This week we chat with David Pakman, a tech investor with a background in computer science and music. David worked at Apple and founded several companies before moving into venture capital, where he invests in crypto, robotics, AI, and consumer technology.
You can follow David on Twitter here and read his blog here.
Check out more about Dapper Labs and it's work with the NBA and NFTs here.
David has written some influential pieces on the world of digital music and the role of software platforms. Check out a few of his pieces here.
Read about David's adventure's setting up a Minecraft server for his kids and using software for griefer detection.
Thanks to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, Keith Thompson, for answering the question: Go lang differentiate “\n” and line break
As Keith eloquently explains, "There is no distinction between a 'real' and an 'unreal' line break."
David Pakman I think crypto currencies were misnamed early on. If they were, if they were instead called crypto assets, when they were created, they wouldn't have gone through the four or five year argument that 'well their volatility prevents them from being useful as money! Why would you ever pay with Bitcoin?' And it was a sideshow, that turned out to be a complete sideshow. What was novel here was that there Software defined assets that have both utility and value, and really important, people have been investing in them hundreds of millions of people, and it's created like $2 trillion worth of value. So like full stop, period, you don't get to have an opinion beyond that. Do you know what I mean? Like, that's a fact. Those are facts. So it's a software defined asset class that has really interesting properties beyond just physical assets.
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Ben Popper Alright! Hey everybody. Welcome to the Stack Overflow Podcast. I'm Ben Popper, Director of Content here at Stack Overflow. I have a very special guest with me today, David Pakman. from Ben rock. Hello, David.
DP Hey, Ben, nice to see you again!
BP Nice to see you again, as well. We've known each other for a while since like 2008 or 2009, when I was at the, maybe 2010. I was at the New York Observer, just reporting on the New York tech scene. And you've been a fixture in that New York venture capital scene for a while. For people who don't know, tell them a little bit about sort of who you are. And what it is you do these days.
DP Going way back, I'm a computer science engineer. And then I worked at Apple for seven years, doing product marketing stuff, but I always been a musician. And so I found my way kind of lucky at Apple and helped start a group there called the Music Group, which went on to do a lot of great things, mostly without me. But after a bunch of years of doing digital music stuff in the late 90s, I became an entrepreneur, eventually started a couple companies. I was the CEO of eMusic. And then I became an investor. And in 2008, actually around when we met, Ben became a venture capitalist. So I've been at Venrock since then, and invest in early stage tech companies. I focus on crypto, robotics, Ai, consumer, and whatever else is interesting.
BP Cool. I didn't know that you were starting right at that time. That's neat. So yeah, I mean, I guess one of the things that we'd love to chat about is the programming and music side of stuff that is now intersected with the world of crypto in an interesting way with people minting NFT's and thinking about the possibilities for ownership and royalties. To take us back when you got started, what was the digital music world like? I saw you tweeted today about the first ever live stream before there was live streaming. But yeah, what was the scene like when you got into it?
DP Well, I was just sort of lucky to be born when I was born, because I think, you know, you have the Netscape browser or, you know, NCSA, Mosaic before that in sort of 94, 95. And the very first media type to be digitized was text, of course. And so no surprise, the very first thing that felt some transition from atoms to bits was journalism and publishing. And the very second thing was music, because music was on CDs, which were already digitized. And it was just sort of patently obvious, I think, to most of us, sitting around at that time, that gee, there's no reason to make CDs and sell them in stores. So music distribution will change. And as distribution changes, so can a bunch of other stuff, too. So that was just a time of a lot of early entrepreneurial activity to try to build new ways of music distribution and new ways of music, entertainment, streaming, audio streaming video, and maybe even you know, changing the balance of power between artists and record labels.
BP Right. And so eMusic and early, was that The Locker or was that different locker? I know you had like a music locker at one point.
DP Yeah. So the first thing I did is I joined, after I left Apple I joined, n2k, which was one of the first it was a New York based digital music company. It had a website called Music Boulevard where you could buy CDs online. We merged with our biggest competitor CD Now and then of course, Amazon won. And from there I partnered with an old friend from Apple, Doug Campbell and we made my play which was The Locker Yeah, that was you know, Dropbox for music is the way I think I would explain it now. Just a place for you to store your mp3s. And then I came over and ran eMusic after that.
BP Yeah, I do remember that sort of liminal period. I think I went started going to college in 2000, 2001. So I had 1000s upon 1000s of folders that I downloaded from Napster, some of which I didn't even know. They would just be like, do you want all the blues CDs I have. Here they are. I'd just grabbed a folder, you know if I could. And then I also freshmen and sophomore year was constantly burning CDs, people would be like, do you want to copy my booklet. I'd have 100 like, I just was gorging myself on music. I couldn't even listen to it all. But since people were giving it to me, I was like, gotta have it. Gotta have it. Gotta have it. What was the name of that service that Mark Zuckerberg—Oink? Oink was around for a little while. And that was just like, I mean, you could just main line entire people's collections. It was unreal.
DP Yeah, you had Napster and Kazaa. Oh, yeah. And scour.net, which not many people remember it was Travis Kalanick, you know, the founder of Uber very first project was a Napster clone called Scour.
BP Ah, cool. Yeah, that's something that's a nice bit of trivia. I didn't know that one.
DP But yeah, you're right like that we were all mainlining mp3s. But the one of the impetus for my play was you had your music collection at home sitting on a hard drive, right? And then you went to the office. And you're like, I sure would love to listen to some of my music right now. But I can't because they're sitting on a hard drive at home, it's like, well, why is that sitting on a hard drive? Shouldn't that be in the cloud?
BP And were there technical limitations, then, you know, like, that you think kind of inhibited it from becoming a, you know, a bigger mainstream success than it was? You know, was it bandwidth or storage or things like that, that kind of got in the way at the time, that now wouldn't be an issue?
DP We spent $3 million on hard drives, like that's what it costs to buy a giant EMC rackmount storage device in the data center. But yes, the storage was expensive, but that wasn't the limitation. It was streaming bandwidth. And we had to like downsample, your mp3s so that you could stream them to yourself. But it wasn't a failure, like we had 8 million customers. And it was sold to Bertelsmann, they just didn't do much with it, which is typical of acquisitions. But I think that, you know that that concept, obviously was eventually replaced by the true streaming services like Spotify, obviating the need for you to download it in the first place.
BP And I know, you and I have talked many times in the past about as you brought up earlier, you know, the idea of ownership and rights and licensing, you know, maybe fundamentally, at some point shifting some of the balance of power between artists and labels. I guess, you know, to catch people up, you even testified, you know, in front of Congress, or in front of Senate hearings about this. You know, it seems like the state of play right now, when it comes to the big streaming platforms is relatively the same, which is that artists can can easily put music on there. But it's hard to make a good living unless you're really a breakout star, because a lot of the money does end up flowing back to the tech platforms and the labels themselves. Do you feel like things have changed, you know, over the last five or 10 years are we still in kind of a holding pattern?
DP In terms of the economics, they really haven't changed in the 20 or 30 years, it's been since the internet, record labels still take 50 to 70% of every dollar that a consumer pays for music, whether that's a CD in the old days, a digital download in the more recent days, and then streaming in the current day. And of course, you got to give 30% first to the platform, right to iTunes or to Spotify, then of the amount that the label gets, they keep 50 to 70%. So the artists gets the smallest take, which does seem a little strange, considering that it is their work. But that's, you know, for historic reasons, and I think the question many creative types have asked is, gee, as things have gone digital, do the labels really do as much work as they did when music was sold physically? You know, they, they helped to record the record in a studio, they paid for expensive studio time, they brought in producers and paid their fees, they paid for it to be mastered, they paid for the vinyl to be pressed, they paid for the copies of the manufacturing to be made, they paid for the trucks to drive it to the record stores, like they did a lot of work. Plus they did marketing. But they don't need to do any of that anymore. You record it in your bedroom with GarageBand or Pro Tools. [Ben laughs] You bring your buddies in as your co-writers and producers and and you upload it to Spotify. So, you know, they still do a little bit of marketing, but gee, is that really worth 50? Or 70%? Most people would would say no, but that those economics haven't changed.
BP And so are there like examples of independent artists who broke out and kind of, you know, put the troops to that? And you know, like, I'm thinking of a Lil Nas X or something, you know, when he first recorded that, or, you know, somebody else who's as you, as you mentioned, have been a breakout star, something they've basically recorded on their own, have those individuals been able to stream it, see the difference. That's, you know, is there in terms of the financial reward when you're self published and then demonstrate that to others? Or is there always kind of this moment of friction where like, when you want to go legit, when you want to get on the platforms, you kind of have to, you know, do some kind of deal with the labels?
DP I think the way to frame this, the answer to that question is to first just visit the question of scarcity. The things that are most valuable in music right now are the live shows. That's the healthiest part of the music business. It's been growing the most the last decade is much larger now than it's ever been. And it's you know, ticket prices have gone up considerably. The amount of money, disposable income spent on recorded music, whether it's streaming subscription, is stayed the same or gone down on an annual basis and the amount that people spend on live music has increased. So why is that? It's because the live experience is special. It's scarce, right? Only a certain number of people can attend, artists tours only a certain amount of time, go to the to the location to see it. So scarcity tends to increase the value it can increase in value over time. Whereas the internet created a world of abundance where their net through downloads or streaming the music is available to anyone everywhere and that's wonderful for access, but it probably decreased He says the value. And that's why actually if you look at like the ARPU of Spotify, the average revenue per user, it decreases, not because people have churned out just because they've had to lower their prices to get more and more people to sign up. You know, it used to be 10 bucks a month for everyone. Now, it's, well, it's 15 bucks for a family of five actually, right? Oh, and you're a student. That's not 10 bucks a month, that's 4.99. So you know, and that's good, I actually applaud them because they want to get more people paying for music, but, but still, the price goes down. So scarce items can be very valuable. And why is that important? Well, artists all make more money from their live shows than from there recorded music sales. And so I think the question many artists are asking themselves is, can I make my music scarce too? Rather than uploading at Spotify and getting you know, 1,000,000th of a cent per stream? Can I sell something else that scarce beyond my live show?
BP Right. So obviously, Wu Tang had their one of a kind record, which went on its own journey. But now people are experimenting with, you know, the idea of NFT's and one of the kinds for people who don't know, and I know you're pretty familiar with this world, what's the concept there? You're tokenizing, a record or a song, making it unique, and therefore, it's collectible, in a sense, so everybody's going to hear the music, but only the true super fans are going to get the Kings of Leon NFT.
DP Yeah, and maybe just to make it a little bit more concrete, we can start not with audio and NFTs. But we'll start with like a visual NFT. Think of it as like a digital work of art, right. And people understand the notion of art collecting. That's a very scarce item that sold right and sometimes it's displayed, and sometimes it's not, but people buy it to collect it. And maybe it goes up in value, you couldn't really collect digital imagery, because it's too easy to copy. There's no proof of ownership. So NFT's were invented to actually add proof of ownership and have sort of a seal of authenticity around a piece of digital intellectual property, whether it's text or visual or audio. And because of blockchains, which are public, we can all buy digital items that prove that we own it. And the provenance is provable, and the scarcity is provable. That is like the artist only made 100 of these or one of these. And that the reason we say it's provable is because the proof is public. It's in the blockchain, anyone can see, no one company owns that proof. So that's what's new here. And what that means is that every piece of intellectual property can now have property rights, they can have ownership, and that can make them both valuable and scarce. So now we're presented with the question, okay, I'm a musical artist, what should I do in this world? And there's just a belief that with scarce digital items, that artists of any type can create limited edition works, and sell them often at high prices, to their most devoted fans, right? The true fans. And when you start to do the math, you don't need millions and millions of people to love you, the way Beyonce has achieved, you know global celebrity, you'll need like, hundreds or 1000s, who are willing to pay like hundreds or 1000s of dollars to support you, and you can make a living.
BP Yeah, I mean, I'm a former journalist and the world of substack over the last year has certainly turned people's heads, in the sense of 10,000 super fans are gonna net you a salary that, you know, previously was unimaginable for journalists. And that you have a more intimate relationship with them. And I guess there's a sense of scarcity there, like they subscribe and, you know, other therefore, they can read the newsletter, but obviously wouldn't be that difficult, you know, to copy it or whatever, you know, they're they're paying because they want, they feel a connection, and they want to support you. So it's been interesting to see that happen, right? Even with things that, you know, I think it would be relatively trivial to steal them or copy them if you wanted to. But that's not the point of you know why you're paying that extra, why you're paying that premium?
DP Yeah, you bring up a good point, there's, we're mixing multiple concepts here. And that's okay, because that's what's happening in the world. But there is like, hey, I produce content but can I sell it directly to my audience versus having to go through a big brand, like the New York Times or The Verge or something like that. Can I be an individual creator, sort of the DTC movement for creators. And now what we're trying to add on top of that sort of the superset of substack, is can we also make some of the items that are sold scarce. And I agree with you in the substack example, they're not scarce. That's not what's happening here. There is a patronage model going on where I just want the convenience of the email and coming into my inbox every day. But we're also trying to, you know, also say we're experimenting with the idea of collectible or rare items that whether it's a journalist or musical artists or visual artist could create that I collect and may even go up in value.
BP And so overall, I guess, do you think that this will continue to move in a good direction? I mean, one of the things that that sort of concerns me is that yeah, this is all based on an idea of scarcity and there's a lot of people in the world of NFT's and cryptocurrencies, you know, who are interested in it, because it seems like a great speculative investment. You know, I heard somebody the other day talking about a slightly different version of the NFT, which is that for a long time now people have understood objects in video games can be valuable, you know, there's some scarcity to some special armor in World of Warcraft. And so it's intuitive even to younger people, if I get this, I can lend it out, or I can make money selling it. But in that world, it also has utility, right? Like, it's not necessarily just about the scarcity or about the patronage. Do you feel like maybe the the world of cryptocurrency and NFT has gotten a little bit ahead of itself? Or I don't know that there's a bit of a speculative mania surrounding some of what's happening?
DP The answer is yes to everything. But first, let's just put a few things in perspective, I think we are at the experimentation phase of this market, right? People are trying all sorts of stuff, what has gotten everyone's attention is some things are working really well. So I'm personally a fan of the NFT's that have some utility value, beyond its collectible value. That is, it's not just for speculators. So I'll give you an example. We're investors in this company called Dapper Labs, they created the NFT standard. And they also created this very successful NFT collecting experience called NBA Top Shot. So they partnered with the NBA, and they have the things that you're collecting are not player basketball cards, you're collecting great moments by those players, three pointer, a dunk a block, foul, whatever. And you collect these, they have a scarcity to them, each moment only has a certain number of those available, and they're sold for certain prices, and then they can be resold in a marketplace. So certainly, you can speculate and a bunch of people are. But there's also 50 games coming out, in which you will use these NFT's. You could think of a basketball head to head game where we play each other and maybe let turn by turn game where I play a move and you play a move, but you need to have the NFT in order to play it. So now there's this reason for you to be collecting these NFT's because you want to win the games. And maybe there's rewards for winning the games like more tokens for you to go buy more NFT's or even monetary rewards. So I'm a fan of these NFT's that serve a utility purpose beyond just a collecting purpose. You pointed out virtual items in games, which is really what we're just talking about here. But but just to be a little bit more specific. Sure, people buy weapons or cloaks or capes to be used in games, which enour you with special powers that makes you more likely to achieve or get to the next level. Not only will NFT's be virtual items for games like that, but they may actually evolve. So you know, if you buy a collectible pair of you know, Nike Air Jordan sneakers, the day you put them on your feet, they decrease in value, right? You can't use them. But if I buy a super rare sword, and I use it in a game, and I beat a dragon, the sword could increase in value, could gain more capabilities or experience points or something. So I believe that NFT's will have multiple uses and also will evolve, they'll actually change over time, which makes them even more rare and fun.
BP Hmm, that's interesting. Yeah, I'm sure pretty soon we're gonna see people minting an NFT to go with the pair of sneakers, and then you could wear them but hold on to the NFT.
DP Yeah, yeah, that's really cool That's cool. And you know, just to put some numbers around this. So the NBA Top Shot has sold $518 million worth of top shots so far. Now. That's Dapper Labs and the NBA minting NFTs and then people reselling them to each other in a peer to peer marketplace. Crypto Punks, which is less of a utility but more of a collectible, visual collectible $235 million of sales hash marks almost 50 million. So there really are some large dollars accompanying these marketplaces.
BP And do you think that the audience tends to skew younger, that it's people who were early in crypto and now are interested in spending that wealth in a way you know, that is fun and interesting in the world that they live in of technologists? Do you think that you know, it's people again, who are younger who just have been living in the digital world and are used to the idea that their digital items and identity you know, reflects them as genuinely as their real life and they're just as used to spending, you know, time talking to friends there or impressing people are hanging out there as they're on the road? Do you think I mean, maybe, you know, get you know, from from a Dapper Labs perspective, like what the demographic is like of these users and consumers?
DP Yeah, I think the answer is that it's both and so first, there is a tendency of people to dismiss phenomena happening around crypto as 'well, these are just the crypto people'. First of all, that's a plus not a negative because the number of crypto people is growing exponentially. Coinbase went public and now see a 56 million accounts right, there is something like 100 million on BiNance. So, you know, there there are hundreds of millions of people in the world who own crypto and they are leading edge. Right. So they are early adopters of crypto related things. So first, first of all, I think that's a it's a good thing, not a bit not a bad thing to have crypto people adopting. But I wanted, I wanted to give you the other stats. So on but on NBA Top Shot their goal, Dapper's goal was to find non crypto people to introduce NFT's to non crypto people and 70% of their sales are to people who never had crypto before.
BP And I guess yeah, do you know how those numbers from like a Coinbase, Coinbase and Binance, compared to the number of people who have you know, Charles Schwab account or an eTrade or now I guess it would be a Robin Hood? I mean, like that, that the numbers you were stating seemed pretty wild to me. I know that, you know, like 80% of stocks are held by 10% of people. So I assume that like, you know, there's not actually that many people out there doing retail investing, maybe aside from their 401k or something like that.
DP Yeah, I think those numbers are changing because of the Robin Hood and Square and Cash App. And, you know, the easier ways of investing. So I don't know the number of total brokerage accounts that that's interesting question. But just to get back to your earlier point about like, are these younger or older people? Yes, the you know, crypto adoption skews heavily millennial and Gen Z, which makes a lot of sense, they put their faith in Bitcoin, much quicker than putting their faith in a bank. And also, you know, Bitcoin in the last 10 years is the world's best performing asset. It's the best investment you can make. In fact, a solid, great comparison yesterday, Coinbase, which went public is you know, at at some billion dollar value is one of the best venture or seed investments ever. The seed investors made 6000 times their money. But if, but if on the day that they invested in Coinbase, if instead they had just bought Bitcoin, they would have made 10,000 times their money. So it's no surprise that kids who have been watching crypto are like, it's not only are we good investors, we're actually better investors than everyone.
BP I know it's hard to call something that's 10 years old a bubble, it's hard to think about it in those terms. And yet, I don't know I, you know, maybe this is part of just my nature and why I missed the boat. But, you know, I just see the valuation of these things and not to knock Coinbase, it's already a profitable company. I guess the valuation and the amount of real world utility that exists outside of trading and speculation, that exists out of the act of buying and selling coins, still seems pretty minimal. I mean, there's been a lot of conversation about, you know, what you can do with the blockchain inside of, you know, law or real estate or finance. And for now, that all seems like you said, we're still in the experimental phase.
DP Yeah. And I would, I would have one piece of thought that I share with people, I had the same early reaction to crypto as many of us do, which is like, oh, this is just people trading. Like why is that interesting? Well, first of all, the reason that's true is because I think I think crypto currencies were misnamed early on. If they were, if they were instead called crypto assets, when they were created, they wouldn't have gone through the four or five year argument that 'well their volatility prevents them from being useful as money! Why would you ever pay with Bitcoin?' And it was a sideshow, that turned out to be a complete sideshow. What was novel here was that there Software defined assets that have both utility and value, and really important, people have been investing in them hundreds of millions of people, and it's created like $2 trillion worth of value. So like full stop, period, you don't get to have an opinion beyond that. Do you know what I mean? Like, that's a fact. Those are facts. So it's a software defined asset class that has really interesting properties beyond just physical assets. So like, I encourage the skeptics among us to, to not say, well, it's just these people trading. It's like, yeah, well, couple 100 million people trading assets that are now worth 2 trillion, that's pretty interesting.
BP Yeah, that's a pretty good sized stock market, right?
DP Yeah, right, exactly. Yeah. But now we're in NFT land and now things are different. Now. It's not just, you know, flipping assets. Now there's some utility to them. And now things are getting very interesting.
BP I had an experience the other day, and I play lots of these collectible card games online and Blizzard, which I guess is EA has a very successful, but then I like, you know, the old school Magic the Gathering put went out. And like they would entice you to come back every other day by giving you a deck which is like 60 cards. And I was like, wow, this is a much better experience than the one Blizzard does. Like they're just giving me so much more in terms of like the number of cards, they probably have 20,000 because they've been around since you know, the 90s or whatever. And then I remembered how much I used to spend on those physical cards, you know, between fifth and 10th grade, I probably put 5 to $10,000 into every bit of allowance I had went into those. And now they can just get they can afford to just give them to me, you know, they can just hand them out. And then I circle back and you know, want to pay a little bit for early access to this or that. But I was just sort of shocked thinking about, yeah, the transference of something that, you know, was so valuable to me for so long. And it also to come full circle has insane collectible value, like the physical ones have held onto their value and appreciated really significantly. So all of those things, yeah, kind of make you step back just by my skepticism of NFTs. There's lots of real world examples of how this has played out. And baseball cards, another one.
DP So I'm 100% agree with that, in fact, what the investment thesis that led to my investment in Dapper Labs was not an investment thesis about crypto adoption, it was investment thesis about collecting. I was a baseball card collector to I think I even tried stamps and coins also, they're probably still at my parents house. But I did some research on collecting and it turns out like 40% of humanity collects and we've been doing it for millennia, like we collected needs before money and like collecting is a thing that humans do. And even like, found a book and a psychologist who wrote about like, why we collect and there are like, seven like psychological reasons and it you know, ranges from like—
BP Do animals do this?
DP Yeah, exactly! Exactly!
BP Birds will go get shiny objects. They love them.
DP Yeah, yeah. So it's it goes to the soul, right? It's like what we do so it's a little bit easier to make bets about the future when it's just a continuation of what we already do. So people collect and they collect art and baseball cards and Pokemon cards and Magic the Gathering and they collect shoes and wine and sneakers. Okay, so so why why won't we have digital collectibles to we just couldn't before because they weren't scarce or authentic. But now they are. So there's no surprise. But here's where it gets super wacky. We just agreed that there are going to be digital collectibles. NFT's are the way that that's happening. And we we also agreed that a lot of those collectibles are can be more than just collectibles. There are things that you use in games and useful in other ways. Right? Okay, so there's the, like one of the top Top Shot collectors spent $175,000 on his collection, that's now worth 20 million. So this guy's in his 20s. And he's got a $20 million of collectible assets. So I'm sure he would love to borrow against them and get a little bit of money. So you could like quit his job. But there's not a bank on the planet that's going to lend against NFTs today. So what's happening? There are marketplaces emerging for people to pledge as collateral their NFT's in exchange for a loan, that if they don't pay it back, the lender gets the NFT.
BP So yeah, you can write a smart contract for that. Sure.
DP 100%. So so now we're gonna have NFT DeFi we're gonna have a distributed finance network to provide lending maybe securitization fractionalization, maybe derivatives on NFT's. Now, here's where it gets even more crazy. There are some NFT games Axie Infinity is one, you buy the NFT to use it in your game. If you play the asset, if you play the game, the your NFT earns rewards. Right? It can earn like either tokens of economic value or tokens that are useful in the game. So here's what's cool. Let's say you're a collector, and you buy Axie Infinity NFT's, but you're not a gamer. So how do you get the rewards, the yield, if you will, on your NFT? You need to loan them to gamers. So I can see a world it's actually happening. There's some people doing this, where there's a marketplace for collectors to loan, their NFT's to gamers, so the gamers will play them, and then they'll like split the yield, right? It's like that that's coming, that's going to happen.
BP I'm sure, I'm sure their 12 year olds running the yield curve on those items. And those kids are gonna be way ahead of me. Way ahead of me. Now I know you're an investor. So I doubt you'd speak ill of them. But I had heard that complaint from some people had experimented with with Top Shot that it's hard to get your money out. And that's what you're saying is you'd have to create these new markets where you could DeFi or you know that you couldn't turn it back into cash very easily that you could, as you said, make a collection and see it grow, you know, tremendously valuable that right now you can't take it on cash. Is there a reason like legal or find regulatory reason for that?
DP You can take it out, it just takes time. They sort of make make you go slow. And that's all for regulatory and fraud reasons. If it were easy to load up your account by a bunch of stuff, sell it and pull it out the you start running the risk is this wash trading? Is there money laundering going on? So you will get it all out. There's no as long as everything you're doing is legal, and you're not trying to launder money, you'll get your money up.
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BP Alright, great. Well, I know we could have talked about robotics or a bunch of other things. But this is the topic, you have a lot of intelligent things to say about it. So I'm glad that we connected and got the chance to chat. If people want to follow you on the internet, where would you like to be followed? And if they want to follow up on any of this stuff today, where would you recommend they go to read or learn or play some of this stuff?
DP Thank you for allowing me to do my plugs. Follow me on Twitter @pakman. And, you know, go to pakman.com to read my blog post about the stuff and please reach out you know if you're doing cool stuff in crypto or NFTs or software or consumer, you know, reach out to me on Twitter, I will definitely connect.
BP Okay, terrific. And Ben Popper, Director of Content here at Stack Overflow, you can always find me @BenPopper on Twitter and email us podcast@Stack Overflow.com. If you enjoy the show, please do leave a rating and review, it helps. David, I'm going to shout out a lifeboat badge winner. I don't know, I know you are a coder more than I am. Have you, do you find yourself on Stack Overflow on occasion?
DP I would not be here today if it weren't for Stack Overflow. [Ben laughs]
BP That's kind of you to say. A lifeboat badge winner took a question with a score of negative three and got it up to a score of 20 or more. So thank you awarded yesterday to Keith Thompson. 'Go lang differentiate the end and the line break.' Alright. Well, we'll put it in the show notes. If this is a problem you've had I think we have an answer for you.
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