GRTiQ Podcast: 57 Jim Cousins

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Jim Cousins (00:00:13):

This was something that I really wanted to get involved with because I could see that other people were taking it as seriously as I was. So I see it as my job to give people time when they’re serious about trying to do something, and then finding ways to empower them through my own network. That’s really all it comes down to. I’m in a privileged position where I can choose to do that, so that’s what I do.

Nick (00:01:10):

Welcome to the GRTiQ Podcast. Today, on this one year anniversary of the podcast, I’m going back to my roots and speaking with the very first guest of the podcast, Jim Cousins, Graph Council member, Indexer, and a mentor to many within The Graph community.

(00:01:28):

One year ago, the GRTiQ Podcast went about the hard work of trying to create something that was useful and to book guests to join us. With absolutely zero listeners and no proven ability to deliver, Jim Cousins said he’d come onto the podcast and be guest number one. And as they say, the rest is history. Shortly after episode one was released, the downloads started to stack up, and episode one continues to reach thousands of people.

(00:01:55):

During our discussion, I asked Jim what compelled him to take a chance on being the first guest of the podcast, some of his thoughts on all that has transpired since we first recorded, and then we have some fun talking about web3, The Graph, and where the space is heading.

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As you’re about to hear, Jim is not only well-informed, but he’s deeply passionate about The Graph, this community, and the journey we’re all on.

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I began the conversation by asking Jim about episode one, what his experience was, and why in the world he ever accepted the invitation to record with me.

Jim Cousins (00:02:32):

Well, I guess my role at that time was, my official role, was as an index and relations person at The Graph Foundation. I’ve had to sort of wind down that role for personal reasons, but it was always important, and it remains important to me, to reflect back the sort of the intent and the positivity and the desire to learn that I get from other people, right? That’s my shtick, I would say.

(00:03:07):

But you will have reached out to me via DM, probably, and talked about what you want to do, and I would’ve thought, “This is a great idea.” And a lot of that relations role was just that, right? Was either reaching out to people to ask them if they want to get involved in something, or as people reaching out to you in order to ask if there’s something that you would like to get involved with or something that they could do in the space, and you maybe link them to somebody else.

(00:03:33):

So I would say I was just doing my job. I still do the same thing today, right, but just not in such an official capacity. And the idea of a podcast for a specific protocol, to me, was new. There are many podcasts out there that I’ve been listening to for many years around the crypto space that have been around for a long time. The first one I ever listened to would’ve been the Bitcoin podcast or at the same sort of time, very early 2013, maybe even 2012, the Bitcoin Talk podcast. And then you would see new podcasts like the Epicenter. It used to be called Epicenter Bitcoin, I think. Now it’s called the Epicenter Podcast. It has been for a long time. Which is run by a couple of guys who run a staking company called Chorus One. And I learned pretty much everything I know from those podcast episodes. So this was also a way for me to try and give back, right?

(00:04:40):

I think I probably went into our interview thinking it would be a discussion about indexing, but what it really was was you taking a journey to understand The Graph protocol, and me trying to use my knowledge of The Graph protocol to offer that knowledge back. So it became like a… I guess if you wanted to point someone early on in the year, in last year, to some content that would give them an overview of The Graph protocol, then that podcast was a really good place to go if you learn by listening.

(00:05:16):

So yeah, a combination of things, but mostly it’s about… For me, it was about somebody had a great idea for a podcast, they asked me if I would come on, so I did, right? That’s where the best things come from, right? You put something out there and it’s reflected back at you. And I would say that in terms of the things that I’ve helped people with, and whether it’s their career or something they want to do in the space, I would say GRTiQ is one of the ones I’m most proud of in terms of being involved early.

(00:05:48):

So it’s been really humbling to watch you develop as well over the course of your podcast over the last year, and to watch how relentless you are in terms of, A, getting great people on the podcast, and B, managing to increase the quality over time, despite the fact that you’re releasing something every week. I think it’s been astounding to watch.

(00:06:14):

I don’t know that there’s that many podcasts out there that sort of deliver that kind of content at that kind of cadence. So to watch you develop both the products, GRTiQ and yourself in terms of your knowledge of The Graph and your ability to have conversations with people about it, has been really humbling and really rewarding for me. That’s probably one of the things that makes me most satisfied about my role is when I can help somebody else or enable somebody else to do what they want to do and see them succeed.

Nick (00:06:43):

So Jim, as you look back, since you and I first recorded in March 2021, there’s been a lot of changes in The Graph. What are some of your own observations about the changes that have happened?

Jim Cousins (00:06:55):

It’s crazy to think that it’s already been a year since we last spoke and how much has happened in that period of time, and how my own contributions to The Graph and to the wider web3 ecosystem, some of my opinions on things may have changed, my optimism on certain things may have changed, my pessimism on certain things might have changed, and that’s all just in a year.

(00:07:17):

I think one of the earliest interesting and very unique developments that I’ve been involved with over that year is the introduction of core development teams. I think if you were to ask any of the 10 council members whether they would be helping with due diligence and making decisions on these very large long-term grants, we’re talking some close to a decade in terms of their length, if you had asked any of the council members whether they would be involved in making decisions like that, I don’t think any of them would’ve… Apart from maybe the founders who are mostly visionaries, no one else probably would’ve imagined we would’ve been working on those types of deals at the council level, and it’s been eye opening for me to see these sort of… I guess you in some ways call them community acquisitions. They’re not really acquisitions, it’s just about getting the attention of these really talented teams to work on The Graph for a very long period of time.

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It’s a very unique approach, right? And so far, it seems to be working. There are real advantages to leveraging existing teams, and there’s also challenges to leveraging existing teams. Certainly when you try and bring multiple teams together, it takes a certain type of people to make something like that work, and we’ve seen a lot of that type of leadership and people standing up to make that happen in the core development teams. It’s been great to see that happen.

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What else? I guess the growth of The Graph community as well and how it’s maturing. You have a core set of Indexers who are always very present in the Discord channels, on Twitter, various other avenues.

(00:09:04):

The Delegator community has been maturing. There are a number of individuals who I would call leaders in that space who sort of lead the thinking for Delegators. And of course, the curation piece launched as well in the last year and is one of the most challenging pieces and has some of the most thoughtful, I would say, stakeholders in the ecosystem, because they have quite a lot of responsibility on their head in terms of bootstrapping the curation piece, the signaling piece. And seeing a number of people sort of take leadership roles there has been really a very positive thing for the community, and I’ve been interested to follow them as much as I can and provide support where I can.

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The third area which has been something close to my heart is I started a sort of what was supposed to be a casual voice hour on the Discord voice channel called Indexer Office Hours. We started that just under a year ago, and we’ve ran an Indexer Office Hours every week, pretty much, for nearly a year.

(00:10:11):

The response to that has been extremely positive, and it’s evolved over time from an hour for Indexers to casually talk about protocol, software, infrastructure challenges into something much bigger that has an audience well beyond Indexers. We’ve been doing fireside chats as new core development teams join, so that people have a chance to learn and get to know some of the people in the new core development teams and understand what it is they bring to the table. We have open discussions about specific things to do with the protocol. That’s one of the most popular topics, really. But we do also keep things related as much as possible to the Indexer space, and the level of contribution has been quite good over time.

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I’m particularly proud of the level of contribution that certain people have put into Indexer Office Hours when I haven’t been able to for various reasons. And I think it’s been announced at this point that GraphOps have taken over the reins from me on the Indexer Office Hours, and they’re further developing it into an even more slick hour of conversation that will appeal to, I guess, a wider Graph audience.

Nick (00:11:30):

Well, for listeners’ benefit, I’d like them to know that I attribute a lot of the success of the podcast to that first episode with you, Jim, and I’d also like to share that you and I have developed a friendship, so we stay in touch quite a bit. And I always tell people the success of the GRTiQ Podcast is a result of the Jim Cousins effect. You put a ton of wind behind my back and gave a ton of momentum to the podcast. So not only grateful that you took a chance, like so many of the early guests, on me and on the podcast, but that we’ve developed this great friendship. So certainly grateful for the opportunity to have met you and for this project and everything you’ve meant to it.

(00:12:10):

A lot has happened since we recorded. You went through, just moments ago, a lot of the high mark things that you’ve noticed, the addition of core dev teams, the growth of the community, and Indexer Office Hours, the success that that has had, along with this idea and the struggle of progressive decentralization. But if you were to throw all your observations into one bucket, what surprised you most during the last year?

Jim Cousins (00:12:41):

I think there are different levels of contribution, right, that you maybe expect when you’re building a community. I think at a base level, when people want to contribute, the first thing that you see and the sort of baseline thing that you’re hoping for is that they will contribute in the communication channels that you provide for them. So that would be both official Discord, official Telegram channels. And then the channels that are also sort of spun out of the official channels. Graphtronauts is a great one. They’ve been around for a long time now. Curation Station, which is a Curator-focused Telegram channel. You have some Twitter accounts being led by individual contributors in different languages. I would say they’re the sort of base level things that you would expect to see, and anything above that, really, is a very high signal that you’re doing something right.

(00:13:39):

So when I started to see The Graphtronauts community really mature and start providing their own content, their own leadership, their own products, then it sort of dawned on me that this is very real and these communities, these individual stakeholder communities are very real and have their own opinions, their own thoughts, their own needs, and they’re already building products and tools to address their needs, right?

(00:14:11):

Now, the obvious place where you would see that first is indexing, right? Because indexing is full of engineers. Everybody who’s an Indexer is an engineer, so you are likely to build the tools that you need because you’re an engineer and you get annoyed when things don’t work the way you want to. But to see the same thing happening in all of the stakeholder communities, really for me, was like a light bulb moment to think that there is a real need for these different stakeholder groups and they all have different needs within them and they’re already building tools and they have their own roadmaps for things they want to do. They have their own opinions and they’re starting to bring them into the governance forum, for example, as a group. They’ll bring thoughts from their Telegram channels into Discord. It’s been really interesting to see that more complex dynamic play out, and it’s, I think, a good signal that these communities are building the foundations for something much bigger in the future.

(00:15:02):

That’s the type of thing that I like to see when the end goal for… We talk about decentralized autonomous organizations a lot in this space, and that’s what you want to see when you’re eventually trying to potentially move towards decentralized autonomous organizations. You want to see the different stakeholder groups taking hold of their stake, and making and shaping their communities and the protocols to their needs. So to see that happening in real time has been really surprising to me, but I now realize that that’s really something you want to see if a protocol like we’re building is going to be successful for the long term.

Nick (00:15:44):

It seems to me that for the average person trying to understand crypto and protocols and what The Graph is, it is this idea of decentralization. That you have members of core development teams making contributions, that you have communities emerging, making contributions, and like you said, having their own needs and their own ideas. I mean, all of this is geared towards decentralization, and yet, it’s really difficult for people to grasp or understand. So how has your understanding of what decentralization really means evolved since the launch of The Graph to where we are presently?

Jim Cousins (00:16:27):

I don’t think my own personal opinion of what it means has changed. I think I’ve always been very pragmatic about decentralization. At its core, the easiest way for me to communicate it to other people is to say that the goal of decentralization is to push power from the center to the edges of whatever power structure you might be talking about. I would say that I’m being louder now around my more pragmatic view, generally speaking, on things, and decentralization is one of them.

(00:17:04):

The biggest mistake people often make is this idea that decentralization is a binary outcome. It either is or it isn’t. I would say it is a bit… Well, it’s a lot more nuanced than that. You have systems that are complex enough that certain parts need to be decentralized. And yes, I would agree that all parts need to have some level of decentralization if you’re to call a product decentralized for real.

(00:17:30):

The simplest example to look at would be a proof of stake network, right? So if you had a proof of stake network that only had one node operator validating transactions on it, that’s the equivalent of a centralized service, right? Or centralized product, where all the power is maintained by this one node operator.

(00:17:52):

As soon as you split that, the ability to validate those transactions, to three nodes… I skipped two completely because if two people vote, you can end up with no consensus, if one votes one way and the other votes the other. So with three nodes, you can always find consensus.

Nick (00:18:10):

So Jim, I want to go back a little bit to something you said a moment ago, and that is this idea that decentralization is hard, communicating a plan for decentralization is even harder. And in your answer about the things that you’ve observed or the things that have surprised you, you talked about adding the core dev teams. You talked about seeing the community come up, get more involved. And I’m just curious if your definition of decentralization has fundamentally evolved as well, as you’ve seen these things over the last year or so of your life.

Jim Cousins (00:18:44):

I would say that my overarching definition of decentralization hasn’t changed. So I’ve always sort of been of the opinion that decentralization is a spectrum. Once you get past, for example, in a proof of state network, with three nodes, that’s decentralized, and everything beyond that is more decentralization. Everything prior to that, so two or one nodes, is centralization.

(00:19:05):

My opinion on that has not changed. But what I would say is that the nuance around certain things has changed. For example, the piece around DAOs and hierarchies. We’re starting to see things play out in other DAOs, and seeing sometimes some really ugly stuff happening. And it makes me realize that you need people to… In a decentralized system, you live and die by the people that stand up. The Graph protocol is full of people who stand up. The people that are identified and are headhunted are the people that stand up, and that’s for a reason. You need people to stand up, whether it’s in a DAO or it’s in a protocol or whatever, something that’s aiming to push decentralization to the edges, away from the center.

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So the DAO example is one example. I would say there’s many more. I can’t think of any right now at the top of my head, but progressive decentralization is hard and we need to be honest with ourselves about where we are succeeding and where we still have problems to solve, right? That’s part of where I think the opinion I sort of communicated earlier around roadmaps being very difficult comes into play, because that requires a radical level of honesty about which components are decentralized and which aren’t and what the plans are. So I’m learning that once you get in amongst the weeds and you actually get your hands dirty, it’s not as simple as people like to think it is.

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A lot of the criticisms that I see come from people who aren’t actually doing the work, which is the bit that bothers me the most. Solving these problems takes bravery, and pointing these problems out takes bravery. And I think when I question my own sort of should I have said something about that or should I have not, it’s mostly around the decentralization or the progressive decentralization piece. If we have a new initiative going on that I’m involved with at the council level, I’m always thinking about whether that’s taking us in the right direction towards decentralization or away from it. So that’s probably what I’ve taken away in terms of my own understanding of decentralization in general is that there’s a great deal of nuance, and you do have to be brave to talk about some of maybe the shortcomings in public.

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This is not about specifically The Graph, this is across the ecosystem. We need to be honest with ourselves about all the different products out there, because I would say The Graph is at the forefront when it comes to trying to push in terms of progressive decentralizations. For other protocols, it’s sort of been conveniently pushed under the rug and not talked about at all, and starting that conversation can be very difficult.

Nick (00:21:47):

In your opinion, Jim, do you think The Graph protocol is a voice or a leader in that decentralization ethos within the broader crypto or blockchain community? That The Graph is kind of a flag bearer of decentralization. I ask because it’s come up a couple times on the podcast with other guests. People have applauded or recognized that The Graph has kind of taken that position.

Jim Cousins (00:22:14):

It definitely is, and I would say that The Graph protocol is also under the microscope in that regard because it’s one of the biggest protocol projects or sort of middleware projects in the space.

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When you hear the founders talk, they’re often talking through that decentralized lens. Eva Beylin is always talking about if some layer within your application is not decentralized, then it’s not a dapp, right? You are not decentralized. That sort of goes for all the way down to the communities, right? The communities are not official spaces. Where they communicate are not essentially official spaces belonging to the foundation or some other entity. They’re their own spaces where they have their own opinions and they do their own thing. I think the federated approach that you see in The Graph protocol community really shows that we’re at the forefront when it comes to thinking about decentralization.

Nick (00:23:13):

So Jim, you’ve mentioned a couple times that you’re a council member. For listeners that don’t know, at The Graph Foundation, there are council members. It’s a multisig that helps with a lot of the governance, things like the core devs and governance proposals within the protocol. I’d also like to ask you then, over the last year, what some of the observations you’ve had in the development in that role as a council member at The Graph Foundation.

Jim Cousins (00:23:38):

So I think I sort of intimated earlier on that there’s some aspects of the role, the council role that a year ago, we wouldn’t have expected or thought that we’d be getting involved with, that was around making decisions around these large grants for core development teams. So I think everybody on the council has been going through a significant learning process over the last year.

(00:24:03):

Initially, I was certainly of the idea that most of the work would be looking at what the community’s sentiment is for certain protocol upgrades, and sharing my own opinion and then combining the two and voting against protocol upgrades. I would say that that’s probably a very small proportion of what we do sort of from week to week.

(00:24:28):

So the role of council members has become much more involved over time, and individual members are tapping into their own fields of expertise in order to contribute. That’s a really critical thing to have at a council making these executive decisions.

(00:24:44):

The core dev grants are a lot of money. There’s a lot of work to do in terms of due diligence around the grants. There’s a lot of work in terms of defining the what’s going to get done and when it’s going to get done, and having this group of people who are multidisciplinary definitely helps with that.

(00:25:06):

In terms of future plans at the council, I think we still have a lot of work to do in terms of making the mechanics of what council members are doing at the weekly meetings more transparent or what are the rules under which council members govern themselves, right? We have a council charter for things like meeting attendance, voting activity, or lack thereof, managing conflicts of interest, and we are looking at the moment at ways to share that sort of information more publicly.

(00:25:39):

Other things that we’re looking at at the council level are how do we bring more people in to see the process and maybe contribute, or at least observe. We’re also looking at how do we manage moving people in and out of council positions. And then ultimately, where will the council sit if we were to have potentially a number of different specialty area, multisigs underneath the council. So these are sort of things that we’re thinking about now, and what do we need things to look like in the next two to three years in terms of the council and the governance of the protocol.

Nick (00:26:15):

Jim, part of the reasons we are getting together is to talk a lot about web3 and some really interesting topics that I think we’re going to have a lot of fun with. But we’re taking a minute here and just kind of looking back since we first recorded our first episode together, and I want to ask one more question before we move on to other topics. That’s this idea of the protocol and market adoption or use within the crypto space. So as a last question, looking back retrospectively, what’s been your perspective or observations about the growth in terms of adoption or use of The Graph protocol?

Jim Cousins (00:26:52):

I think it’s clear, from the public data that’s been released by The Graph Foundation, that there’s huge demand in this space for data, and that demand continues to grow. In terms of moving that towards decentralization, so the continuous move from the hosted service to the main net service, I think it’s going to take time and exposure for the wider ecosystem to really register what’s happening there, and that there’s also a lot of technical challenges and soft challenges to address in that space. And the things that you see happening now, like the new core development teams joining, it’s all about moving towards that goal. We have whole companies coming in to contribute to the protocol.

(00:27:40):

And this way of building out a protocol development team in public is very new, right? I don’t know if there’s anyone else who’s doing it on the scale that The Graph is doing it. And also, if you look at the different teams, they all have vastly different areas of expertise. They all come from different industries, many surrounding the data processing industry, the data industry itself, but all working towards the same goal.

(00:28:09):

In terms of adoption, it’s very clearly that adoption is sort of defined by our ability to move as much of the customer base from posted to main net. And having started that process early last year, we’ve learned that undertaking such a huge decentralization task and scaling it appropriately requires some parts of the stack to be more advanced than they might be today.

(00:28:35):

For example, finding ways to reduce the transaction costs for Delegators, Curators, and Indexers. It’s quite expensive to use Ethereum. Delivering the same type of lovely customer experience you get from the hosted service, providing that also on the main net service. These are challenges that they’re at the forefront of the problems that need to be solved in the web3 space.

(00:28:58):

A good example of a soft problem is the customer support function, right? This is super hard to solve in even a centralized situation, right? And it’s so hard that pretty much all companies out there, they buy tools in order to help them do it efficiently. But when you have a service being provided by, let’s say your subgraph has 20 different Indexers on it and there’s some kind of performance issue or an outage, then where do you, as a customer, go for assistance? There’s no central point of contact. How are issues documented and tracked in a decentralized framing like that?

(00:29:39):

These sorts of business problems are the same problems we’re trying to tackle right now and solving right now. And The Graph is far from alone in trying to solve those issues. Many of the largest community-owned apps are tackling the very same problems. So I think a lot of the adoption curve is predicated on solving some of these outlier issues before we start pushing really hard to push all of our subgraphs from hosted to main net.

Nick (00:31:23):

Well, Jim, I really appreciate that you would take listeners back on a retrospective of all the things that have happened since we recorded episode one. And for any listeners that haven’t listened to that first episode, I really want to encourage you to go back and take a listen to episode one of the GRTiQ Podcast, because Jim created the foundation of all future podcasts and a lot of the dialogue that you’ve heard on the podcast.

(00:31:54):

Jim, I now want to shift to current topics and things that are at the forefront of everybody’s mind, and I want to start with this idea of web3. I’ve been really anxious to get your thoughts on this. When I interviewed the first time, I was very new to the space and I was still trying to learn and better understand some of the fundamentals. web3 is now kind of the new thing, so let’s start there. What do you make of web3? The fact that it’s a little bit of a buzzword. It’s used, misused, and interpreted in so many different ways. How are you thinking through it?

Jim Cousins (00:32:30):

I think the sort of increased frequency of the use of that word, web3, or that term, is just a symptom of a space exploring itself and trying to understand what it is in the moment and what it’s trying to be in the long term. At its simplest level, I would try and steer away mostly from the idea of it being a revolution. I think it’s occurring… It’s moving at such a slow pace, that revolution isn’t really the right term. Although personally, I’m sometimes guilty of framing it in that way.

(00:33:05):

At its core, I think it’s more about the right to enter or use a product with your value, your money, and your data, and the right to leave a product with your money and your data, right? I think at its core, that’s what we’re trying to do with web3. To make those abilities available to the largest population of the planet as we can, right?

(00:33:31):

That sort of framing of right to enter and right to leave, by the way, was something that Eva, the director at the Foundation, said on… I think it was on an Odd Lots podcast a couple of weeks ago. It kind of really resonated with me when I heard her say that in terms of trying to sort of condense the whole idea down into a simple sentence, and I think that’s really it, the right to enter and the right to leave.

Nick (00:33:54):

When I’ve had conversations with people I know about web3, there’s always this initial response of, “Well, what’s web2 then?” The web3 concept itself opens a whole can of worms, so to speak, where now you have to describe and contrast it with web2. And I don’t know if that’s really the best entry point to web3 is trying to also define web2, and then I guess logically, you’d have to go to Web1. Have you had similar conversations with friends or family?

Jim Cousins (00:34:23):

Absolutely. I have these conversations all the time. Again, we are the space trying to explore itself, right? So everyone’s having these conversations and everyone has a different lens through which they try and understand these things.

(00:34:37):

I think in terms of practically understanding web3 versus web2 versus Web1, there’s a million different versions of what that means out there. So if we were to zoom out and sort of start by recognizing that web3 is just part of an emergent version of the internet, just part of a supercycle in the advancement of the internet as a net good for society, and from that view, we can see how the progression of the internet itself, right, from a military project called ARPANET back in the very earliest days of these networking projects, to what it is today, which is a huge network that has been born via millions of iterations, millions of successes and failures by teams and individuals to bring us to where we are today. And Web1 and web2 are definitions of sort of maybe not supercycles, but evolutions of the internet, right? And defining them only really makes sense in retrospect, which is why the whole topic of web3, or one of the reasons why I think the whole topic of what is web3 is so difficult.

(00:35:50):

I think back to my own time as a fledgling IT consultant working for a very big IT company where I was a performance engineer and we were bridging the old Web1 world of static web pages with this new world of what we would call dynamic content, right? So we went from a page that would just be loaded and all the content is loaded in one go and that’s it, it’s a static webpage, to a world where you could have one piece of a webpage updating on its own when the rest of the webpage stays static, right? So you might have, I don’t know, a financial ticker in the top right-hand corner, and that’s updating every minute. So I was a performance engineer at that time, so we’d be looking at how do these new technologies work. Do they impact the user in a bad way? If they do, then how do we improve the performance of these new technologies such that there’s a delightful experience for the user?

(00:36:47):

In the midst of that, I wasn’t thinking, “I’m working as part of web2,” right? I was just thinking about cool new technologies that are making the internet a more interesting and dynamic place for people to be. It’s exactly the same with web3, I think. We are in the midst of it, right? We’re trying to sense-make around web3. Web1 brought us the static website. web2 brought us the idea of read, write websites, so that you could, for example, post on a Facebook page. And web3 is different in that it’s actually got much broader scope than just the technology, right?

(00:37:24):

web3 is sitting at the confluence of many very important products that humans need to live in the modern world, and web3, one of the main objectives of web3, is to democratize those products as much as possible so that as many people as possible can use them, right? It’s all about ownership.

(00:37:43):

Early web3 has brought us Bitcoin, for example. I mean, some people would argue that Bitcoin is not in scope, but I absolutely think that when we look in retrospect, that will be the starting point of this narrative, whether it be web3 or something bigger.

(00:37:58):

Then we had the world computer, as it was originally referred to in 2015, Ethereum. And on top of that came a financial renaissance with DeFi Summer, which I believe was 2020. And then recently, we’ve had an art renaissance in the last year, which has applied some limited use cases to non-fungible tokens around the art and culture space.

(00:38:21):

Some of these new ideas, they turn into huge narratives and they enter the zeitgeist. Everybody is talking about NFTs. Everyone has an opinion on NFTs, for better or worse. That’s because people want to use those products, right?

(00:38:37):

Very few people predicted any of those narratives. So who is to really know what comes next? I think we need to give ourselves some leeway in terms of trying to define what exactly web3 is in detail, where I think we can know the gist of it, right? The right to enter and the right to leave. But when you mix technology and then things like self-sovereign money and computing, just crazy things happen. I’m just glad to be part of it, to be honest with you. I think we need to forgive ourselves for not having some absolute correct framework stack diagram to show exactly what it is.

(00:39:15):

Let me ask you, would you agree with that, or would you say that that’s actually a problem for new people entering this, trying to get involved?

Nick (00:39:22):

I think that people have come to accept technology as it exists today as the tip of the spear of what we’ll ever do, what we’ll ever accomplish. And I think there’s apathy in all the incredible things that we’ve seen, created. And I think by and large, people have fallen asleep at the wheel, thinking we’ve kind of done it and we’ve arrived.

(00:39:46):

But to your point, web3 is an evolution of where we are, and it’s a positive step, but you don’t really appreciate it when, number one, there isn’t consensus on what it means. But there’s also this other lens that I think is really critical, and I’d like to get your opinion on it. But you can’t approach the utility or the optimism for web3 without taking a more global perspective of what the impact will be. So for people in the United States, maybe web3 is less interesting or has less of a pull because in the U.S., there’s a lot of technological innovation, a lot of comfort with what the infrastructure is, and maybe there is even a lack of suspicion or cynicism towards the gatekeepers or the centralized organizations that are driving it because they’re U.S.-based.

(00:40:40):

But if you spread out across the globe, if you broaden your lens, you can really see that people will benefit greatly in a web3 environment. People in India, people in Ukraine, people in China. So part of the challenge I’ve had, when I tried to talk to people about web3, is getting them to think more expansively about the impact on a global stage, and the realization that that’s really how to approach this. web3 is an issue about humanity.

Jim Cousins (00:41:15):

Absolutely. I think it’s a lot easier for folks that have lived under some sort of tyranny to really understand the benefit or the value prop of even just the store of value piece, right? Bitcoin. I have friends who live in countries where inflation means that a dozen eggs, 12 eggs, is going to cost you one price this week, and then it’s going to be double the price next week. Someone who lives under that sort of financial regime understands very clearly the value of self-sovereign money.

(00:41:50):

A person living in a Western country with a high degree of freedom, they’re not going to see that in the same way. It’s not going to be a value proposition for them because they have a greater degree of personal and financial freedom. But the question really is, when do they get a taste of tyranny. What happens when persecution lands on your doorstep?

(00:42:12):

I mean, really don’t want to skip into politics in any great detail, but just look at what’s going on in very liberal Canada. People are looking for safe havens now in Canada for their money. The ambitions of web3 lead to what I believe are the best models for those safe havens, whether it be for money or for products that you need to run your life. Communicating that to people who haven’t suffered is extremely difficult. It’s a real challenge. It’s something I think about probably every day, right? How do you sell that proposition to somebody who lives a very comfortable, relatively free lifestyle?

Nick (00:42:52):

In parts of the world, like the United States, which are more technologically evolved, have greater freedom, greater maybe participation, there is this lackadaisicalness and surrender to not fully understanding what the rules of the game are.

(00:43:10):

This was made clear to me in the interview I did with Nena. We were talking about web3, and Nena said, “If someone listening to this podcast just Googled their name and the city or town or providence they lived in and see the type of information that comes up about them, and we’ve probably all done it at some point, so we know what that search might look like.” And the question is, “Who did you give that permission to?” At what point did you say to Google or whatever the website or the listing page is that shows your information, at what point did you say, “I’m okay with that. Let the world know where I live, who my brothers, sisters, children, parents, grandparents are.”? The answer is probably like, “I never actually did.” You probably did when you accepted the terms and conditions of these gatekeeper technology firms.

(00:44:02):

But if you’re comfortable with that, if you’re comfortable with your personal data not being your own, you don’t get to own, control, and you get to just hand that over to be able to use an app on your phone or to use a service on your computer, if you’re comfortable with that, then Jim, I would almost argue then, yeah, web3 is probably not for you. But if that at all makes you uncomfortable, then web3 is a revolution that you’re going to want to take part of, because it’s exactly these fundamentals that it seeks to reshape.

Jim Cousins (00:44:34):

Yeah, I would agree. And again, coming back to the piece where if you haven’t experienced these life under tyranny or some sort of persecution, then maybe these tools aren’t for you. But this isn’t going to stop us from continuing to build them, because there will come a time when people need them.

(00:44:52):

I mean, think back to early Web1, right? Elon Musk, the PayPal mafia. Do you really think back then, that when they were trying to liberate money for everybody, do you really think that they were concerned that people wouldn’t understand the value of that, that they wouldn’t have the vision to understand the value of that? That me at home, come home from school, dial up to the internet, maybe to CompuServe, if it’s pretty early on, or very early dial-up internet. My mom wants to make a call. She picks up the phone, starts dialing and breaks the connection. Do you really think that Elon Musk was concerning himself with that detail when he was thinking about how PayPal could change the world, how him and the rest of the team at PayPal were going to change the world? I don’t think they were. They saw that that was what was going to happen and the potential of the internet to liberate money from these old, tired systems, and they just executed down that path.

(00:45:48):

And they executed through extremely difficult times. That’s something that people forget. They just think that PayPal was an overnight success, but they iterated through extremely difficult times where everybody was telling them they would fail.

(00:46:01):

So I see a sort of history rhyming in some way here, where we have a lot of people telling us that what we’re working on is not of use. But there are people that really do see the vision and have stood up to try and execute against that vision, the vision that we’re for now calling web3.

Nick (00:46:22):

When I have these conversations with my own circle of friends or family, I think some of the barrier to people that aren’t participating in crypto or blockchain or web3 broadly is this idea held by lots of people that maybe web3 is just an experiment and it’s confined to a niche of highly technical people distributed throughout the world. So my question, and I’ve asked it several times on this podcast, is, Jim, do you see web3 as an inevitability, or do you think it’s fair that yeah, in some ways, this is an experiment and we’re all just watching to see what comes of it?

Jim Cousins (00:47:03):

So I would continue to push the idea of looking at this through the lens of previous technological evolution, right? So the internet, Web1, web2, and where we are now, which is web3, what we’re calling web3 for now. I think it’s probably a lot bigger than just Web1 or web2 in terms of the scope, because we’re bringing money and distributed computing into the equation.

(00:47:24):

But in terms of failure, if you look back at Web1, web2, even the internet, the path to where we are today is paved with success and failure. Now when we talk about failure in Web1, we like to talk about things like pets.com, right? But that’s one of a million failures. And a million successes in Web1. When we talk about failure in web2, everyone’s out for blood when it comes to Facebook. But who remembers Friendster? If you lived on the West Coast of United States, you probably remember Friendster, which is a social network that preceded Facebook. There’s a million other examples of successes and failures in web2. You need both success and failure when a space is exploring itself, and I don’t see that as any different with web3. The main difference is that we are involving money and distributed computing.

(00:48:17):

Compared to Web1 and web2, web3 is like this hugely heterogeneous space. There’s just so much going on in so many different fields, it’s hard to keep up. There was a time when I used to be able to keep up with everything that’s going on, but I can no longer do that.

(00:48:34):

So maybe thinking of it as this heterogeneous space, we can split failure up into maybe three different categories. So systemic failure, right? So can the whole space fail? Total failure. Endemic failure. So could some part of the space fail? And then ideological failure. So do we end up not delivering to the objectives that we believe that we are heading towards?

(00:49:01):

So if we think about systemic failure, I think that’s probably the least likely outcome. So what would systemic failure look like if we were to be going down that road? It would look like a flaw at the base level of some of the blockchain with the most Lindy. So what do I mean by Lindy? So Lindy, or the Lindy effect, is basically a measure of the future life expectancy of things. So in this case, let’s say Bitcoin or Ethereum. A life expectancy of those things increases as they continue to exist, right? So the longer they exist, the greater Lindy effect they have.

(00:49:36):

So if we were to have something like some kind of profound cryptographic exploit in one of the main chains, popular chains, or if there was some… People like to talk about quantum computing. If there was some so far undisclosed quantum computing technology that breaks all modern encryption, then that would result in a systemic failure. And systemic failure means that you maybe cannot recover from it.

(00:50:00):

And endemic failure would be let’s say a specific industry in web3 or technology fails. And an ideological failure would be we’ve set ourselves some ideals, we’re trying to work towards our ideals, which is basically all around pushing power from the center to the edges, and the need to liberate the control of money out of central authorities. Money and data. So an ideological failure would be a failure to do that over the long term.

(00:50:26):

The most easy one I think to talk about is endemic failure, or I talked earlier about Web1, web2 and failure in that space. The failures in that space were the basic exploring itself. We see exactly the same things happening in web3, right? I don’t know about you, but every week, I’m reading another Twitter post about something that’s happening in DeFi, where some protocol is exploited or users are phished maybe. That was a recent one with OpenSea. Users were phished of their NFTs. These things are happening on a weekly basis. There are failures happening on a weekly basis.

(00:51:00):

However, I don’t think they will ever lead to systemic failure, because at the lowest layer, the blocks keep getting produced, consensus is maintained, developers learn from their mistakes, business types learn what works and what doesn’t, and more resilient, useful products are built. And at the end of the day, it’s the populous that uses the products that decides whether they’re going to be successful or not.

(00:51:23):

There’s also something that I like to talk about is sort of the social and political side of endemic failure. So with DeFi, for example, you have a traditional finance industry that’s absolutely massive, and DeFi is trying to challenge that, right? But they’re talking completely different languages. So we’re seeing the word CBDC thrown around a lot now, at least this idea of central bank digital currencies to replace traditional dollars. And if those are implemented incorrectly and we don’t do a good job in communicating how they should be implemented, if at all, then web3 technologies will be used to persecute people, and that’s a major failure. That would be a major failure for us. Many wouldn’t admit that it’s our failure, but I genuinely think it would, if our technology was used for tyranny. So we need to be resilient to those outside powers, and that’s where endemic failure could be a serious problem, I think.

Nick (00:52:54):

Jim, I’m loving what you’re describing here. No, it’s so true. You have to, when you approach web3, and you think about the implications and kind of where we are in the evolution, you have to apply these lenses, because there are these three layers, and I haven’t really thought of it in this way. So I really want a deeper dive on this third part, which is ideological failure, because you wonder if this is really the most vulnerable piece of the three you’re talking about here. So how do you think through then this really important, and in my opinion, critical ideological piece?

Jim Cousins (00:53:29):

I would agree with you that this is the most important piece for me as well. This is the piece that’s closest to my heart. I think the other two are mostly a given. I think that many choose to conveniently ignore this piece, in fact. We like to talk about how web3 is open to everyone, how we’re reclaiming control over money and data, our identity, banking the unbanked, these types of phrases, but who’s questioning that and saying, “Are we really doing that? Are we keeping our eyes on those prizes?”?

(00:54:00):

And you mentioned discussing these things with your friends privately. Me too. When I discuss these things with my friends privately, I will often take the position that web3, where it is today, is not the ultimate answer, and it’s also part of my thesis around web3 being much greater in scope compared to Web1 and two, and will last as a supercycle rather than just part of a supercycle.

(00:54:20):

But it is the path towards the right answer that we are looking for with personal control of money, data, all of that sort of stuff. I think this is the pragmatist view. The honest view, the practical view of where we are… So maybe I can provide a couple of examples of the types of things I’ve brought up when I’m discussing this with friends.

(00:54:40):

One of the most obvious ones is censorship at the webpage level or the interface level. For example, if you try and use the web interface for some of the most well respected dapps in this space, dapps that are known to be doing good for a lot of people, you try and use them from a Farsi speaking country, you can’t because some or all of those countries are on a U.S. sanctions blacklist, right? Does that sound to you like a system that’s open to everyone? Because it doesn’t to me.

(00:55:11):

Another example, if you try and claim an airdrop from some or maybe certain U.S. states, you might not be able to, because those in power in the U.S. have decided for you that they’re going to protect you and not allow you to.

(00:55:23):

Relatively recently, I think it was late last year, a financial product called dYdX did a very generous airdrop to their users, and I believe that either all or some U.S. IP addresses were not allowed to take part in that, so they missed out on a lot of financial benefit. That doesn’t sound like a system open to everyone to me.

(00:55:42):

Decentralized exchanges is another one in terms of privacy, right? Let’s talk about privacy now. When you make a trade on a decentralized exchange, you’re broadcasting those trades to the entire world via the blockchain that that exchange is on. There is no privacy by default with the current generation of these exchanges. If you want privacy, you have to actively go looking for it. And doing that is not without its own flaws, right? That is possibly, in my opinion, the biggest hazard for everyday people trying to enter this space, right? The whole not your keys, not your coins.

(00:56:18):

If you want to operate privately in this space, you need to have good OPSEC, which OPSEC means operational security, actively maintaining your anonymity in general, using various different proven methods. This is really difficult. It’s difficult for people who have been in the space for a long time, even. And I don’t see a world where all of that becomes automatically in the grasp of new entrants to the system. So does that sound like a system with privacy and security suitable for all? I don’t think it is.

Nick (00:56:49):

Well, Jim, that’s obviously a very great overview, and you and I have talked many times about all the things that are going well and the things that are being done right. So for the audience, can you kind of just share some of your thoughts on that?

Jim Cousins (00:57:01):

Absolutely. I probably sound like a negative Nancy, right, going through my criticisms there. But like you say, there’s a huge amount of things that we’ve achieved in the last 10 years that are moving towards the ideological goals I think we share. We’ve definitely made huge progress now. We can deploy protocols that have much less central power than their web2 counterparts, right? We have forms of money that are hard or near impossible for governments to take control of. We have tools emerging and models for communities to govern products and protocols where the power doesn’t sit at the center, but sits somewhere nearer the edges. And the iteration never stops. Who knows what the next web3 narrative is that will enter the common zeitgeist. But alongside that, we need to keep our eyes on the ultimate prize as we do iterate. Personal control of money and data for everybody.

Nick (00:57:58):

Jim, I want to conclude our discussion here about web3 with just kind of two questions. The first question is, and you’ve alluded to this, but just to kind of be more direct and specific, how do you frame where we are in the evolution of web3?

Jim Cousins (00:58:13):

I think we are at the very earliest days of that process. It’s very difficult to predict out more than a couple of years in terms of the technology. And I think we need to be easy on ourselves with trying to do that and trying to force things into a box.

Nick (00:58:33):

Well, that’s exciting. And again, this is an incredible period of time to be on this planet and participating in something. And if we’re in early days, Jim, listeners should feel, I would think, a lot of opportunity, a sense for taking part in something that really could shape the future.

Jim Cousins (00:58:49):

Absolutely. I mean, one of my concerns has always been how do we encourage and empower non-technical people to get involved in this space. I think that there is huge opportunity for non-technical people to get involved now. Every function of a business is required in a DAO, for example, and every function of a business is required in a protocol. And even generalists, people who have maybe come from completely different fields, they can do well in this space if they stand up.

(00:59:21):

That’s what I look for when I’m looking for new contributors and leaders. It’s those that stand up, they’re honest about what they do and do not know, and they’re constantly on a path to learning. I have many examples in my head right now of people who are on that path right now. The important thing from the outside is just to ask questions and to not be afraid to ask questions. And the approach from the inside should be to identify those people and raise them up and empower them and help them on their journey of discovery, both to understand what they might be getting involved with in terms of a web3 product, but also just finding their place where they fit in or where they could add value. I have so many good examples of that, of people who are just generalists, not technical, but they’ve decided that they’re interested in this, they’re passionate about it, they want to learn more, and they’re on a path to greater things.

Nick (01:00:17):

The second thing I want to ask you is about the web3 stack. So obviously, spent a lot of time talking about The Graph, not only today, but this podcast shines a special light on The Graph and the people working to build and contribute to it. The web3 stack is an important infrastructural element here. Is it true, Jim, that there needs to be settlement upon what the infrastructure is before web3 can kind of go into the next steps of its evolution?

Jim Cousins (01:00:48):

It’s something that it’s a moving target, right? The different attempts at drawing a stack that I’ve seen, or defining a stack, no matter how well intentioned the thought leader is, there will always be someone who will make a comment about, “Well, that product is not decentralized enough or isn’t decentralized. It shouldn’t be there. Why isn’t my product there?” There’s maybe a whole sector missing. It’s just this ongoing level of iteration that never stops.

(01:01:17):

When I try and harken back to models in the Web1 and web2 space, the thing that I keep coming back to is this model that anyone involved in IT or engineering knows, right? It’s called the OSI seven layer model. It sets out a stack that starts all the way down at the physical layer of the internet, the actual physical sockets and cables that you’re using, all the way through to the application layer going through all the different parts of the web stack that are required to deliver an application to a user.

(01:01:51):

I don’t think I’ve seen that in the web3 space yet. So every time I see a web3 stack document, what I’m often seeing is specific products being called out rather than specific I guess you might call them verticals that are required, right?

(01:02:05):

So if I was to be able to wish for my perfect example of the stack that I think would be least likely to need to change quickly, like on a daily basis, it would be a stack that talks about the delivery layers and not the products, right? So there’s this desire to talk about the products. Okay, so IPFS, right? Is a file management, a distributed file system, right? Okay, well, we need IPFS to store files. We need a specific blockchain in order to have consensus on transactions, right?

(01:02:38):

I would much rather see something that split things up in terms of we need this specific part of a UI… We need this to deliver the UI in a decentralized fashion. We need this to deliver data storage in a specific decentralized way. We need decentralized data querying layer in order to deliver decentralized data. And it goes all the way down to the stack. And for me, it goes all the way down as far as the actual ISPs, the providers of the internet. I haven’t seen that yet, and I think something like that might be more useful and much less contentious in terms of discussion around what web3 is if it existed. I haven’t seen one though.

Nick (01:03:18):

Well, Jim, that’s amazing framing for those that want to think through and have meaningful discussions about the web3 stack. So within the context of everything you just shared, how would you place The Graph protocol?

Jim Cousins (01:03:32):

Yeah, I mean, despite the difficulty of building these stack models, I think the positioning of The Graph in any of these stacks is quite simple, right? The Graph is data middleware for dapps. There’s a set of building blocks required to deliver the user experience in order for it to qualify as a web3 experience. And the main trait of those building blocks is that ultimately they must be decentralized.

(01:03:57):

If you build an application, and one of your components for the delivery of that dapp is not decentralized, then you’ve built an application, not a dapp. Every component needs to be decentralized, otherwise you are sacrificing decentralization entirely for that product.

(01:04:13):

If one of the components of your dapp denies access to users in a specific country, for example, like I said before, you’ve built an app and not a dapp. So that’s the theme there for me. The Graph fits a decentralized data middleware for the dapps, and that’s where we’re moving with the product.

Nick (01:04:30):

Jim, I want to close out the interview with a couple things. I want to ask you a really important question about you and just kind of shine a light for listeners about how instrumental you’ve been in these early days of The Graph. And then by virtue of this being kind of an anniversary episode of the GRTiQ Podcast, to kind of mark this one year introducing a new segment, something you and I talked about before when we were scheduling, which is I’m going to ask all my guests, from this point forward, a series of questions that I think listeners will be interested in hearing their answers and might get some new ideas themselves.

(01:05:07):

So before I ask those questions, I want to ask you about what drives you. I’m asking because a lot of people, including myself, who have gotten involved in The Graph protocol, who have taken more of a proactive role in web3 and crypto, got involved because of conversations or assistance from you. And I’ve talked to you many times. You deflect, you say you’re a pragmatist, you don’t get too much on the emotional side of things. But I really want to ask you, and this is really for the benefit of listeners who have been impacted by you as well, what drives you. Why are you so selfless with your time and energies and helping onboard so many people into this space?

Jim Cousins (01:05:54):

I don’t think I’m selfless at all. I think I’m as greedy as the next person. It’s all about putting something in and having that reflect back at you, right? That’s what it’s all about. I’m in a privileged position where I’ve been in this space for a long time. I can essentially do whatever I want. I can say no or yes to anything I want.

(01:06:16):

So my choice was at some point during The Graph Mission Control testnet, to commit to a specific protocol, right? Prior to that, I spent 10 years as an investor, and I took it very seriously, right? From the very early days as an investor in this space. So what I was trying to do very early on in 2012, ’13 is I was trying to diversify my Bitcoin, right? That’s all I was trying to do. And I’m quite conservative in terms of risk, right? So I spent nearly a whole decade divesting, investing Ethereum, Cosmos, Polkadot, and a million other failures. Nobody talks about the failures, but the path to success is paved with failure. And I’ve got to the point where I could decide that I don’t need to worry about external income anymore. I can choose to commit to something fully if I want to.

(01:07:07):

So I chose… Given what was reflected back to me from many people you know, Yaniv Tal, Eva Beylin, Martin, Indexers, Gary Morris, Payne, all the friends that I made, I decided that this was something that I really wanted to get involved with because I could see that other people were taking it as seriously as I was.

(01:07:27):

So I see it as my job to give people time when they’re serious about trying to do something, and then finding ways to empower them through my own network. That’s really all it comes down to. I’m in a privileged position where I can choose to do that, so that’s what I do. It’s not about being selfless, it’s about bringing more people in that I think can help us succeed in what we’re doing.

(01:07:48):

I’ve learned a lot about that from Yaniv, to be quite honest. Yaniv, it’s really his thesis, right, about investing in people and things. It’s a risk that you take. And in my experience, it works out more often than it doesn’t. So people often talk about that conversation with Yaniv. That’s what it was for me. It was understanding… He understood my thesis. I explained it as I’m on a journey. And I understood his, which was that his way of contributing was to find opportunities and people, and then put resources in the hands of them. That really resonates with me, so here I am.

Nick (01:08:24):

Well, Jim, and I’m sure I echo the sentiment of a lot of other people that listen to this podcast, thank you for everything you’ve done early on here with so many of us to empower us to get more involved. You’ve absolutely done it. So I just want to thank you for the approach you’ve taken, your commitment to people, to humanity, and to creating a legacy.

(01:08:47):

As I said, I want to now ask you these 10 questions. I’m going to ask all guests of the podcast these 10 questions here forward, and I’m starting with you on this anniversary episode. I’m calling it the GRTiQ 10. They’re quick questions that listeners might hear your answer, might point them in the direction of learning something new or going and trying something different. So are you ready?

Jim Cousins (01:09:12):

Let’s go.

Nick (01:09:24):

Jim, what book or article has had the most impact on your life?

Jim Cousins (01:09:28):

I guess I read quite a lot. I would say recently something I read in the last year was Jeff Booth’s Price of Tomorrow.

Nick (01:09:35):

What TV show or movie do you think every human being should be required to watch?

Jim Cousins (01:09:41):

I would recommend, if you’re into sci-fi, The Expanse.

Nick (01:09:46):

Jim, what’s the best advice anyone’s ever given to you?

Jim Cousins (01:09:49):

I guess it would be don’t compare yourself to others. That’s just a recipe for cynicism and lack of progress in life.

Nick (01:09:58):

If you were forced to listen to only one music album for the rest of your life, which one would you choose?

Jim Cousins (01:10:03):

That’s unfair. I was a DJ in a past life, so choosing one album is pretty difficult. But if I was to go back to my roots, I guess it wouldn’t be what I used to spend my time DJing, which was mostly techno, it would be something more classic like a Simon & Garfunkel album or something like that.

Nick (01:10:22):

What’s one thing you’ve learned in your life that you think most people don’t know?

Jim Cousins (01:10:26):

I would say maybe it’s less and less controversial these days, but minimizing sugar in your diet, minimum that you can tolerate individually, and eliminating vegetable oils completely from your life are the most positive, impactful things you can do for your longevity and your wellbeing.

Nick (01:10:43):

Have you figured out any life hacks for how you deal with times when you’ve lost focus or you’re not feeling productive, how you get back on track and feel productive again?

Jim Cousins (01:10:54):

I’m not particularly good at it right now myself, but developing habits, right? But once you’ve developed habits, whether it be for exercise, diet, art, culture, whatever it might be, once you’ve developed those habits, when the hard times come, and they will come, you find solace in those habits that you’ve developed, rather than them being chores.

Nick (01:11:15):

Based on your observations and experiences in your own life and with the world, what are then the habits or characteristics that you think best explains success for people in life?

Jim Cousins (01:11:27):

I mean, success is different for everyone, right? But at the end of the day, no, I think there are some characteristics of successful people. For me and for my success, I would say that it’s constant curiosity about everything. That’s why I got involved in cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin in 2012. Just curious about technology.

(01:11:49):

Also something, a theme, I think, when I meet people that are successful or I know are going to be successful, they’re usually very mindful, and that’s either come through they’re just naturally mindful or they’ve overcome some sort of major suffering in their own life or a person close to them. That tends to push someone into mindfulness. When you’re constantly being slammed by suffering in your life, it humbles you over and over again.

Nick (01:12:17):

Complete this sentence, Jim, “The thing that most excites me about web3 is…”

Jim Cousins (01:12:22):

Being alive to see what comes next with web3.

Nick (01:12:25):

How about this sentence? “If you’re on Twitter, then you should be following…”

Jim Cousins (01:12:29):

You should be following DoombergT. Again, the theme of sense-making in the world in general. Nothing to do with crypto. Can I offer a podcast as well beyond, of course, GRTiQ? I would strongly recommend… Again, same idea, sense-making about what’s going on in the world in general. It’s a podcast called Hidden Forces with a guy called Demetri Kofinas. It’s an excellent podcast.

Nick (01:12:52):

And then what about this sentence, Jim? “I’m happiest when…”

Jim Cousins (01:12:56):

Number go up. I’m kidding. I would say I’m probably happiest when I’m in the midst of creating or building with other people. When you’ve got that sort of creative… The creative juices are flowing and you really feel like you’re making progress, that’s my happy state, I would say.

Nick (01:13:22):

Jim Cousins, thank you again for your generosity, not only for doing today’s interview, but your pillar within this community and somebody that I deeply respect. We didn’t touch on the fact that you are an Indexer at The Graph, but we touched on everything else. A thought leader, council member, and a wonderful podcast guest with a lot of ideas, and a mentor to so many. If people want to stay in touch with you, Jim, follow your work and learn more about all the things that you’re up to, including what you’re doing with Wavefive, what’s the best way to do it?

Jim Cousins (01:13:54):

If you’re interested in Wavefive as an Indexer operation on The Graph, you can check out the website, wavefive.co. If you’re interested in my spicy subtweets on Twitter, you can go to @_cryptovester. And yeah, that’s my two avenues of contact.