Chaz and Gingersnaps Episode 1: Tragically Hip

Opens March 6th 2023 as the pilot of a Chaz and Gingersnaps podcast co-hosted with Tamara Hassan from Ontario Canada, named Tragically Hip for their time in Canada.

Tamara says she grew up in Dorchester Ontario and moved back during COVID, a hero's-journey return where the boon is ADA and Bitcoin.

Charles recounts seeing London Ontario for the first time, buying Warhammer figures at a game store and visiting a poutine shop.

Asks how Main Street's crypto perception changed after the boom and FTX, with Tamara noting neighbors stopped calling and that she never shills, explaining ADA's utility as tokens not securities rather than investment advice.

Tamara describes her textile hobby with a Fabric for Fashion book on plant and animal fibers, wanting to make her own clothes with a sewing machine, diving deep into hobbies like baking.

Charles shares his interest in goats genetically engineered in Wyoming and Utah to produce spider silk in their milk, twice as strong as steel, tied to the bioluminescent-plant and Colossal work.

Thermochromic nano-material that changes color with temperature, including thermochromic shower tile from Japan he installed in an IO house as a prank on COO Jerry Moroney.

Cites Google's Project Jacquard putting transistors into thread so material could compute and change color by mood, envisioning textiles that heat or cool themselves.

He is going to Alaska to look at muskox qiviut, five times warmer than cashmere, to raise on the ranch alongside the bison.

Reflects on a two-hour Twitter space on governance the night before, saying the community is in a fearful transition since change is the only constant for a dynamic protocol.

People come from many political systems, citing a woman from Jordan with a king and Cardano's founding in Japan and Switzerland, where there is no president but a seven-person confederacy board.

Tamara says she listens to internal company debates and the contingent-staking debate with Dumpling, Bullish Dumpling, and Rick, praising the community's mature, respectful argumentation.

Emphasizes debating the same set of facts, noting people conflated the layer-1 and layer-2 arguments in contingent staking, which will matter as the MBO stands up.

Addresses the perennial question of IO's role and announces settling on the name IO, since the company moved from Hong Kong to Input Output Global years ago with a rebrand still coming.

Tamara transformed IO via the PI system with squads and tribes, since building complex software across research, product, and engineering is hard to coordinate in a decentralized environment.

PI planning is incremental every three months tethered to product strategy and requirements, harder for Cardano because it can be so many things, so the roadmap must be product-driven.

Teams get a week to plan then run three months uninterrupted, admitting Charles used to interrupt teams, and that agility matters in a fast-moving industry.

His deadline-missing reputation came from operating systems where management believed things were imminent that were actually six-to-nine months away, and that the new system surfaces problems earlier.

Tamara says she is passionate about supporting the CIP 1694 workshops with proper facilitation, joking that the workshop count creeps from five to twenty to thirty.

Tamara is rebuilding a business model called Integra with John Vandergriff, rethinking how organizations work while studying operating models like holacracy.

Recalls knowing Sebastian since 2016 and Duncan Coutts being an amazing ice skater at the 2019 Berlin Ledger workshop that formalized the specifications.

Tamara recounts helping a friend choose a chain for an NFT project who picked Polygon over Cardano citing low activity, which she disputes.

The NFT space needs to be more customer-focused and easier for non-developers, since her friend found the process painful with slow responses.

Wants Marlowe for NFTs as a turnkey no-code solution and to bind intellectual property to NFTs, an unsolved problem, possibly extending OpenLaw or Catala and combining with Prism's verified-NFT standard.

Cardano NFTs are the most vibrant part of the ecosystem with 8 million assets issued and over half of projects NFT-related, and highlights the cross-ecosystem interoperability problem, jpeg.store as the canonical marketplace, and NMKR as the turnkey platform bringing a quarter of NFT projects onto Cardano.

The Tragically Hip is his favorite band and shows his Blueberry guitar, a Canadian maker that built Joe Perry's, with an engraved dragon matching his treble-clef tattoo.

He has 11 guitars including a Strat and a cracked Martin, and asks if anyone fixes guitars.

Wraps up planning to make the podcast regular every two weeks or month, longer and more topical, having not gotten to anti-aging or Mark Hyman.

Closes noting Tamara has been with the company nearly six years doing events worldwide, that the next episode might be at the Milken Institute, and that the point is to show there are more people at IO than just Charles.