Podcasts about Zeitgeist

In episode 1491, Miles and guest co-host Blake Wexler are joined by comedian and host of Cold Brew Got Me Like, Chris Crofton, to discuss… DeSantis' Twitter Event Was a Predictable Disaster, The Barbie Movie Finally Gives People What They Want: Aqua's Barbie Girl and more! DeSantis' Twitter Event Was a Predictable Disaster Ron DeSantis gambled on Elon Musk and went bust The Barbie Movie Finally Gives People What They Want: Aqua's Barbie Girl Barbie Movie Trailer Fan Edit Adds Iconic Aqua Song and It's Fantastic ‘Barbie Girl' Turns 25: Aqua Opens Up on Song's Legacy and Absence From Movie Mattel Sues Aqua Over “Barbie Girl” ‘People Probably Want to Kill Us': The Oral History of Aqua's ‘Barbie Girl' Mattel Loses ‘Barbie Girl' Lawsuit Justices Refuse to Hear Mattel's ‘Barbie Girl' Lament LISTEN: Rock Steady (Alternate Mix - Young, Gifted and Black Outtake) by Aretha FranklinSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In episode 1490, Jack and Miles are joined by host of Black People Love Paramore, Sequoia Holmes, to discuss... Nikki Haley's Transphobia Not Poppin Off in New Hampshire, But People Are Pushing Back On This Wave of Hate, Orcas Are Sinking Boats off Portugal In Unprecedented Coordinated Attacks and more! Nikki Haley's Transphobia Not Poppin Off in New Hampshire (Clip) But People Are Pushing Back On This Wave of Hate Target becomes latest company to suffer backlash for LGBTQ+ support, pulls some Pride month clothing Orcas Are Sinking Boats off Portugal In Unprecedented Coordinated Attacks First orca found washed up on coast of Britain in 20 years as scientists say it had plastic in its stomach Five dead after boat ‘flipped over by large whale' LISTEN: Bluff by Yunè PinkuSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In episode 1489, Jack and Miles are joined by comedian Blake Wexler to discuss... An AI-generated image rattling the stock market, AI being used to track mass movements of people and read brain waves, MTG buying Kevin McCarthy's garbage, and much more! 1. An A.I.-Generated Picture Stokes a Stock Market Plunge - The New York Times (nytimes.com) 2. U.S. Intelligence Building System to Track Mass Movement of People Around the World 3. AI Reconstructs 'High-Quality' Video Directly from Brain Readings in Study 4. Guess who just bid $100K for McCarthy's used chapstick LISTEN: Peg - Wibijazzin' Hit us up @DailyZeitgeist on Twitter  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In episode 1488, Jack and Miles are joined by comedian, actor, writer, and host of TV, I Say, Ashley Ray, to discuss… Harlan Crow IS JUST A REGULAR OLD GUY, David Zaslav Delivered a Boo-Filled Commencement Speech, Adidas Will Sell Off The Remaining Yeezy Gear With (Some) Proceeds Going To Charity, The Great Disney Streaming Purge Is Upon Us and more! David Zaslav Delivered a Boo-Filled Commencement Speech Discovery! How CEO David Zaslav Made $247 Million Last Year Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav Says “A Love For Working” Is What Will Resolve Ongoing WGA Strike All That Zaz: With Warner Bros. Discovery Merger, David Zaslav Is Angling to Become America's King of Content Adidas Will Sell Off The Remaining Yeezy Gear With (Some) Proceeds Going To Charity Adidas to start selling stockpile of Yeezy sneakers later this month ADIDAS SELLING OFF YEEZYS... Disney will remove over 50 shows from Disney Plus and Hulu this month Disney slammed for pulling doc on queer lyricist Howard Ashman as Little Mermaid hits screens LISTEN: America Has A Problem by Beyoncé & Kendrick LamarSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In episode 1487, Jack and Miles are joined by author and host of Crime Writers On... and ...These Are Their Stories, Rebecca Lavoie, to discuss… True Crime And America Waking Up To The Fact That Cops Are Bad at Their Jobs, Elon Is A Human Sh*tpost, Workplace Drug Testing Needs To F*ck Right Off and more! Workplace Drug Testing Needs To F*ck Right Off Record number of U.S. workers test positive for cannabis, study shows Companies are Getting Rid of Drug Tests Because They Can't Find Enough Workers The Bizarre History Of Workplace Drug Testing REAGAN AIDES SPLIT ON DRUG TESTS PRIVACY IN AMERICA: WORKPLACE DRUG TESTING The thriving, legally questionable market for synthetic urine LISTEN: Feeling Normal by CalibreSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The weekly round-up of the best moments from DZ's season 287 (5/15/23-5/19/23)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In episode 1486, Miles and guest co-host super producer, Justin Connor, are joined by the creators of High Science, Matt Klinman and Zack Poitras, to discuss… The Debt Ceiling Sh*t Show Continues…, ABC Unveils Depressing Writer-less Schedule, Jimmy Fallon's Staff Won't Be Paid...But At Least He Has The New Zelda Game, Look Out: Will Fast X Lead To People Driving Like Maniacs This Weekend? And more! The Debt Ceiling Sh*t Show Continues… Wicked game: Kevin McCarthy's debt-ceiling "crisis" is political theater at its worst ABC Unveils Depressing, Writer-less Schedule Fox Loads Up on Unscripted Series for 2023-24 ‘The Bachelor' Senior Citizen Season Is (Finally) Coming This Fall Jimmy Fallon's Staff Won't Be Paid...But At Least He Has The New Zelda Game "If you have a Blue Sky account, we are bullying Jimmy Fallon" (A Twitter Thread) Look Out: Will Fast X Lead To People Driving Like Maniacs This Weekend? Drag Race Deaths, Fast Film Linked 'Fast and the Furious' Movies Linked to People Driving Recklessly Car chases in movies embolden Albertans to drive fast and furious, study shows Sales of Corona Beer Going Up Fast & Furiously Any Brew You Want, As Long As It's a Corona LISTEN: dk001 by Tlim ShugSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In episode 1485, Jack and Miles are joined by writer, investigative journalist, and the host of Drilled, Amy Westervelt, to discuss… We Are About To Cross The Dreaded 1.5C Threshold Of Global Warming, Kirk Cameron is Fighting a War Against Vicious Librarians and more! We Are About To Cross The Dreaded 1.5C Threshold Of Global Warming Kirk Cameron is Fighting a War Against Vicious Librarians A Conservative Publisher Wants to Be the Answer to Liberal Children's Books. There's Just One Problem. Kirk Cameron is promoting his new children's book by protesting against other children's books — and CRT and drag queens and librarians Public libraries aren't censoring Kirk Cameron. He just wants attention. Here's what happens when Kirk Cameron, Jack Posobiec, Sean Spicer, and Libs of TikTok read to children LISTEN: Mongkok Madness (feat. Henry Wu) by JianboSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In episode 1484, Jack and Miles are joined by comedian Michael Swaim, to discuss... James Comer losing track of his top Biden informant, Rudy Giuliani getting sued for sexual assault, Paris transforming into a car-free paradise, and much more! 1. Rep. James Comer Says He's Lost Track of His Top Biden Informant (thedailybeast.com) 2. Former Giuliani employee alleges sexual assault and harassment in $10 million lawsuit - POLITICO 3. Paris to Cars: "Au ReVroom!" LISTEN: Barz Simpson WATCH: Papa Bear - A new movie from Swaim & Epperson of CRACKED. - Film and Storytelling | Seed&Spark (seedandspark.com)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In episode 1483, Jack and Miles are joined by comedian, Abe Epperson, to discuss... Jordan Neely And The New Kyle Rittenhouse, New Reality Just Dropped! Richard Dreyfuss Brings Up Some Really Good Points About Acting… And more! Jordan Neely And The New Kyle Rittenhouse Fundraiser for Jordan Neely's Family New Reality Just Dropped! Richard Dreyfuss Brings Up Some Really Good Points About Acting… White Men Playing Othello (A Twitter Thread) Support the Papa Bear Movie Fundraiser: Papa Bear - A New Movie from Swaim & Epperson of CRACKED. LISTEN: Andino by Manzanita y su ConjuntoSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In episode 1482, Jack and Miles are joined by host of Invisible Hate, Asad Butt, to discuss… Diane Feinstein Is Back…But At What Cost? New Twitter CEO Just Dropped, Twitter Could Become A Dating App... According To Noted Relationship Expert Elon Musk, AMC Says “F*ck It, We'll Make Our Own Candy...,” Disney Lost Millions Of Subscribers Due To Cricket, Not Loki's Gender Fluidity and more! Diane Feinstein Is Back…But At What Cost? New Twitter CEO Just Dropped Linda Yaccarino leaves NBCUniversal, adding fuel to the Twitter CEO fire Twitter Could Become A Dating App, According To Noted Relationship Expert Elon Musk Blue is a dating app for verified Twitter users Verified Twitter Users Get Their Own Dating App So They Can Finally Bone AMC Says “F*ck It, We'll Make Our Own Candy.” Disney Lost Millions Of Subscribers Due To Cricket, Not Loki's Gender Fluidity Disney+ Loses 4 Million Subscribers, Prepares to Pull Some Content Disney+ Subscriptions Plummet by 4 Million as Studio Keeps Pushing Transgender, Drag Queen Content No, Disney+ didn't lose 4 million subscribers due to ‘woke content' or fandom backlash Disney's Hotstar loses 8.4 million subscribers as Ambani's JioCinema ascends Disney without cricket risks its streaming game Reducing Disney+'s Massive Subscriber Loss to Culture War Nonsense Is Just … Factually Incorrect Disney+ is losing subscribers, thanks to India's obsession with cricket Disney will bring Hulu content into Disney Plus and raise its ad-free prices LISTEN: Voices by FlumeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The weekly round-up of the best moments from DZ's season 286 (5/8/23-5/12/23)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Virginia and Louise are excited to share some must-read new releases including compelling stories about activist guerilla gardeners, true crime podcasters, writers rooms, surveillance and murder as well as the pitfalls and power dynamics of modern relationships, social media, dating apps and late night sketch TV.BooksI Have Some Questions For You by Rebecca Makkah, 2023, Flint PublishingBirnam Wood by Eleanor Catton, 2023, Granta PublishingSearch History by Amy Taylor, 2023, Allen and UnwinRomantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld, 2023, Penguin Random HouseStreamingSuccession HBO NetflixThe DiplomatLine of DutyPodcastsMel's Electric AdventuresKicPod, Keep It Cleaner Podcast

In episode 1481, Jack and Miles are joined by activist and podcast host, Saadia Khan, to discuss... You don't have to be white to be a white supremacist, Elon Musk retweeting racist bullshit... again, TikTok being overrun by amateur sleuths and so much more! 1. Kathleen Belew on Twitter: "My twitter people, the category of "whiteness" we use right now in the US is not the only one. We've only had this one for about a century" 2. Elon Musk retweeting racist BS 3. TikTok is overrun by amateur sleuths – so which clues should I leave in case I go missing? LISTEN: Pink and Orange - GoonSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A popular thought in the Zeitgeist is that it is important to claim Social Security as soon as possible because the whole system is on track to insolvency.  Alex and Wade explore this issue with guest Brian Bass, MSFS, CFP®, RICP®, AEP®, CLU®, the Managing Director of Wealth Management at McLean Asset Management. We find that while reform is needed, many options are available, and near retirees can still expect to receive most, if not all, of their presently legislated benefits. Listen now to learn more!    Links  https://www.crfb.org/socialsecurityreformer/ Join the FREE 4-day Retirement Income Challenge for Consumers on May 22nd-25th by registering now at risaprofile.com/podcast      This episode is sponsored by Retirement Researcher https://retirementresearcher.com/. Download their free eBook, 8 Tips to Becoming A Retirement Income Investor at retirementresearcher.com/8tips

In episode 1480, Jack and Miles are joined by super producer, DJ Danl Goodman, to discuss… Ohhhh, Tucker Tried It With The Wrong One And Got GOT, Appreciate Teachers? F**king Pay Them, 2023's Pop-Culture Is Just Reliving 1989 and more! Ohhhh, Tucker Tried It With The Wrong One And Got GOT Inside the ‘Death Match' that Helped Doom Tucker Carlson at Fox Appreciate Teachers? Fucking Pay Them McDonald's to Observe ‘National Teacher Appreciation Day' with Free Breakfast for Educators 2020 has shone a light on the importance of good teachers, but many are paid less than a living wage in the U.S. The Gap Between Teacher Pay and Other Professions Hits a New High. How Bad Is It? Most of the US is dealing with a teaching shortage, but the data isn't so simple Arizona breaks ground on tiny homes for teachers amid worsening educator shortage Is Congress going to raise teachers' salaries to $60K? This Is the Living Wage You Need in All 50 States Legislators react to release of Arkansas LEARNS Act Sarah Huckabee Sanders signs sweeping education bill, to praise and protests Biden unveils new efforts aimed at fixing teacher shortages, increasing pay 2023's Pop-Culture Is Just Reliving 1989 New The Flash Movie TV Spot Focuses On Batman Harrison Ford Is Done With Indiana Jones After ‘Dial Of Destiny' & Reveals He “Will Not Be Involved” With TV Series 'Ghostbusters: Afterlife' Sequel Will Return Franchise to New York City, Jason Reitman Confirms The new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie looks unexpectedly gorgeous TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES (1989) Doogie Kamealoha, M.D. Season 2 Featurette Celebrates Female Empowerment Alyssa Milano reunites with Tony Danza and Who's the Boss? costars ahead of revival series ‘Baywatch' Remake In The Works At Fremantle As Buyers Circle CBS' ‘Matlock' Reboot Adds Jason Ritter LISTEN: Billie Toppy by Men I TrustSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In episode 1479, Jack and Miles are joined by writer, producer, and host of Sanctum Unmasked, Karley Sciortino, to discuss… Fox HAS BEEN PWNED…, Criticizing Drag Queens In The Military Is Staggeringly Ignorant, Guardians of the Galaxy 3 Features Marvel's First “F*ck” and more! Fox HAS BEEN PWNED… Tucker Carlson Caught Making Disgusting Comments About Women In New Leaked Video Criticizing Drag Queens In The Military Is Staggeringly Ignorant U.S. Navy Picks Active-Duty Drag Queen for Face of New Recruitment Program Ex-Navy SEAL who claimed he killed Osama bin Laden banned from Delta after maskless selfie Navy drag queen influencer has House GOP cranking up heat on Defense Secretary Austin Gay, Lesbian Troops Perform in Drag at Fundraiser Drag in the Navy: An Interview with Harpy Daniels GIs as Dolls: Uncovering the Hidden Histories of Drag Entertainment During Wartime Does a Photo Show British Soldiers in Drag Fighting Nazis? Guardians of the Galaxy 3 Features Marvel's First “F*ck” Chris Pratt and James Gunn Talk ‘Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3' Signature Oner, the MCU's First F-bomb and Star-Lord's Most Emotional Scene Guardians Of The Galaxy 3's Historic F-Bomb Went Right Over Karen Gillan's Head LISTEN: No Way by Mansur BrownSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The weekly round-up of the best moments from DZ's season 285 (5/1/23-/5/5/23)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Zeitgeist contributions, fan theories answered, and a love letter to the horror genre… Oh lawd, it's about to get pretty dark! To wrap up an exciting hangout, these ‘90s kids continue to gush about fiction with their favorite Courage the Cowardly Dog alums - head writer David Steven Cohen and co-composer Jody Gray. In this installment, they learn what went into some of Courage's most memorable compositions, share more insight on '90s children's media at large, and finally ask their most burning question of two firsthand sources: Why was it all SO dang dark?! Have a frightfully nostalgic memory to share or a pretty dark topic you'd like us to cover? Email us at thatsprettydarkpodcast@gmail.comGive to our Patreon for extra content: patreon.com/tpdpodcastFollow us on Instagram and Facebook @thatsprettydarkpodcast

In episode 1478, Jack and Miles are joined by award-winning writer, photographer, poet, and host of Ten Thousand Things, Shin Yu Pai, to discuss… Harlan Crow Paid For Clarence Thomas' Kid's Tuition, Four Proud Boys Were Found Guilty Of Sedition, Who Is Greg Gutfeld--The Only Late Night Talk Show Host On The Air and more! Harlan Crow Paid For Clarence Thomas' Kid's Tuition Thomas' longtime friend acknowledges — but defends — Harlan Crow tuition payments Four Proud Boys Were Found Guilty Of Sedition Who Is Greg Gutfeld--The Only Late Night Talk Show Host On The Air With late-night talk shows suspended, political news takes a hit The late night rise of "Gutfeld!" is telling us something. It isn't funny, but that doesn't matter Is the right winning the comedy wars? ‘Gutfeld' Shows the Sickly State of Conservative Comedy A Publishing Pest Moves On Lads' mag editor Gutfeld leaves Maxim VISIT:  Less Desolate: A Haiku Comics Collection Kickstarter! LISTEN: Lunes 1 De Abril by The Holydrug CoupleSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week's guest is Domingo Valadez, Co-founder & CEO of Homebase, a platform that lets people invest in tokenized residential real estate for as little as $100. As real estate prices continue to get more and more unaffordable for people, Homebase aims to be the destination for US renters to invest in the US residential real estate market via fractionalizing NFTs. Show Notes:0:50 - What is Homebase?2:05 - Why Solana?4:06 - How does it work?7:09  - Benefits using web3 and Solana9:17 - Us vs International11:11 - How things can evolve for Homebase?  14:18 - Regulatory landscape in the US / next US markets to expand to17:04 - User journey from first wallet to being a homeowner20:04 - Voting  21:14 -  Retaining people in Crypto    22:57 -  Exciting things in on-chain residential real estate.24:38 -  A builder Domingo admires in the Solana ecosystem Full Transcript:Brian Friel (00:05):Hey, everyone, and welcome to The Zeitgeist, the show where we highlight the founders, developers, and designers who are pushing the Web3 space forward. I'm Brian Friel, developer relations at Phantom, and I'm super excited to introduce my guest, Domingo Valadez, the co-founder of Homebase, a digital platform for fractionalizing residential real estate via NFTs. Domingo, welcome to the show. Domingo Valadez (00:28):Thanks so much for having me, Brian. Super excited to be here. Brian Friel (00:30):Yeah, super excited to have you on as well. You guys are a hotly anticipated recent launch. I've seen you guys on Twitter. It's one of the most, I'd say, unique and more pragmatic applications I've seen most recently launch on Solana. Can you give us a quick overview of what is Homebase and how can users start using it today? Domingo Valadez (00:51):Yeah. Homebase is a platform that lets people invest in tokenized residential real estate for as little as $100. The main value property right people is just getting exposure to an actual physical rental property and starting to get some of that passive income, starting to get that appreciation over time in terms of how you can participate and invest, you can just go to our website, make an account, we do force you to put a KYC and that's just to follow us regulations. So right now we're limited to just US investors unfortunately, but have plans to make it international as we continue to grow. But right now it's a matter of KYCing. You also have to set up a 15-minute call with one of my co-founders, Alex, and that's just to make sure that you're a sophisticated investor so you get to know us a little bit. So we're very transparent with our team and what we're doing, but we had 38 people participate in our very first home and now have 1500 that want to participate in our next one. Brian Friel (01:41):That's awesome. So residential real estate investing, that's something that I'd say a lot of the demographic with Solana maybe skews potentially on the younger side. This is something that people think is interesting but have historically been left out of this world of investing. What made you guys decide to do something in a purely digital way that's different than traditional residential real estate investing and what made you guys choose to launch this on Solana? Domingo Valadez (02:05):I grew up in a family that has always seen real estate as a great way building wealth over time and just growing up I've very quickly seen it become unaffordable for most people in my generation. So I was working at Google for five years, still couldn't afford anything in the Bay Area and I was like, "This is absurd." And so it was like how can we make this affordable for people where they can actually get some skin in the game with the properties they're living in? And so that was really a big culmination for why Homebase and so then I've invested in my own residential property, myself and my hometown of McAllen just going into that flow, so many third parties, how to work with a bank, took literally three months to buy the property and that was just awful as well. So it's kind of like what can we do that's completely digital that just makes the experience really, really easy for people? (02:49):And so that's where the idea around Homebase came from. We're making it where people can invest in properties for as little as a hundred dollars. And so real estate's also a industry that loves silo data. You have big players that really hold their data near and dear to their heart and don't want to share it, and that's the complete opposite of public blockchains, right? It's like, "Let's just get data. Everyone should have a fair shot at understanding what's going on and if you know how to utilize that data, you can make some great decisions with it." A big piece of it came from the mission as well of I've been following Bitcoin since 2017, love the decentralization aspect of it and so wanted to see how we could get real estate in a very transparent open source way. That was a big culmination about why even build in a digital space using blockchain to do this. Brian Friel (03:33):Love it. I think that story resonates with a lot of listeners potentially I myself in Bay Area. Similar story there, so it's similar frustrations. I guess I'm a little curious how does this at a high level work under the hood? Kind of back to my earlier question, a lot of folks maybe don't know much about real estate investing. There's a lot of paperwork involved. What role is Homebase playing? What parts of this are done on chain? How do I go from, "I'm just a normal crypto user with NFTs." To now, I can say, "I'm a part of this homeownership project." How does that all work under the hood? Domingo Valadez (04:07):I'll share the Homebase side, then I'll share the user experience side. So it's actually quite complex to make it work. It took us seven months to build out the legal frameworks to how to do this and then building out the software for tokenization took about two months for us to do. But just to walk you through this first home, how we did it effectively, we found a property that was suitable. We put it under an exclusive buyer seller agreement, so Homebase had full rights to sell the house on behalf of the owner. We then spun up a special purpose vehicle that was sole intent was to purchase that property, and so then we created NFTs that represent ownership in that special purpose vehicle and we had a mint date on that mint date. It was basically like the day we started selling the property. (04:45):And so people could literally go to our website, these are people that have already KYC accredited, non-accredited, could then buy tokens with USDC and they would mint them directly on our platform. And so they would get those tokens immediately to their account and then in tandem they would get DocuSign documentation sent to them. So they have to sign a legal LLC operating agreement, they need to sign a security token purchase agreement, all this legal documentation that basically says like I am buying tokens using USDC and I'm now a member of this LLC that was created. So once we acquired all the money that was necessary, we then closed up the SPV and then actually completed the transaction. And so the owner received the amount of money that they were trying to sell on his first property, and then once that was closed, we then filed with the local title companies to basically transition the title from the owner into this new SPV we created. (05:40):So the piece that's truly on chain are the NFTs we created to represent ownership, but we're pretty much a Web 2.5 company where we do need to know who exactly owns what tokens, and we only whitelisted wallets can effectively trade them between themselves. So we file these as Reg D 506, security, private placement offerings, and in that regulation you have to hold the investment for at least a year. You can't trade it for that initial year, and then after that you can sell it through our platform either back to us or eventually want to allow for peer-to-peer trading, but we need an alternative trading system license for that, which we don't have yet. So the majority of it's going to be people selling it back to us and then us reselling it to the next person. Brian Friel (06:23):That makes a lot of sense. That was going to be one of my follow-up questions because given the permissionless nature of most tokens by default on chains, I was wondering how that works within a legal framework. You mentioned this first home that you guys tokenized from what I saw, it sold out within the first two weeks. It was a great success, but you guys basically just proved a use case that, "Hey, within the legal framework of how this exists today, this actually works." I think we could get into in this podcast talking a lot about where you guys see this going in the future and how this whole process is going to evolve. But can you talk a little bit about even just this first home that you guys tokenized and sold, what were some of the immediate benefits that you saw using Solana or blockchains in particular that might be different than the normal process? Domingo Valadez (07:09):I think a lot of the benefits are for users, not for us as the company doing it. So there was still a lot of complexity when it came to structuring all this and every single home we tokenize and sell on the platform has a lot of complexity behind the scenes, but for the end user, people could literally invest in this first home within five minutes. That's how long it took some of our users to purchase these tokens. And then they're just relying on us to do all the paperwork on the backend. Moving forward, we're going to be distributing out all funds using USDC, we're actually partnering with Circle. They're our money transmitter. They're the ones basically sending out all the funds to every single holder and we're going to be doing that monthly. (07:46):So as an end user, you just became a fractional owner in this property. You don't need to deal with any sort of property management headaches. You get your passive income and when you're ready to sell, you can just sell it back to us. We're going to be partnering with blockchain home registry to showcase the value of the properties monthly, and so you'll be able to sell it at true fair market value as dictated by five different data points of trusted institutions saying, "This is what the value of that property should be." Brian Friel (08:11):That's pretty awesome. One thing I want to hit on too is you mentioned that there's accredited investor checks, but is this also open to non-accredited investors as well? Domingo Valadez (08:19):We can have up to 35 non-accredited investors participate per home offering. It's limited to that just by the Reg D 506 B offering that we do, but we can have unlimited accredited. So moving forward, we think the 35 non-accredited spots will be taken pretty quickly because of course that's the main use case for people where they see the main value in what we're doing. But yeah, we plan to switch to Reg A offerings in the future and that'll allow anyone to participate. No limitations whether accredited or non-accredited. Brian Friel (08:47):These terms, accredited investor, unaccredited, Reg A, they're very, I would say US-centric. There's a lot of particular nuances to US investing laws that maybe contribute to why folks like us are interested in these kind of products. We can't always afford residential real estate in areas that we live and work. Is Homebase exclusively focused on the US Do you guys also see this problem internationally and can you talk a little bit about maybe how the US differs from some other major markets internationally? Domingo Valadez (09:17):The US probably has the toughest regulation when it comes to this. So for us, we very much wanted to tackle one of the hardest markets and also two of the three co-founders are US based, are three co-founders in Canada and both markets so similar, very, very expensive real estate in any sort of big city all feel priced out. So we really all align in the mission behind this. Our initial launch market was in McAllen, Texas, so that's where I'm originally from. So it was very near and dear to my heart to launch there and see properties that I grew up with actually get access to the internet and get tokenized in that capacity. But we'll stay likely in the US for the near medium term, but we do want to allow international investors to participate as well. So we've already been reached out to by a few big players internationally that want to be LPs in our future properties and then they can sell it to some of their customers as well, and that's how we'll open it up and expand the pie to international investors as well. Brian Friel (10:12):I love that. So you mentioned when you did the high level overview of how this process works, essentially onboarding people one by one, taking video calls with them, making sure they understand the process, having to give them tokens that there's restrictions on how they can actually be sent to different people if they want to resell. It oftentimes having to go through you guys that whole process and then I'm sure even just the whole process of you setting up these legal entities as Homebase and your Web 2.5 company right now, there's a lot of legwork that you guys are doing on the back end, abstracting this out. (10:45):I think listeners of this could imagine a world where one day this is all pushed more to the edges, to the actual token holders and owners themselves. How do you guys think about how this is going to evolve over time? Which pieces of this do you think potentially in the next couple years could be more evolve, looking in areas where you guys maybe at Homebase aren't doing as much legwork and which areas do you think are going to be a little bit slower to evolve over time? Domingo Valadez (11:12):US real estate's very locally driven. Not only do you have to follow federal regulation, you also have to follow state regulation. You also have to follow local regulation all the way down to the county level. And so understanding each of those three layers of regulation is really important. And so that drove a lot of where we first launched. So Texas is very pro landlord, they're pro tendency in common, so it was very easy to fractionize the property there and they don't have any sort of transfer taxes. So if I sold my tokens to you, other states or other cities would charge a tax on that, Texas doesn't. So that was a big piece that kind of decided where we even launched on the piece about where we're going and what do I think is going to get better over time. One of the big reasons we even did this on chains, we've had a lot of people say, "Why don't you just fractionize this without blockchain that's so complex, you're making your process harder." (12:00):It's really about the secondary financial implications of what it means to have things decentralized and on an open platform. So for example, we're already in discussions with an on chain lender to allow people to collateralize their tokens to actually take on chain debt. No bank, no credit score required, literally just you collateralizing your tokens to take on debt and that to me is a beautiful thing. You cannot own any piece of a home without a mortgage under your name or a bank, someone getting involved and checking out your credit score. So that to me is really, really exciting and something we can already do with the first home moving forward. Another piece would be as regulation gets looser, having more clarity around allowing peer-to-peer trading. So alternative training license is what we're going to be going for relatively soon, and that's going to allow for people to trade within themselves so they don't have to sell it back to Homebase, but actually allow for peer-to-peer trading. (12:55):To me, it's really just like all of the applications that then could get built on top of having real estate completely tokenized on chain is what gets me excited about the Web3 space. I think the pieces on the regulation that's going to push back is making sure everyone's KYC, making sure you know who your users are, making sure they didn't launder any of their money. But yeah, I think that's one of the biggest benefits of Web3 and creating liquidity in a market that's historically been pretty illiquid and at a very, very high prices. Brian Friel (13:23):Yeah, I think you're right. There's this element of composability that comes with this when this is native to the internet, it's online and there's a token, anyone can [inaudible 00:13:34]. Then like you said, build a lending market around that. And there's a world where one day you guys aren't even involved with that decision, it's just someone can just sole end or another project can say, "Hey, we already have this lending market and we accept these tokens now as collateral." My gut tells me that you guys are doing this by the book. That regulation is going to be the rate limiting step in all of this as it starts to go. How do you guys see the current regulatory landscape in the US and you mentioned that there's some differences not just federally, but on state levels and on county levels. Can you talk a little bit about that and why maybe you guys are choosing to start in Texas and where you guys, I mean maybe foresee the next markets that you guys are expanding to as well? Domingo Valadez (14:18):You're absolutely right. Regulation's going to be the inhibitor on doing a lot of Web3 related transactions for properties. I think Coinbase getting sued by the FCC is going to provide a ton of clarity around... Or that's my hope at least a lot of clarity around how Web3 companies should be operating. I think there's been a lot of confusion around what's legal, what's not legal. So just to keep our users safe, we chose the web2 legal approach where we tried being as closely to the book as we can in case things go wrong or awry. Our users are completely fine and we feel very confident with that. But of course as we continue scaling the company and getting bigger, we love for these secondary applications like a Solend. To just say, "Hey, we just created this lending platform, we actually don't need your permission to do it. We can just trade." (15:05):That to me would be amazing because that means we're succeeding in actually bringing homes on chain and tokenizing them and letting people do what they want with their assets. But the regulation's really going to kick in until then. Texas was great because it was very landlord friendly, very easy to fractionize the property and no taxes associated with that. We'll likely continue to stay in Texas for the near to medium term, we're in McAllen now, plan to go to Austin later this year. (15:31):Other markets we'd likely open it in would be Colorado is also pretty open to this. So is Florida, specifically Miami is pretty pro Web3 and pro tokenization. It would be very, very city state dependent on what laws they have in place and how we can make this work. For example, even us opening it up to international investors, that requires us to redo some of the legal structures we have to allow for international investors to even invest. So we're going to very much rely on partners that say... There's a lot of demand in Latin America, for example, specifically from this country, "Okay, that's going to be the first country we allow to invest internationally just because of the regulatory piece of that." And we don't want any of our users to worry about that. So we're trying to remove all that complexity for end users while Homebase deals are all the complexities around that. Brian Friel (16:19):That makes a lot of sense. Miami, Florida doesn't sound like the worst place to be a homeowner as well, so that aligns pretty nicely. Taking a step back as an end user who's thinking about this, let's say that somebody has a Phantom wallet, they've experimented with sending some crypto to their friends, they maybe have a few NFTs. What would they need to know to feel confident in taking this next step and being an owner of residential real estate? Is it as simple as just showing up to your guys' website, hitting connect wallet, filling out a couple forms in a Zoom call? Is there anything that they need to do after they've already completed the purchase or other things that they should be aware of? Essentially, could you walk us through the user journey from getting their first wallet to actually being a homeowner? Domingo Valadez (17:05):Yeah, absolutely. So funny enough, for our very first property, we actually had a lot of new to Web3 users participate. So plug for you guys, we had Phantom as the preferred wallet for people to create and effectively onboard into the Solana ecosystem. And I think something that was very beautiful about this was people could upload their money into Coinbase, send Solana or USDC and Solana to their Phantom wallet and see it happen in two seconds within the call that we were helping them do it. So I don't think it's the same thing for other chains, but that's something that Solana does really, really well. So once you have a loaded wallet, you as you mentioned, have to make an account on our website, you do need a KYC, you set up a quick call with us, just it's your way of understanding who we are as founders and you can ask us questions directly. (17:50):It's really just to build trust with people. But once we have a home that's live, you literally just go to the property page, you connect your wallet that we've already whitelisted preemptively, and then you can just buy however many tokens you like. So every single token is denominated in a hundred dollars, so everything's transacted in USDC and you can just buy however many tokens you like, they immediately get minted to your wallet and then you get sent DocuSign links to sign that'll make you truly a fractional owner of the legal entity we spun up to acquire that property. So once you purchase it and everything closes, you don't need to worry about anything. We know exactly whose wallets hold what tokens, and we just start sending you your proportional amount of net rent every month and then you can decide to sell whenever you'd like. Brian Friel (18:35):So there's no upkeep. Part of the joys of being a landlord is things break in houses, there's taxes, property taxes to pay, all this kind of stuff. All of that is abstracted away from an end user. Domingo Valadez (18:47):So any home we list on our platform, we charge an extra 5% fee and that's really just to have a capital reserve pool. So if anything breaks, like we as Homebase have a property manager, they'll go out and fix it and then we refill that reserve pool with rent. So the goal is to never ask people that purchased it for money, we can refill it ourselves with the rent we collect, which is what's beautiful about real estate, it's cash generating and in terms of property taxes, we handle everything from that end. We do distribute K1s to everyone at the end of the year because everyone has their own personal income taxes they need to pay. So we can't force you to pay them, but we can give you all the information you need to pay them on your behalf. Brian Friel (19:25):That makes a lot of sense. I was also thinking when we talked earlier about the layers of this that could be abstracted away and evolved over time, that's potentially one of them, but I'm not sure if people actually at the end of the day want that. Is there a world where there's Homebase down people are voting on how do we pay for fixing the plumbing leak? I have a feeling that that's a service that all owners here are pretty glad that you guys are handling on behalf of them. Domingo Valadez (19:50):Yeah, one thing that is true though is people can vote us out. So we're the default manager of the property, but if you're not happy with the job we're doing, you can absolutely vote us out. Brian Friel (19:58):Oh, that's interesting. How does that vote happen? Is that an on chain vote with tokens or how did you guys set that up? Domingo Valadez (20:05):Yeah, so not on chain right now, but theoretically you're truly an owner of the LLC and you have voting rights in that LLC. So if people just came together and said like, "Hey, we want to vote them out." There's a meeting set up, people say like, "Yay, we want to remove Homebase." We won't be the manager anymore. It'll be up to the owners to pick a new manager and then that's how they can start facilitating the management of that property. Brian Friel (20:28):Wow, that's fascinating. Domingo Valadez (20:30):Yeah, we truly want people to be owners. Brian Friel (20:32):Oh, that's really cool. So I guess I have a couple questions here to kind of wrap up, but you mentioned that you guys are onboarding a lot of net new users to Web3, essentially people getting their wallet for the first time, maybe they don't fully understand how to use these wallets or the gravity of sending things on chain and the irreversibility of a lot of this. Do you guys have any particular insights from getting on calls with these people and walking them through this process? Do these users stay in crypto in your view? Do they stay engaged with it? Is it a steep learning curve for them? Basically, how as an industry are we doing at onboarding these people who maybe find crypto not because of crypto but because of a use case Homebase where they're just, it's a solution to their problem. Domingo Valadez (21:15):So very transparently, I'd say some people do have difficulty and it's a 30-minute call, and other people it's very easy. So I think something a lot of users asked for was like, "How can we abstract the complexities of wallets even further?" We're thinking about potentially having noncustodial wallets on our website where we partner with someone that basically just showcases the wallets directly there and then for an end user, it doesn't matter if it's crypto, you just know you own tokens in a property, you didn't have to create any wallet, it was automatically created for you. But for the people that do know Web3 and have their own Phantom wallets, have their own personal wallet, they can do what they like with those tokens and use on chain, that sort of piece. So I think for the industry to continue to expand, we need to continue to make it easier for people to onboard, abstracting away a lot of the complexity is something that'll continue to be key to keep widening the pie for everyone. Brian Friel (22:09):Totally. I can't imagine the call where someone buys a bunch of shares in a residential property and then forgets their seed phrase so, these are things that we're thinking about as well. I mean, I liked that framing of essentially giving users the easy option to start and the optionality to eject from that and really take control if you really know what you're doing. I think that's awesome. Domingo Valadez (22:31):Absolutely. Brian Friel (22:32):Well, this has been an awesome discussion, Domingo. Before we wrap up with one closing question, I always ask everyone I want to know for you too, what excites you the most right now from where you guys sit in this new field of on chain residential real estate, where are you guys heading next and what do you think is the most exciting next frontier? Is it new markets? Is it improvements in the way this is happening on chain? Is it in regulation? Or maybe it's something completely different that you guys are seeing? Domingo Valadez (22:57):I'd say one of the biggest drivers for me for building Homebase, we want to redefine home ownership and what that even means, I think we'll continue to see real estate prices keep getting more and more unaffordable for folks. And I think being a homeowner's going to start being a privilege, which is a really sad reality. Unless we have true government intervention come in and add more housing supply, I think it's going to get worse. And so with that reality, it's like it's up to private markets to figure out how do we actually make more people homeowners? So something we care a lot about at Homebase and something we're very mission driven about is making the tenants that live in these properties, also fractional owners of them. And so getting people comfortable with the idea of only owning 10, 20, 30% of their property, but still feeling like an owner of that property. (23:42):And so for this very first home, for example, Homebase bought an extra piece of it so that we can offer it to the tenant to actually buy it from us so that they can also be a fractional owner of the apartment they're living in. And so in 10 years we want Homebase to be the destination for renters. When you're moving to a new city, you use a Homebase platform, you find an apartment, you move in, you buy 30% of the value, and now you're a fractional owner of that property. So that's why Web3 excites me. You can completely do this in an open liquid market and we're trying to facilitate that through Homebase. Brian Friel (24:14):Yeah, that's putting skin in the game too, right there, you're a renter and you actually have upside if you treat the place well. That's pretty cool, and I think that's kind of spinning the model on its head in a really crypto native and interesting way. And I love that framing. Well, Domingo, this has been an awesome discussion. One question we ask all of our guests, and I want to know this for you as well, is who is a builder that you admire in the [inaudible 00:24:38]. Ecosystem? Domingo Valadez (24:38):Okay, this is going to be a total cop out, so I'll give you two. My first one's [inaudible 00:24:44]. I love that man's Twitter content. I feel like the way he speaks, he's clearly very, very technical, but also very good at bringing things to a high level and explaining things. And it's no secret that Solano ecosystems gotten a lot of heat from a lot of third parties where the day FTX went down, someone from the Binance blockchain basically told me I was dumb to continue building on Solana and was really trying to pull us to build on their chain. (25:09):And I was like, "I think the leaders of Solana are taking this very well and are being very, very thoughtful about how they're moving things forward." So that's the first piece really, really like [inaudible 00:25:19]. The second one's [inaudible 00:25:21]. I love his content. He's been a champion for Solana and you can always rely on that guy to call out people that are spewing fake news about the chain and really showcase his technical know-how of how things truly work behind the scenes. So I think those are probably my two biggest, I fanboy over both of them a good amount. Brian Friel (25:43):I think those are both great choices. And a sneak peak, you mentioned that the [inaudible 00:25:47]. Recording was just before this, but [inaudible 00:25:49]. Also mentioned [inaudible 00:25:50]. As his choice. So you're in good company there. Part of what [inaudible 00:25:55]. Was saying too is he loves people that are building pragmatic applications that can "Only be done on Solana TM." And I think Homebase is a really awesome shiny example of that. So thank you so much for taking the time to walk us through it. I'm super excited. I'm going to have to check it out, bring my Panama to it. I know nothing about residential real estate, but I think you've given me the confidence to give it a try today. For folks who want to check it out, where can they go to learn more about Homebase? Domingo Valadez (26:22):Yeah, you can go directly to our website, which is Homebasedao.io. Brian Friel (26:26):I love it. Domingo Valadez (26:27):Everything's completely transparent on our website, we even have a white paper that goes into all the technical pieces, whether it's the legal side, whether it's all the technical side on the blockchain component piece. So we're very, very transparent and we also have a discord where we answer questions as people have them. Brian Friel (26:42):That sounds great. Domingo the co-founder of Homebase, thank you so much for coming on. Domingo Valadez (26:48):Absolutely. Thanks so much, Brian, for having me.   

In episode 1477, Jack and Miles are joined by host of The Final Girls and author of Unlikeable Female Characters, Anna Bogutskaya, to discuss… THIS Is Why Tucker Was Fired? We're Not Lovin' McDonald's Child Labor Violations, Social Media Has Completely F*cked Up How We Name Babies It Seems… And more! THIS Is Why Tucker Was Fired? New Creepy Comments Emerge That Contributed to Tucker Carlson's Firing We're Not Lovin' McDonald's Child Labor Violations McDonald's starts hiring children as restaurant struggles for staff Republicans aren't yet done trying to make child labor great again Social Media Has Completely F*cked Up How We Name Babies It Seems… Mirror of Your Mind: How Algorithmic Feeds Conflate Identity with Diagnosis LISTEN: Long Term Parking by 79.5See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In episode 1476, Jack and Miles are joined by writer and podcast host, Molly Lambert, to discuss... Both parties hoping that you don't realize they've done absolutely nothing about anything, The WGA Strike proving that Hollywood really wants robots writing movies, and much more! 1. Ronna McDaniel reiterates importance of 2024 debates: 'We need to come together' | Fox News Video 2.The writer's strike wants to prevent an AI-generated Hollywood hellscape | British GQ (gq-magazine.co.uk) LISTEN: Supersonic - NoisiaSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In episode 1475, Jack and Miles are joined by comedian, Paige Weldon, to discuss… Kings And CEOs All The Same, Now Ticketmaster Is F*cking Up King Charles' Big Day, The Theme Of This Year's Met Gala Is Dead Designer And Giant Creep Karl Lagerfeld and more! Kings And CEOs All The Same Coronation for the Cost of Living Crisis As King Expresses Wish for ‘Good Value' Now Ticketmaster Is F*cking Up King Charles' Big Day The Theme Of This Year's Met Gala Is Dead Designer And Giant Creep Karl Lagerfeld Grab your fancy duds for Met Gala mania with Karl Lagerfeld Karl Lagerfeld lost 92 pounds using a diet he called a “sort of punishment” The weird and wonderful dieting advice of Karl Lagerfeld. Karl Lagerfeld Diet WATCH: Paige Weldon Stand-Up Clips on the Don't Tell Comedy Youtube Channel! LISTEN: TALK YO ASS OFF by Always ProperSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In episode 1474, Jack and Miles are joined by comedian, Brodie Reed, to discuss... Breaking Down Disney's Lawsuit Against DeSantis, Let's Keep It On Ron For A Second and the Presidential Race…, AND ONE LAST THING…His Time At Gitmo, Please Put Drug Sniffing Dogs Out Of A Job and more! Breaking Down Disney's Lawsuit Against DeSantis The Wildest Statements in Disney's Lawsuit Against DeSantis DeSantis' tough words may come back to haunt him in Disney lawsuit -experts Did DeSantis ‘retaliate' against Disney? Here's a look at the evidence. Disney's had enough — it's taking Ron DeSantis to court Florida Gov. DeSantis says Disney lawsuit is political Why I Can't Root for Disney's Lawsuit Against Ron DeSantis Disney vs. DeSantis: Iconic monorail is latest target in feud NTSB Releases Report On Disney Monorail Death AND ONE LAST THING…His Time At Gitmo Please Put Drug Sniffing Dogs Out Of A Job Minnesota Republican Wants To Keep Pot Illegal To Save Drug Dogs' Jobs Since the nose doesn't know pot is now legal, K-9s retire Drug Detection Dogs Are Unreliable and Reflect the Vicious Heritage of Their Slave-Hunting Dog and Police-Dog Predecessors Report: Drug-Sniffing Dogs Are Wrong More Often Than Right Time to Cancel Police Dogs, Experts Say Sniffer dogs inherit unconscious bias Federal appeals court: Drug dog that's barely more accurate than a coin flip is good enough The surprising reason more police dogs are dying in the line of duty LISTEN: CATCHIN' EM SLEEPIN' by Always ProperSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The weekly round-up of the best moments from DZ's season 284 (4/24/23-4/28/23)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In episode 1473, Jack and guest co-host super producer Justin Connor are joined by comedian and co-host of Pod Damn America, Jake Flores, to discuss... Now Biden Is Selling “Dark Brandon” T-Shirts, Trump Rape Trial Began This Week, Reminder: The Ten Commandments Are Trash, Black Mirror Is Coming Back... Despite The Fact That We're Living In It and more! Now Biden Is Selling “Dark Brandon” T-Shirts Dark Brandon' Rises, and Buoys Biden's Beleaguered Faithful Know Your Meme: Dark Brandon Chinese propaganda or Nazi imagery? Dark Brandon memes face disputed origins Trump Rape Trial Began This Week 'Donald Trump raped me,' writer E. Jean Carroll testifies at civil trial How Many Presidents Have Been Accused of Sexual Misconduct? George H.W. Bush Is the Latest Reminder: The Ten Commandments Are Trash Texas Senate passes bill requiring public school classrooms to display Ten Commandments High school football coach who lost job for praying on field after games to be reinstated In the case of the praying football coach, both sides invoke religious freedom Law on Ten Commandments Rejected 8 times that a 10 Commandments monument had its day in court Why Christians get the 10 commandments wrong Are the Ten Commandments really the basis for our laws? Black Mirror Is Coming Back... Despite The Fact That We're Living In It New York police are bringing back controversial ‘Black Mirror' robot dogs The Black Mirror-esque AI service lets you speak to the deceased loved ones Black Mirror: The Unexpected Foresight of The Waldo Moment 'Black Mirror' impossibly predicted David Cameron's #PigGate scandal Charlie Brooker on Cameron and #piggate: ‘I'd have been screaming it into traffic if I'd known' LISTEN: CECE (feat. nobigdyl. & Jon Keith) by indie tribeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On this episode of the Zeitgeist, AGI President Jeff Rathke speaks with Dr. Norbert Röttgen, member of the German Bundestag (CDU) and Vice Chairman of the Atlantik-Brücke, about Germany's efforts …

Our guest this week is Mert Mumtaz, Co-founder & CEO of Helius, a vertically integrated developer platform offering a suite of tools to help easily build products on Solana. Mert joins Brian Friel to clear up common misconceptions about Solana, shares the latest opportunities for developers, and dives deep into state compression, which reduces the amount of on-chain storage required to store NFTs, resulting in lower costs for creators and buyers by up to 100 times. State compression on Solana is already being leveraged by projects like Dialect, Drip.haus, and Helium to help scale their projects. Show Notes:01:10 - Origin Story and background05:08 - How he started on Solana07:45 - How Helius began11:27 - Misconceptions about Solana      18:01 - What is he most excited about on Solana23:03 - How is Helius working with DePin25:34 - Opportunities for Developers on Solana32:15 - A builder he admires          Full Transcript:Brian (00:06):Hey everyone and welcome to the Zeitgeist, the show where we highlight the founders, developers, and designers who are pushing the Web3 space forward. I'm Brian Friel, developer relations at Phantom, and I'm super excited to introduce my guest, the man who in Solana needs no introduction. Mert Montaz, the founder and CEO of Helius. Mert, welcome to the show. Mert (00:25):Thank you for having me, Brian. Brian (00:26):I've been looking forward to having a conversation with you here for a while. I don't know if you remember this, but way back in the day, I was getting my start on Solana by writing articles on Twitter, dev related articles, and you were one of the first people that took my article and said, hey, I'm an engineer at Coinbase. I can actually vouch that this is legitimate. And that actually got me in front of Chase Barker and everything. I don't know if you remember that interaction, but it's been a long time that I've seen you on Twitter. Mert (00:54):I do remember it. Brian (00:55):Thank you for that because that got me my stardom of three. Maybe that'd be an interesting place to start is I'd love to learn a little bit more about you. I know you were, previously before getting involved with Solana, you were at Coinbase. Can you share a little bit about your journey, what your background is and what led you to Solana? Mert (01:10):Yeah, absolutely. First of all, I do remember that interaction. I think it was a medium article about it was either voting or incremental counter, maybe a peanut butter sandwich or something. Brian (01:21):Yeah. It was like a simple app. Mert (01:22):Yeah, it was actually quite good. I was super impressed with it. I wish people kept producing those. I think we need more brine blog posts. Yeah. I guess maybe a brief intro of how I got started. I majored in math and communications engineering, communications engineering being satellites and signals and stuff like that. And I actually got to work at Blackberry as an intern. And so I got to see some pretty interesting engineering challenges at my earlier years about cloud infrastructure. I was on the team that ran the cloud for BBM, for example, which handled a lot of volume until it died, of course. Yeah, I mean after that I worked at the big banks in Canada, Canada's run by five big banks and I worked at three of those in some weird order where I did cybersecurity, I did payment systems, ATM withdrawals and stuff like that. (02:11):And I then joined a startup that got acquired, Shutterstock. It was about digital advertising and stuff like that. I'm sure some people are familiar with Shutterstock. And then I worked at Clear Bank on the treasury team where we were in charge of payment rails and stuff for funding entrepreneurs. And then we had this situation where we needed to send money to Australia and I needed to write the code that would handle doing that. And we met with a bunch of these vendors and stuff and it was all super complex for some reason that I didn't understand, you had to do these hops through various jurisdictions and stuff like that. And I was like, I mean you could probably just use USDC or something. And people just thought that was a scam. And at that point I was like, I wonder what the actual truth is here. (02:55):I did some digging and I was like, this is obviously not a scam, not even close. And in fact, it seems super interesting. I did a brief look into crypto in university where I thought I was maybe too academic and you need a PhD or something to do anything meaningful. Obviously quite wrong, but that was my first intro. And then a few weeks after that I was working at Coinbase. Actually it was interesting because I joined them slightly before they went public. And so they still kind of had the startup ethos and it was super fun working there and got to learn and build and talk with a bunch of really bright people. And that's obviously doing research on different blockchains. Obviously Coinbase is very EVM centric. Some times were good, some times we're bad. And somewhere in that line I found Solana and I just started digging around posting stuff, publishing stuff. And I really liked the approach that Solana had taken to be the pragmatic approach. I'm sure you hear this word a lot, but the practicality of the ecosystem as well as the ethos really resonated with me. (03:52):And the community was also pretty cool. You actually just mentioned Chase talking to you about something you posted. That was also my experience. Whenever I would posted something, Armani or Chase would hype me up and I was like, okay, that's pretty cool. And yeah, I mean it kind of just took off from there. Brian (04:07):Yeah. I love that framing of the pragmatic chain and you actually having that experience at a big bank just saying, why don't we just use USDC? It's settled in 400 milliseconds or whatever. And Solana really, I think, is the best example of that. That's pretty poetic that you found your way there. Mert (04:23):Mm-hmm. Brian (04:23):I remember a time though when you first were posting on Twitter, it was mostly around trying to help others understand what was happening on chain. And you mentioned Coinbase, very EVM centric. I think a lot of us who worked in crypto at the time, it was just EVMs the only game in town. And if you thought differently, that was just weird or a lot of people it didn't make sense. And I think my experience, one of the biggest barriers to getting people familiar with Solana was just wrapping their head around the mental model of just how stuff works on chain. It's just inherently different. Can you talk a little bit about that, how you got your start? What were you doing when you were writing these articles and helping others understand what was going on on chain? What did you have to build, what were you teaching yourself at that time? Mert (05:07):Yeah, that's a good point. Most people actually don't really know that unless they were early like you. At first what I would do, this was kind of during the peak kind of start of NFT season on Solana and basically a lot of influencer types or people who I don't think were very intellectually honest would post some sort of claim about, oh, the price of the NFT is going down because the price of Solana is going up. This is obvious and stuff like that. And I thought to myself, there's no way the markets are that efficient for JPEGs, right. There's other stuff there. If people were botting these NFTs and getting a high concentration on maybe dumping on retail and doing other sketchy stuff. And so I would just write scripts, goal length scripts or JavaScript scripts, whatever, and analyze the data. This is before any data analytics existed, really like Solana FM or I mean, Solana FM was there, but they did regular indexing, Solana floor and stuff. (06:09):Flip side, Nance, none of these actually covered Solana. I would just do it and then I would just write my findings in a Twitter thread with some charts and stuff. And I did that pretty regularly. I did it for a bunch of different stuff, including some upcoming projects in terms of gaming and where the potential is. And somewhere along the line after being armed with that knowledge of just doing it for a consistent amount of time, I came across a lot of people on crypto Twitter just really making unsubstantiated claims about Solana and its architecture and its scaling plan and all this stuff. And I guess I was in somewhat of a unique position where I was actually still at Coinbase at the time and somebody would post something and I had relatively okay knowledge of EVM, but also pretty good knowledge of Solana. (06:56):And so I'd usually be able to tell, okay, this is just not true what this person posted. Why is nobody correcting them? And it's because nobody actually just really knew both ecosystems that well. And sometimes in internal Coinbase chats, this would come up and people would be like, that is wrong. And I'd be like, yeah, that is wrong. Why aren't we doing something about this? And I kind of just started yelling at the people who were just lying or maybe spreading knowledge that was not grounded in truth, let's say. And I just never stopped doing that. And turns out crypto Twitter is full of these people, and so I never- Brian (07:29):Yeah. Your job's never done. Mert (07:30):Exactly. Brian (07:32):Is it fair to say that you arming yourself with this knowledge, you had to actually build the tools you needed just to understand what's going on-chain. Was this the start of Helius and essentially what you guys now offer? And maybe you can talk a little bit about that, how Helius began. Mert (07:45):Yeah, 100%. That's exactly right. The most common problem I ran across was when you're looking at on-chain data, the data is super cryptic, right. The instruction data is bortion coded or something. And unless you knew the schema of how it was encoded or maybe the idea which, especially in NFTs, in DeFi, it's not too bad, but especially in NFTs and other non-DeFi use cases, nobody has any idea what the on chain data looks like. And so I would have to hard code some weird methods, maybe parse logs, but also reverse engineer based on discriminators. Or I would even try to brute force it sometimes, which actually kind of worked. I would go on Magic Eden, and you would know this is before Magic Eden's programs were more readable. This is the first version. I would check the app layer. I would go to magiceden.io and I would see, okay, this NFT is listed for 20 SOL or something. (08:38):And then I would try a bunch of different decodings until I got that answer. And then I would do that with a bunch of different ones and I'd be like, okay, this is clearly the discriminator that I need to use. And so I would do that. I also did a bunch, go to the network tab, inspect source, and then dig through the entire minify JavaScript, unminify it, see the schema and try to use that schema when trying to decode the data and stuff. And I was like, this is bananas. This should not be done. And basically that's kind of where Helius came from and the first iteration of Helius was like, okay, we need to make on chain data read about Solana because it's particularly impossible. And then along the way, once we started doing that and talking to customers, it seemed like quite a few people were having other problems, especially around RPCs, which was surprising 'cause I thought RPCs were kind of okay, but after digging into it, it turns out that wasn't really the case. (09:28):And then you run into all sorts of other issues like streaming data on chain, at least in an inexpensive and reliable way. Solana has this problem with web sockets where you might lose data. Yeah, I mean just talking to customers just found a bunch of problems. And Helius is essentially now there to be this vertically integrated developer platform on Solana to essentially just help developers succeed on Solana. And we're not necessarily bound to Solana, but basically my philosophy on this is that I want crypto to succeed. I mean obviously we're all here because we're interested in crypto and believe in crypto's future. If you start from first principles there, I think given the options out there today, Solana's our essentially best shot at executing that vision. Obviously a lot of people disagree with that, but it's something I believe in. And so then my thought process, okay, how do we get more people to build on Solana so that we can have a better crypto future? Brian (10:19):No, I totally agree with that. I think that's been our ticket on Phantom as well, where it's like most of Phantom came from EVM folks and I think a lot of us independently kind of had this realization of we want crypto to succeed. Pragmatically thinking, what am I going to get my parents or my friend to use today? How are we realistically going to scale this thing in the next couple years? Solana also right now is the most pragmatic approach to doing that. I think before we jump in a little bit more to Helius in particular, what you guys offer and what you guys are up to, I kind want to take a moment just to talk maybe broadly about Solana because I think you are one of the most well known vocal defenders of Solana where there is a lot out there that's just blatantly wrong and you not only technically know how to rebut it, but you take the time and the energy to be out there and educating people. I want to know a little bit for where you sit at Helius, what you see right now, what would you say are some of the biggest misconceptions today about Solana that folks who maybe already know about crypto, maybe are already well versed in EVM, but maybe they just haven't gotten through to actually hear from somebody's boots on the ground. What would you tell them that they're misunderstanding about Solana? Mert (11:27):Maybe I'll take a more broad approach to answering this because it's kind of different segments, but in terms of maybe people from EVM, if you're already familiar with EVM and maybe you want to build on Solana and what are your kind of reservations, right. Some of the ones I've come across are, well, one, Rust is just hard to write. Solana has a diehard kind of fan base of Rust developers, but Rust is not easy. That is just a fact. Solidity, is somebody in high school could learn it easily, but Rust, I mean they'd be able to learn it, but I don't think it'd be easy. The concepts like lifetimes and for example, that stuff is not easy for somebody who wants to just prototype and maybe ship something. And so then you'll say, well, there's Anchor and stuff and Anchor is super helpful and probably my favorite tool on Solana, unless you know Rust, you're still going to be kind of flying blind and you know might need that to build your applications. (12:17):And if you're a determined developer, you'll get over that and then learn Rust anyways. But that friction alone is enough to deter a good amount of people is what I found. That's just one thing, and I know Foundation folks and Dev are working on this and there's some other teams, there's the Python seahorse stuff, there's a new type of Script One coming out. I think maybe there's even a Goaline One. It's also just a result of being early. Solana has really been around for two years, whereas EVM almost nine years now. It's hard to compare these things. That's one. And then two, and this is an interesting one, is developer optionality. As a developer, let's say at an entering focus from Coinbase, let's say you want to build a new product and  you're deciding between EVM and Solana. Well, the obvious kind of elephant in the room is, okay, if Solana has a problem, you are kind of done, right? (13:12):You don't have any other options. You can't port your code base over anywhere else. Whereas if you are the EVM developer and you build on Polygon, you can just use main net Eth, maybe you can, with some effort, use any of the other L2's or maybe another EVM for it, something like that. It's a much easier transition. It's less risky such that on a design doc that you want reviewed by product managers, most engineers are going to take the safe route there. Brian (13:37):It reminds me of that “no one gets fired for hiring IBM” phrase that they used to have back in the day, the safe route to get it approved by somebody. Yeah. Mert (13:45):100%. And it doesn't help that the Solana PR is so bad that everybody's even mistakenly saying, oh, Solana always goes down or Solana's all these different things. You add these up and then as an engineer, if you're at a big firm and you pick Solana, you have to religiously fight or justify your position. And most people just aren't going to do that even if they believe it. That's a big problem. One of the reasons why I think more SVM roll-ups that sell on other chains might be interesting here to give developers more optionality such that if you build on Solana, but Solana has something bad happen, but it's still settling on these other L1's or other data availabilities or whatever it might be. And then three, is of course, there are actual misconceptions about the reliability of the chain. (14:33):People think the chain has gone down 12 times or something, or multiple digits. It's actually gone down four times. People conflate performance degradation with outage. Performance degradation is just when you maybe have, you guys obviously notice at Phantom when you maybe aren't landing transactions on chain or maybe there's latency or something like that, that's the functional equivalent of fees getting higher on EVM. That's performance degradation. But an actual outage is actually relatively rare. In fact, the numbers, I think the last time I looked at them were 99.7% uptime, which isn't perfect, but it's also not bad. It's certainly not as bad as something that would go down every day or regularly. I mean there's a misconception there. Brian (15:15):Or reorgs in that matter too. Mert (15:16):Yeah, exactly. I mean we can kind of talk about that in maybe another part of this, but people don't realize that especially for an indexed company, maybe Coinbase where you're selling funds, those reorgs actually affect your architecture an insane amount because you need to add new systems to communicate, oh actually this block was not correct or something. Whereas on Solana, you don't really need to do that. I mean no block to my knowledge went back after being confirmed. Brian (15:40):Yeah. I was going to say I don't think there ever has been a... It's even, yeah, the optimistic confirmed, not even finalized as there's never been a reorg once it's been that. Yeah. Mert (15:49):Exactly. Some people think you need ridiculous hardware requirements to run these nodes and that's actually not true. You can run a node, depending on if you want an RPC node or a validator node for really anything from $200 to $800 a month. People think you need actual data centers to run it, which I don't know where people get that from. And then there's also light clients coming out now, right. I can talk all day about the misconceptions, but I think the first two are probably the most justified reasons from actual engineers that I've heard. Brian (16:20):Yeah. No, that's a really good take, I think, because one, there's the FUD, which I think is the back half of what you kind of just talked about, which I think that just comes with time and getting people to experiment with Solana and trying it firsthand and understanding there's no better teacher than that, otherwise you're fighting essentially Twitter algorithms. But I think that's a really nuanced take what you had to start, where you're saying the de-risking almost to get this buy-in because you know what it's like to work at these large companies and kind of proliferating Solana there. I also think what Jump is doing with Fired Answer is also just another benefit to that as well. Essentially just reducing the service area potential bugs that occur. Essentially if you have a bug in just one client implementation, adding a second one greatly reduces the chance it'll happen again. (17:09):Maybe one way we can take this is instead of fighting the FUD, because that could take all day, is from where you sit right now in Helius, say that you guys have a really interesting position in the space because one, you're super close to what's actually happening as Solana's roadmap evolves. I'd say part of being the pragmatic change is Solana's not afraid to push the boundaries, take risks, add new token programs, NFT compression, just constantly evolving at a fast pace. You guys are close to that and then you're also close to the developers who are coming into this space for the first time, like you said, the hobby weekend developer who's interested and they don't want to learn Rust and so they need some sort of abstraction layer to this coming in some sort of dead platform that's helping them in some way. What are you personally most excited about right now that's happening on Solana? Mert (18:02):Well, I mean Compression, I think, maybe is one that's gaining some steam in and an obvious one that I think most people are aware of at this point. But back when I was trying to show it, most people weren't aware. I think our job here is maybe done so now it can kind of take off, but Compression is super exciting because most people don't realize that Compression, actually, let me just explain what it is first. Data storage or state storage on Solana is quite costly. I don't know the exact cost, I guess I would need to look at that chart, but there's some articles on this and you can look at the Helius blog "shill" for seeing the comparisons for the numbers, but basically state storage on Solana is expensive and with Compression, essentially what you can do is instead of storing the data in state, you can store it on ledger. And that might sound a little abstract, but basically instead of needing it for consensus, you securely log it in transaction logs. (19:00):Basically it's what an engineer would call a stateless accumulator. I call them L2 because I like doing random marketing stuff, but Toly really doesn't like it. Do not call it an L2. Call it a stateless accumulator, which isn't very beginning friendly, but that is actually what it is. You just store a reference, it's a pointer by reference kind of thing. You store a reference to the data that's on the ledger on the state now instead of storing all the data on the state. And we do that via Merkel Trees, which I'm not going to go into here, but essentially you're able to get a few orders of magnitude and cost reductions. Now that's useful for digital assets and that's the first use case, NFT compression where you can mince thousands, millions, billions of NFTs. People will say like, oh, why do you need to mint a million NFTs, billion NFTs? (19:45):And it's like, that's not the point. The point is that we're not limited by technology anymore, whereas before we were, and we can maximize the design space and explore some things, right. You have Dialect doing sticker packs, Cross Mint using their APIs for all sorts of different cases, including loyalty programs, Helium migrating over to Solana for their hotspots using Compression, driphouse doing airdrops, Render potentially using it for their scene graphs, which is a super cool concepts, high map results even using them. And so it clearly has some use, but the cool thing about it is it's not actually limited to NFTs. Actually you can apply to any account, you can extend it to be fungible tokens and also just general account compression, which I think the guys at Gum are doing for some social graph formatives. It actually has quite a bit of potential there. (20:28):That's one of the big ones I'm excited about since my name is Compression Mert on Twitter right now. And then the Solana mobile, the Saga phone is awesome. I had a test unit and I've been an Android user my whole life after Blackberry Force and it's the best Android phone I've used and it's super snappy, very good build quality and it actually has changed my consumer behavior somewhat where actually, before I would explicitly shy away from mobile first or mobile crypto apps, I wouldn't use crypto at mobile at all. But now I'm like, okay, this is actually pretty cool. I can use leverage my secure seed vaults. We do need to work on that naming, but I can use that and have that confidence and that seamless integration. You have apps like Otter, Finance, Tip Link, Get Code or I guess just Code Wallet, which enables super fast kind of P2P payments, something like Venmo. And actually, I have used all of these to make payments to my family members and friends, so I'm super excited about that. (21:27):The thing I'm most excited about on Solana is this narrative of decentralized physical infrastructure or deepen taking off with not only do you have Helium now and High Mapper, you also have Render Now, Pollen Network, Genesis Go, Teleport and let's see who else we can get over. But I think this kind of intersection of P2P networks and using crypto to actually enable change in the physical world is super interesting and something that wasn't really possible before. Brian (21:56):That's super cool. I should say just for the listeners that we are recording this on April 13th, 2023, which is the official Saga launch day, so it's topical to bring that up. We're super excited about that too. I just think it's awesome that they're not afraid to push the boundaries on that. I mean for us at Phantom to not even have the ability to see a user seed phrase and it's just completely abstracted away at the hardware level, I think is awesome and a glimpse of where this is all heading. Let's talk a little bit about DePin too because I'm not as up to speed on that. I don't know if most of our users are. I think Helius migration is happening soon, TM, like this month in April. What are you guys seeing there? Is there any major changes to what you're doing on the infrastructure layer that's going to have to adapt for this? Do you foresee any major changes to end user behavior? (22:46):Part of what's interesting about Solana is the fee markets can adjust on a per piece of state level as opposed to if it was on Eth, you could see all of a sudden all your gas fees are increasing just like it would on a crazy NFT mint day. Can you talk a little bit about how you guys are working with this new DePin movement and what you guys are seeing? Mert (23:05):Helium particularly is interested in using Compression, or I mean they are using Compression to represent their hotspots and it would cost them just too much money to work with that kind of stuff on any other chain. And so Solana is what makes the most sense. And like you said, the independence of state, which causes individual account based fees as opposed to chain level fees, which doesn't make the UX horrible for one person here either. It's just you might have to pay extra. And so compression is something that they use the most, both High Mapper and Helium and also Render is, I believe, going to use it. They mentioned this in their GitHub migration paper. And so that's kind of the main driver, but also these teams generally have to subscribe to on chain events. And as a larger engineering firm or maybe independent of size, most people prefer getting data pushed to them instead of setting up some polling system to listen for events because there might be issues there. (24:02):They actually use our web hooks and then they kind of configure what events they want to listen to and then they kind of have this ease of mind where, okay, Helius will just stream me these events as they happen and I can just kind of plug, play and then forget. If anything happens, Helius will kind of let me know or maybe I'll get a page or something. The web hooks have actually been, it's interesting. When we first came to Solana, there was no web hook products on Solana and I'm not even sure if there was anything like that on Eth. It was just such an obvious thing and we built it and we shipped it and for example, Discord uses that for their integration into Solana. Their first actually Web3 integration, or actually I don't like the term Web3, their first crypto integration was with Solana and that was enabled with the Web hooks and we have some other big names using them now as well. (24:47):I don't think those are announced yet, but it's such a simple primitive, but just web hooks and listening to on chain data really helps some of these bigger firms who don't want to spend the time writing all this complex infrastructure code and they can just plug and play into some existing solution. Brian (25:02):Yeah. It's future-proofed, essentially. They can build once and they don't have to constantly be readjusting their implementation. Mert (25:08):Exactly. Brian (25:08):That's awesome. Turning this back to a developer who is maybe listening to this, familiar with EVM, looking at Solana, you guys do a lot, not just on the infrastructure side, but also on developer education, getting developers involved. We can talk about some of the specific initiatives there, but at a high level, what would you say are some of the biggest opportunities for a developer today who's looking at Solana? Where would you guide them to get started? Mert (25:35):Well, one thing I'll say is that Solana has maybe two main things that I would mention that might be interesting for folks coming over. One is that it's much earlier than the other ecosystems. And so there's a lot of low hanging fruit and underdeveloped tooling infrastructure, application layer stuff that exists in other chains in some form, but not on Solana. And so as a developer, let's just try to build something and you'll notice what's missing. You'll notice that the deployment workflows aren't great. You'll notice that maybe the monitoring isn't that great either, or maybe it's easy to shoot yourself in the foot with certain types of smart contractors and stuff. You'll notice a ton of problems and that's just your opportunity to make something cool and fix those maybe as open source, maybe as a public good, maybe as a company. And so there's a lot of potential there. (26:22):Another thing is that Solana's architecture is, and so this almost kind of contradicts the first point, but not really if you think about it. The architecture of Solana is so different, right. It's functional based where you have actually a lot of modularity within the layer. You have independent state and logic, you have different accounts, localized fee markets, and so it's much more modular than something like ETH where state and logic are coupled. And also obviously the scalability features of Solana are quite different than anything else. And what that means is there's a lot of things that you can actually build that's only possible on Solana. Brian (26:57):I love that catchphrase by the way, only possible on Solana TM. Mert (27:01):Yeah. I've been a big fan of that one, let's just say. And it's totally true, right. Order books, for example, you saw it with Serum, you're seeing it now with Phoenix. This is before Fire Dancer and before 200ms block times, which will happen. This is the slowest it will be, it's only going to get faster from here. And so there's a bunch of things that are only possible on Solana. And I would strongly encourage people to think from first principles as a developer, look around, see what problems there are. They don't have to be Solana specific, they can just be problems, right. I don't know, maybe it's too slow to send your dad money or maybe it's too hard to offramp crypto, I don't know, something like that. And then usually if you are trying to look for a solution there for that problem, Solana will be able to handle it much more comfortably than others. (27:47):And the other important thing is it'll actually scale, right. You want kind of elasticity as a developer such that if your app takes off, you don't want to have to now migrate to another stack or something. With Solana, it's honestly just plug into a cloud provider, just kind of scales with you. But also a third thing I'll actually mention, which this really should have been number one, but I would encourage you very, very strongly to produce content, especially developer related content. Build something, learn from it and then write about it, make a podcast, produce a video, produce a tutorial, just write content. And not only will that obviously help you connect with other people who are in the ecosystem and like-minded and building other cool stuff, but also when you write stuff and produce content, you have to know what you're talking about, otherwise you won't be able to write it, right. It'll make you connect the dots and it'll point out flaws in your thinking. Brian (28:44):Yeah. It's the fastest way to get the right answer on the internet is to publish something that's wrong. Mert (28:49):Exactly. And so I guess maybe to go along with that is just have a high tolerance for looking, I don't want to say stupid, but just have a high tolerance for being wrong. You're going to be wrong a lot, but that's not a bad thing unless you're building the infrastructure for handling, I don't know, some critical payments or something. But you're probably not going to be doing that. Brian (29:10):Yeah. It's like the pursuit of truth. If you're open to that and you're excited to get told what's right, I couldn't agree more that's 100% the best way to build. Mert (29:19):Yeah. Sometimes I'll post something that I think is correct, but it's not apparently actually correct because Toly will comment and he'll gently say something that's slightly unrelated, but it's like, oh, okay, I'm wrong, I guess. I will retract this. And so honestly, it's just a fun way to learn and you do enough cycles of that and you are going to be doing that to other people and that's how we grow. Brian (29:46):Yeah, I totally agree. I think this ties in with what you were saying earlier of Solana being the pragmatic chain. I think part of the benefit, there's a knock, we talked about it, about, hey, Solana's new, it's different and you're essentially fighting network effects at that point. But part of the benefit is you get to build your own genuine kernel of a developer ecosystem and start from first principles and start from new and not be afraid to change things new. And I think that's been pretty eye-opening, even just to me personally. As Phantom enters EVM, we're looking at everything that EVM has inherited over the years. Most obvious one being even just how injected wallets play with each other on EVM is so different than Solana because Solana took a very first principles approach and said, we're going to do this in a way that you have a wallet, you can use it anywhere, it's going to scale forever kind of thing. And it's been pretty eye-opening to see the differences there. (30:36):That would be my only other thing I'd add to you is if you are a dev and you want to make it high impact on, it's probably the best place for it because you can post publicly about why you're doing what you're doing and you'll get people who are interested in listening and will back you on the basis and the merits of your ideas is what I'd say. Mert (30:52):Yeah, absolutely. Me, Chase and other parts of the developer system will help you the best we can. Basically the Helius tagline is actually “Where Solana teams succeed” because our entire goal is to help you succeed. That's essentially why I wake up and that's what I spend my entire day doing. And the Phantom founders, for example, are great example of this, right. They came from EVM and they saw what was possible on Solana and they built the number one wallet in crypto and it had such good UX and such good design and stuff, and you guys absolutely dominated. And then now you're actually transcending the change, right. It's actually becoming a product, it's not just a chain's product, it's just a product that you can use to onboard people onto crypto. I really like that approach from starting from first principles like you guys. You saw Meta Mask and you're like, okay, well we're going to do it differently. And you did it much better in my view. And so I think that's just an example of what's possible. Brian (31:50):Thanks. Yeah, I mean we love hearing that, but obviously love everything that Solana's doing and Solana's always going to be home. There's a lot to do on Solana. I'm excited to roll up the sleeves this year and get started. I guess, Mert, and as we start to wrap this up, one question we always ask all our guests, I'd love to hear this from you. You mentioned a lot of people on this podcast, a lot of teams, but I'd love to know, is there a particular builder that you admire in the Solana ecosystem? Mert (32:17):Oh man. I mean, I do admire my co-founders, to be honest. I don't think they got that much credit because I'm kind of the loud one, but Nick and Liam are super, they're actually the driving force behind Helius and they do all of the engineering, and I do essentially nothing other than just larp on Twitter. Them for sure, but also, I'll give you my general approach on this, actually, maybe this is useful for someone, but my general approach to Twitter is whenever I see a founder on somebody's bio or something like that, or maybe a co-founder or something, I'll immediately follow them because those people are super inspiring to me. I pretty much follow all the founders on Solana at this point, I think. For example, the founder of Squat, Stephan Wright. I saw him, I was like, I'm going to follow this guy. (33:01):Turns out amazing dude, we're friends now. That's my general approach. I just respect all the founders in the ecosystem because they're taking big risks and they're trying to build cool stuff, and they're all trying to help the ecosystem. And so I have just huge respect for everyone there. Someones, I would probably point out specifically, would be obviously Armani and Tristan, huge respect for them. The founders of Gito, right, Sec, Fault and Buffaloo, I'll just say their pseudonym names. Co-founders of Squads, right, Margin, Drift, Zeta, for example. All the DeFi protocols. I'm probably just going to end up listing literally every single one. I would say if there's one particular one, it would be, I guess honestly just Toly, right. That's probably a cliche answer, but Toly just always keeps his composure under people just relentlessly slinging mud at his life's work essentially, and in a super unfair way. And he still gets up. And I mean, not only does he engage with the community, but he still builds cool stuff and there's so many different things. I have no idea how he does it, and I have a ton of respect for that. Brian (34:08):Well, I think that's the perfect answer. Having listed all the major founders in Solana, and then you go back to the guy who started it all, he sets the tone for the space and I think he makes it that drama free, practical, pragmatic, how do we build practical that's useful today. That's been my answer secretly too, that no one's asked me, but... Well, Mert, this has been awesome. Thanks so much for coming on. We'll have to do this again later once we've shipped all these crazy upgrades to Solana and check in again. But where can folks go to learn more about Helius? Mert (34:42):Yeah. Just helius.xyz. You can just go there or you can just @ me on Twitter. That's honestly how most people get in contact with me. Just tag me on Twitter on something and I'll respond. Brian (34:50):Awesome. Love it. Mert, the founder and CEO of Helius. Thanks so much for coming on. Mert (34:54):Thank you for having me.   

Tune in to hear:- Dave is a “financial futurist.” What in the world is this and what does it look like practically in his day-to-day work?- What “behavioral hacks” does Dave bring to bear in his own practice when he tries to look out beyond 2 years and how does he try to stay out of his own way when thinking about what the future might look like?- Can the past be used as a vehicle for better understanding the future or is there not much to learn there and we are forecasting in ineffective ways by relying so heavily on the past?- What is the place of innovation and cutting edge thinking in an industry that is often at its best when it's at its stodgiest?- In the recent past we have socialized business failure while individualizing business success. What is it going to take for this Zeitgeist to change?- Which financial innovations does Dave think hold the most promise? On the flip side – what financial innovations does he think are overrated?- Learn how Dave connects the dots between the overall lack of institutional trust, “polycrisis” and the crisis of meaning.- Things like the climate crisis can't be solved on an individual level. How do we take our institutions back and have an appropriate amount of trust in them as a way to solve some of the biggest problems we face?- What does the research say about whether or not the current flows into passive vehicles perturbs overall market functioning?https://www.etftrends.com/author/davenadighttps://twitter.com/DaveNadighttps://twitter.com/Vetta_FiCompliance Code: 0850-OAS-3/24/2023

In episode 1472, Jack and guest co-host Jacquis Neal are joined by stand-up comedian, Caleb Synan, to discuss… Steven Crowder Getting A Divorce, New Profile of Lue Elizondo (The UFO Pentagon Guy) Is Worrying and more! Steven Crowder Getting A Divorce Steven Crowder Thinks Divorce is Unfair (Clip) New Profile of Lue Elizondo (The UFO Pentagon Guy) Is Worrying LISTEN: Hippo by The Lazy EyesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In episode 1471, Jack and guest co-host Andrew Ti are joined by Ever Mainard to discuss... Biden announcing his re-election bid, Sarah Huckabee Sanders' embarrassing ultra-Right beer battle, the return of the "Got Milk" ad campaign, and so much more! 1. Biden Announces Re-election Bid, Defying Trump and History - The New York Times (nytimes.com) 2. Sarah Huckabee Sanders' embarrassing response to Bud Light row (thepinknews.com) 3. The Rise and Fall -- and Rise Again -- of “got milk?” — The Palmier 4. "Nicholas Rossi's" bizzare Dateline appearance LISTEN: Blenda - Charlotte Adigery & Bolis PupulSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.