In this episode, we're joined by Talisha Shine, an IT Professional and Certified Blockchain Consultant with over 20 years of experience in the information technology and software fields. Listen in as we cover the basics of blockchain technology and how blockchain is the foundation of everything from cryptocurrency to NFT's.
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EPISODE 034
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The Beginning Of Web 3.0
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Host - Monique Mills:
So welcome everyone to the Unpolished MBA, and today I have with me, Talisha Shine. She's an IT professional who advocates for blockchain technology and educates minorities on the opportunities that blockchain offers. Her and I have been connected on LinkedIn and really through social media for years now. Right Talisha?
Guest - Talisha Shine:
Yes ma'am.
Host - Monique Mills:
Well, it's a pleasure to have you today. I'm going to ask you the same two questions. I ask everybody else, which is, are you an entrepreneur or corporate employee?
Guest - Talisha Shine:
I am an "Intrapreneur," so I have a corporate job, but they understand that I have external pursuits. So I do both currently.
Host - Monique Mills:
I love it. MBA or no MBA?
Guest - Talisha Shine:
MBA.
Host - Monique Mills:
That's all right. I have to ask you though, you know we're the Unpolished MBA, and most people think that to be good in business, I think I'm not doing well because I don't have an MBA. I don't believe that to be true, but I always ask people, why did you decide to get your MBA?
Guest - Talisha Shine:
Truly it was the job that I was working at at the time. There were a lot of just awful things going on, you know, you're just like, I know I can fix this to do my job better. And again, as an IT person, I'm always looking for efficiency hacks. And so it was just like, I know there's something that can be fixed. I just don't know how to, and I need to get that information, and that's where the MBA came. And I literally took every use case from my own job to make sure that that was what I used for all of my theories and all, everything that I submitted during my MBA was directly from my corporate job at the time. And I would take that information back to my boss and his boss and be like, see, this is what we need to be doing. And they were like, yes, that's fine. But that was the interesting part about it, it was like, even when you had a solution, not everybody is receptive to a solution. They like what they like. And so, I moved on from that position, but that was really the catalyst for me to get the MBA.
Host - Monique Mills:
Wow. You know what, that, that sounds all too familiar with so many, uh, so many instances where when you're making recommendations or suggestions within a, you know, a corporate environment, if you don't have the education, they don't tend to respect it.
Guest - Talisha Shine:
And then when you get it, they don't do anything with it. I said, I, purposely, I mean, I made a conscious decision to be like, I'm going to school to fix these things. Do you have anything else you want me to discuss and find out? Like, it was just a very much I went in, and I'm going to school for us. And it really just turned out to be just something for me.
Host - Monique Mills:
Well, let me ask you this. Since I'm going to school for us was part of the conversation. Did they pay for it?
Guest - Talisha Shine:
They reimbursed me a little bit. Not a lot.
Host - Monique Mills:
Okay, nope, it's better than nothing.
Guest - Talisha Shine:
That's what I said. I'm like, yeah, you're giving me something for doing this, but yes, it wasn't the whole shebang, but I did get some compensation out of it.
Host - Monique Mills:
I have to give a round of applause for that because most companies want the benefits of you having the MBA, but then they don't want to pay for it. So, okay. Well, I can't be mad at them. I can't be mad at them. I do want to dive into what we really want to talk about right now, which is your expertise in blockchain and applications of it. So, as I mentioned to the audience, you're an IT professional, a longtime IT professional. Tell me a little bit about your career background leading up to this point.
Guest - Talisha Shine:
Then we got to go way back to the nineties, which for some people probably don't even like, when is that?
Host - Monique Mills:
Don't be telling all our business about the age and all of that.
Guest - Talisha Shine:
Okay. I liked being a gen X-er. I think that's one of my superpowers. I always say that superpower of being, knowing what wasn't and what is, and what could be. So that's how kind of I even approached my career. So I started again, just figuring out I was an engineering major, which you already know that. And while I enjoyed engineering, I just didn't find myself in it. I still didn't know what to do. And it was the early nineties when I graduated high school. So I just kind of fell into it. I was a math and science person, and then I stopped for a little bit because I just kind of got burned out.
And I knew that I wanted to go into the trajectory of kind of you know, tech, but I just, again, there wasn't, computer science wasn't available at that time. So I waited a little bit and went back to school and got a computer science degree. I started working in my field very much right after I graduated. And I always kind of found my way; you maneuver through it.
Just like I tell everybody else, your skillset will kind of lead you to what you're coming with, and what you learned kind of bolster together and leads you to wherever you need to be. And wherever I kind of kept coming into the space of being in between development teams and business teams, I would always sit there and be able to speak the tech that needed to be, but ask the right questions so that the business understood and gave me the information to provide to my technical team.
So that's where I've been kind of all the time either I'm actually hardcore coding or in between, and kind of pulling out the business requirements and the functional requirements from my business team, I got into the health tech arena, well, 12 years ago now, and that's just a true passion of mine combining healthcare and technology because I just feel like that's the area that needs to be most fixed as we have seen with this pandemic, that everything kind of fell apart, which we know is already teetering on being very broken. So at this point, that's where I spend a large portion of my time, but that's where blockchain came in, looking for again, a better solution, something that would be efficient. Give me all the things that I needed, and blockchain became that thing.
Host - Monique Mills:
So blockchain is one of those things that a lot of people don't understand. Um, and I'm not assuming that everyone is an engineer like us or even a technical person like us. You know, we have a very diverse audience. So would you mind explaining what blockchain is and in layperson's terms?
Guest - Talisha Shine:
Definitely, it is truly just a digital ledger, but I always like to make the analogy of its infrastructure. Think about the internet. You don't know all the ones and zeros and the HTML and all of that string, but you do know how to go to an application. You know how to go to google.com or facebook.com.
Those are applications of the information highway as it used to be called. And that's pretty much what blockchain is. It is truly the infrastructure that can give you applications such as cryptocurrency than NFTs, but all it is is a true ledger. It keeps all the things they're very much encrypted. It has some of the components that I think most people would think of as applications upon other applications, while some of this is embedded into the actual infrastructure.
So its operating system is heavily encoded it's immutable, meaning that you can't change it. Once you write to the blockchain, you can never make any modification to that record. It's very much distributed. Everybody gets a copy of it. It's not one central database where if I hack into it and I get everything, there's no way to do that in a blockchain kind of perspective.
And it's decentralized, meaning that it's not owned by any corporation. One person doesn't own it either. So that's the bang for the buck that you get with the infrastructure being so robust, and every time you build upon it, you get all of those perks and privileges.
Host - Monique Mills:
I love it. So one of the things that's everyone's talking about right now is cryptocurrency, and people tend to combine it all together, cryptocurrency, NFT, and blockchain; they don't know one from the other.
So you just explained blockchain. Now let's talk a little bit about it the relationship between blockchain and cryptocurrency. And then I want to go into the relationship between blockchain and cryptocurrency and NFTs because it all goes together.
Guest - Talisha Shine:
Yes, it does so again, we've laid the foundation of the blockchain is what it's on. So that's the base and the infrastructure. So from that base, you can do things from it, such as, you know, doing some algorithmic calculations to get coins. And that's what we call a mining process. And that's how you get cryptocurrency. And cryptocurrencies are very different in the sense that most people, again, want to say a coin and a token, very, you know, you can use them interchangeably, but really they are distinct. A coin is truly currency. We know that Fiat currency means that I can go and buy something at a store. I can exchange something with that currency.
A token is a little different. And I always like to say it's just like Chuck E. Cheese. You go to Chuck E. Cheese, you get Chuck E. Cheese tokens, which you can, you know, buy pizza, play games and win prizes and, you know, get yourself the little bracelets that everybody wants, but you can't take those tokens outside and go buy McDonald's.
Host - Monique Mills:
Right, right. I really wished that we could, though because-
Guest - Talisha Shine:
You got a whole lot of Chuck E. Cheese?
Host - Monique Mills:
So many tokens leftover!
Guest - Talisha Shine:
But what happens is that's the ecosystem, the building that Chuck E. Cheese in that whole thing is the ecosystem. And that token is good while you're there. But once you leave that environment, it's no longer viable, but Fiat currency will take quarters. quarters are good at McDonald's and at Chuck E. Cheese. Cause it's a currency. That makes the distinction between the two of them. Right?
Host - Monique Mills:
Tell it, Talisha.
Guest - Talisha Shine:
It's real simple stuff. It doesn't have to be complicated.
Host - Monique Mills:
So, right. So what I can tell from the way you described this number one is you will make a great professor. Um, I just have to tell you that, you know, I, I do adjunct work here in there in entrepreneurship, and this is so much fun, but I, I know that the students would love you just the way you described that. But secondly, you can also tell from your experience, you have mastered the art of explaining things to people who are not technical.
Guest - Talisha Shine:
Yes. I always say tech, for tech's sake, doesn't help anybody. Tech is really supplemental; it's supposed to help you do what you do better. And I would say it's just like Wi-Fi. You don't need to know how it works. You're just asking me for the password. Let me get the password, right? There's no sense of me beating you over the head about how things move, and the speed of light and sound like you don't care. You just want to be able to do something with it. And that thing is what I think is the best part about tech. It can be just the magic in the background.
Host - Monique Mills:
And it's definitely, it seems like magic. And especially with blockchain and cryptocurrency and it's, you know, people have more access to information than ever, but even with that, some people still are not aware of what it is or that it even exists right. And so, I'm very thankful for you taking the time to explain it to our audience. Now we're going to go a little bit deeper, and we're going to talk about NFTs. So what's the relationship between NFTs cryptocurrency and the blockchain?
Guest - Talisha Shine:
Okay. So again, we just defined kind of the difference between a token and a coin, and an NFT is a Non-Fungible Token, meaning that it's a unique digital asset. So as we go back to the comparison, one quarter is the same as any other quarter, right? Same thing.
Well, in a non-fungible, one token is exactly the only thing. It's very unique. There's one of one. And with that, that gives you something of leverage. And more importantly, it's really just an old use case of blockchain. It is to show authentication and ownership. That's what that token is supposed to represent. And it can represent a physical asset. And also a digital asset.
So we can go anywhere from a full picture, a portrait, a sculpture, even a house, or we notice something like an IP, you know, you developed your own website or your healthcare records. These are the kinds of scopes that we can see with regard to an NFT and why we would use it as again to show authenticity.
But the one thing most people don't ever talk about is that it's programmable. And NFTS are powered by smart contracts. That's another aspect of the blockchain where these smart contracts can actually do things. It's kind of, this there'll be a tech term if then that-
Host - Monique Mills:
Right---if this then that.
Guest - Talisha Shine:
Right, that's what really happens in these smart contracts, but they're able to do it at a much powerful rate and with a large information task kind of thing. And so with that, that programming ability, so not only do you get to have the thing, now I have a relationship with you that isn't just based on that single transaction. We can have a bilateral exchange over and over and over again. So when you think about it, it's like, yeah, I wanted to buy a ticket to my favorite artist, but now I want to know when they're in town or when they're about to release their next album, or if they're having, you know, a new Instagram. That NFT could be the ticket to all that communication and bilateral thing. Because once I hold that, now that person can send me all that information back and forth continuously.
Host - Monique Mills:
Now, in that example, can the holder---the initiator of the NFT, can they provide additional ones to other people that are, I guess they would still be unique to other people?
Guest - Talisha Shine:
Yes, because there is still no one on one and you can make them. And I think that's what people are like, well, if you send me a copy, this is not a JPEG. It has some metadata that's attached to it or just data in general. That makes it very unique.
So yes, we sold 20 tickets, but your ticket gives you different access because it's yours. Whereas my ticket gives me something else. That's where the unique part comes in. And it has that ability to be maneuverable and programmable at that level as well because it's between you and me.
Host - Monique Mills:
And with NFTs are they bought and sold using cryptocurrency or regular currency like we do now?
Guest - Talisha Shine:
Yeah, both. So you can use Fiat currency, you can use MasterCard and Visa to buy them, or you can actually buy them with cryptocurrency as well.
Host - Monique Mills:
And are all NFTs on a blockchain?
Guest - Talisha Shine:
Yes.
Host - Monique Mills:
See y'all. You see how easy.
Guest - Talisha Shine:
I would say true NFTs because we are always into faking things, but again, NFTs have the ability to be a token, it has to come from a blockchain and that's from a consensus protocol, meaning how you get it from that, that source. So sometimes we mine it, which means we are solving an algorithm to get that or proof of stake, which just means that we kind of creates a paradigm that works with it and then that's how we give you that information and generate that token.
Host - Monique Mills:
So in order to get access to these NFTs and different opportunities that are on a blockchain, you have to register on a platform?
Guest - Talisha Shine:
Correct. You have to go to a registered platform that has them. That's the one thing. So if you know what NFT you want and not every platform will have it and you have to go there and register, and some of them require you to have a wallet or again, you can just put in your credit card number and you can buy it, but you, again, to store it, that's where they said you can buy it. But then where do you put it? You still need a digital wallet in order to be able to capitalize upon your NFT and show that it's yours.
Host - Monique Mills:
So I just wanted to say to everyone, we kind of flowed through this conversation. Feel free to back up, rewind it, listen to it again, match it up against some reading you may do on your own or YouTube videos. But I really wanted to point out how this conversation kind of flowed for us, because I knew what questions to ask. And when you're new to something, you may not know what questions to ask. And so it's good to have a basis. Right. Just a little bit of basis before having a conversation.
But if not, as you can see someone like Talisha has such a strong sense of explaining things so that the non-technical person can understand them. So I know that you're involved in several educational initiatives and things to help different communities understand this growing web 3.0 right? That's basically what is.
Guest - Talisha Shine:
Yes.
Host - Monique Mills:
To understand and learn it more. You want to share a little bit more about your work in that realm?
Guest - Talisha Shine:
Sure. And I love that you brought up web 3.0, because everybody's like, what is that?
What does that actually mean? And if we kind of look back over the time of where we started from the internet from a very, very early age. And I was there when you had to use it, you know, the alphanumeric.
Host - Monique Mills:
Stop telling the business.
Guest - Talisha Shine:
Girl, I like it. I'm proud. I'm happy. Cause I'm like, we are never going back there. Punch cards? No, thank you. And then we got domain names like this is where, you know, and I think that insight again is why, this particular time is very great for us. And the sense of, as like I said, we can maneuver cause we knew what was and what could be. And we remember when it wasn't that. so web 1.0, was truly just what I would consider read-only. most people have read-only access. You can't do anything, but you can access it. And that was really the digitization of things. We digitize the phone book, we digitize menus. We digitized the movie, you know, That was all that, that was, it was just information in a new place.
And then we got to web 2.0. Which allowed us to have read and write access. So at that point, we could read it. You can go to Facebook and type your opinion. You could do different things, but the latter portion of the web 2.0 was the e-commerce part. We could start to buy things. And that made us real strong consumers in a different way. And as we transition from web two to web three, we have all that capability. We have the read and write and we have consumerism, but now we have ownership. And that changes the game, your attention. Yeah. I mean that that's the blow-up of the whole game because now everything you do within the space can be monetized. From your attention, how long you stay there, how many articles you read to your comment to things that you just want to put up there? I want to show you a picture, but this is how I'm going to do it. And all of this now changes the scope of what we're doing.
And again, that's why I think people are like, oh, this is too tech, or I don't know where I fit. You're going to do the exact same thing that you always do, but now you have to think about it. What's in it for me. Think of yourself as a business. You're now transacting everywhere you go. You are doing a business transaction because you're giving them something and they have to now in kind give you something different. Right.
So that's where I kind of always thought about this when we created the black blockchain consultants, which is the educational platform that we created back in 2017. That was our mission, really, to tell people, you know, not to give them tech information, but really show them how they fit into this new space. Either reskilling, themselves, learning, just something new, pulling their information that they have from their corporate jobs or all the experiences they have. And now applying. And again, just being conscientious consumers, because that's exactly what you'll still be doing. You'll still be participating, but now with a different intent
Host - Monique Mills:
And it removes the middleman, right. Because before I needed this book in order to, you know, to sell something or, you know, or I needed Amazon, whatever it is. Right? So we, we always had this middleman, but with the web 3.0, we don't need that middleman.
Guest - Talisha Shine:
Blockchain is a peer to peer network. It's meant to take out the intermediaries---to get those out of there and just let it be. We have decided you want to sell me your house. Cool. Let's do it.
Host - Monique Mills:
Let's do it.
Guest - Talisha Shine:
That's all right. We could do that. That's right there. I have the NFT. That's the contract. I get the deed. Boom, we are done. And it's written and it's readable and everybody can see it. It's not like we did something, you know, shady or in some secret room. If I go to that blockchain browser, I could see, yep. We made a transaction. There it is. And it's going to be there forever. That is game-changing, especially for an industry like real estate, where.
You know, once you put a contract on a house it's title search, you have to pay for title insurance to make sure that, oh, this someone comes back later and say, no, I actually own that property. You don't own it. You know, you have title insurance, that'll pay, you know, that lawsuit or whatever that person off, like all of that stuff, goes away. Correct. All of it.
And what happens also now you have another layer, which is now you can tokenize the property itself. Like if I say, okay, we're going to split it. How do we split a house? That's very difficult, but if we tokenize it, I can take the value from that NFT and I can leverage it somewhere else.
So maybe I do want to buy something else. And the NFT is the way I do it. Whereas before, when you can't break a physical asset like that, you can't break it down into these little mini pieces with tokenization, you can. And you can leverage it in different ways. Again, this is going back to the monetization piece. What part of it do you want to monetize? Do you want to hold on to it? Do you want to sell it or do you want to leverage it for defy or collateral? Whatever you want. Those are the kind of possibilities that web three gives us that is just not possible right now.
Host - Monique Mills:
So for those of you who don't know what DeFi is, decentralized finance. And so do you want to explain that just real quick?
Guest - Talisha Shine:
Sure that again is the tokenomics piece of how we are moving through this space. So DeFi allows you to stake, which means just kind of participate in the blockchain and while it accumulates those coins, you're, you're there as the base you're acting as the bank yourself. So you're storing the token or the coin there, and you get a residual, so you get interest in dividends and all that kind of stuff. And just in the other aspect, too, you have the maneuverability, your coin can be different things in different places. So when you're looking at this space, it's like, yes, I want it to be here, but maybe I want to leverage the coin. Like you have Bitcoin, but you're like, yeah, I'm not going to, you know, sell it at this point, but I still want to maintain it. Well, then you can stake it in different places in order to gain interest on it. So it acts very similarly to our finance system. Now it just is much more robust and much more flexible.
Host - Monique Mills:
And they are afraid of it, I'm telling you right now they are afraid.
Guest - Talisha Shine:
If you lose it. I don't need you anymore. It's between me and the other person. Then that becomes---I always say that parent-child relationship, you don't need me anymore. It's like, yeah, I don't need you. Thank you though.
Host - Monique Mills:
There you go. I just came back from the big financial conference called Money 2020 last month. And let me tell you the banks, they're shaking in their boots. They try to act like they're playing it cool, but they're peeking around sniffing around to see, "Hey, what is this? What is this doing?"
Guest - Talisha Shine:
They have been all in, and this is why being in this space for so long, you've got to watch. You know, I watched JP Morgan Chase and they say, "Oh, it's a fad. It's horrible." While they were building their own blockchain and then buying millions and millions of dollars of Bitcoin in the bathroom. So that's, what's happening is there's a race going on trying to figure it out.
But this is hard because it moves at a breakneck pace and that slowness is truly an inhibitor because we have other nations, specifically third world countries. I would say everybody besides the United States moving much quicker because they don't have that bureaucracy around certain things.
And this is a test and learn kind of thing, just like in any tech, you have to really test it to break it and see what happens. And we just don't do that very well here. Whereas other countries are much more agile with that. And so they're seeing large aspects of, you know, let, let's see how this works or maybe we do create a token or maybe we do just digitize our, our Fiat currency. So they're moving in all different areas and doing many, many use cases simultaneously trying to find the best fit while we're still trying to figure out if we are going to do it.
Host - Monique Mills:
We're going to do it. I tend to think that that's a result of us being too comfortable. Like if things are working just fine for the people at the top, like, Hey, things are fine. Why do we need to shake things up? Where in other countries there's hunger to win and make the nation better--the circumstances for the people better and there's a sense of urgency there.
We're here. We're comfortable. So it's like, okay. Yeah, we'll look into that later. But right now, you know, I have this over here going on.
Guest - Talisha Shine:
It's too hard to ignore. I think that's the only problem or this, it is not a fad. It's not just a trendy little thing that's happening. It is here and it's going to continue to grow.
Host - Monique Mills:
Yeah, it's just like the internet did. So, you know, I want you to tell me about this new initiative you're working on with Correlate Health, the new initiative that I know that you got going on. So you might share a little bit about that.
Guest - Talisha Shine:
All my passions rolled into one. So we have healthcare, health, tech it and blockchain and NFTs. So we have it all in one fell swoop. And this is a platform that truly is allowing individuals to leverage their medical data. The cures act, which was just, you know, kind of finalized and put into legislation really does give us the ability to now have control of our medical records, at least access them before you had to go to your doctor. And he said, okay. And maybe you get them six weeks later and whole fax of some sort. But now with that piece of legislation, we are entitled to them in real-time. And with that. There are other aspects to it.
And then not only just monetization but just for your own personal records of yourself, you know, you may be living in different places. You may have disparate records and we do now have different care facilities, but you want a collective health record. You want to be able to say, yeah, I don't want to fill this form out over and over again. Every time I go see the specialist or just my regular PCP, this gives you the ability to do that within a space. And give you an NFT to be able to, again, now maneuver through. So you don't have to just give somebody your, all of your medical records. You can give them a part of your medical records and you can also send it because the NFT is that bilateral exchange. I can give it to you for a set amount of time.
Host - Monique Mills:
Love it.
Guest - Talisha Shine:
Right. You don't have to have that whole like you have my record indefinitely or for seven years, HIPAA compliance. Now I can say, this is the information you need. To help me with this episode of care and you have it for 48, 72 hours to make that decision. And thank you. And we move along.
Host - Monique Mills:
That is awesome. You know, um, I was just talking about this weekend, which is this crazy. I know it was supposed to be on vacation and I'm talking about applications of blockchain with buying and selling your own data. And, you know, right now, Let's say you have an Apple watch or you have a Samsung watch and it's just, you know, they have access to your data, but if you allow someone else if you wanted to share that data and put it somewhere, then this is the proper environment to do something like that.
Guest - Talisha Shine:
Correct, because you do want transparency. You want to be able to say, who has my record? What are they doing with it? And for how long that is the part where you've been again, unfortunately, the web 2.0, just made us check the box and just to give it, just give me access it, just check the box. If you want in now that was the gatekeeper and we had to remove that, but we are now kind of in that habitualness of just checking the box and giving everything away for free. Yeah, we have to roll that back and be like, okay, what's in it for me.
Host - Monique Mills:
Exactly.
Guest - Talisha Shine:
What part do you need now? You get to have a conversation before I'm just being told, given me everything to get into the, you know, into the space.
Host - Monique Mills:
So what's your role in Correlate Health? Are you a co-founder? CTO, something like that.
Guest - Talisha Shine:
Yes, I am not the co-founder. I am the Chief Information Officer for them.
Host - Monique Mills:
Oh, that is fantastic.
Guest - Talisha Shine:
Yes. We just kind of rolled it out. I was an advisor early on and just love the project so much. And this is where you find just things that you're really passionate about. And there are so many things out there. So I always tell people there's enough for everybody. Just find where you fit and just dive in.
Host - Monique Mills:
Are they raising money now? Like what stage is the company and do they have the product ready?
Guest - Talisha Shine:
Yeah, we are in the, in a raise. So if you could go to net capital, you'll see correlated health there. And we are going to hopefully close this round out at the end of next month, which is starts tomorrow. So a few more days left, but we are just looking to finalize. Cause again, there we're creating a marketplace. So that is obviously the tech, you know, tech-heavy in that space. But other than that, that's what we're moving on. And we're looking to release some of that. Kind of modulation going on with certain things, because this is also for clinical trials.
Again, COVID has really shown the lack of data and the mismanagement of data all at the same time. And from our standpoint, specifically, our community, knowing that we have hesitancy about giving information and even going to doctors having a place that would really take care of the data, make us feel secure and also give us the compensatory aspect of using our data is something that we were really passionate about and to ensure that we could do that.
And this is where we've kind of merged that clinical trial people who are looking for clinical trials, specifically looking for very, you know, participants that have certain markers and whatnot, and combining those two and bringing them together in a very safe environment and allowing. To get the information they need to ultimately do what they need to do.
Host - Monique Mills:
Wow. Incredible. Well, Talisha, we're going to wrap up this episode and I want to thank you so much for sharing all of your expertise and knowledge with the Unpolished MBA podcast.
Guest - Talisha Shine:
Well thank you very much for having me.
Host - Monique Mills:
You’re welcome.
So welcome everyone to the Unpolished MBA, and today I have with me, Talisha Shine. She's an IT professional who advocates for blockchain technology and educates minorities on the opportunities that blockchain offers. Her and I have been connected on LinkedIn and really through social media for years now. Right Talisha?
Guest - Talisha Shine:
Yes ma'am.
Host - Monique Mills:
Well, it's a pleasure to have you today. I'm going to ask you the same two questions. I ask everybody else, which is, are you an entrepreneur or corporate employee?
Guest - Talisha Shine:
I am an "Intrapreneur," so I have a corporate job, but they understand that I have external pursuits. So I do both currently.
Host - Monique Mills:
I love it. MBA or no MBA?
Guest - Talisha Shine:
MBA.
Host - Monique Mills:
That's all right. I have to ask you though, you know we're the Unpolished MBA, and most people think that to be good in business, I think I'm not doing well because I don't have an MBA. I don't believe that to be true, but I always ask people, why did you decide to get your MBA?
Guest - Talisha Shine:
Truly it was the job that I was working at at the time. There were a lot of just awful things going on, you know, you're just like, I know I can fix this to do my job better. And again, as an IT person, I'm always looking for efficiency hacks. And so it was just like, I know there's something that can be fixed. I just don't know how to, and I need to get that information, and that's where the MBA came. And I literally took every use case from my own job to make sure that that was what I used for all of my theories and all, everything that I submitted during my MBA was directly from my corporate job at the time. And I would take that information back to my boss and his boss and be like, see, this is what we need to be doing. And they were like, yes, that's fine. But that was the interesting part about it, it was like, even when you had a solution, not everybody is receptive to a solution. They like what they like. And so, I moved on from that position, but that was really the catalyst for me to get the MBA.
Host - Monique Mills:
Wow. You know what, that, that sounds all too familiar with so many, uh, so many instances where when you're making recommendations or suggestions within a, you know, a corporate environment, if you don't have the education, they don't tend to respect it.
Guest - Talisha Shine:
And then when you get it, they don't do anything with it. I said, I, purposely, I mean, I made a conscious decision to be like, I'm going to school to fix these things. Do you have anything else you want me to discuss and find out? Like, it was just a very much I went in, and I'm going to school for us. And it really just turned out to be just something for me.
Host - Monique Mills:
Well, let me ask you this. Since I'm going to school for us was part of the conversation. Did they pay for it?
Guest - Talisha Shine:
They reimbursed me a little bit. Not a lot.
Host - Monique Mills:
Okay, nope, it's better than nothing.
Guest - Talisha Shine:
That's what I said. I'm like, yeah, you're giving me something for doing this, but yes, it wasn't the whole shebang, but I did get some compensation out of it.
Host - Monique Mills:
I have to give a round of applause for that because most companies want the benefits of you having the MBA, but then they don't want to pay for it. So, okay. Well, I can't be mad at them. I can't be mad at them. I do want to dive into what we really want to talk about right now, which is your expertise in blockchain and applications of it. So, as I mentioned to the audience, you're an IT professional, a longtime IT professional. Tell me a little bit about your career background leading up to this point.
Guest - Talisha Shine:
Then we got to go way back to the nineties, which for some people probably don't even like, when is that?
Host - Monique Mills:
Don't be telling all our business about the age and all of that.
Guest - Talisha Shine:
Okay. I liked being a gen X-er. I think that's one of my superpowers. I always say that superpower of being, knowing what wasn't and what is, and what could be. So that's how kind of I even approached my career. So I started again, just figuring out I was an engineering major, which you already know that. And while I enjoyed engineering, I just didn't find myself in it. I still didn't know what to do. And it was the early nineties when I graduated high school. So I just kind of fell into it. I was a math and science person, and then I stopped for a little bit because I just kind of got burned out.
And I knew that I wanted to go into the trajectory of kind of you know, tech, but I just, again, there wasn't, computer science wasn't available at that time. So I waited a little bit and went back to school and got a computer science degree. I started working in my field very much right after I graduated. And I always kind of found my way; you maneuver through it.
Just like I tell everybody else, your skillset will kind of lead you to what you're coming with, and what you learned kind of bolster together and leads you to wherever you need to be. And wherever I kind of kept coming into the space of being in between development teams and business teams, I would always sit there and be able to speak the tech that needed to be, but ask the right questions so that the business understood and gave me the information to provide to my technical team.
So that's where I've been kind of all the time either I'm actually hardcore coding or in between, and kind of pulling out the business requirements and the functional requirements from my business team, I got into the health tech arena, well, 12 years ago now, and that's just a true passion of mine combining healthcare and technology because I just feel like that's the area that needs to be most fixed as we have seen with this pandemic, that everything kind of fell apart, which we know is already teetering on being very broken. So at this point, that's where I spend a large portion of my time, but that's where blockchain came in, looking for again, a better solution, something that would be efficient. Give me all the things that I needed, and blockchain became that thing.
Host - Monique Mills:
So blockchain is one of those things that a lot of people don't understand. Um, and I'm not assuming that everyone is an engineer like us or even a technical person like us. You know, we have a very diverse audience. So would you mind explaining what blockchain is and in layperson's terms?
Guest - Talisha Shine:
Definitely, it is truly just a digital ledger, but I always like to make the analogy of its infrastructure. Think about the internet. You don't know all the ones and zeros and the HTML and all of that string, but you do know how to go to an application. You know how to go to google.com or facebook.com.
Those are applications of the information highway as it used to be called. And that's pretty much what blockchain is. It is truly the infrastructure that can give you applications such as cryptocurrency than NFTs, but all it is is a true ledger. It keeps all the things they're very much encrypted. It has some of the components that I think most people would think of as applications upon other applications, while some of this is embedded into the actual infrastructure.
So its operating system is heavily encoded it's immutable, meaning that you can't change it. Once you write to the blockchain, you can never make any modification to that record. It's very much distributed. Everybody gets a copy of it. It's not one central database where if I hack into it and I get everything, there's no way to do that in a blockchain kind of perspective.
And it's decentralized, meaning that it's not owned by any corporation. One person doesn't own it either. So that's the bang for the buck that you get with the infrastructure being so robust, and every time you build upon it, you get all of those perks and privileges.
Host - Monique Mills:
I love it. So one of the things that's everyone's talking about right now is cryptocurrency, and people tend to combine it all together, cryptocurrency, NFT, and blockchain; they don't know one from the other.
So you just explained blockchain. Now let's talk a little bit about it the relationship between blockchain and cryptocurrency. And then I want to go into the relationship between blockchain and cryptocurrency and NFTs because it all goes together.
Guest - Talisha Shine:
Yes, it does so again, we've laid the foundation of the blockchain is what it's on. So that's the base and the infrastructure. So from that base, you can do things from it, such as, you know, doing some algorithmic calculations to get coins. And that's what we call a mining process. And that's how you get cryptocurrency. And cryptocurrencies are very different in the sense that most people, again, want to say a coin and a token, very, you know, you can use them interchangeably, but really they are distinct. A coin is truly currency. We know that Fiat currency means that I can go and buy something at a store. I can exchange something with that currency.
A token is a little different. And I always like to say it's just like Chuck E. Cheese. You go to Chuck E. Cheese, you get Chuck E. Cheese tokens, which you can, you know, buy pizza, play games and win prizes and, you know, get yourself the little bracelets that everybody wants, but you can't take those tokens outside and go buy McDonald's.
Host - Monique Mills:
Right, right. I really wished that we could, though because-
Guest - Talisha Shine:
You got a whole lot of Chuck E. Cheese?
Host - Monique Mills:
So many tokens leftover!
Guest - Talisha Shine:
But what happens is that's the ecosystem, the building that Chuck E. Cheese in that whole thing is the ecosystem. And that token is good while you're there. But once you leave that environment, it's no longer viable, but Fiat currency will take quarters. quarters are good at McDonald's and at Chuck E. Cheese. Cause it's a currency. That makes the distinction between the two of them. Right?
Host - Monique Mills:
Tell it, Talisha.
Guest - Talisha Shine:
It's real simple stuff. It doesn't have to be complicated.
Host - Monique Mills:
So, right. So what I can tell from the way you described this number one is you will make a great professor. Um, I just have to tell you that, you know, I, I do adjunct work here in there in entrepreneurship, and this is so much fun, but I, I know that the students would love you just the way you described that. But secondly, you can also tell from your experience, you have mastered the art of explaining things to people who are not technical.
Guest - Talisha Shine:
Yes. I always say tech, for tech's sake, doesn't help anybody. Tech is really supplemental; it's supposed to help you do what you do better. And I would say it's just like Wi-Fi. You don't need to know how it works. You're just asking me for the password. Let me get the password, right? There's no sense of me beating you over the head about how things move, and the speed of light and sound like you don't care. You just want to be able to do something with it. And that thing is what I think is the best part about tech. It can be just the magic in the background.
Host - Monique Mills:
And it's definitely, it seems like magic. And especially with blockchain and cryptocurrency and it's, you know, people have more access to information than ever, but even with that, some people still are not aware of what it is or that it even exists right. And so, I'm very thankful for you taking the time to explain it to our audience. Now we're going to go a little bit deeper, and we're going to talk about NFTs. So what's the relationship between NFTs cryptocurrency and the blockchain?
Guest - Talisha Shine:
Okay. So again, we just defined kind of the difference between a token and a coin, and an NFT is a Non-Fungible Token, meaning that it's a unique digital asset. So as we go back to the comparison, one quarter is the same as any other quarter, right? Same thing.
Well, in a non-fungible, one token is exactly the only thing. It's very unique. There's one of one. And with that, that gives you something of leverage. And more importantly, it's really just an old use case of blockchain. It is to show authentication and ownership. That's what that token is supposed to represent. And it can represent a physical asset. And also a digital asset.
So we can go anywhere from a full picture, a portrait, a sculpture, even a house, or we notice something like an IP, you know, you developed your own website or your healthcare records. These are the kinds of scopes that we can see with regard to an NFT and why we would use it as again to show authenticity.
But the one thing most people don't ever talk about is that it's programmable. And NFTS are powered by smart contracts. That's another aspect of the blockchain where these smart contracts can actually do things. It's kind of, this there'll be a tech term if then that-
Host - Monique Mills:
Right---if this then that.
Guest - Talisha Shine:
Right, that's what really happens in these smart contracts, but they're able to do it at a much powerful rate and with a large information task kind of thing. And so with that, that programming ability, so not only do you get to have the thing, now I have a relationship with you that isn't just based on that single transaction. We can have a bilateral exchange over and over and over again. So when you think about it, it's like, yeah, I wanted to buy a ticket to my favorite artist, but now I want to know when they're in town or when they're about to release their next album, or if they're having, you know, a new Instagram. That NFT could be the ticket to all that communication and bilateral thing. Because once I hold that, now that person can send me all that information back and forth continuously.
Host - Monique Mills:
Now, in that example, can the holder---the initiator of the NFT, can they provide additional ones to other people that are, I guess they would still be unique to other people?
Guest - Talisha Shine:
Yes, because there is still no one on one and you can make them. And I think that's what people are like, well, if you send me a copy, this is not a JPEG. It has some metadata that's attached to it or just data in general. That makes it very unique.
So yes, we sold 20 tickets, but your ticket gives you different access because it's yours. Whereas my ticket gives me something else. That's where the unique part comes in. And it has that ability to be maneuverable and programmable at that level as well because it's between you and me.
Host - Monique Mills:
And with NFTs are they bought and sold using cryptocurrency or regular currency like we do now?
Guest - Talisha Shine:
Yeah, both. So you can use Fiat currency, you can use MasterCard and Visa to buy them, or you can actually buy them with cryptocurrency as well.
Host - Monique Mills:
And are all NFTs on a blockchain?
Guest - Talisha Shine:
Yes.
Host - Monique Mills:
See y'all. You see how easy.
Guest - Talisha Shine:
I would say true NFTs because we are always into faking things, but again, NFTs have the ability to be a token, it has to come from a blockchain and that's from a consensus protocol, meaning how you get it from that, that source. So sometimes we mine it, which means we are solving an algorithm to get that or proof of stake, which just means that we kind of creates a paradigm that works with it and then that's how we give you that information and generate that token.
Host - Monique Mills:
So in order to get access to these NFTs and different opportunities that are on a blockchain, you have to register on a platform?
Guest - Talisha Shine:
Correct. You have to go to a registered platform that has them. That's the one thing. So if you know what NFT you want and not every platform will have it and you have to go there and register, and some of them require you to have a wallet or again, you can just put in your credit card number and you can buy it, but you, again, to store it, that's where they said you can buy it. But then where do you put it? You still need a digital wallet in order to be able to capitalize upon your NFT and show that it's yours.
Host - Monique Mills:
So I just wanted to say to everyone, we kind of flowed through this conversation. Feel free to back up, rewind it, listen to it again, match it up against some reading you may do on your own or YouTube videos. But I really wanted to point out how this conversation kind of flowed for us, because I knew what questions to ask. And when you're new to something, you may not know what questions to ask. And so it's good to have a basis. Right. Just a little bit of basis before having a conversation.
But if not, as you can see someone like Talisha has such a strong sense of explaining things so that the non-technical person can understand them. So I know that you're involved in several educational initiatives and things to help different communities understand this growing web 3.0 right? That's basically what is.
Guest - Talisha Shine:
Yes.
Host - Monique Mills:
To understand and learn it more. You want to share a little bit more about your work in that realm?
Guest - Talisha Shine:
Sure. And I love that you brought up web 3.0, because everybody's like, what is that?
What does that actually mean? And if we kind of look back over the time of where we started from the internet from a very, very early age. And I was there when you had to use it, you know, the alphanumeric.
Host - Monique Mills:
Stop telling the business.
Guest - Talisha Shine:
Girl, I like it. I'm proud. I'm happy. Cause I'm like, we are never going back there. Punch cards? No, thank you. And then we got domain names like this is where, you know, and I think that insight again is why, this particular time is very great for us. And the sense of, as like I said, we can maneuver cause we knew what was and what could be. And we remember when it wasn't that. so web 1.0, was truly just what I would consider read-only. most people have read-only access. You can't do anything, but you can access it. And that was really the digitization of things. We digitize the phone book, we digitize menus. We digitized the movie, you know, That was all that, that was, it was just information in a new place.
And then we got to web 2.0. Which allowed us to have read and write access. So at that point, we could read it. You can go to Facebook and type your opinion. You could do different things, but the latter portion of the web 2.0 was the e-commerce part. We could start to buy things. And that made us real strong consumers in a different way. And as we transition from web two to web three, we have all that capability. We have the read and write and we have consumerism, but now we have ownership. And that changes the game, your attention. Yeah. I mean that that's the blow-up of the whole game because now everything you do within the space can be monetized. From your attention, how long you stay there, how many articles you read to your comment to things that you just want to put up there? I want to show you a picture, but this is how I'm going to do it. And all of this now changes the scope of what we're doing.
And again, that's why I think people are like, oh, this is too tech, or I don't know where I fit. You're going to do the exact same thing that you always do, but now you have to think about it. What's in it for me. Think of yourself as a business. You're now transacting everywhere you go. You are doing a business transaction because you're giving them something and they have to now in kind give you something different. Right.
So that's where I kind of always thought about this when we created the black blockchain consultants, which is the educational platform that we created back in 2017. That was our mission, really, to tell people, you know, not to give them tech information, but really show them how they fit into this new space. Either reskilling, themselves, learning, just something new, pulling their information that they have from their corporate jobs or all the experiences they have. And now applying. And again, just being conscientious consumers, because that's exactly what you'll still be doing. You'll still be participating, but now with a different intent
Host - Monique Mills:
And it removes the middleman, right. Because before I needed this book in order to, you know, to sell something or, you know, or I needed Amazon, whatever it is. Right? So we, we always had this middleman, but with the web 3.0, we don't need that middleman.
Guest - Talisha Shine:
Blockchain is a peer to peer network. It's meant to take out the intermediaries---to get those out of there and just let it be. We have decided you want to sell me your house. Cool. Let's do it.
Host - Monique Mills:
Let's do it.
Guest - Talisha Shine:
That's all right. We could do that. That's right there. I have the NFT. That's the contract. I get the deed. Boom, we are done. And it's written and it's readable and everybody can see it. It's not like we did something, you know, shady or in some secret room. If I go to that blockchain browser, I could see, yep. We made a transaction. There it is. And it's going to be there forever. That is game-changing, especially for an industry like real estate, where.
You know, once you put a contract on a house it's title search, you have to pay for title insurance to make sure that, oh, this someone comes back later and say, no, I actually own that property. You don't own it. You know, you have title insurance, that'll pay, you know, that lawsuit or whatever that person off, like all of that stuff, goes away. Correct. All of it.
And what happens also now you have another layer, which is now you can tokenize the property itself. Like if I say, okay, we're going to split it. How do we split a house? That's very difficult, but if we tokenize it, I can take the value from that NFT and I can leverage it somewhere else.
So maybe I do want to buy something else. And the NFT is the way I do it. Whereas before, when you can't break a physical asset like that, you can't break it down into these little mini pieces with tokenization, you can. And you can leverage it in different ways. Again, this is going back to the monetization piece. What part of it do you want to monetize? Do you want to hold on to it? Do you want to sell it or do you want to leverage it for defy or collateral? Whatever you want. Those are the kind of possibilities that web three gives us that is just not possible right now.
Host - Monique Mills:
So for those of you who don't know what DeFi is, decentralized finance. And so do you want to explain that just real quick?
Guest - Talisha Shine:
Sure that again is the tokenomics piece of how we are moving through this space. So DeFi allows you to stake, which means just kind of participate in the blockchain and while it accumulates those coins, you're, you're there as the base you're acting as the bank yourself. So you're storing the token or the coin there, and you get a residual, so you get interest in dividends and all that kind of stuff. And just in the other aspect, too, you have the maneuverability, your coin can be different things in different places. So when you're looking at this space, it's like, yes, I want it to be here, but maybe I want to leverage the coin. Like you have Bitcoin, but you're like, yeah, I'm not going to, you know, sell it at this point, but I still want to maintain it. Well, then you can stake it in different places in order to gain interest on it. So it acts very similarly to our finance system. Now it just is much more robust and much more flexible.
Host - Monique Mills:
And they are afraid of it, I'm telling you right now they are afraid.
Guest - Talisha Shine:
If you lose it. I don't need you anymore. It's between me and the other person. Then that becomes---I always say that parent-child relationship, you don't need me anymore. It's like, yeah, I don't need you. Thank you though.
Host - Monique Mills:
There you go. I just came back from the big financial conference called Money 2020 last month. And let me tell you the banks, they're shaking in their boots. They try to act like they're playing it cool, but they're peeking around sniffing around to see, "Hey, what is this? What is this doing?"
Guest - Talisha Shine:
They have been all in, and this is why being in this space for so long, you've got to watch. You know, I watched JP Morgan Chase and they say, "Oh, it's a fad. It's horrible." While they were building their own blockchain and then buying millions and millions of dollars of Bitcoin in the bathroom. So that's, what's happening is there's a race going on trying to figure it out.
But this is hard because it moves at a breakneck pace and that slowness is truly an inhibitor because we have other nations, specifically third world countries. I would say everybody besides the United States moving much quicker because they don't have that bureaucracy around certain things.
And this is a test and learn kind of thing, just like in any tech, you have to really test it to break it and see what happens. And we just don't do that very well here. Whereas other countries are much more agile with that. And so they're seeing large aspects of, you know, let, let's see how this works or maybe we do create a token or maybe we do just digitize our, our Fiat currency. So they're moving in all different areas and doing many, many use cases simultaneously trying to find the best fit while we're still trying to figure out if we are going to do it.
Host - Monique Mills:
We're going to do it. I tend to think that that's a result of us being too comfortable. Like if things are working just fine for the people at the top, like, Hey, things are fine. Why do we need to shake things up? Where in other countries there's hunger to win and make the nation better--the circumstances for the people better and there's a sense of urgency there.
We're here. We're comfortable. So it's like, okay. Yeah, we'll look into that later. But right now, you know, I have this over here going on.
Guest - Talisha Shine:
It's too hard to ignore. I think that's the only problem or this, it is not a fad. It's not just a trendy little thing that's happening. It is here and it's going to continue to grow.
Host - Monique Mills:
Yeah, it's just like the internet did. So, you know, I want you to tell me about this new initiative you're working on with Correlate Health, the new initiative that I know that you got going on. So you might share a little bit about that.
Guest - Talisha Shine:
All my passions rolled into one. So we have healthcare, health, tech it and blockchain and NFTs. So we have it all in one fell swoop. And this is a platform that truly is allowing individuals to leverage their medical data. The cures act, which was just, you know, kind of finalized and put into legislation really does give us the ability to now have control of our medical records, at least access them before you had to go to your doctor. And he said, okay. And maybe you get them six weeks later and whole fax of some sort. But now with that piece of legislation, we are entitled to them in real-time. And with that. There are other aspects to it.
And then not only just monetization but just for your own personal records of yourself, you know, you may be living in different places. You may have disparate records and we do now have different care facilities, but you want a collective health record. You want to be able to say, yeah, I don't want to fill this form out over and over again. Every time I go see the specialist or just my regular PCP, this gives you the ability to do that within a space. And give you an NFT to be able to, again, now maneuver through. So you don't have to just give somebody your, all of your medical records. You can give them a part of your medical records and you can also send it because the NFT is that bilateral exchange. I can give it to you for a set amount of time.
Host - Monique Mills:
Love it.
Guest - Talisha Shine:
Right. You don't have to have that whole like you have my record indefinitely or for seven years, HIPAA compliance. Now I can say, this is the information you need. To help me with this episode of care and you have it for 48, 72 hours to make that decision. And thank you. And we move along.
Host - Monique Mills:
That is awesome. You know, um, I was just talking about this weekend, which is this crazy. I know it was supposed to be on vacation and I'm talking about applications of blockchain with buying and selling your own data. And, you know, right now, Let's say you have an Apple watch or you have a Samsung watch and it's just, you know, they have access to your data, but if you allow someone else if you wanted to share that data and put it somewhere, then this is the proper environment to do something like that.
Guest - Talisha Shine:
Correct, because you do want transparency. You want to be able to say, who has my record? What are they doing with it? And for how long that is the part where you've been again, unfortunately, the web 2.0, just made us check the box and just to give it, just give me access it, just check the box. If you want in now that was the gatekeeper and we had to remove that, but we are now kind of in that habitualness of just checking the box and giving everything away for free. Yeah, we have to roll that back and be like, okay, what's in it for me.
Host - Monique Mills:
Exactly.
Guest - Talisha Shine:
What part do you need now? You get to have a conversation before I'm just being told, given me everything to get into the, you know, into the space.
Host - Monique Mills:
So what's your role in Correlate Health? Are you a co-founder? CTO, something like that.
Guest - Talisha Shine:
Yes, I am not the co-founder. I am the Chief Information Officer for them.
Host - Monique Mills:
Oh, that is fantastic.
Guest - Talisha Shine:
Yes. We just kind of rolled it out. I was an advisor early on and just love the project so much. And this is where you find just things that you're really passionate about. And there are so many things out there. So I always tell people there's enough for everybody. Just find where you fit and just dive in.
Host - Monique Mills:
Are they raising money now? Like what stage is the company and do they have the product ready?
Guest - Talisha Shine:
Yeah, we are in the, in a raise. So if you could go to net capital, you'll see correlated health there. And we are going to hopefully close this round out at the end of next month, which is starts tomorrow. So a few more days left, but we are just looking to finalize. Cause again, there we're creating a marketplace. So that is obviously the tech, you know, tech-heavy in that space. But other than that, that's what we're moving on. And we're looking to release some of that. Kind of modulation going on with certain things, because this is also for clinical trials.
Again, COVID has really shown the lack of data and the mismanagement of data all at the same time. And from our standpoint, specifically, our community, knowing that we have hesitancy about giving information and even going to doctors having a place that would really take care of the data, make us feel secure and also give us the compensatory aspect of using our data is something that we were really passionate about and to ensure that we could do that.
And this is where we've kind of merged that clinical trial people who are looking for clinical trials, specifically looking for very, you know, participants that have certain markers and whatnot, and combining those two and bringing them together in a very safe environment and allowing. To get the information they need to ultimately do what they need to do.
Host - Monique Mills:
Wow. Incredible. Well, Talisha, we're going to wrap up this episode and I want to thank you so much for sharing all of your expertise and knowledge with the Unpolished MBA podcast.
Guest - Talisha Shine:
Well thank you very much for having me.
Host - Monique Mills:
You’re welcome.
Thank you for listening to the Unpolished MBA podcast to hear more episodes or to request to become a guest please visit unpolishedmba.com.
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