PoolTogether Community Podcast #8: Chuck, PoolTogether Co-Creator

This is the PoolTogether Community Podcast. PoolTogether is the world's number one no-loss prize savings account. You can visit pooltogether.com to deposit. You're listening to the PoolTogether Community Podcast, and we are here With Chuck from the OG PoolTogether community, co-creator of PoolTogether. Chuck, it's so good to have you here today. Thanks for making time for us.

Yeah, definitely. Thanks for having me.

So, so Chuck, uh, you— yes, you being the OG, you being a Gandalf-type figure in PoolTogether, could you tell me how this, how this happened? How did, how did PoolTogether happen? What's your side of the story?

Sure. So I guess PoolTogether happened when Denver and I, or Brendan and I, went down to Denver in 2019 to do ETH Denver and do the hackathon and all that. And we came down with an idea. We already knew what we wanted to build, but we heard Leighton's pitch about the idea of PrizeLink Savings, and we thought it was a great idea. So we chatted with him a bunch about it. We still built our own project. It did pretty well. But after that, we hooked up with Leighton again, and Leighton wanted us to build up the prototype because he did like the hackathon version of it, but it wasn't what he wanted. So yeah, we just got together after that and built out the prototype and Put it up on— he put it up on Reddit and I think Product Hunt and such. And then, yeah, kind of just went from there, kind of found some good traction and just wanted to run with it. So,

so I'm going to ETH Denver here next week. I'm so pumped about it. Can you give me tips on how I can go to ETH Denver and start some badass protocol like PoolTogether? What are your pro tips on on the rest of my life and success, please.

I mean, I think the trick would probably be just talking to people, but I'm guessing you have no problem just getting in there and chatting with other people around, around Denver. I think the best part about getting together in person is the collaboration aspect. So that's definitely the trick.

So, okay, so do I need to wear like a, like a tee, like a I feel like I shouldn't wear some sort of crypto t-shirt or clothing. I feel like that's too forward. That's like going to watch your favorite— that's like being in a band and wearing your own band t-shirt or something like that, right? So I don't want to do that, I don't think. Do I need to like wear a costume? You know, do I need to— do I need to like— who am I looking for? Who should I talk to? The people with the crypto t-shirts? The people in costumes? Give me some strategies for like going to start a protocol. Who do I need to shake down?

So I think it depends on what kind of protocol you want to start. If you want to start something fun and crazy, definitely wear a onesie and wear your best bear or penguin onesie or what have you and try to find those people. If you want to start something a bit more, I don't know, serious and down to earth, I mean, we were dressed pretty normally, you know, regular old t-shirts and such. So, uh, depends on what you want to get out of it, I would say.

Okay, so you guys, you were nondescript, you were normal, you were normies going in there. You didn't have any sort of branding or anything like that. Okay, so yeah, I need to choose between my Wasi onesie or, you know, you know. Okay, got it, got it. I love that.

Exactly.

So, so now that you— now past 2019, Past starting PoolTogether. Well, first, first, actually, there's a question here. What did you like about Leighton's pitch? Like, what grabbed you about what he said to you at ETH Denver that you're like, yeah, we could do this?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's the same guiding principle that we've had with PoolTogether since the start, which is just, how can we make things better? We want to use our powers, if you will, programming or design or what have you, to do good. And PoolTogether does help with that, or I believe it helps with that. It helps people that have gambling addiction. It can help you fight that off because you still get that gambling dopamine high, but you're just saving money. You're not actually— throwing it away in that regard. And yeah, for just anybody who wants to build their savings over time, it gives you more of a reason to do that. And crypto is perfect for it because the yield we see, I could get 0.1% APR out of my bank savings account, or I could do something like PoolTogether and have a much more interesting time with it, much more lucrative probably as well. And the borderlessness of it is amazing as well. We've seen some great stories come from PoolTogether from the Philippines and such, just more developing nations where people have been able to renovate their house because they won a PoolTogether prize. So just things like that have just been incredible along the way. But that was the original. I heard Leighton's pitch and I was like, envisioning what it could be and what it has turned into.

So, yeah. So Chuck, what's your specific role at PoolTogether?

Great question. I mainly do frontend programming. So, you know, a lot of the UI, React, CSS, all that good stuff. I also do design. We did have Lily for quite some time doing design, heading up design, but she's moved on to her own project, which is awesome. And so I've taken over on design for the meantime. So yeah, anything along those lines is kind of what I focus on around here.

So as you've reflected on 2019 to now, we're in 2022, how has it been being at Pooled Together? What are some challenges that you've seen? What are some victories? And I would love to know what you see, if you could predict the future for us as far as PoolTogether goes.

Ooh, predict the future. I like that. Let's see. When we started, it was 3 of us and we had a dream, but we didn't know if it was actually going to take off. And since then, it's just exploded into its own kind of living organism. And that's been incredible to watch. Because, yeah, the entire DAO concept wasn't really fleshed out back in 2019 as much. I didn't even know what a DAO really was back then. For instance, I just did Ethereum stuff. So we've just watched the community kind of grow and explode, and it's been amazing. Obviously some growing pains with that because there's all these questions around, like, who's responsible for what? Or what is this team and what is this company and what does this organization do? and such. But I think it's being handled pretty well so far. Everybody's really complimentary towards each other, especially on the chats and such. We have our Friday community calls and everybody's just so friendly and helpful. And yeah, that kind of resonates through the community, which I think has been amazing to watch. Predictions for the future? Hopefully just more of the same. Hopefully we just keep growing. I think what we did over the past few years was keep iterating on the idea until we landed on something that really works with V4. And personally, I'd rather us not do a V5. I'd rather us just kind of scale out horizontally with V4 and try and get out to as many people with it as possible. So we don't really need to iterate as much in that regard anymore. We can just build on top of the platform that we now have. That's as far as I see it. And yeah, just bring it to the world, keep growing.

Now, what's the balance of PoolTogether Inc. versus DAO? How do you balance that? What's happening with that?

Yeah, I mean, there's, there's been a lot of talks about should PoolTogether Inc. even exist now? And there's talks of having some— I can't remember what Leighton was calling it, some unincorporated nonprofit or something, some sort of different kind of organization in that regard. Or should there even be a company of any sort connected to the DAO? So yeah, we've definitely had talks about that, but I'm not sure at all where that kind of stuff goes. Thankfully, Leighton heads up all that kind of more business kind of stuff. I personally like to shy away from that and focus more on product design and what have you. So yeah, I think it's just the community and the DAO are number one at the end of the day and the governance and then the corporation at the moment just exists to kind of push that along as far as I see it.

What do you think PoolTogether's secret sauce is?

Community. Yeah, as I mentioned before, just like the complementary nature of our community and how positive everybody is and welcoming. I think those kind of vibes just resonate, and when people come to check it out, they actually want to stay for that reason. So That's kind of what I see as like number one. And then obviously number two is the idea itself, the concept, the smart contracts, etc., that we've built is— yeah, that's the secret sauce. Those are the two things you need.

I wonder what our PoAP farmer to contributor conversion rate is right now. But I think, I think our, our secret sauce is how we treat bots. We're very polite to bots.

Yeah, I've noticed that a bit. Although I can never tell who is a bot necessarily or not, you know, because some people might just join those calls to get the POAPs, but then leave it running by accident, just forget about it. And then they're not a bot necessarily. But yeah, who knows?

I mean, I could be a bot. And then what is that? It's not the Turing test, is it? Where you— where humans talk to bots and they don't realize they're talking to bots?

Yeah, I mean, if you were a bot, you would be a very convincing bot.

Like, oh

God,

that's the sweetest thing anyone's ever said to me.

Yeah, yeah, I would, uh, I would have to do, uh, some CAPTCHAs. We'd have to do some CAPTCHAs to figure it out for sure.

Nice. Yeah. Um, okay, uh, what would your ideal PoolTogether promo be? I'm on the marketing work and I asked Anne this as far as like experiential marketing goes, like What would be just like you've arrived, right? Like you shed one, you shed a single tear, it's like your baby has grown up, pulled together, has arrived. What would that promo be? What would that campaign be?

Marketing is not at all my specialty. So I can only have an idea of what I would consider to be ideal in that regard. I would say something where we can really push the message and promote the idea of having an easy way to use PoolTogether, easier than the app. Lately I've been kind of trying to move away from the app myself and try to distance ourselves from that concept because it's so difficult to work with. And push, pull together to where the people are, where they're using crypto, whether that's Coinbase or Kraken or some centralized exchange or Zerion, Zapper, et cetera. I really would rather see us go to them and then the marketing campaign would just bolster that, would just push that message really hard that like, hey, this is how you can do PrizeLink savings where you are, where you do your crypto.

So, so what's the— so what's the Canadian equivalent of a— I know it's a Super Bowl commercial, but there's got to be something specifically Canadian that's like that big time to have a commercial during

hockey, probably.

So Stanley Cup Finals commercial for PoolTogether.

Sure, yeah. But I would think bigger. I would go past Canada, you know, definitely a global market. What can we do that's just way bigger than Canada? Canada's only got so many people. So

we do a pool together prize drawing from space, from the space station.

There you go. There you go.

Boom.

Now we're thinking.

Beam it down. Sweet. So in your— Chuck, in your Twitter profile, You're very cryptic here. You say that you do a bunch of digital projects. Can you enlighten me as to what those might be?

Yeah, I'm a bit of a tinkerer. I, as I mentioned earlier, yeah, I love messing around in Ableton Live, making songs or just doing sound design. Right now I have my Windows machine beside me rendering out an animation in Blender. So on top of doing design and programming, I really need to itch that creative itch. So that's kind of some of the other stuff that I work on on the side. Yeah, actually planning on doing some 3D promos for PoolTogether at the moment. I've put together some good ones, but I just need to kind of finalize them before I show them.

Yeah. So, so what the— where can— with the Ableton stuff or with the music stuff, where are you putting that out into the world somewhere? Is there somewhere where we can go check that out?

Not yet, no. Um, I'm the kind of person who I don't really want to publish just whatever. I want to make sure that it's, you know, ace before I actually put something out there. Um, so I— because I've been focusing on PoolTogether for however many years, I haven't had time to to polish up an album of any sort. So nothing that you can give a listen to at the moment, but perhaps someday for sure.

So is it like 4 on the floor type stuff? You doing some like trap? What do you— what are you doing? What kind of—

It is. Yeah, it is electronic. I don't really know what subgenre it would be. I do try to aim to make it danceable. So yeah, it 4 on the floor, we could go with that for sure. Um, I mean, I come from a rock and punk background. I used to play in bands when I was younger, and, uh, then I just got into modular synths and, yeah, in the box, um, Ableton and such, all the great VSTs out there. So yeah, okay, a lot of, a lot of experimentation.

We're in the danger zone here because I am, I am, uh, just way too much into modular. And so, yeah, we could just start talking about that. Metropolis is coming out with an Ableton Live new firmware update from Intelligel. We can go down that, but we won't. But Chuck, let's do, let's do that at some point. If you're going to be at ETH Dev, wherever we got to sit down and talk about this stuff and collab, that'd be awesome.

Definitely. For sure.

Yeah. Cool.

They're a lot of fun.

Yeah, they're, they're, they're a lot of fun and very expensive though. You know, I just think a module is Basically a transaction fee on mainnet, so it's fine.

Yeah, about one and the same, right? For sure.

That's right. I just try to limit my transactions on mainnet and get more modules. So what do you— what are your predictions for crypto this year in 2022? You gave us a little taste of what you thought, where you thought PoolTogether was headed, but I would love for you to hear about your thoughts on how the space is going to be headed this year in 2022?

Yeah, I definitely have a very positive outlook for crypto myself. I don't ever believe in any of the regulation FUD or any of that stuff. I think the technology is out there. We're going to use it. People are going to use it whether they try to contain it or not. I think it's just going to explode. So DeFi is just going to keep growing. NFTs are obviously been insane lately and that's just going to continue. DAOs, hopefully there's just more DAOs and more people working in DAOs. I've seen countless people move from Web2 to Web3, incredibly talented people too, pouring in from Apple, Google, Facebook, whatever. It's been fantastic to finally watch that happening and I think it's just going to keep continuing on that path. I'm actually, I don't even know if I'm not too convinced that there's going to be a crypto winter for a while. I don't think 2022 is the year for it. I think it's just going to keep growing for the moment. So incredibly optimistic and positive outlook from me, at least.

What about NFTs? So you mentioned NFTs. Where do you think those are going? What are you excited about?

I am excited about— I actually saw a pyramid, like basically the hierarchy of needs kind of pyramid, but for NFTs the other day. And investing was at the bottom and then self and identity is at the top next to community and such. I think NFTs, at least in their current incarnation, is really about community and really about the people collecting them. I have become a bit of a collector myself and jumping into the Discords of all those different projects has been amazing to see as well. Yeah, there's, there's a lot of promise there. And obviously it's going to go past just the cultural aspect of the artwork world and those communities and go into the actual, you know, deeds and all that, the actual NFT ownership stuff that's just going to transform the world completely.

Chuck, we want you to name names. We want you to name some projects you're excited about. Let's be specific. Give us that alpha.

As far as NFT communities?

Yeah.

Yeah. Let me just pull mine up. I'll show you, or I'll run off a few that I'm really into. So I am a fan of the Chubby Corns, for instance. I don't know if you know the Chubby Corns and Chubbyverse, but they're just absolutely freaking adorable. And there's a lot of great alpha that they share in their channels once you become a holder. Exodia. Exodia has a lot of promise. It's an analytics platform. And again, when you hold an Exodia, one of their NFTs, you get access to their channels and they just share amazing stuff in there. And that's pushed me towards Haus, H-A-U-S, Haus Modules. You should definitely check that out. And the Muri project. I think if you hold Haus Modules, you also get access to Muri when that drops. So there's just a whole lot of networking kind of effects that happen from go from one FT project to the next FT project to the next one. And yeah, the communities are just incredible, which just opens up all these doors for you.

How do you spell Muri?

M-U-R-I. It's a very kind of secretive anime project so far.

Nice.

The other ones are not anime though. They're all just different styles and different, different things, right? Like Exodia is just analytics, for instance. So

got it, got it. So, so these are more like NFTs that get you into a community. Like I'm thinking of like packaged goods or something like that, that like, but, but not necessarily like utility NFTs, right?

Well, I mean, I would argue that that is a utility.

Oh, for sure. Yeah.

But yeah, I mean, as far as utility goes, the thing that we've been talking about in PoolTogether Live has been really exciting where the concept of when you hold these NFTs, what does that get you? Well, we can delegate, we can have the owners of these NFT communities delegate funds to their NFT holders. I think that's mind-blowing. I think we have a lot of promise there. I'm hoping people work on that and really flesh that out soon. Yeah, that's going to be huge or has the potential to be huge for sure.

So how are NFTs going to save the world?

Oh, I don't ever save the world. That's too far for me. I don't think we're— I'm not that optimistic. How are NFTs going to transform the world? Honestly, I think that crypto and NFTs and all of this stuff in general just has the power to remove all that friction and all those positions, all those jobs that are not necessary and that people just milk and exploit others with. I would rather see people become their own ownership, owners of their their savings, their net worth, and cut out the banks and the middlemen and all that. And I think NFTs and crypto in general are one of the keys to do that. So that's— I wouldn't say save the world, but I would definitely say improve the world.

Well, it's quite the paradox because I've never been more paranoid now until I've been in crypto. So, yes, no, there are all the tools there, I think, for you know, decentralization and empowerment. But there's also, you know, that crypto Twitter is all about these, these two, you know, people who, who got the billions of dollars of Bitcoin. You know, there's always— there's, there's a scammer around every corner.

Mm-hmm.

And there's also like, what was it? I saw a tweet that said something like the best, the easiest way to make money in crypto is to scam people, something like that right now. So there is this, like, yeah, there's the power to change, but then there's the power to corrupt as well.

There definitely is. And that's just human nature, right? Like, you give anybody a technology tool such as this and they're going to use it for good and for bad, right? But I think we're also going to see a lot more methods of helping people with that, whether it's insurance or what have you. I've definitely been scammed myself sometimes. And when you get scammed, You learn a lesson, right? You're just learning how to avoid that down the road. So sometimes they're hard lessons, but sometimes they're also necessary.

Yeah, I prefer cheap lessons. But there's also, there's also, you know, on the pyramid, the hierarchy of needs pyramid or hierarchy of NFTs, is that nonprofit charitable organization mentioned, that sort of thing?

Not sorry. In the pyramid of NFTs, are you asking?

Yeah. So, so I come from the NFT world or the nonprofit world and, and generally the nonprofits I work with would have no clue, nor would they have any clue how to enter the crypto space for the next 5 years at least. And but there, there are these nonprofits like Sea Turtle NFTs that, that where money goes toward sea turtle research. I saw that Leighton was interested in this house NFT where you would purchase the NFT and it would build a house for somebody who needs a home. So there's this whole arm of charitable giving, and I've even seen like artists who will do their first NFT drop and give everything to like, for example, a food bank in New York City. So there is this like charitable—

I actually was a part of that.

Oh, great. Maybe I saw from you when I was looking at that, when I scrolled through the— The Twitter.

Yeah, Dmitry Chernyak, Stringer's work that he did. He just, he made an unlimited supply, but you could only buy it that one day for 24 hours. And everybody that bought it was donating meals to people in New York, which is, yeah, I think that's brilliant. I love to see that kind of stuff.

Yeah, I love it. And then also the, what I would tell a nonprofit in my limited knowledge of crypto, I've only been here since November is, is, uh, or really, you know, full-time with my attentions in, in since November is I would tell a nonprofit that if you really want to enter Web3, you have to change fundamentally the organization of your nonprofit. I don't know if you would agree with that, but I mean, the way things, the DAOs are going, and even with PoolTogether, we're seeing like, hey, no, you, you, if it's truly decentralized, the community owns it, the community makes it happen, the community empowers The work. So, yeah. Would you agree with that? How do you see nonprofits entering the NFT or the crypto space?

It's nonprofits, it's corporations in general. I hear it a lot from games and the gaming communities, people saying AAA developers and all sorts of indie developers probably won't have a very easy time breaking into crypto because they're so set in their ways and their structures have grown the way they have. The best route to getting into it is probably to start something from scratch. So that's definitely what I would recommend if somebody is looking to break into Web3 in that regard and start something new. Yeah, the existing Web2 and the existing structures that we have don't necessarily line up very well. I imagine there's, there's some that could make that migration, but it'd be very challenging, I would imagine.

Okay, so I would love to hear about your greatest success and your worst failure in the crypto space.

Okay, um, greatest success is definitely PoolTogether, hands down. When we started, so Brendan and I were contracting in Web2 when we met, and eventually we're just like, oh, there's something going on here. 2018, we're like, oh, we need to look into this, we need to figure this out. And he found Ethereum and figured out how amazing it was. And so we started freelancing down that road. And That's great. And got some Chubbyverse friends already. That's awesome. Chubbyverse friends are adorable. Definitely recommend jumping on that. Getting distracted by the chat here. So, yeah, Brendan and I did some freelancing on a project called MedCredits. They also went by MedX. They raised under the 2018 ICO and we built out a telemedicine platform for them and nobody used it because nobody needed telemedicine on crypto at the time. But that was a good success. And then that brought us to working with OpenZeppelin. And so we built out some stuff from OpenZeppelin, something for the gas station network there. And eventually that brought us to meeting Leighton and gave us the experience we needed to really build up what PoolTogether is. So that's the success. That's the main success. Failures. I mean, I guess MedCredits and MedX was a failure, but it wasn't our project. We were contracting on it, so it didn't really go anywhere. They raised a bunch of money and I don't think it really went anywhere. So that was interesting to see. Interesting to see the failures from the 2018 ICO space, who didn't survive that. I've also been working on IPFS lately, trying to build out more decentralization for PoolTogether, and that's been very challenging. I wouldn't say it's a failure, but it's probably the most difficult thing I've done so far with PoolTogether. It's just been quite the challenge. So,

well, thank you for being vulnerable with us. Generally, people share investment wins and losses, and I love That you're a builder. And so we do the same, that side of things.

Yeah, builder, builder number one, investor number 2 or 3 or whatever down the road.

So let's do a little, let's do a little lightning round.

Sure.

Bitcoin or Ethereum?

Ethereum.

What's your crypto guilty pleasure? NFTs. Who's your favorite follow on Twitter?

Um, Layton. Oh yeah, yeah, always, uh, listening to his notifications. He shares some good stuff.

Wow, you have the bell on for Layton?

Yeah, definitely,

dude. That's late.

Latent is our, you know, main avenue towards the business side of things too, right? So I keep on top of things that way.

That's right. Okay. All right. I'm going to turn on the bell too. I suggest everyone does the same. Not financial advice.

Yeah.

Favorite dApp besides PoolTogether?

Oh, I mean, Zapper, I guess. It's kind of a dApp. You know, they do You can make transactions on it. So that's the one I'm always looking at though.

Pause lightning round. Tell me, tell me about Zapper, why you love it so much.

It's simple, it's easy to use. You can group your accounts together and then see your overall balance and what you're holding, all your NFTs, everything like that. But you can also interact with various protocols through it, find best farming APRs, et cetera. Zapper's just really rad.

What do you think they should— how should they pivot? Or what do you think that would totally be not Zapper but totally Zapper?

How they should pivot but not?

You know, just dream dreams for Zapper, please.

Wallets? Mobile?

Okay, which they're going there, right?

I've heard rumors, but I don't know.

A whisper of a rumor. I mean, they were also doing like a lot of game type stuff where you'd like, you get volts and sync them and get NFTs and stuff, which is pretty fun, but it was on mainnet, so I'd rather buy Eurorack modules. Um, and then, uh, okay, uh, favorite chain and why?

Oof. Um, I mean, I would say Avalanche lately just because that's, uh, you know, I'm in the pool together on Avalanche and Polygon and The Avalanche pools brought me more prizes for some reason. So Avalanche, I guess, but looking forward to Arbitrum, Optimism, MATIC, anything ZK. So yeah, along those lines.

Okay, so you said Avalanche first place, then you mentioned Optimism, and then you said any of the stuff.

Yeah.

Cool. I have not won on Avalanche, but my main, my main pool My Avalanche and my main pool are on the same wallet. So does that affect me in some way? Like I can only win 2 prizes that pool together, right? Per draw across both. Across both. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. There's some sort of like numbers. People have done the math on how to split things up to like optimize

it.

Big deposits. Yeah, exactly. When the most prizes— I don't know. I haven't paid much attention to that. I just threw some money in. Yeah, totally. So yeah,

yeah. And I, and I wrote a song about Avalanche, but I can't even remember it. I

think was that was you, hey? I think I saw that. Yeah, yeah, with the animation. Yeah, yeah.

Oh, I'm excited about this together on Avalanche. Yeah, on Avalanche. Okay, yeah, yeah. All right, um, uh, what's, what's your favorite moment in crypto? Now this is different than the question of your wins. But what do you think, like, in the whole cryptoverse, what stands out to you as like, that was awesome?

Nothing stands out. I feel like it's just insane every day. I mean, it was just yesterday where this random couple was trying to launder $3.6 billion in Bitcoin. Right. Like, that happens. That kind of stuff happens all the time. And I think that's, that's pretty monumental. It's really entertaining. And yeah, so a lot of good memes come out of that stuff as well.

Okay, so this couple was your favorite moment in crypto then? That's what's going down in this podcast?

Sure. Yeah. Or at least one of the tweets following it up that somebody had edited together, the FBI trying to track them down, and it's just her rapper video. It's just, yeah, amazing stuff like that.

Somebody posted a TikTok. I don't know what reality is really, but somebody posted one of her TikToks where she like admits to stealing the Bitcoin, like to, you know. But I was like, there's no way they had a TikTok filter where it would be like, did you just steal billions of dollars in Bitcoin? Yes. Crazy. Yeah. All right. And then, and then what do you think the worst moment in crypto has been?

Oh, these are the hardest questions. There's been so many, so many negatives. Probably whatever the biggest exploit is, you know, so far, or any of the, any of the exploits where people are losing a lot of money, where it's just like an internal job. Those are the worst. Where it's just people actually scamming people and trying to make it look all good and great. You know, a lot of people I know in Canada lost a lot of money to Quadriga and that whole scam. And then I just heard last week that that guy surfaced again, or one of those guys, and was connected to MIM and Spell and all that. And that's just, it's just lousy. Yeah, there's a lot of unfortunate things that happen, but There's also a lot of fortunate ones.

Yeah, for sure. I was talking to my— I work in a church and the organist at the church, I was talking about crypto and he's like, I had no clue he was even into crypto, but he was part of the Ledger hack. And I had seen some tweets of just how deep it went where they took the shipping information from Ledger and then they were able to get in people's And it was just so horrible. And then I immediately couldn't talk to him about crypto anymore because he told me about how he got rugged and he's like, oh, I'll eventually get back into it. I'm like, dude, I'm so sorry. So I'm not going to talk to you about this because I'm excited about it. So I'll leave you alone now.

Yeah. Yeah. I've had that experience as well. My physiotherapist's husband got, got rugged in Quadriga and I was like, oh, all right, let's talk about something else. Sure. That's unfortunate.

So, so let's go back to PoolTogether then. And as far as like DAOs, Chuck, do you have any thoughts about DAOs? And I saw a tweet the other day about like somebody saying how DAOs can't accomplish anything and name a DAO that has, has created something that's worthwhile. And PoolTogether seems to be really big into their DAO, right? We've got a good thing going here. So what are your thoughts on DAOs in product and, and how we can move forward? especially with PoolTogether, but just in general in the space. Is it like a utopia thing where we're just like dreaming and singing Kumbaya and it's really actually not going to work, or there is a way forward for DAOs in the space with product?

Yeah, the way I look at this stuff, I definitely look at it from maybe a different lens than some. I don't see— I don't know what The answer is I don't know what the future holds in that regard. We probably haven't unlocked those things yet or figured out how to make them work properly yet, because I would liken this to maybe 1994 or 1997 or something in the internet world where I was still using dial-up CompuServe and nobody knew what the internet really was or what was the power behind it. So anybody that says, like, well, DAOs haven't done anything, or Crypto hasn't done anything. Yeah, I mean, sure, you can make that argument and maybe you've got somewhat of a point. I don't think so. I think we've done some incredible stuff. But if that's what you believe, then you don't know what's coming. You don't know what the next 10 years holds. It's just going to be— I think it's going to be insane what we're going to see. It's going to be amazing.

I love that. Okay, so I want to talk about the meatspace for a second. Any, any plans to attend any events, anything you're excited about going to in the future that people might be able to see you at?

I've got one thing. I really don't— I'm not really big on traveling or any of that kind of stuff during the whole COVID deal. But I am going to take the risk and go down to Mexico with the team, with like Brendan, Leighton, and Those guys and our great coworkers and just go chill in Mexico at the end of March for a while. Just do some team building in that regard and see what comes of it. Get some, get some R&R in as well. Definitely need it through this Canadian winter, pandemic winter. So that's, that's what I'm looking forward to right now. Eventually I'll go to conferences and such again, but I'm just waiting for COVID to die down. I don't really want to take 3 flights to Europe and 3 flights back, for instance.

I'm sorry, you cut, you cut out there for me for a second. Were you inviting me to Mexico? Is that—

Uh, yeah, no, I, I definitely was not. Uh, it's not my trip. I think you'd have to talk to somebody else if you want to, if you want to see if you can get invited on that one.

I love that you pawn it off on the community. Yeah,

yeah, you know, somebody else, somebody else is planning that one.

I used to do college admissions, and when somebody would ask if they were accepted or not, I would always blame the— yeah, the committee. Yep. Well, the committee decided that this was not a good idea, so that's fine. I got a taste of my own medicine. I get that. Yeah. All right, uh, cool. Well, well, Chuck, I think we're about done here. Chuck, it's so good to have you here today. Thanks for making time for us.

Yeah, definitely.

Thanks for having me. the Pool Together 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 Pool Together Discord and let us know.