Episode link:
https://www.citizencosmos.space/chriscastig

Episode name:
Chris Castig, Bots, Startups, & The new web.

In this episode, Citizen Cosmos talks to Chris Castig, co-founder of Console.xyz. Chris and Citizen Cosmos discuss education and its importance. They delve into a possible future where bots may be recognized as people and look at the now where people are already behaving like bots. Chris gives a wealth of information on Console.xyz and I for one will be making an account, just to see if it is as beautiful as described.

Citizen Cosmos
Good spacetime y'all. In this episode of The Citizen Cosmos podcast, I speak to Chris Castig, founder and console, X, Y, Z, a Web3 chat for Decentralized Communities. Along with Chris, we talk about digital identities, good and bad. Robots and Humans, personal rights, startups, education and product market fit. We also discuss the dangers of wrong funding the Golden Billion onbourding users and the original vision of the Internet.

Chris Castig
I think if we could understand the original vision for the web and then understand how it failed or the challenges with it, which I would say are the powers of centralization that came in the early 2000, then I think you can start to understand what a better future might be. There has never been a more exciting time since maybe the nineties with the web.

Chris Castig
What Web3 does really well is I think of it as like a bunch of different Lego blocks that we can interconnect. It's open, transparent. It's on the blockchain.

Citizen Cosmos
They turn people into bots, into the bots you describe in.

Chris Castig
They turn people under bots. Yes. Okay. You don't have enough money now. You have to give up your like eye retina scan.

Citizen Cosmos
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Citizen Cosmos
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Citizen Cosmos
Hi everybody welcome to a new episode of Citizen Cosmos podcast. Everybody I have with me Chris from counsel X, y, Z today on the show.

Chris Castig
Chris Hey, Serj Happy to be here.

Citizen Cosmos
Happy to have you. First things first, the most typical thing in the world. Let's introduce yourself, please, for everybody, for me and the listeners. Tell us about what you do and anything else you want to include in the introduction.

Chris Castig
Yeah. My name is Chris. Most people call me Castig like C A S T I G . So that's where you'll find me on all social and everything. Castig and I am the co-founder of Console. We started a console in the summer of 2021, so it's a little over a year now. And console is. It started as Web three chat, and we're really evolving it into so much more with really everything that, like communities need.

Chris Castig
We think of it as like the future of creative community. So I'm sure we'll get into a bit more of that. But that's the main project that we're building right now. There's a team of ten of us and we're pretty well funded and have a pretty great vision. In addition to that, I am an adjunct professor at Columbia University Business School.

Chris Castig
Right. Of course, coding and Web three. So that's a fun project as well. And before this, my last company was an education company, a technical or coding education company called One Month. We met through Y Combinator, and prior to that I've been involved or helped start up a handful of other startups. So I think startups, it's mostly been my journey was the developer for a while now, basically heading product the team.

Citizen Cosmos
Nice. What did you say you teach? I missed.

Chris Castig
Columbia University. Wow.

Citizen Cosmos
Wow, cool. And you teach computer science. Is that an introduction? Of course. Or a basic or what is it?

Chris Castig
So it's in the business school. So imagine it's a bunch of people who are MBAs and want to start companies, and they need to know the foundations of coding of Web three of databases of all this stuff. So it's like a foundations class of like the least amount that you need to know to, like, hire or manage and get started.

Chris Castig
That's what the courses.

Citizen Cosmos
And how do the students like are interested in computer science? I'm curious, the business guys.

Chris Castig
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's no, this the class is very heavy. It's very popular. It usually sells out or they bid. They have a bidding system about 70 students every semester. And yeah, I don't know that they care so much about computer science, but they love building things, you know? And so they want to just like, build tech and hire people to do it, manage people to do it and co-create.

Chris Castig
So the class called Digital literacy, that's the focus of it.

Citizen Cosmos
Cool. And I know you started in Berkeley, right?

Chris Castig
Berkeley. Just to my dreams. Berkeley, California. It sounds beautiful, but no, I'm from the New York City area. Yeah.

Citizen Cosmos
Why did somebody feed me this information? This is. This is what happens. This is like now I'm joking. But for some reason I saw somewhere that and I don't know how that's going to here. There is. And I was going to ask that I'm less Cards on the table is I have noticed that a lot of crypto people are from Berkeley.

Citizen Cosmos
Like there is a huge, huge community. And I was like going to go into all conspiracy theories right now. But that said, I'm not going to do it. So but it's still a topic I do have for you is that I wanted to ask your opinion about to be more precise, is education and the role of education in society today, and how do you see Web3 fitting into all that?

Citizen Cosmos
So I know it's a kind of a vague, huge subject that you can probably gone for weeks. But in general, do you think that today Web3 is an educational enough space? Does it need to be more educational? Do we need more people to educate people or do we let people educate them by themselves since it's the free market?

Citizen Cosmos
How what's your opinion on all this topic? What do we need to do to improve the literacy? Let's say about three in general, in the community, in society?

Chris Castig
Yes. Education is a large part of what you're doing here, right, with Citizen Cosmos and the podcast, everything. So I really appreciate that. I think education is the key to a better, happier future for everyone. I think as a teacher myself and as someone who I don't know, I read pretty voraciously, like I just love reading. I think just ideas to me are just like so exciting.

Chris Castig
And I think Web3 itself is like at this moment built on a lot of ideas for the future with a lot of money from mostly Andrews & Horowitz That's kind of a joke, kind of true. And I think a lot of just really talented people. And so I'm excited about the movement and everything that it stands for. But to answer your question specifically, I think we need education about how we got here and the problems that today's Web, because as I kind of just painted this picture, I think people are arriving at Web3 for the first time and kind of seeing this amazing future that it could bring for us.

Chris Castig
But I feel like without the past, we repeat a lot of the problems in the future. And so specifically, for example, understanding that the Internet itself, which was invented in the sixties and seventies, was built for decentralization, was built for the people. Right? A lot of the principles that we're talking about web3 really came from kind of near Berkeley, kind of California, San Francisco, that whole area right during that time.

Chris Castig
And I think if we could understand the original vision for the Web and then understand how it failed or the challenges with it, which I would say are the powers of centralization that came in the early 2000, then I think you can start to understand what a better future might be. So this is a very broad picture that I'm painting here, and I think this is a lot of what I teach as well with trying to understanding the past of how we got here and where we're going.

Chris Castig
But I think when we talk about web3 and education, I think understanding the problems, how we got here and then understanding the solutions and not the other way around.

Citizen Cosmos
What are the problems that you're talking about? Because this is like, I think, the main elephant in the room, right? Those problems.

Chris Castig
Yeah. Well, one thing that people on the Web understand, I think today, especially if you're on discord or social media, is that these platforms are overrun by spam and bots. Right now, if I go on Twitter, my inbox is full of just like a bunch of bots trying to sell me some weird CryptoKitties or something. So spam robots are a big thing that face the internet.

Chris Castig
If we could understand the way that like identity works right now on the internet, you have an Instagram account, you have a podcast account, Riverside account, you have a Facebook account, you have all these accounts, and with each one of them you have a username and a password. So the way the web is designed right now is your identity is stored with every website that you go to Facebook has part of your identity, Instagram as part of your identity, and because of that, it prevents that.

Chris Castig
It provides a lot of challenges. One of those, as I mentioning, is the amount of spam and bots we get. The reason those two things are linked is because when we have our within, let's say we use like Instagram, right? When we have, when it's so easy to just spin up accounts and have no history and just kind of show up on Instagram, it's really easy to just not know who is real and who is basically, you know, a scammer or bot or something, right?

Chris Castig
And so we have this problem of like personhood on the Internet and those are some of the challenges that Web three are looking to solve with some people call it proof of humanity, or there's different metrics for how we can show that people are there. But I think one of the main ideas to look at in the future, which I think is going to really take off in the next year, is removing identity from the platform so that there's one global identity.

Chris Castig
I have, for example, my Castig.Eth my ENS name, and my ENS name can be my global identity that I can go and then use and access hundreds of websites, but then I can leave those websites. And no one that works at those websites knows I was there. I don't leave a huge fingerprint. They can't deplatform me.

Chris Castig
I am just using them like a platform and leaving with my identity and leaving with my data. I think that's one of the big shifts in how things have been and where things could be going.

Citizen Cosmos
I think the whole DID topic is decentralized ID topic is a really interesting one and I've had several guests throughout the course of the last few years that we've discussed this with. And I think one of the most common questions I have for them, which I will definitely want to hear your opinion on, why do we need all that if we already have a public and a private Key Pair

Citizen Cosmos
I mean, isn't that enough to have understanding of proof of any identity? There is a private public key. We don't need to collect any more data. That's it. There is the whole deal solved. Is that enough or do we need more?

Chris Castig
Yeah. The private public key is a really great first step and I think in some ways you're right. You mean there haven't been, to my knowledge of the research that I've done, I haven't seen so many bot accounts with private public keys, although it definitely exists, but it hasn't really infiltrated kind of my daily Web three experience. And at the same time, I think that's just because the scale is so small.

Chris Castig
But I would be concerned that with just a private public key, there's not enough friction. I would say that you could you could create and people have created them. They do exist like ways of just spinning up private public keys, like automated, right. And so I think we could see a future where that's not enough. I think you're right.

Chris Castig
Right now it's enough by adding friction. By friction, I mean, in some ways, like a cost can be a type of friction by making it a little bit harder to interact with me. Like if we have a conversation on an app or we're chatting by having to purchase like a domain name, right? like an ENS name or something. That right there, it's just $5 a year.

Chris Castig
Removes 80% of bots, but it won't be cost effective to have thousands of millions of bots if you got to send them up for $5 and then they immediately get banned with email emails free. Right now we just spin up a bunch of emails, right? So I think it's in combination. Having that friction can be a big game changer that will really, I think, just help help me.

Chris Castig
I think that's what Elon Musk is trying to do right now. You know, that's exactly like his move with the blue checkmark. His idea is like, look, if somebody is paying $8 a month, it adds a certain type of friction that shows that this person's real. And not only that, but they value the account. And I think it's a similar shift in how we can how we can see the web not only as the user.

Chris Castig
So I'll just add one more thing. I don't think it's the user who has the blue checkmark or the ENS name and Web three, But think about that on the other side, the receiving side, I can then set up my for myself parameters for who I can talk with and who I can let to talk with me. I can say hey and so on console what we're building.

Chris Castig
I can say I only want people to randomly dm me who have an ENS name and six months of on chain activity. Right. Like that becomes the level of friction that makes it difficult for automated bots to impersonate.

Citizen Cosmos
So private and public key with economical incentives.

Chris Castig
Yeah.

Citizen Cosmos
But I mean, okay, but let me be a bit of devil's advocate. I'll definitely have more console questions for you. But before we get to their you said couple of things and of course we talking and stigmas here but devil's advocate in me is being loud You said for example it's $5 per year and this is one thing in crypto there is to me, you know, we spoke about decentralization, we spoke about things.

Citizen Cosmos
And this is a question to you that for me is very hard to understand. And I always ask my guests, well, two thirds of the world, or roughly a third of the world, live about a dollar per month. So $5 per year is a lot is a hell of a lot of money for some people. And a lot of the folks in crypto sometimes forget that we are not making a product just for the golden billion.

Citizen Cosmos
You know, we're making a product for the whole World Bank. Band the unBanks in my opinion unbank the banked. You know, we don't need the banks. We need the unbanked people to go out there. I mean, I don't play devil's advocate right now, but this is kind of the point. But I said it's a lot of money, $5 per year. Shouldn't we, like, strive to the point of eliminating that cost and letting everybody use not just that one golden billion that lives in the western northern Hemisphere?

Chris Castig
Yeah, you're totally right. So. Well, the way I see a lot of tech solutions or just like a lot of progress in the world. Is during the short term and longer term benefits. And I think it's easy to look at the short term innovations and then say, hey, it doesn't work for every single person in the world. Fuck it, this is stupid.

Chris Castig
I think we see that with anything that happens in American politics where I am right now, where it's like some achievement happens, but it affects one part of the population directly. And we nay say it, or I think it happened with Bitcoin in some way, or I'm still really bullish on Bitcoin, you know, but it has this environmental impact.

Chris Castig
And I think the way I look at some of these situations is if you zoom out, I think with those two cases I just mentioned politics and Bitcoin, I think there are people who are working on these problems and there are potential optimistic futures for improving those paths and making them so that they are more scalable and are more efficient for the world to actually accept.

Chris Castig
If that didn't exist, I would 100% agree and just join that crowd and say, Hey, you know, this doesn't make the entire world better. It's not. So I feel the same way about the $5 ENS example. I just shared. I feel like it's a milestone. And then there's more work to do with the milestone that it helps to hit is it gives us some data on proof of personhood and proof of humanity, and it helps us eliminate 80% of the bots for a large percentage of the world.

Chris Castig
We could probably say what there's like 8 billion people on the planet. We could probably say at least three or 4 billion could afford that. Roughly. It's making rough numbers up. So I think that is a large part of the world. But you bring it you bring up a good point. How do we then scale that? I think from there, over time, these technologies will get better.

Chris Castig
And there are I could list a few alternative ways that are other ways to add friction that aren't $5. You know, whether it's like sharing your ID, whether it's like I haven't looked at world coin enough, but I know that World Coin is working Sam Altmans project, working on looking at giving tokens based on eye retina scan, which is I mean, I feel like I could play devil's advocate to this myself, to you, or I could say like, you know, so okay, you don't have enough money now.

Chris Castig
You have to give up your like eye retina scan of privacy. I think there are tradeoffs that all different levels. But I think if we come at it with a good mind for like how we could scale it long term, I do think that is an important piece on the table. And I so I don't think we should stop this, but I don't know all the answers for sure.

Citizen Cosmos
It's definitely a spectrum, you know, definitely like as far as anything, concerns as a spectrum. And I'm not talking just about decentralization. I think life is a spectrum, right? Anything on it is just another spectrum for us to zoom in, zoom out. Like you said, I'm going to be devil's advocate. One last time because I really want to hear your opinion here.

Citizen Cosmos
And you mentioned it like a few times. You mentioned bots a few times. I'm personally connected with several AI projects and there are a few that I'm really curious. I'm not talking about just crypto right now. I'm talking about in general artificial intelligence and I'm curious as to your opinion. As somebody who's creating the central social network? And I personally was involved in the launch of a decentralized social networking 2016 and there was a lot of failures that we did.

Citizen Cosmos
A lot of the experiment didn't really work out. One of the biggest questions we had and you mentioned it several times today, a bot and a person, why is it such a big problem? Why do we need to eliminate the bots? I mean, at which point the world suddenly decides a bot isn't an entity who is allowed to exist by itself, really without being proven that it's not a bot.

Citizen Cosmos
And I'm not talking about, you know, stupid. I mean, of course there has to be, like we said, a spectrum, some gradation, probably. But somewhere along the line in ten years time, maybe even less, I'm sure that bots are going to be capable of proven to be human, right? So this is the question Why are we so afraid to make that step and to say, Hey, any account with a private or a public key is an account, whether it's a bot human, there is already a difference story.

Citizen Cosmos
But was the reason we are afraid of that is humanity.

Chris Castig
Yeah. When I describe bots is a word that I'm using to describe accounts that are I would say, detracting value from communities. So I think on Twitter that tends to be accounts. So I'm using bots to describe sock puppets, which is to define that, which is essentially when you masquerade as a different account. Right. So, you know, I can have like a computerized thing saying it's Chris and you're talking and you think you're talking to me.

Chris Castig
But but it's kind of masquerading kind of like a sock puppet on your hand or bots that are just spamming or bots that are just like even retweeting and just commenting and liking and stuff. Now what they do is they detract from the authentic value of the system. And I think in some ways most of the world politically leans toward a liberal democracy.

Chris Castig
This is the kind of generic state of the world right now, like the default. I would say a lot of people share those values. And I believe we also tried to create those values in the programs in the digital world. We want Twitter, for example, to have these qualities of a democracy, which in a lot of ways mean one person should have a voice, right?

Chris Castig
They should have they should have freedom of speech. There should be not censorship, but a reasonable if somebody basically screams fire or, you know, or is basically like saying something malicious that we can, you know, to have these triggers. And I'm just kind of reflecting what, for example, Twitter is just as one example. But I think we try to follow these habits when we create ecosystems online.

Chris Castig
So bots come in and they are able to manipulate that usually at the expense of one person can spin up thousands of bots and then create and manipulate public opinion. So that's what I mean by bots. So I don't think that that is helpful. It tends to, yeah, really just break communities and you know, in the case of discord, because that's something we've studied a lot over the past year, also steak hundreds of millions of dollars in funds by masquerading as other people.

Chris Castig
So they don't create value in that way, but they bot being just in the most simple way, like an automated thing to reply to. I agree. Like there is a it can be helpful to help with automated tasks, but it's when it's being controlled like a puppet that I think and can be manipulative in these kind of ways, that it really erodes the value of the ecosystem sometimes without us even knowing that that's happening, which is really nefarious.

Citizen Cosmos
I'm going to make a cruel joke. When you say manipulated like puppets, you mean like Cambridge Analytica did with millions and tens of millions of humans and influenced the election of every single existing election on the planet? Is that what we mean?

Chris Castig
I 100% mean what Cambridge Analytica. Yeah. And the and specifically to add to that the Internet research agency in out of Moscow which is like a troll factory that basically helps create a lot of this manipulation and bots

Citizen Cosmos
I’m Saying they use real people not just bots they turn people into bots, into the bots you describe in.

Chris Castig
They turn people under bots. Yes.

Citizen Cosmos
I said the scary thing, right, Chris I did mention that I was involved in the experiment with trying to launch the decentralized social networks in 2016. well not try, we launched and we did it essentially exist today without any team and it exists by itself. The biggest problem we faced was the economical side of things. The economical side of things for us was a failure.

Citizen Cosmos
I'm not talking about budgeting and management, but I'm talking about simply we couldn't find a model that wasn't able to be milked by the users and at the same time was beneficial to the users. So how do you guys solve this at console X, Y, Z, and what do you do? Do you completely eliminate the economic side or is there some economics involved?

Citizen Cosmos
And how does it work in console?

Chris Castig
You mean, how do we make money?

Citizen Cosmos
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm sorry. My apologies. What about the users, The incentives? What is the incentive to use console X, Y, z? And how do the users keep engaged in using console X, Y, Z?

Chris Castig
So one important thing to share is that we are in this data period right now of co-creation with the communities that are on console. So what that means is if you are a console or you want to come to console and you're a part of our data, not only are you benefiting from being able to use our platform, the better security, beautiful design, but you're also able to share and grow with us.

Chris Castig
And we are trying to learn from the communities that we're working on. So what are we learning? One of the things that we're learning that I think is super interesting and relevant to your audience is that onboarding right now for new community members is really broken across different Discord Telegram platforms. We're noticing how by watching communities, if you have your starting up a new community or you have a community and you send people the link, a lot of people who are new, especially people who aren't used to these platforms, come into discord and they're so excited and they want to contribute and they want to learn their buy your NFT and they get in the

Chris Castig
middle and there's just so much noise and it's just like, what is happening here? So one of the benefits that we're able to learn from the communities that are using console is to have a better onboarding experience so that you can give a link and then they can have just like a beautiful experience of that first moment coming on the platform.

Chris Castig
We have a doc feature which is token gated docs. So that now if someone is click the link they've signed in or signed with their metamask if they need to and then they're able to read the docs kind of come through the flow and learn about the project. Think of it as like an operating system for Web three.

Chris Castig
So you come in and you're onboarded, you understand what the community is about. But not only that, you could understand where all of the different component pieces, like what Web3 does really well. I think of it as like a bunch of different Lego blocks that we can interconnect. It's open is transparent, it's on the blockchain. The blockchain is essentially like this database that we're all sharing, right?

Chris Castig
That never goes down, hopefully. And that's really powerful for us to tap into that. And that's what we're doing at console. So we provide chat, we provide that onboarding, and then we allow communities to use all these Lego blocks to help build their community as they need. If they need a treasury, we'll provide access to that. If they need voting, we provide access to that.

Chris Castig
We can help work with these communities to help them grow as they need.

Citizen Cosmos
Another thing that I guess I saw as an obstacle not during that time, but actually with another project. And I'm curious how you guys solved it. Was the whole idea of creating a social network, a decentralized social network, which would have the same level of security as blockchain kind of thing, and I've seen the projects and I want to go like into names of course, here.

Citizen Cosmos
So not to take the focus of you, but the idea was that the problem sorry was that people were just not ready for that. Like, you know, web three using a ledger to make a tweet or something like that. They're like, What's going on? People were like, mind blowing. They were like, okay, that's why I'm going to use that, of course.

Citizen Cosmos
And at the same time, you saw people on Twitter saying, Oh, we really need this stuff. You know, Twitter has been hacked. We really, really, really need this stuff, you know, and like stuff like that. So how do you guys solved it? What's your solution here?

Chris Castig
Yeah, to let you in on some of the thoughts that were conversations that we're having right now internally, we think it's really important. Number one, important to make an app that solves people's day to day problems. It needs to be a beautiful, usable app that people can get onboarded to because, you know, a lot of these things that you're listing there and that Web three chance about decentralized private open source ownership, like these are all a lot of the key principles of Web three.

Chris Castig
I do believe that those are really important and I do believe those are a foundation for building the future of communities. And at the same time, the whole basket for many people, for me and you, it might be enough. But for most people that baskets not enough. Most people are struggling right now to build their grow their size of their community, to monetize their project, to have outreach with the people who are in their community.

Chris Castig
And the first discord of Telegram, they may not know even who's in there, who's active, you know, all of these things. So at console, the way we're approaching it is like that really is the number one problem. It is figuring out how to help people grow their communities, to focus, to have essentially like a CRM to manage the most active people, to reward those people.

Chris Castig
All of that is really like the sweet spot. And we know we need to do it on that core foundation of all those Web three principles, because that's where the future is going. And I think this recipe, any startup who's listening, I think really needs to adopt this in the next year because this year to me really proved that that market, if we talk about product market fit, having a market for a product that's going to create value for your project, the market for people in crypto is so small that people who are actually active, I want to say it's less than 100,000 people.

Chris Castig
If you just use the number of people who are active on crypto Twitter. Right? And so that's not enough to really build a business to grow a future either. We onboard more people into our tribe. Possible it is growing it will continue to grow or what I think is the winning solution. We take what we're doing export it as the foundation to just amazing apps that people can seamlessly use.

Chris Castig
And and in ten years from now, I think if they don't even know it's on the blockchain or identity, that's even better. I don't think people have to know this just as Today, when we switched on the web from HTTP to HTTPS I think most people can't name the date when that happened or why that happened, but it is like a huge innovation in privacy.

Chris Castig
But we're all benefiting from that and you can benefit from that without knowing it. I think Web three has to be the same way.

Citizen Cosmos
A lot of the things that talk about content and privacy and you mentioned content before at the beginning, not right now, but it's a big thing. Obstacle for myself personally, I have a team and often people in the team change. So every now and again and it's very hard to explain to them why we want to own our content, why we I mean, we are using Spotify while using Google to put out the to the podcast, but it's really hard to explain to them, why do I need to start that file an IPFS or why do I need to like, you know, go on and do some crazy thing, which doesn't really make sense

Citizen Cosmos
because like you can go and do that, but there is not the internet that we kind of own. So I totally understand what you're saying. The and from that, like a question from what you were describing and you mentioned the words operational system, I don't know if you heard of such a project called Urbit because you mentioned communities and operational system.

Citizen Cosmos
And I'm curious at all, are you guys connected? Are you doing like in terms of what you're doing in console? Is it any how similar the vision to to what Urbit has or.

Chris Castig
Yeah, I don't know enough about Urbit so maybe you can tell me more. I've heard a lot about the project, but yeah, tell me a little more.

Citizen Cosmos
As far as I know and I'm definitely not affiliated with any how anybody there, but so it's going to be a very subjective personal opinion. Well, it's all about private servers, but a lot of the rsync is built on communities, like about owning your server, and it's not actually a blockchain project as per say, but identity in there is using Ethereum and a lot of it is about building your own community in a decentralized space and the like.

Citizen Cosmos
Very, like you said, building blocks by blocks all of their operational systems, so to speak, and adding part to part to it. And from what you were describing, it sounded like you have guys a lot of similar growth ideas.

Chris Castig
Cool. That sounds amazing. Have you interviewed them in the podcast or.

Citizen Cosmos
Unfortunately, not. Unfortunately, I have not, no. But I guess I need to go out there and do it.

Chris Castig
Yeah, I've heard a lot about it, so I'm excited to learn more.

Citizen Cosmos
For sure, Chris another question you've seemed to make a large journey with what you did and you said the project is only a year. But from what you're explaining, I mean what you guys are doing in doing are very like slow steps that make based on experience of what you want to see or what you would expect to see or something like that.

Citizen Cosmos
What would be your advice apart from the one you said a couple of minutes ago to people that are building web3 projects and trying to grow their communities and trying to succeed in this space?

Chris Castig
Yeah, having run a few startups in Web two, let's say, or before Web three and coming to the space, a lot of the same principles apply as far as growing a project. For example, like I mentioned, having product market set. I mean there's a lot that I think users could read about that and learn about that. But really one ingredient of that would be just growth.

Chris Castig
And so having a metric for growth, whether it's people coming and using your app or paying for your app, is still really important. And I think that that starts with just observing how people use these tools, understanding the problems and experimenting and hopefully iterating on those experiments until you hit something to make something that people love and that that's essentially like the startup framework.

Chris Castig
If you read Paul Graham's blog or the Lean Startup book, you know, this is essentially that playbook. And in a lot of ways, I don't know that that has changed all that much. To me, launching a NFT or launching a token is largely fundraising. If you're paying for it, it's largely a way of bringing funds to the project.

Chris Castig
It's largely way of bringing in some of your first users, but that it alone is not a business plan, you know, or like a goal. Like that's not like the end goal you have like the startup, you know, the bootstrapping goal. And so I would like to see more projects. I think hitting the real problems that real people have.

Chris Castig
I think we've spent a lot of time working on infrastructure and there's a lot of people working on infrastructure and the lower level stuff and it does still need a lot of work. And at the same time, I feel like there's a lack of real world utility for how we use these apps, how someone who is not into Web three could benefit from a Web3 app.

Chris Castig
And I think we’re close I think there's a lot of projects that are starting to get closer to that every year after year. I think we get closer and closer to that, but I think that's the equation is just finding growth in users and solving real problems. And then I think people will come and I think together it's a small space thing.

Chris Castig
Together we can raise a lot of awareness for what I like to call a user owned Internet. I mean, that's essentially what we're making an Internet that's owned by the people use it as opposed to just the handful of corporations that as we have it now. I think that is the future. And I think we're on our way to that.

Chris Castig
And so I'm excited for anybody who's stepping up to build in that space.

Citizen Cosmos
What about the one thing to avoid?

Chris Castig
Oh, man, so many things. I think building too long without having a customer is a similar kind of advice, but literally finding that first customer could be such a unlock. And I think building because I've seen people build for years and so maybe nobody's using it. I think I think if you build without out customers, it's really bad. I also think fundraising can be a mix.

Citizen Cosmos
Maidsafe Maidsafe came to mind i know if you know the project. Maidsafe The guys are also building a similar thing to you, but they've been building for like 15 years or something like that. So sorry to interrupt you there.

Chris Castig
So no, I hadn't heard of that. But I guess that's the point of what you're trying to tell me is that it exists. But yeah, the final thing I was just saying is that I think fundraising can be like a pro in a con. As someone who's come through fundraising rounds, I think seed round can be nice as a way to kick start the project, but it's also to be careful about taking too much money or relying too much on that because sometimes, often incentives can get misaligned and then you end up building something that even you don't want for sure.

Citizen Cosmos
Chris, I know your short on time, I noted, so I'm going to go to the last question to the Blitz. The Blitz is three questions. You don't have to answer a super quick, but I know you have almost no time, so it depends on you. Three projects outside the top 20. Please don't say Bitcoin, Ethereum or Cosmos or Polkadot that you are curious.

Citizen Cosmos
And in terms of what they are doing and you're curious, the technology they're building.

Chris Castig
Yea, ENS comes to mind. I don't know if that counts, but yeah, ENS doing some pretty great work with coming up like a global identity for users on the Internet. I think that's really powerful. In addition, I think a lot of the stuff Protocol Labs is doing is still early days with Ipfs and Filecoin and decentralized storage. I think we're moving storage from centralized servers.

Chris Castig
This is really a huge innovation, but it's so early days. I think that's coming along. But it's still early days and a third project.

Citizen Cosmos
Doesn't have to be you don't have to push it out of yourself. So this could be 2 you know. Yeah, I here.

Chris Castig
Yeah, Those to come to mind

Citizen Cosmos
What about two motivational things that keep you going in your daily life to build on the products that you are building? I know you're writing a book as well, and I know there is a lot of other things you do. So teaching, for example, what are those two motivational things you would share with other people to help you to do those, everything that you do?

Citizen Cosmos
Sorry.

Chris Castig
Yeah, I'm inspired by I don't know if you're familiar with Stuart Brand. He started the long now, which is a way of looking at humanity and kind of a zoomed out way. There's a really beautiful book that he wrote called The Clock of a Lot Now, which I really love. It's just a handful of essays like less than a hundred pages, and the idea of long term thinking is looking at problems that you can work on in your life that might not be solved even in the time of your life.

Chris Castig
Right? Like, there's some really big challenges, like climate change, for example, is a problem that will still be a problem. I'm certain, you know, 80 years from now, I won't just have gone away. I don't think it may hopefully be less or we will have got away, but I don't think it will. I don't think it was you know, I think this will be a challenge.

Chris Castig
So I think there's something. Yeah, really inspiring and optimistic of zooming out, thinking about children and our children's children and what we can leave and leave a better world for them. And so I'm just yeah, I'm just kind of endlessly I don't know where I got it from, but just optimistic about the future. And I think that we right now have the ability to create the future right now.

Chris Castig
Why wait for the future, like when you can create it? And I think there's never been a more exciting time since maybe the nineties with the web right there, the first web that there is now, or there's just all of these technologies, not only Web three, but also AI. There's just been such a leapfrog. You know, there was like ten years.

Chris Castig
I feel like most of the tens, the 22 and 20 tens like 2018, where they're like wasn't so much innovation. There was like APIs and there was like some stuff. But but now there's such an array of technology where if you started learning AI right now and you studied single day and you start building something like a year and a half from now, you'd be like in the top of people you got today, probably like the top thousand or maybe ten would be like the top people because it's so new.

Chris Castig
There's so much you could have different ways you could travel with it. So I it's hard not to be inspired by it. You just think about the future and think about the impact you can have and just think about. It's never been easier to get started, you know, I think it's pretty exciting.

Citizen Cosmos
Last one and you kind of already answered, but you might change your mind. One person that you would suggest to follow writer GitHub account I don't know. Crypto Founder Non-Crypto Related Person. One person that you would suggest to everybody to follow up to read.

Chris Castig
I am really a big fan of Stewart Brand, who I mentioned I think is his book now is is a really great one. And Stewart Brand helped kickstart the Internet itself in the 1960s. So there is this kind of angle of tech and and humanity, I think, in all his work. And I'll also give a shout out to Kevin Kelly, who is, I would say the right word, like he learned under Stewart Brand like I'm an apprentice or whatever.

Chris Castig
So Kevin's a little bit younger and his book out of Control, I read when I was in college and Out of Control came out in the nineties. It was a funny kind of trivia about the book Out of Control. It was like required reading for everyone in The Matrix movie, so it's like a weird trivia. All right. Yeah, yeah, that's cool, because in the nineties, Kevin Kelly saw the power of decentralized systems.

Chris Castig
And if you look on the cover, there's it's all BS like in, like a technological hive But he basically saw the decentralized movement and how we would all be kind of creator bees and that's what the book's about. And a lot of the lessons still are true today and I think a lot of it has seeped into the a lot of the products and founders over the past 20 years.

Chris Castig
So that book in particular is also another one. And I guess it makes sense, the two of them, both of our blog now and our because they're both think about a lot of the same things which I think are relevant for Web three.

Citizen Cosmos
I think, yeah, definitely. There were Shevchuk brothers back then. Yeah, they had a fantastic vision sometimes. I'm not sure if that was the vision they had because it's too perfect. It's like, how the hell did you manage that? Wow, I think it was a mistake. Like, no way you could have envisioned that. Like, no.

Chris Castig
Way. It's like, but yeah, I know.

Citizen Cosmos
It's crazy. Chris Casting all of them together. Thank you very, very much. I still have some questions for you, but I know you're out of time and I know you have to run. So thank you very, very, very much for joining me. And hopefully we will see how involvement of console X, Y, Z more and more and more.

Citizen Cosmos
And I'm hoping that you will be able to onboard a lot more users than other social networks before that managed to do. And I hope in this will help you in that journey.

Chris Castig
Thanks, Serj Yeah, it's been great to get your podcast. I really appreciate you coming in asking questions today and just feel really lucky to spend some time with you today. Thank you.

Citizen Cosmos
Thanks. Thanks, everybody. Bye.

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