the field, you know, and that’s what I find find really interesting, you know, because when when gold was delivered From from the state currencies you actually had like gold competing against national currencies. But gold is money might not be a really good medium of exchange, but it’s still economic economically speaking money. So we always had like, gold competing against national currencies. We always saw it when les crisises were happening or when people didn’t even trust their government anymore people, they would buy up money like gold and silver, you know, and now with Bitcoin, you have a new kid on the block, if you will, you know, that could be a potential competitor, and then also maybe crypto assets in general, you know, that might be spawned out of this whole new phenomenon that Bitcoin actually lived in. So we don’t really know where we’re going there, you know, but in my book, I especially concentrated on Bitcoin, you know, because it’s just the first thing that’s here and that at the moment is also the most prevalent one, you know, but then I think you have this competition, you know, in the future, and I think Think Bitcoin will gain ever more in popularity also because of things that we’re in maybe right now even though when you look at the price in the last two weeks Bitcoin also went down so the people came along and said Bitcoin is no safe haven and you can forget about it again but I mean, I don’t have this really like short timeframe, I look into the future and I say well, this whole crisis that might be upon us now you know, could also bring like markets down we talked about it before you know, it could bring supply chains down and all these things so it will bring the system down and people might then go down the Bitcoin rabbit hole and I’m really excited for also curious how many people will be pushed because of that towards Bitcoin and then they will also go down the rabbit hole. It might not be that many people after all, because the system maybe is going to, you know, somehow stabilize itself again, but I think many others Like a couple of people will try to contemplate things and then maybe adopt Bitcoin for themselves, you know, and the more people will do it, the more interesting it will become. Because Bitcoin I see is really a competitor to national state currencies, not only when it comes to medium of exchange and all these things that we’re still not really in the know where Bitcoin will actually take us but also when it comes to store of value and just have money that’s uncomfy scalable, you know, that you yourself can own that you can as a crypto asset with Bitcoin, you can what I call in the book also you can do crypto secession, you you can crypto succeed, you know if your money. So I find this a very interesting idea, actually.
Rob McNealy
Do you think that crypto currencies will actually undermine the sovereignties of governments in the future?
Pascal Hügli-Ignore At Your Own Risk
Yeah, it’s also very interesting question. I mean when you look at the whole history and how it was designed it’s probably it was designed as an alternative to our day to day system you know, and it was designed the way that you can really get a hold of it and you control it yourself you know you don’t have to put it into an institution again where the institution has the keys and you don’t really own the thing you know with Bitcoin as we always hear you can be your own bank you can be your own bank CEO if you will, because you are in control of the keys and nobody can take it from you even or executor like unless it holds a gun to your head and then he can always force you know, but I mean and states can obviously do this because they have the force the monopoly on force. So there I don’t really know how things are actually really going to develop you know, I would expect that with Bitcoin gaining traction, you know, with the money, like the the old industrial money system, showing everybody cracks you know, and we’re seeing some of it happening right now again with the Khurana thing you know that it might be Corona is really bad thing but it might also be the thing that really pops the, the the bubble, you know, which was like built up way before Corona because the system itself was just really brittle because of like institutionalized money creation, you know, banks that can create money out of thin air central banks that have bloated their like balance sheets and everything always to also, like fight the last recession we had in 2008. And it wasn’t really like a lasting sustainable fight against the recession. He was just papering over old old cracks you know, with with new money and that’s not the goal, you know. So there I think the more our old system will show all these cracks, you know, and those really let people down and fail people, these people then we’ll we’ll we’ll probably move towards something else. And I think I’m not really sure how many people that that will be, you know, will it be a critical mass that he can actually really challenge the money monopoly of the state in its home? Or will it always be a little fringe movement that just takes their own individual sovereignty, which is already something very cool because nowadays, if you run a full node, if you have your own Bitcoin, you can be your individual sovereign, you know, but as a whole, because only a couple of people do this, it might not really challenge the state after all, and I don’t really know which route we’re actually going down, you know, I see that more individuality is happening. I have friends that come up to me, but oftentimes, it’s just because they want to Make Money With Bitcoin, you know, and they’re in to sell it afterwards again, for dollars for Swiss francs for state national currencies. So you see, they’re not really here to challenge the system, you know, so and I mean, Bitcoin as a tool is only as good as We people really use it, you know, if we just use it as a tool to make more national currencies in the end, we’re not really challenging it. But I mean, there is a possibility that people could really long term stay with Bitcoin and stick with Bitcoin because the old system is just letting them down, you know, also speaking of potential pensions crisis in Europe, you know, like, like the population that’s aging ever more, and then all these cracks that the state is kind of try is kind of trying to fight now. And I don’t know how long he can still put up a good fight, and maybe he can’t and that’s what I’m also trying to explore in the book, you know, but I’m really I don’t have a definite answer. Probably nobody has but yeah, we’ll see how it’s all gonna unravel.
Rob McNealy
And as it unravels, which I think you talk a little bit about in your book is what happens or how is the state going to react when it feels threatened by cryptocurrencies,
Pascal Hügli-Ignore At Your Own Risk
huh. Yeah, I mean, we’ve already seen states react against it maybe now not so hostile hostile yet, you know, because they think it’s still this fringe phenomenon that you don’t have to you don’t have to take care of. And well, I think probably, that will be going on like this, like on a global scale a little longer, until maybe crypto is really a force to be reckoned with. And then they will probably try to crack down even harder. But but by die by, by this time, it might already be too late. So, from a crypto perspective or a Bitcoin perspective, you would have to hope that it would be too late, you know, but then at the same time, so I can imagine many people you also see it in states that are called failed governments, you know, Ecuador, Venezuela, all these countries. There you can already see that. I mean, they’re cracking down on things. Sometimes. Even they don’t do it. You know, because many Well, I was told by a friend, even the government tried to like, use use cryptocurrencies, you know, start mining cryptocurrency because they found it to be something interesting they can profit themselves from also when you think that other countries like the US and bigger countries, you know, are trying to sanction states like North Korea and other roof states, you know, and they could have an interest in adopting even though they are themselves challenged by crypto, you know, so you have these really paradoxical situations, you know, where you also I can’t imagine that like world governments could come along and shut it down, you know, because we don’t have a world government. And I don’t think in our geopolitical situation today, all the states would magically gather up together and would unified or have a unified or Woods be a unified force to shut crypto down you know, and as long as you don’t have that I mean Bitcoin and all these crypto assets they are decentralized they can be spawned up somebody somewhere else in the country when they are shut down at some place you know, it’s really hard to kill him you know I got a got an example as time told where people are like they compared Bitcoin and all these currencies to starfish, you know, and I didn’t know that when you cut off a starfish leg, you know, like a new one immediately like grows again and I think it’s really good analogy to say that’s exactly how these crypto things work you know, so I think states will react like hostile and and some will do it some will try it. Some will see it as a benefit also maybe like so far the state of Switzerland, you know, where I think like regulators, they’re really open. You can also talk to them, we do it on a regular basis, you know, that they and they seem to be very open to it. And there’s not going to be like a unified force against these kryptos, at least, so far, I wouldn’t tell and I don’t think they can pull it off because they can’t even combat climate change, if you will. So they won’t be able to come back to crypto as well. So, yeah.
Rob McNealy
So, um, how do you see crypto is empowering individuals?
Pascal Hügli-Ignore At Your Own Risk
Yeah, I mean, as I already said, I find it very interesting thing, you know, that. I mean, there’s so many ways it can empower you, you know, you can, like I have a practical example from my book, you know, we had a person that was proofreading our English book, you know, and I also had a designer that was before the book as well, who did some covers for me, you know, out of Pakistan. So then I sent money to him, you know, I tried to send dollars to the guy in Pakistan and it didn’t work, you know, it just didn’t get there. You know. So then I chose, it was like, okay, Pakistan, it’s a country. I can imagine that things Don’t work because my Swiss banks or my Swiss bank actually don’t might not be liking to touch Pakistani things. So I was kind of okay and then I sent Bitcoin and that all works, you know, but I mean then I also wanted to pay our proofreader out of Canada and I mean Canada is a Western nation as well you know, I would compare it to Switzerland I don’t want to wouldn’t call it a shady state or something, you know, and even there we tried to use like the normal banking system and it didn’t work we paid it and afterwards money came back and it came less came back you know, like $50 was just gone You know, for something that didn’t work. So the customer experience was really bad. So we also opted for Bitcoin and there I saw, that’s really cool. You know, that then with Bitcoin at all, where it empowered me it empowered the proofreader we had, you know, that’s just a practical example of using it as a Like a means of payment and stuff, you know, but then I also find it really interesting to have a non sovereign store of value that I myself can own, you know, on my little hard drive a hard wallet, and nobody can take it from me, you know, especially now with stock markets going down. You know, in the last few days, you heard like stock markets closing or just being terminated for a couple of minutes, you know, you never know maybe they’re going to close stock markets down permanently or like for more than a few days, you know, and also with banks, maybe we already saw it in Greece and Cyprus, you know, where they actually rationed the money and you couldn’t take money off your bank, you know, and there you might be in a really tricky situation and again, you have crypto it empowers you, you might be able to still have it, whether you can use it to buy like bread at your, your Baker I don’t know yet if he’s aware of Bitcoin and if he would even take it But still, like, psychologically It just really helps me to know I have something on my key drive. I even have it maybe memorized you know, the the seed phrase, the words I have memorized it in my in my head, and nobody else knows that I have that money, you know, or that I have that crypto. And that’s something I really like personally because I think financial privacy is still something which is very important. And when I talked to a guy last week, we had a course when I talked to a person who deals with regulation, financial regulation, AML know your customer and all the things and the things she told me it just clearly showed me like financial privacy is that you know, it’s it’s completely dead. And going into the future it will be it won’t get better, I think and Dave, I find it really important that at least we have something like Bitcoin and other kryptos which are maybe even more private You know, but that you yourself can old and that you yourself maybe can see for yourself that you have some financial privacy left. So that’s maybe a couple of ways I see it empowering them individually, you know?
Rob McNealy
So in all your research about Bitcoin, have you drawn any conclusions on why Bitcoin has not been adopted yet?
Pascal Hügli-Ignore At Your Own Risk
Well, yeah, I mean, for one thing, I would argue maybe and it comes back to the point before maybe because I am not so sure whether Bitcoin will well, whether they will be really just hyper Bitcoin ization, and they will really, really challenge the state in a significant way. Maybe Bitcoin wasn’t really made for mass adoption. You know, maybe it was always made for a couple of people who really have problem with the government who maybe have problem that everyone is trying to spy on them. who are maybe some type of people, you know, maybe these so called libertarians, you know, I myself have like, a great sympathy for this way of thinking. So maybe it was made for these kind of people, you know, and this is why at the moment our world I mean, when I talk to my mom and to my friends, especially here in Switzerland, also everything runs smoothly, you know, and they don’t need that, you know, because they say, yeah, the state might be texting me and and things might become more expensive, but still, I can go on vacation. I have enough money all this good, you know, what are you complaining about? You know, and I it might be, from their perspective a little bit too, too. Yeah. Thinking about things that are not so imminent, you know, paranoid, one could call it but still at the same time, I also try to explain these people, you know, you might be one day you might be happy and really Lucky that you have something like Bitcoin, you know, we never know, I just have to stay humble because I don’t know what’s going to be here in 10 years time, you know, maybe the world has completely changed. Maybe we’re leaving the industrial age and we’re leaving into a whole new age of techno panopticon where we all are controlled. We we don’t know, maybe we move into a state where we don’t need crypto either, you know, because it’s still a free and open world. I just don’t know. And I would say I have to own it out of humility. But many people don’t see that argument yet. You know, and also it doesn’t really yeah, it doesn’t resonate with these people, you know, because they don’t, yeah, they have their job all this fine, and they don’t need it. But maybe again, you know, we had it back in 2018. When when we saw this crisis, or this financial repression, you know, with the problem that emerged out of the US, I mean, there many people suddenly started asking questions, you know, and they many of my friends then back then also discovered Austrian economics, you know, back then Bitcoin wasn’t there yet. So they discovered the theoretical thing. They were asking a couple of questions. Some of them read a book, but then took two to three years later, everything was fine again, and nobody knew again now back then I read a book by Mrs. But now Who is he? So there you also saw kind of people actually got they have had a lot of questions when things were imminent. But then when things all were good again, they didn’t ask the questions anymore. And that’s also something maybe with with with a new crisis happening, which states really letting them down because the pension systems doesn’t really work anymore. Also with millennials who are asking themselves the question, will I be able to buy myself a good house over here because in Switzerland, especially housing prices are Huge, you know, maybe in other cities in the US, it’s the same, you know, but in Switzerland, like really especially, I mean, and and many of the millennials seeing Bitcoin also as a revenge, you know, against the boomers and that’s maybe why they will stick to Bitcoin. So it’s just gonna be these, you know, these faiths this these individual faiths that will determine whether Bitcoin will be adopted more and more. And I when I look forward, I see some more potential that Bitcoin will be more adopted. But right now so far, there weren’t really these these reasons, you know, and that’s maybe why it wasn’t really mass adopted yet, you know,
Rob McNealy
I think it makes sense. Pascal. Where can people find out more about you and where can people get your book?
Pascal Hügli-Ignore At Your Own Risk
Well, the book itself is available on Amazon. Yeah, you can find it through Amazon. You can get it there. Yeah, it’s all about as I already said. Money. So we talked about aetherium. You know, the whole smart contract thing. You know, that might be interesting that I, myself are also a little skeptical on, but it was I thought it’s worth exploring and really see where we might be going with this maybe even in a more long term view. And then yeah, I mean, you can find me on Twitter, you know, my Twitter handle is ke H, you eg pa hc. And that’s where I will be at and I love to talk to people. So yeah, sure, hit me up would be great.
Rob McNealy
Thank you so much past cold. I appreciate you coming on the show today, folks. I will have all his information linked up at Rob McNealy calm and make sure you take care yourself out there. Thank you.
Pascal Hügli-Ignore At Your Own Risk
Thank you, man. Bye You too. Bye, guys.
Rob McNealy
Thank you for listening to the Rob McNealy program. Make sure you check us out on the web at Rob McNealy calm and subscribe to our podcast at YouTube, iTunes and on the Google Play Store.
Episode Links
Rachel Siegel – Crypto Finally Interview Transcript
Note: This transcript was automatically generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and therefore typos may be present.
Rob McNealy
Okay, well Hey guys, today I am talking to crypto. Finally.
Rachel Siegel – Crypto Finally
Yes, Rachel from crypto finally you you had that right and you can say my name that’s fine by me. Okay. Well, you know, everybody’s got these weird pseudo names right now, right?
Rob McNealy
Like everybody and I get it people are weirded out about stalkers and freaks. And, and And trust me, it seems to me that crypto has a lot of freaks in it these days. So, Rachel, how are you today?
Rachel Siegel – Crypto Finally
I’m good. I’m, I’ve been well, just been a long week, the MTV thing was last week, and just sort of recuperating. I’m going to Florida on Thursday, to hang out with Tim and do some live streams. So that’s fun. That’s on the up and coming.
Rob McNealy
That’ll be fun. I like doing live streaming with Tim. And in fact, there’s all sorts of interesting stories. Doing that was
Rachel Siegel – Crypto Finally
I watched the livestream you are on And then I texted him immediately after and told him it was my favorite piece of content he’s ever done.
Rob McNealy
It was actually was really funny because I’m sitting here going on guys guys. All right, I’m going now but so alright, so you’re like this crypto influencer. And you know, from what I’ve seen, you know, you put out a lot of really interesting, funny and sometimes ridiculous content. What got you into doing content creation in the crypto space? How did you even get in here?
Rachel Siegel – Crypto Finally
Okay, well, I come from a mainstream production background. Um, so I’ve done production in the past. I also have a theatrical background, I wrote plays and a lot of musical theater actually. And I had friends from my production background, who came to New York City for consensus in 2018 invited me out to the networking parties and I really got to know the community from there. I basically saw what there was to offer in the space right now as far as this being the ground floor of a new town. Technology, something so big as Bitcoin and blockchain and decided that it would be dumb not to get involved. So I started working with a different YouTube channel prior to crypto finally. And we made educational blockchain content, some really good videos. And then a few months later, I sort of segwayed off and started with crypto finally. And that’s when I brought the music and the production background to the forefront and made like some of those Bitcoin music videos, which is what I’m assuming you’re talking about.
Rob McNealy
Yes, indeed. I actually unlike a lot of people actually try to go out and do some research on the people that I talked to. And usually before I ever even invite them on the talk because I just I like to talk to interesting people. And the production musical backgrounds kind of interesting because I’m kind of doing a lot of that outside of crypto as well. So it’s kind of fun to hear that. So are you in crypto full time? Is this how you make a living right now or do you do anything else?
Rachel Siegel – Crypto Finally
I’m completely in crypto right now. I’m Um, I have several different aspects that I come in from crypto so there’s crypto Finally, um, and so you know, the work that I do as me and myself I also work with a business partner out of La His name’s geo and we make animations. We make animations for blockchain companies I’m sorry it’s funny I haven’t spoken about this in a while, um, but innovations your blockchain companies would read basically break down white papers and easily to understand sort of ways to make it accessible for a consumer which is more or less the same sort of a phrase and sayings that I go along with crypto Finally, which is let’s make it easier for people but um, yeah, we do that and then I have several different legs. What I do with crypto finally as well and I do some side production things.
Rob McNealy
So where did the name crypto finally come from?
Rachel Siegel – Crypto Finally
I honestly it’s so funny. People always ask me that. I didn’t put a much thought into it. Um, as as, as you know, people would assume and I only say that because I’ve been asked that question like maybe like 60% of any podcast or interview I’ve ever been on. I thought that it was fun. I thought it sounded like crypto sort of now, all the handles were available across platforms. I didn’t realize the way that the social spaces sort of interacted at the time like I didn’t realize that people were going to start referring to me as crypto Finally, or finally have that didn’t cross my mind once when I set up the social accounts.
Rob McNealy
Well, it’s kind of interesting when I got into social media, probably when you’re in elementary school. There there was like this kind of like trade off back in the day. Like the big thing back then was personal branding. like everybody’s like, Oh, you gotta do your personal brand because you know, you got to grow yourself so people know you. So all my social media platform names across everything is just my name. And it’s funny because when I I’ve been in crypto for a long time I’ve been on social media and Twitter for a long time. And when I got into crypto a couple of years ago, I kind of revived my dormant Twitter account because I’d been on Twitter for since they started. I’d been on Twitter a long time. And I just got bored of Twitter a few years back, and I just stopped using it for years, literally years. And then when I got back, everybody’s like, got all these handles. And I’m like, do I change my name on Twitter? Now, I didn’t know what to do. So I just left it because I’m not that creative, I guess.
Rachel Siegel – Crypto Finally
I know some people who did then change their name over time on Twitter, just because, you know, the way that the social space does interact, but there are a lot of people with their real name is their handle.
Rob McNealy
Yeah, it’s funny people like I gotta be the pseudonym. I also find though, it’s like interesting, going to conferences, and you’re like, oh, you’re like the dog head. What’s your real name? It’s like, it’s just kind of weird to me.
Rachel Siegel – Crypto Finally
You know, I don’t know what it looks like.
Rob McNealy
They all have there’s a couple dogs and masks and weird thing that I’m just like, okay, I don’t even know what your real name is, though. So do I do to call this person? You know, crypto ninja guy, or do I ask them what their real name is? Because you don’t want to offend anybody, right? So you got this production background got into crypto. Recently you posted an image of you riding a forklift did was that all about?
Rachel Siegel – Crypto Finally
I was work was certified from my production background. So I worked for the Blue Man Group for about three years. I’m out of their corporate production space. I was the supervisor of that space and I basically sat in on all commercial and social shoots. I helped the creative team. I did set build lights, basically everything that would go in and out. It was a very small team for the scale of work that was going on at the time. About 60 people strong on the corporate end at that time, and me and my supervisor were the only two people who are Great things in the production space and there was a scissor lift. And a scissor lift is different from a forklift. A scissor lift doesn’t have the two forks that lift up into a pallet a scissor lift goes upwards and it still drives in circles like a small vehicle. It’s like, you might see a scissor lift on a sidewalk walking down the street or in a mall somewhere fixing a light. But it’s all the same certification. And so I was using those machines on a regular basis. And so we went to go get me a forklift license. That photo that you saw, was taken on a sidewalk in Queens. I’m at a continental lift location. That’s where I got my certification. I’m OSHA certified.
Rob McNealy
That’s pretty awesome, actually, to you know, so it’s kind of weird. I always tell people I have weird hobbies. So I’m like half like my day job. I’m like not in crypto full time. I don’t make a living from crypto at all. And my day job, I’m half blue collar and halfway collar. So I’m a former corporate MBA guy that’s been an entrepreneur in like the blue collar space. For a long time, so I kind of have one foot in one world but last June or like starting two years ago, or a couple years like four years ago I started getting into welding to make stuff and I take my hobbies really seriously. So like two years ago, I went to welding school for a year and a half I’m a full certified welder. So last June I became like graduated from welding school like the community college it was a year and a half program four nights a week like structural welder now, and it’s funny because that’s why I put that in my Twitter thing that says welder and he an MBA welder, and I’m like, it’s like true. So like, I literally got a whole world shop in my garage and stuff. So it’s kind of funny, but I like to make stuff so welding is hard to it’s really hard. I tell people that Welding School was harder than graduate school for me because I don’t have natural like fine motor skills, and I’m really impatient. And so welding is those are really bad things for a welder to be impatient and not have great fine motor skills. So I was like, in the middle of the road for my, my, my class, I was not the best welder in the class. So, and that was actually really humbling in a lot of ways as well because I’m usually doing really well I’m very competitive and it was like really frustrating for me because I’m like, I’m not the best at this. But I actually really enjoyed it and actually really liked the guys in my class. And it was really kind of funny. So, my wife is a medical doctor by training, and it was really kind of interesting. Like New Year’s, the people I had at my like, you know, we had people over for New Year’s this year. And it was like me, my wife some other friends and then my buddy who was like a welder and it’s like all just hanging out and it was like really cool because it’s like, I totally like can get along with anybody. So it’s just like kind of fun. Anyways know enough about me. So production background so you’ve worked on a lot of this, you know, sounds like you worked in you know TV and entertaining. and things like that. How did the MTV so the MTV thing you were recently on MTV? And and I know you got a lot of crap because they labeled you crypto expert, which is awesome. And by the way, high five to that, because who wouldn’t want that on their resume? How did the MTV thing come around?
Rachel Siegel – Crypto Finally
They found me on Twitter. They found me on Twitter. It was almost a year ago now. And they reached out to me and basically explained that they’re going to be doing an episode that involves cryptocurrency. And that was basically it. As we went on a Skype, I flew out to LA, we shot the episode, and then it was in production for about 10 months. I didn’t really see any of it before it aired. And now here we are today. So it was pretty simple and quick, but they found me on Twitter.
Rob McNealy
That is actually actually really cool. Excellent. Yeah. And do you think anything else to come out of that? Or do you are there gonna be any five episodes Do you think?
Rachel Siegel – Crypto Finally
I’m not to my knowledge with MTV. But again, I was dealing with the third party production company. Um, I think I think it’s interesting as well that Twitter had so much backlash being that they found me on Twitter, which does indicate that people are looking on Twitter for people to talk about stuff like this. So guys, if you were one of the people who wrote like rampid, negative things, they’re probably not going to then pick you for your expertise next time. But they, yeah, Twitter. It was fun. It was really like a one off type thing, as far as I know. But there’s been a lot of really cool stuff after the fact. You know, I’m getting a lot more outlets to actually talk about what I do in the space, which I think is pretty cool as well, in that sort of with the catalyst of people wanting to talk about the MTV thing.
Rob McNealy
Well, I mean, to me, it’s like I’ve been on TV before to live another life. And it’s kind of interesting. You don’t always plan Those things right. And a lot of times people don’t understand that the producers and the directors are the ones that make those decisions, it doesn’t mean that you called yourself crypto expert. And then all of a sudden, that’s what you are like and and I think a lot of people who don’t understand how production works in general in the media, they just don’t understand that you have no control over that generally. But you’d let’s talk about that a little bit. They are the kind of the backlash Tell me what you’ve kind of had to deal with since that.
Rachel Siegel – Crypto Finally
Um, I mean, I’m not exactly sure how to quantify that. But, you know, people saying things like who watches MTV, that kind of thing, like just sort of like, like talking down on the entire situation. But I think that that’s honestly, what’s sort of interesting about this is that these people don’t watch MTV these people aren’t these kinds of people on the MTV audience would have watched that and known that I didn’t call myself a crypto expert, because that’s what they’re Good at and I think it’s funny that the cryptocurrency community is a very good at that. That’s my real takeaway is that we do have different skill sets and we do different things and just because crypto Twitter doesn’t watch MTV doesn’t mean that nobody else does. And inherently that’s why it was a remarkable moment is cryptocurrency was being talked about on an outlet that is not intended for this community.
Rob McNealy
One of the things that’s really important and and I think that is a substantial paradigm shift is that crypto seeping into the mainstream, and just because you’re a part of that, so, so think about that. How ridiculous is the response that you’ve been given? Right, like on one hand, everybody talks about mass adoption, mass adoption, and then massive something that could lead to mass adoption happens and they shit on it? And and that that baffles me, like, honestly..
Rachel Siegel – Crypto Finally
Well, I just I just believe that people are genuinely good at different things. And there are things that I’m good at that they are not good at. And they’re things that they’re good at that I’m not good at. But I’m not posting all over their pages telling them about how they don’t get enough press for Bitcoin. Oh, you’re a minor Oh, you’re dead? Oh, you’re great at all these things, but like, when’s your last article? Bro? I don’t leave trolling comments like that on people stuff, you know. And that would be the equivalent of what they do to me like, just because I’m not good at what you’re good at doesn’t mean that I don’t have a valuable skill set to be offered here doesn’t mean that I’m not talking about a new, interesting and important topic within the space itself right now. It’s just different and it’s new. And I think that people are really going to need to step up and open what they have set as their preconceived notion of a tech space. If they’re really looking for something like global adoption, like, imagine if PayPal had come out the door and everyone using PayPal was like, fuck you hipster cans. You can’t use our service. Like you suck. You don’t even know how PayPal works. Like do you think it ever Take it off. No, um, and it’s just stuff like that, like really, really look at what you’re doing and how you’re behaving and how you come off to others. Because honestly, like, I’m not sitting here, you know, feeling overly bashed about what’s going on in the space or really bad about people feeling bad about me being on MTV, I’m just reading these notifications, hordes of them thinking like, Why is everyone such an asshole? And that’s the takeaway, I really just think you’re an asshole when you do stuff like that. And I think that if my friends follow you, they’re assholes too. And you just make everyone look dumb. That’s that’s my date.
Rob McNealy
Don’t Don’t filter anything. You know, and I can, I can actually sympathize and empathize with that and not but I look at it from a different perspective. I come at it from a project view. And when we launched two years ago as our little project and I don’t know if you even know what we’re doing, but, you know, we launched two years ago. And when into an Ico or anything like that we didn’t hyper sell tokens or coins trust me it would have been a lot easier at some point if we had the money from selling coins and tokens to do a lot of this stuff we’ve gotten so far but but you would not believe the hate that Bitcoin maximalists have dumped on us over the last two years. And, and, and it’s funny because at first when you get into the space you like want to be accepted, right? You’re like, Oh, I’m really into this technology. I’m new to the space. I’m not a developer, right I’m more like you’re more of a sales and marketing guy and and and I’m an entrepreneur, I’m not a developer. And when we got into the space it was like, you know these people would just like without even knowing you just shit all over you because you’re you know, especially the Bitcoin Maxis. They’re probably the most toxic of the mall. And you’re like, dude, I’m not a scammer, dude, I’m not didn’t sell anything. You know, I’m trying to do this solve this one problem over here and you guys aren’t even trying to solve this problem when we hear why you’re giving a shit. So Yeah, I don’t get it. And I think you hit on something really, really important, Rachel is that, you know, we need to get out of this little bubble. There’s only like a very small number of people in the crypto world. And this is my take and tell me what you think of this. I don’t believe you’re going to get mass adoption unless you have mass marketing. I just don’t think it’s gonna happen.
Rachel Siegel – Crypto Finally
Um, I believe that and I also think that a good example of that in the cryptocurrency space, and this is going to be hard to hear. But the big tokens the big market cap tokens besides Bitcoin, everything close and beneath. Why do you think they have the highest market cap? Why do you think the most people know about them? Why do you think that their creators have 500,000 followers and more on Twitter, it’s marketing, they had the most money to put into marketing and I’m just going to say it and it’s not to say that they’re not good. It’s not to say that there aren’t good use cases. It’s not to say that I’m not personally invested in the top market cap coins. I am. But in my genuine opinion, those were coins. Those were projects who had money behind them to put into marketing to access the consumer. We heard about them. Everyone knows about Litecoin and a cerium. On ripple, all of these, like coins that we hear about Tron all the time. And why is that? What do these creators? What do these founders and companies do differently? And they’re putting money into marketing. And I’m not condemning that in saying this. I’m saying that you’re correct. It is and has proven to be effective.
Rob McNealy
So I’m a little I’m assuming I’m a lot older than you. But I was, you know, a grown up in the 90s. I graduated from high school in 1990. So put in perspective, so I was a grown up all through the 90s. I went to high school starting at six, man, I’m really frickin old. So but here’s interesting. So I was, you know, not even just a kid, but I was an adult when the World Wide Web came into the In fact that I was in college when people started getting hotmail accounts and things like that. But the one thing you hear this a lot with Maxis, especially younger Maxis who weren’t around them, right or weren’t, like old old enough to really remember. But they always say, well, crypto is going to take forever. And mass adoption will just take a long time because look how long the internet took to, you know, grow. And I and I looked turn around and I say couple things where I think that’s wrong. One. Do you know, you know, do you know how many CDs AOL sent out?
Rachel Siegel – Crypto Finally
I wouldn’t say that. So I was only like six when that happened. But I remember the AOL CDs because I would collect them so I could go on the internet.
Rob McNealy
They were everywhere. They sent out millions and millions of those stupid free CDs with the software. AOL is what drove mainstream adoption of the World Wide Web.
Rachel Siegel – Crypto Finally
And all of my friends in the third grade we’re chatting on aim every night after school like it’s a real was a real thing. I completely agree with you on the AOL CD that was outrageous.
Rob McNealy
Yes. And without that it would have been relegated to college email addresses. That’s where it was. And so I tell people and in I’m glad you remember that because I tell people this. And they’re like, argue with me like, Look, because we’re making a lot of people will make excuses why Bitcoin hasn’t been adopted by the masses. And I think it should have been, and I think it could have been, if some things were a little different. But the The fact is, I think the problem with the BTC, especially, or some of these other decentralized projects is they have no structural, they’re not structured to do any marketing. And guess what you need, you know, we found because when with our project, we talked to retailers were holding their hand our whole project was geared around how do you market crypto as a decentralized project? How do you market it? And guess what you need to do sales you need to knock on doors. And guess what? most developers lead projects aren’t really struggle with that because developers typically Hate sales, marketing and business development. So they don’t do it, then they only have people in place to do it. And then they wonder why the projects that do have those people in place are getting successful. And they just make fun of them or tell them they’re scams. And it’s like, a Oh, well, look, there was HTTP and other protocols back in the day. But AOL took that to the masses took it to the consumers, and then it went from there. And if you want to deny that, then, you know, I don’t know what to tell you. Because things just don’t magically change. People are lazy. And because of inertia don’t like change. Right? So if you make it hard for someone, and you don’t give them any incentive, they’re not going to adopt your stuff. That just doesn’t make any sense to us. I mean, I mean, do you have any of your your own family and friends? Are they into crypto? Like, you know, your older family?
Rachel Siegel – Crypto Finally
Not so much.
Rob McNealy
And why do you think that is?
Rachel Siegel – Crypto Finally
Well, I just think that they were you know, it’s funny that people say that I’m about older people not like the learning curve. I know. That’s probably where you’re headed. is like the accessibility and the user interface and their their knowledge of the fact that it’s there. But I think like one step further, I think the reason that my older family wouldn’t have known about it is just because they don’t exist in those domains and demographics that it has been marketed to, you know, so that’s something that I talk about often. You know, the Simpsons is a great example, the recent thing about the Simpsons and everyone’s watching it because they talked about cryptocurrency and it was geared towards that group. That’s something that an older person might watch. That’s something that a 65 year old man might come across. But in my family, they’re just not keyed towards that kind of media.
Rob McNealy
I don’t even think it’s learning curve that actually wasn’t where I was gonna go. I talked to a lot of people about crypto, I don’t push it like, I’m not gonna harass the poor girl making my sandwich at Subway or something like I don’t do that. Because I just don’t want to be a jerk. But I ask people all the time. Have you heard of Bitcoin? And you know what? In the last year I haven’t found anyone in multiple states that haven’t heard the word Bitcoin. Yeah. And then I always follow up, what do you think of it? What’s your impression of it? And invariably, they say it’s a scam or they don’t know what it is or what have you, but it’s always negative. It’s never like positive.
Rachel Siegel – Crypto Finally
I think there are three I think there are three groups of people right now I totally agree with that. three groups of people right now who are actually using cryptocurrency and blockchain and that would be one the people who don’t know it exists who are out there. To the people who know it exists, like you said, and think it’s just not real because they’ve been sold a bad story on it. And the people three who are aware that it exists would love to, you know, invest in Bitcoin, but just think that it’s too difficult for them to get involved and give up their um, I was the third person. So my first exposure to Bitcoin and cryptocurrency was during the Ico boost in 2017 with all of the social Celebrity token endorsements. So I got to hear about it because the celebrities were all talking about it. But at that time, you know, the message that I’m hearing as well is that like all these, like nerdy hacker criminals made a bunch of money and I’m like, Well, I don’t know how to do that. I’m not that person. I’m never gonna be. out there showing all this like cryptographic shit on the news and telling me like money and I’m like, Oh, well, haha. I don’t understand that at all. But, um, you know, it’s just, it’s just that learning curve. So I was one of those people who just thought, you know, there was no chance that I was ever going to be able to figure out how to own Bitcoin. I was just never going to know and there was no point in asking any of my friends because it was stupid and they weren’t going to know either. And I think that there are a lot of people like that out there right now. who think it’s cool, they’re interested in it. They just think that it’s way way too hard on because they don’t understand how to do it yet.
Rob McNealy
I think there’s definitely that and I would, I was thinking a little deeper that You know, most cryptocurrencies right now don’t solve a problem that most people have. If you go to typical person right now Now I understand the arguments about oh, well, their fiat currency is always losing but yeah, you know, the average person doesn’t even know what those words mean. So, so that’s not our I say, crypto needs to solve a recognized problem, meaning that just because you have this great understanding of Austrian economics and you really understand, you know, all how few outs, you know, slimy and all that stuff, I get all that, but most people don’t. If you want to, you know, get crypto adopted, you need to take crypto to people that have a recognized problem that crypto solves most most people’s grandmothers Bitcoin doesn’t solve a problem for most grandmas out there. In fact, it creates them it’s more expensive. It’s it’s slower. It’s you know, it does have a learning curve though, someone you know, anybody can get over the learning curve with
Rachel Siegel – Crypto Finally
I argue differently that it could though. Well you know that like, there’s, that’s like, it’s so funny that you said that specifically about grandma’s because you know, the old sitcom trope that revolves around the grandma not being able to get to the bank in time. Well, like that’s a trope. There’s a trope about grandma not being able to go get to the bank and needing to deposit a check or needing to get some money from the family or needing to, you know, something like that. So I think that there are inherent issue that that solves, but you’re right, that it’s just too hard for grandma to access. And it doesn’t make sense for her to go through the steps of making that happen. Correct.
Rob McNealy
Yeah. And I think that’s the I think that’s the same like and this is the thing like you pointed out earlier, like this whole litmus test about you know, off PayPal you if you’re not just, you know, if you’re not doing command line interface on you boon to version 4.0 you just aren’t worthy of our payment system. Right. You know, and but the problem is, the masses don’t need to know that the masses don’t know what Swift is, they don’t need to know how the system settles things to be able to use it. And I think people get caught up on the wrong thing. And part of that’s bias, right. It’s like we always look through our like, own, you know, kind of lens of the world. And I think this is the problem with developer lead projects is that developers have a very specific narrow view of how things are. They’re very stubborn, because they’re generally very smart. But the problem is, I, you know, and I think I and I, it sounds like you I come from Lisa, the entrepreneurial view, and they used to say, as an entrepreneur, do you want to be rich? Or do you want to be right? kind of thing and in terms of selling, right, because, you know, what I’m saying, you know, it’s like, you got to reach people on their own terms, not on your terms. If you want to try to sell and market to people based on how you personally want to be sold and marketed. If you’re a super smart developer kind of person. You’re never going to be effective at using those methods of reaching out to the masses.
Rachel Siegel – Crypto Finally
Yeah, and you know what, I take it a step further. I don’t think they’re necessarily Stubborn because they’re smart. I just think that their skill set isn’t social skills, you know, it’s not social intelligence, it’s not emotional intelligence. And that’s cool. That’s fine. Not like the the idea that we’re all supposed to be like mathematical geniuses and really good at talking to people is it’s impossible. There are some people who can do that. And they are very rich and famous, because it is a hard thing to master both. Um, and, and that’s really, that’s really where the ends meet, you know, people need to sort of branch out and get a better idea of how to interact within social spaces overall, and how that works. And that plays right into marketing, everything that we’re talking about. But I think that it’s important for people who might be really, really smart, who might have amazing mathematical and scientific minds to understand that that does not necessarily mean that you’re making the smartest social and emotional decisions. So that’s something to consider.
Rob McNealy
Well, I think what it comes down to is, is your projects team balanced like it It’s okay, if you have those super, super smart, you know, analytical, introverted kind of people working on the product. In fact, you probably need them and lots of them. And if you can find good ones, you keep them, you feed them, you pet them, you make them really feel at home. But you also need the other pieces and and I think what it comes down to is I think the most successful projects going forward be the ones that have the balance teams, that you know, okay, we we put the right people on the bus and put them in the right seats on the bus and need everything.
Rachel Siegel – Crypto Finally
And I think that a lot of that does go back into marketing. And I know that there are some standout companies who you know, start from nothing and do no Ico or anything like that and do make it based on their team. But marketing is a really big part of that as well. You know, like how many people can you realistically bring on a team for how long doing how much work without paying them. So there has to be money somewhere.
Rob McNealy
Yeah, well, we we’ve been doing that.
Rachel Siegel – Crypto Finally
Yeah, well.
Rob McNealy
It’s very freaking hard. By the way. Yeah, that’s why I always joke around with people like, Oh, you can’t do an Ico because that’s scummy. And then it’s going to be a community project. I can tell you, Rachel, you go try to find someone that will work for free for two years to build out a community project with no upside potential. And you let me know how that works. Because let me know how that works.
Rachel Siegel – Crypto Finally
It’s not realistic.
Rob McNealy
It doesn’t happen. It just doesn’t. But I think you got, I think I it’s refreshing talking to you, because you get it. Because marketing is important. And it’s not a bad thing. And I think a lot of times, people rag on, you know, sales, marketing, business development kind of things. But I also think that if you miss those pieces, you’re going to have a really hard time. Because they’re, they’re integral, you have to have those pieces to be successful. And I don’t, you know, everybody gets caught up in this whole like, you know, oh, it’s a it’s a protocol. It’s not a company. It’s a decentralized community, private like, you know what, that’s great. You can use those words all you want. But the bottom line is, if you don’t think like a company, if you don’t think in terms of market share and customer acquisition and user acquisition and all that goes into that, you’re not going to be successful long term.
Rachel Siegel – Crypto Finally
Yeah, I agree.
Rob McNealy
Well, good. Well, how do we get other people to agree? That’s the key here. How do we get the other people out there to get on board with that?
Rachel Siegel – Crypto Finally
Yeah, well, I just and I say this over and over again. And this is the exact same thing again, on the technology is important. It’s obviously important. The technology is the back end of everything. And it’s what we’re trying to put in the spotlight right now. But after the technology comes the user interface, the UI and the UX, both of which are going to be incredibly important to get your consumer involved in the technology. And then furthermore, the distribution because you can have the best tech and the best UI the best UX. But if you don’t get it in front of people, they’re never going to use your product. So those three things in tandem matter when you’re looking at marketing something, especially in a new tech space like this?
Rob McNealy
Yeah, it’s really interesting when when we were initially doing our stuff with task, before we ever coded it and all that I started trying to figure out why crypto had metamath adopted or at least have some kind of market share. You know, to me when you got a 10 year old project, right, that’s got huge brand recognition. Apparently big network effect, why aren’t people using it? And then I went down this whole rabbit hole of trying to figure out the answer to that question. And one of the things we’ve just looked at is I started, I just started doing homework, and I started going down the list. So I’m like Quinn, market cap, and clean Gecko and looking at all the projects. And then I go to their team pages. And I started looking and I started seeing some timeline. com, developer, developer, developer, developer, developer developer, like there’s something missing here. And universally, if you go and look at all the projects that actually have teams, right, that are publicly, you know, visible, pretty much none of them have sales and marketing people. And if they do, they’re not in a position of authority in the project. Yeah. And that tells me two things. One, that organization, whatever you want to call, it doesn’t value those functions. Because they’re not putting those people high up in the hierarchy and that those functions are likely not being performed. It made sense to me that crypto hasn’t been adopted. I mean, look at. So I think with our project, our competitors are Visa and MasterCard and Venmo and PayPal, that’s who I view our competitors. I don’t view our competitors being Bitcoin, even though lots of other people think that’s who our competitors speed. I’m like, I’m not focused on building an investment vehicle. I’m focused on building a payment system and I’m looking at other payment systems that might impact my competition, even though we’re decentralized project and go look at the history of Venmo. I mean, Venmo been around 10 years, they’re doing like 18 billion a year in transactions, not, you know, transactions, like you know, people are moving that much money around and there, you know, to 1% off the top or whatever on every one of those. And so you say, but then you look at Bitcoin and you’re like, Okay, how many of those how many transactions for buying and selling goods and services are actually happening? And it’s, it’s like, if you’re looking at the timeframe, it, you know, if it was a great service, and it really performed those functions, well, why hasn’t that come up? Like, you know, 10 more has and it’s like, I’m, you know, I’m always open to answer, but what do you think?
Rachel Siegel – Crypto Finally
Oh, man, I mean, I think I I just think that that that’s like a horse of a different color. Um, so I agree that if you’re just looking at payment services, I think that more people should be doing things like that looking at the model on the product versus just like a token on that they’re betting against, because I think that the way you explain that is honestly a better way of hearing. A lot of things explained in this space. I’m saying that you’re looking at the Venmo versus big Bitcoin. I think that that’s important. I think that more people need to do stuff like that and I’m not sure how you would go about sort of adopting something in that fashion, necessarily outside of people understanding the space. If the thing that makes it unique and different is the decentralized aspect, you know?
Rob McNealy
Absolutely. And, and I also think it’s an Achilles heel, on a lot of aspects, as well. And I don’t know, I don’t have all the answers. You know, I’m always trying to reach out and talk to people to learn more things, then struct a smart people like you. So what would be your advice? Not a two piece of advice you could give. So if a new project was coming into the space, what advice would you give them? And then, for people that want to reach out to you, no, not No. coiners? What advice would you give them? You know, think of like a developer, what advice would you give the developer when communicating to the no-coiner world?
Rachel Siegel – Crypto Finally
I’m sorry for new projects and developers. I think the advice that I would Give you would be dumb it down. Understand that there’s a bigger learning curve. You had your head in your project for a really long time not everybody is going to come out off the bat excited and understanding of what you’re doing. make it really easy for people to understand and try to access more people outside of your soul group to try and understand, you know, does this really have a use case outside of a dead world?
Rob McNealy
Wonderful. I think it’s great advice. Rachel, where can people find out more about you? And being the crypto expert that you are,
Rachel Siegel – Crypto Finally
Of course, obviously, at crypto finally on Twitter, or YouTube at crypto Finally, I do weekly live streams on Friday at 12pm and 5pm at crypto underscore Fridays as well because I’m also a live streaming expert. But, but crypto finally is your safest bet. So Twitter and YouTube
Rob McNealy
Rachel, thank you so much for coming on the show today. I’ve really had a good time.
Rachel Siegel – Crypto Finally
Thank you.
Rob McNealy
All right, I got you later.
Rachel Siegel – Crypto Finally
All right. Thank you.