1:48Jasmine BrunsonIt’s super cool with trying to be like the world computer in a sense. They do have a little bit of competition with Ethereum, however, but -- and also, this is another opinion. This is just an opinion from a developer standpoint. I feel I have the same feelings with -- I have similar feelings with ICP that I do with Um, StarkNet, I, I think with like making a whole new language with what you’re building can be very novel initially. But when it comes to like onboarding developers who are like, say they’ve been working on Solidity for like since 2017, right? That, that, that’s the year I started. I touched my first smart contract was 2017.
1:48Jasmine BrunsonAll right, cool. So you have developers that have been working with this, um, language for 6 years. Then you’re saying like, oh, We have Makoto and we have Cairo. And I feel as though like it can be a bit challenging as a dev to kind of like, okay, drop what you’re doing with Solidity or drop what you’re doing with C and then get into these languages. However, like if you have those experiences, it is kind of a little bit easy for some people to pick it up. But I did check out like the Makoto language. I played around with it. It’s interesting. I just think that, um, ICP and all those other projects, it’s going to be hard to kind of like fend against ETH, who has, you know, got what, 4.5 million users on DeFi protocols?
1:48Jasmine BrunsonYou got over -- I, I don’t know how many smart contracts are out there, but I’m pretty sure there’s billions. Like, it’s interesting, but that’s kind of what I -- that’s what I know about them. And, and also, like, they’re based in Switzerland, from my understanding. But I, I did a, like a hackathon with them a couple years ago.
4:15Kamal HubbardYeah, I mean, obviously I’m, I’m new to their ecosystem. I’m learning more and, you know, I, I like what I’ve seen and heard so far and I’m looking to, to learn a little bit more and maybe pick up some TypeScript. What do you think about that? Just from your opinion being a dev.
4:40Jasmine BrunsonYeah, I think you should start off with JavaScript, because JavaScript really is like, that’s gonna open the floodgates for you when it comes to like the object-oriented programming. Now I’m biased because I’m a data science, but my first language I ever learned, I was 16, it was Python. And Python is where I learned a lot of my object-oriented programming. But I learned that Python can go but so far. Because it’s, um, it goes in between like being a scripting language and like, like I said, it can be object-oriented programming, but typically in practice people use JavaScript. So I would say Python, like you can start off with JavaScript or you can start off with Python and then allocate a lot of time to JavaScript, and then that will open the floodgates for other languages.
4:40Jasmine BrunsonBecause it’s a running saying in the development industry that, um, once you learn a language, it’s quote unquote easy to learn others, but like, I will go on the fence and say like, no, especially when it comes to smart contract development. The methodologies are so different, like, like from arithmetic operations like adding and subtracting and multiplication and division. It could be like a slash for division for one language, but it could be like a slash asterisk asterisk for another language. And from a smart contracts the auditing standpoint, those where like the vulnerabilities can lie when it comes to logic. ’Cause you could do something in Solidity that’s way different in Cairo or way different in Mokoto.
4:40Jasmine BrunsonAnd then you’re thinking like, yeah, your methodology and your logic’s right, but the syntax is wrong. So I think there’s gonna be a lot of opportunity and push for chains like that that are making their own, their own languages to introduce a whole new set of auditors into their ecosystem so that we don’t make those mistakes when it comes to deployment. But yeah, I’ll digress.
6:42Kamal HubbardNo, no. I mean, hey, I definitely appreciate, you know, how thoughtful you are in pretty much everything you do. So, but I appreciate that. your insight into that, because that gives me a little bit more guidance and direction in terms of other resources I should tap into. One of the questions I was walking away from the conference with that I’m still wondering, I guess, is, is there a place for Bitcoin maximalism in the global Black families movement for self-determination? What do you -- what are your thoughts on this? And, um, I don’t know if you came across that question coming out of the summit or not.
7:32Jasmine BrunsonYeah, I, you know, funny enough, me and Lamar, I go back and forth with Lamar all the time. And like Lamar, back in the, um, the Clubhouse days, um, you know, it was a lot of push for like Bitcoin, like Bitcoin, just buy Bitcoin, don’t look at all this other stuff, etc. And I’ve had conversations with Lamar, Najah, and Isaiah, right? And I think the, um, the way I look at it, and like, um, a few of them look at it too, is like, okay, you can get your money how you get your money. Um, however, I do think that there’s a limitation to the Bitcoin maximalism that I personally can like accept or I can deal with.
7:32Jasmine BrunsonAnd I think what the issue with that I had back in like 2021 when I went to Bitcoin 2021 in Miami was like, okay, cool, Uh, we’re pro-Bitcoin, okay? Everyone’s bags are up, okay? Let’s party, our party, whatever. But why are we filling dumpster trucks of the Venezuelan dollar and like burning it and, and playing around with it, right? You look at this country and its wealth and the privilege that we as, um, quote unquote Americans have, right? And we’re filling up dumpster trucks of the Venezuelan, um, bolívar We are, we are telling people to buy Bitcoin or die broke, right? Stuff like -- I forgot the saying.
7:32Jasmine BrunsonIt was so much toxic Bitcoin maximalism at the Bitcoin 2021 conference, to the point where I even tuned out because I just don’t think that that’s the answer. It’s like, you’re, you’re back, okay, your bags are up, you’re feeling yourself, whatever. But like, I feel like us as Black Bitcoiners or Black in, um, Black blockchain experts, we have a certain responsibility that can’t look like that, where it’s like we can’t just get up and be like, oh, I made my, my capital, I made what I wanted to make out of my investments, let me go up and go shame people. Now I saw that from the other communities, um, at the, at the conference that was very shameful, but I I’d rather do the work of like bringing on board countries that are, that have been plundered by Western conquests.
7:32Jasmine BrunsonYou know, countries in South America and countries in Africa and countries all over this world that have been plundered by the powers that be that are actually rich in minerals and resources that actually need a stable quote unquote dollar or they need stability, right, through Bitcoin. I look at it like you need to support individuals that come from these places instead of like telling them that they’re gonna die broke if they don’t buy Bitcoin. Like, that’s, that’s just so bizarre to me. Like, I, I’ve never understood that. So, um, that’s another big thing with me is like the education piece, and then also like not steering people in the wrong direction.
7:32Jasmine BrunsonBecause you can tell people to buy Bitcoin all you want, but they don’t -- you didn’t tell them where to buy it. You didn’t tell them how to buy. You didn’t tell them that they can -- they don’t have to buy a whole Bitcoin. So now when they open up that app and they, and they hear, oh, Jasmine told me to buy Bitcoin, oh my gosh, but it’s like at $26,000, I don’t have that right now, they’re probably going to walk away not knowing that they can buy a fraction of Bitcoin for a dollar. And I, I think that was the big value proposition and the execution that the Black Bitcoin Billionaires Club brought to our community when Clubhouse was hot.
7:32Jasmine Brunsonit’s like teaching people how to, how to get and, and catch fish instead of teaching them that, hey, you know, fish is good, you know, it’ll sustain your life, it’ll do this. Like, I just think that that is the difference between, um, how a, a lot of us educators run ourselves in this space versus like how the greater industry runs it. And I’ll say this on record, I feel as though like the American crypto and blockchain space is not going to really like it. The American crypto and, and blockchain space is actually the antithesis of what this space is really about, because the American ideals of like, uh, corruption, of, uh, destruction, of all these things are actually embedding in the blockchain space.
7:32Jasmine BrunsonAnd the blockchain itself is supposed to be this trustless, permissionless technology, but we’re building -- we’re bringing the evils of, of human um, desire of human evils onto the blockchain, onto -- into the industry. Um, I think it’s been proven how historically it’s been proven. I don’t like SBF. Sam Bankman-Fried was an example. We ignore him. We now pretend like he did not exist, but it happened, and it had ties to the United States government. It had ties to Gary Gensler. It had ties to politicians who were actually funded on both sides by this man. So I think that when that happened, the whole world -- I was talking to partners in Dubai, I was talking to partners that I had in South Africa -- the whole world was looking at America.
7:32Jasmine BrunsonThink about that. When it comes to the workings of being the antithesis of what this space is about, the whole world was looking at America destroy the market. Like, let’s think about that. So I feel like there’s a level of -- and I said this again when I’ve done talks on AI and machine learning, because like I said, that’s part of my background as well, doing data science. I feel as though the technology has become more altruistic than us as human beings, meaning that we are now continuing to live our daily lives with our issues, with our problems, not seeking the change that we need to adapt, right?
7:32Jasmine BrunsonAnd to be loving and altruistic people. However, the technology is being more altruistic and it’s, it’s actually advancing more than the love in our hearts. And that’s something that I thought about and that’s like something I’ll go on record saying, like, I really feel as though this space will only grow as big as the people who are willing to change themselves to grow the industry, to make it the ownership economy.
13:51Kamal HubbardYeah, absolutely. I mean, that’s why I wrote my book, DeFi for the Diaspora, is like, really talking about, in one regard, Bitcoin is a zero-sum game and there’s going to be winners and losers. And with traditional finance onboarding onto Bitcoin and accumulating as much Bitcoin as possible these days, and that’s how it’s been for months now, not a lot of those traditional financial institutions are looking out for the best interests of Black people. And, you know, I have the utmost respect for the Black Bitcoin billionaires and what they do because they have brought a lot of, you know, resources to the community, whether it’s financial, educational.
13:51Kamal HubbardBut, you know, there’s a difference of opinion and it’s not even anything personal or major. It’s almost like the Lakers and the Celtics. At the end of the day, yeah, you can look at it as entertainment, but it’s definitely -- we’re not going to get there on Bitcoin alone. It’s about leveraging the technology to create a parallel economy that takes that traditional financial system out of the equation in their discrimination and historical mistreatment of people who look like us. So I don’t know. I mean, I’m open to more discussion along those lines, but I don’t see how more of these traditional financial players who once again have discriminated against us are now going to use Bitcoin to help bring us out of or change that historical mistreatment.
15:39Jasmine BrunsonYeah. I mean, I look at it like this. I look at the, the docket, like, and what we’ve seen time and time again. And in 2017, I was a junior. No, no, no. I was a sophomore in college. So 2017, I was at Technica, which is an all-women hackathon that happens at the University of Maryland, um, every year. And I saw the JP Morgan people, and that was around the time where there was FUD going on. Um, There was FUD about Bitcoin going to zero. There was FUD about Bitcoin being crap and all this. And I argued with the JP Morgan people at the hackathon about what Jamie Dimon was saying about Bitcoin because he was saying all these bad things about Bitcoin.
15:39Jasmine BrunsonHowever, he was buying the Bitcoin for his daughter. He was buying Bitcoin for his daughter for her birthday while telling people that look like us or in our economic positions not to buy it. And oftentimes people -- and this is my issue that I have with fake celebrity these scams and, and things. People will listen to celebrities that look like they have money, but most of these celebrities don’t really have it for real, especially when it comes to like some of the rappers that come into our community. Like if such and such Lil Such and Such is launching a token or pumping an NFT, you got to really do your research to see like what actual utility is in that and who, who the holders are, like who the actual token holders are and how many of them are they.
15:39Jasmine BrunsonBecause I can tell you right now, they’re going to leverage their their following to dump on you eventually. So I look at it like, um, the institutions, they themselves have to sit down and, and, um, and undo a lot of their assumptions and a lot of their unfortunate misnomers that they have to really participate in this space because they’re going to get checked at the door. Like, there’s so many amazing NFT people that I’ve met over the few years that literally champion this. I know Mech is like one of them. She’s like amazing where she keeps people accountable when it comes to the distribution of investments to NFT collectors -- NFT builders, I’m sorry.
15:39Jasmine BrunsonAnd it’s just like, at the end of the day, don’t say that you’re going to participate in this space and you’re all for the ownership economy and everyone being able to participate in the financial inclusion while only being focused on the money. Because a lot of these institutions, to be quite frank, they’re only here for the money. But that goes for the same -- that goes for the same for the kid who just graduated from NYU or graduated from UPenn, who is able to leverage his connections, get a $5 million, $10 million investment, and start a DeFi protocol. Like, that goes for that cat too. You can’t -- like, the, the people who come from privilege, the people who come from these, these spaces where they’re given privilege they have to come with the -- come correctly, right?
15:39Jasmine BrunsonBecause you’re gonna ruin it for someone who literally works so hard to build themselves up in the industry, build a skill set such as development or such as marketing and sales to work for a blockchain company. And if they have to work alongside you or work with you, but you don’t -- you haven’t even changed your outlook on life when it comes to looking at people as human beings and not as numbers, then you’re going to ruin it for people who are actually seeking freedom in this space. That’s how, that’s literally how I look at it. And unfortunately, I don’t think that the, the industry or those people who come from privilege and things don’t sit down and think about this stuff because they think about money.
15:39Jasmine BrunsonI get along way, way, way better with the people who develop the tech and the people who are focused on building great tech than the people who are focused on chasing a bag in this space.
19:31Kamal HubbardYeah, no doubt. And I mean, to a certain extent, I get it. You got in early, and like you said, your bags are looking nice. But what about everybody else? That’s that’s always been my argument. And you know, when I was doing work in this space with the hedge funds, with the crypto VCs, with the family offices, none of them ever brought up. Okay, hey. All this Bitcoin that we’re going to accumulate, we’re going to try and do something for Black people. That never crossed their mind. I mean, except for one, but that was a group of Black investors. So that aside though, that got deep for a second, but there’s nothing wrong with that. Moving on to my next question I wanted to ask you. I mean, I have observed that you’re a DJ, and what types of music genres and artists do you like to play in your sets?
20:39Jasmine BrunsonYeah, yeah, I, um, I’ve been DJing for a while now. I like to play a variation of things. It depends on the vibe and how I’m feeling in the crowd, but I really, really like Afrobeats. Afrobeats is my thing. Um, I like Wizkid, I like Davido. Um, and then I, I kind of like go -- like I said, I go with my vibe. Like, I’ve been feeling, um, some nuances of like hip-hop with house these days too. I love mixing hip-hop with house because like I’m a big house lover, but I like when it’s like it has like nuances of things that I recognize. And I noticed that that’s where a lot of the music’s going.
20:39Jasmine BrunsonIt’s like they’ll, they’ll remix a hip-hop song, like a well-known Ludacris song with a house beat, and then they’ll they’ll dance to it wherever the way they want to dance. So I really enjoy making those mashups. Um, Amapiano is something I’m trying to get into now. Um, Amapiano is like a whole -- like, it’s like blowing up. Um, uh, one of my friends actually in this space, he introduced me to some Amapiano music in, um, South Africa, and I was like, whoa, what is this? It’s like -- it was like house, but it was like an airy like vibe, like it’s a vibage house. And I was like, whoa, this is nice.
20:39Jasmine BrunsonSo that, and then, um, you know, I do hip-hop, but I don’t do like the low vibrational hip-hop, you know, the, the negative stuff. I do like the, I do like the back in the day, like Grand Poobah, like, um, the, the legendary hip-hop. And I like to scratch with that. So, uh, recently I had, I was in a studio with my, my guy DJ Miss, and we were working on the, um, the Juice Remember the Juice, um, song where, uh, Quincy was playing a Juice song? Or that’s -- did I say Quincy? Was that his name in, uh, Juice? I’m trying to remember, but you know what I’m talking about.
20:39Jasmine BrunsonYeah, basically.
22:37Kamal HubbardYeah, yeah, you’re talking about the Juice soundtrack from ’95. I could be wrong.
22:46Jasmine BrunsonWe were scratching like that. It’s a love that I have for scratching now because at first I was like kind of like hesitant, like if I scratch, I gotta scratch like you know, like they did back in the day. But now I’m like super comfortable with it, so I enjoy that. But it depends on how I’m feeling, my vibe. Um, I like neo-soul music too. I like Smino. Um, J. Cole is cool. Old J. Cole is cool. Old Drake is cool for me. Old Kanye. Like, um, a lot of this new stuff, unfortunately, I can’t really get with it because it doesn’t -- it doesn’t -- it goes against like who I am.
22:46Jasmine BrunsonBut, um, you know, the hip-hop that really like touch you is like the hip-hop that I really like. Um, but yeah, I mean, that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s it in an eggshell. But I, I really enjoy it. Funny enough, the music and the tech actually help each other out because I found myself like, if I’m stuck on like a project and I’m coding and my head is like hurting and I’m upset, I would like walk around, I would like work out, and then as soon as I get back home, I’m like, okay, let me not get on my computer. Let me like, let me DJ real quick.
22:46Jasmine BrunsonLike, let me open up my creative, my creative channels. So that’s kind of how I do it. Um, it, it works for me and it brings me peace.
24:05Kamal HubbardThat’s great. That’s great. Well, Thanks so much again, Jasmine, for your time and sharing your story and talking about Rectify AI. Can you let the folks listening know where to find you online and on social media? For sure.
24:26Jasmine BrunsonFor sure. You can check us out at Rectify AI, um, on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, uh, GitHub. Check out our GitHub, start, uh, look at our repos. Uh, we have a repo in our GitHub called Auditing Demystified, for people who are learning about auditing or want some resources all in one place. So I have that out for people who wanna learn about how to get started with smart contract auditing. We also have a newsletter at Rectify AI at Medium. We have a newsletter and publications from security researchers if you wanna read more about some hack postmortems or, you know, breaking down what a phishing attack in crypto looks like, et cetera.
24:26Jasmine BrunsonSo check out that. And then to find me, you can find me at Jasmine Brunson. Uh, on LinkedIn, uh, and then my Twitter is Bubbly Orca. So Bubbly Orca is my shadowy super coder name. So Elizabeth Warren had made that, that weird statement a couple years ago talking about crypto was run by a whole bunch of shadowy super coders, and like a lot of the coding community was like, okay, I’m a shadowy super coder. So, um, my, my coder name is Bubbly Orca. And it’s kind of like a, it’s kind of a contradiction because if I was a shadowy super coder, I wouldn’t put my name out.
24:26Jasmine BrunsonSo that’s a little joke too. But yeah, you could check me out at Bubbly Orca on GitHub and on Twitter. All right.
25:55Kamal HubbardCheck her out, y’all. And with that, don’t just make it a good day. Make it a great day. A great day with crypto. Crypto with Kamal. And I’ll catch you on the next one.
