How do we spread the good impact Web3 can have in people’s lives? By bringing in those from the community to share the great work they have been doing! After pulling off a successful NFT LA event last March, Jeff Kelley brings the great insights shared from the mainstage talk or breakout panel. He was joined by Andrew Yang of GoldenDAO/Lobby3, Calista Wu of Cali Star Entertainment, and William Tong of GoldenDAO. Together, they talked about what they are creating to unite the world as well as updates on music, art, gaming, and more. If you believe that Web3 has so much power to change people’s lives, this episode’s for you.
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Listen to the podcast here
NFT LA Collection – Jeff Kelley Hosts A Panel On The Future Of Community X Cryptocurrency, Feat. Andrew Yang (GoldenDAO/Lobby3), Calista Wu (Cali Star Entertainment), And William Tong (GoldenDAO)
We did it along with my incredible cohosts, Jeff and Josh, as well as with the huge crew of rock star team members we assembled. We have pulled off a stellar inaugural NFT LA event, featuring the creme de la creme of Web 3.0 and leveraging the vibrant entertainment scene of Los Angeles. This episode is one of a series featuring content from the NFT LA event, which happened from March 28th to 31st, 2022. This session is among those where one of us cohosts facilitated a main stage talk or breakout panel. This episode features my cohost, Jeff Kelly, conducting a panel on the future of community and cryptocurrency featuring Andrew Yang, Calista Wu, and William Tong. Enjoy.
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In our final keynote, we’ve saved the best for last, returning to lead the chat on The Future of Community X Cryptocurrency is one of our hosts for this fantastic journey we’ve all been on, the Edge of NFT Podcast Co-creator, Mr. Jeff Kelly. Our very special guest is the Chair of The Forward Party and a serial entrepreneur who ran for president of the United States in 2020, championing universal basic income and other anti-poverty policies.
He has founded organizations including Venture for America, Humanity Forward, and GoldenDAO. He was named a Champion of Change by the Obama Administration in 2012 and Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship in 2015. He has stood against the anti-Asian hate that has deeply impacted our AAPI community. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome, Mr. Andrew Yang. Joining him from GoldenDAO, please welcome Ms. Calista Wu and welcome back Mr. William Tong.
Thanks so much, Kristin. Thank you, Andrew, Calista, and William for joining us here. I couldn’t be more excited to have you here. Let’s dive right in and start at the beginning. How did you become interested in Web 3.0 and crypto? Where do we go from here?
It’s a privilege to be on the final panel here at NFT LA. I’ve been enthused about this community since I ran for president. When you’re running for president as a relatively little-known entrepreneur on a platform like universal basic income, you notice when people support, embrace and champion your campaign early on. No one did that as much as the crypto community at that time.
I spoke at consensus and blockchain for good in these events. It was like, “These people get it.” I tried to figure out why so many of you got it. I realized it was because you were so optimistic and enterprising. You had a vision for the future that you draw other people into all the time. I like to think that my campaign was the same way. This community has been aligned and near and dear to my heart ever since 2018. I have this opportunity to give back and do some good.
You’re certainly doing that. You’ve launched Lobby3 DAO and GoldenDAO. You put those on the scene in a big way. It elevated the conversation about DAOs. I was wondering if you could take a minute and tell us a little bit about each of them and how they play into your vision?
I’ll talk about Lobby3 DAO and have Calista talk a bit about GoldenDAO. I’m super excited about both of these projects. I learned a lot about Washington DC over the last number of years. Not all of it was good. I read an Onion article in 2011 that had a real impact on me. This is a true story. The Onion article said, “The American people hire lobbyists to fight for our interests on Capitol Hill.” There’s a guy in a suit being like, “They’ll take the American people seriously.”
I thought this was the funniest article but I thought, “We should do that. We should hire a lobbyist.” I hired about fifteen lobbyists and stopped running for president to lobby for Cash Relief, the enhanced Child Tax Credit, and anything I thought would fight poverty. When the Infrastructure Bill was passed, folks woke up to the fact that there was a language that affected the Web 3.0 community very directly. It was a language that frankly displayed a total ignorance about the way that firms operate. There was this huge commotion and fear. We’re like, “You are going to regulate us. This doesn’t make any sense.”
I spent the last couple of years developing a sense of how to make things happen or not happen in DC. I was like, “I can help here.” I then went to my friends in the Web 3.0 community and said, “I’m going to be starting a DAO called Lobby3 DAO. What we’re going to do is go to Washington and try and make sure that the regulations that get written over the next number of days and weeks make sense.” I have a relatively middle-of-the-road perspective on this where I think there should be sensible regulation.
There are risks associated with the space but it can’t be the regime that ends up pushing all of this energy, ingenuity, and creativity to other parts of the world. Among other things, I am an American and want America to remain the home to a lot of this energy and activity. I hope you all agree with that. That is Lobby3 DAO. It’s very exciting. This vibrant community of people wants to tell more holistic, accurate stories about some of the creators and artists who’ve had their lives changed by Web 3.0. Golden DAO is an AAPI empowerment DAO. One of our founders here is with me, Calista. I would love to have Calista speak about what brought you to GoldenDAO.
My name is Calista. I am an attorney and a recording artist. I do music and am also an activist. We’re so excited about GoldenDAO because we here, as part of the founding team of Golden DAO, are passionate about the AAPI community. For those of you who aren’t familiar, that stands for Asian-American Pacific Islander. A lot of us have been active in the Stop Asian Hate Movement.
We’ve been trying to advocate for increased representation for Asian-Americans in music and entertainment, trying to break barriers and show people that we exist and who we are through all our different talents. We’re excited about GoldenDAO because it combines Web 3.0 with Web 2.0 and our real-life passions and friends. Our hope is to mobilize, build community and make an impact utilizing Web 3.0 in ways that expand what we’re already doing with our lives in our community.
We’re talking about making a meaningful social impact. There are a lot of different ways to do that, traditional affinity groups, nonprofits, and so on. What distinguishes a DAO from those organizations? Why choose to go that path?
I don’t know about the rest of you but you can tell that our bureaucracies and political parties are long in the tooth, a little bit behind the times. When I found out about DAOs, I got super excited because I said, “This can be the future of organizations.” At the high end, it could even be an upgraded, more modernized version of democracy, where we conduct something called Liquid Democracy. I empower someone to vote on my behalf on various issues. You can get responses in real-time as opposed to having this ossified structure where every four years, you show up and most people don’t know what’s going on. You have a one-party rule essentially in 95% of the country.
Web3: You notice when people support you, embrace you, and champion your campaign early on.
DAOs excited me immediately. If you look at both Lobby3 and GoldenDAO, they seem tailormade for what DAOs can do in terms of harnessing the energy and creativity of a massive, diverse community of people that want to make good things happen either in making a positive case for Web 3.0 technologies on Capitol Hill or in elevating empowering AAPI contributors, artists, creatives, activists, and folks that want to build a brighter future for everyone.
I do want to say, despite the fact that I sang the praises of DAOs, in real life, I compared DAOs to those college projects we were all on where sometimes you did all the work. There are people around you that benefited from your work or sometimes you were the person who didn’t do as much work. DAOs are subject to the laws of human nature like anything else. There’s a lot of learning being done in terms of how we can most effectively channel people’s wants, energies and ambitions. These two causes both seemed ideal for large groups of people that want to have their ideas come to the table and make a case in collective ways that bring different groups of people together.
If I could add, we are also in these spaces and I’m on twelve boards or organizations. Asian Americans Advancing Justice-LA, I’m on that board. I’m General Counsel for Hate Is A Virus. We’re not excluding these existing organizations. We’re trying to look to Web 3.0 to bridge the fragmentation of these organizations and maybe help empower everyone.
As we’re seeing especially DAOs, different than traditional organizations, there’s a much stronger acceleration of impact and amplification of voice. In a traditional model, you may not feel that your voice is being heard but in a DAO model, your voice is equal and as loud as everyone else’s. We’re seeing a lot of people will be much more effective in a DAO structure than they would be in a traditional structure.
I want to echo what Calista said. I love traditional nonprofits. I started one myself. If you participated in a traditional nonprofit, you feel good. You’re generally sending donations to an organization. You hope that they’ll do something positive with it. They have events, send you communications, and try and convey to you what they did. A DAO does give you a more direct sense of control and feedback where you can say, “We should be doing this.” If you get enough people excited about that and the DAO Treasury ends up allocating resources, you’re off to the races. That’s a much more ground-up version of these kinds of organizations than has been available.
To make the changes that we’re talking about happen, adoption also needs to happen. There’s a lot of interest from the general public in Web 3.0 and DAOs but there’s not an easy button it seems for adoption. I’m curious about your thoughts on that. How do we make adoption easier for everybody?
We have to try and make it more accessible and seamless to a broader group of people. People are working on ways to do that. Some of you know them. For example, folks are working on an interface where you can use a credit card to buy an NFT, as opposed to some of the mechanisms that are used, which would broaden the potential audience, including some of the older folks in our lives who you have to spend an hour trying to explain a bunch of things to them.
Create something new where you can unite the world. Click To Tweet
If you say, “Here’s a site you can use a credit card. You can buy the NFT,” that would be positive. There’s always tension when you have early adopters to a community about keeping something tight and someone insider and then broadening it to more and more people. You can put me very much on the latter page. The more folks that we can provide an on-ramp, the better off we’ll all be.
I have the same ambitions I did when I ran for president because poverty is unnecessary. We should get rid of it. I’m here in large part because of the work that many of you are doing and these tools and technologies of Web 3.0 can help us meaningfully eradicate and alleviate poverty for tens of millions, maybe even billions of people. If that’s your mission, you should try and include as many people as possible.
William and Calista, I’m curious, you have been in and around this space for so long. How do you view the opportunity to create an easy button and its influence on adoption?
I don’t think there’s an easy button. Honestly, my passion is bridging Web 3.0 with Web 2.0 in IRL and with GoldenDAO. One of our core founders, Theodore Lu, and the other founders, Jack Liang, shout out to them, we have 30 minutes to 1 hour of phone calls to onboard people to mint. A lot of them didn’t even know what MetaMask was. We’re doing that and trying to walk and handhold people to join the Web 3.0 space to mint.
A lot of us are also prioritizing activating the Web 3.0 community to let them know there’s an AAPI community and this cause. An NFT and a DAO is not a traditional NFT project but we want to build a community here too and you can also add value. What we’re trying to do is create something new where we can unite the world. I go into the voice chats and I’m like, “There’s this thing called GoldenDAO.” They’re like, “What’s the mint price? What’s going on?”
I tell people it’s not for everyone yet. Our founding collection opened for mint but we have second collections later on that will have higher collection numbers and lower mint prices. What we’re trying to do is onboard people who have the founding token desire to build from the beginning. We’ll take those funds and make them more accessible to everyone. We have a vibrant community on our Discord and want to bring in more. We’re doing partnerships with a collection. If you’re also interested in partnering with GoldenDAO, please hit us up.
The founders do get one of these incredible gold signet rings. You can seal it with hot wax. It’s like very medieval. It’s 18 karat gold plated and personally numbered based upon your token. It feels great on the hand.
Web3: A DAO gives you a more direct sense of control and feedback.
The thing that I’m so passionate about especially in this space is people like you in the audience, the builders, the people that are building tools to make things easier. I remember years ago when crypto punks first came out. I wasn’t smart enough to figure out how to claim a free crypto pug. I never did. Looking back, I wish I’d been a little bit smarter but I’m grateful for builders.
One reason I joined Origin Protocol is they’re very passionate about giving creators and artists the tools to make things easy. You can go to Story.XYZ, upload your digital visual assets, and immediately people can buy the NFT. They can use their credit card. Origin Protocol is a platform that is the easy button. A wearable is coming out as the solution. I met another fellow named Jevon. He has a great solution as well. I’m grateful for the builders in this space. Thank you so much for making it easier for people like me.
Andrew, when we think about your experience in the political sphere as an entrepreneur building community, we’ve talked about it a lot. How does that experience impact how you think about building community in this space?
When I decided to run for president, it was a bit of a leap of faith. I had confidence that other people would get excited about this vision I was presenting for what our future could be but it was slow going initially. When I first started running, my friends said to me, “President of what?” I was like, “I’m running for president.”
The early adopters of the campaign ended up christening themselves the Yang Gang and that took off. There was a discussion from within the campaign. There were like, “Yang Gang is that too sinister-sounding?” My attitude was like, “We didn’t make it up. People have adopted it.” We should run with that. The campaign came up with something. It would probably be dumb and no one would use it.
I was running for president and would go to different cities. I campaigned all over the country. Certainly, here in LA, we had some massive events. One of the debates was here too. It was the debate when I was the last non-White candidate where we got to find out whether Asians were White. The answer is no. We’re not White. I would meet in person in Ohio, Iowa, Atlanta, or wherever someone I would find online. There was this sense of connection. You’ve all had this experience too, where you met someone online or in the metaverse virtually and you meet them in real life, maybe here at this conference.
There was this kinship and an alignment of values. In a way, my political campaign was a version of these Web 3.0 communities that are happening for people that didn’t necessarily adopt a new set of tools. They were using Twitter, getting together in person, meetups but that was so powerful. I’m proud of a lot of things in my career but one of the things I’m proudest of is that I’m responsible for ten weddings that I know of.
Communities can elevate and help other communities. Click To Tweet
These are people that volunteered on my campaign, hooked up, and are engaged. I’m going to set that as a threshold for you all. In these communities that you’re building, try and exceed ten weddings. Meanwhile, I’ll still be trying to stack more weddings on top of those ten because I want to hold this record.
Lobby3, GoldenDAO, you’re at the leading edge of anything that politicians are doing in this space, by far. What else do you have in the pipeline?
I’m super excited about these two initiatives. Lobby3 is very time-sensitive. I don’t know if you all know but the stuff out of DC buried in the text of the Biden executive order was he wants the regulations written within 210 days. That’s six and a half months. Why did they set that timeframe? They know they’re going to lose control of Congress. They were like, “Let’s try and draft this stuff before the government changes hands. If we want to make effective changes to whatever rules they are looking at, what’s our timeframe? It’s now, essentially.
Lobby3 DAO is all hands-on deck very quickly. GoldenDAO, I’m going to suggest, has similar urgency. I live in New York City. There are Asian elders and women, unfortunately in particular, who are getting spit on, assaulted, and in some cases killed because of who they are. Many people look at this and say, “I want to help and do something but I don’t know what to do.” The hope is that GoldenDAO can be this galvanizer for all those people to be able to make a common cause around campaigns that help make a difference on the ground for people in New York and across the country, even across the world.
I’m super excited about both of these projects. In terms of what lies ahead, I’m concerned about our future. With the people here, I’m not concerned about you at all. You’re all going to be great but our future at large has some very dark clouds gathering. A lot of us sense it. I’m going to be doing everything I can to try and clear up those dark clouds. It’s a very tall order. Web 3.0 having a seat at the table is a big part of the future that I’d like to see.
We talked about how crypto and Web 3.0 are influencing the ways in which folks can impact policy and make changes. When we think about it, how can we give folks a roadmap if they want to get involved in the space and make a change? There are a lot of folks here that are interested in doing so. What are the best steps that they can take to do that either through the DAOs that you’ve created or beyond?
Most of the people I’ve met here have phenomenal projects they’re working on. They’re laser-focused on making those things happen. Ideally, the communities that we’re working on can support other communities. We can elevate and help each other. Some folks have gotten involved with Lobby3 DAO because they see that what’s happening in DC will affect them eventually. Who has a surplus of energy and time? Some people have the desire to help us try and make this case.
Web3: The people who build the tools are very passionate about making things easier for creators and artists.
Some of them also are creators who said, “My story being spotlighted would be helpful. I can help make a video that might be able to tell this story in a new way.” One of the joys of this space, in my opinion, is that there’s a lot of what I call enlightened self-interest in the work that you do. I’ve been an entrepreneur for years. If you make someone money, that’s a very special bond you have. You’re connected for life. There’s nothing wrong with us making each other money. There is something very beautiful and magical about it. The goal is that we’re able to help each other make different projects successful and be able to pass it on to the next set of people that are trying to come up behind us.
How do we get Washington to listen?
I do have some inside knowledge of how to get Washington to listen. If you don’t know anything about how Washington works, you can worry about it because it’s going to affect everyone. It’s an environment where there are 535 legislators. Each of those legislators has a chief of staff and a legislative director. You’re looking at 2,000 people who are all core decision-makers and each has different constituents and agendas. You have the regulators.
These individuals are so powerful that if you used to work for one of them and can’t get a meeting with that chief of staff, that’s very marketable. You become what’s called a lobbyist. You charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for representation. These lobbyists essentially were former staffers or legislators. You hang out around DC and say, “I can make some calls and get meetings with these folks.” It may be a little bit like LA. I don’t know.
You have this entire industry set up around relationships. How would you want to make an impact in that environment if you wanted to, which we do? What we’ve done is we’ve hired an organization that employs a couple of dozen of these lobbyists who make the case to different members. They can educate them directly, furnish research to the middle of the road think tanks that maybe have some credibility, go to leagues of mayors or governors and try and make a case directly at the state level. Those are some of the things that we’re doing to try and both improve the climate and the knowledge base. What percentage of legislators do you think to understand Web 3.0, crypto, or NFTs?
I’m going to give you some data points because I’m the math guy. The average senator is 63 years old. The average representative is 58. Leaders are about fifteen years older. The percentage of people that understand this stuff is probably like 10%, 15%, or something along those lines. There’s a lot of confusion and skepticism but there’s also an opportunity because it’s a bit of a blank slate. The blank slate is getting colored in by relatively negative press accounts because you have a lot of mainstream press organizations.
When you all see press stories about Web 3.0, what are they about? It’s fraud, swindlers, rug polls, money laundering, or Russian money laundering again. Those are the stories. To the extent that there is preconception in the minds of these decision-makers, that’s it. We have to try and advance that to something more accurate and representative of the people here.
Web3 has so much power to change people's lives. Click To Tweet
How can we get folks involved in GoldenDAO and Lobby DAO? What are the steps people need to take right here to join the cause?
GoldenDAO’s public minting has started. You can go to GoldenDAO.XYZ. Join us. If you want to help, be part of this community, and elevate this cause, go to GoldenDAO.XYZ. Join the Discord. It’s going to be great. We’re going to build something that will truly change the course of history for Asian people across the world and everyone else because we’re all in it together.
Closing words, William, what are your thoughts?
For me, I’m grateful to Andrew for the giant bridges and the platform that he’s built to come into Web 3.0 to lend us his platform, his voice, his math, and his thoughts in terms of how it is that we can make the communities that we’re building in these new spaces and blend them with Web 2.0 and traditional media. Most importantly, blend them with the influence and political spaces that are so necessary for us to have a significant impact. I’m grateful to everyone here, for Edge of NFT, Calista, and Andrew.
I’m grateful to learn about the people behind the Discord usernames and the Twitter handles. I realized Web 3.0 has so much power to change people’s lives. When I meet people who are in some other country and they’ve scrambled to get 0.1 to get on a mint list, make 0.1 into 0.2 to bring their family out of poverty, I think about how important what we’re doing is and the impact that we can create, not only for ourselves and our families but for our communities like GoldenDAO, AAPI and beyond. I want to encourage and empower everyone to keep doing what they’re doing and continue to innovate in this space because there’s so much potential. I still think we’re early. I can’t wait to see what happens year after year.
This is the closing that stands off all of NFT LA. I want to say how pumped I am to be here with you all and help build a future we’ll be proud of together. This community is so creative and entrepreneurial. You have such a key vision for what you want to see in the future. Let’s make it happen. We can make it happen together. Let’s go. Thank you all so much.
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We hope you enjoyed that episode. Make sure to visit EdgeOfNFT.com/Discord to continue the conversation and also visit EdgeOfNFT.com/AR to plant a 3D augmented reality tree right from your mobile device inspired by our forthcoming Living Tree NFT collection which will offer you the hottest alpha and participatory benefits within our ecosystem. The Living Tree NFT collection will also plant over 100,000 real trees.
We’ve reached the outer limit at the Edge of NFTs. Thanks for exploring with us. We’ve got space for more adventures on the starship so invite your friends and recruit cool strangers that will make this journey so much better. How? Go to Spotify or iTunes, rate us and say something awesome. Go to EdgeOfNFT.com to dive further down the rabbit hole. Be sure to tune in next time for greater NFT content. Thanks again for sharing this time with us.
Important Links
- Andrew Yang
- GoldenDAO
- Venture for America
- Humanity Forward
- Lobby3 DAO
- Onion Article – American People Hire High-Powered Lobbyist To Push Interests In Congress
- Asian Americans Advancing Justice-LA
- Hate Is A Virus
- MetaMask
- Origin Protocol
- Story.XYZ
- EdgeOfNFT.com/Discord
- EdgeOfNFT.com/AR
- Spotify – Edge of NFT Podcast
- iTunes – Edge of NFT Podcast
About Andrew Yang
Andrew Yang moved to New York City 25 years ago. He came of age, fell in love, and became a father there. Seeing the City the way it is now breaks his heart. What they do in the coming months will determine thier city’s trajectory for decades.
Andrew Yang is running for mayor because he sees a crisis – and he believes he can help.
Together – we can move New York City forward.
Chip in to our campaign at https://secure.actblue.com/donate/yfny-li
About Calista Wu
Not only is she a lawyer and former 9th Circuit judicial law clerk, Wu is the founder and premier star of entertainment company Cali Star Entertainment, and general counsel for Hate Is a Virus, and she’s on multiple boards of nonprofit organizations like Asian Americans Advancing Justice Los Angeles. Wu is also a singer-songwriter and one of the top, in-demand influencers in Los Angeles.
A master of the pivot, Wu is gorgeous, fiercely intelligent, talented, bold, driven, and ambitious.
About William Tong
William Tong is the 25th Attorney General to serve Connecticut since the office was established by the state constitution in 1897. He took office on January 9, 2019 and is the first Asian American elected at the state level in Connecticut. General Tong previously practiced for 18 years as a litigator in both state and federal courts, first at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP in New York City and then at Finn Dixon & Herling LLP in Stamford. He served for 12 years as a State Representative in the Connecticut General Assembly, where he served as House Chairman of the Judiciary Committee as well as the Banking Committee.
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