The Future of Web3 with Manoj Madnani | AI, Bitcoin, Creativity
In this video Manoj Narender Madnani, MARA's Managing Director of International, explores the dynamic intersection of human interaction, AI, and blockchain technology. He highlights the enduring importance of genuine human connections despite advancements in digital tools and avatars. Manoj critiques the current state of crypto investments, noting a tendency towards speculative and short-term gains rather than sustainable development. He underscores the need for financial discipline and genuine utility in Web3 projects, while also acknowledging the potential for blockchain to drive transparency and innovation in various sectors.
Transcripts are autogenerated. May contain typos.
people buy from people people want to meet people and people are inspired by people once you define your utility the community will come you have six basic human needs energy food water infrastructure Healthcare and education I leave alcohol and sex to the side these are six which I'm willing to put money in you could launch a token and you could make 30 40 50x and literally if you make that if you have that kind of returns you have no incentive to come back the next day and sit on the same desk all the major
studios in the world whether it's the Disney The Paramount they're scared of web 3 because they're centralized I will use AI to produce the content not to create it you just go through history go through every country in the world it's all humans the humans have left the Legacy not the AI [Music] hello welcome to bitk show I'm your host wear usan today we have 53 year old gold right that was the right absolutely thank you welcome to Studio thanks for having it and we already had this very
interesting uh chat you know off record and I want to bring it to because I think we were touching very interesting topics and you work into like a art and creative and I recently had this chat with an AI professor and he was telling like before we used to like people used to go to concerts and Opera Houses to listen to music and now it's in our like fingertips on our phones like Spotify and so on and actually going to concert becomes a luxury and we so this like a tailor Swift hyper like you know you can't put your hand to any ticket it
becomes like a very a true luxury what do you think like with the technology and all the things evolving around are like a day-to-day things becoming luxury so I think one thing that's very interesting I saw a couple of days a ago that the zoom CEO said that get used to having your digital Avatar attend a zoom meeting so that made me think about why I'm sitting here today we are having a human-to-human interaction so if I sent a digital Avatar to come to speak with you I'm not sure what kind of content quality of
content authenticity would convey to your audience and I think when I look at the fact that why do I insist on having a human-to-human interaction whether I'm B2B or b2c at the end of the day people buy from people people want to meet people and people are inspired by people so I take a step back I get inspired when I see phenomenal technology but I don't even use the word artificial intelligence I call it augmented in intelligence because without the human there would be no in intelligence it's
the human who trained that piece of software to become smart right so I agree with you that there is going to be an exclusivity factor in having a human experience I crave that I like to meet people I get energized by people and the more people I meet leads to the Network's effect which is I feed off the energy of the people that I'm sitting with so I'm trying to think would I go to a concert to watch it to watch a computer screen sing to me I don't think so right I go to listen to the energy of
the singer and the energy of the entire audience in that room so that's something which I always think about I always say like no matter how big your TV is it never can put you into the stadium to watch a football game right because even that I always have like this conversation with my parents and with this Olympic Games coming and I was telling like oh like I really want to go and attend an opening ceremony and my parents were like no you usually have the best experience especially now it's in France it will be across the river
you know you won't get I like yeah but it's being present is it is part of the thing and but like also in crypto we see so many projects that there's no human face behind even the founders have have an avatars and people are still investing so I'm seeing a little bit of a shift now I had a very interesting meeting yesterday with one of our portfolio companies there's a company um it's called bsgg it's an interesting online gaming community and effectively what has been impressive to
me is sure they're an online sports betting platform but what is interesting is they focus on the fundamentals which is cash flow profit the old school things that people don't even think about today right and when you and I had our conversation last time we spoke about the fact that the crypto World actually does it in reverse order you raise the money first you already have raised all the money and whether you decide to build or not the money is already in the bank so therefore your incentive to go and build and deliver is
actually very low all right whereas in the traditional world you build something put together a plan bootstrap it for some time and hopefully you raise the seed round series A B C and then you go and create a product and then you take it on a path to commercial viability right so I'm still very old school I I love the words cash flow I love the words profit I like to see audited accounts I like to meet the people I want to know who's behind a company and if someone shows me a JPEG and this is who they are guess what you
will lose me pretty fast that's cool you mentioned that because recently I was also talking to a founder and they were so excited about this like a quick small lock period And if you can exit you can do amount of X and I was like what's your Runway and these people didn't know what Runway is and they had no plan what they're going to do with the money they're raising true and I'm like how you can operate this and I'm like this is should be you should know what your Runway is and how
it corresponds with your lock periods and how you going to build something in six months that created demand that no one dumps your token like sometimes I believe the industry is so fast and exciting that people don't think they just kind of take the money now and then decide what you're going to do with it other than actually building a solution and in this bull run we see so much raise of the meme tokens that no utility no project it's literally like a lottery ticket on a chain so you have what I call there's a
there's a phrase that I use right and you either learn or you earn all right so you're absolutely correct we've seen a lot of the the meme token has taken over parts of the in of the sophisticated asset class by storm all right but then I take a step back today we spoke earlier about the pump and the dump times that that we have seen all right and today what's happening is if the fundamentals are not there then you're not investing you're actually gambling all right but if you have a
value proposition which you can articulate then I think it's something which you should see and go through and as you said it correctly the words like Runway like cash flow head count simple things that people that we consider simple or I do it's something simple meaning it's something that I want to understand before I sit with any team and look at them but what is interesting now many of the current projects that are in the web 3 space don't have that Runway of transparency and as you said correctly
they're more interested in raising the funds versus what to do with the funds after they have been raised so there's a disconnect still going on a little bit less now I think but the thing today the web3 community is growing and I think once you define your utility the community will come there so I'm seeing a a little bit smarter investor pool today than we did in the first run like what is your take on like as we talking about like a investors perspective and you have like a portfolio companies like don't you think
like difference between like a traditional VCS and investors versus web3 investors like at least my observation in a recent buol run was that web three investors they took the similar narrative to like a retail investors and Angel Investors they also they're not here for a longer run and in traditional startup ecosystem there are vs that would invest for 10 years without you know exiting or they one wec exits to another while in web 3 everyone thinks very cyclic and I've seen so many we's they want a very short Cliffs and
lock periods and everyone's justification is that oh we've been burned last cycle when Cliff came we couldn't exit because Market was down we want to be able to in and out within one bull run so I think you have to take a step back back go to the fundamentals of web 3 right Bitcoin is one of the foundations of web 3 okay and I recently joined Marathon digital Holdings which is one of the world's largest Bitcoin uh Miners and the approach there has been they have recently gone from asset light
to asset heavy they managed to go through the ups and downs of the recent industry and the reason they were able to do that is because the chairman Fred teal the CFO Salman Khan applied a very strict Financial discipline what's interesting is that when I go back and look at so in every industry forget the timing right you're always going to have some bad players they should not Define the entire industry so yes we had some very funny players on FDX Celsius I mean there in every industry has it it's not exclusive to
this industry right but you also have some great players some people who were okay we're going to focus on a certain sector we're going to build a proper business I saw a lot of discipline in Marathon digital Holdings the world's one of the world's largest Bitcoin miners who are effectively transforming themselves from being Bitcoin mining into traditional background energy and infrastructure so they were able to take a a very powerful narrative which is okay we are mining Bitcoin but we're also an energy
technology solution company and because they're financially disciplined they're able to attract the true Bitcoin Believers at the same time realizing that yes Bitcoin does Bitcoin production or Bitcoin mining consumes a lot of power but as we shift it to Renewable Power and other sustainable sources of power you now have an ESG solution so if you think about it the evolution not only of the narrative but the evolution of the industry attracts a wider audience and that comes because of financial discipline and then
at the same time it's a commodity I mean since we've had the last the last um crash Black Rock has come in their ETFs have gone through the roof what they have achieved in terms of what their ETF has gold took 20 years just think about that so the smart Capital has now realized you need to have some allocation to Bitcoin in your portfolio this is a commodity that's here to stay it's limited at 21 million everybody knows that and there's a level of sophistication now that I'm seeing which was not there during the first
R make sense it does and also like I'm really surprised to see like because in the beginning it was like also a bit skepticism that there's like all this ethereums and like new technology Bitcoin is old but like with ordinals and now the things you can stake Bitcoin you can do so many things it became a true Financial investment vehicle absolutely and there's a lot of money coming in and it totally changed the whole Narrative of that what it is and today I believe that we became in the world where Bitcoin has its own Journey
sure and also this bull run we saw that that Journey doesn't much influence because in previous bull runs we saw that Bitcoin goes up and then everything kind of follows we don't see it today today we see that people are focusing okay this project is going up or not going up because what they're doing or what they are not doing or they supposed to do or how they're competing ab and and I think you will continue to see a level of sophistication now because you suddenly have I mean take into account a global
bank like standard a Chartered Bank they have now set up digital custody so when you have centralized financial institutions looking at holding digital assets for their clients it's showing you I don't want to say a shift it's an expansion of the mindset right and if they're able to go out there and pass through their own internals internal compliance and get behind the fact that this is a digital asset which is going to increase in value and if their clients are in the mining space then guess what they're going to provide a
service and as you said correctly but in this case what's going to happen is you'll see a level of sophistication which is there now people are being a little bit more more cautious because at the same time you're also going to be very thorough in your process to make sure that you're not overleveraging yourself so you're here to stay and as the industry evolves we've just seen a recent Bitcoin having it's going to come again in the next four years but then the transactions are going to kick in as
well right so it's about timing it and watching it all happen but watching the adoption grow to a much larger scale that's how we see it I believe yes adoption should be and will be the next driver especially like next bu runs will be about adoption because now finally it's a time to go bigger and bigger and I saw like more people joining even at bitet side we see how much like a new joiners are there people actually coming and interested yes some come to gamble some come to for various reasons whatever I think it's a kind of a
learning curve learning jump and we saw more more people joining but I want to discuss that very important thing you just mentioned about being here for a longer run and having that Vision while so far even within like a big players of an industry it was very cyclic and I can even give an example of one of our biggest competitors that at some point in next pool run there were like around like 8,000 team members today they're like a back to 4,000 and we see that even large players in the market they are very cyclic they
just go up and go down and not only about investment and investment appetite but it's also about like a how they manage Talent what they build how faster they go or how Visionary they are why why we can't just or why most of the players can't just you know do that or it is more about how we can make more money and that when so I think I think when you take go back and look at the traditional world of Finance right you have a bull and a bear cycle so during a bull cycle all the inv investment banks are
hiring whether it's you know Equity or debt trading divisions there's a lot of activity m&a is at a peak and then suddenly you will go through a bare market and you'll see a shift in the in the human resource so if you take a step back it's exactly the same thing happening here right I think there is a lot of at the end of the day there's a lot of hype associated with the first bull run which we we saw and when we saw the crash it happened pretty fast as well right and I think I think there's
been a recalibration now there is a level of I'm going to use the word common sense that has kicked in now because back in those days you could launch a token you could make 3040 50x and literally if you make that if you have that kind of returns you have no incentive to come back the next day and sit on the same desk there is no incentive and then suddenly you're you become more geared up to go and raise money for your next project hoping that you'll also get the 30 40 50x on it right and there are players who have
done that but at the same time if you don't have the basic tenets of infrastructure you have a a infrastructure you have a community who comes and trades on your platform today you need to have a certain amount of human capital in order to attract the financial Capital right same thing here so the more financial Capital that is attracted needs more humans to actually uh manage it right and again that cyclical nature is common whether it's in web 3 or whether it's in a traditional Web Two same things talking
about making like a 50x and just you know starting a token how did you end up in crypto like what brought you here so I think what brought brought me here was I observed one thing very interesting was during the pandemic I observed how saw an interesting phenomenon where sports teams and I watched this in India and a few other places where sports teams were playing in empty stadiums so they did not have the spectators physically there because of covid but yet the communities were engaged around their specific sports
team teams and I met then the management team it was this company called bet Swap bsgg and they told me what they are doing they said look the world's largest sports betting markets are the US of course India is quite large the Middle East is quite large Asia of course Africa and the globalness of sports this transcends through any religion any culture if you love football you and I were just talking about the the opening of the Olympics how just being there it's an experience right so when I heard about the fact that you could engage
with the community building of so many people supporting their sports teams some people would say it's gambling I'm like no it's actually you're supporting your team and you've you've gone deep whether it's you know Cricket just name the actual sport here Cricket soccer tennis football basketball you go on you've seen the surgeons of very large companies in the US Draft Kings etc etc who have done extremely well but what I liked about this was the fact that there was a web 3 business
pretty Global it to it has taken them a bit of time and I'm very happy as I said I met with the management team and what I saw was the chance to communicate and work with a global Community who was interested in sports and then I look into that Sports leads to media media is not only content creation or films TV it's also music engagement one of my partners in uh my media business is Dr Deepa Chopra he talks about the metaverse for good talks about the fact that you can actually employ technology and you can actually
use it as a Force for good in a world where there's a high level of anxiety caused by social media and today you're finding a interesting phenomenon happened where people are now going out to buy devices that don't have any social media tools on them they want to use it as a phone and WhatsApp and that's it so you're actually seeing a lot of Basics going back to the basics now so what I saw was an interesting way that crypto brings communities together and yes in any Community you have the
Good Bad and the Ugly normal part of life you have that in web too as well it's not only exclusive to web 3 the thing is in web 3 you don't know them okay in web 2 you know who they are all right so there's a learning curve out there right and I come from the experience economy so what I saw was the fact that I could see certain good web3 players I take anim Mara Brands I like like what they have done I've just joined uh the Universal Health token which is an interesting an interesting view on a token that it's not rewarding
you for nothing as you improve your health score which means there's an ESG component to this all right they're backed by a company in India called gouki which is probably one of the most incredible digital Integrative Health platform platforms a phenomenal web 2 business digital platform but you now have a Gokey score which impacts your life and health insurance so think about the impact of using data using a web2 platform but with a web 3 component to it so what I like is the fact the in the integration
element of this and I think what is also surprising all the major studios in the world whether it's the Disney The Paramount they're scared of web 3 because they're centralized they don't want to lose the power they want to keep all they want to keep as much of the profits as they can and I was having a conversation today with someone they're the fat cats in the room they will allow the content creator to get some crumbs and they'll allow the client to get some crumbs but they want to eat it all right web 3 allows you a
level of transparency curcy in your economic model you can actually give people you can share a lot more with the content creator since everything is on the blockchain so I like the fact that you can document certain things and if you think thoughtfully about it you can actually build a huge business on web 3 with the blockchain platform because it's actually more transparent so that's what attracted me and nut show I I I like the example of that like a fat cat because we know what happened with this
Ai and the they jumped and the re I saw this tweet the lady tweets that you know I want AI to cook my food and clean my home that I can go to Art not the other way around I thought that was fantastic it's true though right today I'm a if I'm a creative person and you and I said this earlier I don't mind going to a concert to watch I mean interesting thing the other day my son who's 25 was invited to watch The Rolling Stones concert in New York recently and he said dad I saw this 80-year-old guy MC Jager
with so much energy that's pretty cool right you have an 80-year-old guy on stage who's lighting up the entire room still at the age of you know 80 and he went there for the experience now today if somebody if an AI Avatar is singing an AI created song would you go to watch it in a concert what are you going to watch a screen not going to happen right so this all goes back to the human connection behind it and what that lady who posted that makes a lot of sense I want the AI tool to clean my house cook my food
drive my car but the creativity rests with us and I'm going to and I say this the creativity of Steve Jobs the creativity of Henry Ford look at the the icons Rockefeller I mean you just go through history go through every country in the world it's all humans the humans have left the Legacy not the AI so that's what I I keep thinking about that is definitely because also I was thinking like when we talk about democratization and how like blockchain can impact I believe during the pandemic there was this authors that couldn't
publish the book and they actually did like Pieces by pieces and like people helped them to fulfill their dream and they became the stakeholders and I think that's great like imagine if you could do that in of course I think more we talk about it more dangerous it sounds like you know if the actors in a film or film crew gets more shares rather than just like a last half a second of their name Crossing this screen or any other business look there is a level of I talked about it one of our compan is Beacon media right and Beacon media
is asset light IP heavy so we work with great independent content creators one of them being Dr Deepak Chopra I'm the chairman of that company and what we do there is we are partnering with phenomenal producers and directors with a great track record and we literally look at the communities that we look at the following around the content so if a content if a creative has a huge community in a certain country we create the content for that right what's interesting is that we're marrying the two and I always say this I will use AI
to produce the content not to create it that creativity must come from a human being that creativity is what keeps us here right of course with today's AI tools can I go to chat gbt or any other tool out there and say can please write me the next episode for something I'm sure it will but it's going to gather the information that's already out there in the public domain and it's going to give me what it gathers from everybody else so effectively then I become a salad of everybody else's thoughts that
go out there right that creativity spark is gone so I now think to myself the independent content creators the independent movie makers the Futures with them because today I met with somebody today who said a very interesting thing to me he said content is King but distribution is King Kong he was right very smart guy I met today Andy a very sharp person and he really made me think about this because at the end of the day the old equation was content plus distribution equals money today it's content plus distribution
plus experience that will give you monetization so if you think about it if you're a studio if you're in the media space if you're not providing these three things there's no monetization and that's what I think people have to think about and why like we started a conversation we talked about monetization and importance of making money sure and we are in middle of the conversation still about the monetization and making money do you think that these Ventures and tokens that we are selling and buying and
investing is it actually a monetization because most of the time I see that projects will issue a token yeah people will buy and sell it but you never use it for the actual reason of that token that is designated whether it is to exchange a content and so on or like I don't know whatsoever the reason that you earn and you should be spend in in that toomics chart that it's it never does it's 90% is just people trade in it as a so I think there is a level of again there's two reasons right one is you'll
have the fundamental stall Works in any Community who will stick who will buy and just hold on for dear life right but you have a certain amount of people who trade and at the same time go to the retail market look at look at any other Stock Exchange there's a level of institutional investors there's a level of strategic investors and you have a level of retail investors day trade in and out so if you think about it it's exactly the same thing right there are people who are able to access stock or tokens in this case at a
certain price the value creation thesis kicks in they want to monetize they go to an exchange they sell it on the exchange they buy on the exchange they understand the marketing strategy they put in the social media influence it's like any other product or project right the narrative counts who you're associated with will give you will give you a validation so to speak and sometimes who you're associated with will also give you the wrong validation right so you're judged by The Company You Keep and I think many of them in the
web 3 space if I take a step back there was a lot of hype a lot of money was raised without thinking it through without thinking okay what is the endgame and you said this correctly there was were we raising money to build the project or raising a money so that 10% will be used to build the project and 90% will just be monetized and create a trading environment It's a combination always and why we talk about like a very much you know invested kind of air uh perspective how do you because you also invest yourself and you mainly
do like a very early stage you know you work with a lot Founders like how do you Scout a project like what is a promising project to you so I have a simple view on the world maybe it's a little bit I take a bird's eye view as following we're 8 and a half billion people today globally you have six basic human needs energy food water infrastructure Healthcare and education I leave alcohol and sex to the side these are six which I'm willing to put money in right so I try and see what part of these six basic
human needs that project touches and that's what drives me first to understand it so if it's in the health care space I give you simple example so I'm an investor in a company called M mics the number one killer in the world is cardiovascular disase disease heart disease they have A Simple Theory they want to go from number five to number sorry from number one to number five that's pretty cool they built a unique proprietary algorithm that goes into your any headsets or anything with a 99.
7% accuracy gives you reading on your heart the use Cas is I'll give you a simple example 10 and a half million people fly on a plane every day imagine if I if you're listening to the headphones on the plane and I can tell you that passenger on this flight seat number so so it's about to have a heart attack that's pretty cool how many people take Zoom calls or teams calls and use their headsets imagine if you could tell the level of stress sitting with your team members who as you said today everyone is virtual right so you
also understand the value of bringing it in and this is what drives me I I look at the fact that anything I mean I'm very excited about the health Tech space we also there's a company that we're currently looking at called lonus bio incredible company they have they're close to FDA approval they can with by analyzing a strand of hair from a newborn tell you whether that child is predisposed for autism or ALS that's pretty cool so when you have something like this that's cool you're
coming to me with a project that has no utility and I think today we can it comes with age I was jok and I introduced myself to my team that I bring no hair SL gray hair which is fine I'm not into the pump and dump that's not my style it's how do we build something and I try to look for the web three angle and whatever we are doing that to me is very important because I want to be able to transcend both the communities and bring them in place that's amazing and I think that's very important to find the
projects that you are passionately connected with the etos understanding why are you investing what are you trying to achieve rather than just oh I'm here because I heard someone told that this talk going to do 5x look today uh Bitcoin right Bitcoin just cross 70,000 do I see a future in it absolutely because I'll tell you why Bitcoin mining is going to be probably the biggest supporter of the global excess energy sector there's a significant amount of excess energy capacity coming globally every single country in the
world and one thing very clear 25% of the US power needs by 2030 is going to be Ai and compute there's not enough distribution right now so what's going to happen is if you take a step back the only buyer of excess intermittent energy is Bitcoin mining so Marathon digital Holdings unique proposition what did I say my six basic human needs energy was the first one right marathon is in the energy business so Bitcoin mining is not only Bitcoin mining it's providing an energy solution for countries it's part of everyone's
National development agenda so you need to support Bitcoin mining because they come in provide grid balancing they can give back to the the energy Grid at a time when the grid needs more capacity like for example here in the Middle East there's we have a facility in Abu Dhabi our partners are 02 with adq what do we do we balance the load at a time when there is Peak capacity in the summer we curtail we switch off our we can be offline in 5 to 10 minutes and we go online when we need to think about which other industry in the
world they will need six months or nine months to plan the C the curtailment to balance the grid so Bitcoin mining actually has some great uses in the global energy sector yeah and I think it's very important because I I know that like there's Latin American countries Nations that do the same because of the like the excess Hydro power and they don't know what to do with it because unfortunately there isn't batteries like that big that could store energy not yet therefore I think it's a very
creative approach where you can just tell okay it's anyway excess energy you don't know what to do with it corre let's turn it into valuable something hold it and and I give you something else as well right the oil and gas business especially the energy industry as you as you as you extract more resources out of the ground some countries of the world still flare a lot of gas a lot of associated gases come out of the ground that's being flared you can capture that and mine Bitcoin so everything I look at is
looking at the web 2 and the web three angle and that's what I think excites me as long as it fits one of these six basic human needs that's how I think about it yeah that that's crazy I I was also reading the other day that during the war because Russia couldn't sell that much gas they're just literally burning and CO2 no any benefit it's just like I don't know what to do with this energy and you can't just close your I don't know gas Wells and oil wells and can't waste and there's no way to do
anything with it it's I mean if you take take a step back right so there's a lot of Renewable Power coming online in Saudi Arabia Korea India turkey lot of places around the world Central South America Kenya the grid is not ready to absorb that so what is interesting is up until the time the grid is ready you need someone who can plug that that's where Bitcoin mining comes in actually provide an energy solution and if you think about it that way it's wow yeah there are also makes a lot of sense other creative very creative
projects I recently we listed a project on bitet uh a deepin project that helps the individuals to sell to the grid and buy from the grid and because that thing is very hard to do like in a manual traditional analog version on chain it's very easy you can put the prices calculations everyone knows who owns who what that's so crazy like that's crazy that how blockchain when you go deep to the technology can be actually applied even like without tokenization and all this like hyp words and recently we were
talking with some very high level like a VPS at unver and I was fascinated how they use blockchain technology to trace their palm oil production absolutely it's about transparency today right you want to be able to trace the feed stock you want to be able to trace the journey and the end user and I think today's world there is a lot of transparency out there and what's interesting is I always joke and say the lack of transparency is actually with fiat currency there is no transparency there because you don't
know where it came from you have some idea but there's the blockchain gives you a ledger for life so you know what's going on there right no cash is definitely one of the like most Anonymous things recently like there was someone talking about you know the Gen and the centralized world and being an anonymous and like gosh because you don't know who gave who of course no no 100% 100% it was an amazing chat today and we talked about the importance of like EOS and being connected to the things that really matter and of course
transparency and my guest was manuch thank you for coming thank you for the gift of your time thank you very much I was your host vugar USI [Music]
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