The Pomp Podcast - #554 Amanda Cassatt on Marketing In Crypto

Episode Date: May 13, 2021

Amanda Cassatt is the CEO of Serotonin, a marketing firm and product studio for transformative technologies. She is the former Chief Marketing Officer of Consensys. In this conversation, we discuss brand positioning, public relations, marketing, what most teams get wrong, how to talk about your product, and the positive impact of marketing.  ======================= Circle is a global financial technology firm that enables businesses of all sizes to harness the power of stablecoins and public blockchains for payments, commerce and financial applications worldwide. Circle is also a principal developer of USD Coin (USDC), the fastest growing, fully reserved and regulated dollar stablecoin in the world. The free Circle Account and suite of platform API services bridge the gap between traditional payments and crypto for trading, DeFi, and NFT marketplaces. Create seamless, user-friendly, mainstream customer experiences with crypto-native infrastructure under the hood with Circle. Learn more at circle.com ======================= OKEx is a leading crypto exchange known for providing the most options for crypto traders and investors. Whether you want to trade spot, futures, options or swaps, OKEx gives you institutional-grade tools and a best-in-class trading engine. The platform offers credit and debit card funding options and supports 40 different fiat currencies, including EUR, CAD, GBP, TRY, INR and RUB, to name just a few. You can invest, trade, and earn yield, all within one place at okex.com. OKEx is not available to customers in the United States.  ======================= Exodus is an absolute game changer in the crypto wallet space, and we’ve teamed up to offer an exclusive discount for you, as listeners of the podcast. Sign up for Exodus today using my promo code Exodus.com/pomp. This is a no brainer for both newcomers and crypto heavyweights - go sign up today.  =======================

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Amanda Cassette is the CEO of Serotonin, a marketing firm and product studio for transformative technologies. She's the former chief marketing officer of ConsenSys. In this conversation, we discuss brand positioning, public relations, marketing, what most teams get wrong, how to talk about your product and the positive impact of marketing. I really enjoyed this conversation with Amanda, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is Near. Near is an open source platform that

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Again, $25. Download the app, crypto.com app, and use the code POMP to get that $25. All right, let's get into this episode with Amanda. I hope you enjoy this one. personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Amanda here. Thank you for doing this. Thank you for having me. It's great to be here. All right. How did you get to Consensus? That is a great question. I only ask great questions on the podcast. Just so we're all clear. Go ahead.

A lot of luck along the way, for sure. So I started my career with a more kind of pure media and marketing background. I worked for Arianna Huffington actually at HuffPost. Okay. Like directly for her? Yeah. So I worked very closely with her, part of her team and sort of circle there. And what we did was really help move the online media industry from print into digital. Not that HuffPost was ever print, but it was one of the first really mainstream digital media outlets. It really popularized a lot of strategies around aggregation. And while I was there, it had just been acquired by AOL. And there was this shift going on where a lot more of the distribution was happening on social media. Digital media was

changing. And we started to have this big creator platform where people were creating content and they weren't being paid for it. And it was interesting. And I started seeing some of the writing on the wall that all the people creating content on Facebook, creating content on Twitter, they're adding so much value to these platforms, but they're not getting remunerated for their work. So after a couple of years there, I left and I started my own digital media platform called Slant. And what we tried to do was reward creators for their work. And so we had tons of college students and journalism school students writing a lot of first-person narratives during the time when college campus life was really in focus in the media. So we had a ton of people writing,

ton of traffic and we would pay out the creators 70 of ad revenue for the um the stories that they wrote and we would teach them yeah yeah you can see where this is going so we would teach them how to market their content online we teach them how to share it um and um we would pay them out so we were we had basically like a microtransaction based business model we were often splitting the dollar we were splitting the cent and we were dealing with third-party payment processors in order to do this. And dealing with those third party payment processors, even though this business model makes logical sense, it made it not really make practical sense. And so when I first learned about Ethereum, the idea that we could have peer to peer transactions and just pay directly, I was

like, wow, this solves my random little startups problem. I ended up starting to get really into crypto. And I hadn't been part of the community that had really been reached by Bitcoin. I just wasn't on those kinds of message boards. It wasn't my demographic. So I came in through Ethereum, which is really unique because I happened to meet some of the early Ethereum folks just socially hanging out in New York and sort of a tech founder crowd. I met Joe Lubin. I met Andrew Keyes. I met Sam Cassett. I married him. We'll talk about that later. Maybe. And yeah, I just got started getting really involved. And it kind of blew my mind when they explained Ethereum to me. It solved the problem for my business. And I thought about, you know, all the different

micropayment-based business models. I thought about remittances. I thought about what you could do with tax. I thought about all kinds of different use cases. And I was sort of mind blown. I knew I have to do this. So then after Slant, I ended up coming back and joining Consentus when it was under 100 people. And there wasn't really like a marketing establishment there. There wasn't really this kind of narrative creation engine there yet. There were some early businesses. There were a lot of engineers, developers. And so what I really did is I built the marketing function at ConsenSys, marketing, PR, all that good stuff and grew that and kind of built the marketing engine for helping to bring to market a lot of the early ConsenSys companies. So what's interesting to me is like

at a world that's so technical that's so um kind of built on this idea of we're gonna build products we're gonna release them to the world there's everything from liquidity bootstrapping on out marketing and pr seems to be like a skill set that a lot of founders forget about right and they just don't think about that and so how did you look at hey i'm basically going to be marketing these whether they're decentralized or centralized kind of more technical projects like was that a natural thing to do or did you guys have to kind of learn how to do that yeah sure so so the macro project was telling the story of ethereum and telling the story of ethereum is really different from telling the story of bitcoin because the barrier to entry to understanding what bitcoin

does is a lot lower because you just have a bitcoin fundamentally it solves an economic problem it solves an interpersonal social organizational problem ethereum is a computer thing and you have to have some kind of knowledge of how technology works how computers work in order to fully grok Ethereum and what it can do. And so that barrier to entry is just naturally higher. And so it requires a more robust storytelling engine to get out to the world, not only how it works, which isn't necessarily even what you want to do,

but what it does. And that's the thing that you really want to bring across. And you bring that across with use cases. So all of the early projects that we're building at ConsenSys were, and in the way I thought about them, use cases for Ethereum that demonstrated different capabilities

the technology in the way that you can't just explain it. So that was kind of the framing going in. In terms of individual projects in the ecosystem on an individual level, I think like marketing is sort of a dirty word because no one wants to feel marketed to. It's actually really reasonable that that's the sentiment around it. We say marketing and people who haven't dealt with marketing before or haven't dealt with good marketing think, you know, advertising. They think about Facebook ads. They think about Twitter ads. They're not thinking, this is how I learn about the tools that I need in order to do the things I want to do. And so good marketing in this space is about understanding the audience. And the audience sometimes is developers. Sometimes

it's enterprises. But no one wants to feel marketed to. People want to feel like they're being introduced to tools and software that they want to use that serves their use case. makes sense that you would want to speak to people in their language and make sure that they have the emotional connection to it, right? When you left ConsenSys, what did you decide to do? Yeah. So after nearly four years as CMO of ConsenSys, I stepped down to start Serotonin, my company that I've co-founded with my business partner, Matthew Iles. Matthew was the CEO and co-founder of civil the blockchain media project that was then fully acquired by consensus they invested in it that's how he and i really got to know each other because he was also working with

me early on building up the consensus marketing team and he had run a digital marketing agency for 10 years before that brought to market like over 60 mostly e-commerce startups he actually wrote the general assembly digital marketing coursework and so he's educated all these people on how to do digital marketing and we decided to team up because we were basically you know we love ethereum love consensus felt like ethereum was basically de-risked like it's successful the rest of the world would think you know what are you talking about it's so new it's not across that line yet but for us you know ethereum is used like it's it's the foundation of d5 and so we were playing with d5 we were playing with nfts we were playing with dows

We want to be out where that kind of edge is. We want to be dealing with that, you know, that really complicated storytelling that hasn't been broken down yet and introduced to a mass audience. That's where we want to live. And so we started working with those projects. So we started, you know, really doing all of the different marketing, parts of marketing with these projects. So helping them with content, with PR, with growth marketing, product marketing, community,

and really building strong, differentiated brands. and being able to work with a lot of different projects is so cool because we get to basically paint with a broader brush and think about these macro narratives in the industry and then fit these projects into those narratives in ways that are synergistic and complementary between these projects and between their goals. So we've been able to really introduce a lot of new concepts to the market this cycle. And then we've been investing in having our own in-house engineering and product studio. And so we actually are just in the process right now of launching our very first product, which is called Mojito, which is a Shopify-like backend for minting NFTs. We called

it Mojito because it's the sweetest way to mint. And the idea that we had there, we saw from a number of our partners. So we work with Sotheby's, for example, on NFTs. We did the pack sale with Sotheby's. And we work with them on an ongoing basis on NFTs. And we noticed that a lot of these really prominent companies or really prominent people would rather not partner with one of the marketplaces. They'd rather just host an NFT sale on their own existing website instead of blending the brands together. So we're like, why not create this back end? And that's really been the synergy between the the marketing services that we offer we learn from these companies what they all need and then we can build that thing now that we have an engineering team and so in that situation is

that a just piece of software or is that more of a crypto type product where there's like a decentralized element there's tokens and all of that like how do you think so so it's both so the idea is that anyone should be able to add nft capabilities to their existing website just as easily as you should be able to add an online store. We think that eventually it's going to be as ubiquitous to have an NFT as just to have a store on your website. And you don't say I launched a Shopify store. You just say, here's my store. And I think in the same way, everyone will have these NFT enabled sites where they're just continuously selling NFTs to people that want to buy them. And we think that Mojito is that backend that's going to subserve that market

demand because we don't need to be out there with a flashy brand saying we're a marketplace, we just want to be that backend, kind of like WordPress. We're in this moment of transition where we had this digital transition. We transitioned from the physical world to the digital world, and now it's about transitioning the digital world to the Web3-enabled digital world and taking all the artifacts that have been digitized, whether that's songs, whether that's images, whether it's video, whatever it is, taking those artifacts, if they have some kind of um, scarcifiable value, taking them and putting them in NFT form. And we think that's just going to be massive and ubiquitous. When you think about like what goes into telling the right story for

something like this, right? Like how do you sit down and actually form that story? Right. So is it start with the branding of it? Does it start with the client comes to you say, okay, you know, let's look at what the market needs or what other people are doing. Just like walk us through. If I'm a founder of a project or a company, what is the path for me to be able to do this better? given that most people in the space are horrendous at it and they'd be the first to say it right like i don't understand anything about marketing i don't know anything about this so like i just don't do it so it starts with an emoji so there's a finite number of emojis you have to pick one no you're laughing but literally that is some truth to it i guess i also want to like pay tribute to

some of the projects in the space that don't officially engage marketing services but that are actually amazing at marketing something like base like there's some of these defy projects that are just hilarious and unique in their ability to market. So I definitely don't think you need to engage like a formal marketing service in order to be really great at this. And I think there are projects that are great at this.

I think we're pretty great at it too. So we usually start with brand positioning and that's the foundation. So building brands that are memorable, that are differentiated and that create a new category. And that's a really important thing. So the idea is like you could either be one of something that everybody knows what it is, or you could be the first, the biggest, the best of something new

that you define. And we've brought some new terms into the market and helped define them with our various partners. And we know that those terms, those categories are working through mimesis. So if other people repeat those back to us, if other projects are raising their hands saying, oh, we're one of those, or, oh, we work like that, or, oh, I want to build one of those, that's how we know that we've actually been successful. So that's basically the foundation of the house. And then on top of that, the channels that we've noticed over and over that everybody needs are PR. So earned media, we consider that part of a holistic marketing strategy, not something that necessarily belongs off on its own in a corner, but something that

should be integrated into the whole marketing process. Content, there's all kinds of content that you need, websites, decks, white papers, or like base, you can just write chicken a million times as your white paper, but you still need someone to do that. Yeah, they just wrote chicken over and over but you know they someone did that so how many pages was this it was a bunch of pages i remember i i'd sort of uploaded onto my um onto my ipad i was like i'm gonna read this before bed and then i open and it just says chicken but that's great right i had a great experience it was part of the marketing exactly like i had an incredible incredible experience with um with with that white paper the best one i've ever had and you don't even necessarily need a white paper

anymore. So that was a little bit like 2017 style content. But you need storytelling. Verbal storytelling is a part of this. So PR, content, then growth marketing. You can't use crypto terms on a bunch of paid platforms right now. So if you want to use terms like Bitcoin and crypto, it's hard to run a paid campaign on a platform like Facebook or Twitter. But there are alternatives. And I think the ecosystem is generating its own alternatives. We're actually building one. We're building a product called Kismet, which is a peer-to-peer advertising marketplace, which will enable crypto projects to do paid programmatic advertising without having to

go to any of these platforms where it's banned by directly peer-to-peer connecting with influencers. More on that coming. But there are growth marketing things that you can and should do depending on what kind of outcomes you're looking for. We only really recommend doing growth marketing once you can measure things like the actual lifetime value that you can get out of a customer. You're getting some kind of revenue from it. You should be doing growth marketing campaigns into your margins as opposed to just spending a ton of money. And then product marketing.

So making sure that all of the different assets that a user or a visitor might knock up against are arranged into a funnel. and that that funnel is linked together by calls to action and that you're measuring the ability to draw people through that funnel to take the actions that you want them to take. It's product marketing and then community. So a huge aspect of all these projects is community. Oftentimes, it's the founders that are doing a lot of the community management, especially early on, as it should be,

because bringing on those early people and really engaging them, that's your core. um so online that's you know that's discord that's telegram that's twitter you know it's whatever you want it to be and offline i think you know physical in-person events are going to come back um and making sure that you have an interesting differentiated presence at those at those physical events and then the other the other the other bits and pieces that are that are relevant here are visual design you know making sure that you don't just have a great verbal presence that you have an interesting visual presence and then understanding how to do entry

into various markets around the world. So English is still, in my opinion, kind of the highest leveraged language to have your content, to have your story played out in. Mandarin's a close second. And then there are really interesting markets in Japanese and Korean. Obviously there are markets in Europe and Africa

and South America, but a lot of those are actually reachable through English. When you think of somebody who's done this really well from like a creation of the product all the way through from a marketing perspective, who do you think's done it best? Yeah. So there are a few examples that I really like. One of the folks on our team actually was a head of comms at Chainlink. And I think Chainlink's done a really great job. I actually

kind of call this strategy the Chainlink strategy, where you do a lot of announcements, you make a lot of partnerships, you announce them, and that lets you ping the market over and over and over. And so I think that's a really interesting thing, especially because, you know, not everybody in the market sees every announcement coming from a company but the more announcements that you're able to do the more times you're just putting your name out and that's more people that are going to end up seeing it um so that's a strategy that we've just seen go really well how do you do that and make sure that people don't lose faith or like confidence in that uh oh you said that there was an announcement there's another announcement there's another announcement

eventually well it just all has to be true it has to be stuff that you're actually doing and you have to follow through on the partnerships like you can't just announce stuff and then not actually follow through on the thing that you're going to do. Because then you lose the trust of whoever is on your side. Yeah. I mean, having what you say to the market be accurate and following through on it, that's the most important thing. So there's a lot of distrust in this space. And so this is also a really great point, which is you're limited as a crypto project in terms of what you can say credibly about yourself. So you can say, you know, we're talking about brand positioning. I'm this, we produce this, our competitive advantage is this. But you won't be believed unless you have

third party proof points saying you are this. So partnerships, having other trusted known entity projects, either in the ecosystem or in the enterprise world, depending on who your target market is, having them say, oh, we're working with them and we're working with them specifically on this and having that testimonial really showcase an aspect of the functionality that's the main value on. So important because you can only say so much about yourself. It's really about piecing together perception from a bunch of different third parties and making sure they're confirming the quality of what you're doing. So investors play a big role in that. So venture investors play a big role kind of validating the quality of projects. Partnerships play a huge role.

And then influencers, depending on the kind of project, there are sort of trading influencers out there. They're also technology influencers, really trusted tech leaders. And, you know, making sure that you have prominent, respected folks aligning with your project and saying great things about it. We're not talking about influencer marketing of the kind where it's like you pay an influencer to go say great things about your product. We're talking about actually authentic organic influencer marketing by aligning with smart people that are trusted by their communities and partnering with them to tell a story when you think about the thing the industry is the worst at which part of this whole marketing and pr like body of work are you

just like we're atrocious as an entire industry at x oh yeah that's interesting um i i think actually branding and positioning is actually the real challenge. I think a lot of people are using the same language, even using the same images. Like I remember in the 2016, 2017 cycle, if I saw one more website that was kind of moving triangles, remember what everything was those triangles. And if you were really sophisticated, you would animate your triangles and they would sort of connect with each other. And it sort of insets this idea of the blockchain. So there's a lot of similar imagery being used. There's a lot of similar language being used. So it's really hard to stand out, especially with everyone shouting at once. So it's so important to just do

good differentiation, good category creation. It's not enough at this point to say, I'm an L1. You have to have a very specific competitive advantage. Okay, here's how I'm better than Ethereum or here's the niche I'm occupying that makes me different. Because you don't just get to say, I'm an L1 and say, my merits are just the merits of a blockchain. We're decentralized, we're peer-to-peer. No, you have to go further. They're existing winners in those spaces and you have to disambiguate. When you think about how you spend your day, is it 100% on kind of the agency and marketing services with some of the building in there or do you do other stuff? Like how do you just think about how you break down, how you spend your time? Yeah, for sure. So it's

a mix. I sit sort of at the intersection of those two parts of our business. So we have this product studio where we're building products and we have this marketing services business where we're working with partners and these things connect really deeply so what i'm trying to think about all day is what's the connective tissue here so across our services business i'm thinking what's the macro story of what's going on in the ecosystem who's telling this story and how do we get our partners into that story in a way that's going to be synergistic and beneficial to them And at the same time, what's missing here? What's missing from this picture? How do we build into what's missing in a way that's going to be enhancing to all of it? I'm a big fan of the rising tide lifts all boats jam. That's always been true in my interactions with the industry. I think it makes a lot of sense. And so I think of myself as kind of a puzzle solving storyteller trying to figure out, okay, there's a piece here that's shaped like this. There's a piece here that's shaped like this. What can we build? What can we connect? What can we augment or tell the story of in some way? That's what I'm always looking for.

And when I look around the market, the projects that I'm really attracted to tend to be projects where there's a real skeleton there. And, you know, sometimes I compare product, R&D, you know, engineering and marketing to kind of like the skeleton and the muscle on a body. And you have to have that sort of hard core of an actual product, something that works, something that makes sense. And then, you know, if it's just bone, you're not going to get anywhere. You have to attach muscle to it and then you can take it on a walk. And same goes if you're all muscle with no bone, you're just going to flop around and not be able to go anywhere. So it's about that balance of finding teams that really have the goods but aren't punching

at their weight class in terms of having their story be understood by the market. And we help them get there and further. Pretty much you're looking for a mispriced asset. Yeah, totally, totally. That's it. Same thing as like investing. That's exactly right. we're creating we're looking for in market inefficiencies and we're making them into an

efficiency and really what you're doing is you've only can do this with things that have substance because if you put the best marketing at something that doesn't have any substance then it ends up not even being that value it's not gonna work exactly yeah um when you think about geographies is there a difference you mentioned kind of language earlier but is there a difference between the u.s markets europe uh asia you know any other market yeah in terms of like how you think about what's said not just the language that's said in yeah very much so um so in in mandarin and also a bit in korean no i don't i wish i did um mandarin korean japanese like in in the asian markets that i've helped launch projects into in general i've noticed that the

communities there are very price focused obviously the english-speaking ones and european obviously a lot of communities are price focused. But there's no narrative or there's less of a narrative about being in it for the technology. There's less of this insistence that influencers be authentic or organic. They expect that things are pay to play a bit more there. And so KOLs, which is what they call influencers, are a big part of the marketing tactics. Also, the platforms are really different. I remember when I started doing work in Mandarin speaking markets, noticing that, WeChat has these 500-person groups, and it's an interesting tactic because it means you can't actually assemble a bunch of people and speak to them at once and organize them. You know what I'm saying here.

But you break it all up, which means that the process of managing those communities isn't that scalable because you need more community managers, and you have to hire more community managers linearly to maintain all those WeChats. It's almost like somebody wants to make sure that it's very hard to talk to lots of people at once. Yeah, but it's, but I'm trying to, you know, it's a different, it's a different spirit in terms of why people largely, I mean, of course, their exceptions are interacting with the space and the actual platforms have different logic to them and different constraints. So there, there's, there's both kind of a larger narrative difference and there's a, and there's a procedural kind of tactical difference. And then in the English speaking markets, you know, it's very much about having authentic support for these projects. And I find it kind of like almost maybe tacky isn't the right word, but it feels wrong to have a project that is talking about price and that's all about price. It needs to be a project that genuinely just wants to put a cool technology into the world. And then the value of that technology is reflected perhaps by the market if the market's able to properly understand the value of the technology. But that's the order of operations.

It almost feels like there's some crazy way, the exact same thing that's true in software startups and kind of venture capital of just like the companies that build products that solve people's problems or that people want, they win. And everything else kind of falls to the wayside and struggles. Same thing here, right? Totally. Totally true. same thing here, but there's just so much exuberance in the market and so much is linked to cycles that there's not always that logic to it. Sometimes just the rising tide is such a strong tide that it lifts all boats, the good, the bad, and the ugly. And so sometimes that makes it hard

to see the logic of a project that's actually technically superior succeeding over one that's inferior. But oftentimes that's temporary. So it's almost like the sustainable strategy is what i described but sometimes you can have an unsustainable strategy and still benefit just because right so you can't go in and say i've noticed that this token is performing really well so i bet this technology is really high quality that's a very difficult jump to make and be correct necessarily um but i think in a really exuberant market like this if you have good technology and you're able to tell a good story around it you can get the market to reflect that back to you so uh i've recorded with sam he's on like the farthest end of the dgen

where are you on the spectrum if like let's say like bitcoin maximalism is like on the farthest one end of the spectrum the other end of the spectrum is like the whole dgen yield farming etc uh where do you kind of think of yourself in terms of like where you spend most of your time Yeah. So I would say like ideologically, I'm like the degen as degen. But I appreciate that the whole spectrum is necessary in order to get everyone there. So we work with projects that are all over that spectrum and very happily so. Because there's this macro picture, which is that there's value moving from the centralized economy that's controlled by a bunch of individuals discretionarily. There's value moving from that context into a decentralized context. And it doesn't just hop over there. It needs to move over there over bridges. And those bridges are often centralized companies like Coinbase. Like they're basically a toll booth on that bridge. And that's why they've been so financially successful, because they're literally just charging to be that link. So you can have this centralized trust. You can have someone, you know, custody your crypto for you, but you can get the upside of participating or the community incentives or whatever it is of participating in this transition toward decentralization. And you can have these decentralized coins. And so we're seeing all these businesses cropping up along that spectrum.

You know, we're obviously seeing a huge rise of DEXs. And so, you know, maybe the value that moved into Coinbase maybe now is moving into DEXs. And so you see this progression. And so maybe, you know, I'm very values aligned with what's going on at the extrema of decentralization because I think that's really interesting and I think that's driving the whole thing. But I recognize the need for the entire bridge and support, you know, all of it. If I shut off the podcast and I asked you what's like the biggest thing that you think you know that other people aren't paying attention to right now, what would you say? I would say that a lot of the trends that are coming from DeFi actually aren't flashes

in the pan and are long term things that are going to stick with us. So, for example, I think there's something really macro. there's a macro negotiation going on about the value of engineering talent. Like that's a huge macro, right? So right now VCs, even in the last cycle in non-crypto companies, VCs have been able to use capital to eat a certain chunk of cap tables and engineering talent gets remunerated X amount. And things like fair launches and these kinds of DeFi protocols that VCs can't really buy into are a refutation of the types of cuts that VCs have been able to take. So VCs get slammed down to smaller percentages.

Exactly. So there's a macro negotiation being done at the level of the technology between engineering talent and venture capital. And I think that's a really interesting thing that's going on. And I think engineering talent is calling out venture capital as undervaluing them and overvaluing themselves. So that's interesting. And one thing real quick on that is I guess there's like a Venn diagram of the people with capital and the people with engineering expertise that like if you sit at the center of that, that's actually the most valuable position to be in, right?

Because you can put large pools of capital to work and also you can do it in a technical way and that's where the return is. Yeah. And I think also the other trend is as we build out this decentralized ecosystem, increasingly the financial products that you're using, the things that you're buying, things that you're dealing with, you don't have to take your money out of the system. And so that's the other thing that I think is going on is, you know, right now we have this bridge, we have these toll roads with these big toll booths on them. But what if we're moving into this world so much that we don't need to move back and we can actually live our full 360 degree life in our decentralized context without having to go backward into fiat? I think that's what's being built here. I think that everyone I bring in here is pretty much convinced that's where we're headed. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so I don't know if I know things that other people don't. I probably know about some things that are going to launch that are pretty cool. But yeah, feeling very excited about where things are going. Awesome. I have three questions for you. Then you could ask me one to finish up.

Yeah. Most important book you've ever read. You know, I think every business book is based on how to make friends and influence people. And every other business advice book is some kind of derivative or bastardization of how to make friends and influence people so that one's just been incredibly powerful um for me um one of my favorite just books in general that i always love and always come back to is ender's game i just i just love that story and i i got to a point once where i always knew what the next line of it was going to be and i just love i love adventure i love sci-fi i think that's part of the spirit

of this space um you know some of the neil stevens and stuff is awesome so i read a lot of fiction read a lot of sci-fi but in terms of business how to how to win friends and influence people Yeah, that's a classic for a reason. Yeah, for sure. Because it's actually a really marketing style book because it's about, and it's amazing that someone had to invent this now, but instead of thinking about what you want

and telling people what you want, you think about what other people want and you present what you want in the context of what they want. And that's the ultimate marketing mentality is just not just thinking about yourself, thinking about what other people want, what other people need

and shaping things so that you're meeting their needs and building things so you meet their needs. it's not rocket science i mean but someone had to come up with that right yeah which is wild yeah exactly sleep uh our friends over at eight sleep sent me a thermoregulated bed so i can make it super super cold uh i sleep like a baby now i sleep like five six hours now i'm like eight nine hours what's your sleep schedule i sleep a lot i'm a big sleeper i do you know eight nine hours i have an aura ring i have a chili pad we have a lot of like you should get rid of the chili pad and you should eat sleep okay great um so we can even edit out the the reference to that

but you know i'm a huge fan of having you know a nice cool a nice cool sleep environment uh very dark like to really really close the blinds um i love the aura ring i love tracking my sleep i think it made me have healthier habits to just kind of see like what gets measured gets managed yep do you sleep a lot you're a big sleeper eight nine hours nice like need it the eight sleep is game changer both my wife and i like when we lay down on it she actually likes a little bit warmer i like it colder it's great because then she doesn't try to like come over and take part of the bed i stay over there um and i do like a little a little cbd before bed cbd that's me there's a company uh house of wise i thought you might know a cbd company yeah house of wise is uh

focused on female uh use cases of cbd uh got it house of wise awesome awesome it's great uh aliens are you believer or non-believer i think there's an infinite universe and um if that's the case then there's probably all kinds of all kinds of stuff gotta be out there right gotta gotta be out there i i i think there are all kinds of intelligences you know like it isn't necessarily our kind of intelligence um i think you know ants look at us and they think nothing probably and i think probably there are other kinds of intelligences that have the same we look at the relationship nothing yeah we think that they're a bunch of ants so there might be something looking at us that way yeah i mean that's crazy to think about but yeah uh you could

ask me one question what do you have for me what question um let's see what would it take to convince you to buy eth i don't think it's so much like convincing me to buy eth right like what would make you make you buy by the way i thought sam was gonna ask me this here's the deal is everyone forgets i'll say one thing everyone forgets i actually started uh similar to you the way that i found crypto was mining eth people don't so if you're mining then you know i think that counts i was mining ETH very early on. I still, so I did it personally. I actually, here's a wild story for you. I took my Facebook stock and I sold it. 50% of it or so I put into my bank account in cash

and 50% I bought GPU rigs and I started mining. And the pitch to me was from somebody who just was like, Hey, there's like data centers, but better. I didn't understand the difference between ETH, Bitcoin, anything else. Like it just was, Hey, you're going to buy this computer and you're gonna mine it started mining it this is like end of 2016 well we're like mining eath and all of a sudden it's like 10 to 30 to 100 and by like may of 2017 it's like 100 bucks and i was like what is you know like what is this thing up and so uh one of the mistakes that i made i started trying to oh it ran up to 200 i should sell it and then buy it like what i'm not a trader i don't know what i'm doing right uh but i kept those machines for quite a long time then what i

did was a company that i'm an investor in uh with a friend of mine jason williams he is also a very large investor on the same company um we then built a mine there on site it's a power company to take car tires to turn it into uh electricity and rather than sell it on the grid built this mine so technically it is still mining ether uh so it's not so much like i fought it or done any of stuff um there's this weird thing of like if you own a bunch of bitcoin if you sell it you pay taxes so like i do think of a lot of like people get locked in right like if you went and you uh are at consensus you buy a bunch of eth you you know get paid in eth all the stuff if then all of a sudden one day you're like ah you know what i'm gonna go buy a bunch of bitcoin it's like new

dollars into the system right rather than which gets to the point again about keeping everything in the system great it's crazy right but like laws have to change all that stuff uh the other thing is um there's an argument for pure financial gain right so like forget uh the um forget like the uh the narratives around the assets the tribalism around the assets i help make the narratives i can forget that easily i can i can i can if i say here's 20 assets which one's going to perform best financially right uh i actually think bitcoin and ether are like in the same bucket in that spectrum the returns are quote-unquote commoditized by crypto standards at this point so even if bitcoin goes up 20x right it goes to a million dollars or so from

where it's about right now and that takes through the next having five years most people in crypto are going to be like bitcoin 20x five years like that's such a small return for such a long period of time which in the traditional world sounds nuts yeah of course ether maybe that's 30x in five years right people are like that's not that super interesting right they want the 100x in a month they want the you know the dgen stuff right and so i think that a lot of times in some weird way there's almost like this barbell strategy of like if you have bitcoin and then you get want pure financial return like something i invested in uh recently is built on top of bitcoin so you know it makes a ton of sense for where i spend much of my time but it has a lot of the

elements and it went up a bunch in a very short period of time and so when you think of that i think it's more so uh you're making an opportunity cost decision from my standpoint right now what people forget is if you're going to use some of this stuff you need ease right so if you want to buy nfts for example what do you need usually you have to use it to do it mojito is going to enable people to pay with credit cards okay perfect that's a good plug that's a good plug uh but But I think that a lot of times, too, you have to separate out, like, are people using it or are they holding it as an investment asset? Sure. Right?

And stable coins. And so I think that a lot of times what ends up happening is people are forced to use an asset. There's some systems where you're forced to use Bitcoin. There's some systems where you're forced to use ETH. Sometimes, actually, you're forced to use a stable coin, right? And sometimes there's something else. And so I think it's less about, like, some, like, religious view on, like, anti-ETH. And it's much more about Bitcoin.

I'm obviously a big believer in. I feel like that is the safest bet in the industry. It's actually like the least risky thing to bet on just because of the asset, the monetary policy, the adoption, et cetera. And then it's like, if I'm gonna do anything, I wanna do like the riskiest things I can find, right? And so you get that like almost barbell strategy

within an industry. Now, you and I sound absolutely insane to like a traditional finance person. What do you mean? Like you, I think would have the viewpoint of like, ETH is the thing that is the least risky, you know in your opinion or whatever like is very not risky yeah and then you'll go do a bunch of other stuff right and so whether it's bitcoin or eth forget the debate for a second that's actually

like the least risky stuff in the industry totally but to like a traditional financial person they're like you guys are nuts like this is you know half a percent in my portfolio it's the riskiest thing i own like it's going you know either to zero or up a lot and so i think it's all perspective of just like how do you want to allocate your assets and for me it's outside of bitcoin it's pure financial return and so the further out on the risk curve you can get the better you're going to get a return rather than just basically get like the second biggest thing well that's a great answer to my question and i feel like uh the times of being tribal and religious about these stupid it doesn't make sense i mean in a bull market you'll get a lot of people throwing off the

the shackles of religion in a in a bear market people band together so let's see what happens humans are great at psychology humans have come at least predictable true where can we send people able to find you on the internet um my twitter is amanda cassett c-a-s-s-a-t-t um and my company serotonin serotonin.co awesome thank you for doing this we'll do it again thanks for having me