"This Is What the Blockchain Is and How It Can Change Your Life" - Niloo Ravaei, Blockgeeks

Transcript

hello and welcome to the blockchain and us we're pioneers and thought leaders talked about their journey in blockchain technology crypto assets and a token economy and I'm your host manuel staggers this episode has support from eighth grade story driven media eighth grade is a media production company with a focus on telling engaging stories about new technologies and the future with films interviews podcasts and other media that make an impact to learn more about story driven media visit 8 gr8 calm my guest today is Neelu Ravi Neelu is the head of education at block geeks with the mission to share and grow

knowledge around blockchain technology Neelu is a filmmaker turned coder who screened her short film at the Cannes Film Festival and has helped FinTech startups in Toronto and San Francisco scale into some of the biggest players in the space she is heavily involved in the global blockchain community working with emerging platforms and enterprises that want to leverage the technology and she also works with various causes to design and implement socially impactful blockchain solutions and now to the conversation with Neelu Ravi hi Neelu and many thanks for taking time today thanks so much for having me let's jump right in

with your education activities at block geeks what are you teaching there about blockchain technology well when we started out with block X we were mainly focused on developing engineering talent or watching development so we were focused very heavily on development on the theorem platform as well as development on private platforms like hyper ledger the hydrologic fabric Sawtooth and these kind of different platforms and we coupled this learning with information about how a blockchain works and some of the underlying principles of why the blockchain is the way that it is so mainly things like

crypto economics how do you prevail and this kind of content to make it appealing we noticed that in the way that where we've presented this content a lot of her students were asking for a much more guided and finite program so the way that we had it our programs originally structured is that they were kind of like Coursera courses where you would basically go select the course that you're interested in and we had some content and developed around it and you can watch that and follow the lessons code along and essentially gain their own skills for yourselves but what we found is that people especially a lot of our students who were just coming

into this field without any kind of previous information or knowledge but they needed more than just the information was a guided process where they were in touch with us a lot more frequently they were having a personal experience and that the courses and the content was designed in a way to guide them from not really knowing anything about blockchain to being able to have a portfolio and being able to become developers so because of that we started a series of accelerated programs so our accelerated programs right now include the 3m accelerated program which is basically a lot of our courses from the etherion program but just redesigned including assignments and just having a

lot of high-touch contact contact in the form of cat support and live classes make sure that students are really doing that community vibe and learning from each other and actually getting to a point where they're not just passively consuming content but they're actively creating and by the time they graduate from the program which is about five weeks long they're actually able to become smart contract and etherium developers and outside of just Nerium we've also expanded to different kinds of block chains including hyper ledger we've also expanded to other fields within two options so not just technical so we're also launching an accelerator called blockchain MA which looks at the legal implications of block chains for

lawyers or operations managers were interested in being involved the regulatory soft side of blockchain block chains and blocks and applications and cryptocurrencies and we're also doing a scene for business accelerating program as well which is more for business professionals and c-level executives who are interested in understanding how blockchain works they don't want to be coders but they still want to understand what the blockchain is about and which kinds of business needs require watching and which don't because I found in my personal experience this was one of the biggest questions regardless of some if someone was a coder if someone was a business person or who they were understanding when they needed to use a blockchain and when they didn't or what

kind of applications demanded a blocking solution was the biggest challenge so are watching for business course is specifically tailored to answer this question and so so basically when you graduate from this program you'll see if someone has some sort of an IC o---- and they tell you this is their business plan you can basically look and see does this solve one of the problems that we said is the problem that blockchains can solve and if not then this is not a big match this is not a good solution okay how important in general is that to understand coding when you want to learn about developing applications on block chains so I believe more important than understanding the code behind the blockchain is understanding the

processes of what's happening behind a blockchain and how they lend themselves into the effects that the blockchain has so the most important thing is understanding what makes the blocking special what is it that block screen is actually doing and then this second layer of that which gets a little bit technical is understanding how the blockchain is essentially doing what it's doing so that means understanding processes like consensus protocols understanding things like proof of work for instance understanding crypto economics and how game theory comes into play to make this economic system that's essentially decentralized right so more than really going in the lines of code of how Bitcoin works

understanding these processes is much more important and so when it comes to actually developing on the blockchain so writings from our contracts and things like that you're not really dealing with the source code of the blockchain right so you're just there it's basically essentially smart contracts are written primarily in a language called solidity and that's essentially like any other programming language and it has its own girls and programming on the blockchain has its own limitations and rules which you have to be familiar with but for that you don't need to know the source code of experience okay interesting it's it's a the reason why I asked that it's just yesterday at a conversation with somebody who puts together and kind of a class on Bitcoin programming and and he

said it's super important that people know that people are developers they must be software developers otherwise that it will be you know not interesting for them because they won't be able to follow the class but he said one of the main challenges is even for very senior developers if they don't understand what you just mentioned you know if they don't understand how lock chains work and how incentives work on block chains then it can be very very hard even for them yeah so to that point I mean one of my personal challenges when I joined when I joined this industry essentially was that I am a developer so I worked as a software engineer and if in fact in the FinTech company for the past three

years before I started up block heaps but I don't come from a technical background so I'm a self-taught developer the same as a lot of our students have brought you somebody who basically wanted to do a career shift so I attended some sort of a boot camp learn basic skills about how to code and then started working and so I wasn't a big strong I didn't have a strong computer science background and so coming into this field that was one of my challenges because I felt like the information being presented was very esoteric and it was very guarded in the sense that a lot of people in the industry had the same exact assumption that if you're not a senior software engineer you shouldn't even be involved in this field you shouldn't even think

about watching and to me when I actually understood what the blockchain was I felt like this is the biggest hypocrisy because block teams need to be adopted for by everybody and the fact the information and knowledge about how they work which should be common knowledge for everyone is being so you know guarded with this like technical jargon and just you know complication that makes it very difficult to understand that was not that was something that I felt very passionate about very felt very passionate about change because it made my it made it very difficult for me to learn these things when I was starting out so that's a lot of what we're trying to do a blocky to say you don't need to know all the intricate details but understanding the big picture isn't as hard as it's been waiting

hmm okay interesting what kind of resources were those that that were accessible that you yeah you know that everybody grouped around and said here this is the Holy Grail that's very difficult to understand what I mean by esoteric is that the way that it is written assumes a lot of pre technical pre knowledge so even if you guys you know be the Bitcoin white paper is a classic piece of writing so you know as complicated as it is it's the first classic piece of writing but even any kind of writing in the etherium world or any kind of writing about governance or you know even processes or even

understanding cryptography like that was one of the main things that for me was the biggest struggle because I wanted to understand what public key cryptography was and everything that I wanted to look at just duck dove into the deep mathematics from sentence one and so it lost me right away and so they took me so long to understand okay I don't need to know the math I just need to know what's happening right and so basically what ended up happening is it actually inspired me to start my own blog called cryptography for dummies which basically does what I was hoping to find myself which was explaining what cryptography is just in layman's terms understanding what it does and how it works without having to dive into the mathematics and

I think making information accessible like that allowing people to not because what happens is when you start with the hard mathematics on line one you've lost everybody you know you you basically people are now scared of even interacting with this information they're either bored or they're you know unengaged right but if you actually give them if you actually show them why this information is relevant to that how it can help them how the blockchain is important in their daily lives and you know the interesting parts about it the interdisciplinary parts of I cannot make some math and computer science all coming together to basically simulate kind of a human economy right so look those things were all like amazing to me

and I felt like that's so important for everybody to see that and not be afraid of I mean to kind of wrap up what you just said there I mean you said there were there was a lot of information out there but it quickly became very very difficult and very technical it was intimidating in a sense right and so you focused on distilling the essence of what really matters and and made that easier accessible yes yes but how what were certain you know tools that you used to do that so one book that really really helped me and I think it just changed how I looked at watching my understanding was called mastering

Bitcoin by Andreas Antonopoulos and I remember reading this book and just felt like this is exactly what we need because it was completely like it wasn't glossing over information in the sense that it was hiding away the extract it was hiding away the complexity or making it too simple it was still talking about all those things that it needed to talk about and it was getting technical in some parts but it was so well written and it was so informative and approachable that I felt like after reading this book I just understood everything about what like the basics of what a blockchain was so if this book was written specifically about Bitcoin so there was some specific information

relating to Bitcoin but a lot of fundamental processes of how consensus protocols work how the different nodes are connected to each other what happens you know so all of these things it just allowed me to visualize the full process we need to visualize from the moment that I send Bitcoin from my account to somebody else what is happening what are all the steps that are going on and being able to see that through that book just really took my knowledge to the next level and I always recommend it to anybody who's starting out as well it's a great book to have and they're actually with Gavin wood and Andreas actually just launched mastering aetherium as well I'm really so I think that's a great book series yeah definitely and we'll put the links

in the description to both of these books you already said who is taking the class you know you said some are developers others are lawyers then you have business people but what about you know age bracket is it more students or more people who are already already you know working and advance in their career or what's the demographic so we actually have a wide range it's it's exciting so typically I would say most of our students are in the 30s to 40s range so there are business professionals or developers or whatever the profession may be but they're people who've been in the workforce for quite a number of years and they're mostly interested in somehow leveraging blockchain technology

either in their own business or learning about it and making career switch but having said that we also have some outliers so we have we actually had one young girl who's 15 years old and she's actually based in Toronto as well and she's 15 and so she took our courses and in our life live webinars and then she has built a genome project on the blockchain that helps track genome samples and it was really really exciting to see somebody so young being invested in this technology and kind of you know taking the lead and being interested from such a young age but that was really inspiring to see and we all you students every cohort that are you know much older you know we had one guy in my last cohort who was like 63

and basically the iron but he's just interested in in technology was like I keep hearing about this Bitcoin and I want to find out what it is so just at every stage of their life they're curious is also interesting cool that's excellent who who do you think currently in your in your view or experience who is missing or underrepresented when you know when you look at the people taking the class definitely women we have almost no women yeah so the girl that I mentioned Ananya is she for fifteen year old she was a girl but I believe that's probably yeah one of the only girls we've had in the program so it's overwhelming how how many people have taken the program

thousands out of a thousand is the one that's that's insane I'm sure there's a few more but definitely I would say ninety ten yeah well that's the story of tech it seems early and I believe within tech even blockchain is even more so more so inaccessible to women and from my experience in in the industry I don't think it's necessarily because it's a boys club look I haven't found that myself in fact I feel like people are very appreciative of the fact that you're a woman and you're interested in this stuff so I've had a little bit of a reverse experience but I think the main reason again is that the information is

just so wrapped up in you know dry technical information that it's not a somehow it's not appealing to a lot of woman or a lot of women don't think that you know they think that it's boring or it's not happy or this or that so the same way that a lot of women in general maybe look even when they're in school or whatever are somehow dissuaded from pursuing technology or finding technology interesting you know they're always guided towards more creative more arts which is great as well but at least it for me personally I found that I was always somehow disinterested in mathematics and technology and yet when I you know stumbled upon the actual field and got to learn what it's

actually about I found it quite interesting so then I always went back and I thought how did I not think that this was interesting or how was this information kept for me or so that's one of my questions as well when I think about why there aren't more women involved in tech I believe that's a deeper problem and it starts with education rather than just you know the environment of being a boys club which is true as well but maybe not as deep interesting but how I mean in general how do you convince people that they need to know about blockchain technology I think for me I mean I don't know if I can convince people about wanting to learn about stuff but everyone has to find their own way yeah well but it's

just what you mentioned before right you said Matt Mouse is interesting but you know how do you get people excited about it too one way to learn it but what got me excited about it when I was kind of finding out what what this is is essentially what I try to expound to other people as well right so for me it was this idea that one this is this essential system that within this system you there is no authority right so you essentially as the individual have absolute control over your own life and there's no system or government or entity that can exert any kind of control over you and so for me coming

from a country like Iran where you know so much of the government controls so much and people but the economy is ruined because of the country's relationship the United States and people are suffering and not only that but people we have revolutions every like you know 20 years or something you know and it never works there's always one regime continued by another regime continued by another regime and they're all just as bad and to see that okay up till this point we had no choice but to rely on these centralized systems because there was the only way we could get our processes to work there was the only way we could they could stand in the middle of our transactions and mitigate those transactions and allow a society to function but the fact that we

can essentially create a mechanical version of that where it is just run mechanically and there's no person there who can be corrupted there's no person there who has perverse incentives there's no person there who can take advantage of the other people and the fact that we have that option to use this system now as an alternative instead of the old centralized systems that we have to rely on to me it just signifies a new kind of revolution it says well now we can actually we don't need to go out on the streets and die anymore we can just stop using your systems and if you don't use your systems your systems will collapse and so to me being able to have that much power as an individual was just such a profound idea

and I felt like that's why every single person needs to understand what blotching is and how it can be useful for that cool that's excellent what you just mentioned there is it basically it's a story of empowerment right so you're you're telling you take a technology and you you look for its essence you find it empowers people and and then you know you give them that tool and I think that's a very strong you know that's a very convincing argument right know about how you can build your own future and take charge of it I think that's super super strong what what are other narratives that you think work you know that bring across what block chains can do or what you know token economics can do and how they

can improve the future question so the way that I usually think about where block chains can be helpful or essentially what types of solutions require block chain I think about three or at least I've been able to distill it down to three different you think he says so the first piece case is essentially the one that I mentioned to you so being able to cut out these centralized institutions or middlemen and transactions and allowing people to transact directly so and then through that being able to have sovereign control over yourself because you don't need to rely on systems anymore essentially so that was the first essentially narrative or use case the

second one would be if you want to reprogram incentives so one example that comes to mind in this regard is the example of fake news so the reason that fake news is happening right now is because of perverse incentives when it comes to sharing news stories through social media or through any kind of online platform so the value is placed on how many clicks your article gets because advertisers will pay you to put their ads on your page that's a lot of clicks so because of this people who are hosting articles are now incentivized to write you know catchy titles that grab people's attentions and

incentivize them to click rather than being accurate or telling the truth right so now instead so essentially because there's money in advertising and advertisers pay these articles who are essentially creating click big paid articles you're getting misinformation spread around so you're getting this essentially fake things so what the watching system can do and a company called civil with consensus is actually doing this right now is reprogramming these kinds of incentives so that instead of people being rewarded for people clicking on their articles people are essentially rewarded for fact-checking articles or publishing true articles so the way that civil does it essentially is they in their

newsrooms they allow people to stake money against a particular article and then fact checkers will go and they will try to essentially like find flaws and articles to be able to win money so essentially inside prizes everybody to go in fact check all these articles and make sure that everything accurate and so you're not doing this by kind of forcing people to you know post true articles or banning them or kind of trying to limit them in this way but you're just changing the structure of the game you're reprogramming the way the system works so that people acting in their own self-interest the way that people naturally act will perform something that's good for the entire

network and it's good for the entire or they perform what you want to perform which is exactly one of the you know which is the basis of crypto economics and it's what was so revolutionary about Bitcoin and is that you actually got the network to do on their own without any kind of policing the correct behavior or the good behavior essentially so that's essentially the second kind of narrative when it comes to block chains and then the third narrative would be when it comes to interacting and this is more relevant in the private sector and multinational corporations specifically you know retailers supply chain and stuff like that where when you're working or even with banking when it comes to

ky CNN's money laundering laws and things like that and so it means when you're interacting with multiple organizations or multi organization transactions you're allowing them to be much more transparent and you're allowing so instead of having a bunch of different databases that are essentially siloed and incomplete and as soon as a piece of information comes into your database you just know what is happening while it's there and then once it leaves your database you don't really know what's happening anymore and you end up having this broken process where none of the numbers know really the full history of a particular item you're essentially stopping that with a blockchain because all these members now have a shared ledger shared database and shared

processes so there's great transparency and there's much greater speed and as well as provenance and tracking particular item which is super useful when it comes to things like supply chain and being able to track for example you know a piece of lettuce you know that has Ebola in it or something you know any able to track that exact lettuce and recall it instead of having what we call everything yeah cool it's an excellent summary there too I think don't you have a film background or something yeah you have all these visual metaphors you know that are really really good so and it was interesting to make the switch to tech but I feel like

right now what I'm doing with blocks is kind of the best of both worlds because I still get to be involved in the tech world but I also get to use some of what I love which is telling stories and making people excited about cool stuff yeah that's excellent was there a specific event you know that showed you that more education about this space is important so when I first learned about blockchain I was just kind of I think what happened is I went I randomly stumbled upon some meetup here in Toronto and I walked in and it was a very again so this is what I'm talking about when it's like a very essentially uninviting environment to somebody who's not familiar with it so I

walked into this Meetup and it was super technical people were you know discussing bits of code within the etherium you know within web 3 and like talking about all that kind of stuff and I just remembered just not even understanding one word of anything that they were saying so I was kind of dejected and I was walking out the door and as I was walking out somebody was at the door and he basically said hey some of us are going to grab a drink do you want to come and I said sure why not went to grab a drink with them and while I was there I was like what is this blotching why do people care and they just explained to me in layman's terms what centralization was and what the blockchain was actually doing and I felt like that's so crazy because I heard about the auction and

Bitcoin for like three four years at this point and nowhere does it say this basic sentence about the fact that it just enables people to have decentralized systems you know and so they're even going to find that it's very under so much other jargon and other things like that where you know whereas I feel like I should be the headline it should be the thing that draws everybody and so you understand yes well it's not exactly clickbait is it yeah exactly wait the part where it should be clickbait but what I just find with any kind of not just technology but just any kind of teaching or learning or whatever you want to call it is what people care about is look there every time when someone's trying to learn something

they're trying to apply it to their own life they're asking why should I care about this why is it since why is this information important and so when you're trying to talk about the blockchain instead of diving into you know from step one diving into what proof-of-work is and like going into the details of that consensus algorithm you have to grab people with this is what this technology does this is its implication this is how we can change your life you know and once people understand that and they're hooked that vision now they're interested in learning about the intricacies of it and the details but and I find that that was one of the biggest challenges in the spaces that they always started with the super technical you know minutiae without actually looking at the without

for explaining what it actually was meant to do yeah that was somebody do need to kind of grasp that what why is that the case you think I think probably well I mean I have two beliefs so I think what I just described to you is not just true in the context of blockchains I think it's true in the context of any kind of system or Institute not necessarily the industry that governs our life so I definitely noticed this in the context of law and the context of finance other technology as well where you know for example if I want to learn about finance if I try to go on the internet and find out what a future is it's so difficult look everything that you want to read about

it is so complicated and convoluted and it's so difficult for a simple person to even understand something as basic as how money works in their country I just remember this because I had to go learn this when I was trying to learn economics so I could teach it blocky and I found it so confusing and confounding and the same with law as well where you just find a lot of like legal you know jargon and documents and stuff like that which are made you know weird way to confuse people and keep them out so that they don't start questioning those systems or they don't start engaging with them and so to me I feel like in this sense it's just a way to take power away from people right because if you don't understand something you're not

going to question it you're not going to engage with it and so now you're willing to relinquish the control of it to somebody else though to me that's essentially and they call it techno strategic discourse where the language is made deliberately difficult to keep the majority of people out and only allow a very limited number of people to understand and engage with that technology and essentially control it and we see that in the blockchain as well where a lot of the people who are essentially designing these systems and who are essentially decision-makers of the blockchain governments if you want to call them with a theory on world and the Bitcoin world are really highly technical developers and so when they

interact with each other and when they communicate with each other really as hard as somebody who's not a part of that world to be able to interact with them and so because you're not at that level and you don't have the same understanding now your voice isn't being heard and you know in the scheme of what they're doing but in the context of blocking though I don't think that it was as harshly what I'm saying because these old systems of finance and law have been around for so many years a thousand hundreds of years right so in the context of blocks and I think it was just mostly happenstance because the Bitcoin white paper first came out with an very kind of small crypto cryptography and the cipher cypherpunk

communities and so the people who kind of championed in and were interested in it were just from that background and so that was what they were interested in was that the technology and was the you know the cryptography and just you know the technical side of it so much and so the more they were talking about it and expressing it and writing about it they were focused on that part and so I think now it's the job of people like me or coming from the other side to come and say okay there's a technical side if you're interested and then you learn it but if you're not a technical person this is still for you and this was this can still help your life you must stop let's take a quick break for a message from our sponsors eighth grade is a media production company with a special

focus on telling engaging stories about new technologies and the future companies work with eighth grade to turn relatively dry content such as scientific articles business white papers or corporate narratives into engaging stories with films interviews podcasts that reach people on social channels and offline to contact eighth-grade and learn more about making an impact with story driven media visit eight gr8 calm so I mean how do you how do you make that leap you know from getting somebody fired up to then not lose interest to you know see it through to learn more that's a really good question and it's

one of the challenges we were trying really hard to solve it blocky so what we've been able to do it block eeks is we we basically we basically do once we get somebody who is interested in learning about you know the technology and everything we try to so as much as we can we try to ease them into the information so we show two techniques that I found are really useful are one just like divulging a little bit of information at a time and then doing lots of review so for every lesson you're essentially reviewing a lot of what the previous lesson was was as well because the concepts are very challenging and they do take a couple of

renditions for it to actually seek them to your mind right so we actually found that that was really useful and one of the most important things about getting people to not lose interest is that at every step of the way they have to feel like these get it and it's easy you know like oh that's not so bad I understand this I understand this it's okay and so the challenge for us has been to not just dive too quickly off the deep end and moving to something super technical quickly where we lose them so if we're just building a little bit of information each time and one of the challenges of that becomes when I was just starting out and learning about blockchain myself that was easier for me to do because as I was learning

information I was sharing it with people and so because we were on the same plane I felt like they could understand and connect with that information a lot better but what ends up happening is once you're in the industry for a while a lot of that information you start taking for granted because you're just surrounded by that world so much that all of that information these like it becomes common sense or it becomes common knowledge and so at that point it becomes a little bit more challenging to get back into that mindset of the beginner I try to understand what questions are they having right now what are their issues and how do you solve these little knots for them and just give them a little bit of information just to solve the question they have allow them to ask the

next question and then you know provide that little bit of answer and so going back yeah coming back to the previous part we're talking about about you know why so much of the information in the blockchain world is kind of super esoteric and not accessible is that I think because these people who started this essentially industry were super technical you know cipher pawns cryptographers and things like that to them meeting those terms was like common sense that was their common way of talking so you know for them it was hard for them because they were such masters in that field and they were so technical it was so hard for them to think about what somebody who doesn't understand this stuff might

think mmm interesting you know I I noticed this with some writers with some podcasters who may have started quite early to report about the space and who became more and more expert at this and in the process became less and less accessible you know to their to maybe new audiences yeah so I mean going back to the issue you were talking about with the podcast is that because I think because there I feel like now there's like a little bit of a blockchain bubble where as long as you live inside this bubble you feel like you see blushing everywhere so for me I feel like you know because of my work and everything and you're listening to all these podcasts and everything like that so you're kind of surrounded by this all

the time and you think it's everywhere but it was super interesting to me because as soon as I stepped out you know talking to somebody who's not in this field outside of our little bubble people still have no idea what this is so to the point where I just tell people I'm a computer programmer because nobody understands what I actually do so so there's no point to even go and talk about it so I think the point is because there's a little bit of a sense of community people are you know by that but the danger of that is to think just to live in that bubble and to think that you know we've made it and the blockchain is everywhere because we were talking about it all the time but it's you're talking about it in the context of this like five hundred people

who are in watching community not the rest of the world you still really doesn't know what's going on or anything about it yeah exactly but I think I mean I I second that with one reservation which is it's very easy then to slip into some kind of marketing role you know I don't want to be a salesperson absolutely and and it's just I think it's still important to maintain you know a certain grounding and maybe a certain it's just important to keep a you know to differentiate from from just plain old marketing and rallying of people to do something to definitely seen a lot of that well I think especially in the height that was happening this time last year we a lot

of people who maybe didn't know so much about what he asked the actuality of blockchain but it is and just kind of jumping on the bandwagon and just you know trying to make a quick buck or you know things like that and that's definitely unfortunate but it's a reality that's a part of but people like that will always exist and will always try to capitalize on whatever the next big thing is but the question me or you know the rather test for me is I try not to think of it in terms of like selling or not selling because I think if even look if you think about selling in general it's the way that I think about it is if you if what you're offering is valuable to somebody then that's like a

mutual benefit so like if I'm trying to sell something that I know is not good and I'm basically trying to use like trickery or whatever to try to make a buck or to the market or to my own advantage when I know when I don't believe in what it offers that's a different story but if you're at the same time passionate about something and you're sharing it with everybody it's up to them to decide if they want to engage with it or not but you being passionate and like talking about that shouldn't be something that you're afraid to do I agree with you do you need to be critical as well and passionate at the same time what do you mean well I mean the reason I ask is

because um well when I when I published my film you know I got attacked from several sides who said you're too optimistic you know people will jump into this and lose a lot of money mm-hmm and so I thought maybe I should have interviewed more critics you know are a little bit more reserved about what blockchains can do but then again they weren't there you know they were just ranting critics who were against everything and so it was - suppose it wasn't a measure discourse I couldn't have done that but it showed me that it's kind of you know when you when you do something and and half a million people watch it it has an impact for sure yeah and so how to also be responsible you know there's I think

there's a kind of a line there that's very true and I think where the missions where it can get misconstrued is when people you know start thinking that you're trying to advertise people buying cryptocurrencies you know because especially because so much of what people associate the blockchain with is cryptocurrencies so when you're talking about you know blockchain so that some someone who's not really well-informed might say like oh I invested in this crypto and it went down and I lost all my money and it's all a scam you know and now you're telling me let's go invest in this thing so I think that's definitely a challenge and we as people who are talking about we as educators you know we have to be very careful about kind of that this

distinction and the language that we use and I think at the same time you're absolutely right I mean there are dissenters in the blockchain world as well who are academics and stuff like that look some of them are on Twitter and I think it's good to have a balanced mix of people who agree with you disagree with you just because otherwise you would gang like going to this thing of just living in this bubble and kind of getting a lot of confirmation bias right would you agrees with what you're saying so it must be right and then you're just kind of not listening to and not necessarily not listening to on purpose but just because you're surrounded by you know and I think a lot like our social media fosters that a little bit right because you just follow the people that you agree with and then

your use their thoughts and comments and so you just live in well that's kind of what happened with the Trump presidency right where no one none of the people who are liberals thought that it was possible because they were just surrounded by others like them who don't believe it but you know then there's this whole other world out there of people who are completely not like you but you're siloed off from them so I think I think it's important to yeah definitely need like seek out some of those opinions and and try to you know can I counter this or or if it's if it's not if it's a real limitation then you know what does this mean is there a way around it or you know because I think you have to always be challenging your own beliefs as well which is not super

easy to do and that's super easy to do especially if you if you are so convinced that it's the right thing but how what what do you think is one of the misunderstandings about blockchain technology that maybe people have good question um so I would say rather than a misunderstanding it might just be a lack of understanding so in my most my experience with people mostly they don't know anything about the blockchain so it's not really at the point where you know people are kind of you know they have their form their own opinions and then maybe they're missing a point or two or they're not sure about a certain

thing so I would I would say that majority people that I interacted with know close to zero almost nothing about blotching so they don't know the difference between Bitcoin Bitcoin and blockchain they think it's the same thing or they don't know the difference between the different kinds of cryptocurrencies they don't know they're not familiar at all with the concept of decentralization they just think bitcoin is like digital money think like a very basic level issues and then even within the industry when you start entering it a little bit and you know people who you know at least say that they know more about things or you know there's more involved you start to see a lot of people just trying to shoehorn any kind of application that

exists right now in our world into a blockchain solution and just kind of put a blockchain stamp on it and say we've got a token for this you know we you know and not really understanding that the business model is changing so I would say like that's probably the biggest misunderstanding about the blockchain where it's not just a technology it's a paradigm shift and how we will how our institutions will operate and how we will conduct business so the way that business will conduct will be different right so I find a lot of companies or you know startups or whatever their interests they're like oh we're going to create this blockchain company and we're going to have this token and it's gonna do this thing and they don't understand the economics of

how to make that token actually useful and they don't understand how to monetize their business so because they're basically taking an idea that exists and is working perfectly fine with the current system that we have and then they're just trying to let me do it as a blockchain idea no yeah yeah exactly or they think in old terms you know I mean I read today I read something um or I think it was some kind of newspaper that tried to explain how mining works on the in Bitcoin and it said the miners are compensated somehow you know in cryptocurrency and it sounds like somebody would pay them to do a job and so it's there must be like an employer almost hiring those people to mind like in a in a real mind right and

so I think this is super hard for people to wrap their heads around these new economic models that it yeah so I'm wondering you know do you have any metaphors you know that you use that you find work well to bring across that point yeah so I guess the biggest like kind of an obvious metaphor really but kind of the biggest one is kind of looking at the difference between how business was conducted before the Internet age and how business is conducted now and not just business but the kinds of ways we interact with each other right so even a lot of you know when the internet was coming out in the 90s people were kind of you know some people look at there's actually clips of

it right where you know something like the lady in the 90s talk-show is talking about like you know what is this internet thing I don't even know we don't even need to use it what is this like AD symbol for an email it's just for people to like talk to each other on the computer but I don't want to do that so I feel like we're exactly at that point right now where the technology itself is so young that it hasn't developed to the point where real applications can be built on it and so as a result of that a lot of the real actual use cases of what a blockchain will broader blocks an application will be aware block chains will become super widespread essentially hasn't been thought up yet so the same way that if you think about in the 90s nobody was

thinking about Google nor face early even if they were thinking about that it was so small that you know it was just a seedling of an idea and the infrastructure of the internet wasn't at the point to be able to support that right so I believe we're kind of in the same same place where right now the way that you know ecommerce is done the way that we share information the way that we communicate with each other all of these things like the Internet has essentially dominated all of this right to the point where somebody thinking about it in 1992 you couldn't have even imagined that these applications actually exist and so much of business was being done online to the point where we actually have abandoned malls in the United States right now

where people just are all buying stuff online so they're not going people aren't going to the malls so that metaphor really works for me and I think it helps me kind of be patient and understand that you know a lot of you know just with the same way that when the internet first came out you know the public use in the 90s there were so many terrible websites that didn't make any sense and were broken and there were so many scams and things like that and all of those had to kind of die and then and then when the technology was building up and becoming a little bit more robust real application started to take hold real use cases that nobody else had thought of before and I think that's essentially where we're headed with the blockchain in the next five to ten years

where within you know the next five years we're gonna see a lot of focus on the actual building of the structure allowing you know inter watching solutions to allow like larger applications to run on the blockchain allowing faster transactions to make it more scalable for maths news and so by the time we get to where the technology is actually able to handle mass adoption then we're gonna see applications being built on this where right now we don't even we can't even imagine that that application is or what that used to mean oh man now this kind of business is done entirely on the blockchain or this kind of loading is done entirely on the

blockchain and it's completely or this kind of whatever fill in the blanks is the gun complying and it's not what we expected mm-hmm yeah I think it's super interesting and it's somewhat similarly you know to the self-driving cars you know who rely on Google Maps and Google Maps was only possible because of Google and Google was only possible because of the internet and you know who would have thought you know if self-driving cars that have maps that are just available in the 90s I mean that would have been a big stretch yeah it'll be definitely will be interesting Neelu with I mean with all this knowledge right I mean you know coding you know the token economics you see business models did you ever think about you know raising money in

ICO and launching your own token or currency because I don't know I mean for me that was never what excited me about it I wasn't interested I mean everyone likes money like I'm not gonna say that I'm completely altruistic but I mean that wasn't what interested me about Bachchan's anyway so for me I just feel like being able to help spread the word and educate people and we're getting everybody to actually learn about this and use it is gonna be way more effective in the long run than any kind of SEO or single application that I can do because like I said that at this

point the the actual infrastructure of a blockchain is not robust enough to support an application that can be widely used by a lot of people's so unless I want to make some sort of very niche application or if I want to you know just essentially do looking ico scam where I raise a bunch of money and then Brian it doesn't make a lot of sense I think it's more valuable anyone a blockchain is and get more people to want to use it to want to understand cryptocurrencies and just remove that barrier to entry so that when the technology is more robust we have essentially like an army of people who are ready to build and help

yeah cool that's excellent do you have in your work or in your life do you have any role models yeah I would definitely say my boss at block uses the role bottle of my music he's the CEO of Blahniks and he's a great businessman and so I definitely admire him for that but beyond that I would say I just admire him because you know working with him so closely I'm seeing you know you always have this misconception this perception that you know business is cutthroat and you know the nice guy finishes last and kind of these kinds of

I've like proverbs or whatever that you want to say where you know being successful a lot of times is equated with kind of doing things or not being a good person or not being are not having morality and one thing that I found was working with Amir and not just a mirror but with a lot of the people in the blockchain space is that they value so much you know morality and just being good people and helping each other and doing right by each other and to be able to see that you can still be a successful businessman and not you know have to essentially sell your soul to do it very inspiring and it makes me think that it's possible to be successful and at the same time a person that's cool

that's excellent I mean if you had you mentioned a lot of like the good qualities that people should have right to do business in this space and maybe in other space in other business areas as well but next to a deep understanding right off the technology of the economics behind it and you know the coding skills to actually transform the knowledge into a product that can make a difference what do you think are characteristics that that people need to be successful in business in the future I think one of the main characteristics of people actually I would say two things that people need to have to be able to be successful in the future the

business is going the first one is the ability to learn quickly so because things are going to change so quick the industry because even if as we're looking you know before industrial revolutions happen every 100 years and when we had a railroad and you have the factories and then now you have the personal computer and then the internet and then mobile and now blockchain and it's just happening that succession between these revolutions is happening faster and faster and exponentially faster rates so as somebody who wants to Succeed in Business you need to be able to be comfortable with you know new information that you don't understand that you don't know you need to be

comfortable with the unknown and you need to be able to you know learn different things quickly and one of the things that I'm noticing specifically in watching industry and I believe it will bleed into other industries as well is this is having an interdisciplinary disciplinary mindset where you're taking in pieces of information from different industries and you're putting that together and you're combining that in new ways to create new solutions so if you actually look at what the blockchain itself is is a perfect example of that so it basically took you know principles and doctrines from game theory and economics combine them with you know best photography and mathematics in a

creative way to create an entirely new system and so I think this kind of mindset and this kind of thinking instead of you know doing a deep dive for example in one field and then just spending your entire life learning the minutiae of that it makes a lot more sense to be a generalist and know a little bit about a lot of different things and see how you can put all that information how would one how would you go about learning this kind of thinking I really believe in a growth mindset so I think whatever location your whatever limitation you think you have you're putting it on yourself so if you you know I was reading this book called the efficient engineer Earth engine infective engine and it's a really great

book I highly recommend it and just talks about like work practices of effective engineers essentially how to be an effective engineer and one of the chapters was talking about the study that they did in an English class where and like a Chinese University where they essentially asked all the students you know they believed they could learn English or they couldn't or how easy was for them to learn English or something and the ones who essentially put their hand up and say oh it's not hard for me to learn or I can learn anything where I have a growth mindset were able to learn that language way faster than the ones who essentially believed that learning was an inequality and that they couldn't

learn English or something though I think it's really important to know whatever you think that you can do is what you can do so if you think that this is my personality or this is my writing learning style and I can't learn then you will prove that and you won't be able to learn but if you believe that you know everything is a skill we are you know and you can learn and grow and continue learning and changing your styles then you can do that as well yeah what skill are you currently acquiring in that sense right now what I'm focusing on is public speaking your grade already so I think are quite far

ahead there yeah I've had a little bit of practice because of my work at block eeks but one of the things that I'm really interested in is kind of taking my speaking to the next level where I can be much more concise in the way that I speak so you know using a lot of a lot less filler words and not beating around the bush as much when I'm trying to explain something and just to being able to explain it see words as possible because I find that that's much more effective than you know expounding on the same topic over and over again because you tend to lose people that way neither do you think you'll still work with blockchain technology maybe five years I hope so yeah I mean let's see where the industry is I mean I don't want to set anything

in stone but I I find the technology fascinating and I think there's a lot of work to be done so I definitely hope so cool neither where can people find you you guys can reach me Twitter so my twitter handle is an revise so an r/a a hi and you guys can also read some of the articles that are written so my blogs on cryptography and some other blog posts as well add medium.com so my my handle on media has newly revised of ni l oo o ra da e IL one word great Nino this was fantastic thanks a lot for taking time thanks so much for joining us today more info on our guests and our

sponsors is in the show notes of this episode and on a podcast website the blockchain does calm to help people find good podcast it's important that you download subscribe and give it a top rating and drinking or on the podcast platform of your choice I'm Manuel staggers and I thank you very much for listening [Music]