This week on Thinking Is Cool 🤑

Welcome back to Thinking Is Cool, the podcast and newsletter here to make your next conversation better than your last. I’m your host Kinsey Grant. If this email was forwarded to you, sign up here.

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Stop what you’re doing right now and turn on one of these three songs: “Super Rich Kids” by Frank Ocean, “Year 3,000” by the Jonas Brothers, or “Money (That's What I Want)” by Barrett Strong. Today, we’re talking about bitcoin. The mood has to be right.

Welcome back to another edition of the Thinking Is Cool newsletter. Blink once if you’re Satoshi Nakamoto...holy sh*t I knew it!

Fine, you probably aren’t the creator of what’s been lauded as the decentralized, fairer, and freer future of money, but you can still be just as generous. Why not share the content wealth and send this newsletter to a friend?

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Now...we’ve got a full plate today what with determining the future of our global financial system and all. Before we jump in, you have options:

• Option 1: Read this newsletter for background first and then go listen to the episode on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere else you get podcasts. Recommended for people who still carry cash regularly.

• Option 2: Go listen to this episode on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere else you get podcasts and then come back to this newsletter for more context. Recommended for people who started using Apple Pay in 2014.

Ready? Let’s go.

This Week on Thinking Is Cool 🤑

Every time I’ve tried to see into the future, I’ve been off base. Perhaps it’s a distinct lack of intuition that makes futurecasting so terrifying for me; perhaps it's the Bennifer redux none of us saw coming that’s left me jaded. But either way, I’ve never been much for making predictions.

I am, however, very comfortable asking other people to make them.

So when it became very glaringly clear that the future of cryptocurrency was something that needed predicting in the early days of this show, I called on the internet to determine what the next iteration of this allegedly paradigm-shifting technology might look like. Or if that future might exist at all.

This week on Thinking Is Cool, speaking with smart people and reading smart pieces has offered me some reprieve from that persistent worry that I’m incapable of seeing 10 steps ahead of me. After making this episode, I think I know pretty well where we go from here, at least as far as cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology are concerned.

And guess what...I still don’t fully understand what a distributed ledger is. Or what a node is. Or what web 3 is. Or what any complicated concepts within decentralized finance are, for that matter. And that’s just fine by me.

• Here’s why: I’ve come to the conclusion that understanding the deepest applications of a specific piece of technology isn’t a prerequisite for participating in its advent.

It’s a realization born of whatever the emotion one step behind panic is. See, this winter, I watched befuddled as concepts like NFTs became mainstream. I read as much as I could about the technology behind this new investment class, and I couldn’t seem to understand what in the world the experts and so-called experts were talking about.

As someone whose livelihood is rooted in understanding complicated ideas and synthesizing those ideas for the masses...I was freaking the F out. I felt confused by the words I was reading, and I felt skeptical of the people uttering them. I craved clarity.

That’s why I wanted to make this episode of Thinking Is Cool. I wanted to better understand why I was being told repeatedly by the loudest voices on Twitter dot com that this was my future—inevitable, and coming at me hard and fast. Here’s an excerpt from the episode out today:

“If this technology really is the future for all of us, we need to know what we’re dealing with. I’m not content to just fumble through life putting a couple bucks into bitcoin here and there—I want to know how this shit works so I can make it work for me and for those around me. And I don’t want to be scared doing that.”

In making this episode, I’ve felt the fears subside.

I don’t fully understand what an NFT is and how it works. But I understand the baseline applications of blockchain technology, and that’s all I really need. I understand there are several potential futures for the worlds of decentralized finance, cryptocurrencies, and blockchain tech (I’ll go through the most important potential futures in the episode). I understand that there are certain deep-cut concepts in the crypto world I might always be confused by.

That doesn’t mean I’m incapable of navigating this new future of finance, which is looking more and more cryptofied each day. And the same goes for you, whether you’re a cryptopunk or someone who thinks that label is a joke. Sometimes it just takes a deep breath and a good podcast to remind us—we’ve got this.

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Now, to the details of this week’s episode:

Who: I love this episode’s guests. They’re the kind of people you get off the phone with and think, “yeah...I could definitely get a beer with that person.”

• Joe Wiesenthal, the co-host of the Odd Lots podcast and “What'd You Miss?” on Bloomberg TV.

• Aubrey Strobel, head of communications for the bitcoin rewards app Lolli.

What: A full and complete podcast episode about bitcoin that’s under 45 minutes long. Do you know how rare that is?

Where: Anywhere you listen to podcasts, especially on Spotify and Apple.

When: The sooner the better, but this and every other episode of Thinking Is Cool aren’t going anywhere. Our library is growing. Cool, huh?

Why: Don’t you want a glimpse of what the future of money is really going to be like?? Kind of kidding, but it really is an episode I’m proud of. I’d love to hear what you think about it, too.

Finally, one of the key themes of this episode goes as follows: In the world of crypto, there’s just as much malarkey as there is potential. For every genuine harbinger of promise, there’s a charlatan angling to take advantage of the uninitiated.

With that, it can be difficult to separate the wheat from the proverbial chaff as far as true insight goes. Lucky for both you and me, this week’s guests were more than forthcoming with suggestions. Some of those suggestions:

• You might consider reading The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to CentralBanking by Saifedean Ammous, Aubrey recommended.

• “A lot of the people whom I trust the most in this space and that I talk to and have learned a lot from are people who I've never met. I don't even know their names. They're like anonymous people on Twitter. And a lot of the people who...I'm most careful or like I'm most skeptical of are the people with their real names and their suits and everything like that,” said Joe.

• Might I also suggest listening to this episode of Thinking Is Cool? Idk, could be really helpful. Could be.

One last thing: I have a special treat for the fine folks who follow me on Twitter. I went to dinner with my mom and my cofounder, Josh, a few weeks back. After several drinks, Josh explained the broad concept of bitcoin to my mom in what can only be described as an Oscar-worthy performance as a crypto bro. I’ll share it to the Twitter-verse later this week—follow me to see it and roast Josh in the replies.

See you Friday for another edition of the Thinking Is Cool blog. Have the best week ever.

—Kinsey