If you wanted to create an exclusive online community with a shared goal, how would you go about it? If your answer is, "with crypto, obviously!" then you're in luck. DAOs (those are decentralized autonomous organizations, if that helps) are growing more popular with proponents of cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies. But what's up for some debate is what these communities are actually good for, and what kind of impact this purposeful gatekeeping can have on the real world.
This week on Gadget Lab, WIRED senior writer Gilad Edelman joins us to talk about the topsy-turvy world of DAOs and his own experience with creating one.
Read Gilad’s story about his experimental DAO for punchlines.
Gilad recommends calling the IRS (yes, seriously). Mike recommends the New Yorker Android app. Lauren recommends WIRED’s beginner’s guide to Discord.
Gilad can be found on Twitter @GiladEdelman. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.
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Lauren Goode: Mike.
Michael Calore: Lauren.
LG: Mike, would you like to join my DAO?
MC: I think I'll pass. Thanks.
LG: Are you sure? It's called GoodeDAO, sir.
MC: Yeah. Double sure.
LG: Good vibes only in this DAO.
MC: Well, I don't really know much about DAOs.
LG: All right. Well, we have a colleague here at WIRED who really wants us to join his DAO, and there's a New Yorker cartoon caption contest at the end of this wild journey. So have I intrigued you yet?
MC: I'm going to say yes.
LG: All right. Let's get started.
[Gadget Lab intro theme music plays]
LG: Hi everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I'm Lauren Goode, I'm a senior writer at WIRED.
MC: And I'm Michael Calore, I'm a senior editor at WIRED.
LG: We're also joined by WIRED senior writer and DAO creator Gilad Edelman. Gilad, welcome back to the show.
Gilad Edelman: Thanks for having me.
LG: Should we just skip to your recommendations, because we know that's what everyone wants to hear from you.
GE: No, because what everyone doesn't know is that I show up every time not having a recommendation in mind, and need the time that we're recording the podcast to think of one.
LG: I love it. I love it. Maybe by the end of this, you're going to have created a new DAO and that's going to be a recommendation.
GE: Only time will tell.
LG: All right. Today, we are talking about—drum roll, please—the blockchain. Or specifically, we're talking about one way blockchain tech is being used by communities who are working towards a common goal. This is all very abstract. We're talking about DAOs, or decentralized autonomous organizations. Basically it means you have some online community, might be through something like a Discord server, and the participants who are participating need to buy into this community with crypto tokens. Now, as you can tell by the name alone, this whole thing is a little bit complex, which is why we asked Gilad, who is our resident Web3 reporter, to come on the show and walk us through this.
MC: You might even say that you're our show's token Web3 reporter.
GE: Nice.
LG: Well played.
MC: Thank you.
LG: All right. So Gilad, you recently went to this conference in Denver. There were lots of crypto tokens there, there were just cases there.
GE: Yeah. It was crawling with tokens. Yeah.
LG: Yeah. Crawling with tokens. You ended up making a DAO, tell us about this. What have you done?
GE: Yeah. So this DAO concept was on my radar. There've been some news stories about high-profile DAOs that failed spectacularly in various ways. And I was curious just to figure out what they actually entailed under the hood. So before going to the Ethereum conference, I texted my friend Jackson who works in blockchain-related stuff and is always up for goofy stuff, and asked if he knew how to make a DAO. He said absolutely. So while we were there, he and I and some of his coworkers just set aside some time to put one together, which is very in the spirit of these conferences, by the way, it's like a hackathon, which is very foreign to me as a journalist with no technical skills. So Jackson had suggested because you have to come up with, OK, what's the point of our DAO? What's our DAO going to do? So he suggested what if in our DAO the funniest people govern? To which I said, "Oh, we could call it lmaoDAO." Like LMAO DAO.
LG: Laughing my ass off, for those who are not done with the vernacular.
GE: Yeah. To describe what everyone's not doing, when we take the time to explain acronyms to them. The secret of journalism is you just write the headline first and then do the story. So it felt like we were 70 percent there with a good name and—just kidding to our listeners out there, we don't write the headlines first. So then we had to figure out, OK, but what does that mean? And I had the thought of what if we tied it to the New Yorker caption contest. Which if listeners don't know, every week, The New Yorker magazine, which is a fellow Condé Nast publication like WIRED, has in the back of the magazine and online, of course there's a cartoon with no caption and it's always some very whimsical situation, and the contest is to supply a funny caption for the cartoon. And this seemed nice because it was an off-the-rack weekly comedy competition, essentially. So we decided, OK, let's go with that.
So that's the purpose. So then my question is, OK, what do you need to do to actually make a DAO? What are the atomic units of a DAO? The answer is, fundamentally, a DAO is a club or an organization for which possessing a certain custom token is the key to get in. It's like instead of a secret handshake, you distribute some custom token.
MC: Well, it is a secret handshake, because you have to have that token, you have to have a wallet. So you're already talking about people who are into cryptocurrency, they are the people who can join DAOs, right?
GE: Right. And like a secret handshake, it's really complicated, if your secret handshake's any good. That's right. When you talk about needing to possess a crypto token to be a member of something, you're immediately narrowing the aperture of who might participate, because you have to, yes, either have a crypto wallet or understand how to get one. And then there're all kinds of logistical hoops that you have to go through to get the token and then prove that you have it. So in our case, we invented a token out of thin air.
LG: What did you call it?
GE: It's just called lmao, L-M-A-O.
MC: OK. So that's the name of the DAO and the name of the token.
GE: Yes, exactly. And one of the guys who was helping me with this, he came up with a good idea because there's was a question of, OK, who's going to join? And so his idea was, well, we can use the Meal tokens, which were crypto-based of course at the conference as a proxy for everybody who attended the conference. And so we can just say everybody who is here gets these tokens and thus is eligible to join. And so he scraped the blockchain and just made a list, compiled the list of all those crypto wallets. And so we just dropped our bespoke token into those wallets.
LG: OK. I'm going to step back a little bit. So you …
GE: I sound insane right now, right?
LG: No, no. Yes.
GE: This is the most normal thing in the world.
LG: So I thought that one of the features of the blockchain is that people who are participating, making transactions, are anonymous, but it sounds like you were able to access this list of people at the conference who had wallets and then invite them to your DAO.
GE: Yeah. This is all of blockchain. It's all supposedly anonymous, but it's really pseudonymous because you're identified by some …
MC: Your transaction.
LG: By some element of the community too. I joined your Discord server as me, and so I would attach a wallet to that, right? And the wallet would in theory, be not identifiable, but I'm saying this is me.
GE: Yeah. We've identified. Yes. Your wallet, it's a series of letters and numbers, this is your wallet address. And now that I have that information, I can absolutely monitor everything you do with that wallet, so be careful.
LG: Be careful, he tells me.
MC: So the purpose of your DAO is to create captions that you then enter into The New Yorker cartoon caption contest.
GE: Right.
MC: So what are the mechanics of it? How does it work?
GE: Right. So far, we've just been talking about how do people get in.
MC: Get in the DAO.
LG: Which is an important part of it, by the way, because this barrier does still exist to this. So you're doing this as a proof of concept for a DAO. The New Yorker caption contest is just a fun incentive to put out there.
MC: So we've covered how DAO. I'm asking why DAO?
GE: Why DAO? No, it's still how. Right. So by far, the most popular platform for doing DAO activities is Discord, the chat and discussion app. A lot of DAOs, including mine, are basically just a Discord group where you need a certain token to enter. Especially with mine, because there's no actual money involved, because I'm not out here trying to scam people. The token really is just like that secret handshake. So the way it works is you join this Discord server, there's an integration in Discord that can scan your wallet, essentially, and verify that you have the lmao coins. And once you do that, you have access to the locked channels. And then, so what we do is, every week, there's an internal contest where people submit within the Discord, and then the submissions that get the most, we made a custom laughing emoji.
It's very cool actually. We take the top three or a Discord bot takes the top three vote getters and then we put those up to the official vote "on this platform called Snapshot," which again, integrates with your wallet. Just back to your point, Lauren, about this being a proof of concept, it's kind of a disproof of concept, because what I suspected was that a lot of DAOs are not really decentralized or autonomous. And that's definitely the case for this one; it's very much my friends and me, we're the Discord admins. We literally have the New Yorker subscription necessary to submit the captions, that's all done manually. So it's really not decentralized in the sense of everybody having equal power. And what has been striking to me is that no one cares. The reaction I've gotten both in person when I was at the conference, explaining the project to people, and then subsequently is people just think it's fun, they think it's cool. And I think that's telling to me that I don't have people in the Web3 world coming up and saying, "Hey, this isn't a real DAO."
MC: Right. So what is a real DAO? Because I suspect it's something where, given the culture of DAOs, maybe you can tell us more about this, but it seems to be, it's a group of people deciding how to spend the funds that they have earned from their token holdings on some particular project. The community that they've built is around some hobby or some principle that they want to further in the world, and they come together, they make decisions about how to do that, and then they basically spend the funds that they've raised by building the DAO towards that. Is that right?
GE: That is largely right. So to back up a little bit, what can a DAO do? Is an important question. If it's a "real DAO" you would want that to really be doing things on the blockchain. And you would want it to be built in such a way that everybody who's got the tokens gets some power and gets to vote in ways that are actually binding, that are written into the code of the DAO, so that whatever the community votes for happens. Well, I talked to a guy named Spencer Graham whose day job is doing DAO stuff, and he's an expert. And he was telling me that over the last year, a lot of DAOs have been created that are like mine, that are trying to do something in the real world.
And the problem that arises there, is the blockchain can't do anything in the real world. Blockchain can't reach out outside of the blockchain and tell people to do stuff. So as soon as you want to interact with MeetSpace, say, by submitting something to a caption contest, you need people to do stuff. And people are not governed by votes that happen on the blockchain. Now, what is governed by votes that happen on the blockchain? Spending cryptocurrency. The only thing that you can govern on-chain is moving funds or tokens back and forth. So the closer a DAO gets to just being about allocating funds, the closer it is to recognizing this ideal of it's all a community of co-owners who are voting on things that are being executed through code.
MC: Right.
LG: I have so many more questions, but we need to take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to have even more DAO jokes for you. Get it, like dad jokes, but DAO jokes.
GE: They'll be at least as good as that one.
MC: Yep. Guaranteed.
[Break]
LG: OK. So Gilad, we've talked about your experience creating lmaoDAO.
MC: That's right.
LG: That's right. lmaoDAO. So obviously building a community designed to develop the perfect New Yorker joke is very, very important. We've talked about how these DAOs are defined by the exchange of cryptocurrency, the exchange of a specific token, and that's how you join the community. But in the example that you've given us, when you're talking about crowdsourcing a bunch of ideas to arrive at the best idea. Why does that require any kind of token? Why does that even require currency?
GE: So two things. First, it absolutely it does not. Like I was saying before, issuing the crypto token is just a way to distribute membership, just like having a secret password or something. Now, for other DAOs that are about allocating money, the connection makes a little bit more sense because if what you're doing is coming together and making decisions about allocating resources that are on the blockchain, it's more logical to make people possess something on the blockchain to be members. As for your point though, about coming up with the best caption. I would not say that what the DAO does is come up with the best caption. And this gets at another question you might have about this form of organization. When you just have up several dozen at this point, it's well over a 100 random people who are interested in crypto and Web3 stuff vote.
You're not necessarily going to get the funniest or cleverest results. And there's a lot of submissions in here that are jokes that only make sense if you're into Web3 and crypto stuff, which is not going to win over the cartoons editor at The New Yorker magazine, I don't think, although I did win last week. So I don't know which way that cuts. I won the internal vote. No, we didn't win the actual New Yorker one, no, come on. There weren't enough umlauts. So when it comes to the caption contest, who cares? But I do think this raises a question about the applicability of this model, because I think the really important thing about this DAO construct is that actually any Web3 platform or business idea or whatever you want to call it, just about all of them, actually have this structure of a DAO, and the reason is the whole sales pitch for Web3 is what? Well, decentralized, you have some ownership in it.
And these are the key elements of these things called DAOs. But there are Web3 startups galore that are trying to build the blockchain version of Spotify or the blockchain version of Twitter or Instagram or Google. And what they all tend to have in common is there's some token, and everybody who is a user or otherwise involved in the platform gets some of those tokens. And in theory, they then get to vote on what happens, changes that are made to the platform, so that everybody gets control. And you might wonder, Hmm. Would a version of Instagram that's governed by majority rule, is that going to really lead to the best product? Is that really going to win—
LG: Yeah. Chronological timeline. Right.
MC: It'll be the Homer, right. It'll be the car designed by the person who just piles absolutely everything on and it becomes undrivable.
GE: Right. You can imagine it going that way. You could also imagine only a small core of people either have the clout or own enough tokens, or just give enough of a crap to actually participate. But it is interesting that by far the most common story of dominant tech companies in the United States over the last 20 plus years is the super powerful visionary founder, right? Who's a piece of crap and throws sharp elbows both internally and to the competition and emerges victorious. And there's a lot of energy among Web3 enthusiasts around this idea of cooperative collective decisionmaking, but TBD how practical a truly leaderless organization is going to be when you want to actually create something that works.
LG: And the idea is, if you were creating something where you had to pool resources or some mutual aid group that is using a fiat currency, a standard currency people would pay in, but then that doesn't allot any amount of power or ownership to the people who are participating in the community versus these tokens.
GE: Right. This gets back to how the main thing you can do with the DAO is spend money. And so you could think of a DAO as basically blockchain-based crowdfunding, that's basically what it is. And so I asked Spencer Graham, the DAO expert, "How much better than Kickstarter is this?" And he said, in a lot of cases it's not. In a lot of cases, if you're just trying to raise money for something, and you live in the US and you have a bank account, and you're connected to the financial system, then a Kickstarter is probably going to be better. But as you say, Lauren, giving money to Kickstarter doesn't necessarily entail any ownership, although it could, right. That could be something that you promise as the person responsible for it. What Spencer did say was if we're talking about moving money across international borders, talking about jurisdictions that are not where people are not connected to the banking system, then you can start to see why, if you're trying to raise and donate or spend money, there are certain advantages to doing that using cryptocurrencies on the blockchain.
MC: So your DAO is obviously very LOL, and we thank you for bringing more joy into the world, but what are some examples of DAOs that you've seen out there that are actually doing work that would impact policy or impact things that would touch upon the public sphere?
GE: Well, I would actually push back a little bit, as silly as my DAO is, it has a much more concrete objective than most DAOs in that respect.
LG: He's starting to sound like the founders we interview. No, please tell us more about how you're changing the world.
GE: Yeah. I'm literally changing the world by bringing into existence submissions to a contest that wouldn't otherwise exist, and I think that's more than a lot of DAOs can say. I just want to point that out.
LG: OK.
GE: Would I use the word visionary to describe myself? Yeah. But taking your—
LG: Do you also have controlling shares of your DAO?
GE: No. In fact, we did set it up so that the more lmao- …
LG: Have you stacked the board with a bunch of—
GE: I'm trying to answer you.
LG: … white men who really support you? OK, go ahead.
GE: I didn't stack it. That's just who is in Web3. It would've been really hard to stack it otherwise. We set it up so that when you win in the internal vote, you get more lmao tokens. And the more tokens you have, the more your vote counts in the official voting—there's this logic to it, right? It's like, if you've proven that you're funnier, then you should have more of a say over what gets submitted. But the finding is when we distributed the tokens in the place, we gave 100 to everybody who had one of those Meal tokens I was talking about, but we also gave 100 to everybody who had this NFT that was associated with the conference, but I don't have that NFT. So there are a lot of random people in the DAO who have twice as many lmao coins as me, so they have twice as much voting power. So in that way, it's a little bit decentralized. But then again, I'm the one who actually submits the caption. So ultimately I can do whatever I want.
MC: Yeah. You do hold the key.
GE: Yeah.
LG: I think we've lost him. I think we've just lost him into this world. Did you just hear? He managed to get LMAO down tokens, NFTs, decentralized, did you say blockchain too? It's all in there. It's all there. My God, Gilad, please remember the little people when you make it big in the world of Web3.
GE: Well, again, as I mentioned earlier, there's no actual money involved. So there's a limit to how big this is going to make me.
LG: OK. So to get back to Mike's question. Yes.
GE: Yeah. I would say there are DAOs that are spending money. There's quite a lot of enthusiasm for using this for charitable purposes, which is not crazy. It's a way to crowdfund, and so there's one called Giveth. I spoke with the very excitable person associated with Giveth, who was convinced this was really going to change the world. There's an organization called Gitcoin, which is basically a way to crowdfund different Web3 based projects, Ethereum-based project. So all this stuff tends to be very self-referential, but they say that they have so far raised and directed more than 50 million worth of cryptocurrencies. And they are gradually trying to turn themselves more and more into a DAO. You hear that a lot, some existing centralized project, but they have plans to DAO-ify themselves.
MC: Yeah. It seems to me the ones that I see that gain traction in my world are DAOs who are trying to change journalism. DAOs where you buy in and there's some Gitcoin mechanism that makes $1 token worth $22. And they can use that money to hire fact-checkers, journalists can become independent by basically replicating the Substack model, except instead of using Substack, you do it on your own and you accept cryptocurrency for people to subscribe to your newsletter or whatever. It's difficult for me to see how this is entirely different than the systems that we've already set up, except for that you create this barrier of entry that the person needs to have a familiarity and a comfort with cryptocurrency in order to participate.
GE: Yeah. Again, it goes back to that thing of, are you trying to do something that reaches into the real world? And if you are, this is probably a pretty dumb way to do it.
MC: Right.
GE: If you're just trying to spend crypto and have collective decisionmaking around that, it's plausible to me that there are situations where that's a good idea. But if you're trying to do something that involves interacting with the world, then all you're doing, as you say, Mike, is just making it harder for people to join.
LG: But I am very intrigued by all of this. I think a lot about the podcast that you and I did a year ago with our colleague Kate Knibbs about NFTs, and it was called “WTF are NFTs,” if anyone would like to go back in the library and listen to that one. And we had a lot of similar questions about the whys and what does this stand for and what does it mean to have these tokens? And what does it mean to have the certificate for this thing that you supposedly have ownership of? And now we've just seen over the past year, NFTs have just become a part of our conversation as tech journalists, and as part of the broader tech community. And we're seeing different ways they're being used. And I have a feeling that DAOs are going to be part of the conversation for a while, right. As we see this building out of Web3 and how people are using it. So hopefully we look back on this episode and we're like, "All right, we got it right maybe, and it all started with lmaoDAO."
GE: Yeah. I think “sort of got it right” is a good standard to hold ourselves too.
LG: I think so. I think that I'm open-minded about the ways in which this could be used and not feeling particularly attached to the ways the technology is being described or defined or categorized right now. I think in terms of payments in the earliest days of online payments, there's infrastructure there, and there's the exchange of goods happening that seems to make a lot of sense, but there's also this early rush to define things, and I'm not sure makes the most sense right now.
GE: Part of the issue here is one that is fundamental to any conversation you have around crypto-related projects, which is, a lot of it really just depends on the underlying utility of blockchain-based systems and the underlying value of the cryptocurrencies in question. So an organizational structure that allows people to move cryptocurrencies around, the long-term value of that is only as much as the currencies have long-term value. And that's what's really in question right now; we're talking in a moment where the crypto market has cooled down a little bit from where it was a few months ago, but zoom out a little bit and it's still absolutely not so. Bitcoin and Ethereum are so valuable, but they have yet to prove any inherent value other than the market's confidence in people's ability to sell them for a higher price further down the road. And that fundamental question about what all this stuff is going to amount to and how much staying power it's going to have will go a long way to determining whether any of the Rube Goldberg contraptions that people are building on top of it has any real worth.
LG: Right. Well, Gilad, thank you once again for trying to make sense of all this for us, we're going to take another quick break and come back with our recommendations.
[Break]
LG: Gilad, as our GOH as our DAO GOH.
GE: Nice.
LG: Guest of honor, what is your recommendation this week?
GE: Well, mine is tailored to the approach of Tax Day, which is: Call the IRS.
MC: You're recommending that we call the IRS.
GE: Yes. When appropriate. So recently I got a letter in the mail from the IRS saying that I owed $7,000 or $8,000 in unpaid taxes and penalty associated with that. And I was pretty freaked out by that, but there was an explanation for why I hadn't paid that. So I wasn't sure what to do, and I asked people here at WIRED and various people connected me with their accountant or their tax preparer. So I emailed with one guy and he said, "Yeah, you should submit these forms. I could do it for you for about $300." I thought about it, ‘Oh, it would save me some time. $300 versus $7,000 or $8,000 that I owe.’" But then somebody else said you should call the IRS. So I called and I sat on hold for like an hour (they're busy), but then I got an absolutely lovely employee who I explained the situation to.
And she told me just to send her the records that I had and she took care of it for me. And so I could have wasted $300, but instead I called the IRS and got it taken care of. The IRS is a much maligned agency, they're severely underfunded and understaffed, but in my interactions with them, there're pretty lovely people who work there. So if you have an issue and you are in the right—because this advice won't work if you're an actual tax scofflaw. But I would say, if you have some issue with the IRS before you go paying somebody to handle it for you, don't forget step one of just calling and waiting on hold and until you get to talk to somebody.
LG: I love it. I really thought you were going to say that you were fined because you were trading in crypto and it caught up to you.
GE: No, my crypto schemes are at best revenue-neutral.
MC: That's fantastic.
LG: I just never thought …
GE: Call the IRS.
MC: The man comes around.
LG: First of all, I never thought on the Gadget Lab podcast, we'd ever have a recommendation for the IRS. Second of all, there's—
MC: Calling the IRS. Picking up a telephone and calling the IRS.
LG: Actually just calling and then waiting for them. And then the irony, the juxtaposition of us talking about all of these cryptocurrencies, these non-fiat currencies, where people are just avoiding their taxes, presumably, and here you are recommending the IRS.
GE: The original Web3 technology is government.
LG: Thank you for that recommendation. Mike, what is your recommendation this week?
MC: Well, this is actually very on topic. The New Yorker now has an Android app.
GE: Cool.
MC: So if you are a fan of The New Yorker and you use an Android phone, you may have felt a little bit left out for the last, oh, I don't know, 12 years, because The New Yorker publication has had an iPad app since 2010. They've also had an iPhone app since around that same time, and they have never had an Android app. So the Android app has finally arrived; it arrived this week. As a New Yorker subscriber with an Android phone, I downloaded it and I logged in and it's OK. It's OK.
LG: The mere existence of it is exciting.
MC: So I suppose we should disclose that we have the same parent company, right? The New Yorker is a Condé Nast publication, WIRED is also a Condé Nast publication. So I'm sure there are people who I could Slack right now who worked on this, so I'll be gentle, but there's no search function. So if you know that you're looking for a story about a particular topic, you can't search for it, at least as far as I can tell. You can open up the most recent issue of the magazine and read everything except for the features, because those do not appear in the recent issues. They appear in back issues, I looked at some issues from 2014 and 2016, and I could see the features, but I looked at last week's New Yorker and it had the front-of-book stuff and then the critics, but it didn't have the features. I thought that was weird.
GE: What about the caption contest?
MC: It does have that. It has all the cartoons and the poetry and fiction and all that. So that's all easy to find. Just a little odd.
GE: Sounds like Mike's recommendation is get an iPhone.
MC: Well, no, my recommendation is that you download The New Yorker app, because I must say that the reading experience, reading the stories in a browser view that does not contain all the cruft that you normally get with a browser view is great. It's really nice, because their typography is excellent. You get to see all the photos in line, which you don't if you use something like Instapaper or Pocket to read.
GE: I agree. Same with the WIRED app. It's just so much nicer.
MC: Yeah. It's nicer to scroll through, and it's nicer to have the presentation layer there.
GE: Yeah.
MC: However, come on guys, search box. So that's my recommendation.
LG: That's a good one.
MC: Download The New Yorker app if you're a subscriber, and if you're not, maybe subscribe.
LG: All right.
MC: What's your recommendation, Lauren?
LG: I thought you'd never ask. My primary recommendation today would probably be that if you have pets and you have a pet carrier. to get ones that have hard sides, a hard plastic and maybe like a metal grate in the front.
MC: Why would you be recommending this today?
LG: There's a whole story there that involves me getting stitches and a tetanus shot this morning, but it's all good. So that's my first recommendation. My second recommendation-
MC: Her cat clawed her carrier, chewed his way out of her carrier, and then scratched her and drew blood.
GE: While she was driving her across—
MC: While she was driving her car across the Golden Gate Bridge.
GE: Honestly amazing that she made it to the office.
LG: It actually is. And after this I have to go get antibiotics. It's all mess, I should have gotten a dog. But I honestly think having a toddler at this point would be easier.
MC: No, probably not.
LG: All right. No, my real recommendation this week is, we talked about Discord earlier and all three of us have been spending some time on Discord because of these DAOs. But our producer here, Boone Ashworth, who's also a contributing writer to WIRED. He wrote this fantastic guide to Discord a short while ago. And I have looked it up a bunch of times as I've tried to navigate my way through Discord. So if you're joining these communities, and you're just a little bit confused by the Discord interface or where you find any mentions of you or where your mailboxes are or how to join new communities, go to Boone Ashworth's guide to Discord on WIRED.com.
MC: It is very good.
LG: That's my recommendation.
MC: And I can say that because I did not edit it. I usually edit Boone's stories, but this one, I don't think I edited. Yeah, it's great.
LG: It's great. Alan, edited this one? Alan Henry.
MC: I think so.
LG: Yeah. OK. We could ask Boone, he's right here.
GE: Some people are better seen, not heard.
MC: Oh, harsh.
LG: Well, Gilad, it has been an absolute pleasure having you back on the show. Thank you for joining us.
GE: Thanks as always for having me.
LG: Yeah. Or should I say TYVM.
GE: Nice.
LG: Mike, thanks as always for being a great cohost.
MC: Of course. No problem.
LG: Thanks for taking my phone call really early this morning.
MC: You are welcome.
LG: I called you from the Golden Gate Bridge.
MC: You are welcome.
LG: And thanks to all of you for listening. If you have feedback, you can find all of us on Twitter and on Discord. Just check the show notes; we'll include our Twitter handles there. This show is produced by the excellent Boone Ashworth. We'll be back next week. Actually I will be out for the next couple of weeks, so I won't be back next week, but Mike will be here, and then I'll be returning for a special episode, a pretaped episode on April 8th, so be sure to tune in for that one. Goodbye for now, and don't forget to tune in next week.
[Gadget Lab outro theme music plays]
LG: But I think I'm just going to use—
GE: We can actually use other—
LG: Trust Wallet or something.
GE: I think it now is compatible with other wallets. My devs have done a lot of interesting work to increase the functionalities.
MC: "My devs!"
LG: “My devs.” I know we've lost him. We've really have lost him.
GE: This is the thing about this whole shtick that people don't understand. People have no idea whether I'm trolling or not basically … which I am.
LG: Boone, please put that in the show as an easter egg. Please include that, thank you very much.
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