This is my working framework for marketing in today’s world.

Using it to find the pace and language to share our stories cross communities, cross the long span of a company’s evolution, iteratively piece by piece, over time.

In every era, we need to discover the relevant language that helps us understand our actions with intent, that work as directional signals to guide us through changing market turns.

Today, with the breakneck speed and constant interactions, with the atomic nature of our communities themselves, episodic storytelling is that framework in a nutshell.

In fact, the narratives we construct are the only design element that lets us find a path to cut through the noise, and uncover ways to coalesce collective beliefs in the face of so much activity, diversity, and division.

I came on this from looking into the language and cadence of episodic TV as a unique approach to storytelling and a new hierarchy of decision making that fits current market dynamics like a glove.

With the added twist that in this model writers are the managing storytellers, the new leadership under the moniker of a Showrunner. They are the top of the creative decision matrix, the head of how the story arc will flow to the public, analogous to how you as a company organize your approach to the world.

A good place to start if the job of Showrunner and the dynamics of Episodic TV are foreign to you, is the excellent A16 podcast with Sonal Chokshi leading a discussion with Marc Andreesen and Showtime’s quite brilliant Billions Showrunner Brian Koppelman.

Koppelman is a treat.

A renaissance man of sorts, endearing cross his many obsessions and tangents from daily meditation to Morning Pages, to writers block, the creative process, writing partnerships, and more.

He is as well, a product of the changing dynamics of visual storytelling from the dominance of traditional Hollywood and movies, to today, where serial episodic TV and the new distribution models have changed the media consumption game. And culture along with it.

There are two shifts worth noting.

The first is that in traditional Hollywood, coming out of the studio system, the hierarchy of control was always director, producer, then writer.

Directors were the leads and called the shots. This from the days where we experienced the most creative stories and the best produced presentations in movies not on the small screen, from the golden age of studios, not independents nor certainly streaming models.

A decade or so ago, this started morphing.

Serial live TV (think soap operas) introduced the episodic, diurnal pulse of engagement, with stories changing almost daily. We as the viewer became in a personal sense part of the story itself, living it daily with the on screen characters as literally part of our lives.

The writer in this paradigm, went from being what followed the production, to what led it. They were writing the viewers story, day by day.

This is most obvious today in the new studios like Amazon and Netflix where most everything is writer driven, and writers as Koppelman defines them are the Showrunners. In this newish Showrunner driven reality, production supports the narrative and the writer, not the other way around.

Narrative is truly king in every sense.

The second shift is in the iterative arc and episodic nature of the storyline.

When we moved out of the theaters to an every-screen-wherever-we-are reality, we took the story with us. The arc was not the start and stop of a movie but of a season, of multi-season, of in many cases a generation.

We lived the story daily as popular culture, as one community experiencing it together. Think of GoT and the tens of millions talking, discussing, sharing excitedly, listening to podcasts as the final episodes unwind.

Listening to Koppelman meander on,  you get the sense that he and his partner start with the arc of the season itself and write to that as a backfill. A strategic story arc, like a strategic plan that changes over time, influenced by their changing moods and our collective responses to the the plot twists.

I create products and markets, not TV shows obviously.

But in the work of discovering communities of early acceptance, building cultures of developer support, thinking through the long process of launch and follow-up, of brand and product introduction, it is all about the iterative narrative arc. The long plan, the story and dialogue, and the invariable changes the market demands.

We understand that in everything we do as a company, we are part of a process, some of it controlled, much of it unexpected, but needing a living story to tie it together.

We need to think of marketing as the choreographer of sorts, the conductor even of an improv group of uncontrollable talents, where we understand directionally where we want to get to and let the ball roll forward, recalibrating as time passes.

Think about this in context of your company, product or brand needs. You will have many analogs.

It is essential in a Marshall McLuhanish kind of way that we find not a bridge, but a narrative to lean on as a platform defined over time. By a multiplicity of content strategies, events, interactions that in some inchoate way merge with the consumption habits of our customers.

I think there are more similarities than differences between the dynamics of a markets relationship to a fictional story—be it Billions, GoT, Lost,  even the Sopranos–and how we build platforms for a protocol, or a brand for a DTC product, or the balance of sustainability in a fashion apparel product.

I used to believe that marketing is what bridges the distance between what you sell and what the customer thinks they bought.

Not any longer.

The times have changed and brands go way beyond and deeper than a transaction.

It’s the story you initiate that the market makes their own, in their own way, over time. That they love when you get it right, and hopefully tune back into give you another chance to fix it when you screw it up.

When it comes together, it’s their story. They are simply letting us write it for them.

I believe that we are iterating towards a decentralized future on the blockchain.

Stress testing the technology and discovering through social experiments what works for our behavioral needs and community dynamics in this new paradigm of incentivized human interactions.

If you believe this as I do, then you need to come to grips with the idea of ‘mining’, as decentralized blockchain systems by nature require some way to verify transactions and gain consensus.

Without going out of my depth, this how I view mining, the migration from proof of work (PoW) to proof of stake (PoS), and where I think staking as a service is leading us.

Every public blockchain is a system of decentralized nodes (or computers) which need to be incentivized to continually confirm transactions.

With PoW, which is what both Bitcoin and Ethereum are today, there are miner nodes which compete to solve a complex mathematical problem, which once solved releases a group of verified transactions to the blockchain.

This works extremely well with the big catch that it takes massive amounts of electric energy to run, and centralizes this power in the hands of a few well-capitalized mining companies.

PoS works towards the same verification end, except the creator of a new verified block is chosen in a deterministic way, depending on its wealth, using its stake of coins as collateral. A person or group stakes capital so there is an economic incentive to verify the transaction honestly.

My initial attraction to proof of stake was the environmental necessity for a more ecological solution without depleting the planet’s resources.

Whether the blockchain community shares my environmental bias, they do seem to unanimously have adopted this direction.

The migration from the now dominant PoW to PoS will I’m certain be long, complex, and arduous but it is well under way. Hybrid MasterNode systems (like Dash) are becoming increasingly common, and new blockchains like NEO in China are being built on MasterNodes and PoS from the ground up.

This idea of Green Mining (as some call PoS) is a gimme and will certainly happen.

But there is more to this when staking as a service enters the narrative here.

There are an increasing number of blockchains using PoW in some fashion, and likewise an ever growing opportunity for more and larger stakes to be placed. We are already seeing staking as a service platforms popping up, where well capitalized individuals have these services build, host, and maintain MasterNodes, sharing a piece of the profit (and risk).

There has been a gap between how traditional financial services and our stock portfolios work, and crypto as an investment vehicle.

There is risk/reward certainly in the crypto investment space, but the idea of passive, less risky dividend-paying crypto vehicle wasn’t there.

Till now.

These numbers popped up in my feed a while back and are worth looking at as a sample of annualized dividend rates paid out by some PoS coins:

NEO–5.5%. OKCash–10%. Dash–7.5%. Reddcoin–5%.

The list is long and growing exponentially all the time. It will literally explode when the Plasma and Lightning networks come on board with incentivized nodes over the next few years.

With staking as a service, we are laying the groundwork for a more ubiquitous blockchain-wired world that is 100% energy efficient and less costly to run. While an equally secure means of verifying transactions as the original PoW systems.

And not least, the creation of a new, dividend paying, crypto asset class–the MasterNode.

But the narrative goes even a step further.

I’ve been bothered that one of the initial promises of the blockchain was the highly intoxicating idea of the  democratization of money. A notion that not only the rich get richer in this new world.

Staking helps move this forward to some degree.

While it is less capital intensive to stake a node then to build a competitive mining company with acres of computers running customized ASICs, it is still beyond the scope of most. Even at today’s bearish coin prices.

I involved as an advisor with NodeSwap, a company with a broad vision building a new democratized financial future in this area.

They are equalizing the playing field further, being attractive to both large institutions and very small retail investors alike. Building a staking as a service exchange that will tokenize PoS coins and Masternodes. Allowing any retail investor, no matter their size, to build a portfolio of owned coin and MasterNode slots.

With a click. With less risk, with passive income in a more easily understood and approachable vehicle.

I’m quite partial to this project certainly, but honestly inspired by this greater idea of a different and better financial and ecologically sustainable future.

That in the replumbing of the transaction verification and consensus process on public blockchains, something truly better, for all is possibly coming on line.

This is a brand new direction obviously, with lots of players coming in and a future that is very much up for grabs.

But one that engenders loads of optimism.

We get to creatively experiment with a decentralized future. We get to power this financial future at close to zero energy cost. We get to build a crossover financial instrument at lesser risk with passive income returns that is usable by all people not just institutions or professional investors.

And just maybe (I’m betting on this), we get to democratize access to this stack of opportunity in a new way for more people, cross borders, and cross income divides.

The NFT.NYC event was a great opportunity to do a deep dive into how early developers are leveraging the characteristics of non-fungible tokens on the blockchain.

We were all in a common sandbox, trying stuff on, and getting feedback on our product and market assumptions.

I approached my panel on NFTs for Good, thinking in the language of philanthropy and charitable giving, talking about the learnings the team had gleamed from our experiences with the Honu the CryptoKitty charity auction.

I came away with a new perspective, understanding that my view was too narrow, and the philanthropic narrative not inclusive enough for the magnitude of the changes we were setting in motion.

When my friend and true industry maven Bill Tai spoke to me about active philanthropy and conservation, I was thinking more about how we can take the friction out of giving. From there creating a natural connection between things of great import and rarity, and communities that could become their supporting lifelines.

We would preserve things of indigenous value, coalesce around shared emotions, donate as a way to act on our beliefs, and create a cycle that is positive, preserving and self perpetuating.

It is that certainly, but much more.

In my chat at the event with the futurist John Clippinger, it became clear that I was not fully embracing the possibilities of what Bill was suggesting.

That the true magic of what NFTs bring is making a leap to an entirely new economy of impact. The idea of an ecological economy that is based on natural and human rhythms, created where the ethics and needs of people meet the values of a positive balance sheet.

A truly different, broad-based economic and social vision.

Where conservation is not the antidote to society’s excesses, rather a building block of how we design a different economic future without the negative ballast.

And in this instance, the broader the palate of thought, the greater the touch points where conservation, community and true markets come together. And likewise, the more it unleashes the creative possibilities of what we can accomplish.

Let me back up a bit.

I realize that the blockchain and NFTs are obscure ideas to many. But there is a way to think about them as tangible tools for game designers, behavioral marketers, conservationists, technologist and scientists working together to rethink responsible economics and new cultural norms. With a new language and narrative, not reactive, but fresh, tied to where we are going not as a response to where we have been.

In the simplest terms, NFTs are a wrapper that can instantiate tokens which hold the value of a thing, carrying programmable and dynamic metadata with it. Naturally imbued with emotive value by our connection with a real objects, like the inexplicable magnificence of endangered species, or a reborn coral reef, or the wonders of an ancient shipwreck that somehow can be surfaced to change our current world in a better way.

This enables us to create something quite different from how we might conceive of a cryptocurrency, subject to a slew of ineffable market forces, the mechanics of exchanges, and the flurries of speculation.

When we tokenize things of inherent value in the real world, we are in effect, memorializing them into a sharable, experiential form not in one market or exchange, but cross communities as the very definition of interoperability.

In effect, we are taking the essential components of a marketplace stack—provenance, liquidity, value, security and scarcity—and using them as a series of characteristics in our tool chest to memorialize something of inherent rarity in a dynamic, communal, and economizing way.

The other big ahaa for me coming away from the event, was that I was thinking mostly about living, endangered things from a philanthropic view, not realizing that NFTs can also wrap data, and agreements as contracts as well.

Our personal data on our cell phone as a token for example. Dynamic contracts with new power sources perhaps, that can support people, sustain a future environment, and create new value while the tide of sustainability rises with it.

Where scale enforces preservation, not challenges it.

Where as John Clippinger suggested to me, the data marketplace behind ideas like a Smart City could belong not to Google, but with NFTs, to each of us as individuals tied together at the intersection of our wrapped data like atomic pieces in a decentralized network.

This simple connecting power of an NFT can unlock the most profound impact, inspiring the potential for creative, intertwined, economic and ecological design.

This isn’t a collectibles market vision, but a much broader schema that will roll out in unforeseen ways that could change parts of our world order cross communities around common grounded beliefs.

To illustrate my own early thinking on this, take look at some of these innovative projects–Last of Ours in Bangkok, CryptoCorals in Paris, Po8 in the Bahamas, and Swytch here in the states.

They are all at a formative place, quite wonderful,  imaginative, unique, and illustrative in their own way of an impact economy made possible by a community of shared beliefs harnessing the power of the blockchain with the tokenizing utility of NFTs.

I am all in on this.

This is the good stuff of how technology can help us make the world a better place for everyone, forever.

I am as well considering taking this idea on the road, so if there are venues to speak at or projects I should know about, please ping me.

I’m interested in platforms for change that let us organize society in new ways for a greater good.

Sometimes this just happens, like impromptu communities popping up cross the web. Or belief systems that percolate for years, and then, seemingly overnight, become a new norm.

In my world of tech however, they are often conscious leverage points catapulting off of new capabilities or protocols, tools in the hands of the inspired that start something special.

Maybe this will be true for NFTs, an open standard on the blockchain that allows you to tokenize things, digital or not, in an immutable, secure, transferable way.

With the NFT.NYC event this week, there is much chatter on the topic.

Some are focused on NFTs as a new investable asset class. Some on our natural propensity to collect stuff, that is flattened and enlarged with market potential in the digital realm. Many on how with scarcity and immutableness you can reimagine art originating onchain, or re-plumb a host of things like incentive programs or registration processes.

I care about something different.

I’m interested in how NFTs can be a missing thread in letting us rethink environmental philanthropy and bring to market new ways of thinking at the intersection of conservation, charitable giving, gaming, community, and storytelling.

I’ve touched on a lot of this lately. In my post on the Honu the CryptoKitty charity auction. And my post on reimagining the black box of philanthropic giving.

There are four core pieces of the NFT puzzle that work as conceptual building blocks for me:

Mitigating offline/online friction

We’ve had paired real and virtual worlds for decades, and there is invariably inherent friction between the flow of offline valued things and online communities that support them. A difficult leap of suspended disbelief to overcome.

NFTs with their unique programmable capability to tokenize real things, be it a coral reef or a rare endangered animal, is a leap forward to possibly mollify the friction and make the transformation possible. And more natural.

This is a big deal for philanthropic, community and marketplace design.

Encapsulating real-world value in online tokens

When you create a digital asset, it is not inherently valuable because it is scarce, though its scarcity can hold the value of its possible uniqueness. That is the business model gotcha for online collectables.

With a real world connection, we bring innate visceral value, mirrored within a one-to-one correlation. One rare white Rhino, or one specific coral reef tokenized and naturally emotive with meaning even as a digital icon.

Unlike digital collectibles created online, the asset is not the NFT, it is what is behind it in the real world, along with built in market appreciation emotionally collateralized in a new way.

A meta matrix of real world consequence and importance tagged and shareable online.

Real-time, perpetual annuities of value

The broken work flow of philanthropy is that you labor to create awareness, gather a community then you raise funds one-on-one invariably with high net-worth individuals. The process of economizing support breaks, not congeals, the community.

The goal is to disassemble this black box.

To have a continuous annuity of support flowing back to the cause that perpetually re-ups itself as the flywheel of the model continues forward.

Metadata as the lifeblood of the system

The value of a token is anchored in the narrative of its real world value and uniqueness. That story is the sweep that fuels success in the online world.

But there is often metadata correspondent to the token.

For example, IoT devices showing a video timeline of the reseeding of a coral reef and its growth. Or trackers and cams documenting the life of a sentient thing itself, in effect, a proof point that the results of the economy are sustaining life and the environment.

This informs, reifies, authenticates and supports the narrative of the thing and the token both.

Much of this thinking comes from my learnings on the Honu the CryptoKitty charity experiment. We had success that heartened us most assuredly and overt shortcomings that isolated areas to be explored.

Where we need to start with, not end with the real world objects, staking value at its source where it touches us in our lives.

Where the narrative needs to highlight not just our pathos to the cause but new participatory ways of support and visibility to the impact of our contributions.

Where the data itself as a pulse of a life we are memorializing, reifies the process and can possibly be a creative source of new ways of engagement.

This is a waking dream surely, but one I embrace wholeheartedly as both necessary and inevitable.

A virtuous cycle where the rare and endangered, the wondrous and essential can find a pulse in scalable communities and new economies that take care of their own.

See you at the show if you are in town.

Note that I am on a panel called NFTs for Good: Creating a better world with Michael Casey, David Noble, and Nithin Eapen.

I just stepped out of my first infrared sauna session on a cold and rainy Winter Sunday in TriBeCa.

A bit light headed I’ll admit.

Considerably flushed as I moved from 45 minutes in the 160 degree dry sauna room, to a cool shower, then into the weather.

My interest in this as a wellness booster worth incorporating into my weekly regimen is seriously piqued.

This was really easy to fall for as there is a sauna backstory here.

Some 30+ years ago, my buddy Nevar and I, our families living off the grid in the Monashee Mountains in central British Columbia, built a log cabin sauna in a steep gorge by a mountain creek.

We would clomp down in the deep snow, cleaning the path for others to follow, stoke the wood fire till it was crazy hot, steam our bodies till pink, throwing water on hot rocks, then run outside, chop a hole in the ice on the creek, and jump in. A group of young, naked and screaming people in the middle of nowhere melting the snow under our feet.

That is honestly what I was thinking about today—that edge feeling—while I slipped into a meditative state in the intense, inside out heat of this sauna.

Cold plunge and screaming hordes aside of course, it was that state of mind that I got again, when my body was an all-inclusive platform for my mental state.

My blog community knows that I’m a health and wellness geek, obsessed with nutrition, exercise, and meditation. Open to whatever works to make me feel better, healthier and more productive.

Infrared dry saunas are something new-2-me, to look at in the experimental wellness category.

Saunas where you heat the air with fires or stones, warming your body from the outside in are timeless. Think of the steam-sauna scene from Ingmar Bergman’s Virgin Spring.

Infrared or FIRS (far-infrared-saunas) use infrared light (between visible light and radio waves on the electromagnetic spectrum) to create heat from the inside to the outside of your body.

This one was 160 degrees and while hot, was cooler and less abrasive than the wood heated, steam-infused saunas of my memory.

And obviously something that can exist in urban NY in a high-end gym, down the street from my place, where you can schedule online, and pop in and out.

Unlike Salt Caves which I blogged about last year, there is not a lot of historical studies on the benefits of saunas in general. And unlike Cryotherapy, there does not appear to be a pure physiological thread of what is actually occurring.

But beside my initial visceral reactions, there are some obvious ways to frame your thinking about this.

If you heat your body on a cellular level, your heart rate goes up, blood circulation increases, and you oxygenate your cells, muscles and joints. That is the general reality of what is happening.

And logically, with that, with circulation increasing and ton of sweat (trust me!), toxins are released.

There are a plethora of claims around the aerobic impact of this (I believe that from my increased heart rate), caloric burn, soreness lessening, arthritis pain softening, skin renewal, and just a better frame of mind while less tired and feeling more vital.

We shall see about this over time but it is an immensely satisfying and intense experience.

There is as well, a scientific string that ties infrared spectrum lighting (I recently purchased a Joovv unit btw) through the field of light science called photo-biomodulation to an impact on our mitochondrial health. I am prone to believe this, as the impact of mitochondrial health to our total health is not the question, just what impacts their communications channels and whether infrared is a trigger.

I’ll add some additional thoughts on this after I do a few more sessions over the next month or so.

In my opinion, 30-minute sessions are way enough (and less expensive as well). It is really hot, internal generated heat and quite intense.

I went to HigherDose studio at my local Equinox which was great—affordable, convenient and with the much needed locker room facility. High tech, private and easy to plug in your phone for music or podcasts.

I believe SaunaBar and SweatTheory are similar in LA.

Really fun and interesting experience.

I don’t honestly know that I’m glowing, but feel damn good with no reason to supplement this with another gym workout today.

If your heart is healthy and you are in shape, this is something to try.