The Future of Self-Custody Wallets: A Conversation With Michael Haley from Taho

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. I'm your host, Millie Yearley, AKA Tim. AKA, I'm not caffeinated enough today, so we'll see how this plays out. And I'm here with Michael from Tahoe. Michael, thank you for being here on the Pull Together Community Podcast, sir.

Oh, thanks for having me. Stoked.

That's right. We have a real-life soundboard here. Hey, so, so what are you doing in crypto? How'd you get here?

Oh man. Long time. Long time. Do you want the TL;DR or like the full juicy, you know?

Listen, We got an hour and the juicier you can make it, that probably— we're looking for downloads here. We're looking for listens.

All right. All right. All right. Especially since we're doing it live here. So where to begin? So I first started to tumble down the rabbit hole in 2014. So I've been in the space a long time now. And at the time the space was really Bitcoin. This was pre-Ethereum, you know, before Ethereum was even really, I guess it was a concept at this point, but most people didn't know about it. The ecosystem at the time was really Bitcoin and Some static. So I found out about Bitcoin initially from a friend of mine from college who I randomly bumped into in Lower Manhattan, you know, at some point in 2014. And like a lot of people that had gotten their hands on Bitcoin in the early days, I believe he was a little bit of a Silk Roader. No, don't quote me on that. But, you know, that's how I, you know, this friend of mine is how I first heard about Bitcoin and it kind of blew my mind. When I was an undergrad, I got really into sort of the anthropology of money with one of my professors was this famous sort of Deleuzian Marxist theorist. And I'd gotten pilled on, oh my God, what is money? It's a social construct, all this stuff. And I just sort of decided, okay, well, look, we have nation-state issued currency. That's how things are going to work basically for the next couple hundred years during my lifetime. We're not going to really see anything change there. So when I first learned of Bitcoin, and this again, it's like 7 years ago, it really just completely blew my mind. The fact that you could have this totally different regime of money or currency. And then like a lot of people, when I started to hear about the early Ethereum vision, which is sort of extending that not just from monetary policy to all sorts of other things, it just completely blew my mind. So around 2014 to 2015, I was going to a lot of early Bitcoin meetups in New York City. This was like when BitDevs was just getting started. This was also when ConsenSys, Joe Lubin's entity, was starting to be formed. This is before ConsenSys even started. And I just got pretty pilled on the early Ethereum space back in 2014, 2015. And there are all sorts of crazy ideas floating around in the space, and it's been kind of wild to see them slowly actually start to get realized. I mean, DAOs at the time were kind of the craziest, most futuristic thing anyone could think of regarding Ethereum. And now we're kind of living in that reality, which is pretty special. So basically 2014, 2015, I got pilled on Bitcoin. I got really excited pre-launch about the vision of Ethereum. 2015 to 2018, I moved into the space full-time. I was working in a company called AlphaPoint, which is now basically building the Chivo wallet in El Salvador. And then from 2018 to 2021, I moved to a different company. I went more into the consumer space and I worked with a gentleman named Jameson Lopp. If you guys have any exposure to the Bitcoin space, he's kind of like the canonical Bitcoiner, big beard, hardcore libertarian guy, lots of guns buried in spider holes behind his house and different places around the US. And we basically made what I think is by far the best high-security multisig Bitcoin wallet. They're now actually, since I've left, adding support for Ethereum, which is awesome. But around 2021, I started to get really, really interested in coming back and working on Ethereum. My mind was blown by what had happened in DeFi from 2019 onwards, and I just thought there was a really, really interesting opportunity to do something in the wallet space. And that's kind of what brought me to Thesis and the project that we're incubating now, Tahoe, which at the time was called Tally ho. So yeah, that's my, that's kind of like the fast forward version of me getting radicalized by early Bitcoin and then the early Ethereum vision and then pivoting over to full-time to the space 2015, working on the, basically working on a B2B SaaS project for 3 years, going into the consumer space in Bitcoin for another 3 years after that. Um, and basically the last, yeah, 2 years I've been heads down on Tahoe.

So you gotta talk about Ledger then. Uh, and we can, again, you know, But I, I would just want to hear it. Like when you talk about a multisig, like super secure Bitcoin storage wallet or something, and then we see what's happening with Ledger, which is like, hey, you know, for the benefit of features, you can actually share a portion of your key with product or something like that. I, I, I haven't really fully delved into it, but I, I just see the knee-jerk reaction of like, this is garbage. We must go to other things, you know? just like, like a drop of the hat, boom, everyone hates Ledger today for some reason. So any thoughts on that?

Yeah. I mean, you know, I'm definitely a Ledger user personally. I've got sort of mixed feelings on it, right? I, I'd actually, I need to kind of go through all the documents that they've, I mean, I need to go through all the stuff and make sure I got a clear understanding for how this is all going to work. But yeah, in general, it's, it's definitely a bit scary that, you know, there's API access to your key material. I mean, I think the main thing I would say about this is like, Honestly, for, for like the motherlode of your funds, like you really want to make sure you eliminate like pretty much every single, single point of failure you can think of. And there, that means like a geographic point of failure. So don't have all, you know, all your funds in a hardware wallet in just one place. That also means like the vendors you're working with. So at Casa, the multisig system we put together, you know, the, the motto is basically just eliminate every single point failure you possibly could. So it was multisig, multi-location, multi-device. So it was a 3-of-5 multisig. You'd have one key on your phone, one key Casa held multiple copies of, and then the other 3 keys you would keep on different hardware wallets— Ledger, a Trezor, a ColdCard— and you would keep them in different geographic locations, typically with different security profiles, right? So you would have one, maybe you'd have one at home in a safe, one at a bank, you know, one in another kind of secured access location. A lot of our clients were pretty, pretty extreme, which we really encourage, and they would even keep them in different jurisdictions. Right. So if you're in the US, you know, maybe you don't want more than 1 or 2 keys in the US. You know, maybe you want to keep some in Europe if you have family in South America, that kind of thing. So all of which is to say, yes, I need to kind of better look at what Ledger is doing. But yeah, I mean, it certainly makes me nervous like a bunch of other folks. But I would also say, to be honest, like no one should be using a single hardware wallet for the motherlode in general. There are all sorts of, you know, we think the key material can never leave a hardware wallet. That's just honestly not true. You know, generally, if you have a fairly sophisticated attacker, there are, you know, there are, there are ways to exfiltrate key material. This is a little bit scarier, um, because there's, you can do this programmatically, but, you know, I think it doesn't change the core advice, which is don't put everything in one device. you want to, you know, yeah, I mean, there's, there's more I could say about this, but early, you know, overall I'm a huge fan of what Ledger has done for like the industry. This does look a little bit scary, but I think we're also going to see a lot of experimentation over the next couple of years trying to get— we're basically, we just try to take the edge off self-custody in general. Like you're seeing more and more like MPC wallets. Like this also makes me a little bit nervous, to be honest, but the current regime of like asking users to defend their seed phrase is just, you know, it's, it's, you know, not going to scale for another, like, for the next 1 billion people that are going to use crypto. So it's a bit of a long rambling response, but no one should trust just one hardware wallet or just one vendor, period. Anyway, I like that they're— I like the direction Ledger is heading in. Um, it would be nice if there's maybe a different way technically they could, they could try to get the same consumer experience they're gunning for.

And listen, if you're doing all that stuff that you just said, like, like even jurisdiction-wise, I mean, you can, you get to put detail-oriented on your LinkedIn. Okay. Because that, I mean, that's, that's, that's some Type A stuff, which is great. Uh, I do know, like, I, like, I admire wallets like Argent, which is doing, which is doing social recovery, but then also you can use hardware wallets with that. Right. So it's like this kind of, uh, abstraction of a multisig. They, they do time-based stuff, which is really great as well. But yes, that's the whole thing is, is there's this drive to abstraction. But along with the drive to abstraction, there's got to be a drive for security as well. So we can't just— yes, you can make everything easy to access, but that also means way more scams. That also means way more, you know, rugs are possible, you know?

Yeah, totally. I mean, the only other thing I'd flag here is I do think we're going to see a general blurring between You know, in the past it's been either total custody, right? You're just sending your funds to an exchange or third-party custodian and, you know, knock on wood, they don't lose it. Or B, you know, you've got your seed phrase, you know, etched into a metal plate in a spider hole in your backyard and redundant, you know, backups and different. So it's either like, you know, full custody or full self-custody. I think we're going to see those things blend a lot more over the course of the next couple of years. And I think they're going to be you know, a couple two-step-forward, one-step-back situations, and maybe you could put what Ledger's doing into that. But I think it's a place we need to experiment in because I think, you know, asking everyone to defend a seed phrase is unfortunately just a, a high bar.

Yeah. And also like maybe just don't hold all your Starbucks Odyssey NFTs in one place, you know, like divvy 'em up a little bit. You know, that's also a single point of failure. So, so you're, that's so interesting though, you going, Michael, from this like Super secure. You know, you said spider hole a couple of times, so that I want to know, I want to know about spider holes, but, but, but to Tahoe, which seems to be like, you know, the user-friendly wallet, right? It's, it's, you've got a puppy, you're, you've got a puppy as your, as your logo. So there's like this kind of like best friend vibe that you have with your wallet. So how'd you, how'd that happen?

Well, so I would say, I'd say 2 things. We actually take security super seriously at Tahoe, I think as much as at Casa. But Casa, to be honest, like we try and do some of the same things there as well. So our lead product designer at Tahoe, or I'm sorry, at Casa, previously was one of the main designers at Tinder. So, which it's actually funny if you look at the 2 apps side by side, a lot of the things with just font, button weight, illustration style, it was actually very similar to Tinder. So Scott, amazing guy, wrote a book called Designing People Love Anyone, or Designing Products People Love. Anyone who's like an aspiring product designer, I would definitely recommend checking that out. It's like an O'Reilly book. And, but yeah, anyway, so the whole mission at Casa was like, how can we take the most hardcore, intense, you know, sort of paranoid tinfoil hat, because that's how we were, approach to security and make that like a really cute, lovable, reassuring experience, right? And we're doing something very similar with Tahoe. So we also, Our product design lead at Tahoe is incredible. I don't want to dox him too much, but he was the original designer on MetaMask years ago, back in 2015, 2016. And MetaMask was, you know, one of my favorite early crypto projects back in the day. So yeah, I mean, I guess I would say I don't see these 2 things as radically incompatible, but yeah, I mean, there's a very different security profile. You know, Tahoe is very focused. I mean, it's, you know, right now it's just a browser extension. We'll be in other form factors at some point. I'd imagine as soon as next year, maybe even the first half next year, but it's much more about interacting with dApps and being a Web3 user. We don't encourage folks to put the motherlode of their funds in Tahoe, right? That's where you want to use a hardware wallet. We actually do have a Ledger integration, probably be adding support for Trezor and maybe, you know, maybe a few other hardware wallets later on. But yeah, I don't know. I mean, there, so there's actually a few other elements to the brand as well that are going to come into focus a lot more over the course of the year. But yeah, it's basically a dog in the forest. And one thing we haven't talked too publicly about is this— the forest is actually a reference to Dan Robinson's piece about Ethereum being a dark forest. So we feel like Ethereum in general, like the security landscape, can definitely be kind of a scary place and you want to have a trusted friend, a dog, a wallet to help look over your shoulder, make sure you're pointed towards the right opportunities, all that good stuff. So that's, I don't know, definitely something we baked into how we think about like the wallet and how it fits into folks' lives. Yeah. I don't know much more to—

Oh, I've got questions. Don't get me started on Dark Forest. That's, there's the Three-Body Problem trilogy and the second book in the series is called The Dark Forest.

Yeah.

And the idea, I guess this is similar to what you're talking about. I mean, this is the Dark Forest principle is that in a dark forest there are predators. And the reason that you don't see predators is because they're predatory, they're, they're they're predating, they're, they're hunting, right? And so they're hidden. And that's the reason why we haven't discovered aliens is because, well, of course, space is a dark forest and there's only a limited habitable space. And so, you know, you don't want to out yourself like we are screaming into the dark night saying, anybody out there? You know, of course you can't anyway. So that's, that's part of that. But I do see the star in the branding, right? There is the dog and there are the stars. And so, right. So that's also, I guess, the dark forest Kind of branding as well. What else? I love this stuff. No, we— I've never had a conversation about branding like this. So do you have any other nooks, crannies, secrets? What about the spider holes?

Okay. So yeah, a spider hole. Just, yeah, there's, there's— we haven't thought about this, but yeah, I mean, maybe we can have an element where you're digging spider holes in the forest. And so just, just because this keeps coming up. So

yeah, there are assault rifles in those spider holes, which I'm like, that's a large spider hole.

Yeah. So for folks that don't know, I mean, a spider hole could, of course, in biology, be a hole where a spider would live. But in kind of prepper parlance, a spider hole is basically an underground cache where you can keep supplies for when, quote unquote, the event or some kind of crazy apocalyptic event occurs. So you could have weapons, you could have foodstuffs, you could have seeds, you could have gold, you could have— Money. Your ledger, you know, you could have whatever in there. And so there's definitely no reason, you know, you couldn't have a spider hole in the forest as well. Though, you know, that's, that's, that's taken a little bit of a backseat to the DogR branding. But yeah, I mean, the basic idea— thanks, you have the Three-Body Problem is like the perfect reference there. I mean, yeah, Dan's piece in— I think it's— it was a Medium post initially, but it's been moved to the Paradigm blog, was all about you know, applying that concept of, hey, you don't want to signal what you're doing because if you do, predators are going to come after you. Basically applying that to the problem of MEV in, you know, in, in Ethereum.

Yeah, totally.

If you're just doing a transaction, you're going to get swarmed on by searchers. Interestingly, you know, in doing some more background research on the dark forest theme, I also noticed that one of the co-founders of Kickstarter, I believe, Yancy, had a post about the internet in general being kind of a dark forest. Obviously, you know, if you're just a normal user, you're not, you know, you're not doing, you know, MVPable transactions. But if you're just leaving a data trail on the normal web, um, getting cookied, you're basically, you know, sending up a flare and asking, you know, ad tech giants to swarm on you, right? And, you know, in that sense, the internet is kind of a scary, dark place. And a lot of what his argument is about, and other folks have followed on about this, is the need for Cozier spaces on the internet, right? And I think Facebook was trying to do these with Facebook groups, but I really think that Discord and Discord groups, they have emerged as like the dominant form of, you know, kind of an enclave in internet culture. So instead of the wide-open social networks like Twitter, which are kind of a battlefield of insults or, you know, getting cookied everywhere you go in your browser, Discord is a little bit more of a safe space. So anyway, these are some of the conceptual waters that we've been playing in. It's like, what would sort of, you know, companionship and a more cozy Web3 experience look like? And how can we bring that to users inside the wallet instead of just through Discord? That's kind of a question without an answer. You know, it's something we want to keep asking and thinking about, but it's one that's like really important to our team. You know, a lot of the Web3 experience is pretty solitary in some ways. Yeah. You know, unless you're on Discord or on Twitter all the time, but the actual wallet UX feels pretty solitary. And if we have a community-based project, you know, what are some ways, you know, what are some things around like the UX paradigm that we can do to, to change that and make the user feel, you know, a little bit more watched out for, a little bit less isolated?

Yeah, I like that idea of enclaves and thinking about Discord as such, thinking about communities as such. I think in the Three-Body Problem trilogy, the, the, the chess move, like the ultimate weapon is actually revealing your opponent or revealing. So, so like shining the light and basically alerting everyone to someone else's position. So I'm trying to think of the crypto, the crypto version of that. But as I do that, I would love to follow up with another question, which is how does one wallet in, in a wallet space, You know, like there's, there are these, you know, there's, it's the same thing I could ask like Adapt. It's just like, what, who, who's the, who's the Tahoe target market? Who's that enclave? What's that sweet spot for Tahoe? And, and what's it, what does growth look like?

Totally. So we have a bunch of different data points on our users. So our user base is pretty international right now. I'd say it's spread pretty evenly over the Americas, Europe, and basically like throughout Asia. What I have found is that sort of like the prevailing trait is that people who are using our wallet and then become community members are just folks who love the idea of a user-owned wallet. And if there's one thing that folks are really passionate about, it is just ensuring sort of uninterrupted access for like to Web3 for users regardless of where they live. Right. So, you know, I wouldn't say we're going, oh, we're going after, you know, the preteen market or, you know, we're going after, you know, 30 and 40-year-olds in Europe. We don't think of it like that. We've got pretty broad spread, at least according to, you know, totally optional feedback surveys that we send out in terms of, you know, age, geographic location, all that stuff. Most of our users, for what it's worth, have been in the space for at least 6 months. I would say like 6 months to 3 years is kind of like the sweet spot. But it's users, I would say, who, I don't know, are just kind of believers, to be honest. I mean, I would put myself in that camp. Most of our core team is in that camp, but it's folks who love the idea of a wallet where, you know, value isn't like siphoned away to investors, but is like reinvested back in the community. It's folks who care a lot about like transparency in terms of like, how is this thing run? How are decisions made? And then Yeah, like I also said, just ensuring pretty durable access to Web3, that would be kind of another core value that keeps cropping up again and again and again. We have a couple of aces up our sleeves on the growth front that I can't totally drop now. But we are obviously a community-owned project. Their, the formal DAO launch should be coming up pretty soon. And if you combine that with some of the ideas we have around like, okay, how can we make, how can we make the Web3 experience a little less single player and a little bit more multiplayer? I don't know. Hopefully that gives a hint of some of the things that we've got in store. I think basically like once the DAO goes live, which is pretty soon now, to be honest, we've been working towards it in public, you know, over the last year, year and a half. Once that goes live, we're going to be experimenting with a lot of ways to, yeah, just make the core Web3 wallet experience feel more like you're participating in a community than just like you're farming alone in the wilderness. And we have some really cool ideas around that. And honestly, PoolTogether has been, you know, one of the projects that we think does a good job with some of this stuff. So yeah.

And so what, what would be other projects that you think like that the community kind of rallies around Right. 'Cause you're a wallet. I mean, this is, I love that community-owned wallet, of course, like for swapping, for any sort of like fee-related thing that wallets could be engaged in, it'd be awesome to have the community benefit from that. But, but I'm wondering like, what are those, like, are there any niches in the community where they're like, yeah, we have like a crazy Axie Infinity group, or we have like a really— people love buying like NFTs that, that are already at zero. And I don't know, like any, any sort of insights like that with the community?

Oh yeah, that's a great call out. I mean, so I would say, I mean, I feel like this is true of the ecosystem in general, but we have a lot of, a lot of our users are heavy just Arbitrum Optimism users, for what it's worth. So we're, we have a great relationship with the Optimism team, community. We love what they're doing. I think compared to other wallets, a lot of what our users are doing is on L2. I think that's probably one of the biggest differences actually. So if you look at, you know, it's a little bit different now the last couple months, 'cause they've been doing it, they've released some rewards. But if you look at, say, you know, the percentage of swaps that we have on, you know, Binance or Ethereum versus Optimism and Arbitrum, us versus say MetaMask or Rainbow, for the latter 2, MetaMask predominantly Ethereum and Binance. If I recall correctly, up until about a month ago, Rainbow was Almost entirely Ethereum. For us, it's exactly the opposite. It's, you know, Arbitrum and Optimism are probably historically like 80, 90% of, you know, the swaps that happen in our wallet. And you can see that on the 0x dashboard, you know, public dashboard, all of our swaps go through 0x. That's probably the main community I'd, you know, that's probably the main thing I'd mention in that regard. I mean, the other thing is obviously like we like dog memes, obviously. There's just like a shocking amount of dog stuff. And also I found that a lot of our, like a lot of our most dedicated community folks, like our, our moderators, everyone unsurprisingly has at least like one dog. Some people have like 3 to 4 dogs. It's actually kind of shocking. I mean, I live in New York, so that's very ambitious, but—

Same.

Yeah.

I love dogs. I love all animals. I am a cat. I have many cats because, and And by that fact, it's hard to have dogs, but I like dogs. How many times, like, is Who Let the Dogs Out, like, forbidden, right? Is it, are you past that? Like, you can't make any sort of reference to that, obviously.

Oh my God. What? So have you been on any of our community calls? No worries if you haven't, but wait, sorry, what?

No, I have, I have, but I came late. But are you, are you saying that, like, that you play that song all the time?

Yeah. So there was, there was a period, a season. There was, yeah, there was a period of time where before the community call started, like, Who Let the Dogs Out was just on loop and people just started showing up later, later for the call. Exactly. So yeah, Who Let the Dogs Out? I don't know. We may bring it back at some point, but, um, but we've taken a break from it for a little while.

It's so funny that like that stuff can just get old, but then like there are TikTok songs or there are meme songs. songs that will never get old, like Pump It Loom Dart. Everybody always plays it. Like, there are just these things that like, there, there's like a, I don't know, a popular song. And I guess maybe it, maybe it has achieved meme status. I mean, this is, we're getting into the philosophy of tech here now. I don't know. What is meme status like? Uh, so, so I want to ask you a question about that. Who is your favorite pop philosopher? I just, I just creeped you on Twitter. So I looked at your Twitter bio and says that you did philosophy of tech. So I'm

a fan of philosophy as well. Um, So I wouldn't say he's a philosopher per se, but the person that comes to mind who I'm most excited about right now is actually— let me make sure I get his name right.

You're going to say Slavoj Žižek, aren't you?

You know what, actually, he is— I do recommend his movies, but no, I would actually say there's a sociologist from Stanford named Fred Turner who I'm really, really into now. He wrote a book in I don't know, maybe 10, 15 years ago that I'm about halfway through called From Counterculture to Cyberculture. And it's all about how basically early computing culture in the, you know, the '60s and even to some extent the 1950s came out of and sort of interrelated with like the hippie movement, like the counterculture movement. And it's all about the transformation of like how computing Started out really in the early '60s being seen as this cold instrument of the Cold War and the nation-state to becoming more a way for— like a tool for people who wanted to opt out and create a new type of society. Probably the most obvious example in popular culture of the computing industry ripping on themes from the counterculture is just Apple, you know, like it's almost painfully obvious, but it's, it's, it's actually like a pretty remarkable translation. So a lot of that book is around how, you know, folks living in communes and, you know, Stewart Brand, you know, who started Whole Earth Catalog, really kind of got computers into the hands of hippies and it really changed our sense of like what computing is and what it could do. And obviously a lot of that trickles down into the crypto space, right? Like, a lot of what we're thinking about is like, well, how can we design new types of communities, new types of monetary systems, something that's not quite a country, not quite a— I'd say DAOs are kind of like somewhere in between small companies and small countries, right? That's the way they're trending probably over the next 10 to 20 years. So you see a lot of these things in crypto, and just digging into some of the history around that has been kind of mind-blowing. So yeah, Fred Turner from counterculture to cyberculture. That's one of the things I'm probably most interested in now.

Love that. I love that. Also, just me from the maybe outside, I come from nonprofit marketing professionally, but I, but I do like, you know, music and there's, I do, I do a lot of things. I have ADD, but there's, there's, you know, I always wanted to get into tech. And so for me, that was like Web2 tech up until a certain point. And then like when I got into crypto and, and like full-time November 2021, I was like just surprised with the community aspect of it, like how community wins. And of course that makes sense to me, but, but for me coming like as an outsider, as somebody who's like into like always on the bleeding edge of tech, but like not in the tech industry and had been rejected from, you know, jobs specifically because I had not been in tech. And then when I'm in like tech, but like crypto tech, you know, it's like, oh my gosh, everything is relationally based here. It's all, it's all about like what you said about these like safe spaces, these communities, these, these enclaves. And then, and then how technology can accentuate the experience of that community and how it can serve that, or how you can band together to do that. I guess that's what this is. I mean, like, that totally makes sense, putting the commuter computer into the hands of hippies, which would seem like some sort of like anti-computer system. And even going to ETH Tokyo, going to this hackathon, my very first one, got to participate. That was cool. And then seeing like, oh, everybody's nomadic and this is their community. And this is what they're doing with their lives is like going to, to these hackathons and just like putting stuff together, but seeing the community aspect of that and how, how much that is very I don't know, to an outsider, to like my mom, that would be like, oh, that's so weird. I would think it was very people just down in their monitors and how the community is so vital to all of this. So I guess Fred Turner, I can read this book and enlighten myself even further in this aspect. Love it.

Yeah, no, it's interesting stuff. I mean, yeah, what you're describing with the, um, yeah, the conference nomads. I mean, yeah, it's digital vagabonds, you know, not, you know, instead of following, uh, I know, instead of, you know, following the Grateful Dead or whatever folks are going around, right? You know, following the, you know, Ethereum conference circuit. Yeah.

But same thing.

Yeah. But, you know, the thing that's a trip is like the hippies actually were pretty high tech in some ways. Like, yeah, there's a huge back-to-land side of this, but there, but, you know, they were, you know, they had geodesic domes.

They had ham radios. You know, they had like methods of communication. Yeah. This is, this is so, uh, I could talk about this forever, but you don't have anything to say on Slavoj Žižek, do you? 'Cause we have, we have like kind of a cool, like the Pull Together community. There are some in the community that love Slavoj. So I don't know any thoughts on, on that before I move on to my next question.

Yeah. So I've definitely read a bunch of his stuff. I mean, in a very different life, you know, I was starting at grad school basically in, um, critical theory, you know, English continental literature and You know, Slavoj, he's kind of a celebrity, but he also for many years is a pretty legit scholar. Yeah. I've read some of his stuff. I read his book on violence. I've read a bunch of his books around Lacan. There's a lot of stuff. I mean, my, I think I've actually been meaning to rewatch with my girlfriend his, his crazy movie on Hitchcock and David Lynch. What is it? The Pervert's Guide to Cinema. Have you seen that?

No, no. I've only watched his YouTube clips and I have a bunch of his books that I've read like pieces of. But no, I need to— now I'm like, oh, he's got movies? I'm on that.

No, this movie is amazing. I think it's easily the best film on films that I think I've seen ever. So it's him going through, giving his commentary on different movies. I think he talks about E.T., he talks about everything, but a lot of it is sort of David Lynch and Hitchcock. But the way they set it up is they recreate a lot of the sets. And so they'll play a little segment from The Birds, and then they'll have his voice overlaid And they'll be talking about it. And then the next shot will be him in a recreation from the set.

Oh, wow.

So it's this very weird dynamic where he's weaving in and out of all your favorite scenes from The Shining or Rear Window. It's really well done. Anyway, that's pretty cool. Well, hold on. If there's a room in your Discord where you guys are nerding out on Gigi Hadid—

No, it's really our CTO and me, basically, is all I'm talking about. We, we like geek out and now we call, like I said something about, I said Slavoj and our CTO Brendan was just got like flustered and he's like, he, he just was like, so smoke. So now I just say so smoke all the time, which I mean Slavoj. But that's the thing is also, and this is what happens with philosophers is you get so widely known and so widespread, you kind of like, it's, you looked at it as like a sellout now. Right. So like, I feel like Slavoj has achieved like such notoriety and such widespread You know, is a YouTube star now and then is like less of a philosopher because of that potentially, but also like the most prolific. I've never seen so many books from a philosopher in all of my being. There's just so many books from Slavoj. But

anyway, it's shocking. And they're pretty long, you know, they're not short. Yeah.

Dude rants. That's what I think his books are, is just his rants. Like, it's just like going off.

But yeah, I mean, it's sort of like the Neal Stephenson phenomenon where, you know, even if I just don't understand how he's able to produce this kind of volume. That's interesting. Yeah. So Slavoj, I used to be a little bit more of like a Lacanian, who obviously he is as well. At some point, maybe around like 2014, I kind of got killed on, you know, you're on Derrida. I mean, you always have to, it's like, there's sort of 4 poststructuralists you can choose, right? There's like Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, or, um, you know, Deleuze. And I don't know, I guess I'm still a Derridean a little bit, but it's like the least fun, like. Yeah.

You gotta get, you gotta, you gotta pick the fun side.

You gotta pick the fun side. I know.

You gotta be honest with yourself too. So yeah, exactly. Okay. So that was the philosophy section of our podcast, the very— so we're, we're doing like branding, the depth of branding. That's a, that's a new section to the podcast. And then we've also— now we've had a philosophy section, the very first one. So this is great. We're starting to create some more structure for the Pull Together Community Podcast. Now let's go back to our OG structure of what's the future? Where are we headed in this weird churning market, in this weird, you know, account abstraction, AI, public good themed crypto space right now, Michael?

Oh man, I know it's interesting. So I think it's a— so, so many, so many things I could say, so many things I could say here. I'm trying to think what the right thread to start is. So one is I think AI is definitely putting pressure on crypto and Web3, at least in venture capital circles, to kind of put up, shut up, show us the goods. We definitely don't want to seem like a fad that didn't make good on its promise, right? We don't want to be 3D printing, as it were, right? Remember?

Oh, damn. Shots fired.

Shots fired, right? We don't want to be, oh my God, this thing that's going to revolutionize all manufacturing, and then, oh, actually, what happened to that? Right? I guess MakerBot's doing okay and maybe got acquired. I don't remember. We want to avoid that outcome. Right. And so much VC excitement in California, but kind of broadly, is just moving from kind of Web3 to AI. Right. So I think we really, as an industry, it's time to double down and actually make good on a lot of things that we're all here for. I think we can do it. I mean, that's why I'm working on the project that I'm doing. But I think there's definitely been a very different kind of conversation. Right. So that's one thing. So what do I think is going to happen over the next couple of years? I mean, I think we're going to continue to be in like a sideways market, definitely through the end of this year. Maybe it'll go down a little bit, maybe it'll go up. You know, I mean, I'm pretty bullish on like, in terms of like what's going to be around or behind the next bull market. I think I have like pretty unconventional, or I think I have pretty conventional thoughts here. I think L2s are going to be highly involved. I think we're going to see Ethereum basically become more cemented as, I don't know, like a state settlement layer that a bunch of different L2s and also just even different types of systems, some of which might not even be what we normally think of as blockchains, tokens settle into. I don't think Bitcoin's going to go anywhere. I think Bitcoin makes sense as the reserve currency of basically whatever we want to call this, the metaverse, this new post-national blockchain-based ecosystem that we're kind of chiseling out. Pretty bullish on Cosmos, to be honest, as well. It's kind of a different thesis, but I also think just unsurprisingly, like at some point in the next 3 to 5 years, we'll see another bull cycle. And I think we're going to see another use case that's probably already right in front of us that's really going to drive it. Like NFTs around for a really, really long time, but it wasn't until like 2020, 2021, that they really expanded everyone's understanding of what crypto was, right? It was the first, obviously, like people buy and sell NFTs, they trade NFTs, but they're not financial the same way that just tokens are. So I think we're going to see another use case like that. The smart money would be that it's going to be something related to identity, social networks, gaming, or probably a mix of all 3. So I think there's going to be some kind of emergent use case, the beginnings of which we're already seeing now. that's really going to dramatically expand the field for what the ecosystem is about. Last thing I would say, I guess, is on the AI front, I mentioned a lot of VC interest has turned there. I mean, I think there are very different types of technologies. I think I'll maybe leave with this thought. A friend of mine who's probably one of the best acupuncturists in New York actually was really interested to know my thoughts on AI a couple of months ago. He felt like, you know, from his perspective, not as someone who's worked in tech, he was like, you know, this is what's happening in AI. You know, this is the beginning of sort of, you know, I could see the outline of a digital totalitarianism. I was like, yeah, you know, that's fair. And he, for him, you know, he really thought like, well, I could see, you know, crypto and these decentralized systems as sort of, you know, the one sort of viable alternative to that. And so that might be stating it a little bit more dramatically than I would. But I do think there is there is something true. I think we're going to see interesting ways in which crypto and enclave communities act as a sort of counterweight or refuge to this sort of more data-centralizing AI system. So pretty scattershot approach, but I mean, in general, something with social networks, something with gaming, something with identity is going to come together in a really interesting way, I think, over the next few years. I'd expect another bull market in not too long. I don't think Bitcoin and Ether are going anywhere, and I think we're going to see some really interesting and unexpected ways that existing trends with AI and crypto, I don't know, come into harmony and then also into conflicts with one another. So I think it's going to be, I don't know, exciting stuff. And then who knows what's going to happen geopolitically while all this is taking place. I mean, that's where it gets really weird, right?

Yeah. One thing that you said, I mean, and this is the credentialing part, is having the on-chain and the off-chain work together. So still doing the decentralization. So like Disco XYZ, it took me a couple of conversations with them to, to, to get it to be like, oh, so like when, when I pick my t-shirt size as a credential, I can choose to like reveal that and make that public or not. Or I can like gate that. I can, I can. So, so there are just ways of like, oh, okay. Yeah. And I don't have to pay gas for that. That's awesome. And I don't have to like, there, there's like how the on-chain and the off-chain work together. With credentialing, like not everything has to be an NFT, but what if we had really cool things as NFTs? Or what if we had really cool things with credentialing? And yeah, so that interaction I think has been very interesting to me as well. But I, so I appreciate your feedback. That was really insightful and yeah, got, got the neurons firing, but we should wrap up. But the way I want to wrap up is— I guess. Michael, with your advice on podcasting, because I know that you do podcasts. Right. You, I could just hear it in your voice. So do you have any tips on making a successful podcast in this day and age?

Yeah. I mean, I think just book awesome guests and have, you know, 5 to 10 awesome questions. I mean, and I think, you know, I don't know, that's totally prosaic. My friend Carolyn and I, who's also our studio thesis, actually did a podcast as a COVID project back in like 2020 to 2021. I don't know. I mean, my favorite part about podcasting in general is just like the people you get to meet. You

know, 100%.

Yeah. Yeah. The thing that worked for us was just, it would be so easy to like, just get in the flow of the conversation and kind of black out and be like, oh my God, what do we even talk about? So I don't know, my podcasting advice, it sounds like you're already doing it, is just have, you know, 5 to 10 questions that can get the conversation right back where you want it to be. And yeah, but I think you guys are doing an awesome job already.

Well, I appreciate that. And this has been really fun talking to you about this stuff. And, and, and so for me though, where I go for, cause Because been doing this, I think this is like, we're in our 60s, getting up on 70 episodes. And, uh, and we do it every week, uh, unless like, you know, there's a conference or something that, that, or, or unless we've been ghosted. Or the other thing is I book like at least a month out in advance. And so sometimes projects like close or fail, you know, fail. Oh no, it's crypto. It's crypto, baby. But I, you know, I'm always like, should we do SEO? Should we put it on YouTube? Should we have it on video? Should we not record in Discord? Should we— I'm always like going, but you're so right. I mean, this is the same thing with marketing a product. It's like the product has to be pristine. Like the product needs to be like really accessible and what people like. And then this other stuff like SEO and the platforms that you put it on and everything accentuates that. But it's like focusing on like the booking and the podcast prep and the actual conversations that we can have.

Yeah, it's tough because, you know, what we found is we did, you know, I think we only did like, you know, 10 episodes or something. But one of our episodes with Daniel Schmachtenberger was, you know, over half of our total listens, you know, so you never know which episodes are going to take off. Right. The other thing that I found is I always thought, okay, you know, wow, we interviewed Jameson on this podcast. You know, he's got 200,000, 300,000 Twitter followers. You know, when he retweets it, we're going to get a huge flood in. What I've sort of learned partially from my own experience and partially from talking to folks is you guys just got to get on lists, you know, got to get on lists. What are the best, you know, 10, 20 crypto DeFi projects or podcasts? Because otherwise the stuff on social is just like too transient to really like convert. That's what we found.

Oh, wait, wait, wait. Get on lists? Like, just go to I'm like, wait, there's lists? So, you know, people have like, here's what a Google search.

Yeah, exactly. So what we'd, yeah, ideal scenario would be someone's like, okay, what are the top 10? You know, someone Googles best crypto community podcast, you know, and people are going to have all sorts of listicles around that. And, you know, if you're on those, that's, that like just pays dividends.

Nice. Okay. So if I can't get on some, then I'll just manufacture my own. Right. And then just SEO those. That's right.

All right. We got a job for the Growth Guild.

That's right. Listicles, lists. Lists. So very cool. Very cool.

But you got, yeah, you guys got a, I mean, you guys got a massive, you know, inbuilt community and stuff too. So.

Yeah. Yeah.

I think it's super smart also to do it on Discord. We, we would always record ours. I think it's smart. Yeah. So we would record ours just using Zencastr or something and then just put it out on Spotify and Apple after.

Yeah. Well, I'm thinking like video, but then like the thing about like this is I can just send people a Discord link. They show up and then, you know, whatever mic they're using, it's fine. And, and we can go and then, you know, and then sometimes people bring in like crazy amounts of community and there's like a lot of questions and it gets really cool. I don't know. Yeah. I like this, but I always doubt the Discord thing too. I'm like, oh, we should probably do this like on video or whatever. So I appreciate that. The other thing that's helpful is like, When I have a conversation with somebody like just random person and they're like, oh, hey, I've been listening to your podcast. And I'm like, what? Like when that happens, it's just like the wind is in the sails. It's like, okay, I can do another 40 episodes off that, you know, just being helpful to somebody. So, but yeah, but listen, you know, having the awesome guests, we got that on lock today. So thank you, Michael, for being our awesome guest. Thanks, Blake. On the Pull Together community podcast.

I'm sorry. I'm like user fan of Pull Together. We love what you guys are doing. Uh, we actually want to do some stuff with you guys in the future. Going to have to DM around that. But yeah, it was awesome to be on. Um, and you know what, for my part, I think Discord is great. Video is not good. I'm calling in from a spider hole, so it would have been cameras off anyway.

Well, have a couple of granola bars for me.

All right. I'll have some dehydrated food.

That's right. Your MREs. All right. Well, thanks so much. Take care.

Awesome. Cheers then. Bye. Bye everyone.

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.