Decentralized Internet Infrastructure: IPFS, Bitcoin Bubbles, and Censorship Resistance

Rob Long [00:00:00] The a hundred books concept is kind of a good way to, to filter them out to say, alright, these are, there's a hundred books I'm willing to put on a couple of shelves and say, this is worth a place in my home that if you stand in front of this bookshelf, you should be able to ask me about any one of these books. And I'll have a conversation with you about that book as opposed to like, eh, I got that. It looked interesting, but I never read it. You know, this is Jordan Gaal, a senior communications associate living in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and you are listening to the Van Scro podcast.

Vance Crowe [00:00:31] Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here today. I sat down in studio with my man, Rob Long. Rob is a long time friend of mine and even though we've known each other for years, we have never done an in-person interview you. If you're a long time listener to the podcast, you know that during Coronavirus we sat down, but there's something different about getting together in person and doing these. And so Rob and I have a wide ranging conversation where we talk about everything from the interplanetary file system to having your own servers stored in your house to all kinds of things about art and writing. This is a fun and interesting conversation that I am sure you will find worthwhile. Before we go to that, I am starting a new project in the Articulate Ventures Network. This month's shared experience was what we called the Connections Project, where each day I would write to the network a a way to connect with people that you know, or people that you wish knew each other and these prompts would say, Hey, reach out to a teacher that made a big difference to you. Is there a boss that really had a big impact on your career that you've never reached out to? Or who is somebody that you knew in your childhood that now has gone on to do great things and you've never reached out to tell them how much you admire them? Why don't you try and do that? The response from the network has been really positive. And so I went out to Twitter and said, Hey, would you guys find this interesting? And I was shocked by how many people said that they would be interested.

Vance Crowe [00:02:03] So we've decided to do something totally for free. For podcast listeners or anybody that's interested is if you would like to receive a weekly prompt that will get you to think about who should I connect within my network? How can I write one of these emails that will get me to push electricity and positive energy into the world? Then go to vance crow.com/connections. Each week I'll send you a prompt, and inside of that prompt will be not just who you should reach out to, but I'll actually show you an example of an email that I have actually written and then put in some writer's tips, some things that will help you become a better writer so that this is something that will help you improve your overall writing and connection skills. It's something that I think we can do to add more positive energy into the world. And as we're coming outta Coronavirus, it seems like what a great way to build out your network and not be focused on your business or making sales or any of those things, but just really adding to your life and giving yourself meaning. So I hope you'll join us. Go to vance crow.com/connections. And now without further ado, enjoy this interview with one of my closest friends, Rob Long, Rob Long, welcome back to the podcast.

Rob Long [00:03:19] Yeah, it's good to be here. First time in person.

Vance Crowe [00:03:21] Yeah, that's weird. I guess we had never done an in-person podcast. We'd done them on online when we were doing COVID stuff, but now that we are doing them in person, I feel like there's a whole level of of added benefit that comes from it. Like a lot of people don't realize there's a seven frame or so delay between when you hear somebody and when you see them on Zoom. And I feel like now that I'm back to doing in-person interviews, it makes a huge difference on my ability to be like, is this person agreeing with what I'm saying? Are they mad about what I'm saying? Am I going too far?

Rob Long [00:03:55] I'm probably not gonna be moving fast enough for that to really make a real difference, but we'll, we'll find out.

Vance Crowe [00:04:00] So, you know, you and I talk all the time, so it's one of those things that's difficult to know exactly what to talk about. But you have recently come up with this hypothesis that, or like kind of idea that jarred me at first. In fact, the first time I heard it I was like, no, that's a bad idea. It's dumb. And now I'm starting to think about it a little more deeply and it's the a hundred books that you would be willing to read over and over again as opposed to the concept of having many, many, many books in your collection. Where did you hear this idea? What is it all about?

Rob Long [00:04:31] Yeah. Yeah. So it's definitely not my idea. I know I heard Naval Ravikant reference this. I'm fairly certain I've heard Ryan Holiday, these kind of milieu is is emanated from this side of the internet. Yeah, yeah. The basic idea and the way it's kind of phrased up is mathematically pleasing to me. 'cause it's like, you know, it's better to read a hundred books 10 times than to read a thousand books once. And I love the concept of this in the sense that I, I don't think I, it, it doesn't imply that you're ever gonna only read a hundred books, right. That you know ahead of time, which those books are. But the point is that as you go through books, it kind of gives you a yardstick to think about things in terms of, alright, I'm reading this. Am I really getting something valuable out of this? Is this deep enough that I would wanna read this book again later on in my life and kind of call back to, you know, 'cause the book obviously is the same words printed in there, but I I definitely have had the experience of reading a book, you know, 10 years later and having almost an entirely different take on it and having it mean something different to me. Because a lot of the context and the, the message that you get from the book is totally dependent upon what's in your head. So the, you know, it, it's kind of an interesting, there's a, there's a, I forget who said it, but it's essentially, you know, you, you can only step into the same river one time, right? Because it's a different river, it's ever flowing and you're a different man. So it's kind of the same concept, like the, except the book isn't really flowing, but

Vance Crowe [00:06:03] Kinda works. I, so I grew up, you've been to my parents' house where my dad has the gentle madness where he is collecting books just infinitely. And as a child, I always thought I absolutely, you know, people would come over to my house and they'd be like, oh, this is what I want. I want to have a house filled with books. And me, I'm, I like, roll my eyes and be like, you have no idea the amount of clutter that this is. Right? This is like visual chaos for me because the way he would organize them would be whatever his organizational structure was, you know, how did it map to his brain? But you have no sense of order. Every book cover is trying to grab your attention. Every book binding is trying to grab your attention. So for me, I always imagined as soon as I can, I will get rid of every book that I possibly can spare just a few these right here. Yeah, I mean that really, that's like, and I have always been of the mindset of if I'm reading a book and I don't like the book, I don't like give it away. I don't, you know, I throw it away like any, anytime I don't like kill

Rob Long [00:07:08] It, but

Vance Crowe [00:07:08] I want that idea out of the, the me lou.

Rob Long [00:07:11] Yeah, no, I mean, I think it, it's interesting

Vance Crowe [00:07:13] That

Rob Long [00:07:14] You bring up the, the clutter of books, right? Because I definitely feel like as a person interested in, in books generally and like, you know, learning over time, you know, going to school, that sort of stuff that I'm kind of pursued by books. They just find their way into my presence for one reason or another. And the a hundred books concept is kind of a good way to, to filter them out to say, alright, these are, there's a hundred books I'm willing to put on a couple of shelves and say, this is worth a place in my home that if you stand in front of this bookshelf, you should be able to ask me about any one of these books. And I'll have a conversation with you about that book as opposed to like, eh, I got that. It looked interesting, but I never read it, you know?

Vance Crowe [00:07:56] Yeah. I mean the, the book that I start and then don't finish lasts at my house for like two or three months, unless it's a book that somebody let me borrow. Like, you know, you know, I'll give you back a stack of books that sometimes I've read 'em and sometimes I haven't. But for the most part, if I realize like, I've started this book and I left it behind, and now I haven't come back to it, that book is gone. And, but then this brings you me up against like an actual problem I think is going on in society, which is there's, there appears to be this push towards censoring of books, or at least this kind of concept that there are some ideas or some books that just shouldn't be allowed. And so then I, then my hoarding sensation comes out and I'm like, I want to get all the books that I can because the, the dream of having all these books digitized now comes at a cost because if somebody else holds that digital book and they can come in and be like, why don't we just take these, you know, words out, why don't we, we take this paragraph or this chapter out, or just remove the book entirely. So for me, there's like this weird tension that I'm having right now between wanting to preserve things and have access to them versus not wanting the clutter.

Rob Long [00:09:08] I have a couple of thoughts about this. First of all, kinda like I said, I think the, the, the a hundred books things gives you a good metric. So like, if, if you were truly, you know, in love with the books and wanted to save them from the, from the bad people, from the, you know, the, the, the firemen, the Fahrenheit 4 51 firemen, then you will eventually drive yourself crazy and become a, a home for wayward books, you know, and turn into the, the book man, whatever, and just be, you know, snowed in with books.

Vance Crowe [00:09:38] I'm like completely drawn to it. I mean, Jim Rutt came on the podcast because I had heard the story that he had been booted off Facebook. And the very fastest way to get me to go learn something more about somebody is when a whole bunch of people are shouting that this person should no longer be around. And I think this is like a good policy. And sometimes you'll find out the person that they're shouting out is like not a person you particularly want to engage with, but a lot of times what you find out is this person has ideas that, you know, caught the eye of soran. And so it's, it's good to figure out what ring they're holding there.

Rob Long [00:10:12] Yeah, you can definitely have people who use this feature to their advantage. Like I would say Myo OUIs was a good example of this, right? Like, he definitely was, I would say 99% provocative just for the sake of being provocative. And 1% had had interesting, you know, something to say, but that definitely drew people his at, you know, attention to him. But yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:10:38] You know, Lee Cronin had a really interesting turn, a phrase that I, it's really kind of altered the way that I use Twitter. And he's like, I want to be intellectually offensive, and I find that to be like a value, right? Because you can definitely see the people that rise to prominence because they're not afraid to take on the mob. And so they go say things that are intentionally offensive and like, that's okay, right? Like, I don't mind, I don't, I don't fault anybody that wants to do that, but like at the end of the day, the intellectually offensive things are the ones that have the potential to generate conversations that Yeah. And engage my brain in a different way.

Rob Long [00:11:18] Yeah. I mean, historically you have to be prepared to be burned at the stake for this though, right? Like, this is human behavior is if you're on the, on the outside of consensus, you're, you know, you're outside of the circle around the fire there, you're in trouble.

Vance Crowe [00:11:31] I think I've always, we've talked about this before, you know, I remember my watching a movie with my dad back when the Berlin Wall was still up, so I would've been like eight or nine. I was still pretty young and watching these people try and get over in a hot air balloon and then, you know, getting shot down and, and their people being afraid that their friends were gonna report on them. And this just seemed totally nuts to me that, that this would happen in the past. And my dad was like, no, Vance, this is going on right now. This is happening, you know, in the current moment, just in another place. And I was like, why would they do this? And my dad started talking about totalitarian regimes and like, the very first people to get picked off are the ones that are loud and can draw attention and, and are gonna have avant-garde ideas. He was like, those are the ones that get pulled out and taken away. And he was like, that'll probably be you.

Rob Long [00:12:19] Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:12:20] I was like,

Rob Long [00:12:20] The ones that are really articulate and the precipitate networks. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:12:26] And so that's always been on, on my mind, but I think that you have a much better way of just like, engaging with things that you like, but not necessarily having this pull to draw others to it. Like, I am really interested in your conversations about IPFS and like the, the new way of being able to, if you wanna put things onto the internet, being able to preserve them or protect them and not having to draw attention to them or, so how would you describe this interplanetary file system?

Rob Long [00:12:59] Yeah, that's, that's quite a jump and it's, it's fun to, to take that turn. So let's start this and say that the technology is still in its early days, even though it has been around for a while now, since I guess 2013 or 14, about that time, it's still not really tested on the level that it needs to be to be like relying on for civilizations, you know, memory, right? But this is how you get there, you do it. So the base layer of what we're talking about with IPFS is essentially a way to address content, right? Content being websites, files, pictures, movies, the kind of stuff that you're, that you can think about in terms of that you would, you would consume over the internet and all of that stuff underneath is actually just a file, right? It's just some container full of data and you can uniquely identify this file in a fascinating way. So at the core of Bitcoin is something called a hash function. And when you run a hash function, you basically just give it an input and it gives you an output. And that output is, you know, 32 bytes, right? And that those bytes uniquely identify the thing that you put in there. If you put the same thing in, you'll get those same 32 bytes out every single time. So what they did with IPFS is say, okay, we're gonna take this algorithm and use this 32 bytes that we get to, to address the thing.

Rob Long [00:14:33] So if I have a file, I can say, all right, here's the file, I know the 32 bytes of this file, I can go put this on a server somewhere and I can use those 32 bytes to go and find that file again, right? So I know for certain when I go and get it, that is exactly bit for bit the identical file that that, that the person who gave me those 32 bytes are the ones that I generated that, that it was put out there, right? So it's like a, a way of verifying that it, the content is completely unchanged.

Vance Crowe [00:15:05] And why is this solving a problem that people have?

Rob Long [00:15:08] Well, so it's interesting. If you, if you think back, like the internet now, the regular internet is, you know, like for popular use is at least 25, almost 30 years old. And when you go to old, old websites, you'll either find missing files, right? So like, you go there and there's just a 4 0 4 and there's just nothing there and you just don't get it. Or the problem that you mentioned before with the books, that's not possible in this universe, right? So if somebody goes in and just like, okay, I'm gonna go ahead and make some edits to Tom Sawyer here and just make this a little nicer sounding so the people can, you know, be happier reading it, you it, that, that, that then becomes a different thing. And when you, if you ask for the same address, it's not there, you, you get the same file when you ask for the same thing, so no one can change it. Right? Now there's difficulties around that because you, you don't want to read exactly the same bites every single day when you go to a website, right? Like presumably people are updating news for you, things like that. But there are ways around this pointers that, that you can update that, that point to the content that is stored this way. But ultimately there's a lot of problems that this can solve. So one of these is fascinating is that the way DNS, which is essentially like, you know, vance crow.com is your domain name, and that's stored in a system called DNS, which means domain name system. And essentially the way addresses work on computers.

Rob Long [00:16:40] When you type vance crow.com into your browser, that doesn't mean anything to the computer, right? It has to go to a DNS server and say, what is the address that is associated with vance crow.com? And when you pay to register a domain name, that's what's happening. They're, they're saying, yes, okay, we're gonna associate this name with an IP address, which is a thing that computers can do something with, right? So there's this centralized place where, you know, unless they allow you to do this mapping, no one will be able to get to your website or find your data, right? So if I was sitting here on your wifi network and you were here on your wifi network and you had a server for vance crow.com on this same network, but our connection to the outside world went down, I couldn't access that because my computer, I would type vance crow.com and it would say, we can't reach the DNS service. You know, we can't help you. But with IPFS, it, it wouldn't, it would be totally transparent. I would just find this data locally because all of the nodes are connected and they can forward based on the address that you're asking for, right? So if someone in your house has already downloaded it first, you can get it really fast. It's already present here. So, you know, this isn't really a problem that people are worried about typically right now, at least folks that are on really fast internet all the time. But I think more rural folks would be interested in this, in that you don't have to, you know, hump these heavy files over the network 10,000 times that, that you want it.

Rob Long [00:18:12] Or maybe you just go, you know, down the road a bit to your neighbor who has it already. And it doesn't, you know, it's not the case that you need to know physically where these files are located. It's just the network knows, right? It handles this. So it's dramatically decentralized, it's resistant to network failure. So it's kind of a peer-to-peer style connection more as opposed to a centralized or even decentralized where you have kind of local, more local nodes, but there's still somewhat centralized, it breaks all of that and it's directly peer to peer. So, and it's also highly censorship resistant, right? So right now, if you become accused of committing hate speech or something like this, and you know, the angry mob comes to the DNS provider and says, you know, take this, take this website off the internet, don't let anybody find their, their IP address, you know, stop mapping this, that's it, it's over, right? They have to go to some other DNS provider and say, will you please help us? And then they see what happened and they're like, nah, I don't think we wanna do this. It'd be interesting to hear Jim Rutt UHS take on this too.

Vance Crowe [00:19:21] Yeah, I mean, so for people that don't realize this about Jim Rutt, I didn't, the first time I interviewed him was that he was the CEO of Network solutions, which was one of the foundational companies that set up the DNS. And he talks about how, you know, the reason they were able to sell it for $15 billion is it was a government enforced monopoly. There was really very few players that were even allowed to assign these domain names to the, to the, you know, number that you had, that was your server. And he's been very interested in several of these different censorship free concepts, right? So there, there's a bunch of people working on this. The one that you have brought up to me is with IPFS and then the concept of Filecoin. So this being a new digital currency, but in a very different way.

Rob Long [00:20:10] Yeah. So that's, this is a, a pretty cool addition on top of IPFS. So IPFS is kind of like the base layer, much like HTTP would be in a normal website. Like this is the, the protocol that the computer uses to talk to the website to get a particular page or follow a link or grab a file, that sort of thing. And then on top of that, Filecoin is a way to incentivize people to store this data for you. So in IPFS, if I go and access a website, it's then in my local node, my local IPFS node, it's stored there, but I'm not pinning it, right? So pinning it is saying, keep this here no matter what else happens, even if there's a lot of other pressure on your cash here. If you, if I, if I got a lot of files in here and I run outta space, I'm still keeping it there. Push something out. But there's not really an incentive for people to do that, just for arbitrary content that they want to consume day in and day out. So if you want to keep something permanently on the internet and ensure that it's gonna happen, this is what Filecoin is for. So you can spend some, you know, how to put it, purchasing power on the network and cause a Filecoin minor to store this for you on your behalf. And essentially what they're doing is taking your file and they have to perform some proof every so many time periods to prove that they're storing a unique copy of this data, right? So they can't just go out and find somebody else who has it and say, oh yeah, I got it. Here it is. They give you a unique seed that you have to mix with the file that only you could answer questions about.

Rob Long [00:21:46] And that's the process of mining Filecoin. So the incentive there is if you have computers with storage ca capacity and you're attached to a network, you can earn, you know, Filecoin while doing this. And of course those are out there traded on the open market, pardon me, something like, last I saw they were $175 a shot and they had, you know, spiked from like, I don't know, maybe $20 ago. Yeah, I

Vance Crowe [00:22:16] Remember the, the very first time you and I talked about it, it was sub $20. And you just said something that I think I understand it in a different way. That's why, you know, you and I like talked about Bitcoin probably 15 times before I was like, I remember the conversation, I was like, give it to me one more time. And then I was like, I got it. So I think like that's an important lesson for anybody trying to understand things like IPFS or file coin, like the first time you don't get it, the better option is not, that's dumb because I don't understand it. The better option is like, I'm gonna go away, I'm gonna think about it for a little while and I'm gonna come back. But, you know, you and I have talked about the, the idea that servers will eventually become like a home appliance in the same way that somebody might have a dishwasher or a toaster or their own computers at their house, that you might have a server there to be able to store files. So you, that way you didn't have to worry about the cloud. You know, I'm gonna store all of my photographs or all of my emails, I'm gonna make sure that Gmail holds all of them, but I didn't realize that this also pairs with that concept that if you say, okay, I will preserve some of my storage on my server, this computer that I'm not going to access regularly, I'm not gonna play video games on it or to surf the internet. It's just there to, to store things. I could buy a bigger one and have it pay for itself by turning it essentially into a minor by saying, I'm going to pin these files here that people say they want stored locally, and in return for doing that, I'm going to get Filecoin, which I could convert into US dollars or Bitcoin or whatever I want to, but, but the way that they pay you for storing those files on your personal server is Filecoin.

Vance Crowe [00:23:58] Is that right?

Rob Long [00:23:59] Yeah, that's right. I wouldn't exactly say that. I wouldn't link that idea exactly with the appliance, because I think that probably in order to be profitable at Filecoin in the long run, at least, I'm not sure what it takes right now hardware wise to be competitive, right? So basically there's a marketplace and you put up bids or, you know, offers actually for, you know, to, to accept contracts to store files and people will accept them. And there's a actually a really cool tool out there by a company called Textile that will track the different miners and like keep its own reputation score for you. So you could see do they, you know, lose their contracts? Like they have to put out a little bit of earnest money when they accept a contract just so that they're not incentivized to just totally walk away from your, your deal, right? And be like, eh, I wanna stop mining now. I don't care anymore. So there's something that prevents that from happening, but ultimately I feel like it's going to be cost prohibitive or at least you, you won't be competitive with the best miners out there just with a home resource maybe. So maybe the, the the, you know, the idea of being local, like, of saying, all right, of all of the people in on my block, you know, in my city, in my state, in my continent, whatever, who are mining filecoin, you know, maybe I would like to pick people who are like on my block. That way if the uplink to the next state goes down, I'm still online, but I, I do the, the concept of the appliance, we are far from that right now.

Rob Long [00:25:37] You know, this is still the early days and it's all very kind of Rube Goldberg at this point. You know, it's kind of like maybe, maybe roughly at the same stage as VR in terms of, you know, user friendliness. Like vrs been around longer than this technology, but it's still very kind of like finding its way in the wilderness right now. And I mean, in the long run, it's easy to imagine a community valuing this resource enough to say that this is what public libraries could be. They could be repositories for data sets that are, you know, deemed important to the community that they wanna pay to support, like, you know, Wikipedia and you know, kind of actual data that people need to do their work. You could imagine, you know, farming communities, keeping soil data, you know, like sensors that are red, that sort of thing. Like aggregating those things over time, maybe making them available for sale to people who can, who you know, who can find use for them, industrially. There's a whole world out there that you can imagine an economy growing out of this, this space, but it's, it's just barely kicking off.

Vance Crowe [00:26:45] It's interesting to hear you compare it to VR because I feel like VR is somewhat user-friendly, but the idea of bringing a server into my house seems overwhelming to me, right? Like to, to to, to do this. So for me, I think maybe even further back than, than vr.

Rob Long [00:27:05] Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's a fair point though. I would say once this gets to the point where I'm, where I'm talking about this would be a truly an appliance, right? That you just find a, a footprint in your home and plug it in and then that's it. You don't need to know how to boot it up and install an operating system and be a admin and that sort of thing. It's just kind of an autonomous, you know, provider of it. Like, like your furnaces mostly, you know,

Vance Crowe [00:27:29] So are the, like, who are the people that are working on this? Because you could go to the thing of like, ah, Rob's, you know, building a bunker in his backyard and loading it up with canned goods, which now after COVID didn't seem, didn't seem that I've saying would've been smart, but like, you know, are these, are these bunker people? Are they,

Rob Long [00:27:47] No, not at all. I mean, I'm sure there are bunker people involved, right? But it, this is, I, I don't know how to put it, but it does feel like a, a renaissance in kind of distributed computing that's out there that takes the somewhat hyped, somewhat hyped, the very hyped blockchain space and kind of melds it with something that actually can cause it to have real value, right? And it's still, there's, there's still a lot of hype out there, but NFTs, for example, right, which are, are a hundred percent in some kind of a mad bubble frenzy at this point, right? Where people are spending tens of thousands of dollars on the, you know, a picture of a unicorn crying or something like

Vance Crowe [00:28:33] This, right? But

Rob Long [00:28:35] It's still, there's still something underneath there of great value. And pretty much every one of those is a, a file stored on IPFS and the contract references the IPFS address because it's that file, right? So it's not like it says, you know, unicorn jpeg and you go there the next day and the person that owns the server replaced it with a picture of, you know, a, a pickle or something.

Vance Crowe [00:29:01] So for people that I haven't aren't familiar with NFTs, I talked about it with Jack Butcher, he did a great job. You know, it's a non fungible token, essentially. It's like the artist, if, if you're talking about a piece of art, signing it and saying, this one is the authentic one, all the other ones are copies of this. And it's kind of funny because when you try and wrap your mind around it, you say, well, it's one thing to say I have a painting by Matisse and I, I want, I want to actually see his brush strokes as opposed to a computer generated brush strokes or some sort of mimic of them. But in effect, like it really isn't all that different, right? If the color shapes everything are the exact same on the painting as they are of the original, you know, what is the, what, what's the value of having the original? Well, it's that there's only one, only one person can have the original and that's what makes it valuable.

Rob Long [00:29:55] Yeah. And this is absolutely a case of artificial scarcity, right? Like a, a jpeg for example. You can copy that any number of times. And the first one is always just as good and every copy is just as good. They're digital, right? There's no, there's no kind of, you know, fatigue over generations of copy here. And yeah, obviously with a painting that is a physical artifact of which one single artist sat there and slathered paint over canvas or something, right? And came up with this physical thing that you can possess and to make a copy of it, you have to go through some serious labor. And it's not the same thing. But I think that we, you know, this is like the first use out of the gate. I think for one, it's, it makes sense that there's going to be patents, copyrights, trademarks can be expressed in this format. And it might be a way where those devices can actually be relevant to the way that we do things now as opposed to a bizarre, you know, 17th century concept of I have to send a copy to a central office somewhere and say, that's my, that's my book. I'm copywriting. You know, though it is automatic now, we don't actually have to send a copy anywhere. But the, the point being that that system hasn't been updated since, you know, the, the framing of the constitution and technology has changed greatly. They could not make, you know, indefinitely make copies of things at that time without cost, but we really can now or virtually without cost.

Rob Long [00:31:29] So I think this kind of is something that people will figure out what this means in the long run. When I was talking to Sean about this topic, i i, it, it, it kind of makes sense to me that at some point you're

Vance Crowe [00:31:43] Talking about Sean Newman. Sean Newman, sorry, because you were on Sean Newman's podcast. So Sean was just on the podcast, fantastic guy, but for people that didn't know Rob actually went on Sean Newman's podcast and they had a, a rip roaring conversation about Bitcoin and all sorts of things. So definitely, we'll, we'll leave a link below to check that out.

Rob Long [00:32:00] Yeah, yeah. It was a lot of fun. And you know, I think ultimately one of the things that you could see is that the, the network environment out there could actually make this useful. You could imagine a place, let's say something like Twitter where if you wanted to put up an avatar, they had a, a, like a coin slot that you have to put one NFT into, that's your, that you own. That's like, okay, you have to own something to have a face on this. You know? So like, not everybody might do that, or it might not mean something to everyone, but, or you could just, you know, draw a squiggle on a piece of paper and take a picture of it and say like, okay, there's my, you know, and mint your NFT and say, there it is. But you could see it being built into the way things are done and having it evolve a meaning it's just kind of out there now, right? It's like looking at the internet in, you know, 1994 and saying, well, boy, if I wanted to read about some cranks opinion about Isaac Asimov, I'm, I'm in heaven, but there's not a lot else I can do with this thing yet. And it's like, yeah, but you gotta see what, what it's capable of,

Vance Crowe [00:33:02] Man. Speaking of like, like the way things change and you don't, you don't expect it. I remember, like you and I talked about Bitcoin, you know, back, not at the beginning, but at the very early stages. So we were invited to go give talks and you know, we wrote some articles and we, we had a, like a good time enjoying this, being there around there, trying to tell people about it. And I just had, for the first time, the sensation I had when I was building houses out in Colorado, where out there, you know, we had, I had a business partner, we bought a house, we were renovating, it was going really well. And then I would go to dinner parties or just parties outside and random people, people like an attorney or, you know, some, some, some banker or somebody be like, oh, you're flipping houses. I'm, I'm gonna do that too. I hear how easy it is to make money. All you gotta do is like, buy the house and flip it. And that's when my buddy Courtney and I looked at each other and we were like, dude, it's time to get out of this. Yeah. Right. Like, we, we gotta, we gotta go. And so I'm conflicted because the other day I started hearing people that were so against Bitcoin that it was not even funny now being like, this is the obvious thing, it's the obvious way to make money. And I, you know, I'm a holder. Like I, I'll just long term I just buy it and hold it. But it does seem to me like we've seen this giant rush into it that it's, it's like everybody has come to the conclusion that there's enough people that believe in it that it's okay to believe in. And it's kind of Renee, Gerard's mimetic desire.

Vance Crowe [00:34:34] I see other enough, other people want it, so therefore I want it. But I think things are gonna get awfully wild in this space because so many more people have jumped in.

Rob Long [00:34:44] Yeah. I mean, that's what it means to be a currency on some level, right? Is that you believe that you'll be able to exchange it for something else of value in the future. And, you know, there's some problems with transaction volume in Bitcoin. It's, there's, there's, it's never gonna be a, you know, hundreds of thousands of transactions a second. You know, it's not gonna, it's not gonna replace visa at least on layer one, you know, possibly layer two. But I think in the long run, the dynamics of this are, you know, and not a, not an investment advice for you or whatever, but personally I feel like there's, I don't, I don't foresee a time when it would not be a good time to put money into Bitcoin.

Vance Crowe [00:35:33] That's always my, my like, 'cause I see all these people doing this crazy, like, I think it's gonna hit a price ceiling and then it's gonna go down 40%. And like, and it's

Rob Long [00:35:43] Like, yeah. And you know what? It probably will. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:35:44] Like it

Rob Long [00:35:45] Probably will, but why play games with it?

Vance Crowe [00:35:46] Exactly. Yeah. Just

Rob Long [00:35:48] Dollar cost average, you know, stack, stack and SATs as they say, you know, just getting into it, don't play the game. You know, it, it, you're not like, this is an amazing opportunity. Like a once in a, you know, a millennium level opportunity. I, I feel like honestly that the, you know, the inception of a new mode of economics, even like this is, you know, hunter gatherer to agriculture, agriculture to industry industry to information age. And now we're kind of like taking off with this distributed information, age, whatever you wanna call this, right? And I think it's got legs. I think it makes a lot of sense. And the reason that people are enthusiastic about it is because the rest of what's going on in the world seems sclerotic and, you know, entropy ridden and, you know, troublesome. And it's not to say that there are not problems with Bitcoin or other things that can go wrong with it, but the core ethos of this is we're just gonna go and build something and you know, good luck. I hope you like it, you know, 'cause we're building it anyway. And that's kind of what's happening. And I think that's what needs to be done as opposed to, you know, chopping each other's, you know, legs off at the ankle and arguing about, you know, this and that, that's like, just go build something instead and try to try to make something work. And that's what it feels like. It is.

Vance Crowe [00:37:14] Yeah. You know, Bitcoin reminds me of the concept. You and I have talked about this before that John Boyd talked about, right? You can either be somebody or you can do something. Yeah.

Rob Long [00:37:24] And

Vance Crowe [00:37:24] Bitcoin seems to be one of those things of like, people just doing something right? And like, we kind of have in our culture this concept of be somebody, but be somebody drags you into the day-to-day melu the fight that you're talking about all the time. Whereas like, these people were just like, it's not easy to write this code. It's not easy to set up these structures, but like, we're just gonna do it and we're gonna do it for a long enough period of time that we're building the thing that we want. And that like, then we have the thing that we want.

Rob Long [00:37:55] Yeah. Yeah. And it's not to say that it's like they're avoiding the day-to-day troubles of real life. 'cause that's exactly the opposite of this, right? It's that in order to be somebody you're playing status games, you know, you're, you're engaging in the social hierarchy, you're positioning yourself in with other people in terms of social status. And there's, there's some place for understanding, you know, relations to other human beings. Like this is not totally black and white. I don't want to, you know, paint it like that. But in the end, deeds are really the thing that matter. Like, you know, your intentions, we can all argue about that. Like, you know, how much does this really matter? I don't know. It's an open-ended philosophical question, but, you know, it's hard to argue with deeds.

Vance Crowe [00:38:41] Yeah. Just, just, just create, you know, the, the, it was interesting. I just passed 200 podcast episodes and when I started at one, the idea of getting to a hundred was like almost unimaginable. And now that I'm past 200, it's like you can barely, I can barely believe it, right? That's 200 at least hour long conversations with totally different people. And the way you get there is not by trying to get to 200 the way you get there is you just do the next one. And I think like that's that I think since you and I met and Bitcoin and Stoicism and a lot of these other things that we've talked about, right? Like, it's very much just like, don't try and take on all these things, just do the next step. And I think like whenever I get confused or exhausted, like the thing I'm, I'm usually trying to strive for some like crazy out there thing as opposed to being like, what is the next step I should take?

Rob Long [00:39:46] Yeah. How could I, how can I put something in the bank? You know, just something simple and make progress. That's interesting. I think. And you know, if I could presume to ask you a question or ask you to Yeah man, sure. It's to say something here, you once, I can't remember the exact phrasing of it, but it was about how to quit smoking. And it feels like this is the exact same thing, but just kind of with the reverse polarity. Do you remember that?

Vance Crowe [00:40:13] Yeah, absolutely. I mean, how do you quit smoking? You just don't smoke the next one, right? Like, that's, that's it. That's, that's the key

Rob Long [00:40:20] To it. You don't, you don't really have to quit. You just have to quit smoking the next one. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:40:23] You just like, and then, and then you're not like quitting all future cigarettes.

Rob Long [00:40:28] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:40:28] You're just quitting the next one. And that made it so much more manageable to me because then it would be presented that I would be presented with one choice. Like, do I want to smoke a cigarette today? And I don't have to actually do the entire day of no smoking. I just have to say no to this one right here. And like, to me, that's, that's actually been how I've quit all sorts of things, you know? And then you pick up bad vices and you know what, you know, like Yeah.

Rob Long [00:40:56] There's no magic, right? Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:40:57] You just, I, I actually, I've been thinking a lot about vices and about how so much of life is really about being able to figure out what the vice, for me, figure out what the vice is that I picked up after I set the last one down.

Rob Long [00:41:14] Yeah. Yeah. 'cause you had some kind of nervous energy that you were at taming or, or something, right? That's interesting, right? Like, there's gotta be a combination of, I mean, you know, vice is the opposite of virtue. So it's like that's, those are the things that you should be going away from and virtues are the things that you should be going towards, I guess, you know, maybe, you know, do something that, that you could imagine that's virtuous instead of vicious. You know,

Vance Crowe [00:41:41] The, the, I was talking with Nick Cizik the other day, and he really had a good point, and I, I kind of took this on, on my own. Like, when I do things like meditate or write every day, I don't necessarily feel the positive benefits of them in that moment. What I actually notice is the what happens when they're absent. Hmm. Right? It's like far, far more noticeable for me to be like, woo, things have gotten off the tracks. Why, oh, I quit doing these things that I, I know I should be doing. And to me, having that understanding is really good because, you know, when you first start doing something, you first start doing meditating, you're like, wow, this is amazing. I love this. Look at how present I am, look at like how much more clarity I have. And then over a little bit of time the newness wears off. You kind of cross that Dunning Kruger threshold and you're like, this is hard. Or this is like, you know, I don't, I don't see the major traction benefits. And so coming to terms with the fact that there are things that you do that you don't actually see their positive impact on the day to day, but that you can more quickly recognize when you're not doing them. That that seems to be a very helpful thing for me.

Rob Long [00:42:56] Have you heard the term trough of disillusionment?

Vance Crowe [00:42:58] Oh, I think, yeah. That I put that into the Dunning Kruger probably from our conversations. All

Rob Long [00:43:02] Right, there you go. Well, that's it, right? Like there's that, that, you know, that initial uptake period, and then it peaks, and then you have the trough of disillusionment, which is exactly that, where you're like excited with this new thing and solving all problems in terms of this new thing. And then it's like, okay, it doesn't actually solve all the problems and it's expensive and yeah, this takes work and everything. And yeah, then gradually it kind of comes back up to some sort of rational level that's below where the peak was, but above, certainly above the trough of disillusionment.

Vance Crowe [00:43:33] I feel like that's vr, right? Like I, I, for me, vr I, I strapped that thing on and I was like, this is amazing. I love this. Look how amazing this is. And then the more that I did it, the more I was like, well, this is so hard to do. Oh, I, I thought that it had this capacity, and it doesn't, and for me, the only way to get through the trough of disillusionment is to, is to just keep putting it on. Even when I'm like, I don't know what I'm gonna go do in there. I, I, I got bored the last time I was in there. And then thankfully during Coronavirus, I had committed to doing an hour every day, and I did it for, I don't know, 45 straight days. And it really, really helped me. But I feel like I'm probably in that trough again, and I'm excited about what VR has to offer, but it's got a long ways to go.

Rob Long [00:44:22] Yeah. It's definitely still finding its way. You know, I, I, I think the one thing I would say about it is that technologically it has really evolved, right? The, like, speci, I have an Oculus quest too, and I find it to be very technologically capable, right? The screen refresh rate is very fast. It's, I don't see any individual pixels. It does a good job of, of, you know, keeping it aligned so I don't feel like I'm getting sick or anything like that. But there's something lacking in the program space. There's some kind of human spirit, and I don't mean like, oh, it's a computer so it doesn't have human spirit. I mean, there's some kind of designs that you can feel that somebody who cared about it put it together, that that had a passion for what was going on in there. And like my, you know, whatever old school video game crank argument here would be, this is the exact inverse of what the Atari was, right? It had terrible hardware and it was not, you know, it was made of giant blocks. And, and to be fair, many of the games were terrible, but there were some games, I'll say a combat, right? Which was the one where you're like two airplanes just flying around, and if you go off one side of the tv, they'd come on the other side of the tv.

Vance Crowe [00:45:45] Like,

Rob Long [00:45:46] I, I could play that for hours, hours and hours. I could sit there and play that with you and, and not get bored for a while, right? And, and they, they made like, they didn't have great technology, but they had to just think up what would be fun to do with this. And they succeeded at that. I just don't think that whoever's putting together the VR games right now has that. And I'm not, you know, like, I don't know either. I play around with this stuff and, you know, kind of fiddle with web VR things, which I really am excited about thanks to Anthony

Vance Crowe [00:46:23] De Pascal. Yeah, man, that guy is killing it on there. I, so for me, the best thing that's happened on VR is building the Articulate Ventures underground bar. And that's because it was built for a very specific thing. It was like, I want to be able to get my network, my friends together in a space. And so, you know, I've talked about this before. I made the ceiling intentionally low because I wanted it to be like the feeling of a New York comedy club. And I like intentionally didn't make a giant coliseum because I wanted people to be pushed together. And then there's a bar and there's all sorts of programming problems with it, and it could be made better and faster and cleaner and more interesting, but it serves this purpose that makes it so much fun to go there for book club that like, that's what I want to see more of. And, and I think it's like, one of the ways that people are creative is that they're confined. And maybe one of the reasons that VR is really difficult to be creative in is that there's, it's infinite. Like you can do literally anything inside of it. All rules are broken. You know, I've played games where you, the sensation is that you're actually floating because of the way that the, you know, the imagery looks. So you're like doing gravity things or you can move in slow motion or you can, you know, be be fighting an actual boxer and it almost feels like he's about to hit you. So you have an infinite number of options. But I think it's sometimes hard to be truly, deeply creative when you don't have constraints.

Rob Long [00:48:00] I wonder, you know, and it, it occurs to me as you're saying that too, that, you know, somebody picking apart my argument might say something like, well, you know, you were 10 years old or something when you were playing the Atari and the world was totally unformed to you, so you were sitting here doing this amazing thing that was nobody else knew about at the time or whatever. Whereas now I'm a, you know, a grizzled middle-aged person

Vance Crowe [00:48:27] And,

Rob Long [00:48:28] And you know, a bit more world worn or whatever, and kind of jaded in some way and, you know, harder to be impressed about something like, eh, I'll just go care about something in real life. Huff Huff, you know, I don't know, maybe there, maybe the problem is, is in me, I don't know.

Vance Crowe [00:48:48] I mean, I think for most problems they are within you specifically. Yeah, I agree. But you know, what I wanna see is the game that is as engrossing as Sim City was, right? Where, where like, so for anybody that never played, like Sim City 2000, you are building a city, you have to zone things for residential and commercial. You gotta make these decisions about how much, how many water pumps should we get? How many electricity stations should we go? And by the way, we gotta pay for this in taxes, but if you raise the taxes too high, the people get pissed off or they don't move there. You have to deal with crime. So you had all these dimensions that you had to, to figure out, but you also had a canvas and you could build whatever you wanted within whatever space that you wanted. And I played that game for so many hours. It's, it's probably unspeakable how much time I spent on that game. And I think most people that, that were encountered it had the same experience.

Rob Long [00:49:46] Yeah, absolutely. I was presented with the Choice in 1991 or 92 that I could get a Super Nintendo or a computer, and I had a, a regular NES at the time, and I was reading Nintendo Power and I saw Sim City that, that they had it on the Super Nintendo. And I was like, oh, this is it. I'm gonna get, I'm gonna get Super Nintendo. I gotta play this game. This like, it, it, it, you know, it drew me in. And then just from randomly walking around at a Best Buy, I saw, oh, they have it on the computer too. Like, I had no idea about how any of this stuff really works. I didn't know what was going on or anything. And so my dad talked me into it, you know, I was like, ah, let's get the computer right. So he got, so we got the computer, a Packard Bell, 3 86 20 megahertz, two megabytes of Ram, you know, no sound card, nothing like, no CD ROM at the time even. And we got that and got Sim City, like the original sim city that came out. And I, yeah, I just spent endless hours playing that game and putting stuff together and breaking it and putting it together again and breaking it and like, just being utterly fascinated with this little generative thing that was in the computer that it could make some, it, it really felt like it was alive in some important way, you know, like it had a kind of homeostatic, you could perturb it and see what it does. And, and I ultimately, I feel like there's a whole realm of aesthetics that opened up to me from that, right?

Rob Long [00:51:17] Like cellular automata the programming. And in and of itself, I think it became interesting to me as an avenue to get towards whatever this enjoyable experience was, just specifically from playing that game. It was truly moving. And then when Sim City 2000 came out, we couldn't even play it. I got it for Christmas and I was like, just, you know, ecstatic and we didn't have enough ram in the computer to play it. Like we just was never going to work, right? So we had to, so we actually had to go and buy more ram and figure out, like, I didn't even know really what that meant at the time, but I had to learn and figure it out and get it done and put it in the computer myself and then we, then we could play it. And that was like one of the most amazing times ever was getting that reward of solving the problem and playing the game. Goodness.

Vance Crowe [00:52:07] It's interesting 'cause as you're describing your experience with the computer, my dad used to bring home, you know, the four, you know, the Pentium four 20 and like we, we had these varying computers and speeds, but we were not allowed to touch the command line.

Rob Long [00:52:22] Oh man.

Vance Crowe [00:52:22] Like you, you would touch the command line to get into a, a program, but if dad caught you like opening up the back end and like messing around with stuff or mom like you were in trouble because you might delete something that would ruin it. And I think about that and like relative to my physical skills. So my dad, when, when we had a, like a lawnmower, if the lawnmower broke, you either fix that lawnmower or you got the rotary lawnmower and you, you know, sharpened the blades. And so I got real good at, you know, fix and spark plugs and sharpening blades and doing all those things. And I see now the result of what you let a kid play with or really kind of what you force a kid to play with really has a big impact on things. And like letting them get behind the hood is really important because if you just let them play on the fashion layer, the only thing you're doing is letting them be a consumer of these things as opposed to a purveyor of these things.

Rob Long [00:53:24] Yeah. I think I had the exact inver inverse experience as you where within a week I had edited auto exec bat, which

Vance Crowe [00:53:33] If you know anything about

Rob Long [00:53:34] Dos is the

Vance Crowe [00:53:35] The devil line.

Rob Long [00:53:37] That's the, that's the thing, like when the computer boots up, it does everything, you know, executes all the commands in that file. And so I had taken some key thing out of there or commented it out or something and it just wouldn't, you know, it wouldn't boot up. And so I was of course, you know, in big trouble and my dad took the computer to a guy that he knew at work that could fix it, you know, so he, he like messed, messed around with it and used his social skills to get this guy to fix our computer. And then, you know, yelled at me and was like, you know, Don don't mess with that stuff anymore. And it's like, eh, okay. Right back to it, you know?

Vance Crowe [00:54:10] But

Rob Long [00:54:10] I didn't, I didn't break it that bad ever again so that nobody else could get it. But I did every, everything there is to know about dos, you know, that as a, as a whatever, a, a, a sixth grader that I could figure out about it. I did. And that's actually the first time I encountered programming if, have you ever heard of gorillas or nibbles?

Vance Crowe [00:54:32] Right?

Rob Long [00:54:33] So there's two files that come with this thing. Dos 5.0 is what I had. It had something on there called qba, which is a, a, a programming language that's basic, right? But it was the, the Microsoft basic and it had two files on there, gorillas, BS and Nibbles Bs. And if you could have it execute those files, there were games, which like to a kid is like, you know, it's just like gold when you find this. And gorillas is like, you type in an angle and a velocity and they're two gorillas on a procedurally generated little funny looking city and they throw a banana and your goal is to get the right angle and velocity so that it goes, it's like got a tiny model of physics in it so that it lands, it hits the other gorilla and then you win. Right? And, you know, so it's kind of ridiculous, but it was just some, somebody came up with this and then nibbles is the one where there's like a, it's like, it's called snakes, right? Where you eat the thing and it gets longer and longer.

Vance Crowe [00:55:28] Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And

Rob Long [00:55:29] You have to not hit your own tail. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:55:31] It

Rob Long [00:55:31] Was like that only it was, you know, this asky thing that was happening. And so like I understood at this moment that you could make something like that. This is really a power that I had. Like there it was right there. I made it work, you know, there were words and then there was a game. And so I would just tinker with these things and eventually, like the first, I remember a friend of mine stole a book from the library called Chaos by James Gleek and gave it to me when I was like a freshman in high school. And he was like, oh, this seems like something you would like, you know, and I was like, thanks, I guess, you know, and it turned, and like some of the first things I did was to, to make fractals on, on Qba, because Qba, you could draw stuff on the screen really easily. Like it's, it's surprisingly difficult to make graphics happen on a computer from scratch, but in Qba you could just, you know, draw dots wherever. And so I was like, oh, I'll do the, you know, make a zinsky triangle by picking random points and going towards a random vertex of the triangle. And it just kind of makes this, this fractal appear out of it, you know? And I, I, there's software toys, like this is what Will Wright, the guy that created

Vance Crowe [00:56:43] Sim city,

Rob Long [00:56:43] SIM city, what he calls these, they're software toys, right? Like that it's, it's something that has some system that has dynamics that, you know, you have to understand, you know, differential equations in order to really, you know, get your mind around mathematically. But you can also grab it and move some of these parameters around and have a very strong intuitive sense for what's going on. Like you were talking about the tax rates and that sort of thing. Like there's, you know, the way the dynamics of that system works, there's some optimal rate at which, you know, you have to raise the tax level to some level to get money out of it, but if you hit it too high, obviously people move away. So there's some like maximal point there and you know, if you make it nicer to live in your city, you can kind of push the taxes up a little higher and they're willing to accept this, you know, so there's that, that part of the game they're playing. But you, you develop this intuitive sense for these really high dimensional dynamic systems. Not that it's perfect, but it's probably the best we can do short of actually using, you know, differential equations.

Vance Crowe [00:57:48] I mean that I, for me, the sim city, the game that that, that it was, that helped me to understand the complexities of managing things, right? Like, you know, you ramp stuff up, you want money right now, and you turn those taxes up, that, that like throws everything out. And one of the most amazing talks I've ever seen is Will Wright talking about a fitness landscape, how, like when you play the game, the sims, you know, you can have on one axis you could go towards having fun or being social and then the other axis you could have like work or you know, professional, but like you could maximize to to on either one of those and just get to a certain level of a mountain peak. But if you found the balance in between those two, if you, if you weren't just all work or all pleasure, you could find this enormous set of mountain ranges in between there. Watching that talk was like opened my eyes and we'll put a link to it in the, in the show notes. But like, that was such a profound thing because it shows like life is not just one or the other, it's kind of the balance in between those. And I, I would not have understood that had I not played the game.

Rob Long [00:59:00] That's a really amazing talk. I would definitely say if you're listening to this right now and you're even remotely interested in this, you know, bookmark this and, and come back to it and give it a watch. There's just, it's just, it's a long talk, but there's, it's just laden with concepts like this.

Vance Crowe [00:59:20] So we're gonna wrap up, but I wanted to, to bring up something for the listeners. You have started publishing writing and man, like, not just as your friend, but like, just as a consumer of, of interesting things. I love when your writing comes out. So it's, it's quick, it's very to the point. It jars me into the art space, right? Like where it's making me think about things that get me outta my grooves. What made you decide you wanted to start writing and what's, what's going on with that? Where, where is this, where is this generating from?

Rob Long [00:59:59] Yeah. Well first of all, thank you. I appreciate that. Ultimately this comes from kind of wrapping back around to, you know, the whole IPFS space and that, that kind of decentralized concept. I think it occurred to me that the whole attitude of complaining about social media being biased or, you know, being full of mobs or kind of being prone to some kind of madness from time to time, I think that's all true. Like I really do, I see it out there, but I think complaining about it and kind of talking about what the bad people are doing every day is really a really a not the right approach, right? And the, the approach of building tall of what, what Bitcoin would do here is just, just do something instead. And to me, and I might even put this, I I think there are probably other people who would agree with me on this. So it's not exactly a Peter Thiel paradox fodder. Adam Curry is definitely one of those people that RSS is ultimately one of the technologies that will bring us back to some sort of balance on the internet where it was this fertile ground for fascinating new ideas that people could express themselves and kind of, you could productively find new and interesting things there that it was a generative place where things were

Vance Crowe [01:01:21] Coming from me from, lemme jump in RSS for people that aren't our age or a little bit older is really simple streaming. There used to be this like really

Rob Long [01:01:27] Simple syndication

Vance Crowe [01:01:28] Syndication. There was like this little button that you could push that would say, anytime this person publishes, give me a notification that says they've put something out there. And it was in vogue for a little while and then kinda went away as Twitter and Facebook kind of took over. We'll show you what information is interesting. Yeah,

Rob Long [01:01:47] I don't, it's not exactly gone away, it's just people don't really pay attention to it anymore. Like most, most platforms still support it. There's a lot of things, places you can go to read RSS feeds. Like for example, feedly.com is the one I usually recommend to people 'cause it's really low barrier to entry, really easy to use. It's got apps. And pretty much the, the mode that I'm getting at here is that blogs are ultimately are kind of the, the strongest ways to publish RSS feeds. I mean, you can do this through kind of the blogging platforms too. Like Substack, if you, if you have a Substack, you have an RSS feed already. But I like the idea that the individual publisher owns the content that they're publishing. It's not, you know, by grace of yeah, Twitter or Facebook or somebody if you, you know, all your tweets are ostensibly owned by Twitter and that's it, that's the end of it. So if they decide they don't like it, it goes away. But if it's your blog, you know, then it has to go at least go down one layer in the network stack to the service provider to try to boot you off of there. And that's then that's kind of like the next layer that I'm interested in working on, which is IPFS. So how do we, how do we solve that problem? Where should we host these blogs? That sort of thing. But I see ultimately as a blog, as potentially your personal feed that you publish things to, like you would a social network and that the other blogs that you follow are like, you know, friends or, or you know, folks that you follow on this network.

Rob Long [01:03:25] And my motivation to publish every day came from I the, you know, this is what I want, this is how I would like to interact with people. I, I would like for thoughts that are more refined than, you know, 10 words or 280 characters or whatever. But it doesn't have to be a book either, right? It's just kind of a place where I can say something, it doesn't really cost me anything. And I'm just kind of building a pattern language with my friends who are reading this to say, remember that thing I mentioned a month ago? Well, even if you don't remember, here's a link to it right here. You can go see it if you want. You know, and this, this stuff is just there and it's accruing over time. So I thought I should actually try to model this behavior because this is something that I think that I would like to see. So I'll see what it's like. And so far I feel pretty good about it and I'm gonna keep trying to do it. I'm not, I have happened to publish something every single day. I don't think I will necessarily, you know, hit every single day all the time. I don't know, maybe. But yeah, that's, that's kind of my purpose.

Vance Crowe [01:04:34] I mean, I've been like really working very hard on this idea of getting out of the super sensorium and, and you, you and I have talked a lot about Eric Holl and his concepts about art versus entertainment and I feel like your blog forces me to, to like grapple with things. And sometimes it's hard and sometimes it makes me laugh, but there's no time when I'm like, oh, I know where this is going. And that's the most important thing. I think all too often the things that we see and the things that we absorb are the ski slopes that we've skied down a thousand times. And so you're not learning anything new and it doesn't strike anything. And for me, I've been trying so hard to make my dreams deeper, to try and get further into the cathedral that is my, you know, subconscious that, that you're helping me. And I would highly recommend that if, if you really wanna see something, somebody learning how to do art, I think that's what you're doing right now. I think it's really great work, man. Well

Rob Long [01:05:36] That's awesome. I appreciate that. I have been reading Eric's book The Revelations lately, and it has definitely lodged in my brain. So like things that are kind of, you know, dreamlike or phantasmagoric or have this weird property that I'm have trouble, yeah. I have this, this trouble understanding like how defining this term, but it's definitely out there, right? The bachinski you know, I call them blasphemous landscapes after the, the HP Lovecraft idea and like, you know, and actually one of his stories, which is about a man who's about to die and is like go traveling in his dreams to this weird location that he goes to and tries to open this little door and figure out how to get it open in his dreams and the whole thing takes place in dreams. It's like there's not, you, you can't really communicate things on this level in a dry scientific way. You, it's like all about subjectivity and being embodied and like, like there's nothing more subjective than dreams, right? This, it's just pure the, the, the, you know, confection of your mind without real connection to reality, I guess.

Vance Crowe [01:06:45] Yeah. Well I'll have to have you back on and we can talk all about dreams because like, this has been a new exploration for me and I know I'm going through the Dunning Kruger, like the getting really high on the, on the beginning supply, but I think that this is a, this has been a way for me to discover things and Eric Cole is coming on the podcast. He, he agreed and we could do it like really fast or I was like, or I could wait and read your book. I just need a couple of weeks and man, that book is phenomenal. Yeah. Phenomenal.

Rob Long [01:07:17] It's really good. I'm, I've been taking copious notes and I'm gonna write up a pretty long form review of it. I have never written a book review. I don't normally read book reviews either, so it'll be a fun exercise.

Vance Crowe [01:07:30] Yeah, man. And, and book club coming right up Jurassic Park. So we will be on the last Sunday

Rob Long [01:07:35] Absolutely.

Vance Crowe [01:07:36] Of this month, which I heard you and Anthony de Pascal talking about how this was in, in vr. So we were in Anthony's for anybody. Anthony de Pascal is an artist that is really doing cool things in vr. And every once in a while we get together with a small group of people from the network and we go into one of Anthony's worlds and we have these conversations and I heard you and Anthony having such a good conversation about Jurassic Park does like, ah, let's put it in the book club. And that's what we did this month. And anybody who's welcome to join us, whether you have a VR headset or not, and we'd love to have you join us, but Rob, let's go hang out with the cameras off. But thank you man so much for coming by.

Rob Long [01:08:15] Yeah, great to be here. Thanks.