PoolTogether Community Podcast #16 - Taliskye from PoolTogether

This is the Pool Together Community Podcast. Pool Together is the world's number one no-loss prize savings account. You can visit pooltogether.com to deposit. You are listening to the Pool Together Community Podcast. I'm Hot Mike, aka Wassy Wednesday wannabe with Talus Guy, there's no Poap today, but there is Talus Guy. Welcome, Talus Guy.

Wow. That's a lot of, a lot of W's. Thank you. Good to be here.

Wasi Wasi Wednesday. Wasi Wasi Wednesday. I just wrote the song for it and they, they, we dropped it today. So I'm, I'm, it's stuck in my head. It's really an earworm.

I was gonna say, did something happen on Wednesday for Wasis today?

It's Wasi Wednesday every Wednesday. They celebrate one Wasi. And they get like a, like an award and stuff. But I made an intro. I'll drop it in the chat. I made like an intro video theme song. And so it's, it's stuck in my head. And, and now if you listen to this, it'll be stuck in your head. I'll drop the tweet here so we can get some, some interaction here. But this isn't about Waseys. It's about, it's about you, Tails Guy. We're talking about you today. So how's it going? How is life for you?

Uh, life is good. Life is real good. I just actually got back from a long weekend I spent in the Smoky Mountains, kind of disconnected from everything for, I don't know, 20 hours out of the day.

Smoky Mountains, huh? So is that like a, that's like the actual name of the mountains? The Smoky Mountains?

The Smokies out in Tennessee.

Oh, you're the only 10 I see. See what I—

Oh gee, thanks. Yeah.

You've heard that. You've heard that. Do the mountains actually smoke or do you go there to smoke or what is, isn't smoking bad for you?

Smoking is terrible for you. Would not recommend. Uh, I've never actually done it, but I've gotten a lot of people to quit. Uh, they don't actually smoke. They just seem really foggy. Uh, there, there is a section of them on fire right now, like over near Dollywood. Oh, we weren't there.

Oh no. Okay. So they, so they do, you do get foggy. I was gonna say, if they're not smoking, do they vape? Okay. All right. So Talosky, uh, thank you for enduring that. My, but, uh, I would love to hear more about you and how, how did you, can you tell me your superhero origin story? How did you? get involved in crypto and with PoolTogether? Would love to hear that.

This is my third junket in crypto. So I've actually like, I'm totally ADD. It's amazing that I've stayed with PoolTogether as long as I have. It's been like, I don't know, 2 years. But this is my third attempt at being in crypto. I got in crypto originally way back when I was in college. So like 2010 and just stumbled into the whole Bitcoin thing. Had a wallet, sort of. I don't actually remember. Again, ADD, so memory is not great, but I found like one of those wacky scam sites that basically would use your leftover CPU processing power to farm. And I got some amount of Bitcoins, but that's long gone and like, Lost to the, the nethers. And then in 2017, I got involved in CryptoKitties a little before all of the genetics was figured out. And I had fun trying to figure some of that out because I'm a bit of a math person. So trying to figure those out before they're actually all cracked, so to speak, was, was a fun little dive. And I do have a wallet that I still have. keys for that has, I don't know, like 30 random CryptoKitties that are worthless in there. And then when the pandemic happened, for some reason I found crypto again through Coinbase and their app. And PoolTogether was just one of those like random things on like their web browser portion of the app. And Pull Together really appealed to me because of the whole price savings thing. Like, it seemed like it could be a financial wellness tool. And my job at that time, and now again, is kind of focused on financial wellness and helping people through not only figuring out their retirement, but kind of planning loosely how to retire and save assets. And I thought Pull Together could be a really good, like, crypto entryway to doing that. Um, yeah, that's how I found PoolTogether.

And then how did you get involved? Like you just found it, but then, then you just, you're, you're in it to win it. Like you are the bedrock of the PoolTogether community. Let's, let's be real.

I really appreciate that. I think that's overstated. Um, But yeah, I got involved because of the token launch. So when the token launched, I basically just approached Leighton and said, hey, is there something I can do to help? I know when tokens launch, stuff goes crazy. And he's like, yeah, sure. Here's the Gov forum, help moderate it and, you know, just get involved where you can. So that's what I did. I started to help. being moderate the governance forum, which wasn't terribly difficult because everybody here is really cool. Like there's not a whole bunch of spam on the forum. No one's really trying to like shill anything. It's just a lot of good conversations. So like, I don't know, maybe one post a week you'd have to pay attention to and the rest you just need to like look at and be like, yeah, this person seems sane and normal like everyone else and pull the other. Great. Somewhere along the way I met Chris Crypto and we kind of hit it off and tried to start forming the swim teams, which was basically a set of working groups to try and develop the protocol. And we did that way too early and pulled together, like, I think that was the April after the token launch. There was still a lot of People not really knowing what to do, not really knowing how to get involved, not really having any clear idea of how they can get involved or what skill sets were needed. And at that point in time, we were still young enough that people thought they needed to have like, I do X thing and I'm going to build Y with it. We're really like, pull together is like, are you passionate about the project? Let's talk about what you think we can do with it and let's just integrate you that way. And eventually it kind of evolved from there and we fell outta swim teams and now we're falling back into working groups again, uh, which is good to see. Like we were on the right path, just the wrong time. Um, and along the way, you know, we made kind of the, the grants committee and, and different little, I don't know, like sort of like subgroups where people just kind of like think tank. themselves together and then stuff happens just kind of the way DAOs are. You get these little think tanks and like, bam, there's, you know, pool streaks or stuff like that.

So what's your strategy with pool streaks? Because I can't buy myself a bucket. I can't win.

Oh, I don't have a strategy. My, my strategy with pool streaks is effectively try and always never have a streak.

Yeah, there should be, there should be like an award for shooting the moon, like actually not getting any of them right. Right,

exactly. Like, I, it's not that I don't want to get any right, but I always want like the really weird thing to be the thing that happens. Like, oh, this thing's worth 3 points this week. I want that one to happen just because that would be really cool.

I'm totally with you. And for those that don't know what pool streaks are, it's It's a quiz show for those who hold the POOL token and it's run by DaBoom, who's DaBomb. And it's just like, basically it's rel— it's related to each of the drawings and like, they're just tricky questions on, on like, like what wallet address, like the grand prize winner, how many will there be? And somebody who wins a, the grand prize, will they have how many letter Bs in their wallet address? Wallet address, stuff like that. And so the goal, the goal of Pool Streaks is to have a streak, is to get more than one right. And whoever has the longest streak by the end of each epoch is the winner. And then you can multiply your winnings by holding POAPs, which by the way, there's no POAP for this call. Okay. For this podcast, but that's, that's Pool Streaks in a nutshell. And I suck at it. I suck at it.

We're just, you know, team zero, zero streak, the big goose egg.

That's right. Season 3 goose egg or season 4. What are we on? Season 4, season 4 goose egg. And then also we do, we do trivia. We do pool together trivia, which is another fun thing also run by Da Boom. And that one, I think you did fairly well at. I think you're pretty, pretty top notch, but I think your strategy was to just pick the answers that everybody answered first. Like you went with the majority every time, right? Was that your strategy?

Uh, that was the strategy when we got into the second section, which talked about like history and stuff. Like the first section, there's all science and math. Like I pretty much knew, I don't know, 90% of those. Uh, the geography history portion, which was, I think the second section, I'm terrible at that, that stuff. I would not be able to point at any country on the globe and be like, yeah, I know that's Anywhere, like other than the United States. Like I could not point out Germany. I am just geographically terrible and history is not something that ever sticks in my mind. So I just voted with whatever the top vote was. Uh, in the pull together history, I was just slower than Tuna.

Yeah.

'Cause Tuna came in first.

That's right. And I think the, the round 3 was history. The round 3, I think basically it's like If you did well at round 3, you could, it's okay if you were mediocre in the other 2, something like that. But Tuna did—

Yeah. 'Cause I, I think Tuna did pretty well in the first 2 rounds. Leighton did not do well, but he came in like 6th or something 'cause he did okay in the Pool Together round.

Yeah, it was tons of fun. Uh, I encourage you listener to join the Pool Together trivia because it's, it's a good time. It's really fun, but you gotta be quick. You gotta be quick and you gotta have a strategy. going into it. And so we've given you a little alpha for that Pull Together trivia. Talisker, what do you even do? So what are you doing now at Pull Together? Like, you're, what are you, what are you running? What are you in charge of? What do you have your, your mitts in?

I'm on the grants committee, which is not as active as it used to be in terms of getting grants, but we're getting more quality grants and they're generally grants that were geared towards community building rather than App integration. Other than that, I'm just crazy active in the Discord and the Gov forum. I don't really like to put a label on anything else because it's not like formal stuff. I just kind of throw ideas out into the ether because I don't have time to do everything that I want to do. So if someone likes my ideas, they run with them.

What's the secret? What's that? What, what are Taliskai's tips for getting a grant proposal passed? Or what do you like to see in grant proposals? Or how can we get the monies?

Uh, things to, to get your grant proposal seriously considered. Uh, be a depositor or already active in The Discord. When you do make your proposal, if you're not already in the community and the proposal is for something community-driven, call out how you think it would impact the community in a positive way. Like, don't assume that we're going to be able to read between the lines and say, okay, this is what it's going to impact. Come out and say specifically, I think that Doing these courses in Kenya is gonna bring more Kenyans into the PoolTogether Discord and expand the community in that geographic region of the world.

Okay. So like, you know, so anything community-based, so like if I wanted to do something like a merch drop or something like that, that's probably not gonna be a grant, 'cause that's not building community. But if I was saying get a mobile limo, like get a limo with a hot tub in it and drive around the country and wrap the limo in PoolTogether, that would be a home run, right? That's, that's basically, that should be proposed right now is what you're saying.

Well, only if it's one of those hot tub limos, you gotta get the pool involved.

That's right. You gotta put a pool on it. So do community stuff, but put a pool on it. I love that. I just got, I gotta point this out. Like, why is Tiarek chatting everybody in general, not in the podcast chat for some reason? I don't understand.

Tiarek got lost.

Tiarek's lost in the— there you go. Okay. So Taliska, you're, you're, I love ADD people because I am one of those. And we can go any which way. We can go over the river and through the woods to grandmother's house and check out all of the NFTs hanging on grandma's walls. So what are some, what are some things that you're excited about in the crypto space? What are, where has your ADD taken you over the past 6 months? Where

has it taken me? Yeah, the past 6 months, I've been really kind of Diving down the rabbit hole, not actual rabbit hole, but rabbit hole into like the refi stuff and getting green-pilled. So basically like figuring out how you can utilize blockchain tech to either reforest or carbon capture or just get people to plant trees. Basically how to use this technology to fix everything the past couple of generations have blown up since, you know, the steam engine happened.

So could you keep encouraging to— the first time I'm hearing about ReFi.

Yeah. So, uh, Klima is like the most, uh, I don't want to say user-friendly because their UI is not great. It's not complicated. It's just, it's crypto-friendly, not human-friendly. They do carbon capture and they've done a pretty good job at it. Do, do, do, do. Sorry. Yeah, they do carbon capture and they've done a fairly good job at getting that. Kind of figured out on how to get carbon credits locked in a blockchain token. So once they're in their protocol, they can't really like be released or sold. There's a couple of NFTs like Capsule Vault and Woodies that I've been involved with and following that have planted trees. Like Woodies planted over a million trees. Capsule Vault has planted like 17,000 trees. And every time one of their NFTs gets sold on secondary, they plant another tree. There's also another NFT project called Memis, which I can never remember the location that they're focusing on. There's somewhere in South America that they bought like 300 hectares of land and they're effectively funding the protection of that land through selling NFTs.

What was the name of that one again?

Nemus. It's, it's Nemus. Yeah.

Thank you. Okay, cool. And this is green pilling, but it's also calling refi. It's also being called refi. What is the re? Reforest? Regenerate?

It's regenerate. Yeah, regenerate. There's actually, there is a refi DAO, which I'm in their Discord, but I'm never like, In their Discord, like I am with Bull together. Get their notifications and read them.

So this was a lot.

They're also a pretty good follow on Twitter.

Okay, that's the the who is a good follow on Twitter?

Refi Dow.

Refi Dow. Great, perfect. In the chat. Cool, cool, cool. And and and listen, you want to be in the chat when we're doing these things because that's where it's happening. Like we've got a lot of commentary. that's happening. There's the, you get the raw unedited podcast and then if in the Discord, but then if you listen to it, it's polished and clean and very fancy. So you want the raw unedited if you're in the Discord. But Telesky, I've, when I was at ETH Denver, Andrew Yang was on stage and he's got this DAO thing about like trying to do stuff with politics. And his main point was that Web3 and crypto, for it to be legitimized, it needs to show how it can change the world for the better, like the positiveness of it. And this greenpilling, I think, is like very much one way to do that. And it's got me thinking about, oh yeah, like how do we change the world with crypto that's not just line go up? you know, bags going to the moon, but like, how do we actually make this, this world a better place in all aspects, in all facets? So I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. I, I'm going to follow it up, but I want to hear you respond to that. And then I have one more piece about that. Go for it.

Uh, yeah, no, I think that's 100%. Somewhere on the NEMIS Twitter, which I was trying to find while you were saying that, they mentioned how they literally stopped tree poachers from knocking down like 30 acres of theirs just because of everyone being in the community, being able to fund them effectively through their sale of NFTs. Also, Jarg put an amazing YouTube video, I think it's also a podcast for Greenpilling with Kevin Iwaki. He basically like literally wrote the book on it called Greenpill. It's a pleasant read, but his podcasts are also really good when it comes to this.

I love it. We're going to have a very robust description for this podcast with all these links. So the follow-up to that is there's an article in The Atlantic entitled Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid. And it's written by, uh, Professor Jonathan Haidt, who, uh, is a professor at NYU.

He's amazing.

Yes.

Also a good podcaster.

Yes. Uh, The Righteous Mind is a rockstar book. Very good. But this, this article actually, I, I, you know, it's a definitely a good read, but quick summary or, or just the one point I wanna pull outta this article is that, um, technology Though it has the ability to advance humankind, has generally been used to destroy it. So, so even with crypto and Web3, when we talk about all this stuff, when we talk about greenpilling, it's like the potential is, yes, it's so huge, it's there. But, but the probability that we will use it to destroy ourselves is quite high, like very high. So I don't know how we balance this. How do we balance the power of the tool with humanity's tendency to go off the rails?

That's incredibly difficult. And I did post something in the chat from Leighton, which kind of sort of loosely talks about this in that we as crypto natives, given that we're so early, really need to start writing the book in terms of how we're going to Everything. We are driving this and we need to drive it in such a way that we don't make this technology destroy everything. And there's definitely a vein of that in crypto given, you know, the whole degen nature and the yield farming and everyone's just trying to get rich quick. But we, I guess, royal we need to— You know, change that culture into something that's, that's more productive and built for the better.

Yeah. The Leighton tweet is like huge. You dropped that in there. We'll put that, that in there too. But it's, it's that, it's that small possibility of harnessing the vast potential and doing something that promotes equality, that promotes, I mean, this is the other thing is like everybody wants crypto to be deflationary. Like everybody wants, they want to be early. And by being early, anybody, our children, if you have children and our children's children are screwed. Like you create this like feudal state. Yeah. If you're truly early and you've truly pumped your bags. And it's really this, I mean, and this is like a logical fallacy. It's like this, the same thing with like chronological snobbery. It's like, it's like thinking that we are so much more advanced than medieval times. No, like we have all this technology and it's just created new problems for humans. It's created like new, yeah, sure, we've gotten better in some areas, but in other areas we've still got a long way to go. Uh, maybe it's like the baby steps forward, like there have been baby steps forward or something, but it's generally not like we're, we're on the verge of nuclear. Um, so I'm taking this to the darkest timeline, but it feels like we are on the darkest timeline. You know, we're on the verge of—

we're definitely on the strangest timeline.

Yes. Okay. Strangest. I'll go with that one. Great. Yeah. Okay. All right.

Like there's a lot of good things happening. There's a lot of just confusing things happening. Um, I don't, I don't know if it's the darkest timeline. Nope. No big red buttons have been pushed yet.

That's right. That's right. Yeah. Um, but this is about you and not about my fears and my, my, uh, insecurities, but Talisker, what, what, what encourages you about PoolTogether? What do you see about the protocol that you're excited about, that you're, that you're pumped about, that you want to, that keeps you here, that keeps you going every day in the PoolTogether Discord?

Everybody here. The community is just amazing in so much that everybody has good ideas. Nobody has any time. We all just kind of throw them out there and someone picks it up that has the time to make it happen. Like, you know, Andy brought up the whole delegation aspect on the community call last Friday on where he thinks the delegation's going to go. I picked up, 'cause I had time to summarize that when I got home from my vacation to say, here's what I think it is. Let's document it somewhere. And because it's documented somewhere, someone else is going to find it. And when they have time to build it, I'm sure it'll get built because it's a fantastic idea. And that's, that's just how

we

work.

I missed that idea. What is that idea?

Uh, where did I put it? I think I put it in the feedback section. It's in a thread. So effectively for the delegator UI, it just needs an overhaul. So like right now it's just an MVP. You can delegate to like a wallet, an address, and Send some funds over. What Andy was talking about and what I tried to summarize is basically instead of just having one person delegate to another person, let's make it so it's easy for a protocol or a project to delegate. So if you have an NFT project that has, you know, 5 million USDC that they could put into pool together, let's make it so they can put that in and then they can drop a CSV file or a subgraph query that'll pull out all of their users that have their NFTs. And they can assign, either have it being evenly distributed. So everyone gets a portion, an equal portion of that $5 million delegated to them that hold the NFT, or they do something where we have using the RNG that we use to pull the tickets. We also RNG who gets delegated. They could say, well, I want 10 addresses a week for the next month to get delegated, you know, Why can't I do math right now? $500,000 a week to each of those 10 people. Or you could even go further and, and I thought it would be interesting if there would be a way to have like a weighted way of doing it. So if someone holds more than one NFT, they have a greater chance of being selected out of that random draw of the CSV file or subquery. Or if they've held the NFT for a long period of time, they have a greater chance of being drawn for the delegation. So if they, they're delegating, you know, $500,000 to 10 people, you really want someone that believes in your project, that's held the NFT longer to have a better chance of getting that delegation, because that guarantees them basically, you know, at least one win a day, if, if not significantly more. And then just having the UI be easy to use that way. You can just drop the CSV file of the addresses in there, or just give it the query that you would use from, from the subgraph.

This is your podcast, Tal Sky, but I want to keep talking about that. Is that okay? Can we just like keep nerding out to the multi-delegation tool?

No, I hate that idea. This is mine.

Yeah, let's do it. Yeah, so I'm a pro, like this is the thing is like we wanna see communities be able to reward community members and PoolTogether having a sick community, very sweet, tons of love, sneak hugs. We want to empower those communities to take their stables and reward their community members. And I'm trying to think like even as I'm approaching these NFT projects and trying to muster up some like, some like explain what it all is and everything, I mean the operational, complexity of it is fairly difficult. For example, like if you have the Wasis, there's 2,600 wallets that hold Wasis. And so how can you, what's, I want kind of like a delegator optimization calculator where you put your stables in and then you put your like total number of the community and then you put like hit calculate and it optimizes like, hey, well, You've only got $50K in stables, so it's probably gonna be better if you reward 3 people over the next month with that $50,000. Oh, or if you got $5 million, hey, you can reward every, you can delegate to every wearable or NFT holder and they're gonna win X amount or something like that. Just something where you put in your stables, you put in how many people you're thinking about, and it pumps out like, Optimally, this is what you want to do. I would love technology to do that.

What if you spin it around? What if you spin it around instead of saying, I have, you know, 2,600 people that are holders and I want X number to win. What if you have, I have 2,600 that are holders, I want at least one winner a week and I want that win to be a $1,000 prize, whatever the top prize is. How many delegations can I have so that statistically is likely to happen?

Yes. I like that. I'm going to transcribe this and I will copy and paste the text into the delegator UI and expansion. I think that's huge. I think that's like really, um, uh, I, it, but then it needs to be easy to be able to delegate, which is like, I think a CSV upload. Similar to what Gnosis Safe uses when you do multiple transactions. I think that's probably like a really, really sweet option.

Yeah, I think that's probably the easiest way to go about it. Whatever we do, it has to be easy enough that I could explain it to, I don't know, my 16-year-old cousin and he would be able to just do it.

What about this? There's this grayed out under— we're talking about like tools.pooltogether.com. And there's this like promotional rewards coming soon. Do you know about this?

Where are you? Hold on.

So tools.pooltogether.com.

Oh yeah.

Yeah. So this is a way, this is coming soon that you can reward, you can basically airdrop stuff to PoolTogether depositors. Yes. Which I think this is also more than I know about this.

No, I don't. I don't have any help on this. I just have ideas similar to what Leighton was talking about, about like fractionalizing an NFT and then distributing those tokens over time to people so that they could effectively like have part ownership of some really cool NFT. Okay. I think, yeah, I think it would also be cool if there is some sort of way that you could get Like DeFi protocols involved with this. So like if we partner with, I don't know, Trader Joe on Avalanche or something, they would be able to distribute their tokens to pool together depositors on Avalanche that have used that DEX.

Oh, that's available.

Like, yeah, it wouldn't just be like a regular airdrop. It'd be like a pinpointed airdrop where, you know, like pool together And Trader Joe would come out and say, okay, PoolTogether is going to drop 5 Pool tokens. Trader Joe is going to drop 5. I don't remember what his token's called. We'll just call them Joe's.

Joe's. Yeah. Or, or you could do any, or like interacted with a smart contract or did, you know, you could do any sort of, but yes, I, I don't, I would think you would drop a contract address and like try to, I just did this with the Wasis. Like just, I just tried to figure out, I had to manually do this. I did how many PoolTogether depositors, Hold Wasi's, so I had to go through everybody, all the wallets. I did CSV exports on Ethereum, Polygon, and Avalanche in one column, and then I did the Wasi contract holders, which had, which apparently that's really hard to do. You can't just get a CSV of NFT holders. Under the Sea wrote wrote me a little API magic and got me those wallet addresses, and then I did like an Excel formula, and boom! There's sixteen. There's fifteen Wasi holders who are also. Pulled together depositors, but it took, it took a while. Yeah,

that's cool. It took way more time than it should have. And now you can, you know, come up with your own custom Wasi floaty and then just airdrop that floaty to 'em.

That's what I'm talking about. And I just saw there's a beach towel idea floating around. I would love that. Just walking around during the summer in New York City with a beach towel around my, around my neck, pulled together perfectly.

Oh, we're gonna make that happen.

We're

gonna make that happen.

So tell us, Scott, what's your Discord strategy? Because I've got 1,000 Discords and I also have ADD and I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do about it.

So I audit my Discord like every month and be like, well, I haven't been here in a while and I don't know what's going on and I don't appear to be interested anymore. So I'll leave that server. But in terms of organization, I try and group them into folders. Which tends to be a little more organized. And then I just close the folder if I haven't been in it in a while.

Wait, you can close a folder or is it hiding a folder? What are you doing?

No, it just like collapses. So then you have like a bunch of little—

yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. I just collapse it and ignore it.

Do you, do you do the whole whitelist or the allowlist hunting? The, you know, you try to get in on projects and try to get in on NFTs and, 'cause that is oppressive. Like that is a weight on my shoulders to try to, all the things that I'm like, I'm losing out, I'm missing stuff. Oh my gosh. You don't do that?

No, I, so I'll follow like the, I don't know, the, the allowlist contests on a couple of different Discords. So like the Wanderers, the Woodies, and Capsule Vault. They all have different people involved in different veins of NFTs. And I'll just look through those lists and say, do any of these interest me? And generally the answer is no, none of these seem that interesting. But I did, you know, like that's how I found NEMIS and I was able to get on their allowlist for NEMIS, gotten there early, which they haven't done anything, but I'm not really in NEMIS to make a huge gain. I'm in it to help support the forest. Uh, and then through Wanderers, I got onto an Arbitrum thing called Battlefly, which I don't know nearly enough about it to talk about it at any length, but it did get me to start—

No, no, no. Before that, you said through something you got to Arbitrum.

Oh, through, through Wanderers and this allowlist for this Battlefly thing. They're on Arbitrum, so I started using Arbitrum that way. 'Cause there was no other reason for me to go to Arbitrum.

Like the,

it's the same thing with like Avalanche. If PoolTogether wasn't there, I wouldn't be on Avalanche.

The cool thing about Arbitrum is that I think most of the NFT projects interact with each other through like CastleDAO. So you can like, actually you can use your NFTs on Arbitrum in CastleDAO, but I need to check this out. This looks very cool. This is like its own game, right?

Yeah. It's its own like mini game thing where you basically get this like butterfly that generates for 2 months and the butterfly gets these different mech type things that get stacked on it for different stats. And then you send 'em into an arena to basically earn more magic tokens, which I haven't really explored what magic tokens do yet, but I could get more of them. And then at the end of that arena thing, which I think takes a month, you start all over again and you can mint new butterflies again.

It's just, it just kind of hurts my heart to know that something so beautiful as butterflies would fight each other.

I mean, they kind of do in real life sometimes.

Oh, they do? Nature's brutal.

Yeah. Yeah. No, nature's really crazy.

Now I'm just looking up butterfly wrestling moves and posting the GIFs in the, in the Discord. So, so this is played around—

Hold on, hold on. You say GIF?

I forget. Shoot. GIF is the old school way to say it. And now the new school way to say it is GIF. And I have outed myself. I've been trying to say it the GIF way, but I'm old school with the GIF, like the GeoCities, you know, you have the GIFs. Yeah.

Oh, I remember GeoCities.

Yeah.

Did you ever Fark?

I just got boomer alerted. Did I ever fart?

Fark. F-A-R-K.

No. What is that?

So Fark is like a, a random news website. It's like super random. I think that's originally how I stumbled into Bitcoin way back in the, my college days. 'Cause I, I found all sorts of wacky things through FARC. Like I found Zooniverse, Free Rice, um, like a, a math thing called Mersenne Prime. I don't even remember, but it, it, it was like this whole little section of my college life where I was like going through and finding different community-styled projects where you could just either Contribute through doing really monotonous tasks to distract myself from studying, uh, or install a program that you don't fully understand on your computer cuz you're just a dumb kid and it uses your CPU in the background when you're not using it to do things.

Right. My, there's, there's one called like SlackNet or something. There's like some sort of news site that I remember my buddy was into who is way more nerdy than I was. in like doing like the IRC or whatever, even Kermit chat or something. I don't know, stuff like that. I wasn't there, I wasn't there, but I did say GIF. We were talking about butterflies back to, oh, the question I had for you was play-to-earn. Is it ever like sustainable? All these play-to-earn projects are just diving generally. Like you have this pump and it's like, ah, we, yeah, make money, passive income. Ah. And then like, you know, 3 months later, inflation, we're screwed.

I think inflation is just going to be the story of crypto. So I don't think play-to-earn is ever going to be sustainable. That's, that's some really big words coming, like big.

Wow. That's a hot take. That's a hot take.

I mean, you know, take this as it may from a guy who was in and out of crypto 3 times at this point. Like inflation is just the, like going to be the steady thing for crypto because anyone can just make tokens and random things can happen. I mean, it's just like watching the NFT craze. Like there's no reason some of the NFTs should moon. Like they don't have that much of a community built. They, there's really nothing going on with them yet they get pumped. What is the Daily Dose of the Internet?

Are you the Daily Dose of the Internet guy? Is that you?

I don't know what that is. Am I?

That's exactly the, what the Daily Dose of the Internet guy would say.

I wish I was that well known for something, but no, I don't think so. Maybe I do in my sleep.

Isn't Ethereum deflationary?

Yeah, so the network is deflationary, but I, I don't think as a whole crypto will be deflationary. I think that's incredibly difficult to do just due to the fact that new tokens continue, can continue to be made.

Okay. So hold this here.

Individual tokens can certainly be deflationary, but the space as a whole, I think, is inflationary.

Got it. Like nature is inflationary. It's nature will always take up empty space. It will always expand. So the same thing with crypto, it's just going to, you're going to have infinite tokens. You're going to have infinite NFTs.

Yeah. Like it's, it's, it's like set theory, which for math nerds, they'll totally understand what I said just there. And other people will just be like, I have no freaking clue. But effectively, like Ethereum is its own set, its own space, and it has its own rules that apply. And then that set is part of a larger set, which can continue growing. And that would be like, you know, the set of all real numbers where it's infinite and continuously expanding.

But you can't have an infinite set, right?

Oh, you can, you can have an infinite set of infinite sets.

But doesn't that by it, by its very nature mean it's So an infinite, a set of infinite sets, but so, but a set of infinite sets.

There's different sizes of infinity too. Like just, just wrap your head around that. There's different sizes of infinity.

How so?

Well, I don't remember the math behind that. I just remember that being a fact.

Oh, okay. I had a good question that I gotta get back to in my mind, 'cause we were talking about infinite sets. Uh, oh, what were we talking about before that? Play to earn. We're talking about deflation. Yeah, play to earn.

Inflation and deflation.

Okay. All right. I, you just broke my brain with that. Oh, that was it. Hot takes. Okay. That was a spicy take. You said, you said that, uh, Crypto is inflationary. And so it's, it's always going to like play to earn will not succeed in the ways that you think it will because of the inflationary measure or nature of, of the space. So what other hot takes do you have? What are, what are some things that, this is an interview, job interview question. What are some things that you believe that most people disagree with?

That's, that's, that's a hard question. Things that I believe that other people disagree with. I think doomsday preppers have the right idea. They just take it to the, to an extreme that doesn't make any sense. Or do you want crypto-specific ones?

No, I love that. That, that was actually really good. And now I want to follow that up with, I said that a doomsday prepper would think that we're on the darkest timeline, correct?

Oh, 100%.

But you, you corrected me. You corrected me and said, no, we're not. We're on the strangest timeline. But then you just said that you are a more, you, you think they have the right idea. Those doomsday preppers, they just probably buy too many hazmat suits.

Yeah. Like I, like we're definitely on a more than not doomed trajectory. But I don't, I don't think that it needs to be taken to the extent where you need to be buying a property on 20 acres in the middle of nowhere and milking your own goats to make your own cheese. Like, there's just a lot of effort. It's not that hard to just be like, I can buy my own cheese or just not have cheese.

What other, what other hot takes do you have? Keep going.

NFTs, like music NFTs, are going to be short-term hot. So like the next like 2 or 3 years, they'll probably explode and then they'll stop being as popular. It'll just be like the MP3 wave. Someone will figure out how to LimeWire NFTs effectively or some nonsense like that. And then they'll stop being as popular. It just seems to be how the music industry operates. Can you hear the lawnmower in my neighbor's yard?

No, I can't. The Krisper plugin is working well. But I tend to agree with you. I actually am frustrated that music NFTs are just trying to redo the album and artist and single medium.

Yes. Like there's no innovation there.

Yeah, like I wanna have the NFT of the Free Bird guitar solo by Lynyrd Skynyrd, or I wanna have like, you know, like a certain part of a live performance, or, you know, I wanna have something that I can then iterate on or those kind of things or hear what that kind of like, what other things can we do with music NFTs than what we have so far?

I think the live performance thing would be absolutely phenomenal. Like if there was a way to capture a specific set of a live performance, like my favorite band, Hueco Boingo, they did their last concert, I think it was in 1991. So like I was not old enough to go or anywhere close. And it was in October and they had one song that they played, Water, and it's my favorite song that they did. And it's not on any album. I would give an arm to have an NFT of that concert, of that song.

It's not on YouTube.

Well, it is, but like, it's, it's not—

Yeah, no, I know what you're saying.

Like, I don't necessarily do that. Yeah.

So I, I wanna, I wanna have an NFT of me being at a live performance at some show. And when I go, woo, I wanna have that. I, I wanna have that clip of me going woo at whatever, at Bieber, at Justin Bieber concert or something, you know, that would be sick.

I think we should all question why you're at a Justin Bieber concert.

Oh, just the Biebs' new stuff, Lonely. Oh, I mean, it's, it's like U2-level music. Justin Bieber. That's my hot take.

He's definitely getting there in terms of like fandom.

Yeah.

I think some of his fans are otherworldly.

Yeah. Okay. More hot takes. This is fun. Well, let's, let's do, uh, let's do one, one more hot take. 2, if you want to give us a bonus hot one.

One more hot take. Um, I think people need to grow more of their own food.

Explain.

The amount of people that don't know what vegetables and stuff are actually supposed to look like. So they're requiring like, you know, a red pepper to look like this pristine picture of a red pepper without actually being like, okay, some of them can be lumpy and it's still edible. Like, it's just crazy that people need these like picture book forms of a fruit or a vegetable just to be like, yeah, I can eat that. Like pumpkins, they're never like perfectly round or anything like that. They're lumpy, weird shaped things.

It's like, it's like the, the curated timeline, like the Instagram timeline, the highlight reel, but IRL and in produce, right? So like, we only know the Cavendish banana. That's all we know. Right.

And then when you eat a Banana Runch, you're like, this doesn't taste like a banana. And little do you know, that's the old banana before it went extinct.

And, and like when I'm eating apples or other, you know, mass-produced food, it's starting to get— they do this with flavor too. Junk food. The whole point of junk food Is it's gotta be interesting enough to eat, but not too interesting so that, you know, that you're eating it. It's gotta be like bland enough. It's gotta, it's got this like bland factor that you must maintain. So it's not even the look of it, but it's also like the flavor of it as well.

Yeah. Like it's, it has to thread that delicate line. Like I've always found it really interesting to find something super new. In the grocery store and try it. Like, I'm originally from Western New York. So like we had Wegmans and they always had crazy things in the grocery store. And one of the things I found, oh God, a decade ago was this thing called Prometheus Springs. And it was a capsaicin water. It was amazing.

I don't even know what that is. Like capsaicin water. What are you talking about?

So it's, it's basically water that's infused with the thing that makes hot peppers hot.

It's actual spicy water, which is what I call seltzer. I call seltzer spicy water, but that's not, it's, it's hot pepper water.

It's literally spicy water. Yeah. Like there'd be one that was like brown, like it was, uh, like black pepper lemon. So it'd be black pepper lemonade basically with Capsaicin oil mixed in, so it was hot when you were drinking it. It was so good.

Does Wegmans— Wegmans is in Brooklyn now, so I can go there. It's a very, uh, brown store. It's like earth tone-y. It's like the whole, yes, the whole paint job is like, it's almost, it's like a, a darker Cheesecake Factory, which is basically yellow. And they haven't— anyway, do, do you think they would have this now or you're saying they used to have it and they don't anymore 'cause no one bought it 'cause it was too spicy?

They used to have it. I don't think it exists anymore.

I guess I could make my own. Just put some, put some stuff, some hot, some pepper and some hot sauce and capsaicin oil.

Yeah, I don't think it's made anymore.

Okay.

That's unfortunate. Well, we gotta wrap this.

Yeah, we gotta wrap this up, Taliskai. But, uh, and I've totally, this is my favorite interview so far because we've been able, I've just, This has been fun to just roam through the gardens of our minds together and talk about things as it pops up and embrace the ADD. But I want to know for this, your podcast episode, do you have anything that you wanted to talk to— talk about that we have not discussed up until this point? Anything that you want to shill? Any bags that you want to pump?

I'm not that type of person. I don't have any bags to pump. Buy more Pool.

Buy more Pool. That's right. Where should the— where should you buy Pool? What's your favorite place to buy, to hoard Pool? What's your favorite exchange? Or that we— or, or is it— we're not financial advice here, so we shouldn't probably say that.

Yeah. Yeah. Not financial advice. Do your own research, all that jazz. I don't really have one. I use Sushi a lot because it's sushi. It's everywhere. I don't know.

That's true. Okay. All right, great. Well, this has been a treat for me, and I think for the Pull Together community, Tal Sky, that you would give us, that you would trust us with your hot takes, that you would bring the care and concern that you have for our planet and for humanity into this interview, into this podcast. I'm excited to write this description with all the links that you've given us as far as all these NFTs and different things that you're interested And thank you so much for joining us, Tal Skye, and keep fighting the good fight.

Thanks. Thanks. Thanks a lot, Hot Mike. This, this has been fun.

You've— well, I gotta do the ending thing here. Yeah. Let me say, uh, thanks for listening to the Pull Together podcast. I'm Hot Mike and I'm dropping that mic like it's hot. Okay, cool. There

you go. Then you can insert a thud at the very end.

There you go. Thanks for listening to the PoolTogether Community Podcast. You can visit pooltogether.com to deposit, and we'd love to hear what you thought about today's episode. So visit the PoolTogether Discord and let us know.