Mike Townsend: Hey guys. And welcometo another episode of around the coin. Today's guest is Rand Hindi. The CEO ofZama. Zama AI is a startup building, homomorphic encryption solutions for Web2and Web3 applications. We talked about what that is specifically and why thewhole internet is moving in that direction.

Mike Townsend: The company has raisedover 50 million, uh, Rand's previous company. He was the CEO of Snips an AIcompany, which was acquired by Sonos. Uh, he's an investor in over 50 startups,ranging from blockchain to semiconductors, to psychedelics. He holds a degreein computer science and a PhD in bioinformatics from UCL in London.

Mike Townsend: We talked aboutencryption what's happening. What is going to happen in the future and whatZama is doing to help accelerate that trajectory. Uh, we talked about the macroeconomy. Uh, Rand is from Paris, France. So we talked about the impact thatblockchain is having crypto is having on that part of the world in Europe, inAmerica.

Mike Townsend: Throughout the, theWestern world, we looked at the trajectory of the NFTs, DeFi going up, comingdown and made some predictions about what will happen in psychedelics of allthings. Uh, we briefly touched on Rand's, uh, investment thesis and what heviews, uh, the lens through which he makes investment decisions on.

Mike Townsend: And, uh, I deeplyenjoyed this conversation. Rand is a super, super smart. Well accomplished andbuilding something super meaningful for the world. So hope you enjoy learnsomething. If you do, please give us a thumbs up or share it. And here is  

Mike Townsend: Rand Hindi.

Mike Townsend: Alright Rand, I'mexcited to be chatting with you. Um, like I said, a few minutes ago, I wasreading some of your background and really impressed by the different projectsthat you've been involved in companies you've invested in and then businessyou're now running at ZAMA Um, I I'd love to kick it off  

Mike Townsend: with just talk, justcovering the bases of encryption, where we are today with encryption, what the,uh, challenges are in moving to.

Mike Townsend: Uh, a world wherethere's this, you don't have to think about encryption encryption at all.  

Rand Hindi: Yeah, go for it. Hi,Mike. Um, so when you think about a history of privacy and encryption, uh, it'sactually a topic that's very, very old. I mean, you know, a Caesar famously hada cipher that he was using for sending, you know, encrypted messages andthroughout history, you had all kinds of different cryptography techniques.

Rand Hindi: Encryption techniquesinvented by the military, mostly in order to securely communicate for a verylong time. However, the problem was. How can you actually communicate secretlyand share the same? Passphrase right. You needed some kind of shared secret inorder to be able to decrypt and encrypt the message.

Rand Hindi: So for a very longtime, the biggest problem with encryption was how do I send you the passwordpretty much? Uh, fortunately at some point in the seventies, people inventedwhat's called public key encryption, meaning that I can encrypt a messagewithout having to share the private secret key with you because you actuallyhave it on your side and that completely revolution.

Rand Hindi: Cryptography. Itenabled people to communicate securely. It enabled having things like, youknow, the HTTPS thing or browser, the secure communications on internet. Itenabled messaging apps like WhatsApp or signal that encrypts the messages endto end the problem. However, is that this was still only useful fortransmitting data.

Rand Hindi: Whenever you had tomanipulate the data and do something useful with. Well, you know, it wasencrypted. So by definition it was completely random. And this is wherehomomorphic encryption comes in. It's a new type of encryption technique whereyou can actually manipulate the data while it's actually encrypted and producea result after a decryption, which would be the same as if you never had theencryption to first place.

Rand Hindi: Um, so think about it thisway. Imagine I want to use. You know, uh, some kind of web service, uh, let'ssay something like Siri right now, I would need to send my voice to thecompany, providing the service. They would analyze it, send back the response.So the company offering the service. Has access to all of my data, withsomething in my homomorphic encryption, I would encrypt my data, my voice inthis case, send it encrypted to the service provider who has no idea what Ijust sent and doesn't have the key to actually decrypted, but it can stillsomehow manipulate it.

Rand Hindi: It can run algorithmson it. It can do, you know, Operations on it produce a result, which itself isstill encrypted that they send back to me. I can decrypt. So from myperspective, nothing changes, I just sent something and received a response.But now the data is encrypted even during processing. Um, and so this is reallythe holy grail of cryptography, because when you think about it, it means thatyou no longer have to send data anywhere.

Rand Hindi: Everything on theinternet can be encrypted all the time. 24 7 in everything you're doing, whichis why I firmly believe that in the future, people will not care about privacy.Not because it's irrelevant, but because it won't be a problem to care aboutanymore.  

Mike Townsend: Hmm. It it'll almostbe you, you have this, um, this, uh, new protocol, I guess, acronym HTTP Z.

Mike Townsend: So this would besimilar to how we moved from HTTP To S for secure, this will be just like thenext. Way that everyone operates and people won't think about it, uh,underneath the hood. When, when companies are receiving data from users thatare encrypted and they wanna make changes to that data or do something with it,it, you have a great example on the site where there's like an image and youflip the image and, you know, contort it in some ways, black and white, andthen you get the response.

Mike Townsend: It seems like a greatexample. It's also simple or simple. Is there, is there areas where there's nota simple algorithmic. Modification to the, to the data that, that limits theability, uh, of, of companies to make changes. Like if you wanted to, you know,update. Part of your profile or something like, are, are there areas where it'sjust technically impossible to make a change?

Mike Townsend: It used to be thecase, if  

Rand Hindi: It used to be the caseif it's, it used to be that you were limited to additions and multiplication,so you could only do very simple things. Uh, fortunately the technology hasgone way beyond that point now, and we're able to do things like artificialintelligence, like, you know, ZAMArt contracts, uh, any kind of.

Rand Hindi: Arbitrary complicatedcomputation on the encrypted data. Um, there are a few things, however, thatyou cannot do encrypted, and this is when a human needs to be involved in theloop, right? Because you know, if a human has to, well, look at the data andmodify it, a human has to look at the data and modify it.

Rand Hindi: So , it cannot beencrypted, but as long as the data is processed by a machine, it can remainencrypted at all times.  

Mike Townsend: Interesting. And arethere, are there cases where. I is it pretty much black and white? I mean, doyou see this, uh, occurring more like a switch where companies. Make someupdate behind the scenes and it's just end to end encrypted or is it, is itlike what's the technical debt that we're in?

Mike Townsend: Yeah, I guess is whatI'm, what I'm asking. Well,  

Rand Hindi: we're trying to make itsimple. Uh, it was very difficult to use this technology before because youneeded a very strong knowledge of cryptography. And as a result, nobody wasreally understanding how to use it. This is something that we're figuring outat the moment and we created.

Rand Hindi: Very simplifieddeveloper tools. So that developers of, you know, uh, cloud applications orblockchain smart contracts are able to use homomorphic encryption withoutchanging anything to the way they build their applications. So from adeveloper's perspective, you can think of it as something that comes afteryou've built your application.

Rand Hindi: You know, you justwrite your program, do whatever it's supposed to do. Then you have thisspecial. Conversion function that will take that program and convert it intosomething that can run an encrypted data. And so that's it, that's the onlychange you have to make. You have to add this extra step at the end of yourdevelopment process, but from the user's perspective, nothing changes, youknow, they're just accessing a service.

Rand Hindi: The only difference isthat they're no longer giving data away to the service.  

Mike Townsend: Yeah. And giving dataaway specifically, that is like, there's a point of decryption where companiestypically decrypted data. They modify it in some way and then re-encrypt it.And that, that. Area where there's, there's just plain taxes where the majorityof the  

Mike Townsend: hacks gonna comefrom  

Rand Hindi: hacks gonna come from.

Rand Hindi: Because when you thinkabout it, you're a hacker or you're a government and you want to engage in masssurveillance. You aren't gonna go and try to hack every single individual. Whatyou're gonna do instead is you're gonna go and access the data from all ofthose users in whatever database or centralized.

Rand Hindi: So typically, youknow, any popular. Uh, product will centralize data on millions or billions ofpeople. So this is the single point of failure. If a government wants tosurveil a billion people, they'll go to a company that has data on a billionpeople rather than go to a billion individual people. So with homomorphicencryption, this becomes a moot point because the data that's hosted on theservers of those companies is.

Rand Hindi: And there is no wayeven for the company, even for a government, even for a hacker, even for aquantum computer to actually break that type of encryption.

Mike Townsend: Uh, is there, arethere limitations like, uh, like one thing that comes to mind I wanted to askyou about is, uh, if a company has, you know, say 10,000 users and they havesome basic information about these people, they have their ages, they havewhere their, their locations, they have, uh, spending patterns, whatever it is,you know, picturing like Google would have just a monstrous treasure trove.

Mike Townsend: That data is usefulbecause these companies effectively build a business model on top of that, by.Relevant advertising to these people. Is there when they would move to fullyencrypted, is there. Does that model disintegrate by default and then the userswould have to opt in to giving data to the companies.

Mike Townsend: In order for thosecompanies to have a profitable business model, it doesn't have to access it.Doesn't have  

Mike Townsend: to,  

Rand Hindi: to uh, let's take theexample of advertising. Okay. You can hate advertising as much as you want.That's not the point of their discussion. The point is, can you still rely onadvertising as a revenue model?

Rand Hindi: If the data'sencrypted all the time? The answer is yes. And the way this would work issimple. The user will still upload their data encrypt. To the server of thatcompany and that company would then do an encrypted advertising matching,right. So they would have a database of ads and they would just, you know,blindly match those ads to the user.

Rand Hindi: So they actuallywouldn't know which ads they're serving to the end user, because this would beencrypted as well. Right. And whenever the user clicks on an ad, then they canget the attribution link to actually, you know, say the user clicked here. Soin practice, you could have a system where you have end to end, uh,advertising, uh, with homomorphic encryption.

Mike Townsend: So let me break itdown an example. So if, uh, you went on Facebook as an advertiser and you saidI wanted to target people 25 to 29 that are interested in skateboarding. Yep,Texas. How, what, how would, how would Facebook without having access to the,the playing text data, how would they reverse engineering?

Mike Townsend: Yeah I  

Rand Hindi: Yeah, I  

Rand Hindi: know that, that soundslike black magic, but is a whole point, right? So what happens is, so Facebookwould make the query, right? That query would be matched against an encrypteddatabase of profiles. And so what they would get outta this query is a list ofencrypted profiles. So they wouldn't, they wouldn't know who was select.

Rand Hindi: As part of this query,they would just basically get a bunch of random numbers. But those randomnumbers represent the result of that encrypted query. And then they could usethat with machine learning, whatever, to select the ads they wanna show, butthey also wouldn't know which ads they're selecting, because they don't knowwho they're actually.

Rand Hindi: Getting the resultsfrom, so the ad itself would be encrypted. They would send that back to theuser and the user locally under device would decrypt the ads that they'rereceiving and display them. Right? So from Facebook's perspective, the, thedatabase is encrypted. The query is encrypted. The selection of theadvertising's encrypted, the ads they're sending back to the user is encrypted.

Rand Hindi: So they have no ideawhat it just sent back to the user, but the user can display it on.

Mike Townsend: interesting. Do yousee a tremendous amount of either political or social pressure being necessaryto make large companies that build their businesses on top of advertising to,to adopt this? Even if they technically could. Or is this somehow is thiswithin their interest to do so? I believe

Rand Hindi: I believe  

Rand Hindi: it's within theirinterest because when you think about it, when you're holding plain text data,what you're really doing is holding a very dangerous asset.

Rand Hindi: Uh, you've goteverybody trying to hack you. You've got, you know, people internally leakingthe data. You've got governments coming and asking access to the data. Youreally don't want the. And those companies don't sell this data. Thosecompanies use this data to sell advertising. So if they can keep on sellingadvertising without actually having the data, there's actually a net benefit interms of data security, compliance, risk perspective.

Rand Hindi: So there is nodownside. The only companies that want you be able to use this kind oftechnologies are companies that sell the actual data. So if a company has tosell the data. then obviously they don't want the data to be encrypted. Right.Uh, but I would argue that selling data is not acceptable anyway, so, you know,too bad data disappear.

Rand Hindi: Yeah.  

Mike Townsend: Yeah. And you couldn'teven, even in theory, you couldn't sell encrypted data or does that not makesense? Well, I guess you could, right?  

Rand Hindi: Yeah. I guess youcould, I guess you could. Uh, but you know, I mean, if you're trying to sellsome marketing database to a human, who's gonna call people on the phone, thedata kind of has to be not encrypted.

Rand Hindi: Right. Yeah, unless, Imean, unless it's right. In which case you could actually do like automated AIspeech generation from the encrypted data, but then, you know, this is toofarfetched. . Yeah.  

Mike Townsend: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Andthere's not, there's not like a reverse engineering that you could do if youhad metadata on these people.

Mike Townsend: Like if you knew, uh,yeah, I get, I guess that's a whole point of encryption, but the, so Facebookblocking someone who is like, say 13 years old or younger or outside of countrythat they can't operate in would that would be detected even if they didn'thave the raw data. like, how would they be able to ma make a, a business logicdecision like that?

Rand Hindi: That's right. So, sothey could make the business logic decision. They just wouldn't know theresults of the decision. Right. So they could still, they could still geo causethat would be programmed. Exactly. They could still geofence the content isjust the content would be encrypted. So by geofencing, let's say a post, thereare implicitly encrypting the post itself.

Rand Hindi: And so the user wouldjust get it or not get it, but Facebook wouldn't know the user. Got it.  

Mike Townsend: It's interesting. Itkind of flips the whole game, like in, in many ways, you know, you're so frompractically speaking from say like a marketing or even product engineeringperspective in a company, you don't, you can't just say like a, you know,product person, couldn't say.

Mike Townsend: To like a DevOpsengineer or something. Hey, give me data on, you know, what percentage of ourusers are, uh, over 65 or like, could they run these kind of  

Mike Townsend: queries?  

Rand Hindi: queries So, so this iswhere things get a little bit, you know, um, it turns out that you can designyour cryptography. Homomorphic encryption could be designed in a way that ifyou combine it in a certain way, the result is.

Rand Hindi: visible right. So theindividual data is not visible, but the result of aggregating a ton of datawould be. Right. And so you could do analytics, you could do, you know,statistics on a large sample of users and get the result of that. So you couldsay how many users are above 30 and get a response, which is like 25, eventhough you wouldn't know anything about the individual users, um, there's evena whole field of cryptography dedicated to that called differential.

Rand Hindi: Uh, I think apple doesthat a lot in some of their stuff. Uh, like, you know, when they analyze theemojis and the text messages and things like that, um, it's amazing. It's wild.What cryptography can do today. Yeah,  

Mike Townsend: yeah. Yeah. I'm tryingto put this in, in a sense of like, where's, what's the trajectory that we'reon.

Mike Townsend: Um, When you makesense of this from like a, a large arc of history, if you, you know, look atlike pre BC, uh, encryption where they're just having some code, right. Even inlike world war I, world war II, there's like they use the, uh, I think Americaused the native Americans to. Encrypt messages famously. And that was, youknow, impossible for the, you know, the other people to, to decipher.

Mike Townsend: Do you see this asbeing a constant technological March towards this end to end encryption as theend zone? And once we're here, it's like game over or do you kind of see thisas part of the evolutionary process of encrypting all the way to like, likewhat's the next check checkpoint we hit technically, is it quantum where thatkinda.

Mike Townsend: Throws everything up.in chaos And so fortunately  

Rand Hindi: in chaos, fortunately,quantum computers cannot break homomorphic encryption and some of those newcryptography techniques, uh, just because they can't do it. Right. So, so it'spost quantum safe by construction. Um, so I think, you know, it's a morebroader question of how much privacy do people want.

Rand Hindi: I would argue thatpeople want as much privacy as they can get, and then they can decide who toselectively, give access to the. And encryption is a way to guarantee thatbecause if only you have the key to decrypt, the data only you can decide whocan see the data, even though you're letting other people provide services ontop of your data.

Rand Hindi: And this is kind ofwhere things are really different, right? Like cryptography and homomorphicencryption doesn't prevent you from using services. It just enables you to doit without revealing the data. If you don't want. But, you know, if you'regonna go to a hotel and you have to check in and there is a human in front ofyou, you still have to give them the data.

Rand Hindi: Right. They have tocheck your ID physically and make sure that is you. Right? So, so there aremoments where you want to give people access to your data, but you don't wantthat to be the default. And the reason why it's been the default is becausepeople needed that to run the services. But if you no longer need this data torun the service, then you can switch the default from a public to a privatesetting.

Rand Hindi: Mm-hmm .  

Mike Townsend: And I would imaginemost people, oh, you can add it and thing. Yeah I was gonna  

Rand Hindi: Yeah, I was gonna  

Rand Hindi: say, this is actually,I think what optimizes this the most is block. Right, uh, on a blockchain, whenyou look at a smart contract and when you look at like, you know, somethinglike Ethereum and everything else, everything on the blockchain is public, andthis is a huge problem, right?

Rand Hindi: It's, uh, you know,it's, uh, you can get front run, uh, and have all MEV kind of issues. You know,uh, people know how rich you are, right? It's very easy to target you. There issurveillance 24 7, like it's very, very problematic. You know, putting asidethe fact that a whole bunch of applications don't exist because everything ispublic.

Rand Hindi: You know, for example,you would never have a geolocated smart contract because who the hell wouldwant to put their location with a transaction. That's like asking people to puta gun to your head and steal your crypto, right? So there's a whole bunch ofstuff you in blockchain because things are public.

Rand Hindi: But when think aboutit, the reason why. Things are public isn't because of some kind of idealistictransparency vision. It's actually because you need multiple different peopleto agree on what has been done. You need consensus and to reach consensus, theyneed to be able to redo the same thing, which means they have to share thedata, which means in that case, the data is public.

Rand Hindi: But with homeencryption, you could actually have encrypted, smart contracts where the data,the smart contracts are MIS manipulating. Is encrypted. So you could still havethis decentralized network where people agree on the result of theircomputation, but instead of agreeing on the result of a plain text computation,they're agreeing at a result of an encrypted computation.

Rand Hindi: And so that means thatyou can have a public decentralized network on top of which you can buildprivate applications. Then nobody can see the content aside from the usermaking the transac. and that's huge, right? Because now you can build anythingon the blockchain. You know, you can put your identity documents on theblockchain.

Rand Hindi: Uh, you can put yourlocation data on the blockchain. Uh, you can keep your assets private, uh, onchain. Uh, you can do all of these things, which was not possible before. And,and  

Mike Townsend: is this something thatwould need to be designed from the ground up in a layer, one chain, like I'mpicturing Manero or Zcash come to mind as, as chains that seem.

Mike Townsend: Go down this path. Is,is this something that could be retrofitted to like Bitcoin, Ethereum andothers or Does it need to be foundation yes, of course.  

Rand Hindi: Does it need to befoundation? Yes of course You could, however well it's founda. It has to befoundational in the sense that you have to modify the consensus protocol to beable to deal with this encrypted states.

Rand Hindi: Uh, but there is noreason why Ethereum sh wouldn't be able to do it. I mean, likewise, you know,there, isn't a reason why Bitcoin wouldn't be able to do it, but you know, butBitcoin doesn't want to change. Right. So I think, you know, it's a, it's not,yeah, it's not even a discussion. Uh, but I, I hope, I really hope thateventually all layer ones will integrate homomorphic encryption as a way tooffer privacy on chain.

Mike Townsend: I could see this beingthe kind of thing that would cause a massive fork where you almost have these,like, you know, in the arc of history, you have times where there'sconsolidation of power. It could either be politically or socially,religiously, and then it kind of forks off. You have like core, you have almostan erosion of values.

Mike Townsend: Like I could seeBitcoin 10 years from now, or maybe even sooner or later than that. Saying wedon't wanna change anything. We're the Purita yeah. We're the Puritanmentality. And then, then it's like, well, you know, then there's kind ofthese, these, uh, collective benefits that people are, are pushing for.

Mike Townsend: And then these benefitslike encryption, maybe there's like a, a, something related to speed or cost oftransactions or layer twos or something. And they all get together. Andeventually there's enough momentum to say we're at roughly like 50, 50, theyfork off. And now. Now we have a world where there's like two large dominant,reserved, but why,  

Mike Townsend: why forking though?

Rand Hindi: why forking thoughBecause it's an optional thing. You can still run things publicly. You, you canjust get to choose between doing things privately or publicly.  

Mike Townsend: I would imagine thatthere's there's like you said, there's kind of just this pseudo religious oralmost does there's this there's this  

Mike Townsend: massive re to changethe structure  

Rand Hindi: well, there's thismassive re to change the structure, right?

Rand Hindi: It's only true of.That's true. Uh, you know why? Because yeah, that's true. When you look atother chains, right? Like Ethereum and all these guys, um, they're developers,developers care about people building applic. Right. And the whole mindset tothe whole kind of vision of Ethereum isn't to be a currency, isn't it isn't toreplace central banks is to provide a shared resource where people can proveownership of assets.

Rand Hindi: This is verydifferent. It's very, very, very different, right? Like I think that whatEthereum wants and what all of those smart contract platform wants is maximalusage and, uh, utility for the network. They don't necessarily want to stick tothe original cryptocurrency vision that Bitcoin is sticking to.

Rand Hindi: So I think likeBitcoin is a very unique ecosystem in the sense that, you know, they have this.this vision of like the global financial system collapsing and being replacedby Bitcoin Ethereum doesn't care about that. They just want everything to runin Ethereum.  

Mike Townsend: Yeah. And I think youcan maintain both of these mentalities at the same time.

Mike Townsend: I think you can, youcan see the, the global financial system. Uh, I dunno about collapsing eroding,certainly maybe moving towards, uh, more decentralized finance and then Bitcoinis like blocks in or slots in for gold ethere slots in for all, allintelligence. Yes. Yes. So, um, so you, if, if

Mike Townsend: Bitcoin is, is gold,Ethereum is like AWS, right.

Rand Hindi: Bitcoin is is goldEthereum is like AWS right Or something like that. Right. Right. Then mostthings are gonna be built in AWS. Right? Not on top of gold. Right. Right. Youcan, you can build jewelry. Right. Of course you can still do that with gold.Uh, but that's like very niche type of products. I mean, niche, you know, toget the point it's very limited.

Mike Townsend: Yeah, I, I, haven'theard many people refer to themselves as Ethereum maximalist, uh, which issomething I saw you wrote. Is that still your stance on it? And is it becauseof the, the central properties of Ethereum being programmable, whereas Bitcoinor maybe others aren't yeah,  

Rand Hindi: Yeah definitely. And,uh, and I think, you know, I mean, there's a lot of very good technologies outthere, you know, competing L one S and everything.

Rand Hindi: My conviction is thatpeople will go where developers go because developers build applications andthose applications attract people to the network. And there is no ecosystemthat's more active than Ethereum in terms of developer activity. So my, mybelief in life is developers decide what gets adopted.

Rand Hindi: Not companies, notconsumers, not governments, developers. If developers don't want it, it's notgonna happen. If developers want it, people will. And right now developers wantEthereum,

Mike Townsend: would you also saythat it's a cyclical process? That the only reason developers like want it isbecause people are willing to use it. So there's like developers will chase thetechnology. That's the best as fastest, easier to build on because that'sultimately what gets people to. Like, yeah, I think common used the app in thefirst  

Mike Townsend: place.

Rand Hindi: place I think Youcould, you could argue that. Uh, I think we're past that point though. I thinkthis would've been through four years ago in the last, you know, cycle.  

Rand Hindi: I think this cycleEthereum has is just too big. Right? And so the momentum it has and catching upto Ethereum would be extremely difficult. I mean, you would, you would need amassive.

Rand Hindi: Breakdown of thenetwork itself for people to lose faith and move to something else. Uh, but sofar it hasn't happened, right? If anything, actually, many of the othercontenders for L one S have broken down have been unreliable. Ethereum is theonly network that has never gone down. You know, there are people who arehacking it.

Rand Hindi: There's a lot of badthings in quirks and whatever. Right. And we'll see what happens with themerge, but at the end of the day, it works and that's the most important thing.Hmm. .  

Mike Townsend: And how, how did you,after you sold your last company, I saw that you, you both started Zama andthen you started becoming more active in investing across not only crypto, butyou mentioned psychedelics bioinformatics.

Mike Townsend: I might be forgettingsomething there, but seem to be the general themes. Uh, how, how did you developthe thesis? Say specifically within crypto first, uh, people, you know,projects that, that generally make sense? I mean, did you have a, a thesis thatwas, uh, unusual or atypical in how you'd invest? Um,  

Rand Hindi: so in general, I liketo invest in companies that other, that other investors don't.

Rand Hindi: So, you know, I investvery early stage in super deep tech, very math, heavy science, heavyengineering, heavy type of projects, you know, semiconductors, quantumcomputing, blockchain infrastructure, cryptography, machine learning. Uh,that's really my sweet spot. I know nothing about marketplaces and consumers,right.

Rand Hindi: Uh, I don't knowwhat's gonna be the next big app or next big NFT project, but I know whatpeople need to build. And this is really where I'm focusing on cryptospecifically have been in it since 2013, actually, uh, a friend of mine who wasa very early Bitcoin, uh, adopter, uh, basically reimbursed me for lunch with aBitcoin at the time.

Rand Hindi: Right. Uh, and youknow, so that's when I created my wallet and he sent me a Bitcoin. It was like,great. You know, I have it. And then I started buying more and more losteverything at some point, because I thought, you know, I knew what I was doing,but I. Uh, and that's when I decided to really focus on, you know, um, Ethereumas an ecosystem and really focusing, not on trading or investing andspeculating on crypto, but really on investing in crypto projects.

Rand Hindi: Uh, so I've beenpretty early in quite a few DeFi projects. Uh, I'm currently really lookinginto, you know, obviously our two solutions, but also. All of like theinfrastructure pieces are on blockchain. Um, so I've seen three cycles, right?I've seen the 2013 cycle. I've seen the 20 17 18 cycle. I've seen, you know,the 20, 20, 20, 21 cycle.

Rand Hindi: Um, and it's kind ofalways the same thing, right. Uh, you know, people get over excited, everythingblows up and then it crashes down and then people go back to build and thenpeople get excited about something new that was built. And I'm convinced, for example,the next cycle will be driven by decentralized identity.

Rand Hindi: Uh, people will startrealizing that crypto wallet is their identity and they will start signing andauthenticating themselves with their crypto wallets and everything. And that'sgonna drive massive adoption of crypto beyond the currency use case, literallyjust as a proof of identity and ownership of stuff.

Rand Hindi: Um, and know, and, andthat will probably lead to another, you know, bear cycle. And then that's justhow things work, right. Uh, um, it's, it's. But, but it's happening, right.It's getting bigger and bigger and that's the most important thing.  

Rand Hindi: So  

Mike Townsend: So if NFTs drove themost recent cycle and then maybe, maybe you could also combine in their likeDeFi and then prior to that.

Mike Townsend: Yeah. I think we haddouble cycle crypto generally. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe it was that violent because ofit.  

Rand Hindi: Yeah. We, we had thiskind of weird double cycle thing, you know, when you actually look at what. Wehad the DeFi summer that pumped everything. It actually crashed like 60% rightafter that. And then right after that, you got the NFT summer that started, andthen that brought everything up.

Rand Hindi: So actually we had twocycles condensed in two, two years, which is a very unique, uh, thing. Right.Um, so, so yes, I, I think, you know, we see those things happening faster andfaster. Hmm.  

Mike Townsend: And in the case ofDeFi, in the case of NFTs, it's easy for me to see how millions of people getin and they're able to transact and, and inflate, like have something toinflate in the first place.

Mike Townsend: In the case ofidentity, it's less obvious to me because it's not in intuitively atransactional asset. How do you see the cycle being driven? Uh, uh,decentralized or crypto identities, crypto identities.  

Rand Hindi: So, I mean, thinkabout it. Uh, the thing that people do the most online is login. right. Mm-hmmthey log into a service, they fill some data, the service offers some kind ofstuff.

Rand Hindi: And then they move on.This is transactional because what you're doing is you're authenticatingyourself, you know, a signature basically. So replace a password with yourcrypto signature. You're doing the same thing. And then you're providing dataand that's a transaction. You're sending data to a service exchange for thatservice.

Rand Hindi: That's a transaction.Right. So why wouldn't that? Part of your, you know, identity wallet, you know,why would your passport and personal data be stored on a server and not in yourwallet and just accessible to whoever needs to use it. Uh, and we've had peopletry to do that before. Right. You know, you remember this company calledGravatar, that was kind of like, you know, your centralized, you know, socialprofile.

Rand Hindi: People try to do it,but they never had the technology to do it. And I believe the technology to dothat is. Your wallet and is, uh, storing your assets on a blockchain so that itcan be reused anywhere. And would  

Mike Townsend: And would  

Mike Townsend: that look somethinglike what apple pay does where there's a new. There's a new interface to makingtransactions or is there some, I I'm I'm I'm getting at whether there's anunderlying asset that people would purchase and then that price would get overinflated and then we'd go into that cyclical cycle.

Mike Townsend: Again, Again I don't Idon't,  

Rand Hindi: I don't  

Rand Hindi: think that it would bean asset per se. Right. I think people will store, let's say their passports,uh, their location, data on chain, whatever they wanna store. Right. And thenpeople will build services on top of that accessing this data. And those serviceswill be tokenized most likely.

Rand Hindi: So I think, you know,the identity is gonna drive people to blockchain. But it might not be what'svaluable, right? What's valuable is the services you can start building. Andagain, this is where homomorphic encryption comes in. Cuz if you're gonna bestoring your private data on chain, you wanna keep it private and selectivelydecide who can see it, which means you wanna keep it encrypted on chain and letpeople use it encrypted and just reveal the result whenever you want to.

Rand Hindi: Yeah It's  

Mike Townsend: Yeah. It's  

Mike Townsend: almost like, uh,greasing the wheels, so to speak. You're you're just making it easier for thenext wave to happen. Exactly. Whatever that next wave is. Fun. Fundamentallyinvesting in. Yeah. Uh, how do you make sense? You're in, I know you'retraveling now, but you're grew up in live in, in France. Uh, and I know you alot of time investing in or talking to founders in other places throughoutEurope, in the us as well.

Mike Townsend: How do you make senseof. The, um, the big picture landscape change on, uh, this shift fromtraditional finance to, to this crypto world, but, but not even restrainedwithin finance, it's like, it seems to be, we have a few major trends happeningat the same time. Like AI, I, I spent the whole weekend playing with midjourney and I think just like blew my mind.

Mike Townsend: Yeah. And it just,well, you could easily see how this goes from a discord channel that you typein a few words and gives you a rendered image to I type in words, it gives me avideo and then I put on VR and I just articulate and describe what I want. And.All of Hollywood, all of movie production is now superseded by any individualwho wants spend enough time articulating a story.

Mike Townsend: That's interesting. Sothat's, that's like that, that alone is civiliz like civilizationally.Changing. And then you have like, we're moving seemingly from centralized powerto decentralized, at least in the Western hemisphere. And then like Indiasharply rising China, sharply rising in economies. Um, do you, yeah.

Mike Townsend: Do you have any macrothesis on the general trajectory of these things and how they settle out?Well,  

Rand Hindi: Hmm. I, I think myjournal thesis is really, you know, a transhumanist kind of agenda, right?Typical singularity type of agenda. Right. It's what we're really doing here iswe're making everything digital and by making everything digital, we're makingit easier and easier for people to live in a digital space and to startcreating this IWiN.

Rand Hindi: I twining betweenbiology and technology. And it's not just AI, it's not just crypto. Right. It'salso, you know, new medical technology. It's, it's everything. It's technologyin general. Uh, people think about transhumanism as a new idea. But in fact,transhumanism has always existed. The first time a human took a stick to get afruit in a tree.

Rand Hindi: They extended thelength of your arm. This is transhuman, right? They went beyond biology itselfby using technology in that case, a stick. So this is just a continuation ofwhat humans have all has done, which is. To not self limit to what biology gavethem as natural capabilities, but to go beyond that by inventing technology andthe more you want to integrate this technology, the more you need thistechnology to be super fluid and super simple and super seamless.

Rand Hindi: And this is reallywhat we're seeing right now. So yeah, sure. Your example is great. You know,you're gonna put a headset to describe what you. And, you know, that's probablygonna be the reality for a lot of people, right? And maybe at some point it'sgonna be like the matrix. You won't even know you're in a simulation anymore.

Rand Hindi: Uh, or maybe we'regonna be cyborgs and you know, everything in your body will be eventuallyreplaced because you're gonna live 500 years. And you know, like theprobability your arms gonna be chopped off at some point is very high. So youhave to replace it. I don't know exactly know where things are going.

Rand Hindi: All I know is thatwe're definitely seeing the beginning of. A fuzzy difference between physicalreality and digital reality. And, uh, and that's just gonna get more and more,uh, not less.  

Mike Townsend: Mm. And what areas,you mentioned a few deep tech areas you're focused on which areas do you feellike people have the least appreciation for the impacts that this technologicaldevelopment will, uh, impact the world in like the next three to five years?

Rand Hindi: Um, Hmm. I don't thinkthat people realize what's happening in medicine right now. Um, COVID amongstmany other things has accelerated the demand for better healthcare for people.And I don't mean like healthcare, like, you know, you're going to the hospital.I mean, people actually wanting to live longer, healthier.

Rand Hindi: Uh, I cannot tell youhow many of my friends who didn't used to care about. You know, these thingsare now freaks about, you know, tracking their data and understandingsupplements and eating well and sleeping well and doing all kinds of weirdinjections and things like that. This is becoming mainstream.

Rand Hindi: And I don't thinkpeople realize what that means. It's, it's a first time that people actuallycare about being healthy.

Rand Hindi: And if we've been ableto live to a hundred years, With our current lifestyle. Imagine how long we canlive by actually taking care of ourselves. So I think this is gonna be huge.Um, and I, I don't think people see that coming, right. I think in 20 years,we're gonna realize that we can live to 150, no problem.

Rand Hindi: And people will belike, oh wow, we never, we never saw that coming. They probably wouldn't eventhink about that. I don't think that there is any moment where, where peoplewill tell you, Hey, you're gonna live to 150. I think you're just gonna live to150 and then be like, huh. Interest.  

Mike Townsend: Mm. Yeah. Yeah. I, Ihave, uh, mixed reactions there.

Mike Townsend: I, I feel like there,there, there tends to be, uh, almost like a, a, a separation among people wherethere's a, a group of people who are interested in optimizing their healthmm-hmm and then, you know, those people, you generally can look at them,they're in great shape already. And, you know, they're focused on their macrosor, you know, whatever fasting or cold plunge experiment they're into.

Mike Townsend: And then there'speople who. Like roughly in the United States, Mexico, other countries as well,there's like 30 plus percent of the population who's obese or morbidly obese.And the vast majority of healthcare money goes to people who have issues that aresomehow downstream from being obese, could be diabetes, could be cardiac issuesor mm-hmm osteoporosis.

Mike Townsend: Any of those. And it'slike that's low hanging fruit from a civilizational health perspective. , it's,you know, certainly related to diet and exercise like basics. You certainlyhave like technology in the end state, but just a bit of anecdotal. My wife isan orthopedic surgeon. She practiced down in, in LA and, uh, and, and she wouldtake care of the patients down like south central LA, which were vast majority.

Mike Townsend: Just low income. Yeah.Uh, and, and just like physically obese and, and there's this tremendous amountof money spent on those people and just like, not a. Not, not a greattouchpoint for technology. To me, it doesn't seem like it's like a tech problemper se, but it's, it's such, it's such a screaming problem.

Mike Townsend: Yeah. It's like,they're not concerned with optimizing lifespan. They're just like thinkingabout the next week, the next paycheck, the next meal.  

Rand Hindi: Of course, whatever itis. Of course, of course. Right now it's luxury right now. It's a luxury in 20years, 30 years, 40. When it's affordable when it's, when it has trickled downinto everything.

Rand Hindi: When we replaceprocessed food by great food all the time, everywhere, you wouldn't even haveto make an effort, keep in mind, like, you know, the diabetes and obesitypandemic started in the seventies. So there was a starting point and thestarting point was the introduction of process flow pretty much.

Rand Hindi: Right. So, you know,if you change the baseline, if you change the default, you're changing. Theend, the end result for everyone. Right. But in order to do that, you havethings, you need things to be cheap and to work. Right. And I think we're gonnaget to that point. So in the beginning, sure. You and I probably, you know, willbe the first people to live to 150, but in a hundred years, I think everybodywill be able to.

Rand Hindi: And  

Mike Townsend: do you have a sensefor whether. the breakthrough on food production to be more either sustainablymade or healthy, widely distributed cheaper. Is this a technology breakthroughor is this more of a regulatory, operational breakthrough that needs to happen?I think it's, you view it as like, it's both, we have underground plants and soon.

Mike Townsend: I think it's both right.And I  

Rand Hindi: I,  

Rand Hindi: think it's both rightAnd I I'm not an expert in, you know, public policy and things like that.Right. But it's definitely both. Because when you think about food, if you'reable to engineer food the way you want. You can engineer it to be as good asyou want or even better. Right. So why, why should people take supplements ifthe food is already amazing and enriched with everything, right?

Rand Hindi: So I'm not talkingabout GMOs or everything, but I'm talking, you know, about all those new labfoods, people are creating, uh, Hey, if you can eat bacon, that's not baconthat tastes like bacon. That's a win. Right? Right. Yeah. yeah.  

Mike Townsend: Yeah. Yeah. I'm, I'malways I'm. I always feel like there's one pattern that seems to reproduceitself over time, which is the, the like, Hey, this is the solution.

Mike Townsend: And then it is, it isthe solution, but it introduces a whole new layer of problem. It's like, coursethe process food problem is the solution to starvation. Yes. You know, in, inthe last generation, last century. Yeah. And so, yeah,  

Rand Hindi: I agree. But theimportant thing is that on average, the population gets. right.

Rand Hindi: So, you know, you'llhave new problems introduced with every new solution. I agree with you ahundred percent, but on average, people will still be doing better. And this isreally what matters, right? What matters is that the average goes up is thatpeople are happier, healthier, you know, richer, uh, more, you know, fulfilledon average.

Rand Hindi: You know, you wantthat curve to keep going up. Um, and thankfully there will be problems tosolve. Otherwise we'll get very. . Yeah,

Mike Townsend: yeah, yeah, totally.Uh, it is almost like you want a balance of problems and. Entertainment. Yeah,you wanna, you wanna, I wanna travel to stars. I wanna watch amazing movies,play amazing games, have great experiences and also have something that's likethreatening me.

Mike Townsend: Mm-hmm , there's a,there's a great, um, there's a great kind of study on this, where they tookmice and they put 'em in a, in a tube and they would measure how fast they gofrom one side of the tube to the other mm-hmm and they would put mic. Andthey'd measure them baseline. And then they would starve the mice for a fewdays or weeks.

Mike Townsend: And they'd they'dmeasure how fast the mouse wants to go to the cheese. They put cheese at theend and that mouse of course goes faster. And then they put cat urine behind themouse. And they found that when the, when the mouse was starved and those caturine behind the mouse, That's when they would run the fastest.

Mike Townsend: So you're like, you'remotivated to get to the cheese. Yeah. And you're also scared from getting eatenbehind you, which  

Rand Hindi: makes sense. Yeah.yeah. Yeah. Stay hungry. Stay foolish. Right? Uh,  

Mike Townsend: how do yeah. Stayscared. Stay, stay hungry. Yeah. , that's the moral slightly scared, which,which I feel like climate change is a nice kind of impeding existential threatthat we're all layering on.

Mike Townsend: Um, how do you makesense of the psychedelic, um, situation we're in, which is that, you know, inthe us, at least speaking here, it was pretty much banned mm-hmm after amassive spike in popularity in the sixties. Yeah. And 50 years later, 60 yearslater, we're just starting to. Like excavate the opportunity. A lot of academicresearch is happening.

Mike Townsend: I'm in Oregon andthere's a lot of legalization that's happening solely, but surely do you, doyou reconcile this with like a particular direction of society? Is this, yeah,I'm curious how you make sense. Yeah.  

Rand Hindi: I think mental health,there's a bunch of factors, right? But mental health is a, is a growingproblem.

Rand Hindi: And we're actuallystarting to acknowledge it more often. Right? So it's not that it's not justthat more people are unhappy and have problems it's that we also have morepeople talking about it. And so when you combine that, it creates this massiveproblem slash opportunity to, you know, help them. Uh, I think there was astatistic I saw, which was really shocking, um, during COVID 25%.

Rand Hindi: So a quarter of peopleunder 20. Thought about suicides in the, in the previous six months. That'shuge, man. Wow. That's huge. It didn't mean they tried it, but he thought aboutit. A quarter of the young people thought about suicide in the past six months.I mean, what's going on. Right. And I think, you know, psychedelics isinteresting because it's actually a very good example of a technology, youknow, can you feel great and be great in your life?

Rand Hindi: Yeah, sure. You know,can you meditate for 10 years and reach, you know, this amazing. Yeah, sure.You, you can do those things the painful way, but if you have a shortcut, ifyou have technology to go beyond the natural biological ability to fix yourmind, why not use. Psychedelics is effectively a technology for your mind, thesame way that a stick is a technology for getting fruits in a tree.

Rand Hindi: Um, and, and I think,you know, we're starting to discover that and, uh, and that's gonna open up awhole new space of understanding the brain, understanding how things work. AndI think we're gonna be very disappointed once we figure it out, you know, thatit's gonna be much simpler than what we think. Um, , but I think that's gonnaopen up the door to that.

Rand Hindi: I, I think, you know,we got now to a point where it's no longer acceptable to feel miserable.  

Mike Townsend: What do you mean byit's going to be more simpler than what we think?  

Rand Hindi: I think, you know, wehave this fantasy about the human brain as like a super complex machine that isunfathomable and that, you know, we'll never be able to crack through.

Rand Hindi: I just think we hadthe wrong tools to actually understand it. Uh, and when you combine, you know,Uh, mother and imagery, right? Uh, new mother MRIs. We have more fine grainedunderstanding the brain, you know, uh, brain implants, psychedelics. These arethings which help you understand how the brain works. Uh, I think psychedelicsin particular is interesting because it's a way to modulate how the brainactually works.

Rand Hindi: Uh, we think aboutpsychedelics like PCI and, you know, L SZ and whatever, which are kind of like,you know, you're electro trolling, a whole bunch of stuff, hitting everyreceptor and then see what happens. But precision psychedelics, which is reallythe next trend in psychedelics enable you to target very specific receptorcombination and turn on or off specific parts of your brain and specificemotions and specific attributes.

Rand Hindi: So you can literallybe like, okay, I wanna turn off, uh, happiness and see what that does to thebrain. Right. Uh, see how people react. So like you have this new era ofexperimental, you know, Psych analysis, experimental, you know, neurology thatwas really hard to, to get before. Uh, and I think that's amazing, right?

Rand Hindi: Like you, you canthink of it this way. Um, psychedelics is to the mind what CRISPR is togenetics. It's a tool to manipulate it in a very precise and fine grainmanner.  

Mike Townsend: I, I agree with you. Ithink the mind has another layer. Uh, probably far stretching the analogy ofCRISPR to the body in that the, the experience you have of the world around youis the thing that's being manipulated.

Mike Townsend: Mm-hmm unlike CRISPR,which is you, you're kind of looking at your finger or your arm or, or somepart of you that is being manipulated. And even though it's, it's, it'sattached to you, it's not the, the functioning mm-hmm , uh, machine behind the.The generation of the experience. And even then, is it, is it true to sayscientifically that consciousness is created in the brain?

Mike Townsend: I don't, I don't knowmatter. Do I, it certainly seems like there's a lot of activity happening. YeahYeah. matter Do I  

Rand Hindi: Yeah matter. DoI,  

Rand Hindi: I think this is one ofthe areas where we're gonna be very disappointed. Uh, I think we're not gonnafind much. We're just gonna discover that humans are very, very good machines.Which is fine, very good machines, very good machines.

Rand Hindi: We're amazingmachines. Right. And, and I think, you know, I'm, I'm honestly sincerelyconvinced that we got to the end of what our machines can do and that we haveto, you know, uh, get beyond it. Very, very basic transhumanist, you know,vision. I think it's been out there for centuries, nothing new here. I justthink that we're getting to that point.

Mike Townsend: Hmm. And, and do yousee this as being, what, what is the new thing like at, at a certain point? Willwhat, um, what will the, are you most subscribed to the singularity?proposition where there's a supercomputer AI that kind of just outpacesreceiving computation.  

Rand Hindi: Not really. I think Iwould be more like in the generalist transhumanist kind of philosophy that, uh,you know, you want to transcend biology using technology.

Rand Hindi: I don't necessarilythink that AI is gonna be, what's gonna take over. Uh, I think actually that,you know, genetic engineering is gonna be huge, not just for the human, butalso for the environment. Uh, you know, so geoengineering. Plant engineering,food engineering, all of these things. You're manipulating biology right at theend of the day, but you're using technology to do that.

Rand Hindi: So it's not that we'regonna live in an AI simulated world. It's just that nothing that we're gonna door live or eat or whatever will be natural as in like unaltered. Um, anyway,people hate that idea, right? The idea that everything will be manipulated, butI think, you know, that's where we're going. Uh, you know, it's, it's a moreand more precise engineering of every single bit of thing out there.

Rand Hindi: Uh, and it doesn'tmean the experience is not gonna feel authentic and real, right. Uh, cuz mostpeople won't even know it's happening. You know, if you can manipulate theclimate and it's sunny outside, you're still gonna feel great because it'ssunny outside. It's not gonna feel fake. It's just gonna be.

Rand Hindi: Hmm done on purpose,right? Hmm.  

Mike Townsend: Yeah. I'm with you.Uh, how much, how much concern? Well, let me ask you this question. Do you feelthat the, the world maybe France in particular us in particular, you know, youcould pick Europe in America as, as case studies here, are we properlycalibrating our response to climate change or.

Mike Townsend: Are, do you feel thatwe're leaning too hard into regulatory caution mm-hmm or, or not enough? Or, orare we pointing in the wrong direction?  

Rand Hindi: I, I don't know.Unfortunately, I, I haven't looked enough into climate change. Uh, it's one ofthe things I have on my, uh, agenda. So actually dig deeper specifically.

Rand Hindi: I'm interested ingeoengineering actually. Uh, I'm less so interested in politics around it. I'mreally interested. You know, can we use technology to solve that problem?Right. If it's too late to go back, what can we do to make it livable? Right.Um, one thing for sure though, it feels like it's coming faster than we hadanticipated.

Rand Hindi: And that's very scary.That's very scary. I think this summer was a first time that I freaked outbeing like, something's really wrong. Something's really, really wrong rightnow. What made  

Mike Townsend: What made  

Mike Townsend: you feel that way?

Rand Hindi: Too hot, right? Like,you know, going, oh, okay. Going in Portugal in the water. And the water was aswarm as the Mediterranean sea, like what's going on. Yeah. Right. When you goto the Atlantic, you're supposed to be wearing like, you know, a, like a, likea body suit to go in the water. It's supposed to be cold.

Rand Hindi: And now it's warm, youknow? Uh, I went to Saudi, France. I went into the water. It felt like a hotbath, right? Like it was 42 degrees Celsius in Paris for a week. this makes nosense. Wow. Right. It makes no sense. Wow. Uh, and so I think, you know, likewe were told that these things were gonna happen, but I think that thefrequency at which it has been happening this year is way above expectation.

Rand Hindi: Uh, and that'sactually really like it. Wasn't supposed to be like that at that point.Hmm.  

Mike Townsend: Yeah. It certainlyseems like the kind of thing that would be, um, uh, you'd wanna be you'd wannabe more cautious than not. So I think that line of thinking makes sense. Likeif we don't know, well, we, we might as well invest more into preventing thenegative externality than, than the other way around.

Mike Townsend: I think what I viewthe challenge in political, like trip wire is, is slowing down cargo ships. Theright way, the right focus. Like, I dunno if you've heard of this, but likeinternational cargo ships are being required to slow their speed to preserveemissions. And it's like, is. how do, how, if we're ever gonna make onecollective political decision correctly, like it really, it needs to be thisone.

Mike Townsend: And I, I, I, I thinktechnologists that are like clearly and honestly, non, politically biasedarticulating, like this is the things we need to invest in. And this is how cuzeven throwing money at electric charges and electric cars. It's like, maybe itdoes more harm than good, you know, maybe you're giving a huge tax incentive towealthy people who could afford Teslas.

Mike Townsend: And then you're meanwhile,like increasing the taxes on those who are like just barely getting by and thatcreates more chaos in the world and they can't contribute to the solution.They're it's like, I don't know. It's it does seem like such an enormousproblem. And, um, yeah, and  

Rand Hindi: to be honest, I thinkthis is way beyond my level of competence.

Rand Hindi: Uh, I think quitefrankly, I don't think anybody has. , enough I don't think anybody canunderstand such a complicated system as a whole, right. There are too manymoving parts in getting this right. And I think, you know, the best bet that wehave is to just keep trying stuff. Uh, one thing we know for sure is if wedon't do anything is gonna be a, you know, not good um, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rand Hindi: So let's trysomething, anything, right. Uh, and maybe it's, you know, engineering climate,or maybe it's reducing, uh, cargo shipping. I don't know. Most likely we shouldtry all of these. At the same time. Yeah.

Mike Townsend: What, uh, Rand, whatareas? Uh, what books or people, podcasts or blogs, have you have inspired youthe most or, or ones that you still reread or pay attention to today?

Rand Hindi: Hmm. Hard to tell, um,you know, I mostly get my content by following people like on Twitter, prettymuch these days, that and Reddit, you know, these are my two sources ofinformation. Reddit is amazing. I think this is where you get the truth. Uh,anything you Google now is gonna be SEO driven. So it's gonna be basicallymarketing material.

Rand Hindi: If you want to knowwhat people really think and how things actually work, you have to look onReddit. Uh, so I think that for me would be like the primary source of fruitson the internet right now. Um, there is one book I read, which I think is reallyinteresting. If you want to understand, you know, the whole, um, mindset behindcrypto, behind, you know, the internet and everything.

Rand Hindi: It's a, it's a bookcalled the temporary autonomous zone, uh, by, uh, guy called Hakim Bey Uh, itwas written in the eighties, but when you read it today, it's surprisinglymodern in the sense that it talks about. It basically talks about how thepirate utopia created internet. Right. And they predicted everything in thatbook.

Rand Hindi: They predicted, youknow, the dark net, they predicted crypto. They predicted DAOs All of it is inthat book. So, you know, if any, if anybody's interested in, you know, kind of,uh, uh, cipher punk type of, uh, thinking and, uh, mindset, uh, then you shouldread that book. I think this is our very good one. It's very short thing.

Rand Hindi: ING, interesting. 40pages. Yeah.  

Mike Townsend: Oh, reallyinteresting. I'll check it out. Any particular subreddits that you'reespecially attracted to  

Mike Townsend: or interested in?  

Rand Hindi: or interested in Well,obviously I read the crypto subreddits, uh, and I'm also into like a wholebunch of like health subreddits. Uh, it's amazing. Like people just try stuffand post there.

Rand Hindi: Right. And so you canactually literally see from experience what people are doing. Uh, superinteresting. So, yeah, so, so I think, you know, it's, uh, Reddit is acomplicated. Community to navigate, but if you know how to do it right, you'llget invaluable information. Yeah.  

Mike Townsend: Awesome, man. Um,well, where are you on the internet?

Mike Townsend: I know I have your,your blog here. Uh, randhindi.substack.Com um, Twitter name is the same.Yeah,  

Rand Hindi: I think ran hat.com.Where does that take you? I don't even  

Mike Townsend: know. Uh, sorry.substack.com  

Rand Hindi: Yeah. dot.com. Yeah,exactly. Uh, so yeah, that's my blog. Uh, so it's mostly an investment blogthough. Right. So I, I post about, you know, deals I'm investing in and thingslike that.

Rand Hindi: Uh, I'm not a verygood poster, but I'm gonna start posting once a month, uh, soon. So it's gonnabe more and more content, uh, Twitter. That's the easiest way to get in touchwith me. Uh, my handle is randhindi Um, so I guess, you know, reach me onTwitter. I'm always open to discussing things by direct message.

Rand Hindi: Um, and yeah, enjoy mynewsletter. Sweet  

Mike Townsend: Sweet will do.Awesome, man. This was fun. Thanks so much. And awesome. Thank you, Mike, withthe business. Great. Thank  

Rand Hindi: Thank  

Rand Hindi: you. Mike Yeah.

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