 Live from San Juan, Puerto Rico, it's The Cube. Covering Coin Agenda, brought to you by SiliconANGLE. Hello everyone, welcome to our exclusive Puerto Rico coverage of Coin Agenda. I'm John Furrier with The Cube. We're here covering all the action at Restart Week, a ton of events, all the thought leaders, influencers, decision makers, you name it, in the industry, pioneers, making it happen. Our next guest is Tony Lane, who's the founder of CoinGraph, she's a true influencer with a lot of impact in this market. Welcome to The Cube. Thank you for having me. We're so glad to have you on. Like the little joke at the beginning about being an influencer. You actually are an influencer. You've done such great work in the industry. Thank you. You're well-regarded in the community. You have publication and you do a lot of great content. Thanks for coming on. Well, for sure. Yeah, thanks for having me. So being an influencer, what does that mean these days? Because we were just talking before the camera on. Yeah. Influence changes. You can't be an influencer all the time. You can be super expert at something, but your expertise could change. You could move to a new topic, learn something. Yeah. And there's a lot of people in the digital marketing rule saying, I'm an influencer. It's kind of half-baked. Really, I mean, it's not about the followers. Your thoughts. Well, I mean, most of those followers are purchased. So there's a big difference between being an influencer and having actual influence. Because if you have a million followers on Twitter, that's nice. How much engagement do you have? And that's actually what you look for is when you look at someone's, whether it's social media, their digital presence, it's not about followers. It's all about engagement. I don't even have that many. I don't spend a lot of time doing that. At least I haven't so far. It's something I'm getting more into. But I have people that are really engaged. And so I look at people that have 15 million followers and I'm like, you have just as many likes on your things as I do. Because these people aren't real people. And it's less about having influence in general is in many ways about having authenticity. And so influence is your ability to get something done. Being an influencer is your ability to hold someone's attention for a fragment of time. But being an influencer is not the same as having influence. And this community here certainly with decentralization here, you get the decentralized applications coming up, blockchain, you got ICOs booming. It's all about the network effect. If you look at network effect, that is a new concept that ad technology does not know because you can't cookie a network connection. The only way to measure someone's true network is through malware today. And that's not good. No one does that. Well, they do. They're, but you can't do it as a business price, not sustainable. The point is, it's not about how many followers you have. It's the could be that one follower, maybe 200 or 2000, that opens up more. This is the network effect. This is what this community is all about. So I want to get your thoughts on this community's vibe. A lot of mission driven, impact oriented, merged with tech. So you have a fusion of technology, artistry, craftsmanship, and mission driven societal change in one melting pot. This is your wheelhouse. Share your thoughts on this. Well, so all of the different digital currencies have different value systems and they attract a different breed. And there are different incentives for each of these based on how the technology is designed. Each protocol, right? So if you look at Bitcoin, in Bitcoin the incentives are mining is done by computers. So your only incentive is like having social influence. And this is I think why we've seen a lot of, kind of I would call it a scarcity mentality in terms of the way people, why we see even more trolls in Bitcoin is because social influence is a huge way that success is measured. Because as a developer you can't have, you can't achieve a level of status any other way. As a developer or as an influencer in Bitcoin because the Bitcoin network is so far removed from that. And that's actually a perverse incentive in and of itself. And not only that, but early days in Bitcoin there were major organizations who had hired people to man 100 in Reddit and Twitter accounts and go into the Bitcoin community and actually fragment the public opinion using technique grassroots psychological insurgency. So buying Reddit accounts that had been active for the last 10 years and going through and essentially just stabbing at people and creating even having conversations with themselves to empower the voice of trolls. And that what happens is you start bringing out what we call actually what the former Assad called after Henry Kissinger, there was a big move that happened in the Middle East where Kissinger realized the Middle East was becoming too powerful and he saw it as a threat to American democracy. And so Kissinger organized a deal that fragmented the Middle East. And Assad said to Kissinger that his actions would be, he played Assad basically. And Assad said to Kissinger, your actions will bring up demons hidden underneath the surface of the Arab world. And that strategy is actually something used in the Bitcoin community to leverage the incentives that are created, which is why we have seen previously so much even from our industry leaders, so much fragmentation and so much tension. But the network is the most secure and the least corruptible. Hands down fundamentally, it's real cryptography. But let's talk about that one. I love this conversation because with networks, you have concepts of self-healing. This kid nerdy on packets, how packets move. At that level, self-healing networks has been a paradigm that's been proven. So that's out there. That's got to go to the societal level. The other one is the incentive system. If you have an immune system, if you will, in a network, this is cultural thing. So actions, the reddit's obvious. Weaponizing content has been well-documented. It's coming now mainstream. People are getting it that this outcome was actually manufactured by bad behavior. Now, I argue that there's an exact opposite effect. You can actually weaponize for good. Because everything has a polar opposite. So what is your view on that? Because this is something that we've been teasing out for the first time. How do you weaponize content for good? I guess that's not a right word, but how do you create the option value? Right, yeah, I mean it is in so many ways, right? So I think it's about, there's a professor at Stanford whose name is BJ Fogg, and he's a behavioral researcher and he talks about essentially, he writes a lot about habits, but something that's even more interesting about his understanding of propagandas. I studied a lot of Edward Bernays. He's responsible. He created the theory of propaganda, right? And he's the nephew of Sigmund Freud. He's responsible for essentially every consumptive theory in like leading up to the last century. He's actually, I would say he's responsible for the state of advertising and the economy today. Almost really single-handedly. And what's fascinating about this theory is that you can use propaganda to get women to smoke by unearthing what it is unconsciously in men that makes them not wanna smoke. You can also use propaganda to get people to invest in health and wellness. You can also use propaganda to get people to stop their bad habits. So it's understanding that a technique works in a cognitive capacity in a way that affects a large amount of people, and it's really about the intention behind why a person who has influence, as we were saying, is leveraging that relationship. So I would say it's more about- So we have to reimagine the influence. Because the signalings that are igniting the cognitive brain can be tweaked. So that's what you're getting at here, right? So that's what we have to do. And it's an illusion from almost every angle. It's even the idea that in the United States, the level of influence the president has. And who's running, you know, and who's at the wheel, right? We live in a world that is built on manufactured consent, and manufactured consent is enabled through thinkers like Bernays, and through what I call the illusion of things like our former construct of even American democracy. That these things we've imagined to be so, the foundation and the structure for the way that we live, all of those things have become so far removed from their theory that they're no longer serving the principles under which they were founded. And that disconnect is actually a huge, it's a gap. It's an inertia gap for exploitation, or it's an inertia gap for growth. And usually what happens is you have the exploitation first. Someone says, oh, here's a big gap of information asymmetry. So I'm going to exploit the information asymmetry. And then once people start realizing that that information asymmetry is being exploited, you experience a huge inversion of that. And you have enough kind of, you have enough inertia behind that slingshot to launch it into something totally different. Yeah, this is great. I interviewed the founder of the Halcyon House since in Washington, DC, and she's an amazing woman. And she had a great consciousness about this. And what she postulated was bubbles that burst, well, exploitation is always, we've seen it in all trends. The underbelly, because it's motivated, no dogma. They don't care about structural incentives. They just want to make cash. But she had an interesting theory. She was talking about, you can let the air out of the bubble with community and data. So all the societal entrepreneurship activities now that are mission-driven, now getting back to mission-driven is interesting. There might be a way to actually avoid the pop because depending upon what the backlash might be on the exploitation side, as we saw in the dot-com bubble, you can actually let the air out a little bit through things like data. I mean, how do you see, in your mind, just thinking out loud, how do you see that playing out? Because we have community now. We have access to open data. Blockchain is all about immutability. It's all about power to the user's data. This is a mega trend. Yes. Your thoughts? So interdependence is huge in the blockchain community and that's actually to touch back on the incentives in Bitcoin. I think that that's actually one of Bitcoin's, it's not that it's a wrong or a right. It just is, right? Like them, like side trains will be launched eventually. But the idea that Ethereum created something that was adaptable and empowered people to be creative and yet they're creating incentives for people to launch products that are, I believe causing in some ways could cause some serious harm to the ecosystem once the air is let out of that bubble. The data. The data. How do you let the air out of the bubble? Yes, yes, yes. Because the pop could be massively implosion. Yeah, yeah. Because you leave a crater. So data is a non-scarce resource. This is actually how I describe blockchain to people. And this is actually I think one of the challenge, if you want to look at it from the perspective of challenge and then I'll talk about for benefit just between Bitcoin and Ethereum, there are obviously other blockchains, EOS is like coming out super soon, Holochain, their kind of steam is actually its own infrastructure. Tons of other blockchains to speak about. But just to take these two main blockchains, which are not competitors. In Bitcoin you have, it's really cryptography. Cryptography is not about like, let's do some rapid prototyping. Cryptography is about let's put a lot of thought into this thing and have mathematical certainty that this is non-exploitatable. And Ethereum is just kind of like, well, let's build a framework and then let people play as much as they can. And so there are challenges and benefits to both of those models. The challenge of Ethereum being that you've let all of this capital into the industry, which is not actually, 46% of ICOs have already failed. Already failed. And then if you look at Bitcoin- And the price of Ethereum is trading half of what it's at 1200, so it's a 50% discount there. Oh yeah, oh yeah. And then if you do the same thing and you're looking at the Bitcoin blockchain, we've seen that the capacity for innovation, Bitcoin could have done what, they could have been the first to market for what Ethereum is doing. And they chose a different route. And I don't think there are some pros and cons to both of those things, but I think there is an intentionality behind why the world played out in the way that it did. And I think it's the right strategy for both products. But so the way I describe applications using blockchain technology to people and what I call the future of an infinite economy is that if you think about why are Facebook and Google these multi-billion dollar companies, it's really simple. It's because what are they on? Right? The data. The data. Some of the last companies that are still stewarding these things in a way that is taking vast amounts of aggregated ownership over an asset that people are generating every day that's extremely valuable to companies in the private sector. So the way that I describe blockchain is that if we begin to own our self-sovereign identity, then when we're owning our data, that's the foundation for universal basic income. If we take a non-scarce resource like data that's being generated every day, not just from us, right? But the data in the health of the ocean, right? The stewardship of the ocean, the health of the fish, actually saying, okay, fish are thriving in this area and so there's a healthy ecosystem and so this coin is trading higher because we're stewarding this area of the ocean so we don't overfish the quality of the air so that when we're actually depolluting the air collectively, everyone around us is creating and generating data to say we're making the air better, the air, actually the health of our bodies, of our earth, of our minds, of our planet, of even the health of our innovation, right? What are the incentives behind our innovation? Those are all forms of data and that's a non-scarce resource so if we take all of these different applications and make many different blockchains, which I fundamentally believe that there's a powerful theory in having blockchains that are economically scarce because I believe you're going to empower more diverse spectrums and also have a level of difficulty in creating the coin, you're going to have more innovation and so yeah. This is a key area, this is super important. Well, I mean, you step back for a second, you zoom out, you say, okay, we have data, data's super valuable. If you take it to the individual's levels, which has not been, quite frankly, the individual's been exploited. Facebook's of the world, these siloed platforms have been using the data for advertising. That's just what everyone knows, but there's other examples. The point is when you put the data in the hands of the users, combine that with cloud computing and the internet of things where you can have an edge of the network, high-powered computer, the use cases have never been pushed before. The envelope that we're pushing now has never been in this configuration. You could never have a decentralized network, immutable, storing the user's data. You've never had the ability to write the kind of software you can today. Never had cloud computing. You never had compute at the edge, which is where users live, they are the edge. You have the ability where the user's role can enable a new kind of collective intelligence. This is like mind-blowing. So, I mean, just how would you explain that to a common person? I mean, because this is the challenge, because collective intelligence has been well-documented in data science. User-generated content is kind of at the beginning of what we've seen, user wearables, but if you can control the data streaming into the network, with all the self-healing and all the geek stuff we're talking about, it's going to change structural things. How do you explain that to a normal person? You don't, you don't, right? So, you show them. Because I could sit here all day and I can talk to you about, you know, I could talk to you about all of these things, but at the end of the day, with normal people, it's not something you want to explain. You want to show them. Because with my, actually my grandma gets Bitcoin. My grandma hit me up in like 2012 and she was like, she know what that Bitcoin thing is? I'm like, Mimi, I'm like, how do you know what Bitcoin is, Mimi? And she's just like, I don't know, I read, you know? I was like, this is, so, where are you reading? Like, are you hanging out in like libertarian forums? Like, what's up? What's going on in the club there? I mean, they're playing, yeah. Yeah, but she's a really unique lady. So, I would say that for most people, they're not going to, when you explain things to people. What would you show them? I mean, what's an example? The way that, so when I was, so I got into Bitcoin in 2011 and the way that I would explain Bitcoin to people is I would just send it to them. I would be like, here's Bitcoin. Like, take this Bitcoin, here's some Bitcoin for you. And that was, people got it because they were like, I have $5 now in my hands that was not there. And this person just sent it to me. And for some people, even still, you know, to be honest, even then, I remember how much energy it took for me to do that. Everywhere I go, I'd be like in cabs, they'd be checking out at grocery stores and I would try, I would essentially pitch Bitcoin to every person that I met. You were evangelizing a lot of it. Oh yeah, it took so much energy though. And even after that, there were very- There was hundreds of people to receive it. They would have to do one at that time. Think about what the process was back then. There were very few people who, even after doing that, really got it. And so, but you know what happened, just this is so much perspective for me. I remember doing that in 2013 and I remember in 2018, actually I think it was the end of 2017, I went to a gas station. It's the only gas station in San Francisco with a Bitcoin ATM. And I was like, I need to get some cash and run it on Bitcoin. I think there's one in Mountain View now. Yeah, yeah. And so I go in and these guys, I'm like frustrated. I'm like, oh, the ATM is like the worst user experience ever. I'm like, hey, hey, hey, hey. That's, I literally, I'm like, it's just like eyes rolling in the back of my head, like just so frustrated because I'm super privacy freak. And so it was just a super complex process. But the guys that, the guy is straight, he looks at me and he goes, yo. And I was like, what's up man? And he goes, you trying to buy some Bitcoin? I was like, I'm trying to sell some Bitcoin right now. And he's like, oh. You're just fencing it, they're like, yeah. He's like, oh, word? And he's like, how much are you trying to sell? And I'm like, I don't know, like 2K. And so he goes, all right. And he's like, let me hit up my friends. He literally calls three of his friends who come down and they just like, they're like, how would you want to sell more? They're like all, they just peer to peer. It's like we bypassed the ATM and it was actually peer to peer exchange. And I didn't have to explain anything. You know what made people get it? You showed them the money. You showed them the money. Sometimes people don't. You can explain these concepts that are world changing, super high level or whatever. People are not actually going to get it until it's useful to them. And that's why user interface is so important. Like if you even look at the internet, who made the money in the internet, right? It was the people who understood how to own the user interface. I had a conversation with Fred Kruger from Workcoin. He's been around the block for a long time. Great guy. We were riffing on the old days. We talked about the killer app for the mini computer and the mainframe and the mini computer and then the PC. It was email. For 20 years, the killer app was email. We were like, what's the killer app for blockchain? It's money. The killer app is money. And that's going to be 50 year killer app. Now the marketplace is certainly maybe tier two killer app, but the killer app is money. Oh, I'm sure. That's amazing. That's the killer app. Okay, so let's talk about money. Let's talk about wallets and whatnot. There's a lot of people that I know personally that have been, wallets have been hacked. Double authentication, horizon wires, news articles on this, but even early on, you got to protect yourself. Something that you're an advocate of, I know. Recently you've been sharing some stuff on Telegram. Share your thoughts on newbies coming in. Be careful. Your wallet can be hacked and you got to take care of yourself online. Is there a best practice? Can you share some color commentary on when you get into the system and get Bitcoin or crypto? Yeah. What are some of the best practices that you'd like to share? I think you need to remember a key principle of cryptography when you're dealing with digital currency, which is like, don't really trust anything unless you call someone and you have like first-hand verification from a person that you trust. Because these things are, I mean, I've had literally last week, I had seven friends contact me, actually more than that once I posted about it and they were like, is this you? And I was like, what? Like people would literally just go online. They would scrape my Facebook photo. They'd go on Telegram and they would make, my name is at Tony Lane C, T-O-N-I-L-A-N-E-C and so is my Twitter and people would scrape my photos from my Twitter or my Telegram or my Facebook and they would create fake accounts and they would start messaging people and say, hey, like what's up? How are you? That's cool, great, awesome. So like I need like 20 BTC for a loan. Can you help me? And all my friends were like, I was just talking to you, is this you? And I'm like, no. And so I think that there's the other thing you have to, it's not just security in terms of, and this is actually a problem blockchain has to solve, right? It's not just security in terms of protecting your wallet and getting like a ledger or a treasure and making sure that you're keeping things like in cold storage that you're going, there are so many keeping your money in a hard wallet, not keeping your private keys on your computer, like keeping everything, storing your passwords in multiple places that you know are safe, both handwritten like in lock boxes, putting it in your safe deposit box or you know, there's so many different ways that we can get into like the complexities of protecting yourself and security, not using centralized cell networks is one of the big ways that I do this because if you are using two factors- What's a centralized cell network? Any AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile. Because you are putting yourself in a situation where if you're using a centralized system, those centralized systems are really easily exploitable. I know because my mom, when I was a kid one time, she put a password on my account so I couldn't buy games. I was not happy about it. It was my money that I was using it. It was my money I was using to buy games. She was like, you should just spend your money on better things. And so I remember going in when I was a kid and I was like, this is my money. I totally want to buy this upgrade on this game. And so I went in and I essentially figured out how to hack into my own phone to be able to use my own money to buy the games that I wanted to buy in my phone. How a motivated learning opportunity here. But I realized that in the same way we're talking about things that can be used for good can be used for bad. In the same way that someone can do something like that, you can also say, well, I'm in a call and say that I'm this person and take their phone and then get their two-factor off. So I don't use centralized cell networks. I don't use cell networks at all. What do you use? So I mean I have different kinds of like strategies or different things that mostly- I might not want to say here. Yeah, yeah, they're different. I'm happy to talk about those privately. The way that I've kind of handled that situation. And then the other thing that I would say is like, we really need hardcore reputation systems in our industry and for the world. And not social reputation systems like what is happening in China right now where you can have someone leave you like, let's say I get into an Uber and I'm 30 seconds late. I can end up in a situation where I'm like, not able to be admitted into a hospital. Or I'm not able to take a public train because someone rates me lower on this reputation system. I think that's a huge human rights issue. Yeah, that's a huge problem. And so not reputation systems like this, but reputation is like the one we're working on at culture that are really based more on the idea of restoration and humanization and rather than continued social exploitation to create some kind of collective norm. I think that kind of model is, it's not only- Well a network should reject that by- Exactly. All right, so let's talk about digital nations. Since you brought up China, so there's some bad behavior going on there. I mean, some will argue that there's really no R&D over there and now they're trying to export the R&D that they stole into other countries. Again, that's my personal rant, but the innovation there is clear. We chat and other things are happening. They finally turn the corner where they're driving a lot of innovation, mainly because of the mobile. But there's other nations out there that kind of left behind. The UK just signed this week with Coinbase, a pretty instrumental landmark licensing deal which is a signal, because I know Estonia, Armenia, you name it, every country wants to, Baharain's got Dubai, Envy, so I mean every country wants to be the crypto country. Every country wants to be the smart city's digital nation. I know this is something that you like and you and I were talking about could be both are interested in. Your reaction, your thoughts on where that's going, obviously it's a good sign. What's the thresholds there? What are some of the key things that they need to do to be a real digital nation? Well I think it's less about digital nations as in terms of like, a nation is a series of borders and more about first nations, that we are, this is what we work on at culture, that we are actually a nation of people and a lot of those nations have overlap and we should be able to participate in many different nations who have many different economies that are all really cooperating interdependently to create the best possible life for all human good. Rather than just saying like, I care about me and mine because that strategy, go away government works now, it's a closed network with low trust that is extremely inefficient in management of resources. And the only way you can- That's the opposite by the way of what this mission movement's about. Exactly. And the only way you can have influence in government is to go in government and to work through government, right? So it's the idea that, look at how much food we waste in the United States. If we took the food we wasted in the United States and repurposed it, we could literally cure world hunger. That is how bad it has gotten, right? And there are people starving in the U.S. There are people on food stamps in the U.S. I mean, every institution, education, healthcare, you name it, it's all, you know, foobard, big time. But we're throwing away tons of lettuce and all of this different kinds of produce because it like looks funky. Like this peach looks like a little too much, like a bottom. So we're like not able to sell it. It's got a little brown on it. Throw the whole thing away. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And that waste is unacceptable. So what we need to move toward is a model of open networks of governance where we have peer to peer distribution of finance and of resources in a way that allows people to aggregate around the marketplaces that are actually benefiting the way that they believe the world should work. So it's about creating a collective strategy of collective nonviolence and eliminating harm. So obviously, you know, having a society that has enough proper incentives so that people are well off and that people are provided for. And I think blockchain will- I know she's wearing a United Nations pin. Yeah. And blockchain I think will also create this. That's what's up, top. Yeah, I think blockchain will also help create universal basic income. But in addition to that, it's the idea that if I'm living next door, I'll give two examples. So one is about the legality of the way that we contribute to society. So let's say I have a next door neighbor and let's say that this next door neighbor and I feel literally, we totally get along on everything. One issue we feel, we're like, I totally disagree with this. I totally disagree. And that issue is the use of, and I hope this isn't controversial to say, but anyway, so the use of medical marijuana, right? So, and it shouldn't be because we can have two different opinions in the world can still work. And that's the point. It's not legal to have a marijuana. For sure, it's legal here as well. So it's the idea that if I, so let's say I'm a woman who, I have someone in my life who was injured by a driver who was driving under the influence of marijuana. And so that's all I know about marijuana because I don't really do drugs. I've never been around drugs. So when I hear that word, I immediately think about the person in my life who was harmed because of, yes. And so immediately triggered and I'm like, I don't wanna support anything. I don't wanna support anything to do with marijuana. I think marijuana is like the devil's lettuce and I have no interest in, I have no interest in supporting marijuana. She never has to support marijuana. She doesn't have to. But her next door neighbor is a veteran with Parkinson's disease. Her, me, whatever. Is a veteran with Parkinson's disease. Okay. And the only way that this man can move is he's literally shaking, but when he smokes medical marijuana, he's actually able to, you watch in literally 30, 45 minutes, he's upright. He looks like a normal, healthy man. And so he says, I believe that every, after I fought on this, I believe every person should have access to medical marijuana because this is the only way I'm able to even operate my life. The different context. I mean, yes, exactly. And so what culture is really about is about understanding each other's context. That's even how reputation works. It's contextual awareness that provides greater understanding of who we are as individuals and the way we work together to make society work. So maybe they can mutually agree that he's not gonna smoke while he's driving. And he can pay to support everyone who needs to have access, who needs access to medical marijuana. Or you can finance Uber drives for him, rides for him, you know, or whatever. I mean, he has mechanisms. Yes. But it's the, exactly, exactly. It's the idea that we're all, we're coming together to share context in a way that's not aggressive and not accusatory. So two people can believe two totally different things and still develop enough mutual respect to live together peacefully in a society. You know, the other thing too, I'm riffing on that is that KYC is a concept term that kicked around here, know your customer. I've been riffing on the notion KYC for know your neighbor. And what we're seeing in these communities, even the analog world, people don't know what their neighbors are. They don't actually even care about them. For sure. I grew up in a different culture where everyone played freely, the parents were on the porch, having their cocktail or socializing and watching the kids from the porch play in the lawn. Now I call that Snapchat. So I can see my kids Snapchat. So I'm not involved, but I have peripheral view. For sure. But we took care of each other. That doesn't happen much anymore. And I think one of the things that's interesting in some of these community dynamics that's been successful is there's empathy about respect. They kind of get to know people in a non-judgmental way. And I think that is something that you see in some of these fragmented communities where it's just like, if they just did things a little bit different. You agree, I'm obviously shaking your head, your thoughts on this. This is super interesting social science thing that's now you can measure with digital or you can measure that kind of. We can incentivize it. We can incentivize it. And that's the difference. Measurement is one thing. Incentive is a behavior changer. Incentive is a behavior changer. And that is what we actually have to do in the way we think about the foundation of these systems. Is it's not incentivizing competitive marketplaces that are like, my way of thinking about this thing is right and your way of thinking about this thing is wrong and like, ah, it's not about that. At the end of the day, I think we forget or misquote so much of so many of the great thinkers of the last generation. Like if you think about Darwin, what does everyone know about Darwin, right? It's like survival of the fittest. It's not what Darwin said. Okay, it's misquoted and it's used. It's like one of those things where people who want to exploit. It's a meme basically. Yeah, people who want to exploit someone else's knowledge for their own ends will use that to in some way uplift the kind of like strategy of incentives of the time. What Darwin actually said was that human beings with the highest capacity for sympathy, qualities we now identify as altruism, compassion, empathy, reciprocity, will be the most likely to survive during hardship. Fundamentally and I mean, look at the state of the world today. It doesn't look good. It's like you look at the way people interact with each other. It's like a virus that's attacking itself in an ecosystem that is our planet Earth and we need to be, you know what is the antibody, our own sense of consideration for our fellow man. That is the antibody to violence. And so we can incentivize this and we're going to have to because we're going to AI automation. These will fundamentally transform the way we think about jobs in a way that will liberate us like we've never known before. And once given the freedom, I think that we'll see the world start to change. Tony, I really appreciate you spending the time and this thought leadership conversation working back and forth. It feels great and it's a great productive conversation. I got to ask you, how did you get here? I mean, who are you? I mean, you're amazing. Like, how did you, how did you get here? I see coin telegraph is one of the projects here running great content. You were in the UN pin. I'm aligning with that. Got a great perspective. What's your story? Well, I don't. Where'd you come from originally? I mean, how did you get here? I think, you know, I don't, no, I'm really connected to Saturn. I don't know where my home planet is. What spaceship did you come in on? No, I mean, seriously, what's your background? How did you weave into this? Cause you have a holistic view on things. It's impressive. You also can get down and dirty on the tack and you have no, you know, have a good, strong network. Did you kind of back into this by accident on purpose or was it some of the, that you studied? Yeah. What's the, what's the evolution? So. Yeah, you know, I studied performance art and I was an artist all of my life and I had a really big existential crisis because I realized as I was looking around that technology was replacing every form. I remember the first time I watched an AI generate, this was maybe, and like, I don't remember how, this was a long time ago, but I was essentially watching before like the deep dream stuff, maybe, maybe like 2009 or 10. And I remember watching computers generate art. And I just was like, I was like mic drop. I was like, anything that could ever be created can and will be created by computers because these are, you're looking at this data. You can scan every art piece in the world and create an amalgamation of this in a way that extends so far beyond human capacity that the form that we have used to express artistic integrity, all forms will in some way become obsolete as a form of creative expression. And I had this huge existential crisis as a performer realizing that the value of my work was essentially like how long would the value of my work live on if no one is, I am not alive to continue singing the song. You don't remember the people who played Carmen. You remember Bizet who wrote the opera. You remember Carmen, the character, but the life of a performer is like that of a butterfly. It's like you emerge from the cocoon, you fly around the world beautifully for a very short amount of time and then you just, you know, start us again. And so I had this huge existential moment and it was a really big awakening call. It was as though the gravity of the universe came into the entire dimension of my being and said, what you have learned has given you a skill, but this is not your path. So I went, okay, I just need some time to process that. And so, because this is my entire life, it's the only thing I ever imagined I would ever do. And so I ended up spending three months in silence meditating and people are like, whoa, like how did you do that? And I don't think people under, I don't know, I'm not that people don't understand, but I'm not certain that a lot of people have the level of this kind of existential moment that I experienced. And I couldn't have done anything else. I really just needed to take that time to process that I was actually reformulating every construct at the foundation of my own reality. And that was gonna take, that's not something you just do overnight, right? Like some people can do it more fluidly, but this was a real shift, a conscious shift. And so I asked myself three questions in that meditation. It was what is my purpose? What is the paradigm shift and where is my love? And so I just meditated on these three questions and started to, I don't know how deeply you've studied lucid dreaming or out of body experiences, but that's another conversation we can get into in another time. That was my area of study during that period. And so I ended up leaving the three months in silence and I just kind of, I started following my intuition. So I would just essentially, sometimes I'd walk into a library and I would just shut my eyes and I would just walk around and I would touch books and I would just feel what they felt like to me, like the density of their knowledge. And I would just feel something that I felt called to and I would just pull it out of the shelf and just read it. And I don't know how to explain it. And other... I was guided, I was guided to this. This was in 2011. And so what I started getting into was propaganda theory. The disillusion of a Aristotelian politics is an idea of citizen in state when we're really all consumers in a Keynesian economy structured by Edward Bernays, the inventor of propaganda who essentially based our entire attitude of economic health on a dissolving human well-being. Like the evolution of our economic well-being and our human well-being were fundamentally at odds and not only was that system non-sustainable but it was a complete illusion. At every touch point and turn that the systems we lived in were illusions. And so is all of the world, right? Like this whole world is an illusion but these illusions in particular have some serious implications in terms of people who don't have the capacity or not the capacity, everyone has the capacity but who have not explored that deeply, right? Who haven't gone that deep with themselves. And one of those books was like a tech book or was like societal things. I know it was multiple books and it's not that I would even read all of the books all of the way through. Sometimes I would just pick up a book and I would just open it to a certain page and I would read like a passage or a couple pages and I just feel like that's all I need to read out of that book. It's you just tune into it. What was your first trade on Bitcoin, first buy? You wanna know something nuts, people always, people are like, when did you first buy Bitcoin? I was not, I didn't. So after I started, all this knowledge came to me and I just started talking about it. I was like, I've been given some wisdom, I just have to share it. So I started going out into the world and finding podiums and sharing. And that was when someone put a USB full of Bitcoin into my hands. I very rarely, I don't necessarily buy, I've just been gifted a lot. They've been good gifts. They've been great gifts. And then when did you start Cornchelograph? When did that come online? So that was in 2013. I joined the property, it had been operable for I think like three or four months. And some guys called me and they said we're just really impressed with you. And we wanna work with you. And I said, well, that's nice. I was like, but you don't have a business, right? And they were like, what do you mean? And I was like, well, you have a blog, right? And so I went in and I said essentially like here's, to scale the property, I was like here's a plan for the next three years. If we really wanna get this property to where it needs to be. And like here are the programs that we need to institute. Here's like this entire countries we can be operable in and then other acquisitions and other properties and I essentially went in and said like here's the business model and the plan to scale. And they were just like, I think they were a little like the first call that we had. I think they were just like, we just called you to, it was a bold move. Like we just called you to offer you something and you countered our offer by saying we don't have a business. Like it was one of those things. Well, there's a labor of love for them, right? Well, for all of us, for all of us. For all of us. For all of us. You're just sharing. Yeah, for all of us. So thinking about how to grow it, you gotta nurture it, you need cash. Yes, and so I essentially came in and then started, I was both editor-in-chief and CEO and co-founder of the property who helped bring in a lot of the network, build the reputation for the brand, create the scaling strategies. So a lot of mergers and acquisitions, a lot of franchises and... How many properties did you buy? Roughly. And full? Six, less than six. So I would also say that... Little blogs and kinda check them together, bring people together, was that thinking? Yeah, you know, what's interesting is media from all shapes and sizes, 15 to 20 offices in 25 different countries. From, I always say this when I talk about this, a very important lesson that I learned. How do you manage a team of 40 anarchists? You don't. You don't, that's the answer. You don't, you don't even like, you're like, oh, I remember when I was like, we're a team. And someone was like, no, we're not. I don't believe in teams. I work for myself. And I was like, oh, wow. I was like, oh. The power of we. I was like, oh, right. But it was a good learning experience because I was like, well, this is the way, these are your needs. So if that's your, I was like, well, let's embrace that. Let's embrace the idea that... That's the culture. And let's create the economy around that. Let's actually do direct incentives for if you think that you're, if you wanna be in this on your own, then let's say, okay, we're gonna make this fully free market economics. And we're gonna have a matter of consensus on whether or not someone is exploiting the system. You write an article, you send it out, the number of views and shares that it gets from accounts that are proven verified. That is how much you get out of the bounty that's created from our ad sales. And if the community comes together in a consensus and says that someone wrote an article that was basically exploiting the system, like beer, guns, tits and weed, plus Bitcoin. And then they just shared it with everyone that obviously they would be weighted differently because the community would reach consensus. Change the incentive system. Yeah, started redesigning essentially. Once I had that moment, I was like, okay, I was like, well, we've really gotta change the incentives here then because the incentives are not gonna work like that. If that's the, if there's a consensus that that is the way you guys want to do things, then I gotta change things around that. All right, cool. And so, yeah, it was a really, it was a really interesting, awesome learning experience from like, you know, a team of like, maybe like 20 to 40 into, probably took it up to 40. And then with all of the other, you know, companies and franchises to about 435 people. And then just took the revenue from, when I, yeah, just took, it was like, skating revenue and then rocketing revenue. So that was really my role in the growth of the business. And we're all, you know, it's amazing to see how these kind of blockchain holocracies work, you know, at a micro scale and at a macro scale and what it really takes to build, what it really takes to build a movement, right? And then in some ways, I guess, it'd be either become or create a meme. Well, I really appreciate the movement you've been supporting. We're here to bring theCUBE to the movement, our second show, we're third show we've been doing. And we're going to do a lot more this year as the ecosystem is coming together, the norms are forming, they're storming, they're forming, it's great stuff. You've been a great thought leader and thanks for sharing the awesome range of topics here. For sure. Hey, Tony Lane here inside theCUBE. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching our exclusive Puerto Rico coverage of coin agenda. We'll be right back.