Warren Whitlock - Tokenomics to Monetize Social Media

JohnPaul: [00:00:00] Hey everyone, welcome to the podcast. I’m your host JohnPaul and this is Digital Gold. Known to many as the Bitcoin Kid, I started my own cryptocurrency out of my parents’ basement back in 2013. The goal of this show is to simplify the crypto world and explore how it changes the way the world thinks about money through conversations with thought leaders [00:00:16] in this space.

[00:00:17] JohnPaul is the founder and CEO of Orm Capital Ventures. All opinions expressed by JP and podcast guests are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of Orm Capital Ventures. This podcast is intended for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon foreign investment decisions.

JohnPaul: [00:00:42] My guest today is Warren Rittlock. Warren is a business storyteller with a vast network and a mission to help brands improve the results of their digital marketing. Throughout his career, he has created new strategies to use influence and persuasion to help his clients to achieve their goals. Warren says, I set hard sales goals and measure performance [00:00:58] but never forgot the people hate being sold but loved to buy. Warren Rittlock has been an entrepreneur in the computer publishing and media industries. He looks for collaborations where brands can share resources, extend their reach and give customers an experience they will want to share with others. Warren is currently partnering with IBM Futurists and

JohnPaul: [00:01:13] a few brands and startups along with keynotes where he can engage with executives transforming the organizations for abundant future. I’d like to welcome Warren Rittlock to the podcast.

Warren: [00:01:22] Warren, how are you doing today? Howdy. I’m glad to be here. Glad to be alive. Ah, I’m great to hear that. It’s a beautiful day today, Tuesday Election Day, but we’re not going to talk about too much about that. As we jump into the question, the first opener we have here, I’m endlessly fascinated by all the very projects that you’re constantly

JohnPaul: [00:01:39] working on. It leads me to my first question, which is, when you meet someone who is not

Warren: [00:01:43] familiar with your background and they ask you the age-old question of, what do you do? Or how do you spend your time? How do you even begin to answer that, Warren? What’s your go-to stock answer? My favorite way to answer that is I try to be an enigma. So, I thought having business cards made, then I realized that I never stay on one thing [00:02:01] long enough to get business cards made. But I like a variety of projects. I started out out of college selling radio advertising, a little bit of newspaper, actually, and then some radio advertising. Oh, the first 10 years of my career was broadcasting. And back then, what I really loved about my job was I was working in a small town and we were the only

Warren: [00:02:25] radio station. There were six newspapers. So, that was our competition. And we were very close to major markets in Northern California. And so, we had to do something unique. There were no ad agencies. There was no professional marketing being done other than the stuff we got from outside. And so, we were constantly creating things and helping people. And I [00:02:47] learned to sell. First of all, I learned that what you said about me, that I’d rather find people that want to buy than waste my time trying to talk somebody into something. And especially true now, but we can get into that later. And I was doing that. And what I really loved about the job was I could sit down and talk to anybody about anything. And because

Warren: [00:03:09] I worked for the radio station, it was exotic enough in a suburban community that people

JohnPaul: [00:03:15] would want to know about that. And then how does that work? How would radio advertising

Warren: [00:03:19] help my business? Or what, you know, I told my boss, we should be doing something like this. So, I was constantly helping people talk about their business problem. And it was different every day. I met with a guy once who had co-op money. That’s when the manufacturer says, we’ll reimburse you if you run ads. And he was in the oil business. [00:03:39] It was actually, I think it was Chevron, was one of the big companies. And he had this fund of money that he could spend. But he was because he was catering to farms. He just wasn’t selling come to my gas station or anything. And so, what can we do? We’re not the farmers radio station. What can we do with this? And the interesting things I found out about his

Warren: [00:04:05] business was much more interesting what the ads we ended up writing. And it was just like that every day. And throughout my career, that’s what I’ve looked for. There have been times when I really got stuck into the rut. I ran one business for what I call the 17 years in the suburbs raising children. And, you know, we pivoted, we changed. It was in [00:04:26] it was in PC. So we were there was always something different we were doing as new things came out. The internet came along during that time, the mid 90s. You know, so it was something new that way. But once I got out of that and realized what I really like to do was help people find the strategy that they needed to get to the next step to be successful to get

Warren: [00:04:46] their goals. So today, every time I talk to somebody, which, you know, be the same as, you know, talking to you now is what’s your goal? Now, the first thing I ask you when you divide me on the program, what’s the goal here? What do you want to talk about? How can I help people? And once we get into that, then it’s, you know, pretty easy. So I guess [00:05:06] really goal seeker would be a more a closer title. But that just, you know, that gets really muddied up with the people saying, I’m in the goals business, I’ll help you set and meet goals. Now, you know, that’s not me. But I do want to know what a goal is and get to that and really, you know, make a difference. Because like, why bother getting up in the

Warren: [00:05:28] morning if you’re not going to change the world? That’s like, great line. Why bother getting up in the morning if you’re not going to change the world? Recently, I was actually learned a little bit more about how there was a cycling team in the UK and how they had wanted to try to win some more gold medals. And so they basically said, we’re going to [00:05:44] only focus on five of the top things that are going to drive results and improvements. And over the past just two weeks, I’ve been trying to really understand what those five things are for me to focus on and understanding that if you do focus on just five things and you can bring 1% improvements every day, you’ll really see those compounding returns. So you

Warren: [00:06:04] probably can talk on that, I bet. You’re already talking about the dark side of what my philosophy of life brings because I am working on new and interesting things. And it’s normal for us to want to find the novel. It’s interesting. We don’t want change. We want things to be dependable, consistent. [00:06:23] At the same time, we like to see something novel. That’s why you look across the street, the guy seems to be doing better than you. What’s he got that I’m missing? But the truth is, if you really want to be successful, that five things rule is just fantastic. I had a friend that did magic. He put himself through college doing magic shows. And he used to love, like,

Warren: [00:06:45] I think every magician would dabble a bit in that. You want to learn the new trick. You want to find out something, what’s your master’s? Something you want to move on to the next one. And he had a very wise mentor tell him that he needed five tricks. And so when I met my friend, it’s been nearly 20 years ago, he was way far away from that. In fact, he’d grown that business [00:07:06] into having a lot of magicians work for him and then shut it down and do something completely different. It was in three different careers by the time I met him. But what he taught me about it was once he figured out to have the five tricks that he did well, they could always call him. And he was doing one trick he called the greatest card trick you will ever see. And he used that

Warren: [00:07:28] line over and over again in the trick, NLP setting things up. It was just magnificent to watch him. I’ve watched him do it 50 times. And I can’t tell you anything about how the trick is done, just that every time it’s just amazing to watch the audience, not the trick itself, the audience about how he does that. And because he can do that so dependably, [00:07:48] it’s like driving a car or riding a bike. If you get good at it, your brain takes over and does it subconsciously. And then that’s when you really are allowed to be creative. And I don’t think most people are taught about how to focus on just five or four things in their day to day and really understand what they want. Because like you said, we’re always comparing

Warren: [00:08:08] ourselves, like, oh, the guy across the street, he has this, I want that. How am I going to get that? I’m going to do what he’s doing. And I think that kind of brings me to my second question, which is, how is your view of the world as a nonconformist helped you get to where you are

JohnPaul: [00:08:21] today? And how did you begin to adopt this view? I myself identify as a nonconformist and I guess

Warren: [00:08:27] started identifying as one in the early high school days where I was like, Bitcoin’s the future. Let’s build on top of this. I was, yeah, I was junior high school. And I found a postcard, you know, you can buy a postcard back before we all printed our own things and send them an email. I was at day, it was a swap meet. And I saw somebody selling postcards. The big [00:08:52] thing was the new thing then was a posters that you could use under fluorescent lights under Black Light. That was a big thing brand new. It would have been, you know, late 60s. So, you know, kind of the end of the whole hippie era psychedelic and whatnot. And I remember going there and I couldn’t afford a post. The poster was like $3. I couldn’t afford that, but they had postcard. So I’m just

Warren: [00:09:16] rifling through the postcards. And I found one that said, I tried to be a nonconformist, but they wouldn’t have me. And I barely understood what that what it meant. But I bought it, you know, because it was only a nickel and and displayed it in my room for years. And you know, I, you know, I just like amazing that I hit upon that. And it’s so close to my philosophy. I don’t want to be, [00:09:42] I think Groucho Marx said, I don’t want to be a member of any group that would have me as a member. And I get that at the same time, I am somewhat of a joiner. I have been, you know, involved in lots of very, very much normal, traditional kind of things. I’m married for 42 years, you know, I went to, I went to college like I was supposed to. But it’s always kind of feeling like I didn’t

Warren: [00:10:08] quite fit in. They were 10 people for the team. And I was number 11, but number 10 fell out and I got promoted. Yeah, you know, like, that’s kind of how I felt about life. And so I get that, I get the non-conformance, but you got to be really careful when you decide to be a non-conformist that you’re not going to try to fit in. And so, so certain thing about confidence, [00:10:34] real confidence is walking into a room, not thinking that you’re the best, thinking that it just doesn’t matter about the rest of the world. Hmm, that’s, that’s a very strong quote, and a good way to look at it. Because yeah, there’s a fine line between being a non-conformist and then being, I think someone who is stuck up and thinks they’re the best person in the room, as you kind of hint

Warren: [00:10:54] at that. Well, really, it’s non-conformance is that, you know, their opinion is they don’t really, and I say care, whatever else is opinion about the subject is because they have their own strong convictions that they hold about, you know, for me, it was Bitcoin and money. Sure. Well, there’s, there’s the idea of resisting, which is popular in politics now. And this is, this is not a position [00:11:13] in politics at all. It’s just the word resist. We’ve got all these non-rules about everything does, we, we form everything by a committee and we do all the, basically, why are you here? What’s your goal? Back to my, my original thing, they said that, you know, what I’m looking for in life, what’s your goal? What would you like to have done? Are you want to take the 1% out and shoot

Warren: [00:11:33] them? You know, whatever it is, we can talk about it. You know, that’s an insane goal, but, you know, whatever you think is going to change everything, well, we just like to have all their money distributed to everybody else. Well, you know, live a little, you’ll find out why that doesn’t work, and you know, find out some easier, better ways to do it. Yeah, there’s so many times we just go out really [00:11:52] ready to go out and set the world on fire, and we, we don’t really know what we’re going to do and get it. It’s like the, the dog that likes to chase, chase cars, you know, what you’re going to do if you catch one. Talking about setting the world on the fire, I have a question about your first social media platform that you made an account on. And do you remember what drove you to

JohnPaul: [00:12:15] get on that platform? And then kind of on that note, where do you see these platforms going? Do

Warren: [00:12:20] you see any next big iterations in the marketing space? Well, well, actually, depending on how you look at it, because I can define email as a social media platform. But, you know, let’s move aside from in the 80s, I was, I belonged to BBS, bulleted board systems. And I, you know, I, you know, we even ran one for a little while, and copy, serve, and those kinds of things. And it was social. It was [00:12:44] very important to me. I had small children. I had just started in business. I had gotten out of that career. I talked about, you know, being the salesman for the radio station. And I found myself alone a lot. So socially, I needed to do that and copy, sir. That’s, that was the motivation that got me on doing that. I would, you’d have to log in with the modem. I’d run a bill of several hundred

Warren: [00:13:08] dollars a month doing it. And along the way, I justified it because I could sell things. And I sold just enough to about break even on it. If I didn’t count the idea, you know, that I was spending 40, 50 hours a month doing this, but so much feeding my mind of learning things, talking to people. I’d moved into a suburban community where just, I mean, it was back where I’d grown up. And none [00:13:34] of the guys I knew from high school or junior college back then, none of them wanted to take off and go get lunch. They are all very busy in their little business or doing whatever their thing was or taking off and going to some job. Yeah. And I like, but I missed this, because, you know, it’s a big thing I did when I sold advertising was to take people to lunch. And half the time

Warren: [00:13:57] was just my employees or, you know, whoever, just an idea to get away and do something different in the middle of the day. And we’ve lost that. I, you know, it’s not done the same way today as it was back then. And so I would get on CompuServe and I talked to people. And there was people that have an opinion about a certain amount of kind of technology or whatever. And actually, the people [00:14:20] that were entrepreneur and wanting to trade and some import export people fast forward now to, you know, getting on the internet and doing some of the same things. There was a use net groups very close to that. But then there were people trying to build community. So there was one trying to build a community on your surname. I don’t remember where this was, but somebody said,

Warren: [00:14:43] you know, your last name is Whitlock, you should join this community. And I did. And about then I started realizing just because somebody wants one of these things to go, doesn’t make it work. You have to have some something, enough people that want to bring it together. Either one really overworked forum leader or, you know, a bunch of people that want to come in, [00:15:05] they all are into this enough that they’re going to spend the five hours a week it takes to make make the thing work. And that’s when I really learned about community building by the time what’s called social media came on is on something called rise, RYZE in the early aughts. And a lot of good networking was going on there. It was more like LinkedIn is today. And LinkedIn then

Warren: [00:15:28] came out in 2004. And so by that time, I had quite a newsletter list. We mailed newsletters for my company back then. And then as I got into more like consulting kind of thing, I was using some of those same contact to build, you know, the weekly mailer or whatever it was, I would mail out. And so I found that building the community was important. I started a trade [00:15:54] association in the mid 90s. The first thing I did, I didn’t want to be running it or doing the work. So I let you know, I said, we should have somebody else do that. They ended up electing me the first president anyway. I found out that’s the guy that has to sign everybody up. And so that led me to grow a large mailing list, which got me into, you know, when I got on LinkedIn,

Warren: [00:16:14] I just accepted everybody’s invitation. And I probably went to three years without much caring about it until I read about Twitter. So I had a my space account by then, Twitter had come out, two things happened. They went to South by Southwest, where people started using it as like a text chain to be able to say, here’s where the cool party is going to be tonight. And people would [00:16:38] check and they’d see it on Twitter. And they’d just change the plans for the evening to get to the party where the cool people were. And then Facebook opened up to where the adults could get on, was just colleges for a while. And then they started opening up their API so other, other services could use it. And the and the first that I know of was Twitter. And so Facebook and Twitter became

Warren: [00:17:02] my thing to do summer of 2007. And by February of 2008, I was in publishing and promoting books was what I was doing for a living back in it. I looked up Twitter on Amazon and there was no such thing as a book about Twitter. And so I go like, well, that’s pretty cool. I know how to get a book written. Let me put together a book and we’ll have the first book out on Twitter. We ended up making it [00:17:26] 375 pages long and took six months to put it together. And then I found myself becoming, you know, somewhat famous for that. I could I could have my podcast. We it was block talk radio. So we call online radio program because podcasts hadn’t quite cut on this the same way. I’ve all but I love the word podcast. It wasn’t it wasn’t something to call things back there. That’s like 12 years ago.

Warren: [00:17:55] The subtitle of our book was how how social media and mobile marketing are going to change everything about the way we do business and live our lives. And that’s what we were saying in mid 2008. And I still don’t know. People would have me on on podcast back then and ask me, hey, does it too late to get into social media? Can I say no, not at all? The whole of the [00:18:23] 20th century was us learning about mass marketing, mass production, mass distribution, and then social media is the the culmination of all that. It’s two way communication with a brand. Whether that’s a person, a company, a a product, Bitcoin, whatever it is, you find birds of a feather all over the place. And certainly we’ve eliminated the need to find a mass audience and

Warren: [00:18:47] push something to it anymore. It’s now about individual one to one. Other thing people would

JohnPaul: [00:18:53] ask me back then is what? How did you get to have so many followers and I go like, you know, just one

Warren: [00:18:59] at a time? I mean, one person at a time. Now, at some point, I have 500,000 followers. At some point, you know, you just know, I’m never going to get to talking to all those people. But a lot of them don’t want to. There’s a fair minority of them that are lurkers that read what I what I say and never do any kind of action and they may hit a like occasionally. But I can’t get a good count [00:19:26] of how many of my followers have ever liked a post or retweeted it. I just don’t know. And you know, and then it gets really complicated when you go from channel to channel. So yeah, that’s but the big change that we’ve had is that we’re now talking about people with what what could be a one to one conversation. It’s interesting that you you kind of hit on a lot of a lot of key points

Warren: [00:19:52] that I want to definitely dig into one of those was incentives. And how you mentioned that in the early days of social media, you realize that you could make these social media networks. I think we saw that with blockchains a lot and with ICOs and that you can make these networks. But unless you have the right and proper incentives, not everyone was going to join people, weren’t going to [00:20:10] participate in the network actually wouldn’t flourish. And so I guess my question to you is, as social media is improving, and now we kind of have this this area where we have dominant players in this space, do you see a blockchain technology coming in and potentially helping change the incentive structure and maybe change how influencers are being paid or being compensated for their

Warren: [00:20:33] content in this iteration of digital marketing? Is there anything there that you see with the kind of the two blockchain and digital marketing coming together? Well, you’re really asking about two things there. You’re talking about incentivizing and you’re talking about getting paid. The get impayed part is tricky because the smaller your audience, the less it’s worth. But if you have [00:20:57] one follower and it happens to be somebody, if the president follows you and follows nobody else, well, then you’ve got something. A famous example of that was Conan O’Brien when he was between gigs after the whatever late night words he was in. He just decided to open up a Twitter account and follow one person. And he put it out on whatever videos he was producing or

Warren: [00:21:20] he was going to follow as one person. Well, every TV station started looking for that person to go interview and figure out who she was. It’s just some rando that he picked. Well, we never know. Maybe somebody’s cousin got a pick. But if we know, just a random woman got picked. And she got a little bit of fame for doing that. And I love the example because it isn’t about how many have [00:21:47] it’s about the quality. Like I know for sure that my 500,000 followers on Twitter were just tiny fraction of what your 500 or 5000 are worth on a per capita. They’re just not as productive. But when it’s real people, you know, and build a relationship. That’s something so imagine as we get into more of doing this, we can track who those people are. If I knew when somebody followed me

Warren: [00:22:16] that they had an interest in mining, and I could say something about your show and get them interested over there and make that connection, they’re going to remember me. Another popular thing in my view of the world here is Inception. You know, there’s a movie about every idea comes from an Inception point. You know, the movie of going dreams within dreams and all that are ridiculous. [00:22:44] Or maybe not. But the philosophy of everything comes from one point. So in networking, now, if I introduce somebody I know to somebody you know, and we’re connected and we’re the nodes, whether or not that came together because we are doing this podcast, or because we do some business together, or whatever it is, it no longer needs to be that my listeners cousin who finds out about

Warren: [00:23:10] your friends mining operation and one of the investors in that, and those two people go off and do whatever. They date and get married or they form a company together or whatever it is. The whole network is uplifted in a way that we’ve never been able to measure at all. We know society is better off because people connect. We’ve not been able to measure any of that. And so [00:23:36] working with one company now that’s developing something that when you click on a link, a remnant of that link goes back up to where the source is and you can tell what’s happened. So if I put out a link and it gets you know, tweeted, retweeted, and shared that we can kind of trace where it’s gone to, and there’s room for some incentive systems in there,

Warren: [00:24:03] but people don’t want to be social to get paid. So there’s, I’ve seen this like, oh gosh, it must be 50 times now that somebody’s coming to me and say, we’ve got something better than Facebook, we’re going to incentivize everybody. And I’m going to, yeah, and how does your MLM work? You know, it’s like some of us just don’t want to get that involved in it. [00:24:27] Who’s your down line? What’s everything you know, and you can get really carried away with those things. The difference is there’s now like there’s the browser, what’s that? The one who pays in bats? Brave Bowser? Yep. Yeah. And I interviewed somebody on my podcast that that was showing a way to accept ethernet for anybody, any podcast you want. I just needed to

Warren: [00:24:52] put an Ethereum short address into the description of my shell. And I thought, okay, that sounds interesting. And then I got asked any questions about it. Well, to make it work, the person giving the Ethereum or whatever was the token, it might have just been another ERC. The payment would require somebody to use that guy’s player. Well, now you’re into the player wars. And yeah, [00:25:17] how are you going to incentivize people to download this? Well, we’re going to pay them. We’ll give them so many coin. And you know, the tokenomics just don’t work out that well for most of you. We’re not all as good as Satoshi is coming up with a new way of paying people. So, you know, and some of that, there’s some room for some of that. But the biggest thing I learned

Warren: [00:25:39] about selling to people and influence persuasion is getting away from the idea that everybody wants another dollar in their pocket. A lot of people, most of what happens in the world, in fact, happens without that. You know, it’s like Gary Vaynerchuk says, what’s the ROI on mom? You know, you can’t figure that out. And I’m as much of a capitalist business person as there is in my way [00:26:02] of thinking in my brain. I’m trying to calculate it all out. And the more I’ve learned to let go of that and just say, let me do what’s right. And everything else is going to be okay. I’ve learned that the amazing power of reciprocity and reciprocity is often taught as a persuasion technique. And it gets people get into the quid pro quo that I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine.

Warren: [00:26:29] But what real reciprocity is, and at least in the psychological principle of this, is I’m going to scratch your back because it itches. And I’m going to do that because it’s the right thing to do and not have that expectation of when you’re going to pay me. And the more you learn to give without that expectation, that’s what it means when we hear the religious teaching, all philosophies [00:26:53] have it in. It’s what they told you about Christmas is better to give than receive. It doesn’t matter if you get all the money and be screwed McDuck. If you got nobody to share it. Exactly. I was actually, when you were talking about the connection and how that, those one connection, you can be one person, introduce them. If they’re wanting to be interested in

Warren: [00:27:13] Bitcoin mining, you can point them over here, if they’re interested in food, you can point them to someone else that you know. I think with the advent of the technology we now have in our phone and 5G being able to not only send and upload a live stream video, but to be also able to download someone else’s live video as it’s coming in and kind of getting those similar interactions, [00:27:34] those interactions you would receive at a party. If you were meeting people just by swiping on your phone, what do you see this with technology coming to the forefront and video technology and streaming

JohnPaul: [00:27:47] coming to the forefront? How do you see the ability to send video and receive video in real time

Warren: [00:27:53] to really take over social media or build a new type of connection that allows for that more intimate connection that’s almost instantaneous with either one user or thousands of fans,

JohnPaul: [00:28:04] you know, as COVID has kind of brought everyone together to stay in their houses. How do you see

Warren: [00:28:09] that, I guess, working out? I think that’s just the natural extension of where we’re headed with things. The only reason we haven’t used video from the start is that transmitting video in real time was impossible. You know, my first streaming media project was over wires. My new junior high school with cables in 1969. And we immediately wanted to put something into the classrooms, [00:28:34] right? And there was, you know, it was a small place. We could share everything, we do that, and I started envisioning what it would be like to be able to be there. And I think we always want to have that ability to connect and connect on a deeper level. And it really is, you were describing that. I got thinking of one of the things that came up when we were

Warren: [00:28:53] talking about social media early on in that, you know, in the heyday of that great decade ago. And they, you know, they go like, yeah, but don’t you don’t you hate it? How everybody’s just staring down at their phones. And so I found a picture of taking in a subway car from the 1930s, everybody was staring down at their newspaper. Things haven’t changed that much. But I think of it as a [00:29:18] TED talk. I got about intimate moments. And they told the story of a baker had get up at 2 a.m. to go, you know, bake bread. And his wife would get up at six or seven, get the kids ready for school. He’d be having lunch, and they could have a brief interaction by phone, you know, and again, this old story. So, you know, it’s just the fact that they were doing it. Today, it seems like

Warren: [00:29:42] nothing though. By the time he got home, she was off at work. And, you know, he probably was going to bed by the time she got home from work at night. So, you know, as they were going through their normal daily routine with kids and jobs at different hours and stuff, what kept what kept things going was this into the sense of intimacy. And video just really brings that out where you [00:30:04] can send a you can say in in China, they’re not using SMS and Twitter quite the same. There’s a lot more use of short audio messages. And in there’s places where there’s traffic jams that will last an hour. And you don’t know if you can get to the meeting. So, they’ll start the meeting and just include the person with these with a bit of audio input, he can listen and then he can

Warren: [00:30:29] send a message and zoom, of course, we’re seeing just makes that, you know, available to anybody can join a meeting from anywhere. And of course, you know, the silver lining from the pandemic is, we’re learning that, yeah, all this remote technology works even better. So, when you see somebody who is, you know, holding up their phone to take a picture at the extreme something at the [00:30:51] concert, it’s not because they don’t know how to be present. It’s because they want their cousin to see it. We’re at intimacy more and more. And there’s got to be some kind of balance. You know, if you’re spending your whole day trying to figure out whether or not your Instagram photo is going to get enough likes, you got a problem. But that problem’s bigger than the platform. So,

Warren: [00:31:14] I think in the future, what we’re going to see is more and more of that. I’ve got a two-year-old grandchild who phones us regularly on FaceTime. And like, you know, she just stayed with us for three days. We don’t tell her how to use the phone. She grabs him and starts using it. That’s the future. She just expects that if she wants to talk to grandma, she’s going to, you know, [00:31:40] she may need a little bit of help of the dialing part, but you know, she’s going to get on and, you know, and my poor wife has to spend 20 minutes at the drop of hat. Just, you know, when the kid gets bored and goes off and does things and comes back and she’s waiting on the FaceTime call. By the way, I’ve seen my poor wife. She never complains about it, you know. She loves that she

Warren: [00:32:02] can do that. And I look at it and I go like, oh, gosh, what’s this going to become? It’s telepresence all the time. So, you don’t need to go to a big office if you can be with all the people. The other things that makes it there. Does this replace face-to-face? No. It’s just that, you know, until we get the technology to beam ourselves halfway around the world, it’ll be more convenient [00:32:24] to do a lot of this stuff by the technologies we do have. So, you know, this year will be the time when people are complaining that they don’t get to go to Thanksgiving. And next year, they’re going to be looking forward to it in a way they haven’t in years. Yeah, you’re exactly right. One of the things you mentioned was intimacy. And I found it interesting

Warren: [00:32:44] that you know, intimacy is kind of being created by these direct connections with either the creator, the influencer, you know, the child’s grandmother. I wanted to jump to another topic, which was about Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining. Do you remember when you first heard about Bitcoin or Bitcoin

JohnPaul: [00:33:01] mining? And did you end up getting a miner? Can you tell a little bit more about that story?

Warren: [00:33:04] I saw the white paper when it came out. So, when I read about that, my interest in blockchain got big. So, you know, one famous big deal friend in it and that interest with those things together, I just had to start looking for it. And that’s about the time I started thinking of myself as a futurist, you know, and I got officially that title from IBM in 2014. But even back then, it was [00:33:31] like, how can I use my platform and tweet about this and the new technology? And so, the same goes for 5G for Internet of Things, IoT, for all the technology coming out, especially machine learning and AI. But the nice thing about blockchain is it’s one, it’s a foundation that goes everywhere. And fortunately, because of the crypto and the startups were needing advice and, you know,

Warren: [00:33:58] and I have a large audience there. So, I’ll come together that it’s a good way to make a living, too. But all of this technology, you’ve got to look at it. How’s it going to really help people in the future? And if not, you know, why are you going to spend all this money you make? I mean, really, think about it. You do really well and you can, you know, set around playing Xbox all day [00:34:21] and meanwhile, you’ve got a machine going, it’s mining coin and you can buy anything you want. Well, if you never, you know, leave the house, how much money do you need? Mom wants you to move out, by the way. And it’s not to get land. Yeah, it’s not to get lambos and, you know, and make it rain at the club and all the, you know, all of the Hollywood version of what

Warren: [00:34:50] wealth is, it’s getting, where can I really make a difference? And that’s why you see somebody like Bill Gates has been, you know, he’s been at it now for over 15 years that he has, you know, focus on giving away his money. And he does a good job that Warren Buffett gave him money to give away, you know, and so, you know, he learned late in life. I learned to give it all away a lot [00:35:19] earlier in life. Here you go, kids. Here you go. Take this funny money. But on a serious note, I actually, you know, it was interesting that you say that because when I was in high school, finding out about Bitcoin, this idea of, you know, why are we all going to school to go to college to get a degree to make start making money was interesting to me. Because at that point,

Warren: [00:35:41] I had a robotics camp and I was making, you know, 30 to $40,000 a year running this robotics camp as a 16, 17 year old kid. And I was understanding that maybe there was more to life than making money. And I think that’s why Bitcoin, you know, a monetary policy where it would hold its value, it was scarce, just had a much better monetary, I guess, environment to build wealth on top of, [00:36:03] which I feel like is one of the hardest things or one of the biggest problems facing people today, which is basically they can’t build their wealth on anything because it’s always being printed. Their money is losing value. And if you don’t own real estate, if you don’t own these hard assets, building that security to be able to fulfill those Maslow hierarchy needs that you mentioned

Warren: [00:36:20] is very hard to do. And so one of my last questions to you is, is what problem do you face every day or that you think a lot of people face every day that nobody has solved yet that maybe a technology like blockchain or machine learning or anything else we’ve been talking about social media could solve or could help solve and move that in the [00:36:38] right direction? Well, it’s a great question. You know, I always hate to pick a favor because, you know, I don’t conform. You know, one thing I’m thinking about, especially as we’ve discussed today is trust. Trust is one thing that’s really lacking in our world. And, you know, Bitcoin and crypto, it actually is introducing trust. So, you know, sometimes we talk about it

Warren: [00:37:02] is I can spend Bitcoin with you and I don’t have to trust you, but it is the trust. This has been not only amazing to hear your social media background, but the whole conversation of value and intimacy. And I want to give the listeners an opportunity to connect with you online. So, where is the best place for them to reach out when they’re done with anything? [00:37:21] If you find my name and I’m not a former Obama administration employee, I’m the old white guy. The black guy is not me. Warren Whitlock and I’m on Twitter at Warren Whitlock, LinkedIn, Facebook, Telegram, WhatsApp, you know, I’m on all those things and you can find me or Warren Whitlock.com. Well, thank you, Warren, for coming on again to the Digital Gold

Warren: [00:37:46] podcast. All right, great. I look forward to seeing this get out there and help some people.

JohnPaul: [00:37:51] No, I’m excited to get it out there. Well, thanks again, guys, for coming on and Bitcoin

[00:37:55] and mine on. I hope you enjoyed today’s episode of Digital Gold. Be sure to subscribe so you’re notified when the new episode drops. Don’t forget to leave us a five-star review to support our

Warren: [00:38:06] journey to become the number one crypto podcast. Thanks so much for listening and until next time,

[00:38:11] mine on.