Tech Brew Ride Home - (TWTR SPC) That Feeling When You Almost Buy The Constitution

Episode Date: November 24, 2021

The legendary tech analyst and general deep-thinker @benedictevans comes on to discuss this essay about the state of the Metaverse right now. Then, several members of the ConstitutionDAO team come on to tell us the behind the scenes of all that historic event at Sotheby's all went down last week. Featuring: @sadlyoddisfying, @youfoundanisha, @julianweisser, @RobbieHeeger, @ciaomack, @kyle_billings Sponsors: FindYourFidelity.com ARM Viewpoints Podcast VPLS.com/goit Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome everybody to the TechMeme Ride Home Experience for Saturday, November 20th. This is a rare and strange time, but the holidays are coming up. And so we wanted to get ahead of our recording schedule so you guys have some content from us to consume over the long weekend or break or whatever it is that you might be experiencing.

I was just talking to Brian about how I have, I find myself in computer transitional hell, I suppose, is the best way to to describe it. I am the fortunate upgrader. I've waited a couple cycles to upgrade my phone. And as Brian and I have been waiting a long time, I also upgraded my MacBook Pro. And I first ordered my phone in September, and then through a number of fluky things, it ended up just arriving, I think, yesterday, actually. So it took a long time. I believe my phone went back to China. It came back here because of all the supply chain nonsense.

And anyways, even though I ordered my MacBook Pro probably a month and a half after my phone, they arrived in the same day. So I started the upgrade process and the migration process for both of these devices. And man, it is a shit show. In some ways, I totally understand the whole iCloud, you know, sort of warm cocoon, just put everything in the cloud and you don't need to worry about anything. Whereas that's not really my style. I tend to have, you know, stuff locally saved, stuff in Dropbox, stuff in one password, stuff, you know, in various storage receptacles. And as I've done this migration, not everything has come over.

And especially on the new M1s, I don't know why, but like it seems like a bunch of my apps are just not running. And maybe it's because they're the Intel versions. And so when you migrate Intel versions of apps over to the new chip, you need Rosetta. I'm very confused. But needless to say, in my... My setup today was totally fucked because of all the things that I've rejiggered to try to make this new setup work and it wasn't working. Brian, are you having better luck?

I have held off on upgrading my laptop because I think didn't we talk about I end up using the laptop now only three or four times a month. Oh, right. I actually end up, I'm using a Windows laptop more right now than I am my. What? For gaming? Long story. Actually, half of it is for gaming. It's a longer story, though, unrelated.

But yeah, just to put a pin in this, whenever I've decided whenever I do upgrade, I'm going to do the full fresh thing. I'm not going to try to get it restored from my... This is what I've decided. This is going to be my weekend, which is not what I preferred, but it just feels like I need a clean start. And fortunately, the last time I did this, I did write down a bunch of notes for how I like my system to be set up.

but I customize everything, and it takes so goddamn long to get my system back into a place where I wanted to be. So we'll see. I'm going to jot down some notes, and maybe the result of that will be a list of other people could, like, quib from if they want to. But anyways, that's where we are. You know what? I think maybe I have the transition to talk to Benedict real quick here. Go for it. I am using the Windows laptop for gaming a lot because, you know, Age of Empires 4 is a hell.

of a drug, and they don't have a Mac version for that yet. We wanted to talk to Benedict for a couple weeks now because this will get into discussions of AR and VR and the Metaverse, and Benedict wrote a fantastic piece. I guess it was back in the beginning of October about Metaverse, Metaverse, Metaverse. And Benedict, I'd like to just pick your brain for 15 or 20 minutes about about this, about Apple Cars and stuff. But the thing that struck me about your essay, and I've actually kind of copped this sort of point a couple times subsequently on the show,

is that this is kind of obvious where buzzwords are buzzwords because no one really has to define them. But in your piece, you made the point that this feels to you like people, in terms of the metaverse, it feels to you like people at the beginning of the 90s being in front of a whiteboard describing the information superhighway. Where do you think we're at in terms of the metaverse? Is it just the solution to everyone's problem no matter what tribe you're in right now? Or do you think that there's actually some sort of coherent vision starting to come together? Well, so I think it's kind of interesting that we've had two sort of,

for want of a better term, rebrands. There's this whole thing to re-describe rebrand, reconceptualized crypto as Web3. And in many ways, I think, rebrand, reconceptualized ARVR as Metaverse. And obviously, crypto is a lot further along than Metaverse. But it's sort of, but it basically is what you're doing is you're kind of trying to leave behind a limited vision. So this is a sort of a universal vision. So if you hear squeaking, that's a 12-month-old puppy sitting on with that. It sounded like.

If you hear an out, that's because you bit my finger again. So, yeah, so, you know, as one tries, there's an old joke that from Voltaire that the Holy Roman Empire was neither Holy, nor Roman nor an empire. And cryptocurrency is neither cryptography nor a currency. And, you know, it's not a distributed database. It's not a payment system. It's not a currency. It's all of those things and lots of other stuff as well. And there's always been sort of a struggle of, well, how do you tell people what this is and what it could be?

And when you try and go from saying crypto to saying Web 3, you're trying to communicate that, yes, it could be a store of value. Yes, it could be payments. But really, these are distributed computing systems and that have some characteristics of sort of open as much open source 2.0 as Web 3.0. And so you're trying to can capsulate and sort of describe a bunch of conceptual chips in what's possible. And when you do that, which is also kind of what Tim O'Reilly was doing with Web 2, was describing all the stuff that he saw in kind of the mid-2000s. In some ways, that sort of creates a vision as much as describes it, because it gives everyone a sense of what collectively you're pushing towards.

And so I think that's sort of what's behind, some of what's behind Web 3. And I think it's also what's behind saying Metaverse, because, you know, VR, A.R obviously doesn't exist yet. I mean, it exists in a very limited sense in the way of your phone at something, but really exists in a set of optics that no one has yet. And Apple might have solved, but no one that side Apple knows. And VR, having been a dumb idea from the 90s that never were, then suddenly started working because people realized we had the computer and the screens and the sensors and the chips.

But the other half of it has been, well, what do you do with it that isn't a game? And, you know, VR by default is sort of stuck as a subset of the game's console business. which is, you know, it's not a bad business, but it's 200 million people. It's not 5 billion people, which is where smartphones are. You wrote another great piece about that, I think, a year ago, is right when the pandemic started and you're like, this should be the moment for VR. Yeah, we're in the VR winter.

We are in a VR winter in that we've got the great device. The Oculus Quest 2 is a great piece of hardware. It is a games device. There is nothing else that it's good for. And a lot of people, our Facebook has sold 10 million of them. Quite a lot of them are sitting in closet, it's unused. There's a few other interesting things like kind of big screen and, you know, the fitness thing that within became. But it's not broken out into everyone saying, oh, my God, we've got to have this.

And the way that I always sort of thought about this was it's as though you'd seen a PlayStation 5 in 1980. And you would say, holy fucking shit, this is mind-blowing, this is amazing, this is going to be part of the future. And it is, but games consoles are 200 million units. It's a small industry. It's half a size of Snapchat in terms of users. And so the puzzle has always been, how did you break out of it being, it's for games, it's for industrial CAD, it's got for these interesting use cases, and make it a universal product.

And how would you describe what that universal product might be? which kind of gets you to the, you know, my sense that this is sort of like a mood board. Obviously, most people won't have read the piece I wrote. Kind of what I said was, like, imagine it's 1992, and it's kind of become apparent that actually maybe quite a lot of people are going to have a computer. And that was kind of a new idea in the late 80s. Actually, quite a lot of people might have a computer, and what would that mean? And you'd get your whiteboard and you'd write words like interactivity and multimedia.

and maybe graphical user interface, because people weren't completely convinced by GUIs at that point, and probably CD ROMs and broadband and even VR, and you draw a box around it and you call it Information Super Highway. And you would imagine that this would be built by Sony, AT&T, Disney, Matsushita, Sharp, Panasonic, Zemans, Alcatel, and Microsoft. And Microsoft, yeah.

So I actually have a report from a company called Telegeography from 1995, and they've got a table of the top 50 Info Communications Companies. Isn't that a wonderful term? Info communications companies by revenue. And because of course, because it's by revenue, half of the companies are Telcos. Because Telecoms is now is a $1.2 trillion. Telecoms is probably a $2 trillion industry now. It's a much bigger industry than technology in revenue terms because everybody, everybody, on Earth is paying money every month. So basically you've got AT&T and Deutsche Telecom and Panasonic and Zemans and Alsom and all these sorts of engineering companies and

Intel is on the list. Microsoft isn't on the list because it's too small to be in the top 50. So I mean never mind they don't have Netscape on the list. They don't have Microsoft on the list of top 50 technology companies because at that time that you know it's just that sense of the conceptual shift in how the world was going to change that just wasn't captured by that. And the reason the problem I have with talking about Metaverse is number one, it's basically a description of all the cool shit that might have happened in 10 years. Everything that you think we might be doing in 2030 is on the list. And the other side of it is it gets talked about as though there's going to be one of them.

It's as though everybody got together in a room in 1994 and said, we're going to announce a consortium to build the World Wide Web. But that's not how it works. Lots of people built stuff for the World Wide Web, but no one built the World Wide Web. And so now to say, well, this is what the Metaverse is going to be, and we're going to build it. Again, it feels like basically like a category error

of how to think about how the future happens and how to think about it that gets built. So one question that I actually have about this, I'm sorry, Brian, is the contrast in capabilities with, I guess, next generation technology and the web. And I think this will come up a little bit with the second half of our conversation around Constitution Dow. Because when I think about what the web was and what the web did to translate documents into digital form that were interlinked or hyperlinked, relative to what's necessary for the metaverse and the skills and the capabilities and the tools and the compute and all of those.

I mean, it's a very privileged type of context to, I guess, deliver digital experiences. And we had my younger brother and two nephews on the show last time or two times ago. And the rigs and the equipment and the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars that they've actually put into what they're doing to build for the Metaverse feels far less accessible than what was necessary to build for the web. So I guess my question is, you know, you said that, well, you know, the future is not really built the way that Zuckerberg claims to say it is, but the games universe kind of was, right? So if you think about Weta or you think about Unity, you think about Unreal Engine, it feels like those actually had quite a bit of capital investment by experts, you know, who, you know, did digital art or 3D animation or graphics. And so, and the skills that were necessary to build that type of world and those types of experiences were much different than what. allowed the web to be created. So maybe kind of two different actually, two quite different things to think about here. One of them is if you look at all

the interesting stuff that happens in, say, enterprise productivity or consumer apps, or indeed all the stuff that's happening in Web 3, none of it's about well, everything would be better if only we had a bigger screen. So if you look at

Notion or frame.io or all those kinds of like new productivity tools, all those new ways of working. They're all basically about some combination of collaboration and networks and automation and workflow. This is what Figma is. It's you replace a Google Drive and some spreadsheets and an email thread and lots of

things called version three, final final version three. Well, it's sort of becoming into the same moment, right? And I know Zuckerberg uses presence. Well, no, I mean, my point is if you think of what is interesting in software design now? it's figma and frame.io and nation it's merging files and collaboration and discussion and workflow into a unified tool and that needs a smaller screen not a bigger screen you know i don't know why figma would be better if it was in 3d unless you're actually making 3d objects yeah but maybe you might give the shit about making 3d 3d i mean have you seen the web 3 graphics

style most of it is 3d objects but yeah but that's not but that's not the point you know Instagram doesn't become better if the Instagram window is floating in 3D space. It's still Instagram. Email doesn't become better if the text is floating with a three-dimensional object somewhere you kind of vaguely hovering in front of you. That's bullshit. You know, what you don't, what you want is to have less fewer email messages. What you want is to turn 150 message email thread into version tracking and workflow and

automation and machine learning. Hold on though, because one of the whole premises that Zuck, I think, brings up and that Adam Aseri talks about is how a lot of Facebook's workplace stuff in the metaverse is better in the sense that you bring people together in a room or in a space. And I think this is actually one of the things that you're pointing to, which I think is accurate and true, which is how do you teach people who mostly know how to communicate on three-dimensional surfaces, whether it's email or, you know, whether it's drawings or, you know, charts. So those aren't three-dimensional. There's a two-dimensional.

That's what I'm saying, two-dimensional, who are used to communicating through two-dimensional environments, and then you bring them into a 3-D virtual space in which now they actually have the ability to communicate in, you know, 3D digital game-like expression, but none of us, or very few of us have actually grown up with the ability to sort of think and express in three dimensions. And so what you're saying, I totally agree with. Like bringing a two-dimensional Instagram feed into a 3-D environment really doesn't make a lot of sense. And yet it seems like, oh, just add 3D and it's going to be great. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, the direction of travel is not that you have a three-dimensional email client. It's that you're not sending those emails.

Sure. Right. That's what I'm saying. You're actually getting into a room. No. No. It's that you move to a model where those emessat communication doesn't need to happen or it happens in a more efficient way. Look, if you look at what Figma does or Framer.io we're doing, the transition is you used to have a network drive with a bunch of

different drafts of your deliverable. And then you had a Google sheet with 45 or 450 rows of comments at this time code, change this frame and color correct that object. And then you've got an email thread between 50 different people talking about it. And frame. .io moves that into workflow so that you're not managing all of those different emails and copying and pasting stuff from the email into the Google sheet and then paging through the Google sheet and scrubbing through the video to get to the right frame.

And to say, well, if you make that three-dimensional, it'll be better as bullshit. None of that requires. You don't improve that by making that three-dimensional. You improve that by stopping people having to copy and paste from an email into Google Sheep and have that happening in one interface. And yes, hey, maybe you could put it in 3D as well, but that's just completely set, a completely different way of thinking about what problem you're trying to solve. And again, when I look at the whole workplace thing and say, well, now instead of you

talking to somebody in text, you'll talk to somebody in three- three dimensions, yes, but I don't, the purpose here isn't to talk to somebody. The purpose here is to communicate that frame 872 seems to have a glitch on it. That's not solved. You don't make that easier by saying, hey, let's grab a 3D room. In fact, you probably don't want even to go onto zoom. What you want is to have a little bit of structured data tagged onto that frame so that the video editor can go in and find that frame and fix it. The last thing you want to do is schedule a fucking call to talk about that frame. never mind make it a 3D call and have to put some goggles on so you can do it.

So just to understand, and then I want to bring up the folks from Constitution Dow, you know, is what I think I hear you saying is that you're skeptical about either Zuck's approach to building the metaverse and that it's sort of, you know, centrally run out of Zucks's, you know, mind and or... You know how skeptical I am about the whole idea that this revolution is all about having meetings in frigging VR, but go on. Well, yes, but I guess what I also hear, or what I thought I heard Benedict saying earlier, you know, was that what Zuck is missing about the way in which these tech revolutions happen is that it's a more sort of diasporatic spread out, you know, way for these, you know, I don't know, things to happen in fits

and starts. And it rarely happens in sort of a centralized fashion where it's like, oh, the information superhighway is the thing. We've got, you know, like Nokia had these like great concept videos back in like the mid-aughts, you know, that portrayed augmented reality and all this other stuff. And yet they're more or less irrelevant today. So in a similar way. So I think there's, There's two different things here. One of them is, you know, well, three points. First of them is metaverse is a very vague actual term for everything cool that might happen in 10 years. And many of them probably will happen, just not necessarily like that,

which is the point of my comparison with the information superhighway. Yeah, we are all doing interactive multimedia over broadband networks in graphical user interfaces. It's just not like that. Yes. Not on television sets controlled by AT&T in the New York Times Times. So that's one thing, which is, you know, it's this very vague, fuzzy, hand-weight sense of what it will all be and how it will get built. I think the other, which I think is a much more specific point, is I think Web3 is a vastly more interesting way of thinking about how you would build software. And something like Figma is a vastly more interesting way of thinking about the way you would build software than just saying, well, we'll make it 3D.

And that's the next generation. I don't think it is. I think the next generation is changing how. it works and what it's doing, not changing the UI. I think the UI changes to follow what it's doing. Got it. Whether that's a DAO or whether that's workflow or network or something, but it's not taking whatever brilliant idea you've had and saying, and we'll have a three-dimensional interface.

Okay, so let me build on this and try to make an elegant transition and bring Julian up here, Kyle, we've got Dan and we've got Munam. I'm not sure if we've got some other folks from this. the Constitution Dow. But one of the things that you just said, Bennett, I thought, was very interesting and worthwhile to, like, bring into this larger context, which is if you imagine Figma or a Figma file, to some degree, and this is very, very messy, but if you were to imagine Figma as being a tool for DAWS, and that everyone can sort of roam around, everyone has a cursor, and they can add, you know, sticky notes, or they can, or I guess I'll speak to my

personal experience recently where I did an offsite and I used a fig jam, which is Figma's kind of diagramming tool. And, you know, we had multiple people all actually in the same place kind of working together to come up with, you know, a coherent, you know, strategy or vision that normally you might have done on a, you know, conventional whiteboard, which, you know, has limitations, et cetera. And of course, this process could have happened remotely. It happened in person. But in a way, that type of collaboration, real time, additive, where you can see everything else that's going on. It's transparent to you. What I kind of like about this idea is to imagine Fig Jam as almost like a tool that is perfectly time.

for what's going on with Dows, in the sense that you've got a lot of people coming together, they go into a space where maybe they do or don't know the other participants. They're all working towards a shared goal, and there's visibility and transparency in ultimately what it is that's trying to happen. Now, I think, Benedict, your point is about, well, it's really about the work that's going on and what's being done and how it's being done relative to, you know, if this is in 3D or not. Like, that's irrelevant, and that's besides the point. And it's kind of a distraction that's precipitated by current, you know, computing capabilities

that are new and novel and shiny, but isn't the point. So that's why I wanted to actually bring the folks from Constitution Dow up here to talk about their recent project, what they did, how they brought it together, the fact that they used Discord largely to coordinate in Twitter, and I'm sure a number of other tools. So Julian, you guys want to come, Moonam, you want to come up and sort of introduce yourselves and then tell us a little bit about this crazy week that you guys have had. I'm Julian, Constitution Dow. I'm not much speaking, but from the team, let's see a bunch of them in the audience.

I'm happy to pull some of them up or text you or something. I will add you as a co-host. The other thing here is, you know, what Benedict, we were saying about how things don't really, you shouldn't just try and slap sort of the latest, greatest thing onto it, like makes things in 3D, but sort of have the exact same thing and just make a 3D. I think that's the same thing with Web3 or crypto or on the blockchain. It shouldn't just be blank, but on the blockchain. It should be something new that's enabled by these technologies.

So I think that sort of what Constitution now is a part of that doing something different that wasn't necessarily possible before or would have been really hard. You see a lot of people trying to use like digital art especially. It's kind of just like taking art and putting it on the blockchain. You know, it makes a lot of sense to have sort of ownership of digital assets. But the same time, it feels like that's just the beginning. There's a lot more creative things that could be done beyond just putting something, you know. Go ahead. Oh, yeah. I just wanted to say, like...

By the way, this is Dan. Oh, hi, I'm Daniel, by the way. I do social stuff for Constitution Dow. So I think the whole, like, art on the blockchain aspect of NFTs is actually, like, very overplayed to some degree. I mean, it does work, but I think that, unfortunately, the media has picked up on this one, like, one use of NFTs and, like, the core usage of it

and missed out on a lot of, a lot, like, more interesting. interesting uses. So I just wanted to clarify that NFTs are not strictly art on the blockchain. I think the broader conversation, and to Benedict's point, and I think this is very relevant, at least where I'd be very interested to see this conversation go, is a little bit about how, you know, historically we do tend to take, you know, the previous medium or the content of the previous medium. We impose it or superimpose it on a new emerging medium, which we don't fully understand yet. the media, I suppose, you know, the press media has a tendency to try to describe things relative to what's come before and you lose a lot in that transition, whereas the people who get it and are deeply, you know, ensconced in this stuff, are seeing the new possibilities. So, for example, you know, as I was describing that fig jam example and what you guys have

done with the Constitution Dow is like, why do you need a corporation? Why do you need an entity? Why do you need to register in Delaware? Why do you need to have all that, you know, additional overhead when you can come together, put a bunch of stuff on the blockchain, have a set of smart contracts that set the agreements for the rules of participation and formally at a thing. And if a thing works, then keep going. If it doesn't work, then you dissolve it. And you didn't have to do all that extra work. So if you're in this space, then gravity has sort of shifted.

And all the mathematical formulas that you use to make sense of reality are slightly off. And you can see it and you understand it. but people who are used to the way that the world used to work will apply all their, you know, bureaucracy on top of it because it feels necessary because that's how they know things. So I guess what I'm saying is I agree with what you're saying about NFTs as being overplayed and being more towards art. But that feels like a function of the press, getting excited about something that they could explain about crypto because crypto is too abstract. And it's sort of like money and it's sort of like a store of, you know, wealth or gold or whatever. But it's not really. and then people clays over.

And so help us understand how this Constitution Dow came about. Like, who was the person who was like, you know what? The Constitution's like coming up for sale for the first time in like 10,000. Well, it's not 10,000 years, but like, you know, in a long time. And this is our shot. Well, wouldn't it be so cool if like we the people actually owned this document, at least as a Dow goes. So walk us through that just so that we have a little bit of that background and that momentum and then see where that goes from there.

Hey everyone, it's Winnam Wesse. I helped out on the Constitution Dautium primarily in running our discord and sort of helping with onboarding people. Chris, regarding your point about sort of this platonic ideal where everything can be programmed ahead of time and can sort of work off of rules, you know, that's a vision that I believe in and that's a vision that I wanted to see happen. But for something like this, where we had such a small deadline and, you know, no idea how big this thing would get, we didn't have the luxury of doing that sort of thoughtful engineering and actually fix it. out the rules. A lot of this was finding the best, most talented people we could who were able to, you know, contribute their time, and then trying to figure it out as we go. A lot of the things that we didn't know were things that we did not know that no one knew, because it's sort of the first time anyone attempted something at this scale. And the real challenge was not sort of the limitations of our tooling online, but was all of the real world, you know, meet space challenges. And I think the amazing thing about this team is that we very quickly, you know, ran into sort of friction in and trying to push forward, re-evaluated that, you know, came up with like an actual sort of structure and then, you know, ended up to the point where we got, you know, we got to the final destination, even if we didn't win. But it's put us into a position to keep doing cool things. And I'm sure everyone else can tell you from their perspective, but a lot of it was just learning on the fly and, you know, trusting in each other to do a good job. I mean, so much of that is social.

So much of that is about people and relationships. And at least my impression of DAWS is there is a degree of maybe internal cohesion and familiarity and relationships that already exist. But you guys pulled in, what, 17,000 people in this? So how does that happen? So I think it started, like, very initially. He's very gracious and doesn't really take credit. But from what I understand, the first person. to talk about this in our circles was either my friend David or this guy, Austin.

He sent a DM to this guy, Jackson, Dame, who's pretty big on Twitter. We've had Jackson on here before, actually. He talked about the Loop Project. Yeah, so I think he sent a DM to Jackson about buying the Constitution, and Jackson sent it to our group chat where we were like, oh, like, should we actually try to do this? So Austin sent that DM, I think, and we were already talking about it a little, but we were like, oh, we should actually like attempt to do this thing. And so then from there, we had a meeting like the night, like Thursday night to talk about it. And it's the grew.

When you say meeting, I think this is important because we understand meetings in a certain way. And, you know, they had meetings when they wrote up the Constitution. But like what was the context format where you in person? Was this remote? Was this on Discord? Was this clubhouse? What kind of meeting was this? I think it was a Zoom meeting.

Very relatable. Yeah. Yeah. Someone just sent a DM to a group chat on Twitter. and it was like, guys, we're having a meeting to talk about, like, maybe we might actually, for real, try to buy the Constitution. But I'll just say that this was pretty laughable at the time, you know, in terms of, like, I was totally on board, but it was also hilarious and not very feasible. And that was kind of what made it really intriguing. And I think why a lot of people showed.

I think we had like 15 people who showed up. And then it kind of just grew from there. That's actually, by the way, this is Brian, the co-host again. But I'm just curious, and this is a really simple, dumb journalism question. But are you guys, I mean, are you feeling bummed now that you didn't win it? Or was this experience so, like, nothing that you could have even prepared yourselves for, that it is sort of like I said on the show. It's kind of the dumb thing of it's the friends we made along the way.

Are you bummed now or are you just amazed at what you achieved to even get as far as you did? Hey, Brian, this is Jonah. I contributed a lot with crypto onboarding to people that were new to crypto. You know, one thing I'll say is in the moment, things really hurt. You know, a group of us got together to discuss, to watch the auction. And it really hurts it, you know, have all this going on, have all this energy and momentum and we raised all this money and things failed. You know, we kind of were there in shock for a few minutes and then started talking about all the major wins we have. You know, one of those major wins were a third of the wallets that were involved in contributing had never contributed, I had never had any transactions on Ethereum before.

So we brought in, you know, around 5,000 people that had never used Ethereum before to using and understanding this technology. We got the word Dow in, you know, on the eyes and ears of people that were familiar with crypto and blockchain. But I think a lot more people are showing to resonate with this as a real-world use case. they can really understand and they can wrap the head around. You know, I think a really great example of this that I heard recently was, I was listening to a tech podcast and someone described an example of a Dow use case of an old historic movie theater in a town that was shutting down, but maybe the community could get together and very quickly fundraised to get to be able to save

that historic building. So, you know, it sucks that we didn't win. But I think everyone's really excited about where we can go from there. and we're not done by any means of the doubt. We're exploring with the people. I was going to say that that was my next, sorry to interrupt whoever that was. That was literally my next question.

So maybe you can answer that. Are there plans, are there discussions being actively had right now to be like, all right, well, we're already here. We have all this energy behind us. Let's do something else, even if we swung and missed on this first pitch here. So the first, yeah, go ahead.

Well, I was just going to add to your, the color that you had around. So I'm McKenzie. I was a core contributor. I helped with museum partnerships, legal structures, and some internal ops. But I think the thing that was most touching for me was that when we were, we had organized some people in person in New York with Robbie, he was actually doing the bidding for us. So Robbie, Nicole, and Alice were representing us in another room. And the rest of us were watching a live stream right outside that room and after the bid ended, after the auction ended, and they came out, everyone stood up and gave them a standing ovation. So just a sense of like the emotion basically behind that and just how much

the team really came together and just the genuine affection I felt toward like people I had never met on the internet, you know, never actually met before the five days and met for the first time that Thursday hours before the bidding. Let me let me let me, let me, let me, let me, Shoehorn one real quick specifically for you, McKenzie. When you reached out, I assume you reached out to Sotheby's to get someone to actually be

your bidder there. Were they receptive? Were they gung-ho? Were they helpful to you? What was your relationship with actually getting someone on the stage to raise their hand for you for the bidding? Yeah, so I mean, essentially, we reached out to Sotheby's pretty early in the process.

And the reason we did it really early is because There were a lot of questions around what they would accept as funds. This was a, this was an auction that required. Right? Like, it was just such a wild time and I was so focused on. But Anisha, I think, was very involved in a lot of those conversations. I was definitely not the single point person, either with like Sotheby's or anything, but I did help a lot with press and like a bunch of our like external and internal comms. Um, my understanding is that Sotheby's, like, definitely was receptive to having us, you know, bring someone on board and do our bidding and we've interacted with a number of individuals from Sotheby's that have been really, really kind to us.

Um, I think something that was really cool to see aside from our, like, you know, the relationship with, like, Constitution doubt in Sotheby's was even when we were watching the auction, um, I don't know who else may have noticed that. But when they kind of had the prices laid out as the bids were going up in different forms of currency, Ethereum was also on that list. And so they were like, I remember seeing for some banksy pieces that were being bid on, they would announce the price in both USD and an eighth. And they mentioned that this is the first time that they were doing that. And I thought that was really, really, really cool. I can't say that it was because of us or, you know, Banksy or like, you know, other such crypto pieces or crypto groups like coming into like the Sotheby's like world. But I thought that was really exciting to see. And McKenzie, another another thing while you guys were on the ground in your gathering, which I wish I was there.

A bunch of us were also like on a video call. And I think Dan mentioned earlier that one of the places that this idea was initially surfaced and kind of like put in a group chat. Dan and I are like in the same group chat called like gas station. And a bunch of us actually were all watching the auction on the live stream in a group like Zoom session. And to kind of like have that support from like the community who was, you know, part of the core contributor. were on that call, but also like a bunch of our friends were on that call, and we were kind of all watching in anticipation together. And I think that was like really, really special too. What I'd love to hear from you guys a little bit is what this means to you personally in terms of,

I don't know, I'm sure many of you have, you know, had different types of success in the past and have experienced, you know, that type of visibility. But it really felt for a moment, moment, you know, the broader sort of, you know, Twitter ecosystem had really sort of emerged into the mainstream and that this thing had sort of, you know, obviously taken on a life of its own. And the story was so significant. And I suppose, like, I don't want to center on me, but to draw a parallel back in 2004, when we were working on the launch of Firefox, I contributed to the design of this two-page ad that went in the New York Times to announce Firefox to the world. And the reason why it was significant was because that ad had been crowdfunded by nearly 10,000 contributors of very, very small amounts of money.

This is in the era of Barack Obama fundraising and using micro donations to power. Well, previously it was the Howard Stern, Howard Dean campaign, which then led to Barack Obama being able to use micro donations as well. And it's been a while, I feel like since we've actually had something that was so maybe, commonly relatable. I mean, buying the Constitution is something that people all over the world have a familiarity with in a connection to. And so for you guys to put this out there in the context

of Web 3, in the context of a DAO, in the context of, I would almost say like the culture of Web 3. That is, I suppose, that one of the more significant things that comes out of this. The culture of open source needed to come out to the world in 2004 to say, hey, this is how we work, this is how we operate, and we also have financial power.

So can you guys speak a little bit to maybe how this feels to you personally? And maybe it's, you know, I don't want to like overstate the case, but, you know, you might have some sense of what your life was like, you know, before and how you thought you could change things before and how you feel about that now. So, Chris, I would really recommend that you and everyone here take a look at the fundraising page because people left these incredible messages about kind of, what's the best way to get to that link? Yeah, it's a juice box.

I want to plus one that. Okay. So there's some incredible messages. We actually posted some at our Instagram as well, Constitution underscore Dow. Just to people, you know, in their relationship to this document in this country, and some of those relationships were very, very positive, and some were negative.

And I think part of what we wanted to do here is, you know, have the opportunity for people to relate however they felt was important to them. You know, some of the best ones. were stories about immigration or, you know, I'm going to give this to my daughter when she's old enough to learn about the Constitution, or, you know, stories of this document was very harmful to me in my community, but now I can't have ownership over it and power over it. And I just think that that was really beautiful and meaningful. I know that, you know, in my family, I got to contribute and they're not really crypto-native, but we kind of included our family's immigration story, which is the name of my grandfather's memoir. So, highly recommend that everyone go read through this. There's some funny memes, but there's also some really incredible stories. I'd also just like to add one more thing to that in that I think everyone from our team and our side became aware pretty quickly that this was a cultural inflection point. And we wanted to put our best foot forward because just as, you know, we were just a group of

individuals trying to do something crazy. I think it really captured sort of this zeitgeist at the moment that there is possibilities for change. And there is possible for more equitable institutions. Museums themselves are often considered pretty stodgy and unchanging, and a lot of them reached out to just try to learn what we were all about. And the most amazing thing was sort of on the day leading up to the auction, you know, a bunch of museums set us like good luck emails. That wasn't something I don't think any of us were expecting.

And it's sort of amazing to see, you know, some historical society in some states say, good luck tomorrow. I hope you win this. You're doing this for the right reasons. So we hope that this actually sets a precedent and a chance for different organizations to engage with, you know, the institutions that define culture and, you know, some of these ethos around crypto where it's just sort of, you know, the ultimate meritocracy can carry through to society. I think one thing I also want to add is just I was pretty blown away by just how much, I mean, people have mentioned how much the community is rallied around us, but we wouldn't have been able to pull this off. that's a short time period, have we not been able to lean on existing partners? I mean, we worked with six or seven people for different partners just to be able to set

up the payments flow and the legal partnerships. And I know Robbie is in the speaker audience and just like a huge, humongous shout out to endowment, FTX and a number of other partners just because of, yeah, just incredible. I mean, just Robbie being like sort of the person actually visiting. Yeah, yeah, it's just incredible. And like even after the endowment, or sorry, even after like the auction ended, like you guys at inatement have been so involved and so ready to help us. So massive, massive shout out to you guys.

And I don't think anyone from FDXUS is here, but on the day of the auction, we simply would not be able to even get to the point of being able to bid if it worked for them. And so they were a massive, massive help too. You guys are making me blush. It's truly such an honor to be a part of what you guys have built here. And, you know, I think it really underscores the fact that you kind of need these partnerships in order to bridge the gap here. That for the things, for translating the crypto industry into the modern culture, into the mainstream culture, We need institutions that are crypto-native in order to come in and be able to provide the infrastructure for a group like Constitution Dow to actually be able to place a bid on Thursday night.

And that's why we built endowment. And so this was just like the perfect use case for what we've been working on. But without the energy and the enthusiasm and the hard work of this incredible core team and the community around it, like there's no opportunity. there, right? So there's really this very beautiful symbiosis that was just such a no-brainer for us and the team at endowment. And yeah, happy to sort of, you know, weigh in on anything that that has to do with that compliance angle or with, you know, like auction mechanics or anything like that. What do you guys think is next? You know, and what else surprised you about this process that either was harder or easier or like sometimes I just- Well, you know, a better way to say that, Chris. If there was something you could do differently, If you had a second shot at it or the next time you do something, what have you learned for someone else that maybe even is coming behind you to do something similar?

What would you do differently? What's a big learning that you could take away from this whole experience? That third party guarantees are a thing. Oh my God, yeah. Yeah, that's true. I think that the two weeks, like, or the one week, like, end goal was good. And, like, having, like, a solid end date in mind really, like, boosted the rate of the entire project.

But I think having a two-week-away end goal might be just like a slightly more comfortable end date. It got pretty tight, I think. I think that we also, given the time frame and just given everything, we did, in retrospect, like a phenomenal job of getting all the moving pieces working. But if I were to try to stand up and down my free time again, doubling down on some of that structure and certain internal comms and having certain just like internal structure in place would be something that'd be in my place. Can you impact that a little bit?

Because I think there is an impression about Dow's or at least, you know, maybe in the general thing, where it's like a free-for-all and it's like totally egalitarian and, you know, everyone is participating in equal ways. but at some point, to move so quickly within a week, to do the things you need to do, you also need to delegate, have some structure, some organization, maybe even some hierarchy. So what types of structures would you recommend people think about when approaching this type of thing? Yeah. So I'd say like a couple of things. Like one, this is kind of coming from only my perspective. I've been a part of like other DAs in the past and have joined other like discords of DAWs.

So I'm kind of contrasting my experience there with Constitution Dow and I guess what I would like to see beyond any of those. Sometimes when you initially join a Dow, there is a lot of chaos and you don't really know where to start or how to contribute or where to go. And different DAOs have kind of different gauges of how they want to structure things or organize things. with Constitution Dow, I think there was like, you know, that core set of contributors and we pretty quickly kind of like sorted ourselves into different roles or things that we were kind of handling. I'd say that we still maintain like kind of a flat structure as Dow's are known to sort of have rather than a hierarchy with one person in charge. And I think that was really important. that being said, like, you know, there were some people who were primarily focused on getting our website up and running. Some people were the mods.

Some people were dealing with museum partnerships. I was handling a lot of like press comms related stuff. And I think like more than there necessarily being like any kind of hierarchy, I think certain lines of communication are really important to keep in mind. For example, one thing that I personally was. dealing with was as we scaled, what did we as a group want to communicate to our external community in terms of our messaging or statements that we put out as a collective that had to kind of be run by everyone? We all had to agree upon it. And just having some kind of understanding amongst everyone about how we wanted to accomplish that, whether that's by rules or

by like, hey, we, if we want to like propose something, how do we want to like vote on it? Where is that going to happen? What kind of like majority do we need to have by it? What time frame are we working on? I think these are all like really, really finer details. And some of them couldn't really be thought about in the time span that we were working with. And we did like, you know, the best we could. But I think, you know, just for DAOs in general, those are all like internal things that,

they are easy to overlook, but when you are thoughtful about them or when you are not thoughtful about them, it can have major ramifications one way or another. Can you actually go a little more in depth about those specific things? Because I think those mechanics are exactly the things that really separate, you know, as I understand, these DAOs, you know, that sort of come together and especially the things that are either on or off chain. So you talk about voting and governance. And this is a big piece of what the Web 3 world seems to be about. And so the social functioning of participation in these groups is something that feels a little bit more, I don't know, it's not esoteric.

It's actually quite essential. But I think it's something that people don't have a lot of access to. It's the whole principle of what Web 3 is trying to do in a lot of ways by putting things on chain, having their visibility, creating, I don't know, more fair participation. engines for these types of things. So how does that work when you're trying to move very, very quickly and you need people to, like, vote? Is there like a time frame? Is there actually a system or a structure or tools? Or is it just kind of like, let's call it to like a verbal vote or like, let's get a bunch of like emojis on or emotes on this discord, you know, comment and we'll make a decision in the next 10 minutes. How does that work? So Chris, I think a lot of this was

exactly what you were saying, emojis on a discord message. You know, there were more important decisions that we got together on Zoom and discussed, but we were moving so fast. I would say, like, for the core team, it almost felt like a tribe, where, like, you know, we were all very working closely together, shared contact, shared information, just go, go, go. There's a concept I'd recommend so many in a group look into. There's great articles around it called Progressive Decentralization, where a lot of these ideas start in a one or a few places, and then you push as far as possible to say how decentralized can you actually make it?

So, you know, with our core team, we're obviously making a lot of decisions right now. But our first priority, of course, after we refund people that are no longer interested in being involved, is getting to a place where anyone in the community can become part of core and that we decentralized to the greatest degree possible. Yeah, and to add to what, just to make sure you can do you hear of it. Can you hear me okay? Yep. Cool. Yeah, just to add to what which is being said there by Jonah, I think another thing

worth noting is like how much of this is on-chain versus off-chain. A lot of decisions take place off-chain, you know, like as you were saying via emojis. But even even when you're doing a snapshot, you know, doing a snapshot with votes and it's tied to sort of a governance token, you still have most of the actual actions as a result of that on-chain vote. taking place off-chain a lot of the times and a lot of dows. So it's not just like, you know, there's a smart contract and everything executes based off of the outcome of a vote. For the most part, you have to trust that the snapshot vote actually leads to an off-chain action. And in our case, you know,

we were buying a physical constitution, copy the Constitution, and we were doing all sorts of things that would require off-chain action. But really determined a lot of our strategy in terms of how we were building, the tools that we're using, and whatnot. So as a final addition there, that's a technology constraint. And, you know, I hope as we build out this ecosystem, you know, the easiest thing a doubt can actually do from, like, direct action right now is send funds from the Treasury from a vote. The tooling is being built out for everything else. Right.

So it seems like, and I guess I want to just try to like, again, create a mental model around this, that, you know, Discord style, you know, emot or remote, I guess, like, yeah, reactions is almost a way of kind of sampling like for what does the community feel like of the community that is here you know or over some period of time and then from that sample is like okay we have a sense that we can move forward with this maybe it isn't like everybody participating but it's enough so that we have some sense of consensus and then we can move forward and then when it comes to distributing funds or things where you know these are really critical like you know voting moments then that's where you would actually do it you know on chain and so that's a slower process it's more

deliberative, but people have the ability to actually contribute. Is that roughly the mechanics? Are there other mechanics that I'm missing? Yeah, thresholds. Sorry, say that again, Julian? Yeah, so essentially thresholds. Not to say that we have, we have that now, but like you see in certain, in certain dows and different circumstances, they have different thresholds that would require a certain number of votes, total votes, or a certain percentage of votes voting yes, for different things depending on the severity or the irreversibility of the decision being made. Right, exactly, like the one way or the two-way door problem. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, got it. One other thing I'll add here is that the first moments where Dow is coming together are really critical in the eyes of like the regulatory landscape. And so the presence of a token must also, the prevailing legal opinion, and with the caveat that I am not a lawyer, but that we spend a lot of time on this, is that the prevailing legal opinion is that if a governance token is launched with its governance apparatus alongside the launch of the token, that you avoid a lot of the concerns around securitizing something because it wasn't just a standalone thing that was on markets first.

And so when we think about what's next or what we need here in the space is we need places like juice box that have done amazing tooling around how to pool these funds to also, you know, start to think about incorporating the governance mechanism alongside of it so that when a community says this is a governance token, they actually already have the tooling there. And they can point to the government and say, you know, this has its ability to be a voting mechanism from the very start. Got it. Interesting. And how much of this was all familiar to you guys beforehand and how much were you learning live? I personally learned.

Yeah, most of it I learned live. This was pretty new to me, but I'm sure other people are somewhat more familiar with it. I think that was like a great thing. Yeah. I was just going to say, I think there was like a mix. We had a lot of people like tell us that by contributing to the Dow, like it was their first experience with like Web3 or, you know, even being like a part of a Dow for the first time.

But I think even among the core group of people, there were, there were people who it may have been their first time being in a Dow or maybe had been in a Dow before, but not this involved. And I think that was my experience. Yeah. And I think Kyle is here. Maybe he can speak to his experience. I think you were saying Kyle that this is your first experience with the Dow, right?

Yep. It's just about to chime in there and say, yeah, this is my first big experience with kind of 3 in general. So there's a lot of learning along the way, a lot of trying to figure out what it means to be a designer in an environment like that. We've been talking a lot about, like, what kind of tools make a lot of sense and what kind of tools are most conducive to DAWS. And absolutely, Figma is, I've been to hold out on sketch up until now, but, you know, after using Figma for this project, and kind of sold. But yeah, I mean, like a big part of my own paradigm shift is just around how to offer. as a designer how to work and contribute to a product like this because it's not, but even the decision making from a product standpoint is not centralized.

You're more so just creating tools for everyone else to generate memes or ideas around this idea and to all make progress jointly. Everyone needs to be empowered and so it's, it really has been a pretty game-changing experience to work on this and I'm definitely a all in now. So, Kyle, one thing, so a lot of folks, obviously, who listen to this show wouldn't know how I'm connected to each of you differently. And so, you know, I've been friends with you in various ways, whether it's, you know, on Twitter or like, for example, Julian actually interviewed me for on deck. And so he was the guy to let me into that community. And then Kyle, actually, I know through a totally different area, which is wine. And so actually, I just like, I think to help the audience understand a little bit more about like this journey. and how, you know, folks who maybe weren't even, you know, super into the Web3 world, you know, got involved in this, got pulled in, got drawn in, and were able to contribute. Like, I don't mean to put you on the spot, but if you're willing, Kyle,

I'd love to just sort of hear a little bit about kind of what you were doing before, what you were working on, the types of things that you're doing, you know, on a day-to-day with, like, your actual, you know, business and company, and then how you sort of got into this. Because I think that migration, I think, is where people are kind of, maybe they're crypto-curious or they're kind of, like, Web3 wondering. and if you cross that threshold, what was that experience like?

I think for me, it was just getting really interested in the technology from just the perspective of, you never necessarily want to take technology and try to figure out what nail you can hit with it. Take a look at the problem, figure out what technology makes sense. But I certainly...

Yeah, I was definitely interested in what's going on here. And if I can arm myself with that, with an understanding of that technology, maybe I can apply it to the work that they do. So, yeah, like you said, I started a company called True Wine and we had, we were just teaching. It was basically like Duolingo for wine, not really adjacent to Web 3 whatsoever. But just in thinking about different ways to handle a course creation or like user generated content, I was very interested in the ideas of things like knowledge, as currency, of a learn to earn,

the sorts of things and just getting really interested in how to incorporate those things. because I genuinely believe that that is education. In education, there's a lot of these problems that can be solved with these Web 3 paradigms. So I was just, you know, getting back into that. And that's what caused me to reach out to Julian and just try to pick his brain a little bit about what's going on in the space. And then, yeah, one day he just, you know, he sent me a link to a tweet with the two scrolls and the rest of his history. And what ultimately did you contribute? Like, what were you doing?

For me, it was design and the website. Got it really just front-end stuff. So I was, again, like kind of fielding the different sorts of, you know, there are a lot of suggestions from the community, kind of being the liaison between what kind of stuff was bubbling up from the community and the kind of stuff that we put on the site. And it really was an interesting project to, you know, to not fully go for like a clean, like, like, Stripe website, but instead to say, like, hey,

this meme has really gotten us a long way. So let's make sure that we're true to the community and true to who we are and keep the brand as something that has been kind of scrappy and kind of memey, kind of funny. Something that's just sticky and it can spread. And yeah, it's just been great. So yeah, I've been working on design, working on shipping stuff to the website, and we'll definitely do more of that in the future. Cool.

I have two more questions, and then maybe we'll wrap. One of the questions that I have is really just about, I guess, trust. And, you know, Kyle, for you to, you know, show up, I suppose maybe there was some preexisting trust or awareness, you know, when Julian reached out to you. But you must have had a bunch of, you know, volunteers and people who you didn't know, and people who, you know, have, you know, pixel profile photos or, you know, strange discord names. And they're showing up and they're saying, oh, I want to do something, give me some ability

to edit the website or do something else. Like, that could really go badly, you know, if, if, you know, if, I take a look at all the spam that I get on Discord. There's a lot of bad stuff out there. What is the process for evaluating and knowing whether or not someone who shows up to contribute to a Dow actually is trustworthy, is someone who should be given some power or the ability to do things? What does that process look like? I think that that's one thing that I'm definitely interested in is especially moving forward as we begin to really get the government structure going and get voting up and up and running. It's been that balance of centralization versus decentralization, the ideal version of it,

is that it is completely a meritocracy and all ideas are considered equal. But when moving super fast and before everything is really set up, it is, I mean, the way that it was structured for us was like, I didn't even have right access to the GitHub. And so I was creating a pull request and that was just part of our process. And that was like a traditional way of, you know, triaging different changes, different ideas. And so it is. It's it's a really interesting challenge, I think. And one of the things that I'm definitely interested in learning more about, but, you know, just watching different groups of people pop up in the discord and start to contribute stuff. Like, they'll just get to work, you know, to give them permission and they'll ship around.

They'll show you their work and to like, what can I do to, you know, get this onto the site? What can I do to get this implemented? and you just have conversations with them. And really, everyone is just so eager to contribute to it. And they all care so much. And that really comes across as the element that lends credibility is just you can kind of see how much time they put into it, how much they care, how much they're looking to continue to put into it.

And that, yeah, people will just pop out and surprise you in big ways. Got it. Was there any other, I guess, what's the word? I guess rewards or like a lot of things that happen in these, you know, both DAOs or like Web3 communities are around being rewarded with tokens or other types of, you know, ways to, I don't know, honor or, you know, provide a benefit for contributing. Was this more just kind of like, let's do this thing and let's like make it happen and worry about it the rest with there's one goal and like, let's get that goal done? Or was there thought about that other side of incentives essentially?

So our attitude, Chris, was, you know, this is something that we probably should figure out eventually, but really the mission was the most important part. So once we have, you know, voting and everything fully set up, that's up to the community. If there's rewards retroactively and rewards going forward, I expect going forward, you know, once we have the Dow set up and we want more community contributors, we're going to have to figure out a reward system. So, you know, it's something that like came up, but we were all like, you know what, like, guys, this is the least important thing right now was really important if we get this thing done. And everyone's attitude was, you know, even if we don't get this thing and have to return everyone's money, like, who cares? You know, we still did something really incredible. And we're able to inspire a lot of people. Totally. I'll add that it would seem, it would seem potentially very disingenuous if we had said we were going to reserve a, you know, a token supplier. something like that for the core contributors. You know, that's what people do with a lot of projects that I think it makes sense. But given sort of the nature of this almost being like a community charity project

versus it being sort of like a venture where we were trying to make money, it seemed like it would be sort of against the spirit of it. And we thought that would be much better to tell people that, hey, you know, if we win, if we're successful or if this continues, please consider, you know, voting for a proposal in the future to award us some tokens or something like that. We thought that was just a much better way to do it. Sort of put our work up front and then if people appreciate it, um, sort of allow them to, to show that later on.

Totally. Yep. Brian? Yeah. So, oh wait, Dan had something. I just wanted to say like as doing it as I was doing like the social and community aspect of it, I got a lot of people who like made memes and stuff who were like reaching out to me like, do you guys have like a token reward system?

them in place, but I think it was basically established that, like, okay, we have one week. This has been like a mad dash to the finish. Like, we will have a reward system eventually, but right now it's like much more important to focus on just like getting stuff done. And like, I would probably congratulate everyone as payment for their contributions. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it makes sense. Now, now, Brian? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And by the way, everybody, I think this will probably be last question ish. But I have to ask it because we haven't brought it up this whole time, but, you know, like a villain being

unmasked at the end of a Scooby-Doo episode, I would just be curious on anyone's thoughts about Ken Griffin being the guy unmasked as the winning bidder. I mean, to start, congratulations, Ken. You know, like, this is, it's really exciting. We're, we hope that you do something great with this documents and do something where, you know, you can do something meaningful for yourself, but hopefully also explain to the public. You know, I think there's definitely a crypto narrative of, you know, fighting back against big finance and him as the CEO, Citadel is a very cogent sort of foil to what we've been doing. So, you know, I think, yeah, the fact that we were able to get so far, but ultimately not win kind of shows that there's a long way to go.

and lots to learn. And, you know, Ken, if you're out there, would love to talk to you about the crypto world and teach you a little bit about what we're working on and what this world is all about. I'll just, I'll add really quickly to that, that, you know, we drove the price up on this piece significantly. This is a document that shouldn't have gone for $43 million. Just, you know. Right.

I think fair value was supposed to be about $20 million. It was supposed to be about $20 million, right? Well, it probably would have gone for over that. Right, right. We spoke with a lot of really smart people in terms of evaluating how much stuff like this is worth, and they didn't think that it was going to go anywhere near this. And so we drove the price up, and it's worth noting that the woman who sold this, Dorothy Goldman, she is one of the leading donors to constitutional studies.

All of the money from the sale was going to be donated to a foundation that supports constitutional studies. So we probably raised about $10 million more than had we not been in this bidding. And also, we got pretty much everybody to drop out either because of the price or because they wanted to support Constitution now. There were going to be a lot more bidders. And it ended up just being two. Nobody else even had a bid on the table other than us other than us in Ken. So ultimately, I think we did a lot of good for raising money for an important cause. We rallied a community that seems like a lot of them still want to continue.

continue and more to come on that soon. That's awesome. Okay. Well, I mean, if anybody else has anything else to offer or to add, anything that I failed to ask that you think is pertinent, you know, now would be the right moment. Of course, also, if you guys want to point to any resources that you'd like people to check out, now would be a good time to share those as well. And if actually, for those of you who spoke from Constitution Dow, if you want to just

say your name and then your Twitter handle so people can find you afterwards, given that this is being recorded and it'll be shared shortly. That would probably be great for the listeners. Yeah, sure. My name is Daniel. My Twitter handle is at SADY-O-DISVine. Jonah? Hey, I'm Jonah, everyone. Jonah Earlich. My handle is at J-I-E-R-L-I-C-H. Cool, Robbie. Yeah, I'm Robbie Heger at Robbie Heger, and you can follow along what endowments up to atendowment.org. That's H-E-E-G-E-R. And Kyle?

Correct. Everyone, Kyle Billings, working on design here. Kyle underscore Billings is where you can find me on Twitter. Sweet. Julian. Yeah, I'm Julian Weiser. My Twitter handle is at Julian Weiser. I've been trying to get at Weiser for a very long time. So other than going to Constitution Dow and getting involved with the next chapter of Constitution Dow,

please let me know if you can help me get access to At Weiser. person's been dormant since 2017. I mean, come on, it's time. I think we have some tweets on this call that might be able to help you out. By the way, Chris and listeners, I have been screenshoting hopefully everybody that spoke.

So in the show notes, when this airs, if you're interested in following any of those folks, I'm going to hopefully have everybody's handles in the show notes. So you can check that. Right, because we've lost a few folks since then. And I still don't have recording of Twitter spaces yet, but if I did, then you guys would see

all the amazing links that I've actually pinned to the nest related to this whole thing. And so I have a thread, obviously, on my profile. You can also check out. But, okay, Brian, anything else? No, that's it. You know, I just want to say congratulations, everybody involved. It was a hell of a lot of fun. I watched the whole thing, and, you know, it really has been amazing what you've done.

Yeah, 100%. I mean, I really, I just, you know, from my perspective, I think this is like one of those watershed moments where, you know, there's been many, many sort of things. things that have been happening in the crypto world that are making it more and more accessible. But this is a story that I think touches on so many different people's perspectives and interests and the way to participate and how these things form and come together and the way in which Web 3 is really about making the web a lot more participatory and inclusive. And so anyways, from that perspective, I was super excited to see this.

Oh, I totally forgot to mention. But I hunted the way actually that this conversation came about was Moonam and Julian reached out or we got in touch somehow. and they wanted to know if they could hunt Constitution Dow. And I was like, well, I don't know if you could actually hunt a Dow, but maybe. And so one of the things that they did and that we talked about was how the Constitution Dow is sort of creating a playbook for running other DAOs. And that was the thing that we kind of launched. And it turned out that that was my 3,000th hunt.

So I reached a milestone as well in this process. And I was excited to contribute in what little way I could to helping this thing get out there. And yes, I did also invest in trying to buy the Constitution. So it was very excited. all right everybody that's it for today thank you once again for joining for the tech meme ride home experience and we will talk to you very soon all right everybody thanks again bye everyone chat thanks for our most thanks guys thank you