Rekt Tech Rekt Rob

Interviewing Sam Bankman-Fried on December 6th, 2022

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https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/rekt-report-issue-25-blockchain-questions-answered-rob-mowry

This year, I'm investing time into sharpening up my presentations to a general audience on blockchain topics. There's a huge appetite in the Los Angeles area for people that can come in and explain these complicated topics. I'm happy to do these to sharpen up my ability to communicate some of these often opaque topics and am doing them about once a week.

I enjoy getting feedback from audiences because it allows me to determine what parts of my presentations are the most impactful and, like a stand up comedian will tighten up their set, I use this as a good barometer of what to focus on and further build out and what to cut. Another good exercise is ask the audience afterwards: what was the real takeaway from this one or two hour presentation that you'll take with you?

When I read a book, I like to write down a handful of thoughts, every hour, so that I can review impactful points, because after reading for five hours, I'm not going to be able to immediately recall all of the salient points that hit me at various times. People have limited free time and public speakers have a duty to get right to the point of the most impactful topics that's relevant to an audience.

I had a conversation about content structure with a colleague whose writing I enjoy and we discussed the push to impactful brevity. Blockchain influencers and fund managers are integrating memes and shorter form content by looking to the standard that if you can communicate something in less words, as impactfully as something that is haphazardly spilled out on a page, then it's an imperative that you do so. Every minute that something isn't tightly wound into something that's highly readable, you've introduced the potential to lose the reader so to the extent that you can prevent against that you must.

In one of my recent presentations, I fielded questions during the slides, and I thought that in this Rekt Report, and ones that follow, that I would answer specific questions that I seem to be receiving on a recurring basis. Rather than try to weave answers into the context of a longer form article, which I will do from time to time, I think that it would be particularly useful for a blockchain newsletter that's facing the public to piecemeal out answers that are easily digestible. So here goes:

What is the Web 3 movement and why is it important?

Web 1 was the use of the internet with individual, static websites that were functionally more like online brochures for a business. Web 2, which has been the past decade, is the era of centralization where you login to your profile on a platform of a tech behemoth. They control the rules to the game, own your images, and you're creating content for them, much like writing for a regional newspaper about your life, telling all your friends about it, and doing so for free while the newspaper rakes in advertising.

Web 3 seeks to break the monopolistic control of tech companies who, first and foremost, have their profits in mind to meet analyst numbers projections and operate despite the preponderance of evidence that that their sensationalist algorithms, coded to foment extreme reactions that will engage users enough to stay on their platform, are deleterious to one's mental health. The most savvy tech minds, like Professor Cal Newport, embrace a tech minimalism, with all social media apps off of one's phone, in observation of the toxicity of this phenomenon. If an activity is deleterious to our productivity or overall well-being, common sense would suggest that we disengage to the extent that we can practically, and professionally, do so.

By definition, Web 3 refers to a decentralized online ecosystem utilizing the...