The Interop

What's your sense of the vibe compared to last year? I'm curious.

I get the sense of a little bit of like, self flagellation.

It's been a long bear market and you can feel it.

These other ecosystems tend to be trying to build one system, one system to sort of optimize on one variable.

Yeah.

And Cosmos is building a system of systems.

And the difference between that is like the difference between algebra and calculus. Act like a winner.

This is kind of the message I want to give Cosmos is like, recognize, take the W.

You know, you don't have to be like all these other people or organizations and whatever that feel victimized.

Like, Cosmos is actually the winner. They haven't figured it out yet.

Hey, Robert Kelley.

Hey, Seb.

What's going on?

Nice to see you here in Dubai.

Yeah, it's been a while.

It has been a while. I've been in the US for like two months.

Yeah. Yeah. So a lot of people in Cosmos may not recognize you, but they might know your work.

Right.

And. Yeah. So what have you been up to this last? Has it been two years or a year?

One year. So I came to my first cosmoverse last year in Istanbul.

Yeah.

Um, and I talked to, I estimate about 60 people, tried to ask some similar questions about how they felt

about the ecosystem, how they were doing themselves.

Um, and I wrote up a sort of summary of my observations and posted it on the Cosmos Hub forum.

Yeah.

Um, and it.

What was that, what was that post called?

Uh, an Organizational Psychology Perspective on the Cosmos Hub Ecosystem. Something like that.

Yeah. You got a lot of reaction.

It got a lot of reaction, including.

From some, like, from Jay. Also from J. Kwon, I think.

Jay, Ethan Zaki. Yeah. A lot of people wound up reacting, some stronger than others.

Yeah.

And what I think I was a little bit surprised about is that all kind of happened and then nothing.

Sort of.

I couldn't really find a way to get any momentum from that in terms of engaging with the community.

Yeah.

So I've. It's. It's kind of been like my.

My white whale, you know, I could have been doing my normal job, but I wake up in the morning

and I think about the Cosmos ecosystem and I go to bed at night and I think about the Cosmos

ecosystem. And I've been percolating these ideas about how to. How to engage with the community.

And it's been great to come back and see how people are doing and getting the reactions of people from

a year later like, hey, I remember you.

Yeah.

So it's Kind of funny because, I mean, we know each other from just from the kind of the Paris

expat community. You were one of my normie friends and now you're one of my crypto friends.

Isn't it funny?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, so, so what, like what, what is your that day job like?

What do you actually do for people who don't know?

Yeah, so, I mean, I have a, I have a degree in organizational psychology.

What does that mean?

So it's, it's, you know, the basics of psychology, understanding human behavior, but especially in groups.

And, and I work, as I call it a work psychologist or a business psychologist.

So understanding how people work in order to get things done.

Yeah, so it could be a business, but it a charity or it could be a non governmental organization.

But how do people come together? What does leadership look like? And. Yeah, how do people get things done?

Yeah, so people have like, this is like couple couples counseling and you're sort of like business counseling.

You come in and if an organization is having organizational issues or management issues or issues with like the team

and management sort of not working well together or you know, some, some might see this as sort of like

business coaching, but at the organizational level.

And you try to sort of work through those issues with people and find a better balance for everyone.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, you know, we do, we'll do like when we do or when I do founders work.

Yeah, like that can look a lot like couples counseling.

You know, you have two co founders and they're not getting along. Sometimes that's like very analogous to a relationship.

Sometimes it's one leader who's struggling with how to connect with their employees.

And sometimes it's a whole team that maybe it's a new team or it's a team that's undergone some changes

and they're trying to figure out how to get back to the point where they're running on all cylinders.

Yeah. Now you take that, right?

You take a team or a company that I think, you know, generally is already like quite a close knit

group. You know, they may be working in the same building, they've been working together for a long time.

They're in the same slack or kind of teams, groups or whatever.

They also, I think, come into a company with a common purpose.

How does that overlap with an ecosystem of teams? So you sort of scale that up to now.

An ecosystem of teams of people, some that have real sort of clear visions. Like. Right, so like a company.

Right. Or maybe just community members and contributors that, you know, might gravitate and go from one team to another.

I mean, it just seems like it's an impossible challenge to solve and then.

And, but also a much more interesting challenge because you're talking about really a global community of people with divergent

interests and.

Yeah, well, and I think that's.

For me, that's one of the most fascinating things about the Cosmos ecosystem, because if you compare it to especially

other crypto ecosystems, there's not a sort of visionary figurehead who can kind of, even if it's decentralized, you know,

technically, culturally, there's someone who can kind of make a decision. Cosmos doesn't have that.

And that's both a strength and a challenge. And you're absolutely right. Like, there.

There are so many different interests, so many different visions, and bringing that together has a potential of sort of

getting to the best answer. You know, you, you, you're.

That's, that's the whole value of decentralization is that you're getting all these different viewpoints and, you know, you're bringing

in all this different data.

You're probably, in the long run, going to outperform one person with one vision or a couple people with one

vision.

But you can also fail, Truman. Like, it can fail catastrophically.

But if you can't communicate.

Yeah.

You can never get off the ground.

And then obviously, Cosmos has gotten off the ground, but there does seem to be a sort of like, friction

right now in productivity or in efficiency or whatever, because that communication is just not happening very, very easily.

Yeah. I was just talking to Valeo from Quasar, and he has a way of thinking of Cosmos is.

I mean, like a sort of two. There's like two facades to it. There's the.

There's the tech and the liquidity. So it's like business in the back, party in the front. Right.

So you have. And it tends well to him because he's had a mullet at some point.

I think it's the opposite way, isn't it? Or, or party in the back, party in the background. Yeah.

Like, you know, the tech is in the back, then the liquidity, but, you know, we don't have any liquidity

or Cosmos doesn't have any liquidity or very little compared to other ecosystems, but we have really strong tech.

Yeah.

So that sort of begs the question, you know, is the.

Is the vision for Cosmos to have just really great tech that makes it into, you know, the broader kind

of crypto ecosystem, or is it to have liquidity?

And the way I like to look at this is kind of analogized to Linux.

And in the 90s, you know, Linux was sort of getting off the ground.

Linus Torvalds built Linux on the Unix kernel and there were all these different like nerds, yeah, fighting about how

like the vision for Linux and building competing distributions, distros or Linux.

And there's, you know, maybe hundreds or maybe like, you know, a significant number of Linux distributions, many of which,

you know, no one's ever heard of or very, very people use, very few people use.

But then you end up having the fedoras that you boon twos and Slackware, et cetera.

But Today, fast forward 20 years, we all use some version of Linux all the time in our phones, in

our computers. If you're using Mac or an iPhone or an Android phone, you're using a Linux backbone.

Your connected TV has some version of Android running on it. That's Linux.

Your connected fridge, all your embedded devices, all of the server infrastructure, for the most part, I think with the

exception of Windows, which also has quite a few now Linux components in it, is using this software and.

But, you know, do people think that they're using Linux? No.

But as a result, we all have this better experience, this better kind of software and hardware experience as a

result of this great work that was done in this early kind of chaos of the 90s.

And I sort of see Cosmos as the same, as the same thing.

And I wonder sometimes, you know, does it really matter that Cosmos doesn't have the liquidity if the technology gets

exported to Ethereum, to Solana, to all these ecosystems, to Bitcoin by, you know, being the liquidity hub for kind

of Bitcoin defi? Does it matter if, you know, it doesn't make it to, you know, I.

Mean, it's an interesting, that's an interesting way to think about it because, you know, there is obviously the Cosmos

has been this leader in technology and in technological vision and you know, sort of famously Ethereum has followed Cosmos

and actually brought these Cosmos innovations to scale in a way that Cosmos hasn't been able to.

But I think what's, what's maybe different is that the vision of Cosmos actually I think is more important than

the technology of Cosmos, and that the vision is this idea of sovereign interoperability and that is made possible through

the technology. But it's also a way of looking at the world. It's an ethos.

And I feel like that's the part that's actually most important if you say Cosmos succeeds, you know, in the.

And if, you know, whether they get the liquidity or not, does this ethos of sovereign interoperability wind up sort

of becoming all pervasive across, across the entire crypto and like universal ecosystem?

Yeah.

So what are the, what are the things you think that Cosmos needs in order to be able to move

forward? Actually, maybe before that, like, I think before we get to that.

What do you, what do you, what.

Is your sense of the vibe here?

I know, I know it's only day two, but what's your sense of the vibe compared to last year?

I'm curious. What.

Yeah, I mean, we talked about this a little bit yesterday, which is, you know, I get the sense of

a little bit of like self flagellation, like a little bit of, you know, we're, we, we've been bad, we're

not, you know, doing things the right way.

And a lot of it does feel like it's tied to market performance.

But the thing is, when you look across the broader crypto market, aside from like bitcoin, no one's really thriving

in the last 12 months. You don't really see anyone. Well, Solana, Solana, but even Salana has been kind of.

I haven't fallen closely, but they've been a little flat. Right.

And I think that there's a little bit of we're especially bad.

And look, this is based on just a few conversations so far.

This is only the morning of day two, but yeah, it's been a long bear market.

Yeah, it's been a long bear market and you can feel it.

Yeah. I mean it could be worse. It could be Algorand.

Sure.

And you like some other kind of, you know, ecosystem, very few users and at least, I mean, I think

what Cosmos has going for is like people still see Cosmos as having like a lot of gigabrains.

And from my conversations here have been, I think the sense is that it's, it sort of feels like the

bottom of the cosmos. Bear market regard.

Regardless of what's happening in the rest of the ecosystem and how other ecosystems are, you know, thriving or attracting

liquidity or whatever, it feels like a lot of the people who were not fully aligned or did not really

believe in the vision are no longer here or you know, have left or like are doing other things or

maybe you're focusing on other things. This is anecdotal, right? This is what people have told me, right.

How they think about it and that those who are still here are really sort of aligned with this long

term vision. Even though the vision I think often has maybe different people have different Paths to get there.

The long term vision of sovereign infrastructure, interoperability, et cetera, I think is the kind of, are still the core

pillars.

Yeah, I think you're, you're absolutely right.

I mean one thing that this sort of long drought has done is driven the people who were here for

other reasons away. Yeah.

And you know, I have, in the conversations I had yesterday, people seem to be like, hey, we're, we look

around and all right now the people that are left are the people we want to work with.

Yeah, I, I did, I didn't get that, I did get that feeling as well.

Yeah. Yeah. So yeah. What, what are the, what are your recommendations having like looked at the space and.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, my, my assessment of, of Cosmos is that you talk.

About three things before.

Yeah. So. So first of all, Cosmos is, is really unique.

Like I was just at a different crypto event last night, like non Cosmos and the vibes are so different.

It's, it's really, there is something like really genuinely. It's weird.

It's weird given the way that Cosmos tends to operate. But it's. People are really nice here.

People are really curious. They're really.

Greg Assuri of Akash tweeted yesterday that Cosmos is like the only genuine crypto ecosystem left. Yeah, authentic.

I'm paraphrasing, authentic I think is a great word. Like people really are interested in what you have to say.

It doesn't have that sort of feeling of a bunch of sharks just circling, looking for the easiest short term

opportunity. And I think that's something that maybe people take for granted that what a special place this is.

And I would add one thing to it, which is I mentioned earlier, these other ecosystems tend to be, they're

like, they're very smart people, but they tend to be trying to build one system, one system to sort of

optimize on one variable. And Cosmos is building a system of systems.

And the difference between that is the difference between algebra and calculus.

Like it's a whole other level of complexity and it's harder. It's like way harder.

Lots of people like were great at algebra and got to calculus and really struggled with it.

And I think that's another thing that maybe is not appreciated among the cosmos ecosystems.

What we're doing here is really hard. It's really new, it's really hard. It's really abstract.

It's like, you know, you, once you start going and you do calculus and then you start getting to like,

I don't know, number theory or whatever, higher Order mathematics. There are.

When you kind of do that work, you're not as grounded.

Like, the person who's the most grounded is like the farmer who's just, you know, when you're doing this really

abstract cognitive work day in and day out, it's hard to stay balanced.

And I think that that's one of the reasons why I feel like there's a lot of work that I'm

interested in doing with the Cosmos ecosystem, because it's hard to do this work.

And so, yeah, so the first point was it's really unique. The second one is it's really hard.

And just in the, in the short term, you're not always going to be rewarded by the market for doing

this sort of higher order work.

So the third thing I guess I'd say is there's, there's a sense I get in the Cosmos ecosystem.

And you know what I'm going to say, actually it's universal.

Right now I'm going to use a cat metaphor because cats will become relevant.

Later in this conversation.

Cats are pretty relevant now.

Yeah, cats, they're like, strongest move they can make is when they're on their backs kicking with their hind legs.

And when a cat's attacked, that's what a cat does. It gets on its back and it kicks.

And I think that people can look at that and say, oh, if I want to be my strongest, what

I got to do is get on my back and kick. Yeah, but that's adopting a defensive posture.

And that works when you are literally being attacked.

But when you're trying to be on the hunt, when you're trying to build things and get things done, you

have to be on your feet. And I don't, I don't think this is necessarily unique to Cosmos.

I think we're seeing this sort of like trend of, you know, sort of victim mentality across, you know, the

broader culture.

But I think it's especially, it's especially unproductive in this context of Cosmos, because Cosmos is like a winner.

Cosmos has achieved this sort of highest level of complex abstract thinking.

And then we get on our backs and it's like, no, act like a winner.

This is kind of the message I want to give. Cosmos is like, recognize, take the W.

You know, you don't have to be like all these other people and organizations and whatever that feel victimized.

Like, Cosmos is actually the winner. They haven't figured it out yet.

Everyone else is late to the party, they're going to get there, so keep doing your thing.

Be on your Feet. Get on your feet. Yeah. Anyway, that's my pep talk.

That's my pep talk to the Cosmos.

It's a pep talk everybody needs right now.

I just noticed your T shirt says, how much worse can it get?

Well, this is. This is the A down T shirt for this year. Yeah, yeah.

It's very apropos.

Shout out to Rena and whoever else worked on that.

Yeah, you know, I feel that because, um, you know, like, when we launched the fund a year ago, our.

Our go to market for the fund was very much like, hey, you know, we invest in the Cosmos ecosystem

and modular and whatever.

But our thesis, and then kind of the genesis of the vision for the fund was Cosmos.

And that had a lot to do with kind of my background and the ecosystems that I had invested in

in the past and, and, you know, my affinity in the Cosmos ecosystem.

And we raised on this thesis on this vision and a lot of investors were, you know, whether they or

not they invested, were interested because they were not exposed to this space.

So it might have been folks who were like, in Bitcoin or in Ethereum or in Solana and saw that

Cosmos had all these gigabrains and all these really smart people building, building cool tech.

And also that the Cosmos vision was being adopted in other ecosystems like Ethereum, with the role of centric roadmap.

And so this was really appealing and people respected that.

Over time, though, there's been a noticeable shift, I think, in people's perception of Cosmos.

And so people used to say, oh, you're a Cosmos fund. Interesting.

And then now, and the fact that we're a Cosmos fund is sort of a meme, I think, like. Right.

But now people are like, oh, you're a Cosmos fund. Right.

So I, you know, the perception of us investing in Cosmos as a real or not, as that might be,

is kind of shifting. And so it's led us to also be a little bit defensive. Right.

And some, you know, admittedly, like, I'll respond by saying, well, we don't only invest in Cosmos.

Like, we've made investments of movement and we're like, very bullish on that ecosystem.

We invested in infrastructure that works sort of across the ecosystem.

But there is that kind of like, defensive position of. And that.

That I've also noticed other projects now adopting, which is distancing themselves from Cosmos.

You know, projects like, like sei, for instance, that started as a Cosmos project and very kind of aligned with

Cosmos and using the stack and now have really distanced themselves from that branding or at least for, for quite

a while, actually. You know, bear chain also.

And so a lot of folks, I think, like, use Cosmos tech but want to distance themselves from, you know,

like, it's, it's the mullet. Right.

So they want to, they want, they want to have the, they want to have the mullet, but they don't

want to have the party in front.

Right.

Or as they said, they don't want the party that Cosmo has, which is like lack of liquidity.

So I think that resonates with me and probably like with other people also.

Yeah, yeah.

And I mean, I'm not, I want to be clear, this isn't about like, your branding strategy might not include

Cosmos. I think it's more about the posture that you take with regard to the work that you're doing.

You know, this is really important work. It's good work.

And if it's not being rewarded by the market right now, that's not necessarily a signal that you're doing the

wrong thing. Go. Anyway, yeah, yeah, let's talk about your cat cult. Right.

So, so my, my experience, I think I mentioned quickly at the beginning of the, of the, of our chat

was that after that whole. I made the post and it kind of went viral and whatever I tried to.

So normally the work that I do, I work with organizations and know they pay me by the hour or

by the day and you know, I work as a practitioner and that culture doesn't exist.

I have probably in broader Web three, like, Web two has a budget for leadership development, executive coaching, like, you

know, team building and that kind of thing.

And the companies, you know, we're talking about much smaller companies in Web3 that don't necessarily have that sort of

ability or even that instinct to like, well, let's train our managers.

You know, it's like we have a position, we need to put someone in there to manage, do it, learn

on the job, like jump in the deep end kind of thing.

And so I was a little bit frustrated that I couldn't get any traction in terms.

And so if I care so much about this ecosystem, really, like the people really feel like there's a lot

of great work to be done. How do I do that? And so.

Well, my vision, I guess, for the Cosmos is that if you're going to be this sort of like, highest

level of complex abstract thinking, you also need to be best in class at communication. You.

Because that's where you're, you're like, think about it, you're like way out in space, you're super Far apart.

Now, being able to communicate between these huge long distances, and they could be intellectual distances or however you want

to think about it, is just super important.

And if you're using the sort of communication technology, if you want to think of it that way that people

are using when they're sitting around a table, it's just, it's not going to work.

So what I, what I thought, like, what's a fundamental thing that is already working in cosmos is this idea

of, of sovereign interoperability. And people want to be free, but they also know they need to communicate.

And if we can just get an opt in community of people who said, hey, I'm in.

I want to communicate with other people.

I know I'm not always going to agree, but I can see everyone's point of view and it's valuable to

see other people's point of view for the collective intelligence, you know, of the community. Then let's start with that.

Let's start with the opt in.

And the people who don't want to opt in can choose not to opt in.

And that gave this idea of this oath.

And the oath is, if I have a problem or an issue, conflict with anyone else who's also taken this

oath, I will seek to find a win win resolution with the help of the community if necessary.

And it's a seek. There's no guarantee whatever, but I'll try.

And I thought, okay, so this is what I'm going to do.

I'm going to try to put together this community.

But it's kind of like, as you've heard, it's like a long spiel to like, get someone interested.

So I was thinking, what's a shorthand for this? And this is where we get to cats. Cats have this.

You know, cats are social animals and cats do this.

Lions do this, which is when they want to signal to another cat they're not there.

I'm not, I'm not here to fight you. I'm not in predator mode.

They do something called the slow blink, where they close their eyes for maybe a second or two and it's

like you show a little bit of vulnerability and you say, hey, I'm, I'm, I'm just, I'm chill.

I come in peace. And I thought, well, that's it. That's like the slow blink.

That what, what I'm trying to say is, everyone, we're out here, we're kind of like, you know, a little

bit on edge. You see someone looking at you like, are they about to attack?

And you get in that defensive posture.

So if we can all like, sort of do the slow blink physically or just metaphorically, then maybe we can

get to the point where we can start having some more, like, better conversations. Some, Some.

Some more giving the benefit of the doubt and, and really recognizing that, okay, you might not agree with what

I say, but I can see where you're coming from. Maybe I can learn a little bit from it.

So the way it works is it's an NFT that you mint when you take the oath.

We worked with the team at Asteroid who does inscriptions on the Cosmos hub.

So it's kind of like the cosmos or the web3 equivalent of like swearing on a holy book.

You inscribe your name next to this oath and you upload your profile picture and you put a little picture

of a cat on it.

So you can, on the forum or on social media, show that, hey, I'm a member of this group that's

trying to, like, work on, on. On communication. And for me, you know, it's.

If we can build this community of people who think that this is an important thing to do that we

have to do collectively, you know, that's what I'm trying to do is, is.

And we can see it here in Cosmos. But it's not just for Cosmos, you know, it's. It's for.

It's for everyone. Like, someday maybe the whole world can understand that.

And this is, you know, this is like the mythology of the cult is that cats are giving us a

gift. They're like, hey, you know, we're.

We need you humans to succeed if we want to have our lives of leisure, you know, so if you

guys could chill out and learn to work together, um, then we're all going to be good.

So, yeah, that's it.

So Slow Blinks on Asteroid. You launched it yesterday.

Slow Blinks on Asteroid.

The first one has been minted and hope to get a lot of people in the community.

Cool. So people can mint their slow blink. Is it called Slow Blink?

Yeah, there's.

There's four different cats you can choose from and depending on how much you want to be a part of

the project. And maybe I should add there's a meme coin associated with it too.

So every month for the next 19 years, we'll do an airdrop exclusively to holders of the NFT.

Why is it 19 years?

Because Thomas Jefferson said that no law or constitution should bind a group of people for longer than a generation.

And he defined a generation as 19 years.

And so now sort of the life of a cat. Cats are usually like.

It is exactly about the life of a cat, too. So here we go. This is cat number one.

And after this cat lives out its life, the world's going to be a completely different place.

But I think that the ethos of sovereign interoperability is one that will last the long, long term.

Doing God's work, man. Thank you, Catholic.

Thanks, Sam.